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Aug. 25, 2020 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

01:38:48

WHY SHOULD YOU BE LOVED?

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Time	Text
	Good morning, everybody.
	Stefan Molyneux. It is the 23rd of August 2020.
	I hope you guys are doing well and having yourselves a good, exciting weekend and are surviving all of the excitement that 2020 has to offer us.
	Massive social media dissident-busting US elections, murder hornets, coronavirus travel restrictions, mask Karens, the entire list of revelations, end times.
	Prophecies and predictions are upon us.
	I'm sure there's more than a few that I've forgotten.
	But let's get into the deep realm of philosophy with each other and find comfort, Seneca style, in what wisdom has to offer us in these troubled times.
	James, who do we have?
	What questions are floating around us, yea verily, like the moons of Jupiter?
	Well, we have a Ganymede for us.
	No, actually, that's not a name.
	That's just a moon. I'm flexing on my astronomy.
	Oh, look at that. Somebody built a solar system as a kid, and that would be God.
	Absolutely. All right, so the first question up today.
	Can you help me understand what me plus means?
	I'm in a total fog around the concept.
	Is it a matter of degree?
	Does it have a specific quality to it?
	Where is the boundary between me and the plus?
	Is it more like when there's no reciprocity or only if they want you when they need you?
	Now this is a written question, right?
	This is a question that he was describing to me and I wrote down a few notes about what the question was.
	And he's online now as well.
	Oh, he's online. Okay, so I just wanted to make sure if I'm talking to the text or talking to the carbon-based biped.
	So are you on, my friend? Yeah, I'm here.
	I hope you can hear me. I sure can.
	So did you want to talk a little bit more about your question?
	Do you want me to start taking swings at it?
	What's your pleasure? Well, it's kind of...
	I would kind of like maybe if you can, if it's possible, like a definition or if not, yeah, just take a swing at it.
	So, okay, so a me plus is something I've talked about for many years.
	It kind of came to a head, I suppose, in my discussion of the death of Robin Williams.
	So with Robin Williams, you had an enormously talented man who grew up as a very lonely child.
	And like a lot of comedians, see, it's funny, like what we call skills as adults, not always, of course, but what we call skills as adults is It's most often desperate survival practice as children, right? So, I mean, the obvious example would be a boxer.
	Really, really good at fighting.
	Well, why is he so good at fighting?
	Well, he's good at fighting because he probably experienced a lot of violence as a child.
	He was a bully. He was bullied.
	And so his facility or ease with violence comes out of desperate survival practices as a child.
	And with Robin Williams, he had a lonely, depressed mother.
	And the way I sort of look at it, this is a really old movie by now, but it was a fairly influential movie when I was a kid.
	Gosh, what was it? Risky Business, Risky Business.
	And... In the movie Risky Business, this is not a spoiler, but it's well worth watching the movie.
	It's got some very iconic lines and a very youthful, I suppose.
	And what is it with Tom Cruise?
	I've got to tell you, the man is a cyborg miracle of modern pharmaceuticals, I believe, simply because I keep pretty fit, pretty healthy.
	But I will tell you that I've had to scale back my exercise regime about 10% just over the last year or so just because, you know, the stuff that I'm pretty comfortable with is becoming a little less comfortable as I age.
	And I'm younger than Tom Cruise, and he's still doing his own stunts.
	I mean, my God.
	I mean, maybe he's just genetically gifted that way.
	But being in your, what, mid to late 50s and still doing this crazy sprinty stunts, it's pretty wild.
	I just wanted to point that out.
	It's just something I thought of that I don't know if there's any particularly good answer to it.
	But he may be on a lot of hormones, or he may be just naturally gifted.
	Who knows? But it's pretty wild to see this level of hardcore athleticism for a guy who's in his mid to late 50s and all that.
	So in the movie Risky Business, there is a car.
	I'm pretty sure I haven't got this confused with Ferris Bueller's Day Off.
	But anyway, there's a car that's rolling down a hill and Tom Cruise is desperately trying to stop it from rolling down a hill.
	And... That scene, it's a very, very short scene, of course, and he's, you know, he's got his legs in, he's scrabbling, he's trying to stop the car.
	Now, he can't stop the car from rolling down the hill, of course, because even though he's Tom Cruise, he can't do it.
	And that's what struck me as a particularly vivid scene, because that is, if you have, often the case is maternal depression, and I write about this in my novel, which I just released another couple of chapters of the audiobook yesterday, and I really, really hope that you will check it out.
	It's a very good book, I believe.
	One of the major topics in the book is the effects of maternal depression on boys, right?
	And how your entire life gets defined by maternal depression and the need for constant resuscitation of your mother's failing mental health.
	And that's kind of all you do.
	And it's every part of your You wake up and you have to gauge...
	It's not just depression, maternal...
	And this can be paternal too, but my experience was maternal because my father, although he had crippling depression for a good chunk of his life, was in Africa, so it was a little bit more remote to my sensibilities.
	And so you wake up and you think, how's mom?
	What kind of mood is she in today?
	Is she up? Is she down? Because unpredictability...
	Unpredictability is the real killer in life.
	Real killer in life.
	I was reading about Huey Lewis.
	For my younger audience, he was a singer-songwriter, very popular in the 80s.
	Power of Love from, I think it's from Back to the Future.
	Oh no, Back in Time was Back to the Future.
	Power of Love was a great song.
	Hip to be Square was a great song.
	They do a lovely acapella song that I think they wrote.
	Naturally, also worth checking out.
	And they do a good version of that live on Letterman, I think.
	And he actually was a harmonica player.
	He was in a band. He was never really a singer, but then he ended up having to step up to be a singer.
	He was a good front man, good-looking guy, and all of that.
	And he blew out one of his ears in the 80s.
	And then, I think it was just a couple of years ago, he blew out another ear.
	And he can hear, like, burps and growls and all of that.
	It's really tough for him.
	I mean, music was his life, and he was, I think, suicidal or didn't want to get out of bed after he...
	And the most frustrating thing that he was saying is that sometimes it's better, sometimes it's worse.
	You know, let's just say, heaven forbid, you lose your arm.
	Well, it ain't growing back.
	It doesn't get better or worse.
	But other things, you know, back pain, migraines, tinnitus, like all of this kind of stop, start, come, go stuff, it can make you kind of obsessive.
	The uncertain, the wavering, the up and down, the rollercoaster of symptomology present or absent, it can make you a little crazy because what it does is it interferes with your day because to one degree or another you're obsessing about whether or not things are better or worse today.
	And with maternal depression in this particular case, if it was just completely catatonic, then you'd reconcile yourself to that.
	Or if she gets institutionalized, you reconcile yourself to that.
	But when there's still fight left in the old gal and she's...
	Putting up her dukes to the giant dark cloak that threatens to sweep the entire family underwater or into the state's arms, sort of a similar kind of thing.
	It's really uncertain.
	Will you win? Will you lose?
	Is she up? Is she down? Is she getting better?
	Is she getting worse? And depressed people, it's funny, I've known both kinds, the people who completely turtle-like self-isolate, but then there are the people, and it's usually on the maternal side, in my experience, What they do is they hook in, they grab on, they attach.
	And like a drowning person, they'll simply grab at the buoyancy of their children's personalities in order to try and survive.
	I was mad about this when I was younger.
	And I was rereading parts of Robert Whitaker's Mad in America, And realizing just how bad some of these medications, quote, medications can be for the human mind and then wondering when my mom was institutionalized what they might have put her on that might have detonated the remnants of her character.
	But I was more mad at this in the past because my mom would just sort of grab on to me and she would try and talk her crazy out into me, which is kind of like forcing me to suck out a poison in her body that could Kill me.
	But there is of course a desperation in her that came out of her war years that I have more sympathy and forgiveness now than in the past.
	But this kind of, is she up?
	Is she down? It becomes your relentless focus and for someone like Robin Williams who had to try and cheer up his mother.
	Try and cheer up his mother.
	That is a desperate burden to put on a child.
	And it causes muscles to be developed that shouldn't be there and to be developed far too strong in the child's personality.
	And in this case, it was CPR. Comedic pulmonary resuscitation.
	Make your mom laugh.
	Keep her happy. Make your mom laugh.
	Keep her happy. Make your mom laugh.
