- 11 hours ago
Stefan Molyneux fields listener questions on the raw truths of parenting, social illusions, and the unyielding nature of reality itself. He arms new parents with the logic of gentle guidance—revealing how it forges unbreakable bonds by honoring a child's innate drive for reason over blind obedience. Diving into the fractured psyches of internet personalities, he cuts through the noise to isolate objective truth from the fog of public chatter. He unravels morality's tangled web, exposing emotional manipulation as the poison that strangles authentic love, which demands ruthless honesty with self and others. In the end, he challenges everyone to pursue real connections through unblinking truth, no matter the societal myths pulling you back.
0:00:00 Introduction to Listener Questions
0:06:21 The Journey of Fatherhood
0:13:40 The Debate on Destiny
0:20:45 Refugees and Politics
0:21:20 Insights on Ayn Rand
0:24:53 Societal Collapse and Smart People
0:31:02 The Concept of Love in Families
0:37:29 Philosophical Truths and Family Dynamics
0:44:20 Honesty and Parental Relationships
0:50:05 Individualism vs. Collectivism in Society
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You also receive private livestreams, HUNDREDS of exclusive premium shows, early release podcasts, the 22 Part History of Philosophers series and much more!
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0:00:00 Introduction to Listener Questions
0:06:21 The Journey of Fatherhood
0:13:40 The Debate on Destiny
0:20:45 Refugees and Politics
0:21:20 Insights on Ayn Rand
0:24:53 Societal Collapse and Smart People
0:31:02 The Concept of Love in Families
0:37:29 Philosophical Truths and Family Dynamics
0:44:20 Honesty and Parental Relationships
0:50:05 Individualism vs. Collectivism in Society
GET FREEDOMAIN MERCH! https://shop.freedomain.com/
SUBSCRIBE TO ME ON X! https://x.com/StefanMolyneux
Follow me on Youtube! https://www.youtube.com/@freedomain1
GET MY NEW BOOK 'PEACEFUL PARENTING', THE INTERACTIVE PEACEFUL PARENTING AI, AND THE FULL AUDIOBOOK!
https://peacefulparenting.com/
Join the PREMIUM philosophy community on the web for free!
Subscribers get 12 HOURS on the "Truth About the French Revolution," multiple interactive multi-lingual philosophy AIs trained on thousands of hours of my material - as well as AIs for Real-Time Relationships, Bitcoin, Peaceful Parenting, and Call-In Shows!
You also receive private livestreams, HUNDREDS of exclusive premium shows, early release podcasts, the 22 Part History of Philosophers series and much more!
See you soon!
https://freedomain.locals.com/support/promo/UPB2025
Category
📚
LearningTranscript
00:00All right, these are more questions from the fine listeners on X. Good morning, good morning,
00:04everyone. Hope you're doing well. Freedomain.com slash donate to help out the show. You love it
00:10being ad-free. I save thousands of hours of your life by not having ads. Freedomain.com slash donate
00:17to help out. Thank you. So, tips for a new father for an upcoming first baby, aside from your
00:24peaceful parenting book. Of course, yes, peacefulparenting.com. Tips for a new father.
00:29So, one of the things to remember, and I'm sure you know this, it's really just a reminder,
00:35is that being a new mother completely reshapes and really beautifies your wife's personality.
00:45So, once you become, once a woman becomes a mother, she never stops thinking about her family.
00:53She never stops thinking about what's best for her children. She never stops thinking about,
00:57I mean, you can, it's like a dimmer switch that you can't turn off. You can turn it down sometimes.
01:02But, I mean, good mothers, and I'm sure you have a lovely wife, good mothers, it's just something
01:09that happens. You are no longer, number one, you are, number one, shared with your children. So,
01:22you don't want to look at your wife and say, oh, I'm getting less attention, I'm getting less focus.
01:28You want to say that you are now part of a larger focus, and she has honored you with the
01:32greatest gift
01:33a woman can bestow upon a man, which is children. So, recognize that you are now part of a larger
01:41love. Sorry, I'm going to get emotional because it's such a, it's such a beautiful time when you have,
01:48especially your first child. It's just amazing and wonderful. And so, you are part of a larger love.
01:56The love now is not merely romantic and sexual, which is, you know, a wonderful part of life and so
02:02on. But your love is now familial. And being part of that larger love is everything in life.
