Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux - Three Types of COURAGE!
Aired: 2026-05-14
Duration: 01:48:21


=== Lord of the Rings Casting Controversy (02:52) ===

[00:00:00]  Hello, hello, good evening, my friends.
[00:00:03]  I hope you're doing well.
[00:00:05]  Hope you're having a nice evening, a nice week.
[00:00:09]  Hope you're doing good things in the world and accumulating the inevitable resentments from bad people.
[00:00:19]  The Odyssey.
[00:00:20]  Of course, The Odyssey is a Crispin Nolan film that's coming up with Matt Damon, and a black woman is playing the face that launched a thousand ships.
[00:00:34]  Helen of Troy.
[00:00:35]  And of course, it's a fiction and so on, but it's Greek fiction.
[00:00:39]  And she's considered to be the most beautiful woman in the world.
[00:00:41]  And can you imagine if there was a black epic, an African epic, and they cast a white woman as the most beautiful woman in Africa, people would lose their shite, right?
[00:00:54]  They would lose their shite.
[00:00:55]  But it's a different matter, of course, when it's white stories and all that sort of sad stuff.
[00:01:05]  Tragic.
[00:01:05]  And what really is the answer?
[00:01:07]  What is the answer to all of this?
[00:01:09]  I mean, you just have to boycott.
[00:01:11]  You know, I will sometimes watch stuff that is pretty horrendous just because I want to warn people off it.
[00:01:19]  I think I may end up having to actually just avoid hate watching this one.
[00:01:25]  Even like there were the Rings of Power, I think it was on Amazon.
[00:01:29]  The Rings of Power with a, you know, the Lord of the Rings is a Northern Western European epic.
[00:01:38]  And, you know, thank heavens the Lord of the Rings managed to squeak in under the DEI casting stuff.
[00:01:45]  The Rings of Power, with again the non European cast.
[00:01:48]  I don't think that Europeans should be in non European stories.
[00:01:50]  I don't think non Europeans should be in European stories.
[00:01:53]  It just breaks the reality, breaks the reason, and so on.
[00:01:58]  And of course, like we know, we know all the tensions that come from living in a multicultural society.
[00:02:08]  Something else, then the problem, of course, is that nobody addresses the multicultural tensions that happen in a multicultural society.
[00:02:18]  And they learned about this, of course, in Singapore back in the day.
[00:02:21]  Because in Singapore, the guy who was in charge of Singapore ended up having to give up on having jury trials.
[00:02:28]  And I think the same thing is happening in the UK at the moment.
[00:02:33]  And they had to give up on jury trials because ethnic groups would find it very hard to convict members of their own ethnic groups.
[00:02:42]  And so they had to end up going to trial by judge rather than trial by jury because juries work when you have universal morals.

=== Multicultural Tensions and Jury Trials (06:25) ===

[00:02:52]  They don't work when you have in group preferences, like tribal preferences or ethnic preferences or religious preferences or racial preferences.
[00:03:00]  And of course, one of the great things that Christianity did around the world was bring universal morals to the world as a whole.
[00:03:08]  And then the problem is that other people have not really adopted that mindset as a whole.
[00:03:15]  And as I sort of talked about before, diversity is sort of this endless process of thinking that you're on a team and you're all just one big football team and you keep passing the ball to the other players, but the other players only keep passing the ball to themselves.
[00:03:32]  And then you end up losing the game.
[00:03:36]  You end up losing the game.
[00:03:38]  And so, yeah, in group preference versus out group preference.
[00:03:43]  Out group preference is going to lose.
[00:03:46]  Or neutral, right?
[00:03:47]  Or neutral preferences.
[00:03:50]  That is going to end up losing as a whole.
[00:03:54]  So tell me what you think of this.
[00:03:55]  My aunt, this is from R slash child free, people who are child free, no kids.
[00:04:01]  And yeah, I got to tell you, I mean, it's a tough thing to talk about because, you know, of course there are people who have no children through no fault of their own.
[00:04:11]  And, you know, they wanted to have kids.
[00:04:14]  Maybe they waited a little too long.
[00:04:15]  Maybe IVF didn't work.
[00:04:17]  Maybe they went into premature ovarian failure.
[00:04:22]  The FSH was too high.
[00:04:24]  And maybe they just have other infertility issues.
[00:04:27]  Maybe they had.
[00:04:29]  I knew a guy in the business world once, many years ago, who lost his ability to produce sperm from a medical treatment where that was a rare side effect.
[00:04:39]  And he just couldn't have kids.
[00:04:41]  But I'm talking about the people who choose not to even try.
[00:04:45]  You never know.
[00:04:47]  What is it most women say these days that they spend their entire 20s trying not to get pregnant, and then they spend their entire 30s trying to get pregnant?
[00:04:56]  It's a whole different kettle of fish, right?
[00:04:58]  But if you don't have kids, to those who do have kids, Your life just seems, you know, and again, I'm talking about like if you've never met the right person, I'm talking about like if you are in a circumstance where you can't have kids, like you're in some long term relationship, you're married and so on, and you just don't.
[00:05:17]  I'm not talking about, you know, if you're a monk or something like that.
[00:05:21]  But if you choose not to have kids, you just seem kind of profoundly unserious to people who do have kids.
[00:05:31]  You know, when you do have kids, So much of your life revolves around your kids that it feels obsessive to people who don't have kids.
[00:05:41]  Like, you know, you're hanging around when you have kids, you're hanging around with people who don't have kids.
[00:05:46]  And, you know, you can see it sort of in the rise of stuff.
[00:05:48]  Is that all you're going to talk about?
[00:05:49]  It's like, that's your life.
[00:05:50]  Your life is being a parent.
[00:05:52]  Your life is taking care of your kids, making sure they have a good life, resolving conflicts, helping them develop, dealing with the inevitable pains and scrapes and illnesses and heartaches and heartbreaks, half childhood and dating and teenage life and all that kind of stuff.
[00:06:06]  Friend group issues, you know, all of that sort of nonsense.
[00:06:09]  I don't just say nonsense, it's real and serious stuff.
[00:06:12]  But if you don't have kids and you could have kids, your life just seems kind of profoundly unserious to those of us with kids.
[00:06:22]  The stakes just aren't that high.
[00:06:23]  Like when you have kids, the stakes are crazy high.
[00:06:26]  I remember when my daughter was born, it sort of felt almost crazy like we could just take her home.
[00:06:32]  Just take her home.
[00:06:33]  Nobody checked in on us.
[00:06:34]  Nobody circled back.
[00:06:36]  You know, nobody called afterwards.
[00:06:38]  Like, I mean, when we had to travel over COVID and we came back, you know, they made sure we quarantined.
[00:06:46]  They called, you know, every day to make sure we were quarantined.
[00:06:51]  But you just take a kid, you just go home and you're just done.
[00:06:55]  You just, you know, good luck.
[00:06:57]  Good luck to you.
[00:06:57]  I'm sure things will be fine and all of that.
[00:07:00]  The stakes are just high.
[00:07:02]  It's just crazy high.
[00:07:04]  It's sort of like, if this makes sense, if you're, On a train, and you're going to go fight in some war, and there's some guy across from you who's just going in that direction, but stops off a lot earlier as a tourist.
[00:07:18]  He's just going to go do some tourist stuff, but you're going over the border and fight some war.
[00:07:22]  The stakes just are enormously different.
[00:07:25]  And if the guy, you're in the train, you're going to go fight some deadly war, and this guy's like, Oh, I hope my Airbnb is comfortable.
[00:07:32]  Because sometimes you go to an Airbnb or you go to a hotel, and it's just not that great, and they have those old radiators that don't really heat as much, and so on.
[00:07:40]  And you're like, I'm going to war.
[00:07:43]  And you're concerned about the quality of your motel, hotel, BB, whatever it is.
[00:07:48]  It's just a different mindset, and it's just kind of tough to look at things that way.
[00:07:54]  Or maybe another example would be that if you've taken your entire life savings and you've poured them into some business, you know, you're working 60, 70, 80 hours a week to keep this business afloat, to make it grow, dealing with endless problems and challenges and all of that.
[00:08:08]  And then your friend is like, you know, he's working in a restaurant and, you know, the boss is not giving him the hours he wants.
[00:08:15]  And he's just kind of like, hey, man, you know, it's a real dragon.
[00:08:17]  And you're like, I'm fighting for my life over here with my entire life savings on the line.
[00:08:23]  And if I. Lose this, like I've mentioned this before, when I was an entrepreneur in the software world, I had to personally sign staggering loans to get our payroll covered.
[00:08:35]  And if the business hadn't worked out, I think I would have, yeah, it's 7 13, 7 13 on this mid May day.
[00:08:46]  And I probably would have just about finished paying them off now.
[00:08:49]  It would be done right about now.
[00:08:53]  And that is just a whole different planet.
[00:08:56]  And, you know, when I was doing all of that kind of stuff and people were complaining that they won't get the hours they wanted or, you know, they were having some conflicts with their bosses and things like that, it's like, ah, when you're playing a high stakes life, and parenting is really the ultimate in high stakes life, but when you're playing a high stakes life, the sort of average stakes life, you just don't have that much in common.

=== Parenting in a Traumatized World (06:38) ===

[00:09:18]  And parenting, especially if you're doing like not normie parenting, like if you're doing parenting where you're really trying to get your kids to think for themselves, where you're doing the peaceful parenting thing and all of that, when you're doing all of that, And dealing with you make, you know, this is the big challenge.
[00:09:34]  It's really tough, it's functionally impossible to be a great parent these days because the better parent you are at home, the more your kids are going to have difficulty fitting into the generally traumatized and propagandized world as a whole.
[00:09:48]  And that's really, really a tough situation.
[00:09:51]  I'd love it if being a great parent meant that your kids fit in really well in a happy and rational world.
[00:09:59]  But the adjustment.
[00:10:01]  From raising your children in a peaceful and rational circumstance.
[00:10:04]  The adjustment then to them going out into the world and having to deal with your average misfiring lunatic, it's a challenge.
[00:10:11]  The better parents you are at home, the more challenge it is sometimes for your kids out there in the world.
[00:10:16]  And so you got a lot of navigating to do.
[00:10:20]  You got a lot of overcoming of your own history to do to become a great parent.
[00:10:23]  You become a great parent, and then you've got to figure out how to introduce your kids to the world as a whole.
[00:10:32]  And I did a big speech on this.
[00:10:34]  Many, many, many years ago, called Shape the Hell Up World.
[00:10:39]  Stop being so nuts.
[00:10:40]  So I don't have to tell my kids how much they're going to have to change or adapt in order to, I wouldn't say fit in, but just sort of get along.
[00:10:51]  Because they're used to negotiating.
[00:10:53]  They're used to rational people.
[00:10:54]  They're used to reason and discourse and conversation and virtue and integrity and honesty, you know, to whatever degree is appropriate in those situations.
[00:11:03]  And then they go out into a world just full of, you know, liars and manipulators and bullies and cowards and And all of that.
[00:11:10]  And they go from a household where reason rules to a world where aggression rules.
[00:11:18]  And it's tough.
[00:11:19]  I mean, what are you supposed to do?
[00:11:20]  Be aggressive with your kids so they speak the language of aggression?
[00:11:22]  That doesn't seem right.
[00:11:24]  But, you know, your kids, if you raise them peacefully and reasonably, they go out into the world and they just meet a whole world full of bullies and cowards.
[00:11:32]  Because that's, you know, that's kind of what the world is bullies and cowards, and they feed off each other.
[00:11:37]  So you've got a whole bunch of bullies.
[00:11:39]  And they manipulate and they're aggressive and they intimidate and then they feed off cowards, right?
[00:11:45]  You get some group, some bully moves into the group and immediately starts identifying the healthy people and bullies everyone else into ostracizing the healthy people, you know, kind of like deplatforming, but in a minor sort of way.
[00:11:59]  And you just realize that the bullies run things and the cowards just want to go along with everything and not get into too much trouble.
[00:12:07]  And if the cowards have to choose between a good person and a bad person, well, they say, well, the good person isn't going to try and attack me or get me ostracized, but the bad person is willing to do things.
[00:12:18]  Bad things that the good person is not willing to do.
[00:12:20]  So I guess I'll just comply with the bad person and throw the good person overboard and, you know, just seeing that process happen over and over again.
[00:12:27]  It's kind of disheartening.
[00:12:28]  It happens all over the place, all the time.
[00:12:33]  So R slash child free.
[00:12:37]  Rant.
[00:12:39]  I think this is a woman, right?
[00:12:43]  I'm the only person in my extended family who is openly child free.
[00:12:47]  Everyone knows.
[00:12:49]  Actively horrible about it.
[00:12:50]  It just comes up occasionally in ways that make me want to leave the table.
[00:12:53]  This was one of those times.
[00:12:56]  We were at a family dinner, maybe 12 people, normal Sunday thing.
[00:13:01]  My aunt starts talking about updating her will because her financial advisor suggested it.
[00:13:05]  Fine, not my business, except she then explains her reasoning out loud to the whole table.
[00:13:10]  Her two kids both have children.
[00:13:12]  I don't and won't.
[00:13:14]  Therefore, she says, it makes more sense for things to go to people who have a family to pass it along to.
[00:13:20]  I'm 35 years old.
[00:13:21]  I have a career, a home, things that I care about, people I love.
[00:13:26]  The idea that I'm somehow less deserving of consideration in her will because I won't be producing grandchildren she can feel good about is, I don't know, something.
[00:13:36]  Something.
[00:13:38]  I didn't say anything in the moment because I didn't want to make it a scene.
[00:13:41]  And also because it's her money and she can do whatever she wants with it.
[00:13:45]  That part I genuinely mean.
[00:13:47]  What bothered me wasn't the decision, it was the public.
[00:13:51]  Explanation.
[00:13:52]  The casual assumption that my life is worth less inheriting because there's no next generation attached to it.
[00:13:59]  It said right in front of me, like I was a piece of furniture that couldn't hear.
[00:14:02]  My mom texted me later saying, She didn't mean it like that.
[00:14:06]  I'm sure she didn't.
[00:14:07]  But it still landed exactly like that, though.
[00:14:11]  Hmm.
[00:14:13]  Interesting.
[00:14:15]  Interesting.
[00:14:17]  So, of course, it's keeping the money in the family line.
[00:14:21]  Right if you leave.
[00:14:23]  Your money to people who've had kids, and they leave it to their kids, or they use it to further their own kids, and so you keep your money in the family line.
[00:14:30]  And this is what people have done for tens of thousands of years, or basically ever since there was any kind of resource.
[00:14:37]  Then you would leave it to your family, and you would try and keep the resources within your family line.
[00:14:43]  That's the way it's supposed to be, that's what makes sense.
[00:14:48]  And what happens to the money when this woman dies?
[00:14:53]  Let's say.
[00:14:54]  She gets a million dollars.
[00:14:55]  Let's say she spends half of it or whatever.
[00:14:57]  And then there's $500,000 at the end of her life or a quarter mil or whatever it is, right?
[00:15:03]  What does she do with it?
[00:15:04]  What does she do with it?
[00:15:07]  Well, she's going to leave it to some woke organization almost certainly because almost everyone who doesn't want to have kids is on the left.
[00:15:15]  So that means, assuming this is a white family, it means that the money is going to go to some hyper woke leftist organization that's going to discriminate against the white males.
[00:15:28]  In the family.
[00:15:30]  So, very sad.
[00:15:34]  Very sad.
[00:15:36]  This came in just recently.
[00:15:37]  Canada court blocks Alberta separatist bid to force an independence vote over failure to consult Indigenous people.
[00:15:44]  Failure to consult Indigenous people.
[00:15:47]  Well, All right, let's get to your questions and comments.

