0:03 - Introduction to Relationships
8:38 - Evolution of Gender Roles
17:41 - The Emperor's New Clothes
24:56 - Truth and Intimacy
37:31 - The Role of Religion and Meaning
40:20 - Generosity in Relationships
40:50 - Understanding Empathy
46:15 - Love and Emotional Complexity
49:38 - Fear of Rejection
58:34 - Confidence and Options
1:04:53 - Contradictions in Relationships
1:12:49 - The Nature of Virtue
1:20:29 - Accountability in Relationships
1:27:43 - Advice for a Happy Marriage
In this interview, Stefan Molyneux, author of "Real-Time Relationships: The Logic of Love," discusses the complexities of human relationships, the fundamental roles of gender dynamics, and the importance of truth in establishing intimacy. Molyneux argues that the contemporary narrative often pits men against women in detrimental ways, asserting that the historical narrative of men as oppressors contradicts the reality that men and women have evolved to complement each other rather than be adversaries. He challenges the notion that men are inherently harmful, emphasizing that much of male behavior is shaped by the choices women make throughout history. Molyneux posits that men have adapted traits largely influenced by women’s selections in partners, thereby reflecting a broader evolutionary perspective.
The conversation delves into how the social constructs surrounding masculinity and femininity play into personal relationships and societal expectations. Molyneux critiques the modern tendency to blame men solely for destructive behaviors, suggesting that this narrative ignores the significant influence women have over male development, particularly in parenting roles. He also highlights the ongoing experiment of excluding male figures from child-rearing, suggesting that the absence of male role models in various social spheres, including education, has led to negative outcomes for boys.
Throughout the discussion, Molyneux illustrates the significance of understanding historical and evolutionary contexts when examining contemporary relationship dynamics. He points to the stark differences in how women and men exist within the reproductive marketplace, particularly in dating scenarios where women's choices dramatically influence available male characteristics. He connects these discussions to contemporary societal issues, such as relationships strained by modern expectations and the pervasive belief systems surrounding men and women.
Keith Knight then introduces specific cultural references from films and discussions around emotional fragility and aggression, asking Molyneux for his insights into the root causes of behavior, such as insecurity leading to acts of violence against women. Molyneux critiques the oversimplification in narratives that portray men strictly as aggressors, stressing that such narratives ignore deeper psychological factors, including childhood experiences and maternal relationships.
The conversation extends to the overall societal focus on emotions in relationships, where Molyneux underscores the necessity of accountability and the importance of fostering genuine connections rooted in truth rather than convenience or societal approval. He asserts that intimacy requires transparency, and for true emotional connection to flourish, individuals must engage with sincerity about their feelings and identities.
Lastly, Molyneux provides practical insights and advice for navigating personal relationships through openness, curiosity, and an emphasis on moral values. He concludes that the foundation of his successful marriage lies in mutual respect for each other's virtues—which enriches their personal growth and understanding of each other. The interview encapsulates a wealth of knowledge and reflection on relational dynamics, suggesting that actively pursuing truth and accountability is essential for fostering meaningful connections in an increasingly complex social landscape.
[0:00] Welcome to Keith's Night, Don't Tread on Anyone and the Libertarian Institute.
[0:04] Stefan Molyneux has returned to discuss his book, Real-Time Relationships, The Logic of Love. Mr. Molyneux, please remind the audience the best place to get a copy of the book.
[0:15] The book is available for free in PDF, EPUB, and audiobook format at freedomain.com slash books.
[0:23] There was a discussion about relationships on CBS News some time ago with Justin Baldoni. He said, it is easy to ask, especially as men, why do women stay? But the real question we need to ask is, why do men harm? How would you respond to that thought process?
[0:46] So there's a funny thing that's happened over the course of my lifetime, which is a smidge longer than yours. And what it has been has been the setting of males against females and females against males, really more the latter, that when I was growing up, you know, men were male chauvinist pigs and patriarchs. Patriarchs, and we just, we get together, we rubber hands together, and we try and figure out how to harm women, how to underpay women, and so on. And it's funny because it kind of, it doesn't come out of religion. It certainly doesn't come out of Christianity, where men and women are designed to work together for the betterment of the family and the culture and the civilization and so on. And it comes out of the left to a large degree. And it is kind of counterintuitive as a whole, because the left accepts evolution.
