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Aug. 29, 2022 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:19:33
The Philosophy of Fraud!
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Time Text
Good afternoon, everybody.
Hope you're doing well. I'm so sorry for being a tiny bit late.
It wasn't my fault at all. My daughter simply prevented and blocked me from being able to do a show.
I finally had to chew my way to freedom and was able to be finally released.
But it was rough. It was rough, let me tell you.
I think she took two bad pieces of advice from me today.
And the first is that we made cookies this morning.
And she said that we should take them off the pan while they were soft.
But I wanted to do something, I mean, because I wanted to do something else, and also because of my deep knowledge of not necessarily cooking, but cookies.
She's now having to use cherry bombs and a flamethrower to get them off the sticky pan.
And the second was we were playing Minecraft Dungeons, and I said we should increase the threat by killing a particular monster.
And how did that go?
Terribly. Why?
Because we died and it went horrible.
Now, do you think that the deaths that you achieved occurred because of the monsters or the traps that are completely predictable?
The traps!
What? Once, yes, but only because I was...
I died once, and you died once on the traps.
So that's double. That's...
Yes. But technically, you are one quarter my age.
If I had set up the threat, then the traps would have done less damage, and I would have lived.
Is that right? Yes. Are you saying that somebody unnamed could have been wrong twice in one day?
Well, that's it for me for the year then.
Because, you know, I'm wrong twice in a year.
And that's how it goes.
So, you know, it's actually kind of a relief.
You know, they say that you'll be involved in two little traffic accidents over the course of your life.
So after I had my two, I was relieved because now I'm bulletproof.
I can drive... I can now just drive however I want.
I'm bulletproof. It's really a beautiful, beautiful thing.
But anyway, enough!
Enough! Enough! Never enough.
If anybody has any questions, comments, issues, criticisms, I am all ears.
I'm like a sword sharpened on a whetstone.
There's sparks, scattered thoughts, and things get better.
So if you have a question or comment that you would like to partake or participate in, Thanks again to Tim for great questions,
great comments, and You know, some stuff I come up with on my own, which is great, and some stuff comes directly off you.
And, you know, in many ways, the best stuff, I think, comes directly on you.
So if you have comments, questions, issues, criticisms, I'd be happy to help.
And let me just give a second here for anybody who's shy, who might feel like a dropping by.
Yeah, what was it?
Was it Andrew Tate who got 120,000 views on his Rumble live stream?
That's pretty wild, man.
That is some pretty wild stuff.
I was actually listening to some Kevin Samuels last night, RIP.
And yeah, it's funny, you know, to watch the women as they get older.
So one of the things, of course, that happens with women as they get older...
Is they're so used to dictating the terms of attraction because they're young.
And that was actually in one of the videos.
It was not Kevin Samuels, but someone else.
A fellow, it was a rather plaintive statement.
I don't know what you think of it, but I thought it was interesting and quite plaintive.
And the statement was, not every man, every woman gets to be 24, but not every man gets to be six foot tall.
And I thought that was a sad but plaintiff and, you know, I really do understand the sentiment.
The other thing, too, of course, is that men as a whole chase after the most attractive women and forget that there's, of course, a whole bunch out there who are the, I guess, the equivalent of short for a man.
But it is a tough thing, I think, for women who are young and, you know, go through that period of super hot.
I think that the prime age for women, it's been sort of clocked in that men find 24-year-old women the most.
And then when women get older, the general statement, again, not from all women, but the general statement is something like this.
Well, I may be older.
I may be, you know, slightly less attractive, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
But boy, oh boy, does it ever...
Do I ever replace that with wisdom?
And with wisdom. And that's really interesting.
That's really interesting. And I might believe that...
I might believe that, except for the little part which goes, when you were 24, would you take a short guy who was wise?
And that's really tough.
So women can dictate the height of a man that they find attractive when they're young and sort of in their prime.
Now, as they age out of top sexual market value, it's really tough for women to understand that they are now not in a...
They're now in a position where they are the ones who have to conform.
So when they're young, men will conform to them like salmon in a swift current.
Men will conform to what the women want.
It's tough because first impressions are tough to maneuver.
Then later on, of course, the women are in a situation where it's a buyer's market.
And men are now the buyers.
And the fact that women, and I can understand it, that they still think that they can continue to dictate a man's romantic or sexual or marriage preferences, you know, that a real man would whatever, whatever.
Well, okay, that might work when you're 24, but it really doesn't work.
And that's really tragic.
And it's a tough thing for women too.
And no disrespect to women, it would be really tough if it was the other way for men.
That men are born 6'6", and then end up being about 5'0", by the time they're 45.
And, of course, when they're 6'6", and women are all over them because the women love the height in a lot of ways, and then when the men start shrinking, right, which is the sort of fall of female peak attractiveness after 24, when men start getting shorter and shorter and shorter, what they do is they say, because when when men start getting shorter and shorter and shorter, what they do is they say, because when they were 6'6", women were all over them, and
And then when they start shrinking and they go to 6'5", 5'6", 5'3", and they say, well, but women just have to respect me for my increased wisdom and forget about my decreased height.
And because they had such high sexual market value being tall, when they shrink, it's tough.
It's tough. You know, this stomp your feet stuff just doesn't really...
I mean, I guess it will work with some...
Men, but there was a woman who had a panel of women, and the women were all like, you know, like a real man would step up and accept my increased wisdom, and I still look young, and blah, blah, blah, blah, and she did use the 90% egg thing, so the egg-splaining, I guess, had some value.
And the women were just like shaking their heads back and forth in that vaguely serpentine way that some women do.
And it's like a real man would blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
And they're still dictating.
They're in their mid to late 30s and they're still trying to dictate what men should be attracted to.
And that is a tough thing to, you know, having that degree of vanity and that degree of high value.
And of course, remember, like throughout our evolution, women were never supposed to have this extended period of high sexual market power.
Power corrupts, and women and men are both subject to that iron law of life.
And so A woman was supposed to be, you know, like, maybe get 6 to 12 months of peak sexual market value, right?
6 to 12 months, right?
So she's on the dating market, the debutante ball or whatever coming out or whatever it's going to be, right?
She's on the market. And then she's got 6 to 12 months to get married.
And that was the deal.
And during that 6 to 12 months, of course, she's supposed to, you know, at the peak of her flower, the peak of her beauty, the peak of her appeal, she's supposed to use that to lock in a man.
And then, of course, in the absence of birth control and with religious injunctions to have children, then, of course, what happens is she starts having kids and, you know, the ravages of motherhood and breastfeeding and being up all night, you're tired, you know.
And so, it's supposed to be, it's supposed to be maybe 6 to 12 months of peak attractiveness, and then that's supposed to, you cash that in, right?
And this idea that you would go from, you know, 18 to 38, right?
20 years. I mean, to me, it's not too confusing as to why men are complaining, oh, like, women are crazy, women be crazy, right?
Women are crazy these days because That's like the drug of high sexual market value is supposed to be very, very short term.
You know, it's like fight or flight is supposed to give you the adrenaline and cortisol dump for like five or ten minutes or maybe half an hour.
You got to run from a bear or you're in a fist fight or something, but sort of chronic anxiety wears you down, right?
But... For women, this high, this sort of walking on air, this men deferring to you and being wooed and this romantic glow and all of that, six to twelve months, boom, and then you're in a pair-bonded relationship.
In fact, it might be even less if your parents have arranged a marriage and so on.
Six months, right? Probably would be the average, right?
So six months. So you're supposed to get that high and that clamor, that attraction, that being held aloft, being praised, having people write poems in your honor and so on.
That's 6 to 12 months.
And the idea that you would take that high, that power, and instead of it lasting 6 months, you take it 40 times longer.
You're taking a 40-fold dose of just about the most powerful drug ever.
