0:00 - The Trials of Philosophers
7:19 - The Evil of War
16:49 - The Menace of Gossip
24:46 - The Urge to Escape
37:14 - Lifelong Friendships and Changing Priorities
40:16 - Fundamental Changes Through Constant Feedback
44:00 - The Shift from Oughts to Musts in Morality
1:10:39 - Cheating Accusations and Manipulation Tactics
1:20:17 - The Price of Manipulation and Isolation
1:35:12 - Confronting the Harsh Truths about Relationships
1:39:50 - Unraveling Illusions and Bonding with Categories
Welcome to Wednesday Night Live, where we take a deep dive into the dark corners of human behavior and history. From unraveling the impacts of adverse childhood experiences on adult behaviors to reflecting on the significance of marriage and family life, we cover a wide range of thought-provoking topics. The exploration of post-Christian morality and its contrast with traditional Christian values sparks a fascinating conversation on the importance of principles and integrity in today's society.
As we navigate through discussions on the lost art of essential skills like swimming, cooking, and outdoor activities, we reminisce about a checklist from 1933 that outlined the skills of a proper man. The decline of physical dexterity in modern youth due to sedentary lifestyles is a point of concern, emphasizing the value of hands-on experiences and physical activities in personal development.
Our reflections on various life experiences such as sailing, fishing, and music highlight the importance of staying active and engaged in diverse interests. We stress the significance of clear communication, financial literacy, and emotional resilience in navigating challenging family relationships. The power of honesty and directness in seeking help and building genuine connections is a cornerstone of personal growth and well-being.
In our exploration of manipulation, honesty, and relationships, we delve into the complexities of setting boundaries and recognizing manipulative behaviors. By sharing personal insights and engaging with listener questions, we shed light on the nuances of human interactions and the transformative potential of honesty and self-awareness. Thank you for joining us on this journey of introspection and understanding as we navigate the intricate dynamics of human behavior and relationships.
[0:01] Yes, yes, good evening, everybody. Welcome to Wednesday Night Live. Oh, gosh, what is it, the 24th? So, I think all philosophers have their trials. Some get burned at the stake. Some have to drink hemlock. Some even get nailed to a cross. Some get sold into slavery. And then, really at the pinnacle of human suffering, there's me, who decides, for reasons that pass human understanding, to pour an entire day into reading an audiobook book with a voice half-destroyed by a cold. Welcome to Beastful Parenting. I am your Slavic demon, Svolovic, and we will take you into the dark part of the data regarding children and their childhoods. So, it's gonna be pretty much out of Ace Ventura. Ventura! You're Satan? Oh, I'm sorry, I mistook you for somebody else. Who Plato was sold into slavery?
[1:01] All right, he says, yeah, this is what happens when philosophers go into politics. He tried to go into politics, Plato, and he was sold in Syracuse into slavery, and he just happened to be bought back for about 400 bucks, I think, by one of his former pupils and was freed. But philosophers and politics, not necessarily the most magical of mixes. Because philosophers want to tell the truth, and politics is lying. It's kind of the opposite job description.
[1:40] Somebody says, I wrote a novel last year. I don't know if it's morally good or bad. I do know that I believe in it. And so I guess I'm asking you if that part, am I good or bad?
[1:50] Well, writing the novel is just the first in a thousand steps of getting your ideas out into the world. Now you have to get behind your novel and get it out into the world. And that's the big challenge, but thank you for the tip. I appreciate that. And I wish you the very best of luck with your novel. Bit of motivation for you, Steph. Thank you, Evan. Philosopher at a discount, just $400. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, so you can be deplatformed by being kicked off the major platforms, or you can be deplatformed by being sold as human chattel into slavery, which was what happened to Plato post-politics. So, there is, Plato had this idea that the price of not being involved in politics is being ruled by your inferiors. So he was all kinds of, hey, I'll just be a philosopher and I'll go into politics. Absolutely. Fine idea. A fine idea. Oh, well, maybe people that read the Republic and knew that Plato was a psychotic tyrant who wanted to completely dissolve the family and have brothers and sisters having sex with each other because nobody knew who their parents were. Ah, what a fatted leftist monster he was. The original totalitarian.
[3:16] Um, just a reminder too, um, we had a call last night just for donors. Uh, there is a debate going on where everybody misses the point. So we'd have to donate $400 if Steph is ever sold into slavery. Uh, I'd hope I'd go for more than that, but I also might be a bit nervous to be bought by somebody who'd pay more than that. So yeah, we had a chat last night. there's a big debate going on, I guess, in conservative circles after Tucker Carlson, went on Joseph Rogan, Joseph Rogaine, uh, Toe Thumb, Joe Thumb, Toe Rogan, Toe Rogan, there you go. Uh, and we're talking about the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And we had a great chat last night for donors. Uh, there's a link here. If you're listening to it later, freedomain.locals.com slash support slash promo slash all caps UBB 2022.
[4:20] And you can join this donor community here on Locals. You can also, of course, join on subscribestar.com slash freedomain. And we have these a couple of times a week. I'll just fire up the Skype room and we'll do voice chats. And you've got questions, comments, issues. We had a great discussion about what does it mean when you have, like, I don't know if you've seen that meme, which is, you know, the brief history of Japan, and it's like, crazy shogun warrior, mushroom cloud.
[4:57] Insane orgasm face anime girl, and that's like the whole history of Japan. And Japan now, you know, pretty nice, pretty civilized in a lot of ways, very civilized, and quite functional, you know, if you don't look at the debt sheet, right? And...
[5:16] Yet, in the 1940s, the Japanese military, the Japanese culture, was approximately as evil as anything can get in this life. Like, rampant rape as a weapon of war, beheadings, the torturing and slaughter and vivisection of prisoners of war, cannibalism, and the experimentation, particularly on Australian POWs, of massive amounts of biological weapons. They would tie the prisoners of war in concentric circles and release the weapons to see what would happen. And they raped women and gave them venereal diseases to see how the children would be affected by the presence or absence of venereal diseases. Just really about as evil as you could get. Now, I know that there's a lot of war propaganda, propaganda but you know some of this stuff seems to be fairly independently verified so just about as evil as you get and you know it's all like well but you see in hiroshima and nagasaki, there were all of the innocent innocent women and children.
[6:27] Children sure yeah i get it innocent but the women i don't know man man. Somebody raised these psychos who were willing to go out and do all these terrible things. Someone did. If you raise a child who grows into a man capable of such absolutely primitive, mindless savagery, the Japanese are one of the highest IQ populations in the the world. So somebody says the Japanese were worse in World War II than the Nazis, in my opinion. Well, it's hard to know who you'd want to be captured by. The Nazis were a profoundly anti-intellectual movement, as were the communists in many ways. As I said in my documentary on Poland, they just came in and shot everyone in glasses, right?
[7:19] All the lawyers and the doctors and novelists and intellectuals. And the same thing happened with my family was hunted by the Nazis in Germany, like my grandmother was hunted by the Nazis in Germany, as was my mother. And then I assume that she was assaulted by all of the invading Russians at the end of the war, where the Russians raped every woman from eight to 80, every girl from eight to 80, sometimes repeatedly in the day. Yeah, the Nanking, rape of Nanking, absolutely just monstrous.
[7:53] Now, the Japanese women were heavily involved, much, much more so, of course, than the men in the raising of the children. So if you raise boys who do that, are you really innocent, completely and totally, just absolutely innocent? There's no, you have no causality in anything that ever happened.
[8:23] Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence. So yeah, it's, we had a long discussion about this and I sort of put forward this whole idea or argument regarding how people mess around with the concepts of philosophy and morality, comparing how you deal with allies versus how you deal with enemies. It's a really great conversation. It's up there on the donor site at freedomain.locals.com and yeah, I don't think the Russians mind of getting captured by the Nazis, at least they would get a hot meal for once. What's your ethnic background, Steph? I'm half Irish and half German. Yeah, I mean, when you have a brutal, violent, psychotic and evil regime, the women to some degree are conveyor belts from hell. So, well, the Russians, of course, I mean, it was just brutal. They always have this scorched earth policy. They just withdraw. They poison the wells. They kill all the livestock and they wait for winter to do its work. And I think, wasn't it, Hitler was invading Russia in order to try and free it from the communists. Wasn't that his idea?
[9:48] So, innocence and guilt is really tough. It's really tough. But they're just innocent civilians. I don't know. I don't know. Similar ideas to what you brought up in your series, The Truth About the French Revolution. Yeah, that's also for donors. Who raised these men and women? Who can commit such evil acts? And some of them, of course, were not as guilty, right? They were conscripted. They didn't want to do any of these things. They would be shot if they didn't, and I have great sympathy for that, but it was pretty crazy stuff, man. There is this horrible story. I guess since we're starting with horrible stories, there was this horrible story about the Russians who attempted to stay in the West after the end of the Second World War. They were captured or they were sent back to Russia and untold numbers of them would break the windows on the trains and try and slash their wrists or cut their own necks rather than be sent back to communism. They were trying to kill themselves.
