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Nov. 23, 2025 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
37:09
How to Screw Virtue! Listener Questions
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All right.
Questions from ex listeners or readers.
Is it against UPB to preemptively attack?
UPB, of course, is a rational system of secular ethics.
You can get the book for free at free demand.com slash books.
You can also get a shortened version in the last third of my free book, Essential Philosophy.
Is it against UPB to preemptively attack?
Someone is at the border of your property with a gun or troops are amassing at a border.
Is it moral to attack them first?
How far in advance are you able to act and still be moral?
So this is edge case paralysis.
I'll be straight up with you.
This is edge case paralysis.
So the goal of this kind of question is to sort of pretend that morality is so helpless and hopeless and complicated that it can't ever really be sorted out or understood.
It is if somebody's starving to death and they are stealing a loaf of bread.
Is that okay?
If someone has stolen something and then they hand it to their children and their grandchildren, at what point, I ask you, at what point does it become theirs?
Is it beyond right?
And this is sort of like the argument of, well, what, or saying, well, what is the magical difference?
Let's say that we say that the age of 18 is when somebody becomes a legal adult.
Well, what is the magical philosophical difference between, you know, 17.9999 and 18 years old?
And it's all this just edge case paralysis.
And the origins, and I'll answer the question.
I will.
I'll answer the question.
But I just want you to understand that this is a tool of evil.
Now, I'm not saying that everybody who asks these questions is evil, obviously, right?
But you are unwitting tools of malevolent forces.
And the question of when is self-defense legitimate?
Do you have to wait to get stabbed?
And, you know, all of this stuff.
Edge case paralysis.
Oh, you respect property rights, but what if someone's drowning and you have to take somebody else's lifesaver and throw it to them without their permission?
It's all this edge case paralysis stuff.
And the purpose of it is to pretend that edge cases are the essence of philosophy.
And the essence of morality is to ponder these edge cases.
And they're designed to not be answered.
They're designed to, you can't answer them.
And it is there to paralyze philosophy, to paralyze morality, or, since those things are abstractions, to paralyze moralists, to have them chasing a beast that can never be caught.
And not to take down the beasts that are right in front of you.
It would be like somebody saying, like, you're a hunter in the Neolithic age or era or whatever, right?
And you're a hunter and your wife says, only come back with a two-headed rabbit.
I will not eat anything except a two-headed rabbit.
Now, are there two-headed rabbits in the world?
I imagine that you can have a rabbit born with a very rare genetic mutation.
I've seen two-headed snakes and things like that.
There are conjoined twins in humanity and so on.
It's like they share a lot of the body, but they have separate heads.
So they're extraordinarily rare.
So if your wife were to say to you in Caveman Days, you can only eat a two-headed rabbit, you would starve to death because you could roam the entire world for your whole life and never see a two-headed rabbit.
So having you search for the rarest incarnations and step over the things that can actually feed you is sending you on a useless and pointless quest in order to destroy your life.
I'm not kidding about this.
I'm genuinely, deeply and seriously not kidding about this.
In our lives, we face real, deep, genuine, and daily moral choices.
We probably know people who hit their children.
We probably know people who support corruption in the form of various government programs, almost certainly, right?
We probably know people who are morally compromised by working against their fellow citizens for malevolent aspects of the government.
We probably face people who are propagandized into spreading extremely dangerous lies as if they're true and good and virtuous and noble.
I think Scott Adams and other people have got an entire list of lies.
We probably know people who subscribe to moral beliefs yet do not follow them in any practical way.
Last night, I had a call, and it was a good call.
The fact that I got angry doesn't make it any less good for me, and I certainly did say to the man, I'm not angry at him, but where he was saying, well, I mean, but people could misinterpret peaceful parenting, and could they get it wrong?
And it's like these are unanswerable questions, and they're gotcha questions.
I'm not saying he was doing it consciously.
I doubt it.
But it's an unconscious thing.
And it's trauma from having been hit as a child, which he kind of half confirmed.
But as I pointed out, the Bible seems to fairly explicitly command people to beat their children with implements, right?
If you beat your child with a rod, he will not die, right?
So people, Christianity is the biggest religion on the planet, right?
So people who read the Bible beat their children based upon what's in the Bible.
Some of them are more allegorical, like the rod of instruction is often a shepherd's stick used to guide people and so on, right?
