0:00 - Welcome to My Birthday Month
24:00 - Exploring Freedom and Responsibility
48:00 - The Burden of Parental Indifference
54:17 - Reclaiming Your Power
1:01:37 - The Struggle with Self-Discipline
1:03:33 - The Laziness of Abuse
1:06:55 - The Urge to Fix Parents
1:09:44 - Understanding Childhood Abuse
1:13:57 - The Weight of Misinformation
1:19:35 - Reckoning with Fear-Mongering
1:23:47 - The Shift in Women's Rights
1:39:08 - The Impact of Abortion Discussions
1:46:29 - The Value Without Subsidies
1:59:14 - The Lies of Divorce
2:02:12 - Closing Thoughts and Donations
This episode dives deep into a range of complex issues surrounding personal relationships, societal values, and the ethical dilemmas of parenting and autonomy. We tackle some tough questions about the nature of libertarianism, specifically around open borders, and the impact of the welfare state on immigration. I challenge the notion that freedom is the cornerstone of libertarian ethics, arguing instead that property rights play a crucial role. The discussion reflects on how immigration has evolved over time, with immigrants now often seeking government benefits rather than the previously sought opportunities for freedom.
I share my personal insights as a parent, emphasizing the importance of guiding children through the lessons learned from our own mistakes. We delve into the topic of hypocrisy in parenting, acknowledging how renewing our own experiences can be beneficial for our children. I reinforce the idea that the essence of parenting lies in transferring accumulated wisdom, allowing the next generation to avoid repeating the same errors while also accepting that they will forge their own paths.
The conversation segues into the broader implications of relationships and how we manage them, particularly when faced with familial indifference. I discuss the challenge of connecting with parents who demonstrate emotional neglect, and the heavy burden placed upon children who seek affection and validation from distant or uninvolved family members. The pain of wanting to repair these relationships sometimes leads to a futile pursuit of approval from those who are unwilling to change.
As we grapple with the complexities of human relationships, I invite listeners to consider the implications of autonomy and choice, particularly in the context of modern debates surrounding issues like abortion. I reflect on the societal pressures that inform personal choices and the unfortunate detachment that can arise in interpersonal dynamics. This branching discussion on bodily autonomy touches on deep-rooted fears and societal expectations that shape individual behaviors and choices.
Throughout this episode, I maintain a focus on the harsh realities of contemporary relationships while urging listeners to consider their own values and beliefs. The conversation is both introspective and critical, pushing us to evaluate the connections we have with ourselves and others—and ultimately, how we can foster more genuine, impactful, and loving relationships in our lives.
Tune in for a thought-provoking exploration of ethics, autonomy, and the fundamental nature of love and responsibility in our lives.
[0:00] All right. Good evening, everybody. Welcome to my birthday month. FreeDomain.com slash donate to help out the show. Much, much, much, much, much, much appreciated. I know, I know, I know, I know, I know. All right. Let's get to your questions. I'm not even doing an intro. I'm not even doing an intro. So there. But yes, you can donate on the app. Support the show. Please, please don't forget to share PeacefulParenting.com. All right. Are the open borders libertarians making the mistake of thinking freedom is the foundation of the libertarian ethics as opposed to property rights? Well, open borders libertarians are not recognizing the immense draw of the welfare state. In the past, people came to the West for freedom, and now a lot of times they come for free stuff. It's kind of a different equation, right?
[0:58] And of course, in the past, so in the distant past, they came for free stuff, sorry, for freedom. And then there was sort of an intermediate period. Of course, immigration in America was shut down for about 60 years.
[1:10] And this is when America went through periods of immense growth. See, if you don't have a lot of immigration, wages go up because there's a shortage of workers. Now, there's a lot of people who don't want wages to to go up for a variety of reasons and so they like to bring people in to keep wages down you know nothing nothing too too shocking there but of course there was a period when immigration was opened back up when you had to wend your way through this byzantine lower intestine flow of paperwork in order to get say to the west and that's not really the case anymore and now people are like they're not even just coming for free stuff they get you know loaded up cards twenty $25,000 free money to buy a house. They get a snap EBD in particular. And so it is not a situation of meritocracy. It is not, it's simply free stuff and, and paid stuff. So it's a different situation than really it was in the past. So it's just not, Not really much of an understanding with regards to the open borders libertarians. They don't sort of recognize how much immigration has changed. All right.
[2:27] Bought another copy of your book, Real-Time Relationships. Thanks for your great work. You're welcome. Thank you for purchasing it. Purchasing it. I appreciate it. How do you reconcile to a child that you recommend doing something the opposite of what you did, especially when it's a lot of the choices that you made?
[2:44] Well, every parent faces that. I mean, we want our children, of course, to learn from our mistakes. We want our children to learn from our experiences, right? So, one of the things that you could say to a child is, if I burn myself as a child, if I burned myself as a child, would it be crazy for me to tell you not to burn yourself? Right if i if i painfully burnt my hand by putting my hand in a fire when i was a kid i grew up i have kids and i say to my kid hey you probably shouldn't uh you probably shouldn't put your hand in a fire that would make sense right and you can sort of go from there and say okay well let's say that uh instead of saving my money or investing my money when i was a kid Thank you for the tip. What I did was I just blew it all on candy and I had cavities and I got overweight and couldn't run up the stairs and it was just bad. Should I say to you, maybe save your money and don't spend it all on candy, right? There's nothing wrong with that, right? So the whole purpose, and you say to a kid, look, the whole purpose of culture and of parenting and of human knowledge is so that people don't have to keep making the same mistakes over and over and over again.
[4:06] You don't have to invent your own equations. You don't have to invent your own language. You don't have to invent your own spelling. You don't have to invent your own piping. And it's all knowledge that has accumulated.
[4:18] And so the purpose of civilization is to accumulate knowledge so that the next generation doesn't have to make the same stupid mistakes. Maybe they can make different stupid mistakes, but just not the same ones, that's all. I don't mind if my daughter makes her own mistakes, I just don't want her to make the same mistakes that I did, right? So I dated around too much when I was younger, so I would say that's a bad idea as a whole. It's not a good idea. year it's not good for your heart it's not good for your pair bonding and it makes you feel like you're doing something with your life when you're actually just spiraling and spinning in circles, so yes and well you did it it's like yeah yeah yeah yeah you know you know what else i did was i made some money which would you like to inherit that i don't mean like dangle it but it's like you're going to inherit my money you're going to inherit some of my mistakes i'll try to warn you about them and you're going to inherit my wisdom just as I inherited things from my... So there's a sort of pass down of the...
[5:19] Of the wisdom that is accumulated. So, you know, if you smoked when you were younger and you'd tell your kids don't smoke and they come across a picture of you smoking, they say, well, that's kind of hypocritical, isn't it? It's like, no, that's me telling you. I mean, I remember when I was in theater school, there was a guy who was starting to take up smoking and one of the smokers, it was the director, oh, he was in the directing program, sat him down and said, okay, you're going to go down this path of smoking. Let me tell you what it's going to be like. You know, you're going to, every 15, 20 minutes, You're going to have to try and find a place to go smoke, and you're going to have to stand outside of the cold, and you're going to be annoying to people, and your car is going to smell like hell, and you're going to smell like cigarettes, and you have to spend $500 to $700 to $1,000 a month on your cigarettes, and you're going to be short of breath, and your teeth are going to turn yellow, and your house is going to turn yellow. And like just telling him, if you go down the road that I'm going down and get addicted to cigarettes, things get pretty bad pretty quickly. And did he, I mean, would it make much sense to say, well, you're a smoker. It's like, yeah, that's how I know what I'm talking about. I am, in fact, a smoker. And that's how I know what I'm talking about. Right?
[6:37] All right. right don't forget tiktok.com forward slash at free domain.com tiktok.com slash at free domain.com i will throw it in the chat here but please go to subscribe and keep all of that stuff right.
[6:58] Alright, let me get to your other questions. I am, of course, I'm going to check questions over on Rumble as well. Paul went out for Candace Owens on YouTube, got demonetized quite tragically. You know i go back and forth right so it's funny i i go back and forth on a lot in fact i'm writing my new book, called dissolution i'm writing my new book to come to a final answer a final answer.
[7:32] About whether people are villains or victims right so i have this thing, sometimes in my call-in shows i dislike a particular caller but then i find out about that person's history and i'm like oh sympathy sympathy replaces any sort of friction or conflict that i might have in my own mind if you know enough about people does their villain narrative simply become an origin story are they just dominoes knocked over by the past i have been driving myself crazy back and forth and round and round for about 40 years, on this question, and I'm going to work it out in this novel. It's going to be a great book. It's going to be, I've had like 50 pages of notes already on the characters and situations, and it is going to answer the question, are people villains or are they victims? Are they victims of their history, simply acting it out without free will to some degree, or are they villains with choices so i'm gonna work that out because i'm kind of tired of not having the answer all right yeah so yeah one of the so candace owens uh has been demonetized uh on on youtube.
[8:41] And you know it's i'm of two minds right part of me is a lot of sympathy because i've been through that but the other part of me is like well she didn't say much when i did so um you But isn't that kind of how they get you? They get you to betray each other in little ways, and then nobody stands up for anyone else.
[9:03] All right. Tipped and all. Let me just make sure I get to the questions.
[9:12] Yeah, spoiler. It's not really a spoiler, but I'm writing for the first time in reverse. Verse so the beginning of the book is the end the end of the book is the beginning because i want to trace back all of the decision all the little decisions that lead to catastrophe um because that's where free will is in the little decisions that lead one way or another or not the big disasters that happen at the end of those roads so all right let's see here.
