Feb. 16, 2026 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:27:53
The Danger of Eternal VICTIMS! X Space
Stéphane Molyneux critiques fiat currency’s inflation as a coercive tax, comparing it to historical coin debasement and the Netherlands’ 36-37% crypto gains tax. He warns against victimhood—like his fictional protagonist Robert in Dissolution—where status addiction leads to self-destruction, while real-world relationships demand trust over fleeting perceptions. Bitcoin’s decline is blamed on institutional speculation, not technical updates like Taproot, as fiat collapse looms amid Biden’s open borders and $6.2B remittance-driven economies like Nicaragua. Ultimately, he argues systemic financial decay overshadows short-term market noise, urging focus on long-term survival over fleeting distractions. [Automatically generated summary]
Hope you're having a lovely afternoon slash evening.
And we are going to talk about a bunch of stuff today.
I'm happy to take your calls on X. You can just hit request to talk.
And there's two things that I wanted to talk about sort of kind of briefly here.
And then we will get to your questions and comments.
So first thing I wanted to mention is, so everything's down, right?
Everything's down.
Gold, stocks, bonds, Bitcoin, everything's down.
Everything's down.
But why?
But why?
Well, the answer is, A, I don't know.
I'm not an expert.
But B, the answer as to why everything is down is, in my obviously amateur opinion, not investment advice.
The reason why everything is down is because everyone thinks that there's been some sort of kind of solution to the problem of inflation.
That's right.
Everyone thinks there's been a little bit of solution to the problem called inflation.
Whether that's to do with a tightened monetary policy under the new Fed, but everyone thinks that there's...
See, people don't want to be investing.
People don't like investing.
People don't want to invest as a whole.
Why do they do it?
Because their currency, their savings, their lifeblood, the jugular of their very heartfelt and hardworking existence is being hunted by the predator called fiat currency.
That is why people invest.
They invest as a defensive measure.
They do not invest because they are greedy.
They invest because the assholes who run central banking are greedy and keep printing more and more money so that they can keep handing out money to their friends.
So the way that it works in general is when you print a bunch of money, you give money to your friends, and your friends can spend it at full value.
And then as it goes like a tsunami through the economy, it loses value until those at the bottom of the economic ladder, those people on fixed incomes and so on, they really get it in the shorts.
They end up with monopoly money, nonsense money, paper, toilet asswiping currency, pretend.
So people don't want to be in gold.
They don't want to be in stocks.
They don't want to be in bonds.
They don't want to be in Bitcoin.
They don't want to be in any of this stuff.
They don't.
What they want to be is not being ripped off.
Not being ripped off.
That's the key.
Now, if there is a perception among the moneyed classes, if there is a perception that tighter monetary policy is going to happen, then inflation, which is always and forever not prices rising, but inflation of the money supply, if they believe that central bankers are going to print less money, then they don't have to worry as much about inflation, which means they don't have to be in all of these defensive bunkers.
You want to think of investments as a whole as air raid shelters, right?
Air raid shelters, Mrs. Spinner style.
So if there's a war and the air raid siren goes off, everyone gets into their air raid shelters and they eat their tin cans and they hope that they're not going to get hit by anything direct, right?
That's what people do when there's an air raid.
If there's no air raid, then you don't spend time in the bunker, right?
People don't.
You know, of course, I think about my show.
I have the same donation levels now that I did 21 years ago, but $5 is not worth nearly as much as it was 21 years ago.
So I'm losing money.
If you'd like to help out the show, freedomain.com slash donate, I really would appreciate it.
But I'm losing money by having the same donation levels.
But of course, if I raise my donation levels, people will say, oh, he's taking more money.
It's like, no, I'm not.
I'm not taking more money.
I'm just trying to maintain an income as best I can.
So I think a lot of people in the investment world have interpreted the signals from the Fed about a tighter monetary policy and have said, oh, well, that's great because that means that we don't need to be in the air raid shelter.
We can take some of our money out of these investment areas and maybe we can spend some or hold it as cash or whatever it is, right?
Because people like to have some cash.
It's kind of hard to feel wealthy if all of your money is locked up in financial instruments you can't get a hold of.
That's like burying your treasure and never being able to go there, right?
Like this guy lost a bunch of his Bitcoins in his computer, was thrown into a municipal landfill and he begged them to offered them millions and millions of dollars if he can just go and get his computer back because they never let him do it.
So it's like having wealth that you can't access.
So people like having some cash because they like being able to spend their money, right?
So when people are not as afraid of inflation, instruments, financial instruments as a whole become less valuable.
And this is why I would assume that everything across the board is going down.
And somebody says, I like real estate best.
Well, real estate, though, has become a challenge in America because of the deportations that are occurring.
Obviously at a very slow rate, but like 10% of various Latin American countries, 10% of the population was let in under Biden.
But that's why they hit the J6s so hard because if the election was questioned, then they wouldn't get to wreck the country with mass immigration, illegal immigration.
So if people are leaving, and of course COVID transformed a lot of businesses, and there's many real estate, commercial real estate is a big, obviously a big driver of any economy, particularly the American economy.
And combination of deportation plus the work-from-home stuff that came about as a result of COVID has lowered the value of real estate in some areas quite significantly.
So real estate is not also a kind of hedge.
Real estate is a pseudo investment, like it's a pretend investment because things seem to be going up in value, but it's all debt-based because mass immigration is driven by debt because immigrants are drawn usually by some free stuff.
So people are less interested in real estate because value could be going down.
People are less interested in gold because they don't need it as much of a hedge against inflation.
And people are less interested in Bitcoin and stocks and all these other sorts of things because most people aren't investing.
They are protecting.
They are trying desperately to hang on to Their money.
Your money is constantly being eroded.
And so that is the reality.
So that's the first thing I wanted to talk about.
The second thing I wanted to talk about is hit me with a why.
If you know professional victims, professional victims aren't necessarily those who make all their money off victimhood.
Professional victims are people who don't take any responsibility for their own bad decisions and constantly place the blame on others.
And in fact, if you want to give me a number of the professional victims in your life, I would be thrilled to hear it.
How many professional victims do you know?
Of course, most of them you haven't invited into your life voluntarily.
Most of the professional victims that you have are in your life as a result of family and circumstances and so on.
So I wanted to talk a little bit about the dangers of professional victims.
Gold recently hit an all-time high.
Yes.
And where is it now?
Let's see here.
Gold.
I think it went down a little bit.
I'm going to do it in the only currency that I truly grok.
Gold is.
Oh, no.
No, you're right.
No, it went back up.
You're right.
It dipped a bit and then it went back up.
Yeah, good.
Good.
So maybe people are no longer believing that the inflation is going to hit as much.
Used to be one recovering professional victim.
More than five.
Ouch.
Why minus two?
Okay, that's a little bit overly mathematical for me, if you don't mind.
Oh, we have a request.
Okay, let's take a wee call.
Maybe it's on the topic or related to the topic.
But let's take a wee call.
Stefan, are you a Brit or a Canadian?
I am a Canadian.
Oh, I live in Canada.
All right.
Let's see if we can get a caller in.
Joe.
Can you hear me?
Steph.
Yes.
Hey, thanks for responding to my request.
You were talking about metals, one of my favorite hobbies to talk about.
And I was wondering if you could go in a little bit about the divergence between the paper market and the physical market and what Trump's done with critical minerals, how that's going to put a floor on physical metal.
And what I think I see going on here is a controlled demolition soft takedown of the ETFs so that the banks don't go under when the physical goes cuckoo with revaluation.
And I'll stop talking because I'd like to hear your opinion on that.
No, you tell me a little bit more about that.
I've not really followed the regulatory stuff that happened with gold.
I've been following some of the crypto regulations, but you're saying something regulatorily speaking has changed with gold?
All kinds of stuff, stuff.
You know, because monetary metals, we're talking about gold and silver, right?
And copper used to be copper, but they can't make pennies of copper anymore because it's too expensive.
