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Nov. 6, 2022 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

02:05:16

HOW TO LOVE MODERN WOMEN! Freedomain Call In 6 Nov 2022

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	Good morning, good morning, I hope you're doing well.
	Yes, it is Der Steffbottonhead.
	It is the 6th of November 2022.
	Good afternoon, morning, European everyone.
	Hello. I am here for you.
	I have questions, I have answers, I have thoughts, I have emotions.
	And I have a strangely curly armpit hair, but only the former are available for your perusal over the course of this particular Sunday chat.
	So, let us get ourselves going in the most efficient manner, and we have somebody who wishes to talk.
	Matt, my friend. Just unmute, and I'm all yours.
	I'm all ears. Go for it, brother.
	Good morning.
	Send that same energy back to you, buddy.
	I was wondering if we could talk Twitter, social media, the censorship plan that you put out.
	Yes, please do. That's great.
	Yeah, no, I was able to watch the seven-minute video.
	When the man who solved secular ethics puts forward a solution, I'm inclined to listen.
	But I'm wondering if you can help me close a couple of gaps in my understanding.
	So as I understand it, one of the mechanisms that this uses, and I think I threw this in the Discord, but It's a good opportunity to pick your brain.
	One of the mechanisms this relies on is if my account is flagged, and correct me where I get this wrong because I'm obviously not trying to mistake you, then I have the ability to go look for, let's say I call Albonians a bunch of animals, and someone flags my account for that, and I have the ability to go find any other instance where anyone else has also called Group X, filthy animals, and I can say, well, hey, look, you know, we're not being consistent here, so I get some sort of bounty or credit for...
	No, no, hang on, sorry. Let me just back you up a second there.
	Perfect. Okay, so you get flagged for saying Albonians are animals or whatever, right?
	And then what happens is you have a week to find similar posts.
	Now, Understand that most people wouldn't have the skill, the bot, the coding, so this would be an outsource, like there'd be companies competing and you'd pay them 50 bucks and they would find you X number of, right?
	So this would be, I mean, sure, this would be a service that would be provided because it would be such a valuable service.
	So companies would do it, or you could do it yourself, or you could, you know, if it was someone like me, I could say to listeners, hey, do me a solid and send me any posts that match this standard, this, you know, this abuse of the terms of service standard.
	So somehow, whether it's you, a third party who provides this service, or you crowdsource it if you're relatively popular or whatever it is, right?
	So you get all of these posts that are similar to yours.
	And then what happens is you submit these posts and AI would extract the emotionally volatile content, would send it to the moderation party, which would probably be a third party or group of third parties.
	I mean, the best thing to do would be to have five third-party reviewers of ban-worthy texts, and it would have to be like four out of five of them would have to independently agree.
	Because right now, it's just usually one, right?
	Which is corrupt, right?
	So you'd want competition.
	And if, say, four out of five agree that all of this stuff is ban-worthy after the emotional content has been taken out, then either everyone gets banned who has posted something similar to you, or you don't get banned either, right?
	Because it has to be consistent.
	And this way, the rules are applied consistently and rules are not really...
	Rules are rarely abusive if they're applied consistently, right?
	The more consistent the application of the rule, the less abuse there is in the process.
	So... Does that make sort of sense?
	I know that's a little bit more than I was talking about in the sort of short video, but does that sort of make sense about the process?
	Yeah, no, I really appreciate the clarification.
	And let me just try to restate this back to you so you're comfortable that I understand.
	So on an ongoing basis, what you have are third-party companies who would be running full-time searches or kind of crawling the website for instances where people have been banned.
	It's not like we're notifying them.
	They're always kind of on the case, right?
	I think it would be a flagged situation, right?
	Somebody would flag you.
	I don't think you'd want AI sniffing out the site to try and find negative language.
	I think you'd have to... Because the more passive the system, generally the less corrupt it is.
	So if you think about the war on drugs, right?
	So the war on drugs, one of the reasons why it gets so corrupt is because it's not a passive...
	It's an active system.
	In other words, if you go and buy some drugs from someone, then neither of you are complaining.
	So there's no complaint that's brought to the government.
	The government has to actively go out and seek these transactions and monitor people and try and entrap them or put up these stings because nobody's actually complaining.
	It's the same thing with prostitution, right?
	I mean if you go pay for sex, it's a desperately unwise and bad idea.
	But if you go and do it and you get the sex that you want and the prostitute gets the money that she wants or he wants, I suppose, nobody's complaining.
	So the government then has to say.
	So you want the system to be as passive as possible, and so you would wait for complaints.
	And right now, there's no moral hazard for complaints, right?
	Because if you complain about someone, and you know how it works.
	This is a bit more on the left, I think, than on the right.
	The way it works is you get a whole group of people, like, you know, they're all part of some group somewhere on some social media, and they say, you know, this week we're targeting Bob, right?
	And then they find anything that Bob might have said that could be conceived of as objectionable, and then they all flag at the same time, which raises the awareness of the social media company to Bob's posts.
	And then they just review Bob's posts, and either they find them okay or they don't.
	But the people who've flagged never face any negative repercussions if their flagging has turned out to be false or a coordinated attack.
	And so if they say, well, you know, Bob said this objectionable stuff, then if the rule is applied consistently, then they themselves or their friends or their cause could also get caught up in the mess.
	So there's, you know, you need to have some moral hazard for the people flagging.
	And if it turns out that they flagged and their flag is rejected, then they would face a suspension.
	Because if you falsely accuse someone of something, then there has to be some negative repercussions.
	Otherwise everyone will do it all the time.
	Sorry, if that makes sense. Yeah, this is all good stuff.
	So the only part in which the third party enters the sphere at all is the AI abstracts the content and sends it out to third parties who evaluate it independently, stripped of emotional content.
	And that's the first insertion that third parties have in this system.
	Is that right? I don't know who would do the code.
	Right. Right.
	Right. So I don't know exactly who would write the code, but the code would have to be open source and the code would have to be open to review.
	At least that would be the ideal, right?
	If you wanted to make a fair social media company, then you would have the code be open source and people could review it for bias and sort of that.
	And then you'd have to have, I don't know, some consortium that would approve the code or let the code run or whatever, right?
	And you would be able to test the code as well, right?
	So there'd be an input-output website, so anybody would be able to test the code, right?
	So if you say, this particular group of people is really bad, and then you put another group of people in and say they're really bad, if the code says that there's some difference between the two, then you know you have biased code.
	So there would be...
	It would have to be as open source and transparent as possible, if that makes sense.
	But I don't know exactly who would write it and who would be responsible for it, but the more open source it is, and of course you'd need to educate the shareholders that the more open source and the more fair it is, the more their investment is protected, right?
	Because you could really make the case a lot of social media companies have shot their value in the foot or shot the shareholders' value in the foot by having an arbitrary and subjective and corrupted process of moderation.
	So you have to really educate the shareholders on, like, we're doing this to protect your value because arbitrary ban hammers for political purposes are really bad for the value of the stock in the long run.
	And we can sort of see this going on with Twitter at the moment.
	So yes, someone has to write that code.
	If it's open source, they don't think it matters too much.
	And you can look at the source code and you can trace it through and see if there's any bias.
	So I would say that whoever writes it, not as important as that it's open source, if that makes sense.
	Yeah, no, it makes perfect sense.
	I mean, small side note that just occurs to me when you I kind of described just talking to your shareholders about the value of the company.
	If Twitter had been constructed not to be profitable, but in fact to be consumable or absorbable by the state at some point, and then that was sort of the long-term play in lieu of solvency, then they sort of played their cards.
	Well, the major problem with corruption in this situation...
	Social media moderation is always going to be a problem as long as we have this virtually omnipotent state that can transfer trillions of dollars.
	Because the incentive to corrupt the process in pursuit of power is so great because the government has so much power in pursuit.
	So you're always going to be fighting a little bit of a losing battle, like if you think of a really free society, a stateless society, a voluntary society.
	What would be the purpose of having arbitrary banhammers?
	Because elections don't swing on it.
	Trillions of dollars of resource transfers don't swing on it.
	People won't be propagandized to think, well, gosh, this particular group is so bad that suppressing them is like suppressing the Nazis or the fascists or whatever.
	So it's a moral virtue.
	Would you murder Hitler?
	as a young boy, you know, that sort of stuff, right?
	So you wouldn't have the hysteria.
	You wouldn't have the goal of being able to control the government.
	And so as long as there's this amount of centralized power in society, it's going to be really tough.
	I think this is the best I think we could do in this situation.
	But it's going to be kind of a losing battle in the long run until state power is diminished.
	So, yeah, so I think this is the best approach that I can think of.
	Because what's going to happen at the moment, everybody knows this, right?
	So a company becomes successful and they now have influence over the levers of power in society.
	Because they have influence over the levers of power in society, people will come in and attempt to grab those levers at the expense of the profitability and sustainability of the company.
	So if you have a bunch of hard leftists coming into your company, they don't care about profitability because they think the whole company is exploiting everyone anyway.
	What they care about is power.
	And so when you get ideologues coming into the company, they don't care about the long-term sustainability of the company.
	In fact, they're kind of opposed to it on principle.
	What they care about is using the system to get power over others, right?
	There's a famous quote from Lenin that says, the capitalists will sell us the rope by which we hang them.
	And so, recognizing that corruption will destroy the value of the company, and because there's a lot of power in social media at the moment, people who are after power, not profits, will get into the company and will attempt to shift it from profits to power.
	I mean, this is why a company as big and powerful and with as wide a social reach as Twitter is losing the jaw-dropping sum of $4 million a day.
	That's completely impossible unless there are people in there focusing on power over profits.
	And recognizing that as a shareholder, that this is a giant risk in the system as it stands, that people will come in pursuing power at the expense of your profits, then putting in systems to try and ensure profitability by preventing the takeover of the company in pursuit of particularly political power.
	That's the best way to safeguard shareholder value.
	Yeah, yeah, totally agreed.
	I didn't want to, I could pull that thread quite a bit longer, but I wanted to zoom back in on one feature of the moderation.
	So the thing that I, that I'm thinking through is when we talk about, you know, there's some cases where like abstracting the content is really clear.
	Again, when you have sort of Word-for-word duplicates, like, Albonians are gross, and, you know, women are gross, right?
	That's very easy to compare like-to-like when you remove the group name.
	Where I'm struggling is thinking through, like, various gradations of insults that don't, that aren't, that might be harder to equivocate or might be harder to write a program that could effectively equivocate.
	So, like, We obviously as a culture have particular sensitivities around the n-word to the point where it's the only word that's sort of still at Voldemort status.
	You just don't say it.
	And then if you compare that to crackers, well, both of these things are technically slurs for racial groups.
	Would the AI extract that to just a bracket saying racial slur?
	And if so, would that inspire objections because There are different levels of malice intended, not necessarily in that particular example, but as you consider the broad possibility of all examples like that.
	I'm curious how you think through that.
	Well, sure. It would be...
	There was a video the other day I saw.
	I thought she was very funny.
	This black woman was in a sandwich shop and a guy came in and said, do you serve crackers here?
	And of course she said, we serve everybody with a sort of big smile.
	And I actually thought it was pretty funny and charming in its own way.
	But of course if you were to reverse that, it would not be.
	And so I kind of understand that there's different levels of sensitivity for historical reasons and I'm not objecting to any of that.
	So... So you would simply say racial slur was used.
	I know you're going to say, okay, well, can you use racial slurs, yes or no?
	And, you know, there are an unfortunate number of racial slurs that are attached to just about every...
	Race, ethnicity, religion, and so on, right?
	So you can say, okay, are racial slurs allowed?
	And you'd have a database of racial slurs.
	And, you know, if you were to say, you know, this person is a, you know, insert racial slur.
	Okay, well, is that bannable?
	Well, I think according to most terms of service, it would be.
	And so you would have a database of racial slurs, and you would say, this person is a, and then square brackets, racial slur.
	Is that bannable or not? Now, again, some people would say, well, this is or isn't a racial slur.
	And look, you can go nuts on the fuzzy boundaries, right?
	And I'm also perfectly aware that you put this system in place, the first thing people are going to do is try and find a way to evade it.
	They're going to invent different words that mean the same thing, and then that's going to spread as a subculture.
	So it's definitely going to be whack-a-mole a little bit.
	But don't go nuts on the fuzzy edges.
	That will drive you mad. Because then what happens is the focus on the fuzzy edges is the paralysis of the program, right?
	So you can't move forward until every conceivable possible workaround or using this particular, you know, how people use the at symbol instead of the A or, you know, the one instead of the I and so on.
	So yeah, I mean, there's going to be a little bit of whack-a-mole and it's going to be an evolving process.
	But I think if you can get 70 to 80% of this stuff Pretty quickly, you've just done a massive service.
	And, of course, this would use about 1% of the current labor force to do it.
	Now, this doesn't deal with videos, video images.
	It doesn't deal with...