Spare the rod, spoil the child means if you don't instruct your child in virtue, he will swing to hedonism and status and other things that are not moral.
But the other one is like if you beat your child with a rod, he will not die.
It's better to beat him than for him to go astray, and you should beat your children.
And so the question is not, can people misinterpret what I say, but can people correctly interpret what the Bible says and end up beating their children with implements, like with belts or sticks or rods, switches, they call them in the South.
There's a particularly diabolical form of child punishment, which is just child abuse, which is to have the child choose their own stick with which to be beaten.
And, you know, just to sort of clarify my point with talking about this to the man is if somebody brings up a moral concern, right, to me, and of course, you can always, the question, can someone misinterpret what you're saying, is always a gotcha question.
Always.
And again, I'm not saying he's doing it consciously, but it is an instinct based upon, in this case, an excessive or wild amount of punishment from parents.
So it's a gotcha question because if you answer, no, it is impossible to misinterpret what I'm saying, then you look crazy because everybody knows that it is possible for people to misinterpret what you're saying.
If you say, yes, it is possible for people to misinterpret what I'm saying, then you are automatically downgraded as an effective communicator.
So it is a gotcha question, as you would expect from somebody who was, you know, I think fairly brutally punished as a child.
And it is, it's annoying.
It's an annoying question.
Because if he's concerned about people taking moral instruction and applying it badly against their own children, he already said that there are billions of Christians around the world who do that, which he's not focusing on.
He's focusing on my little show and my little book and all of that, right?
So that is not, that's not good faith arguing.
And again, I'm not sort of accusing him of any sort of conscious malevolence, but that's just not good faith debating.
Is it possible that people have, could that people could misinterpret what you've written?
I don't answer questions that are gotcha questions.
There's no point answering them.
I don't, and that's why I reframed it, right?
And to say, well, is it possible for anyone to misinterpret anything?
Sure.
But the point is you put out things as clearly as possible.
And when the Bible commands you to beat your children with implements, the issue is not whether somebody might misinterpret the non-aggression principle applied to children.
Because he said that there are a lot of Christians, or, you know, I don't remember exactly how many he said, but there's an unknown but not insignificant number of Christians who beat their children based upon what the Bible says, and that's bad.
I didn't ask him if he was beaten.
I only asked him if he was spanked.
So if he's concerned about people abusing their children, then they are far infinitely more likely, really, if they're Christians and they believe that beat your children with implements is the word of God, then they are much more likely to beat their children on a correct interpretation of a Bible verse than to beat their children when I say don't use violence against your children.
Like if you have clear instructions on how to put a cabinet together, and they're good, they're not like some half-translated kanji crap, right?
You have clear instructions on how to assemble a cabinet, right?
You make a cabinet, you ship it out.
Very clear instructions.
You have videos online.
You have help centers, you know, help people are confused.
You include all the tools, right?
You make it as easy and as clear as humanly possible to assemble the cabinet.
And then somebody says, well, isn't it possible that people might assemble the cabinet incorrectly?
That is not a good faith question.
It's absolutely not a good faith question.
Especially if there's a cabinet about a billion times more popular that has incorrect instructions, right?
So going to a cabinet maker who has very clear instructions and saying, well, isn't it possible that people could misinterpret your instructions and put your cabinet together incorrectly when he actually subscribes to a cabinet maker a billion times more popular that actually has bad instructions is a bad faith argument.
If he's concerned about bad instructions, then he should focus on his cabinet maker that's way more popular and which has really bad instructions rather than my very clear instructions, very small time relative to his cabinet maker.
You see, this is why it's bad faith, right?
If you're concerned about bad instructions, you go to the biggest cabinet maker with the worst instructions.
You don't go to the smallest cabinet maker with the best instructions.
That's why it's bad faith.
And again, I'm not accusing him of any conscious malevolence, but that is the result of trauma that is a result of bad parenting, of punishment-based and violence-based parenting.
So we all know people, let's say, who are Christians who have not forgiven, even when the person has apologized.
We all know people who are Christians who bear false witness, who lie to their parents, still, and aren't honest, if they have issues with their parents, aren't honest about those issues, and so on, right?
We all know people who follow Christianity, who are not particularly generous with the poor, and so on, right?
