It is snowing like God's got infinite dandruff and can't stop sneezing.
It's just that kind of day.
So if you're out there, drive in slow motion.
It's like underwater driving.
Everything is slow motion when you drive in the snow.
And for those of you teaching teenagers how to drive, enjoy, enjoy the experience.
I learned to drive actually when I was working up north, and I learned to drive on a very old truck with a terrible transmission, and you had to change all the gears by hand and kind of cross your fingers.
And the guy who was teaching me how to drive had a coffee test.
So he'd have a coffee with no lid.
And if I could change the gears and start and stop without him spilling his coffee, he considered that a plus.
And I ended up taking my driver's test in a town that was so small, they couldn't even figure out how I handled traffic lights.
Why?
Well, because there were no traffic lights.
It was that small a town.
So I hope you're having a great day.
I would love to hear thoughts, questions, issues, challenges, problems, criticisms, whatever is on your tasty, biodegradable minds.
I'm all ears.
I mean, I wanted to mention a little bit about something I think is important.
And this is not going to be specifically philosophical.
It's not going to be specifically political, although I suppose it has elements of those.
But I just wanted to sort of drop in.
And since it's the end of the year, which is a time of rumination and review, at least for me, I think for most people.
But I just wanted to talk about how much of the modern world is designed, designed, I say, to remove from your heart the capacity and experience of love.
The capacity and experience of love.
And it does this in a variety of ways.
It makes men fearful of women and women suspicious of men.
One of the key ways in which love is denied or stripped from the hearts of the general population is, you know, the entire purpose of modern education seems to be to denigrate boys and to praise girls.
You go girl, girl boss, don't settle, live your best life.
It's just kind of an annoying phrase.
But it pumps women's vanity up to the point where I saw this video of this woman.
I hate to say mid because everyone's, you know, most people are beautiful in their own way.
I mean, maintain a healthy weight, exercise, eat well, and you're going to be pretty attractive as a whole.
But, you know, attractive, you know, a seven or whatever.
And she was complaining that she's like, I'm in LA and I'm like, I go on hinge and I'm like, I just have the requirements.
He's got to be between 25 and 34 and 6'4.
The height fetish is wild and is relatively new in society.
And, you know, someone did the math that there were like, I don't know, 7,000 men in LA who were six foot four and above, because it's very rare.
And, you know, 3% a change of people are on hinge.
So she's looking at 300 guys.
Potentially, just 300 guys.
And, I mean, maybe she has a racial preference.
Maybe she has a looks preference.
You could be six foot four and also 350 pounds.
You could be six foot four.
I mean, I remember I had a friend when I was younger, very tall.
I think he was 6'3 and really shy, really shy.
I actually had two friends.
One was really shy.
The other one had knee problems because of his height.
And that's something that's sort of under discussed.
Height is nice.
Height comes with less longevity because your heart has to work harder to get the blood to those distant vistas.
And you've got knee problems, sometimes back problems.
And it was actually pretty bad because he had knee problems, ended up taking painkillers, got addicted to them.
And his height, you know, at least for some time, kind of ruined his life.
It was a big problem.
Height is not automatic success.
Like everyone has this thing.
Well, if I had great hair or if I was really tall.
And it's like, oh, just look at those people.
I mean, you want to be as good looking and talented and wealthy as Brad Pitt and end up going from half-crazed Jennifer Anderson to fully crazed, oh, gosh, what's her name?
Anginine La Jolie.
And then you end up doing a lot of drinking and you get into a fight on a plane and your kids don't want to see you.
And you end up, what are they engaged in some lawsuit over some winery that's gone on for years and years?
It's just, you know, not a great life.
So it's not a magic solution.
And what is it now that one of them, I think it's Tinder, is now doing height verification.
In other words, you upload a bunch of photos.
It can kind of calculate your height.
And if you say 6'4, when you're 5'6, it'll say, no, please enter the correct height.
And of course, inevitably, there's going to be, can we get weight verification for women so you don't get fat fished?
I mean, you can get short fished, you can get fat fished and all of that.
But yeah, women who are like, I want a guy who's six foot four.
And here's the thing, too.
This is the funny thing about the modern world.
And this is, I think, what kills love more than anything else.
And I've wanted to do this speech for a while.
I have it in my notes.
And then I completely forgot about it.
Now, of course, if you want to interrupt me and give me your thoughts, this doesn't have to be a monologue, but I will say this.
You know, one of the toughest things in life in the modern world is to see yourself from the outside in.
Have you ever done this?
Really, really important.
You sit in a room, you're talking to someone.
Like last night, I was chatting with my wife after dinner.
And I look across the room at her, and we're having a great chat.
And it's really, really important to imagine being across the room and looking at yourself.
What is it like to be across the room, across the table, and looking at yourself?
Would I find me attractive?
Would I find me engaging?
Would I find me enjoyable to talk to?
Because this is, I think, a little bit more true for women.
But the I want, hey, there's nothing wrong with I want.
I want is beautiful.
I mean, you can't say I love you without having an I, right?
So I want is beautiful.
But what does the other person want?
So when women say, I want a guy, he works in finance, 6'4, whatever, right?
He's young, he's wealthy, which is a very rare combination, unless you come from money.
But if you come from money, you're not on hinge.
If you come from serious money, I mean, do you think that Ivanka Trump, before she buried that space alien, do you think she was on hinge?
Of course not.
If you're young and wealthy, you have family that guards you, right, to make sure that you don't end up making some stupid dating decision.
If you're young and wealthy, you're going to get your dates through contacts or through meeting people at exclusive golf clubs or the Granite Club, or you're going to meet people at exclusive ski resorts, but most likely you're just going to be introduced to people so young and wealthy, which is ridiculously rare, you don't have access to.
I don't have access to.
Like you just don't have access to those people because, unless it's just to sleep around, right?
They might let you off the plantation, so to speak, of wealth to sleep around, but not for dating with intent to marry.
The Lords do not generally date down.
They might sleep with the scullery maid, but they don't marry the scullery maid.
So if you're looking for young and wealthy and you're not already yourself in those circles, yeah, you're not gonna find them.
You're not gonna find them.
So young and wealthy is the equivalent, I suppose, of the male fantasy of the, she's a sexy librarian.
She doesn't even know how hot she is.
It's a great line from Stanley Kowalski in Street Car Name Desire.
I never met a woman yet who didn't know exactly how attractive she was.
And most of them give themselves credit for more than they've got.
So this, I say this was a female delusion.
There's a male delusion too, right?
But the female delusion is not having high demands.
That's, you know, it's fine.
You can have high demands.
But it is the equivalent of saying, I want a job that pays me half a million dollars a year where I only have to work a couple of hours a day at something I really love, right?
Look, is that a crazy ambition?
It's not impossible.
It's possible, I suppose, to get paid half a million dollars a year working a couple of hours a day at something you really love.
I suppose that's possible.
But the I want is tough because it's narcissistic.
To just say I want is narcissistic.
So when you see, here are my demands for dating, here are my demands for this, here's what I want, here's what I'm looking for, I won't settle for less than blah, Fine.
No problem.
But what does the man that you want want?
What does the man that you want want?
What does the employer that you want want?
What does the friend that you want want?
You look at your children.
You look down at your children because you're taller, right?
You look down at your children.
Maybe you're finger whacking at them.
Maybe you're scolding them.
Maybe you're crabbing at them.
Maybe you nag them.
What's it like to be your children looking up at you?
What is it like to be sitting across the table from you?
Can you see yourself from the outside in?
What is it like to be with you?
What is it like to interact with you?
What is it like to play with you?
Are you a sore loser?
Are you a crabby opponent?
Do people have a generally positive experience of you or negative experience of you?
Or is it just neutral?
In which case, there's no not even aversion and no passion.
What is it like for someone to come into your life?
You're at the coffee shop.
Maybe you see someone, give them a smile.
How did they, what do they think looking at you?
And this is just philosophy, really in action, which is the universalization.
Philosophy is all about universalizing things.
You have demands.
Fine.
Well and good.
Have your demands.
But recognize, recognize, my friends, that other people also have demands.
It's fine to want the world, but to want the world, you must offer the world.
The higher your demands, the higher the value you must provide.
If you want to get paid half a million dollars a year, working a couple of hours a day at something you love, okay, fine.
You have to offer a lot of value, a lot of value in those couple of hours.
If you want to be a life coach, I want to be a life coach.
Eternal cry of the cubicle-bound middle-aged woman.
I want to be a life coach or an influencer or something.
Okay, fine.
But then you have to figure out how you're going to add value to others.
I want, I want, I want is, and I hate the word literally because I overuse it, but it is literally infantile.
