0:03 - Welcome to a little bit of time
5:36 - Expertise and Popularity
13:38 - Assert Your Expertise
16:18 - Navigating Professional Challenges
29:42 - The Values of Bitcoin
32:22 - The Abortion Debate
43:05 - The Atheistic Sphere's Impact
51:42 - Personal Challenges and Health Concerns
57:09 - Overcoming Childhood Trauma
1:05:43 - Navigating Relationships After Divorce
1:10:50 - The Future of Society and Personal Responsibility
1:20:07 - The Church vs. Science and the Free Market
1:22:51 - The Impact of Literature on Life Choices
In this episode, I dive deep into a range of topics as I engage with callers from diverse backgrounds, sharing thoughts and reflections on personal experiences and broader societal issues. I start by expressing gratitude for the community's ongoing support, emphasizing the importance of having meaningful discussions about life's challenges and philosophical questions. Encouraging listeners to participate, I invite them to voice their questions, thoughts, and disagreements, creating an interactive environment conducive to learning and growth.
As I explore the concept of personal expertise, I emphasize the importance of recognizing one's own skills while also respecting the expertise of others. I illustrate this with anecdotes about social media influence and public engagement, underlining that follower counts should not overshadow the quality of discourse. I argue that integrity in sharing and applying knowledge fosters genuine connections, which, in turn, helps us navigate complex social landscapes more effectively.
The conversation takes a thought-provoking turn as I analyze the societal consequences of individual choices and the perceived normalization of poor behaviors, particularly among youth and younger generations. I discuss the idea that positive role models are essential in mitigating emerging trends that reflect societal decline. We touch upon the subject of meritocracy versus egalitarianism, stressing the necessity of recognizing and affirming excellence while challenging vanity and entitlement.
In a poignant exchange with one caller, we delve into the pressing issue of parenting and its ramifications on future generations. I argue that the predominant driving forces of societal values—positive or negative—are often rooted in early childhood experiences. We discuss the critical role parents play and how their behaviors shape character and moral understanding in their children. This leads us to reflection on the potential for societal improvement through more attentive and compassionate parenting practices.
As the dialogue shifts, I engage with callers on personal matters ranging from relationships to health, addressing the intricacies of their lived experiences. The discussions highlight the profound impact of familial love and support on one’s worldview and journey. In particular, I share insights on the difficulties individuals may face in overcoming past trauma, asserting that self-awareness and personal accountability are crucial in healing and moving forward.
Towards the end of the episode, we circle back to literature and philosophy. I discuss my novels, particularly "The Future," which envisions a society free from oppressive structures. I stress the importance of storytelling in illustrating complex moral and ethical dilemmas, aiming to provide both entertainment and practical insights for the reader. The episode wraps up with reflections on how literature can serve as a transformative tool, encouraging listeners to engage with the philosophical elements presented in my works.
Ultimately, I encourage everyone to wield their voices and expertise thoughtfully in order to foster a community grounded in virtue and personal development. Through open dialogue and mutual respect, we can collectively pursue a deeper understanding of ourselves and the world around us.
[0:00] All right, what do I want to talk about? What do I want to talk about? Hello, everybody.
[0:04] Welcome to a little bit of time that I have to chat with you all, which is a great, deep, and wonderful pleasure in my life. And thank you so much for joining. Thank you so much for your support of philosophy at freedomain.com slash donate. But enough of the donation requests. If you have questions, comments, issues, challenges, problems, disagreements, whatever you like. I certainly have some thoughts which I would like to share, but if we have eager requirements for anything that I can be of use for, please raise your hand and request. I can, of course, simply chat and go from there. So, I'll just wait for a second in case anybody's got a yearning burning that doesn't require a doctor and a shot, we can do a brain and a chat. A brain and a chat. All right. So just while I wait for the people to come up as a bit, you know, never complain, never explain. Like I get all of that and I sympathize with that. But let me tell you, my friends, people seem to misunderstand this a lot. So I'll speak on it once and then forever hold my peace. And it goes a little something like this. So let's say that I have, I don't know, what is it? 420,000 followers or whatever, right? And you know, it's been going pretty well. And of course, thanks to everyone.
[1:29] For supporting and sharing what it is that I do. And so having a big follower count, I mean, it's not that big, right? It's not big, not tiny. It's not that big. But let's say having a medium. Having a medium-sized follow account does not have me win any arguments except how to have a medium-sized follow account. Right? You follow? So, when people say to me, Stef, you need to do this, that, or the other on X, well, I'm curious, and I will go, and I will have a look at that person's account. And I someone had a couple hundred followers one guy who'd been around for a long time had 4,100 followers now, I don't care, 4,100 followers maybe that's your thing, maybe it's a tight group of quality people but not tighter and more quality than this group of people but, I don't care that you have a small following, it doesn't mean that you're right or wrong about anything, except except how to be effective on X. That is the one grand exception. So, for instance, if you are 300 pounds.
[2:43] And you're telling me about quantum physics, I don't get to say, well, you're wrong because you're 300 pounds. But if you tell me, Stef, dieting is really important, being a healthy weight is really important, and I have the best diet, and I know the best how to lose weight, I'm going to say, but you're 300 pounds. So where there is a congruence or a match between what you're telling other people to do and what you clearly haven't done, that's going to be taken note of. I mean i'm bald and if i'm talking to you about philosophy the fact that i'm bald is immaterial solar powered sex machine not solar powered thought machine however if i'm trying to sell hair restoration products and i'm bald people are going to say but you're bald now it's not an ad hominem, not an ad hominem, to say to me, you're bald, if what I'm doing is trying to sell or hawk hair restoration products. Because if it's really important to restore your hair, and I know exactly how to do it, and it's safe, why wouldn't I have done it?
[4:03] So it is not, it's an ad hominem to say, Stef, you're wrong about morals, because you're bald, that's an ad hominem, sure. But when it's directly related to to what it is that you're talking about, sure, of course we judge a book by its cover. Of course we do. We judge a diet book by the person who's on the cover. And if the person who's on the cover of a diet book is 300 pounds, we don't buy it. Ah, Stef, but logically, come on, let's all be reasonable about this. Somebody who's trying to sell you makeup, right, the model who's trying to sell you makeup isn't going to have crappy skin. Someone who's trying to sell you hair care products isn't going to have crappy hair.
[4:49] And so when people come on X and they say to me, Stef, you need to do this out of the other on social media, hey, okay, fine. But then they better have a good follow account. And I have, of course, taken advice over the years from people with big follow accounts, and that advice has been very helpful. But when someone comes at me kind of snarky about what I should or shouldn't be doing to be effective and to increase my reach on social media, of course, I'm going to go and look at their follow account. And the reason why this is important is that if we don't push that there is expertise, we end up with socialism. Oh, does that sound like a stretch? It might, but give me a moment and I will tell you what I mean.
[5:36] So when you really understand how good people are at some things then you'll understand, why they're very popular why they have a big follow account why they make money why their albums sell and other people's albums don't sell and so on right so a classic example of course is what's considered by some the best live performance in history, which is Queen at Live Aid.
[6:09] And if I, you know, occasionally I'll do karaoke and occasionally I'll get some applause. Yeah, you know, whatever, right? I'm a decent amateur, okay singer, whatever, right? And I like to perform. So I go to karaoke and I think once or twice, oh yeah, no, two or three times I've actually sung in front of people in a more formal event, and it's all good-natured, goofy fun. I'm not much of a vocalist, but I enjoy doing it, and people seem to enjoy the passion, if not necessarily the expertise. So, if I'm reasonably well-received at karaoke, I don't go up and lecture Freddie Mercury on how to perform in front of people, because Freddie Mercury has performed in front of 300,000 people in Brazil. Well, Queen as a whole, but Freddie Mercury is the front man. It's not like anyone's looking at John Deacon, right? So, I might tell Freddie Mercury, if he was still alive, here's some expertise I have in the realm of philosophy, if he was interested, but I'm not going to tell the guy how to perform, because that would be an idiotic thing to do. Now, of course, I'm taking extreme examples, just to sort of reinforce the point. I'm a reasonably decent chess player. But I'm not going to go up to a grandmaster and tell him how to play because it's ridiculous.
