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Sept. 5, 2020 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:20:40
A MILLION DOLLARS IN ONE DAY!?!?
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Good evening, everybody.
It is... Hey, you know what?
It's Stefan Molyneux, and it's my birthday month.
Now, for those of you who don't know what a birthday month is, a birthday month is a sad little bit of economic beggary that occurs for people who had parents forget their birthday when they were little.
And the birthday month is a time when you get to dominate those around you.
If they disagree with you, you remind them that it is in fact your birthday month.
And if they don't want to do you a favor, you remind them that of course it is your birthday month.
And you hope, usually successfully, that they're too mature to return the favor to you when it's their birthday month when you barely remember what's going on with them.
So that's just an important thing to remember.
I give you the gift of the birthday month.
In return, you know, if you should want to help out with my...
Birthday month, you can go to freedomain.com forward slash donate, and you can help me out.
I will, of course, be whining and complaining about it for most of the month, but, you know, if you want to forestall it, or at least believe that you might be able to, freedomain.com forward slash donate.
Now, I am actually, this is probably one of the tiredest I've been doing a show.
Now, I had some of this.
When I was in Australia, oh man, because, you know, I traveled to, of course, to Australia with my wife, with my daughter, and this is, I can't believe it's like two years ago now, just a little over two years.
So she was nine, and it was a fantastic trip.
I drank deep of everything there was to offer in life down under and had some fantastic tangles and victories with mainstream media people who were trying to catch me in all these various traps in live interviews and We recorded interviews and it was seeing, you know, we had up to a thousand people come to see Lauren and I and staying late and sitting there with my daughter at the book signing table chatting with people.
I'd sign the books, she'd sign the books.
I mean, it was just a fantastic experience.
And I loved just about everyone I met in Australia.
And even the people who came out to protest.
Well, okay, maybe not in Melbourne, because those guys were pretty jacked up on Marxist rage.
But other places where people came out and protested.
And one of the places we gave the speeches at, they came out and it was raining pretty hard.
And You know, it turns out that a lot of that, like, blue dye in their hair, a lot of that sort of weird mascara and those little coffin purses and the red, bright, big red style hair, that doesn't really hold up that well into the rain.
And so Lauren and I went out and...
Gave them some umbrellas that we had, extras lying around, which we brought for people who needed any kind of umbrellas, like if they had to go to the car or whatever it is.
And we went out and we chatted with them a bit and their rebellion was running down the backs of their necks in these little blue and red rivulets of tragedy and sadness.
And, you know, tried to dispel some of the notions that are implanted by nasty people about, ooh, what bad people we were, and so on.
Just had a reasonable chat with them and all that.
Anyway, they said they wanted to continue protesting, and it's like, yeah, it's peaceful, you know, come and make your statements and all that.
It'd be great. I mean, we had people who came into the speeches and we did these lengthy Q&As.
Like, I spoke for about an hour, Lauren spoke for a little less long, and we'd do an hour, hour and a half of Q&As.
It was really great, and some people were pretty punchy, which I appreciated and respected, and And absorbed and worked with about, you know, what we'd said or what they'd heard and all that.
It was great. But these leftists, these socialists did come out to protest what we were doing and we gave them our umbrellas.
And then later we went out to check on them and They had left.
I mean, there were these little puddles, you know, of congealed leftist rivulets of tragedy, sadness, and early life in daycare, I assume.
These little... It looked kind of oily, like a little bit of blue, a little bit of red, swirled around in these little puddles.
And they had left, and they had...
Almost inevitably, I guess, they had taken our umbrellas.
And not... Which to me was just perfect.
Come and protest on property that's not your own.
Accept gifts from those who are protesting and then leave with that property.
That is in a nutshell.
So, yeah, sorry, just a little bit of a tangent there.
It was really quite a wild and vivid trip.
But I was pretty tired for some of those.
Because, you know, it's a 12-hour time flip and you get all messed up on this long flight.
I mean, it was really a long trip.
I mean, the flight to Australia was not nearly as bad as the flight coming back from New Zealand.
The flight coming back from New Zealand, near New Zealand, that was brutal.
That was like, that sort of reminded me of the kind of comfort I had when I was in church choir as a kid in boarding school, where they had these hard pews you'd have to sit in for quite a long time.
And we had, I guess there were two priests when I was a kid.
One was a guy who was a semi-catatonic droner.
You know, there's some people who kind of have these hypnotic, slow, sonorous voices.
And it kind of echoed around in the church, so it's kind of hard to hear.
If you're not very precise in your language in a large space, it really is easy to get all kind of treacled up and fuzzed down.
But every now and then, he would kind of erupt in this...
Old Testament passion.
And it would be really startling because I didn't sleep much in boarding school.
It was boarding school, right?
I didn't feel that relaxed. And so he would be talking about...
He was big on the begats.
Begats, not that interesting when you're six or seven years old.
I was six when I went to boarding school.
I'd rather was sent to boarding school.
Begats, you know, athesia, begat.
Bartholomew, who begat...
And it's like, you know, begat's not that thrilling.
But every now and then, he would just take a deep breath, and it would come out like that.
Sorry if you were just falling asleep to my...
But this is what would happen to me.
I'd be there in the church choir.
And it'd be lots of baguettes.
And there's so-and-so baguette.
And it's like, studdle you up, this kind of thing.
It was like this sort of whiplash.
He used his voice like Indiana Jones, the tip of his whip.
And so I was tired when I was in Australia for part of it.
I adjusted fairly well.
And then, of course, I was tired of coming back.
But last couple of nights, I've been working late on the audiobook.
I've actually finished the first book.
It's a three-book series.
And it's almost – it's my novel, a novel that I wrote about this British family, this German family, and their loves and lusts and combats between World War I and World War II.
It's sort of a pan-European history.
And it's got lots of famous people.
Churchill is a character in it, lots of famous people in it.
I'm trying to sort of encapsulate everything that happens in Europe and England in this period with lots of family drama.
I hadn't read it in a long time.
I wrote it close to 20 years ago now, and it took a long time to research and write, and I was incredibly pleased with it.
And I am very pleased with it.
Like, wow. It's really, really good.
It's free, and I hope that you will check it out.
As I said, you know, being off politics, I wanted to create some things of more depth and power and beauty and art.
And so you can go to freedomain.com, and you can go to the blog.
There's a listing there. But the easiest way to get it is to go to...
F-D-R-U-R-L dot com forward slash almost.
It's F-D-R-U-R-L dot com forward slash almost.
I'll just wait while you do that and then bookmark it.
And at the top there's a feed.
I just sort of created a feed.
And the first ten sections are out.
This is over ten hours of audiobook reading.
Lots of different characters. And I got a whole new studio set up just for this.
Because... Sorry for all this backstory.
I don't know if you're interested. It's interesting to me.
I sort of like lifting the lid on this kind of stuff when other people do it, so hopefully you'll find it interesting, but...
Whenever you set something up for video and audio in particular, it's finely calibrated.
I have a friend who is really good in the studio.
He's a musician and a really great guy, great musician, and a great dad, by the way.
I wanted to mention that as well. And he came in and helped me set this up.
I brought a whole separate amp and mic system.
I really needed it to not be connected to my main studio because my main studio is set up for a particular kind of show.
