Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux - Men Raised by Women! Twitter/X Space

Aug. 5, 2025 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

01:22:19

Men Raised by Women! Twitter/X Space

Large

Audio Only |

Scroll

Time	Text
	Hey, hey.
	Hey.
	Good morning, everybody.
	Hope you're doing well.
	Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain, Freedomain.com slash donate to help out the show, really would appreciate.
	As you get the distilled wisdom of over 40 years and tens of thousands of hours of the study of philosophy delivered straight like a laser dopamine to your orgasmic joy centers of your brain.
	Hope you're doing well.
	Let us tickle our neurons with a discussion of philosophy this morning.
	And I certainly have, hmm, I certainly have my speeches all prepared, but I'm happy if you want to holler in my ear, we'll do a table tennis bounce back and forth and see if we can advance the common cause of humanity closer to reason and evidence.
	Just raise your hand, raise your finger, raise your shirt, and raise our expectations, and I'm happy to chat.
	Because, oh my, well, I do have a rant within me.
	Actually, more than one, but right now there is one that is coruscating and coalescing within my midriff.
	But I don't want to brain block anybody with stuff to talk about.
	So I'll give it a going once.
	I'll give it a going twice.
	I'll give it away, give it away, give it away now.
	All right.
	So it looks like we're here to listen.
	I assume people, oh, if you're at work, I expect to cut.
	So, wait, we have someone.
	TM.
	TM, Transcendental Meditation to Muchness.
	Tia Maria, what is on your mind?
	Oh, my.
	I did not think it was going to be this quick.
	It is lovely speaking with me.
	That's what she said.
	Anyway, go on.
	You've succeeded in wiping everything from my mind.
	The only worst thing is, is it in?
	Philosophy.
	Let's stick to philosophy above the waist.
	All right.
	Hard thinking.
	There we go.
	Do it.
	So I look at the current state of things and I find myself deeply concerned about the transmission of good values of how we are going to keep ourselves a free people.
	And it seems we've made quite a hash of things.
	It's just an awful mess that we have in terms of keeping the republic, keeping ourselves free, understanding what we need to do in terms of meat and potatoes to keep ourselves free.
	And what would you suggest would be practical efforts to further that that would be on a human scale that would be, you know, a mid of X could do it on the subject.
	So is your question, how do we promote freedom in the world?
	Eudaimonia is what I'm looking for, but I think.
	I'm sorry, I didn't quite catch that side of that.
	But what does that mean?
	Eudomania, Aristotelian concept of a good virtue.
	Oh, eudaimonia.
	Okay, eudaimania.
	Got it.
	Got it.
	Okay.
	So are you trying to sorry?
	Hang on, hang on.
	Hang on.
	Hang on.
	Are you asking me how to promote happiness or how to promote virtue?
	Now, I know that Aristotle says that virtue leads to happiness and so on, but you talked about, I think, some of the tyrannies and loss of freedoms that we experience.
	And are you saying, how do we promote political freedom?
	How do we promote, or how do we promote personal happiness?
	Well, I'm a little concerned about the present generation of the right.
	Okay, bro.
	And that is good.
	Bro.
	Okay.
	I keep asking you these questions and you keep going on speeches.
	Do you know what I'm asking you?
	I understand what you're saying.
	Okay, then.
	Here's the thing, Aristotle.
	No, here's the thing, though.
	So if you're going to have a conversation with me, then you have to acknowledge that I asked you something, right?
	So if I say, is this the way to the grocery store?
	And you say, well, I'm very concerned about the online right.
	It's a little rude, right?
	Because no, you can say, listen, I've heard your question.
	I'm going to answer it in a roundabout fashion, blah, blah, blah.
	But if I ask you a question, and I've asked it twice now, and then you just start speechifying.
	I mean, my experience is you're here to speechify, not to answer my questions.
	Now, if you want to speechify, that's fine.
	Then you should get your own show and speechify.
	But if you're having a conversation with me, one of the prices is you got to listen to what I say and respond to it.
	Okay.
	Are you asking me how to promote personal happiness or political freedom or something else?
	I believe that personal happiness is tied up with political freedom.
	I don't accept that the two are necessarily separate.
	So it's a very important thing.
	Okay, so I get what you're saying in a general sense.
	Do you think that people ever suffer for the promotion of political freedoms?
	Sure.
	I mean, they're not the same thing.
	I'm sorry?
	I suffered on the way to marrying my wife.
	She liked to walk a lot.
	Blisters.
	So yeah.
	Okay, let's not diminish the struggle for political freedom by making silly jokes about blisters with your wife, right?
	Because that's a whole different situation.
	So, I mean, if these are serious issues to you, then I'm not sure that making jokes about blisters is the way to go.
	Because if you don't take it particularly seriously, which is fine, then it's probably not a great topic of conversation because it does seem to be a very important topic of conversation.
	I think that a happy life is not a life that is totally devoid of suffering.
	So yes, suffering can happen for freedom, obviously.
	Happens all the time.
	Okay, so then when you say that it's a false dichotomy to say it's one or the other, look, the reason why political freedom is not achieved is whenever you gain any traction or success in promoting political freedom, people fuck up your life because they don't want to give up political power, right?
	I mean, it wasn't like America won its independence from England with sternly worded pamphlets, right?
	I mean, the people who signed the Declaration of Independence almost to a man were hounded and had to live in caves in the woods and had their families and businesses destroyed.
	And I mean, the pursuit of political freedom comes at enormous personal sacrifice.
	It can.
	When things deviate largely enough, then yes.
	Okay, so what you're saying is there are times when promoting political freedom and achieving it, not just promoting it, right?
	Sure.
	So, I mean, I could promote political freedom in Aragon's Kingdom in Lord of the Rings, but nobody would care because it's not a real thing, right?
	So are you saying that if you promote political freedom and You have some success.
	In other words, you are diminishing the power of power-hungry politicians and all of the other rulers.
	Are you saying that if you are successful in promoting political freedom, that the political rulers, there's no blowback?
	I think that the goals and happiness isn't necessarily personally there.
	I mean, I forget which one of the founding fathers was saying, I study war so my sons can study politics so their sons can study art.
	Okay, do you remember my question?
	Yes, that is there going to be blowback.
	Sure, there's going to be blowback.
	Okay.
	Is it going to be quite consistent that if you harm the interests of evil people, they would try to harm you back?
	Yes.
	Okay, so then it is consistent that if you are successful in the promotion of political power, you're going to suffer personally.
	Political freedom.
	Like if you harm the interests of politicians.
	Sorry, I interrupted you, but I wasn't sure if I suddenly was thinking back and did I get that phrasing right.
	So yeah, if you are successful in promoting political liberty, then you harm the interests of power-hungry rulers, and then you're going to get blowback, right?
	I mean, it's not like North Korea is not North Korea because people like it.
	It's because they get tortured and killed if they oppose the dictator, right?
	So the promotion of political freedom, if you're successful, will almost always, I mean, as certainly as things can be in human life.
	I mean, my family has a long history of promoting political freedoms all the way back to my ancestor William Molyneux.
	And we have consistently received punishments as a result.
	So that's why I'm asking you: if you're promoting personal happiness or you're promoting political liberty, because one almost always comes at the expense of the other.
	The happier you are, the less you're disturbing evil people.
	And the more you are disturbing the interests of evildoers, the harder they will make your life.
	So that's why I'm sort of asking.
	Well, I'm demurring for a specific issue that there is a way to not suffer that blowback if you can create a way to have a win-win.
	Like, okay, you're really miserable, North Korea, because, yes, you have great political power, but your pie is really small.
	So let's enlarge the pie, not kill you, but create some sort of win-win situation.