Infants want, want, want, and they do not think of reciprocity, and neither should they.
The freak babies who were born, who had massive amounts of empathy and consciousness of others when they were younger, and said, Oh, I'm sure mommy's tired.
I won't wake her by crying for breast milk.
Well, those babies died in the night, so that gets wiped out.
I think my daughter was about maybe six or eight months old when I was feeding her, and then she grabbed the spoon and fed me back.
It was lovely.
So that's when, oh, I like to eat.
That person has a mouth.
I'm sure they like to eat too.
I enjoy being fed.
I will feed.
And obviously, that was very early and not exactly full empathy, which is a tough thing to maintain.
Empathy is never predator, but it's often prey.
Empathy means that you never attack, but you are often, people will often try to exploit your empathy, and sadly, quite successfully, a lot of times as well.
But it is infantile to have a list of demands without showing what you offer.
And looks are not enough, ladies and gentlemen.
Looks are not enough.
Looks won't do it.
Makeup won't do it.
Filters won't do it.
Tabs won't do it.
Because if you're saying a man has to provide all of this massive value and I only have to exist, then you are not thinking about what the other person wants and needs in the relationship.
And women will say, here's my list of demands.
And then they will say, guys, exploit me.
They make promises.
They seem nice.
We have sex.
And then they ghost me.
But see, here's how the men know how to exploit you: is that you are putting out the signals that you want to exploit someone else.
You put out a list of demands that include height, wealth, good sense of humor, good looking, stable family, emotionally sensitive, intelligent, good conversation.
So you're putting out a list of demands without offering anything other than your genetic inheritance called looks.
And, you know, maybe you dieted and exercised and so on.
And that's fine.
There's nothing wrong with that.
But it's nowhere near the same amount of value that a man, if you want him to make like $200,000 a year, he's got to provide at least $400,000 to $600,000 worth of value to his employer.
Not just because, you know, I don't want to get all Marxists, but, you know, I've run businesses.
There's a lot of overhead per employee.
You know, the offices, the computers, the advertising, the marketing, the accountants, the lawyers, the, you know, all of that sort of stuff.
So you want, you want, you want.
So you're putting out a signal that calls to you exploiters because you're saying, I want to exploit others.
I just have to exist.
The man has to work 60 hours a week and have accumulated a net worth of half a million dollars.
All I have to do is exist.
And what that does is it says, I'm an exploiter.
I'm an exploiter.
And if you are an exploiter and you don't know it, then you will be exploited.
Because if you say, I want to exploit others and I'm not aware of that, then you will not have any defense against being exploited because you're lying to yourself about your desire to exploit others and therefore you will be defenseless against other people who want to exploit you.
People who exploit others and they know it, like con men and so on, they're suspicious because they know and aware that they want to exploit others.
And so that comes with suspicion.
That's why exploiting others is a bad idea, but it's even a worse idea if you're not conscious of it.
And in any relationship, and I'm a little focusing on women because it's the more obvious example.
It happens with men as well, of course, right?
But in any relationship, if you are not thinking about what the other person needs, you will exploit and be exploited.
Now, it's an Aristotelian mean, right?
You don't want to be selfish.
You don't want to be selfless.
You don't want to have other people serve your needs without thinking of their needs.
And of course, you don't want to serve other people's needs without thinking about your own needs.
I mean, of course, when your kids are very young, that's what you do.
But, you know, as they get older, you have to raise your demands for reciprocity because you are phasing them into adulthood.
And if you just serve your children without having any needs or preferences or pushback or feedback of your own, then you dump them out into the world where they have not been trained to think of other people's needs.
And therefore, they will exploit and be exploited in turn.
And, you know, I got to tell you, and I'm certainly happy to hear you guys' thoughts about this, but I got to tell you, very few people go through life thinking in a balanced way about the needs of the self and the needs of the other.
If you want someone to do something you want, which is fine, you also have to do what other people want from time to time.
And that's just recognizing that you have your needs and preferences.
And I'm sorry to sound so basic, but and I'm sure you guys get this, but it's more telling you about how many people don't get this.
See, I have my needs.
Great.
I have my list of demands or requirements or preferences.
That's fine.
But so does someone else.
And you're in competition with others.
If there is a job which is paying half a million dollars a year for working a couple of hours a day at something you love, everybody else wants that job.
And if other people can provide that, then the salary will go down.
The more people who want it and can achieve it, the more the price goes down.
Now, to be the lead actor in an action movie that opens a movie that gets people to come and see the movie is very rare.
It's one thing, and it's important to remember, it's a funny thing that action stars are athletes as well.
I mean, think of the amount of physical training that Tom Cruise has to do to go through to do his stunts when he's 60.
Or think of the amount of athleticism that Brad Pitt needed to do the sword fighting scenes in Troy, or that Keanna Reeves needed in The Matrix, all of the martial arts.
That takes a huge amount of dedication, strength, hand-eye coordination, repetition, dedication to overcoming pain.
It's a wild thing.
So it's rare.
You have to be good looking.
You have to have great hair.
Hashtag Bruce Willis excluded.
Although now you can just have hair pieces like Sean Connery did.
But if a lot of people can do the job, you can't have a lot of demands.
If a lot of people can do the job, you can't have a lot of demands.
And if you're just a pretty girl, there are lots of pretty girls.
Lots of people can do the job.
I mean, it's not exactly the same as running cashier at McDonald's, but it's not that rare.
I'm young.
I'm relatively pretty.
I'm not fat.
Okay, that's tens of millions of women in your country, or millions of women in your country.
And given that people can now date internationally, that's tens or even hundreds of millions of women around the world.
What do you bring that other people can't bring?
A lot of people will go and see a movie just because Brad Pitt's in it.
You can't do Mission Impossible without Tom Cruise.
Not, well, I was going to say, not every woman is willing to windshield wiper her legs like Sharon Stone in Basic Instinct.
But if you look at Bridget Bardot, not a lot of women are that attractive and good actors and willing to show that much flesh with a level of comfort that is unusual.
The late Bridget Bardot.
So you're applying for a job.
And if you are looking for a top-tier man or a top-tier woman, you are applying for a job that everybody else wants.
And you got to have the resume.
You got to have the resume.
If there was a part-time job that paid half a million dollars, everybody's going to be applying for it.
And if you're just like, well, this job fulfills all of my checklists, half a million dollars, couple hours a day, work from home, doing what I love.
This job checks off all of my requirements.
And that's your whole resume.
That's your whole resume.
I want this job.
That is narcissistic.
That is selfish.
And I don't think people see it.
I don't think people are seeing it because I see a lot of demands on social media.
And again, it comes a little bit more from women, but because there's a sort of funny meme.
It's a bit rude.
I won't say the rude word, but what I'm looking for in a woman, four out of ten, good at cooking, likes me, not a total witch.
But if you come with demands and you don't think what you have to offer, then if you've ever, I mean, I'm sure you have been to pet stores, used to go to pet stores with my daughter when she was younger and there'd be the litter of kittens, right?
Like, I don't know, six or eight kittens, six kittens, seven kittens, eight kittens.
And the kittens all kind of look the same.
And, you know, maybe you have some sort of vague instinct or some pleasing shape, or maybe some kitten meows louder or slightly more affectionate.
But if you had to roll a D8 to pick a kitten, you wouldn't really have a bad choice.
You'd be like, oh, I really want this kitten.
I can't stand that kitten.
Because they're kind of all the same.
Like teenage boys, broccoli head haircuts these days.
Half a fro, short on the back.
So it's not at all a 360 review.
And you're trained to I want, I want, I want.
Right?
There's a, I don't know if it's true or not, but there was a book on what men need to do and a book on what women need to do.
And I deserve showed up hundreds of times in the woman's book, or you deserve.
Whereas for men, it's you have to, you must showed up hundreds and hundreds of times.
If you only think about what you want and you don't think about how the other person is going to benefit from you, you will never, ever find or keep love.
All you'll get is fairly psycho fusion.
Fusion is when, oh, this is the greatest person ever, undifferentiated, merging, totally R-selected, which then collapses within a couple of weeks or a couple of months.
All the buried treasure that you think is diamonds gets exposed to the summer of time and melts in your hands and you get bitter.
Outside of looks and sex and money, how does the other person benefit from having me in his or her life?
Now, of course, we're raised by nannies, daycare teachers, women for the most part in government schools, at least when we're young, and they never think about what we want.
I mean, I went to a bunch of different schools in a bunch of different continents, and not one single school ever, ever, ever gave me a survey of, hey, what do you like?
What would you like to study?
What's good for you?