But if you've been following the metals, like, so like I have a little Stack of what we call constitutional silver.
And that's just coins that were made, you know, before 1964 with 80% silver.
So they're more valuable than face now.
You kind of, their melt value was, well, whatever the spot is today.
But if you look at the divergence in the market, the spot price isn't what you're paying for physical because they put a quote premium on top.
So it's more than it's ever been.
But there's been some regulatory stuff.
What they've done is they've on the they've created a situation.
And I'm not, I'm not, I'm a physical guy, but I'm not paper.
But in the paper market, which controls.
Sorry, paper market means paper representations of gold holdings.
Yes, it's called ETFs.
ETFs.
They've been trading ETFs for years.
Well, no, but ETFs aren't just for gold.
ETFs are any way that people can own something without owning it directly.
There are ETFs for Bitcoin.
Just to be clear, right?
So ETFs are ways of holding things indirectly.
Correct.
And you can play with that.
You can do like short selling with that stuff.
You can do future trading with that stuff.
Whereas physical demands delivery.
So if you look at the paper market, paper ETF silver, which you're right, there's a big ETF.
The silver market has been spoofed.
There's been like JP Morgan was caught spoofing the market.
They've been dumping paper trades anytime they want to drive down the physical market.
And they're getting to a point where they can't do that with silver anymore because of industrial demand, like things like solar panels and medical supplies because silver has a lot of properties like that, antimicrobial batteries, EV batteries, computer, all space stuff.
Any space technology needs silver.
So they can't suppress it anymore.
And what's happened is everyone's over-leveraged.
You ever see the big short?
It was about the housing crisis.
It's a great movie about how everyone was over-leveraged with the subprime mortgage scandal in the 2008s.
This is like that one steroids.
If someone pulled the plug, the whole house of cards would come down.
But what they've done recently is they've made it hard for anyone but the big whales to do any business with paper ETFs.
And there's something going on.
China has shut down physical shipping and they're just buying and hoarding.
Lots of funny stuff going on with the U.S. Mint.
Trump, critical minerals, talking about a project called the Vault.
And I know that they want to get the mineral rights, you know, up in Canada.
I'm calling from Canada.
I'm a U.S. citizen living in Nova Scotia, dual.
They also want mineral rights in South America.
I like Trump.
I think he's trying to do the right thing.
Government Force and Value00:09:22
I mean, I know.
Okay, I'm going to.
Sorry, I mean, this is all a series of information.
Can you kind of wrap it up and get to a question or a comment?
Because this is just scrolling.
Think about what you're doing.
And can you also do me a favor?
So this is sort of the way that it's supposed to work is that if I start talking, if you could not talk the moment I start talking, that would be great.
I mean, if you want to have your own show, you should do your own show.
But if I start talking, if you could just wait for me to finish, I'd appreciate that.
But yeah, if you can get your more concentrated, because this is not a financial show, but I'm certainly happy to tell you my thoughts.
So how can I help more directly philosophically?
I love that because I think this is a philosophical issue between fiat currency and sound money.
And I think what you're seeing right now is the paper currency and ETFs collapsing because it's not based on reality.
You know, like we're Plato's cave, we've been trading shadows instead of sunshine.
And that's my point.
And I was just wondering what you had to say about the market decoupling.
The shadow market, like the Plato's shadows on the wall is the paper.
The real metal is the sunshine.
And that's all I have to say.
I still don't know what your question is.
Sorry.
My question is, what do you think about that?
They're coming apart the seams.
You brought it up, base metal.
This is the thing that's happening.
It's diverging paper from physical, the fake market from the real market.
This is Plato's cave, man.
Someone just went outside and saw the sunshine.
And they're coming down to say, hey, this paper you're trading, it's fake.
It's fake.
It ain't real.
And my question to you is what you think.
It's fear currency.
And I've talked about this a number of times on the show.
Of course, yeah, it's fear currency.
It's just gun to the head, pretend that the image of the thing is the thing itself.
Your reality sense is held hostage by a gun to the head.
Fiat means by decree, by government force.
So by government force, you have to pretend that the bits and burps in a computer or the physical paper in your wallet has value.
It has value and it's not real value.
And of course, we know all paper currency, and by that I include electronic currency without any backing, all paper currency goes to zero because force achieves the opposite of its stated goal, right?
So people say, well, we need the government to protect our property.
And is it the Netherlands?
So for those of you who don't know, the Netherlands gave birth to capitalism hundreds and hundreds of years ago with the very first stock exchange.
A stock exchange is one of the foundational elements of capitalism.
In fact, I think Murray Rothbard said basically, you don't have capitalism unless you have a robust and free stock exchange.
And I think it was 16th century, the Dutch gave birth to the free market by having the very first stock exchange.
And now they've just passed a measure to tax, what, at 36, 37%, to tax unrealized capital gains in things like crypto and stocks and other things, which is complete and total theft.
It is absolutely brutal.
So what that means is if you've made a million dollars on paper, it's not real, right?
This is why I don't particularly care about the price of Bitcoin from day to day.
I'll check in it from time to time and I'll do my mental math or whatever, but I don't really care about it because it doesn't mean anything if you don't sell it.
If you don't sell it, it's just up and down.
It's like watching someone through binoculars in a roller coaster.
It doesn't really add much because you're not strapped in because if you don't sell, it doesn't matter.
And so what they've done is they've said something like, if you've made a profit, even if you haven't sold, we're going to tax it.
And that's to some degree hatred for farms, for a bourgeois.
And of course, it is in general, the boomers lifting up the ladder after they've climbed their way up so that they can nag people and say, well, you see, the reason that you don't have a house is you spend on lattice and rotisserie chicken and you Uber eats once a month.
So, yeah, it's a wretched system.
And it is guaranteed to bleed the country dry.
It is guaranteed to bleed the country dry.
Every country that they're trying.
I mean, the capital gain stuff is beyond appalling.
But of course, most people don't really know much about it.
And what this means, of course, is that, well, of course, people will flee the country as quickly as they can, like as quick as Mark Zuckerberg gives hundreds of millions of dollars to Democrats.
He funds the Democrats, and now he's fleeing from California to Florida.
So he funds Democrats and flees Democrats.
I guess in the same way that locusts would finish off a field of grain and then move to a fresh field of grain in order to consume that as well.
So yeah, governments won't protect your property.
In fact, governments will lock you in and then take your property.
Governments, for most of you who don't know, a lot of countries have an exit tax, which means if you try to leave, you have to pay a brutal tax on everything.
So you're locked in.
I mean, to leave is virtually impossible.
And so you're locked in, and then they can just turn up the heat and turn up the heat and tax you more and tax you more.
And what they can't tax, for whatever reason, they will just inflate away, right?
Because the inflation is just about the worst tax that there is because it's the most insidious.
But governments like it because everyone gets mad at the shopkeepers rather than the central planners for the rise in prices.
So yeah, it's a brutal, horrible, coercive, degrading, violent, enslaving system that always ends the same way.
And whether it's people say, well, it's fiat.
The problem is a currency.
Well, I mean, of course, they didn't have paper currency really in the Roman Empire.
They had, well, shit coins.
They had shit coins.
So they had coins that they just mixed more and more trash metals into, right?
The gold got mixed up with all kinds of other crap and diluted and so on.
And of course, the other thing that happened, happens even with coins, is that you shave the edges, right?
So you put the coins in a big bag and then you shake the bag and it shafes the coins and drops little bits off and then you can make more coins.
There were people in England, not many people know this.
Of course, they know Sir Isaac Newton, right?
Famous scientist and so on.
Sir Isaac Newton, if I've got the name right, I think I do, was also in charge of the mint.
And people were shafing down the edges of the coins.
So he put ridges in, right?
This is why coins have ridges in them.
So it's not in particular fiat currency.
It's all currencies, although fiat is a little easier to print.
But governments will just degrade all of their currencies, whether they're fixed or not.
