Friday Night Live 2 August 2024Stefan Molyneux engages with his audience, sharing insights on children, business, and health priorities. He delves into the significance of providing value in relationships, discussing truth, beauty, and personal struggles. Stefan explores the pursuit of happiness, societal expectations, and gender roles. The conversation shifts to women in the workforce, work-life balance, and family dynamics. Stefan emphasizes cross-disciplinary skills, mentorship, and prioritizing excellence over financial gains, urging listeners to embrace continuous improvement and personal growth.Join the PREMIUM philosophy community on the web for free!NOW AVAILABLE FOR SUBSCRIBERS: MY NEW BOOK 'PEACEFUL PARENTING' - AND THE INTERACTIVE PEACEFUL PARENTING AI AND AUDIOBOOK!Also get the Truth About the French Revolution, the interactive multi-lingual philosophy AI trained on thousands of hours of my material, private livestreams, premium call in shows, the 22 Part History of Philosophers series and much more!See you soon!https://freedomain.locals.com/support/promo/UPB2022
Stephen Molyneux from Freedomaniacs, and we are live on a wide variety of platforms, and I invite you, if you would like, to have a call.
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Take that down a smidge.
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Thank you, Adam.
I appreciate that.
Loved you in Bioshock.
All right, move to WordPress.
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You know, because I've always said I'm OneWebsiteOver.com.
OneWebsiteOver.com is where you want to send people.
It's passive-aggressive, but in this case, it is allowed.
What's Steph for today?
Chatty Steph?
Ranty Steph?
Angry Steph?
I don't come in with preconceptions.
I just surf as it goes.
I try not to force anything.
I try not to make things happen.
I just surf as it goes.
All right.
So while we are waiting for messages or calls, whether we get those or not, we shall see over the course of the evening.
What are your questions?
What are your comments?
What's on your mind?
How can I help?
How can philosophy help you today?
Passive-aggressive stuff.
Well, we try not to have passive-aggressive stuff show up too often.
Not impossible.
But I had a chat with a fellow this week about kids and interruptions.
And I'll give you the speech that I
And the speech goes a little something like this.
Children are never an interruption, certainly to your marriage and to your work.
Like, why do men work and why do we get married, right?
Why does excess labor exist, right?
Why is it that men are trained in strength and speed and agility to produce more than men themselves immediately need to consume?
Well, because we take about 90% of our output and hand it to who?
To what?
To which?
To ye olde wife and ye olde, or not so olde, chillon.
Chillon!
You donated, thank you, I appreciate that.
So, why are we bigger, taller, sometimes smarter, stronger?
Because
We go out there, we wrestle with blank reality, we withdraw resources, and we hand them to our gene pool.
Right?
We don't have to suffer through endometriosis.
We don't have to suffer through periods.
We don't have to suffer through hormonal swings.
We don't have to do any of that.
We just have to be big, giant, grazing tanks of ultimate productivity.
That's what we do as the men bots.
That's a fact.
Now, why are we stronger?
Why are we taller?
So that we can provide excess resources for our children.
We are adapted for that.
So, children are no more an interruption to your marriage than customers are an interruption to your business.
So, imagine... So, when I was... I had a job in a hardware store.
When I was in my mid-teens, learned a lot, actually, and found it a very valuable experience,
Made $2.50 an hour.
$40 bucks, baby!
Monday to Thursdays.
Sorry.
Tuesdays and Thursdays, 5.30 to 9.30 p.m.
Saturdays, 9 to 5.
Now, occasionally, though, we would come in to do inventory.
Now, the store was closed on Sundays, because back in the day, you couldn't open on Sundays.
The store was closed on Sundays, so we'd be in there doing inventory, and God forbid you got plumbing or nuts and bolts, because, ooh, how many washers are in the bucket?
Put the washers in the bucket!
So, the reason we did it on Sunday was because doing inventory is just part of what you have to do to run the business, so you know what to reorder and what you're selling.
This is of course long before electronic cash registers and so on.
Slightly after Abacus's Abakai and slightly before modern cash registers, so you had to do that by hand.
We did it on a Sunday because everybody was in there counting stuff, rather than helping customers.
So, when I worked in the hardware store, I was always told the same thing.
Drop whatever you're doing, and help the customer.
Drop whatever you're doing and help the customer.
Hit me with a why if you had somebody who gave you some good business advice about that.
Maybe a boss, maybe someone business owner, maybe an uncle who ran a business.
That it's just all about the business.
I mean, I lied my ass off and to get a job at another hardware store in my mid teens saying, Oh yeah, I know how to fix screen doors.
Right?
And I was avoiding fixing the screen doors because I didn't know how to fix them.
And I was cleaning and tidying and the guys like,
That's not making me any money.
I gotta pay your pay with something, so go make me some money.
So, I said, oh, just remind me and, you know, it took me, honestly, about four and a half minutes to figure out how to fix screen doors, so we did all of that, right?
Things, great things to do when working at a hardware store.
Nostalgia time.
Number one.
Breaking up boxes.
I didn't mind it.
Because everything gets delivered and in the basement and all these boxes, you gotta break them up and take them out.
And toss them out.
Breaking up the boxes, I quite enjoyed.
Cutting keys was great fun.
Cutting glass was great fun.
But the Cinquanon, the Everest, the Peak of Joy, was in fact... mixing paints.
Oh.
It doth give my heart a little butterfly thrill, even low these many moons later.
So, mixing paint was a great deal of fun.
One of my co-workers, you've got keys, you put it in one side and the other and you, right, the blade cuts the key according from one to the other.
If you put them round backwards though, a friend of mine was working there, shaved a key down to nothing, which normally would be just a hassle, but this was a complete disaster because the guy had his family flying in because he was opening a house they'd bought, this was the only key they had, and he nuked it.
So then we had to pay for a locksmith to go out and all of that.
So yeah, if you got time to lean, you got time to clean.
Look busy.
Look busy.
That was brutal.
Because you weren't allowed to socialize and there were no phones back then, of course.
Well, there were phones, but they were rotary dial and wound in tight cords to the wall.
I have lots of fond memories of working retail in the 90s.
What else I used to do?
Another thing I used to do, I used to figure out
Yes, I remember this.
I used to figure out... I had a little calculator, watch.
And I would go, okay, my computer I want is $750.
Divide that by $2.5 an hour.
That's 300 hours.
So divide that by 20, wait, eight, 16 hours a week.
So 18 weeks, divide that by four months.
So in six months or so, I can get a computer, right?
That was my, I would check that out.
How much progress am I towards getting a computer?
Because that's what I want.
I want it.
That's what I wanted.
So the purpose of the business is to make money.
The purpose of the business is not to hire people.
The purpose of the business is not to be busy or to be clean.
All the things that are done have to serve the customer.
Why did we do inventory?
So that we could figure out what customers wanted and get those.
Right?
Do those.
Do that.
Right?
So that's what was going on with that.
And so when people say, Hey, I'm talking to my wife and my kids keep interrupting me.
I'm like, I do not think you understand the purpose of the marriage.
The purpose of the marriage is the children.
Children are no more an interruption to your marriage or your life.
Then customers are an interruption to
Your business.
And there's a funny thing that in order to be happy, right?
So in order to be happy in your relationships...
In order to be happy in your relationships, what is the one key thing you need to do to have happy and sustainable relationships?
What do you think?
What's the one?
If I could give you just one piece of advice.
I mean, I've been happily married for 22 years and so on, and I have good friendships going back many, many years.
So, what is the one thing that you need to do
To ensure your greatest chance of happiness in a relationship.
What do you think?
What is the one thing that you need to do?
What's the one metric that you need to measure in order to know whether your relationships are going to work and are going to sustain?
What do you think was the one thing that you need to do to achieve that?
Tim says, you can only make money long-term by providing...valve?
I think he means value.
Look at that!
He's trying to provide value with this comment, and he types the essential word wrong.
You can only make money long-term by providing value for a reasonable price, i.e.
quality must be the highest value.
From that, profit follows.
That is not true.
That is not true.
That is not true at all.
Value...quality is not the highest metric.
Quality, Tim, is not the highest metric.
Because if quality was the highest metric, there'd be no such thing as economy in airlines, right?
Everything would be first class because you've got legroom, you get your own hot towels.
I think I've only flown first class once in my life, and that's because someone else was paying.
But it was pretty nice!
So, you know, quality is not the highest value.
What is the highest value?
That's good.
We'll come back.
I haven't forgotten the other question.
What is the highest value?
In trading, because business is trading, relationships are trading.
And you say, well, quality is the highest value, but that's not the case.
There are dollar stores, you know, like my daughter, she's going out of that phase now, but she absolutely loved this catching things with nets, right?
And so what happens is you go to the dollar store and you buy these absolutely craptastic nets that are put together with balsa wood, prayers, hope, and human spit.
And they're crap, and they last maybe half a summer, and then they just break.
And they cost a buck and a quarter, or a buck fifty, or two bucks, or something like that.
And so, quality is not a value there.
So, in the business world, what is the highest value?
What do you guide yourself by?
What is the highest value in the business world?
Trick question.
Is it a trick question?
If quality was the highest metric, there would be no Node.js backends.
I don't know what that means.
Getting a good deal.
Profit.
No.
Profit is the effect of the highest value.
Your profit margin?
Your profit margarine?
You paid in fake butter?
Oh, there's Snarky Steph.
It's been a while.
It's been a while.
What is the highest value in business?
Getting a good deal?
Getting a bit more than you paid for?
That's right, Ben, you have got it.
Boom!
Whatever the fuck the customer wants is the highest value.
I mean, assuming it's legal and blah blah blah.
Whatever the customer wants is the highest value because there is no objective value economically.
Morals, yes.
Economically, what is the highest value?
I was just having this conversation with my daughter, introducing her to the depths, complexities, and gorgeous crystalline northern lights beauty of Austrian economics.
No, the highest value is whatever the customer wants!
That's the highest value.
Because value is subjective, economic.
And she's like, well, but if someone's starving, food is their highest value, it's a perfectly fine argument, except it's not true.
It's not true.
If you're on a hunger strike, if you want to die, if, you know, whatever, you're trying to lose weight, the fact that you're hungry doesn't make food the highest value at all.
There is no objective value.
Monks go on hunger strikes, yeah?
Why am I in love in stereo?
Okay, so.
People say, well, people want health care because people care about health.
I don't know that that's true.
In fact, I would say, okay, let me ask you this, let me ask you this.
How many people in your life have health as one of their top three priorities?
How many people in your life
Have physical health as one of their top three priorities.
Doesn't have to be their very top priority but how many people in your life have physical health as one of their top three priorities?
Or we could say what percentage of people in your life
What percentage of the people in your life have physical health as one of their top three priorities?
In other words, they organize their life around it, they exercise eight to ten hours a week, they don't overeat, they're not overweight, they try to get a reasonably healthy amount of sun, they prioritize sleep and hydration and all kinds of things.