[7:30] And it's really important to push back on this kind of vanity in people. And if it's any consolation, it's also good to push back against this kind of vanity in ourselves. This arrogance, because, you know, we're all the main players in our movies and so on. And maybe this is a British thing. I spent my formative years in England. And some in, I mean, I saw all the different classes because I was in a really kind of broke-ass rent-controlled apartment, a flat. And then I also went to boarding school for a couple of years and mixed with the hoity-toities. That was sort of funded by my father and then not funded by my father. But anyway, so I grew up in England, and in England, embarrassment is, you know, this is the word cringe. You know, it's cringe that it comes out of, and cringe is sort of an NPC control word for the most part. But the idea that I would go and lecture someone who was much better at something than I was would be horribly embarrassing.
[8:43] And it would also indicate what's called the Dunning-Kruger effect. The Dunning-Kruger effect is if you're not good at something, it's hard for you to recognize how good someone is. So, for instance, I know almost nothing about surgery. So, if I'm watching someone perform a surgery, I really have no idea how good or bad they are because I don't know what's going on. I don't know if they should be cutting there. I don't know if that was a good or bad cut. I don't know if it's a good or bad sew-up. I don't know if they got everything they needed to. I don't know, because I don't know much about surgery. So, I don't know who's good or bad at surgery. So, I don't try to figure that stuff out. I just sit back and, oh, okay, well, I don't watch surgery, because I don't really know much about it. When I first came to Canada, and I didn't grow up with ice hockey or anything like that. So when I first came to Canada, I watched hockey. And I'd be like, what do you mean icing? It's all icing, right? I mean, there's still things I don't particularly understand about American football or basketball. These are two sports I've never really played. And I don't really, I mean, I can give you all the finer points of tennis and stuff. Cricket, I guess, even still. But I just don't know. So I'm not going to judge because I don't know.
[10:11] And it's important to assert your expertise in life and to recognize other people's expertise. So Mike Cernovich is like great at posting and engagement. He walks a great line that, you know, you could say I didn't or whatever, right? Different choices. I'm not going to go to Mike Cernovich and say to him, hey, you need to do X, Y, and Z, right? Even though you know i don't know how much who's got two or three times my follow account now admittedly i've been away for a while but i mean he's he's very good whatever you think of the content i think the content's actually good but he's he's a really good at social media, alex jones what i see the other day alex jones was having a live stream that had like 350 000 people watching right am i gonna go to alex jones and say well alex, Well, Alex, you see, here's what you need to do to be more effective at live streaming.
[11:17] Oh, I mean, you know, I could talk to people about philosophy, but I don't go to people, like objectively and demonstrably better or having a better effect than I've had in certain areas and lecture them on how to improve. Yeah. So, just so you know, right? I mean, it's not because I have, I mean, I don't care about people's follow account. I care about their arguments. I don't care about the follow account. And somebody can be on X and not want to grow their follow account much at all. That's fine.
[11:51] But if somebody's going to tell me how to be good at social media and they have no followers, i'm going to say that's ridiculous and that's important because when people think they're better than they are or sort of stride around cock of the walk as we used to say then that's abrasive and annoying and what happens of course is that quality people don't want to spend time with them. I mean, come on, we've all, yeah, let's be honest, right? We've all had that friend, maybe we've been that friend, but we've all had that friend who, you know, from the comfort of their armchair knows exactly how other people should do stuff better. Well, what he should have done is she should have done more calf work before going out on the field. Yeah they shouldn't have tried that reggae sound man that sucked i would have gone with country you know and these are people who haven't really achieved much of anything, there's an old i remember this from when i was younger and sort of reminded me always of the scene in in atlas shrugged at uh uh hugh axon's restaurant anyway so and i was always kind of terrified. When I was younger, I might end up like this guy. And I'll get your questions in just a sec. I'm almost done. I appreciate your patience. But...
[13:19] There's a diner, and there's a guy down at the end of the diamond. He's kind of unshaven. He's kind of greasy-haired. He's clutching a coffee, nursing a coffee, doesn't want to finish it because he maybe can't afford another one. And boy, oh boy, does he have the solution to all the world's problems. Woo! Man, he's got it down. He has got it down.
[13:39] Any question that comes up, he's got an answer. To which, of course, some people might say, then why are you a greasy haired guy in shabby old clothes sitting at the end of the diner unable to afford another cup of coffee.
[13:57] Assert your expertise in the things that you're good at do not let people encroach upon your territory of expertise do not encroach on other people's territory of expertise, and I was talking the other day I was playing pickleball with some friends and next to me at the court. We had a pickleball court, and then next to me was a tennis court. And on the tennis court were four guys staggeringly good at tennis. Like, holy crap. I mean, serves like a bullet, backhands that just soared over the net just perfectly. And the idea that I would go and lecture them about how to play tennis, I would be, I would die. I would die. I would melt into the ground.
[14:41] And don't encroach them. Like, I could learn from them. I can watch them and learn from them. But the idea I'm going to palm, well, you need to hold your racket this way. It's like, don't encroach upon people's expertise. Have conversations with them, alone with them, enjoy what it is that they do, but my God. Oh. I mean, this used to happen sometimes when I was in the theater world, that people would just be bitching and moaning about some very successful actor. Oh, he's not that good. It's like, but he's successful. Yeah, but, but, but. It's like, well, you know i mean it's like arnold schwarzenegger was he going to play hamlet no i mean he brings a certain persona and character to his characters like brad pitt now it's becoming kind of like a caricature of the marlboro man right so they're good at what they do people want to see them, and they get to tell stories that other people don't to a much wider audience, and you have to assert your expertise because if you don't assert your expertise people don't understand why some people are more successful than others. And if they don't understand why some people are more successful than others, then they end up being socialists. All right, so I appreciate that. Thank you for your patience, Zach. You are on the air and in my ear. You'll need to unmute. What's on your mind, brother?
[16:07] How are you?
[16:09] I'm well. How are you doing?
[16:10] I'm really good, thank you. I'm really good long-term listener. I love the call-ins. It's great to see you on X.
[16:18] I was just thinking about what you were saying in terms of putting forward your expertise. I'm finding that in my field of work in IT, I'm getting lots of staff inside organizations like graphic designers doing our work. I find a lot of level one support requests are being handled by ChatGPT. I basically feel like the industry is almost evaporating before my very eyes, but it is difficult when they have these tools to do their own troubleshooting and they tell you what you need to do and it's that asserting my expertise, like no. You guys stick to graphic design and 3D animating, and I'll do what I do, which is take care of the computers and the security and things like that.
[17:13] Yeah, I mean, can you imagine you run some complicated cross-border business with a whole bevy of lawyers and accountants, and you as the manager, you're going to argue with your lawyers and accountants? No.
[17:23] No, I don't argue with my lawyer at all. Yeah, I mean, my garden is still, okay.
[17:28] You say jump, I say hello. Hi. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, so just this idea that we, I mean, am I going to argue with my dentist? I mean, I don't know if my dentist keeps making me lose teeth, maybe I'll move dentists. But just having respect for expertise seems to be a thing, a gun. And I think it has a lot to do with the sort of feminization of youth that's going on, like just absolute cloying. And there's nothing wrong. Women are absolute cheerleaders. And that's great. If you've been around, you know, I don't know if you have babies or kids or whatever. But, you know, when your kid does the slightest little thing, the women are all like, yay, good job, well done, good job. And it's beautiful. It's beautiful. Oh, he learned to roll over. Yay, good to you. You caught the ball. Wow, you can roll the ball back to me. Beautiful. And they're just thrilled at every breathing, waking moment. And it's beautiful. And then about the age of five six seven eight see somewhere in there, the kids are supposed to especially the boys they're supposed to be turned over to the men, and uh what are the men supposed to do if the kid is bad at something that's not good, that's really bad because everyone learns how to roll over everyone learns how to sit up everyone learns how to roll the ball back. Everyone learns how to.
[18:54] Feed themselves with a spoon, right? So, the enthusiasm is fine, but after the basic skills are mastered, you split into people who are really good, people who are okay, and people who are bad. And men need to be the custodians and champions of that sorting process. You know, it's kind of funny how there's a sorting process in Harry Potter with the hat and all, that's completely random, right? So, women are, you know, boosters. I'm going to say mindless because it's, you know, it's appropriate to babies and toddlers. You want them to get excited about learning basic skills. But after the basic skills have been learned, yay, you made the letter A. Oh, that's great. But publishers have to be, you're not a good writer. Right? So, you know, the first time your kid hits a ball with a bat, you're thrilled. Yay, great job. Wow. However, that's not how the Major League Baseball works. Major League Baseball is like, you suck. You're going down to the minor leagues, right?
