And I'm going to say, of course, freedomain.com slash donate because this is gold, baby.
Literal digital gold, if I can get myself an oxymoron going.
So money, This is, you know, just a couple of caveats.
Of course, this is not financial advice.
I'm not telling you to do anything or don't do anything.
Don't buy or sell anything based on what I'm doing here.
I'm not an expert.
But I have thought for many, many, many decades, decades about the philosophy of money.
I became aware of money pretty early on because we didn't have any in my family.
I was raised, my parents divorced when I was very little, and I was raised in a single-mother household with a brother, and we had no car.
It wasn't so bad in England.
We had a pretty rent-controlled apartment and so on.
But shortly after we came to Canada when I was 11, my father, sorry, my brother went back to England.
I stayed with my mother.
She lost her mind.
And I got my first job at the age of 10 in England painting plaques for the Silver Jubilee of Queen Elizabeth II, the monarch, not the ship.
And from the age of 11 onwards, I had a, in Canada, I had a paper.
I worked in a bookstore.
I cleaned people's houses.
I washed cars.
I did just about anything under the sun.
And had two jobs, sometimes three jobs.
I cleaned offices at night, a travel agent's and a dentist and a doctor's, and made money.
And I've been sort of paying my own bills since I was about the age of 15 when my brother and I got roommates because my mother had left to go to Vancouver.
Well, we sort of encouraged her to leave.
And then I spent a year and a half working up north after high school, gold panning prospecting.
And then I spent two years at the Glendon campus of York University.
And I definitely got some grants and some loans, but also worked my way through university as well.
I emerged with about $10,000 in debt even after I got my graduate degree.
I did two years at the Glendon campus of York University in English literature.
I did almost two years at the National Theatre School in Montreal.
Then I did two years finishing up.
I switched from English to history and finished up there.
Then I spent a year working and then I did a master's.
And then I spent another year working in my sort of first gig as a computer programmer because I did a lot of computer programming as a hobby in my teens.
And then I co-founded a business and grew it.
So I kind of got from, I wouldn't say that we were quite at the bottom of society because almost no matter how far down you are, there are people lower than you.
But boy, we sure weren't far from the bottom.
We had eviction notices and I spent, you know, some not insignificant portions of my childhood, like short of food.
When I first got a job in a restaurant, I was thrilled because I could get regular meals.
I would hang around my friends' places hoping to get invited for dinner and so on.
Occasionally, I would not exactly steal food, but I would sort of sneak food from friends' places, like go into the fridge and grab something before leaving.
And I knew all of the places in the woods where you could get water.
And yeah, it was a rough, hard scrabble existence.
Oh, it taught me good lessons.
Yeah, I mean, it did.
It did, but it's not really stuff that you want to go through as a whole.
And I lived real close to the bone, real close to the bone, until maybe 2026, 27.
And then I was making 40K a year as a computer programmer.
And then when I started the business, I went to 60K a year.
And then within about six months, I went to 120K a year, all before 30.
And grew the business.
I worked there for about seven years.
I had a team of about 30 people and did a lot of travel throughout.
I went to almost every state in America.
I felt like at one time or another.
And did business in China and Europe and did conferences in Hawaii and all of that.
So that's not part of America, but it's not sort of a brag thing.
But what I sort of want to point out is I went from very, very poor, very poor.
And like poor enough that sometimes you really just had to eat food that was really questionable.
Like a little fur, scrape the fur off kind of stuff.
And you couldn't, if you burnt the toast, you just had to scrape the black carbon off the toast.
You couldn't afford to make more toast.
And I was able to get into the middle class.
And I did this, you know, necessity, obviously, some ability, talent, some opportunities, and some grace from people and some help from people.
And I did it, of course, a lot by thinking a lot about money.
Thinking a lot about money.
And I wanted to share with you some of the thoughts that I've had about money and how I think I have made good decisions about money.
And then, of course, I want to get your thoughts, your advice as well.
We can make this a roundtable.
So I'll tell you some of the major lessons that I've learned about money.
And hopefully these can be of help to you.