02:12That's everything. The fierceness with which you will want to protect your children, I talked about
02:17this on the Scott Adams School yesterday, the fierceness with which you will want to protect
02:22your child and your family will be very primal and very powerful. And it is to avoid people gathering
02:31that fierceness of protection, that the powers that be are overjoyed to strip love from our hearts
02:36through vanity and bribery and sophistry and propaganda. So, you are entering into a cycle
02:45of life that is a much larger love than you have with your wife. Your daughter, your son, will come
02:58out
02:58of the womb with a fierce, desperate desire to love and respect his or her parents. I mean, you have
03:09a
03:09daughter. Soon, I have a daughter who's almost an adult. And children very much desperately want to love
03:18and respect and please their parents. Because of that very powerful bond, you need a very light touch
03:28when it comes to correcting or guiding your children. The way that I see a lot of parents doing it
03:38is,
03:39it's like if you have a Cessna, like a little tiny plane, little tiny lightweight plane, then if you
03:47yank that joystick around, your plane will stall, it will turn too sharp, you'll put too much strain
03:55on the wings, it'll tear up, it'll fall apart. You need a very light touch with children because
04:00children bond, attach, and love you so much that a slightly raised eyebrow, a small gesture is enough
04:12to correct them. You need micro adjustments with children, which is why it's so wild to me that
04:17so many parents, you know, attack and slam and hit and scream and it's like, oh gosh, it absolutely
04:24overwhelms the pair bond. And maybe it's because people are incapable of having a pair bond because
04:31of prior trauma that they've never worked on or something like that. But children come out of the
04:37womb wanting to please their parents. I mean, we can just think of this evolutionarily speaking,
04:43biologically speaking. Of course, children want to please their parents because children who
04:47significantly displeased their parents didn't usually make it. So the general cycle that happens,
04:54honestly, in most families, most families spank, at least in America and Europe, a little less so,
05:01but then they replace spanking with cold-hearted, icy-eyed indoctrination. So the general cycle
05:09that happens really is horrible and so unnecessary. One of the saddest things in my life is how much
05:17richness and enjoyment my mother could have gotten out of being a mother, which she shredded and
05:24destroyed with her aggression and violence. It really is very sad, you know, especially how much
05:31I enjoy being a parent, how much fun my daughter and I have together. It's really sad how much,
05:37I mean, both my parents walked away from all of that happiness because of the war, because of great
05:45tragedies, and because of, I don't know, like, is it an inability to pursue self-knowledge because the
05:53trauma has been so great? Or is it choosing the vanity of a pompous self-image instead of
06:02relinquishing that vanity and pursuing the truth? I mean, I don't know. I did not go through
06:08nearly as much trauma as my mother did. I was in an insane pocket of a relatively sane world.
06:14My mother was in a world that was being destroyed from end to end in the war. So it's, yeah,
06:23it's a real shame. She could have had a lot more fun and had a much happier old age. But
06:28that's not
06:30what happened. So the general pattern, it's very sad, is that parents get very aggressive with their
06:38children. This destroys the bond. And then because the bond is destroyed, they end up being even more
06:46aggressive, which further destroys the bond, which makes them even more aggressive. It's sort of like
06:52if you're in a car going very fast, then you need micro adjustments to the steering wheel. Of course,
06:59if you're going very fast and you turn the steering wheel sharply, you're just going to turn and flip and
07:03roll in the car. So imagine if you are in a car going fast and you make a micro adjustment,
07:13but the car
07:14doesn't turn, then you have to turn a little more. And it still doesn't respond, so you have to turn.
07:23So eventually
07:23you're just slamming the steering wheel back and forth, just trying to get a change in direction. And that's the
07:30kind
07:30of escalation that occurs. You get angry at your baby. Your baby looks at you in fear. This harms the
07:37bond, which means the
07:38baby is less likely to respond in any organic way. And then the next time you get upset, your baby
07:45looks
07:46at you in fear. You hate that look of fear because it makes you feel guilty. So then you get
07:51aggressive.
07:52I'm not talking about you. I'm just talking about obviously people as a whole. And next thing you know,
07:58all you're doing is managing brittle distance. Managing brittle distance. That's most families.
08:06Most families. And, you know, recognize that your daughter bonds with you. Be a source of happiness
08:15for people in your life. I mean, it really shouldn't need to be said, but it feels like it needs
08:20to be said.
08:21You know, be a source of happiness for people in your life. Successfully compete with the null
08:29hypothesis. Successfully compete with not being there. I want my family, let's say they get up earlier
08:38than I do. When I come down the stairs, I want my family to be happy that I'm up because
08:45I am a source
08:46of happiness for them. It's not super complicated. I mean, you are in a market in the world. And I
08:59want
08:59to be a source of wisdom and enrichment for you as best I can. And I also learn from the
09:07audience and
09:07from the feedback and every call and show, I learn something new. So just be a source of happiness
09:15for people in your life. I remember saying this when I was a manager in the business world. I was
09:20chief technical officer. I was a director of technology. I was a director of marketing in
09:26three different organizations. And I would say to my employees, first of all, you're not working for
09:33me. You're working for the customer. I don't pay you. The customer pays you. So they're the ones you
09:37have to please. And if that means you have to confront me about something in order to better serve the
09:41customer, please do. That's number one. And number two, I said, my salary is deducted from
09:47your wages. Right? If I wasn't here, if I wasn't necessary, if I wasn't adding value, you would be
09:54paid more. So maybe you pay, I don't know, $5,000 a year to me or $10,000 a year
10:04to me, which means
10:05I also work for you, which means I'm here to make your job easier and better, maybe more fun and
10:13so
10:13on. So I have to be of value to you. Now, of course, you have to be of value to
10:18me, to the customers and
10:19all of that. But don't forget that as your boss, I am here as a resource to provide value for
10:25you.
10:25If you're having trouble, please come to me. If you're having difficulties, if you're stressed,
10:29if there are problems, if you're not happy, come to me and I'm here to make your job experience
10:34as good as possible. So just be a source of value in people's lives. And it's really hard to fail
10:45if you focus on that. If you focus on providing value to people, then it's really hard to fail in
10:56life. It's the same thing with your children. Be a source of pleasure. Play with them. Engage with
11:02them. Have those, you know, beautiful conversations where you're just sitting around late at night,
11:09jawboning about things. Ask them questions. How did you sleep? Did you dream about anything?
11:15What's on your mind? You know, show interest in them and be a source of guidance and wisdom for them.
11:21Now, of course, you have to gather with them wisdom before you can provide it. So do that.