	Keep her happy. And when I see somebody who's very good with jokes, I, not always, but in general, I'm like, wow, that's somebody who really had to prop up a depressed parent or find ways to make that parent laugh.
	And that's why, to me, I enjoyed Robin Williams' comedy, but I always found it too manic, too up.
	It was intrusive.
	It wasn't inviting.
	It was like a wall of voice.
	And again, brilliant. I mean, the man was an absolute genius of a comedian.
	I wonder if they will ever release the outtakes from Aladdin where he played this completely manic genie.
	Sorry, I couldn't...
	My spelling brain, because I've been playing a lot of Scrabble lately, was...
	D-J-I-N-N-I or G-E-N-I-E. Gin, I think, is the other one.
	But anyway, so he played this man.
	And I think there were like nine hours of audio or more of him just riffing.
	And they took the best bits of it and put it into the movie.
	And I would actually be kind of curious to hear the other stuff because I bet you it's pretty funny.
	Two of the stuff that he did when I was working up north.
	Oh, man. This is long before cell phones, internet, or anything like that.
	When I was working up north, I wanted to listen to music while I was doing...
	The rather monotonous work of gold panning, some of which involved a machine, some of which was by hand, and I couldn't get any radio stations up there.
	So what you would do is you'd go to a, as you would drive to wherever you're going, you would stop off, obviously, at gas stations.
	I remember having to drive, I had a truck with two gas tanks, and you get stuck out there with a No gas and you're in a serious amount of trouble.
	I didn't actually realize there were two gas tanks until I almost ran out from one, pulled over, and managed to find a second.
	But you'd stop off at gas stations and you would grab these fistfuls of tapes.
	Boy, I didn't even know how to explain tapes to my younger audience.
	Cassette tapes, you could look them up. And I would grab these cassettes.
	And I remember once, my favorite singer when I was at that age was Sam Cooke, the American soul and blues singer, and occasionally country singer, I think.
	He did a cover of Blowing in the Wind that was pretty good.
	And I found a Sam Cooke tape in a convenience store, like literally in the middle of nowhere.
	It was pretty wild. But I grabbed this fistful of tapes, and one of the tapes that I got was Robin Williams' Good Morning Vietnam, which actually, funnily enough, I just started off last show with that.
	I don't think it's out yet, but And so listening to Robin Williams plus these songs, I got it kind of grooved into my brain because you didn't have a whole lot of tapes and you had no radio and it was nice to listen to music, so I listened to that over and over.
	And I still found it, you know, again, it's very funny, but I sort of feel like it's a wind that's too strong, like it's bracing, but it makes you cry, makes your eyes leak.
	So with Robin Williams, he had this, I believe, desperate comedy need to please, desperate desire.
	To please. And to me, it was not hard to scratch that surface and see the sadness underneath.
	And it was a pretty sad end, obviously, to a pretty storied life.
	And so the Me Plus, sorry for all that deep background, but that's sort of the idea behind it.
	They say, wow, he's really good at comedy.
	It must be a natural genius.
	Well, obviously, there's There is some native talent there, but I can't help but wonder how that talent would have manifested if he had not had to bend it so strenuously to keep a depressed and alienated mother's head above water.
	You know, it's sort of like somebody could have a natural brilliance with swimming.
	You know, maybe their bones are light, their muscles are strong, and I remember a guy in my, I was on the swim team in high school, Swim team and water polo team, actually.
	And there was a guy who just had this chest...
	He had the V, like narrow waist and big, wide, flared shoulders and so on.
	He had these chest muscles that you could just beat like a tom-tom and be heard at the top of an Aztec mountain.
	He had a natural affinity for swimming.
	His muscles developed in just the right way.
	So I sort of think of somebody who's got a natural affinity for swimming.
	What would their life have been like if they didn't have to be a lifeguard constantly saving people?
	Because if you're a lifeguard constantly saving people, you will develop certain muscles, but they won't be the kind of muscles that you could have developed, and you won't have the kind of skills that you would have developed if you had simply joined a swim team, gotten good coaching, and learned how to swim that way.
	So they'd be very good at saving people, but they wouldn't win any swimming races.
	Their natural talent for swimming would have been distorted by the desperate emergencies of their situations into something else.
	Into something else.
	Something more humane.
	Because I think that Robin Williams was extraordinarily intelligent, had a certain amount of latent wisdom, but this need to please.
	So when Robin Williams, and again, it doesn't really matter.
	It's not about him. I never knew him.
	I never met him or anything like that.
	So it's just a kind of... So could he just sit down and have a conversation with you?
	You know, if you compare another great comedian, Dave Smith, who I do know and have chatted with and done a couple of shows with, so Dave Smith, you can sit down and have a conversation with, he doesn't have to be on.
	That's something that he does, but he doesn't have to be on.
	So the real question is, the me plus, what value do you bring to a relationship?
	What value do you bring to a relationship?
	That is one of the most foundational questions that we have to answer in life.
	What value...
	You can look at this in the mirror one day.
	You can ask that question directly and straight of yourself.
	What value do I bring to a relationship?
	Why would someone want to spend time with me?
	What objective and consistent characteristics do I possess that would generate the attachment called love?
	Why would I matter to someone else?
	What would draw someone to me and keep them with me?
	Thank you.
	It's one of the most foundational questions in human life.
	Why would I be loved?
	What positive value that is consistent and predictable would draw people to me and keep them with me?
	It's a very, very foundational question.
	And given that with social animals, it is a question at least as important as that of personal integrity, which of course is completely related.
	If you can answer that question, the odds of your life being happy go up tremendously.
	To be loved is one of the greatest glories of human existence.
	To be treasured, to bring positive feelings to good people, to bind them to you with respect and attachment, and reciprocate in a just and positive manner, is, if not the highest, one of the very highest peaks in the great mountainscape of human joys.
	Why should someone choose you?
	Why? You're just a guy or a girl.
	Why should someone choose you?
	Why should a good person attach to you?
	What do you bring to the table that is unique and singular enough to gather to you a just, fair, and positive lifelong love?
	That is the big, big, big, big question in life.
	Answer that positively, you are happy.
	Answer that negatively, and you are not.
	Quite the opposite, in fact.
	I'll give you a couple of bad answers.
	We'll talk about the good answers, and then...
	I'll draw the curtain back on the final Me Too...
	Me Too moment.
	Me Plus moment, sorry. Not the Me Too moment, the Me Plus moment.
	Some bad answers.
	Why? Let's talk about women.
	Say, why should a man want to be with me?
	I'm pretty. I have a nice figure.
	Great rack. Sexual access.
	That is the R-selected terrible answer that is core to the undoing of modern civilization.
	Why should a man be with me?
	Says the woman.
	Why should a man want me?
	Well, let's reduce it to something impersonal.
	Sexual access, prettiness, status, hormones, lust.
	You know, glue is a great thing if you want to fix something or make something.
	But it's really bad if it's a spray-and-pray random thing.
	So you ever do this? I think everyone's done this at once.
	You're trying to fix something with some Gorilla Bond crazy glue super adhesive and you stick your fingers together.
	Now, the gluing together of the thing you want to fix or make, that's good.
	The gluing together of your fingers, that's bad.
	And heaven forbid you scratch your nose or tug at your earlobe.
	It's a Looney Tunes cartoon, isn't it, where everything gets stuck to everything else?
	So the bond to make or fix a family, yeah, that's good.
	Glue that stuff together, everyone's happy.
	But when it just starts spilling over and sticking to everything, you go from a fixer.
	To a mess.
	And the bond, the gorilla bond, I guess almost literally, the simian bond, the ape, human, bald gorilla bond of sexuality should be used to make or fix a family.
	Just randomly attaching to various people, you just end up walking around with a giant train of people gorilla glued to your ass by their genitals.
	Maybe not your ass. You understand.
	You understand. Why?
	Why should someone choose me out of a lineup?
	The lineup of love?
	Why? Why you?
	Why me? Why anyone?
	Lust is a bad answer.
	It's a terrible answer.
	Because there's a reason why I injected...
	It's great to talk about injections when talking about lust.
	There's a reason why I injected the phrase, the phrase is stable and predictable, the words.
	Because if you have a positive attribute that is unstable, unpredictable, whether it's a positive attribute for the child trying to resuscitate continually, depressed mother called, she ain't so depressed today, the removal of a negative, it's more, that's a sad thing that you have to survive with.