[1:40] Now, evolution, we've gotten to the top of the food chain, we are the unquestioned, you know, hopefully mostly benevolent rulers of the world. And I don't think there's any rational way that we could have gotten to the top of the food chain, men and women, if we weren't pretty good at working together. If we hadn't evolved to complement each other, to work well together, and so on. So it is strange when women are sort of taught that men are bad, and men are messing up women, and men are exploiting women, and we just run around raping and killing and so on. Yeah.
[2:23] Then how are we such a successful species if we're not good at working together? Now, over the course of evolution, men are the shadows cast by the choices of women.
[2:37] I mean, throughout a lot of human history, many more women reproduced than men. And we can see this in the dating market. We can see this on dating apps, right? The reasonably attractive women get cavalcades of messages. I just did a call-in show last night with a woman who was a model in Japan and New York and South Korea, and she's very pretty. She puts her profile up, and she just cavalcades of male messages, whereas men are lucky to get a message or two a week, and usually from women who they would not consider particularly attractive as a whole. So, women tend to choose the type of men that get to reproduce throughout. And certainly in the West, I mean, there are other cultures that are arranged marriages, which is, you know, sort of semi-institutionalized coercion. But in the West, certainly Christianity and post-Christianity, women have been able to choose the men that get to reproduce. So what that means is the nature of men is to a large degree forged or formed by the choices of women. So men have 40% greater upper body strength than women as a whole. Why is that? Because women chose men who were stronger. If women had chose men who were weaker, then we would have less upper body strength.
[4:02] So the characteristics that men possess are to a large degree shaped by the choices of women. We are, as women have made us. Now, this is not to say that men don't have choices or anything like that, but with regards to evolution in a non-coercive reproductive environment, which is certainly the West for most of its modern history.
[4:27] Men are the result of women's choices. And of course, if women are complaining about male nature, then they're really complaining about a lot of female choices throughout the process of evolution. And they're also complaining about how men, how boys are raised by women. And we've tried this experiment for the last half century, which is to get men out of positions of authority with regards to women forever and ever. Amen. I worked in a daycare when I was a teenager for many years, and I was the only male there. And of course, a lot of the fatherless boys kind of swamped me and liked the sort of roughhousing and joke telling and storytelling that we engaged in.
[5:08] We've had this experiment where, you know, apparently every man who wants to work with children has sinister intent. It's just a way of keeping male influence away. So we have tried this experiment, the welfare state, as you know, moves fathers out of the home, right? Because women often can't get benefits if they're married or if there's a man in the house. We've taken men away from homes through easy divorce, through alimony, through child support, through welfare, through section eight, through a wide variety of things. We've taken males away from educating children to a large degree to the point where there's only a few percentage points of early childhood educators are male. And we've taken a lot of male role models out of society as a whole. There have been a bunch of whole swarm of lawsuits that has ended up fairly wrecking things like Boy Scouts and sort of other organizations designed to help mentor boys. So we've taken male influence out of boys' lives. And, you know, how's that going? Well, Evolutionarily speaking, boys were designed to be raised by females and males. In general, it was females for the first couple of years, and then males took over sort of the age of six or seven.
[6:25] And would women as a whole say that society is infinitely better because we have taken males out of authority roles or mentoring roles or parenting roles in society? I think that most women would not say that society is a lot better. And it certainly isn't better for boys who are really adrift and discriminated against fairly viciously in public schools. They've done these studies where they take away whether you can identify it's a boy or a girl who wrote a certain test or paper. And when you do that, the boy's marks end up going up quite a bit because there's, of course, you know, ADHD drugs and all these other things, which are, to my mind, at least somewhat sketchy, is disproportionately affecting or they're disproportionately inflicted on boys. And this sort of sit still, you know, hands clasped, staring at a whiteboard or whatever is not exactly how boys are designed to learn. I mean, I don't think it's great for girls either, but I think it's even worse for boys. So if there's complaints about men, what generally has to happen is men have to be perceived as somehow specially bad or wrong or immoral, and we just kind of emerge without female influence. When a woman chooses to.
