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May 28, 2021 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

01:59:57

HOW TO JUMP START YOUR LIFE!

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	Let's get straight on to the belly of the beast, shall we?
	I want to talk to you about morality.
	So why are various isms so violent?
	Why are fascism, communism, socialism, why are they so violent?
	And why does violence tend to escalate and increase in the world as ideology takes over?
	And I'll tell you why. Bitcoin is going up again, Steph was right.
	Yeah, generally. There are worse bets in the world than assuming I'm correct.
	So, yeah, now apparently it's okay to look into the China virus coming out of the Wuhan lab.
	Apparently that's a thing again.
	I did the case against China, oh gosh, well over 13, 14 months ago.
	So... What I really want to get across at this point very, very clearly to you is really, really important.
	Morality is violence.
	Morality is violence.
	And what I mean by that, not that all violence is moral, but all morality justifies the use of force.
	All morality justifies the use of force.
	If you're a woman and you have the moral right to not be raped, very good, then of course you are perfectly legitimate in using force to prevent from being raped.
	If you have the moral right to not be assaulted, then you have the right to use force to prevent yourself from being assaulted.
	If you have the right to not be murdered, to not be stolen from, you have the right to use force to prevent that.
	So, whatever we define as the moral Is what we give permission to use violence in the pursuit of or defense of that principle.
	Morality is violence.
	And again, that's not to say that the two are completely synonymous, because you can have just self-defense, which is the use of violence to defend your moral rights, and that's perfectly fine.
	But, but, but...
	When people talk about morality, they're talking about justified violence.
	So, what is the morality that reduces the amount of violence in the world?
	What is the morality that reduces the amount of violence in the world?
	Well, clearly it has to be reactionary morality, and it has to be case-limited morality.
	So if you were to say, it's immoral for it to be raining, I guess you shoot the clouds or something like that.
	Let's start with a very sort of limited specific example.
	So the non-aggression principle is reactive.
	It's not proactive, it's reactive.
	It's the non-aggression principle.
	Thou shalt not initiate the use of force against others.
	But, but...
	If force is initiated against you, then you have the right to use force to defend your persons, your property, and so on.
	And you can do this ex parte or third party as well.
	Use somebody else, right? It's a universal principle.
	So, once we understand that morality is that which is used to justify violence, then we have to be very sparing, tiny, case-controlled, and tight in our Justifications for morality, because whenever we justify morality, whatever we apply morality to, there do we also justify violence.
	And if we want to keep violence down in the world, we have to keep morality reactive, case-specific, very, very, very tightly defined.
	So if we say morality is the non-aggression principle that bans rape, theft, assault, and murder, We have a very powerful and very limited justification for violence, and it's reactive.
	Let's look at another example of something that is often considered a moral right or a moral rule.
	Let's say that you say it's immoral to pay women less than men for work of equal value or equal standing.
	It's immoral.
	To pay women less than men.
	Okay, so if you say that, what have you now justified?
	You have now justified the use of force in raising women's wages.
	You've now justified the use of force.
	You say, oh, well, no, but I think it's moral, but I don't want force involved.
	Then it's not morality! Then it's aesthetics or politeness or social convention or something.
	It's not morality. Morality is that which takes the safety off the revolver and lets you point it at someone.
	That's what morality is, foundationally.
	Takes the safety off and lets you point your gun at someone.
	Someone's coming to rape you, take the safety off, point your gun at them, and shoot them if they continue, right?
	If you say it's immoral, it's evil, it's wrong, to pay women less than men, what happens?
	Well, you run to the government. And you say, there's this injustice going on, there's this inequality, this exploitation, this sexism going on.
	So the government says, oh, okay, well, that's wrong.
	And what do we got to do?
	We got to ban. We've got to ban women being paid less than men for work of equal value, whatever that is defined as.
	So you get, and this is back in the early 1960s, Equal pay for work of equal value, the equal pay legislation went through in America, a lot of other Western countries in the 60s were said it's now illegal to pay a woman less than a man.
	Now, there's an example of something that is defined as immoral and Therefore, the safety is off.
	Guns are pointed at people. And if you're found to be paying women less than men, they can sue you.
	And you won't get government contracts.
	And if you lose the lawsuit, you have to pay.
	And if you don't pay, they'll take the money from you by force.
	It's the domino. You flick that little domino called this is now immoral.
	And the big last domino is the safety coming off guns and guns being pointed at people.
	If you say racism is immoral, if you say hate speech is immoral, then you are saying to people you can take the safety off and you can use weapons and you can use force to keep things moral.
	Murder is immoral. You could use force to defend yourself from being murdered.
	Racism, sexism, various phobias, you name it.
	The moment you define these things as immoral.
	Now, you can define them as impolite, you can define them as gauche, as coarse, as unrefined, as socially unacceptable.
	These are not moral judgments.
	Like, that's evil.
	The moment you say evil, safety comes off the revolver, right?
	And yes, there are revolvers for safety, right?
	So if you want to know why something like communism is so violent, and I'm going to say it's not just violence by tendency, I'm not just going to say that it's violent by historical example.
	I'm not just going to say it's violent because power corrupts.
	I want to prove to you that something like communism is violent by definition, that it can't ever be anything else.
	Because, you know, we've got to pinch off that escape avenue of real communism has never been tried, which you never hear about National Socialism, but that's, of course, for reasons that are pretty obvious.
	And I have this definition in my book, free book, Universally Preferable Behavior, three kinds of moral categories.
	So there's good and there's evil, and good you can use force to defend, and evil you can use force to oppose.
	Then that's violations of rape, theft, assault, and murder.
	And fraud being a subspecies of theft.
	Then there's aesthetically preferable actions.
	Now, these can be universalized but are not enforceable.
	Things like politeness, being on time, wearing appropriate clothing, you know, that kind of stuff.
	Where it's, you know, nice to have, but you can't shoot someone for being late.
	And the reason you can't shoot someone for being late is they're not forcing you to be in that position.
	Somebody who's got a gun to your head who's going to shoot you is forcing you into that position so you can use force to push back.
	And then there's morally neutral actions, you know, taking a dump, running for the bus that don't have any, you know, don't have any moral quality or characteristic.
	They can't be universalized.
	You can universalize everyone being on time.
	You can universalize everybody, not raping, stealing, assaulting, and murdering, and so on, but you can't normalize.
	So things which you can't normalize, can't universalize, sorry, are not part of any moral continuum.
	Things which you can universalize but are not imposed upon you, I call aesthetically preferable actions.
	It's nicer if you do it, but you can't shoot people for not doing it.
	And then there's universally preferable behavior, which is respect for persons and property that you can use force to defend yourself for violations of, right?
	So I want to prove to you how and why, forget all historical examples, forget The, well, communism causes power to accrue at the hands of a few people and power corrupts, which is kind of like a loosey-goosey, foggy domino argument.
	You know, it's like the slippery slope argument.
	What I want to do is I want to show you, prove to you, establish beyond the shadow of a doubt that communism will always lead to infinite violence.
	And the reason is this.
	Communism says that economic And political inequality is evil.
	People who make more, people who make less, people who don't have enough access to political power, that this is immoral.
	Let's just deal with the economic side first.
	So they're saying, people who make more money than other people are stealing from them.
	The capitalist is stealing from the workers, the highly productive workers are stealing from the less productive workers, and everything has to be equal in order for morality to be achieved.
	For a moral good to be achieved, for a morally good society to be achieved, everyone has to end up equal.
	Now, of course, it's functionally impossible for that to do so.
	You cannot universalize that.
	And we've talked about Price's Law, Pareto Principles, a bunch of different names for it, which is that the square root of any group of productive people in a meritocracy, the square root produces half the value.
	So you've got nine people working...
	In sales or on a factory floor, a third of them, the square root, right?
	Three of them are going to produce half the value.
	If you've got a hundred people, ten of them are going to produce half the value.
	If you've got a thousand people, right, you understand how it works.
	A hundred of them are going to be producing a square root.
	Sorry. If you've got ten thousand people, a hundred of them are going to be producing half the value.
	And you only get that value if they get an equal amount of reward for producing half the value.
	So that's just the way it works.
	It works in all spheres. It works in sports.
	It works in medicine, in physics, the business world, the music world.
	It's everywhere, always identical.
	The square root of people produce half the value.
	Yeah, 100 of 10,000.
	That's right. Sorry. What is it for 1,000?
	33.333.
	Anyway, so... So that's a fact.
	You've got a company of 10,000 people, 100 of them producing half the value, and 10 of those are producing half that value, which means out of 10,000 people, 10 of them are producing 25% of the value.
	It's just the way it is. It's magic to those on the outside.
	It's like, how do you write a hit song?
	Well, if everybody knew that, we'd all be singers, or at least songwriters.
	So when you say, when you apply a standard of universal equality to a system wherein inevitably, absolutely, universally, some people are going to be disproportionately more valuable, You will never be able to achieve what you want.
	Now, when you create a morality which is unattainable and unachievable, you are simply giving license to infinite violence.
	You are giving license to infinite violence.
	Because if you say, look, I have the right to life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness and property and so on, then I'm a peaceful guy until someone tries to take my life, my liberty, my property.
	And then morally you can use, and even legally now, you can use force to defend yourself, right?
	So it's passive, it's reactionary, it's limited, and it's instantaneous.
	It's a moment, right? This is not chasing some Pegasus-style fantasy of infinite and perfect egalitarianism.
	This is simply...
	If you're aggressed against, you have a moment of self-defense, it's done and it's over.
	And you have restored your liberties which were threatened, your life which was threatened, your property which was threatened.
	And it's done. It's not a license for infinite violence.
	It's very specific.
	It's laser-like, it's precise, it starts, it stops, it's done.
	But if you say violence is legitimate until economic and political equality is achieved...
	Which it never will be.
	That's a license for infinite violence.
	Now, people, I believe, whether that's conscious or deep down doesn't really matter, but people create these unattainable standards because they want to be violent.
	If you've ever been in an abusive relationship, standards get manufactured in accordance to the ill temper of the abuser.
	If the abuser's in a good mood, it doesn't matter what you do.
	Everything's fine. If the abuser's in a bad mood, it doesn't matter what you do.
	You're going to get abused. They'll find something.
	Go around sniffing, looking for things.
	They'll find something. Find something.
	And then you'll get nervous and tense, and then they'll say, well, why are you nervous and tense?
	It's annoying, right? So the rules, the standards, the standards are invented To vent the abuse, to vent the sadism, to vent the cruelty, to vent the violence.
	In other words, you don't say, well, I have as an abstract moral standard that everyone should achieve political and economic equality, and I'm just going to regretfully use violence in pursuit of that, because once you define something as moral, you've taken the safety off the revolver.
	No, no, no. What happens is people say, God, I love using violence.
	Oh! Says the sadist, says the psychopath, the violent.
	I love using violence, he says.
	Boy, how can I get that going?
	How can I get that going? I know, I'll create a standard which can never be achieved.
	And I'll say, well, I'll use violence until the standard is achieved.
	The standard cannot be achieved.
	And therefore, the license for violence is infinite and eternal.
