In this subscriber only Sunday Morning Live on 30 November 2025, philosopher Stefan Molyneux kicks off with a playful reference to the month of November and the joys of temporal awareness before plunging into the announcement of his new physical publication: the Peaceful Parenting book. This text is described as "uncancellable" and "uncensorable," emphasizing a unique, tangible connection to the principles of parenting that Stefan stands for. He invites listeners to order multiple copies for Christmas, hinting at the struggles of shipping costs, particularly to Canada due to ongoing strikes.
As the episode progresses, listeners are treated to the depth of Stefan's philosophical reflections concerning life's inevitable realities. He poses a profound question about the nature of death and personal experiences with bereavement. Drawing on his own life and the lives of his listeners, he explores the nuances of witnessing death, especially the emotional turbulence involved when a loved one is slipping away. This theme is fleshed out through a poignant caller's story about his best friend's mother, a tragic case of misdiagnosed illness leading to an imminent end. Stefan navigates this heavy topic with a mixture of empathy and philosophical inquiry, considering the different psychological responses to impending death.
Stefan's engagement with his audience continues as he delves into his own life experiences with grief. He discusses his estranged relationship with his family and how this isolation has influenced his perspective on mortality. He reflects on whether love and obligation tie individuals to one another in moments of dying or if those connections are what distance them from facing the inevitability of death with courage. He acknowledges an intriguing contrast between early childhood experiences and adulthood, suggesting that perhaps its absence has freed him from the terminal obligations many feel towards familial bonds.
The conversation takes a turn toward public transit and safety in urban environments as Stefan launches into a commentary on societal structures and their flaws, emphasizing how crime rates directly influence public behavior surrounding transportation. He presents a compelling argument that if communities are left vulnerable to crime, it will disincentivize their residents from utilizing public transit, showcasing a clear link between crime and environmental sentiments. His critique extends even further as he reflects on the environmentalist views concerning public transport, amalgamating his experiences with psychological observations derived from philosophy, echoing concerns about national debts and their environmental implications.
Listeners are challenged to ponder deep existential questions about life satisfaction, choices made in youth, and how those choices echo dramatically into the future. Topics of morality, parental responsibility, and how stories are interwoven throughout human existence are highlighted through Stefan's interactions with callers. The dialogue spirals into broader discussions on growth, both personal and philosophical, with poignant interludes on literature and narrative structure grounded in his own experiences and those shared by his listeners.
Towards the end of the episode, a caller shares visceral anecdotes of death and dying that her family has faced, illustrating her experiences with both a brother lost to addiction and a grandmother who chose to ascend to another life. Through this compelling narrative, Stefan emphasizes the power of consciousness in connection to tragedy, exploring the delicate interface between love, loss, and the profound moments that humans share when faced with mortality.
The episode concludes with a call to action for community drinking deeply from thoughtful discourse that Stefan cultivates. It encapsulates his assurance that while death is an ultimate ending, the ideas shared and the memories made endure. The potential impact of this conversation underscores one of the podcast's key tenets: even amidst despair, there arises an opportunity for rebirth through wisdom shared across generations. Stefan encourages everyone to reflect on their legacies, nurturing humanity's capacity to transcend the mortal coil through shared experiences and philosophical insights.
0:08 - Introduction to the Podcast
6:55 - Reflections on Death
7:42 - The Burden of Aging
8:17 - A Call for Donations
10:19 - Public Transit and Society
13:18 - Feminism and Historical Context
14:31 - Environmentalism and Urban Planning
19:27 - The Role of Crime in Transit Use
26:58 - Economic Disparities in Italy
29:11 - The Influence of Culture on Wealth
33:05 - Personal Experiences with Death
41:01 - The Power of Will to Live
47:02 - The Fragility of Life
55:47 - Philosophical Perspectives on Immortality
1:03:07 - The Essence of Energy and Souls
1:17:08 - The Philosophy Behind Beauty
1:21:57 - The Journey of Writing a Novel
[0:00] Good morning, good morning, everybody. Ooh, is it the Nth? Yeah, it's the Nth. It's the Knuckles, right? January, February, long, short months.
[0:08] And it is the 30th of November, 2025. That's right, my friends. Not only was it a great speech yesterday that left me wiped for the day, feels like giving birth to an endless array of Aragon-style ghosts coming up with speeches like that, but due to the very kind, kind, gloriously generous work of a listener and, dare I say, a friend, the Peaceful Parenting book, physical, uncancellable, uncensorable, destroyer of trees and savor of children, the Peaceful Parenting book, physical book, is now available for order. Now, there's some kind of strike going on in Canada, so it's pretty expensive to ship to Canada. So that hopefully will change over time. But you can go to.
[1:06] fdrurl.com/pp for Peaceful Parenting. Not, I guess it's about P-P for kids as well, but fdrurl.com/pp and you can get your Peaceful Parenting book. Order a couple of copies for Christmas. We're taking a very sort of razor-thin margin on this because I just want to get the word out there. And so, Peaceful Parenting, it'll be on the website. Maybe we can put that on the website for Peaceful Parenting. And of course, it will go to freedomain.com/books. And it'll go to shop.freedomain.com, where you can, of course, get your absolutely... Yeah, set that up. Have it point to the maxim page. That's perfect. Thank you so much. Yes, I will give the link here. fdrurl.com/pp. Oh, James has done it before moi, before little moi. You know, it's funny. I was on X the other day, and people were talking about science and scientists. Do you know that some of the code I wrote was accepted as scientific advancements.
[2:17] By the government for R&D tax credits? So, it doesn't make me a scientist. But let's just say, neither does it make me the polar opposite of a scientist. So, I just thought that was kind of cool it's just something that i remember back in the day so uh i've gone through that process just a little little bit so yeah had some spicy conversations lately sorry for the weird angle on the um x live stream uh but but that's what you get for supporting the show is you get to look up my nose and watch me give half a ratio to two microphones two microphones so one for recording and one for hex and so on so.
[3:06] Let us get to your questions and comments and issues and challenges and problems. Had a really great call-in show yesterday with a fellow. Let me ask you this. Let me ask you this. And we'll go to donors in just a sec. We'll go to donors only in just a sec. Have you gone down into death with someone? Someone you care about. Not someone you're just kind of obligated to or you want to get something out of the will or something like that. But have you gone down, down, down into depth, into death, well, depth and death with people? I myself have not had that experience. Isn't it strange that I've made it to almost 60 and I've not had the experience of going down I mean I've known people who've died but it's usually been quite sudden as it tends to be but as far as people sickening and dying like a friend of mine's mother had an aneurysm and it just wiped out her brain and it was like there was nothing going on and you had to make the terrible decision to pull the plug and all that kind of stuff but I've.
[4:26] Have people gone down into death with others? Because I was talking to a listener yesterday who was quite broken up because his best friend of many decades, and this is a public call, so I'm not telling tales out of school, as the saying goes, but his best friend of many decades, got misdiagnosed and is dying of pancreatic cancer, which is very painful and brutal, although not long. He has eight weeks. And his initial question was interesting. His initial question was, should I just counsel my friend to run up a bunch of credit card bills and go and have a blast, go to Vegas, go to shows, go eat out or order in whatever it is? Because, well, but it's not, it's in the States, you know, I'm not a lawyer or anything like that. But my amateur understanding is that debts are not discharged on death. Credit card debts come out of the estate. If there's no estate, then yeah, they're discharged. You can't take your debts and apply them to others unless you have a government with national debts. So if you die and your.
[5:40] Estate has assets, then the credit card companies will be paid. On the other hand, if you don't have assets, then yeah, the debts get discharged or, I mean, basically shoved onto others. So we were talking about that, but the conversation went way deeper than that. So yeah, if you're on X and you want to talk about it, I'm quite interested because, I mean, I'm certain that I will experience that before I die, obviously, but I haven't yet. I haven't yet. And, you know, this is one of the, I won't say even Stevens because, you know, childhood was pretty wretched. But I will say, that one of the benefits of having a bad childhood is you are under no obligation to follow your parents into death. My father died, and I only found out about this during COVID. And, of course, I was prevented from flying out by COVID restrictions.
