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April 16, 2023 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

01:30:09

Subscriber Livestream 15 Apr 2023!

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	Good afternoon. Yes, if you are not a subscriber, I will request that you join.
	Yes, it's going to be the in-club today, I'm afraid, my friends.
	We are going to cook super deep with the eye of newt, ear of bad, bubbling cauldron of intimacy we call the subscriber network.
	So if you haven't subscribed, you know what?
	I'll give you something right here.
	Boom! If you haven't subscribed, heaven help you.
	I can't imagine why.
	There's so much great stuff.
	In there for subscribers, including my review of the album The War, wherein I put forward a fairly provocative and powerful thesis about how communism is feminized dictatorship, whereas fascism is masculine dictatorship.
	If you really want to understand the big things that go on in the world, then you can also hear me do my tormented rendition of the song Mother, which I believe I have earned the torment, honestly.
	Alright, so let me just cruise around a little bit and see what's going on here.
	Hello. Hello, DBP. You sound like you should be an AI person.
	Alright. Alright.
	Yeah, just hit me up with your questions and I'll start.
	Right away, we'll do one question before we seal off the tomb of thought to all of those outsiders who don't have five bucks a month to part with.
	So, somebody asks, Hi Steph, two Fs.
	Hi Steph, how should you deal with one or more co-workers who bully you and slander you?
	Confronting them only makes them bully more, and you don't want to quit that job.
	Should you just endure?
	Right. I've had a couple of workplace bullies over the years.
	I have had a couple of bullies over the years.
	Thank you for the tip. If you would like to tip, I am perfectly thrilled.
	Income is always a little bit tough this time of year because, you know, people doing their taxes and stuff like that.
	So if you could step up and help out the show, help out philosophy a little bit, I would hugely appreciate it.
	Maybe I'll buy a new backdrop somewhere in Bali.
	All right. So in my experience, bullies...
	are relatively passive souls.
	Like, you know how nature abhors a vacuum?
	Like if you have one vacuum chamber and one with air in it, and the air all rushes into the vacuum.
	So, bullying is a force that enters into a vacuum of assertiveness.
	And in my experience...
	It's one of these show no fears situations.
	And so I've had people who've bullied me or tried to, in work situations, I even had an employee who tried it once, but that was pretty easy.
	I just fired his ass.
	But what you have to do is try and find, like I had a bully in one job.
	I had a guy who was really, he was, I was the head of the technology department and he was in another project management area and he was really harsh, really harsh and aggressive towards technology.
	In fact, I remember once he had to catch a flight and they were still compiling The program for him to take, and it was just Dick, this really tense, tense guy.
	Anyway, over the while that I worked there, he ended up being very hostile to...
	We actually went to go and see Van Morrison together.
	You can turn these things around.
	People who are bullies...
	There's two types of bullies. People who are just genuinely nasty, evil sadists, and I think you've just got to stay away from those kinds of people.
	You can't reform them. Any weakness is just going to be further exploited.
	And then there are people who just, you know, bad temper, bad moods and in a way, deep down, they want to be released from their bad temper and bad moods as much as you want to not be affected by them.
	And if you can find a way to lighten their load...
	They will come around.
	That's really been my sort of fairly universal experience.
	I've had a lot of people who, you know, when they only heard about me, they hated me, which they don't hate me.
	They just hate the words that other people have used to paint, right?
	I mean, it's sort of like, I hate to look at that building and it's covered in graffiti.
	It's like, it's not the building, it's the graffiti, right?
	It's the language, not the thing itself.
	So, if you have people...
	Try to release them from their own demons by not taking their demons too seriously.
	I mean, they can't beat you up, right?
	They can't set fire to you.
	You're not trapped in them like you were.
	Like I had to really say to myself when I would have bullies in my life, and it was occasional, but it would happen.
	When I'd have bullies in my life, in the business world, I'd just have to remind myself, I'm not at home.
	I'm not a kid. I'm an adult.
	I have choices. And...
	I won't repeat the stories that I've talked about with regards to this kind of stuff, but if you're fairly lighthearted and if you push back, you know, if they come at you harsh, just push back.
	And again, this is a way to find out if you're someone who's just going to escalate to the point of insanity, then you might want to skip the environment.
	But if it's someone who when you push back it's like a mark of respect.
	Don't always look at bullying as trying to humiliate you and push you down.
	Bullying can be kind of like a mark of respect and it's a way like it's like trash talking
	in sports.
	What is trash talking in sports?
	Trash talking is a...
	I remember, I won't give you the context, but I remember playing beach volleyball some
	time ago and this teenage guy was like, oh I got sand in my eye and I said, oh right
	over there, the princess eye wash station is right over there.
	And he looked at me like, I said, I'm just kidding, right?
	But it's just like a mark of respect.
	Don't take things too seriously.
	It's okay to be made fun of.
	It's okay to be ribbed. It's okay to, you know, they're not just all trying to grind you into a powder.
	And in some cultures as well, too, it's just kind of a mark of respect.
	Like in the British culture that I grew up in, insulting someone was a mark of respect.
	It was kind of like a mark of friendliness.
	This is a little more true in the Hispanic culture, of course, in the black culture as well, but in a lot of European cultures as well.
	Like trash talking in sports, you know, like my grandmother could throw better than that.
	It's just a way of being friendly and also making sure That you're not a girly girl, right?
	That you're not a snowflake.
	In a sense, in a very real way, this kind of trash-talking slash bullying is a way of making sure you don't get caught up in the neuroses of a hyperfeminized man who probably was raised by a single woman and doesn't know in particular well.
	And I put myself in this category when I was younger, so I wasn't hyperfeminized, but...
	In terms of, like, the trash-talking and the sort of hyper-male culture, there were two places that really helped me with the hyper-male culture thing.
	One, of course, was going to boarding school when I was little, which was a hyper-male culture.
	And the other, oddly enough, was, I mean, I worked with, of course, you know, very manly guys.
	Guys with bad backs, guys who smoked, you know.
	I worked with guys who had really bad backs and...
	And they were strong and tough when I worked up North Gold Panning and prospecting.
	And yeah, they would trash talk you.
	You'd be carrying a heavy drill and you'd fall into the snow and they'd just make fun of you.
	And it was just a way of saying, toughen up, snowflake.
	It's fine. It's not a big deal.
	And, like, women don't have a very strong way of saying to people it's not a big deal, but men have a very strong way of saying it's not a big deal, and that has something to do with trash-talking and put-downs and the trading of insults and so on, like, all of that.
	So, yeah, it's a way of just seeing, can you handle some rough-and-tumble?
	In other words, are you trustworthy in a stressful situation?
	If you can't handle the, quote, stress of trash-talking, then you won't be good in a stressful situation.
	So... A lot of cultures, I mean all cultures evolved with insults and humiliation, sometimes physical, sometimes verbal.
	All cultures evolved with that.
	So try not to imagine that it's all just a personal insult to you and it's your terrible parent and you're trapped there and so on.
	So push back, push back, push back.
	When I, you know, what would have been funny if, like I say to the teenage guy who's got sand in his eye, oh, the princess eye wash station is right over there, darling.
	And he'd be like, you know, look at me and he'd say, well, I guess, I guess volleyball competence is not solar powered given your scalp.
	It's like, okay, that's, you know, we're trading some insults and it's fun.
	There's a certain lightness and pleasantness about that kind of stuff, which is kind of incomprehensible for a lot of women because men wage war physically.
	So if you're trading jabs with someone, it's friendly, whereas women wage war verbally.
	And so trash talking for women is like reputational destruction.
	So you can't get the love of your life.
	You know, it's just really, really serious.
	Yeah, that's the truth in there, right?
	Women trade fake compliments, men trade fake insults.
	Yes, it is a masculine endeavor to trash talk and hypersensitivity to trash talking means you don't get to go on the hunting party.
	I mean, sorry, that's just the way it is.
	If you can't handle the stress of trash talking, you can't handle the stress of throwing a spear at a boar that is trying to rip your balls off, right?
	So it's a way of just figuring out Who has enough presence of mind, enough confidence, enough security in their own being to trade some insults?
	It is saying we can insult each other and be friends, which means we can trust each other as allies.
	And this whole idea of like, this is how I grew up.
	This is one of the things I have trouble doing.
