Stefan Molyneux of Freedomain discusses conformity, aggression, and human duality in classic literature, focusing on Robert Louis Stevenson's "The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde." He critiques the allegorical interpretation of the novella as alcoholism, framing it instead as a conflict between societal norms and personal impulses. Molyneux explores the concept of the "shadow self," noting how societal pressures can mask latent aggression, and critiques virtue signaling in contemporary discourse.
He emphasizes individual ethical responsibility in confronting complicity within power structures and advocates for aligning personal relationships with moral values. In exploring aging and legacy, Molyneux underscores the pursuit of moral excellence and the importance of personal accountability, challenging listeners to reflect on their beliefs and the genuine quest for virtue in a complex world.
GET MY NEW BOOK 'PEACEFUL PARENTING', THE INTERACTIVE PEACEFUL PARENTING AI, AND AUDIOBOOK!
https://peacefulparenting.com/
Join the PREMIUM philosophy community on the web for free!
Also get the Truth About the French Revolution, multiple interactive multi-lingual philosophy AIs trained on thousands of hours of my material, as well as targeted AIs for Real-Time Relationships, BitCoin, Peaceful Parenting, and over 100 Call-Ins. Don't miss the private livestreams, premium call in shows, the 22 Part History of Philosophers series and much more!
See you soon!
https://freedomain.locals.com/support/promo/UPB2022
He emphasizes individual ethical responsibility in confronting complicity within power structures and advocates for aligning personal relationships with moral values. In exploring aging and legacy, Molyneux underscores the pursuit of moral excellence and the importance of personal accountability, challenging listeners to reflect on their beliefs and the genuine quest for virtue in a complex world.
GET MY NEW BOOK 'PEACEFUL PARENTING', THE INTERACTIVE PEACEFUL PARENTING AI, AND AUDIOBOOK!
https://peacefulparenting.com/
Join the PREMIUM philosophy community on the web for free!
Also get the Truth About the French Revolution, multiple interactive multi-lingual philosophy AIs trained on thousands of hours of my material, as well as targeted AIs for Real-Time Relationships, BitCoin, Peaceful Parenting, and over 100 Call-Ins. Don't miss the private livestreams, premium call in shows, the 22 Part History of Philosophers series and much more!
See you soon!
https://freedomain.locals.com/support/promo/UPB2022
Category
📚
LearningTranscript
00:00Good afternoon, everybody. Stephen Lawrence, Freedomain. Hope you're doing well.
00:03And please help support the show, freedomain.com. These are questions from Facebook.
00:08Is the strange case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde an allegory for alcoholism? I don't think so.
00:15So I'm sure as you know, this is a novella written by Robert Louis Stevenson,
00:19maybe based on a friend of his or an acquaintance of his who seemed outwardly normal, but actually
00:24killed his wife by poisoning her with opiates. And it is about an upright lawyer
00:29who is a secret killer. So I don't think it's about alcoholism. I think it's about two things.
00:38Number one is that conformity breeds rage. Forcing people to conform breeds resentment and anger.
00:47Censorship breeds rebellion, repression breeds revolution. And so pushing down
00:56personalities, pushing down aspects of yourself breeds rebellion.