[11:15] Yeah, it's just awful. The death rate for POWs in the West was like 2%, but the death rate for POWs held by the Japanese army, the Imperial Army, was like over 30%. They were just, you know, the Bataan death march and all of that was like a hundred plus mile march through the jungle and if you stepped out of line or fell out of line, they just shot you. There's something that was so foundationally arrogant. Uh, I went looking for the French revolution in your premium section and couldn't find the series on the private link. Can you have Jared or James show me how to find it, please? Yeah. I mean, it should be in the, there's a long document with all of the bonuses, but, uh, uh, let me see. Uh, yeah. Have a, have a look. There's a big document with all the bonus materials you get the 22 part history of philosophers series the truth about sadism the truth about the french revolution just a whole like 130 premium podcasts and all of that so.
[12:25] But, of course, Japan had to be rehabilitated after the Second World War. Does anyone know why? Who wasn't in on the convo last night? Do you know why Japan had to be rehabilitated and they couldn't focus on the war crimes of the Japanese?
[12:42] The bombings didn't come out of nowhere. I'll just tell you that, right? So the bombings, I don't believe that the bombings were necessary. In fact, there's very strong arguments as to why they weren't necessary. Japan had already been negotiating a surrender. Unconditional. Well, first of all, they say, well, 100,000 American lives would have been lost invading Japan, but you wouldn't have invaded Japan. Right? You would have just blockaded it and kept bombing it until they surrendered. You wouldn't have had to invade Japan. That's number one. Number two, the Japanese government was already willing to surrender. They said, we just want to keep the emperor. And the Americans said, no, you can't keep the emperor. And while those negotiations were going on, the two bombs were dropped within a couple of days of each other. And then when Japan surrendered, they got to keep the emperor anyway. Anyway, so the conditions for Japan's unconditional surrender minus keeping the emperor were already in place. So the bombs did not achieve anything new. I mean, you could say it demonstrated to the Russians, maybe kept them a little bit further out of Eastern Europe, but the State Department was so infested with communists that it didn't seem like the Russians weren't getting absolutely everything they wanted. The whole war was started to defend Poland, which was then handed over to the psychotic communists. So I don't believe the argument that, well, it would have had to have been an invasion. No, of course not. It's a blockade, it means. Blockade it and bomb it. There's no need for an invasion.
[14:04] I mean, there were more deaths in one night in the Tokyo firebombings than there were in either of the, it was 100,000, I think 60,000 for the other ones, right? But the Japanese army had been so relentlessly evil that there was the hammer of the gods. And there is a theory. It's a dicey theory. It's a dicey theory. I'm not behind it 100%. but it's interesting. It's my theory, by the way. But I put this forward very tentatively. That war doesn't end. War doesn't end until the women truly suffer. War doesn't really end. And I'll give you a couple of examples. If you look at Japan, Japan bombed, of course. The women hugely suffered. And Japan has been relatively peaceful since. If you look at Germany, bombed end to end, of course. The women hugely suffered, my mother included, and my grandmother was killed in Germany, in Dresden. And Germany has been relatively peaceful ever since.
[15:27] So, if you look at France, which was the site, of course, of the First World War. The First World War was trench warfare for the most part. Cities weren't bombed really in any consequential way, but there was a pretty significant amount of suffering in France. And then France did not fight particularly hard in the Second World War and was conquered by the Blitzkrieg in a matter of weeks in the summer of 1940.
[15:56] Yeah, the nukes were dropped. It was the location of the small Christian populations of Japan. So when the women get the blowback from the war, the women stop raising the psychos. That seems to be a pattern. Again, I'm not behind it 100%. I put this forward very tentatively as a possible hypothesis. And the analogy that I would give is if you have some crazy woman who just enjoys stirring up fights among men, you know, this guy grabbed me, he said this trash talk about you, you know, he tried to kiss me or whatever it is. And so she's just out there, and she gets this sort of sadistic pleasure out of causing fights among men.
[16:49] She probably enjoys that pastime until she gets the living crap beaten out of her for some reason. Like when it blows back on her when it's not just picking fights and getting other people to fight and all of that which a lot of women find like crazy women will find sexually exciting.
[17:16] And so the woman who's crazy and abusive in this way, she's going to enjoy getting men to fight each other until that time when she gets the living crap beaten out of her and then then she suddenly doesn't want to play anymore, right? Somebody says, there's a lot of historical accounts of the Japanese citizens knowing about atrocities in China and still supporting the acts committed there in China. Yeah. So, America also needed Japan to block communist expansion post-World War II. Yeah, to some degree, but I think what America most needed was a market for its products and also the Japanese government, after some time, is a huge holder of U.S. Bonds, so they needed the Japanese government to buy a lot of bonds. So I'm not sure of the timeframe, but I know that happened later. So I assume that that's one of the reasons why you didn't hear a lot about the Japanese war crimes. So, yeah, it's really sad. And the countries that are still quite pro-war are the countries that haven't had the kind of blowback on especially the women that other countries have had.
[18:38] I mean, England was very aggressive until England got bombed. England had a whole, right? Sun never sets. It owned a third of the planet, England. But then after the Blitz and after the bombings in the various British cities, which of course blew up a lot of women, suddenly women became a lot more peaceful in their upbringing of children. So anyway it's just a very tentative possible theory i don't i haven't obviously researched exhaustively but it's something that i've kind of noticed because you see these countries that go from kind of psychotic evil to kind of tremulous peaceniks in like like that right japan post-war germany post-war france to some degree post-war just really peaceful and what's the difference Well, civilian bombing. So.
[19:42] Yeah, let's you and him fight. Yeah, for sure. That happens for sure. Ever read Thomas Hardy's poems on war? No, I read a lot of World War I poems. Siegfried Sassoon and all of that. When I was doing my research, I wrote a novel set in World War I called The Jealous War. And I read a lot of poetry and all of that about World War I. It was very powerful.
[20:16] All right, so I'm happy to take your questions, comments, tips, help. I won't be doing a super long show because I have been working my voice like a Turk, and I will not push its generosity too much. But if you've got questions, comments, issues, challenges, disagreements and of course the tips are super welcome. You can tip on the app. You can tip at freedomain.com slash donate as well, as well, as well. And I'm very happy. I did two and a quarter hours of the Peaceful Parenting book. I am, gosh, where am I now? Let me just see where I am. I think I'm three quarters through. I think another two days, two eight-hour days and I should be able to be finished the audio book let's see where am I I am.
[21:14] Yes, I am. 339 of 477. And, uh, yeah. Bilateral parahippocampal gyrus. Mmm, tasty. Tasty, tasty data. I feel like I'm auditioning for a reboot of Bones. With all of these crazy numbers. Implications for biomarker research. Yeah, but it's pretty wild. All the data that we put together.
[21:58] About adverse childhood experiences and cancer, heart disease, ischemic heart disease, stroke, obesity, promiscuity, drug abuse, and all of that, it's really really something antisocial behavior like we've got study after study after study because this is all the data all the data all the data and really really did kind of need it how spanking predicts dating violence like if you're spanked you're much more likely to, use violence during a date in dating and promiscuity of course as we mentioned and drug abuse, alcoholism, smoking, all of the stuff, got all the data, all the data.
[22:42] Oh, and divorce. Yeah, the effects of divorce on children, marijuana. And next we go, heart disease and cancer in more detail. Sorry, 363 of 477. Let me just make a note here. Start here. year. So yeah, it's a slog, but it's just important to be able to get all this data in. Because one thing to have the theory, it's great to have the theory, but yeah, if you want to give the name of your novel, that's fine with me. What would be your arguments for and against self-isolation, living alone in a cabin in the woods? Will you be feeding the PP book into the The StephBot AI. Yeah, I think so. The pee-pee book.
[23:35] I mean, I don't think that you want to live alone. We are incomplete social organisms. We are incomplete biological organisms without our tribe, right? I did feed blog posts into that, yeah. The story is The Mayor of Christ Mountain. I'm publishing it serially online. Good for you. The Mayor of Christ Mountain. Thank you.
[24:03] I mean, there is a masculine urge to live in the woods, Walden style, right? To hunt and to fish and to trap and to build fires and to improve your environment and build paths and so on. There is a masculine urge, second only to the masculine urge, to liberate a woman from her crappy, no-open-windows-fluorescent-light jobs and take her to the azures and have her become a bronze domestic goddess. But yeah, there is the male urge to just escape responsibilities and live with the meaty muscle of your hands, wrestling sustenance from nature.
[24:47] Absolutely, yeah. For sure. Sure. I like staying and talking. I like staying and talking. I read a book many years ago about a guy who literally did that. He decided to go and live in Alaska in the wilderness. And he brought his son with him. And it was a pretty, pretty wild story.