They'll use less and less and lower quality gold just so they can make more of them.
And then people will counterfeit them like crazy.
And fiat currency is just slightly more efficient form of counterfeiting.
But governments can never be in charge of currency.
And this is the whole point of Bitcoin, right?
Is to have a currency system that governments aren't raping and pillaging left, right, and center.
But hey, I mean, all that child trafficking isn't going to fund itself.
So you've got to find a way to do it.
And people, you know, it's funny.
It's something I've always remembered ever since I was a kid, right?
So everybody knows that sort of famous Lord Acton quote, right?
The quote is, a power tends to corrupt.
Absolute power tends to corrupt absolutely, right?
Power tends to corrupt.
Absolute power corrupts absolutely.
And everyone's like, yes, oh, human beings can't handle power.
And then they all charge off to the government to get more, to give it more power to do more great things, right?
That's what they do.
And it's completely contradictory.
It is people saying, you know, smoking is bad for your lungs.
Oh, do I have, I have a double marathon to run.
I better start smoking a pack or two a day.
It literally is that contradictory.
Everybody knows human beings can't handle power.
And power, of course, is the ability to impose rules on others that you yourself don't have to follow, right?
To punish people for following the rules that you want to have, right?
So you're not allowed to steal, but the government can crank out as much money as it wants.
You're not allowed to counterfeit, but the government, blah, blah, blah.
So you're not allowed to just impose your violent will on your neighbors, but the government can impose its violent will on the entire population.
So we can, of course, see all of this in the government, right?
They regularly lose billions of dollars, hundreds of billions of dollars, sometimes trillions of dollars.
That sort of famous audit right before 9-11 that the, what was it, the Pentagon that lost trillions of dollars.
But if you send $601 to someone over Venmo, right?
Slave To Status00:10:03
Right.
So the whole point is to have rules for thee, but not for me.
That's the whole point of power, is to create rules that you yourself are excluded from.
They're actually going through this process in Canada at the moment.
So yeah, it is people, everybody knows human beings can't handle power, and all they want is to give the government more power because they hope to get free stuff from it.
So that's not great.
It's not great.
But it's one of the wild contradictions of the world as a whole.
Is there anything else that you...
Thanks for having me on, Steph.
You're a very insightful guy.
I appreciate it.
Appreciate it.
Thank you.
Thank you.
And yeah, feel free to drop by.
X. Somebody had a dream about me last night.
I hope that I was riding a muscly unicorn in the slow rain with the wind blowing past my armpit here.
Because that's a dream, I think, that the entire universe could get behind.
Steph, your book Dissolution was amazing.
Did Robert die from intense overwork?
Spoiler, because Helen would divorce him if his income ever went down.
Well, that is a good question.
The book is not heavily plot-driven.
It's heavily character-driven.
So it's still worth checking out the book.
The book is called Dissolution.
So with Robert, I wanted to explore, and this is based upon I dated the wrong woman in my 20s, married the right woman in my early 30s.
Thank God.
Thank Jesus.
And so I wanted to explore a sort of alternate life where I chose the wrong woman over the right woman.
And so Robert chooses a woman based upon her attractiveness and charisma rather than her character and her virtue.
And then we see the lives of these two women diverge over the course of the novel because there's some choices in life it's almost impossible to undo, right?
So you have to really, really marriage is one of the, of course you can get divorced, but you can't ever be a not divorced person and you go through that whole heartbreak and cost and expense and acid mitosis and all that.
So I wanted with Robert to explore that Robert is kind of a slave, right?
He's a slave to his boss, Peter.
He is a slave to his wife, Helen.
He's a slave to his children.
He has no authority, which is why Justin holds him in such contempt.
And Samuel doesn't really respect him and why Shane is so easily able to get in and subvert his family.
So why is he a slave?
Because he's a slave to his bad decisions.
He's a slave to his greed, to his desire, to his thirst for status.
Because if you want to be good in this life, the first thing that you have to give up is your desire for status because they will fuck you up if you're a good person.
They will frack you up.
They will frack you with an unlooped barge pole if you are a good person and they will drive down your state.
I mean, come on.
I mean, look, I think I'm a pretty good example of that.
I'm a pretty good guy and tried to do a lot of good in the world.
I'm still doing some good in the world.
And they went after me like nobody's business, right?
To sort of drive my reputation down into the dirt.
And of course, I remember saying at the time, because I was talking about some pretty spicy stuff, even more spicy than usual, and people said, ooh, this topic's going to get you banned.
And I'm like, well, if this topic gets me banned, this topic is going to become the biggest topic in the world because that's what people do, right?
There's a Streisand effect.
So, yep, that's exactly what happened is that I got banned for talking about particularly spicy topics.
And after I was banned, those topics became the biggest topics in the world.
And now they're unstoppable.
And I'm not doing anything to change the course.
It's exactly what I predicted.
So if you want to be a good person, which means you want to be able to be loved, then, and I see somebody else wants to talk.
So, yeah, if you want to be a good person, the first thing you have to give up is status.
You have to give up approval because that's how they'll go for you, is they will go for your status and they will try to destroy your status, your reputation, your source of income.
And of course, they, the enemies, right, of virtue, what they think is that if they destroy your status, then they destroy your life.
Because if you are status-obsessed and your status is destroyed, let's say you marry a woman or a man, you marry a woman and she's with you because of your status, and then they destroy your status.
They hope, they really hope, that your wife is going to leave you.
And they hope that their friends will turn on you, but that's projection.
Because that's what would happen in their life if they lost status.
And so as virtuous people gain status, evildoers lose status.
And evildoers have a lot to lose because if evildoers lose status, then all the people who are with them just for their status flee like the Titanic, right?
They don't go down with the ship.
They flee like rats off a sinking ship.
And so they attack, right?
People always reveal themselves in their attacks, right?
So they attack the virtuous man or woman in terms of income and status.
And they say, well, I mean, if I lost my income and I lost my status, then my wife would leave me, my children wouldn't respect me, my friends would abandon me, and I'd be miserable and broken and lonely and blah, And they don't understand that if you're the good person, that isn't what happens.
If you're under attack for justice, your moral friends, your moral companions get closer, they shore you up, you shore them up, and you end up a stronger, better person out of it, right?
So they were really aiming at my marriage.
They were aiming at my friendships.
They were aiming at everything.
And they missed.
They missed, of course, right?
Because they can only think of harming you in the way that they fear being harmed the most.
So I wanted to explore in the character of Robert, a person who takes his cues from status.
And what does that do?
Well, he becomes a slave.
Because if you're focused on status, you're not free.
Because your value is dependent upon the approval and money and prestige granted to you by others.
Your conscience is not your own.
Your conscience is out there.
It's been subverted and perverted into the approval of others.
And therefore, you become a slave.
So what happens is you get hollowed out by status.
And even though Peter, his boss, was a complete warning of what was going to happen to him, to Robert, if he took that path, he took that path anyway.
Because there's a lot of addictions, right?
Helen is addicted to status and beauty and therefore is paralyzed.
Robert is addicted to our status and money and prestige.
Therefore, he's paralyzed.
Of course, Shane is addicted to drugs and nihilism.
And Robert's parents, Robin Shane's parents, are addicted to boomer blindness, right?
Boomers are just kind of like toddlers.
You can't startle them with too much information or their brain's short circuit.
So I wanted to sort of explore that as a whole.
With Robert, what happens is when you get addicted to status, you become a workaholic.
Because when you become addicted to status, you have to succeed.
You have to make more money.
You have to rise in your profession and so on.
And there's less of you to love because you're hollowed out by filling yourself with the transitory views of other people.
It's like the women who post thirst traps and, you know, guys like them and, oh, you're so pretty, you're so hot and that kind of stuff.
And they hollow out because nobody's actually regarding them for their virtues.
And so Robert became a workaholic because he was all in on Peter's sort of demonic status machine.
And also what happens is if you go for status, then you don't want to be home as much because there's less of you who's there richly, emotionally.