And heaven forbid it change or if I need to adjust anything for the order, I just needed to photocopy it and work on the copy, so to speak.
So I've got a whole new audio book set up, whole new mic set up, whole new amp set up, and it really sounds nice.
It's a different kind of mic. I wanted a richer kind of mic than I have in the mainstream studio, so I did a fair amount of research and bought something that I think is good for this.
And given that it's such a long book, and I'm going to keep grinding out.
I have like half a dozen novels.
You can, of course, if you're in the newsletter, I'll be sending you out my other audio book, which is a modern comedy novel, comedy-drama novel, called The God of Atheists.
Which is interesting because I wrote The God of Atheists years and years before I started podcasting, before there even was podcasting, and one of the main characters...
Has incredible philosophical monologues into a webcam, which he then publishes on the internet.
And this was... I wrote this in like...
Ooh, my gosh.
2002? 2003?
Something like that. A long time ago.
And it's pretty wild that I had a character doing this, which is something that I then did and do.
But this is before any of that existed, so it was just kind of prescient, I suppose, that way.
I saw the potential of...
What the technology could do very early, and I was very keen to pursue it as soon as the ability became available.
And I remember slaving over.
Early in the day, man, you couldn't find any documentation on this stuff at all.
Even just creating an XML feed was brutal.
There wasn't any of this automated stuff.
I just did it in Notepad.
It was wild.
Getting this stuff up and running to begin with.
I remember I couldn't do bandwidth.
It was crazy expensive back then as well when I first started.
I settled on 40k per second.
It wasn't so low quality that it sounded like a beach radio, but it wasn't so high quality that I would go broke on bandwidth because it was pretty wild that way.
But yeah, so Tired, I've been working late on this audiobook.
It's the kind of audiobook...
That, you know, the time of day that you record is actually quite important.
Don't record, you know, comedy for me is good to record in the morning, but for drama, and there are funny bits in this book, but it's pretty dramatic, of course, as you can imagine from the subject matter, but you got to record in the wee hours.
That's when it works, when it's quiet.
And because this is a very intimate, it's funny because it's, It's a very global in scale novel.
It's, you know, all of European history.
It's politics, it's economics, it's psychology, it's family history, but it's also got...
I really wanted the characters to be people that you feel you know.
That, to me, is always the very best in novels.
In an old E.M. Forster novel, there is a mom, and there's just one little comment.
This is in Room with the View.
It made it into the movie, this comment.
And you don't know what's happened to the father of Lucy Honeychurch, but the mother says at one point, must he sneer?
I mean, this is the furniture your father chose and we're stuck with it, so to speak, or we keep it because of the memory of him or something like that.
And just that little detail, I love those little details about characters in stories where you really get a sense of how they're fleshed out.
There's a woman who looks at her husband and realizes how much she's aged.
And she sees him tapping on his teeth with his spectacles.
And she remembered that when he was younger, before he needed spectacles, he used to do that with a pen.
And just that, I mean, just little things that you remember, things that you notice.
I really wanted to flesh out the relationships, the characters, and their history, and so on.
And so this is the kind of thing, because a lot of the conversations take place at night, and they're very intimate and powerful, and I really...
So I've been recording at night.
And because it's also quite personal for me, you know, as a depressed mother, an absent dad, and all that, so there's a lot of me in there.
Obviously, you have to write what you know to some degree.
And... So I write and then I'm kind of jangled afterwards.
It takes a little while to settle down.
So then, you know, I'll get some sleep.
And as you get older, it's not bad for me, but, you know, you can notice it as you get older.
What happens is your body's just like, hey, it's 6.14 in the morning.
You know, I'm pretty sure there's a cow that needs to be milked out there somewhere.
So up you go.
And so you wake up.
But, I think, I gotta tell you guys, like, I'm not a morning person.
I'm sure you're kind of aware of that.
I'm like a morning person, like a comedian is a morning person.
And, for me, I literally remember there have been two times in my life.
Two times in my life where I woke up, you know the way you see people wake up in these mattress ads where you wake up and everything's in white in your bedroom and the curtains are billowing in artfully and the sky is blue and you wake up and your hair's perfect and you give a stretch and you smile.
I've had that literally twice in my life.
I wake up like they're bringing up the Titanic with one Single goddamn helium balloon.
I wake up like I'm tunneling up from death itself.
I wake up like I'm evolving from a single-celled organism to something that's vaguely biped.
I wake up slowly and painfully, so to speak, right?
And so your body's like, hey, it's time to get up.
Maybe there's a rabbit.
That you could see somewhere on the street.
And so you're awake, but then you're not awake enough to do anything particularly useful.
And, of course, you always have this feeling.
Oh, this feeling.
And it happens often enough that it's worth pursuing.
It's like, hmm, maybe I'm waking up like a dolphin comes up for a breath.
Maybe I'm waking up like you throw a rock into the air to come.
Maybe I'm just waking up.
I'll have a quick pee and I'll get back to sleep and I'll put on something slow and murmury like, I don't know, a Scott Adams show or something.
I like his shows, but, you know, he's not like me because he's not changing volume.
He's occasionally, but he's, you know, he's a slow and steady talker, right?
And then you're like, you're bouncing along.
You're just bouncing along.
Like, you're not quite asleep.
You're not quite awake.
You're not quite getting rested and you're not getting anything done.
And then what happens is eventually it's like, fine, I'll just get up.
So that kind of happened this morning around 6.15.
And I'm, you know, I tried, you know, like, and you can't try to fall asleep.
That's the big problem. I remember when I was a kid.
I used to dream about having this switch on my legs because I was a real light sleeper as a kid, you know, such a stressful environment and all that.
And I used to dream about having this switch on my leg, like just bink, and I'm out for seven hours or eight hours or whatever, right?
And I remember telling my daughter this a couple of years ago.
And, you know, the great battle of the household is my daughter and I are night owls.
My wife's a morning person, but...
I remember telling my daughter this dream about having the switch, and then she says, I see the switch, and she touched, like, just, like, behind the knee.
Like, sorry, I shouldn't say behind the knee.
Like, then just above, just thigh side of the knee, I don't know, end of your quad or whatever, right?
She touched that, and then we'd have, we had a game for a couple of months every now and then where I'd be talking, and she'd just touch that part, and I'd have to pretend to immediately fall asleep.
It was actually quite hysterical at times, although not when we were driving.
No, I'm kidding. So I ended up getting up.
Now, I don't know about you.
I'm not that great on little sleep.
I know some people like little sleep.
My daughter, my wife, my daughter, they're fine with no sleep.
But I'm like, I'm okay.
But I'm like, it's not a great day.
It's not a bad day. It's not a great day.
I'm just kind of dragging along.
So then what happens is mid-afternoon, like, I don't know, 2, 3 o'clock, right?
Your body's like... Hey, you know, remember all that sleep I didn't want at 6.15 this morning?
You know, when you desperately, you wanted sleep, but I wasn't giving it to you because I'm an asshole.
Okay, now, now that it's like 3 o'clock in the afternoon, I tell you, I blow the universe to get a nap.
That is what your body's saying, right?
Like, I was an asshole this morning.
I wouldn't let you get any sleep. But now you're trying to get something done.
