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Dec. 6, 2020 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

02:35:26

"YOU'RE A 10 TO WOMEN!" Freedomain Call In

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	Good evening, everybody. Stefan Molyneux from Freedomain.
	It is the 4th of December.
	20 shopping days until Christmas officially begins in the civilized world, which is Christmas Eve, not Christmas Day.
	And that's because children in Europe are much more whiny, and therefore we get to open our presents early.
	I hope that you follow that tradition.
	And don't wait for the ungodly.
	Actually, I think it's because we had Boomer parents who just didn't want to get up early.
	So they let us open our presents in the evening before, rather than waiting for early the next day.
	But that perhaps is more detailed.
	Don't forget to pick up your free copy of my finally, now finished, What was that?
	Four or five months of the recording.
	The audiobook of almost my historical novel from World War I to World War II. And if you think it's about the past, think again, my friends.
	It is very much about the present and a way of averting, hopefully, the future of what was going on in the 20s and 30s.
	And if you've missed philosophical novels, you know, it's interesting because philosophical novels...
	There was a movie...
	With, oh gosh, Demi Moore and Bruce Willis, I think it was, or someone like that, called Disclosure.
	And it's a fairly forgettable movie, except there was a debate about male versus female power in the movie.
	And the entire movie kind of flew by without me.
	Ah, who cares, right? Was it Michael Douglas?
	No, I think it was Michael Douglas. He always played the hard done by Me Too victim.
	And the whole movie was pretty forgettable for me, except for like the 30 seconds that they debated male versus female power, at which point I was enraptured.
	So if you've missed philosophy in your art, if you want to see all the way from growing and harvesting the initial agreements to the final bitter taste of either a holy or unholy meal, I'm telling you, this is the book for you.
	If you've not experienced a philosophical novel before, oh man, are you ever in for a brain-tickling treat?
	And you can get it, of course, at freedomain.com forward slash almost.
	There's a link there.
	You can go and copy the feed and paste it into iTunes or any kind of podcatcher that you're using, and it will download and play for you as you like.
	And it will, of course, record...
	Where it is that you left off and all of that.
	I quite like the program called Podcast Addict because what it does is when you start it up, I listen to audiobooks sometimes when I'm going to sleep, and what it does when you start it up is it automatically will, you can set a timer for like 20 minutes or 15 minutes and it will automatically turn off the moment you start playing after that period of time, which is good if you're heading off to bed.
	Not, of course, that you could possibly sleep With me reading this gripping story in your ear.
	But theoretically, if you wanted to sleep, or as it's also known, insult me, then you could use that.
	Anyway, Podcast Addict is a pretty good program.
	It's on iOS and Android.
	I don't know if there's a Windows version.
	But it's very good.
	So I hope that you will check that out.
	And with that having been said, I'm all ears for you, the fine listeners who keep this entire, I was going to say Titanic, but...
	I will not. This entire flotilla of philosophy is kept aloft by you, and I hope that you will continue to support the show.
	Or if you haven't, please start out supporting the show at freedomain.com forward slash donate.
	There are a number of donation options.
	I've added Litecoin back, which I hope that you will shovel a few my way.
	If I happen to get you into cryptos early, that would be most appreciated.
	So freedomain.com forward slash donate, freedomain.com forward slash almost to get Gosh, what is it?
	22 hours? 23? It's a long book.
	It's no Shrugged, but it's no Hobbit either, so I hope that you will check it out.
	I think if you kind of dive in and let yourself be swept up in the tornado of language that is the place settings in the first chapter of the book, I'm actually working with someone who might animate the first section of the book, which I think would be very, very cool for those who are more visually inclined.
	Well, I'll keep you posted on that. So many...
	So many irons in the fire, so many projects going on.
	And I just, look, I really wanted to thank you guys as well because, you know, it's been 15 years plus since I first started this thing.
	And it really has come down to your interest, your enthusiasm, your support, and, of course, your willingness to take the slings and arrows of outrageous compatriots when you say, oh, there's this philosophy show.
	And then, you know, they perform the goo-goo image slaughter known as a search for enlightened philosophy.
	And, you know, you guys have to kind of stand firm and say, yeah, no, people have been lying about philosophers since there was philosophy.
	It really is the basic enemy of philosophy.
	It's not even violence. The basic enemy of philosophy is sophistry.
	Because you can't have violence usually without sophistry.
	You can't have violence unless it's accompanied by a story that justifies the violence.
	Sophistry is...
	Both sufficient and in many cases necessary for violence to be enacted.
	A parent doesn't hit a child by saying, well, I've had a bad day and I'm going to take it out of this defenseless little human being.
	No, no, no. Of course, a parent hits a child because the child has done wrong and hasn't listened and is bad and is talking back and is not showing the sufficient level of respect and is ungrateful.
	And that's what happens if you're ungrateful around the parent.
	You get hit or punished or whatever.
	And so... There's always a story as to why the violence is justified, why the censorship It's justified.
	And yeah, there are people who fight back.
	So Candace Owens, she was on the show a couple of times.
	So Candace Owens has decided to launch a lawsuit against Facebook fact checkers.
	So she was apparently making like a million bucks a month from Facebook ads and then some fact checkers.
	Fact checked her right off the monetization program.
	And I guess she lost, well, you do the math, about $12 million.
	A year, which is a truly staggering sum of money, of course.
	She lost that amount of money by getting demonetized off Facebook because she posted something from a well-respected doctor, but then the fact checker says, well, we found a doctor who disagreed with her, or her doctor, the doctor she quoted, and therefore it's false.
	And of course she protested, she went through the proper channels, she complained, and they said, okay, fine, we'll change it from false to mostly false.
	Now that's an amazing thing.
	It's an amazing thing. To think that as a fact-checker and the head of this fact-checking firm, which got a pretty lucrative contract from Facebook, wouldn't you know, just happens to have been a long-time CNN editor.
	Isn't that fascinating?
	And so if you're able to look at two complex medical scientific arguments and know which one is entirely true and which one is entirely false, well, you understand that's not science.
	That's not philosophy. That's not reason.
	That's not evidence. And that's barely even theology.
	That's barely even theology.
	I remember seeing some imam complaining or yelling at a woman who was complaining about being beaten and saying, well, look what's in the Koran.
	Are you going to disagree with that? That's the kind of absolutism and anti-rationality that characterizes ideological dogma, which is based upon Desperation and insecurity.
	Why are people dogmatic? Because they don't believe they can get resources in any honest environment, so they have to shunt out and, I guess, ideologically, reputationally, or even physically slaughter the truth-tellers or the questioners.
	But imagine just waking up and saying, wow, these are two doctors, very well respected, very well educated, and they have differing interpretations of different data.
	But I know which one is 100% true and I know which one is 100% false.
	Can you imagine? Imagine having that kind of mindset.
	That that's the way your brain goes.
	That's how you process.
	The world that you can just put a finger and know exactly who's right and exactly who's wrong.
	Now, of course, that's all nonsense, and we all understand it's complete ideological nonsense to even imagine that such a situation is possible, that someone can adjudicate between two doctors.
	And they're not just doctors like GPs, not the GPs.
	It's only just a GP. We rely on GPs to keep us alive, but...
	This is a guy, I mean, these two are two heavily accredited and I think PhD level researchers and medical experts and scientists of the first order.
	And yeah, they're disagreeing.
	That's called science.
	I mean, if there was no disagreement, we wouldn't have science, we'd have a cult.
	And, you know, science as it's ideally practiced, which of course is never ideal, but it's getting pretty bad these days.
	But science as it's ideally practiced, It's predicated upon the fact that there's going to be an enormous amount of disagreement and the back and forth is how you actually get to the truth.
	So, of course, this ex-CNN editor is in no way, shape, or form, as far as I know it, at all qualified to adjudicate complex scientific discussions.
	So what's going on?
	Now, of course, people think it's got something to do with the science, and of course it doesn't.
	In my opinion, it doesn't have anything to do with the science.
	So what's really going on?
	Well, see, the left gets their billions from Open Society Foundation, from teachers' unions, from, well, forced union dues of Every and any kind.
	They get massive amounts of support from the government, so they just got massive amounts of money flowing in.
	Now, Candace Owens is running an operation which is getting, I guess, I don't think it's going to her personally, but, you know, $12 million a year from Facebook.
	So the big question is, okay, well, how do you stop Candace Owens from getting her $12 million?
	Because that $12 million is used to fund Her show, it's used to fund initiatives like the one she's got called Blexit, which I think was a fairly unsuccessful attempt to swing votes from the black community from Biden to Trump in the last election.
	But that's $12 million that's going towards causes that the left doesn't like, doesn't appreciate, doesn't want to have funded.
	That's bad. Don't want that.
	And so what do you do?
	What do you do when you have All this money flowing to Candace Owens.
	Well, what you do is you work with your friends in the mainstream media and you create a panic.
	And the panic is about...
	We all know, right?
	The panic is about misinformation.
	Misinformation, the original title of that ancient Kelly Clarkson song, but that's a story for another time.
	Misinformation. So you create this panic about misinformation and then you darkly hint that people might die.
	Die, I tell you!
	They might just die by getting misinformation.
	So you start to talk about misinformation on social media and you start to whip up a frenzy and you start to whip up a hysteria and you start to whip up, you know, there's witches everywhere, there's Nazis in the soup, and there's misinformation all over the place, right?
	Now, of course, misinformation implies that there is a perfect source of information that can adjudicate all this misinformation And that isn't the free market of ideas, you see.
	That isn't the free market of ideas.
	And of course, misinformation wasn't at all an issue when it came to Trump telling people to drink bleach to cure COVID, which he never did.
	When it came to Trump claiming that he just wanted to grab women by the hoo-ha as if it was some kind of assault, which is not what he said.
	He said that if you're famous, there were women who will let you do that.
	Oh, Russian disinformation, you know, the Russia collusion conspiracy theory.
	There was never any concern about misinformation with that kind of stuff.
	Of course not, right? Because that was propaganda and lies, like the fine people hoax.
	That was propaganda and lies, you see, that served the Democrats.
	So they're very, very big fans of that kind of propaganda.
	But when something comes along that goes against the narrative that they wish to put forward, why then suddenly it's dangerous disinformation.
	And it's all as predictable as sunrise and one of the reasons why.
	I'm sort of describing a process of censorship, but this is why politics has just become so boring because it's so predictable that universal principles are going to be invoked in only one-way street situations of moral turpitude and decay.
	And so you whip up this, oh, there's disinformation out there, and then you sort of darkly hint that negative consequences should accrue to companies that promote this disinformation, right?
	Because it's dangerous to our democracy, you see, disinformation.
	And then what happens is you maybe start to say the government should step in and do something or something should be done, you know, these vague something-should-be-done stuff.
	You know, like the woman who wants her, the wife who wants her husband off and says to her boyfriend, something should be done about this man, something should be done, he's torturing, he's tormenting me, he's brutal.
	That something should be done, this dark intimation.
	So then, of course, what happens is that the heads of the social media companies all get together and they kind of freak out and they say, oh man, you know, we got to do something about this disinformation thing because, man, I mean, governments could step in, we could get regulated, we're already on the knife edge of the antitrust stuff as it is, you know, this is really, really bad.
	We can't have all this disinformation!
	And of course, again, nobody compares it to anything objective.
	Nobody compares it to anything true.
	Nobody compares it to anything empirical.
	It's just this new hysteria of disinformation.
	Information that goes against the narrative that the left wants to put forward.
	So, the social media companies have these meetings about disinformation.
	And they say, well, I know exactly how these meetings go.
	I was in lots of business meetings.
	So the way it goes is they say, well, we face three dangers.
	We face three dangers from disinformation or the perception of disinformation.
	Number one, potential regulatory intervention, government all over us.
	And they darkly quote what happened to Microsoft in the 90s.
	They darkly quote what happened to Microsoft.
	IBM for like 50 plus freaking years.
	Oh, we don't want that, right? We don't want that.
	So we've got to do something about this disinformation.
	The second is, well, if there's a lot of disinformation out there, we might lose our value as an advertising platform.
	And of course, remember, Facebook, for instance, they're not in the business of connecting you with your friends.
	They're not in the business of you sharing memes.
	They're not in the business of providing you any kind of platform or any kind of messaging.
	They're not in the business of that at all.
	You've got to remember what Facebook's business is, what YouTube's business is, what Google's business is.
	All of these platforms have one business and one business only, and that is not delivering connections to you or a platform for you or anything like that.
	Their sole business is delivering you to advertisers.
	It's like the news. The news is not in the business of getting information to you.
	The news is in the business of delivering you to the advertisers.
	And so they say, well, you know, okay, the government could threaten us and also there's this problem of And this is how the Wall Street Journal first went after PewDiePie, right?
	They say, oh, look, PewDiePie did this terrible gesture and blah, blah, blah.
	And do you want your products to be associated with this terrible, terrible person, this terrible, terrible thing?
	And they start to threaten the business model, of course, of the social media platforms.
	And so they say, well, you know, if we get a reputation for hosting misinformation or disinformation or whatever it is, conspiracy theories, then advertisers will not want to do business with us.
	And so then they say, okay, well, maybe what we can do is we can identify the people who produce this bad information, and then we can uncouple them from the advertisers.
	And then when advertisers say, Hey, man, you've got a problem with disinformation.
	We can say, ah, yes, and we also have a budget, and we have outsourced, and we have a team, and we have a program, and we've removed X number of thousands or hundreds of thousands of videos or posts of this.
	We're cleaning up the place.
	Don't worry. All that's going to wrap, right?
	Now, of course, if I were in charge of one of these companies, which is probably why I'm not, if advertisers sat down with me, well, you've got a problem with disinformation, I said, okay, can you define to me what disinformation is?
	Well, stuff that's obviously false.
