Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux - Do Unions Equal CULTS? X Space

April 2, 2026 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

01:26:09

Do Unions Equal CULTS? X Space

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Hostage Situations vs Unions 00:14:49
	Good evening, good evening, my friends.
	Welcome back, my friends, to the show that really ends.
	It's the fan Molyneux from Free Domain, freedomain.com slash donate to help out the show.
	Very much gratefully and deeply and humbly appreciated.
	Appreciated.
	And let us talk to Pity Patty El Gordel.
	Are you on the line?
	Don't forget to unmute.
	Hey, Steph, can you hear me?
	I certainly can.
	How are you doing?
	Quite well.
	How are you?
	I'm well.
	Thank you.
	Hey, I wasn't sure if you had a chance to check out my comments.
	It gets to philosophical points.
	I know you're off politics, but I had a discussion about.
	I asked Grok, and I thought it wasn't going to agree with me.
	I asked it, can you make a good argument that unions and cults are the same?
	And it came up with some surprising similarities in that.
	I've gotten actually surprisingly good.
	I've been posting it all over the internet about different union groups.
	I've gotten pretty good feedback.
	And I'm wondering your take on that since you've been accused of being a call leader for so long.
	And I know, obviously, you're not.
	You deprogram people out of the cults of family and open their eyes.
	I kind of just wondered your take on that, if you had any thoughts on that.
	All right.
	So the question is cults and unions.
	Now, there's two ways to look at unions.
	And one of them, of course, is just a voluntary association of workers who gather together for collective bargaining purposes, right?
	Perfectly fair, perfectly valid, nothing wrong with it.
	It is not a violation of the NAP to get together with a bunch of other people and bargain collectively, right?
	So if you are working in a restaurant, there's like one manager, let's say there's 10 waiters, one manager, 10 waiters.
	Now, the 10 waiters can all get together and say, we want to put forward these collective demands.
	Maybe we want a 25% wage increase.
	So the waiters can put forward that request, totally fine.
	And they can also say, we're all going to quit if we don't get this 25% wage increase.
	No violation of the non aggression principle.
	It's perfectly fine, fair, and valid for people to want that kind of raise and to organize collectively to get it.
	No problem, no fault, no unfair, no fail.
	Now, if you've ever been a manager, if a bunch of your workers want to quit all at the same time, you have a big problem with business continuity.
	So they have leverage.
	They have leverage.
	Now, if you overextend that leverage, in other words, if you say, we want double our wages or we're all going to quit at the same time, if the wages are too high for the business to continue, then the manager will just fire you all and try desperately to replace you.
	He might shut down for a week or two, you know.
	And try and sort that out.
	Because if you ask for more than the business can sustain, the business manager will just cancel the business until he can reconfigure.
	Now, hopefully, if you're a manager, you work to keep your employees happy and you say, are you happy with your wages?
	Do you think that you're underpaid?
	Nobody ever thinks they're overpaid, but do you think you're underpaid?
	And you'll work with that proactively.
	If you get into a hostile situation, though, all of the 10 waiters can say, we're quitting because you're not going to give us a 25% wage increase.
	Totally fine, totally fair, totally valid.
	The problem becomes.
	When the 10 waiters can use force to prevent the manager from firing them or hiring other workers.
	So in the union movement, which is largely socialist slash communist, they're called scabs or strike breakers.
	So a bunch of factory workers go on strike for better wages, better working conditions.
	And, you know, maybe their requests are quote fair, although I don't really know what fair means in this world other than what you can negotiate.
	So fair.
	Is just a word for little children to try and get extra candy and adults to pretend that they're owed something that they haven't earned for the most part.
	Now, if these 10 waiters in the restaurant can not only all quit at the same time, which they can certainly do perfectly validly and peacefully, if however they can use force to prevent other waiters from being hired, then you're not in a negotiation situation, you're in a hostage situation.
	So if you say to a woman, will you marry me?
	And she says no, that's fine.
	If you then Threaten to kill anyone else who might want to marry her, you're in a different situation morally, right?
	So that's the general argument and idea.
	So unions in the modern sense are far worse than cults, far worse than cults, because a cult in general will not forcefully bring you in.
	A cult in general will not forcefully prevent you from leaving.
	You might sign some slightly lengthy contract or things like that, but the cult won't sit there and say, If you leave, we will destroy you.
	I mean, some cults might, and of course, that's wrong and immoral, but it is.
	A cult will sort of woo you in and keep you in with extravagant promises, and maybe they'll gather information on you, like, tell us all your dirtiest and darkest secrets, and then maybe they'll hint that they might release it and so on.
	And, you know, that's sinister and bad and wrong.
	So it's a kind of blackmail.
	But for the most part, cults are voluntary.
	They're voluntary to get in, and usually you can leave.
	Like, if you leave some cult and.
	Go somewhere else.
	They're not usually going to hunt you down.
	If they do, of course, that's immoral and evil and bad and wrong and all that kind of stuff.
	So unions, in other words, collective bargaining, totally fine.
	Unions that run to the government and say it is now illegal to bring in outside workers, right?
	They form a ring, as they often do.
	They form a ring around the factory.
	They march around the factory.
	And anyone who tries to cross the picket lines, anyone who tries to cross the picket lines will be beaten up.
	Strike scabs, they're called scabs as a vile term.
	So they're physically attacked and beaten up to discourage them from crossing the picket lines.
	So if the workers who are making $25 an hour, $150, Dollars an hour and crazy benefits and job security, and all but you know, the greed runs both ways.
	Everyone thinks that only the capitalists are greedy, but the workers are greedy as well.
	It's a human problem of greed.
	And so, if the workers form a ring around the factory and then someone else comes in and is willing to work for the $25 an hour, and if there's lots of people willing to work for the $25 an hour, then the factory owner will take those people.
	And we'll train them to do the job, particularly if the job is not that difficult, right?
	I mean, if it's just running a lathe or, you know, stacking boxes or using a forklift, you can train someone to do that kind of stuff in a week or two for the most part.
	It's not so much if you're a vascular surgeon or something like that.
	That's sort of a different matter.
	So, unions, as far as voluntary associations, are great.
	Now, unions can also perfectly morally use ostracism, right?
	So, if there's a bunch of waiters, they all quit at the same time.
	And if there's another friend of theirs who's a waiter who's out of work who then says, Oh, I want a job in that restaurant.
	I really need to be a waiter and I need, it's my skill set.
	Then if that person decides to cross the picket lines and go and work in the restaurant, then the other waiters, the waiters who are on strike, it's perfectly morally fine to ostracize that person.
	You're dead to us.
	We're never going to socialize again.
	Your kids can't play with our kids.
	So we're going to cross the street.
	If we see you coming like all of that stuff, totally fine.
	Totally valid, totally no problem because that's all voluntary and it's peaceful.
	And I'm a huge fan of ostracism as a method of social control as I sacrificed myself to be deplatformed to prove that very point.
	I was hoist by my own petard.
	I was punished by the same social mechanism I say run society for perfectly legal and moral speech.
	I mean, I think that the, uh, ostracism was not based on truth, but that's a different matter.
	But yeah, ostracism is great.
	Uh, ostracism, cause it's ostracism or violence, right?
	So unions, great, no problem.
	Unions that use violence, big problem.
	And of course, one of the things that's hollowed out America's industrial base and, and a lot of the West's industrial base is the fundamental problem of voting based social systems is that the dependence Vastly outnumber those they're dependent on, right?
	So tenants vastly outnumber landlords, workers vastly outnumber managers and owners, right?
	The crowd in the stadium outnumbers the players on the field.
	So there are a very small number.
	Uh, I really think that about 15% of an economy is composed of productive people adding value.
	And everyone else is either neutral or a net, uh, taker.
	Uh, because of course, you know, I mean, there are children.
	That's inevitable.
	There are retired people, uh, government workers, neats, not in education, employment or training, uh, video game addicts, uh, porn addicts, basement addicts, uh, just lots of people who aren't particularly productive who are living off the system as a whole.
	And so, if you look at the number of people who are net taxpayers in the private sector, the free market, it's actually quite few.
	The slave owning class, which is those on the receiving end of government money, the slave owning class is far outnumbering the slaves who are those being pillaged of their income for the sake of keeping everyone else from rioting.
	So, the problem is that the workers outnumber the managers, the tenants.
	Outnumber the landlords and so on.