I'm just going to, like, gravity well you to the bed.
And, you know, hey, you know what?
Maybe it would be good for your research to listen to...
A lecture, or an audiobook, or some kind of documentary that has something...
Hey, you know how you're studying the French Revolution, you know what you should do?
You should find someone calm, measured, and reasonable, like Tom Woods or someone, and, you know, find something they've done on the French Revolution, listen to that, you know, just lie down, close your eyes, because you'll be able to listen better when you...
Right. And that's just luring you in like some seductress, like some sleazy STD-ridden semi-whore down in the Motel 6, you know, just like, hey, just come to the bed, man.
I wasn't going to give anything this morning to you, like in the realm of sleep, and it would have been helpful.
But now... That you've been up and tired for half the day, now have a little sleep, and then, then you really, you're at a crossroads, right?
And every now and then, I don't know if you have this, like if you nap, every now and then you have like this great nap, you know, where you're like, you just, you bounce a little, a little dream, and you wake up, and you know, you're back in that mattress commercial, like, ah, hmm, oh, that's so nice, oh, I feel alert, I feel rested, and it doesn't Screw up your sleep later.
That's kind of rare, and it's getting more rare as I get older, right?
But now, it's like...
You know, you have the nap, you kind of pass out for a bit, and then you wake up, and again, it's like tunneling up from the underworld, you know, like you're crossing back over the River Styx with Christy Berg or something, you know, like, I'll pay that very man to take me back, because it's like, ugh.
And then you're just kind of half-stoned.
And then what happens is, at least for me, I'm very tempted by, oh, you know, oh man, it's four o'clock, I nap for an hour, I'm still kind of groggy.
I know, I'll have a coffee.
So then you've had a nap and a coffee, After mid-afternoon, and you're doomed for the night, and rinse and repeat.
So anyway, this is my long way of saying, I'm kind of tired tonight, but that could be quite interesting, right?
Because... Other creative things can happen when you're tired.
Being tired is not necessarily a bad thing at all because, you know, when you're tired, you give less of a shit about saying things that are bad or wrong or whatever.
So, let's just see where it goes.
So, yeah, that was a fairly lengthy intro, but, you know, why not share little slices of ye olde life of mine because I think the more personal it is to me, the more I guess we all connect at this level because I'm sure everyone goes through similar things.
And yeah, body, stop waking me up at 6.50 in the morning.
I'm not a farmer! I am not a farmer.
And I'm not in the army, so I don't have to hurry up and wait someplace.
And just, you know, give me the kind of sleep that your average, decadent, Shelley-esque kind of Oscar Wilde Wastrell would have in the 19th century.
And just give me that kind of...
I'm not saying until noon.
I mean, I don't want to be completely decadent.
But, you know, maybe 8 o'clock, 8.30, maybe 9 o'clock.
Just, you know, something reasonable.
And in return...
I guess in return I won't read incredibly haunting and deep audiobooks at one o'clock in the morning.
Okay, that's a fair deal. That's a fair deal.
All right. So, James, thank you for, well, I don't know if you went and had dinner and watched a movie while I did the intro, but if there's somebody on the line, I would be happy to chat.
I think we're all done for the night.
All right, well, thank you, everyone.
It's been a great...
See, I have no filter when I'm tired.
Now, we do have some people online, and we have our first question for the evening.
And he writes, Is going to college and getting the magical piece of paper that opens doors to entry-level positions worth the costs?
Are the career paths a required degree to do things that don't require a degree to do worth investing time and money in?
I am getting pretty frustrated with my current immobility and I don't want to end up saying, screw it, and find myself 5-10 years down the line looking back on all the time I wasted.
I've spoken to a lot of people and can't seem to find that small amount of unknown information that gets me thinking in the right direction.
I'm currently very frustrated, which may also be a sign that there is something else that is bothering me about this process, but I don't know what that would be.
Well, that's a great question.
I really, really appreciate you bringing it up.
And is there more that you wanted to flesh out with this, or shall I dive in like that, or how would you like to take it?
Yeah, if you have any thoughts right off the bat, go ahead.
What do you want to do? That's a great question.
It depends on the roadblocks in the way, I guess, right now.
And it seems like there's a lot of them.
So I'm kind of up in the air.
I've gone through so many different interests.
I mean, through all of the force-fed career workshops in high school, all of the different...
Different college researching, study halls that have been put through.
I've gone through lots of different ideas, and I'm on one now, but I don't have any concrete, you know, I don't have a calling, I guess.
I just have a few things that I'm sort of interested in.
Well, that is a very measured and mature response, which I will attempt to undo, like the virtue of a maiden.
Well, okay, so you said there are roadblocks, but the whole point of blue sky thinking, like I said, what do you want to do?
Not what is practical or what is possible, what do you want to do?
So if you could make your money doing anything, anything, let's say that there weren't any roadblocks, what would that anything be?
Conflict resolution in some form.
Are you a middle child?
Yeah, I am. How did I know that?
Are you bringing it to R versus K selection theory?
No. Oh, well, see, that was the answer in a previous podcast, so that's what I went with.
What? We've talked before?
No. I was going to say, I can't be switching theories around that's going to make me look completely random.
I want to look partially random, but not completely random.
Well, so middle children.
You know what? I won't do a whole thing on middle kids because I want to make sure we stay focused on your thing.
But the fact that middle kids are very interested in conflict resolution is not the first person I've talked to who's a middle child who is very interested in conflict resolution.
But anyway, so tell me about the conflict resolution thing.
Like a mediator or that kind of thing?
Yeah, yeah. That's, I mean, that's what I, after going through all of the different, you know, since I was a kid, oh, I'm going to be a biomedical engineer.
No, I'm going to be a, I don't even know.
I'm going to be a theoretical physicist.
No, I'm going to be a, I don't even know.
Again, I've gone through so many, so I was like, yeah, you know what, I'm pretty, I think I'm pretty good at basic conflict resolution between people, at least more so than, The people that I come into contact with, so people have been suggesting it to me for quite a while now.
Okay, but sorry, what's your family history with conflict resolution?
Because I'm telling you this, man, if you can leverage off the shit you learned as a kid, you are going to be miles ahead of the competition.
Yeah, that's, I mean, that's been my thought process as well, is that, well, that's basically what I grew up trying to accomplish and never get in anywhere with, so.
Oh, so your parents fought that?
Yeah, my parents are divorced.
You bastard, you failed them.
Yeah, yeah. How could you let them get divorced?
What's the matter with you? Yeah.
No, what's the story then?
Um, my, my, let's see, they, they got divorced when I was about, um, 10, um, I think, around there.
And, um, they had a pretty ugly divorce.
I mean, my, the house that me, I have, again, middle child, one, we're all separated by two years.
Um, My siblings and I, we all stayed in the house that they got divorced in.
We were living in a house in a...
A family unit, then they got divorced, but we all stayed in the house, and they would just rotate who got to stay in the house.
And then at some point, my mom, who was the one who initiated the divorce, she said, well, I don't want to leave anymore.
And so she stayed, and there was this whole big thing.
I mean, I went to grandparents' houses in between different weeks.
There was lengthy court battles that was constantly changing.
I mean, I had lots of conflicts with who I wanted to stay with.