	I guess you could run optical character recognition on GIFs or images and so on.
	But, yeah, it doesn't do videos, so I get all of that.
	But in terms of just straight-up text posts, you could get, I think, easily 70% to 80% of this stuff in a fairly automated way.
	So, well, what about the remaining 20%?
	It's like, well, but the remaining 20% doesn't know that it's not in the 80%.
	So it's just going to diminish it as a whole.
	So if you have a system that gets 80%, you end up with much less than 20%.
	You say, oh, well, we've got 100% now where there's no system in place that's not corrupt in my view, right?
	So you've got 100% now. Well, we get 80%.
	You say, what about the remaining 20%?
	And that's not how it works.
	If you have, let's say you have a highway with no speed limit, and you say, well, gosh, everyone's doing 90 miles an hour, right?
	Or let's say you say 20% of people are doing 90 miles an hour or more, right?
	And then you put in a speed limit of 90 miles an hour or whatever, right?
	Well, that's going to diminish because people don't know if they're going to get caught or not, right?
	So if you get an 80% solution, it quickly becomes a 95% solution because the remaining 20% don't know whether they're going to be caught up in this net or not.
	And so they're going to be more cautious and more civil, more reasonable, more polite, so to speak.
	So, yeah, don't worry about the fuzzy edges, because the people on the fuzzy edges don't know if they're on the fuzzy edges or not.
	And so they will be more cautious anyway.
	And again, you can always invent something that's going to find its way through this, but...
	I mean, if you take a sort of silly analogy, in World War II, they dropped a lot of bombs, and most of the bombs didn't hit their intended targets.
	Does that mean that the bombing campaign was useless or worthless?
	There are, I can't remember, it's some ridiculous number, like 100,000 bullets are manufactured for every bullet that shoots an enemy combatant, right?
	So that's a ridiculous, quote, failure rate.
	Does that mean that there's no point making bullets for your military, right?
	So... You as a rules-based life form and me as a rules-based life form, we think of these things and then we say, aha, but I could think of one that could somehow trickle its way through this mechanism and end up being okay.
	It's like, yes, absolutely.
	And if you have a bulletproof vest, somebody can still shoot you in the face.
	Does that mean you go into...
	I mean, so you do your best and you can – and we can't predict all of the fuzzy boundaries because the fuzzy boundaries will be constantly shifting in response to this particular – whatever we design now prior to the system going in place will be unrecognized.
	Like, the ways to get around it will be unrecognizable.
	In the future, because people will know that the system is in place, and so they will find ways to work around it, and then you'll try and catch those.
	And it's a bit of cat and mouse, of course, in the same way as it is with just about everything in life.
	But if you're going to get the vast majority, you're going to reduce the cost, and you're going to eliminate a significant majority of...
	Political and corrupt decisions on deplatforming, well, that's good, right?
	That's good. I mean, people take medicines that are never 100%.
	You know, people use condoms that aren't 100%.
	But it's a lot better than the alternative, if that makes sense.
	Oh, yeah. No, I mean, comparing this to the existing system, I mean, what's the existing system?
	Who's moderating it now?
	It's some combination of, like, Pfizer...
	George Soros in the Department of Homeland Security, right?
	And it's just being run for purely malicious reasons.
	So, I mean, no question, if you were comparing this system to the existing one, the leaps and bounds, this would be better.
	You know, I'm not trying to clear this up to undermine it.
	Mostly, I just, like I said, you're...
	Well, and, you know, we have to...
	So, the deplatforming occurs usually one of two ways.
	Either it's just arbitrary and final with no appeal, which is obviously unfair.
	Or, it's pretty please.
	Right? That's it. So you would get a notice.
	Oh, this violates our terms of service.
	And they'd be like, I want to appeal it.
	And basically, it's just a pretty please.
	You have no leverage. You have no authority.
	And there are no consequences for a bad decision.
	I mean, you could argue that one of the reasons why Twitter is losing $4 million a day is because they yeeted some of the most interesting people off the platform, you know, so it has consequences.
	And... Yeah, I mean, that's kind of my earlier point.
	I mean, if what they were really doing was...
	Communication power to hand it over to the state, then it would make a lot more sense to you, your interesting people.
	One thing I haven't even heard you touch on that I think actually is another benefit to this is, you know, I don't know if you've ever read the articles about kind of what these content moderation farms look like, because a lot of these are not employees.
	A lot of them are contractors, and they go to these warehouse facilities, and they have to put their phone in a locker, and And they sit all day and do nothing but review the most illicit material imaginable, death threats and pictures of violence and other unimaginables.
	And a lot of these, I mean, these are not good paying jobs.
	You know, these are $15 an hour.
	Whoops, I got a useless degree jobs.
	And, you know, the turnover rate is insane.
	And then you're just taking these like 23 year olds and exposing them.
	To like unbelievably unpleasant things for the nine months they can bear it.
	And then they quit and they go back out into the world, probably totally traumatized, right?
	I mean, if you're a young woman and all you do all day is review claims of like revenge porn, are you going to have...
	How is that going to impact your view of dating, right?
	And the system you're describing, a lot of that...
	You don't have the same conveyor belt of horror, you know, being monitored by a contractor base.
	A lot of that's being evaluated at an algorithmic or AI level.
	And I'm sure some of that's true now.
	But it just, it occurs to me that, you know, this does have one potential additional benefit, which is like, You're reducing the horror factory and the trauma factory of these contractors sitting and doing this stuff manually.
	Well, yeah. I mean, that comes under the question of the innocence of the foot soldiers, right?
	right?
	I mean, if people are involved in an unjust system, making arbitrary decisions that harm society, how innocent or guilty are they in that process?
	How much sympathy would we have for people who are censoring others in the foot soldiers of a fairly unjust, in my view, censorship regime that goes on in these areas?
	And I mean, I agree with you, I don't want these people to be traumatized, but at the same time, they could get other jobs that are distinctly more honorable.
	And so, but again, so there's two things, right?
	So number one, when the state is this powerful, corruption is just going to be something you're going to have to fight forever.
	And number two, of course, when people have these terrible childhoods that are going on around the world, and we have more subtly bad childhoods in the West at the moment, because they're more about abandonment than direct abuse a lot of times.
	So, yeah, you have all of these.
	It's so wild to me that...
	The left in many ways, and the right as well, they complain endlessly about, you know, boy, just people are so susceptible to misinformation, and they just follow these wild conspiracy theories, and they don't think for themselves.
	And it's like, well, both the left and the right support government schools.
	And it's just, you know, if you've got a huge problem in society, everybody just steps over this bleeding corpse of the children's minds in the classrooms of the state.
	You know, it's just wild to me.
	It's like, if you've got a problem with, quote, disinformation, right?
	It means things that go against my prejudice in general.
	That's sort of what it means. But if you say, even if we say the term, well, people have just a massive problem distinguishing truth from falsehood.
	They just can't think for themselves.
	They can't distinguish truth from falsehood.
	Well, that problem is in the schools.
	That problem is in the homes.
	Because if you've got 12 years straight to train people on something and then they're completely incompetent, After this 12-year period and then saying, well, we've just got to play whack-a-mole with their ignorance.
	It's like, no, you've got to fix the 12 years.
	So, again, you're fighting a little bit of a rearguard battle against the power of the state and the propaganda of the school system.
	But I think this would be a good step forward.
	And I really, really dislike...
	I mean, obviously, if you're corrupt, you want to be able to accuse people without consequences.
	And I really think it's so important.
	If you think someone, if you really genuinely believe that someone is doing something wrong and doing something appalling or egregious on social media, then yeah, okay, flag them, report them or whatever, right?
	But there has to be some hazard if it turns out that you're wrong.
	And, you know, as far as that, you know, if there's an appeal for that process, you know, I think we sort of do these things one at a time.
	What you do is if you have a fairly lengthy process, you implement, you know, 70% of it the first round and then you sort of tweak the rest as you go forward.
	Yeah, no, that makes perfect sense.
	I think you would get the occasional person who misplaced their flag.
	There'd be clear... I mean, it's like the pattern of, like, this account exists to flag a thousand things a day.
	Yeah, that's gone, right? You've been unbelievably gracious with your time.
	I don't know if there's anyone else waiting to speak.
	I know I fired probably four or five questions at you.
	No, no, go for it. I mean, it's a great topic, obviously a very important topic.
	So, yeah, hit it.
	So we're about to go through a midterm election where Twitter is not functioning in its intended...
	Purpose is sort of the, you know, one of the more significant distribution arms of propaganda.
	I'm not saying that there are plans to assassinate Daylon, but I would be shocked if there hadn't been a committee assembled to discuss what the logistics of it would be if it came to that.
	I'm curious on kind of, because you mentioned the other day, you know, your expectations, there's a way to go for Twitter to meet your standards of, hey, you've shown enough good faith and will, right?
	They're a good start, but there's a long way to go.
	It looks to me like they're taking this pretty seriously.
	I think they'll throw a bunch of lawfare at him.
	They'll comb through every detail of the gajillion pages of the transaction and they'll probably indict him on something and just see if it sticks.
	I'm curious, do you think Elon survives if this is what this looks like in 2024 and they're trying to fortify Joe Biden's next term?
	Well, I mean, this is real close to politics, which I'm not doing anymore, but I will say this.
	I don't, I mean, I don't think we're at an assassination level in society.
	I think generally what seems to happen is there is just this, and this goes all the way back to McCarthy, right?
	So I kind of know this about Joseph McCarthy.
	I did a whole presentation called The Truth About Joseph McCarthy.
	You can find it at fdrpodcast.com.
	And with Joseph McCarthy, I mean, they didn't assassinate him, right?
	But what they did was they just tried to sort of tangle him up in endless, distracting investigations and lawsuits and all of this kind of stuff.
	And so I think in general, they throw a lot of impediments in your way, and you will be investigated and all of that, and maybe there'll be lawsuits and so on.
	So I think we're sort of in a lawfare situation.
	I don't believe in the direct assassination stuff for people like Elon Musk.
	So I think it'll just be a lot of logs on the road, but it won't be like blowing up the bridge, if that makes sense.
	Yeah, so there's more of the legal realm.
	You mentioned the other day that you've seen a noticeable increase in the quality of curating a smaller social media community.
	And I'll tell you, that has been really consistent with my experience.
	I'm in Several Discord servers, and they're just more fun.
	It's a lot of the fun parts of social media where you're exchanging ideas, you're kind of shitposting a little bit, but it's none of the...
	Walking around on eggshells because there are political commissars in the room.
	I'm curious if you think that if more of the future of social media broadly is kind of a drift away from mass networks into more curated networks.
	Because my experience has been much better.
	And it sounds like you've enjoyed it more.
	So I'm just curious on your thoughts of the trend there.
	Well, I'm a mixed view about all of this.
	And again, this is all under the constraints of the current system, but the internet has spread sanity and insanity in equal measures.
	And the real widening split in society is not between left and right or individualistic and collectivistic.
	The really widening spread in society is between sane and insane.
	So, in the past, let's say you, I mean, I'll make a joke about a guy who called in some years ago who was a furry really into European river otter dress-ups.
	The otter. Yeah, the otter guy, right?
	Now, he's doing much better.
	He's married. He's got kids.
	This is all behind him, so I hope that he doesn't mind that I poke a little bit of fun at this because I think with philosophy and he went to therapy and all kinds of good stuff, so he's He's all better, right?
	He's all better. Now, so there's an example, I think, where, you know, some stability and sanity was kind of brought to people.
	And, of course, I think this show with like a billion views and downloads and all of that, you know, spread some sanity around the world in a very sort of positive and good way.
	Now, so that's the upside of the internet, that you get exposure to rational thinkers that otherwise would have been gatekeepers, right?
	As I was gatekeepers a couple of years ago, right?
	But it would have happened even before I got started.
	Now, that's a good thing, I think.
	Now, the bad thing, of course, is that if you are into European river otter dress-up, and that's your kink, right?
	And let's say that it interferes with your life happiness as a goal, as a whole, like it's a problem, right?
	It's an addiction of some kind.
	Well, in the past, you would have been completely isolated with regards to that, and you would have had to...
	Suppress all of that and it would have to be sort of like some guilty secret you kept around and you wouldn't have a community.
	Because you couldn't find people who were into that, right?
	And so I think in the long run those oddities would be somewhat sanded down.
	Somewhat. I mean, it's hard to say because there's not a lot of data, but definitely some of these kinks were not nearly as prevalent in society before the internet.
	And I think that they got sanded down.
	At some point, it just becomes easier to drop it, in a sense.
	Or you fake not being crazy to the point where eventually not being crazy becomes sort of second nature and you end up somewhat sane.
	Now, of course, with the internet, that's a whole different story.
	Because in the internet, you can go to, I don't know, Reddit slash...
	European river otter fetish and there are like 50 people there.
	And instead of comparing your beliefs to the people around you, you then merge your beliefs with the beliefs of people in niche sub-communities.