01:03Now we all have an aggressive side and we should because there are a-holes out in the world who
01:09will strip us of our rights and liberties and property and freedoms and families. And like
01:13there are people who will do all of that and we need to be able to get angry and fight
01:19where necessary. Now society, when it becomes over-aggressive, dissolves into chaos and
01:29warlords and totalitarianism and all kinds of messy stuff. But when society gets too conformist,
01:37then progress tends to stop. It's kind of like evolution, right? Evolution needs a couple of
01:43random genes in order to progress and without those random genes things don't progress. But
01:48too many random genes and the mutations are usually too strong for the organism to remain
01:54viable. So society as a whole needs its conformists and it needs its rebels. And
02:01society will try and turn every rebel into a conformist. And the rebels will rebel often
02:11against that. So I think it is about if you force a significantly aggressive nature,
02:20instead of harnessing that, instead of harnessing that in society to find some positive
02:25aspect to it, maybe a soldier or a boxer or something where, maybe even a very aggressive
02:32business man or woman, usually man. But society needs to find a way to harness
02:38aggression rather than just shaming men for being aggressive. You know,
02:43toxic masculinity and all this kind of stuff. The fact that we have that but no conversations
02:48about toxic femininity shows you just how completely one-sided and lopsided these
02:54conversations are. So if you force too much conformity in society, there's going to be
03:02a rebellion against that conformity. And there should be. I'm not talking violence,
03:09I'm just talking about a rebellion against that conformity. And we can kind of see that
03:14happening right now. We have all of these, you know, fairly, I mean, very aggressive,
03:19woke language scolds and everyone's bad and phobic and racist and everything is toxic and
03:25appropriated and all of that. So when the aggression of repression gets too great,
03:35then there is an explosion of anger. So when you have an outwardly mild and conformist person,
03:44there is another person in there who's the polar opposite. This is sort of a Jungian
03:48thing, the shadow self and so on. Polite people, like hyper polite people, can be incredibly
03:56aggressive. And we can see this, of course, that the more that there's this focus on diversity of
04:03thought and toleration and openness, you can see the shadow side of those ideals being the,
04:10you know, fairly hysterical and wild aggression and de-platforming and violence and censorship
04:18to as you push for more and more quote diversity, then you actually end up with less and less
04:25diversity. You end up with this sort of chilling uniformity. And so we can see this everywhere
04:31in society, right? That those who push for the most tolerance have as the
04:38underside of the superstructure of their belief systems, like sentimentality
04:43and cruelty often go hand in hand. People who start to become addicted to this idea
04:51of being sweet and nice and wonderful, and they get addicted to the feelings of virtue signaling,
04:57get very aggressive at people who point out that the virtue signaling is covering up
05:04massive dysfunctions and actually cruelties in society. So people who like, oh, you know,
05:09we need universal health care so that everyone gets health care. And then you point out that
05:14people aren't able to access health care, like in places here in Canada, you have to wait up to two
05:19plus years to get a doctor, a family doctor. And a referral to a specialist, I think is at 27 weeks
05:25now, which is, you know, it's over six months, right? So when people say, well, I just like the
05:30idea of everyone getting free health care. And then you point out, well, you're actually denying
05:34people health care in many ways. They get angry because they want to feel good. So you see this
05:40supposed niceness, when you point out that it isn't actually very nice and is actually harmful,
05:46then they get very aggressive, right? So people who are conformists have underneath that conformity
05:58and that mildness and that pleasantness, they have very wild hostility, aggression, and the
06:06capacity for significant or extreme violence at times, or at least a support for it, right?
06:15A support for it. And I mean, you can see this, you know, all the my body, my choice feminists
06:21and feminist allies didn't have much to say when women were forced to take, or I mean,
06:26we are virtually forced in many ways to take vaccines and so on, right? So it is a
06:32unconscious recognition of the very real fact that conformists are very aggressive.
06:43And so this guy in the story, who's very much a conformist, has a hidden side of aggression
06:48to him. And I think that the story picks that up very well. That's number one. Number two
06:53is that if you want to do evil, the best way to do it is to pretend to be good.
06:59And if you want to do evil, the best way to do it is to pretend to be good. And so on the one
07:08side of things, there is the sort of mild-mannered conformist main protagonist, right? And there is
07:17the underside of violence. Conformity is aggression, because how do you get people to
07:23conform as children, right? Society can't tell people how to be good because it doesn't really
07:28know how to be good. So all it can do is threaten children with aggression, spanking, rejection,
07:34violence, going to bed without supper, being forced to sit in a particular location and sort
07:40of the timeout stuff. So society can't teach people how to be good. I mean, until it accepts
07:47UPB, which will probably be at least one to three generations. Society can't teach people how to be
07:52good. So all it can do is threaten them. And so conformity results from threats. And that is why
07:57conformity has an understructure of violence underneath it, because conformity is enforced
08:02through violence and aggression and threats of ostracism and so on, which to children are
08:06threats of violence, of course. So that's on the one side. On the other side,
08:12if you want to be somebody who's not suspected of being evil, then you want to drape yourself
08:20in the mantle of virtue, right? It's the great question of the sort of woke movement that's
08:27going on. It's really not a very organic movement, but this woke movement is, are people genuinely,
08:35they want to do good in the world and they get frustrated and angry at those who disagree with
08:39them? Or are the most efficient bullies those who cloak themselves in moral righteousness? In other
08:46words, do they want to be good but are frustrated or do they want to be bullies? And the best way
08:52to do that is to take up this mantle of egalitarianism, right? Do say communists,
09:00do they just want to land of milk and honey and peace and reason for everyone?
09:05And they just get frustrated and angry at those who disagree with them and reluctantly turn to
09:09aggression or violence as generally tends to be the case. Or it's the best way to indulge your
09:15sadistic impulses to cloak yourself in an ideology that inevitably leads to mass violence, right?