Now, when I started making money, I had people in my life who also started making money, not involved in the business and things like that.
And one of the things about, I'll just call him Bob.
It's not his real name.
It's a guy named Bob that I worked with, made some money.
What drove me crazy was that I went from making, you know, 3K and change a month to 6K to 10K.
And I also got a car allowance.
So it's about 10,700.
And as income went up, I did not have much of an urge to spend a lot of money.
I mean, I did out a little bit more, and I always liked to keep myself in good tech.
So I got a nice computer, but I also did some work from home.
But anyway, I got more money, but I didn't spend more.
I certainly don't mind spending on necessities.
I don't have any very expensive hobbies at all.
My car is eight years old.
I mean, it's fine.
It gets me from A to B and is reliable and safe.
So I'm fine with that.
I've bought a secondhand car in the past because it works.
I will lavish money on tech, but that seems like a good investment.
I think that's been a good investment for me.
So when I was 11 or 12 years old, my stepgrandmother died.
No, my grandmother died.
Sorry, my grandmother died.
And I got $800.
And my mother very kindly chipped in, I think, another $300.
And I bought an Atari 800 with, wouldn't you believe it, 8K of RAM.
I remember much later buying a 32K of RAM from a really sketchy guy in a parking lot.
I think it was actually smoking hot.
It got it up to 40K of RAM.
And I really wanted the computer.
I was happy to have the computer.
I really didn't want to spend my money on anything else.
And it turned out that that $800 plus my mother's $300, the $1,100 investment was one of the greatest investments of my life because I learned how to program computers, which then became a very well-paying career for me for quite some time.
So as far as the philosophy of money goes, I noticed that the people around me who were the least happy tended to spend the most if they could.
Some people were unhappy because they couldn't spend because they didn't have any money, but the purpose of life, of course, is not money.
The purpose of life is happiness.
I mean, the purpose of, yeah, I mean, the end state that you want to be in is happiness, because that's the one thing you don't get in order to do something else.
Like, why do you go to work?
Oh, to get money.
Why do you get money to pay bills?
Why do you pay bills?
So that you have a place to live.
Because if I didn't have a place to live, I'd be unhappy.
Or it's cold or rainy or wet or whatever.
So if the purpose of life is happiness, and if the ideal of philosophy is you organize your thoughts and actions in a rational manner according to reason and evidence, reason leads you to consistency in morality, because reason is consistency, and reproducibility.
So reason leads you to consistency in morality.
Consistency in morality is your greatest chance for long-term happiness.
It doesn't guarantee it, of course.
If you eat well and exercise, you eat in a healthy manner, you maintain a healthy weight and you exercise, this does not guarantee that you'll never get sick, but it is your greatest chance of staying healthy.
Things can happen outside of philosophy that can make you unhappy, right?
You can get T-boned in a horrible car crash and end up in a wheelchair and that's going to interfere with your happiness, at least for a time significantly.
Although sometimes disabled people rank highest on happiness that probably has a lot to do with gratitude.
So the idea and the goal for me behind finances in this talk of finances is to make this case for you and then hear if this works for you or if you've tried another approach.
So if you are rational and empirical, then you can be consistently moral.
If you are consistently moral, this gives you your greatest chance for happiness.
And this is really, really important.
This is really important.
The opposite of money is bad relationships.
If you act rationally and virtuously, it gives you your greatest chance at sustainable happiness, not like cocaine high or won the lottery high, but sustainable happiness.
But if you are virtuous and have integrity, then you will have good relationships.
Or no relationships, but at least you won't have bad relationships, which is kind of the key.
Now, if you have good relationships, then what do you enjoy the most?
If you have good relationships, what you enjoy the most is conversation.
And conversation is free.
See, reason equals virtue, leads to happiness, leads to saving money.
So in relationships where there's not a lot of happiness, there tends to be a lot of spending to make up for that happiness.
The people who ostentatiously spend the most tend to be the least happy.
People who are happy with themselves, comfortable in their own skin, have good quality relationships, need to spend less money.
Investing in philosophy invests you in happiness.
