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July 6, 2023 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

02:17:34

The History of the West from the 1950s to the 1980s

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	Alright, there we go. Wednesday night, live!
	5th of July, 2023.
	Man, what is it?
	50.02% of the year is gone by.
	Pretty wild. Do you know that the end, last day of this year, will be 1-2-3-1-2-3?
	You know how that works, right?
	It's actually, it's true. Hello, and welcome to Free Domain Radio, with my rather fae shirt here.
	I was outside a little bit today, sun shirt.
	We have a minor ailment in the ducks.
	They appear to be covered in tartar sauce.
	No, we have a minor ailment with the ducks, so I had to be out there wrestling with ducks to put their medication on.
	So, let me ask you this.
	Let's start right off at the deep end.
	Right off at the deep end, baby.
	So, do you think that crazy people end up in crazy relationships, or do you think crazy relationships make people crazy?
	Do you think that it's crazy people who end up in relationships, crazy relationships, or do you think it's crazy relationships that make people crazy?
	No, don't give me this, it's both, chicken to the egg.
	There's actually data on this.
	There is data on this, and I will be absolutely overjoyed to tell you said data.
	All right, here we go.
	So, a new psychology paper suggests dysfunctional relationships are a precursor to mental illness.
	I really should turn...
	This is like getting interrogated by Nazi web here.
	Eyeballs! But...
	An article published in The Current Directions of Psychological Science discusses how relationships that become conflicted, unsatisfying, or distressing can trigger a biological or psychological predisposition for mental illness.
	So, you know, there's things like...
	You're driving me crazy.
	You're driving me crazy.
	Oh, what's this? There's a t-shirt here for psychologists.
	Oh, keep talking. I'm diagnosing you.
	All right. So, in this work, Purdue University psych professor Susan C. South builds a case as to why malfunctional romantic relationships can be important social environmental triggers for psychopathology.
	Approximately 90% of the US population marries at some point in their lifetime, as much as 59% of younger generations, those aged 18 to 44, have cohabited.
	Well-functioning relationships predict overall well-being.
	However, those who are unhappily partnered tend to experience unfavorable mental health consequences and are more likely to meet the diagnostic criteria for disorders such as PTSD, depression, alcohol use, generalized anxiety, and not listening to free domain.
	Well, we know which is worst.
	We know. We know. I don't have to tell you.
	So longitudinal studies support a direction for this effect such that distressed relationships lead to a greater likelihood of mental health issues as opposed to the reverse, mental health issues leading to dissatisfying relationships.
	Yes, we can drive each other crazy, right?
	In prior work, South and colleagues assessed the generality and specificity of the links between relationship distress and psychopathology by studying long-term heterosexual married couples.
	The author writes, and I quote, Sorry, I kind of blanked out on that statement.
	I don't know what the hell that means.
	Twin studies on psychopathology and romantic relationship distress suggest
	that the same genetic factors that contribute to relationship distress
	likewise give rise to symptoms of psychopathology.
	Studies that have closely examined the non-shared environment of siblings or twins
	—non-shared environment is everything outside the home— provide evidence that environmental influences also play a
	role in the link between relationship distress and mental
	illness.
	So, anyway, can we see if there's anything else?
	Aren't these articles just written so badly?
	Like, nothing personal to this writer.
	It's just really, really bad.
	So, the diathesis or predisposition to psychopathology is not necessarily purely genetic.
	Factors such as emotional or cognitive tasks that vary across individuals, the degree of support or use of emotion regulation strategies in a conflicted relationship could also be mediators between relationship distress and mental health.
	Anyway, so...
	Yes, that is a thing.
	That is a thing.
	So... What does this mean?
	Or, you know, what is most important in all of these things?
	What does it mean? No, that's not the most important thing.
	The most important thing is, how was I right?
	You know, this is the lens that I think everyone, including non-sentient creatures, inanimate objects, dust particles, atoms, and so on, the first analysis of any information is, how can this be twisted or manipulated to show that Steph was absolutely prescient in the past?
	I'm just kidding. So, I mean, I did say, do you have mental illness or are you just surrounded by a-holes, right?
	This is a thing that I haven't talked about for a long time.
	I also talked about, like, okay, let's get to you guys here, right?
	Let's get to you guys. Have you ever been in a relationship that you felt was driving you kind of crazy?
	Other than philosophy.
	Have you ever been in a relationship where it feels a little bit like you're being driven crazy, right?
	Somebody says, rooming with drug abusers and activists and prostitutes made it difficult to stay sane.
	Yeah. Yeah, for sure.
	For sure. It was pre-self-knowledge.
	Yeah, yeah, it would be, right? That's why people who are dysfunctional hate the spread of self-knowledge because it gives people self-defense against their predations, right?
	So, what was it?
	What was it that you think...
	What's the most crazy-making stuff?
	Like, what was the most crazy-making stuff?
	I can tell you some of the things that I... I mean, I've never been quite driven crazy in a relationship, but, you know, I think in some of the relationships that I dated, there was some dysfunction.
	I mean, nothing particularly horrifying or major, but definitely some stuff.
	So, what was it, do you think?
	Yeah, lying for lying's sake.
	She didn't want me to have friends.
	Violence projection. Yeah, that'll do it.
	Dishonesty, withholding, gaslighting.
	Nothing I ever did was good enough.
	Breaking makeups over the course of two days.
	Yeah, it's not impossible to get addicted to makeup sex.
	It's not impossible.
	Not impossible. Oh, say, listen.
	Girl just disappearing for three days.
	Coworkers constantly playing mind games.
	Trying to manage suicidal, cutting, etc.
	Oof. Yeah. Starting a pointless fight over the most inconsequential things possible.
	I don't understand that stuff.
	When I explicitly told them my boundaries and they broke them anyway.
	Ah, yes. That's the...
	Here's where it really hurts. Make sure you don't push here.
	Why would you do that?
	Because you told me where it hurts and I'm kind of cruel.
	Right? She hid drinking.
	Oh, that's tough. It's hard to...
	Oh, I guess mints and all of that, but doesn't it smell it on the breath or something?
	It seems that way. Sabotaging your employment.
	Well, all dysfunctional relationships sabotage your employment.
	All dysfunctional relationships sabotage your employment.
	And all dysfunctional relationships sabotage your education, right?
	Because, you know, you have a big fight and then you've got a test the next day and you're tired and, you know, just let me get to bed, let me get to sleep.
	No, we're going to finish this, you know, all of that stuff, right?
	She was married and escalated over smallest things.
	Can't feel sorry for the husband?
	What, you dated? You having an affair with a married woman?
	Oh, that's not good.
	That's really bad.
	That's really bad, my friend. Having an affair with a married woman.
	Oof. I don't want to rest in the palm of another man.
	Don't want your second-hand love.
	I don't want your second-hand love.
	All right. Sex was literally whenever I wanted.
	it fun, but red flag. Being told not to give advice or feedback unless asked for. Being
	blamed for the consequences of the other person's incompetence, they're getting upset when
	I'd call them out. Somebody says, oh, about the pointless fights over inconsequential
	things. My ex-girlfriend of 10 years, she would escalate into an eruption of anger and
	threaten to split up, rinse, repeat over and over like Groundhog Day. Yeah.
	Thank you.
	.
	Yeah. Why did you...
	Listen, this is not critical at all.
	I mean, I'm genuinely curious and I don't want anyone to take this the wrong way like I'm blaming you.
	But why did you stay?
	Why did you stay? I mean, some of this stuff sounds pretty messy.
	Very messy, right? Why did you stay?
	What was the plus? Sunk cost fallacy.
	Well, but you have to stay long enough for the sunk cost fallacy to kick in, right?
	So you have to be there long enough for that to even be a thing.
	So why did you stay?
	Although I thought she could learn or change, yeah.
	I was a kid. Where else could I go?
	Simon the boxer formation.
	The cuddles and attention afterwards.
	Yeah, yeah. I didn't.
	That's why I answered N. Sex whenever I wanted, LOL. Had girlfriend make threats to break up if she didn't get her way?
	Stayed because she was super hot?
	I hadn't figured out I was still trying to please my abusive mother through the girlfriend.
	Desperation and insecurity.
	Thoughts. She was all I deserved, all I could get.
	Pattern of not making the effort to improve my situation.
	I thought I was in a unique position to help.
	Meaningful emotional vulnerability.
	Yeah. So, do you know how these...
	Abusers tend to work.
	I mean, do you know the general pattern?
	I'm sure you do. Hit me with a Y if you'd like a refresher on it.
	Yeah, I mean there'll be other temptations in life, right?
	So the way that abusers work as a whole is they
	convince you that they are superior to you and You won't do anything bad
	You can't get any better. And either they are in some ways credibly superior to you, which is rare, like in terms of beauty or desirability or whatever it is, right?
	Or wisdom, like they're right, they're smart and you're wrong and just need to be brought along and they're kind of half charity work and so on.
	So either they have some success that you don't have or, which is more common when you're young, They just have this attitude that they're smarter and wiser and better and they just need to hack down your confidence so that you feel like you can't do better than them and that they will convince you that if you walk away it's because you have failed to reach their level of excellence and you will be doomed to be a loser forever.
	Just ring a bell with anyone?
	Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, it's really, really awful.
	If they can convince you that all the problems in the relationship are your fault, all the problems in your life are your fault, they're there to help, they want you to come along, they're there to just improve your life and try and bring you up to their level of excellence, and have you ever heard this, like if you're in a fight with someone and you just, like it's escalating or whatever, and you just want to, you want to Take a walk and cool off or whatever and they're like, oh yeah, just run away.
	That's what you always do. Just run away from all your problems.
	Don't stand and face anything.
	Just run away. It's cowardly.
	So they're reframing it.
	They're reframing it like they're being abusive and you want to get out of the abusive situation and that means you're a coward who runs away from his or her problems.
	Have you heard this kind of nonsense before?
	Yeah, it's really terrible.
	It's really appalling.
	Another way that you know an abuser is you always have to give way.
	Like, you always have to give way.
	They won't ever admit fault.
	They won't ever admit fault.
	It's culpability. They won't ever really apologize.
	The only thing that like if you grovel and apologize, they'll say, yeah, I'm sorry it got so crazy or whatever.
	But yeah, they will never admit fault.
	It's the biggest red flag that there is possibly is somebody who won't admit fault.
	And of course, when people want to portray me as bad, they'd say, oh, yeah, he never admits that he's wrong and all that kind of stuff, right?
	So, yeah, it's always your fault.
	It's always your immaturity.
	You're the one who didn't listen.
	And one of the things I think that abusers will do, and it's part of their flex, it's part of their flex, which is literally 45 seconds away.
	Can go between them saying one thing and then saying the exact opposite and they won't admit it.
	Have you ever had that urge? Like, I'm just gonna record this and play it back, right?
	And so they'll say...
	Up is up. And then they'll say up is down.
	And then when you say, well, wait, you just said up is up.
	No, I didn't. No, you just did.
	No, I didn't. You're just, you're not listening.
	Right? And they just escalate.
	Right? They're just, this impatience, this tension is right there like a fist behind the curtain.
	Right? And yeah, that's the people who won't, there's no, there's no, not even any continuity.
	will absolutely contradict themselves and it won't make any difference at all.
	Like you know, you saw this in COVID, right?
	I mean, which was one of the mass abuse situations, right?
	Where people would say, we got to make the vaccines mandatory.
	And then it would be like when an abortion came up, it's like my body, my choice, medical procedures
	should never be forced on anyone, right?
	Gaslighting isn't a real thing, you're just being crazy.
	Yeah, recording doesn't even work.
	They will find a way to squirm out of it, right?
	Yeah, because if you record them, which is a really...
	I mean, the moment you're recording, just get out.
	Like, leave the recorder behind.
	Like, the moment you're at the point where it's like, I need digital witnesses to the craziness I'm going through.
	Like, run. Don't walk.
	But yeah, if you record them, then what will happen is they will say, that's not what I meant.
	I was confused.
	You're jumping on this.
	I can't believe you're recording me.
	You don't trust me.