	You don't get good food, but at least you're not eating poison for a day.
	Yay! The removal of a negative can't be a consistent positive because the more happy you are about the removal of a negative, the more you believe it's going to recur.
	But it has to be something that's consistent.
	The occasional good mood, the occasional good humor, the occasional make someone the belly laugh with a good joke or something like that is not terribly consistent.
	And sexuality, lust, It's certainly not consistent.
	If you're only with a woman because of her sexual attractiveness to you, that's not going to be consistent enough to build a relationship, right?
	At all. You are building your house on sand, not on rock.
	Minecrafting a mansion atop a vagina is a very bad idea.
	It may be an even worse metaphor, but it's a very bad idea.
	For men, why would you choose me?
	Abs. Money.
	Car. Success.
	Wealth. Status.
	Cosmopolitan, the magazine for women, It's decadent and primitive beyond words.
	Because cosmopolitan generally means, I guess it's a drink, but it generally means urbane, sophisticated, modern.
	But it's the most primitive sex tips for broken whores kind of rag.
	It's the same thing to some degree with other magazines that I would have some critiques of.
	Men's health. I have occasionally scanned through that magazine looking for any advice that has anything to do with morality, integrity, honesty, loyalty, courage.
	Now it's full of stuff that's supposed to give you abs and triceps and advice from bartenders on how to avoid women who stalk you.
	It's really not about men's health.
	So men and women both have ways of gaining attention that are highly profitable.
	See, here's the thing. This is the problem.
	Philosophy is not profitable for people in the short run.
	In fact, if people focused more on the qualities of their character and the nobility of their soul rather than the length of their eyelashes and the tightness of their butts, a lot of people would lose a lot of money.
	Philosophy would elbow and shoulder aside the vanity industry that characterizes most of the modern West.
	I mean, what are they trying to sell you?
	Do you go to a mall? Any philosophy stores there?
	No. It's all primping and perming and status and blush and lipstick and soaps and ways in which to carve, slice, Subtract,
	enhance, beautify, prettify, soften, harden the exterior shell that turns a human being into one of those absolutely horrible candies in the Monty Python sketch about the worst chocolate company in the world.
	Spring surprise!
	Oh, what's that? Well, you chomp down on the chocolate and twin steel bolts erupt and plunge through both cheeks.
	Crunchy frog! But that's what the modern vanity industry turns people into.
	Chocolate-covered horrors.
	So you focus so much time on your exterior that hides all of that.
	James mentions, I can imagine a comic strip of someone.
	I can imagine a comic strip or something where a customer walks in, slams a bunch of money on the counter, and says, Your finest philosophy, my good sir!
	Are you calling this show a comic strip?
	I guess you kind of are. Freedomain.com forward slash donate.
	Freedomain.com forward slash donate.
	Your finest philosophy, my good sir!
	I try every time, every time, to bring my A game.
	And tell me this isn't good stuff.
	Come on. This is good stuff.
	Because I'm one of the few people on the planet who gets some sort of income by telling unvarnished truth.
	And you know what I'm talking about.
	Look, it is important and valid.
	And I'm not saying don't care about your external appearance.
	I'm not saying that at all. But just, I would say at least spend as much time on your character as you do On your artfully crafted man stubble.
	That's all I'm saying.
	Ladies, at least spend as much time working on the qualities of your character as you do on finding just the right way to create a man halting smoky eye.
	That's all I'm saying. 50-50!
	50-50!
	A man cannot ignore the fact that women respond to status.
	A woman cannot ignore the fact that men respond to fertility.
	We're not abstract beings.
	I'm not getting all platonic up in your grill.
	Recognize that we are the apes of God.
	We are the mammal and the divine, the universal, the abstract.
	We are mind and body.
	We are spirit and flesh. We are, in a sense, both Plato and Aristotle, which is why they remain with us so strongly.
	We are the collective.
	We are the individual. We are in a deep dance with the tribe.
	And sometimes I win, and you win, and the individual wins, and sometimes...
	The tribe wins. Tribe's got a little bit of the upper edge at the moment, I'll be frank with you.
	As you probably know from my last couple of months.
	A listener is saying here, I guess running and paying off my mortgage is a reason a woman should choose me is pretty vain, huh?
	Well, it's not necessarily for a woman to take care of her appearance.
	It's not necessarily vanity because it recognizes the fact that men respond to appearance.
	Men respond to appearance.
	Women respond to status and resources.
	So the fact that you look good, got to watch out for your knees, man.
	That's all I'm saying. Me and Tiger Woods telling you, man, watch out for your knees.
	So there's nothing wrong with you paying off your mortgage.
	It's fine to run. I'm not saying don't do those things.
	And you're listening to this show, so you are, of course, to some degree, and I imagine to a larger degree than the vast majority of people, a far larger degree, concerned about the qualities of your character.
	The fact that Robin Williams, I believe, was compelled to make jokes because he viewed the entire world as depressed and needing his humor doesn't mean that you can't ever make a joke.
	When you create these standards or you view these realities, they don't become commandments.
	I'd say, ah, don't just focus on external appearance.
	I could let myself look like a homeless guy.
	No, that's not what I'm saying.
	It's not what I do. I don't think.
	I hope not. So I'm not saying that don't focus on qualities of character.
	Sorry, don't focus on external, you know, be responsible with your money.
	If you want to run and pay off your mortgage, that's fine.
	That's great. Nothing wrong with it.
	But not at the exclusion of the qualities of your character.
	Because what you've got to do is, in your mind's eye, you've got to say, what makes me unique enough that I can be loved forever?
	What is that? How many other people in the world run and pay off their mortgage?
	Well, quite a few, in fact.
	Quite a few. Pretty sure Usain Bolt doesn't have a big mortgage.
	So... What is it that makes you so unique that a woman would choose you or a man would choose you over everyone else?
	Because you understand that's the reality that we continually retain a choice throughout the rest of our lives with regards to our husbands, our wives, the mothers and fathers of our children.
	They can keep choosing.
	You can keep choosing. So working to improve the quality of your character is very, very important for your happiness and for the great happiness of being loved.
	Now, this, of course, could logically be reduced to the argument wherein people say, ah, well, let's say that there is one most moral and virtuous man, then every woman should love him and everyone else is a compromise and a blah, blah, blah, and a settling and second best or fifth best or five billionth best or whatever.
	No. Because there are personal characteristics, personal preferences, personal predilections that are important in maintaining a relationship, That are not specifically associated with virtue or integrity or courage or anything like that.
	But it could be something as simple as a particular lifestyle.
	You like country music.
	She likes opera. You like going to comedy clubs.
	She likes sitting at home.
	I mean, she likes hiking.
	You don't. There could be just a bunch of things that you can do together that it's like a jigsaw puzzle.
	But you definitely want to have the core virtues established.
	Now, the other stuff is going to be a little bit more personal tastes and preferences and things like that.
	Now, of course, there are also age compatibilities and so on, cultural compatibilities and so on, and intelligence compatibilities, you name it, right?
	So, it's not, oh, there already is the most moral man in the universe, and everyone else is second best, and women sigh and choose them out of sadness, and I get all of that.
	I mean, you could say all of this with everything else, too, right?
	You could say all of this with everything else, too.
	I... Okay, I don't want to tell you guys how I wasted two hours, but I'll tell you.
	So... We were watching, my family was watching a show, and they mentioned how Catwoman, the movie Catwoman with Halle Berry, how Catwoman was a really bad movie.
	And I think it got the Razzies, the Raspberry Awards, and so on.
	And so my daughter was like, hey, we should watch it.
	And I'm like, okay, check, is it appropriate?
	Yeah, it's not too bad, right? We can skip the kissy bits.
	And so we watched parts of it.
	I mean, it's a movie aimed at women, I guess, so it's about makeup.
	The plot device revolves around makeup.
	I'm sorry, this is an old movie.
	I don't care if you haven't seen it. You can skip this bit if you want.
	But it's about a makeup that is supposed to make women young, but it gives them migraines and then their skin hardens when they get older.
	Into a kind of exoskeleton.
	Now, of course, that's a pretty cheesy analogy, but given that the villainess was Sharon Stone, it has a certain amount of, I guess, kind of truth to it, because this is the cycle, right?
	So you get the young hot thing, and she ages, and she ages out of the young hot thing, and then she's, right?