09:23Are you a good person who descends into evil or are you an evil person who pretends to be good?
09:30In other words, is the shadow side of the good person, the evil side, or is the shadow side of
09:39the evil person or the light side of the evil person, the pretense to virtue? So, I mean,
09:46sort of typical example of this is, say the boomers, the boomers will say, you know, we care
09:52about our life, our society, we care about our children, you know, our children are everything
09:58to us, right? And then you say, well, then you have to give up some retirement benefits and
10:02healthcare benefits because there's not enough money to pay. And then they get very aggressive,
10:06right? So that's the shadow side. It's the shadow side. So I think the story goes quite deep into
10:14these issues. So, all right. How can we, the people be held accountable for our complicity
10:20in the collapse of the Western world? We who stood by as we allowed them to sell our children's
10:24futures and $35 trillion in debt. All right. So, we who spoke against the corrupt politicians
10:30and then obeyed them. Well, I mean, obviously my case for 20 years is called the against me
10:39argument. And so you sit down and talk with, you know, friends and family and you say,
10:44well, I don't support X, Y, or Z government action. And they say, well, I do support it.
10:50And then you say, well, do you support me being thrown in jail if I don't support it, right?
10:56And if they do support you being thrown in jail because you don't support X, Y, or Z program,
11:00then like, let's say that if you say, I don't support, I don't know, foreign aid, right?
11:08Okay. Then, but you would support me being thrown in jail if I don't pay for the foreign aid,
11:15right? That's sort of the question, right? And if people say yes, then I do support you
11:22being thrown in jail or the welfare state. Like I think the welfare state is toxic and
11:25destructive and harmful and immoral. Then do you, would you allow me, or would you support me being
11:31able to withdraw from paying for that, which violates my conscience, right? And if people say,
11:36yes, you should be thrown in jail if you don't do what I want, that's immoral. And I personally
11:42don't associate with those kinds of people. I just, I just don't. I just, it's a matter of basic
11:47elemental pride and self-respect. And so I think it was close to 20 years ago, I sort of introduced
11:52this argument to the world, and it's a way of making people take their beliefs seriously.
12:00See, people can mouth off whatever platitudes they want, but if they don't have any skin in the game,
12:06then the beliefs are not real and they suffer no negative consequences. You know, I mean,
12:12the old sort of joke was sort of a bitter dark joke was everybody who put the Ukrainian flag
12:18in their bio with this sort of Slava Ukraine kind of thing, that they would then be drafted to go
12:23and fight the war in Ukraine. Well, you can imagine how quickly those flags would come down.
12:27Or if they alone got a bill for the support of the war in Ukraine, if they alone got
12:35the bill, how quickly would that, you know, they would have said, okay, well, if you have the flag
12:39in your bio, then you got to pay $10,000 towards supporting the war in Ukraine. How many people
12:45would then take that down? And so, you know, one of the problems, of course, is that the people who
12:50are interested in freedom tend to be sort of very nice. And one of the reasons that we care about
12:55freedom is we have empathy to people, free will choice, virtues, morality, and all of that kind
13:02of good stuff. And so, we tend to try to reason with people. We don't like saying,
13:10I'm not going to have anything to do with you if you continue to want to force me to do things
13:15against my conscience. And I'm just, I'm talking, obviously, completely peacefully, involuntary,
13:20and so on. It's like the intervention thing, like someone has a terrible addiction,
13:25and friends and family get together and say, you got to go and get help for this addiction,
13:30or we're cutting you out of our lives, right? Now, very few, as far as I understand it,
13:35sort of very few libertarians have gone down that path. I really haven't heard of any, but,
13:43I mean, outside of people who sort of listen to the philosophy that I put forward, I haven't really
13:49heard of any. But if you look at something like COVID, then the people who believed in the
13:58efficacy and necessity of the vaccines were absolutely willing to cut off family members
14:03who didn't get vaccinated, or even who opposed these sort of mandatory vaccine. So, the people
14:11who were pro-vaccine were willing to ostracize family members. And I was reading this really,
14:17really sad history. I mentioned it on the show the other day. It was under a Naomi Wolf post on X.
14:23It's a very sad history of how much ostracism was going on over the course of the pandemic.
14:32So, they were very serious about their beliefs and willing to sacrifice relationships for the sake
14:40of the vaccine. And so, they'll win. Until we are willing to ostracize people
14:49whose beliefs are immoral, deeply immoral. And I don't mean, like, right away, you make the case.
