0:00 - Welcome to the Podcast
1:49 - Censorship and Deplatforming
4:54 - Finding Personal Value
5:04 - Reason or Violence
5:04 - Increasing Income Strategies
14:23 - Resentment in the Workplace
18:22 - Best Dating Advice
29:56 - The Impact of Beauty
31:17 - Good Parents vs. Bad Parents
36:28 - Parenting with Purpose
39:45 - Navigating Peer Pressure
42:35 - The Ethics of Family Relationships
53:58 - The Impact of Honesty
58:09 - Understanding Humility and Credibility
1:10:01 - Closing Thoughts
In this episode, Keith Knight concludes his four-part discussion with Stefan Molyneux, the founder of Freedomain. The conversation dives deep into the critical taboo topics of society, particularly the imperative nature of reasoning in our interactions with one another. Molyneux argues passionately that the absence of rational discourse often paves the way for violence and conflict. He elaborates on the fatal consequences of dismissing differing opinions through tactics such as shouting down or deplatforming opponents. He emphasizes that rejecting reason—not engaging in thoughtful dialogue—leads to societal division and escalations that can threaten civilization.
Molyneux further articulates that societies should have the confidence to debate even the most outlandish ideas openly, thus fostering a public square where arguments can be tested rather than extinguished. He laments how the current climate often creates parallel societies where harmful ideas flourish unchallenged due to lack of public engagement. He connects this issue with the broader problem of educational systems failing to foster critical thinking, resulting in adults incapable of reasoning through problems, thereby perpetuating cycles of ignorance and violence.
The episode doesn't shy away from practical discussions either. When asked about personal growth, Molyneux provides actionable insights on boosting one's income and overall value in both professional and personal settings. He highlights the importance of demonstrating value through increased outcomes, noting the significance of documentation and proof when negotiating for raises or asking someone out. Molyneux stresses that upon increasing value, it's crucial to communicate clearly and assertively with those around you regarding your worth.
Molyneux's reflections extend to the importance of understanding the dynamics of modern relationships and parenting. He advises that parents must prioritize their children's well-being and engage in continuous self-improvement through feedback and introspection. By modeling virtues and demonstrating love and support, he posits, parents can cultivate secure, flourishing relationships with their children.
The dialogue also encompasses the idea of dissociating from toxic relationships, asserting that toxic dynamics may obstruct personal growth and emotional health. Molyneux expresses the necessity of relationships being mutually beneficial and respectful, and he stresses implementing boundaries in order to foster a nurturing environment.
As the conversation unfolds, Molyneux makes a connection between people's humility or lack thereof in different domains, particularly contrasting practical skills with their often untested opinions on matters like politics and economics. He explains that without having personal experience or “skin in the game,” opinions on complex systems tend to be rife with errors and misconceptions, thus underscoring the need for accountability in discussions about moral and societal issues.
In closing, this podcast episode with Stefan Molyneux serves as a clarion call for rational discourse, personal growth, and critical engagement with one another—reminding listeners that societal progress hinges on our collective ability to reason together. The episode is replete with thought-provoking insights and practical advice that listeners can apply in their personal and professional lives.
[0:00] Welcome to Keith Knight Don't Tread on Anyone in the Libertarian Institute. Today, I am joined for part four of my discussion with Stefan Molyneux of Freedomain.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? us?
[0:20] Well, 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 you desperately need food and you can't trade or voluntarily beg and get resources that way, you have no choice but to steal.
[1:06] And everybody who says that, that reason is a prejudice and who is willing to escalate to character attacks and ad hominems 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.
[1:50] 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 hundred 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.
[2:20] 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.
[2:37] 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.
[3:00] 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 it's 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 of the minds of half the country are full of absolutely terrible appalling wrong.
[3:40] Ideas well y'all had them as kids for 12 years straight thousands and thousands and thousands 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 prejudiced and bigoted it's like y'all educated them the government and so what you should do if you genuinely think that people 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 appalling and unthinking and uncaring and selfish, 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 won't 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. 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 destruction.
[4:54] You know, 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.
[5:04] What actions can people directly take in their personal lives to increase their income and overall standard of living?
[5:12] Hmm. 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 execution. 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.