Somebody says, three out of like 30 people I know.
One, me.
Three, four off the top of my head.
One, two, most are all fat.
The obesity rate would contradict that most people care about health.
Right.
So even something like good health, you say, well, you know, good health is a real value.
But it's not.
It's not.
It's not.
Good health is not a big value for most people.
About two percent for me.
Zero then.
Seventy percent.
One, myself.
I know a lot who claim it, but none act on it.
Right.
Right.
So you say, well, good health is the highest value.
And it kind of is, right?
You know, there's that cheesy old saying, but it gets, it's very true as you age in particular.
If you've got your health, you've got everything.
Your good health is worth a million dollars, easy.
Good health is worth every dollar you have in savings.
Because if you were struck with some fatal disease that was going to kill you next week and the only way you could survive would be to empty out your bank account, you would empty out your bank account, right?
So, good health is worth everything that you own, right?
Would you rather die in a penthouse or live temporarily under a bridge?
Well, I mean, I would live temporarily under a bridge rather than die in a penthouse.
So, good health is everything.
Good health is everything and everybody knows exactly how to achieve it.
Good sleep, good food, good exercise, good movement, good sunlight, all that lovely stuff.
And I respect people's choices.
I respect people's choices.
If people want to be lazy and fat and sedentary and eat too much and smoke or whatever, it's like, yeah, okay, I don't want to pay for your health care because you don't care really about your health.
That's fine.
But I don't give people sympathy who then get sick.
Because that would be to disrespect their choices, right?
Thank you Rico, I'll take your call in a sec.
So the way that you have good relationships is you provide value to others.
Are they better off for having interacted with you?
Are they happier?
Are they wealthier?
Are they wiser?
Why are you people coming back?
Why do you come back night after night?
Because I'm providing you something that is of great value that you can't get elsewhere.
And you like the thrill of the live, which I like the thrill of the live, and so on.
Right?
So, because, you know, the first, I don't know, 14 years I just did pre-recorded stuff, so doing it live is much more fun in many ways.
God, I don't know what's happening.
What the hell's going on?
So... Just make sure you provide value.
And keep asking, and keep asking, and keep asking.
Am I providing value?
Am I providing value?
Am I providing value?
And then you have to trust that you will also, because you don't give 1% and wait for 1%, you're just generous and see what comes back.
And if something doesn't come back... If something doesn't come back, you'll notice it.
Alright.
I think we have a caller.
Which is cool.
I'm still excited by it.
I think that's still excellent.
Alright, let's see if this works.
All right, Rico, are you with us, my friend?
What's on your mind?
Do you want me to read your question or do you want to read it?
Can you hear me now?
Yeah, yeah, go for it.
Hey there.
So, yeah, I recently saw your video where you discussed the utilization of history.
Essentially, my understanding was the point you're trying to make was it was
Ultimately, a method of extracting resources from another party.
Overall, love the video.
One random thing that struck me as interesting was, I think you threw out a specific example of, I think you were trying to illustrate unverifiable statements that people throw out.
I think the example is something along the lines of, you know, you're going to hell if you look at someone lustfully.
And I was just curious, was there any particular reason that example came to mind, or was that just some random one that popped into your head?
Sorry, are you asking me for my motivations for an analogy or an example that I used some weeks ago in a spontaneous speech?
Yes.
Whether or not... Well, how on earth would I remember why that popped into my head?
But I mean, I'm certainly happy to be, I mean, I have no problem with you asking the question.
It's a fine question.
I'm just not sure, like, if I were to say to you, okay, this analogy that you used a couple of weeks ago when you were spontaneously talking to someone, why did that come up in your head?
Would you, I mean, unless you were holding some horrible guilty secret, would there be some reason why you would remember these things?
Oh, I guess not.
No, again, I'm not criticizing, I'm just curious why the source of the analogy, whatever that might be, would be the case.
Now, I would imagine, I'm sorry, I don't want to interrupt if you wanted to say something else, because I have more to say on it, but I don't want to interrupt you, because there's a call, right?
Right, right.
No, I guess that's the long and short of it.
Pretty much, I guess that struck me as an interesting example in the context of the topic.
Do you suffer from excessive lust?
Personally?
No, not particularly.
Okay.
So, I would imagine that the reason it came up with me was because I would want something that most people would not consider a sin, even if they were secular.
So, for instance, if I said, if I use the example of murder, right, well, you're going to hell if you murder someone, people would say, okay, well, maybe I don't believe in hell, but it's bad to murder someone, right?
So, I was looking at something that could be considered wrong by some, certainly would probably be wrong in excess, but which is impossible to avoid as a whole.
So, I went to dinner with my family tonight, picked up my daughter from work, and then we had a quick bite before I did the show, and we had an attractive waitress.
Am I supposed to not notice that the waiter is attractive?
The waitress is attractive, right?
And she was nice and we chatted and, you know, everything was nice and so on.
Now, did I look at her like, damn, I wish I wasn't married because I'd ask her out or something like that?
Well, no.
Did I notice that she was attractive?
Yes.
Did I lust after her?
I did not.
But if I looked at her and noticed that she was attractive, is that a sin?
Well, I think for most people it wouldn't be a sin.
I do understand that you don't, if you're married or in a monogamous relationship, you don't want to start down that path of, oh, that person's really attractive.
I'm going to come back here alone and I'm going to order some food and I'm going to try and engage her in conversation and I'm going to hide my wedding ring and I'm going to
You know, like whatever you'd come up with that you don't want to take those steps.
So I think, I think the injunction against looking at other women with lust in your heart is to say, don't take those steps.
Stop it right at the beginning.
Don't wait for momentum.
Because like, you know how people have affairs usually.
I think so.
It becomes invasive, and then you go back, and you try to chat that person up a little bit more, and you say, oh, it's just for fun, it's just play, it's not a big deal, it doesn't really matter, and so on, and you still consider yourself loyal.
And so, bit by bit, right, it's incrementalism is how bad things happen, and we can see this happening all over the world at the moment.
So, I would imagine that I came up with the example because
Yeah, and I don't know.
Because I'm not a theologian, of course, right?
Theologian.
So, if there are more knowledgeable people there.
So, if I look at a woman and I register her as very attractive, is that the same as looking at a woman lustfully?
Right?
Because I'm not sitting there fantasizing about her.
I'm just like, oh, that's an attractive woman.
And I can also look at a man and say, that's an attractive man.
Right?
I mean, but I'm not looking at him lustfully, unless it's the mirror, of course.
Right?
So I would imagine it's something like that.
Does that make any sense in terms of, yeah, the slippery slope thing is very real, it's not a fallacy at all.
But I would imagine it would be something where it could be considered a sin, but you'd have to be religious.
In order for it to be considered a sin, whereas rape, theft, assault, and murder, even if you're not religious, are considered evil and, I guess in that context, sinful.
So it would have to be something that would require religion in order to be considered immoral, right?
Because the idea is that if you look
If you look at a woman lustfully, then you have already cheated in your heart.
Like, looking at a woman lustfully is the same as cheating, which I don't think people would say is the case.
So, I think we would want to say something that would be a sin, but you would need religion in order for it to be considered sinful, if that makes sense.
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.
I think a lot of people, they hear that and they think, you know, like, have that problem of just any kind of experience, any kind of feeling, that's, they think that's the bad thing.
But really, there's a difference between appreciating beauty for a thing and thinking that's a wonderful, like, appreciating the goodness in someone or something in that way.
Well, I mean, come on.
And coveting that thing.
Listen, man to man, if you look at a woman and you notice she's very sexy, you're not appreciating an abstract beauty.
You know, it's not like, what a lovely sunset in a bra, you know?
That's not, that's not, come on, man.
Let's, let's be blunt about these things.
True.
What a lovely carving by Michelangelo.
Oh, and she happens to be playing beach volleyball in the Olympics at the same time.
Right?
Right.
So, uh, you know, it's not just abstract beauty, right?
Is it?
I mean, you're looking, you know, we, we, we as men are programmed to note fertility symbols, right?
Fertility markers, right?
Youth, beauty, uh, physical beauty and, and sexiness and all that kind of stuff.
Right?
Right.
And at the end of the day, while you have to, at the end of the day, you have to ask yourself, are you, is your appreciation for this quality in someone causing you to respect them less as a person and start viewing them more as an object?
And I think
I don't know, I think there's a nuance to that.
A lot of people miss, and they go to these extremes of... Sorry, and I'm really interested in what you have to say, so I don't want to interrupt, but I just want to make sure I understand what you mean by not seeing the person, but seeing them as an object.
What do you mean?
Right.
So, you have people, they have qualities, there's a certain beauty to all people, but
Okay, now I'm even more confused.
There is a certain beauty to all people?
Well, sure.
People naturally are inherently beautiful.
All people have beauty.
That is like an inherent property to what they are.
Why?
Then the concept of beauty simply means...
Humanity.
Then I don't know why you would need the concept beauty, because the concept beauty is an exception.
And if you're saying everybody has the exception, it's no longer an exception.
So I, again, I'm not disagreeing with you.
I'm just not following what you're saying.
And I really want to understand what you mean.
Well, I'll be honest.
I kind of forgot where I was going with any of this.
No, no, let's honestly, I'll stay with the beauty thing.
So, um, right.
So there's a common in
Some theological circles this concept of three transcendentals, truth, beauty, and goodness, and it's thought that these are the ultimate properties of all of existence.
Let's see if I got my thoughts straight on this.
We naturally seek those three transcendentals everywhere in life.
Sometimes the search for those things that gets twisted, gets messed up, that's where things go bad.
For example, you appreciate a beautiful woman and you think, wow, that's beautiful.
And like almost all evil that occurs, it started from a good intention.
Like you see food, you're hungry, you wanted to fulfill that hunger.
You see
You want to get something right.
What does 2 plus 2 equal?
If you come to the conclusion 4, then you're hitting the target.
But if you come to the conclusion of 5, then you're missing the target, even though you wanted to come to a good conclusion of 4.
So... So, I don't mean to interrupt you if you're in the middle of something.
Oh, go ahead.
Okay.
So, we started off with you don't want to treat people as objects, and I was trying to understand that, and then we went to everyone's beautiful, and I tried to understand that, and then you say everyone is drawn to truth, beauty, and goodness, and all evil starts with good intentions.
I mean... I'm going off the rails here.
No, no, no!
Listen, I appreciate the conversation.
I appreciate the conversation.
I'm thrilled that you're talking about these things, because I find them very interesting.
So, as a guy who's been attacked, bomb-threats, death-threats, chased through the streets, de-platformed, and so on, I think that I know that I speak the truth, and I believe that virtue is beautiful, and we should pursue it, and I certainly have focused a lot of my efforts on goodness.
Do you think you might have a certain amount of difficulty
Convincing me that the world is very keen on truth and beauty and goodness, given how it's treated me, say.
