Feb. 25, 2017 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:03:11
3602 Man: "I'm dying. I only have a few weeks to live."
Eventually life comes to an end. Have you made a good use of your limited time on this planet? Stefan Molyneux speaks to Andrew from The Private Man blog about his recent cancer diagnosis, the emotional experience of being told you only have weeks to live and advice to younger people looking from the deathbed backwards. Website: https://theprivateman.wordpress.comTwitter: https://twitter.com/man_privateFreedomain Radio is 100% funded by viewers like you. Please support the show by signing up for a monthly subscription or making a one time donation at: http://www.freedomainradio.com/donate
Hi everybody, Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain Radio.
So I'm here with Andrew.
Now, Andrew is the author of the Private Man blog about relationships, attraction, and dating.
You can find him at theprivateman.wordpress.com and on Twitter at twitter.com slash man underscore private.
However, sadly to say, perhaps not for long.
Now, I've had a couple of calls with people who are ill.
About four years ago, I had a call with a woman who was dying of cancer and wanted to know how she could talk about it with her kids and all that.
She actually only had a couple of months to live.
She ended up living for almost four more years.
So maybe the healing power of this show might reach through.
But this is the first request I've had to chat with someone because chatting with me is on their bucket list.
So Andrew, why don't you tell people a little bit about what's going on and how we ended up connecting today?
First of all, I've been following you for a fairly long period of time.
And I do watch your videos, your full-length videos.
Oh, and by the way, I've got to say this and get this out of the way.
Stefan, that's not an argument.
Sorry.
That is very true.
This is a personal sharing moment, but it's definitely not an argument.
I had no choice because that is one of your constant refrains over the years, and it's absolutely brilliant.
So anyway, I've been involved in the manosphere, the red pill kind of stuff for a number of years.
You are also involved in that, and it's sort of a more intellectual capacity, more dealing with culture and political issues.
I stick to sort of attraction and dating, but there is a bit of overlap.
We can talk about that at some point.
And so basically, it's like, well, you know, I don't have law on this planet.
I want to talk to Stefan Molyneux.
Grab your slice of immortality on the Freedom Aid radio train.
Exactly.
What's happened to you health-wise?
It's been fairly rapid and started with your eye.
Yes.
Actually, it started with my eye back in 2013 through a routine.
And probably people can see that I do wear an eye patch.
And that's because my eyeball was removed at one point during the treatment process.
It was intentional.
It wasn't like an accident or anything.
And I was originally diagnosed and it was pointed out during a routine eye exam that I had something on my retina.
And it was made very clear to me and very urgent to me that I needed to go see a specialist.
Within a matter of hours, which I had to wait until the end of the weekend and then went on the Monday.
And then he sat me through a series of tests.
He sat me down after about two or three hours.
And he said, you have ocular melanoma.
Okay, I heard the word melanoma.
That's kind of serious.
And then I said, well, what do I have to do?
And he said, well, you need to go see an ocular oncologist.
And as soon as he said the word oncologist, I knew life was...
Very different.
And so over a span of a couple, three years, I had some treatments, including at one point getting some injections into my eye.
My poor right eyeball just went through hell.
And finally, they just gave up and said, we got to take it out.
And so they took it out.
Very interesting.
It was outpatient.
Yeah, I only spent a couple hours in the hospital down at Baptist Regional Health.
The eyeball was removed, an outpatient procedure down in Miami.
And then at that point, I was living with the eye patch and just sort of going my day-to-day stuff, having regular ultrasounds to determine the state of my liver.
And the reason that the liver is important, because this is a melanoma.
It is a blood-borne cancer.
And when it does spread, especially from the eye, and this ocular melanoma, by the way, is incredibly rare.
I mean, outstandingly rare.
I mean, this is not something you hear about every day.
I'm sure you never heard about it until you heard me mention it.
What was it like?
I think I read Four in a Million or something like it.
Oh, God.
It's just...
Oh, it's just...
I should have bought a lottery ticket.
And so when it does spread from the eye, it almost inevitably goes to the liver because the liver is a processor of blood.
And so what happens is the melanoma lands in the liver.
Then things get weird.
And the best way to show it is at first an ultrasound and then subsequent tests.
Well, in late January, I had one of my usual ultrasounds and my oncologist found something.
And so then we proceeded the number of tests up the ladder, finally ending in a liver biopsy.
And it was said, as he said very clearly, yes, it has metastasized to your liver.
Once it does that, there pretty much are no treatments.
No chemotherapy, because again, it diffuses throughout the liver, and one's lifespan is now, and I asked him very clearly, and I've been ready for this, Stefan.
I mean, I knew when I was diagnosed back in 2013 that this day would happen.
The stats on ocular melanoma are grim at best, tragic at worst.
Nobody makes it past 10 years.
Nobody.
I think it was Christopher Hitchens who, when he was given his survival chances for the kind of cancer that he got, he basically said, well, these aren't the odds I would have chosen.
And that always struck me as pretty, pretty powerful.
Right.
But I knew three years ago after doing the research, my first doctor, the retinologist, he said, stay off the internet.
And what do I think I did as soon as I got home?
Hello?
And then I realized this is as serious as it gets.
I thought I had a few more years left in me.
Eh.
Okay, we all die.
It's just a scheduling issue.
Okay, so they pulled my schedule back a little bit.
And so with that in mind, the doctor told me back in late January, I asked, well, are we talking about weeks or months?
And he said, well, we're talking about weeks.
Yeah.
So, and he said 8 to 12 weeks, hopefully more.
I suspect it's going to be a little bit more.
Maybe the healing power of the Stefan Molyneux show will give me, which will bum out my friends a lot because they're expecting, everybody's expecting me to die now.
So I don't want to disappoint them.
And so, yeah, so in theory, I have a matter of weeks left.
I mean, I've already done a lot of things to prepare for this.
I've already contacted the fine folks at the local hospice care office.
I've already bought and paid for my cremation services.
I have lists of things for people to do.
My blog is going to get turned over to somebody else.
My Twitter account is going to get turned over to somebody else.
So I've made many of the logistical preparations.
I've had three and a half years to emotionally prepare for this moment.
Simple as that.
And a lot of people don't understand that.
The people in hospice, they came over and they were like, you don't look sick.
Well, no, I don't look sick!
