Welcome to Keith Knight, Don't tread on Anyone in the
Libertarian Institute. Today I'm joined for part four
of my discussion with Stefan Molyneux of Free domain.com.
Links will be in the description below.
Mr. Molyneux, of all the taboo topics, which one do you think
is most important to discuss? What I think the most taboo
topic at the moment is that if we don't reason with each other,
violence ensues. I don't know why people don't
get this connection. Maybe it's because of child
abuse, maybe it's because of bad schooling, maybe it's because of
the media. But we really only have the
choice of reason or violence. And if we can't negotiate with
each other according to some relatively objective rules, all
that is left is bullying, manipulation and escalation.
If we can't find win win situations.
I mean, if if you desperately need food and you can't trade or
voluntarily beg and get resources that way, you have no
choice but to steal. And everybody who says that oh,
reason is a prejudice and who is willing to escalate to character
attacks and AD homonyms of other kinds or escalation or abuse or
like all those people are paving the road down to hell itself.
And I don't know why people don't see that.
Maybe it's because their personal relationships are so
crappy or something like that. But the most taboo topic is
shouting people down, getting them deplatformed, saying that
they should be unpersoned, saying that violence is an
acceptable response to certain ideas or arguments, no matter
how bad or terrible or horrible those arguments are.
I mean, we as a society should be confident enough that even if
some absolute corrupt lunatic comes along and says, oh, I
think slavery is the most moral, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, we
should be like, hey, you know, we've dealt with this a couple
of 100 years ago. Here's all of the reasons as to
why you're wrong and we should lay it out.
But censorship and deplatforming and aggression and escalation
and mass flagging and all this kind of stuff is a confession
that arguments are weak. And you do not make an argument
stronger by destroying its opponents.
You strengthen an argument by engaging in the public square.
And of course, when you have bad arguments, ideas or data,
sending it underground, removing it from the public square where
competent people can debate these lunatics, sending it
underground simply creates a parallel Society of people who
can't be corrected. It's a terrible idea.
So everybody who has the impulse, oh, this idea is so
terrible and offensive, I must shout it down, I must destroy
it, I must get people out. You are absolutely confessing
that you don't have a good answer.
Now then of course, people also have a funny thing where they
say, well, there are so many people in society with really,
really bad ideas. You know, there's these far
right extremists or whatever you want to say.
There's, you know, a huge half of America are the deplorables
and have these terrible ideas of racists and and someone and it's
like, well, who's been responsible for educating these
people? And so funny.
I don't know why people don't see this connection, but maybe
it's just me, But it's like if you're saying half the country
is full, the minds of half the country are full of absolutely
terrible, appalling, wrong ideas.
Well, y'all had them as kids for 12 years straight.
Thousands and thousands and thousands of you can't teach
them how to think better, You can't teach them how to reason.
Well, there's all these people in society, they won't listen to
reason. They're just prejudice and
bigoted. It's like y'all educated them,
the government. And So what you should do if you
genuinely think that people are just have terrible, terrible,
terrible ideas is you should completely change your
educational system. Because if it's just cranking
out people who are just bigots and, and appalling and
unthinking and uncaring and selfish.
And it's like, well, you're educated.
And it's not like it's reading, writing and arithmetic these
days. It's foundational moral
education that occurs in schools.
So all of the taboo, the most taboo idea is that if you want
reason with people, you are setting the stage for violence.
And everybody who contributes to that, you know, everybody's got
to put a log on that fire to burn down the whole world.
And I don't know why we have such a passive acceptance of
people who reject reason, because we know, we absolutely
know every single factor of history and philosophy and
morality tells us where this goes.
We either reason with each other or we come to blows.
And blows were bad enough in the past.
Now we've got weapons of mass destructions, You know, those,
those blows could be fatal to the planet as a whole.
And I don't know why people don't see that this escalation
is almost inevitable if we don't find a way to reason with each
other. What actions can people directly
take in their personal lives to increase their income and
overall standard of living? Well, in most things there's
theory and there's practice. Like there's the hypothesis,
there's the business plan, and then there's the the execution.
So there's two things that you need to say, increase income or
gain more value in a relationship of some kind.
Number one is you have to have a way of making the case that you
provide more value. So if you're a salesman and you
have doubled your sales from last year, you can go to your
manager and say, hey man, I'm assuming you're not on pure
Commission. Hey, man, I've doubled my sales.
I should get a raise. So the first thing you have to
have is some reasonable proof or at least a compelling case that
your value has increased. And what that means is you
actually have to increase your value, right?
Like you actually have to increase your value.
So when I first was in the business world, I spent
countless hours reading, you know, Harvard Business Review,
reading books on business, reading books on sales, on
marketing, on management, because I kind of came in from
academia with a graduate degree in the history of philosophy to
growing and running a software business in the 90s.
I ended up with like, I don't know, 35 employees or something
like that. So there was a lot for me to
learn. I'm a, I'm a little bit of a
loner when it comes to thinking and acting.
So learning to work and manage people was a real challenge.
So I actually had to increase my value with knowledge and skills.
And then I had to make a case as to why I should be paid more.
And then I actually had to ask for it, right?
So you have to increase your value.
Find a way to measure that because everybody's, you know,
infinite $1,000,000 an hour in their own heads, right?
So you have to increase your value and then you have to make
that case. And if you can find someone who
agrees with you, then you can get more income, you can get
more pay. And it's the same thing when it
comes to, you know, this woman that you like and you want to
ask out, Then you have to find a way to be valuable to her.
And then you actually have to ask her out and see if she
agrees with your assessment of your value to her, right?
That's like that old song says, I'm not perfect, but I'm perfect
for you. And so you have to actually
increase your value. And then you have to validate
it, find a way to prove it, make your case.
And then you have to have a belief.
If you've convinced yourself the drone value has increased, like
you have doubled your sales output, And if somebody says,
well, I'm not going to pay you more than you have to have the
confidence to start looking elsewhere.
Because without competition, there really is no such thing as
quality. You don't know who the fastest
runner is unless everybody gets to run the race, then you'll
find out who the fastest runner is.
And so if you have empirically and genuinely increased the
value of whatever it is you have to offer and people in
particular niche fields, I mean, I know this in managing a bunch
of tech people, there are people who just, they go in with their
horse blinders on. And I was like, well, I have
this code to complete and I have this project to do, and I have
this report to write and this PowerPoint to produce.
And they just do that. And it's just input output and
they just focus on a particular task.
You are never going to add that much value to a company doing
that. What you want to do as an
employee is you want to understand the business,
understand the value of what the business is providing, and then
work with your boss to make sure you're not performing specific
tasks, but you are serving the customers by maximizing the
value that the business is providing.
So when I had people who were working for me as programmers,
some of them you just give them a task, give them a task, they
grind through it. Others would be like, well,
what's this for and what is the customer looking for?
And I even had a couple of people who I mentored who came
along with me on sales calls, who came along on service calls
so that they could meet the customer, understand what the
customer is looking for, and understand the value proposition
of the business. Rather than just doing your task
like you're just eating chocolates on a conveyor belt or
something, you want to actually figure out what the business is
doing and what the value proposition is.
And that way you can ask yourself the most fundamental
question, which is how am I serving the customer?