	Navigating my way through the estrogen tsunami blur storm of modern hypersensitivity, because when I was raised, when I was growing up, yes, I was raised by a single mother, but I played a lot of sports, and again, I went to boarding school for a couple of years when I was six, so a very masculine environment.
	I did, you know, some Dungeons& Dragons stuff, which was a pretty, I mean, it's a pretty heavy sausage and sword fest, and I just...
	I was raised with...
	Sticks and stones can break my bones, but words will never hurt me.
	Right? Get over it.
	It's just words.
	If someone's making fun of you, make fun of them back.
	This idea that words wound, this idea that words are weapons sharpen the knives, right?
	That's an LXS song. This idea that...
	It goes absolutely counter to everything that I was raised with.
	And that's given me some strength and some weaknesses, of course, in navigating the modern landscape.
	But, I mean, hit me with a Y. Were you raised with this sticks and stones?
	Well, he said something mean to me.
	It's just words, sticks and stones.
	Hit me with a Y if you were raised that way.
	Sticks and stones can break my bones, but words will never hurt me.
	This was always told. If I'd go, oh, he said something mean to you.
	So? Are you bleeding?
	No! Then shut up!
	There was just this kind of toughness.
	I didn't even think that it was, yeah, I'm rubber, you're a glue, what you say to me bounces off of me and sticks to you.
	Yeah, this is sort of how we were raised, which was that words are not weapons.
	And verbal agility and verbal insults can be a lot of fun.
	I remember when I used to...
	I used to do a lot of diving when I was in my early to mid-teens.
	I swam all the time like a fish.
	I was on the swim team, I was on the water polo team, and I got some pretty complex dives going off.
	And I remember some friends of mine and I, we had a challenge, which was, can you combine a complicated dive with a clever insult?
	This went on for hours.
	We would get up and we'd pick someone, and it was like six or seven of us.
	We'd climb up on the diving board, and we'd do a dive, and we would launch an insult mid-dive at a friend.
	And some of them got quite creative, some of them got quite clever, and some of them were totally lame.
	And the real challenge was that you had to finish the insult before you hit the water, because if you miss the end, then it's not really much of an insult.
	So yeah, we would...
	I don't know, this was just like a...
	A thing where, you know, you practice making fun of people.
	You practice learning how to give and take insults.
	And it's a mark of affection.
	And I don't know, this whole idea that, you said something mean.
	The seas shall part and blood shall boil the oceans away.
	I don't know, it's just, it's very, very strange.
	And still feels kind of foreign to me, this whole snowflake stuff.
	All right. Let's get here.
	Hi, Steph. Could you clarify why, in a debate, the burden of proof lies on the accuser?
	Is it an etiquette thing?
	Or is it as simple as what is submitted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence?
	That's a great question.
	That's a great question.
	And it's really a male-female question.
	Alright, we'll get to this.
	I'm going to turn on supporters only.
	You've got one minute to join!
	I will just throw the link down here.
	And again, I think you should join.
	I think it's respectful to the labor and passion and precision that I put into what it is that I do.
	And, you know, exchange value for value, right?
	This is another kind of masculine thing, right?
	It's funny, you know, most of my donors tend to be men because men are used to exchanging value for value, whereas women are used to having value just for being.
	And so men are like, yeah, he's doing good work.
	Let's show some love.
	All right, so let's get started with the answer.
	This is a very, very good question.
	Why does the burden of proof lie on the accuser?
	So, in general, men's activities are empirical and objective and you can't lie your way in
	So, talking evolutionarily speaking, for a man to gain resources, he has to hunt the boar, he has to bring home the deer, he has to plant the crops, he has to hoe the back 40, he has to build a fence, he has to build a structure.
	It has to be... The men's resources are empirical.
	They're there or they're not.
	And It's proven or not.
	It's established or not. Now, of course, men can lie about it, but not particularly when you grow up with them.
	Like sort of, oh, I'm an investment banker or whatever, right?
	I'm a hedge fund manager or whatever.
	I used to be an airline pilot. That stuff's all new, right?
	The way we evolved in sort of 150 strong communities, 150 people or whatever, you couldn't really lie about it.
	So for men to provide resources...
	It has to be proven, which is why men tend to be more empirical.
	It's why there tend to be more men in the hard sciences, in the physical sciences.
	We just grow up, things are empirical.
	Things are empirical.
	I will tell you straight up, I value what I do or I perceive my value in what I do to some degree, to a large degree, based on donations.
	Because I'm an empirical guy.
	So if I'm not getting many donations, I assume that I'm not providing much value.
	Or people are being mean and selfish.
	But, you know, it's probably mostly me.
	So I have to sort of shift that to try and get and provide value.
	I mean, I'm working at the moment with someone on the truth about daycare, which I hopefully will record tomorrow, which is really my one-two to try and get kids out of these hellholes with, you know, objective data.
	So for men, you have to provide value, which is why generally men ask women out.
	So the men are showing, or the boys are showing, that they have the value called courage and the follow-through on their desires to get what they want.
	In other words, women have to prove that the men are willing to win the resource called women before they're willing to settle down with the men and therefore they don't really have to assume that the men are just maybe going to go and get the resources called food and shelter and warmth and firewood and all that.
	So, the burden of proof.
	Now, for women, how have women evolved?
	Women have evolved that the burden of proof is not on the value that women provide.
	Because the woman has value because she is a scarcity in the reproductive realm.
	And so women have value, men have to prove value.
	So when you're in a debate with a man, it's always like, prove it, right?
	You know the famous phrase among men, like, picks or it didn't happen, right?
	Just saying something or the old joke about, yeah, I have a girlfriend in Canada, she just never seems to quite come down to visit us, right?
	Pixar didn't happen. Show me.
	Show me the proof. What's that famous line from the old film Jerry Maguire?
	Show me the money. Show me the money.
	Don't tell me about how much value you have.
	Don't tell me how much value you've got.
	Show me the money. I don't believe anything until I see it or it's proven.
	And that's the skepticism, right?
	So men have to prove value so that women will commit to them.
	But women, what is the value that women bring?
	Is having children and raising children and so on.
	Now, of course, there's sex and all of that, but the sex is to serve the having and raising of children.
	So a woman can't prove her value before she commits to a man.
	Because that would mean to have a baby.
	She can't prove her fertility before she commits to a man, which is why there's no sex before marriage in most modern civilized cultures prior to the welfare state.
	So the man has to prove his value to the woman.
	The woman doesn't have to prove her value to the man.
	Her value is innate. In terms of sexual access and fertility and reproduction and so on.
	Now, she should of course prove that she's going to be a good mother and a good companion and a good wife and a good homemaker, all those kinds of things.
	But that's all in the future.
	And you can get some indications of it ahead of time, but you can't prove it.
	A man has to prove his resources, then he gets the commitment from the woman, and then the woman hopefully manifests those resources down the road.
	But men have to prove to women Qualities of character and capacity to provide resources before the women will even think about committing to them.
	The women do not prove their value until after marriage, right?
	Men have to prove ahead of time.
	Women hopefully manifest after the fact.
	The proof for men is before marriage.
	The proof for women is after marriage.
	Which is why a lot of men are scared of women and there's a little bit of a leap of faith stuff that's going on.
	It's just a basic mechanics of reproduction based upon level of investment in pregnancy and children and so on, right?
	So when a man makes an accusation, then he needs to prove it.
	He needs to prove it.
	Because men are proof-based.
	We operate in a proof-based environment.
	We operate in an empirical proof-based environment.
	We have to show.
	We have to show. For a woman to make an accusation, she generally doesn't have to prove it, because they don't live in that same empirical.
	So, because men deal with reality and women deal with relationships, if a woman says...
	If Mary says about Betty, Betty is a mean, terrible, horrible person, does she have to prove anything?
	No. Because she's already said, I'm not having a relationship with this person.
	I don't like this person.
	And because I've said it, it's proof that I don't like this person and I don't want a relationship with her.
	And then she says, do you agree with Betty or do you agree with me?
	And she divides people up and so on.
	But there's no proof that's required because she's talking about a feeling.
	Now, of course, you could say she's saying, well, my feelings are the result of Betty being a mean, terrible person or whatever.
	But for a woman to make the accusation, and you understand this is how the rising dominance of femininity, and not necessarily the best elements of femininity, have provided things like cancel culture.