[6:56] So my mother is still alive my grandparents died long ago as you would imagine and I am not close to my family in England because I left when I was 11 years old after seeing them I would see them fairly regularly, but I left when I was 11 years old and there was no relationship after that. So I'm not close to them. So yeah, it's really interesting. I have dodged that really slow moving bullet that tears people apart over six months, a year, two years. I mean, a friend of um.
[7:42] Mental decay, Alzheimer's, and so on. And that just goes on and on, man, especially, you know, it's one of the things that's really tough is that if you are super into health, like your body is just robust and healthy, and it's kind of bulletproof to the ravages of time, at least for quite a long time. And then, then what happens is you get some sort of brain degenerative disorder, then your brain is going, but your body is robust. And that is very, very tough. That is very tough.
[8:17] All right. So we are going to go to a donorist on the locals platform. We are of course on donors for the X or Twitter platform. So if you want to join, you can go to freedomain.com/donate and you can get yourself a tasty subscription of course you have no point saying this on x because only the donors are listening but if you have a tale of death if you have a tale of falling and fading into death.
[8:57] I would be curious to hear it. I would like to write about it one day in a novel, but it's tough without knowing what it's like. So the happiness that was subtracted from my childhood is to some degree added to my late adulthood, which is pretty wild, right? It's pretty wild.
[9:27] And I do also want to say that, I'm sorry if I have this whole setup where it's all for listening to people on X, I will change it so that we can listen to people on locals as well, but I have not gotten around to that as yet, but I will, I will figure it out. All right, so while we are waiting for any potential or possible callers, Then a guy named Alex Glister said about transit, right? Public transit. Pretty basic roads should focus on moving the most amount of people, not the most amount of cars, right? And of course, it's a picture of a bunch of people jammed into a bus as opposed to the same number of people on a whole four rows of cars and all that kind of stuff.
[10:20] I get that. I understand that. And of course, it's really interesting.
[10:28] Because people say this kind of stuff, and leftists have this obsession with public transit. It's just wild. Honestly, I know, saying it's an obsession is not an argument, but they have this kind of focus on public transit that's quite hysterical. Because here's the thing, man, you can't be soft on crime and expect people to take buses and subways and so on. you can't. Because if you're soft on crime, then evil, violent, crazy people are out there roaming the neighborhood and taking the buses. And I remember I was nursing a bird back to health when I was about 11. And I remember being on a bus, taking the bird to see a friend of mine whose mother was quite good with animals. And I remember this crazy guy on the bus, you know, that bird deserves to be free. He needs to be free. What are you keeping a cage up for? and I was, you know, a little bewildered and just trying to fence him, fend him off verbally. And some guy leaned over and said, like, he's crazy, man. Don't talk to him. Don't talk to him. He's crazy. You know, it wasn't very helpful. Maybe he could have talked to the crazy guy rather than expecting the 11-year-old little kid to do it. But that's just society. That's just the world. So I wrote, if you keep repeat criminals, in prison people will use public transit. If you're soft on crime, people will drive. It's really not complicated. Prison is environmentalism. And this is why, you know, I remember...
[11:57] For me, it was the Monica Lewinsky scandal. That was wild. I remember, I remember being on a, I was on a driving with a salesman in the States back when I was in my business career, we were driving to do a presentation, try to close a deal. And he was conservative. So he had, I think it was Rush Limbaugh on and Rush Limbaugh or whoever it was, was talking about Monica Lewinsky and the fact that Bill Clinton was using her as his own personal Geisha/Kleenex. And then he was inserting cigars into her while some king was trying to have a meeting with him or something like that. And I was just like, oh my God, the feminists are going to go insane.
[12:41] But this is one of the worst Me Too, because they're all saying like, you know, gee, disparity of power makes sex non-voluntary, right? Power disparities make sex or diminish the voluntary nature of sex. There's no bigger power disparity than literally the most powerful man in the world and an unpaid intern. Like there's no greater power disparity outside of the family that you could like in, in any business or political or office or paid context, there's no bigger disparity than an unpaid intern and literally the most powerful man in the world.
[13:14] And I thought, my God, the feminists are going to go nuts on this. And they didn't. They didn't. They didn't at all. They were like, yeah, I mean, he can get a blowjob if we get to keep abortion. That was their sort of perspective.
[13:32] And I remember thinking like, ah, come on, this is all nonsense now, right? And I remember I'd sort of touched around the edges of this before. When I was in university, if I met a real feminist, I would say, wow, a feminist. So you must really celebrate female success. Oh, yes, blah, blah, blah. And I'm like, wow. So Margaret Thatcher was the first female leader of a Western country. You must really celebrate that. And of course, you get the lip curl and the eye roll. And it's like, no. Or you'd say Ayn Rand was a woman who wrote the most influential book outside of the Bible in the Western canon, an amazingly powerful intellectual, philosophical book and they hated Ayn Rand too. These are two females who had spectacular, achievements that the feminists loathe and despise. And so, yeah, it's got nothing to do with women. It's only to do with communism and power. And it's the same thing with environmentalists.
[14:32] Environmentalists should focus on removing taxicab plates, right? They should focus on that. But taxicab plates are in order to, quote, limit, well, they do limit, but it's supposed to be for the benefit of the consumer, but it's not.
[14:47] So in order to reduce the number of cabs, most cities have taxi cab plates where you have to buy the right to run a taxi cab. And sometimes these can run into tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars, which of course is all tacked onto the price of a cab. The more expensive you make cabs, the fewer people will use them, particularly the middle class and below a middle class. And I remember in the business world, like I remember taking a cab, I flew into LA and I had to take a cab for about 45 minutes and it was like 130 Canadian dollars. And I was just like, I mean, it was a business expense. So it went on the company, but I was like, holy crap. Cause you know, that's not free. The company still has to recover that money. So I have to raise the prize of their, their goods. And I just remember like, I don't Ever remember environmentalists saying, well, we've got to reduce the price of taxi cabs because that way fewer people will need cars because they can just get a cab, right? Or, you know, what we have to do is we have to work as hard as humanly possible to make public transit, you know, safe and clean and efficient. Because if you care about the environment, then you want people to take the bus or the subway, which means you've got to keep it clean and keep the criminals out. But nope, don't care about that. They don't care about taxicab plates. There was a bunch of other things. But, yeah, it's just...
[16:15] It's just, it's wild. It really is just about control. Because this is the thing that people don't do. And it drives me crazy. Well, maybe it still does. I don't know. I haven't thought about it in that way in a while. But...
[16:33] If you care about something like the non-aggression principle or environmentalism or whatever, then you should start from first principles. You should say, okay, well, what is it that I want? Okay, well, I want people to not have cars and I want people to take public transit or cabs. Public transit best, well, biking even better, but public transit and cabs, but not have cars. Okay. So what I want to do is I want to reduce the amount that people have to commute. So everybody knows the way that real estate works in the West. You want to get away from the dangerous inner city, but not so far that you have a four-hour commute. That's the balance. Why do the suburbs exist? because the inner cities are dangerous as a result of particular policies, notably not putting people in jail and keeping them there. So, the inner cities are dangerous, so people can't live there. So, because they can't live in the inner cities, they need to go out to the suburbs. In other words, the suburbs exist because wherever the bus line ends, you want to be a little bit beyond that.
