Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux - X/Twitter Questions 2 March 2026
Aired: 2026-03-16
Duration: 54:00


=== Tips for New Fathers (07:52) ===

[00:00:00]  All right, these are more questions from the fine listeners on X. Good morning.
[00:00:03]  Good morning, everyone.
[00:00:04]  Hope you're doing well.
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[00:00:19]  So tips for a new father for an upcoming first baby.
[00:00:23]  Aside from your peaceful parenting book, of course, yes, peacefulparenting.com.
[00:00:27]  Tips for a new father.
[00:00:29]  So one of the things to remember, and I'm sure you know this is really just a reminder, is that being a new mother completely reshapes and really beautifies your wife's personality.
[00:00:45]  So once you become, once a woman becomes a mother, she never stops thinking about her family.
[00:00:53]  She never stops thinking about what's best for her children.
[00:00:56]  She never stops thinking about, I mean, you can, it's like a demo switch that you can't turn off.
[00:01:00]  You can turn it down sometimes.
[00:01:03]  But, I mean, good mothers, and I'm sure you have a lovely wife, good mothers, it's just something that happens.
[00:01:11]  You are no longer number one.
[00:01:16]  You are number one, shared with your children.
[00:01:22]  So you don't want to look at your wife and say, oh, I'm getting less attention.
[00:01:26]  I'm getting less focus.
[00:01:28]  You want to say that you are now part of a larger focus and she has honored you with the greatest gift a woman can bestow upon a man, which is children.
[00:01:37]  So recognize that you are now part of a larger love.
[00:01:42]  So I'm going to get emotional because it's such a beautiful time when you have, especially your first child.
[00:01:49]  It's just amazing and wonderful.
[00:01:53]  And so you are part of a larger love.
[00:01:56]  The love now is not merely romantic and sexual, which is, you know, a wonderful part of life and so on.
[00:02:03]  But your love is now familial.
[00:02:06]  And being part of that larger love is everything in life.
[00:02:12]  That's everything.
[00:02:14]  The fierceness with which you will want to protect your children, I talked about this on the Scott Adams School yesterday.
[00:02:21]  The fierceness with which you will want to protect your child and your family will be very primal and very powerful.
[00:02:28]  And it is to avoid people gathering that fierceness of protection that the powers that be are overjoyed to strip love from our hearts through vanity and bribery and sophistry and propaganda.
[00:02:42]  So you are entering into a cycle of life that is a much larger love than you have with your wife.
[00:02:53]  Your daughter, your son, will come out of the womb with a fierce, desperate desire to love and respect his or her parents.
[00:03:08]  I mean, you have a daughter soon.
[00:03:11]  I have a daughter who's almost an adult.
[00:03:14]  And children very much desperately want to love and respect and please their parents because of that very powerful bond.
[00:03:27]  You need a very light touch when it comes to correcting or guiding your children.
[00:03:35]  The way that I see a lot of parents doing it is it's like if you have a Cessna, like a little tiny plane, a little tiny lightweight plane.
[00:03:46]  Then if you yank that joystick around, your plane will stall, it will turn too sharp, you'll put too much strain on the wings, it'll tear up, it'll fall apart.
[00:03:58]  You need a very light touch with children because children bond, attach, and love you so much that a slightly raised eyebrow, a small gesture is enough to correct them.
[00:04:13]  You need micro-adjustments with children, which is why it's so wild to me that so many parents, you know, attack and slam and hit and scream.
[00:04:22]  And it's like, oh, gosh, it absolutely overwhelms the pair bond.
[00:04:28]  And maybe it's because people are incapable of having a pair bond because of prior trauma that they've never worked on or something like that.
[00:04:34]  But children come out of the womb wanting to please their parents.
[00:04:40]  I mean, we can just think of this evolutionarily speaking, biologically speaking.
[00:04:43]  Of course, children want to please their parents because children who significantly displeased their parents didn't usually make it.
[00:04:53]  So the general cycle that happens, honestly, in most families, most families spank, and at least in America and Europe, a little less so.
[00:05:02]  But then they replace spanking with cold-hearted, icy-eyed indoctrination.
[00:05:08]  So the general cycle that happens really is horrible and so unnecessary.
[00:05:13]  One of the saddest things in my life is how much richness and enjoyment my mother could have gotten out of being a mother, which she shredded and destroyed with her aggression and violence.
[00:05:28]  It really is very sad, you know, especially how much I enjoy being a parent, how much fun my daughter and I have together.
[00:05:36]  It's really sad how much, I mean, both my parents walked away from all of that happiness because of the war, because of great tragedies, because of, I don't know, like, is it an inability to pursue self-knowledge because the trauma has been so great?
[00:05:55]  Or is it choosing the vanity of a pompous self-image instead of relinquishing that vanity and pursuing the truth?
[00:06:04]  I mean, I don't know.
[00:06:06]  I did not go through nearly as much trauma as my mother did.
[00:06:11]  I was in an insane pocket of a relatively sane world.
[00:06:14]  My mother was in a world that was being destroyed from end to end in the war.
[00:06:22]  So it's, yeah, it's a real shame.
[00:06:24]  She could have had a lot more fun and had a much happier old age.
[00:06:28]  But that's not what happened.
[00:06:31]  So the general pattern, it's very sad, is that parents get very aggressive with their children.
[00:06:39]  This destroys the bond.
[00:06:41]  And then because the bond is destroyed, they end up being even more aggressive, which further destroys the bond, which makes them even more aggressive.
[00:06:50]  It's sort of like if you're in a car going very fast, then you need micro adjustments to the steering wheel.
[00:06:58]  Of course, if you're going very fast and you turn the steering wheel sharply, you're just going to turn and flip and roll in the car.
[00:07:06]  So imagine if you are in a car going fast and you make a micro adjustment, but the car doesn't turn.
[00:07:15]  Then you have to turn a little more and turn and it still doesn't respond, so you have to turn.
[00:07:23]  So eventually you're just slamming the steering wheel back and forth, just trying to get a change in direction.
[00:07:29]  And that's the kind of escalation that occurs.
[00:07:32]  You get angry at your baby.
[00:07:34]  Your baby looks at you in fear.
[00:07:36]  This harms the bond, which means the baby is less likely to respond in any organic way.
[00:07:42]  And then the next time you get upset, your baby looks at you in fear.
[00:07:48]  You hate that look of fear because it makes you feel guilty.
[00:07:51]  So then you get aggressive.