And who are ostentatious in their consumption and live in a house bigger than they need.
And when Jesus says, those who would follow me, sell everything you own, give the money to the poor.
Now, I know that's to be pure, but there are a lot of Christians I know that spend more money than they need when they could be giving the access to the poor as Jesus commands.
So we all know people who support government programs while failing to process and understand the fact that government programs are based on coercion.
We all know people who blame capitalism for the actions of government monopolies, such as currency and interest rates or significant government influence in that way.
We all know people who are rude and aggressive to their spouses and friends.
We all know people who are doing dodgy things at work and aren't acting with high integrity.
We all know people, and we look in the mirror and we, I mean, I'm not perfect, you're not perfect.
So we all know people who are not following the moral standards that they preach.
We all know mothers, for instance, who say, I would do anything for my children.
And then you point out how dangerous and bad government schools are and that they should quit their work, quit their jobs and homeschool, and then they won't do it.
It's like, well, then don't tell me you will.
I don't, I don't, I mean, in a sense, I don't care what people do.
I just don't want them to lie about it.
So if you'd rather have your job and dump your kids into brain-rotting government schools, okay, then that's fine.
It's bad, but it's fine as long as you're honest about it and say, well, I'm doing that which is not best for my kids because I like having a job.
Okay, just be honest, right?
Then don't say, family comes first and I do anything for my kids because you won't.
You won't.
So the reason I'm saying all of this is when people come to me with moral questions, they could ask about anything, anything.
And to me, the most honorable people are the ones who ask about moral questions and challenges that they have in their own personal lives, right?
And they say that, oh, you know, I'm having problems at work.
I got morally compromised.
I'm having problems with my kids or my spouse or my parents or my friends or myself.
I'm not fulfilling my potential.
I'm whatever.
Any number of things, right?
Now, that's honorable.
That's good.
That's decent because that's something you could do something about.
You know, my brother's hitting his kids and I really don't like it.
Or my sister-in-law yells at my kids or whatever it is, right?
Or yells at her kids, they say.
Or, you know, my parents were really harsh with me, but they're great with my kids.
And I like to sort of figure out that disparity.
You know, the call-in stuff, right?
Calling shows.
Now, again, people want to talk abstract philosophy.
Great.
I did a chat two days ago with a fellow about the ethics of forgiveness.
It was very interesting.
So that's my question.
Is what you're asking about something that you can act on or is an important issue in your own life, right?
That is the essential question.
Is it important in your own life?
Is the moral question that you're asking important and actionable in your own life?
Now, if somebody is asking a really edge case abstract question that will never ever apply to them in their life, then by implication, they're saying, and I hear this very clearly, and just, you know, if you're going to ask me questions, again, I don't mind discussing the edge case abstractions.
I'm just telling you what they look like to a perceptive person.
What they look like to a perceptive person is, this is the most important moral issue in my life.
Therefore, all the other moral issues are dealt with.
Do you see what I mean?
If you were to come into the ER and you were bleeding from your eyeballs and one of your ears was hanging off and your leg was gangrenous and the doctor said, okay, what do you need?
And you were to say, well, let me ask you just sort of theoretically, if I got some very unusual disease, even though I hadn't been around anybody infected with it, what would happen?
Or what would be the, how would you deal with it?
And all of that, right?
Or, you know, I don't have a hangnail, but if I did have a hangnail or, or, you know, gosh, you know, once when I was 12, I cut my nails too short and they kind of hurt for a while.
Is that bad?
Do you see what I mean?
That would be so dissociated that the doctor wouldn't even really know what to say.
And he might answer your question, but I think he would also point out that you're bleeding from the eyeballs, your ear is hanging by a thread and your leg is gangrenous, right?
Or, you know, there's a sort of famous meme where this guy is having a chat with a girl on a dating app and she's like, well, I don't like, you're not MAGA, are you?
Because I don't like that Republicans are taking away my reproductive rights.
And he's like, you're 39.
What do you care about reproductive rights?
A little harsh and also a little young.
But nonetheless, if you are 400 pounds and you go to a nutritionist and the nutritionist says, all right, what can I do for you?
And you say, let me ask you something.
Let's say that I was mildly lactose intolerant and 80.
What kind of meals would you design for me?
Wouldn't that be bizarre?
Like, you're 400 pounds now.