[17:47] And so, people move out of the dangerous inner cities and they move to the suburbs. So, what you want to do is you want to say, gee, if we want to reduce the amount of CO2 in the air, one of the things that would be great is to eliminate or reduce the need for people to get out into the suburbs to get to good schools, to get to safe neighborhoods and so on. Because I mean, that's all the suburbs are. All the suburbs are is, well, I don't want my kids to get robbed or knifed or beaten in school or in the neighborhood. So I need to move beyond where the buses go. And that's all that drives the suburbs. So we've got to work to make the inner cities more livable, which means we have to take bad people and put them in prison. I mean, that's a short-run solution, and it absolutely works. Again, Bukele and El Salvador has proven that, beyond a shadow of a doubt. So...
[18:35] That's, I mean, when I grew up in Toronto, it was called Toronto the Good. There was no danger taking the subway. It was clean. It was efficient. It was safe. And I felt no need to have a car until I was in my business world where I had to go pick up clients from the airport and so on because it's kind of a courtesy thing because we were a small company and we were all dealing with Fortune 500 companies. So I needed a car. So I got a car. But before that, I biked. And I took the bus and the subway and it was great. And recently I was in Toronto and I talked about this at the time and I tried to drive into Toronto and then take my wife and I, we drove into the outskirts of Toronto and then we wanted to take the subway in and the subway wasn't running and then we had to take a bus and then the
[19:25] bus didn't stop at the place we needed. And I was just like, forget it, I can't do it, I can't do it, there's only so much that you can, so it bothers me, and I don't believe people when they say, well, I'm an environmentalist, I'm like, okay, well, what is it that causes the most pollution? Well, of course, if you're an environmentalist, and you're for mass migration, then you're for taking people from low carbon emission, environmentally low impact places, and putting them into massive.
[19:56] CO2 burning high consumption of nature's scarce resources places because you're taking them from some place like Bangladesh and you're putting them with a bunch of government money in the West where they're going to be producing far more CO2 and they're going to be consuming far more resources. The other thing, of course, is that if people were into environmentalism in any rational way, they would be vociferously opposed to national debts because national debts is the habit or the process of taking nature's scarce resources, going into debt to consume many more of them in the here and now than otherwise, and it's a catastrophe, right? The, what is it, 40 trillion or whatever it is, like 200 trillion unfunded liabilities, 40 trillion debt, whatever it is in the States at the moment, that's all resources that have been consumed, that shouldn't have been consumed, right?
[20:49] I mean, if you go into debt to buy a bunch of stuff, you've consumed a bunch of stuff or bought a bunch of stuff, which you shouldn't have bought because you're in debt, right? I mean, assuming it's not like some long-term housing debt. So they should be against national debts. They should be against fiat currency because fiat currency stimulates the consumption of nature's scarce resources in the here and now. But they don't care. They don't care. It's all just philosophy, right? Not philosophy. Feel. Feels good. Feels good. Philosophy. So, yeah, it's, I just, I don't, and this is true for libertarians too, which I've talked about a million times before. I won't get into it now, but the libertarians are like, wow, I really want to, I really want to oppose the non-aggression, violations of the non-aggression principle. It's like, okay, let's blank slate and because I started a business from scratch, I started a podcast from scratch, I'm just used to blank slate and, right? All right people saying mentioning ayn rand is my favorite lol yeah for sure.
[21:52] I got some pretty nasty responses from that, mentioning Ayn Rand. Oh, her woman card is revoked. I was pretty mortified at that one. Yeah, because people trash Ayn Rand and they never get accused of anti-Semitism, right? So, yeah, it's nothing to do with, it's just power. Like, it's all the people who are like, women's work in the house is unpaid. It's just a basic IQ test. If women's work in the house is unpaid, then who is paying for the house? You know, if you go find some house, some really abandoned rickety house in the woods and you go clean it up.
[22:44] Then nobody's going to pay you for that, right? Nobody's going to pay you at all. So, oh, somebody says, I've got a good call-in topic, but I don't see where to raise my hand to call in. So you can't on locals at the moment. And I'm sorry, I will sort that out. I think, I think I cannot do it right now. Let me just see here. Yeah, I think I cannot do it right now. Uh, somebody said, yo, just bought Stef merch, a large mouse pad and sweatpants. The pad just arrived. Fantastic shop.freedomain.com. I appreciate that. I appreciate that I wonder so we're not getting there's not many people listening on X which is fine but I wonder if I wonder if, what do I do I think I wonder if I can okay I'm not live for everyone so give me just a sec give me one split second I'm gonna see if I can, get.
[23:50] This sorted out. Oh, but then the people on X won't be able to hear it. Yeah. Yeah. Sorry. The people on, who are not on X can hear it if someone from X calls in, but the reverse won't be true. So I apologize, but of course you can just go to freedomain.com/call to sort that out. So, you know, when I, it's funny, when I was, I used to read Matt Groening's Life in Hell, I was pretty funny, right? And there's a couple of things that I remember from it. One is the most bitter person in the world is the grad student who never graduated. And the other was, you know, you've got that teacher somewhere in your educational history who's got the single theory explains everything, you know, everything is, everything runs on the price of magnesium, and I remember thinking, like, that single factor explains everything, so I was on X, just, just this morning, just this morning, and I.
[24:58] There was a question. Let me just see this. Oh, yes. Michael A. Arruitt said, I've never understood this massive divide between northern and southern Italy. Same country, same language, same culture. What drives that? And in the north of Italy, The GRDP per capita is a little over 60,000, down at the toe of Italy, 21,400, and in Sicily, 22,200, so a little bit more than a third, right? And you can see the numbers in general, not perfectly, but they go up from the bottom to the top.
[25:53] And what do people say? Historically, northern cities, Venice, Genoa, Milan, Florence became independent merchant republics and banking hubs dominating trade with Europe and the East. They built wealth through commerce, manufacturing, wood, wool, silk, and early finance. The North had capitals, guilds, guilds, and fertile plains, Poe Valley, proto-industrialization and higher productivity. South remained a feudal agricultural-based kingdom, first Normans, then Spanish rule, focused on larger states and exporting raw materials, little urban development, weak middle class, and heavy taxation to foreign rulers. Europe is doing this again. After Italian unification, the North already had cities, infrastructure, and capital. The South started far behind. That historical gap never fully closed and still explains most of the current wealth difference. No, absolutely false and nonsense. Somebody says the 60,000 spot used to be Austria. Some people say, the only reasonable conclusion that can be drawn is that it
[26:56] is not the same culture, despite whatever people think. Southern Italians either lack the courage to stand for what is right, or their belief system is different. They prioritize other things, hence different financial outcomes.
[27:11] That's pretty funny. Modern Italy had to be forged from people with different customs, languages, etc. The first king didn't even speak Italian. Culture varied and very still. A lot by region. Wealth concentrated itself, says someone else, in the northern part of the country, as the Italian mafia had a much stronger grip on southern Italy. Also, northern Italy's soil is a lot more suited for larger-scale agriculture. Southern Italy's soil, soil, soil is very rocky and doesn't hold water well. The north is closer to the Reformation countries. as someone else. Look at the economic history in Europe of those countries, predominantly influenced by the Reformation and those that were not. Property rights and delay of consumption were of higher importance in Protestant countries versus Catholic. This enabled greater capital formation and the benefits of such over time. Overland trade was still much more accessible to Northern Italy, to Switzerland, and Germany, while still maintaining sea roots. Deeper capital formation from these influences led to greater wealth over the centuries.
[28:14] Oh, it's all just Ptolemaic. It's so ridiculously complicated. It is unfalsifiable, right? It's wild. Okay, so we're, you know, we're jazz clapping itself here at the higher echelons of human thought, what is the answer as to why the per capita income is almost two-thirds lower in southern Italy as opposed to northern Italy? What is the answer that you don't need all of this weird, complicated, convoluted, hollow mirrors? Well, it's an infinitely complex combination of and culture, and geography, and soil, and proximity to the Reformation.