I was constantly living out of a bag for most of my public school experiences, and it was not a fun time.
I would highly recommend not watching the Betty Broderick story.
For ugly divorces, it really takes the cake.
This was a divorce where, back in the 80s, I think, this woman, she raised four kids.
She put her husband through...
medical school that he didn't really want to be a doctor so then she put him through Harvard Law and he became a malpractice doctor made a fortune started banging his secretary left his wife for his secretary put her through five years because he's a lawyer right so he knows the system put her through five years of incredibly grueling she had like nine court things against her at one point and she basically went insane under the pressure and she drove a car into his house and then she ended up shooting him and his mistress So,
yeah, these divorces can get really, really ugly.
So did your parents have money?
Because whenever I think of, like, long protracted divorce, I mean, that's expensive as hell, right?
Yeah, my dad makes more than average, yeah.
And do you know what their conflicts were?
There's very little communication between me and my parents, especially when it comes to things of actual importance or that could lead to any sort of problem solving for myself and my own problems.
Oh, so they've learned nothing.
They've learned nothing from the divorce.
Oh, no, and my dad has married my wife.
His new wife is my mom.
All right, hang on, hang on. We'll get all Freudian up in your grill in a sec here when you refer to your mom as your wife.
I get it. So he basically just photocopied the younger model?
Not even younger, like same age.
Oh! Meet the new bus, same as the old bus, as the song goes, right?
So what should they have learned, do you think, from this whole process?
Could you give me a little more context?
Bye.
Well, so...
If your dad married a woman like the woman he divorced, then he clearly didn't learn anything.
And what lessons do you think he could have learned that would have had him not repeat that mistake?
Oh, well, I mean, his own relationship with his parents and his – because I remember hearing some – Pretty shocking conversations and scenarios where while my parents were engaged or still dating,
they met each other's parents and my My mom's dad, my mother's father, and my dad, they hit it off and they ordered the same beer.
They talked about the same thing.
I remember talking to my grandfather, my mother's father, about...
What he thought of my dad.
And he was like, oh, he's such a great guy.
Oh, man, I really remember meeting him.
And I was just like, wow, that doesn't spell out danger in any capacity at all.
But definitely understanding his own relationship with his parents because, I mean, I'm just thinking to just the disciplinary style of parenting that they went through, not even related to the relationship that just completely...
Must have gone over their heads as well because they're not thinking in terms of themselves.
They're not thinking in terms of any sort of self-knowledge standpoint.
They're just repeating exactly what was done to them.
That is very abstract, man.
That is very abstract.
Is there anything specific that if you could sort of go back in time and get them to understand something?
That you would really want them to understand.
Like with my mother, I mean, one of her big issues was vanity.
You know, just because God gave her a good figure and a very pretty face doesn't mean that that creates value for her as an individual.
She's just sort of strip-mining male hormones for personal validation, and that's a terrible idea.
And it's one of the things I was somewhat prey to as a good-looking young man.
And you really have to...
Try and make sure that the value that you bring to the world is specific to you rather than things you didn't earn like, you know, looks or height or even intelligence, things like that, right?
So, you know, for my mom it would be like vanity, right?
For my father, it would have been responsibility, right?
Just take responsibility for things and don't run from things and so on, right?
So, I mean, with your parents, I mean, there must have been...
I always think of this Shakespearean fatal flaw thing, you know, like Hamlet's indecisiveness or the ambition of Macbeth or the jealousy of Othello and so on.
Like, what is...
Are there fatal flaws that your parents didn't learn from, continue to manifest, that if you could go back in time and flip a switch, you would change?
Yeah. They wouldn't solve problems.
They wouldn't solve problems.
It's almost like there's a connection here.
But they wouldn't solve problems that would go past a certain time span.
So if it took too long, they would just...
Bury it under the rug and move past it.
That was a shocking thing, at least that I saw early on when they first started having their bigger fights that later I picked up on after I had tried to desensitize myself to it that I could see again.
Okay, but why?
So that's the effect.
What's the cause? So why did they avoid significant Problems.
I mean, I guess it would depend more on the specific problems.
I mean, I would imagine...
No, no, no. There's a common pattern to these kinds of things, usually.
Right? Was it laziness?
Was it insecurity? Like, we don't think we can solve these problems with the whole relationship based on a lie and you don't want to pull that thread because the whole wall comes down?
Like, there's some reason why people try to avoid or strive to avoid dealing with big problems.
I'm not entirely sure what the foundations of the relationship were that they were avoiding, but I know that they were avoiding aspects of the relationship.
I just don't know what they were. Well, hang on.
Sorry. When they were younger, were they both good-looking?
I've seen pictures of my dad and he looks like me almost exactly.
So I know my dad was attractive.
My mom, I think she was pretty attractive.
I think I've only seen like one or two pictures though.
Right. Right.
I once worked with a fellow who...
Basically, he was going through a bad divorce.
And he said, this is the great tragedy.
I married the first woman who would have sex with me.
And he actually went to marriage counseling with his then wife.
And after an hour, the marriage counselor...
Now, this is his story.
Probably true. He seemed like a pretty honest fellow.
Marriage counselor took them out of the room and then called him back in and said, word to the wise, she's never going to change.
Like, if you don't want her the way she is, do not hold out any hope for change.
She's not going to change. And so for him, you know, it's like the relief of just, you know, having a woman who'll have sex with you is like, hey, let's get married!
And that's, of course, a terrible reason, right?
It could be, well, a lot of couples, this is why I ask you about the good-looking thing, a lot of couples get married because they look really great together.
And they can provoke a lot of envy.
I think this was the Betty Broderick thing as well, the Dirty John thing.
This is another series about a guy who preys on women.
And he's a good-looking guy, and he worked out a lot, and he claimed to be a doctor, although he was a nurse anesthesiologist who had lost his license, I think, for a while.
But anyway, he looked really good, and he was able to present really well.
And a lot of times, people get together because they...
Picture themselves on Instagram and then everyone's going to look at them and say, oh, what a good-looking couple and feel envious and blah, blah, blah, blah, right?
And so this is why I asked about their looks because if they just got together based on looks, that is a very unjust subsidy.
You know, I don't like unjust subsidies to businesses or individuals through the welfare state or the military-industrial complex.
But another unjust subsidy is just, yeah, good-looking.
And it can really, really mess people up.
And so, yeah, I was just wondering if they got together for looks, for lust, for status, for whatever, right?
And there's nothing there.
Yeah, well, seeing my dad basically go through like a, yeah, like an almost exact repeat with his new wife.
Yeah, I can definitely tell that.
Repeat of what? Of getting together with someone, like with basically, you know, another version of my mother.
He just found a woman who was incredibly similar and basically was just available and was attractive enough for him.
When I say available, I mean they met each other because she needed a place to stay, so she rented out his basement, and then they started hooking up and eventually just started Dating and got married.
Holy crap. Yeah.
I thought...
I'm sorry, I'm just...
I'm sure I'm missing something here.
If your dad makes pretty good money, I mean, I guess people can rent out basements, but it seems like a younger person thing to do than your dad.
Oh, my dad was not renting out the basement.
He was the one who rented to the woman that he now has married.
Oh, so it wasn't his house?
It was his house. Ah!
Okay, sorry, I'm sorry.
