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Aug. 4, 2022 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

01:47:44

Rapid-Fire Philosophy! Wednesday Night Live 3 Aug 2022

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	Okay, Wednesday Night Live, we're back on D-Live, so I hope you're doing well.
	So here's some questions that I had.
	I'm going to try and do these fast, fast like a teenager.
	All right, if your definition of love is an involuntary response to virtue, so my definition of love is it's our involuntary response to virtue if we ourselves are virtuous, and virtuous defined as behavior of high moral standards, then because higher mammals are capable of basic morality as part of their social behavior, then It then follows that animals can be rudimentarily virtuous and therefore can be loved.
	Okay, so if love is our involuntary response to virtue, if animals can be virtuous, then we can love animals, and we assume to some degree they could love us back.
	The problem here is a little bit, but there's a couple of problems.
	First, if virtue is defined as behavior of high moral standards, well, that to me is not a definition that helps.
	Right? So when you're going to have a definition of something, you can't use a synonym, right?
	So if morality and virtue are kind of a synonym, and you say, well, what's the definition of virtue?
	Well, the definition of virtue is behavior of high moral standards.
	It turns out that morality just equals virtue.
	So then you say, well, the definition of virtue is behavior of high virtuous standards.
	Like that doesn't, hasn't explained anything.
	So virtue is integrity to universally preferable behavior as a bare minimum.
	So there's virtue in terms of not doing evil, like not initiating the use of force or fraud, and then that's neutral.
	I mean, you're not doing evil.
	It doesn't mean you're necessarily good, but at least you're not evil, and I'd be pretty happy if the world was that far along.
	But if you promote and spread the good, and you are virtuous in that you promote the non-aggression principle, peaceful parenting, and so on, then you're actually virtuous.
	So... So he says, it then follows that animals can be rudimentarily virtuous and therefore can be loved.
	The difference is that the moral standards of an animal, like a dog or a rat, I think he means a cat here, are imposed by a trainer rather than by moral reasoning, like in some humans.
	Okay. Here's my thoughts on this.
	First and foremost, love animals.
	My daughter loves animals.
	I love animals. I grew up with rats and mice.
	No, not rats. I grew up with mice and hamsters and bred them.
	Great affection for animals.
	Love the animals. My daughter has really reintroduced me, as kids do when you're a parent, to love animals.
	And I grew up, when I would visit my family in Ireland in the summers, There were dogs.
	I still remember one of them named Brandy.
	Just an absolutely wonderful dog.
	When I visited my father in Africa, more dogs.
	So I've always loved dogs.
	I've never owned a dog myself because I lived in apartments for most of my life when I was younger.
	So yeah, big, big fan of pets.
	I think they're wonderful to have.
	Very good for developing empathy and so on.
	So, of course, those of us who come from cultures that have embraced livestock, well, we have a great affection for animals, and we bond with the animals, right?
	Because the animals are essential for our survival, right?
	You need the cows for food during the winter.
	You need the dogs to chase off the creatures that might eat your chickens.
	You need the cats to eat the rodents that will otherwise defecate in your corn and wheat and barley and destroy its value for you as a farmer.
	So you need hawks to hunt.
	And so we have a great symbiotic and beneficial relationship with most domesticated animals, and we have a great deal of affection for them.
	But we can't love them.
	We can't listen to that old Janine Garofalo movie.
	I can't remember what it was, but she says, hey, it's okay to love your animals.
	Just don't love your animals.
	So animals can't be virtuous.
	Now, can animals be loyal?
	Absolutely. But they're not loyal based upon virtue.
	They're loyal based upon imprinting and pleasure, right?
	So, ducklings will, you know, the ducklings that my daughter gets on a semi-regular basis will follow us around.
	Is that because we're virtuous?
	No, because they've imprinted on us.
	It's just nature's bonding mechanism.
	If you have a dog and you pet that dog and you play with that dog and you take your dog for walks and the dog has a really positive attitude towards you, then the dog is loyal to you, partly because they've bonded with you and partly because you've given them pleasure.
	Hitler, an evil guy, was famously kind to animals, so animals loved Hitler because they didn't know all the other stuff he was doing and they couldn't possibly judge it.
	So, The way a virtue is, it requires an abstract conceptual system of morality that you can conform to, right?
	So you have an ideal system of morality, you know, be honest, be courageous, tell the truth, whatever.
	And then, sorry, I shouldn't say whatever, like that's my whole gig as a moral philosopher, but anyway, you should understand what I'm saying.
	So animals cannot compare proposed actions to ideal standards.
	Animals cannot compare proposed actions to ideal standards.
	Animals, if they want to take your food, like let's see the famous example from when I was younger, you get a phone call, you have to leave the room, and the animal, your dog jumps up and gets your food and runs off with it.
	Or you see these videos online of seagulls going into a convenience store, grabbing some food and then heading back out.
	So, those animals can't conceive of theft.
	They can't conceive of fraud.
	They can't conceive of property rights.
	And they can't say, well, you know, I am really hungry, but I haven't paid.
	Like, they can't process proposed actions to ideal moral standards.
	So... Animals can't be moral.
	Now, because animals aren't moral agents, doesn't mean that we can treat them however we want, because animals feel pain, animals have bonding, animals care for their young, animals like their caring creatures that experience pain.
	So we should try to treat them as well as possible, but...
	No, you can't love an animal.
	You can bond with an animal, you can have affection for an animal, but your dog is not loyal to you because it's evaluated your moral character and thinks that you're a great guy.
	Your dog is loyal to you because you bring that dog pleasure, you feed the dog, and the dog has a bonding mechanism built in as part of a pack animal.
	So we know this, of course, if you have children, Hopefully they won't eat you if you die, despite all the push for cannibalism that rather creepily is happening in the mainstream media these days.
	But cats for sure will eat you.
	Dogs maybe, but cats for sure will eat you after you're dead.
	So, yeah, there's no...
	So, can we have affection for our pets and our animals?
	Absolutely. Should we protect and care for them?
	Absolutely. Are they capable of morality?
	Not at all. Can they be loyal?
	Can they defend you? Absolutely.
	But that's programmed. And that's based on pleasure.
	That's not a moral state.
	And the problem I have with pets...
	Sorry, I'm going to be blunt.
	I'll tell you what I think. Here's the problem I have with pets.
	The problem I have with pets is a lot of people...
	Think of the fur babies phenomenon where people say...
	You know, my grandmother had eight children.
	My mother had...
	My great-grandmother had eight children.
	My grandmother had five children.
	My mother had two children. I have an abortion and a dog.
	You know, and that's really, really pathetic.
	It's really pathetic. So, when you have pets...
	If you humanize the pets, if you anthropomorphize the pets, if you project human qualities onto those pets, then you have a pretend relationship that is really sad.
	It's a pretend relationship that is really, really sad and kind of pathetic, frankly.
	Now, again, I'm not talking about affection for animals.
	If they're part of a larger social circle, you've got kids.
	Even if you don't have kids, if they're part of a larger social circle, you enjoy, you know, the dog helps you get out and walk, and they're wonderful, beautiful, fantastic, love it.
	However, I mean, we all know someone, or maybe more than one person like this, who desperately humanizes their pets and pretends that having a relationship with your pet is like having a relationship with a human being when it's totally not.
	It's a very...
	It's like just having a pet instead of a human being, having cats instead of children, having dogs instead of a girlfriend, is really, really sad.
	And, you know, I'm not a statist by any stretch of the imagination, but if there was a law passed that says, you can't have cats until you have kids, okay, I can certainly see where people would be coming from.
	I find it desperately sad when people...
	Pretend that a pet is a person, have a relationship with a pet, and use it as a substitute for going out and having a real relationship with a real person.
	That's really, really, really, really sad.
	And it's an addiction.
	It's desperately tragic.
	Pets can't challenge you.
	They can't challenge your morals.
	They can't challenge your conscience.
	They can't challenge your ambition or lack thereof.
	They can't challenge your drug addiction if you smoke too much weed.
	They can't say you've been streaming, you've been watching too many Netflix shows, you need to whatever, right?
	They can't criticize you in any fundamental way.
	They can't give you feedback.
	They can't exhort you to be a better person.
	So it's not a relationship with a human being.
	It comes with virtually no challenges.
	As long as you feed and take care and give your pet a positive experience of you, they'll be thrilled and happy and wonderful.
	How about having a human being who can judge you be overjoyed when you come home rather than just a dog who needs to go for a walk and to eat?
	Who needs to shit and eat?
	And you can facilitate both.
	Therefore, he loves you. That's really, really sad.
	And I've had this conversation with women in particular, right?
	Like they're humanizing their cats and I'm like, are you going to have kids or just cats?
	And they get really mad, right?
	And that's fine. I mean, but that's why.
	So the skills that you develop by pretending you have a relationship with your cat don't transfer to people.
	But what happens is if you go out and you get rejected by people, you can come home and get accepted by your pet, which the pet has no choice over.
	It doesn't have free will in that way.
	And so because you have this drug called pet ownership, you don't do the hard work of developing moral qualities of character so you can have a positive relationship with a good person.
	Really tragic and sad, sad, sad.
	It's just heartbreaking.
	And, you know, I mean, you can see this with people, you know, because we outlive our pets usually, right?
	And, oh my God, it's...
	You know, the people who are like, oh, we're too good for, dogs are too good for us, you know, man's best friend.
	It's like, they're not your friends!
	You feed them and you pet them and you take them for walks after confining them from their natural wolf-like existence.
	It's really sad.
	And I would strongly suggest that you not fall prey to this addiction.
	Pets and animals are a wonderful addition to an already flourishing social circle, but they're no substitute for it.
	All right. Somebody says, in a way, governments are already in a state of anarchy and to each other.
	Sorry, in a way, governments are already in a state of anarchy to each other.
	Do you think a viable way forward is for people to just move instead of bothering the democratic process?
	Won't that make the governments wake up and start to compete for citizens?
	Well, this has already been happening, right?
	If you look at the Queen and I think David Bowie and the Beatles and so on, they moved out of the UK because they were being taxed at a 95% rate, right?
	That song, The Tax Man, that's one for you 19 for me.
	I'm the tax man, right? And this is one of the reasons why tax rates got lowered from absurdly and obscenely high rates is because people were moving there.
	You too, I think, did that as well because they're all big socialists, right?
	So, that does happen, and it does have an effect, but if it starts to happen, this is one of the reasons why citizenship requirements and passports and visas and so on are so restrictive, so that people don't, if the harder it is to move, the less governments have to compete for high-skill, high-income, high-tax cattle people.
	If it happens too much, it'll just be banned, but it already is a sort of situation.
	All right. About the relationship reality.
	You give advice to young men and women.
	But what advice do you have for men who are over 45 without resources and without children and women who are over 40 without children?
	So if you're a man who's over 45 without resources, so that means you've been working for 25 plus years and...
	You don't have any resources?
	What does that mean?
	How could you be working for 25 years and listening to this show, right, which means you're smart?
	How could you be over 45 as a man without any resources?
	Oh, maybe you got divorced or something like that.
	Women are over 40 without children.