[29:12] What's the answer? No, not fewer people. Come on, people. What's the answer? IQ. That's right, jonjon. It is IQ. It is the IQ. What is the IQ gap between the north and the south of Italy? I ask you, what is? Oh, Kerry, I see you there. I'll get you in just a sec. No. Yeah. What is the IQ gap? Well, the IQ gap is about 10 points, you know, give or take, right? But the 10 points is significant because that's the average, right? Which means that you get, remember the Pareto principle, it's the smart people who drive the economy. And when you have a lower average IQ, there are far fewer smart people. And those far fewer smart people have much lower social respect because there's so few of them. So uh the uh and and so if you look at the south right just look at uh michael corleone right i mean if you look at the south of italy uh their dark swarthy olive skin because they were ruled by the moors for hundreds of years there was lots of uh i assume forced uh rape and so on and so yeah iq is uh iq is down all right yeah so again it's not not super complicated but it's not a magnesium thing. All right, Carrie, what is? On your mind, how can philosophy help you today?
[30:39] Good morning.
[30:41] Morning. Thank you.
[30:42] Thank you for always taking my call. I feel like you're a stalker sometimes, but I have things to say to you.
[30:47] Then say, this conversation is not stalking.
[30:51] Um, I've seen death personally three times, so I, what... What kind of things are you wanting to hear or talk about?
[31:01] Give me the roughest one first. What was the roughest one?
[31:05] The roughest one was my brother. I told you last time that he'd gotten some bad drugs and he ended up on life support and we had to take him off. But he started out, they took him to my hometown hospital and then they sent him to our teaching hospital, which is OU Medical here in Oklahoma City. And they said that there was maybe some kind of dialysis they could do to try to get the drugs out of his system to see if his brain activity came back, right? And so I followed the helicopter there. Excuse me. And that night, I stayed in his hospital room with him. And there was a little bit of brain activity before they sent him to this hospital. And I was the only one there. and the nurses, one nurse was mad because my sister on drugs had called up there and gotten onto them about something and she thought it was me when I showed up. And so she was kind of admonishing me like, the only thing keeping him alive is the machines. You shouldn't be talking to him. He can't hear you, right? But I just kept talking to him.
[32:12] Well, hang on, sorry. She kind of been upset because you were talking to your brother.
[32:16] Well, she was upset because she thought I was the sister that had called up there yelling at them earlier. And so she just thought it was ridiculous that I was talking to him when he was basically in a coma and brain dead. I don't know what this nurse's personal feelings was about that, but she was not very nice to me about it. But I just kept sitting there and talking to him and holding his hand. And a couple times during the night, he would squeeze my hand or something. So I knew that he was kind of still there, or at least that was what I was telling myself, right?
[32:54] And somewhere in the night, I just knew he was gone. It was just pretty sudden. It was like, well...
[33:01] He was kind of there. I felt like I was talking to a person and then he wasn't there. And so by morning, like I was sleeping on the floor there, you know, with all the wires hanging and stuff. And the nurses, the new nurses came in, they were nicer. And they kept telling me, you just need to go down the hall and, you know, stay in that room and you don't need to be in here. But I just stayed there. But then by morning, when I knew he was gone, then I did just get up and go down the hall. And then by the time the rest of the family showed up that morning, they were all in there trying to talk to him. And, oh, I just know he can hear me. And I'm just shaking my head because I knew that he could not. Like some, I just knew he was gone at that point. Like, and then they did another scan. And of course, there was no activity at all at that point. And then, you know, the base of the brainstem, you know, it'll rupture. And then that's when, you know, the doctors explained to me and I explained to my parents. And so, you know, by the time that happened, now you just got like the organ donor people just trying to get in there and get you to sign papers, you know, to get what they can before they disconnect him.
[34:11] Is that right? So they take organs even from people who overdosed? Right.
[34:16] Well, they weren't allowed to salvage much because my parents were dragging their feet on disconnecting. They just couldn't grasp the fact that he's not coming back. And being a teaching hospital, I think they let that drag out kind of gruesomely. Because when they found my brother, he'd been passed out on his arm for so long that his arm died, right? And so when, this is kind of gruesome, but when tissue dies, you know, it starts to swell up and everything. And so his arm kind of ruptured open and was like seeping. And even though they knew that he was gone, they still took him down to surgery and sewed that back up for him. You know, just so we don't have to see that. It was very strange.
[35:07] And I just assume it's because it was a teaching hospital. But, you know, by the time that they did disconnect him and everything and they took him down to take his organs, they were only able to get like part of his eyes and maybe some skin tissue, something, because everything else had been damaged. And actually, like, I don't understand why they let my parents keep him in that condition as long as they did, because he was basically dead for days. Just, you know, like the tube that went up his nose had rubbed an actual hole in his lip, you know, that had to be fixed for the open casket, and it was just very gruesome. But you know like I said I just knew like there was a consciousness there even though he couldn't talk or anything and then I just knew when it was not there you know.
[36:12] Right, right. Again, it's a horrible tale for sure. And how close were you with your brother prior to his demise?
[36:21] I was not that close to him. I was six years younger than him, but he would call me sometimes when he was proud of himself, like as if I was the parent, you know, and be like, I just wanted you to know that, you know, I've got my GED and I'm enrolling in college now and I'm straightening up. And, you know, and it seemed like he was trying to get his life on track finally at 30. But then, you know, he went and hung out with some old friends and got some bad stuff. But it was strange because me being the younger sister, the second to the youngest out of five, I was the one that he looked up to because, you know... I was the only one that actually graduated without a GED and was in college. And, you know, he would just call me every once in a while or flag me down if he'd see me in town and have me follow him to his house and tell me what was going on with him. You know, but he didn't have my mom and dad to be proud of him.
[37:18] Well, there's a desperation among addicts. I'm good now. I'm better now. And it's almost like an apology and it's almost like a desperate plea for reintegration. But a lot of times so much damage has been done that there's just not a lot of trust. And the other thing too, of course, as I'm sure you're aware, but I mean, maybe other people don't, is that one of the big drivers of drug addiction is a temporary recovery. So if you're into drugs, then you build up a tolerance, right? Which is why you generally have to have more and more drugs. And then when you get off the drugs, you lower your tolerance. And then if you try to go back to what you used to be able to flourish on, so to speak, at least get your high, it kills you because you've lost the immunity to some of the drugs effects. And so your body has become more sensitized to the drugs. So it's very dangerous to go back on drugs when you've been off drugs. And that's where a lot of ODs happen.
[38:16] Yes. Yes.
[38:18] Tolerance. I guess tolerance is your body has lost its tolerance. So and like awful though that story is and you know, massive sympathies. That's not really quite the same as going down into death with someone because he just showed up kind of half brain dead and then just died, right?
[38:34] Yeah. Well, with my grandma, she had an episode and was in the hospital and they released her. She was 80 something. They released her to my aunt's house when I was in grad school. So I was taking care of her when my, when my aunt was at work. So I would go over and give her her insulin shots. And, you know, she had started to get in the evenings, I'd be there too. And she'd started to kind of get the labored breathing a little bit, but she was still, you know, she could walk around and she could eat and she could talk and we had some good, good discussions. And then the last night I was there, it was just me and her. And she said, can you pray for me? I'm ready to go see David. And David was her husband since she was 16, 17 years old, and he had died 20 years before. And she said, you know, I had a good life, but I'm ready to go see David. But she wasn't that far down as far as I was concerned. But, you know, we did have hospice kind of coming by the house. And I don't know how much of it was hospice was just giving her a lot of morphine and that helped her pass, or if she had just decided that she was going to go and her body followed. Because the next morning when I went by, my aunt had left for work and I went in there into her room and she was gone.
[39:55] And how long was she in hospital for? Sorry.