	That's so invasive.
	That's such a lack of respect for privacy and boundaries.
	And they'll just turn it on you.
	Or they'll say, well, you had my head spun around because you won't admit anything and therefore I got, you know, it'll be your, right?
	It'll be your thing, right?
	Somebody says, my mother has a mental illness and I left home when I was 16.
	Ever since then, I don't like crazy in my life.
	It was that bad and I don't ever want to be around that again.
	I'd rather be alone. Yeah.
	I mean, does she have a mental illness or was she evil?
	This is the big magical pole of the modern world, right?
	Mental illness or evil.
	Mental illness or evil? Mental illness or evil?
	Mental illness not evil? I saw like something was it something biological?
	Was it like a brain injury or something like that?
	I'm just curious.
	I mean, I'm not disagreeing with you.
	I'm just, you know, when someone does something evil these days, what do they say?
	Oh, he's having a mental health crisis.
	having a mental health crisis.
	Yeah, I just want to wait till...
	I know people are catching up here, but I wanted to.
	I'm not sure she was a World War II orphan, possible child rape, right?
	Which means she had some real work to do.
	Right, she had some real work to do.
	And if she didn't do it, she's responsible for that.
	If she behaved differently in public, it's not mental illness.
	Yeah, of course. Tourette's doesn't matter where you are, right?
	That's a genuine spasmodic thing, right?
	As far as, it doesn't matter where you are.
	You're just going to say that kind of stuff, right?
	So, you know, one of the things that I really wanted to mention here is I saw this Interview where a woman married to the Eiffel Tower got divorced because she's now in love with a fence.
	So a woman who was in love with the Eiffel Tower now got divorced because she's now in love with a fence.
	There was a woman who was not married who was old and then she ended up marrying herself.
	Oh, Friar, she married herself.
	Now, I think one of the things that is important to understand about the world as a whole
	is, There are a lot of people who are TFN, totally freaking nuts.
	They're nuts. They're absolutely nuts.
	And they can't be fixed.
	I don't know.
	Of course, we never know.
	Once someone's crazy, you'll never find out the cause because they'll never tell you the truth because they're already crazy.
	There are a lot of people in the world right now who are entirely nuts.
	And, I mean, the big demand in the world these days is you've got to go along with it, right?
	That's how crazy people...
	Yeah, a guy marrying a sex doll, like all this kind of stuff, right?
	A lot of people just, they're genuinely insane.
	And this has been a huge problem for all of human history.
	I think in general, asylums throughout most of human history are where the victims of rampant sexual abuse were put.
	Like you drive people crazy in the house.
	Usually it's sexual abuse, could be some other mechanism.
	But you drive people, you torture children into insanity and then you lock them up in an asylum to hide the crimes from the world.
	What percentage of the people that are nuts are just the victims of evil?
	Yeah, I can't give you victims of evil because that's a no-free-will situation, right?
	I genuinely think that the people who end up nuts, they start going nuts, and isn't there a choice?
	I don't have any proof of this, right?
	I understand. This is just my ideas about it, so I don't have any proof about it.
	But I think that people...
	Like, they're tempted by this stuff, right?
	They're tempted for the relief of an excuse.
	They're tempted for a lack of responsibility.
	They're tempted for blaming the past.
	And then, you know, step by step, bit by bit, they just go crazier and crazier and crazier.
	It's like every smoke, like the first cigarette is very unlikely to kill you.
	Right? But there's that one cigarette.
	One cigarette. You tip the balance, right?
	You get to that tipping point, and then you're going to get your emphysema, your COPD, your lung cancer, whatever's going to kill you from smoking, right?
	It's like 50% of smokers die from smoking, right?
	So, I think that you're tempted to crazy, but you've got to keep walking towards it.
	And then I think at some point, I think at some point, you just can't come back.
	It's the little decisions at the beginning of things.
	This is a speech I haven't given for like 15 years on this show.
	But it's the little decisions at the beginning of the things that make the choice, right?
	Like, you know, I think a lot of people, like when I was younger, every now and then, you know, you're flipping through the newspaper and you come across the horoscopes, right?
	And, you know, I would say, oh, what's Libra?
	Like, I'm Libra, right? And what's Libra?
	And I'd read it and I'd be like, oh, that's interesting.
	Whatever, right? But the idea that there's this vast interstellar machinery of control over you, that there's literally Geppetto puppet strings between you and the Super Sun Beetlejuice or something, it's tempting, right?
	It's tempting. Little bit.
	Little bit by little bit.
	And then you go nuts.
	You're weakening your resistance to evil and you are strengthening your acceptance of wrongdoing.
	Excuses are exponential, says Tim.
	Every excuse is twice as big as the last.
	Absolutely. Like if you say...
	If you say...
	I had a bad childhood, therefore.
	If you lower your moral standards because you had a bad childhood, that's how the bad childhood wins.
	The great danger, as I said this on a show recently, the great danger of a bad childhood is not the abuse, it's the excuse.
	Not the abuses, it's the excuses.
	That's what gets you. To be a victim is infinitely better than to be a wrongdoer.
	It is far better to suffer evil than to do evil.
	Infinitely better, really. So, the excuses...
	It took me a long time to learn this, but now...
	I mean, not that there's anyone in my life like this.
	But if somebody says...
	They do something wrong, they do something bad, and they say, well, I had a bad childhood.
	Or they say, well, my parents did things that were wrong and bad, but my parents had bad childhoods.
	You know, my dad was raised by this crazy person, and my mom was raised by this crazy person.
	Run. Run.
	For me. Anyway, I can't tell anyone else.
	Run. Absolutely run.
	Because what they're saying is, I had a bad childhood.
	A bad childhood excuses bad behavior.
	I had a bad childhood. A bad childhood excuses bad behavior.
	Therefore, I've just disabled my conscience.
	Now, of course, you've heard me.
	I mean, this is a judo move.
	It's a judo reverse move where you say, well, someone who suffered from abuse as a child should be the last person to commit abuse because they know exactly how bad it is.
	They know exactly how bad it is.
	And when I was a kid growing up in the 70s, Hit me with a Y if any part of your childhood overlapped with 70 to 80.
	Hit me with a Y. Yeah, about 50-50, right?
	But does 89 count?
	Only if you don't know what 70 to 80 means.
	Okay, so... Could we get the show in audio form?
	Yeah, I put them out in audio form.
	Yeah, you'll get them. And thank you for the donation.
	If you could help out, I would really appreciate that.
	You can go to, later if you're listening, freedomain.com slash donate.
	Okay, so do you know...
	Oh, it's been a while since we've had a rant.
	Do you think? Has it been a while since we've had a rant?
	I think it's been a while. Yeah.
	I feel something.
	I feel something.
	It's either a lot of gas or it's a big-ass rant on the evils of the 70s.
	I don't want to tease you guys.
	I don't want to like... A little under the top action, but that's it.
	I, uh...
	Should I, uh...
	Okay. One to ten.
	How big should I go?
	I don't know. I won't force it.
	I won't force it. I just need to know how wide to open the gates.
	Alright. 2 to the power of 10.
	Be natural. Man, I'm all natural.
	All right. Do you know how evil a decade the 1970s was?
	Am I wrong on this? If you were around in the 70s, hit me with a Y. If you think that the 70s...
	We're like Satan shitting evil sludge down the throats of the planet.
	Am I wrong in this?
	I just experienced that entire...
	I'm sorry. Hit me with an S if it's okay for me to swear.
	I don't know how delicate are we feeling tonight.
	S, you guys are just snaking me.
	Yeah, the 70s were really, really evil.
	So... They were sordid.
	They were gross.
	They were relentlessly simian.
	That's the name for the 70s is simian.
	It was ape-like and it's an insult to apes because apes aren't dysfunctional unless you're talking about the Desmond Morris Human Zoo stuff.
	But it was a sleazy porn stash, oils and bathrobes and hosing down the floor of the bedroom because weird treacly substances fell off the squirted up...
	Four poster tying people down for savage satisfaction.
	It was a time of waterbeds and you got seasick on the swinging sickness of the 70s.
	And there were creeps who put mirrors over their ceilings.
	And it was the beginning of rampant pornography.
	And it was just a seedy, satanic, vile, vicious, destructive, repulsive...
	Decade. It was the kind of decade that you simply cannot become clean from.
	You cannot sandblast that satanic silt away from your soul.
	It was a time of key parties.
	Do you know what a key party is? Hit me with a Y if you know what a key party is.
	No, some of you don't.
	Okay, so a key party was, often in the suburbs, could be just about anywhere, a key party was, you go, ten people or five couples go to a party, and they all throw their keys in a bowl, and then you just pick out the car keys, you pick out the keys, and that's who you go home with.
	It was filthy, it was vile, it was savage.
	It was a time when a giant axe was hewn down on the last remaining tendrils binding the joys of men and women together.
	It was like Tom Bombadil in a psychotic Hunter Biden cocaine rage just decided to slash and hack all the last remaining IV bonds between the males and the females.
	It was a time where female vanity was inflated to absolute supernova madness.
	Irradiating, house-destroying, bursting point.
	It was a time when female vanity and female irresponsibility, which are two sides of the same coin, you understand?
	Female vanity and female irresponsibility are exactly the same thing.
	And it was a time when the groundwork of the 60s manifested in the pustulent boil goiters of female vanity pumping and female excuse generation.
	Male chauvinist pigs.
	Men are pigs.
	Women are wonderful.
	And women just follow this like a suicidal guy followed by lemmings, followed by ducklings, followed by a trail of fire ants.
	I just... Marriages all split up, and the women all huddled together in their pathetic rent-controlled apartments, sucking at the bloody teat of the state, castigating men, while absolutely requiring the men get to fuck up and go to work to pay for their welfare.
	"'You pigs!
	Get out of bed!
	Get on that oil rig!
	Go make broken mama some money!' You exploiters!
	You send mama some money or you're gonna get a call.
	People are gonna hammer on your door and drag you out of bed and throw you in jail.
	You exploiters!
	How dare...
	You have different opinion from the fairer sex.
	We will call our buddies in blue and F.U. up the chimney.
	It was the time of the foundation of the great lies of modernity.
	It was a time of the great lies.
	It was a time when pornography was, and people talk about pornography access these days as adults, I understand that, but it was a time when pornography was just scattered around the neighborhood.
	You tripped over it.
	It was gathered together by the sinister, pimply, go-nowhere boys and maybe even girls of the time.
	It was a time when the window of the television was a portal to a slightly better world.
	Because there's a delay, right?
	The people who were in charge of television are the people who were raised the decade or two previously.
	It was a time of drugs.
	It was the hangover from the rampant flower and scabies highs of the 60s.
	It all crashed and cratered into the drug-addled cesspit of the 70s.
	I remember overhearing a neighbor once talking about how she sniffed greedily at ammonitrate
	when her boyfriend was having an unconventional and uncomfortable form of sex with her.
	It was a time of unbelievable levels of rampant wife-beater t-shirts, hair poking out, the
	cheap polyester unemployment.
	.
	Where I lived, there was the bungalows.
	Out back of the roadhouse, we got some bungalows.
	As for the people who like to go down slow...
	And you'd see these rows of guys.
	We'd be out there, back there, skateboarding and all.
	You'd see these rows of guys.
	Greasy, slimy hair, pop bellies, beers like half-dead tin soldiers sitting beside their white plastic chairs hanging together with Spider-Man.
	Grip, trying to support their fat, hairy asses.
	And there'd be these guys back there, staring at the kids, glassy-eyed, thousand-yard stares, unemployed, unemployed, unemployed, on pokey, they call it pokey, on the dole, on unemployment, on welfare.
	The trollops, the slags, the skanks.
	The women would be there.
	And we would all, all of the young, sort of enthusiastic, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed kids, we'd go past this rose of the living dead.
	And all these guys, all these guys had women.
	They were never alone. They were disgusting, wretched, parasitical.
	And they always had Now, he wouldn't exactly say that these were highest quality women known to men, but it was wretched.
	And what were we supposed to think?
	Because the world gave us two lies, but one was empirically, at least to some degree, verifiable.
