• 2 months ago
Wednesday Night Live 11 September 2024

In this episode, we delve into the complexities of personal relationships and societal values, focusing on parenting and autonomy. I challenge the libertarian views on freedom and property rights, exploring the implications of immigration and the welfare state. Sharing insights as a parent, I discuss guiding children through our mistakes and the emotional struggles of connecting with distant family members. The conversation also addresses autonomy in the context of societal pressures around issues like abortion. Join me for a thought-provoking look at love, responsibility, and the connections that define our lives.

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Transcript
00:00:00All right, good evening everybody, welcome to my birthday month.
00:00:06Freedomain.com slash donate to help out the show, much, much, much, much, much, much appreciated.
00:00:11I know, I know, I know, I know, I know, all right.
00:00:16Let's get to your questions.
00:00:18I'm not even doing an intro.
00:00:19I'm not even doing an intro, so there.
00:00:22But yes, you can donate on the app, support the show, please, please, don't forget to
00:00:25share peacefulparenting.com.
00:00:28All right, are the open borders libertarians making the mistake of thinking freedom is
00:00:30the foundation of the libertarian ethics as opposed to property rights?
00:00:35Well, open borders libertarians are not recognizing the immense draw of the welfare state.
00:00:48In the past, people came to the West for freedom, and now, a lot of times, they come for free
00:00:54stuff.
00:00:55It's kind of a different equation, right?
00:00:59And of course, in the past, so in the distant past, they came for free stuff, sorry, for
00:01:03freedom, and then there was sort of an intermediate period.
00:01:06Of course, immigration in America was shut down for about 60 years, and this is when
00:01:11America went through periods of immense growth.
00:01:13See, if you don't have a lot of immigration, wages go up, because there's a shortage of
00:01:18workers.
00:01:19Now, there's a lot of people who don't want wages to go up for a variety of reasons, and
00:01:23so they like to bring people in to keep wages down, you know, nothing too shocking there.
00:01:30But of course, there was a period when immigration was opened back up, when you had to wend your
00:01:35way through this Byzantine lower intestine flow of paperwork in order to get, say, to
00:01:40the West, and that's not really the case anymore.
00:01:44And now, people are like, they're not even just coming for free stuff.
00:01:47They get, you know, loaded up cards, $25,000 free money to buy a house.
00:01:51They get SNAP, EBD in particular, and so it is not a situation of meritocracy.
00:02:02It is not.
00:02:03It's simply free stuff and paid stuff.
00:02:07So it's a different situation than, really, it was in the past.
00:02:12So there's just not really much of an understanding with regards to the open-borders libertarians.
00:02:22They don't sort of recognize how much immigration has changed.
00:02:26All right.
00:02:28Bought another copy of your book, Real-Time Relationships.
00:02:30Thanks for your great work.
00:02:31You're welcome.
00:02:32Thank you for purchasing it.
00:02:33Purchasing it?
00:02:34I appreciate it.
00:02:35How do you reconcile to a child that you recommend doing something the opposite of what you did,
00:02:39especially when it's a lot of the choices that you made?
00:02:43Well, every parent faces that.
00:02:46I mean, we want our children, of course, to learn from our mistakes.
00:02:52We want our children to learn from our experiences, right?
00:02:56So one of the things that you could say to a child is, if I burned myself as a child,
00:03:03if I burned myself as a child, would it be crazy for me to tell you not to burn yourself?
00:03:11If I painfully burnt my hand by putting my hand in a fire when I was a kid, I grew up,
00:03:15I have kids, I'd say to the kid, hey, you probably shouldn't put your hand in a fire.
00:03:23That would make sense, right?
00:03:26And you can sort of go from there and say, okay, well, let's say that instead of saving
00:03:30my money or investing my money when I was a kid, thank you for the tip, what I did was
00:03:36I just blew it all on candy and I had cavities and I got overweight and couldn't run up the
00:03:43stairs and it was just bad.
00:03:45Should I say to you, maybe save your money and don't spend it all on candy, right?
00:03:52There's nothing wrong with that, right?
00:03:53So the whole purpose, and you say to the kid, look, the whole purpose of culture and of
00:03:59parenting and of human knowledge is so that people don't have to keep making the same
00:04:04mistakes over and over and over again.
00:04:07You don't have to invent your own equations, you don't have to invent your own language,
00:04:11you don't have to invent your own spelling, you don't have to invent your own piping and
00:04:15it's all knowledge that has accumulated.
00:04:19And so the purpose of civilization is to accumulate knowledge so that the next generation doesn't
00:04:25have to make the same stupid mistakes.
00:04:27Maybe they can make different stupid mistakes, but just not the same ones, that's all.
00:04:32I don't mind if my daughter makes her own mistakes, I just don't want her to make the
00:04:35same mistakes that I did, right?
00:04:37So I dated around too much when I was younger, so I would say that's a bad idea as a whole.
00:04:43It's not a good idea, it's not good for your heart, it's not good for your pair bonding
00:04:47and it makes you feel like you're doing something with your life when you're actually just spiraling
00:04:51and spinning in circles.
00:04:53So yeah, saying, well you did it, it's like, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
00:05:02You know what else I did was I made some money, would you like to inherit that?
00:05:05I don't mean like dangle it, but it's like you're going to inherit my money, you're going
00:05:08to inherit some of my mistakes, I'll try to warn you about them and you're going to inherit
00:05:11my wisdom, you're going to, just as I inherited things from my...
00:05:14So there's a sort of pass down of the wisdom that is accumulated.
00:05:21So if you smoked when you were younger and you tell your kids don't smoke and they come
00:05:26across a picture of you smoking, they say, well, that's kind of hypocritical, isn't it?
00:05:29It's like, no, that's me telling you.
00:05:33I mean, I remember when I was in theater school, there was a guy who was starting to take up
00:05:36smoking and one of the smokers, it was the director, he was in the directing program,
00:05:41sat him down and said, okay, you're going to go down this path of smoking, let me tell
00:05:44you what it's going to be like.
00:05:46You're going to have every 15, 20 minutes, you're going to have to try and find a place
00:05:50to go smoke and you're going to have to stand outside of the cold and you're going to be
00:05:53annoying to people and your car is going to smell like hell and you're going to smell
00:05:57like cigarettes and you have to spend $500 to $700 to $1,000 a month on your cigarettes
00:06:04and you're going to be short of breath and your teeth are going to turn yellow and your
00:06:09house is going to turn yellow and just telling him if you go down the road that I'm going
00:06:14down and get addicted to cigarettes, things get pretty bad pretty quickly and would it
00:06:23make much sense to say, well, you're a smoker, it's like, yeah, that's how I know what I'm
00:06:30talking about.
00:06:31I am in fact a smoker and that's how I know what I'm talking about, right?
00:06:38All right, don't forget, tiktok.com forward slash atfreedomain.com, tiktok.com slash atfreedomain.com.
00:06:48I will throw it in the chat here, but please go to subscribe and keep all of that stuff,
00:06:56right?
00:06:57All right, let me get to your other questions.
00:07:00I am, of course, I'm going to check questions over on Rumble as well.
00:07:05Paul went out for Candace Owens on YouTube, got demonetized quite tragically.
00:07:12You know, I go back and forth, right?
00:07:13So it's funny, I go back and forth on a lot.
00:07:17In fact, I'm writing my new book called Dissolution.
00:07:25I'm writing my new book to come to a final answer, a final answer about whether people
00:07:35are villains or victims, right?
00:07:37So I have this thing, sometimes in my call-in shows, I dislike a particular caller, but
00:07:42then I find out about that person's history and I'm like, ooh, sympathy.
00:07:46Sympathy replaces any sort of friction or conflict that I might have in my own mind.
00:07:50If you know enough about people, does their villain narrative simply become an origin
00:07:55story?
00:07:56Are they just dominoes knocked over by the past?
00:07:57I have been driving myself crazy back and forth and round and round for about 40 years
00:08:03on this question, and I'm going to work it out in this novel.
00:08:09It's going to be a great book.
00:08:12I have like 50 pages of notes already on the characters and situations, and it is going
00:08:16to answer the question, are people villains or are they victims?
00:08:20Are they victims of their history, simply acting it out without free will to some degree,
00:08:23or are they villains with choices?
00:08:29I'm going to work that out, because I'm kind of tired of not having the answer.
00:08:33All right.
00:08:34Yeah.
00:08:35So, yeah, so Candace Owens has been demonetized on YouTube, and, you know, it's, I'm of two
00:08:45minds, right?
00:08:46Part of me is a lot of sympathy, because I've been through that, but the other part of me
00:08:48is like, well, she didn't say much when I did, so, you know.
00:08:52But isn't that kind of how they get you, is they get you to betray each other in little
00:08:57ways and then nobody stands up for anyone else, so.
00:09:01All right.
00:09:05Tipped and all.
00:09:06Let me just make sure I get to the questions.
00:09:09Yeah, yeah, spoiler, it's not really a spoiler, but I'm writing for the first time in reverse.
00:09:20So the beginning of the book is the end, the end of the book is the beginning, because
00:09:25I want to trace back all of the decisions, all the little decisions that lead to catastrophe.
00:09:31Because that's where free will is, in the little decisions that lead, one way or another
00:09:35or not, the big disasters that happen at the end of those roads, so.
00:09:38All right, so let's see here.
00:09:45My mom and dad divorced when I was little.
00:09:48He is a psychiatrist and basically very rarely visited me or contacted me until he remarried.
00:09:53He married a depressed patient of his.
00:09:56Really?
00:09:57No, I don't think so.
00:10:01I am no expert on this, but aren't psychiatrists not supposed to date their patients, let alone
00:10:07marry them?
00:10:08Maybe in some places there's like a couple of years if you haven't been the person's
00:10:14psychiatrist for a couple of years, maybe that's okay, but I don't know about that.
00:10:18All right, so he married a depressed patient of his.
00:10:20The root of the depression was an inability to have kids.
00:10:24They thought about adoption, but decided to try to get me to live with them instead.
00:10:27I did for six months, but could not get along with him.
00:10:30After I left them, there was very little contact.
00:10:32He called once to congratulate me on graduating university with honors.
00:10:37Although during university, while I was in terrible poverty, he did not call once to
00:10:40ask if I needed something.
00:10:41This was during my whole youth, not one call to ask.
00:10:48For example, as a broke student, I desperately wanted a laptop.
00:10:51He had two.
00:10:52He never asked if I needed a laptop, even when I brought it up.
00:10:56Now we rarely talk.
00:10:57One to two times per year, maybe, he keeps inviting me and my fiancée over.
00:11:01Question, should I try to have a relationship with him?
00:11:05If I do it, how should I go about it?
00:11:07What requirements should I state?
00:11:09What about apologies and making amends?
00:11:11I fear him dying in the future and not having any relationship with him.
00:11:17He is a functional alcoholic and one of the reasons my parents got divorced.
00:11:21Gosh, oh gosh.
00:11:27Gosh, oh gosh.
00:11:28I am so sorry.
00:11:30Honestly, absolutely heartbreaking.
00:11:37I have deep Great Lakes wells of tears for the thousands and thousands of stories that
00:11:43I've heard over the course of my life, in the call-ins, in my personal life, and just
00:11:50in people that I've met over the years, because I've always been curious about what made people's
00:11:54hearts tick, the deep bells of dark histories, or happy histories for that matter.
00:11:59So I'm really, really sorry about this.
00:12:03I'm really sorry about this.
00:12:09It is so unbelievably sad and tragic how used Kleenex-style disposable we are to each
00:12:20other, isn't it?
00:12:26Out of sight, out of mind.
00:12:29You ever notice this?
00:12:33You move away and people are just like, he's gone.
00:12:37Was he here?
00:12:38We just seem to be a sort of connect-four-cheesecloth kind of Swiss cheese memory hole to each other.
00:12:48People leave the room and it's like, they vaporize.
00:12:52Somebody goes away for a while, vaporize.
00:12:57We don't seem to bond with much at all anymore, do we?
00:13:06We don't seem to bond at all with much.