[39:58] She was in the hospital for like a week. You know, she had an enlarged heart, you know. And so when she was released to my aunt's house, she wasn't like on her deathbed. She was still able to get up and around the house and things. And so it didn't seem to me like she was that close to passing to where she had me pray with her one evening, completely coherent in the living room. And then the next morning I go over and she's passed. So it always made me wonder, how much of I'm just ready to go does a human have to pass? Or was it just I gave her a bunch of morphine that morning before I got there? I'm not even sure. But it's a, you know, people that work in nursing homes and see death a lot more, they probably know more so if a person can just kind of will themselves to, I'm done and pass.
[41:01] I don't know. Let me see. And people will their own death. I know this is not perfect, but I've heard that, of course, right? I think most people have. No, people cannot literally will themselves to die in the sense of simply deciding to stop living and having their body obey. However, there are rare but well-documented cases where extreme psychological states appear to contribute to sudden or rapid death. So voodoo death, psychogenic death, give-up-itis, first described by Walter Cannon in 1942, later studied extensively, seen in prisoners of war, indigenous people under curses, right, the voodoo thing, severe trauma survivors and some elderly people after extreme loss.
[41:49] Sequence documented in case reports and small studies, profound hopelessness leads to massive parasympathetic vagus nerve over-activation, heart rate plummets, blood pressure crashes, death within hours to days, even with no obvious physical disease. Modern term, psychogenic shock or stress-induced cardiomyopathy reversal. Real examples, Holocaust survivors who, quote, decided they were done and died within 24 to 48 hours despite food medical care. Documented Aboriginal Australian bone pointing deaths, right? So point the bone, voodoo curse, right? Broken heart syndrome, this is another one. Acute severe stress, grief, fear, rage can trigger a surge of, oh, cataclylaminia, sorry, catacolamines that literally stuns the heart muscle. One to five percent of cases are fatal, especially in the elderly or those with heart disease. Literally, I'm going to die of a broken heart can become self-fulfilling. Refusal to live in the terminally ill or very elderly, common phenomenon in palliative care, or the will to live fluctuates. Some patients who are ready to go will stop eating or drinking and die within days to a couple of weeks, even when physically they could linger longer. Others rally dramatically when a loved one arrives or a meaningful event occurs. Classic waiting for Christmas cases. Studies.
[43:10] Show that expressed will-to-live scores predict survival time independently of physical status. Of course, extreme anorexia nervosa or depression, they can will death by refusing food or fluid long enough to die, and so on. In terminal anorexia cases, some U.S. states now allow medical aid in dying, partly because the refusal is seen as autonomous and irreversible. What is not possible, healthy young person lies in bed, decides I want to die, and their heart stops. That's impossible. No documented case of pure conscious control over autonomic shutdown in a physiologically normal person. So in extreme circumstances, profound hopelessness, massive acute grief, terminal illness, or cultural psychological collapse, the mind can trigger physiological cascades that hasten or directly cause death sometimes remarkably quickly. It's not willing in a magical sense, but the brain-body connection is powerful enough that surrender or refusal to live can become lethal. So it's not like a superpower, but something close to it has been observed when people are, you know, and we've heard this, of course, ready to go. Now, we don't know, of course, if their body is basically telling them you're ready to go and they're expressing it because their body is shutting down or whether they're being ready to go causes less rallying in the body. And I think that the immune system is related to, um a stress or um peace of mind or things like that so yeah that's something so that was a week and that's terrible what's what was the third one.
[44:39] It was a man I didn't know. I got a knock on the door and somebody said, my friend is not well. And it was a homeless man that lived kind of on a property next to us. And so I went over there and he was orange. Like, I think he drank himself to death, but he was still kind of, I tried to give him, I gave him CPR, not mouth to mouth, you know, for a few minutes.
[45:08] Wow, that was brave.
[45:10] It was very bizarre.
[45:12] Well, brave. I mean, you don't know what illnesses you might have, right?
[45:15] Right. That's why I wasn't, you know, I just, with my hands, you know, I tried to do what I could, but I didn't, I was not going to get my face down there.
[45:23] Right, right.
[45:24] But I made an attempt.
[45:25] Oh, sorry, CPR, not mouth to mouth. Okay, got it, got it.
[45:28] Right, yeah, I was not going to do that. But he was already orange. It was very strange. But, you know, that's just. You know, death. But, you know, I called the paramedics and he was gone. But I, you know, made an attempt. But it was really, it kind of bothered me for a week or so just seeing death in that way. But it wasn't a personal, I didn't have any personal feelings about it.
[45:56] Right.
[45:56] He'd done it to himself.
[45:58] Yeah, I remember as a, I think the first time I saw death, I was a kid playing in the neighborhood. And somebody was like, car crash, car crash.
[46:11] And I went up with my friends and it was in fact a terrible car crash. The car was on its side. There was fire and they were, I remember they pulled a brunette woman out of the car. The fire was there. The ambulance was there and they pulled her out of the car and it was like pulling banana out of its skin. Like the way they pulled her out, she just kind of fell apart while they were pulling her out. And I was like, oh, okay. So we are pretty fragile. And I do remember another time seeing a woman lying on the sidewalk. I don't know if she was alive or dead, but yeah, I do remember that quite, quite vividly, just that sense of fragility and that sense that,
[46:56] wow, you can really, really end up falling apart pretty, pretty rapidly. And, you know, Humpty Dumpty cannot put you back together again, so to speak. So, yeah. So, I mean, sad stuff for sure, but that's not a sort of long-term managing because I've had a lot of calls with people. And I had one call long before I did private calls. I did a private call with a woman who was dying of cancer and wanted to know the best way to tell her children, which was, you know, something that I had a little bit of experience with. But she ended up actually living for another four years, if I remember rightly, although she was only supposed to have months. I'm not saying that's entirely due to philosophy, but maybe somewhat.
[47:38] So, but going that sort of long-term going down into death with people that you really care about. I'm not saying you didn't care about your brother, of course, or your grandmother, but that is, there's a certain amount of helplessness in what happened with you, right? I mean, your brother just overdosed and then you just sort of had to manage what was going on there. and your grandmother was, you know, old enough that it's not a tragedy. You know, I think if you make it to your 80s, it's hard to say, taken too soon, you know, that kind of stuff. But.
[48:16] Right at the funeral, I knew the preacher. We were at the graveside and all the families there, you know, the cousins and everything. And I hadn't seen this preacher in a while. He used to be my preacher when I was in high school. And he said, oh, hi, Carrie, how are you? And I said, oh, I'm doing great. And then everyone looked at me and I was like, oh, I mean, you know, I'm doing all right. But I was fine with it because she had already expressed to me how to pray with her. She was ready to go.
[48:46] She said I had a good life. And, you know, I mean, I like the Irish thing of celebrating someone's life rather than mourning their death. Because mourning should be reserved for things that are out of the ordinary. And if somebody makes it to their 80s and they die of natural causes without too much pain and it's not a long lingering costly horrible illness i mean it would be like a morning like take an extreme example like you somebody makes it to a hundred like they die at a hundred and you're mourning and it's like but they're gonna die and a hundred is amazing a hundred is great, And so I think the celebrating the fact that people lived rather than mourning the fact that they die. Again, I'm not talking about a kid who dies of cancer or, you know, somebody who gets wiped out by a rampaging bus in their 20s. I'm talking about people who've made it to a solid old age and have been in reasonably good health and not like, you know, they're in agony and dying for like five or 10 years because it's horrible, right? But if somebody makes it to 100, they die in their sleep and so on, it's like we should all be so lucky, right?
[49:58] We should all be there. Yeah, it's impossible, though, to be talking to someone one minute, basically. And then they're a thinking, feeling person. There's a consciousness there. And then the next thing you know, they're just ashes, right? They're just part of the earth going back to now. Where did they go? You know, it's impossible for humans not to think.
[50:25] Well, they jump to your memory and live on there, but that's the only place they live.
[50:36] So I've been wanting to ask you this for a long time, if I can. So humans are animals, but we are the only animals that contemplate is there God? Where do we go? Like, why would we be the only ones with that kind of a spirit soul in that way to be able to contemplate those things if we weren't different in that way? If there wasn't something, a spark or something inside of us that makes us different than animals, because if it was just evolution, something else, would have had that as well, not just Homo sapiens.
