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Nov. 4, 2025 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
02:02:25
What Happens When Welfare Runs Out? Twitter/X Space
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Time Text
Come on, don't make me do the double tap.
Yo, yo, yo, yo.
Hello, hello, everybody.
Hope you're doing well.
Saturday.
Play day, but not for philosophers, because every day is play day when you're working on philosophy.
November 1st, 2025.
Hope you're doing well as we sail into our 21st year as a philosophy show.
21st year.
Yes, that's right.
At the end of this year, finally, Freedom Man can have a drink.
Finally.
So we're looking forward to that.
All right.
I have a topic.
You know, sometimes you have a conversation so intense that you can't sleep.
And I had a call yesterday.
This was the Halloween show.
And if you can struggle through my Tim Curry impression, you can get to a very interesting conversation after the what's the worst thing philosophy has ever taught you, which is a conversation about certainty.
And it was chattous, interrupt us, because we were just finally getting to the juicy stuff when, sadly, as we began examining the caller's history and emotional motivations for his radical skepticism, oh, what a shame.
He just had to go.
Just, it was very unfortunate.
The timing, of course, was tragic, not entirely unpredictable.
And I've spent today, I've spent today, going through in my mind how to deal with the problem of radical skepticism, which is a huge problem.
Radical skepticism is a brain virus that turns the world over to evildoers.
Evildoers are certain.
Sociopaths are certain.
And if we cannot be certain, we lose.
We lose everything.
Honestly, we end up with holes in our heads plowed under in a ditch of totalitarianism.
So it's a pretty, pretty big stakes that we've got going on here.
So I have been racking my brain.
I was looking for, here's the thing.
I just, and I'll get to, I know we've got a caller request.
We'll get to that in a sec.
Jeff, just hang tight, if you could for a minute or two.
I'll sort of tell you my sort of secret sauce.
I always look for ways to approach a debate, especially a really essential debate, like the question of certainty, like absolute certainty, like no doubt, no hesitation, 100% certainty.
I always try to come up with ways that do not rely upon the honesty or integrity of the other person.
I always look for arguments that are not going to rely on the participation of the other person.
And by that, I mean I don't need something from them in order to prove it, right?
So rape, theft, assault, murder, UPB, I don't require someone to accept any particular principles in order to prove that these things can never be universally preferable behavior and so on.
So that is the reality always of what it is that I'm looking for.
So I'm going to talk about that.
But first, but first, we will get to our good friend.
Well, I'm sure he'll be a good friend.
Jeff, if you wanted to unmute, I'm all ears.
If you'd like to help us out with your thoughts, let us spray syllables of rocketing wisdom across the world.
If you want to unmute, just let me know what's on your mind.
Yes, sir.
Well, congratulations on now two decades of philosophical excellence.
Thank you.
And in keeping with that, I would like to know: have you thought about just looking back over the last 20 years?
And would you care to share some thoughts on all of the young men and women that you've influenced, not just as parents, as you've said many times, but now who have gone into government service in the United States and other countries as well, but particularly the United States.
And even as politics, I know bores you, but I can't imagine how many thousands of young men, in particular, who are now serving in places of influence that have been influenced by free domain.
I'd love to hear your thoughts on that.
I appreciate that.
And I'm always sort of cautious in terms of talking about my influence because sometimes being a bit of a power behind the throne is a beneficial, or at least to some degree, a safer place to be.
But yeah, there has been a lot of influence.
There has been a lot of positive feedback.
There have been a lot of changes.
Honestly, hundreds of thousands of people are alive because of what it is that we do here as a community.
Maybe I'm the figurehead dude, but sometimes it feels a little bit like being the ornament on the front of a car.
But the community as a whole, I calculated my Taylor Swift tweet created 60,000 people.
And I went through the sort of back of the napkin calculation.
And this is important things to do.
It's important for motivation.
It's important to do these kinds of things if you're having any kind of public effect on the world, or even your personal life.
I went through all the millions of people who viewed that tweet and engaged with it.
And I went through the number of women of a particular age who might have decided, like being maybe shocked that 90% of their eggs were gone by the time they were 30, 98% by the time they're 40 might have accelerated their desire to have children, right?
Get that information out.
And it's, you know, honestly, like, that's, that's not even a complicated equation.
People getting mad.
It's weird that you're thinking about Taylor Swift's eggs, man.
It's like, no, it's just a convenient jumping point to get some basic biological facts across to people because these biological facts are relentlessly hidden from the general population.
There was a survey even of female doctors, doctors of all people, who had no particular clue about egg quality, egg number, geriatric pregnancy, risks of later in life pregnancies and so on.
Just no, no real idea.
And of course, you'll never see, like I went to go and see the movie One Battle After Another.
I was just kind of curious.
And it was very interesting.
We can talk about that perhaps later if anybody's interested.
But you'll never see a movie where there are two sisters.
One sister has kids and is happy and positive and productive.
And the other sister takes some lonely, bitter, sexaholic feminist travel route and ends up lonely, bitter, and alone.
I mean, I write those books, but that's why they're not made into movies because I'm trying to help people that way.
So 60,000 people off one tweet.
Honestly, it's probably close to half a million people, given my relentless focus on facts, reason, evidence, and pronatalism.
Smart people hesitate to have children because they've been propagandized into thinking that having children is dumb work.
You know, oh, you're just home wiping diapers and wiping drool and wiping applesauce off baby lips.
And like they've kind of frightened smart people into being child averse.
Oh, I'm going to create all of these beautiful, wonderful things with my immense intellect.
And it's far, far beneath me, a brood mare.
They do this particularly to women.
You'll just be a brood mare pumping out children for the sake of the patriarchy.
You know, it's all the sort of.
Now, of course, appealing to the vanity of intelligent people is a rich mining vein that never seems to run out.
And I, of course, have worked very hard over the last couple of decades to really reverse that trend, to talk about how intelligent people are the people who need to have children most of all, because the genes are rare, absolutely essential for humanity.
And we're the ones who get the most propaganda about doing all these other wonderful things with our glorious, accidentally inherited brains rather than the aforementioned broodmare wiping diapers, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
So if I've got 60,000 babies off one tweet, I got to think over the course, probably close.
I know that the numbers are creeping up, right?
And I could do the back of the napkin calculations.
But it's hundreds of thousands and probably closer to a million or so babies.
And just sort of based upon my inbox and the ratio and all of the lovely pictures I get from people who are like, yeah, I decided to stop screwing around and start settling down.
I had kids and blah, blah, blah, peacefully parenting and so on.
So yeah, there's hundreds of thousands, probably close to a million, could be more, could be more.
It's really tough to know what the calculations are.
I could probably figure it out with some sort of complicated methodology.
But yeah, hundreds of thousands of smart kids.
Again, everyone who listens to me, I put in the top 1% of intelligence.
That's not some sort of praise for the audience thing, but that's just a simple fact that what we talk about here is complex.
I try to put it in digestible forms, but it's complex and abstract a lot of times.
So let's say that there are three quarters of a million or a million smarter kids in the world.
Because, you know, I mean, I'm telling you, the pictures that I get from families, it's not one kid, right?
It's usually three or four.
A friend of mine has five.
Another friend of mine has six.
So, yeah, I think the relentless pronatalism, enthusiasm for parenting, tools of parenting, and, you know, perhaps to some degree, I think maybe to a not insignificant degree, the shows I've done with my daughter, where we have a lot of fun and conversations back and forth and so on, I think has helped people to understand what a joy and pleasure parenting is.
And the sort of view from the second half of life.
The view from the second half of life has largely been hidden from people because they just want you focusing on the hedonism and the consumerism.
I mean, the devil, when he wants to sell you all the cool stuff, right?
Fame, money, sex, fortune, whatever.
So where the devil wants to sell you all the cool stuff, he'll give you the images of you climbing up the red carpet stairs, photography, flash bulbs going all over the place.
Sidney Sweeney on one arm and Prime Megan Fox in another.
I don't know how old is she now?
What?
40s?
Anyway, plus satanic.
But anyway, you've got the money, you've got the Bentley, you've got the fans, you've got the fame.
So he's going to show you all the early parts of corruption, of course, right?
All the fun stuff.
All the fun stuff.
I mean, the Seth Rogan Stoner movies, which are a vicious plight and cancer upon civilization, they always show like, hey, it's cool, man.
It's fun.
Don't be a nerd.
Don't stay home and study.
Go out, smoke, drink, party, blah, blah, blah.
It's fun, man.
Avoid your responsibilities.
Be a man-child, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, right?
And that's all caustic, civilizational attacks, But they don't show, they don't show the super bad kids when the 50, 60, 70 losers alone, no money, no success, no family, no kids.
They don't show any of that stuff.
You know, like the Judd Appetow freaks and geek stuff, they don't show the losers later on.
And so the devil, he'll show you all the fun stuff, all the stuff that you get.
He won't show you the price.
So the devil doesn't sell you all this cool, fun stuff by showing you you being dragged down screaming to an eternity of torment at the end of your life, or you being old and lonely and bitter and isolated and unloved and uncared for and desperate, so desperate for human contact, you'll pretend to have an ache in your shoulder just so the doctor will touch you for 10 seconds.
So by showing the second half of life, because I was really influenced by Carl Jung when I was younger, obviously to some degree CLM.
But Carl Jung said that, you know, the purpose of the first half of your life is to prepare for the second half of your life.
And there's real truth in that.
The second half of your life is determined by the health choices you make in the first half of your life.
The happiness of the second half of your life is determined by the degree to which you're willing to delay gratification in the first half of your life.
Are you willing to do the difficult things, eat well, exercise, don't sleep around, find someone to love, get settled, do something of productivity and utility in the world, hopefully of virtue as well.
And just about everything you can do, you can do with some level of virtue.
Have some kids, get rid of toxic relationships, bring good people closer to you.
So the second half of your life is determined by the first half of your life.
And the devil hides the second half of your life from you and just shows you all the cool stuff from the first part of your life, like the Justin Bieber thing, right?
Hey, you get all of these cool concerts and you're going to be rich and famous and paparazzi and all that, screaming fans.
They don't show what happened over the weekends at the rappers' houses, which I assume was about as bad as could be imagined.
And they don't show all of that stuff that comes afterwards.
And you start with baby, baby, baby, oh, and then you get to the midpoint of I'm so fucking lonely, which was a song that came out a couple of years ago.
So by showing the second half of life, I've helped people organize and plan for the second half by making better decisions in the first part of their life.
So I've been very happy about that, very pleased and proud about that.
And of course, of the three-quarters to a million plus people in the world as a result of this philosophy show, who knows what some of them are capable of doing.
I mean, all of them are capable of doing great things.
If they've been raised peacefully parented, then they're all capable of doing wonderful and great things and certainly almost certainly will.
But there also may be that world-changing special spark of a human being somewhere in there that is going to grow to some sort of pride, pinnacle, and prominence and do some truly amazing things that I am unable to do or perhaps even unwilling to do.
Who knows?
So I think as far as philosophy goes, it's the greatest creation of good and life in the history of philosophy from a single philosopher.
Now, again, a lot of this has to do with the technology and a lot of it has to do with the you as the great audience listening, sharing and participating.
Some of it has to do with my choices.
A lot of it has to do with the fabulous hardware I accidentally inherited from four billion years of evolution.
I think that they're going to look at my brain after I'm dead and see a bigger language and reasoning center than Einstein's Spatial Reasoning Center, but we'll see.
Well, I won't see.
I won't see much of anything at that point, but others will see, hopefully.
And maybe they'll give me some credibility after death when they carve apart this rabid syllable engine of fire-spitting reason characterized by what goes on between my ears.
So, yeah, it's been a hell of a journey.
It's been very exciting.
And my goal at the end of all of this, however long that is, and of course, I'm much closer to the end than the beginning.
Going to be 60 next year, right?
So if I get another quarter century, I think that's pretty good.
Hopefully for longer.
You never know.
You never know.
But I don't think that any more particularly concentrated and single good has come out of any other philosophy conversation.