And I'm not trying to make that as an argument, I'm just, I'm not sure that you're fully conscious of the difficulty you would have in convincing me of these things as if they're self-evident.
Well, you know, everyone loves truth, beauty and goodness.
It's like, but that's what I was delivering to the world and look what happened, right?
So, I'm not sure that we're both in the same headspace for the conversation, if that makes sense.
Right.
So, there is an inherent longing for these things that everyone has.
But obviously, some people get it wrong completely or they... Some people.
Yeah.
Even people who liked what I did, 95% of them wouldn't go one website over.
So if we're talking about a very minority of a minority of a minority, then you have to explain to me how you get everyone.
You know, I used to live stream to six to 7,000 people.
You can see the numbers, right?
This is a tiny percentage of that, less than 1%, right?
So.
Help me understand how most people want what they have attacked, rejected, or ignored in what I provide.
Now, maybe you can make the case that what I provide is not truth and beauty and goodness.
Fine, okay, we can make that case.
But let's just talk about truth.
So, the stuff that I talked about, even the most controversial stuff,
Was either put forward tentatively as a hypothesis, was put forward with data and sources, you know, with the IQ stuff.
I talked to 17 world experts on the subject from both the left and the right, and people who were politically indifferent.
I got the argument from environment, I got the other cultural arguments, I got other kinds of arguments.
So, it was true!
So if people are drawn to the truth, and that's a essential, that's the default factory settings for human beings, why does just about everyone attack the truth like a rabid animal?
Well, everyone's broken.
Nope.
Okay, but you can't say that everybody loves the truth!
Well, no, actually, nobody does, really.
Or very few people do.
Well, that's because people are broken.
Okay, so is the essence of human beings to love the truth, or is the essence of human beings to be broken and hate the truth?
I'm not sure, you can have it both ways.
Well, you can't have it both ways, because either one is true or the other is true.
So, someone who is overweight maybe doesn't want to be overweight, but they also don't want to have to put in the work in order to stop being overweight.
So, they can appreciate, oh, I could probably feel really good about myself if I put in the effort to make the choices that would get me to that state in life.
But making those choices require me to
Completely change course and be uncomfortable and experience things I don't want to experience.
And so, in order to come to this higher state of not being overweight anymore, I'm going to choose not to do that because I feel like the choices I have to make in order to get to that state are just not worth it.
Um, so, in that case, the truth, goodness, and beauty, in this case, in this example, would be not being overweight, being fit.
Um, but... Okay, so, sorry, let me just interrupt you for a second.
I apologize for that.
So, help me understand what's wrong with being overweight.
Now, of course, we understand the health issues and so on.
What's wrong with it?
So, for instance, if you were condemned to death and you have a last meal, you're not going to worry about the fat and salt content, right?
You're just going to stuff your face with whatever your favorite food is.
I think they've got a cap now of 25 bucks on something because people were ordering like Kobe steak flown in from Japan on the wings of hummingbirds or something.
So, you wouldn't care about that, right?
And so, I assume that the people who are fat are saying, I'm getting the maximum pleasure I can out of life, I'm not particularly happy, and I don't want to live for a long time without the food that makes me happy.
Right?
So, it's almost like they have a last meal, and every meal is their last meal.
They don't want to live to an old age.
You know, like the people who are the influencers, right?
Who just eat like crazy, right?
And then they often will die in their 30s or their 40s or their 50s, right?
I assume that they're aiming for the maximum happiness they believe they can achieve, which is the happiness of eating a lot of food that tastes good, rather than living more moderately and longer.
So, if somebody, let's say somebody has a happiness level, let's go minus 10 to plus 10, minus 10 totally suicidal, plus 10 orgasmic bliss.
So, let's say somebody has a happiness level of minus 3, you know, generally dysthymic or negative or whatever it is.
And they just don't want to live in that state, right?
So what they do is they say, OK, well, if I eat a lot of food, I get to a happiness level of 5.
But I'd rather have 10 or 20 years at 5 than 50 years at minus 3.
And so, I don't view obesity, again, we've got all the issues of making other people pay for your health care and so on, but aside of all of that, because that's the result of corruption in the political system, but is it objectively wrong or evil to maximize your happiness by overeating as opposed to being unhappy without the food and living longer?
See, I think that's a fundamental mistake that people make regarding
Addicts or people who are overweight.
Let's just talk about being overweight.
So you say, well, I'm a happy guy.
So I want to live for a long time and I will not eat too much because I want to live for a long time.
So, I'm a happy guy, and I'm generally cooking at 7 or 8 happiness, which to me is the maximum I can do before wobbling, right?
I mean, I get higher, I get lower, but in general I'm, you know, 7 to 8 in terms of happiness.
So, I like being alive, I enjoy living, and so I want to live for a long time.
I want to live for a long time, so I'm willing to deny myself the pleasures
Of eating so that I can maintain maybe another 20 or 30 years of plus seven or eight happiness.
Now, of course, I'm not guaranteed that could be things that make me unhappy, but I think I'm old enough now to recognize that that is my general level of happiness, and whatever I deviate from, that's where I kind of reset to.
So I want to live longer and I'm willing to eat less, which is sometimes uncomfortable.
I want to live longer because I'm a happy guy doing good things in the world.
If I was an unhappy guy and my only real chance of happiness in my perception, and again we can argue these things, but
Yeah.
I mean, they're like, you know, it's better to burn out than fade away.
You know, live fast, die young, leave a good looking corpse.
And we can say, oh, that's so nihilistic, that's so terrible.
But I don't, I don't, if somebody wants to just smoke cigars and, and, and eat, you know, the James Gandolfini guy who was the, he played Tony Soprano in The Sopranos.
I mean, I don't think that guy made it to 60.
I mean, he ate like a horse, he didn't really exercise, he's big and fat and coarse and, you know, very Southern Italian and so on.
Now, am I going to say to him, he lived large, I mean, metaphorically, literally, you know, he was a huge character on screen, he lived large, I think he died in an Italian restaurant with his face full of creamy pasta or something like that.
Now, am I going to look at that guy and say,
He just lived terribly.
Well, I don't know.
You know, there are some people who say, if you eat salads and exercise, you don't live for forever.
It just feels like forever.
And maybe their social circle is just a bunch of muckbangers who love to stuff their faces.
And if they don't have that, they don't have a social circle.
And, you know, so I don't have a functional foundational problem.
With people who say, I want to eat what I want, I find exercise makes me unhappy, I don't like it, my social circle is this.
I mean, James Gandolfini, I don't know the guy, but I would imagine his doctor probably said on more than one occasion, this is not a healthy lifestyle, like you're overweight and so on, right?
And you're probably not going to make it to a ripe old age, right?
So, did he live in the wrong way?
All right.
So, I just realized I stood someone up for a prior appointment, so I gotta go fix that.
But I will say before I head out, it sounds like the flaw you pointed out is the premise that, you know, in that example I gave, truth, goodness, and beauty is feeling good, living a long life.
Because if you're like, the one example you gave, for example,
If someone's going to die, like the next day, why would I care if my health or my weight is even there?
And that is a valid point, and it brings us to the question of what then should the ultimate value be?
On that note, got to dip out.
Appreciate your time.
No, no problem.
I love this conversation a lot.
And hey, have a great rest of the night, all right?
Thank you, thank you very much.
So, I just looked it up here.
So, he took his own family on a trip to Italy, was having a marvelous time in Rome.
His son Michael had just finished his junior high school and won a soccer championship, making it an all-around celebratory excursion.
On June 19th, this is 2013,
At around 10 p.m., Michael, his son, found Gandolfini passed out on the floor of their room at the hotel, etc.
The family had a marvelous day together, and when he returned to the hotel, Jimmy Gandolfini, James Gandolfini, went to the bathroom, and that is when something happened, his assistant said.
The 13-year-old called the reception desk for help, and when workers failed to revive him, an ambulance was called.
Gandolfini was alive, and he was taken to the hospital at around 10.40, but he died soon after his arrival.
An autopsy later confirmed that Gandolfini had suffered a major heart attack cutting his life short at just 51 years old, robbing his family of a loving father in the world of a major talent.
So, yep, absolutely, he was a... living large guy.
And he wasn't super obese.
He was not super, and he was a fantastic actor, you know, a powerhouse of an actor, a courageous actor in many ways, in terms of the malevolence that he was willing to portray.
I mean, it's a bit of a cursed set, but the woman, Melfi, who played, the woman who played his therapist also ended up, I think, in horrible debt and so on, right?
Yeah, so she looked like she was living the dream with an Academy Award nomination starring in the hit series The Sopranos.
She was fighting depression.
That's interesting, right?
Oh, she was in a long-term relationship with Harvey Keitel.
Oh God, Keitel.
Well, that would be pretty monstrous.
And they were in a relationship for 11 years.
Wow.
There we go.
And then she got into a custody battle?
Of a custody of their daughter Stella Keitel, then only eight years old.
The custody battle was to cost Lorraine Bracco over two million dollars and became a horrific nightmare when it was alleged that her new husband, actor Edward James Olmos, had fondled Stella's 14-year-old babysitter.
The marriage was short-lived in 2002.
Bracca went almost with divorce.
Bracca was bankrupt and her daughter Stella was diagnosed with systemic juvenile rheumatoid arthritis.
Oh, that's terrible.
That's very tough.
A five-year custody battle.
Wow, and then she divorced Olmus.
He was a Hispanic actor, I think, in Stand and Deliver, kind of a famous creator phase, and he played Admiral Adama in Battlestar Galactica, if I remember rightly.
She ended up winning the custody, but of course, after five years, it is pretty rough.
It's pretty rough.
Oh, she was originally going to read for Carmela Soprano, but she wanted to
Play the therapist.
Interesting.
So yeah, she had it pretty rough.
Pretty rough indeed.
All right, I'm arriving late but still erect for philosophy.
Excellent.
The president erect has arrived.
A lot of my dad's friends died in the late 40s to early 50s.
Yeah.
Apparently a lot of my father's uncles died in their 50s as well, but I heard it was Pennsylvania coal miners' black lungs sort of things.
Yeah, yeah, for sure.
He died with cancer and type 2 diabetes and hypothyroidism, but died of a massive heart attack.
Is that right?
Oh, okay.
Oh, that's not... Okay.
Dad's friends.
Not Captain Adama.
Admiral Adama?
Yeah, the admiral, the commander of, right?
So, you know, I don't have any particular issue.
Now, of course, some people, they regret.
They have regrets later.
And I think it's important to not give people the luxury of regrets for things that they have voluntarily chosen.
You know, if a woman chooses to kind of sleep around and not settle down and then ends up kind of on the ash heap of the post-war 40s without being able to get a good guy on her side, um, but you had your fun!
I mean, I can't give people sympathy for the voluntary actions of their own free will.
By the way, if you do want to call in, I'm sorry this guy had to dump, it was a very interesting topic which we can get into again, but if you do want to call in,
I will put the link in just in case you have arrived in a more recent fashion or in a more recent way.
