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Sept. 25, 2025 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
42:40
MY BIRTHDAY GIFT TO YOU!
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Welcome, welcome to your Wednesday night live.
We're going a little bit earlier because I'm going out after an absolutely lovely day out and about with my wife.
I hope you guys are having a wonderful day.
It is, of course, of course, the 24th of September.
2025.
And I am now in my in what my wife refers to as my 60th year.
Now, to be fair, uh ever since about the age of 55, boy, there's really nothing like having a teenage uh teenager around to boost your old self-esteem, because it really has been uh easily four years, although maybe a little longer, uh, since um since my daughter uh has been pointing out to me uh all of the places that will give me a senior's discount.
Uh it is um it's delightful, it's it's charming, and I've never felt younger.
Um she's very funny.
She's very funny.
Ha ha, who's gonna get the last laugh when I'm decrepit.
Anyway, so I hope you're I hope you're doing well.
I hope you're having a lovely week.
And I, of course, am thrilled, just thrilled to hear from you on this uh lovely day.
And oh yeah, yes, I was gonna give you a present because I suppose I just have birthdays entirely backwards.
I mean, of course, if you'd like to give me a present, a little a little taste, allow me to wet my beak in your digital glory.
Uh, you can go to free domain.com slash donate.
Uh free domain.com slash donate.
And we can get ourselves going uh that way.
But uh I really am going to, yeah, yeah, I forgot to push one of the button goes here, go buttons here, so yes, Friday Night Live.
Sorry, Wednesday night live, 24th September 2025.
Give my birthday.
And I'm gonna give you all something nice here, which is I think it's nice.
I have two premium shows, uh two pr a series of premium shows.
And it's very, very great stuff.
Uh there is a 12-hour history of the French Revolution, which, of course, if you've liked my truth abouts, um, they're really, really great.
Uh, it's fantastic stuff.
And a very novel thesis that I've not seen anywhere else.
So I'm gonna give you some links here just for my birthday.
And uh, if you're listening to this, you can go to rss.com slash podcasts slash French Revolution.
You get my whole series on the French Revolution.
And the other thing that I've done uh that I'm very proud of, and to me, some of my I mean most of my work is glorious to me, uh, but this is even more glorious than most, and that is rss.com slash podcasts slash history philosophy.
That's rss.com slash podcasts slash history philosophy.
Not history or philosophy.
Anyway, it should be history philosophers, but this was just, I think that one was taken.
So anyway, you can go and you can just take those feeds, you can put them into any feed catcher, and it's my birthday gift to you.
Normally, of course, it's only available for donors, but why not?
Why not?
You guys are just uh incredibly great in your interest, in your support, in your disagreements, in your vociferous opposition.
Oh, look at that.
I just locked into X and it gave me balloonies.
Balloonies.
All right, so I'm gonna just post this here as well.
Uh yeah, locals is chucking as well.
My gift to you.
My gift to you.
It's not just more singing to you.
There you go.
And uh it'll be up and then it'll be gone.
But yeah, this is my way of saying thank you for I mean, what is wild, man?
It's coming up on 20 years.
20 uh next month, next month.
I think it would be 20 years since I first penned my public essay, The State of Society, an examination of alternatives, which the very kind and occasionally jowly Lou Rockwell was uh uh generous enough to uh put on.
Thank you, Troy.
I appreciate the the tip was generous generous enough to post.
And I think I think I went dark On his site for a while during times of great controversy, but he's stuck in there, and I think you can still find me on Lou Rockwell.
And I started the podcast.
I started the podcast just reading my articles.
I was interested in podcasting.
It's actually funny because in the 90s, I wrote a novel called The God of Atheists about a thinker who becomes famous with a webcam and a microphone.
And this, of course, was long before YouTube, long before podcasting, really long before any of this kind of stuff.
But I wrote it wasn't, it wasn't super hard to figure out which way the wind was blowing from a communication standpoint, and that it wouldn't actually be that long before you could broadcast.