00:13:09We don't bond to our gods, we don't bond to our culture, to our history, to our ancestors,
00:13:14to our values, to our virtues, to our families.
00:13:17We don't seem to bond much with anyone anymore, as a whole.
00:13:33So, some of the saddest stories I've ever heard are the stories of children valiantly
00:13:47trying to maintain a relationship with an indifferent parent.
00:13:55You know, I got this with my own father over the years.
00:14:00Also then when he died some years ago, a couple of years ago.
00:14:09You can't run a relationship with a parent.
00:14:16You can't be in charge of it.
00:14:18You can't really make any foundational decisions about it.
00:14:22It's sort of like, there's this whole theory in the business world about what's called
00:14:26managing upwards, like if your boss isn't doing the right thing and you don't have any
00:14:29authority over him, of course, because he's your boss, what do you do?
00:14:32What do you do?
00:14:33Well, you have to do a variety of things, you have to try a variety of things, but fundamentally
00:14:38you can't manage and control your boss.
00:14:43You might be able to have some influence on him, but he defines the relationship and he
00:14:48has the final say.
00:14:56You know, just the idea of being, I'm sorry for the waves of sadness, but the very idea
00:15:07of being foundationally indifferent to your own children, to me, speaks
00:15:20of such a shattered and broken soul that it's almost like the essence of the person
00:15:26has been atomized, or in this case, drowned in alcohol.
00:15:37Alcohol generally scrubs the soul of its conscience.
00:15:43You know, indifference.
00:15:44Ah, I guess I'll call him when he graduates, I don't really think about him, you know,
00:15:50this narcissism, this navel-gazing, this solipsism, this I-me-me-I stuff, the boomer stuff, I-me-me-I,
00:15:58the only thing that matters is me.
00:16:04Out of sight, out of mind.
00:16:08The concept of being indifferent to your own child and not being fascinated by, engaged
00:16:15with, involved with, interacting with your own child, I mean, I know I experienced it
00:16:24to some degree, but I certainly, I think with my mother for sure, and to some smaller degree
00:16:33my father, I don't know if you've ever had this, there was sort of this sense or this
00:16:37idea that they were kind of waiting for me to become more interesting.
00:16:44You know, once I became older and had my own philosophy or thoughts or I could write books
00:16:51or like, then it became more interesting.
00:16:55And then I was worthy of attention, but by then, of course, I was an adult and it was
00:17:02just all too late.
00:17:11You can't fix things with your parents if it's this far off the rails.
00:17:19What can you fix?
00:17:20What can you do?
00:17:21You can't change them.
00:17:24And even if you could change them, it's too late.
00:17:33It's all too late.
00:17:34By the time you become an adult, they are your sperm donor and egg carrier, but the
00:17:45parenting is largely done.
00:17:49I mean, my daughter is going to be 16 this winter, and there's a couple of tweaks here
00:17:54and there, which maybe I can provide some helpful advice on, but I mean, parenting was
00:17:59done quite some time ago.
00:18:06So by the time you become an adult, you say, well, my father, my mother, my parents.
00:18:13But to parent is a verb, not a noun.
00:18:15A parent is not an object.
00:18:16A parent is a whole series of actions.
00:18:22I mean, would you look at a nutritionist you never called or who never returned your calls
00:18:31and say, that's my diet?
00:18:33No.
00:18:34Diet is not just having a nutritionist or maybe reading about a diet, it's actually
00:18:38changing your diet.
00:18:40And I mean, you've heard me ask this of people.
00:18:43I've got so many thoughts colliding, I'm just trying to wait for them to settle into some
00:18:50slightly more coherent pattern.
00:18:51But you've heard me say to people, okay, what did your parents, what wisdom or instruction
00:19:00did your parents give to you that remains valuable into your adulthood?
00:19:05What wisdom, moral instruction did your parents give you that remains valuable into your adulthood?
00:19:18And if you really can't think of any, then you weren't parented.
00:19:22Then they were your landlords, they were your managers, they were your disciplinarians,
00:19:25they were your sperm and egg donor, they were your funding source.
00:19:30But to parent is to transfer moral values to your children that last them a lifetime.
00:19:39To parent is to transfer moral values to your children that last them a lifetime.
00:19:43And if your parents did not transmit or transfer largely through inspiration and to some degree
00:19:50through instruction, if your parents did not give you moral instruction, you were not parented.
00:19:59And if you weren't parented, what on earth could it mean to say, my parents?
00:20:10When I was six years old, in boarding school, every Saturday we had a haircut, and then
00:20:18we had to write letters to our parents.
00:20:21And so I wrote, dear mother, and then I wrote, dear Tom.
00:20:24And of course they read all of your letters to make sure you weren't complaining about
00:20:27the boarding school.
00:20:29And I said, you can't send this.
00:20:31Why not?
00:20:34Because your father.
00:20:35You can't say, dear Tom, it's your father.
00:20:39I didn't get that.
00:20:41Even into my, I guess I was maybe 11 or 12 years old, people would ask me about my parents
00:20:50and I'd say, well, my mother lives here, my ex-father lives in South Africa.
00:20:57And people would say, what do you mean your ex-father lives in, what does that mean?
00:21:02I said, well, he was my father.
00:21:05I never see him.
00:21:08And he lives in South Africa.
00:21:11And people were just like, they were agaric at this.
00:21:14What do you mean?
00:21:15I said, well, look, he's my mother's ex-husband and he's my ex-father because he doesn't parent
00:21:22me.
00:21:25And I just remember people being agaric and I'm like, don't get mad at me for calling
00:21:31things by their proper names.
00:21:33Were you parented?
00:21:36Did they show interest?
00:21:37Take delight in you?
00:21:38Did they give you moral instruction?
00:21:39Did they help you in life?
00:21:41Did they help you navigate and negotiate friendships, school, homework, dating, job, career?
00:21:48Were you parented?
00:21:53Is someone a husband if he pays no attention to his wife?
00:22:03I mean, I guess they're technically married and I guess we're technically family, but...
00:22:16What are your relationships like?
00:22:22If you don't try to change anyone, right?
00:22:31What are your relationships like if you don't try to change anyone, yourself included?
00:22:40I'm going to say this again.
00:22:45What are your relationships like if you don't try to change anyone, yourself included?
00:22:50I'm going to say people for who they are, what they are, not say, well, if this relationship
00:22:56were the complete opposite of what it is, then it would be a good relationship.
00:23:03No.
00:23:05No.
00:23:09No.
00:23:20People are who they are.
00:23:22You are who you are.
00:23:24And rather than trying to fit a round pig into a square hole, just go find people like yourself.
00:23:32Somebody says, my father has two children he hasn't spoken to in eight years due to a bad divorce.
00:23:39What do you mean due to a bad divorce?
00:23:43Was he accused of criminal or illicit actions against his children?
00:23:49A bad divorce does not mean that you don't speak to your children.
00:23:53He says, my father has two children he hasn't spoken to in eight years due to a bad divorce.
00:23:58I say he should reach out to them since they're 18 plus now.
00:24:01He says he wants to let them come to him when they're ready.
00:24:04What do you think?
00:24:06You know, just as a whole in life, I'm fairly contemplative.
00:24:27You know, of course, it's a 9-11.
00:24:29It means that the attack on the Trade Center is 23 years ago, which seems like an absolute lifetime infinity ago.
00:24:45And I think, because I'm going to be 58 in a couple of weeks, which means in 23 years I'll be almost 81 years old.
00:24:53I'm sure I'll be chugging, I'm sure things will be good and fine and all of that.
00:24:58In 23 years I'll be almost 81 years old.
00:25:06And I'll tell you this, it's both longer and shorter than you think, life.
00:25:14It is both longer and shorter than you think.
00:25:18It is longer than you think because if you have a bad conscience, the days are endless.
00:25:23You're just wired up and scraped up and running from yourself and never at peace.
00:25:28And they're long fucking days to be ill at ease in your own skin.
00:25:34It's a long life to feel like you're in your body, like a chain rattling, bloody fingered ghost in a haunted house on a foggy hill.
00:25:46To not be settled into your own skin, to be jumpy, to be distracted.
00:25:51That's a long, long life, man.
00:25:57The hell is the eternity that life feels like when you have a bad conscience.
00:26:05I mean, if you can imagine being in considerable pain for the rest of your life, how long those days would feel.
00:26:12So life is a lot longer than you think, which is why you have to work as best you can, as best I can, to have a good conscience.
00:26:19To be happy and satisfied with your own company.
00:26:27It is a long life to be at war with your better self.
00:26:36Imagine how long the day feels if there is an invisible predator in the house.
00:26:48How your heart would hammer and how the minutes would tick by like hours.
00:26:52It is a long life if you have a bad conscience.
00:27:02But it is too short a life to waste years trying to assemble a giant bridge out of soap bubbles and fantasy.
00:27:20To try to upwardly manage relationships that you can't control, that you didn't define, particularly with parents, that you are simply reacting to.
00:27:34And you are trying, what, at the age of 25 or 30 or 35 or 40 or 50, you're trying to summon a live beating heart from a chest that was ashes.
00:27:47It is a long life, probably years and years before you even drew your first breath.
00:27:55You are like a doctor digging up the desiccated corpse of a great-great-great-grandfather and performing CPR.
00:28:08It is a long life, probably years and years before you even drew your first breath.
00:28:16And you are trying to resuscitate a mummy, an Egyptian mummy.
00:28:22And I don't care how you tilt the head, lift the neck, pinch the nose, blow into those dusty dead mouths.
00:28:32The animating principle, the life, the choice, the connection, the virtue is long gone.
00:28:41Not coming back, there's nothing you can do.
00:28:49I really think of the years and years that I spent chasing these ghosts off cliffs, forever reaching, forever grabbing, forever falling.
00:29:01Forever bouncing in sick battery-taste metallic thuds on the stony ground below, climbing, chasing, falling, climbing, chasing, falling.
00:29:14God, what a waste.
00:29:17What an ungodly, unholy, immortality fantasy waste all of that was.
00:29:27Trying to negotiate people into coming back to life, trying to use the eloquence of my language to shape living hearts out of dead dust.
00:29:42I spent decades, really, trying to climb inside flat, dead paintings.
00:29:55I look so lifelike from the outside, I'm just going to try and get in.
00:30:00Paintings are two-dimensional and they hang on walls that you cannot get through.
00:30:08One more speech and they will see me.
00:30:14One more tear and they will feel me.
00:30:20One more fight and they will surrender.
00:30:30Walking with the dead, thinking you're going anywhere but the graveyard, is worse than an exercise in futility.
00:30:43Life is long with a bad conscience but it is too short to waste time trying to bring a conscience to people with no empathy.
00:30:55You can't do it. I can't do it. I mean, I'm fairly eloquent. I've never done it.
00:31:01I'm very eloquent, very passionate.
00:31:09I mean, I wield words like Inigo Montoya wields swords and revenge.
00:31:16Can't do it.
00:31:23That's even worse. It's even worse post-COVID.
00:31:31The amount of guilt and shame the average person has about how they acted over COVID
00:31:41has walled off the desiccated souls of those who betrayed any compassion, reason, and virtue.
00:31:55This is why nobody talks about it. It's the largest elephant in the West.
00:32:02So, you're like, can I have a relationship? This guy, he ignored me, didn't really talk to me, won't even give me a laptop.
00:32:08I was broke. He's got lots of money. He didn't give me any money. He didn't care. He doesn't contact me. He just...
00:32:14Man.
00:32:20What information are you waiting to get that you don't already have?
00:32:33I ask you again. What information are you waiting to get that you don't already have?
00:32:45You have been struck by a voodoo curse. The voodoo curse. I've talked about this before.
00:32:51The voodoo curse which says, oh, if you don't reconcile with your dad when he dies, you're going to face a lifetime of regret.
00:33:00You'll be so sad forever. Oh, if you don't fix things with your dad.
00:33:08No, this is, you know, that's just verbal abuse, right?
00:33:15That is verbal abuse to say to you, if you don't repair the relationship with a cold, soulless, cruel person,
00:33:26then you will be miserable and cursed and unhappy forever.