I'm certain that no more philosophical problems have been solved than over the course of this last 20-year conversation.
My aim and my goal is to wrestle, drag, kick, cajole, massage, and catapult philosophy from a state of pagan superstition, of contradictory arguments, to a core and clear set of certainties from which to build the reason and morality of the world going forward.
That is the goal.
I mentioned the other day, I have the biggest ambitions of anyone in history.
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
Because I refuse.
I refuse to be bound by prejudging what I'm capable of.
But that would be an act of vanity to say, I know, I know.
I mean, the unconscious has been clocked at 6,000 times faster than the conscious mind.
So who am I to say what could go on down there that I can get out into the world?
I aim to do to philosophy what the scientific method did to human knowledge in the physical realm.
The scientific method, Baconian method onwards, organized and rationalized an objective, unbelievably valuable methodology for pursuing truth and validity in the realm of matter and energy, which is why we have this conversation.
Why, you know, you needed the scientific revolution before you could get the philosophical revolution, because science needed to create the technology to allow us to bypass gatekeeping and get philosophy into the minds and hearts and souls of the people without having to go through all the sophists who bar reason from the people for the sake of their own vanity and profit and enslavement to the powers that be.
So I aim to bring genuine, empirical, validated answers to the great questions of love, of free will, simulation theory, particularly ethics, to metaphysics, epistemology, and politics, to have the answers and to have a robust methodology for moving forward.
And things can go a lot faster than they did with the scientific revolution, which took 400 years plus, well, I shouldn't say quite that long, but took 100 or 200 years to really begin bearing fruit.
But I aim to bring to philosophy the same advancements that, say, Francis Bacon brought to our understanding of matter and energy and to Gutenberg to our capacity to share arguments and information.
And that is the goal.
I have achieved a lot of it.
There's still a lot more to go.
And I will do it until my dying breath.
And I thank you for the question.
Jeff, is there anything else that you wanted to mention?
Yes.
One thing in particular I wanted to get your thoughts on, or just say thank you for this.
The insights that you have brought to the philosophical discussion, particularly on the issue of the capability, the equal capability of maliciousness and evil in every human heart, whether it be male or female.
Obviously, any honest woman will tell you, oh, yeah, women can be very mean, very cruel.
But, you know, for actually for just saying out loud what every honest woman knows, you have been pilloried for so many years.
And when you look at guys now who are younger, it's much more acceptable to talk about, you know, the evil in every human heart, particularly the female heart today and how women have their problems.
But it wasn't that acceptable 10 years ago.
And nowadays, it's a much more low IQ discussion.
And it's still not very much allowed.
But I just want to thank you for having used, having brought philosophy and reason and evidence and good arguments back in the day.
Whereas now you got the young guys going around saying, oh, women are awful.
And the young women saying all men are awful.
But you actually brought some reason, evidence to the discussion so that people who actually want to have a real discussion and not just trade insults are able to bring facts, reason, and evidence.
Well, thank you.
I mean, I want to empower women.
I really do.
I mean, I have massive love and respect for both my wife and my daughter and, of course, other women in my life.
But I want to empower women.
Women always say, well, we want to be empowered.
We want to make a difference.
It's like, okay, great.
Great.
Well, the great challenge of the world is becoming moral, is spreading reason, virtue, values, and evidence to the general population.
And if women have no capacity for evil, then women can never be empowered in spreading the pursuit of virtue.
And women are fundamentally not human if they don't have the capacity for evil.
And if women have the capacity for evil, then women turning away from evil towards good, particularly in the realm of raising children, is the biggest single advantage that we can have as a species in the vanquishing of evil and the promotion of virtue.
So everybody loves responsibility in the abstract and often quails and recoils before it in reality.
So when I say to women, you have the capacity for evil and you do a lot of evil, I'm giving them a massive amount that they can change to empower themselves and empower humanity in the pursuit of virtue.
But of course, when people recognize female evil, then women lose some of their privileged status and they're ambivalent about that, right?
You know, the show just feminists, right?
If she gets what she wants, she's empowered.
If she doesn't get what she wants, she's a victim of someone else.
So I think it's been really, really important.
And I want women to be recognized as full participants in the great human experiment of consciousness, which means they're as capable of men as in the pursuit of evil.
They are as capable of maliciousness.
And of course, they have a lot more opportunity to act out maliciousness in secret because of their power and control over children, whether it's personally through motherhood or teachers or daycare workers and teachers and other kinds of educators.
And I saw, of course, I saw this when I was in, I was the only male in the daycare that I worked in and saw a lot of female corruption in the pursuit of power and control.
So I appreciate that.
And that's a very good point.
Thank you.
Yes, sir.
And thank you.
And thank you.
I'll pass it on to the next caller and just say I'm very thankful that I grew up in the era of Stefan Molyneux philosophy as opposed to Nick Fuente's hot takes.
I'll just say that.
Well, thank you.
I appreciate that.
All right.
Tim?
Tim, Tim, Tim.
Always think of Monty Python.
I'm actually listening to John Cleese's autobiography at the moment in audiobook form.
It's quite interesting.
I'll probably wait till I'm done to give my thoughts because it's both inspiring and also kind of heartbreaking.
But anyway, Tim, if you wanted to share your thoughts, I'm happy to hear.
I can't hear you yet.
If you're talking, you might need to unmute.
All right.
He has come and gone.
Let me just give a moment for anybody else who wants to jump in.
I certainly have some thoughts, but I can do those in a solo show.
All right, we'll try Tim again.
See if he has any more luck.
Tim, if you want to unmute.
Hey, it's hey, Time Lock.
How's it going?
Hi, hey, how's it going?
Oh, yeah, Timmy Locke.
Timmy Locke.
Okay.
Yeah.
What's going on in mind, my friend?
Hey, I just had sort of a fun topic to bring up.
You mentioned the other day about sports and how it's probably more beneficial for kids to learn how to self-officiate and work through conflicts like that.
And I just wanted to posit the idea that the sport that most aligns with UPB and peaceful parenting would be Ultimate Frisbee.
Are you familiar at all?
Ultimate Frisbee.
Is that like Frisbee Golf?
No, it's more like soccer.
So you play with a Frisbee and you throw it around like you would in a soccer field.
The main thing is that you can't run with the disc.
So once you catch it, you have to stop.
So the unique thing about the score, about the rules, is that there's no officials, there's no referees, and everything is self-officiated.
So you have to, if someone follows you, you have to call that for yourself.
And something that's built into the rules of the game is what happens if the other team disagrees.
So let's say if someone follows me and I call it, the other team can contest that.
And then there's two different outcomes based on whether the call was contested or not.
So I think it's just, you know, it's a newer game.
So it's kind of came out of sort of the hippie culture, to be honest.
But so it has more of an egalitarian kind of scoring and ruling system.
And then there's also some social peer pressure in that you can actually call what's called a spirit foul on someone.
So if they're not playing by the rules or they're just being a jerk, you can call spirit foul and get them removed from the game potentially.
Wow, that's very interesting.
That's very interesting.
And have you played for long?
Yeah, I played many years.
I played on some pretty serious club teams back in like 2013, 2014.
And I actually played disc golf more.
So now these days with getting a little older, but yeah, it's a great game.
So disc golf is frisbee golf, right?
Yes, exactly.
And that's where you throw the frisbee, you try and get it in metal chain link baskets, right?
Yes.
Yes.
And I played that.
I remember playing that up north in a couple of years ago on a blisteringly hot day where it was like, I'm pretty sure we're going to make it to the end, but I'm not giving myself super great odds.
For sure.
Yeah, so Ultimate's really like a fun game.
And I think it's a great game for kids to get into just because of the way you have to, you know, stand up for yourself in a lot of ways and call your own fouls.
And yeah, so it's pretty interesting.
I, you know, it's sort of stupid, irrelevant facts about my life.
I love Frisbee.
I love throwby catchy games.
Yeah.
You know, you have the sort of half-boon little throwers and they've got a ball and you throw it and they kind of curve.
And I absolutely love that stuff.
My daughter, unfortunately, is a bit too old for it now.
But we had a lot of fun with that.
We were younger.
I loved, you know, Frisbee and the quad and university and frisbee games as a whole.
Just throwing and catching frisbee, it's so zen.
And especially if you get a big field and there's not a lot of wind, although, of course, you can do a lot of cool stuff with the wind.
Like, you know, you set it up at 30 degrees and the wind blows it back down and you can get really precise with that stuff.
So I am a huge fan of frisbees.
I have an embarrassing variety of frisbees.
I have a light-up frisbee.
Really?
I would have had no idea.
That's awesome.
Yeah, I love frisbee stuff.
And that was one of the great things about, unfortunately, my wife keeps hurting her thumb because she's not quite throwing it the right way.
So, but my daughter was fantastic at it.
And so, and even, you know, like throwing it up 45 degrees against the wind and trying to get it to come back to you if you can catch it yourself, like just really cool stuff.
And I'm a huge fan of frisbee stuff is and throwy catchy stuff as a whole.
So it's interesting because, you know, there's no other really sport where you're playing with a plastic toy either.
Really?
It's like you got a ball, you have like some sort of leather or something.
And it's just a very new concept.
You have this plastic disc, which, and then you open up there's so much physics with centrifugal force and wind and all that.
Yeah, it's amazing.
It's very, it's a very delicate game because what's interesting is it's kind of like chess in that there's no dice rolls, but there's so many variables that it feels like it's almost random.
So like trying to manage all the variables that you can't figure out what exactly angle you're throwing it at and whether the wind is going to puff up.
You know, one of the things I've always loved with Frisbee is, I'm sure you've done this, like you, you throw it directly into the wind and it goes up and down.
And then trying to catch it at the other end is just, yeah, it's really, it's really neat.
And of course, you know, when I was younger, I would like get a frisbee and then live in fear that, oh no, a roof, a tree, a sudden gust of wind, it comes and goes out into the lake waiting for it to come back.
I'm a huge fan.
Have you ever, do you know how to throw with your backhand, like a flick?
Have you ever done that?
Yes, I have done that.
I also, and this is, I haven't tried this in a while, but I was able to throw between, like, you know, you leap up, you part your legs, and you throw under your groin from behind.
Oh, that's some tricky stuff.
Yeah.
I was, I was pretty good at that.
I was pretty good at that.
And I did consider it a personal amount, a personal badge of honor or medal of honor that if I didn't physically permanently injure myself in catching the ball, I would do it.
For sure.
For sure.
You got to watch.
For me, it's the ankles, rolling the ankles out there.
Rolling the ankles.
Yeah.
Or being so focused on catching the frisbee that you run into a pole or a wall or something like that.
And that's always a, that's all.
I remember, I wasn't frisbee, but I remember when I was a kid in school in England, maybe it was about six.
I was running to catch a ball and I ran straight into a metal fence wall.
And it's funny because I bled like a stuck pig, but it turned out that I had just cut myself.
You know, the bridge of the nose right below the brow is the thinnest skin on the body.
And I just happened to have, I didn't break my nose or anything like that.
And I didn't even need stitches.
They just put tape on it.
But I've never bled more in my life than that.
And everyone thought it's like, oh, he's going to die.
But nope, nope.
It was just a nose bump.
Just a nose bump.
That's good.
That's good.
Well, yeah, I think just any parents out there listening, great sport for your kids.
Ultimate Frisbee.
All you need is cleats and a bottle of water and you're good to go.
So and some comfortable people to play with, right?
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
That's good too.
Yeah.
And I would strongly urge, I would strongly urge parents, get your kids out there without supervision with a bunch of other kids so that they can figure out how to play games where they can enforce their own rules.
That gives, it's all about negotiation.
You know, one of the things that's just kind of happened as a dominoes is that, you know, neighborhoods have become unsafe.
Too many kids, too many parents working bedroom neighborhoods and so on.
And so kids are just everywhere they go is structure.
You got arcades, you got a Chuck E. Cheese, you go to, you know, wherever your trampoline park or whatever.