[19:55] So, Stefan, what age do you sort of see that where a boy in particular would be, you know, going from being, you know, under the mother's tit to being into, I thought that was from like 10 in the teenage years from my, yeah.
[20:12] Well, traditionally, I'm sort of thinking about Judaism, seven or so, or the age of reason about seven, the age of moral responsibility. It really depends, I suppose. I sort of said sort of five through eight, and it depends on the kid to some degree. It depends on whether it's a boy or a girl. But yeah, just this mindless boosterism. The male world is a raw meritocracy. The female world is enforced egalitarianism. And again, absolutely beautiful for both men and for women. We have together as a zygote team, we have created the greatest thing in the universe, which is the human mind. But yeah, it is always a shock when meritocracy is asserted. So when someone lectures me about something I'm good at and they're bad at, I need to tell them. No, it's unkind. It's unkind.
[21:09] How do you, like when you're in a consulting sort of IT provider, external party to a business, and you have that happening, what's a reasonable way to actually handle that situation where they are telling you how to suck eggs and you say, well, hang on, you guys, I get paid either way. If you want to tell me how to do my job, you know, how would you...
[21:34] Okay, no, no, give me, it's too abstract. Give me a more concrete example.
[21:40] So this particular client, they're in growing pains. They've got about six staff. They're on track to have about 100 staff, and that's sort of a turning point for some of these organizations, going from a small business to a medium-sized business. And so, for example, they've got admin staff saving all their passwords in spreadsheets, and they've got graphic designers creating pretty word documents for passwords where management are struggling to understand that they need to actually have a… Okay.
[22:14] I don't want the laundry list of problems. Give me a particular problem where you get a pushback and you have expertise.
[22:24] So they want to implement a system that was from 20 years ago that Microsoft had and you needed to have on-prem equipment to use. It's no longer it's not something you would ever put in as a solution anymore you would need to use the Microsoft cloud systems to utilize and you'd need to add your license, or organization you'd almost triple your licensing costs just for one document to be protected but because they were using ChatGPT and arguing with us about that it became quite difficult to, like they were fighting me because they were copying and pasting what our responses were into chat gpt and saying oh no you could just do it this way is that too um.
[23:13] Well okay so i mean the way that you would do that is is uh you would uh you'd measure it right okay so copying and pasting takes five seconds times, x number of employees times x number of people today and this is the hourly rate and this is their overhead and you'd say okay this is costing you guys uh you know 4.8 million dollars a year, right no so something like you you have to slice and dice right and then and then you say okay but if you do it my way it's a million dollars a year 3.8 million dollars a year if you've got the facts i mean they can't really argue the facts like i've literally watched people do this i've timed them and i know how many times it happens and so this is a bad solution and if they fight back then say, have you done this before have you done this kind of upgrade before and if they say no say well i I have done 12 of them.
[24:07] So, I have to benevolently assert my expertise. I understand it's tough because, you know, when you're a small entrepreneur, you do everything yourself and you do everything better than everyone else in general, right? And so, you know, I understand it's tough for you to recognize that somebody else might be better at something. I understand that. I sympathize and I get it. But it's true. and so you know part of growing a business is surrendering to other people's expertise because as a founder you might be able to do just about everything in a five-person shop or even a 10 person shop but 30 50 80 100 like i've grown a company from me and a guy to like 35 people so not major entrepreneur stuff but not bad and so if people haven't done it before just say I am the expert. Here are the numbers. I've done it 12 times. You haven't done it once. And I've also seen people who can't let go of control and trust other people's expertise. It cripples the company because people can't grow. And if you're a control freak, so to speak, or if you've got your finger in every pie, competent people don't want you nagging them and looking over their shoulders. So it's not even trust me, bro. It's like, I've got the numbers. I've got the history. This is exactly what you're paying for. Take the expertise.
[25:28] Wow yeah that's that's that's awesome awesome.
[25:31] All right well listen i appreciate your call and thank you so much for uh dropping by i'm gonna have some cool stuff to talk about on x shortly and uh you're welcome of course anytime and i wish you the best.
[25:41] All right stev.
[25:44] Stev what's on your mind friend.
[25:50] Oh is that me yes.
[25:51] Unless there's another stev in your left pocket go ahead.
[25:56] Um hey guys um i just jumped in i didn't hear too much of the conversation but um that's.
[26:02] You you can talk about whatever you want you don't you don't have to talk about my lead that's just a benevolent filler go ahead.
[26:07] All right i definitely have something i want to tell others it's great to see you on um x again stefan i haven't uh i remember you got shadow banned and then uh i saw your post randomly in my feed i'm like holy shit stefan stefan's on uh twitter again he's done called a lazarus anyway with i guess that would make uh that would make uh elon jesus but go ahead yeah welcome back i love your content and um um it's also one of the reasons why i got into crypto i work full-time and absolute crypto not now mostly on the technology side but i encourage everyone to um watch stefan's uh presentation um bitcoin versus political power the Cryptocurrency Revolution. That was a very inspirational presentation for me. So that's my... My crypto origin story so thank.
[27:01] You i appreciate that.
[27:01] To to watch that um and ever since then too you know in crypto it gets really saturated with people who are you know um like wind moon and all this other stuff but um i'm.
[27:13] Sorry what wind moon what do you mean what does that mean.
[27:16] Oh wind moon like when when is my meme token gonna price appreciate uh it's like.
[27:21] Oh oh sorry so when when money and when the thing goes to the moon okay i'm sorry i thought you said wind moon i'm like earth wind and fire or in crypto okay.
[27:30] Honestly i often use urban dictionary sometimes when i see some of these acronyms the crypto remember.
[27:36] It's been a while for me but anyway what's uh what's on your mind.
[27:39] Yeah not much i'm i i would just say um you know people check that out because uh crypto market has grown a lot it'll be nice if we have people who still care about the values of Bitcoin. Because I know, Stefan, you said something that I kind of agree with. You said capitalism kind of like two things where it's, very simplified too, because people say, people construe things with capitalism which aren't really capitalistic, like the Federal Reserve Bank and a lot of the systems that exist now. But I think he said capitalism was two things where it was like private property and enforcement of contracts or in other words, just keep your promises and don't invade my home. I feel like if Bitcoin did not have those values where, hey, not your keys, not your coins, or when it comes to programmable chains, that's where you get to realize, keep your promises, recap, trust, minimize, contract enforcement and stuff. But, yeah, that's why I'm here in this industry, and I think…, It's hard to explain the values of crypto sometimes. And what else? Yeah, it's hard to explain those values. I feel like if Bitcoin didn't have those values at all, no one would find it valuable.
[29:08] Hmm. Right.
[29:09] It needed, or even when it comes to smart contract programmable chains, if the value is to keep your promises in a trust-minimized way, I don't need the government with a bunch of guns to trigger this value exchange, for example, when a certain event is met.
[29:34] But I always find that incredible, and I always encourage people to recognize the value of crypto.
[29:42] And in a way, it's kind of like a capitalistic, I don't know, those two principles of capitalism you mentioned a while ago was just private property enforcement of contracts. I feel like that's why kind of the whole blockchain industry exists and has a value to offering in the first place. If Bitcoin was just inflationary nonsense ran by one guy, people wouldn't find it as a store of values today.
[30:13] Yeah, no, I appreciate that. And for those, of course, who want to get into Bitcoin, there's lots of great people who are talking about it, Michael Saylor, Andreas Antonopoulos, and lots of other great people. And of course, I did a presentation, I did original presentation on Bitcoin 2014, and I updated it last year. So I hope people will check that out. And thank you so much for dropping by. Congratulations on getting into a very cool industry. All right, short and long. What's on your mind? I'm all ears.
[30:41] Oh, okay. Stef, wow, this is amazing. I can't believe I'm finally speaking to you.
[30:48] Believe it.
[30:51] I've been watching, I just want to say I've been watching you ever since you had a formal debate with this man who made the Zeitgeist movies.
[31:01] Oh, Peter Joseph.
[31:03] Peter Joseph, yeah.
