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April 3, 2022 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

01:55:56

TO HELL WITH A RISK-FREE LIFE!

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	That's right. April the 3rd, 2022.
	Still feels like a science fiction day to me, but here we are.
	Do you think Gordon Ramsay is a good person?
	What, the shark-haired yelling guy on TV? Is that the chef?
	The guy who puts a woman's head between two pieces of bread and says, what are you?
	And she says, an idiot sandwich.
	Are you playing 1v1 Catan Special Rules?
	No, I'm not doing any expansions, just the basics.
	My daughter is, like, ferociously good at it.
	Like, here's the thing. She's going to be, like, card-sharping levels of skill set at some point.
	Like, she will tell you.
	Like, it's just bizarre. She will, to me at least...
	She will tell you which cards you have.
	Now, she's not obviously looking, but she will tell you which cards you have because she's just kept track in this, you know, Rain Man kind of way.
	She's kept track of everyone's cards.
	She just knows what cards everyone has.
	It's an amazing thing.
	It's like Ben Affleck levels of card counting, hopefully with a slightly different outcome.
	By the way, Do you like the cap?
	For those of you just listening, the cap says, it's a 20-sided dice, and it says, because I'm the dungeon master.
	That's why. Keep Izzy away from Vegas.
	Yeah, yeah, no kidding. Stefan, how come so many restaurant employees tend to have tattoos?
	I mean, I worked in a bunch of restaurants when I was a teenager, and it's a chaotic environment.
	It's a drug-addicted environment a lot of times.
	It's a promiscuous environment.
	It's not a very healthy environment.
	A lot of people just kind of cast away from the normal daily life of the world and end up in restaurants.
	And of course there are a lot of people who were there who were waiters.
	I remember working, one of my favorite jobs that I had in the restaurant world was a pizza hut.
	Because I love Pizza Hut. I love Pizza Hut.
	To me, fantastic pizza.
	At least it was back in the day.
	And also, I really liked their fettuccine Alfredo.
	And it was a mad environment, let me tell you.
	So, you had little countdown timers on the table sometimes.
	And you had to get the drinks out and the food out for lunch within five minutes or their meal was free.
	And this came down from head office and the restaurant manager would sometimes...
	He would literally throw up and sometimes he would throw up blood out of stress at the end of those lunch things because it was really quite insane.
	But a lot of fun to work and it taught me quite a lot.
	It taught me a lot about pecking order because there were these...
	Pizza fossils, right? These women who'd worked there forever, and this was where they were going to work.
	This is where they were going to retire.
	And they got all the best sections, right?
	And I was like, no, but I'm a charming, competent waiter, and people really like me.
	I get good tips. They're like, no, you're never going to get those sections.
	Why? Because you're just passing through.
	They're here for the duration, so we've got to give them the good stuff.
	So you learn a little bit about value-added packing order.
	And there was a guy...
	He looked kind of like Turkish or Middle Eastern or something like that.
	And the one thing you can say about the sort of Middle Eastern guys is they tend to have a certain amount, in general, a certain amount of braggadocio.
	You know, they just, everything they do is cool and they have the best cars.
	And this guy, I remember he always had the same faded jeans on.
	And in particular, the jeans were very faded around the crotch.
	I don't know if he netted them with pumice to make his balls look bigger or something like that, but they were very faded around the crotch.
	Like full-on cucumber in tinfoil down the pants, spinal tap style.
	And he would always corner you and tell you all about the real estate deals he was doing.
	Yeah, I got a great offer on a house in this neighborhood and I'm just upgrading a house over in this neighborhood.
	He would just constantly corner you and tell you about all the real estate deals that he was working on.
	Now, I was, I don't know, 16 when I first started working there, and I've got to tell you, even at the age of 16, I'm like, you know you're a waiter at Pizza Hut, right?
	Like, I mean, if you could...
	If you were doing all these real estate deals, I kind of doubt you'd be trying to impress some 16-year-old kid with how great your real estate deals were.
	That just didn't seem to make much sense to me.
	But yeah, I learned a lot about hustle, learned a lot about customer service, learned, I mean, waitering is a good job as a teenager, but once you get into your 20s, it just seems to be a pretty bad, bad idea.
	Seems to be a pretty bad idea to stay.
	Are you still planning to do the parenting Q&A show with your daughter?
	Yes. Yes, we are. People do a surprising amount of cocaine in restaurant kitchens.
	Yeah, for sure. For sure.
	I also remember, and again, why I'm dredging up these refugees from my history and broadcasting them forever.
	I'm just a search and rescue operation from my own past.
	But... I remember a woman came in, so you could either get a one-time pizza deal, like, sorry, for the salad bar.
	They had a fantastic salad bar, Pizza Hut.
	I don't think they still have it anymore, but they used to just be an amazing salad bar.
	The chickpeas were fantastic.
	And I remember this woman used to come in in the morning, And she would pick up a salad bar for lunch.
	And I remember the cashier charging her for an all-you-can-eat salad bar and the restaurant manager just getting kind of mad at her.
	Like, why would you charge her for an all-you-can-eat salad bar?
	She's literally leaving the restaurant in 30 seconds.
	She's going to work. This is her lunch salad.
	Why would you charge her for an all-you-can-eat salad When she's literally leaving the restaurant right after she pays.
	And that was a moment.
	I remember looking at that moment and saying, yeah, you know what?
	You really do have to think and be alive to the moment.
	Just don't go on automatic. Well, everyone...
	Because, you know, just about everyone took the all-you-can-eat.
	In fact, before I worked there, my friends and I were so broke, we used to go there, all order water.
	One guy would order an all-you-can-eat salad bar and we'd load up on the eggs and stuff and the bacon and we'd just pass it around and just go out three or four or five times because we were just...
	Broke and needed food, and that was a pretty good way to get it.
	So sorry for that. I apologize for that rather skeevy thing, but you know, when you're poor, you're poor, right?
	Why is parenting such a hard topic?
	You think it needs one hour per week?
	I don't even know how to answer that.
	Why is... Raising another human being to be moral and independent and virtuous and have moral courage in a situation where the world is going rapidly insane, how could that be a tough topic?
	I don't even know how to, like, why would brain surgery be such a tough topic that you'd need to go to school for years?
	I don't know. Good luck with your spork, man, but I don't really know how to answer that at all.
	I used to work as a busser in a city restaurant.
	I got ostracized because I didn't want to talk to all the female very gossipy waitresses.
	Yeah, there's a lot of drama in restaurants for sure.
	A lot of drama in restaurants.
	Love you too. Owen, thank you so much.
	All right. Questions or topics?
	Hi to my European friends.
	I just want to do something in the afternoon because I know the evening.
	I mean, where the hell is your dedication to philosophy, man, that you're not willing to stay up till three o'clock in the morning local time?
	Crazy. So, do you think the stigma of homeschool kids being unsociable will ever go away?
	Well, yeah. Yeah.
	You know, if you secretly shove enough puberty blockers, well, anyway, you know what I'm saying.
	Yeah, because the kids who are in school are not well socialized at all.
	I mean, would you say, I need to develop social skills, I think I'll go to prison, because I'll learn how to...
	School is not social, you understand?
	School is not social.
	See, when you're an adult, big shock here, right?
	So when you're an adult, you get to choose your own friends.
	You don't just get locked in a room for six or seven hours a day with a bunch of local lunatics in your environment.
	That's not how things work.
	When you're an adult, you choose your own job, you choose your own spouse, you choose your own boyfriend, girlfriend, you choose your own friends, and you can even, as I've suggested for many years, choose your own family.
	So that's how it works as an adult.
	Now, being jammed into a room with 30 other kids where the teachers have zero legitimacy and authority, and they don't really have any authority.
	The only thing that the teachers do is punish the good kids and appease the bad kids.
	That's all that ever happens, and everybody knows this, because if you have a problem being bullied, going...
	To a teacher? I mean, you've got to be kidding me.
	Nobody goes to a teacher when they're being bullied because the teacher's just going to try to avoid them.
	And the teacher's not going to take on some bullying kid, especially if he's not white.
	They're not going to take on some bullying kid because that leads the teacher directly in conflict with the family of the bully who's probably going to be a bully too and going to make her life very difficult and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
	So, school does not teach you social skills.
	All school teaches you is survival skills.
	That's all it teaches you.
	And it teaches you survival skills for an environment where your society is shoved upon you by government fiat.
	Now, if you have half a brain, you're not going to end up like that in your life.
	So, you know how people have a terrible time when they get out of prison trying to adjust to life outside the bars?
	Yeah, they have a tough time with that, right?
	Sure. It's really tough to adjust from a coercive regimented society where you don't choose your companions, let alone your cellmate, let alone whoever, right?
	From a coercive environment to go to a voluntary environment is very tough, right?
	And it's exactly the same thing with schools.
	Why do people think that jamming kids in with 30 other unchosen kids where the lowest common denominator psychos are going to run the entire system, why on earth would you think that that prepares a child to grow into adulthood where they get to choose who they hang out with based upon Values and preferences in sports or whatever it is, right? It makes absolutely no sense to me at all.
	You know, when I first came to Canada, I lived in a town called Whitby where my half-uncle was and I was in grade 8 and then we moved to Toronto where I was put back in grade 6.
	And my very first day with the lovely colonists in...
	Because I came...
	It wasn't a bad school.
	Fairly classy school, I suppose.
	I mean, boarding school was very classy, but the school that I went to in England was fairly classy.
	And I was, of course...
	Well, I was separated from the class with another friend of mine, and we were put into our own special area because I was writing stories and books and reading like crazy, and we were given our own special...
	Like, we were segregated and sort of put into a hyper-advanced...
	Actually, it was the paint closet.
	Thank you. It was the craft closet.
	We were hived off from the regular class and the two of us were just put into the art closet with a bunch of books and told, you know, read these books and we'll ask you questions about them later.
	And I remember my friend got mad at me because I plowed through Emil and the detectives in an afternoon and I was like, no, I'm done.
	Can we get another book? And he's like, man, don't ask for another book.
	Let's just read more work. It's like, I'm not sitting here looking at the paint dry, for God's sakes.
	So, I don't know how you think that's going to somehow translate.
	So when I first went to grade 6, the very first recess, and I still remember all the kids involved, the very first recess, the boys chased down the girls and punched them in the vagina.
	And I remember the girls giggling and laughing and the boys chasing them down and punching them in the crotch.
	I don't know how the fuck that was ever supposed to prepare me for adult relationships.
	You know, I've never had a workplace where it's like, hey, you know what?
	We got 15 minutes till the next meeting.
	Let's chase the female employees and punch them in the crotch.
	Never. Never happened.
	Would be illegal.
	People would go to jail. So, I don't know how on earth being forced into the psycho Lord of the Flies maelstrom, the Dante's Inferno level of dysfunctional kids running the show, how on earth is that supposed to prepare you for any kind of rational, reasonable adult life? It makes no sense at all.
	All right. Let's see here.
	Your work jobs in the past, but now seem to run your own business.
	What is the biggest pros and cons?
	Do you have a preference? You couldn't pay me enough to go and work for someone else again.
	I hit my real stride of success when I no longer had a boss.
	Because running this show for 16 years, I have no boss other than you, lovely people and donors and so on, right?
	Freedomain.com forward slash donate.
	If you'd like to help out the show, I'd appreciate it.
	But no, you couldn't possibly pay me.
	I don't, you know.
	There's people I work with?