[9:44] My mom and dad divorced when i was little he is a psychiatrist and basically very rarely visited me or contacted me until he remarried he married a depressed patient of his really, no i don't think so i i am no expert on this but isn't and psychiatrists not supposed to date their patients let alone marry them maybe i saw in some places there's like a couple of years if you You haven't been the person's psychiatrist for a couple of years. Maybe that's okay, but I don't know about that. All right, so he married a depressed patient of his. The root of the depression was an inability to have kids. They thought about adoption, but decided to try to get me to live with them instead. I did for six months, but could not get along with him. After I left them, there was very little contact. He called once to congratulate me on graduating university with honors. Although during university, while I was in terrible poverty, he did not call once to ask if I needed something. This was during my whole youth. Not one call to ask.
[10:48] For example, as a Berks student, I desperately wanted a laptop. He had two. He never asked if I needed a laptop, even when I brought it up. Now we rarely talk, one to two times per year maybe, he keeps inviting me and my fiancé over. Question, should I try to have a relationship with him? If I do it, how should I go about it? What requirements should I state? What about apologies and making amends? I fear him dying in the future and not having any relationship with him. He is a functional alcoholic and one of the reasons my parents got divorced. Gosh, oh gosh.
[11:27] Gosh, oh gosh. I am so sorry. I'm honestly absolutely heartbreaking. Breaking you know i have deep great lakes wells of tears for the thousands and thousands of stories that i've heard over the course of my life in the call-ins in my personal life and just in people that i've met over the years because i've always been curious about what may be people's hearts tick the deep bells of dark histories or happy histories for that matter so i'm really really sorry about this. I'm really sorry about this. It is so unbelievably sad and tragic how used Kleenex-style disposable we are to each other, isn't it?
[12:26] Out of sight out of mind, you've noticed this like you move away and people are just like he's gone was he here was he ever here, we just seem to be a sort of connect four cheesecloth kind of swiss cheese memory hole to each other people leave the room and it's like they vaporize somebody goes away from up, Vaporize. We don't seem to bond with much at all anymore, do we? We don't seem to bond at all with much. We don't bond to our gods. We don't bond to our culture, to our history, to our ancestors, to our values, to our virtues, to our families. We don't seem to bond... Much with anyone anymore, as a whole. So.
[13:40] Some of the saddest stories I've ever heard are the stories of children valiantly trying to maintain a relationship with an indifferent parent. You know, I got this with my own father over the years. Also then when he died some years ago, a couple of years ago.
[14:09] You can't run a relationship with a parent. You can't be in charge of it. You can't really make any foundational decisions about it. It's sort of like that there's this whole theory in the business world about what's called managing upwards like if your boss isn't doing the right thing and you don't have any authority over him of course because it's your boss, what do you do? what do you do? Well you have to do a variety of things you have to try a variety of things but fundamentally you can't manage and control, your boss you might be able to have some influence on him but he defines the relationship and he has the final say, you know, just the idea of being, I'm sorry for the waves of sadness, but, the very idea of being foundationally.
[15:15] Indifferent to your own children, to me speaks of such a shattered and broken soul, that it's almost like the essence of the person has been atomized, or in this case, drowned in alcohol. Alcohol generally scrubs the soul of its conscience. You know, indifference. I guess I'll call him when he graduates. I don't really think about him. I'm, you know, this narcissism, this navel-gazing, this solipsism, this I-me-me-I stuff, the boomer stuff, I-me-me-I, the only thing that matters is me.
[16:03] Out of sight, out of mind. The concept of being indifferent to your own child and not being fascinated by, engaged with, involved with interacting with your own child. I mean, I know I experienced it to some degree, but I certainly, I think with my mother for sure, and to some smaller degree my father, I don't know if you've ever had this, there was sort of this sense or this idea that they were kind of waiting for me to become more interesting. You know, once, once I became older and had my own philosophy or thoughts, or I could write books or like, then it became more interesting. And then I was worthy of attention. But by then, of course, I was an adult and it was just all too late.
[17:10] You can't fix things with your parents if it's this far off the rails. What can you fix? What can you do? You can't change them. And even if you could change them, it's too late. It's all too late. By the time you become an adult, they are... Your sperm donor and egg carrier, but the parenting is largely done. I mean, my daughter is going to be 16 this winter, and there's a couple of tweaks here and there, which maybe I can provide some helpful advice on, but parenting was done quite some time ago.
[18:06] So, by the time you become an adult, you say, well, my father, my mother, my parents. But to parent is a verb, not a noun. A parent is not an object. A parent is a whole series of actions.
[18:22] I mean, would you look at a nutritionist you never called or who never returned your calls and say, that's my diet? No, diet is not just having a nutritionist or maybe reading about a diet, it's actually changing your diet. And I mean, you've heard me ask this of people.
[18:44] I've got so many thoughts colliding, I'm just trying to wait for them to settle into some slightly more coherent pattern. But you've heard me say to people, okay, what wisdom or instruction did your parents give to you that remains valuable into your adulthood? What wisdom, moral instruction did your parents give you that remains valuable into your adulthood? And if you really can't think of any, then you weren't parented. Then they were your landlords, they were your managers, they were your disciplinarians, they were your sperm and egg donor, they were your funding source. But to parent is to transfer moral values to your children that last them a lifetime. To parent is to transfer moral values to your children that last them a lifetime. And if your parents did not transmit or transfer largely through inspiration and to some degree through instruction, if your parents did not give you moral instruction, you were not parented.
[19:59] And if you weren't parented, what on earth could it mean to say, my parents? When I was six years old, in boarding school, every Saturday we had a haircut, and then we had to write letters to our parents. And so I wrote, Dear Mother, and then I wrote, Dear Tom. And of course they read all of your letters to make sure you weren't complaining about the boarding school. And I said, You can't send this. Why not? Because your father. You can't say, Dear Tom. It's your father. I didn't get that. even into my, I guess I was maybe 11 or 12 years old.
[20:48] People would ask me about my parents, and I said, well, my mother lives here, my ex-father lives in South Africa. And people would say, what do you mean your ex-father lives in, what does that mean? I said, well, he was my father, I never see him, and he lives in South Africa. And people were just like, they were agog at this. I was like, what do you mean? I said, well, look, he's my mother's ex-husband, and he's my ex-father, because he doesn't parent me. And I just remember people being agog, and I'm like, don't get mad at me for calling things by their proper names. Were you parented? Did they show interest, take delight in you? Did they give you moral instruction? Did they help you in life? Did they help you navigate and negotiate friendships, school, homework, dating, job, career? Were you parented? Were you parented? Is someone a husband if he pays no attention to his wife? I mean, I guess they're technically married and I guess we're technically family, but...
[22:14] What are your relationships like if you don't try to change anyone? Right? What are your relationships like if you don't try to change anyone, yourself included? I'm going to say this again. What are your relationships like if you don't try to change anyone, yourself included? Take people for who they are, what they are. Not say, well, if this relationship were the complete opposite of what it is, then it would be a good relationship. No. No. No.
[23:20] People are who they are you are who you are and rather than trying to fit a round pig into a square hole just go find people like yourself, somebody says my father has two children he hasn't spoken to in eight years due to a bad divorce what do you mean due to a bad divorce divorce? Was he accused of criminal or illicit actions against his children? A bad divorce does not mean that you don't speak to your children. He says, my father has two children. He hasn't spoken to in eight years due to a bad divorce. I say he should reach out to them since they're 18 plus now.
[24:01] He says he wants to let them come to him when they're ready. What do you think?
[24:18] You know, just as a whole in life, I'm fairly contemplative. You know, of course, it's 9-11, so... It means that the attack on the Trade Center is 23 years ago, which seems like an absolute lifetime infinity ago. And I think, because I'm going to be 58 in a couple of weeks, which means in 23 years, I'll be almost 81 years old. I'm sure I'll be chugging. I'm sure things will be good and fine and all of that. In 23 years, I'll be almost 81 years old.
[25:06] And I'll tell you this, it's both longer and shorter than you think, life. It is both longer and shorter than you think. It is longer than you think because if you have a bad conscience, the days are endless because you're just wired up and scraped up and running from yourself and never at peace and they're long fucking days to be ill at ease in your own skin. It's a long life to feel like you were in your body like a chain-rattling, bloody-fingered ghost in a haunted house on a foggy hill, to not be settled into your own skin to be jumpy, to be distracted that's a long, long life, man, the hell is the eternity that life feels like when you have a bad conscience. I mean, if you can imagine being in considerable pain for the rest of your life, how long those days would feel. So life is a lot longer than you think, which is why you have to work as best you can, as best I can, to have a good conscience, to be happy and satisfied with your own company.
[26:27] It is a long life. to be at war with your better self. Imagine how long the day feels, if there is an invisible predator in the house. How your heart would hammer and how the minutes would tick by like hours. It is a long life. If you have a bad conscience.
[27:02] But it is too short a life to waste years trying to assemble a giant bridge, out of soap bubbles and fantasy, to try to upwardly manage relationships, that you can't control, that you didn't define, particularly with parents. That you are simply reacting to, and you are trying, what, at the age of 25 or 30 or 35 or 40 or 50, you're trying to summon a live beating heart from a chest that was ashes, probably years and years before you even drew your first breath.