How am I adding value to the customer?
I always used to say to my employees, don't come to me for
a raise. I'm not paying you.
I'm not digging into my bank account and paying you out of my
own cash, right? Who is paying you?
And it took a depressing amount of time for some people to get
this is like, who's who's paying you?
The customer is paying you. And so if what you're doing is
serving the customer, right? Because we're not taking money
from the customer, we're handing money back.
So you know, briefly one of the value propositions was there's a
particular business task that was about $3000 and using our
software and it happened hundreds of times a year in a
business using our software. It cut the cost 40% and we
validated that and we'd got the, so we had the spreadsheet the
the whole presentation. So we could so you know, give
me, you know, $200,000 for my software and I'll give you 3000
three $100,000 back this year. And the rest of it is all
profit, right? So we're not taking money from
the customers. We're giving money to the
customers by reducing their costs.
And the way in which we're saving money for the customers,
the, the delta for that is what you get paid from.
So getting to understand the big purpose, don't just be like this
hamster wheel person who's just like, oh, I got a task, I got a
task, but figure out how the task helps the customers.
Because of course, if you help the customers, your boss look
good, looks good, the company makes more money, and then you
can legitimately ask for that. So understand the larger context
of what you're doing in the business world.
And that way you can also be in a partnership with your boss.
Your boss says, well, I think this will help the customers the
most. And you can say, well, that
certainly will help the customers.
Here's another thought. Let's run it through the
metrics. Let's figure out what can
happen. And that way you can be a
participant. And it's much more fun that way.
It's much more creative. The hamster wheel eating
chocolate tonic, conveyor belt stuff is why people get
depressed and feel alienated from their labor.
You know, the old Marxist criticism that you're alienated
from your labor, that in the past you used to make a whole
chair. Now you just bolt on one leg,
you know, 100 times a day. But one of the reasons people
feel alienated from their own labor is they don't know what
it's for. What are you?
What are you doing this project for?
What is this piece of code for? What is this PowerPoint for?
What is the goal? And if you are just doing this
hamster wheel chocolate on a cabebell stuff, then you can't
add that much value and your life becomes progressively more
meaningless because you're doing a series of incomprehensible
tasks because you're ordered to. It's like being a well paid
serf. So figure out the purpose of
what you're doing. Figure out how you can add value
to customers and document, document, record, record,
record. Because your boss is not
psychic, he doesn't know everything you're doing.
Record stuff and then continually check in with your
boss. Is this actually adding value to
the customers? Is this valuable?
Is this the maximum value that I can provide?
And if your boss is constantly agreeing with you that you are
providing maximum value or the most value that anyone can think
of, then when it comes to a raise, you say, hey man, you
keep telling me I'm providing maximum value, which means the
customers are paying you more for my time.
I'd like a little taste of that, my friend, right.
So you've got to just make a case.
But just going and feeling like, well, I, I, I, I deserve more
money. I want more money.
That's all very petty and childish.
You need to make a business case and you need to sell yourself in
this life. And you don't want to be a
fraud, right? You don't want to say, well, I
deserve more money when you're not actually verifiably adding
more value because that's going to be non sustainable to put it
mildly. But yeah, add value, make the
case, have the documentation, and be willing to walk if people
won't recognize your value. Yeah, it's important because you
see that, well, businesses will just pay the least amount of
money, and that's why we need a minimum wage.
Turns out a microscopic percentage of workers actually
earn the minimum wage. So how do you explain all these
people getting paid more? And this was such an important
lesson for me because the first time in an early job that I
asked for a raise, it was I have a lot of bills.
Can you guys please give me more money?
And recently when I asked for a raise, I said here's where I was
when I started. Here are things I have now that
I didn't previously have. Here's the value I could add to
the company. I didn't say customer, but I
should have said customer. Here's the value I could add to
the company. If I stay on, could I please get
this raise? And then it was fortunately
accepted. So that is just so, so important
for people to have. The amazing thing is that the
last two jobs that I worked, the number one reason people lost
their job was because of attendance.
So, so much of this is actually within our grasp.
People showing up late, people not showing up at all.
So I had just previously had this idea that while the poor
stay poor and the rich get rich in society and there's not much
you can do, you could, you know, have a revolution and change the
system. But other than that, your hands
are just tied. The fact that I thought that was
just so unproductive for so long that I think that these messages
are so vitally important. Well sorry just to interrupt
this for a second because the people don't understand how
radical resentment of work is and resentment of bosses is.
So how is it that I was able to succeed in the software field
even though mega mega corporations were doing the same
thing? Well.
Because I was broke. And I know this sounds kind of
odd, but there's this constant churn in society.
So many people when they get money, they just increase their
spend, right? It used to drive me crazy with
people that that I worked with, they'd get they'd get their
hands on some cash and they'd just immediately buy more stuff.
And I'm like, no, freedom is a buffer.
You got to have some savings. Otherwise you don't really have
anything to negotiate from because you've got to eat what
you kill in the moment. There's no storage, right?
So when you have a bunch of rich people, they can't compete with
the talented poor. Because when I first started my
software company, my my rent was $275.00 a month.
I mean, I was living in one room in a house with five other
people in a pretty rough section of town next to an abattoir.
I mean, I had no car I had, I mean, I've never been a big one
for, for clothing or, or sort of ostentatious spending or
something. So, so I could live on less.
And when you can live on less, you can sell your product for
less. If you've got to pay someone
$150,000, then you have to pass that cost along to the customer.
So poor people are a constant threat to the wealthy because
the wealthy get comfortable, they get complacent, they get
lazy, and there is a churn in a free market because the wealthy
have particular talents, their kids are unlikely to inherit all
of those talents. You know, like the the kid of a
great singer is probably going to be a better singer than
average, but not as great as the great singer.
It's just a regression to the mean.
It's called, right. So rich people who become
wealthy, they want to hang on to that privilege.
And in a free market, the best way to hang on to that privilege
is to make poor people resent working, resent bosses resent,
feel exploited, you know, because resentful workers are
not very productive. They don't like coming into
work. They don't want to understand
the business. They dislike their boss.
They're obstructive. They're difficult.
They spread negative rumors. They they don't do a they're not
focusing on productivity. They just kind of hate being
there. So this propaganda and it's a
kind of funny thing that the people who are doing well in a
relative free market have a huge incentive to sow the seeds of
resentment among the poor. And I saw this because I grew up
in a very, very poor environment, you know, like
welfare, really the bottom and dregs of society.
And you could see this resentment was just being sown
all the time. You're just being exploited,
man. The boss makes 10 times what you
make, but you're the one who actually produces the goods,
right? There's a a line from an old
police song, which is I work all day in the factory making a
machine, but not for me. Must be a reason that I can't
see, right. And this, so this idea that
you're the ones doing the real work, man, the bosses are just
parasites. And then you don't like the
bosses, you don't learn, you don't get mentored by the
bosses. And it's a way for the wealthy
people to stay wealthy. It's just so although these
seeds are some resentment among the poor because they know the
poor can radically outwork and out compete them because the
poor are hungry and lean as hell.