And when you have happiness, you don't need to buy happiness.
Now, I do believe that there's an Aristotelian mean.
If you're too stingy, it's kind of missing the point.
And I'll get to that in a bit.
If you're too extravagant, if you're a spendthrift, then, well, you end up kind of stressed because you're out of money.
You're short on money, right?
So if you spend too little, you're kind of stressed because buying everything is stressful.
Buying anything is stressful, even if you can afford it.
If you spend too much, then your life is stressed because you're constantly running out of resources or worrying about how to pay bills or things like that.
So money equals choice.
Money equals free will to a large degree.
If you want to buy a car, if you want to have the choice to buy a car or a condo or a candy bar, if you want to have the choice to buy something, then you have to have the money to buy it.
Now, of course, to get the money to buy it, you have to give up other freedoms, which is the freedom to do whatever you want during the day and go fishing instead of go, as in my case, to go program computers on a tandem operating system in COBOL 74.
That's actually the name.
We went from 74 to 85 when I was there.
Ooh, big step forward.
So money is choice.
If you spend too little money, then you have restricted your choice.
So let's say you don't really feel like cooking.
You can afford to eat out, but you say, oh, but that's frivolous, right?
Well, then, and then you say, well, I can't eat out because that's frivolous.
Well, what have you done?
You've simply removed eating out as a choice.
So you have removed your choice because you can't.
Not that you've decided not to, but you can't.
It's too frivolous.
It's too wasteful in your mind.
So that reduces your choice.
So if you spend too little, your choice is removed.
If you spend too much, your choice is temporarily increased in the here and now.
I could buy these 10 things on my credit card.
So your choice is increased in the here and now, but your choices are diminished in the future because you have to work extra hard to pay off all of that debt plus the great demon of the modern world or the ancient world too, interest.
So in the Aristotelian mean in the middle of the road, you have the choice to spend, and your choice to spend money should be to maximize freedom, to maximize free will, to maximize freedom.
That's really the purpose, philosophically speaking, of looking at your money and thinking about your money.
Am I free to spend it?
If not, you're not very free.
This is the Howard Hughes thing, you know, the guy who had like 14 foot long fingernails and shuffled around with his bare feet in Kleenex boxes, who was a multi-billionaire and spent almost nothing.
All these, you know, these stories of the people who die in mangy old apartments and have millions of dollars to their name that they never spent.
Well, they're not free to spend it if they're not going to spend it.
Money represents choice.
And you want to maximize your choices in this life because the more choices you have, the more capable of virtue you are.
Nobody says that an agoraphobic is making a brave choice by staying inside, right?
Because that's their default position.
That's what their messed up mind and body is telling them to do.
So you want to, in thinking about money, you want it to be little pieces of paper that represent additions or subtractions to your free will.
And you want to invest, of course, into things that appreciate, not things that depreciate.
Like, that's so obvious, like, but I'll tell you sort of philosophically why that means a lot more than what most people think, right?
So a lot of people want to throw money into depreciating assets, right?
Depreciating assets, cars, computers, clothing, things that wear and tear and lose value over time.
I mean, houses wear and tear, but because of mass immigration and boomer coffin clinging, they go up in value as a whole.
Well, whether they go up in price or value, right?
Price is the denomination in currency, and value is what that currency actually means, right?
I mean, as we all know, minimum wage is a lot higher now than it was in 1960 in absolute dollar terms, but it's worth much less in real purchasing power.
So you want to invest in things that go up in value.
And of course, it's worth going into debt even for that, which is why people buy a house with a mortgage, right?
I bought a house with a mortgage, my wife would, and I bought a house with a mortgage because the house value increases more than the interest rate.
And you need a place to live.
So you either rent or you buy.
And if you rent, of course, it's in perpetuity.
If you buy, the cost go down once you've paid off your mortgage, assuming you didn't buy so old a house that it just needs a bunch of repair stuff after that.
So, of course, it's a truism to say, and makes sense to say, you should buy things that go up in value.
Bitcoin not Teisos.
Inside joke.
So you want to buy things that go up in value.