It's all structure.
It's all structure.
And what you want is your kids out there playing with other kids with no adults, no supervision, no structure.
And wherever you can achieve that, you are doing great favors to your kids because, you know, they're playing a game called Grounders, where you have to sort of close your eyes at certain times.
So it's sort of like Marco Polo, but at a playground.
And you see some kid who's got his eyes open.
And what do you do?
How do you enforce the rules?
It's a very interesting challenge.
And I think some of the sort of more neurotic aspects of youth and childhood these days has a lot to do with the fact that kids just aren't out there imposing their will and enforcing their rules, not through any kind of force or appeal to external authority or having the server enforce the rules.
The old issue with tag, hey, I touched you.
No.
Well, I touched your shirt.
Well, the shirt doesn't count.
Well, I, you know, like, you got it, you got to figure out how to negotiate those rules because a lot of relationships and work issues and so on.
There's a reason why we play those games because it's how to negotiate rules without having to run to authority.
But the government doesn't want you learning how to enforce rules without running to authority because then you might actually doubt the utility of the government as a necessary agent for the enforcement of social rules.
So I appreciate that comment.
Yeah, I'm glad to have talked about a particular obsession I've had for many years.
That's awesome.
Well, yeah, I think, and I think probably some of that comes out of the fact that they're just so glued to iPads and everything is on rails and there's no ambiguity and they're just so used to that kind of one-way interaction.
Yeah, and that's why with my daughter, when we played this sort of heavily sanitized version of Dungeons and Dragons from when she was very little, she can do anything she wants.
And it's a lot of it is negotiation.
And so I think that's one of the reasons why she's popular and she's very good at problem solving among kids.
Do you guys play Catan too?
Do you guys ever?
Yes, yeah, oh, yeah.
We were introduced by Catan some years ago and we certainly play.
We play, we certainly, when we have people over, we'll play the physical version or we'll jump in sometimes to the online version.
But yeah, Catan is a lot of fun.
But Catan, I mean, there's some negotiation in terms of trading.
There's a game I played, which I've been meaning to introduce to my family called Diplomacy.
My friends and I used to play that when I was in my teens, which is all about taking over the world through negotiation.
And you can betray people and you can make and plans and all of that.
And all of that was just a blast.
I've also been meaning to get into an old game I played on my Atari 800 with friends way back in the day called Mule, M-U-L-E.
And that's another game I was sort of meaning to get into, but I haven't.
But yeah, Catan is cool.
But again, it's one of these sort of structured based games, which is definitely fun, but doesn't have quite the same open-ended rules enforcement as just playing randomly is.
So kind of a random question off that.
Do you think there's any risk of introducing games with a lot of deception and that kind of thing to kids?
Or do you think that's just kind of harmless fun?
No, I think it's an essential skill.
Fair enough.
No, no, the ability to lie is not a skill that you want to leave your kids without because deception is very important when it comes to fighting the bad guys.
True.
The Sun Tzu thing is that, you know, all war is based upon deception.
And you're going to have battles in your life.
And it's going to be, hopefully, you know, you're on the side of good.
And I mean, I remember this from my business days.
I won't bore everyone with the same stories again.
But yeah, there are times in my business days where I was trying to do the right thing, really working hard to do the right thing.
And there were, even within the same organization, there were bad people in the way.
And sometimes I had to be friendly towards them while undermining them behind their back.
Like, because again, I treat people the best I can.
When I first meet them, after that, I treat them as they treat me.
If there's somebody who's really messing with me or with my department or my employees or my customers, then I have no moral obligations towards them.
And I will do my very best to have good triumph.
So I think the ability to be able to deceive others is an essential part of the battle between good and evil.
I mean, can you imagine?
And I'm not saying you would say this.
Imagine if the military training you took was always tell your enemy where your troops are.
It wouldn't do very well.
Always tell your enemy where your most vulnerable supply chains are.
Always tell your enemy, right, where your weaknesses are.
I mean, no, in war, you appear to be weak when you're strong.
You appear to be strong when you're weak.
And it's, you know, the fog of war and deception and all of that.
And of course, a lot of that has been obviated by satellites and drones and so on.
But no, not only do I not think it's harmful for kids to learn the arts of manipulation and deception, I think it's essential because otherwise you really are sending them out unarmed.
Like, you know, you teach your kids how to fight physically, not because you want them to be bullies, but because somebody might try to mess with them physically and they need to know those dark arts in a way.
And they would also be able to recognize when they're being deceived, too.
Yes, I think that's yeah, I think that's very true.
The naivety thing that, oh, I cannot touch the tools of evil is like, no, of course you can.
I mean, of course you can.
Otherwise, evil is the only one armed and we all lose and die like dogs.
So no, I think it's, I mean, you want to talk about, you know, the virtues and values and honesty and so on, but not as a sort of fixed absolute, as a sort of the difference between myself and a Christian.
With the Christian, the rules are sort of a fixed absolute.
But for me, it's like immorality is a relationship in the same way that economics is a relationship, right?
If you don't ship me the iPad, I'm not sending you the 500 bucks.
I don't just send you the 500 bucks regardless of what you do.
If you ship me the iPad, I got to send you the 500 bucks because you've earned my honesty and integrity.
But if you're cheating me, I don't need to support you.
And so, yeah, I think it is really important to be as wily as foxes and be prepared to fight.
Because, of course, a lot of what I've done is to do with combat and spiritual combat, moral combat, philosophical combat.
And I mean, obviously, I certainly find it most valuable because I am working in the realm of philosophy.
But so, to promote the truth, promote honesty, promote integrity.
But I certainly would not want my children to have no idea how to be deceptive in the world because you need to be able to see it and therefore you should have experienced it.
And there are times where it may be necessary in the pursuit of virtue.
Interesting.
I guess the last question then, and I've heard you mention it before about poker.
So I guess poker would kind of fall in that category of deception and knowledge.
And I think you had some comment that it was basically just a test of who knows more, which is very true.
There's a lot of studying involved.
I play at a pretty high level.
So is there anything not virtuous about poker?
How do you see it?
Oh, now, do you mean gambling for money?
Yeah.
Yeah, I'm not a fan.
Well, let me just actually one caveat is that it is a game of skill.
So just like investing in the stock market, you could call that gambling.
If you're really good at poker, no, no, no, because investing in the stock market is giving people money to produce jobs and goods and services.
That's not poker.
Okay.
Poker is just a net.
It's a net loss.
Well, you're actually putting in equity into the pot.
So instead of putting equity into a company, you're putting equity into the pot.
Right.
But there is no.
So you and I are playing poker for $1,000, right?
So one of us walks out, like we up the ante to $1,000, right?
So one of us has $1,000 at the end and the other guy doesn't, right?
Right.
So what beneficial economic activity has occurred?
None.
It's a completely lack of any kind of value like that.
Now, that's not the end of the world, obviously.
I mean, it's not like everything you do has to be a net economic value.
But in this one, you could say, well, gee, I know, you know, you bought the cards, somebody bought the table, you need electricity for the fans, or somebody's got to bring you the drinks.
So there's certainly some economic activity, but it is a net negative.
Now, I mean, if I go to a bar and sing karaoke, what is the net positive?
Well, obviously, I brought glory and joy to everyone with my vocal stylings.
But so it's not like everything has to be this sort of net economic winning or losing.
I mean, if I sit down and play Catan, then usually that's fun.
And usually, you know, the board games are a great way to get people to get together and just chat about stuff as well, right?
But with poker, if you're playing for fun, whatever, or playing sort of penny anti-poker or nickel and dime poker, because nobody has any pennies anymore, but then it's fun, sort of friends getting together.
But in terms of making money from poker, it is, I mean, it's not immoral, obviously.
It's not like you're stealing.
Not forcing.
There's a sort of edge of fraud.
What is it, a ringer where you pretend to be bad and then...
Well, yeah, I mean, that's just deception, right?
That's pure.
If you're a good player, you want to act like you're bad.
Right.
And but if somebody is new to the game and you know that there's a vast skill difference, when does it become wrong?
I want to come like taking advantage.
Well, I think the one thing would be that the player that doesn't know how to play wouldn't be playing in a game with very good players.
It wouldn't be because the blinds would be much higher, right?
So you'd play at the level that you're at.
Okay.
Yeah, that's fair.
There should be some filter mechanism, like a ranking system or something like seeding in tennis or something like that.
Yeah.
So listen, I mean, it's not immoral at all, right?
It's voluntary and there is, of course, the deception, but that's part of the game.
I mean, that's in chess as well.
You say, oh, I'm making a move over here when you're actually trying to distract from what you're doing on the other side of the board.
So there is all of that deception.
So I have no problem.
I have no problem with any of that sort of stuff.
I think, and if it's not much money involved, that's fine.
It's sort of recreational.
I suppose the issue is, you know, when it comes to if that's how you make a living, again, not immoral, but I don't know that it is a very satisfying or ennobling or good way to make a living, if that makes sense.
It does.
I would say that I'm pretty good friends with a few professional poker players.
And for them, it's a vehicle for self-improvement.
So getting up every day, studying, being on top of your health, your sleep, because all of that is building to improve their poker game.
Okay.
And at the end of their life, what have they built?
Well, they do other, they invest in other companies.
I'm talking about, I'm talking about the game, not the peripheral game.
The game.
The game.
What have they done to add to the good of the world through the poker?
Because we're just talking about poker, right?
We're not talking about, oh, I take my winnings and give to charity.
That's a different matter, right?
But the game.
You know, my concern is that at the end of the life, you've flipped a bunch of cards over.
You've studied a bunch of stuff.
You've taken money from players who are not taken, but you've won money from players less competent than yourself or whatever it is.
And you look back at the end of your life and what?
What have you like in terms of just the poker, right?
Let's say that is your job, right?
So you look back at the end of your life and you've made some money, you played some card games, and what have you other than the money, right?
I would agree.
Yeah, I agree.
It's pretty nihilistic.
But you can say the same thing about professional sports too, right?
Yeah, I mean, I have a whole, I have a whole issue with professional sports as well, which is which poker doesn't suffer from, by the by, right?
Right.
So poker is not subsidized by force or the taxes.
I don't think so, right?
Unless it's because it's some native casino benefit because of some treaty.
But, you know, as you know, the sports are massively subsidized, the state, massively subsidized.
And the high school sports is subsidized by taxpayers.
At the university level, it's taxidized.
It's subsidized by student fees and so on.
So, and it's funny, you know, because I love sports.
I love playing sports, but I can't stand watching sports for the most part.
I think I've watched like three, three games of sports my whole life.
I think in the 92, I watched the Blue Jays.
And I was actually out with my wife the other night where the Blue Jays were playing and there was a sort of TV.
And I like every half an hour, I looked up, and she's like, oh, they're too ahead.
And it's like, okay, whatever.
So it doesn't particularly interest me because a life spent watching sports is wasted, right?
All of that time is largely wasted.
And if you're playing sports, then that's good, right?
Because you have camaraderie and skills and health and all that kind of stuff.
So I think poker is certainly better than sports.
Now, if you're a professional sports player, you know, I don't know that it's the most noble way to spend your life.
I mean, if you are inspiring other people to play sports and exercise and be healthy, but you look at your average sports fan, they look like a pear-shaped butterball, right?
So I don't know that that's particularly happening.
And then you can't have great sports like Ultimate Frisbee.
You can't compete with the ultra-subsidized megastadium.
So we're stuck in this like archaic brand and circus.
Yeah, yeah.
And I think as if I was like some super sports guy, I, you know, I never know, and I probably will never know, but I never know what goes on deep down in people's conscience, right?
So if you're some big sports guy and you look back on your career and you say, okay, well, I made a bunch of money.
Basically, I'm throwing, catching, bouncing balls or whatever it is.
So I made a bunch of money.
Okay, whatever.
Right.
But I wonder if you say, okay, but what real good have I given to society?
And I think that for all but, you know, the real sociopathic among us, I think that's a question that cooks on the back burners.
What good am I adding to society?