=== Be a Source of Happiness (03:11) ===

[00:07:52]  I'm not talking about you.
[00:07:52]  I'm just talking about obviously people as a whole.
[00:07:56]  And next thing you know, all you're doing is managing brittle distance, managing brittle distance.
[00:08:04]  That's most families.
[00:08:06]  Most families.
[00:08:07]  And recognize that your daughter bonds with you.
[00:08:12]  Be a source of happiness for people in your life.
[00:08:17]  I mean, it really shouldn't need to be said, but it feels like it needs to be said.
[00:08:22]  Be a source of happiness for people in your life.
[00:08:28]  Successfully compete with the null hypothesis.
[00:08:31]  Successfully compete with not being there.
[00:08:35]  I want my family, let's say they get up earlier than I do.
[00:08:40]  When I come down the stairs, I want my family to be happy that I'm up because I am a source of happiness for them.
[00:08:50]  It's not super complicated.
[00:08:54]  I mean, you are in a market in the world.
[00:08:59]  And I want to be a source of wisdom and enrichment for you as best I can.
[00:09:05]  And I also learn from the audience and from the feedback and every call and show, I learn something new.
[00:09:12]  So just be a source of happiness for people in your life.
[00:09:16]  I remember saying this when I was a manager in the business world.
[00:09:19]  I was chief technical officer.
[00:09:21]  I was a director of technology.
[00:09:23]  I was a director of marketing in three different organizations.
[00:09:29]  And I would say to my employees, first of all, you're not working for me.
[00:09:33]  You're working for the customer.
[00:09:34]  I don't pay you.
[00:09:34]  The customer pays you.
[00:09:36]  So they're the ones you have to please.
[00:09:37]  And if that means you have to confront me about something in order to better serve the customer, please do.
[00:09:43]  That's number one.
[00:09:43]  And number two, I said, my salary is deducted from your wages.
[00:09:49]  If I wasn't here, if I wasn't necessary, if I wasn't adding value, you would be paid more.
[00:09:55]  So maybe you pay, I don't know, $5,000 a year to me or $10,000 a year to me, which means I also work for you, which means I'm here to make your job easier and better, maybe more fun, and so on.
[00:10:13]  So I have to be of value to you.
[00:10:16]  Now, of course, you have to be a value to me, to the customers and all of that.
[00:10:19]  But don't forget that as your boss, I am here as a resource to provide value for you.
[00:10:25]  If you're having trouble, please come to me.
[00:10:27]  If you're having difficulties, if you're stressed, if there are problems, if you're not happy, come to me.
[00:10:32]  And I'm here to make your job experience as good as possible.
[00:10:37]  So just be a source of value in people's lives.
[00:10:44]  And it's really hard to fail if you focus on that.
[00:10:47]  If you focus on providing value to people, then it's really hard to fail in life.
[00:10:57]  It's the same thing with your children.
[00:10:58]  Be a source of pleasure.
[00:11:00]  Play with them, engage with them.

=== Supporting Your Wife During Pregnancy (02:40) ===

[00:11:03]  Have those beautiful conversations where you're just sitting around late at night, jawboning about things.
[00:11:11]  Ask them questions.
[00:11:12]  How did you sleep?
[00:11:13]  Did you dream about anything?
[00:11:15]  What's on your mind?
[00:11:17]  Show interest in them and be a source of guidance and wisdom for them.
[00:11:21]  Now, of course, you have to gather with them wisdom before you can provide it.
[00:11:24]  So do that as best you can.
[00:11:27]  Peacefulparenting.com is a great free resource for parents.
[00:11:31]  So that is really the basis of it, recognizing that you're entering into an infinite cathedral of love that goes far beyond the individual and hooks you into and lashes you in a lovely way to the cycle of life that's been going on for four billion years.
[00:11:51]  Merge yourself with a larger pattern of existence that gets you out of your own head and your own concerns and your own worries.
[00:11:59]  And now you are there to support your wife as she dissolves even more than men do into the beautiful lattice work and tapestry of family love.
[00:12:12]  Be there to support her, to help her, make sure you get her rest.
[00:12:17]  And if you can get her other women who've gone through a motherhood to give her advice and feedback, assuming that they're good mothers, that's well worth it.
[00:12:26]  But, you know, once you, you know, for your wife, of course, motherhood begins at conception.
[00:12:33]  And for you, fatherhood is like, yeah, there's a bump in the belly.
[00:12:36]  And I would certainly recommend reading to the baby in the belly.
[00:12:42]  And particularly, as a man, you'd have a deeper voice and that transmits well through the fluid that surrounds your lovely baby.
[00:12:51]  And the studies have shown that babies respond to their father's voice, if they've been read to in the womb, more so when they come out.
[00:12:59]  So give her something familiar, continuity that goes from the womb to the outside world.
[00:13:04]  Read to her and put your hand on the belly, and she can put her hand through the sack to your hand, and it's a beautiful kind of contact.
[00:13:16]  And be there to support your wife in the biggest change that she's ever going to experience, even bigger than a puberty, as she merges her soul with a new soul.
[00:13:32]  And it is peak, as my daughter would say.
[00:13:36]  It is peak, peak human experience.
[00:13:38]  And it doesn't end.
[00:13:41]  It's amazing.
[00:13:42]  It's an amazing process.