	So you're still in power, but we're going to make the pie larger.
	So you're actually going to do better by allowing more freedom.
	That is a structure that's possible.
	Some people have tried it.
	Personally, I've experimented in that sort of bargaining, and it can work.
	So I don't, I accept that what you're saying is true insofar as it can be true, maybe even dominantly be true.
	I don't accept that it must be true.
	Well, as I said, there are no musts in human affairs because there is free will and there's always a certain element that can't be predicted.
	So are you saying that the ruler of a dictatorship, we should appeal to their self-interest and say that they'll make more money if they allow a free market or something like that?
	It's certainly better than shooting.
	I'm sorry.
	Yes.
	So you're saying that that is the case.
	Okay.
	Now, what if the ruler of the dictatorship, what if the ruler is a sadist and he gets his great pleasure out of torturing and killing people?
	Then he's less interested in money than he is in the power to do his evil deeds and not suffer any negative consequences.
	In which case, this appeal to self-interest would not work.
	Yes.
	So, I mean, sadists aren't healthy people.
	So, yes, if an unhealthy person was in a position of power, they would.
	Are you saying that there are lots of healthy people in positions of power?
	I'm saying that I know of two that actually made a run for it.
	Obscure ones, but yes.
	Okay.
	I mean, certainly when we're talking about dictatorships, we're not talking about healthy people by definition, right?
	Lenin, a Stalin, a Hitler, Mussolini, like on the left, on the right, whatever you want to call them, the people who took significant and savage power over the lives of millions and sometimes destroyed entire countries and economies.
	And like the guy who was in charge of the biggest concentration camp in Soviet Russia, killed millions and millions of Russian natives.
	And saying, well, you'll be able to buy a nicer car if you stop doing that isn't going to be enough because I assumed that he was a sadist and enjoyed torturing and killing people and starving them and so on.
	There are countries.
	That doesn't work.
	And Cincinnatus would be an example, who did have power, was elected dictator, and then went back to his famously.
	George Washington could have been a dictator, and he was trying to get out of that power as quickly as he can.
	Hang on, hang on, hang on.
	Hang on.
	Hang on.
	You're just throwing historical examples left, right, and center.
	Okay.
	So, I mean, you know about the whiskey rebellion, right?
	That George Washington sent 10,000 troops to go and collect taxes from farmers who didn't want to pay a whiskey tax.
	Yes.
	I mean, isn't that a bit dictatorial?
	No.
	No.
	Okay.
	Enforcing the law is not dictatorial.
	And saying this is the law, I declare it, that's dictatorial, whether it's violence or not to enforce it.
	Well, I don't want to have a conversation about statism as a whole, so we'll just stay in the general paradigm of that.
	Okay, I accept that.
	Okay, so you said that you had some examples of being able to talk people out of doing evil, and I would love to hear those.
	Okay.
	Come Romania, 1989, there was a coup.
	The younger generation of communists out throughout the older generation of communists, but they kept in.
	It was still a communist land.
	No, no, no.
	Sorry, you said that you had your personal.
	I mean, were you in Romania at this time?
	Is that what you're talking?
	Because I wanted to hear your examples.
	Yes.
	Ceachescu and Romania, is that your example?
	The first non-communist government of Romania, I participated in that debate and was reliably informed that my positions were being taken up from an internet debate and saying, you know, he's got a point there.
	We can really make bank and these old fossils will never get, they'll never let us in.
	And the I'm doing it out of order, so it makes It makes less sense.
	So 1996 comes, there will be an election, multi-party election.
	It's shaping up to be a fraudulent election.
	Over the summer, prior to the election, I was making the case along with a small band of other Romanian ethnic Americans that the communists should split because the young guys are never going to get power while the old guys are going to hold on to it for as long as they can and giving specific advice on how to do it.
	And it turns out that's exactly what happened.
	And that's how the first non-communist government actually showed up in Romania.
	Now, it could have been a coincidence.
	It could have been my influence.
	It could have been the influence of others that coincidentally were advocating it.
	But that's history.
	That's what happened.
	So that was my personal brush with it.
	And I was informed.
	Sorry, just to remind me of the case that you made.
	I may have missed it.
	And I'm sorry about that, but you just remind me of the case that you made to the, was it to the older communists or the young people?
	Oh, no, to the young guys.
	The older communists weren't on the internet.
	Okay, so the young guys, you said to them, what?
	You guys are never going to get real power.
	The old fossils are going to clutch onto power for as long as they can.
	Go and split the communist vote.
	Go and set up so that party A gets some of you, party B gets some of you, party C gets some of you.
	whoever gets in, make arrangements so that you're going to be fine.
	You're going to be fine.
	The fear of the communists were that they let go of power for real and there'll be trials.
	There will be retribution.
	There will be violence.
	And what ended up happening is that there were no trials.
	There was hardly any retribution.
	There's hardly any violence.
	And you got a sort of lurching muddle towards freedom that stretched out over a number of elections.
	And it wasn't satisfying.
	It wasn't happy, but it was practical.
	And it avoided bloodshed.
	Sorry, when you say bloodshed, are you saying that the communists who committed horrendous crimes against the Romanians did not get punished?
	Oh, no.
	That's been a hobby horse of Romanian anti-communists for decades.
	They lost.
	Sorry, what do you mean?
	What do you mean?
	Hang on, hang on, hang on.
	What do you mean by a hobby horse?
	That's pretty fucking disrespectful, isn't it?
	I mean, people whose families were tortured and murdered, well, they have a hobby horse called retribution or punishment.
	That's not a hobby horse, bro.
	I mean, you know this better than I do.
	I mean, people's families got tortured and murdered.
	What the fuck is a hobby horse in wanting people to be punished for that?
	When the choice is to go and engage in violence or to hang on, hang on.
	So collecting a whiskey tax, that's fine.
	Riding down on farmers who don't want to pay a whiskey tax, that's fine.
	But perhaps trying and jailing people who slaughtered hundreds of thousands and tortured hundreds of thousands, well, that's just violence.
	I don't understand your thinking.
	And perhaps you can unravel this mystery for me.
	Okay.
	Well, digging back to the whiskey tax, the tax was passed by duly elected, freely elected, not fake elections, legislators.
	The state needs money.
	So unless we're all going to be anarchists, we have to concede that the state is going to tax something.
	And this kind of insulting, right?
	No.
	I mean, we're all smart enough to know, and I already conceded that point.
	So what you're saying is that using violence to collect a whiskey tax is good, but using violence to jail communist dictators is bad.
	What I'm saying is that when you don't have the numbers and you don't have the ability to actually take power, you can't.
	No, that's not what you said.
	What you said was what you said.
	No, no, no, it's recorded.
	What you said was that not having retribution against communist dictatorships against communist dictators avoided violence.
	Yes.
	So you're fine with using violence to collect a whiskey tax, but you're not fine with violence being used to punish murderous dictatorships or dictators.
	The problem with Romania.
	No, no, I don't want to hear about the problem with Romania.
	We're talking about a moral question here.
	Sure.
	The moral question is, is your violence going to actually do anything?
	No, that's not the question.
	You're happy with the use of violence to collect a whiskey tax.
	You're not happy with the use of violence to punish dictatorships.
	You're mischaracterizing my statements.
	So let's, you know, you say you're conceding things, but you're kind of backing out of it.
	You said that not, you said not punish.
	We already agreed on this.
	And look, I'm not trying to get you.
	I'm genuinely trying to understand this line of thinking.
	So you said, well, the whiskey tax is fine because the government has to enforce the law, blah, blah, blah.
	Right.
	So killing farmers who resist the whiskey tax, which is what happens if you resist a whiskey tax, right?