	And they reinforce you and I understand and I get it and I'm the same way.
	And you then tribalize your attachments to people with the same beliefs rather than going up against people with different or opposing beliefs.
	So, the fragmentation of social media definitely has its value.
	And in terms of, like, getting quality conversations going, it's wonderful.
	So, for the spread of sanity, it's great.
	But unfortunately, it's also great for the spread of insanity or dysfunction or addiction because...
	Whatever you surround yourself with feels normal to you.
	And if you use the internet, as a lot of people do, to find niche sort of nutty groups that mirror your own beliefs, and this can include the mainstream media as well, then what happens is you're reinforcing the crazy and avoiding the sane.
	So this is the real split, right?
	Some people are using the...
	Capacity of the internet to provide information to become saner and more rational, more reasonable.
	And other people are using it to burrow into subcultures.
	Like, I don't know if you've ever been to a renaissance fair.
	Have you ever done anything like that?
	Or I guess it could be civil war reenactments, that kind of stuff.
	Ren fair, yeah. Yeah, so if you go to a Renaissance fair, you know, there's a whole bell curve of people there, right?
	There are some people who are just there out of curiosity.
	There are some people who... I love the Middle Ages.
	I love the medieval stuff. This goes back to, you know, Dungeons and Dragons, Lord of the Rings, my own sort of early efforts at fiction of the fantasy genre.
	So I love...
	I have a great nostalgia for the Middle Ages, you know, when...
	You got up to five months off a year.
	You didn't have to work in the winter, and you only worked about 20 hours a week.
	You know, in this sort of hyperactive workaholic modern world, it's, you know, a certain amount of nostalgia for a simpler life.
	So there are some people who are just, you know, kind of curious.
	There are some people who like the Middle Ages and want to dip into it.
	And then there are other people who've just gone nuts on medievalism, like genuinely nuts.
	on medievalism and you know they've done body modifications and those people can have their entire subculture.
	Their entire subculture. Or if you look at Dungeons& Dragons.
	So Dungeons& Dragons is a fun game.
	And I don't obviously begrudge anybody who plays it as an adult.
	But in general, it's kind of a teen thing.
	Because it's very time consuming.
	And that's a teen thing. And then what happens is you move on.
	Now, of course, in my group, we played Dungeons& Dragons.
	I was maybe 13.
	And I played to about maybe 16.
	And then went to discos and discovered dated girls and all that kind of stuff.
	But of course, if you are still into Dungeons& Dragons, you can now play online, and so your friend group falling away doesn't, in a sense, force you to try new things, to do other things.
	One of the extended adolescence thing is that you can be online and you're not maturing with your peer group who are kind of pulling you in different directions and challenging the eternal adolescence that we're all tempted by.
	But instead, you can just go to some, you know, online forum or local place and you can live that extended adolescence either by being with people who are just like yourself or by hanging around younger people without necessarily telling them how old you are and you don't have the same chafing that sands you into an adult, right? So we're all born kind of with...
	Well, we certainly have a lot of odd ideas and temptations and so on, and being around people who are progressing in life tends to help you.
	Being around people who are getting educated, whether self or formal, tends to help you get educated, and as the various stages in life fall away, you end up with no one to play with, right?
	I mean, I remember being in Camp Bolton many years ago when I was in my early teens.
	I was sort of dumped there in a sense for the whole summer, but I really liked it in many ways.
	And wanting to, like, I got some broom handles and wanted to do sword fighting with people.
	And there was a kid who was like, aren't you a bit old for that?
	And of course, you know, in a way, it's kind of right.
	But I was like, oh, you're never too old to have fun.
	It's kind of a bit of a lame response.
	But this is at the same time that the women were wolf whistling me because I was on the swim team and, you know, was really buff and good looking and all that.
	So, you know, maybe a little less sword fighting, a little bit more chatting with ladies would be the thing.
	I remember at that camp, this is one of the first times I had slow dances with a girl.
	And I got the sort of There's always the queen and the king of whatever social circle you were in high school, or in this case it was the camp.
	And I was not the king of the camp, but I definitely got the queen of the camp to dance with me, and a friend of mine came by and elbowed me really hard in the side of the leg, and I kind of went down like a listing pirate ship because he was, I guess, kind of jealous and all of that.
	Kind of funny in hindsight, not so funny at the time, because I had to sort of stagger and try and keep my, you know, 13-year-old dignity while dancing with a girl far beyond my capacity to retain.
	So, yeah, I think that the specialized communities are great, but we are balkanizing.
	Like, as a society, we're just balkanizing.
	And some of those places are places you want to be, like Sane Rational Conversations.
	And other of those places are places where the crazy has overwhelmed anyone's capacity or desire to infiltrate and make more sane.
	And so you could see that some of the people at the Renaissance Fair, yeah, just they've fallen over.
	And you know that they found each other and reinforced each other and nobody's pushing back against these things.
	So when you see the growth of various dysfunctions in society, I see balkanization.
	We're supposed to have this Esperanto language of shared values, shared reasons, and shared critical thinking, but that's kind of fallen by the wayside, and I think people fall down some pretty deep rabbit holes.
	And if the rabbit hole happens to be reason and evidence, good.
	If it happens to be Crazy and subjective, bad, and society used to rescue you by, in a sense, you being isolated with your crazy beliefs, and it doesn't really have much capacity to do that anymore because you can find your own tribe, and everything's just getting dialed up to 11, right? The sane is getting dialed up to 11, which is good, but the crazy is also getting dialed up to 11, which is, I think, the real split that's happening in society.
	A quick underscore of the plug for The Truth About McCarthy.
	That series was terrific. I actually watched that because of a comment you once made to Dr.
	Duke Pesta, where at the outset of the interview, you both acknowledged that the real problem in the West was the rise of global communism and the reincarnation.
	And I heard that and I went, geez, that doesn't sound familiar or doesn't sound right.
	And then I ended up watching The Truth About McCarthy.
	Joseph McCarthy in that series was mind-blowing.
	That was so good. But it's a great normie test, right?
	And you see people on the right still talking about, oh, it's just McCarthyism, like it's some sort of witch hunt.
	And it's like, no, no, no, McCarthy was even more right than he knew.
	Right. Yeah, that's true. Doomed to stand by watching helplessly while everyone else repeats it.
	But yeah, so it is a narrative that serves power.
	The whole History of Philosophy series, one of the themes that I'm really working on is there's no objective history of philosophy.
	I mean, why is one philosopher prominent and one philosopher not prominent?
	Why do you know about Jeremy Bentham but you don't know about Lysandra Spooner?
	Well, because Jeremy Bentham served power and Lysandra Spooner did not serve power.
	Then quite the opposite. So it's not an objective.
	We think history, you know, and it's just not.
	It's just selected narratives that serve power as a whole.
	Or, yes, an old Norm MacDonald joke.
	It's just incredible how every single conflict the good guys have always won.
	Isn't that amazing? What are the odds?
	What are the odds? All right.
	Any other thoughts about us?
	Before I let you get on to some other callers, I just want to mention to the kind gentleman who is the caller you referenced, the Otter gentleman.
	I snickered a little bit. I don't want you to listen to this and think that viewers aren't sympathetic.
	I think the work you've done is amazing, and I'm glad that you were part of the community, and I benefited from hearing that call.
	So I just want that out there in case the gentleman listens to the call.
	But thank you so much for being so gracious with your time, Steph.
	Wonderful thoughts. Thank you. Well, before we go into the big sleep, I want to hear the cry of the butterfly.
	I'm doomed because I'm listening to a biography of Jim Morrison at the moment, so I'm doomed to have shreds of dwarf song going through my head.
	That stuff is really a brain virus.
	It's really quite remarkable. Thanks for the call.
	I appreciate it, and I'm sure that the fellow who was doing the River Otter stuff is also having a bit of a cackle about his history as well.
	All right. Spartan, you are on, my friend.
	I am happy to hear you.
	You're just going to need to unmute yourself.
	Go for it. No, I can't hear you yet, brother.
	Yeah, I can't turn my volume up because I want to blast my ears in case you come through.
	Spartan, my friend, you have unmuted, but I cannot hear you.
	No, nothing yet.
	Just three little dots up there.
	Matt, did you want to come back?
	Was that you?
	Matt, I'm not sure if this is the same Matt.
	It might be. You did have a request to talk?
	No? Okay, we will move on to Sabrina, a.k.a.
	the Teenage Witch. You are on.
	Sabrina, if you just want to unmute yourself, then I'm happy to hear.
	Oh, Sabrina.
	Hi, Stefan.
	Can you hear me? Yes, there you go.
	Yes, I can. How are you doing? Good.
	So, I'm getting married in six days, and I was just wondering if you had any advice for the early stages of marriage and preparing to have kids?
	Well, I can't give you any advice before I say congratulations.
	How thrilling. How exciting.
	What a blast. Marriage is...
	I mean, the marriage day is just absolutely, absolutely wonderful.
	Absolutely fantastic. It was...
	I mean, I would say it was one of the greatest days of my life because that's to say that the best part of my marriage was 20 years ago, but it was a fantastic day.
	Because I'm going to go out on a limb here and assume that you know it's the right person and that you don't have any hesitations or reservations and all of this sort of stuff.
	So I am...
	I'm perfectly thrilled for you.
	Marriage is... Just about the greatest institution known to man, God, or beast, and I'm thrilled that you're participating in it.
	So I just wanted to mention that up front.
	Congratulations, congratulations. Can you tell me a little bit about the history of the relationship?
	Not because I like to gossip, but just because I like to gossip.
	Yeah, well, we started dating actually eight years ago in high school.
	Now we're in our mid-20s and have a house together, and we're just ready to make that next step.
	Eight years? Eight years, yeah.
	It's a lot. Do you both believe that you're immortal?
	Are you vampires? Have you made a deal with the devil?
	Have you exchanged your blood for some sort of eternal ichor?
	Is there eight years?
	That's unusual. Yeah, well, we started dating when we were 16, 17, so we were quite young, and I guess that's not really an excuse, but...
	It's a bit of a reason, right?
	It'd be one thing if you were, you know, 22 to 30 or something, but yeah, it's a reason.
	I can sort of understand that. And how long have you been engaged for?
	About a year. Okay, so that's not some extendo engagement.
	Okay. All right. And do you have any concerns or hesitations that I can address in terms of any relationship hiccups that you might have had in the past?
	Well, I guess the biggest concern would be communication.
	We're good at dealing with conflict when it comes up, but it seems like we're not good at like foreseeing what conflicts come up, if that makes sense.
	So I don't know, just a way to prepare for like any big conflicts that might come up.
	And I'm not sure if that makes sense.
	No, it makes perfect sense. I was just talking about this with my daughter last night about how at some point in your life, some meteor is going to hit.
	Some asteroid is just going to smash into your life.
	It could be sickness. It could be the death of a loved one.
	I mean, hopefully she'll mourn when I die and so on.
	And it is important to just recognize that you're going to have to have some robustness in life because it's going to punch you down to the ground at times.
	And, you know, the goal, of course, is to keep those times to a relative minimum, but it's definitely going to happen.
	So, yeah, you are going to face challenges.
	You are going to face issues.
	You know, people have miscarriages.
	You're young, but I'm sure as you get older, your parents will get older.
	Occasional random health issues or, you know, a friend of mine bought a place and the balcony had not been properly waterproofed.
	And he ended up in, you know, some weird fight with the builder about all of this stuff.
	Was it under warranty or not?
	And so, yeah, there's just things that are going to just crop up and happen.
	And so conflict is generally solved when you get to the root cause.
	So, again, don't have to tell me anything you don't want to, and you can just give me it in the most general terms, but what is a conflict that happened relatively recently that you can think of?
	So, our main conflict comes from...
	He had a much rougher childhood than I did in terms of abuse and how his parents treated him, so he comes to a lot of roadblocks when it comes to, like...
	Being really moody and maybe blowing up when something goes wrong.
	So that's the biggest issue that we're dealing with.
	Like, it's so easy to talk about it when we're not in the moment.
	But yeah, I guess the root issue would be like how he was treated as a child, but it's hard to deal with it in the moment.
	And has he had conversations with his parents where he discusses his childhood and the issues and complaints that he's had?
	Yeah, they don't really listen or take any responsibility.
	And what has happened as a result of those conversations with his relationship?
	We don't talk to his parents at all anymore.
	They're not a part of our lives.
	I'm sorry to hear that, but I can certainly understand the decision.
	And when did these conversations happen?
	Over a year ago, when we bought the house and his father was helping work on the house, that's when the relationship ended, basically, between him and his parents.
	Right, right. So it's one thing to get abusive people out of your life.
	It's quite another thing to get them out of your head.
	And again, I say this with some significant, I could say this with some, I just, I had a dream this morning.
	I had one of these, I'm working on a new book and it's more personal than my last one.
	So, you know, it's kicking up all kinds of bodies in its wake.