And you want to maximize your purchases into things that go up in value because that's future freedom, that's future choice.
And you want to minimize your spending on things that go down in value.
That's understood.
That's pretty clear.
I'm sure everybody knows that.
The little twist I'll put in it, and again, I'd love to hear your thoughts on all of this, but the little twist I'll put on that is mating displays are an investment in value, right?
So let's say you're going out on the town and you spend a couple hundred bucks on a nice outfit.
You got a nice watch, maybe more than a couple.
You got a nice watch, you got nice Chinos, a nice shirt, you get a nice haircut.
Now, is that investing in something whose value goes up or investing in something whose value goes down?
Well, I would argue, and data really backs me up on this, I would argue that investing in personal grooming, in a gym membership and looking good, in skincare products, in hair gel, investing in that which makes you more attractive.
I'll just speak to the men here.
Investing in things that make you more attractive is an investment in an appreciating value.
Not depreciating.
I say, oh, yeah, but you throw out the hair gel.
And the gym membership is ephemeral, right?
It doesn't leave you with anything substantial other than some muscles and some hopefully unclogged arteries or whatever.
But I would say, no.
For men, investment in personal grooming and for women too.
But again, women understand all of this, so I'm just speaking to the bros here.
Invest in personal grooming.
Go to the dentist.
Get your teeth cleaned.
Maybe get some whitening if they got yellow from coffee or something.
He says, oh, but that's so shallow.
That's so frivolous.
No, not at all.
Not at all.
Nice shirt, nice pants, nice watch, nice haircut, clean, glowing skin, maybe a little cologne, certainly some.
I don't use antiperspirant because I don't like the idea of clogging my pores, but I certainly use deodorant.
And, you know, as a man, it's important.
I don't know what happens.
It's like things die in our armpits every single day.
I don't know why.
I don't know why.
I've put deodorant on in the morning, done some sort of work around the house, and then if I'm going out to exercise, I have to put it on again because, you know, I don't want people to pass out around me.
So that's just, you know, maybe that's just me, but that's just man, man, man-oog.
So, why is investing in personal grooming investing in an appreciating asset?
Well, because there's two times when a man's income jumps the most over the course of his life: the first is when he gets married, of course, and the second is when he has children.
The more attractive you are, the higher quality mate you can attract.
Now, why do we find features attractive?
Because they are markers for IQ.
Even features, good hip to waist ratio, reasonably low body mass index.
These are all signs of IQ intelligence and emotional intelligence.
I know it's a bit of a fruity metric, but just bear with me for a second.
So, the more attractive the man, the more attractive the woman, in general, the higher IQ.
Now, the higher IQ, the less likely you are to divorce.
Higher IQ people tend to be more reasonable.
They tend to be better at negotiating.
They tend to have a higher capacity for empathy.
They have a higher capacity to hold self and other in the mind.
Like, you know how you can hold like nine things in your mind, directly visualizing them in your mind.
So they can hold self and other in the mind.
And what that means, of course, is that they can say, well, if I were in your shoes, how would I want things to go?
They don't like selfish people, of which there could be very high IQ, selfish people and people who aren't so smart, who are good at negotiating, but in general, right, the trend occurs.
You got to cast your odds, right?
I mean, it's true that the guy living in the trailer park might win the lottery, but you probably should try and date a doctor, lawyer, engineer, or entrepreneur.
Well, maybe not entrepreneur, depending, right?
If you want some sort of stable income.
And this goes back to something I talked about with my friend in junior high school when the Adidas bads, Adidas bads, the Adidas bags were big.
A-D-I-D-A-S.
Adidas.
All day I dream about sex.
That was the joke acronym.
So the Adidas bags were very big.
Bare Naked Ladies sang.
I got an Adidas bag and a humongous binder.
These giant binders with flaps and enough vertical storage units for an entire Library of Congress worth of big pens.
So carrying around your stuff in an Adidas bag, having a big binder and so on, was high value.
And my friend's mother worked in an accounting office.
This is back in the days of dot matrix printers where you had the printers with the tears with the paper with the tearaway sheets on the side with the holes in them so they could be fed through the dot matrix printer printing.