And that is the thing that, you know, the mammals overtake the
dinosaurs. There's a constant churn in the
free market. But if you can convince all the
poor people who have low overhead and a huge work ethic
that they're just being exploited and they should resent
their bosses and hate going to work and it's all terrible and
and so on, man, you're crippling a lot of people who would out
compete you. And it's a it's a beautiful
thing for the wealthy, but a terrible thing for society as a
whole. You had an excellent video
called The Best Dating Advice 29 minutes Long, worth every
second. What is the best dating advice
you have? Could you please summarize it
for us? Well I'll I won't just summarize
the video if people should go and watch it.
Maybe put the link in below. So the best dating advice is
what do we date for? We date for love.
Dating exists because pair bonding is needed.
Two best raised children, right? We have these children that just
take a ridiculous amount of time to grow up.
I mean, it's completely mad. You know, you see these videos
of like these foals a day or two after they get born with these
long wobbly stick legs, they can get up and walk around.
You know, it takes human babies an average of a year to, to be
able to walk, even though we've got these, you know, sturdy
trunk legs. And it takes the male brain
about 1/4 of a century to reach full maturity.
Women, it's a couple of years less.
I mean, it is completely mad. And I've been a stay at home dad
and I've seen this, this progress and process going on.
It's it's absolutely wild. So the reason why we're able to
develop so slowly, and that's because we have this giant brain
like that, which in nature ends up more complex, takes longer to
evolve, no longer to grow. So we have this amazing,
wonderful, incredible brain. And the reason we have that is
because we have pair bonding and romantic love.
So we date for the sake of pair bonding marriage, whether you
consider it legal, which I don't, but I do consider it a
public declaration of we're going to stay together no matter
what so that your family and friends keep you together should
you run into trouble. So we, we date for those
reasons. And So what we want to do is
date with the greatest pair bonding we have now.
Love, of course. Is admiration, it has to have.
I mean, it's not, it's not that all admiration and love, but
all, all, all love has to involve admiration.
What is most admirable about people?
What do we most admire about people?
Well, we admire moral qualities. That is the most admirable.
I mean, we can have some respect and admiration for certain
athletic skill and so on, but what we absolutely fall in love
with is virtue. So I've defined and I've got a
whole book about this called Real Time relationships.
People can get it for free at freedomain.com/books.
Love is our involuntary response to virtue if we're virtuous.
So if we and virtuous just means striving for virtue and having
objective standards, it doesn't mean being perfectly virtuous
because then we all fall short. But if you have objective,
decent moral standards and you know, non violence, moral
courage, telling the truth, they're standing up for what you
believe in, promoting virtue, opposing evil, we're reasonably
safe. All of these things are things
that we admire. And so love involves virtue.
So the best love involves the greatest virtues.
So what you want to do when you're dating is you want to
find someone whose morals, whose virtues you admire.
The other thing too, is that, you know, a lot of people base,
and Lord knows I've been guilty of this myself on more than one
occasion with very little excuse.
But a lot of people base their attraction simply on looks.
Now, it's complicated, like 'cause it's easy to dismiss
looks, but looks and our attraction to looks exist for a
reason, right? I sort of, I, I, I demonstrate
here on my own face like I'm the best looking guy on the planet,
which is nonsense. But just to sort of give an
example, even as a feature, symmetry between the features
and so on indicate healthy genetics, good genetics, right?
There is a very, very fascinating study that
correlates objective measures of intelligence with how good
looking someone is. And between reasonably good
looking and not very good looking.
You can get up to a standard deviation of intelligence data
different. So it's quite important.
Good looking people tend to have higher verbal skills.
They tend to be better at negotiating, which is very
important for marriage. They tend to be healthier, they
tend to live longer, and they tend to make more money.
Now some of that's the Halo effect that people just like
having good looking people around.
So maybe they'll pay them a little bit more.
But given that it also correlates with intelligence to
some degree, which correlates with income, it's interesting.
So if you want to know how intelligent someone is, you
could either, and you had to choose between two metrics, just
see how good looking they are or know their educational
attainment. Those two things are about equal
in predicting somebody's intelligence.
So it's not that looks or oh, looks are so shallow they mean
nothing. No, no, no, they do.
They do mean something. I mean, obesity is negatively
correlated with intelligence. And again, of course there are
very smart people who are very fat and there are not so smart
people who are very lean. But in general, it's a proxy.
So a lot of the things that we find attractive are proxies for,
you know, healthy genes and intelligence and and so on.
So it's not like looks are completely unimportant, but if
you are not focusing on the person's virtue, then you are
not focusing on that which will foundationally cement your pair
bond. And of course, I think most of
us have known people over the course of our lives who've had
children with somebody who's corrupt or immoral or shallow or
selfish or narcissistic. And man, it's a brutal life.
It's AI. Just had dinner the other day
with a friend of mine I've had for like over 30 years.
And, and we were just talking about this man and we all know
people who've just, they've just had kids with the wrong person.
And it is an absolutely brutal life.
And it's even worse for the kids, which is the, that they
are the real victims because they didn't have a choice about
it at all. So if you're just somebody sexy,
somebody sexy, again, nothing wrong with sexy that, that's a,
that's a good thing. But you will spend a fairly
significant time over the course of a marriage.
You'll spend a fair amount of time not having sex.
I mean, it's, you know, you could say, I don't know, half an
hour, 3 * a week, that's an hour and a half of having sex.
That's a what, 1% of your week? Less than 1% of your week.
So you're going to spend a whole lot of time not having sex and a
whole lot of time having conversations.
And so you want someone good conversation that's good at
negotiating. If they've had childhood trauma,
they've found a way to deal with it.
They've done therapy or something that's helped them
deal with that childhood trauma. Somebody with a good sense of
humor, somebody who doesn't flip out, somebody who's not overly
triggered by by things and can talk through their emotions.
Somebody who can interrupt their impulses to act out aggression
and say, instead of saying you're an A hole, they say, I
feel really angry at the moment. I'm not sure why, but let's talk
about it so that you can have a reasonable conversation.
And last thing I'll say is you. The reason I think it's so
important to focus on virtue over the course of a marriage
which you know, hopefully lasts from, you know, 25 to 75 or 20
to 80 or something like that, Like that's 50-60 years, right?
Is that you ever look at old people and say.
Well. Nobody wants to make out with
them. You know, she's, she's 80, he's
78 or whatever it is. But what it is that keeps old
people together is if you found your attraction and your love
and your commitment on virtue, virtue tends to increase over
the course of lifespan. If you just base it on looks,
well, you know, I'm going to be 58 now.
I don't look like I did when I was 18, right?
So if you base your attraction on looks, looks are going to
fade. They just do.
I mean, just a fact of life. And nobody ever believes it when
they're young, and neither did I.
But just a fact. If you base, oh, he's so
athletic. Well, athleticism declines over
time. And you could say, well, I base
it on his wealth. And it's like, yeah, and wealth
can increase over the course of a life, but then you retire and
income goes down and all of that, right.
So what is the one thing that you can hook your heart into
that is going to grow and swell over the course of life?
Well, that's virtue because we can always be better.
We can always have more integrity and apply yourself to
spreading virtue and opposing immorality even more.
And so if you look at moral qualities, and moral qualities
don't have to fully manifest when you're young, but you do
have to have the principles in general.
So does the person believe in morality?