	And as women became more prominent and prevalent in public life, the standards for defamation and slander tended to collapse, which is currently being played out by Fox News and Dominion voting machines right at the moment.
	The standard in the 60s came up That you have to show actual malice.
	What does that mean, right?
	So if a man says to another man, you're a horse thief, that's a very serious accusation.
	And the result could be being killed or being thrown in jail for a long time.
	So you've got to prove it. You can't just say stuff.
	But for women as a whole, you can just say stuff.
	And there's not that same burden of proof, which is why defamation and slander have become so profitable for people with ill intent or people who can't compete with the intellectual rigor of objective debates and discourse.
	So, the burden of proof.
	It's a masculine concept.
	Now, of course, I'm sure I don't need to say this to as intelligent and sophisticated a crowd as this.
	Tons of women can do it.
	Tons of men can't do it.
	It's maybe 55, 45, 60, 40, or whatever it is.
	So, the burden of proof lies on the accuser.
	Because if it doesn't, then lying becomes enormously profitable.
	Lying becomes enormously profitable.
	So let's take a theory, right?
	A guy named Bob.
	Now Bob is really eloquent in the realm of politics, and Bob has a big enough platform to potentially sway an election.
	Now, but if you say terrible things about Bob, then if you have an audience...
	That is skeptical about the terrible things you're saying about Bob.
	If you have that audience, then they will say, well, prove it.
	Show me the evidence. Show me the proof.
	Because men live in a proof-based environment.
	And if that person can't provide the proof, then instead of Bob losing his reputation, the accuser loses the reputation.
	Like, oh, you're just a liar.
	You make up terrible things and so on, right?
	That's how, in general, men operate.
	Now, women, for women to be disliked is really bad.
	It's just a general, right?
	Women rate higher in trait conformity and so on, right?
	For a woman to be disliked is really bad.
	For a man to be disliked is probably really good.
	And this is why a lot of men are kind of incomprehensible in the public sphere to women.
	Like, how can they just blaze through and people really hate them and that would paralyze me and that would...
	No! If you're a man, you expect to be hated.
	Of course you do. Because you're in competition with other men.
	So if you and your friend, I wish that I had Jessie's girl, if you and your friend are going after Jessie's girl, and you win and your friend loses and Jessie loses, they don't like you.
	That means you've won. Everybody wants the alpha female, the cheerleader, whatever, right?
	So you get that girl, all the other guys dislike you.
	If you go out in a fishing boat and you come home without the 86 days of the old man in the sea, if you come home from that fishing trip and you got a big-ass fish and all the other men come home empty, they dislike you.
	You're in competition with other men.
	So, of course, you expect to be disliked.
	If you're not being disliked, it means you're not winning.
	Winning and being disliked are the same thing for men.
	Men are in competition for objective resources, like food, shelter, land, or whatever, right?
	Crops. Women are in competition for relationships.
	So for a man to be disliked means that he's winning.
	For a woman to be disliked means she's lost already.
	Because if other women dislike her, the other women won't watch her children, they won't support her, they won't take care of her when she's sick, like she doesn't have this sometimes sick, interdependent, but often quite beneficial coven of codependence that characterizes female tribal relationships.
	So for a woman to be disliked is the worst thing.
	And if someone says, oh, this woman's a total negative, she's a total bitch, right?
	Well, you can't, like, what does proof mean?
	Because you've already lost.
	Like, if a man comes home without any fish, does he need to prove that he doesn't have any fish?
	No, he doesn't have any fish. It's right there.
	If a woman, if some woman says, if Sally says to Mary, or says about Mary, oh, Mary's a real bitch.
	Was that true? Was that...
	Because she's saying that, Sally already dislikes Mary, therefore Mary has lost, because she's lost that relationship, she's lost that support mechanism, right?
	So for women, proof of accusation is less important, because the accusation means that the relationship is already toxic and negative, that you already hate it.
	So, as The female psychology begins to become more dominant into society.
	The accusation becomes the proof.
	Because in the female world, a woman hating you is proof that she hates you.
	That means you've already lost.
	What else? Like, does she need to prove?
	No. Which is why for women, spreading rumors is so powerful.
	A slander, a libel, just lying about people.
	It's so powerful. Whereas for men, Let's say that you and I are fishermen.
	Sorry, I'm just reading the old man in the sea with my daughter, so here's my analogies now.
	You and I are fishermen, and can you go around and say, oh, Steph is a terrible fisherman, man, he never catches anything.
	I mean, you can say it, but let's say every time I come home, I got a big-ass sailfish or a marlin or something strapped to the ass of my boat, right?
	And then you go around saying, oh, he's just a terrible fish.
	Like, people are like, no, no, no, he comes home with big fish all the time.
	Of course he's not a terrible fisherman.
	What are you talking about? Like, you're crazy, right?
	Whereas if a woman says, oh, so-and-so, she's underhanded, she's sneaky, you know, she spreads rumors, she's a bitch, right?
	Can you prove that? No.
	Men live in a realm of proof, so if you make an accusation towards a man...
	You need proof. If you make an accusation towards a woman, or a woman makes an accusation, you don't really need proof because they don't live in a world of proof.
	They live in a world of relationships.
	They don't live in a world of objectivity.
	They live in a world of subjectivity.
	And again, this is beautiful, and this is why we're all here, and this is what men have chosen, and this is what nature has perfected in evolution, and so this is not any criticism of men or of women.
	I'm just talking about how we evolved.
	So the burden of proof lies on the accuser.
	It's not an etiquette thing.
	If I say you are XYZ negative thing, well, I should be right because the negative consequences are that other men can do violence, right?
	That can happen with women too.
	But if I say, like some guy dies and I say, oh, you killed that guy.
	Well, his brothers might come and kill you.
	you so if I accuse you of being a murderer I better have some proof
	because we're dealing with life and death at this point right and
	philosophically that sort of that sort of evolutionary speaking philosophically
	speaking if you say something is true it should be true If you accuse someone of something, it should be true.
	And we did have this thing that, I mean, we used to have this understanding of competition.
	I mean, we used to have this...
	Like, when the mainstream media goes after alternate media personalities, they're going straight against the competition.
	If Coke says something negative about Pepsi, do we assume that's objective?
	No, of course not, right? Of course we don't, right?
	So... Yeah, the burden of proof is, philosophically, if you claim that something is true, it ought to be true.
	And if you have a standard of truth and you say something is true, then you should be able to provide proof of that.
	Otherwise, you're lying. You're saying something is true, but you have no proof.
	And because people do lie, you seeing something is not proof.
	Well, I saw that guy steal the horse.
	Well, do you have any proof? Anyone could say that about anyone.
	Do you have any objective proof?
	Because men live in the world of objective proof.
	Which is why men make cities and women make the population.
	Men live in things.
	Women live in people.
	I hope that helps. All right.
	Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom.
	All right. It's very nice to be chatting with you guys.
	And thank you for the tips. This is how I navigate my way through the complexities.
	All right. Alright, somebody says, I recently talked to my brother, who flat out said he's not interested in being good, and he's okay to not be evil, and that he's okay with not being evil. He cares not to
	strive for virtue. He confirmed my suspicions that he just doesn't care about
	personal growth or being a force for good. My feeling is that of
	annoyance and despair.
	I also think that I shouldn't get in his way of living a neutral life.
	life as he puts it and respect his wishes. Any advice for addressing this
	issue is greatly appreciated.
	Right.
	Well, let me ask you guys this.
	I want to give potential respect to your brother.
	I'm always open to the possibility that other people are right.
	Of course, right? Because you can't navigate according to your own vanity and ego, right?
	So maybe let's put out the possibilities.
	Put out the possibility that he's right.
	Okay, let me ask you this.
	I'm going to go down to the stream chat here.
	Alright. Hit me with a why if you think that over the next five to ten years
	being conspicuously virtuous is going to become increasingly dangerous.
	Well, that's unanimous.
	Right. On a scale of 1 to 10, how dangerous do you think being conspicuously virtuous is going to be on a scale of 1 to 10?
	So we have 1, N, and a couple of dozen yeses.
	11, 1999.
	Right. Right.
	Right. Right.
	Okay. So, let's go back up, right, and let's look at your brother's statement, not from the realm of abstract virtue, and not from the realm, I assume, of Christianity, because in Christianity, pursuing virtue, even to the cause of death, is... It's worth it in Christianity because you get to heaven.