	And I had a dream last night about a sort of close family member I haven't really thought of in quite a while and I haven't dreamed of in quite a while but it's just one of these nights where you just you're awake for you know 15 minutes and then you have some wild dream for an hour or two and then you're awake for 15 but it's just one of these like massive just like fast-cut dream nights of like when you wake up and it's like what what kind of tumbleweed was I in like what sort of dryer was I stuck in tumbling around my unconscious all night?
	So, yeah, it's one thing to get them out of your life.
	It's another thing to get them out of your head.
	So, one of the things that I think is important in a marriage is...
	So, you're just marrying each other, right?
	It's not polygamy or multiple wives, multiple husbands, right?
	That's correct. I'm just kidding.
	Of course, I know that's the case.
	But monogamy is really a serious concept.
	Yeah. So everyone thinks it's like, well, you know, obviously I'm just married to my husband and he's just married to me, so that's monogamy.
	And it's like, no, no, no, no, that's not monogamy.
	That's not monogamy.
	Monogamy is when my wife is married to me and not me plus my mother and other family members and other people who harmed me and other people who traumatized me and other people who tripped me up and other people who are dedicated to the destruction of my marriage because of their own selfishness when she's just married to me.
	So it sounds like if your husband's parents are still in his head tripping up the marriage, you have not achieved monogamy as yet.
	Because monogamy is when it's like, hey, love you, love you.
	When you're reacting to me like I'm your mom, then that's not you.
	That's your mom running things. Or if, you know, you get involved in some house repair thing and you get really tense and hostile, like for many, many young boys, there's nothing more frightening than holding the flashlight for their father, right?
	Because what always happens? Not that way!
	Turn it this way! No, hold it!
	There's tension, right?
	Yeah, that actually became an inside joke between us because I have to hold the light a lot when he works on stuff and that seems to be when things happen.
	God help you, right? I remember many years ago listening to this woman who is a comedian and she said, Yeah, my father, man, he likes things done a certain way.
	If you ever want to, like, torture my father, what you do is you staple him to a wall and you fold up a map right there in front of him the wrong way!
	Against the crease! And yeah, there's some people who are just like that and it's pretty exhausting and it's pretty brutal.
	So... So monogamy is when your husband's parents aren't constantly interfering in your relationship.
	Now, you say, well, they're not there physically, but if they're there psychologically, you're still in a polygamous relationship.
	And monogamy is when it's just you and the other person.
	And so if you can become adept at saying, oh, oh, mom's come, mom's come, mom's here, right?
	And listen, the reason I say all of this is also because one of the byproducts of the I guess, at this point, hundreds and hundreds of different role plays that I've done with people often involving their parents.
	I mean, how good are people at imitating their parents?
	Yeah, amazing.
	I mean, these are people without acting training, without improv training, and they're just like, boom, inhabited.
	I would actually, you know, one day, maybe in my dotage, I'll fund a study where you have...
	A conversation with a mother, right?
	You have a conversation with a mother and then you map what's going on in her brain.
	And then what you do is you bring her son in or her daughter and then you have the daughter, let's say, imitate her mother answering the same questions and just see how much of the same brain lights up.
	Like you can see the ghost in the machine.
	You can see the imprint of the personality in the brain.
	And so monogamy is when it's you and your husband and it's him and you.
	If your husband's parents are coming in and smashing up things and causing problems and so on, I think one of the things I would suggest is there are going to be signs of that.
	There's usually a change in facial expressions.
	There's a change in eye contact.
	There's a change sometimes in body posture or body language.
	you probably have a sense, right, of when Banshee Mom is screaming in to possess your husband.
	I'm not trying to say this in any prejudicial way.
	Actually, that's totally prejudicial, so we'll just go with that, right?
	So you probably have a sense of when he's, in a sense, being possessed by the past.
	And it's harder for him, so it may be more incumbent upon you to point out that, hey, we've gone on this hike and a tree branch seems to have fallen on you and pinned you on the ground, so let me help you lift that tree branch up, right?
	So you can say, okay, who am I talking to here?
	Is this my husband or my husband's mom?
	I don't know if you can find a way to make it funny, but good humor is often a way of diffusing fear.
	Humor and fear tend to be somewhat...
	Opposites, which is why as people get more scared in society, they find less and less funny because comedy is the opposite of fear in many ways because you can't be afraid and laugh usually at the same time.
	So if you can find a way to sort of positively and proactively point out when your husband's natural personality or your husband-to-be's natural personality is being eclipsed by ghosts of the past, then that can be a good way to preempt these kinds of issues.
	At the bottom of personality possession is usually one sentence.
	Finding that sentence is really tricky.
	Finding that sentence is really tricky.
	So, I don't know, the sentence at the bottom of my sort of parental history is something like, I'm small or I'm unimportant or something like that, right?
	And, oh boy, good thing I didn't have any reaction formation to that, eh?
	Boy, that's self-knowledge 101.
	So, If you feel small or you feel unimportant or unremarkable or something like that, then, you know, there's a fear around that.
	And generally, if you have authenticity, you feel non-existent in the presence of narcissism.
	Because narcissism will only view you as valuable if you have utility.
	And authenticity has no utility to narcissism.
	In fact, authenticity and curiosity and honesty are like the mortal enemies, like sunlight to the vampire, to the narcissist.
	So... If I was surrounded by selfish people growing up, my authenticity made me feel very small.
	And then, of course, my authenticity in the world later made me feel not so small, which is good.
	So the same thing that made me feel small helped me live pretty large.
	I think it's fairly safe to say I lived pretty large over my life.
	So if you can get to the root sentence that's imprinted by your history...
	I mean, I knew a guy growing up, a super good-looking guy, and his whole life he was just, oh, he's so good.
	He's such a handsome boy, such a good-looking baby, and everybody just commented on his looks the whole time to the point where he just didn't really feel like he had any value outside of his looks.
	And yeah, it was tough. It was tough.
	I mean, his actual root language was probably something like, I'm ugly.
	Because if people are constantly commenting on your exterior...
	I never want to look inside.
	It's because they don't like the idea of what's inside.
	You're constantly commenting on someone's exterior.
	It's denigrating what's inside them, right?
	So if you can dig down to the root sentence of your history, that's the way out.
	That's the path out. That's the exit strategy.
	That's the Rita Hayworth poster that gets you out of the dungeon, so to speak.
	And with conflict...
	You have the conflict. The conflict's done.
	But if it comes back in any repetitive fashion, then the conflict is not resolved.
	In other words, the root cause of the conflict has not been dealt with.
	Now, most people, when they've had a conflict, and it's past them, let's say you had an hour or two of conflict, and you're like, whew, okay, let's go out for dinner and talk about something fun.
	And I understand that.
	It makes perfect sense, and it's not productive in the long run.
	So if you have a conflict, and you resolve that conflict in the moment, then, you know, take a break if you want, but you need to return to that conflict when you're calm.
	When your fight or flight is not activated.
	Because when your fight or flight is activated, generally people can't resolve conflicts.
	They can agree to disagree and usually things just simmer back down, but the root cause is not dealt with, right?
	It's, you know, like you've got a bunch of garbage in the backyard, you've got a bunch of rats in there, you can put out a rat trap and you'll get the ones that you can see, but there'll be way more that you can't see that are reproducing like crazy, so you've kind of got to lift up the rubble and, you know, deal with the source, the origin.
	So, yeah, my advice for early in the marriage is think back on your conflicts and when you're both in a sort of calm and positive state of mind, Then say, okay, let's talk about this last conflict.
	And that way you can get used to talking about conflict without the fight or flight.
	Now, I mean, you'll feel some tension revisiting the old conflict and so on, but if you do that, then you're much more likely to get to the root cause of the conflict than you are by just waiting for the next time it happens, having that blow up or that conflict and then tamping it down and wanting to move on and then it comes back a week or two later and it's like, so... Maybe it could be in the next day or whatever, but when you're in a more calm and relaxed state and you have some time, maybe in the car or whatever, right?
	Talk about the conflict and what might be going on at the root.
	You know, it's really, really important.
	If you love someone, don't take their aggression towards you personally.
	It sounds kind of odd, right?
	But if someone's, you know, a husband's a good person, you're a good person, and he's got a tough history.
	So when he's getting tense or he's getting upset or he's getting angry, it's not about you, it's about his past.
	It's not about you, it's about...
	I mean, I view it almost like if I were a doctor treating someone for epilepsy and then they had an epileptic attack and reached out and slapped me on the face purely by...
	By accident. I wouldn't take that personally.
	I wouldn't press charges, right?
	You'd be like, oh, wow, you know, we were trying to deal with something difficult and you lashed out, but, you know, you weren't really...
	You certainly didn't want to hurt me.
	You weren't trying to hurt me. And so if someone you love does something hurtful to you, it's almost always because someone in their past wants to damage your relationship.
	And if you focus your anger on the person who is possessing your partner and making them, in a sense...
	Be destructive for their own selfish purposes, right?
	I mean, if you have a happy marriage, if you have a happy marriage, man, you're a marked man, you're a marked woman, because there are a lot of people out there with unhappy marriages or no marriages, and they don't really want yours to succeed, particularly if your parents have unhappy marriages.
	Then if you have a happy marriage, it's torture to them.
	It's torture to them. Because they've accepted, well, you know what they always say.
	People normalize everything. Oh, well, you know, marriage is a hard work and of course there's a lot of conflict.
	And then they make fun of people who have good marriages.
	Oh, they're just avoiding conflict.
	They're so shallow. They don't have a deal with anything.
	They're just skating the surface. You know, we get down.
	We go down into the muck and the mire and we take care of things and we deal with things and we go down into the dark, colluthian dungeons of our history.
	And of course, they never come back up for error.
	They never deal with anything. So they normalize that all marriages are bad and anyone who has a good marriage is just shallow and stupid and foolish.
	And they will sabotage your marriage.
	Unconsciously or consciously, they will sabotage your marriage.
	Because if you have a genuinely happy marriage, then they've just compromised with misery rather than raise their standards and all of their unhappiness is for nothing.
	You know, how many times have you heard this?
	Oh, marriage relationships are tough.
	You've really got to work at them.
	And it's like, no, no, no, no.
	Your job can be tough.
	You have to work at your job.
	You shouldn't have to work at your marriage.
	Your marriage should be the source of your security, should be the foundation of your joy and your support.
	It shouldn't be something... I mean, of course, you know, you have to work at it from time to time, but I've never really understood these people who are like, you've got to work at these relationships.
	It's like a relationship is there to get you through life with companionship and love and support.
	It's like people who have some crappy used car and they spend more time fixing it and it spends more time in the shop than actually getting them anywhere.
	And they say, well, you know, cars are hard work.
	It's like, no, your car is hard work.
	My car is great.
	Yeah, I take it into maintenance every six months, but my car is fine.
	My car goes where I point it to and works well.
	No, no, no.
	It's like, no, no, no. Your car, not mine.
	Your car is hard work. And, you know, maybe you should get a better car or really fix it up so it doesn't keep breaking or I don't know what, right?
	But so if your husband who loves you is testy or upset or volatile or whatever, recognize that as an outside influence that's come into the marriage that wishes to harm the marriage in order to serve the needs of people who can't admit they made bad decisions.
	Don't take it personally. Now, of course, the person who comes in to possess your husband and turn him against you wants you to take it personally and wants you to fight your husband as if he's that person.
	In a sense, you're treating an epileptic patient and the epileptic patient wacks you in the face and they want you to think, oh, wow, we're sparring now, man.
	We're going to fight now. I'm going to hit you back.
	It's like, no, no, no, that's not the right approach.
	So yeah, just work to get to the root language of the suffering.
	Work to understand the sabotage.
	And if you get abusive people out of your life, that's not the end, man.
	That's a good start. It's not the end.
	Not the end at all. There's still a process of getting them out of your head, getting them out of your relationship, and really, really focus on monogamy, you and your husband.
	So, yeah, that's my advice for the beginning of the marriage.
	Any thoughts, comments?
	Happy to hear. That's really helpful, and what you said about the root sentence is really interesting.
	I can't figure out what it is, but it's something I definitely want to talk with them about and try to figure it out.
	So, thank you. Oh, you're welcome.
	Listen, if you guys want to call in, I'm obviously happy to chat about that.
	I want everyone to have as joyful and happy a marriage as possible.
	And yeah, the root sentence thing is really important because we think everything's so complicated down there.
	And it's not complicated.
	It's just camouflaged. Like everything down at the root of our being is not this just giant, massive complication of impenetrable Gordian knot, lower intestine nonsense.
	It sort of boils down to...
	Like think of a...
	What's the shape? I don't know.
	A diamond, you know?
	It's like you've got a pyramid facing up and then a pyramid facing down, right?
	So you've got a double diamond, right?
	Pyramid facing up, a pyramid facing down.
	So facing up, you get this point of contention, right?
	Some conflict in the moment.
	Now you start to go down. It seems to get wider and wider and more complicated.
	And then you keep going down.