[31:05] Wow.
[31:06] Yeah, I've been watching you ever since then.
[31:09] That's cool. That's very cool. I appreciate that. So what's on your mind?
[31:15] Um, I, I, I just wonder if there's any, I mean, like, have you seen the, uh, what happened in Britain with children being, um, um, aborted at any time in the pregnancy?
[31:32] Yeah. Yeah. Up to birth, right?
[31:35] Yeah. Yeah. Up to birth. Yeah, that's crazy. So, I mean, what do you think that, people should do from there? Because obviously that's pure evil. Right?
[31:56] I mean, it's a little bit uneasy when people say, like, what should people do? I mean, it sounds like almost sinister, if that makes sense. So, yeah. Yeah, I mean, it sounds almost sinister. I'm not saying that's you. I'm just saying that there is that sort of aspect to it. So, as far as what people should do, I think just have a conversation. Have a conversation about this as a whole.
[32:22] And you know if you look at america since roe v wade which was largely a scam operation of the woman who was originally um the the abortion uh test case turned against it was lied to and so on so it was a bit of a scam that whole thing but it's 62 million babies you.
[32:41] Know it's sick.
[32:43] Like six this is like 10 plus holocaust this is a this is more than a world war two and a half, that is you know that is that is uh six world war ones now i get it's not quite the same as taking an adult and blowing them up with shrapnel or mustard gas in their lung sacks but, that is a lot of not people that is a lot of not people go ahead sorry so.
[33:10] Like isn't it though right when we're talking about killing a life inside whether it's inside of a mother or not.
[33:19] No, no, I'm sorry. And I was unclear about that. So let me revisit what I said. So what I mean is that it's not vivid for people. It's a quiet little suction in a back room or whatever it is going to be, right? And it's a disposal and a recycling and it's not like a guy getting blown up or gunned down or hanging off razor wire or something like that. It's a quiet, silent slaughter, so to speak. And it's not vivid and it's not dramatic. And it is something that, and again, I'm not trying to put all women into one giant lump of estrogen sameness, but what I will say is that, boy, oh boy, does that seem to be, I mean, it is recorded in America as women's number one concern, access to abortion. It is the biggest thing in the universe. Sorry, go ahead.
[34:15] And it's just kind of like, why? You know? Like, why is that your number one concern? You're, if you're, I mean, I would put it as if, if you're not in any sort of danger from being, from being pregnant in the first place, and, you know, you, you are one of those women who gets a pregnant, who gets an abortion just because of the fact that it's inconvenient to your life. And like, why is that the main concern amongst most women? It's 40%. You know what I mean? Which is almost half, which is ghoulish.
[34:53] Sorry, 40% is referring to, is that the 40% to whom it is the number one 40% of women?
[35:00] Yes, exactly.
[35:02] Well, would you like the answer? And I would hesitate if I were in your shoes to say, well, it's an inconvenience. Like a human life and a baby is more than an inconvenience if you want to raise the kid well. So I can tell you why I think that, oh yeah, it's more than an inconvenience. I mean, I've been a stay-at-home dad. I mean, it changes your whole life. I didn't write books for 10 years because I was busy raising my daughter, right? It's more than just It's like, oh, man, I got to, oh, I left my phone at the dry cleaner, so I'll have to go back. That's an inconvenience.
[35:33] You know, it's a major responsibility.
[35:35] Yeah, massive. It's the biggest thing that can happen. Yeah, it's the biggest thing that can happen in your life. And it's more time consuming than any other single thing you'll do outside of work. Sorry, you were going to say?
[35:45] I guess I have a different perspective on it just because I would love to have a child. Me and my wife have had two miscarriages so far.
[35:52] Oh, I'm so sorry. And isn't it awful when you're desperate to try and have a child watching two things? People get abortions and people be terrible parents or people not even try to become parents. Yeah, no, it's horrible. It's horrible. Well, I can break out the mystery, if you like, and I can tell you why some women or a lot of women are so concerned about abortion. And I think there's a lot of reasons, but I'm, you know, I'm the philosophy guy, so I've got to try and boil it down to just a few. So, one of the most important ones is lust. Now, in the past, women would not provide sex until marriage. At least, that was generally the ideal. And if you were found to be having sex before marriage, you would get a shotgun wedding and so on, like 30% of 19th century Wild West weddings, like you can tell from the date of birth, that the woman was already pregnant. So, if...
[36:53] Abortion is off the table and by i'm not talking about medical emergencies life of the mother i'm talking about you know that 97 or 95 percent of of or 90 percent of what women choose abortion for which is it's just there's no incest there's no rape there's no medical necessity it's a just a choice it's a choice so if you take that off the table then women have to focus their lust, on men who will be good providers and husbands, and most importantly, fathers for their children. They don't get to straddle the tattooed motorcycle guy with the lopsided grin and the chiseled jaw and the steel blue eyes, right, who's exciting for them, right? And I understand that. I mean, it's like the hot crazy matrix works the other way, hot stable matrix for guys as a whole. So they have to say, okay, look, there's lust, and then there's what's best for myself, my family, my children, and my future. And it's the same thing with guys. There's some hot-to-truck girl, you know, maybe she's kind of unstable, and, you know, for a lot of guys, unstable women are great in bed, because they kind of have to compensate for their personalities, and you have to say, whoa, whoa, hang on. I don't want to get dicknapped here. I'm going to have to really think with the big head. so if you say to women if you get pregnant and.
[38:20] Then what? Right? So the whole problem, of course, and the reason for why we have these big brains is because the children take forever to raise, right? I mean, I don't know if you've seen these videos, like a baby horse, a foal is born and can stagger and walk around within a couple of hours or a day or two at most. Human beings take over, yeah, a giraffe, human beings take over a year to learn how to walk. Our brains don't hit full maturity, females early 20s, males mid-20s. I've heard some arguments about that, but that's sort of the last data that I saw that was really credible. That was a quarter century. It's insane how long. But you know, that which is more complex takes the longest to develop. So, the human brain is the most complex thing. It takes the longest to develop. Now, if you say to women, you can't have an abortion, then they are really nervous about having sex. And that interferes with lust. Right? It would be like if there was a magic pill and you could eat anything you wanted and if you gained weight, you took a pill and all of your excess weight was gone, that would have a huge effect on your eating, wouldn't it?
[39:35] You'd eat whatever you want because there was a magic pill that could take away all the negative effects of bad eating and abortion is a magic procedure that takes all the negative effects away from irresponsible sex, which means you better start getting bloody responsible. And then the issue is, you know, one of the reasons why, women offer up sex instead of virtues. Because they say, oh, I want an alpha. Oh, I wanted this and that and the other. It's like, yeah, okay. So let's say that the alpha is a guy of high intelligence and ambition and success and motivation, all these kinds of things, right? Well, if you want to have more than just sex with an alpha male, you have to be an alpha female, which means you have to be well-read, you have to be presentable, you have to be positive in his.
[40:26] Business associations you have to be the kind of woman that other men are going to envy because you know men work on status and their wives have a lot to do with that status so if you want to, have sex with an alpha male in traditionally you had to be an alpha female right you can't be really overweight you can't have a lot of tattoos you can't have face piercings you can't have weird hair you can't have you know even even like obviously fake boobs i know the jeff bezos thing or whatever, right? But you have to be kind of classy and you have to be well-read. You have to be able to hold a good conversation. You have to be able to run a great dinner party and you have to be a really great homemaker and all of that kind of stuff, right? So if you want as a woman to bed an alpha male, you have to be an alpha female and the bedding, if it's going to occur, going to bed together, is going to happen on the way to the altar. But women want sex with the alpha males, but they don't want to bring alpha quality. So all they do is they bring sex to the table. And then they can, you know, a woman who's a six can get an eight, a woman who's a seven can get a 10, only on the basis of sex, not on the basis of any permanent arrangement, right? So last thing I'll say is that women are as subject, maybe not quite as much, but quite a bit subject to the same principles and disastrous and temptations of lust. And if you say to women, you, You can only have sex with men who'll be good fathers.