	So, in any democratic system, the needs of the many or the preferences of the many destroy the rights of the few because they can just vote to take away the rights.
	They can vote to take away, they can vote for rent control.
	They can vote for additional benefits and retirement plans and packages.
	They can vote for additional wages.
	But of course, that's only domestically, right?
	So, in America, the unions just Kept exceeding and exceeding and exceeding their demands.
	And in my view, one of the things that happened with China and with Russia was that they saw a massive economic opportunity to take over manufacturing because they saw, as enemies of America do and the West as a whole do, they see the politicians bending to the will of these unions and goods becoming more and more expensive.
	Members who raise their wages.
	If everyone who's a union member gets double their wages, well, I mean, all that happens is the price of a lot of goods goes up twice.
	So they don't actually end up with more money.
	Everything you ask for over and above fair market value or negotiated market value just adds to inflation and reduces the purchasing power of your wages anyway.
	So you get double the money at half the value.
	That's just the way these things work.
	But as the demands, particularly in the public sector, as the demands in the West got higher and higher and higher for unions, The wages, the benefits, the job security, the pensions in particular, the health care.
	A lot of American motor companies sell cars because what they really are in the business of delivering health care and retirement benefits to their current and prior workers.
	They're not in the business of selling cars anymore.
	They just sell cars in order to fund all of the pension schemes that they signed up for.
	So, as the price of and benefits of American labor went higher and higher and higher, this created a massive arbitrage market opportunity for other countries to sign free trade agreements or to, as China did, get into the World Trade Organization and then just crank out manufactured products and destroy the American industrial base and thus weaken its entire capacity to sustain itself, keep its citizens employed, and wage war.
	So, at the same time as you're stealing American jobs because the American workers are stealing from the consumers through the power of the state, You then are also delivering drugs to the hollowed out towns, which remain somewhat stagnant because of welfare, right?
	So it's really horrendous.
	And then there's a whole question, I'll try and keep this brief, of course, the whole question of government unions.
	So unions are supposed to exist because the capitalist owners are greedy and avaricious and want to just grind down the wages of the employees and so on.
	It's like, yeah, it's not how productive business works as a team.
	You know, I would always tell my employees, I managed about 30, 35 people at one point.
	And I always told them, like, you're paying my wages.
	I need to be of value to you.
	If there's a technical problem I can help you with, if you've got a difficult customer you want me to take over, if there's anything that you need to be, I'm working for you as well as you working for me.
	And I worked very hard.
	I got about a million dollar raises for my people from the board by doing a salary comparison after they complained about low wages.
	I hired an outside consultant, got a salary comparison that was objective, and then lobbied and got about a million dollars worth of raises for my people.
	And, you know, I said, so for instance, That's one thing that I can do for you.
	And everybody was very happy, and productivity went up.
	I also fired difficult employees, particularly a very aggressive and insulting team lead that was making people cry.
	And so, you know, I try to sort of help the workers out, and the workers have a good deal of loyalty to me, and I have a good deal of loyalty.
	But that's how productive capitalism is supposed to work as a whole.
	Now, of course, unions are supposed to exist because the greedy, monocle, fat capitalist guy just wants to steal all the money, so you need a union.
	There's not any of that pressure.
	There's not that competitive pressure.
Vanity and Greed in Wages 00:10:55
	There's not that exploitive pressure in the public sector.
	So, unions in the public sector are absolutely horrendous because the public sector often has a monopoly.
	You can't, like a public sector union where it's very expensive or where you're charged for the service anyway, like a public sector union for teachers.
	I mean, the teachers get paid whether you send your kids to them or not, whether you send your kids to private school, the teachers get paid whether you don't have any kids at all, whether you're overseas, you still get paid, right?
	And so when you have a union and you have no competition and you have enforced income, then you end up with a truly horrendous situation where workers have a stranglehold on the economy because of a government enforced monopoly.
	And then they can also unionize.
	And then you get, you know, these garbage workers strike their public teachers strike, various HR never goes on strike because I mean, who the hell would notice?
	So public sector unions have been horrendous.
	And the other thing that happens, of course, in the eternal kick the can down the road.
	Situation of modern economics, what happens is politicians, when they're faced with a strike, you know, the garbage piles up or the schools are closed and the entire economy is scrambling, then what they do is they don't want to give the workers, particularly the public sector, can happen in the private sector too, they don't want to give those workers.
	Wage increases in the here and now because the math just doesn't math, right?
	They're just, as a government, you don't have the income and there's only a certain amount of bonds you can float, particularly at the municipal level.
	So what they do instead is they say, man, don't sweat it.
	No problem.
	Bro, I gotcha.
	Uh, I'm going to give you massive retirement benefits in 20 or 30 years, right?
	To the average worker, right?
	The average worker say, say 40.
	So when you, when you're 60, you're going to get massive pensions and healthcare benefits and dental and all of this kind of stuff.
	And, uh, that's just kicking the can down the road.
	So, they then promise all of these crazy benefits that future taxpayers are on the hook for.
	And then the union leaders say, hey, man, we secured this great deal.
	You can retire a couple of years earlier.
	You get 25% more retirement, full health benefits, dental, whatever it is you're going to get.
	And then everybody pretends that they're happy.
	Oh, I guess everyone is happy.
	And then 20 years later, the city goes bankrupt because all these promises have been made.
	So, yeah, cults are largely voluntary.
	Cults will love bomb you and seduce you and so on.
	I mean, mostly voluntary.
	There are a couple of violent cults, but then they would be just criminal organizations.
	But government unions and unions that are protected by the government are violent thug enterprises that bribe people with largely coerced, hostage taken, in a sense, and stolen money.
	And you don't really have a choice.
	And I remember first being interested in this, just by the by.
	I worked at two restaurants as a teenager.
	Well, more than two, but the two that are important one was Pizza Hut, and the other was Swiss Chalet.
	Now, Pizza Hut, non unionized.
	Non unionized, at least back in the day.
	And Pizza Hut, I didn't have to pay for my uniform.
	I didn't have to pay for my name tag.
	I didn't, none of that.
	And all my meals were free.
	And anything that I wanted to eat, I could just go and get it.
	I mean, not some big, large pizza, but, you know, at the end of every shift, they used to have this great fatted Genie Alfredo.
	I would get some of that, or I would take a hot chocolate and go with it.
	Anything you could eat at lunch, there were these pizzas left over from the five minute lunches, and I could just eat anything you wanted.
	At Switch LA, I had to pay for my own uniform and I also had to pay for meals.
	And it was unionized, and they took, I don't know, three or four or five, or maybe it was 6% of my income.
	And it was just, I just made less money at the unionized place than at the non unionized place.
	So, yeah, I mean, if they really wanted to insult me, they wouldn't call me a cult leader.
	They'd call me a union leader.
	That would be much more, much more insulting.
	Does that help at all?
	That's so beautifully said.
	And like how you stated, the greed of the workers is something that's often overlooked.
	And you spoke that debate with the other guy, the guy who wasn't listening, which blows me away how many people don't listen to what you have to say.
	You said so much.
	I'm trying to unpack it so much that it's people like I guess perhaps because you've been a business owner and a manager that you get that perspective.
	Like how you said that.
	Sure, that your wages are double, but they can't see the, like you said, taking the can down the road that it's going to, the value of what you're doing isn't going up.
	It's just you're getting paid more and this, it's causing the value of everything else to go down.
	And I view it as like a larger societal problem.
	And I know I'm trying to get ahead of this.
	I know you're not about politics, like you said, but next year, I believe in the US and Europe, and I believe in Canada too, in 2027, they're having large labor strikes.
	And I believe if we can get ahead of, maybe I'm, Being too optimistic, but if we can kind of point out the overall immorality, like you said, especially with the public sector, means that maybe we could sort of have a national conversation.
	And I know it's kind of cliched, but maybe we could sort of get ahead of these things before philosophically point out that they're immoral before they become a larger, like you said, riots and further problems.
	Yeah.
	I mean, I've been sort of trying to mull over what is the biggest sin in the modern world.
	I think it's a toss up between vanity and greed.
	And Vanity and greed are both desire for the unearthed.
	If I say I'm going to sell you something for 500 bucks and you agree to pay me 500 bucks for it at freedomain.com slash donate, sell you my gratitude for a support of the show so we can stay commercial free.
	But if I say I'll sell you something for 500 bones and then you say, sure, I'm happy to pay 500 bones and 100 fins.
	I had a friend who used to call $5 bills fins.