[27:53] You are like a doctor digging up the desiccated corpse of a great-great-great-grandfather in performing CPR. The heart that cannot reach you, the eyes that cannot see you, are dead and blind years and years and years before you come along. And you are trying to resuscitate a mummy, an Egyptian mummy. And I don't care how you tilt the head, lift the neck, pinch the nose, blow into those dusty, dead mouths. The animating principle, the life, the choice, the connection, the virtue, is long gone. Not coming back, there's nothing you can do.
[28:49] I really think of the years and years that I spent, chasing these ghosts off cliffs, forever reaching, forever grabbing, forever falling, forever bouncing in sick battery-taste metallic thuds on the stony ground below, climbing, chasing, falling, climbing, chasing, falling. God, what a waste. What an ungodly, unholy, immortality fantasy waste all of that was. Trying to negotiate people into coming back to life, trying to use the eloquence of my language to shape living hearts out of dead dust.
[29:42] I spent decades really, trying to climb inside flat dead paintings I look so lifelike from the outside I'm just going to try and get in, paintings are two dimensional and they hang on walls that you cannot get through, One more speech, and they will see me. One more tear, and they will feel me. One more fight, and they will surrender.
[30:31] Walking with the dead, thinking you're going anywhere but the graveyard, is worse than an exercise in futility. Life is long with a bad conscience, but it is too short to waste time trying to bring a conscience to people with no empathy. You can't do it. I can't do it. I mean, I'm fairly eloquent. I've never done it. I'm very eloquent, very passionate. I mean, I wield words like Inigo Montoya wields swords in revenge. Can't do it.
[31:23] That's even worse. It's even worse post-COVID. The amount of guilt and shame the average person has about how they acted over COVID, has walled off the desiccated souls of those who betrayed any compassion, reason, and virtue. This is why nobody talks about it. It's the largest elephant in the West. So you're like, can I have a relationship? This guy, he ignored me, didn't really talk to me, won't even give me a laptop. I was broke. He's got lots of money. He didn't give me any money. He didn't care. He doesn't contact me. He just, man. What information are you waiting to get that you don't already have?
[32:34] I ask you again, what information are you waiting to get that you don't already have? You have been struck by a voodoo curse. The voodoo curse, I've talked about this before, the voodoo curse which says, oh, if you don't reconcile with your dad when he dies, you're going to face a lifetime of regret. You'll be so sad forever. if you don't fix things with your dad.
[33:08] No, this is... You know that's just verbal abuse, right? That is verbal abuse to say to you if you don't repair the relationship with a cold, soulless, cruel person, then you will be miserable and cursed and unhappy forever. That is a way of transferring power from the innocent to the cold, cruel, and unutterably guilty. And if you don't put yourself at the power and mercy of a cold-hearted, cruel person, you'll be unhappy forever. Really, what are the opportunity costs of that? What am I missing or losing out by doing that? If you don't stay in the orbit of people who've coldly and cruelly rejected and ignored you your whole life when their whole job was to care about you, boy, if you don't put yourself under their power and in their orbit, you'll be unhappy. Really. Bullshit. What do the opportunity costs? I mean, I've known my wife for 22 years. If I had been tight with mom...
[34:26] Would I have gotten married? Nope, not to her. My mom had no problem with the woman who was not right for me.
[34:40] What are the opportunity costs of staying in the orbit of cold-hearted people, who humiliate you with their indifference? Right? Thank you, Tony. What are the opportunity nobody ever talks about the opportunity costs.
[35:05] What are the opportunity costs of being around people who treat you like shit, what are the opportunity costs how does it affect your sense of your own value you if you have people around who treat you like shit and that you are subjugated to and humiliated by.
[35:36] James says, I've mentioned this before. My ex-mother lived a mile away when I was 10 after my parents divorced. Barely saw her. Seemed to hate it when she watched us. I was not parented, no.
[35:51] See, if you have a parent who's indifferent to you, it's the parent's fault. I've said this to my daughter on more than one occasion. I said, I can never foundationally criticize anything about you because I was you, I am your father. If there's something, quote, wrong with you, I have to criticize myself, not you. I am the one person, and your mother too, but I'm the one person you come to, where there will never be a foundational criticism. Never! If something is wrong in your relationship with your parent, it's your parent's fault! 100% 150% a million percent your parent defined the relationship chose to have you chose your biological nature by who they chose to have a child with were in complete control of your environment throughout your entire childhood 18 years complete control, you had no legal independence no choice of who to spend time with with no capacity to stay, to go, to leave.
[37:07] Nothing was your choice. Nothing wrong with that. It's just a fact of life. The quality of your relationship with your parent is entirely dependent upon your parent. The tail cannot wag the dog.
[37:33] You trying to take responsibility for your parents is like a citizen trying to take responsibility for the government or a janitor cleaning a school long clothes, taking responsibility for the countrywide curriculum, pushed by federal departments of education. It's like the office cleaner taking responsibility for the overall balance sheet of a multinational, multi-hundred-billion-dollar corporation.
[38:15] It's like one Amazon driver taking responsibility for the cost of the entire corporation. One shelf stocker in a grocery store taking responsibility for the entire chain of grocery restores. It can't be done. It will drive you mad to even attempt it. It's like, you know, you're out in a field at night, maybe it's a meteor shower, Perseid or something like that, and there's a plane. Do you ever do this as a kid? Do you pretend to push the plane? Right? Or there was an old SCTV. I crush your head, right? I crush your head, right? Oh, I'm going to push the plane through the night sky. You're just waving your hand. The plane is miles away. It doesn't care. It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter what you do. It's just for your own amusement.
[39:16] Check in with yourself with regards to your father. Do you want to spend time with your father if he's not your father? Because if he didn't parent you, he's not really your parent. So imagine this. Go to an extreme example. Let's test the case. Let's go to an extreme example. For example, you find out that you are the child of your mother and an anonymous sperm donor.
[40:01] And somehow you track down this sperm donor, and he's a serial killer. Now, he is your father, right? So an anonymous sperm donor turns out he's a serial killer. Well, you're like, well, I have to have a relationship with my father. Father, right? I don't mean to laugh, but come on. Or, you know, if that's too far, you know, he's just a terrible guy or whatever, the thief or a break of heart, a sociopath, a manipulator, whatever, right? Stop giving people your time and attention based on abstract categories that have almost nothing to do with what is actually required of the category. Hey, if your parents were good to you, they loved you, they parented you, wonderful. We want to repay justice with justice. We want to be fair in our evaluations. Graduations, love them for their virtues. Absolutely wonderful. Great. If they did not love you, if they did not take joy in your presence, if they did not move heaven and earth to make your life better and to teach you well.
[41:22] They're just sperm donors and egg carriers, Landlords And the providers of food and healthcare.
[41:35] And trying to chase ghosts off cliffs Keeps you away From all the good people, chasing bad people breaks you out of the orbit of good people. And it is not coming from any rational optimism. I say this with great humility. It's not coming from any rational optimism. Where does it come from? Well, it comes from your addiction and my addiction. To rejection. I mean, I've thought about this long and hard over the course of my own life. Hey, let's make it about me, shall we? No, I've thought about this long and hard over the course of my own life that I was rejected by mother and father and sibling and extended family. Oh, and I got deplatformed. Is this just a Simon the Boxer repetition compulsion? Am I addicted to being cast out and treated unjustly and rejected and scorned? And am I just engineering that? I'm going to ask myself these questions. I'm not just turning these lasers outward. They burn down here too.
[42:56] No, I mean, I think the rejection that I experienced as a child helped me to navigate things like deplatforming and hostility and lies and slander and all this kind of stuff. But I did it in order to connect. And you can see that the idea of the voluntary family is really starting to go mainstream. Of course, nobody will ever give me any credit for it. That doesn't matter. The credit is in my conscience, in a sense, in the eyes of God and in my own heart.
[43:27] But I'm telling you, man, you've got to watch out for this. All I know is how to manage being rejected performed by my father. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to keep running after my father, and I'm going to try again, and I'm going to try again, and I'm going to twist it, and I'm going to change this, and I'll try again, and I'll try having this conversation, I'll try having that conversation, I'll try bringing up this, I'll try a different approach, I'll let it lie fallow for a bit, I'll try here again. You're taught all you're doing is you're i think often not you in particular but all people in general are doing is they don't know how to live without managing these feelings of rejection you know you should have authority with your parents because they care about you you should have power in the relationship you should have credibility and weight, in the relationship because, they care about you, we all seek power if we have no power in relationships we cannot escape, then the power we will pursue is the power of managing rejection well i can't control that i'm being rejected but i can have some control over those feelings of being rejected but the problem is then the only way you feel how you have power at all is to continually be rejected.
[44:54] Your relationship with your parents is your parents responsibility, now does this mean you never bear any fault in anything you ever do with your parents well no when you become an adult if you deviate from the values they taught you and you accepted then you have some responsibility for that for sure right if they if they said it's a good idea you to tell the truth in relationships, and then for some reason or another, I don't know what could happen, but you end up lying to them, okay, well then, but that's not you managing a relationship with your parents, that's you managing a relationship with morality. In seminators and incubators, yeah.
[45:42] You know, there are so many parents out there, who are absent NPC, dead-eyed ghosts in their own households. They go to work, they come home, they watch TV, they ignore their children, they play video games, they play golf, they go on business trips, they come home, they don't talk to their children, and they mutter a little bit here and there. They go watch TV. They put on their headphones. They vanish. There but not there. Ghosts in the house. And you ask yourself, you ask yourself, when was the last time with your parents? When was the last time you had a deep, easy, meaningful conversation with your parents? Something that meant something. Something where you revealed something of yourself. Something where you got good advice, something where you got to understand them a little better and more deeply.