I will give you the link.
I think it's fdrurl.com slash colon.
But you can do that.
Steph, now that you're doing private call-ins, would you be open to other forms of paid content?
How much would it cost me for you to review a five-hour show?
Well, I think that would be quite a bit.
I think that would be quite a bit.
FDRURL.com forward slash live call.
FDRURL.com forward slash live call.
Alright, sorry, I missed the comments over here on Rumble.
Somebody says, I've never been that way until recently, because the doctors tell me I have a high blood pressure and gout.
I have a young son I must raise, so now longevity is an issue, parental responsibility.
Right.
Jesus made that statement to point out God's absolute standard of morality as opposed to our natural human standards.
We reason we cannot live up to the standards of absolute faithfulness to our wives.
Can actions be beautiful?
Can actions be beautiful?
Yeah, I mean, certainly dance is an action, and dancing can be beautiful.
Not everyone is drawn to truth and beauty.
There are many with perverse outlooks who love ugliness and chaos.
What matters is a person's ultimate ideas about the nature of reality.
Without God, we can't determine whether gluttony is objectively wrong, yet God has declared gluttony to be wrong, so yeah.
Is it easy to tell who's happier without being in another's head?
Or is it very speculative?
As libertarians we acknowledge we each own our own lives and are responsible for our own choices.
That is why freedom is essential.
I would certainly agree with that.
All right, let me just get to your comments here.
So yeah, live calls are available if you would like to call in.
So let's look at some of the theological issues that were coming up from the previous caller, because I do find them very interesting.
I do find them
Um, obsessing about physical health is also gluttony.
Oh, so it's just kind of, I'm not sure what gluttony then means.
It's just an excess?
Is that just what it means, an excess?
But saying an excess is bad is not a very helpful statement.
It's like saying overthinking.
Well, what does that even mean?
I mean, what is the right amount of thinking?
There's underthinking, there's overthinking, how are you supposed to know, right?
So, he said we don't want to treat people as objects.
So this is a Kantian thing, which means we should treat people as ends in themselves, not as a means to our own ends.
So the typical example would be the man who treats a woman, lies to a woman just to have sex with her and then dumps or ghosts her.
That he's treating her as an object with which to satisfy his own lusts.
He's not treating her or interacting with her as an end unto herself, but rather he is treating her as a mechanism or a means or an object by which he will satisfy
His own lusts.
The politician who promises all kinds of goodies to people are not treating them as ends in themselves.
He's treating them as objects to be manipulated in his own lust for power, his own pursuit of power.
A salesman who sells you a shorty good while pretending it's better than it is in order to make his money and move on to somewhere else, that person, what is it they always F you in the drive-thru, says, uh, I was in one of the Lethal Weapon movies, I can't, right?
But as far as how we interact with people as a whole, we are interacting with people as objects.
That's 99.999% of our economic life is treating people as objects.
You know, I don't particularly care about the waiter's inner life, I just want my food brought to me.
When it's still warm.
I can't stand cold food in restaurants.
I don't have a lot of things, but getting cold food is definitely one of them.
I like a nice steaming plate of food.
So, I care about the waiter for his or her ability to bring me my food accurately and on time and warm.
So, am I treating the waiter as an end in herself, or am I treating the waiter as a means to my end?
Well, we're both treating each other as objects, and there's nothing wrong with that that I can see.
I'm happy to hear the cases.
Is she treating me as someone she just wants to feed me so I can go and do good philosophy at 7 p.m.
Eastern Standard Time, Wednesday nights, Friday nights, and 11 a.m.
Sundays, Eastern Standard Time?
She's not!
She doesn't care where I've come from.
She doesn't care where I'm going.
Or if she says she does, it's just because she wants to establish a more personal relationship in order to get tips.
To get better tips.
So she is treating me as an object.
She needs pay.
She needs to pay her rent.
The person she's paying rent to is treating her as an object, doesn't care about her as a person.
So this idea that we should not treat each other as objects, I find a little incomprehensible.
I mean, we care about each other, I think.
I mean, certainly I've been very privileged to look inside the lives of thousands and thousands of people over the course of almost 20 years of doing this show and the call-in shows and other things.
But, this is an unusual business, but for most people, for most of what we do, we don't care about the people, we care about the utility they can provide us.
You know, the electricity that is powering this show, I don't care about the people running the electrical grid.
I don't.
I don't.
And they don't care about me.
They want to get paid when I pay my electricity bill, and I want electricity when I pay my electricity bill.
I don't particularly care.
About the person.
I care about what they provide me.
And most people don't care about me.
They care about what I provide them.
So an example that's sort of very practical and tangible here is when I stopped about four plus years ago, I stopped covering politics.
Now, a lot of my audience was there not because they cared about me, or my mission, or my virtues, or even the children that I could help for the better with peaceful parenting.
They didn't care about that.
They cared about me delivering political analysis to them.
That's a fact.
Because when I did not provide political analysis to them, which is what they wanted,
They went elsewhere.
They either gave up on getting political analysis, which I assume would be quite unlikely, or what they did was they got their political analysis elsewhere.
Obviously not as high quality, but no, I appreciate, I care about you and I love the fact that we got this jazz club and we know each other and there's more caring here, right?
Absolutely.
You know, if I was doing a live stream and having six or seven thousand people watch the live stream, then if one person, I don't know, said, I'm feeling really unwell, I've got to go, I barely even noticed it, but you know, it's a smaller, tighter group here, so we care and there's more sort of interpersonal stuff and all of that, right?
So this idea we shouldn't treat people as objects, I have absolutely no idea how to survive economically in a world without treating people as objects.
I have no idea.
Because when you think of the things you consume over the course of every single day, the things that you consume, thousands or tens of thousands of people have touched them.
I mean, think of how many people it takes to just bring electricity and water to your house.
Or gasoline to get into your car.
To think of thousands of people all have to work in coordination and history and management and physical labor and planning and engineering and ships and sailing and captains and like thousands of people have to interact in order to give you what you want.
And you're one of the thousands of people who interact to give them what they want.
Now, if I just want electricity in my house, how am I supposed to care about the thousands of people?
Oh, so-and-so's got a twinge in their foot, and so-and-so's not having a great marriage, and so-and-so is really worried about their child, and so-and-so thinks that they should change careers but don't really know.
Like, am I supposed to care about the people individually when I just want some electricity for my house and I'm willing to pay for it?
So, this idea that we shouldn't treat people as objects, that we should treat them for the people themselves... I don't know.
There's something odd about it.
There's something odd about it.
Okay, we'll get back to that.
Let us go to... Alright.
Yes, my friend, you are...
Up, RR, who wants to talk about family structure.
Can you hear me?
Going well.
Yes, go ahead.
How you doing?
Good.
Okay, so I quickly got on.
Let me formulate my question for you.
When we think about the past,
Family structures, traditional structure, the man, the husband, his role typically was to protect and provide the woman, nurture and take care of the household and the children.
That worked primarily during a timeframe when
There was less technology, men had to go out and work and produce and provide.
Now, times have changed.
You have air-conditioned offices, you have technology, and women are in the workforce.
With that structure, when you have children, children overall, in my opinion,
With the traditional family structure, we'll have more connection and attachment with their mother because they're just more present, where the father may be out of the home.
So, Warren Farrell talks about men show their love by being a way for the family, that sort of thing.
But now, women can go out there and they can work, and I know that you have a great relationship with your daughter.
You stay at home, Dad, you work from home, so I guess I'm assuming that you're able to be more present with your daughter and you have a great relationship, I'm assuming, because you was able to be more present with your daughter.
So, in modern times, what's your opinion about perhaps having a shift
From the traditional family model where women can work, men can take their foot off the gas in terms of being productive, so they can be more available and have more attachment with their children as well.
Versus a traditional family setting where
Fathers just don't have that level of connection with their children.
When you have this circumstance where men are producers and providers, you have the potential where, you know, the kids don't know you because you're not around, and sometimes the wife resents you because you're not around.
But the trade-off is, maybe if both parents are working, then
You know, you don't have the communication, you don't have the development, so the kids will suffer to a certain degree, but men have a better relationship, potentially, with children, since they're able to be at home more, or work less, because women work more.
Right, okay.
So, what makes you think that women can provide for a family better than men?
I mean, and I know that say, oh, well, women work, but do they really?
I mean, as a whole in the modern world?
I mean, wasn't it the biggest single hirer of men, of women, is the government?
And employers have to be forced at gunpoint to hire women sometimes.
And the only way that women can be economically productive is with massive subsidies and laws that force people to hire them.
And also they have to not have children.
Right, so in terms of like, we can aim for equality of outcome with regards to male and female employment, but only at the cost of destroying our entire civilization through collapsing birth rates.
Because if women say, I want to have three kids, right?
Say, I want to have three kids.
Okay, so when's the best time to have kids?
Well, the best time to have kids is in your early twenties, because you've got energy and strength and so on, right?
I was talking to a friend of mine who was complaining, his wife was complaining about being tired raising their baby, and she had a kid in her late thirties.
And it's like, well, of course you're going to be tired.
It's not your baby's fault, but you know, it's a whole lot easier to pull all-nighters in your early twenties than your late thirties.
So if women are going to have three children,
Because you can't just have two, because then, you know, you need 2.1.
So let's just round up a little.
Obviously, up more than a little, because some people choose not to have kids.
So, let's say women want to have three kids.
You start having kids in your early 20s.
Let's say the kids are two years apart, or 18 months apart.
Let's just say two years, because the math is easier.
So you have a kid at 22, 24, 26.
Right?
You stay home for five years.
That puts you in your early 30s.
Right?
So,
How is it economically viable to have women in the workforce and have a replacement or mildly growing birth rate?
It's not.
And the only way you get women in the workplace is to destroy the birth rate.
And so, it's not civilizationally sustainable to subsidize women into, quote, equal economic outcomes to men.
Because then,
The woman who has, she had a kid at 26, so the kid is 5, she's 31, and she's probably going to need to be around those kids, because in many places it's not legal for your children to be home alone until they're at least 12, right?
So she's got to go then to be available to the kids after school and so on.
From the age of her young, her youngest kid is five when she's 31.
So he's got to get to 12, which is seven years.
So then she's 38.
She's been an adult for 20 years.
She's 38 when her youngest kid is 12 and can spend time at home alone.
Now, maybe then she can go and get a job.
Maybe.
Now, the problem is though, when your kid is 12, your older kids are going through the teen storms, right?
So they're having to navigate teenage structures, drugs, alcohol, sexuality, bad peers, bad parties, bad problems, peer pressure, all that kind of stuff.
And if she just abandons all of them to go and work at some job, is it economically productive?
So let's say that one of her kid goes off the rails because she's not home, making sure she's vetting his social circle, making sure he's safe, making sure he's making good decisions, making sure he's exercising and making sure he's fulfilling his commitments and driving him to work if he's going to get a job or something like that.