	I said, okay, well, you mean like the Russia collusion conspiracy theory, like the fact that the people believe that Trump called Nazis fine people, like all of this stuff?
	That's total disinformation.
	That's completely false.
	So... Or that Trump...
	You know, I've done the whole untruths back in the day, and I sort of...
	I'd say, okay, define for me disinformation and then also define to me how do we best deal with stuff that is obviously false.
	Well, the way that we deal with stuff that's obviously false is the way that you deal with a liar in your life.
	If you have someone around you who lies a lot and you are committed to honesty, what do you do?
	It's pretty simple. What you do...
	I would say, listen, if you think that Joe Blow is putting out bad information, you can choose not to have your rights run on this platform, that's totally fine.
	But we're not going to get into the business of determining what's right and what's wrong, what's true and what's false, because that is not the job of a social media company.
	That is the job of the marketplace of ideas.
	And of course, throughout human history, 99% of what people believed to be perfectly true was actually perfectly false.
	Completely and totally false.
	And so, and also they would say, listen, if, I mean, you enjoy having access to customers or potential customers through advertising, through Facebook, Google, YouTube, whatever, right?
	And the only way that we're able to do that is if we stay resolutely neutral in terms of editing for content.
	So if we're in there, like we'll do a platform and people can make their case, they can be rejected, they can be reputed, you can opt out of particular ad situations if you want, totally happy with that, that's free association.
	But we're not going to get into adjudicating what is right and what is wrong, what is true and what is false.
	And they'll bring up the most egregious examples and say, well, this person denies this, that, or the other.
	It isn't that awful and isn't that terrible.
	And say, yes, absolutely.
	I think that is awful and that is terrible.
	But we have a commitment.
	We have a solemn commitment with the U.S. government to not editorialize.
	And not editorializing is the only thing that maintains these Section 230 protections, which makes us immune from lawsuits based on content.
	The moment we start saying this is true and this is false, this is right and this is wrong, we're now not in the business of being a platform, we're now a publisher.
	We're now a publisher. In fact, we're not a publisher in the modern American definition of the term, because a publisher in the modern American definition of the term is generally somebody who commits to telling lies.
	You know the old joke from, I think it was Mark Twain who said, the average person who doesn't read the newspapers is uninformed.
	The average person who reads the newspapers is misinformed.
	And so you're asking us to create an entirely new form of media that is devoted to the objective and absolute truth and has the capacity to know what is true in just about all circumstances and situations, which is impossible.
	And we're going to be threatening our Section 230 immunities.
	It's like, yeah, yeah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
	But don't worry, because if you allow for misinformation against Biden elected, you don't have to worry about your Section 230 immunities because he's so grateful to the platforms that are full of leftists and blah, blah, blah, right there.
	Now, the third thing that a social media company is going to have to worry about if this whole boogeyman of misinformation gets loose Incredible Hulk style is reputational damage to the corporation.
	There's an old saying about the software industry that the entire value of the corporation goes down to the elevators every night after work.
	So a software company, it's got a bunch of computers that are depreciating rapidly in value.
	It's got some office space that could be rented by anyone else.
	But it's not like, they don't have big giant plants, manufacturing plants.
	They don't hold swaths of real estate.
	They don't hold farms.
	They don't have, like, they got some IP and they got some people.
	And without the people, the IP is, you know, only somewhat valuable.
	But the entire value of the company goes down the elevator Every day, right?
	Now, that's different, of course, from a manufacturing.
	You've got a $10 billion manufacturing plant.
	You've got a bunch of people, usually low to medium skilled.
	They go down the elevator, but if they don't come back up the next morning, you just go hire new people, and there'll be a couple of weeks or months of turmoil and transition, but you'll get things up and running again pretty quickly.
	It's not the same when you've got tens of millions of lines of H1B1-infested spaghetti code, and you need people to maintain it, and you can't just replace people.
	And I know this. I mean, I was a software manager, as you know, for many years.
	So, what is it that makes these companies so valuable is to a large degree their reputation.
	In other words, if you want to advertise, there's a couple of companies you'll think of first, and there's a bunch of other people you'll think of later.
	But there's people you'll think of first, and those are the people you're going to go and advertise with.
	And that reputation is worth an enormous amount.
	I'm no accountant, but if I remember rightly, in In software terms, sorry, in accounting terms, the value of that company, right, what's the value of a company?
	Well, it's earnings, it's profits, it's assets, whether those are people, although people are much loosier and goosier as an asset because they come and go.
	It's fixed assets, it's actual assets.
	Usually it's capital invested to capital machinery and all of the factories and so on that it's got and contracts and its IP and all the value of the company.
	But a lot of it is something called goodwill, which is just a positive view that people have of the company, which is one of the reasons why companies spend so much on charities and feel good and make good projects.
	Some of those are really good. I have no problem with it, but it's to create a positive impression of the company to add to the accounting thing called goodwill, which in software companies is a pretty significant amount of their valuation.
	So the one, two, three punch with this disinformation hysteria is government intervention, loss of reputation, and loss of the actual tangible accounting metric called goodwill, which is a positive view of the company.
	And so they say, man, we've got to do something.
	And then they say, well, wait a second here.
	We don't want to do this internally.
	Because if we get something wrong, and we're going to, we're going to get something wrong.
	If we get something wrong, we don't want people to sue us directly, right?
	Because here's the deep pocket syndrome and so on, right?
	So companies don't sit there and say, well, you know, we're going to bing on, you know, 50,000 or 100,000 people, going to comb through stuff, listen to complaints.
	Because, of course, they can't comb through everything.
	And so they basically have to listen for complaints.
	And as we all know, the left is happy to complain and use that to weaponize the destruction of people's reputations and channels and livelihood.
	So they wait for complaints, and then they have to adjudicate those complaints.
	And of course, when you go up against somebody who's really, really into complaining, oh man, things get messy pretty quickly.
	Because you know what happens when you get carinated that kind of way.
	It's that someone comes to complain to you, and if you don't take their complaint seriously, they ask to see your manager, and they try and get you in trouble.
	If you won't let them destroy someone else's livelihood, then they will work to try and destroy your livelihood.
	In other words, if you won't work with them to try and get Joe Blow demonetized or deplatformed, Then they will go to your manager and they will make stuff up.
	They will lie. They will cause lots of trouble.
	They'll file false paperwork.
	They'll do whatever just to try and get you fired.
	Because when you come face-to-face with those razor-tongued destroyers of souls, they say, give me a sacrifice or you're next on the altar.
	You tell me who I can take down.
	And it's either going to be Joe Blow Or Candace Owens or Stefan Molyneux or whoever.
	You give me those people!
	You give me that scalp or it's your scalp next.
	And of course, you know, I understand the path of least resistance.
	I understand most people aren't enamored to or focused on abstract principles of free speech and willing to take that stand.
	And even if they are, it doesn't matter.
	It's whether their managers are.
	Like if the manager ever says, if you reject anybody, Who has made a complaint.
	You reject the validity of their complaints.
	You will never be fired for that.
	Ever. Ever.
	Well, of course, those guarantees don't exist, right?
	So ABC Software Company, who now wants to guard against misinformation and that one, two, three punch of negative results, what do they do?
	Well, they outsource.
	They hire some company to do the work of the fact-checking.
	And of course, there are companies clamoring for that because now you have a massive finger on the scale of human communication.
	If you get that job as fact checker at some giant social media company, you hold the destiny of the world in your sticky, neck-bearded hands.
	And so people are clamoring for that.
	I mean, it's good money, but also, I mean, just having that amount of power.
	Oh my gosh. Having that amount of power, it's a drug.
	It's heady. It's really, really addictive.
	So, the social media companies, they can't stand up and say, no, no, no, listen, guys, I hear what you're saying.
	I don't like misinformation.
	Nobody likes misinformation, but it's really tough to define.
	And are you asking us to censor the mainstream media that have lied about people constantly for the past, I don't know, 3,000 fucking years?
	Or if you just want to take since 2016, just about everyone to the right of Chairman Mao, right?
	Because Russia collusion, fine people, General Flynn committed a crime, all of this stuff, right?
	All misinformation. So should we ditch those platforms?
	No, no, no. We should elevate those platforms as trusted news sources.
	Okay, well then, they have repeatedly put out stuff which is totally false.
	It's completely disproven.
	It's, you know, 10-second cursory glance at the transcript of Trump's comments about Charlottesville completely repeatedly.
	So that is misinformation.
	Trump never said, take bleach to cure COVID. That is misinformation.
	Do you want us to kick off the mainstream media sources that for years have been pushing toxic and dangerous lies?
	Joe Biden founded his entire political campaign on the fine people hoax.
	He's repeated it over and over and over again, that half of America voted for a guy who praises Nazis.
	That's the argument. It's incredibly divisive, incredibly destructive, and has caused significant violence.
	You believe that, then you believe you're fighting Nazis.
	Well, if you're fighting Nazis, punch a Nazi becomes a good thing.
	Haven't you ever watched a World War II movie or every single Tarantino movie that pathologizes all Germans?
	Anyway. So, if it's disinformation, Joe Biden is pushing disinformation.
	I mean, this is one of countless examples, right?
	Joe Biden has manifested an entire presidential campaign that looks like it's going to be successful based upon this lie about what Trump said about Charlottesville.
	So that's disinformation.
	And it's much more destructive or divisive than whatever you're quoting, right?
	Some guy or some woman who said something bad or whatever, right?
	So if disinformation, dangerous disinformation is the key, then I assume you want us to censor the alphabet soup of mainstream media and news outlets.
	You want us to censor Joe Biden.
	You want us to censor Kamala Harris.
	All of these people, right?
	Because they've all repeated this hoax and this lie.
	I think even Bernie Sanders has and all this kind of stuff, right?
	So misinformation that's dangerous and bad and toxic, we've got to get rid of that stuff.
	I mean, without a doubt, without a shadow of a doubt, right?
	But then they say, no, no, no, no, no.
	That's not, that's not misinformation. That's, that's responsible journalism.
	It's like, but they, they turned out to be completely wrong.
	And in fact, it was, they, they knew that they were wrong because they'd all read the transcript to report and say the Charlottesville fine people hoax.
	So they were pushing known disinformation.
	Known, toxic lies.
	Incredibly destructive. Not to the reputations of Trump, but to the reputation of all Trump supporters.
	Because then, if you believe that lie, then you see a red hat and you see a swastika.
	You see a Trump supporter, you see a Nazi.
	So, it's incredibly dangerous.
	And this is one of the reasons why.
	This lie about what Trump said in Charlottesville about the neo-Nazis, this lie has Caused an immense amount of violence in America.
	An immense amount of violence in America.
	That's really, really toxic disinformation.
	So again, this is why nobody would let me run a social media company, because I just tell those people to fuck off.
	Just, you know, take your toxic, manipulative, leftist goo somewhere else.
	But if you don't want us to de-platform places like CNN for pushing this lie year after year after year, Russia colluded with Trump to take the U.S. presidency away from the legitimately elected Hillary Clinton, if you don't want me to censor those people, fuck right off and go away.
	Because you're just a hack.
	You're just a political... It's all bullshit, right?
	So anyway, they don't have the spine to do that.
	They don't have the ideological inclination to do that.
	It's obviously, you know, they like that stuff.
	They like the disinformation that serves their own cause.
	They just don't like the legitimate debate that doesn't, right?
	So you create this disinformation scare.
	The companies get goosed.
	They back down. And then they outsource.
	And the moment that Candace Owens launched her lawsuit, because she wants to go into discovery, she wants to go and figure out, how did they get the contract?
	How does this work? What's their relationship to Facebook?
	I mean, of course she wants to find that stuff out, and she might.
	She might. I think the whole time she'll be running flack from the mainstream media, because the closer you get to the truth, the more the mainstream media will attack you.
	That's just an absolute given.
	I mean, that's how you know somebody's getting close to some important truth.
	Unless they're a total proxy who's just going to be used as a first test case in suppression that then is going to be expanded to other people.
	For the most part, if you're being attacked by the mainstream media, well, I mean, come on.
	I mean, I think we know in general what that means.
	So, you outsort this stuff so you can claim legal arm's length.
	This is what Facebook has done. They say, oh, we don't have any association with those guys.
	It's like, well, you kind of do because you gave them control over your platform, right?
	Like, if you allow an app to read or write your email, And say, well, I have no relationship to that app.
	I have nothing to do with that app.
	It's like, well, you gave it permission to read and write your email, so you've got some relationship to it, right?
	But what happens then is Facebook says to this, whatever group it is, and it's a number, and you saw this with the SPLC and Jeff Bezos from Amazon during one of the congressional hearings in the late summer.
	And Then these people say, oh, this person has been pushing disinformation.
	They put out a claim, or they published a claim, or they echoed a claim, or they amplified a claim that is disinformation.
	And then what happens?
	Well, they get demonetized.
	And then Candace Owen is down.
	I'm still staggered at this number.
	I'm just... This is what was said in an interview she gave.
	I'm staggered at the number, but I assume it's $1.3 million Canadian a month from Facebook with 4 million followers.
	Again, maybe that was a misstatement, but it's probably some significant amount of money, but wow.
	Wow. So then the penalties for disinformation are demonetization, and that's how you get To make sure that Candace Owens doesn't get a hold of $12 million a year for her conservative courses.
	It's really, it's a great endgame.
	I mean, you take the morals out of it, which, you know, are pretty significant, but you take the morals out of it, and, you know, this is like trap spider levels of patience, and building that slow wall, brick by brick, to sort of wall you off of the general population.
	It's an amazing thing. I wouldn't say it's a thing of beauty because it is just so underhanded and vicious and motivated by bottomless levels of hate.
	Like, I just don't have that much hate in me.
	Like, to just sit there year after year and just focus on silencing people and shutting them up and getting them...
	I just... I mean, I may have good reason, but I just...