	And that's how they roll, and that's why the heads roll.
	Now, are you ready for the escape routes to be pinched off?
	Well, I hope so, because they're going to be.
	Why is it impossible to achieve these standards?
	It is impossible to achieve these standards for this simple reason.
	And you could say, oh yes, but men and women won't ever be totally equal because of childbirth and because of slightly different brain sizes and because of less testosterone and because of blah.
	You could take all of those variables away in some scenario, right?
	Here's the issue. Here's the issue.
	Let's go back to women getting paid less than men.
	If you want women to be paid the same as men because you're saying, "Well, all groups must have equal income," then what you need to do is you need to have one group called the government forcibly take property from another group, accumulate massive amounts of property and power to themselves in order to solve the problem of political and economic inequality.
	In other words, you have to exacerbate political and economic inequality In order to try and solve political and economic inequality.
	Which is why it can never functionally be achieved.
	You can't ever...
	It's by definition.
	Everybody's got to end up with five units of political and economic power.
	And in order to do that, we have to grant a thousand units of political and economic power to this group.
	The states, the czars of equality or whatever you want to call them.
	So the goal is everyone gets five units of political and economic power.
	In order to get that, we've got to give a thousand units of political and economic power to this group.
	Well, you've just blown the whole egalitarian scenario out of the water.
	Because now one group in the government has to have a lot more money.
	You've got to give them a budget of 5 billion or 10 billion or 50 billion dollars.
	Oh, look at that. Now we have economic inequality.
	Because some people get that money in the government and other people don't.
	And you've got to give them a lot more political power so that they can impose these rules on everyone else.
	And therefore, to try and deal with relatively minor political and economic inequality, you've created a massive bulge of political and economic inequality.
	Can't work.
	It can't work like, oh, well, let's try it again.
	It can't work, oh, well, if we could only fix this in human nature.
	It can't work. Praxeologically, it can't work in its essence.
	If I said to you, I have a plan to create perfect equality by creating massive, violent inequality, you would look at me and say, I think you need to zip on back to that old drawing board stuff and start from scratch.
	No, no, no, but you see, the way that we're going to make everyone perfectly the same height is we're going to make a whole bunch of people 30 feet tall.
	The way that we're going to make everyone equal weight is we're going to feed some people to 700 pounds.
	That's how we're going to do it.
	The way that we're going to end up with the quality of property is we're going to forcibly transfer billions and billions of dollars to this particular group.
	The way that we're going to end up with everyone having an equal say in society is we're going to give massive, coercive political power and control to this group of people.
	So that's why it can't work.
	It's a logical contradiction.
	It's a logical contradiction.
	So the fact that it's an obvious logical contradiction tells you that this goal has everything to do with sadism and nothing to do with equality.
	That you set up, if you want to have legal scope for your sadistic impulses, you set up a system that justifies infinite violence for a goal that can never be attained.
	ever be attained.
	It's a very powerful way of looking at moralities.
	So when you're engaged in a moral argument, you are engaged in an argument of who gets to point the gun at whom and when it gets to be fired.
	That's all morality boils down to.
	Morality is that which you can defend through force or inflict or impose through force.
	Now, if you have a reactionary morality, it's very limited in scope.
	It's very specific. It's very short-term or instantaneous, right?
	You fire the gun in self-defense.
	If you're justified, it's done and dusted.
	If you have a proactive morality that seeks the impossible, you literally open the doorway to hell.
	And the demons that pour through will never stop.
	Morality is violence.
	Morality justifies.
	Safety off. Gun pointed.
	Trigger. Figure attention.
	And so when people say, the good is equality, what they're saying is, Boy, I'd really love to do evil, but I don't want to get caught.
	The best way to get, to avoid being caught and punished for doing evil, is to define evil as the good.
	to define a goal which requires the initiation of the use of force.
	And then you can go around pointing guns at everyone and consider yourself, oh, such a good person.
	So I hope that helps.
	I hope that makes some sense in the moral discussions that we're having today.
	Ask someone what he or she defines as the good, I will tell you where they're happy to have the guns pointed.
	Ask someone what he or she defines as the good, I will tell you exactly where they're very happy to have the guns pointed because it's all embedded in the definition of the good, in the definition of morality.
	The current debates about morality The racism, sexism, homophobia, Islamophobia, all of the hate speech, all of these are debates about which unattainable goal should we go in hot pursuit of in order to vent our sadistic impulses on a usually legally disarmed population.
	It's very powerful stuff.
	You understand this essence of morality, that morality is coercion.
	And that when there's a moral goal that requires its own violation in order to be achieved, in order to claim to approach economic and political inequality, you have to impose through force massive political and economic inequality.
	If your very goal is utterly violated by your proposed remedy, It's like having a do-no-harm Hippocratic Oath that requires an atomic bomb on a population center.
	You have automatically invalidated your entire approach.
	If you want equality, but in order to pursue equality you have to create massive inequality, you've failed in the very basis of the definition.
	Can't possibly work, will never work, and it's not designed to work.
	It's not designed to work. Any more than, you know, you have some abusive parent and they come home in a bad mood, they're going to find something to get mad at you about and you think it's got something to do with the rules.
	No! The rules are simply an excuse to vent the abuse.
	Just an excuse to vent the abuse.
	That's all it's about. So, I wanted to mention that up front.
	Thank you so much for dropping by.
	We're not done. Happy to take...
	We can take some calls.
	You can type some questions.
	I'm happy to set the StephBot chatterbrain on whatever it is that's going on for you in a moment.
	There we go. All right.
	And, yeah, I did a...
	You can find it at freedomand.locals.com.
	Oh, and by the way, if you sign up for...
	Ten months, you get two months free there.
	freedomain.locals.com.
	I hope you will check that out.
	But I did post... I did post the Christianity Roundtable, Theological Roundtable.
	It's processing at the moment.
	You go freedomain.locals.com.
	It's not even for the donors only.
	There is some stuff up there for donors only, but I hope you will...
	Check that out. I would really, really appreciate that.
	Now, if you want to type some questions, you know what, let me set up the old chat system, and we'll go into that as well.
	I'm an underachiever, but I'm in great shape, and the only thing that gives me drive is boxing slash MMA.
	Should I pursue that?
	Well, I suppose the question is, What's your history with violence?
	So if you have a history with violence, and in other words, if you grew up in a violent environment, and the only thing that you could do is manage your reaction to violence, that's the only way that you could feel like you had any strength or efficacy or control or purpose, then it may not be particularly healthy to pursue a career where you're managing your response to violence.
	It may not break you entirely free of that particular situation.
	Alright, let me just toss in the chat.
	If you want to join me in chat, just jump in and unmute, and I will do my very level best.
	Thoughts on kids being bribed with ice cream to get the vaccine?
	That makes sense. My dad was a constant threat of violence.
	I'm sorry to hear that.
	Every kid who grows up in a violent environment feels helpless, and you can't control the violence, but you can control your own reaction to the violence, but that means when the violence is gone, you don't have a sense of control, so you'll be in pursuit of violence in general.
	What is the motivation for someone wishing to be correct at any cost, including human lives?
	lives is that person unreachable with morality so why do people become murderous in this kind of way Well, because they hate society because society failed to protect them as children.
	The amount of violence that I've squished in this world, so to speak, by counselling now millions of people for the better treatment of children, it's immeasurable, it's massive.
	It's immeasurable and it's massive.
	If you want society to be respected by children, then society has to do the bare minimum, at least, of trying to.
	Doesn't necessarily mean it will succeed, but trying to protect children.
	But if society doesn't even try to protect children, if society pursues the indoctrination of children, if society steps over the bodies of children being ravaged by their parents in order to get to the latest Laker game, then, well, guess what?
	Children are going to grow up Having absolutely no respect for society and a massive amount of contempt, hostility, and hatred for society in extremists, that becomes straight-up murderous.
	As a whole, do you see humanity getting every day better or worse?
	I mean, I think we still have a chance.
	You know, I got replatformed, not deplatformed, and we still have a chance.
	You'll come, trees, on parents.
	Protecting children have had the biggest impact on me.
	Yeah, I'm at 15,000 words on the Peaceful Parenting book.
	It's quite something to write, to bring it all down together in one package.
	So, yeah, people who want to be correct at any cost, including human lives, they...
	It's not that they want to be correct.
	They just want to do damage.
	There's that statement from the old Batman movie, you know, some men just want to watch the world burn.
	They don't mean anything. Nobody's woken up.
	Nobody wakes up just wanting to watch the world burn.
	It just doesn't happen.
	What happens is we grow up and we're exploited and beaten and we find out about the national debt and we find out that we have no choice about the schools that we're in and if you're a young white male you're taught to hate yourself for the imagined sins of Everyone and everything, and you're brutalized.
	Psychological torture is the rule of many schools these days, particularly, again, for white males.
	So, yeah, you're going to grow up, and what on earth kind of respect are you possibly going to have for a society?
	Not only that failed to protect you, but inflicted injuries on you.
	Do you define a difference between morality and ethics in any of your books?
	Now, I mean, to me, the...
	The words are so interchangeable that trying to define a difference between them slows down the conversation in any particular way.
	So it doesn't really... You can use the word morality.
	You can use the word ethics. It doesn't really matter.
	You wouldn't want to conflate morality with politeness, but...
	Is reducing physical requirements for entering the military a way to weaken or destroy the force itself?
	Well, that's just an example of everything's got to be equal.
	Right now, there's these crazy woke ads for the American military, and that's because they want non-Christians to come in.
	They want people to come in that they can more easily turn, I assume, on others.
	Thoughts about Goldman Sachs partnering with a bank in China?
	Well, did you guys see this John Cena thing?
	John Cena! Was he an actor?
	He's in the Fast and Furious movies.
	I think he was a wrestler.
	Did I get that right? John Cena?
	So John Cena, in some press conference, referred to Taiwan as a country.
	Of course, this very much angered China, which loves to humiliate others and flex its muscles, not because it's China, but because it's communist.
	I have a great affection and respect for For the Chinese people.
	When I was over in China back in the year 2000, doing business, wonderful people.
	When I marched with the people in Hong Kong, it was one of the most moving moments of my life.
	Dangerous, hell, but moving.
	And I truly love the Chinese people.
	I think that they are amazing and wonderful in general.
	And... So John Cena, by referring to Taiwan as a country, angered the Chinese.
	And of course, I guess he's in some movie that they want to be able to distribute in China.
	And so he had a public struggle session where he recited in Mandarin.
	Some people said it was perfect.
	Jack Sobik did not. He recited in Mandarin some apology and reiterated his love for China and so on.
	And that's...
	That's shitty, not tough guy stuff, John.
	That's shitty, embarrassing, humiliating, disgusting, gross, betray the Chinese people.
	Cowardly shit, brother. I don't know if you've taken so much crap that your balls have shrunk, but that's just sad.
	That's just sad.
	And you know, it's funny because, you know, if I had mouthed the platitudes and I had denied the truth, I'd still be platformed in the way that I was before.
	I wouldn't have lost two million people and 15 years of work here and there.
	I wouldn't have lost all. I mean, I get all of that, but dear God.