[41:52] Well, they then have to be good mothers because men who are good fathers are looking for women who are good mothers and more than just a set of spread legs and a nod. They're looking for moral qualities, not just a place to dump their semen. And so do women feel confident enough that they are bringing moral qualities to the table to the point where they can win over and keep a quality man, a quality father, a quality provider, and a quality husband. Well, if you take abortion away, women have to become, again, not all women, of course, right? But if you take abortion away, then women can't subsidize sexual activity with sex. They actually have to get commitment from a quality man. And that's really alarming for a lot of women because sexuality is a kind of drug and male attention is a kind of drug, and keeping the love of a virtuous person is a whole lot harder than gaining the sperm of an unstable man so i i would say that has a lot to do with it but i'm certainly happy to hear your thoughts as well well.
[42:56] Yes um i i was uh gonna go i was gonna go into something else but i i had a different thought.
[43:05] How much of accountability do you think that the atheistic sphere has had in the collapse of the West and in bringing us to this point where we are seeing this a heinous abortion law and these are just absolutely just um the uh the amoral um facet of you know regular everyday people well i think that is that is um that has birthed that has birthed um this uh this you know want and need for attention of of men uh by women and and you know Just the 18 million men who have an OnlyFans subscription and the 10% of 18 to 24-year-olds who have an OnlyFans account, women who have an OnlyFans account. Well, it's not small in that, of course, for I would say 90%. Sorry, what's 90%? The the contribution of the atheistic sphere to what we have going on now.
[44:21] Right. Now, it's not small, of course, because you probably know even better than I do. Christianity says that life begins at conception and the soul is in the body and murdering the fetus is killing a human being. Right. So so that's the answer. Now, the church, though, and I'm going to use just this big nomenclature, church, although I recognize that there's a lot of denominations, but I'm just going to say the church in the West as a whole, Christianity as a whole, the church faced a massive challenge, of course, starting in the 16th, 17th century. I'm not really talking about the Reformation or the Protestant fragmentation of Christendom. I'm talking about science.
[44:58] So the church had been in control of human progress for, I mean, 1,500 years. I mean, I'm just going to give a nice millennia and a half, although, of course, it's arguable on the fringes, right? And the church—I'm just talking about the West, so just bear with me, right? So the church faced the fact that science was contributing far more to the alleviation of human suffering and the progress of the human spirit than the church had maintained and i know it's unfair to say well just the dark ages and i get there were the saracen uh harassings and and two million europeans were taken into slavery by muslims and all kinds of terrible stuff and there was the there was uh the collapse of the collapse of the roman empire and then of course in the early Middle Ages, you got hit with successive waves of the Black Death. Thanks, China. It's long like that's the last time that's going to happen.
[45:51] Which, of course, people conveniently forget about the Saracen.
[45:55] Yes. And in fact, not even many people know that Saracen is the same as Muslim. Anyway.
[46:00] Yeah, exactly.
[46:01] So, the church faced a real competitor in two things. Number one, science. Number two, the free market.
[46:13] And science and the free market did not come out of the church. I'm not saying that the church was... Tom Wood schooled me on this some years back about how pro-science a lot of church elders were. But it did not fundamentally come out of the church science and it did not neither did the free market and science and the free market have been the two and the free market by far the most have been the greatest beneficiaries i'm sure you've seen these graphs of like human income and wealth from like the dawn of history until like you know 200 years ago it's just flatlined and then goes through the roof so the problem is that science materialism empiricism and the free market combined to produce the greatest forward thrusting of human progress the planet has ever seen. And it's not even close. It wasn't even like, we are tens of thousands of times wealthier than the people were when the church was in control. So that is a big challenge. The way that I, of course, have tried to bridge that challenge is to say, well, given that the progress of science and the free market and, of course, 20th century medicine, given the benefits that that has all produced, which does not come out of the Bible, does not come out of Christianity directly, those benefits have...
[47:35] Delegitimize Christian virtues, Christian ethics. And by that, I don't mean that Christian ethics are delegitimized. But if you say, if you're a doctor, right, and you say, I've got the cures for what ails you, and you don't really cure that many people, or many people stay sick, and then some other doctor hangs up shop, hangs up his shingle across from you, and he's healing, you know, 10 or 100 or 1000 times more people than you, your business is challenged. And I'm sorry to put it in such crass terms, but I just want to look at the general mechanics about these things. So, when the church faced the overtaking and elevation of the human condition through science, the free market, and 20th century medicine, people were no longer in particular believing in the virtues and values of the church. Now, atheists then ditched morality to a large degree along with theology, and that is the demonic aspect of modern atheism, which I know personally because, of course, I came up with a rational proof of secular ethics. And I'm not a complete unknown. I was the biggest intellectual in the world by some measures for quite some time and had good inroads within the atheist community and debated. And I debated atheists. UPB was debated. I debated atheists regarding UPB, my approach to ethics, and they hated it. They hated it more than Christians, which is an amazing thing to me. A rational proof of ethics was questioned and accepted and.
[49:02] Christians were interested in a curious and non-hostile fashion, but atheists just hated it. And it's like, okay, that's kind of demonic, bro.
[49:09] Yeah, I think I remember that.
[49:10] So I think it has a lot to do with, and certainly atheism has a lot to do with it, but the church, and I'm not sure exactly how, but the church needed to find a way to bring ethics into the realm of science, reason, and evidence. And the church was unable to do that, or unwilling to do that, perhaps due to the limitations of needing faith. But philosophy has to be the way forward. Materialism, right, the body without a soul has not worked. The soul without a body has not worked in focusing on the afterlife and faith and theology alone. It is my hope, of course, that philosophy can do the job that religion and amoral atheism has failed at. It is, of course, my goal to hope to step into the breach and heal this wound through which civilization is currently bleeding out, if that makes sense.
[50:06] Um i think that um that religion well okay so let's see here um i think i think i heard you say it once uh long ago years ago 2015 something like that um that you know um what atheism did was pick out the philosophy of the church, but it left a vacuum because it left nothing there.
[50:43] Well, it left the moral void.
[50:44] Yeah, exactly. Which is a moral vacuum, exactly.
[50:48] So religion is focused on the ought, and science is focused on the is. And of course, as Hume has famously argued, you can't get an ought from an is, which you can't get morals from atoms. And so atheism just gave up on that, and Hume did a huge disservice. And I've obviously believed that I have solved the Humean is-ought dichotomy, which we don't have to get into right now. But when Hume became very popular as a Scottish philosopher, when Hume became very popular, You can't get an ought from an is. Well, as society moved more from the ought of religion to the is of science, the study of matter and energy and the relationships there on, well, the ought, the morals, the vision, the purpose all got lost. And people carved apart the universe looking for virtues, could find none, and then became amoral. And of course, it is my goal as a philosopher, again, to sort of heal that. Sorry, is there anything else? We've got a whole whack of people. Is there anything else that you want to mention? Great questions,
[51:41] By the way, I really do appreciate you calling in.
[51:43] No, of course. I just wanted to finish this up by saying that I've always wanted to speak to you, especially when you were on YouTube and we were going through the whole migrant crisis thing. I remember, I think you did a speech by Winston Churchill. And yeah, I think you remember the video that I'm talking about. I do, I do, I do. It was impressive. And I just remember that whole point being such a pivotal part in society because of the fact that, I mean, that's when you actually got taken off of YouTube. You and Lauren Southern, I think, as well as a few other people. Yeah, that was a lot going on. Yeah, exactly. you and red ice radio.
[52:41] Well i mean for for the banning too because i was focusing on the human origins of covid that was a big deal because the reason why the lockdowns happened was because covid was perceived to be of natural origin if something of natural origin has only got a toe hold in the infection of human beings you can slow the spread if something is engineered from the ground up to infect human beings, then there's no, absolutely zero point to lockdowns, that there's no point to it whatsoever. So, all right, well, listen, thanks very much. You're welcome to call back anytime. I really do appreciate the questions and I hope I did some justice in the short time that we had. Zach attack. Unmute, my friend, and I'm all ears. Like a dumbo.
[53:29] Oh, thanks for having me back on. Oh, look, sorry. Did we already talk or were you? We did, we did, but I sort of just was just rifting on what you were sort of talking about in terms of the subject you were talking about, but could we talk about something else? But keep it brief.
[53:45] Because I've got a bunch of people, so I apologize. You look familiar, but I have the memory span of your average goldfish. Sorry, go ahead.
