HOW TO WIN AGAINST CRAZY PEOPLE!

Locals Questions Answered 7 Dec 2023

Discussion: Challenges of engaging with immoral individuals, importance of respectful company, avoiding understanding "crazy" actions, enforcing boundaries, drawbacks of instant gratification, addiction to travel, prioritize long-term happiness.

Brief Summary
In this conversation, we discuss the challenges of engaging with immoral individuals and conclude that it's nearly impossible to win against them. We emphasize the importance of surrounding ourselves with people who respect conflict rules and advise against trying to understand the actions of "crazy people." We also touch on topics such as the addiction to travel, the significance of enforcing boundaries, and the drawbacks of prioritizing instant gratification. Overall, we stress the simplicity of moral concepts and the need for long-term happiness over short-term pleasures.

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Chapters
0:00:00 The Impact of Crazy Mothers on Attracting Healthy Partners
0:10:09 The Importance of Engaging in Good Faith Debates
0:13:07 Possible Motives Behind Mother's Dislike of Ex-Wife
0:15:31 Exploring the Concept of "Cold Feet"
0:17:46 The Addiction to Travel and Lack of Pair-Bonding
0:20:10 Why Should Anyone Be Interested in You?
0:27:17 Boundaries Equals Death: Evolutionary Perspective on Enforcing Boundaries
0:28:27 The Fear of Enforcing Boundaries
0:34:49 Negative articles on Bitcoin controlled by powers that be.
0:37:48 The consequences of not having children and a family.
0:40:02 Memories of buying and selling computers and technological advancements.
0:43:25 Selfishness and Deferred Gratification
0:51:42 Morality: Simple and Universal
0:52:25 Explanation of Rational Proof of Secular Ethics

Long Summary
In this part of the conversation, the main speaker explores the idea of engaging with immoral people and concludes that winning against them is nearly impossible. They suggest that the best outcome one can hope for is a draw, where the immoral person's false sense of self remains intact. The main speaker emphasizes the importance of not engaging with people who do not adhere to the rules of a conflict and cautions against getting involved in debates or negotiations with such individuals. They believe that having people in one's life who respect these rules is essential for a healthy and sane life.

The main speaker suggests a theory about the listener's situation, stating that their mother recognized their ex-wife as a verbal abuser and wanted her out of their life. They advise not to delve too deep into understanding the actions of "crazy people" as it can be futile. The main speaker then discusses the concept of cold feet, explaining that it is a gut feeling or instinct signaling that something is wrong with a commitment. They argue that the term "cold feet" is used by exploiters to dismiss these instincts.

Moving on, the main speaker addresses the addiction to travel, suggesting that it can be a way to avoid deep connections with others. While there's nothing wrong with gaining vivid experiences through travel, it can often be a substitute for genuine intimacy and self-knowledge. The main speaker believes in shielding their child, Isi, from the harsh reality of human evil for as long as possible.

The main speaker shares their observation that people who are insecure about their value often seek validation and praise from others. They then discuss their own experience with their family of origin, where they tried to have open and honest conversations but were met with resistance. Despite their successful personal life, they still face challenges with their siblings. The main speaker questions why they continue to engage in destructive conversations with their sister and why they feel heightened anxiety afterwards. They conclude by comparing the fear of enforcing boundaries to the fear of public speaking, as both are associated with potential threats to survival.

Moving on to the concept of sacrifice, the main speaker believes that sacrifice is giving up something you value for something you value less. They argue that even actions that seem altruistic can be seen as choices that increase one's own values. They believe that humans should not be sacrificial animals and that prioritizing immediate desires over long-term happiness is selfishness.

The main speaker explains the concept of the hedonic treadmill, where pleasure from investments like hedonism decreases over time, while pleasure from investments like having children increases. They argue that putting happiness solely on things like sex or travel is a losing game, as the initial excitement will fade and lead to a diminishing situation. They also discuss the pursuit of money at the expense of love and relationships, emphasizing that wealth and success alone do not guarantee happiness.

The main speaker addresses the importance of creating good definitions of concepts and explains that concepts arise because atoms exist. They use the example of water to illustrate how consistent behavior of atoms allows us to create accurate concepts. When it comes to moral concepts, the main speaker believes in simplicity and universalizing rules. They argue that moral concepts don't have to be complicated and that Christianity understood this simplicity long before philosophers did.

In conclusion, the main speaker emphasizes the importance of not engaging with immoral individuals and the need for people in one's life who respect the rules of conflict. They advise against trying to understand the actions of "crazy people" and caution against prioritizing instant gratification over long-term happiness. The main speaker also discusses the challenges of enforcing boundaries and the simplicity of creating good definitions for concepts. They conclude by expressing their gratitude and encouraging listeners to check out their premium content.

Tags
challenges, engaging, immoral individuals, impossible, win, importance, surrounding, respect conflict rules, understanding actions, crazy people, addiction, travel, significance, enforcing boundaries, drawbacks, prioritizing, instant gratification, simplicity, moral concepts, long-term happiness, short-term pleasures

Transcript
The Impact of Crazy Mothers on Attracting Healthy Partners

[0:00] Good morning, everybody. Hope you're doing well. This is Dan Mullany from Free Domain. Hope you will join the community whose questions I strive to answer this morning.
Freedomain.locals.com First question. You said in a couple of call-in shows that having a crazy mother around you will prevent you from attracting a healthy partner, which makes total sense, and I agree.
Just to nitpick a tiny bit, you can attract a healthy partner.
Let's say you're just some 6'2", rock-ribbed stud muffin.
Then you might attract her, but you can't keep her. However, would that mean that crazy mothers will approve of crazy partners?
In my personal experience, my mother hated my first long-term partner, whom I eventually married and divorced, even though they were both abusive women.
So I'm not entirely sure what happened there.
Why would my verbally abusive mother hate my verbally abusive partner if she posed no threat to her?
Well, you know, sympathies for the marriage and divorce, there's a lot of static here which I understand, and this is a category reversal error in a way, and And sorry for the slightly technical term, or my technical term for it, so let me put it in a way that makes sense.
All criminals hate the police, but that doesn't mean that all criminals love other criminals.