	Dear God. The humiliations of the moment for standing up to the truth, they pass!
	They pass! They go!
	But the shame... Bowing down and kowtowing.
	To tyrants. Oh, that lasts.
	That lasts.
	The story I remember hearing when I was younger.
	It's a way of putting it.
	It had a big effect on me. Judas betrayed Jesus for 30 pieces of silver.
	And the story is, of course, that he took his 30 pieces of silver to betray Jesus.
	But he hated the money so much because all they did was remind him of his weakness and his sin.
	He threw the money away.
	He went to a tree and he hung himself and the legend says the tree died with him.
	And most of us, we're not going to get presented with something as dramatic as betray the greatest man of the universe for 30 pieces of silver.
	Maybe it's just little compromises here and there.
	Maybe it's just biting your tongue when someone says something wrong or bad, not standing up for someone you know is in the right.
	Maybe it's little things. Most of us don't do anything quite as dramatic as go and hang ourselves from a tree.
	But you know what is true?
	What is really true?
	We take all those little compromises.
	The tree dies anyway.
	Whether we hang ourselves from it or not, the tree, our spine, our balls, our sense of self, our capacity to stand upright and have some pride, just dies anyway.
	John Cena's worth how much money?
	Tens of millions and millions of dollars.
	You don't think he's got F you money?
	Because he played a tough guy in the ring, didn't he?
	Played a real tough guy in the ring, didn't he?
	He's a tough guy! The fast and the furious and the cucked.
	The chai cucked. Well, it's really bad.
	That's really bad. And, you know, why is he doing it?
	Because he's addicted to fame, because he's addicted to money, because he's addicted to prominence, because he's addicted to being in another stupid fucking movie with cars flipping.
	Is that really...
	What are you selling yourself out for, John?
	Another piece of trash movie with screeching metal.
	Tough women! Scenes with cars and trains.
	And a tidy patch of anti-Shaksperian dialogue that runs into a cozy three pages.
	That's so sad.
	And he'll have his career, right?
	And people will just forget it.
	that he spent days learning how to mouth out Mandarin to apologize to the Chinese government.
	Can you imagine Ronald Reagan or Clint Eastwood apologizing to the Soviet communist government Can you fucking imagine such a thing?
	It's incomprehensible that Ronald Reagan, as an actor, Clint Eastwood's an actor.
	Can you imagine them groveling and learning perfect, learning how to enunciate perfect Russian in order to apologize to fucking Brezhnev for referring to Ukraine as a separate country?
	God! Never!
	Never. Okay.
	You want to know what my cup says?
	I was hoping for a battle of wits, but you appear to be unarmed.
	Not you, my lovely audience, but...
	Yeah, excuses for China are a byproduct of critical race theory.
	Only people of European descent can be evil, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
	I don't have any particular thoughts on Monero.
	I mean, nothing that's...
	nothing particularly philosophical about it.
	All right. Huge respect for keeping on with your work despite the mainstream trying to silence you.
	Yeah. James Woods is a beast?
	Yeah, he's alright. James Woods is alright.
	Everybody steps around the important issues though.
	Well, except me. Can you talk about your thought experiment where you meet your parents at a party as strangers And see if you want to get to know them.
	Yeah. Yeah, for sure.
	I mean, I think it's just been put that way, right?
	You want to live your life like you are creating new and continuous value in every interaction.
	When I come down in the morning to greet my wife, good morning, how are you doing, how did you sleep, great to see you, blah blah blah, right?
	Because that's what I would be doing if it was her first morning of marriage.
	Now, just because we've been married almost 20 years, why would I diminish that?
	Why? Makes no sense.
	We're now more invested in each other.
	We have a child together. We have property together.
	Why would I lower my standards going forward?
	Now, that process of continuing to provide value to people, even after you've kind of got comfortable and there's a routine and these things just kind of go their way, you've got to keep working to provide value to people.
	I've been doing this show now.
	Oh my God, if this show had been born when I started it, it would be able to drive now.
	And I hope to be doing it when it's in the demographic to drive a golf club.
	This morality is violence and this explanation of communism, that's new.
	Now, 16 years, Coming up with new stuff, there's a law of diminishing possibilities because I've just come up with a whole bunch of new stuff, right?
	All the time. So, in your relationships, always keep trying to add value.
	So, yes, I would like to think that if my wife met me at a dinner party, you know, she would be interested in keeping knowing me.
	I would like to think that if my daughter...
	Met me at, you know, some gathering of friends with kids, right?
	That she'd be like, hey, that guy's really fun.
	In fact, I did have a friend of mine.
	I met his kids. And his daughter was like, yeah, you know, of all your friends, that guy's my favorite.
	Because, you know, I dove in and played with them and rolled around.
	And that's just fun, right?
	You want to really...
	Your kids should really know how much you enjoy their company.
	Your wife should really know.
	Your husband should really know. Your friends should really know.
	How much you enjoy their company.
	Just said I love you to a friend of mine the other night who's going through a tough time, right?
	So you should always be aiming to continue to provide value and make sure that if people met you for the first time, they'd still want to get to know you.
	Because the law of diminishing returns where people start off strong and end up lazy...
	It's like, you know, I don't know.
	I guess you still do this now in school.
	But when I was a kid in school, you would get this notepad, right?
	And you'd start writing in your first page.
	It would be very neat. And then, you know, strangled spider squish, chicken scratch descends thereafter.
	But, yeah. Just, if you're with relationships where you're all just kind of being lazy and putting in the bare minimum and relying on easy jokes and drinking and shared nothingness and, oh, I like this movie and, oh, this band's really cool.
	There's nothing wrong with that stuff.
	But if that's the basis of your relationship, it's not much of anything.
	And then you've got to say...
	It's a way of asking about yourself, too, right?
	So I say, okay, well, if I met...
	My mother, if I sat next to her at a dinner table for a dinner party, would I want to see her again?
	The answer, of course, is that big, God, no.
	In fact, I'd want to move within five minutes of her boring the living crap and scaring me with her conspiracy theories, right?
	I would like, no, it won't have anything to do with that, right?
	But it's a way of asking yourself.
	You have that standard for others. You want to have that standard for yourself.
	You've got to say to yourself, if everyone in my life met me today, never met me before, met me today, would they want to keep knowing me?
	Kind of important. Kind of important.
	All right, let's see here.
	What else have we got? I feel bad I couldn't make it for the beginning of the stream.
	I only made it at the end of a great monologue owner to focus on the mug.
	I have, you know, places I go I like to pick up a funny mug for the show.
	Let's see here. I often feel that I don't add value to relationships, so I don't seek to form them.
	No, that means that you're trying to form relationships with people that will not accept you adding value.
	And the only value that you can add To a relationship is to tell the truth about what you think and feel.
	That's the only value. Because the only thing that's uniquely yours.
	You want to have a monopoly of you.
	And the more individuated you are, the more people will love or hate you.
	If you don't really exist, if you're just like a shadow cast by general propaganda and you smile and, you know, wring your hands and doff your cap and get along and go along, then nobody will hate you.
	Nobody will love you. And you'll just pass by like the...
	The cars shatter at 3am in the morning when no one's awake.
	You'll just come and go and end your life like a spear drop from an airplane.
	Bloop! Barely even leaving a ripple behind.
	But in order to have value, you have to have a monopoly.
	And only you have a monopoly on your thoughts and feelings.
	And the more you hide your thoughts and feelings, the more indistinguishable you become From emptiness, from nothingness, from, you know, those old paintings in the 19th century,
	what were they, Monet, where he'd have some crowd in the back, it'd be this tiny little thumbprint with no face, or one of the great characters in 80s cinema, Cameron, from Ferris Bueller's Day Off, where he's at a Chicago art museum and he's looking at A 19th century painting, and there's a child there with no face.
	And he's looking there, and he's like, yeah, he doesn't exist.
	He hasn't manifested. He's too afraid to live.
	So, you say, well, I don't feel I add value to relationships.
	That's because you're trying to be yourself with people who hate the truth.
	You're trying to speak the truth to people who hate the truth.
	So, of course, you're like, withhold yourself, right?
	Why would you, right? You know, the communists should invite me.
	I mean, I invite the communists on my show all the time, right?
	They should invite me to come and give a big-ass guest lecture, right?
	But, of course, they won't, right?
	They don't want that truth. They don't, right?
	I would interfere with their cruelty, right?
	So, don't feel that you don't add value to relationships.
	You do. As a unique individual with your own thoughts and feelings, If you're honest about them, you will add value to relationships where people value honesty.
	And if they don't value honesty, then you will be a threat to them and they will seek to shut you down.
	All right.
	What is the answer to the guy buying a goat meme that you posted?
	Wait, somebody said, hello, handsome Stefan.
	I appreciate that. Thank you.
	I do love my own looks.
	I do love my own looks. I'm not wildly, hugely keen about getting older, but, you know, I think I'm doing all right.
	Ferris Bueller's Day Off. Yes, very, very positive.
	I mean, he was a bit of a cartoon character, but the sister is fantastic.
	Fantastic. Such emotional exuberance and passion and commitment, and nobody does pissed off like Ferris Bueller's sister.
	The principal, also fantastic.
	And the secretary is also great, underrated comic actress who was also in WKRP in Cincinnati.
	That's our guest of honor not having his cheesecake.
	Uh-huh, uh-huh. And Cameron, oh, unbelievably great character.
	Unbelievably. And the guy, the guy was what, like 29 and playing an 18-year-old?
	It was amazing. He's got a face of youth, right?
	Steph, the fact that you respond to so many of my comments makes my heart feel warm and squishy.
	God bless. These streams keep me sane.
	I appreciate that. Spoiler, your heart will be warm and squishy either way.
	At least I hope so, because if it's not, it's cold and hard, and that's not a good thing.
	That's not a good thing. Have you heard about the Red Cross not accepting blood from people with the COVID vaccine?
	I have. And you really, really do want to look up that there are 10,000...
	Doctors and a thousand lawyers who were taken, I think, the World Health Organization to court, international court, I think it is, for crimes against humanity.
	It's really powerful stuff, and you should read up on it, I think.
	Let's see here. You are right.
	I do hide my true feelings.
	The inauthenticity becomes very tiring.
	Yeah. Yeah.
	There's, gosh, there's an old Pete Townsend song.
	From my window I see rooms.
	I can't remember exactly how it goes, but at the end he says, I gotta hide out, yeah, hide out.
	And this hiding out thing, hiding from people, hiding from the truth, hiding from your history, hiding your true feelings and suppressing everything, just hide out, hide out, hide out.
	You spend your life underground and then you die and they put you back underground.
	It's very sad. It's very sad.
	Just tell the truth, man.
	Tell the truth. You know, if my wife's respect required me to be deplatformed, it's a pretty replatformed.
	It's a really easy equation.
	It's a really easy equation.
	All right. Let's see here.
	Oh, yeah. So the goat meme.
	Let me just dig that one up.
	Make sure I got it right.
	And I will tell you what I think.
	I've seen a wide variety of different answers.
	But here we go. You guys can tell me.
	I will give you the...
	Let me just give you the share here.
	Share! All right.
	Save post. Yeah, I don't want to save post.