[51:20] I don't know that that's necessarily the case. That's like saying there should be two elephants, right? I mean, but we are a mixture of the mortal and the immortal, and I don't have to be religious to know that. So two and two make four is a truth that has existed since the beginning of time, before math.
[51:44] And we know that because there are particular molecules that require, you know, four atoms, right? And they're different from the ones that have three atoms. So four is different from three. The laws of physics have been around forever and ever, amen. And so when we say things that are true, when we accurately identify things that are universal and absolute and permanent, they are eternal. When we have concept formation, We are participating in immortality, in eternity, in absolutism, and we are born into truths that are eternal. We conceive or bring into our mind truths that are eternal, and that is how immortality or eternity or infinity enters us. We participate and partake in that which is eternal and infinite during the course of our lives, and then our mortal flesh falls away, and everything that we have said and communicated that is true lives on after us. That's why I say people, like we jump into people's memories when we die, and that's the only place we still have any life.
[52:56] So, 10,000 years from now, people will be listening to this conversation. I mean, I know they will. I mean, this is what we do in here is pretty big in terms of philosophy. It's not that well understood now, but that's the whole point of being ahead of your time is to last for all time. And so what you and I are saying here will still have effects on people's minds, centuries and millennia after we're dead. I will live on. People will be watching this in a thousand years, 10,000 years, and they will be listening to what I'm saying, and they will be looking into my eyes, although I will be long dust and history. And if there are any communists left, I'll be in a grave site where people come and pee on my headstone. That's just the way it's going to go. So you and I are now partaking in immortality. And it doesn't have to be on a philosophy show. It can be, of course, in your children. It can be on the people that you influence. You know, they say that a mind once shaped by a new idea never goes back to its original shape. So whatever we do, which we communicate about truth, virtue, reality, absolutes, universals, morals, we change people's minds. You know, I was just this morning thinking about how I would do the rough calculation of how many people have been brought into existence because of what I've done for the last 20 years in the public sphere. I mean, before that, I was pro-natalist anyway, but...
[54:26] It's at least conservatively hundreds of thousands of children have been born. I mean, I've had over a billion views and downloads, and I've influenced a large number of people because they come into my inbox. I've influenced a large number of people to get married and have children. So how many lives have come into being because of what we have done here as a community, what I've done as an individual? Hundreds of thousands at least could be more, could be millions, certainly hundreds of thousands. I mean, I got 60,000 people created from one tweet alone.
[54:58] So there's a certain amount of immortality, right? That old, I mean, I have only one child, but in fact, I have hundreds of thousands of offsprings, so to speak. And they're also not only the children born because of what it is that I do, but they're born into a rational, moral, peaceful parenting families. So not only are people being created, but they're being created in a positive and peaceful and moral environment. And what effect does that have on the world? Who knows? We can't trace all the effects that we have. But we are like, I sort of view us like dolphin. You know, you see these lovely shots, and maybe you've seen it live, of dolphins jumping out of the water and going back into the water. Well, that is us assembling mortality to process eternity.
[55:48] We come and we go, but everything that we say that is true and universal and everything we do that influences others through that, we are shot through with eternity. So when people say there's an eternal part of us called the soul, I'm like, yeah, that is an analogy for what is true and verifiably true. That UPB was always true.
[56:18] And for us to participate in the eternal moral values of reason and evidence is to transcend the mortal, transcend the physical in the way that physicists do. I mean, E equals mc squared was always true. Energy equals mass times the speed of light squared. That was always true. You couldn't have stars. You couldn't have suns. You couldn't have heat. You couldn't have fission or fusion if these things weren't true. And so we exist because of Einstein's equation. Einstein is long gone. His equation is eternal and so the fact that he melded and welded his mind to that which is eternal and in fact the very basis as to why his mind exists because if we didn't have the sun we wouldn't have the heat to have life. So we are consistently swimming between the mortal and the immortal, between the temporary and the permanent, between the transient and the.
[57:16] Ever true. So we conceive of the truth, and through the conception of the truth, we merge our temporary minds to permanent accuracy, permanent validity, permanent truths. And so the degree to which we never die is the degree to which we participate in the truth, and thus not only drag ourselves forward to eternity, but drag the human heart from its animal nature to its godlike side of the contemplation and action called virtue, if that makes sense.
[57:49] It does. And there's no doubt your influence and chain reaction of what you've done is huge, you know, in the eternity, you know. But when, even in the Bible, you know, everything is the source, the light, right, the energy. And we're supposed to find our way back to that. Everything in life, you know, the way that we talk about God and Jesus and everything is the light, right, and the source. So—, It's, it's, it's, it's, I don't know how to ask this. So when you're, we're, we're, we're like a ball of energy, right? We've got all these synapses and all these electrical things happening that make us a conscious person.
[58:34] Well, that's your brain activity.
[58:36] Right?
[58:36] The brain activity is a measure of energy, right? When somebody's brain dead, that brain activity, their energy has ceased to be. Sorry, go ahead.
[58:43] So, but when, when our body expires, all that energy is, you know, I guess you're saying it just kind of dissipates and it goes out into the universe. You know, it keeps going. Of course, you know, as physics, you can't destroy energy or matter. But I guess as Christians, we believe that that holds together as your soul and it goes back to the source and we're all part of that. We came from that and we go back to that as that's our Our soul is that ball of energy, I guess, is how I would say, you know, because I, you know, The fact that we're just so different from animals, it just makes me think there is something there that's more than just the body, and it has to stay together and be something to go back.
[59:39] Well, and I would certainly agree with you that there's more than the body, which is the mind. And the mind in particular, the human mind is able to, and in fact is kind of instinctively drawn, towards universal concepts, which is why we don't just count on our fingers. we have math, right? That we can understand our position in the universe because we can merge our minds to eternal truths. As to where we go when we die, I mean, where does your cell phone go when the battery runs out?
[1:00:08] Well, it's just out of energy. And if you never recharge it, it's never going to have the energy. The components are still there, but the energy is gone, or rather it's been dissipated, right? The phones transmit energy into photons, into radiation, into sound waves, and so on. And then when the phone runs out of battery, all of the components of the phone are still there, but the phone, what do they say? My phone died. So I say, I've got it, my phone died. I've got a dead phone. And it's, yeah, it's the same thing with people. When our batteries run out, when our inevitable decay of the cells results in death of some kind, the energy that we have has dissipated. The atoms that make us up will be permanent and eternal. So not only are we composed of concepts that are eternal, but we are composed of atoms that are eternal. So it is the mere assembly, right? If you've ever done this when you were a kid, right? You get the, um, get the Play-Doh, right? And you want to make a little dragon or you want to make a castle or whatever it is. My family and I, just not too long ago, I posted this on X. We went to a clay place and we painted clay and we fired up clay or they fired it up for us and all of that. That was kind of cool. So if you've done this as a kid, you get your Play-Doh and you don't want to mix the colors, but they always end up getting mixed up and you end up with this swirly 50s Volkswagen.
[1:01:29] Seat cover kind of play-doh and you form it into something, right? Oh, look, I made a little rabbit or something, right? And then what do you do? You pound it and then you make it into something else. Well, so the atoms formed themselves into a simulacum of a rabbit and then you pounded it down and made it into something else. And so, yeah, the atoms that compose me have always been there. They will be there after I'm gone. The particular configuration that produces human consciousness. Consciousness will not be there. And everything that I have done that...