[1:12] So crazy people hate sane people, but that doesn't mean that crazy people like all other crazy people.
Now, the criminals will work together sometimes, like they'll band together in some raid or whatever it is, but the alliance is often quite short-lived and volatile and so on, right?
So, if we look at your mother as an immoral person, and we look at your ex-wife as an immoral person, the fact that they don't like each other, well, criminals compete for the same turf.
And criminals who compete for the same turf will often have great hostility, towards each other, and that hostility may match the hostility they have towards the police, right?
So they will generally, the criminals will band together in opposition to the police, but in the absence of the police, in other words in the absence of a moral person in this analogy, they will generally turn, each other. So competition for the same resource produces hostility between criminals, and in this case the same resource would be your time, attention, resources, good regard, whatever was being exploited about you.
And if your ex-wife moved in, as it sounds like she did, moved in on your mother's territory, which was the exploitation of you, and this could be psychological, it could be time, it could be money, it could be emotions or anything like that, it could be just a sense of superiority.

[2:37] When you gain self-esteem from putting other people down, you need to keep people wrecked and destroyed around you in order to have any sense of control and efficacy, and if those people gain self-esteem, that threatens your entire sense of being, and soul murder is usually the first response to growth in those you're exploiting, right?
So you say, why would my verbally abusive mother hate my verbally abusive partner if she posed no threat to her?
How? So, one criminal can't put another criminal in jail, but one criminal can put another criminal out of business.

[3:09] So clearly, your ex-wife posed some kind of threat to your mother.
If you have a drug dealer in Atlanta and you have a drug dealer in San Francisco, they don't care about each other.
They have no hostility or whatever, relative to them being nervous about the police.
However, two drug dealers vying for the same street corner or the same population or the same group of addicts in Atlanta are going to have great hostility towards each other because they're threatening each other's interests, right?
So hopefully that makes some kind of sense. All right.
Sorry, I didn't realize there was more but there's a second part of the question oddly enough that failed relationship prompted me to change It become the peaceful parent. I am today with my mother out of the picture Was that why my mother hated her?
Did she somehow know that going through another hell will make me turn the ship around and have no shitty people in my life?
Yeah Trying to guess what goes on in the minds of crazy people or immoral people is.

[4:07] Foolish a foolish game It's a foolish game Trying to reason out why crazy people do what they do is a hole with no bottom. It is a journey with no destination.
It is a time waster, extraordinary, and it gives too much credence to crazy people.
The motives of immoral people are hidden even to themselves and will never be brought to the light of day.
The motives, listen to me, focus on this, it's really important.
The motives of immoral people are unknown even to themselves and if ever exhumed will never see the light of day.
Bad people generally don't know why they're bad and don't want to know why they are bad because they think they're good, right? They think they're good.
Like the guy who, like the dad who verbally abuses his children is just trying to toughen them up, right? Roman style from my novel, the future.

[5:08] And mothers who hit their children are just trying to instill some discipline and respect in them and don't want them to turn out soft and mealy-mouthed and spineless and like all these modern children who are pampered and coddled and spoiled, right? So they think that they're doing good.
Now if you ever, ever get anywhere close to bringing up an evil-doer's motivations to himself or herself, if you try to bring the level into the altar of consciousness, the relationship will end and you will have gained a perpetual enemy.

[5:43] Who will often stop at nothing to try and wreck you.
So, the only thing that you can, I mean, in sort of interpersonal relationships, in my view, I'm not saying this is some objective truth, right, but in my view, and sort of, I've got some experience in these matters and doesn't mean I'm right, I'm just saying this is sort of where I'm getting my information from.

[6:02] The best that you can ever achieve with immoral people is not knowledge or apologies or understanding or like I mean really immoral people I'm not sort of people who've made a moral mistake as we all have but you know people who've harmed children for years and years and so on right really harmed children so the best you can achieve with immoral people is a draw you can't win you can't win you can't win against immoral people you cannot win against immoral people, because in the moment you start to win they'll just change the rules of the game they'll counter-attack you they'll try to destroy your reputation they will undermine you in some manner, they will leave the relationship but then continue their dark work of attacking you from the periphery and then you've got a huge problem to manage for years or decades or something like that, right? You can't win against immoral people.
You know, everyone, I mean, in terms of like relationships, right?
So the best you can achieve is a draw, which means you leave them with their false self intact because you can't undo their false self anyway because there's nothing behind it.
See, immoral people, when fighting against moral people, immoral people are fighting for their lives.

[7:15] Deeply immoral people, evil people, if their immorality becomes conscious to them, they will most likely do something enormously self-destructive.
It may not be direct self-ending, it could be just going off the rails, it could be driving too fast, it could be drinking to excess, they will do things enormously self-destructive.
So you're fighting for the truth, but they're fighting for their very lives.
The analogy of course in the realm of economics is you're trying to end subsidies to the sugar industry, right?
Now if you end the subsidies to the sugar industry, people might save as a whole 20 bucks a year, 30 bucks a year, whatever it is, right?
So you're not fighting for very much for each individual, but for each person in the sugar industry, for each CEO in the sugar industry, they're talking about tens of millions of dollars a year.
So the incentives are just completely lopsided.

[8:09] I don't enter into combat with people I don't share the rules with.
I mean, you know this, right? This is nothing that you... you can't play chess with somebody who can redefine the pieces at will, right? It's not chess.
You don't dishonor the idea of chess by playing with people who make up the rules as they go along.
I mean, I remember when I was a little kid playing a game of chess, and I had bet my whole strategy on victory, I remember this so clearly, I must have been I don't know five years old, I bet my whole strategy on my absolute certain belief that the king could move two spaces because I'd seen the king move two spaces, it turns out this was castling right where you flip the king of the castle on the back row, it's a defensive move, and I had bet my entire strategy on on the belief that the king could move two spaces.
And then I lost the game and I was very upset.
And we had, of course, in my house, encyclopedias, the Encyclopedia Britannica.
And we got it secondhand, it was like from the 1960s, but you know, it certainly, it functioned in the realm of chess, because that hadn't changed.