	I don't want to do any of that. What I want to do is I want to share the damn thing.
	All right. Here we go. All right.
	She had a news feed.
	I want to do that. Just let me share the damn thing.
	All right. Okay, here's the photo.
	Here's the photo. Now, listen, maybe you'll respect me after this.
	Maybe you won't. I am not entirely sure.
	But we shall find out.
	Okay, so I'm going to post this into the chat here.
	And there it is.
	Alright, so here's what it says.
	To all people new in crypto slash trading, you should not trade before you can answer this correctly.
	A man buys a goat for 60, then he sells it for 70.
	Later, he buys that goat back for 80.
	Then he sells it again for 90.
	How much profit did he make? Right?
	Buys for 60, sells for 70, buys for 80, sells for 90.
	Right? How much profit did he make?
	And I'll let you guys cook on that for a bit because, you know, kind of important to know these thoughts as a whole.
	Let me just see here. Let's put that there.
	And also, sorry, I'm just going to put the chat thing in here as well in case you all wish to talk.
	Oh, yeah. Actually, let's make sure that I can hear you.
	There, because I have a mono headset.
	I always need to change the sound so the sound only comes through one side.
	Otherwise, it just doesn't...
	The whole house of cards is coming down.
	Alright. So, let's see here.
	Let's bring a sound control panel.
	I do quite like these logic puzzles myself.
	Alright. Alright.
	So, yeah. Let me finish this and I'm happy to hear if people have things that they...
	Wish to say, and let me just make sure I can share that chat thing as well.
	Settings, and you are live, baby, live.
	While the empty church's bells are peeling, peeling out.
	Share invite link. Okay, let me just put this in here and then I will tell you my thoughts on it.
	And of course, a lot of these things are around definition.
	Depends what you mean by profit and depends the kind of...
	Here we go.
	There we go.
	I'm going to put that in here as a chat, and I'll just put it in one other place in case anybody wants to join me in there.
	All right.
	So I will tell you the way that I process it, because I'm a transactional guy, the way that that works when it comes to sort of personal economics.
	I'm just telling you, I don't know if there's an objective answer, I don't know if there's a true answer, but I'll tell you the way that I would process this.
	You buy the goat for 60, you sell it for 70.
	Okay, so you've made 10 bucks.
	Or you've made, we'll just say bucks, right?
	So you've made 10 bucks here, right?
	Later he buys that goat back for 90.
	Now the fact is that it's the same goat.
	Not a goat. It could be a bigger goat.
	It could be a pregnant goat.
	It could be a goat with tastier haunches.
	I don't know. It's the same goat. That goat.
	A man buys a goat for $60,000.
	For $70,000, he's made $10,000. He buys that goat back for $80,000.
	Well, now he's lost 10, right?
	He sold it for 70, bought it back at 80.
	So now he's lost 10. So he's even, right?
	So it went 60 to 70. He made 10, sells it.
	He sells it. Sorry, it goes 60, sells it at 70.
	He's made 10. He buys it back for 80.
	He's lost 10. Then he sells it again for 90.
	So he's net on the transaction series 20.
	Sorry, 10. He's net 10 up.
	Now, you can look at it and say, look, every sell is a profit.
	So 60 to 70 is a profit.
	It doesn't matter that he buys it again for 80.
	80 to 90 is a profit. But I look at the net thing as a whole.
	Man buys a goat for $60.
	Let's say he only has $60, right?
	So he buys a goat for $60 and sells it for $70.
	Yay, he's got $10. $10 more.
	But then he's got to buy the goat back for $80.
	So he's got to go borrow $10 to make up the difference because he doesn't have it, right?
	So he's made $10. Now he's borrowed $10.
	He's even. Then he sells it again for $90.
	He's up $10. And it's just a way of talking about the buy and sell day-trading stuff of crypto in that little old holdy-who situation.
	A little old, holy who is the way to go, in my humble opinion.
	So, yeah, that's, you know, lots of people making lots of complicated comments about capital gains.
	But no, it's just a mental exercise that I think is worth looking into.
	So the way that I would look at it, if this is my portfolio, I would look at that and say, well, after a whole bunch of bouncing around, I ended up with as much as I started with, right?
	Buy a goat for 60, sell it for 70.
	You've made 10.
	Then you buy it back for 80.
	You borrow 10 to make that up.
	Sell it for 90.
	Okay, so then you've got to pay back the 10.
	That leaves you with 10 at the end.
	So the point of that is that if you just bought the goat for 60 and sold it for 70, you'd have made 10.
	If you had to stop there, you're exactly the same as later, except, except that you've now thought about it.
	You've bought the goat back for 80.
	Then you found a seller. You decided to sell it for 90.
	So there's a lot of mind space that gets taken up.
	60 to 70, you make your 10.
	80 to 90, you end up making the same 10 again, except you've lost time because you've been back and forth with the market quite a bit.
	So, yeah, that's the way it works, I think.
	And certainly that's the way it would work for me in evaluating all of that, right?
	Okay, so let's see here.
	What are people saying here?
	Let's see here. If you want to chat and you're in the chat, you know, just let me know.
	Just unmute yourself and I'm happy to do that.
	Yeah, some people are saying 20, 10, minus 10.
	The problem with authenticity is that without boundaries, dignity is lost.
	I don't know about that. Anybody who considers you undignified for speaking honestly your thoughts and feelings is simply using the word dignity as a weapon.
	Zero. The currency was inflating the whole time.
	Now, you don't want to get overcomplicated with this stuff.
	This is basic logic stuff for me.
	I can't do logic. That's why I have the staff do it for me.
	That's funny. A ball and a bat cost $110 together.
	The bat costs $100 more Than the ball.
	How much does the ball cost?
	A bat and a ball cost $110 together.
	The bat costs $100 more than the ball.
	How much does the ball cost?
	So if you say it's 10...
	Oh! Oh, that's interesting.
	So if you say, because the normal thing would be to say, okay, the ball costs 10.
	No, but then if the bat costs $100 more than the ball, then the bat costs $110.
	And then the bat and the ball together would be $120, right?
	So that's no good.
	So the bat costs $100 more than the ball.
	If the ball is free, then you still only add up to $100.
	$105, $5, $115.
	That's 10, 110, the ball.
	Okay, sorry, you know what, I'm going to just...
	I get that the answer is not 10.
	It's not zero, because then the net would be 100.
	If it's five, $100 more than the ball, 105.
	Oh, it's five. It's five, right?
	The ball is $5. The bat costs $100 more, which is $105, so together you get $110.
	Okay, so the ball costs $5 if I got that right.
	Okay. All right.
	Non-fungible go. Yes, that's right.
	Yeah, this is good, right? Yeah, this trying to add parameters is not part of the word problem.
	No, that's no.
	Yeah, yeah. Bat $10, ball $5.
	Oh, did we get that? Ball don't lie.
	And if you get two balls, you can give them to John Cena.
	And maybe you can learn to stand up to tyrants when he's a multi-zillionaire.
	I don't know. Just goes to show you, man.
	I mean, no amount of money or looks or health or fame or muscles or anything like that is going to make you courageous.
	Well, he's there to demonstrate to everyone else to step in line.
	All right, that's, listen, I can go over a bunch of stuff I've thought of in the intervening time since our last chat, but I am very happy to listen to you guys, if you like.
	I'd like to talk a little. Crypto Nation's Report Card just came out for 2019 in the realm of science.
	So, here's a question for you, my friends.
	What have we got here? Let me just...
	Oh, hang on.
	Yeah, hold on.
	I'm just going to check my audio.
	Sorry, just one sec here. It should be playing.
	It should be running.
	It should be doing its fangle.
	So, you have a movie for me.
	That guy is very, very funny.
	A good micro-actor and all of that, right?
	Steph, when does authenticity become negative, such as sharing a photo of your poop in the toilet?
	You really are part of the premium stream, aren't you?
	No, but that's invasive.
	That's not authenticity. That's invasive and it's a lack of empathy.
	Why on earth would you want to show someone a picture of your poop in the toilet who's not your proctologist or your doctor?
	Yes, so what do you think fourth grade proficiency in math, sorry, in sciences in America?
	As of 2019, fourth grade proficiency, what percentage of students were proficient, which means they understand the basics of The scientific method can explain what it's for and so on, right?
	Nothing too massive, nothing too detailed, right?
	What do you think, what percentage you've got in the fourth grade?
	We got a 20%, the Julie says 30%, 35%, 15%, 17%, 20%.
	So in the fourth grade, 36% of students were proficient.
	By the 12th grade, so with another eight years of education from our good friends in the government, by the 12th grade, right, fourth grade is 36% proficient.
	By the 12th grade, what percentage of students are proficient in science?
	36% to what?
	We got a 40%. We got a 20%.
	We got a 69%, of course.
	And 25%.
	So the numbers go from 36% proficient in the fourth grade to 22% proficient in the 12th grade.
	By the way, is it true that...
	Sean Hannity really helps Joy Reid not get fired for her time-traveling homophobic hack-tweet nonsense.
	Isn't that really true? She wrote him a thank you slide for it.
	I was reading that. So listen, the fact that fewer than a quarter of students are even remotely proficient in science by the 12th grade in no way invalidates putting women in charge of education because women are fantastic at science and they love it.
	Love it! Just like they're fantastic at economics and that's why they never quite get any economics Nobel Prizes.
	So, of course, they have to dumb down kids' understanding of science so that they can turn science into a cult.
	So you know the way it works, right? So the way it works is you come up with some...
	A globe-spanning organization, like the World Health Organization, and they put out recommendations, and anybody who goes against those recommendations is going against science, because that's exactly how science works.
	A bunch of self-interested fucking half-communist bureaucrats put out a bunch of shit, and that's what science is.
	It's a production of bureaucratic committees.
	With highly, highly compromised self-interest and massive ideological biases for one world government.
	So that's exactly how science works.
	It's not tiny rebels going against institutions.
	The real science was the Pope, not Galileo.
	Galileo was going against the received scientific doctrine of the day.
	It's not Copernicus. It's not Einstein versus the community of the ether transfer, right?
	Science, as everybody knows, is big, giant Marxist bureaucracies with massive compromised self-interest, never disclosing their financial interests, never disclosing any conflict of interest, putting out highly ideologically charged missives.
	That's what science is.
	And of course, the only way you can believe that is if by grade 12, only 22% of you are even remotely proficient in science.
	You can't turn science into a cult if people actually understand it.
	And then, of course, you have a legal system where if you disseminate information that goes counter to the Marxist, made-up, nonsense, bullshit science of these multi-continental organizations from hell, if you put out anything against it, you're spreading disinformation.
	It could be liable. Very sad.
	Very sad. Yeah, there's a guy, a soldier in Canada, who said that the soldiers should not be participating in the vaccine stuff, and he's being brought up on mutiny charges, which hasn't happened since extremities of merchant navy rebellions in the Second World War.
	Absolutely crazy. So, here we go.
	Here we go.
	Are you ready for all the gold mined worldwide each year fits in a small apartment?
	How many great pyramids of waste rock does it take to mine gold every year?