00:33:32That is a way of transferring power from the innocent to the cold, cruel, and unutterably guilty.
00:33:42And if you don't put yourself at the power and mercy of a cold-hearted, cruel person, you'll be unhappy forever.
00:33:49Really, what are the opportunity costs of that? What am I missing or losing out by doing that?
00:33:57If you don't stay in the orbit of people who've coldly and cruelly rejected and ignored you your whole life
00:34:02when their whole job was to care about you, boy, if you don't put yourself under their power and in their orbit,
00:34:07you'll be unhappy. Really. Bullshit.
00:34:13What are the opportunity costs? I mean, I've known my wife for 22 years.
00:34:22If I had been tight with mom, would I have gotten married?
00:34:29Nope, not to her. My mom had no problem with the woman who was not right for me.
00:34:40What are the opportunity costs of staying in the orbit of cold-hearted people who humiliate you with their indifference?
00:34:49Thank you, Tony.
00:34:55Nobody ever talks about the opportunity costs.
00:35:05What are the opportunity costs of being around people who treat you like shit?
00:35:12What are the opportunity costs? How does it affect your sense of your own value
00:35:18if you have people around who treat you like shit and that you are subjugated to and humiliated by?
00:35:28James says, I've mentioned this before. My ex-mother lived a mile away when I was 10 after my parents divorced.
00:35:42Barely saw her. Seemed to hate it when she watched us. I was not parented, no.
00:35:50See, if you have a parent who's indifferent to you, it's the parent's fault.
00:36:00I've said this to my daughter on more than one occasion. I said, I can never foundationally criticize anything about you
00:36:06because I was you. I am your father.
00:36:11If there's something, quote, wrong with you, I have to criticize myself, not you.
00:36:15I am the one person, I'm your mother too, but I'm the one person you come to
00:36:20where there will never be a foundational criticism. Never.
00:36:25If something is wrong in your relationship with your parent, it's your parent's fault.
00:36:33100%, 150%, a million percent.
00:36:39Your parent defined the relationship, chose to have you, chose your biological nature by who they chose to have a child with,
00:36:47were in complete control of your environment throughout your entire childhood, 18 years!
00:36:53Complete control!
00:36:56You had no legal independence, no choice of who to spend time with, no capacity to stay, to go, to leave.
00:37:07Nothing was your choice.
00:37:11Nothing wrong with that, it's just a fact of life.
00:37:15The quality of your relationship with your parent is entirely dependent upon your parent.
00:37:23The tail cannot wag the dog.
00:37:34You trying to take responsibility for your parents is like a citizen trying to take responsibility for the government,
00:37:41or a janitor cleaning a school long close, taking responsibility for the countrywide curriculum pushed by federal departments of education.
00:38:00It's like the office cleaner taking responsibility for the overall balance sheet of a multinational, multi-hundred billion dollar corporation.
00:38:15It's like one Amazon driver taking responsibility for the cost of the entire corporation.
00:38:20One shelf stalker in a grocery store taking responsibility for the entire chain of grocery stores.
00:38:27It can't be done, it will drive you mad to even attempt it.
00:38:38It's like, you know, you're out in a field at night, maybe it's a meteor shower, Perseid, or something like that, and there's a plane.
00:38:44Did you ever do this as a kid? You pretend to push the plane, right?
00:38:49Or there was an old SCTV, I crush your head, right? I crush your head, right?
00:38:56Oh, I'm going to push the plane through the night sky. You're just waving your hand, the plane's miles away.
00:39:00Doesn't care, doesn't matter, doesn't matter what you do, it's just for your own amusement.
00:39:16Check in with yourself, with regards to your father.
00:39:20Do you want to spend time with your father if he's not your father?
00:39:29Because if he didn't parent you, he's not really your parent.
00:39:35So, imagine this. Go to an extreme example, let's test the case.
00:39:40Let's go to an extreme example.
00:39:47You find out that you are the child of your mother and an anonymous sperm donor.
00:40:00And somehow you track down this sperm donor, and he's a serial killer.
00:40:08Now he is your father, right?
00:40:12So, an anonymous sperm donor turns out he's a serial killer.
00:40:16Well, you're like, well, I have to have a relationship with my father.
00:40:20Father, right? I don't mean to laugh, but come on.
00:40:24Or, you know, if that's too far, you know, he's just a terrible guy or whatever, he's a thief or a breaker of hearts, a sociopath, a manipulator, whatever, right?
00:40:38Stop giving people your time and attention based on abstract categories that have almost nothing to do with what is actually required of the category.
00:40:48Hey, if your parents were good to you, they loved you, they parented you, wonderful.
00:40:52We want to repay justice with justice, we want to be fair in our evaluations.
00:40:57Love them for their virtues, absolutely wonderful, great.
00:41:07If they did not love you, if they did not take joy in your presence, if they did not move heaven and earth to make your life better and to teach you well.
00:41:22They're just sperm donors and egg carriers, landlords and the providers of food and healthcare.
00:41:35And trying to chase ghosts off cliffs keeps you away from all the good people.
00:41:45Chasing bad people breaks you out of the orbit of good people.
00:41:51And it is not coming from any rational optimism.
00:41:56I say this with great humility.
00:41:58It's not coming from any rational optimism.
00:42:01Where does it come from?
00:42:03Well, it comes from your addiction and my addiction to rejection.
00:42:16I mean, I've thought about this long and hard over the course of my own life.
00:42:19Hey, let's make it about me, shall we?
00:42:21I've thought about this long and hard over the course of my own life that I was rejected by mother and father and sibling and extended family.
00:42:27Oh, and I got deplatformed.
00:42:29Is this just a Simon the Boxer repetition compulsion?
00:42:34Am I addicted to being cast out and treated unjustly and rejected and scorned?
00:42:41Or am I just engineering that?
00:42:44I mean, I ask myself these questions.
00:42:46I'm not just turning these lasers outward.
00:42:49They burn down here, too.
00:42:56No, I mean, I think the rejection that I experienced as a child helped me to navigate things like deplatforming and hostility and lies and slander and all this kind of stuff.
00:43:06But I did it in order to connect.
00:43:09And you can see that the idea of the voluntary family is really starting to go mainstream.
00:43:15Of course, nobody will ever give me any credit for it.
00:43:17That doesn't matter.
00:43:18The credit is in my conscience, in a sense, in the eyes of God and in my own heart.
00:43:26But I'm telling you, man, you've got to watch out for this.
00:43:34All I know is how to manage being rejected by my father.
00:43:38So what I'm going to do is I'm going to keep running after my father.
00:43:41And I'm going to try again and I'm going to try again and I'm going to twist it and I'm going to change this and I'll try this and I'll try having this conversation and I'll try having that conversation.
00:43:47I'll try bringing up this.
00:43:48I'll try a different approach.
00:43:50I'll let it lie fallow for a bit.
00:43:51I'll try here again.
00:43:52All you're doing is you're, I think, often, not you in particular, but all people in general are doing is they don't know how to live without managing these feelings of rejection.
00:44:04You should have authority with your parents because they care about you.
00:44:08You should have power in the relationship.
00:44:10You should have credibility and weight in the relationship because they care about you.
00:44:21We all seek power.
00:44:23If we have no power in relationships, we cannot escape.
00:44:27Then the power we will pursue is the power of managing rejection.
00:44:33Well, I can't control that I'm being rejected, but I can have some control over those feelings of being rejected.
00:44:39But the problem is then the only way you feel you have power at all is to continually be rejected.
00:44:54Your relationship with your parents is your parents' responsibility.
00:45:00Now, does this mean you never bear any fault in anything you ever do with your parents?
00:45:07No.
00:45:08When you become an adult, if you deviate from the values they taught you and you accepted, then you have some responsibility for that for sure.
00:45:16If they said it's a good idea to tell the truth in relationships and then for some reason or another, I don't know what could happen, but you end up lying to them, okay.
00:45:24But that's not you managing a relationship with your parents, that's you managing a relationship with morality.
00:45:35Inseminators and incubators.
00:45:42You know, there are so many parents out there who are absent NPC, dead-eyed ghosts in their own households.
00:45:54They go to work, they come home, they watch TV, they ignore their children, they play video games, they play golf, they go on business trips, they come home, they don't talk to their children, they mutter a little bit here and there, they go watch TV, they put on their headphones, they vanish.
00:46:11There but not there. Ghosts in the house.
00:46:16And you ask yourself, you ask yourself, when was the last time with your parents?
00:46:23When was the last time you had a deep, easy, meaningful conversation with your parents?
00:46:31Something that meant something, something where you revealed something of yourself, something where you got good advice, something where you got to understand them a little better and more deeply.
00:46:43You know, I mean, I went on a two-hour hike with my wife today and then we had lunch.
00:46:53I mean, beautiful.
00:46:58Such a great conversation, so much fun.
00:47:04I don't think I ever had that once with my family of origin.
00:47:20You have no authority with your parents if they don't care about you deeply, if they're not willing to make sacrifices, so to speak, if they're not willing to defer to what you need and want, what is legitimately of value to you.
00:47:34What do you have to negotiate with?
00:47:38And if you have been distant from your father for 30 years, that's all it's going to be.
00:47:47Just take a deep breath and accept it.
00:47:53My father went to his grave without telling me he was even unwell.
00:48:00Now, could have been sudden, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know what he died of.
00:48:04I probably never will.
00:48:18All right, let's get to your comments.
00:48:24I wasn't parented, but I was constantly given bad advice.
00:48:27I assumed to sabotage my life for some type of amusement and had the rather serious things I was dealing with constantly infantilized.
00:48:33Yeah, for sure.
00:48:34Yeah, sabotage.
00:48:35Boy, you know, people who know you very well can do you the greatest good or the greatest harm.
00:48:40Intimacy is vulnerability.
00:48:41Intimacy is risk.
00:48:44Intimacy is danger.
00:48:47Intimacy is handing the weapons that open and flay your heart to someone else.
00:48:53Intimacy is what you have to be the most careful and cautious about.
00:49:00I parented my parents.
00:49:02Not possible.
00:49:03You appeased them.
00:49:06Somebody says, my parents cut my husband and thus all of us off two weeks ago now.
00:49:10It turns out that the things I thought might be true about them were.
00:49:13We were told that having any expectations of my mom when she comes to, quote, help, visit really, was being a slave driver.
00:49:19And they wouldn't stand for her being turned into a slave.
00:49:22It's sad, but freeing.
00:49:24I'm due with our fifth as of last week.
00:49:27Congratulations.
00:49:28And they truly don't really care.
00:49:29We'll celebrate and enjoy it better this way.
00:49:33Yeah.
00:49:35I'm sorry about all of this.
00:49:36It's very, very sad.
00:49:38My sister told me that dad has disinterested to the point that he hasn't paid his bills and they got sent to collection.
00:49:46They have fallen a long way.
00:49:48That's just the consequence of a bad conscience.
00:49:50My mom seems early dementia and she's only not quite 60.
00:49:55And my once intimidating, high-earning dad is melting into a puddle of helpless goo.
00:49:58It's quite pathetic, honestly.
00:50:00There's nothing I can do for them but pray.
00:50:03Well, what's the point of praying if this is the just punishment for their misdeeds?
00:50:15Oh, his dad is disintegrated to the point.
00:50:18What is the point of praying if the conscience that God designed for them is doing this to them?
00:50:24If the punishment is coming from God's design and architecture of the mind, heart and soul, what is the point of praying?
00:50:32Are you praying to God to betray his own virtue?
00:50:38Are you praying to God that he should not punish them for the evils that they do?
00:50:47I don't think that you want to tell God that he's wrong about morality and conscience.
00:51:02I often times feel like I'm standing in the middle of a graveyard playing EDM on a boombox expecting life to rise out of the graves.
00:51:09LOL.
00:51:11Yeah, not very LOL, brother.
00:51:13I think about the opportunity cost every day.
00:51:17Your life can't be better than the worst person in it.
00:51:20I'm telling you this from the bottom of my bowels, heart, mind and soul.