	Okay. So for morality to continue, for humanity to continue, you've got to have kids.
	Kids are necessary for humanity and morality to continue.
	However, every human being can practice morality, moral excellence, right?
	So, you can promote peaceful parenting, you can promote the non-aggression principle, you can promote property rights, do all of those wonderful things.
	And you are adding enormously to the world.
	When it comes to having influence on the next generation, you can have nieces, nephews.
	I know that some of my listeners have joined the Big Brother organization to mentor a child.
	You can do charity work and all of that.
	So there's lots of good things that you can do.
	And also what you can do is you can...
	Help people avoid the mistakes you've made.
	You can help other people avoid the mistakes that you made.
	So I spent my 20s enmeshed in not so great relationships.
	So one of the things that I do is try to help people not waste their 20s in that way.
	So you can really help people.
	So if you are a man and you don't have any resources, despite the fact that you're halfway through your entire business career and probably more than halfway through your life, well, you can help other people avoid the mistakes that you have made, right?
	You can write blogs, you can do video talks, you can do podcasts, whatever it is to say, look, here's the mistakes I made.
	Don't make these mistakes. If you're a woman over 40 without children, well, that could be because you had trouble conceiving and so on.
	Or it could be because you spread yourself around, you spread your legs like peanut butter, and by the time you are, you know, no more games, I'm ready to settle down, which means you're kind of a used-up party favor who's lost the ability to pair bond.
	But you could warn people about that.
	You could warn other women to not try to lock down a man until you have dino eggs, right?
	So there's things that you could do to help people avoid the mistakes that you've made.
	All right. In my experience, human beings are hierarchical creatures.
	We naturally create hierarchies in just about any context.
	My questions are, how does or would UPB operate inside a hierarchy?
	Would UPB maintain or undermine Would UPB maintain or undermine one?
	how would different people with different levels of seniority interact with one another in a family, community, work or society etc so yeah we're hierarchical creatures Yes, we are hierarchical creatures.
	Just go to any karaoke contest and you'll see that, right?
	So, sure. But in the absence of coercion, we settle into a good old-fashioned meritocracy, right?
	In just about every field of human endeavor, 95% of the money goes to 5% of the people.
	Music, sports, podcasting, videography, just anything you can think of where there's an actual meritocracy, not some government-mandated whatever, right?
	So we've settled into a meritocracy in a voluntary system.
	Now, is that a hierarchy? Sure.
	It's a hierarchy. It's not a coercive hierarchy.
	It's a hierarchy based upon choice.
	I mean, I remember, boy, there's a friend of mine who, when I was in, oh, grade 10 or 11, I still remember her name, this girl was very, very pretty.
	Now, we had, they probably don't have this anymore, but we had back in the day a sort of Valentine's Day where the kids could Choose to give valentines to whoever.
	And this girl just got valentine after valentine after valentine after.
	She was like you could barely see her, like her desk was piled high with valentines, right?
	So again, this is one girl out of 20, 5% of the class got 95% of the valentines.
	It's just the way things are.
	It's not just the case in human society, it's the case in nature as well, but certainly where you have a wildly different bell curve of abilities.
	You know, I mean, certainly back in my heyday, when I was doing like 10 million views and downloads a month, before I was deplatformed, You know, in terms of the 95% to 5%, yeah, 95% of the eyeballs are going to 5% of the people who do what I do.
	Now we're doing jazz clubs, not stadiums, which is fine.
	You know the old joke about jazz and rock?
	Rock is playing three chords to 5,000 people.
	Jazz is playing 5,000 chords to three people.
	Yeah, we will sort ourselves into hierarchies.
	A Pareto principle. Sure, but they're just not coercive.
	They're not violent, right? Somebody says, baby talk.
	Is it of any benefit to talk to babies in a baby voice?
	I personally think it's a bit strange as babies are intelligent and should be spoken to as such.
	Babies are intelligent, but they don't know language yet.
	They have language potential, they have language centers, but they don't know language yet.
	And it's actually been fairly well studied, and you can look up these studies.
	High voices tend to interest babies more, because high voices are associated with mothers, are associated with food.
	So if you speak in a high voice, then babies will show more interest and show more attention.
	And generally what people do is they slow down and exaggerate speech when they talk to babies.
	Now, slowing down and exaggerating speech is exactly how you should learn a language, right?
	When you've got to break down the morphines and the phonemes so that you can see how the language works.
	Like, English is a sung language, right?
	I mean, nobody speaks in a monotone unless they're a Sandman.
	It is a sung language, so we need to exaggerate the parts of speech and nice high voice.
	It actually really does help babies learn language.
	And it's kind of funny because my daughter, who's actually going to be 14 this year, right?
	My daughter used to make fun of people who would speak high to babies.
	Now she's got her ducklings and she's like, oh, they're little ducklings!
	She does this high stuff with the ducklings, even though they're not going to learn much English at all.
	So that is...
	It's kind of interesting. So yeah, it's a useful and good thing.
	Whenever something is widespread, don't toss it out.
	This is sort of a basic conservative principle that things that have developed for a long time, you have to try and find a way.
	You have to find out what they're there for before you get rid of them.
	And every culture, people speak in high exaggerated tones to babies.
	And whatever babies respond to, that's kind of what you do, right?
	Could you maybe give us some life lessons on working hard?
	I'm talking working tirelessly up to the point of exhaustion on a daily basis.
	Do you have any techniques to be ever resistant to burnout?
	Context. I'm in tech and I want to start my own SAAS. What's that?
	Software as a Service Company. Right.
	Right. So working hard.
	You know, panic is not a bad driver for working hard.
	Panic is not a bad driver. Find something you can panic about.
	For me, you know, state of the world and all of that.
	Find something you can go on a slow burn panic about.
	When I was a software entrepreneur and co-founded a software company, was chief technical officer for many years.
	And I would go out and do sales presentations and close deals with I think we did about 100 of the Fortune 500 companies and it was in environmental software engineering management so it would help reduce pollution and all that.
	You know, nothing helps you work hard like having to make payroll, right?
	Payroll is like cash flows king in business, right?
	Because you've got this metronome of always having to do payroll, but, you know, the sales is uncertain.
	The payroll is like you've got to do it every two weeks.
	So, yeah, panic is not a bad way to do it.
	I think it's important as well.
	If you withhold satisfaction from yourself until you get something done and then give yourself a little bit of a reward, it is a little bit like trading a puppy, but it does work.
	Worked pretty well. So, you know, I liked playing, back in the day, Unreal Tournament.
	And so we'd be like, with the team that I was managing, I had like 27 employees at one point.
	So with the team, we'd say, those who wanted to play, we'd say, okay, well, let's get this code to compile and work, and then let's have a game of Unreal Tournament.
	So you can withhold satisfaction from yourself until you get things done.
	But here's the thing in tech, really, really important, okay?
	It's certainly the case in tech.
	It could be with other businesses as well.
	So... Stop subsidizing shitty management with burnout.
	Right? So...
	If the customer changes specifications or the job changes specifications, then it's the goal of the sales team to make sure the customer pays extra for changing the specifications.
	But the sales team doesn't want to do that.
	The sales team doesn't want to say to the customer who's changed the specifications, oh, this is going to cost you another $20,000.
	What they want to just have the tech team work for all weekend to do it in for free, right?
	So if you have...
	A sales team or a management team that overcommits in terms of product features.
	Oh, it does this, that, and the other, right?
	Yes, the 3D printer module is almost ready, whatever, right?
	Then that's bad sales and management.
	I used to have these fights all the time, all the time.
	When salespeople would have a promise, and I'd say the whole point of being a salesman is you've got to sell, what the fuck we have?
	You have to sell what we have.
	It doesn't take a very skilled salesperson to say yes to everyone.
	Can I do this? Sure.
	Can I do that? Yes. Can I integrate with this?
	Totally. But we don't have that capacity.
	So your job as a salesman is to realistically portray our software and then close the deal.
	But if you say it can do everything, then you're not much of a salesman.
	Because just saying yes to everyone is the least skilled thing you could conceive of.
	I remember in one meeting, I said, we could get one of those nodding birds, those little plastic things that just dips into the water and goes back up.
	We just get a little nodding bird.
	Oh, does it do this? Yes, yes, yes, yes.
	The whole point is, sell what we have.
	Not what the customer fantasizes or believes we have.
	And they'd say, well, you know, the tech team will always pull it off.
	They always pull it off, and we make the sale.
	It's like, yes, but you get a commission check, we get unpaid weekends of work.
	It's not fair. It's not right.
	And I had varying degrees of success with all of that.
	But it's very easy to subsidize...
	Businesses that need to be fixed with excessive work hours.
	So if you've got a bad process, you've got bad sales, you've got overpromising, you've got false marketing, then it all eventually piles down to the tech people to just, sorry, you're going to work all weekend to make up for this.
	And it's like, don't subsidize bad management with overwork.
	Because, you know, they don't have to fix the business model.
	If you work too much. So I remember, I remember one time in the business world, because I was really struck when the salesman said, well, you always pull it off.
	It's like, well, yeah, we have a great team and I'm a great programmer and we do always pull it off.
	So they keep doing it, right?
	So at one point I just said, no, we can't do it.
	Can't do it. CEO went insane, board went insane, call, pressure, pressure, pressure.
	It's like, no, no. I mean, he said, could you theoretically do it?
	And I said, no, I mean, if you look at the...
	We're not paying overtime.
	And the stock options were late.
	So I'm not going to work this weekend because I'm tired of making lots of money for the salespeople while we get square eyes from the computer code.
	So I'm not going to tell the people to do it.
	Well, maybe we should just find somebody who will, right?
	Okay, well, you should find somebody who will then.
	But I am not any longer going to use the...
	I'm not going to burn up the social lives and sleep schedules of the tech team just to take care of a couple of late middle-aged salespeople who don't know how to say no.
	Right? We need to get paid for what we do.
	And if the customer changes what they want...
	You know, and I use this now.
	I remember this board meeting regularly. I said, if the customer changes what they want, we have to charge them.
	Do we at least understand? We're at least on the same page about that.
	Can we at least have the same business model that a car dealership does?
	Because if you're ordering a car, right?
	You say you order some Lexus or whatever, right?
	You order a car and they say, oh, it's going to be $40,000, right?
	And then, a couple of days later, you say, ooh, you know what?
	I really want a sunroof in that thing.
	What does the dealership do?
	And ask this question in the meeting.
	What does the dealership do? Do they say, oh yeah, great, and then they just have their mechanics work all weekend for free.
	For free, mind you.
	To put in a sunroof?
	No. Well, first of all, they'll say, well, we should have told us this at the beginning, but if you want a sunroof in the car that you've ordered, it's going to cost you this much extra, right?
	I mean, it's not that complicated.
	You want halogen? If you fall, I'm fine with regular lights.
	No, no, no, call them. I want halogen lights.
	They say, here's how much it's going to cost.
	Because if it's free, you'll just keep piling stuff.
	Oh, it's free. I'll just keep asking for more.
	I want it to integrate to this. I want this piece of code.
	I want it to print to the...