	Sure, fantastic, right?
	But you couldn't pay me enough to go and work for someone else.
	Like going back to grade two, it just wouldn't happen.
	There's no con. There's no con.
	Steph, have you gotten used to listening to your own voice?
	Is that part of actor training?
	Serious questions later. Oh, I love my own voice.
	Are you kidding me? I love my own voice.
	Now, I mean, I had a bit of a cold because we had some friends over and they brought their kids and their kids brought the usual array of gunshot viruses.
	But no, I've been listening to my book, Just Poor.
	As I sort of go to sleep, I've been listening to various chapters here and there.
	I love it. I love my reading.
	I love the characters. I love the sound of my voice.
	I love the flexibility. I mean, it's an instrument.
	What I do with my voice is like an opera singer, right?
	I mean, this is an instrument of expressiveness.
	And so when I'm doing five different characters at a dinner party or seven different characters at a dinner party...
	And on the page you can see when someone new starts to talk, but you have to just do it.
	In the audiobook you have to have a strong enough accent and tone and pitch that you know who's talking.
	And also you have to...
	Interrupt yourself, right?
	So one thing I don't like about movies, never like this about movies, you know the way it works in movies and plays?
	Somebody has a speech and the other person waits until they finish that speech and then responds.
	But that's very rarely how things happen in real conversations.
	In real conversations, you get interrupted all the time.
	So I try to write that way to try and make it as realistic as humanly possible.
	So when I'm reading an audiobook, I have to interrupt myself, right?
	So I have to speak and then over-speak myself in a different gender, in a different accent, with a different emotional tenor and so on.
	The technicalities of reading a high-quality audio book with...
	And again, these are different accents because these are people like...
	This is all the way from the top classes to the bottom classes in England.
	So it's all the way from the people who speak in a very millifluent manner and so on.
	All right, all right, all right, all right.
	So it's really – I have been very much blessed vocally with having a very expressive voice.
	Now, acting training has helped with that.
	But when I'm listening to that audio book, I absolutely – like I don't want to go to sleep.
	It's so good. It's so...
	Wow. Like, wow, I really got that.
	I really caught that. And, of course, because it's characters I created in a story I'm incredibly passionate about.
	It's a story I wrote over 30 years ago.
	JustPoorNovel.com. Totally free.
	Go get it, please. I'm begging you.
	You'll love it. And it's about social justice warriors, but long before they ever became a thing, right?
	So, I mean, you could see this kind of stuff coming, this egalitarianism and this use of inevitable differences to provoke guilt and compliance in those who have resources.
	So, I wrote about all of this, like, over 30 years ago, and you'll really, really recognize the power of this main character and the man she...
	Well, it's funny, she tries to destroy him, You know what?
	I will let you do it.
	So no, I love what I'm able to do vocally.
	I've worked at it.
	I took years of vocal training.
	When I went to theatre school, it's one of the great things that happened with me.
	I went to the National Theatre School for almost two years acting and playwriting.
	And I did my first year just acting.
	And they said, stop. Don't be a playwright.
	Just be an actor. You're fantastic, right?
	Well, and then they hated me because they found out about my politics, so then I became just a terrible guy, bad actor and all that.
	But one of the things that happened was, you know, the British culture is very abstract, very intellectual, and there's some great things about that, but it's not very connected with the body.
	It's not very connected with the meat and muscle that drives the mind.
	And one of the things that happened in theater school was the connection of the voice from the sort of upper chest voice down to the, you know, the testicle voice, the base of the spine voice, the esophagus, sorry, the diaphragm and so on, right?
	So that was very helpful, and I think that's done a lot of good in what I do.
	But I will say this.
	It took a while to record Just Poor because the vocal acrobatics was so challenging.
	I'd get about an hour, maybe an hour and a quarter in, and I would simply feel I would start to lose the flexibility of the voice because it's quite a strain on the voice to have people, to have women screaming in a different accent is quite a workout for the voice.
	And so, no, I very much appreciate and enjoy my own voice, and I'm incredibly grateful.
	That I have been given.
	I mean, a pleasant sounding voice, but a voice that has great flexibility all the way up here and all the way down there.
	A great deal of flexibility.
	It's an operatic voice for communication, and I'm pleased with that and very grateful for that.
	Do you use a safety razor or cartridge style?
	So I've tried using electric razors, but, you know, there was a guy, Victor, something or other, as close as a blade, you'll get your money back.
	No, I just use a five-blade razor.
	The cold voice suited you.
	Do you do a voice warm-up before the shows?
	I don't do a formal voice warm-up the way that I would.
	When I was on stage or before I would give speeches, you do all these, all these vocal warm-ups, rubber baby buggy bumpers, rubber baby buggy bumpers, right, to warm up your voice.
	But I usually do a voice, do a show after I've chatted.
	That's why I don't do any particular morning shows.
	I usually do a show after I've chatted with people for a while, but no, I don't do it.
	Dialogue too perfect. Oh, the dialogue in that book is fantastic.
	I was really struck by a movie that I saw as a teenager called The Fourth Man about how life gives you warning and warning and warning and the people who don't listen to it are the people who come to a bad end.
	And it really woke me up, and I've used this in my own novels, it woke me up to look for the signs that things are going to go badly and really You know, it's a great line in Just Poor.
	The truth is not a sword to be drawn at all costs.
	You've got to figure out what you can say, when you can say it, what your enemies are, the size are, right?
	There's times when you do a frontal assault, language-wise, and there's times where you have to go underground, right?
	I feel there is an epidemic of mind-reading.
	People very willing to judge others' intentions or thoughts without solid evidence.
	Why is this? That's a very good question.
	That's a very good question. So I think that having been a stay-at-home dad and realizing, you know, my daughter has some new ducklings, one call duck and one pecan duck, cute as old button.
	There's one that will only fall asleep.
	I have to cut my hand around the duck and he pokes his beak in between my fingers and that's the only way he falls asleep.
	They have to sit there for a while. It's really cute.
	So, my daughter, she's so wonderful with these ducks.
	She's very tender, very caring, but also, you know, quite firm, like, oh, stop chirping, you're fine, you know, that kind of stuff, when they're just a little bit too upset for words.
	But, and she's wonderful, and of course, it's a lot of motherhood practice that she's into, because she wants to have like five kids or whatever, which is great, but So, I mean, being aware that when you are a baby, I mean, you guys are here, we might as well have this aspect of the conversation, right?
	So, did you have a caregiver, probably a mother, it could be, did you have a caregiver when you were younger, a baby, or your earliest memories, and you can't really remember as a baby, right?
	Eye contact and curiosity and bonding.
	Somebody who really took pleasure in your company when you were a toddler.
	Like, was somebody really happy to see you?
	Yay, you're up!
	Or yay, you're here!
	You know, let's play! And did somebody really enjoy your company?
	And hit me with a why if that did happen when you were a kid.
	And... I just wait for you guys to catch up.
	I'm not sure where the stream is.
	So we've got a yes, a bunch of no's.
	There are two yes, no.
	Okay, yeah, yeah. I mean, I did.
	You know, one of the things I think that separates me from my family as a whole, my family of origin, is that I had an aunt who bonded with me so enormously she actually named one of her children later after me and we just had this wonderful bond and it did me a huge amount of good although it gave me a fair amount of disconnect with my family of origin as a whole most of whom did not experience that.
	I can't think of one who did. So if you have the ego and the other, right?
	This is universalization of the basic principle of being.
	The basic principle of being is I exist, I have my thoughts, I like to be heard, not necessarily agreed with, but I like to be heard, and other people are like me.
	You know, when I was a kid, the big saying, yeah, put yourself in their shoes, or how would you like it if they did that to you, or, you know, whatever it is, right?
	And so when you are a kid, you hopefully get that through eye contact, through somebody taking pleasure in your company, through somebody wanting to play with you and engaging with you and so on.
	And Through that, you get built into your neural system, like your physical system.
	There's, what is it, Sacha Baron Cohen's cousin was on my show many years ago talking about The Science of Evil, which is a great book to read, that there's like 13 complex systems in the brain that need to develop for you to get empathy.
	Empathy is not the same as sympathy.
	So you can be a woman walking down the street at night and some guy stealthily coming up behind you.
	You are empathizing with him in that you recognize that he's creeping up behind you because he wants to do something nasty.
	So you will take whatever defensive measures you can to avoid that.
	So empathy is when you recognize that there are other people that have their own emotional states and they have similar preferences to yours, although those preferences might not coincide.
	Right, so the guy chasing the woman stealthily down the street, he wants to get what he wants, which is maybe to attack her or whatever it is, and she wants to get what she wants, which is home safely, right?
	So they both want what they want, but their wants, of course, oppose each other in a pretty grim fashion.
	So... When you get the self and the other, then you have the capacity for a relationship.
	Because a relationship has to be you and another person, right?
	Laris and the real girl style relationships with sex dolls are not relationships.
	Relationships where you're using people for your own personal pleasure or gain It's not a relationship because you're using them.
	Like a man who uses women for sex or a woman who uses men for money, you're not having a relationship because you're using each other, right?
	And people don't like to be used, and so you have to lie to that person and give them the illusion that there's a relationship often when in fact you're simply exploiting them, right?
	This is the way that companies do it when they say, you know, welcome to the, insert company name here, family.
	You know, we're like family here.
	It's like, no, you're not. You're not family.
	It may tell you a lot about that person's family if they think it's an economic arrangement for the profits of shareholders, but people will try to...
	Because, you know, if you can convince someone, if you can convince an employee that he's part of the GM family, it's like, okay, well then if your family asks you to mow the lawn on the weekend, you'll go mow the lawn on the weekend.
	So getting people to believe that they're part of some corporate fucking family is a way of getting work for nothing, getting free work, right?
	And this is why the most important people in the country are on salary.
	The most important people in the company are on salary.
	The Pareto distribution square root of the people involved produce half the value.
	You've got to put them on salary because you've paid them hourly.
	You'd go broke. That's why people work weekends, don't get paid extra, stuff like that.
	So, you've got to have a self and another in order to have a relationship, and you have to recognize that the other person...
	I mean, do you ever do this, right? If you're married or whatever, right?
	You look at your wife. Do you ever just try and put yourself in her eyes looking at you?
	What do you look like? What do you sound like?
	What's your mood like, right?
	If you come down in a bad mood, do you sit there and say, well, how would I like it if...
	I came down. If my wife came down and I was downstairs already, my wife came down and she was in a bad mood.
	Well, that would be kind of negative.
	So do you put yourself in the other person's shoes?
	Do you try and figure out how you look like from the outside?
	Do you recognize that what you can communicate through the power of speech is usually at best 10 to 20 percent of what goes on in your mind?
	You have a giant churning brain worth of thoughts, impressions, sensations, memories, emotions, dreams, fantasies, fears, anxieties.
	You have all of this turmoil and positive and negative stuff going on in your brain.
	And what you can squeeze out through your language is a very small portion of that.
	So do you recognize that everything is censorship, in a sense, right?
	Or you may be upset and have no idea why.
	Now, you directly experience the feeling of upset or anxiety, but you don't necessarily know why it's being caused.
	So then when you try and talk about it, you can't transmit or transfer your direct emotional experience of yourself, obviously.
	But you can try and squeeze it through language, which is imprecise and doesn't encapsulate the whole deal.
	And of course, it's very easy to misinterpret if the other person is feeling defensive or is also upset themselves.