Your wife doesn't love you.
She just needs the money.
You become a demonic deliverer of money and status in that way.
And therefore, there's less of you to love.
There's less reason to love you.
And so he worked hard, not just because he wanted to keep delivering money to Helen, money and status to Helen, but also because he didn't like her that much.
And you can see her impatience with him in the scene with the children in the cafe.
She doesn't like him that much because he's just, he is serving the worst within her, right?
He is serving the worst within her.
And he's too terrified to leave her because that would harm his status, right?
That would harm his status.
And I actually knew a guy.
I knew a guy when I was younger in the business world.
Yeah, kind of worked himself to death.
Heavy into status, right?
I mean, he used to say to me, he had a family cottage way, like four or five hours north.
And, you know, his family was up there the whole summer having a blast.
And he was like sweating away in the city and working 50 hours a week or 60 hours a week.
And then maybe he'd drive up Friday night, get there real late, and then be there for Saturday.
And his wife would give him a whole list of things to fix around the cottage.
And then he'd have to leave Sunday in the morning just to beat traffic.
And he's like, yeah, they have the best life.
They have the best life on the planet.
And I'm just a workhorse.
And he ended up dying quite young.
It was very sad.
Very big warning for me about workaholism.
Draw the Line Between Success and Stress00:07:03
So I hope that makes some sense.
But yeah, definitely, it's a great book to read.
And you should read it.
free.
Power causes brain damage apparently I watched a study proving it with brain scans.
That's interesting.
What tips do you have for a guy going on his first cruise?
I'm going on a cruise with my Asian wife and CNN watching in-laws who are allergic to meaningful conversation.
So my particular perspective is I'm fine to avoid politics, especially with normies, like with NPCs.
I'm fine if you want to avoid politics and we just want to chat about things.
But if, so I don't draw.
I don't draw first, right?
Right?
And, but I will draw if other people draw, right?
So I will give people a pass or two, right?
you might get this dig in the ribs, right?
And you may get the stick and the ribs from your wife if the parents start bringing up politics, right?
And if your girlfriend's parents start bringing up politics, then I'll let them go once or twice.
And I would expect my wife, if I was in your shoes, I would expect my wife to say, let's move.
Let's move on, right?
What's this great line?
It's a great line from...
Maybe there's a God above, but all I've ever learned from love was how to shoot at someone who outdrew you.
It's great.
So, yeah, if I were in your shoes, I would say to my wife, listen, I don't want to do politics.
I don't really want to do politics.
If they do politics, I need you to stop them.
If they don't stop doing politics, I'm doing politics.
And then just leave it on her shoes.
all right uh with the name of the novel is sorry dissolution D-I-S-S-O-L-U-T-I-O-N.
Dissolution.
I don't know.
Being a good person doesn't guarantee love and success.
Nothing is guaranteed.
Okay, my dear.
Here's a tip, my friend.
Here's a little tip.
What was it the leper said to the prostitute?
I left a tip.
So here's a little tip.
So you're speaking out of bitterness and personal experience, which I sympathize with and I think I reasonably understand.
So before you say something, ask yourself, would intelligent people already know this?
Right.
So do you think that there's anybody in this live stream who thinks that if you are a virtuous person, success and love are just guaranteed to you?
Sorry, I don't mean to laugh.
Do you think there's one person in this audience or anyone really who thinks that if you are good, noble, and virtuous, that success and love and all of that are guaranteed?
Do you think that there's anyone who thinks, particularly with moral rewards, particularly after watching me get thunderstruck from the stratosphere and cast down into the stiggian depths over the last six years, do you think there's anyone who thinks that anything is guaranteed?
So generally, generally, what you want to do, and I listen, I have to remind myself of this as well.
So this is not any big, big, big diss on you.
But generally what you want to do is you want to say, am I speaking from emotional reaction or am I providing value?
Because it's very clear, I think, to most people, if you say, I don't know, being a good person doesn't guarantee love and success.
Nothing is guaranteed.
Do you think there's anybody here who doesn't know that?
And because it's very obvious that there's nobody here who doesn't already know that, that you're speaking from personal bitterness, which, again, I sympathize.
We all have it.
I sympathize with all of that.
But just be careful.
And the reason you want to be careful of that is that if you state the blindingly obvious as if it's a big revelation, it will probably tend to alienate or push people away because smart people don't like to be lectured to about obvious things.
Joe says, I figured Robert was really afraid of losing his wife family due to money status since he was willing to do the shady illegal stuff at the law firm.
Right.
Right.
I wonder if everyone has an addiction.
Like, is it part of human condition you just need to get a healthy addiction?
No, there's no such thing as a healthy addiction.
And addiction, by definition, is a repetitive habit that harms your self-interest.
So it's like, am I addicted to working out?
Well, if I was working out to the point where I had actually visible muscles, see, I got my cute little muscles there.
They're nice little, little, little doughy things.
Like a nice little hamster asleep on my arm under a nice blanket of pudgy skin.
And I got my cute little muscles.
I'm very happy with them.
I think that they're sweet.
I think they're kind of adorable.
I'm like a Pillsbury Dough Kenboy with a few pudges in the right direction.
I have my cute little muscles.
I'm happy with them.
I think they're fine.
They're useful for me.
And so that's fine.
If I, you know, going to be 60 this year, and if I was working out to the point where I was constantly getting injured and hurting myself, that would be bad, right?
If I wasn't working out at all, then that would be addicted to laziness.
So I try to do the Aristotelian mean when it comes to exercise and so on, right?
I'm also can be susceptible to injuries, right?
Damn, says Chris, you're spot on.
I've been a workaholic and that hits deep.
Oh, man, nothing drives ambition like being unhappy at home.
I mean, I had that in my 20s.
One of the reasons why I was quite a successful entrepreneur in my 20s was I didn't like going home.
So yes, I'm happy to stay at work.
I'm happy to stay and work.
It's like at the beginning of Kramer versus Kramer, where he's just sitting there chatting at work.
Wasp Sting Warning00:05:55
It's not particularly important and so on, right?
Whoa, here she comes.
Watch out, boy.
She'll chew you up.
All right.
Steph, your book, Dissolution, was great.
How is it that Shane's mother found him alone on his brother's grave while he got there with his new girlfriend?
Does this imply that there was more to that chain of events than the direct description?
Sorry, again, a little bit of a spoiler here.
So if you read that section carefully, well, this is a little bit of a literary illusion.
So Beatrice was Dante's guide in the inferno, not like a real person.
And the girlfriend is made up.
girlfriend is not real.
The girlfriend is a, the girlfriend is a phantasm from his drug addiction.
And the wasp sting is him taking his final fatal heroin dose.
So no, there was no girlfriend.
And if you read it, I guess if you read it carefully, it's fairly clear when you reread it that there is no actual girlfriend.
All right.
Other than preferences, what ultimate standard is morality based in?
Well, it is based on a reason, reason and evidence.
Like all the truths that we accept in the world, it is based on reason and evidence.
To me, it's like saying, what are the truths in science based on?
What are valid hypotheses in science based on?
Well, they're based on two things.
One, logical consistency, and two, empirical evidence.
And it's the same thing with morality.
For more on that, you can get my free book, Universally Preferable Behavior, A Rational Proof of Secular Ethics.
No, the WASP sting, because, you know, I think I say it stings him on his vein or something like that.
So it is.
He has fallen back into drug use because the nihilism has won.
And you can say, like, if you read about Beatrice in the chapter with Shane's death, she has no needs and preferences of her own.
She has no life of her own.
She has no ideas that go into it.
Everything is part of his mind.
She has no thoughts or opinions or perspectives of her own.
So she is a drug fantasy that comes out of his narcissistic nihilism.
Okay, Jose, can you just stop typing all of this crap?
It really doesn't help.
Virtue does not exist.
All people do their desire, then justify it.
Virtue does not exist.
All right, then what you should do is you should jump on X and tell me about how virtue doesn't exist.