What's the best time for you to come to school?
What would you like?
What works for you?
Nope.
I mean, my local pizza place will do that.
I get a receipt and they'll offer me a gift card, competition if I give them feedback on the pizza.
But the people who educated me for, you know, 12, 14, 16 years, they're never asked.
I mean, our parents never say, how's my parenting?
What could I do better?
What could I do differently?
I ask that all the time, of course, on these shows, because I want to provide value to others, because I want to have a mutually beneficial relationship with you, the lovely audience.
So the reason I'm saying all of this, of course, is because I want to.
I think it's of benefit to you.
It's beneficial for me to have listeners.
But what I want you to do, and I'll get you in a sec, JJ, I appreciate that.
But what I want you to do is to make a New Year's resolution.
High resolution, XVGA.
I want you to make a New Year's resolution.
Two, for every demand you have of others, have an equal list of what you offer.
And not abstract things, support, affection, blah, blah, blah.
Not abstract things.
Because if you have a list of demands, let's say 6-4 or whatever it is, right?
Which is mostly nonsense, but whatever, right?
A 6-4-4 guy is for the other women to envy you.
It's not because it's going to bring love to you.
And because women marry the government, they now turn to the sisterhood for affirmation rather than getting their affirmation from men.
It's very tragic.
Just another way that love is stripped from us.
But be specific.
Be specific.
If you want a guy who makes a lot of money, why would he choose you?
What do guys who make a lot of money want?
What are they looking for?
How will you help them make a lot of money?
How will you enhance his status?
How will you enhance his reputation?
How will you be someone he is incredibly proud to show off?
And if you just have decent looks, it's not enough.
If you want a guy who's one in 100, you have to be a woman who's one in 100.
If you want a woman who's one in 100, you have to be a guy who's one in 100.
I want fantastic.
I offer is equally important.
Can you imagine wanting a guy who makes a lot of money but has no capacity to judge value?
You understand how insane that is, fundamentally?
I want a guy who's fantastic at making money, which means he's really good at providing and demanding value.
He provides value, but he demands value.
A guy doesn't get paid a quarter million dollars a year if he doesn't know how to negotiate recompense for the value he provides.
It's not like the union is doing it for him.
I want a guy who is confident in the value he provides and a strict negotiator for the value he receives.
A guy who is a salesman who doubles his sales is going to ask for double the money.
And if he doesn't get it, he's going to go elsewhere because he's confident in the value he provides and he's confident enough to demand recompense for the value he provides.
He gives and he gets.
He offers and he receives.
He provides value and he demands value.
That's why he makes a quarter million dollars a year.
Imagine the staggering audacity to present your list of demands to a guy who only fulfills at least some of those demands because he knows how to provide and receive value and not offering any value other than existing and not being fat.
Ladies and gentlemen, people who know the value they provide and demand in return value, when presented with a list of demands with nothing in particular to offer, will laugh at you.
I mean, they'll roll their eyes, they may shake their head sadly, but they will absolutely laugh at you.
I want a guy who demands value for value.
I'm going to present him my list of demands with nothing on offer.
You are excluding yourself from love.
Figure out what you have to offer and then make your demands.
You don't make a bunch of high-salary, low-work demands in a resume without attaching any experience or education.
That's Delulu.
Not Delululemon, but Delulu.
All right.
JJ.
Demand's so nice.
They named him twice.
What's on your mind?
You will.
Yeah, can you hear me?
Yes, you hear me.
Okay, yeah.
So I definitely have some points, but I wanted to get your opinion or your take on something.
I feel this might be beneficial.
So it's an indirect benefit for me.
Question is: if you are a parent, say mother, father of daughters, right?
And most guys with any self-respect don't really want a girl that's been around the block per se, kind of sleeping around with a bunch of fat guys and random dudes hooking up with them.
What kind of advice would you give to parents that don't want their daughters to be so loose with casual sex?
Right.
Okay.
That's a great question.
Tell me what you think.
And if the ladies want to chime in here, of course, I'm happy we can sort of have a three-way.
But why do you think women sleep around when they're young?
Or just why do you think women hook up that way?
I think it's you're kind of testing just how I think part of just being young and when you kind of have that sexual market value, you just want to see how far you can go with it.
It's like, oh, wow, I have all of these guys approaching me.
I wonder how good I can do.
And then there's also like programming and whatnot and like the media, but that's kind of my shoot from the hip opinion on it.
Okay, I get that.
Now, as far as saying, okay, how far can my sexual market value take me?
A woman could easily do that to get a successful husband.
Right.
So why do you think it would be sexual, like repetitive, repetitively sexual in nature?
Because again, a woman who's really attractive could say, oh, I wonder what kind of really high-quality husband I could get with my looks and charm and whatever it is, right?
So I'm not sure that she would spend that.
Like it was like saying, well, why did somebody buy a bunch of junk?
Well, because they inherited a million dollars, but that doesn't mean they could then take that money and invest it in Bitcoin or something, right?
So the fact that she has that she's in demand doesn't mean that she's going to satisfy that demand with empty sex.
She could satisfy that demand by getting a high-quality husband.
So I think it's not bad, but I don't think it's the final answer.
Yeah, I've never, I never thought of it that way.
I've kind of only thought of it from, I guess, from like my sort of perspective.
So, I mean, I don't even have an answer to why they would do that.
I would just be guessing at this point.
My guess is just, I think you said this before.
People want free money, not in the sense that they want a man that pays for everything, but they just want like they don't want responsibility.
That's my shoot from the hip answer.
Okay.
Let me ask you this.
This may sound like a tangent.
I don't think it is.
But in life, there's important conversations and there's small talk.
Nice weather for this time of year.
You know, that kind of stuff that you, the sort of general pleasantries you exchange when you're checking out at a grocery store or something like the small talk, right?
So there's some people, basically all they do is small talk.
And to me, you know, there's some sort of analogy, love versus sex, or the happiness that you get from love and sex together, just the sex.
So I think if you've had really good conversations, you get progressively impatient with small talk if it just goes on and on.
Does that make sense?
Yes, it does.
And it's not like small talk is, I mean, I call it sort of shits and giggles when you had, we had people over the other night and we had a really nice dinner and then we played Exploding Kittens, which is a card game that's actually quite funny and quite fun.
We sometimes play a card game called Cheat that is quite hilarious as well.
And so was that a deep conversation?
No, but it was absolutely like we were laughing so hard, we were crying.
It was hilarious.
And so when you have those kinds of quality interactions, can you stand extended small talk after a while?
When you've had really good connections, small talk becomes progressively less enjoyable because you're comparing it to something better.
Does that make sense?
No, I feel that.
Like I feel that deep to the to my core, like down in my bones, totally.
Okay, okay.
So how do you get your kids to want to have deeper conversations rather than just small talk?
Well, what you do is you raise them with deep and important conversations.
And then they won't be satisfied with small talk because they have something to compare it to, if that makes sense.
It does.
And I mean, you can see this on social media.
You can see the NPC talking points all the time.
And these are just people who are programmed.
They don't think for themselves.
Oh, Elon Musk took government money, you know, that kind of stuff, right?
Or so you can see these sort of talking points, these program points.
I would much rather be alone than in a conversation with somebody who didn't think.
They don't have to think like me, but think, right?
So I find with NPCs, and I don't have much exposure to NPCs, but you'll run into them occasionally.
And I can't, I can't do it.
I would much rather be alone with my thoughts than plugged into some empty phrase NPC regurgitator, if that makes sense.
Yes, it does.
Or with the people who you have a long conversation, they agree with you, you've changed their mind, and then a week later, they're back to saying their old original talking points.
I won't have further conversations with people like that because you might change them for a moment, but it's like holding a balloon underwater, right?
As soon as you stop, I mean, that sounds a bit aggressive, like you're drowning them, but they don't, nothing sticks.
They just return back to their old ways of thinking of their old talking points.
There's no point.
So sorry for the sort of long generality, but sometimes it's better to approach these topics from a less volatile standpoint.
And sorry, Davidson, I also see you as well.
We'll get to you in a sec.
So how do you prevent your daughters from being promiscuous?
Well, obviously you will show in your relationship with their mother deep and important conversations with mutual respect.
And also you have, with both your sons and your daughters, you have deep and important conversations.
You listen, you talk about life, you ask questions.
And then they look for the capacity for important conversations when they go out into the world.
Now, shallow guys who exploit women for sexuality, and women can exploit men too as well, but can they have deep and important conversations?
No.
No.
They're manipulators.
And of course, you warn them, of course, about all of this sort of stuff.
So you model healthy, romantic, and love connections with their mother.
So they say, okay, that's a relationship.