[46:43] You know, I mean, I went on a two-hour hike with my wife today, and then we had lunch. I mean, beautiful. Such a great conversation, so much fun.
[47:04] I don't think I ever had that once with my family of origin. Thank you for watching. You have no authority with your parents if they don't care about you deeply, if they're not willing to make sacrifices, so to speak, if they're not willing to defer to what you need and want, what is legitimately of value to you. What do you have to negotiate with? And if you have been distant from your father for 30 years, that's all it's going to be. Just take a deep breath and accept it. My father went to his grave without telling me he was even unwell.
[48:00] No, could have been sudden. I don't know. I don't know. "'No, I don't know what he died of. "'I probably never will.'.
[48:19] All right, let's get to your comments. I wasn't parented, but I was constantly given bad advice. I assumed to sabotage my life for some type of amusement and had the rather serious things I was dealing with constantly infantilized. Yeah, for sure. Yes, sabotage. Boy, you know, people who know you very well can do you the greatest good or the greatest harm. Intimacy is vulnerability. Intimacy is risk. Intimacy is danger. Danger. Intimacy is handing the weapons that open and flay your heart to someone else. Intimacy is what you have to be the most careful and cautious about. I parented my parents. Not possible. You appeased them. Somebody says, my parents cut my husband and thus all of us off two weeks ago now. It turns out that the things I thought might be true about out them were we were told that having any expectations of my mom when she comes to quote help visit really was being a slave driver and they wouldn't stand for her being turned into a slave it's sad but freeing i'm due with that i'm due with our fifth as of last week congratulations, and they truly don't really care we'll celebrate and enjoy it better this way.
[49:35] Yeah i'm sorry about all of this it's very very sad my sister told me the dad, My dad has disinterested to the point that he hasn't paid his bills and they got sent to collection. They have fallen a long way. That's just the consequence of a bad conscience. My mom seems early dementia and she's only not quite 60. And my once intimidating high-earning dad is melting into a puddle of helpless goo. It's quite pathetic, honestly. There's nothing I can do for them but pray.
[50:08] Well, what's the point of praying if this is the just punishment for their misdeeds? Oh, his dad is disintegrated to the point. What is the point of praying if the conscience that God designed for them is doing this to them? If the punishment is coming from God's design and architecture of the mind, heart, and soul, what is the point of praying? Are you praying to God to betray his own virtue? Are you praying to God that he should not punish them for the evils that they do? I don't think that you want to tell God that he's wrong about morality and conscience.
[51:02] I have sometimes oftentimes feel like I'm standing in the middle of a graveyard playing EDM on a boombox expecting life to rise out of the graves lol yeah not very lol brother I think about the opportunity costs every day yeah you your life can't be better than the worst person in it I'm I'm telling you this from the bottom of my bowels, heart, mind, and soul. Your life cannot be better than the worst person in it. At all. In any way. No apology from quote mom, who linked help to getting jabbed. Who linked help to getting jabbed? Oh, if you got jabbed. Actually contacted me long enough to drop off photos, left without any conversation. I don't feel anything much about that. Maybe I intellectualize that I can regret that there is no love there. there, but no great sadness or ache or sense of loss, their choice to be who they are. I'm sorry about that.
[52:03] On that scenario, working near minimum wage, dreaming up all the ways the company is doing things wrong and how they could fix it, waste of time since I have zero say about that stuff. You have more chance as a janitor of fixing a corporation than you do of fixing your parents, because the corporation doesn't have a guilty conscience about you. See, here's the thing, my friends. If people you've known for decades have never admitted fault, they're not going to start. They're not going to start. Almost nobody is more naive than the person with a good conscience. Almost nobody is more naive than the person with a good conscience because the person with a good conscience doesn't have a big problem admitting fault. They can admit fault. They do self-correct because they have a good conscience. They have a conscience, they listen to their conscience, therefore they can be corrected, and they can figure things out. You know, my daughter at her job says to her boss, what can I do better? How can I improve? What am I doing wrong? How can I be more efficient? How can I provide more value? She does that, right? She's got a great conscience. I'm asking you guys, what can I do better? What can I do different? How can I improve?
[53:20] So, if you have a good conscience, it means that you admit fault, you correct, you listen, you have empathy with yourself, with others so then you're like, well, I mean, then they must be like me they must be like me, I just haven't figured out, the right words to unlock, the hidden reservoirs and deep wells of feeling and empathy locked up in their heart it comes from the soul that there's an unharmed part of selfish people that you just have to unlock with your silky magic syllables. If I just find the right... Open, speak, friend, and enter. If I just find the right word, phrase, approach, different angle.
[54:13] But you're standing there with a big basket of fucking vegetables trying to open a lock. Well, if I try the radish.
[54:17] Oh, it didn't work. Let me try the celery. Okay, maybe the green pepper. Or maybe the tomato woman. Nope. They're not like you at all. They're not. If a man or woman can't admit fault in their 40s and 50s, they will never admit fault. Never, never, never. Because their lives have become conditioned that way and they've made so many terrible mistakes that the moment they admit fault, Thanatos will appear. The death impulse will appear. If you've made enough mistakes and never admitted fault, after a certain amount of time, admitting fault is death. It's death! Because you can't fix it anymore.
[55:24] Pray for those who disputefully use you. Love thy enemy. Sure. Sure. Absolutely. Love your enemy. For sure. I have no issue with that at all. Love your enemy for the instruction they're giving you. Love your enemy as a signpost to stay the fuck away. Way you know if you're if you're wandering in a field you're wandering and hiking in the middle of nowhere in a field and there's a big sign that says minefield you love that sign don't you because it means your leg doesn't get blown off you love that sign because it says don't walk here you'll lose a limb you'll die you'll bleed out oh god i love that sign thank you so much for that sign Yeah, love your enemies, for sure. Love your enemies. Love the moral instruction they're giving you.
[56:23] I would not have, as close an intimate relationship with my own conscience if I had not seen the desperately ill effects of people who rejected their own conscience. I love them for reminding me of the value of virtue, you the essential nature of reason and the absolute dedication to morality that is required to both love and be loved. My enemies taught me how to love. My enemies taught me how to think, how to reason, how to be vulnerable, how to be open, how to feel deeply and communicate directly. All my enemies taught me that. I love them for their instruction. They're absolutely terrible people, but I love them for the instruction that they gave me. Absolutely love your enemy. That doesn't mean make him your friend. It means make the moral lessons his empirical aunt's example provides you your friend.
[57:31] Somebody says i miss the old graphics like the native american one from youtube era when you have those slides yeah yeah yeah i i don't like spending time in the studio i i've spent decades in the studio uh so i mean i'll do it for the live streams because i want to read stuff but i'll do my very best to stay out of the studio if i can, somebody says oh somebody says oh James I struggled for years to unlock my father's heart I only became more depressed yeah, it's we know deep down it's futile and we know deep down, they won't give us their heart because they don't have one, somebody says as a child I remember being punished I don't recall whatever the excuse for being in trouble waiting on dad to come home and be spanked please Please try to check your messages. I don't want to get to brain goo. Why isn't empathy genetic? What do you mean, why isn't empathy genetic?
[58:42] Why isn't empathy genetic? Because we know the environmental conditions that reduce the capacity for empathy. these stuff. Stef, I understand logically what you're saying about not being able to fix my parents, but it seems like my emotional part is refusing to acknowledge it. What can I do to convince also that part of me? Is there some action I can take to make it obvious?
[59:12] You're asking how to quit an addiction. You just quit the addiction. I mean i'm not sure if i mean oh you know if you're if you're an let's say you're a smoker heavy smoker right and you're just addicted to nicotine and smoking the whole ritual and all of that you say you know Stef i understand logically that i should quit smoking but, there's a part of me that doesn't want to acknowledge it how can i convince myself that i should want to quit smoking and that quitting smoking will be good for me and fun for me and i'll enjoy the process and it's going to be nothing but a net positive it's like Like, that's not what addiction is. Addiction is part of you really wants to continue performing the addictive behavior, right? Slap your hand back. Do you ever, you never do this? You never do this? Slap your hand back.
[1:00:12] Slap your hand back. I had to do this with sugar, right? I had to do this with sugar. Love me some sugar. It's now been, what, nine months plus since I've had, I mean, what have I had? I've had maybe one or two desserts over the last nine months, a piece or two of chocolate, and an ice cream or two. That's it, right? You know, cut most, almost all sugar out of my life. So what do I have to do? Slap your hand back. Nope. Walking towards, nope. Turn away, nope. Have a drink of water, go for a walk, nope. Just slap your hand back. What do you think willpower is about? Willpower is when you want to do it and you say no. Well, but there's a part of me that I, this is self-indulgent crap. Sorry to be blunt, but it is. That's what willpower is.
[1:01:03] Yeah, I really want to call this girl. She's not not good for me. She abuses me, but she's sexy. Slap your hand away. Whap. Slap your hand away. Sorry. It's okay to be stern with yourself. Being stern with yourself and avoiding bad habits is not self-abuse. Self-discipline is not self-abuse. You were abused by people with no discipline. They just indulged and acted out. You were abused by people with no discipline, and then you think, oh, but if I'm disciplined with myself, that's the same as being abusive, and everything has to be on board, and I've got to be kind and gentle and nice. No, why? Why? Why? It's a willpower. It's a willpower.