11:25As best you can. Peacefulparenting.com is a great free resource for parents. So that is
11:33really the basis of it. Recognizing that you're entering into an infinite cathedral of love that
11:41goes far beyond the individual and hooks you into and lashes you in a lovely way to the cycle of
11:49life
11:49that's been going on for four billion years. You merge yourself with a larger pattern of existence
11:55that gets you out of your own head and your own concerns and your own worries. And now you are
12:01there
12:01to support your wife as she dissolves even more than men do into the beautiful lattice work and tapestry of
12:11family love. Be there to support her, to help her, make sure you get her rest. And if you can
12:18get her
12:18other women who've gone through a motherhood to give her advice and feedback, assuming that they're
12:23good mothers, that's well worth it. But, you know, once you, you know, for your wife, of course,
12:31motherhood begins at conception. And for you, fatherhood is like, yeah, there's a bump in the belly.
12:36And I would certainly recommend reading to the baby in the belly. Particularly as a man,
12:44you'd have a deeper voice and that transmits well through the fluid that surrounds your
12:49lovely baby. And the studies have shown that babies respond to their father's voice if they've
12:56been read to in the womb, more so when they come out. So give her something familiar, a continuity that
13:01goes from the womb to the outside world. So read to her and put your hand on the belly and
13:08she can
13:08put her hand through the sack to your hand and it's a beautiful kind of contact. And be there to
13:18support your wife in the biggest change that she's ever going to experience, even bigger than
13:24a puberty. As she merges her soul with a new soul. And it is peak, as my daughter would say,
13:36it is peak, peak human experience. And it doesn't end. It's amazing. It's an amazing process. And
13:44I wish you the very best going forward with that.
13:49What's your take on the streamer, Destiny? Well, of course, I,
13:54read about him in Lauren Southern's new book. He seems very hyper and very aggressive. And there's
14:03this kind of tension that happens with certain people when they're in debates, this very rapid
14:13fire aggression and almost contempt that comes out of people. And it's not particularly fun to see
14:24and it's also something that I view as being driven by a kind of ideological desperation.
14:31So, two kinds of people in the world. There are people who survive and flourish based upon
14:40their pursuit of real things in the real world. I mean, you know, plumbers go and actually fix
14:44toilets and pipes and so on. Electricians fix wiring and fuse boxes and so on. And so,
14:51there are people who get their survival and income and flourishing from doing real things in the real
14:59world. And those people tend to have a kind of calm to them. As I said before, though, I was
15:06not a huge
15:06fan, obviously, of manual labor when I was a child and a teenager and in my early 20s. But I
15:13did
15:13years of manual labor, hard physical labor, and boy, did it ground me in the real world.
15:20And in general, the other kinds of people are those who make their living out of bullying,
15:29nagging, and bamboozling others. As you think of the single mom who is constantly voting for more and
15:36more government benefits. So, they survive on a kind of falsification and implicit bullying.
15:44And it is the sort of typical historical proto-natural male and female archetypes that the man is out
15:51there doing things in the real world and the woman is using sexual wiles or nagging or bullying to
16:01get resources from the males. And the people who live by lying or manipulating, who live through
16:13language rather than through real work in the real world. I know this sounds ironic since I do kind of
16:21talk for a living, but I do a lot more than that. So, those who live by sophistry through emotional
16:30manipulation, through the application of negative emotions and the application of positive emotions,
16:38through approval and disapproval rather than truth and correction, who threaten to make people feel bad,
16:48either through a consistent application of condemnation or hostility, those people have a kind of
16:57panic in the base of their assault. It's the panic of a con man who is, of course, constantly nervous
17:05and
17:05anxious that his con is going to be exposed. Sort of the Bernie Madoff and Elizabeth Holmes kind of, or
17:11Samuel
17:12Bankman Freed. This concern or this anxiety that the fraud is going to be exposed. It creates a certain kind
17:21of
17:21tension. And so, there's kind of a driving aggression and condemnation and impatience and they're signaling
17:27that they're in the right, you're in the wrong. And there's not a sort of patient building up from
17:34first principles in pursuit of the truth. Are they in pursuit of the truth? I would say not. And one
17:42of the
17:42things that's really important when debating with people is to look at the personal costs and benefits
17:49of them admitting fault or error. And have they done so in the past? It's really important.
17:57Is the person you're debating capable of admitting fault and or error? And if there's no particular
18:05evidence that the person you're talking to is capable or has in the past admitted fault or error,
18:10I wouldn't. I wouldn't really bother unless you're doing some public debate to instruct others in
18:15general. I certainly wouldn't bother with that. So, yeah, I think there's just this kind of
18:23energy and panic and aggression and hostility and contempt. These are all emotional signals that
18:29if you disagree, then things will escalate. And, you know, possibly, I'm not saying with destiny,
18:35but with this sort of type of personality in general, that things will escalate in potentially
18:41dangerous ways. There's a sort of background threat to all of this. And the other thing,
18:47of course, is to look at the person's arguments and say what would be the consequences politically
18:55of accepting a person's argument or rejecting that person's argument. If that person was proven wrong,
19:05what would happen politically? And generally what I mean by politically is what would happen to voting
19:08patterns and what would happen to the, you know, multi-trillion dollar a year bamboozle of income
19:16transfer, coercive income transfer that characterizes political redistribution? You say, well, what would
19:22happen? What would happen? Well, if you have a hard leftist who then says, gee, I'm wrong, you're right,
19:30and so on, then hard leftists tend to be characterized by violations of property rights for purposes of
19:38political reward, right? So they take money from the successful and they give it to the less
19:42successful in return for votes and allegiance to political power, right? This is an age-old
19:49foundational aspect of politics. So if someone like destiny was proven wrong and accepted that they
19:58were wrong and had a respect for property rights and so on, then if that were to be established within
20:05society, then trillions of dollars would stop being herded around the political landscape
20:11by the aggression of politicians and the state apparatus. Well, that would be quite a big thing.