I mean, you know, if we were having this call and say maybe a month or two, I might be yellow because of jaundice, because of liver failure.
Well, if that's the case, I don't want to be on camera anymore.
Right.
So what will happen is that I will eventually fade from view, and the person who delegated my Twitter account will be picking that up.
And there will be, and I'm already drafting up a statement from my blog saying, okay, the private man is gone.
Here's the new guy.
And so that's going to happen both on my blog and on Twitter.
Because I've gotten a lot of requests for people on my blog to say, what's going to happen?
Are you going to keep your blog?
And the answer is, well, I'm not, obviously, because I'll be dead.
But it will be picked up by somebody.
So I've got a primary guy in mind and also an alternate guy in mind as well.
And it's interesting what is happening.
You know, when I had my bout with cancer, I mean, you do mentally prepare yourself for a whole bunch of stuff.
And I remember many years ago, Andrew, reading about a World War II survivor, right?
So he was in one of these god-awful raids that happened, and he lived, I think, into his 60s.
And when he was diagnosed with a terminal illness and given, again, sort of weeks to live, people were very sad and upset, and then he wasn't.
And he said, look, I mean, my friends all died decades ago in a war.
I've been blessed with so much additional time that they never got that I'm not going to complain about this.
And of course, you know, I mean, if you're in your 50s, you've already...
beings ever got to throughout history.
You know, an average lifespan in the 20s or 30s.
I mean, if you got through that childhood, teenage phase, you went for longer, but we've already been gifted with so many fantastic decades in the modern world.
I mean, it's not just quantity, it's quality of life.
You know, you're sitting there in Florida with air conditioning and a fan and all that kind of stuff.
And all of these things were incomprehensible in the past.
It doesn't make, of course, what's happening to you fine or okay, but there is an enormous amount to be grateful for just having set foot in the modern world in a time where there's far less disease, far less war, no famine to speak of, particularly in Florida, if I remember rightly, not a lot of people looking too starved out in Florida. particularly in Florida, if I remember rightly, not a lot So there is some gratitude that we can have for the kind of life that we've been able to live.
But what's been going on for you in terms of sleep, in terms of concentration?
Do you feel like, well, I don't want to sleep, I'll cheat myself of hours I could be awake and conscious in doing things?
These are all thoughts that ran through my head facing not as grim a prognosis, but a similar kind of illness.
What's going on for you in terms of your mind, your concentration, and your contacts with people?
A couple of things have happened.
I'm not showing any serious symptoms yet, obviously.
My voice is still strong.
I'm not yellow.
My level of fatigue has gone up a bit.
I do tend to sleep a little bit more.
Bear in mind that I've had a very rich and full life.
My bucket list was crossed off basically in my 40s.
I had a hunch growing up For some odd reason, I wasn't going to make it all the way.
I'd get close, but I wasn't going to make it all the way.
I made a point of taking on opportunities and doing things that would make me realize that I have had a rich and a full life.
Regrets are about the things not accomplished.
I took that to heart many, many years ago.
I sought to do a lot of interesting things in the course of my life.
So that as things are kind of winding down, I don't feel compelled to run off and do more crazy shit because I've done plenty of crazy shit over the years.
So I'm not worried about that one.
I am less social.
Normally I'm a very, very social guy.
I like going to parties.
I like going to social events.
I like meeting new people.
I don't like that anymore because I'm not going to see these people again.
When my girlfriend asked me, it's like, hey Andrew, we gotta go meet my friends such and such and such and such.
Back a year ago, I would have been like, yeah, let's go and have some fun.
Let's go have some drinks and meet some nice people and have a good conversation.
I don't do that anymore.
If you read the literature about the dying process, This is one of the first things that go is the willingness to be social.
I do not want to make an emotional investment in somebody that's new, even as friends.
If they don't like you that much, what's the point?
And if they really like you, then they're going to be sad.
So there's no real upside to that interaction.
Right.
There really is no upside to that interaction.
And again, I've read the literature on the dying process.
This is normal because people sense their own mortality.
They're not willing to be as social.
And this is just normal stuff.
Well, if you know you're going to be fired at a job, you don't start a lot of big new initiatives, right?
I mean, that's just the way it goes, right?
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah, that's exactly it.
Now, that being said, I am still gainfully employed.
I am still working.
I work from home, which is a blessing.
My employer does not know.
And there's two reasons for that.
Number one is health insurance.
Because here in the United States, if you don't have health insurance, especially if there's something along these lines...
Now, granted, I'm not getting any advanced treatments or anything like that, but hospice...
I'm now under the care of hospice, and I still have to spend down my deductible, and they use that kind of stuff.
That's one reason.
Another reason is that I have a very, very healthy life insurance policy that I want my brother to get.
So I'm not going to call in sick.
I'm going to call in dead.
Right, right.
You know, I have to die on payroll.
Right.
It's kind of a scheduling concern.
Right.
So, Andrew, maybe you'd like to talk a little bit about your rich life.
Let's give this, is this stuff carved on the infinite skywriting of the internet forever?
The things that you did, that you remember, that had power and meaning and vitality for you, let's get them down and recorded for all time.
Okay, we can do that.
Now, first of all, I will say that I've never had kids, and I never wanted kids, and that's a personal decision and one that every man has to deal with as an individual.
But back in my youth, soon after I graduated high school, up in the Massachusetts area, up in Massachusetts, I did an exchange program in Australia.
And I'd already applied for that, and a week after graduation, I'm back in school at In Australia, Western Australia, at a grammar school, those classic public high schools that you read about in England and whatever.
But I went to one of those in Australia.
And that was a very good experience.
Traveling, especially in my early life, in my 20s and 30s, was a very, very big part of that.
And then I returned.
I had taken a European high school and college, which I do recommend for young men.
It's called the gap year.
That's what they call it in England.
Yeah, I did it too.
There you go.
It gives you the time and the opportunity to sort of do some interesting things.
And I made a point of that.
I worked at a mental hospital for a while.
I took a long motorcycle trip, and then I ended up in northern Canada, like the Arctic Ocean, Canada.
Things like that.
Then I went off to college, and the following summer I ended up being a roughneck on an oil rig in the United Arab Emirates.
Just doing things that I knew that I would not have the opportunity when I was married, And when I was more settled, this gave me the opportunity.
And then my brother and I bummed around Asia for a while.