	But in the sort of secular world, in the evolutionary world, in the mammalian world, then being moral, if it gets you ostracized or imprisoned or banished or killed, well...
	Is it worth it? Is it worth it?
	That's a big question.
	Can you be moral if you don't survive?
	Well, no. A dead person cannot be moral.
	And again, with the Christian and the afterlife and so on, that's a different calculation.
	But I'm going to assume that your brother is not a devout Christian.
	He's not a devout Christian.
	I'm sorry, I'm just...
	I hate to break my flow here, but I cannot find this message.
	Oh, I was further up.
	Yes, okay. Yeah, so he's okay to not be evil, and that's because he's got a spider sense about where society is going, and maybe he's in America or whatever, wherein conspicuous virtue is going to draw attack.
	To be good, in some ways, at some point in the future, is to be doomed.
	And he wishes to survive.
	He might, if he's a father, he might say, you know, I did have kids, so I can't be poking these bears that just go after people and try and destroy their lives because I made a commitment to my kids to be a good dad, right? So I would say, you know, look, first of all, always, always, always assume that the other person is...
	It's at least possibly wiser and righter than you are.
	This is my approach.
	I assume when I'm in a real disagreement with someone, a real conflict, maybe they're totally right.
	Maybe it's just defensiveness on my part.
	Maybe it's a truth I don't want to accept.
	Maybe they're totally right. I always assume that.
	Always assume that. I tried to write that perspective in the chapter 24 that I just read in my new book, The Present.
	Maybe... How could I argue a position I despise?
	Yeah, he's not interested in being good.
	What are the rewards of being good?
	If you take heaven out of the equation, you take your eternal soul, you take reuniting with your ancestors to
	drink mead in the halls of Valhalla, if you take that out of the equation, why be good?
	Now, you can say, well, you know, I want to attract a virtuous woman, blah blah blah.
	I get all of that for sure. But if continued public purposeful and powerful virtue draws attack, And if the attack splinters you from allies to the point where you're facing the Leviathan alone, which means you're going to lose.
	You think of a World War I guy with a pistol going up against a tank.
	Who's going to win? That's not courage, that's foolhardiness.
	So maybe your brother has an astute analysis of where the world is and where it's going.
	And he's like, hmm, being good is just to paint a target on your head and to be eviscerated from space-orbiting lasers, right?
	I don't want to be evil, I don't want to join the bad guys, but the cost-benefit of virtue versus neutrality is no longer tipping in the favor of survival.
	Right? So, and if you're honest with yourself, and I know that you guys are, if you're honest with yourself, You also have pulled back from the truth for the sake of survival.
	You have done, to some degree or another, what your brother has done.
	We all have to.
	I mean, sorry, I shouldn't say we have to, but I think it's prudent and wise, especially if we're parents.
	So, approach him.
	Hey, I'm curious. Tell me more.
	Tell me what your thinking is.
	Now, if he just, I don't believe in any virtue, I think it's all a lie.
	Like, if he's just a nihilist or whatever, that's a different matter.
	But if he's just like, whoa, I've seen what's happened to a lot of virtuous people throughout human history, and I really don't choose to pay that price.
	Or I don't have the right to pay that price because I have people who depend upon me.
	So... Be curious.
	With family members in particular, any relationship in your life that you can't be curious with is not worth having.
	Honestly, I say this from the very bottom of my heart, which doesn't make it right.
	I'm just telling you this is...
	I always try to be direct and sincere.
	If you can't be curious about someone, if you jump to conclusions, if they're just a bad person, if you have opposite values and you don't care to explore, you don't care to know their thoughts or their minds or their dreams or their aspirations or their whatever, belly rumblings from too much chicken masala, if you're not curious about people in your life, if you don't want to know and explore what they think and feel, it's not a relationship.
	It's just a pitched prejudicial battle and barely worth showing up for a coffee for.
	So yeah, if you want to have somebody in your life, great, wonderful.
	You want to have your brother in your life and you have a disagreement with him that seems kind of foundational, ask and ask and ask and ask and ask and be curious.
	He might have fantastic reasons that could save your back bacon.
	He might be wiser than you.
	He might be wiser than you.
	All right. What do you do when someone will not accept a sincere apology?
	I've itemized the offenses, took steps to assure this offense won't happen again, and I paid restitution by doing a fairly expensive favor for them, which they accepted.
	We hugged and I thought it was over.
	Now I'm hearing that they are still bad-mouthing me and even making up lies about me in an attempt to hurt my reputation in business.
	Should I respectfully confront them?
	You mean her, right, my friend?
	That's who it is.
	I got your username here.
	Hit me with a Y if it's a female.
	Yes, I thought so.
	Okay, right, right, right.
	All right. Are you ready for red flag time?
	Are you ready for red flag time?
	I bet you are.
	I will tell you what you absolutely have to know in order to have a relationship with someone.
	What you absolutely have to know.
	This is new. This is not something I've talked about before.
	Alright. Here's what you absolutely have to know to have a relationship with someone.
	When you apologize, You are being vulnerable and you are putting yourself in the hands of someone else.
	You're putting yourself under their power.
	It's the one thing you absolutely have to know with someone.
	This woman, we call her Mary.
	You're in a relationship with Mary.
	Whether it's romantic, business, friendship, lust, love, whatever, marriage.
	How does someone handle power over you?
	How does someone handle power over you?
	Because you cannot be in love without giving the other person power over you.
	You can't be intimate. You can't share your thoughts and fears.
	You can't love someone without surrendering power to them.
	Putting yourself under their thumb, so to speak.
	This is universal. This is inescapable.
	You cannot love without vulnerability, which means giving someone else great power over you.
	And you see this, of course, when men are terrified of getting married.
	Well, because that's giving a woman power over them.
	How do people handle it when they have power over you?
	When you're vulnerable, when you need something, when you apologize and you say, I'm in the wrong, you're right.
	Do they appreciate that?
	Do they thank you for it? Do they work to equalize the relationship by accepting the apology and moving past it?
	Or do they're like, well, I guess this changes things a little bit.
	I'm really gonna make you pay for this one All right, what is the old joke they
	They say that 97% of women...
	97% of archaeologists are women because they're just so good at digging up the past, right?
	So, if you make a mistake in a relationship, as everybody does, and you apologize, you have given the other person power.
	The power to make you feel bad for being in the wrong.
	Are they then going to extrapolate you being in the wrong until, well, you, hey, oh, you think you're so right now.
	Remember that other time you thought you were right?
	Turns out you were totally wrong, huh?
	How do you know this isn't just like that?
	And then just they're always right and you're always wrong because you admitted fault.
	You admitted being wrong.
	You're vulnerable. You've given them power over you.
	They can use this against you.
	They can grind you down with it.
	They can lord it over you anytime they want.
	How does someone handle it when they have power over you?
	Now, if you're a man, or a woman, obviously, but in particular, I think we're mostly dudes here.
	If you're a man, how the woman handles power over you is a prequel to what?
	Let's batter back and forth a little, right?
	You're dating and you're vulnerable.
	You're dating and you tell her something that could be used against you.
	You're dating and you show her your soft spots.
	You're dating and you're giving her power over you.
	What is that indicative of in the future?
	Come on, babies.
	Show me your frontal lobes.
	Give me your brains. Come on, baby.
	Hit me. I know we're a little bit behind here, right?
	How she'll be as a mother.
	Exactly. You.
	Ding, ding, ding. Yes.
	How she'll treat children. You guys.
	Brilliant. Beautiful. It's like gazing with a macroscope into a disco ball of genius brilliance.
	Putting me. All right.
	Let's get our... Let's get back in focus here, shall we?
	There we go. Yeah, so the reason you're vulnerable with a girlfriend is you see how she handles power over you.
	Why? Because she's going to have power over your children.
	And if she mishandles, abuses, and uses power over you, she's going to grind your children
	into cinnamon dust and scatter them to the four winds of blind conformity.
	Because when other people apologize to you, the temptation is to use that to grind them
	down, to feel superior, as opposed to saying, hey, you know, we all make mistakes.
	We really appreciate the apology.
	Let's move on. That's very kind, very thoughtful, especially if you've accepted a favor, as you say, a very expensive favor.