	This is an old saying in Hollywood.
	There are three roles for women.
	Young ingenue, district attorney, and driving Miss Daisy.
	It's all you get. I don't know if Jessica Tandy, who was in Driving Miss Daisy, I think.
	I don't know if she ever played a district attorney.
	I doubt it. Maybe. But I think she was the original Blanche Dubois in Stanley Kowalskiville, right?
	Marlon Brando, Elia Kazan, the whole thing.
	She wasn't in the movie.
	That was Jason... Lee?
	No, not... Oh, Lord, I can't remember.
	Anyway, some woman who played a crazy woman in the movie Janet Leigh and then I think went crazy in real life.
	But anyway... So, in Catwoman, the young attractive and the older woman gets vengeful when the new model, literally the new model, right?
	I mean, it's very on the nose, right?
	Like there's a new model of car, new model of iPhone, new model of Android.
	And so there's a new model, and the new model replaces the old model, and then the old model gets bitter, angry, and vengeful, and destructive, and blah, blah, blah, right?
	Because she's a woman, this Sharon Stone's character is a woman who's relied on her beauty and But her beauty fades and she gets replaced.
	It reminds me of a woman I know, I knew many years ago, there was an anti-cellulite, anti-cellulite, you know, those tapioca dimples that women, I guess, and some men get on their butts and backs of their thighs.
	I think Kim Kardashian had some for a while before her team of alien robot engineers worked her over, painted a new coat on the Cartoon sex cyborg of her entire frame.
	And this woman was looking at this ad.
	It was an ad for this cream that was supposed to remove your cellulite.
	And she said, you know, I looked this up because there was a picture of a woman's butt and legs, right?
	She said, you know, I looked this up.
	Do you know who's on that goddamn advertisement?
	Do you know who's on that billboard?
	That is a 14-year-old gymnast.
	And these mother bleepers are putting a cellulite cream ad showing a 14-year-old gymnast.
	You've got to be kidding me.
	And she was enraged. She was enraged because there's that brush...
	Of sexual mortality.
	Sexual mortality.
	Whew! You know that old...
	It's a Shakespeare, I think. The hero tastes of death but once.
	A villain dies a thousand times.
	A coward, sorry.
	A hero tastes of death but once.
	A coward dies a thousand times.
	Sexual mortality, which is when a woman passes over the peak of her fertility markers and the eggs...
	The remnants of the eggs, you verily, they doth rot in her midsection.
	Like the eggs in the fridge of an elderly Japanese woman who died and stopped paying her hydro bill.
	Sexual mortality is the great terror.
	I mean, imagine, you know, we talk about inflation taking away your savings.
	Oh, I got a million dollars!
	Yeah, okay, but next year, it's less.
	Year after that, it's less. Year after that, it's less.
	Inflation is taking away your money.
	It's a silent thief in the night. Well, at least you can invest your money.
	You can do something to hedge against inflation, right?
	But, but, but, but, if you're a man and you want to understand women, you've got to think about Sexual deflation.
	Well, it's sexual inflation, but it sounds like something you'd use to pump up a half-functioning boner.
	But no, sexual inflation is a very, very big thing.
	That a woman's sexuality, after she becomes an adult, loses value year by year.
	It grows, and then it falls away.
	Now, again, you can invest your money and find ways to avoid being stolen from by inflation, but a woman, all she can do is apply a fresh coat of paint to a house that's just going to fall over anyway.
	If you look at the vanity industry that exploits and destroys women, the vanity industry is predatory.
	The vanity industry is a vampire that corrupts and destroys women because it allows them to enhance fertility markers past their due date and thus gain male attention without reproduction.
	I remember this years ago, seeing a very fat woman.
	I was with a friend of mine. I saw a very fat woman.
	And she had some eyeliner.
	And she was older.
	She was probably in her late 50s.
	Which, you know, at the time seemed pretty old to me.
	I guess I'm getting up there now.
	Next month, I'll be 54.
	So this old woman, she had the cracked lips, but she'd still applied red lipstick and she had the blue eyeliner and so on.
	She had her hair done. And it's like, yeah, but you're really fat and you're in your late 50s.
	What is that supposed to do?
	And my friend was much more sympathetic.
	Oh, you know, let her look good if she wants.
	And it's like, but she doesn't. She doesn't.
	All the time and effort and energy she spent figuring out the eyeliner and the lipstick and so on.
	All of that could have been spent something else.
	No ring on her finger. I mean, to think of the number of government teachers with comorbidities, particularly obesity, no wonder they're terrified of going back to school next month, right?
	All makes perfect sense to me.
	So there'll be a new model.
	If you are, as a woman, going to rely on youthful beauty and fertility markers, well, guess what?
	You're aging out and a new model will come along.
	You will be replaced.
	And there's nothing you can do about it.
	There's nothing you can do about it.
	Now, I've just said, of course, I mean, there are people who will lie to you and tell you that there's something that you can do about it.
	I dated a woman older than me, and she looked amazing.
	She looked amazing.
	Clear skin, no wrinkles, great figure.
	She looked fantastic. But I knew.
	I knew. Tick, tick, tick, talk, talk, talk, talk, talk.
	Couldn't be with her. Because I wanted to be a dad.
	You know, like, I guess I worked in a daycare, so I knew I'd be really good at it.
	I've always really liked kids.
	I'm surprised, always surprised that the world doesn't like them more.
	Oh, well, people listen to bands other than Queen.
	What can I tell you?
	There's nothing you can do about it, but people will sell you the illusion that there is something you can do about it.
	You know, it's funny because women get mad, some women, will get mad if a man claims to be an airline pilot or a doctor or whatever, and then they sleep with him, and turns out he's not.
	Right? That's... Dirty John writes a podcast on I think a show or something like that.
	Centers on these issues.
	The woman can get fooled!
	Like all the women who end up marrying some guy who's not what he says he is.
	It's like, what, you never call him at work?
	Are you kidding me? You never check him out?
	Gotta be kidding me, right?
	So, a woman can't do anything because, you know, there's no makeup for eggs, right?
	There's no Botox for eggs.
	And men kind of know. And I'm certainly trying to help men to know and remember more about this stuff.
	A man's status has its own dangers as well.
	So literally hundreds of billions of dollars, if not trillions of dollars around the world, are made from giving women the illusion that they can extend the life of their eggs.
	But putting a fresh paint on an old car doesn't reset the odometer.
	In reality, right?
	Buying a better mic will not make you a better singer.
	Now, men's Status has its own dangers, and I know there's a lot of men, of course, listening, so I'll just touch on these briefly.
	So men's status has their own danger, and the men's status danger is that if you work hard to build up looks, money, and power, the trifecta of unholiness that, according to Fifty Shades of Grey, allows you to beat women into loving you, that trifecta looks money and power.
	I mean, there's a reason people wanted to ban gravel-voiced arch garden troll Henry Kissinger, and he said, it's about the power.
	You got your looks, you got your money, you got your power.
	If you work on those, you work hard to get your income up, you work hard to look good, you work hard to gain influence.
	But then the problem is, That you face exactly the same problem that a woman faces when a man chooses her for sexual attraction, which is you're being chosen for fertility markers rather than for who you are.
	And again, I'm not saying you'd be a slovenly monk with no money because children need resources, that's a fact, and men need fertility in order to have children, so that's a fact too.
	So I'm not saying do women look like a troll.
	I'm not saying do men be...
	Homeless. I'm not saying that at all.
	But what I'm saying is that these things aren't enough to maintain love for a lifetime.
	They're necessary, as the saying goes.
	They're necessary but not sufficient.
	A woman does need to be fertile for you to have children.
	A man does need to have resources in order to raise children.
	But if you focus on developing your status and your looks and your money and your power and your beauty and your push-up bras or whatever it is, right?
	At the exclusion of cultivating qualities of character.
	Ah, well then.
	You are setting yourself up for a life of horrendous disappointment and regret.
	Because if a woman chooses you, this is something that Tom Wolfe wrote about in A Man in Full.
	One of the longest developed, somewhat least...
	Longest developed, somewhat most disappointing books in recent modern literary history, although his critique of other writers has always been pretty fantastic.
	But it's a guy, a lot of money and power, gets a hot wife, loses his money and power, loses his wife.
	There is an instability and fragility to life.