Do they believe in objective principles?
Do they have good verbal skills? Because good verbal skills means
that you can negotiate, which is very, very important.
Marriage is a lot of negotiation.
And if you marry a woman, say with good verbal skills, then
she will negotiate with your children rather than yell at
them or hit them or punish them, can find them, take away their
dinner or jam them down on stairs for these fairly
aggressive timeouts and so on. Just negotiate with your kids.
So somebody with morality, good verbal skills, that is who you
want to get involved with. You know, if you, my wife and I
go for these like, I don't know, 2 hour hikes and just Yammer and
chat the whole way and it's just absolute.
It's an absolute joy. And you have that as the basis
of your relationship. Man, you're doing well.
And beauty, the last thing I'll say is like physical beauty.
I mean, it's a wonderful thing. I've had no particular issue
with physical beauty. It's a wonderful thing.
But man alive, it is so out of bounds at the moment.
You know, when you think about our evolution, you know, let's
just say girls over the course of our evolution would get
married in their teens, right? I mean, in general, right?
And so physical beauty was supposed to be at its maximum
coinage or of significant import for maybe 6 to 18 months, right?
So a woman is of marryable age in our evolution, whatever that
was in the tribe. And then she'd get picked fairly
quickly. And I guess the most beautiful
and most attractive woman would get more quick, would get picked
more quickly. So you'd be out of the
marketplace in six months, 12 months, maximum 18 months, and
you'd probably be out of the marketplace by the time you hit
20. And then what happens?
Well, then you have this endless conveyor belt of of kids and all
of the ravages that that does. You're out in the sun with no
sunscreen. You know, you just you get kind
of crypt peeper, you get kind of crypt keeper pretty quickly over
the course of. So beauty is like supposed to be
this eclipse. It's not supposed to just last
and last and last. And so one of the reasons why
beauty is such an intense draw is because it's supposed to be a
very short lived flame. I mean, that's how we evolved.
But now, oh, and also, sorry, not only, but also also a
woman's beauty in a relatively small tribe of 100 or 200 people
or maybe a small village of up to 500 people or whatever,
there'd only be a couple of dozen young men who would really
be interested in your beauty from a wooing and marriage
standpoint. So the woman's beauty was very
short lived and of importance to a very small number of people,
again, for a very short amount of time.
And that's one of the reasons why it burns so brightly and why
we're so immeasurably drawn to physical beauty.
But now two things have happened.
I mean, number one, of course, is that with social media, a
woman's beauty can be available both in I'm pretty and you know,
here's me topless in in a pretty sordid manner to hundreds of
millions of men around the world like that.
That's not what we're designed for.
That's like straight up sugar to the eyeballs.
And also a woman's beauty now, instead of it being a short
flame that draws a man for parent bonding so that you can
start with the real business of beauty, which is the having and
raising of children. Now beauty just goes on and on
and on and on. And I mean, it's wow, look at
Salma Hayek in her like mid late 50s and she's, you know,
cryogenically preserved every night or whatever she does or
Jlo or Jennifer Aniston and so on.
They just have all this wild technology and these diets and
this Botox or whatever it is that they're doing to create
this, you know, youthful skin and, and figures and so on.
And so we've taken this immense power that's supposed to be a
flash in the pan for a very small number of people.
And we've made it a multi decade semi exploitation available to
hundreds of millions or billions of people.
And I think that's driven a lot of beautiful people kind of
crazy because it's just way too much power and it's not really
what beauty was designed for, which was very short and limited
in scope and duration. And it just goes on and on.
And that I think that just drives people kind of kind of
crazy. And it's no longer to me as much
of A mark of attractiveness, especially sort of post social
media, but rather the mark of somebody who can't pair bond
because they have option paralysis.
What differentiates good parents from bad parents?
Well, what different good parents from bad parents?
I like to pause, to prioritize, not because I Huh, interesting
question. I've never thought of that
before. I wonder what it could be.
So I think the best parents, you know, you wake up in the morning
and you're not a parent yet. Is that right?
Oh no, I'm not OK. So if you're not a parent yet,
it's Wildman again. I was just talking about this
with my wife the other day. You become a parent.
Your old life is gone, man. Like it's gone.
And it's not even gone like the stage of a rocket where you
still have something that's that's part of it.
That's kind of the same. When you become a parent, you're
never the same again and you can never just think for yourself
again. It's sort of like when you get
married. When you get married, you become
one flesh and you can't think of your own pleasure without
thinking of your partner's happiness and what is best for
both of you in the long run. You become one flesh, right?
I mean, you, you don't work out saying this is really good for
my left arm, but I could care less about my right arm.
Like working out is good for all of you as a whole, right?
So you, you just become one flesh.
And then when you add a kid to that mix, I mean, it's, it's
just, it's kind of a cliched thing, but it's really true.
Like I wake up in the morning, I'm like, OK, what's what, what
can I do today that's going to be best for my family as a
whole? And you, you can turn it down a
little bit like a dimmer switch that doesn't go off, but you
just, you can't turn it off. So if you wake up in the morning
and you say, OK, what's best for my my kids?
What's best for my kids? Well, you have to study, you
have to do your research. You have to read, you have to
read books on parenting. You have to read some, maybe
some science books. You have to figure out what is
best for your kids. And the studies are very clear.
And as far as correlations in the social sciences, it's about
as good as you can get in terms of like spanking is bad for your
kids, verbal abuse escalation is bad for your kids, not
breastfeeding is not great for your kids.
Putting your kids in daycare is very bad for your children in in
many ways. I think that modern government
education with the propaganda and all of the creepy sex stuff
for kids is really toxic. So you have to say, OK, what's
best for my kids? Well, what's best for my kids is
having the mom stay home, breastfeed for about a year and
a half on average and not put them in daycare.
So what's best for my kids is to have the mom stay home and you
could say the dad and that could happen if that's what's
absolutely necessary. But you know, mom's got the
breastfeeding equipment. We're all taps and no plumbing.
So you have the mom stay home and raise the kids right.
Even nannies are tough man, because nannies, they come and
go and the better the nanny is, the more the kids hearts going
to get broken when the nanny inevitably leaves to go do
something else or have her own kids or something like that.
So a a pair bond skin contact, eye on eye contact, you know,
kissing and, and hugging and singing and language and so on.
Just I was reading, I was reading stories to my daughter
when she was still in the womb because especially male voices,
which are deeper, they transmit fairly well through the
placenta. And the studies show that women
did, babies who are read to in the womb recognize their
father's voices when they come out.
So there's a continuity there that's really nice.
So focusing on what's best for your kids and getting the data
to find out that what you're doing is in fact best for your
kids is really great. And people who refuse to upgrade
their parenting while I parent the way that I was parented,
it's like, but that's not just how people live.
I mean, the people who say, well, I, I just parent the way I
was parented. I bet you they don't have Rotary
dial phones and still a little modem going when they want to
connect to the Internet, right? They they've upgraded their cell
phones, they've upgraded their cars, they've upgraded their
Internet access, they've upgraded their computers.
So yeah, we just need to to upgrade.