One of the kids goes off the rails.
And let's say going off the rails, I mean, that can easily cost a family $100,000 if a kid goes off the rails.
Especially if he gets involved in something like drugs or even alcoholism.
Maybe he's got a DUI, that's an easy 20-30K.
You know, maybe he gets a drug addict habit and steals, and that's an easy 20-30K.
Maybe he's got to go rehab, that's another 20-30K.
All of these things.
Is it economically viable for women to both have replacement birth rates and be in the workforce?
And if you look around the world, the answer is pretty damn simple, and it's no.
It does not work!
The only way that you can get women on even close to economic parity to men is for the government to hire them, for there to be laws that force employers to hire them, and to give up your birth rate.
So, how is this even remotely sustainable?
It's not.
So, when you say, well, maybe men should stay home and women should go to work,
Well, first of all, who's going to breastfeed?
Second of all, women have evolved for hundreds of thousands of years to deal with toddlers.
And men have not.
And generally what happens is, in most societies, around seven or eight, sort of, is when kids transition from moms to dads.
In particular, the boys, right?
Because they can start to do some useful stuff with regards to hunting or farming or whatever it is, gathering and so on, right?
So, I'm open to the arguments and, you know, I love women and want women to be happy and I absolutely believe in perfect equality under the law for men and for women, but when you give women all the education in the known universe, they tend to go into economically unsustainable debt.
You know, the student loan debt crisis is largely the women choosing unproductive degrees crisis.
So, how does it work to try and get women out into the workforce without any compulsion, without any violations of people's personal, private, property, legal, and business rights?
And again, I'm open to hearing the argument.
I'm open to hearing the argument, but I can't see how it works.
Let's also take welfare out of the equation, because the welfare state is largely the single mother state.
And, you know, again, I want to reiterate, I have massive affection for women.
I live with two wonderful females who are the absolute light and joy of my life.
But if I look at this from a sort of cold, pragmatic, statistical, factual, across the world, across history,
It doesn't work.
Women can only be, quote, economically sustainable in the workplace with massive amounts of government intervention, control of the marketplace, subsidies, debt, and a collapse in birth rate.
So, I don't... I did hear the chirp, I don't know if that's a smoke alarm, but...
Anyway, so I'm sort of happy to hear the argument, but I can't see it.
If I look all across the world, I look at places like Korea, I look at places even like Russia, I look at places like Japan, I look at the West as a whole, and it's like, well, we've worked really, really hard to try and close the gender pay gap.
And the only way we can close the gender pay gap is to cease to exist as a civilization in any recognizable form.
Call me crazy, that just seems like a rather high price to pay.
What are your thoughts?
Well, I get that.
I agree with a lot of what you're saying.
I guess my question is, if you have your followers that are watching your show and every once in a while your daughter will come on the show,
And they will see the great relationship that you have with your daughter.
And I'm going to assume that you have this great relationship because you were able to work from home.
Just your circumstance.
If men overall, in general, did not fit the prototypical role of protector and provider,
and were able to take their foot off the gas a little bit and be more present with their children, then now they can enjoy that fulfilling relationship with their children.
So maybe when little Johnny falls and scrapes his knee, he runs to dad instead of mom because dad is a little bit more present.
Okay, but sorry, who's providing for the family when the children are young, let's say?
I mean, obviously you need women for breastfeeding, right?
I mean, that's the healthiest thing, and it's at least, I think the World Health Organization, back when it had some credibility, was like 18 months for that.
So, who is providing for the family if the father is home?
Well, it's sort of a hybrid situation.
So you have breastfeeding, but women can pump.
So... Yeah, but breastfeeding isn't just about getting the breast meat, oh sorry, breast meat, cannibalism.
It's not about getting the breast milk down the gullet of the baby.
We were not evolved to pump and have bottles and it's about the whole experience and connection and the scent of the mother and the feel of her skin and her sweat and her eye contact and the touch.
I mean, it's a whole thing.
It's not just about food.
I mean, you ever try, if you've got a new date with a girl, you ever try taking her to a hot dog stand, right, downtown?
And she's like, well, hang on a second, why are you taking me to a hot dog stand?
And he's like, and you're like, hey man,
$3 street meat is the way to go.
It fills you up just as much as a dinner at a nice restaurant.
And she's like, yeah, but I want the ambience.
I want the candlelight.
I want the violins.
I want the nice waiter.
I want the tablecloth.
And it's like, you understand it's not just about the food.
It's about the whole experience.
Yeah, I get that.
I get that.
The milk change is based on the saliva of the baby.
Sorry.
I just wanted to mention that as well.
So, uh, it is, uh, it is a symbiotic relationship.
Sorry.
Go ahead.
Yeah, but you mentioned evolution.
Is that your smoke detector, just out of curiosity?
Yeah, I gotta change the battery, sorry about that.
No problem.
So we have evolution, and
In the past, when, you know, you had saber-toothed tigers, or whatever the case may be, and men had to gather and hunt and coordinate, that sort of thing, and bring back calories for the old and the children and their wives, that sort of thing.
But we don't deal with that anymore.
And now women, over time, with technology, we haven't overcome everything, but women can go out there and work.
Or they do work.
Okay, when do they work?
When do they work?
Let's assume that we want three kids a family.
When do they work?
When do the children go to work?
Sorry, when do the women go to work?
Well, what I'm saying is... No, no, what age?
Come on, just tell me!
What age do the women go to work?
Well, unfortunately, you may have a circumstance where you might even have a newborn.
I'm just making up a scenario.
No, no, no.
I'm not asking you to make up a scenario.
I'm asking you to answer the question.
You say women can go to work, and let's assume that we want a sustainable birth rate.
Let's say three kids a family, because, you know, more is better is more is better.
That third kid wants to come along.
So, at what age would you suggest women go to work?
Well, my issue is...
They can go to work if you have a family situation, this particular family situation, three children, a husband and a wife.
No, no, I'm not looking for a particular family situation.
I'm asking you, as a society, you want a birth rate of three kids a family, when should women go to work?
Ideally, okay I keep saying ideally, when the children are a little older, so 8, 9, 10.
Okay, so once the kids are how old?
Let's just say 8 years old.
8 years old, okay.
So at 8 years of age, the children get on a school bus, they go to school, they come home from school to an empty house, is that right?
No, they're not coming home to an empty house, because Dad is there, because... No, no, Dad's working nine to five, right?
So they come home, and he's got to, often has to work a little late, or he's got a commute, or whatever, he probably doesn't get home till six or seven.
So an eight-year-old comes, hang on, an eight-year-old comes home to an empty house.
Okay.
Is that good?
Well, of course not.
Okay, so the answer can't be eight.
So what is the age that women go to work?
It's certainly not in their early to mid-twenties because, again, I'm talking about a totally free society, right?
You can hire and fire whoever you want.
You actually have property rights in your business, right?
So if society is aiming for a
Birth rate of three per couple, right?
Then how many employers are going to hire and train women in their prime childbearing years, knowing that most people are going to want to, most of the women are going to want to get married and have kids?
They're going to say, no, no, no.
If I hire a woman, she's going to get married and have kids.
If I hire a man, he's going to have kids to provide for.
So who's going to work harder and more consistently?
The man is going to work harder and more consistently.
Okay, so again, what age should women go to work?
Can't be when their kids are 8, because their kids shouldn't be home alone at the age of 8.
And we also have this, you know, freaky thing now where kids are getting access to horrendous stuff online at a very early age, so you're just going to need to have someone home.
Kids being home unsupervised is in many ways much worse now with the internet than it was even in the past.
What age should the women go to work?
Yeah, I get that.
I mean, you can't leave small children unattended.
Okay, so it's not eight.
And you're not paying for older children because older children can get into all kinds of trouble with the internet friends.
Well, and I'm also not sure that it's entirely fair to say to older children, you have to be the parent now because mommy wants to work.
Because it's economically inefficient.
I mean, you could say, well, she's going to pay to have someone come and take care of her children.
It's like, but that's not that much fun for the kids because those people tend to come and go.
They may not have the same values.
In fact, they almost certainly won't.
There's going to be a lot of contradictions.
There's going to be a lot of problems.
Those people can be untrustworthy.
They're certainly not bonded with their children.
They don't have the same loyalty towards your children and so on, right?
So it doesn't end up being very economically efficient.
What age?
At what age of the mother should she go to work?
Now again, if she doesn't want to become a mother, that's a whole different thing.
But of course, I mean, in a free society, you can ask people that, because that would be a free speech issue.
Now you can't.
But at what age should?
Again, assuming you want a replacement birth rate, at what age should the mothers go to work?
Well, I mean, when you put it that way, the age of the mother, the mother would not be able to go to work until her children are pretty much grown.
Okay.
So let's say she's got her, she has her last kid at 26.
So he's 18 when she's 44, right?
Right.
Okay.
Now, remember, she is living in a society where women generally have kids in their early twenties, right?
So, she's going to go back to work when she is within a year or two or three of becoming a grandmother.
Now, do you think that her time is better spent at work in her mid-forties with no particular work skills, or is her time for society better spent transferring her parenting skills to her children and being a great-grandmother and helping them with their babies?
The latter.
Okay.
So, again, I ask you, when does she go to work?
I think my chair's squeaking.
It's not.
Anyway, sorry, go on.
Yeah, I understand everything that you're saying, and the direction that you're leading.
No, no, I'm not trying to lead in any direction.
I'm genuinely — I ask this of friends and society as a whole.
When should children — if we want a replacement birthrate, and we also want people raising their own children, because
I mean, there's not much point, and I go through all of this in my novel, The Present, which you should definitely check out at freedomain.com.
It's free, but it's not economically viable for women to go to work and then hand money to other women to raise their children.
It's not economically viable, and it's not civilizationally viable, because women are the transmitters of culture.
So there's not much point.
You don't have children to pass along your genes, you have children to pass along your values.
And if you're paying other women to raise your children, then those women who raise your children would, by economic logic, have to be much less valuable and competent than you are.
Because otherwise, you wouldn't have somebody who was a maid or a waitress paying a lawyer to raise her child because she couldn't afford it.
So it has to be the other way around.
Is there a logical time at which you say, oh, well, what about before they have kids?
Okay, so let's say they can start working at 18 and then they go and get a job.
Well, who's going to hire them knowing that they want to have kids in their early 20s and who's going to hire and invest in them a lot?
And also, shouldn't they be out there trying to find a great husband rather than
typing into PowerPoint or Excel spreadsheets under fluorescent lights in an airless office.
That doesn't seem to make much sense, because then they won't get as quality a husband.
So, I mean, I think we've sort of exhausted this line of reasoning, but there is no particularly decent answer as to when, if you want a replacement birthrate, when should women go to work?
And there's no answer to it.
You can't answer it.
So then my question is just for men and fathers, is there a path for men and fathers to be able to enjoy the love and connection and attachment with their children?