[25:11] The guy from Into the Wild? Well, that guy just wanted to die. Yeah, the guy from Into to the wild in my view i did a movie review on this many years ago but yeah he just seemed to kind of want to die all right let me just get to a couple of topics as i await your questions.
[25:41] Uh where did i put my list of topics i feel it's close it should be close it must be you know i hate it when this happens you have this happen, where you're like there's got to be something that does this whatever it is whatever this is got to be something that does this, and like i was looking for the problem with the ai voices i wanted to clone my own voice and i wanted to feed text into it so that the text could be read in a simulacrum of my voice, and just see how that was so i looked into it and the problem was i couldn't find anything that took more than 5,000 characters at a time. And then it takes like five minutes to generate the text. So then I'd have to copy and paste like, I don't know, 80 times to finish the book and I'd have to nurse it. I might as well just read the damn thing. Because then at least I proofread it one final time and all of that. So just trying to find something where it's like, okay, I've got perfect recordings of my voice. I could just feed it a bunch of chapters up the Peaceful Parenting book, clone my voice.
[27:01] And give me a decent amount of copy-paste so that I can have it done. Could I find such a thing? I could not. I just couldn't. And here's the thing, too. So you spend a certain amount of time looking for things, and you know it's got to be there. It's got to be something. The technology's all there. I mean, I don't mind paying for it. I mean, people got to live. I understand that.
[27:26] But it's like, you just got to give up after a while, don't you? You just got to give up. It's a hole with no bottom. So, when you go down that rabbit hole, you know it could be done, and then all of these, oh, sign up for this, oh, it's this price, oh, but we're not going to tell you how many characters you get, and I don't want to pay if it's not going to be what I want, and then this place is like, well, okay, but you're going to do, you know, a third of a page at a time, and it's going to take forever to generate, in which case, like, if I just got to sit there nursing something, I might as well just read the book. So I think that's where, you know, it'd be nice if there was an AI assistant where you could say, maybe there is. Here's what I need to do. Here's what I need to get done. Here's what I need to get done. And please do it. Just, you know, find some way to have it be done. But no, this thing is not a thing. it can't be done, alright let's see here.
[28:39] Someone in the community introduced me to Daniel Mackler on childhood trauma. Have you ever watched any of his videos? Yeah, I've interviewed the guy. He actually hosted a dial-in show, like a general show, a couple of times when I couldn't do it. How is Daniel Mackler doing these days? I actually met him many years ago as well. What is Daniel Mackler doing these days? Is he married? Does he have kids? What's his story? Let's see here.
[29:27] I ended my private practice in March 2010 for a variety of reasons. Since New Horizons, New Challenges, traveling, couch surfing, hitchhiking, made three new films, been learning new languages, studying myself, and continuing to heal from my history of childhood trauma. I no longer have a calling to be a paid therapist. In fact, many days, I'm not even sure if I believe in this thing called psychotherapy anymore. I'm much more a proponent of cell therapy. Born in 1972? Oh yeah, he broke away from his own family of origin. What's he doing? I've broken out of their orbit, very grateful as a result. Now I am, oh, I thought he was going to say, now I am a parent. He says, now I am my own parent. So, I don't know.
[30:22] Let's see here. I've never worked professionally in biology. That's where his education. After college, I waited tables. I tossed pizzas. I hitchhiked around the world. I was lost and depressed a fair amount. I did temp work in New York City. I worked as a kid's folk musician and storyteller, played a ton of guitar. I found my way into the mental health field as a professional. Yeah, I don't know. Not that he has to talk about his personal life, but I'm just curious. All right.
[31:07] Yeah, I mean, the single without kids and hitchhiking and traveling a lot. Yeah, nice. But he's getting up there now, isn't he? He's in his 40s or over, right?
[31:21] Good voice acting is rarer than most people think. I'm not sure what that's related to. So is he... It seems a bit like an eternal adolescence thing. He was born in... Oh, he's born... Oh my gosh, he was born in 1972. So he's in his 50s. Right? He's 53. Yeah. Wait, I was born, he's six years old, 50, sorry, 51. 72, I'm 66, he's 72, so he's six years younger than me. I'm 57, so he's 51. So 51. And no marriage, no kids. Well, it's probably not going to happen, right? That's a shame. That's a real shame. Re-voice acting you talking about getting the book recorded yeah it's i mean i think i need to do it but i just wanted to get it done because i you know i have this bee in my bonnet like i just have it's like a mosquito constantly circling me when i have a project unfinished and the book's been finished in terms of its writing but it needed the narration. No, I think he said that he was born in 72, so he's 51. If I have that right. I hate to be retarded.
[32:49] 52, yeah, it's 52. 51 or 52.
[33:02] Yeah, it's just fine. It's tough to find the sweet spot with the AI reading. And I thought the AI voice was fine. It's certainly better if I do it. Think you'd do another interview with Fox Day sometime? You know, I don't have any. I mean, I like him. I don't have any, but I mean, what would we talk about? I'm not really following politics. I'm probably just not interested in the same things anymore. Daniel Mackler had a video saying he would never be healed enough to have children. Well, I'm sorry about that. I wonder why he wouldn't call me and say, well, you had a tough childhood. You love being a parent. You have a 21-year marriage. Why don't you give me some advice? You know, it's kind of funny. I don't know. I don't know. Boy, it's funny watching the dissident right, too, without their resident philosopher. You know, I don't think this is true. I don't think this is true, but I have this sometimes, this... Oh, I don't know. We probably shouldn't get gossipy, should we? I mean, that would just be petty and wrong and... Filthy and muddy and sensual, oily, Really, caked on, fun to peel off, with a spatula and jello.
[34:30] You love gossip? Well, that's just a sin. I myself float above it in my gossamer wings of idealistic platonic perfection. Never would indulge in such a thing. Gossip, ah, gossipe? It's a gossa, I don't even know how to pronounce it. I'm just so magically above and beyond it. Actually, gossip is only slightly below philosophy in my level of interest because it's wisdom, really. It's applied wisdom from practical examples.
[35:03] But I think, you know, I was thinking about this today. I was taking a break from the endless, making my eyes square, audiobook reading. And I was just taking a short walk.
[35:18] And I was thinking about all the people who knew me well. And, you know, we were acquaintances or, you know, we'd done shows together or whatever, who just completely vanished. And I think part of it was, I think part of it probably was or had something to do with, well, you know, if Steph's not around, there's a whole lot more views to go around for the rest of us because Steph was taking most of the views.
[35:45] You know, there was an article published some time ago on misinformation and like they had lines between all the influences and I was like right in the center and right, the biggest, right? Excellent. Here comes that whistling sound. And I was thinking about the people who were like, you know, maybe part of it deep down was something to do with, you know, I'm sorry he got deplatformed, but, you know, there's a whole lot more views to go around. But it seems to me that the dissident right is kind of fragmenting because there aren't unifying principles anymore. And I think that's part of the price of not having the philosopher around. Yeah, because people are going through all these paroxysms of conflict and disagreement and aggression and name-calling and so on. And it's like, yeah, well, life without philosophy is tough, man. Pretty chaotic. I wouldn't want it, but I guess other people are fine with it. And you can't argue with them substantially, right? Thank you.
[36:49] All right, so let me get to your comments in case I missed any just here and there. It's a long life without kids from 40 to 85. That's a long life, man. It's a long life. The people, you know, my experience has been in seeing this.
[37:14] So if you hold on to your lifelong friends, maybe you've got a shot. But the problem is if you hold on to your lifelong friends most likely they're going to get married and then when you get married and have kids like i'm sorry you just run out of things to talk about with the people who don't get married and don't have kids it's a sad thing i don't know any way around it but when you get married and you have kids and you're literally responsible for the survival and flourishing of a genuine human being who's completely dependent upon you, other stuff just becomes like you know and people were like yeah you know I'm trying to get this girl to go out with me it's like yeah that's nice I'm keeping a human being alive who's completely dependent upon me and I have to shape them into an independent human being in a crazy chaotic world.
[38:09] So my friends who didn't get married and have kids just stayed as adolescents. I don't know the cause and effect. I don't know, obviously, whether because they stayed adolescents they never got married and had kids or because they never got married and had kids they just never fundamentally had to grow up. I don't know, but you just have less and less in common, as you move forward. So the people you have things in common with are other parents. And most of my friends, not all, but most of my friends are other parents.
[38:47] And it's a long life from 40 or 45 to 85 without, you know, if you're a good parent, you have baked in companionship through old age, right? And that's nothing to be sneezed at. Because when you're young and pretty and full of energy and all of that, you have lots of people floating around, you go to parties, and you meet people, and you travel, and you meet people, and all of that, the energy and surfing effervescence of youth and all of that. But you get into your 50s, you get into your 60s, I mean, you slow down, and you just become a little bit less appealing. Because the young people don't want to have much to do with you because you're old. I mean, of course, how much did you want to hang out with guys who were 60 when you were 22? Well, you didn't, right? I mean, outside of family.