That's a good relationship.
That's a successful relationship.
And then you warn them about the exploiters and you give them a taste for meaningful conversation, which comes with the inevitable impatience with shallow manipulation and small talk.
And that way they're looking for connection rather than dopamine.
Or to put it another way, they get their dopamine from connection and good conversation rather than just being lusted after like an animal.
And so if you give them the higher aspects of human consciousness rather than living at the merely animal level, and of course, we are animals as well as humans, right?
So I get we're human animals.
So there's nothing wrong with the animal.
We need to eat and sex is fun and blah, blah, blah, right?
But if you expand the musculature of their higher selves, then they won't be looking for dopamine in the most animalistic of pursuits, which would be empty, our selected sexual activity, but no connection.
And so teach them the value of conversation, communication, depth, and a meeting of the minds.
And since they have that requirement, the bad guys will avoid them.
Because the bad guys don't want to know that they're bad guys.
But if they meet a perceptive and intelligent woman who has a requirement for good conversation, they'll realize that they have nothing really to offer.
And they'll avoid that person because they don't want their own shallowness and emptiness exposed to them, if that makes sense.
So your sons and daughters are protected in two ways.
One is they have a they get happiness from conversation rather than just empty sex.
And two, the bad guys will avoid them because the bad guys don't want to be exposed to themselves as shallow and exploitive, if that makes sense.
It does.
I do have a follow-up question.
That's kind of on the same note.
So let's say someone, this is like, doesn't apply to me per se, but just following up.
You have, you know, two kids, maybe, or maybe one kid, or you don't have a lot of kids, but your kids are surrounded by the average, right?
And so say it's a son or it's a daughter, and it's like, well, every boy out there is shallow, or every girl out there is shallow.
I have to fit in.
How does a parent kind of counter that?
And how would a kid deal with that?
Because that's tough, right?
If you're just like an outcast and you don't fit in that way.
I know it sounds shallow, but that's just like a real.
No, no, it's fine.
It's fine.
So there's nothing wrong with lowering your standards to fit in for a time.
There's nothing wrong with that.
So we live at the intellectual level.
We live at the abstract level.
We also live at the level of the animal.
We live at the level of conformity.
And so there's nothing wrong.
If I end up in a social situation with a bunch of NPCs, I'm fine.
I mean, I don't want to spend too much time there.
It's kind of like holding my breath underwater.
I mean, I guess it can go a little bit longer than that.
But, you know, like if I'm at some pickleball tournament, like I like playing pickleball.
And if I'm at some pickleball tournament and in between games, people are NPCing their way.
I mean, I could deal.
It's fine.
I mean, you could do whatever as long as you're conscious of it, as long as you're aware of it.
So if there is a bunch of low-rent NPC stuff going on and you want to join in with that, that's fine.
Just be aware that you're doing it and recognize that it has value in that if you stay off political or philosophical topics, you can have fun with NPCs, you know, just making jokes or whatever it is, right?
Although the jokes, if they're too NPC, then there's usually pretty strict boundaries around humor and so on.
But as long as you're aware that you're doing it and you say, look, I'm going to a party.
It's not going to be full of intellectual conversation, which is fine.
Again, we had our great chats at dinner the other night and then we had shits and giggles playing exploding kittens and both were fun.
Both were great.
It doesn't, you know, both are an important aspect of life.
So as long as you're aware of what you're doing, you know, outside of straight up UPP violations, which, you know, this is not something that this audience would be about.
But as long as you're aware of what you're doing, it's fine.
If you want to hang out, if your kids want to hang out with a bunch of people or whatever, like if you've got a son and he wants to hang out and, you know, it's not a particularly elevated blah, blah, blah.
I mean, it's fine.
It's fine.
Go enjoy.
And, you know, just be aware that it's a bit of a deviation.
It may not be something you want permanently.
You know, that kind of stuff, right?
So if that makes sense.
It does.
I guess it's kind of helpful.
I was kind of like going more along the lines with, say, like a young teenager that wants to date, but they want, they crave that substance and they don't want to be like the girl that doesn't get asked out the prom or the guy that can't get a girl at prom.
Just kind of how they would go about or how their parents would kind of talk to them about that.
Doesn't apply to me, but directly, but it does indirectly.
Well, I mean, experience is experience as a whole.
So if you've got a son and he wants to ask a girl out, maybe, you know, maybe she's not the deepest or most thoughtful girl, but he likes her, I mean, she's pretty or whatever, or maybe she's got a great love.
Yeah.
I mean, I would say ask her out because children also need to experience things directly, including bad things.
Because otherwise, everything is theoretical and it's just, you're just dependent upon the perceptions and experience of your parents.
So, for example, if your son is learning how to ride a bike, you could hold on to the bike forever and ever, amen, and he'll never fall, right?
But at some point, he's going to need to ride the bike on his own and at some point he's going to fall.
And saying, you know, you're going to fall is natural and inevitable.
So children do have to experience, quote, negative things because they need to be their own people and not just rely on the experience of others.
So if I have a son and he wants to date a girl and I'm like, well, you know, if in my heart I'm like, I'm not sure that that girl is marriage material in the long run, blah, blah, blah.
You know, you just talk and say, okay, there's benefits.
You can have some fun.
You can enjoy.
You have someone to go to the prom with.
That's nice.
Good memory.
And there's nothing foundationally wrong with that.
I don't know that you can stay home until the absolute perfect person comes along.
I'm certainly glad I didn't.
But at the same time, you can say, look, if you end up in a relationship with someone and you don't know if it's going to go long term, then you are excluding other relationships that could be better.
And weighing those cost benefits is important because, you know, when you're dating someone, you're not dating anybody else.
And so understanding those, the hidden costs of dating is important as well.
But, you know, they have to make their own decisions over time with some advice, but, you know, sometimes they have to fall off the bike, if that makes sense.
Yes, it does.
Thank you.
Yeah, with that whole spiel you gave earlier.
Yeah, super helpful.
It's just interesting how, like you said, people in general, men and women, just have their list and don't really consider the other person.
Now, that's interesting.
Let me interrupt for a second here.
Sorry, it's interrupt.
It's interesting, right?
Because you said you had a question, right?
Then you asked the second question, right?
And then you asked a third question, right?
Now, what would be, if you were really listening, it's not a big criticism, it's just a minor tweak, right?
So if you were really listening to the first part of my speech, which you're now commenting on, what would you have said?
I could have said I have a, I think what I said initially was I have a question and I have my own stories that I'd like to say, but I think this question is beneficial.
I should have said I have some follow-up questions that go with this.
That's not what you say.
Oh, and I know you're a smart guy, right?
So this is probably just, we all have them, a little bit of a blind spot.
So if you say, I have a question and I'm running a call-in show where there's a bunch of people in the queue, right?
So if you have follow-up questions, what should you do?
Ideally.
And let it be known.
Let it be known.
What else?
Ask permission.
Well, not even permission, but just say, I know you've got people in the queue.
Is it okay with you if we pursue more questions than I originally wanted?
Oh.
Okay.
Right?
Because that's thinking about my needs as well as your needs.
Because you were thinking and then also thinking about the other people's needs who want to ask questions themselves.
And look, again, I'm not, it's not overdramatic.
It's not a huge deal.
But this is just sort of a little tweak is to say, okay, so I'm talking to Steph.
He's got a bunch of people in the queue.
And I said I had a question.
Is it okay to ask follow-up questions?
Is it okay?
How does it work for Steph?
How does it work for his show?
Does that make sense?
No, that makes perfect sense.
That's my apologies.
I didn't make that clear from the get-go.
Well, but it's not a question of making it clear.
So you had follow-up questions, which is great.
And it's not an apology situation.
You have nothing to apologize for because if I wanted to, I could have just said, I've got other people.
I'm going to hold off on that question for another time.
So this is nothing you have to apologize for.
But I did notice it that I said you also have to think about what the other people need.
And then you focused on what you needed and preferred.
And then you wanted to comment on my speech.
So I thought, and I was thinking, should I bring this up or not?
And then when you started going on to talking about my first speech, I thought it would be worthwhile because it's an interesting, and I appreciate what you've done because it's an interesting example of thinking about what the other person needs in a conversation, if that makes sense.
It does.
Just a slight pushback on that because what I had wanted to talk about, I had some stories, but I held off on those and I tried to ask a question that would benefit like the parents in the room that indirectly would benefit me.
But I'm not privy to that thought process.
All I hear is you wanting more answers without asking whether that's good or bad for the conversations.
Because again, I'm not privy to your secret thoughts, if that makes sense.
Yes.