	It gets narrower and narrower and ends up with a single point, and that point is the sentence at the bottom.
	So a lot of people, they go down and say, oh my gosh, this is getting more and more complicated.
	But you keep going, and it gets simpler and simpler.
	It comes down to one sentence. One sentence.
	And if you get that sentence, you can undo the whole structure and be yourself.
	So yeah, if you guys want to call in, I'm certainly happy.
	But congratulations on your marriage.
	It is a wonderful, joyous, blessed institution.
	And I hope that you guys have a wonderful time, as I'm sure you will, with the help of philosophy and self-knowledge and all those kinds of good things.
	And if there's anything I can do, just email me, callinatfreedomain.com.
	This is true for everyone out there, callinatfreedomain.com.
	And I've got a call coming up tomorrow.
	That's just going to blow everyone's mind.
	But yeah, call in at freedomain.com.
	Send me an email and I'll be happy to put you in the queue for a call-in completely free of charge.
	So thank you very much and have yourself a wonderful marriage and a wonderful wedding day, of course.
	And I will now bring up, we will try again.
	Should we try again? Should we try Spartan?
	I feel that we will...
	Testing, testing. There you are.
	Oh my God, thank you so much.
	This was a quite powerful, the last, I guess, speech, rant.
	I'm not sure what you would call it. I've got a hard question, though.
	So are you ready? Yes.
	All right. So in the past...
	Traditional relationships had, I guess, trade-offs.
	So, like, the men would sacrifice their security, the women would sacrifice their chastity and youth.
	In modern relationships, that's not really a thing anymore.
	Usually, girls usually aren't, I guess, like, you're not the first, I guess, their first choice in this case.
	And they don't usually come up with, I guess, the domestic skills or even...
	Partial competence or household running?
	It's a different deal, even for guys that would, I guess, qualify.
	In this new, I guess, market, what would you say are the trade-offs that the new modern couple has?
	What, I guess, what trade?
	What's the trade-off? So before we used to get, I guess, chastity, for all our hard work and effort, we used to get, I guess, I'll say it again, chastity, homemaking, femininity, like that stuff we used to get.
	Now we don't really get that stuff anymore.
	So what do we pursue?
	Why should we strive?
	What do we strive for? Well, what's the purpose of a relationship, a romantic relationship for you?
	I would assume it's kids and, I guess, community.
	Well, no, because you can have...
	It has to be the one thing that's specific to that, right?
	You can have community without romance.
	Oh, I guess...
	Kids?
	It's... So I guess it would be motherhood and kids and child raising, but the skills aren't...
	It's not the same as what it was, basically, is what I'm trying to say.
	No, I agree with you.
	It's not the same as it was.
	But are we going to say that that agreement is around having and raising children?
	Yes, yes. Yes.
	Okay, so what would you want from a woman in the having and raising of children?
	Femininity, home raising, competence.
	I guess these are abstracts.
	Can you give me an example?
	Something I can...
	Well, I mean, the physical basic one in the having and raising of children for a man...
	Is that the woman bear your children and not someone else's and pass them off as yours, right?
	Well, of course, but this...
	I'll let you finish the argument.
	Well, so you would need monogamy, you would need loyalty, you would need honesty in order to trust the woman, right?
	It's mama's baby, it's daddy's maybe, right?
	So the first thing that you would need is a woman who was able to restrain her own impulses and For lust.
	Because as men, we don't generally understand how easy it is.
	Or at least as straight men, we generally don't understand how easy it is for women to have sex.
	It's incomprehensible to us.
	And you've seen these studies.
	Some attractive woman goes up to a bunch of guys in a bar or wherever, a hotel lobby, and says, hey, let's go up to my room and have sex.
	And the majority of men...
	Sounds great, right? And, you know, when the other thing happens, an attractive man goes up to women, they're all like, what are you, creep?
	You crazy? It doesn't really matter how attractive he is.
	So we don't understand.
	We just don't grok.
	We don't get deep down. I mean, I had gay roommates when I was in college, and I found it quite fascinating listening to stories of sort of the gay community and so on.
	And, yeah, my gay roommates, they met, they had sex, then they met, introduced themselves, and then they ended up going on a date.
	And I remember one of my gay roommates telling me that he ended up having sex with a guy who called the wrong number.
	Right? So it was the wrong number.
	And they ended up meeting up for sex.
	Now, I, you know, I was not the most unattractive young man in the known universe, but I cannot conceive of, in my wildest dreams, or nightmares, I suppose, I cannot conceive of the idea that a woman would call me up with the wrong number, and we would end up making the peace with you guys.
	Yeah, I don't think that's...
	So, we don't...
	We don't get it.
	We can vaguely think of it, but we...
	We don't get that sex is as easy for women as pornography is for men, right?
	We just don't get that.
	So obviously you need a woman with loyalty, with restraint, with virtues, honesty, and commitment, and somebody who takes her vow seriously.
	I mean basically you need a lot of integrity from a woman.
	And of course, look, the woman needs it from the man as well.
	I get all of that, right? But the man can share his resources with others without breaking the monogamy, but the woman can't share her fertility with others without breaking the monogamy, right?
	So a man can give a lot of money to his wife and children, and he can also give money to his aging mother.
	So he can spread his resources out without breaking monogamy.
	Now, if he gives it to his mistress, that's a different matter.
	But a woman can't spread her fertility without breaking the monogamy and so on, right?
	So, yeah, you need a lot of, you know, virtues and qualities.
	Now, you can say things like femininity, but if you say things like femininity, then you're saying that it's, you know, that's a fairly subjective standard.
	I mean, femininity...
	So, one of the things that really helped me with understanding women was just the wild divergence between my mother and my aunts.
	Ah, it's incredible, right?
	So, my mother is almost like a caricature of femininity, right?
	Hyper-manipulative and hyper-obsessed with appearance and able to change on a dime based on her whims.
	She was really like a Blanche Dubois...
	Caricature of femininity.
	A cartoon character. Wildly exaggerated.
	But I would go and spend summers when I was younger in Ireland with my aunts.
	And my aunts were solid, hardworking, sensible women.
	They put a little bit of makeup on them when they went to church, but they were raising kids, they were running households, they had charity drives, they did community work, they were robust and strong and still women and loved by their husbands.
	And so I saw both, I don't know, hysterical, caricatured hyper femininity, and I saw robust, sensible, hardworking, solid, good women.
	And so what does femininity mean?
	I mean, you could say it includes both, but they're, in a sense, kind of opposites.
	So, I would try and steer clear of stuff that's more subjective and just look for the really objective works.
	Virtue. So, you need a woman who's hardworking.
	Like, you need a woman who's hardworking.
	So, there's a trend.
	It's a bit of a trend, right?
	Where men shoot these little short videos of them imitating their girlfriends.
	And, oh my god, again, I know that these are not exactly random samples or anything like that, but this is the men imitating their girlfriend.
	So I saw one of a man imitating his girlfriend, and he says, oh, let's get up and make some breakfast.
	And then he imitates her because she immediately says, oh, let's go to Starbucks.
	And then they go to Starbucks, and then he imitates her drink order.
	You know, I want a pumpkin spice latte with extra cinnamon and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, right?
	Yes. And if they're out of it, he then imitates her whining.
	Well, why would they be out of their most popular drink?
	I mean, it's their most popular, you know, just this sort of whining.
	And he knows exactly what she's going to say, right?
	So then there's another guy who imitates his girlfriend, and he says, what do you want to do today?
	She says, let's go to Target.
	And then they go to Target, and she's like, let's buy this archway.
	It's so cool.
	Yeah. That sounds exhausting.
	Yeah, and he says, what? This is $300.
	And then he imitates her saying, oh, please!
	And then they end up buying it, bringing it home.
	And then after they finish setting it up, she turns to him and he imitates her saying, I love you.
	And it's just like, you're dating toddlers.
	Like, I don't even know what to say.
	Like, you're dating children in adult bodies.
	I don't even know what that is.
	And that's sort of an insult to children.
	So, that's exhausting and debilitating and these women are lazy because what they do is they whine and they complain, right?
	I mean, so the idea that you would wake up and not make yourself breakfast but always want to go to Starbucks...
	It's completely insane.
	And I think I get it that if there weren't women in the planet, there'd be no Starbucks at all.
	I don't know what it is with women in Starbucks.
	I have no idea. It's like mother's milk to them for babies.
	I don't know what their obsession is.
	This Starbucks fetish is just completely bizarre.
	Is he like the father they never had who provides things for them?
	They feel special. I mean, there's this word that works with women that doesn't work with men called pampered.
	I remember some woman telling me, like, she got this phone call.
	It's like, you know, we'll treat you to an in-home pampering.
	And apparently being pampered is just, I don't know, makes you a queen or makes you an Antoinette or something like that.
	Let them eat brioche or whatever. But I can't imagine, like, as a dude, somebody calling me up, I'm going to treat you to an in-home pampering.
	It's like, I assume that you're just going to roofie me and take my stuff.
	That's all that I would get out of that.
	But for women, apparently this in-home pampering stuff is like a big deal.
	And being pampered, just, this is the spas, right?
	This is like, we're going to pamper you all day.
	And it's like, I don't need to be pampered if I, I'm an adult.
	I don't need to be pampered.
	I'm an adult.
	I don't need anyone to change my diaper because I'm an adult.
	It just seems odd that women just have this, I don't know, a lot of women just have this fetish for being taken care of and pampered and.
	And for them to have to do work is lower status.
	And maybe it comes from this royalty stuff or aristocratic stuff or wealthy women stuff.
	If you're wealthy enough, then you shouldn't have to work.
	And if you've got a high status enough husband, then you shouldn't have to work.
	But a woman who doesn't work is...
	I mean, it's just like a vampire hanging off your neck.
	Like a woman who's not going to work.
	Because if she's not going to work, you're paying for sex.
	Because she's not producing anything productive in your life.
	She's not making your life easier.
	She's not, you know, I don't know, doing your taxes or whatever, right?
	She's not getting groceries.
	She's not, you know, whatever, getting the repairman to come if she's home.
	And these are all things, of course, the man can do and you should be working as well.
	But yeah, if you're out there making the money and you've just got some stay-at-home Girl child who, you know, puts her boobs on a shelf and whines so she gets stuff, that's, I mean, that's just terrible.
	It's a terrible relationship and it's not even a relationship really, it's just a mutual exploitation and it turns her into kind of soft prostitute, right?
	The softitude is a pretty important thing where it's like not direct exchange of money for sex, like you don't leave a hundred bucks on the nightstand, but the softitude is the woman who doesn't really provide any value other than prettiness, status and sex, sexual access and gets resources in return.
	And for a woman to mine her sexuality for resources rather than for her children, right?
	The woman's sexuality and the man's higher sex drive and all of that is for resources to flow to the children.
	It's not for the woman to capture all of those resources.
	You know, she's a custodian of the resources.
	They're supposed to pass through her and get to the kid.
	Like, if you've got some kid and there's a lawyer in charge of his wealth, and the lawyer takes all the money, that would be a kind of fraud and theft.
	And it's the same thing when a woman takes resources for her sexuality rather than using the man's additional less than extra resources to build a foundation in which to raise the children.
	Well, it's predatory, it's selfish, and exploitive.
	Yeah, so I think as far as what you want to exchange...
	You want a hardworking woman.
	If you're a hardworking guy, I mean, if you're a lazy guy, you probably won't get much of any woman at all because women do respond to labor and resources.
	So, yeah, you want a hardworking woman and you want a woman who has integrity and virtue.
	And you also have to understand that in a romantic relationship, to some degree, to some degree, there's this platonic ideal of love.
	Your girlfriend should just love you for who you are and no matter what.
	And it's like, but that's not what love is for.
	Love is our biochemical pair bonding for the sake of raising children.
	And what that means is that If you're not providing resources, love won't stick.
	Oh, but I just want to be loved for who I am, regardless of what I do.
	It's like, no, no, no, that's for babies.
	Babies should be loved for who they are, regardless of what they do.
	Toddlers should be loved for who they are, regardless of what they do.
	But we as adults, we never can, nor should we even think of that.
	It's a dangerous, deadly fantasy to be loved for who we are, rather than what we do.
	The idea that there's some platonic godhead shining Michelangelo statue within you that everyone has to gaze at and worship and kneel before no matter what you do as an actual person is to say that love is platonic, not empirical.
	But love has not been evolved.
	Love has not evolved to be platonic.
	Love has evolved to be relentlessly empirical because love is our pair-bonding mechanism by which we build the foundation to raise children.
	In other words, if our ancestors had tried to love the person just For themselves, we wouldn't be here because we wouldn't have survived.
	So yes, I mean, in the manosphere, it's like, well, women only love you for resources.
	It's like, hello, that's why we're here.
	Of course they do. And this is why for a woman to withhold, assuming no medical issues or whatever, for a woman to simply withhold sex within a relationship is disastrous.
	It is as bad for the relationship as the woman not working.