You take any drug that's got a particular dosage that's healthy and then you multiply that 40 times, you're going to get sick.
So to me, it's not just, oh, the women have dated a lot or the women have had people lie to them for a long time to sort of get in their pants or whatever.
It's not so much that, I think.
I mean, that's obviously part of it.
But for me, When I look at many women in their 30s, when I was back in my 30s and still single, but when I looked at many women in their 30s, part of me was thinking they're just kind of worn out on this crazy drug of...
Dating. Again, dating is supposed to be a very short-term thing.
Determine compatibility. I'm not saying it's ideal, of course, but in the Indian society, sometimes it's like three dates and you're married.
Just find out basic compatibility, but then of course they have a lot of shared cultural customs, which eases the transition and so on.
But it's supposed to be really short. It's supposed to be really short.
It's really possible.
I think it's almost inevitable that if you're in the dating market for like 20 years, and only then do you start thinking about settling down, that you are worn out.
The fall of monogamy and the rise of the endless dating culture has coincided with the rise of Frustration among women and hostility to men and feeling overwhelmed and feeling stressed.
Well, of course, because you're riding high on these hormones or this drive, this beauty, this attractiveness, you're riding high on this for 40 times the recommended dose.
So, of course, you're strung out.
Of course, you're strung out.
It's not just, oh, the number of men you've dated or the number of men you've slept with or whatever.
It's just... We're kind of worn out, and I don't know if it's true, but I was reading somebody posting that the single unhappiest group of people in society are women over 40 without children, single women over 40 without children.
And I mean, of course, there's the issues that happen with women with hormonal birth control and so on, lots of problems with aggression and masculinity and just messed up hormones.
Or as one woman said it, I want to get off birth control because I'd like to meet me, like to know who I am without the drug.
So I think it's important and I hope that you'll have some sympathy because asking people to give up this drug It's really tough.
The drug of being super attractive and the top of your sexual market value, six months.
Maybe 12 months tops.
Six months. And if you take that out for 40 years, you take 20 to 40 times the dose, it's going to string you out.
And it's going to keep you, like, it's the neoteny thing, right?
So if you take a stage that is supposed to be for youth and you stretch it out into middle age, It's hard to grow up.
And this happens to men as well, right?
Pornography, video games, all this kind of stuff.
So this happens to men as well, that they take something like video games, which is designed for youth.
And again, there's nothing wrong with playing video games.
I play video games. But if it's a substitute for life, or somebody posted on social media the other day, You know, what's your game hours?
What are your game hours, right?
And people were posting, I think it's from Steam, which keeps track of your game hours.
And I remember being like, wow, wait, I put 100 hours into Skyrim?
That's a lot. This is many years ago.
And people got like 1,800, 2,000 or more hours in a game.
Someone had over 600 hours in Elden Ring, which is what you're supposed to be able to beat it in 60 hours, right?
Man, 1,800, 2,000 hours.
That's the fifth of the way to mastery in anything you choose to pursue.
So the stretch of time when you're a teenager where, you know, friends are super important and you date around a lot if you can and parties are super important and you don't really plan for the future and you just indulge in the hedonism of the moment.
And that's totally fine for mid-teens.
That's totally fine for mid-teens.
But you stretch that out into your 20s, your 30s, and it's pretty sad.
And this is where I think a lot of the anxiety and depression comes from, is taking a state that's supposed to be concentrated in youth and then just stretching it out.
And men get strung out if they take their adolescence and stretch it out and have a life of anti-responsibility and hedonism and merely Pac-Manning consumption of immediate pleasures in the moment rather than any kind of deferral of gratification and planning for the future.
So men get strung out on that, and women get strung out when they take 20 to 40 times the dosage of peak sexual market value.
It just makes them crazy.
It is an overdose.
And what do overdoses do?
Well, they mess with your system.
And this is part of the vanity, right?
I mean, we see this quite constantly, and I don't know how much you would see it in real life.
You guys could tell me, but... You see it quite a lot on videos where a woman in her 30s is told that she's past peak sexual market value and what happens?
She just completely denies.
She shames the men for having preferences based upon biology.
Of course, the only reason that men would have lust for women is for the making of children.
And she wants to use that lust for women and use it to milk dating culture and milk the high of bonding and thus avoiding the deep pleasure of love, right?
The high of immediate sexual bonding, which lasts, you know, maybe six months.
The high of immediate sexual bonding, if you keep pursuing that, then you lose out on the deep and meaningful pleasures of true and lasting love.
So she's just hop-skipping and jumping from dating high to dating high to dating high It hits the wall and then people say, well, you know how you've had standards for men, right?
They make six figures. They've got to be six foot tall.
What's 666? Make six figures, be six feet tall, have a six-inch penis, something like that.
I guess that would make me 12 feet tall.
Just kidding. Just kidding. So, when women are told this, they simply, you know, wave their fingers, shame men, and deny reality.
Well, how is it that it's possible to deny reality?
Because you've not been living in reality.
You're just used to denying reality.
And it's tough, you know.
And, you know, this sounds negative to women.
It's really not. If we men had the kind of power that women have when they're young in the dating market, we would also be Deluded and deny reality.
They just happen to get the power first and then get the power later.
And it's a lot easier to assume power when you have been denied it for a long time.
Because you know what it's like on the other side.
You kind of have an automatic empathy.
If you get the power first and then you have to let it go later.
Like if I had the choice, I would much rather get power later.
I guess I kind of did have some sort of influence in the world later after being rather helpless as a child.
I would much rather get the power later.
If you get the power sooner, it's really tough to flip later.
If you get the power later, at least you have the empathy of being relatively powerless sooner.
So, it's just the tragedy of our system.
I mean, boy, you just...
I mean, again, I talk about this in my novel, The Future.
Oh, is it time for a plug?
Hair plugs and freemain.locals.com.
You can sign up and I think there's still a few left.
You can get a promo code for a free month of premium access.
It's uppercase UPB2022 and I hope that you will check it out.
It's a great book. I talk about this in my book, the different ways in which, like when I was more into libertarianism and economics and politics and so on, you'd see things there.
But it's just everywhere, right?
The system is just messing everyone up in every conceivable way, or in this case, inconceivable way, because women just take forever to settle down, have their kids.
And, you know, none of this is really on accident, as my daughter used to say.
I'd say, by accident? No, she would.
And my daughter would always say, no, I'm going to say it this way.
I'd be like, well, it's going to be kind of tough to undo later.
Like, there's a way of spelling jail.
G-A-O-L. And there's a famous poem by Oscar Wilde, whose biography I'm actually reading at the moment.
But there's a famous poem by Oscar Wilde called The Ballad of Reading Jail.
But jail was spent G-A-O-L. And I've always thought, I always thought it was Ballad of Reading Goal.
Because I hadn't read the poem. And I've just never been able to undo that wiring.
I've never been able to undo that wiring.
All right. So if you have questions, I certainly have questions from the forum as a whole.
So if you don't have anything right now, you can raise your hand.
I'm happy to take your questions or comments or criticisms.
And if not, I'll answer a couple of questions.
And if you want to step up, I'm happy to hear.
All right. Let's see here.
I have problems with...
Oh, sorry, did somebody...
Yeah, I had a question or a comment about everything you just said.
It's interesting you bring up the sexual marketplace value that women have.
Over the last two or three weeks, I've seen two instances where women in their late 30s and early 50s have just poured their heart out on social media talking about how lonely they are, how depressed they are.
My partner's business partner, actually, she's in her late 30s and she's a business owner.
So very driven in terms of her career and making money, but has never settled down.
And the men she has chosen throughout her adult life have not been very good men.
Sorry, how old is she? She's 38 now.