	So you've got these tenuous stragglers of people going from mouth to ear and mouth to ear and trying to get a relationship on the challenges of language.
	And language includes body language and language includes touch and so on, right?
	I mean, we have very tenuous links to each other, which is why you've got to work to really communicate well and have a good relationship with people.
	Now, when it comes to jumping out of yourself...
	And trying to see how other people see you, that's a real challenge.
	You have to do it in order to have a relationship, right?
	This is why I'll listen back to my audiobooks.
	It's why I'll look and see, okay, am I communicating well?
	Am I going on too many tangents and trying to get feedback from you guys about what I'm doing?
	So, jumping out of yourself requires a stability of ego, right?
	A certainty in yourself.
	So you can jump out of yourself and truly empathize with someone else if you have a strong and certain sense of your own self.
	You're not going to lose yourself or not find your way back to yourself or whatever it is, right?
	Sorry, this is also abstract, but I hope it makes some kind of sense.
	But you've got to jump out of yourself, put yourself in other people's shoes and figure out how they behave.
	See you. Now, that may improve your relationships.
	That also may end pretend relationships, right?
	Because if you jump out of yourself and look at yourself as other people see you and you kind of get that they see you as unimportant or a resource that they can exploit or someone that they're bored with but put up with for the sake of momentum or history, you may find that you're unimportant when you go into somebody else's mind and look back at yourself.
	And that's something really important to deal with.
	So, when it comes to jumping out of yourself and really trying to understand somebody else's perspective, right?
	I mean, you've listened to these call-in shows that I've done for many, many years, right?
	And sometimes in a two-hour or two-and-a-half-hour call, I'll spend the first hour and a half simply gathering information.
	I mean, it depends how good they are at expressing it and so on, but in general, if the person is good at expressing and there's obviously complexity in someone else's life, before you even venture an opinion about what's going on in someone else's life, you have to really get their life.
	Now, 90 minutes of asking questions, if you're experienced and good at what you're doing, you can get a lot of information.
	And even then, I still put things forward as tentative and potential, and I always say to people, you know, your experience trumps my theory, so if I get anything wrong...
	Just tell me and let me know and I'll completely change course and I've apologized when I've made mistakes.
	Oh, I thought it was this or that or the other.
	So getting into somebody else's mind is a very patient process where you put your own ego and feelings aside and you simply explore somebody else's thoughts and emotions.
	And that, of course, starts when you're young.
	Somebody taking pleasure in your company, being curious about what you think, what's your perspective on this, or what do you think about that, or what's your experience of the other, and what do you think of this person, and just really trying to understand what somebody else is thinking.
	But that's the only way to actually have a relationship.
	There's nothing else. There's no other path.
	There's no other way to try and have a relationship.
	And so... Unfortunately, now, I mean, we've had the shattering of the nuclear family, and, you know, the most disastrous thing in the modern world is the lack of fathers in the household.
	You say, so where is all of this identity stuff coming from?
	Well, a lot of it, I think, is coming from simply a lack of fathers.
	In the household, we know that that leads to massively higher levels of child abuse, particularly sexual abuse, and of course that's going to give people significant personality issues down the road and mental health issues down the road and so on, right?
	So taking fathers out of the family, which is a prerequisite to the destruction of society, is pretty bad.
	It's very bad. It's the worst thing, I think, that's happened outside of government schools and things like that.
	So, now if you have a conflict with someone, the best way to understand and diffuse that conflict is to restate the other person's viewpoint so that they understand, that you understand their viewpoint.
	Because if somebody feels understood, they generally don't feel nearly as hostile.
	Right? So, if someone is angry at you, it's important to try and understand their anger.
	Why are they angry at you?
	You don't take it personally, because it may not be personal.
	It may be something to do with their own past, their own history.
	Try and understand why they're mad at you.
	Say, okay. Because when someone's mad at the first thing we want to say, I didn't do that, or I never said that, that never happened, or you're wrong.
	And then you just end up, right?
	You say, okay, so your perception is that I said or did this, and this means this or the other.
	Do I have that right? You can get out of your own mind.
	You know, try and understand where the person's coming from.
	Because, of course, if you don't want to understand where the person's coming from, then you don't have a relationship.
	They may be wrong. They may be right.
	They may have valuable information.
	Well, all the information, if you're in a relationship with someone you claim to care about them, everything that happens in their mind is of value to you.
	So if someone's mad at you, Then you can say, okay, well, tell me what you're mad about, and I will listen, and I will try and understand, and say, look, it doesn't mean I agree with you, but I really do want to understand where you're coming from.
	You might be right. You might be wrong.
	That's not really important, but I really want to understand where you're coming from.
	Well, you leave your dinner plates on the table, and you just never take them into the kitchen.
	Right? Now, of course, the first thing we hear about that is we want to say, well, yesterday I did take them into the kitchen and I put them in the dishwasher and they ran the dishwasher and the day before that I emptied the...
	Right? You just... Okay, but the person is upset with you about the dishes, right?
	So you've got to understand, right? Okay.
	It gets annoying. Now maybe, if you dismiss those symptoms, right, then you may be in for something much more deep and much more serious, right?
	Because why is the person mad at you for not taking your dishes from the dining room into the kitchen, putting them in the dishwasher, or rinsing them, or putting them the right way, or whatever it is, right?
	The reason why they're upset with you is because they feel that you take them for granted.
	That you just go off and do your thing and leave them to clean up the mess and you're not thinking about life from their perspective, right?
	Right? If your wife...
	Does the laundry? You know, thank her on a regular basis.
	Never just, oh, the laundry is like gravity.
	It just gets done. Thank her and make sure that you're contributing in your own way.
	Make sure that things even out.
	And if people are appreciated, they will bend over backwards.
	And if they feel underappreciated, you're in trouble.
	So trying to get into other people's minds, really trying to understand them.
	It's a pretty important, an essential skill in your life, for sure.
	Now, some people are trying to get into other people's minds in order to manipulate and control them, right?
	So, you want to make sure you're around people who are empathetic and safe in this way, right?
	Like, most times, I was talking about this with my daughter the other day.
	Most times, if you say, some kid invites you over and you say, I don't want to go, right?
	And then the kid is going to say, well, why not?
	That's an important question.
	Why don't you want to come and play at my house, right?
	Big question. Big question, right?
	And there's two reasons that somebody would ask you that question, right?
	There's two reasons why somebody would ask that question.
	Sorry, my friend, you are spamming and you're going to have to go because I'm trying to get people to listen to my show and it's not about your agenda.
	Okay, so some kid asks your kid out.
	Your kid says, I don't want to go. And then the other kid says, well, why don't you want to come?
	Now, one could be, well, why don't you want to come?
	Am I not that much fun to play with?
	Is my house dirty? Do my parents yell at each other?
	Is there a glass on the floor?
	It could be some reason that could be solved, right?
	But most times, people say, why don't you want to do something so that they can change your mind and make you do something you don't want to do?
	Right? So, you're at a car dealership, and the dealer says...
	You should buy this car.
	And you say, it's too expensive.
	Or you say, I don't want to buy the car.
	The dealer says, why? Because it's too expensive.
	And he's going to say, well, I can lower the price a little bit.
	You can be put on a playment pan.
	We can take no money down.
	It's only going to cost you this amount per month, blah, blah, blah.
	So he's trying to find your objection so he can overcome your objection so you'll buy the car and do what he wants.
	Right? So most times when people are curious about your reasons, it's because they want to control you by eliminating those reasons.
	Eliminating those reasons, right?
	Why don't you want to go out tonight?
	Oh, I'm kind of tired. Oh, have a coffee.
	It'll be fun. You'll be fine.
	Going out will give you energy, right?
	It's just because you want to go out, right?
	So, when it comes to people who just mind-read, believe it or not, I do remember the original question.
	When it comes to people who mind-read, it's narcissistic to not ask other people what's bothering them.
	And try to solve that by listening and understanding where they're coming from.
	Now, of course, I get punchy in debates and I don't ask people what's bothering them because it's an explicitly combat situation with people I don't ever plan on having a relationship with.
	In fact, I would view the prospect to be quite horrifying.
	But in intimate, close relationships, mind-reading is just so much easier.
	You can just make up whatever you want that is self-serving.
	Why does someone disagree with me?
	Because he's a racist.
	When you don't actually have to understand things, you don't have to understand other people's perspective.
	You can just make up whatever you want.
	That is a self-serving narrative wherein you're the hero and everyone else is the villain and you get to be right and everyone else gets to be wrong and then you never have to compromise.
	In fact, compromising would be bad because the moment you define you is right, the other person is wrong and bad, And you're just glorious and perfect and they're just bad and evil, then compromise would be unthinkable.
	It would be bad to compromise.
	And so why is it that people want to do that?
	Because there is a giant rip and tear and hole in their heart where they should have been empathized with when they were little.
	Somebody should have taken pleasure in their company.
	Somebody should have wanted to spend time with them.
	Somebody should have been curious about what they think.
	And because that didn't happen, that's incredibly painful.
	And the reason that's incredibly painful is that if you have a caregiver who doesn't really care about you, you're in giant danger.
	You're in giant danger.
	What is it that gives us security in relationships?
	It's empathy. Because if somebody doesn't empathize with us, they can hurt us and not care.
	They can hurt us and enjoy it maybe if they've got a sadistic streak.
	So if somebody doesn't care about what you think and feel and fully appreciate and understand your humanity as a whole, I mean, they can shiv you in the shower and not think twice.
	So the only security in a relationship is empathy.
	You don't have the empathy. You're in a constant state of danger.
	That's very painful. And then when somebody, you know, let's say a parent doesn't empathize with you and they say, oh, but I would do anything for you.
	I do everything for my kids. I love my kids.
	Right? Then they don't even know how they don't have empathy and don't care about you and will mess you up to suit their immediate emotional goals and objectives.
	Really, it's a dangerous, dangerous, dangerous situation.
	To be in. Very dangerous.
	And it goes on for years and years and years and years and decades and decades and decades and decades sometimes.
	It's a very painful situation.
	So if somebody were to say, I really want to learn how to empathize with other people, they'd have to go through all the pain and shame and fear and abuse and horror of having been raised by someone or being educated by someone or a group of people who didn't empathize with them.
	And rather than embrace and accept that pain and say, well, I'm going to have to do things differently now.
	I know how painful it is to not be empathized with, so I'm really going to empathize with others.
	That's a painful thing to go through.
	It's a whole lot easier. And of course, if you've had an abusive, cold-hearted parent, your parent doesn't want you to learn what empathy is.
	Are you kidding me? That would be the worst disaster in the world for that parent.
	Because then you'll ask for empathy from the parent, the parent will be unable to provide, and the relationship could be threatened.
	And they want you to take care of them in their old age.
	All right. When do you think you'll have a podcast or roundtable on crypto?
	There's been so much going on so far this year, I don't know what to make of it.
	Yeah. I mean, it's not your fault, but it's a little annoying.
	And it's not your fault because you didn't know why I was gone for four and a half months.
	So I've been back for a grand total of 12 or 13 days.
	So give me a chance to get my gears back up again.
	So again, not your fault.
	I'm just telling you that...
	And this is the difference, right?
	Because I know things that you don't and so on.
	And there's no reason why you would know those things because I haven't said them so...
	I apologize for that.
	I'm just saying that, yeah, you know, I've had a lot going on.
	So, all right, here we go. Let's see here.
	Here we go.