And I I don't know if I've ever mentioned this before, but I've I was a DJ and I had a uh twice-weekly show in university.
So I had some sort of experience.
I still have a tape somewhere of my show or a couple of shows that I did as a DJ in my early 20s in university, uh, and mostly it was uh talk, uh, mostly it was songs, and occasionally I would do dance nights and spin the platters that matters.
And it was uh a lot of fun.
And I've always really enjoyed radio.
Uh and I mean a show I liked was WKRP in Cincinnati, which was a radio show.
I've always liked sort of radio, like broadcasting, never wanted to be a broadcaster, never, never, never.
I knew I had the voice for it.
I knew I had the relative wit and charisma for it, but it was never something that I was like, ooh, I think I'll go and be a DJ at a radio station or something like that.
Uh and maybe this is because sorry, this it's a complete ramble fest.
But when I was a kid, uh I I've always loved music.
And if I were starting all over again, I mean, it's sort of more important for me to do philosophy, but if I was starting all over again, uh I would do songs I love, music I love.
I have very broad musical tastes.
I like the chicks.
Now, very broad musical tastes, and no, I know a fair amount about music, and I've always loved music.
And when I was a kid, I would wake up and a song that I loved would be on the radio.
I hated the DJs, man.
I hated them, I hated them.
Because they kept, I think this was for legal reasons, because people would just sit there with the tape recorders and bank, hit the record when you had a song that came on that you loved.
And I did that sometimes when I worked in the business world, like I was a temp in university in HR departments and other places.
I sit there and bring a little little ghetto blaster in and I would hit record and songs that I liked.
And I mean that's one of the reasons for that is that I had I had a record player that was so bad.
It was so bad, it was so bad.
It had plastic speakers.
I got it from ShopRite or Consumers Distributing, one of these places where you line up and you you fill out the little pieces of paper and you get it.
It was very cheap to buy stuff that way.
They there was no showroom, you just warehouse and you'd fill out these things.
I would uh I had this record player that was so bad that it would the needle would scrape along the top of the record, unless you put a lot of plastic scene, and I ended up having some some plasticine.
It was about the size of a hamster.
I had some plasticine sitting on top of this needle, which allowed it to play the songs, although it was a little bit like an Apple Cora, it would go through albums fairly quickly because it was too much grind down.
My friends would never bring their albums over.
They'd bring me a tape, they'd bring me tapes until my crappy tape deck also had a bad habit of eating tapes, which you know you pull out.
It's like, oh, the strings of my heart are serrated.
But I had this record player, it was so bad you couldn't close the lid if it wasn't a 45.
I got it for like 20 bucks uh at a um at one of these places.
And so I had this hamster-sized ball of plasticine on top of my needle, put the needle on the record with the Plastocene hamster on the needle on the record.
And unfortunately, what it would do is it would it would slow the songs down because there was too much pressure and the motor was bad.
And it was I just remember, hey, a new song.
Why MCA, it's fun to stay at the or Pink Floyd could be even slower.
Now there's uh look in your eye.
Like black holes in the sky.
Sure.
Anyway, It was um it was not good.
I I uh when I when I would actually hear I don't know if you've ever had like a I had an old walkman that that was slow too, and and when you hear the regular song, it's like, wow, this is really fast.
It's a lot faster.
A lot faster than I remember.
I had no fast songs.
I had no fast songs at all.
And uh I I could make one of the few record players that could make Ella Fitzgerald sound like Sam Cook.
Ooh.
There's some fairly obscure references.
But anyway.
It was not obscure back in the day.
Anyway, these DJs in the morning, I didn't forget that thread of the story.
They they talk over my favorite songs, and it drove me nuts.
Because you'd say, you'd be sitting there waiting for the stop talking, stop talking, stop talking.
I still remember having uh I love you always for I remember having that song recorded, and there was a 99.9 DJ who was like, four out of five rec dentists recommend 99.9.