[1:01:38] Self-indulgent. Hedonism to say, well, I'll make better decisions when every single part of me is fine with it. Hey, spoiler. That's not going to happen. It's like saying, well, I'll go to the gym once I'm muscular.
[1:01:53] Right? I'm overweight. I'll go on a diet when I'm already thin. Nope. Slap your hand away. way. Or slap your ass to the gym. Slap your ass at the gym if that tickles your fancy. You know, I was feeling a little low energy this afternoon before the show. I'm like, I could say no. And I showed up here. There were no donations, only a couple of people. And I was like, no.
[1:02:35] Now, did I sit there and say, well, there's a big part of me that doesn't want to do a live stream. So I'm going to sit here as the clock ticks past seven o'clock. I'm going to sit here and I'm just going to wait for every single part of me to want to do the live stream.
[1:02:56] Come on. You got to be kidding me. Not being disciplined with yourself is acting on the same principles by which people abused you if they did. People abused you because they were self-indulgent, and they just got mad. They wanted to yell, so they yelled. They wanted to hit, so they hit. They were just self-indulgent, lazy, hedonistic, narcissistic, whatever, right? People abused you because they were lazy.
[1:03:33] You know, somebody who was cruel to me when I was younger, I confronted them in my 20s, and he said, every morning I woke up, I wanted to do better I wanted to do right by you I wanted to be nice Then I failed It's just laziness, It's just laziness Abuse Is laziness Corruption is laziness Theft is laziness You could work for it Nope, you're going to steal it.
[1:04:14] Stop being self-intelligent. Have some discipline. I'm not perfect with this. Please understand. I am not perfect with this at all. I say this with great humility right down there in the trenches with you. Stef, I understand logically what you're saying about not being able to fix my parents, but it seems that my emotional part is refusing to acknowledge it. What can I do to convince? Also, that part of me, is there some action I can take to make it obvious? Slap your hand away. Can't fix your parents. Have the urge to fix your parents. Feel the urge. Which doesn't mean you have to act on it in the same way that your parents were angry at you didn't mean they had to hit you and yell at you, if that's what they did. Have some discipline. That's what philosophy is for. If philosophy isn't waiting for the planets to align, everything feels totally fine, and you're going to do it because there's no part of you that doesn't want to do it, that will never happen. That will never happen. I've got to wait until all the salmon are swimming in the same direction, and it's all perfect, and it's just... Oh, my God. Talk about inaction and procrastination. Well, I'm going to wait to do it until every part of me is on board and I have no hesitation. I'm going to wait to ask out that girl until I'm not at all nervous about her saying no. There could be no possible downside. Well, I'm going to call her back when I don't feel any anxiety about whether she had a good time on the date and everything's getting... Oh, my God.
[1:05:38] Do you not think there have been times over the past 18, 19 years when I've just had to fucking white-knuckle willpower it? Oh, my God. I literally took to stages with bomb threats and death threats hanging over me.
[1:05:56] You know, I'm... I mean, they were whipping up such hatred against me on some of my speaking tours that I'm taking a pee before going on to speak. Somebody comes in loudly, I'm like, hope I don't get stabbed. You don't think there's a little bit of willpower involved in getting on the stage and engaging positively with the audience? Do you think every part of me was on board with going forward? You don't think I've had to white-knuckle willpower some of this shit? Really? Even tonight a little bit, and I think it's been a good show. It's been a good conversation. My God, you do really wait for everything to just be all aligned within you in order to make a decision that you know to be right? Well, I'm not going to go and take a job until I'm perfectly confident and every part of me is happy with the job and I know I'm going to succeed perfectly.
[1:06:55] Well, welcome to a whole life of doing not much.
[1:07:11] Do you think being objective in regards to childhood abuse is something that people who have had to constantly take their own self-slash-needs out of the equation of things so being objective in their thinking comes easier?
[1:07:27] You're overthinking it, man. Being objective with regards to child abuse is, can I hold my parents to the same standards they held me to as children? That's all. It's really not complicated. Can I hold my parents to the same standard or standards that they held me to as a child? Right? So as a child, if I did something wrong, I was punished. Okay? So if my parents did something wrong, will they accept responsibility and can they be punished? Right? For my parents, if I failed to prepare for something that I knew was coming, like a test, if I failed to prepare for a test I knew was coming, you've known about this test for weeks. Right, you know that, like me preparing at the age of eight to tell my mom Sunday night I have a big presentation that requires a lot of materials on Monday. Oh, here I go. You've known about this for weeks. Why are you just telling me now? Why haven't you planned? It's like, okay, well, you knew for at least nine months that you were going to become parents. What parenting books did you read to make sure you were good parents? Right, can I hold my parents to the same standard to which they held me? It's nothing to do with, it's just objective, that's all.
[1:08:56] Somebody says, thanks to the emotional and physical abuse, for which I'm very sorry, of course, I will never be able to be the cruel, indifferent people my adoptive parents turned out to be. I'm not saying it was worth it. I'm not saying they had any good motives. It's despite them, not because of them, I chose to be kind and never cruel. Never cruel? Maybe throwing the baby out with the bathwater a little bit. Peanut butter chocolate bars were my weakness. Yes. The question about empathy. I meant it as an hereditary trait such as IQ IQ is not purely genetic IQ is about 80% genetic by our late teens but it's not purely genetic.
[1:09:45] James says me losing over 35 pounds earlier this year involved a bit of white knuckling back at it still want to go but I'd never go down if I were to wait for all my parts to be on board yeah, imagine hunter-gatherers waiting for everything to be perfect and worry-free before hunting their prey they'd strafe i think you mean starve yes i will wait until the time is perfect is just a way of saying i prefer to not act and i'm really desperate to lie to myself about my motives things just aren't perfect yet it's not quite right something's amiss not every part of me is in perfect alignment. That's just lying to yourself. I mean, we all do it. So again, please understand, I'm not lecturing from any superior standpoint. But just be honest and say, I don't want to do it. And I don't want to exercise my will. I don't want to exercise my will.
[1:10:43] Books on parenting how about dr spark well something so over on rumble what do we got here good evening praying for all those lost on 9 11 in the aftermath that followed, um somebody says talking to my mother has always been heads she wins tails i I lose no getting through to her. Still waiting on that, I was wrong, the jab didn't work from her. Normies think the jab worked miraculously, saved the world and the diseases no more. Yeah. You know, it's pretty tough. It's pretty tough. Megyn Kelly had an interesting thing to say about COVID. She said, I almost can't get my arms around it. like just how much we were lied to. I almost can't get my arms around it. And this is part of the naivety, which is to say, well, I feel uncomfortable lying, right?
[1:11:44] And, you know, there's just so many liars online, so many liars online, or people who push things forward that they didn't. There's a guy, he's a bald guy in England, I can't remember, John something or other, I think. And he put forward this thing about how there are these self-assembling nanobots in the vaccines, and he's got these scary structures under him.
[1:12:10] Big microscope and all of that. Now he is a guy who you know seems to have a fair amount of credibility so i looked twice and all of that and uh i thought about it i read about it it seemed a bit not quite right but you know what am i i'm certainly no no expert in these things anyway he turned out to have withdrawn the post because apparently they left the vials in the they left the stuff in the vials for a year and maybe the proteins crystallize or something again like i'm no expert but i'm not saying he was lying but i'm just saying a lot of stuff you read and the community notes is actually pretty good as far as this goes on twitter you know a lot of people who are like oh this is true and it's like no not really this was a skit john campbell yeah that's the guy a reasonable guy and and all of that he's got that you know sky daddy british father vibe going on and and a lot of the the information he puts out is pretty good and you know we all make mistakes so but this was a peer peer-reviewed paper he said and uh again it just seems you know like they were saying uh oh canada is is is withdrawn pfizer and moderna vaccines and they're ordering all of the samples destroyed and everyone's like going nuts and it's like i don't think that's it so i checked and no they're still recommended and i think they're just destroying last year's vials as they do with the flu shot every year and so on. It's just like, God, just stop lying. Stop lying, people. It's just terrible.
[1:13:38] I don't know if people jump the gun or they don't check their sources or they don't. Oh, my God.
[1:13:45] It really is terrible. I mean, I do understand, you know, the government and other people, other places. I do understand this frustration with disinformation, misinformation.
[1:13:57] Like, I really do. I really understand. You have to just be so cautious and careful with all of this stuff, right? You have to be so cautious and careful because there's a lot of people who really don't check very much. And i think i was on telegram i posted the john campbell video because it just seemed kind of mind-blowing to me and seemed a little kind of far out there and and then i also posted his retraction because that seemed important as well and i'm i'm basically hesitant to uh you know what do they say kamala harris had these uh earrings on that are actually broadcast uh earrings and she's got me i i don't know man.
[1:14:37] People want to sit on their ass smoke weed and do conspiracies instead of white knuckle virtue truth reason etc yeah yeah oh it's really it's really sad, now i'm happy to take questions and comments uh tips of course are very very much appreciated this is a one-of-a-kind conversation you really can't get this stuff anywhere else and it is the greatest philosophy conversation in history. I will defend that to my dying day, hopefully many decades from now. But you can go to freedomain.com slash donate to help out the show. You can donate on the apps, on Rumble, on Locals. And of course, donators get.