We were in China in 1983, back when they were still commies.
Real commies.
I mean, there were no stores in China in 1983.
You had your one people's department store, and if the town was big enough, you had the friendship store, and that was it.
There was no capitalism in China.
That was a very wonderful experience.
Just all those things that And then later on in life, after I got married, my ex-wife and I, we sold everything we owned.
We moved aboard my sailboat, and then we headed south.
We were originally supposed to go to the Bahamas.
We got as far as South Carolina.
Close enough.
Come on.
You know, a few hundred miles either way.
No one's paying attention.
And so, you know, it was adopting.
When opportunities struck, it's taking those opportunities.
Right.
And that's sort of been how my life has gone.
It mellowed out in my 40s and obviously my 50s, of course.
But even in my 30s, I took a job where there was a lot of business travel.
I ended up in South America for three months.
I ended up back in England for a while.
Just doing a lot of traveling-oriented kinds of things, which I would recommend for all men, especially young men.
I mean, this is something that adds season to one's character.
I don't know what your early life was like.
Clearly, you lost your hair, so you did some cool things.
These kinds of experiences doing interesting things in one's youth, I think, is extremely important that young men do so that they don't look back in their 40s or 50s and say, I should have done that, or I should have done that, shoulda, coulda, woulda, which are terrible ways to go through life.
That is a very, very poor way to go through life because then you become bitter and filled with regrets.
You become the classic old man who is waving his cane angrily at kids on his lawn.
Stuff like that.
That's what not to be.
The point about growing old and growing wise is that you have young people coming up to you, whether they're your own kids or your grandkids or their friends, coming up and saying, Stefan, tell me again what we're supposed to do now.
I mean, that's how to go through life.
I mean, that is the legacy that a man should leave behind as he gets older and his body slows down.
And he's no longer dictated by his libido and that he has the opportunity to pass down that wisdom.
We no longer have that tradition, unfortunately.
It's something that will hopefully return at some point.
We're seeing it on the internet right now, by the way.
Yeah, I mean, just jump off the conveyor belt.
Society tries to set you up for this conveyor belt that gets you out of high school, puts you into college, and then puts you in a cubicle.
And if that's what you want to do, if that's your passion, more power to you.
Go for it.
But asking questions about why...
Things are the way they are.
Asking questions about why should I do the next thing?
Is it advantageous for me to go get an arts degree and emerge $50,000 in debt with very few job skills?
Who's it benefiting?
It may not be me.
After high school, I went and did gold panning and prospecting up in the wilds of Canada for, I guess, almost a year, and then did it again for some months after that.
Yeah, go travel, go do things, and say, like, build your relationships and say yes to opportunities.
I think that is an impact.
There's very little that I've ever said yes to in my life that I've looked back and said, ooh, shouldn't have done that.
But I think that, and that's where you want to be, you know, when the Grim Reaper comes, you know, sliding up your driveway.
Yeah, and I think a lot of the guys in the space that we travel in, again, you tend to be much more political and cultural.
I tend to be much more having to do with mating and dating.
But still, there's enough overlap there.
And so I think a lot of people in our space are beginning to be aware of that.
And I've talked to and had phone conversations with younger men.
And a lot of my blog readers are younger men because they don't have a strong masculine figure at the house.
Who's at least willing to share some of the essential, if not very uncomfortable truths, and saying, look, kid, here's how it really works.
I don't care what your mom says.
I don't care what your sister says.
Here's the real deal.
If that's your doctor, feel free to take it.
No, it's not my doctor.
It's the chaplain at hospice.
So...
Excuse me.
I think a lot of guys in our space know this, and the word is slowly getting around.
It has been for years.
I don't know how long you've been in this.
I've been in this game blogging actively since 2011.
I've got about 600 blog posts now, plus some videos.
The last year has been mostly Twitter, which I'm a big fan of.
Spreading this knowledge used to be it couldn't be done.
There was no effective vehicle for getting this kind of information out.
Now we have that.
We can look at your videos or we can look at anybody's videos.
Even the pickup artists, you know, believe it or not, they've got a lot to say about this stuff.
Now, granted, a lot of them have gone real sort of seriously right wing, but that's okay.
It's, you know, whatever they want to do.
So there's a lot of good information being spread around these days and that people are much more willing to accept that.
And I find that very, very encouraging.
You know, we talk about the blue pill, red pill dichotomy.
And I'm sure you've read about this and you know about all this stuff going on.
So right now, we have this dichotomy and a lot of people are understanding.
First of all, they never admitted the dichotomy existed.
Now they know it exists.
Which when I started blogging back in 2011, I mean, you talk about the red pill and people think you're out of your mind.
Now it's like, hmm, there might be something to that.
And you talk about this stuff in your videos as well.
What is the information that you would like to get across to young men in particular that has been kind of...
Masculine wisdom has been stripped from culture almost exclusively.
Not only has it been stripped like it's absent, it's been stripped and reversed.
So now masculine wisdom is considered to be, you know, caveman, patriarch, man, pig, misogynist, all this kind of stuff.
What is it that you would like for young men to gather from...
Your experience and understanding about how the world works, in particular between the genders in the West.
First of all, stop listening to your mother and sisters.
I mean, I understand.
If a guy is 17, 18 years old, and he's been raised by a single mom, which is all too common, and he doesn't have an appropriate role model to go to, he asks his mom.
He's like, Mom, how do I get girls to like me more?
Very common thing.
And what does mom say?
Treat them with respect and defer to them.
Yeah.
Or I was told, be nice and be yourself.
First off, for the young man, don't listen to the women.
And I know I'll catch a raft of shit for that, but I don't care.
I'll be dead.
Well, sorry to interrupt, but the treat them with respect and defer to them, this is treating women like children.
If you treat women with respect, then you treat them equally and you're as honest with them as you would be with a man.
At least that's my perspective.
No, and it's a very, very valid perspective.
In fact, I got into a bit of a Twitter back and forth just not an hour ago talking about chivalry.
And chivalry is one of those things that I don't think is being taught in today's schools.
And I'm glad!
Because girls have made it very clear.
We're strong and independent.
We have our own agency.
Okay, what are the unintended consequences?
Well, we'll let them figure that out.
Meanwhile, for the guys, don't ask girls.
I mean, if you want information about how things really work between the genders, find the biggest dick you know who's...