And then there was a sound of a guy screaming and adrilling and said, we're still working on the fifth.
It's like, actually, it's kind of funny.
Rob Christie, back in the day.
Whatever happened to that guy.
Anyway, don't let me ramble on.
I'm gonna ramble on.
There's just no way I'm not drunk.
I'm not drunk.
I'm just high on not being dead.
You ever get that feeling?
Like you say, I'm just I'm just kind of high.
And it's on not being dead.
Now, it's nice.
I had a uh I had uh a uh fatal illness or potentially fatal illness like 13 or 14 years ago.
Skated past that.
All it left me with was a little bit of tinnitus in my left ear, not the end of the world.
And uh so every day, north of the dig the big deep six is a beautiful day.
It's a wonderful day.
It has led me to be somewhat stress-free ever since.
You dodge enough bullets and uh, you know, a bird shits on your shoe, and what do you care?
You don't care.
Nobody cares, doesn't matter.
So uh it has helped me in terms of philosophy, it has helped me in terms of risk.
Nothing seems particularly risky when you stared down the big C and walked away with your life intact.
And uh I just thank you.
Of course, everyone here who has made this conversation what it is, and I really, really do appreciate it.
All the people who disagree with me, I don't mind.
Not only do I not mind, I appreciate it, because Lord knows, Lord above knows, that I have no monopoly on truth or accuracy or being right on just about anything I put forward.
I think I think a lot before I post, and then I put forward arguments.
Maybe it's a little unfair, like if I'm thinking 12 moods that moves ahead on a chessboard, but I think a lot, I post, and then I'm certainly willing to be corrected, but um I will never ever, ever surrender an argument unless I'm disproven.
I certainly will change my mind if disproven.
In fact, the reason that I'm broadcasting on X is in part, in large part, in fact, almost exclusively because my daughter gave me a better argument for coming on X than staying off X, and uh she was she was right, and so uh, you know, I it's my birthday,
I could take the day off, friends, family, but I wanted to take a little bit of time because I just really want to, you know, humbly and gratefully and deeply express my sincere and awestruck appreciation for what we all bring to the realm of virtue morality, philosophy, conversation, truth, reason, evidence, and goodness.
And goodness.
This is the greatest conversation in the history of philosophy.
And I know that that sounds vain.
Um I've always said I'm actually the least important part of this conversation.
If people could just forget about me and focus on the arguments, I would be infinitely happier.
But it's the it's the greatest conversation in the history of philosophy because of the technology and because of you guys.
You make me better, you take me down a peg, you humble me, you instruct me, you provoke me, you go to me, you inspire me, and this being a conversation is the most so many philosophers my precious, they sit in their rooms and hunched over, like they're turning into a question mark, you know, birth, why though, death.
And so many philosophers uh stay in their ivory tower, don't engage with the general population, don't have the love of wisdom to engage with people, to land some blows, to have some blows landed on them to engage, to encourage, to inspire then to be schooled and beaten down from time to time, all of which is wonderful and beautiful.
And I remember I think it was in the 1960s, I remember reading.
Sorry, I wasn't reading it.
I was born in 66, so I wasn't reading it.
But I remember reading about, you know, in the big height and crisis of the leftist violence, which lay dormant for a while, right?
Leftist violence in the 60s was there to gain entrance to the march through the institutions.
Now that's largely complete, they can be violent again.
But I remember reading that the American philosophical association met in the midst of Vietnam, of uh the welfare state, of the crisis of violence, the destruction of the family.
They met together and they had a big long seminar about how real a noun could be.
And when I read that, I felt like a visceral hairball of contempt, honestly, just coursing through my body and my mind.
And I thought, because this is I read this, I mean, I got into philosophy in my mid-teens, right?
So it's 40 today, 44 years or so.
I hope to make it to, let's say, conservatively let's go for 80 years.
That would be nice.
I could I could live to 95.
I think that would be reasonable.