	And the man withholding all the money.
	The man's making money, he's just not giving any to his wife and children.
	Well, that would be grounds for divorce, right?
	Failure to provide. And it's worse if he has the money, but won't provide it.
	The woman has the capacity to have sex, but won't have sex with the man.
	It's as much a betrayal as...
	It's the same as an affair.
	In fact, it's worse than an affair.
	Because if the man's having an affair, the woman can still at least have sex with him.
	But if the woman freezes the man out sexually, then he has nowhere to go, right?
	Nothing. There's nowhere to go.
	So, anyway, look, I'm not saying that women should have sex when they don't want to at all.
	Of course not, right? That's horrible.
	What I am saying, though, is that if there's a barrier to sexual pleasure, that you really work to solve it and figure it out and, you know, get back on the horse, so to speak.
	But yeah, women should not have sex with men when they don't want to.
	Men should not have sex in the theoretical case that, you know, some men doesn't want to have sex with a woman one day.
	So, yeah, you've got to have these basic virtues and you have to recognize that, yes, she's going to love you in part, in large part, because you provide things.
	And you will love her because she provides children and is a good mother.
	So what you look for is competence in motherhood.
	Now, she looks for competence in fatherhood, but competence in fatherhood has a lot to do with not being there.
	Because competence in fatherhood is to provide and protect, which means that you've got to be out there getting the government cheddar or whatever cheddar you're getting to bring it home to feed your kids.
	So a father's commitment to the family is often defined by absence and a mother's commitment to the family is often defined or generally defined by presence.
	So yeah, sorry, she's going to love you for not being there and you're going to love her for being there.
	And I don't know, people get this weird thing like that's somehow bad.
	Oh, you know, women have hypergamy.
	It's like, yeah, do you like having a big brain?
	Do you like being the apex predator?
	You know, the only reason we have a big brain and we run the world is because women have hypergamy so you're complaining about the very thing That makes you who you are.
	We are the product of women's hypergamy.
	Yes, women want to marry up.
	You find a woman with a master's degree, she ain't going to marry someone with high school, which is...
	Again, what was it?
	Janet Heimlich was on my show many years ago.
	We were talking about this. She was the daughter of the guy who came up with the Heimlich maneuver.
	She was talking about how the higher education, women getting more educated, more skilled, it just means that there's fewer and fewer men that they are willing to settle for.
	One of the ways that you lower the birth rate is hyper-educate the women to the point where they won't marry anybody lower than they are.
	And that, of course, if you're a highly educated, high-status, high-income male, you absolutely want a lot of women to be highly educated because then you're competing with much fewer men, right?
	So the people who sort of run the culture, run the system, a lot of whom are men, they absolutely are going to encourage women to get educated because then the women are going to be disproportionately educated.
	Targeting the men and they become rock stars because they're the 3% of men that women have wanted.
	Whereas if women become less formally educated, it doesn't mean uneducated because you can always read, right?
	Most of my education came from reading and thinking and talking and interviewing rather than some sort of formal thing from a teacher.
	I can barely remember anything that any of my teachers said that was ever of any use.
	So I'm not talking about being uneducated, but just not formally educated because that's the high-water mark that women don't descend from.
	So, yeah, I mean, the best way to turn high-status men into rock stars is to yank up the status of women to the point where they don't look down, only look up, and there's only, like, three guys left.
	They get to be, like, rock star porn gods to these women.
	So, again, it's just another dating and mating strategy for high-status men.
	It's nothing to do with, oh, we want women to be this, that, or the other, right?
	So... Yeah, so just look for those particular qualities.
	But if you want those qualities, like if you want quality, you have to offer quality.
	So a lot of men will complain that they can't get high-quality women, and the best way to get high-quality women is to become a high-quality man.
	And in the modern world, of course, a lot of men think, well, I just go to the gym, I get abs, you know, and it's like, well...
	No. To a high-quality woman, abs are a sign that you don't understand what a high-quality woman is looking for.
	A high-quality woman is not looking for abs.
	I'm not saying she'd say no to abs, but abs are like two hours a day in the gym.
	And that's two hours a day in the gym that you're not adding to your human capital.
	And abs are generally unsustainable over the course of your whole life.
	I mean, if it's your job, like Brad Pitt, to have abs, then sure, you can sustain them.
	But even Channing Tatum, when he was looking at Magic Mike 2, was like, oh, God, no, I can't be that hungry for months.
	Like, I can't work out that much and be that hungry.
	It's completely unsustainable if you have a job or anything like that, right?
	So, no, she's looking for resources, and abs are not resources.
	I guess unless you're an underwear model or something like that.
	But, yeah, abs are not resources.
	Going to the gym is... Now, I'm a big fan of working out.
	I think it's really, really important.
	Mind, body, blah, blah, blah. But be a high-quality man.
	You know, have a good sense of humor, because that's a sign of high intelligence.
	And women tend to be more neurotic than men, and so being able to help a woman out of her neurosis with good humor is essential to her mental health in the long run.
	And, yeah, just be a high-quality man.
	Be courageous, be virtuous, be strong, and, you know, worship her, but call her out when she's made a mistake, just as you want her to worship you, but call you out when you've made a mistake, so...
	Yeah, just work as being a higher quality man as possible, and then just be a relentless naysayer.
	Like, oh, there's all these low quality women around.
	It's like, yeah, well, you've identified them as low quality, so...
	You know, I mean, when Peter Gabriel left Genesis, they auditioned 400 singers to replace him.
	400 singers! To replace him, and of course, if you were to get an audition for Genesis, you already had to be a pretty damn good singer to begin with.
	Not the great guy who did Tempted by the Fruit of Another and In the Living Years by Mike and the Mechanics.
	That guy could sing the phone book.
	But they ended up not finding anyone they liked.
	So Phil Collins took over the singing and then ended up with a bad relationship with his kids because when he was on tour, he could only send faxes.
	Because he couldn't talk during the day.
	He couldn't phone them during the day because they needed to save his voice.
	Because he's a real belter, right?
	You listen to Driving the Last Spike, man, you can hear him really belt out.
	Or you listen to Home by the Sea, man, that's a belter and a half, right?
	I remember trying that in a car when I was working up north.
	I'm like, yeah, I don't think I'll be a singer, but it sure is fun to yell at the top of my lungs.
	Yeah.
	Just be a relentless naysayer.
	Just no, no, no, no, no, no, no.
	I just, no, no, no, no, The quicker you say no, the quicker you get to a yes.
	I mean, I learned this in the business world, right?
	So I built and sold very highly specialized software for reducing environmental impacts from large corporations on air, groundwater, and so on, soil.
	And I would have to sometimes make up to 500 contacts in order to make one sale.
	And so, you know you're going to have to contact 500 people to get one sale.
	Now, the software sold for, you know, sometimes upwards of a million dollars or more, so that was fine.
	But the quicker you get to no, the quicker you can get to a yes.
	So just relentless, relentless.
	Now, it's tough for men to be relentlessly because, you know, we're a bit of, you know, we're kind of pussy beggars, right?
	So it's tough for men to be relentlessly sorting.
	But if you know your own value, man, you just say no one hell of a lot.
	I mean, Genesis knew their own value as a band and they weren't going to take some second-rate singer.
	So does that help at all?
	It was extremely dense, extremely helpful.
	It is. I think it almost makes me almost extremely resentful.
	I have to sit back and think about this.
	You know how it is. Donut November is in play, so we're all reaching enlightenment here.
	I've thrown out all my cashews already, but go on.
	So, there's...
	I'm still pretty young.
	I don't know if you can tell about my voice.
	And I'm, I guess, building my career.
	I'm working on my craft and trying to get out there.
	In this kind of stage, it's kind of where usually I would expect to be, I don't know, I'm not pursuing a relationship, but this is usually where people, I guess, in the past, maybe a little younger, would be married and have kids and stuff like that.
	If 10-70 years later and I'm successful later, it's kind of weird to go back to monogamy after you become successful.
	My assumption is that the trade-off is when you're young and you're still aspiring, you hook someone when they're in their peak and then the curve kind of inverts.
	So when you're at your peak, she's not at her peak, and it's like that.
	But if it's only at the end when you already have the resources and all that stuff, doesn't that defeat the purpose of the trade-offs?
	I hear where you're coming from.
	So let me just make sure. I'm going to repeat this back just to make sure I sort of understand it.
	So you're saying, okay, so let's say I'm 35.
	I'm 35 and I make $100,000 a year or whatever, right?
	And then I've got to date some woman in her 30s who's already had five boyfriends or 10 boyfriends.
	So she's on the downward spiral of her sexual market value.
	I'm at the peak of my sexual market value.
	And therefore, it's a bad deal.
	Is that what you mean?
	That kind of, but it's also, let's say you date some, you're 32 years old, you make $100,000, and you're dating someone who's like 20-something.
	You wouldn't, usually, especially guys that make that much, don't usually stick with one girl, basically.
	They usually have like multiple or like, I don't know, they do weird stuff.
	So If it's going to be like that, that relationship isn't monogamous.
	So the guy who's 32 or who's already made it doesn't need the 20-something or the 32-year, doesn't need anyone, I guess, to co-sign him at the end.
	He only needs someone to co-sign him when he's growing.
	Does that make sense? Okay, so are you saying that if you're 32 and you make $100,000 a year, you can get a lot of different women, you can sleep around, and therefore settling down is not a thing?
	Well, I guess you could say that, but it's like...
	No, no, no. Honestly, I'm trying to get what you're saying.
	Because, again, dense and compact, and I'm sure you're communicating it well.
	I just want to make sure that I really get what you're saying.
	So I don't want to do one of these answers where people say, like, it's a great answer.
	It just wasn't for the question I asked.
	So go ahead. It's...
	I'm so frustrated because I have a...
	Okay, I think you're right.
	No, don't be frustrated.
	We've got time. There's no hourglass on this conversation.
	We've got time. So yeah, it's a complicated set of stuff you're getting across.
	So yeah, take your time. No rush. If you were older, you've already succeeded.
	There is no risk.
	There is no... There's no traditional risk, I guess there is, but there's no traditional risk that the woman would take when you're still young.
	So when you're still young, there's the potential of, okay, he could be successful in the future, or he could be, I guess, a bum in this case.
	So there's a risk there at the start, and they're trading their youth for it.
	Now, at the end, when you're already successful, there's not the same risk I know women respond to incentives, but I'm trying to say that there's this different risk.
	So there's a risk when you're younger, but not as much risk when you're older, because you already know how this life is going to play out, probably.
	Oh, no, no, no. So, okay.
	I think I understand what you're saying.
	So you're saying that by the time you've already proven yourself, there's no risk for women to choose you, and so it's unfair.
	Yeah. It's vastly smaller.
	The risk is vastly smaller.
	And I'm going to disagree with you very strongly.
	It doesn't mean I'm right. I'm just going to disagree with you very strongly.
	Okay. So let's take same age women and men, right?
	32, right? Now, he makes $100,000 a year.
	And so she wants him because he makes $100,000 a year, right?
	Yes. Okay. Okay.
	Why would he choose her?
	Oh, yeah, okay.
	That's, yeah. Okay, explain the risk I'm talking about.
	Okay, so when he's older, he's already proven himself, so he doesn't need the monogamy like the young guy did.
	No, no, no, let's say he wants to settle down and get married.
	So if he's 32 years old and he's making $100,000 a year, Why would he choose the 32-year-old woman?
	He's going to choose a woman who's 25 or 24.
	Because he's already proven his resources, so he's going to want a woman who's proven her fertility.
	And the only way you can genuinely prove fertility, or the greatest indicator of fertility, is youth.
	So because he's already proven his income, he's going to go for a woman of provable Fertility, which is not a woman who's 32.
	He's not going to start dating a 32-year-old woman because her fertility by the time they get married is going to be like 34, 35.
	So he's going to go for a younger woman.
	So her risk is, yeah, she wants the 32-year-old guy making $100,000, but he doesn't want her, right?
	Exactly, yes. So she is, you know, if she chose not to invest a guy when she was younger, her risk is, and it's a very considerable risk, and it's a huge risk that plays out badly for a lot of women, is she says, oh, you know the old thing, like, I've had my fun, I'm ready to settle down, which is like, I'm worn out like the space shuttle and have to bring it in for a landing.
	So she then, in her early 30s, she starts...
	With this weird belief that she has the same sexual market value that she had when she was 24, she starts trying to lock down a high-earning guy in his 30s.
	And what does he say? Nope.
	No, thanks. No, thanks.
	Because A, you're older, and B, you stink of desperation.
	And if he's at all knowledgeable about female psychology and...
	So on, then he'll know that if she's an attractive woman, that she's probably got a dozen or half a dozen boyfriends.
	And, you know, divorce is dick dose dependent, as we know.
	So she's more likely to divorce him.
	Because he's got more to protect now, right?
	If you're making $100,000, you've got some assets, you've more to protect.