00:51:24Your life cannot be better than the worst person in it.
00:51:28At all. In any way.
00:51:31Apology from quote mom who linked help to getting jabbed.
00:51:35Who linked help to getting jabbed?
00:51:37Oh, if you got jabbed.
00:51:39Actually contacted me long enough to drop off photos left without any conversation.
00:51:43I don't feel anything much about that.
00:51:45Maybe I intellectualize that I can regret that there is no love there.
00:51:49But no great sadness or ache or sense of loss.
00:51:51Their choice to be who they are.
00:51:54I'm sorry about that.
00:52:02On that scenario, working near minimum wage, dreaming up all the ways the company is doing things wrong and how they could fix it.
00:52:08Waste of time since I have zero say about that stuff.
00:52:11You have more chance as a janitor of fixing a corporation than you do of fixing your parents.
00:52:17Because the corporation doesn't have a guilty conscience about you.
00:52:24See, here's the thing, my friends.
00:52:27If people you've known for decades have never admitted fault, they're not going to start.
00:52:34They're not going to start.
00:52:38Almost nobody is more naive than the person with a good conscience.
00:52:43Almost nobody is more naive than the person with a good conscience.
00:52:46Because the person with a good conscience doesn't have a big problem admitting fault.
00:52:50They can admit fault.
00:52:51They do self-correct because they have a good conscience.
00:52:55They have a conscience.
00:52:56They listen to their conscience.
00:52:57Therefore, they can be corrected and they can figure things out.
00:53:00You know, my daughter at her job says to her boss, what can I do better?
00:53:03How can I improve?
00:53:04What am I doing wrong?
00:53:06How can I be more efficient?
00:53:07How can I provide more value?
00:53:09She does that, right?
00:53:10She's got a great conscience.
00:53:12I'm asking you guys, what can I do better?
00:53:14What can I do different?
00:53:15How can I improve?
00:53:18So, if you have a good conscience, it means that you admit fault.
00:53:23You correct.
00:53:24You listen.
00:53:25You have empathy with yourself, with others.
00:53:27So, then you're like, well, I mean, then they must be like me.
00:53:34They must be like me.
00:53:36I just haven't figured out the right words to unlock the hidden rest
00:53:46and deep wells of feeling and empathy locked up in their heart.
00:53:51It comes from the soul that there's an unharmed part of selfish people
00:53:55that you just have to unlock with your silky magic syllables.
00:54:00If I just find the right open, speak, friend and enter.
00:54:03If I just find the right word, phrase, approach, different angle.
00:54:13But you're standing there with a big basket of fucking vegetables
00:54:15trying to open the lock.
00:54:16Well, if I try the radish.
00:54:17It didn't work.
00:54:18Let me try the celery.
00:54:19Okay, maybe the green pepper.
00:54:21Maybe the tomato.
00:54:24Nope.
00:54:29They're not like you at all.
00:54:34They're not.
00:54:39If a man or woman can't admit fault in their 40s and 50s,
00:54:43they will never admit fault.
00:54:45Never, never, never.
00:54:46Because their lives have become conditioned that way
00:54:48and they've made so many terrible mistakes.
00:54:50At the moment they admit fault, thanatos will appear.
00:54:53The death impulse will appear.
00:54:56If you've made enough mistakes and never admitted fault,
00:54:59after a certain amount of time, admitting fault is death.
00:55:02It's death.
00:55:05Because you can't fix it anymore.
00:55:24Pray for those who disputefully, who use you, love their enemy.
00:55:30Sure.
00:55:32Sure.
00:55:34Absolutely.
00:55:35Love your enemy.
00:55:36For sure.
00:55:37I have no issue with that at all.
00:55:41Love your enemy for the instruction they're giving you.
00:55:44Love your enemy as a signpost to stay the fuck away.
00:55:54If you're wandering in a field, you're wandering and hiking
00:55:57in the middle of nowhere in a field, and there's a big sign that says,
00:56:00Minefield.
00:56:01You love that sign, don't you?
00:56:02Because it means your leg doesn't get blown off.
00:56:04You love that sign.
00:56:06Because it says, don't walk here, you'll lose a limb.
00:56:09You'll die.
00:56:10You'll bleed out.
00:56:11Oh, God, I love that sign.
00:56:13Thank you so much for that sign.
00:56:15Yeah, love your enemies.
00:56:16Sure.
00:56:17Love your enemies.
00:56:18Love the moral instruction they're giving you.
00:56:24I would not have as close an intimate relationship with my own conscience
00:56:32if I had not seen the desperately ill effects of people who rejected their own conscience.
00:56:38I love them for reminding me of the value of virtue,
00:56:42the essential nature of reason,
00:56:46and the absolute dedication to morality that is required to both love and be loved.
00:56:52My enemies taught me how to love.
00:56:54My enemies taught me how to think, how to reason, how to be vulnerable, how to be open,
00:57:00how to feel deeply and communicate directly.
00:57:05All my enemies taught me that.
00:57:07I love them for their instruction.
00:57:10They're absolutely terrible people, but I love them for the instruction that they gave me.
00:57:16Absolutely love your enemy.
00:57:18That doesn't mean make him your friend.
00:57:21It means make the moral lessons his empirical example provides you your friend.
00:57:31Somebody says,
00:57:32I miss the old graphics like the Native American one from YouTube era.
00:57:35When you have those slides.
00:57:38Yeah.
00:57:40Yeah.
00:57:42I don't like spending time in the studio.
00:57:44I've spent decades in the studio.
00:57:48I mean, I'll do it for the live streams.
00:57:50I don't want to read stuff, but I'll do my very best to stay out of the studio if I can.
00:57:59Somebody says,
00:58:01James, I struggled for years to unlock my father's heart.
00:58:03I only became more depressed.
00:58:04Yeah.
00:58:07We know deep down it's futile.
00:58:09And we know deep down they won't give us their heart because they don't have one.
00:58:15Somebody says,
00:58:16As a child, I remember being punished.
00:58:17I don't recall whatever the excuse for being in trouble waiting on dad to come home and be spanked.
00:58:22Please try to check your messages.
00:58:29I don't want to get to brain goo.
00:58:32Why isn't empathy genetic?
00:58:35What do you mean?
00:58:36Why isn't empathy genetic?
00:58:43Why isn't empathy genetic?
00:58:46Because we know the environmental conditions that reduce the capacity for empathy.
00:58:52Steph, I understand logically what you're saying about not being able to fix my parents,
00:58:55but it seems like my emotional part is refusing to acknowledge it.
00:58:58What can I do to convince also that part of me?
00:59:01Is there some action I can take to make it obvious?
00:59:12You're asking how to quit an addiction.
00:59:17You just quit the addiction.
00:59:21I mean, I'm not sure if, I mean,
00:59:23Oh, you know, if you're, if you're, let's say you're a smoker, heavy smoker, right?
00:59:27And you're just addicted to nicotine and smoking the whole ritual and all of that.
00:59:30You say, you know, Steph, I understand logically that I should quit smoking,
00:59:34but there's a part of me that doesn't want to acknowledge it.
00:59:38How can I convince myself that I should want to quit smoking
00:59:41and that quitting smoking will be good for me and fun for me and I'll enjoy the process
00:59:45and it's going to be nothing but a net positive.
00:59:47It's like, that's not what addiction is.
00:59:49Addiction is part of you really wants to continue performing the addictive behavior, right?
01:00:02Slap your hand back.
01:00:04Do you ever, you never do this?
01:00:06You never do this?
01:00:07Slap your hand back.
01:00:12Slap your hand back.
01:00:13I had to do this with sugar, right?
01:00:15I had to do this with sugar.
01:00:16Love me some sugar.
01:00:18It's now been nine months plus since I've had, I mean, what have I had?
01:00:24I've had maybe one or two desserts over the last nine months,
01:00:28a piece or two of chocolate and an ice cream or two.
01:00:32That's it, right?
01:00:33You know, I've cut most, almost all sugar out of my life.
01:00:38So what do I have to do?
01:00:39Slap your hand back.
01:00:40Nope.
01:00:41Walking towards, nope.
01:00:42Turn away.
01:00:43Nope.
01:00:44Have a drink of water, go for a walk.
01:00:45Nope.
01:00:46Just slap your hand back.
01:00:48What do you think willpower is about?
01:00:51Willpower is when you want to do it and you say no.
01:00:54Well, but there's a part of me that I, this is self-indulgent crap.
01:00:58Sorry to be blunt, but it is.
01:01:00That is what willpower is.
01:01:03Yeah, I really want to call this girl.
01:01:05She's not good for me.
01:01:06She abuses me, but she's sexy.
01:01:08Slap your hand away.
01:01:09Whap.
01:01:10Slap your hand away.
01:01:11Sorry.
01:01:12It's okay to be stern with yourself.
01:01:14Being stern with yourself and avoiding bad habits is not self-abuse.
01:01:20Self-discipline is not self-abuse.
01:01:22You were abused by people with no discipline.
01:01:24They just indulged and acted out.
01:01:26You were abused by people with no discipline and then you think,
01:01:28Oh, but if I'm disciplined with myself, that's the same as being abusive,
01:01:31and everything has to be on board and I've got to be kind and gentle and nice.
01:01:33No, why?
01:01:34Why?
01:01:35It's willpower.
01:01:36It's willpower.
01:01:38Self-indulgent.
01:01:40Hedonism to say, well, I'll make better decisions when every single part of me is fine with it.
01:01:44Hey, spoiler.
01:01:46That's not going to happen.
01:01:47It's like saying, well, I'll go to the gym once I'm muscular.
01:01:53Right?
01:01:55I'm overweight.
01:01:57I'll go on a diet when I'm already thin.
01:01:59Nope.
01:02:00Slap your hand away.
01:02:02Or slap your ass to the gym.
01:02:04Slap your ass at the gym if that tickles your fancy.
01:02:11You know, I was feeling a little low energy this afternoon before the show.
01:02:18I'm like, I could say no.
01:02:22And I showed up here.
01:02:24There were no donations, only a couple of people.
01:02:26And I was like, eh, no.
01:02:35Now, did I sit there and say, well, there's a big part of me that doesn't want to do a live stream.
01:02:41So I'm going to sit here as the clock ticks past seven o'clock.
01:02:46I'm going to sit here.
01:02:48And I'm just going to wait for every single part of me to want to do the live stream.
01:02:56Come on.
01:02:59You've got to be kidding me.
01:03:03Not being disciplined with yourself is acting on the same principles by which people abused you if they did.
01:03:12People abused you because they were self-indulgent.
01:03:15They just got mad.
01:03:17They wanted to yell, so they yelled.
01:03:19They wanted to hit, so they hit.
01:03:20They were just self-indulgent, lazy, hedonistic, narcissistic, whatever, right?
01:03:28People abused you because they were lazy.
01:03:33You know, somebody who was cruel to me when I was younger, I confronted them in my 20s.
01:03:38And he said, every morning I woke up, I wanted to do better.
01:03:43I wanted to do right by you.
01:03:44I wanted to be nice.
01:03:47Then I failed.
01:03:48This is laziness.
01:03:52It's just laziness.
01:03:54Abuse is laziness.
01:03:57Corruption is laziness.
01:03:59Theft is laziness.
01:04:00You could work for it.
01:04:01Nope, you're going to steal it.
01:04:14Stop being self-indulgent.
01:04:16Have some discipline.
01:04:18I'm not perfect with this.
01:04:19Please understand.
01:04:20I am not perfect with this at all.
01:04:22I say this with great humility right down there in the trenches with you.
01:04:28Steph, I understand logically what you're saying about not being able to fix my parents,
01:04:30but it seems that my emotional part is refusing to acknowledge it.
01:04:33What can I do to convince?
01:04:34Also, that part of me, is there some action I can take to make it obvious?
01:04:37Slap your hand away.
01:04:40Can't fix your parents.
01:04:41Have the urge to fix your parents?
01:04:42Feel the urge.
01:04:43Doesn't mean you have to act on it in the same way that your parents were angry at you
01:04:45didn't mean they had to hit you and yell at you, if that's what they did.