	Life, this is such a nonsense fortune cookie, I'm embarrassed to utter it, but it's nonetheless true.
	Life has its ups and downs.
	We're in, we're out of the money.
	Things are good, things are bad, things are up, things are down, you're healthy, you're sick.
	This is why the vows are in good times and in bad times, in sickness and in health.
	Life is full of ups and downs, particularly if you have any kind of originality.
	Or independent thought to the equation of your existence, life is going to have some ups and downs.
	I've gone through quite a few over the last 15 years, but the one thing I think that has remained constant is my dedication to philosophy, my love with the audience, my focus on speaking the truth.
	Those I can control, whether I stay on various social media platforms I don't have much control over.
	And The rejection of the present is simultaneous in cause and effect to the success of the past.
	If I hadn't been influential, I wouldn't need to be deplatformed.
	Success is rejection.
	You only need protection if you can actually get pregnant.
	The possibility of success is the reason you have to ostracize the sperm and make sure that no puck gets past the goalie.
	So if you focus just on developing external markers of reproductive success, you will gain a certain amount of attention.
	And I don't know how older men do it.
	Maybe there's something that I don't grasp or get or whatever it could be.
	But when older men, who are very successful, end up with much younger women Being in relationships with them, it's pretty clear, right? I mean, it's pretty clear what the equation is.
	It's fertility for resources, right?
	It's particularly sad if they don't even end up having kids.
	Because then it's just like, okay, you just pillaged part of the next generation for your own sexual vanity.
	At least give her some kids.
	At least put that fertility to work, for heaven's sakes.
	You know, marrying a young, fertile woman and not giving her kids if you can is like a younger woman marrying an older rich guy and he doesn't give her any money.
	Oopsie! Or doesn't share any of his money.
	Or doesn't leave her any of his money.
	Bait and switch. So I don't know how the older guys do it when some young hot thing decides to get with them like that really old guy that...
	Oh, there are so many famous Nicoles.
	But... Somebody help me.
	Help my brother out. Oh, I don't know.
	Jessica Simpson, did she marry an old guy?
	No, Nicole...
	Oh, there's Nicole Brown Simpson.
	There's lots of famous Nicoles.
	No, it was the woman. She married this old, very rich guy.
	He was, like, in his wheelchair. Anna Nicole Smith.
	Oh, my God. Yeah, I knew there was a Nicole in there somewhere.
	I knew there was a Nicole in there somewhere.
	Yeah, Anna Nicole Smith. And you ever want to get a serious wake-up call as to the dangers of fertility symbols, which she kind of had by the barrel load, right?
	There's a show called The Last 24 Hours Of, and The Last 24 Hours of Anna Nicole Smith was pretty wretched.
	Health issues, drugs, oh man, it's just ghastly.
	And it's funny, you know, because I've known a lot of Very attractive women.
	And if you get into conversations with them, I don't know what it is.
	Maybe it's just a coincidence. Maybe it's just my experience.
	But I've known a lot of attractive women.
	And what they do is you start asking them about their lives.
	And it's like boom, boom, boom, boom, boom.
	Health issue, health issue, health issue, health issue.
	I don't know what it is. Maybe it's if they've...
	Had excessive dieting.
	Maybe they feel they need to make up for health issues by becoming more physically attractive and so on.
	But it's just boom, boom, boom.
	Health issues, health issues, health issues.
	Again, it could just be my particularly oddly clustered experience, but I just wanted to mention that.
	Ask and you shall receive sometimes carpet-rolling tales of health horrors that are really quite a challenge to get into.
	So, yeah, I don't know. So, because there's got to be, I mean, obviously, there's got to be a part of you if you're old and you're wealthy and you snack some hot young thing.
	I mean, you know, right?
	Come on, you know. She's there for the money.
	She's there for the money. I mean, there's no way that Anna Nicole Smith wanted to bang the old guy in a wheelchair.
	And she got all the money, and she got all the fame, and she got the modeling contracts, and she got the yo-yo weight, and then she got the health issues, she got the drugs, and that was it.
	And that was it. That was it.
	She got everything she wanted.
	Turns out it wasn't anything she wanted.
	And that's very often the case in life.
	And that's what marketing is, right? Marketing is selling you the path to hell for the most part.
	I'm going to stimulate desire in you for that which you have not earned and hollow out your personality and leave you all husk and no corn at the end of a process.
	I'm going to give you everything you wanted.
	It turns out when you get everything you wanted, your personality collapses if what you want is not virtue and integrity as a whole.
	Me plus I want you to think of a fulcrum.
	Or, to be a little more vivid, a seesaw.
	You know, when you're a kid, you've got the seesaw.
	You sit at one end instead of someone else.
	It's at the other end. If you're girls, you go up and down pleasantly.
	If you're guys, you try and jolt the other guy off and have him faceplant into the bar.
	I think of a seesaw. Now, I actually had one seesaw that went not just up and down, but round and round, which was like one of the coolest things that I ever played with when I was very little.
	So you think of a seesaw and just think of you on the seesaw.
	And you have to balance between fertility and virtue.
	If you have, with regards to bonding, sexual attraction, romantic attraction.
	Now I'm talking about people who are young.
	I'm not talking about people who are going to get married in their 60s and past having kids.
	I'm just talking about fertility.
	Why are there men and women?
	Why do we have the squishy bits that go together so pleasantly?
	Because of children, fertility, babies, that's why we're all here, that's why there are hormones, why there's sexual attraction, why there are boners, why there are vaginas, all of that.
	The in and out of the vagina is designed for the out of the baby, right?
	The breadcrumbs all lead to the baby's lust, right?
	So... Bicyclists can use the road, but the road is not built for bicyclists.
	And people can get married and they don't have kids, but the whole reason why there are men and women and sexual attraction in marriage is for babies.
	So again, you can be on a bike, you can use the road, but the road is not built for you.
	So I'm talking about the central core purpose of all of this.
	So I want you to think of standing on that seesaw, right?
	Left leg, right leg, over the fulcrum, the middle point where it pivots, right?
	And it goes up and down. Now, if you focus only on personal virtues, but you don't focus at all on income, fertility symbols, attractiveness, health, blah, blah, blah, right?
	Then you've got your entire weight on one side.
	One side is down, the other side is up.
	So you've just focused on Qualities of character without really giving a thought as to how those qualities of character are going to be transmitted.
	How do you transmit your qualities of character?
	Well, I guess you could do a podcast and stuff like that, but the general way that most people transmit their qualities of character is through having children and raising those children to have those qualities of character.
	That's how you reproduce. That's how you reproduce.
	Qualities of character are the scales.
	Having children is the concert.
	Transmitting those values to your children.
	For most people, it's the purpose now of having those qualities of character.
	To find a quality mate who shares those qualities of character, those virtues, and then transmitting them to your children who will then go out and have their own children and transmit those values.
	That's what it's for. Now again, you might be somebody who's fantastic at writing poems, plays, movie scripts, you name it, and you can transmit some qualities of character that way, or as seems to be the case these days,
	the exact opposite. Of those qualities of character, you can promote degeneracy and lust and our selected immediate gratification and the destruction of values.
	So yeah, for sure. I mean, dynamite, of course, was invented to build tunnels and was later used to destroy things in, well, In wars, and it was used by robbers and so on.
	Alfred Nobel actually invented dynamite, but he was so horrified at how it ended up being used that he created the Nobel Peace Prize.
	So now we associate and remember him as somebody who promoted peace rather than the guy who invented dynamite.
	And in the same way, arts, culture can be used to transmit good values or to destroy those values, which is very much the obsession and compulsion in the media these days.
	So if you focus only on qualities of character and never learn how to attract a woman and build a bond and a family and raise your kids, then absent some literary genius, which very few people possess, some artistic or creative genius, which is the number of people who can actually influence culture, is very, very few.
	Very few. So that's not a statistical probability for most people.
	And so the way that your values live on is through a family and having children.
	So if you only focus on the qualities of your character, you gain virtue but lose its continuity.
	I mean, and can you imagine?
	Secretly and silently through an entire nest of corporations, buying a plot of land in the middle of nowhere, finding some way to build the most magnificent house, live there, die there, and have the forest slowly creep back and take it over.
	It's like, yeah, okay, you had a nice place to live, but there's no continuity.
	Nobody else lives there.
	It falls back into decay.
	It's destroyed, in a sense, when you die.