	What did you do? What did you do?
	What did you do that you had to apologize for?
	Just give me the generals, if you don't mind.
	But yeah, when you're vulnerable, when you're vulnerable, that's when you find out how people handle power.
	And if they are insecure and brittle and hollow, and they feel powerlessness, and they don't have...
	A goal, a purpose, something they're willing to sacrifice for, then they will just grab at power.
	Like a drowning man grabbing at a log or a pit bull at a child, right?
	They will just grab at power because they're kind of pathetic, they're kind of useless, they're kind of pitiful, they're powerless.
	And so they will grab at power just to alleviate for 10 minutes their sense of helplessness and powerlessness.
	It's terrible. It's terrible.
	So yeah, be vulnerable.
	Absolutely. Be vulnerable with the people you're dating.
	If you're dating some woman, dating some man, be vulnerable.
	absolutely and then
	see how they handle that power of you yeah I remember um... oh gosh forces of nature
	is a movie with Ben Affleck and Sandra Bullock
	Thank you.
	I'm out.
	It's a good movie. And at the end of it, there's a reuniting between, like, the mother and child reunion.
	There's a reuniting between a boy and his highly dysfunctional mother.
	And, you know, it hit me like two horses to the chest when I first watched it.
	And I was with a date and I wasn't expecting it.
	I just thought it was, you know, I mean, she doesn't exactly do these dramas a lot, but it was a good movie and the ending was just a wallop and a half for me.
	Kind of came out of nowhere and just, yeah, just hit me.
	It broke me down. Seeing how people handle your vulnerabilities is essential.
	So how do you find people who are good?
	How do you find people who can handle power?
	You give them power and see how they handle it, right?
	You barmer them. You give them power over you and see how they handle it.
	I know for an absolute certain fact that there are some people who get off on me asking for donations because they will always say no.
	I'm not putting you guys in this, of course.
	This is a donor podcast, and thank you for that.
	But I know that outside this circle of trust, there are people who are like, it gives me great pleasure when Steph begs for donations.
	Because it gives them a sense of power that they can withhold something from me that I want, that I need, in fact, to operate.
	They can withhold something from me And that makes them feel strong.
	It makes them feel powerful. And the price they will pay is they will not be vulnerable and they will not be able to merge with another person to become one flesh and be in love.
	That's really tragic.
	I mean, it's really tragic. All right.
	So if this person, you have genuinely apologized and they are using it against you, Then they can't handle power.
	They are too easily corrupted by power.
	Now, I don't know what this means in terms of a relationship because I don't really know
	the nature of the relationship that you have.
	So, but yeah, they can't handle power.
	And I don't...
	I'm not in relationships with people who can't handle power with me.
	If power swells them into mini-dictators, like, okay, look, I can survive people betraying me.
	Obviously, I mean, that's not exactly wildly uncommon in life as a whole.
	So, yeah, I can handle people betraying me.
	But I don't want to stay in relationships with people when they've shown their true colors.
	And vulnerability... We'll turn a light on like, boom!
	Boom! This is who they are.
	Now, maybe, just maybe, some people will like, oh, well, you know, I really mishandled that power.
	I've got to figure that out. And you talk to them about it.
	But no, usually it's really just the way they are.
	Just the way they are. All right.
	Let me get to more.
	I am not keeping up with the questions.
	But I will tell you I'm very pleased with the answer.
	Asian cultures don't understand sarcasm.
	As if! All right.
	I just read this terrifying thread on Twitter about a woman who's in South Korea saying, well, here's why I'm not having kids.
	And I actually talked about this many years ago, that the reason the Japanese population is cratering is because people don't want to work to death like their parents did.
	And this woman goes through all the details as to why that is the case.
	I know it's not the same, but all right.
	In the Netherlands, I don't know why that's vaguely Jamaican, daycare costs are almost entirely subsidized, 95%.
	Yeah, so women are bribed to turn their kids over to the state.
	Yep. The majority of kids will go to daycare up until they can start public school, age five usually, and then they will go to some sort of after-school daycare to fill up the remaining hours because both parents are working.
	Can you help me understand why so many mothers don't hesitate to abandon their kids in order to work?
	What happened to the maternal instinct of wanting to protect and nurture your offspring?
	Yeah. Tell me, hit me with a why, and this is, again, we're just looking at this from an evolutionary perspective.
	It's not a moral judgment here. Hit me with a why if you think it's easier to talk women out of their instincts than it is to talk men out of their instincts.
	So N, it's easier to talk men out of their instincts.
	Y, it's easier to talk women out of their instincts.
	Just scroll it down here.
	A lot of comments.
	I'll be here for three days straight, my friends.
	Yeah, so it's a tough one, some people say.
	We've got yes, some no's.
	Yeah. Yeah.
	Yeah. So, why...
	Let's make this so participatory.
	You guys are philosophers like I am.
	This is not my job that you watch, right?
	Okay, so...
	What is the evolutionary advantage for women to break their bond with their children?
	What is the evolutionary advantage?
	Because if there was no evolutionary advantage, this wouldn't evolve.
	What is the evolutionary advantage for women to be able to break their bond with their children?
	Yeah, so they could raise another man's children if they're invaded.
	Yep. Or if their husband dies, the father of their children dies, again, evolutionarily speaking, and a new man won't want them if they have children.
	Yeah. I mean, we see this in nature, right?
	I mean, I saw this video not too long ago.
	It was a mother stork.
	And again, I know that you can only go so far with animal analogies.
	Lemurs aren't my baby, man.
	They're not my children.
	Sorry. Everybody who's read the book or listened to the book knows who that is.
	And the stork was, she had a big nest full of baby storks and she picked out the runt of the letter and just dropped it over the edge.
	So she'll go and feed all the children, all the baby stalks.
	She will go and burn up all calories and day and night to feed.
	But this one, probably not going to make it.
	It's going to consume food. Over the edge she goes.
	Yeah, the new lion kills the female lion cubs, right?
	And of course, given the danger and violence of a lot of human history...
	A woman who refused to break the bond with her children, should a new male come along, would probably be in significant danger.
	I'm a woman, can my Y count extra?
	Yes, your Y chromosome can count extra.
	So, what you have to do if you want to get women to abandon their children, the programming is fairly simple.
	What you have to do is you have to say you are more attractive if you spend less time with your kids.
	You're more attractive...
	And you're better if you're not mothering your children, if you're not raising your children, primarily, right?
	So, I mean, it's pretty easy to do, and this has been around, you know, this has largely been a lot of sort of alphabet agencies around the world doing this stuff since like the early 60s.
	It's pretty simple. You just, you put out a lot of pictures of really pretty women.
	I remember this in the 80s, you know, the pretty woman with the big...
	Shouldered power suit and she's got a business briefcase on one hand and she's got a baby on the other hip and you can have it all.
	You're the super mom. You can go be a high-powered lawyer and have great lunches with beautiful glasses of wine and you can go and have these amazing afternoons talking to clients and saving the world and then you come home and you whip up some food and just all you do is you say to women the most attractive woman is the one who's not a mother.
	Now, women are programmed by nature, and there's free will.
	I get all that. I'm just identifying this stuff.
	The women are programmed that if they have a choice between being more attractive...
	And raising their children, they tend towards more attractive.
	They will choose being more attractive.
	And again, that's evolutionarily speaking because if they can't get a man to commit to them, their children can't survive anyway.
	So if they have a kid by a guy and the guy dies and no new man will marry her, if she has that kid, she's going to leave that kid in the woods.
	Maybe she'll find some other...
	A kid, some other person to raise it, or maybe she can drop it off at an orphanage, or maybe she can drop it off at a nunnery or a monastery or something like that.
	But just look at this from a raw evolutionary standpoint.
	If she's got a kid, if she doesn't have a provider, she and that kid will die.
	So if she has to abandon that kid in order to get a provider, then that provider will give her new kids and those new kids will survive.
	Like, I'm sorry. And listen, if you doubt this at all, I give you the statistics that single mothers, their children, the children of single mothers, are over 30 times more likely to be abused by the men.
	In other words, the women are sacrificing the children in order to keep the men.
	So it's not hard to get women to break the bond.
	You just say it's unattractive for you to be a mother and it's attractive for you to abandon your children.
	That hooks into women's programming and says, well, I clearly want to survive.
	I can't survive if I'm not attractive.