I would love to have that conversation.
I really would.
I'm addicted to Steph.
Well, that's fair.
That's valid.
That's a plus.
I figured the girlfriend ran off.
She did say she was allergic.
And Shane just stayed there and let the wasp sting him.
Right.
And I'm sorry to, you know, again, to go into the mechanics of the novel, but the reason why she says that she's allergic is because she's a fantasy of Shane's mind.
And if he dies of an overdose, she's going to die in his mind, right?
So she is allergic to his drugs because if he takes too many drugs and dies, which he's obviously in danger of doing, then she vanishes.
So that's why she says she's allergic to the wasp sting.
Thank you, Steph.
I suspected that she was that, and it means a lot that you affirmed this.
You used to ride a bike to get around instead of a car in your 20s, right?
Did that discourage you from going home?
I don't know what that means.
So I did get a car in my business career.
In fact, I had to.
I was given a car allowance, and the board told me in no uncertain terms that I had to get a car, and it had to be a nice car because I picked up clients from the airport from Fortune 500 companies, right?
I watched the movie A Room of the View.
I do not understand why you think that movie is so good.
Can you please explain?
Thank you.
Did it remind you of old-style England?
Well, sure, yeah.
So Aruma the View is a glimpse into the world before the World War, before World War I, the Edwardian era.
The world before World War I was a relative paradise in that Western Europe went through almost 100 years of no war from the fall of Napoleon in 1815 to the start of the First World War in 1914.
I mean, the Franco-Prussian War in the 1870s, but for the most part, it was war-free, and huge amounts of wealth were created.
And all of that wealth was then destroyed in World War I.
And it is a beautiful view into a world where the big issues were authenticity and love and directness and honesty and all of that.
So, that's a great plot device, reminiscent of Fight Club, but better.
Oh, thank you.
That was the list of great intellects who got married.
The virtue does not exist guy was claiming that smart guys don't get married.
Well, smart girls don't get married to nihilists.
Why Atheists Fear00:04:26
Your takes regarding atheists, says somebody, lead me to the conclusion that atheists are just afraid, afraid to admit their transgressions and wickedness.
Atheists are useful because Christians tend to oppose the state and atheists worship the state.
They displace God and replace it with the state.
I call them statheists, right?
They're statist atheists.
Is having a high body count inherently bad or is it the attitude about your past that's most important?
No, having a high body count is inherently bad and it's particularly bad for females.
Would anyone be interested in the reasons why?
I can touch them.
I can touch them, touch on them briefly.
So, of course, for men, the big issue is paternity fraud.
And a woman with a high body count, you can't be sure that you're raising your own children because people got married very, very quickly in the past.
And so paternity fraud is tough.
If a woman has a high body count, it means she has an addiction to a very wide sexual appetite, a very varied sexual appetite, which means that she's more likely to cheat on you.
And so that's bad as well, which is why a woman who is a virgin is so highly prized, right?
She's a virgin on your wedding night.
You impregnate her, you know that the children are yours.
And you say, ah, yes, well, but modern DNA, blah, blah, blah.
But that's not how we evolved.
And in general, because it's very simple for a woman to have a high body count.
It's very simple.
And it's hard for a man to have a high body count because it's hard to seduce women, but it's easy for a woman to get sex.
If a woman goes out and offers sex to men in a bar, she will go home with a guy every night.
Every night, every night.
And it almost doesn't matter how she looks.
She would go home with a guy every night.
So it's very easy for women to get sex.
And so if a woman is doing that, which is very easy and dangerous, right?
So she can get stalkers, she can get creeps, she can get STD, she can get unwanted pregnancies.
And in particular, in the past, it just means that she's making bad decisions.
And in general, men don't want to marry women who make bad decisions because a man is putting his life in her hands, so to speak, particularly legally, to make good decisions.
And so it's hedonistic and so on.
And so, yeah, you don't want her to cheat on you.
You want to make sure that your children are your own.
And see, that's the funny thing, right?
There's something kind of gay about this sort of modern stuff.
I'm not putting this on anyone in the chat here.
There's something kind of gay about it.
So women say, we want to be like men.
We want to be the same as men.
And why should there be a double standard?
Well, you know why there's a double standard?
Because straight men aren't gay.
And because we're not gay, we don't want women who act like men.
Because if we wanted women who acted like men, we'd be straight.
We'd be gay, right?
Not straight.
So we want women who are very different from men.
And so there's something kind of gay about convincing women to act like men.
So a woman with a high body count is like a man, because most men would have a high body count if they could.
And so a woman who has a high body count is like a gay man, because gay men in general have very high body counts.
I mean, the number of, I mean, I know that there's some men who are monogamous in the gay community, but it's kind of rare.
And I mean, I had a bunch of gay roommates when I was in college.
And I mean, the sexual stories I heard from them were just astounding.
One night, one of my roommates was telling me how he got a call.
It was the wrong number, but they ended up having sex.
I mean, it was crazy.
It was crazy.
And I had another roommate who would go to these clubs and come home with a different guy every night.
And so a high body count is gay for men because you're like a man.
You have the, you know, you're like a man in that you have a high body count and you're supposed to be different from a man.
Because if you want a straight man, you can't be like a man.
Because the only men who want women who are like men are gay men or something like that.
High Body Count00:08:42
All right.
All right.
Somebody, okay, says, I hear a lot of talk about how having a high body count makes it difficult to pair bond.
I don't understand what that means in reality.
Does that mean you can't experience true love ever if you have a high body count because you're damaged or incapable afterwards?
I mean, the analogy is like a piece of sticky tape, like you keep attaching it and removing it and attaching it and removing it because every time you get your heart broken, you get a little bit of PTSD.
You get a little bit more scared, a little bit more nervous, a little bit more jumpy, a little bit more defensive, a little bit less willing to surrender your heart and so on, right?
So I don't know why I said Western Europe.
Russo-Turkish war is not Western Europe.
You have to listen, écouté, listen.
All these people who want to seem smart.
All these people who want to seem smart and all they're doing is not listening.
What if you have a high body count, but it's mostly before the age of 21?
Well, that's the reformed virgin stuff, for sure, right?
Right.
Well, I mean, if it's long ago and you've reformed, then that's better, right?
Bomb bomb.
All right.
What are your thoughts on libertarianism?
You can go to FDRpodcast.com and do a search for libertarianism.
I think it's pretty good.
It's certainly better than conservatism, which conserves nothing, of course.
Why do you think that some people believe that white-knuckling it can actually work in terms of willing the change of something beyond their control?
Is it a belief that force works?
Well, so the reason that people want to white-knuckle away from bad habits is they don't want to dig down into the root of their bad habits.
And the reason they don't want to dig down into the root of their bad habits is because the people who raised them don't want them to dig around into the root of their bad habits, right?
Nobody won the First World War.
Yeah, nobody won the First World War.
The First World War was an example, of course, of how foreign intervention is just absolutely disastrous.
Because in the First World War, they were fighting to a standstill.
And they would have all just had to go home because they were just running out of people, running out of money, even with money printing.
And so in the First World War, they were just, it would have ended relatively quickly.
But then when America came into the war in 1917, you got a fresh influx of troops on the Western Front.
And then that meant that Germany had to move troops to the Western Front, which meant it had to do a deal with Russia, which meant that it had to ship the communists through Finland into Russia.
And so as a result of joining the First World War, Russia fell to communism.
And then eventually through Russia, a third of the world fell to communism.
So it's just another example of just how bad it is, right?
Yeah, libertarians, they mostly talk about politics because they don't want to deal with violence within the family.
Yeah, so women are told to be like men.
Women are told that man is the ideal.
Men have power.
Men are free.
Men are the standard.
And you should be like men.
And no, you shouldn't be like men, and men shouldn't be like women.
My wife is delightfully incomprehensible to me.
She's very much a female.
And she's very feminine.
And it's beautiful.
I mean, because I want the feminine as a straight man, I want the feminine.