[1:02:07] Is true and valid, will live forever in other people's minds. So UPB is a form of replicating my consciousness in other people's minds. It's the opposite of propaganda because I'm arguing from first principles with reason and evidence. And so I am copying the patterns of my mind into the patterns of other people's minds, just as other people copy the patterns of their minds into my mind. And the more truth and validity we have, the more opposition we face in the present, of course, but the more value we have to the future. So I certainly respect and appreciate the Christian approach. And there's a real powerful elemental truth in it. I would view it philosophically and materially rather than there's a ghost that steps out of our collapsing castle of mortality.
[1:03:00] Okay. Well, I was just wanting to see what you thought about that.
[1:03:05] And I appreciate that explanation. Right.
[1:03:08] Well, thank you very much. And always a great pleasure to chat. And I hope you have a great day.
[1:03:12] You too. Thank you.
[1:03:13] Thank you. All right. So I'm going to try a little something here. So give me just a second to do a tech thing. I think if I switch audio sources to the Rodecaster, I think that we can, because I know somebody really wants to talk on locals. John does. So let me just, give me a second here and I will try. Oh, hang on, hang on. Oh, hang on. Sorry, sorry. Hold on. If I don't have to switch, it's so much better. But John, oh, I can't take my mouse down to my phone. Yeah. Jonathan, thank you for your subscription on X! And what is on your mind, my friend? You need to unmute, going once, going twice.
[1:03:55] Yo. Hey, Stef, what up? This is Jonathan in Bulgaria.
[1:04:01] Are you JonJon on Locals?
[1:04:06] Nah, that's someone different.
[1:04:08] Okay, I just wanted to check because he really wanted to talk and I wasn't sure if he had two subscriptions.
[1:04:12] Sorry, go ahead. So I thought I should just come over here to X. And you may have the pleasure of hearing my four months year old. I'm holding him as I'm talking with you.
[1:04:27] Beautiful.
[1:04:28] Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. He is unvaccinated, uncircumcised, going to be raised Christian with blue Slavic eyes gleaming with the future of the unwritten.
[1:04:45] Lovely, lovely, lovely. Well, congratulations. And how are you enjoying parenthood?
[1:04:51] Okay, it's an intense, it's hectic, but very, very happy. And it's easier than I expected. My whole life, I was told that the first year of parenthood is just this monumentally difficult task. And it's actually, yeah, it's actually been easier than I expected. But actually, I was going to call in to chat with you about something different that you might be interested in talking about. This year, I finished a novel, a philosophical novel that I've been working on for about 10 years now, on and off, and your work has inspired and shaped some of the themes of this novel. I name you in the acknowledgement section of the novel. So I was thinking you might want to hear a little bit about it and maybe give me some feedback on some passages.
[1:06:09] Well, hang on, sorry. Is the book done?
[1:06:12] Yes.
[1:06:15] So, I'm not sure what kind of feedback I'd be able to give you if the book is completed, but I'm certainly happy to hear about the book.
[1:06:23] Sure. I had this crazy idea. Okay, I've got a sequel to it. I've got a sequel to it that's going to be coming out. And I had this crazy idea of thinking maybe I could talk stuff into writing the foreword to the sequel.
[1:06:42] Well, I appreciate that thought. So, tell me a little bit about the book.
[1:06:45] Okay, so it's called Hourglass, and it's a science fiction cyberpunk book. And this book was inspired by kind of this journey that I've been on for about 14 years now. I've been really obsessed with the topic of biohacking and personal growth. So people have probably seen me on Odyssey. I've done a bunch of videos about all sorts of smart drugs and biohacking things and weird and wacky personal growth things that I've experimented with for about 14 years now, while at the same time being edified by your content.
[1:07:39] All right. So, hold on. Sorry. Let me just interrupt you for a second. I apologize for that. So, this is your first book, right?
[1:07:47] No, this is going to be book number four.
[1:07:51] Book number four. Okay. So, you know I've been in marketing and sales for many years, right? Yep okay so when i ask you tell me about the book what have you started doing.
[1:08:07] Ah, talking about myself.
[1:08:09] Right. That is not the best approach. With all due respect, I really want to help you with this book. But that is not the best approach. Now, if somebody says to you, what was the background to this book? Or how did you come up with the idea? Or whatever it is, right? But you really want to make sure that you listen very carefully to people, right? This is a big tip for people as a whole. Because, you know, I've been having these calls lately. not that this is one of them where I ask someone a question and they go off on a tangent and then I ask them, what was my question? And they don't even remember, right? So, and the reason I'm saying that is that if you want to be an effective communicator, which is what a writer is, then you need to really listen to people and answer their questions. Because if you want people to read your book and they ask you a question and you go off on a tangent, what do they assume your book is going to be like?
[1:09:03] Tangents.
[1:09:04] Yes, yes, yes, yes. Or the book is going to be about you rather than the story, right? So if somebody were to say to me, tell me about your latest novel, Dissolution, I would say I'm really fascinated now that I'm older about decisions that people make early on in their life that have catastrophic effects later, but don't seem that big in the beginning. And I wanted to write a story to explain how these little decisions you make at the beginning of your life have absolutely catastrophic effects later on. And one man, and this would be a spoiler, so one man, Robert, decides to switch from a good girl to a hot girl, and that gets him killed later on. And one kid decides.
[1:09:50] To date a spooky, exciting, sexually charged woman, and she introduces him to drugs, and that gets him killed later on. Right. So I wanted to write about the little decisions that people make. A woman chose a vain and rather empty quote career over her own children. And that causes her to the vanity causes her husband to die, her children to be alienated, her family to be destroyed and her to be junked into an old age home at the end of her life. Right. So the little decisions, each little decision, like every little cigarette, but there's one cigarette that's going to kill you, right? If you stopped right before that cigarette, you live. And so the little decisions and the whiplash of, because philosophy is about prevention, not cure. So I wanted to say to people, it's really important. The little decisions that you make at the beginning of your life will determine the quality of your life. So there's a little bit about me in that, but in general, it's about the value that the book provides to the reader, if that makes sense.
[1:10:59] Sure. Shall I start over and try to address you?
[1:11:02] Yeah, so try it from that approach and see how that goes.
[1:11:05] Okay, cyberpunk thriller about a man who is a internet criminal, a master cyber criminal, and he gets involved with a nefarious company that is doing things with hacking time. And then he has to save civilization from the same comet that destroyed Atlantis 12,800 years ago.
[1:11:43] Okay. So that's good. That's good. All right. And that's certainly an exciting plot. And where's the human side of it?
[1:11:54] Okay so the human side is in uh romance so that the human side is in uh a story of bad romance not true love but bad romance that ensues between the protagonist and his love interest And then the human side is also the dynamic with the protagonist is this high IQ cybercriminal biohacker mathematician. So he's very, very intelligent and he has all the most potent life hacks and biohacks for getting him over challenges, but he has fundamentally bad character. And so he continues to self-sabotage in his mission uh in his mission even though he's very even though he's so intelligent he continues to self-sabotage because of bad character i think yeah i think that's probably the human side that people might be able to connect to okay.
[1:13:08] Yeah so it's definitely an exam i mean saving the world is it is an exciting story and the fact that he's got enemies and the fact that he's got struggles and so on is great. And then the other question I would have is, is he the only person who sees the danger or does he have allies?
[1:13:29] Okay, there's his love interest is, his love interest is, I wanted to create a virtuous woman. His love interest is the closest thing to a virtuous woman. And then there's a pilot. There's a couple of Christian characters that see the same danger. Let's see, there's a Muslim imam that sees the same danger. And then there's a Swiss scientist that sees the same danger that guide him and inspire him.
[1:14:13] Right, right. Okay, good. So, I mean, the plot is there, the character is there, the man versus man is there, the love interest is there. So, it all just comes down to execution. And that's, you know, so you want to get people to read the first page. So, why don't you read the first page?
[1:14:29] Oh okay i'm so glad you asked me about that because the first page i'm pretty proud of or actually do you mind if i do you mind if i hold you in suspense on that and read you a passage that explains the title of the book and then listen it's.