	So killing farmers to collect your tax is fine.
	But what was good about not punishing dictators from Romania is that it avoided violence.
	So violence in the collection of taxation is fine, but violence in the punishing of murderous dictators is bad.
	That's what I'm just denying.
	That's not unwrapped.
	The second part were that you're mistaking my position.
	So there is a real issue with whether your rebellion will work or not, whether your violence will work or not.
	If you're going to raise the flag of rebellion, win.
	And if you look at the numbers and you say, nope, we're not going to win, don't raise the flag of rebellion.
	That is a good summation of my statement, of my position.
	If you have the ability to do a negotiated settlement so that you trade and you say, okay, well, you guys kind of give up some of the power and do a long, slow surrender and we will pay for that by not insisting on retribution,
	then that is superior to them hanging on to the dear end and having a transfer later and a transfer that is much more violent.
	Am I distinguishing it enough for you to see the difference now?
	So morally, the dictators should have been punished, but it was impractical.
	Yes, it was impractical.
	It remains impractical.
	But morally, the dictators should have been punished.
	Yes.
	Sorry, what's the pause there?
	I'm not sure.
	I understand what the pause is.
	I'm trying to, what the pause is?
	Because you're parsing things in ways that made me a little suspicious.
	All right, is this going to be misused against me?
	It was just a quick two, three second check.
	Okay, that's fine.
	I mean, to me, I try to just be honest about what I think and feel and the reasons behind it rather than trying to strategize about other people's reactions.
	Okay, so it wasn't really the avoidance of violence.
	It was the avoidance of failure, and the failure might lead to increased violence.
	So if you said to the people in charge, we are going to we are going to punish you, then they'll hold on to power, which makes things a problem, might make things more violent.
	But if you say there won't be any retribution, then they'll give up power, right?
	And then you well, it's less that they'll give up power than the you're it's divide and conquer.
	Those old fossils ended up with small pensions in crappy apartments.
	The new guys, the young guys, sped up a generational power structure and they rose to power in other parties.
	They were chameleons.
	They were opportunists, not ideological communists.
	Okay.
	So why feeling off the chameleons was a way to get to break the dictatorial coalition.
	Okay.
	So why wouldn't you promise that there would be no retribution, gain power, and then just try the murderous dictators?
	I mean, why wouldn't you just lie to them?
	Mostly because they're 30 to 40% of your cadre.
	Well, no, not the dictators themselves.
	No, the chameleons.
	Sorry, the chameleons are who again?
	The chameleons were the young communists who didn't give a darn about Marx, but were perfectly willing to go along to get along to eventually get a rise in power.
	So the corrupt bargain was, and it absolutely was corrupt, was, hey, come, you know, split out.
	You go to the liberals, you go to the peasants' party, you go to this other party, and all of the parties will be enlarged enough that the communist leftovers will lose power, you know, and you'll have your buddies in all of them.
	And that sorry, go ahead.
	And that will allow a progress for the country.
	And any little moral compromises that you did along the way, they will necessarily be swept under the rug because any party that does that, they're making themselves irrelevant.
	So this is sort of a forensic examination of what actually happened.
	It was a way to get past an unfortunate period of halfway out of communism, halfway in communism that Romania had from late 1989 to 96, excuse me.
	And sorry, go ahead.
	And it was done without violence and it was a muddle and it was ugly, but it was progress.
	Okay.
	Fantastic.
	So how has Romania been doing since the 80s?
	Considerably better.
	It went from all of the competent people have communist roots to there are a lot of people who are outside the Communist Party and actually can form a legitimate government that's competent.
	And I'm not a great fan of the last administration, but it's well within the normal parameters of a European democratic republic.
	Yeah, I'm just looking here.
	Romania is a partly free country, score 48 out of 100.
	It is 53rd in the world for free press.
	They're not sending assassins to the University of Chicago to shoot uncomfortable professors anymore.
	This is the positive.
	Got it.
	Okay.
	So for those who aren't, like, I guess you were fairly involved in the transfer of power from the outside agitator and I'm tempted to start doing it again.
	But that's, you know.
	Sorry, what does outside agitator mean?
	It means that I left Romania as a toddler because Richard Nixon bought me out of bondage.
	And I grew up in a émigré neighborhood, émigré social milieu in New York City, learned my Romanian in a church basement and self-taught to be literate in that language because there was just no opportunity to learn it.
	Okay, so what were you doing?
	And this sounds skeptical.
	I don't mean it that way.
	But so what were you doing in the 80s in managing this transition or helping this transition alone?
	Early 90s, the place to be to the hot debating talking shop, Twitter not having been invented yet, was a Usenet group called Soap Culture Romanian.
	And I was there, you know, being, you know, abused for my awful Romanian and for other issues, you know, doing philosophical and political advice to the non-communists.
	So sorry, you were on a Usenet group.
	Yeah, I was on a Usenet group.
	I also had a website later on.
	I had a, I actually had Olivio Guerman, who was the, who used to be president of the Communist Party, actually do a press conference about my website and claiming it was the CIA.
	Very spooky.
	Okay, and were you anonymous on this website or could people find you?
	It was that experience that convinced me to start using my real name.
	Sorry, that's not using it.
	It was a little of this, a little of that.
	I actually switched during that time period.
	So I went.
	Switch, sorry, switch from what to what?
	Switch from studenes to using my real name.
	Okay, so I'm findable under my under my current name.
	Okay, so at what point in the transition did you become known As who you are.
	Oh, dear lord.
	30 years ago, I'm digging.
	Just roughly.
	I mean, was it during, after, before?
	It was kind of during.
	During.
	Okay, got it.
	Okay.
	So somebody with political aspirations talked about your website and you were on a Usenet group for the most part anonymously until the transition was underway.
	Do I have that right?
	Pseudonymity at that point was not, it wasn't that thick of a shield during that time.
	It was Romanians in the diaspora were very paranoid by for good reason.
	Well, then it's not paranoid, right?
	Well, I mean, I talked about the University of Chicago for a reason.
	There's a guy.
	He was shot in the bathroom.
	And I grew up, you know, my church congregation was mostly, maybe 35% former political prisoners from the Romanian state.
	So very well aware of the unfortunate reality.
	Okay, I don't want to argue about whether evildoers can be dangerous.
	Of course, they can, right?
	So, and I'm not trying to diminish.
	I'm just trying to understand what it is that you're doing.
	So, you were on a Usenet group and you had a website that someone in politics talked about, and you were pseudonymous for a good portion of that time.
	Now, would you say that you were in fear or did you have concerns about blowback from the work that you were doing in the 80s and early 90s?
	Oh, I was young and dumb, didn't think much about it.
	If I had, I wouldn't have done it.
	Okay, so you should have had caution, but you didn't because you were young, as you say, young and dumb, right?
	Oh, yes.
	Okay, so the only reason that you didn't suffer anxiety about the political work that you were doing was because you didn't understand the danger.
	Um, that's fair.
	That's fair.
	Okay.
	Okay, so I think we're back to our original point that if you are effective in politics, it interferes with the quality of your happiness.
	And the only reason it didn't with you was like a blind zebra, you didn't see the lions.
	Blind zebra.
	Okay, I don't know what to do with that.
	That analysis.
	Well, no, it's just a matter of that there was danger.
	And you said I was young and dumb and didn't recognize the dangers.
	And I wouldn't do it now if I knew then what I know now.
	So it was, I mean, it wasn't really bravery.
	It was, and I'm not, again, I'm not trying to diminish what you did, but I'm just using your words.
	So my argument was that if you're going to promote political liberty, it's going to interfere with your personal happiness.
	And then you say, well, I did promote political liberty.