[7:47] To have reproductive sex with a male, she's choosing half the genetics of her son. And so her son is at least half a reflection. If she chooses to bed down with an irresponsible, aggressive, impulse-driven, you know, guy, then that's, you know, at least to some degree, the genetics that she's choosing for her son. So it is the old thing that to abstract men and say, where we just live in this bubble, we evolve on our own, we are not at all the reflection of female choices, is strange and bizarre and anti-evolution, anti-science, anti-responsibility for women. And so I think just to say, well, men harm, well, women chose aggressive men a lot of times throughout evolution because other women had chosen aggressive men.
[8:39] And it was a sort of race to see who could survive. So, you know, you've got tribe A and tribe B. If the women in tribe B are choosing really aggressive men to have children with, that's going to have some effect on the personalities of the boys. Maybe they're more aggressive towards tribe A. So then tribe A has to, the women there are going to, in order to survive, they're going to choose more aggressive men so that they get men capable of violence who can defend them. Or if tribe B has aggressive men and tribe A doesn't. Tribe B takes over tribe A, takes the women as concubines, perhaps.
[9:11] And then, so it was just a state of nature. It was a sort of war of all against all. And we all did our very best to survive. And for women, sometimes that meant choosing aggressive men. And, you know, that's what got us to the top of the food chain. I don't think we should blame each other. I think we should, you know, vive la différence, as the French say, or used to. And so I think that we should really celebrate and enjoy the differences between men and women. And.
[9:41] Women can be violent. We know, of course, that women kill children far more than men. We know that 50% of domestic disputes are initiated by women. We know that female rulers start wars more often than male rulers. We know that lesbian relationships tend to have the highest domestic violence statistics of any group. And the problem of aggression or violence or violations of the non-aggression principle is not centered on one gender versus the other. And there are violent men out there. There are violent women out there. And women as a whole need men capable of aggression to protect them from the small percentage of men who are violent and evil. And there's just no real getting away from that. But trying to convince women that they don't need men, trying to convince men that they don't need women, it's really just this big stop having babies depopulation nonsense. sense.
[10:33] In Baldoni's movie, it seems like the point he tries to get across is that his character comes across evidence that Blake Lively is interested in this guy from her past, and this makes him insecure. He's so insecure that he lashes out. He has this uncertainty. So Baldoni never comes out and says this. I wanted to know what his take was. He basically says that men are fragile because they don't get their emotions out. And this makes them feel like they're not enough with this insecurity. They lash out violently towards women who are easier to control than, you know, going and trying to like beat up a police officer. They know they can beat up the woman. Do you think there's any credence to this?
[11:22] I mean, certainly not in the modern world. I mean, in the modern world, any man who's aggressive towards a woman is immediately arrested. So I don't think it's like, you know, I guess maybe deep in the past, but you know, even in the past, beating up your wife in the West at least was illegal for, I mean, it's been that way for centuries. The idea that it's sort of fragility that drives aggression, I mean, I don't really think that's the case as a whole. And of course, what I would really like to know in that story between Lively and Baldoni is what was his mother like? How was he raised? Why is he, let's say he's really insecure despite being a great looking guy who's like this surgeon and has abs and, you know, just every conceivable bit of female fantasy sculpture. Why is he insecure? I mean, we have a society where women overwhelmingly raise their children, female teachers overwhelmingly raise the boys, and males are minimal in their impact on children.
[12:30] So I would assume that the Jason Baldoni character was largely raised by women. So then why would he be insecure? And I think if we look at, and I'm not, of course, I'm not trying to blame all male immorality on women and their choices, but it certainly has an influence. So I would like to know in that characterization, how was he raised? Is he just incomprehensibly and causelessly violent and controlling and abusive? Where does his fragility and his insecurity come from? Fragility and insecurity usually come from a very damaged bond with the mother.