	But that's building your virtues without finding ways to reproduce them.
	Now listen, again, I know that there are people who can't have kids, and I don't want to pretend or I don't want you to take away from this that somehow you're a lesser human being.
	So find a way to transmit your values.
	It could be through your nephews, through your nieces.
	It could be through any variety of things.
	Maybe you can write a children's book.
	And again, I don't know that you need super literary genius to write children's books or anything like that, but there's things that you can do to help transmit your values if, for one reason or another, you're unable or perhaps even unwilling, although I'd question that, to have kids.
	So I want to put that parenthesis in or that footnote in.
	That I'm talking about, you know, the normal, natural, nature's way of having kids.
	This may not be available to you for a variety of reasons.
	And, I mean, I talked, gosh, I don't think I've put this show out yet, but I talked a while ago to a guy who had such a bad circumcision that his penis was virtually destroyed.
	So if you're listening, I'm not saying that you don't have your part to play in the transmission of values and virtues if you can't have kids or either physically or psychologically.
	So I'm not trying to shuffle these people off the stage, but I'm talking to the vast majority of people who have the capacity and the willingness to have children.
	So if you only focus on your virtues, you're building a house in the middle of nowhere that decays and dies when you do.
	And Okay.
	But wouldn't you rather have a house that can last?
	Something beautiful that you create that can last?
	Well, that's having kids. And that's homeschooling.
	Now, homeschooling, you're just turning...
	If you don't homeschool, or at least find some tutor who's in concordance with your values, then you are going to...
	Well, you're going to lose your kids.
	I've had a number of emails from people, of course quite a number of emails from people, who are enraged at the mosque edicts in Coronaville, right?
	In the land of Corona that we live in, right?
	And a number of them have mentioned their kids, you know, even my kids in government schools have to do this, that, or the other, right?
	Okay. Why on earth would you be concerned about mask edicts when you're putting your kids in government schools?
	I mean, what are you talking about?
	It's such a disconnect.
	The government is so terrible and unjust that I'm going to let it raise my children.
	So if you think of yourself on that seesaw, on that fulcrum, right?
	If you've got everything...
	On one side or the other, that's not good.
	That's not a balance, right?
	If you've got everything on the side of personal virtues and nothing on the side of building a family, which is fertility markers and reasonable income and learning how to negotiate in relationships and bringing your personal virtues to the gallery of humanity, I mean, I don't want to say what's the point of having personal virtues if no one sees them, but it's kind of like a question like that.
	Like, what's the point of, like, it's funny, I could have recorded all these podcasts and then just stored them or erased them right after I did them.
	I mean, what would be the point of that?
	You've got to share the quality of these conversations with people, my thoughts.
	I think they're good. I think they're important.
	I know that they are. So, you can paint a beautiful painting and you can set fire to it right after you're done, but what's the point?
	And it's the same thing with personal virtues.
	If nobody's there to see them, you know, a tree falls in a forest.
	Does it make a sound? Well, it depends how you define sound, of course.
	Is it something that people hear or something that disturbs the air?
	If it's something that people hear, it doesn't make a sound.
	If it's something that disturbs the air, then it does.
	If a man or a woman is virtuous, but nobody really sees it, are they virtuous?
	Yes-ish. But virtues that last longer are better than virtues that last shorter or last for less long.
	If you are honest for a day, it's not as good as if you're honest for a year.
	And if your virtues don't pass beyond your own personality, that's not as virtuous as if they do.
	Part of virtue is the reproduction of virtue.
	Part of virtue is the instilling of virtue in others.
	For most people, that's their children.
	That's the point of your virtue.
	Because without that, your virtue dies with you.
	And the world gets worse.
	And what was the point? Well, it made me a better and happier person.
	Yeah, yeah. But it made the world worse.
	Because your virtues weren't transmitted.
	And the Lord above knows that the evil people are transmitting their anti-virtues with great strength and willpower.
	So... Somebody wrote here, no one lights a lamp and puts it under a bowl.
	Instead, they put it on the lampstand where it gives light for everyone in the house.
	Yeah, of course. Can you imagine?
	You know, they call this the last mile of connectivity back when you had to have physical wires go into the house for like cable and phones and electricity.
	The last mile, right? They call it the last...
	Can you imagine? There's a house somewhere in the middle of nowhere, you know, like 50 miles from the closest...
	Generating station. And you build the wires 49.9 miles, but then you just don't do the last.1.
	You see, not doing the last.1 makes the 49.9 worse than useless because you've wasted...
	Make it continue.
	Finish the job. Finishing the job of virtue is reproducing virtue.
	James put in...
	Masking up again in coronavirusville, searching for my lost freedom or two.
	Some people claim there's a market to blame, but I know it's China's fault.
	That's pretty good. Jimmy Buffett song, right?
	I was vaguely thinking of an old Howard Jones song, No One Is to Blame.
	And I was going to do lyrics to that, but I think it's still copyrighted and all of that.
	We know, we know, we know China is to blame.
	Matthew 5.15.
	I'm afraid you're digging deep into my Christian choir memory, so feel free to post that as well.
	So, you go fully for virtue without reproducing it.
	It's not as virtuous as if you can reproduce it.
	And your virtues would be limited because virtue is not just personal, virtue is social.
	Virtue is social.
	Yes, you must be honest with yourself, but honesty is also measured by your honesty with other people.
	Yes, you must have courage with regards to your own fears, but your courage is also measured relative to external things, events, and people.
	I mean, I've spoken, I think, pretty much the most difficult truths of any public figure over the last 15 years.
	Could be others. I'm just, from what I've seen, from what I believe, and from what I've sort of charted and planned for myself and our community.
	And yeah, there have been great highs and some dismal lows.
	But if I said to myself, well, I have the courage to accept these difficult truths, but I'm never going to speak them to others, do I have courage?
	I am willing to accept X, Y, or Z that other people find really, really upsetting to hear.
	I am willing to accept it.
	Okay, there's a certain amount of intellectual courage there.
	But if I never speak it to anyone else, A, clearly that's a deficiency of courage, and B, really what's the point of accepting it myself if I don't talk to others?
	And so our virtues cannot simply be defined with reference to ourself.
	I am honest with myself, but I lie to others.
	Am I virtuous? Well, you can't tell the truth to others if you lie to yourself, but if you only tell the truth to yourself but lie to others, that's not particularly virtue.
	Someone says, and the reason I'm saying someone says, I don't want to put people's usernames in here, and not just virtues.
	I have had many accomplishments and challenges during my lifetime.
	I speak about them all for the same reasons that it may help and encourage others But would be lost if I stay quiet.
	Yeah, yeah, yeah.
	I know that people, because I get the emails too, I know that a lot of people have really benefited from my frankness about my history.
	By, you know, when I talk about breaking away from an emotionally destructive family of origin, defooing, people think it's me, right?
	People think it's me. No, no, no, they defooed me.
	I spoke the truth. And they didn't want to talk to me if I spoke the truth.
	I no more defood my family than I voluntarily quit Twitter and PayPal and YouTube.
	No, I spoke the truth and they didn't like it.
	My family dumped me because the price of being with my family of origin was to not tell the truth.
	Well... Sorry, boys. I can't live like a slave.
	I had that as a child.
	I couldn't speak the truth when I was a child.
	I can't live the rest of my life.
	We've got to grow up, right? We've got to grow up.
	We've got to put away the childish things that live as men and women.
	Sovereign, independent, honest.
	So let's go back to our seesaw.
	If you're only focused on personal virtues...
	Without sharing, building, communicating, and reproducing them, you're not particularly virtuous.
	Virtue is defined as knowledge plus action.
	Reading a diet book doesn't make you any thinner.
	Reading a diet book plus changing your eating habits, that will affect you.
	So if you're only into the personal virtues, You're not particularly virtuous.
	Now, if you go to the other side of the seesaw, right?
	For me, the right is personal virtues.
	The left is, for no particular reason, maybe it's because I'm left-handed.
	And, like, understand, too, like, when I was a young man, as I've talked about before, I was a very good-looking chap.
	I was scouted for modeling.
	I, well, you've seen the pictures.
	I'm a pretty good-looking guy.
	And I was not exactly in my mid-teens focused on the quality of my character.
	So I've traversed these, right?
	And then I huddled and hid with virtues in therapy for many years.