And Lord knows my mother is uh an undead smoker of uh and consumer of instant coffee that manages to stay north of the deep sex uh like a ghoul, but so maybe, maybe, maybe.
But I remember thinking when I got into philosophy that if I ever got a chance to speak to the world, and this is I could see 20 years, right?
So uh I was um I mean I was in my late 30s when I started started cooking this stuff.
No.
No, yes, sorry, I can do the math.
I really feel I can.
So in my late 30s when I started doing this stuff, and I I remember just as a teenager thinking, well, academia is not gonna academia is not the way to go.
Because that's what they're talking about.
And they'll uh people have uh a visceral I get this, right?
And it's not me, not me as a person, but people have really strong visceral reactions to my essence, my aura, very strong reactions.
And that's great because my wife, of course, has a very strong positive reaction, as this is my daughter and and friends and so on, and and the people who support what it is that I do.
People have very visceral reactions.
I'm not a person that people tend to be neutral about.
And again, it's not me as a person.
I'm actually a very nice person.
Uh I really literally love to help old ladies across the street.
I give to charity, I'm very friendly.
I always, always, always, unless something really extraordinary is going on, I have a mission that everyone I meet, even as briefly as possible, everyone I meet has a more positive interaction or a better day because of interacting with me.
That's uh maybe whether it's a joke or a tip or or uh friendliness or something, maybe even a hug.
If people are startled, I'll do that.
But I've always sort of had that goal.
So I'm actually a very nice person, a very positive person and a very friendly person.
But when it comes to the arguments and ideas that I put forward, people have very strong reactions to them, which shows you the power of philosophy.
And I sort of uh equal opportunity offender.
So when I first got on X, I hope you guys find this interesting.
Uh I'm uh it's sort of my sort of view from from inside the brain.
But when I got on X, I really uh annoyed the atheists.
Now I'm in the process of annoying the Christians.
In between, I've annoyed a whole bunch of other people.
Um I mean, I think one of the reasons I ran into trouble in the past was criticizing other groups, which I think we're all aware of.
So it is uh it is it is a wild ride.
And my sort of feeling is this about this, and uh maybe this approach or this way of thinking about things will be helpful to you because Lord knows you may not be as public a figure as I am.
Maybe you're more so than I am, but this is like there are already enough people out there in the world not telling the truth.
That's my sort of basic, basic philosophy.
We've tried as a society holding back the truth, watering down the truth, bypassing the truth, stepping around the truth, trying to smuggle the truth in.
We've tried all that.
And having tried all that, this is where we've ended up, which as a society is not ideal.
It's not ideal.
So we've never tried fully reforming parenting according to moral principles.
And I talk about this in my History of Philosophers series, which again, I really, really hope you'll check out.
Starts with the pre-Socratics, goes to Buddhists, and it's really, really good stuff.
But we we've tried reasoning with adults.
We've tried reforming the state, we've tried reforming the economy, we've tried lots of different things.
And we've not tried reforming parenting.
Because one of the things that I looked for over the course of studying the history of philosophers, which I did long before I did this series.
I did this in my 20s when I was at doing my graduate work.
And none of them talk about parenting.
That literally is the furnace in which the human mind is created, shaped, fashioned, and filled.
I'm gonna say programmed, filled.
And I don't I don't understand why philosophers never talked about parenting.
It's almost completely absent from philosophers as a whole.
I mean, Locke touches on it briefly, of course, Rousseau touches on it, and there is some discussion of childhood in Plato's Republic.
But as far as the ethics and virtue of parenting, nothing.
Almost not even Ayn Rand almost never talked about it at all.
I mean, you've got Peter Keating's mother, who is an example of a bitterklinger, a uh devouring vagina dentata single mother, but philosophers never talked about parenting.
And for me, I would like, I would not want to get...
I would not want to get into philosophy and do all the stuff that didn't work before.
I would...
I would rather, well, maybe not go back to working as a dishwasher, but something like that.