And she's a business owner, so she's very driven.
in terms of that aspect of her life but she's never settled down so she's on all these dating apps now and she is not finding any guys and she my partner says that she comes across very bitter and angry and she believes that it's because her part her business partner is very lonely and I think to myself wow you know Steph would say Wow,
you've got 40 or 50 years to go and you don't have kids.
You don't have a partner.
All you've got is this business and that's going to keep your cup full.
Everything you've said over the last several years regarding this topic, I can totally see it happening now.
Sorry, I'm just going to need...
It's really sad, too.
You don't have a headset, right?
Because I'm getting an echo.
Oh, sorry. I don't have a headset.
You know what? I'll unmute, and I'll let you take it from here.
Thank you. So here's the great tragedy, right?
So women have been lied to, and this is not an accidental, very sort of conscious plan.
Women have been lied to, and they've been told that, well, here's what you like in a man, and so if you pursue that, a man will like you back.
But attraction is asymmetrical.
I mean, in the same way that it's tough to make a baby if you have an outie without an innie, right?
If you have a penis without a vagina, it's kind of tough to make a baby.
So there's asymmetricality.
And I remember in sort of my most successful relationship saying, oh yeah, no, she's not supposed to be like me.
This is the delightfully incomprehensible stuff that I've talked about with regards to women as a whole.
They're not supposed to be like us. We're not supposed to be like them.
It's complementary. I mean, division of labor.
If you have everyone in a software company who's a programmer, the software company will fail because you need a lot of different things to make it all work.
Right? And so here is the real tragedy.
So women, they get educated.
They get a career.
They start a business. They become, you know, hard-driving lawyers or accountants or, I don't know, whatever.
Dog grooming businesses seem to be quite popular in certain circles.
So they get all of this stuff going for them, right?
And then they get into their mid-30s.
And they say, well, I own my own condo and I have a car and, you know, I work 50 hours a week and I make $80,000 or $100,000 or $200,000 or whatever, right?
And they think this is going to be attractive to a man.
A man who wants kids.
But, I mean, a sensible man who wants kids, what's he going to do?
Let's say that there's some lawyer, she makes $150,000 a year, right?
And she works, you know, 50, 60 hours a week.
She travels, whatever. He's a very successful lawyer.
Good for her. But a man who's 35 looks at a woman who's 35, who has all of that, and he says, okay, so if I want to have kids, I'd like someone to raise my kids.
Now, you have developed this hard-driving, fairly masculine, hyper-aggressive, hyper-competitive approach to life.
And again, that's totally fine. Women can do all of that.
I have no problem with that. But you've trained yourself to read, to think, to argue, to not compromise.
You've not trained yourself in massive amounts of empathy.
And you've not developed any skills to raise children, to run a household, to support me.
And so if I marry you...
Then either you keep working, in which case I have no one to raise my kids and no one to run the household and it's just really stressful and difficult and I don't even get much of the pleasures of parenting and my kids are going to bond with someone else and be dumped in daycare and I think that the daycare facade, oh daycare is just as good as parents, is cracking and I'd like to take 1.1.1.001% of credit for that.
So the man looks at the woman and he says, okay, so you come with $150,000 and no child raising.
So if I want to have kids and I want to have a reasonably unstressful family life, because remember, the kids who were raised in daycare, if they have any self-knowledge or worth anything at all in the dating market, in the marriage market, the kids who are raised in daycare, so the people who are raised in daycare, They don't want their kids to be raised in daycare.
That's a pendulum, right? So they don't want their kids to be raised in daycare.
They want someone to stay home with their kids.
They want their mom, the mom of their kids to stay home with them.
So they look at the hard-driving $150K a year lawyer and they say, okay, so you consider yourself valuable because you're a lawyer who makes a lot of money.
But if I want you to raise my kids, that all goes away.
So if I want you to raise my kids...
Everything that you claim to be a value that you've achieved will have to end.
If I want you to raise my kids, then you being a hard-driving, hyper-competitive, aggressive, successful lawyer, again, totally fine for law.
But that all goes away.
Like the sole value that you claim to bring, competent, professional, making a lot of money, that has to end if I want you to raise my kids.
And then you have to make the transition to an entirely different kind of life.
I mean, can you imagine going to a law firm, right?
They say, we want a lawyer.
I advertise for a lawyer. I want a lawyer.
Can you imagine going to a law firm and saying...
Yeah, I'd like to, I'd really like to apply.
I would like to be a lawyer.
I want to apply. I want you to hire me as a lawyer for your firm.
And they say, oh, where did you get your law degree?
And you say, oh, no, I didn't.
What are you talking about? I didn't get a law degree.
And they say, what? No, this is for a lawyer.
You kind of have to be a lawyer to get a job as a lawyer.
No, I didn't get a law degree.
I mean, I do remember I was pretty good at debating when I was a teenager, but no, I haven't done that stuff for like 20 years.
I mean, they would laugh you out of the office or take pity on you or call security because you were crazy, right?
Imagine you go for a job as a surgeon.
Say, oh, well, where did you get your medical degree and your specialty?
It's like, no, I don't have a medical degree.
I don't have any specialty. But I do remember I was really good at dissecting frogs in grade 8.
And they'd be like, why are you applying for a job that you're completely unqualified for?
Right? Right? So given that the woman who's a lawyer, if she wanted to hire another lawyer, would never take somebody without experience, why would a man hire a wife who had no experience in raising children in a running household?
Supremely unqualified.
Supremely unqualified.
And again, a woman who's trying to be like a man and who has all of this.
And again, I'm fully on board with the spectrum of gender identity, right?
I mean, there are tomboys, there are more effeminate girls and more effeminate boys.
I'm fine with that. There's no issue with me, no problem with me at all.
I mean, that's something I think we've all seen, and I have no issue with that.
But... To raise children, and you can be a tomboy and raise great kids, right?
It doesn't all have to be, you know, princess dresses, and I'm fine with all of that.
I mean, I grew up with two poles of femininity, right?
There was my mother, who was kind of like Blanche Dubois, you know, this sort of tremulous, hysterical, sex-obsessed, feminine caricature, in a sense.
And then I had relatives, particularly on my father's side, who were these, you Margaret Thatcher Perm, square-hipped women who lived in the country and were just very practical and sensible and raised kids and ran households and were just very solid and dependable and really high-quality women.
So, I've seen those and, you know, I guess they're, obviously they're both females, they're both aspects of femininity, but I think that has sort of really helped me in terms of not thinking that all women are alike.
I just grew up with really, really wide spectrums of femininity.
Plus, you know, one or two of the moms of my friends when I was a teenager were really, you know, solid, sensible, practical women who, you know, raised good kids and ran good households and worked in the community and did charity.
Solid, sensible, great, brilliant women who just contributed enormously to their family and their communities as opposed to other aspects that I've seen in the more trashy side of things.
So I've seen that full spectrum and I'm totally down with it.
But if you have poured your energy into...
Combat and aggression and business climbing, status climbing and all of that.
That's great. You could get the job as a lawyer, but can you get the job as a mother?
If the woman says, well, I'm 35 and I'm attractive because I have a high income, The man looks at that and says, oh, so I was raised in daycare.
I didn't really like it. It wasn't good for me.
I don't want to put my kids in daycare.
So all of the things that you think make you attractive make you unattractive.
All the things you think are a positive are negative.
You say, oh, well, I have this income. It's like, well, no, but if I want a happy family life, that income has to go away.
And this is what you pursued for your whole life, which means you don't have training or experience in running a household, being a mom.
And it's going to be really tough for you and it's going to be really stressful for you.
If I'm going to ask you to give up your career, you're not going to want to give up your career because you like the status, you like the income, you like the combat, you like all of the things that you're doing.
So you're going to, what, give up your career to raise kids?
You're not going to be good at it because you don't have any practice or training or experience.