	How many pyramids of waste rock does it take to mine gold every year?
	The gold that fits into a small apartment.
	Anybody want to guess?
	Anybody want to guess?
	How many great pyramids of waste rock does it take to get small apartments worth of gold every year?
	No, don't give me three billion tons.
	You think I can do that in my head?
	How many great pyramids?
	Ecoute! This is what we say in my family when somebody's not listening.
	Ecoute! Can we arrange for that gold to be stored in my apartment?
	That was the bar I used to go to.
	It's probably still around in Toronto, at least it used to be.
	It was a great disco bar when I was a kid, a teenager.
	A thousand apartments. Oh, you guys are going to give me a facial tick, aren't you?
	So it takes a thousand great pyramids of waste rock.
	How many liters of water does it take to produce one year's worth of gold?
	New gold, right? How many liters of water does it take to produce one year's worth of gold mining?
	Come on, dive in!
	Dive in! How many liters of water?
	Too much. That's a subjective opinion, but...
	Yeah, 22% is extremely high.
	Well, of course, yeah, it's much lower than that for real, right?
	Comment est votre français? Yeah, yeah, no, do not comment.
	Well, you can comment in French as you want.
	Three Lake Michigans. So it takes 50 million liters of water.
	Are you insane? Well, I guess I have the annoying history of actually working in the gold mining industry.
	So it takes 10 trillion liters of water, right?
	10 trillion liters of water.
	Or 1,000 gigalitres of water or 400,000 Olympic swimming pools.
	400,000 Olympic swimming pools to produce gold.
	How many tons of cyanide does it take?
	Because you've got to use cyanide to leach away some of the rock, right?
	So, how many tons of cyanide does it take to produce gold?
	One year's supply of new gold.
	Gold is thirsty AF. Yeah, it is.
	It's 500,000 tons of cyanide or one trillion suicide pills.
	It's five billion tons of waste rock or a thousand great pyramids of Giza.
	So yeah, orange coin, good.
	Yellow rock, bad! So, yeah, so everybody who wants to talk about, oh, you know, Bitcoin uses some environmental energy is like, do you have a gold ring?
	Shut up. Do you have gold earrings?
	Shut up. If you're Donald Trump, do you have gold-plated ass coverings on your toilets?
	Shut up. It's just, you know, it's the old saying that foreign policy or war is nature's way of teaching Americans about geography.
	So Bitcoin is just nature's way of teaching people how unbelievably wasteful gold mining is.
	That's all it is, right? So yeah, if you've never been bothered by gold, then shut up about Bitcoin.
	Like, I just don't care.
	I just don't care what you have to say.
	it's all pure nonsense and propaganda.
	Um, what else did I get?
	Um, If Bitcoin was a country, it would be the number one greenest country in the world.
	That's pretty important.
	So percentage share of primary energy from renewable sources as of 2019, because of course the data is a little tough to get these days, right?
	So percent share of primary energy from renewable sources.
	So the United States, how much...
	Again, I like the guessing stuff.
	If you guys like it, I hope you do.
	How much...
	What percentage of American primary energy usage is coming from renewable sources?
	What percentage? What do you got?
	All those wind farms and solar farms and clean energy and green this and blah, blah, blah.
	What does it all add up to for the United States?
	What percentage? Yeah, I'll post links.
	You got a 10% there?
	Appreciate that. 3%?
	5% if that, 20%.
	It's a little higher than some of you think, a little lower than what some of you think, but I'm sure the average works out.
	So it's 8.7%.
	It's 8.7% of America's primary energy comes from renewable sources.
	Anybody know what it is in China?
	China. 8.7% of the United States.
	What percentage?
	In China. You got a 20% there.
	From Jiayu-chan.
	Yes, you might have a bit of an inside scoop on that.
	0%, 12%.
	No, here's the funny thing. So the United States is constantly complaining about Chinese pollution, but 8.7% of America's energy comes from renewable sources, and 12.7% in China comes from renewable sources, right?
	The average for the world is 11.4%.
	Okay, what percentage...
	Of Bitcoin's energy use comes from renewable sources, right?
	Because everyone's like, oh, Bitcoin is so wasteful, I can't believe Elon Musk.
	Oh, don't even get me started, man.
	I could rant on Elon Musk until my spleen comes out my eyeball.
	So, US 8.7%, China 12.7%, world 11.4%.
	What percentage, and this is 2019, it's better now, but what percentage in 2019 came from renewables?
	Elon Muskrat. Hey, hey!
	Do not insult Muskrats. So it's 39%.
	Right?
	So what is that? Five times...
	So five times United States renewable is Bitcoin.
	You know, four times, give or take to China, four times the world.
	So Bitcoin is just about the most...
	If it was a country, it would be by far the most environmentally friendly country in the world.
	So again... Just shut up, everyone.
	You don't know what you're talking about.
	Or don't shut up. Be an environmentalist and have fun staying poor.
	What can I tell you? What can I tell you about all of that?
	It's kind of funny, right? Where do I get my stats?
	I will bend over later with a flashlight, and I will show you where some of these stats come from.
	Don't worry. I'll tell you.
	I'll tell you. I'll tell you.
	Here we go. Here is the other one for the Thousand Pyramids of Giza.
	Well, they're all Giza's, weren't they all pretty old?
	Oh, Dad Joke 101.
	Always. All right.
	Yeah, go to DLive.
	Alright. I can't math for crap.
	In fact, you can play craps quite well if you can math for good.
	Any thoughts on nuclear energy, Steph?
	Yeah, I think it's great. I think it's great.
	I mean, it would be way better if it wasn't government.
	And of course, this is another way that communism has screwed us, of course, is that Chernobyl gave nuclear power a big negative thing, but of course it was fucking communism, you know?
	And so it wasn't anything to do with the free market.
	The phrase, have fun being poor or staying poor?
	I think staying poor is better.
	I don't want to echo people buying Bitcoin.
	Yeah, I get that. I get that.
	I get that. All right.
	Since nobody wants to talk to me, I'll be fine.
	It's okay. Nobody wants to talk to me.
	Let's see here. So this was May 24th from the great Anthony Pompliano.
	If that's not a guy who shouldn't open a restaurant, I don't know what is.
	He says Bitcoin is down about 25% over the past 10 days.
	But... It has still outperformed gold by 66 times and the S&P 500 by 11 times over the last decade.
	In my humble opinion, Bitcoin is the world's best savings technology.
	So, yeah, that's pretty good.
	And, oh, Jeff Tucker has put out a book that you should check out.
	In my humble opinion, I'm not getting any kickbacks from any of this kind of stuff.
	But I'll put the link here.
	He is one elegant writer and a very gracious fellow.
	So he's got a book out called Liberty or Lockdown.
	Liberty or Lockdown.
	And I'll put the link here.
	Not a sponsored link or anything like that, but he's such an elegant writer.
	I can't wait to read it. And I read one of his audiobooks many times.
	I guess some years ago now.
	I think that came back to bite me because Murray Rothbard said something mean in the 1960s and therefore I'm an evil guy.
	Anyway, something nonsense like that.
	But yeah, Liberty or Lockdown by Jeff Tucker.
	Well worth a look. I haven't read it yet, but...
	Oh, it's not that recent. Sorry, I guess I missed it earlier.
	It came out last September. But yeah, he's always worth a read.
	So you should check that out, in my humble opinion.
	So I'm going to just take a tiny pause here.
	To see if you guys are responding to my early dating strategies by ghosting me.
	Does anybody want to jump in with a question, a comment, an issue, a compliment?
	You know, it's funny, um...
	I'm kind of freckly. I don't really look that freckly on a webcam, but on these high-quality cameras, which I use because they record for themselves as backup.
	But I saw a picture of Zach Braff, who's dating some woman 25 years younger.
	This is the guy from Scrubs.
	I saw him without makeup.
	I'm like, yeah, okay. It's just a post-40s, post-50 thing or whatever.
	You just get kind of spotty.
	You end up looking a little bit like Jupiter's pimples just sneezed on your forehead or something like that.
	All right. So I'll just take a pause here.
	If you want to chat, I've got tons more stuff to talk about, if you like.
	But you can unmute and chat if you want.
	Hello! Hey, Steph.
	How you doing? Doing great.
	It's great to talk to you. What's on your mind?
	So, I'm a Christian, like I was raised in a Christian family and all that, and we recently went to a Baptist church.
	And I mean, I think I'm still Christian, but there's like a lot of issues I have, like With stuff like, some verses say like, hey you gotta beat your kids or they're not gonna grow up right and that's I really have issues with that.
	Good. I've mentioned this on the show before, but you can bring this argument back.
	Spare the rod, spoil the child is something that violent people just grab at, like a drowning guy would grab at a barrel.
	And they think that it means that if you don't beat your children with a rod, with a stick, that they're going to turn out spoiled.
	It's not even close to what it meant.
	Not even close. So do you also do to me.
	And the children are, legally at least, the least among us, so if you wouldn't spank Jesus, don't spank your kids.
	But the rod refers to a staff, like a shepherd's staff.
	A shepherd uses his staff to lead the way, to clear brush, to, you know, poke ahead to make sure that there aren't too much swamp going to swallow up the sheep.
	He doesn't beat the sheep with his staff.
	He just uses it to lead the way and to guide and so on.
	So spare the guidance, spoil the child.
	Yeah, children who grow up without moral guidance are going to get pretty feral and going to be very much Lord of the Flies state of nature stuff.
	So... But no, you don't beat children.
	You don't beat children because, of course, you'd say, well, why would you beat children?
	Oh, well, but they don't listen.
	It's like, okay, well, sometimes parents don't listen.
	Does that mean that the children can beat them?
	Well, no, no. But the children's brains, you see, are deficient.
	They're cognitively deficient, so you have to hit them.
	It's like, oh, okay, so when you get older and you have a senior moment and you can't forget what your keys are to your adult children get to beat you then, it's like, well, no, that's it.
	Just no, don't use violence against children.
	They're not there by choice. And if you wouldn't use violence against your wife, but you would against your children, that's simply because you're kind of a cowardly asshole who knows that your wife can leave you, but your kids can't, and so you're just abusing that power.
	But no, you want to teach people to love the Lord and to love Jesus, and you don't want to beat them if they don't comply.
	Plus, it doesn't work. 40% of kids are still being beaten into their teenage years or hit.
	So if it worked, why do you have to keep doing it, right?
	It doesn't work. And it makes things worse.
	Kids don't listen. And statistically, the data is really clear.
	All it does is produce immediate compliance followed by later noncompliance.
	And that's why you have to keep doing it.
	So no, it doesn't work. Yeah.
	I mean, that's kind of...
	I totally agree with you.
	I kind of tried to explain it like that.
	I mean, not that eloquently, but to my dad, and he said, like, no, that's not true.
	And, like, there's another verse, or a couple of verses from Proverbs 23, verse...
	13 and 14.
	Withhold not correction from the child, for if thou beatest him with a rod, he shall not die.
	Thou shalt beat him with a rod, and shalt deliver his soul from hell.
	And I, like, totally disagree with that.
	Well, it certainly is true that most times that you beat a child with a rod, he will not die.
	Is that Old Testament?