Yes, absolutely!
Sorry to interrupt.
So the way for men to stop
Having to be distant from their family is to stop men from having to be forced fathers all the time.
Because that's life at the moment, is that men are forced to be fathers.
And what I mean by that is men are forced to provide for families that are not their own.
Through the welfare state, through forced women's employment and so on, men are forced to provide for families that are not their own.
So every working man is supporting, on average, another family.
Or at least another child.
Right, so every man who's working is supporting at least one other child and quite often another family, depending on his tax bracket and his level of work and so on, right?
So the fact that we have this bizarre, economically polygamous, fracked-up, harem-based society, where a man, in order to have a family of his own, he has to work, and in order to have a family of his own, he's forced to provide for another family that he doesn't even know.
And he provides for it directly through taxes, indirectly through inflation, money printing, debt, you name it.
And also he's forced to subsidize women to not have children.
So he's forced to subsidize the women who have children through the welfare state and he's forced to subsidize women to not have children through having to subsidize higher education and employment that is based upon government fiat and edict.
Government force.
So, I want fathers to be very much involved in their own families, but in order to do that, they stop having to be drow horses to other families from irresponsible women who have children outside of wedlock without a provider.
Or who want to LARP as girlbosses, but not subject themselves to the actual free market and voluntary choice.
Oh, because women are all about free choice, my body, my choice.
Well, what about the mind, body, and resources of all the men who are hooked up as drow horses to pull your vanity and often irresponsibility?
For some women, not all women, of course, tons of responsible, wonderful women out there.
So yes, I would absolutely love it if men got to spend more time with their family, but then they have to stop being forced to subsidize other people's families.
Does that make sense?
Gotcha.
Thank you.
All right.
I appreciate the conversation and great, great questions.
Go change your battery, brother.
Appreciate it.
Thank you.
Bye.
All right.
All right.
We have another caller.
Freedomain.com slash donate to help out the show.
All donations get.
A copy of my fantastic presentation on the French Revolution, which will blow your mind and bring the modern world into glaring wild focus.
Just before that, somebody says, I don't agree men are less capable of looking after toddlers.
I think such evolutionary theories are vacuous.
All right.
So, you're saying that men can breastfeed, right?
Because that's into the toddler-ville, right?
And you're saying that women have not evolved to deal with toddlers, even though women spend almost all of their adult lives dealing with toddlers and children.
There's just no evolutionary pressures whatsoever for that.
Sorry, Lou, go ahead with your comment.
What you got?
Yeah, so actually I was trying to develop location-independent income, and I have a pretty good job, and I was
Interested to hear your thoughts on the viability of finding an employer that would be willing to allow an employee to work either as a contractor or through hiring, sorry, through a staffing agency from other countries.
Right.
Well, how do you get an employer to pay you money?
By providing more value than his next best option.
Right, so you have to make a business case to an employer as to why that employer should hire you and the advantage of you being remote.
So how do you do that?
I guess the same, almost the same way I would ask for a raise before accepting a job.
Well, but you're trying to get someone new to hire you.
Is that right?
Yeah.
Well, I was also thinking of doing it with my existing employer while he's trying to.
Okay.
Got it.
Now, so you have to figure out this is sales 101.
So I'm sorry if I, I sound obvious to those who know this, but so how do you sell something to someone?
Well, you have to figure out what their objections are.
Assuming they have any desire for it at all and business people want to make more money and they don't want to spend money on offices and computers if they don't have to.
So, what are the biggest concerns that employers have about out-of-office workers?
Slacking?
Yeah, of course, right?
I mean, there are people who walk around downtown at three o'clock in the afternoon, and they ask everyone at a cafe where they work, and then they just short that company.
It's going to go out of business, right?
Or do badly.
So how do you address your... I can only deal with new employers here, right?
But let's say you're trying to build
A staple or a group of people who are going to pay you to work remotely, how do you overcome their fears or concerns that you're just going to be slacking?
I'm not sure, but I noticed that employers that are already offering remote-only work
Are not willing to allow one to work from out of country because it's not something their existing process supports.
Okay, so you're saying that they have, say, some sort of payroll scheme or benefit scheme that is specific to a country and they don't want to pay somebody outside of the country?
That's right.
Okay, but that's easy.
I mean, you know that there's international business all the time, right?
I mean, business-to-business is significantly international, and it has been since the 16th, 17th century.
So then, how do you deal with the fact that you don't hook into their existing payroll and benefit schemes if you're working outside country?
Well, I can offer to work as a contractor, but if they see compliance risk with that, I can create my own entity and they can hire me through that, uh, through a service agreement.
And that way my entity acts as a shield that absorbs all the compliance costs.
Yeah.
Okay.
So you just have to make a business case for them.
But yeah, I'm also thinking that this wouldn't work for positions where they can easily replace people.
I think they would just hire someone else.
I'm not sure what you mean.
Can you give me, you don't have to tell me the exact job, but what sort of, do you mean like a call center or something?
Call center's gonna get replaced by AI, but anyway, what do you mean?
No, let's say a low-level position in any profession, like engineering, accounting, or software.
Well, I don't know that those are low-level positions, but you have to be so productive that you're worthwhile.
You know, it's like, it's like saying, well, how do I, how do I get my own private trailer on a movie set and my own private sous chef on a movie set?
Well, don't be an extra.
You have to be a star.
So you have to relentlessly add to the value that you can provide to the point where people will bend over backwards to accommodate you because you're a 10 X or a 20 X kind of guy.
Do you see what I mean?
Yeah.
The only thing that you can do in life is just completely aim to add value as much as humanly possible in just about every circumstance or situation.
You know, I've been talking about this with my daughter since she was a little kid and she got her first job a month ago, she's already got a promotion.
Did she have to ask for it?
She just was relentlessly competent.
No, she didn't ask for it.
She goes the extra mile, she does the hard work, she always says yes, and she's very enthusiastic, and she just gets a promotion.
Okay.
So you just have to keep adding value, right?
Okay, so are you in the sort of engineering field or something like that?
No, I'm in accounting.
Accounting, okay.
So if you're in the accounting field, maybe you learn about HR, maybe you learn about compliance, maybe you learn about the technical end of whatever business you're doing the accounting of.
You need to cross-pollinate your skills.
Right, so one of the reasons that I made money in the business world is I did the programming, I was heavily involved in the marketing, I went along on all the sales calls because they desperately wanted me to come in on the sales calls, and I learned about the business side.
So that's a big gathering of skills, right?
And so one of the reasons that I was successful in doing what I'm doing is because I know how to code, I know how to manage, I know how to do marketing, I know the business world, and I have a reasonable degree of self-knowledge and causality within the human mind.
So that's just a big, you know, big mess of skills.
So you just keep
Widening your skill set rather than just deepening.
The problem with deepening your skill set is, to me, it's like taking the wheels off your car.
I mean, yes, you're going to be there and you can't get anywhere else.
So, in terms of how do you become more productive as an accountant, I always aim to do 10 times more than the guy in the next booth.
I aim to have a show at least 10 times better than my nearest competitor.
I mean, I'm not even going to tell you whether I achieve that or not, that's really not up to me to judge, but that's my goal.
So how can you be 10 times more productive to the point where, like, you just become this wood chipper, they can just throw anything and you just cruise through it, you do it, it's accurate, it's right, it's fantastic, and all of that, right?
So how do you
Become this sort of 10x or 20x kind of guy.
As opposed to, well, I'll just try and do what I do, but a little faster and a little better.
That's not going to give you any kind of leverage.
So the reason that movie stars have paid $10 million, $15 million, and $20 million is because they open a movie.
In other words, people would go and see a movie just because Robert Downey Jr.
is in it.
Like he's going back to the Marvel Universe and they're paying him like $80 million or something like that.
Why?
Well, because people will go and see a movie just because Robert Downey Jr.
is in it.
And so, they're not paying him 80 million dollars.
The moviegoers are paying the studio $160 million and they're just giving Robert Downey Jr.
half of that, or something like that, right?
They're not paying him, they're making money from him because he's that charismatic, he's that beloved, he's got that much rizzle, whatever you want to call it, to the point, and that much talent that he can open a movie.
And also because he's Robert Downey Jr.
Everybody in the media is thrilled to get an interview with him.
Like I read an interview with Robert Downey Jr.
in some men's magazine, and they were thrilled to get the interview.
There was a wine magazine on an airplane I read many, many years ago, where a guy wanted to interview Tom Cruise.
And I think he spent 18 months trying to get an interview with Tom Cruise, and he finally got an interview with Tom Cruise.
Because Tom Cruise doesn't give that many interviews, and he's a real get.
And so, if you pay a movie star, they'll generate a lot of buzz about your movie, particularly if they change their weight.
Some sort of Christian Bale kind of thing, right?
Yeah, develop some code that generates some repetitive task.
Five times, easy.
Yeah, can you learn how to program Excel?
Can you learn how to deal with the back end of something that you can... So, I mean, I don't want to pump my own skills or whatever, but it's just the closest thing that I have to this.
So, Othello, a very kind listener, helped us automate the media posting and the uploading and publishing of videos.
And I gave him some money for that, and he was very kind and generous to do it, and it's been an absolute lifesaver for me.
So, that is just, you know, you just leave it, and you come back, and it's mostly done.
I mean, it's a little bit of hand-holding, but for the most part, it's automated, so that you just, whatever you can do to automate, even assertiveness skills.
So, for instance, if you have an employer,
And you're an accountant and the employer is doing something that could be risky, could be dicey, could cause problems.
Are you confident to say, whoa, whoa, whoa?
You need to stop this, and we need to review this, and I'm gonna... or maybe you do a presentation and say, here's the risks you're taking, here's the problems that I see.
And that may be an assertiveness thing.
So there could be softer skills that make you 10x.
And then the guy's like, wow, you just pulled me back from walking into a highway in a foggy storm, right?
So you could have just saved my bacon.
So in my own situation,
Way back in the day, we had these databases and these front ends, and all the customers wanted changes.
They wanted to add fields, tables, forms, reports, and so on, right?
So, I wrote a program that accepted... it was a spreadsheet, and you could just say, here's what I want to have changed, and the customer could do it.
I would spend, you know, an hour or two training them how to do it.
They would do all of that, and then my program would open up that spreadsheet,
Make all of the changes automatically to all the tables, all the queries, all the forms, all the reports.
It would create the drop-downs.
It would create every time you double-clicked on a date field, you'd get a little calendar.
Every time you double-clicked on a number field, you'd get a little calculator.
All the query forms where you could just pop up a form, type whatever you wanted, it would filter the underlying stuff.
All the reports.
Everything would be altered automatically.
Now that would take weeks and weeks of labor and it was all done
In about an hour with a full report that the customer signed off on.
And then there weren't any, oh I didn't ask for that, I didn't ask for that, I wanted this to be different.
You know, people sometimes make decisions later or forget or try and weasel stuff in.