I would rather have a paper root or be a waiter than go into philosophy and do all the stuff that didn't work before.
And I remember thinking about this very clearly before I sort of launched myself into the public eye, that I thought, okay, like, am I going to write a more influential novel than Atlas Shrugged?
I mean, let's just say it's pretty unlikely.
I mean, I like my novels, but that's not my particular bent.
I'm actually on I've finished my new novel is 24 chapters, and I've read up to chapter six as audiobooks.
Again, it's for donors.
But I'm like, well, I'm not, I'm not gonna write a more influential novel than Atlas Shrugged or The Fountainhead, or We the Living is a bit more obscure.
And so I was like, okay, well, I'm not gonna do that.
Am I gonna write a better treatise on economics than something by Ludwig von Mises or Hayek or Milton Friedman or I mean, gosh, Murray Rothbard?
I mean, no.
No.
That stuff has been done and done fantastically, and it doesn't work.
It's great.
Love the arguments, love the ideas, love the perspectives, love the approach, love the data, love it.
But I'm not gonna do a more elegant mathematical and praxeological takedown of central planning than von Mises' on socialism, say.
It's just not going to happen.
Of course, Atlas Shrugged at one point was voted the second most influential book by some readers after the Bible.
I I am, I suppose, yeah, teeny tiny bit ambitious, teeny tiny bit ambitious.
But I would say that if I had as the goal to write the most influential book outside the Bible, pull them ahead of Atlas Shrugged.
Philosophy by the tonnage.
So I knew I had to do something uh different.
Which is why, and I I did check this out the other day, because I was curious kind of when uh uh James and I checked it out.
I think it was like within the first dozen or two dozen shows, I start talking about the family roots of our addiction to violence, the family roots of our addiction to oligarchical political tyrannies, the state, right?
And and all of that.
It was it was right 20 years ago, man, right back at the beginning.
Because I absolutely knew that for me to retain any enthusiasm, and for me not to get as depressed as the ever-living hellscape of a futile and empty life, I had to do something that hadn't been done before.
And all the stuff that hasn't been done before is blindingly obvious in hindsight and completely invisible beforehand.
Oh, of course we should do X, Y, and Z. How could we have not done X, Y, and Z. You know, as they say talent hits a target that no one else could hit, genius hits a target that no one else can see.
Of course, we should take the non-aggression principle and apply it to parenting.
Of course, how we view power, control, coercion, and authority is shaped by early childhood experiences with parents, daycare teachers, teachers, and of course I had the good fortune to work in daycare for a couple of years as a teenager.
I saw this the shaping of minds, even before, long before I became a father, I saw that directly.
And, you know, one of the curses of having great potential is ooh, man, if you miss, if you miss and you have great potential, oh, that's ugly.
There's a one of the last movies I ever saw with my mother was called Shadowlands with Deborah Winger, who seemed to have an entire career of dying of cancer, and Anthony Hopkins, uh playing C.S. Lewis.
And C.S. Lewis as an academic is sitting with a bunch of other academics, and he looks at one sort of nihilistic dark-haired fellow and says, uh, do you ever get this feeling of just a waste?
He's like, of course, of course.
If you have great potential, you have to succeed wildly or fall forever.
There's no there's no middle ground.
You either fulfill your potential or you are cursed by failing to fill fulfill your potential.
Because everyone wants, hey, I wish I had all this talent.
And it's like, but it's a, I mean, it's a crushing burden and a responsibility because if you don't use your talent, and this and with Aristotle here, Eudomania, that there is no better way to use your abilities than in the pursuit and promotion of virtue.
You know, I've I've obviously been fascinated by the life of Freddie Mercury because I mean Freddie Mercury, one of the most successful singer-songwriter performers in human history, let alone sort of the present time.
I mean, even he didn't want to be Freddie Mercury, because he kept pursuing hedonistic homosexual lifestyle until he died of it.
He was not promoting virtue, uh, to put it mildly.