	And that's fine.
	It's not greedy, right?
	But if I overcharge you, if I double charge you or whatever because I'm entitled.
	So greed and vanity are both the desire for the unearned.
	Vanity is, I want people's good regard without having to earn it.
	And greed is, I want more than people have bargained for just because I'm so gosh darn special that everyone should give me everything.
	And why is it that people want more and more and more?
	Why is it that they're so easily stimulated into feeling resentment for being, quote, underpaid?
	Like I see this all the time on X. You see it everywhere.
	All of these women bawling and caterwauling into the four winds of.
	Testosterone indifference about all of their unpaid labor.
	All of the women's unpaid labor.
	Oh, the value of women's unpaid labor.
	It's like, damn, someone's got to be paying you or you'd be starving to death.
	Someone's got to be paying you.
	I mean, women don't get paid for housework.
	It's like, you know, the answer's in the word housework.
	What you're getting paid is having a house around you.
	You can't do work and not get paid without starving to death.
	If I go out into the woods in Canada and I decide to move bushes around, For some reason, am I getting paid?
	Nope.
	Let's say I'm a waiter.
	And I remember, you know, eternal, I thought of this the other day like, eternal thanks to the guy.
	When I was, I remember this very clearly.
	I was new to Canada.
	It was a horrible winter.
	And I was in a group of kids.
	And there was an older guy there.
	Like, they were, my friends were 11 or 12.
	I just sort of made new friends when I came to Canada.
	And there was this guy who was like 14 or 15 and a smart guy.
	And one of the guys was talking about, you know, hey, man, you know, It costs like 15 cents for a can of Coke.
	It costs a quarter for a can of Coke, but you know that the ingredients only cost three cents.
	And I was like, ooh, ah, now of course you get a feeling that something's not quite right about that, but you can't really articulate.
	At least I couldn't articulate it back then.
	Like that doesn't seem quite right.
	They're really making 20, 22 cents profit of a quarter can of Coke.
	And the older guy was like, come on, don't be such a kid.
	Think about it.
	The cost of the ingredients is not much in the can of Coke, but you got the actual can of Coke you got to make.
	You got to pay for all the workers.
	You got to pay to have a more transported.
	You got to pay for the heating.
	You got to pay for the factory.
	You got to pay for the management.
	You got to pay for the advertising.
	And you just went through this whole list, right?
	I mean, literally, that 14 year old kid, God bless you.
	God bless you wherever you are, man.
	Saved me from a life of pathetic socialist idiot resentment, right?
	Because And it's like, well, oh, yeah.
	Oh, yeah.
	Oh, yeah.
	Oh, that's right.
	And so I thought that was just beautiful.
	And so the greed, the resentment, the vanity, my work is worth more.
	And of course, it's a bit of a low IQ thing, too, because when you're a worker, you can see all the work that you and your friends are doing, but you take the factory, the lathe, the forklift, whatever it is that you're working with, you take all of that for granted.
	And it's just kind of there, like a tree or like a river or whatever it is, right?
	And so you don't see the boss working, right?
	You're out there, you're cutting stuff around, you're moving stuff, you're spot welding, you're doing all of this kind of stuff.
	And you don't see the boss is just in his office somewhere and it looks like he's on the phone a lot and it looks like he's typing a lot.
	That ain't working.
	That's the way you do it, right?
	And it's like, well, we're doing the working.
	What the hell is he doing?
	And it's like, well, he's making sure that the entire factory runs.
	Because you're doing all of these movements in the middle of nowhere doesn't make you a damn penny.
	Someone's got to build all the machinery around you and then.
	Do the marketing and ship everything off and get paid and make sure that the taxes are paid and all of that.
	So, yeah.
	And why are people so greedy?
	I think they're greedy because they're unloved.
	You know, if you're unloved, you tend towards materialism.
	Because if you're like as a kid, if you're unloved, if you're unappreciated, if no one takes delight in your presence and wants to know what you think and feel, if you're a little kid and you're unloved, you tend to want status.
	And then you associate value with material, in material terms, not value in moral terms, not value in respect, and not value in love and appreciation and so on.
	And if you're not loved, you tend to be more and more status driven, materially greedy, and then you're very susceptible to this kind of socialist resentment, which is why, again, I try to solve everything at the realm of family and love.
Faith, Belief, and Background 00:03:44
	That's so beautifully said.
	I mean, I wish I don't want to annoy you or I don't want to change topics.
	I mean, shouldn't Christianity have made you an honorary saint for all you've done to help children at this point?
	I mean, you've done more to help with peaceful parenting that you saved millions of children from being abused than any sort of religious figure in the past.
	I don't know, perhaps ever.
	Perhaps we should go that route too.
	I mean, I'll let the next person speak, but thank you so much for that breakdown.
	That was beautiful.
	I'm very glad.
	Somebody says, I asked Socrates, how does it feel to be the world's greatest philosopher?
	He says, I don't know.
	You need to ask Stefan Molyneux.
	That's very kind.
	I appreciate that.
	Thank you.
	If you want to talk, that's fine too.
	Oh, yeah, we do have someone.
	Let's give Mike the mic.
	Mike squared.
	If you want to unmute, I'm all ears.
	Hi there.
	Can you hear me?
	Yes, sir.
	Go ahead.
	Stefan, it's an honor to speak to you.
	I am a first time caller.
	Been a subscriber for a while.
	Thank you.
	Been listening to you for a long time.
	If you're ever in Colorado or you ever want to visit Colorado, we'd love to host you at our house and in our guest bedroom.
	It would be our pleasure.
	You've been such a big impact on me and my family.
	We peacefully parented two kiddos, and it's just been a game changer.
	So I wanted to say thank you for that.
	I appreciate that.
	And thank you for the very kind offer.
	That is very nice.
	Colorado is one.
	Beautiful state.
	And as I get older, my bucket list gets smaller and more intense.
	But returning to Colorado has always been on the list.
	So I appreciate the offer.
	Thank you.
	I had one question, if I may.
	My daughter is 17, and she's again been peacefully parented.
	Both my wife and I have been in conversations with her, obviously, as far as religion is concerned.
	Obviously, a lot of her friends and family that we interact with have a faith.
	Based on background and a belief.
	And I think she's, I would probably say she's still searching.
	She would probably say she's an unbeliever at this time.
	But the concern she has is that she's entering the dating scene.
	What is the best?
	And I want to hear what you would recommend for her.
	What would be the best way to start conversations with a guy she's potentially dating or she's around?
	When that question of faith comes up, particularly if it's somebody who comes from a Christian background.
	You mean if she's dating someone from a Christian background?
	Correct, correct.
	Yeah.
	And again, you know, her family's fairly Christian.
	So I think she's exposed to the ideas.
	But without stepping on any landmines, I just wanted to see how your daughter perhaps is addressing that or any of your recommendations would be.
	It's very kind.
	I will answer this without reference to my daughter because that's more sort of personal to her.
	But it's an interesting question.
	It's the question of faith versus works.
	Is the belief in God what is needed to make you good, or must that belief in God manifest in actual works in the world?
	It's a big question faith versus works.
Virtue Without Abstract Theory 00:08:28
	It's an old argument in.
	Christianity, if you have faith, but the faith does not manifest in good works, do you go to heaven?
	If you do good works without the faith, do you go to heaven?
	And that is a very interesting question.
	Now, I prefer good works to mere belief.
	A belief that is not manifested in action is hypocrisy in practice.
	Because if I said, Oh, peaceful parenting is very good.
	And then I yelled at and hit my kids, that would be, that would be terrible.
	That would be just appalling.
	That would be like the Christian preacher who rails against people having an affairs while himself having affairs often.
	Through Grindr or something like that.
	So I prefer good deeds to good ideas.
	Now, of course, it's very hard to consistently have good deeds without good ideas.
	And the way that I generally work it is something like this.
	So if you're operating at a very abstract realm and you're trying to solve a lot of problems in the world as a whole, then you need the most refined abstractions.
	If, on the other hand, you're just trying to do basic good in your life, you don't need all of the refined abstractions.
	Abstractions.
	And the analogy, which is actually kind of close, is the difference between a NASA engineer trying to send a probe to Jupiter as opposed to a baseball hitter who's just kind of hit the ball or catch the ball or throw the ball.
	Now, the baseball hitter is just working locally.
	He can practice a whole bunch of times.
	He doesn't need to know the math, he doesn't need to know the quadratic equations or the air resistance, frictional, whatever it is, coefficient.