And it was a whole process.
You'd send them this, you'd receive it, they'd sign off on it, and those were the changes.
And they were documented, validated, automated, perfect.
And this cut the time to produce a system
In terms of these changes, it cut it by 90 to 95%.
So what was that worth to our business?
Well, it was worth a massive amount.
Because you know, in software, every time a human being has to touch something, it's like a massive, sludgy break in the whole process, right?
Is your negotiating power then from the expectation that you will continue to have those skills in the future and create more value in the future?
Because they already have the automation, since you've already created it.
Well, not if you're keeping the automation.
Oh, if they need you to maintain it.
No, no, like if I was a contractor saying, hey, I'll make these changes to your database, then I would automate those changes to the database.
And if I didn't have the skills, I would just pay someone to do it and that way I could turn around and have this automated.
In fact, I developed to the point where you could simply point a website at the database and it would dynamically generate all of the entry forms, the navigation forms, the report forms, the query forms, you could do data entry, you could do filters, the whole thing.
It was just boom!
I remember going to China
And we had a translation of the system from English to Chinese.
So I just changed all the labels instead of, because I had the whole.
Even the labels on the forms were documented in the database, so I just put another column in, I put the Mandarin in, I had them point at the Mand... In fact, you could switch back and forth between Mandarin and English.
It took about an hour to translate an entire database with hundreds of tables, thousands of queries, and hundreds of forms and reports.
It took about an hour, and then that was permanent.
You could switch back and forth between the two.
How cool was that?
It happened on the Windows version, it happened on the
Web version and it was all automated.
So, you hold on to those tools.
You don't hand them over, right?
You hold on to those tools.
How can you hold on to them when they're the intellectual property of the company once you've created them?
So, the work product, right?
If you use your own laptop to create an accounting package or an accounting solution, they don't take your laptop, they just take the solution.
They don't take your capital equipment, they don't take your productivity, right?
Yeah, okay, that makes sense.
But when you can provide exceptional value as an employee, do you do it and then wait to see if value is reciprocated or do you try to negotiate ahead of?
Oh no, you take, in my view, again, you can do it in a number of ways that you want, but a lot of people think that it's just about being productive, but it's as much about marketing as it is about anything else.
There's no point having a great product if people don't know about it.
Right, so one of the things that I've been doing with the private call-ins is I've been saying to people, can you tell me how valuable the call was to you and then I can use that to gain credibility.
So with regards to people thinking that if you work remotely or in another country you'll be lazy, well what you need to do is do a couple of contracts, maybe even at cost or at a loss, and what you do is you get testimonials from the people you've worked with and you negotiate that ahead of time, say look I don't need
A novel, I just need a certain amount of time.
And you then get testimonials and say, the work was incredibly fast, incredibly efficient.
And you say, I did this remotely, this is what people are saying.
And that way you overcome this concern that you're going to be a jiggler or somebody who just jiggles the mouse and pretends to be busy, if that makes sense.
So you've got to get these testimonials.
If you get these testimonials, then you overcome people's objections or fears or concerns that you're going to be lazy, if that makes sense.
Yeah.
Thank you, Stefan.
The status bar, you don't see them as much quite anymore, but sometimes you do, like the bar of how fast a particular process is going.
So the way that I wrote code was I would write it to get it right, but not efficient.
So to make sure I got the right numbers going in, the right numbers coming out, and that way I know what the input and output is supposed to be, and then I can make it efficient knowing that I have a baseline.
And I always had the goal
That I was going to make it at least 10 times faster.
At least!
With server-side queries or I would download stuff to local, um, they're called record sets, which is ways of working with data.
And you can load record sets into RAM.
Now this was a little tricky because this is back when you only had a couple of megs of RAM, not gigs, but megs to deal with.
So I would load record sets in, I would set pointers, I memory markers, I would index stuff, I would just, anything that I could do.
To make it faster.
And it just was a complete obsession to me.
Just about, can I make it faster?
Can I?
There's a story about Steve Jobs, right?
That when one of the first IMAX was being built, it took like, I don't know, three minutes to boot up.
And he said, listen, if we can get this down to a minute and a half, he went through all the numbers.
You'll be saving like 3,000 man years every day just by getting the speed of the boot up.
Cut by half, right?
Or the speed accelerated by two.
So, I just have this particular obsession about trying to make things more efficient and faster.
You know, I time myself.
Honestly, I bring up, and do this, like I bring up, I got it right here, I bring up the clock on Windows or wherever, I bring up the clock, I still have the last one that I timed, and you go to stopwatch, and you reset, and you start.
And I say, OK, I finished the show.
How long is it going to take me to process a start?
And I try to make it faster.
And is there anything I can do to make it better and a better flow and so on?
Right.
So just always be trying to increase and improve.
That's fun.
That's fun, you don't keep doing the same things over and over again, and if you can find a way to just make things improve in that way, you just get a reputation as a monster.
And, you know, I mean, people like Stephen Crowder, they have like 17 people working
In the studio, right?
And I have always been, at least in my studio, though I have obviously other help, but it's just me.
All right, so let's see here.
This conversation makes me concerned that I'm not being paid enough.
Right.
There's not enough to be good.
You also have to, people have to know that you're good.
Steph, what are some tips to avoid going above and beyond and then receiving a $25 Pizza Hut gift card?
Well, you have to get to better managers.
You don't get to better managers until you're an exceptional employee.
The best coaches teach the Olympic athletes.
Honestly.
If you want good managers who recognize quality, you have to rise above the crappy managers.
Like, why do so many young people have a bad view of capitalism?
Because their managers suck.
And why do their managers suck?
Because high-quality managers aren't working with 19-year-olds.
High-quality managers are working with top performers in their 40s.
So, yes, of course.
Of course your first managers suck.
Because the good managers are... It's like saying, where are the really, really great directors?
Well, they're making Hollywood movies for a hundred million bucks a pop.
They're not in some local podunk theater doing another version of Death of a Salesman with amateurs.
And it's nothing wrong with any of that stuff, but... So, if you go above and beyond and you get a $25 Pizza Hut gift card, okay.
Well, then you have to break above those managers, so you have to get promoted to the point where you get to the God-managers, the God-mentors, the people who can help you go from 10x to 100x.
Those people.
But those people's time is incredibly valuable, and they don't waste it on people who don't have massive potential.
Is it easy to know if you're with a good manager?
Well, your numbers go up and you're incredibly thrilled to be there and you're very excited to get his feedback and you can't wait to put his suggestions into practice.
Because you pay a great manager with productivity, enthusiasm and appreciation.
So when you're thrilled to listen and he just comes up with stuff that blows your mind and just is incredible with regards to his insights and it's just kind of magic, right?
That's a great manager.
And you just, if you've ever been around people who just have that level of enthusiasm that feels like you're getting irradiated, it feels like you're, you know, you're like that.
Linda Hamilton character in Terminator 2 and the chain-link fence.
You know, it's just like, wow!
Wow!
Somebody says, I'm literally being called by different regional bank managers to assist in employee training and basically being told thanks.
I'm the second lowest tier employee in the company.
Yes.
Do you know?
I mean, and look, there's lots of barriers.
There's lots of barriers to excellence in modern corporations, right?
Because everything's got to be equal and everything's got to be even and so on.
And I get all of that.
But you should work for excellence no matter what.
I mean, it's not like when I had a lot more people watching live streams, it wasn't like, well, I'm just going to put more energy into those shows and none into these.
Like, you strive for excellence no matter what you do.
I aim to strive for excellence no matter what it is that I'm doing.
If I'm cooking an omelette, I want it to be the best omelette my family has ever tasted.
Is it?
Probably not, but that's what I'm aiming for.
I want every live stream to be a great live stream.
I want everything that I do to be as great as humanly possible and then to be even better next time.
Because that's fun!
Why would I want to just do the same?
I don't wake up every morning saying, damn, I'm still really good at walking.
Because you want to go from walking to running to gymnastics to whatever, right?
So, just aim for excellence and the world is so hungry for competence that when you focus on being excellent,
And you let people know, and you're very generous with your... Because you're like, oh, I'm just gonna get a $25 gift card.
It's like, but it's not about that!
Because then what happens is, you put out your effort, you get a $25 Pizza Hut gift card, and you're like, oh man, this sucks!
I'm never trying again, it's not worth it!
And then you just sink back down again!
You sink back down again.
And you kind of, oh, I'm so cynical.
You think you're going to get bribed into having a commitment to excellence?
You think if they gave you a hundred bucks or five hundred bucks or a thousand or ten thousand?
No, no, no!
You pursue excellence because it's good for your brain, it's exciting, it's an interesting challenge, and it's good for the customer.
And that's how you measure the quality of the work that you do.
You know, we're all alive because there were excellent hunters and excellent warriors and excellent nurses and excellent doctors and excellent mothers.
We're all alive because of excellence and you pay it forward and you focus on quality and you focus on excellence and being the best at what you can do.
Obviously I do some weights here and there but I'm not some big weightlifting guy because that's just maintenance for me.
I'm not aiming to be the excellent perfect weight guy, right?
That's not my thing because I'm there to pursue philosophy and working out and exercising gives me the energy and focus and physical health to be better at philosophy and do more philosophy.
So, but the end goal has got to be excellence!
I mean, this is why I have, like, two microphones here, because one is going into a Zoom recorder, the other one's going into the camera, and I've got recording here so that I can, uh, now I had to add that people are calling in, so, and I've got to make sure that the quality, and I think you'll recognize that the audio quality that I put out is excellent, and the video quality is pretty good, because I've fussed around it like crazy, so just try to be
Excellent and good and focus on that.
And it's like, yes, sometimes you'll get nothing from it.
Sometimes.
You know, I've complained about this before.
It's just a fact of life.
A lot of what I do just seems to spiral off into a void.
You know, I put out these great novels and every now and then I'll be like on the, oh, a novel feedback, and I'm like, oh, someone's got something to say.
No, no, my mouse was just hovering over that particular channel, so blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, right?
Now, I mean, I put out the Peaceful Parenting book and I get a couple of messages a week, but you know, relative to the amount of work and also the amount of effect that I know it's having, I just have to live on
Relatively little, if that makes sense.
So that's my $25 gift card in a sense, right?
But I'm still focused on being the best that I can possibly be, because I'm aiming to be relevant in a thousand years.
So aim for excellence.
Oh, but I'm not getting the right feedback.
It's like, but you're not in kindergarten.
You don't need the teacher to be like, Oh, good job, Johnny.
That was excellent.
Look at that lollipop, man.
It's almost looks like a real lollipop and a real man together.
I want to eat the paper.
I mean, that level of feedback has to come from your own commitment to excellence and your own conscience.
Say, ah, well, but people aren't giving me the kind of positive feedback that I want.
It's like, but you need to be committed to it for the thing itself.