20:20Also, in general, the more aggressive someone has been in public about their beliefs, the less likely
20:26they are to change them. So the more somebody has held others in contempt, you know, like, I'm against the
20:32welfare state. Oh, you just hate the poor, you heartless fascist, whatever, right? Well, then the
20:37more aggressive someone has been in public, the less likely they are to ever change their views
20:40because they would have a lot of apologizing to do for their aggression. All right. So will we start
20:48taking real refugees from South Africa under Trump? I mean, certainly I think there's good
20:53justifications for the refugee program extending to South Africans, but the refugee program as a whole
21:01is something that's run by the state. Therefore, it is subject to all the corrupting factors of
21:07the state. I'm not a fan. All right. John asks, what are the key takeaways from Ayn Rand
21:14and her philosophy? I always hear you mention her, but to be honest, I don't know anything about it.
21:20So I have a whole series. It's a three-part series. It was going to be a fourth-part series,
21:25but I never got around to the fourth. And it is on Ayn Rand's philosophy. There's parts one,
21:30two, and three. You can go to freedomain.com slash podcasts or FDR podcasts, Free Domain Radio,
21:39that's the original name of the show, FDR podcasts.com. And you can do a search for AYN and you'll
21:45get a
21:46bunch of stuff there. And there's a three-part series. Very briefly, I think Ayn Rand was asked
21:50to define her philosophy while standing on one leg. And I think she did so. Reason capitalism.
21:57I think it was selfishness, reason capitalism, self-esteem, or something like that.
22:01So the basics of Ayn Rand's philosophy are that existence exists independent of consciousness,
22:08that consciousness is able through the evidence of the senses to accurately perceive reality,
22:13and that reason is man's best tool for long-term survival, both individually and generally,
22:22and that the free market is the only moral way to exchange resources in human society.
22:33Reason, objectivity, it's called objectivism because it's about the objectivity of reason
22:39and the objectivity of reality as received through sense data. So the key takeaways are existence exists,
22:50reason is the only valid tool of cognition, emotions are not tools of cognition, and that free markets
22:57are the only moral way for human beings to exchange resources. And she's not an absolutist,
23:06though. She was not consistent. So she believed that the state was necessary, even though the state
23:15is, by its very definition, a violation of property rights and a coercive intrusion into the free market.
23:23Of course, in the end of Atlas Shrugged, I'm not giving any spoilers because I'm not talking about the story,
23:29but in the end of Atlas Shrugged, the big solution that apparently was going to solve all the problems
23:34was correcting some moral typos in the Constitution. And somehow that was going to solve everything.
23:41She responded to Murray Rothbard, who was part of what was jokingly called the Collective,
23:46which was a group of people talking about philosophy and markets that Ayn Rand was the head of.
23:52And Murray Rothbard was an anarcho-capitalist who said that if we're going to extend property rights
23:57and the non-aggression principle to their consistent universals, then the state becomes morally
24:04delegitimized. And she said, oh, but that would just result in a war of warlords and all against
24:08all and so on. And she was very impatient. And we could guess as to why it had to do
24:14with her own
24:14corruption. She did seduce and sleep with one of her acolytes who was decades younger, who became a
24:22psychologist, Dr. Nathaniel Brandon, who I actually had on my show a couple of times, again,
24:28fdrpodcast.com to search through. And she put her own personal lusts above what was good for philosophy
24:37as a whole, because the movement fell apart in large part because of this affair and the cover-up
24:43of it. So it was not ideal. I mean, people don't have to be perfect, but it would be nice
24:51if they
24:51acknowledged their own inconsistencies. All right. So, will all the smart people have fled the West
24:57by the time a Mad Max-style societal collapse occurs? Well, if you sort of look at the market
25:03of countries in the world as a whole, then the country that encourages or invites the smartest
25:12people to come to that country will be the next center of civilization. All right. What would you do if
25:20you catch your daughter watching at Nick J. Fuentes? I have not had that experience, but of course,
25:27if my daughter was watching someone whose views I had questions about, let's say, just ask her
25:34questions. You know, what's interesting? What are the arguments? What are they like compared to the
25:39evidence? And so on. Just be curious. Do you think God is a scientist? No, I don't think God is
25:47anything because God does not exist. Why do you, in some of your books and podcasts, outline
25:53a desert-like existence for those who've recently defu, i.e. the necessary period, walking alone
25:58before meeting, like valued individuals? A desert-like existence? So this is an analogy that
26:07you think you are in a city of people. It turns out that you wake up one day and, like
26:13Sean of the
26:14Dead style, you realize that you are in a city of zombies. Zombies being, of course, those who
26:20physically died but are still moving around and eat brains and act collectively and have no thoughts
26:28of their own. It really is an analogy for NPCs. As zombies became popular, as government curricula
26:37became more and more centralized. So as governments at the federal level take over more and more
26:43education, they produce more and more NPCs, people whose capacity to think, which is really our basic
26:50soul as human beings, people whose capacity to think has been robbed from them, propagandized away
26:57from them, sandblasted out of their souls. It is really just about the most gruesome thing that happens
27:01in the world as a whole is to sandblast and excavate out the seat of thinking, which is our essence
27:08as
27:09human beings, and replace it with a bunch of fearful and aggressive propaganda that is really the most
27:13brutal thing. So you wake up and you realize that the city that you're in is not populated by people
27:24but populated by zombies and that your own skin is turning green and that if you don't get out of
27:29the
27:29city, you will become a zombie. And that is, if you are around people who don't think, you will lose
27:35your capacity to think. I mean, if you've ever learned a language, I learned French and German when
27:42I was younger, if you don't spend any time speaking that language, you lose it. And if you're around
27:47people who don't speak a new language that you've learned, you will lose your capacity to speak that
27:52language. It's the same thing with reason. If you're around people who don't reason, who just react,
27:56get aggressive, hysterical, manipulative, pouty, cry, run from the room, whatever, call your names, then you
28:02will lose your ability to reason. So the infection of the city is burning its subtle way through your own
28:10skin as well and turning you green and bits of you will be falling off relatively soon. So you get
28:17out of the
28:17city and out of the city, around the city is a desert. And that's why people stay in the city
28:21because around the
28:23city is a desert that seems to go on forever. And if you are smart and alert and aware, then
28:31what
28:31will happen is you will get out of the city and you will look and scan the horizon for little
28:36tiny thin
28:37threads of smoke. Because it's a desert, there's really nothing to burn there. So the smoke must be
28:42coming from distant human habitations. And you will strike and struggle and climb knee deep and sand the
28:50dunes and stagger from oasis to oasis, rare as they are. And then after a hazardous period of traveling,
28:58you will come to an actual human settlement of the people who have fled the zombie city and actually
29:04think and reason and laugh and challenge and enjoy each other's company. So there is a passage.