	Hey, Steph, why would a man feel uncomfortable when they're around women, mainly attractive women?
	I certainly do. Jesse, because you fear being rejected.
	You fear being rejected and therefore your genetics coming to an end.
	Remember, 40% of men throughout history did not reproduce.
	Right? So you are uncomfortable because you desire women and you're afraid of rejection.
	And so desiring women brings you to women.
	A fear of rejection brings you to the right level of women.
	Because if you shoot too high, if you're some, I'm not saying you are, but if you're some 6 going for a 10, you're not going to make it.
	And so the sex drive or the lust or the desire for romance brings you to the women and the fear of rejection, you scale down the woman you can get until you don't feel as much fear.
	And then that is your way of saying, okay, here's what you're going to match up with and here's how it's going to work.
	So... How much are people to blame for the propaganda they believe in and the results that come from it?
	The amount of disinformation is relentless.
	Well, I've gone back and forth on this, so this may not be my final answer if there is such a thing in philosophy, but I am really of the opinion at this point it's 100%.
	It's 100%. See, I think, so when I was a kid, it was really hard to get the facts.
	My God. Really hard to get the facts.
	There's an old Mel Gibson movie called Conspiracy Theory about a guy back in the day before the internet.
	He had to hand print his own newsletter.
	When I was writing my novels, I wrote my first novel, or didn't finish it, but I wrote about half the novel when I was 11, called By the Light of an Alien Sun.
	It's a science fiction story.
	And later, when I started writing novels more seriously, I would type them up on my Atari 800, then my Atari 520ST, and then I finally got a 286, I mean, I like the Atari stuff hugely, but I still was working on 3.5-inch hard disks, and there was no hard drive.
	Buying a hard drive was $1,000, but I could get a second-hand 286 with a built-in hard drive for $850, so I did that instead.
	It was a shame. I don't know why the Atari stuff is so expensive, but they killed their whole platform with this proprietary stuff, I guess because it was proprietary like the Mac.
	It ends up being more expensive.
	But I would have to take my discs down to a copy shop and I would pay...
	If I could get a place that would do two cents or three cents a large volume copy, then I would do that.
	And I would have to give my novel out to friends to read and print it all out myself.
	It was crazy. When I wrote a play...
	An adaptation of Turgenev's Fathers and Sons.
	I wrote a play and funded and produced it and so on.
	And it was a lot of work, man.
	A lot of work. I had to do all the publicity and hire.
	I directed it myself. I was going to have to act in it, but I finally found somebody who was able to do a role that was hard to fill.
	And I had to man the box office and do the advertising.
	And yeah, it was a lot of work.
	Just to get a play on, right?
	Now, I can share my books very easily.
	I mean... For those of you who are younger, life before the internet, how could you get the truth?
	Everything was gate-kept, and the gatekeepers were increasingly leftists, right?
	This whole process started in the 40s and the 50s of the hard leftists taking over.
	And they explicitly said this, right?
	It's a slow creep through the institutions.
	They were just going to take over the institutions and change society that way, right?
	Disney. Anyway, so...
	It was really hard to get the truth.
	You might find an obscure book in a library if you're willing to look all day.
	You might find an obscure book in a library that would have a different perspective.
	I mean, I remember reading a book in my teens called The Case Against Socrates, like why the Athenians went after him and why they tried him.
	Pretty good book. I actually tried to find it more recently, but I couldn't.
	So... It was really hard.
	It was really hard to get the truth.
	And really, you could say, kind of impossible.
	But now, I mean, since the start of the internet, and in particular with cell phones, I mean, the truth's in your pocket.
	The facts are grinding up against your ass on a regular basis.
	You have a me-too relationship with the facts.
	If the facts were an employee, you'd report them to HR! Right?
	So everyone has the facts now, immediately available to them.
	You can send links, you can write.
	So, when I was a kid, there was a saying.
	It's probably still a saying, but it was more believable when I was a kid.
	Ignorance of the law is no excuse.
	You break the law, even if you thought it was legal, it's no excuse.
	Now, the law was massively complicated back then.
	Now it's probably ten or a hundred times worse with all the regulations.
	So we have a saying in society, and it's considered to be a just and moral saying, and in a fair society it would be, but in our society it's still considered valid, that ignorance of the law is no excuse.
	You know, you get something wrong on your taxes, and it's like there could be 30 thick books of tax regulations.
	You get something wrong, too bad.
	Ignorance of the law is no excuse.
	You still go to jail, or whatever fines.
	So, if ignorance of the law is no excuse...
	And we accept that. Or most people do.
	How is ignorance of facts you carry on your ass?
	You know, women carry their phones and their cleavage, which I don't think is a very good idea, but they do.
	I mean, if you have boob facts...
	If facts are literally half breastfeeding from your side boob, okay, then you probably have a pretty significant responsibility for getting the facts.
	And if you were to ask people and you were to say, can you get the truth from people who already agree with you about everything you believe, people would say no.
	No, you have to get. So people already have the theory.
	They have the facts at their fingertips, half sewn into their jeans, it seems like.
	I feel like if the women have their phones in their back pocket so tight that you feel it's going to crack the screen if they try and tie their shoelaces.
	So yeah, if you have facts riding your ass like a jockey, yeah, you're responsible.
	irresponsible let's see here speech is really so crude when you think about it It's fantastic. And you can do some amazing things with language.
	Again, justpoornovel.com.
	But yeah, I mean, compared to your own inner experiences, I mean, I'm pretty good at this stuff, but what I can squeeze out of my own inner experiences is like turning the sun into a laser.
	Man, I have some errands to get done, but I'm really feeling this stream and don't want to turn it off.
	Well, you can take it to go, man.
	You can take it to go. Alright, so let's see here.
	It's so hard to empathize with someone's insecurity if you are confident yourself.
	I don't experience that, but I'm not going to disagree with you about your experience, of course.
	Let's see here. Just, sorry, I haven't stopped the show.
	I'm just getting caught up.
	Hey Steph, feeling pretty miserable.
	Thought I'd tune in. Oh, have you been reading the news?
	That'll do it. I would then really, really strongly suggest limiting your exposure to what's going on in the world because you can't change most of it and it's just like watching the surgery channel constantly.
	I don't have any appetite. Can I make anyone better?
	No. Let's see here.
	I do kind of miss the days of scouring large libraries, though.
	Yeah, when I was doing my graduate degree at the University of Toronto, I had my own little desk in the library where I could keep my books.
	I used to go up there in the afternoon.
	I'd take my chair and go and sit by the sun and just read and take notes and listen to a little bit of classical music.
	Oh, my God. It was absolutely lovely.
	Do you think it's good to expose children to Disney World at a young age like two to four?
	I've never been a big fan of Disney World myself, the whole Disney thing.
	I think the last enjoyable Disney film for me was Tangled.
	It was directed by a Christian, if I remember rightly.
	It's funny that Colin Kaepernick is now begging to be in the NFL again, right?
	He's begging. This is slavery.
	Oh, can I? I don't know.
	It's just so funny, right?
	Let's see here. Would love a truth about ADHD, brain damage or a social issue.
	Ah, come on. I mean, I'm a philosopher.
	You're asking about a lot of medical stuff there.
	You can't really do that. I've noticed some people have woken up and refusing to get their third booster shot.
	Still a little too late for them, though.
	What was it? There was a guy... He got vaccinated over 87 times in Germany because he was doing it to get fake vaccine certificates for other people.
	So, in the UK, look, I'm just reporting stuff that I've read.
	I can't verify it.
	Of course, I'm not a doctor. But stuff that I've read is that if you look at The vaccine goes into your body and it's supposed to clear out of your body, right?
	Now I know it concentrates in some organs and so on, right?
	But it's supposed to clear out of your body.
	So if you got vaccinated a while ago and you get COVID again, I don't think that's actually a measure of the vaccine's efficacy.
	I think that's a measure of your immune system's efficacy.
	And there's some numbers coming out of the UK and out of Canada that if that's the case, people's immune system's not doing that well as a whole, right?
	If the reinfection rate is a measure of your immune system as a whole rather than the efficacy of the vaccine in particular, people's immune systems are not doing very well.
	That does not seem very good at all.
	Again, I can't prove any of this stuff.
	I'm just sort of saying what I've read and something to look into, right?
	Kids don't know how fun libraries used to be.
	Oh, yeah. Well, of course, also when I was a kid, we would, when I was, I don't know, 11 or 12, do you ever do this if you're older?
	We'd have library hour or whatever it is.
	You'd go and look up books in the library and read.
	And what we would do is we would shuffle.
	You know, you get your shoes on, right?
	We have your shoes on. And you shuffle that thick, plush, keep-em-quiet library carpet, right?
	And what you do is you build up a...
	You basically become Zeus.
	Like you build up a static charge in your body that could blow a cow into the fourth dimension.
	And what you do is you shuffle until you build up just enough charge.
	And then you go up and you touch someone's ear.
	And you can see their skeleton for a moment.
	That was a huge amount of fun.
	God, I loved that. All right.
	Steph, one more thing. Why can't I watch action movies with women getting hurt or killed, but not when it's happening to women?
	That's a typo. Do you mean with men getting hurt or killed?
	All right.
	Let's see here. Is there anything wrong with being an introvert?
	I don't hate people, but I don't trust as easily.
	Is that a great line from the movie Barfly?
	A woman sits down and says to the Mickey Rourke character, I hate people.
	Don't you hate people?
	No, I don't hate people.
	I just seem to feel better when they're not around.
	No, it's fine to be an introvert.
	Of course. It's fine to be an introvert.
	You see, personalities are scattered around so the division of labor occurs within the tribe, right?
	So you need people who are night people, who like staying up late and sleeping in.
	Why do you need them? Because you've got to guard the tribe at night.
	And then you need morning people who fall asleep at 9 o'clock and get up at 4 in the morning because you need people to guard the tribe.
	In the morning. Like back in the sort of hunter-gatherer days, right?
	You need people to keep the fire going.
	You need to do that, right? So there are night people and there are morning people.
	And we're all part of the same scattershot of complementary personalities that kept the whole tribe going, right?
	I mean, people thinking...
	Like the morning people, they're always bagging on the night people, right?
	And the night people are always rolling their eyes at the morning people, which is ridiculous.
	It's like your little finger saying to your elbow, well, I can bend more.
	And it's like... But my purpose is not to have two joints, right?
	Or three, I guess. So no, I mean, being an introvert is perfectly fine.
	Now, if it bothers you, if you can't meet anyone, if you can't reproduce, then I get that.
	It's a problem. It's something you probably want to look at and deal with.
	But don't assume that your personality is a problem.
	And of course, we worship the extroverts, right?
	We worship the extroverts because they just seem so cool and so suave and so funny and they get all the attention and so on, right?
	But they rarely progress the human condition, particularly the moral condition, right?
	The moral condition is people sitting alone in a room thinking to themselves.
	And to do that, you generally can't have other people around.
	So improvements, inspiration don't come from extroverts putting their stupid lampshades on at parties and dancing around.
	It comes from people sitting alone quietly.
	That's where human progress comes from.
	So it's just less flashy, right?
	It's just less flashy. All right.
	Steph, thoughts on watching, reading, listening to content on self-improvement, including doing call-ins, yet haven't taken action?
	Well, I mean, it's fine to gather knowledge, and you need to gather knowledge before you act.
	But if you gather knowledge in the absence of action, then you're basically saying to yourself, well, you know, one more call-in, one more this, one more that.