Now, when I was an entrepreneur, I was fortunate to be in a field where I was adding real good, like helping companies pollute less and so on.
And also, I was hiring and mentoring a whole bunch of people who, some of whom have gone on to some considerable success in the business world.
And obviously that's a lot to do with their talents, but probably a little bit to do with my mentoring as well.
So, you know, did some real good in the world.
This was sort of the Jay Leno speech that he gave about, you know, how happy he is that his show has helped hundreds of people be able to raise their families and pay their bills and all of that kind of stuff.
And laughter is a positive thing.
Comedians obviously releasing the oxytocin and the happy joy hormones.
And often they are puncturing sacred cows and getting people to be less frightened of speaking about controversial issues and so on.
And the playfulness that reminds people to have fun in the world.
So I think comedians are doing that kind of good.
But with sports, you know, I wonder.
I mean, you're heavily subsidized.
You're forcing people to pay for your salary even when they don't want to.
And the other thing, of course, is that I wonder if down in the back of your mind, you're saying, well, I took a lot of time away from people's family time in a way.
True.
Right?
I mean, the sort of the cliché of like, well, you know, it's Sunday afternoon and my dad's going to be watching football for the next four hours rather than playing with his kids.
I don't know.
I don't know if that kicks in the back of people's minds or not.
Most people that I've talked to over the years, and some of them have been, of course, shows here.
But a lot of people that I've talked to, when I start picking around sort of the basis of their minds, there's a lot of real steamy conscience activity going on down there.
And I don't know if that happens with sports people.
I'm so sorry.
I'm rambling alone.
And she had something that she wanted to mention.
Go ahead.
No, I was just going to say, I don't think it probably comes up at all.
I would imagine these professional athletes think they're a gift to humanity just existing and that their talents being on display are a, you know, just the flourishment of humanity.
I don't think they see it like that at all.
Well, okay.
So you said two things there, right?
So it's very interesting, right?
So one thing you said was it comes up.
And now I didn't say that.
It kind of said, is it cooking in the back burner?
Is it somewhere down at the bottom, right?
So that I don't know, right?
So does it come up?
Occasionally, I can't remember.
There was some, I think he was a black NBA player who basically walked away from fame because he wanted to pursue yoga and Zen and meditation and all this because he said fame is terrible.
And so, I mean, for a few people, it does seem, but just because it doesn't kick up in people's minds doesn't mean it's not having an effect.
Sure.
Right.
So it's like the people who take a bunch of government money, they don't sit there and say, oh, you know, I'm forcing people to pay for my lifestyle and so on.
But does the conscience operate independently?
The subconscious, I guess you're saying, right?
No, the conscience.
Not the conscience.
Sorry, the conscience.
Okay.
Right.
So the conscience which compares your empirical actions to the good.
And the good, there's some subjectivity in the good, but not total subjectivity in the good.
So if, like, let's say, for instance, take the example of Henry Fonda, the actor.
So Henry Fonda was a sort of very sensitive and deep actor, but apparently, according to his children, completely cold-hearted at home.
So with Henry Fonda, he, I think his last movie was something I watched as a kid on Golden Pond with Audrey Hepburn.
No, men.
All we just sucked bees.
Anyway, lost me on that one.
Oh, yeah, sorry.
That's way old.
I just remember the boat crashing into the edge of the water.
Okay, so he pursued professional success at the expense of his children.
I guess Peter Fonda was one of them.
He was in some movie about bees.
And of course, he was with Dennis Hopper in Easy Rider and so on.
Peter Fonda and then Jane Fond, his daughter, who became very enamored of totalitarian communist regimes pretty much all over the world and was kind of a traitor in many ways, in my view.
But so he pursued professional success off acting all the time and neglected and ignored his family.
And that's not great.
Of course.
And did it have an effect on him whether he acknowledged it or not?
Right.
So in other words, if you don't really think that smoking is bad for you, but you smoke a bunch, it has an effect on your lungs whether or not you think it's bad for you.
Right.
Sure.
And this is always the question.
And I don't know the answer.
And maybe at some point brain scans will tell us.
I think that people's relationship to UPB shows up because UPB provokes the conscience.
UPB reflects our conscience because UPB is that morality is universal, objective, and independent of our wishes and preferences.
And so our conscience is what measures our actions empirically and compares them to the good.
Right.
And so if you're a Christian and you believe that you must love your enemies and then you rail against and hate your enemies.
If you're a Christian and believe that you must forgive those who seek restitution or who give restitution and apologize, but you don't, right?
What happens when your actions go against the good?
So do you think that do you think that ever has a physical effect on a person or is this just psychological?
Yeah, I agree.
So and like, do you believe in like the physiognomy, physiotomy?
I don't know how to even say it.
Physiotomy?
Physiognomy.
Yeah.
Do you think that plays an effect?
And like if your conscience.
Well, I wouldn't say it doesn't change the shape of your nose.
Well, some people think it does.
I mean, oh, because over a decade or two, that can kind of shape your manifestation of your physical form, perhaps.
Well, I agree with that, right?
So but so, for instance, you can if you're living a kind of scummy, scurvy, manipulative life, I think that has an effect on your posture.
Sure, absolutely.
You know, and apparently whether your hands rub together or something.
I don't know, right?
But it has an effect on your posture.
It has an effect on your eye contact.
If you are unpopular because you're doing bad things, you're less likely to be invited to backyard barbecues, to sports, to picnics, to hikes.
So you probably spend less time outside.
That's going to have an effect on your skin.
It's going to have an effect on your health.
Vitamin D level, perhaps.
Vitamin D levels.
If, of course, you are living a life of cheating and blowback or potential blowback, your stress levels are going to be higher.
And with your stress levels being higher, you're going to either be overeating or undereating.
Yeah, the cortisol, adrenaline dumps, and you're going to feel kind of shifty.
Again, you're going to have difficulty making eye contact.
And you are going to know that people out there kind of hate you and want vengeance.
And so you're going to be a little bit more jumpy.
The lack of sleep is going to have particular effects on your entire health system and so on.
So I don't necessarily believe that everyone gets the face that they deserve because it doesn't change your skull structure and so on.
But it certainly does, or it doesn't change your eye color.
But this Jennifer Welch woman, I don't know if you've been following this at all.
She just unloaded a torrent of just satanic verbal abuse on Riley Gaines and so on while accusing Riley Gaines of being so full of hate.
And, you know, that's, that's a sort of, she's, it looks like she's had some bucle fat removal or she's got these holes in her cheeks that look completely bizarre.
And, you know, the sort of twisted mouth and this sort of contemptuous sneer of a face and so on.
And, you know, I mean, the woman had children with a kind of a raging addict.
So not a great life as a whole.
So, you know, but she's not an unattractive woman.
She's got a particular kind of middle-class, vengeful Karen look that I guess isn't she's got nice hair and so on.
But, you know, the sort of freeze frame of her, you know, with the sneering and the hostility and the contempt and so on.
Yeah, that's, that's, that's pretty negative.
That's pretty negative.
So I do think that you can, as people age, for sure, you can certainly judge them to some degree.
It's sort of a first-past judgment on how they carry themselves.
People with a good conscience, you know, they tend to, you know, walk somewhat tall.
They tend to be, you know, pretty, pretty healthy as a whole.
They tend to have good social relationships.
And that takes, you know, good social relationships take a lot of the buffer off the stresses of life, right?
I mean, being solitary is the equivalent of smoking about 15 cigarettes a day.
It's pretty bad for you as a whole because we're social animals, right?
So I do think that you can judge people to some degree by how they carry themselves.
But of course, the challenge is that people who are good at conning will imitate, right?
They will study people with a good conscience and imitate their gait and walk and try and camouflage themselves that way.
So it's not a very certain thing.
Back to poker.
Back to this.
Yeah, back to poker.
And also, people who've been ground down by abusive parents will have all of the markers of furtive and untrustworthy people, but that's not necessarily their fault, especially when they're young, because that's just how they happen to get ground down by their parents if their parents were bad.
So it's not, and certainly as you get older in life, it tends to be, it tends to become more reliable.
But that is certainly that's, I, I do, I do look at the physiognomy of people.
There's a reason why we find certain, like nobody finds the hunched over guy with, you know, bad skin and dark circles under his eyes.
Nobody finds that attractive.
And I think that's because it does give a certain sort of geevy nature.
Like what was it, the movie, Fast Times at Richmond High?
That was the guy who was the scalper who just had this whole skeevy air to him.
And so I'm sorry, this is again sort of out of your generation, but I do think, and I don't, I don't know.
Every time I've probed people about their conscience, whether it's in person, privately, or on the show, there's something really churning down there.
This, of course, is the Christian idea that your conscience is implanted in you by God and cannot be removed by yourself or the devil or a surgeon or anything like that, that your conscience is constantly measuring your actions against your claims.
And the more you lie to people, the more you deceive people.
And I don't mean in sort of some defensive manner, but the more your conscience will plague you and the less happy you will be.
But the negative effects tend to show up over time.
It's not that the third drink you have doesn't give you cirrhosis of the liver, but eventually, or like the third cigarette doesn't usually give you lung cancer, but it does, the damage does accumulate over time.
And there are people who do seem to be somewhat immune from a conscience, like the real sociopaths, but they never have any satisfying relationships at all.
They have the same relationships with people as you have with your NPC characters in Skyrim, right?
There's no relationship at all.
And so they may not accrue negative effects, but that's because they never have any positive effects to begin with.
Very interesting.
Well, appreciate the chat.
And always went a little further, a little deeper than I expected.
So I appreciate it.
I appreciate that.
And thank you for the great questions.
Always interesting.
And let's go with X Django trademark.
If you want to unmute, happy to hear your thoughts.
Going once.
Hey, is this me?
Yes, it is you.
Hey, so thanks for bringing me up.
I like the title today, How to Murder Uncertainty.
We didn't quite get there, but I'm happy to have the topic.
But it may be a solo show.
But go ahead.
Yeah, well, maybe my question topic will lead us there.
So the 1st of November, one of the big headlines is the end of SNAP Benefits, which is a food assistance program in the United States.
The Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Plan, if I remember rightly.
That's right.
And, you know, I think sometimes there's this polemic that you either have communism or complete anarchism where people are left to fend for themselves.
And so the first kind of topic I was hoping to touch on.
Hang on.
Hang on.
So you're throwing a bunch of definitions out there that I would have some challenges to begin with.
Just so you know.
Sure, which part of that maybe the word polemic or those two words?
No, no, just help me understand what you mean where you say we either have full communism or anarchism where people are left to fend for themselves.
Now, what do you mean by fend for themselves?
Well, that's where I think Snap fits in.
And I was hoping...
No, no, no, no.
What did I just ask for?
Sorry to be annoying.
What did I just ask for?
I asked, what do you mean by fend for yourselves?
That's independent of the SNAP discussion.
Feeding ourselves rather than relying on the people around us, a system of well, listen, that's an interesting nuance.
And that's kind of exactly the point I was trying to make is what point of this spectrum do you fall on where, you know, I understand.
Okay, hang on.
You're skipping away.
I still need the definition.
What do you mean by fending for yourself?
being self-sufficient uh relying on ourselves to feed ourselves rather than relying on the the people around us to provide us for with food and snap is a program where the society around us I don't want to get to SNAP.
We'll get there, but I just want to make sure I understand.
Okay.
So let's take a man with a wife and two children.
And his wife is a stay-at-home mom who homeschooled their kids, right?
Let's just make that a scenario, right?
It's not uncommon in America or other places where homeschooling is allowed, right?
Now, is the woman fending for her, his wife, the wife, the mother of his children?
Is she fending for herself?
Okay, so we're starting at the point of we find this group of three people or four people.
So you're questioning whether or not at this point in time, are they fending or is either is one of those four people fending for themselves at this point in time?
I'm sorry, I'm not sure why you're just repeating my question.
I mean, maybe you have an answer, maybe you don't, but I don't think repeating the question adds much.