[9:23] So, we went to look up the rules of chess, and it said right there in black and white, the king can only move one space.
So then I lost the game, right? I lost the game, I accepted that I lost the game, I wasn't happy about it, but I learned an important lesson, which is to don't assume rules based on observation.
That's an important lesson. Just because you see a king move two spaces doesn't mean that the king can always move two spaces.
Don't draw a general inference from a single instance. King moves two spaces.
Of course I wouldn't have called those terms at the tender age of five, but it was an important lesson in empiricism.
The Importance of Engaging in Good Faith Debates

[10:09] So don't get engaged in conflicts with people who don't follow the rules of the conflict.
So if you have a rule of the conflict which says we are going to strive to have a debate based on reason and evidence, and then the person who loses the debate will spread rumors that you did something absolutely heinous, or will put laxative in your brownies, or will let the air out of your tires, or cut your brake wires, like, don't get involved in a debate with people who don't respect the rules of debate.
So trying to figure out the motives of people who would often rather die, kill, or completely erase the relationship than have their motives revealed to themselves, it's not a good faith negotiation.
It's not a good faith negotiation.
You have to have people in your life, if you want a sane life, if you want a healthy life, you have to have people in your life who respect the rules of negotiation, who don't use threats, intimidation, abuse, and so on, right?
So, was that why my mother hated her? Did she somehow know that going through another hell will make me turn the ship around and have no...
No, she didn't know that. She didn't know that.

[11:25] Because what we're doing here is unprecedented beyond words. It's unprecedented.
There is no history of anything like this in the annals of the human experience going back 150,000 years.
Like there's nothing like this. where you take simple principles and apply them to daily life.
You take moral principles and apply them to daily life. You don't apply them to trolley problems, you don't apply them to the realm of foreign policy.
I mean, you can do all of those things if you want, there's nothing wrong with it, philosophers have been doing it for thousands and thousands of years, and we still have a deeply amoral and immoral society, so you can continue to do that, which hasn't worked.
But there was no possibility of people anticipating that a practical empirical applicable moral philosophy was going to emerge from the dank swamps of the internet with the pure light of a thousand suns. It's just no way.
So the reason that your mother hated her was because your mother, I would guess, I don't know obviously right, I just said don't try and plumb the depths of the motives of evil people.
No, and I, so I understand that, right? I'm not making a rule and breaking the rule.
I'm just saying one possible theory, which you'll never know the answer to, right? You can have a theory, you see if the theory fits the facts, right?
But you'll never have an answer, because evil people will never give you an answer.

[12:51] Because an answer for them is the destruction of everything they know.

[12:56] But I think the theory that fits the facts as you've provided them to me, which again it's not an answer, you'll never know for sure, but I think the theory that fits the most goes something like this.
Possible Motives Behind Mother's Dislike of Ex-Wife

[13:07] Your mother recognized in your ex-wife another verbal abuser which you have confirmed.
And what that means is that you are now vying for the same territory and your mother wanted your ex-wife out of your life in the same way that one criminal will want another criminal to not take over his turf and that your mother had concerns that there was going to be inevitably a conflict between your allegiance to your mother and your allegiance to your wife, your girlfriend, your wife, right?
So there's going to be a conflict and your mother probably recognized that your ex-wife would stop at nothing to make sure that she, i.e.
Your ex-wife, won that conflict and that she would say anything, do anything, and thus she needed to implant in you the lowering of the credibility of your ex-wife so that your mother could win the battle for the allegiance of your time, resources, heart, money, whatever, right?
So that's my guess. But yeah, honestly, don't go deep into trying to figure out what crazy people are doing.
Because if you could figure out what crazy people are doing, they wouldn't be crazy. way.
Exploitive people are simply doing that which maximizes their exploitation.

[14:21] I mean, if you want to know the fundamental driver behind exploitive people, think of a wolf chasing a rabbit. Which way is the wolf going?
If you're just looking at the wolf, the wolf looks insane, right?
If you don't see the rabbit, for whatever reason, right? You just have the camera.
It looks like the wolf is just running all over the place, darting back and forth, changing direction, stumbling, tripping over, lunging.
The wolf looks like it's having some kind of seizure or some kind of epileptic attack.
You say, well, gosh, what on earth is that wolf doing? It doesn't make any sense at all!
Turning, twisting, running, jumping, backpedaling, treading, turning, stumbling, getting up, like, what the hell is that wolf doing?
It doesn't make any sense.
What is the motive of that wolf? What on earth? What's the wolf going to do next? And you can't figure it out.
That's you don't see the rabbit and why don't you see the rabbit?
Because you're the rabbit. You're the rabbit.
You're the rabbit. Men generally exploit through force, women generally exploit through words.

[15:20] So if there are crazy people in your life and you can't figure out why they're doing or what they're doing, it's because you can't see the rabbit.
Because you're the rabbit. Once you see that you're the rabbit, all their behavior will make sense.
Exploring the Concept of "Cold Feet"

[15:31] All right. What is cold feet?
Obviously you know cold feet is an anxiety that you have prior to making a large commitment, right?
So you might have cold feet if you're buying a big expensive house.
You might have cold feet if you're about to get married and so on.
And so when you're about to make a big commitment, cold feet is the anxiety or fear that you have before making that big commitment.
The term cold feet is invented by people who want to exploit you so that you will ignore your instincts.
Oh it's just it's just cold feet. Every bride has them. Nope.
I had no cold feet getting married. My wife had no cold feet getting married.
We were both thrilled to get married, we've been thrilled to be married to each other ever since. No such thing as cold feet.