	I'll read one more diet book, then I'll change my diet.
	The purpose of the call-ins is to have you apply these things to your own life and make changes for the better.
	So I understand that it's more fun to listen to another call-in than confront someone in your life who may be doing you harm, but, you know, you really...
	It's more fun to read another diet book than it is to change your diet, right?
	It's more fun to watch another workout video than to actually start to exercise.
	All right. Hey, long time no see.
	Well, I'm back, baby. Any thoughts on giving kids military-related gun toys to play with?
	It's fine. It's fine.
	It's fine. I'm not sure why it wouldn't be.
	I mean, combat is part of the human condition and combat play is part of the human condition.
	And here's the thing, too. Like, if your kids want to play pew-pew, right?
	Cops and robbers or whatever it was, right?
	If you want to do that, then...
	Just not giving them guns doesn't, it doesn't erase that, right?
	It doesn't erase that aspect of their personality, right?
	Just, if you're a parent and your kids want to play with guns, toy guns, right?
	Then sit down and play with toy guns with them and find out what interests them and what they like about it.
	And then if you want to redirect that into something like, you know what's a real fight?
	Chess, you know, and you get them into chess and, right?
	There's ways to get that aggression, which is perfectly fine and natural part of human nature.
	It's ways to channel that into something really positive.
	It's like sports or whatever it is, right?
	So, Steph, I mean, I can handle seeing men getting hurt, but not so much women.
	Well, sure. Because men are disposable based upon investment in resources.
	Sperm versus eggs. Men are disposable and women are not.
	Extroverts can be obnoxious and overrated.
	Oh, God, yeah. So if you're an introvert and you want to understand an extrovert, here you go, man.
	I've got both aspects of the personality.
	I really do.
	And I was very shy as a kid.
	So if you want to understand and stop envying the extrovert, okay, so if you're an introvert, you know how you feel when you're in the company of other people?
	You feel kind of overwhelmed and a little anxious and you just don't feel comfortable or relaxed or at home?
	Okay, well, that's how the extrovert feels when he doesn't have an audience.
	So really understand that.
	Just so you can stop envying the extrovert.
	So the extrovert needs someone to play off, needs someone to make laugh, needs someone to admire him, needs someone to look up to him, needs to be the center of attention.
	And when they're alone, the extrovert often feels tense and irritable and uncomfortable, or even when they're with people for a long time.
	So extroverts are fantastic with new people, because they can be whoever they want to.
	So it's the typical thing where the extrovert The man and the wife, the husband and the wife go for dinner.
	It's a new dinner party. And the husband is like incredibly expressive and funny and great conversationalist and engaging all throughout the dinner.
	And then he's totally quiet on the way home.
	Why? Because he doesn't need to keep impressing his wife.
	He only needs to impress the new people.
	So the wife then gets really frustrated.
	And it's like, how come you're such a fantastic conversationalist with all of these people at the dinner party?
	Then you totally, you barely talk to me on the way home.
	And it's like... For the extrovert, that's like his wife picking him up from doing a play.
	And she says, you know, you did all of these wonderful speeches to the audience.
	Why don't you do the wonderful speeches to me in the car?
	It's like, well, that was my job. Now I'm not doing my job.
	So why would I do the speeches in the car?
	You understand, right? So just so you stop envying.
	The extrovert feels the anxiety you feel in crowds, the extrovert feels when he's alone.
	So you're driven to seek solitude to avoid that overwhelmingness, and the extrovert is driven to seek crowds.
	He doesn't have really a moment's peace, because he's constantly trying to get new crowds, right?
	Steph, do you think water birth at home with a wind wife is a good thing?
	I don't know. I mean, I know, I think Mike Cernovich did that and all that, so...
	Please don't ask me for medical advice.
	obviously, right?
	I don't know.
	All right.
	Yeah, don't envy the extroverts.
	It's a hell of a life.
	And the flip, like when they don't have, like, you know, when you're in a crowd, you feel anxiety.
	Often when the extrovert is not around crowds, they feel real depression.
	And then they go for the dopamine of entertaining the crowd again.
	Your opinion on a boy six years old joining a performance arts club in the UK? I don't know how on earth I would have an opinion upon that.
	I'm sorry. Yeah, stop admiring extroverts.
	Because that's what the extrovert needs.
	The extrovert needs your admiration.
	They need you to look up. Oh, you're just the introvert.
	All you do is stay home. And, you know, I remember when I was in theater school, we went to go to Stratford at the beginning of our second year.
	And we saw like 10 plays in two or three days or something like that.
	And it was really, it was quite nice. We got to go on stage and meet the actors and all of that.
	And I was reading a book called Modern Times by Paul Johnson, a fantastic book, The Palimpsests of Freedom.
	The guy had the wildest titles for his, like the pompadous of love, I suppose, right?
	And I was in, we were staying in a hostel, right?
	And I had a little room for myself, and I was just curled up, and I was sipping hot chocolate, and I was reading this fantastic book on modern times.
	It was from, I think, First World War to Thatcher.
	And he's a great writer, very entertaining, very, very interesting.
	And my friend was like, he was kind of an extrovert.
	And he came in and was like, let's go explore the town!
	And I looked at him like, what?
	What are you talking about?
	I'm like, no, I'm just going to chill with the book.
	I didn't say chill because it wasn't really, I'm just going to stay and read.
	And he was just like weirdly annoyed, of course, right, that I would prefer to sit inside reading a book rather than go and explore the town.
	Whatever that meant. Anyway, so, yeah, he couldn't sit there and read a book.
	He'd just get too antsy. So, yeah, that's no good.
	Yeah, I've had some wild dreams lately.
	There's definitely stuff going on in the world.
	Definitely stuff going on in the collective unconscious these days.
	Do you think swimming classes for toddlers is a good idea?
	It seems like a valuable skill for them to learn.
	Yeah, I think swimming is really important to learn.
	It's a great thing to learn. Plus, it's an exercise you can do your whole life because it's not hard on the joints.
	Can you speak something about a topic, about unique credibility before any relationship, especially before high self-monitors?
	I'm sorry, word salad does not compute.
	All right.
	If you have more questions, hit them in now.
	Otherwise, I do have a wee topic which I can share with you.
	Yes.
	Share with you.
	How do we stay positive about the future as mid-20s male with the current state of the economy?
	So So... If you were talking to me, late Roman Empire, late Peloponnesian Empire, late Greek Empire, late whatever, right?
	I could say, yeah, you've got every reason to feel like crap.
	But... We got a parachute for the first time in human history.
	We have a parachute for the very first time in human history.
	And that parachute is Bitcoin.
	There was never an off-ramp to a decaying fiat currency in the past.
	Never. To an abused and corrupted currency.
	Where was the escape ramp?
	Where was the escape ramp out of the Roman Empire?
	Fleet of Turkey. You could get the escape ramp off the decaying European powers was America, which you then get drafted into a civil war.
	It took about, what, 80 years to leap the constitution.
	So, we never had an off-ramp before, other than giant flight.
	We never had an off-ramp before.
	You gotta have faith.
	You gotta believe. And I'm not saying have faith for no reason.
	So, right now, the hungry are the hunted.
	The successful are the prey.
	And The magic golden-fingered productivity of the economic superguards.
	You know, I've talked about this before, the Pareto principle or prices principle, sometimes prices law.
	The square root of any meritocracy produces half the value.
	So you've got 10,000 people in a company, 100 of them are producing half the value, 10 of them are producing half that value.
	So you've got 10 people out of 10,000 producing fully 25% meritocracy.
	Of the value in any organization.
	It's the same thing everywhere you look.
	Everywhere you look. You know, in sports, 95% of the money goes to 5% of the people.
	It's the same thing in movies.
	It's the same thing in music.
	It's always the same. There's a few people who just have unbelievable Midas-like golden touches.
	Everything they touch turns to gold.
	They're incredibly productive. The Teslas, the Elon Musks, the whatever, right?
	And I'd like to thank Elon Musk for the duck memes.
	It's kind of funny.
	So those people who carry everyone else afloat in the loft are the prey.
	Bye.
	They are the hunted. Because now the politicians who have a massive disparity in political power, which is really dangerous and toxic and coercive, are pointing at the people and claiming, well, there's just a massive disparity in economic outcomes.
	That somehow, you know, Elon Musk just stole from you.
	It's like, no, he didn't. I mean, okay, there's embedded in the state and, you know, there's all that, but as a whole.
	I didn't steal your words to make my podcast, right?
	So, we're the prey, so to speak, right?
	The people who are very economically protected.
	People who start companies, the people, right?
	They're the prey. And the fury of the mob is getting whipped up against the very people who keep them alive.
	And this is constant throughout human history.
	There's a certain amount of economic liberty.
	The economic liberty produces big disparities in outcome, which raises the economic output enormously, right?
	The best farmers can afford to pay the most for fields, so you get the most food.
	And then because you've got farmers, you know, 5% of farmers own 70% of the land, this then is considered to be very unequal in the politician's Who just hate inequality, although they can pass laws and you can't.
	They hate inequality, although they can impose taxes and you can't.
	They say, ah, but it's so wrong that 70% of the land is owned by 5% of the people.
	And then they get, we've got to redistribute this and we've got to Khmer Rouge these people and we've got to have collectivized farming and we've got to share it all equally and blah, blah, blah, blah, right?
	And this is like, it's almost like...
	They're the predators from excess population or something because they whip up all this hatred at the people who are literally keeping them alive.
	The really competent farmers who can produce five or ten times more food than the other farmers, which is why they ended up with most of the land.
	The really competent farmers.
	And if you think that it's unjust that the really competent farmers Have all the land.
	It's no problem. Just wait a decade or two.
	Wait at least a generation.
	Because we know that regression to the mean, somebody who's fantastic at farming, his kid won't be.
	Someone else's kid is going to be fantastic at farming and end up with most of the land.
	It's churn all the time.
	For society to survive in any civilized fashion, you constantly need to reallocate resources to the most competent.
	Constantly reallocate resources to the most competent.
	Always, always, always, always.
	You know, that raising its son stuff.
	That money was made from my dad's blood.
	You know, where you invest in people who just kind of run off with the money and all that kind of stuff.
	You constantly need to take resources out of the less competent and give them to the more competent.
	Right? Of course. If you look at a football stadium, there's a small number of guys on the field and everyone else is in the stands.
	Because if the people in the stands were on the field, there'd be no stadium, there'd be no football, there'd be nothing.
	You constantly need to reserve the grass for the people who are the best athletes all the time.
	Constantly sorting it out. You're getting bad, you're gone.
	You're really good, you're in. You're benching, you're now in, you're in.
	You're constantly putting the grass under the feet of the very best players all the time, all the time, all the time.
	You just constantly need to take shit away from incompetent people and give it to super-competent people.
	Now, this is not...
	You don't take it.
	It's the market that does it over time.
	So, freedom brings inequality of outcome.
	Freedom brings inequality of outcome.
	That inequality of outcome is used by the softest to turn the mob against the competent and have them take stuff back.
	Because the mob doesn't realize that if you leave the farmland in the hands of the most competent, you get way more food than if you're given 40 acres and a mule.
	If some super farmer guy, let's say everyone in this audience here, gets 40 acres and a mule, we end up with way less food.
	Like leaving the resources in the hands of the competent people are how you get the most resources.