	The first lie...
	Was, well, you know, you've got to work hard, you've got to be successful, you've got to study for your test, you've got to get to university, you've got to get a career, all of these things.
	And that way, you know, you'll be a good family man and you'll get married and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
	Nope! Empirically, every day, we would go past these trenches of wasted human potential.
	These black-holed eyes, prayers upon the last...
	Vestigial corpuscles of productivity running through the dying veins of the British society.
	And these guys were complete losers and all had women and kids.
	They would call out, you know, in the way that happens when you go past a bunch of people who are unbelievable losers preying upon society and you know what they do.
	They call out something useless and stupid and embarrassing and pointless.
	Hey, nice skateboard!
	What the hell is that supposed to mean?
	Be careful! Yeah, gotta be careful like you are with your waistline and your energies and your focus and your productivity.
	And this undertow of like, be a total shit and you'll get a woman.
	This undertow caught people.
	It caught boys.
	That was a devilish temptation down in the trough and pit of human potential down there.
	Nothing was natural.
	Everything came from a can, even the fucking clothes.
	Thank you.
	Thank you.
	The hair was greasy.
	I remember I had a Scottish landlord once, just grease, thinning, greasy hair.
	Nobody could accept aging.
	People had comb-overs.
	Fat people defined their jawlines with ridiculous beards.
	Did they play dominoes outside?
	No, no! No! God, that's far too much effort.
	People were dipped in petroleum that pretended to be clothing.
	Everything smelled like grease.
	Even the clouds looked greasy.
	There were shortages. When I was a kid, there were shortages all the time.
	When I was in boarding school, I was thirsty.
	Why was I thirsty? Because there was not enough water for everyone.
	You could get, there was never enough for even like we would get these little plastic cups of water, you know, the big giant thick teacups.
	We get little plastic cups of water and that was your choice.
	That was your choice. You'd come in and you'd be playing football, soccer, rugby, whatever, right?
	You'd be running around like crazy.
	And you'd be dying of thirst.
	And you'd come in and you'd get one little cup of water.
	And then if you drank it fast because you're thirsty, then maybe you could line up to get the next one.
	Because you'd line up to this.
	But there was never enough for two for everyone.
	And you'd go to bed thirsty and you'd wake up thirsty and your pee would be various shades of unhealthy colors.
	And there were meat shortages.
	So not only were you thirsty, but you were also fed bizarre industrial Stalag Sputnik fiber substitutes.
	Everything was crap.
	You know, even the clothing...
	Have you ever been in an environment where your clothes are abusive?
	Like they get washed in such ridiculously bleachy, horrible, starchy stuff that it's basically like a hyperactive orangutan hugging your balls covered in sandpaper.
	Have you ever had that? Because that was school, that was home.
	I remember, you know, crying at the age of, I don't know, six or seven because my shorts were so stiff that I had terrible rashes up my legs.
	Like, everything was uncomfortable.
	Everything was horrible. And, of course, the kids who were around were in And these uncomfortable clothes.
	There were water shortages.
	shortages, people couldn't bathe as much as they wanted.
	It was a decade of hell.
	And people, oh, the materialism of the 80s, man, that was a glorious godsend
	relative to the squalor of the 70s.
	And you could see, you know, like the ships that go over the horizon, big ships that go
	over the horizon, the hulls go, and the main buildings, and the tops of the buildings, and
	the chimneys, and then they And you could see the old world just sailing away, going away, falling away.
	The world of the 50s and the 60s.
	The world of solid, lower middle class values and national pride.
	You could see that all dissolving under this relentless assault of squalid, greasy hair cream and semen.
	There's a vat of human repulsive greed.
	You couldn't get decent food to save your life.
	Sometimes it felt like. What we could get endless amounts of was bread that looks like it had been pulled from the ass of the Michelin man and buttered with Crisco.
	That you could get. You could get, like we would get mountains of bread with like shitty margarine.
	Well, margarine is always shitty, right?
	And you'd have to, you'd have to gobble down that stuff because you won't get enough food for everything else, right?
	Ah, you gotta, you know, kids, boys, boys, you gotta work hard.
	You gotta study.
	You gotta buckle down.
	Hey, with any luck, you'll either get drafted in a war or divorced by a devil-sent harridan of feminist family court destruction.
	Hey boys, you got a choice.
	You can work hard like your fathers who got divorced and had to flee not just the town, not just the country, not just the continent.
	They had to flee the hemisphere.
	Dad went to Africa.
	So you can work hard and you can get a quality woman and then if you look at her funny, she can divorce your ass And put you like cheese through a grater like your balls in the starchy underpants of testicle-shredding youth.
	Or, or, alternatively, you can be a lazy, greasy, fat bastard and you can sit on a plastic chair in your wife beater and a woman can bring you your fourth warm Newcastle brown ale of the morning.
	That's your choice.
	Have enough to be robbed or, or, go with me here, sit and do nothing and have your woman
	lash to you with all the necessities of the welfare state.
	All those, I mean I know the modern world is tough, I get all of that, but all of those
	who weren't around or got to skate past the 70s or were in some other different country
	or culture.
	Bye.
	you Well. And the psychological weirdness of the 70s.
	So there was a weird streak of mysticism in the 70s.
	You know, you could, oh, do you know that you could put a razor under a pyramid and it'll sharpen it, man?
	Tarot cards, man.
	Mysticism, crystals, weird bells, dream catchers, a worship of whatever indigenous population had managed to shame their thinkers into suicide and thus remained in the Stone Age for tens of thousands of years.
	Ouija boards and UFOs that weren't scientific or rational, just weirdly, anally invasive.
	Gray almond-faced people who regularly beamed up hillbillies from their General Lee reproduction
	vehicles and took things out of their asses and put them back down disoriented.
	Thanks for watching!
	There was no science in any of that.
	Rocks do have auras. They're just uranium and will kill you.
	Hit me with a Y. Hit me with a Y. Did you ever hear of something called a pet rock?
	A pet rock? You know how fucking insane that is?
	This was the 70s.
	You know, because the 60s were like, hey, we're going to get to the moon, man.
	Next stop, Mars.
	Nope. Next stop, a pet rock.
	This was considered clever or intelligent or fun or cool.
	I have a rock.
	I'm going to pretend it can be your pet.
	Greatest marketing idea ever.
	No, it's not the greatest mock idea.
	It's a rock with plastic iron. I have a pet rock.
	No, because here's the thing, right?
	If you're a kid and you see a bunch of mouth-breathing absolute morons snapping up pet rocks like this is a limerick from Shakespeare.
	This is one of the greatest and most entertaining things that happened.
	They put googly eyes on a rock.
	See, the problem is you don't want to raise a generation that grows up with absolutely bottomless contempt for the people in their own society.
	And the people who were like, hey, that's my pet rock!
	That's super funny! It's like, I will have no desire to defend this culture.
	Like, if you all want to buy pet rocks, that's fine.
	But the bottomless...
	No, it wasn't the fidget spinner of the 70s, because you could do something with the fidget spinner.
	That's a pet rock! That's so funny!
	You just parted with 10 bucks for a rock.
	It just shows you how unbelievably retarded people can be.
	How unbelievably stupid people can be.
	Well, Pet Rocks are cool! I'm gonna get one, cuz Pet Rocks are cool!
	Oh my god. The stuff that people bought, the stuff that people paid for, the stuff
	that people followed.
	It was the decade of cults.
	It was the decade of nihilistic, environmental, imminent disaster.
	Chia pets? But weren't they at least a plant?
	Everyone who bought the pet rock contributed to the cynicism and the nihilism of the next generation.
	Thank you.
	Thank you.
	Global Cool League was a scare in the 70s.
	Yeah, for sure. You remember Infinite Boredom?
	Yeah, for sure. Now, Rubik's Cubes, okay, I don't get them.
	I have no idea.
	I saw a video the other day.
	A computer can now solve it in like 0.25 seconds or whatever, right?
	So, listen, Rubik's Cubes, though, it's a clever puzzle kind of thing, and, you know, it's a relatively harmless way for people with no athletic ability to show that they have some ability in something.
	You know, when I was in my early teens and I would go to my junior high school's computer lab on Saturdays all day, so, you know, some of the kids who weren't any good at sports would be like, hey, I made this subroutine run faster.
	Okay, cool. In the late infomercials, I remember there was one for something called the Tuna Turner.
	I guess named after the late Tina Turner, but it turned your tuna.
	Didn't Leonard Nimoy do a whole newsreel on global cooling back then?
	Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
	Well, of course, they wanted to provoke this end-of-the-world greed for stimuli before death.
	in search of with Leonard Nimoy well and by the one so my friends and I you were used to we
	had skateboards and and from the
	apartments of the flats that I lived in there was sort of a curly ramp that went down to the
	trench of trashy greasy men Mm.
	And we would go down and we would have little sticks with us.
	And we would try and drop the sticks right in front of the other person's skateboard.
	Because if you get the right stick at the right angle and the right speed, it just stops your skateboard dead.
	So we would always try to get the, it'd be the last one in the bottom.
	And sometimes you just have to bail off your skateboard because you'd see that it's the right stick and you're just going to go head over head over feet.
	It was actually a lot of fun.
	At least selling pet rocks did less harm than data mining platforms disguised as social media sold to China.
	No, but I'm saying it's part of the whole process.
	How on earth are you supposed to respect the culture or your elders or people when pet rocks is a thing?
	You know, a friend of mine's father was a doctor and got into scream therapy.
	We'd be over at his place and you'd hear this screaming Because he got into some Jungian primal scream therapy
	bullshit This is how crazy people were back then
	Thank you.
	It was like watching human brains being disassembled by invisible goblins with sporks and chainsaws.
	Ahhhh. Lingerie parties.
	Thank you.
	Rampant substance abuse.
	Of course, there were tons of places where it was more normal and all of that.
	It was wild. It was really the beginning of the ultimate demoralization of the West, right?
	The demoralization of the West.
	Good rock and roll, though?
	I'm a spaceship superstar.
	Was Disco a mistake?
	So Disco...
	Thank you.
	Was the hyper-feminine cousin of Rock.
	Rock. See, okay, so one of the things that happened in the 70s was people began competing on bullshit.
	Now, I don't want to idealize prior blah, blah, blah, right?
	But in the past, you did compete a little bit on your virtues.
	You did compete a little bit on your charity.
	You did compete a little bit on your house.
	You did compete a little bit on your income or the prettiness of your wife or the politeness of your children or where you sat in church.
	So there's always an element of human competition, right?
	But the 70s was when people began competing on utter bullshit.
	You know, I remember seeing Saturday Night Live.
	Wait, Saturday Night, sorry, Saturday Night Fever.
	I want to just check.
	I think that was the late 70s.
	That soundtrack was like a brain virus that was absolutely everywhere.
	Yeah, that's right.
	When did that come out? Yeah, 1977.
	It was a Star Wars year, right?
	Oh my gosh, it was just repulsive.
	I remember watching that movie as a kid.
	I don't know why on earth I ended up in these nightmare scenarios.
	I saw media that I should never ever have seen as a child because there's no boundaries in the 70s, right?
	At least not in my environment.
	And I remember seeing that movie.
	And I don't remember much about it other than there was a lot of screaming, there was a lot of skinny hip dancing, and at one point a woman is so desperate to sleep with a guy that she throws condoms at him.
	Oof. And even this helium-voiced Bee Gees, right?
	I mean, God, whatever happened to baritones...
	I mean, I'm not saying everyone's got to be a Don Ho bass, but whatever happened to baritones like Frank Sinatra?
	Night fever, night fever!
	Yeah! Don't mess up my hair!
	Yeah, from Saturday Night Fever, right?
	It's repulsive. It's about a guy.
	Of course, it's all the demonic stuff, right?
	You can be a great dancer and women will love you.
	Women will throw condoms at you.
	Make sure you don't become a priest because your brother's going to become a priest and that's really bad.
	It's competing on bullshit.
	Competing on ape-like sexual stimuli.
	It's like the white equivalent.
	Disco is the white equivalent of twerking.