	Right? So I said, can we at least have the business model of a car dealership or a fucking pizza place?
	If you order a pizza and you say, I want a medium, and then you call them back five minutes later and say, no, no, no, actually, I want a large.
	Do you pay a medium? No!
	They'll upcharge you to a large.
	And if they've already started the pizza, they'll say, we can't change it.
	You can order a large separately, but you've got to pay for the medium because that's what you told us.
	So can we at least rise to the business genius of your local mom-and-pop pizza store?
	You know, or a convenience store.
	I really did labor the point because I just needed to get this across.
	You go to a convenience store and you say, oh yeah, I want a piece of gum, I want a pack of gum, and I want two liters of milk, right?
	And then they ring it up and they say it'll be three bucks, and then you say, oh, you know what, I'm going to make a bag of chips too.
	Oh, that's four bucks. Whereas if it's like, oh, this is what I ordered, no, I'm going to pile all this stuff, I'm not paying extra.
	Nobody does that! Why do we do it in software?
	Anyway, so eventually it worked out.
	But you have to take care of yourself.
	Make sure that you exercise, get your sunlight, get good sleep, eat well, like all that kind of stuff.
	Have you guys ever experienced this?
	In the business world, it's sadly quite a common phenomenon.
	In fact, if you want to, you know, I wrote a novel, part of which is set in the software world.
	None of my direct experiences, of course.
	And you can find that audiobook at fdrurl.com slash tgoa.
	fdrurl.com slash tgoa.
	All right. So, let's move on with our question.
	What do you say to people who lack motivation, goals, and purpose in life?
	I don't know if this is the person himself asking this about himself or someone else.
	Lack motivation, goals, and purpose in life.
	Okay, so first and foremost, if you lack energy, what was this meme I saw not too long ago?
	Here's what nobody tells you about adulthood.
	One day, you'll just find yourself kind of sleepy.
	And then you stay that way for the rest of your life.
	If you lack motivation and you lack energy and so on, my suggestion is I'm no medical expert, but I would say go get yourself checked out, right?
	Go to a get a full blood work done, a full panel done, blah, blah, blah.
	Get yourself checked out.
	So assuming that there's no sort of physical issue, you're getting decent sleep, you're exercising, getting sunlight, you're eating well and so on, right?
	So what do you say to people who lack motivation, goals and purpose in life?
	You don't say anything, you get the fuck.
	Run, run, run. They are quicksand.
	They are vampires. They will drown you.
	They are Bermuda triangles of life-sucking void.
	Have nothing to do with these people who lack motivation, goals, and purpose in life.
	They're passive-aggressive.
	And what they do is they're incredibly frustrated and bored with themselves, but they won't process it.
	They won't deal with it. So what they do is they create.
	They recreate that... That passivity, that frustration, that aggression, that...
	They recreate that in everyone else by saying, well, I'm bored.
	I'm not motivated. And you sit down and say, well, you could try this.
	Well, I can't, but yes, but...
	And then you just walk out of that conversation and all they've done is balled up their whole hairball of frustration and passive aggression and laziness and self-hatred or whatever it is, and they've just jammed it down your throat and then you walk off going...
	So, yeah, I can't do those people.
	I mean, I've tried. I've tried.
	I've really tried in the past.
	And they don't get anywhere.
	You literally end up nowhere.
	You bleed out.
	You know, it's like they say, oh, I'm bleeding out.
	I need a blood transfusion. So you take out half your blood and then just throw it on the ground.
	Psh! Dip your ketchup in, throw it in the sewer, splash Pennywise, and be done.
	It is just a horrible, horrible situation.
	Now, if you yourself lack motivation, goals, and purpose in life, while we naturally flourish, you have to look at who's profiting, usually from your past, usually parents, who's profiting from your failure.
	See, if you...
	This is the basic thing in life, man.
	Pretty rough. Pretty rough.
	If you take up opposite values from your family of origin, you're at war.
	Straight up, if you take up opposite values from your family of origin, you're at war.
	Assuming that you can't convince them and they can't convince you back.
	You're at war. So, it's the same thing with your friends.
	If you take up opposite values from your friends, you're now at war.
	Now, I choose not to fight that war.
	I choose to walk away and live my values with people who share my values.
	But if you still stick around with people whose values are opposite to yours, you're at war!
	And only one of you can possibly win.
	And sometimes it's neither, right?
	So, an example.
	Here's an example. You and I are lost in the woods.
	We know that the only place we can go is a town that's 20 miles away.
	But we don't know in which direction.
	We disagree with it. And we say, okay, I'll go this way, you go the opposite way.
	I'm going this way, you're going the opposite way.
	Because we can't agree and we disagree.
	I think it's north, you think it's south.
	But we're on cell phones, right?
	So we walk and trust me, it can take a long time in thick woods to go 10 miles.
	Sun's getting down, wolves howling, bears growling, whatever's going on.
	And then your friend phones you and he says, oh, I made it to the town.
	Because you go in an opposite direction.
	Only one of you can win. And if he wins, you've totally lost.
	If he wins, you've totally lost.
	Because now, instead of being 10 miles away from the town, you're 20 miles away from the town.
	You're deep in the woods. So, if he calls and tells you he's at the town, you feel bad and angry and upset, right?
	I mean, you're happy for him in a way, I guess, but you're mad at yourself because now you've got to spend a night in the wolf-infested woods.
	So, if you grow up in a family that's not philosophical, not rational, not empirical, and you take up rational, empirical philosophy, and they don't change, they need you to lose.
	Because if you win, they've lost.
	If you have opposite values from those around you and you win, they've lost.
	They don't want you to win. They want you to fail and they're willing to sabotage you in order to ensure that for the most part.
	Why do Christians sing?
	Singing is a mark of health.
	It's a mark of intelligence. It's a mark of fine motor control to hit the right note.
	And you raise a joyful noise.
	I was at a church choir when I was younger.
	It was wonderful. You've said in the past that memes can really capture the cultural zeitgeist.
	What do you think about doing a meme review of listener-submitted memes?
	I'm not so keen. I just put them out there on social media and see what other people take.
	What is your take on John Rawls' theory of justice?
	This is what the left uses to justify many of their woke ideas.
	So very briefly, and I did a whole show on this, fdrpodcast.com, just do a search for Rawls, R-A-W-L-S. He was, I think, a Harvard or Yale professor of political philosophy and wrote a book called The Theory of Justice.
	Very briefly, his argument goes like this.
	Let's say that you were floating like the rings of Saturn in the ether before you were born.
	You're just the soul. And you know you're going to be born, but you don't know what your abilities are, your race, your gender, your abilities, your intelligence or anything.
	You don't know anything. You just know you're going to be born.
	What kind of society would you want?
	Well, you'd want a society that if you happen to be born dumb and sick and whatever, right, that you'd be supported by that society, right?
	So you'd need some kind of minimal welfare state and social support system and all that.
	So you wouldn't fall through the cracks.
	On the other hand, if you were brilliant and energetic and healthy, then you would want some elements of the free market so that you could rise and achieve your potential and all of that, right?
	So that... That's his argument.
	The mixed economy, right?
	Take care of the poorest and let the most able have their scope for excellence.
	He said you wouldn't want full communism because although you'd be supported, you wouldn't have any scope for your abilities.
	You wouldn't want full capitalism because that would be great if you had abilities, but if you were sick, weak, broke, dumb or whatever, then you could fall through the cracks pretty easily.
	So this is what they use, right? It's total bullshit on every conceivable level.
	So first of all, there is no such thing as before you're born or whatever, right?
	Secondly, of course, it's your parents who are responsible for buying insurance, right?
	So in a free society, your parents would buy insurance in case you were born sickly, then you would get health care and all of that.
	So that would be the case. Your parents would take care of it.
	And the other thing too is that Why would you need a welfare state to help you if you were poor?
	Because the welfare state results from voting.
	So if enough people want to vote for the welfare state, then you get a welfare state.
	But of course, if the majority want to vote for a welfare state, then they don't need a welfare state because the majority of people really want to help the poor.
	So when I used to debate politics and I would talk about voluntary charity taking care of the poor, people would say, oh yeah, but in a free society, there's no guarantee that the poor will be taken care of.
	I said, well, you care about it.
	I care about it. So there's 100% people in this debate really care about it.
	I give to the poor. You will give to the poor.
	They'll be taken care of. Because every single time I would have the discussion about the welfare state, people would say, ah, but the poor, we've got to take care of the poor.
	It's like, okay, then we know. We know, we know, we know that the poor will be taken care of because that's the first question everyone asks.
	And the other thing, too, is that the only way that you can promote this kind of horrible statism, wretched, wretched stuff, is if you imagine that the state is populated by gods or machines.
	See, if you say, ah, yes, well, the poor won't be taken care of because people are just too selfish, they're too mean, they won't care.
	Okay, well, those exact same mean, selfish people will be in charge of the state.
	If humanity is too mean and selfish to take care of the poor, then it's way too mean and selfish to be given near-infinite political power.
	So there is no machinery in the state.
	It's inhabited by human beings.
	And whatever dial you have for good or bad in humanity, let's say, oh, they're hugely bad people, okay, well, they're even worse people, but they have political power over you, which means that they can enact their evil wills using the awesome power of the state.
	So, yeah, it's an absolutely terrible idea on every conceivable level.
	And it's not popular because it's true.
	It's not popular because it's a good argument.
	It's popular because it serves the needs of those in power.
	It's only popular because it serves the needs of those in power, because it justifies the welfare state itself.
	Somebody says, how do you heal significant trust issues for being tricked and abused by a narcissist?
	I myself have been tricked by a woman who seemed perfect the first 1.5 to 2 years, but then proceeded to turn into the narcissistic monster she really was.
	I now fear that every woman I encounter also is a potential narcissist in disguise, as I was not able to see any significant warning signs before I was in too deep with my now ex-girlfriend.
	Any tips or insights on this would be much appreciated.
	Alright. Keyword.
	What's the keyword here?
	The keyword here is significant.
	Right? The keyword here is significant.
	So this guy says, I was not able to see any significant warning signs before I was in too deep.
	So, what were the signs?
	You may have thought they were insignificant, but they weren't.
	So the way that you do is you ask about the personals.
	What's your personal history?
	What was your childhood like? Can you meet the parents?
	How were you disciplined as a child?
	Have you ever done any therapy?
	And of course, if the woman's in her mid-twenties or older, why are you still single?
	Did you have meaningful relationships?
	They didn't work out. Why didn't they work out?
	What were the issues? Have you learned from them?
	You just ask people about their general...
	And that's really, really important.
	And if you find that they've had a really troubled history, they've never done any therapy, and they blame everyone who's broken up with them, they blame the other person, well, don't date them.
	If somebody has had a really traumatic history and they haven't done therapy or at least a significant amount of self-work, you know, journaling and sentence completion exercises that Nathaniel Brandon has and John Gray has and other people have, you know, you can do some work with it yourself.
	And they say, oh, why are you still single?
	Oh, you know, I just, I choose the wrong man.
	Oh, why did you choose the wrong man?