=== Discrimination Against White Males (02:06) ===

[00:15:56]  Richard, welcome back.
[00:15:58]  I think that's you.
[00:15:59]  What is on your mind?
[00:16:01]  Oh, hey, Stefan.
[00:16:03]  I was assuming there'll be other coolers.
[00:16:06]  Coolers.
[00:16:06]  Coolers.
[00:16:08]  Um, Yeah.
[00:16:10]  I have a question to ask you, right?
[00:16:15]  There's a motto who dares wins.
[00:16:19]  I'm sure people have heard this before, this motto.
[00:16:23]  And essentially, it outlines the, you know, if you don't dare in some sense, then you will not win.
[00:16:33]  And I feel like, you know, that's a military thing, but I feel like it applies equally.
[00:16:39]  Or more so in a different context to the poor, you know, life in general.
[00:16:46]  And especially to men, I think you have to, I think it's a healthy thing to embrace that ethos if you're a man out there.
[00:16:58]  And yeah, I'd love to hear what you think of that.
[00:17:05]  In what context do you think it matters most?
[00:17:08]  In conflict, in work, or in love?
[00:17:10]  Because those are the three main areas that men have to deal with.
[00:17:13]  Risk, conflict, and work and love.
[00:17:16]  Where do you think it matters the most?
[00:17:18]  Risk, taking of risks.
[00:17:23]  I think it applies to all three kind of equally, really.
[00:17:27]  I think that as a man, if you can't foster that in yourself, then.
[00:17:36]  Sorry, foster what?
[00:17:37]  Be specific?
[00:17:39]  Yeah, the ethos of who dares wins, which is like, if you're fearful of.
[00:17:45]  Taking any kind of chance and putting yourself out there, then you're likely more likely to fail than succeed.
[00:17:55]  And this goes for both in personal relationships, in work, and in life in general, I think.

=== Risk, Conflict, and Work Ethos (04:04) ===

[00:18:03]  Yeah.
[00:18:04]  Okay.
[00:18:04]  So give me an example.
[00:18:07]  I don't think it's equal, but I'm just sort of giving it my first pass.
[00:18:10]  It doesn't mean that it isn't.
[00:18:11]  I just don't think it's equal.
[00:18:12]  So give me an example.
[00:18:15]  What's the biggest risk that you would say you've taken in your life?
[00:18:18]  The biggest risk.
[00:18:21]  Well, I mean, other than appearing on a volatile podcast, but go ahead.
[00:18:26]  Yeah, sure.
[00:18:27]  Okay, so let me just give you an example of I would, this is going back a number of years, number of decades.
[00:18:34]  At that time, I was working at a halfway house and I went on vacation.
[00:18:42]  I came back from my vacation and then I was told by the boss.
[00:18:50]  That he would have to kind of demote me, I guess, in some sense.
[00:18:55]  I wouldn't be able to have the job I had at the time, and I would have to sort of stand down into a lesser position.
[00:19:04]  Or he could just let me go, you know?
[00:19:07]  So I thought about it, and I thought, you know what?
[00:19:10]  Ah, just let me go.
[00:19:12]  I'll find something better or something else.
[00:19:15]  Anyway, so in the next few days, I was working there on the night shift.
[00:19:21]  There was one fellow who was a, you know, we used to call them residents, you know, we had a mixture of young guys and older guys, seemed to balance things out pretty well.
[00:19:32]  Anyway, and the older guys were mostly in for like DUIs and that kind of stuff, right?
[00:19:37]  Nothing, no serial criminal kind of activity.
[00:19:41]  And one of the guys was like an iron worker type guy.
[00:19:44]  And I sat down with him and I said, Look, you know, I'm leaving in a few days.
[00:19:48]  You know, you got any ideas?
[00:19:50]  And he says, Well, you know what?
[00:19:53]  I could give you this piece of paper and you take it up to the union hall in another town.
[00:20:00]  Just tell them you got in from, you know, you just tell them you just got into town and they'll find a job for you, right?
[00:20:07]  So I thought, okay, sure.
[00:20:09]  So I took the chance and he gave me some old gear I could wear.
[00:20:14]  And I went to the Union Hall and they gave me a ticket.
[00:20:19]  And it was for this small kind of refinery.
[00:20:25]  It was a very small kind of oil refinery type thing where they would recycle used oil.
[00:20:30]  Had a bunch of.
[00:20:31]  Anyway, so I'd show up on the Monday in my car and a bunch of, you know, all these other new guys.
[00:20:38]  Show up at the same time, and I knew that I am.
[00:20:40]  Hang on a sec, like these are actually qualified iron workers, I'm not.
[00:20:44]  And I just thought, okay, well, you know what?
[00:20:46]  I'll just get to the back of the line and see what happens.
[00:20:49]  So, anyway, these guys all file through the porter cabin thing.
[00:20:53]  The guy sets them off on their jobs, and then I get there and I say, you know, look, I'm not an iron worker.
[00:20:59]  And he just sort of looks at me and he goes, What are you talking about?
[00:21:04]  I says, Look, I'm, you know, I kind of fake my way in.
[00:21:08]  I'm not an iron worker.
[00:21:09]  I'm just being up straight with you, but I do need a job.
[00:21:12]  And he goes, Well, okay, like, what do you do?
[00:21:16]  And I said, Well, I know how to use a cutting torch.
[00:21:18]  And I had a little bit of welding kind of experience, but, you know, and he said, Okay, all right, I'll, you know, okay, you can go off in the backfield and cut up all these old pieces of steel.
[00:21:31]  And that was great.
[00:21:32]  And I guess the, you know, and that worked out for most of the summer.
[00:21:37]  Finally, he had to let me go because, you know, it was pretty obvious I wasn't a qualified union, qualified.
[00:21:43]  I am a worker.
[00:21:44]  So, but you know, the takeaway for me was that, like, if you take a chance, the worst that can happen in that situation, you could just say, look, sorry, you need to leave, kind of thing.
[00:21:56]  And I thought, okay, fair enough.
[00:21:58]  That's a chance I took, but it worked out.
[00:22:01]  And that's not like a very sort of thrilling story, but it did show me.

=== High Stakes for Young Adults (02:49) ===

[00:22:07]  Hang on, hang on, hang on.
[00:22:08]  So, but I asked you your biggest risk.
[00:22:10]  Your biggest risk was taking a summer job that you were less than qualified for?
[00:22:15]  No, no, no.
[00:22:15]  Okay.
[00:22:17]  Okay, well, hang on, let me think back over my life.
[00:22:19]  Well, hang on, you can't start that now.
[00:22:21]  I asked for your biggest risk.
[00:22:23]  I will say that's an underwhelming, you know, no disrespect, right?
[00:22:25]  But it's rather if you're saying who dares wins, and your biggest dare in your life was, you know, leaving a job where you're about to get fired and going for some other job and asking for one, I'm trying to figure out the who dares part.
[00:22:39]  And let me, while you sort of collect your thoughts on that, I'll tell you how I think risk applies to these different things.
[00:22:45]  So risk definitely falls into the Aristotelian mean.
[00:22:50]  A life with too little risk is complacent and lazy and too fearful.
[00:22:57]  A life with too much risk is too unstable and too dangerous, right?
[00:23:06]  I mean, you can ride your motorcycle in the rain and no helmets and so on, and that's too much risk.
[00:23:16]  And so finding the right level of risk for life.
[00:23:22]  Is a challenging thing because it also changes.
[00:23:24]  When you're younger, you have more time to bounce back.
[00:23:28]  So, when you're younger, if you want to take your obviously often quite meager life savings and throw them into a business, if the business fails, then you have time to rebuild.
[00:23:38]  So, you should be taking more risks when you're younger.
[00:23:40]  And this generally is the case with investors.
[00:23:43]  When you're younger, you can probably afford a little bit more risk in your investment because it's going to smooth out in the long run.
[00:23:49]  And, you know, if you have a financial advisor, usually they'll ask you this question and they'll say, well, what could you afford?
[00:23:58]  To lose in your portfolio.
[00:24:00]  Again, if you're younger and your portfolio goes down 25 or even 50%, you probably have time to regrow it.
[00:24:06]  But if you're a year away from retirement or if you're 70 or 75 or something like that, then you probably want to be a whole lot more conservative because you can't probably do quite as well if you lose half your life savings, right?
[00:24:20]  So if your savings are smaller and you have more time to regain.
[00:24:23]  So in terms of risk, things are different in life and trying to find the right balance of risk and reward.
[00:24:32]  And risk is also related to reward.
[00:24:34]  I mean, you could, I don't know, jump off a 20 foot high wall and hope that you'll be okay.
[00:24:40]  I mean, maybe you could do that for clicks now on media.
[00:24:44]  But it really doesn't make much sense to do that because there's no particular reward.
[00:24:49]  So I think risk and reward have to be tied in together high risk, high reward.

=== Following Dreams Despite Age Limits (03:36) ===

[00:24:57]  And it changes over the course of your life.
[00:24:59]  You have time to burn.
[00:25:02]  This is related to a story that I mentioned many years ago on the show.
[00:25:06]  I'll just touch on it briefly here, which was one of the big things in my life my brother had some.
[00:25:15]  My brother was in the business world, I was still in the art world.
[00:25:19]  And my brother was taking out some clients for dinner, and he invited me to come along.
[00:25:24]  And I went along, and there was a guy there, just call him Bob.
[00:25:29]  And Bob was a professional in the business world.
[00:25:33]  And Bob said to me, What do you do?
[00:25:34]  And I said, Oh, I'm an actor.
[00:25:36]  He said, Oh, an actor.
[00:25:37]  That's cool.
[00:25:37]  My brother's an actor.
[00:25:39]  And I said, Oh, really?
[00:25:40]  Yeah.
[00:25:40]  Well, how's that going for him?
[00:25:42]  He said, Oh, you know, it's tough, man.
[00:25:44]  It's tough.
[00:25:44]  I feel for the guy.
[00:25:45]  I really feel for the guy because he's in New York.
[00:25:49]  He's been in New York, I think, maybe six or seven years.
[00:25:53]  Seven years, I think.
[00:25:55]  And, you know, he's got some off Broadway stuff.
[00:25:58]  He's got a couple of commercials.
[00:26:01]  And, you know, he obviously does some extra work, as everyone does when they're trying to make it as an actor.
[00:26:06]  And it's just enough.
[00:26:09]  For him to not give up.
[00:26:11]  I mean, obviously, if he got nothing, it's just enough for him not to give up.
[00:26:16]  But it's not enough for him to do what he really wants to do, maybe get married, have a family at some point.
[00:26:24]  So he's 31.
[00:26:27]  He's 31 years old.
[00:26:29]  He's been doing it for, I think, seven years.
[00:26:32]  And it's tough because he doesn't want to leave right before he hits it big.
[00:26:37]  But at the same time, if he keeps on doing what he's doing, You know, what's he going to do if he puts in another couple of years and then he gets, you know, maybe too old to really get a quality?
[00:26:50]  He can't get a steady girlfriend because the steady girlfriend is like, you make how much and doing what?
[00:26:54]  And of course, he still has to work part time as a waiter and all kinds of crazy stuff because he needs to be available for auditions, right?
[00:27:00]  So he can't have some nine to fiver.
[00:27:02]  And yeah, it's really tough.
[00:27:03]  And he's really, he's not regretting being an actor and, you know, he's trying to work on his own stuff, but that's also stuff to get going as well because if you want to put on a, One man show when you're nobody.
[00:27:14]  It's pretty expensive.
[00:27:15]  He doesn't really have the money.
[00:27:16]  So, you know, it's a tough life, you know?
[00:27:20]  And anyway, so we talked about that over the course of the evening, and I just felt these spider webby tendrils of icy dread reach out from my nads up my spine because I think that it's what one of my acting teachers said is that, you know, if you can, he said this to all of us if you can do anything else, you should.
[00:27:41]  If you can do anything else, you should because it's a pretty tough life, it's a pretty horrible life, it's a pretty difficult life.
[00:27:50]  As a whole, and that story of being stuck, having just enough success that you can keep going.
[00:27:59]  And see, if you're an actor as well, there's always something in the wings.
[00:28:02]  There's always something that's coming down the pipe.
[00:28:04]  There's always someone who's looking at a script of yours.
[00:28:06]  There's always someone who's got a friend who's casting something in the summer and they're really interested in you.
[00:28:11]  And there's always something that's going to give you that kind of savage hope.
[00:28:16]  It's not like just, oh, and you know, there's this audition that's coming up in the fall for a play I just know I'd be perfect for.
[00:28:23]  And, you know, one of my ex girlfriends is a stage manager and she still likes me.
[00:28:27]  She's going to put in a good word for me.
[00:28:28]  There's always something just over the horizon.
[00:28:30]  There's always these, there's a mirage on the horizon.
[00:28:32]  I'm lost in the desert, but I can get there.