	Look, I'm the best dancer!
	And this was held out to men as like the thing.
	Yeah, there's no love for baritones in pop music.
	What can you get? Billy Idol?
	Is he the only baritone left?
	I can't even listen to the modern music, because it's always some breathy-voiced helium singer with rap in the middle.
	I don't particularly care for the rap either way, but, my God, I mean...
	I don't know why everyone's got to be like Michael Jackson's love child with Madonna on helium.
	Like, is there nobody who's got any timbre anymore?
	It's just completely gone? Did it go K-pop kind of way?
	I mean, even Elvis had a nice baritone at the lower registers.
	What is Sting? Yeah, yeah.
	Yeah, I saw Billy Idol in concert, actually.
	It was very good. I mean, but Billy Idol also.
	Was decadent trash, right?
	I mean, it's fun. My parents tried to solve my anger as a teenager by taking me to Scream Therapist.
	Very woke, very hippie, and batshit crazy.
	Many years later, I phoned Stephanie, helps me more than my parents and that dumb, crazy therapist combined.
	Sting? No, Sting's a countertenor.
	Like, he is super high. He's higher than a tenor.
	Or at least he was. He doesn't sing that high anymore.
	I mean, you can't keep that up.
	Literally, right? Yeah, it's like, so the 60s were like, they held out this whole thing.
	And you know what? I'm happy to stop.
	If you guys want to talk about something else you have, maybe this doesn't help you.
	It might help you understand your parents' Depeche Mode.
	Yeah, that was a fun band.
	I think I've seen them twice.
	Just can't get enough. It's a great dance song.
	Again, it's obviously kind of fae, but it was a great dance song.
	So hit me with an N if you want me to move on to another topic because I can absolutely talk about how the 60s led to the 70s if that's of interest to you.
	It doesn't help you. It's a...
	No, you want me to keep going on something else?
	That's totally fine. Oh, or is that...
	I'm so sorry. You want 60s?
	Hit me with a Y if you'd like me to do the 60s.
	Okay, it looks... Okay, sorry about that.
	That was my bad. I apologize.
	That was like terrible communication.
	I'm going to give you a triple negative and then, right?
	All right. So...
	The 50s represented a massive challenge to leftism because it was working, right, for the middle class in particular.
	The larger the middle class, the less chance you have for a revolution, right, because the middle class, this is why the leftists hate the bourgeois so much.
	The rich can be made to feel guilty, the poor can be bribed, but the middle class want their freedoms, right?
	So the 50s were a huge problem, and of course, in Western countries, there were lots of babies, and as we know, Western babies will often grow up to be skeptical of totalitarianism and want free speech and free markets and all of that.
	So they had a huge problem.
	So what they had to do was they had to find some way to nuke The stability and conservatism of the 1950s.
	And so the way they did that was they reframed everything as square and they programmed people through music and popular culture to view all restrictions on their animal lusts As inhibitory and destructive.
	This all goes all the way back to Freud's civilization and its discontents, right?
	The superego, the ego, and the id.
	The god, the man, and the devil.
	So the id is the seething desires of the ape.
	The superego is the restrictive, bullying strictures of society.
	They have to fight the ape, and the ego is the one that mediates between these two opposing forces.
	So civilization and its discontents off Freud, the coke addict, coke dealer, childhood sexual
	abuse betraying son of a bitch, basically complete unbelievably horrifying human being.
	I did a whole speech on him in New York some years ago.
	You can go look that up.
	Just look up FDR podcast Freud.
	So the argument is basically like, you know, you got to express yourself.
	You've got to be spontaneous.
	You've got an animal side.
	I'm a monkey! I've always liked that scream that comes out of Mick Jagger's throat in that Monkey Man song, right?
	I'm a monkey! So we've got this animal, primitive, expressive nature wherein there's all this creativity and fertility and wisdom and peace and beauty and aggression and all of that natural and what civilization does, it comes along and there's this whole natural flood of humanity and energy and ecstasy and joy and terror and horror and love and it just dams it up and it crushes it and puts it in a tiny box for the convenience of those in charge.
	And we lose all of that deep ape-like spontaneous creativity and spontaneous exhibition of rank animal passions and power.
	You know, and what civilization does is it just...
	It emasculates you.
	It un-apes you.
	It makes you...
	A slave to other people's approval.
	And you saw all of this Tony Randall stuff and Jack Lemmon stuff, an establishment man.
	It was always the same damn story in the late 50s and the early 60s, right?
	That the man in the thin gray suit and the man in the flannel gray suit or whatever it is.
	He's an advertising executive, but he's got a secret passion, and every time he goes to work, a little piece of him dies, and it's kind of boring, and he's got a kind of boring life.
	And then, you know, he just, he finds his passion begins to uncork.
	He meets some Zorba the Greek person who's primitive and really kind of...
	Spontaneous and fun, and that person just has him stay out all night and do crazy things, and he just breaks out of his monotonous nine-to-five, boring, middle-class, suburban existence.
	Like all this Weeds stuff.
	Weeds was sort of the updated version of this, right?
	Like, hey man, you just wake up at nine, or you wake up at eight, you go to work at nine, you come back at five, you watch a TV in front of a TV dinner, you go to do it all over again, and it's boring, and it's repetitive, and bleh, right?
	And now, of course, the same thing happens with this eat, pray, love.
	Literally coven witchy, satanic stuff that's dangled in front of women to have them run off the cliff of their own vanity and greed.
	So they had a problem. So how do you break the rules of society?
	What you do is you say, well, all rules are oppressive.
	All rules are imposed on you by people who want to crush and cripple you.
	All rules go against the natural grain of your spontaneous and generative human instincts.
	Kill the superego.
	Release the id. Release the beast.
	Release the kraken. Office space.
	Oh, really?
	Really? You want a little thing on office space?
	Because it's not what you think it's about.
	You want office space?
	I'll give you office space.
	Office Space is a movie about a whole bunch of people who are masochists.
	.
	That's all it is. Oh man, the corporate world is so oppressive.
	Why are you complaining about your life?
	You chose it. They're all masochists.
	They're all broken. They don't have strong fathers in their lives.
	They're all masochists and they just blame their environment.
	Like Jennifer Aniston in that movie, she plays a waitress.
	She's supposed to have flair, right?
	She's supposed to have... And she doesn't have enough flair.
	Well, how much flair do you want me to have?
	Like, you worked at a restaurant where you're supposed to be enthusiastic.
	God forbid a waitress be enthusiastic and show people a good...
	Oh, I want to show people a good time.
	I hate my job. You're a loser.
	If you're in a job you hate, fucking quit and shut up.
	Oh, God. I mean, if you're in a gulag, you have nothing but sympathy.
	If you're a child being abused, nothing but sympathy.
	Oh, my job can be kind of boring.
	Well, welcome to adulthood, kid.
	I have a pretty exciting job.
	My job can be kind of boring.
	You know, it's a one-to-one ratio doing these shows and then, oh, I've got to process the show.
	Oh, I've got to normalize the audio.
	Oh, I've got to cut out some blank spots.
	Oh, I have to go back here and I've got to get all the questions and I've got to put them out there and then I've got to upload them because I'm off the major platforms on the 15 different platforms and then I've got to post them.
	Right? It's the greatest job in the world, in my opinion.
	Is it always exciting?
	No. Sometimes it's too exciting.
	Half the time it's really boring.
	I mean, I'm not going to complain.
	I'm not going to complain.
	Do you hear me complain? I'm going to do all this processing with my shoes.
	Jesus. Office space is like blaming the environment for your own sad sack existence that won't get off your ass and build something for yourself.
	Quit your job. And it's about people who have no support structure.
	It's about people who have no fathers to say, if you're bored, change something about your life.
	Oh, and it's about criminals.
	I mean, really, it's about central banking in a way because they're just shaving everybody's money, right?
	They've got this program that shaves everyone's deposits, fractions of pennies off and deposits into more money.
	And also it's about the rage that happens when you blame everybody else for your own life, right?
	So the guy who... Sorry, it's an old movie, spoilers, blah, blah, blah.
	But yeah, the guy who sets fire to...
	What's the name of the guy who sets fire to the whole place at the end?
	Milton. Right?
	So this is a guy, no support structure, and he's a loser, and he won't speak up for himself, and he won't do anything, and then it's the rage, right?
	It's the rage of the self abdicated.
	No, people think it's somehow a criticism of corporate America.
	What?
	Come on. First of all, it's not set where it should be set in the government.
	It's set in a private industry.
	I found...
	I did not like the businesses that I was involved in after a while, so I went and did something else.
	I mean, does anybody in these people...
	Does anybody say...
	Why are you guys there if this is such a horrible job?
	Does anybody say to them, like, stop whining and quit?
	Like, what's the matter with you? No, see, they can't quit.
	The only thing they can do is steal.
	Now, I get it's a funny movie and all of that, right?
	Looks like somebody's got a bad case of the Mondays.
	Well, we pretty much kicked their ass.
	It's like, well, yeah, I know, because I worked in a lot of physical fields when I was younger.
	Now, if you're talking about a kid in government schools, absolutely, but you can't talk about that stuff.
	Because that's a real thing. You always got to, oh, you know, the real hell is a free market capitalist environment where you can quit and you get paid and you get a comfortable work environment.
	Yeah, work is boring and these are young guys too.
	Okay, hit me with a why if you had a completely thrilling and exciting job before you were 30.
	Come on, hit me with a why.
	Did you have a really exciting and wonderful job before you were 30?
	No, of course you didn't.
	Okay, a few of you did.
	Poker dealer. Alright, tell me your exciting jobs before you were 30.
	Tell me your exciting jobs.
	I'm happy to be wrong about this.
	Park ranger? Homeopath?
	Engineer? Sound engineer?
	Paintball referee? Good.
	Okay, so that actually helps. I mean, I've got...
	I win either way, right?
	So, okay, fantastic.
	So you had cool jobs in your 30s.
	So then you watch this movie about a bunch of well-educated, decent-looking guys whining about their jobs.
	When there are tons of cool jobs before you're 30.
	No, don't give me dishwasher.
	Man, I did that for two days and then I quit.
	bit like that was a job even I couldn't handle. Or, okay let me ask you this,
	Hit me with a why if you had not just an exciting job, but a job where you were doing good and had meaning out of the job.
	Right? Did you have meaning?
	Hit me with a why if you had meaning in your job.
	Wow. Good for you guys.
	Fantastic. You were certainly doing better than...
	Well, no, I shouldn't say. I had meaning in my mid to late 20s.
	Some? Yeah.
	So, yeah, the...
	It's a nihilistic movie, and it lures you into resentment.
	It lures you into resenting your environment.
	It lures you into resenting your life.
	It lures you into resenting others.
	Yeah, if you could just come in this weekend, that would be great.
	If you could just, yeah.
	Yeah, I mean, okay, so yeah, everyone has these sort of boring doofus jobs, sorry, boring doofus managers.
	See, there was no quality manager.
	Like, there's Fezziwig and Scrooge, right, in A Christmas Carol.
	Fezziwig is the really generous boss and Scrooge is the really mean boss.
	It's a nihilistic job that teaches you that you can't ever tell the truth, that idiots are always going to be in control of your life, and the best hope you have is criminality, right?
	Yeah, Dilbert is a comic script.
	Main character's fat and whiny and doesn't even lift, you know?
	And it's the ultimate incel, right?
	So yeah, I just wanted to point out that this whole thing about office space...
	Somebody says, the resentment makes sense.
	I worked in an awful call center and all my friends hated their jobs and their lives.
	So it's strange to look back and see people in the definition of misery loves company.
	Yeah, I worked in a call center for a while, off and on.
	And I remember there was a guy...
	He was a real screamer. The guy was a real screamer.
	It taught me a lot about how public policy went.
	It taught me a lot about how public policy is led along.
	I remember one of the questions I was asking, you know, you phone people up, you ask them questions, you get the surveys, right?
	Do you think that the public should rely on their uninformed opinion or the professional advice of the city planners?