	What's the causality or reason behind you choosing the wrong man?
	Just look for signs of self-knowledge.
	Now, here's the other thing, too.
	Men get insane.
	Like, we're insane when we're turned on, right?
	When we're sexually excited, when we lust for someone, for a woman.
	We're crazy. We're mentally ill, in a way, right?
	Okay. But that's why we have family, that's why we have friends, to punch us in the nads and try to get us back to reality, to help us, right?
	If you have a significant problem with a woman, let's say you got truly enmeshed and woven together with a bunny boiler, okay, so where were your friends?
	Where was your family? Where were the people trying to talk sense and reason to you?
	I mean, if you're in a game where you're blindfolded and your friend who's supposed to guide you keeps walking you into trees, is that your fault or your friend's fault?
	Well, everyone knows that men lose their reason when they're in pursuit of a very attractive woman.
	We lose our reason. So that's why we're social animals.
	We can afford to lose our reason because we're supposed to have people around us who keep us on the straight and narrow, who point out the warning signs, who help us to avoid these kinds of disasters.
	So we've developed the ability to lose our reason because we're supposed to be protected By those around us, right?
	If those around you didn't protect you, then the issue is not primarily with the woman.
	The issue is with the people around you.
	You need to have better people around you who aren't going to let this kind of stuff happen to you.
	And do this for other people as well.
	All right. With universally preferable behavior and a free society, is there a possible downside?
	Imagine, in 300 years, if children were parented well and the capitalist system worked in a reasonable free and open fashion, could society then implode because of lack of abrasive resistances, a lack of opposites?
	What I'm teasing at, is UPB a utopian ideal?
	If it was ever realized fully en masse, could there be a huge negative reaction and consequences because UPB could flatten the polarity of opposites and remove necessary resistances?
	There is the analogy that it takes three generations to make and lose a fortune.
	My point is, how would UPB affect the polarity of opposites?
	And is it desirable to aim at a philosophy that could possibly flatten out and level out a society and culture too much?
	Is UPB a utopian ideal?
	Okay, first of all, read my book, The Future.
	It is about a free society.
	It takes place in a free society.
	It's exactly what we're working so hard to build.
	So just read the book.
	I'm begging you, read the book.
	Or listen to it. It's really great in audiobook format as well.
	A utopian ideal, a lack of opposites.
	Oh my god, dude.
	I don't know, man. I don't know what to say.
	Society is dying, you understand.
	Society is dying.
	Inflation is through the roof.
	Unfunded liabilities are through the roof.
	Economies are holding together by thread spit and teeth-gritting, nail-cracking willpower.
	Society is dying. Well, but if we have a peacefully parented society that respects the non-aggression principle and property rights, might there be imbalance in the yin...
	Oh my God.
	Talk about inventing bullshit so you don't have to be moral.
	Wow. That's something else.
	Doctor, this man has come in and he's bleeding out.
	Well... Okay, I mean, I could save his life and all, but...
	What if he suffers from ennui in 40 years?
	Let's talk about that.
	He looks like the kind of guy, he's got, you know, a bit of a unibrow.
	He looks like the kind of guy who really could, you know, suffer from mild existential malaise in 40 years, so...
	I don't know. I mean, it's true that the blood is hitting the ceiling right now, but...
	Maybe it's just Utopian to save his life.
	Maybe he'll kick a cat in 20 years.
	It's really tough to tell.
	Oh my god. It's a utopian society.
	Yes, the non-aggression principle and not beating children, not raping children, not assaulting children, not circumcising children.
	Oof, that's a tough call, man, because what if people find that there's just not enough resistance out there in the future?
	You know where they'll get resistance?
	They'll get resistance in positive, useful shit, like exploring the universe.
	That's where people will get their resistance.
	Massive... Intellectual challenges, engineering challenges, poetic, artistic challenges.
	Out there exploring the universe, saving other civilizations, doing all of this amazing, glorious, wonderful stuff.
	We're already supposed to be living on Mars, but nope!
	That wasn't the plan.
	We got other things instead that nobody really wanted.
	So... You're just giving yourself a kind of bullshit paralytic here so you don't have to go out and advocate things.
	I'm being thoughtful, and it turns out that my thoughtfulness doesn't get me in trouble with people because I'm not promoting peaceful parenting of the non-aggression principle against the existing political hierarchies that rule the world.
	Isn't that interesting how my musings absolutely happen to coincide with me not getting in trouble with anyone in my life?
	Oh yeah, totally objective musing there.
	Totally objective musing.
	Just a coincidence. Hey, look, if you don't want to promote virtue, if you don't want to take on the challenges of confronting evildoers and promoting virtue, fine.
	It's totally fine. Nobody says you have to.
	It's not compelled. It's not force.
	It's not physics. It's not gravity.
	You don't have to do it.
	But then have the guts, have the courage, have the honesty.
	Look yourself in the mirror and say, nope, not for me.
	Yeah, I'd like a free society.
	Yeah, children are being raped, assaulted, beaten, ignored, abused hundreds of millions of times a day, billions of times a day.
	Society's heading off a cliff and bad things are coming.
	But I don't really want to do anything about it because it's unpleasant.
	It's difficult. I could get in trouble.
	It's fine. Listen, I'm not going to tell you what you have to do or not to do.
	It's fine. Just have the honesty.
	The raw, bloody...
	Naked tooth, no sense of honesty, to look at that and say, I'm going to let things fall apart because I don't want to get in any kind of trouble with the people around me, with whoever, right?
	I just, okay, that's fine, that's fine.
	You don't have to do it.
	But you do have to be honest about it.
	That's all I'm saying. You have to be honest about it.
	Don't give me this, well, you know, I would like to promote a free and virtuous society and protect children, but I'm concerned that in 300 years there might not be quite enough resistance for humanity.
	It's like, no, you're not. You don't give a shit about that.
	Come on. Let's be frank with each other, man to man.
	You don't care about that stuff.
	What you care about is not getting in trouble in the present, but you need to create some abstract nonsense so you don't feel bad about what you're doing.
	I'm not saying you should feel bad about what you're doing or not doing.
	Yeah, don't promote virtue. It's fine.
	Step off the pitch. Step to the sidelines.
	Go do whatever you're going to do.
	Don't promote virtue. That's fine.
	Don't fight evil. Don't promote virtue.
	But don't give me this bullshit about being concerned about the yin-yang of humanity in 300 years.
	That's just total bullshit. Alright.
	Is hope good?
	Or does hoping for a good future prevent you from creating one?
	Hope is fine. Hope without action is a drug.
	Hope is fine.
	But hope without...
	So you can't manage what you can't measure, right?
	You can't manage what you can't measure.
	Right, so when I was in charge of...
	I was a marketing manager at one point in my career.
	And I had a guy who had a good marketing campaign idea and he's like, you know, I believe this will do the business good.
	I said, how will we know? Well, we'll raise awareness of like, okay, how will we know if we've raised awareness?
	Well, you know, we're sending these out, we're doing this, we're going to go to the trade show.
	Okay, but how are we going to measure this?
	Because, you know, if we're spending money, we need sales, right?
	If we're going to spend $100,000 on your marketing plan, we need to get at least $200,000 in sales.
	How are we going to measure that?
	He's like, well, you know, if we get sales after the marketing campaign, it's likely because of the market.
	He's like, no, no, no. After this, therefore, because of this is a logical fallacy.
	What is measurable? How is it measured?
	Because if you can't measure it, I ain't funding it.
	You know, all due respect, it could be the best idea in the world, but if you don't give me any way to measure it, because, you know, I've got a budget.
	I can't remember what my budget was, a couple of million bucks or something like that, right?
	But I've got a budget.
	I'm going to spend this amount. I'm going to spend $100,000 on your marketing plan.
	I really am going to need to know what I'm getting back.
	Why? Because I care about it.
	Because, you know, for $100,000, I could go hire two programmers back in the day, right?
	So you want me to take away two programmers, then you've got to give me at least three programmers worth.
	Because two programmers I know will be productive.
	Your marketing thing has got some risk associated with it, right?
	So just measure it.
	So hope is fine. Hope is great.
	But you've got to measure it. You've got to track it.
	I just was in a car.
	I did a three-hour call-in show last night with a couple.
	And the woman had some, I don't know, pretty unpleasant parents.
	And she's like, no, but I'm hoping that they're going to improve.
	I'm like, okay, well, how are you going to measure it?
	How are you going to know? Crossing your fingers is not a strategy.
	Hope is not a strategy. Hope is not measurable.
	So if you hope something's going to happen...
	Find a way to measure it.
	If you hope your parents are going to become nicer, talk to them about your preference and need for them to be nicer.
	Explain how them not being nice has hurt you or upset you and explain that them being nice is going to really improve the relationship and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and then measure and then tell them what being nice to you would look like and then measure if they actually do it.
	Being nice to me would be, you know, calling me up to see how I'm doing at least twice a week.
	Okay, do they do that? Being nice to me would be never raising your voice at me.
	Okay, do they stop raising their voice at you?
	Being nice to me would at least mean not calling me names.
	Okay, do they stop calling? Have something.
	You hope your parents...
	Okay, you hope your parents are going to be nicer.
	Find something that you can measure.
	Ask for it and measure the results.
	Everything else is just time-wasting.
	Do you still plan on playing Unreal Tournament 2004?
	Yes, we actually did have a game yesterday.
	Yeah, it was a lot of fun. So yeah, just freedomain.locals.com.
	Just join the community. It's free to join.
	You can join the community. And when our next play, we'll post it and you can join in.
	Would it be misleading for an atheist to convert to Christianity to meet good people and potential partners?
	Yeah. Well, if you're an atheist and you don't believe in God, but you say you believe in God, then you're lying.
	Now, you can say, I don't believe in God, but I have a huge respect for Christian values.
	Okay, that's, you know, that's a positive thing.
	That's an honest thing.
	But no, to actually convert and claim that you've converted when you haven't, no, that's unfair and will blow.
	You won't meet good people because good people will sense that.
	If forgiveness is only possible with restitution, what restitution exists for a stolen childhood?
	None. There is no restitution for a stolen childhood.
	So restitution is when you're okay with something.
	You're not happy that it happened.
	You're not unhappy that it happened.
	You're just kind of okay with it, right?
	So if your friend borrows a tennis racket and they break the tennis racket and then they get you a new tennis racket, you're like, okay, it's fine that it happened.
	It doesn't really change much.
	It's not a big deal. I'm not happy that it happened.
	Like, if you broke your tennis racket and then he gave you a million dollars and a new tennis racket, you'd be like, here, break this tennis racket.
	I'll take two million dollars. You're thrilled that it happened.
	So that's over-restitution.
	That's too much, right? And that changes the wrong incentive structure.
	So restitution is when you're, you know, like when you want someone to fill up your beer.
	You want them to fill it near the top.
	Not over, right? Not too little.
	Not too much, right? That's the Aristotelian mean.
	So if somebody wrecked your entire childhood, no restitution is possible because I can't imagine.
	Okay, maybe world peace or something, right?
	But what would you take to make your ruined childhood okay with you?