[16:21] When together we bought a place we had no cold feet about buying the place.
We enjoyed the place, no problems with the place, no cold feet.
Cold feet is your right, it's your second gut, right? There's a reason why it's further away from your brain.
So you have a second gut which is roughly as complex as some parts of your upper brain and it's your secondary instinct.
It's where your unconscious manifests physically is often in the gut.
A gut sense, a gut check and that kind of stuff right?
So cold feet is your unconscious telling you or your gut telling you something's wrong with this commitment. Something's wrong with this commitment.
And of course people who want to exploit you just tell you oh it's natural you have cold feet you got to push through it everything's fine it's natural to have some anxiety when making a big commitment.
It's like no it's not. No it's not?
I mean the life of the philosopher is not always easy but I've never wished I didn't do it.
So yeah cold feet is a term invented by people so that they can talk you out of it, listening to your gut when you're in danger.
A second question why do some people want to move across the continent or across the world no matter how many times they do it?
What is this addiction to travel, to the enjoyment of surrounding oneself with strangers and fleeing desperately even when it's very financially irresponsible from the familiar?
It affects our always feeling back at square one and being at the bottom of the social hierarchy.
The Addiction to Travel and Lack of Pair-Bonding

[17:46] What is the addiction to travel? And it's kind of funny because...
Sorry, I just want to make sure I've got things in the right sequence here. Ah yes, okay.
So, the addiction to travel. I understand it. I did some travel when I was younger.
I won't bore you with all the details because the details are always boring to everyone except the person who's doing it.
So, a travel is a way of ignoring your lack of ability to pair-bond.
A travel is a way of ignoring your lack of ability to pair-bond.
Now of course, why is it that society has people who can't pair-bond?
Well because you need long-distance hunters, you need long-distance warriors and scouts and people who are willing to leave the tribe for extended periods of time, so evolutionarily speaking you need some people who don't pair-bond.

[18:35] But travel is a way of introducing yourself to new people, which means you never want people to get to know you that well because you're going to move on to some new place.
It is a way of substituting wisdom with vivid experience.
And hey, there's nothing wrong with vivid experience.
I remember a thousand beautiful things I've seen in the world. I'm very glad I saw them.
Nothing wrong with travel and seeing cool new things and so on.
But travel is a way of replacing a capacity to pair bond and be deeply known with vivid external experiences.
Also it's a way for people who don't want to be known to appear interesting because they've been to a lot of places.
I've been to Bali, I've been to Central America, I've been to wherever, right?
And it's just a way for people to appear interesting through the consumption of sense data, exotic sense data, as a substitute for intimacy, self-knowledge, personality.

[19:34] Charisma. Everybody wants to be known and liked and loved, I mean that's sort of a natural human thing, so the question is how do you go about it?
Do you go about it by sort of trying to do good in the world and being a good person and bringing, you know, happiness and truth and virtue to people or whatever, right?
Or do you do it by having a bunch of photographs of cool places?
Or do you do it by having a really muscly body? Or do you do it by, I don't know, being really big into art?
How do you interest people? How do you interest people? Why should anyone be interested in you?
That's the fundamental question. We all ask this, right? Why should anyone be interested in you?
Why Should Anyone Be Interested in You?

[20:11] Trying to arouse people's interest in you is foundational to genetics, right? Because if nobody's interested in you, your genes die with you and your genes don't want to die with you, so people will... everyone has to answer this question. Why should people be interested in you? Why you? Why you?
Why you and not the guy next to you or the woman next to you? Whatever, right?
And how you answer this question defines your entire life. How you answer the question, why should anyone be interested in you?
How you answer this question defines your whole life. Now personally I was never attracted to people who traveled a lot.
I was never, I mean I sometimes occasionally, very occasionally I would find their stories interesting but for the most part they were just lost lonely souls who were trying to substitute a lack of personal identity and virtue with vivid external experiences.
You know like those Ukrainian Easter eggs you suck out the middle and then you paint the outside in these exotic colors and patterns and they look really cool but they're incredibly fragile and have no inner life.
This is another analogy for beauty. You suck out the eggs and paint the exterior, right?
You suck out the fertility and replace it with lust signals and it's bad as a whole.
So if you can't pair bond and you're not particularly interesting, you would constantly want to meet new people and do new things, because you don't have any inner stability. Alright.

[21:31] At what age would you expose Isi to information such as is contained in Lloyd DeMars' books?
Adulthood. I want to shield her from the reality of human evil as long as possible.
Without putting her in danger, of course, right?
There's so many people nowadays unable to compliment their partners without degrading themselves.
For example, referring to my wife as, my better half, oh god, that's, boy, that hits, that hits a solid spinal nerve in me.
I don't know, I'm so happy that my wonderful wife has put up with me for all of these years.
I mean, boy, she's a saint. Oh god, it's wretched.
It's embarrassing. And what's more embarrassing is the wives don't say, what are you talking about? Don't insult me by saying I put up with you.
Don't insult me by saying I'm better than you. If I'm better than you, why would I choose you?
Like it's just a marker of low self-esteem on both sides.

[22:28] And it's a marker to the vanity of the woman that she wants a man who's going to praise and defer to her in this kind of way, without feeling shame.
I mean, can you imagine me saying, I'd like to thank my listeners for putting up with my incoherent ramblings these last 18 years.
You know, I don't really have anything of value to say or add or offer, but, you know, occasionally I spaz out a couple of decent analogies which probably lead nowhere, but, you know, my incoherent, complicated, rambling, nonsense meanderings, I'm so glad to do that.

[23:02] I mean, wouldn't you feel insulted if I denigrated my own contributions to the world in this way and thank you for listening to that which I openly declare makes no sense and has no value. I mean that would be terrible.
That would be an insult to everyone involved in the equation.
Me, you, everyone right?
So they have chosen vainglorious women who demand obsequience as the price of vaginal access.
I mean let's be... you disintegrate your self-worth I'll spread my legs right?
Access to the eggs requires ejection of the balls, abandonment of the testicles, right?
Oh, it's just, it's really sad. It's really, really sad.
I mean, it's tough. You know, it's tough for women in many ways.
And it's tough for women who are constantly told that they're warriors and fighters and master business people and this, that and the other.
But it's kind of tough for women to look around the world and say, well, you know, gosh, where are all of the female, the great female engineers and scientists and all of that sort of stuff? It's kind of tough.