So focusing on what's best for your kids and getting the data
to recognize it and then just doing that, just doing that,
that's I think the basic thing. You really have to, I say you
have to enjoy your kids company. But if your kids know that you
really enjoy their company, that gives them a great sense of
security. And if your kids know that the
dysfunctions that they may have in their personalities are your
fault as the parent, then there's a real pair bond.
Because for children to grow up happy, they need to feel secure
and they need to experience their parents devotion is
absolute. Now, that doesn't mean never
correct your child or never suggest, hey, no more candy
today or we got to go to the dentist, right?
Because that is helping your child in the long run.
But if your, if your kids know that you, you love them, you
enjoy their company, you're always focusing on what's best
for them and that you're not going to blame them for
personality dysfunctions because you as the parent are
responsible for how your children develop to some degree.
I mean, you obviously can't really control their height
except by who you choose to marry.
But the in terms of the moral contents of your child's mind,
that's, that's your deal. So if your kids know that they
really enjoy you, you really enjoy their company, then they
will of course, warm to you. And they kids love to please
their parents. We we evolve that way.
And so you don't have this conditional thing where you say,
well, I like you when you do this, but I don't like you when
you disobey or you don't do this or you don't do that.
That's man, that's real conditional.
And that's very tough for kids because they can't be secure.
That kind of conditional approval for parents to take
responsibility for their own lives is really, really
important. If parents play the victim,
that's going to transmit to the kids and paralyze them in terms
of self ownership. And I would also say that
whatever kid, whatever you want your kids to do, you have to 1st
consistently model yourself for years.
I mean, if you if you want your kids to identify the difference
between a tree and a driveway, you have to consistently use the
right word for tree in driveway for quite a long time for them
to get that. If you want your kids to tell
the truth, then you have to consistently model telling the
truth for years. If you want your kids to have
integrity, if you want your kids to talk about their feelings,
then you have to do the same in sort of age appropriate ways.
So if you whatever you want in your kids, well, you want your
kids to respect you, it's like, OK, well, have you respected
them for years? And if you understand that, that
your kids are a reflection of your own consistency and
integrity, then rather than trying to fix your kids or
change your kids, you focus really on changing your own
behavior and modeling that which it is that you want in your
kids. And then the last thing I would
say is of course like no violence, no aggression.
I think that's sort of taken for granted, but try not to live
automatically. And that's why I was saying
figure out what's best for your kids.
Sorry, have the dedication for what's best for your kids and
then figure it out through research because, you know, so
many parents are like, well, well, people, OK, I graduated
from high school. I guess I, I, I, I got to go to
college. OK, then I've got to try and I
get a job. I got a date, I've got to get
married and then, you know, we're going to have some kids.
And then I got to get back to work because I only have this
long a maternity leave and I got to get my kids in daycare.
Like you're just living automatically.
And the problem with that is if you live according to society's
blind habits, then you are, as a parent succumbing to peer
pressure. Well, all my friends put their
kids in daycare and went back to work.
So that's, that's what you do. And the problem is like all
parenting comes down to the teen storms right when the hormones
hit, you know, 12/13/14, whenever it is, the hormones hit
and the focus of the child naturally, evolutionarily,
biologically shifts from parents to peers because parents of the
past and peers of the future. Peers are where you find your,
your partner, your person, your your love interest, your future
family. So kids are going to switch in
their teens, not 100%, but their focus is going to switch from
parents to peers. And you want your kids to not be
susceptible to peer pressure for negative outcomes, right?
Some peer pressure is fine. You know, don't look weird,
don't you know, don't be weird. Like, I get there's some peer
pressure, that's fine. But it wasn't, you know, what's
not fine is, hey, I, I found these pills under the couch.
Let's take, you know, that's not the peer pressure you want your
kids being susceptible to. So the way that you protect your
kids from negative peer pressure is you think for yourself as a
parent and you don't just follow society's blind habits and say,
well, we have to do this because other people do this.
So what's the justification? Well, I parent the way I was
parented. Well, that means you're not
thinking for yourself and you're just copy pasting the past.
Well, don't do that because if and also, you know, it's kind of
funny that parents, it's funny, like sad funny.
The parents say about their kids, oh, you know, they're just
so susceptible to peer pressure. And those same parents put their
kids in daycare when the kid was a baby, like a year old or 18
months or two. And it's like, but when you put
your kids in daycare, their primary contact is with peers,
not with adults. I mean, I worked in a daycare
for many years, as I mentioned before, so I know this one very
well. There were two of us and 25 to
30 kids. They spent way more time
interacting with each other than interacting with the adults.
And so if you're going to put your kids in a situation where
peers dominate their life because of daycare or school for
that matter, then if they let their peers dominate their lives
as teenagers, it's really hard to find a rational reason why
the parents can complain about that.
That's just reaping what you sow.
So live consciously, have good values, model those values,
those kids, those values then flow down to your kids.
And it's just so much more fun. You know, I mean, I grew up with
a fairly aggressive parent and I do think it's one of the things
that's actually kind of sad about all of that is how much
fun aggressive parents give up on with their kids.
You know, having a kid you get along well with is, is such a
pleasure. It, it, there's such an ease
and, and sense of fun and joy in the in the family.
I mean, particularly when your kids become teenagers.
My daughter's impression of me or impersonation of me has me
literally rolling on the ground with tears coming out of my eyes
in laughter sometimes. The way she ramps up the British
accent and complaints it is just absolutely hilarious.
And what a what a huge amount of joy to have in your life.
And boy, what a what a bad deal it is being aggressive.
Yes, I have unfortunately reluctantly kicked my dad out of
my life and I was wondering what criteria should I use when
deciding whether or not to disassociate from a friend or
family member? I'm sorry to hear about that.
It is a very, very sad thing. And I often think about how much
harm has to be done in the parent child relationship by the
parent in order for that most primary relationship to be
expendable. Now, I mean, this is something I
started talking about this the voluntary family that morals are
higher than blood relations. And it's a funny thing because,
you know, I got into a lot of trouble.
People got really mad at me about this.
Well, not the people I was helping, but the people who were
in general, I would consider abusive got mad at me about
this, which I again, it's one of these things.
It's like, but if a woman's in an abusive marriage, we will
tell her she doesn't have to stay.
In fact, we might even encourage her to leave.
Now that's a relationship she chose voluntarily.
We didn't choose our parents. So it's saying, well, people in
abusive relationships that they voluntarily chose, maybe it's a
good idea for them to get out. But people in involuntary
relationships that they never chose just have to stay forever
and ever. Amen.
And And that just doesn't make any sense.
We know for a simple fact that moral standards are higher than
blood relations because family members go to jail even though
it breaks up the family. Like if they do something deeply
immoral like that, the dad is a bank robber, then we arrest the
dad and we put him in jail, even though that quote breaks up the
family. So we know that moral rules are
higher than family relations. But then when I talk about it as
a philosopher, well, I don't know.
I, I have this special ability. I don't exactly know where it
comes from to generate maximum love and maximum hatred.
It's like everybody has their special superpower.
Suppose my massive loyalty, I, I either have people who think I'm
the greatest thing since sliced bread or people who want to
chase me off a Cliff with pitchforks.
I just have that kind of personality.
And so the question of like whether you dissociate from a
friend or family member, My own particular experience has been
this, and I don't want to make it anecdotal, but I want to
start with something that's more empirical.