29:12Because I don't want to lie to people about the difficulties of philosophy.
29:16The rewards are enormous. But if you were to say to somebody quitting a drug, you'll have no
29:22problems with it. It's easy. As falling off a log, you would be a liar. And if you were to
29:28say to
29:28people, telling the truth is all wonderful, there's no downside, everyone will love you for it,
29:33you would be a lying. Now, of course, thou shall not bear false witness is the most foundational
29:38commandment of theology and philosophy. So there would be nobody in the zombie city if it wasn't
29:46surrounded by desert. That the zombie city is maintained by threats of ostracism. Propaganda
29:52runs on threats of ostracism. That people will cut off contact with you if you don't agree with their
30:00lies. So there is the zombie city because of the desert. And NPCs react with bottomless hostility
30:14when their programming is questioned. Because you are pointing out their greatest wound, which is that
30:21they are not loved. They are simply approved of by evil people. And that's most people's existence.
30:26They're not loved. They simply have the approval of corrupt and evil people. And most human beings
30:32would rather be approved of than right. Again, evolutionarily speaking, those who preferred being
30:38right over being approved of, those genes didn't make it. Because we take so long to grow, like 20 to
30:4525 years it takes to grow a human being, that if we don't have the support of the tribe, we
30:50can't make
30:50it. And the support of the tribe is paid for by conformity with the tribe's lies.
30:56So, with regards to the DFU, that stands for, F-O-O is family of origin. It's a psych term.
31:04If you
31:04say, my family, are you talking about, if you have a wife and kids, your current family, or are you
31:08talking about the family you grew up in? So, F-O-O stands for family of origin. So, DFU is
31:14when you
31:14take a break from your family of origin because they are unrepentant abusers and destroyers of
31:21health, mental well-being and happiness. So, you can't be loved if you can't disagree.
31:28If you are attacked for disagreeing, then you are not loved. You are only praised for conformity
31:35and punished for non-compliance, but you're not loved. So, for instance, if you're in prison,
31:40one of the reasons or one of the ways that you know that you're in prison is, if you want
31:45to leave,
31:45you will be very strongly disagreed with, right? If you try to walk out, the door is locked. And if
31:50you try to make a break for it, they will perhaps even shoot you, but certainly can use great violence
31:57to prevent you from escaping. So, if you say, I'm not in prison, then the simple test is to leave,
32:06to walk out, right? So, I went to do Sam Hyde's show. I was in a hotel, and I wanted
32:12to go out for a
32:13walk. So, I left my hotel room, walked down the stairs. I tried to do stairs, not elevators.
32:19And I went for a walk. And they waved me, have a nice walk. And I came back, and they
32:25said,
32:26welcome back. And I got a nice decaf and warmed up because it was cold as hell. So, I say,
32:33I'm in a
32:34hotel. I can leave. Okay. So, then I can easily test that. Now, if I think it's a hotel, but
32:43it is
32:44in fact a prison, they won't let me leave. That is the basic test. So, people say, I'm in a
32:49family
32:49that loves me. Okay. That's nice, and I hope that that's true. I love that that's true, if it's true
32:57for you. So, people say, I'm in a family, and they love me. Okay. So, what is loving behavior?
33:05Well, if you are yelled at for disagreeing with them, is that loving? Probably not, I think. I think.