[1:15:21] The History of Philosophers series, which is really, really great. So i am happy to yeah i was really wrestling with myself today about talking about the debate i did watch the debate last night uh but i've decided not to um i could talk about the form of it and so on but it's still pretty close to politics so i think i will look this there's my white knuckle right i'm just not going to but i do have another topic to talk about it's a little dark, In fact, it's very dark, but...
[1:16:00] Stef interviewed a lady a few years ago. She claimed 30% of all those facts would be dead by now. It was supposed to affect real estate prices. Technically, I have no problem with you saying what you're saying. Technically, I did not interview her. She was on a roundtable that was to do with cryptocurrency, and she brought up that topic as a whole. I did not interview her. She brought up that topic of her own volition, and so on, right? So, yeah, it was a Bitcoin conference. I didn't interview her. She just was in a roundtable, and she had her say. And I dislike that as well. You know, I'm not going to name any names. I'm not going to name any names. But there are a lot of people out there who said, oh, the people who took the jabs will all be dead in a year or two or three. And it's like, but they're not. Well, there have been injuries. I get all of that, but that's not what people said. And that kind of fear-mongering, people should really apologize. You know, if you say something like that, you are scaring the living shit out of people who took the vaccine.
[1:17:06] Did you see Styx groping his new girlfriend on his debate live stream? No, I didn't see Styx groping his new girlfriend. I don't even know if that happened. But isn't he a dad? Didn't he get married or the marriage didn't work out or something like that? I haven't really followed it, but he's a hard guy to dislike, so all right. But yeah, you shouldn't tell people, oh, if you did this, you're going to die, or your loved ones are going to die in two years. And like, that's horrible. It's a horrible, horrible, horrible thing to do. It's an absolutely horrible thing to do. And I don't know. I mean, can you make restitution for that? I don't know. Yeah yeah yeah it's uh i i don't know how people live with themselves about that, you know i i was thinking about all the people who didn't follow me after the deplatforming and all the good stuff they've missed out on but i did check it out bitcoin was about a fifth of the price that it is now when i was deplatformed so by not following me people might have missed out on 500% increase in debt, right? Yeah.
[1:18:31] Yeah, I really, I mean, I do know some people who, according to their own estimation, it's not something I know for sure, of course, because I'm not an expert in this, but I do know people personally who say that they have experienced significant issues health-wise after taking the COVID vaccines. Vaccines i mean i just know no people like that i can't prove it it's really hard to prove but, i mean i i do think there's been that and you know but you know then people say oh in canada the excess mortality is up 400 blah blah blah and it's like i don't know man i do wonder what a couple of years without health care did for people i mean i can't tell you just how unbelievably Unbelievably frustrating, that is. Yes, a couple of donations would be very much gratefully appreciated. Yeah, so, I mean, and you've got to hold these people's feet to the fire. No, honestly, if I was still doing interviews and outside work and so on, I'd bring one of these people on and I'd say, you were wrong.
[1:19:36] I would tell them this ahead of time. I don't like this, you know, Joe Rogan style or whatever, this kind of ambushing stuff, right? But you were wrong, and you scared the living shit out of people. You had people think they had only two years to live, and they're okay.
[1:19:58] How do you live with that? How do you live with that? Because you told people, and then they sat down with their friends, and they sat down with their friends and their family, and they said, well, if you took this jab, you've got two years to live. You better make your peace now. My God, that's terrible. Absolutely appalling. That's worse than the fear-mongering from the global warming people and all of that kind of stuff, right? You're broke, you tipped over the years, donate again when possible. Thank you, I appreciate that.
[1:20:33] Oh i don't know and and is there you see everyone said oh there's a reckoning it's like is there a reckoning for the fear mongers uh the the the the covid vaccine fear mongers is there a reckoning for them are they getting called out are they getting like you said everyone's going to be dead in two three years blah blah blah uh is that is that happening are they being called out are they making their apologies like i don't know it just it really rude. Because here's the thing, this is the alt-media space. I don't want to get off on a rant here. So the alt-media space, I mean, they have rights. They look at sort of the mainstream media and they say, look, these guys made terrible mistakes. They lied about this. They lied about that. They made people afraid about this. And they should apologize. Yes, absolutely. But is this true in the alt-media space too? Is it also in in the alt-media space are people held to account for egregious, terrifying falsehoods.
[1:21:39] I don't know that that's happening. I just, I don't like the idea, and I'm not saying it is true, but I don't like even the idea that the sort of alt-media space is just a different set of unaccountable falsehoods. People who said everyone's going to die have they been held to account because they were wrong and they scared the living shit out of people and that's terrible.
[1:22:23] I mean, I don't think a lot of this stuff is really going to be investigated very much because I think people just want to move on. People just want to move on. All right. Happy to take other questions, comments, issues. Happy to hear. Congratulations on quitting your tobacco. Excellent. Excellent. Excellent. Good for you. Good for you. All right. Let me just check the messages here. Craig Jones made a comment that the pro-vax and the anti-vax people are looking at each other now confused that the other person is still alive. Right. I mean, we all know, what was it, the Biden thing about the unvaccinated looking at a winter of severe disease and death. Okay, that's really terrible. Telling people they're going to die is just about the worst thing you can do outside of actually killing them. Right? That is terrible, terrible, terrible, terrible behavior. Thanks, Leah. I appreciate it. It's terrible behavior. I mean, can you imagine a doctor saying you have a year or two to live?
[1:23:48] Oh wrong you're fine oh my god people made like people made major major life choices like if you got the vax and then somebody said you're going to be dead, you would make you you quit your job you'd spend your money you'd you'd whatever right, And, my God, that's just appalling. People made major decisions on information that was not true.
[1:24:30] All right. Go in once, go in twice, type quick. Otherwise, I've got a topic that will take us home. Ah, but I'll wait. If you've got a yearning burning, a son of an itch that I can scratch, I'm keen to help. You are the master.
[1:25:11] All right, some people are typing. Please, 2008 Stef. The topic, okay. Right, so the feminine mystique is largely dead. A lot of chivalry came about because women were viewed as beautiful, delicate, wonderful creatures who were nurturing and kind and thoughtful and connected and bonded and so on, right? Now, it is not the case, of course, that this applies to all women. Tons of exceptions. But the one thing I couldn't help but take out of the debate from last night, is just how rabid massive numbers of women seem to be to have the right to kill the babies in their own wombs.
[1:26:11] It's pretty wild. It's kind of tough, I think, and this will be a permanent change in sex relations. It is kind of tough, I think, for men to sentimentalize women when massive numbers of women seem to live, breathe, and die according to their ability, to kill shot their own fetuses is in order to pursue a life of sex and PowerPoints.
[1:26:46] Abortion is a terrible topic. It is a horrible issue. It is the death of a baby. And I have a whole debate about this with a woman in the premium section, freedomain.locals.com. You can go and listen to more of my thoughts about it there. But what is really quite astounding is seeing how hungry so many women are for the right to kill their own fetuses. That's really something. And I don't think that gender relations, the relations between men and women, will never again resume any kind of sentimentalized or prior state. It will just never happen. This is all over. It's all over. It's all done. Because this, you know, the mask, the witch mask ripped off, the feral aspect of this is really something. I mean, not to get into the debate in particular, but, you know, Kamala Harris saying.
[1:27:51] Well, we believe in bodily autonomy and for a woman to control her own body and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It's like, well, a fetus is not her own body because, I mean, your liver is your own body, but it doesn't detach and go to college and get woke. It's not even your DNA that's in the baby, right? So it's not your body. But Kamala Harris saying, with a straight face, with moderators who claim to be fact-checking, saying, well, you know, women, we've got to be able to control our own medical decisions and privacy and bodily autonomy and control. It's like she and Biden created vax mandates. I mean, so it's not about bodily autonomy and control. It is just the kill shot for the fetus. That seems to be what it's all about. And men are still, I think, fundamentally not processing this. Are you? Let me know. Am I off base about this? How are you processing?
[1:28:51] How are you processing this fairly ugly side of female nature that wants this power without, it seems, significant regret or conscience? I can see if somebody says, you know, this is an absolutely terrible situation, any kind of abortion is just awful, and regretfully with this, that, and the other. And it's like, no, it's just like, hey, it should be subsidized, should be safe, legal, free. We want to have this ability. And it's the number one political issue, isn't it? James, can I get a fact check on that? Is it the number one political issue for American women? Isn't this wild? What is that old joke? My body's a temple? Yeah, like an Aztec temple.
[1:30:16] I mean, at the very most charitable, I could look at abortion like amputation, right? Like amputation is a terrible thing. You should do everything you can to save the limb. Amputation is the regretful necessity in a horrible extremity. But can you imagine doctors roaming up and down the streets demanding and cheering and singing, we demand the right to amputate? I guess they kind of are in a way, right? But, it is, there's no road back I'm not look the road forward I mean it's always better to have the facts right, so the road forward is better because these are just the facts and I'm not saying this is even female nature as a whole because we don't know what male and female nature is, because we live in a human zoo, so you wouldn't want to judge animals by how they act in a zoo, right? I'm not saying women are animals, it's just an analogy.
[1:31:44] So, but there's no going back to sentimentalizing women.