	Well, I'm going to imagine there's nothing that anyone could do to make your childhood okay with you.
	That's why you don't... One of the reasons, other than the moral reasons that are obvious, that's one of the reasons you don't scrub people's childhoods is because you can't make restitution.
	You can't make restitution.
	So... That's why I don't try and get restitution from people who ruined my childhood because...
	Can't happen. Alright.
	When should you intervene or use force against others?
	How do you find that line?
	Suppose we live in a future free society.
	There's a small tribe or group of people that isolate themselves.
	We suspect that they are committing heinous acts upon their own people, abusing children, for example.
	At what point do you intervene?
	If they were raping or murdering, it might be obvious that they have crossed the line.
	But what if they are verbally abusing their children?
	Where is the line between letting people raise kids as they see fit and needing to step in to protect the innocent?
	Straight up out of my novel.
	I'm going to just refer you to that.
	The future. Freedomain.locals.com.
	You mentioned a few shows ago how important it is to men to be aware of their mating displays, car, hair, clothes, and so on.
	Does that also apply to social media?
	I'm asking because I don't really like them.
	I don't even have an account in broadcast-based networks like Facebook or Instagram.
	Is this behavior in any shape comparable to not having a car or being untidy?
	Um... I don't know because I've never dated in the age of social media, so I don't know what women expect.
	I'm sure that women do check up on you on social media.
	Not having a presence might be a red flag.
	I couldn't honestly tell you.
	I don't know. But if anybody else knows, just please let me know.
	Hey, Steph, could you please elaborate on your apparent dislike of lotteries?
	Certainly I understand that one is not likely to ever win.
	But if people think they are fun to play, it seems like one of the few ways that government raise money voluntarily, i.e.
	one is not forced to buy tickets.
	I'd be interested in what you have to say on the matter.
	No. Government lotteries are entirely coercive because you're not allowed to compete with them.
	So they have a monopoly.
	It's a legally enforced monopoly.
	And how do the governments pay off the lotteries?
	Well, usually they just borrow and print money, right?
	So, yeah, no, they're horrible.
	They're horrible because if you've grown up around poor people, you know how addicted poor people are to the lottery.
	They're more addicted to the lottery often than just doing hard work, raising their human capital, and it is just...
	Terrible. And the only thing that's worse than people playing the lottery is people winning the lottery.
	Just go look up at the outcomes of people who've won the lottery.
	It's almost universally a complete disaster.
	If you haven't earned the money, and inheritance can work the same way, but if you haven't earned the money, it can be very, very hard to have a productive or positive life that comes out of it.
	So yeah, it kills people's work because you know they have Fingers crossed, you're going to win the lottery, and it's just terrible.
	It's just a form of gambling, and gambling is like a theft from mathematics in a sense.
	Does the brain actually finish developing at 25, or is this a misrepresentation of how the brain ages?
	Thanks. Do you think I'm a brain expert?
	No. Go look it up.
	My understanding is that women's brains stop developing at about the age of early 20s, and men go a little longer, 25, 26.
	So, I don't know what you mean by finishing developing.
	It means that, you know, you stop growing.
	It doesn't mean you can't work out or whatever, right?
	So, you stop growing at some point.
	You reach your maximum height. I'm just under six foot.
	So, your brain stops developing.
	It doesn't mean that you can't get more knowledge and more wisdom.
	Of course you can, right? Let's see here.
	I'm not vaccinated and am overall extremely against it.
	This guy writes, I keep my personal views to myself in professional and casual situations, but when it comes to deep friendship and certainly with dating, I can't get past it.
	It's the worst timing because I've really come into my own in many aspects of life within the last couple of years.
	And this, thanks in no small part to you, includes wanting a family.
	I've cut things off with nearly perfect women after a date or two over it, but I had a thought the other day that had me second-guessing my choices.
	If it's this hard for me to find someone now, what are the chances my kids will be able to do the same?
	Is it selfish for me to reject a vaccinated partner when my kids' future partners, at a minimum, are likely to be from vaccinated parents, especially at the risk of them never existing at all if I keep waiting?
	And just to add, I've started lowering my standards to get more options.
	They're all still vaccinated.
	That's interesting. That's interesting.
	I'm happy to be married.
	Of course, my daughter is going to be dating in a couple of years.
	Yeah, it's a tough call.
	It's a tough call. So...
	Fertility issues seem to be indicated by vaccination, right?
	So for sure, sperm motility and sperm count is diminished at least for a couple of months.
	But of course, if people are getting boosters, then that could stay depressed.
	There are issues with the regular periods.
	There are at least some indications of concentrations of the spike protein in female reproductive organs.
	And there does seem to be, depending on how you measure it, about a 10% decline in birth rates.
	In vaccinated countries, depending on the level of vaccination.
	So, there may be.
	There may be. I'm no expert.
	Look it all up yourself.
	I'm not making any recommendations or making any knowledge claims.
	But from what I've read and heard, and you can look at Dr.
	Peter McCullough, you can look at Robert Malone, more on this kind of stuff.
	There do seem to be fertility issues that could be associated with vaccination.
	So... I think that someone who has gone very much against the current might be somebody more interesting.
	Somebody who's really managed to grit their teeth and endure one of the biggest...
	Social pressure operations that have ever existed in history.
	Somebody who's been able to weather that storm might be somebody who's interesting now.
	Of course, if they've already had COVID, then according to the latest research, you're 97% protected for, you know, as long as they've been able to measure it.
	You're 97% protected against severe outcomes and death again.
	As far as I understand, look it up for yourself.
	So, yeah, it might be...
	I would certainly, if I was single...
	I would be looking for someone who had been able to withstand this level of social pressure that really was quite outlandish, because that shows an independence of thought.
	Whether you are pro or anti-vax, you've got to admit that at least the people who didn't get vaccinated, I mean, they really stuck to their guns, so to speak.
	Yeah, that's tough. That's tough.
	Certainly, if you want a family, you might want to wait for more data on reproductive effects.
	We'll see. I mean, certainly, as far as I remember, in some of the documentation that was done during the tests, the miscarriage rate for women who took the vaccination in the first trimester was just crazy.
	All right. Let's see here.
	Thoughts on the effects of polygamy?
	Polygamy is brutal, it's hideous, it's destructive, and it's are selected because you need two people pair-bonding.
	One of the great advantages and advancements of Christianity was pair-bonding.
	Right? One man, one woman, permanent bond, and so on, right?
	I'm talking sort of the historical development of Christianity because it means that people got to choose and there isn't a huge cohort of men with no future, the incels of the time, no future, no family, who contribute significantly to social instability.
	Polygamy is our selected sexual greed at the expense of social stability and children.
	Children's happiness, I believe, or certainly children's stability.
	How do you know if you lack toughness or you're just in a really bad situation where weakness and quitting is justified?
	What's your take on this whole man up thing?
	When is such an attitude appropriate and when is it malicious?
	So, man up is sacrifice your own interests for the sake of social convenience or the pleasures of others.
	Right? So, you know, one of the man-up things is, oh, here's a single mother.
	She's a single mother. She's got three kids by three different guys.
	You need to man-up and marry her and take care of those kids.
	Like, how does that benefit me?
	I understand it benefits her.
	It may benefit the kids to some degree, but how does that benefit me and my lineage and blah, blah, blah, blah, right?
	So, in a bad situation...
	If there's an outcome that is good for you, it might be worth continuing.
	If there's an outcome that's good for you, it might be worth continuing.
	If there's no outcome that's positive for you other than praise, oh, he stepped up and he did the right thing, right?
	If there's no benefit to you other than praise or a relief from criticism, then that's bullshit.
	Don't do it. Thank God.
	Absolutely not. Weakness in quitting, if the tipping point has been achieved to the point where the benefits that could accrue to you from pursuing the path don't end up to be greater than the suffering to get there.
	then that's a perfectly fine time to stop, right?
	So let's say that you want to run a marathon, but you've got some problem with your knees and it's really, really painful.
	Okay, well, you'd like to run the marathon, but you also don't want to have knees that are like two ball bearings grinding against each other.
	So quitting that is justified because the cost-benefit analysis is it's more costly for you to wreck your knees than it is a benefit for you to finish the marathon So yeah, quitting is perfectly justified, it's fine, if the benefits no longer outweigh the costs.
	And the man-up thing is like, you know, what's in it for me?
	See, people who want to exploit you will just create these ridiculous statements that are designed to remote control your entire existence.
	Man up! Or the people who, like, you get trolls who would occasionally, when we used to have a message board...
	Years ago for the free domain community until we got a bunch of attacks and had to shut it down.
	And, you know, people would show up and be total jerks and I'd ban them or the admin would ban them.
	And they'd say, well, first of all, they'd come back.
	They'd always do the same thing. They'd come back and say, hey, that guy's gone.
	Was he banned?
	I really enjoyed his contributions.
	I thought he had wonderful things to say, right?
	And then, of course, the other people, they'd show up in other forums and be like, oh, he banned me just for questioning his central UPB thesis.
	It's just nonsense, right? But they then say, oh, you know, for a guy who's really into free speech, you're totally censorious.
	And this is just, it's not really an argument, right?
	Hey, I'm into pool parties.
	That doesn't mean you can pee in my fucking pool.
	If you pee in my pool, you're out.
	Hey, man, I thought you were really into pool parties.
	Yeah, I'm into pool parties, not into pee parties.
	So, thank you, but, right?
	You know, I like having people over for dinner, but don't spit in my soup, and spit in my soup, you're out of my house, right?
	So, yeah, people would just create these things.
	Oh, you're a climate change denier.
	Oh, you're an anti-vaxxer. They just create these phrases, like these magic spells, that just control your brain.
	I just find it kind of funny.
	Man up! I have no idea what that means.
	Do you want me to become an astronaut?
	I don't understand. So just ask people to define what does man up mean?
	Well, it means taking on responsibilities.
	It's like, well, if there's a single mom with three kids, that's not my responsibility.
	But she needs help. Then she should go to the man.
	He left her. It's like, well, if she's really bad at choosing men and I'm a good man, she won't want me.
	Anyway, so just kind of boring.
	I used to work in IT support for years and can really relate to your tech rants.
	What was one of the worst tech issues you had to troubleshoot at home or in work?
	Oh, absolutely simple for that one.
	Fucking Bluetooth. Holy shit on a stick.
	What the hell is going on with Bluetooth?
	Is it just voodoo?
	Is it magic? Is it fucking Esperanto?
	Do they need a Rosetta Stone to push a couple of bytes across four fucking feet?
	It's unbelievable how bad Bluetooth is.
	Ah, your phone is connected to your car!
	Not really. Not really.
	What is going to happen, though, is you're going to have your GPS up and then the phone's going to interrupt the GPS put into a tiny window that you can barely see because there's some pairing request from something you already paired it to.
	Nope. Doesn't work. Oh, do you want to play something on a Bluetooth speaker?
	Oh, do you want to connect to your TV? No.
	I'm just kidding. What can happen, though, is you can waste approximately 300 fucking percent of your life Uselessly pushing buttons.