	Hmm, I wonder how people are going to answer.
	that's very interesting right so yeah it I really dislike the office space thing because
	the only criticism is outside the characters The characters are the anti-heroes and it's Kafka-esque in a sense, right?
	So Kafka wrote a short story called Metamorphosis about a guy who wakes up and he's a cockroach.
	He wakes up and he's a giant cockroach.
	It's a completely repulsive and insane story.
	A completely repulsive and insane story.
	But it's not his fault, right?
	He's just a victim of this metamorphosis where he wakes up and he just happens to be a cockroach.
	And this has been really...
	I think Baryshnikov did it on stage as a ballet or something like that, right?
	And look, if you're talking about...
	You know, the trial, Kafka's other famous book about this man who's accused, nobody will ever tell him what he's accused of, and he's got endless bureaucracy and all of that.
	That's a terrifying story, but then, of course, he did live in a pretty socialist bureaucracy and all of that sort of stuff.
	And in office space...
	These guys would be, in a sane book that I would write, these guys would be the losers, and their journey would be to figure out that they always had the power, they just refused to exercise it, and to figure out what childhood Simon the Boxer repetition, compulsion, despair they were acting out.
	Maybe it would be government schools, maybe it would be terrible families, uninvolved families, but these are kids, the three major characters, Michael Bolton and the other two, They have no coaching.
	They have no fathers. They have no mothers.
	They have no one, no grandfathers.
	Nobody's telling them how to live or what to do to the point where the guy is desperately pounding on the door of his neighbor who works as a plumber or whatever saying, well, how the hell do you live?
	He has no clue how to live. Nobody taught them how to live.
	Office space shows how unmeritocratic large bureaucracies are.
	are.
	Thank you.
	Okay, is it the nature of large organizations to be anti-meritocratic?
	Is it just the nature?
	No, it absolutely is not.
	It's not the nature of these things to be anti-meritocratic at all.
	No. No.
	Nope, nope, nope, nope, nope.
	Now when you have giant government contracts, when you have various initiatives of tick the box and fill
	the squares, then yeah, of course you have anti-meritocracy.
	That's not the nature of the organizations.
	It's the nature of the crazy legal environment that people live in.
	You know, office space is like if he's talking about governments or large bureaucracies that are semi-fascistic because they're controlled and reinforced by the government.
	Okay, fine. Fine.
	But you know what? Office space is like a softer version of A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Solzhenitsyn, wherein Solzhenitsyn only blames the prisoners, only blames the guards, only blames...
	The doctors. Doesn't blame the system.
	doesn't blame anything.
	All right, so let's get back to the 60s.
	Bye.
	If art wants to show a problem, show a problem.
	Fantastic, art is about helping people solve problems.
	It also is a way of getting intelligent and powerful people to abandon the centers of
	Well, you can't work in an office.
	You've got to go be a plumber. Okay, well, plumbers generally aren't changing the world, but, you know, maybe people who work in offices can do a little bit more sometimes.
	I mean, it's just about, you know, abandon ship, abandon ship.
	Okay, whatever, right? And back then, it was too soon to make that call.
	So, The 60s was the satanic promise that if you drop rules, you get freedom.
	That freedom is the result of abandoning structure and self-restraint.
	That self-restraint is tyranny.
	Self-control is tyranny.
	And to be fully expressed, you must loosen the restraining bolts of any rules or any self-restraint, and you must follow your bliss.
	Go live your best life.
	You want to have sex? Go have sex.
	You want to do drugs? Go do drugs.
	You want to stop bathing?
	Stop bathing. You want to grow your hair?
	Grow your hair. All the rules, all the self-restraint is tyranny.
	No, this is called the great relearning.
	Everyone's like, you know... Soap is a bourgeois prejudice, man.
	We're just going to raise our children in common.
	We're not going to bathe. And then they've got ticks, scabies, fleas, right?
	Oh, that's why we have...
	It's all the relearning, right?
	We've got to abandon all these rules that have been evolving for thousands and thousands.
	We've got to abandon all these rules.
	Hey, let's just raise kids without dads.
	Ah, man, the chauvinist pigs.
	Anyway, let's raise kids without the patriarchy, right?
	Let's just raise kids without patriarchy.
	We don't need those stinking men.
	Badges, we don't need no stinking badges.
	Just, you know. Okay, it's true that we evolved to be raised by males and females.
	It's true that we evolved that. But, you know, that's just bushwhide prejudice.
	Let's just rip it all out, right?
	I mean, it's true that we evolved with a very complex calculator in our mind to make sure that we did not consume more calories to get fewer calories.
	You don't spend 2,000 calories to get a 1,500-calorie meal because you're starved to death.
	So we have very finely calibrated to make sure that we have advantage, to have a profit.
	The fundamental profit is calories.
	If you don't get that, you die.
	and water, clean water.
	So we've all evolved with this finely calibrated sense of to work for profit.
	People think that profit has something to do with the free market.
	Profit is fundamentally biological.
	You need to profit off calories or you die.
	You need to profit in the dating game, in the mating game, in the pair bonding game, in the marriage game, or your genes die.
	You need to win. Or you die.
	That's evolution 101, right?
	So all these atheists who are socialists are like, well, it's true that we have evolved to directly respond to incentives and make sure that we get more out of stuff than we put into it.
	That's, you know, absolutely the case.
	You don't put the grape at the top of the tree and say to people, go get it, because they'll say, pfft, it's not worth it.
	It's not worth it! So literally life for four billion years...
	I've been making sure that it profits from its endeavors.
	Four billion years.
	The only reason we're alive is our ancestors did more winning than losing.
	You think profit is evil?
	then you're saying life is evil.
	It's crazy.
	So four billion years...
	All living organisms have been finely tuned for profit.
	But then the socialists come along and say, hey, you know what we don't need?
	We don't need profit.
	Let's not do profit. Let's not have these finely tuned four-billion-year evolutionary senses.
	Let's just completely throw those out.
	And people will just, they'll just work because.
	They'll just work because.
	Trust me, bro. So, yeah, we'll try, you know, let's try no rules, says the 60s, right?
	We've got all of these rules and the self-restraint that's evolved for hundreds of thousands of years, millions of years, billions of years.
	All animals require some level of self-restraint, all of them.
	The bird who just wants to eat his own food doesn't feed his offspring and his offspring die.
	The bird who wants to retain his energy by not doing those crazy, clear all of the twigs out of the clearing and shake your fan ass in the female's face.
	That's a waste of energy, man.
	I conserved my resources.
	That's not fun. It might not even work.
	Ah, forget that. Okay, his genes die off.
	You know, I know this now, like ducks sit on their eggs like 22, 23 hours a day, exposing themselves to predation, getting desperately thirsty and hungry, and then they wobble off to go get some food and some water and come right back.
	They have self-restraint.
	They're hungry, they're thirsty, they sit on their eggs.
	They have self-restraint.
	When a lion is chasing a gazelle, and the lion is sensing that it is expending more
	calories than it could probably get out of a gazelle, It stops chasing. The gazelle, hey man, you win.
	You get away. You've seen those, like the eagles come down and they get to the rabbits and the rabbits jump over the eagles.
	They tried that a couple of times. If the rabbit is too nimble and too quick, hey man, I'm not wasting any more energy.
	They have self-restraint.
	They don't do the fallacy of sunk costs.
	Animals can't afford it. They're looking to profit on their calories and they have self-restraint.
	Abandon a lost cause.
	It's crazy.
	A lot of self-restraint.
	.
	The mother gorilla will carry water in her mouth miles sometimes to feed her babies, to give water to her babies.
	Even though she's thirsty, she will spit the water.
	You've got mama birds who literally regurgitate half-digested worms down the beaks of their babies.
	She'd rather eat it herself.
	Nope. She's got self-restraint.
	So the idea that we can have life without self-restraint is an insane person's idea.
	And of all the creatures in the known universe, we are the ones who need the most self-restraint.
	Because they weren't saying, let's go back to the self-restraint of the apes.
	Let's go back to the self-restraint of Of the lions.
	No, we don't need self-restraint at all.
	They completely detached humanity from everything that is biological.
	No profit, no evaluation, no selfishness, no in-group preferences, no grooming.
	Like, no grooming. And it's funny because, I mean, the atheists who were largely driving this stuff, they said to the Christians and the religious, oh, you guys are crazy, there's no such thing as the soul.
	But you know what would be totally sane?
	It's detaching the most evolved creature on the planet from all evolutionary history to completely remove, because, you know, the soul is crazy, but you know what's really sane?
	It's having animals do the complete opposite of what animals are.
	No restraint, no biology, no history, no profit.
	No sense of winning or losing.
	It's completely detached. Well, yeah, if you watch what animals go through to survive, get meals, feed young, oh, it's crazy.
	I mean, have you seen...
	I'm sure you've seen this, right?
	You've got a bunch of smaller birds up in a tree, and some hawk comes along, and the birds all just fly at the eyes of the hawk.
	It's crazy! Wild!
	Because they're profiting from that, their genes are profiting from that, and they're willing...
	To do it that way. To take on the risk of the hawk killing them.
	To protect their babies.
	That's self-restraint, isn't it?
	Oh, well, it's programmed.
	Oh, yeah, so is ours to some degree.
	And we need the most self-restraint of all because our children take an archaeological eon to evolve, right?
	To grow, right? It's a quarter century to brain maturity for men and 22 plus years for women.
	Now we need, oh, we're just not going to have any self-restraint.
	It's crazy stuff. So The 60s were the most anti-scientific age since the Dark Ages.
	The most anti-evolutionary, the most anti-biological, the most anti-life decade since the Middle Ages.
	The Middle Ages was the dawn of science.
	So really, and even in the Middle Ages, even in the Dark Ages, animal husbandry and selective
	breeding, all of that was understood.
	It was an age of fanatical anti-life mysticism.
	Thank you.
	Or, to put it another way, are you ready?
	Mind-blown time? Mind-blown time?
	Is it time?
	Valium was the 60s I think.
	Do you want me to...
	.
	Because this is still what they're offering you.
	This is still what they're offering you and what they're offering me.
	You wanna know what they're offering you?
	Waaaiyaaayooaaayoo Ayaa roooaaayoo
	Ayaa ooo The return to innocence, right?
	So here's what they offer you.
	This is what the devils offer you. Okay.
	Who doesn't need...
	Who doesn't manifest self-restraint?
	What is the creature that doesn't manifest any self-restraint whatsoever?
	Absolutely right. A baby.
	A baby. So what they do is they say, you can return to a state of babyhood.
	You can return to infancy.
	Just go back. We'll take care of you.
	We'll give you what you need.
	And this is what they always sell, right?
	This is what they always sell. This is what the demons attempt humanity forever.
	This is what they always sell you. Oh, you're going to be loved.
	You should just be loved for who you are.
	You shouldn't be loved for anything you do.
	We're going to take care of all your needs, just like mommy and daddy did when you were a baby.
	You know, you can just wake up in the morning and do whatever you want, like a baby.
	You don't have any need for self-restraint and anything that gets in the way of what you want is fundamentally
	unjust and wrong And you can get angry at as a baby gets angry if a mother
	withholds food Self-restraint is the mark of adulthood
	Thank you.
	You don't need to be an adult.
	It's the temptation to regress.
	You understand? To fall back through the tunnel of time and wake up in hammer and sickle diapers.
	That's what's going on.
	That's what they're always offering you.
	That's the whole deal.
	You don't have to work.
	You don't have to have any responsibility.
	We'll take care of the consequences.
	Hey man, you have a kid out of wedlock, we'll just give you welfare, man.
	You don't have a job, we'll just give you money.
	We'll just take away all your consequences.
	Because that's what good parents do when you're a baby.
	You're not supposed to learn from consequences.
	This is the constant offer.
	You can be a baby forever.
	You can be a baby forever.
	Adulthood, you know, man, it's not working out for you.
	It's too hard.
	It's too hard, man.
	You're not good at it.
	Just go back.
	Just go back. You regress.
	We'll take over. We'll tell you what to wear.
	We'll tell you where to go.
	We'll tell you who your friends are.
	We'll tell you who to marry. We'll tell you what your job is.