01:04:49Have some discipline.
01:04:51That's what philosophy is for.
01:04:52Philosophy isn't waiting for the planets to align, everything feels totally fine,
01:04:55and you're going to do it because there's no part of you that doesn't want to do it.
01:04:58That will never happen.
01:05:02That will never happen.
01:05:06I've got to wait until all the salmon are swimming in the same direction,
01:05:09and it's all perfect, and it's just...
01:05:12Oh my god.
01:05:13Talk about inaction and procrastination.
01:05:15Well, I'm going to wait to do it until every part of me is on board,
01:05:18and I have no hesitation.
01:05:20I'm going to wait to ask out that girl until I'm not at all nervous about her saying no,
01:05:25there could be no possible downside.
01:05:26Well, I'm going to call her back when I don't feel any anxiety about whether she had a good time on the date,
01:05:33and everything's getting...
01:05:34Oh my god.
01:05:36Do you not think there have been times over the past 18, 19 years
01:05:40when I've just had to fucking white-knuckle willpower it?
01:05:43Oh my god.
01:05:45I literally took to stages with bomb threats and death threats hanging over me.
01:05:55You know, I'm...
01:05:56I mean, they were whipping up such hatred against me on some of my speaking tours
01:06:01that I'm taking a pee before going on to speak,
01:06:04somebody comes in loudly, I'm like,
01:06:06I hope I don't get stabbed.
01:06:11You don't think there's a little bit of willpower involved in getting on the stage
01:06:17and engaging positively with the audience?
01:06:20Do you think every part of me was on board with going forward?
01:06:24You don't think I've had to white-knuckle willpower some of this shit?
01:06:27Really?
01:06:28Really?
01:06:31Even tonight a little bit, and I think it's been a good show,
01:06:33it's been a good conversation.
01:06:36My god, do you really wait for everything to just be all aligned within you
01:06:41in order to make a decision that you know to be right?
01:06:48Well, I'm not going to go and take a job until I'm perfectly confident
01:06:52and every part of me is happy with the job and I know I'm going to succeed perfectly.
01:06:56Well, welcome to a whole life of doing not much.
01:07:11Do you think being objective in regards to childhood abuse
01:07:15is something that people who have had to constantly take their own selves
01:07:19slash needs out of the equation of things,
01:07:21so being objective in their thinking comes easier?
01:07:26You're overthinking it, man.
01:07:28Being objective with regards to child abuse is
01:07:31can I hold my parents to the same standards they held me to as children?
01:07:35That's all. It's really not complicated.
01:07:38Can I hold my parents to the same standard or standards
01:07:43that they held me to as a child?
01:07:46So as a child, if I did something wrong, I was punished.
01:07:53So if my parents did something wrong,
01:07:57will they accept responsibility and can they be punished?
01:08:03For my parents, if I failed to prepare for something
01:08:08that I knew was coming like a test,
01:08:11if I failed to prepare for a test I knew was coming,
01:08:13you've known about this test for weeks.
01:08:16You know that like me preparing at the age of eight
01:08:20to tell my mom Sunday night I have a big presentation
01:08:23that requires a lot of materials on Monday.
01:08:26Oh, here I go.
01:08:28You've known about this for weeks. Why are you just telling me now?
01:08:31Why haven't you planned?
01:08:33It's like, okay, well, you knew for at least nine months
01:08:35that you were going to become parents.
01:08:37What parenting books did you read to make sure you were good parents?
01:08:42Right, can I hold my parents to the same standard to which they held me?
01:08:47It's nothing to do with... it's just objective, that's all.
01:08:56Somebody says, thanks to the emotional and physical abuse,
01:08:58for which I'm very sorry, of course,
01:09:00I will never be able to be the cruel, indifferent people
01:09:03my adopted parents turned out to be.
01:09:05I'm not saying it was worth it.
01:09:07I'm not saying they had any good motives.
01:09:09It's despite them, not because of them, I chose to be kind and never cruel.
01:09:13Never cruel?
01:09:16Maybe throwing the baby out with the bathwater a little bit.
01:09:19Peanut butter chocolate bars were my weakness.
01:09:21Yes.
01:09:23The question about empathy.
01:09:25I meant it as an hereditary trait, such as IQ.
01:09:29IQ is not purely genetic.
01:09:32IQ is about 80% genetic by the viral late teens,
01:09:35but it's not purely genetic.
01:09:38James says, me losing over 35 pounds earlier this year
01:09:41involved a bit of white-knuckling, back-ache, still want to go,
01:09:44but I'd never go down if I were to wait for all my parts to be on board.
01:09:47Yeah.
01:09:49Imagine hunter-gatherers waiting for everything to be perfect and worry-free
01:09:52before hunting their prey.
01:09:54They'd... strafe, I think he means starve.
01:09:58Yes, I will wait, until I'm ready.
01:10:04Yes, I will wait, until the time is perfect,
01:10:08is just a way of saying, I prefer to not act,
01:10:11and I'm really desperate to lie to myself about my motives.
01:10:14Things just aren't perfect yet.
01:10:16It's not quite right. Something's amiss.
01:10:18Not every part of me is in perfect alignment.
01:10:21Let's just lie to yourself.
01:10:23I mean, we all do it, so again, please understand,
01:10:25I'm not lecturing from any superior standpoint,
01:10:28but just be honest and say, I don't want to do it,
01:10:30and I don't want to exercise my will.
01:10:32I don't want to exercise my will.
01:10:42Books on parenting, how about Dr. Spock?
01:10:45Well, something.
01:10:48So, over on Rumble, what have we got here?
01:10:51Good evening, praying for all those lost on 9-11
01:10:54and the aftermath that followed.
01:10:57Somebody says, talking to my mother has always been
01:11:00heads, she wins, tails, I lose.
01:11:03No getting through to her.
01:11:05Still waiting on that, I was wrong, the jab didn't work from her.
01:11:09Normies think the jab worked miraculously,
01:11:11saved the world and the diseases, no more.
01:11:14Yeah. You know, it's pretty tough.
01:11:19It's pretty tough.
01:11:22Megyn Kelly had an interesting thing to say about COVID.
01:11:27She said, I almost can't get my arms around it,
01:11:30like just how much we were lied to.
01:11:33Almost can't get my arms around it.
01:11:36And this is part of the naivety, which is to say,
01:11:39well, I feel uncomfortable lying, right?
01:11:44And, you know, there's just so many liars online,
01:11:48there's so many liars online,
01:11:50or people who push things forward that they didn't.
01:11:54There's a guy, he's a bald guy in England,
01:11:57I can't remember, John something or other, I think.
01:11:59And he put forward this thing about how there are these
01:12:01self-assembling nanobots in the vaccines,
01:12:07and he's got these scary structures under him,
01:12:11big microscope and all of that.
01:12:13Now, he is a guy who, you know, seems to have
01:12:16a fair amount of credibility.
01:12:18So I looked twice and all of that,
01:12:20and I thought about it, I read about it.
01:12:23It seemed a bit not quite right, but, you know,
01:12:26what am I, I'm certainly no expert in these things.
01:12:29Anyway, he turned out to have withdrawn the post
01:12:32because apparently they left the stuff in the vials
01:12:37for a year and maybe the proteins crystallized
01:12:40or something.
01:12:41Again, I'm no expert, but I'm not saying he was lying,
01:12:43but I'm just saying a lot of stuff you read,
01:12:46and the community notes is actually pretty good
01:12:48as far as this goes on Twitter.
01:12:50You know, a lot of people who are like,
01:12:51oh, this is true, and it's like, no, not really.
01:12:53This was a skit.
01:12:54John Campbell, yeah, that's the guy.
01:12:56Yeah, a reasonable guy and all of that.
01:12:58He's got that, you know, sky daddy,
01:13:01British father vibe going on,
01:13:03and a lot of the information he puts out is pretty good,
01:13:06and, you know, we all make mistakes.
01:13:08But this was a peer-reviewed paper, he said,
01:13:11and again, it just seems, you know, like they were saying,
01:13:15oh, Canada has withdrawn Pfizer and Moderna vaccines
01:13:19and they're ordering all of the samples destroyed,
01:13:22and everyone's, like, going nuts,
01:13:23and it's like, I don't think that's it.
01:13:25So I checked, and no, they're still recommended,
01:13:27and I think they're just destroying last year's vials
01:13:29as they do with the flu shot every year and so on.
01:13:31It's just like, God, just stop lying.
01:13:34Stop lying, people.
01:13:36It's just terrible.
01:13:38I don't know if people jump the gun
01:13:39or they don't check their sources or they don't.
01:13:42Oh, my God.
01:13:44It really is terrible.
01:13:46I mean, I do understand, you know, the government
01:13:51and other people, other places,
01:13:53I do understand this frustration with disinformation,
01:13:57misinformation, like, I really do.
01:13:59You have to just be so cautious and careful
01:14:03with all of this stuff, right?
01:14:05You have to be so cautious and careful
01:14:06because there's a lot of people who really don't check very much.
01:14:11And I think it was on Telegram I posted the John Campbell video
01:14:14and it was kind of mind-blowing to me.
01:14:16It seemed a little kind of far out there,
01:14:18and then I also posted his retraction
01:14:20because that seemed important as well,
01:14:22and I'm basically hesitant to, you know,
01:14:26what do they say, Kamala Harris had these earrings on
01:14:29that are actually broadcast earrings,
01:14:32and she's got, I don't know, man.
01:14:38People want to sit on their ass, smoke weed,
01:14:39and do conspiracies instead of white-knuckle virtue,
01:14:41truth, reason, et cetera, yeah, yeah.
01:14:46Oh, it's really sad.
01:14:50Now, I'm happy to take questions and comments.
01:14:53Tips, of course, are very, very much appreciated.
01:14:56This is a one-of-a-kind conversation.
01:14:58You really can't get this stuff anywhere else,
01:15:00and it is the greatest philosophy conversation in history.
01:15:03I will defend that to my dying day,
01:15:06hopefully many decades from now.
01:15:08But you can go to freedomain.com slash donate
01:15:10to help out the show.
01:15:11You can donate on the apps, on Rumble, on Locals,
01:15:15and, of course, donators get the
01:15:21History of Philosophers series,
01:15:22which is really, really great.
01:15:26So I am happy to...
01:15:30I was really wrestling with myself today
01:15:32about talking about the debate.
01:15:34I did watch the debate last night,
01:15:38but I've decided not to.
01:15:40I could talk about the form of it and so on,
01:15:42but it's still pretty close to politics, so I think I will.
01:15:45Look at this. There's my white knuckle, right?
01:15:47I'm just not going to.
01:15:48But I do have another topic to talk about.
01:15:51It's a little dark.
01:15:53In fact, it's very dark, but...
01:16:00Steph interviewed a lady a few years ago.
01:16:02She claimed 30% of all those facts would be dead by now.
01:16:04It's supposed to affect real estate prices.
01:16:06Technically, I have no problem with you saying what you're saying.
01:16:09Technically, I did not interview her.
01:16:11She was on a roundtable that was to do with cryptocurrency,
01:16:14and she brought up that topic as a whole.
01:16:17I did not interview her.
01:16:18She brought up that topic of her own volition and so on, right?
01:16:22Yeah, it was a Bitcoin conference.
01:16:24I didn't interview her.
01:16:25She just was in a roundtable, and she had her say.
01:16:28And I disliked that as well.
01:16:30You know, I'm not going to name any names.
01:16:34I'm not going to name any names.
01:16:36But there are a lot of people out there who said,
01:16:40oh, the people who took the jabs will all be dead in a year or two or three.
01:16:44And it's like, but they're not.
01:16:47Well, there have been injuries.
01:16:48I get all of that, but that's not what people said.
01:16:52And that kind of fear-mongering, people should really apologize.
01:16:56You know, if you say something like that,
01:17:00you are scaring the living shit out of people who took the vaccine.
01:17:07Did you see Styx groping his new girlfriend on his debate livestream?
01:17:10No, I didn't see Styx groping his new girlfriend.