	I can't...
	Maybe I'm too happy. Maybe I'm too much in love with my family and my friends.
	I just enjoy what I do so much, but I just can't summon that level of hatred to just work to destroy people and shut them up and call them Nazis.
	There's people I hate in the world.
	There's ideologies I hate, but I just can't do it.
	It could be a flaw and a failing, and I know that there's people out there who want me to hate a whole lot more than I do.
	I'll get angry, but I can't sustain that multi- You know, like a friend of mine was approached by a documentarian some years ago to film, and, oh, I'll be your friend.
	The guy kept up this pretense of being a buddy for years.
	I completely turned on her.
	And, like, how do you keep that going, that false front that I'm your buddy, I'm your friend?
	Like, how do you keep that going week after week, month after month, year after year?
	Just so you can completely skewer that person with your end project.
	That's creepy as hell.
	That's weird as hell. This is bottomless.
	Hate like gravity.
	Hate like the laws of physics.
	Hate like light.
	Hate like electromagnetism.
	Like it's just unthinking, absolute gravity.
	Energy of the universe.
	That's some seriously creepy stuff.
	And of course, it's very dangerous.
	Because most people who will turn against you don't turn against you because they disagree with you.
	They turn against you because it's like, well, if you're targeted, I don't want to be anywhere near you because I'll be targeted next.
	It's not because, I mean, they haven't evaluated anything.
	They don't believe what people are saying about you.
	They're just like, well, if you provoke someone's anger to the point where they'll lie this much about you, I can't be around you because of the splash damage.
	And, you know, abuse works.
	Violence works.
	Verbal abuse works. Character assassination works.
	It works. And the fact that it works shouldn't be surprising.
	If it didn't work, it wouldn't be around.
	It wouldn't be around.
	It's around because it works, and it works really well.
	It works really, really well.
	You know, if anybody should be singing songs about radical ideologies, it should be Ariana Grande, right?
	I mean, crazy extremists blew up people at her concert.
	But no, she's still cussing and talking about hair extensions because violence works.
	It works. It works.
	It works. Now, does it work in the long run?
	Does it work in a moral sense? No, of course not.
	But of course, if you're the kind of person who thinks about the long run, you would recognize how such hatred eats away at you and turns you into an eater of all that is light and good in the world.
	So, yeah, it's a pretty long game.
	It's a pretty long con. And it works pretty well.
	And if you try and fight back, you know, I wish Candace Owens the best and, you know, good on her in a way, good for her and so on.
	You know, although personally I do think that focusing on minority votes, statistically it did cost Trump the election.
	Like, no matter what you think of sort of what pinky stuff happened in various places, by pursuing minority votes, Trump I mean, it's a fact, right?
	And that was part of Candace Owens' gig, and it's also part of, of course, Jared's gig and so on.
	And it was just unfortunate.
	I mean, go after everyone's vote for sure, but not one group at the exclusion of another.
	That just seems kind of racist. And that's kind of what Trump did based upon the, you know, he listened to the wrong Jared.
	What can I tell you? So that's the long game.
	And maybe it'll work out for her.
	But I imagine that what's going to happen is if she gets anywhere close to pulling skeletons out of the closet, I mean, they're just...
	I mean, gosh.
	We'll see. We'll see.
	But it's not going to be good, I'm going to guess, the way that these things play.
	I could be wrong. I could be wrong.
	And I'll be... Listen, if she ever listens to this, you know, good for you, man.
	I wish you the very best, and I hope that I'm wrong, but that's my particular concern.
	Oh, the last thing I wanted to mention, sorry for this little intro, but the last thing I wanted to mention was if you search for me on YouTube, of course I'm gone, right?
	But you search for me and Joe Rogan.
	I did three shows together with Joe Rogan back in the day.
	The last one was like six years ago or whatever.
	And I think a whole bunch of Joe Rogan videos have been purged from YouTube.
	I don't know if you guys know anything about that or the why of all of that, but it's really quite interesting.
	And if you can let me know what that might be, why that happened.
	But I mean, it's probably something to do with the Spotify thing.
	Spotify is associated with Tencent, which is associated with the Chinese government, all this kind of stuff, right?
	But I don't know. I don't know why this all happened.
	Happened to change or to coincide with this move over to this kind of stuff, but we probably will never know.
	We probably will never, ever know.
	His back catalog is now Spotify exclusive.
	Oh, is that right? Is that what happened?
	His back catalog is now Spotify exclusive.
	But Spotify is just an...
	Audio platform, isn't it?
	I don't know much about Spotify, but isn't it just an audio platform?
	I mean...
	So they pulled it all from everywhere, and now...
	Oh, they do video too? I guess that makes sense, right?
	They would, right? The Alex Jones show is still the other one that they just did recently.
	Interesting. Interesting.
	Oh, the one from a year ago? Okay, thanks, Mitch.
	Appreciate it. So yeah, I guess if you want to go and watch...
	I guess, hey, well, I don't imagine...
	Can you guys have a quick look? I don't imagine that I made it over to Spotify.
	They have been fans of mine for quite some time.
	I didn't, right? Yeah.
	So yeah, it's a badge of honor for me.
	If you make it over to Spotify, well, there are spots on your soul if you're on Spotify.
	In fact, there are spots on your soul the size of your soul.
	There are holes in your soul the size of your soul.
	But, yeah, so that's...
	I guess that's gone. Oh, I guess you can probably still find it on the library, but...
	Yeah.
	It's gone, baby, gone.
	Well, I don't imagine too many people watching that stuff other than historical curiosity, but...
	There was some good stuff back in the day when I was talking about the dangers of bioengineered weapons with Joe Rogan, so...
	Even something like the Sean Baker interview has gone off YouTube, so, yeah, it might be a part of the back catalog thing.
	Is that right? Sean Baker?
	Is that the... Wait, is that the snowboarder?
	The hot-headed redhead?
	Not to break any cliches that we have going on in our brains.
	Anyway, sorry. Oh, he's an orthopedic surgeon.
	Wow. So he skateboards and he's not...
	Okay, sorry. That was too obvious. All right.
	Well, that's Sean White.
	Thank you. I knew it was Sean someone or other.
	Yes, so you can...
	And if you want to see the Joe Rogan interviews...
	I've sort of forgotten to mention this, and I'll put out something a bit more singular about this.
	We are resurrecting the playlists from YouTube using the different platforms of BitChute and Library and Brighteon and so on.
	And Rumble is really good, by the way.
	And I post into Rumble, so you can get the stuff from Rumble if you're having buffering issues with Library.
	I love BitChute, but it can be a little bit blocky.
	I'm a bit of a pristine guy, but Rumble is really good for video.
	So you can go to rumble.com forward slash free domain and follow me there.
	But if you go to fdrurl.com, forward slash interviews fdrurl.com forward slash interviews you can see the featured interviews which are a collection of interviews that I've given with a wide My one's with Jordan Peterson, my one's with Noam Chomsky, and just a wide variety of people that I've done interviews for.
	If you're having any trouble finding them, just go to freedomain.com, click on interviews, and there's just a whole list of them there, and we've also got under videos, there's some featured videos as well with some links to my most popular ones, so you can check that out.
	I have even interviewed climate change, the concept.
	That's right. That's right.
	Slippery bugger to nail down.
	Turns out plant food is the best way to enslave humanity.
	Turns out, funny story, plant food was the best way to enslave humanity, other than the China virus.
	And isn't it weird, you know, I mean, seeing the terrible things that are going on in Canada with regards to COVID and maybe do a whole show about that at some point, but Man, it's rough.
	It's rough. All they had to do was close the borders.
	Like, nobody ever talks about that.
	Nobody in the mainstream media ever talks about that.
	Well, in Canada, of course, the mainstream media is now owned by the liberal government, but they just don't talk about it.
	Just close the borders.
	All you had to do was close the borders and there wouldn't be any of this stuff.
	So, oh, but that would have cost us money.
	It's like, not as much as COVID. Well, we didn't know because China hid information.
	It's like, you guys chose to trust China.
	You chose to trust a communist dictatorship.
	And, of course, these kinds of mess-ups, this is what's so weird about the status system as a whole, right?
	These kinds of mess-ups, like, absolutely titanic screw-ups, which have cost the deaths of millions of people and destroyed trillions of dollars of economic value, destroyed people's lives, wrecked people's childhoods.
	You know, I was just thinking that the song for 2020 is an old Billy Idol song.
	Eyes without a face.
	Eyes without a face.
	God knows you embrace.
	Like, that's the song. Eyes without a face.
	You know, in the sort of deep Islamic countries, you get the burqa and everybody else gets the communist burqa for coronavirus.
	It's just wild. And so they don't close the borders.
	They trust China. They downplay.
	They lie. They don't close the borders.
	Everyone gets infected and they get rewarded with massive amounts of power and control and making more and more people dependent on them.
	I mean, it's incredible. Ah, it's crazy.
	Oh, that's crazy. So, all right.
	Well, thanks for letting me chat.
	See, here's the thing, man.
	It's been like two days since my last live stream.
	And you should really check out the Stand Up for the Effing Truth video.
	And please share that. I'm sorry about the cussing, but it really did kind of feel necessary and important at that moment in time.
	But you should really, really check it out.
	All right. Some of the episodes are there.
	That's over on Spotify. Ah, debate with Stefan Molyneux.
	Oh, my debate with Thaddeus Russell, who thinks that human beings can mate with trees and produce viable offspring.
	Oh, my God. Ah, the wee sapling known as my child.
	All right. If you could...
	Sorry for that.
	I hope James is still awake.
	James, come back. Let's get on with the caller.
	And thanks for listening to this beginning.
	But it has been two days since I did a live stream.
	So clearly I'm backed up, baby.
	I'm backed up like a teenager with eczema on his hands.
	All right. Thanks for that image.
	Or a metaphor. I guess it's my fault if I visualize that.
	So I do have a caller tonight.
	He writes, I recently avoided getting into a relationship with someone who definitely has red flags and maybe has some virtues.
	I met this woman when she was seeing a mutual friend.
	She and I became friends.
	At my age, there's always some level of sizing up women up for dating.
	I didn't seriously consider it until after I made a flirty joke she sent me nudes I didn't ask for in March.
	This was red flag number three at least.
	Over the months I went over the idea, felt all sorts of emotions had all sorts of thoughts.
	We talked and hung out a lot, and went on a couple of vacations with other friends.
	There were a couple of scenarios where sex was on the table, and I decided against it.
	About a month ago, after reading some RTR, I decided to make a move by being open and honest with her about my thoughts and feelings.
	I don't want to just fuck her and become another one of the guys masticated by her sexual meat grinder.
	I'm interested in dating, but I for sure see red flags, maybe some virtues, so the only way that would work is if we're both committed to growing together like the painters in RTR. She told me she'd think about it.
	I talked with some friends.
	Some said, go for it. One who knows her said she's not relationship material.
	So when she suggested another vacation, I said we'd have to be clear on what our relationship was first.
	She said she didn't want to date me.
	I said that was fine, but when we hung out a couple days later, she was super flirty, tried to have sex again, and I got pissed.
	We hung out one more time after that, and we haven't talked since.
	This was a few weeks ago. All that juicy backstory leads me to my question for this show.
	What are the virtues to look for in a mate, and how can we, to the best of our ability, clearly identify them?
	Steph's talked about the idea of looking for virtues in people a lot.
	It's in his definition of love, and specific virtues have come up in the conversations in RTR here and there.
	But searching RTR in past shows, I haven't found one that's, here's the list.
	And I think having it in one place along with some signs to look for would be helpful for all of us.
	In this case, luck and wisdom kept me from entering into what would almost certainly be a terrible relationship and I'm proud of myself for that.
	But I don't believe I'm fully immune for making a big mistake along these lines.
	And I'd like to improve my radar for great people so that I can more easily spot and go after them with my whole heart and efforts.
	Wow. That's my entire show.
	Wow. Hey, it's a palindrome.
	So, if you could tell me just a little bit more of the sort of backstory or side story.
	Also, if you could just share those nudes, that would be great.
	Just let us know a little bit about the sort of backstory and side story about this.
	Well, I think I will keep the nudes for the sake of privacy concerns and not getting any Woke mobs coming after anybody.
	But yeah, I think the further backstory that feels like the right place for me to start is just general my dating history.
	I had a girlfriend in like eighth grade, first kiss, lasted three months.
	We went to high school and she had better options.
	I asked a girl out freshman year.
	At a school dance and didn't actually want to date her.
	So I ended up having one of her friends break up with her for me like a month into that.
	And then like senior year of high school, end of it, there was like one girl that I liked and we hung out and kissed some, but it didn't really go anywhere.
	And then I really didn't date for a variety of reasons.
	Not a thing that I was in a position to do.
	For a bunch of years until I was like 25, 24.
	So that was two or three years ago now.
	So I feel like overall my just general dating experience is severely lacking.
	And so that kind of contributes to a situation like this for me in that I've got all the kind of classic like hormones, getting jacked, confusion that everyone gets without like a lack of experience to really kind of understand what relationships mean to me and who I want to be in relationships and be able to kind of see through the fog.
	And there's also still kind of this, as much as I'm working against it, there's still a kind of desperation, a kind of Scarcity mentality that comes into these things.
	So I think all that kind of contributes to when I meet someone in real life, not through one of the various apps that is available to me, it kind of stands out a little bit more, and it's got more gravity to it.
	And so last summer, it happened to be a more social time for me than...
	Most of my young adult life and met this woman, like I mentioned.
	She was seeing one of my friends, I think, is the technical term.
	And I am not someone who's going to, like, steal your girl, quote-unquote, because thanks to you, I appreciate that.
	The principle there is, well, if I have a better option, I will leave you.
	Just like I left him.
	So that's not something that I'm going to do.
	But like I mentioned, there's just kind of always single young male.