14:57You may make the case for some weeks or possibly even months, though years seems a bit ridiculous.
15:02But at some point, you have to take your beliefs seriously. And my argument has been,
15:07if an action is defined as immoral, right? If an action is defined as immoral,
15:14then people who advocate that action in particular against you are immoral people.
15:19And of course, we try to help people who are immoral and we try to bring them to the light.
15:23But if they are steadfast in their immorality, then a moral person really can't hang out with
15:29them and retain integrity, right? An immoral person cannot remain in the social orbit forever
15:37of a moral person, and the moral person then still claims integrity. So, you drop your morality
15:44after a certain amount of time, or you drop the relationship, or you accept that the morality
15:49doesn't really mean anything to you. It's just a pretense and so on, right? I mean,
15:53if morality doesn't inform you who you spend time with, then the morality doesn't make any sense.
16:00Morality, one of the things it should do, is help define who you should spend time with.
16:05So, for instance, obviously, I am anti-spanking, right? Spanking is a violation of the non-aggression
16:10principle. Now, if I had a relative who not only spanked his children, but also advocated for it,
16:21was very prominent and positive about it, and constantly would post about the need for it,
16:26and all of these kinds of things. So, spanking is immoral. Now, I can understand that if you
16:31grew up this way, it may take a little bit of time for you to see the immorality of it. But,
16:37you know, I would sit down with that person and say, okay, so this is your practice. Let me give
16:43you the moral arguments. Let me give you the consequentialist arguments. Let me give you the
16:47scientific arguments. You know, here's the lovely Dr. Elizabeth Gershoff to tell you about the
16:53meta-study to spanking, and how harmful spanking is to kids, like all of that sort of stuff.
16:58And then it comes down to a choice. If this family member, or friend, or whoever,
17:04even after being exposed to all the rational, and empirical, and factual, and scientific,
17:09and consequentialist arguments, if this person still said, spanking is good. I don't care what
17:17you say. I'm going to hit my children, and I'm going to publicly advocate for hitting children.
17:22Well, that person, again, after a certain amount of time, you give a little bit of time for the
17:27shock to set in, for the change to occur. You give some grace. And I remember giving a speech
17:33about this exact topic, and taking Q&As from the audience in the Libertarian Convention,
17:38I think it was out in California or something in 2011, like, you know, 13 plus years ago.
17:45So, would I sit down happily and break bread with somebody who hits his children,
17:54even after I've explained all of the virtues, morals, and ethics of that? Would it be right
18:01and reasonable for me to sit down and expose my children to it, and so on, right? What do
18:07my beliefs mean? What do moral beliefs mean if they don't change any of my actions, and in
18:15particular, my social actions, right? The moral beliefs would be just yapping, just noise.
18:22So, if you have made the case for the non-aggression principle, and you still have
18:29people in your life who want you thrown in jail for standing to you or by your ethical beliefs,
18:36then you are responsible. And I've certainly made the case.
18:40So, all right. Do you enjoy Guinness beer? No, I don't. I don't really enjoy Guinness beer.
18:47You know, what is it, hack me off a slice of Guinness? It's like if you carbonated bilge water
18:51and added some semi-toxic sludge to me, you would get a bit Guinness. It's not my thing.
18:56But then again, I'm not working in the fields and desperately need non-bacterial-based energy
19:00in the Middle Ages. All right. How do we regulate the kids' use of iPad? I mean,
19:05I think it's fine to give them some access to an iPad, but your challenge as a parent is to be
19:08more engaging and enjoyable than an iPad, right? So, my daughter really enjoys river walks,
19:16right? Like we go and walk up and down rivers, turn over rocks, and try to catch little fish
19:23and crayfish and so on. She really loves doing that stuff. So, if she's on the iPad and I say,
19:28let's do a river walk, I can't think of a single time. In fact, we went today, right? I can't think
19:34of a single time when she didn't want a river walk over an iPad. So, you just have to find ways
19:38that you're more enjoyable than an iPad. All right. Somebody says, I think faith and first
19:43principles are technically identical in their function. I think the only difference between me
19:48and an atheist is this regard is that I accept my faith and they're in denial of theirs.
19:52Is there a good argument against that? Science doesn't exist without its methodology.