Well, I added that this point in time because there's obviously they got to this family situation through participation in a larger society.
Of course, everything is at this point in time.
I'm not saying for eternity.
I'm not saying when she was two years old, right?
So let's say you've got a husband, he's got a wife, and she's at home, and she's raising his children.
And is she fending for herself?
And I don't mean this in any combative way.
I'm just genuinely curious what you mean.
What do you mean by fending for yourself?
Does that include, is that someone who's fending, is she fending for herself?
She's working together with her husband and whoever her husband trades with in order to provide food for their kids.
Is she fending for herself?
Sorry.
I don't know if that I could just keep asking the question.
I don't mean to be rude, but I'm not sure what.
Okay, let me put it to you this way.
Is she providing her own income?
She is not providing, like in terms of income on a market structure denominated in some sort of currency.
No, she's not.
In this case, so she doesn't have a job that she gets paid by someone external, right?
Right.
Okay.
So who is buying her food?
The husband is, I'm assuming these people aren't raising their own food.
She might, sorry.
It was unclear.
Yeah.
Who's paying for the food?
Well, again, assuming they participate in some sort of an economy where they buy food at a grocery store, then it's not overcomplicated.
It's not overcomplicated, please, for the love of God, right?
So who pays for her food?
The currency that the husband earns in this market.
Okay, the currency doesn't pay for anything.
Who's paying for her food?
The husband.
Right?
Husband goes to work.
I don't know.
Have you ever been a are you married?
Do you have kids?
One of those two.
Yes, I'm married.
Okay, you're married.
All right.
And does your wife work?
We both work.
Okay.
All right.
So do you want to have kids?
Yeah, we have one on the way.
Oh, congratulations.
How lovely.
Okay.
Is your wife going to stay home?
we're both self-employed so we kind of already work from home but yeah I mean she'll probably yeah but she's gonna have a baby Yeah.
So the baby's going to take up quite a bit of time, right?
Exactly.
Okay.
So she's probably going to move to part-time.
She's certainly not going to be working 40 or 50 hours.
Like, I'm going to tell you, I'd be the stay-at-home dad.
It's a fantasy to think that you could work as much as you did when you have a baby in the house.
Right.
Okay.
So let's just say, for the sake of argument, your wife quits.
She no longer earns an income.
And so you would be responsible for paying the bills, right?
That's right.
Okay.
Is she fending for herself?
She is supporting me.
And together we are feeding our child and ourselves.
No.
You are paying for the income.
You are paying for the, you are paying the bills.
Is she fending for herself?
Like, if she's out there alone, she's not married, she doesn't have kids, then she's fending for herself if she has a job, right?
If she's getting her money from you in return for the great service of running the household to raising the children and all of that, she's not fending for herself in the same way as if she's single and paying all her own bills, right?
Okay.
No, sorry, I'm not sure if that's an agreement or not.
Yeah, this is exactly what.
Yeah, this is the topic because this is kind of the topic of discussion.
I was curious, you know, at what point of these kinds of programs do you support?
Hang on, hang on.
I'm sorry.
I'm still trying to keep you on the train track of the conversation to some degree.
So if your wife is accepting money from you, you're paying the bills and she's staying home raising the babies, she's not making money, and she is accepting your income to pay the bills.
So she's not fending for herself in the same way that she would be if she was single and working to pay her own bills, right?
Okay.
Sorry, I'm not sure if okay means you agree or you've just heard the words.
Nodding that I'm following you.
Yep.
Yes.
Do you agree?
That she's no longer paying the bills that she was before when she was earning cash income.
Yeah, that's right.
Okay.
Are your children fending for themselves?
They are not.
They are reliant on me.
Now, if you have a society with the requisite 2.1 children per family birth rate, right?
The 0.1 for people who don't make it to adulthood and reproduce.
So let's just say you have a traditional family structure where the husband is making the money and you've got a wife and you've got 2.1 children, right?
Okay.
So three quarters of the people in that society are not fending for themselves.
Okay.
Does that make sense?
I agree.
Okay.
So when you say people fending for themselves, when in a normal society, the vast majority of people are not fending for themselves.
That's why I was a little confused.
No, and that's either communism or people are just fending for themselves when wives, mothers, and children don't fend for themselves.
The old people generally don't fend for themselves, right?
Exactly.
No, I really like it.
Yeah, I like how you took it backwards a little bit before those assumptions were made.
I like that.
Okay, so most people don't fend for themselves in a free society.
Okay, agreed.
So when you said it's either communism or everyone's fending for themselves, I would have issue with that because in a functional society, most people don't fend for themselves.
The women and the mothers rely upon the labor of the father to produce the family income.
Right.
And children don't just pop up out of nowhere.
Right.
Agreed.
When you're going through this whole process right now, right?
So yes, they don't pop up nowhere.
Okay, so I think it's a false dichotomy to say you either have communism or a society where everyone fends for themselves.
Because if you have a society that's functional, three quarters of the people or more don't fend for themselves.
And I would agree to the periods of their lives.
And I would agree it's a false dichotomy that I threw out to try to tease out your opinion about how much support is warranted versus no support at all.
Food versus, you know, possibly more than just food.
Sorry, how much support is warranted?
Okay, so tell me what you mean.
And I'm sorry to be pedantic, but I think it's important.
Tell me what you mean by support.
Well, food, you know, is provided to people that apparently don't have enough food.
And so I'm curious how you approach, you know, analyzing that.
Because it seems like it's part of this sort of slippery slope.
I'm sorry, go ahead.
I had lots of speeches.
You finished your thought.
Sorry.
No, I apologize if I'm jumping in too quickly as well, but I just think there's a slippery slope of accelerating need-based dependency.
And then there's also a degree to which emergency relief for people that are caught in a tricky situation that aren't able to provide food.
And so how do we approach that sort of, you know, curving level of support where a little bit seems helpful in an emergency, but too much creates dependency?
Yeah, it's a great question.
I believe, and obviously I'm open to correction on this, but I generally believe that charity is one of the most perfect examples of what's called the Aristotelian mean.
The Aristotelian mean says a balance between two extremes is good.
If you don't have any courage, you're a coward.
If you have too much courage, you're foolhardy.
And if you eat too little, you starve to death.
If you eat too much, you get fat and get sick and die.
And so if you exercise, if you don't exercise at all, then you're weak and your bones are brittle.
If you exercise too much, you get injured all the time.
So it is Aristotelian mean.
We kind of want to walk the straight and narrow.
Now, certainly, there are people who need our help and support within society.
And so a deficiency of charity, I think, would be cruel.
But an excess of charity breeds the aforementioned dependence and poor decision-making.
Does that make sense?
Yeah, and that's a new word for me.
The Aristotelian mean is new to me.
So that gives me something for further research.
So things.
Right.
I mean, it's in terms of confidence.
You don't want too little confidence.
Otherwise, you're kind of paralyzed with self-doubt.
But you also don't want too much confidence and think you can do everything without training, right?
So I could fly this plane.
I could do an appendicitis with a spork.
Right.
So confidence and a lot of the aesthetic attitudes towards life fall into the aristocracy.
It doesn't mean good and evil, right?
You don't want a balance between not murdering people and murdering people.
Somewhere in the middle.
No, the good and evil is a different matter, but charity is not a matter of good and evil when it's voluntary, right?
Now, tell me if you can, just so I know whether we're talking theoretically or not, what have your experiences been in giving money to people in need?
Well, usually it's of the hands-on nature rather than just, you know, sort of cash.
And usually it's the sort of the mentorship roles.
I've had my own business for about 15 years.
So usually it's an opportunity to work with people and lead by example.
So generally.
I wouldn't say that mentorship is in the same category as charity.
Okay.
Okay.
Sorry.
Because it's not, we talk about SNAP, right?
Yeah.
That's neediness to the point where people might be sick and die without the help, but that's not, I wouldn't, I mean, mentorship is a nice thing, that kind of benevolent coaching, but you also get a benefit from that in your business, right?
And intrinsically.
It's part of my human being.
So I'm talking about when you have seen somebody in significant need and have transferred resources to them where you don't get any particular benefit, material benefit yourself.
So the charity is so, and maybe you have had these experiences, maybe you haven't, but I'm just kind of curious if we're dealing with theory or we're dealing with things that you have practiced.
And this is some moral test because I'm sure there's lots of good that you do in the world outside of direct charity.
But I'm just kind of wondering if you have transferred resources to poor people and how that's gone.
Yeah.
I mean, I'm thinking like there was a charity that I donated to that builds low-cost wheelchairs for people that are victims of landmines.
You know, that was like a cash donation program.
And I'm sorry to be, I'm sorry to be annoying.
I'm talking personally.
Yeah.
Okay.
So like you let your brother in law because he needed to go for a job interview.
I mean, because giving money to charity is fine, but I'm just talking about personal experience that you've had with helping people by giving money or resources.
Yeah, the last time was during COVID.
I remember donating, you know, bringing food to somebody that wasn't working.
You know, I knew that he probably didn't have a lot of cash because he wasn't working at that time.
So I remember delivering a number of groceries to this person's house without even being asked about it.
Just showing up and making sure that what's the rough dollar value of what you donated?
Probably less than 75 bucks.
I mean, you know, just letting them know that if they needed more, they knew how to reach me.
Okay.
Anything else?
I mean, that's kind of the most immediate example.
But yeah, I mean, that's kind of the most recent thing I can think of in the context of.
You don't care about it that much, right?
Okay.
Fair enough.
No, no, it's not a criticism.
I'm just looking empirically, right?
If over the course of your life, you must be in your 30s or 40s if you've had a business for 15 years and you can remember giving 75 bucks worth of stuff to someone.
Yeah, I mean, I generally assume that people are kind of responsible for themselves and the people that I've created are going to be my domain of responsibility for the first few decades of their lives.
But yeah, generally for somebody else.
Sorry to interrupt.
But then I have a question, which is if you don't find it that important, why are we talking about it?
I'm not trying to be hostile.
I genuinely, I'm curious.
Like if it doesn't matter to you, like to the point like 75 bucks over the course of your life, why are we talking about something that doesn't really matter to you?
Okay, good.
Yeah.
No, this is a great transition because I did have a second part to that question, which I think does kind of is why I thought about it more explicitly.
And a third part that actually I think brings it all home for me personally.
The second part is that I think this matters to me because there's this concept of social contract.
And I don't remember ever signing an explicit social contract.
I know there's an implicit social contract, but never.
No, there's not.
No, there's not.
No.
Social contract is just something that people make up so that they can make you believe you have some sort of obligation in terms of giving up money against your will.
There's no such thing as an implicit contract.
There's no such thing as a social contract.
I understand that it's a concept that's bandied about, but it's just a compliance thing.
Well, I think there is an implicit one, which is society gaslighting us that there is one implicitly, but you're right that there is no explicit social contract construct.
No, and there's no implicit social contract.
Well, I would argue that your average person is implicitly.
You can't go to a car dealership and then be forced to buy a car because there's an implicit contract.
Well, that's why I'm saying that's the definition of implicit.
There's an implicit social contract, and that's why we're saying that.
I'll say it's implicit.
It's invalid.
Exactly.
It's just propaganda.
Okay, but let's go on with the so why does it matter to you if why does it matter to you theoretically if it doesn't matter to you materially well because it's one of the ways that society has gaslighted us so to me okay so I'm sorry I'm really confused now so we're talking about it because society gaslights us but you've brought up all of this snap and helping the poor aren't you kind of gaslighting me now okay maybe I'll have to reflect on that no again it's not a hostile
statement i'm just like because if if i you say well we gotta help the poor and this that is really important and it's like 75 bucks and i'm not criticizing that i mean listen you helped the poor by creating jobs and creating something that people want to spend their money on and thereby motivating them to want to work harder to earn that money to trade with me well that's yeah so that's what i say to people on twitter right so you've run your own business for 15 years and by the way congratulations because that is a hard thing to do and that is a big challenge and
those of you who don't know most businesses fail within the first couple of years so you've kept something and you've hired people and you you have their you paid them and and by hiring people you've also raised the wages of everyone else because you've taken some people out of the supply and demand curve of wages so you have incrementally raised the wages even of people you haven't hired and so in terms of like practical effects in terms of actually helping the poor right so all these people are like oh i want to help the poor it's like we'll start a business and
hire them yeah i 100 agree with you yeah so let me get to the third part hang on but we're talking about charity here okay because snap is not hiring right snap is direct transfer and now people say well but it's not money directly but of course as we know people take their snap food and they sell it um and they generate cash that way of course not everyone but but a lot so we're back to the question of of charity
now charity should not be enforced right it's it's good for society to have children but that doesn't mean you can rape women right and it's good for society to help each other that doesn't mean you can point a gun to people's heads and force them to help others right right and the welfare state as it's currently constituted is coercive from right?