	And so he just practices and then he becomes really good.
	You don't say, oh, well, if you want to be a really good baseball player, you need to study physics.
	Nope, you just need to practice.
	That's your localized environment for doing good.
	But if you want to send a probe to Uranus, then you need to put on the rubber gloves.
	No, you need to have the.
	Actually, you can't even do that on Newtonian physics.
	You need Einsteinian physics to do that.
	And you need to do all the math and you need to have.
	So the more broad, wider, and generalized your application of virtue, the more you need the actual detailed theories.
	And so if somebody is a baseball player and they want to.
	Join your team, then what you do is you, and let's say you've not met them before, you'll throw some balls, you'll see how they hit, you'll see how they catch, you'll see if they understand the rules of the game, and that's going to be enough.
	You don't sit there and say, well, I'm going to need your PhD in quantum mechanics in order to know whether you'll be a good baseball player.
	So good deeds in the local sense arise without the necessity of strongly abstract and detailed and universal theories.
	If you want to do really great good in the world, then you need to have The broader spectrum of abstract theories.
	UPB is necessary for promoting peaceful parenting in the world, but to not hit your children locally, you just need to have some basic compassion and empathy and remember what it was like to be a child and respect that your children want to love you and want to respect you, therefore don't hit them.
	So the reason I'm saying all of this is that if your daughter dates a guy for whom the theory is everything, then she's not going to have much luck In dating him as a whole, unless he's going to try and convert her, you know, which of course he's welcome to do and all of that.
	But if he's a theory only kind of guy, then it's going to be tough to date him, unless she can talk him into believing something perhaps a little bit more rational or a little bit more empirical or something like that.
	However, if he's, as most people should be, because most of us are not NASA engineers and so on, and we're not doing double slit experiments.
	What is that, a threesome?
	Anyway, so what you want to do is A, not have her listen to this, but B, If she's dating a guy who's good works, fantastic, then you can say, I do good works, you do good works.
	We're both really good at baseball.
	You pray to God before every game.
	I don't.
	But we both practice the same amount and we can both be on the same team because we're both doing good practical things in the world.
	And so if it's not, if the quote virtue is not driven by heavy abstract theories, which is a little tricky, like if somebody says, I only do good because I've worked it out according to theory and theology and so on, it's kind of questionable how good they really are.
	But if somebody just enjoys doing good at a practical level, then.
	In a sense, it doesn't matter too much how you're there.
	Like, if, as happens for me on occasion, I see someone yelling at their kid or shaking their kid, and I sort of run up and say, Hey, that's not a good idea.
	And I'm happy to help out if you want to take a breather.
	Let me be a buffer and try and do some nice thing to lower the temperature.
	I mean, you don't need to be a rational philosopher with a theory of universally preferable behavior in order to.
	Run up to someone and try and get them to calm down if they're aggressing against their kid.
	You just need to be somebody with a basic heart who remembers what it's like to be a kid and doesn't like to see that kind of stuff.
	So if she's dating someone who's abstract, heavy, theory and theology and so on, probably not much of an entree.
	If It is a different belief system, but the practical virtues are enacted both the same, then you would have a lot more in common, if that makes sense.
	It does.
	Thank you so much.
	I love that.
	And just so you know, she's going to be listening to this.
	It's a lovely thing to be a dad and to have a daughter who is listening to the same philosophy you listen to.
	Yeah, I appreciate that.
	Just edit out the threesome joke and we're good to go.
	Can I impose on you one more question?
	Yeah, of course.
	Of course.
	How do you handle the identification?
	So, you know, when I turned from belief, you know, it was atheist, and obviously that term has a negative connotation in our culture.
	Non believer, humanist, there's a lot of terms.
	For somebody at her age, particularly in a social circle, it's not necessarily the best way to be identified immediately.
	What would be a good way for her to kind of start?
	Hey, what church do you go to?
	Where do you attend?
	What would be the best way to kind of Start that conversation for her to identify herself or where she's at, if that makes sense.
	Yeah, I would say that if somebody says, What's your denomination?
	Say, My favorite thing to do is I love philosophy, and that includes theology, and I love studying that.
	I love thinking about that, but I try to approach everything from a reason and evidence standpoint, you know, like scientists do and so on.
	And I mean, that includes a lot of ethics, that includes a lot of religiosity, and so on.
	But yeah, I'm.
	I'm approaching things from a reason and evidence philosophical lens, you know, and really in the Aristotelian tradition.
	And I mean, that may sound a little pompous, however, she wants to word it to include a couple of skibbity toilets and six, seven references.
	Obviously, that's not her, but I'm just showing my grasp, firm grasp of teen argot these days.
	But yeah, I would say interested in philosophy, interested in reason, interested in evidence, interested in empiricism.
	And, you know, the big challenge of how to be good.
	You know, I don't want to just be ordered around to be good.
	I really, really want to understand it.
	I don't want to just follow commandments because that turns me kind of like a computer.
	And I, I really want to exercise my free will, not just to be good, but to know why and to understand it better.
	And so I spent a lot of my time thinking about what's good and bad, what's right and what's wrong.
	And this allowed me to avoid social consensus and, and allows me to avoid peer pressure.
	And, uh, I don't, you know, like a lot of people just look at the universe and say it is what it is.
	And I'm very much a, but, but why?
	But why?
	Why is it?
	My daughter was the other day standing with her, uh, her legs far apart and sliding down.
	And I said, why?
	And of course, everyone laughed because she was an upside down why.
Why Question the Universe 00:03:56
	So yeah.
	So, I mean, the, the why of things is where human beings are.
	Animals live at the, at the, at the level of sense perception and human beings live at the level of abstraction and curiosity.
	So yeah, I mean, I, I, I, I find religion completely fascinating.
	I just did a whole thing on the prodigal son the other day and, um, we're going back to Noah's ark, I think at some point soon and, I find it completely fascinating, but I am not a person who is going to consider myself a realized or a self actualized human being if I'm just taking orders and obeying commandments.
	Thank you for that.
	Thank you for that.
	I'll let the next person go.
	I just wanted to again say thank you so much for everything.
	Your physical books are amazing.
	The condensed version of Peaceful Parenting is awesome.
	I can't say enough about how great you've been to our family and to my life.
	So thank you so much.
	Thank you very much.
	I really, really appreciate that.
	And thank you for your support of the show over the years.
	Without you, what's it called, Sandra Bernhardt?
	Without you, I'm nothing.
	Without you, I'm just screaming into a void.
	So thank you.
	Thank you very much.
	Somebody is asking Is a debate about rights with Andrew Wilson in the future?
	So nothing is scheduled.
	He's a very busy guy.
	And I'm medium busy.
	So nothing is scheduled.
	But I certainly would be happy to do that at any particular time.
	Time.
	So, and you know, there's a tough life.
	You know, I'm not saying anything that isn't publicly available.
	I don't have any private pipeline to Andrew Wilson, but you know, I hope that people will have some, you know, real, real sympathy for what's going on.
	He was, I think he was married and he had a stepson that he raised from the age of two who ended up dying at the age of 10 in some horrible car crash from some kid who was 14.
	And it was just, yeah, it was a real, awful, just, you know, completely heartbreaking situation.
	And then he and Rachel Wilson, I think.
	They have three kids, two of whom are autistic and not like a tiny bit.
	And so, you know, lots of big hugs and sympathies.
	Those are big challenges.
	They've written a book about this.
	So, again, I'm not, but, you know, I hope that people will drop them a line and wish them the best.
	And, you know, they've got some real challenges for which we should all have great sympathies.
	And so I just wanted to mention that.
	Okay.
	Let's see.
	What was the last five good things Steffi did?
	You know, it's just funny.
	It's just kind of funny.
	You know, to, oh, Steffi.
	It's just a very sad little diminutive thing.
	The most important thing is not to worry about the good that I'm doing, but to focus on the good that you can do as a whole.
	And, you know, putting down philosophers who are working to bring peace, reason, and evidence to the world by putting a fee at the end.
	Take the name, Steph.
	Well, take Stefan, shorten it to Steph, and then say, Steffi.
	Where's Steffi then?
	Oh, it's so sad.
	Oh, my God.
	Oh, my God.
	This is like watching an ant run its head into the wall of a sidewalk.
	All right.
	Thank you for your patience.
	We have, can I be frank with you?
	You can be anyone you want with me.