=== Balancing Career Success and Risk (05:42) ===

[00:28:34]  I can bathe.
[00:28:35]  And, oh, this one's a mirage, but there's one right past that.
[00:28:37]  And it's real easy to just burn up time.
[00:28:40]  And then, of course, everyone's whispering in your ear saying, man, you got to follow your dreams.
[00:28:43]  You got to follow your dreams.
[00:28:44]  It's like, yeah, well, but the problem is, the problem is, everyone who tells you to follow your dreams, well, their dreams succeeded.
[00:28:53]  I mean, it'd be like me saying to everyone, you know, Damn it, you've got to go and you've got to follow your intellectual dreams and start a radical philosophy podcast.
[00:29:02]  It's like, yeah, but I don't know that there's a lot of people who have the kind of skills and abilities that I have.
[00:29:10]  You know, it's like Luciano Pavarotti saying to everyone, you should follow your dreams as a singer.
[00:29:15]  It's like, well, when you've got a glorious, God given golden tenor, sure, you can do that.
[00:29:21]  But if you don't, you know, following your dreams is an advice, a piece of advice that's given to people.
[00:29:28]  By a very self selected group.
[00:29:30]  It's like asking people who've won the lottery, should I play the lottery?
[00:29:34]  And you're like, of course you should play the lottery.
[00:29:36]  Well, yeah, you say that because you've won the lottery.
[00:29:38]  You don't talk to all the people who've wasted their lives on gambling addictions.
[00:29:43]  Should I start gambling?
[00:29:44]  No, right?
[00:29:45]  So it all matters who you're hearing it from.
[00:29:47]  So risk is a challenge.
[00:29:49]  I think in business, you should take some risks for sure.
[00:29:53]  You should take, I mean, I had my first steady paycheck.
[00:29:56]  I was making 40K a year as a COBOL programmer at a trading company.
[00:30:03]  And I was there for about eight months, pretty stable.
[00:30:08]  They were happy with me.
[00:30:09]  I had a good career path going forward.
[00:30:12]  The guys I was working with were all consultants, making an ungodly amount of hourly rates.
[00:30:16]  So, if I'd continued down that path, I would have been making serious coin within a couple of years as a consultant.
[00:30:27]  And that was a little tempting, honestly.
[00:30:30]  That was like my first regular paycheck, it was my first professional job.
[00:30:34]  And I was good friends with all six of us who worked in the same room.
[00:30:40]  It wasn't even that big a room.
[00:30:41]  I got to overhear everybody's phone calls.
[00:30:43]  The one guy who was getting divorced, the one guy.
[00:30:46]  But everybody liked me.
[00:30:48]  I stayed good friends with them for even some time after I left.
[00:30:52]  We were all getting along well.
[00:30:53]  So that would have been a very good professional base to kick off from to make some really good money.
[00:30:59]  But of course, it was a lot of maintenance programming and a lot of taking care of old school programs.
[00:31:05]  Our big upgrade was from COBOL 74.
[00:31:08]  To Kobol 85.
[00:31:09]  This was in the 90s.
[00:31:11]  So, on the other hand, I had the opportunity to go and co found a software company with my code, with sort of modern technology and GUI interface and VBA and all kinds of cool stuff.
[00:31:25]  So, to me, it wasn't actually that much of a, oh my God, this is a crazy big risk, because I just wanted to go out and write my own code rather than maintain other people's code.
[00:31:38]  Maintaining other people's code is kind of like being a cover band as a musician.
[00:31:41]  I mean, you can only get a certain amount of success, you have to write your own code.
[00:31:45]  Songs in order to make it as a musician, or at least that's your only real chance, unless you want to be some Jimmy Page session musician who never founds Led Zeppelin.
[00:31:54]  So for me, I didn't really feel like that much of a risk.
[00:31:57]  And again, I was a relatively young man.
[00:32:00]  I was 27 or 28 when I co founded the software company.
[00:32:04]  So it was, you know, if it had blown up in my face, I had enough time to recover.
[00:32:12]  So I felt like that was worth it.
[00:32:13]  But I also didn't leave my job until we had secured.
[00:32:18]  I think we got $80,000 to start the business.
[00:32:22]  And that turned out to be, and the people who invested that got massive amounts of money back.
[00:32:26]  So that was all very good.
[00:32:28]  So I thought that was a reasonable level of risk.
[00:32:31]  And I think that is good.
[00:32:34]  I think it was a good risk assessment when it came to quitting my career as a software executive and doing what I do here.
[00:32:45]  I mean, of course, my wife had an income, and I already had some indication.
[00:32:51]  I remember at the beginning, my goal was to make a little over $2,000 a month.
[00:32:56]  If I could make a little over $2,000 a month, then, and I remember being cobbling that together.
[00:33:01]  I sold the book here, I had a little donation there, all kinds of stuff was going on.
[00:33:06]  So I just had to sort of hop from lily pad to wobbly lily pad at the beginning.
[00:33:12]  And I felt that was a reasonable risk.
[00:33:14]  And that was, I mean, compared to being in the software world, which I really enjoyed for the most part, doing philosophy honestly felt like an absolute dream come true.
[00:33:23]  This was like a pinch me.
[00:33:25]  Moment.
[00:33:26]  And I remember, you know, talking it over with friends and family and saying, and then saying, you know, does the world need another programmer or does the world need a moral philosopher?
[00:33:38]  Does the world need another software executive, a marketing guy, a sales guy, a business guy, an entrepreneur?
[00:33:44]  Does the world need another entrepreneur or does the world need an expert moral philosopher?
[00:33:50]  And it's like, yeah, yeah, kind of when you put it that way, it's pretty important.
[00:33:55]  And to some degree, Your passion has to be guided not just by what you want but by what the world needs because otherwise it is a life of self service, which is not the end of the world or anything.
[00:34:06]  But if you can unite self service with service to the world and service of the good, then I think you've got a pretty good and sweet life going on.