My own particular experience has been this.
The people who I've ended up not being in contact with, I did not
have any big stormy, you know, you are dead to me.
I see you no more. Like I have no father.
And you know, whether you did that or not, it's totally fine.
I'm just telling you my own particular experience.
What I did was I just said, you know, I don't want to lie
anymore. I don't want to pretend to be
someone other than who I am. You know, like every time I
would get together with my mother, who I have not seen in,
I don't know, 25 years or so, whenever I'd get together with
my mother, she would talk to me about topic X.
And it doesn't really matter what it was.
And it was just obsessive. Like an hour or two.
I'd just be like sitting there kind of trapped, like a sailboat
trying to attack against the wind of her words.
And I didn't like it. I didn't like that it was so one
sided. I didn't like it that it was her
obsession. I didn't like that I couldn't
get a word in edgewise. I didn't like that I felt
invisible. I didn't like that.
And of course, when I was a kid I had to put up with it because
that's the only home I had. But as an adult, I didn't have
to, and I did for a while. You know, you like, you try to
be nice, right? You try to be reasonable and,
and, or at least try to, you know, everyone's got their
little quirks and you try to indulge them as if if
reasonable. But after a while I was like, I
don't want to do this anymore. I, I don't want to just sit and
pretend to listen to something that I find creepy, unsettling,
boring and weird. And so I said, hey, you know, I
know you're really interested in this topic.
I appreciate that. I'm sure there's stuff that I
talk about that maybe isn't always super interesting to you,
but I just, you know, my experience has been that it's
like 100% of the time we get together, you talk about this
topic and I kind of space out and I don't want that anymore.
I, I want to have a more involved and back and forth,
blah, blah, blah, right? So I had that sort of speech and
boy, did it ever not go well. And then of course, the next
time I saw my mother, she pretended nothing happened.
And I said, well, you know, we did have that last conversation
that didn't go particularly well.
Let's end it, right. So what happened was I simply
stopped lying and then people stopped wanting to have anything
to do with me. I mean, so it wasn't some big
thing where I, you know, kicked people off the plane or off the
island and and flew on or, you know, went on alone.
It was, well, look, I have some criticisms.
I have some issues, I have some problems.
I have some things that I want to talk about that maybe I'm
super comfortable for you. And I found out very quickly
that if I was honest, people didn't really want to spend time
with me. Some people, I mean, obviously I
have people now who do my hand puppets, of course, and my
inflatable friend. But if you're just honest and
tell people what you think and feel, do they actually want to
spend time with you? Are are are you in a quote
relationship that is only acceptable to the other person
because you don't speak your mind?
You don't, you're not honest about your experience of the
relationship, right. So there's a cup I wrote down a
couple of things here to sort of summarize it.
One of the things is that is this person going to block me
from having a quality person in my life?
You know, my mom has some positive qualities, but on the
balance, the negatives are a little more.
And so if I, you know, when I meet a really great quality
moral woman and then I like here's your mother-in-law for
the next 50 years. Is that going to have her run
for the hills? Well, I can't sacrifice my
future for the sake of my past, I can't sacrifice love for the
sake of history, and I can't sacrifice a chosen relationship
for the sake of an unchosen relationship.
So if say, my mother being in my life is going to prevent me from
having a quality wife, sorry. Like that's not even that.
That's not even a close choice for me.
You can do a search at fdrpodcast.com for the Against
Me argument, which is more around politics and statism.
Of course, if there's violence, aggression, coldness, a lack of
empathy, a lack of curiosity about you, that's not a very
good thing at all. If people have destructive
addictions, and politics can be a very destructive addiction.
But if people have destructive addiction addictions, obviously
if they're sex addicts, gambling addicts, drug addicts,
Alcoholics and so on, that's probably not particularly wise.
I think it's worth putting it on the line and saying look, you
got to go get help. Like the intervention thing.
There's this whole show about that everyone gets together with
the addict and says you've got to get get help or you're out of
our lives that can help. Is it a one way relationship
overall? I mean, relationships have, you
know, tide comes in, tide comes out.
Sometimes you focus more on what your partner needs.
Sometimes they'll focus more on what you need for various
reasons. You know, your partner has some
big upset, you'll spend a couple of days talking to them at the
exclusion of your own thoughts and feelings.
But does it balance out overall? I think that's important.
And can they accept you for who you are?
You know, when I was younger, I don't know.
I mean, I think it's true for most people.
Like, you got to fake a whole bunch of stuff.
I mean, even if you have a good family at school, you have to
fake it. You have to fake being
interested in all of the nonsense that they're talking
about. And school's way worse now than
it was when I was a kid. When I was a kid, it was just
boring. Now it's like mentally
dangerous. It's like toxic.
And so you got to pretend to be interested in school and care
about it as opposed to rolling your eyes and saying to the
teacher, you're really boring. And this stuff means nothing to
me. So you got to lie that if you
have families, sometimes you have to pretend things that you
don't particularly believe or want or like and so on.
And so at some point in your life, and this happened to me, I
think it was in my late 20s or so where I was just like, I
don't want to spend the rest of my life not telling the truth.
And some of the greatest highs and some of the lowest lows have
come out of that sort of just basic decision.
Like when I was a kid, I, I had to falsify things because
telling the truth is pretty volatile when you're a kid,
right? Especially if you have
aggressive parents. And in university, I had to, I
was pretty good at, at being honest, but you still had to not
talk about a whole bunch of things.
And so at some point I was just like, what's that line from
Risky business? Sometimes you just got to say
what the heck or heck it. So at some point I was just
like, you know what, there's billions of people around the
world who don't tell the truth. I, for various reasons, could
not tell the truth when I was younger.
I'm just going to try this telling the truth thing.
I'm just going to try being honest about what I think and
feel the research that I have, the conclusions that I've come
to. I'm just going to tell the
truth. And this was like this, like,
you know, when they test some nuclear weapon and you can feel
the tremors in like, half a world away, It was kind of like
that. Telling the truth is just like
this radical thing that sets off these weird secret hidden
detonations. Nothing.
Nothing's obvious. No house falls down.
The clouds don't vanish. The seas don't pot in front of
you. People don't burst into flames.
So there's nothing real obvious and visible.
But there's like this hidden earthquake that goes through
your life, like this subtle shockwave where people's neurons
just get rearranged in one way or the other.
And through the process of just telling the truth, it, it acts
as an A hole repellent and a signal to bring virtuous people
to you. And it is really the greatest
decision that you can make. It's straight out of Hamlet,
right above. Above all, to then own self be
true. And then it follows as night
follows day. You can't be false to anyone.
Just tell the truth and be honest.
And that will drive the bad people away.
It will win the good people close to you and it will draw
virtuous people to you. And there's a lot of volatility
in that process. But I tell you man, I would not
have it any other way. Absolutely, and that's why I
think this topic is so important to discuss.
My dad once asked me is there something I could do differently
as a dad and I stupidly answered this question accurately.
Oh, no, wait, you you, you took him at face value.
Oh. No, I took him.
I don't know why I did that. I want to say I was 16.
It led to a another rageaholic episode and I and at first it
was really scary, but it was so clarifying.