[24:11] And so...
People who are the most insecure about their value are the ones who demand the most praise from others.
This is like a plug-in-a-socket thing to take the sexual analogy and render it electric.
Kind of a plug-in-a-socket. The people who are most insecure about the value they provide are the ones who most demand empty praise.
All right, somebody say is. This is a long one.
I've never had credibility in the eyes of my family of origin.
I used to try and talk with them about being honest, having empathy, unburdening the children of the family from bearing the guilt that the adults should have shouldered.
My sisters and I are now firmly middle-aged, and while everyone has had success in their careers, I'm the only one with a husband and a peaceful home with my kids. No divorces, no addictions, and no abortions.
At a certain point, I understood I had no capacity to influence their choices, so I let go of the anxiety, stopped engaging in the family dramas, and focused on my own family.
I swore I'd never get sucked in again, but I had kicked a hornet's nest with my outspokenness.
My sister recently confronted me shouting, swearing, and calling me names, and being generally abusive, loud, and irrational. It tore me apart.
I'm still dissociating because the fight still creeps into my thoughts.

[25:22] Two questions. How was it that I so quickly forgot every principle and shred of self-respect I've so painfully worked for, just from my sister coaxing me into a conversation with a few sweet words like, can we talk?
I really want to work out our issues, how am I still taking the bait?
Second question, even though I have no doubts about the reality of my situation, why do I still feel this heightened anxiety days afterwards?
There are no revelations here but I'm shook, I don't get what I'm missing here.
Apologies for the lengthy question and thank you kindly for your attention.
Look I'm really sorry, I'm really sorry about that, I'm really sorry about that, that's a terrible situation to be in.
And of course you know the one thing that's true of siblings and parents as a whole, but siblings even more so, our siblings know exactly how to disassemble us.
They know exactly how to take us apart, because they were there from the beginning, right?
The ring of power is destroyed by returning it to the place of its forging, and siblings hold more power over you as an adult than parents, even than parents.
Siblings hold more power over you, I mean for good or ill, right?
They can support and help you in these ways or they can absolutely take you apart.
So, I mean, there's a reason why my novel Almost deals significantly with sibling relationships.

[26:42] Hold more power over you as adults, like when you're all adults, than your parents do. Because of course your parents are aging as well and so on, right?
And so if you have benevolent, helpful, wonderful siblings, and I've certainly seen those in families that I know that I've met through this show, great siblings and all of that, if you have wonderful, helpful, positive siblings, there's almost nothing that you can't do.
If you have vengeful, spiteful, horrible, abusive, destructive siblings, well, you end up with this kind of situation.
How am I still taking the bait? Well, because your siblings want you to take the bait.
Boundaries Equals Death: Evolutionary Perspective on Enforcing Boundaries

[27:17] So, when you're, when you grow up in a situation where boundaries equals death, and let's be frank about this, I'm not talking about presently, I'm not saying that if you stand up to your siblings they'll kill you, I'm just saying that evolutionarily speaking, boundaries that could lead to death are generally not enforced, because to enforce them would be to end your bloodline.
Or to put it another way, of course, as I usually do, those who strictly enforced rational boundaries when they were growing up, more often than not, or more often than those who didn't, didn't make it to adulthood, therefore those genes are gone.
So you don't have boundaries, you can't enforce boundaries as a child.
You can't enforce boundaries as a child. It's impossible.
I mean, you can say theoretically it's functionally and evolutionarily impossible.
Remember, half the kids throughout human history didn't make it.
Now, of course, this wasn't, of course, because of parental aggression always, but half the kids didn't make it.
So, to get into the favored few who made it to adulthood, you had to leverage every single potential scrap of advantage.
Everything had to be leveraged. Every scrap of advantage had to be leveraged, because survival was a razor-thin margin.
The Fear of Enforcing Boundaries

[28:27] And so, if not enforcing boundaries gave you a 1% greater chance of survival, you accumulate that over 5,000 generations and there's nobody left who has the instinct to strictly enforce boundaries as children.
So enforcing boundaries feels like dying because you were warned off by your gut don't enforce boundaries around abusive crazy violent people or you probably won't make it or you might not make it or your odds of making it are way lower or somewhat lower or even one percent lower.
Enforcing, I mean there's a reason why we have this death anxiety when it comes to enforcing boundaries. If I enforce boundaries, I'm going to die.
I mean, am I wrong? Is this not what happens? Like, why are people so afraid of public speaking?
Because normally public speaking was defending yourself against an accusation of immorality, of blasphemy, of criminality, or something like that, or treason.
You were speaking publicly because you were defending yourself against the threat of death in usually a very rigged.

[29:31] Legal system. That's why people are so afraid of public speaking.
Avoid public speaking at all costs, because public speaking is usually death for the average, right?
Or significant humiliation and lower reproductive chances and so on, right?
So hopefully this all makes sense to you, but that is the reality.

[29:53] So your siblings want to keep violating your boundaries and not offering yourself up on the sacrificial altar of your abusive siblings needs feels like death.
It feels like death.
We avoid establishing boundaries in violent families or abusive families for the same reason that we avoid throwing ourself deep into a hornet's nest or doing the do-si-do along the edge of a cliff, right?

[30:25] So it's not that you forgot every principle, it's that you are wired for survival.
See, in general, your head is for philosophy, your gut is for survival.
Your head is for philosophy, your gut is for survival. Now these two are complementary, I think, and the people we tend to remember most in philosophy are those who followed their head and ignored their guts.
I believe in more of a balance, that may be just a personal thing and maybe that's good or bad but it's right for me.
So your head is there to tell you about the truth and your gut is there to tell you that the truth is really fucking dangerous and if you want to make it you better balance what you're doing.
To navigate the challenges of bringing the truth to a world that will try to destroy you for telling the truth, like your life is not worth living if you can't tell the truth, for me, but if If you tell too much truth, well, I think we all know how that plays, right?
So I hope you'll have some gentleness and some understanding.