=== The Peak Human Experience (10:43) ===

[00:13:44]  And I wish you the very best going forward with that.
[00:13:49]  What's your take on the streamer, Destiny?
[00:13:52]  Well, of course, I read about him in Lauren Southern's new book.
[00:13:58]  He seems very hyper and very aggressive.
[00:14:02]  And there's this kind of tension that happens with certain people when they're in debates, this very rapid-fire aggression and almost contempt that comes out of people.
[00:14:19]  And it's not particularly fun to see.
[00:14:24]  And it's also something that I view as being driven by a kind of ideological desperation.
[00:14:32]  So two kinds of people in the world.
[00:14:34]  There are people who survive and flourish based upon their pursuit of real things in the real world.
[00:14:42]  I mean, you know, plumbers go and actually fix toilets and pipes and so on.
[00:14:46]  Electricians fix wiring and fuse boxes and so on.
[00:14:51]  And so there are people who get their survival and income and flourishing from doing real things in the real world.
[00:15:00]  And those people tend to have a kind of calm to them.
[00:15:04]  As I said before, though I was not a huge fan, obviously, of manual labor when I was a child and a teenager and in my early 20s, but I did years of manual labor, hard physical labor.
[00:15:17]  And boy, did it ground me in the real world.
[00:15:20]  And in general, the other kinds of people are those who make their living out of bullying, nagging, and bamboozling others.
[00:15:31]  So you think of the single mom who is constantly voting for more and more government benefits.
[00:15:38]  So they survive on a kind of falsification and implicit bullying.
[00:15:45]  And it is the sort of typical historical proto-natural male and female archetypes that the man is out there doing things in the real world and the woman is using sexual wiles or nagging or bullying to get resources from the males.
[00:16:05]  And the people who live by lying or manipulating, who live through language rather than through real work in the real world.
[00:16:18]  I know this sounds ironic since I do kind of talk for a living, but I do a lot more than that.
[00:16:23]  So those who live by sophistry, through emotional manipulation, through the application of negative emotions and the application of positive emotions through approval and disapproval rather than truth and correction,
[00:16:45]  who threaten to make people feel bad, either through consistent application of condemnation or hostility, those people have a kind of panic in the base of their assault.
[00:17:00]  It's the panic of a con man who is, of course, constantly nervous and anxious that his con is going to be exposed, sort of the Bernie Madoff and Elizabeth Holmes kind of, or Samuel Bankman-Fried.
[00:17:14]  This concern or this anxiety that the fraud is going to be exposed.
[00:17:19]  It creates a certain kind of tension.
[00:17:21]  And so there's kind of a driving aggression and condemnation and impatience, and they're signaling that they're in the right, you're in the wrong, and there's not a sort of patient building up from first principles in pursuit of the truth.
[00:17:37]  Are they in pursuit of the truth?
[00:17:39]  I would say not.
[00:17:41]  And one of the things that's really important when debating with people is to look at the personal costs and benefits of them admitting fault or error.
[00:17:53]  And have they done so in the past?
[00:17:55]  It's really important.
[00:17:57]  Is the person you're debating capable of admitting fault and or error?
[00:18:03]  And if there's no particular evidence that the person you're talking to is capable or has in the past admitted fault or error, I wouldn't.
[00:18:11]  I wouldn't really bother unless you're doing some public debate to instruct others in general.
[00:18:16]  I certainly wouldn't bother with that.
[00:18:20]  So, yeah, I think there's just this kind of energy and panic and aggression and hostility and contempt.
[00:18:28]  These are all emotional signals that if you disagree, then things will escalate.
[00:18:33]  And, you know, possibly, I'm not saying with destiny, but with this sort of type of personality in general, that things will escalate in potentially dangerous ways.
[00:18:42]  There's a sort of background threat to all of this.
[00:18:46]  And the other thing, of course, is to look at the person's arguments and say, what would be the consequences politically of accepting a person's argument or rejecting that person's argument?
[00:19:02]  If that person was proven wrong, what would happen politically?
[00:19:06]  And generally, what I mean by politically is what would happen to voting patterns and what would happen to the multi-trillion dollar a year bamboozle of income transfer, coercive income transfer that characterizes political redistribution.
[00:19:21]  You say, well, what would happen?
[00:19:23]  What would happen?
[00:19:24]  Well, if you have a hard leftist who then says, gee, I'm wrong, you're right, and so on, then hard leftists tend to be characterized by violations of property rights for purposes of political reward, right?
[00:19:40]  So they take money from the successful and they give it to the less successful in return for votes and allegiance to political power.
[00:19:47]  This is an age-old foundational aspect of politics.
[00:19:52]  So if someone like Destiny was proven wrong and accepted that they were wrong and had a respect for property rights and so on, then if that were to be established within society, then trillions of dollars would stop being herded around the political landscape by the aggression of politicians and the state apparatus.
[00:20:17]  Well, that would be quite a big thing.
[00:20:21]  Also, in general, the more aggressive someone has been in public about their beliefs, the less likely they are to change them.
[00:20:28]  So the more somebody has held others in contempt, you know, like I'm against the welfare state.
[00:20:32]  Oh, you just hate the poor, you heartless fascist, whatever, right?
[00:20:36]  Well, then the more aggressive someone has been in public, the less likely they are to ever change their views because they would have a lot of apologizing to do for their aggression.
[00:20:45]  All right.
[00:20:46]  So will we start taking real refugees from South Africa under Trump?
[00:20:51]  I mean, certainly I think there's good justifications for the refugee program extending to South Africans, but the refugee program as a whole is something that's run by the state.
[00:21:04]  Therefore, it is subject to all the corrupting factors of the state.
[00:21:09]  I'm not a fan.
[00:21:10]  All right.
[00:21:10]  John asks, what are the key takeaways from Ayn Rand and her philosophy?
[00:21:15]  I always hear you mention her, but to be honest, I don't know anything about it.
[00:21:20]  So I have a whole series.
[00:21:22]  It's a three-part series.
[00:21:23]  It was going to be a fourth-part series, but I never got around to the fourth.
[00:21:27]  And it is on Ayn Rand's philosophy.
[00:21:29]  There's parts one, two, and three.
[00:21:31]  You can go to freedomain.com slash podcasts or FDR podcasts, free domain radio is the original name of the show, fdrpodcasts.com.
[00:21:43]  And you can do a search for A-Y-N, and you'll get a bunch of stuff there.
[00:21:46]  And there's a three-part series.
[00:21:48]  Very briefly, I think Ayn Rand was asked to define her philosophy while standing on one leg.
[00:21:53]  And I think she did so.
[00:21:55]  Reason capitalism.
[00:21:57]  I think it was selfishness, reason capitalism, self-esteem, or something like that.
[00:22:01]  So the basics of Ayn Rand's philosophy are that existence exists independent of consciousness, that consciousness is able through the evidence of the senses to accurately perceive reality,
[00:22:14]  and that reason is man's best tool for long-term survival, both individually and generally, and that the free market is the only moral way to exchange resources in human society.
[00:22:33]  Reason, objectivity is called objectivism because it's about the objectivity of reason and the objectivity of reality as received through sense data.
[00:22:46]  So the key takeaways are existence exists, reason is the only valid tool of cognition, emotions are not tools of cognition, and that free markets are the only moral way for human beings to exchange resources.
[00:23:04]  And she's not an absolutist, though.
[00:23:06]  She was not consistent.
[00:23:08]  So she believed that the state was necessary, even though the state is, by its very definition, a violation of property rights and a coercive intrusion into the free market.
[00:23:23]  Of course, in the end of Atlas Shrugged, I'm not giving any spoilers because I'm not talking about the story, but in the end of Atlas Shrugged, the big solution that apparently was going to solve all the problems was correcting some moral typos in the Constitution.
[00:23:38]  And somehow that was going to solve everything.
[00:23:41]  She responded to Marie Rothbard, who was part of what was jokingly called the Collective, which was a group of people talking about philosophy and markets that Ayn Rand was the head of.
[00:23:51]  And Murray Rothbard was an anarcho-capitalist who said that if we're going to extend property rights and the non-aggression principle to their consistent universals, then the state becomes morally delegitimized.
[00:24:04]  And she said, oh, but that would just result in a war of warlords and all against all and so on.
[00:24:09]  And she was very impatient.
[00:24:10]  And we could guess as to why it had to do with her own corruption.
[00:24:16]  She did seduce and sleep with one of her acolytes who was decades younger, who became a psychologist, Dr. Nathaniel Brandon, who I actually had on my show a couple of times.