A, you're not making it to 80.
B, you're not even lactose intolerant.
And C, that's a complete waste of time to deal with a theoretical that has nothing to do with the immediate dangers.
Did you see what I mean?
So when people say, and I say, give me your toughest moral questions, give me your biggest moral questions.
And people say, well, when is it precisely the best time to use preemptive force in a situation where somebody is about to come onto your property and they're armed or there's an army massing on your border and like all of this stuff?
And again, I like the theoreticals.
I've got no issue with that.
That's fine.
But just so you know, I know that is probably item 10,000 on your prioritized list of moral issues in your life.
So then the question is, why do people ask these impossible questions?
There's a trolley and there's one switch that you can kill five people.
There's another switch you kill four people.
It's like, well, I wouldn't throw a switch.
I would go and perform a citizen's arrest on whoever set up this scenario.
So I guarantee you, I guarantee you, that this person who's asking this question has never once in his life had to deal with the situation of edge case preemptive self-defense, and he never will.
And nobody he knows has ever had to deal with this or ever will.
This is so unbelievably rare that it is a non-issue in his life, and my answer will change absolutely nothing about his life.
Somebody who's currently bleeding out, who says to the doctor, Hey, I watched this episode of House, but this and Lupus and the other, and you know, what, you know, what would you do?
And it's like, bro, you're bleeding out.
What are you like?
It's so strange to me.
And it's not strange if somebody says, Okay, listen, I've got moral issues in my life.
They're really challenging, but I want to kind of take a break and work on something abstract.
You know, I'd like to do this preemptive self-defense thing, right?
But there is a certain amount of pride, ego, and vanity when you say the most important moral question that I have is a theoretical that will never happen to me or anyone I know.
By implication, you're saying all of the other moral issues in my life are completely sorted out.
I am morally so great and so perfect that the only issue I can come up with is a bizarre theoretical that will never happen to me or anyone else I know.
That is unanswerable.
It's unanswerable.
Philosophy is not there to adjudicate individual cases.
That's why we have courts.
Please understand.
Please, please, please understand.
Philosophy is not there, does not exist to adjudicate individual cases.
It has the same relationship to individual cases that a theory of physics has to the construction of an individual bridge.
A theory of physics cannot say what type of bridge you should build.
It will tell you the properties of matter and energy and what you probably need to build as a minimum, but it can't tell you.
Should I build a bridge out of wood or out of metal?
Well, that depends.
If it's a footbridge, then you should probably build it out of wood.
If it is a bridge that has to carry trucks or trains, then you probably want metal or stone.
But asking physics, what kind of material I should use to build a bridge is not a question that physics can answer.
And if you go to a physicist and you say, well, I don't have a big budget.
I need a strong bridge.
I can't afford it to be all metal.
But I also don't want the bridge to fall down, but I don't have enough money for an all-metal bridge.
Like the physicist is going to say, I don't, like, that's not the job of a physicist.
You're talking about an individual instance of engineering.
You are not talking about a general theory of matter and energy.
Morality can tell you that the initiation of the use of force is immoral, and morality can tell you that self-defense is legitimate.
Right?
And that's a pretty big thing to do.
The initiation of violence is immoral, and self-defense is legitimate.
Now, what people do is they come up with some really complicated situation of self-defense and say, what does morality have to say about that?
And the answer is nothing.
Any more than physics can tell you what kind of specific bridge to build in an edge case scenario, right?
Morality can tell you that self-defense is justified.
Morality cannot tell you about Bob's edge case of self-defense.
Do you see what I mean?
So the Bob's edge case of self-defense is something to be adjudicated by a court with reference to the idea that if Bob is found to have acted in self-defense, then he is not guilty of a crime.
If Bob is found to have not acted in self-defense, then Bob may be guilty of a crime.
And what people will do is they will slice and dice moral scenarios until you cannot answer.
Morality will tell you self-defense is wrong.
Morality cannot adjudicate edge cases.
Morality can tell you if Bob's action falls under the category of self-defense, then it's morally justified.
If Bob's action does not, then it is not morally justified.
But what is it?
5149 or 50-50 or whatever it is, right?
It's the same as this.
Let me give you an example, right?
Heads versus tails, right?
You're figuring out who goes first in Monopoly or something, right?
Heads versus tails.