[31:24] Your sister gains a sense of power, authority, and powerlessness.
And contentment and satisfaction, she has a generally positive experience by verbally abusing you.
I know this is kind of incomprehensible to those of us with a shred of conscience but you know it is it's just a truth in life that there's a lot of people who gain great and deep satisfaction and a dark and unholy joy out of verbally disassembling other people.
And remember your siblings know exactly where your buttons are and exactly how to push them to to do the most damage, right? To do the most damage.
So your sister wants to harm you. How do we know that? Because she does things that are harmful.
She lures you in and then strikes, right? So your sister wants to harm you.
Empirically that's just a fact, right? People do what they want to do.
Empirically we know what people want to do based upon what they do.
And you want to please your sister because not pleasing your sister as a kid was akin to dying.
It evoked a death threat upon you, right?
And there's lots of ways that siblings can undermine each other.
Food, parental attention, survival from predators. If you're older you know what's a risky situation and you can convince your younger sibling to engage in some risky situation.
I remember when I was on the train going to boarding school when I was six years old I was really really thirsty and there was I wanted to drink from the tap in the washroom on the train but there was a sign there that said.

[32:52] Don't drink from the tap and the train is not in motion.
So I didn't know what to do. I was desperately thirsty but the train wasn't moving and it had been not moving for a long time. I wasn't sure when it was going to start moving again.
So what was I supposed to do? So all of the older kids gathered around me and gave me these long speeches about how it was perfectly safe to drink and they gave me all these convoluted explanations as to why that sign might be there but don't worry it was perfectly fine.
I mean, obviously that's kind of sadistic, right?
And it was one of the early instances that I remember about how dangerous the mob could be, how dangerous the crowd could be, and how much they just made up stuff to control those with less authority, less power.
I mean, these kids were all eight or nine years old, and I was six years old.
I was the youngest kid in the whole boarding school, if I remember right, or one of them.
And it was just something that I very clearly remember, that people would just talk you into just about any kind of nonsense and dangerous stuff.
Of course I don't know to this day why there was that sign, but I do know that everyone telling me that sign was meaningless and having all these conflicts.
I mean, of course, they're old kids, they don't know why, they're just making up a bunch of stuff to see if they can get me to drink the water because that gives them satisfaction and a sense of power and control.
Oh look, I've convinced a six-year-old to drink some water in a potentially dangerous situation, right?

[34:11] So, yeah, I mean, they want to harm you because it gives them a sense of power and control.
And for you to have boundaries with them is very dangerous.
And the longer you're in contact with people, the worse it tends to be when you enforce the boundaries. All right.

[34:26] In reference to what you said on Sunday about how people will buy Bitcoin when they're told.
Do you think that this is what occurs at the end of bull cycles when large investors want to sell and they get people to buy it to close to the top?
Again you're asking me to plumb the minds of other people who will never reveal their motives.
Negative articles on Bitcoin controlled by powers that be.

[34:49] So in general you will see negative articles.
And you know, maybe this is false, it would be interesting to do the study, but in general you see negative articles about Bitcoin when the powers that be want to buy Bitcoin.
And when they want to sell Bitcoin, then there will be positive articles about Bitcoin.
Now it doesn't really alter the people who've been in Bitcoin from the beginning, but it alters new people.

[35:15] Have you read any Raymond Chandler novels? I have not. In your talk with Dr.
Pester, you all discussed sacrifice in the context of the Bible.
This week in a Q&A, you also discussed the topic.
I've always seen these biblical and societal concepts of sacrifice as morally incorrect, in that don't think humans are or should be sacrificial animals.
I see the rant notion that something is not a sacrifice unless you give up something you value for something you value less as a more accurate human concept.
It requires you to first have defined your values, then rank them, then choose with free will. It seems more appropriate.
It seems to more appropriately describe what parents do for their children.
They value continuing their genetic life more than the other stuff they could buy or time on other pursuit, yet isn't altruistic or at a loss slash negative of for themselves.
Even the action of Mother Teresa or similar ilk could be explained this way as they act to increase their values by actions that seem altruistic but instead are not as they are choosing the reward of those actions, accolades, sense of accomplishment, emotional reward of helping, etc.
Over time, money or other alternatives they could have chosen but value less.
I'd be interested in hearing how specifically you define sacrifice and relate it to both the concepts of the Bible and that of that Rand describes.
Not sure what to call the latter, Rand's.

[36:32] So the reason why children are a better investment than hedonism is that the pleasure in children increases over time and the pleasure in hedonism decreases over time, right?
It's called the hedonic treadmill, right? So everyone's had this experience if you've been in some kind of investment and the investment goes up and you're thrilled!
It's gone up 20% this month and you're thrilled and then Then it stays at 20% and you're disappointed, right? Everybody knows this feeling, right?
You get what you want and that becomes the new norm.

[37:06] And so with hedonism, it's declining happiness, right?
So let's say that you want to have a lot of sex.
Okay, well, you'll get tired of the new sex and you'll get older and your physical capacities will decline over time and your attractiveness will decline over time and so it's kind of a losing game to put your happiness on hypersexuality.
It just doesn't work, right? Particularly for women, right? Also if you don't have kids and a family, you end up mostly surrounded by people who fail to have kids and a family, right?
The consequences of not having children and a family.

[37:48] And there's exceptions of course, right? But you end up often, particularly so getting into your 50s and so on, you just end up with a bunch of weirdos who've never settled down and who've never really sacrificed themselves to create life or whatever, right?
So you just end up in a declining situation.
If you are a travel addict, sort of as we mentioned before, and you say, well I'm going to sacrifice income and stability and pair bonding and so on, so that I can travel.
Okay, well, you can certainly do that, but that also is a diminishing situation, because your joy in traveling will go down over time, the hedonic treadmill, right? Everything that doesn't improve decays.