	I had some effect, but it didn't interfere with my personal happiness because I was young and dumb and didn't understand the danger, which is why I'm saying, like, a blind zebra doesn't see the lions, but that doesn't mean that the zebra is wise.
	He just doesn't see the lions in the same way that you were young and dumb, as you said, and didn't see the danger of what you were doing.
	I take your point, and you do have, you do have one.
	The only thing is I'm older now, and I'm considering doing it again.
	So I'm not going to do it.
	But you would do it now with much more caution, right?
	So we'll just leave it at that.
	But you would do it now with much more caution and much more concern.
	And I think there would be wisdom in that, right?
	I mean, as we all know, there's a long history of people opposing political power coming to some very bad ends indeed under just about every system of government.
	So when you were asking me, so my question at the beginning was, are you asking me how do you promote personal happiness, Aristotelian eudaimania, or are you asking me how to promote political liberties?
	Because the two are usually in conflict.
	And, you know, more power to those.
	And, you know, great honor to you for pursuing political liberty.
	I'm glad in a sense that you didn't feel the dangers because I'm sure it made you more effective and so on.
	But that was sort of back to my original question: that if you are going to promote political liberty and you're effective, then there will be blowback, almost almost certainly.
	And so if you're promoting political liberty, it will often come at the expense of personal happiness.
	And if you're promoting personal happiness, it will often come at the expense of effective opposition to tyranny.
	And so that's where our sort of conversation started.
	And I think we've come full circle and we're mostly in agreement.
	Well, I would quibble with the, I think you didn't start with often.
	Often I'll buy.
	Yes, but not necessarily always.
	I'm sorry, not necessarily often, always.
	I'm sure what that means.
	Not necessarily always.
	So often.
	Okay, no, no, no, no, I never said I never said no.
	No, no, no, no.
	Don't mischaracterize me.
	I said, as certain as these things can be, given the varied varieges of human choices and free will and all that kind of stuff.
	But in general, it is the case that if you're effective in opposing the interests of evil people, they will find ways to make you unhappy, right?
	That's their general goal in one way or another.
	I mean, is that an iron law?
	Well, of course not, because there's free will and choice and exigent circumstances and blind luck and all these kinds of things.
	So, no, I never said always, of course.
	Okay.
	Well, I think we have come to as close to agreement that human beings can practically do in a few minutes.
	So good.
	Okay, good.
	So I'll answer both questions.
	So in the promotion of personal happiness, and I think that there's a way to do both, but in the promotion of personal happiness, reason equals virtue equals happiness.
	So you have to live with integrity and you have to live with honesty.
	You have to live with a fair amount of moral courage.
	You have to promote the good and you have to interfere with the interests of evildoers.
	Now, the way that you interfere with the interest of evildoers is not with attack, not with punishment, certainly not with violence, but with ostracism.
	So if there are people who promote corrupt and immoral or evil practices in your life, in your environment, of course, you sit down with them and you try to reason with them and you try to bring them to a wiser and more moral viewpoint.
	But if they remain relentlessly attached to their corrupt and immoral perspectives and arguments, well, you cut them out like a tumor.
	You don't have them in your life.
	You just don't have them in your life.
	Now, it doesn't actually take, it only takes three to five percent of people to affect social change because most people are just led around by the nose.
	They'll just do whatever is do whatever seems popular or makes them feel safe.
	They are not moral beings.
	They are consensus beings.
	And so they'll just go along.
	And we know this, of course, from the Milgram experiments and other psychological experiments that people mostly will just go along with the herd.
	And it only takes 3% to 5% of people to really make a social change.
	So what you do is you, I mean, I've got whole books on ethics and virtue and integrity and honesty, freedom.com slash books.
	They're all free.
	And so what you do is you act with moral purpose and you try to bring people into your sphere of virtuous virtues and virtuous actions.
	And if people are hostile or negative or opposed to virtues and virtuous actions, again, you reason with them, but only for a certain amount of time.
	We're not immortal and we can waste a lot of time trying to turn corrupt people into virtuous people.
	At some point, it does become like trying to talk a cancer into a muscle.
	And then you simply don't have people in your life who are corrupt and immoral.
	I mean, this is a not, it's not a shocking thing, but it's shocking how little it's practiced because most people just, again, will go along with, well, these are the people I grew up with and these are the people who've been around my whole life and all of that.
	So the personal is the political in this sense.
	So, I mean, for instance, if I had people in my life who'd been totally bloodthirsty to strip the unvaccinated of their rights over COVID, if I had such people in my life, I would sit down with them and talk them through the wrongs that they did and remind them about the Nuremberg codes and all these kinds of things.
	And I would expect them to have some sort of moral breakthrough, to have a genuine contrition, apologies, to learn some wisdom, to learn about the corruption that they weren't only just capable of, but had actually manifested.
	And I would expect a serious change in moral attitude in order for me to continue that relationship, because I'm not a big fan of people who want to strip me of my rights for maintaining my bodily autonomy and integrity.
	So that would be an example.
	Now, if they did, you know, made apologies, made restitution, figured out a way, you know, maybe they did therapy or studied moral philosophy or something so that they would have a bit more of a bulwark against their own susceptibility to generalized corruption, then, okay, that's reasonable recompense and I would continue the relationship with a little bit more caution than before.
	But if they denied, if they gaslit, if they wouldn't admit anything, well, we did the best we could with the knowledge we had, it's like, no, you didn't.
	No, that's just a lie.
	So I would not continue a relationship with somebody who'd been that corrupt and false and really enabled some pretty terrible things and just wanted to sail on like nothing happened.
	In other words, I'm not saying that I would punish people.
	I am saying that I would not associate with them.
	And ostracism is the powerful thing.
	Now, ostracism spreads a very powerful political message.
	And it also, although it's difficult at the time, it also enhances the quality of your personal relationships.
	And so ostracism for the corrupt, the irredeemably corrupt, again, you have conversations, but ostracism for the irredeemably corrupt both is a very strong political message and also improves the quality of your personal relationships.
	So that's my sweet spot for those two things.
	Do you think that the ostracism that you are talking about is a personal activity, or do you think that it is also a collective activity?
	What is a collective activity?
	Ostracism.
	No, no, but I don't know what is a collective activity.
	As in, I ostracize person X because they have done wrong and they're not willing to go out of it.
	I tell other people, you should ostracize person X. And other people do.
	You're collectively ostracizing it.
	Well, I mean, if someone did a great evil to me, I wouldn't hide that from others, but I never tell people what to do because the important thing is that people have integrity.
	Because, you know, a lot of the COVID mess came out of obeying orders.
	So the last thing I'd want to do is have people obey an order I gave.
	Not that I have any power to do that, but I would simply say this person did this evil thing or did this corrupt thing or supported this evil or corrupt thing.
	I've chosen not to associate and here's why.
	And then people can make their own decisions, if that makes sense.
	It makes sense.
	You seem to be trading effectiveness for, I'm not sure what you're trading it for.
	But I don't know how you end up in effective ostracism, where people.
	Sorry, I don't know what you mean.
	I can only control my own moral decisions, right?
	And the degree to which I communicate what is morally good actions, right?
	I can't control other people.
	And so by putting this argument out, you know, to eventually millions of people will hear it.
	So by putting this argument out, I'm making a strong case for ostracizing corruption.
	And so I'm not sure what you mean by like I've had three quarters of a billion views and downloads of my shows, whereas you had a Usenext blog in the 80s and you're telling to me, well, I don't know, man, that's not very effective.
	No, no, I'm not saying that, okay, I'm not saying that I'm not looking to pick on you personally.
	I'm looking, I'm not saying you're picking on me personally, but I'm making a case here.