	And so, you know, I am not stating any of this as...
	Any holier-than-thou condemnation of a guy who's always had the balance in the middle of the seesaw.
	No, no, no, no. I've traversed from one end to the other, and I say this from pretty hard-won experience and great sympathy for people who are misled by culture and you name it, right?
	So this is with great humility, and this is hard-won knowledge from having gone to both ends of the spectrum.
	Trying to find balance in the middle, right?
	So you go to the left, and you simply focus on Fertility markers.
	You know, the men do their push-ups and pull-ups and sit-ups and go to the gym and American psycho-style focus on the suppleness and youthfulness of their skin and they get hair transplants and they buy useless expensive cars and And they fight and claw their way,
	bonobo style, up the latticework of some hierarchy to gain resources and power.
	And they try and hit that trifecta.
	Money, wealth, and power.
	And they don't focus on the personal virtues that they can bring to the equation.
	So what they do is they reproduce that amorality It's not necessarily immorality, though it can certainly drift that way depending on the integrity of the organization you're part of.
	But what do they do?
	Well, maybe then they do have kids, but they reproduce that amoral status and power-seeking, which makes the world in general a worse place.
	It's interesting to me that people have learned through COVID to make do with less.
	Good. Good.
	I'm working on it. It's been strange to not travel.
	But I'm working on it.
	Learning from it. Just got to find that balance.
	Got to have fertility markers.
	Got to have some wealth. Got to have something to bring to the table, but you've got to have the personal virtues.
	And you put those two together, and you have personal virtues which you can reproduce in a family situation with your children and make the world a better place thereby.
	Which is why I have focused on relationships, on keeping relationships together, on how to better communicate.
	My second book was Real-Time Relationships, The Logic of Love, and it's one of my longest books about how to get along.
	With your spouse, with the co-parent of your children, you name it.
	Me plus is when you're focusing on one or the other.
	If you focus on, well, I'm a good person, I'm broke, but I'm a good person, then what you're doing is you're saying you should choose me for my virtues, although I can't bring any resources to the table.
	The similar thing for a woman might be, well, I'm a good person, But I'm really...
	I have to take care of my health.
	Maybe I'm overweight. Maybe I have, you know, bad teeth or whatever, right?
	But I'm a good person. It's like, yeah, well, but you kind of miss the fertility marker stuff, right?
	And if you focus on just the fertility markers without the virtue, then you can't be chosen for any stable reason that is going to last.
	Like if a woman... Gets chosen for her beauty, her youth and fertility, then that's going to fade.
	So it's an unstable situation.
	If a man is chosen for his money, power, and status, well, that's going to fade to some degree because you just get old, you retire, you can't work as much, maybe you keep the money or whatever, but your looks are going to fade as a man.
	And it's not just the externals, right?
	I mean, I still look, I think, relatively youthful for a mid-50s, but, you know, I'm getting creaky.
	And that's despite waging a pretty bitter battle against time with health and exercise and actually weigh less now than I did when I was 20.
	And I've been, I don't know, working out three hours, maybe two, three hours a week.
	I mean, combined with just general walks and all of that and moving around, but I've been working out two, three hours a week for decades.
	But you can only hold back the clock so far.
	Internally, you age as well.
	You know, when I was in St.
	Louis, as I've talked about before, I was wearing squeaky new sneakers, chasing my daughter down a hallway with tiles, and I squeaked into one of the tiles, lost my balance because the shoe had no give on the bottom.
	It just stuck like glue, fell down, crunched my knee.
	It took 10 months to get better.
	I didn't run, of course, during those whole 10 months.
	Now, I don't know if I'm going to be able to get back into sprinting.
	It's really tough. So even if you can pump up the exterior, you know, your joints, your tendons, all that sort of stuff, right?
	I was with some friends.
	My family was with some friends yesterday.
	And you can play this game in a pool.
	I am a tree. I call it I am a tree.
	And you say, I am a tree.
	I cannot be knocked over by any children.
	And then, of course, the children will jump on you and try and pull you over.
	And you've got to stay up.
	And it's a huge amount of fun, especially if you've got boys around, right?
	And yeah, I was like wrestling and trying to keep my...
	And I was like, oh, I got a twinge in my tricep from pushing some kid off behind me, right?
	Threw my daughter in a pool a couple of weeks ago.
	My forearm was a little...
	I mean, my elbow was a little tender.
	That's fine. I massaged it.
	It's like that's all new.
	Yay time! But the values are being transmitted in the show, in my family, and that's good.
	So me plus...
	Is you can't just be yourself in a natural state.
	In a balanced state.
	In a state poised between God and ape, as we all are suspended.
	But you've got to pump something up.
	You can't just be a good person with resources.
	You have to make people laugh.
	And the reason you make people laugh is not because...
	You like to make people laugh, but because if you don't make people laugh, you feel worthless.
	Are you, when you pursue your path in life, are you doing what you're doing because you are pursuing a positive or avoiding a negative?
	I ask Microsoft this question a lot.
	I'm perfectly aware that I spent my first quarter century trying to talk my mom into being sane.
	And then I spent another 15 years trying to talk the world into being sane.
	I'm aware. These two things ain't exactly unrelated.
	I failed with my mother.
	I think it's kind of a draw with the world at the moment.
	But am I reasoning with the world?
	Because I love reason and want the world to be more rational.
	Or if I give up, I have to accept that the world is my mother and crazy is going to win.
	It's all been for nothing.
	Worse than nothing. Because I've been engaged in a 40-year battle that I couldn't win.
	What a waste. I'm aware.
	I'm pretty self-aware with regards to this stuff.
	Is this show simply a continuation of me trying to talk sanity into my mom?
	It's a big question.
	Am I doing what I do because I love philosophy and wish to share it with the world or because it will irreversibly break my heart to accept the fact that my mom went a little bit crazy.
	Well, my mom went crazy just a little bit before the world went crazy and there's no escape from madness.
	That you break out of an asylum into a larger and more dangerous asylum.
	Because at least with the first asylum you had the fantasy that you could break out of it, but the second you don't.
	That the layers of inception have no bottom, and there's no way back up.
	Was Robin Williams sharing his joy of laughter?
	Or was he afraid that the entire world was like his mom, and he could never escape his childhood?
	Obviously, I don't know.
	I don't know the guy. I never talked to him.
	I think there's reasons to believe, given his ending and the tragedies of his relationships, That it may have been the latter.
	You know, when you grew up in an abusive and dysfunctional household, you have to, have to, have to, in order to survive, believe that there's a world out there that's not that.
	It's not that!
	Otherwise, you won't make it.
	You won't make it. It would be terrible.
	You have to believe that. There's a way out.
	And I remember this so funny, I looked this up just the other day while I was waiting for a video to compile.
	On my old Atari 800 there was a game, one of the first 3D games I guess along with Ball Blaster, called Way Out.
	And in Way Out there was a maze You find your way out and you were followed by, I think it was called a kleptangle, which was a kleptomania rectangle that would steal your map.
	And I was playing this game when I was a kid.
	And my mother came in, so I had to pause the game.
	I could see the exit in the game, but I was stuck.
	I was paused. I could see it on the map.
	I could see how to get there.
	I couldn't see it on the actual view, right?
	There's the eye view and then there's the map view.
	Like your GPS and your windshields, right?
	My mom came in and was blathering on about some guy, some dance she was at and all of the complicated, hysterical brain...
	Squeezing complications of this glance and that glance and what he did and what she did and whether he was interested or whether he would ask her out or, you know, just bleh, bleh, bleh.
	And I was stuck in my chair.
	She's between me and the exit.
	The verbal diarrhea, the largaria of my mother was truly a force of nature.
	Bit of an unholy force of nature, but nonetheless.
	And she had the need to, it's like things weren't real to her unless she spoke about them, so words became her empiricism, but inflicted upon me at the age of 11 or 12, somewhat inappropriate.
	And of course, I don't remember why I remember these things until much later, but I remembered that of all of the times when my mother cornered me and Verbally diarrhoea me into virtual non-existence.
	I remember sitting in that chair, occasionally glancing at that screen.
	Way out. I'm stuck.
	I'm paused. I'm on hold.
	I can't get out. My mother sat between me and the door of my bedroom, and though I could see the exit on the map, I couldn't get there because the game was stuck, was frozen, was stopped.