	Man. Yeah, there's a lot of adulting is hard memes out there.
	Stop this demonic stuff, Steph.
	Sounds like my brain. Well, you may have somebody else in there other than me.
	But am I wrong? Isn't this the...
	It's stressful, man.
	Making my own decisions is tough.
	It's stressful. I can't...
	I'm not ready. I... I just got to give up the reins.
	Let Jesus take the wheel.
	Let Stalin take the reins.
	Hence the proliferation of life coaches.
	Pfft.
	Very good points being made tonight.
	Oh, thank you for the tip. I appreciate that.
	And if anybody else is finding these to be...
	I see if I can tell you what the demons are offering you then I've given you protection, right? I
	Was absolutely desperate myself to get to adulthood when you
	There's no money on this planet that would take me back to childhood.
	I was desperate to get out, desperate to move on, never had any urge to go back.
	Right? In some high schools in Australia, we teach students how to fill out welfare forms when I leave school.
	Sorry, that wasn't a great accent, but yeah, yeah.
	Yeah, my friend's sister is 36 and is stressed because everyone wants her to have children.
	She says she's still adventuring.
	I'm still finding myself. I've got a lot of growing to do.
	I've got unspecified healing from unspecified trauma.
	No, it's just delaying.
	That's what they are for you. You never have to grow up.
	In fact, you can grow down. You can grow down.
	Just go back. Just rewind, rewind.
	And it won't even be a, like, rewind and there's no forward from there.
	You don't go forward, you just stay back there.
	Just stay back. Right?
	You don't have to become a, like, if you keep people in a state of permanent adolescence or permanent childhood or permanent toddlerhood, like, this is what, this is what always says, right?
	Like, if somebody comes along and says, well, we've got to cut welfare, what do the moms always say?
	It's usually the moms. What do the moms always say?
	Well, how's my kid going to eat?
	My kid needs health care?
	How's that going to get paid for? So that's a child's, right?
	That's a child's view of the world.
	To go rubber bones and have other people solve the problems.
	And that's fine. When you're a kid, right?
	I mean if you're a kid and some animal comes into the hut, you run away and let your parents deal with it.
	So that was the promise of the 60s.
	Thanks.
	You can be a baby.
	But you can be a baby with big balls.
	Because you can be a baby.
	And what they offer you is they say, well, without self-restraint, you can have a lot of sex.
	Now, we're going to offer you a lot of sex.
	All you have to do is give up your property rights.
	Because when you have a lot of sex, there are a lot of unwanted babies, you need a welfare state, you need socialized medicine, you need all of this stuff, right?
	People who want to give up adulthood will always get infancy and tyranny.
	You want to be treated like a baby, you need totalitarianism.
	Yeah, all the benefits of childhood with the sacks of adulthood.
	Right. Right.
	So then what you do is when you offer people an escape from consequences, those consequences don't vanish, just other people have to pay for them.
	If you don't have a good dad for your kid, other people have to be forced to pay for your kid.
	If you don't take care of your own health, other people have to be forced to pay for your health care.
	If you don't stay close to your own children, other people have to pay for their resulting antisocial behaviors.
	If you don't want to grow up, other people have to adult for you.
	Burdens can't be lifted, they can only be shifted.
	If you're not responsible, other people have to be more responsible.
	Thank you.
	.
	If you don't take self-ownership, other people have to have their self-ownership stripped away.
	You can't have freedom of association when you're a baby.
	Shouldn't have freedom of association when you're a baby because your parents need to take care of you.
	You can't get your own stuff. And you can see people do this.
	Like if you've ever watched these debates, you can absolutely see.
	You can see when they just lick finger candles and their eyes go out.
	They just go rubber bones. Who's going to solve this?
	How am I going to get this? How's that going to happen?
	It's your life, man. You figure it out.
	How am I just going to get educated?
	there's no government schools. Your kids you figure it out.
	How my bills gonna get paid for?
	Your life you figure, I mean, your life you figure it out.
	Voting is almost always voting away adulthood.
	...
	you Voting is a time-tuddle to diaper-clad helplessness and immobility, but with the adult liberties to create disasters.
	So the reason why babies are not given agency, well, they don't have agency, but they can't do much damage.
	What can they do? Pee in your eye, whatever, right?
	They can't do any damage, right?
	It's the people who have independence and adult sexual organs and so on and
	Parents who aren't paying for them. They're the ones who can do a lot of damage, right?
	Somebody says I have a lot of conflict when my pastor says go out and help the poor
	My mind says they won't self-correct.
	Thoughts? It's a funny thing, you know.
	It's a funny thing where the idea is that helping the poor means giving them money.
	Right? It's a weird thing.
	Helping the poor means giving them money.
	What a strange thought. People aren't poor because they lack money.
	Right? What does helping the poor mean?
	What does it mean to help the poor?
	Why are they poor? It's like saying people are fat because they have access to too much food.
	No, they don't. That's not why they're fat.
	People are generally poor because they lack wisdom.
	They lack the wisdom to defer gratification.
	They lack the wisdom to be moral.
	They lack the wisdom to save for a rainy day.
	They lack the wisdom to work hard even when it's unpleasant.
	They just lack the wisdom.
	You want to help the poor?
	What they need is wisdom.
	Money and happiness are not very strongly correlated beyond a bare minimum.
	And the other thing too is that a lot of people sadly exist in the world mostly as an example to others.
	Here's what not to do. I sit down with the poor and help them to get over their resentment.
	Right, I mean you've heard this in a million of my listener calls.
	Most people are poor because they're resentful, which is why I'm constantly trying to break
	people's resentment.
	.
	I had a men's rights guy, I haven't released the call yet, but he was really raging at women and I had to push back really, really hard on him.
	Resentment is futility.
	Resentment is paralysis. Resentment is helplessness.
	Resentment is one of the ultimate loser emotions.
	drives your soul out of your body and your mind out of your life.
	I grew up among the poor.
	Do you know why they were poor? Do you know why most people I grew up with were poor?
	You know poor people. Why are they poor?
	Not always. Not always.
	But a lot. Why are they poor?
	Hate. Poor choices.
	No. Resentment is easy, resentful.
	There's some undisciplined, yeah.
	But there's a blanket answer.
	Why are most people poor?
	Most people are poor, well, either because they have a complete inability.
	Like, let's say that they're just really not smart and, you know, they just...
	In which case, we should have sympathy.
	Absolutely not their fault, right?
	Absolutely not their fault. We have sympathy.
	It's a real shame. It's tragic.
	We shouldn't blame them. I get all of that.
	But most people are poor because they prefer that state.
	Most people are poor because if they...
	Come on. If you came from poverty, what happened when you started to rise up?
	What happened to all of the people around you?
	What happened with them? What happened with them and with you?
	When you were trying to get out of the crab bucket, what happened?
	Envy, shunned, sabotage, bad mouth, yo you think you're so good, you think you're too good for us.
	Yeah, they prefer that.
	I think it's tragic, I think it's sad, and I try to talk people out as much as possible.
	Do they sit there and say, wow, man, you really managed to get out of this hellhole.
	Tell me how you did it.
	Take me with you. I'm dying to get out.
	Please, teach me your ways.
	Did anyone say that to you?
	Anyone?
	Hey man, you gotta relax!
	You work too hard, man.
	You gotta learn to have fun.
	Don't just live to work. Work to live, man.
	Oh yeah, I forgot. You know everything.
	If you got out of poverty, how many people were desperate to know how you did it and took coaching?
	The people who you grew up with who were poor.
	How many? Zero.
	Yeah. Not a damn one.
	They prefer it. It's ego, it's social circle, it's sunk cost fallacy into poverty.
	Not one. They were jealous, they attack, they undermine, they're hostile, they sabotage.
	Misery loves company.
	These are all common sense things.
	All used to be common sense.
	People love mystery. I know a girl who's not happy unless she's in some kind of drama.
	It's odd. Yeah, so drama is distraction, right?
	Drama is distraction from an emptiness of the self.
	I can help you get a job where I work, but you'd have to quit smoking weed.
	Crickets. Yeah. Was anyone happy for you getting out of poverty?
	You grew up poor. Was anyone happy for you getting out of poverty?
	Were they thrilled? Were they excited?
	Did they applaud you? And did they say, even if it was too late for themselves, let's say that they'd made just some terrible mistakes or whatever it is.
	So let's say it's too late for them, right?
	Let's say there was some, I don't know, single mom with three kids or whatever, three different dads in your building or whatever, and you managed to get out.
	Did she say, did she say to you, hey man, listen, I mean, it's kind of heartbreaking.
	It's kind of tragic. We've known each other for a long time.
	I know you're getting out. Listen, can you do me a favor?
	I'm just, I'm going to beg you on bended knee.
	Is there any chance, you know, my kids are getting older.
	Is there any chance I could just get you for an afternoon?
	To just talk to them about how you did it.
	Like, what did you do? What approach did you take?
	Just an afternoon, man. It would make all the difference in the world.
	Affleck's character in Good Will Hunting must be a unicorn.
	It's a complete lie. I mean, there's more realism in Lord of the Rings than there is in Good Will Hunting.
	Did anyone ask for your advice?
	Did anyone, even if it was too late for them, did they say, at least talk to my kids, tell them how you got out?
	What steps did you take?
	Can you mentor them? Anything!
	Can you help my kids get out?
	Can you help me get out?
	Can you help my brother get out? Can you help anyone?
	You've got to pass out!
	Who wanted any help?
	Once I started my first job my brother would only ever call me ask me for money after he stole our mom's savings
	Thank you.
	you Yeah, I had a friend when I was director of technology.
	I was a top tech in a pretty big software company.
	I was a top tech guy in a pretty big software company.
	And he was unemployed. Not doing well.
	He's going burning through his savings.
	And I got him a job interview.
	He didn't even show up.
	Oh, I forgot man.
	Now I didn't hire him.
	I got him a job interview. I had one of the guys who was best man at my wedding.
	Hired the guy. Gave him a good job.
	Offered to mentor him if he wanted.
	Nope. I just come in.
	I do work. Go home, man. Somebody says, no, Steph, I clawed my way out.
	I remember seeing fleas drowning in my cereal before going to bed.
	Yet no praise from the family for where I am now.
	Right. They like to focus on the advantages that rich people had as an excuse not to take any action.
	Like Bezos getting $200,000 to start Amazon.
	Most of them would have just had fun with that $200,000.
	Yeah. Yeah.
	When I worked up north, right, the layout of every small town was the same.
	Post office, convenience store, liquor store.
	Post office to cash your welfare check, convenience store to get your cigarettes and snacks, liquor store to pick up your beer, off you go.
	I mean, go to a poor neighborhood.
	What are the stores there?
	What stores are in a poor neighborhood?
	Beauty salons, liquor stores, convenience stores, crap food stores.
	.
	Any libraries? No.
	Libraries of free books?
	Free books! Porn shops, payday loans, check cashing places, yeah?
	Bars, casinos, strip clubs, yeah, it's all.
	So the $200,000, see, people don't, they say, oh, well, you know, but Bezos got $200,000, so of course he could start his business.
	It's like, no, no, no, no. He got the $200,000 because people could see the hunger and the planning and he had the business plan and he had the knowledge and he'd read the books.
	People don't just, like, investors just don't look at 200 people and say, eeny, meeny, oh, let's give 167, you get $200,000.
	Come on. That's not how it works.
	You step forward with a good plan and you've got resolution and you've got knowledge, ambition, maybe some context, whatever.
	You know, I got $80,000 from a bunch of people when I co-founded the software company.
	I had nothing. What did I have?
	I had a degree in history.
	Oh yeah, now I'm going to be chief technical officer.
	You ever taken a computer science course?
	Well, I took one in grade 9, but I failed.
	Because it was like punch cards that you didn't even have.
	It was terrible. It was terrible.
	So why did I get the money?
	Why did I get the money to start a software company when I had no education or really much experience at all?
	So the idea that, well, you just got money, man.
	You just got money. It's just weird, man.
	I didn't get money. Yeah, I rode my bikes and hung out of the library all the time to get away from home.