	And you're saying, well, I don't see how that's effective.
	But I've been very effective in communicating this.
	Okay, so are we talking about you personally or the strategy as would be done by your every but the strategy doesn't exist outside the actions of individuals.
	The strategy isn't out there like a tree or a rock or a cloud.
	The strategy is out there in the actions of individuals.
	So if you're saying, if you're saying, well, I don't know how the strategy does it, it's like, well, it's up to you to advocate for it.
	It's up to you to practice it.
	What I'm trying to get at is that, you know, there are people like me who are looking at tools and how do we do things that are up till now personal acts.
	And how do we coordinate better so that we can do them in larger groups and become more effective?
	So I'm trying to gain a sense of what your view would be in terms of what's inbounds in terms of tool use to make this more than just one individual person, no matter how influential, to do something into something that multiple people are doing in a coordinated fashion to gain more effectiveness.
	Well, fantastic.
	And listen, I mean, I'm not going to gainsay that, but what I'm saying is that if you, look, I'm not saying mine is the only path, of course not.
	But what I'm saying is that if you want to maximize the combination of personal happiness and political effectiveness, ostracism is the way to go.
	Now, if you say, well, no, I want to coordinate in this, that, or the other way and promote, you know, freedom and virtue and all of that, and you're effective, well, then you're directly interfering with the preferences of evildoers and you're going to get your blowback.
	So what I'm saying is that if you are willing to sacrifice personal happiness for the sake of political effectiveness, then sure, political organization is the way to go.
	If you want to maximize the combination of personal happiness and political effectiveness, ostracism is the way to go.
	But yeah, if other people, I just want people to know what the costs are of the other approach.
	Fair enough.
	All right.
	Well, thanks, man.
	I appreciate the conversation and I really appreciate the back and forth.
	And, you know, congratulations on the work that you did.
	Obviously, Romania is a better place now than it was under communism.
	And the degree to which you had an effect on that, I think, is very noble and honorable.
	And I certainly thank you on behalf of humanity for that work.
	Thank you for your patience with me struggling with, say, with the details.
	No, no problem.
	These are tough things to talk about, but I appreciate your persistence.
	All right.
	Keaton, Keaton, Buster, or who's the other?
	Who's the other famous Keaton?
	Oh, the Batman guy.
	Jeez, Michael Keaton.
	There we go.
	Or Peter Keating.
	I guess we're just stretching the syllables now.
	What's on your mind, friend?
	Do you believe that rationality can be calculated like math at some point?
	Yes.
	Okay.
	How do you think that's going to happen?
	What do you mean?
	What do you mean it's going to happen?
	It's been a 3,000-year project of philosophy to use reason to get to the truth.
	Right.
	But I'm saying we could fix the annotation and make it so that it's not even a debatable thing anymore.
	Well, sir, what do you mean by fix the annotation?
	So right now, the annotation of language is the alphabet, right?
	If we're talking about English, would you agree with that?
	English is composed of letters in the alphabet.
	I certainly agree with that.
	Okay.
	So what I'm suggesting is that we can reduce, we can fix the annotation by removing the redundant letters and by ordering according to symbolic logic principles.
	What are the sorry, what are the redundant letters in the alphabet?
	So the redundant letters are going to be S C Q W let's see.
	Are you trolling?
	I mean, this sounds like the old Steve Martin joke, you know?
	You know, you say, hey, if you want to commit a crime, this is an old Steve Martin bit, like, if you want to commit a crime, you put in two reasonable demands and one crazy demand so you can always claim the insanity defense.
	You say, ah, I want a million dollars, a getaway car, and I want the letter M stricken from the English language.
	And then he laughs as a getaway car.
	That's crazy, right?
	So are you saying that you want particular letters struck from the English language in order to improve rationality?
	So I would be Tefan because you're getting rid of S, right?
	Here's what I would be.
	I would say we combine those redundant letters into the most logical, multifaceted letter for each case.
	So the idea.
	Okay, so yeah, sorry, drugs are bad kid.
	Drugs are bad.
	Kids don't do them.
	All right.
	Thomas, you are up, my friends.
	And we have a slot or two.
	If anybody else wants to join in, Thomas, what is on your mind?
	Fran, it's me again.
	I have a case I will tell you.
	When I went to study in Germany, I met this Austrian girl.
	And the first thing she told me was, I have ADHD.
	And I didn't make what?
	ADHD.
	ADHD.
	Sorry, go ahead.
	Yeah.
	So I didn't make much of it because I didn't know what ADHD was, but a few months happened.
	And then somehow maybe the algorithm, I start investigating about ADHD.
	And I figured out that I might have it.
	And so I spent maybe a couple of days just focusing on the literature, investigating literature.
	So I found out, for example, that ADHD has a strong genetic component as well.
	But some people reject the notion of ADHD as well.
	They say that it may be due to low conscientiousness if you take the big five personality traits.
	So in my search to improve myself and to try to be a better person, I want to be able to do things.
	And the other day you had also had a podcast about anxiety.
	I also think that my anxiety is pretty, pretty low.
	So I'm not, I don't have enough will to do stuff.
	And I think this all may be linked.
	But to end the question or your comment with this, I want to ask if maybe you think that it's also the modern society that has something to do with all of this.
	And of course, what's your take on the ADHD?
	Do you think it's a real thing or not?
	That will be it.
	Thank you, Stefan.
	Well, sorry, let me ask you this.
	Did you grow up with a father?
	Partially, up until three years old.
	And then I saw him every weekend.
	Well, do you know that for boys, ADH, ADHD symptoms evaporate when they're spending time with their fathers?
	No, I had no clue.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	Girls can't, like, moms can't raise boys.
	Moms cannot raise boys.
	And, you know, we could argue, of course, alternatively that fathers cannot raise daughters, but single fathers, the children of single fathers, do about the same in terms of outcomes as the children of two-parent households, whereas the children of single mothers just do badly on average, tons of exceptions, but on average, single mothers are the worst parents statistically.
	Again, single fathers, things are pretty equal to two parent households.
	And so tell me a little bit about your relationship with your mother.
	Did you respect her?
	Was she calm?
	Was she authoritative?
	Was she honorable?
	I mean, how did your relationship with your mother go when you were growing up?
	I would say that she's too kind.
	She didn't put a lot of discipline into me.
	So whenever she had to discipline me, she had to call my father.
	And my father had to, through the phone, try to discipline me and make me understand that some things are wrong.
	And yeah, that's the main feature I would say about my mama.
	And I don't really like that about it.
	And now I have a new daughter.
	And that's the first thing comes to my mind that I want to avoid with my daughter.
	Right.
	And I sympathize with that.
	So in our evolution, women generally raised children for the first, say, three to six years of life.
	And then the children would pass over to the fathers for further instruction as a whole.
	And in lots of religions, if there's a family split up, the father would get the children.
	But now, of course, the children are an income source for the single mothers, both through the state and through child support and so on.
	So that's become economic rather than what's best for the children.
	So in general, the practical, empathetic, connected, keep them safe child raising of infants and toddlers was the province of women.
	But the moral instruction of children was the province of the men.
	Does that sort of accord with your experience as a whole?
	It does.
	It does, because I always felt like there was something missing there.
	I needed maybe a father figure, in a sense, closer to me because I still had a father figure.
	You weren't a father figure.
	You needed a father.
	Yeah, I thought I was present because I just saw him every weekend or every Sunday out, actually.
	So it wasn't a lot.
	It was not everyday day-to-day life.
	Right.
	So for most children, or for many children, let's say many children, for many children, many boys, we have eliminated male authority from their environment.
	So they don't have a father in the home.