Who is absolutely flawless with women and ask that person.
Don't ask your buddies in your LAN party for your video games.
They're not going to know either.
So find somebody who's good at what you want to become and ask that person questions.
And if it sounds a little naive in the beginning, tough shit.
You're at least learning.
You're at least going to somebody else.
Who's got that information?
That would be the first thing.
The second one, and I touched upon it before, is don't be afraid to experience life.
It's very easy for guys to withdraw socially.
I see much more in guys my age, by the way, in talking to guys in their 40s and 50s and talking to the women who want to actively date guys in their 40s and 50s.
These guys have a real problem with social isolation.
Well, that starts at a fairly young age where you do have that stereotype of the kid who plays too many video games.
He comes home from school, and the first thing he does is he switches on his Nintendo or his Xbox, and he spends three, four hours playing games.
And I got to look at his video games.
I love video games, but not to the exclusion of all else.
So that, you know, the next thing I would tell a young man is that always put yourself in social situations.
To work on your social skills.
Social skills are something that are being actively degraded.
It's very hard for guys to find opportunities and to actually go out and be social because what do we have?
We have these things.
Well, and we have this political correctness and this fear of being perceived as negative to any particular group, this fear of offending people.
I mean, not only has the non-social technology become so compelling that it's like a gravity well keeping people away from social gatherings, particularly men, particularly white men, you know, who are the targets of all of these kinds of attacks on, you're mansplaining,
you're being racist, you're a misogynist, and so not only has the technology to keep Men out of social situations become so compelling, but the potential price and danger of entering into those social situations and receiving some significant negative feedback that can spread through the internet like wildfire, I think you've got a push-pull that's keeping men out of the social sphere, I think, to the detriment of everyone in the long run.
Yeah, and I have no good answer for that because I didn't experience that.
Now, That being said, I blog anonymously so that my employer doesn't find out.
But I have not gone through that, where some poor young man says something on Twitter that is not politically correct, and then he ends up on the college campus the next day, or he leaves his dorm and he goes outside, and the next thing you know, people are throwing eggs at him.
This is the current reality on the ground.
I am not ignorant of this.
So that, you know, it becomes, you know, in a large and say in a college, is to actively seek out like-minded people.
So you can have a social circle.
And that's very, very important because you do get a lot of things.
I mean, I didn't have the luxury of, I went to a college.
Actually, I went to the same university where Christina Hoff Summers taught.
And I was there at the same time she was there.
Did I take one of her classes?
No.
No.
That's a regret.
But anyway, we didn't have fraternities.
They were outlawed by the college campus.
And my former brother-in-law, he went to a campus close by to another school where he joined a fraternity, and it was a big deal.
I mean, he had a guaranteed social life.
He had a sense of fraternity, brotherhood. - You get contacts for life, connections for life, networking for life. - Yes, yes.
In fact, that's one of the things that if a young man doesn't want to go off to college, and I've heard you say this, and I'll reiterate it.
Guys, if you have to go into debt to get a degree in the humanities, you might want to rethink that.
Well, you don't need it anyway.
I mean, all the courses are available for free on the internet, and you'll get them with less propaganda, because you won't be tested for politically correct opinions in judging how you have consumed the information.
You can go and consume the information, you can come to your own conclusions, and you're not going to be tested by some quasi-Marxist for your proletariat-compatible opinions in order to get the degree.
So you won't face that problem.
Right.
And also, you know, imagine going into serious debt.
If you come out with a degree in, I don't know, medieval history.
Nothing wrong with medieval history, but you can learn this shit on your own.
It's a fine hobby.
It's a fine hobby.
Absolutely.
Nobody goes to college for stamp collecting.
It's a fine hobby.
Keep it as a hobby.
And exactly.
So that, guys, if you're going to go into debt, you know, to go to college, you pretty much are compelled to do the STEM subjects.
You know, science, technology, engineering, and math, because that's the only thing that's going to pay off those student loans.
And whatever you do intellectually on the side, do it!
You know, study American history, post-World War II American history, which is actually my personal favorite.
But I read those books on my own long after I finished graduate school, because that was my interest.
So, you know, and this is new.
I mean, you know, I don't know how old you are, Stefan.
We're vaguely in the same demographic.
I'm 50.
We're vaguely in the same demographic.
Okay, so when we went to college, a college degree was still something.
I mean, I graduated 85.
Well, they had some damn standards back in the day.
Back in the day, college had value because they turned most people away.
You know, even when I went to theater school, they took 1% of the applicants to get in, right?
So it was really, really tough.
It was just this big, giant IQ test, which, of course, if you could actually take to get a job, you wouldn't even need this stupid college degree.
Because it's intelligent people do well with or without college.
But yeah, it meant something because it was really exclusive.
You had to work like hell to get in.
You had to pedal like crazy to get up the hill of academia.
And now it's like, Pulse, you're in.
You're graduated.
Good for you.
Right.
And here's your debt receipt for $45,000.
Right.
And so this is a relatively new cultural phenomenon in North America where a young man, he can do better By doing STEM or the trades.
And I don't just mean, you know, like the basic trades.
I mean, you know, computer controlled machining.
You know, that kind of stuff.
The real hard, you know, the real sophisticated trades.
Technology has become a challenge, though, because of all of the people coming in from overseas, like the H-1B visas and all of that.
Technology has become a little bit more of a challenge to make a buck in because they're bringing in these sort of third world serfs who are chained to their desks for less money than most Americans can live on and who can't leave their jobs.
So I just really wanted to put that caveat in.
Even in the STEM fields, you need to research where things are going market-wise.
Yeah, I do agree.
The thing about the trades is that, because I used to live in upstate South Carolina where there was a lot of high-tech manufacturing, there were not a lot of H-1Bs.
These were young, good old boys who were very bright.
They had thick Southern accents and liked to drink beer and drive pickup trucks.
But when they went to work and did their jobs, it was like, damn.
I mean, this is some pretty serious technological crap.
And there wasn't an H-1B guy sitting next to him because they're basically on the floor, so to speak.
You know, they're running these machines on the floor.
So, I mean, but this is relatively new for young men.
I mean, you know, you can sound like you're educated in college, but not necessarily get a college education.
And I know that sounds kind of weird.
But, you know, men can change how they speak.
They can work on their vocabularies.