It's probably because I'm tired, but just help me sort of...
So he's renting out his basement to this woman?
Yep. Okay, so that's what I said, right?
So, I mean, you know, normally...
Oh, I see. I see what you're saying.
I see what you're saying. Yeah. He wouldn't need the money is what you're saying because he makes...
Well, it's not that he wouldn't need the money.
I mean, everybody likes a little bit of additional money, but...
It just, you know, what is he in his 40s or 50s or whatever?
Like, I mean, it just, you know, if he's been making good money, it just seems odd.
I don't know many people who have made decent money who are in that age bracket who are renting out their, I mean, I had a friend who was, he bought a house and he lived in the basement and he rented out the rest of the house.
And, you know, the basement was pretty gross.
Like, it was barely even finished.
It wasn't even finished, right?
And he was, like, real proud, you know?
Like, yeah, my wife and I, we're getting a house for free.
And I'm like, you're living in a cellar like some Gestapo-fighting Parisian underground guerrilla fighter.
Like, what are you doing? Like, come on, man, have some pride.
You're living like a sewer rat.
It's like, yeah, but the house is free.
It's like, yeah, but...
You're not happy. How could you be happy?
I mean, you're coming home and you're going down to a dank.
Anyway, so that's my sort of perception.
And it didn't actually work out for them.
They fought a lot. It's kind of degrading, I think.
I mean, if you have to, that's fine.
We've all done things which you have to do for money.
But it sounds like I sold myself in the gutter or whatever.
But you know what I mean, right?
It just seems a little odd, right?
Yeah, she's not really a pillar of morality.
I don't know how many times she's been married.
She was married multiple times, I believe.
She has two kids that are really old.
One of them had a cocaine addiction.
Another one... Has her own thing.
She is apparently...
Has her own thing? Come on.
Open the suitcase in the middle.
I mean, she was a...
I lived with her very briefly because she had to move back into the house that, again, that my dad was letting her stay at.
But she was quite a pill.
I mean, I'll say that much.
I didn't know what she was doing.
She was dating the bass guitarist of some local band who stayed with her.
What do you call a bassist without a girlfriend?
Homeless! Anyway. Wow.
Because the other thing too, sorry to interrupt, but you also have to rent, let's say this woman's in her 40s or 50s or whatever, right?
So not only, you know, if you've made some decent coin, you probably don't need to rent out your basement, you know.
But the other thing too, if you do rent out your basement and there's a woman in her 40s and 50s, you end up having someone under your roof whose life has ended up that they have to rent a basement in their 40s or 50s.
There's no good thing that comes out of that in general.
There could be tons of exceptions, but there's a reason why a basement dweller is considered to be such an insult.
Listen, I didn't live in a basement, but I lived on a ground floor in a tiny little apartment when I was going to theater school.
It's one thing if you're a young person and you're just hungry for carving your life out and you rent a basement.
There's nothing wrong with that.
It's perfectly, perfectly fine.
But you're supposed to, you know, kind of, it's like, you know, like having a bus pass when you're 50, you know.
It's not the end of the world or anything, and it's fine if you live downtown, and maybe you can bike places too, but in general, you're supposed to get these phases in life, and living in a basement is probably not what you want to be doing when you're middle-aged.
Yeah, well, she's not the exception.
Just... Okay, I don't want to sound too judgy.
Yeah, no, no, no, no, no.
Not at all. Maybe...
I wasn't there. I wasn't there when all of this was happening.
I had a long period of time that I stopped talking to my dad.
Yeah. And I tried to avoid him.
Was that because of a particular incident, or was it...
A series of incidents, yeah.
I mean, just with all of the crap that was happening with the divorce, he kind of...
He took it out on me and my siblings, and there was conflict and stuff.
Oh, man. I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry. That's just so terrible.
Took it out how? What do you mean?
I... He would...
I mean, he would...
He would punish at least me, because I was the one who didn't want to be there the most, just unfairly or disproportionately whenever we would make problems, because I mean...
I'm assuming he wasn't able to handle whatever shit that he had going on for himself, and so when anything else was just gently dropped on his plate from me or my siblings, he would just overreact.
I remember the list of the go-to stories you tell people for context that I've had to do so multiple times, especially with family members.
He's thrown beer bottles.
He threw all of my sister's luggage out on the lawn.
He forced me upstairs and locked me in my room all day.
I don't want to keep going down the list here, but it was not a fun time.
It ended up with me, I got physical with his mother, so my grandmother, after I I, like, pushed his jacket off of a chair so I could sit down, because I was upset at him, and she wanted me to pick it up, and I refused. And then she slapped me, and I pushed her, and then he said, okay, fine, now you can leave.
And so there was, I mean, it was just a really terrible situation.
A series of events, and so I tried to distance myself as much as possible from my dad for a series of years, and while I was doing that, this is what was happening.
He apparently, because I didn't know all this, I had to be told all of this by my older sister, and she was basically just telling me how he moved, I mean, he moved houses about twice once he Like, the second one, he let her stay there, and then they started dating while she was renting the basement out from him, and then they got engaged and married.
I don't know. I didn't go to the wedding.
He's literally moving on up, right?
Yeah. Emerging to the basement and getting to the ground floor.
Oh, man. Climbing the stairs of middle-aged lust.
Oh, your kid's a cocaine addict?
Fantastic. My shit's not going to steal itself.
Yep, yep.
And so, the way, apparently, that they met was because she knew my...
Again, this gets into, like, my family, but that I don't understand my family structure 100%, because I just don't delve that deep into swamp water.
That's... It's just fucking...
It's really... It's a really bad scenario, but...
She knew one of my relatives who was the same age as my dad, and so she set them up, I guess, as roommates or with the intention that she would eventually start dating my dad.
I don't understand.
I don't know what it is that the scenario was because I wasn't having any contact, but it was...
Right, there's a parasite looking to hook on, I assume.
He's an easy mark, right?
Oh, yes.
It's the Kuz Kahn.
Exactly. I mean, I think the more that I'm having this conversation, I think, I mean, just the similarities between her and my mom, that might have been what my mom was doing as well.
I mean, not to the same degree, because she invested a lot more a lot earlier.
But, yeah, it's pretty obvious with this woman.
Yeah, I mean, your dad's a good-looking guy.
He's making good money.
And, you know, it is really sad to me just how somebody, you know, smart and attractive and good money and all that.
And he looks in the mirror and he says, yeah, the basement-dwelling mom of a drug addict, that's what I'm worth.
Yeah, that works for me.
That does it for me. Yeah, and there was no consultation with any of me or my siblings who were even living in his house at the time.
I mean, he didn't... It's not like he spoke to anyone about...
Wait, wait, wait. You were living there with the basement drawer?
I was not. I was still...
Oh, your siblings? My siblings were.
Oh. Yep.
Yep. I remember my younger brother, he said he went to the wedding and the friend, the relative of mine that introduced them apparently said, like lied about how they met and made it seem like they were high school friends or something that had rekindled some long love relationship.
And I remember hearing that from my older sister because she was saying about how My younger brother was visibly upset when he heard that and was just basically saying, you know, like, oh, the first marriage never happened with my dad.
And, you know, these two just trying to act as if she wasn't some basement dwelling, you know, three-time marriage, you know, terrible leech of a person.