01:17:12I don't even know if that happened.
01:17:15But isn't he a dad?
01:17:17Did he get married or the marriage didn't work out or something like that?
01:17:19I haven't really followed it.
01:17:21But he's a hard guy to dislike, so all right.
01:17:27But yeah, you shouldn't tell people, oh, if you did this,
01:17:29you're going to die or your loved ones are going to die in two years.
01:17:32And that's horrible.
01:17:34It's a horrible, horrible, horrible thing to do.
01:17:37It's an absolutely horrible thing to do.
01:17:40And I don't know.
01:17:43I mean, can you make restitution for that?
01:17:46I don't know.
01:17:51Yeah, yeah, yeah.
01:17:56I don't know how people live with themselves about that.
01:18:01I was thinking about all the people who didn't follow me after the deplatforming
01:18:05and all the good stuff they've missed out on.
01:18:07But I did check it out.
01:18:09Bitcoin was about a fifth of the price that it is now when I was deplatformed.
01:18:14So by not following me, people might have missed out on 500% increase in that, right?
01:18:21Yeah.
01:18:31Yeah, I really, I mean, I do know some people who,
01:18:35according to their own estimation, it's not something I know for sure, of course,
01:18:39because I'm not an expert in this.
01:18:41But I do know people personally who say that they have experienced
01:18:47significant issues health-wise after taking the COVID vaccines.
01:18:52I mean, I just know people like that.
01:18:54I can't prove it.
01:18:55It's really hard to prove.
01:18:57But I mean, I do think there's been that.
01:19:02But then people say, oh, in Canada, the excess mortality is up 400%, blah, blah, blah.
01:19:07And it's like, I don't know, man.
01:19:12I do wonder what a couple of years without health care did for people.
01:19:15I mean, I can't tell you just how unbelievably frustrating that is.
01:19:20Yes, a couple of donations would be very much gratefully appreciated.
01:19:24Yeah, so, I mean, and you've got to hold these people's feet to the fire.
01:19:28No, honestly, if I was still doing interviews and outside work and so on,
01:19:32I'd bring one of these people on and I'd say, you were wrong.
01:19:35I would tell them this ahead of time.
01:19:37I don't like this, you know, Joe Rogan style or whatever,
01:19:41this kind of ambushing stuff, right?
01:19:44But it's like, but you were wrong.
01:19:47And you scared the living shit out of people.
01:19:49You had people think they had only two years to live and they're okay.
01:19:58How do you live with that?
01:20:00How do you live with that?
01:20:02Because you told people and then they sat down with their friends
01:20:04and they sat down with their friends and their family.
01:20:06They said, well, if you took this jab, you've got two years to live.
01:20:08You better make your peace now.
01:20:10You better, my God, that's terrible.
01:20:12Absolutely appalling.
01:20:15That's worse than the fear mongering from the global warming people
01:20:20and all of that kind of stuff, right?
01:20:24You're broke, you tipped over the ears, donate again when possible.
01:20:26Thank you, I appreciate that.
01:20:33Oh, I don't know.
01:20:36You see, everyone says, oh, there's a reckoning.
01:20:38Is there a reckoning for the fear mongers?
01:20:41The COVID vaccine fear mongers, is there a reckoning for them?
01:20:45Are they getting called out?
01:20:47Are they getting, like you said, everyone's going to be dead
01:20:49in two, three years, blah, blah, blah.
01:20:52Is that happening?
01:20:54Are they being called out?
01:20:56Are they making their apologies?
01:20:58I don't know.
01:21:00Because here's the thing.
01:21:01This is the alt media space.
01:21:03I don't want to get off on a rant here.
01:21:04So the alt media space.
01:21:07They have rights.
01:21:08They look at sort of the mainstream media and they say, look,
01:21:10these guys made terrible mistakes.
01:21:11They lied about this.
01:21:12They lied about that.
01:21:13They made people afraid about this.
01:21:15And they should apologize?
01:21:16Yes, absolutely.
01:21:17But is this true in the alt media space too?
01:21:23Is it also in the alt media space, are people held to account
01:21:29for egregious, terrifying falsehoods?
01:21:39I don't know that that's happening.
01:21:41I just, I don't like the idea, and I'm not saying it is true,
01:21:47but I don't like even the idea that this sort of alt media space
01:21:50is just a different set of unaccountable falsehoods.
01:22:01People who said everyone's going to die, have they been held to account?
01:22:07Because they were wrong and they scared the living shit out of people.
01:22:13And that's terrible.
01:22:23Yeah, I mean, I don't think a lot of this stuff is really going to be
01:22:25investigated very much because I think people just want to move on.
01:22:31People just want to move on.
01:22:41All right.
01:22:42Happy to take other questions, comments, issues.
01:22:47Happy to hear.
01:22:49Congratulations on quitting your tobacco.
01:22:51Excellent.
01:22:52Excellent, excellent.
01:22:53Good for you.
01:22:55Good for you.
01:22:56All right, let me just check the messages here.
01:23:00Craig Jones made a comment that the pro-vax and the anti-vax people
01:23:02are looking at each other now, confused that the other person is still alive.
01:23:06Right.
01:23:07I mean, we all know, what was it, the Biden thing about the unvaccinated
01:23:13looking at a winter of severe disease and death.
01:23:16Okay, that's really terrible.
01:23:18Telling people they're going to die is just about the worst thing you can do
01:23:23outside of actually killing them.
01:23:25Right, that is terrible.
01:23:28Terrible, terrible, terrible behavior.
01:23:31Thanks, Lee, I appreciated it.
01:23:33It's terrible behavior.
01:23:37I mean, can you imagine a doctor saying you have a year or two to live?
01:23:47Oh, wrong.
01:23:49You're fine.
01:23:51Oh, my God.
01:23:53People made major life choices.
01:23:57If you got the vax and then somebody said you're going to be dead,
01:24:02you would quit your job, you'd spend your money, whatever, right?
01:24:08And, my God, that's just appalling.
01:24:12People made major decisions on information that was not true.
01:24:31All right.
01:24:36Going once, going twice, type quick.
01:24:39Otherwise, I've got a topic that will take us home.
01:24:47Ah, but I'll wait.
01:24:49If you've got a yearning burning, a son of an itch that I can scratch,
01:24:54I'm keen to help.
01:24:57You are the master.
01:25:11All right, some people are typing.
01:25:15Right, please, 2008 Steph.
01:25:20The topic, okay.
01:25:22Right, so the feminine mystique is largely dead.
01:25:27A lot of chivalry came about because women were viewed as beautiful, delicate,
01:25:32wonderful creatures who were nurturing and kind and thoughtful and connected
01:25:37and bonded and so on, right?
01:25:41Now, it is not the case, of course, that this applies to all women,
01:25:49but the one thing I couldn't help but take out of the debate from last night
01:25:56is just how rabid massive numbers of women seem to be to have the right
01:26:03to kill the babies in their own wombs.
01:26:11It's pretty wild.
01:26:13It's kind of tough, I think, and this will be a permanent change in sex relations.
01:26:18It is kind of tough, I think, for men to sentimentalize women
01:26:23when massive numbers of women seem to live, breathe, and die
01:26:30according to their ability to kill shot their own fetuses
01:26:36in order to pursue a life of sex and PowerPoints.
01:26:46Abortion is a terrible topic.
01:26:48It is a horrible issue.
01:26:50It is the death of a baby.
01:26:53And I have a whole debate about this with a woman in the premium section,
01:26:58freedomand.locals.com.
01:26:59You can go and listen to more of my thoughts about it there.
01:27:02But what is really quite astounding is seeing how hungry so many women are
01:27:09for the right to kill their own fetuses.
01:27:13That's really something, and I don't think that gender relations,
01:27:19the relations between men and women, will never again resume
01:27:22any kind of sentimentalized or prior state.
01:27:26It would just never happen.
01:27:27This is all over.
01:27:29It's all over.
01:27:30It's all done because this, you know, the mask, the witch mask ripped off,
01:27:37the feral aspect of this is really something.
01:27:42I mean, not to get into the debate in particular, but, you know,
01:27:47Kamala Harris saying, well, we believe in bodily autonomy
01:27:53and for a woman to control her own body and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
01:27:57It's like, well, a fetus is not her own body
01:27:59I mean, your liver is your own body, but it doesn't detach and go to college
01:28:02and get woke.
01:28:04It's not even your DNA that's in the baby, right?
01:28:07So it's not your body.
01:28:09But Kamala Harris saying, with a straight face, with moderators
01:28:16who claim to be fact-checking, saying, well, you know, women,
01:28:20we've got to be able to control our own medical decisions and privacy
01:28:22and bodily autonomy and control.
01:28:24It's like she and Biden created vax mandates.
01:28:27I mean, so it's not about bodily autonomy.
01:28:30It is just the kill shot for the fetus.
01:28:32That seems to be what it's all about.
01:28:38And men are still, I think, fundamentally not processing this.
01:28:42Are you?
01:28:43Like, let me know.
01:28:44Am I off base about this?
01:28:46How are you processing this fairly ugly side of female nature
01:28:59that wants this power without, it seems, significant regret or conscience?
01:29:08I can see if somebody says, you know, this is an absolutely terrible situation
01:29:14and any kind of abortion is just awful and, you know, regretfully with this,
01:29:20that, and the other.
01:29:21And it's like, no, it's just like, hey, it should be subsidized,
01:29:24should be safe, legal, free.
01:29:26We want to have this ability.
01:29:28And it's the number one political issue, isn't it?
01:29:34James, can I get a fact check on that?
01:29:37Is it the number one political issue for American women?
01:29:53Isn't this wild?
01:30:01What is that old joke, my body's a temple?
01:30:03Yeah, like an Aztec temple.
01:30:07I mean, at the very most charitable, I could look at abortion like amputation, right?
01:30:23Like amputation is a terrible thing.
01:30:28You should do everything you can to save the limb.
01:30:31Amputation is the regretful necessity in a horrible extremity.
01:30:35But can you imagine doctors roaming up and down the streets demanding and cheering and singing,
01:30:41we demand the right to amputate?
01:30:43I guess they kind of are in a way, right?
01:30:45But it is, there's no road back.
01:31:00I'm not, look, the road forward, I mean, it's always better to have the facts, right?
01:31:05So the road forward is better, because these are just the facts.
01:31:15And I'm not saying this is even female nature as a whole,
01:31:18because we don't know what male and female nature is, because we live in a human zoo.
01:31:23So you wouldn't want to judge animals by how they act in a zoo, right?
01:31:29I'm not saying women are animals, it's just an analogy.
01:31:44So, but there's no going back to sentimentalizing women.
01:32:04Talked online to a woman, says someone who did not even think getting an abortion
01:32:07was a subject requiring deep thought and moral reasoning.
01:32:11I mean, the maternal instinct, the beauty of women, the sentimentality that men have for women,
01:32:15the idealization of women, the pedestalization of women,
01:32:18the poetic, mystical feminine, that's all gone, man.
01:32:22That's just gone.
01:32:24That is gone.
01:32:25Not for all women, there's still wonderful, beautiful women out there, but...
01:32:29Somebody says, I think men would advocate for abortion more if they had to be pregnant too.
01:32:36Sorry, I don't understand this at all.
01:32:38Not all of them, of course, but I think it's easy for men to pretend to hold a higher moral ground on this issue
01:32:42because they don't have to bear the physical burden.
01:32:45They don't have to bear the physical burden, what are you talking about?
01:32:52A woman can choose to be unpregnant, a man cannot choose to be not a father.
01:32:57I mean, you know this, right?
01:32:59A woman can choose to terminate a pregnancy, a man cannot opt out of fatherhood.
01:33:04So, if the woman decides to have the baby, the man is on the hook for child support for the next 20 years.
01:33:10So he has to bear a big fucking burden, I'm not sure what you're talking about here.
01:33:15Don't have to bear the physical burden.
01:33:18I mean, I don't know the guy's name, but some black guy just went to jail
01:33:22for not paying 70 grand in child support.
01:33:27What are you talking about?