=== Avoiding the Zombie City Mindset (06:29) ===

[00:24:27]  Again, FDRpodcast.com to search through.
[00:24:30]  And she put her own personal lusts above what was good for philosophy as a whole, because the movement fell apart in large part because of this affair and the cover-up of it.
[00:24:44]  So it was not ideal.
[00:24:47]  I mean, people don't have to be perfect, but it would be nice if they acknowledged their own inconsistencies.
[00:24:53]  All right.
[00:24:54]  So will all the smart people have fled the West by the time a Mad Max style societal collapse occurs?
[00:25:01]  Well, if you sort of look at the market of countries in the world as a whole, then the country that encourages or invites the smartest people to come to that country will be the next center of civilization.
[00:25:19]  All right, what would you do if you catch your daughter watching at Nick J. Fuentis?
[00:25:24]  I have not had that experience, but of course, if my daughter was watching someone whose views I had questions about that say, I would just ask her questions.
[00:25:34]  You know, what's interesting?
[00:25:35]  What are the arguments?
[00:25:37]  What are they like compared to the evidence?
[00:25:39]  And so on.
[00:25:40]  Just be curious.
[00:25:42]  Do you think God is a scientist?
[00:25:45]  No, I don't think God is anything because God does not exist.
[00:25:50]  Why do you, in some of your books and podcasts, outline a desert-like existence for those who recently defu, i.e., the necessary period, walking alone before meeting like valued individuals?
[00:26:02]  A desert-like existence.
[00:26:04]  So this is an analogy that you think you are in a city of people.
[00:26:10]  It turns out that you wake up one day and, like Sean of the Dead style, you realize that you are in a city of zombies.
[00:26:17]  Zombies being, of course, those who have physically died but are still moving around and eat brains and act collectively and have no thoughts of their own.
[00:26:29]  It really is an analogy for NPCs.
[00:26:32]  Zombies became popular as government curricula became more and more centralized.
[00:26:40]  So as governments at the federal level take over more and more education, they produce more and more NPCs, people whose capacity to think, which is really our basic soul as human beings, people whose capacity to think has been robbed from them, propagandized away from them, sandblasted out of their souls.
[00:26:58]  It is really just about the most gruesome thing that happens in the world as a whole is to sandblast and excavate out the seat of thinking, which is our essence as human beings, and replace it with a bunch of fearful and aggressive propaganda.
[00:27:12]  That is really the most brutal thing.
[00:27:15]  So you wake up and you realize that the city that you're in is not populated by people, but populated by zombies, and that your own skin is turning green.
[00:27:28]  And that if you don't get out of the city, you will become a zombie.
[00:27:32]  And that is, if you are around people who don't think, you will lose your capacity to think.
[00:27:37]  I mean, if you've ever learned a language, I learned French and German when I was younger.
[00:27:43]  If you don't spend any time speaking that language, you lose it.
[00:27:46]  And if you're around people who don't speak a new language that you've learned, you will lose your capacity to speak that language.
[00:27:52]  It's the same thing with reason.
[00:27:53]  If you're around people who don't reason, who just react, get aggressive, hysterical, manipulative, pouty, cry, run from the room, whatever, call your names, then you will lose your ability to reason.
[00:28:03]  So the infection of the city is burning its subtle way through your own skin as well and turning you green and bits of you will be falling off relatively soon.
[00:28:16]  So you get out of the city and out of the city around the city is a desert.
[00:28:20]  And that's why people stay in the city because around the city is a desert that seems to go on forever.
[00:28:26]  And if you are smart and alert and aware, then what will happen is you will get out of the city and you will look and scan the horizon for little tiny thin threads of smoke.
[00:28:39]  Because it's a desert.
[00:28:40]  There's really nothing to burn there.
[00:28:41]  So the smoke must be coming from distant human habitations.
[00:28:46]  And you will strike and struggle and climb knee-deep in sand, the dunes, and stagger from oasis to oasis, rare as they are.
[00:28:55]  And then after a hazardous period of traveling, you will come to an actual human settlement of the people who have fled the zombie city and actually think and reason and laugh and challenge and enjoy each other's company.
[00:29:10]  So there is a passage.
[00:29:12]  Because I don't want to lie to people about the difficulties of philosophy.
[00:29:16]  The rewards are enormous.
[00:29:19]  But if you were to say to somebody quitting a drug, you'll have no problems with it.
[00:29:23]  It's easy as falling off a log, you would be a liar.
[00:29:27]  And if you were to say to people, telling the truth is all wonderful, there's no downside, everyone will love you for it, you would be lying.
[00:29:35]  Now, of course, thou shalt not bear false witness is the most foundational commandment of theology and philosophy.
[00:29:41]  So there would be nobody in the zombie city if it wasn't surrounded by desert.
[00:29:47]  That the zombie city is maintained by threats of ostracism.
[00:29:51]  Propaganda runs on threats of ostracism.
[00:29:54]  That people will cut off contact with you if you don't agree with their lies.
[00:30:01]  So there is the zombie city because of the desert.
[00:30:08]  And NPCs react with bottomless hostility when their programming is questioned, because you are pointing out their greatest wound, which is that they are not loved.
[00:30:23]  They are simply approved of by evil people.
[00:30:25]  And that's most people's existence.
[00:30:26]  They're not loved.
[00:30:27]  They simply have the approval of corrupt and evil people.
[00:30:31]  And most human beings would rather be approved of than right.
[00:30:35]  Again, evolutionarily speaking, those who preferred being right over being approved of, those genes didn't make it.
[00:30:42]  Because we take so long to grow, like 20 to 25 years it takes to grow a human being, that if we don't have the support of the tribe, we can't make it.
[00:30:50]  And the support of the tribe is paid for by conformity with the tribe's lies.