=== Underestimated Risks in Truth Telling (15:28) ===

[00:34:17]  And then I underestimated risks, I underestimated risks in some areas as well.
[00:34:23]  I mean, I've made some good risk decisions, I've made bad risk decisions as well.
[00:34:30]  I wrote this on X not too long ago.
[00:34:32]  That one of the big mistakes that people make, and I've certainly made it myself on an embarrassingly large number of occasions, but one of the big mistakes that people make is they think other people are like themselves.
[00:34:45]  Other minds are like themselves.
[00:34:47]  What a catastrophe.
[00:34:49]  Boy, if there's one thing, it's hard to say because I think it's all worked out pretty well.
[00:34:55]  But other people are not like me.
[00:34:58]  They're probably not like you if you listen to this kind of conversation.
[00:35:02]  Other people.
[00:35:03]  Don't listen to reason.
[00:35:06]  So, for me, if somebody makes a good case, even if I hate the case, if other people make the case, I mean, I remember learning about racial IQ differences back in university.
[00:35:20]  And it was talked about and all of that.
[00:35:24]  So, I'm like, okay.
[00:35:25]  And I hated the idea.
[00:35:26]  I mean, I still kind of hate the idea, but you kind of just got to go with what's true and real.
[00:35:30]  I wish it wasn't the case, but it is.
[00:35:32]  But I was like, okay, well, that's something I don't like.
[00:35:37]  But it's something that makes sense.
[00:35:38]  You know, I was a socialist when I first began reading about the free market, and I was like, well, it certainly goes against the grain, but I have this mental illness called an inability to argue with reason and evidence.
[00:35:54]  I have this insanity called an inability to dismiss facts and reality and rationality.
[00:36:01]  I just don't feel comfortable, don't like doing that.
[00:36:08]  It goes very much against the grain and it feels cowardly because the only reason I would give up reason and evidence is because I feel frightened or I am bullied or something like that.
[00:36:21]  And so I don't want to give up reason and evidence.
[00:36:23]  That is a mark of cowardliness, which I don't respect and don't want to be.
[00:36:27]  If my ancestors can march out into no man's land in World War I, if my ancestors, not even that long ago, can pilot bombers.
[00:36:40]  In World War II, then I can accept uncomfortable facts.
[00:36:46]  I honestly think I had by far the easiest job of any of my ancestors going back centuries.
[00:36:53]  You know, when my ancestor William Molyneux was hiding in barns trying to escape the king's troops with John Locke being chased all over Ireland for something they'd said.
[00:37:05]  Well, I'm not, you know, I have to run through the streets being hunted by Antifa in Australia.
[00:37:11]  You know, facing bomb and death threats.
[00:37:12]  Still not quite the same as what my ancestors had to face.
[00:37:14]  I really do have the easiest gig of all of them.
[00:37:17]  I hope that they look upon me with approval and I'm sure with a little bit of envy as well.
[00:37:24]  So I definitely have underestimated some risks, and I did that.
[00:37:29]  I underestimated some risks because I had the general assumption that people were like me, that I have sort of a template for the human brain.
[00:37:41]  That is shared obviously to differing degrees by others, and that if I put forward the case with reason and evidence, other people will be cowed, even if they hate it, and maybe even especially if they hate it.
[00:37:57]  Like when I did the IQ stuff, I was very careful, I didn't want to go out on some wobbly promontory.
[00:38:04]  I wanted to make sure I was on solid footing and foundation, so I interviewed 17 of the world's experts on human intelligence to make sure that everyone, left, right, and center, all agreed with.
[00:38:17]  The conclusions.
[00:38:19]  And then I went forward and put the data out there and put the facts out there, put all the sources out there, put the books and all of that.
[00:38:26]  And I thought, well, you know, people, they might ignore the topic, but they can't just attack the topic because that to me would be as shameful and embarrassing as attacking the two and two make four.
[00:38:38]  It would just be the mark of being a crazy person.
[00:38:42]  And so I ended up underestimating that risk and the risk of other.
[00:38:50]  Back in the day, like I saw Matt Welsh is doing a show on Martin Luther King Jr.
[00:38:55]  And of course, I think it was like, I don't know, 12 or 14 years ago, I did the truth about Martin Luther King Jr.
[00:39:01]  And so on.
[00:39:02]  And so all of this stuff seems very giant come lately to me.
[00:39:06]  So I underestimated some of the risks, talking about the origins of communism and other things that I was talking about and talking about the true causes of World War II.
[00:39:18]  Doesn't really matter if you have the facts.
[00:39:19]  And people would get mad at me and I'd say, but here are all the facts.
[00:39:22]  And then people would just attack from a different sector or a different vector.
[00:39:27]  The idea of attacking people for telling the truth is kind of incomprehensible to me.
[00:39:32]  Actually, I wouldn't say it's completely incomprehensible to me, but it is the modus operandi of most of the world to simply mindlessly attack people for telling the truth.
[00:39:44]  And once you've shown your claws to someone who's telling the truth, then anybody else who's thinking of supporting the person who's telling the truth will run away and hide.
[00:39:56]  And we can say right or wrong, good or bad.
[00:39:58]  It's just merely a description of behavior, not a prescription of ideals.
[00:40:03]  So if I Were a religious man, I would say that God hid the risk for me so that the truth could come out.
[00:40:11]  That if I had known the risks about a wide variety of the topics, you know, family separation, right?
[00:40:17]  Separating from abusive, like relentlessly and unapologetically abusive parents as an adult, that I did not think that was as controversial a topic as it turned out to be.
[00:40:29]  Because I thought, well, you know, I mean, there'll be some parents who complain, but the parents are kind of clearly abusive.
[00:40:37]  Sorry, Richard, I keep muting you because you keep making swallowing sounds.
[00:40:41]  So if you could not unmute until you have something to say, I'd appreciate that.
[00:40:44]  Yeah, I apologize.
[00:40:47]  Yeah, just ask you not to interrupt.
[00:40:50]  Just stay muted.
[00:40:51]  So I underestimated the blowback.
[00:40:57]  And I didn't underestimate the blowback in terms of, oh, I don't think there'll be blowback.
[00:41:01]  I underestimated the fraidy cat nature of people as a whole who wouldn't stand with a truth teller under attack.
[00:41:11]  And that is something that, I mean, it's still going on.
[00:41:13]  I'm still largely persona non grata among former colleagues and so on.
[00:41:18]  Like, nobody really invites me back on, even people whose careers I helped start.
[00:41:23]  Not a big complaint.
[00:41:24]  I'm happy with the way things are.
[00:41:26]  I'm working right now on a new movie on the proof of philosophical ethics, the absolute proof of rational ethics, UPB, University Preferable Behavior.
[00:41:37]  UPB, easy as ABC, easy as one, two, three, baby, UNB.
[00:41:43]  So, that's a lot of fun.
[00:41:45]  And of course, I have been mercifully liberated from audience capture to a large degree.
[00:41:50]  So, yeah, so I would say that some things I thought were more risky turned out to be less risky.
[00:42:00]  Some things I thought would be less risky turned out to be more risky.
[00:42:05]  And that's just sort of been an education.
[00:42:07]  But the upshot of it is that I got essential truths out into the world.
[00:42:12]  And once you get the truths out and you stand behind them and you stand by them, once you get those truths out, well, They have to live and die on their own.
[00:42:19]  You can't be out there constantly pressing the truth into everyone's face, you know?
[00:42:25]  Smell the glove.
[00:42:27]  It wasn't a glove.
[00:42:27]  They wanted to put it on there, I can assure you.
[00:42:29]  But get the truth out there, and it lives or dies on other people's acceptance or rejection.
[00:42:37]  So I've done my part.
[00:42:39]  The world now has to do its part, or not.
[00:42:42]  But I've certainly done my part.
[00:42:45]  So, with regards to work, I think that taking risks is good.
[00:42:50]  You won't get every risk right, nobody does.
[00:42:53]  And be careful you don't listen to people who've won their risk taking who say taking the risk is always worth it because it's not.
[00:43:02]  That's not the case.
[00:43:02]  That's not true.
[00:43:05]  And be sure, if you can, to have your risk, the risk that you want to take, the dream that you want to pursue, include something that is of general benefit to the world as a whole.
[00:43:19]  And that is work.
[00:43:23]  In terms of conflict, that's a tough one, man.
[00:43:28]  In terms of conflict, if you can fight alone, then have great courage.
[00:43:35]  I think that's important.
[00:43:38]  I've never turned down a debate opportunity in the subject I feel competent to debate in.
[00:43:46]  And, you know, when people call in and they oppose what it is that I say, they oppose my arguments.
[00:43:54]  They get to the front of the line.
[00:43:55]  I want to be opposed.
[00:43:57]  I want to debate.
[00:43:58]  I want to have those conversations.
[00:44:01]  Because if I'm debating with someone, then it's kind of a one on one chat.
[00:44:05]  And it's me and them and have courage in those situations.
[00:44:10]  The problem is, of course, when you have to rely on other people.
[00:44:16]  So the analogy would be if you are a good fist fighter, maybe you know some martial arts or something like that.
[00:44:26]  And you get jumped by one guy, then you should feel confident taking on that one guy.
[00:44:31]  However, if you and five friends get jumped by him and his five friends, then if your friends run away, you're kind of toast because not everyone is going to come at you one by one like some set of highly coordinated sequential Bruce Lee enemies.
[00:44:49]  Wasn't his career like 22 months?
[00:44:51]  Do I have that right?
[00:44:52]  Bruce Lee's career was like 22 months.
[00:44:54]  All those drugs, bad for the heart.
[00:44:58]  So, If you are on a six on six and then your five friends run away and it's you facing six people, you're going down, brother.
[00:45:07]  You're going down.
[00:45:09]  And that's where you have your challenges.
[00:45:12]  So if you can't fight alone, you have to have total confidence in the people you're fighting with.
[00:45:20]  And that's tough to come by.
[00:45:22]  That is tough to come by.
[00:45:24]  People who will stick by you and who you will stick by no matter what.
[00:45:28]  And when you can find those people, man, hang on to them with both hands because they are absolute gold.
[00:45:34]  In this world.
[00:45:35]  So, fighting, you can assess risk based upon the reliability of courage, right?
[00:45:41]  When it comes to conflict or even combat, the reliability of courage.
[00:45:44]  If it's just you and you're a courageous person, then you can fight one on one and you will have that courage, whether it's physical or intellectual or whatever, right?
[00:45:52]  But if you have a group and you're reliant upon a group, you know, when I was attacked in a very coordinated way, you know, and it took them two years to lay the foundation for, there were like New York Times articles, it took them two years to lay The foundation of my deplatforming, Wikipedia, and all of these other sorts of things that were going on, all of these agencies and organizations labeling me an extremist and far right, blah, blah, blah.
[00:46:17]  I mean, not just far right, just very right, very right, as in I'm very correct.
[00:46:22]  So it was probably maybe a little longer, two to three years to lay the platform for my deplatforming.
[00:46:27]  And I assume that that went in, that process started right after Trump's victory in 2016 for obvious reasons.
[00:46:35]  So, yeah, it took about Three years.
[00:46:38]  I probably wasn't top of the list, but I was definitely up there in terms of getting deplatformed for 2020.
[00:46:44]  So, the people who could have stood by me when I was under attack did not.
[00:46:51]  The people with much larger platforms, when I was under attack, did not give me their platform with which to rebut the allegations.
[00:47:00]  Because what happened was you get attacked, which is a common playbook, right?
[00:47:06]  So, you get attacked, and then your reach gets limited before you get deplatformed.
[00:47:10]  So, you get suppressed.
[00:47:12]  I mean, I remember back in the day on.
[00:47:15]  Many social media and video sites, you could type in my name and nothing would come up.
[00:47:22]  I remember you could type in the name of my Hong Kong documentary, Hong Kong Fight for Freedom, freedomain.com slash documentaries, really, really well worth watching.
[00:47:30]  Still more relevant now in many ways than ever.
[00:47:33]  And I remember you could type in Hong Kong Fight for Freedom and get nothing.
[00:47:38]  So they attack you and then they suppress you so that you can't rebut.
[00:47:45]  The allegations.
[00:47:46]  So the allegations get boosted, and any response that you make gets de boosted or hidden or eliminated really from people's view.
[00:47:54]  And then you stop getting recommended, and your videos stop showing up, or your podcast or whatever stops showing up in recommended or even search terms.
[00:48:03]  So they can attack you, but you can't defend yourself.
[00:48:08]  And the only way that you can defend yourself is to have other people whose reach remains large have you on to rebut the allegations.
[00:48:17]  But nobody wanted me on to rebut the allegations after the big attacks started.
[00:48:25]  And so it was a case that I was being beset upon by dozens of other people, and I needed dozens of people to help me fight back.
[00:48:36]  And they all despawned and vaporized and pursued their own survival and careerism and so on, right?
[00:48:43]  Okay, well, I'm not even mad about it, man.
[00:48:47]  It's fine.
[00:48:48]  I'm fine with it.
[00:48:50]  No, honestly, it's so long ago now, and people have made their choices, and my conscience is clear.
[00:48:57]  I mean, other people, you know, I never got any messages from anyone since, during, or since, whoever said, you know, I really should have stood up for you a little bit.
[00:49:10]  I'm sorry that I didn't.
[00:49:11]  And that's really interesting.
[00:49:13]  And maybe I don't think I don't read out people's private messages to me unless I ask permission beforehand, like even if people say something positive about me.
[00:49:22]  I will not publish it unless I ask them first.
[00:49:24]  So that's been a general policy of mine since the beginning.
[00:49:28]  But yeah, no one has said, you know, could have stood up for you a little bit more.
[00:49:37]  You were really fighting alone, and I was running for the hills.
[00:49:42]  I feel kind of bad about that.
[00:49:44]  I wish things had gone differently.

=== Courage in Combat and Apologies (02:08) ===

[00:49:46]  Now, of course, in general, you only get an apology 48 hours after the wrong occurs.
[00:49:53]  After 48 hours, all that people do is justify to themselves that I brought it on myself.
[00:50:01]  It doesn't really matter.
[00:50:02]  I knew I was playing with fire.
[00:50:04]  They've got families to feed and all of that sort of stuff.
[00:50:07]  So, in general, if someone wrongs you, my experience has been if you don't get an apology within 48 hours, don't bother.
[00:50:18]  Don't bother.
[00:50:20]  It's like trying to go to a graveyard to resuscitate people.
[00:50:23]  It just doesn't make any sense.
[00:50:25]  It doesn't work.
[00:50:26]  It isn't going to happen.
[00:50:28]  So, if you are in a situation of conflict or combat, your courage should be dependent upon the courage of your fellow travelers, of your friends, of your colleagues, and so on.
[00:50:41]  And if six guys set upon you and your five friends, right, 6v6, and then you turn around and your five friends have all run away, or some of them have even joined the other team, it's time to get the hell out of Dodge.
[00:50:59]  It is time to leave.
[00:51:01]  Because risk in combat is only reasonable when you can be sure of the courage of those fighting with you, not against you, but with you, right?
[00:51:11]  Your companions, right?
[00:51:13]  So if you don't have companions, they'll turn on you.
[00:51:16]  And it was obviously pretty scurvy, I think, for a lot of the people who were colleagues and former colleagues to pretend I didn't exist when I was under attack.
[00:51:28]  And I don't know, maybe they wanted my audience.
[00:51:30]  Who knows, right?
[00:51:31]  Once the.
[00:51:32]  Once the king is down, you get to carve up the kingdom, King Lear style, right?
[00:51:36]  So, when it comes to conflict, you should judge the risk based upon either your own courage, if you're fighting solo, or the courage of your compatriots, or your allies, or your friends, your companions, your fellow soldiers, so to speak.

=== Love Versus Financial Security (03:46) ===

[00:51:54]  And you should judge your risk based upon that.
[00:51:57]  The last thing, though, I'll say, I appreciate your patience, the last thing, though, I'll say is that when it comes to love, When it comes to love, it's a different matter.
[00:52:09]  It's a different matter entirely.
[00:52:11]  Now, love should not be risky.
[00:52:17]  Now, I don't mean in terms of like you ask the girl out, maybe she'll say yes, maybe she'll say no.
[00:52:21]  This is just, you know, I mean, men will complain about this.
[00:52:25]  Why do we have to ask women out?
[00:52:26]  It's like, that's just the way it is.
[00:52:29]  Look, man, you should just be happy you don't have a period, you don't have period cramps, and you don't have the self adornment.
[00:52:37]  Absolutes or necessities that women deal with.
[00:52:42]  And you also don't have to worry.
[00:52:44]  See, when you're a young man, you almost never have to be worried about being chosen because of your money.
[00:52:51]  I make this joke occasionally that I literally have a house full of females at the moment.
[00:52:58]  It's crazy, man.
[00:53:00]  It's very cool.
[00:53:02]  And we were joking the other day, and it's a gaggle of females in the house at the moment.
[00:53:08]  I was joking the other day, and I said, I worked very hard to make sure that my wife was not a gold digger when we met.
[00:53:15]  And some of the females did not know the story.
[00:53:18]  And I will only burden you with a tiny fragment of the story.
[00:53:22]  But I said, you know, I worked very hard to make sure that my wife was not just choosing me for my money.
[00:53:28]  And of course, my wife laughed her head off at the very idea that she was choosing me for my money because I'd been unemployed for over a year when I met my wife.
[00:53:40]  And I was living in a dingy 18th floor bachelor apartment.
[00:53:45]  On a broken old futon with a TV on the box that came in.
[00:53:52]  Because I had quit my business career to write novels.
[00:53:56]  And I wrote The God of Atheists and I wrote Almost, which are two great books, freedomain.comslash books.
[00:54:02]  You should check them out.
[00:54:03]  They are fantastic.
[00:54:05]  But my wife worked in a hospital.
[00:54:09]  She's a mental health professional, practiced psychology for 27 years.
[00:54:13]  And she had a nice car and She had bought a condo, a really nice condo.
[00:54:19]  That's actually where we moved in after we got married.
[00:54:22]  And I was a brokey.
[00:54:24]  I mean, I had some savings, and of course, I was not starving because I was living off some savings from my time in the business world, but I was pouring everything into writing.
[00:54:37]  And I took sort of one of Canada's premier writing programs and got some great feedback and had an agent who was really working at selling my writing and so on.
[00:54:47]  And so, when I was talking about how I worked very hard to make sure that.
[00:54:54]  The woman who became my wife wasn't just marrying me for my money, to which, of course, my wife quite wisely said, What money?
[00:55:02]  Now, of course, she knew that I'd had a business career, so she knew that I wasn't a perma brokey, but I was kind of brokey.
[00:55:07]  I was pursuing my dreams.
[00:55:08]  Of course, I didn't realize how hostile the publishing world was to straight white male fiction.
[00:55:15]  I didn't understand all of that back in the day, although I had certainly some indications.
[00:55:19]  Theater school was very communist.
[00:55:22]  So there was a guy who'd come off doing the farm show who referred to us all as young, white, and bougie when we all got in.
[00:55:28]  Which was not true for me.
[00:55:29]  It may have been true for some of the other actors.
[00:55:32]  So, a young man really doesn't have to worry about being chosen for his money because he's mostly broke.