	Yeah, it's Old Testament.
	It's the King James Version.
	Okay, so they know that the Christian thing is he says that he has come with a new covenant, right?
	So he's come with the New Covenant.
	And the New Covenant is, hey, you know, Old Testament is circumcision.
	New Testament, not so much, right?
	So there's a whole New Covenant, the whole deal with Jesus is there's a New Testament, which supersedes the Old Testament.
	So, and of course, you know, in the Old Testament, they tell you to do, sorry, dude, your mic is just killing me here.
	What are you doing? What are you doing?
	Every time. I don't know what it is.
	Like, nobody can just call me in a quiet room.
	It's so weird. Like, would you call your wife or your girlfriend in some howling storm or jumping up and down and clackering and clamming?
	Just try and show me the same.
	I'm not mad at you. It's just a continual problem.
	Every single damn show, people are like...
	It's like I've got to fix it in post.
	I've got better things to do with my life.
	So yeah, just do me a solid.
	Just stand still in a quiet room while you're talking to me.
	I do this all for free.
	That's all I ask. Just let me have a life after the show without having to fix all this stuff.
	But no, you wouldn't... In the Old Testament, there's a whole bunch of stuff you've got to do.
	Don't you have to put homosexuals to death?
	They're not doing that, are they? So they're perfectly willing to ignore stuff in the Old Testament all the time.
	So, yeah, the idea that you're going to reach back into that and just step over all of the other stuff you're supposed to do.
	If your child speaks back to you, you're allowed to kill them or supposed to kill them at some places in the Old Testament.
	You're not doing that, are you? So you've got to go with the New Testament Jesus stuff and have that superseded, right?
	So that's not a good argument at all.
	Alright, did I scare him off by nagging him about his mic sounds?
	No, sorry. It's just for each individual, it's not so bad, but just for me, every single show, it drives me crazy.
	Sorry, go ahead. Yeah, I mean, I totally agree with you.
	It's just I'm having trouble, like, with my, especially my dad and, like, people in my church.
	But your dad hit you, right? Yeah. Yeah, he did, and, like, I talked to him about it, and he, like, listens to your show, but he disagrees.
	He says, like, well, you only got one daughter, so you don't know, but...
	Like, I talked to him about it, and he said, yeah, I'm not going to apologize for that, and stuff like that.
	Okay, so he obviously can't reconcile himself to the fact that he might have done wrong, right?
	Yeah. Okay.
	Does he know much about the sin of pride?
	You know, pride being an unwillingness or an inability to even listen to the possibility that you might be wrong.
	Yeah, I can't say for real that he does.
	Right. Well, it's his conscience, of course, right?
	It's his conscience. And, you know, if he wants to call in to me, I'm happy to talk with him, but I would just say, look, your son is upset because you hit him.
	And you don't hit anyone.
	Does he hit anyone else in his environment other than his kids when you were younger?
	Did he hit anyone else's kids?
	So he's able to restrain himself from hitting everyone else's kids.
	He's able to restrain himself from hitting police officers, your wife, your teachers, waiters.
	I'm sure lots of people disobeyed him or did things that were wrong, according to his version of morality.
	He didn't hit them. The only people he ended up hitting were the people who were small and weaker and completely economically and legally dependent upon him.
	It's not a universal principle that he's behaving by at all, right?
	And the other thing, too, is that, I don't know if you have kids or not, No.
	I'm still living with him.
	I'm 22. Okay.
	Well, I mean, personally, if there's an unrepentant child hitter in the environment, they're not around my kids.
	Like, it's not going to happen. Sorry.
	Not going to happen. Because if they still think that hitting children is good or right, then they're going to hit my kids, right?
	Because they want to be good at helping me raise the kids, right?
	And if they don't hit my kids...
	Then they're either allowing me to be a bad parent or admitting that you don't need to hit kids.
	There's just no good way out of that.
	So, you know, your job as a dad, your job as a husband, your job as a man is to protect your family and your level of protection should be the greatest where people are the weakest and most vulnerable, which is children.
	So you just need to keep children away from people who justify hitting them.
	Of course, right? I mean, if there was some guy, let's say you're dating some girlfriend, some girl, and there's a guy who's like, oh yeah, a woman talks back to you, you just punch her.
	You just hit her. You just put her over, you just hit her, right?
	Well, you wouldn't want your girlfriend hanging out with that guy too much because she's only going to be a certain amount of time until she gets hit, right?
	You would be putting her in danger, right?
	And your children don't have the kind of choice.
	They need you to enforce that choice in safety for them.
	He can have all the beliefs he wants, right?
	Because you can't change people's minds.
	But if your father is an unrepentant child hitter, to me, I'm just telling you my particular...
	Okay, you can believe all you want, but you're just not around my kids.
	If you want to hit kids, like if you think that's good parenting, like you can believe all you want, but, you know, beliefs have consequences.
	Yeah, yeah. I mean, I agree.
	And he didn't... I know, like, this is something a lot of people say that, like, it wasn't that bad, but, like, I did the ACT test, I think it's called.
	No, the Everest Childhood Experience Test, the ACE test.
	Yeah, well worth doing. Yeah.
	I mean, I looked at it, and I think it was, like, one or two...
	Like, we only got, like, hit, I don't think it was very often, but I still think, like, even a little bit, well, it's not good, and it's still something you should apologize for, but...
	I think so, yeah, and there could be good reasons why he believed it was the right thing, but we wouldn't say, you know, if we say, well, I only hit my girlfriend a couple of times a year, we wouldn't say, well, that's a great relationship now, isn't it?
	Right, right, yeah, and, like, After being presented, like, with the facts and all that, you should, like, apologize, I think.
	I think so, too. And, again, you know, it may be that's genuinely what he thought, but here's the thing, too.
	When you were a kid, if you were in the wrong, I bet you weren't allowed to say, hey, man, but that's genuinely what I thought.
	You'd be like, no, you're wrong. And of course, I guess your father did consult a 3,000 or 5,000-year-old book, but that's certainly not the latest science in parenting.
	And parenting has been peaceful in terms of its portrayal in the mainstream media since the 1950s, since shows like My Three Sons.
	You had a perfectly reasonable and peaceful parent, a very...
	Very positive with his kids and never yells at them, never calls them names, never hits them, anything like that.
	So this parenting has been modeled for like 70 years.
	There's no way people don't know about it at all.
	Well, listen, I wish you the best.
	And again, if your dad wants to call in, I'm happy to wrangle it out with him, father to father.
	And, you know, maybe he'll set me straight.
	Maybe I'll set him straight. We'll see.
	But he's certainly welcome to call in.
	All right. Thanks, man. I appreciate that.
	And don't forget to mute yourself and your cyclotron when you're done.
	Yeah, thanks. Kind of windy out here, sorry.
	Yeah, I noticed that. I think I noticed that a bit.
	All right. What else have we got here?
	Let's go for another couple of minutes.
	What do you guys say? What do you say?
	Hey, Stefan, can I ask you a question?
	You can. Okay.
	So, I have a little bit of a dilemma.
	You know, I'm from New York, and I moved out of town to get away from the pandemic, and I got a new job while I was, you know, working remote.
	And now, you know, the company has sort of called everybody back to New York.
	And, you know, they've sort of told people, you know, you don't have to get the vaccine.
	But I feel, you know, sort of pressured to do it.
	And I feel like, you know, I may not be completely safe if I don't do it.
	What do you think about that?
	So what aspect would you like feedback on moving back to New York, working for a employer who wants you to get the vaccine, taking the vaccine?
	I'm not sure, like, can you sort of narrow it down for me a smidge?
	You know, I feel like even the decision to stay or to go, you know, I feel like I have no idea what to do.
	Do you like living outside the city?
	You know, I'm really not set up very well for it.
	You know, I'm the kind of person where I've lived in, I sort of grew up in New York, so I thought I would never leave.
	And, you know, I don't even know how to drive.
	So I don't know what kind of life I would live if I didn't go do this.
	Sorry, let me ask that again, because you kind of gave me a big complicated answer there.
	Do you like living outside the city?
	You know, there's some peace and quiet, there's a little bit more room, a little more space.
	Just curious. I'm not saying do you like it more, but do you like it at all?
	It's okay. Yeah, I've gotten, you know, I've found some things I like about it.
	Okay. And do you enjoy being the victim of violent crime?
	No. Okay.
	So the month of April 2021, crime index in New York rose what percent over year over year?
	I want to say 20 percent.
	You are two-thirds of the way there.
	It is 30.4 percent.
	A 66% increase in grand larceny.
	A 35.6% increase in felony assault.
	28.6% increase in robbery.
	Shooting incidents in April 2020 were 56.
	What were they in April 2021?
	Uh... Sorry, I can't do math right now.
	Is it 150?
	Yeah, 149. You're very close.
	You're very close. Oh, okay.
	So, it's dangerous, man.
	It's dangerous in there right now.
	It depends on what you think is going to happen to the currency.
	There are supply chain issues around the world.
	There's big disruption in the farming community, a lot of racist policies on forgiveness of loans based on just terrible stuff.
	I think that the US dollar is...
	I'm going to experience a couple of shocks over the next little while.
	That's pretty vague, I know. But, you know, moving...
	If you have a choice, for me, at least, moving into a city with this kind of, like, 66% increase in grand larceny, 35.6% increase in felony assault, that's just one year.
	And that's just reported stuff.
	I mean, you don't drive.
	Does that mean you'd have to take the subway?
	Are you going to Bernie Getz this whole thing or what?
	I mean, if you had the chance to not be in a city, it seems to me like that might be something worth looking into.
	Yeah, you know, I've definitely thought about it, and that's another element in there.
	Well, what is it that, I mean, New York, New York, right?
	The city's so nice they named it twice.
	What is it that you like the most about it?
	I'll tell you my calculus here.
	Basically, what happened is, you know, I had a job before the pandemic that I was stuck in for five years.
	That was kind of a dead-end job.
	I work on Wall Street.
	And this new job is a lot higher paying, and I would say it has a little bit of prestige.
	You know, it's kind of a...
	It's got kind of a...
	I wouldn't walk away from it lightly, but it feels kind of horrible.
	It feels like walking into a minefield either way.
	What's the minefield in the country?
	Just you might not make as much?
	Well, I just think if I walk away from this, I just don't know what's going to happen to me.
	I mean, I could be... I've worked for a while.
	I mean, you know, I'm a smart guy and, you know, I could try to do something, but I don't, you know.
	So there's a phrase that you said there that I'm going to push back pretty hard on.
	You said, I don't know what's going to happen to me.
	Do you know why that bugs me so much?
	I'm not saying you're wrong. I've just, personally, you have any idea why that phrase bugs me so much?
	Why? Why are you letting things happen to you?
	It's your life!
	Don't let things happen to you.
	Make things happen.
	Carve your own way. Be the icebreaker.
	Chew your way through rock if you have to.
	What do you want out of life?
	Go make that happen as opposed to letting other people dangle your choices so your book becomes some choose your own adventure thing written by someone else.
	What do you want? Now's the time.
	Are you young? Are you single?
	You've got some money in the bank.