	Therefore, if society says stay-at-home moms are dull and dumpy and unattractive and the men are going to leave them and you saw all of these endless movies, endless movies, where The man, who was a high-powered lawyer, would have an affair with a working woman and betray his stay-at-home wife.
	Fatal attraction, disclosure, all this kind of crap, right?
	Is it working girl? I think that was one of the things too.
	So all you do is you say to a woman, well, the working women are way more attractive and the stay-at-home women are just way less attractive.
	And then the only way to be an attractive woman is to put your kids in daycare.
	And if you don't put your kids in daycare, your husband's going to have an affair with the more attractive woman and you and your kids won't survive.
	I mean, that's how it hits the genetic programming.
	Man, are we cooking today or what?
	Yes, we are. All right.
	How can you help guide a teen girl through the initial stages of dating?
	When is even the right time for this to start?
	How can you encourage them to pick a boyfriend wisely and carefully?
	Yes. I think?
	If you have a wholesome community, which in general means a Christian community, could mean a free-demand community, but of course slightly less common than the wholesome communities.
	But, you know, pornography addiction for children and boys, they often will start at the age of 10 and it just rewires their brains and turns them very strange.
	Like that Mr.
	Beast co-host or whatever, apparently he's in some very strange stuff online and it seems to have a fairly negative effect on him.
	So... How can you encourage them to pick a boyfriend wisely and carefully?
	Well, the best thing you can do, of course, if you've got a teen girl, is to have been a good father for her over the course of her life, to have a good relationship with her mother, and she's going to choose a quality person if you are a quality person.
	In the same way that you speak English with her, she's going to speak English.
	So the right time for this to start, I don't really have an answer to that.
	If it's supervised, like if it's a teen dance or something like that, and there are adults around, Whatever.
	Do it whenever that's right, right?
	I don't know, 14 or whatever, right?
	So do that whenever that's the right time to start.
	In terms of dating, dating, that's tough, right?
	Because dating used to be something that was parental supervised.
	You had a chaperone, right?
	You could never close the door to the bedroom.
	You always had to have one foot on the floor.
	There are lots of rules, even for girls in college.
	To leave your precious teenage daughter in an unsupervised situation with a boy who's had access to unholy materials since he was a child is tricky.
	And so you have to get to know the family.
	You have to get to know the parents.
	And, uh, certainly what I would do, I think, is try to work at some sort of more communal activity.
	Have them go out in groups and report back, get reports back from the groups.
	Have them, uh, come over.
	I mean, certainly, um, you know, the gauntlet of having to make it through the, um, The father, right?
	The father with the, you know, the, you ever hurt my daughter?
	You know, that kind of stuff, right? Having to run that gauntlet, that's pretty important.
	If the boy comes over and you talk with him and he likes you and he respects you and so on, and I think that's the best you can do as a whole.
	But yeah, you've got to get to know the family.
	You've got to get to know the environment that the boy grew up in.
	And in general, I would be more keen on somebody who's into sports, Because people who are into sports tend to be more wholesome, more healthy.
	They have social skills.
	They have negotiation skills.
	They're able to survive rejection because a lot of sports is about rejection, like you lose or you don't get picked for the team or something.
	So I think that's stuff that I was looking for.
	Reading the present makes me think twice about having kids.
	Do you think it's risky to have kids right now, right before a major economic catastrophe?
	I mean, I don't know what you mean when you say, do you think it's risky to have kids right now?
	It's always risky to have kids.
	It's been risky to have kids.
	I mean, it was risky to have kids in 1900 because there was a war.
	It was risky to have kids in the late 2000s.
	19-teens and early 1920s because there ended up being a war.
	It's risky having kids after the Second World War because there was the war in Korea, then there was the war in Vietnam.
	So, I mean, it's always risky to have kids.
	I mean, obviously, my particular...
	Get involved in something that can survive an economic catastrophe, such as, I don't know, for me, crypto is a good thing, particularly Bitcoin.
	There's lots of things. Get your social circle up.
	Get your productive and practical skills up.
	And so, ameliorate the risk, but don't let the bad people rob you of your life.
	Don't let the bad people rob you of your life.
	People had kids in the Black Death.
	People had kids when there's, you know, famine and pestilence and wars and plagues and Lord knows what, right?
	So... If your ancestors could do it, and you would try and explain to them, well, you know, but there could be quite a bit of inflation.
	Well, is there any way you could survive that?
	Oh, yeah, you know, there's gold and crypto and stuff like that.
	Well, dude, you know, I mean, we had Cossacks coming over the hills, and we had Saracen Barbary pirates taking us from the shoreline every couple of days, and you're like, well, you know, I might have to memorize a 12-key phrase to survive an economic catastrophe.
	It's like, well, maybe you could just find a way.
	And there's the other thing, too.
	Do you want to have something to fight for?
	This is why there's a lot of talking people out of having kids because people who have kids look further to the future.
	They look further to protecting freedom.
	They look further towards protecting economic opportunities and so on.
	So do you want to go through economic dislocation alone or with a group of people who really love you that give you the motivation to protect, right?
	So there's no risk-free life ever.
	Somebody says, I work in construction and verbal jabs are nearly a constant.
	I do find it tiring after a while, though.
	Yeah, I mean, it can become a substitute for any kind of conversation.
	It gets kind of exhausting, right? I received a survey call from the senior analyst policy planning, blah, blah, blah, a training grant.
	Questions were standard. What gender do you identify as?
	Are you mentally stable? Are you happy in your life?
	How much dollars do you make?
	Yeah, I mean I I wouldn't answer that to anyone All right. Why is the Dalai Lama kissing little boys?
	Is he trying to become a public school teacher?
	Yeah, so, I mean, obviously it looks a little creepy.
	He's kissing the boy in the mouth.
	He's asking the boy to suck his tongue, although that could be a mistranslation, like there's maybe a Tibetan thing like bite my tongue and so on.
	I've heard reports that this could be, because this happened in February apparently, I've heard reports that this could be just some CCP psyop to try, because, you know, they're circling around, they're trying to expand and extend their reach around the world in, around, Thailand and other places.
	So it could be a CCP PSYOP. It could be any number of things.
	It was a pretty creepy incident, whatever cultural norms you expect.
	I did The Truth About Dalai Lama, which I recently republished at freedomain.locals.com and talking about the abuse that happens in these places.
	There's this funny thing that people in the West have.
	Which is, over there, they're really deep and spiritual and noble and virtuous.
	Ah, but the Buddhists or the Zoroastrians or the Hindus, over there, it's just they've escaped all the toxicity of Western society and they just have all of this Noble and oneness and communion with nature and the natives in the indigenous population in Polynesia or in America.
	There's this weird fantasy that somewhere in the human landscape is a nirvana, particularly in how they treat children and in their relationship with nature.
	Go look up the 10 most polluting rivers in the world.
	Look up what contributes by far the most to ocean pollution, to river pollution.
	The 10 most polluting rivers in the world.
	It's pretty much all India and China.
	So there's this funny belief that, well, my life is difficult, my childhood was difficult, And I'm going to create this magical, weird portal to a world less realistic than Dungeons& Dragons where they just love children and they're at peace with nature and they meditate and they levitate and just somewhere out there in the world is this heaven and I can just find it and join it and the answers have been put together and...
	No. It's a complete and total lie.
	There's a complete and total lie.
	Tibet is not paradise.
	India is not paradise.
	Paraguay is not paradise.
	The indigenous population of wherever, Australia, New Zealand, North America, not paradise at all.
	That was part of the speeches that I gave some years ago in Australia.
	Nope. So, well, but you know, the Buddhists have really got it worked out, man.
	No, they don't. No, it's primitive mysticism.
	Oh, but meditation. Meditation.
	Oh, my God. Meditation.
	Self-whackery. Look, I've done some meditation in the past.
	I think it's fine. I think it's a good thing to do if you're finally wound up.
	It's a good, you know, breathing exercises and so on.
	I generally prefer exercise to calm myself down.
	And shows like this, which both calm me down and wind me up.
	But... Meditation is not virtue.
	Meditation is attempting to manage yourself rather than change the world.
	And sometimes your feelings are not just about, you don't calm them with hypnosis and repetition.
	You are supposed to act on them to make the world a better place.