It's not optional.
Right.
And it's also not even paid for by the taxpayers to a large degree, because if it was, there wouldn't be deficits and debt and unfunded liabilities, right?
Right.
So it is predatory and coercive, and everything that is coercive corrupts, right?
And so the sort of snap stuff, the issue is that, of course, the spending on Snap has doubled just in America in the last sort of four or five years, which is crazy, of course, right?
But if you give people free food, the average person who's on Snap is obese.
I did read that as true.
Yeah, whether that's correlation or causation, we can sort of, but it certainly is a fact that they're certainly getting more food than they need.
Not even just to survive, but they're getting more food than is healthy.
They're getting more food than is healthy because they're obese.
And so when it comes to charity, I do think that people should be helped, but it is a very delicate operation.
And I won't get into all of the history of me giving direct money to people, but over the course of this show, I've given a fair amount of money to people who need it.
There was a young man who needed it because he was going to get evicted and he was about to get a job.
I gave him a bunch of money, and then he ended up getting fired because he was up all night playing video games, which I did not consider a very good use of my money.
I've given a lot of money to people who are in need of it because they can't afford therapy, but they really need therapy.
And I have no way of tracking.
I don't demand receipts or anything like that.
But in general, I hope that they're spending the money on therapy, right?
I'm not paying the therapist directly, but I generally hope that that's been the case.
I don't have any way of confirming that, but it takes a special kind of person to cheat a philosopher who's giving money for them to go to therapy.
So I don't think that's my listenership as a whole.
I'm sure that they did the right thing with the money.
I gave a huge amount of money over the years to my mother.
My mother then took that money and used it to pursue people legally who I did not think were in the wrong.
So I had stopped doing that because I was enabling negative or destructive behavior, in my view.
And that was a negative.
I have helped friends out with loans over the course of my life.
I would say it's about 50-50 in terms of the loan getting repaid or the friend just becoming somebody who dodges you.
Okay.
And I've, I mean, to be fair, I've also borrowed money from friends from time to time over the years when I was younger.
And I've always paid that back and tried not to avoid, you know, but said, you know, here's what's happening and here's how I'm going to pay you back.
And here's why when.
So helping people is a big challenge.
It's a big, big challenge.
It is a very delicate operation.
To me, helping people is more complicated than open heart surgery.
Yeah.
Right.
Because you want to help them enough that they get back on their feet.
But there's two other factors.
The obvious one, which is you don't want to help them too much that you reduce their motivation, right?
If you give somebody $50,000 a month for being unemployed, they ain't getting a job, right?
Well, that person still had motivation to play video games, but right, like healthy motivations for parts of their life that probably...
Yeah, let's not slice and dice this to Adams, right?
But yeah, so it's going to kill their motivation to get work if you give them a bunch of stuff for free.
A woman who can't feed her children, it's good to receive assistance because it's not the child's fault that she's unable to feed them.
But if you give, and of course, women who have more children should get more help because they have more mouths to feed.
On the other hand, if you give women money for every child they have, they have an incentive to have a bunch of kids with no father.
As you know, the welfare state in, this is sort of identified in the Patrick Moynihan report in the 60s, but the welfare state had a problem in that a woman would claim to be without a provider.
without a husband or a boyfriend or the father of their children was not providing, so she'd get a bunch of welfare.
And then they would find out, lo and behold, that the man was living there and working.
So then they had to play this game of cat and mouse, wherein the man was not allowed to live with the woman.
And that was a requirement for her getting welfare was for them.
And so basically they literally drove the man out of the home.
And when you drive the man out of the home, girls who grew up without father figures tend to be much more pruist.
Promiscuous tend to have out-of-wedlock births at a far higher rate.
And so you're just perpetuating in and keeping the cycle going and making it worse.
Now in America, there's like three or four generations of people who've never been anywhere near a job application and they fundamentally have no skills left with which to, you know, it's like if you're a bunch of farmers and then there's three or four generations of people who've never seen a farm, you can't just ask them to go be farmers again, right?
Because they don't know how the hell to do it, right?
Yeah.
So you want to help people enough that they don't end up in a bad way, but you don't want to help them to the point where they end up taking that help for granted and having their motivations reduced.
You want to help women who have a bunch of kids, but you don't want her to have a bunch of kids in order to get money.
So these are, you know, big, complicated, challenging situations.
And of course, there's absolutely no way governments can do it.
Governments cannot solve these problems.
Governments have no interest in solving these problems.
And governments, of course, get money by not solving these problems, right?
I mean, the last thing that the Department of Welfare or the last thing that the managers at the welfare state want to do is get everyone off poverty because then they've got no jobs to go to the next day, right?
So that seems, you know, when you sort of portray government as a unified sort of logic, that seems a little hard to follow.
But yeah, I mean, I sort of see where you're coming from.
But yeah, I think institutions have their own logic outside of individual decision makers.
Well, do people who get paid to help the poor have a foundational incentive to eliminate poverty?
Well, we're also not measuring them on this sort of strategic thinking.
We're actually just operationalizing their poverty reduction and therefore they're never going to win.
So yeah, I would say.
Right.
Now, it's a little bit different with private charities.
So I give to private charities that have a proven record of eliminating some of the problems that they're trying to manage.
So I don't want to give money to a charity that just pays people who are on drugs.
I want to pay, I want to give money to a charity that has a proven record of getting people off drugs.
Does that make sense?
Yeah.
Now, there's no way that in the abstract, in the general and in the universal, that any individual can look at an aggregate of poor people and know who to help.
Because there's a bell curve of some people, no matter how much you help them, they won't work.
No matter how little or how much you help them, they just won't work.
There are some people who will figure it out themselves and you don't need to give them a penny.
And then there's some people in the middle where help will change things.
Does that make sense?
So if you've got, you know, 10,000 people who are, and of course, everybody wants to appear in the middle.
So the people who have no intention of getting jobs really want to camouflage themselves as people who will get a job, but only if they're helped.
Right.
So the people, most people don't want to say.
You don't need to help me.
I'm going to figure it out on my own if there's free money to be had.
There'll be some, but we're talking about the aggregate, the general.
So the problem is that it's a game of cat and mouse for the most part for a lot of, for the majority of people.
So the majority of people want to put themselves in that sweet spot, right?
You know the concept of triage, right?
So triage, just for those who don't, I talk into the world.
So the concept of triage is if there's a, you're in an ER and there's been a terrible bus crash, right?
You get 30 people coming in, you do your triage.
There are people who are going to die no matter what you do, and you give them over to the priest.
There are people who are going to survive for a couple of hours without much intervention.
And so you hand those over to the nurses.
And then there's a number of people right in the middle of the bell curve who are going to die without immediate skilled intervention.
Does that make sense?
Yeah.
So don't try and help the people you can't help.
The people who can wait to get your help.
Don't deal with them.
Just deal with the people who need your help immediately.
Now, the problem is, is that you want to give your money to the poor who are going to most benefit from that money.
Sorry, that's kind of circular, right?
And how you know they're going to most benefit from that money is they will get a job if they have money.
Now, if they're going to get a job without money, you don't need to help them.
If they're not going to get a job, even if you give them money, you may need some other solution, but giving them money isn't the answer, right?
Okay.
So you want to give money to people who really need that money so that they can become self-sufficient.
Right.
So in terms of treating people who've got a drug addiction, there are some people who are never going to get off the drugs.
And really, what's the point of trying to get them into rehab?
And right, you're just taking away space from people who will get off the drugs.
So there are some people who are not going to get off the drugs.
Sending them to rehab is a bad idea.
You may need some other intervention, but rehab is not the way to go.
Does that make sense?
Sure.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Hang on, hang on.
So last bit.
But there are people who will get off drugs on their own.
Most people deal with their addictions on their own.
And so you don't need to send them to rehab because they're going to kick the drugs on their own.
So the rehab slots should be reserved for those who will only get off the drugs if they go to rehab.
They need the rehab to get off the drugs.
That's where you want to send the addicts, right?
Because the people who aren't going to get off the drugs no matter what are just taking up space at rehab.
And the people who are going to cure themselves no matter what, or get off the drugs no matter what, you don't need to send them to rehab.
So rehab is just for those who can only get off the drugs with rehab.
Can we sort of agree on that?
Sure.
Now, how could you possibly know that?
Because everyone is going to be, or most people are going to be pretending they're in that middle category.
So the people who aren't going to get off drugs will absolutely swear up and down, blue in the face, that they will get off drugs, but they desperately need rehab, man.
Whereas, and the people, a lot of the people who could get off drugs on their own will prefer going to rehab because it's, you know, free food, a nice environment, you get counseling and you've got a social life.
And right?
So everyone is going to pretend to be in that middle category of people who can only get off drugs if they go to rehab.
Does that make sense?
Sure.
So how do you solve that?
There's no answer to that other than deep personal knowledge.
You have to have somebody who's dealt with all these people before, who's got their number, who knows what they're all about.
And even then, they're going to make mistakes.
They will send some people to rehab who relapse.
They will send other people to rehab who otherwise would have quit on their own.
And we have rehab is kind of wasted resources.
So even with deep personal knowledge, people will make mistakes.
They'll make fewer mistakes, though.
They'll make fewer mistakes than a faceless bureaucracy.
And then the last thing I'll say, and then this is totally yours to respond as you see fit.
I want a maximum reduction in the number of drug addicts.
So as a charity, what will they focus on?
Because that's what most people want, is they want the maximum effective use of their charitable dollars.
So if the rehab place or if the charity to get people off drugs, if they take on a whole bunch of people who just aren't going to quit no matter what, how do their numbers look?
Bad, right?
Because then they have a relapse rate of 95% or whatever it is, right?
And then people will say, well, you know, boy, I mean, I'm not spending all this money if people just end up going back on drugs afterwards, right?
Okay.
Now, they will have an incentive to provide rehab to the most motivated people, which means they're going to skew more towards the people who will get off drugs even without rehab, because that will raise their numbers, right?
However, in the total population of drug addicts, if all they do is take the people who are going to get off either way, they're still not decreasing the number of drug addicts relative to another charity that takes on the middle of the group.
Does that make sense?
Okay.
So if you have two towns, town A and town B, there are a thousand drug addicts in each.
Let's say 200, like 100 are never going to quit.
100 are going to quit on their own.
And there's a bunch of people in the middle or whatever it is, right?
So the charity that takes the most people from the middle will end up with the greatest reduction in the number of drug addicts because they won't try and help those who aren't going to get fixed.
And they also will let people who will fix themselves fix themselves.
So they will, the people who most accurately identify those who desperately need their rehab help to get off drugs, they will end up with the greatest number of cures relative to the population of addicts.
Does that make sense?
Okay.
Right.
So like it's like if you've ever been like rock climbing, right, and you're helping people rock climb.
There are some people who are just, you know, fat and lazy.
They're not, you know, they're not going to rock climb.
So you don't even, you don't even put them in the belay.
There are other people who are going to scamper up no matter what.
But if you want to get the most people to the top, you focus on those who are motivated.
And with your help, they can get to the top.
That's how you get the most number of people to the top.
You don't help the people who are going to get up no matter what, because then you're not helping the people who aren't going to get up without your help.