01:33:29Men don't have to bear the physical burden.
01:33:32Men cannot reject fatherhood.
01:33:41And in some places, it's really, really tough and sometimes illegal to even get a paternity test.
01:33:46So men can be forced for 20 years to pay for a child who is not their own.
01:33:54There was a boy somewhere in America, and check me if I'm wrong,
01:34:02I don't want to fall for these urban myths, right?
01:34:04So double check me if you can, James.
01:34:06But if I remember rightly, there was a boy who was like 15 or 16
01:34:09who was the subject of statutory rape from an older woman who still had to pay child support,
01:34:13was still on the hook for child support.
01:34:15So I don't know what you mean when you say men can't be pregnant too.
01:34:19Women can choose to be unpregnant, but men can't choose to not be fathers.
01:34:23I mean, once the woman is pregnant.
01:34:25It says, further, my female friends agree that women don't get abortions
01:34:28if they have the means to provide for their children.
01:34:30It's usually due to an inability to afford to be a single mother.
01:34:33But that's not true.
01:34:36Again, correct me if I'm wrong,
01:34:38but I think that the number one reason for abortion is, you know,
01:34:42it's inconvenient, it's the wrong time, it doesn't fit into my lifestyle, that kind of stuff.
01:34:45So I don't know about that.
01:34:49And single mothers get tons of welfare, so I don't know what that means.
01:35:04Yeah, doing back-breaking labor to provide for family sounds like physical burden to me, right?
01:35:09Pro-choice, this is from 2020.
01:35:12Pro-choice younger women are more likely than counterparts to say
01:35:14abortion is the most important issue determining their vote.
01:35:25I grew up thinking abortion was okay.
01:35:27Is it superficial thinking that it is a simple fix to the inconvenience of an unwanted pregnancy?
01:35:31No morals behind it, just a way to get what they want.
01:35:36Story from 2014.
01:35:38A male victim of statutory rape became a father at age 14,
01:35:42got served in 2012 with papers demanding child support.
01:35:45Yeah.
01:35:49So they say, well, the victim of rape should be able to abort.
01:35:51Okay, well, we can make that argument, but I don't see...
01:35:54This was a boy who was a victim of rape,
01:35:58who not only has to...
01:36:00Well, who has to now pay child support for 20 years.
01:36:03He was a victim of rape, and he's now tied to his rapist for 20 years.
01:36:09My God.
01:36:13And again, we can have discussions about the virtues, ethics, and morals of...
01:36:21killing fetuses.
01:36:26But...
01:36:32Yeah, what do they call it?
01:36:34I was watching a video where a woman called an abortion clinic,
01:36:38and she said, I'm 34 weeks, or whatever.
01:36:40What's that, seven or eight months?
01:36:41I'm 34 weeks.
01:36:42And they're like, we then remove the products of conception.
01:36:47The fetus, the products of conception, the clumper cells, the...
01:37:00And it's funny because there is this...
01:37:02Well, not funny, of course, right?
01:37:04But a lot of times in the same personality,
01:37:07there is this coldness towards the baby growing in your own body,
01:37:11and then this infinite warmth for, like, migrants and criminals,
01:37:15and, like, it's wild.
01:37:20It's wild.
01:37:22So this is not...
01:37:24Thank you, Matthew.
01:37:25This is not ever going back.
01:37:30What we are doing as a society at the moment, it's amazing.
01:37:33It's an amazing thing, and I'm incredibly proud and happy,
01:37:35and thank you for your support to be a part of this.
01:37:38But we are getting, in real time,
01:37:40absolute permanent verification of the state of mind of people in statism.
01:37:54And what are the numbers?
01:37:57Again, please, to verify, if you can,
01:38:00is it a third of women, 25% or 30% of women have had an abortion?
01:38:09That's not right.
01:38:15That's not right.
01:38:16I mean, I think that's statistically right,
01:38:19and James, if you can just give me a quick check on this,
01:38:21but it is wild.
01:38:31And, again, this is not to argue whether abortion should be legal or illegal.
01:38:36I'm not even arguing the ethics of it,
01:38:38but what I am doing is I'm saying the way in which it's discussed,
01:38:42this sort of absolute self-righteous woman controlling her own body,
01:38:47this number one political issue with the right to...
01:38:55...abort babies, that that's the number one thing,
01:38:58I mean, that's some cold shit, man.
01:39:04That is some cold, cold stuff.
01:39:09I mean, of course, what we want to do is,
01:39:12even if abortion is legal and so on,
01:39:14what we absolutely want to do is minimize it as much as humanly possible.
01:39:21Because the other thing, too, is that abortion, of course,
01:39:23diverts a massive amount of medical resources
01:39:25that could be used for non-voluntary conditions, right?
01:39:35Non-voluntary conditions.
01:39:36Now, women say, well, I consented to sex,
01:39:39but I didn't consent to pregnancy.
01:39:41It's like, if you have procreative sex,
01:39:46like male orgasm in the birth canal at time of ovulation,
01:39:50isn't that kind of like saying,
01:39:52well, I consented to Russian roulette, but not to getting shot.
01:39:55It's like, but that's sort of the risk you take, isn't it?
01:40:06I mean, if you motorcycle blindfolded and you say,
01:40:08well, I consented to a motorcycle ride, but not to crashing,
01:40:10it's like, but you did kind of raise the risks there, right?
01:40:13One in four U.S. women expected to have an abortion in their lifetime.
01:40:24This is as of 2024.
01:40:26Thirteen percent of women in the United States
01:40:28likely to have an abortion by age 25.
01:40:33Man.
01:40:39Do you think the rhetoric around bodily autonomy
01:40:41is speaking to those pro-abortionist women
01:40:43having their bodily autonomy acted against e-childhood sexual abuse?
01:40:46Well, I mean, one in three girls, one in five boys,
01:40:50at a conservative estimate.
01:40:51I think the numbers are much higher,
01:40:52but at a conservative estimate,
01:40:54one in three girls, one in five boys.
01:40:58You know, the hot crazy matrix, of course,
01:41:00the hot crazy matrix has something to do with the fact
01:41:02that attractive women, attractive girls, excuse me,
01:41:05attractive girls are often preyed upon more by pedophiles.
01:41:15I mean, this is, of course, anecdotal and so on,
01:41:36but I'm sure you've seen these brutal videos
01:41:38of men begging their wives and girlfriends
01:41:41to not get an abortion,
01:41:42like they're pounding on the doors of the abortion clinic
01:41:44and begging and crying for this not to happen.
01:41:48Yeah, they sometimes call the child of the woman
01:41:51a parasite and so on, right?
01:41:58James says,
01:41:59there are so many women on dating profiles
01:42:01that list reproductive rights as important to them.
01:42:03It's a pretty big red flag for me, right?
01:42:12Thanks for the stream, Steph.
01:42:13There's always very profound things to think about.
01:42:15Thank you, appreciate you being here.
01:42:20Now, would you like to close off with a wee theory
01:42:26as to why these rights are so important to so many women?
01:42:34James, can I just get you to look up one last thing?
01:42:36Sorry to keep taxing your pinkies, your phalanges,
01:42:39but what percentage of women are pro-abortion?
01:42:45Because, I mean, they say it's a women's issue.
01:42:47It's like, no, for a lot of women,
01:42:49particularly Christian women, abortion is a sin.
01:42:55I think only 2% of abortions are the result of rape and incest.
01:43:00So it is extraordinarily rare, as far as that goes.
01:43:05And, you know, there can be false allegations.
01:43:08I'm not saying there are, of course, in any one of these circumstances,
01:43:11but there certainly can be.
01:43:14So what...
01:43:18For what percentage of women, right?
01:43:26Do you think it's possible that you are underestimating
01:43:29the degree to which sexuality has changed?
01:43:34Okay, Chris, that's kind of an annoying,
01:43:36passive-aggressive way to ask the question.
01:43:42I mean, you know, you saw this in the debate, you know,
01:43:46where it's like, do you think you could have done anything differently
01:43:51in the past that would have been better?
01:43:52And that's a question you can't...
01:43:54There's no answer to that, right?
01:43:56It's a trap.
01:43:57Because if you say, well, maybe I could have considered this
01:44:00a little bit more, like, Trump admits massive fault,
01:44:02you know, this kind of stuff, right?
01:44:04Whereas if you say, no, I did everything perfectly,
01:44:06it refuses to even consider the fact that he might be wrong,
01:44:09so narcissistic he can't even think about doing it.
01:44:12Like, you just can't win that, right?
01:44:13There's no way.
01:44:15Do you think it's possible you're underestimating
01:44:17the degree to which sexuality has changed?
01:44:20Anything's possible.
01:44:21Do you think it's possible you could be a space alien from Mars
01:44:24and not even know it?
01:44:25Sure.
01:44:27See, harsher men and then their partners hardening up
01:44:29and objectifying their body more, calling it boundaries.
01:44:31Porn is generally quite harsh nowadays.
01:44:35I will let you tell me that.
01:44:36All right.
01:44:45James says the last time he looked at stats,
01:44:46it was less than 1% of abortions attributed to rape slash incest,
01:44:49but even 2%.
01:44:51Yeah.
01:44:56Whew.
01:44:57Yeah.
01:45:02Yeah, I think, I think, I think, Joe, you have it, right?
01:45:05You steal my thunder.
01:45:06Don't steal my sunshine.
01:45:08Because women only have sex to offer and no personality.
01:45:11If they can't offer sex, those women are screwed.
01:45:13Well, I don't think that's true.
01:45:15I mean, I think there's truth in it.
01:45:18So, what happens to women if they cannot offer sex?
01:45:28What happens?
01:45:29I mean, just imagine this.
01:45:31Go with me on a journey, my friends.
01:45:33What happens, and again, not all women, right,
01:45:36but to a lot of women out there, why is it such an important issue?
01:45:41So, if a woman goes out into the dating marketplace and says,
01:45:46no, no sex until marriage, right?
01:45:50What happens?
01:45:51Well, how can she compete with all the other women
01:45:53who are offering sex?
01:45:55But particularly to young men to whom sex is like
01:45:59the alpha and the omega, so to speak, right?
01:46:01So, how is a woman going to deal with that?
01:46:05Well, she has to become such a high quality woman
01:46:10that the man is willing to wait.
01:46:13It's worth the wait.
01:46:15Absolutely.
01:46:16You are so much fun.
01:46:17You are so smart.
01:46:18You are so funny.
01:46:19You are so engaging.
01:46:20You're such a great conversationalist.
01:46:22Yeah, I never thought I'd say this,
01:46:24but I'm willing to wait, right?
01:46:29So, sex is a subsidy for dating
01:46:34that women find it hard to give up.
01:46:43If a woman can't offer sex,
01:46:51she has to offer something else of value.
01:46:58Is she going to offer money?
01:46:59Nope.
01:47:01She's not going to offer money
01:47:02because women in general don't want to pay for their men.
01:47:08They don't want to pay.
01:47:09So, is the woman going to offer money?
01:47:13No.
01:47:15What is she going to offer that differentiates her
01:47:18and makes her of value in the dating marketplace?
01:47:21Now, there are lots of wonderful women out there
01:47:24who produce wonderful, have great conversations.
01:47:27They're smart.
01:47:28They read a lot.
01:47:29They really provide great value, right?
01:47:33But for a lot of women, and Gallup poll from 2022,
01:47:36women identifying as pro-choice on abortion, 61%.
01:47:41Now, given that Americans are the most religious country in the West,
01:47:47that means that virtually all non-religious,
01:47:51or at least, virtually all non-religious American women are pro-choice.
01:48:00Pro-choice.
01:48:04So, what is a woman going to offer to get a boyfriend
01:48:10if she can't offer sex?
01:48:14I mean, just imagine that.
01:48:18I mean, particularly for young men,
01:48:22although maybe not these days in the days of crashing testosterone levels,
01:48:26but for men, young men, it's a kind of sexual desire.
01:48:32It's a kind of madness.
01:48:33It's a kind of craziness.
01:48:35It's so intense, right?