You're going to resent me for giving up your career and crushing your dreams.
So for women...
All the things that they think make them attractive.
Make them attractive for casual dating.
Oh yeah, listen. If you want some casual dating, you know, a 35-year-old lawyer is going to be a lot of fun, right?
Like let's say that you're... I don't know, you're 45 and your kids are grown and you're divorced or your wife died or something and you just want to casually date.
Yeah, listen, a lawyer is going to be a lot of fun.
She's going to have great stories. You're going to be able to go to expensive restaurants.
You can go fly down to New York and you can see plays and you can see shows and go on vacations, three-day trips to the Barbados if she ever gets time off work.
It's a blast. It's a lot of fun.
to date a successful and wealthy career woman in her 30s as long as you don't want to have kids and have her raise them.
So women have in a sense been groomed to be of higher value to men who casually date But impossible to settle down with, right?
Because the woman's... I mean, it's unlikely that the woman...
She could, right? But it's unlikely that the woman who's 35 and a successful lawyer...
And remember, she probably only really got into law in her mid to late 20s as a career because she had a lot of education and training before that.
She passed the bar and all.
So she's, you know, eight years, nine years, ten years maybe.
She's been a lawyer. And she also has this thing, well, you know, if I quit to become...
A stay-at-home mom, then I'm making it harder for other women to get hired and femininity and feminism and solidarity and people are going to make fun of me and I'm going to feel like a failure and what was the point of all that education and I'm really only starting to get into my stride to make my real money and I'm going to make partner within 10 years and I'm going to make a fortune.
So, I mean, there is this semi-satanic stuff instead of people.
You know, you can make stuff.
You can make money or you can make people.
Make money or make people.
That's the big fork in the road.
You want to make money or you want to make people?
Well, money is shit for the most part.
I mean, you need it to pay your bills.
You know, a certain amount of material comfort is a good thing.
But in terms of how you age, in terms of how you age, in terms of what has meaning to you, in terms of, you know, money is diminishing returns, right?
There's only so many times you can fly to Barbados.
Alone, right? Money is diminishing returns.
And particularly when you've had a good deal of money and you look around and you say, well, geez, there's nothing else I really need to buy.
Okay, what's the money do? It's just piling up numbers in your bank again.
I mean, if you're alone, what are you going to do?
Get a bigger house? What's the point?
It's just going to make you feel more lonely, right?
Are you going to buy a better car to do what?
Drive around? Drive someplace?
Oh, I'm going to get nicer clothes.
For what? You've already got nice clothes.
There is a law of diminishing returns or a principle of diminishing returns for extra money.
It's really, really tragic.
Which is why a lot of wealthy people are pretty miserable and seem to be addicted to population control, to put it mildly.
You've got to find a meaning. You've got to invent problems.
You've got to invent issues, right?
So... Making people, like being a parent, making people gets better and better over time.
So every year you make more money, that money becomes less valuable, but every year your child grows up, your child becomes even more valuable.
They start off amazingly valuable, they become even more valuable.
My daughter is in the process of making more solid horizontal friends and spending more time with her friends, and this is wonderful.
It's exactly how it should be.
So, children are accelerating returns.
Money and material success is diminishing returns.
And so, a woman who comes and says, Well, I make a lot of money, so you should marry me.
I want to have kids. Well, she's not going to quit her career, which means the kids is going to be a mess.
If he's got any self-knowledge, in other words, if he's worth dating, the man's going to be like, well, I don't want my kids to have the childhood I had.
I can tell you that for sure.
I don't want my daughter to have the same childhood that I have.
In fact, I kind of wanted her to have the complete opposite.
And yes, so far, so good.
That's all been robustly achieved.
But a man who's Worth a damn.
He's going to say, well, I was dumped in daycare and I was raised by crazy peers and I don't want to, you know.
And especially if you want to, you know, get your kids out of the hellscape of government schools and you want to homeschool and all of that, which is, again, it's a very skilled job, very skilled career, very skilled home occupation and so on, right?
You run a household and raise kids and homeschool and all of that.
It's a job. It's an absolute job.
And it's the job that has meaning, where there's accelerated payoffs as opposed to diminishing returns.
And eventually, the money just becomes negative as well.
Notch, it was the guy who made Minecraft, who sold it, I think in 2013 or something to Microsoft for like a little over $2 billion or something like that, and he ended up with $1.2 billion or something.
I mean, the guy hated being wealthy.
I mean, he got divorced and he said, you know, like I'm just sitting here looking at a screen waiting for my friends to get off work.
And then he posted some spicy memes and got cancelled.
He's got removed out of Minecraft and stuff like that.
So, yeah, it's really tragic.
What do you do when you get everything you want?
Well, for most people, they start losing their grip on reality and they become isolated.
The only thing worse than losing or drawing even sometimes is winning.
Because we're designed to strive.
We're not designed to win. We're designed to strive for the momentary happiness of winning.
The thrill of victory, said Monica Sellis, I think, the tennis player, the thrill of victory lasts about 15 minutes.
And then the hedonic treadmill, right?
We adjust. And so we always have to have something to aim at.
When you get everything you want, you end up pretty isolated.
You've got all this money. There's nothing really you want to buy.
There's nothing, no place you really want to go.
Especially alone, right?
I mean, it's funny because I remember when I was younger, I went on vacations on my own.
I remember going to Aruba for two weeks, entirely alone.
When I was in my late 20s.
And I had a blast.
I really enjoyed it. I read copious amounts of philosophy, played endless amounts of beach volleyball, met up with some people, became friends, traveled with them for a bit.
And it was just a really, really fun thing.
But I sure as hell wouldn't want to be doing that in my 50s.
Just go someplace alone and look at a beach sunset and say, well, this is something carved into my brain that's going to vanish when I die.
There's no one to tell about it, no one to share it with, nothing to write about.
Nothing to keep. And so the money in your bank account becomes a prison that isolates you from people if you're alone.
So it goes from being something you strive towards to something that's a curse that isolates you.
I mean, you see this all the time with people who win the lottery.
There's a woman in Australia who's suing the government because she won the lottery.
She was saying that you shouldn't be able to play it at 16 and she's very pretty and she won a lot of money.
But it was very tough for her.
And the old Crimea River.
No, no, seriously, it's very tough.
People who think that the money is just going to solve everything, it's a mad delusion that just makes you unhappy where you are.
It's a mad delusion that just makes you unhappy where you are.
So, yeah, all the things that women think make them attractive, right?
And the women who are like, well, a man should value me because I've become wise.
Well, any woman who says that, like, I'm 35 years old, some 20-year-old, she doesn't know anything.
She's totally naive. I have become wise with the years that a man should value my wisdom.
And it's like, well, if you're so wise, why are you still single at 35?
If you're so wise, why do you think at 35 you can dictate what a man should like and do in the same way you could when you were 24 or 20?
But any woman who says a man should date me because of my increased wisdom and he should value me as much as when I was 20 because my increased wisdom has got no increased wisdom in any way, shape or form whatsoever at all.
And that's really tragic to see.
So yeah, ladies, try and figure out what men want.
Ask men. You are, I mean, yeah, you can be A seller's market, buyer's market.
In your 20s, you have control.
In your 30s, the men have control.
You've got to swallow back your pride, recognize you've been lied to, tamp down your vanity, and say, okay, I am now in the position of the clamoring man, right?
So when you're young and pretty, you are...
In the position that the men are clamoring after you, right?
And men will do anything. You can pick and choose.
You can wave your finger.
You can snap your fingers. You can stomp your feet.
You can, you know, oh, I need to move.
And there's 10 men show enough to help you move.
And, right, men will text you and men will send you resources if you want.
And, you know, they're just all over you.