And it was just... It's not like anything's improved since then.
It's a strange thing.
This is not many women, right?
I mean, I get that, right?
But for a certain class of women, I can't imagine a world where it's like, fuck a guy, get a house.
Can you imagine? I mean, I would think about doing that if that's what it took.
I mean, maybe not 100%.
I'm not saying as a guy, although I guess maybe it works in the gay community too.
When I was an aspiring writer, I was set up with an old gay publisher.
A friend of mine was like, oh, you should go meet this guy.
And it was like, I was a pretty young, hot thing and all that.
And Yeah, it was a pretty creepy meeting.
It's like you could get published, but you've got to come back and put on a gimp costume like you were in the basement of a Tarantino movie.
I'm like, I think I'll wait to self-publish.
Thank you very much. I think I'll wait for the technology to catch up.
It's going to take 15 years, but it's worth every minute.
But yeah, I guess that was screw a guy, get a book deal or whatever, right?
It was, yeah, fuck a guy, get a house.
Like, it's so incomprehensible for most men, right?
Because, I mean, unless you're some gigolo or whatever.
And there was this guy, John Meehan, I sort of mentioned from this Dirty...
It's a podcast you can get called Dirty John.
And, yeah, this is a guy who's good-looking enough, just preyed on women, took their money.
And, you know, that's pretty rare for men, but for a lot of women...
And he wasn't, you know, this, like, troll-faced three-time divorcee living in a basement.
I mean, but...
And it's just weird to live in a...
This is why it's so incomprehensible for men and women to truly understand the options in the world that each other live in.
And again, I'm not talking all men and women, right?
But just, you know, fuck a guy, get a house.
You know? This is why you never see women who are homeless.
Because, you know, blow a guy, get shelter, get food, get...
Like, it's just so strange because, you know, you and I, you know, as men, for the most part, unless you're one of these, like, one in a thousand genetic freaks who just, like, looks perfect or whatever, right?
But... It's like, you know, we go up to women and ask women out.
Some will say yes, some will say no.
You're trying to gauge where you are on the scale of attractives.
But because we're sort of going up waiting for rejection and, you know, it's for your honor to aim higher than you are, right?
You want to work – you want to go aim for the top and work your way down in the sexual market value hierarchy.
You don't want to do what your dad did and, like, work from the bottom and just stay there, like – There's no working your way up once you've got that kind of stuff in your life, right?
So you aim high, which means you get rejection, rejection.
Oh, yes, okay.
This is my cap.
This is where I top out, you know?
That's good. But it means you get a lot of rejection.
And so I just – I can't imagine what it's like or, you know, cry and people give you money.
I mean, that's just so bizarre.
And be upset and the world shifts in its orbit to make you feel better.
Whereas with a man, it's like unless you actively cut off your finger at your own father's funeral, shedding your tears isn't going to get you much goddamn sympathy at all, right?
Yeah. And it's just, it's a wild world out there for women.
You know, bang a guy, get a car.
Bang a guy, get dinner.
Bang a guy, get a house.
I mean, it's just so different, such a different universe.
And this is why you're not thinking about, you know, I should do sit-ups and learn weird oriental sex techniques to give women orgasms to come out of their ears.
You're like, I got to get a job.
I'm going to make some money.
I can't bang a guy and get a house.
I guess I'll have to earn it the old-fashioned way.
But then, of course, the guys earn it the old-fashioned way and then some woman bangs them and takes it away.
Anyway, so yeah, I just wanted to point out it's just – it really is a different world out there for a lot of the ladies.
And until we can kind of grind that into our brains, so to speak – It's like this woman.
I mentioned her on a show last year, I think.
You know, this woman, Belle Dauphin or something like that.
And, you know, she's a cute young woman.
And she wears these, like, weird Barbie anime wigs and all of that.
And guys will buy her bathwater.
I mean, I don't even know if it's real or not, but...
They'll buy her bathwater.
I don't know what they poured on their dicks and whacked off.
I don't know what the hell happens, right?
But it's like, you know, can you imagine?
Like, I could go to college, or...
Or, you know, and just...
I could take a bath. Just hang with me on this, you know, just indulge me for a moment, or...
I could catch the runoff from my shower and sell it.
Like, that's... There's never been a business plan that's ever crossed my mind, you know?
Or, you know, I could do a really exciting, intellectually challenged, risky podcast that pushes the Overton window of truth-telling in society.
I could do that. Or, hang with me, I could sell my underwear.
Like, that's just a whole...
There's some woman, I kind of remember her name.
She went on one of these OnlyFans sites, right?
This chick made a million dollars in a day.
In a day.
A million dollars.
That's what most men earn over the course of their entire fucking life.
This woman made a million dollars in one day.
What was she selling? Was it even like full pornographic material or was it just like a...
I think she's made a porn film.
But no, it's...
I don't know. Is she promising nudes or something like that?
Look, James, you've got this bookmarked, obviously.
But have you heard this story?
I'm actually afraid I have not heard that one before.
That was a long pause while he was deleting that bookmark.
Okay, hang on a sec. I'm looking this up.
I don't want to get her name wrong.
And she's like, but I'm a sex worker.
I'm like, at a million bucks a day?
I don't really think that's work.
Yeah, here we go. Bella Thorne.
Pretty positive that's not her name.
So, let's see here.
Okay. Bella Thorne.
Let's see here. Bella Thorne joined OnlyFans.
So OnlyFans, I assume, is a website where you get some pictures and then if you get tears and if you pay more, you get more risky pictures.
So she cleared $1 million in a single day and set a record for the subscription-based social media platform.
Social media here meaning media that might be too not safe for work for it to be posted on other platforms where it would violate the terms of service.
I don't know what she's got sticking out of what, but, you know, we can only be terrified for that, right?
So a week later, Thorne said that the number had grown to $2 million.
So she joined OnlyFans, set a price at $20 per month for a subscription to her feed.
So her net value was going down.
What do you mean? It sounds like.
Oh, yeah, so she did a million dollars in the first day.
Right, right, right, right.
So let's see. So she directed a pornographic film, Her and Him.
That's very imaginative.
She won an award for that.
And she's...
Let's see here. So Thorne said she would not be posting anything fully nude.
Her page does feature some suggestive imagery, numerous bikini photos, her eating a hot dog, but nothing explicitly graphic.
In a poll, however, she did ask her fans what type of content they'd like from her.
Tongue teasing, lingerie, booty, showering, and twerking were among the answers.
But I heard she charged $200 for a single nude photo.
And... So...
I don't know.
I mean, there's some... Ugh, there is some controversy.
Anyway, who gives a shit, right? But here's the funny thing, right?
So, you know, I've been doing this philosophy show for a long time, and, you know, it's pretty exciting sometimes when it comes to the finances, right?
Because I'm not going to, you know, get into too much whining or anything like that, but, you know, getting deplatformed, kicked off, this and that and the other.
You know, it's a... I'm a moving target, but I'm a target, right?
And so, you know...
You know, I'm always asking people, you know, what kind of shows do you want?
What kind of shows do you like the best?
You know, what can I do to keep you happy as people who support?
And can you imagine?
Like, I go and I'm like, okay, here's what's going to happen, man.