33:15If they've treated you consistently badly, i.e., they hit you a lot, they screamed at you a lot,
33:23they called you terrible names, and so on. Well, is that loving? It's hard to say that hitting people
33:32and screaming at people and calling them terrible names is loving. I mean, if you did that to your
33:39wife, especially out in public, people would be horrified and you'd go to jail. So, it's pretty
33:43hard to say that loving gets you jailed, maybe in the Middle East. So, if you say, my family loves
33:53me,
33:53I'm in a loving family, then clearly, as an empiricist, right, I don't care about theories,
33:59I care about facts. I care about evidence, first and foremost, like science cares about evidence,
34:04not theories. Evidence trumps theories. In any contradiction between theory and evidence,
34:08evidence wins, right? So, if you have a hypothesis, my family loves me, I have a good family,
34:16then that should be a testable hypothesis. Love is not biological attachment, otherwise ducklings have
34:24ardent love for me when we have ducklings because they follow me around and are imprinted upon and
34:30attached to me. It's the cutest thing in the world, of course, right? So, if you have a theory,
34:36my parents love me, great, then they should have acted in loving manners, in ways that we would
34:45recognize as loving. Now, insulting people, calling them horrible names, hitting people,
34:53screaming at people for having questions or disagreements, that is not loving. I mean, we can,
34:59I think we can all accept that. So, if your parents have been abusive and destructive and horrible and
35:06blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, then you can't say that they were loving, and it's dangerous to do that
35:12because philosophy is not about the past. Philosophy is about the future, like pain. Physical pain is not
35:17about the past, which can't be changed. It is about the future, right? So, if you are riding carelessly,
35:24you know, hands-free on gravel and you fall off your bike, then your body will give you pain.
35:29Not to undo the past, which can't be undone. Your body will give you pain in order to prevent you
35:36from being so careless in the future, right? So, philosophy is about the future, not about the past.
35:41Now, if you say, my parents love me, and my parents are also horrible and abusive and call me terrible
35:48names and scream at me and yell at me and so on, right? Then what you're saying is that love
35:54is defined
35:55by being abused, being put down, insulted, yelled at, and includes being hit in the past,
36:01since most people who are adults, they're not being hit by their parents currently, but
36:06maybe they were hit from the age of 3 to 13 to 10 years, you know, once a week, right?
36:11That's a lot, right? You get hit once a week for 10 years. That's being hit 500 times.
36:19That's a lot of hitting. 520, I guess, technically. So, the problem is, if you say,
36:27my parents love me, and my parents treat me terribly, then you're saying that love is being
36:32treated terribly. And that will condition how you pursue love and what you define as love in your
36:38adult life, which is not good. Also, if your parents treat you terribly, and some reasonably
36:47mentally healthy person does actually love you, then they will despise your parents, because we
36:51can't love someone and also love the people who have done the most harm and damage to them.
36:56You can't love your girlfriend and love the guy who screams at her at work and insults her and puts
37:03down. You can't love your boyfriend and also love the guy who humiliates him in public repeatedly.
37:09You can't love your friend and also love the person who beats them up once a month. If you love
37:16someone, then you will hate those who do them harm. And so, if you say that your parents love you
37:23when
37:23they, in fact, treat you terribly, or anyone for that matter, but I'm talking about the core
37:29formational experiences. If you say, my parents love me and my parents do me great harm, then you
37:36are conditioning who you love in the future, which then causes you to repeat the same parental
37:40misdeeds. You are keeping good people away from you because they won't want to be around such
37:45dysfunctional people. And you are accepting a falsehood. So, if your conjecture, your hypothesis,
37:52and I'm obviously open to and very happy to hear people's thoughts and hypotheses, I listened
37:58last night to a guy, he said he was a physicist, who was kind of incapable of admitting that
38:03he was wrong. So, he was talking about morality as something which spontaneously emerges among
38:07people, peoples and cultures, and then I would say, but then why does it decay into immorality
38:12within 100 or 250 years? And if you compare it to something like gravity, that gravity is a
38:22constant. And he said, well, no, gravity, there are theories that gravity is not a constant.
38:29And, honestly, I mean, I just kind of give up at those moments. I just really do. The idea that
38:35gravity is not a constant, and I gave him all the arguments, biological, physical, and so on, as to why
38:42gravity is not a variable, gravity is a constant, gravitational attraction, and its force is a
38:47constant. And the idea that it could change, how could it possibly change? Based on what? God's
38:54finger dialing up and down? This goes up to 11. I mean, it's ridiculous, right? Ridiculous.
39:01And, of course, the universe is, you know, 100 billion galaxies with 100 billion stars. It's like
39:08enormous beyond any capacity for human beings to understand. And the idea that if gravity were to
39:18change as a constant, like the speed of light in a vacuum were to dial up and down, if gravity
39:26were
39:26to change as a constant, it would have to change based upon some external cause or force. And how could
39:35it change from one end of the universe to the other? Because that would defy the laws of physics that
39:42information and facts cannot transfer faster than the speed of light? The universe is, what is it, billions
39:49of light years across? I don't know, it's huge, right? So the idea that every atom can be simultaneously
39:54affected by some outside force is antithetical to any kind of basic physics and reality. It would be like
40:02every atom in the world, sorry, every atom in the universe, suddenly went one inch or one centimeter
40:08to the left. You couldn't affect that in the entire universe, because you can't change things
40:15faster than the speed of light. And so, completely irrational. And I made all of the arguments he wanted
40:22to cling to that gravity was, in fact, a variable that might change. And so, I looked it up on
40:29Grok,
40:30and there is, in fact, no possibility, no evidence that gravity changes. I mean, obviously, it's impossible
40:37to measure perfectly, I assume, because whatever measurement tool you put in there is going to
40:42subtly change gravitational pull, but, you know, it's very easy to approximate. So, if someone is that
40:50committed to unreality, to the point where I provide an example of permanence that goes against
40:59the argument that morality somehow spontaneously evolves, and we didn't even get to the point that
41:05even if you say morality somehow spontaneously evolves, then it doesn't explain why there are cultures
41:13with vastly different moralities, right? When the Europeans first came to Africa and first came to
41:20North America, the natives would perform child sacrifice and kill and eat others, like cannibalism.