	Man, go make something happen.
	Don't let things happen to you and don't say what's going to happen to me like it's up to someone else.
	You've got to be some dream that you've always wanted to do that now might be a perfect time to pursue.
	Some business you want to start, some thing that you want to do, some adventure you want to have, something.
	That you're choosing from a void.
	The best things in life come from when you choose from a void, not from what's available to you.
	If you decide to stay in the cave, turn to page 83.
	If you decide to leave the cage, turn to page 89.
	That's no way to live. And I know it's a big rant.
	It may not be specific to you, but man, I'm just telling you.
	Blank page this mofo.
	Blank page it. Rather than, okay, little from column A, column B, I got one of two choices.
	No, you don't. You're a 21st century young urban god.
	You've got all the choices in the known universe.
	You have a richness of options that people throughout history could barely have comprehended.
	So instead of saying, well, should I move to the city?
	Should I stay in the country? How about you just take a big, giant, blank whiteboard and say, sky's the limit, baby.
	What can I do? I could do anything.
	If I could do anything, if I could design my life from the ground up, from the bottom up, What would I do?
	But instead, you're like someone in grade nine saying, well, I got to take either calculus or I got to take physics.
	And it's like, no, no, no. Blank slate.
	Blank. If you could do anything with all the resources you could imagine, you don't have to answer this now.
	I mean, there's something on the tip of your tongue.
	What would you do? Um...
	You know, well, I could try to start a company.
	I could try to...
	Not could. Not could.
	Yeah, you could become a mime, but if you don't want to, right?
	If you could make of your life anything, anything, what do you most want to do?
	Now, that doesn't mean you can do it right now.
	But you've got to know what it is that you most want to do.
	Like, do you know what I most want to be doing right now with my life?
	It's talking to you.
	That's the design. That's what I want to be doing.
	It is? Yeah, absolutely.
	Otherwise, I would be doing something else.
	Oh, well, thank you.
	You know, I think my problem might be that, you know, I've been working these corporate jobs for long enough that I'm just very, like, Uh, kind of zoned into this track where I'm saying, okay, I just, I'm just gonna, you know, save up money and just, just kind of check, check my boxes and do this for a couple of years.
	And then I'm going to do that.
	Like, then I'll figure it out.
	Right. That, that was my plan.
	And I feel like that plan has been taken away from me or it's sort of, you know, it's sort of been like, like a rug has been pulled out from under me.
	And I'm kind of like, you know, I realized that maybe that, that, uh, I don't know.
	That's not quite going to work out.
	You are going to give me a facial tick with this passive voice, my brother.
	It was taken away from me.
	The rug was... Who took it from you?
	Who took it from you? I don't know.
	The man? No, no.
	You opened your hand. You let it go because it's easier.
	It's easier to take choices that are offered to you rather than define your own life.
	It is. This is why most people do it.
	And if you were most people, I wouldn't be having this talk with you.
	But you're screwed now, man.
	You listen to this show, you get the lecture.
	Whether you like it or not, you can hang up if you want, right?
	But no, this is your life.
	It's your choice. Yeah.
	Are you afraid to hope?
	Are you afraid you won't get what you want?
	Are you afraid to...
	Forge your own path?
	What's holding you back from choosing for yourself rather than picking from what's on the menu?
	I feel like I worked very hard to get this particular thing that to just, you know, to turn around and just to, you know, do a 180 and walk away from it.
	You know, that's a little out of my...
	That's not something I would necessarily do.
	But I never said to you, walk away from this job.
	This job could be perfectly a stepping stone for where you want to get to in life.
	But where do you want to get to?
	What's your ideal life?
	That's my question. What will you want to do tomorrow?
	I can't help you with that.
	I'm a nutritionist, not an ER doctor.
	I can tell you about five years from now.
	I can't tell you about tomorrow.
	Right? So what's your ideal life in five years?
	What do you want to be doing? I think I would like to, it's really tough to answer this.
	I feel like everything I do is kind of putting off things into the future, where I feel like I'm kind of suffering.
	Um, through things and just saying that, you know, tomorrow is going to be better and I'm going to have, you know, I'm going to be materially comfortable and, you know, I'll be, have some, some freedom and then I'll just, I don't know, you know, like I, there I imagine more of like a life of leisure or, you know, I can, like, I can, I don't know, I can study if I want to, or I can be, you know, Pursue, like, intellectual stuff.
	I don't know exactly what that would be, but what I imagine is that...
	Yeah, I mean, mostly what I want is freedom, I think.
	But I don't have any particular thing where I'm saying, like, you know, I want to go paint or something.
	It's not really...
	What you want is nihilistic.
	What you want is not what you have.
	You don't know what that is, but whatever it is that you have, you want something that's not that at some point in the future, right?
	Yeah, I'm interested.
	You would call that nihilistic.
	Why do you say that?
	Because it's a negation.
	In the future, I want something that I don't have right now, but you don't know what that is.
	It's nihilistic because it's a negation.
	It's going to be something that's the opposite of what I have It's like if you said to me, Steph, where do you want to go in the world?
	And I said, well, I sure as hell don't want to go to Buenos Aires.
	Okay? So that narrows it down to everything but Buenos Aires.
	No, no, that's my passion. My passion for travel is to not go to Buenos Aires.
	And your passion for the future is to not be doing what you're doing.
	I don't see...
	I feel like this is what everybody does.
	Am I wrong? Doesn't everybody just kind of clock into their...
	No! No, because if everyone did that, there'd be nobody starting the companies that would offer you jobs, right?
	So you're relying on other people to not do that, so you have some jobs to choose from to avoid whatever makes you tense about self-definition.
	But I tell you this, man, in life, in life, in life, in life, you will never, ever...
	Get or achieve what you won't define.
	You will never, ever, ever achieve what you won't define or what you don't define.
	Right? So if you say, well, I want a house.
	You'll never get that house.
	If you say, I want a house in the country, you'll never get that house in the country.
	If you say, I want a house in the country with two and a half acres and a pond and a barn and a place to raise chickens and I want it to have two floors, okay, maybe you're getting close to something that you might actually achieve.
	But if your future is, well, I just, I want to not be doing what I'm doing in the hopes that something else will be better, you will never achieve that because that's not anything to aim at.
	You're just aiming away from where you are.
	What about this?
	Let's say I'm the kind of person where I'm saving literally as much money as I can.
	And I'm just putting money away.
	And the way I think about it is, look, I don't know exactly what I want this moment, but my options can only increase, right?
	You know, I'm preserving optionality, but just by saving money and seeing what's out there and eventually something will hit me.
	That's sort of the way I think about it.
	How old are you?
	28. Okay.
	It's 28, man. Anything hit you yet?
	No. So this is your strategy?
	I guess so. At some point in the future, something's going to hit me that's never hit me so far, but that's what's going to happen, and then my life will have clarity.
	But you see, you still won't be choosing, because let's say you wake up tomorrow and it's like, I'm going to be a mime.
	Well, you still haven't made a choice.
	Something just hit you. It's still passive.
	I see. What help did you get when you were younger trying to figure out what your dreams were?
	What encouragement did you get to have a dream?
	You know, so, well, I would say my parents kind of pushed me a little bit to go into the field that I'm in.
	So I wouldn't...
	I mean, I would say my dad kind of, you know, he was encouraging, but I don't know that he necessarily...
	Uh, said, like, you know, what's your dream type of thing?
	It's more like, you know, uh, I think, uh, I think my dad at least told me that I could do great things or I could start a business but he sort of still wanted to push me into like a certain career track and I would say my mom was not very encouraging at all.
	Do you remember as a kid going through the cowboys and astronauts phase where you dream crazy big nonsense stuff?
	You know, for me, I think it was actually, like, video games.
	Like, I used to dream that I would make video games.
	All right. That's a bit more realistic than astronaut.
	So good for you. I was astronaut guy.
	I was fighter pilot, starship pilot, you name it, right?
	Okay. Well, it wasn't realistic in the sense that I didn't imagine sitting in front of a computer, like, drawing, you know, models and writing code.
	I just imagined, like, you know, stories or kind of...
	Like the actual game, not the drudgery of making one.
	But you know that that's a job, right?
	Yeah. And you know that you can write out the prospectus for a video game and you can get it funded.
	If you have a great idea for a video game, you can write out the mechanics, the idea, the plot, the story, some of the dialogue, how that moves, you know, who your demographic is going to...
	You can write all of that stuff up and you can go and try and get investment if you want.
	I'm not saying this is what you do or don't do.
	I'm just saying that that's certainly possible.
	That's how video games get made, right?
	Right. So if you were to think of doing that as a hobby on the side, who knows, right?
	Just, yeah, I can write up some video game stuff and I'm going to start to look at how to get it funded, right?
	Yeah. What do you think of that?
	Well... I don't know if that's something I would do now, but I do see your point.
	I don't know if that's my dream now.
	Maybe it was more of a childhood thing.
	I feel like I've sort of had adulthood kind of beaten into me a little bit.
	What's your life like? Non-existent.
	Do you know why? Why?
	Because if you want a woman to want you, you have to want something.
	I'm not kidding. Women are incredibly drawn to male ambition.
	If you want a woman to love you, you've got to fall in love with something.
	Not just her. It's not enough.
	That's a circular mirror, right?
	Or a mirror facing each other.
	So if you want to generate love from a woman, You've got to be passionate about something other than the woman.
	I understand.
	But so this issue with my job is that, like I'm saying, my plan right now is that I am, you know, pretty career oriented and like I'm, you know, I'm kind of honed in on this track that I had, and that's why I feel like to walk away from it would be almost like killing myself.
	I feel like I'm talking to your dad here.
	I'm not saying walk away from your job.
	What am I saying? This is your listening question, right?
	What have I been saying? Well, you're saying to kind of like, you know, find something that I really want and kind of work towards it.
	This job could be a stepping stone.
	Yeah, maybe you say, I'll work here for two or three years or five years.
	I'm going to save up this money. I'm going to...
	Whatever it's going to be, right?
	Whatever it's going to be. But I feel like there's a little bit of urgency here that I may have not...
	You know, illustrated is that they're telling me to come back, come to New York by this day, you know, by, you know, let's say July X, right?
	So I have a decision to make that is very, like, imminent.
	And I feel that the decision puts me at personal risk.
	Okay, but listen, listen. If I was your nutritionist, right?
	And I said, oh, you've got to eat less carbs, right?
	And you said to me, well, look, I have a dinner reservation for this weekend at an Italian restaurant.
	They only serve carbs.
	What am I supposed to do? It's like, we're talking about your life.
	I don't care what you eat on the weekend.
	I care about your life as a whole.
	You know, it'd be good to cut down on your carbs if I was some imaginary...
	I don't even know if that's good advice.
	Some imaginary... And you're trying to argue with me about where you're going to eat this weekend.
	I'm just saying that for your life as a whole, you want to have a vision that is big, that is great, that is powerful.
	I think. Because if you, look, if you have no capacity for that, you wouldn't be listening to the show and you wouldn't be calling it for me, right?
	And deep down, I think you have this capacity.
	Otherwise, you also wouldn't be not listening this much because, you know, you can listen to things when you're indifferent even.