	You know, if you've got some weird wart on your hand, you say, oh, I've got to get rid of the stress about the wart on my hand by meditating.
	It's like, go see a doctor right now.
	All right. Oh, this is about the dating.
	We'd like her to pick someone with similar values and at a similar socioeconomic level.
	What are your thoughts on the latter? We feel the two go hand in hand.
	Similar economics would increase the likelihood of similar values.
	She's giving some pushback on the issue as she is, quote, dating someone outside these criteria.
	We hesitate to demand they break off the relationship, but we also don't want her to develop habits and expectations based on this first relationship.
	Similar values. Are you a female by chance?
	If you could just reply, hit me with a Y if you are a female, hit me with an N if you are a male.
	I just want to tailor myself back.
	Okay, so you are a male.
	All right. So, what do you mean similar values?
	I don't quite understand that.
	I mean, if you're a Satanist and he's a Satanist, you have similar values.
	I don't quite understand that.
	Don't you mean good moral objective virtuous values?
	Similar values is very subjectivist.
	Right? So if you've raised your daughter to have good values, to be honest and direct and courageous and all of that, and also with the wisdom of knowing that sometimes discretion is the better part of valor when to speak up, like all the wisdom that you have to do to navigate the insanity of the world as a whole, then those are good values.
	Now, if she's dating a boy with good values, you should be okay.
	Right? But similar values?
	I don't know. Now, as far as the socio-economic status goes, I'm a little confused by that too.
	I'm not trying to play dumb here.
	Let me just copy this because I want to get some more details about that.
	First of all, the socio-economic status of the parents has something to do with their competence.
	The socio-economic status of the children has nothing to do with their competence.
	Right? If Bob makes a billion dollars, that's because Bob is pretty good at making a billion dollars.
	That might speak to his competence.
	Now, Bob's 14-year-old boy has nothing to do with Bob's competence.
	Children do not have a socioeconomic status that reflects their personalities at all because they didn't earn it.
	They didn't earn it.
	They happen to be born into, say, the upper middle class.
	Now, you could say, well, that's going to give them some similar values and maybe they've inherited the intelligence of their parents and so on.
	But, you know, there's a regression to the mean, right?
	So let's say some guy has made $10 million.
	His kids are not likely to make $10 million because there's a regression to the mean.
	Like some guy is 6'10", his kids are not likely to be 6'10".
	They'll be taller than average but not 6'10".
	So you don't want to judge the offspring by the parents.
	The offspring have no personality-reflecting socioeconomic status.
	This is something that's very near and dear to my heart.
	I was born very poor.
	I mean, ridiculously poor in many ways.
	I literally could not afford $2 for a swim club.
	So I was born very poor.
	I've had many jobs since I was 10 years old.
	I was born very poor.
	I never felt that at all.
	I never felt lower class. I never, ever, ever felt lower class.
	And listen, I had some friends around who were, you know, definitely lower class.
	But I never, ever felt lower class.
	Now, a little bit of that may have had to do something with boarding school, but even before I went to boarding school, I never felt lower class.
	I never really identified with the people who were lower class.
	I just never felt that way.
	My mother, lower class.
	My father, upper middle class.
	I was not going to, like, I didn't internalize any of that sense of class.
	Now, remember, of course, England is a very, very class-based thing.
	Why did I not feel lower class?
	Because I was reading books.
	Because I was debating. Because I was thinking.
	Because I was, I dragged an entire door home from a house under construction, a house that was being demolished, so that I could paint a giant landscape.
	Because I loved art.
	I loved, you know, I read a book of children's poetry somewhere.
	I still have it. The drawings that I did by the poems.
	There was a poem about a cow and the universe and its tail.
	And if anyone ever finds that, please let me know.
	But yeah, I just, I never felt lower class.
	So if you were to judge me, say, well, you know, single mother and bad neighborhood and poor and like, okay, but that wouldn't be to judge me.
	Children... Do not have a class.
	They're born into parents who have a certain class, but the children should not be judged by the virtues or the sins of the parent.
	Children should not be judged by the virtues or the sins of the parents, either morally or economically.
	I mean, you wouldn't say, oh, the child of a murderer is somehow infused with murderousness.
	No. Do you still have the door you painted?
	No. My God, that was in England.
	We didn't exactly take the door open.
	We were too poor to fly directly to Canada, so we flew Freddie Laker from London to New York and then took a fairly lengthy bus ride up from New York to Toronto.
	But no, we didn't quite get my painted door in the overhead bin of the airplane, so it didn't really happen.
	All right. And of course, if you're looking for ambition, looking for kids who are raised wealthy is not where you're going to find the ambition.
	Like I was, honestly, I was like a ferret in an overturned aquarium.
	I was just clawing to get out of the lower class.
	Like if I had ended up my life in the trash pit that I was born in, I would end my life pretty damn soon because it would just be not worth getting out of bed in the morning.
	My God. So, there's a huge ambition for children of potential to get out of the lower class.
	Claw your way out if you have to.
	Like, you can't live down there.
	It's hell down there.
	It's horrifying.
	It's god-awful down there.
	It's addiction and abuse and dysfunction and screaming.
	I mean, it's just...
	It's hell down there. It's human...
	It's demons in human form to a large degree down there.
	Like I couldn't, I just, I can't even, like I couldn't, I just couldn't do it.
	And so I was just desperate to get out.
	And I was just, anything, whatever it takes to get out, I'm just going to get out.
	If I have to work 80 hours a week, which I did as an entrepreneur, I will, like, easy.
	Because if the alternative is staying down in that shit pit, man, I'm out.
	I'm out. So, yeah.
	I mean, I wouldn't necessarily judge the kids by the parents because if you grow up wealthy and you know you're going to inherit, where's your ambition?
	This is always the big challenge for us.
	This is why there's a lot of churn in classes, right?
	A lot of churn in classes.
	Upper class doesn't stay upper class for long.
	I mean, the super, super rich do because they control the state and they have access to the Fed and so on, right?
	So... Alright, thanks again for the tips.
	You guys are motivating me, you know, tips.
	And I hate to say it, you know, I'm going to hold back my best if you don't pay me.
	But, you know, it is just a motivation.
	So I appreciate the tips. Thank you so much.
	Alright, let me get to...
	The Bible says to be indebted someone is to be enslaved to them.
	Well, yeah, financially for sure.
	Yeah, for sure. Thank you again for correcting my assumptions about my perfectionism.
	It really was fear of being criticized, but it's sometimes hard to separate these things in my head.
	My work is usually known for quality, but sometimes my inner critic exhausts me.
	Yeah, yeah, no, I mean I could stand a little bit more, you know, like I wrote my last two books and very complex
	novels.
	I wrote them in like a three month apiece and another three months to edit and read the audiobook.
	Most writers are like two years for a book and I'm like ripping it off in three months and all of that and say, well, you know, but I could keep rewriting them forever and a lot of writers do, right?
	And so sometimes I think I work too fast, but I just, I can't edit that much.
	Like I just can't edit that much.
	Finally caught the live stream.
	Did it just start or is it going on for over an hour?
	The time zones are confusing. We've been going for an hour and almost 18 minutes.
	Let's do another little bit here.
	Yeah, I write about this in my novel.
	Let me see if I've got a little snippet here.
	Because if you haven't read this book...
	I love these people. I've always wanted to write novels because I had this when I was a kid.
	Like, I'd have a novel with characters that I really loved, and I would hate to come to the end of the novel because I would feel like I was losing friends.
	I was losing people I cared about.
	I was losing people that mattered to me.
	And they were my people, my tribe, right?
	My friends were significantly fictional for the first part of my life.
	All right. Let me just see here.
	Let me just see if I can find it.
	Oh, yeah, yeah. So I wanted to talk about this fantasy, right?
	This fantasy of this community.
	Community stuff. It is not great.
	Sorry, I'm just trying to find the right keywords here.
	Oh, yeah. I love Rachel's parents.
	All right. I literally love those people.
	Ah, why can I not find?
	Oh, God. I really, really dislike words.
	Half the time you do a search, you end up in the text.
	And you do a search, but you type in the text, which actually messes up the text.
	Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. This is about Rachel the reporter.
	The secret truth was that Rachel really liked to travel, to splurge the coins of her days as if she sat on an inexhaustible treasure.
	But she couldn't just say that she was a traveler because that would seem frivolous and wasteful and, well, not at all carbon-friendly.