	I'm trying to stay off automatic jokes.
	I'm failing.
	Frank, if you wanted to tell me what's on your mind, I'd be happy to hear.
	Yeah, I was thinking about some of your Gene Wars stuff, and I had it gave me a thought related to pornography, and I wanted to run it by you and see if it made sense.
	It's very brief, I guess.
Pornography and Modern Dating 00:15:09
	It's just that my general theory is that it kind of works like a double edged sword, at least in our contemporary circumstance, but all negatives, where.
	It would appear to make K selected individuals more sexually apprehensive or anxious, or like, you know, there's all these things about erectile dysfunction and so on happening in the West.
	I don't know if it's exclusive to Westerners, but then the flip side of this theory is that it might make our selected individuals more sexually aggressive.
	And I just wondered if you had any thoughts on that.
	I mean, pornography, of course, is a big and complex challenge.
	One of the things that does appear to be the case.
	Is that as pornography becomes more widespread, sexual attacks, at least in the white community, tend to go down.
	And we assume it's because the people who are sexually aggressive are getting their gratification from pornography rather than the real world, which of course doesn't mean that it's not a problem because, again, the women who are doing pornography are themselves usually victims of significant control and abuse.
	Although, again, the OnlyFans thing has really blown people's minds as a whole because, you know, according to some metrics, like 10% of American women aged 18 to 24.
	Are on OnlyFans and trying to sell pictures of unmentionables for a couple of bucks, most of them making $100 to $200 a month.
	It's really sad and not worth it.
	Because again, in OnlyFans, 98% of the money goes to 2% of the people, as is the case with most raw meritocracies.
	And if you think, well, so it's 10% of women 18 to 24, 18 to 30, I can't remember the exact number, are on OnlyFans.
	And then you think, well, but what percentage of the top.
	10 to 20% of attractive women is that?
	And of course, the answer would be a lot higher, right?
	I mean, if a woman is 18 to 30 or 18 to 24 and is severely obese or has bad hair or bad skin or whatever it is, then she's less likely to be on OnlyFans.
	So, in the top levels of attractiveness, the percentage of women on OnlyFans is very high.
	I mean, very high.
	I, you know, it could be 30, 40, could be as high as 50%.
	When you start to get to the top levels of attractiveness, because that's where the cost benefit is potentially the highest.
	And so when you have a quarter to a half of very attractive women voluntarily doing pornography in a sense or sexually explicit material in a sense, and then, you know, even the overlap of the Instagram girls who it's all like tiny bikini and butt floss bikini shots and so on, highly, highly sexualized.
	What's really fascinating is what this shows about female nature that.
	Women are completely thrilled to sexualize themselves for money.
	Without, you know, the typical route for prostitutes, like for physical prostitutes is, you know, they get kicked out of home, uh, or they've run away from home because of abuse at the age of, you know, 13 or 14 or 15.
	And then they're living on the streets and then they get taken in by a pimp who then gets them addicted to drugs and turns them into a prostitute through a grooming process.
	And it's all just a horrendous meat grinder of shredded and ground under heel human potential.
	But, uh, that's not the path, of course, for the OnlyFans thing.
	I remember many years ago seeing.
	A video of someone who was trying to promote OnlyFans at a college.
	And he was saying to these attractive women passing by, you know, you should do OnlyFans.
	And the woman said, I don't think my father would approve.
	And he said, Your father wouldn't have any problem with it if you give him a Lamborghini, which is horrendous, of course, and only tempting to the shallow and soul destroyed.
	But women are happy.
	To hyper sexualize themselves, right?
	This isn't a woman.
	I can't remember many years ago when I worked in a place with a bar.
	If the tips were slow, they would all of the women would beg to have the woman with the giant boobs and the low cut tops come in because that would be guaranteed to get them more tips.
	And so I guess women, tools of the trade, right?
	As I took a photo of this many years ago at a store advertising makeup, tools of the trade, right?
	And so young women are for reasons that.
	Perhaps past understanding.
	I mean, I sort of put myself in this alternate universe where how many people would pay me for a picture of my butt?
	I mean, maybe I could set up a service which is like stiff butt a day unless you pay.
	If you don't pay, you get a picture of my butt every day.
	That would be stop the flow of pasty orbs.
	So I can't imagine a universe wherein people, like if I took my top off right now, you know, and people were like, Here's the money.
	Here's the money, buddy.
	And so on.
	Or, you know, hiring, I don't know, Indian scammers to type in the keyboard about sexual fantasies about me with people.
	And I'd get like, I don't know, $20,000 a month or something from taking my top off and pretending to be sexually interested in housebound neckbeard simps or whatever it is.
	I just, I can't imagine that universe.
	I can't imagine.
	I mean, I've had a couple of offers of selling out.
	You know, people have said a couple of times over the last 20 years, hey, I'd love to put you in my documentary.
	Hey, I'd love to follow you around.
	Hey, I'd love to see what your life is like.
	It's like, no, you don't.
	You just want to edit things to make me look bad.
	And no, I'm not an idiot that way.
	So thanks, but no thanks.
	And other people have offered me money for an even more advanced and beautiful studio.
	And what it is, they've offered to sort of fund me, but then there would be some editorial control.
	And I'm like, nah, I'd rather not.
	Thanks.
	I'd rather just have three chords of the truth rather than a whole stadium, a Philharmonic, and lies.
	So, yeah, pornography is, is, is a big challenge.
	Again, it does seem to reduce some levels of sexual aggression in practical terms.
	It does, uh, hypersexuality and, and seeing sexuality everywhere is a mark of primitive tribes.
	The civilization is defined largely by our commitment to privacy.
	And so when people see massive amount of sexual activity, they do get programmed to be, uh, are selected.
	And yes, the erectile dysfunction stuff is a very, Real thing.
	There are some men who've actually completely, like, it seems permanently destroyed their capacity to have and maintain an erection due to overconsumption of pornography and so on.
	So, yeah, it is a big challenge.
	And of course, we all know that if it wasn't for, like, the incel and the pornography is very much intertwined, they are bonded together, you might say.
	Because when masturbation and Was strongly discouraged through religious doctrine and so on.
	And Kellogg, I think it was, introduced circumcision to help men refrain from touching their unmentionables.
	But when hypersexuality, in terms of omnipresent pornography and masturbation, when that was limited and there was no particular pornography, or at least it was very hard to get a hold of, then men would.
	Date women and get married in order to have sex.
	It's not the only reason, but it was a pretty important reason.
	But if you have, I don't know, the infinite sexual playground and there's no prohibitions on masturbation, then you can just delay, delay, delay.
	And this is, you've heard me say this a million times to young men or not so young men on my show that if you're, you know, mid 20s, late 20s, early 30s, and you don't have much of a dating history, any woman with any brains will simply assume and probably be quite right that you're just a pornography addict.
	So does that help at all?
	Yeah, I suppose so.
	I mean, part of what I was.
	Thinking as well is that perhaps in case selected individuals, or it there might be some of the inhibiting effects might arise from overthinking, you know, or it's like if you excessively when thinking about like incels and stuff, the people who cannot get laid are often trying too hard and they're like thinking about it.
	Way, way too hard.
	And it's almost like.
	Sorry, when you're thinking about it, I'm not sure what it refers to.
	Thinking about it.
	Oh, sexual access or sex in general.
	Okay, hang on, hang on, hang on.
	So, you just, when you come up with complex thoughts, don't just skate past them as if I know what you mean.
	So, help me understand the overthinking part.
	So, and I'm not disagreeing with you, I just want to make sure I understand.
	So, give me a sort of practical example of how somebody, I'm sorry to use the word incel, but it's kind of well recognized.
	How an incel is overthinking.
	What are they overthinking in what way?
	Just perhaps even how to approach a woman, how to start the conversation.
	I'll give an example from my own life when I was very young and was exposed to pornography.
	It was kind of like in elementary school, I would have no trouble talking to any of my female classmates.
	And then the moment that I started seeing and using pornography, the ability to socialize with them just vanished.
	And it's almost as though the objective or the goal of sexual access had created this massive gulf between all the actions that might get you there.
	This massive gulf between all the actions that might get you there.
	Again, I'm not disagreeing, but I'm always trying to translate that into some sort of practical term that I can really understand.
	If I could put it as simply as possible, if you want to have sex with a woman, you have to approach her.
	Impress her, court her, go on a date, and so on, and work your way in, gain her trust, et cetera, and form a bond.