So, and also you can say, Steph, you've been doing this for over 20 years.
Do you think this next question would be beneficial?
It's not a question I need answered, but do you think it would be beneficial for the audience as a whole?
But you made that decision for me and went on as if I'd been part of the conversation when I hadn't.
And again, it's not a big criticism or anything like that.
It's just an interesting thing that happened that I would recommend mulling over in yourself to say, okay, if I'm in, this is, I was sort of thinking earlier, though, this isn't you.
This is the people who sort of call in on speakerphone in a windy place with a lot of background noise.
And it's like they're only thinking about their own needs, what might be best for the conversation or the show as a whole.
And again, I'm not putting you in that category, but it's just that's a sort of further extreme of that.
And they were great questions.
And I think people did appreciate the answers.
That's just my suggestion is if you're in a conversation where you have needs and preferences, fine, fine, fine.
Also, make sure that other people, like if I'm even with my family who love me very much, if I'm telling a long story, I'll say, Look, is this interesting?
I want to make sure that this is interesting and enjoyable.
Because if it's not, like if I'm now talking to my daughter about economics or something, I'm like, okay, but does this interest you?
Is this important?
And most times she'll say yes, other people, but sometimes she'll say, well, I'm not in the mood for it, or this doesn't really hit me in a fascinating way, or something like that.
So just even with people you've known for a long time, it's just important to check in with them about their experience of the conversation.
So listen, I appreciate it.
And I wish you a very happy new year.
I always enjoy your contributions to the show.
And thank you so much.
All right.
Davidson, you have been waiting most patiently.
I see you, Tyler, as well.
And if you want to unmute, Davidson doesn't have a son.
Then it's David's son.
He has a son, David Sun, sons, and yes, sir.
Go ahead.
Yeah, can you please give us insight on what are the best valuable things that a man can offer to a potential bride?
Okay, give me a sense of how old are you?
25 to 30.
You're 25 to 30.
Okay.
And what is it that you want from a bride?
Let's start with that.
Willingness to, or a preference to invest time and resources into having a lot of children as opposed to other things and other moral qualities like caring about the other person, caring about what's right.
I don't know.
Okay, so you want her to be moral.
You want her to have a lot of kids, which means giving up on economic alternatives and being reliant upon you as the sole source of income.
Is that right?
Yeah, that's right.
Okay.
So those are your list of requirements and demands.
You obviously want her to be quite young.
If you want a lot of kids, so she's got to be sort of early 20s, I assume.
I assume you want a certain level of attractiveness and intelligence and so on.
Okay, so those are good qualities to look for, I think.
And it's a good list to have.
So what do you think would be on her list?
Kind of the mirror of that.
Also, willing to invest a lot of time and resources into having a lot of kids.
You know, long-term making decisions that allow one to provide a lot of resources to her and her children, to the household.
So money making.
Sorry, I just be less abstract.
So she needs money, right?
Yeah.
Okay.
So she wants a guy with a high income.
Okay.
Go on.
Yeah.
She also wants a guy that cares about her experience and her preferences and who's a good father, you know, not a pushover, able to stand for things that are worth standing for and give way when on, well, in general, on things that don't really matter.
So like emotionally mature and stable and so on, right?
Yeah, someone that you're happy is around.
Oh, yeah.
Okay.
I mean, yeah.
So, I mean, but that's like saying that on her list of benefits is stuff that benefits her.
That doesn't answer too much.
Okay.
Okay.
So high income, got it.
And do you can you provide that?
I believe so, yeah.
But you should have some evidence of it by now, right?
Because you've been out in the workforce for, you know, 10 years or so.
Well, not 10 years, but something like that.
Well, let's say you're 25 to 30.
So most people get their first jobs at 16 or 17.
And so you've been in the workforce.
I didn't say full-time, but you've been in the workforce for 10 years, give or take, right?
Yeah, yeah.
Okay, so you should have some idea of how hireable you are, how much value you provide.
You know, if you have your first job and you're working at, I don't know, a bakery or something, then if they give you a bunch of hours and they promote you or at least hold on to you for a year or two, then you have the ability to provide value.
So you have 10 years of rising income.
And so if you want a woman to have a lot of kids, then obviously you're not making as much money now as you will when you're 40 or 50, but there should be a good rising curve that has no particular upper limit so that you can provide for the kids, right?
Right.
Okay.
So good dad, emotionally mature, and so on.
That's fine.
But I think you're missing the key ingredient.
Yeah, tell me more.
So what is the biggest fear for a man in a marriage with kids?
Infidelity or divorce, maybe?
Yeah, infidelity or divorce.
Okay.
So what is the one thing that you need the most from a woman to allay those fears?
Commitment, loyalty.
Yeah, you need integrity.
Integrity is if you make a promise, you keep it.
And the biggest promise that we make in our life is marriage, right?
Right.
So you need a woman who is maximum trustworthy.
I agree.
Okay.
And because without the trustworthiness, nothing else means anything in marriage.
I agree.
Because if you get married to a woman, right?
And then the woman, if you want to get married to a woman, you say, oh, let's get married.
And she says, well, yeah, but you know, I mean, if I have a bad day, I'll just divorce you.
If things aren't going particularly well for a week or two, I'll just divorce you.
Or if I don't get enough sleep or, you know, whatever, right?
If you put on five pounds, like you wouldn't get married to someone like that, right?
No, I'd be thankful that she's honest to tell me that.
Right.
Okay.
So you need a woman who, when she says, I do, for the rest of her lives, she really fucking means it, right?
Yeah.
There is no option called divorce.
You work out whatever you need to work out no matter what.
Well, wouldn't there be like you said, no matter what, but wouldn't there be certain exceptions to that, certain extremes?
Go ahead.
Like, what if someone tries to kill the other?
Or I know it's silly, but.
No, no, but that's breaking the vows, right?
Because she vows to love you, and you can't love someone and want to kill them, right?
Or try to kill them.
So that if she says, I'm going to love you and honor, respect, obey, which is mutual, I'm going to be with you.
You're going to be my number one heart throb and the only heart throb.
And I'm, you know, dedicated to you for the rest of her lives, no matter what, you need her to keep that word, right?
You need to trust her that she's going to keep that word.
Right.
But then wouldn't she have doubts or wouldn't have doubts if the other person will see something that isn't major as a betrayal and a breaking of the vows?
Sorry, I'm not sure what you're saying.
I'm saying you need her to commit to that vow, and you're saying, well, what if she doesn't?
But that's the whole point of integrity.
Okay, let me try to clarify.
So if there are certain exceptions, like if they try to kill you and you consider those not exceptions, there are not exceptions.
Bro, bro.
If she tries to kill you, then she's already broken her vows and she's not trustworthy.
So you need someone who's going to keep their vows.
Okay.
Right.
If you employ the contract, oh, because in the vows is the very thing she broke.
Yeah, right.
Right.
Right.
So you say, well, what if the woman cheats?
It's like, well, but you have the vows that say we're monogamous.
In the vows, it's like, there's nobody else.
It's just us.
Right?
Going to be true.
Okay.
So you need trustworthiness in order to have a marriage.
Yes.
Now she is going to make herself economically crippled, financially crippled, career crippled, and dating crippled if she's going to have a bunch of your kids, right?
Yeah.
Does that make sense?
Yeah, it does.
Okay.
So she needs to trust the living hell out of you that you're going to be there and provide for the rest of her life.
I do have a reservation on that in that she has welfare to fall back on.
But I agree with it just not.
Well, and yes, and you can take off to Thailand where you're beyond the reach of the law, right?
So I mean, can I?
Well, I don't know, but I mean, I think some people do find ways to escape this kind of stuff.
So yeah, she has welfare for sure.
Absolutely.
And if she's got, let's say, four or five kids, then she can survive on welfare, but she's undatable for any quality guy.
So she can get some money for sure, but she can't get love because the guy doesn't want to raise five other kids, right?
Yeah.
And of course, if you divorce her, let's say you make a bunch of money, right?
Let's say you become some, you get $10 million in some Bitcoin goes up or whatever, right?
So you get $10 million.
Well, you can always say, you know what?
You're 45.
You can't have any more kids.
I'm 45.
I can have a bunch more kids.
So I'm dumping you.
And yeah, I'll pay you some child support for whatever's left over, but I'm going to go have a second family because then instead of five kids, I get 10 kids.
Right.
So saying she can get welfare is sort of like saying, well, but you could also break up with her and date other women.
Wouldn't I be financially crippled from the divorce, though?
Unless I was super rich, I guess.
No, no, no.
You got $10 million.
Let's say for some reason she gets half.
You still got $5 million.
That's enough to start another family.