=== Discipline Required to Attract Partners (04:30) ===

[00:55:41]  Whereas a young woman definitely has to worry about being chosen for her sexual attractiveness because she's at the peak of her sexual attractiveness.
[00:55:50]  And all throughout their lives, most men rate early 20s females as the most attractive.
[00:55:56]  Whereas there's a Silver Fox, salt and pepper resource guy.
[00:56:01]  You know, tanned and golfy guy can be attractive to women as they age because he signals resources and so on.
[00:56:07]  But what you have to do, of course, as a young man is talk to women, ask women out, and don't be frightened.
[00:56:16]  You can't go to jail for talking to a woman in a Starbucks.
[00:56:18]  You just can't.
[00:56:20]  You just can't.
[00:56:21]  I'm not a lawyer, but I don't believe there's any law against talking to someone in a public place.
[00:56:27]  You can do it, and you just, you got to do it.
[00:56:30]  It's easier in the short run.
[00:56:32]  To go home and look at screens and practice your tennis elbow, but it is not good, right, or healthy in the long run.
[00:56:40]  So, yes, there's some nerve wracking stuff.
[00:56:43]  You need some courage.
[00:56:43]  You need to take some risks in asking girls out or talking to them or seeing if they're interesting and so on.
[00:56:53]  And you should, of course, a young woman is almost certainly fertile.
[00:56:59]  A young man is of uncertain, Financial prospects.
[00:57:04]  Like, remember that.
[00:57:05]  The young woman, by being a young woman, is at peak fertility.
[00:57:09]  That's almost a guarantee.
[00:57:12]  But a young man is of uncertain future productivity.
[00:57:18]  So, gentlemen, when you want to approach a woman, you must look disciplined.
[00:57:27]  The D word.
[00:57:30]  You must look disciplined.
[00:57:31]  You must.
[00:57:32]  It's not optional.
[00:57:34]  If you want a quality woman, You have to look disciplined.
[00:57:40]  And what that means is have a decent haircut, have some decent clothing, have been to the dentist, and I don't know, get some teeth whitening or whatever it is.
[00:57:54]  Just make sure that your teeth look reasonably good because a woman is going to judge you by that.
[00:57:58]  If you can't take care of your teeth, how are you going to take care of her and babies?
[00:58:02]  And have some discipline.
[00:58:05]  Play some sports well.
[00:58:07]  A sport.
[00:58:08]  A sport.
[00:58:09]  Not an esport, a sport.
[00:58:11]  Play a sport.
[00:58:12]  Well, that shows discipline.
[00:58:13]  That shows that you can do teamwork.
[00:58:15]  That shows that people like you and want you on their team, particularly if it's a team sport.
[00:58:19]  Have won at least some things in the world, or at least striven to win those things.
[00:58:24]  You know, I met my wife playing volleyball, actually got introduced to that volleyball league by one of the guys I was working with at my COBOL programming job.
[00:58:34]  Forever blessed be his name.
[00:58:36]  You know who you are.
[00:58:38]  And the fact that people wanted me on their team, the fact that I was competitive, but also a good loser, not a sore loser, and the fact that I was physically competent, I'm pretty good at volleyball, and the fact that You know, volleyball as well, you have three hits, right?
[00:58:54]  So you've got to set the ball up for other people to hit.
[00:58:57]  And the fact that I was willing to set up other people rather than just take the shots myself, and particularly, even if they weren't particularly good, you know, how do they get better, right?
[00:59:06]  If you keep not passing the ball to bad players, they don't get any better.
[00:59:09]  So, you know, but not to the point where we just lost every time.
[00:59:12]  So, you know, there was a lot of sort of positive social stuff that was going on.
[00:59:19]  You know, I had a reasonable haircut.
[00:59:22]  I've always taken good care of my teeth.
[00:59:24]  I still have my wisdom teeth.
[00:59:25]  I'm like one in a thousand people in their late 50s who still have their wisdom teeth.
[00:59:30]  And so show that you have some discipline, show that you have some popularity, show that people like you, show that you have some good social skills, you can take care of your teeth.
[00:59:41]  For heaven's sakes, make sure you either have a beard or don't have a beard, but don't have that weird neck beard mange stuff going on.
[00:59:49]  And dress reasonably well.
[00:59:52]  And have a nice smile, be friendly to people.
[00:59:55]  All of this signals that you have success.
[00:59:58]  And as a young man, it's really, really important that you signal to women that you're going to be successful.
[01:00:03]  And that is foundational to talking to women because a woman is very skilled at sizing you up.

=== Control Over Work Outcomes (15:56) ===

[01:00:11]  And, you know, one of the first things I said to my wife, other than generic chit chat about the sport that we were playing, when she said, How was your day?
[01:00:21]  I said, Great.
[01:00:22]  I just got my first.
[01:00:23]  Book published.
[01:00:24]  And she was, this is, there was a publisher, we won't sort of get into the whole story about it, but it wasn't self published.
[01:00:30]  There was a publisher who was going to publish my novel Revolutions, or did publish my novel Revolutions.
[01:00:34]  And she was very interested, right?
[01:00:38]  Because it's kind of unusual.
[01:00:39]  And the fact that I'd written books good enough to get one published was an indication of reasonably good judgment and of discipline, the discipline to research and write and finish a book and all of that.
[01:00:53]  And then she said, Yeah, maybe I'd like to read it.
[01:00:57]  And I said, Maybe I'll just play hard to get and won't let you read it.
[01:01:00]  And she said, That reverse psychology stuff doesn't work on me.
[01:01:03]  I practice psychology, I'm a professional.
[01:01:06]  And so, of course, I have great respect for the profession of psychology, and she has good respect for people who can write a book.
[01:01:13]  So, that was the beginning of now an almost quarter century conversation that is just beyond wonderful.
[01:01:21]  And the best thing in life is a great conversation for the rest of your life with someone you absolutely worship and adore.
[01:01:26]  You can't do better than.
[01:01:28]  Than that as a whole.
[01:01:29]  And I get that there's some luck involved in that.
[01:01:31]  And I think of all of the 20,000 hours I poured into writing, even before I met my wife, even though that didn't become my profession, it was well worth it just to be my wife, just to have a book on that day that I could talk about because that piqued her interest and her profession certainly piqued my interest and all of that.
[01:01:49]  So, yeah.
[01:01:51]  So, yes, when it comes to love, you don't want to take risks.
[01:01:54]  I mean, you want to take risks in terms of talking to girls and so on.
[01:01:59]  And for girls, maybe.
[01:02:01]  Smiling at guys, or whatever it is that girls do to win men's attention these days.
[01:02:06]  But there's risk in all of that, but you don't want to take a lot of risks in getting married.
[01:02:13]  I hope it works out.
[01:02:14]  I mean, when my wife and I got married, you know, we got engaged, I don't know, six or seven months after we met.
[01:02:22]  And we got married 11 months after we met.
[01:02:26]  And there was no risk in it for me at all.
[01:02:30]  Like, no risk.
[01:02:31]  I wasn't like, hope it works out.
[01:02:33]  Ooh, you know, both my parents got divorced.
[01:02:35]  Ooh, that's a lot.
[01:02:36]  Most of the people I know have bad marriages, got divorced, or getting divorced, or having problems, or fighting, or blah, And.
[01:02:45]  Yeah, I had a friend of mine who had a terrible marriage and he ended up, oh, I was just bad, just bad all around.
[01:02:53]  But when I got married to my wife, I felt no sense of risk, no risk at all.
[01:03:01]  I knew it was going to work out, I knew it was going to be great, and it hasn't.
[01:03:05]  It is.
[01:03:07]  And of course, you know, back in the day, I started the show, gosh, what was it?
[01:03:12]  I started our show, I started Free Domain a couple of years into our marriage.
[01:03:16]  And of course, people were like, oh, you just wait, man.
[01:03:18]  You're in the honeymoon period, and I'm like, it's going to be the same in 20 years.
[01:03:22]  It's going to be, in fact, it's going to be better in 20 years.
[01:03:25]  People are like, hey, everyone says that.
[01:03:26]  But, you know, all the cynics, all the cynics that you just don't want in your life.
[01:03:31]  And yeah, now it's 21 years since I started the show, and, you know, 20 years since I was talking about how great it was to be married.
[01:03:43]  And, you know, for anyone who stuck around or anyone who's dipping back in, I was right.
[01:03:49]  You were wrong.
[01:03:50]  And your cynicism has given you a miserable life, and my realism and optimism has given me a great marriage and a great life, honestly.
[01:03:57]  I mean, because I'm going to be 60 this year, there's a couple of things I'm doing.
[01:04:02]  Number one, I've just got to stop old habits.
[01:04:04]  I just have to stop old habits.
[01:04:07]  I still have some old bad habits.
[01:04:08]  I still try and live two sides of a relationship sometimes.
[01:04:12]  I'll get into all of that perhaps another time.
[01:04:13]  I've just, you get this thing like if stuff hasn't worked now, it's not going to start working now.
[01:04:19]  If some of my sort of more negative habits or more problematic habits or whatever it is, If it hasn't worked by now, the great thing about turning 60 is you just get to give up on stuff that hasn't worked.
[01:04:29]  Because if I haven't made it work by the time I'm 60, it ain't going to work.
[01:04:32]  It's just not going to work.
[01:04:33]  So I can drop some old bad habits because you get, you know, statistically, I got another maybe 27 years.
[01:04:43]  27 years.
[01:04:44]  And I was just saying this to my wife, you know, I said, I'm thrilled that we get to be with each other statistically even longer than we've already been with each other, which is great.
[01:04:52]  But of course, it's not like the last 10 years are going to be just like the last 10 years from now.
[01:04:57]  Like, I assume that 75 to 85 ain't quite the same as 50 to 60, because you're a little creakier and so on.
[01:05:04]  Although I would say that stuff is going pretty well as a whole, and I'll do my very best to hold on to strength and flexibility.
[01:05:11]  But there's some stuff that you can manage and some stuff that is beyond your control.
[01:05:17]  And so I did not perceive getting married to be risky at all, at all.
[01:05:26]  And it hasn't been risky.
[01:05:27]  I mean, I've taken risks within the marriage, not.
[01:05:32]  In the marriage, like I've taken risks, like, I don't know, let's open up marriage, like, oh, nothing like that.
[01:05:37]  But what I mean is, like, I've taken risks professionally in the context of the marriage.
[01:05:44]  But the marriage itself has been, I would argue, completely risk free.
[01:05:49]  I don't have any sense of risk within the marriage.