And he would get used paper from his mother's office and he would carry the school stuff that he needed around in plastic grocery bags.
And I was not very well schooled in the subtle arts of personal attractiveness.
But even I, yay, yay, verily, even I could see that this was an unwise move.
And I remember saying to him, like, why are you carrying your stuff around in plastic bags?
And he said, Adidas bags cost like 20 bucks.
Like, my mother's an accountant.
Adidas bags cost like 20 bucks.
Paper is like expensive, but the printed paper is free, so it's throwing it out from my mom's office, and the plastic bags are free.
Now, this is before I got into Austria economics, so I couldn't really tell him there's no such thing as free, and everything, a lot of things that seem free come at a pretty awful cost.
And I haven't talked to that guy in quite a while, but I did track him into my 30s, and he never got married.
I'm not sure he ever dated.
I don't think he ever did.
So, saving a couple of bucks on an Adidas bag and some duo-tang paper does not seem like a very wise investment.
Investing in personal attractiveness is investing in higher income, because particularly for men, we have to have something to work for.
Why are there houses in the suburbs?
Well, to get away from the inner city, of course, but there are houses in the suburbs because women want them.
I have somewhere in my files from many, many years ago a comedic script for a movie Raised by Bachelors, which was going to be sort of blackfaced interviews to people talking about how they were raised by bachelors that would make them rub February on their armpits before going to school.
I was raised by a bachelor.
But men will, you know, the sort of typical example that men will have a place, they'll have a foot on or just a mattress on the floor, and they'll put their giant screen TV on top of the box it came in and consider it fine.
It's great.
And then women come along and make everything nice and lovely and pretty.
And they need stuff for that, right?
They need houses, the paintings, paintings, pictures, right?
Things like that.
You can't just, as I found out, you can't just have a bunch of two-by-fours with bricks you found from an old construction site holding up your bookshelf.
And my wife, in beautifying the place, is entirely right.
It's much more civilized, much more pleasant, and is good for the mind, heart, and soul.
So, an investment as a man in beauty products, I mean, for women, I understand this, right?
I mean, I have a photo somewhere in my photo album that I took when I was younger in a store which was selling makeup, and the sign said, Tools of the trade.
The more attractive the woman is, the higher-earning man she can get.
And the more attractive a man is these days, the higher-quality wife he can get.
So, for the low, low price of $1,000 or $2,000 worth of product and clothing, you can get a wife who won't divorce you because she's smart and verbal and good at negotiating and all of that.
And of course, if you've ever been through or seen a divorce, it is one of the most brutal economic disembowelings that a family, and in particular, if there are children involved, a man can experience.
If you have friends with whom you have good conversations, you know, you can save hundreds of thousands of dollars over the course of your life, both in direct costs and in opportunity costs.
One of the things that saved my bacon, not from a dating standpoint, but from a money standpoint, was being introduced to Dungeons and Dragons when I was, I don't know, maybe 12 or 13.
Because me and my broke friends, well, they weren't all broke, but we all enjoyed the game, would get together once a week, maybe twice a week, and we would play Dungeons and Dragons, which was largely free.
A couple of rule books, a couple of dice, some graph paper.
I think my friend was still bringing the paper in from his mom's office at this point.
Sorry, we used it for that.
But saved me a huge amount of money.
Say, ah, yes, well, dating is expensive.
Yes, dating is expensive, but it pays off.
Because if dating leads to engagement, leads to marriage, leads to children, then your income and your ambition as a man is going to go through the roof.
And for the price of a couple of thousand dollars of grooming and dating and things like that, like let's say you spend $5,000 or $10,000 grooming and dating, but a man's income often doubles with marriage and kids.
So you go from $50,000 to $100,000, $60,000 to $120,000, $75,000 to $150,000, whatever, $40,000 to $80,000, whatever it's going to be.
You've paid off your $5,000 or even $10,000 investing in dating in months, months, not years.
And you get to stay married.
And couples who stay married and couples who have children generally have the highest income.