	Oh, if I hold this down until my finger turns into a white divot hole like somebody's just playing the back 40 off it in golf, turns into a white fucking divot hole, push, push, push.
	Oh, I got flashing lights.
	I got flashing lights. I'm going to have either epilepsy or there's going to be a Bluetooth connection.
	And then it says, no, Bluetooth failed to connect.
	Why? No reason. Just try restarting it.
	Oh yeah, that's fine. I'll just try restarting my house.
	Yeah, that's no problem. Just reboot my house and we're totally fine.
	So I don't know what evil gremlins or souls live in the heart of the Bluetooth developers.
	But Bluetooth is like a frigid Pac-Man that will eat all the glowing dots of your entire existence and give you absolutely nothing back other than 10 minutes wasted time.
	And every now and then, every now and then, everybody has one of these Bluetooth pieces of shit in their house, right?
	Every now and then you're like, Ah, maybe it'll work now.
	Maybe there's an update. Maybe it updated.
	Maybe it'll work now. And then you're just like, no, no, it's another 10 minutes of my life.
	I'll never get back. And it put me in a sour mood because it's like, I just need a piece of data to go from here To here.
	Like, I'll hold it up.
	I'll hold it up six inches.
	I just need a piece of data to go from here to here.
	Now, if you told me that there's no such thing as Bluetooth, I wouldn't even particularly care for it.
	I would just get a cable. I'd just buy a cable and wire it in.
	It's fine. But because of this Bluetooth, it's like, oh man, this is going to be sweet.
	I'm going to be able to play music and it's going to be fantastic.
	I get a keyboard on the TV. It'd be beautiful, man.
	It's such lies. It's such a...
	And then it's like, you're paired.
	Oh, I'm sorry, you haven't used this for six minutes?
	No, I'm sorry, it's not paired anymore.
	It's not paired anymore.
	Oh, you want to pair it to more than one thing?
	Fuck you. I mean, no, sorry, not fuck you.
	Not fuck you, because if I said fuck you, you wouldn't try.
	You wouldn't try to pair it.
	No, no, it's worse than fuck you.
	It's like, maybe, maybe.
	Hold it a little closer.
	Okay, restart it.
	Okay. Hold down the button again.
	I know your finger hurts. Man up!
	Hold the button down. Just hold that thing down.
	Something's going to start. No, don't hold it too long.
	You just turned it off. No, no.
	Hold it just the right amount of time so it starts flashing.
	Not so much that it turns off.
	Oh, and by the way, you need to hold it down before you turn it on, but not for too long.
	Otherwise, it won't start. So, just the right amount of time.
	It's basically like landing a drone on a landmine blindfolded, but you can get just the right amount of time to start flashing.
	Is it going to connect? Well, it can see it.
	It can definitely see it.
	Push the connect button. Oh!
	Wait, try it again. Oh, it connected.
	Oh, then it dropped again. I have to try it again.
	It's like, this is your hell of your life.
	Just get stolen. Bluetooth is basically Satan.
	It is Satan. It's not a good Satan that you can have a proper fight with.
	It's just a slander you Satan that just slowly undermines your reputation and your will to live.
	So yeah, Bluetooth is the devil.
	I don't even turn it on anymore.
	I don't. And here's the thing.
	So in my last car...
	I've only had two cars, right?
	First car I got in my 30s.
	Volvo S70, a 98 Volvo S70. God, I drove that thing into the ground.
	And no Bluetooth.
	98, no Bluetooth.
	Because the devils hadn't been summoned from the bottom circle of a Dantean hell to create the massive lie of cock-blocking data nonsense called Bluetooth, right?
	So, what did I do?
	I had a tape deck, because I couldn't afford a CD player back then.
	I had a tape deck, and in the tape deck, you could put a tape thing in with a cable that came out, went into your portable player.
	Hardwired, baby! Cable.
	Cables, I love cables.
	Cables are like an absolute godsend.
	If the entire world could run on cables, we'd be perfectly happy, right?
	So, my first car, if I wanted to listen to something...
	You take the 3.5mm jack, you plug it in, and you hit play every single time.
	I guess it's hardwired. Every single time, it went from the player to the speakers.
	My God, it was incredible.
	I didn't have to hold anything down.
	I didn't have to enter any codes.
	I didn't have to reboot anything.
	Just, cables, done. Done.
	But then I got a car with Bluetooth.
	It didn't have any cables that you could attach to the stereo system.
	And so, it just...
	It was horrifying. It was horrifying.
	So then you had to do this thing. It was like...
	Oh, I'll connect for calls, but not for music.
	How about that? Oh, no, no.
	I'll connect for music until you queue up the song that you really love, that you haven't heard in forever, that just happened to be next on the playlist.
	Oh, love this song.
	Okay, you'll get maybe 35 seconds into the song, and then it will just disconnect.
	Why? Because you're driving and you're enjoying the song, so you can't do anything about it.
	Disconnect. Disconnect. Sorry.
	Bluetooth just divorced the car.
	Why? I don't know.
	I was just dissatisfied.
	Just not super happy with it.
	Can I get a cable that will connect to my car?
	Nope. It's Bluetooth, baby.
	And you know, you have these things around the house that are Bluetooth-enabled.
	Can I turn off the Bluetooth?
	Nope. Got to pay for the radiation and the power.
	Can I connect to it in any useful fashion?
	Nope. Got a coffee maker with Bluetooth?
	It's always going to show up there every time.
	Oh, coffee maker! Oh, that's right, and paying for this stupid Bluetooth that I can't use!
	No, it's straight up evil technology.
	Straight up. And Bluetooth is actually ancient Aramaic for soul stealer.
	Not many people know that. But it's just horrendous.
	Everything I have, I turn off Bluetooth as soon as humanly possible.
	Oh, 5G is the devil?
	My 2013 card Bluetooth stopped working when 5G took over.
	Oh, my God. Let's see here.
	Oh, sorry. I'm going to step up here.
	Bluetooth is brutal. Yeah, yeah.
	Bluetooth is awful. If I go downstairs, it's gone.
	I have yet to have a problem with Bluetooth.
	Well, maybe you're just not using it that much.
	Listening to this on Bluetooth Galaxy Buds Plus.
	Yeah. Bluetooth gremlins are spreading monkeypox.
	Everyone has to stay home for two years.
	Kids can't get an education.
	Nobody can get any healthcare and you can't see your grandmother who's dying.
	But God forbid you ask people to stop having orgies.
	God forbid. All right.
	I just had to play around in my car trying to get Bluetooth to work.
	Yeah, it's fine, but then it won't stay working.
	That's the problem, right? It takes 10 hours to connect to my laptop.
	That's nice. That's nice.
	Yes, on six minutes drop.
	Yeah, just one. When Bluetooth works well, it's great.
	I can never go back to wired earbuds on my phone.
	No, I'll choose wired all the time.
	All the time. I disable all Bluetooth modules because they contain arbitrary code execution vulnerabilities.
	Oh yeah, that's right. That's right.
	I remember that cable between the CD player and the tape deck.
	Oh yeah. Oh yeah.
	5G is the devil. It's always Amazon Music crashing or I can't connect to listen.
	Time to hotwire an MP3 player in my car.
	Why is it called Bluetooth? I have no idea.
	Alright, so let's see here.
	I'll skip a couple here.
	So it's a mix for me.
	It's a mix for me. I want the characters to be alive, which means I can't control them too much.
	This is one of my criticisms of Ayn Rand's writing, is that the characters were so over-controlled that they lacked a certain amount of spontaneity and surprise.
	So I definitely have an idea.
	I mean, with my new book, I knew the general arc of the story, but I wanted each individual scene to really let the characters live and flow through my imagination.
	So characters took the arguments in ways I completely did not expect.
	I know that sounds a little crazy, but when you're in the zone and you're writing really well, characters become so vivid and so passionate that they will grab, like in dreams, right?
	Dreams are surprising and very detailed and very vivid and very powerful and take you in surprising directions in life.
	So creativity is a kind of waking dream.
	You're tapping in, I think, into the same area.
	So I have generally a sense of where the story is going.
	I know the major plot points in the book and then each particular scene, I will let the creativity just flow and then I will edit or manage it afterwards.
	I'm a big one of like get it down and then get it right.
	Is there ever an appropriate time to cringe?
	Yes, the only appropriate time to cringe is anytime anybody uses the word cringe.
	What is your favorite way to spend time with your daughter?
	What is your favorite way to spend time with the whole family?
	So, I mean, honestly, just sit and chatting is completely wonderful.
	We do our imaginative game called Roleplaying, which is kind of like a verbal Dungeons& Dragons.
	She's created a whole world and a whole civilization and a whole economy and a whole set of cultures.
	So we do Dungeons& Dragons.
	She's the dungeon master. The whole family, we love a good hike.
	Because it's a really great place to be tech-free and chatting and all of that.
	And board games, Catan is our board game du jour.
	Although my daughter likes Go more than I do, but I'll play it with her for sure.
	Let's see here. Oh, that's it for that set.
	Let me just get one or two more.
	My God, has it already been an hour and a half?
	It can't be so!
	It can't be so! All right, um...
	Wasn't that the reason for using Bluetooth in the first place?
	Blaine cancer from holding the phone by your head?
	I don't know. Let's see here.
	My conspiracy mind thinks that the elites are messing with Steph's tech to drive him mad.
	I use all the latest tech and have no issues.
	Yeah, but I push the tech quite a lot, right?
	I push the tech quite a lot.
	So it probably is a little bit different for me.
	You're probably not doing it for a living, so to speak, right?
	Speaking of living, freedomain.com forward slash donate, freedomain.com forward slash donate.
	Let's see here.
	We'll just get to my...
	I'll try and keep these quick.
	I'll fail, but I'll try.
	I find sad music addictive and almost as a form of self-medication, but it doesn't solve any of my problems.
	What's your take on people's choice of music?
	So people's choice of music is very much conditioned by their life experiences in the moment.
	If there's something in your life that is unexpressed within you, it will often try and find an ally in music to wedge you free of any defenses so that you can deal with it.
	I'd love to hear you talk about some people's tendency to self-alienate by adopting unorthodox or weird ideas, including lifestyle and ideology.
	Are those internalized abusers who want you to become isolated chunt and a laughingstock?
	On the other hand, doing anything off-mainstream can alienate you from others as well.
	For example, being objectively better at something won't make it easier to fit in.
	What could be a healthy balance to that?
	Well, yeah, I've thought about that.
	Of course, I was attacked as a child by authority figures.
	Now I'm attacked as an adult by authority figures.
	And I've thought about if that's sort of repetition, compulsion, and so on.
	But... No, if I had completely silenced myself off essential issues, I would have had no respect for myself.
	So, it is one of these things in the modern world, you have to choose your poison.
	Like, you either let them completely destroy your capacity to talk about what's important and essential for you, or you get attacked.
	There's no telling the truth and being happy.
	There's no telling the truth and being free from being attacked in the world as a whole.
	I do think that, you know, this is...
	It's a big topic, so again, I'll keep it brief, but...
	Why is it that people join strange subcultures?
	Because those strange subcultures will give them an instant association.