[01:05:52]  I don't cross my fingers, hope we're going to make it.
[01:05:55]  We've never had any thought or talk of anything like separation or divorce.
[01:06:03]  Would never in a million years.
[01:06:04]  And we said this before we got married.
[01:06:06]  Look, if we're going to get married, like we have questions before we get married, the marriage answers all those questions forever.
[01:06:14]  Who am I going to be with?
[01:06:15]  Well, you get married, and that's who you're going to be with.
[01:06:17]  That's it forever.
[01:06:19]  And am I going to be monogamous?
[01:06:21]  Well, then you make that vow, you make that, that's what's going to happen.
[01:06:25]  And you've never heard a whiff of scandal about me, which is one of the reasons why people don't try and corrupt me or turn me because there's no scandals.
[01:06:32]  There's no scandals to talk about.
[01:06:34]  So I would say, just to sort of reiterate, If the reward is high in work, then it's probably worth taking the risk if you have a reasonable amount of control over the outcome.
[01:06:48]  When I started this show, when I started the software, co founded the software company, I don't want to say co founded because I don't want to come across as some big founder or co founder.
[01:06:57]  But with those situations, I had a good degree of control over the outcome.
[01:07:08]  In the business world, it was a software company, and I was the chief technical officer.
[01:07:12]  So I was in charge of all the software, and I wrote most of the code for the first couple of versions of the software, which was probably a million, million and a half lines of code.
[01:07:21]  It was maybe 750K, because I trimmed it down a bit towards the end.
[01:07:25]  But anyway, so that was a lot of coding.
[01:07:27]  Man, it's a lot of coding.
[01:07:29]  That was a lot of staring at CRT monitors back in the day.
[01:07:34]  But I had a lot of control over it, because I wasn't just typing away at head office.
[01:07:39]  I also would go on the road and talk to customers, so I knew what they wanted.
[01:07:42]  And so I had a lot of control.
[01:07:44]  I could control who I hired, who I fired.
[01:07:46]  I had a lot of control over that.
[01:07:48]  And then when I felt I didn't have control after the business had been sold for the second time, I really felt like I didn't have that much control.
[01:07:56]  And so I moved on and then I moved on to writing.
[01:07:58]  Now, writing, I don't have any control over whether I'm successful, but I have control over the quality of the book that I produce.
[01:08:06]  And I felt strongly about that.
[01:08:09]  When it comes to what I do here, well, I have control over the qualities of the show that I produce to some degree.
[01:08:20]  I have, certainly the solo shows, I have control over the topics that I choose.
[01:08:25]  Again, I also choose to do open ended call in shows like the ones today.
[01:08:29]  So I have some control over that.
[01:08:31]  And of course, even with the call in shows, I can control whether I continue the conversation or not.
[01:08:37]  And so I have a lot of control.
[01:08:38]  Now I don't have control over the platforms, other than, you know, because everybody who's on the mainstream platforms, with the exception of X to a large degree, which is Elon Musk's foundational.
[01:08:48]  Bedrock launch pad for free speech and all praise to him.
[01:08:53]  Most successful African American in the world, in many ways.
[01:09:00]  So, where you have a reasonable degree of control, you should accept risk if there's great reward.
[01:09:05]  When it comes to conflict, the big risk is the continuity of courage.
[01:09:10]  If it's just you and you can control your courage to some degree, to a large degree, you can control your commitment, it's great.
[01:09:16]  But otherwise, you should really strictly and skeptically evaluate the courage of your friends.
[01:09:23]  I would have come through deplatforming fine if people had stood up for me, but they didn't.
[01:09:26]  And that may be a fault in me.
[01:09:29]  Maybe I'm just not the kind of person who elicits that kind of loyalty for whatever reason.
[01:09:35]  I mean, this is just sort of, I don't want to blame everyone else, right?
[01:09:38]  I mean, obviously, I'm part of the equation.
[01:09:40]  And the one thing that was in common with everyone who didn't stand up for me was me, right?
[01:09:44]  So it could be me.
[01:09:46]  I could be somebody who just doesn't elicit that kind of loyalty or something like that for whatever reason.
[01:09:54]  So it's simply a fact.
[01:09:55]  So.
[01:09:55]  Those will be my three ways of looking at risk.
[01:10:00]  All right.
[01:10:01]  Tyler, if you would like to unmute, I'm all ears.
[01:10:07]  Stefan, thanks for taking me as a person to ask some questions.
[01:10:13]  So I have five kids, one on the way.
[01:10:16]  I've been married 16 years.
[01:10:17]  Congratulations.
[01:10:18]  Congratulations.
[01:10:19]  I am green with Martian envy, but go on.
[01:10:26]  It hasn't been easy.
[01:10:28]  And my question for you is I didn't know.
[01:10:31]  You were a coder at one time.
[01:10:34]  Do you still?
[01:10:35]  I was an application developer and now I can't make as much as I once did because of all these AI agents.
[01:10:43]  And I'd love your thoughts on is this going down this path?
[01:10:47]  Do you think it's still worth doing and pursuing supporting such a large family?
[01:10:53]  I feel like more is expected of me and I can't just work.
[01:10:56]  I feel like there's no profession in the West where you could only work 40 hours a week and still have a.
[01:11:02]  Happy family life.
[01:11:05]  That's a pretty wide net you're casting.
[01:11:06]  Can you narrow it down for me just a little bit?
[01:11:10]  Oh, so do you okay?
[01:11:14]  Can somebody support a large family only working 40 hours a week?
[01:11:19]  And another question is coding still, you think, an option with all these agents?
[01:11:23]  Yeah.
[01:11:24]  Do you feel like men today, if they want big family?
[01:11:26]  I wouldn't go directly into coding.
[01:11:27]  So a couple of years ago, some friends of mine and my daughter and I started working on a video game project.
[01:11:36]  And I actually started off programming video games way back in the day.
[01:11:42]  And we started on a video game project.
[01:11:44]  I still have the prospectus around somewhere.
[01:11:47]  And we had some great ideas for a very funny and enjoyable video game.
[01:11:52]  And then, for reasons outside the scope of this conversation, we had to put that aside.
[01:11:56]  But I was programming in the love language because, sorry, that sounds like love, body language.
[01:12:02]  It's love language.
[01:12:03]  It's a language which is multi platform for various.
[01:12:06]  It goes for iOS and I think it does Windows and I think it does Android and so on and so forth.
[01:12:10]  So, we started doing some programming and it was great to get back into it.
[01:12:16]  And I felt rusty and I've never done heavy graphics programming.
[01:12:20]  I've mostly done GUI, web, and database layer programming.
[01:12:25]  And so, I really enjoyed being back into it.
[01:12:29]  This is before the AI agents came along.
[01:12:31]  And in another universe, we would have finished that project and put it out and seen what would have happened.
[01:12:37]  But yeah, my daughter had a great idea for a video game.
[01:12:40]  And we got some friends together and we all started working on it.
[01:12:43]  And we were making some progress, starting to get a prototype together.
[01:12:46]  She was working on some level design stuff and so on.
[01:12:52]  And it was really cool to get back into the coding because I have so little experience.
[01:12:58]  The last time I did video game programming was on an Atari 800.
[01:13:03]  So it's the Pokey graphics, the player missile graphics, it was called way back in the day, where you had three little spaceships and three little.
[01:13:13]  Dots that you could shoot.
[01:13:15]  And so it had been a while.
[01:13:16]  So I was kind of rusty with all of that kind of stuff.
[01:13:18]  And it's a very different kind of environment.
[01:13:19]  And I was so used to conserving resources that the idea of refreshing the screen 60 times a second was incomprehensible to me because back in the day, you could go side to side with clear missile graphics in basic, but up and down was really slow.
[01:13:32]  You had to use machine code for that.
[01:13:33]  Anyway, that's neither here nor there.
[01:13:35]  But if the agents had been around, then, and I've thought about this since, since it's still a pretty good idea for a video game, that you could build this kind of stuff.
[01:13:44]  With agents.
[01:13:45]  And so if I was looking into getting into a tech role, I would throw programming aside, although it's good to have the programming knowledge.
[01:13:56]  It's good to have the program.
[01:13:57]  In the same way that, you know, when I was sort of trying to explain to my daughter why it's important to know what you're doing when it comes to long division and multiplication and so on, is that she's like, well, everyone has like a calculator in their pocket, right, in their phone.
[01:14:15]  And of course, she's quite right.
[01:14:16]  But you still need to know what's going on in case you fat finger something.
[01:14:19]  You need to know when something looks wrong or just is kind of out of whack or out of ratio or something like that.
[01:14:24]  You kind of need to know.
[01:14:25]  Otherwise, it's just magical hieroglyphic punching that you just.
[01:14:28]  Read out answers without any comprehension.
[01:14:30]  So, in the same way, the people who've got experience programming who become good at AI aided programming are going to be more valuable than people just who come into the field and do AI stuff in the beginning.
[01:14:44]  In other words, if you have, you know, 5, 10, 15 or 20 years of coding experience, then you are going to be much better at evaluating AI produced code and maybe optimizing it.
[01:14:56]  And even if the AI is producing really good code, Making it faster, because that's kind of important.
[01:15:03]  People seem to have completely given up on making code faster.
[01:15:08]  I mean, again, it's truly nuts.
[01:15:10]  I use a product called PowerDirector for some of my video work.
[01:15:15]  And I did, again, I did Steamboats, right?
[01:15:18]  It's three or four Steamboats when you click on something for the menu to change.
[01:15:22]  That's insane.
[01:15:22]  And this is on an i9 with 32 gigs of RAM.
[01:15:25]  It should be instantaneous.
[01:15:27]  I mean, I was getting faster performance on a 386SX notebook from Mighty Max.
[01:15:33]  Way back in the day, that was faster in many ways than my i9, and it had one meg.
[01:15:39]  I know it had one meg of RAM and a 60 megabyte hard drive, and it was faster.
[01:15:51]  I remember being able to run both Adobe, the back Adobe PageMaker, I think it was Illustrator, and Word, switch between the two, no problems.
[01:16:03]  Now with 32 gigs.
[01:16:04]  Things are and an SSD, things are just thrashing around like crazy.