And it's not, I'm not mixing up cause and effect because it's not like people just make a bunch of more money and then they can have a bunch of kids.
No, no.
You have kids, you lock in, as my daughter would say, you lock in.
And you work hard and you're focused and you don't waste time.
You don't diddy-dally, as some people say, you don't do any of that.
You lock in.
So it works really well.
If you're happy with your friendships, you know, this afternoon I was chatting with my wife all afternoon, two or three hours, really nice.
We didn't need to go anywhere.
I mean, our anniversary is coming up, 20, 24 years.
Our anniversary is coming up, and, you know, we'll go out for a nice dinner.
But if for some reason we didn't, it would be fine.
We just sit and chat about our life, about our marriage, about our friends, our families, and opportunities, thoughts, memories, just beautiful, wonderful stuff.
If you have a happy marriage, you don't have to spend much money.
If you have good friendships, you don't need to spend much money because you can say to people, come on over.
You know, we'll order a pizza.
We'll just sit and chat.
We'll play some cards, some Catan.
We'll enjoy each other's because we don't need to go out.
I mean, we can.
It happens, but we don't need to.
If you are happy with yourself, then you don't need an excess of showiness.
Right?
Again, when it comes to dressing up, when it comes to grooming, right?
You want to be presentable and attractive, but not some highly oiled P. Diddy metrosexual.
What's that?
Two guys in prison, Maduro and P. Diddy in the same cell, and P. Diddy says, Hey, man, they took my oil too.
You don't want to be deficient in grooming.
You also don't want to be excessive in grooming.
You don't want to show up to pick up your date on a bus.
You don't necessarily want to show up in a Bugatti, with all due respect to Mr. A. Tate.
There's undercompensating and then there's overcompensating.
In the same way, you want a woman who's trim, fit, healthy, slender, mildly athletic, maybe, but not a woman with BBLs and plastic boobs that she can use to rescue half an ocean liner that found us in the sea.
Were you in a car accident earlier today?
Because I think your airbags are still deployed.
So philosophy could really help you with finances.
Philosophy teaches you to be rigorous in your thinking, which is very helpful in business.
Philosophy teaches you to surrender your ego to objective principles.
And in business, of course, that's things like profit and loss and signed contracts, satisfied clients, happy employees, so things that are pretty objective, and you have to subsume your ego to something larger than yourself in order to succeed in business.
Narcissists will have some short-term success, I guess, as in the Menenda's father's situation, but then you end up being blown away with your wife in a basement.
So philosophy teaches you rigor.
It fosters a sense of happiness and self-satisfaction in your life.
And if you are happy and self-satisfied in your life, you don't need to chase the dopamine of buying, of purchasing, shopping therapy, retail therapy, I think they call it.
You don't need to do that.
When you have philosophical virtues and clear and consistent thinking, you tend to attract and retain the best people in your life with whom you can have a lot of fun.
My daughter and some friends of ours and I are playing through a game called Solasta, Crown of the Magister.
My daughter was a big fan of Bolt Escape.
We did a whole review of it, actually.
And the game cost us 12 bucks each.
GOG.com.
It's a great game.
You should play it.
It's a lot of fun.
And so for a grand total of $48, you know, we're going to have like 70 hours of fun.
Well, maybe 69 hours of fun and 70 hours of maybe occasionally crapping at each other for making the wrong move or doing the wrong thing in a high-tension battle.
You know, it's funny because, of course, games, you have to kind of take them seriously in order to make them more fun.
But if you take them too seriously, that's the Aristotelian meaning.
If you take them too seriously, you get too punchy.
It's like sports, you got to win, but you don't want to scream at anyone on your team who makes a mistake, right?
So we don't need to spend $400 on Rolling Stones tickets.
We can spend $12 on a game, and because we have a lot of fun, or like we used to live stream these things when my daughter was younger, or record them and play them, which was Among Us.
Or there's another game that's like it called Goose Goose Duck, which was free.
Among Us was free.
You could pay for some extras.
And if you have good quality conversations, I mean, if you have great friends, you can pick up a $4 pack of cards and have years of fun if you want.