	And then you get to have sex.
	But if you're thinking solely of this goal, it's like this massive gulf gets created.
	And all those steps that lead up to the goal, they just become overshadowed by it.
	All the steps that lead up to the goal get overshadowed by it?
	I'm sorry.
	It's very abstract.
	I really, really try to understand what it is that you're saying.
	And again, I'm not disagreeing with you at all.
	I just don't follow what that means.
	So yes, of course, if you are attracted to a woman, let's say it's a teenager, right?
	You're attracted to a girl.
	You will, you will go up and try and talk with her, right?
	I mean, you have to do that, right?
	Does that make sense?
	Yeah.
	Now, in terms of what to say or how to approach it, I mean, obviously, there's tons of guides or ideas online and so on, but you just have to go up and try talking to her and see if she's friendly.
	If she's friendly, then hopefully you can fall into conversation and you can enjoy each other's company.
	And then, you know, maybe you can say, let's go for a walk or let's go for a coffee.
	Like, so you just have to go up and see if she's friendly.
	Like, most men, most boys have had the experience of going up to a girl.
	And she's unfriendly.
	I remember one of the first girls I ever asked out when I said, Would you like to go swimming?
	Which, of course, was in hindsight not the wisest move.
	A lot of girls are quite self conscious when they're in their teens.
	And she's like, Well, with who?
	And what she meant by that was, Which group?
	Or boys or men have had the experience.
	I've had this experience as well asking a girl out and her saying, If she's part of a group of friends that we both know, it's like, Well, we could all go out together as a group.
	And so she's saying, I don't want to go out with you.
	Individually on a date, right?
	And you just kind of lick your wounds and you just keep talking to girls until you find a girl who's interesting and you're interested in, and the conversation flows relatively easily.
	And you just kind of take it from there.
	If I may interrupt, that's not really the present issue.
	And I guess I'm trying to think through or develop a theory of how pornography negatively affects.
	Different groups.
	Sorry, what do you mean by this is not the present issue?
	Well, what I mean is I'm in a relationship.
	So it sounds as though I'm giving.
	Hang on.
	We're talking about incels.
	We're not talking about you in particular.
	I'm not talking about you, you.
	You have a theory about what happens with incels, about how incels overthink things, which I think we're having a discussion about.
	So if I'm trying to present a general approach to talking to incels, Girls and trying to figure out where is the overthinking part.
	And then you say that's not the issue because I'm in a relationship.
	That's a little confusing, right?
	I misunderstood when you were elaborating.
	I thought that you might be trying to work your way because you misunderstood me.
	I thought you were trying to work your way around to explaining what you might think that I'm trying to get at.
	So I've misunderstood.
	All right, hang on.
	So you say that I misunderstood you.
	What do you mean by that?
	Hmm.
	I mean, I've been asking for explanations because while I get a general abstract sense of your meaning, I don't know what it means in practical terms.
	So help me understand what I'm not trying to be hostile.
	I'm just, what do you mean by I've misunderstood you?
	I'm trying to understand what it is that you're talking about and how it applies.
	I'm striving to understand.
	I don't think that's the same as misunderstanding.
	Well, could I take another quick run at what I'm getting at?
	Hang on, hang on, hang on.
	Now we're getting into contentious territory.
	Okay, what did I just ask?
Overthinking Predatory Behavior 00:14:26
	Well, I don't know how to answer that question.
	Sorry, I should speak more directly.
	Okay, so you made a claim that I had misunderstood you.
	I asked, I was trying to understand you, help me understand what you mean, and then you ignore my question and just go off on a tangent.
	That's kind of rude, right?
	Um, I suppose so.
	Sorry, I don't mean to be, um, evasive.
	It could be rude.
	Okay.
	I don't do, I don't do meaning.
	I only do what people are doing.
	It is rude.
	If I ask you a question, like if you say, Steph, you miss, you, you misunderstand me, then you are saying that I, Steph, have a failure of understanding.
	I'm pretty good at understanding things.
	I'm certainly not perfect.
	But if you are using very abstract language, like incels overthink the approach because there's such a distance between introducing yourself and having sex.
	I need to know what part there, like I need to know what do you mean by overthinking at what stage in that is overthinking and blah, blah, blah, right?
	So, in trying to understand what it is that you're saying, if you then say, Steph, you're misunderstanding me, then you are, and it's fine, but publicly you're saying, Steph, you have a failure of understanding.
	Now, you haven't said, I was unclear, right?
	You've said, Steph, you might understand me.
	And what that means, of course, is that you've been clear, but I have failed to grasp what it is that you're saying.
	That's why I'm trying to ask, what is it that I have misunderstood?
	And then, if you just ignore that question and go off on something else, then you've made a public accusation that I lack understanding of something that you've explained well.
	And then, when I ask for what that means, you then go off on a tangent.
	That doesn't seem to me having a good faith conversation, if that makes sense.
	Okay, I think I understand what you're saying.
	And what I believe I meant to say is not that you misunderstood me.
	When I said that, what I think I meant, or what I did mean, is that I was failing to communicate to you adequately.
	And my perception of when you started explaining the process of courtship and so on, my understanding, I perceived that as you guessing what I was getting at.
	No, I can tell you what I was trying to do.
	So when you say, In cells overthink.
	And you could be right.
	I just don't know in what part they're overthinking.
	Overthinking is a way of paralyzing yourself by giving yourself so many options, in a sense.
	I'm sure you've met people who are talented in a bunch of areas and they can't figure out what they want to do with their lives because there's so many options.
	And so, option paralysis, sometimes it's called.
	So, overthinking can be that.
	Overthinking can also be.
	Catastrophizing, right?
	Well, if I go and talk to this girl, she's going to secretly record the conversation.
	It's going to be all over school.
	Everyone's going to make fun of me.
	I'll never be able to show my face again.
	Like just catastrophizing.
	I used to have this on X when I'd say to guys, you can go talk to a woman in a coffee shop and they'd say, but you'll get arrested and go to jail.
	And it's like, why?
	That's just catastrophizing.
	Maybe that's a form of overthinking.
	Maybe people say, well, you know, if I like this girl, we have sex.
	I might get an STD or maybe I won't be getting an erection.
	Or maybe we'll get married and she'll take half my stuff.
	Like, I'm just not sure what you mean by overthinking in what area, in what context, because the show here, I'm sure you know this, right?
	The show is designed to help people.
	And if you just say in general, people are having trouble talking, like getting dates or having sex because they overthink things.
	We need to know specifically what they're doing in your view that is overthinking and in what context and in what area and in what step so that we can help people rather than just give them a generic thing called overthinking with no context that doesn't actually help people solve any problems.
	If that makes sense.
	Yes, and all the examples that you just gave of overthinking are perfect examples.
	Okay, so when you say overthinking, it's every possible thing that you could overthink about in all phases of courtship from asking a girl out to having children.
	I'm not mocking.
	I'm just trying to understand what you mean.
	Yeah, all the variations on how badly it could go or the failures that you could run into in your effort to get sexual access or sexual gratification.
	Well, of course, if your primary goal in talking to girls is sexual gratification, they should reject you and you should be an incel.
	Because if the only, I'm not talking about you, but if you're talking about people whose only interest in talking to a girl is to achieve an orgasm with her or at her or on her, I don't know, then they should be rejected, right?
	It would be like if you were very wealthy and the only reason anybody would talk to you or if the only reason someone like Bob would talk to you is because he's hoping to get some money out of you, then Bob shouldn't be your friend, right?
	It's not a question of overthinking, it's a question of horrible motives, if that makes sense.
	Yeah, you might have given me an answer I was looking for because I was trying to think through how the inhibition in someone who's K selected functions.
	And by making the goal solely sexual access, it's kind of inherently corruptive to the whole process.
	And that might be where a derailment is taking place for.
	These people who end up as incels or stuff like that.
	Yeah, if the only reason a man will go and talk to a woman is he wants to have sex with her, then the reason why he has difficulty doing it, if he has any shred of a conscience, is because he's being a dishonorable asshole.
	Because he's going to lie to her.
	He's going to pretend to be interested in her just to get into her pants to pump and dump, to have sex with her, and then to ghost her.
	And so he's kind of predatory.
	And he's definitely a deceiver because he's pretending to be interested because he doesn't just go up to the woman and say, I don't really care about you as a person, but you know, you look attractive enough for me to, you know, dump some fluid on.