They can work on their own critical thinking through stuff that's on the internet.
A lot of the self-taught stuff, which is what we used to do back in the 17th, 18th century.
I mean, you know, these were the self-taught intellectuals of the day.
But we still have that opportunity available to us.
I don't know if any of the founding fathers got a degree in political science.
They just kind of did stuff.
Yeah, and back in the day, even as late as the 1970s, I know in South Carolina, you could what's called read the law, which meant that you went to the law library and you had a syllabus that you got from somewhere.
You read all the law books, and if you read them well and internalized them and studied hard, you didn't have to go to a law school to get a legal credential.
You could just take the bar.
Now, they got rid of that, but I mean, that was up until the 1970s.
So, I mean, there was still that tradition of self-taught expertise.
And there's no reason why a man can't do that.
You know, none whatsoever.
The biggest problem that I see for also a lot of young guys is they get very myopic about their goals.
And I read this a lot for the masculine self-improvement guys that have come up through PUA. They get so hyper-focused on that goal to the elimination of all other stimuli, of all opportunities.
I'm working on my goal.
I have to make $15,000 a month on my online book sales or my blog or whatever online endeavor, and it doesn't do anything else.
Vertical knowledge is great, but it is also self-limiting.
And, you know, hyper-focus on a goal is self-limiting.
There's more to life than that.
I mean, we talk about the Renaissance man.
We talk about the well-rounded man.
I mean, I think this is much more of something that a young man should shoot for than just being hyper-focused on one particular financial goal.
And, you know, and I read it a lot, and I haven't commented a lot about that kind of stuff, but, you know, I'm going to say it now, is that if That if you only know your goal, you're missing out on a lot of life.
Because a lot of life happens outside that siloed, compartmentalized goal.
Well, if you're not in a position to be surprised by life, I'm not sure you're actually living.
I mean, if everything is predictable and you know you're in control of all the variables, which is what happens when you get very narrowly focused, you're in control of more variables.
But to me, some of the richest stuff that happens in life is the stuff that almost happens by accident or by surprise.
I mean, I started vlogging and blogging in 2005, 2006.
I started a blog and a podcast and then moved to, I was like fourth guy on YouTube or something.
And this was all, you know, I just, I had a long commute and I was tired of audio books.
So I started recording my thoughts and next thing you know, I have a career.
So I think you want to stay open to new possibilities, keep pushing the boundaries, keep expanding your knowledge.
You never know when the stuff you study is going to become important, particularly if you're disseminating knowledge on the internet, every little scrap that you've ever thought or read Can be assembled into something quite beautiful.
And I think a lot of people try to have a little bit more control over their lives and don't do the dance.
You know, the dance with possibilities to me is really, really important.
I agree.
And my early travels in life were me saying to various opportunities, okay.
And I ended up doing it.
I actually ended up on the oil rig because one of my Neighbors in the dorm walked into my office, my dorm room, and he said, hey, Andrew, do you want to work on an oil rig this summer?
And I said, okay.
And he'd already gone to three or four other guys, and they all said, no, you're out of your mind.
And I was the last guy he went to, and I said, yeah.
And I had an amazing experience.
I still have physical scars from it, but still.
But I'm glad I did it.
And so that, yeah, you have to be open up to new experiences.
And I think that the hyper-focused guys are not quite getting it.
Neither are the video game guys.
I mean, when you're at home with your Xbox, you are not saying yes to all the nefarious possibilities that life might be sending your way.
It's a very controlled environment.
Here's I know what I'm going to do.
And it's a very...
Anxiety-avoidant environment because you're in control of the variables, you're playing your game, you know pretty much what's going to go on, and you're not challenging yourself to overcome some of the reservations sometimes that men have about social life and going out and meeting new people.
It's really, really important, as my old R&D manager used to say, to get out into the big blue room and meet the flesh people.
That's something that I think people are losing a little bit of anxiety.
Yeah, they are.
Like I said, I see it a lot in guys my age who only do online dating.
They don't do singles groups, for instance.
Well, guess what the math is, online dating versus singles groups.
Live singles group is usually two-thirds to three-quarters women who attend those.
But here are guys who aren't willing to do that for whatever reason.
They'd rather go home and do online dating, so they send out 100 messages.
They're lucky if they might get one date.
That was my ratio, by the way, during online dating.
It was 100 to 1.
And I'm a professional writer.
I know what I'm doing, and it was still 100 to 1.
And then I went out to singles groups, and I met so many lovely women.
Getting phone numbers and talking and flirting was just so much more easy, because that's real life.
And you're going to get a lot more information from somebody face-to-face, right?
90% of communication is nonverbal.
You're going to get a lot more information face-to-face than you could ever get on messaging and photos.
Right, exactly.
And because of that, you know, that's what I recommend to guys is to do a little online dating.
Sure, no problem.
But if you live in a big city, even a medium-sized city, there are going to be meetup.com singles groups.
Go to one.
Age appropriate, but go to one.
And this is about the whole social skills and all that.
Well, younger men are losing those social skills at a younger and younger age.
I'm not even talking about the women.
Don't get me started.
But for young men, it's...
Yeah, they hit the video game.
They're online.
They're watching YouTube.
They're not participating in the world.
I know it's harder because if you're 16, 17 years old, leaving the house is sometimes not an option because parents are protective.
They're scared for you, for whatever reason.
Life isn't that dangerous.
Is it really?
Well, it's safer now for children than it's ever been before.
But without the mechanism and manliness of patriarchal figures in the family, the natural over-caution of moms has just become...
I'm trying to think of a word that doesn't involve cancer here, so forgive me.
It's spread quite a lot.
It's metastasized.
It's spread quite a lot.
Women, they carry the babies inside.
They breastfeed.
They're one flesh.
The child stumbles and the woman feels the pain in her leg.
I mean, that's natural and it's a beautiful part of femininity, but you kind of need that masculine influence to pry the children a little bit away from, send them out into the world and deal with the anxieties.
You need that yin and the yang.
You need the protection, but you also need the go explore, go west, young man.
And that the absence of fathers or the sort of neutering of fathers, even if they're around, they're usually kind of neutered in many ways by, you know, divorce laws, by fear, by culture, by anti patriarchy, anti masculinity, by political correctness, by you can't voice anything because you get in too much trouble.
So even if men are around, they're kind of around as unique examples of, hey, your culture really can't.