01:48:38Nature's attempts to make families is not the most subtle motivation
01:48:42known to man, God, or beast.
01:48:47So, imagine that.
01:48:50Now, you can imagine this as a man very easily.
01:48:55So, when you look back on your girlfriends,
01:48:57the women you've dated,
01:48:59doesn't have to be girlfriends, girlfriends,
01:49:00but if you look back at the women you've dated,
01:49:0564% overall are pro-choice, Democrats 86%, Republicans 23%.
01:49:10Yeah, so that would be the religious swing, right?
01:49:14So, how many, what percentage of the women you dated
01:49:18over the course of your life would you have dated without sexual access,
01:49:21or if they had said no sex before marriage?
01:49:25How many of the women
01:49:35you dated in the past would you have dated
01:49:38if you knew there was going to be no sexual access until marriage?
01:49:43Religious service attendance, so if you attend
01:49:47church weekly, 20% are pro-choice,
01:49:50weekly, monthly 46%, seldom or never 70%, right?
01:49:58Give me your percent.
01:50:04I won't give my exact number because it's very low,
01:50:07and through that you might be able to calculate my body count,
01:50:10but it's not high.
01:50:14It's not high.
01:50:16Right.
01:50:18So, abortion on demand is an R-selected strategy
01:50:28that opposes K-selected dating standards.
01:50:34Abortion is a mechanism in a sense by which R-selected
01:50:38mating strategies win out over K-selected mating strategies.
01:50:58Imagine if, as a man, you had to take sexual access
01:51:03off the table when it came to dating.
01:51:11Or, to put it another way,
01:51:14how handsome and well-spoken and well-dressed
01:51:17would you have to be to get a woman to pay
01:51:22for all of your dates as a man?
01:51:26Isn't that an interesting question?
01:51:34Say this again.
01:51:38If you wanted a sugar mommy, even a woman your own age,
01:51:41if you said, well, if you want to date me, you have to,
01:51:44as a man, if you said, if you want to date me,
01:51:46you have to pay for everything.
01:51:47You have to pay for all of the dates,
01:51:49you have to pay for my gym membership,
01:51:52you have to pay for, and there are women who do this, right,
01:51:54for himbos or whatever, right?
01:51:57So, if, as a man, you said to women,
01:52:02if you want to date me, you have to pay for everything,
01:52:06imagine how ripped, handsome, charming, well-dressed,
01:52:11you'd have to be so ridiculously high status
01:52:13for the woman to date that everybody would assume
01:52:15she was paying for everything anyway.
01:52:19And she'd have to probably be post-wall,
01:52:21post-fertility or whatever, right?
01:52:27So, if, as a man, you're not allowed to pay for dates,
01:52:30you'd have to up the quality of what you're presenting so high,
01:52:33it would be, yeah, you'd have to be like Brad Pitt handsome
01:52:35or something like that, right?
01:52:37I can imagine most women would laugh at that or be disgusted,
01:52:39some would even be insulted.
01:52:40No, I get that.
01:52:43I get that.
01:52:44But imagine how good-looking you'd have to be as a man,
01:52:46how high status you'd have to be as a man
01:52:48to demand that women pay your bills.
01:52:50So, that's the analogy.
01:52:52If a woman says, I will not have sex with you until we're married,
01:52:56how attractive does she have to be?
01:52:58And I don't just mean physically, but how attractive does she have to be?
01:53:01Does she have to be?
01:53:02Does she have to be?
01:53:03How attractive does she have to be in order to get your commitment?
01:53:08Isn't that an interesting question?
01:53:10Sexuality is a subsidy and money is a subsidy.
01:53:15Men use money as a subsidy and women use sex as a subsidy.
01:53:23Also, women love being wooed, man.
01:53:26I was thinking a little bit more.
01:53:28I'm listening to the audio book of the movie that I reviewed,
01:53:32It Ends With Us, the Blake Lively movie.
01:53:37And I have lost track of the time,
01:53:41but it's something like this woman has this rock-abbed,
01:53:47ripped, neurosurgeon, handsome god of a man.
01:53:51He lusts after her for over a year.
01:53:56Over a year, he's just massively lusting after her.
01:54:00And she finds this the sexiest thing you could conceive of.
01:54:04It is the sexiest thing to be desired for a woman.
01:54:08And if that desire pays off and she gets married and has kids,
01:54:14well, she is no longer being pursued.
01:54:17She's no longer being lusted after in the same way.
01:54:21Now, of course, good husbands know that you lust after your wife
01:54:24every day and twice on Sundays.
01:54:26You must lust after your wife.
01:54:28Hopefully, she'll lust after you too.
01:54:30But you absolutely, if you're not lusting after your wife
01:54:33and making her call HR with every other breath,
01:54:36then I don't know what you're doing as a husband.
01:54:39But imagine if you did not have the subsidy of sex or the subsidy of money.
01:54:52Because men in the past generally didn't have the subsidy of money
01:54:56because we were broke, poor, lower class, middle class.
01:55:00Maybe you inherit something down the road, but you'd be poor.
01:55:03Now, the goal, of course, is you're going to make money later on as a man
01:55:07and, you know, maybe things would be better off.
01:55:09But a man couldn't lavish money on a woman in the past
01:55:12because we didn't have that much money.
01:55:14Think about, like, you know, even post-industrial revolution,
01:55:16but certainly before that, you got nothing.
01:55:19It's a famous date, a jug of wine, a loaf of bread, and thou.
01:55:26Men couldn't bribe women with money in the past,
01:55:31and women couldn't bribe men with sex.
01:55:36Abortion allows for a woman to offer fairly risk-free sexual access to a man
01:55:46rather than elevating the qualities of her morals, conversation, and value in other ways.
01:55:56And people, you know, I'll tell you this, man.
01:55:59This is part of the whole deplatforming thing, right?
01:56:02It can be tough, I'll tell you this, man.
01:56:04Have you ever gone through a period in life where you actually find out your real value?
01:56:08Ooh, it can be a little bit of a sting.
01:56:13I'm so valuable. People love me.
01:56:15Oh, I'm one website over and 96%, 97% of people don't bother coming over.
01:56:20Well, I guess I'm not that valuable, right?
01:56:23I mean, that's a reality.
01:56:25Have you ever tried to figure out, and this can happen in the workplace,
01:56:29can happen in a relationship, do you care about me enough to compromise?
01:56:32Are you valuable? How valuable are you?
01:56:36People have a terror, especially the more vain they are, the more they pump themselves up,
01:56:40the more that they get in resources and attention and dopamine,
01:56:43the more they get addicted to sexual attention, to find out.
01:56:48Now, a woman gets married, she has kids, then she finds out exactly how, quote,
01:56:55valuable she is, right? How valuable is she?
01:57:01Do women want to find out how valuable they are to men without being able to offer sex?
01:57:07And do men want to find out how valuable they are to women without offering money?
01:57:12Without paying?
01:57:14People are just too lazy to pursue truth.
01:57:17More of an addiction thing.
01:57:26So I think the abortion is a cover for a desperate fear that a man is only interested in you for sex.
01:57:35It's really, and the man's fear is that the woman's only interested in him for money and status, right?
01:57:42So a woman's fear that a man is only interested in her for sex is mirrored, I think, in the abortion question.
01:58:00If there's not easy, free access to abortion, well...
01:58:12How valuable are you?
01:58:21How valuable are you without subsidies?
01:58:28It's a tough question, right?
01:58:31It's a big question. This is the me-plus thing that I talked about with the Robin Williams video.
01:58:35Do you have to be you plus something in order to be of value?
01:58:39The bare-forked animal is this great quote from King Lear.
01:58:43Man is just this bare-forked animal, like a kid's lollipop drawing stick figure, just a bare-forked animal.
01:58:49Who are you without flash and sizzle and pizzazz?
01:58:53I mean, look at me.
01:58:55Look at me, dammit. I've got no big backdrop, no big studio.
01:58:59It's just me and a microphone and all of that.
01:59:04I'm just trying to have value without flash, without fancy graphics, without a bunch of guests, without props and jokes.
01:59:15Can I get the truth across just me?
01:59:18I like having a minimalist studio because it challenges me to keep people's attention without flash and bedazzle.
01:59:24I don't have chyrons. I don't have any of that.
01:59:28Can I keep you focused and interested just with that?
01:59:34Somebody says, I agree, especially for the daughters of divorced families.
01:59:37A lot of those daughters watch their fathers walk away and it breaks their heart. Too young.
01:59:41They learn then that no man will ever love them more than their father and their father loves stuff more than them.
01:59:47I don't know. It could be right, of course.
01:59:58The problem with divorce is that the parents can't teach the lessons to the children.
02:00:05So in divorce, in general, the woman says, your father, my husband, did something bad or wrong.
02:00:13He was distant. He was unavailable. He cheated. He didn't make enough money. I was bored. He wouldn't talk to me.
02:00:18He would hold up in his study and wouldn't come out and he golfed all weekend.
02:00:23So the mother says that there's something wrong with the father that she couldn't predict.
02:00:28The real problem with divorce is the lies told about it, not the actual divorce.
02:00:32So the woman in general will say that the man did something wrong that she couldn't possibly have predicted.
02:00:37He just turned out that he was this, that and the other. I didn't expect it.
02:00:40And therefore, that makes the daughters and the sons paranoid about pair bonding.
02:00:48You're on fire tonight. Thank you.
02:00:55The mother blames the father, takes no responsibility for herself.
02:00:59And this makes the daughters paranoid about falling in love.
02:01:03Vanity kills vulnerability. Vanity kills openness. Vanity kills pair bonding. Vanity kills love.
02:01:10Well, your father just turned out to be like this. I couldn't have predicted it.
02:01:14And that just makes women paranoid about falling in love because you could fall in love and it could just be right.
02:01:20As opposed to saying, well, I didn't deal with my childhood shit. I chose the wrong guy.
02:01:24It was obvious from the beginning. And here's how to avoid that. Now, it would be kind to the children.
02:01:29The problem with divorce is the lies told about the marriage and the divorce.
02:01:36And the husband may have his own falsehoods.
02:01:40And he's also worried about telling the truth for fear of losing his access to his children.
02:01:45The divorce is not the problem. As a adult.
02:01:52I'll go even further and say, in many ways, the child abuse is not the primary problem.
02:01:58The problem with child abuse as an adult is not the abuse itself, but the lies we tell ourselves about it.
02:02:03Oh, it was a mistake. They didn't mean to. They did the best they could.
02:02:06Which means that you can, quote, be doing the best you could and still commit unutterable evils.
02:02:10That makes you paranoid about virtue. Paranoid about virtue.
02:02:14Helpless in the face of inevitable ignorance.
02:02:19Well, that's just the way he is. And she couldn't have known that ahead of time.
02:02:27All right. Listen, I really, really appreciate you guys dropping by tonight.
02:02:31Any last donations would be absolutely beyond affectionately, if not downright lovingly welcome.
02:02:38I really, really do appreciate you dropping by tonight.
02:02:42Thank you in particular to Anthony, who carried the show with a donation.
02:02:46If you could help out, freedomain.com. Donate. I would really, really appreciate that.
02:02:51Yeah, Al Bundy, right? What's that meme about? Like the Fight Club thing?
02:02:55It's like kids in the 90s. I have a well-paying stable job and it's hell.
02:02:59One income wife, two kids, dogs, home, and a car.
02:03:06And he was a shoe salesman, right? He was a shoe salesman.
02:03:10I mean, look at the house that Homer Simpson lives in, right?
02:03:14Stay-at-home wife. Yep. We didn't know how good we had it.
02:03:18And we didn't know we were the last ones.
02:03:22We didn't know how good we had it. And we didn't know we were the last ones.
02:03:27We'll donate on the website. Thank you. I appreciate that. I appreciate that.
02:03:32Lots of love. We will talk to you guys on Friday night. I appreciate that.
02:03:35And I'm very glad I ended up doing the live stream.
02:03:38I mean, I feel a responsibility, but I think it worked out well.
02:03:42And I appreciate that. Everyone, and I'll talk to you soon. Bye.