Or you can just sit and chat.
If you have friends who are funny, or at least roll with comedy, do you need to go to a comedy club?
Yeah, I mean, you can.
I've gone to comedy clubs with friends, but generally it's funnier at home.
Philosophy will give you the happiness so you don't need to buy it.
Philosophy will deliver unto you the quality relationships so that you can not, you don't have to spend money to have a good time.
Philosophy will deliver unto you quality relationships that increase what you make and decrease your chances of acid mitosis through divorce.
And of course, philosophy, because you don't have to spend money to have fun, because you have good relationships, because you're happy with yourself.
Philosophy will deliver you into old age with good savings, with quality relationships.
And really, what else can you ask for from old age than have enough money to live on comfortably and to have good people to spend your twilight years, your sunset years in.
So the amount of value that philosophy can provide in terms of money is enormous.
It's absolutely enormous.
Freedomain.com/slash donate.
See?
Philosophy has even delivered unto me donations.
But I really wanted to make it about how philosophy can help you to not overspend, to not underspend, to aim at the happy middle, the happy medium, and to give you as much peace of mind and as much free choice humanly possible, to have the choice to spend in the now if that's what you want, and it will add to your choices, or to not spend,
to not spend so much that you have no choice in the future, to not spend so little that you have no choice in the present, to maximize the flexibility of free will.
And the more free will you have, the more choices you make, the more certain you can be of your virtues and the less money you have to spend.
So I hope that makes sense.
I'm certainly happy to, if you have any questions or comments or things you want to share or massive, wild and deadly opposition to everything that I have said, I would be thrilled to hear.
Or maybe you have invested time and you wish to get the payoff of rumination, of rumination going forward.
So I'll just give a pause for a sec here and I'm going to continue this conversation for donors, but I wanted sort of the first one because, you know, listen, I really, really want you guys to do well in the world.
I really want you to do well in the world.
And we are often raised with very distorted senses of money.
And of course, we have all of this, you know, marketing and advertising and, you know, industrial propaganda scales that go on that really all have to do with getting us to consume, consume, consume.
Society, of course, wants to transfer money from men who tend to be savers to women who tend to be spenders.
And, you know, both are good, but because it's coerced trans the coerced transfer of money through debt, welfare state, pretty fraudulent in my view, student loans and things like that.
Getting money from the hands of men into the hands of women, I mean, just go to the mall, right?
How many stores are there just for men?
None.
The answer is none, none stores.
I mean, there used to be, I was down at college in Queen in Toronto, probably is still the case, but I mean back then forever, there used to be a whole string of computer stores.
You could say, okay, that street, that's for the boys.
When you got to assemble your computers sometimes yourself.
But you go to a malls.
It's all women.
And the fact that women spend and men save is great.
You need, again, the balance of both, but the government has tipped the scales far too much towards women.
And the economy is fairly frivolous and fairly shallow and materialistic as a result, because it's not for the home.
It's for mating displays that don't consummate in actual marriages.
All right.
Going once, going twice.
I think I will stop here if I just wanted to sort of drop in and give you some thoughts about money.
I'm fascinated by money.
I have had the good fortune of being able to ask, you know, hundreds of people about their finances over the course of my show.
Like that, what's it Caleb?
Caleb Hammer, the guy with the Michael Jackson mosquito voice.
And he gets to ask people too.
David Ramsey?
Yes, he also gets to ask.
So I think if you have friends, it's okay to talk about money.
When I grew up in England, it was absolutely forbidden.
You couldn't talk about money.
But it is a very important topic.
And life runs on productivity.
The present runs on consumption.
The future runs on savings.
And the balance is where the sweet spot is.
But it's hard to find and it changes over the course of your life.
So I wanted to do the first one of these series out here in Le Publique.
And I'd love to get your feedback.
If you're listening to this later, you can just email me, hosth-O-S-T at freedemain.com.
If you find what I'm saying to be a value, I would be thrilled to get your thoughts and your donations at freedemain.com slash nate.
Shop.freedomain.com.
And don't forget your peacefulparenting.com for the book.