[39:51] And other people your age, I mean, if they're single, okay, you know, maybe you can hang out, but there's a certain oddness that tends to accumulate around people who stay single into their 60s. They just, they don't. You have a very different experience. So when you, you know this if you're married, right? If you're married, you have someone in your life 24-7 giving you feedback.
[40:17] Yeah, Stephen Molyneux, now Stephen Moly-old. Yeah, I'm getting there. And thank God for that. You know, post-cancer, every day's a blessing. So, yeah, you have this constant feedback and it changes who you are. It fundamentally changes who you are to have constant feedback from a loved partner 24-7, like 22 years now, 21 years. I'm just not the same. I'm not even close to the same person I would have been if I hadn't been married. And so the person that you are when you're married and get that kind of feedback is very different from the person that you were friends with with your friends when you were all single. Yeah, you learn to reshape your life to accommodate someone else. Look, you...
[41:09] You wake up in the morning and your first thought is, do I need to pee? And the second thought is, and how's my family doing? Not even, sometimes it's reversed, right? But you wake up and you think of your family. You think of how you can make your family's day better and you go down, you look forward to seeing your family. They're happy to see you and all of that. Or he says, my brother is unmarried at 50 and he's hard to work with sometimes. Yeah, it's, you know, I, you know, I have some sensitivity to it because of course, some of my best friends are bachelors, but they're looking to get married and I'm sure that they will. But yeah, it's a, it's a different life, man. And, and particularly I'm thinking sort of mid to late fifties, mid to late fifties, the people I have known in the mid to late fifties who are still single, just oddballs. It's just such a different life. Like by the time, like by the the time I get to 60, right, I'll be married over a quarter of a century, right? Over a quarter of a century. Be what? 26 years, 27 years. So, and I've known my wife for close to three decades, and we hung out every day within the first couple of days of dating and got married very quickly.
[42:30] That amount of shaping by another person the amount of wisdom that she brings the good humor the positivity the support and it's just wonderful, but by the time you hit 60 if you haven't had that kind of constant feedback from people you know it gets pretty hard to accommodate people later on in life you know you get kind of set in your ways right you get kind of set in your ways.
[43:01] And it's important uh what's a friend of mine was saying oh it's getting a little too comfortable staying at home all day, all right it's a great question not a fun question but a great question where do you think modern post-christian morality has gotten has gone worst wrong modern post-christian morality has gone worse wrong. So.
[43:34] When you get rid of the oughts, all you get are the musts. So Christianity has the oughts, right? You ought to do this to get to heaven. You've got your Ten Commandments. You've got your Sermon on the Mount. You've got your Do unto Others, Golden Rule, Love Thy Neighbor. You've got the Good Samaritan Parable of the Good Samaritan and so on. So you've got these shoulds. You should do this, right? These are your morals.
[44:00] Now atheism came along and scrubbed morality from the universe you can't get an ought from an is all the way back to Hume all the way back to Hume so it came along and it said you can't get an ought from an is there's no such thing as should in the universe ok, now the, end result of that has not been the elimination of morality, but the replacement placement of morality with easily programmed hysteria. See, the Christians have two great sources of morality. I mean, one is the more formal one, which is the Bible and the commandments. And the second is communion with God.
[44:52] And that limited the amount of external hysteria that could be imposed. But now, in the absence, of any central organizing principle of morality, any objective or universal... Now, we can say, of course, that the Bible is not a philosophical document, but it is objective insofar as everyone who believes in the Bible has access to the same moral commandments. There's no Christian who says, says thou shalt steal is a commandment, right? They all say thou shalt not steal is a commandment, right? So there's reference to, yeah, love your enemies, and there's disagreements about that, and questions of self-defense and just war theory. I get all of that. But there still is objective morality that you commune with based on the book, based on maybe a great priest, or a great conversation, or a theologian, and based on prayer. You pray, you pray, and you get the answers, right? You pray and you get the answers. Now, that's gone. So there's no objective arbiter of morality. Now, when you don't have an objective arbiter, which means a philosophical way to determine morality, and theological is just philosophy with different first premises. So.
[46:19] It's philosophy one step removed.
[46:27] So, now, by getting rid of the shoulds, now all we have is the musts. You must do this, you must do that, you must do the other. Or you'll get cancelled, you'll get fired, we'll attack you, we'll shut you down, you know, we'll weaponize various things against you, and you're toast. The conscience has been removed from the individual and has been thrown to the beast called the mob.
[47:10] Christianity believes morality is based on something real and external to ourselves. Absolutely, yes. And it's not subjective. You don't just get to make up your own moral rules because they're written down. They're written down. And, this is the distinction in the theory of law called is natural versus positive law so natural law says that there's God given rights and the law must reflect them and if the law opposes God given rights, then the law is invalid the law is unjust there's a standard you judge the law the human law outside of the human law, right, that's natural law Now, positive law says, whatever the law says, that's what's legal. And there's no other standard to compare it to. Now, of course, natural law took a fairly significant advantage point when basically the Nazis made legal all of the horrors they were doing. Or, as has been pointed out multiple times, the Bill of Rights and the Constitution of the Soviet Union under communism was fantastic, but didn't mean anything. Because nobody enforced it. Or they enforced the opposite, really.
[48:31] So, still things need to get done. Still things need to get done. So, now, it's the chaos of the mob and its programmed targets targets, that is the musts, yeah, positive law, the average American committing three felonies a day, yeah, that's right, that's right, then the law becomes, you know, these wonderful magical fish nets, right, the netting that lets all the big fish go while capturing all the tiny fish, right, that's kind of the way it works. And people end up evaluating, propositions not based upon any reference to abstract principles or universal laws, but immediate positive or negative consequences. That's all, right? That's all. So for me, I was raised to tell the truth.
[49:53] I was raised to tell the truth. I was told, you know, you tell the truth and shame the devil. You tell the truth, though the skies fall, you tell the truth. I was raised in a Christian sense with that, and I was also raised with a philosophical dedication to that, or raised myself that way. And also just lying is humiliating. Lying is an act of foundational fear of another, and it's humiliating to lie. To lie is just humiliating it means you're scared it means you're a prey species it means you're broken, so the purpose of modern quote morality is to get you to fear the consequences of your actions not to judge them morally, so if you talk about this disaster will follow, and so don't talk about it then it's just a matter of will I get positive or negative things out of talking about topic X rather than well we just got to tell the truth.
[51:09] So, when you don't have access to principles, it's very easy to program you by consequences. Jesus, of course, is an example, as are other thinkers throughout history. But Jesus is an example of saying, well, what matters is what Jesus would call the truth rather than the consequences, which were immensely negative, of course, for him. Although Christianity did end slavery, which is probably one of the reasons why it's so hated by the modern slave owners, right? So people who are willing to act on principle are less troubled by consequences. But people who lose principles are then just programmed by consequences. Oh, we're going to call you this word. We're going to call you that word. We're going to de-platform you. We're going to attack you. We're going to humiliate you. We're going to write hit pieces on you. Oh no, that's bad, that's scary. Forget it. There's no principles. There's only consequences.
[52:16] I mean, whatever community I was part of, I guess close to half a decade ago, it was very closely observed that they utterly abandoned their core moral philosopher. They utterly abandoned, in a sense betrayed, trade, their own core moral philosopher. And you just, you can't do that without consequences. Maybe that makes sense, right? You can't do that without losing credibility, either with others or with yourself or both, right?
[52:50] Daniel Mackler is an antinatalist. Yes, I think that's right. I think I remember that. He believes it's impossible to have children without transferring your trauma to them. Very sad. Oh, so he would call me an abuser then, I guess, by having a child. I have a friend who is 65 and unmarried and hangs around 20 to 22-year-old girls. He money whips them. Oh, he's like a sugar daddy? Well, that's very sad. That's very sad and kind of gross.
[53:36] And so now we decide things based upon bullying and bribery, not based on principles for the most part. And that's tough. That's tough. Now we're just, we're prey species. We're just bobbing and weaving and ducking based upon these sort of sky howitzers of negative blowback. I heard someone say that only high testosterone men habitually ask is it true others ask will i get in trouble for believing it well even high t is one way of putting it but it's not like i mean it's not like i mean high t men they're not all free thinkers right i mean isn't dwayne johnson's a high t man not a free thinker on schwarzenegger screw your freedoms right he was It's like he's the high-T guy and, I mean, he's, I mean, it was kind of pathetic, right? Really pathetic. So, no, I get what you're saying. It's not a high, it's just, you know, people with integrity. And also, excluding women from that is not, not fair. Certainly not fair in my experience. So.