[53:52] Okay, so I'm a really long-term listener, so no mercy, all good. I got my doctor's results back last week because we're trying to have children, and we did all the blood tests and everything like that. Um uh it came back that my testosterone levels was half of what the minimum was needed to be and it's just a gut punch gut punched sorry.
[54:18] The minimum of what you mean for a sperm production or something.
[54:21] Or the healthy range of just and.
[54:23] Your wife's fsh is good and there's no issues there.
[54:26] No issues there no okay all right.
[54:28] So you are low on on the t.
[54:30] Yes yes okay and and i'm not not just more from your experience of what kind of effect that could have on me. Like we were talking about, um, you know, asserting my expertise with, with clients, you know, could, could, could some of these things, uh, uh, how, how could they present themselves in my day to day? Or, or is it just, uh, obviously I'm looking at how to, how to correct. Low in tea. I just want to do it.
[55:02] Look, I can only talk about, I mean, somebody doesn't really matter. Let's just call him Bob. And yeah, Bob had some anxiety. This is a guy I know. Bob had some anxiety. I think he went to go and get, I think it was DHEA or something like that, which I think is some sort of testosterone supplement. And he said that his anxiety lessened and so on. And I, of course, have always been aware that I really need to check my T-levels and do what I can to keep it up because it's really tough as a man to be assertive in the absent or the low part of testosterone. And again, none of this is any kind of medical or nutritional advice. I want to make sure that people don't think that I'm overstepping any expertise that I don't have. But yeah, I think it's worth getting checked. obviously you've got checked and uh you know as far as things that you can do uh obviously talk to a a doctor or a nutritionist and get into the kind of things that will help and i think you'll be quite surprised referral.
[56:02] For that for specialists and that sort of thing because he said the doctor sort of said it at like 31 it's quite low to have such low teeth um and i just wondered if it could be also environmental like i didn't grow up with a father i was raised by my grandmother and a single mother um.
[56:19] And it's funny because i have i have a memory of and maybe with ai people can do this now i have a memory of reading that being raised by a single mother lowers testosterone and then i looked for it again some years later and i couldn't find any good confirmation so we'll leave that but i and i certainly think it doesn't help i certainly think it does not help at all so um yeah i think you'll be quite surprised at what you think of as your personality and how much it is dependent on things like hormones and testosterone levels and all of that. So I hope that you, I wish you the very best and, you know, drop me a line if you can, host at freedomain.com and let me know how it's going forward and what worked for you.
[56:57] I mean, my wife and I would really love to do a call-in show with you and- Yeah.
[57:05] Oh, fantastic. Wait till your tea is up and then you can scream at me. All right. I appreciate that.
[57:09] Okay. Thank you.
[57:10] Thanks, man. I appreciate that. And Christopher, we got people cycling in and out of here like the Assyria up and down like the Assyrian boy. All right. Christopher, if you want to unmute, what is on your mind, my friend?
[57:24] Hey, wow. This is surreal. It is a great honor to talk to you. Finally, I tried 10 years ago through your program. However, something got mixed up. I wasn't very good at articulating my problems. I'm your case example. I stumbled onto you because I was in a relationship with my wife, that ex-wife, that was the abusive thing, narcissist, typical profile. And I was like, oh, but she had me convinced I was the problem. So I started listening to you with all your remarks about you know the and it stems back it it folds out like i can follow my whole family lineage uh to where like abuse is like the cycle and whatnot um so that was really insightful and then it also got me uh seeing that i'm not the problem i was programmed to be accept the problem i also like the fact that you were like it's okay to get rid of toxic people even if it's your parents. I use that. I still talk to my mother. However, you know, it's tentative, but like the things you say were like, it woke me up. And I really wanted to thank you on that.
[58:36] Yeah. And I appreciate that. And just sort of very, very briefly, I mean, it's wild to me that people think that the moral law somehow carves around parents. And when the moral law should most apply to parents because they have the greatest power in your life when you were helpless and dependent. So, when people say, well, but the moral law bends around parents, respect their mother and their father no matter what. It's like, but that's not how the law works. I mean, if a father, let's say that a father...
[59:04] Is the getaway driver for his 17-year-old son who's violently robbing a bank. Do we say, well, we got to throw the 17 or 16-year-old kid in jail, but the father should get us scot-free? Heck, we might even give him a key to the city. We might give him a new Cadillac, right? Because he's the father. And it's like, no, we would actually be really even more upset at the father for drawing his still underage son into a life of crime. I mean, the law does not step around parents. In fact, the law holds parents to higher accountability. I don't go to jail if my neighbor doesn't feed his kid. But if the neighbor doesn't feed his kid, the neighbor goes to jail or at least receives some kind of visit or some kind of sanction. So there is a higher moral law for parents and the law and in society as a whole. And then when you talk about, well, if they're abusive, you don't have to spend time with them if they won't change, if they won't grow, if they won't heal, if they won't respect your voice or your arguments, and then just people lose their minds. And yet, the law, you know, it's like the old thing, well, they separate families and migrants, illegal aliens to separate families. And as Tom Hoonan has pointed out, it's like, That's all of the law. You know, some guy gets arrested for drunk driving. He goes to jail and the family is separated.
[1:00:20] Yeah, well, it's also an invisible shadow. It's a shadow on your life because what it did is it messed with my programming. So the reason I ended up with my ex is because I saw her as normal because both my parents were abusive physically and emotionally and the whole night. But were instilling righteous values into me. Love family uh life is thicker than or blood's thicker than water uh church religion all this stuff and i'm an audio visual learner so like reading it's not my perte uh but when i started listening to audiobooks and podcasts in fact that's how i stumbled on you as i was a truck driver um and so i i was i've listened to a lot of your content lots and lots of hours probably unhealthy amounts of hours or healthy unthinkable.
[1:01:11] There is only health and the more the better anyway sorry go ahead.
[1:01:15] No go ahead it's just that you know it is what it is but uh so i landed into the relationship and then this happened whatever uh and then i ended up with my abusive father and now uh he's dead and then i'm in new situations it's like a glorious little stew of nicety but I'm working through it. I'm looking at all this garbage as a new way to come up with this new concept of this grassroots program I call Roots. And I'm working on that diligently. Of course, I'm way backwards in time because I was a truck driver 12 years and I was a computer technician at one time. And so I knew all this stuff like the back of my hand, but now I'm having to pick it up. And it's a little bit more difficult than riding a bicycle because you're like, Oh God, what is all these like, I'm still, I'm learning this. Well, what was Twitter now X and it's like, well, how's it how to navigate and all that stuff. So I'm learning.
[1:02:12] And I appreciate that update. What happened with your parents? You said physically and verbally, what did they do when you were a kid?
[1:02:23] So I was the oldest of four younger brothers. And I was basically, so I suffered from what you call Peter Pan syndrome. I was a parent before I ever was a child. And then when I was...
[1:02:37] Hang on, hang on. What does that mean? What does that mean? You mean you took care of your brothers or you had a...
[1:02:42] Yeah, yeah, yeah. So they would be gone. They'd be gone doing odd jobs. And we lived off welfare, all this stuff. So they'd be doing odd jobs and whatever. Of course, when I got to age, then I'd help out. So I learned scrap metal. I was doing jobs. I was working since I was like seven, eight years old, like doing stuff. I mean, I'm from the time, you know, back when toys were made out of metal.
[1:03:00] So long dots taken out the week. Yeah.
[1:03:04] Like, you know, our fun times were, you know, throwing rocks at each other and their grenades or whatever. But yeah, so good times. Uh, your, you know, your playgrounds were made out of steel and the hot sun. Great times. Um, but yeah, so yeah, they're there. Uh, then, you know, I went to that, but there was, you know, I mean, excessive spanking, uh, the verbal thing was more of, um, a complacency thing. It wasn't necessarily like a, um, oh, you're no good. You're no, it was more like I got eyes behind my head, uh, like this. it's italitarian type.
[1:03:45] Yeah. I don't know. We had some kind of hiccup. So sorry, you were just saying that you were a parent before you were even an adult and we were talking about your early work and so on.
[1:03:54] Yeah. Yeah. So basically I've been working since I was eight. I got strong work ethic. I've always had that and whatnot, but I had a frailty because I didn't recognize evil people because I was raised by evil people. So I ended up with an evil person that was trying to tell me I was the problem but you know like i said thanks to your help i actually was able to uh you know walk the minefield and it wasn't easy it was not that easy at all.