The culture you build hates you now.
And I think it's become that fear of the world that women live with if they're not protected in a sort of safe and familial family environment has, I think, infected young men, young women as well, but young men enormously.
And I think that's where a lot of this campus hysteria comes from and the daycare generation, which I've talked about before.
Yeah, I've heard some of your videos and how you've spoken about that.
And it's a very valid point.
There was a famous map that showed the distribution of kids, I think, 7 to 10 years old, of their range in the community.
And it's only like 20 years ago, 30 years ago, it was up to like a three-mile radius of Where kids would just say, you know, they were like, alright Ma, see ya, it's warm out, we're gonna go do whatever, throw rocks at people, or whatever the kids would do.
And then, you know, ten years later, it's down to like a mile.
And then it gets closer and closer, and like in 2015, it was like the backyard.
Yeah.
And that was it.
My mom had a big-ass cowbell.
She'd just lean out the apartment window and clang this huge cowbell when it was dinner time.
And that's when we knew it was time to come in and get ourselves some protein.
But now, oh yeah.
Now, of course, yeah, there is this encouragement, "Kids, stay home!" And that's got a lot to do with multiculturalism and anxieties within the neighborhoods.
And the studies have been done repeatedly on this.
And multiculturalism destroys people's sense of security and cohesiveness within their own communities.
Whatever politically correct term you want to use for it, it does wreck neighborhoods like a giant ball out of a Miley Cyrus video.
So there is that aspect of things.
Now, Andrew, let's get to the shadow lessons, right?
The darker side of life lessons.
Regrets and the sort of hardest one wisdom that you've got, how can you sort of spread that around to help people avoid some mistakes that, you know, we've all made in our lives?
Yeah, the hardest one is I was always, you know, when I was a kid, Whether it was I was taught to be or just I was wired, I was sensitive.
That caused me more problems than anything else, was being overly sensitive or just too sensitive, whatever you want to call it.
Do you mean shy, something like that?
No, not shy.
I was never shy.
But if somebody said something to me that was too intense or I took it as a...
I'd burst into tears.
Up until I was like 12 years old, I mean, it was really, really bad.
I didn't have that kind of emotional self-control.
Or support, maybe, within the family.
Who knows where it came from?
But the fact of the matter is that I harp on emotional self-control, which is allowing me to get through what I'm going through right now.
You know, a lot of guys tell me, you know, it's like, I'm surprised you're not a blubbering mess.
Well, number one, I've had three and a half years to prepare, and I take pride in my emotional self-control now.
That's a hallmark of being a good adult.
Simple as that.
And, you know, being sensitive in one's youth, I mean, I find that that did more damage to me than anything else in the long term.
If I could have somehow, you know, 11 or 12 years old, taken a magic pill to harden my heart.
I know it sounds kind of cynical, but I really did need my heart.
It needed a thicker skin.
It's impossible to achieve anything of note and depth and pith and meaning in life if you're oversensitive to criticism because then you just have this big giant deactivation button where your heart is and people can just jab you with the javelin of criticism, hit your deactivation button and you fold over like a string cut Geppetto puppet.
Yeah, pretty much.
And that's how a lot of my youth went.
And then that made me become very cynical and sarcastic.
In fact, I was talking to a little high school friend just recently about that.
And he says, you know what I remember about you?
You were just so sarcastic all the time.
And that was a defense mechanism.
I didn't want to be sarcastic, but that was the only way I could handle being so sensitive.
Well, if you don't show any vulnerability, and sarcasm is a way of saying, I'm nihilistic, I don't care.
I'm above it all this petty ant-like human horde and their conflicts from my ivory tower of Zeus-like detachment.
I think of it's ridiculous and so on.
And that way, because you don't care about anything, you're not showing any soft underbelly to anyone with a black arrow.
Yeah, and frankly, it was all malarkey.
It was all bullshit.
You know, it was...
And that's something that I would tell young men is, you know, work on your emotional self-control.
You know, you don't...
You know, your defense mechanisms and, you know...
In general, cynicism masks a failure to cope with something and a hypersensitivity.
But sorry, go ahead.
Well, no, and that's, you know, that's one of the darker elements of...
Of, you know, me dealing with thinking back to my youth and how, you know, if I could, which, you know, is there a magic, you know, magic cure for being too emotionally vulnerable?
But fundamentally is that men do need a sense of strength.
I mean, it has to be honest strength.
I've wallowed in cynicism, you know, for a number of years.
What really got me out of that was doing a lot of traveling, seeing how the whole world works, and it's like, You know, I'm not that important.
Which is another important lesson for men to learn.
It's like, you know, yeah, you're important, but you're not a special snowflake.
That's one thing that really, really troubles me about the younger generation is the whole special snowflake concept.
You can become something special, but you really have to work and you're going to take a lot of slings and arrows for doing so.
You don't get born that way.
Yeah, you're not born a special snowflake.
Human behavior is remarkably predictable.
And this comes from women, because when women are young, their sexual market value is so high that everyone treats them as special no matter what, because eggs.
And it doesn't translate to men.
It does not translate to men.
I'm not saying that male disposability is justified, but when you're taught by women, of course everyone treats young, attractive women as special snowflakes, because eggs, but it doesn't translate to them.
If men try and do that, they just become impotent.
Well, yeah, no kidding.
But men can also, you know, they can at least value themselves a little bit higher.
You know, when you talk about mangenas and white knights and all those various buzzwords, you know, we're talking men who value themselves very little.
And this is one of the things that PUA and masculine self-improvement has taught, is to value yourself a little bit more, or a lot more, depending on how low down you are, so to speak.
Yeah.
And I see a lot of those lessons.
It's value yourself more.
Have an abundance mentality.
Have the mentality that, okay, so this cute young thing is giving you the brush off.
Well, there's going to be three or four more cute young things this very night if they're going out and Tinder does not cut it.
None of those do.
Tinder is just a way for women to get the dopamine rush if someone finds me attractive without actually having to have a relationship.
So that's basically a drug.
Yeah.
Pretty much.
And that's why you have alternates to Tinder coming out, trying to slow the whole process down.
And there's a whole technological arms race involving online dating.
But yes, I think that young men, especially in the face of attractive young women, that they need to value themselves higher.
And the POA literature is all very clear on this.