Plus, you're making a bunch of money anyway.
I think that might be a bit unrealistically high number.
I'd like to stay with you.
When did I say it was realistic?
I'm using it for purposes of illustration.
Yeah, no, I agree with that.
I like to stay with illustrations that are more relevant.
The number one thing that you need is, and the number one thing that she needs is trustworthiness.
So the question is, how do I know if a woman is trustworthy?
Consistency, well, consistency between her actions and what she says.
Well, she needs to have a moral standard that she subsumes her ego to.
She has to have something larger than herself that she is willing to sacrifice her ego, her preferences in the moment to.
Like if you're a great trainer and you want to train a great athlete, the athlete has to be willing to do stuff that's difficult and hard when they don't want to, right?
Yes.
So they have to have a standard above immediate gratification in order to sacrifice immediate gratification for the sake of the long-term good of the family, of the children, of you, of herself, right?
So she has to have a standard of behavior.
She has to have morals that she has a track record of sticking to, right?
Which is why men don't want women with a high body count, because it means that she has been hedonistic, which means she doesn't have a set of moral standards that she's willing to stick to despite it being uncomfortable or less pleasant in the moment.
Does that make sense?
Yes.
Is it equally valid if her moral standards come from her religion?
Well, that's a challenge because religious standards drift.
So, for instance, women used to consistently vote conservative.
And then you got a bunch of woke priests and woke this, that, and the other.
And then they sort of shifted mind-wise to go elsewhere for the then I'll vote left.
So the problem is that if you have a woman, let's say she's a Christian and she's conservative and the trad wife kind of thing, and she goes to a church, but then let's say that some woke priest ends up taking over the church and starts talking to her about the patriarchy and feminism and like God knows what you name it, then those things can drift.
It's not for certain that that will happen, of course, right?
But it certainly is not beyond the realm of possibility.
So whatever standards they are, they have to be immune to change.
And so this is why I like UPB and...
I'm sorry?
Is that possible?
Sure, it's possible.
Yeah, I mean, I'm not going to go become a thief, right?
Right.
I'm not going to go become a murderer.
I'm not going to go commit terrible crimes, or even non-terrible crimes, right?
So, yeah, for sure.
Yeah, it's not only very, it's very possible that people have moral standards.
So, if the woman has, if she's conservative and traditional from a religious standpoint, then she has to have a commitment to that, that if the church goes woke, what does she do?
I mean, would you be able to interrupt that process if you're there with her and you see that?
No, no, because she's got to have her own integrity.
Because if she changes based on you, then she's not particularly trustworthy, right?
So if she's a traditional Christian and the church goes woke, what does she do?
I'm not sure.
I mean, she might go with it.
She might reject it.
She go to a new church.
Right.
Right.
Ideally, yeah.
Well, I mean, that would be to have integrity.
Yes.
It would be to have integrity to principles rather than people.
Because if her Christianity is whatever the priest says, well, let's say the old priest dies and a new priest comes along who's woke, then she's going to go woke.
And right.
So she doesn't have her own internal integrity.
So if she has fidelity to principles rather than people, then she's trustworthy.
If her principles are just whatever people tell her, then she's not trustworthy.
So if I know people can change their mind about moral questions, wouldn't she be able to change her mind if it's not based on people?
Well, sure, but fidelity to principles like reason and evidence means if new evidence comes along, if better arguments are made, you don't break integrity by following principles.
But you do break integrity by never changing your mind, no matter what information or arguments come along.
That makes sense.
Right.
So fidelity to principles, you want your wife, your husband to change their mind according to reason and evidence because new reason and evidence will always be coming along.
And you want to be able to negotiate with each other according to reason and evidence, right?
So if she comes up with a better argument than you have, then you go with that.
If you come up with a better argument than she has, so that's how you trust people is that they have fidelity to principles, not to conclusions.
Okay.
So you have to, and you don't have to answer this question, of course, but you have to show fidelity to principles.
So you have to have morals, virtues, and ideals that you have a track record of holding fast to.
And if you have that, then you're trustworthy.
And then you can ask for trustworthiness from her.
If you don't have that, well, and then all of your demands will be somewhat foolish, if that makes sense.
Okay.
And so, sorry, last thing I'll say, and then I'll obviously you can talk.
So because you're 10 plus years into the dating pool, you better have that integrity under your belt.
You better be able to point to all of that integrity, because if you don't have it by now, in an empirical fashion, then you will not be trustworthy.
Like if you get together when you're 18, right, then you can say, yes, I have these commitment to these values.
She's going to have to, to some degree, take your word.
She'll probably look to your family and how you were raised and all of that.
But if you get into your mid to late 20s, or between 25 and 30, as you said, then, and I remember our conversation from a couple of days ago, but if you get into, let's say you're 27 and you've been in the workforce for 10 years, you've been in the dating world for 10 plus years, then you have to have already shown this kind of integrity.
Like a sort of tiny example is when I was dating my wife, I was in my early 30s, and I had good evidence of my integrity.
I was offered a staggering sum of money to work three days a week by an organization that I considered not good.
And I said no.
And that was all understood.
That was all accepted.
And, you know, she I talked about when I was in graduate school, the difficulties I had getting my thesis done because it was not politically correct, but I stuck with it and got my degree and so on.
So I already had evidence of good levels of honesty, honor, and integrity.
So I had evidence, right?
So the question that you have to ask yourself, and you don't have to answer it here, but it's a good question for everyone to ask themselves is, since what I want the most, what I need the most in a partner is trustworthiness, which means sticking to abstract principles despite significant discomforts.
I mean, I stuck to an abstract principle called tell the truth about important issues, though it cost me just about everything I built up over 15 years through deplatforming.
And I think that gave me a certain amount of, I can, you know, can point to that and say, yeah, I've taken some bullets for the cause, so to speak.
And so you have to have evidence of trustworthiness unless you're dating very early.
And so a woman who is trustworthy is and knows why she's trustworthy.
And the only way to be trustworthy is to have these standards and stick to them.
So a woman who's trustworthy is going to look at you very skeptically, not in a hostile way, but very skeptically, and say, ah, okay, so you are a guy who wants a trustworthy wife, which is great.
Good for you.
So you want me to have a bunch of kids, which means I'm now going to have to trust you to take care of me financially for the rest of my life.
And as a guy, your body is not going to get ravaged by the challenges of childbirth.
So if you want me to have, you know, five kids or six kids or whatever, then I'm going to get less attractive.
My belly is going to stretch out.
My boobs are going to sag.
It's just a fact, right?
Nothing wrong with it.
It's just life.
And you're going to stay pretty attractive as a man.
I am going to need to trust you to be to stay with me, to provide with me, though I'm aging out and often tired, exhausted, busy, you know, too tired to make out or have sex or whatever.
So, you know, my body's getting less attractive.
So I'm going to really need you to stick with me no matter what, because you're asking a lot and I have a lot to offer.
So she's going to look for that kind of integrity in you.
And because you're dating 10 plus years into the dating market and 10 plus years into the working market, you need to have evidence of this, or she's not going to believe you, if that makes sense.
Yeah, it makes sense.
I don't remember what else I wanted to say.
Well, what would you, I mean, again, you don't have to answer this, but it would be interesting if you did.
So if the woman says, okay, show me your evidence of integrity and trustworthiness, what would you show her?
What would you say?
I would show her my continued persistence to figure out how I can accomplish this goal of having a family and not get divorced.
That in spite of all the indications, I persisted.
And also that in the meantime, I did work to build a career and so on, more so than I needed in case that I would eventually be able to figure it out.
Okay, so give me a, if you don't mind, and again, you don't have to, but what she's going to ask you is: give me your biggest moral temptation that you've consistently overcome.
I mean, for example, mine would be conformity, right?
I want to be liked like everybody does.
And I know that I'm charming, witty, funny, blah, blah, blah.
I have some decent charisma.
So I can definitely be liked.
And society says if you do what we want, you'll get a lot of approval and will give you a lot of success.
And I want approval.
I want success.
And the big temptation for me is to be liked.
And I think it's fairly safe to say that I've overcome that temptation.
I've overcome that temptation quite consistently over the course of my life.
So, I mean, that would be, I could give you, I won't bore everyone with countless examples, but there's quite a few.
Not that I've been perfect, but I think I've been pretty good.
And so that would be, I think, the challenge that you would have to answer.
No, I'll probably have to think that one through.
Okay.
And listen, I appreciate that.
It's great questions.
And I really do.
It's funny how that sort of fits maybe not by accident, but it fits very well into the theme of here's what I want.
What does the other person want?