[1:14:48] Your book i can't possibly tell you what to read or not so but but remember that it is the if you say it's a two-hour movie i'm going to show you an hour 10 into it then that's going to be tough to sell because people want to know if the beginning of the book is going to grab people.
[1:15:08] Okay i'll hit you with both in under two minutes okay okay the form of the hourglass is inspired by that of a beautiful woman in the bloom of fertility your this is sorry is this the beginning this is explaining the title a little bit and the beginning will make more sense with this passage out of the way so this is like a personal growth guru speaking to the protagonist. And he says, you're drawn powerfully to Astrid's exquisite hourglass shape because it represents both the finite and the infinite of, The finite in that a woman's beauty is fleeting. With the passing of time and the bearing of children, her hourglass shape will crumble.
[1:16:07] Her shape reminds us powerfully, as men, how little time we have to capture the beauty beckoning and hold it in our own hands. And with her in your hands You can create an unbearable lightness of being moment That you'd be happy to replay and replay forever You capture that gleaming moment as a treasure Which will bring you a faint smile On even your deathbed one day. Your lust, Xavier, inspired by her shape Is your genes' way of whispering to you. Memento mori. You're going to die, friend. So take a chance on lust. And, Xavier thinks, lust is the existential reminder of death. Hmm.
[1:16:59] And the guru continues. But the structure of an hourglass is timeless in contrast
[1:17:05] to the sand that passes through it. Your genes draw you to her shape because through it, eternity beckons. Through a woman's beauty is the only way that we can achieve genetic immortality in this world Through her shape, we cast our essence into the future The only way we defeat death practically and become like God, metaphorically Creating new life in our own image.
[1:17:40] Your legacy, in the truest sense, is the exponential effect of your genes striving for the future. If, but, if you fail to plunge into womanly beauty and leave a part of yourself there, then, in the grand arc of history, no matter what you accomplish in this life, You will be like a spear falling from a great height into a dark pool. Your legacy, barely a ripple. You might recognize a few of those.
[1:18:19] Yeah, yeah, no problem. That's, yeah, very nicely, very nicely put. Very nicely put. I mean, it's interesting that the spiritual guru was talking about physical lust rather than spiritual union or virtue or love, which is fine. I mean, no problem with that. i just thought that was interesting okay so can i hear the beginning.
[1:18:35] Yes let's jump to that, and is my is my toddler is my four-month-year-old is he making much noise or no no audio quality okay chapter one, The 33 trillion cells of his body and his 20,000 genes screamed at him to say something to her, yet her mere presence paralyzed him. This was the third time she had looked at him in a confined commute together of only four floors.
[1:19:18] Xavier Oren was nervous. It had been a while since he had been alone and physically this close to a woman actually wearing a skirt, especially a woman like this. She had strikingly exotic features Long, jet-black hair Piercingly full green eyes Sensual red lips Aristocratic high cheekbones Clear, creamy Mediterranean skin The color of coffee with a lot of milk added And her hips had an alluring width to them She was dressed stylishly With an expensive-looking white leather purse Her curvaceous form beckoned from the delicate fabric of her daring black top, and the green striped skirt did more than hint at her shapely legs.
[1:20:15] In the four mirrored walls of the elevator, her reflection receded infinitely away from his. On top of the anxiety, he was irritated that he couldn't access the internet via his embedded ocular cyber-optic uplink lens, link for short, to escape her gaze, his own reflection, and this awkward moment.
[1:20:49] Very nice. Yeah, that's evocative for sure. Very nice, very nice, very nice. Yeah, I mean, I think that's great. What's the word count on the book?
[1:21:00] Okay it's a hundred and okay i wrote the book and it got too long so i split it up into two books and it's 180 000 total so about yeah about 90 about 90 on each book okay um and the first book I released recently, I am badly in need of reviews of the book, honest reviews of the book. Perhaps I can drop it in the Free Domain Locals page and give it away for free there. I can give away the print, or no, no, not the print.
[1:21:44] Yeah, make sure it's a PDF or something, make sure this fire is free and all of that. But yeah, I mean, you may want to give it to donors so it doesn't get out to a wider audience. But yeah, you're certainly welcome to drop it there and get people to review it.
[1:21:57] Sure. Do you have any thoughts on the passages?
[1:22:01] No, they're very, very good. I mean, I like the fact that you capture his genes wanting to. And I'm not sure you explain, although that comes in the book, the hesitation or the fear, right? So the hesitation or the fear might be that he's aiming too high. Because men generally are going to have anxiety about who they ask out, and they should. Because if... If a man is not aiming high, then he doesn't feel any anxiety. You know, like if I went for to get a job at McDonald's, I could get a job at McDonald's. I wouldn't be sweating through the interview. But if I go to get a job as, you know, some sort of high level, whatever, whatever, then there's going to be some anxiety. So I think that is he aiming too high? And that's why he's anxious. And you've got to be careful about being too anxious means you're aiming too high, or you are aiming in the wrong direction. So I thought the beginning was great, really good.
[1:22:59] Thank you yeah i was trying to capture the central tension of the of the book the and in this case he's well he's anxious because he's a he's a broken man raised by a single raised by a single mother and he is at this point in the story he's a man that has who's barely a man he's uh a person that has no sexual sovereignty at all sorry what does that mean.
[1:23:33] What does sexual sovereignty mean.
[1:23:35] Okay like a person that has a degree of a man that practices his free will his agency over the sexual department of his life okay and that and that's not what he is at this point and he's raised by a single mother in a corrupt near future dystopian society so yeah that's that's why he's anxious in this in this situation.
[1:24:06] Okay, good. Sorry, go ahead.
[1:24:08] Okay, since I'm here with my son, I should mention, so that in this book, this first passage that I just wrote, so he's in this elevator with four mirrored walls with this beautiful woman. Have you ever been in an elevator with four mirrored walls?
[1:24:30] Not four, two, yes, not four.
[1:24:32] Okay, a little weird Even two mirrors A little weird, right?
[1:24:41] So I had written this passage 10 years ago when I was living in Colombia, and I'm not sure what inspired the detail of the four mirrored walls. But it was about a year ago. It was about a year ago.
[1:25:00] My wife and I, we got a positive pregnancy test after we'd had some losses, some devastating losses. We got the positive test, and we went to the doctor's office for the checkup, and we got the confirmation of the child that I'm now holding in my arms. And then we walked out of the doctor's office into an elevator with four mirrored walls. One of the very few, very rare elevators that I've been in in my life with four mirrored walls. And it was just one of those kind of spooky moments where life seems a bit more mysterious than your materialist view of the universe where I had written this in a book and then I had started working on the book. And then we got the news of the pregnancy and then we found ourselves in that four-way infinite reflection.
[1:26:13] Very cool. Very cool. Yeah, so I would definitely say if you want to get some feedback on the book, and listen, it's tough to get feedback from the book. I've been asking FDR listeners for a month or two to give me feedback on the book, and I've gotten, I think, precisely two or three bits of feedback. So don't feel too bad if it takes a while to get some feedback, but I would definitely put it out there. And you can, of course, also arrange with people if you've got a Discord server or something like that to invite people to give you verbal feedback, because sometimes that's easier for people than writing it out. But I think that would be a great idea, and getting that kind of feedback would be a good idea for sure.
[1:26:52] Sure thing. Thanks, Stef.
[1:26:53] All right. Thank you. I'm sorry, jonjon, I'm not going to try and switch it over here. But I will, you can just set up a call in and we can, you can do that. And of course, it can be a free call in. So freedomain.com/call. And don't forget to go to fdrurl.com/pp for Peaceful Parenting the book. You can order it. It's still kind of pricey in, and I ordered it from Canada. It was kind of pricey to ship, but I assume that's got something to do with the postal strike. So hopefully that will be resolved, but it's pretty cheap to order in the U.S. So thanks, everyone. Have yourself a wonderful day. We'll talk soon. Bye.
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