I read this in the Red Pill subreddit all the time.
Have that abundance mentality.
Value yourself better.
And be honest.
I had a woman on the show recently, a very, very accomplished and brilliant woman in robotics and very attractive and just an amazing person all around.
And she dated unsatisfactorily to a lot of guys who were very sort of impressed.
And she was a very impressive person.
I'm fine with that.
But who did she end up marrying and having children with?
The guy who wanders along and he says to her, you know, you're the smartest woman I've ever met.
And she said, well, wait, don't you meet the smartest person you've ever met?
And he's like, oh, no, no, no.
I know tons of men who are smarter than you.
But as far as women goes, you're like the smartest woman I've ever met.
Now, statistically, that's the case, right?
Men inhabit the extreme ends of the bell curve and blah, blah, blah.
But...
This is the lesson that this amazingly accomplished and wonderful woman, like a great person, who does she end up marrying and having children with?
The man who's willing to be honest and tell her the truth, to not be intimidated by the giant glittering cave of vagina access.
Just, you know, walk in and tell the truth, treat women with respect, with the capacity to listen to facts.
Yes.
Sadly, a lot of people, women especially, are not willing to accept those facts.
I went to a presentation about a week ago, maybe two weeks ago, on the science of love.
It was done by a woman named Dawn Masler.
She's based here in South Florida, and she's a neurobiologist out of one of our local universities.
And she's written a couple of books, and she's sort of on the circuit.
And so she gave a presentation, and there was probably 15 people in there.
Only three were men.
Again, this is classic.
Women tend to be more social and men don't.
And the other two guys who were there, they were kind of schlubs, but that's neither here nor there.
So she's up there talking about how, you know, the science of love and the various neurotransmitters that are affected and what happens to one's cognitive abilities when love strikes or lust or, you know, depending on the classification.
And then here are all these women after the fact.
They're all asking, well, I'm very unhappy because I can't date anybody.
I can't meet anybody.
And these are women with very short hair.
They're wearing very frumpy clothes.
By the way, this is in the back of a sports bar.
So they could have walked out that and it's 90% men.
But they all walked in there and they didn't stand out.
They didn't dress in a feminine fashion.
Because they've been told that somehow sexuality or romantic attraction is only about personality.
Well, if it's only about personality, then just have a friend.
But if you're going to start talking about sexuality, dating, kissing, romance, then yeah, presentation and looks matter.
Because the whole reason why there are two dangers is to make more people.
And if we avoid that basic fact, you know, friendship, however wonderful it is, is not going to produce one new baby in the world.
So, yeah, they've been told that it's all about the personality, which is – let me just open up every woman's magazine.
It's not about how to improve your personality.
It's about how to make your eyes look like a raccoon for some reason that I can't quite understand.
Right, right.
And I've read over the years – you know, I've been doing the online dating thing.
I'm now involved with a woman.
But I've been doing the online dating thing off and on for 12 years.
I've read – Tens of thousands of online dating profiles written by women.
And there are certain themes that stick out.
And the funny thing about an online dating profile is there can be a lot of honesty.
Age and weight, they're not honest.
We know this.
We can factor that in.
If she says she's 39, she's actually 44.
If she says she's athletic and toned, she's actually average.
If she says she's average, she's actually fat.
Whatever.
That can be factored in.
But the things that they talk about can be very, very honest indeed.
And it's not all about personality.
I would say 80% mention chemistry.
And this is what this woman Dawn Maslow was talking about was chemistry, actual chemistry.
Like stuff that happens in the brain chemistry.
And people talk about chemistry.
Chemistry is just a fancy buzzword for sexual attraction.
Simple as that.
There's nothing...
That's all there is to it.
It's chemical.
Does this person want to make me have sex with them?
And that has something to do with personality, like enthusiasm and excitement and positivity and all these things.
Remember, the internet is where crazy goes to hide.
They're hiding it very badly, Stefan.
No, because if they hit it, I mean, for you and I maybe, but for a lot of people, they don't see it.
So, you know, if you've got a woman who's 44 and of average build and not particularly physically attractive and not particularly accomplished and she says, I'm not going to settle, it's like, sorry, honey, statistically, You're going to have to, because that's just entitlement and narcissism and a lack of recognition of lowering sexual market value, which means an overemphasis on feminist indoctrination and all of this cult of personality stuff that goes on, like personalities make babies.
No, no, squishy parts make babies.
Well, you know, at my age, that's less of a concern, obviously.
But we still like, I mean, I still like going through the motions.
And one of the things that has popped up In the last five, six years in a big way, of course, is the dating coach for women.
Where women pay for a dating coach to wean them off slowly and diplomatically at a great expense.
To wean them off this whole attitude of, okay, just because I have a vagina means that my value in the relationship or dating marketplace is that much higher.
Not understanding that a lot of guys have already taken themselves out.
Their health is an issue.
A lot of these guys who are particularly successful need to be 55 and 60.
Their health is taking a hit because they've worked way too hard to make all that kind of money.
Or if they're 60 years old, their health is in good shape, and they still have options, they explore those options.
And this is what dating coaches do.
And they aim young!
I mean, I got a buddy of mine down in Miami who's a matchmaker.
And his primary clientele was men in their 50s and 60s.
And, you know, they fill out the application, whatever, I'm looking for this, I'm looking for that, I'm looking for that.
But, you know, so my buddy Dan goes off and finds potential matches and the guys are like, no, that's not what I want, that's not what I want.
And then Dan's like, I know what you want.
You want a party girl.
You want an early 30s party girl.
Yeah, because they spent their whole life working and missed out on a lot of their 20s, so now they want to go relive some youthful escapades.
Yep, absolutely.
And there's plenty of girls here in Miami in their late 20s, early 30s, who are more than happy to hitch their wagon to a wealthy horse.
And this is the reality on the ground.
And women excoriate that behavior and They think it's a horrible thing for men to do to date younger women or to date multiple women concurrently.
Well, these guys don't care anymore.
Well, I mean, and it's so transparently obvious that women enjoy high sexual market value when they're younger.
And then when they get older, they start criticizing the youth.
Why?
Because you don't have it anymore.
So, of course, you're going to try and reduce competition and shame men into dating you because you used it when you were younger.
You don't have it anymore.
Sure.
I mean, it makes perfect sense.
But I think that the shaming men approach has run its course.