	So you don't want to date a woman who's in her 30s, who's had a lot of boyfriends.
	Because you're going to lose all the shit you worked for, most likely.
	So, yeah, there's huge risk for her, which is by the time she's ready to settle down, nobody wants her.
	So, I understand the resentment.
	I really do. But, listen, there's no free lunch in this life.
	Nobody gets anything for free.
	Nobody gets anything for free.
	I mean, all the women are like, oh, yeah, we want the welfare state because, you know, my...
	My boyfriend got me pregnant and then abandoned me, so I want the welfare state.
	It's like, okay. So, no, you get the welfare state and it looks like you're getting something for free, but you're not.
	Because no man wants to date you now.
	No quality man is going to want to date you as a single mom.
	And especially if you have sons, although it also is the case with daughters, your kids are going to grow up dysfunctional and won't really like you very much.
	Particularly now that there's the internet out there to set them wise about all of this stuff.
	So, you know, you get, quote, free money, but your life is kind of a purposeless waste where you're raising all these kids who end up not liking you very much, and you can't get a man, and so there's nothing for free.
	Like, everybody looks and says, oh, these people are getting something for free!
	It's like, eh, but, you know, what price the whole world if you lose your own soul?
	I'm not necessarily saying that pity is, you know, people are still morally responsible.
	I'm not saying that pity is necessarily the appropriate response, but, you know, I don't view people as getting a bunch of free stuff.
	You know, I mean, just because I'm listening to Jim Morrison, right?
	I mean, Jim Morrison was raped by someone close to the family, I assume, for quite a long period of time when he was a little boy.
	And, you know, his drug addiction, his hyperpromiscuity, his hypersexuality, I mean, these are all classic earmarks of sexual abuse.
	And Jim Morrison, again, according to what he said, I mean, I think it was one of his psychiatrists or lawyers who heard this story.
	Jim Morrison said, like, I went to my mom to tell her about this, and my mom just scorned me and told me it didn't happen, and I was crazy.
	And this is why, when he was in his late teens, he simply cut off all contact with his parents.
	I assume this is why. He told the keyboardist, Ray, well, first of all, he said his parents were dead.
	And then when Ray asked him for more details, he said, well, okay, well, I'm not really dead, but, you know, my dad is an admiral in the Navy, and I just never want to see them again for the rest of my life.
	And he didn't. And, okay, so what did he have?
	I mean, he was a... So he was a chubby kid and a chubby teen, but then he ended up losing 35 pounds in six weeks because he was living on a roof, and the only food he could get because he was broke was stealing avocados and apples from trees in the neighborhood, right?
	So he lost all his weight, became skinny, which was a big thing.
	He had a beautiful head of hair and, you know, sort of classic Irish cheekbones and so on, and...
	So a very, very handsome guy.
	Very talented. He had, with no musical training, just songs began popping into his head.
	And he just began to write them down.
	Now he read voraciously, and he had an IQ of 149.
	So he was very smart and very disturbed.
	And of course, kind of a sociopath.
	I think it was the drummer who went to pick him up and found him whispering threats into a girl's ear in an apartment while cutting open the front of her blouse with a knife.
	Like a real psycho in that way, right?
	And... So he was beautiful.
	He was talented. He was famous.
	He was wealthy. And what happened?
	Well, he dragged himself to death, drugged himself to death, and had a constant death wish.
	Even in his mid-twenties, he was saying, oh, it doesn't matter.
	I'll be dead in two years. And that death wish, right?
	In other words, that people would rather him die than tell the truth, which is really the only option we have if we're heavily traumatized.
	That's why I told the truth about my history.
	Is that people would rather us die than tell the truth about our own abuse if we were abused.
	And so the only way to escape that curse and end that blackmail is to tell the truth.
	But to tell the truth, you can't be blackmailed.
	And the only way to escape the death wish of traumatized childhood is to just tell the truth.
	And he didn't and couldn't.
	He took refuge in drugs and sex and so on.
	And so, yeah, I mean, you look at Jim Morris and say, wow, you know, Rich, beautiful, famous, successful, wealthy.
	And what did he get from it?
	Well, nothing but misery and a very died of 27.
	27 Club, right? Died early.
	So, yeah, I hear what you're saying.
	It's very easy to look at people and feel envy and feel resentment.
	Absolutely. You know, I mean, there are people who have not been deplatformed.
	And that's fine. I could resent them and say, well, that's not fair, or they're just sellouts or whatever.
	It's like, no, they made different choices.
	They chose to take on some topics and then avoid other topics, and they made their own strategic decisions about what they were and weren't going to talk about.
	So they get more prominence in the here and now.
	Yeah, they get more prominence in the here and now.
	Okay, but who gets prominence in the future?
	In the future, they'll be forgotten.
	And the people who had more courage to talk about things that will matter to the future, right?
	Because what looks like prudence in the present is just often revealed as cowardice in the future.
	So I'm staking my dice roll on the future and they're staking their dice roll on the present.
	So we each get benefits and costs.
	And am I going to resent them?
	No, not really.
	You know, there's costs and benefits to decisions that we make.
	And this is not a good or evil decision.
	It's not a right. I mean, you could say there's some integrity, but that's not something I'm going to sit there and enforce in my mind with some sort of whip.
	So it's just costs and benefits.
	So some people get benefits and some people...
	Get cussed. And there are people who look and say, oh man, he just threw away his entire career because if he just hadn't talked about this one particular thing, it's like, yeah, but if that's the most important thing, it seems that's kind of the job.
	So yeah, try to avoid the resentment stuff.
	And in terms of female nature, saying that there's something negative about female nature is a death wish.
	It literally is a death wish.
	I don't mean everybody who says that wants to die.
	But saying that female nature should not be what it is It's saying that we should not exist as a species because we only exist as a species because female nature is what it is.
	And if you think that your ideology trumps four billion years of cellular evolution, then that's grandiose.
	I'm not saying you, but there's this grandiosity that I can't even really conceive of.
	The purpose of knowledge is to study nature, not to lecture nature.
	It's to study nature, not to whine at nature.
	It's to study nature, not to complain about nature.
	So women's nature is a beautiful thing.
	Now, is it corrupted by the state?
	Yeah, of course it is.
	Is male nature corrupted by the state?
	Yes, of course it is.
	So the issue is unchecked power, not the people trying to survive in the crazy zoo of modern society, right?
	If there's some random zoo where animals are just sort of intermittently punished and rewarded for no reason and the animals go a little crazy, do we sit there and say, well, it's the nature of animals to just be mad, to be crazy?
	It's like, yeah, women have too much power.
	They have too much sexual power.
	They have too much power as a voting bloc.
	Yeah, and the problem is the power.
	Don't get mad at the women because they're your fellow victims in this zoo, this madhouse.
	You know, have love for your fellow victims.
	We're all in this together.
	You know, this is the men and women turning at each other.
	It's like Sam turning on Frodo in Mordor, you know?
	How come you always get to walk first and push him off the edge?
	It's like, I think we've got some bigger enemies than each other in the world.
	So, yeah, I would say female nature is a beautiful thing and power corrupts and the devil gets his price and try to love...
	People under the distortions of the pressures they've been put under.
	So women in general, you say, oh, well, men are more sensible and so on, but women in general are more agreeable.
	And you can say, oh, women shouldn't be so agreeable.
	It's like, okay, but why is it that nature has selected women to be more agreeable than men?
	It's like saying women should be taller than men.
	It's like, well, why did nature over billions of years select women or females to be shorter than men?
	To be curious about that is important.
	I'm just saying it shouldn't be that way.
	Well, women shouldn't be hypergamous.
	Hypergamy is shallow. It's like, okay, so why over 4 billion years of evolution or 3 billion years of evolution, why did human females end up developing and maintaining hypergamy?
	You say, well, it shouldn't be that way.
	It's like, well, then you're wishing not to exist.
	Because the only reason we exist in the way that we do is because of And the other thing too, we have won.
	We are the dominant species.
	We've totally won. So you're saying, to the one species out of the millions of species that won the entire three or four billion year history of evolution, we won.
	And we won because of the cooperation and natures of men and women.
	That's why we're at the top.
	Men and women. We both equally contributed to becoming the most successful species in the universe that we know of.
	Millions and millions and millions of species, billions and billions of years of evolution, we won.
	And then saying, well, the team that won, the relay team that won, one half of them is a really bad athlete.
	It's like, no, that's not possible.
	Sorry, that's not even remotely possible.
	If you've got millions of people in a race that goes on for billions of years...
	And one couple wins the race saying, well, the man is a really good athlete, but the woman is a really bad athlete.
	It's like, no, no, that's absolutely factually, statistically, logistically, realistically impossible.
	Can't happen. Can't be that way.
	Both men and women, over the course of our evolution, won because we're fantastic at it.
	Women are fantastic at moving the human species forward.
	Men are fantastic at moving the human species forward.
	And that men have been conned.
	You say, oh, women are so conned into feminism and so on.
	Men have been conned into disrespecting women.
	You say, oh, well, but they do these bad things.
	It's like, that's the state.
	It's like blaming a lazy waiter for communism.
	No, it's the system.
	Get mad at the system.
	The system is immoral.
	The system is corrupt. Getting mad at the women and denigrating the women?
	We're only here because of what they did and who they became.
	And who they became wasn't even under their choice.
	It was under the choice of evolutionary pressure.
	Let's say there was a woman who was less agreeable.
	Well, the woman who was less agreeable would get less cooperation from the other women that she needed their cooperation in order to keep her children alive because the children are running all over the place.
	There's dangerous stuff around. There's predators.
	There's farm machinery. There's cliffs.
	There's edges. There's lakes to drown in, ponds to fall in, places to get lost.
	You need other women to watch out.
	If the other women don't like you, they won't watch out for your kids as much.
	Your kids don't make it as much.
	Those genes get weeded out.
	Is that the fault of any particular woman?
	It's certainly not the fault of the women who live now.
	The end results of the multi-billion year handoff of millions of generations of evolution?
	It's not their fault that this is how women evolved?
	So I don't know, just getting mad at people for the inheritance of a couple of billion years is just kind of strange.
	It's just kind of strange. Well, it's unjust to blame some people for slavery in the past.
	Yeah, okay, you can make that case.
	But how are you going to blame women for the personalities they inherited from billions of years of evolution?
	Good Lord. Have some respect.
	Have some sympathy. And also recognize that who women are is to some degree the result of male choice.
	And I'm not just talking about in Wisconsin where they first gave women the right to vote.
	I'm not disagreeing with any of that.
	What I'm saying is that who are women?
	Well, women are as they are because men chose to reproduce with them.
	And men are who men are because women chose to reproduce with them.
	We are the shadow cast by the choices of millions of generations going back billions of years.
	And blaming the individual for the choices and options of billions of years and millions of generations is really kind of nutty, right?
	It's like blaming water for warming in the sun.
	Well, that sun traveled eight light minutes, that sunlight traveled eight light minutes to get there as a result of giant bombs going off in the sun for billions of years.
	Oh no, it's that water's fault.
	We are just the last domino in millions of dominoes.
	Doesn't mean we don't have free will, because they'll make choices.
	The first choice is to stop resenting that which people didn't have control over.
	Stop resenting. Oh, women are into height.
	It's like, yeah, women are into height, and men are into fertility.
	Well, it shouldn't be that way.
	Well, then you're wishing to not exist.
	I'm not saying things shouldn't be improved, and we shouldn't have highest...
	I get all of that. But saying women shouldn't be into height?
	Of course women are into height.
	Why? Because tall guys were better protectors and providers.
	And that's true even now.
	Tall guys make more money. That's unfair!
	Fairness is for toddlers.
	Fairness is for babies.
	You know where fairness comes from?
	You've got two kids. You give one kid a cookie.
	What does the other kid say? That's not fair!
	He got a cookie! Okay.
	So you get a cookie. But fairness is when you have no power to provide your own resources.
	Then you cry unfair. You can't get your own cookie.
	You can't make your own cookie. The word fair is a slave word.
	It's a helpless word.
	It's a paralyzed word.
	It's a do nothing, achieve nothing, can't get anything I want word.
	People who whine about fairness are people who can't produce their own values.
	It's a profoundly unattractive quality.
	Have I ever said it was unfair, the things that happened to me?
	No. In fact, I've said, I chose, I made my choices, I take the consequences.
	It wasn't like it came out of nowhere.
	So, yeah, just, I hope that speech makes some sense.
	But yeah, this resentment thing, it's a psyop.
	It's implanted in you so that you won't reproduce.
	It's not anything that's organic or comes from any sense of sympathy or justice to your fellow inmates.
	I – forgive me.
	I It's good.
	I appreciate it.
	You know, I think I may have been projecting, I guess, the failings of my own mother onto, I guess, random women.
	I think... What I'm going to do is I'm going to, I guess, pursue the best woman I can, I guess, with the meager resources I have at the time, and try to create, I guess, the best life I can with my knowledge that I have right now.