And that's very addictive, which is why it used to be camped down by monogamy, right?
It used to be camped down by getting married early and so women wouldn't go crazy from the vanity, right?
And you get into your 30s, like, man, it's all just reversed.
And you can either go with that reversal or not.
But it has reversed.
A reasonably successful man without kids who's fairly mature and without divorces, without kids, without crazy exes, a reasonably successful man in his 30s without kids is a rock star.
Is a rock star.
And if you play hard to get with a rock star, the rock star will simply move on to someone else.
You know, I mean, it's like, you know, Stephen Tyler in the 70s after the concert, there's like 20 women with their tops off, right?
And you playing hard to get?
Come on. You then have to stop providing value.
But because vanity is the belief that you don't have to provide value.
And if nature has provided value by making you young and attractive as a woman in your 20s, right?
If nature has provided value and you don't have to provide any personal value other than don't eat, right?
For men to be attractive, we've got to spend an hour a day at the gym.
For women to be attractive is like, just don't eat like a Cossack army.
Just, you know, don't eat too much and, you know, you'll be fine.
All right. Let's answer a couple of questions.
Again, I'm happy to hear if you want to raise your hand, but yeah, don't just unmute, but if you want to raise your hand, let's...
Freedom A, I have problems with fraud being theft or a violation of the non-aggression principle.
What is fraud?
People often misunderstand each other.
Surely that should not be a violation of the NAP. Most advertising could easily be considered to be fraud.
Would those be violations of the NAP? Fraud is easily confused for an offer you don't like.
Surely there can be disagreements on what's a violation of the NAP with homesteading, abandonment, etc.
But fraud takes us to the extreme.
And there's no way to test for fraud.
It's 100% subjective. Okay, so I'll answer meta and then I'll answer individually.
Okay, I'll tell you what is not something I respect intellectually.
It's when people put forward the weakest arguments And then claim that they're right or they put forward the exception that proves the rule, right?
So in the video that I was watching about women, the moderator was saying, well, you know, but in your 35, your eggs are diminished and your fertility is way down and all that.
And the woman says, well, yeah, but there could be some 20-year-old could be completely infertile.
And it's like, okay, but that's the exception that proves the rule.
So one of the things that I've got a lot of comments from, and I appreciate that, is how powerful a set of arguments I give to those who oppose my position, right?
So there's straw manning, which is you set up a really weak argument, knock it down, and think you've won.
And then there's steel manning, which is you invest a huge amount into creating the best possible arguments against your position.
And... In my novel, The Future, I steal men positions I consider completely reprehensible.
I give the strongest possible case for the harsh treatment of children.
The strongest possible case against the free society.
The strongest possible case against property.
I could just dig in and we all know these, right?
So I'll tell you what is kind of boring to me and I'll answer this and this is nothing hostility, right?
This is just, you know, you've probably been raised by women, right?
So If you want me to help you lift a weight, don't lift a very light weight.
Like, if you want me to spot you, Nobody says in the gym, I need to lift my bottle of water.
Can you spot me? Because that would be kind of ridiculous.
You can lift that bottle of water yourself.
Now, I'll spot you.
I used to work out with friends, right?
And I would spot them.
And of course, when they were doing their bench presses, I used to try and make jokes to make them laugh because nothing's funnier than seeing somebody trying to bench press and laughing at the same time.
But If you want me to spot you, lift a heavy weight.
If you want help, lift a heavy weight.
And if you're just lifting one of those little tassel-bound pink three-pound things, I'm not going to spot you because it's kind of ridiculous, right?
So if you're having trouble with fraud, then look up the law, look up arguments for fraud, like being a violation of the non-aggression principle, and Work through those arguments yourself.
Don't just think of the weakest possible arguments, dump them on my lap and say, fix it.
Because it means you're intellectually lazy.
It means you're not interested in critiquing your own arguments.
It means you just take the dumbest possible arguments, dump it on someone else and say, aha, owned.
Well, that's very lazy.
And it says to me that you're not particularly interested in the pursuit of truth.
You're interested maybe in muddying the waters.
It's like all the people who were like, well, you quoted this article in a podcast a year ago.
Can you get me the source?
It's like, you can look it up.
Right? I don't owe you that.
You can look it up. So if you're going to say, I don't get the fraud thing, and then, well, fraud is just misunderstanding.
Surely, misunderstanding isn't against the non-aggression principle.
That is seriously lazy, my friend.
And again, I say this with all love and respect and thanks for you for being a supporter of the show.
And I really, I say this out of love, genuine love, that if you want to be taken seriously by people who take themselves seriously, then don't waste their time.
And what that means is if you look up the strongest possible arguments against your position and you genuinely can't overcome them and you've thought about it for a week, then absolutely, you know, get in contact with someone and say, listen, you know, here's the argument and write.
It's fantastic. But if you're like, well, I just have an issue with fraud and you just toss out a couple of lazy, boring things, like, well, fraud is just misunderstanding and surely misunderstanding.
You can't use violence against misunderstanding.
Of course you can't use violence against misunderstanding.
But the idea that fraud is just identical to misunderstanding is lazy, right?
I mean, there's no law against misunderstanding.
There are laws against fraud.
People don't go to jail for misunderstanding.
People go to jail for fraud.
Now, that doesn't mean that – but there's a very longstanding common law tradition against fraud.
And so if you don't do the research, if you don't look things up, if you don't steal, man, the strongest arguments against your own position, then you're asking me to spot you when you lift a bottle of water.
And it's just like, no, I don't.
So I'll answer these questions, and I'm happy to, but I just sort of want to point out that I get a lot of these very obvious quote rebuttals, and I generally ignore them.
Because if you don't have the habit of of looking up the strongest arguments against your position and working through them, then me giving you the answer doesn't do you any good.
Because you haven't learned the principle.
So maybe I'll give you the answer about fraud here, right?
Okay, I'll give you the answer about fraud.
But if you don't have, then it'll just be something else.
Well, but what about the roads?
And what about national defense? And what about the law courts?
And what about prisons? And what about education?
So I can answer this question about fraud.
I know for sure this is why I don't do it with most people.
It's because you'll just move on to some other topic and you have never learned the value of steel manning.
If you want to lift weights, you have to lift heavy weights.
If you want to get strong from lifting weights, you have to lift heavy weights.
And so if you want to become strong intellectually, you have to deal with the strongest opponents.
You have to deal with the strongest arguments against your position.
And it's not just good to deal with them.
If somebody were to give me, and again, this is in the novel, if somebody were to give me the task of saying, well, you need to argue against voluntarism, or you need to argue against peaceful parenting, or you need to argue against all of the things.
You need to argue against monogamy.
You need to argue against the non-aggression principle.
You need to argue against property rights.
I can do all of that. In my book, Essential Philosophy, I have Socratic dialogues of me arguing very strongly against my own position.
And in many of my books, and in particular in...
I want to honor the enemies with strength, right?
There's no point considering yourself a great boxer if you just go and push over a gold guide.
Right? So if you say, I want to train to box at the top level, and I'm some crusty boxing coach.
I want to train for boxing at the top level, man.
And you then show me a video of you...
Pushing over a girl guide and running away, I'd say, I'm not training you because you have no idea what boxing is.
So if you give me the weakest possible, quote, arguments and then say, well, you know, that means that you're disproven, then you're just pushing over a girl guide thinking you can be a world champion boxer.
And it's like, no, I need to see some muscles.
I need to see some strength. I need to see you having at least absorbed strong arguments against it.
Okay, so the question, what is fraud?
Okay, so you can look up the definition of fraud, right?
It is the unwanted transfer of property through deception.
It's the unwanted transfer of property through deception.
I mean, I don't know if that's the formal definition.
I think that's a good working definition for a moral standpoint, right?
So they say, what is fraud? Have you looked it up?