Does that make sense?
Yeah, it does.
Okay.
So that sweet spot is a real challenge to find because everybody wants to pretend that they're in that sweet spot.
Right.
And in the same way that if you were in that aforementioned bus crash and you were desperately in pain and they were only giving morphine to the people who were about to die, you'd say, I'm about to die.
Because you'd want to pretend to be who gets the morphine, right?
So as far as helping people go, as far as helping people go, that's the sweet spot that you have to get to.
The people who without your help will do very badly.
So there are some people who are just not going to pull themselves out of poverty, right?
They just like it down there.
That's where their social circle is.
They've maybe got the brain damage from too many drugs.
For whatever reason, and I knew these people, like not the brain-damaged ones necessarily, but there are people that I grew up in a poor neighborhood and there are people who are still in that poor neighborhood that I grew up with.
Other people have made it out.
And I mean, some of them I even gave jobs to when I was an entrepreneur, right?
So, but they just didn't, for whatever reason, right?
This is where they were comfortable.
This is where their social circle was.
This is, you know, they didn't want to go through the discomfort of changing classes because, you know, if you've ever gone through that process of going from poor to middle class, it's pretty freaking awkward.
And you have to be willing to get a whole bunch of stuff wrong.
It's like moving to Japan or something.
Wait, could you repeat that again?
The moving from poor to middle class.
Is that what you said?
Yeah, yeah.
Moving from poor to middle class or poor to upper class is very difficult emotionally, psychologically.
I mean, it's difficult financially too.
But I can see why people prefer to just stay at the bottom because they're comfortable.
It's familiar.
That's where their social circle is and so on, right?
And they know what's expected of them.
They understand the culture and so on.
Whereas if you go from really poor, so let's say you end up in the top 1%.
You don't know how to act.
You don't know how to interact.
You don't know.
You don't have the same shared history.
Like it's an awkward situation, which is why the classes do tend to harden to some degree.
So there are some people who are just going to stay poor because that's what they prefer.
There are other people who are going to get themselves out of poverty without any external help, right?
But there are some people who will get themselves out of poverty if they get some money.
But the problem is, because people like free money, everyone's going to pretend to be part of that group and sorting out the wheat from the chaff is really tough because everyone's going to say, man, I can't make it without your help because they want free stuff, right?
Right.
So as far as charity goes, it's difficult enough to figure out all of these categories, even if everyone was honest.
But most people lie through their teeth in order to get free stuff.
Of course.
So, I mean, gosh, if you've ever seen a family dissolve into the War of the Roses because of some inheritance, and you've seen just what happens when there's free stuff floating around, how people lose their minds and just lie and cheat and battle and sue and all this kind of stuff, right?
God forbid there's a cottage that needs to be divvied up between three kids.
Like, God help you, right?
So, I mean, silverware is a little easier, but so as far as charity goes, it's really difficult and it's really complicated.
Some people, you need to give them direct financial assistance.
Some people need a little bit less direct financial assistance, but they need health care.
You know, maybe they've got Crohn's disease and they have trouble working because they're in constant pain.
Maybe they've got some sort of liver ailment, which is draining their a thyroid ailment.
Or, you know, I mean, as I'm sure everyone has met someone over the course of their life that has Lyme disease.
I mean, Lyme diseases.
What happened to the, like, Bieber had it?
A lot of celebrities seem to hike in pretty bad neighborhoods or bad places, right?
Bieber had it.
A friend of mine in the music industry had it.
Or they live near Lyme, Connecticut.
Yeah, maybe, yeah, maybe where the potential bioweapon was released.
But, oh, gosh, who's that?
Lay down, what you're yelling for, that skater boy.
Avril Levine, she had it too.
And she was out of commission for years because she was sick.
So, you know, giving them money doesn't cure their Lyme disease.
So they need healthcare.
Other people have psychological issues and they need counseling.
And other people need tough love.
Some people need a hug.
Some people need a kick in the pants.
Like it's all really complicated and has to be very specially tailored to each individual with the additional layer of the fact that everybody's going to bullshit you and try and get stuff something for nothing.
And not everyone, but most people, right?
Certainly people who are going to be on your radar, because the people who are going to get wealthy or at least get to the middle class without charity, they're not even on your radar.
So they generally don't exist unless they hear about all this free stuff, in which case they're going to pretend, oh, I need your help.
I can't make it without it, blah, blah, blah.
Right?
Yeah.
I mean, there are NGOs with people coming across the Mediterranean, they're NGOs, like the people from Africa and so on, that will literally coach them on what to say to get migrant status, to get refugee status and all the free stuff that is handed out like candy from the European governments.
People will literally coach: here's what you need to say.
You need to, you know, do this.
And they'll teach them, you know, you're a persecuted Christian, and here's the catechism you need to remember.
And here's what you need to say, or you're gay.
And right?
They will literally coach them on how to get free stuff.
And there will be, like, the moment you start handing out charity, there'll be a bunch of skeevy industries that emerge to teach people how to fake whatever standard you have for giving free charity.
So it's a game of cat and mouth.
So, as far as helping people, it's crazy complicated.
And I think of one example is the Dr. Phil.
They call the Dr. Phil family.
This was many years ago on the Dr. Phil show.
It was a family, I'm going off memory here, but there was a doctor and he had his wife, and the kids were into drugs and drinking and so on.
And he worked with them for years.
And it was still a complete mess at the end of it.
Now, this is Dr. Phil, you know, trained psychologist, all the resources known to man and God.
He's got, you know, the team camps.
He's got counselors that he has personally selected who are the most effective.
He's got resources to throw out this family forever and ever.
Amen.
And they were, as far as I could tell, just about as much of a mess after years of intervention as at the beginning.
And of course, that's just one example, but it's sort of a telling example.
And again, this is why I sort of asked: have you tried to help people directly and personally in your life?
Because it's really complicated.
I have tried, you know, the fact that I have productive conversations through these call-in shows is because I was doing this for years before.
I didn't sort of just tumble out of the briar patch and start from scratch, right?
I've been trying to help people ever since I got into philosophy in my teens.
I've been trying to bring, you know, wisdom and virtue and values to people and teach them how to, you know, I tried to mentor friends that I hired in my businesses and so on, right?
So it's really, it's really tough and it's real hit and miss.
And you're going to miss a lot more than you hit.
And so really helping people is really tough.
And the other thing, too, is that, you know, the question is, why do people end up poor?
Well, so, so some woman can say, well, the man ran away, right?
Okay, the man, the man left his obligations.
Well, first of all, she should legally pursue him to get him to pay his obligations.
Oh, he's totally broke or whatever it is, right?
It's okay.
Well, why did you have kids with an unstable, don't stick around broke guy?
Because if you give money to women whose boyfriends ran off, then you are subsidizing women having children with boyfriends who run off and you're going to get more of that.
It's such a delicate operation to help people.
And it's one of the most complicated things in the known universe.
And handing it over to some faceless bureaucracy with infinite money, the infinite money glitches is just crazy, crazy, crazy.
And of course, it doesn't work.
So, with regards to Snap, you know, and I'll, again, shut up in a second and let you take the convo.
But with regards to Snap, it's a brutal system because everybody knows it's unsustainable.
That the debt is too big, the unfunded liabilities are too big, the deficit is too big.
It is absolutely this whole system of welfare and benefits and unemployment, insurance, and snap and child tax credits or child benefits and so on, absolutely unsustainable.
So, you're getting people addicted to a substance that can't possibly last, which is fiat currency.
You're getting people addicted to it.
It is literally to me like drugging someone, getting them completely addicted to drugs, and then throwing them in jail where they can't get any drugs in solitary confinement.
And, you know, that just the whole system is going to go and revolt, and they might not make it.
So, we've got people addicted to all of this free government jedd, and it's absolutely coming to a halt, whether it's this shutdown or just the math at some point.
At some point, mathematically, that cannot continue, will not continue.
So, you've got all these people absolutely dependent on these government handouts, which can't possibly continue.
And then what?
Well, they're going to, I mean, the threats are very clear on social media.
So, it's not everyone, right?
They're going to riot, they're going to steal, they're going to rob, they're going to attack people, they're going to, you know, and it's going to be absolute madness and chaos.
And it's going to make everything worse because they're going to trash the local grocery stores and convenience stores, which are then going to close down and not come back.
So, then what?
Like, it's an incredibly cruel system.
But people haven't been thinking long term because it's just about buying the next round of votes.
But so, yeah, that's sort of my thoughts on it, if that makes sense.
Yeah.
And as Alan Greenspan said, we can mathematically, we can definitely pay social security benefits or SNAP benefits.
It's just that we can't guarantee what these benefits are going to actually buy.
Yeah, they can print money and hyperinflate their way out, but that's yeah, then you're going to be a thousand bucks for a banana, right?
And that's why I thought I would just, you know, enlist the generosity of a philosopher to kind of see how you approach, you know, analyzing this problem, because I think you've done a great job of kind of giving me sort of perspectives about how you look at this and the three groups.
You know, obviously, gerbiotics are a little bit of a stand-in for other types of charity, but that was really helpful.
And, you know, I agree that it's really important to remind people that there is no explicit, some would say there's not even an implicit social contract.
But one question I had, just if you don't mind me extending this conversation just a smidge longer, but related point is, and kind of going back to how you started the conversation when we brought up that early polemic and you questioned, well, you know, who are we talking about?
And you imagine a family.
One place that I question, I kind of have a book project where I'm looking to.
So I'm hoping you could maybe weigh in on this because you're a little bit older.
You have kids that are closer to being adults themselves.
How do you approach this idea that maybe the one place that we can have an explicit social contract would be in a family households type situation?
And that might actually cultivate some sort of virtues.
Because one of the places that I learned in my own life is that one of the issues I had with my parents is that there was never an explicit social contract in our household.
And I think it led to a lot of disharmony and mismatched expectations where people implicitly kind of were assuming things that were never made explicit.
And therefore, there was a lot more trauma around what it meant to be a part of a household.
And so I'm just wondering if, although there isn't an explicit social contract globally, maybe there could be one in a household.
And if so, what would you put into it?
You mean like chores and allowance and stuff?
Yeah, or even more broad about, Yeah, just maybe broaden it.
Just be, you know, beyond those kinds of chores, but maybe my book is kind of exploring this topic to try to make it more broad.
Because I think one of the places where narcissists thrive is actually this liminal space between what's implicit and what's explicit.
And so people kind of want to shift the goalposts by constantly making the people around them think there's something that there isn't.
That's that's about as vague a thing as I can think of, but I think I think I get where you're coming from.
So do you mean something like telling the truth in the family?
Yeah, and putting it into writing about like, what is it that we expect of each other?
Oh, no, no, no.
Yeah.
Put it into writing.
No.
My God.
No.
Okay.
Do you have it in writing that you and your wife are monogamous?
Okay.
So that's that's not been necessary for us, but uh, you know, that that's you know, one example.
Okay.
Is there?
Well, okay, so when you have to raise your kids to manage themselves, and contracts are about external enforcement.
So I want my daughter to exercise, right?
So how do I get my daughter to exercise?
Well, you've reinforced the idea that you want her to exercise.
So then she's been reminded multiple times.
No.
How do I get my daughter to exercise?
Incentives matter, so you've made it easy for her to exercise with you, playing frisbee, for example.
So I get her to exercise by exercising myself and making it enjoyable for her to exercise.
Okay.
I talk to her about the health benefits of exercise, which is largely abstract, right?
And then I just wait for her to teenager who wants to be attractive, right?
So then she manages it herself, right?
But how would her signing an exercise contract, how would that do anything?
Again, I'm open to the case.
I just don't really follow.
Well, it would, I guess, what I'm imagining is that for families like the one that I grew up in, there's this tricky situation where things were never explicit.
Like the idea that you're expected to exercise was never made explicit.
So.
Okay, hang on.
So let's take that.
Did your parents exercise?
No.
Okay.
So how could they get you to exercise if they don't exercise?