	They go to daycare, which is almost exclusively run by women.
	And then they have kindergarten, all women, and then they go to primary school.
	And many of the boys will not even hit any kind of male authority figure until they're in their teens.
	Now, that is an experiment absolutely unprecedented in human history, unless there are brief moments where the men are all killed in war.
	So, and of course, if the men are all killed in war, then the enemy tribe or the enemy country takes over your land, and then there are new authority figures for the boys.
	But to sustain decade after decade a situation or environment where boys have no access to male authority figures is unprecedented in human history.
	And it comes out of fear currency, government control of the family court system and all other kinds of, you know, borrowing and debt and money printing, all other kinds of terrible things.
	But we have now, I mean, I mean, the big wave of divorces hit late 60s and 70s.
	In fact, the divorce rate now is lower than it was in the 1970s.
	And of course, when you get divorced and your mother becomes a single mother, you generally move into a bad or poor section of town, a bunch of rent-controlled apartments.
	And mostly what are around are either trashy men who you can't respect or no men because it's the matriarchal manners, right?
	They call them in the ghettos, they call them the Guildford farms, like the section 8 housing, where there's just all these women with no men around.
	So, so yeah, we've tried this experiment of raising boys without fathers, without male authority figures.
	And of course, because of the increasing godlessness in the West, you can't even pray to a male authority figure.
	And because lawsuits generally destroyed the Boy Scouts, you couldn't even get male authority figures that way.
	And because hostility to Christianity in particular has removed priests from many children's lives.
	I mean, you know, this constant blood libel against the Catholic Church for enabling pedophiles, which it certainly did at times.
	But childhood sexual abuse is infinitely worse per capita, almost infinitely worse per capita in single mother households than it is in the church and also in government schools as opposed to a Christian church.
	But nonetheless, it's all this blood libel to have women say, well, I can't send my sons to a priest, right?
	So it's all just removing male authority figures from boys and girls, of course, and girls suffer too, but in different ways what we're talking about and talking to a man here about this.
	So we've tried this whole experiment of removing male authority figures from boys' lives.
	And the result has been, as is quite predictable, when you deviate from evolution, right?
	I mean, the whole point of communism, as distinct from fascism, is that communism views history as prejudice.
	And the way that we evolved is wrong and bad.
	And so they say, well, we don't need families, even though we evolved in families.
	We don't need fathers, even though we evolved with fathers.
	So there's this whole experiment to just try and completely rip out from under the feet of society the entire rug of history and how we evolved.
	And it's not a conscious decision that is discussed in society, right?
	It's all this subterfuge.
	It's all this subversion, right?
	So nobody sits there and says, well, it's true that for millions of years, males of the hominid and I guess Neanderthal and certainly the Homo sapiens, for millions, hundreds of thousands, millions of years, boys grew up with strong father figures.
	Let's try just getting rid of that shit completely.
	Let's just try completely getting rid of that for hundreds of millions of boys around the West, right?
	Not in other countries so much, but around the West.
	So it's not something that was discussed, but it's just it's been advanced in these sort of surreptitious march through the institutions, slow asphyxiation stuff, right?
	So what has been the results of taking male authority figures step by step, piece by piece, out of boys' lives?
	Well, you end up with revolutionary impulses.
	And what I mean by that is, and this is something that happens to me constantly.
	So without a doubt, I put myself forward as a strong male authority figure.
	And Thomas, disagree with me if you think that's not the case, because I don't want to speak outside of your experience.
	I would say that I do have some revolutionary tendencies, but I'm also quite soft at the same way.
	So my revolutionary tendencies, I would say, I keep mostly hidden, especially when I was younger, not so much anymore.
	I think I've been developing myself a little bit after I was, I hit 22 years old or something.
	But especially to interrupt, I was a bit unclear in my question.
	Do you think that, or do you perceive me as a strong male authority figure or something else?
	Oh, yeah, yeah.
	Yes, I do.
	Actually, yes.
	Yeah.
	Okay, because I get internet dad stuff all the time, right?
	So I put myself forward as a strong male authority figure.
	And it's from the view that I see, particularly now I'm back on Twitter on X. Sorry, I'm back on X. And it's something that, of course, I haven't seen for half a decade.
	I was playing jazz clubs, not stadiums.
	So I was mostly around people who kind of got philosophy and, you know, we would reason together.
	But being back on X, there is a very interesting hostility to me as a male authority figure, a strong male authority figure.
	And by strong, I'm simply saying, like, I'm certain.
	I'm certain I know what's right.
	It's the two plus two argument that happened last week.
	And then I did a debate on Sunday morning with someone about this.
	So a strong male authority figure is, yeah, I'm certain, right?
	So I'm having this pretty wild debate on X. I think it was last night and this morning, which is people refuse to say that the Earth orbits the sun.
	It's pretty wild.
	And Like certainty is the prerogative of the male mind to a significant degree.
	Not absolutely, of course, but it is right because men are about dealing with prosaic, tangible, material, empirical, rational reality, whereas women tend to work with relationships and people.
	And with relationships and people, certainty is kind of impossible.
	But with tangible practical reality, certainty is a necessity.
	You can't doubt that the deer exists if you're going hunting.
	You can't doubt about physics when you're shooting an arrow or throwing a boomerang or whatever you're doing, right?
	So men have to be certain, whereas women generally work with less certainty because they're dealing more with people and relationships and we can't read minds and all of that.
	Reality doesn't lie to you, but people sure as hell do.
	So it's easier to be certain about reality than it is about people.
	So in removing male authority figures, we have removed certainty.
	And so we get all of this postmodernism, subjectivism, and relativism and so on.
	And people won't say obvious things like two and fucking two make four and that the sun is the earth orbits the sun, right?
	And then people are saying, well, but you know, it's slightly off-center because there's the mass of other things in the solar system.
	It's like, yeah, but they don't orbit.
	That's like saying because we have tides, the earth orbits the moon.
	No, the moon orbits the earth.
	Now, does the earth, does the moon have a gravitational effect on earth?
	Sure, it does.
	And does the earth wobble slightly?
	Yes.
	But orbit is circumnavigating around.
	That's an orbit.
	I mean, if I tell you to walk around the building, you don't just stand there and wobble a bit, right?
	If you accept the mission and you walk around the building, circumnavigating, right?
	I don't say I'm circumnavigating the globe if I'm just standing there jiggling my leg in my chair.
	So just basic certainty.
	It's this midwit stuff where people, the moment they see certainty, they get messed up.
	They get tense.
	They get hostile.
	So when I come in with certainties, yeah, two and two make four.
	Yep, the earth orbits the sun.
	And then people are like, well, but the sun has the sun is affected by earth's mass as well.
	It's like, never said it wasn't.
	But the earth orbits the sun.
	And then when I'm just saying male certainty, people get messed up.
	They get hostile.
	They get tense.
	They get angry.
	They get manipulative.
	They get weird around strong authoritative male certainty.
	And we saw this with the atheists, right?
	Where they say, well, why wouldn't you lie?
	And they come up with a whole bunch of nonsense, which is just hedonism and carrots and sticks and all that.
	And they don't have any particular answers.
	And then I give them the answer and they run away because authoritative male certainty, particularly in the realm of morals, has been not, it's not absent.
	It's been driven out of the public square.
	And this is why atheism is never punished by the powers that be.
	Philosophical certainty is the stuff that I talk about.
	Yeah, that gets punished.
	But atheism is not punished because atheism is the removal of male authority.
	And this is why you end up with these peculiarly feminine arguments for morals that come out of atheists.
	Well, it feels good.
	And, you know, I don't get punished for it, I guess, social rewards.
	I mean, that's just carrot and stick shit.