For 20 bucks a month, I'm going to eat a hot dog.
And that's it. I'm going to eat a hot dog, which a fucking chihuahua can do, right?
You know, like a chihuahua can't come up with universally preferable behavior.
It can't plumb the depths of the human psyche.
It can't unravel propaganda in the media.
It can't come up with relationship-based advice that is truly valuable, powerful, saves marriages, improves parenting, blah, blah, blah.
Like a chihuahua can't do that.
But you drop a fucking hot dog and the chihuahua's all over that like a fat kid on a smarty, right?
Or like, you know, I say, okay, you know, screw philosophy.
I'm going to shower with a cam.
That's what I'm going to do.
And you get to see the underside of my tongue.
Oh, and I'll be shaking my ass.
I mean, the amount of work that I put into philosophy to kind of stagger along this wasteland of social media rejection and sniping and hostile stuff from the media and shit like that, right?
It's like, oh, yeah, no, or what I could do, you see, is I could take a dryer sheet, drape it around my dick and sell a photo.
And it's like... It's like, I don't have that world.
Men don't have that.
I guess some gay guys do, maybe.
But men don't have that world where you sit there, like, you're sitting there going, man, how can I make some money?
And I'm like, yeah, go on OnlyFans and, you know, eat some yogurt slowly.
It does not exist for us.
And I fucking hate the whole thing.
I don't hate her like she's just some woman and, you know, a million bucks is a million bucks, right?
I mean, you know, what's his head?
Joe Rogan took a bunch of money to go over to Spotify and lo and behold, hey, none of the shows I did with Joe Rogan, anyway, are over there.
But, you know, it's kind of hard to say, hey, you shouldn't Do this for a million bucks in a day.
A million bucks in a day. A million bucks in a day.
I don't hate her.
I don't hate the situation.
My particular hatred is these unbelievably sad, pitiful guys who are forking over 20 bucks so they can whack off to a picture of her.
Like, that's really sad.
Because that's not going to get your family.
That's not going to get you married. That's not going to get your kids.
That's not going to get your life going.
That's just a sad waste of seed.
And I just really wanted to...
Don't do that, guys.
Come on. Don't do that.
And if you know people who are doing that, don't enable it.
Don't do that. It's really unhealthy.
It's really bad for society.
And it doesn't just corrupt her.
So she gets a million bucks, right?
But what happens is there are a bunch of other women who don't get all that stuff.
But what they do is they put compromising photos of themselves out there.
And that's pretty bad for them because it keeps good guys away from them, right?
And it's really bad as a whole.
And... I just really wanted to point that out because, you know, I mean, this isn't your stepmom, Stifler style.
I mean, your stepmom is not getting a million bucks from OnlyFans, but, you know, she's getting to move up from the basement, right?
Yep. And we don't exist in that universe as men.
But the problem is, it's not resources for sex, right?
That's not... Like these guys, it's 20 bucks a month you're sending to some woman so you can get her nude pictures.
I mean, this is kind of sad, right?
I mean, I know it's a pandemic.
I know that there's lockdowns.
I get all of that. I understand all of that.
But, I mean, come on.
I mean, this corrupts her.
It corrupts women as a whole.
It draws a lot of people into what could be some kind of dangerous situations.
I mean, this woman didn't figure out Bitcoin early on.
You know, she didn't invest in Microsoft in 1990.
She has tits, and she's pretty.
She didn't earn that.
I mean, she works out, I'm sure, right?
But yeah, she only works out because she's already pretty, and it's valuable for her to do so, right?
So it's pretty sad.
And listen, it's not a relationship.
It's like, you understand, like to get, it's deeply disturbed in a way because to get pictures of a woman showering, normally you'd be doing something illegal.
Like you'd have some creepy peephole or you'd be one of those, like every now and then you hear about these motel owners who had video cameras installed and are taking illicit pictures of people, videos of people or whatever.
Like there's a weird kind of creepy, I don't know if the phrase is still used, peeping Tom.
It was used when I was a kid. Which is, you know, the guys who go around trying to get glimpses of women as they undress or change or have sex or whatever it is.
And this creepy voyeuristic stuff, it's not, it's really not good.
It's really not healthy. So, again, I don't know her, whatever, right?
But I'm, you know, expecting her to turn down a million bucks is kind of unrealistic.
But for God's sakes, don't do it.
Like, just don't pay.
Don't pay this kind of stuff.
Don't pay for a woman's bathwater.
What's the matter with you? For God's sakes, man, don't pay for a woman's bathwater.
I mean, that's so degrading for the man.
Here's 20 bucks. I'm going to pretend that I could watch you in the shower.
Here's 20 bucks. I want your bathwater.
Ugh. I mean, come on, man.
That's not, you know.
There's an old book by Larry Niven and some other guy called Lucifer's Hammer.
I was telling my daughter about this the other day.
And in Lucifer's Hammer, it's an old book now, a comet strikes the earth and wrecks civilization.
And at the end, they're trying to figure out whether they should try and rebuild stuff or whether they should just try and survive.
And this guy gives this great speech and says, we used to control the lightning and I read this as a teenager.
I said I'm mid-teens or whatever.
We used to control the lightning.
You know, we built the most incredible civilization the world has ever known.
Separated church and state.
We got the free market going.
We ended slavery. We liberated women.
We stopped hitting our kids.
We created...
The greatest glories of art, technology, science, medicine and economy that the world has ever seen.
And we dragged the world out of pre-medieval barbarism.
And with all of that wealth and power and momentum and history and beauty and achievement and high art we inherit all of that And we push a couple of greasy dollar bills across the internet so that some woman will send us her underpants in bath water.
The fuck? That's gross, man.
I don't meant to get all Old Testament on everyone, but...
I told you there was no filter when I'm tired.
Maybe that's better. You know, maybe I'll just stop sleeping three days before a show.
Anyway, so let's get back to you and what you want to do.
So conflict resolution.
So if when you were a kid, if you worked on conflict resolution...
Then you're way ahead of the game.
And I say this to you, to everyone.
It's a double-edged sword, though, man.
You've got to be really careful because if you are able to leverage the skills you learned as a child in order to To bring greater value to a situation.
So when I was a kid, I learned how to program computers and then I became a computer programmer.
I co-founded a software company, chief technical officer and built great software, sold for good money.
So that to me, that was good.
That was a good, useful thing to do.
However, the philosophy thing has always been a bit more ambivalent for me because one of the reasons I'm good at it is because from a very, very early age, Reason, empiricism, objectivity, rationality.
All of these things were desperate lightsabers that I had to wield against the scissor-legged Roger Waters, the wall nightmare of a mother who was trying to disassemble my brain to match her own insanity.
So this desperate fight against anti-rationality I was doing it from very, very early on as a survival mechanism.
survival.
So I'm good at it, but I'm ambivalent about those skills because I don't want to end up in a situation where I end up never escaping my childhood.
In other words, I'm reasoning with the world that doesn't listen as opposed to, and you're listening and I'm not talking about the world as a whole.
I don't want to end up in a situation where I'm forever going to be seven years old trying to talk my mom out of being crazy or at least trying to prevent her from talking me into being crazy.
So I have a lot of skills, but I really have to be alert about all of this.