[13:10] And I mean, there are terms for it and so on. And so if a child is, you know, truly loved by his mother and has a very strong bond and she, you know, takes pleasure in his company and really enjoys his presence and laughs and smiles and plays with him and coaches him and all of that, then he grows up, this is sort of attachment theory, he grows up with a very strong emotional and connected bond with a woman. If, on the other hand, which is, you know, tragically common these days, if the mother, what was it, I think Trump's press secretary, did she just go back to work four days after having a kid or something like that? It's one of the women around Trump. And if, on the other hand, she just.
[13:55] You know, is sitting on her laptop ignoring her kid, and then she puts him in daycare, you know, a month or two after he's born, and then he's cared for by strangers, he doesn't have the same bond, you know, the daycare workers are underpaid, so to speak, they kind of come and go, or at least they're not paid very much. And they don't have any particular bond with your kids. Well, then what happens is he doesn't have a vertical bond. The child doesn't have a vertical bond with a connected and present caregiver. He often is not breastfed, which is really, really important for children recommended 18 months of breastfeeding. It's great for your immune system. It's great for, you know, skin on skin touch, which is essential for the development of empathy and so on.
[14:35] So if the Jason Valdeni character was raised with, you know, great connection with his mother. His mother loves him. He loves his mother. Why would he be aggressive towards women, right? So the dehumanization of women, often will come, again, not exclusively, but often will come because there is not a strong attachment between the boy and his mother. Could be his father too, but in this case, we're talking mother. And if the boy doesn't have a strong attachment to his mother, what kids dumped in daycare, what do they do? Well, they can't really pair bond with the daycare teacher. Again, I've worked in the environment for years. You're just, you're really busy. Like it was one teacher and I was just an assistant and there were 25 kids aged five to 10. And it was, you know, quite a lot of chaos and quite a lot of just wrangling and solving problems. You don't really get to sit down and, you know, talk one-on-one with kids and sort of understand their feelings and their history and so on.
[15:31] So what happens is the children in daycare, they pair bond with other kids. They pair bond horizontally. But children can't raise children. Children can't bond with children. And of course, in daycare, as we know in school, the social life tends to be dominated by the bottom 20% of the least functional kids because they tend to be the most aggressive, they tend to be the most intrusive, they tend to be the most demanding. And so you end up pair bonding with often quite impulsive and aggressive children, which you can't really do. And therefore you have this unstable bond. Empathy doesn't develop. And you probably have some residual resentment towards your mother for dumping you in this chaotic and difficult environment. I don't know if you've seen these videos that are on X of like the parents coming to pick up their kids and the kids just bursting into tears and running to be with their parents because they feel so disconnected and isolated in daycare. And studies out of Quebec, Canada have shown that daycare is just really bad for children's emotional stability and development.
[16:31] So I think it's a very interesting question, of course. You know, some men are violent towards women. And I'm certainly not trying to blame all women for men's violence. Men certainly make bad choices and immoral choices. But when you're starting to look at the roots and patterns, rather than just finger wag and blame people and make men some sort of isolated Satan development of self-generated personalities, we need to look at the dominoes of how it is that people end up wanting to control, end up with fragility, and it all has to do with a lack of pair bonding when they're young. And of course, there's things that you can do to solve this when you get older, but I think just the movie is very shallow, at least in Fifty Shades of Grey. God help me. At least with Fifty Shades of Grey, Christian Grey's personality was shaped by a predatory older woman who exploited him sexually when he was young. And so there's at least some... Understanding of these dominoes. But yeah, I find it quite boring when it's like, well, just men are bad and isolated from any causality and women are just victims. And it's very tempting for people, but it's very wrong and very harmful to society as a whole.
[17:41] It really destroys women's capacity for love and men's capacity to pair bond.