So she's going to want evidence of massive amounts of integrity and trustworthiness because she's putting her entire life in your hands or balls, I suppose.
So she's going to need for you to be super trustworthy, and you're going to have to provide evidence of that.
Again, because you're not dating at the beginning, you're going to need to provide evidence for that, for her to consider you.
So I appreciate the conversation.
Have yourself a super happy new year.
And let us talk to Tyler Tytai.
What's on your mind?
Yes, I'd like your input on kind of a thought that I've had that plays off probably with both callers.
Funny enough, last time I talked, I think I was after JJ too.
But so the first conversation was about helping children navigate NPCs.
And I've actually was thinking about this yesterday, and I've always had the thought of when I do have children, I'd like to approach not in an overbearing way, but kind of like legacy-minded conversations and instilling in my children, not legacy in a Game of Thrones, like will to power, smash others to get what you want, more in reputational legacy.
And I ain't that, you know, I was thinking about this and I'd want my kids to be virtuous, right?
I'd want them to defend the weak, tell the truth, mean what they say, things like that.
And that way, when they do navigate life and NPCs and situations, that I'm not the proverbial father holding on to the bike forever.
I can let go.
And even if the bike does fall, at least the bike is still strong and has a reputation.
Does that make sense?
Let me ask you a couple of questions, if you don't mind before I answer that.
Sorry to be answering a question with a question.
How old are you?
32.
32.
And do you live alone?
No.
Okay.
And how often would you say you engage in meaningful conversations on any given day or week?
Pretty often.
Okay.
And do you find that other people easily follow what it is that you have to say?
Usually.
Okay.
Do you think that this is one of those times?
You have to tell me.
No, no, I'm asking you.
Do you think?
It's not a criticism.
I'm sure some of it's ambiguous, but because it was long, but sure.
Okay.
So you said legacy, what was it?
Legacy mind, instilling like a legacy-minded framework for children.
Okay.
So do you think that I know what a legacy-minded framework is?
Well, I use the word reputation as well.
So that kind of puts it in.
Okay, so legacy-minded something to do with reputation.
Do you think that I know what that means?
And I'm not trying to nag or anything.
I'm just genuinely curious.
I think most people understood what I was saying.
Yeah.
I hope that's true.
It's impossible.
It's impossible.
But I can elaborate.
No, no, because my question is, do you think that you're comprehensible to begin with?
So, and I'll sort of tell you why.
So legacy is a very ambiguous word, right?
Legacy can mean the impression you leave on the world.
It could be positive or negative.
It's not moral, right?
I mean, Stalin has a legacy.
It can also mean financial stuff.
You know, leaving a legacy for your children can include money or property.
And I didn't think that you were talking about it in that way.
So legacy means simply impressions that you leave on people or the world.
And legacy generally means more the world than people.
Right.
And the way that I followed when I mentioned legacy was not Game of Thrones will to power, which is you versus how the world perceives you, right?
And then I went on a long mentioning virtues, right?
I want my children to be virtuous.
Okay.
Do you think that virtue is a clear word for most people?
Or does it mean different things to different people?
You gave some examples, but do you think?
Yeah, it means different things for different people, for sure.
Now, with regards to reputation, reputational legacy, do you think that reputation can be ambiguous?
I hope not.
One would hope not.
Okay.
Have you ever heard that I, in many circles, have an extremely negative reputation?
Yes.
Okay.
So do you think that is the result of me being a good guy or a bad guy?
No.
No, it's the world's posture, right?
Okay, so I have a bad reputation because I'm a good guy.
Which you've mentioned earlier, actually probably like three minutes ago about how you get rewarded in the world for being a conformist, right?
Sure, sure.
Okay, so, and this is around moral stuff as well.
So you talked about honesty.
Would you say that I have a reasonable commitment to honesty?
Yes.
Okay.
So when you talk about reputational legacy, it's confusing because my reputational legacy, at least in the short run, is pretty bad, right?
To some, yeah.
Well, I would say to most, right?
Not the intellectually curious, which.
Well, okay.
My reputational.
And trust me, I mean, I hate to pull the authority on my own life, but I know a whole lot more about this than you do in terms of my reputation.
Is that fair to say?
Yeah, yeah, of course.
Okay.
So when you talk about reputational legacy, I'm not sure what you mean, because if your children are moral and good, they will be attacked reputationally, right?
So they will have a negative reputational legacy if they're good people.
Well, I mean, children shouldn't be challenging, you know, societal big problems like you do.
So that's, I think that's kind of not really the equivalent.
And the reason why I bring up the verdict.
Hang on, hang on, hang on.
So if we're in the middle of a debate, which we are, saying the reason is jumping out of the debate.
So let's just hang in there for a sec.
All right.
So do you think that children don't face peer pressure?
Of course.
And do you think if children go against peer pressure, that they might suffer from blowback reputationally?
Correct.
Yes.
Okay.
So saying that it shouldn't be to the scale that I do doesn't solve the problem that your children are going to have to risk reputational damage in order to be honest and do the right thing.
Right.
What about if they're taught things that are demonstrably false or obviously false in school, which is a big issue, right?
So what if they're in school?
Let's say you have white kids or whatever, they're in school and the teacher says white people are responsible for slavery.
Right.
Which I struggled with this very thing.
Okay.
So what should your child do?
Obviously, you know, children have different personalities.
Okay, don't, don't, don't start off with obvious stuff that we all know.
That's just stalling, right?
Okay.
Well, I'm going to ask.
Of course, children have different personalities.
Everybody knows that.
So don't stall.
Just answer the question.
I would hope that they would be virtuous.
And that doesn't mean jumping in the line of fire every single time an opportunity arises.
And hopefully my children would, when they first face that situation, they would approach me because I'd have a close enough relationship with them and I'd be able to say, you know, give them wisdom and say, you know, sometimes battles are not worth picking.
You don't, you know, the tall poppy seed gets cut.
But in your personal relationships with people at school or social situations, I'd hope people at, let's say, when they get to graduation, they would know you as being an honest person.
You protect others.
You mean what you say.
And that them jumping out in front of cutting off a teacher because a teacher is saying something that maybe they know is false.
That doesn't, I mean, that's a very extreme example.
And I don't think not every kid I have.
No, it's not extreme at all.
I mean, school has changed a lot since I was in school.
It's changed a lot since you were in school.
It's 20 years since you faced these kinds of battles, right?
No, no, at college, I was hard on professors when they were saying stuff that wasn't.
Okay, so it is a big thing.
And even if it's not the teacher, right?
Let's say that they have a friend who says white people are responsible for slavery, right?
Let's say that their friend says that.
So it's not a teacher authority situation.
So, what should they say?
Hopefully, they would provide them with the facts of things that they know and show the support.
And there'd be a dialogue between the two of them.
Okay.
And if it doesn't go well, they will suffer reputational damage.
Maybe, yeah.
Well, almost for certain.
But again, that person would be intellectually dishonest.
So it's not like they're losing.
Like, were they going to be friends in the long run anyway?
It kind of goes back to your marriage, the guy you were talking to before, like the woman's looking for somebody that has utmost integrity.
Well, that's just a filtering mechanism, right?
And it's okay for people to have that filter mechanism.
So now you're telling the guy who sacrificed his reputation that sometimes you have to sacrifice your reputation for the truth?
I mean, this is kind of more, this is more along the lines of children and why I brought it.
Okay, but we're talking about children.
So, and the reason I'm bringing all this up is I don't follow what you're saying because you're saying that reputational legacy is important and honesty is important.
And the two are very often opposites.
Opposites.
Okay.
You tell the truth and what happens to your reputation.
People will still know you as somebody that tells that has conviction, right?
Like that's not necessarily always a bad thing.
Like not every not every person is going to experience the lashing that you have have endured.
And I'm sorry.
Sorry.
Are you now telling me that not everyone has my experience?
Do you state these obvious things as if they're valuable?
I don't, I don't.
No, no, I'm saying.
If you a big lecture on two and two make four?
No, no, I'm saying you making the equivalent of what happened to you to a child in school is a little it's it's not as fruitful as I think it.
I think some people take it.
But you don't have children, right?
No, not yet.
Okay.
So for children, what happens in school, from an adult perspective, you say, well, that's not so important.
But for children, it's massively important.
Yes.
Right.
So I agree with you.
So I don't know how it's helpful to say, well, kid, the fact that your friends ostracize you is just not important in the larger scheme of things.
It's like it's pretty important to the kid, right?
Yeah.
Yeah.
But I mean, I don't have to be around, like if your kid's in school and they're ostracized because someone calls them a racist for saying that not only white people had slavery, right?
And that you and I don't have to go.