I go, oh, This is why my sister doesn't talk to you anymore
because unfortunately for my dad, I came across Henry
Haslet's book Economics and one lesson.
So I learned about opportunity cost and I go, this is a 30
minute rant. What could I be doing with my
other 30 minutes of this scarce time that I have on this earth?
So, so my things were the opportunity cost of being around
the person. Second thing was have I
clarified my criticisms to this person in the past?
Hey, I drive all the way up here and I walk on egg shells for 16
hours straight, and then I run to my car started like I'd like
to jump in the window like Starsky and Hutch to get the
hell out of there, right when I'm like, I'm off the clock.
I got to go. And then the third thing was how
much time they had to process the criticisms.
It's not like change right now. Here are my criticisms of you.
All right, it's now dinner time. I'm out of here.
It was I think 14 years from the day I was real clear with my
first criticism his his other child, my sister had stopped
speaking to him and I just lost all the energy and I said I
don't ever want to talk to him again, but let me wait 24 hours
before really telling him. I ended up waiting a month
before saying it. From the day I made that
decision officially to when I actually told him.
So it has been so liberating. It might have been too
liberating cause I've done it to like six other people in my life
since then. I'm just like, I keeps freeing
up time. I'm like more books to read.
I might have to kick out that guy who was a prick to me.
I'm, I'm, I'm kidding, of course, but that was my thought
process behind the whole thing. It took a lot of time.
Yeah, I've just had an urge to be a lot nicer to you.
So excellent. No, and I'm, I'm really, I mean,
obviously kudos to having these standards, but as a parent like
you, you have your, you have your voice right up against your
kids ears. You're and so to me, parents who
yell, scream and, and and so on, it's absolutely overwhelming to
the nervous system because we desperately want to please our
parents. I mean, evolutionarily speaking,
kids who didn't please their parents didn't tend to do very
well over the course of protection and food and and so
on. So we are very desperate to to
please our parents. And one of the things I really
got as a parent was you need such a light touch because we're
so close. Like if you've got your lips
right against someone here, you got to whisper, otherwise you're
going to hurt them. And this screaming stuff when
people, it's so overwhelming and it comes from such a sense of
helplessness and and lack of self-control that it is just
dangerous. But that level of parental
hostility and anger is, is just, it just short circuits the
emotional system to the point where you kind of have to
retreat just so you can gain the ability to feel normally.
Like, you know, if you go to a concert, you get that ringing in
your ears. You got to treat your ears well
for a while so you don't damage them in any permanent way.
So I, I really, that's a very, very sad story.
But I mean, really, what are your options?
What are your options is you imagine you meet some wonderful
woman and if your dad was still in your life and is wonderful
woman, you take her over to your dad's place and your dad yells
at you and you got to I'm so sorry.
I like you got to fold and be and what's going to happen to
her level of respect for you and when she sees what you're going
to take or you tell you have kids, you take your kids over to
somebody who treats you badly. Your kids are going to see that
and lose respect for you and what are you going to say?
You got to have standards and values in your life.
When you let someone treat you badly and that you don't have
to, it's bad for everyone. And it is really sad that people
take that choice. And the I mean the other thing
too, like in relationships, you constantly got to ask people how
you're doing. You don't just leave it life
fallow. I shouldn't have to wait till 16
for your dad to say how I'm doing.
Like every couple of weeks with my family.
I'm like, hey, what have I been doing good?
What have I, what could I improve?
Like, I mean, you, you go, you go order a slice of pizza like
on the receipt. It'll be like, give us your
feedback and we'll give you a dollar up for your next pizza.
Like they'll, the pizza place will ask people have, but people
actually who are parents provided the most essential
service to their children. They don't ask how they're
doing, what the children like or don't like, what's been good and
bad, what could be improved. My gosh, we do this all the time
in life. And to not do it with your own
children is foundationally incomprehensible to me.
And that you would then your father would have to wait until
you were 16 to try and get even any pretend feedback.
It's like, no, that should happen all the way along.
It should happen all the way along.
It's not that hard to have good relationships.
You just need to be reasonably virtuous and ask people how
you're doing and get feedback. And if you're not getting
feedback, you are undermining the entire relationship because
people who aren't giving you feedback are not giving you
feedback because they're scared of you.
And if people are scared of you, they can't love you.
And your relationship is being eaten out from the inside.
So, so very, I mean, I'm massive sympathies, but you know, it
sounds like a, a very wise decision to get that level of
aggression and abuse out of your life.
Absolutely, we're almost at time.
Do you have time for one more topic?
Do it. Why are people humble in general
when you ask them how do I build a car?
How do I build a house? They tend to respond with, I
don't know, haven't studied it, but they seem to have no
humility when it comes to politics, economics, history,
foreign policy, labor markets, etcetera.
Why is there such a disparity in what people are humble about?
I think it has to do with whether things are testable or
not, right? So if somebody says, here's how
you build a wall, you can say, oh, what's your experience and
and where did you learn this and and so on right now, if they
say, well, I don't have any experience, but I saw a wall
once on CNN, you'd be like, well, you know, so stuff which
people can have personal experience with, they tend to
tell you about that experience and they tend to have
credibility because they've done that right.
So, you know, I could talk a little bit about how to have a
reasonably successful podcast. I could talk a little bit about
how to run. I've been an entrepreneur for
like 30 years. So I could talk a little bit of
how to how to start and run a business, how to manage people.
I can talk a little bit about marriage and success.
I've been very happily married for like 22 years.
And this is coming from a parent who divorced when I was a baby.
That's, you know, fairly decent improvement.
I can talk a little bit about some parenting stuff because I
mean, I'm being a stay at home dad and my daughter and I get
along very well. People can hear her from time to
time on my show. So this is not, you know, I'm
not claiming something without any evidence.
So when people have personal skills, then they have to have
some credibility with it. But people can have all of this
windbaggery nonsense about stuff that doesn't have any
verifiability to it. Well, I think that the Fed
should raise interest rates. OK.
Have you ever been in charge of an institution that can raise
all lower interest rates and been personally responsible for
the consequences? Well, well, no, but someone on
CNN who was standing on a wall told me that the Fed should
raise interest rates or something like that.
Right. So the more abstract and the
less personal. And the less consequential,
right, this is the skin in the game argument is that if people
don't have skin in the game, I don't particularly care what
they have to say about a topic. It's just noise.
So if you know, somebody says, and you, you've seen these
videos, right? We should take migrants.
Oh, here's a migrant to come to your house.
Well, I can't, right? If people say we should do more
to help the poor, right? I'd be like, OK, So what?
What have you done? Because the poor is not some
weird abstract category. They're actual people with
virtues and flaws. And one of the people, the only
people who genuinely think that the government can help the poor
are people who've never really really tried to help the poor.
I mean, I grew up poor and I created companies and created
jobs and I hired some of my, some of the people I grew up
with because I was able to give them jobs and I helped the poor,
you know, by, by I've, you know, created like 100 jobs over the
course of my entrepreneurial existence.
I mean, it's not massive, but it's not nothing.