	Oh no, Rachel was a change agent whose calling found it necessary to travel to Guatemala to write worshipful pieces on communities that appeared to be full of love and togetherness and oddly shaped native art made by other travelers who weren't at all natives.
	These communities always seemed to fall apart shortly after Rachel left, but she explained Mostly to herself, since people, even her boyfriend, rarely asked.
	that the article was still necessary because it brought inclusivity and curiosity and acceptance
	to the world as a whole.
	To her credit, Rachel did have good instincts about her audience.
	Most of her readers were young women addicted to mismanaging their anxiety.
	To distract them Rachel invited them into a kind of Paradise or Shangri-La, a wondrous place with the magical power to eliminate anxiety, usually through a stained glass mosaic of pottery, chanting, meditation, incense, trying to fit together with other broken people, beautiful views and close murmuring voices.
	Young women flocked to her articles and some to these locations, hoping against hope that the portal of her words would lead anywhere except into the broken remnants of their own heart shards.
	Over the years, Rachel had tried doing follow-up articles on these communities, but always found them either embittered or broken, because the anxiety these women tried to flee always followed them and brought them down like a snarling pack of dogs that only attack if you run.
	And it turned out that there was no magical location that purges anxiety.
	Rachel's readers would turn on their own communities, pick fights, cause problems, provoke hostility, and then run to some other location or occupation or hobby or man, casting venomous backward glances at the betrayal of the universe to free them from their self-inflicted and self-maintained wounds.
	So yeah, this idea that somewhere out there is a place where healing happens environmentally rather than through self-knowledge and virtue.
	I am not a fan.
	I mean, I get it's very profitable for people who want to sell this nonsense, but it's not good.
	It's not good. When will you do a live stream on the book?
	Well, I want to wait until I'm finished.
	I'm doing 25 of 29 chapters, so I'm mostly done.
	This bit about the Guatemalan communities confused me a little.
	Is this a real thing? Is there a movement of single Western women to go and live in random foreign communities to find inner peace?
	Well, yeah. Eat, pray, love.
	It's just a whole movement.
	If it's just women, they just throw themselves to the winds and blow around the world, probably literally blow around the world.
	And yeah, they waste their fertile years in the hopes that they can find some peace of mind by eliminating their capacity to judge or reason.
	In the military, they call it going native.
	Yeah, except it doesn't have any of the discipline that the military or the discipline that the military used to have.
	All right, let's do another question or two.
	Why do some people share stories about how they experience something bad or shameful?
	But when you offer sympathy, they get frustrated or annoyed.
	At the same time, they don't mind others laughing or joking at their expense.
	So they have normalized self-shaming, right?
	So they've been shamed by their parents, probably, and they've normalized that.
	And so they go through the process of shaming themselves.
	When you offer sympathy...
	The whole purpose of shaming someone is to put them down.
	And if somebody offers sympathy to someone that you're shaming, they're criticizing your shaming tactics, your shaming approach, right?
	And so the reason they get annoyed is they've been programmed by their parents to shame themselves in front of others.
	When other people offer them sympathy, that is interfering with the programming, and it's the inner parents who get annoyed at that.
	Alright. Hello from Seoul.
	Well, good early morning philosophy.
	Hello, hello. Are you finding Seoul an impossible place to have and raise children?
	Somebody was saying the average commute in Seoul is like 90 minutes.
	Lord above. That is a long time.
	Oh... MrBeast can't become number one on YouTube without making sacrifices to the Beast.
	Yeah, even his name, MrBeast, right?
	There you go. All right.
	Yeah, abortion is women literally sacrificing children on the altar of their career.
	No, not necessarily, because a lot of women who are on welfare have abortion too.
	Abortion is, I want to be attractive to men, not for the purpose of having children, but for the purpose of gaining resources without having to spend them on children.
	It's a form of pillaging, right?
	A man has sexual desire and wishes to bond with a woman to provide resources to his children, not just to her, because she's just some woman, right?
	But to his children. So a woman who aborts often is...
	Doing so because she wishes to continue to get resources without actually having to do the work of raising children.
	It really is a form of evolutionary theft, in my opinion.
	All right, so let me just get a question or two.
	Thanks, Steph. Amazing live stream.
	Well, thank you. I appreciate that. I'm glad that it's helpful.
	All right. Have you considered writing a book entitled The Past?
	Well, I've done a number of historical novels, so I actually have just started making notes on a sequel to the present called The Future Tense.
	I know I'm playing around with titles a little bit too much here, but what happens to the children of New Eden when they grow up and what they want to achieve in the world?
	Do they want to fight back?
	I'd like to write an action book, like a serious, straight-on Jason Bourne action book.
	I think that would be a real challenge for me because I always want to get poetic, right?
	So just getting it right down to lean Hemingway-ish prose would be quite interesting.
	I find with meditation you can get too lost in the mental space and not enough action in reality.
	You may need to process and think, but action is necessary.
	Yeah, yeah.
	Let's see here. Same here.
	Poor yet not lower class.
	Girls would hang on the street at age 10.
	I was biking and playing tennis and reading.
	Still hard to go through seeing all the insanity of the lower class.
	You float generally to IQ, self-esteem and competence levels.
	I think my wife would be a good debate opponent for this topic.
	I'm not sure what you're talking about, but I'm always happy to have a good debate.
	So if she wants to debate with me, let's set up a time at a topic.
	All right. Rachel is definitely a wokester.
	She's not committed to the ideology, but she benefits from it.
	She conforms to the existing social structures rather than passionately defining them and inflicting them on others.
	All right. Do Western women like Rachel just travel and ban guys for money?
	How do they pay for their trips?
	Well, yeah, I mean, they could be influencers.
	They could post on social media and ask for money from simps.
	Occasionally it is like that little gif of the woman with a bunch of hot dogs thrown at her face.
	Yeah, could be as well. Who knows, right?
	If someone shows you something they're working on and that thing is something you're an expert in, do you offer constructive criticism if they haven't explicitly asked or just say, looks great?
	Well... You ask, do you want feedback?
	And feedback is tough, right?
	If it's really early, just say, it's too early for me to judge, because if you give someone really negative feedback really early, it can crush their motivation to get better.
	If you're really good at something, it's hard sometimes to remember that sort of journey that happens to get good at something.
	So I would say, you ask them, and if they want objective feedback, say, yeah, get objective feedback, right?
	Wow, that's awesome. Where would the new book start at?
	So, yeah, it would be in New Eden, and it would be probably, I think I worked this out, something like 19 years since the end of the present.
	If you want to cut your teeth in action, write the saga of Rachel and the phalanx making their way to her mom's house.
	There's a ton of action you could expand on there.
	Yes, yes, but that's already written so it would be a new one, right?
	All right.
	Hour and a half.
	Yeah, I think we did well.
	Listen, guys, thank you.
	So does Oliver accept Rachel?
	I guess you'll have to wait.
	I mean, boy, talk about...
	It's a very unusual artistic decision to have a quasi-love story that ends the way that it ends.
	It's a very, very unusual artistic decision.
	But no more unusual than in my last book, having the child, who's now older than the father, interrogate the father about the childhood 500 years past.
	So I just let my imagination run wild in these kinds of things.
	So... For Oliver to accept Rachel, what makes Oliver able to potentially accept Rachel is Oliver finally confronts his mother's manipulation.
	And so when Oliver feels that he can have rational boundaries with his mother, then he's going to feel that he can get married.
	Y'all, quit dropping spoilers.
	Yeah, sorry. Well, no, I didn't say how it ends, right?
	Okay, well, listen, guys, thank you so much for dropping by today.
	Thank you for the support.
	If you're listening to this later, I hope you guys don't mind if I put this out to the general population, but it's really, really great to be able to do, like, work at super high-level stuff, of course, right?
	So, yeah, thanks so much for dropping by.
	Thanks for the support. If you're listening to this later, freedomain.com slash donate.
	We really, really appreciate your support and help.
	With regards to this, lots of love.
	Thank you, thank you, thank you so much for supporting the show, for being a donor.
	It is... Magical and wonderful and I feel enormously privileged literally every day that I get to do what I do and I hope that I'm doing you guys proud.
	And if you haven't filled out the survey, I hope that you will.
	Lots of love, guys. Take care.

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