	But people get greedy, you know, the goose that kills the golden egg, like this couple gets this egg that lays, this goose that lays a golden egg every day, and they're like, oh my God, we've got to rip open this, we've got to rip open this goose to get all the eggs, and they rip open the goose, it dies, they get no more eggs, right?
	Leave the resources in the hands of the most competent, that's the most wealth society could possibly generate.
	Both directly and indirectly, right?
	But, because people aren't taught economics, Because we have largely female teachers when they're young and women don't need to know as much about economics because they get their resources primarily from the state and from men rather than from nature, brute nature itself.
	They don't need to know economics, they need to know lipstick.
	As a whole, tons of exceptions, but we're not learning anything about economics.
	So it's very easy for people to say, oh, it's time for the rich to pay their fair share.
	The word fair is a magic spell for the incompetent to take things away from the competent.
	It's not fair. It's not fair that the quarterback gets the cheerleader.
	It's not fair that the best athletes get the court.
	It's not fair that the best singers get the prize.
	It's not fair. Fair is just a loser's word for I can't compete but I want shit anyway or I'm going to just sit there seething with envy rather than find the thing that I'm good at and excel at that.
	Maybe you can't excel at anything.
	Maybe you're just dumb, right? I say that with sympathy.
	It's not their fault, right? So people just come up with this magic word, fair, because it's a very powerful word for feeling justified to enslave the competent and take their stuff.
	It's not fair. It's not fair that Ronald Reagan had a full head of hair till he was old and I went bald in my 20s.
	It's not fair. No, no, philosophy made me bald.
	The god of philosophy made me bald, so I wouldn't have to worry about my hair before doing shows.
	Therefore, I can do more shows and get more philosophy done.
	So the reason I'm saying have hope, be positive, is there are countries outside the decay of the West, there are cultures outside the decay of the West, that understand the stampede that is coming.
	Now the stampede that is coming is the smart, productive people looking for a safe haven.
	You understand? This is going to happen.
	I would guarantee it if it were physically possible to do so, but it's not, but I will.
	I guarantee it.
	There is going to be a country, there is going to be a series of countries, who are going to be safe havens for the hungry and the hunted.
	For the super productive dodging the pitchforks and torches of the mob inspired by the magic curse word of unfairness to take their stuff.
	Now in the past, of course, wealth was based on land.
	You couldn't move land.
	If you were an aristocrat who owned a thousand acres and the government was taking your stuff, you couldn't take your thousand acres and go to France.
	But crypto is pretty transportable, right?
	You couldn't even take a thousand pounds of gold and move it someplace, right?
	Very easily. But now, the store of economic value is more transferable than it has ever been before in human history.
	Ever. Communication systems are better than they've ever been before in human history.
	Ever. Some country, some group of countries, is going to step up and say...
	We are your safe haven.
	You, productive geniuses of the world, come here and be free.
	Maybe it will happen in the country you live in.
	Maybe it will happen in the country I live in.
	Maybe it will be somewhere else.
	Will it be a fight? Yeah, for sure.
	For sure. But this parachute, this off-ramp, has never before existed in human history.
	And if all you do is look at the fuel gauge on the plane and not pat the parachute on your back, you're going to feel more anxious than you need to.
	All right.
	Sorry, I lost a lot of comments here.
	I have all these topics, but you guys, your questions are too good.
	Steph, what foods do you eat and avoid?
	I don't know, is that particularly interesting to you guys?
	Probably not. Because again, it's pretty personal to me.
	But I'm going to try keto.
	I am going to try keto. Somebody in my life is doing it.
	I think it's pretty good.
	All right.
	Let me see, sorry, I'm just putting my little verbal beats in here.
	I've read big businesses buying up farmland to lease out to farmers.
	How does the best farmer owning the most land work on this case?
	Well, it's not a free market, right?
	It's not a free market. The people at the top of the economic chain right now get the money-printed dollars at full value, and everyone else gets it in the shorts.
	So they're massively subsidized, and it's more about political pull.
	It's what Ayn Rand called the aristocracy of pull rather than the aristocracy of merit.
	So no, it's not a free market situation.
	Let's see here.
	What have I got here?
	Amen.
	Thank you.
	I need to learn a lot more about being a good person so I can find good people.
	It's really hard to be a good person these days.
	A good person requires moral courage and honesty and directness, and that is becoming increasingly punished these days, right?
	So it's hard to be a good person, certainly in public, right, which is where you kind of need to be to meet new people.
	Yeah, it's really tough. Finding people who aren't another brick in the wall seems impossible, but it's not.
	Sure. You have to look at yourself as you're auditioning, right?
	So when Peter Gabriel quit the band Genesis, they auditioned how many singers?
	How many singers did they audition to replace him?
	400 singers. None of them did the job, so Phil Collins reluctantly stood up and started screaming about his divorces.
	So... You've got to look like, you don't just, if you're a huge band and you're looking for the singer, right?
	Like you're in excess looking for the replacement for Michael Hutchins or you're a queen looking for the replacement for Freddie Mercury or whatever, you don't just go to karaoke bars and just, you have to look only at the elite of the elite of the elite, right?
	The whole purpose of quality in life is saying no to just about everyone you meet, right?
	Keto worked out well for you? Good.
	Steph, do you think genetic, general artificial intelligence is possible?
	Absolutely not. Absolutely not.
	You will never get general artificial intelligence.
	Because people say artificial intelligence is like...
	So I did a...
	I wrote code when I was younger.
	So big corporations have scrubbers and things that manage their wastewater emissions, their air emissions, their whatever, groundwater emissions and so on, right?
	And I wrote code that would seek the best configuration...
	For production to reduce pollution the most without harming profits.
	And, of course, if you could get the increase in profits to the highest and reduce the pollution the most, so could you say that's artificial intelligence?
	Well, kind of, yeah, because it's running through all these different scenarios and making sure the optimized one is presented.
	And, of course, if you hired a consultant to do that, you would have to hire a very intelligent consultant in order to achieve that outcome.
	And so, was that artificial intelligence?
	I guess you could say so, insofar as it would replace a very intelligent consultant that you would otherwise need to hire.
	Did I create a human brain?
	God, no. So I will tell you when I will be satisfied at artificial intelligence being actual human intelligence when artificial intelligence has prophetic dreams with deep spiritual soul-based collective unconscious meaning guiding to wisdom and virtue in life.
	Human beings do that every night.
	You wake up and you can evaluate your dreams and I've done countless dream evaluations on this show including one of my own or two of my own I think.
	So, yeah, you could, you know, the moment that robots, right, the old do androids dream of electric sheep because that Philip K. Dick became Blade Runner, but the moment that computers are having dreams of spiritual progress, I will consider them to have achieved human artificial intelligence.
	But goal-seeking and figuring things out in computers, it's not artificial intelligence at all, at all.
	All right, so let's see here.
	Steph, I'm Russian-Ukrainian.
	Are the West trying to destroy Russia because we stand against the global cabal?
	So, yeah, I mean, there's this general belief that the conflicts in the 20th century came out of nationalism, and therefore, if you don't have any countries, you won't have any war.
	And therefore, any country that has a strong in-country or in-group preference is considered to be a huge problem and all of that.
	And, of course, the Russians are pretty woke to communism for reasons that you can, I'm sure, appreciate.
	So, yeah.
	And Russia, of course, looks at the West.
	I was talking about this when I was on Hong Kong television some years ago when I was down there right before, I guess, when the pandemic was already circulating, and saying, you know, the problem with the stuff that's going on in the West is we've lost moral leadership in the world.
	You know, people might want some of the material stuff that we produce, but they don't want what's going on culturally.
	In fact, they're quite repulsed by it in a lot of ways.
	Yeah, they're pretty...
	Russia, you know, for all of its faults, which are enormous and considerable, it does seem to have a very masculine culture.
	And again, nationalism plus masculinity all are considered to be the causes of war in the 20th century.
	I don't think that that's an accurate reading of history, but I think that's one of the reasons why you get this reaction.
	Let's see here. Let's see here.
	Yeah, human intelligence...
	The human brain and computers are just...
	A computer is not a silicon-based life form.
	It's not a silicon-based brain.
	Human brains and computers just work on such fundamentally different technology.
	You know, human brains are like interconnections of neurons with unconscious and layers all the way back three billion years of spontaneous generation and instincts and fears and anxieties and...
	And the unconscious operates 9,000 times faster than the conscious mind in some circumstances and situations.
	And you can give people math problems they couldn't possibly solve, but then you put them in social fairness situations, they solve it immediately.
	So... That spontaneous, interconnected life generation of thoughts, instincts, emotions, and images, and fantasies, and all of that, computers are binary.
	It's yes, no. Yes, no.
	True, false. That's all it is.
	What do you think about Scott Adams' claim that AI will replace doctors?
	Well, look, I could certainly see that artificial intelligence could be very helpful in the analysis of blood, for sure.
	And again, artificial intelligence, it's not really.
	All it is is binary, right?
	Okay, here's your blood work.
	Here's all the possibilities.
	Answer these. I mean, what does the doctor do?
	The doctor asks a bunch of questions.
	Usually not that many, right?
	But the doctor asks some questions, looks at your blood work, suggests scans, analyzes the scans, promotes a particular treatment, right?
	Could be a wait and see.
	It could be whatever, right? And so all of that can be automated.
	That process can be automated.
	You know, I've thought for many years, you know, like a vending machine, right?
	Like, you know, when you have, let's say you have a UTI, a urinary tract infection, right?
	You've got to go and give, this is mostly for women, right?
	You go and give a P sample, and then they analyze what kind of bacteria you have, and then they give you a specific antibiotic for it.
	It's like, okay, well, why just have a vending machine?
	You know, you can imagine you go in, you poke the blood, and it analyzes the blood and figures out what you need and dispenses it.
	Sure. Or it could be, you know, you pee, you put the cup in, it analyzes it and gives you the right antibiotics.
	Like, there's a lot of this stuff that can be automated, but it's sort of like if you have, you know, you give a buck, you get a pop at a convenience store, you need a person there, right?
	But you've got a vending machine that can do the same thing.
	That doesn't mean that the vending machine is as intelligent as the cashier.
	So, yeah, I do think that there's a lot of that.
	There's a lot of that stuff that's possible.
	Isn't he the guy, yeah, his wife, I think he was going through a divorce at the moment, his wife left him.
	I guess that was predictable, right?
	Well, so the reason that you would think that computers can replace human beings is you don't have any functional free will because you're defensive, right?
	Not you, but people as a whole.
	If you're defensive, so defensive people, I mean, you've got to know the people.
	It's just input-output, right?
	It's just input-output. You say Trump, they get triggered, right?
	Whatever. You say racist, that's a racist, they just get angry and hateful, right?
	So they're programmed, right?
	The stimulus response, Pavlov's dog, right?
	Stimulus response, stimulus response.
	So for those people, the idea that you just reproduce human intelligence with computers is like, well, yeah, they're just input-outputs, so it's a little easier.
	But when you actually have self-actualization and you have your own identity and you really think for yourself, the idea that you could replace that with a computer.
	So people who think that artificial intelligence is just around the corner are just confessing to me that they don't have any spontaneity of thought themselves.
	Yeah, and the Imagine Song by Lenin.
	Yeah, it's pretty rough.
	Straight-up communism. Yeah.
	Lenin, of course, Lenin and all of the Beatles left England because they were being taxed too high and fled to where?
	Switzerland or something like that.