	You size people up.
	And she happens to be pretty forward with being flirty and being overtly sexual and things like that.
	So I kind of let it ride for a while and had some level of awareness of like, yeah, I know this is a thing that...
	That jacks the hormones, so don't tell yourself that this is what love feels like because it's not.
	But kind of play the game a little bit because I feel like I'm at a point where as much as I don't want to make the wrong move and get my life torn up or certainly not have kids with the wrong person, I've defaulted towards kind of not playing the game at all more.
	And so it's better for me to, with certain precautions in place, to not have children with the wrong person, take the risk of getting into a bad situation that might tear me up for a while, rather than just continuing to not try and then end up alone forever.
	Right. Okay.
	How much control do you feel that you have over whether you end up alone forever?
	So one of the things that's really important to me is to take ownership over as much as possible.
	Meaning Luck certainly factors into the human experience, and there are some times where things happen that you weren't able to see.
	Oh, no, no, no. No, I'm sorry. I love you to death, brother, but I can't get into luck factors into the human experience.
	It's way too abstract. Let me phrase it to you.
	Okay. Let me phrase it a different way, because we need to stay on the meat of the subject, so to speak, right?
	If we get too fortune cookie, nothing's going to be actionable, and we'll both feel like we've eaten something, but it's just basically popcorn.
	Bullshit and candy floss, right?
	Most of the bullshit coming from me, so there's no slight against you, right?
	So my question is, how would you rate yourself in terms of your desirability to a quality woman?
	Out of 10. I would say 7 or 8.
	Okay, so that's great.
	That's great. Okay, so if you have a seven or eight in your attractiveness to a quality woman, first thing you need to do is a gap analysis.
	A gap analysis is, you know, here's where I am, here's where I want to be, you know, the before and after photo in your mind of losing weight or exercising or whatever.
	So what's missing? What would a quality woman, why would she not choose you And then we can see if there's anything we can do about that.
	But what's missing? So the thing that just immediately comes to mind for me is a lack of opportunity.
	I work from home.
	I work for myself, which is a positive quality, I think.
	I'm so sorry to keep interrupting.
	I really do, because I probably wasn't very clear.
	Not being visible?
	That's not. I mean, that's going to make it harder to find someone.
	I'm talking about a quality woman.
	Has met you.
	You've gone on a date.
	What's missing for her?
	I think...
	I... My belief in that is that I... As much as I'm aware of, like, subtext and interactions, I feel like sometimes I don't do a good job of really connecting with people.
	Okay, I'm not sure what...
	Just help me understand what that means.
	Oh, is that what you're demonstrating with, like, Mr.
	Abstract and stuff like that before?
	And when I say what's missing for you with a quality woman, it's like, well, I work from home.
	Is that what you mean? Like, you have trouble connecting in that kind of way?
	Yeah, I think it's that sort of thing.
	And I'm pretty good at either asking questions and listening or talking about myself a lot.
	But I feel like finding the balance where people feel like I'm really understanding them and I'm really curious about them and not just kind of interviewing them or being an interviewee.
	Okay, so why are you curious about people?
	Why am I curious about people?
	Yeah. At some level, I feel like it's because I know that being curious is a thing that people who are healthy and well-adjusted look for.
	So it's kind of a should, an ought to, rather than a want to?
	Like, are you genuinely curious?
	Listen, whether it's a virtue or not, we'll just put aside.
	I'm not sure that it is, but just to be perfectly frank about it, But you're saying, well, this is what well-adjusted people do.
	They ask lots of questions, they're curious about people, so I'm going to do that.
	Is it more like that, or is it like I'm genuinely filled with a deep curiosity about people?
	There have been people in times where I've felt genuine curiosity, and those are people that have been good friends.
	It feels like a lot of times doing it kind of mechanistically, though.
	Okay, and what percentage of people that you meet, on average, do you think are interesting?
	Ten percent. Wow, that's good.
	I'm at about two, and I don't mean of this audience.
	This is a pre-selected audience, right?
	Yeah. I'm a little older, and I've talked to a lot of people over the course of my life, and most people are Savagely boring.
	I mean, God love them.
	I'm glad that they do what they do.
	And, you know, they have value in the world.
	It's just that they are so predictable.
	And they're so obvious.
	They're so obvious in what they're doing.
	You know, if it's status-seeking or puffing themselves up or some sort of inglorious posturing or leveling or defensive or, you know, they're just...
	It's ungodly predictable and ungodly boring.
	Now, that's my perspective. I'm not saying that's shared by everyone.
	It's not a virtue to feel that way or to perceive that.
	But my tolerance or curiosity for people – and listen, I'm very curious about you.
	You listen to the show. You're interested in philosophy.
	You're asking these questions, so you're not in that category.
	Nobody I talk to – almost nobody I've ever talked to in the show is in that category.
	But, yeah, the average person that you make, the average normie, oh man.
	You know, and again, it's no hostility, no whatever, right?
	But it's, you know, it's like if you're half Roddy and you go to karaoke, you know, it's like, oh, I guess I'm glad that they're making the effort and I hope they enjoy what they're doing.
	But, you know, most people are bad singers and they don't know it, right?
	And... So if you're at 10%, you know, more power to you.
	I mean, good for you. Maybe that would be a virtue if I was more along those lines, but that's sort of my lived experience is that it's pretty hard to rouse interest in me.
	But, you know, once it's there, great, you know.
	I'm really keen on that.
	I'm keen on this conversation. So please, you know, I don't want you to think that you're not in the category of people who are interesting to me.
	Okay, so only about 10% of people are you genuinely curious about, but how many people do you pretend to be curious in?
	I would suppose all the rest.
	Right, okay.
	Most of the rest. So why do you lie?
	I think it's...
	It's a combination of not wanting to be a dick and then also that kind of trying to live out that Jordan Peterson assumed somebody else has something to teach you about.
	Where it's like, I'm not feeling emotionally like I'm really that curious about this person, but I'm trying to practice the social motions and I'm trying to be a kind person.
	And then maybe I can learn something from just that experience, whether or not that person actually has some piece of knowledge that is interesting and valuable to me.
	Do you think Jordan Peterson lived his values?
	Do I think he lived his values?
	Yeah, do you think he lived the values of assuming that everyone has something to teach you?
	I would imagine that just like most Most values and virtues, it's certainly not 100% across the board kind of thing.
	Oh, dude. I'm afraid you just said your first really boring thing.
	Yeah. What happened there?
	Oh, what happened there?
	My friends, we were doing so well.
	We really were.
	But then you became, well, but nobody lives their values 100%.
	That was a total straw man, right?
	Of course nobody lives their values 100% of the time.
	What does that even mean? I'm into rationality, but currently I'm banging my girlfriend.
	What does that mean? I don't know, right?
	So that was interesting.
	Okay, so that was, okay, what happened right there?
	Right there. Right?
	So I guess you like Jordan Peterson a lot, right?
	Yeah. Well, I enjoy...
	I've had some thoughtful things that I've learned from him.
	Oh, absolutely. I have too.
	But what he's taught you is different from him saying, everyone has something to teach you.
	You know, like Jordan Peterson gets up and gives a two-hour rambling monologue on stage.
	Does he invite other people up to share their wisdom?
	Not that I've seen.
	No! He writes, what, a 700-page book on self-help?
	Does he invite anyone else to contribute even a chapter?
	Uh, nope.
	No! No.
	Do you know that on the label for benzodiazepines, which he got addicted to, it says this is highly addictive and dangerous?
	Did he let the person who wrote that teach him anything?
	Apparently not. I could have told him something about the dangers of public life.
	I certainly was a public figure long before Jordan Peterson was.
	Now, of course, I never got as famous.
	And I could have told him why I never got as famous and why I would view that with horror and revulsion.
	I have a very carefully managed relationship to fame.
	I dance with that devil.
	I could have taught him something about that.
	You know, he was stressed because his wife went through cancer, was going through cancer.
	I actually had gone through cancer.
	Did he reach out to ask me about fame?
	Or the pressures of public life?
	Or the dangers of certain particular topics?
	Or how to deal with cancer?
	No. Listen, I'm not saying we would be best buds.
	I'm not saying he should have.
	Like, I don't care. I don't sit there and think, well, here I've been staring at my phone for three days and Jordan Peterson still hasn't called.
	It's nothing like that.
	I'm just... Curious how he lived that value.
	Because here's the thing, right?
	If someone is going to say, everyone has something to teach you, I'll be like, okay, that's interesting.
	Is it true?
	Sure. Is it valuable?
	God, no. Listen, I don't know what dreams you had last night.
	You don't know what dreams I had last night.
	Nobody knows what dreams the other people had last night unless you actually ask them what they tell you, right?
	So everyone has something to tell you about the dreams they had last night, right?
	Everyone can teach you what dream they had last night.
	Does it matter? Do you care?
	Is it important? No.
	No. Dreams are important, but in order to find value in dreams, you have to have pretty in-depth conversations.
	You have to know what's going on with the person.
	You have to know what, you know, you've heard B2Dream analyses on this show.
	So I know that there are, but everyone has something.
	Yeah, of course. Everyone has something to teach you.
	What did Trump learn from his famous, sorry, what did Jordan Peterson learn from his famous interview with Kathy Newman?
	You know, the famous, what you're actually saying, lobster interview?
	What did he learn from her?
	Yeah, familiar with it.
	Yeah, what did he learn from her?
	I think he learned just how much people in the media, people in those kind of positions, how far they're willing to go.
	To twist who he is and what he's saying and what he stands for.
	But he knew that already. What did she teach him in particular by him being curious about her?
	What did he learn from her?
	Not like, you know, if someone punches you in the face, you're like, wow, I just learned that they wanted to punch me in the face, right?
	But what did he learn from her that she taught him from her own knowledge?
	I don't know that he learned anything.
	From her. Jordan Peterson had significant problems with the Canadian healthcare system, which is why he ended up in a coma in Russia.
	I had to flee the Canadian healthcare system in order to save my life by flying to America for an operation that they said they couldn't get to me for well over a year.
	I had also interviewed a large number of people about addiction, right?
	So I could have had an enormous amount to teach Jordan Peterson and he would have known about all of that.
	I would have been more than happy Privately, confidentially, and all that to talk with him about whatever would have been helpful, right?
	Now, again, I'm not saying I'm not mad that Jordan Peterson didn't call me.
	I don't care. I certainly would have been helpful to him.
	And he would have known all of that.
	I mean, I was one of the more famous Canadian intellectuals.
	I guess not as famous as he was, but not inconsequential either, right?
	He would have known all of that.
	But he didn't want to avail himself of my direct, experienced, lived wisdom in the areas that almost took him down, right?
	So, and I'm not saying this to bag on Jordan Peterson.
	I still like Jordan Peterson.
	I'm just, you know, I know.
	But what I'm trying to say is when someone says, oh, everyone has something to teach you, it's like, oh, that's an interesting thought.
	Do they believe it?
	Because you're asking me, how do you figure out who the quality people are?
	Because you bent a fair amount of your life towards just this one particular statement, right?
	And I have no problem with that because now you're living it and you're trying to figure out how it works and good for you.
	That's what you should be doing when you get a particular belief system that strikes you as significantly motivational.
	But the first thing you have to do is look at the person who gives you the moral.
	And say, how are they doing with it?
	How are they doing with it?
	That's the first thing you do.
	Thank you.
	You know, one of the earliest things I did when I learned about communism was, oh, Karl Marx really hated the idea of exploitation.
	Let's see how he lived.
	Huh. Huh. Okay, sponged off a capitalist who exploited his workers, so he lived off the proceeds of exploitation.
	Ignored his children.
	Was aggressive towards his wife.
	Oh! He banged his maid, and given the power disparity between a world-famous intellectual and a lonely unknown maid that's pretty damn close to rape.
	He banged his maid.
	She got pregnant. He threw her out on the street and refused to acknowledge her.
	His child. So I say, oh wow, so Karl Marx was really, really against exploitation.
	And that son of a bitch exploited just about everybody he came in contact with.
	So I don't care.
	I don't care what Karl Marx has to say about exploitation because it's all bullshit.
	Because he lived the complete...
	It's not like... It's not even like he was neutral towards exploitation.
	I think he just didn't like the capitalists because they didn't exploit people, and he wanted to project, right?
	The satanic bullshit of this kind of thinker is everything they accuse you of, they're actually doing, and you're not, right?
	You know, the leftists who accuse me of being a racist, I'm not a racist, but they fucking voted for a guy who said, well, if you don't vote for me, you're not a real black person.
	Jesus. That's a monstrous, monstrous statement to make.
	So I don't care. Why on earth would I care what Karl Marx has to say about exploitation?
	You've got to be kidding me.
	And of course, if we had that approach and we looked for empirical evidence first...
	Come on.
	You know... And people said this about the joke I made earlier.
	I don't want to see the nudes. Obviously, it's a joke, right?
	But people said this.
	You know the phrase, pics or it didn't happen, right?
	Pictures or it didn't happen? Yep.
	Familiar. Okay.
	Put that right at the center of your heart.
	All of you. All of you.
	A woman you meet online says, I'm a model.
	I'm a swimsuit model.
	Right? No pictures.
	Do you believe her? Not even a little bit.
	Well, it could be true, right?
	I mean, it's not impossible, right?
	But on the grand scheme of things, if she was really a model, there's a very high likelihood she would have pictures.
	So if I'm going to place a bet...
	No, but she would say, I don't want guys just going after me for my body.
	Yeah. I mean, that's my morning mantra.
	I just don't want guys going after me for my body.
	Just me personally, not even the swimsuit model, just me as an individual, obviously.
	I don't like to be sexually objectified.
	Well, I do, but only by one person.
	But of course, if she genuinely didn't want guys to be going after her for her body, she wouldn't say, I'm a swimsuit model, right?