[54:59] There's a recent study that came out that said women who have more sex have better developed brains. So that's your new pick-up line. You raise my Johnson, I'll raise your IQ. Now, of course, it could be that women who have better developed brains end up having more sex because they can maintain healthy and positive relationships. Could be any number of reasons about that, but, yeah, that was something that I thought was quite funny. There's your pick-up line, friends, if you're still out there in the singles world. All right, let's see here.
[55:45] Let me, okay, I'm going to ask you this. This is a semi-manly question, but I think it'd be interesting for the ladies as well. And if you have any last tips, I would appreciate that. freedomain.com slash donate if you'd like to help the show out there. And I'm sorry that my energy is not massively peaking, but this cold has knocked me down pretty hard. I think I'm getting back up now. So this is what a young man should know. From 1933, a checklist for becoming a proper man. This was published in the March 1933 issue of Harper's Magazine. So, here's the short list. He should know how to swim a mile, at least, dive credibly, and not feel panicky underwater. He should also be able to revive those less skillful than himself by rolling them onto a barrel and pumping their helpless arms. I could do that. He should be able to drive an automobile well. He should not be altogether helpless when a car breaks down. He must know how to change a tire and offer some diagnosis when its engine sputters and dies. Well, you could do that back in the day when you had three pistons in the 1933 engine. I can't. Have you changed a tire? I've changed a tire. Um, have you changed a tire? Tell me. Tell me. Yeah.
[57:06] Hey, Steph, I tipped you $5 the other day, but you were busy in the middle of a speech and may not have noticed it. Do you have time to answer a quick question? Yeah. So I have changed a tire, but I don't know how to fix a car. He ought to know how to clean, load, and shoot a revolver or rifle. I don't. As for self-defense, a man should certainly be able to take care of himself in a scrap. He need not know in jiu-jitsu, old-fashioned boxing will be enough. Not a specialty of mine. He ought to know the rudiments of camping. How to build a fire, how to chop wood, how to take a cinder out of his eye, how to deal with a severed artery, how to doctor himself for ordinary ailments. That's camping? How to deal with a severed artery? Where the hell are you camping? The Somme? So yes I know I mean as you guys know I worked for 18 months in the north of Canada well yeah Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Ontario as a gold panner and prospector so there's not much I don't know about camping and wilderness survival, he should also be able to take care of other people in emergencies to apply first aid set a broken bone revive a drunk or a victim of gas deal with a fainting fit administer the right emetic or antidote for a case of poisoning I think I can do half of those.
[58:28] And he should be able to feed himself to cook, not only because someday he may need to, but because cooking is one of the fine arts and a source of infinite pleasure. He should be able to... Okay, what can I do here? He should be able to scramble eggs, yes, brew coffee, yes, broil a steak, yes, dress a salad, yes, carve a chicken, yes, and produce on occasion one first-class dish, such as onion soup. Well, I can do a mean lasagna. The more he can do in these days of the delicatessen store and the kitchenette, the better. It is not effeminate, it is not beyond him, and the best chefs are all men. Kind of true he should know how to use a paint how to use paintbrushes a saw a hammer and other common tools yes i did spend a month or two as a house painter one summer and i yeah i used to saw quite a bit up north a hammer absolutely and other common tools yes uh that so yeah just roughly tell me how you're doing with these kinds of things do they uh they fit with your skill set I work on my car as a hobby, definitely a skill both genders should have. Yeah, I remember dating a woman. She was an engineer once who bemoaned the fact that cars have gotten so complicated that she can't fix them anymore, even though she loves pulling things apart. It's just, ah, it's all done with computers.
[59:42] You ought to know how to debug your Tesla, yeah? Great show. Thank you. I appreciate that. Thank you, Tor. Ah, this is silly Teddy Roosevelt stuff. What about self-knowledge or morality? Well, is that a skill? Those are virtues. I don't... Let me just check. What were these talked about? What were these talked about? The ability, skills, accomplishments, and proficiencies that every man should have. Yeah. Yeah, this is not virtues.
[1:00:19] He also should have a beautiful and distinguished handwriting, but the bulk of his writing, particularly if he's a professional man who has much of it to do, should be done on a typewriter capable of turning out 3,000 words an hour. I do not have beautiful and distinguished handwriting. Man, I used to have a beautiful signature back in the day. I mean, many years ago. When I got into the business world, It seems like for the first year or two of my career, especially as an entrepreneur, all I did was sign documents. And my signature went from a beautiful, elegant swirl of medieval perfection, half calligraphy, to basically an epileptic spider that looks like I've had a stroke and dragged myself across the page. All right. He should play one outdoor game well and have a workable smattering of several more. An American who cannot throw and catch a ball seems pathetic and grotesque. Yes. Have you noticed you fail in handwriting? Yeah, I don't have a great... I have a great fast typist, but I don't have, right?
[1:01:18] I'm like 95 so far, less in the medical bar. Oh, good for you. Above average in most listed skills. I'm not too bad. Doing pretty well. Is there somebody aside from the guns? Yeah. Handwriting, of course, has become a little less. But you know, when you'd write letters and so on, my dad wrote me like a letter every week or two from my childhood. I couldn't read them. I couldn't read them. I mean, if I sat there, I can, you know, help them. I looked at various angles and so on. Ugh. All right. What else do we have here? So outdoor games, well, so list for me, list for me the sports that you're decent at. Outdoors, I do tennis, rugby, soccer, baseball. Baseball.
[1:02:06] Pickleball, it's kind of a subset of tennis. I'm not sure that really counts. I'm not particularly good. I'm not good at football, American football. I'm so-so at lawn bowling. I don't think swimming really counts. Volleyball, yes, volleyball, pretty good at volleyball. And the one thing I've noticed as well is that the young men these days, because I think they spend a lot of time indoors Indoors and a lot of time on video games don't have the same kind of physical dexterity that the kids I grew up with had because when you're just doing sports from very early on, you just get a kind of physical comfort dexterity. Let's see here. The bicycle has gone, he says, yet every young man should know how to ride one. I'm sure we can do that. He also should be able to skate, sail a boat and handle a canoe, possibly. I can skate. Wait, I can even skate backwards. I cannot sail a boat. I don't, oh, I remember many, many years ago, I was out in Victoria, British Columbia, for a friend's wedding. I was best man at his wedding. And I went out for an afternoon of sailboarding. God, it was annoying.
[1:03:23] It's like, I would pay good money to never do that again. It was just like, I don't know, I just, maybe I didn't know how to, I mean, I didn't really know how to do it. I figured I could figure it out because I usually do, but it was just like, haul the sail up. Oh, it blew, blew over, haul it up, blew it over. Anyway. So I do not know how to sail a boat. I can handle a canoe. Fishing is a specialty like chess. I'm not, my, my father used to take me fishing a lot in Ireland. So I'm fairly good at fishing. Not perfect chess. I'm medium, medium at chess. I'm not spectacular. I'm not terrible, but I'm medium at chess. Walking is a noble, but neglected sport. Americans hike once in a long while but seldom walk. I try. Today's been kind of funny. I've done less than 3,000, less than 5,000 steps but normally I'm 10 to 15,000 steps a day because I'll walk around while doing shows. I just like doing that. It's good for the brain too. You can see those brain scans when you're walking. It just all lights up. He should know a great deal about animals and how to take care of them. Okay, what I took care of, what I take care of hamsters, I had, I nursed abandoned kitten back to life and it thrived. Unfortunately, my daughter and I have tried saving some wounded birds. That never seems to work out too well. We've raised ducks, of course. So, I guess three. But a great deal about animals? Not really. You should know how to ride a horse. I can ride a horse, but just not super well.
[1:04:50] He should learn how to dance. Yes, I do know how to dance. He should know how to play at least one card game.
[1:04:57] Um, not a real card game. I mean like poker or something like that.
[1:05:03] I've never, I see the problem with poker for me is I look at, I look at the odds and how complicated they are. I'm like, well, I'm never going to get there. I'm never going to get there. So what do you got? BMX, baseball, table tennis, put outside. Yeah. Okay. Bowling, mountain biking. Yeah. Good. it? Gymnastics was my favorite. I've never done gymnastics really. Sailing is fun on a two-person little boat on a lake. Okay, it could be. Sailing is noticeably easier than that. Oh, good. Sails all my life, but I cannot windsurf a sailboat. Yeah, that's what I was trying to do. I can't swim a mile. Seems a lot to me. Is it actually normal for people outside of athletes to do that? Um, I don't know. I don't know. I'm terrified of horses. Oh, yeah. Rock climbing. I've done it. And I'm fine as long as I don't look down. But when I was in Africa, my cousin and I, he later died. I don't know if it was related to this or not, but we went rock climbing and I climbed up a couple of hundred meters, even with an overhang. And I was 16 years old and we had no ropes, no tether whatsoever. Whatsoever it was complete raw dog climbing it was completely retarded like you you ever have this where you look back at the risks you took in your life and it's like how the hell am i here how is that possible oh well that's life without a mom around sometimes right.