	And then, of course, it's like, well, there's no property, right?
	Any advice for finding risk aversion and believing in one's own abilities?
	Sure. Yes.
	Yes, I do. There is no such thing as risk aversion.
	Or there's no such thing as risk avoidance.
	First thing to understand, life is some dangerous shit.
	Life is some dangerous shit all the time.
	I remember when I was a kid, there was a woman in my church who was holding her grandson, stumbled going down the church steps, saved her grandson, but because she didn't let go of her grandson, she fell and bashed her head in concrete, bled out and died in the church basement.
	Boom. Dead in three minutes.
	Now, she saved her grandson.
	Good call. You know, from a sort of life investment standpoint.
	So she was just going down to pick up some free coffee and donuts and let out on the concrete in three minutes.
	Could get hit by a truck tomorrow.
	Could wake up with some bizarre disease that you had no way of anticipating.
	There is no such thing as elimination, as the elimination of risk in life.
	Life itself is risk. We all exist despite all the odds.
	I mean, there's a sort of famous cliche about...
	Men and women in medical school that every ailment that they read about, they then believe that they have.
	You don't even want to sit there and think of all the shit that's going on in your body that's keeping you alive right now.
	Your heart, your pancreas, your liver, your kidneys, your blood circulation, your brain, your organs, your nervous system.
	Everything that's just coordinating to keep you alive for 80 years, hopefully without anyone having to lift the hood and poke around inside.
	That's insane. I mean, you can't even drive a car 5,000 miles without needing the oil change, but we just chug along.
	The amount of shit that has to work for you to stay alive, if you ever really start to think about it, you will freak yourself the fuck out.
	I'm telling you, man, you will freak out about it.
	And you've got to just recognize that every single heartbeat is something clawed back from the massive improbable ballistic idea of you being alive from the universe as a whole.
	Life is risky. Getting out of bed is risky.
	Getting out of the bathtub is risky.
	Now that I'm older, I'm sitting there thinking, because I don't like to shower, because I have dry skin, so I put the oils in the bathtub.
	So getting out of the bathtub, you're like, one slip, one slip, and I might not walk for six months, right?
	So everything, getting in the bathtub, getting out of the bathtub.
	Turns out I had a tooth that was completely fused to my jaw from a kid.
	Get that dealt with. Didn't expect that.
	Didn't know about that until it showed up, right?
	It's not like I get a bunch of x-rays and knew that.
	Everything is wildly improbable.
	Everything is wildly improbable.
	And your chances of being alive were virtually zero.
	Like if you had to put odds, right?
	Think of the, you know, whatever you weigh.
	Like I'm like 195 or whatever, right?
	So whatever you weigh...
	Think of all of the...
	We're the only life we know, the only conscious life we know.
	So think of the atoms that go to make up your body.
	Think of your atoms. Forget the cells.
	Just think of the atoms, right? Now, you got 150 to 250 pounds of wetware on this M-class planet in the Goldilocks zone between Venus and Mars, right?
	One of 100 billion stars in 100 billion galaxies.
	So you look at all that matter.
	All those atoms.
	All of those atoms.
	You know, there are more atoms in your fingertip than there are grains of sand in all the beaches of the world.
	So, of all of the atoms in the universe, yours get up to walk around and think and speak.
	Now, if you were to lay odds on that, If you were just standing outside the universe, saying we've got 100 billion stars, probably 500 billion planets, and then another 100 billion galaxies, So it's five Googleplex,
	whatever it is, right? And the infinitesimally tiny number of atoms that you have that make up you, the infinitesimally tiny number of atoms, what are the odds that you would be you out of all of the atoms in the universe?
	I mean, it's so close to zero.
	It's like that old joke, that Seinfeld joke.
	Maximum strength Tylenol.
	It's like, okay, give me the level of Tylenol that would kill me, and then just back it off a tiny, tiny little bit.
	It's that live show where he says, someone screams out to you, Jerry, I love you!
	And he's like, I love you too, but I still think we should see other people.
	He's a funny guy. Anyway.
	The unbelievably infinitesimally tiny odds.
	That the atoms that make you are the ones that get up and walk around and think.
	For all we know, we may be the only cognizant beings in the entire universe.
	Probably not, but for all we know, and we probably never will find any others because the universe is too big.
	It's 4.3 light years to Alpha Centauri, the closest one.
	I don't think it even has an M-class planet.
	So... We're not finding shit out there, most likely.
	We're just going to go from place to place and find it.
	It's either empty or it's bacteria or it's, you know, single-celled organisms or maybe a couple of things on beetle legs and that's about it.
	Wild, unbelievable. And if you narrow it down even further, the only part of you that really thinks, right, is the three pounds of wetware between your ears, right?
	So you've got to appreciate, mathematically you have to appreciate the unbelievable odds of you being here, of you thinking, of you reasoning, of you listening, speaking.
	Out of everything in the universe, you get the three pounds of glory.
	Holy shit. You have a near infinitely greater chance of winning the lottery a thousand times in a row than having this incredible gift of animation and thought.
	I don't take it for granted, really.
	You've got to not take it for granted because it can go like that.
	So, being risk-averse, I understand.
	Look, I understand. You don't take on pointless risks.
	You have to evaluate risk.
	Where you can have the most effect with a reasonable level of risk.
	But trying to have no risk in your life?
	Okay. Look at movement, right?
	If you over-exercise, you hurt yourself.
	If you under-exercise, you die.
	Probably prematurely.
	Your heart doesn't work. Your veins don't work very well and all that.
	And your bones disintegrate, right?
	Particularly for women, right?
	Osteoporosis is kind of a thing, right?
	So probably it's a good idea to lift some weights and do some resistance exercise to keep your bones strong.
	So when it comes to exercise, there is no risk-free exercise.
	Every exercise you do might cause you harm.
	But not doing any exercise will cause you harm.
	Now, over-exercising for sure will cause you harm, not exercising at all for sure will cause you harm.
	You've got to find some sweet spot in the middle, but you've got to throw away the no-risk fantasy.
	It's like the old cliché in those action movies.
	The heroes are all running away and some guy gets hit with a bullet or an arrow or a spear and he dies.
	And everyone goes back, oh, Bob!
	And usually some Arabic guy, his troubles are over.
	His troubles are done, his troubles are over.
	Ours are still... Okay, he's now in a risk-free situation because he's dead!
	He's dead! That's now risk-free.
	He's beyond risk.
	Wanting to not have risk in your life is a yearning for death.
	Like that romantic poet, the romantic poem, half in love with easeful death, or the sorrows of young Werther from Goethe.
	Yearning for a risk-free life is praying for the grave.
	It's wanting to not live.
	Because if you're too cautious and you're too afraid of risk, You will get to middle age and beyond and know that shit has passed you by.
	Shit has passed you by and you will never get it.
	You will never get it.
	You know, if you get to your 40s, you're never going to be a cardio-based athlete.
	You're just too old. I mean, if you get to your 30s and you haven't contributed much to science, it's not going to happen, most likely.
	It happens in your 20s.
	You get to your 30s, you're never going to be a dancer.
	And when you get to sort of my age, most of the doors are closed.
	You understand, right? Am I ever going to be a famous movie star?
	No. Am I ever going to be a non-famous movie star?
	No. But you should still watch HoaxToMovie.com.
	And if you haven't Taken the necessary risks to achieve.
	Because every achievement comes with risk.
	Because if you enjoy your achievement, it might fail.
	It's the second novel syndrome, right?
	So somebody who writes a really famous first novel hates writing the second.
	Hates writing the second novel because now they've got to match it.
	Everyone, like it's the one-hit-wonder syndrome, like turning Japanese or Daniel Powder's Bad Day.
	You want to write that next song?
	Probably don't. It's going to be pretty tough.
	Right? If you achieve something, do you get to keep achieving it?
	Unlikely. Unlikely.
	There has been, right?
	I mean, I achieved the heights of podcast fame and success.
	Do I still have them? I do not.
	Was it because I screwed up?
	Not really. So...
	If you don't take the risks when you're young and middle-aged...
	You've simply lived with regret and depression at late middle age.
	You haven't solved anything.
	You've simply pushed forward your risk to a point where it becomes unrecoverable.
	You can't fix it. You can't fix it.
	This is why, at least for me when I was younger, oh, I'm interested in acting.
	I really like acting.
	I think I'm good at acting.
	Okay. I will work like hell and audition for the National Theatre School.
	And I will go and I will try my best.
	Turns out, I was pretty good as an actor.
	Again, they loved me and thought I was the best thing since sliced bread the first year.
	Then they found out about my politics somehow, or I probably said something somewhere.
	So, and then I found out that if you think for yourself, you can't be in the art world.
	Because it's about, everything's for the leftist revolution.
	You can't do it. Can't do it.
	There's no more censorship than being in the revolutionary cadres, smashing of capitalism and trying to think for yourself.
	It's horrible. When I wanted to do academics, I poured myself heart and soul into academics, worked like a dog on my master's thesis, and in a pretty hostile environment got an A. When I wanted to get into the business world, loved the business world, got recognized academics wasn't going to be the place for me, went into the business world, worked for free for like well over a year, worked for nothing, night and day.
	I remember being so awkward in a business meeting, I finished doing my presentation, I had no idea whether to stand up or sit down afterwards, no idea what the hell I was doing.
	And then finally the guy I was with just wrote, sit down.
	No idea. When I wanted to get into philosophy, when I wanted to get into public, I just put everything into it.
	Put everything into it.
	Leave nothing on the table, because the table's going to go away anyway.
	I don't leave any ammo in the chamber, metaphorically, because the gun turns to rust in your hand as you age.
	Risk or regret?
	That's all you got. You risk stuff or you regret everything you didn't do.
	Is it a risk to go and ask a woman out?
	Yes, it is. Will you feel bad if she says no?
	yes you will and if that's all you think of you won't do it but if you ask her out and she says no you're less afraid to ask the next one out and the next one until someone says yes And then you get married and then you have children and then you have meaning and you have companionship and you have community.
	And what do you do? What's your alternative?
	Well, asking someone out is kind of scary.
	Compared to what? If you don't ask, compared to what?
	you can never assess risk intelligently risk and regret it's all you get End is life. You take your risks or you get your regrets.
	Now, the good thing about risks is you can recover from risk.
	Right? A girl says no.
	You ask another girl out.
	You adjust your expectations.
	You realize. And most times girls will ask out.
	Sorry. Most times that girls will say no to you when you ask them out is because you're asking them out for the wrong damn reasons.
	And they know it. They know it.
	If you're asking a girl out because she's pretty, she will say no to you.
	If you're lucky. If you're not lucky, she'll say yes to you and your life will get wrecked because she'll resent you.
	We're not choosing her, but rather choosing her flesh, which is not the same damn thing at all.
	Her personality will be constant.
	Her flesh will fail, will fade.
	So, if you're asking a woman out for the wrong reason, she'll say no.
	Of course she will. I mean, if there was some average, let's say some really, really rich guy and some average woman asks you out only because you're wealthy, you're going to say no to her because you're going to be kind of insulted.
	It's just money, especially if you inherited it and even earned it.
	It's not even a reflection of your courage or integrity or whatever, right?
	Ambition. If you just inherited a bunch of money, well, let's say you inherit some title, you have some royalty, some aristocracy, and some woman wants to go out with you simply because she wants to be photographed And say she had a princeling for a boyfriend.
	You're going to say, no, it's not about me.