	That's just, that's how you train dolphins to do their flips, not how a moral man or a moral woman conducts him or herself.
	So with regards to ADHD, I mean, how are boys supposed to discipline their minds in the presence of the female chaos of the single mother mindset?
	Now, I don't want to speak out of turn.
	So tell me, was your relationship with your mother in terms of how you viewed her thought processes, her integrity and her conclusions, was she steady and predictable or jumpy and chaotic?
	I'd say she wasn't specially chaotic, but I disagreed with her a lot on maybe sometimes on moral topics.
	She has some tendency to lie sometimes, even if it's a non-lie.
	And I wasn't, I was, I was more of a friend of the truth in some sense.
	And that made me not disrespect her a little bit, but that made me not trust her as much, maybe.
	No, but lying and a lack of trust is chaotic.
	I mean, if I praised free markets and then communism from time to time, if I praised science and mysticism from time to time, that would be chaotic, right?
	There would be no consistency in what it is that I argue for.
	If I said, well, reason is the path to truth.
	And then I said, dreams, drugs, and revelation are the path to truth.
	That would be chaotic, right?
	Because you wouldn't be able to predict what the hell I was saying from one day to the next.
	So integrity is the opposite of chaotic.
	And if women as a whole, particularly single mothers, are impulse driven, then what they try to do is win in the moment, which is what lying, lying is trying to win in the moment at the expense of integrity and trust.
	So that is chaotic.
	Lying is chaotic because you can't trust the person.
	A lack of trust is chaotic because you cannot rely upon them to have consistent principles and follow them, or at least when they deviate from following those consistent principles, apologize and fix it, right?
	So it seems to me, and I'm, again, I'm not trying to put words in your mouth, but it seems to me that there was more chaos in your mother's mind.
	I think so.
	And I think the solution I found to that as a child was to just get out of it.
	Ignore reality in a way, because I hang on.
	Hang on, hang on.
	Sorry.
	Ignore reality or ignore your mother's chaotic mindset.
	Good point.
	Good point.
	I think it started with ignoring my mother's chaotic mindset because, oh, yeah, you actually made me remember.
	Because at first, when she tried to discipline through my father, I took attention.
	So I cried maybe and I understood a little bit, but then I didn't give, it didn't make nothing out of me.
	So I started, yeah, I started ignoring her in a way, ignoring her reality.
	And then it maybe spread out a little bit to reality itself.
	So did you mean that you stayed home?
	Is that what you mean by ignoring?
	I'm not sure what you mean by ignoring reality.
	I tended not to be, especially before, not to be too conscious about the world around me.
	Okay, so you avoided the world around you and you avoided your mother's chaos.
	Is that right?
	Yes.
	Okay.
	Now, one of the reasons that you would avoid the world around you is if you were out in the world around you, you would develop more rationality because the world, I mean, not the people, but the world is rational.
	And then when you develop more rationality, when you came home, you would end up in more conflict with your mother.
	That's true.
	Yeah, it's tended to avoid conflict.
	Well, sure, because, I mean, I tend to avoid conflict with people I can't win with either, right?
	I mean, this is so when I'm engaged in debates with people, then I look to see if they have the capacity for rationality or do they have the capacity to admit when they're wrong.
	So in that case, so if they can't and they don't, and women have a tough time admitting that they're wrong.
	Men, we have to admit when we're wrong.
	So for instance, if I say I'm good at baseball and I keep missing the baseball when I swing at it, I'm good hitter in baseball and I keep missing, then I'm a bad hitter in baseball.
	Like, I can't hide that.
	Whereas if women say, I'm a nice person, well, they can just rejig all the definitions that they want.
	Like you even said, my mother was nice.
	No, she wasn't.
	I'm not saying she wasn't nice at all, but she wasn't nice in that she wouldn't give you rational rules.
	She wasn't nice in that she lied to you.
	And she wasn't nice in that her behavior kept changing based upon the whim.
	That's not nice.
	That's just chaotic.
	And again, I'm not saying she wasn't nice, but the examples you gave me were not examples of niceness.
	It's never nice to lie to people unless there's some exigent emergency or whatever, right?
	So men, we can't hide or just make up our own definitions.
	Like if I say, hey, man, I'm a great hunter and I keep going out and coming back with nothing when there's game around, then I'm not a great hunter.
	I can't hide it.
	So men have to admit that they're wrong in order for the tribe to survive.
	If I've got bad eyesight and I can't shoot the bow and arrow at the deer, then I have to hand over the bow and arrow to somebody with good eyesight.
	Otherwise we all starve to death.
	Does that make sense?
	It does make sense.
	Yeah, because no bullshit.
	Yeah, there's no bullshit.
	Like men have this no bullshit reality to themselves, right?
	If I say I'm good at cutting down trees, but I can barely lift the axe, then some other guy is going to, what's he going to do?
	Cut the tree.
	Yeah, he's going to take the axe out of my hand and say, I'm sorry, we got to cut the tree and you're able to lift it.
	It doesn't work, right?
	So women live in a much more subjective world of feelings.
	And please understand, this is nothing negative or disrespectful towards women.
	We have each, each of us, males and females, have each evolved to produce the magnificent species that we are, right?
	I just watched Mel Gibson's Hamlet the other day and I love that speech, you know, how noble in rationality, blah, blah, blah.
	It's a fantastic speech.
	And so this is nothing disrespectful to women at all.
	We work effectively in very different spheres.
	In other words, if women being as objective and rational on average as men had worked, that's what we would have done.
	But women need the support of other women.
	Men need to operate within empirical reality.
	Needing the support of other women to raise your children means that you're in a subjective universe of feelings, emotions, and relationships, which is why women are drawn to jobs where they work with people and men generally are drawn to jobs where they work with things.
	And, you know, I guess maybe because I have sort of the mind of a really rational guy, but I was raised in a very female environment, I have a pretty good combo of the feelings and the rationality.
	And this is why, of course, I mean, I remember many years ago, I was on the phone with a friend of mine and we were talking about, you know, economics and philosophy and politics and so on.
	And it was great, right?
	And, you know, after an hour or so or an hour and a half, and there was a woman I was dating who was in the room.
	And she's like, that was the weirdest conversation I've ever heard.
	I'm like, well, what are you talking about?
	He's like, well, you didn't even ask him how his marriage is going and blah, blah, blah.
	And it's like, and I said, well, we're men.
	Men will talk about these things.
	Now, if he wanted to talk to me about his marriage, I would be happy to hear, but he didn't.
	We talked about what we wanted to talk about.
	And she's like, well, it's just weird.
	And I said, no, it's weird for you.
	It's weird for me that you and your girlfriends don't talk about philosophy, economics, and politics.
	But I recognize that you're a female and I'm a male.
	And don't try and turn me into one of your girlfriends and I won't try and turn you into one of my male friends.
	We will enjoy the difference between males and females and recognize that we're complementary, not conflictual.
	But the fact that I'm incomprehensible to you in my communication style with the male makes perfect sense.
	I mean, why would you want to fix that?
	Why would you want to turn me into a female?
	It's just weird.
	It's weird to me.
	I've never really understood.
	And this is like, God, 30 years ago or something, right?
	So, yeah, it's just strange to me.
	No, more than 30 years ago.
	Yeah, it's just strange to me.
	So with regards to ADHD and things like that, ADHD, I think to some degree, again, please understand, I'm no doctor, I'm no expert.
	I can't diagnose anyone.
	I can't reject any diagnosis.
	These are just my absolute subjective, whim-based personal nonsense opinions.
	But I think ADHD in general happens when a male mind is exposed to too much female subjectivity and chaos.
	And I think that that short-circuits the male mind to some degree.