=== Income Decline and Expectations (14:41) ===

[01:16:07]  So, so I would say that if you have coding experience, if I were in your shoes, doesn't mean that I'm right, I'm just telling you what I would be doing.
[01:16:17]  Obviously, that goes without saying, but I would say I would dive hardcore into AI code generation and then work at optimizing what the AI produces.
[01:16:28]  Now, the optimization might be asking the AI to cut this part or move this part or make this pass faster using this method or something like that, but if you Have a lot of coding experience, and you're getting really good with AI agents.
[01:16:45]  I think at the moment, that's probably the most unbeatable combo as opposed to people who don't have this.
[01:16:51]  Maybe they just come out of school and they're good at AI agents, but they don't have the coding experience.
[01:16:55]  Then the AI is kind of like a magical black box that's producing code, but they don't have the same experience in debugging and optimization that seems to be really important for code as a whole.
[01:17:07]  Does that make sense?
[01:17:10]  Yeah, I've heard some people compare these agents to like slot machines.
[01:17:17]  And it, my fear is, it's good.
[01:17:21]  Sorry, kid.
[01:17:23]  My fear is we're going to be too dependent on them.
[01:17:25]  And some people have been complaining, programmers, that their brains may be atrophying because they're not being as technical.
[01:17:31]  So I'm with you.
[01:17:33]  It's, but it's, it's, it's unfortunate.
[01:17:36]  It's kind of like how, oh, now you work remote or now you have a cell phone.
[01:17:40]  Now you're always available.
[01:17:41]  It seems like this tech is making us more.
[01:17:44]  More is expected of us, unfortunately.
[01:17:45]  And I wish, my fear is I can't put enough time in to do it.
[01:17:48]  I feel like I need more than 40 hours a week to be great.
[01:17:50]  Hang on, because it's just so competitive.
[01:17:52]  To do what?
[01:17:53]  Do you mean to get to code or to get good at AI coding?
[01:17:59]  Just to make enough to support my family.
[01:18:01]  Like, I feel like I can't work for, I mean, I'd love to meet somebody who could work 40 hours a week with AI agents.
[01:18:07]  And it just seems like there's more expected, just period.
[01:18:10]  Like, you can't work just 40 hours a week and have a balanced life.
[01:18:13]  Like, work life balance is a lie, it seems.
[01:18:16]  I hope I'm wrong.
[01:18:19]  Let me ask you this.
[01:18:20]  So, if you work 40 hours a week, what percentage of your family's expenses are you covering?
[01:18:29]  I was the main breadwinner.
[01:18:31]  Actually, I was the only income in my house for like 10 years.
[01:18:35]  And now my wife had to go back to work because my incomes dipped so much.
[01:18:38]  So now I'm currently unemployed and I'm trying to figure out the next thing.
[01:18:43]  So it seems like we both have to work, unfortunately.
[01:18:45]  And that's kind of the two income trap.
[01:18:47]  We're trying to.
[01:18:49]  I wish I could just solely provide, but it's so difficult to do.
[01:18:52]  I'm sorry to interrupt, but wouldn't you say that everyone's income is down because.
[01:18:58]  COVID and inflation and the relentless pressure of foreign workers coming in and driving down wages and people not having as much disposable income because gas and groceries and rent are so crazy expensive.
[01:19:10]  I mean, my income is down.
[01:19:13]  It's not catastrophic, but it's certainly down.
[01:19:16]  Free domain.com slash donate to help out the show.
[01:19:18]  Really would appreciate it.
[01:19:19]  So my income is down and a lot of people's income, I know, is down.
[01:19:26]  Even if they've managed to sort of keep the same income, their purchasing power is down, right?
[01:19:30]  Like 40% of all the US dollars.
[01:19:33]  Ever that have existed with printed, you know, 2020, 2021 and forward.
[01:19:39]  So that's a massive dilution of the, well, massive inflation of the money supply, which is producing lower purchasing value for each dollar.
[01:19:48]  So most, I'm trying to think, most people that I know have seen either real or nominal declines in the purchasing power of their, and it could be because they've gone to part time, it could be because they're not getting raises and inflation is hitting them harder, like yourself, they're unemployed.
[01:20:05]  So, you know, I'm not, Trying to say it's bad for everyone all the time because, you know, the finance bros are doing pretty well.
[01:20:12]  But I think most people are facing a real wage crunch.
[01:20:19]  I mean, this stuff's been going on since the 70s as a whole.
[01:20:22]  And so you're certainly not alone in that.
[01:20:25]  Now, what percentage of your household income will your wife's, sorry, of your household expenses will your wife's income cover?
[01:20:34]  Well, we're, it barely covers anything currently.
[01:20:36]  We're actually considering selling our house because it, We can't afford it anymore.
[01:20:40]  So it is what it is.
[01:20:42]  I think the problem with millennials, which I'm a part of, and the Gen Z, we want a continuous exponential growth, just like the boomers.
[01:20:51]  And I think part of the reason why the fertility rates are in the toilet because maybe social media has ruined us in a sense of our perception of how life is supposed to be.
[01:21:04]  And no one wants to.
[01:21:06]  I came in your space where you're talking about your marriage.
[01:21:08]  I'm sure you and your wife had some tough.
[01:21:11]  Financial moments in it, probably.
[01:21:12]  I don't want to assume, but I'm sure it wasn't as bad compared to some other relationships where it's like, okay, well, I'm out.
[01:21:18]  This is too hard.
[01:21:18]  Well, I mean, the first, I think it was the first two years of our marriage, we barely left and barely went anywhere, barely did anything.
[01:21:26]  You know, we'd maybe rent a movie a week.
[01:21:28]  We almost never went out for food.
[01:21:31]  We had a bunch of debt to pay off for a variety of reasons.
[01:21:34]  And so, yeah, we've certainly been through some lean times compared to when I was at my height.
[01:21:41]  I mean, I won't even give you the percentage, but let's just say there's been a not imperceptible, not inconsiderable decline in when I was doing, you know, 10 million views and so on a month, and, you know, had like 2 million subscribers on social media and so on.
[01:22:00]  So it has been a challenge for sure in terms of.
[01:22:07]  Of income and a very considerable decline.
[01:22:10]  I mean, that's really the purpose of deplatforming is to cause your income to diminish considerably and mission accomplished, so to speak.
[01:22:19]  And so, yeah, I'm used to, I had the general idea that you start, the first job I got was like $2.40 an hour, $2.45 an hour.
[01:22:31]  And you generally have this perception, your peak earning years, 50 to 65, kind of thing.
[01:22:36]  So you have this general sense that your income is.
[01:22:40]  Going to go up over time, or at least not go down.
[01:22:44]  And that's unusual, right?
[01:22:46]  That's been a thing from like the 50s to the 70s, was like the time when income in general rose for a variety of reasons.
[01:22:53]  We don't have to get into much detail about this, but most other times in history, it was up and down like the Assyrian Empire, as the old Monty Python saying goes.
[01:23:03]  I mean, it was like the people who were like, hey, 1890s to the early 1900s, things are looking, oh, World War I, oh, there was a Great Depression.
[01:23:13]  Sorry, there was a great collapse in the financial sector in 1920 to 2021.
[01:23:21]  Sorry, 1920 to 21.
[01:23:24]  It was actually worse than the fall that happened in 1929, but because the free market was allowed to self correct, it was 18 months until it was fixed when the government under FDR came in to save America from the great crash, stock market crash of 1929.
[01:23:39]  It took like 14 years and a half world destroying world war in order to begin to write the economic.
[01:23:49]  And so, for you know, you think, oh, you know, it's 1912, you know, my income is good.
[01:23:55]  Oh, my kids got drafted or I got drafted.
[01:23:58]  And then there's a stock market crash in the 20s.
[01:24:00]  And then there's a sort of the mania, the stock market bubble of the 20s.
[01:24:05]  And then there was another crash and then a 14 year horrible recession with like 25% unemployment and massive losses in the standard of living.
[01:24:13]  And oh, we got drafted again.
[01:24:14]  And my grandkids got drafted.
[01:24:16]  And then, you know, there was from the 50s to the 70s, there was a pretty significant or lengthy increase.
[01:24:22]  And that in America had a lot to do with the fact that there was almost no immigration from America into America from like 1920 to 1965.
[01:24:29]  So wages would go up.
[01:24:31]  The Hart Seller Act in 1965, unfortunately, you know, kind of ruined America for domestic labor and its opportunities, which, of course, I mean, if you are a communist or a socialist, you should be very much against mass immigration because it drives down wages.
[01:24:47]  But hey, they're not about consistency, they're about anti capitalism.
[01:24:52]  So for most of human history, I mean, you think the The Black Death, and you think of the Crusades, and you think of the 300 years of religious warfare in Europe, and you think of the enclosure movement, people getting kicked off their land by the millions, and then having to find a way of making money in the satanic mills of the Industrial Revolution, and so on.
[01:25:13]  There's a lot of variability.
[01:25:15]  We kind of got from our parents this idea that things just get better and better, but historically, they don't.
[01:25:21]  Historically, it is a roller coaster, man.
[01:25:24]  And of course, the other thing that happens too is that people who grew up as boomers and as children of boomers have this idea because, you know, your parents started off poor and they got wealthier over time and they ended up usually with a lot of assets.
[01:25:40]  I mean, the boomers are the wealthiest generation in human history.
[01:25:44]  And we weren't there for when our parents were broke.
[01:25:49]  And so it's a little bit of a shock to us if you grew up in a nice four bedroom, 2,500 square foot mansion with, you know, maybe a quarter acre or a half acre in the back.
[01:25:57]  It's what you're used to.
[01:25:58]  And then when you've got to go and live with a bunch of roommates and take the bus or whatever, I think it's quite a shock for a lot of people.
[01:26:05]  But the idea that things just keep getting better is ahistorical for almost all of human history.
[01:26:13]  It was highly variable.
[01:26:14]  I mean, just think of being a farmer back in the day.
[01:26:17]  Well, you get a good set of rains and you're flush with cash.
[01:26:21]  And if you have a bad set of rains, then you're eating goose feathers from the pillow and tree bark from the woods.
[01:26:28]  You know, Mao style or Cambodian style come spring.
[01:26:33]  So there was a high degree of variability.
[01:26:35]  Or, you know, Genghis Khan comes along and sets fire to your 40 acres and, you know, takes your wife on the back of his horse.
[01:26:42]  Centaur style, well, then you're having a pretty bad couple of years.
[01:26:46]  So this idea that this constant progress thing is ahistorical.
[01:26:50]  And it's easy to say that, but it's hard if you haven't really worked that lesson into your soul.
[01:26:56]  So it could absolutely be.
[01:26:59]  I've had to scale back on a bunch of stuff.
[01:27:04]  Obviously, I have a secondhand car.
[01:27:06]  I haven't bought new technology.
[01:27:10]  The show, the computer that I use for my call in show, I don't even remember when I bought it, but the first time I installed an update was 2017.
[01:27:19]  So that is nine years ago.
[01:27:21]  Nine years ago for a computer, like for a tablet computer, it's pretty rough on the battery and so on.
[01:27:27]  And I have not bought a new cell phone.
[01:27:31]  In five years, six years, something like that.
[01:27:35]  I think I bought a new cell phone in 2019.
[01:27:37]  So that's seven years.
[01:27:41]  And I did upgrade a tablet, but only because it only cost me $150 with a trade in or something like that.
[01:27:46]  So look, I'm not saying I'm starving here and I'm not eyeing the zoo animals as if they're being plucked and turning over in a tasty KFC baster.
[01:27:59]  But what I am saying is that you have to adjust.
[01:28:01]  I mean, my income has dropped enormously from the peak because of deplatforming and so on.
[01:28:06]  And I've just had to cut back on my spend.
[01:28:08]  I've had to cut back on employees.
[01:28:10]  And there are adjustments.
[01:28:13]  You know, you got to be nimble in this life.
[01:28:14]  And of course, you have to remember that what matters most is the quality of your family life.
[01:28:20]  And if you guys look, I'm not saying, oh, if you have to sell your house, that's no big deal.
[01:28:24]  It is a big deal.
[01:28:25]  It absolutely is a big deal.
[01:28:28]  I've had to involuntarily, I won't get into the details because it's a bit of a tragic tale, but I've had to involuntarily.
[01:28:37]  Sell a house in the past.
[01:28:39]  My wife and I both had to.
[01:28:40]  We didn't want to move.
[01:28:41]  We had to.
[01:28:42]  It's not fun.
[01:28:43]  It's not, it feels like a loss.
[01:28:45]  It feels like a failure.
[01:28:46]  But the important thing is to maintain the quality of your relationships.
[01:28:50]  And it's this old, Jim Carrey used to make this joke about his father when they lived in, like, he said, I mean, he said they lived in dumpsters.
[01:29:01]  I don't think, obviously, that was the case.
[01:29:03]  But he would say to his father, Dad, are we by chance living below the poverty line?
[01:29:07]  He's like, Nope, we're rich as long as we have.
[01:29:09]  Each other now.
[01:29:10]  Into the dumpster you go.
[01:29:12]  And, you know, but it's a kind of truth in that you're rich as long as you have each other.
[01:29:17]  You know, as long as I'm happy with my daughter, as long as I'm happy with my wife, as long as we've got enough to pay the bills, the income, and whether we get to keep the property or not is not that important relative to the quality of the relationships.
[01:29:32]  And all we're doing at the moment is joining the absolute march of the entire rest of humanity who had highly variable outcomes, sometimes from day to day, certainly from year to year.
[01:29:44]  I'm sorry, I hope that's not too abstract.
[01:29:46]  I hope that makes some kind of sense.
[01:29:47]  No, it does.
[01:29:48]  I think.
[01:29:49]  People need to talk about this more.
[01:29:52]  I think a lot of people in my generation are expecting, yeah, that continual growth.
[01:29:56]  Growing up, my guidance counselor said, Go into debt.
[01:29:59]  You'll always make more.
[01:30:00]  And it seems like a lot of people are disenchanted by whatever these administrations have told us.
[01:30:07]  I want one final question.
[01:30:09]  If you're not super religious, and you're not attached to your country and your nation, how would you develop a good family culture?
[01:30:17]  That's where I'm currently at.
[01:30:18]  I'm not super religious, I used to be super religious.
[01:30:21]  I'm getting more into my ethnic.
[01:30:22]  Kind of stuff, but it's been hard to develop a family culture since leaving my devout religion.
[01:30:30]  And I don't want it to be consumerism because you don't want to rely on the market for that.
[01:30:38]  I hope this makes sense.
[01:30:39]  It seems like people will have a hard time forming a culture if they don't have some type of ethnic identity or some religion to be a part of.