	Now, of course, it's perfectly clear why I remembered that and why that stuck with me of all the other times I did things, because it was a very powerful allegory for my life.
	And then what happened was, eventually, she left, and she could literally be two, three hours, just blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
	I couldn't follow half of what she was saying, but you kind of had to, because if she ever stopped and asked you what you thought, and she thought you hadn't been paying attention, well, it could escalate very quickly from there.
	And I hadn't hit puberty maturity yet, so I wasn't big enough to fight back.
	So, eventually she left.
	I unpaused the game. But the kleptangle stole my map.
	And I couldn't get out. The pause had been long enough that I'd lost track of the game and where this kleptomaniac rectangle was in the game.
	And there is, of course. Am I pursuing the dissemination of philosophy out of a pure love for philosophy, a belief in the rationality of humanity, and a desire to make the world a better place and share the goods and gifts that I have been given?
	Sure. That's part of it, for sure.
	Is it also because if the world gets crazier, I fall back in time and I'm stuck in that chair with a frozen computer game and a Verbal diarrhea, mother coding me in pathology?
	Yeah, there's that too.
	There's that too. There's that too.
	I can't pretend that the skills I've developed in debate and rationality are unrelated to trying to talk my mother into not being crazy.
	Of course those two are related.
	And that's what I was saying very early on in this conversation.
	Sorry, I know it's not a conversation, but in this discussion, where I was saying that a lot of the skills that people seem to have are desperate countermeasures to personal destruction developed during a dangerous childhood.
	Yeah. And listen, I mean, you guys listen to this show.
	I'm sure that there's some aspects of that there for a lot of you.
	And there's nothing wrong with that.
	I mean, there's still skills, right?
	I mean, the skills that I have...
	In rationality, they're real skills.
	The fact that they were forged in a furnace of screwed-upness doesn't mean that they're not real skills.
	The guy who's a strong swimmer because he spends his whole youth saving people, well, he's still a strong swimmer.
	It still translates to other things.
	The me plus is I can't just be myself in a balanced and positive way, but I have to bring the compulsions of early salvation to my relationships in order to imagine that I have value.
	I can't just be loved for who I am.
	I have to be loved for who I am plus, plus, plus.
	And it's hard to let go of that.
	Thank you.
	It's hard to let go of that.
	I like making people laugh.
	That wasn't a particular thing to do with my childhood.
	It's just fun. But the rationality thing, needing people to be rational, because if I can't convince them to be rational, I'm in great personal danger, as I was in my childhood, if I couldn't fight back the descending Nazgul of my mother's disintegration.
	Well, if you like to make people laugh because you feel incredibly anxious and depressed, if you don't, then you're using them.
	You're using them as a sort of personal narcotic, right?
	That's not going to end well.
	As a whole. Certainly didn't end well for a wide variety of people in this world and it will continue to not end well for a wide variety of people.
	Are you using them?
	Am I using the world and my battle with it to overcome my own terror of anti-rationality rooted in being abused as a child?
	Well, if I am only doing that or that's the major or central reason behind what I'm doing, it's not going to work.
	It's not going to work. It's not going to work.
	If Robin Williams was making people laugh because he was terrified that the entire world was kind of like his mom in a way, then he's not entertaining people, he's using them to manage his own anxiety, or he was, right?
	If that was the case.
	I think there's, again, I can't prove it.
	I don't know for sure.
	But I think there's good reason to believe that's certainly in the vicinity, right?
	Can you just be yourself and be loved?
	Or do you have to put on a show of status, of humor, of intelligence, of sexuality, of something?
	So you think you're a Romeo playing a part in a picture show.
	Never sees what she wants to see forever playing to the gallery, right?
	There's something about this in Oscar Wilde's story as well.
	And my mother used to as well.
	She would cry out to an invisible audience the narration of her disintegration.
	Very unsettling. Always being watched.
	Always being judged. Always being evaluated.
	Am I funny enough to save my mom?
	Am I rational enough to save the world?
	If it's done to manage your own anxiety or depression or hatred or fear, it generally won't work out too well.
	Can you just be yourself and be loved?
	Thank you.
	Now, again, if being yourself is genuinely enjoying making people laugh, fantastic!
	Again, you can't go from one rule to another.
	That's not freedom. So that, in general, I think, is the way to approach these things.
	Look in the mirror. Why would someone choose me?
	There's a line-up. Especially now with like dating apps and so on, there's lineups of thousands and thousands and thousands of people.
	Why would someone choose you or me or anyone?
	When you develop personal qualities of production, of virtue, of utility, of value, then you are in a position of choice.
	If you're an unknown actor, of course, You can't choose your roles, really.
	But if you are a known actor and a famous actor, you can choose your roles, right?
	Like Russell Crowe can choose to be in a film called Unhinged, wherein he pretends, as everyone does, that the most dangerous factor facing society is white males.
	As always, right? As always...
	So I would say, answer the question of why someone chooses you, and you, in many ways, answer the entire question of human happiness for yourself.
	Even if you don't end up being chosen for whatever reason, you still answer that question.
	And I'm sure that you will be chosen.
	And it puts you in a position of choice.
	And you also don't end up choosing people based upon the same shallow or senselessly deep conditions that you have, right?
	Like, if you are on the right side of the seesaw and you say, ah, well, I am only going to focus on personal virtues, not on translating them into relationships, then what happens is, because you've ignored the left side, the success, the resource gathering, the attractiveness, and so on, then you have this enormous hostility and suspicion often to those who have pursued that purpose, and you then think that they're all on the left and none on the right.
	This is the, you know, the great fear of selling out, you know?
	So if you're a really good musician, but you've not written songs that people really care to hear, then, you know, maybe you know someone who's become successful, and you say, oh, well, they've just sold out.
	Because then translating your personal skill into something that is transmissible, consumable, and reproducible, i.e.
	songs that people actually want to hear, People who do that, you think that they're all on the other side and have none of your skill and blah, blah, blah.
	And you hear this, you know, all the time.
	I did a show about this touching on Justin Bieber many, many years ago.
	He's a great musician. He's a great singer, great entertainer, great performer.
	He's listened to. And you've got to find a way to get people to listen.
	You know, the fact that I came from obscurity and no direct academic credentials, like a PhD in philosophy from Stanford or anything like that, get 700 million views and downloads of philosophy, that's really something.
	I don't think that I've given up integrity to do that.
	In fact, I've taken on more challenging topics and more Translatable topics to the real world.
	Statelessness was interesting, for sure, but it's not as translatable as some of the other more recent topics that I've taken on.
	I think I did it with good integrity.
	Whereas, of course, if you're all about the status and you see people on the other side who are all about the personal integrity but have no status or resources or attractiveness, then you just say that they're incels and useless toads and fuglies and all that kind of stuff, right?
	It tends to polarize at these two extremes, and, you know, you've got to find something in the middle.
	Got to have resources, got to have attractiveness, got to have integrity.
	That way, you can reproduce it through the generations.
	Now, I'm afraid that I can't even engage in a conversation on this particular topic, for which I apologize, but I have a rather, I won't say desperate, but urgent situation.
	Urgent situation with regards to a listener, so I did promise a call.
	So I am staggering from one to the other.
	Actually, not staggering. Leaping.
	Gambling. And I'm going to need a few minutes to grab something to eat from one to the next.
	So thank you very much for the question.
	I do apologize deeply for not engaging in more of a conversation.
	I did want to get a bunch of these thoughts across.
	But I will absolutely be happy to have a call, whether it's one-on-one or through this particular situation, about this topic going forward.
	So thanks, everyone, so much for listening.
	Please don't forget, freedomain.com forward slash donate to help out the show.
	And also, don't forget, freedomain.com forward slash newsletter, just in case you happen to sign up for that.
	I'm putting out some stuff.
	And yeah, I've got some good surprises coming up that I think will be very positive for the community.
	So thanks, James, of course, for setting it up.
	Thank you for listening. Have yourself a wonderful day.
	I'll talk to you soon. Well, thank you so much for enjoying this latest Free Domain show on philosophy.
	And I'm going to be frank and ask you for your help, your support, your encouragement, and your resources.
	Please like, subscribe, and share, and all of that good stuff to get philosophy out into the world.
	And also, equally importantly, go to freedomain.com forward slash donate.
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	So thank you so much for your support, my friends.

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