[1:06:30] Uh, what else does he have? I find these interesting.
[1:06:37] Uh, he must have knowledge of how to tip naturally, justly, without fear and without reproach. Yes. I think that the handshake pass along the money. That's nice. On the matter of alcohol, he should learn his capacity and stick within its limits. He should know something about the different kinds of drinks and which drinks produce chaos with him, within him when mixed. Uh, I have, at the most I have, once or twice a month, I'll have like an ultralight beer. That's about it. Where sex is concerned nature clearly intended us to make many mistakes in her hope that some of them would be productive you should know the rudiments of gambling but gambling might be placed on the same plane as drink the less one has of it the better yeah I think that's fair.
[1:07:19] Higher than almost any other accomplishment on the list is knowing music there is no reason why any young man who is not absolutely tone deaf should not learn how to play one musical instrument well enough for it to be a self-resource and a tolerable pleasure to others. I suppose I spent 10 years on the violin. A civilized man should know how to read. The ability to read, or rather the habit of reading, is very rare even among intelligent people and has to be taught and kept up, if it is not to become rusty. That's true. He should have knowledge of at least one foreign language, French or German, preferably both. German children should learn an amazingly good brand of English without ever crossing their borders. Why can't we? One thing we don't really want to, yet we should. An American who knows only English is blind in one eye. I used to know German when I was very little, and I can speak some tolerable French here and there, but he should know how to travel well, efficiently, without fuss or complaint. Now that's true.
[1:08:13] A young man should be able to express himself clearly before a crowd of strangers without shyness, muddle, or a pathetic resort to, so much has been said and well said, or I did not expect to be called on, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, right? The American adult can get to his feet, eat, propose a toast, introduce a stranger, voice a civic protest, heckle a windbag politician, and give utterance to an unembarrassed thought. Amen. Amen. Amen. A man should command the elementary tool of written language and be able to put simple things on paper in clear words. Very true. He should have a good workable understanding of the structure of business, investments, and banks. Well, that I do have. Let every educated man, as a necessary part of his education, be thrown into the muddy stream of American industry and see what it is like to swim alone on daily wages. That's kind of true, right? Let's do one or two more. He should, before reaching 22, have done something because he wanted to, whether other people wanted him to do it or not. Amen to that. You've got to find a way to get what you want to get done done without waiting for the permission of others, or waiting for the approval of others.
[1:09:25] He should not acquire property unless he needs it. Insensitiveness to his personal property, unless, of course, it is extraordinarily beautiful, is a desirable skill for any man to have. It must be learned and worked at. Yes, you have to be willing to let things go that you own and be relatively indifferent to wealth. Otherwise, you're going to be controlled by, like, whatever you desire. Obviously, these days, that isn't just virtue will be used to control you.
[1:09:56] Unusual though this young man may be, he should not seem so. Is it not a parent's basic ambition for his child that he be very different from other people, yet manage to seem almost exactly like them? That's interesting. That's interesting. All right, so that's from 1933.
[1:10:18] If you can't tune a guitar by ear, are you really a musician? That's funny. Somebody says, I told my alcoholic mother that if she wants to be in my son's life, she had to show that she was seeking help. She refused. I cut her off. How did you recover emotionally from defooing your mom? Are you cheating? I think you're cheating.
[1:10:39] I think you're cheating. Yes, you are. So this is the guy who said, hey, Steph, I tipped you five bucks the other day, but you were busy in the middle of a speech. I may not have noticed it. Do you have time to answer a quick question? You know, quick question. What's the capital of Turkey? Quick question. Oh, the quick question, apparently five bucks worth, is I told my alcoholic mother that if she wants to be alone, if she wants to be in my and my son's life, she had to show that she was seeking help. She refused. I cut her off. How did you recover emotionally from defooing your mom? That's a little bit of a cheat. It's a little bit of a cheat. I'll tell you why. Because first of all, tipping me five bucks doesn't get 20 minutes of time. Right? Because that would be paying me 15 bucks an hour, right? The tips are for the shows, and they're not to buy answers. Just so you know that, right? I mean, if you tip, you know, I mean, I'm happy to answer, but of course the questions I answer are for people who don't tip. And what you have probably inherited from your mother is a bit of a manipulative side.
[1:11:48] So rather than tell me how important your question is to you, I'm in desperate need of answers for this from somebody who has real experience that's hard to come by and even harder to communicate. Instead of saying, I'm really, really in need of some wisdom here in something that's really heartbreaking, which I really sympathize with. You say, I gave you five bucks. It's not even a big question. Yeah, that's cheating. Sorry, man. I mean, I'll answer the question. I will. I will. Oops. Sorry, Steph. bad habit. Yeah. I mean, I'm not, you know, I'm not mad or anything. I'm just pointing it out. Don't, don't do that stuff. Right. The first thing you want to do, if you want to escape the abusive childhood is you got to be direct and the honest thing, because here's the thing, right? It's really surprising to me in a way, because when you say, so you say, I tipped you five bucks the other day. So that's to create a sense of obligation. that's kind of a manipulation. Like, hey, man, I gave you five bucks. I need you to solve my central life issue. Five bucks. I think your central life issue, you don't have to tip me on this. I'm just pointing out that I think your central life issue is probably worth more than five bucks. Because if your central life issue is worth only five bucks.
[1:13:02] Then it's not much, right? And then your life isn't worth that much, which is kind of sad, right? Which is not true. So if you're like, so then you're like, oh, quick question, right? I thought it was, you know, just a little thing. saying, did you ever do a show on topic X or whatever it is, right? But no, what is your quick question?
[1:13:23] What is your quick question? I told my alcoholic mother that if she wants to be in my son's life, she had to show that she was seeking help. She refused. I cut her off. How did you recover emotionally from defooing your mom? Okay, just out of curiosity, maybe I'm mistaken about this. Always happy to be corrected. Always happy to be corrected. On a one to ten, how big is that question? On a 1 to 10, maybe I'm seeing it as bigger than it is, but on a 1 to 10, how big is that question? How did you recover emotionally from separating from an abusive parent? 10, 8.7, 7 at the lowest? What the hell's higher? How do you sever from your own mother and recover emotionally?
[1:14:34] You don't think that's a big question? Nine, and I took years to recover. Seven, eight, ten. Probably not ten, maybe nine. Okay, what's ten? Tell me what's ten. I'm not disagreeing with you. I'm just like, for the people who are saying, it's not 10, I'm certainly happy to hear, but what is 10? A man should know how to hook up stereo and computer equipment. Well, I'll say yes to that. I'll say yes to that.
[1:15:08] How did you recover from the foundation of your emotional relational life? Well, how do you draw boundaries with a crazy dysfunctional person? And no, listen, I'm not saying it is a 10. I'm just saying it seems pretty high up to me and maybe I'm missing something obvious if everyone says, no, no, no, it's a seven. Then they're saying that there's three higher tiers, entire tiers of questions. 10 would be about parenting my own children. I think that would be similar in terms of height, but I don't think it would be less because you couldn't be a good parent to your own children if you didn't get resolution with your parents. Rape and dealing murder, that would be 10. But that wouldn't be a question for a philosopher, right? If somebody were to say, I'm a murderer, to me, I wouldn't take that call. It's not a philosophical question. So of the categories that I would get.
[1:16:23] So it's certainly pretty high it's certainly pretty high of the questions that i would answer not of all the possible questions i suppose right.
[1:16:35] Uh he says yes i would say nine or ten honestly steph you really are a whiz it took you five seconds to find out my mother is manipulative and i wasn't even aware i was emulating her her behavior in a way. Well, that's the funny thing, right? And I don't mean this in any negative way, but it's like, yeah, my mother's really kind of manipulative, so here's five bucks, and it's just a little question, man, and you're just manipulating me, right? And again, I sympathize with that, and I'm not calling you any kind of bad guy. I'm just, it's pretty obvious, right? All right. Ten would be, how do I recover from the trauma to have a life as if the trauma never happened? But first of all, you can't have the life as if the trauma never happened. But this is what he's actually asking, right? This guy, he's on Rumble. He is actually asking.
[1:17:30] He is actually asking how to recover from the trauma. And it's the deepest trauma. He says, if somebody else says, abusive mom's a pretty core issue, I say at least nine, 10 would be even more personal, like something to do with wife and kids. Yeah, but the mom is the foundation to the my wife and kids, right? They're not separate. All right, hit me with a why. If it's helpful or useful for you to know how to move on from relentlessly abusive relationships. How do you move on?
[1:18:12] Is it a value? you. I want to know just how much effort and energy to put into this one. Yeah. Okay. Okay. Well, I will tell you. I will tell you.