[1:04:23] Right well and and what's your love life like at the moment.
[1:04:27] Oh it's absolutely horrible um i am uh currently dealing with the great thing of property tax issues because my dad didn't pay taxes for the past three years i own the house Wait.
[1:04:39] Wait, love life, love life What's your property taxes got to do with your love life?
[1:04:42] Oh, my love life If I misspoke, sorry I have no, I got divorced five years ago.
[1:04:46] Right And how's your love life at the moment?
[1:04:50] None, non-existent I'm, my love Why.
[1:04:54] Why, why non-existent?
[1:04:55] Because I'm more into purpose rather than relationship Okay I'm trying to build Do.
[1:05:03] You want to have, do you want to have kids?
[1:05:06] I already have a child uh my more uh no i'm too old for that okay yeah i'm i'm gonna be 49 this year so, that uh i that wouldn't be fair to the kid i i could not do that to someone you know okay got it so that that's out of the deck but yeah no i'm not looking for that.
[1:05:31] Right. Okay. Okay. Well, listen, I appreciate the update. I'm really sorry about what happened to you as a kid, but I'm really thrilled that you have, uh, that you have come out of it.
[1:05:41] My pleasure, man. Uh, all the best. Thanks, man.
[1:05:43] All right. Bye.
[1:05:45] James N1. That is a formal LinkedIn with a tie and everything profile, man. Uh, I feel I should, uh, explain to you what my five-year plans are and why I left my last job. James, you're up.
[1:05:56] Oh i'm up no way hey it's um i can't believe i got up hey it's a pleasure um i wanted to ask i know you're into the philosophy stuff but are you still in canada and given canada day is tomorrow, your thoughts on like where the country's heading i'm quite black-pilled as of late with the director of the country um but yeah just nice to have you back so i wanted to ask that question.
[1:06:25] Yeah, I mean, I hear what you're saying. I'm a free will guy, so I try not to make predictions about absolutes. Certainly, the trends are not great, for sure, to put it mildly. But you never know when someone's going to make a great speech, someone's going to wake people up. You never know when there's going to be a sort of collective awakening. I mean, who would have guessed that the trucker protests, the trucker convoy protests over COVID, which is really just about the most effective protests that have ever been staged outside of perhaps the american revolution and yeah i mean so who would have guessed i wouldn't have guessed that in particular that that was was going to occur so yeah i mean i try not to uh yeah i'll tell i'll tell you my basic sorry.
[1:07:11] When when when those protests happen it like rekindled my like desire to stay here prior to I was I was ready to go.
[1:07:21] Well and going ain't easy man leaving home ain't easy so I'll tell you my basic philosophy of this love to hear your thoughts and I'll keep mine brief because it's supposed to be a combo right so my basic philosophy goes something like this I try not to look down the road too much.
[1:07:36] I try not to figure out general trends too much. What I try to do is do as much good as I can every day, because that's the maximum I can do. I don't know that staring down five years, 10 years, what's it going to be like, other than general prep for life as a whole. I don't know that that's going to add to the good that I can do every day. So I talk to people online. I talk to people in person. I exchange ideas and arguments. I have a loving family. I parent, I think, fairly well. And so, this is the good that I can do in the time that I have. Now, if I do the maximum good, I mean, however you would measure that, I think it's, you know, you've got to pace yourself, right? So, if I do the maximum good that I can with the time that I have.
[1:08:23] Everything else is outside of my control. So, I try not to sort of look at long-term trends and where's this going to go and what's going to happen. First of all, nobody knows. And secondly, it can produce a kind of dread or you know the doom scrolling they call it sort of paralyzing anxiety or what's going to happen with this or what's going to happen with that and then and then if you have a negative experience from looking ahead and thinking it all just goes downhill then that reduces the amount of good that you can do in the day so i ration negative news for sure and i ration my inevitable desire which we all have to try and predict where the world is in five years or 10 years. I mean, nobody would have predicted AI. AI is going to transform so much in the world.
[1:09:10] And so, I don't know. I mean, I wouldn't have guessed, of course, a couple of years ago that Elon Musk was going to buy Twitter and restore my account. I don't know. I didn't know these things. So, I just aim to sort of keep my head down, do the maximum good I can on a day-to-day basis. And outside of that, I suppose you could say it's in God's, the collective's, or the universe's hands, if that makes sense.
[1:09:32] Yeah, it makes total sense. You can only really change in your locale or implement goodwill in your immediate family, colleagues, associates, etc. The idea that we can just change worlds, like naive. No, it makes sense. The only thing, again, Blackfield, but the one thing, a little shining light, is I was very pleased to see a lot of young men finally get engaged in the political arena. And young men are just young people being majority conservative between the three parties, the two left-wing parties and then the cons. I do have some hope, but, man, we've got to get these boomers off CBC. I don't know what to do, but it's great to have you.
[1:10:15] Well, thanks, man. I appreciate that. I appreciate that. And certainly the young people, especially the young men, are giving us, I think, a lot of hope. All right.
[1:10:25] Yeah. so does this mean you're back or not? Are you back actually posting in this? Yeah, I won't be long. Are you back? Are you doing stuff again or what?
[1:10:37] I'm not sure what your question is. I mean, we're talking on X and you're asking me if I'm back on X. What does this mean? Help me riddle this.
[1:10:46] I just haven't seen you. And, you know, I've always loved your content in the past.
[1:10:50] Well, I was banned.
[1:10:52] Well, welcome back.
[1:10:53] And then there was a while where I was mulling over coming back and my daughter made a good case. So I'm back. But yes, if I'm back on Twitter and I'm posting and hosting live spaces, it's fairly safe to assume that I'm back. I'm with you on that.
[1:11:09] No, all I want to say is, like, I really enjoyed your content in the past and welcome back. And yeah, man. And thanks for all the good thoughts.
[1:11:18] Well, I appreciate that. And thank you for coming back and thank you for holding your breath the whole time that I was gone. I'm sure it must be quite a relief.
[1:11:27] I'm interested in reading the online version of the future book. I wasn't sure if you just want to kind of talk about that or.
[1:11:38] I'm sorry you were garbling quite a bit there. You said that you were interested in my novel The Future?
[1:11:46] For sure yeah like I've listened to pretty much all of your audio books I have read recently read. I read your physical version of Almost and many other ones, but I was just wondering if you wanted to talk about the future, because it seems like you like that book. But it also seems it might help me. So what's that?
[1:12:10] I do like that book. So yeah, so just for those of you who don't know, I write a bunch of nonfiction books, and I've written a bunch of fiction books. There is just poor, there is revolutions, there is the god of atheists, there is almost, and then there are two novels that I wrote over the last couple of years in exile, so to speak, which was a novel called The Future, which is a science fiction book set 500 years in the future about a truly free society, and also a book called The Present, which is as society begins to collapse, how people handle it and what they do both morally and philosophically. So all of those books are available for free at freedomain.com slash books, and I hope you will check them out. My favorites in many ways is Almost, but I do like the future as well. So yeah, I'm all ears. What do you want to talk about with that?
[1:12:58] Oh, absolutely. That book, almost, holy crap, that was a great book for me. It was hard for me to read, I'll admit that, but it certainly was nothing like, I was reading, I was attempting to read Atlas Shrugged, I made it to around, like, whatever, around page 280, and it was just, you know, I, it just, anyway, so yeah, back to your books, you know, Ayn Rand didn't have any kids, so, you know, it's like, I don't really want to dive too deeply into her at this moment, so, but anyway, so yeah, so now with the, With the book Almost, it was your sort of metaphor prowess or what have you, the way you spoke of, especially the fact that you were able to make points that weren't in favor of just obeying ranked hypocrites in the military, etc. There's some quotes that kind of stick out to me that really helped me derangle certain emotional wounds from the past, if you will. So it's just, it's, it's very helpful that, that part, those parts of the, I mean, at least that part of the book was, uh, was particularly, uh, memorably helpful in many ways.
[1:14:05] So I always aim to, to have these electric brushes up with other souls of like intimate thoughts. Like the, the deeper I go within myself, the closer I think I connect with others through, through this kind of work. So, uh, okay. So I appreciate that. And, uh, obviously if you prefer it to Atlas Shrugged, well, for me, there's almost no higher praise than I really do appreciate that. And so, yeah, what was your thoughts on the book, The Future?