And so if you can leverage this stuff, fantastic.
However, if it kind of advances you in terms of economics and career, but throws you back to early childhood, that's not a great trade, if that makes any sense.
So if it's more like computer programming for you and less like me with philosophy, that probably is a pretty sweet spot.
But it probably has more to do with trying to manage your parents' conflicts, right?
Yeah, I've had that thought.
I mean, I don't know.
I don't have a litmus test for it.
I don't have an exact measurement of when I might be going too far with that, and it might actually just be a product of trying to resolve problems in my childhood, but I'm aware of that.
I just don't have the answer as to whether or not that's what it is.
I'm incredibly glad that I did what I did.
Because what it did is it took my mom's craziness and immorality and turned it to good in the world, right?
That's good.
That's very good.
But yeah, nonetheless, it really does have to be, you really do have to be, as long as you're aware of it, again, I've always said everything's permissible.
You know, I'm not talking about violations of fundamental morality, like non-aggression principle violations, but all is permissible with self-knowledge.
You know, you can...
Like, just because I fought invasive anti-rationality as a child doesn't mean I can't fight it as an adult.
I just have to be bloody well aware of what the hell I'm doing and its effects, right?
Because otherwise it doesn't work very well at all, right?
So, if you know what you're doing and you're conscious of what you're doing, then I don't think it works out badly.
And you can then, of course...
do some great good out of the difficulties you experienced as a child?
Let me know what you think.
I'm sorry. Yes, I'm nodding.
Excellent. Excellent.
All right. So...
Now, as far as conflict resolution goes, I'm no expert on this, but as far as I understand it, I mean, you don't need to be a full psychologist, you don't need to be a psychiatrist, and there's courses that you can take and stuff that you can take, and maybe there's mentors that you can approach, and you can go down that road without necessarily having to burn up, you know, 10 years of your life getting all kinds of credentials or all kinds of extra super-duper credentials, right?
Yeah. I mean, I've looked into it to the degree that I'm thinking of.
I thought about going into law, but that's just riddled with prerequisites in terms of education or certifications or et cetera, et cetera.
So there's consultants for very specialized areas of conflicts.
So if I were to get a lot of experience in a particular field for particular issues, then I could be somewhat of a consultant.
I know that I enjoy teaching.
Here's the problem.
I could be a professor and consult that way on the particular topic that I'd be interested in, but all of those things actually have They have exact trajectories into a field of study or having basic requirements with university degrees or certifications,
which my main question was about because I'm not entirely sure if I should be getting into those types of careers.
Right, right. Now, are you a white male?
Male, of course. Are you white?
Yeah. Okay, so that's – it's something – this is something that Thomas Sowell talked about years ago, which is, you know, affirmative action is a real thing, right?
And just, again, to refer back to Scott Adams, he talks about how he lost, I think, three jobs because of affirmative action where they said, well, we can't promote you anymore because you're a white male.
Right. Mike Cernovich has talked about how his father didn't get a job as a policeman because of affirmative action, and that caused him a huge amount of stress financially as a family and all of that.
It's a very real thing.
And so if you're going into a field, and say this to all the white males, if you're going into a field where you need to get hired, You'd really need to look into the industry and see what their diversity mandates are, because it's a very real thing.
And it can significantly shut you out of the labor market.
Again, the male thing, the white thing in particular, like that's the one-two punch to potential career aspirations in some manner.
So look into, are they strong diversity mandates?
Look into the ads.
Do they say people of color?
I mean, whatever you think of these programs, I don't like government programs as a whole or government supported or we don't hire.
We won't give you contracts if you don't hit X, Y, or Z demographic numbers.
But whatever you think of these programs, you could be 100% for them as a white male, but it's going to have a big effect.
And, you know, I don't think people look into this enough.
You're a white male. You say, oh, well, I'm going to go and do X, Y, and Z. And then I'm going to go and get a job.
And you send your resume out. You send your resume out.
And... You don't really hear back.
And you're like, gosh, I wonder why I've got a good education.
Well, a lot of it has to do with the fact that there are these mandates.
And a lot of companies have them for ideological reasons.
A lot of them have them for customer relations reasons.
A lot of them have them for defensive reasons.
In other words, they don't want to get sued.
And a lot of them have it because in some countries, you can't get government contracts unless you have this kind of stuff.
And government contracts can be worth a lot and be the lifeblood of a lot of organizations.
So... It's really really important that you look into this before you go into education or if you're in education check into this look at the ads understand What the hiring standards are, both the explicit and the implicit ones.
Look at the recent hires.
You know, are there white males in there?
Like, you really need to look into this stuff because it's pretty catastrophic if you just say, well, you know, this X, Y, and Z fields is demand and I'm going to get a good education.
I'm going to go out and you take on all this debt and you defer all this income.
And Thomas Sowell said, well, what's going to happen with affirmative action is that white males are going to say, well, it's kind of tough for me to get ahead.
So I'm going to have to be an entrepreneur.
I'm going to have to do something myself, right?
And... Again, I think that Scott Adams' part of his journey was, you know, well, I can't get ahead of my career.
I'll have to try something else.
And he did and was very obviously staggeringly successful, one of the most successful cartoonists and had a great career as a public speaker.
And he's got very interesting and positive books.
And he does great political analysis on a daily basis with his simultaneous sip and all that.
I recommend it. But that's really, really important to keep your eye on.
As a white male, There are downward pressures on your hiring potential.
So, it doesn't mean you can't be hired, but it may mean that it's tougher to get hired and it may mean that it's tougher to get promoted after you get hired.
And so, always keep an eye on the entrepreneurial option.
Because then it doesn't matter.
Or at least it doesn't matter as much.
So really, really be aware of that.
I just want to sort of point that out.
Just really, this is something that's not talked about.
It should be talked about. Of course, right?
It should be talked about if you come in and say, ah, well, it's a white male.
You know, there are these downward pressures on your hiring.
And of course, you can't talk about it because we have this magical belief that Positive discrimination is not negative discrimination.
Of course it is, right? I mean, if you say, well, you can only hire X, Y, or Z group, then of course you're saying you're going to hire groups that don't fit into that category at a lower rate.
Of course it's right. So my recommendation is minimum schooling that you can get away with.
Get out there. Start working.
Start getting experience under your belt.
And as soon as possible, start looking at the entrepreneurial option.
All right. And just be aware, if you're recreating your childhood, it's hard to be successful.
But if you're learning and employing, if you're employing the skills you learned from your childhood while being conscious of that, I think you have a massive advantage over others.
So, I hope that helps.
Is there anything else you wanted to add?
I'm probably going to think of something later, but nothing off the top of my head right now.
Okay, good, good. Well, you know, we could always talk again, but was it helpful, do you think, to talk about this stuff?
Oh, yeah. No, definitely.
I really appreciate it.
Thank you. Good. All right. Best of luck, Ben.
And, yeah, keep me posted about how it goes.
Thanks. Definitely will.
All righty, right. Do we have a short or short call?
Again, I don't mean to sound all kinds of fruity, but Daddy's a little tired.
I don't believe we have a really short question queued up, so I think that will be the show tonight.
All right. All right.
Well, thanks, everyone, so much.
A great pleasure to chat, as always.
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And lots of love from up here.
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