=== Testing If Parents Love You (06:50) ===

[00:30:56]  So with regards to the DFU, that stands for FOO is family of origin.
[00:31:02]  It's a psych term.
[00:31:04]  If you say, my family, are you talking about, if you have a wife and kids, your current family, or are you talking about the family you grew up in?
[00:31:10]  So FOO stands for family of origin.
[00:31:13]  Dfu is when you take a break from your family of origin because they are unrepentant abusers and destroyers of health, mental well-being and happiness.
[00:31:24]  So you can't be loved if you can't disagree.
[00:31:28]  If you are attacked for disagreeing, then you are not loved.
[00:31:33]  You are only praised for conformity and punished for non-compliance, but you're not left.
[00:31:38]  So, for instance, if you're in prison, one of the reasons or one of the ways that you know that you're in prison is if you want to leave, you will be very strongly disagreed with, right?
[00:31:47]  If you try to walk out, the door is locked, and if you try to make a break for it, they will perhaps even shoot you, but certainly can use great violence to prevent you from escaping.
[00:31:59]  So, if you say, I'm not in prison, then the simple test is to leave, to walk out, right?
[00:32:07]  So, I went to do Sam Hyde's show, I was in a hotel, and I wanted to go out for a walk.
[00:32:14]  So, I left my hotel room, walked down the stairs, I tried to do stairs on elevators, and I went for a walk.
[00:32:21]  And they waved me, have a nice walk, and I came back and they said, Welcome back.
[00:32:27]  And I got a nice decaf and warmed up because it was cold as hell.
[00:32:32]  So, I say, I'm in a hotel, I can leave.
[00:32:35]  Okay, so then I can easily test that.
[00:32:39]  Now, if I think it's a hotel, but it is in fact a prison, they won't let me leave.
[00:32:46]  That is the basic test.
[00:32:48]  So, people say, I'm in a family that loves me.
[00:32:50]  Okay, that's that's nice, and I hope that that's true.
[00:32:55]  I love that that's true, if it's true for you.
[00:32:57]  So, people say, I'm in a family and they love me.
[00:33:01]  Okay, so what is loving behavior?
[00:33:05]  Well, if you are yelled at for disagreeing with them, is that loving?
[00:33:11]  Probably not, I think.
[00:33:14]  I think if they've treated you consistently badly, i.e., they hit you a lot, they screamed at you a lot, they called you terrible names, and so on.
[00:33:28]  Well, is that loving?
[00:33:30]  It's hard to say that hitting people and screaming at people and calling them terrible names is loving.
[00:33:37]  I mean, if you did that to your wife, especially out in public, people would be horrified and you'd go to jail.
[00:33:42]  So, it's pretty hard to say that loving gets you jailed, maybe in the Middle East.
[00:33:50]  So, if you say, My family loves me, I'm in a loving family, then clearly, as an empiricist, right, I don't care about theories, I care about facts.
[00:34:00]  I care about evidence first and foremost, like science cares about evidence, not theories.
[00:34:05]  Evidence trumps theories in any contradiction between theory and evidence, evidence wins, right?
[00:34:10]  So, if you have a hypothesis, my family loves me, I have a good family, then that should be a testable hypothesis.
[00:34:20]  Love is not biological attachment, otherwise, ducklings have ardent love for me when we have ducklings because they follow me around and are imprinted upon and attached to me.
[00:34:31]  Securus thing in the world, of course, right?
[00:34:34]  So, if you have a theory, my parents love me, great, then they should have acted in loving manners, in ways that we would recognize as loving.
[00:34:47]  Now, insulting people, calling them horrible names, hitting people, screaming at people for having questions or disagreements, that is not loving.
[00:34:58]  I mean, we can, I think we can all accept that.
[00:35:01]  So, if your parents have been abusive and destructive and horrible and blah, then you can't say that they were loving, and it's dangerous to do that because philosophy is not about the past.
[00:35:14]  Philosophy is about the future.
[00:35:15]  Like pain, physical pain is not about the past, which can't be changed.
[00:35:19]  It is about the future, right?
[00:35:21]  So, if you are riding carelessly, you know, hands-free on gravel and you fall off your bike, then your body will give you pain.
[00:35:29]  Not to undo the past, which can't be undone, your body will give you pain in order to prevent you from being so careless in the future, right?
[00:35:38]  So philosophy is about the future, not about the past.
[00:35:41]  Now, if you say, my parents love me, and my parents are also horrible and abusive and call me terrible names and scream at me and yell at me and so on, right?
[00:35:52]  Then what you're saying is that love is defined by being abused, being put down, insulted, yelled at, and includes being hit in the past.
[00:36:01]  Since most people who are adults, they're not being hit by their parents currently, but maybe they were hit from the age of 3 to 13, 10 years, you know, once a week, right?
[00:36:11]  That's a lot, right?
[00:36:13]  You get hit once a week for 10 years.
[00:36:16]  That's being hit 500 times.
[00:36:19]  That's a lot of hitting.
[00:36:20]  520, I guess, technically.
[00:36:23]  So the problem is, if you say, my parents love me and my parents treat me terribly, then you're saying that love is being treated terribly.
[00:36:33]  And that will condition how you pursue love and what you define as love in your adult life, which is not good.
[00:36:42]  Also, if your parents treat you terribly and some reasonably mentally healthy person does actually love you, then they will despise your parents because we can't love someone and also love the people who have done the most harm and damage to them.
[00:36:57]  You can't love your girlfriend and love the guy who screams at her at work and insults her and puts her down.
[00:37:04]  You can't love your boyfriend and also love the guy who humiliates him in public repeatedly.
[00:37:09]  You can't love your friend and also love the person who beats them up once a month.
[00:37:15]  If you love someone, then you will hate those who do them harm.
[00:37:20]  And so if you say that your parents love you when they in fact treat you terribly, or anyone for that matter, but we're talking about the core formational experiences, if you say, my parents love me and my parents do me great harm, then you are conditioning who you love in the future, which then causes you to repeat the same parental misdeeds.
[00:37:41]  You are keeping good people away from you because they won't want to be around such dysfunctional people.