[5:52] 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. You actually have to increase your value. So when I first was in the business world, I spent countless hours reading 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 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, a million dollars an hour in their own heads, right? So you have to increase your value.
[6:57] 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, if there's some 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 that your own value has increased like you have doubled your sales output and if somebody says well i'm not going to pay you more then 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.
[8:11] There are people who just they go in with their horse blinders on 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 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...
[8:48] Is 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 tasks 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.
[9:46] Who is paying you? And it took a depressing amount of time for some people to get this. It's like, 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 $3,000 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 whole presentation. So we could, so, you know, give me, you know, $200,000 for my software and I'll give you $300,000 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 delta for that is what you get paid from.
[10:42] 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 it 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 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 chocolates on a 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, a hundred 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 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 conveyor belt stuff.
[11:50] 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. 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 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, Yeah, add value, make the case, have the documentation, and be willing to walk if people won't recognize your value.
[13:04] 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 have a revolution and change the system, but other than that, your hands are just tied.
[14:23] The fact that I thought that was just so unproductive for so long that I think that these messages are so vitally important.
[14:31] Well, sorry, just to interrupt this for a second, because People don't understand how radical resentment of work is and resentment of bosses is. 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 I worked with. 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've 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 rent was $275 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.
[15:40] I mean, I had no car. I had, I mean, I've never been a big one for clothing or sort of ostentatious spending or something. 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 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 money.
[16:38] Poor people resent working, resent bosses, 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 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.
[17:20] 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 line from an old police song, which is, I work all day in the factory making a machine, but not for me. It must be a reason that I can't see, right? And 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 all of these seeds of 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 a 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 so on, man, you're crippling a lot of people who would out-compete you. And it's a beautiful thing for the wealthy, but a terrible thing for society as a whole.
[18:22] 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?
[18:35] 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 a, What do we date for? We date for love. Dating exists because pair bonding is needed to best raise 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 be able to walk, even though we've got these sturdy trunk legs. And it takes the male brain about a quarter 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 progress and process going on. It's absolutely wild.
[19:33] 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 or 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 should you run into trouble. So 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 that all admiration and love, but 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 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 slash books.
[20:47] Love is our involuntary response to virtue, if we're virtuous. And virtuous just means striving for virtue and having objective standards. It doesn't mean being perfectly virtuous, because then we all fall short.
[20:58] But if you have objective, decent moral standards, and you know, nonviolence, moral courage, telling the truth, standing up for what you believe in, promoting virtue, opposing evil where reasonably safe, all of these things are things that we admire. And so love involves virtue. you. 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, because it's easy to dismiss looks, but looks and our attraction to looks exist for a reason, right? 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, evenness of features, symmetry between the features and so on, indicate healthy genetics, good genetics, 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 difference. So, it's quite important.
[22:19] 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.
[22:43] 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 are, 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 a i 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 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 they are the real victims because they didn't have a choice about it at all.
[24:06] So, if you're just somebody sexy, somebody sexy, again, nothing wrong with sexy. That's a good thing, but it's.
[24:15] 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, three times a week. That's an hour and a half of having sex.
[24:29] 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 conversationalist, 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 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, the reason I think it's so important to focus on virtue over the course of a marriage, which hopefully lasts from 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. 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.
[25:46] 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.
[26:02] 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.
[26:10] But it is 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 to 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 ourselves 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, confine 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, you know, my wife and I go for these like, I don't know, two 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.
[27:39] 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 have 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?
[28:04] And so physical beauty was supposed to be at its maximum coinage or of significant import for maybe six to 18 months, right? So a woman is of marriable age in her evolution, whatever that was in the tribe, and then she'd get picked fairly quickly. And I guess the most beautiful or most attractive woman 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 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 cryptkeeper. You get kind of cryptkeeper 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 So.
[29:27] 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 burned 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.
[29:48] Both in I'm pretty and, you know, here's me topless in a pretty sordid manner to hundreds of millions of men around the world.
[29:56] 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 pair 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 wild look at salma hayek in her like mid late 50s and she's you know cryogenically preserved every night or whatever she does or or J-Lo, 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 youthful skin, 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 uh 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.
[31:17] What differentiates good parents from bad parents?