[1:14:30] Oh, the book, The Future, my thoughts on that were, there's a lot to fight. I mean, a lot to fight to, like, well, at least formally for me, there was a lot more to fight for that to be, excuse me for the background noise, but for that to have been, you know. I mean, for instance, that book has really helped me in ways I haven't currently defined, but, It's just, um, or maybe I don't even need to, but I think, um, yeah, like just, uh.
[1:15:03] I mean, for, I mean, it kind of, it kind of, a part of me was like, you know, if, you know, if someone on the internet who I, you know, I never met in person, whatever it can, if they can do all this good for me, what, what, you know, can I do good for others? At least to some extent to some people so um if if they're out there so you know kind of i just i it's sort of it's a kind of it's surprised especially the the imagery the imagery you have for the book is actually superb it really kind of it's like if someone is like you know it's it's to me at least you know my thoughts are if someone's plotting to be like or you know be some kind of like demonic force in some kind of sense just looking at the cover of that book is sort of like, whoa, like, holy crap. I'm, you know, it's kind of like, it's a way to sort of ward away the vampires. I really wish it was easy to get a physical version of that book.
[1:15:48] I've even tried to get, you know, like physical versions of my own books at this point. It's, it's, it's hard to, uh, to do, but yeah, but no, I, but in terms of, uh, the future, there, there's a lot of, there's, there's a lot of things. Uh, there's a lot of, there's a lot of ways that book will help. And I'm just glad, I'm so glad you're back on X can, you know, again, I've said this a lot of times. I just want to congratulate you for whatever you did to get, however you get back on X, whatever you talked about. I don't want to bring up rants and stuff, but yeah, no, the book, the future was, was, was, was very great. It's, it was very, for me, um, at the time, you know, like, especially when so many people were like getting high or doing degenerate things or like, you know, planning to, you know, do meth or whatever else, like, you know, like those, those kinds of people, like junkies and all that stuff. It's like, well, you can sort of, you know, try to fit in or, or you can just listen to a book. That's like, well, maybe something better will come forth about when after, you know, all the aftermath of whatever, uh, from this point. So, you know, it kind of helped me think about, and I started, you know, thinking about, you know, just like, well, what's the point of, what's the point of just collecting, you know, collecting, you know, government money or wherever else when, when all these problems are happening and I'm somewhat contributing to the problem.
[1:17:00] And so I started to look inwardly, started to think more about objectively what I can do in my own life instead of the past and all the history and trying to like correct this and that and whatever else. So it really helped me focus on, you know, like, yeah, my, the fact that I have my own descendant and the fact that I have to, uh, that I have, if I want to be a man of principle, I got to like, you know, it's not about theory and, you know, it's more about practice. So that's, that's sort of the stuff that I, it, it, it helped me, it helped me adjust the, uh.
[1:17:29] The, the, the, the way that I fight the excuses because before I used to fight the excuses by, uh, just, um, you know, like whatever, I'll just go for a walk or do something random or work out a lot and, or go for a run or something. Of course, I still work out. I still, I still, I still lift heavy, well, I lift heavy weights more than I, more than I do most of any other physical exercise. But, um, so yeah, so it's, it's just, I don't like, yeah, so, so the book, The Future is, it's just, uh, there's a, there's a, there's a lot of different ways. Um i mean i think i think anyone i just i'll just say this is the last thing i'll leave you with because i don't want to like you know i don't i don't know where everyone else is but uh in this conversation but uh so um the last thing i just want to say is that if you haven't at least listened to the book the future listen to it and everyone who who claims to you know love respect admire the you know the possibility the future in terms you know like childhood anti-childism at least like you know, that they actually, they're not just putting on a front, they'll actually listen to the book. And if they disagree with content and the book, they will vocalize, they will write about it, they will rebut it, they will review it, that's fine. We can have a conversation in the present. That's kind of the point of, I think anyway, I don't want to speak for Stefan, but I think that's kind of the point of chats like this is so that we don't have to just, you know, like all pretend each other is.
[1:18:54] You know, obsolete or something. So, um, yeah, so I'll just, I'll just leave it at that for now, but I just, you know, I sort of would like to just hear what your thoughts are on that.
[1:19:07] I appreciate that. And look, it's, it's completely wonderful to me as a writer that the work that I've done has had practical impact in your life. Like I think of a lot of the novels that I've read and they're entertaining and they're engaging and they give me insights and have cool characters, great dialogue. And this is not to diss any other writers, but one of the reasons that I wrote books was I was really frustrated at the lack of practicality in people's novels. How can you actually use this information to become a better person? And I don't just mean more in touch with people and more open and intimate. I mean, like moral. You can become a moral, a morally better person. And so, we are naturally drawn to grand stories, right? If you think of superhero movies, and I'm always a sucker for a Superman movie, God help me. But we're always drawn to these very large narratives, but those large narratives tend to dwarf us.
[1:20:07] You can hear me or you cannot hear me. So, my goal as a writer was to give people practical applications. And drawing people in with grand themes is really important, right? So, of course, in my novel Revolutions, there's the lead up to the Russian Revolution. In my novel Just Poor, there's the Agricultural Revolution, big grand movements of capital and labor and people. And of course, in my novel Almost, this is a German family and a British family from World war one to world war two massive span my novel the future of course is uh an evil politician who's frozen uh comes to life in the future and is put on trial it's like it's all the vengeance that we want against corrupt politicians in the here and now but we had to wait 500 years to get it and also a very controversial use of violence in the protection of children called the angels which you can read about in the novels, very, very important stuff. And obviously, some of it's quite shocking, but all at least in my mind, morally defensible. So, in all of my novels, though, I'm looking at the very early origins of the larger themes in the world. Because we can't fix the larger themes in the world directly, but we can improve people's childhoods. We can improve parenting.
[1:21:35] So even in a huge continent-spanning novel that's like basically three novels called Almost, it comes back to childhood.
[1:21:46] And in my novel The Future, you can't get a free world until you fix abusive parenting, and the fixing of abusive parenting is itself quite brutal, and that's important, and generally it would be, right? So, I do want big grand themes. They're exciting. They're exhilarating, but I also want the details in how we live and in particularly how we parent and how that influences, right? So, there is, there's no particular spoilers, there's a very evil character in my novel, The Future, and his evil is very hard to understand until you learn about his childhood. Now, this is not to say it's all determinism, there are still choices to be made, but the great evils in the world come out of the small evils in the home, or rather to say, the great evils in the home produce all the evils in the world.
[1:22:47] And that really is the goal of what it is that I'm aiming to achieve.
[1:22:51] And the fact that people have read my novels, even something as abstract and futuristic as my novel, The Future.
[1:22:59] And have found practical, useful applications out of it, is exactly what I'm looking for. So, I thank you for that feedback. You can get these books, of course, at freedemand.com slash books. They're free, and I hope that you will avail yourself of them. Honestly, just give it a try. Give it a try. Listen to the first few minutes. Listen to the first five or ten minutes of one of my novels and see. I actually just recorded a chapter of my new novel, which I'm working on at the moment, when I can, and I will be putting that out so that you can get a sense of the kind of writing that I'm doing now, which is, I'm always trying something different and new with every book. It's how I keep myself interested, and I think how I keep.
[1:23:44] My creative juices flowing. So, thanks everyone for dropping by. I really do appreciate it, and I'm sorry if you had any technical issues hearing, but of course, it's all recorded here locally, at least my part. So, freedomain.com slash donate to help out the show. I really would appreciate that enormously, humbly, gratefully, and deeply. And also you can go to fdrurl.com slash locals to sign up for a subscription. And through that, you get access to just some really wonderful and amazing goodies. We've trained a whole bunch of different AIs on, you know, thousands of hours and hundreds of pages of my material. It's multilingual. So if English isn't your first language, you can still get the benefits of the philosophical approach that I take through the AIs, 12 hours on the history of the French Revolution and the meaning behind it. There is a 22-part History of Philosophers series, which is some of my greatest work and hundreds of premium shows that are a little bit too spicy for the mainstream. So I hope you will check that out at fdrurl.com slash locals. All right, my friends, thank you for a glorious afternoon of philosophical chatting, and we will talk to you Wednesday night for a Wednesday Night Live. All the best. Bye.
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