=== Loving Truth Over Comfort (14:43) ===

[00:37:46]  And you are accepting a falsehood.
[00:37:50]  So if your conjecture, your hypothesis, and I'm obviously open to and very happy to hear people's thoughts and hypotheses, I listened last night to a guy, he said he was a physicist, who was kind of incapable of admitting that he was wrong.
[00:38:04]  So he was talking about morality as something which spontaneously emerges among people, peoples and cultures.
[00:38:09]  And then I would say, but then why does it decay into immorality within 100 or 250 years?
[00:38:15]  And if you compare that, if you compare it to something like gravity, that gravity is a constant.
[00:38:23]  And he said, well, no, gravity, there are theories that gravity is not a constant.
[00:38:28]  And honestly, I mean, I just kind of give up at those moments.
[00:38:32]  I just really do.
[00:38:34]  The idea that gravity is not a constant, and I gave him all the arguments, biological, physical, and so on, as to why gravity is not a variable.
[00:38:44]  Gravity is a constant gravitational attraction, and its force is a constant.
[00:38:49]  And the idea that it could change, how could it possibly change?
[00:38:52]  Based on what?
[00:38:53]  God's finger dialing up and down, this goes up to 11.
[00:38:57]  I mean, it's ridiculous, right?
[00:38:59]  Ridiculous.
[00:39:00]  And of course, the universe is, you know, 100 billion galaxies with 100 billion stars.
[00:39:07]  It's like enormous beyond any capacity for human beings to understand.
[00:39:15]  And the idea that if gravity were to change as a constant, like the speed of light in a vacuum were to dial up and down, if gravity were to change as a constant, it would have to change based upon some external cause or force.
[00:39:34]  And how could it change from one end of the universe to the other?
[00:39:39]  Because that would defy the laws of physics that information and facts cannot transfer faster than the speed of light.
[00:39:47]  The universe is, what is it, billions of light years across.
[00:39:50]  I don't know.
[00:39:50]  It's huge, right?
[00:39:52]  So the idea that every atom can be simultaneously affected by some outside force is antithetical to any kind of basic physics and reality.
[00:40:02]  It would be like every atom in the world, sorry, every atom in the universe suddenly went one inch or one centimeter to the left.
[00:40:09]  You couldn't affect that in the entire universe because you can't change things faster than the speed of light.
[00:40:18]  And so completely irrational.
[00:40:20]  And I made all of the arguments he wanted to cling to that gravity was, in fact, a variable that might change.
[00:40:28]  And so I looked it up on Grok.
[00:40:30]  And there is, in fact, no possibility, no evidence that gravity changes.
[00:40:36]  I mean, obviously, it's impossible to measure perfectly, I assume, because whatever measurement tool you put in there is going to subtly change gravitational pull, but it's very easy to approximate.
[00:40:46]  So if someone is that committed to unreality to the point where I provide an example of permanence that goes against the argument that morality somehow spontaneously evolves, and we didn't even get to the point that even if you say morality somehow spontaneously evolves, then it doesn't explain why there are cultures with vastly different moralities, right?
[00:41:15]  When the Europeans first came to Africa and first came to North America, the natives would perform child sacrifice and kill and eat others, cannibalism.
[00:41:30]  So they were old societies.
[00:41:32]  Some human beings have been in North America for almost 20,000 years.
[00:41:36]  So they're old societies and they have evolved rape and torture and child murder and cannibalism and other cultures have not.
[00:41:44]  So what would it mean to say that there's something that spontaneously emerges called morality that is somehow objective or universal?
[00:41:53]  It doesn't really make any sense.
[00:41:56]  So I honestly just, I mean, my phone was low on power for sure, but I mean, it's very silly that somebody is going to, in order to hold on to an argument, is going to make the claim that gravity is a variable, then there's no possibility of reasoning.
[00:42:12]  So gravity is a variable, but I don't need to define morality.
[00:42:18]  Again, I say this with sympathy, but people who want to be right at the expense of reason can't be reasoned with, right?
[00:42:26]  So yeah, so you have a theory that says my parents love me.
[00:42:29]  Okay, then you should be able to disagree with them.
[00:42:31]  You should be able to tell the truth to them, because you can't love someone and then punish them for telling you the truth.
[00:42:38]  This is like saying, I love the acquisition of knowledge in my students.
[00:42:43]  Like I'm a teacher.
[00:42:44]  I love the acquisition of knowledge in my students, but I'm going to punish them violently for correct answers and reward them for incorrect answers.
[00:42:53]  You can't say, I love teaching, I love when my students acquire true knowledge, and then you punish them for accuracy and reward them for getting things wrong.
[00:43:04]  That wouldn't make any sense.
[00:43:06]  When parents say to you, I love you, then they're saying, I love your thoughts.
[00:43:11]  I love your perspectives.
[00:43:13]  I love your virtues.
[00:43:14]  I love your honesty.
[00:43:16]  So if your parents say, I love you, then you should tell the truth to them.
[00:43:20]  You should be able to tell the truth to them.
[00:43:22]  If you tell the truth to them, and some of that truth can be harsh, right?
[00:43:25]  Which is, I don't like what you did as a parent in this way.
[00:43:27]  I don't like what you did as a parent in that way.
[00:43:30]  So if you say, my parents love me, then your parents should be happy that you're telling them the truth.
[00:43:39]  Even if the truth is harsh, they'll be happy in the long run, and they certainly would value the truth.
[00:43:43]  I mean, if you broke something of your parents, they would want you to tell them that rather than hide your evidence.
[00:43:50]  And then they think, oh my God, whatever happened to this?
[00:43:52]  It's just, it's just gone missing, right?
[00:43:55]  Which drives people kind of crazy.
[00:43:56]  Like, if you spill something on the book, say you spill some tea on the book that your parent is reading, your mother is reading, and then you just, you know, hide it and get rid of it and stuff it in the bottom of the garbage and so on.
[00:44:11]  And then she comes back and she's like, hey, where's my book?
[00:44:13]  I can't find my book.
[00:44:13]  Oh, I don't know, right?
[00:44:14]  That's not particularly nice.
[00:44:16]  So your parents say, no, tell me the truth.
[00:44:18]  I mean, just tell me the truth.
[00:44:20]  And if you say, well, I spilled tea on your book and so on, then that will upset them, but it will upset them less than thinking that they've lost their minds because their book has been mysteriously beamed at by space aliens.
[00:44:32]  So you can't love someone, or you can't claim to love someone, and then demand that they lie to you.
[00:44:39]  I can't love a woman and then punish her for telling me the truth and reward her for lying to me.
[00:44:45]  That's not loving her.
[00:44:46]  That's loving compliance or whatever it is, right?
[00:44:50]  So if you have a hypothesis that your parents love you and that it's a good relationship, then you must be able to tell, not even you should, you must be able to tell them the truth.
[00:45:01]  Because lying is where we are not.
[00:45:03]  Lying is where we are not ourselves by definition, right?
[00:45:07]  And so if your parents say they love you, you should be able to tell the truth to them.