	No, that's not a thing you bring up.
	Right. Right.
	Now, if she refuses to send you any pictures after claiming she's a swimsuit model, what do you conclude?
	That she's not a swimsuit model.
	Now, if she sends you pictures And she's got excessive body hair.
	She's overweight and sweaty.
	What do you think? That she's not a swimsuit model.
	Right. Right.
	And then you know she's a liar.
	And crazy because she's claiming to be a swimsuit model and she's the opposite.
	That's disturbed.
	That's deeply disturbed, right? Karl Marx claims to be against exploitation, but exploited everyone.
	You know, you should read his letters.
	I mean, I read the letters of these guys.
	I read the letters of these guys.
	I know Dr.
	Duke Pesta really likes Dostoevsky, and I like him as a writer, too.
	He's a pretty horrible human being, though.
	Addicted to gambling, destroyed his marriage, destroyed his wife's health and finances through compulsive blah, blah, blah.
	Now... You read the letters of the intellectuals, or if you want a real shortcut, Paul Johnson, the historian, has a great book called Intellectuals that I've talked about before.
	Just, you know, pick it up, man. Just pick it up and read through these goddamn intellectuals and just how repulsive, I mean, almost none worse than Bertolt Brecht, but just how repulsive they all are.
	Absolutely horrifying. And this way you don't have to care about what people say.
	Look, what would happen if I was caught beating my child after 15 years going on and on about peaceful parenting?
	Or what if, you know, we all play among us sometimes, right?
	What if I was screaming and calling my daughter names on the call?
	Because, I mean, just by the...
	Sorry, go ahead. Sorry. Yeah, well, and I know you've made the Karl Marx, hey, I'm against exploitation, but he banged his maid argument many times before.
	Okay, but you haven't really absorbed it, though.
	Sorry to be annoying. Yeah, well...
	Because when Jordan Peterson says everyone has something to teach you, the first thing I do is to say, okay, okay, that's interesting.
	So let me look for examples of Jordan Peterson being taught by someone.
	That's what I would look for.
	Thank you.
	The ethos.
	I just want to see it lived.
	Picks or it doesn't happen.
	Picks or it's total bullshit.
	I'll give you a funny little example from our own community.
	It's very interesting to me. So, when we started playing Among Us, I got voted off for no evidence on a regular basis.
	Do you know why? It's very interesting.
	I don't even know what Among Us is, so I have no clue.
	It's a game where it's like a murder mystery.
	There's a bunch of people running around a spaceship.
	They all look the same. But one or two of them are imposterous and they kill people and you have to catch them.
	And then if you think you've caught them, you vote them off.
	And if you vote them off, then you win.
	And if they kill you, then they win.
	It's a very clever game and it's very little about video game.
	It's mostly about suspicion and storytelling and conversation.
	It's a very interesting game.
	And I kept getting voted off with almost no evidence.
	And that was very interesting to me.
	And I know why.
	I know why. The reason I got voted off with almost no evidence was that people unconsciously wanted to see how the real-time relationships guy dealt with being treated unfairly.
	Because it's a big question in the community, given how unfairly I, and therefore everyone here, has been treated over the last 15 years.
	How do I deal with being treated unfairly?
	Do I get angry?
	Do I get sucky?
	Do I withdraw? Am I aggressive?
	Am I silent about it all and say nothing, even though everyone knows I'm feeling something or thinking something?
	So people were putting me to the test.
	I have no problem with it.
	I think it's perfectly fine.
	And so what I did was I said, I am not enjoying the game because I keep getting voted off without any reason.
	And that means that, I mean, everyone's free to do that, but I'm just telling you, it makes me Not enjoy the game, and I won't want to play it.
	Now, I'm not being sucky about it.
	I'm not threatening anyone. I'm just saying these are the consequences of being treated in this way that I don't want to continue.
	And I said, listen, at the same time, Don't not vote for me if you have a reason.
	If I'm acting suspiciously, vote for me to kick me off.
	But if I just get voted off for no reason, then I'm not enjoying it.
	It's annoying, and I won't want to play the game.
	You all can still play. It's not like I have to be there.
	But if you enjoy my participation in the game, then I would just request more reason or fairness in voting me off.
	I think that's a reasonable thing to say, and it certainly was a reasonable...
	Explication of my experiences with the game.
	But the reason that people were doing that is they wanted to see how I would deal directly in an unstructured format with being treated in...
	It's obviously not a big deal, but in a minorly unfair manner, if that makes sense.
	In a, quote-unquote, safe space.
	Yeah. Yeah.
	Now, I mean, also, I'm pretty good at figuring some of this stuff out.
	I'm not the worst liar in the world, although I'm still not as good as my daughter.
	But... So I sort of understand it, but I do think that those mechanics work, and I don't mind that at all.
	I think it's a perfectly fair thing to do.
	Pick so it didn't happen.
	Missed a real-time relationship.
	Be honest about your thoughts and feelings.
	Be assertive without being aggressive.
	Make your needs known without making other people wrong.
	Okay, can you do it?
	Because you wrote about it a lot.
	You've talked about it a lot. Can you actually do it?
	In a situation where you don't have control or authority like you do in the call-in shows.
	Again, it's perfectly fair, and I'm glad that people did it.
	I have no problem with it. But people wanted pics or it didn't happen for me, right?
	For me. And that's fair.
	I put myself out as a bit of an authority on being honest and real-time relationships, being direct and And people were like, okay, can he do it?
	He says he's a swimsuit model, Pixar, it didn't happen, right?
	And people got to see it in real time, if that makes sense.
	Yeah, that's definitely in general a thing that I've been working on is, I don't know, 10 years ago, less time than that, big ideas guy.
	Like think about things and talk about things and map things out and get super invested in ideas and realized at a certain point, like the ideas need to hit reality and they need to be proven out.
	And a lot of what I was doing wasn't helping me become the person that I want to be.
	James, did you want to jump in about your color steal?
	Well...
	I'm going to go.
	I don't know if there's much to say about it.
	No, because it happened more than once that I turned people against you.
	It's just the way the game played out.
	I wasn't obviously trying to be mean to you.
	It's just the way the game played out.
	But it was annoying, right?
	Yeah, it's a little annoying.
	And then, so, there's, you know, people sort of pick their own colors in the game.
	And, you know, I usually typically pick the white or maybe black.
	I just sort of flip around. But Steph is usually just yellow in the game.
	He wears banana on his head.
	So, you know, Steph actually was not bad, but he got people to vote me off with virtually no evidence.
	Because I was the imposter, so I had to throw suspicion.
	That's just how the game works.
	But go on. Yeah, and so what happened was I said, you know, I basically said people were voting me off with no evidence because basically following Steph and, you know, because he's a pretty decent liar and I'm not that good at it.
	And you were a little mad because you were like, that's it, I'm not doing the ghosts.
	I'm not doing my ghost tasks and good luck winning without my ghost tasks.
	Like, you were mad. We all have that feeling during that game.
	It's pretty intense, but go on.
	No, what I did say is like, look, you guys vote me off, I'm not doing my tasks.
	Because it's not fair.
	It's not fair to get voted off so quickly and with no evidence.
	But when they did vote you out, I did start doing my tasks.
	So after I was yeeted, you're like, fine, my tormentor is gone, I can do my tasks.
	No, that's fair. Pretty much, pretty much.
	It's like, okay, well, they did come around to it.
	And then next round, though, I'm like, I'm going to take his color.
	Right, you did. You took my color.
	And what did I say? And I gave it back after about it.
	And you're like, nope, that's fine.
	You're like, that's fair. I said, that's fair.
	Yeah, because I got you voted off to save my own hide as part of the game.
	And you took my color.
	And I'm like, what am I going to say?
	James, that's so petty. Yeah, right.
	No, that's fine. That's totally fine.
	All right. Yeah, I just wanted to...
	I feel I should inform Steph that the proper past tense of yeet is yote.
	Okay, you're just making that stuff up like the people made up the word yeet.
	No, and so I think there's a lot of psychodynamics that go on in that.
	And I occasionally do have a bit of a younger sibling reaction to being treated unfairly in that game or in other situations.
	But yeah, I mean, so I thought that was interesting.
	So people just wanted to see if I could do it.
	What I've said is a virtue and a value.
	Can I do it? Because, you know, everybody gets to see me mostly, I mean mostly, in a structured environment, you know, where I have some kind of authority because I'm, you know, running the conversation or people are calling me in to ask for help, which is a bit of an authority.
	I mean, I certainly reject the authority, but it's sort of implicit in the whole interaction.
	And so in a game, or people see me giving speeches or I'm being interviewed or whatever, so there's a whole different power dynamic.
	But in a recreational situation, I think people wanted to see how am I going to be treated with being...
	Because it happened, like, I don't know, Seven or eight times, almost in a row.
	And that's sort of way beyond the sort of bounds of coincidence and so on.
	And it wasn't because I was so good at the game because I didn't even really get a chance to get good at the game because this was happening kind of early.
	So I just wanted to be honest and say, you know, I really want to keep playing, but if I just keep getting voted off with no evidence, my incentive to keep playing is just not there.
	And so if you guys could hold back on that, that would be great.
	And I still get voted off, but, you know, it's fair.
	It's reasonable. And I do try and push against the no evidence stuff.
	I guess with other people too.
	Anyway, so I don't want to get too dragged into the game, although it is a really, really interesting game.
	I've never played anything quite like it before.
	So people want picks where it didn't happen.
	And this is with Jordan Peterson.
	It's like, okay, how is this ethic going?
	Now, just because Jordan Peterson doesn't seem to have much of a habit of saying...
	You know, when it came to handling fame, I had many years of experience on the guy.
	Again, I didn't reach his level of fame, thank God, right?
	But he could have asked some advice.
	I ask advice from people quite often.
	Because I think it's important to defer to people who've had more experience and so on, right?
	And Jordan Peterson...
	To my knowledge, did not ask people who dealt with public fame and controversy for many years longer than he had.
	He did not ask those people for help or advice.
	He tried to go it alone, and it really, really didn't work.
	And as far as I know, again, as far as I know, I don't think that that's changed much since.
	Now, maybe he's got a whole network of people I don't even know about, right?
	I don't know. I mean, I guess he had, what, the intellectual dark web with Sam Harris and Eric Weinstein and Dave Rubin, maybe one or two other people.
	But whatever was going on in that intellectual dark web, it was not enough to help him with whatever he was going through.
	And I think it was a pretty chilly group emotionally.
	And, you know, it was not enough.
	And I think that if you were part of that group and part of that friendship and part of that circle, and one of you fell down in such a cataclysmic way, I think it's really important to look inwards and say, well, I was supposed to be this person's friend, and this is what happened, and they didn't reach out for me, and I maybe didn't reach out to them.
	Like, something's gone really awry in that kind of circle or that kind of friendship if somebody gets almost completely destroyed in such a catastrophic manner.
	Something's not going right.
	And I guess they had a lot of fun intellectual chumminess, but I don't know if they actually had sort of meat and bones of getting through the hellish stuff in life down too much.
	So, I mean, obviously Jordan Peterson hasn't called me and said, you know, you're still standing.
	I mean, I'm not, I'm significantly deplatformed, but I'm not in a coma in Russia.
	And saying, okay, maybe since you've handled fame longer than I have and are still doing well and all of that, is there something that I could learn from you, right?
	I mean, listen, I've learned a lot from Jordan Peterson, and I respect the guy in a lot of ways, and you have, and I'm not trying to put him down.
	I'm really not. I'm just using him as an example of picks or it didn't happen.
	Has Jordan Peterson talked about what caused him to fall apart in such a manner?
	Now, from what I've read or what I've heard, a lot of it is to do with, well, I just got addicted to these drugs, but he knew the drugs were addictive.
	What was it that he was unable to handle his wife's illness?
	And look, I sympathize with the guy about a bazillion percent.
	Sometimes it's easier to be ill, particularly for a man.
	It's easier to be ill than to see someone you love so much become ill.
	But something was not quite right, I think, in those intellectual dark web friendships and relationships, that they weren't there for him.
	For me, my particular approach to friendship and so on is I would just get on a plane and stay with someone if they need my help.
	If there's someone I care about significantly, if they need me, I'm just there, no questions asked, for as long as it takes.
	You know, Mike Cernovich was doing a documentary about I didn't ask for money.
	I didn't ask for travel expenses to be covered.
	I'm like, tell me when and tell me where.
	I will come and I will give you whatever you need.
	And he's like, yeah, maybe you could do the...
	I think it was either Scooter or John's idea to do the...
	It wasn't mine. It's a really great idea.
	It wasn't mine to do Plato's Cave in the cave outside the Hollywood sign.
	But I'm like, yeah, I'll go do it.
	I'll do it. I think it worked out really well, but if you need me, I'm there.
	If I can be of help, I'm there.
	If I can be of service, I'm there.
	I don't know what happened with Jordan Peterson's friendships.
	I don't know whether Sam Harris flew out to spend a week with his friend.
	In the moment of his greatest extremity, I don't know.
	I don't know, obviously, Jordan Peterson's private life.
	I don't know if people like Eric Weinstein or Dave Rubin dropped everything to go and help their friend who was falling into the abyss fingernail by fucking fingernail.
	But I know I would have.
	And I would have never breathed the word of it to anyone.
	I know I talked about this thing with Mike Cernovich because it's a public thing.
	I'm in the movie. You can't hide it, right?
	Another friend of mine asked me to come out and film footage for Thrive 2.
	And I went out and I gave him a lot of time, cut a lot of video, didn't ask for a thing.
	And these are things I can talk about because they've become public.
	There's lots that I don't talk about because it's private.
	And I don't do this for show.
	I don't do this so I can later say, yes, well, I went and helped out and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, right?
	Because that's not the point of friendship is to do things so you can pat yourself on the back in public later, right?