[1:18:50] The first illusion you have to dispel is that you're leaving something behind. You're not leaving something behind. You're leaving precisely nothing behind. The price of manipulation is isolation. This is why I'm sort of pointing this out with the manipulative question. Here's five bucks. It's just a little thing. Get my foot in the door. So the price of manipulation is isolation. If he'd been honest and direct with me, which I'm sure he'll be in the future, But if it's honest and direct with me and says, Steph, I'm half drowning under this sea of corrupt alcohol-laced estrogen. I really need to get out from under this. And I left it too long because I already have a kid. I'm desperate for help. Please, please, please help me. You're one of the few people who can articulate these issues and has actually been there. Man, can you imagine? How respectful is that? How honest? How admirable? How wonderful is that? As opposed to, well, I did give you five bucks. Maybe you didn't notice it. Maybe you didn't. You were busy, I guess. It's just a little question. That's chilling shit, man. That's chilling shit. So, thank you for the tip. You are not leaving anything behind.
[1:20:11] Because there's no person there in the way that you and I would understand it.
[1:20:18] So what is a manipulator a manipulator is someone who doesn't exist, because they don't think they have any value and so the only way they think they can get things is by pushing emotional buttons in others, right so this guy well you maybe you didn't notice my five dollars that's the self-pity it's a minor obligation thing it's just a little questions getting my foot in the door and they're all false statements i mean he did donate five bucks or whatever but they're all false statements right.
[1:20:59] A manipulator is someone who's stealing from you. My wife asks me to do something. I'll do it. I love helping her. Every day around three o'clock, I'm like, I jump up. Hey, can I make you a coffee? Because she likes her coffee mid-afternoon. I'm thrilled to do it. If I'm doing something and I notice that the dishwasher is done, I'll empty the dishwasher. I'm thrilled to do it. I'm happy to do it. She works hard. I like to put my two bits in, she doesn't have to ask she doesn't have to bully she doesn't have to threaten she doesn't have to manipulate because I'm just happy to do it I want to do it my wife I love her my daughter this morning and last night she said let's go for brunch tomorrow I'm like with great joy, and we went for a lovely brunch today and chatted for like two hours it was lovely.
[1:21:56] But I don't need to say to her, I've sacrificed so much for you, you can't even go for brunch with me. Like, how sad would that be? Because why would I manipulate someone? I would manipulate someone because I want something I haven't earned. And you know how you earn things from good people, is you're fucking honest. You get this, man, you will float up like a bubble through all the layers of trash planet, to the stratosphere of functionality. How do you earn things from good people? You're just fucking honest. Steph, I'm drowning with my mom. I'm half dying inside. I'm trying to draw some boundaries. She's crashing right through them. Help, help, help. That's how you get resources from honest people. But if you manipulate, most honest people, have in part become honest because they've escaped manipulators. And if you manipulate honest people, they will not want to help you.
[1:23:13] Thanks, I really do appreciate, he says, you taking the time on this, especially since you said you were low energy tonight, but the low energy might help with this, because maybe this is the kind of thing that needs to get across more murmur than less uppity up.
[1:23:30] But when you are raised by manipulators, honesty is terrifying, isn't it? Just being direct and honest, it feels like you're just about to get the shit kicked out of you if you're just direct and honest with people. Do you have that experience? You're raised by manipulative people, bullying people, narcissistic people, selfish people, people with nothing to offer you other than punishments and the odd reward. It's very hard to be direct and honest with people when you're raised by liars and the shadow boxes of manipulation.
[1:24:10] And it's funny too, and I appreciate, right? Now you admit that I was low energy too, right? So he also asked this giant question towards the tail end of a show where I said I was tired coming in. That's all right. My job to do the show, I still have a choice every time, right?
[1:24:27] Thanks, Santiago. Appreciate it. Have a good night.
[1:24:32] Now, do you know why, it's very hard, to be honest, when you're raised by manipulators? Because you don't want to do what they want you to do. You don't want to do it. You don't want to do it because they're manipulating you. So when I first saw this guy's question, I'm sorry to pick on you. It's just a good example, and I'm not mad at you. I'm just pointing it out as a good example. When I first saw that this guy's giant question followed by this rather weasley manipulation of I gave you five bucks, maybe you didn't notice me. It's just a little question, boom, right? The reason I didn't want to answer it is that that's manipulative. So if you think of this guy is having such a tough time drawing boundaries with his mother, that when he asks me for help in dealing with his mother, he asks me in the form and style of his manipulative mother. Do you see how amazing that is? That's how amazing the human mind is. He asks for help with his manipulative mother in the style of his manipulative mother because 99 times out of 100 that means he won't get the help, in fighting his manipulative mother so his manipulative mother will win. Does this make sense? I want to make sure I'm not going too fast or too slow. Does this make sense?
[1:26:00] So help me with my manipulative mother. If you do that in the style of the manipulative mother, then the honest people who are really the only people who can help will be the ones who recoil from that asking. Because if you don't even know that you're being manipulative when you're asking for help with manipulation, most people will recoil from that because they don't have the sensitivity and skill or whatever X factor it is, brilliance or something, to just unpack and unravel these complexities. So his mother intervened in his asking, so that I wouldn't help him with his mother. His mother took control of the personality structure to ask me in a way that was off-putting.
[1:26:52] You know here's here's five bucks work like crazy for me, i mean you know try that try that in any profession you know go to a plumber and say i have a massive leak in my house it's going to take you two hours to fix it, here's five bucks the plumber would just laugh at you honestly right wouldn't he and again i'm I'm not trying to insult you. I'm just sort of pointing it out, right? He says, I don't consider it picking on me. You can give me 10 out of 10 honesty, right? Now, another thing that he was doing was by becoming his mother in asking me for help with his mother, he was trying to get me to empathize with the part of him that's trapped by his mother.
[1:27:43] So in asking me how to deal with a manipulator but doing in it doing it in a manipulative fashion which is a creation of a sense of obligation and guilt and falsehood, he is asking me to empathize with how he feels because he can't communicate directly how he He feels he becomes his manipulative mother, which then has me experience the annoyance and irritation, that he experiences with regards to his mother because he's treating me like his mother treated him. Does this make sense? He's actually trying to get me to see what it's like to be him with his mother. It's really amazing how much gets communicated when you pull it apart, right?
[1:28:40] People who can't be honest with you don't exist in a psychological sense. They exist obviously physically. They have minds and brains and plans and calculations and I get all of that. But there's nothing real about them. It's just shadow boxing. That's what manipulation is. Manipulation is when you want things to happen but you can't be honest. You can't be direct. And it can take just about any form. the guy who wants to date the girl but he can't be honest with her so he just hangs around and tries to make her laugh and offers to help her move and all of that he's manipulating, so you're not leaving anything behind see when I stopped seeing my mother.
[1:29:31] It was through the process of accepting that there was no mother there was only a manipulator and there never was a mother. There was only a manipulator for which I have some sympathy. I mean, Lord knows she went through hell, I'm sure, in the Second World War and I have a lot of sympathy for that. But there is no, directus. There's no person. There's no relationship. You can't, have a relationship with somebody who's indirect.
[1:30:11] It says, somebody says, I have a hard time being not nice sometimes, and I hate that about myself, right? So the reason why you have a tough time being not nice is that you don't accept that there are genuinely corrupt people in this world. It means sometimes letting people take advantage of me and my family. No, you're taking advantage of them. You think that if you're just the nice guy all the time you're a victim you're being taken advantage of no it's a mutual taking advantage of it's mutual, you're avoiding the pain of being attacked when you stood up for yourself in the past you're avoiding that pain by being direct right right sorry by being indirect you're avoiding the pain that being direct would have caused in the past. So the reason you can't be yourself around manipulative people, the reason why manipulation spreads is, you know, when I was a, I think I was in my mid-teens or whatever, my mother was part of a particular social club and she really was desperate for me to come to her dances because she wanted to show off her young, handsome, whatever son. And I didn't want to go to these weird old people dances. I really didn't.
[1:31:38] But she kept, you know, just bugging me about it. I've done so much for you, and you owe it to me, and it's just once, and it will make me happy, and all that, right? It was all about her, right? She didn't figure out who she was that I didn't want to come, and how to change that, because that would be the work of years. And she wanted something herself, directly, without having to earn it, so she just pressured and bullied and nagged, until they went, and it was an okay evening, it wasn't the end of the world, it was fine.
[1:32:18] It's not what I wanted to do with my time. But I couldn't say to her, I actually don't really like you as a person because you've been pretty violent and aggressive and abusive and manipulative and there's no connection. That's real. Because if you say to a liar or a manipulator, you're a liar and a manipulator, what happens? Well, you split the atom, right? There's a nuclear shadow on the wall where your child itself used to be.