	Uh, then, you know, no women really would, would say yes to that unless they were really masochistic.
	And so it's not so much, I think, overthinking.
	It's that you have to lie and you have to pretend that you're there for some other reason than the one you're actually there for.
	And of course, women are highly attuned to that.
	Women are highly attuned to men who only pretend to be interested in them in order to have sex, because that was a huge risk for women, of course, throughout all of our, particularly our European evolution or the Siberian East Asian evolution, uh, because of winter, you need a provider, you need a protector.
	There are dangerous predators and, you know, that you can do stuff about.
	So, uh, women are very attuned to a guy who's only talking to the woman because he wants to get his rocks off.
	And so I would say it's not so much overthinking.
	As it is having to hide the fact that you're kind of a predatory jerk who doesn't like women, but just likes their holes and so on, right?
	So, um, whereas, you know, what you should be doing, of course, is you should be talking to a woman to see if you like each other, like as people, because in relationships, there's, you know, occasions where you're not having, you know, catapult based sex harness monkey sex.
	And so you can actually have to get along in ways that you quite like, uh, each other.
	And so you should be talking to women to find out if you like them.
	If there are these men who only see women as disposable holes of paramilitary convenience, then women should reject them and they should be incels.
	And that's real tragedy.
	But I don't think it's overthinking in that context you're talking about.
	I think it's just having predatory motives and women being onto you.
	Not you, but the person we're talking about.
	No, no, no.
	I understand.
	Well, one thing it makes me think about, and I'm not sure if this is an objection to the premise.
	Is that our selected individuals or lower IQ individuals might have better chances at getting what they want in spite of their negative motives?
	Because if you have a shorter sort of mental timeframe, the weight of a lie is less of a problem.
	You'll fumble it less, you'll be able to con someone better.
	If you're more in the moment.
	Well, sorry to interrupt, but it's also true, though, that if you approach women primarily for sexual access, you have to steer clear of intelligent, wise, and perceptive women.
	And you have to go for broken, unstable, desperate women who just desire any kind of approval or contact against their own mental health and well being.
	So when you approach women as sexual objects, you can only have success with women who are.
	Mentally extremely unhealthy, and therefore it becomes sort of a self fulfilling prophecy.
	If you only want women for sex, you can only be around women who pretend not to know that and are so desperate that you can't have any quality relationships anyway.
	Or in the case of some of the, this is just a guess, anyways, in the case of some of the activity that's going on in Europe or the UK with the grooming gangs, women who are naive.
	Well, the grooming gangs aren't targeting women.
	Sorry.
	Yeah.
	My, my bad.
	I kind of an important distinction, wouldn't you say?
	Yes.
	Yes.
	Yeah.
	And of course, I've often thought that if you are a British parent and let's say for some reason you just don't like immigrants and you say to your kids, stay away from the immigrants, um, would your kid be less likely to be groomed?
	It's a question that kind of answers itself.
	All right.
	Is there anything else that you wanted to mention?
	No, not in particular.
	Although you were talking just earlier about the primary evils of the day being greed and vanity as being driven by desire for the unearned.
	And I wondered what you thought about that definitionally being motivated by sloth.
	Sloth, yeah.
	Sloth, yeah.
	It's funny though, because certainly the girls who want money from OnlyFans are lazy.
	I remember having a conversation many years ago with a guy on a plane back when I was in the business world.
	And I've always had this kind of curiosity about people, and people have always told me their life stories.
	I mean, what I do with this show comes out of a long history of people doing.
	Life story stuff with me.
	And he was talking about how his girlfriend was a stripper or an ex stripper, but she was lazy.
	And I'm like, well, she's a sex worker.
	And again, I'm talking voluntary, not sort of drugged and homeless and all of that sort of stuff.
	But she got into it just because she didn't like to get up early and she could make a huge amount of money with very little effort.
	I mean, obviously, it has pretty negative things in the long run, pretty negative connotations in the long run.
	But yeah, he was like, I can't believe she's so lazy.
	I'm like, but.
	But she's a stripper.
	So there is a certain amount of sloth just in wanting money for nothing because you haven't earned your butt, your boobs, or whatever it is that people are paying for on these sites.
	I mean, maybe you've done some exercise or whatever, but lots of people do.
	So yeah, you haven't earned lust as a human emotion.
	You haven't earned your boobs, your butts.
	You haven't earned the fact that there are simps.
	You haven't earned any of that.
	And so, yeah, there definitely is sloth involved in it, I think.
	All right.
	No, that's everything.
	Well, thank you very much.
	You're very welcome.
	And yeah, don't forget to like and share the stream if you could, and freedomain.com slash tonight to help out the show.
	Will, you're not getting back on the show.
	Man, don't even try.
	Go to therapy.
	All right.
	We have.
	Oh, let us do a glasses flip.
	Nick, whoa.
	If you wanted to unmute.
	Stefan, you were not actually supposed to let me up here.
	Why is that?
	I don't know.
	I just didn't think you would let me up here.
	I thought, like, this is for certain members or something.
	Have you and I had negative interactions before?
	Is that what you mean?
	Nope, nope.
	I just, no, I guess I just wanted to say hello.
	I didn't particularly have anything to say.
	But, well, we're going to have a negative interaction now because I don't know why you would put yourself in the queue of a show if you don't have anything to talk about.
	So that would be block and remove.
	All right.
	No worries.
	That's just kind of strange.
	Like, why would you give me that editing job afterwards?
	All right.
	Jeff, if you wanted to give me a shitty, shooty, shouty, owdy, I'm happy to hear.
	Yes, sir.
	Good evening.
	Thank you again for hosting this.
	It's very kind of you.
	My pleasure.
	Thank you for joining.
	Yes, sir.
	I had just a quick question.
Societies That Stagnate 00:13:07
	And my question was looking with your study and analysis of history, looking forward into the future, what would you say is most likely to take, let's say, three future societies down the road?
	10, 20 years, whatever you want to do.
	And let's say one of them is set up like a libertarian version of Las Vegas, let's say, you know, do whatever thou wilt as long as you don't get in someone else's way, that kind of thing.
	Then you have a society that's much more like we have today.
	And then you have a third society, which is run by someone who is warlord, a harsh word, but who's basically like an absolute monarch.
	But his model is to be the best kind of monarchy canon with the best parts of, say, a King David, a King Solomon, Alfred the Great, fill in that.
	In which society do you think we're most likely to see a flourishing of the kind of non aggression for the largest number of people?
	In this benevolent monarchy, this Las Vegas style libertarian society, or?
	In some, it's just some other way, but mainly those two.
	I mainly want to get your thoughts on that.
	The current society that we have is founded upon violations of the non aggression principle.
	It is entirely run on those principles.
	The only way that non violations or respect for property rights is maintained is in order to have entrepreneurs generate enough wealth that they're worth stealing from.
	So, like the Genghis Khan types will allow farmers to.
	Have their crops and have their property rights and so on, but only so that they have just enough incentive to grow enough crops that it's worth stealing from them.
	So property rights are only maintained so that people produce enough value to keep the debt machine going and produce enough value that they're worth stealing from.
	So our current system is a kleptocracy based upon minimal property rights, just enough that people make stuff that you can steal.
	So our current system can't even remotely sustain itself.
	I mean, if you look at the The rise in debt is truly staggering.
	You know, people think that UBI is in the future.
	It's like in America, like the fourth largest or fifth largest, I think it is, item is defense spending, which is a form of welfare for sociopaths.
	But if you look at the other entitlement programs, Medicare, Medicaid, the welfare state, the hugely abused.
	Disability programs and old age pensions and all kinds of crazy stuff, not even counting government spending on useless government email, fertility crushing jobs.
	Not to mention the VA.
	It's shocking.
	Yeah, the VA.
	Caleb Hammer is doing great work in his shrieky way about that, exposing just people who've had two years of a desk job are getting $6,000 a month in disability from the army and so on.
	Everything that you put together to help people would be exploited by people pretending they need help.
	And you have to have it privatized because the people have no incentive to.
	And we've already gotten UBI.
	It's called Bullshit Jobs.
	That book was written 10 years ago.
	Yeah.
	So we have all of this and so on.
	And, you know, I mean, I think that the elites look at the majority of people now as a disposable biomass.
	I mean, in general, they have throughout history, but, you know, you needed people as slaves, you needed people as serfs, you needed people as workers.
	Now, with AI and robots, the majority of people are viewed by the elites as a disposable biomass.
	And.