[31:23] Well, what differentiates 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?
[31:44] Oh, no. Okay.
[31:46] So, if you're not a parent yet, it's wild, man. 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 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. And 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 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 just become one flesh. And then when you add a kid to that mix, I mean, 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, okay, what can I do today that's going to be best for my family as a whole? And 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, okay, what's best for my kids? What's best for my kids?
[32:50] 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 many ways. I think that modern government education with the propaganda and all of the creepy sex stuff for kids is really toxic.
[33:29] So you have to say, okay, 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 uh equipment we're all taps and no plumbing so uh 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 kid's heart's 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 pair bond um skin contact eye on eye contact you know, kissing and hugging and singing and language and so on. 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 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...
[34:43] 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, well, 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 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'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 upgrade. So focusing on what's best for your kids and getting the data to recognize it, and then just doing that.
[35:20] Just doing that. That's, I think, the basic thing. You really have to, I say you have to enjoy your kid's company, but if your kids know that you really enjoy their company, that gives them a great sense of security.
[35:38] 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 uh today or we got to go to the dentist right because that is helping your child in the long run but if your kids know that 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 in terms of the moral contents of your child's mind, that's your deal.
[36:29] So if your kids know that you really enjoy their their company then they will of course warm to you and they kids love to please their parents 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 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.
[37:01] And I would also say that whatever you want your kids to do, you have to first consistently model yourself for years. 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 and 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, okay, well, have you respected them for years?
[37:42] 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. Have the dedication for what's best for your kids and then figure it out through research, because so many parents are like well people, okay I graduated from high school, I guess I gotta, go to college, okay then I gotta try and I gotta jog, I gotta date, I gotta get married and then we're gonna have some kids and then I gotta get back to work because I only have this long a maternity leave and I gotta get my kids in daycare like you're just living automatically.
[38:33] 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 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 are the past and peers are the future. Peers are where you find your partner, your person, 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. I get there's some peer pressure that's fine, but what's not fine is, hey, I found these pills under the couch, let's take them. That's not the peer pressure you want your kids being susceptible to.
[39:46] So the way that you protect kids.
[39:49] 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 or 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 that 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.
[40:42] And so if you're going to put your kids in a situation 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 such a pleasure. There's such an ease and sense of fun and joy 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 and laughter sometimes. The way she She ramps up the British accent and complains. It is just absolutely hilarious. And what a huge amount of joy to have in your life. And boy, what a bad deal it is being aggressive.
[41:55] 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?
[42:11] 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.
[42:36] 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, again, is one of these things that'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 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 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.
[43:39] But then when I talk about it as a philosopher, well, I don't know. 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. I suppose my massive loyalty, 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 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.
[44:49] 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. 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 tack against the wind of her words.
[45:11] 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.
[45:28] But as an adult, I didn't have to. And I did for a while. You know, you try to be nice, right? You try to be reasonable and or at least try to, you know, everyone's got their little quirks and you try to indulge them as if reasonable. But after a while, I was like, I don't want to do this anymore. I don't want to just sit and pretend to listen to something that I find creepy, unsettling, boring, and weird.
[45:51] And so I said, hey, you know, I know you're really interested in this topic.
[45:57] 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 want to have 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. 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 I have some issues, I have some problems, I have some things that I want to talk about that maybe aren't 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 you in a quote relationship that is only acceptable to the other person because you don't speak your mind? You're not honest about your experience of the relationship, right?
[47:27] So, 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'm 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...
[48:12] Sorry, like 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 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've 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 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.
[49:17] 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've 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've 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 had to falsify things because telling the truth is pretty volatile when you're a kid, right? Especially if you have aggressive parents.
[50:31] And in university, I was pretty good 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.
[50:55] I, for various reasons, could not tell the truth when I was younger. Or 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's obvious. No house falls down, the clouds don't vanish, the seas don't part 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 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 all, to thine 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.
[52:22] 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.
[52:34] Oh, no. Wait, you took him at face value? I took him.
[52:39] I don't know why I did that. I want to say I was 16. It led to another rageaholic episode. 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 Hazlitt's book, Economics in One Lesson. So I learned about opportunity cost. And I go, this is a 30-minute rant.