	The point of friendship is you help people.
	You care for someone.
	You help them. Now, I don't know.
	And nobody's asking this question.
	It's weird to me. Nobody's asking this question.
	I don't know if Joe Rogan and Jordan Peterson – they did a bunch of shows together.
	I don't know if Jordan Peterson and Joe Rogan had any kind of acquaintanceship or friendship.
	I know that before Joe Rogan turned on me, he sort of patted me on the back of the parking lot after our second show and said, hey, man, anything can do to help your career.
	You're great. I guess someone got to him, right?
	But I don't know. Did Joe Rogan fly up to help out Jordan Peterson?
	I would. I mean, isn't that the standard if you care about someone?
	I mean, Joe Rogan, Eric Weinstein, Sam Harris, Dave Rubin, they can all afford to take a couple days off or a week off.
	Jesus! They really can!
	And how did he fall with so many people who claimed to be his friends?
	Now, maybe they all did that.
	What do I know, right? I don't know.
	I doubt it. I seriously doubt it.
	Because fame breeds narcissism or narcissism breeds fame.
	I don't know. It's a yin and a yang thing, right?
	But maybe they all did that.
	Maybe they all intellectually dark-webbed their way up and sat around rescuing Jordan Peterson with all of their might and it didn't work anyway.
	I doubt it. I hugely doubt it, but maybe.
	And, you know, there's no way to know because people will never say.
	And it's good if they did that and they don't say anything about it.
	I'm happy to be completely and totally wrong.
	But maybe Jordan Peterson didn't invite that kind of friendship or that kind of aid or that kind of help.
	In which case, when he says we've got something to learn from everybody, it's just not how he lived as far as I can see.
	And again, I just want to reiterate, this is not Hayden Jordan Peterson.
	I like the guy.
	I really do. I admire the guy in many ways.
	I really do. But we do have to, you know, as I'm not his friend, obviously, I'm not even his acquaintance.
	But as Aristotle said about Plato's theories of forms, we must love our friends, but we must love the truth even more.
	And I'm sure that Jordan Peterson would want his The absolute disaster of the last year and this year, I'm sure he would want object lessons to be learned from that because otherwise the suffering is for nothing.
	The near fatal series of events would be for nothing if we didn't learn anything from it.
	And there's something, in my view, there's something wrong with these friendships if somebody can fall that hard or that far.
	We should be caught by those around us.
	We must be caught by those around us.
	It's kind of what you're calling in for, right?
	How do I not fall, right?
	So, And the reason I wanted to spend so much time with it, I didn't want to spend so much time with it, I think it's important though, is you're going to have people come to you like Jordan Peterson said, well, you've got something to learn from everyone.
	Whereas it doesn't seem like Jordan Peterson learned much from anyone.
	Even those significantly more experienced in the troubles he was going through than he was.
	Does he not know anyone whose spouse has had cancer?
	He could call that person up and say, how did you deal with your spouse having cancer?
	Was there not anybody who dealt with fame longer than he had more successfully and dealt with hostility of being anti-collectivist that he could call up and ask for some advice?
	Or was he surrounded by people that he said, well, I can't call these people up because they might go and tweet about it?
	Oh, Peterson is a wreck.
	He caught me up in tears. But then you've got a problem because then you've got people around you can't even trust.
	And then you really fall.
	In which case you say, okay, well, if this guy who's such an expert on relationships has people around him that he doesn't trust, what does that mean?
	What does that mean? What does that mean? Because one of the intellectual dark web fell about as fast and hard and deep as a human being can fall.
	And I don't know that they rushed to his side.
	There are people in this world...
	I kid you not, there are people in this world.
	If they're a coma, if they're in a coma in Russia, I'm going over.
	I mean, not now, as it's COVID, or maybe I would even with COVID. I don't know.
	If it was possible. But you just do it.
	You know, it's an old line, you do for family.
	You do for family. Family asks you, you just do it.
	Now, I don't believe that's true about family because it's not a moral category.
	It's an emotional category.
	It's not a moral category. Because people will tell you what they think you should do all the time.
	Women will tell you you should be attracted to them.
	I'm a swimsuit model all the time.
	This woman who sent you nudes was saying you should be attracted to me.
	I'm an easy lay. I'm diseased.
	That's what I would hear. Spiritually and probably got crotch rock that would kill a gator.
	Maybe even a gator in there somewhere.
	I don't know. Pretty swampy.
	People will be telling you what you should do all the time.
	Because that's how we control each other.
	We create a should and ought, an order, something that's aspirational.
	And Dr.
	Dr. Peterson did that with you.
	Everyone has something to teach you.
	And women will do this.
	I'm attractive. I'm desirable.
	I have value. You should want me.
	That's what makeup is.
	That's what girdles are. That's what working out is a lot of times.
	You should want me.
	I have value.
	Right? And 99% of it, and I'm not kidding you about that, 99% Of it is total horseshit.
	It's total horseshit.
	Clean your room, dot dot, out of benzodiazepines.
	I have value because I have skin.
	I mean, can you imagine?
	I'm sorry, don't mean to laugh.
	Can you imagine seeing that?
	On an OkCupid or Plenty of Fish account?
	Joanna! I have skin!
	No picture!
	Nothing else! I have skin!
	Would you click on that?
	I would click on it sooner than someone who clearly doesn't have skin.
	Well, that's fair.
	I don't have skin.
	Call 911. Sorry.
	But, you know, she sends you the nudes, what she's saying.
	I have skin. I have dermis.
	I have skin.
	Right? I am a sultry skin bag, or a sultry bag of skin, whichever way you want to play it.
	And she's saying, you ought to desire me, and I'm going to bypass your rational self and hook directly into your reproduction-obsessed reptile brain.
	I can't do anything with your brain, but I can tweak your hormones into thinking I have value, right?
	And it's an old thing. It's a saying.
	I don't know if it's still in vogue.
	Probably not anymore. But the saying goes something like this.
	I can't hear what you're saying over what you're doing.
	You ever heard that? It sounds vaguely familiar.
	Right. So.
	Red flags. Red flags.
	Okay. Overt sexual.
	Presentation. Overt sexual presentation is a giant red flag.
	There's a line in my novel, Almost.
	I'm going to keep pimping this.
	Sorry, folks. It's just too good not to.
	I owe it to the book and to the characters and the story.
	Where can we go to listen to it?
	I'm sorry? Where can we go to listen to it?
	Thank you, my friend. freedom.com forward slash almost.
	Wherein one character is described as a living manifestation of the lesson that men always seem to forget, that sexy now means bitchy later.
	And it's true. And the reasons why it's true, I don't want to, you know, massive monologue the whole evening, but overt sexual presentation.
	And by that, I also mean...
	Significant makeup. Look, I don't mind makeup as a little polish up.
	I don't mind makeup as a little touch of something, something.
	I don't mind that at all. But if it's significant or heavy, no.
	There's some really forgettable Anna Faris movie where she wakes up next to some guy and she slips out of bed and puts on her makeup and dusts her hair and then slides back into bed and pretends that's how she just wakes up.
	That's terrifying. That's about as valuable as that really terrible mail manipulation thing of saying to the woman, hey, I'll give you my number.
	And what you've done earlier is you've gone through the garbage at a bank machine and you found a deposit with lots of money.
	And you just pretend it's one of your bank machine receipts and it's got like a million dollars in it.
	You can probably find something like that, I suppose, in the trash somewhere.
	I'm not saying do it. And then what you do is you just rewrite your number, and if the woman ever turns it over and sees that you have a lot of money, she's like, oh, I should call this guy, right?
	That's as sad as that, right?
	So, yeah, overt sexual presentation.
	I happened to read an advice column.
	Now, you've got to stay away from advice columns these days because they're also rampantly degenerate.
	It makes the Weimar Republic look like a nun's abbey of purity.
	It's so degenerate what people are asking about these days.
	And one of them was like, well, my frenemy sent me an explicit selfie.
	Now, of course, I'm a pretty innocent guy in the ways of these things because I'm happily married.
	So I think, oh, topless picture.
	Nope. It was an identified penis in this woman with ejaculate all over her face saying, all for me.
	That's what passes for explicit these days.
	Oh, God. It certainly is in the category of explicit, just a little bit further along the lines of explicit than I would have conceived of, although I guess it's not really an act of conception, but you know what I mean.
	There was that, there was...
	Oh, gosh. Oh, yeah, there was another one which was a lesbian bed-death one.
	You know, lesbians don't have sex.
	The movies are all lies.
	And there was another one which was like, oh, I'm dating this really cute guy.
	He says he's in an open marriage, but he only meets me in parking lots, and it's very rare, and he always jumps up and leaves whenever his wife calls.
	So I don't know if he really is in an open marriage or not.
	Right? It's so vile.
	It's all so vile.
	But, yeah, the overt sexual presentation is, I don't have value.
	And I'm addicted to attention.
	And they'll make you pay.
	They'll make you pay harder than getting married to Meghan Trainor.
	I just happened to hear her song to my future husband on the radio today, and I literally almost drove into a tree because that would be preferable to getting married to someone that selfish and narcissistic.
	You can never disagree with me.
	I'm always right. I don't know how to cook.
	Buy me stuff. Jesus.
	Talk about vagina dentata is the idea that the vagina has teeth and eats men.
	Yeah, it's kind of true for a lot of women, so...
	Yeah, overt sexual presentation for sure.
	Overt flirtiness, absolutely the case.
	Overt flirtiness, there's nothing wrong with a little bit of saucy flirting and stuff like that.
	It's great, a little bit of spice in life.
	But overt flirtiness, oh yeah, that's not good.
	Another is a lack of consideration early on in the relationship.
	A lack of consideration early on in the relationship is always a warning sign.
	And it's more than a red flag.
	It's like a get out red flag.
	You know, on your first date, she's 20 minutes late and barely apologizes, if at all.
	No, no, no. That's a power play, right?
	She's saying that I need to establish dominance early on in the relationship, and you want to get out before she uses the entire fucking legal system and every corrupt judge known to man in the family court system to establish dominance over you for 20 years.
	So, yeah, the establishment of dominance, no.
	If she likes you, And she doesn't tell you, then she's a liar.
	If she likes you and she doesn't tell you, then she's a liar.
	When my wife and I, we ended up going out accidentally.
	We were supposed to go out with the whole volleyball team.
	Everybody else backed out, so it was just her and I, which I'm incredibly grateful for in hindsight, of course.
	And she emailed me the next day and said, had a really great time.
	I'd like to do it again. And we've barely been apart for 20 years, almost.
	And it's great. So, if she plays hard to get, if there's games, if she doesn't reply, if she, you know, oh, I'm busy because she wants to make the appearance, if she's in demand, it's like, no, no, forget it.
	Hey, if I'm not, if you can't see the value in me, I can't, there is no value in you.
	I mean, this is a statement of supreme self-confidence.
	And I'll say this to all of my listeners, you men, you women are golden gods of this planet.
	You are incredible catches.
	You are not even diamonds in the rough.
	You're diamonds in the crown, my friends.
	You are stellar.
	You're thoughtful.
	You're intelligent. You're verbal.
	You're educated in emotions.
	You're educated in communications.
	You're educated in honesty and integrity and virtue and truth.
	You are the golden god's Of the dating world.
	Now you could say, oh, but that's vain, isn't it?
	No. It's honest.
	It's honest. Vain is when you only have value because other people think you do.
	I'm telling you guys, you have great value.
	You hear me, James? You have enormous value.
	You are the top 1% of the 1% of the 1% of the 1%.
	What is that, one in 10,000?
	You have the guts to stick with a conversation that has been significantly demonized.
	You have the integrity to decide for yourself the value of what it is that we do here and not be told by people with a bad agenda how bad we all are.
	You have honor.
	You have depth. You have passion.
	You have independent thought.
	But when I say I love you guys, like I'm not kidding.
	I mean, I know it sounds like some coked-up, hurt-tolic nonsense, but I mean it.
	I absolutely, completely, and totally mean it.
	I admire you guys. I respect you guys.
	I honor you guys. As the old Sandra Oh, it's not Sandra Bernhardt.
	Sarah Bernhardt. No, Sandra Bernhardt.
	Sorry, not Sarah Bernhardt. She's the old actress.
	Sandra Bernhardt had a documentary, Without You I'm Nothing.
	And it was about... I never watched it, but the title, I think it was about being a comedian.
	Now, it's kind of true with a comedian in that if there's no audience, there's no jokes, there's no laughter, there's none of that, right?
	I get all of that. But the public projection of this philosophy...
	Look, if everything stops tomorrow, for whatever reason, right?
	If everything stops tomorrow with what it is that I'm doing, I will have always been incredibly grateful and proud and honored by the value which we as a community have brought to the world.
	You know, people are still reading philosophy from thousands of years ago.
	This is going to be how this rolls.
	I know it. I know it.
	Oh, that's vainglorious.
	It's like... Vainglorious is just a word that insecure people use to hide their own fear of ambition.
	Of course you aim for the highest.
	Of course you aim for the top. I'll tell you this.
	They'll be talking about the philosophy we talk about here a lot longer than they'll be talking about some politician's platform.
	You name me... Five senators from the last hundred years of the Roman Empire.
	I bet you can't. Maybe you get one or two if you're pretty well educated in the subject.
	But what was the platform of the third most popular senator in ancient Greece in the year 300 BC? Nobody knows.
	Nobody remembers. Nobody cares. If that stuff's preserved, it's in some ridiculously dusty tome somewhere written about by one graduate student in a hundred years.
	They don't care. Nobody cares about that stuff.
	Who was the most popular athlete in the Middle Roman Empire?
	You don't know. You don't care.
	But we're still talking about Marcus Aurelius, right?
	Still talking about Seneca.
	Even Solon at the Laws.