And as a straight woman, she wants the masculine.
Which I provide.
I mean, the real body count for women isn't sex, but abortions.
Yeah.
Newsflash.
Straight guys don't want to date dudes.
Yeah.
So, I mean, this is what women have been sold is that, you know, you got to be this tough chick, this Linda Hamilton.
I mean, she was bipolar, but she's completely mental, right?
So you got to be this tough chick, and you got to kick ass, and you got to, you know, chew gum and spit.
You know, it's just like, whatever, right?
All right.
Somebody says, Steph, your latest article was brilliant.
Well, thank you.
I can't help but agree.
I had the idea that it might be helpful to the uninitiated reader to include a negative example to the moral reasoning as in why the avoidance of offensive speech does not qualify as UPB.
The latter would be a misuse of the reasoning you apply.
I appreciate that.
Thank you.
That's a good idea.
I.e. to murder.
How would you argue that?
Offensive speech.
Offensive speech.
Yeah, I mean, the UPB argument about offensive speech is it can't be universalized.
Because if you say to me, Steph, your speech is offensive.
And I say, well, your speech is offensive.
And they say, can everyone ban speech they find offensive?
Well, then nobody would be able to speak.
And, right, so it can't be done.
How do you put up with Christians in your life who aren't fighting tooth and nail to save people?
I mean, I just view them as performative Christians for the most part.
All right.
And...
Storm of Steel by Ernst Junger is a great memoir about World War I from the German perspective.
Yeah.
What is feminine?
That's a great question.
I said incomprehensible, Kay.
Don't you hear me?
I'm just kidding.
What is the feminine?
I mean, and feminine is nurturing.
It cares about the environment.
It runs the household.
It works reasonably to keep people happy as best as possible.
It is accommodating and it surrenders to the masculine.
I mean, there are certain areas in which men should surrender to women and there are certain areas in which women should surrender to men.
The cross-surrendering is how you know the masculine from the feminine.
There's areas in which my wife has unquestioned authority.
There are areas in, well, it doesn't mean she can't be questioned.
It's just that she gets the final say.
And there's areas where I get unquestioned authority.
And there, you know, obviously would be in typical masculine and feminine stuff.
So feminine is when you find a man that you trust and you just trust him.
Right?
Because men have to put massive amounts of trust in women because, again, we don't want to raise children who aren't our own.
And also, men put massive amounts of trust in women because men fight fair and women generally fight kind of dirty, right?
Women fight with reputational destruction.
They fight with if they want to kill you, right?
It's poison, right?
So one of the things that kind of changed with the introduction of autopsies was that women couldn't just poison their men, right?
Because women have a very high body count in that regard.
And if you look at searches for like how to kill a woman and how to kill a man, the how to kill a man is way higher.
So a women fight very dirty.
A man very much puts his trust in the woman, and she needs to be trustworthy, even more so in some ways than the man needs to be trustworthy, because the woman always knows that it's her kid.
And the woman usually knows that she can find some man to provide for her.
But if the woman turns on the man, she can kill him.
Men don't generally kill their women, at least to the same degree or in the same ways, in more subtle ways, maybe, poison and so on, or working them to death.
But if a man breaks up with a woman, then she usually inherits the entire social circle and he's kind of banned because she immediately starts rushing around, lays the foundation as to how the man was brutal and terrible and bad and wrong and a narcissist and a sociopath and evil and scary and weird and unsettling and creepy.
So she starts sowing all the seeds and so his entire social circle is detonated.
So he needs to trust.
She's not going to do any of that kind of stuff.
And so women need to gain men's trust and they need to do that by respecting the man's perspective and opinions, right?
So a woman who won't give you an area of authority is not a woman who can be trusted.
Dealing with Noisy Neighbors00:02:11
All right.
Yeah, I've got a whole truth about World War I, which you should check.
Do you ever have to deal with noisy or obnoxious neighbors?
What is your strategy?
I mean, yeah, sometimes in apartments, I would have to deal with them.
I would just go and talk to them.
Let's see here.
Thoughts on Roy Kurzweil?
I don't have any thoughts on Roy Kurzweil.
I don't know really anything about him other than some vague transhumanist stuff.
Right, I guess I...
I'm so fascinating that you all just want to receive.
Okay.
So I'm happy to take more questions.
I can take a caller before the end of the show, but I thought I would spend a few minutes.
Well, no, I'll hit me with a Y. Do you want to just, I can keep doing questions from the chat.
Do C for chat and V for victim.
if you would like me to talk more about the dangers of professional victims.
In America, sometimes those loud and obnoxious neighbors pretend not to speak English yet.
Yeah, that's true.
Joe Rogan mentioned in Epstein files.
No wonder Rogan banned you.
Well, I think that Joe Rogan was mentioned in that Epstein wanted Joe Rogan to come to a party and didn't.
He didn't go.
So he may be all right as far as that.
All right.
So victimhood.
Okay.
So victimhood.
So victimhood as a whole is granting yourself permission for endless levels of aggression.
So victimhood is like the fist coming back.
Victimhood is like the gun being loaded and the chamber, like you're cocking the gun.
Bad Guy Victims00:11:14
And so it is, you know, like if you're out in the ocean and the ocean sort of sinks very suddenly, it's because that big giant tsunami is coming, right?
And so when somebody says, I've been taken advantage of, people don't listen to me, everybody screws me over, what they're doing is they're signaling that they are going to be very aggressive, that they have given themselves complete permission to be as aggressive as they want.
That is what they are saying to themselves, so it is a very dangerous thing.
It is a very dangerous thing to have those kinds of people in your life.
Okay, hang on.
We got a caller.
Maybe it's something to do with this topic.
Maybe not.
Let us find out.
All right.
You are on the line, my friend.
What is on your mind?
Maybe you are.
Maybe you are.
Can you hear me?
Yes.
Can you hear me?
Oh, okay.
Yeah.
I would say that by the time a woman is 18, her body count is incredibly high.
Recently, I banged out this girl who's 18.
And she told me that before me, she had 15 dudes.
And I'm like, wow, that's crazy.
It was just shocking, you know.
But it was good anyway.
So, yeah, I banged her out too.
I mean, yeah.
So you're basically sleeping with 15 guys.
I don't know, man.
That's just like every chick nowadays, even all the chicks in my harem, they've all have like, there's no chick that doesn't have a body count that's over 20 by the time she's probably 16.
So I don't know.
Yeah, okay.
All the chicks in my harem.
I don't believe these guys for a second.
I mean, and it's pretty funny.
Oh, that's pretty funny.
Yeah, I, you know, the guys who are like, oh, the chicks in my harem and blah, I mean, either the guy is lying through his teeth, which I'm almost certain he is, or he's not, in which case, he just has to hang around the trashiest women known to man, right?
He just has to hang around the trashiest people, women known to man.
And that's pretty wretched.
All right.
Well, you have somebody else to talk to.
I just don't want to promote that kind of stuff because, you know, we want pair bonding.
We want family formation and so on, right?
All right.
We have somebody else on the line.
If you want to unmute, I'm happy to hear what you have to say.
Awesome.
Thanks for having me up.
I appreciate that coming off the Twitter space here, X, whatever.
Whoever that guy was before, I don't know.
I guess he's not an adult man because an adult man who's over his 40s should be maybe possibly having children right now who are in their 20s going to college, whatnot.
So that would be just to me a little bit fucking weird to be having sex with such a young woman.
I don't know.
That's strange to me.
I don't know what the feeling is amongst the crowd or whatnot, but whoever that dude was, that's just crazy in my opinion.
Well, assuming any of it's true, which I would say, 40 years ago, yeah.
I mean, it's just weird as fuck to even discuss such things.
But Stefan, man, I got a question for you.
Like, how do you feel about there's like so many questions I really have because I'm just a longtime listener, first-time caller.
And, you know, how do you feel about cryptocurrencies, maybe Epstein?
I don't know.