And it's so funny because people say, ah, you know, we didn't reveal that he was gay until the day before he died of AIDS.
Bro, on his album, Mr. Bad Guy, he's talking about a problem he's having with a lover, and he says, we've got to talk it out man to man.
Make each other understand.
It's like man to man.
A little bit of a clue.
Also the name of the band.
So uh, even if you're fantastically talented in that way.
If you're not promoting and pursuing virtue, It doesn't tend to work very well.
And so if I have my talents, either I was going to use my talents for good or for evil.
There was no question.
I couldn't just do nothing with them.
And I mean, it's like inheriting, I don't know, five million dollars and just having a pile of cash in your living room that you step around and never touch.
That would be just kind of weird, right?
It would be a sign of being crazy.
So I had to do something with it.
And I thought that something was going to be in the art world.
Then I thought maybe in academia, and then uh in the business world, uh, I had a fair degree of success as an entrepreneur.
And uh, then when it came to podcasting, I'm like, oh yeah, that's it.
And I remember that conversation with my wife.
I want to do this full time.
I want to do this full time.
It's crazy.
I don't even know if I can make really any money at it, but I don't want to do this full time.
God love Roshi.
Just give me a big smile and a hug.
Of course you should.
So I knew that it if I was going to use my talents in the promotion of virtue, I couldn't do what had been done before.
Because philosophy has a 3,000-plus year history.
I mean, it's just the written stuff, obviously it goes further back than that.
But in terms of the written stuff, philosophy has a 3,000-plus year history.
And if you just look at the 20th century, it's a century of near universal slaughter.
Quarter of a billion people murdered by their own governments outside of war.
Of course, tens more millions of people murdered in wars, 40 to 50 million in the second world war, 10 million in the first world war.
You know, that's a 300 million high pile of corpses after 3,000 years of trying to promote virtue, that's what we end up with.
Right.
The Holocaust, World War I, concentration camps, gulags, the mass slaughter in Cambodia, the hellscape of North Korea, Cuba, fiat currency, declining educational standards increased, destruction of the family increased deferred violence called national debts and unfunded liabilities.
That's what we got.
After 3,000 years of trying to make make the world a better place, the body count was never higher.
So whatever I was going to do, it had to had to had to be something that hadn't been done before.
And of course, having gone to therapy myself for I did three hours a week.
I did 10 to 12 hours of journaling.
It was my job, part-time job for close to two years.
I knew that the childhood was the key.
I also knew that for reasons that, again, we'll never know.
We'll never know because they're all dead, but we'll never know why philosophers bypass the most obvious forge origin and furnace of the human mind, where morals are inculcated, taught, and impressed upon the mind, like a hot signet ringed on wax.
We don't know why philosophers refused to talk about the ethics, virtues, and vices of childhood and parenting.
Don't know why.
I don't know why.
And again, we'll we'll never know why, because they are sleeping with the fishes and cannot be interrogated.
But we know they didn't.
We know they didn't.
So for me, it was like, okay, well, if I'm gonna do this thing and I'm gonna go out there and talk about topics, I have to talk about topics that have not been talked about before.
I have to talk because to talk about topics that have been talked about before, when everything that came before led to the hellscape of the 20th century that utterly destroyed my family and destroyed Europe.
Now, Europeans, unfortunately, I've been thinking about this a lot lately.
You know, I listened to these true crime podcasts from time to time, and I was listening to one about a woman who Was uh raped and killed in a um a hostel or a sort of local motel, I think it was in Thailand.
And her family, you know, hired private investigators, flew over and bugged the police, and this went on for 20 years.
I think the Statue of Limitations eventually ran out, even for murder.
And they kept pursuing it.
They kept the website up, they bugged people, they paid huge amounts of money, they flew down and confronted the police regularly to put more effort and energy into the investigation and so on.
And it's like, you know, I mean, my family of origin didn't even call me when I was deadly sick, right?
There's no bonds left.
I the bonds all seem to have been shredded and destroyed.