=== Generational Wealth and Values (15:38) ===

[01:30:48]  I don't know what other options are.
[01:30:50]  And maybe I need to not be so serious about it and just enjoy going on long walks together or cooking together.
[01:30:57]  Maybe that's no, that's so.
[01:31:00]  I don't want to tell too many tales out of school, but what I will say is that I don't really think I have anyone left in my life who I have not met through what I do.
[01:31:11]  I mean, I do this philosophy show, uh, peaceful parenting.
[01:31:14]  I'm just sort of scanning through my brain.
[01:31:17]  I don't think I have anyone that I'm close to that I didn't meet as a result of doing what I'm doing.
[01:31:24]  Now, of course, I'm not saying you got to go, it's not some philosophy show, but what I am saying is that.
[01:31:29]  You start some, if you're into a particular way of thinking, start a meetup.
[01:31:34]  Like, get people in the neighborhood or in the town or in the county or wherever it is, get them to meet up.
[01:31:42]  I mean, I can't hang with non peaceful parents.
[01:31:47]  I can't.
[01:31:48]  And I don't really want to.
[01:31:50]  So, the people that we have over, the people I'm friends with, the people I have in my life, I mean, we don't always agree on everything, of course, right?
[01:31:58]  That would be kind of, I mean, I don't agree with myself on everything either.
[01:32:01]  So, that's no problem.
[01:32:01]  But But we generally have the same reason, evidence, non aggression principle, property rights, free markets.
[01:32:09]  We have all of those basics down.
[01:32:12]  And the relationships are just so easy when you have those things down.
[01:32:18]  And so the church, of course, brings people together of like values.
[01:32:24]  And therefore, they don't have to re litigate the basics on a continual basis.
[01:32:27]  So you just have to find people and you have to work to find people who.
[01:32:32]  Believe what you believe and are willing to practice it, and then the relationships are just so easy.
[01:32:38]  So, sorry, you said it's easier when you get down to the basics, and yeah, you got to figure out what you believe and then find a way to find people who are willing to be convinced or who already agree with what you believe.
[01:32:53]  I'm with you.
[01:32:54]  It seems like a lot of people just like being on their screens and having their own personal algorithms, and well, but then you don't want those people in your life, yeah, so you gotta find people like you go.
[01:33:04]  Start a hiking group, start a, I don't know, whatever you're into, archery, whatever, old movies, like have a book club and make sure that you get, I don't know, my books on Milton Friedman, I don't know, whatever, right?
[01:33:17]  But find something where people are going to share your values.
[01:33:22]  And if you have shared values, relationships are a joy and a breeze.
[01:33:29]  That makes sense.
[01:33:30]  Wonderful.
[01:33:31]  I have no further questions.
[01:33:32]  Thank you so much for your time.
[01:33:34]  Thanks, Tyler.
[01:33:34]  And, If anybody wants to contact Tyler, if you have work, man, support at freedomain.com.
[01:33:42]  Let's help each other out.
[01:33:44]  Mike.
[01:33:46]  That's your whole intro right there.
[01:33:48]  Going once, going twice.
[01:33:50]  Mikey, Mike.
[01:33:51]  Are you with us?
[01:33:53]  Sorry, Stefan.
[01:33:53]  Can you hear me okay?
[01:33:54]  Got you, brother.
[01:33:55]  What's up?
[01:33:57]  Can I piggyback off Tyler's comments?
[01:34:00]  Well, people ask me questions for which I can't possibly know the answer.
[01:34:04]  If it's to talk about Jewish space lasers, maybe not.
[01:34:07]  If you want to talk about something else, That's fine, but go ahead.
[01:34:11]  Specific to Tyler's comment, I could definitely feel the angst in his voice.
[01:34:19]  I grew up, you know, six kids.
[01:34:21]  My parents had six kids.
[01:34:23]  I have five siblings.
[01:34:24]  I think the danger when you're in the hustle, which I completely understand where he's coming from, a millennial, I'm a millennial too, and definitely the hustle is there.
[01:34:35]  I think the fear is that as you're chasing that.
[01:34:42]  I think it's in Alice in Wonderland where the Queen says you have to run to stay in one place.
[01:34:47]  The fear is that you're going to lose that relationship you have with the loved ones around you, like you said, Stefan.
[01:34:53]  And I just don't remember that.
[01:34:54]  If you focus too much on the materialism and you let mere financial worries wreck your relationships, that's the wrong choice.
[01:35:02]  But sorry, go ahead.
[01:35:04]  Yeah, and I remember seeing that, you know, both parents working and we kind of raised ourselves and, yeah.
[01:35:12]  It is definitely tough out there, but I think as long as that's the focus, and I was actually, when I requested to speak, you said exactly what I was going to say, which is at the end of the day, you have to surround yourself with people who understand where this is coming from.
[01:35:26]  I mean, the tragedy, of course, is that everybody is going to go to the extremes of we need socialism as a solution, like New York City is doing, or the other extreme.
[01:35:36]  And unfortunately, it's all going to be just more government as the solution.
[01:35:42]  Yeah.
[01:35:42]  So when I was deplatformed, my daughter was.
[01:35:46]  I don't know, 11 or 12 or something like that when I was deplatformed.
[01:35:50]  And she was like 10 when I started to get nine or 10 when I really started to get suppressed.
[01:35:56]  Now, she's going to be 18 this year.
[01:35:59]  Now, when I was deplatformed, I stopped working as hard.
[01:36:05]  I mean, before I was doing like two or three interviews a week, which meant reading, you know, eight to 10 books a week.
[01:36:10]  I was doing my truth about presentations, which were lengthy to research and lengthy to record and lengthy to produce.
[01:36:18]  And I was writing a book.
[01:36:21]  I took time off from writing books when she was young, for sure, but I was still writing and I was traveling, doing speeches and all of that, and doing documentaries, which were expensive and time consuming.
[01:36:31]  So I got deplatformed, and I'll be honest with you, you know, I don't put in those crazy hours anymore.
[01:36:39]  I mean, that's part of what deplatforming does you have a smaller audience.
[01:36:44]  So I don't want to say like I'm not working because I care very much that everyone's here, and I certainly do work.
[01:36:51]  But I'm not working quite as much as I used to.
[01:36:53]  So then I can say, well, of course, with deplatforming came a pretty catastrophic drop in income.
[01:37:00]  Now, I can say, oh, well, you know, we couldn't buy this, we couldn't buy that, and we couldn't go here and we couldn't go there.
[01:37:07]  Okay, whatever, right?
[01:37:08]  I mean, there was a lot of COVID around that kind of stuff as well.
[01:37:11]  And I can sit there and say, well, we have less money.
[01:37:16]  And we do.
[01:37:16]  We have, I won't even tell you, it's like, it's not small, but we have less money.
[01:37:21]  Okay, fine.
[01:37:22]  However, I had thousands and thousands more hours with my family.
[01:37:28]  Now, when I look back at the end of my life, which is not Beyond my horizon at the moment, right?
[01:37:35]  So, when I look back at the end of my life and I look back at the time that my daughter was a teenager, would I trade all of that extra time with her and with my wife for the sake of having some more money in the bank or having bought more things?
[01:37:50]  Well, no.
[01:37:51]  No, I wouldn't have.
[01:37:53]  Deplatforming strengthened my relationships with my family and with my friends because I had more time with friends.
[01:38:03]  So, You know, you don't know if it's good or bad news.
[01:38:07]  So when people say, oh, well, we've got to sell our house and this and that and the other.
[01:38:10]  Okay, so you've got to sell your house.
[01:38:12]  But that's sad.
[01:38:13]  And I'm not trying to minimize that and say that's no big thing.
[01:38:16]  Because again, I've been through that myself and it's not a lot of fun in the moment.
[01:38:20]  But let's say you sell your house and then you get to spend a couple of years home with your kids, maybe homeschooling them or whatever it is.
[01:38:27]  You will never forget that time.
[01:38:29]  They will never forget that time.
[01:38:31]  That will bring you really close together.
[01:38:34]  I mean, my daughter certainly did not go off the rails.
[01:38:36]  As a teenager, and I don't think she would have anyway, but I think the fact that I was there a whole lot more helped a lot in that way.
[01:38:44]  And of course, for people who, you know, they work, work, work, they don't spend as much time with their kids, and then they take all the money they made while working and then they put it into trying to get their kids back on the rails if the kids go off the rails because of peer pressure because they're not close to their parents.
[01:38:58]  So it's not easy to come up with absolutes with these kinds of things.
[01:39:02]  And it's very easy to look at the losses, right?
[01:39:06]  The visible losses versus the hidden gains.
[01:39:08]  The visible losses are I lost my job or I got deplatformed, income is down, you know, we've got to sell the house, whatever it is, right?
[01:39:16]  Those are the visible losses, sure, but the hidden gains, you got to get those as well.
[01:39:23]  And there's no way that we maintain this standard of living.
[01:39:26]  The debt is too high.
[01:39:28]  And let's say that immigration stops tomorrow, then the price of housing goes down.
[01:39:32]  Say, oh, well, you know, I had all this money in my house, now I don't have all this money, Matt.
[01:39:36]  My wages are up, but the value of my real estate is down.
[01:39:39]  You know, people still keep swarming into all these countries.
[01:39:42]  Well, the price of your real estate, the value of your real estate is going to go up, but your wages are going to go down.
[01:39:46]  Like, we are in this place now.
[01:39:49]  There's so much debt, there's so much lopsided economic activity, there's so much money printing.
[01:39:53]  We cannot in the future at all maintain our standard of living now.
[01:39:58]  Maybe AI and crypto, Bitcoin in particular, will turn that around, but that's not for everyone, of course.
[01:40:04]  So, it's going to get worse.
[01:40:07]  You know, the huge numbers of admin jobs.
[01:40:10]  There's now Claude, I think, is doing a specialized legal AI.
[01:40:13]  They're going to iron out some of these hallucinations.
[01:40:15]  It'll never be gone perfectly.
[01:40:16]  That's sort of the nature of the architecture.
[01:40:18]  But the idea that we have to have things continually growing, and if we have to cut back, that's an automatic negative.
[01:40:28]  No, it is not.
[01:40:30]  Deplatforming was better than it was worse for me.
[01:40:34]  Deplatforming was better for me than it was worse.
[01:40:37]  And again, at the end of my life, I say, well, if I had this X amount of dollars, which again, it's not a small number.
[01:40:43]  Extra X amount of dollars for not being de platformed, but I still traveled a lot and I still gave speeches and I was working on all these presentations and so on.
[01:40:52]  Well, or got Charlie Cook, you know, which is not entirely beyond the realm of possibility.
[01:40:58]  I certainly had the threats quite considerably.
[01:41:02]  So, was it better?
[01:41:04]  Was it worse?
[01:41:04]  I don't know.
[01:41:05]  I mean, on average, I'm happy to have had more time with my family and friends, particularly my daughter, because, you know, she's 18, so she's going to be out in the world relatively soon.
[01:41:18]  And so, you got to sell your house.
[01:41:20]  You got to downsize.
[01:41:21]  Oh, no, we have to move out to the country for whatever reason.
[01:41:24]  Well, maybe your kids absolutely love the country.
[01:41:26]  And maybe you look back and you say, man, losing that job was the best thing that ever happened to me.
[01:41:31]  And I say, man, looking back, deplatforming.
[01:41:33]  Had more positives than negatives.
[01:41:35]  Now, I'm an ambitious guy, so I'm not going to say it was the best thing to ever happen to me.
[01:41:39]  I'm an ambitious guy, so I want to succeed.
[01:41:42]  I want to do well.
[01:41:43]  I want to be number one.
[01:41:44]  And deplatforming certainly took that away.
[01:41:47]  So I'm not going to say that there were no negatives.
[01:41:49]  I mean, there were, but the positives outweigh.
[01:41:52]  And a lot of it has to do, if all you do is look at the visible costs and not at the hidden benefits, it's real easy to end up with despair.
[01:42:01]  Yeah, and I'm.
[01:42:04]  My kiddos are first generation.
[01:42:05]  I moved here in 07 from the former Soviet Union and growing up extremely poor and kind of seeing that arc.
[01:42:12]  You know, I'm in my 40s, I can see what's happening in the empire.
[01:42:16]  And you kind of, you know, I'm glad my parents moved here.
[01:42:20]  But that's sort of the cost of living in an empire, is unfortunately there's a lot of immorality.
[01:42:25]  And like you said, that empire ebbs and flows.
[01:42:28]  You know, you can go live in Venezuela and, you know, maybe that farmer is still a farmer like he was 50 years ago or like his.
[01:42:37]  His parents were.
[01:42:40]  I would say it probably is a little tougher for millennials when you grow up with your baby boomer grandparents who had all the resources, your parents inherited some of those resources, and now you expect to inherit some of it, and suddenly not what you expected is coming to you.
[01:42:59]  I'm definitely seeing some of that in my kind of friend circle, but growing up extremely poor, you just go, okay, so what's the worst that can happen?
[01:43:08]  You're going to go back to the way you were when you were 10.
[01:43:11]  Well, and it wasn't like my childhood wasn't miserable because there was no money.
[01:43:15]  It was miserable because of the people.
[01:43:18]  And the other thing, too, it's important you cannot compare yourself to the boomers.
[01:43:22]  The boomers, out of all of human history, won the ultimate golden ticket lottery.
[01:43:29]  They won the ultimate golden ticket lottery.
[01:43:32]  They were the generation with the greatest peace, the greatest homogeneity, the greatest growing economy.
[01:43:40]  And they got the benefits of the debt, we get the downside of the debt, the national debts and the unfunded liabilities.
[01:43:48]  Like, sorry.
[01:43:49]  I mean, so it is like, you know, if you have some third cousin who won $10 million in the lottery and that makes you hate having to get up and go to work every day, that's not particularly rational.
[01:44:02]  And if you compare yourself to the most pampered, cosseted, fortunate, and privileged generation in the entire history of humanity, Then, yeah, you're going to be bitter and upset.
[01:44:16]  But I don't think that's particularly reasonable.
[01:44:19]  Like, I had a friend many years ago who some distant relative died he barely even knew about and left him a bunch of money.
[01:44:27]  All right.
[01:44:27]  Well, you know, if I'm going to compare myself to that guy, I'm going to sit there and go, why do I have to work?
[01:44:32]  You know, this kind of stuff, right?
[01:44:34]  And so you can't just compare yourself to the most fortunate generation in the million year plus of human history, you know, out of, you know, 20,000 generations, the boomers were the most fortunate and privileged.
[01:44:50]  And of course, they squandered and blew it all, but that's perhaps part of the price of privilege.
[01:44:56]  People who inherit a bunch of money don't usually have a good sense of the value of money.
[01:45:00]  And the boomers who inherited some great economic opportunities did not really understand how to maintain them or didn't want to know how to.
[01:45:08]  I'm not saying don't hate the boomers, that can certainly happen.
[01:45:10]  But what I am saying is that if you compare your life to the one in 20,000 generations that were the luckiest and had the most opportunities, Man, you're going to be better.
[01:45:22]  I choose not to compare myself to the boomers.
[01:45:24]  I choose to compare myself to medieval farmers.
[01:45:27]  And if I compare myself to medieval farmers, I've got a great, or even compared to the boomers.
[01:45:33]  Compared to the boomers, the fact that I can leave my imprints of thoughts on the world forever and ever, amen, with no intermediaries, nobody, no gatekeepers, no people blocking my way, no people getting me foundationally fired, and so on.
[01:45:47]  And I haven't had to go to war, and there hasn't been a giant plague, and there have been no famines.
[01:45:52]  You know, man.
[01:45:53]  Okay, so maybe the boomers were the luckiest.
[01:45:55]  For me, this time is the best because, again, I wouldn't have had a chance.
[01:46:00]  I mean, I would have written a whole bunch of notebooks that probably would have been thrown into a box in an attic when I died, and maybe they would have been looked at in 100 years, maybe.
[01:46:07]  But I get to have these live conversations with the world and have to for more than 20 years, which is an unbelievable privilege and utterly unprecedented in human history.
[01:46:16]  So if you gave me the choice to be in the generation of the boomers or where I am, which is Gen X, Gen X and a half every single time, I really couldn't do better in all of human history.

=== Best Generation in Human History (01:53) ===

[01:46:27]  I.
[01:46:27]  And born in the most fortunate generation because of all of this technology.
[01:46:32]  And so it's easy to look at the downsides, it's hard to look at the upsides, but you really have to wrench your perspective away from the abyss and look at the heights from time to time.
[01:46:45]  Well, and if you let them have your mindset, it's like the saying, right?
[01:46:48]  If you're afraid, the terrorists have won.
[01:46:50]  If you are always going to be worried about how good you're doing compared to the baby boomers, you're just letting them get inside your head.
[01:46:58]  Yes, and it is, as I said, it's ahistorical.
[01:47:02]  And if you compare yourself to somebody burying his fifth child in 10 years or watching 80% of his relatives die during the Black Death, then how many people throughout all of human history would trade places with you and I in a heartbeat?
[01:47:17]  Well, almost all of them.
[01:47:18]  And we should be damn happy about all of that privilege, too.
[01:47:22]  Yeah, Stefana, I'm going to log off.
[01:47:24]  I want to say thank you for having me on, and I really enjoyed the conversation.
[01:47:29]  Thank you, brother.
[01:47:29]  I appreciate that.
[01:47:30]  And again, I want to reiterate I'm not trying to say.
[01:47:33]  Don't be unhappy about having to sell your house.
[01:47:35]  I get that that's a difficult thing to do.
[01:47:37]  But the time when I had to sell my house ended up way better, way better.
[01:47:43]  So you never know.
[01:47:45]  You never know.
[01:47:46]  Have yourself a beautiful night.
[01:47:47]  Free domain.com slash donate.
[01:47:49]  If you'd like to help reverse some of the damage the globalists have done with the deplatforming of those moons ago, free domain.com slash donate.
[01:47:57]  Have yourself a glorious evening, my friends.
[01:47:59]  I hope, I hope, I hope that what I do is of use and of help to you.
[01:48:04]  Don't forget, free domain.com slash call.
[01:48:07]  James, maybe we can set up a call.freedomain.com.
[01:48:10]  Maybe that would be a little easier.
[01:48:11]  Call.freedomain.com.
[01:48:12]  But you have freedomain.com slash call if you'd like to book a call in.
[01:48:15]  Love to chat with you publicly or privately.
[01:48:18]  Have a beautiful night, my friends.
[01:48:19]  Lots of love from up here.
[01:48:21]  Bye bye.