[1:32:57] So, the reason why you end up being manipulative is you can't be honest to the manipulative person because behind the manipulation is always the rage. And the rage comes from the laziness. The rage comes from the laziness and the laziness is because you don't want to work to earn value from others you don't want to be a good person in order to you know like why did my daughter want to have brunch with me today because we have a great time when we go out and have brunch you know we laugh we chat we talk about life we talk about her friends we talk about my show. We talk about just about anything and it's a lot of fun. It's a great time. It's a great time. So I have to make her do things. She does it because she's enjoyable. And for as long as she wants to keep going out for brunch, which I'm sure will be as long as we're in proximity, I'll go out for brunch. I enjoy doing it with her. I'll suggest it. She'll suggest it. We'll do it. But, you know, I've said before, if I need to run to get some groceries, she's like, oh, I'll come, right? Because we have a great time out there at the grocery store, making fun of all the food that no sane human being should ever eat.
[1:34:23] So, you think you're losing your mom, and I'm very sorry that you have, of course, an alcoholic mother. But she's more honest than you are in this.
[1:34:39] He says, it's pretty painful. My parents were partying boomers. Dad became an alcoholic and died, said he didn't want to live anymore because of her abuse. Mom drinks, blames me, and takes no responsibility. See, but your mom is more honest in this way than you are. Because your mom is saying you are not worth much to me at all. Because you're saying, hey, man, maybe you can go and get some help or quit drinking or something. She's like, nope. So she's saying you're pretty worthless to me. And I'm sorry she's saying that. I mean, it's a terrible thing to hear.
[1:35:12] But that's what she's saying. She's being honest. She's saying this relationship is worthless to me. I'm not even going to think about quitting drinking in order to spend time with you and my grandson. So she's pretty honest. She's saying, this is worthless to me. Or worth very little. Okay. But you're like, but I'm losing so much. It's like, no, she's telling you. You know, like if I walk into a pawn shop, P-A-W-N, I walk into a pawn shop, with a stamp, Like an old postage stamp. And I think that stamp is worth a million dollars.
[1:35:57] And the guy says, you know, that's as common as dirt, man. I wouldn't even pay you face value for that. And I'm like, my God, I've lost a million dollars. It's like, no, you haven't. You thought something was worth something. And then the expert tells you, maybe you get a couple of experts. They all tell you the same thing. No, this is worthless. It's worth nothing. You might as well be a scrap of paper. Are you like, my God, I'm in such mourning for the loss of the million dollars. Like, well, you had an illusion it was worth a million dollars. Turns out it's worth nothing. It's the same thing with your mother. You had an illusion that you had a caring, thoughtful mother. Your, quote, caring, thoughtful mother is clearly saying to you, clearly saying to you, this relationship is worth nothing to me. I'm not even in disgust getting help with my addiction. You and your kid are worth nothing to me. Okay, got it. So isn't that honest? Isn't she being honest and telling you you're worth nothing to her? Really?
[1:37:07] And you're like, but the loss. It's not the loss of the person. It's the loss of the delusion. When you take the stamp in and find out that the stamp you think is worth a million dollars is worthless, you don't lose a million dollars you just lose the illusion that you had a million dollars or could have a million dollars or that anything was worth anything like a million dollars.
[1:37:29] You're not losing a million dollars you're losing the illusion of a million dollars you're not losing a relationship with your mother you're losing the illusion of a relationship with your mother your mother doesn't have relationships with people because all she has is manipulations, and when people manipulate you they don't have a relationship with you The only thing they have a relationship with is their own needs. And whatever they've got to do or say to you to get their needs met, they will say. They will say that. It's like a magic spell, you know. Expecto Patronum. Like whatever magic words you have to say to get the resources, like a fire starter spell, or an ice spell, or a clean water spell, or like whatever magic spell. You just learn the magic spell and then you say the magic spell and reality bends to your whims. Well, that's manipulation. You just learn the magic words. The only relationship she has is with the magic words that get shit from you, not with you.
[1:38:45] He says, I've been there. Somebody else says, my mother tried to take me out somewhere for my birthday, even though she skipped the last 15 years, and it's easier to go with her than knowledge dump 15 years of trauma in that moment. So you manipulate her. You're not telling her the truth.
[1:39:07] The original guy says, she definitely is telling me that. is the pain then from wishing I had the real version of that illusion. Well, I mean, if you have a fantasy that the.
[1:39:23] If you have the fantasy that the stamp is worth a million dollars, it's genuinely painful if you find out it's worthless. Do you know what I mean? I get that. I get that. I mean, because you feel like you just lost something. But you did only lose the illusion. The question, of course, that you need to answer is, why did you think you had an illusion of a relationship?
[1:39:50] Why did you think you had a relationship with someone who doesn't give two shits about you? Well, the reason for that is that you had to bond with someone as a kid. And so you had to make up a fantasy mother. You had to make up a fantasy mother because you had a bad real mother. So you had to make up a category called mother that you could bond with that had nothing to do with the actual flesh and blood birther woman you had in your life. You had to make up a fantasy category called mother that you could bond with. My mother. Right? You had to bond with something. If you don't bond with anything, you can't make it through childhood. Right? Right?
[1:40:40] So, you had to bond with a fantasy category, and then you had to graft your mother into that, and bond with the category, rather than your mother. This is the platonic world of forms. The forms is where we take refuge in trauma from shitty people around us. We create these categories called mother and father and country and school and whatever, right? and we bond with those fantasy images and then people work the levers of those fantasy imageries or categories to control us. They don't say die because the inbred weirdo on the throne wants you to go somewhere. It's like fight for king and country and God, right, all these categories. So the good news is that you still have that category and you still have that bond. The category of mother you will take with you and hopefully you'll use it with regards to your kids with the mother of them, right? Their mother, the woman you have children with. You know, hopefully. I mean, unless you didn't mention anything about a wife, but... So you have that category and you keep that category with you. I had a fantasy of a good mother. I kept that category with me. Right? I had a category called called a good father, which is what my real relationship was, but that goes with me everywhere.
[1:42:08] Right? So you get to keep your relationship with the quote good mother in your mind, the category good mother. And that's great because you probably want a good mother for your kids. Well, you do want a good mother for your kids. So you get to keep the most important aspect, which is the fantasy. You get to keep that, the category. You get to keep that anyway. way that can't be separated from you and if you recognize that you bond up with a category that will forever remain in your head and that that person by getting that person out of the category you stop polluting the category you stop polluting the category and then you can find a great woman to be a great mother to your child all right uh let's see here.
[1:42:53] I thought my family, he says. My wife is a good mother, very different from my mother, right? I thought my family was normal when I was younger. After my father died, my family told me now that my father was out of the way. I would be her new punching bag. Nobody warned me earlier, right? Sorry about that. So your wife is a good mother. So you have a category called good mother that your wife inhabits. That's beautiful. So the category is what you bonded with. I don't mean treat your wife like your mother or anything like that, but you have a category called good mother, which your wife inhabits. And you created this fantasy called good mother or this category called good mother so you could bond with something and now you get your mother out of the way. She's no longer standing in her leprous way between you and the category or ideal called good mother. Now you can have a relationship with the good mother in your mind and with your wife as your wife is a good mother to your son. You're gaining. You're not losing. You're gaining. You're gaining.
[1:43:49] You know, it's like you want to make this beautiful orchestra in your life called the future. And your mother who can't sing just screams throughout every rehearsal and every concert. And then you tell her, you know, I'd really bother you be quiet or learn how to play an instrument or sing properly. And she's like, I'm not going to do that. Right? And then she storms out and you're like, oh no. This is terrible. My gosh. How can I go on without my mother screaming all over through and behind my beautiful music? Well, now the discordant screaming is gone and the beautiful music can fill your ears. And that's what your relationship should be with. Does that make sense?
[1:44:34] Don't let shitty people think that you've lost something, when they storm off. I think you've gained everything. I gained everything after separating from my abusive parents. I wish I'd done it sooner. But I really had to absolutely invent the wheel from the ground up. There was nobody talking like this thirty years ago, I tell you that. Wasn't even on the radar. Oh well, credit me for something, I suppose. All right, any other last tips, questions, comments? Tell me you haven't been working. Tonight. We did almost two hours, I guess. Any other last tips? You can, of course, tip later if you hear this. Later, freedomain.com slash donate. You can sign up at freedomain.locals.com. Also at subscribestar.com slash freedomain. Very much appreciated. The Peaceful Parenting book, I'll put out two new chapters tomorrow. Two and a quarter hours of very, very great stuff. Good show. Thank you. I appreciate that. Thank you for dropping by. And sorry for not getting too operatic, but I want to save my voice a little bit for tomorrow as well.
[1:46:00] All right. Thank you everyone so much for your time tonight. You like the darker voice. It's sultry. And yeah, I'm sure I'll be back on track by Friday. And I appreciate everyone coming by tonight. It's a real privilege and an honor to be able to have these conversations with you. Thank you. Thank you so much. And have yourselves an absolutely wonderful night. I will talk to you Friday night. Lots of love from up here. Take care. Bye.
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