If you want to make a lot of money, if you want to be entrepreneurial, if you want to be recognized for value, you have to have a relentless commitment to value and not join into this low rent trashy cynicism of, well, I worked very hard on this and I just got a $25 gift card.
Okay.
So?
Aim to be better next time and you will float up
Above the bad managers who only reward excellence with a $25 gift card.
So, one of the reasons why you get a $25 gift card is to see if you're actually committed to excellence or you just want a $50 gift card or a $100 gift card or a $500 gift card.
Are you just in it for the money or are you in it for the thing itself?
Because if you're just in it for the money, nobody's going to want to invest in improving your quality.
Right, so, does Brad Pitt need to do a movie to pay the bills?
Like, there's a funny thing where Tom Cruise was working with some Eastern European country, and he needed something from them, and he said, oh, you're doing this, that is, yeah, it pays the rent, it pays the bills, right?
Now, that's funny, because Tom Cruise is worth like $400 million, right?
So, by the way, for the future reference, $400 million is just two bitcoins in the future, right?
The idea that Tom Cruise is making movies to pay the bills is funny.
So, if Tom Cruise was in it for the money, he would have retired after Risky Business.
Or whatever, he could have lived on whatever came, I don't know, whatever came after Risky Business.
Legend, or whatever it was, right?
So, if he was just in it for the money, he would have retired long ago.
You know, Raspy Voice Clint Eastwood was making movies into his 70s.
So, he's not in it for the money, he's in it for the excellence.
Now, the reason you get a $25 gift card is if you say, well, that's not enough recognition, so I'm not going to be committed to excellence, then what happens is, people are like, oh, he only cares about the money, so I'm not going to invest in him.
Because if he's committed to the excellence of the thing itself,
Then he's worth investing in because that's a self-sustainable commitment to excellence.
Can't you be both in it for the money and the excellence?
Is there an inherent problem for being in it for the money to a degree?
Listen, I have no issue with money, there's nothing wrong with getting paid well.
The problem is, if you're paid well, does that diminish your commitment to excellence?
Or if you're paid not as well as you want, does that diminish your commitment to excellence?
Or does your commitment to excellence transcend immediate financial benefits?
Right?
I gave up over 80% of my income because of a commitment to excellence in philosophy.
Now, that's my choice.
Maybe other people... I mean, obviously most people choose the money and I did not.
I would consider it dishonorable to choose the money, but I chose a commitment to excellence over income, and some not insignificant income, right?
So, that's my choice.
I think that's what pays off for me.
So, I'm making the case for that, right?
I gave up writing, I used to write two books a year for ten, so I gave up writing twenty books in order to pursue excellence as a father.
I gave up
Illusions about my family in order to pursue excellence as a father.
Now what?
Am I getting paid for that?
No.
Am I getting paid for my pursuit of excellence?
I'm not.
In fact, it's costing me.
That's my particular commitment.
That's because I want to be excellent at philosophy come what may.
And so the $25 gift card
If you get cynical about that, then people say, well, he's mostly in it for the money and the recognition.
No, no, you have a relentless commitment to excellence because that's a challenge, it's exciting, it's interesting, it's valuable.
Now, if you say, well, my commitment to excellence depends upon how much other people recognize that value, then you're going to fail.
The commitment to excellence is not about whether everyone applauds you or curses you.
It's about your commitment to excellence for excellence itself.
Because it's hard, because it's challenging, because it's exciting, because it's valuable, because it's interesting.
It's more interesting than the average, the banal, the boring, the repetitive that everyone else does it to.
So, I mean, there's nothing wrong if
You are doing fantastic work and people aren't recognizing it and they just won't recognize it.
You can go elsewhere.
You can get a better job.
You can become a contractor.
You can start your own business.
I have no problem with that.
If you want to make more money, absolutely make more money.
But excellence is not about the money.
A commitment to excellence is not about the money.
Just focus on being great, because it's satisfying, and it's enjoyable, and it's fun, and you will never ever doubt.
If you commit to excellence, no matter what you're in, what field you're in, if you commit to excellence, you will never ever feel like you're not adding value or providing meaning in this world.
That's a really, really great gift.
All right, I got one more caller, so I appreciate that.
Thank you so much, and obviously let me know how it goes if you can.
Appreciate that.
We have another caller.
We're going to have to keep this relatively short.
It's been a long show, but I am absolutely with you.
Oh, look at that.
Yeah, go ahead, man.
What's up?
How are you?
I haven't seen you in a while, my friend.
Still the same.
Still baldish.
I just do want to preamble.
I like your CIA anonymous whistleblower lighting that's going on back there.
That's nice.
Anyway, go ahead.
It's just the sun coming through.
Although anonymity is what it is.
I do regret what YouTube did to you.
I know that you created a really big kind of... Well, you said, you know, if you are a serf working a field, you don't necessarily work the field, but you have produced the crop.
And if the Lord comes around and says suddenly, you know what?
I'm just going to take all this back from you.
He's not just taking a plot of land.
Oh, looks like the Lord has also taken his bandwidth.
Are you with me?
He's come, he's gone.
Hello.
That's cool.
I didn't know it did video.
I guess we have found out that it does in fact do video.
Although it both does and does not.
It's Schrodinger's video.
Now people, come on man, I'm working like a surf here.
Come on, a little tip here and there would not be the end of the world, would it?
I'm looking at you, Rumble People.
A lot of people there, and no tips.
So...
If I'm providing value to you, and I know that I am, return value for value.
That's called excellence in being a listener, too.
Being a participant.
The Lord giveth, the Lord taketh awayeth.
I don't think that's quite how it works.
All right.
Well, I guess we'll hopefully hear from him next time.
And it's very cool, of course, that it does video.
I did not know.
We'll go full Kevin Samuels.
As my boss says, somebody says, you aim for perfect and sometimes you settle for good.
And good is not dropping a tree on somebody's house.
Did you see my tip, Steph?
Uh, let me see.
Did I see your tip?
Uh, the last one I got was 20 minutes ago.
So, uh, if that was it, then I have seen it, but I don't think that the usernames match.
So I just wanted to mention that.
Somebody says, unfortunately, I don't expect to get moved up in the company anytime soon, 10 plus years.
I'm actively looking for better employment slash entrepreneurship at this point.
Should I confront my employer or make a quiet exit?
Rhetorical question, sorry for my venting, just feeling stuck at the moment.
So if you're unhappy, are you honest?
If you're unhappy at your company, are you honest about that?
Or are you lying by omission?
Now, you don't have to go to your boss every time you are discontented about anything, but I generally did not like it if employees just ghosted and vanished.
I always liked the opportunity to give a counter-offer.
Cause I would like to have the choice to keep employees.
Now, if somebody leaves and I want them to go, that's a different matter.
But in general, I preferred it when people, especially if you have a 10 year relationship, right?
Like if your girlfriend's unhappy, wouldn't you want her to tell you that she's unhappy rather than just break up with you without giving you the chance of response?
So with your boss, um, you can say, I'm not feeling particularly happy or motivated and here's why.
I mean, I've mentioned this story before, so I'll just touch on it briefly here, but when I was a manager, I managed about 35 people, and the head of the programming department came to me and said, we feel that we're underpaid.
This is a company that, not the one that I co-founded, but one I was hired into.
And they said, he said, we feel underpaid.
And you know, long story short, I did the whole commission to salary review and looked at the averages and interviewed people and did my research.
And then I went to the board and I got about close to a million dollars worth of raises a year.
This is why it's always funny to be received.
Help the poor, help the poor.
It's like, Hey, I get got people a million dollar raises and that's going to follow them for the rest of their career.
Right?
So, I'm very, very happy that those people came to me and said we're not happy.
Because my friend is making 30% more than I am.
I was very gratified and relieved, because what I did was I went to the board and I said, okay, here's the whole presentation, here's the salary averages, you know, here's what we're paying them, and here's the cost of how to replace it.
We had two million lines of code, it's going to take six to eight months for somebody to become competent in working with that code, and all that kind of stuff, right?
So, I was very happy that they came to me and said that they wanted more, and I was very happy I spent a month or two working to get them more pay!
Because they deserved it, and they worked hard, and they did a good job.
And it was not the easiest field sometimes to work in, so.
I'm pretty quiet, that may be the primary issue.
Yeah, well, that's a family thing, right?
That's a family thing.
People aren't there as adults, in your adulthood, people aren't there to
Meet your needs.
They're not there to figure out what you need, they're not there to puzzle out your goals, they're not there to facilitate your career, or anything like that.
Oh yeah, don't worry about trying to connect again, because I've been going for over two hours, so I think I'll stop in just a sec, but you can call on Sunday.
But I appreciate that, the call-in was great.
All right, tips to identify bad managers.
If you go ahead and above and beyond and get a $25 gift card, time to change managers.
Wow, Joe, you are really, really working hard and not listening to a freaking word I'm saying.
You're not listening hard.
You're hard work not listening to a word I'm saying.
How do you change managers?
You commit, you continue to commit to excellence.
To the point where you end up with a great manager who would never dream of giving you a $25 gift card.
You continue to work up and up and up until you get to the great manager level.
Somebody says, I quiet exited and started my own business and brought some of the clients with me.
Never sent a letter or message to the boss, just up and left and went well for me.
Boss was absolute whippet shit.
I don't particularly approve of, not that that particularly matters, I'm just telling you, I don't particularly approve of stealing clients.
Because it was your boss who
Paid all of the marketing and sales costs and employee training costs in order to get those clients.
And if you take clients, and in a lot of places, that'll get you sued, right?
It's called poaching, right?
And so, if you just go start some other shop and then the clients follow you of their own volition, that's one thing.
But if you say, hey, you should come with me and I'm going to do this and I'm going to do that, I think that's not ideal because
You are taking the investment that somebody else has into those clients and then making it your own.
And I'm not a huge fan of that.
I mean, I remember I had an employee who left and then just kept coming back to poach my employees or try to poach my employees.
And I'm like, I've done all of the work to hire and train them.
And I would appreciate it if you didn't do that.
I mean, it's not some massive morals violation or anything like that, but
It's not a particularly honorable way, in my view, to do business.
But, again, I mean, I don't know the details and so on, so...
Um, but if your boss has cultivated the clients and then you take them with you, um, that's a little bit of a shortcut to put it mildly.
And then you end up with these clients without developing the marketing to replace them when they go awry.
So it doesn't tend to work out that well in the long run anyway, because you're subsidizing your business by having somebody else pay to get the clients.
So then you just kind of get that as a value without having to set up your own way to get new clients.
So.
All right, well, thanks, everyone.
Got some great call-in shows coming out over the next little while.
I have been working quite hard.
I did a brother-sister call-in show today that was really fiery, and I hope that you will check those out.
Of course, I appreciate if you're listening to this later, freedomain.com.
If you could make up for a rather tragically low donation evening, I would certainly help, because the motivation is quite important for me.
So if you could, I would really, really appreciate that.
And have yourselves an absolutely wonderful, wonderful evening.