[17:47] You mention in the book, one of the most amazing stories in all of literature is the emperor's new clothes. What are the main takeaways from the emperor's new clothes? This, well, usually a children's film, you say there are a lot of implications for adult life as well. What are the main lessons we can learn and apply to our life in relationships?
[18:09] Yeah, it's funny. I remember at the age of six, I was sent, my parents split up and I was a baby. And my father, my late father, he died a couple of years ago, but my father was a geologist, uh, in, in Africa. So I flew from London to Johannesburg, which is a crazy long flight. And I actually had that on loop. I think it gave me a headset and there was a little, um, loop that you could listen to stories. This is before they had movies on planes. And I just remember listening to it over and over, just completely fascinated, completely fascinated. So the Empress New Clothes is a great story, uh, just very briefly for those who don't know it. They have a vainglorious king who loves looking pretty, like we all do, I guess.
[18:52] And you get a bunch of con men, a couple of con men come to the capital and say, you know, we're going to make you the most amazing robes. We're going to make you the most amazing outfit. It's going to be beautiful and iridescent and colorful and magical. But it has a special kind of weird property, which is that everyone who's not competent at their job, can't see the clothing, can't see it. So everyone who's incompetent, everybody who does not deserve their position, who has not earned it, who's faking it, they can't even see the cloth. And then they pull out, of course, this imaginary cloth that's not really there. And they say, oh, what do you think of these colors? And of course, the king believes that if he's not competent for his position, he can't see the cloth, but he doesn't want to admit that, right? So the king, oh, magnificent. Oh, beautiful. Oh, iridescent. Oh, the colors are so shimmery. And of course, then the con men say to the whole court, what do you guys think? What do you think of this cloth? We're going to make the beautiful robes for the king, a beautiful outfit. And of course, everyone thinks that everyone else can see the cloth. Nobody wants to admit that they don't deserve their position. So everyone, of course, is, oh, magnificent, oh, lovely, marvelous, Cogsworth, and Beauty and the Beast, oh, magnificent. And so anyway, long story short, the king gets a whole outfit made of this non-existent cloth.
[20:17] And everyone, of course, is just strolling around butt naked. Basically, maybe he's got a pair of shoes and a glove and everyone of course is admiring the clothes and then he goes out of the.
[20:30] Palace and he's going down the street and in the horse and he's butt naked and of course everybody knows that if you're not worthy of your position you can't see the cloth nobody wants to say anything and then eventually there's a little boy um no i'm not sure the age is specified i assume five or six. Why is the king naked?
[20:49] And because he doesn't really know anything about the propaganda, he doesn't really, you can't be worthy or not worthy of your position when you're that little because you're that little, right? So that's the sort of story as a whole. And then everyone kind of figured it out and the spell is broken and the king is embarrassed and all of that. And I think that the con men have made off with all the money he paid them for this imaginary cloth. So the reason why that story is amazing is it reminds us that we have a lot of shared delusions in society. Those of us who are sort of outside the matrix, and especially those of us who kind of circle back and try and get people to wake up, step up, wake up to reality. It's tough, man. There's a lot of shared delusions in society.
[21:40] And the process by which this conveyor belt of unpropagandized souls is coming into society on a regular basis, right? Every newborn baby's cry summons the propagandists to start their devilish work of rewiring the human brain in the image of delusions that serve those in power rather than reality that serves the conscience of those living in the truth. So the fact that it's a kid who says, well, why is the king naked? Why is the king got no clothes on? That can't be fun for the horse. So I think that is really important. The fact that insecurity drives people's conformity and the fact that we believe that everyone else believes things that are false. And sometimes it just takes someone to say i don't know is this this true like you know we have this i'll sort of give you a more sort of current example and i did an interview with dr kevin beaver many years ago on this is well worth checking out people can check out my show at fdr podcasts.com even all of the formerly prominent videos are still resurrected and in various places across the web but the idea that well the crime comes from poverty right that if you if you're poor. Boy, you just, you need your crust of bread. You just, crime comes from poverty and so on. Statistically, it's just, just not true. It's just not true.