Have you looked into the legal definitions of fraud?
Have you looked into the moral definitions of fraud?
Have you read any articles about fraud from a libertarian perspective?
Have you, right? A lot of people have written about this stuff.
They say, what is fraud? People often misunderstand each other.
Surely that should not be a violation of the NAP. So, you're just saying fraud is misunderstanding.
I mean, I'm not saying you're saying they're identical, but fraud is a subsection.
Misunderstanding is the big circle and fraud is a smaller circle within there, right?
And you don't even sort of pause to say, well, obviously, Steph would never say that misunderstanding is a violation of the non-aggression principle.
So, misunderstand each other.
No. That's a straw man.
Fraud is just a kind of misunderstanding.
No, it's not. It's absolutely not.
Okay, most advertising, he says, could easily be considered to be fraud.
Would those be violations of the NAP? Most advertising could easily be considered to be fraud.
Well, I don't know.
Have you made the case? I mean, and you've contradicted one sentence to the next.
You say people often misunderstand each other, right?
Most advertising could easily be considered to be fraud.
Does that mean that people completely misunderstand advertising, that advertisers have no idea what they're communicating and people just randomly bounce off advertising and do whatever they want?
No. Fraud is easily confused for an offer you don't like.
No, it's not. You're just making statements.
Surely there can be disagreements on what's a violation of the NAP with homesteading, abandonment, etc.
But Ford takes this to the extreme.
And there's no way to test for fraud.
It's 100% subjective.
Again, just a bunch of nonsense.
I mean, this is just a bunch of statements.
It's just a bunch of statements.
It's just lazy typing.
But anyway, so I've already made that case.
So, no, misunderstanding is not a violation of the NAP. So fraud is the unwanted transfer of property.
So, could advertising be considered to be fraud?
I don't know about most, but certainly some advertising would be fraud.
If you promise that your pill cures cancer and it doesn't, that's fraud.
It's the unwanted transfer of property through deception.
You have transferred people's payment for your pill that you claim cures cancer, and it doesn't cure cancer, and so you've stolen from them.
See, theft doesn't always require force, obviously, right?
I mean, if you sneak into somebody's house while they're on vacation and you steal stuff, you haven't directly used force against them.
That's an unwanted transfer of property.
And in a sense, it's through deception.
All theft is based upon...
Sorry, many...
Like, you think catbird is kind of based on deception.
I'm not here. I'm not invading.
You hide where you're going. You pretend you're a neighbor who's coming in to check on the place.
You whatever, right? You go around the back.
You break in silently, so you're pretending you're not there.
So, yeah, some forms of theft are a form of deception or rely upon it, right?
So, yeah, it's not a misunderstanding, right?
Most advertising can use fraud.
Fraud is easily confused with an offer you don't like.
I don't know what that means.
An offer you don't like.
So if somebody says, I'm going to sell you an iPad for $10,000, and you're like, I don't like that offer.
I don't want that.
I won't pay that. Is that fraud?
Like, again, this is what I mean by just lazy typing, right?
And there's no way to test for fraud.
It's 100% subjective.
No, that's not true at all.
Right? If you say, this is like Burn Notice, season one, episode two.
Right? So if you go to an old woman and you say, hey, you've won a contest.
We just need your bank account information to transfer $300,000 to you because you've just won a contest and you've got gold embossed certificates and you look official and blah, blah, blah.
And the woman believes you and then you use her bank information to steal her identity and steal her money.
Is that fraud? Well, of course that's fraud because you've told her she's won money and you end up taking her money and you had no intention of giving her the money.
So you're telling something that's false in order to rob someone.
Is that testable?
Well, of course it's testable. It's not 100% subjective.
Did you knowingly lie to someone in order to transfer their resources to you?
If I want an iPad from you and I send you $500 and you promise to send me the iPad and you don't send me the iPad, you've just stolen $500 from me.
Right? So maybe, you know, I mean, it's not fraud if you just made a mistake, you lost the order or something like that.
So there's ways of testing for these things, of course, right?
You look for motive, you look for repetition, you look for intent, you look for, you know, do you have any iPads to ship?
Do you regularly do this to other people?
So, yeah, there's absolutely ways to test for fraud.
I mean, there was an interesting case where, I think it was in China?
I don't know if this is apocryphal or not, so don't quote me on this.
It was a very interesting theoretical.
So a man married a woman he thought was beautiful, and she was traditionally beautiful, and then the kids came out ugly.
It turned out she'd had a lot of plastic surgery.
And he wanted attractive children, as I guess most people do.
That is one of the reasons we're attracted to physical beauty is so that our children will be more successful by being physically attractive themselves as well as an indicator of good genes and so on.
So was it fraud for her to portray herself as beautiful to not inform him or to deny that she'd had plastic surgery?
Was it fraud? Well, in a way, yes.
If what he wants is attractive children and she was born not attractive but then she paid a surgeon to make her more attractive and of course plastic surgery doesn't transfer genetically to the next generation, was that a kind of fraud?
Well, yeah. What about a woman who has an affair and knows that her husband's child is not her husband's and then tells him that that is her husband?
Is that fraud? Absolutely. I shouldn't laugh, but in France, it's illegal.
I think it's really discouraged, if not illegal, in the UK, but in France, it's illegal for a man to order a paternity test online or wherever, right?
It'll be blocked in customs, and he could face a fine of significant amounts of money up to one year in jail, right?
So you can't actually find out if the child is yours.
It's pretty wild.
And the French government did this to Protect the family.
No, it's to protect fraudulent women.
It's one of the worst frauds that there is.
It's one of the worst. This is an emotional financial fraud and also prevents you from having a child that is actually yours by leaving the woman and all that, right?
So, yeah, of course fraud is completely, you know, of course.
If the woman says to the man, this is your child, when she knows it's not or suspects that it's not, then that's fraud.
Of course it is. I mean, is that...
Undetectable. Of course it's detectable.
I mean, again, I don't really know.
It's just people just lazy typing.
Well, it seems, well, you know, hey, there's nowhere to solve these problems.
But if you haven't done any work to solve the issues you're raising, why would I do any work to solve the issues you're raising, right?
Just means because I'm not going to teach you anything, right?
It's like me grabbing your hand and writing out the answer to a math problem.
I haven't taught you anything, right? Is it justifiable to use violence in stopping a violation of the NAP? Like, it's justified to shoot a thief running away with stolen goods.
Is it justified to shoot a fraud?
I think not. Well, all social rules that involve the non-aggression principle are ultimately remediable by force.
We call them legal, right?
It wouldn't be legal like we understand now.
But all laws...
To me, laws are defined by you can use force to enforce them.
And again, I've got a whole article on self-defense on my website.
You can read about that.
You can also go to fdrpodcast.com, type in defense.
I don't know if I use the C or the S, but try both.
I read it as a podcast many years ago.
But yeah, all violations of the non-aggression principle are Resolvable by force.
Now, what this means, but proportional force, right?
Proportional force. If somebody's running at you with a machete, then you can shoot them.
Right? And this is a standard of law.
Death or grievous bodily harm.
Right? If somebody walks up and slaps you, you can't shoot them.
It's not proportional force.
Right? If somebody steps on your property and does no harm to it, you can't shoot them.
Right? And of course, nobody would do it.
Or it would be a sign of sheer insanity if you did.
So proportional harm is important.
If someone defrauds you, like let's say that you go to some beach and there's one of these guys with like three coconuts and he shuffles them around and so on and it turns out that he's cheating everyone.
Okay, so it's a couple of bucks.
You can't shoot him, right? And But there are situations where fraud can result in death.
So if you fraudulently say that you have a pill that cures cancer, and people believe you and pay you for that, and then they don't get cancer treatments because they think that your pill will cure them, then they're going to die.