	It's about some title I didn't even earn.
	Okay, so the woman says, it's not about me.
	It's not about my virtues or my character.
	It's about some flesh and some hormones I didn't even earn.
	I'm not mining evolution for personal value when it's got nothing to do with me as a person.
	That's what I mean by adjust your expectations.
	I don't mean to ask out someone who you're not attracted to.
	I just mean know why you're asking someone else and don't make it...
	Know why you're asking the woman out and have it not be bullshit.
	Have it be something sustainable.
	Have it be something human, which is values, virtues, stuff that lasts, stuff that you imprint on your children that make it worthwhile having those values because they'll continue after you die.
	If you have values with no companionship, you'd have no footprint, your values die with you.
	What the hell has it all been for? That emptiness, that existential loss.
	I mean, look at all the, particularly the white women, man.
	One in four women over 60 is on antidepressants.
	The use of antidepressants by particularly white middle-aged women through the roof.
	Why? Because they were told they don't need no man.
	You can't have a risk-free life.
	You let that go. It's all about which risks do you want.
	Do you want the risks now, which is doing things that are dangerous, or do you want, and you can still change your mind and do things and fix them, or do you want the risks later?
	When you can't fix them. And you're depressed for everything you missed.
	So for the women in their 40s and 50s, they didn't take the risk of trying to find a real quality man when they were younger.
	They just probably hopped from pretty boy to pretty boy, from ab to ab, right?
	On the carousel of doom.
	And then they're in their 40s and their 50s and they can't fix it.
	They didn't risk being genuinely loved for who they are.
	They didn't risk settling down.
	They just ran after the dopamine of men being attracted to them.
	And then by the time they're in their 40s and 50s, this is what I... One of the reasons I got booted off Twitter was reminding women that they're going to live from 40 to 85.
	Without family, without kids, what are they going to do?
	How are you going to fill all that long time?
	All that long time.
	How are you going to fill it? Well, by the time the women get into their 40s, they realize the giant mistake they've made.
	Can't fix it. And if there's cruelty in this world, it's 45 years of denial, of regret.
	That's hell. Because the women aren't even saying, holy shit, did I ever screw away my 20s.
	I completely faffed up my 20s.
	I just lived for myself.
	I was selfish. I burnt up my youth on the empty altar of flash fire pretty boys.
	They're not out there saying, they're saying, no, no, no, I'm still strong.
	I'm still empowered. Like when I put that tweet out.
	And all the women were like, what am I going to do from 40 to 85?
	I'm going to read books.
	I'm going to travel. I'm going to learn a new language.
	I'm going to make sweet love to my husband.
	I'm going to have a wonderful life.
	Oh, isn't that nice?
	You're going to have a wonderful life that you steadfastly deny to others by having children.
	Your life is so wonderful.
	It's so great that your parents had you and your life is so wonderful that you won't pay it forward.
	Somebody says, 40 and with no kids.
	So much pain when seeing young mothers.
	Oh, yeah. Yeah, we grabbed a kid from the jaws of time.
	It's tough, man. Man, oh man, this is a tough convo.
	I can feel it in me bones.
	I want to resist, but I can't.
	If you want to get a job, don't be interviewed.
	Have a mutual interview.
	So when you go in, somebody wants to hire you, or may hire you, you need to not say, please give me a job, what do I need to say to get this job?
	That's pitiful, that's pathetic, and that shows a lack of self-value that is going to be a turn-off for an employer, and an employer with any confidence.
	So what you want to do is you want to go in and say, I want to see if this is a good fit for us.
	I want to see if this is a good mutual fit.
	I'm interested in working here, but I need to know more about this company to find out if it fits what I value.
	Does it have the right culture? Does it have the right approach?
	Does it have an HR department?
	God help me. It's the same thing with dating.
	You don't go up and beg a girl to go out with you.
	Please, please, please, I have nothing to offer, but I want you to go out with me.
	Ugh! You would find that gross if a woman did that to you.
	You go up and you say, let's have a conversation.
	I mean, you don't have to say this explicitly, but in your mind, let's have a conversation.
	See if we fit. See if we fit.
	I remember one girl, one so pretty, so pretty, such a pretty girl.
	Went for a walk with her. She went for a walk with me.
	Tried to find anything that was interesting about her.
	Any conversation she could have.
	Any emotional connection.
	It was nothing. It's like, oh, that's a shame.
	You've got to interview her.
	You're not asking her out.
	You're not begging for her to go out with you.
	If you have something to offer, first of all, if you don't think you have anything to offer a woman, then it's fraudulent to ask her out.
	Then it's like going for dinner, ordering the most expensive steak, knowing that your wallet is empty.
	You're defrauding. You've got to figure out what you have to offer a woman.
	Now, if you're listening to this show and you're processing this conversation, I guarantee you, you have an enormous amount to offer a woman.
	Enormous amount to offer a woman.
	You've got to know what you bring to the table.
	Otherwise, you're a fraud. You're interviewing for a job you just can't do.
	You wouldn't go and interview to be a surgeon when you didn't know how to be a surgeon, had no credentials or qualifications.
	Because that would be a bad thing to do.
	It would be wrong. You've got to know what value.
	And if you can't figure out what value to have to offer a woman, then you've got to go and talk to your mother and figure out why she didn't value you.
	Once you figure out what you have to offer a woman, you go and you see, I wonder if you can see my value.
	I can see my value.
	Now, maybe we don't share each other's values for whatever reason, and that's not a good or bad thing, but just there's no fit, right?
	But you are, in any situation in life, you are asking and you are offering.
	You are asking and you are offering.
	If all you focus is on the asking, you'll lose every time because you'll be begging.
	If all you're focusing is on the offering, then you'll be arrogant and unpalatable.
	Well, maybe you'll be lucky enough to go out with me a whole lot, right?
	So I provide, I think, the greatest value in the world.
	I really do. I honestly, genuinely and totally and deep to my bones believe that I offer the greatest value in the world.
	In terms of philosophy, bringing positive things to your life.
	So I offer value.
	I ask for, you know, freedomain.com forward slash donate.
	I'm not begging for donations.
	But I'm also not denying the value that I offer.
	So I am offering and asking.
	I provide and request.
	That's the way it should be in your relationships.
	You provide value to a woman and you request her time and attention.
	A banana taped to the wall is high art Stefan.
	How can you not see that? Well, most of modern art is just money laundering, isn't it?
	I wish I was at the point where I could ask that first time.
	No, you can't.
	Life isn't about waiting until it feels right.
	Life is just doing it.
	Right? If someone paid you a literal million dollars, cash, to go and ask a girl out, you'd make yourself do it, right?
	Just do it. It's more than a million dollars to have a relationship and have kids and family and community.
	No, just go and ask.
	You've got to make yourself do it.
	You've got to make yourself do it.
	You'll be fine. You'll be fine.
	Every time you ask and fail, it just toughens you for the next time because you survived it.
	Does hypergamy also look for good physical features?
	Why do we only focus on providing aspects of hypergamy?
	Well, so women look for pretty boys because women can get money from the state, but that's going to change.
	I mean, the women who are sort of early to middle age now never get money from the state when they get old.
	Steph, what would you say to the men who have checked out and don't even want to find a woman anymore?
	Steph, what would you say to the men who have checked out?
	Well, if they don't listen to this show, that's fine.
	If they do listen to this show, get off your ass and find a good woman.
	And if you can't find a good woman, inspire an average woman to become good.
	Go be a leader in your damn society, man.
	Go be a leader. Go lead a woman to virtue.
	Just as she can lead you to greater empathy.
	Go exchange values with a woman.
	Don't just say, well, this woman is not perfect the way she is, therefore there's nothing.
	You're not perfect the way you are.
	I'm not perfect the way I am.
	Well, my wife is perfect the way she is.
	You're just writing yourself out of the gene pool.
	You're writing yourself out of society.
	And what if you're wrong? Right?
	What if you're wrong? What if there are good women out there but you just MGTOW yourself into obscurity, crawl up your own ass and watch Sandman because you're too afraid to go out and find a good woman or inspire a good woman?
	What if it is simply because, like you're not a great singer so you can't find a good band because a good band wants a great singer?
	Maybe you just improve your voice or find something else.
	What if you're wrong? What if there are good women out there, or women you can inspire to greatness?
	What if you could go out and be a leader in that way?
	Wouldn't that be better? Oh no, it's not possible because all women have gone crazy, right?
	Okay, but if all people, you can't just say women, right?
	If all people have gone crazy because of the society we live in, then maybe you've gone crazy too, and your opinions and arguments Are wrong.
	It takes an enormous amount of vanity to say I'm the only sane person in society.
	Everyone else is crazy. I'm the only sane person.
	Me and my MGTOW brothers. No.
	There are smart women who have the potential to break out of the matrix.
	They just need a leadership. And you could be that leader.
	I think it's very sad. Steph, don't you know it's okay for 18-year-olds to be in sex work but not married with kids?
	They aren't baby-making machines.
	Yeah. The dehumanization of motherhood to broodmare baby-making machines is totally sociopathic, right?
	It's totally sociopathic.
	To actually create a brain out of your own body.
	It's incredible. You know, I look at my daughter.
	She's just amazing artwork and amazing animation.
	And I look at the artwork and the animation that she does.
	I'm like... That came out of me.
	That's incredible. Incredible.
	To say, well, I'm not a brood stud.
	That's a human being there.
	An amazing human being there.
	It's an old line from a Michelle Pfeiffer movie.
	She played with Bruce Willis. Like, there were no people, and now there are people.
	It's an incredible thing.
	An incredible thing.
	What value does listening to free domain bring to a woman?
	Well, I mean, there is, of course, the contents of the argument, and there's also the form of the personality.
	I'm a great husband and father.
	I care enormously for my wife and my daughter, and you get to see that hours a week if you want, and you may never have seen that before.
	Doesn't that give you hope?
	What one man can do, other men can do, especially if I'm leading them to some degree.
	Don't be the dude that won't date broke girls and then be like, I don't like career women.
	Right, right.
	Are you still making a video series on how to find a wife?
	Yes, that is on the list. What if the gene pool is dysgenic?
	What if society is degenerate?
	Well, you don't date society.
	You date individuals, so go find them.
	My wife is perfect.
	Woe, Steph, please don't simp. you Worshipping someone you love is not simping.
	Worshipping someone you love is not.
	Of course, my wife's not perfect, but she's perfect for me.
	All right. We should probably close off.
	We get cozy two hours.
	Man, the time flies. I had two topics all laid out.
	Oh, well, I do them in solo cast, so you people won't interrupt me.
	I'm just kidding. It's not an interruption.
	I'm here for you. So, yeah, freedomain.com forward slash donate.
	You know, you know, you know I do the best at this stuff.
	And there's never been anybody who connects philosophy, I think, to people's actual lives in a productive and positive way, as I do.
	And this is a large degree due to the audience.
	You guys have really the best questions in the known universe, and I'm sorry I can't get to them all.
	Love you guys. FreeDemand.com forward slash donate.
	In return, please, please, I'm begging you, just start it.
	You'll love it. JustPoorNovel.com, totally free.
	AlmostNovel.com. You should check it out.
	These are great books. Plus, you get to hear my acting, which I did for many years before I did this.
	All right. Thanks, everyone.
	Lots of love. Take care. Have yourselves a wonderful, wonderful, wonderful, wonderful afternoon.
	And I will talk to you soon.
	And... Take care.

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