	You know, I think the furries or something like that, right?
	So if you say, oh, I'm a furry, and you go and meet, then everybody's going to give you instant companionship, instant approval, instant connection, and you'll be invited places, and boom, right?
	So if you...
	You know, we're like jigsaw puzzle pieces in a way.
	Wherever we can fit in, we'll go.
	And so if you look for people who are kind of desperate for others to join their group because their beliefs are very weird, then if you adopt those weird beliefs, you'll be welcome in that group and they'll give you the love bomb and all that and you get your socializing, but I think it's at great cost.
	Is it better to grow up without one of the parents or have that parent in your life even if he or she is extremely abusive?
	I know that single parenting and divorce has negative effects on children but isn't having both dysfunctional parents together and married as bad.
	That can't be answered because it's too theoretical.
	Because, you see, if your parents are willing to stay together for the sake of the kids or whatever, then they're already making some sacrifices and they're different from parents who split up because they're just discontented or bored or whatever it is that usually passes in a relationship.
	So, of course, it's better to have one parent who's not abusive than two parents who are abusive, without a doubt.
	But there's no objective answer to that, I think.
	Step, how did you experience growing up without a father?
	How did it influence your thinking and emotional state?
	Does it affect you in some way even as an adult?
	I'm aware of general statistics regarding fatherlessness, but I'd like to hear some personal stories.
	So I think that growing up without a father makes you R-selected, and I was much more R-selected when I was younger.
	And for those of you who want to know more about that, you can just do a search at fdrpodcast.com for gene wars, G-E-N-E wars, and go through the R versus K selection stuff.
	So, I got to invent masculinity myself.
	I did not want my father's masculinity.
	I won't go into much detail about that because, you know, he's dead and gone and all, but I didn't want to be a father the way that my father was a father.
	I didn't want to be...
	the men who floated around my mom.
	My mom was very pretty.
	And so there were just a bunch of scuzz wads around who were only there because she was pretty and couldn't judge her moral character at all, at all.
	And so I had a great deal of contempt for those men.
	So when you see masculinity all around you and it's pretty trashy and pretty bad, and when you're in a trashy, low-rent, single mother household, that's generally where you are, welfare state and all.
	You're not just going to see very noble, many noble men.
	There were one or two, really one that I can think of, who was a husband and a father who I did actually respect and liked and so on.
	So, I had a real blank slate, which meant that I could write masculinity for myself.
	And to me, then, masculinity was a strong dedication to truth, reason, and evidence at the expense of feelings, right?
	A lot of the more feminine thing is the more, like, feelings over facts.
	A lot of the masculine thing is facts over feelings, and I think both those things are important.
	So, growing up without a father...
	I did get to invent masculinity for myself, which I think made me more profoundly original than if I'd had a template.
	Somebody says, Why is it when I criticize my dysfunctional parents I feel justified and in the right, but when someone else does it, it makes me irritated and insulted?
	I know that some people want to one-up you by talking how much better their families are or somehow project my parents' faults on me.
	What could be other reasons?
	Oh, because... There's this, I mean, the cult aspect.
	The family as a whole has a cultish aspect to it in that it's supposed to be something you have loyalty to regardless of mistreatment.
	Right? Regardless of mistreatment.
	So, if you get abused but you're supposed to maintain loyalty, there's a cultish aspect to that as well, right?
	So... In general, stick together within the family, other people outside the family coming in with criticisms.
	It's like a band together.
	We unite against enemies, that kind of stuff.
	And also, abusive parents really want to isolate you from talking about the abuse with your peers.
	And so if somebody else insults the parents, there'd be more of an emotional trigger to get you annoyed about that and reject it so that you wouldn't get any support from those outside the family.
	What's the best FDR show I could share with someone where you talk about your childhood the most?
	I don't. I don't have it.
	Sorry. Let's see here.
	Is it ever acceptable for a girlfriend or wife to talk about the man to the man's mother in private about their relationship?
	Thanks. Well, sure.
	Yeah. I mean, if you can say, thank you for raising such a wonderful son.
	It's a privilege or a pleasure to be married to him, to be his girlfriend, and so on.
	Yes. To complain?
	Absolutely not. You do not complain about your relationship with anybody outside your relationship unless it's a marriage counselor.
	You just don't do it. If you've got an issue with your partner, you sit down and talk about it with your partner.
	You do not go and complain to other people.
	Absolutely not, in my opinion.
	I apologize if the question is grim and painful.
	What would you say to a parent if they have discovered that their newborn will have difficulties?
	Sorry, that's not specific enough.
	I don't know if they're emotional or physical or what.
	How can I gain clarity in my sibling relationship?
	I go in circles feeling guilty about how I treated my brother and feeling angry about how our mother pitted us against each other.
	On the guilt side, I don't remember being mean to him when no one was around.
	We figured out that negotiation was the best way.
	But I still picked on him in front of our mother and others.
	And I felt a deeply disturbing but pervasive hatred towards him.
	Was I merely acting out our mother's will or was I making the choice to refuse empathy and sympathy and a good relationship with my brother?
	So you can't gain clarity in a relationship without talking to the person you have the relationship with.
	So I would sit down and talk about all of this stuff with your brother.
	It's one of the things earlier about do I plan the novels or not.
	It's one of the conclusions of the sibling relationship in one of the sibling relationships in my new novel, The Future.
	The conclusion of that was utterly jaw-dropping to me.
	Is there some correlation or commonalities in how NEETs, incels and feminists are developed?
	Do they deserve? Not in education, employment or training, right?
	Developed. Do they deserve one another?
	Well, of course, if you treat women to dislike men, then women will not commit to men, which means that women will date around, which means that women will go for the top 5 or 10% of men, which leaves a lot of men without access to women.
	And this is one of the problems, is we no longer have a monogamous, pair-bonded society.
	How long did it take for your business or tech business to become profitable?
	I think it was a year to 18 months or so.
	How far can self-defense go before violating the NAP? E.g.
	I won't shoot someone trying to steal a lollipop from me because even though I'd be defending my property, the response is not proportional.
	Is there a clear objective line that you can claim everyone ought to agree?
	So yeah, I mean, I gave this some thought.
	And what I think the case that I would make is that if you're defending property, then you can restrain the person but not injure them.
	So, if someone's stealing from your store, then you can have a button, you push a button or whatever, the doors lock, and then the person is...
	So you can, you know, if somebody's running off with your bike, you can tackle them and hold them.
	So you can physically restrain someone for the basis of property, but you can't injure them.
	Whereas if it's self-defense, then injury, where you have the potential to be injured, right?
	If somebody's stealing your property, that's not a direct physical injury that you're going to get, and therefore...
	Directly injuring the other person would not be just or proportional.
	If you're facing the potential for significant injury or injury, then you can apply a proportional response based upon your concerns, right?
	So if somebody is in your house at night, like they broke in or whatever, then you can use force to defend yourself.
	Absolutely, because it could be somebody who's going to panic if they realize they've been observed and might kill a witness and so on.
	So yes, property is restraint.
	Violence is relative to the concerns that you have, right?
	Because you don't know for sure.
	All right, would you consider Republican politicians more dangerous than Democrats?
	After all, Democrats never pretend to be pro-freedom, but Republican politicians have pro-freedom rhetoric.
	Yet in reality, no Republican president has ever once reduced government spending.
	This could entrap some well-meaning, liberty-oriented people in a two-party, one-direction system.
	No, I think Republican politicians are not more dangerous than Democrats because Republican politicians tend to be more pro-free speech, much more pro-free speech than Democrats, and free speech is everything if we're going to have a chance of saving anything.
	Hi Steph. Are shy people usually raised by parents who don't listen to their children much and or don't speak to their children intimately about their own experiences?
	Cheers. Yeah, I think so.
	I think so. People tend to be more volatile if they're verbally abused, but if they're neglected, they tend to be more shy because they don't feel like they're worth even interacting with to be a poison container for their parents.
	Steph, women tend to be leftists because of nature, growing kids, etc.
	I understand this, but how do you live and understand each other with a woman voting left, tell you that socialism is the way to go, or be part of a socialist party?
	So women are not leftists.
	It's really important to understand.
	Women are not leftists. Women have a greater desire than men to care for the underdog because they raise babies and toddlers, right?
	So they have a sympathy for the underdog, for the weak and the helpless and so on.
	No, leftist is women plus the state.
	The problem is not women.
	The problem is not leftism. The problem is the state.
	So power corrupts everyone.
	And so focusing that, oh, well, women tend to be leftists only because of the government.
	Without the government, women tend to band together and do wonderful things like create charities and so on.
	So that's great. Hey, Steph, how to overcome the discomfort feeling when someone asks about my parent?
	I have just recently defued and sometimes get scared when friends ask or mention about how my parent is.
	Thanks for your great work. Well, thank you, and I'm sorry that that came to pass.
	I hope that you, if it was safe, talked about the issues you have with your parent and so on.
	So, if someone asks you about your parent, say, you know, unfortunately, it's a bad relationship.
	Bad things happened. I'm taking a break from the family while I sort things out in my mind.
	Because, you know, defooing is not permanent.
	It doesn't have to be anyway.
	Hey Steph, I'm 26, 27 in December.
	I've yet to be in a romantic relationship since becoming an adult.
	I've had a few opportunities but turned it down.
	Or turned them down, I suppose, because I felt that women weren't at the level of attractiveness I wanted them to be.
	Once I had an understanding of the sexual marketplace, I understood that it was more about me.
	Since 2016, I haven't really tried dating, always coming up with excuses like, I am not stable yet, no career, still living at home, I need to hit the gym first, and so on.
	You often said guys who miss out on dating younger usually don't later in life.
	How can I make sure that doesn't happen to me?
	Okay, so if you're concerned about your level of attractiveness, eat well, exercise, get enough sleep, get your sunlight, use moisturizer, get a nice haircut, go to a dentist, make sure that your teeth are clean, get teeth whitening if you need to, you can put it in overnight, just get your health checked out and just be healthy, exercise and all, right? So, yeah, get all sorted out about that.
	And level of attractiveness, I wanted them to be.
	The only excuse that I give for level of attractiveness is obesity.
	A woman doesn't have control over the bone structure she has on her face.
	She has control over what she puts in her mouth.
	She doesn't have control over her bone structure.
	She doesn't have control over how naturally curvaceous her figure is.
	But if she's of a reasonable, healthy weight, then to me, that's fine.
	You know, because the values matter a whole lot more than the prettiness, right?
	What's that old saying? No matter how beautiful a woman is, there's some guy somewhere who's tired of screwing her.
	And she ain't pretty, she just looks that way, ain't just a song.
	It's a real thing.
	And the reason is because obesity is going to have issues with health, it's going to have issues with athletic activities, it's going to have issues with fertility, it's going to have issues with...
	Joint and knee problems, back problems, it's just a big issue.
	And of course, obesity, for me at least, often signifies significant child abuse.
	Extremes in weight, whether severely underweight, severely overweight, usually have to do with, for my mind, child abuse and often childhood sexual abuse.
	And unresolved.
	Yeah, just go out on dates.
	You understand, it's just going to get harder.