Some of them are going to die from their cancer.
So that's a form of theft and murder.
Now, you say, ah, yes, but people have to participate in things.
Yes, absolutely. It's a little bit different from theft, of course, because theft, you're generally not participating in it at all.
You're away on vacation, someone breaks into your house.
But with fraud, you have to participate.
So I get that for sure.
But if you think, of course, that a level of social trust is necessary for society to operate at all, you don't have to sign a contract that you're going to pay for the meal when you sit down in a restaurant and order the food.
There has to be some degree of social trust.
You don't have to sign a contract when you go into a grocery store that says you're not going to shoplift.
So some degree of social trust is necessary and part of that social trust is going to involve people exploiting you and robbing you blind.
If you're a diabetic and somebody robs you of all your money and you can't afford your insulin, it could kill you.
If somebody steals all your money through fraud, And you can't afford to get your car checked and your brakes fail.
I mean, there could be any number of things.
But yeah, fraud can be extraordinarily dangerous for people.
Even the stress of fraud, you know, stress can kill.
And so even the stress of fraud can cause people to have significant health issues and or, you know, this is why in even civil lawsuits, they talk about mental suffering, mental anguish, stress, and so on, right?
I mean, even I would say slander or defamation would be a kind of fraud that you're saying that somebody has a negative characteristic which they don't have.
It's a form of fraud. So is it justified to shoot a fraud?
See, again, what you're doing is you're going to straight escalation, right?
So self-defense is for immediate threat of death or grievous bodily harm, like shooting someone.
And so I invite you to read Practical Anarchy.
Well, start with Everyday Anarchy, then read Practical Anarchy, then read my novel, The Future, where I go into how the society works as a whole.
So, yeah, you don't just get to shoot a fraud.
Of course not. In part because the fraud hasn't been proven, right?
So if you shoot someone you think has defrauded you and they haven't defrauded you, then you just murdered someone and good luck with all that, right?
That's going to be pretty terrible for you.
So you have to go through a process of proof in order to make sure that the punishment is just.
What is the punishment? Fraud?
Well, obviously, restitution and fines and so on.
And if somebody doesn't participate in that restitution or those fines, then they would be ejected from society, they would be ostracized, and your dispute resolution organization would pay you Whatever, right?
And they would pay you, but they would also require you to go on a course on how to be skeptical of fraud so it doesn't keep happening.
Fraud requires action from two parties.
For theft, only one person has to take action.
Someone can make an offer that you don't like, but it only becomes fraud when you accept it.
How can a violation of the NAP require actions from multiple people?
Someone can make you an offer that you don't like, but it only becomes fraud when you accept it.
I'm sorry. That's too lazy for me to even respond to.
Breaking a contract is difficult.
While it took multiple parties to set up the situation, it only takes one party to break the contract.
Regardless, I say violence can only be justified to enforce a contract if that was stipulated as an enforcement method in the contract, like taking ownership of a house if the mortgage isn't paid for.
All right. Fine.
But fraud often has to do with contracts, right?
And again, there are explicit contracts.
There are implicit contracts. If you dine and dash, then you haven't signed a contract, but you're still guilty of stealing.
You're still guilty of theft, so to speak.
And in a sense, it's fraud, right?
Because if you go into the restaurant and say, I want you to serve me food, but I'm not going to eat afterwards, right?
The implied understanding is that the only way really the restaurant can operate, the implied understanding is you're going to pay for your meal.
They don't have to confirm that ahead of time.
So if you go in with the implied understanding you're going to pay for the meal with no intention of paying for the meal, you're defrauding them.
Same thing with gas. If you pump and dump, you pump your gas and you leave.
I think in a lot of places you pay ahead of time now, but let's say you can do that.
Well, there's no contract you signed, but there's an implicit contract, which everybody understands.
If you said ahead of time, I want gas, but I'm not going to pay for it, they wouldn't give you the gas.
I mean, say to a restaurant, I want food, I'm not going to pay for the food.
So again, it's kind of fraud. All right, so there's a better way to deal with the problem of fraud, discrimination.
Not all bad actions require violence to be dealt with.
We should reserve violence in the NAP for cases where violence is necessary.
Well, that's just a circular thing, right?
We should only use violence where violence is necessary.
Whoa, whoa, whoa. Big brain activity right here, man.
We should reserve violence.
Okay, people should just stop interacting with the fraud and die him access to their property until he makes amends.
Okay, so again, look, not everyone, of course, has to read everything I've written or listen to 5,000 plus podcasts or anything.
I get all of that. I understand that.
But at least give me the respect of like when you ask me a completely obvious question saying, well, I know that you've dealt with this, right?
So if you were to say to me, well, who would build the roads?
Ant, checkmate, voluntarist, right?
And there's a section in my novel where the guy who's hostile and skeptical to the idea of freedom, a free society, for reasons that I think are really powerful and interesting.
Ask these questions and thinks he's doing a bit of a gotcha and the guy from the Free Society says, yeah, well, you know, gosh, you think we haven't thought about these things before?
You know, so if you kind of come in with like, well, fraud is complicated.
It's like, yeah, it can be. Well, ostracism is a good plan.
Yes, ostracism is a good plan.
Absolutely. Ostracism is a great plan, which is why my very first article was about ostracism.
My very first article in 17 years ago was about ostracism.
So if you come to me and say, well, you know, we really should look into ostracism.
It's like, yes! Yes!
Big brain person, that is my intent.
And again, you don't have to read it, but at least give me the courtesy of a reach around, right?
At least give me the common courtesy of ostracism.
It's kind of an obvious question.
Why don't you point me to resources where you've dealt with it before rather than just lecturing me about completely obvious things that I thought about decades ago?
Oh, yeah. So somebody says, I was the one who made the comment about the career-driven boomer.
My partner partners with a business.
This woman is 38, business owner, homeowner, childless, single.
You know the type. She wants to be a millionaire, a multimillionaire to settle down with and have children.
She has an idea of what she finds attractive to men.
She's manifested that for herself and thinks these multimillionaires will find it attractive.
You need balancing personalities, right?
The introvert and the extrovert, you know, dating your opposites to some degree.
I'm organized in my mind.
My wife is organized in her life.
I can hold an entire future society and plot device and multiple characters in my head, no problem.
My wife is like a reverse hurricane of massive, competent organization.
So I think we're a good fit that way.
We're a good fit that way.
So a man who's become a multimillionaire is a man who has pursued, in general, traditionally male and hyper-masculine drive and competition and so on, right?
So if a man marries his mirror...
It generally won't work. I mean, you obviously have to share the same values and so on, but your personal size have to complement each other.
Personal size have to complement each other.
So a man who's hyper-masculine, and again, hyper is not a pejorative at all.
It's a spectrum, right? So a man who's, let's say, left-right, left is hyper-masculine.
No, let's say right is hyper-masculine, left is hyper-feminine.
So let's say he's further over to the right.
How do you balance, right?
Well, we all know this, right? You ever stand with your friends on a seesaw or teeter-totter?
If you stand at the end, he's got to stand at the end in order to balance it.
I remember one of the things I just loved doing when I was a kid.
In my neighborhood, there was a teeter-totter that went round and round, a seesaw that went round and round.
So it went up and down and round and round.
It was super cool. But you all know this.
To balance, if you're on the extreme, so to speak, you need somebody else on the other extreme to balance, right?
Extreme is probably the wrong way of putting it, but let's just bow to the language such as it stands.
So if you've got some hyper-masculine dude who's ferocious and competitive and maybe short on empathy and high on disagreeableness and all of that, then if he marries someone just like himself, it's not going to work.
And so... If she is more on the tomboy side of femininity and she wants a hyper-masculine man, the hyper-masculine man is going to be looking for a very feminine woman.