I don't have to go spend time with people who dislike me or who put me down.
But your kids, if they're in school, they probably do, right?
So saying it's not the same, well, of course, it's not the same, but in some ways it's worse.
Right.
But I mean, I mean, hopefully the school situation will be better by the time I have children.
And I mean, the pendulum is swinging.
So there definitely is a lot of realities being that the public is understanding about slavery and any other hot button topic that's been an issue for children.
Well, I mean, yeah, maybe, maybe for sure.
It's possible it could get better, could get worse.
Who knows, right?
How close are you to having children?
Probably within the next two years, for sure.
Yeah.
Oh, so you're married and your wife and you are.
Nope, nope.
I'm going to speed run it.
Sorry, what do you mean?
I'm going to speed run it.
No, I know what the word means.
I don't know what just repeating it doesn't help me.
Probably going to be looking very aggressively.
Oh, you're not dating?
No.
Well, now I am, but.
Oh, now you're dating.
Okay.
So tell me a little bit about what's going on in your dating class.
I'm not going to go.
I'm a candidate for running for governor in New York State.
So I can't get too personal.
Okay.
Got it.
Got it.
All right.
Okay.
So what's okay.
Well, I guess if you don't want to talk about your dating, that's fine.
But so it's, you know, you're in your 30s and you have no clear prospects for becoming a father, but you're dating.
So tell me what you meant, if you don't mind, when you said helping out the weak as protecting the weak.
Yeah, what does that mean?
That means hopefully being generous when you can be generous when others have less, not allowing others to use their power and authority to dominate others.
And that's socially as well, right?
So hopefully my child would be a person that would defend somebody from being ostracized.
Okay.
So, of course, the challenge with that, like not no murder, rape, assault, theft, 100%, right?
But honesty is a challenging one, right?
There's an Aristotelian mean to honesty.
Too much honesty and you'll just get hunted down and thrown off a glacier, right?
And too little honesty and you're not yourself at all, right?
You're just a slave.
Yeah.
And it's the same thing with, of course, of protecting the weak, is that there's some virtue and value in protecting the weak.
But the problem is the more you protect the weak, the more people pretend to be weak in order to gain your resources.
True, true.
Right.
So I'm just saying that there are these big challenges and interesting conversations to be had about everything that you said, but you presented it as a package deal that I understood.
But as you can sort of see, we're talking about things that are very complex and hard to define.
Again, reputational legacy and virtue, you talk about these things like they're tied together.
Like if, well, if you're a good person, then you leave a good reputational legacy.
And that is highly debatable.
And of course, I think that there was a lack of consciousness about who you're talking to, because if you're going to say to me, Steph, well, if you're a good person, you'll have a good reputational legacy without taking into account how my life has been.
I think that seems a little not thinking of me in the conversation or my experience, if that makes sense.
And it's interesting because we're back to sort of what's the other person's side of the conversation.
So if you say to me, good people have good reputational legacies, you can understand why that would be troubling for me, right?
Yeah.
Like in hindsight, do you see that that was not, I wouldn't say overly sensitive, but you know, you could say, with your exception or, you know, or something like that, or, you know, you are very much the exception.
But of course, I know I'm not the exception.
I know many of the people I know have also faced huge blowback for telling the truth about various things.
Right.
So when you talk about reputational legacies and virtue, as if they're simple and mutually understood and we're on the same page, we're not.
And this is sort of what I mean about, and I'm saying this to you because, you know, if you want to get into politics and you want to have a good relationship with a woman, you need to think about the conversation from the other person's standpoint.
So this is something maybe I'm a bit obsessed about.
So, you know, forgive me if I am perhaps tilting too hard at this windmill.
But I am continually thinking about, is what I'm saying making sense to the other person?
If I were on the other side of this conversation without the knowledge that I have, which is sort of basic teaching stuff, right?
And we're all teaching each other in conversations.
We're all trying to teach each other what our thoughts are, our perspectives, our arguments, our evidence, our emotions.
We're all trying to instruct the other person through language on our experience.
So what I'm continually doing, and I really strongly, I would order it if I could, not that I really would, but it's impossible.
But what I would do is I would say, continually think, what is the other person experiencing in this conversation?
So if I'm using terms that are ambiguous or ambivalent, then I will work my hardest to try and define them so that whether the definitions are accepted or rejected, at least we end up being on the same page.
So when you give me, as you did at the beginning, and again, this is just a, it's not some big criticism or anything.
I'm just really trying to encourage people to think about the other person's side of the conversation, is that when you give me a lot of ambiguous terms, then I do have to ask if you're used to explaining things to people.
That's why I sort of asked at the beginning, do you live alone?
Do you have these kinds of conversations a lot with people?
Because I will tell you, I am a professional communicator.
So you can, and a very successful one, too.
I think a billion views and downloads.
So I'm really good at communicating this stuff.
Doesn't mean I'm right, but it means it's probably worth listening to what it is I have to say that at least in this particular conversation, and I assume this is kind of a habit, you are not particularly good.
In fact, you could be considered to be quite bad at communicating these ideas because you use a lot of ambivalent statements without really understanding how they might land for the other person and you don't define your terms.
And if you want to have good conversations about abstract topics, you need to define your terms and you need to understand how your conversation lands for the other person.
So if you're talking to a human being who's had just about the most reputational attacks for the least justified reasons in sort of modern internet history, and you say, well, having a good reputational legacy is associated with honesty, then it means that you are sort of blind to who you're talking to, which means you're kind of talking to yourself.
And since you know what you mean, but the other person doesn't, you feel satisfied because you know what you mean.
But the challenge, of course, is to get other people to understand what you mean.
And that would be my strong suggestion on going forward as a communicator is to say, imagine I'm talking to someone who doesn't know anything about what I'm talking about.
Yeah.
Yes.
If somebody doesn't know anything about what I'm talking about, how would I explain it to them?
And it's true, especially when you use ambiguous terms like legacy and reputation and even honesty is an ambiguous term because people say honesty like it's just a virtue, but it's not.
As you say, sometimes you've got to shut your mouth.
Sometimes you might even have to lie to be a good person.
Right.
So and protecting the weak is a challenge because the more you protect the weak, the more people will pretend to be weak to gain your protection and resources.
So just about everything you said is a real challenge.
It's not simple and absolute.
It's highly subjective and it falls into the general rubric of a very complicated Aristotelian mean.
But you put it forward as if these were certain terms that everybody, including myself, understood.
And don't do that because either people agree with you or they don't listen to you, but there's nothing new that gets communicated without definitions, if that makes sense.
Right.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Point taken.
There was one last connection I could make that I was unable to do to include Davidson.
I know Davidson at the beginning of his conversation mentioned the exchange between male and female and it got brought up income and how the woman wants a lot of income.
And the reason why I wanted to tie both of them into what I brought up is because not everyone is going to fall on the highest bracket of income and the stars are going to align.
They're going to be virtuous, trustworthy, defend others and have a lot of money.
And what I wanted to express is if the next generation, if we do prioritize virtues in our children, that even in a situation where two people are not making six figures or the dream scenario, that they can still have fruitful relationships and marriages and children.
Yeah, for certain.
But there's no such thing as perfection in any biological context.
All right.
Well, thank you.
I appreciate that.
Is there anything else that you wanted to mention?
And of course, I wish you the very best of luck in your communication journey.
And I listen, again, I sort of hate to be Mr. Nag guy, but if it's any consolation, I nag myself all the time to make sure that I'm being as clear as possible in what it is that I'm talking about, which is why I do try to define my terms.
And of course, I'm far from perfect.
It is a very challenging thing to try and take the net processes of the human mind and squeeze them through the tiny apertures of language.
And so I really do appreciate it.
It's like trying to pass a watermelon through your butt.
But I hope that what I'm doing makes sense to you.
I also love, love, love the conversations.
I really, really do appreciate them.
And I do apologize if I come across as naggy, but I really do appreciate the conversations.
If you would like to support the show, this being the end of the year, it does give me a bit of a boost.
Freedomaine.com slash donate to help out the show.
Don't forget to go to freedomain.com slash books for my new novel, Dissolution, which is a great, great book.
I'm thrilled with it.
It's as close to perfection as I can manage, which I think is pretty, pretty dern good.
Shop.freedomaine.com for your merch and peacefulparentingbook.com for your physical copy of Peaceful Parenting, now with the condensed version.
And we're working on print versions of two other books as well.
So lots of love, my friends.
Thank you so much for another glorious, magnificent, beautiful, wonderful, and enlightening year of philosophy.
I love this conversation about as much as I can love anything except maybe the abs that are somewhere down in my holiday flesh.