	It's just going to get harder the longer you wait.
	It doesn't get easier, it just gets harder.
	It's being too generous an act of vanity.
	How far down the line of descendants should I think about?
	If one is mixed race, taking into account studies that mixed race people have challenges finding organ donors, is it weird to select partners so that kids and grandkids have less of the problem by returning to one of the races?
	Yeah, I mean, look, dating other races, marrying other races, having babies without races, no violation of the non-aggression principle, love is love is love.
	I think it is important to look at, if you're going to do that, if you're going to marry and have a baby that's biracial, you need to do the research to figure out the issues that biracial kids, a little bit more often than single-race kids tend to have, identity issues, depression or anxiety, and so on, and just find a way to work to resolve those.
	How do you recommend a guy respond to his wife when she loses her cool and begins yelling at him?
	what how do you recommend a guy respond to his wife when she loses a cool and begins yelling at him well you have to have a you have to have some rules in the marriage man I'm sorry, I made a laugh. You have to have rules in the marriage.
	We don't yell at each other.
	When you live together, you understand your lips are pressing up against the other person's ears.
	You're that close. You're so intimate.
	People think they need to yell when they're living with people.
	No, no, no. You yell when you're passionate about philosophy.
	You yell when somebody's on the other side of the football field.
	You can't yell at people that you live with because you're all so close.
	The yelling is like...
	Well, it leaves you with tinnitus like...
	I don't know, Pete Townsend and Steve Martin, right?
	It's too loud. It's too loud.
	So you've got to have a rule. Sit down with your wife when you're not having conflict and say, okay, how about we don't yell at each other?
	Now, of course, you should have this before you get married.
	Like, before you get married, how do we resolve conflicts?
	Well, we don't name call. We don't slam doors.
	We don't threaten. We don't intimidate.
	We don't call names. We don't, right?
	We don't do that, right? So you have that as a deal.
	And then if she loses her cool and begins to yell, you say, no, no, no, no, we don't yell.
	No, I'm not going to communicate with you if you yell.
	I'm not going to, I'm having nothing to do with, we don't do the yelling.
	We have that as a deal. Remember, that's our deal.
	Like, you know, in the same way, I don't sleep with other women, you don't yell at me, right?
	That's how, that's how it works, right?
	So monogamy is a deal.
	And if one partner breaks the monogamy by having an affair, the other partner gets really upset because they broke the deal.
	Well, not yelling is exactly the same kind of deal.
	So you just have that rule.
	All right, Sam.
	I've lost all respect for most people after COVID, says the listener.
	When I see a random person on the street, I just see a mindless automaton that can be programmed to espouse completely contradictory views in less than a week.
	Is this a bad thing? And if so, do you have any advice for overcoming this quote condition?
	Yeah, I mean, what I find interesting about the COVID thing, of course, is that people aren't really processing that, what is it, Joe Biden, two vaccines, two boosters, got COVID a couple of times, took Paxlovid,
	got COVID again, rebound COVID. I mean, is anyone processing the fact that they swore up and down a blue streak, everyone, that you get the vaccine, you're not getting COVID? Yet, recent data out of, I think, Scotland, 94% of the people who died were vaccinated from COVID, right? So, COVID, even I was a little shocked.
	I don't have a very optimistic view of humanity.
	Even I was a little shocked. Because they were like, sure, the manufacturers have no liability whatsoever.
	It was developed in nine months.
	Most vaccines, 94% of them fail and 93% of them fail.
	And it takes years and years, 14 years, I think, to develop a proper vaccine.
	And they ended the swine flu vaccination in 1974 when only 50 people had died.
	Oh, 25 people, I think, had died.
	And they stopped the whole thing.
	So all I can tell you is that people...
	Who aren't processing the moving story on COVID, the shifting story on COVID, right?
	People aren't processing that, probably won't have much in common with you if you think for yourself.
	But people who at least are saying, well, wait a minute, they did say this, now this is happening.
	What was their certainty before and are they certain now?
	And I think now there's a new vaccine coming out that isn't even going through human trials.
	You know, it's a saying that...
	So many things... I think it's big philosophy.
	It's just a saying that I knew when I was a kid.
	You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him drink.
	You can give people facts.
	You can't make them think. So...
	It's...
	Most people...
	Don't think for themselves.
	Most people swallow what they're told.
	And, you know, will the unvaccinated ever get an apology for all the people who were baying and demanding that they not be allowed to travel and not be allowed to go to a restaurant or not be allowed to have a job when it turns out that there were some decent reasons?
	It may never happen. All right.
	Let's see here. My girlfriend's brother is having a baby shower and her abusive mother she hasn't talked to in over a year will be there.
	My girlfriend really wants to go to the shower but has anxiety about her mother being there.
	Her brother says they aren't having two baby showers so they're inviting her mother even though she knows how she feels about their mother.
	We would predict that her mother would be very pleasant and act like she's done nothing wrong in the past to my girlfriend.
	Would it be best for my girlfriend to miss the party because of the stress of seeing her mother?
	That is a tough, tough situation.
	I sympathize. I really sympathize.
	So, if your girlfriend was abused by the mother and the brother is choosing the abuser over the victim, the value of the relationship with the brother is probably not super great.
	Now, I would sit down, of course, and talk with the brother and say, you know she abused me, right?
	You know she abused me when I was a helpless, independent child, couldn't get away, didn't choose to be there, had no legal rights or independence.
	She abused me for many years.
	It's her or me. Now, if he says, I'm going to choose the abuser over the victim...
	Well, that's at least pretty clear information.
	My childhood, quote, friends who I barely hear from, all have pretty awful lives, living in their parents' homes at 30 years old, work for $15 an hour at best, love the government, and think Bitcoin is a scam.
	Is it bad now that I just view them as stupid idiots and laugh every time their life gets worse and worse?
	They never listen to any of my advice, and I just keep laughing at them making bad choice after bad choice.
	Am I a dick for chuckling at losers who keep messing up at life but won't take any advice?
	I mean, at some point, you've just got to put people in the rear view and get on with your own life, right?
	Yeah, you give people good advice, but at some point, you've just got to get on with your own life and stop measuring yourself by people who just don't listen.
	And look, we live in a very deluded state at the moment with all this debt and all this money printing and borrowing and all of that.
	It's a very, very unreal situation, and people will get back to reality when the math runs out, right?
	Let's see here. How to confront a father who goes rubber bones when you're trying to ask him to take responsibility for his actions?
	He's always deflecting it and blaming others and his upbringing.
	Although I feel that is all I'm going to get from him.
	But again, you can't make people be honest.
	You can't make people talk to you.
	You can't make people tell you facts or be direct.
	You just can't do it. You can ask for what you want.
	Be curious if people are provided and make your decisions based on that.
	How do you approach forgiveness when a parent who has shown genuine contrition but obviously can't retroactively repair your childhood?
	Oh, I don't know what genuine contrition means.
	Have they said, I'm going to pay for two years of therapy for you?
	If they said, I will join you in therapy to make sure that our relationship is so much better, I'm going to confess to the people who knew you as a child that I abused you and make sure that everyone knows just all the bad things that I did.
	I mean, or they just say sorry to you privately.
	Genuine contrition is doing whatever it takes to make things right.
	Anyone I ever bad-mouthed About you as a child, too, I will go and say, I was abusive and he wasn't a bad kid, I was just being bad, right?
	So, real contrition is a big thing.
	It's a big, big thing.
	Like, we just looked at the 12-step program, which I know is kind of dicey at times, but, you know, all the people that your parents bad-mouthed you when they were blaming you for the effects of their abuse need to be told the truth.
	You need to have full-on family meetings where, you know, you confess and, like, that's real contrition, right?
	Why do you think people wait so long to have kids?
	Because you can live a life of eternal adolescence, at least until you completely run out of gas or run out of juice.
	I just did a show with a guy last week.
	I haven't released it yet. He's 55 years old and has spent a lot of time smoking drugs and sleeping around and stuff.
	It's pretty rough. So there's a lot of propaganda to not have kids, right?
	So governments want you out there working.
	They want you paying taxes. They don't want you having kids, which they then have to pay for, healthcare, and they have to pay for schools and all that kind of stuff.
	What genres would you be interested in writing in next?
	Well, I'm considering doing a sequel to The Future, which is The Sun's Trial.
	So I'm mulling it over. What do you do to be the most productive person?
	I would say that when the idea strikes...
	I did a show, Terrifying Late Night Thoughts.
	I had Terrifying Late Night Thoughts at 1.30 in the morning, so I went down and did a show.
	So when the iron is hot, you strike.
	In the future, I really wanted to see more of Roman society adjusting to the angels.
	Would you consider writing a short story, a spin-off series about that?
	I would think about that. Yeah, let me know if people would be interested in that.
	All right, let me just see if there are any other questions.
	Let me just switch to my super zoomy glasses.
	All right, what do we got here? 40 billion on the Ukraine war.
	Hey man, money's not going to launder itself.
	I find like 99% or so of women who aren't overweight are attractive.
	Finding Your Ten is a great podcast from not too long ago.
	Yeah, yeah, for sure. For sure.
	Thanks for the stream. People walking outside alone in July with a mask on.
	Why? Well, because they feel good and most people who are mask victims are also mask bullies, right?
	So because they bullied other people about masks, they then have no choice, right?
	This is the blowback that happens, the karma that happens with bullies.
	Yeah, people, they don't, most people don't think for themselves or are willing to take any risks or devote anything to the truth.
	What they do is they say, what would get me in the least trouble?
	What would get me the most praise?
	I mean, like dogs or like pets, right?
	What will get me the most praise?
	What would get me in the least trouble?
	That's all they navigate by.
	It's very sad. Will you ever do premium live streams where we can speak live on a platform other than Telegram?
	Yes, but I have to wait for the technology to catch up.
	I do premium live streams at freedomain.locals.com, but it doesn't support voices yet.
	All right. Is that Steph's OnlyFans gif?
	No. That topless dancing gif of me is from a call with a guy who was dating a supermodel.
	Any more info regarding the earlier topic, rage in younger years, confronting abusers to resolve anger?
	Don't recall it, sorry. All right.
	When is there going to be a crypto podcast?
	How much has happened since your last one?
	Yeah. I've been really working on trying to rescue the finances of the show and all of that, so I will get around to that, I'm sure.
	Well, thanks everyone so much for dropping by.
	What a great pleasure to chat with you all tonight.
	Have yourself a superb evening.
	I will see you on the Friday night.
	For Friday Night Live, we'll probably do that at freedomain.locals.com.
	So thanks everyone for dropping by.
	Thank you for your support. Please check out my free books, which is...
	You can go to freedomain.com forward slash books.
	You can go to almostnovel.com.
	You can go to justpoornovel.com for my two historical novels.
	You can go to fdrurl.com slash tgoa for The God of Atheists for my modern comedy.
	And you can get my new science fiction book, Thanks everyone so much.
	Lots of love from up here.
	And I don't even know how to do a good outro.
	Okay, I'll cut it here, but did I close the browser that I was running this thing from?
	We'll see. All right.

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