There's no bond to history, there's no bond to cultural pride, there's no bond to each other, uh, which is I think it was just slaughtered in the first and second world war, and then the coup de gras of the hyper-left takeover of education.
There's no bond.
There's no bonds.
You can't rely on that.
So I had to talk about that which had not been talked about before.
And you look at the most taboo topics, and you say, okay, they're taboo for a reason.
Why don't philosophers talk about childhood?
And again, there may have been philosophers who talked about childhood, and maybe they were just killed and all of their works were burned, although you'd think there'd be some echo of them somewhere.
Although I got deplatformed pretty hard and pretty well.
even in the digital age, I despawned like a fire hose washing down a nuclear shadow in Hiroshima.
And, Thank you.
Actually, I don't think a fire hose could wash that down, because it's the absence of radiation.
Well, the analogy seemed cool until I picked it apart in my brain and well, then it fell apart.
So one of the other insights that I had was that all the philosophers that we know of and were taught about are the philosophers who don't fundamentally disturb political power.
Because any philosopher who actually did disturb political power would not be praised or taught.
The only philosophers that remain on the curriculum are those who do not disturb political power or you can say hierarchical power, because the fundamental original sin of hierarchical power is aggressive and violent parents, which is almost all parents throughout human history.
And certainly around the world, almost all, even in the West, 50 to 75%.
Our parents still hit their children outside of certain Scandinavian countries and other places where it's illegal, but then they toss their kids over to government schools, which is arguably worse.
so So I really did have to do what hadn't been done before.
Otherwise, honestly, there's no point doing it.
If you are and this again, back to the back to the bands that I like, every band that you like.
There aren't any famous, really famous cover bands, right?
And this is what Freddie Mercury was saying to Queen in the early days.
It's like, well, we just have to write our own material.
You can't get anywhere if you're not writing your own material.
Now, fortunately, they had to have four top ten.
They ended up with four top ten hitmakers in the band, which is quite unusual.
But you know, Freddie wrote uh Seven Seas of Rye, and that was their first hit, and he wrote Killer Queen, which was a huge hit, and uh uh, you know, he wrote Bohemian Rhapsody, of course, and Crazy Little Thing Called Love, but you know, John Deacon did You know My Best Friend,
and he did Another One Bites the Dust, and Brian May did some pretty pretty good early songs, and he did Hammer to Fall, and he did Whipple Rock You and uh Roger Taylor did some good early songs.
He, of course, is famous for Radio Gaga, which kid was just making fun of the radio, and he got the inspiration for that.
So you've got to write your own material.
And, you know, my particular concern was that most people who get into philosophy end up being cover bands.
Well, Schopenhaier said this about this, but then Kant said this about the other.
I actually have an unreleased podcast.
It should be coming out.
Relatively soon, wherein I'm getting the view from Inside Academia, I talked to a grad student in philosophy about what it's like on the inside.
And it seems like uh, well, let's just do a jazz reworking of play the game, also a great song by Freddie, as opposed to write your own material.
And I I have too much creativity within me, whether you agree or not, it's definitely there.
Whether you agree with the output or not, it's definitely there.
I have too much creativity in me to be a cover band.
And so I had to have my own material, which means I had to, you know, and this is this is a skill, and I I really, I really strongly suggest this in business, right?
Because you're always looking for opportunities and so on, right?
And in philosophy, I had to say, what's the biggest topic that people can do the most about that is the least discussed?
This is a I learned this in the business world, right?
This is a way of analyzing problems and coming up with solutions, right?
In a market, you say, what's the biggest market that is unders uh underserved that people can afford?
What's the biggest market that's underserved that people can afford?
Now, if you can't find that market, you have to create a great product and make the market.
Like nobody knew they needed beanie babies before they were beanie babies, or Rubik's Cube, or you have to make your own market.
So for me, in the realm of philosophy, it's like, okay, what's the biggest topic the philosophers have not touched on, that people can do something about.