Now, very feminine could be any number of things, but he sure as hell isn't going to be looking for someone just like himself.
So, yeah, you're right. She said, okay, well, this is what I would find attractive in a man, so I'm going to manifest that, and I'm sure the man will find that attractive in me.
And they won't. Not everything.
I was in a relationship with a woman too opposite to me, and it was horrible.
She was pretty much a hippie. Dharma and Greg wouldn't work in real life.
Okay, but that's not opposite in terms of complementary personality styles.
That's opposite in terms of she's a flick, right?
She's mystical. She's whatever, right?
Hi, Steph. Can I ask you for some clarification on the last conversation you had with Tim about positive moral obligations?
And yeah, I still owe a better answer to the question of universally preferable behavior and a universal preference for truth.
I need to differentiate that, and I will work on that this week, so I'm aware of that.
In the conversation, you had an interesting take on Mother Teresa that was fundamentally different from the point of view you presented in RTR. In conversation with Tim around TimeSamp 120, you said that you don't see any dichotomy between loving philosophy and loving people, because philosophy is only manifested in people.
Right. So, you can't be virtuous without philosophy.
I mean, to me, this fits perfectly with my philosophy, and again, with philosophy, tell me if you disagree and why, that would be great.
But, I've always said, Reason equals virtue, right?
You can't be virtuous without being rational.
Philosophy helps you be rational, helps you be virtuous, and it's your only path to love and happiness that is reliable and sustainable.
So when I say I love philosophy in people, I'm saying I love virtue in people, and I've always said you can only love virtue.
Let's see here. She loves Jesus in the poor.
Right. So I love philosophy in people.
In other words, if people manifest virtue because they've pursued philosophy, then I love that.
But with Mother Teresa, and I think it's a good point to bring up, I assume that she loved the soul of the person regardless of their immediate moral qualities.
Mother Teresa used to say she was not administering to the poor, but rather to Christ in the poor, which is a very different thing.
Since Christ is the man-made God who strolled the ways and came back from the dead, as a mere fantasy, Mother Teresa did not have a relationship with the poor as individuals, but rather with her own projected fantasy of service to a non-existent deity.
This is a form of spiritual stalking.
Well, I think that she would love their potential for virtue, and The error that we make oftentimes is that our love can cure immorality.
Our love can cure corruption, right?
It is a terrible mistake that we make.
It's sort of the white man's burden that the British had with the empire.
It is go around the world and turn everyone into sort of a modern UK-style democracy and capitalist country and all that, right?
So it's the idea that our love can cure immorality.
Immorality. No, love cannot cure immorality because what you do is you say, well, moral people tend to be loved.
Therefore, if you love immoral people, they will become moral, which is a reversal of cause and effect.
So people become moral, then you love them.
You don't love them and then they become moral.
Because if you say you love them for their immorality, then they're gaining the greatest treasure by being immoral, which means they're not going to drop that.
So if you love them for being immoral, if you love their, quote, potential, and look, it's fine to love potential if somebody's moving towards that, right?
So if you've got a friend who's losing weight, you can respect their potential for losing even more weight, right?
But if they're gaining weight and won't even admit they have a problem, there's not much point loving their potential to lose weight because it ain't going to manifest, right?
I may as well say that I don't have a relationship with my girlfriend, but rather with the leprechaun in my girlfriend.
Yes, but you're looking, and this is part of the whole analogy thing that I was talking about yesterday, right?
You're saying that, well, Christ doesn't exist, therefore no aspects of Christ exist.
And my argument is saying, look, you can accept that Christ doesn't exist or didn't exist as a divine being, but if Christ was talking about universality and people find their way through universality through Christ, you can love the universality that they have achieved.
Again, would you rather have the right...
Medicine with the wrong diagnosis or the right diagnosis but somebody gives you the wrong medicine.
Well, you'd rather have the right medicine but the wrong diagnosis.
Universality is the right medicine.
If the wrong diagnosis is it comes from God but you still end up with universality, you can love the universality even if you don't have a great deal of affection for the methodology for how you achieve it.
Now, either Teresa truly loved the poor she attended to or she did not.
She either had a genuine relationship with them or she did not.
Which one is it? I know you've used the Christianity of Evolved in Time, as have mine.
I was raised Catholic, although I do not consider myself a believer any longer.
I'd like to hear another take on Mother Teresa from you.
I'm going through RTI one more time in the last attempt to put my life together.
Oh my God, that sounds rather extreme.
If there's something I can do, let me know.
And I always find it helpful to hear you talk about genuine relationships versus relationships corrupted by moral mythologies.
Thank you. It's a great question, and I appreciate that.
I really do. Look, I don't know.
I know that Christopher Hitchens was not a huge fan of Mother Teresa, but I've never really dug into it that much.
And I mean, it's a different gig, right?
It's a different gig. So this is all the way back to my novel, Just Poor, which you should definitely check out.
It's free, justpoornovel.com.
It's a great book. So, how do you help the poor?
Well, helping the poor requires, you know, if they're starving to death, you've got to give them some food, otherwise they're going to die, right?
So that's helping the poor, and a certain aspect of that has great value, and obviously it's life-saving, although it's very complicated because you don't want to give people too much, otherwise they get trapped in being poor and all of that, right?
You want to pay people for resolving poverty, not for giving stuff to the poor, because the two things can sometimes be quite opposite.
So that's one aspect.
The other is to promote the free market that lifts people out of poverty.
If you look at the number of people who live on a dollar a day, it's fallen massively just over the last couple of decades.
So some people solve poverty in the moment and some people solve the conditions that give rise to poverty in the general.
So she was in helping the poor in the moment.
She wasn't into promoting the free market that lifts people out of poverty.
So, you know, another take on Mother Teresa.
Listen, I'm sure she did some real good.
I'm sure that she did some real good.
And she also was some friends with some pretty horrible dictators.
So she did help the poor in the moment, but she also helped continue the conditions that perpetuate poverty.
So... It's sort of like, you know, if you have a toothache, you want painkillers.
But you don't only want painkillers, right?
You also want to resolve whatever is giving rise to the toothache.
And she was a painkiller kind of person, which is needed as long as you're solving something bigger.
Get the She-Hulk. Oh, this is the woman who's like talking to the guy whose father beat his mother to death like the Hulk, is it?
And she's saying, well, I get catcalled.
And so I control my rage because I get catcalled.
Yeah, well, talk to women who no longer get catcalled.
Ask them if they ever miss it. Let's do one more.
Steph, not really a question, just something I wanted to say.
I've been with the same woman for a long time, but before her I never had much like keeping a woman for long, usually just one night stands.
I'm tall and very attractive.
I was raised mostly by a single mother who always tried to be a friend first and mother never.
Anyway, you had a caller some time ago that said he couldn't keep a woman, and your response was, women don't want to date a lesbian.
Well, some women do. This answers so many questions I had.
I'm a very attractive man with a feminine personality.
One-night stands were never a problem.
I've always got along better with women and never had many male friends.
Anyway, thanks. Yeah, so, I mean, one-night stands are women trying to act like men, which means that they're going to choose more feminine women as a whole, or more feminine men as a whole.
All those hot women in the gym are totally overcompensating, and most are a total mess.
They're very interesting to talk to, but I would not touch them.
Maybe when I was single, but now I learned it is a bad thing to do.
Okay, well, I will stop here.
And thank you guys so much for dropping by on this lovely Sunday on the 28th of August, 2022.
Have yourselves a wonderful, wonderful day.
Please help out the show if you can.
I hugely would appreciate it at freedomain.com forward slash donate.
Don't forget to go to freedomain.locals.com, sign up for your free month of premium access.
Some truly great stuff there.
And love you guys so much.
And I will certainly talk to you Wednesday, if not before then.
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