	And we're still talking about Socrates and Plato and Aristotle.
	And Jesus. A man who was not unfamiliar with universalizing moral principles.
	And this great glory and treasure that the future is going to pour over and absorb and compare and contrast.
	This is one of the reasons I strive to be so consistent, is that we'll be graduate students writing about me in the future, comparing and contrasting my positions 14 years apart, trying to make sense of them.
	Hell, there are people doing that even now.
	And you've made this conversation possible.
	Because the public aspect of this conversation And that's the aspect that helps the future, not just my life or your life in the present.
	That's the aspect that helps the future, that's documented and permanent for everyone to see and hear.
	The true projecting of medicine down the gullet of the future only happens because of you.
	I would have philosophy for me, but we together deliver philosophy to the future, and I thank you for that enormously.
	And I don't know if you guys get a sense of just what a big part you're playing in the evolution of All of us.
	You're not spectators.
	You're not bystanders.
	It's not happening to you.
	You are directly involved and part of it.
	You are directly involved and part of it.
	And you will be honored.
	I mean, not now. I get it.
	Not now. Right?
	Popularity with the present is always invisibility to the future.
	Because the people who are popular are paid for.
	You can get paid $100 million.
	But that just means you'll be erased in the future.
	And in fact, they're paying you to be erased in the future.
	So, When people who listen to this show and participate in this conversation, they call me up and they're like, well, I may only be a 7 out of 10.
	I'm like, dude, please, please, please, I'm begging you, adjust your scale.
	Honor your greatness. Honor your depth.
	Honor your clarity. Honor everything that you've learned and everything you participated in and everything that you have created.
	Please, honor the golden God within you.
	It's bigger than me. It's bigger than you.
	It's philosophy. We are merely its humble servants.
	And it can be a bit of a taskmaster at times, but that's the nature of the beast.
	So you, as a male, and I'll shut up, I promise, in just a second, but you, as a male, are programmed to pussybag.
	Programmed to pussybag.
	It's a supply and demand phenomenon because more women than men reproduce throughout history, many more.
	And also, it's become completely pathological now because the taming of hypergamy is the essence of civilization.
	If you can't tame hypergamy, you don't have a civilization at all.
	Because women refuse to settle down.
	They bounce from man to man, always trying to trade up, always distracted by something else.
	They can't fight that urge. Most can't fight that urge.
	And because the alpha males are very few, they're constantly bouncing around trying to trade up, and they blow their fertility.
	They end up maybe as desperate single moms, which kills the transmission of manly virtues, which are the essence of modern civilization from generation to generation.
	If you can't curb and control and contain women's hypergamy, the desire to trade up, you have no civilization.
	I mean, you can see this happening in Sweden.
	Sweden's lasted for 800 years, and it lasted barely a few decades after women got the vote.
	Because when women get the vote, what they vote for, on average, in general, is, I never want to suffer for hypogamy.
	I never, ever want to suffer for hypogamy.
	But of course, if you don't suffer for hypogamy, hypogamy becomes a cancer that swells and grows and eats your entire body politic, your entire society, your civilization, and everything that it represents.
	If I happen to bang a quality guy or a high-status guy or a handsome guy or a player or an alpha and he leaves me, well, shit, you've got to give me money.
	My hypergamy fucked up?
	Well, I don't want to suffer for it.
	In fact, I want to be rewarded for it.
	I want to be rewarded for hypergamy.
	Not only do I not want to suffer, you've got to pay me for trading up and trying to aim too high.
	Right now? That's bad.
	That's very, very bad.
	Indeed. So, now, with the dating apps, it's gone nuclear.
	We have thermonuclear hypogamy going on at the moment.
	And it's not just me talking about this.
	Women are talking about this quite a bit, too.
	Because women are saying, oh my God, I can't stop chasing male attention!
	I can't settle down!
	I can't make a choice! Every man I want to settle down with feels like I'm settling for.
	It's a disaster.
	It's terrible. And men have been trained to control their sexuality by negative consequences.
	Divorce, being beaten up by other men.
	We're banging their wives. But women not only have not been taught how to curb hypergamy, but they're being rewarded, programmed to, and trained as part of a pretty sustained effort to destroy our civilization, which is sadly proving pretty successful at the moment.
	So... I just...
	To honor what you've done in the realm of philosophy, what you've done in the realm of self-knowledge.
	This is the best conversation in the world.
	I believe that with every single fiber of my soul.
	This is not only the best conversation in the world, this is the greatest conversation there's ever been.
	Because everything that comes after this will have this as a template, an example.
	The breadth and the depth of the topics we cover here.
	The joy, the humor, the passion, the commitment, the wisdom, the anxiety, the fear, the punishment, there's nothing like it.
	Never has been and never will be again.
	The second ship that breaks through the ice, well, it has quite a bit easier of time.
	So, if you believe what I'm saying, I think I made a pretty good case.
	On a scale of 1 to 10, what are you worth to a quality woman?
	I feel torn with the leading question to the 10.
	What's wrong with 10? I... There's not necessarily something wrong with 10.
	Maybe it's just my rebel instincts.
	No, no. I'm asking you to rebel against 7.
	Your rebel instincts are cheering me on, my friend.
	I think...
	Are you smart?
	Of course you are.
	You're smart. Are you reasonably knowledgeable when it comes to self-knowledge?
	I think so. I think that what we've talked about here for many years does a pretty good job of that.
	It doesn't mean you're perfect. I'm not perfect, but pretty good, right?
	I could tell you're a good listener because I've been talking for a while.
	You've trained me well.
	Why not a 10? Oh, well, I don't connect with people, but that's why I zeroed in on you thinking everyone has something to teach you.
	No, they don't. Not a value.
	Not a value. Listen, Jordan Peterson taught me stuff of real value.
	Noam Chomsky has taught me stuff of real value.
	A wide variety of other intellectuals have taught me stuff of real value.
	So of course people can teach you stuff of real value.
	But your average person?
	Come on. The lead singer of Marillion, I think it was, used to tour with Queen at some point and would just sit there watching Freddie Mercury work the audience in despair.
	I think he was fairly successful.
	He Knows You Know is a pretty good song.
	But why not ten?
	You understand? It would be entirely dishonorable if you were close to ten and pegged yourself as a seven.
	And I think that you think of yourself as a seven because you say, well, I'm awkward with dull people who don't have anything to teach me.
	Well, of course you are! But you think that lowers you?
	No. The thing that I feel like an impulse to say, and it also seems like a defense mechanism, is I think there are legitimate things that I can work on that are things that are a barrier to me to being a 10.
	Ah, that's a brilliant objection and completely wrong.
	I know you're smart. Because you think you have to get to be a 10.
	But that's not...
	10 is not a thing.
	It's not a destination. It's not a place.
	It's not an achievement. 10 is a process.
	10 is a process.
	Are you willing to admit that you're wrong?
	When you're wrong? Yes.
	That means you're a 10. Now, if you think being a 10 means never being wrong, you're wrong.
	Yeah. Because if being a 10 is being perfect, it means you can't be completed by anyone.
	No one has anything to offer you and you can't be loved because you're a god.
	My wife sets me straight.
	My friends set me straight.
	My daughter sets me straight.
	And I do the same.
	Does that mean I'm imperfect?
	No. I'm a 10.
	Because I'm willing to be set straight, and I'm willing to set people straight.
	I'm willing to be corrected, and I'm willing to correct, and I'm willing to think.
	But 10 is not a destination.
	You get to be 10, and that's it.
	You're 10. No. Because if you're 10, it's the way you think it, then no one has anything to teach you.
	You're perfect, and you can't. No one can love you.
	Love has to have an impact on you that's positive, which means it helps you at Improves you somehow, right?
	So if you think that you can't be loved until you're perfect, you're saying, well, I can't be loved until it's impossible to love me.
	Ten is a process.
	By calling into this show and saying, how do I improve, you're a ten!
	Do you see what I mean? Yeah, that's definitely something that you and a few other people Have taught me is the process versus the product thing.
	And I think particularly that's something that it's part of why I value self-knowledge so much is...
	No, no. You just totally cock-blocked the insight.
	Yeah. That's a rude way of putting it.
	I just told you, you're not a 7, you're a 10, and you're windbagging about something somewhat related but not emotionally impactful.
	Mm-hmm. I just maxed out your sexual market value with a pretty good argument, right?
	And I'm trying to continue to argue as to why you're wrong.
	Right. Which means that you don't want to be wrong about being a 7.
	And that's why you think you're a 7.
	Because you won't sit there and say, damn.
	Damn, that's a good argument, Steph.
	Now, hey, I could be wrong.
	Maybe you'll wake up tomorrow with a perfect counter-argument, but right now...
	I kind of hit that one out of the park, right?
	And you're like, I don't want to admit that I'm wrong.
	I don't want to admit that I could be a 10.
	Ooh, ooh, 10.
	That's bad, right?
	And so instead, you went back at me about, oh, yes, well, I, of course, have had this insight before.
	People have told me this before.
	I perfectly understand that, right?
	Right after you just told me you're a seven.
	And I say this with love and respect.
	I really do, man. Because what I see, and you know I have a commitment to honesty.
	That doesn't mean I'm right, but it means that I'm telling you what I genuinely think.
	A woman who cannot see the quality of who you are doesn't deserve you.
	What if you're a 10?
	What if you get to be picky?
	Like, that's a weird thing for a man, right?
	What if you get to be picky?
	I mean, listen, if you want to attract a woman and you understand hypergamy, can I tell you a secret?
	It's not going to be a secret now.
	I would love that. So when I first met my wife shortly after the woman who is now my wife, and she said, well, what do you want to do with your life?
	And back then I was writing fiction.
	And I said, I want to be, I'm happy with number three.
	And she said, well, what do you mean?
	And I said, look, Shakespeare, Dickens, Molyneux.
	I'm okay with number three.
	Obviously, I'd like to be number one, but I'm not going to touch Shakespeare.
	And as far as being prolific and being successful, I'm not going to touch Dickens.
	But I could do three.
	I'm okay with the bronze.
	I'm okay with the bronze. But that's what I'm aiming for.
	Now, of course, I can hear the world gasping.
	I love the word gasping, right?
	But why the fuck would you want to do something and not aim for the top?
	Now, you'd be mad ambitious.
	Thank you.
	You'd just solve the problem of hypergamy.
	You understand? Why is that?
	Because... I want to say...
	Because...
	I don't know. I'm trying to relate it to the process thing.
	No, no. Forget the process. This is a different thing.
	Yeah. She can't trade up if I'm third because the other two guys are fucking dead.
	If you think you're a 10, you get to be choosy.
	It communicates itself in an unconscious fashion.
	Because women want to trade up and they can't go higher than 10.
	Do you see what I'm saying? If you think you're a 7, you may get a woman but you won't keep her.
	We honor women in our ambitions and we attract women in our ambitions.
	Because I can't tell you how to choose women if you don't have much choice, right?
	If you feel, well, I'm a seven, you know, I gotta...
	I mean, to take an extreme analogy, it's like some guy rooting through garbage for dinner saying, what should I choose to eat?
	I don't know, whatever is not moldy.
	Whatever is still there, right?
	There's no menu there, right?
	It's just whatever scraps you can pick up.
	So if you want to find red flags and pick out red flags, you have to be confident that you can attract women to the point where you can reject women left, right, and center to get to the one who's great.
	And to do that, you've got to be a 10.
	Now, a 10 doesn't mean that you have to have my skills or my ambitions.
	There's nothing like that. It's an old Grace Jones song, I'm not perfect, but I'm perfect for you.
	You got to be a 10 for her.
	If a woman sent me nudes, do you know what I would write back?
	Oh, for God's sakes, woman, put some clothes on and have some self-respect.
	Correct her.
	Put her in her place.
	Thank you.
	Do you see what I mean? Keep this trash out of my inbox.
	The fact that you have skin is not a value to me.
	Go peddle this to some idiot guy who's got about 100 times more hormones than brains.
	But keep this trash out of my inbox.
	I am a great partner.
	Thank you.
	I've been studying relationships, communication, peaceful parenting.
	I'm not going to be the wealthiest guy in the world.
	I'm not going to run a bank.
	But I'm going to be a great husband and father.
	Here's a really practical little tip.
	When I was very young, I would ask girls out, I would say, will you go to the movies with me, or can we go to the movies together, right?
	And, you know, 50-50.
	Do you know how I got it up to like 95% women going out with me?
	Instead of asking a woman...
	No, instead of asking a woman to go to a movie, I would say, I'm going to go and see this movie Friday night.
	Would you like to come? Now, why is that more attractive?
	I've used that trick before. Why is that more attractive, though?
	It's important to know why.
	Because you are doing something interesting.
	You're doing something that you're going to enjoy.
	She can come along for it.
	She's not the decision maker in whether or not you're going to have a good time on Friday.
	Oh, but you're going to go. Because women...
	The fundamental nature of womanhood is the man has to go be successful in order for me to have food, drink, and shelter for the kids.
	He's got to go out there and succeed in the world.
	So I'm going to do this thing, I would like you to come, is a whole lot different and hits a woman on a whole different level than you get to determine what I do in the future.
	And it's not like a little verbal trick here.
	I mean, I would just change.
	But understand, I love my wife, but my ambition, I think, had a lot to do with why she chose me.
	Now, someone comes along and says, I'm aiming for glory.
	Thank you.
	And glory could be anything.
	It doesn't have to be me, Dickens, and Shakespeare or whatever, right?
	And yeah, of course, of course I want to be better than Socrates.
	I want to. I'm not saying I am.
	I want to. Of course I want to be better.
	Well, of course. Socrates would not respect me if I didn't.
	Do you don't think Socrates wanted to be better than the people who came before him?
	Known in a big giant anonymous bag as the pre-Socratics?
	Of course he wanted to be better.