[1:32:03] Talked online to a woman, says someone who did not even think getting an abortion was a subject requiring deep thought and moral reasoning. I mean, the maternal instinct, the beauty of women, the sentimentality that men have for women, the idealization of women, the pedestalization of women, the poetic, mystical, feminine, that's all gone, man. That's just gone. That is gone. Not for all women. There's some wonderful, beautiful women out there, but somebody says, I think men would advocate for abortion more if they had to be pregnant too. Sorry, I don't understand this at all. Not all of them, of course, but I think it's easy for men to pretend to hold a higher moral ground on this issue because they don't have to bear the physical burden. They don't have to bear the physical burden. What are you talking about?
[1:32:52] A woman can choose to be unpregnant. A man cannot choose to be not a father. You know this, right? A woman can choose to terminate a pregnancy. A man cannot opt out of fatherhood. So if the woman decides to have the baby, the man is on the hook for child support for the next 20 years. So he has to bear a big fucking burden I'm not sure what you're talking about here don't have to bear the physical burden I mean I don't know the guy's name but some black guy just went to jail for not paying 70 grand in child support, what what are you talking about men don't have to bear the physical burden men cannot but.
[1:33:39] Reject fatherhood. And in some places, it's really, really tough and sometimes illegal to even get a paternity test. So men can be forced for 20 years to pay for a child who is not their own. There was a boy somewhere in America, and check me if I'm wrong. I don't want to fall for these urban myths, right? So double check me if you can, James. But if I remember rightly, there was a boy who was like 15 or 16 who was the subject of statutory rape from an older woman who still had to pay child support, was still on the hook for child support. So I don't know what you mean when you say men can't be pregnant too. Women can choose to be un-pregnant, but men can't choose to not be fathers. I mean, once the woman is pregnant. He says, further, my female friends agree that women don't get abortions if they have the means to provide for their children. It's usually due to an inability to afford to be a single mother. But that's not true. Again correct me if I'm wrong but I think that the number one reason for abortion is it's inconvenient, it's the wrong time, it doesn't fit into my lifestyle, that kind of stuff so, I don't know about that and single mothers get tons of welfare so I don't know what that means.
[1:35:04] Yeah, doing back-breaking labor to provide for families sounds like physical burden to me, right? Pro-choice sisters from 2020? Pro-choice younger women are more likely than counterparts to say abortion is the most important issue determining their vote.
[1:35:26] I grew up thinking abortion was okay. Is it superficial thinking that it is a simple fix to the inconvenience of an unwanted pregnancy, no morals behind it, just a way to get what they want? Story from 2014 a male victim of statutory rape became a father at age 14 got served in 2012 with papers demanding child support yeah, so they say well the victim of rape should be able to abort okay well we can make that argument but i don't see this was a boy who was a victim of rape who not only has to well who has to now pay child support for 20 years. He was a victim of rape, and he's now tied to his rapist for 20 years. My God. And again, we can have discussions about the virtues, ethics, and morals of, killing fetuses, but.
[1:36:32] Yeah, what do they call it? I was watching a video where a woman called an abortion clinic and she said, I'm 34 weeks or whatever, what's that, seven or eight months? I'm 34 weeks? And they're like, we then remove the products of conception. The fetus, the products of conception, the clump of cells, the...
[1:37:01] And it's funny because there is this, well, not funny, of course, right? But a lot of times in the same personality, there is this coldness towards the baby growing in your own body, and then this infinite warmth for like migrants and criminals, and like it's wild. It's wild. So this is not, thank you, Matthew, this is not ever going back. What we are doing as a society at the moment it's amazing it's an amazing thing and i'm incredibly proud and happy and thank you for your support for to be a part of this but we are getting in real time absolute permanent verification of the state of mind of people in statism.
[1:37:55] And what is the number? Again, please verify if you can. Is it a third of women, 25% or 30% of women have had an abortion? That's not right. That's not right. I mean, I think that's statistically right, and James, if you can just give me a quick check on this, but it is wild.
[1:38:32] And, again, this is not to argue whether abortion should be legal or illegal. I'm not even arguing the ethics of it. But what I am doing is I'm saying the way in which it's discussed, this sort of absolute self-righteous woman controlling her own body, this number one political issue is the right to abort babies. That's the number one thing. I mean, that's some cold shit, man. That is, that is some cold, cold stuff.
[1:39:09] I mean, of course, what we want to do is, even if abortion is legal and so on, what we absolutely want to do is minimize it as much as humanly possible. Because the other thing too, is that abortion, of course, diverts a massive amount of medical resources that could be used for non-voluntary conditions, right?
[1:39:35] Non-voluntary conditions. Now, women say, well, I consented to sex, but I didn't consent to pregnancy. It's like, if you have procreative sex, like male orgasm in the birth canal at time of ovulation, isn't that kind of like saying, well, I consented to Russian roulette, but not to getting shot. It's like, but that's sort of the risk you take, isn't it? I mean, if you motorcycle blindfolded and you say, well, I consent to do a motorcycle ride but not to crashing, it's like, but you did kind of raise the risks there, right?
[1:40:21] One in four U.S. women expected to have an abortion in their lifetime. This is as of 2024. 13% of women in the United States likely to have an abortion by age 25. Man. Do you think the rhetoric around bodily autonomy is speaking to those pro-abortionist women having their bodily autonomy acted against e-childhood sexual abuse? Well, I mean, one in three girls, one in five boys. At a conservative estimate, I think the numbers are much higher, but at a conservative estimate, one in three girls, one in five boys. You know, the hot crazy matrix, of course, the hot crazy matrix has something to do with the fact that attractive women, attractive girls, excuse me, attractive girls are, often preyed upon more by, pedophiles. Hmm.
[1:41:33] I mean, this is, of course, anecdotal and so on, but I'm sure you've seen these brutal videos of men begging their wives and girlfriends to not get an abortion, like they're pounding on the doors of the abortion clinic and begging and crying for this not to happen. Yeah, they sometimes call the child of the womb a parasite and so on, right? James says, there are so many women on dating profiles that list reproductive rights as important to them. It's a pretty big red flag for me. Right.
[1:42:12] Thanks for the stream, Stef. There's always very profound things to think about. Thank you. Appreciate you being here. Now um would you like to close off with a wee theory as to why these rights are so important to so many women, james can i just get you to look up one last thing sorry to keep taxing your pinkies your phalanges but uh what to what percentage of women are pro-abortion abortion because i mean they'd say it's a women's issue it's like no for a lot of women particularly christian women abortion is a sin i i think only two percent of abortions are the result of rape and incest so it is extraordinarily rare as far as that goes and you know there can be false allegations i'm not saying there are of course in any one of these circumstances but there certainly can be. So what, um, what, for what percentage of women, right?
[1:43:26] Do you think it's possible that you are underestimating the degree to which sexuality has changed? Okay, Chris, that's kind of an annoying, passive-aggressive way to ask the question. I mean, you know, you saw this in the debate, you know, where it's like, do you think you could have done anything differently in the past that would have been better? And that's a question you can't, there's no answer to that, right? It's a trap. Because if you say, well, maybe I could have considered this a little bit more, like, Trump admits massive fault, you know, this kind of stuff, right? Whereas if you say, no, I did everything perfectly, it refuses to even consider the fact that he might be wrong, so narcissistic he can't even think about doing it, like, you just can't win that, right? There's no way. Do you think it's possible you're underestimating the degree to which sexuality has changed? Anything's possible. Do you think it's possible you could be a space alien from Mars and not even know it? Sure. See, harsher men and then their partners hardening up and objectifying their body more, calling it boundaries. Porn is generally quite harsh nowadays. I will let you tell me that. All right.
[1:44:45] Uh, James says the last time he looked at stats, it was less than 1% of abortions attributed to rape slash incest, but even 2%. Yeah. Whew.
[1:45:02] Yeah, I think, I think, I think, Joe, you, you have it right. You steal my thunder. Don't steal my sunshine. Because women only have sex to offer and no personality. If they can't offer sex, those women are screwed. Well, I don't think that's true. I mean, I think there's truth in it. So what happens to women if they cannot offer sex?
[1:45:28] What happens? Just imagine this. Go with me on a journey, my friends. What happens? And again, not all women, right? But to a lot of women out there, why is it such an important issue? You so if a woman goes out into the dating marketplace and says um no uh no no sex until marriage right what happens well um how can she compete with all the other women who are offering sex but particularly to young men to whom sex is like the alpha and the omega so to speak right So how is a woman going to deal with that? Well, she has to become such a high-quality woman that the man is willing to wait. It's worth the wait. Absolutely. You were so much fun. You were so smart. You were so funny. You were so engaging. You're such a great conversationalist. Yeah, I never thought I'd say this, but I'm willing to wait, right?
[1:46:30] So sex is a subsidy for dating that women find it hard to give up.
[1:46:43] If a woman can't offer sex, she has to offer something else of value. Is she going to offer money? Nope. Not going to offer money because women in general don't want to pay for their men. They don't want to pay. okay so is the woman going to offer money no what is she going to offer that differentiates her and makes her of value in the dating marketplace now there are lots of wonderful women out there who produce wonderful have great conversations they're smart they read a lot they you know great you know really provide great value right but for a lot of women and gallipol from 2022 women identifying as It's pro-choice on abortion, 61%. Now, given that Americans are the most religious country in the West, that means that virtually all non-religious, or at least virtually all non-religious American women are pro-choice. Pro-choice.
[1:48:04] So what is a woman going to offer to get a boyfriend if she can't offer sex i mean just imagine that, i mean particularly for young men although maybe not these days in the days of crashing clashing testosterone levels, but for men, young men, it's a kind of sexual desire. It's a kind of madness. It's a kind of craziness. It's so intense, right? Nature's attempts to make families is not the most subtle motivation known to man, god, or beast.