19:57Its methodology doesn't exist without philosophy. Philosophers have to make first principle
20:00assumptions about everything to say they can know anything, lol. I'm probably too dumb to
20:05ask the question properly. I'll let God sort that out. Yeah, so this is the idea that people say,
20:09well, I have faith in God, but you have faith in reason. But no, I don't have faith in reason
20:17because reason is not something whose truth I need to accept without evidence. Reason is based on the
20:24essential properties of matter and to some degree energy, but in particular of matter, right?
20:31If you think of Aristotle's three laws of logic, A is A and object is itself. A is either A or
20:38non-A. A can't be both A and non-A at the same time. This is just stuff we all learn as kids,
20:44right? We learn that a ball is a ball. We learn that it continues to be a ball. We can't snap our
20:49fingers and turn it into candy and Lord knows we've probably tried as kids to some degree or another.
20:54So a reason is valid because it describes the basic properties of matter and energy.
21:03That matter and energy is not self-contradictory. That an object is itself. An object is either
21:10itself or something else or nothing. And an object cannot be both itself and something else or
21:16nothing at the same time. So if you're a kid and you're supposed to give a kid three pieces of
21:24candy and you give him two pieces of candy, you can't say that's three pieces of candy because
21:28the kid's going to say, no, no, that's two. One, two. Where's the third, right? So you don't have
21:32to have faith in reason because reason is derived from the stable universal and consistent properties
21:39of matter. Whereas God is not. So it's not faith. Somebody asks, you've embraced AI to help promote
21:48and expand your work in the last year or so. Have you had a chance to use it to challenge your own
21:52beliefs and philosophical theories or to point out any potential flaws in your thinking or anything
21:57like that? Have you actively debated it about anything? If so, what was your experience?
22:02How do you feel about AI overall and where do you see it going? Yeah, I mean, this is not your fault.
22:08I'm just telling you like a sort of minor irritation that I have about things. Well,
22:14Steph, you've been doing philosophy for 40 years. Have you ever challenged your own beliefs?
22:21It's like, what are you talking about? I mean, the whole point of philosophy is to challenge
22:25your assumptions. I've openly said, though, of course, I'm not expecting everyone to have heard
22:29every show, but I've openly talked about how I was mostly an Aristotelian slash objectivist for the
22:34first 20 years of my philosophical journey. And only after 20 years did I find that I had something
22:40of significant value to offer philosophy in the expansion of its methodology. And after that,
22:47right, so I'm talking about universally preferable behavior, my rational proof of secular ethics,
22:51and a lot of other things that I've talked about, some of which I've talked about in this actual
22:55show. And so when you say, have you had a chance to use it to challenge your own
23:01beliefs or philosophical theories? When I have been challenged by, I mean, I've done tons of
23:07debates. I've had people call in to disagree with me. I'm engaged in debates with people about their
23:13history, choices, circumstances, and free will all the time and moral responsibility in my call-in
23:18shows. So AI, what on earth would AI have to offer me that I haven't already gotten from 20 years
23:26and from 40 years really of being opposed, right? So when I started getting into philosophy,
23:33I was a socialist and I had to challenge that. When I started getting into philosophy,
23:38my friends generally were collectivists and mystics or subjectivists, and I had to be challenged
23:43by that and had to debate that. Of course, I was on the debate team in high school. I was on the
23:49debate team in university. I had to fight a lot with largely leftist and collectivist professors
23:57and so on, right? I had to fight in theater school about really about the definition of
24:03art and its purpose, because for them, art and its purpose was generally the promotion of leftist
24:07political ideals, like sort of Mother Courage and her children Brecht kind of stuff. And the purpose
24:13of art was activism, whereas for me, the purpose of art is the exposure of moral truths and their
24:20consequences. So I've had 40 years of massive amounts of opposition, and after 40 years of
24:30massive amount of opposition and self-criticism, I've got a whole series of videos called I Was
24:34Wrong About, so that X, Y, and Z. I've made apologies where I've gotten things incorrect
24:39and was too hasty in my judgments and so on. So the idea that AI would do more than
24:4540 years of massive opposition and flourishing and surviving through all of that,
24:51I think AI is a very good tool. It's a very interesting tool. I think for automated
24:57pseudo-intellectual tasks, it can be fine, but as far as it coming up with new ideas and theories
25:03and so on, anything truly useful that AI comes up with will just be censored anyway.
25:08All right. How to accept aging gracefully? Well, the best way to accept aging gracefully
25:16is to promote virtue and fight evil over the course of your life.