There's like a lot of just different directions you could go besides feminine, masculine, whatever.
I mean, I guess that's a point to have a discussion about.
But in my opinion, like, you know, if we can change the money, we can fix the world.
I don't know.
That's just sort of my situation.
I don't know.
What do you feel about all this?
What's going on currently?
Which is fine.
Yeah, throwing me a softball.
Spin it.
You can spin stuff.
Okay, so I was talking about the victimhood.
Let me ask you this.
Have you ever had a professional victim or a heavy victimology kind of person in your life?
I don't know exactly what that terminology means.
Perhaps you could break it down a little bit further for me.
Like people who have been victimized by me or what I mean is that me behaving as a victim.
Okay, so if you're going to ask me the question, then let me answer it.
Okay, so what I mean by victimhood is people who do bad things or make bad choices and then say it's everyone else's fault.
So the woman who, you know, there's this kind of disparity in that diagnoses narcissists are very small, like a couple of percent of the population.
And yet if you talk to a lot of women, they've all claimed to have dated a narcissist and they all just self-diagnose it or making things up.
And a lot of times a woman says that a man is controlling when he just has reasonable limits on the behavior he expects from her.
Like he doesn't want her to go to some nightclub and, you know, bump and grind around guys who want to sleep with her.
And he says, I don't want you to go to the club.
And you're like, oh, you're so insecure, so controlling, such a narcissist, like whatever.
So people who make bad decisions or women who get involved with a guy who's clearly wrong and bad, right?
So one of the ways that society gets completely hosed by the elites is they tell women you can't trust men.
Now, one thing that men know, we may not know a lot about women, but we do know about men.
And men, boys, we grew up with good men and good boys and bad men and bad boys around us.
So we can spot bullies.
We can spot dysfunctional men.
We can spot mean guys.
We can spot violent guys.
We can spot shifty guys.
We can spot sociopaths and we can spot the charming guys who've got no substance behind them.
And we can spot guys who only talk women up for sex because we've all had those impulses.
We've all had to mastered them in ourselves to one degree or another.
So men are very good at figuring out bad men.
And the problem is, of course, that women have been taught, don't listen to men.
You can't trust men and so on.
And so anytime a man tries to give a woman good advice, like, yeah, don't date that guy.
He's not a good guy.
Who are you to tell me what to do?
I'm a strong, independent woman.
And then they go to make these stupid mistakes.
They date these guys.
And then they say, well, what do women always say if they've dated a bad guy?
Turns out to be a bad guy.
What did they always say?
Well, he just turned out to be a bad guy.
There was no sign ahead of time.
He couldn't tell, couldn't know, couldn't possibly, right?
And all of that, right?
So have you ever known people, could be men, most likely a woman.
Have you, I guess we don't get it.
Men don't get any excuses for our mistakes.
So like nobody gives us any excuses for our mistakes.
So have you ever known women who or men who make bad choices and then blame everybody else and take no responsibility for themselves?
Yeah, sure.
I mean, there's like various degrees of these people, which I have, you know, previously or in my future probably will be associated with in one way or another.
And it's, I guess it's a matter of going about, you know, how do you even me myself, I might even have been a victim of my own victimhood.
I don't know exactly, you know, life, it's a complicated process, man.
I appreciate your image.
Well, and we are victims sometimes.
I mean, we're not responsible for the families we're born into, right?
But the typical victim conversation from male to female is the woman complains about a bad guy and the man says, what?
Well, why did you date him?
Well, I didn't know.
There was no way to know.
He was like, I mean, I dated with him.
I dated him for like a year.
And then he just turned into a monster out of nowhere.
Like they just spread this absolute nonsense.
Like men can just be perfectly nice and wonderful and then, you know, Jekyll and Miss High, they get possessed and they just change and it's all a complete lie.
I mean, personality is one of the most stable things in life.
I mentioned this story before, but many, many years ago, I went to a high school reunion.
It was actually just by accident.
I was just hanging out with a friend in Domas.
We went to the high school reunion and everybody was the same.
Everybody, the shy girls were still shy.
The outgoing guys were still outgoing.
The autistic guys were still autistic.
The nerdy guys were still nerdy.
I was still me.
And everyone was like, my God, you're the same as you were 20 years ago.
It's like, yes, personality is very stable over the course of life.
I mean, there are stresses and problems.
Maybe you get sick or whatever, right?
But personality is very stable.
And of course, I had a woman talk to me not too, too long ago complaining about a guy that she'd married, right?
And I was like, well, did you ask any men their advice?
No, no.
It's like, well, men know bad men.
We know bad men.
We know we have bad impulses ourselves.
We master them.
We can see them in others.
But you can't get, you know, it's patriarchal to give women good advice about bad men.
So women date these bad guys because, you know, maybe they give them the tingles or there's a little bit of, what's it, this sort of fetish that women have Christophelia or something like that, for criminals or whatever.
So she dates some bad guy and then he turns out to be a lazy guy or a bad guy or a violent guy or a neglectful guy or an addict or something like that.
And she's like, you know, why did you date the bad guy?
Well, I didn't know.
There was no way to know.
And everyone's like, oh, Pat, Pat, Pat, that's so sad, right?
When men claim they didn't know, everyone's like, well, that was stupid.
But when women claim they didn't know, it's like, well, okay, you couldn't have possibly known.
And what they do is they spread then this general existential anxiety and terror and fear into everyone else that you can date someone who's just really nice.
And then just as mysteriously, they turn bad.
And, you know, I've been married for like, I've been with my wife for almost a quarter century now.
And she's as great now as when I first met her and better in many ways.
And I don't wake up every morning thinking, hey, is she going to be a completely different human being?
Of course not.
She doesn't wake up wondering if I'm going to be a completely different human being.
That's called love.
Love is trust.
Trust is pair bonding.
Pair bonding is the recognition that a person who has integrity is not going to behave randomly.
And so, yeah, so victims are very dangerous because victims, by saying there was no way I could have known and then blaming everyone else, instill and sow within you a general paranoia about falling in love.
Because they say, well, I fell in love and the guy just became mysteriously bad after six months or a year or two years or three years or whatever.
It was just terrible.
It was just terrible.
And that's, you know, that's really toxic and dangerous.
So there's a lot of subtle negative things that victimizers are going to do for you.
And one of the things is they will make you absolutely paranoid about trusting people and falling in love.
Remittances Siphon GDP00:10:23
All right.
Thank you for the questions.
Pai, you have something that you wanted to add or mention or summa that lad.
Yes, can you hear me?
Am I coming through?
You are very quiet, my friend.
Can you hear me now?
Is this better?
Well, it's hard to hear, but you can maybe just give me a brief question because I don't know if we can have a conversation with your volume level.
I'll just get out of the way.
Thanks for having me on.
Okay.
All right.
Hebristophilia.
Thank you.
Thank you.
I knew it was some sort of word that you sound out when you're having a stroke.
Oh, wait, we've got Alex Alexikov.
If you want to unmute, I'm happy to hear.
Hey, I've got a quick question, and I apologize if you already answered it because I did ask a couple times in a couple of comments and whatnot.
But I was wondering if you had any insight as to the Bitcoin core update version 30, if you thought that the changes to the OPR turn, if you thought that that had anything to do with the recent drop in price.
No, I don't think so fundamentally.
I did a show on this recently.
I just do a search for my last Bitcoin show.
And I also did a show where I went through the upgrade in fairly big detail.
So I won't sort of go over that as a whole.
No, I don't think it's foundational to that.
I think it is a I think it has to do with institutional investors who are not true believers in that sense.
They are not foundational, true believers in the mission of Bitcoin.
For them, Bitcoin is a money-making machine.
And so there's a certain amount of stability to it.
And let's just see here.
It certainly did bounce back to some degree, like it bounced down to in sort of Canadian.
It bounced down to 88, 89.
Now it's back up to 93.
It's almost back up to 94.
So it's gone up.