[53:06] What could I be doing with my other 30 minutes of this scarce time that I have on this earth? 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 eggshells 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 dinnertime. I'm out of here. It was, I think, 14 years from the day I was real clear with my first criticism. His other child, my sister, had stopped speaking to him, and I just lost all the energy.
[53:58] 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 because I've done it to like six other people in my life since then. I'm just like, I keep 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 kidding. Of course. But that was my thought process behind the whole thing. It took a lot of time.
[54:34] 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 have your voice right up against your kids' ears. And so, to me, parents who yell, scream, 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 so on. So we are very desperate to...
[55:14] To please a parent, 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's ear, you've 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 lack of self-control that it is just dangerous. But that level of parental hostility and anger 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 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, this wonderful woman you take her over to your dad's place and your dad yells at you and you gotta i'm so sorry like you gotta 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 take 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 treat you badly, that you don't have to.
[56:35] It's bad for everyone. And it is really sad that people take that choice. And 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. You shouldn't have to wait to 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 could I improve? Like, I mean, you go order a slice of a pizza like on the receipt it'll be like give us your feedback and we'll give you a dollar off your next pizza like they'll the pizza place will ask people how but people actually who are parents providing 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 Dean 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.
[57:42] 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.
[58:10] Absolutely. We're almost at time. Do you have time for one more topic?
[58:13] Do it.
[58:15] 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, etc. Why is there such a disparity in what people are humble about? out?
[58:35] 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 where did you learn this 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 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 coming from a parents who divorced when i was a baby that's you know fairly decent improvement i I can talk a little bit about some parenting stuff because, I mean, I've been 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 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.
[59:59] Okay? Have you ever been in charge of an institution that can raise or lower interest rates and been personally responsible for the consequences? 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, they.
[1:00:25] 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'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, okay, so what have you done? Because the poor is not some weird abstract category. They're actual people with virtues and flaws. Laws 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.
[1:01:10] Because i was able to give them jobs and i helped the poor you know by by i've you know created like like a hundred 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.
[1:01:41] I've put a lot of time and effort and energy into people who call in in shows and say, you know, 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 improve 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, okay, tell me your history of actually helping the poor. Tell me about the neighborhoods 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 uh they send in a resume i i want to be a surgeon right do they just say sounds good you know uh 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 okay 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 surgeries and so on, people ask for verification before they let people know.
[1:02:48] 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 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, okay, if you really, really understand the economy, then you should be an incredible investor.
[1:03:17] Like wow like the people who have these global warming models it's like well we know what the the temperature is going to be worldwide in a hundred years and i'm like wow if you're able to model the future that accurately you must be a zillionaire because you should be able to model the short-term stock market i mean if you know what the temperature is going to be in a hundred years surely you know what the price of apple stock is going to be five minutes from now, so let's take your predictive models that 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 five minutes from now because you can make a zillion dollars longing or shorting going long or short on apple stock five minutes from now so let's see your model work and if they can't predict the price of apple stock five minutes from now why on earth would i listen to them about the temperature a hundred 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, the war in Ukraine is positive, right? Okay, well, you're not going to get drafted.
[1:04:33] 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 skin in the game do you have? And if people don't have skin in the game, they generally don't listen to what it is. So 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. Okay, how many homeless people have you taken into your house or allowed to camp in your garden?
[1:05:05] If the answer is none, then, then it's just noise because if you know specifically i got this straight out of um, the trial and death of socrates right so socrates of course is brought in trial for impiety and corrupting the youth right and melita says who 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 at 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?
[1:06:13] 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 a 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 you know the Puff Daddy thing or just a variety of other things is like.
[1:07:03] If you don't know that this guy is corrupt and evil, why would I care about your opinion? It's like 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 absolutely stone evil.
[1:07:46] 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 miss 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're 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 in was miked and and uh had had camera footage and all that like epstein's so 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 who were relatively friendly with the guy and the rumors have been around forever and ever i mean i i'm nobody in this music rap circle but even I've heard the rumors years ago. So in any sane universe, we'd look at those people and say, maybe.
[1:08:59] 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's credibility. 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.
[1:10:01] 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.
[1:10:09] You're welcome.
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