Well, no, it's still out there.
You read it in The Guardian all the time, and you read it in various, you know, whatever.
It's the paper that lost about 170 billion units of currency last year.
I can't remember if it's pounds or dollars or whatever, but yeah.
Yeah, keep lecturing men.
That's just working out for your finances beautifully.
Yeah, exactly.
Keep at it, Guardian.
We love you.
And so, yes, you know, there's an attempt to shame men.
And then, but think about this, is the irony is, The type of man who will be shamed into dating you, do you want to date that man?
He's weak!
Man, with or without spine, you get to choose the spineless who you will then treat with contempt.
Exactly, exactly.
And you read this all the time, and I've got plenty of anecdotal stories, but I'm not a big fan of anecdotes.
But there's data out there that indicates, for instance, the book The Billion Wicked Thoughts by David Bussin.
Talking about what women, you know, look for in terms of, on the internet, in terms of pornography and eroticism and all that.
And like 100% of the cases, it's where the man is a dominant figure.
Fifty Shades of Grey is a classic example of that.
You know, for a while, those books were the most published books in history.
In history.
Not...
Five years, ten years, ever!
Yeah, no, she's not bossing you around because she wants to boss you around.
She's bossing you around because she doesn't want to boss you around.
And it's a paradox that takes a little bit of understanding, and it used to be fairly well known.
So, Andrew, let's close off with, I mean, are you religious?
Are you going to go for paradise?
Are you going to go for the dirt nap with worms?
I mean, how does this shape out for you coming down the pipe?
I have faith.
It is not structured.
I am a Christian.
Do I believe that there's the pearly gates in heaven and hell?
Not really.
However, I don't believe it's a dirt nap with worms.
I believe that the conscious, whether it's called a soul, called the conscious wrapped in a soul, I find it very hard to believe that it vanishes entirely.
Hmm.
I just do.
I cannot believe that happens.
I mean, I understand the vessel is dead.
I mean, I'm getting cremated.
I mean, the vessel is going to be burnt.
But the same token is, how is it that the consciousness could actually disappear?
I can't believe that it just disappears.
I can't believe that it vanishes completely.
So that when I cross, and there is a cross, and I've watched people die.
My mother died of liver cancer under the care of hospice, and we all saw it.
It was like 30 years ago.
But there comes a time when you do shuffle off that mortal coil, and then that represents a transition into something else.
So your mother died of liver cancer about the same age as you.
Yeah.
Goddamn those genetics.
Fuck.
Well, no.
Hers started out as breast cancer.
So she had a more traditional form of cancer.
Melanoma is not a traditional form of cancer.
So, yeah, that's one of the reasons that I've elected not to do serious, bizarre therapies.
By the way, so many guys are sending me stuff like, you've got to take this diet and you've got to smoke more marijuana.
Or one guy is convinced that certain yoga poses will control my cancer.
I don't know if they're just well-meaning or just trying to manage their own anxiety.
Who knows?
But it's not helpful.
It's not helpful and it puts me in an awkward position because if I say no, I'm an asshole.
And if I say yes and try this stuff, I know it's not going to work.
There's not a big giant conspiracy to keep life-saving cures from people who are dying by the hundreds of thousands.
There's not.
I just had this call with a guy on the show.
I'm like, there's not.
And there's no magic.
There's no miracle.
There's no...
You know, the Andy Kaufman thing, right?
There's no miracle.
You have to accept what's happening.
And, you know, if you've decided, I guess because you've seen what the treatment can do.
Yes.
And you've decided against it.
And, yeah, I mean, I understand.
People want to keep you around.
They like you.
They love your blog.
But it's not helpful.
Fundamentally, it's not.
And I got one just today saying, this particular diet could save your life.
Well, really?
Yeah.
I just, I'm sorry.
If you don't attach a study, you know.
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
And it's not just any study.
It better be a meta-study.
Oh, yeah.
I mean, I want to see, I want to see.
And also, you know, you have a relationship with doctors where you have to trust them.
And if people are saying, oh, there's this cure your doctor's not telling you about, it's like, you're kind of putting a bit of a wedge here between me and my primary care provider, which, you know, not particularly helpful when I can and need them right now.
Yeah, and my oncologist is a bright guy.
He ain't stupid.
You know, I mean, he knows what ocular melanoma is all about.
I mean, you know, he's done the research, and I've helped him do the research because it's such a rare cancer.
But yeah, and I've said on my blog a couple of times in the cancer page, please do not give me alternative therapies.
And people just don't read it.
I said that in the Ruche form as well, very clearly.
Please do not give alternative therapies.
I've made my decision.
It's going to be palliative care only.
I've given instructions to hospice.
I have a medical proxy filled out so that that person knows exactly what my wishes are.
You know, I am not going to fight this.
The quality of my life is much more important, even if it's shorter, than a degraded quantity of life.
And it's the degradation that scares the hell out of me.
I will not accept a degraded quantity of life.
It's just, what's the point?
Just breathing?
Well, and it's also not just about you, although obviously primarily about you, but if you have a degraded quality of life and a kind of hanging on forever, I mean, there are those around you who aren't going to get closure.
There are those around you who are going to continue to suffer alongside you.
As you suffer physically and emotionally, they will suffer emotionally.
There is that aspect which, you know, I've had to stare down the marrow of as well, which is important.
Yeah, and so, like I said, I've made my decisions in that regard.
And, you know, people are a little kind of freaked out.
But, again, you know, to use a classic cliche, my body, my choice.
I mean, this is when the rubber really hits the road, you know, for what I choose to do.
And, you know, the last couple of weeks are not going to be pleasant.
I know this.
I have a whole bag full of medication from hospice to help me with this.
But I'll cross that bridge when I come to it.
Right now I'm not crossing that bridge.
I know it's there.
I know it's just out there.
Well, and look, I'm certainly glad that we had a chance to talk.
I mean, I'm glad that if this is one of the few things left on your bucket list, I'm glad to be able to help you fulfill it.
If you do, you know, change your mind, you know, stay in touch with us, Andrew, of course.
If you do change your mind about wanting to talk as you get closer, just let me know.
We'll find a way to make it happen.
And I do really thank you for sharing your wisdom.
I do offer you my very deep sympathies, at least if you don't have kids and you don't have to sit down and tell them what's happening.