[00:45:10]  If they punish you for telling the truth and reward you for lying, they don't love you.
[00:45:15]  Like, I'm sorry, this isn't even, don't shoot the messenger.
[00:45:18]  I mean, people are tempted to.
[00:45:20]  But if somebody screams at you and calls you terrible names and storms out and gets hysterical and punishes you emotionally and makes you feel awful for telling them the truth, then they don't love you.
[00:45:34]  I mean, there might be a reaction that's negative in the short run, but overall, it can't be bad in the long run.
[00:45:41]  So I think it's a wonderful hypothesis, and I hope that it's true that your parents love you.
[00:45:45]  And this is why I've always told people: if you have issues with your parents, go and talk to them.
[00:45:50]  Be honest.
[00:45:50]  Tell them the things they did right and the things that they did wrong and be honest with your parents.
[00:45:57]  So that is an empirical test of the hypothesis.
[00:46:02]  If you genuinely believe that praying to God will have him teleport you somewhere, right?
[00:46:10]  Then I don't think that's a rational belief.
[00:46:12]  It's not physically possible.
[00:46:14]  But if you genuinely have the belief that praying to God will allow him to teleport you somewhere, then you should test that.
[00:46:24]  I mean, when I was a kid, there were all of these crazy ideas floating around about psychic phenomena and telekinesis and so on, right?
[00:46:32]  So I tried it, right?
[00:46:34]  I remember lying on my bed.
[00:46:36]  I had a train set over my bed.
[00:46:38]  So I lay under my bed.
[00:46:40]  There was in the next room a record player from ShopRite with plastic speakers and you couldn't even close the lid.
[00:46:46]  It only did 45s.
[00:46:48]  You could do 33s, but then you couldn't close the lid.
[00:46:50]  And it sounded terrible.
[00:46:50]  And my friends never bought their albums over because it basically was an Apple Cora and I had to put plasticine on it so that it didn't skate over the record grooves and then everything was a little bit slow.
[00:47:02]  I am CA.
[00:47:05]  It's fun to see.
[00:47:07]  Anyway.
[00:47:08]  So I was listening to the first 45 I ever got, which was Things We Do for Love by 10 CC.
[00:47:16]  And the 45 had finished playing, and you were just getting that of the record at the end.
[00:47:24]  And I worked very hard for almost an hour to try with my mind to lift the needle and put it back at the beginning of the record or do anything with the needle.
[00:47:32]  And nothing happened.
[00:47:34]  So I tried it.
[00:47:36]  My mother brought me, and I got into the newspaper for this.
[00:47:39]  My mother brought me to a spoon bender who claimed to be able to bend spoons with his mind and taught me and a friend how to do it.
[00:47:49]  And it was all nonsense.
[00:47:51]  You just rubbed the spoon till you warmed it up.
[00:47:54]  And then you believed that you could turn it and twist it.
[00:47:57]  And you were able to turn it a little bit and twist it because you'd warmed it up.
[00:48:00]  And also because visualizing strength gives you more strength than you think.
[00:48:05]  And so, yeah, I tried it and gave it the experiment.
[00:48:08]  And it turned out to be nonsense and all of that.
[00:48:12]  I tried writing different names of different colors on little straps of paper and swirling them all around and then seeing if I could psychically pick out which one it was.
[00:48:22]  That turned out to be not valid.
[00:48:24]  It was no better than random.
[00:48:25]  Of course, you can't see things that you can't see.
[00:48:28]  So I tried these things.
[00:48:31]  And because I tried these things and found them to be false, I abandoned the belief.
[00:48:38]  So you should be able to tell the truth to your parents without fear, especially as an adult, right?
[00:48:43]  You should be able to be honest with your parents without fear.
[00:48:46]  And if you're terrified to be honest with your parents, they don't love you.
[00:48:48]  I'm sorry.
[00:48:49]  Like, again, don't shoot the messenger.
[00:48:50]  It's just a fact, right?
[00:48:52]  All right.
[00:48:53]  Why do there seem to be many more low-information people than ever?
[00:48:58]  Says my Pucci Girl.
[00:49:01]  Well, that is interesting.
[00:49:05]  Low-information people.
[00:49:06]  So it is one of the things that's happened with X, which is, you know, people will, you know, post pictures.
[00:49:14]  This is real rage-baiting stuff, right?
[00:49:16]  People will post pictures of an obviously slender girl and say, I like it when women are a little fat like this, you know, and everyone gets crazy and upset.
[00:49:23]  So there's a lot of this sort of rage-baiting stuff.
[00:49:26]  And I'm not saying I don't fall for it from time to time and so on, but there definitely is a lot of propaganda that's out there.
[00:49:35]  I think that there are fewer low-information people than ever because I'm obviously older than you.
[00:49:41]  Let's see this picture.
[00:49:43]  Oh, maybe not.
[00:49:44]  But when I was a kid, everybody was low-information.
[00:49:50]  As someone who studied philosophy in his mid-teens, everybody was low information.
[00:49:55]  All right.
[00:49:56]  Why do you think crypto is really a better system when it's reliant on electricity?
[00:50:00]  Well, everything in society is reliant upon electricity.
[00:50:03]  If you lose electricity, then you lose society.
[00:50:06]  So the idea that somehow the Bitcoin can't survive the end of electricity, even though you can do transactions off-chain on paper, the idea that society can survive the end of electricity is a delusion, even close.
[00:50:29]  Why do you continue to promote hyper-individualism but lament over the destruction of the Western world by intact collectivist tribal groups?
[00:50:37]  I'm not sure.
[00:50:37]  Hyper-individualism.
[00:50:39]  I mean, you can give them all these labels.
[00:50:42]  I just promote the truth as far as I can reason and see it.
[00:50:45]  I promote the truth as best I can.
[00:50:47]  And the truth is that concepts don't exist in empirical reality.
[00:50:51]  And this is the truth.
[00:50:54]  I will not surrender the truth to anything.
[00:51:00]  And I view it as kind of devilish, honestly.
[00:51:04]  And I'm not saying you, I'm just I view it as kind of devilish that you would say to me, oh, well, but if you promote the truth, your civilization will end.
[00:51:16]  Well, that's not up to me.
[00:51:18]  That's not up to me.
[00:51:21]  I promote the truth.
[00:51:22]  I am not going to compromise the truth for the sake of being bribed with the possible continuance of civilization or my civilization or what I grew up in or whatever, right?
[00:51:31]  I have that which dies from the truth.
[00:51:37]  How does it, in what way does it deserve to live?
[00:51:40]  That which collapses when the truth is told does not deserve to stand.
[00:51:44]  And as I suspect, if we have to go through a very dark period in human history because people won't listen to the truth, well, then we have to go through a dark period in human history because people won't listen to the truth.
[00:51:57]  So you are trying to bribe me into abandoning the truth by saying, well, if you promote these facts, your civilization will end.
[00:52:07]  And I'm still going to promote the truth.
[00:52:09]  Listen, you can go anywhere else to get comforting lies.
[00:52:13]  Honestly, you can go anywhere else to get comforting lies.
[00:52:16]  To come to me, who's one of the rare individuals telling the truth in the world, and say, no, no, no, you should lie, and I'm going to bribe you with the continuance of your civilization.
[00:52:26]  Well, my civilization is in the future based on truth.