And you flip the coin and you let it land on a table.
And the coin, through some bizarre miracle of physics, the coin ends up landing on its side, on its edge, like standing vertical.
You say, well, is that head versus tails?
Is that heads or tails?
Can't answer it.
It's neither.
It is undetermined.
It is a null comparison.
A null comparison is from computer programming.
Does nine equal x?
You cannot answer it.
If x is 3 squared, sure.
18 divided by 2, yes.
Absolutely.
Square root of 81?
Yes.
Or the number 9, yes.
Then 9 equals.
But if you say, does 9 equal x and you don't know what x is?
You cannot answer the question.
You cannot say it does not equal x.
You cannot say that it does equal x.
It is a null comparison.
You cannot say that something that is defined matches something that is undefined.
An edge case scenario is a coin landing on its edge.
It is saying, I have a scenario wherein, given the knowledge that you have, it is impossible to know whether the person is acting in self-defense or not.
Right?
Well, then, it's a null comparison.
Self-defense is justified.
Bob is acting in a manner that cannot be categorized as either self-defense or not self-defense.
Okay, then morality has nothing to say about it.
Individual instances fall prey to the issue of the burden of proof.
Now, there are times, of course, when a criminal accusation is true without a doubt.
They left their DNA at the scene.
There's a video of them committing the crime.
They have confessed, right?
Blah, Okay, then that person committed a crime.
They violated morality.
Okay, fair enough.
There are other times where it's clearly not the person.
The victim says it was a tall Asian man and the person arrested is a short Mexican man.
Okay.
Or short Mexican woman who has a perfect alibi, right?
They were with 100 friends on the other side of the country at the time in question.
So then they're not guilty, right?
So one of them falls into the category of criminal evil.
The other does not.
Okay, so justice would say then you prosecute the first person or you put him in jail if he's confessed, and you don't prosecute the guy who doesn't match the description and has a perfect alibi, right?
Understandable.
So when morality says rape is wrong, well, what about Bob, who thought he had permission, but then later on the woman maybe have changed her mind or she was a little bit drunk, but we don't know.
Okay, then all you're saying is the coin has landed on its side.
Then it's neither head nor tails and morality has nothing to say about it.
Morality says if an action falls into this category, it's immoral.
If the action falls into the category rape, it is immoral.
Now, you can always, of course, design a scenario where there's uncertainty regarding whether the action falls into the category of immoral.
Sure, but that doesn't have anything to do with moral theories.
So then why do people ask these kinds of questions?
Well, it is to waste your time.
Because, and also it is to somehow show that morality is limited because it can, because you can create a scenario in which it becomes progressively harder and harder to know whether the action is immoral or not.
But there is no morality.
Sorry to be annoyingly emphatic.
I will do every phone neem.
There is no morality that exists independent of evaluation.
What is the morality of an edge case that cannot be proven?
There is no morality in an edge case that cannot be proven.
So in the court system, the policeman might be entirely convinced that Bob is a criminal, but he cannot prove it.
In that case, we assume a functioning justice system.
In that case, we accept that Bob will not be prosecuted or go to jail because the policeman, although he may strongly suspect Bob, has no smoking gun, no compelling evidence, not even circumstantial.
Bob has a reasonably good alibi and so on.
And so it's like saying, is Bob guilty if, like, is Bob legally guilty if the charges can't be laid because there's not enough evidence?
Well, the answer to that would be, well, no.
We'll say, well, but is Bob morally guilty?
But you can't answer that because that's having a standard of omniscience.
Well, let's say that you knew everything about everything in the universe, and that's considered to be the view of morality.
And I guess maybe that comes from religion or God or something like that, right?
Which is, well, assuming you had perfect knowledge, is Bob guilty or not?
Well, we don't have perfect knowledge, and therefore we don't know if Bob is guilty or not.
That would be for the police to decide, for a grand jury to see if the charges should go ahead.
It would be for the court to decide if Bob went through with his trial.
And even then, you can't say, you can say Bob's been found guilty of murder.
You can colloquially say Bob is a murderer, but it's simply proved beyond a reasonable doubt, 95% or more, not absolute certainty.
I mean, if there's absolute certainty, it doesn't go to trial.
I mean, I can't imagine it would, right?
If the police say, look, we've got you on video, your DNA at the scene, and you confessed and all of that, then they wouldn't go to trial, right?