So there's a certain purchase and sell that's automated.
So in the past, people bought and sold based upon to some degree greed, but also a mission.
Now it's just a financial instrument, and there are tons of people who are trading from major institutions that aren't any kind of true believers.
So because of that, it is just a profit loss situation.
So I don't think it's, I think it had to do with people thinking that there was going to be a tighter money supply.
And if there's a tighter money supply and the dollar rises in value, then Bitcoin becomes less attractive as an inflation hedge.
I think that's the major issue.
But again, you can go more into the detail in my recent shows on Bitcoin and in particular the one where I talk about the actual technical aspects of that upgrade.
Right.
I did actually, that was the only reason I do about the update in the first place.
And it seems like the price has gone down.
I mean, it's not, I mean, it is par for the course for Bitcoin to kind of do this.
So I'm not like overly concerned, but I was looking at whether or not people have kind of just switched over to knots for their nodes and whatnot.
And it does seem like the majority are still sticking with core.
And do you think that that still kind of the pot when I listened to your talk on the on the version 30 update, the the version, the update hadn't gone through yet.
And now that it has gone through, I was just wondering if you think that that's any kind of cause for concern.
Well, I mean, compared to what?
Like fiat currency is going to zero.
You know that, right?
I mean, we all know that, right?
Fiat currency is going to zero.
And I don't believe, given the massive explosion in the debt, right?
So the sort of mass migration is supposed to be a way of dealing with the debt.
Like the U.S. economy since COVID has not grown except in the healthcare sector.
Like if you take out the healthcare sector, it's stagnant as hell.
And yet there's a huge amount of liability that is in there.
I mean, the open borders under Biden brought into America massive financial liabilities in that, you know, there's a lot of people who are being paid a lot of money to be in the country, and they're driving down wages, and to get them out is very expensive.
So it's a massive minus on the ledger sheet.
And the American economy couldn't even survive that not happening, right?
I mean, the numbers are absolutely staggering, and it is completely accelerating the destruction of the U.S. dollar as any kind of reserve currency, right?
So let me just get you some numbers here so I sort of make sense about what I'm talking about.
Come on, you can do it.
Why is the search broken?
I think the search is broken.
Okay, so it's not searching for me.
So let me just see if I can dig it up a little bit faster.
But the amount of people who came into America under Biden and are sending money out of the country is truly staggering.
And people, I don't think, have much of a grasp.
And I'm sorry to sound sort of annoying about this, but I don't think that people have much of a grasp on how big the numbers are as a whole.
And I was talking about this sort of many years ago, how much of the Mexican economy was dependent upon remittances from people in the U.S., right?
And of course, you get people who come into the country and they go to emergency for healthcare and they can't say no to them because of laws.
And so that drives the price of healthcare through the roof because it's just about the most expensive way to get health care is through the emergency room.
And so it's just everywhere that you look, there's just a massive amount of costs being sort of baked in to the cost of housing is going through the roof and the wages are crashing and young people can't get their foot in the door because most people would rather hire adults than teenagers because teenagers are just kind of passing through.
And it is just wild how much like 10% of some South or Central American countries, 10% of the population came to America and is really, they're just sending massive amounts of money back to their home country.
And sometimes, you know, 10%, 20% of the entire GDP of those other countries is money being hoovered up out of the American economy and sent overseas.
Now, I get it's a round trip.
They have to buy something American and so on, but it's really not quite the same.
Okay, I'm going to try one more.
Thank you, Stuff.
Yeah, and of course, what should happen is remittances should be taxed, right?
Remittances should be taxed.
That would make the most sense, but that's pretty tough.
Oh, yeah, here we go.
37% of Nicaragua's, sorry, this is from White Papers Policy Institute.
37% of Nicaragua's GDP is remittances from the U.S., $6.2 billion.
25% of El Salvador's GDP is remittances from America.
27% of Honduras' economy is remittances, 19% of Guatemala's economy.
70% of Hispanic migrants are using the welfare state.
So Americans are paying for this, right?
Migration boom drove record $38.2 billion in remittances in 2024.
That is in Australia.
5.16 to 6.2 million Indians live in the US, a larger population than that of 14 of India's own states and territories.
38 billion in remittances flowed to India from the US in 2025.
Meanwhile, American tech grads struggle to find work while companies import more H-1Bs.
About 10% of the Somali diaspora live in the United States, 180,000 people.
Another 10% in Britain, 12% in Europe.
Remittances to Somalia were $1.7 billion.
40% of families in Somalia are receiving money from remittances.
Western taxpayers are funding 17 to 20% of Somalia's GDP.
It's wild.
£366 million per month in remittances flows to Pakistan from Britain, $4.4 billion annually.
33% of Pakistanis in the UK have never worked.
It's, and these numbers could go on and on.
Remittances from the US to Mexico accounted for $28 billion in 2016.
That's about 25% of the national GDP of 1.11 billion that year.
And of course, it's much, much higher now.
And so it's quite mad.
And so, yeah, so you can say, oh, well, the Bitcoin core and the numbers and the, you know, but it's like compared to what?
Going Dark On X00:03:27
I mean, honestly, to me, and I'm not trying to put you in any negative light, but for me, it's like saying, well, you know, the color of the cushions on the life raft are not quite to my satisfaction.
So, and I'm down to 1% on my phone here, so I think I'm going to have to end that stuff because I'm about to go dark on X. Sorry about that.
I didn't quite get around to setting up the full charge today.
So I hope that's helpful and I appreciate that.
And given that I am at 1%, I should probably end here.
Let me go back and see if there's anything else to answer.
On the rumble.
The rumble.
Yeah, there were no signs.
He just changed out of nowhere.
This is what people say.
Yeah, it's crazy.
What if my wife mysteriously turns fat?
Well, of course, if your wife loves you, she won't turn fat.
I mean, except to be big with child to continue your line.
But one of the reasons I work out is that I have a monopoly on my wife's romantic affections.
And so if I have a monopoly, I've got to stay healthy, right?
When the personality is altered by PDSD, I feel there was lots of room for change for better during the recovery.
Yeah.
Today's Free Demain show, way better than Bad Bunny's halftime show.
I think so.
You should listen to that guy without the backup.
It's crazy.
All right.
Let's see here.
In March 2019, Bitcoin was 3,500.
Two months later, 17K.
Three months later, 21K.
Two months later, 50K.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Congress won't stop overspending.
Well, I think that's a guaranteed truth for sure.
It's going to get much lower, I believe.
I don't think so.
I don't think so.
Because previously it didn't have institutional purchases, right?
All right.
Let's see here.
Oh, Tuesday morning, I'll be on the Scott Adams Memorial.
It's not quite a memorial show, but Scott Adams thing.
Oh, and also I forgot to mention my date has been moved to April 11th for World War Debate, World War Debate in Atlantic City.
You should definitely come out there.
There'll be a whole dinner and a whole meet and greet and all of that.
But I will be out there on the 11th of April.
WordwarDebate.com.
WordWarDebate.com.
All right.
Let's see here.
What a show.
Thank you, Steph.
Well, I appreciate that.
Thank you for dropping by.
Did you see AI Scott Adams show?
No, I think that's too close to having a seance and will invite demons into my brain.
So, no, I didn't.
All right.
Well, thanks, everyone, for a great chat tonight.
We will talk to you, of course, Sunday morning at 10 a.m. for the subscriber show, freedomain.com/slash denote to help out the show.
Shop.freedomaine.com for your merch and free domain.com slash books.
You can get the tasty new physical copies of the book.
And maybe I'll send some books out to Atlantic City and have them available for signed purchase.
That might be kind of cool.
I did that in Australia back in the day.
It was very, very fun and cool.
So, yeah, Tuesday morning at, I think it's 10 a.m., Scott.
I'll be on Scott, the Scott Adams, the post-Scott Adams show.
And I've got some other shows coming up.
Hopefully in a week or two, an in-studio show that I did recently, which was quite interesting, will be out.