	Absolutely. Absolutely.
	Absolutely, I lived at that library at times.
	And listen, this is not a hate on for the poor at all.
	I respect their choices.
	I really do. You know, the people who, you know, like, I was desperate to help.
	The friends I grew up with.
	And look, some of them were successful, so I'm not, you know.
	But the people, like, I was desperate for them to do better in their careers.
	I was desperate for them to be more comfortable talking to girls.
	I was desperate. Like, I offered to help.
	I tried to help.
	They didn't want to do it.
	They didn't want to do it.
	I respect that. I do.
	I know this sounds kind of weird.
	Honestly, respect the poor.
	Respect the poor. They prefer it.
	For the most part. Some exceptions, of course, right?
	But yeah, I mean the people who just feel nothing but pity for the poor. I mean, that's just a virtue signaling
	Paralysis that harms the poor I respect you know the friends of mine who wouldn't take
	any advice on how to talk to women and who stayed single Hey, I respect that
	Not my choice at all, but I respect that.
	I'm not going to have pity for what people choose.
	That's weird, isn't it? Isn't it weird to have pity for what people choose?
	If somebody chooses to be fat, you choose to be fat.
	I don't respect the choice itself, but I respect the process of choosing.
	I respect the process of choosing.
	My friends who stayed poor?
	No. I'm not going to give you money because I respect your choice.
	I respect your choice.
	You chose to not get mentored.
	You chose not to coach. You chose not to read business.
	I mean, I can't tell you how many business books I read, marketing books, programming books.
	Like, just read. Read.
	No, like, I'm not going to give you money because I respect your choice.
	You chose to stay in a familiar social environment.
	You chose to stay in a familiar social class.
	You chose to attack people who were doing better.
	You chose to stay down there.
	I'm not...
	You know, like, if somebody wants to live underground and they built a whole house there and a whole community and a whole tribe, I'm not going down there and kidnapping them and bringing you up to the mountaintop.
	That's weird, isn't it?
	Am I wrong about this?
	I can't kidnap people away from the choices they've made.
	I respect that. Especially now when it's free.
	Like every college has their courses.
	I mean, the idea that people pay for college these days is pretty wild to me.
	But, yeah, I respect the choices that people make.
	My mother chose to blame other people for her own life.
	Okay, I mean, I respect that she chose that.
	I don't respect the choice itself, but I respect.
	Yeah, learning business is totally simple.
	Podcasts, free audiobooks, everything's out there for free, and it's crazy, right?
	I read voraciously and my inner life has become richer, but I'm not making any more money yet.
	I'm waiting for it to all come together.
	Oh, my friend. Oh, you're waiting, are you?
	Are you waiting? You're just waiting?
	It's just somehow it's going to come together?
	I'm out here in the ocean on a raft.
	I'm just waiting for the tides to bring me to Nassau because I like the Bahamas.
	I'm just waiting. I'm just waiting.
	Stuff's going to happen, man.
	Good things are going to come along.
	Even if you were immortal, that would be a terrible strategy.
	Given that you're immortal, it's crazy.
	It's completely insane. I'm sorry.
	I'm just... Just waiting for it to all come together.
	What does that mean? Waiting for it all to come together.
	You know, I'm just waiting for...
	I'm just waiting to wake up in a chair in a big office with a bunch of employees doing important productive stuff.
	I'm just going to wait for... You know what I did?
	I read a bunch of books on philosophy and I just waited for a philosophy show to coalesce around me.
	I just waited for it.
	I could feel the movement of the planets, the movement of the atoms.
	Everything was coming together like a swirl, like a storm.
	It all just kind of drifted towards me.
	It's like the tide bringing in the seaweed.
	You just gotta wait and be patient and all this stuff's gonna happen.
	You know, I wanna have kids, but I'm just waiting for sperm to materialize in a willing womb,
	and for that woman to love me and bring a child over to my house,
	and if she comes with some pizza, so much the better.
	Thank you.
	What, have you been reading The Secret?
	It's funny, you know, when I'm a hot woman with sexy cleavage, the universe just provides for me, you know.
	Drinks just come flying at me, and dinner invitations, they just come flying at me, because the universe just loves cleavage, man.
	The universe is just down with the magical shadow, man.
	I'm sorry, don't mean to laugh, but you're talking to a guy...
	I mean, I've had to manifest everything, right?
	You've got to do stuff.
	I mean, because there's people out there doing stuff, and then there's you waiting for some mysterious Ouija force to come together.
	When the planets align, then I shall be CEO of my chair, right?
	Waiting for taxicab geometry to become real.
	If that man spent less on gel.
	The woman with the astrology manifest vision boards drive me nuts.
	Why? Why do they drive you nuts?
	That's their choice. Don't let other people's choices drive you nuts.
	I mean, come on. They've chosen to worship devilish forces rather than manifest free will.
	They've chosen to blame the stars, not themselves.
	Respect that choice. See, here's the funny thing.
	Respect the choice, again, it doesn't mean you respect, like, I think it's wonderful and respectful of what they've chosen.
	No, respect that. They've chosen that.
	The women who want to fly out to Dubai and participate in truly unholy rituals in return for one selfie on a private jet, hey man, I respect the choice.
	I respect the choice. Because there are so many.
	Well, not for long. Just got to be patient.
	It's good to think in the long term. Like all the people who were like, yeah, I want to, all the girls were like, I'm going to party my way through my 20s and then I'm going to, I'm going to make 34 and then try and settle down and I want a guy six foot tall, six figures, six pack and I'm just going to wait for all of that and I respect the choice, man.
	I mean, you had a blast.
	And you know what? If you die at the age of 33 in some unforeseen accident or whatever, you made the right choice.
	You had a lot of fun and you didn't leave a bunch of kids that somebody else has to raise with their heart broken because their wonderful mom is gone, right?
	Hey, I respect the choice.
	People get mad, you know?
	They get mad at these choices.
	You know, I... I saw this video of these women who were like, oh yeah, you know, guys who like criminal records, they're really violent, they'll stab your dog.
	Those guys are a total turn-on for me.
	It's like, if that's who you want to pursue, then I respect the choice.
	Now, respecting the choice, do you know how liberating that is?
	Do you know what's the upside of respecting people's choices?
	Do you know what the upside is?
	What's great about respecting? What's the liberty of respecting people's choices?
	There's nothing to solve. You're not open to manipulation.
	You're not open to control.
	You're not open to bullying.
	You're not open to pity. You have no burden to fix them.
	You have no burden to fix them.
	My friends who are bitter because they never got married.
	They never had kids.
	I was working on all that stuff.
	And you know what they say? Well, you're tall!
	Of course, if no short guys had ever gotten married and had kids, there'd be no short guys, right?
	So no, just, you know, my mom made the choice to blame her doctors rather than blame herself.
	My mom chose to get angry rather than deal with her childhood trauma.
	She chose to be violent rather than self-reflective.
	Okay, I respect that choice.
	I suffered for it, but I respect that choice.
	I don't have to fix her old age.
	You know, and especially if you've given people good advice, you told your uncle to stop smoking, he kept smoking, and now he's dying and he wants one of your lungs.
	It's like, no, I respect your choice.
	I'm not giving you a lung because I gave you advice.
	Young women are lied to.
	They're never shown the over 50 childless aunt watching reruns of Friends on her sofa crying into her wine with her capesiter.
	Okay, and if you care about that, I understand that.
	I mean, this is part of my whole mission.
	It's like, okay, if you care about that, then...
	Then go tell the young women.
	Absolutely. Again, give them better choices.
	It's tough to say I'm lied to these days when there's so much information out there.
	Everybody knows.
	Everybody knows women's fertility goes down a lot faster than men.
	Also, the red-headed libertarian the other day on Twitter was like, well, women are fertile well into their 50s.
	It's like, no, they're not.
	They're absolutely not.
	Absolutely not. Oh, well I know a woman who was 52 and had a baby.
	Well, A, usually she's had a bunch of babies before, and B, it's like you hear the story of the woman, she, in the late 1990s, she jumped out of an airplane with a parachute.
	The parachute failed. She got her backup parachute.
	It failed to unfurl at 700 feet, and she landed, but lived.
	She landed hard on the ground, but she lived.
	You know how she lived? She landed on an ant colony.
	She landed on a nest of ants.
	The ants came out, bit the hell out of her, and that produced enough adrenaline and cortisol that her heart stayed pumping to the point where she survived.
	No, no, it's a real story. It's a real story So yes, that's the exception that proves the rule
	I mean, can you imagine, say, well, don't jump out of airplanes.
	No, no, no, because there was this woman who landed on an ant nest, and the ants bit her, and it gave her enough adrenaline that her heart kept pumping, and she survived.
	Not only did she survive, think what an amazing, you could dine out for years on that story.
	Yeah, ants soften the dirt by hollowing out sections.
	Yeah, I remember having to dig out a whole bunch of vanilla ants out of my garden once.
	Like, I stepped and it was really soft.
	I'd go out with my daughter and just dig and dig out all the ants.
	And it was crazy and really smelled like vanilla, by the way.
	I don't know what the hell's going on with that, but couldn't eat ice cream for a while.
	So, yeah, I... I respect people's choices.
	Like, don't ask me for pity for your choices, that's all.
	I respect your choices.
	You can ask me for pity, but no, you chose it.
	There was a Milo years ago, had this t-shirt stop being poor.
	And of course it's Milo, so it's kind of provocative, but...
	The people I knew, and again, this is not exactly science, but it's not totally the opposite of science because we've got a lot of people here and not one of you could think of someone when you got out of poverty who said, take me with you or help me get out or what can I do?
	So if you choose to stay poor, I'm not going to give you money because that would be to not respect your choice.
	If you choose not to get out.
	Then you prefer it there.
	Listen, I'm not going to say to other people, because it's not a moral issue, right?
	If you choose to be poor or you choose to make money, this is not fundamentally a moral issue, right?
	Not with the welfare state, but in terms of like human, like it's not a moral issue.
	I am not even remotely vainglorious enough.
	In fact, I'm very humble this way.
	I'm not going to tell other people how to live.
	If poverty is better for you, I'm not going to screw you up by giving you money.
	Like if you've gone through all of this and you've chosen, I understand this, you've chosen companionship, A familiar social environment, your friends that you grew up with, all of the poor people that you hang with and all of that.
	Okay, if you've chosen that poverty, then that's what's best for you.
	Your perception is that's what's best for you, right?
	That's what's best for you.
	Right. So if that's what's best for you, and I give you money, I'm screwing you up.
	I'm messing you up.
	I don't want to mess you up.
	Like if somebody says, oh, I'm allergic to X, Y, and Z, I don't eat it, right?
	I'm not going to mix it into their food.
	I'm allergic to pine nuts. Oh, I'm going to mix some pine nuts into your cereal.
	I'm allergic to lactose.
	I'm going to mix up some milk in your soup.
	I'm not going to do that because they've already told me what's best for them.
	I'm not going to mess them up.
	So if somebody's had the opportunity to get out of poverty, and most people have, and they've chosen to stay in poverty, I'm not going to mess them up.
	That's what's best for them.
	What am I going to do? Say, well, you're totally wrong.
	wrong. That's not what's best for you. No. Respect.
	Respect the choice. See no, respect the hustle, respect the grind.
	Well, respect the lack of hustle, the lack of grind too.
	Somebody says, it's quite stressful trying to help someone when they don't want to help themselves.
	I'm at the point where I just let them be.
	Oh God, yeah. Yeah, save your energy for your kids.
	Save your energy for people where you have some control over the variables, right?
	But if they don't realize they consciously made that choice, but they don't realize they consciously made that choice, do they?
	They think the world did them wrong.
	Okay, but I respect that too, right?
	So I respect that too.
	If they say, well, I never wanted to be poor.
	I always wanted to make those sacrifices.
	The system is stacked against me.
	There's no way I can get ahead.
	It's like, okay, that's your worldview.
	I'm not going to interfere with that either because that's your choice.
	Your choice is to play the victim.
	Your choice is to be the victim.