And so, so my idea of charity is writing a book to reach out to people and households who do want to improve the standing of their families by trying to encourage them to talk through these kinds of opportunities, like exercise as one of them.
It would be to say to the parents, go exercise.
How could you tell your kids to do something you're not doing?
It'd be like if you knew your dad was a con man and he said, well, you got to tell the truth, son.
It's like, what are you talking about?
You don't tell the truth.
You're a con man.
Right?
So it's not about a contract.
It's about modeling the behavior.
You know, I want my daughter to tell the truth.
So what do I have to do?
Tell the truth.
I don't need to get her to sign a contract to tell the truth.
Now, she'll experiment with lying, which is fine.
Kids do that, right?
And so I say, well, you know, let it go, point it out.
You know, if she does it more, I'll say, okay, so is that what we're doing?
Like, we lie now?
Like, so I don't have to tell the truth anymore.
Because if lying is okay in a relationship, then it's okay for both people, right?
Do you want me to say, promise to you, I'll take you to the park later and then just say, no, it's just lying.
Do you want me to say, oh, yeah, you can have dessert after you eat your food and then say, no, it's just kidding.
Right.
Do you, do you want, do you want me to lie to you?
No.
Right?
Okay.
But the price of me not lying to you is you can't lie to me.
So you tell the truth and then you there are a negative consequence to lying, which is that people who tell the truth won't really want to have a huge amount to do with you, right?
And it's not punitive, it's consequential.
Right.
And so you make it beneficial to lie.
If you want me to tell the truth and we're both human beings, I equally want you to tell the truth.
Okay.
So I don't know what a contract would have done with that.
Yeah.
I'm thinking more, maybe it doesn't have to be a contract per se, but more this idea of trying to make the implicit, which is we don't lie, more explicit.
When that sounds like something a parent that's helped, you know, a healthy parent with strong, you know, personal boundaries about ethics would model for their child.
What about for households like mine where lying was the norm, more or less?
Is there a way that the solution is for the parents to stop being lying, to stop lying?
Yeah.
I mean, there's no magic.
Right.
There's no magic bullet that's going to solve a household where that is the norm.
Right.
And so what I would say, and this is the whole concept of the voluntary family, is I would say that if you were raised by parents who were pathological liars and remain pathological liars, you don't have to spend any time with them.
Yeah.
Because you can't have relationships with people who are lying all the time.
Yeah.
There's no real person there, right?
Yeah.
And so the incentive to stop lying is, you know, now the idea has become fairly mainstream that if you have neglectful or abusive or deceptive parents, you don't have to spend time with them as adults.
And what that does, of course, is there are now negative consequences to lying to your children, which is that they may not be wanting to spend much, if any, time with you when they become adults.
And maybe you don't get access to your grandkids.
So maybe stop lying to your kids.
Whereas in the past, if it's like, well, you have to be with your family no matter what.
And even if they're terrible people and even if they're whatever, then there's no particular incentive.
Like, who works hard at a job they don't like if they can never get fired, right?
It's not possible.
The reason that you work hard is because you can get fired.
It's one of the reasons, right?
And hopefully then you get the joy of the job and all of that, right?
But so, yeah, you would, parents can get fired if they do a really terrible job and they will not admit fault or reform or apologize or anything.
So I would hope that people would tell the truth to their kids.
And if they're not telling the truth to their kids, hopefully they would be incentivized by the fact that the kids might not stick around when they get older if the parents are like pathological liars or something.
I'm not calling your parents that, just in general.
But yeah, I don't, if the parents are liars, contracts, you know, and I know you're saying it's not necessarily a contract, but the implicit contract is you can't expect your kids to have higher moral standards than you do, right?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Or just victimhood, you know, status seeking, you know, sort of behavior is like I'm just trying to, I'm wondering if there was something that would have possibly, that would possibly help this head this off for households in a situation where the children don't necessarily recognize what's happening in normal function, normal functioning households.
And this might open up a window to where they can see what a more healthy household would look like.
Oh, yeah.
No.
And so listen, the fact that you're writing a book on trying to encourage families to be more moral, I think is a beautiful thing.
I hope you're not taking anything I'm saying as any.
No, no, I'm trying to, I'm teasing out ideas.
I'm just trying to suck up your best ideas, basically.
Peacefulparenting.com, you can interact with the AI and so on.
Yeah, I'll say that again.
Oh, peacefulparenting.com.
It's my free book on parenting.
There's an AI that is you can ask questions of as well if you want to sort of tease these ideas out more.
Oh, right.
I really appreciate that plug because I know this is a topic that you've sort of been famous for over the years and have struggled with this sort of type of neglect or emotional abuse or whatever you want to call it, this opportunity for more peaceful parenting.
I like that.
So thank you.
Well, and the question is, how do we make bad people good?
I mean, it's a fundamental question, right?
It's the fundamental, you know, if you're a fitness trainer, how do you make flappy people fit?
I mean, is it three groups?
Is it the people that will never change and we don't work on them?
But the people that say they want to change, we're trying to work on that group.
Yeah.
So there are people who aren't going to improve no matter what because they don't have a conscience, so they're too embedded in their corruption.
And I would say in general, probably the best policy with anyone like that in your life is to just try and get away.
Yeah.
There are people.
So there are people who are going to drown no matter if we try and help them.
And there are people who are going to get to shore if we don't help them.
And then there are people who will only get to shore if we help them.
And that's the group that you want to.
So people who want to be good, but lack knowledge.
So there are people who are never going to diet.
There are people who diet on their own.
And there are people who will only diet effectively if they get good advice.
And that's who the nutritionist is going to focus on, right?
And so we have to assume that I would assume, sorry, let me say, I think the best approach would be to target your book at the people who want to be good parents, but don't know how.
And that's something I did recognize.
Yeah.
And I'm trying to tease out.
Right.
So if they want to be good parents, then they have to be good people first and foremost.
Okay.
Well, that's a contribution right there.
So I do that.
Okay.
That's unique.
Yeah.
In terms of my thinking.
Yeah, because you have to, and if they have been bad parents and then they're changing to become good parents, they have to acknowledge that and apologize.
Okay.
Because otherwise they're just going to change behavior and the kids won't know what's going on and they won't trust the process.
So they have to own the bad parenting and they have to apologize, say what happened and why.
And here's the commitment.
And maybe this is part of the contract thing.
So let's say that they hit their children, right?
And then they're like, oh, you know, I feel really bad about this.
And they read my book or your book or something.
It's like, okay, I'm not going to hit my kids anymore.
Well, then good for them.
But they have to make that a sort of conscious change and they have to apologize and they have to say why they did it.
And maybe that's the contract, right?
I used to hit you.
I'm not going to hit you anymore.
And maybe that's the verbal contract, or maybe you write it down.
And maybe the difference is that, I mean, obviously I'm not a perfect parent, but I hadn't had any big reversals like that.
And so maybe that contract is I am like parole or something.
I did bad things.
I'm not doing bad things anymore.
And here's my commitment.
Or would it be even in the reverse?
Maybe the child that has veered off of the norms in that household that have been role modeled, maybe that would be the contract that the child would sign towards this household.
No, no, okay.
No, it's the parents' job.
Okay.
Yeah, it's the parent's job.
No, but I mean, if the child's parent can't say that the child went off the rails when the parents are driving the train, right?
Okay, but if but do you think it would ever be appropriate for a parent that had modeled proper ethics and then the child had made a mistake to sign an apology letter?
Well, no, you don't apologize for a mistake.
Okay.
I mean, if we're asking the parent has modeled the parent has modeled moral behavior and the child is doing something immoral, then at least, you know, I mean, until they're adults and right.
But if the parent has modeled moral behavior and has explained the theory and practice of virtue, then of course the child will experiment with negative behavior, right?
Of course, they're going to have peers and right.
So there's going to be a certain amount of experimentation.
Like I said earlier, children will experiment with lying.
It doesn't mean that they're going to be pathological liars or anything, but they'll experiment with lying.
And, you know, most teens will, you know, they go to a party and somebody offers them a beer.
They might try the beer, right?
Even though they're underage or, you know, whatever it is, right?
So there's going to be some, you know, but you want you want them to be able to reorient themselves and get back on course, right?
So if you have modeled good behavior and your child goes off the rails, and I don't mean just like they try beer when they're 17 or whatever it is.
I don't know, right?
Just making something up, right?
That's not a catastrophe and it's not a big deal.
And I'd be the, I mean, I'd be the last person to be, oh my God, that's the worst thing ever.
I mean, I tried beer when I was 17.
Hell, I was going to discos when I was 16.
So if your child goes off the rails, then you've done something wrong as a coach.
There's something that you have failed to take into account.
There's something that you've done or some malignant influence that you've allowed into your life, into your kid's life, right?
Like maybe you put the kid in government schools and the government schools trained them, you know, particularly if they're white, say, or white male, to hate themselves.
Right?
So you have done something wrong as a moral code if your child goes off the rails.
So then asking the child to apologize, if you are responsible for training your child up morally and something goes wrong, that's on you as the parent.
And I think it's also unlikely that such parents will, you know, often recognize this or have the capacity to understand such new.
No, I don't do.
I don't do have the capacity to understand.
I don't think that parents are retarded, right?
They're not like brain damage or something like that.
So, you know, we're not talking IQ70 parents.
I don't even know what to say.
I'm not even talking about that.
particularly part of the conversation.
But some people, some conditions really prevent the ability to self-reflect and sort of...
Sorry, what do you mean?
Well, there's some psychological conditions where people lack the ability to empathize and reflect on their own behaviors and so forth.
I mean, they're constantly the victim and other people are constantly to blame.
Well, but that wouldn't be part of this conversation anyway, right?
They're not reading these books.
They're not reflecting this.
Right.
They're not in a group that's trying to improve.
Right.
Okay.
Yeah.
It's like you don't sell mirrors to blind people, right?
I mean, you see, Steve, Ray Charles got no pictures on the wall, right?
So, so yeah, they're not part of the market.
So we don't need to, you know, we don't need to sell things to people where there's no market, right?
And so the market would be for people who are seeking to be better parents for them to create some sort of contract.
You do go back to that and sort of well, no, the contract has to be with themselves.
Okay.
And the reciprocity with the children.
So my contract with myself is tell the truth.
Okay.
And I modeled that for my daughter and, you know, and on the rare times where she deviated from that, or, you know, occasionally whatever, she would catch me in something that wasn't particularly honest or direct and whatever it is, right?
So we'd have a conversation about that.
And, but, you know, the general is, do you like it when I lie to you?
No.
Can you trust me if I lie to you consistently?
Like if I'm lying to you a lot?
No.
Right.
Can you plan your time with me if you can never trust whether I'm going to actually do what I say I'm going to do?
Right.
Do you like me as much when I lie to you?
Right.
All these kinds of things.
Right.
And so just that sort of general reciprocity thing to understand that I'm a person, you're a person.
I'm not some magical father figure who's immune from emotions and motivations.
And it's not a good idea to lie.
I mean, we know all the reasons why, right?
Because you end up, honest people don't want to spend time with you and you can't trust yourself and you end up exploiting people and you will end up unhappy.
You can't love people who lie on a continual basis because you don't even really know who they are and we can only love virtue and all this kind of stuff, right?
So you just make the passionate case and you model it yourself.
And to me, I mean, there could be some weird genetic thing.
I don't know, right?
But for the most part, if you teach your kid English and you don't teach them Japanese, the odds of them growing up and speaking Japanese are zero, right?
And if you teach your kids virtue and you don't teach them vice, the odds of them growing up to be corrupt or immoral is virtually zero.
Okay.
Yeah.
All right.
I'm going to if there's any last question, but I'm going to, I'm getting kind of peckish.
So sometimes the demands of the body will overwhelm the requirements of philosophy.
But yeah, if there's anything else that you wanted to say at the end, I appreciate that.
No, that was great.
Thank you very much for weighing in on those ideas.
I appreciate that.
And thank you, everyone, so much for these lovely conversations.
Free, you know the rule.
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