	It's not going to go particularly well.
	Normally, we would have had a war long ago for all of this, but because of weapons of mass destruction, the war has to be fought by other means, the depopulation agendas and other things like that.
	Exactly.
	And do you think, just based on your study of history, and if society, as you've written in some of your excellent books, everyone should read the future, excellent book, in what appears to be something like this coming breakdown in so many ways, do you think that?
	As we try to rebuild a peaceful society in the future, reconstruct it, if you will, would you, based on your study of history, think that that was more likely, that that ember was more likely to be nourished in a world that's like Las Vegas or a world that's run by a benevolent kind of, or at least a guy who seems to be benevolent?
	I would much rather have an abnormal society than a society of a benevolent dictator because benevolent dictators are very rare throughout history and.
	If you are a benevolent king, let's say a King Solomon or King David, if you're a benevolent king and you run your kingdom really well, you do so at the expense of time with your children.
	And therefore, your children will grow up to be not good rulers because they don't have much parental investment or parental time or parental empathy or parental wisdom transfer.
	So, if the king is working 16, 17, 18 hours a day running his kingdom, he has no time for his children, and his children are more likely to grow up dissociated and cruel.
	It doesn't last.
	So yeah, libertarian society, uh, I wouldn't say necessarily do what that will, though it harm no others.
	I think that's more kind of Satanism and so on, but just, yeah, respect for property rights and the non-aggression principle.
	Societies collapse as a whole when self-defense is barred.
	It's one of the big things that is kind of underreported on when it comes to the destruction of a society because everybody knows that the welfare state is going to collapse.
	When the welfare state collapses, there will be rioting and aggression in the streets, but people will not be allowed to defend themselves.
	If they were allowed to defend themselves, the riots would be pretty short and they would stop pretty quickly.
	It's pretty easy to end a riot.
	You just have to use overwhelming force to jail people or to arrest them, and the riot stops pretty quickly.
	Almost all crime these days is allowed to happen.
	Out in California under Newsom, 25% of the health care budget is just fraud.
	And that's just a guess.
	That's the floor.
	It probably goes much higher than that.
	And our whole legal system is designed for a very small amount of fraud and violence, and it's easy to overwhelm, which is why only a few.
	A few percentage points of people in the American justice system actually ever get a trial.
	They just get threatened with double or triple the sentence and they plea out.
	Maybe it's an Alfred plea, but they plea out.
	So the system as a whole is preventing people from protecting their own property and usually violently so.
	I mean, think of those people who there was a bunch of fairly thuggy looking people who were coming into their private gated community and they were standing out front of their house with weapons.
	They weren't shooting.
	I don't think they were even pointing them at people and they still had to go through years of legal hassles and so on.
	Yeah, the purpose of destroying a society fundamentally is around preventing rational self defense, moral self defense of persons and property.
	And then that just allows, that just emboldens and empowers the criminals to do whatever they want.
	And that is usually to kill the golden goose that lays the foundations of the products they want to steal from.
	So, yeah, I would definitely go for the libertarian free market society if I could.
	Interesting.
	Yeah, I would, yeah, I would, I was thinking of examples.
	Like the Puritans in New England, they seem to maintain a more free society for a long time, even though they had a lot of experience on personal bodies.
	Hang on, hang on.
	Sorry, didn't the Puritans almost die because of their experimental socialism?
	That was the Pilgrims in Plymouth Plantation.
	That lasted about one winter.
	Yeah, but they were kind of saved by the natives, if I remember rightly.
	But you're right, Puritans and Pilgrims are not the same, so I appreciate that.
	Yeah, the Puritans never were.
	They never went in for that.
	Yeah, but the problem with those communities, sorry to interrupt, the problem with those communities is they enforce such a strict level of conformity that they end up with societies with very little progress, right?
	It's sort of like the East Asian societies, China, Japan, and so on.
	There's such a high level of conformity that the societies stagnate and eventually are taken over by societies or cultures with a greater openness to non conventional thinking, which allows for progress.
	So.
	Where you have, you can get a seeming amount of short term stability from societies that enforce a lot of conformity, but they end up being taken over.
	I mean, think of the natives in North America, the indigenous population.
	They were, and this is true.
	I talked about this in, God, eight years ago, feels like a lifetime ago when I was in Australia giving speeches with Lauren Sutherland.
	But I talked about that the Aboriginal society in Australia, which had existed for like 40,000 years, was brutally conformist and incredibly violent.
	And the child abuse was rampant and they didn't progress because they couldn't tolerate dissent and therefore they ended up being taken over by societies that tolerate more dissent like European society.
	All right.
	Well, I appreciate that.
	Oh, well, one other question, if I may.
	In Massachusetts, talking about progress, if I'm not mistaken, isn't it New England that gave the United States most of its academic tradition and pretty much dominated intellectually the rest of the continent and where the Industrial Revolution started?
	Sounds like a very innovative region.
	Sorry, it was New England?
	Yeah, the pure fact, if you.
	Look into some of the histories of the American peoples and the different groups who settled in different parts of America.
	The New Englanders are famous for basically miming everyone else's business for them.
	The Southerners are like, just leave us alone to do our thing.
	And New Englanders are like, no, no, no, no.
	We must have progress.
	We must have progress.
	They're constantly that old Calvinist urge to build the New Jerusalem, even later becomes Unitarian and Universalism and atheistic, but still that old urge to, we must build, we must have progress, we must have progress.
	So, in terms of advancement, I think maybe we might need another thing to say what's wrong with that society because the Industrial Revolution in America started there, intellectual advancement started there.
	Literacy was like 98% in New England.
	Well, yeah, I don't know much about the history of that, so I will defer to your expertise and I appreciate you bringing that up.
	Too much intellectual conformity and too much of a requirement for intellectual agreement does tend to stifle curiosity and does tend to stifle exploration.
	Now, there are some societies where they will disallow it in areas of theology and morality, but will be more encouraging of it in areas of technology, engineering, and science.
	So that could certainly happen.
	But as a whole, you need a balance.
	Societies that are too, quote, creative, like the sort of hippie communes where everybody's writing poetry and Often bad songs, sometimes good ones.
	You can get an excess of creativity that leads to no cohesion and no standards and no morals, too much experimentation.
	And you can have a society with too little creativity that is sort of copy paste, that has a high degree of stability, but it squelches all the free thinkers and ends up being taken over by more creative societies.
	All right.
	I appreciate that.
	And you have a good night.
	And let me leave you with this funny thing.
	You talk about free love or the hippie dippy societies.
	Charles Guteau, the man who killed James A. Garfield, President Garfield, he was a part of a free love agricultural commune in upstate New York.
	And for five years, and basically, he was so disliked there, and no women wanted anything to do with him.
	He eventually left because they called him Charlie Get Out.
	Right.
	No, I mean, I.
	I think that the sweet spot of European culture has been, you know, I think it was Charles Murray who did the study in a great book, Human Accomplishment, where he pointed out that 98% of the scientific progress of the entire planet and the entire species was from 800 BC to AD 1950, which is a long, long time, over 2,500 years.
Western Culture's Massive Props 00:01:30
	Oh, close to 3,000, really.
	So, I guess halfway between.
	So, yeah, from 800 BC to AD 1950, 98% of technological and engineering and scientific progress came from a small section of northern and western Europe.
	Basic facts.
	So we did seem to hit the sweet spot of creativity, which is why we cracked the problem of Malthusian limitations on population growth and got through to science, reason, empiricism, and the free market.
	So massive props to the western culture.
	Sorry, go ahead.
	And the rest of it was in northern China, Han China.
	Yeah, but they also stagnated for thousands of years as well.
	Oh, no, I'm just saying it wasn't like the other two.
	Percent was equally distributed.
	Right, right.
	Yeah, yeah, very true.
	Very true.
	All right.
	Well, thanks everyone so much for a lovely evening's conversation.
	Free domain.com slash donate to help out the show.
	Lots of love from up here.
	We will talk to you on Friday night.
	And I really do appreciate your time and support and help.
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Chapters

00:00:00 Hostage Situations vs Unions
00:14:49 Vanity and Greed in Wages
00:25:45 Faith, Belief, and Background
00:29:30 Virtue Without Abstract Theory
00:37:58 Why Question the Universe
00:41:55 Pornography and Modern Dating
00:57:05 Overthinking Predatory Behavior
01:11:31 Societies That Stagnate
01:24:38 Western Culture's Massive Props