[1:48:48] So, imagine that. Now, you can imagine this as a man very easily. So when you look back on your girlfriends, the women you've dated, it doesn't have to be girlfriends, girlfriends, but if you look back at the women you've dated, 64% overall are pro-choice, Democrats 86%, Republicans 23%. Yeah, so that would be the religious swing, right? So how many, what percentage of the women you dated over the course of your life would you have dated without sexual access or if they had said no sex before marriage? How many of the women.
[1:49:35] You dated in the past. Would you have dated if you knew there was going to be no sexual access until marriage? Religious service attendance, so if you attend church weekly, 20% are pro-choice. Weekly, monthly, 46%. Seldom or never a 70%. Right. Give me your percent. I won't give my exact number because it's very low, and through that you might be able to calculate my body count, but it's not high. It's not high. Right. So abortion on demand is an R-selected strategy that opposes case-selected dating standards. Abortion is a mechanism, in a sense, by which our selected mating strategies win out over case-selected mating strategies.
[1:50:59] Imagine if, as a man, you had to take sexual access off the table when it came to dating. Or, to put it another way, how handsome and well-spoken and well-dressed would you have to be to get a woman to pay for all of your dates as a man? Isn't that an interesting question?
[1:51:35] Say this again. How, if you wanted a sugar mommy, even a woman your own age, if you said, well, if you want to date me, you have to, as a man, if you said, if you want to date me, you have to pay for everything. You have to pay for all of the dates, you have to pay for my gym membership, you have to pay for... And there are women who do this, right, for himbos or whatever, right? So, if as a man, you said to women, if you want to date me, you have to pay for everything. Imagine how ripped, handsome, charming, well-dressed, you'd have to be so ridiculously high status for the woman to date that everybody would assume she was paying for everything anyway. And she'd have to probably be post-war, post-fertility or whatever, right?
[1:52:27] So if as a man, you're not allowed to pay for dates, you'd have to up the quality of what you're presenting so high, it would be, yeah, you'd have to be like Brad Pitt handsome or something like that, right? I can imagine most women would laugh at that, or be disgusted, some would even be insulted. No, I get that.
[1:52:43] I get that. But imagine how good-looking you'd have to be as a man, how high status you'd have to be as a man to demand that women pay your bills. So that's the analogy. If a woman says, I will not have sex with you until we're married, how attractive does she have to be? And I don't just mean physically, but how attractive does she have to be? Does she have to be? Does she have to be? How attractive does she have to be, in order to get your commitment? Isn't that an interesting question? Sexuality is a subsidy, and money is a subsidy. Men use money as a subsidy, and women use sex as a subsidy. Also women love being wooed man i i was thinking a little bit more i'm listening to the audiobook of, the movie that i reviewed uh it ends with us the blake lively movie and i i have lost track of the time but but it's something like this woman has this rock abd ripped neurosurgeon handsome god of a man, he lusts after her for over a year. Over a year, he's just massively lusting after her. And she finds this the sexiest thing you could conceive of. It is the sexiest thing to be desired for a woman.
[1:54:10] And if that desire pays off and she gets married and has kids, well, she is no longer being pursued. She's no longer being lusted after in the same way. Now, of course, good husbands know that you lust after your wife every day and twice on Sundays. You must lust after your wife. Hopefully she'll lust after you too, but you absolutely, if you're not lusting after your wife and making her call HR with every other breath, then I don't know what you're doing as a husband. But imagine if you did not have the subsidy of sex or the subsidy of money, because men in the past generally didn't have the subsidy of money because we were broke, poor, lower class, middle class. Maybe you inherit something down the road, but you'd be poor. Now, the goal, of course, is you're going to make money later on as a man, and maybe things would be better off, but a man couldn't lavish money on a woman in the past because we didn't have that much money. Think about like you know even post-industrial revolution but certainly before that you got nothing it's a famous date a jug of wine a loaf of bread and thou, Men couldn't bribe women with money in the past, and women couldn't bribe men with sex.
[1:55:37] Abortion allows for a woman to offer fairly risk-free sexual access to a man, rather than elevating the qualities of morals, conversation, and value in other ways. And people, you know, I'll tell you this, man, this part of the whole deplatforming thing, right? It can be tough. I'll tell you this, man. Have you ever gone through a period in life where you actually find out your real value? Ooh, it can be a little bit of a sting. I'm so valuable. People love me. Oh, I'm one website over and 96%, 97% of people don't bother coming over. Well, I guess I'm not that valuable, right? I mean, that's a reality. Have you ever tried to figure out, and this can happen in the workplace, can happen in a relationship, do you care about me enough to compromise? Are you valuable? How valuable are you? People have a terror, especially the more vain they are, the more they pump themselves up, the more that they get in resources and attention and dopamine, the more they get addicted to sexual attention to find out. Now, a woman gets married, she has kids, then she finds out exactly how, quote, valuable she is, right? How valuable is she?
[1:57:01] Do women want to find out how valuable they are to men without being able to offer sex? And do men want to find out how valuable they are to women without offering money, without paying? People are just too lazy to pursue truth. More of an addiction thing.
[1:57:26] So I think the abortion is a cover for a desperate fear that a man is only interested in you for sex. It's really, and the man's fear is that the woman's only interested in him for money and status, right? So, a woman's fear that a man is only interested in her for sex is mirrored, I think, in the abortion question. If there's not easy, free access to abortion, well... How valuable are you?
[1:58:21] How valuable are you without subsidies?
[1:58:28] It's a tough question, right? It's a big question. This is the me plus thing that I talked about with the Robert Williams video. Do you have to be you plus something in order to be of value? The bare forked animals, this great quote from King Lear. Man, it's just this bare forked animal, like a kid's lollipop drawing stick figure, just a bare forked animal. animal? Who are you without flash and sizzle and pizzazz? I mean, look at me. Look at me, damn it. Look, I'm just, I got no big backdrop, no big studio. It's just, you know, me and a microphone and all of that. I'm just trying to have value without flash, without fancy graphics, without a bunch of guests, without props and jokes and, right?
[1:59:14] Can I get the truth across just me? I like having a minimalist studio because it challenges me to keep people's attention without flash and bedazzle. I don't have chyrons. I don't have, like, any of that. Can I keep you focused and interested just with that? Somebody says, I agree, especially for the daughters of divorced families. A lot of those daughters watch their fathers walk away, and it breaks their heart too young. They learn then that no man will ever love them more than their father, and their father loves stuff more than them. Yeah, I don't know. I mean, you could be right, of course, but.
[1:59:58] The problem with divorce is that the parents can't teach the lessons to the children. So in divorce, in general, the woman says, your father, my husband did something bad or wrong. He was distant. He was unavailable. He cheated. He didn't make enough money. I was bored. He wouldn't talk to me. He holed up in his study and wouldn't come out. And he golfed all weekend. end, right? So the mother says that there's something wrong with the father that she couldn't predict, right? The real problem with divorce is the lies told about it, not the actual divorce. So the woman in general will say that the man did something wrong that she couldn't possibly have predicted. It just turned out that he was this, that, and the other, and I didn't expect it. And therefore, that makes the daughters and the sons paranoid about pair bonding. You're on fire tonight. Thank you.
[2:00:55] The mother blames the father takes no responsibility for herself and this makes the daughter's paranoid about falling in love vanity kills vulnerability vanity kills openness vanity kills pair bonding vanity kills love well your father just turned out to be like this i couldn't have predicted it and that just makes women paranoid about falling in love because you could fall in love and it could just be right as opposed to saying well i didn't deal with my childhood I chose the wrong guy. It was obvious from the beginning, and here's how to avoid that. Now, it would be kind to the children. The problem with divorce is the lies told about the marriage and the divorce. And the husband may have his own falsehoods, and he's also worried about telling the truth for fear of losing his access to his children. The divorce is not the problem.
[2:01:50] As adult. I'll go even further and say, in many ways, the child abuse is not the primary problem. The child abuse is the lies. The problem with child abuse as an adult is not the abuse itself, but the lies we tell ourselves about it. Oh, it was a mistake. They didn't mean to. They did the best they could, which means that you can, quote, be doing the best you could and still commit unutterable evils. That makes you paranoid about virtue.
[2:02:12] Paranoid about virtue. Helpless in the the face of inevitable ignorance well that's just the way he is and she couldn't have known that ahead of time and right all right listen i really really appreciate you guys dropping by tonight any last donations would be absolutely beyond affectionately if not downright lovingly welcome i really really do appreciate you dropping by tonight thank you in particular to anthony who carried the show with a donation. If you could help out, freedomain.com slash donate, I would really, really appreciate that. Yeah, Al Bundy, right? What's that meme about, like the Fight Club thing? It's like kids in the 90s. I have a well-paying, stable job, and it's hell. One income wife, two kids, dogs, home, and a car.
[2:03:07] And he was a shoe salesman, right? He was a shoe salesman. I mean, look at the house that Homer Simpson lives in, right? Stay-at-home wife, yep. We didn't know how good we had it, and we didn't know we were the last ones. But we didn't know how good we had it, and we didn't know we were the last ones. We'll donate on the website. Thank you. I appreciate that. I appreciate that. Lots of love. We will talk to you guys on Friday night. I appreciate that, and I'm very glad I ended up doing the live stream. I mean, I feel the responsibility, but I think it worked out well, and I appreciate that. Everyone. And, uh, I'll talk to you soon. Bye.
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