41:30So, they were old societies, and human beings have been in North America for almost 20,000 years,
41:36so they're old societies, and they have evolved rape and torture and child murder and cannibalism
41:41and other cultures have not. So, what would it mean to say that there's something that spontaneously
41:47emerges called morality that is somehow objective or universal? That doesn't really make any sense.
41:56So, I honestly just, I mean, my phone was low on power for sure, but, I mean, it's very silly
42:03that
42:04somebody is going to, in order to hold on to an argument, is going to make the claim that gravity
42:08is a
42:08variable, then there's no possibility of reasoning. So, gravity is a variable, but I don't need to
42:16define morality. Again, I say this with sympathy, but people who want to be right at the expense of
42:24reason can't be reasoned with, right? So, yeah, so you have a theory that says, my parents love me,
42:29okay, then you should be able to disagree with them. You should be able to tell the truth to them,
42:33because you can't love someone and then punish them for telling you the truth, right? This is like
42:39saying, I love the acquisition of knowledge in my students. Like, I'm a teacher. I love the
42:44acquisition of knowledge in my students, but I'm going to punish them violently for correct answers
42:50and reward them for incorrect answers, right? You can't say, I love teaching. I love when my students
42:58acquire true knowledge and then you punish them for accuracy and reward them for getting things wrong.
43:04That wouldn't make any sense. So, when parents say to you, I love you, then they're saying, I love your
43:11thoughts. I love your perspectives. I love your virtues. I love your honesty. So, if your parents say, I love
43:17you,
43:18then you should tell the truth to them. You should be able to tell the truth to them. If you
43:22tell the truth
43:22to them, and some of that truth can be harsh, right? Which is, I don't like what you did as
43:27a parent in this
43:27way. I don't like what you did as a parent in that way. So, if you say, my parents love
43:33me,
43:34then your parents should be happy that you're telling them the truth. Even if the truth is harsh,
43:40they'll be happy in the long run and they certainly would value the truth, right? I mean, if you broke
43:45something of your parents, they would want you to tell them that rather than hide your evidence and
43:50then they think, oh my God, whatever happened to this? It's just gone missing, right? Which drives people
43:56kind of crazy. Like, if you spill something on the book, let's say you spill some tea on the book
44:02that
44:02your parent is reading, your mother is reading, and then you just, you know, hide it and get rid of
44:09it
44:09and stuff it in the bottom of the garbage and so on. And then she comes back and she's like,
44:12hey,
44:12where's my book? I can't find my book. Oh, I don't know, right? That's not particularly nice. So,
44:16your parents say, oh no, tell me the truth. I mean, just tell me the truth. And if you say,
44:20well,
44:20I spilled tea on your book and so on, then that will upset them, but it will upset them less
44:26than
44:27thinking that they've lost their minds because their book has been mysteriously beamed out by
44:30space aliens. So, you can't love someone, or you can't claim to love someone, and then demand that
44:37they lie to you, right? I can't love a woman and then punish her for telling me the truth and
44:44reward
44:44her for lying to me. That's not loving her, that's loving compliance or whatever it is, right?
44:50So, if you have a hypothesis that your parents love you and that it's a good relationship,
44:56then you must be able to tell, not even if you should, you must be able to tell them the
45:00truth.
45:02Because lying is where we are not. Lying is where we are not ourselves, by definition, right?
45:07And so, if your parents say they love you, you should be able to tell the truth to them.
45:11If they punish you for telling the truth and reward you for lying, they don't love you.
45:15Like, I'm sorry, this isn't even, don't shoot the messenger, right? I mean, people are,
45:19tempted to. But if somebody screams at you and calls you terrible names and storms out and gets
45:26hysterical and punishes you emotionally and makes you feel awful for telling them the truth,
45:33then they don't love you. I mean, there might be a reaction that's negative in the short run,
45:37but overall, it can't be bad in the long run. So, I think it's a wonderful hypothesis and I hope
45:43that it's true that your parents love you. And this is why I've always told people,
45:47if you have issues with your parents, go and talk to them. Be honest. Tell them the things they did
45:52right and the things that they did wrong and be honest with your parents. So, that is an empirical
45:59test of the hypothesis. If you genuinely believe that praying to God will have him teleport you
46:07somewhere, right? Then, I don't think that's a rational belief. It's not physically possible.
46:14But, if you genuinely have the belief that praying to God will allow him to teleport you
46:20somewhere, then you should test that. I mean, when I was a kid, there were all of these
46:26crazy ideas floating around about psychic phenomena and telekinesis and so on, right?
46:32So, I tried it, right? I remember lying on my bed. I had a train set over my bed. So,
46:38I lay under my bed. There was, in the next room, a record player from ShopRite with plastic speakers
46:45and you couldn't even close the lid. It only did 45s. You could do 33s, but then you couldn't
46:49close the lid and it sounded terrible and my friends never brought their albums over because
46:52it basically was an Apple Cora and I had to put plasticine on it so that it didn't skate
46:57over the record grooves and then everything was a little bit slow. YMCA. It's fun to...
47:07Anyway, so, I was listening to the first 45 I ever got, which was Things We Do For Love
47:14by 10CC and the 45 had finished playing and you were just getting that of the record at the
47:23end and I worked very hard for almost an hour to try with my mind to lift the needle and
47:29put it back
47:29at the beginning of the record or do anything with the needle and nothing happened. So, I tried it.