	The best way to get a loving woman is to love women.
	You follow me? I do.
	Now, why are you talking about your mother's failures?
	Like she's some isolated Adam.
	Who chose your mother? My father as well.
	Yeah, so don't pile things on her.
	Your mother was chosen by your father.
	You can't just look at parents in isolation.
	I mean, you can, but it's wrong.
	It's like saying, well, only one half of that archway is what keeps the archway up.
	Nope, you don't have both sides.
	They don't stay up. Because if you say, well, it's my mother's failings, and then you can project that onto all women, which, of course, is unfair, right?
	I mean, you wouldn't want some guy, some woman with a bad dad, you wouldn't want her getting mad at you for that, right?
	Which is often feminism, but, I mean, it's not fair, right?
	It's not right. Exactly, yes.
	You know, if she was some woman with a bully dad, who was, of course, chosen by the mom, you wouldn't want her saying, well, just men are patriarchs and bullies, right?
	So... Most people are just carrying this heavy load.
	They don't even feel it.
	They don't see it. The only thing you can see, you can maybe see it in their shadow, and you can see it in their bent and broken knees and their bloody backs.
	They're just carrying this huge burden.
	And they just lash out at people for momentary relief from this burden and then the burden gets heavier and they just don't know what they're doing and they're just spiraling down.
	And it's really tragic because all of the collective wisdom of hundreds of thousands of years of human history and evolution has just been stripped from us within a single generation or two.
	We lost all our values.
	We lost all of our morals.
	We lost all of our wisdom. All of it.
	It was all stripped, and we went back to the state of nature, to the land of the beasts, to the land of hedonism and lust and sex and hunger.
	What do people do these days?
	They fuck and they get fat.
	Because lust for food, lust for sex, lust for power, lust for money, has replaced all of the wisdom that it took us countless lives to achieve.
	All got stripped away from us.
	Because they took away our guards without giving us philosophy, which left us worse off than animals.
	We're in a madhouse, and yes, there are some people in the madhouse striking out at other people in the madhouse, but don't be one of them.
	And I have to remind myself of this too.
	I'm certainly not perfect this way.
	I'm not Zen this way. I have to remind myself of this too, because people can be pretty provocative.
	But yeah, people are carrying a heavy load.
	They don't even know it. They lash out at others through momentary relief, which makes the load heavier.
	It's true for women too, but...
	To not love women is to not love yourself because we are the product of female choices and of male choices.
	And we're even more the product of female choices than male choices because women have more choices.
	Throughout most of our evolution, women would get into relationships in their teens, have children, and At their sort of peak attractiveness and fertility, they would have choices.
	We are more the result of women's choices even than men's choices.
	And so to dislike women is to dislike your own existence.
	Because we are just the shadow cast by thousands of generations of female choices.
	And to not like women is to castigate the cause of your own existence.
	And that comes at a cost.
	It comes at a penalty. You get this hard-eyed, suspicious view of women.
	The quality woman is going to look at you and say, ooh, this guy doesn't really like women very much.
	I'm not going to. I mean, obviously, if there was some woman who didn't like men, would you want to date her?
	Not a chance. I tend to...
	It's more subtle, but whenever I talk to some girls, you can tell.
	You can feel it. Oh, if they don't like men?
	If they don't like men, yeah. Yeah, I mean, how about a little gratitude?
	You know, if you're driving at a car, it's mostly designed and built by men.
	If you're living in a house, it's mostly designed and built by men.
	If you're using computers, it's mostly designed and built by men.
	If you've got air conditioning, you've got medicine, you've got electricity, most designed and built and maintained by men.
	Any gratitude? No! Well, it's all right.
	The gratitude will come back when these resources become more scarce.
	Look into the diesel shortage.
	It's important. So, yeah, this stuff is going to return, but you want to keep that flame of love alive.
	I don't let crabby people and bad thinkers, anti-rational people, I don't let them destroy my love of philosophy.
	And don't let bad women destroy your love of femininity or of women.
	I mean, that's bigotry, right?
	It's to take the negative actions of some and portray it onto the collective as a whole.
	That's a form of bigotry. And it's letting the bad people win.
	Like, one of the reasons bad people do what they do is they spread their badness by killing hope in others.
	Well, I've just dealt with a lot of crappy women, so there aren't any good women, and it's all hypergamy and monkey-brunching, and you go fall down this rabbit hole, right?
	Okay, well then the bad women have just won, because they've reduced in you, or eliminated in you, your capacity to woo and win a good woman, because she's going to avoid you.
	So I don't see how that benefits anyone except the bad people, the bad women.
	All right.
	So I hope that helps.
	And please, please keep me posted.
	That was, yeah. I will.
	I'm going to let you go.
	That's, that was... Are you sure you're not doing No Not November right now?
	That was pretty enlightening.
	No, no. So I'm working on a love story.
	And in the love story is the men's rights movement.
	So I'm down with this stuff.
	You happen to be keying into my novel writing process.
	I've almost finished plotting out the whole novel, which I've actually never done before.
	So yes, there is a lot that's cooking in my brain about this stuff.
	So I hope that helps.
	Oh, let me be a little greedy here.
	I don't know if I... You can say no if you don't want this.
	There was something you said about the best you can do or like you shouldn't settle for...
	I'm not sure what it was.
	It was like the best you can do.
	Like something, something best you can do.
	It has something to do with relationships.
	I cannot pinpoint...
	This is my last thing. I'm going to get off after this.
	But it's like... No, you cannot get off after this.
	Do you know why? Oh, okay.
	Do you know why you cannot get off after this?
	Because it's November, bro!
	You just told me! Anyway, go on.
	At least not during.
	At least not during. That's my only request.
	Joke's on you. If I hear any rhythmic headphone noises, I will become suspicious.
	Anyway, go on. No, no.
	It was the best you could do.
	Like, don't settle unless it's the best you can do or something like that.
	Or, like, you can't... Oh, yeah, yeah.
	So you get married to the woman when you're like, okay, I can't upgrade from here.
	Is that what you mean? That's it.
	That's it. I can't do better than this.
	Yeah, if I were to design a woman in a lab, I can't do better than this.
	So yeah, I mean, that was my experience, right?
	Like I dated these women and I had lots of girlfriends when I was younger and it was like, yeah, it's good, you know, it's good, but, you know, I had a vague feeling that I could do better and then I sort of met my wife and I'm like, I proposed to her within like two or three months, I think, and we got married in 11 months.
	And it was like, yeah, okay, come on.
	I mean, I remember being on the hike with her.
	Like, we were having a great time laughing, and she's very funny, and she's very smart, very insightful, very curious, and very good.
	Now, isn't that the same as running through women to get to, I guess, your wife?
	Like, the relationship that failed...
	Aren't they, I guess, worse off?
	They got a higher body count now.
	They've, like, I guess, gone through some trauma.
	Like, now they're... It's kind of like...
	I don't...
	The general equation seems to be that men who have more relationships gain certainty, and women who have more relationships lose certainty.
	Like, in other words, I knew what was not good, and so I was able to recognize what was good.
	But for a lot of women, because they tend to bond harder...
	If they have a lot of breakups, then they end up not being able to trust men.
	So how should I move them?
	So if I'm going to... Because I run what I like to call a good boy game.
	So it's more like, I guess, I talk to the community, the friends, the family, stuff like that, just to get a better understanding of the people around me.
	And then I would, I guess, pick from the people there.
	So I'm not going in.
	I'm not smashing them. I'm not destroying...
	I guess turning girls to feminists, at least not yet.
	So if that's the case, how should I move in that case?
	Well, that's obviously a pretty big question.
	Are you saying how should you act in the world to get a quality woman?
	No, it's more...
	I think that's what you're asking, because if you're not asking that, I don't know what we're talking about at all.
	I think that is, actually.
	It's like, how should you move to get...
	Actually, I didn't think of it that way.
	How should you move to get...
	Because I'm worried that if I... Usually the way, you know, you date someone, you smash them, you have sex, you know, it doesn't work out, it does work out, you become more certain that she gets another body.
	And it's funny how they say smash, because that's what you do to break things, right?
	Exactly. So...
	I'm a little guilty because I don't want to do that, but I'll resolve to do whatever I can to get the best relationship I can get, so I'll just bite the bullet because I think it's...
	I'll hear what you have to say first.
	Well, I mean, don't run game.
	Game is manipulation.
	Game is dishonesty.
	Game is hiding your true self.
	Game is compromising directness in order to gain a goal, whether the goal is sex or a relationship or something like that.
	If you want an honest person, be honest.
	If you want a good person, be good.
	If you want to speak to someone who only speaks French, learn French.
	So go out, be direct, be honest.
	Don't run game. Don't say things in order to gain a certain effect.
	Don't nag. All of that stuff is just manipulative nonsense.
	See, guys do that, and then they say, wow, there's nothing but crazy women out there.
	It's like, yeah, because only insecure, dysfunctional women will fall for that nonsense.
	I mean, I can't even picture someone trying to run game on my wife.
	It'd just be hilarious, right?
	She'd just eat them alive. So, no, just be honest.
	Be direct. Be honest.
	And... Don't say anything that isn't spontaneously arising from you out of a desire to communicate.
	I mean, as best you can.
	You don't want to sort of hyper-guide yourself, everything you say, but yeah, just be spontaneous, be yourself, be open, be direct.
	And women who are manipulative will run, and women who are honest and good will be hugely relieved, and they will start to trust you.
	Because game is saying my natural self is not appealing.
	Who I am is not appealing.
	Who I am organically is not appealing.
	So I have to do some nonsense.
	I have to practice being someone other than who I am in order for people to find me attractive.
	Well, that's a huge confession that you feel unattractive.
	Anytime you're not genuinely yourself, you're saying, well, there's something wrong with me.
	I've got to hide it. But you can't keep that up.
	That's why the game relationships don't last.
	Because you can't keep it up. You can't spend the rest of your life pretending to be someone you aren't.
	You just simply can't.
	It's physically impossible. I mean, if you could even achieve that for a while, you'd just end up throwing yourself off a bridge after a while.
	So, yeah, the game is self-loathing, in a way.
	It's self-contempt. I mean, we all know this.
	Like a woman who's, you know, got her tits on the shelf and her butt up and high heels and a tight dress and a bare midriff and hyper-makeup and poofed hair.
	It's like, what's she saying about her?
	Do you feel attractive without that?
	No. So you don't feel attractive.
	You've got to put all this nonsense wallpaper on in order to feel attractive.
	Same thing with, you know, the guys who hyper-exercise and all of that.
	It's like, okay, so who are you without these muscles and abs, right?
	Are you someone that someone can love?
	How would you feel if you didn't have these things, right?
	Well, the one thing that you can't not have is yourself, right?
	So a woman can take off makeup, a guy can stop taking steroids or something and not work out as much, but you can't ever not be yourself, right?
	So one thing that you can guarantee to take from you can cradle the grave is who you are.
	And if you ever try to be someone else in order to impress someone, you'll only impress gullible, manipulative people who in turn will manipulate you back.
	And you are saying to anyone with any brains, you're saying, I don't like myself.
	I genuinely believe you won't like me if you knew the real me.
	So you can take the fake me for a while and then there'll be some blow up, some failure because I can't sustain it.
	So do you want a short-term relationship with someone who's faking things?
	And, you know, any woman of wisdom and quality will say, that's not even remotely tempting, right?
	I mean, in this show, do I really try to be other than who I am?
	I couldn't be this spontaneous and engaging, I think, if I was faking everything.
	And so you're only calling in because I'm trying to be direct and honest and caring.
	And if I was trying to run game on you or trying to look smart or trying to get you to donate or whatever, right?
	Then it would be just, I'm using you for an end that is mine and not yours.
	Whereas if I'm just honest and direct with you about what I think and feel, which is my goal, of course, in these conversations, then you may like me, you may not like me.
	But I'd rather be not liked for who I am than be liked for who I'm not.
	Because that's a form of slavery, right?
	And you're saying that the opinions of others are more important than the reality of your own existence.
	And then you just become a ghost inhabited by the haunted imaginations of other people who probably don't even think about you that much.
	Don't play. Life is not a game.
	Life is some serious business.
	Don't run game. Do the real thing.
	Game as to dating is...
	Pornography is to child raising.
	So, yeah, I would aim for that.
	All right, I'm going to stop here, but thanks everyone so much for dropping by.
	Great sets of questions. Boy, you guys do bring out the best in me, and I really, really appreciate that.
	And freedomain.com forward slash donate.
	In order to help out the show, freedomain.com forward slash donate.
	Don't forget to check out freedomain.locals.com.
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	Check it out. I just finished part 19 of the History of Philosopher's series we did Baruch Spinoza, who's great.
	Next up will be Liebnitz.
	And have yourselves a wonderful weekend.
	Thanks, as always, to my wonderful European listeners.
	I'm sorry that we don't do more shows when it's more convenient to you, but I'll work on that.
	Have yourself a great rest of the day.

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