	What, are we going to try and talk you out of that?
	No. That's what's best for you.
	That's what's best for you.
	That's what you have chosen is best for you.
	Now, do I agree with it? Would it be best for me?
	Well, no, but I'm not everyone. I don't want that kind of life, but I'm not everyone.
	Maybe that's the best they can do. I don't know.
	I don't care. I don't care.
	All I know is that I respect the choice.
	And if you listen to Sophists and you listen to Elias, everyone knows.
	Everyone knows that there are poor people who aren't poor anymore.
	Everyone knows that. Like this is not some Egyptian hieroglyphics you have to translate before the Rosetta Stone is discovered.
	Everybody knows. If you're poor and somebody says, does anyone ever get out of poverty?
	What would you say? You'd say yes.
	Of course. Of course you'd say yes.
	You'd be right. So they know.
	I mean, if you go to women who had children with the wrong man and say, do women sometimes have children with the wrong man?
	What would they say? They say, yeah, of course they do.
	Is it important to vet the men you decide to have unprotected sex with because babies can result?
	Everyone would say, well, yeah. Yeah, of course, now also, yeah, it's not so horrible to be poor.
	You've got cell phones, you've got Netflix, you've got free health care.
	I mean, it's not so bad to be poor.
	And being poor, listen, being poor has its charms.
	It really, really, really does.
	Being poor can be great.
	Hit me with a why if you've ever been poor and happy.
	Yeah, of course you have.
	Of course you have. I love my life, great adulthood, but I have some absolutely fantastic memories of being dirt, stone, broke-ass poor.
	I had a great time in my master's degree.
	It was a one-year master's degree.
	Fantastic time. Loved it.
	Loved it. I was broke.
	Like, seriously broke. I won't bore you with the details, but like, seriously broke.
	Couldn't afford, like, dentistry.
	I'm seriously broke.
	I got no resentment about that time.
	You know, when I left my business career, I spent a year and a half writing novels.
	I wrote The God of Atheists.
	I wrote almost a huge novel, 350,000 pages.
	Loved it. Loved it.
	I took one of Canada's premier writing courses and did really well in it.
	So it was a great time.
	I was broke. What's wrong with that?
	Monks are broke. They're writing a great screenplay and they've chosen to be broke.
	There's nothing wrong with being broke.
	There's nothing wrong with being broke.
	Yeah, but you want a billionaire's life?
	Not me. Not me.
	Not me. I mean, a billionaire might bring you into contact with Bill Gates.
	So, yeah, this being poor, okay, you've got a built-in social circle.
	You don't have to learn all these new skills about how to get along with people.
	I mean, I talked about this in yesterday's live stream about just how when I was broke and poor and grew up in a trashy, welfare, lower-class hellhole, you know, learning how to deal with, like, upper-end people and hire, like, people and all of that.
	It's really tough. Really tough.
	And it was hard work and I felt uncertain and I felt embarrassed and I felt a little humiliated from time to time.
	So if you don't want to do that, I'm fine with that.
	It's uncomfortable to exercise.
	If you don't want to exercise, I'm not giving you money because I respect your choice.
	It's fundamentally disrespectful to override people's choices and tell them that you know what's better for them, better than they do.
	Now, they may have regret and they may say, well, you know, I'm poor now.
	I want some stuff and I want money.
	And it's like, well, no, I respect your choice.
	You chose to not make any money.
	You chose to not make any money and you had a lot of fun with that.
	Now, you can take my money.
	I can't go and take your free time.
	You had all this free time when I was busting my butt, as I still sometimes do, to make money and hustle and all that.
	You were chilling and maybe smoking some weed and watching some movies and hanging out and going to the park and playing hacky sack and frisbee golf and shit like that.
	Now, you can take my money.
	I can't go back and take all that free time you had and given that that's not a deal you don't get my money
	Yeah, yeah was it Mark Zuckerberg goes jogging with like 19 bodyguards
	It's not a life that I would particularly want, but you know, I'm not one to tell him he shouldn't have that life.
	That's a life that works for him.
	Amen. Great.
	Great. So yeah, honestly, respect people's choices.
	It's a tough mindset to get into.
	It's a tough mindset to get into, right?
	But once you get into that mindset, it's incredibly liberating.
	It's incredibly liberating.
	Because when people complain, it's like, yeah, you know, yeah, listen.
	If somebody's super rich and they say, you know, but gosh, all I did was work, you know, and I just didn't have enough leisure time and I didn't go on enough vacations, I'm like, yeah, that can be tough, man.
	Yeah, but I respect your choices.
	That's what you chose to do.
	And if people, I think Musk's mom said no to that fight, funnily enough.
	But yeah, just give people the respect of their choices.
	My mom chose aggression over self-knowledge.
	Okay, I respect that choice. It's not something I want in my life, but...
	Respect people's choices. Like, listen to people complain.
	I get that. Like, we all complain.
	And there's nothing wrong with that.
	Sometimes that can be helpful. Sometimes that can be good.
	Yeah, listen to people complain.
	I listen to people complain. I don't offer them solutions.
	I'm just like, you know, it's just like venting, right?
	So... It's very liberating.
	It's very liberating. Most people are complaining and they want you to fix their problems.
	If you chose to have kids with a guy who didn't stick around or you weren't nice enough for him to stick around or whatever it was, it's okay.
	So you chose...
	I was thinking the other day about a girl I was dating in my 20s who was kind of punchy and kind of aggressive and wouldn't really admit fault very much, if at all.
	And I'm sure she's still single and I'm sure she's got some regrets and so on.
	But you enjoyed...
	Or you preferred to not admit fault.
	You preferred to lord it over.
	You preferred to always be in the right.
	You preferred to never be vulnerable.
	You preferred that.
	Okay, so you don't get the good guy.
	You get cats or whatever, right?
	All right. But there's nothing really to mourn.
	She took what she wanted and now she has to pay for it.
	A lot of people when I was younger had a lot more fun than I did.
	I would look at a friend of mine who would go to these Mises seminars in the summer while I had two jobs.
	Now, I think, I mean, I ended up with much more integrity because this was a guy who was really into free market economics and then ended up working as a tenured professor, which is like the first thing for the free market that you could imagine.
	Well, I actually did work in the free market, so I think he just became a massive big brain hypocrite, whereas I did live with a fair amount more integrity and so on.
	But, yeah, so, you know, he had some summers off and I had to work.
	And because of that necessity, I ended up living with more integrity with regards to the free market.
	So, yeah, I mean, people complain.
	It's like, well, I mean, I'm fine to listen to people complain.
	And it's like, yeah, but I mean, just what you chose, right?
	Well, I wish I'd chosen differently.
	I don't know what that means. There's no time travel, right?
	I mean, if you didn't, right? I wish I'd done things differently.
	It's like, oh, well, then my question is, are you teaching other people to make better decisions?
	No? Then I don't care.
	Well, I wish I hadn't worked so hard.
	Oh, are you telling your friends and your friends' kids to not work so hard?
	And are you sharing the wisdom that you've...
	No. Okay, well, I don't care.
	All right. Any last questions, comments, issues, a tip or two would be nice.
	I'm looking at these declining tips and trying to keep my spirits up.
	But if you could help me out, I mean, pretty useful information.
	I think today we really ran the gamut here, didn't we?
	The whole history of the universe from the post-Second World War period to 1980.
	I thought that was pretty helpful.
	You can donate on the site.
	Yes, freedomain.com slash donate.
	I would really appreciate that.
	And if you could support me here, I would very much appreciate...
	That as well. We've got two presentations that are almost ready to go.
	Number one, The Truth About Pirates.
	Number two, The Truth About the Wild West.
	It was wild. I've learned so much.
	I've learned so much from these things.
	They're going to be fantastic presentations.
	Well, how's the documentary going?
	Well, I need the donations for the documentary because, you know, I can't spend what's not coming in.
	So, yeah, the presentations are coming along.
	Documentary is... No one's headstone says I should have worked longer?
	No, that's not true. Honest headstones would absolutely say that.
	Yeah, absolutely, they would say that.
	So, yeah, there are definitely some people who should have worked longer and harder than they did, right?
	People who said who couldn't afford anything, couldn't afford a family, couldn't afford, yeah, died in poverty.
	Absolutely, there's people who should have worked harder.
	The regret, that's not a true statement.
	Spirit willing to donate.
	Bank account says otherwise. Well, of course, I try not to get blood from a stone.
	But yeah, if you can, if you're listening to this later, freedomain.com forward slash donate.
	All of that would be very gratefully appreciated.
	And tell me if you think...
	Do you think I should do something on the Stephen Crowder divorce, which is getting seriously ugly?
	And it's really heartbreaking to think what is going on with those kids.
	Just tell me if you think...
	I should do anything on that open letter or anything like that.
	Just kind of curious what your thoughts are.
	Yes or no? Yeah?
	I mean, if it wasn't for the kids, I wouldn't really care, but...
	No, thank you for the tip, Chris.
	I appreciate that. Anything new on that subject?
	Oh, yeah. No, they're screaming at each other in court and it's just going...
	Any thoughts on Joe Rogan saying he likes to be around his kids more while high?
	Did he say that? No.
	Did he really say that? Oh, Joe.
	That's so sad. That's very sad.
	That's very sad. Well, maybe they'll get to meet him later on in life when he's more sober.
	You don't think he did? Okay, I don't know.
	So, you know, unconfirmed.
	If you've got a link, if you've got a link, let me know.
	You can send it to me.
	Why are they screaming at each other?
	Because it's divorce and all of that sort of stuff.
	The crowd of stuff is really, really tragic.
	The kids are just going to get mauled.
	And it's, I mean, it really is.
	It's about as bad a situation as could be.
	Thanks to you, I found myself back in church helping very much.
	Oh, that's wonderful to hear. I'm very glad.
	I'm very glad for that. All right.
	Well, I'm going to take myself out from under these blinding heat lamps and get myself something to drink.
	Oh, here we go. Somebody just said this about.
	Uh, yeah.
	Joe Rogan makes shock confession he likes to be high around his children as it helps him, quote, find them interesting.
	Joe Rogan has revealed he likes to get high around his children as he says it helps him find them charming instead of frustrating.
	No. God, that's horrifying.
	In an episode of the Joe Rogan Experience podcast on Tuesday, the 55-year-old spoke with award-winning psychedelic researcher Amanda Fielding about the powers of mind-altering drugs.
	Speaking with Fielding, Rogan said...
	With discipline, it allows you to experience the states and get something from them, pull something from them, and apply it to normal consciousness.
	He shared how he uses these drugs at home.
	People don't like this, but I'm going to say it anyway, the podcast host said.
	I like to be high around my children, because when I'm around my children, I'm fascinated by them, and things that may be frustrating, perhaps if I was sober, instead are charming.
	I find them interesting, and I'm fascinated by their mindset and talking to them.
	Fielding agreed with Roken saying that psychedelic drugs help to connect with the younger generation.
	That's a how old are his kids?
	and I'll see you in the next one.
	One was Lola, born in 2008.
	Wasn't, was she a single mom?
	I can't remember. So 2008, so she's what, 15?
	Two years later, so one who's 13.
	So he's got two daughters. Okay.
	Okay. Yeah, that's very sad.
	That is very sad. Yeah, that's very sad.
	I can't imagine...
	Well, yeah, I mean, I assume that that's a confession that he can't manage his own temper or frustration, so he drugs himself to be around his children.
	Not that he'll ever hear this, but Joe, man, I'll totally take a private call to talk you out of that, because that's pretty bad.
	All right. Well, thanks, everyone.
	I appreciate the information, and you'll have to read the article to get more into it.
	I can't really. It's too tragic for words.
	Yeah, thanks everyone. Freedomain.com forward slash donate.
	If you'd like to help out the show later, I'd really, really appreciate that.
	And have yourselves a wonderful evening.
	I will try to get these recordings out before the end of the weekend.
	Also have an interview, a new interview with someone, which I think would be fun.
	I'll get that out this weekend.
	Lots of love from up here. I will talk to you soon, my friends.
	Freedomain.com forward slash donate.

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