[38:32] And so you will end up with and one day you'll wake up in some hut in Sri Lanka, surrounded by weirdos who themselves have never settled or pair-bonded or just a bunch of weirdos and you'll be too old.
This is the old Chris Rock thing or the Eddie Murphy thing or something like that.
You don't want to be that old guy in the club, surrounded by young people, and they'll look upon you no longer with admiration but with pity. You'll be a loser.
And then usually it's too late to go back and fix things.
So the idea that travel or sex or people who pursue money, This is the old Jim Carrey line, it says, I wish everyone could experience wealth and fame and success to realize it's not enough to make you happy.
And it's not. And it's not. That's how you pursue money at the expense of love and relationships.
Okay, well you get a bunch of money. And then what?

[39:29] Right, what was the happiness you got in getting your first, very first computer or your very first phone?
I remember buying that $1200 Atari 800 with money I got from my step-grandmother after she died.
I remember booting it up, I remember being completely thrilled, excited, happy, learning how to code.
I remember I'm not a morning person, got up early in the morning to write screensavers where triangles danced all over the screen and swirling flows of northern lights, grandiosity.
I remember programming my first games, I remember getting my first word processor, I remember getting my first printer.
Memories of buying and selling computers and technological advancements.

[40:02] I remember upgrading from that cassette tape that transferred 1k a minute, and you had to use the counter to get to the right spot, to getting a floppy drive for $700.

[40:14] Crazy. Crazy. And then I remember trading all of that stuff in.
I spent $850 on a second-hand 286 with a 20 meg hard drive.
I thought the hard drive was the greatest thing ever.
I remember paying $1200 at a place called MightyMax to buy a 386SX25 notebook with 2 megs of RAM.
Crazy. Now I ended up selling it for $900. Like all these computers I ended up selling and made a good chunk of my money back because when I sold them I sold them all with software as well.
So that was a big, a big, so this wasn't like some big net loss. I sold everything.
I remember when I sold the Atari, my Atari 800, I remember a guy coming in and he's like, yeah, yeah, I've told my wife I want to buy this for home automation so we can save money on our electricity bill.
And I was like, and he's like, but you have, you have that basketball game, right?

[41:09] Like, okay, if your wife buys. These are all like shreds of memories from over 40 years ago, 45 years ago. This is kind of funny.
I'm one of, you know, of course I'll never know what happened to that guy, but I do know that he wasn't telling the truth to his wife.
You couldn't use these things to do home automation?

[41:25] I remember as a joke setting up my Atari 800 to pretend to be a computer.
To a mass spectrometer to figure out, we put something, you would put something on a tray and it would pretend to scan it, right, and it would then tell you what it was.
It was a complete, it was half a joke, right, it was a complete fake demo and all of that.
But I wrote all the code and the way that we would do it is I would say, well I have to enter an access code, but what I entered with the access code was a set of symbols that told the computer what was there, right?
So we set it up for a whole bunch of things, everything we would expect to see in a cafeteria, and you know, if somebody put something glass on there, I'd enter a particular code and it would say, beep, beep, beep, scan up and down the spectrum, and then it would say, it's glass.
People would put stuff on and I'd enter a code saying it was an access code, but it was a code to tell the computer what it was.
I mean, it was funny and all of that, and it wasn't particularly serious.
And then of course, one guy came along and said, I don't think there's an access port on the Atari 800.
I'm like, you sir! And then what I did was I had put this in anticipating this kind of question, right?
So after people were just gathered round and, you know, I put in this access code and people were amazed that the computer was able to scan and identify objects and oh, so cool!
And then one guy said, I don't think there's an access port on the bottom of the computer, right?

[42:51] And I said, put your hand where the scanner is. And he put his hand where the scanner was and I entered a special code because I knew this kind of thing was going to come up And the computer said nerd with no life It said of course there's no access code.
You think you think there's a mass spectrometer in this computer?
Come on, of course, there's no access port. Like it's just it's just a joke, right?
So anyway, it was kind of funny, but I remember all of that stuff My gosh, I haven't thought about that in forever.
That was a that was a fun afternoon, man Of course, the teachers were all skeptical They kind of knew that it was nonsense but it was kind of like a magic trick, right? People just, I thought it was kind of neat.
Selfishness and Deferred Gratification

[43:25] So yeah, I mean, to be selfish is, selfishness is fundamentally about knowing that the pleasures of the first half of your life don't translate to the second half of your life, right?
Like the pleasure of cheesecake doesn't translate well if it makes you fat and gives you diabetes, right?
The pleasure of sitting on the couch rather than sweating on a treadmill doesn't translate well into you having like no strength and no flexibility and no this that and the other.
So it's just a matter of common sense of knowing that we have the capacity to defer gratification, and you know I mean of course squirrels understand this right I mean squirrels have an instinct which tells them well there aren't going to be that many nuts around in winter so I better spend a lot of time and energy stashing nuts so that I have stuff to eat in the winter right.
Birds don't particularly want to fly 2,000 miles or 1,000 miles or however many...
Migratory birds, right?
They just know that the pleasure that I'm going to get in eating now is not going to be matched by starving in the winter, so I better fly south, right?
You know, you understand all this kind of stuff, right? So we get all of that.

[44:26] So one of the reasons why we have this shut-up boomer meme is so that, and of course, you know, there are a lot of boomers who are kind of foolish, but the boomers didn't have the internet, so they were programmed by the mainstream narratives and didn't have really access to alternate sources of information, so mixed about the boomers, but one of the reasons why the cult of youth is promoted by sinister people, right?
That youth is cool and old is weird and racist and bigoted and okay boomer or shut up boomer or old economy Steve or, you know, the boomers say just save money and all of that, right?
One of the reasons why youth is fenced off from age is so that the youth don't get access to the lessons that age has painfully learned.
So that young people don't have access and therefore can be more easily lured into hedonism without seeing the ill effects of hedonism.
So young people can be lured into hedonism which destroys civilization.
So cutting off the young from the lessons of the old is essential to undoing the fabric of civilization.