25:20Otherwise, you're wasting your time in brutal, selfish hedonism. The purpose of our lives
25:28is to promote virtue and fight evil, to promote virtue and oppose immorality, to promote reason
25:34and oppose mysticism, violence, manipulation, neglect, gaslighting, all of the sophist Lord
25:43of the Rings ring style trickery that people use to baffle and control other people's minds and
25:48therefore the resources of their calloused hands. So how do you accept aging gracefully?
25:54I mean, I just turned 58, so I hope I have some reasonable thoughts about this, but the way that
26:00you accept aging gracefully is you look back in satisfaction at the virtue you have promoted
26:09and the vices you have opposed, both within yourself and of course in particular in the
26:13world, since philosophy is about the world, not just about you or me or any particular individual.
26:20So I of course look back upon my life at this point, 43 year promotion of virtue and fighting
26:28of immorality, and I've done as much as I can possibly do. I've taken as many risks as I can
26:35reasonably take and survive, and I have done as much as I possibly can to promote a virtue and to
26:42discourage vice. And I have received both, you know, massive social attacks and amazing and
26:52wonderful positives. So I have spent my scant time on this planet using, and this is straight out of
27:01Aristotle, right? That the expansion of moral excellence, the pursuit of moral excellence is
27:07the best way to spend our lives. To be fully human is to manifest that which is the most
27:13human about us, and what is the most human about us is morality, because it's something that the
27:18animals don't have. They have loyalty, they have pair bonding, they have bonding, so to speak,
27:24but it's not morality, right? What we have is morality. So the degree to which we accept,
27:29review, understand and promote morality is the degree to which we are most fully human.
27:35And I, without a doubt, have done as much as I can and worked as hard as I can to
27:42promote virtue and fight immorality, oppose immorality. You know, as I talked about in
27:49the show recently, and in a practical measurable way, right? I talked about this in a show recently,
27:54I've done probably a billion and a half reductions of violations of the non-aggression principle
28:00just in terms of spanking has arisen out of my show. So I enjoy aging because I look back over
28:08the course of my life and I say, boy, look at all the good I've done. Look at all the good I've done,
28:13look at all the immorality I prevented, minimized, opposed or encouraged people to not even manifest
28:20in the first place. So do good, have a good conscience, fight immorality intelligently,
28:28right? I mean, the analogy to wartime is that philosophy is always engaged in a war
28:35of anti-propaganda, not of open violence, right? I oppose the use of violence, of course,
28:43except in an extremity of immediate self-defense. So how do you accept aging gracefully? Well,
28:49do good, oppose immorality, and you will enjoy aging because that's the best use of your time
28:56that you can possibly have and it is the most human. Of course, you know, you can remember,
29:00was it Da Vinci? I think it was Da Vinci who said, I dislike aging, but it sure beats the
29:05alternative. Knowing you're going to die and reminding yourself that you're going to die
29:09helps put your troubles in perspective and helps you take the risks necessary to promote virtue.
29:15All right, last question. You're the best. Well, that's not really a question, that's a statement.
29:21Look, I appreciate that. That's very kind and I don't want to sort of brush that off as if that's
29:26irrelevant, but the philosophy that I generate, articulate, and provide to the world, in particular
29:33for free, the philosophy that I generate, articulate, and provide to the world is really
29:38good. It's really good in terms of its excellence. It's also really good in terms of its morality.
29:43So I can't imagine... I think it was Da Vinci also who said that when he got older,
29:51he regretted that he'd put so little use to the talents that God gave him. And that was always
29:58kind of a chilling thing to me, right? Which is why I've written, you know, I don't know, two dozen
30:02books and I've got like close to 6,000 podcasts, three documentaries, you know, both fiction and
30:08non-fiction. I've written a bunch of poetry and I've just really tried to use the gifts that I've
30:12been given in the most benevolent and helpful way to the world as a whole. I did not earn these gifts
30:19and therefore I have to earn my pride in the gifts. And since I didn't earn my gifts of
30:27intelligence and eloquence and so on, since I didn't earn these gifts, I have to earn pride
30:33in using them in the best and most moral possible way. And I would really suggest that you try this
30:39in your own life. It is the only path really to sustained happiness and all of that. So when you
30:43say you're the best, I appreciate that. It's very kind and I certainly have done some things to earn
30:47that. But really it is about the philosophy that I bring to bear on the world that is really good,
30:53really helpful, really positive and has changed the lives of millions around the world with your
30:57support and help, which I am very humbly grateful for. Freedomain.com. Have yourself a joyous,
31:03joyous, wonderful day. Lots of love from up here. I'll talk to you soon. Bye.