	That's why he's known. And Socrates would stare at me across the table and maybe he'd think I was, probably would think I wasn't, but he sure as hell would respect that that's what I was aiming for because that's what the hell he did.
	You don't think Aristotle wanted to be better than Plato or Plato wanted to be better than Socrates?
	Of course. Of course.
	Your ambition could be I'm going to be the best father.
	Your ambition could be I'm going to be the best husband.
	Your ambition could be I'm going to be a great homestead farmer.
	Your ambition could be I'm going to create a great game for the iPod.
	iPad or whatever, right?
	Whatever your glory is going to be, I'm going to make the funniest Let's Plays.
	Whatever your glory is going to be, aim high.
	And the women who have self-respect will be attracted to you.
	Now, the other women will try and claw you down using their sexuality.
	They will try and tempt you from the path.
	This is an old analogy, a story, a metaphor, an analogy, or a story.
	It's a mythology, which is something like this, that a man can achieve greatness and a woman will kill him through sexuality.
	It's a Seinfeld episode where George stops having sex and becomes super smart.
	Now, that's not because sex is bad or wrong or anything like that or some manipulative tool of women.
	It can be, but it's because if you aim for glory, you get the great partner, you get the wonderful sex life, you get all of this stuff.
	But if you aim for the sex, you get nothing.
	Nothing! You don't get glory, you don't get love, you don't get happiness, and you sure as hell don't end up getting sex.
	Because a woman will lose respect for you.
	Sex is a woman's gift to you for ambition.
	You aim for the ambition.
	The sex is the shadow cast by the ambition.
	You aim for the glory.
	You aim for excellence.
	And the sex...
	Well, it's like kids in an ice cream truck, right?
	Be ambitious.
	Be ambitious. And if you are chasing a woman, she knows you're going to lose in the world, and she will lose respect for you, and you won't get to sex anyway.
	You may get a little bit at the beginning so she can show her dominance and power over you, and she's broken another man, but no, that's not how women work.
	And all these one or two people in the chat say, oh, I haven't dated in 11 years.
	Well, aren't you the selfish bastard, my friend?
	Go date. What are you doing?
	Are you just enjoying all the evolutionary fruits that your ancestors gave you and then hoarding them for yourself because it's kind of dangerous out there?
	Oh, there are family courts, there's hypergamy, there's divorce.
	Yeah, absolutely. You know what there isn't though?
	Fucking typhus and bison and tigers and war and disease, much famine.
	Your ancestors faced down infinitely worse things than a corrupt family court system and reproduced to have you, and you're hoarding all this glory of your hyper-intelligent genes because you listen to this show, so you're very smart.
	You're hoarding all of that, and you're taking what?
	Is that an admission of pride that you haven't dated in 11 years?
	You owe it to the future To have some kids.
	If you can, if you can, and you can still have a productive life, but do something of virtue for the world.
	If it's not having kids, then do something.
	But if you haven't dated in 11 years, dust off the balls and go make some future.
	So when I wrote the question of, like, let's come up with the list, I knew somewhere in there was the, like, I'm sure you could imagine that a lot of I knew somewhere in there was the, like, I'm sure you could imagine that a lot of us that listen to can we just get a list that we can look at?
	But having listened to enough of these calls, I also knew, like, if we don't get to a list, it's probably for the best, because I probably don't actually need the list.
	Well, there's no point saying here's how to be picky if you're not in demand.
	Yeah. Like somebody says to me, well, how can I choose the very best employer?
	I say, well, how many job offers do you have?
	One. What happens if you don't take it?
	I starve. Okay, well, then there's no point talking about how to find the best employer because you can only choose one, right?
	Yep. So my goal is to raise the demand for you and to give you the tools to succeed in the dating market.
	Have some respect for yourself.
	Of course you're a 10. Of course you're a 10.
	Listen. You're 27?
	Yep. You are smarter and wiser than I was at your age.
	And I thought I was a 10 and I wasn't as smart and wise as you.
	So why can't you be a tent?
	I can be.
	I am.
	Yes. Do you have any idea what your golden glory is going to be?
	What's your bronze, your silver, or your gold?
	Yeah, actually, the three things that I want to be are a father, an entrepreneur, and a philosopher.
	Yes. Those are categories, not aspirations.
	Yeah. How good do you want to be?
	Well, I want to be at least one of the best, if not the best fathers.
	I don't need to be Henry Ford or Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg or insert your famous entrepreneur here, but I will make enough money to not have to worry about it.
	I think this was years ago now, so I'm going to admit something that has been near and dear to my heart for a while.
	But I remember you talking about being one of the best philosophers in the bronze medal stuff.
	So I wanted to be like Aristotle, Molyneux, Alex.
	That's beautiful, man.
	That's beautiful. And I'll tell you this too.
	You don't as yet know how great you can be.
	So prejudging how great you can be, and again, great doesn't mean the size of your wallet.
	You know, it's not like, I mean, poor Jeff Bezos, right?
	I mean, how much money did he have to give his ex-wife?
	I mean, that's a pretty miserable existence.
	I think it was like $40 billion or something like that.
	That's insane. Insane.
	Vagina dentard at you and right through your bank account.
	And, you know, divorce is brutal and I think there are kids involved.
	It's awful. It's awful all around.
	But I am far from the peak of my powers.
	I've got a long way to go.
	I'm still a long way from what I can do.
	I'm still...
	I've still got so far to improve.
	I don't yet know what I'm capable of.
	After I've been working in philosophy, on and off, mostly on now, for almost 40 years, I still...
	Have such a gap between what I conceive of and what I can communicate.
	It's still so far.
	It closes. It gets closer.
	I had a pretty good eruption on the Wednesday night live stream.
	But I'm still far from my glory.
	Penultimate glory. The meridian.
	The top. But the glory is the process.
	I'm still working to get there.
	I'm still working to improve.
	I'm still striving for competence.
	And that's the beauty of ambition.
	Because a lack of ambition is vanity.
	I know this sounds weird, but it's true.
	A lack of ambition is vanity because you don't know what you're capable of.
	A lack of ambition says, well, I know from now until the day I die what I'm capable of.
	That's bullshit. A, you don't know what you're capable of, and B, you don't know what amazing technology is going to be out there that's going to allow you to do what you do.
	You don't know. The internet built me as a philosopher because I could finally speak to the masses, the first real time in history that intellectuals could speak to the masses without interference.
	And I would have told Jordan Peterson, don't get dragged into the mainstream.
	Don't get dragged into the mainstream.
	Whatever you do, don't get dragged into the mainstream.
	And I get emails from people, hey, I want to put you on a documentary.
	I want to put you on this big podcast.
	I want to put you on TV. I want to do that.
	I'm like, nope. Oh, man, I want to interview you.
	I'm more sympathetic than those other reporters.
	Nope. Nope, nope, nope.
	Oh, I'm tempted. I'm tempted.
	I'm human. I could have told them.
	Whatever you do, stay away from the mainstream, man.
	They will tear you apart.
	They are jackals.
	They'll lure you in. Wow, that's a lot of views on that video.
	Wow, that's a big publishing contract.
	Wow, that's a world tour of speaking.
	That's kind of what the devil does.
	Offers you a lot of cool stuff and then destroys you.
	And for a guy who's got entire series on the Bible, I don't think he really understood the whole Satan thing very well.
	And I'm so sorry.
	I don't mean to compare reporters to Satan.
	That's totally unfair because Satan is mythological.
	Reporters are very real. But I could have told him this is Icarus and the sun is popularity, publicity.
	And I lord your ambition.
	I think it's fantastic.
	And everyone out there who's listening to this, who's afraid to be ambitious, well, you're afraid to outstrip petty people around you who will try to destroy you because if you succeed where they failed or they didn't even try, then you stand as a reproach to their cowardice.
	You know, it's the bird that rises that gets shot at, right?
	So for those of you out there, you're just not striving.
	You're not... You don't have grand goals.
	You don't know what the hell you're capable of.
	And to think that you do is vanity of the first order.
	And... You know, people say mankind fears the unknown like it's a dark forest or a deep lake or we fear the unknown.
	No, no, no, no. The only thing we fundamentally fear other than death is our own greatness, our own capacity for depth and brilliance.
	That's what we fear the most.
	Because death is an end to suffering.
	but the reproach of the cowardly and resentful masses to those who aim high and achieve or fail.
	They don't even wait for you to fail.
	Well, they can make your life hell long before you die.
	Thank you.
	And we know that a lot of people fear torture more than death because they'll choose to kill themselves rather than continue to be tortured.
	I definitely feel some of that fear in saying I'm a 10 and not a 7.
	Right. Right. Right.
	I understand that.
	I understand that.
	And I sympathize.
	I really do.
	But you have to.
	Because you won't be happy any other way.
	You know, the moment that you...
	The moment that you even think in terms of big ambitions, you're doomed.
	You're doomed. You're doomed.
	I remember seeing a movie a long time ago.
	It was a black guy. I actually watched it a couple of times.
	It was a black guy. I can't remember the name of it.
	Hollywood Shuffle, maybe? And it was about the cliches the black actor's face.
	In Hollywood, but it's about more than that.
	And there was a barber in the movie who talked about wanting to be a singer when he was younger.
	And there's this honeyed voice that plays across the sound of the movie.
	Sounds lovely. And he's just a barber.
	Now, there are some people who are just barbers, and that's fine.
	Their excellence is barber.
	Their glory is being a barber.
	That's fine. But the moment you sit there and say, wow, I could be a...
	Oh, you're doomed. You're doomed.
	Because if you say, like the moment you say, I could be a...
	I should be a...
	I have something to give.
	Well, welcome to the hope and torture of your existence.
	That's how it's going to be for you.
	You either achieve it, Or fail, but try.
	Or you're doomed. So, you gotta try.
	The trying and the failing doesn't matter that much.
	You know, because it's all about the story of the future.
	I mean, just personally, and I'll sort of close on this note.
	But it's all about the story for the future, too.
	It's really, really important to understand, right?
	So I get kicked off all these platforms.
	What does that add to the story of the future about what we're doing here?
	You understand it adds a note, a significant note of glory.
	A significant note of glory.
	It adds significantly to the drama.
	And drama not like in a petty way, but in a very deep and powerful way.
	Does, you know, did Socrates getting killed add to the story of Socrates?
	It sure as hell did. Does us getting socially attacked add to the story of what we're doing here in the future?
	It certainly does.
	But that's how you deal with adversity.
	Adversity is just in the now, and that passes.
	The glory, ah, the glory is forever.
	And we don't remember, Miletus was his name, but we don't remember many of the people who brought action against Socrates.
	please.
	Or if we do, we remember them with contempt.
	But we sure as hell remember Socrates.
	And it is far better to suffer wrong than to do wrong, and certainly better for the story of the future.
	And I'll close with a quote from Hamlet.
	Sorry, but before I do, I know I talked a lot, and I do apologize for that.
	I hope it's helpful.
	But what do you think about what I'm saying in terms of how you can approach these issues?
	I think two things.
	One, the vote of support is appreciated.
	Definitely feels to me like the thing I needed versus the thing I asked for.
	And the other thing is I feel like I feel kind of nervous and afraid to lean into that, but I'm going to.
	I imagine There are times when I'm in scenarios like these that it's kind of like I've been drowning and I get this gasp of air that's like, oh, I can just be done.
	I can just be with this woman and have sex with her and not have to worry about it and do all the work to be ambitious, find and keep a good woman.
	Yeah. And accepting that that's not the case is like feeling yourself getting plunged back underneath the waves.
	Right. Right.
	But it's worth it. Yeah, you've got to claw your way out of the general goop of invisibility of conformist humanity.
	Help me out, brothers. There's a quote.
	I'm butchering it. It's from Hamlet, which I kind of wanted to close on.
	So if you could give me this quote, I would be eternally grateful.
	And for those of you who have literary thoughts, the quote is something like about You know, it's better to get a good reporting from the poets of your age than just about anything else.
	I think it's Hamlet's talking about when the stage players come.
	Oh, this language.
	Oh my gosh. So good.
	I have of late, but wherefore I know not.
	Lost all my mirth.
	Forgone all custom of exercises.
	And indeed it goes so heavily with my disposition that this goodly frame, the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory.
	This most excellent canopy of the air, look you, this brave o'erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire, why it appears no other thing to me than a foul and pestilent congregation of vapors.
	What a piece of work is a man.
	How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty, in form and moving, how express and admirable in action, how like an angel in apprehension, how like a god, the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals.
	And yet, to me, What is this quintessence of dust?
	Man delights not me.
	No, nor women neither, though while you're smiling, you seem to say so.
	Oh, that language.
	See, this is why I'm happy for bronze, right?
	There you go. After your death, you were better have a bad epitaph than their ill report while you live.
	Yes, after your...
	He's talking about the playwrights. Thank you so much.
	After your death...
	You better have a bad epitaph than their ill report while you live.
	Thank you. That's perfect.
	That's perfect. Epitaph, I was thinking.
	I knew the word report was somewhere in there, so thank you so much.
	I appreciate that. And I have something to trim.
	Anyway, no biggie. So thanks everyone so much.
	Freedomain.com forward slash donate.
	Great show. Please, my friend, keep me posted.
	Step forward into the world with confidence, solve hypergamy with ambition, and be in a position of choice.
	And it shall then follow as night follows day.
	To thine own self be true, and then it shall follow as night follows day.
	That canst not be false to any man.
	There's another bit from Hamlet from a very unwise courtier.
	All right. Thanks, my friends.
	Love you so much. I've been working fairly hard today, so if anybody wants to take a break with a bit of Among Us, you can kick me off and listen to me whine.
	All right. Lots of love. Take care.
	Step out. 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.
	To help out the show, to give me the resources that I need to bring more and better philosophy to an increasingly desperate world.
	So thank you so much for your support, my friends.

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