[45:33] Just knowing that the second half of your life, and I remember reading this, I think I was 18 or 19, I was going through a big Jung phase, and I read somewhere in Jung's writings that the first half of life is a preparation for the second half of life.
That the first half of life is about aggression and expansion and winning, and then the second half of your life has to be about conciliation, reconciling yourself to decline and so on.
And that really struck with me. That really struck with me. That really struck me and stuck with me. Let me parse this out a little bit more sensibly.

[46:08] So, selfishness is recognizing that the hedonic treadmill, the law of diminishing returns when it comes to sense pleasures, the law of diminishing returns when it comes to money, right?
Your first thousand dollars is fantastic, you know, when you go from a million dollars, I assume, to a million and a thousand dollars, not quite as exciting, right? and buying things won't make you happy.
There's a limit to how much you can consume and this is something I read when I was in my early 20s in Napoleon's writings.
He said well no matter how wealthy you are you could still only have one dinner a day.
Power doesn't do it, money doesn't do it. Now virtue is something that you can increase in over the course of your life.

[46:55] And seeing your children grow from virtually nothing to intelligent, rational, wise, virtuous adults is pretty much the greatest pleasure there is because you're hedonic pleasures will diminish, but the pleasures of parenting only increase over time.
As you watch your children, you know, go into the world, gain friendships, gain love, gain marriage, gain children, you have grandchildren, you have comfort and care in your old age, and so on, right?
So the pleasures of sex with random women diminishes, but the love you can grow with a single virtuous woman only increases over time, right?
So you want to invest in things that increase over time, not things that diminish over time, right? And people who don't save for their retirement have more fun over the course of their life, but a whole lot less fun, I mean absent government nonsense, right? Have a whole lot less fun when they're older.

[47:42] So to me, selfishness is burning the future for the sake of satisfaction in the present.
It's living even below that.
I don't even know at what level it's living because animals defer gratification all the time Male birds expend crazy amounts of calories creating nests and doing dances for female birds and so on right?
So to me selfishness is when you satisfy the dark whims of the present at the expense of The happiness of the future that's selfish the parent who's in a bad mood and the child does something startling or whatever It was like I was I was actually at a gym I won't really sort of go into the details, it doesn't really matter, but I was at a gym not super long ago and there were a bunch of guys who were like screaming half at the top of their lungs and clashing and clanging weights, right?

[48:31] And literally, I was on a bike machine facing away from them so it kind of startled me whenever it happened, right?
And it was just kind of dumb, right?
Just kind of dumb. And so yeah, so you want to make sure that you are not doing things that satisfy you in the moment that come at the expense of the future.
So these guys were lifting weights way too heavy for them.
Maybe that makes them feel cool and strong in the moment, but they're going to injure themselves for sure.
Like for sure they're going to do some horrible thing to their body that could take them weeks or months to recover from.
And maybe they won't recover at all. I still have a vague shoulder, back of the shoulder thing, from 15 years ago?
The ironic thing is it was actually an aerobics class, I think, I wasn't sure.

[49:17] So yeah, selfishness is... so a parent who is in a bad mood and the kid does something startling or bad or wrong and the parent just yells at the kid, right?
Well that gives them some relief and satisfaction in the moment but it is at the cost of their relationship with their kid in the long run, right? I think we all understand this so hopefully that makes sense.
Would you please make us a crash course how to create good definitions of concepts?
Best if it was a separate video.
I do love it when people tell me how to explain philosophy.
Yes, that's touching. That's you know I hate that oh sweet summer child like oh you know you're such you're so precious and you know that's kind of annoying but you know it's best if you explain philosophy this way.
It's like man if you're so good at explaining philosophy why are you asking me? Go make it yourself.
So the concepts are atoms. Concepts exist because atoms exist.
Right? So H2O, right, makes up water. Right? Two hydrogens and an oxygen.

[50:20] Atoms have stable properties, water has stable properties. And because water has stable properties, you can create concepts around water that are accurate because atoms behave in a consistent manner.
So the best concepts are those which define the essence of the thing itself, irrespective of individual instances.
Water changes properties when it freezes. It goes from a liquid to a solid, right? And it also changes properties when it evaporates, it goes from a liquid to a vapor.
These are all water, but we have ice, water, and steam, because the properties have changed based on the temperature, right?
So a concept is that which takes the essence of a thing, which fundamentally is its atomic structure, I mean physical concepts, right?
And then extrapolates it to infinity. So the reason we know atoms exist is because concepts are valid, and the reason we know concepts are valid is because atoms exist.
Now those are concepts with regards to physical properties and so on.
With regards to moral concepts, it's way simpler.
You take the rule, you apply it to children, you universalize it, and make it an absolute. That's all.
Because otherwise it's just an exercise of power, not a virtue.
So, if you say to children, don't hit, don't steal, okay.
Morality: Simple and Universal

[51:42] That's it. I mean if you have water downstream, it's not the opposite of water upstream, right?
The cloud to the left is not the opposite of the cloud to the right.
So with morality, it's ridiculously simple, which is why it's so annoying that philosophers have avoided this basic simplicity forever and ever, amen, and that Christianity got it way before philosophers did and I think philosophers finally got it now with us.
Don't hit, don't steal. That's the essence of the morality we exhort our children to follow. So we just make it absolute and universal.
Like Newton's like, well what if everything falls? Well then he gets the accurate conception of the model of the solar system.
Explanation of Rational Proof of Secular Ethics

[52:25] Now sometimes explaining why concepts are valid is a more complicated manner which is why my book on Ethics Universally Preferable Behavior a Rational Proof of Secular Ethics available for free at free-demand.com is more complicated, but yeah, that's it.
All right, I think I'm a little out of juice now. I need to get some food.
I forgot to eat this morning, so I'll finish up here. I'll get to the rest of these soon.
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