=== Never Abandon the Truth (01:29) ===

[00:52:30]  That's what I'm trying to get to.
[00:52:32]  And you can read this in my novel called The Future, freedomain.com/slash books.
[00:52:36]  It's free.
[00:52:36]  You should check it out.
[00:52:37]  I'm a trained actor.
[00:52:38]  The audiobook is really, really good.
[00:52:40]  So I'm interested in promoting the truth.
[00:52:42]  Hopefully that gets us to a rational society.
[00:52:44]  If not, there's nothing you can bribe me with that would make me abandon the truth.
[00:52:49]  There is no benefit that you could possibly offer me that would cause me to abandon the truth.
[00:52:54]  You can go anywhere else for your lies.
[00:52:56]  Don't try and bribe me to get me to start lying.
[00:52:59]  It's not going to happen.
[00:53:00]  I've been tempted my whole life.
[00:53:02]  I'm pushing 60.
[00:53:04]  It's not going to happen now.
[00:53:05]  I can't believe people even try this, but maybe you're new to the conversation.
[00:53:09]  It's not going to happen.
[00:53:11]  I've suffered far too much for the truth and been rewarded.
[00:53:15]  Don't get me wrong.
[00:53:15]  It's not like I'm a martyr.
[00:53:17]  I've been rewarded with great love and I've been punished with reputational damage, income damage, reach damage, destruction of life's work.
[00:53:26]  I mean, at this point, like, there's no point, honestly, trying to bribe me with anything.
[00:53:29]  There's no point trying to do any of that.
[00:53:31]  I'm going to tell the truth.
[00:53:33]  And to give it up now would be incomprehensible.
[00:53:36]  I've been doing this for 44 years, telling the truth, and both being greatly rewarded and greatly punished for it.
[00:53:43]  And if you couldn't bribe me when I was 20, oh devil, there's no point trying to bribe me when I'm pushing 60, and I have so much more invested in the truth.
[00:53:52]  That's what you're going to get here.
[00:53:54]  Here's the truth as best I see it, as best I can reason it.
[00:53:57]  In accordance to evidence, freedomain.com slash donate.