	And of course, if there was a female mind and the female mind was raised with almost exclusively male authority figures, the female mind would not get training and mirroring and development from the female mind.
	And I think that would short circuit the female mind because ADHD hits boys a lot more than girls.
	And what we've done is we've taken male authority away from boys.
	And as a result, we have male minds constantly being trained and dominated by the female mind.
	And I think that is unprecedented.
	I think it's unhealthy.
	And I think it produces a certain amount of short circuitry because you just don't have compatibility in that way.
	You have compatibility between the male and female mind, but only as equals, not in terms of dominance.
	Women cannot raise boys.
	Females cannot raise males.
	And when we try, I think we get these kinds of short circuits, if that makes sense.
	It does make sense, Stefan.
	Thank you.
	I will think about it because it makes sense to me at least now.
	And to end this, maybe I would like to comment on something I found out.
	So I found out about my mother, my reliance on my mother when I was 22 years old, Tara.
	And I started hanging out with more men.
	So I think that's helping me a little bit.
	So what do you think about as an adult, maybe these people that didn't have a father figure to get closer to a father figure, like you, for example, what do you make of that?
	Well, I certainly think it's healthy.
	I do think it's, I went to boarding school from the ages of six to eight that did some decent stuff, although we still had a female in charge.
	We had a matron who was in charge of our particular ward who was actually kind of, she was a real nurse ratchet type from Bonfle, but the Cuckoo's Nest, a real, real cold and creepy woman.
	But yeah, I certainly think that the philosophy to me was great because a lot of male authority figures in philosophy.
	So I do think that it is important.
	And the other thing, too, is that the way that you would diagnose this in yourself, I think is really interesting.
	So this is just a back of the napkin calculation.
	It's not designed to be absolute.
	But if you come across, let's say I post something, right?
	And you get upset.
	And there's nothing wrong with being upset, right?
	There's nothing wrong with being upset.
	So I'm not, you know, triggered is to say it's bad to be emotional.
	No, there's nothing wrong with being emotional.
	There's nothing wrong with being passionate about these things.
	But if your response is not direct to the argument.
	Right.
	So when I say that, because I asked a question from somebody who was a radical skeptic.
	Do you accept that the earth orbits the sun?
	Now, if you resist certainty, that's more female.
	That's more female.
	Because women work in the realm of relationships and personality.
	And it's really hard to come up with absolutes in that circumstance.
	And you have to overlook negative characteristics in order to build a community of people who can help women, who can help watch your children, evolutionarily speaking.
	So for women, absolutism is negative.
	For men, absolutism is positive.
	So if you cannot reply to the question, does two and two make four with yes, absolutely, but you feel the need to hedge or you feel anxious about certainty, like you're going to get punished for being certain, that's more female as a whole.
	It's one of the reasons why there tend to be more male physicists, more male mathematicians, more male economists, and so on, because you're dealing with math, facts, reality, empiricism, science, and absolutes.
	It's why the vast majority now these days of psychologists are women and social workers and nurses and daycare workers.
	And again, this is nothing negative to women, nothing negative to men.
	We're just talking about the division of labor that has characterized the evolution of our species.
	So if someone says two and two make four and you feel anxiety about saying, well, yes, obviously two and two make four.
	If you need to hedge it, then you don't get the bow and arrow to shoot the deer.
	You don't get the axe.
	I don't know.
	I don't know if that's really a tree.
	Oh, come on, man.
	We just need to cut down the tree.
	But I'm not 100% sure that's an axe.
	Oh, God, you just get elbowed aside and somebody picks up the axe and cuts down the damn tree because we got to get shit done as men in particular.
	We got to get shit done.
	And this is the self-diagnosis that I think is really important.
	So when I say, do you accept that the earth orbits the sun?
	And you're like, ooh, I don't know, man.
	I got to find a way out of being certain.
	I got to find out a way.
	I got to find a way out of being yes.
	I got to find a way out of being absolute.
	That's female.
	And I don't, I just want to reiterate, I don't mean this in any negative way.
	Women are beautiful, wonderful.
	They're the reason we're all here.
	They're the reason we're alive for the most part.
	And this is nothing negative towards women.
	We work in general, tons of exceptions.
	We work in different spheres.
	So how you diagnose estrogen overexposure is your relationship to two and two make four.
	This is why people don't understand 1984 is fundamentally the tyranny of the female because Winston Smith is not allowed to say that two and two make four.
	What's destroyed in Winston Smith is his certainty.
	And that removes his masculinity.
	And that's why, and of course, George Orwell talks about this in the book, right?
	He says that the real tyrants were the females.
	And so what is your relationship to certainty?
	So if I say, does the Earth orbit the sun?
	Well, of course it does.
	Of course it does.
	But if you're like, ah, but, you know, there's a, you know, that's a little bit off-center, but it doesn't matter.
	Does the earth orbit the sun is binary?
	It's yes, no.
	And if you're not into binary, but everything's got to be shades of gray, you are over-feminized, bro.
	Your male mind cannot function as a female mind.
	Female mind cannot function as a male mind.
	And again, tons of exceptions, right?
	There are obviously very masculine and rational and empirical women and blah, blah, blah.
	I get all of that.
	I'm talking in general.
	It's a round peg and a square hole, or vice versa.
	So you can't become just female.
	All you can do is abandon the male.
	And so it's your relationship to certainty.
	So when I come and I say two and two make four, the earth orbits the sun.
	Gases expand when heated, right?
	The inverse square law is valid.
	Reality is empirical.
	Reason is absolute.
	That's male certainty because I'm out here chopping down trees and hunting deer.
	And it's like, oh, but certainty is going to be punished.
	Well, certainty among women is punished, but doubt among men should be punished.
	Sorry, you were going to say?
	No, I was just going to thank you about the conversation.
	It made sense to me.
	And I have a lot to think about it now.
	So yeah, just thank you and thank you for doing this show and helping us to navigate through the current philosophy.
	Thank you very much.
	My absolute pleasure.
	It's a great joy to chat with you all.
	And yeah, I love women.
	I love the female mind.
	I love men.
	I love the male mind.
	We have to embrace that which makes males and females unique in our thinking.
	I love women's sensitivity.
	I love their devotion to relationships.
	I love their sense of community.
	And I think it's beautiful.
	And it's absolutely appropriate.
	And it's foundational to why we're here and what makes life worthwhile.
	A man builds a house, a woman makes it into a home.
	Both are equally important in the quality of life.
	I mean, okay, you can't decorate an empty space so that the house is needed first.
	But where I live now in my wife's patented, beautiful girly world, everything smells nice and is soft and everything's pretty.
	It's really absolutely lovely.
	And the areas where I have my say is the studio is bare and covered in cables and not pretty at all.
	In fact, I've had artwork at BMI to hang up in the studio probably for four years.
	Oh, look at it.
	I'm sitting right now.
	Okay.
	So, yes, so I would say that, you know, viva le difference, as the French say, let's treasure our differences, but I still stand by it.
	Statistically, women cannot raise boys.
	And if you have an uneasy relationship to certainty, that means that you probably should hang around more with a certain male authority figure.
	And that might probably help whatever is going on in your mind.
	Well, thanks, everyone.
	I love you guys.
	These great conversations.
	Have yourself a beautiful, beautiful afternoon.
	It's Monday, yes.
	I won't see you guys till Wednesday night, but I may be able to rip off another show before then.
	And don't forget to go to freedomain.com, sign up for the podcast.
	FDRpodcast.com has all the feeds, fdrpodcast.com.
	Freedomaine.com slash Danny to help out the show.
	Thank you, my lovely friends.
	I'll talk to you soon.

▲