47:36My mother brought me and I got into the newspaper for this. My mother brought me to a spoon bender
47:42who claimed to be able to bend spoons with his mind and taught me and a friend how to do
47:49it
47:49and it was all nonsense. You just rubbed the spoon till you warmed it up and then you believed
47:56that you could turn it and twist it and you were able to turn it a little bit and twist
47:59it
47:59because you'd warmed it up and also because visualizing strength gives you more strength
48:03than you think. And so, yeah, it was... I tried it and gave it the experiment and it turned out
48:08to be nonsense and all of that. I tried writing different... the names of different colors on
48:16little scraps of paper and swirling them all around and then seeing if I could psychically
48:20pick out which one it was. That turned out to be not valid. It was no better than random. Of
48:25course,
48:26you can't see things that you can't see. So, I tried these things and because I tried these things
48:33and found them to be false, I abandoned the belief. So, you should be able to tell the truth to
48:40your
48:40parents without fear, especially as an adult, right? You should be able to be honest with your
48:44parents without fear. And if you're terrified to be honest with your parents, they don't love you.
48:49I'm sorry. Like, again, don't shoot the messenger. It's just a fact, right?
48:52All right. Why do there seem to be many more low-information people than ever?
48:59Says Mapuchi Girl. Well, that is interesting. Low-information people. So, it is one of the
49:08things that's happened with X, which is, you know, people will, you know, post pictures. This is real
49:14rage-baiting stuff, right? People will post pictures of an obviously slender girl and say,
49:19I like it when women are a little fat like this, you know, and everyone gets crazy and upset. So,
49:23there's a lot of this sort of rage-baiting stuff. And I'm not saying I don't fall for it from
49:29time to
49:29time and so on, but there definitely is a lot of propaganda that's out there. I think that there are
49:36fewer low-information people than ever, because I'm obviously older than you. Let's see this
49:41picture. Oh, maybe not. But when I was a kid, everybody was low-information. As someone who
49:50studied philosophy in his mid-teens, everybody was low-information. All right. Why do you think
49:57crypto is really a better system when it's reliant on electricity? Well, everything in society is
50:01reliant upon electricity. If you lose electricity, then you lose society. So, the idea that somehow
50:07Bitcoin can't survive the end of electricity, even though you can do transactions off-chain
50:14on paper, the idea that society can survive the end of electricity is a delusion. Not even close.
50:29Why do you continue to promote hyper-individualism but lament over the destruction of the Western
50:34world by intact collectivist tribal groups? I'm not sure it's hyper-individualism. I mean,
50:39you can give them all these labels. I just promote the truth as far as I can reason and see
50:44it. I
50:45promote the truth as best I can. And the truth is that concepts don't exist in empirical reality.
50:52And this is the truth. I will not surrender the truth to anything. And I view it as a kind
51:03of
51:03devilish, honestly. And I'm not saying you, I'm just, I view it as kind of devilish that you would
51:10say to me, oh, well, but if you promote the truth, your civilization will end. Well, that's not up to
51:18me.
51:19That's not up to me. I promote the truth. I am not going to compromise the truth for the sake
51:25of
51:25being bribed with the possible continuance of civilization or my civilization or what I grew up
51:29in or whatever, right? I have, uh, that which dies from the truth, what is, how does it, in what
51:38way
51:38does it deserve to live? That which collapses when the truth is told does not deserve to stand.
51:44And as I suspect, if we have to go through a very dark period in human history, because people won't
51:51listen to the truth, well, then we have to go through a dark period in human history because
51:55people won't listen to the truth. So you are trying to bribe me into abandoning the truth
52:01by saying, well, if you promote these facts, your civilization will end. And I'm still going to
52:09promote the truth. Listen, you can go anywhere else to get comforting lies. Honestly, you can go
52:14anywhere else to get comforting lies to come to me, who's one of the rare individuals telling the
52:18truth in the world and say, no, no, no, you should lie. And I'm going to bribe you with the
52:24continuance
52:24of your civilization. Well, my civilization is in the future based on truth. That's what I'm trying
52:31to get to. And you can read this in my novel called The Future, freedomain.com slash books.
52:35It's free. You should check it out. I'm a trained actor. The audiobook is really, really good. So I'm
52:41interested in promoting the truth. Hopefully that gets us to a rational society. If not, there's
52:46nothing you can bribe me with that would make me abandon the truth. There is no benefit that you
52:50could possibly offer me that would cause me to abandon the truth. You can go anywhere else for
52:55your lies. Don't try and bribe me to get me to start lying. It's not going to happen. I've been
53:01tempted my whole life. I'm pushing 60. It's not going to happen now. I can't believe people even
53:06try this, but maybe you're new to the conversation. It's not going to happen. I've suffered far too
53:12much for the truth and been rewarded. Don't get me wrong. It's not like I'm a martyr. I've been
53:17rewarded with great love and I've been punished with reputational damage, income damage, reach
53:24damage, destruction of life's work. I mean, at this point, like there's no point honestly trying to
53:29bribe me with anything. There's no point trying to do any of that. I'm going to tell the truth
53:33and to give it up now would be incomprehensible. I've been doing this for 44 years, telling the
53:39truth and both being greatly rewarded and greatly punished for it. And if you couldn't bribe me when
53:45I was 20, oh devil, there's no point trying to bribe me when I'm pushing 60 and I have so
53:50much more
53:50invested in the truth. So that's what you're going to get here. Here's the truth as best I see it,
53:56as best I can reason it. In accordance to evidence, freedomain.com slash donate.
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