And that leads immediately, and again, I I I it's incomprehensible to me that philosophers haven't done this before, but maybe it's just the business training.
I don't know.
Maybe it's the practicality, maybe it's working with my hands uh for many years as a manual laborer.
I don't know, right?
But it's one of these things that's like, well, why haven't why haven't you talked about the ethics of childhood?
Why haven't you tried, instead of to convince crazy adults, why haven't you tried to raise rational children?
Seems that would be a plus, wouldn't it, rather than waiting until people are broken and then trying to ER them back their weight and take people with their legs broken to nine places and try and turn them into marathon runners?
How about you just don't have people with their legs broken to begin with?
Instead of trying to patch up everyone with your flashing flying syllables of scalpel-like reason, how about you just don't have people mutilated in the first place?
Instead of being the art restoration, how about you just have great art to begin with?
Instead of stitching people up, how about you don't cut them to begin with?
Instead of trying to reassemble Ming vases, how about you just have Ming vases that aren't broken in the first place?
Wouldn't that be better?
Because the fixing people's stuff hasn't worked at all.
Hasn't worked at all.
They make people I said this at a night for freedom in like 2018, something like that.
And it's like they're making people crazy way faster than we can make them sane.
I remember watching MASH was a show that was on when I was a kid, and I remember there was an episode where one of the old surgeons said there's some new sticky bomb glue that attaches itself to human flesh and melts it.
And he's like, they keep finding ways to destroy people faster than we can find ways to fix people.
And that's true, really, our philosophy.
So how about how about we raise people unbroken rather than have a permanent ER of people kicking and fighting the doctor, thinking that the pill that cures them is actually a poison that will kill them?
How about that?
How about how about?
Just as a possibility.
All right.
I really, really white phosphorus, that was it, right?
Yeah.
I really, really do want to thank you and show my deep appreciation for those.
And and, you know, I know this sounds odd, but even to those who've just, you know, lied and slandered and like just said the most terrible things about me, that is part of how I guide myself as well, right?
So think of a bat with its echo location.
Bink, pink, pink.
What it's doing is waiting for the stuff to bounce back, and that's how it guides.
So where the opposition to the sound is, that is how you guide yourself, and where the opposition to what I'm doing is is where I guide myself.
So why did I start talking about IQ?
Because you can't.
And if the people who are in charge of the world, driving it off a cliff says whatever you do, you can't push that pedal.
You know it's a break.
You know it's gonna slow or stop, or perhaps even maybe there's a reverse in there somewhere as well.
All right.
Free domain.com slash donate if you'd like to help out with my birthday wishes.
Yes, a lot and a lot of people.
Uh a lot of people found me because of the haters.
All right, you can go to FDRURL.com slash gift.
F Dr URL.com slash gift.
And that's my birthday present to you.
All right.
Uh and uh it is a Socratic argument that nothing truly bad can happen to a good man.
Thank you, Tom, for the birthday wishes.
All right, should we take a caller?
And I'm not going to do a long show tonight because I've got a lot of stuff going on this evening, but I did want to come in and say hi and explain myself.
All right.
Doctor Murdoch.
Where are you?
Are you coming back?
Where are you?
Oh, he's gone.
All right.
All right.
Uh just waiting in case anybody else has a question they want to ask.
Again, free domain.com slash donate.
If you'd like to help out the show, I really would appreciate it.
In my 60th year.
All right.
Go on once, go on twice.
There were some people, but they have been so staggered by the value of my monologue that they have.
Decided not to follow Queen at Live 8.
All right.
Well, listen, guys, thank you, thank you so much.
Have yourself a beautiful, wonderful, delicious, and delightful evening.
And I really appreciate you guys.
We will talk Friday night at 7 p.m.
And remember, it's a donor only and subscriber only show Sundays at 11 a.m.
And uh I've definitely got some spice that I want to talk about on Sunday.
So thanks everyone so much.
Have a beautiful evening, my friends.
Take care.
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