Because there'd be no point.
You just play the video and the guy gets convicted.
So to construct an edge case, somebody is standing on the edge of your property.
See, edge case, edge of your property.
Somebody is standing on the edge of your property and they're pointing a gun at your house.
Can you shoot them?
Don't know.
It turns out he's short-sighted and he's checking his gun.
He doesn't even see your house.
She shot him by mistake.
He had no malevolent intent.
Right?
I don't know.
I mean, morality has nothing to say about that.
If it is proven that it was reasonable self-defense, then it's in the category called not immoral.
If it is proven that the guy in the house shot the guy on the edge of his property, pointing a gun at his house, and it's proven that that was not justified self-defense, then Bob would be charged with murder of some kind.
The murder is wrong.
Whether this action qualifies as murder is not for philosophy or morality to decide.
That is for the adjudication of our limited consciousness in the pursuit of facts, reason, and evidence, given the inevitable uncertainties of these things.
Murder is wrong.
Well, here's an edge case where it could be murder or it could not be murder.
No?
That's not relevant to morality.
Morality says, hey, if it's proven that it's murder, then murder is wrong.
He's punished.
If it's proven that it's self-defense, self-defense is justified, so he's not punished.
And it's really tough for people to figure this out because, first of all, everyone thinks they need to answer everything, and you can't, right?
Everyone thinks that they need to answer every question.
Oh, come on, bring it all.
And then there's this belief that if you can't answer every question, that your morality, your moral system is flawed.
And it's like, no.
I mean, can you imagine that instead of a legal system with, you know, with a trial, with rules of evidence, a chain of custody, and cross-examining your accuser and so on?
Can you imagine if instead of an entire legal court system, we just had a bunch of philosophers sitting around in a room and edge cases are brought to them and they say innocent or guilty based upon what?
Glancing at things based like there's no process by which the guilt or innocence of people is examined or attempted to be proven or disproven.
That you just have a bunch of philosophers sitting down, somebody comes in with an edge case and they say, oh, Bob is Bob shot the guy, so that's murder.
Or no, no, Bob was acting in self-defense, so it's not, right?
That's not the job of the philosopher.
The job of the philosopher is to tell you what is good and evil and how they are defined.
It is not to adjudicate every single case.
It's like asking an economist, should I buy or rent this house in this location in this neighborhood on this day?
Nope.
Economists can't tell you that.
Can't give you orders.
Otherwise, every financial decision would be submitted to economists.
I mean, I guess they are in the public sector these days.
So, yeah, it is really interesting.
People ask these questions because they want to waste other people's time and they want to say, well, you see, philosophy is kind of helpless because it can't answer these questions.
And, oh, by the by, I'm such a morally perfect specimen that, don't you know, this is the only moral issue that I could possibly come up with.
Everything else in my life is, I'm just surrounded by angels.
I'm an angel myself.
And so, yeah, so it is just to create these edge cases, which I've been fighting for 40 years, right?
These edge cases designed to make philosophy look stilted and to have somebody be unable to answer the question, right?
Which is why the guy in the call yesterday who said, is it possible, isn't it possible that someone could misinterpret what you're saying?
Can't answer that question.
Because there's no honorable answer because it's not an honorable question.
It's a gotcha because everyone knows.
Everyone knows very, very clearly that it was possible to misinterpret.
So if you're asking someone, that's just a humiliation ritual.
And the humiliation ritual is to get you to say things that are obvious but make you look bad, right?
So if this guy says, well, you know, what if it's a real edge case scenario of self-defense?
Oh, you can't answer that.
Well, I guess philosophy doesn't really add up to much then, does it?
Blah, right?
Well, that is not.
You don't play those games, right?
Don't play those games.
So you say, is he innocent or guilty?
Well, I don't know.
I'm going to construct a scenario where it could be either.
It's like, well, then philosophy can't answer that.
Oh, I thought philosophy could answer everything.
Nope.
Philosophy cannot answer the unanswerable.
That's why we have courts, right?
You cannot validly do a null comparison, right?
You cannot say, is this moral or immoral when the morality or immorality cannot be determined.
So I hope that helps.
Freedomain.com slash tonight to help out the show.
We'd really appreciate it.
Lots of love from up here, my friends.
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