And so there are people who have gotten jobs and income because I
started and ran companies. I got raises for people when I
worked for other companies, got some people 30% raises, 40%
raises, which takes them out of lower middle class to middle
class. I've put a lot of time and
effort and energy into people who call in in shows and say,
you know what? I'm, I'm 25 or 30 and I don't
make any money. And I sort of tell them the ways
that they can do to, to improve their, their income and their
potential. So, you know, I've done a lot to
help the poor. And so when I say the government
can't help the poor and somebody says, no, no, no, the government
should help the poor. My question is, OK, tell me your
history of actually helping the poor.
Tell me about the neighbourhoods you went to, the people you
talked to and their success or failure based upon following
your advice. And it's a great clarifying bar
for people to get over. And it's not that complicated.
I mean, we do this all the time, right?
I mean, if somebody says send in a resume, I, I, I want to be a
surgeon, right? Do they just say, sounds good?
You know, I've seen you cut an apple off you go, go and take
somebody's appendix out. No, they'd verify it.
They'd say, OK, what's your education?
We need to talk to your previous boss, we need to verify your
education. We need to see your statistics
on success or failure in your your surgeries and so on.
People ask for verification before they let people be
surgeons. And before I take any advice
from someone you know, you don't take diet advice from the fat
guy and I would not give advice on how to seamlessly regrow your
hair, right? So you, you just look for
personal experience and if people are talking about, you
know, history or as you say, foreign policy, the economy as a
whole, I'm like, OK, if you, if you really, really understand
the economy, then you should be an incredible investor.
Like wow, Like the people who have these global warming models
is like, well, we know what the, the temperature's going to be
worldwide in 100 years. And I'm like, wow, if you're
able to model the future that accurately, you must be a
zillionaire because you you should be able to model the
short term stock market. I mean, if you know what the
temperature's going to be in 100 years, surely you know what the
price of Apple stock is going to be 5 minutes from now.
So let's take your predictive models to go out to massive
complex systems. I mean, the weather's more
complicated than the economy, certainly more complicated than
the stock market. And if you can project the
weather 100 years out, I want to see how your model predicts the
price of Apple stock 5 minutes from now.
Because you can make a zillion dollars longing or shorting,
going long or short on Apple stock 5 minutes from now.
So let's see your model work. And if they can't predict the
price of Apple stock 5 minutes from now, why on earth would I
listen to them about the temperature 100 years from now?
So it's just a matter of testability.
If you're wrong, what happens? Like what negative thing happens
to you if you're wrong, Right. So, you know, if you say, well,
I'm a big fan of the, you know, we the, the, the war in Ukraine
is, is a positive, right? OK, well, you're not going to
get drafted. So what's your skin in the game,
right? You're not personally paying,
right? You're not going to get drafted.
No one you know is going to get drafted.
So what is your what, what is skin in the game?
Do you have? And if people don't have skin in
the game and generally don't listen to what it is they say,
you have to have direct experience.
You have to have skin in the game.
Otherwise, it is what they call virtue signaling, right?
So we've got to do more to help the homeless.
OK, How many homeless people have you taken into your house
or allowed to camp in your garden?
If the answer is none, then it's just noise.
Because if you know specifically, I, I got this
straight out of the trial and death of Socrates, right?
So Socrates, of course, have brought in trial for impiety and
corrupting the youth, right? And Melita says here, you
corrupt the youth. And Socrates says to him, oh, so
if you know that I corrupt the youth, you must know what
ennobles the youth. What is it?
That's the opposite of corrupting the youth?
And he doesn't answer because he doesn't know because he's just
using this word as slander. You know, it's funny because
let's let's go to Puff Daddy because you knew that was going
to be the next topic, right? So Puff Daddy, the notorious
rapper who allegedly, even though there seems to be
recordings, allegedly has been hosting these absolutely vile
sex slash exploitation slash potential rape allegedly parties
for like 15 years, right? And you can see Puff Daddy, if
these allegations are true, you can see Puff Daddy in pictures
with just about every famous person known to man, right?
Some of whom have called me a really bad guy, right?
So all of these really, really famous people don't have any
idea if this guy turns out, even if 10% of what he's accused of
is true, then he's, you know, really, really evil guy.
So all of these people are like shaking his hands and, and
taking his money and, and not just, you know, in passing at
one party, but, you know, like heavily involved with the guy.
So they can't tell this kind of guy, but boy, they know I'm a
bad guy, you know, And again, it's just like if if you have a
stone evil person in your environment, I don't care what
you say morally about anyone ever again.
And this lack like this credibility, right?
I mean, like the Epstein thing or or you know, the the Puff
Daddy thing or just a variety of other things.
It's like, if you don't know that this guy's corrupt and
evil, why would I care about your opinion just at the Bill
Gates question, right, Which is maybe why Melinda kicked him to
the curb, right? It's like, well, you're just so
interested and dedicated in the virtue and positive, blah, blah,
blah. The guy had a relationship with
Jeffrey Epstein that went a long time even after the guy was, you
know, anyway, So I just look at do you have direct experience?
Do you have any skin in the game?
And have you made terrible decisions in the past?
And have you figured out why you made those bad decisions?
You know, I can't imagine this would ever be the case.
But let's say I've been friends with someone for like 15 years
who turned out to be evil. I think I'd shut up about.
Moral choices. Like for a long, long, long
time, and I'd have to sit there and say, Oh my gosh, how could I
fail to see this? My gosh.
I mean, the guy literally rapped about abusing people.
How could I have missed that? He was an abuser, You know,
like, I would have some humility, but people.
Don't man. This is what?
You're saying they just like just move on, right?
And, and the, you know, all of the people who were hanging
with, with Puff Daddy and so on, if it turns out that he's guilty
of what he's accused of. And you know, they're not even
giving the guy bail, although I think he offered 50 mil.
So I assume that they have a fairly solid case.
And apparently the whole house was wiped and my was, was miked
and, and had had camera footage and all that, like Epstein's.
So I, I assume that the proof is fairly incontrovertible if
they've got a hold of this kind of stuff.
So then all the people who were friendly with this guy, and I
don't just mean, you know, met him at a party and there's a
picture of them together, right. But all the people who hung with
the guy, he were relatively friendly with the guy and the
the rumors have been around forever and ever.
I mean, I, I'm nobody in this music rap circle, but I even
I've heard the rumors years ago. So in any sane universe we'd
look at those people and say, so you have no moral.
Credibility at all? You can't tell.
A bad guy when he's right in your face and rapping about what
he's doing. So why would I listen to you
about anything moral ever again? Maybe you can shake your booty
and maybe you can rhyme well, but in terms of moral issues and
questions, you have no credibility.
And because the big question is like, if this guy's been doing
this stuff for 15 years, well, it's like the BBC with Jimmy
Seville, like an absolute horrendous pedophile who
operated in fairly plain sight for decades.
And the BBC has the nerve to lecture people about moral
values. And this is who they covered up
for and protected in many ways. So, yeah, I mean it.
It's the credibility. And you got to be really
skeptical about most people's credibility.
Be skeptical about mine. Be skeptical about yours,
because you've really got to have some skin in the game.
And you really, really have to have some direct experience that
can be verified. That's for me before I listen to
anyone. Thanks to everyone for watching.
Keith Knight, Don't tread on. Anyone in the Libertarian
Institute? Mr. Molyneux, thank you so much
for your time. You're welcome.