	But if you are opposed to them, right, for some reason, right, then it's tougher.
	But here's the thing. At the end of your life, that's the big question, right?
	At the end of your life.
	Most of us don't get hit by a bus.
	Most of us get some Rush Limbaugh-style diagnosis and it takes a fucking year or two to die.
	You look back on your life.
	What do you want to see?
	What do you want to see when you look back on your life?
	Well, I'll tell you what you don't want to see.
	You don't want to see a whole bunch of avoidances and compromises and, you know, shit a little apologizing to the CCP John Cena moments, right?
	You want to see something big.
	If you failed, that's fine.
	You can't fail fundamentally in life except by dying because if you fail, you learn, and if you fail, you gain valuable experience that makes you even more valuable.
	Like I was talking to a friend of mine who's like, oh, I want to quit my job and become a consultant, but I'm afraid of failing.
	It's like, but you can't fail. Because if you fail, for whatever reason, you'll have learned a lot about the business, which makes you that much more valuable to your next employer.
	You can't fail. You can only fail by dying, and then you pass failure anyway, and you've got nothing to regret.
	So what do you want to see when you look back on your life?
	Well, you don't want to see loneliness.
	You don't want to see isolation.
	Of course, if you do see loneliness and you do see isolation, I'm trying to motivate you to be someone that a woman can love, Because here's the thing, right?
	This is a quote from a book, Why Evolution Gave Us Happiness.
	Our immune system has evolved to hum along at peak capacity when we're happy, but to slow down dramatically when we're not.
	This is why long-term unhappiness can literally kill you through its immune-suppressing effects, and why loneliness in late adulthood is deadlier than smoking.
	Indeed, once you're over 65, you're better off smoking, drinking, or overeating with your friends Then you are sitting at home alone, right?
	You're 28. You know, clocks ticking for men.
	It ticks for men as well as women.
	If you can bring passion for something into your life, and that passion may be something you realize.
	You know, I first got passionate about philosophy in my mid-teens.
	It took me until my late 30s to do something with it.
	My God, 25 years.
	It's a quarter century between, I love this shit, to, hey, I can do this shit.
	So I'm not, you know, nobody was saying to me, well, quit everything you're doing when you're 15 and just wait for podcasting to come along.
	But you've got to keep some kind of flame alive in you.
	It doesn't mean about whether you take this job or not.
	But if you don't have anything to aim at, you're never going to get anywhere.
	And if you don't have a passion for something, then expecting people to have a passion for you It's naive.
	It's not going to happen. People want to see you in motion.
	They want to see you yearning for something.
	They want to see you aiming for something, trying, failing, getting up, trying again.
	They want to be ennobled, enriched, inspired.
	And you want that too.
	Could you clarify?
	So what if my passion is something that no one in their right minds would give a rat's ass about and...
	What if it's something that I didn't even want to tell people about?
	Is it legal? Yeah.
	Will you tell me? What if my passion was trading cryptocurrency or doing really abstract computer programming or something?
	Does anybody care if I do that?
	Well, I would say that if you have a passion for crypto because you're like, screw the fiat murder coin slave system, I'm building a freer future.
	That's what I'm passionate about, right?
	You can't just be passionate about money.
	Because once you have enough, your passion dies and you're dead in the water and you've got nothing to go for, right?
	Right. If you're passionate about abstract computer programming, maybe it's because, oh my gosh, I can figure out some AI stuff that's really going to get Skynet woken up and bring Arnold Schwarzenegger back in his prime.
	I don't know. Whatever you've got, some AI thing that's going to cure cancer or whatever.
	It could even be like a video game that's going to teach people about some important facet of morality or government or philosophy or just entertain the living shit out of them to the point where their days are happy.
	Anything. Anything that's bigger than just the immediate thing or just the money, right?
	So if you've got something you're passionate about, fantastic.
	Do you think that people who listen to this show, it's been millions and millions and millions of people now, right?
	Listen to this show. They were not nearly as passionate about philosophy.
	In fact, if you had told most of my listeners that they'd be enwrapped by a philosophy program, In the future, they would have laughed at you.
	They would have said, well, no, philosophy is not that interesting.
	Philosophy is very abstract.
	It doesn't add to anything.
	It's an ivory tower of discipline.
	It's all nonsense. It's very technical.
	It's like a whole bunch of logic float trees and do nouns really exist?
	Whereas if they just said, oh, my God, I'm going to be grabbed by the balls by philosophy.
	My integrity is going to have a total Me Too moment with Steph's forehead for years, and it's going to change my life.
	It's going to change my parenting.
	It's going to change the course of Of my entire existence, right?
	They wouldn't, like, people wouldn't believe that.
	Because I'm passionate enough about philosophy and want to use it to connect to people and make their lives better, that happens.
	Right? So, it doesn't matter what you're passionate about, what matters.
	Is that your passion matters to you and you can frame it to yourself and to others in a way that's more than just vanity or money acquisition or anything like that.
	It has to be about something that's bigger that's a gift to the world.
	It has to be something that's bigger that makes people's lives better in some fashion.
	That fashion doesn't have to be particularly elevated.
	It can just be a twitch shooter like Doom, right?
	It could be fun, fun distraction or whatever, right?
	But if you can have a passion, like if you want to be a writer and you say, well, I want to be a writer because, you know, writers don't have to work that much and writers can, you know, get decent money from movie scripts and then you're not going to be a writer.
	If you're like, well, I have a writer because I just have this incredible passion to tell amazing stories or wonderful stories or scary, whatever it is, right?
	I want to improve the human condition by grabbing people's eyeballs and giving them the best time they can find on paper or something like that, right?
	Okay, well then, that's something sustainable.
	Am I ever going to be done with the job of philosophy?
	God, no. Ten generations from now, they won't be done with the job of philosophy because there'll be new problems to solve, even if we solve all of the ones we have right now, which doesn't appear to be particularly imminent.
	So if you can find something you're passionate about, that you can commit to, that has a larger purpose than serving your material needs or your ego needs, if you have something Like, I mean, if I had stayed in the software field, I'd have been in a Bitcoin like on day one.
	Yeah, I could have probably made more money.
	Yeah, I could have...
	Tons of people in Bitcoin.
	What we need is moral philosophy.
	We need moral philosophy.
	So it can't just be about the money.
	It can't just be about the prestige.
	It can't be about the size of your apartment.
	And it sure as hell can't be about the size of your ego.
	Because then everything that you use to succeed will be used to dominate others and show your superiority, which brings other people down and will make you feel like shit in the long run.
	You want to elevate people with you.
	You want to elevate people with you.
	So I don't know what that answer is for you.
	And it doesn't sound like you know what it is.
	So you've got to go back pretty early and figure out who wet fingered your candle of life early on.
	And you've got to find a way to relight that and rekindle that and stop being afraid to dream big and hope big and try for big.
	Because, you know, big comes with risk.
	I want it to be a giant in the history of philosophy, right?
	Yeah, that's a pretty big ambition.
	And, you know, it's up to history to figure that out.
	It's not really up to me. I can just keep doing the best that I can over time.
	I think I got a pretty good shot.
	But, and it's not even about me.
	I'll be dead, right? That's just about, can I help advance the cause of philosophy in the world which so desperately needs it?
	Can I do that? Not for me.
	Not for my ego. God, if I was in this for my ego, I would never have said half the things that I've said that got me a Wikipedia page that's equivalent to an apple served by an evil Disney queen to a princess, right?
	So aim big, dream big.
	Let's say you aim to climb up Mount Everest and you only get halfway up Mount Everest.
	That's still pretty damn good.
	But if you only aim to get halfway up, you'll only get a quarter of the way up.
	And if you only get a quarter of the way up, only aim for a quarter, you'll get an eighth.
	Just aim high, see how high you get.
	But you've got to figure out what is going to be something that is a passionate contribution you can make to the world that's just not about your needs, but it's about what fulfills others and makes the world a better place.
	If you can find that, then you will be sustained by the good you can continue to do in the world, that there won't be an end to it, and other people will love you For your love of the world.
	But if you don't love anything, who's gonna love you?
	If you can't be passionate about anything, who's gonna be passionate about you?
	Right. Thank you, Stephan.
	I think I learned something here.
	Good, listen. I'm not telling you what to do.
	And I know you wouldn't accept, oh, go to New York, don't go to New York.
	That's not the point, right? The point is, have a bigger vision for your life, and then fit what you're going to do into that.
	But otherwise, you're just like a pinball bouncing from reaction to reaction, and you think you're making choices, but you're only considering alternatives, which is not quite the same thing.
	All right, well, listen, will you keep me posted about how it's going?
	You can drop me a line at, call in at freedomain.com.
	Oh, yes, I will. Thank you so much, Stefan.
	Thank you very much. I appreciate that.
	All right. Bye-bye.
	Yeah, bye. Bye, bye, bye, bye.
	All right. After a year, cumulative COVID mortality in Sweden, no lockdown, no mask mandate, no primary school closures.
	It's significantly lower than the average in both the EU and...
	The U.S., right? This is from May 20th.
	After a year, cumulative COVID mortality in Sweden without lockdown, mask mandate, and primary school closures is significantly lower than the average in both the EU and the U.S. This invalidates the high-cost, low-benefit Wessner approach to the, quote, pandemic.
	And, you know, have I validated all of these numbers?
	I have not, but I will leave it to you to do that if you so choose.
	And I very much appreciated being less than perfectly correct about Sweden.
	All right. I think there was one other thing I wanted to mention before closing things down for the evening.
	Oh yeah, the video gaming industry uses way more energy than Bitcoin.
	Why is nobody upset about that?
	Because that keeps the plebs happy and content and blah blah blah, right?
	Mask compliance in Thailand.
	They have a 93% mask compliance and their cases as of May 20th were absolutely through the roof.
	And the only investment advice I will ever give is do the opposite of whatever Paul Krugman says.
	That I will say for sure. All right.
	Thank you very much.
	This program has inspired me to follow my passion and create the game Minecraft.
	It's that great bit from...
	Spinal Tap. Hey, hey, hey.
	Mime is money. Shut up and eat.
	That's really brilliant. Billy Crystal was very funny in that.
	All right. Netherlands is training bees to sniff COVID. It's supposedly working.
	Netherlands is smart people, man.
	Smart people. Thanks, Stefan.
	Stay sexy. Noam Chomsky said about Bitcoin, I don't know.
	Well, it's Christian coin, right?
	It's Christian coin. It allows Christians to take back control of the monetary system.
	All right. Thanks, everyone, so much.
	Have yourselves a wonderful, wonderful evening.
	Such a great pleasure to chat with you guys.
	I really, really do appreciate it.
	Freedomain.com forward slash donate if you would like to help out the show.
	And I hope that you will.
	Freedomain.com forward slash donate.
	It has been a challenging year or two.
	Let's put it that way. So Freedomain.com forward slash donate.
	Kissed the back of my hand by mistake there.
	You don't know if you're just listening. So have a great evening, everyone.
	Take care. I will talk to you soon.
	And I will not forget to turn that off, which I did last time.
	All right. Take care, everyone.

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