[23:04] Generally, there's a lot of crime and that makes neighborhoods poor because stores don't want to be there and people with means move out because they don't want to deal with the crime. And so just these kinds of causalities, the idea that a socialized medicine is essential for maintaining people's health. No, no, not really. People who have less access to, quote, free government healthcare often have healthier outcomes than people who have, quote, free access to government healthcare, which tends to be a conveyor belt of profitable pills for pharma rather than lifestyle changes for your actual health.
[23:40] So there's a lot of, I mean, we could sort of go on and on, but there's a lot of delusions in society that are constantly reinforced. And, you know, you just have to look at the truly scrambled cooked brains of the CNN addicted boomers to see the effects that this has on people where you really can't reason with them at all because they just have these train tracks burned into their brain. Anything which challenges the train tracks or tries to jump the train tracks is considered to be an attack upon reality almost and just can't be abided. And, you know, this weird gaslighting amnesia that's happened post-COVID where, you know, a lot of people turned kind of evil over the whole COVID thing or at least revealed their evil tendencies in that sort of Milgram experiment style. And it's all gone it's all kind of vanished and everyone nobody circles back and nobody says, you know what did we do that was wrong or how did things get so kind of crazy for, this this ailment and there's a lot of shared delusions and people who come along and tell the truth you know the one thing that's not accurate is the kid is celebrated and, and the truth is revealed that's not really how it works in the world but that's why it's a fairy tale and not a documentary.
[24:56] On page five, you say, truth is a necessary prerequisite for intimacy. Most times in life, we do not even know that we are lying. We do not know that we are failing to process reality, both inner and outer correctly, because we are addicted to mythology or making up stories which drug us with the illusion of truth, rather than humbly pursuing truth in reality. How can we determine if we are engaged in self-deception?
[25:29] It's a big epistemological question. So, I mean... What is truth? Well, truth is when the contents of our mind match facts in reality, right? So the world is a sphere. If we believe it's banana-shaped, the contents of our mind do not match that which is in reality. If I say it's raining outside and it's sunny outside, my statements do not match what is in empirical reality.
[25:54] So empirical reality, right, what we get through the evidence of the senses, and we have a bunch of senses, it's more than just the five, You know, we also have balance and hunger and instincts in our second gut, our second brain, which actually has a whole bunch of neurons down in our sort of gut region. So we have more than five senses. We have sort of reason, evidence, science.
[26:13] So what you want to do is you want to, for the most part, it's a very difficult process because we are to some degree the sum of our beliefs. And when we challenge our beliefs, we're challenging our very identity. We're challenging all of our relationships. we are challenging our sense of morality and we are challenging authority which for most of human history had a very bad outcome indeed so what you want to do is for me it's just blank slate it's just blank slate okay let's pretend i know nothing pretend i'm just like newly hatched newly born beamed in from some other planet um how would i build uh things which are true from nothing and And of course, Descartes did this with regards to reality and Kant did this with regards to ethics. Socrates did this with regards to knowledge as a whole, like let's pretend I know nothing and see what I can build that has some sort of substance or lasting process. And I have a whole 19-part Introduction to Philosophy series. Again, fdrpodcast.com. People can check that out. I've got Essential Philosophy, which deals with simulation theory and free will and morals and so on. So just start with a blank slate. Okay, well, what is truth? Well, truth, the big question in philosophy, there's this famous, somebody famously asked a philosophy professor, how's your wife? And he said, well, compared to what?
[27:32] And that's compared to what? Well, truth compared to falsehood. So true has to have something to do with.
[27:39] Objective reality outside our minds. Because, you know, there's this weird thing where people say, my truth, like that can be validated or verified or something like that. Truth is, in a philosophical sense, truth is the relationship between the contents of our minds that we believe to be true and the actual facts of empirical reality. And so you have to start assuming that everything you've been told is a lie and everything you believe is false and just say, okay, if I have to build things up from nothing, what is true? Well, of course, Descartes famously said, well, I think therefore I am, which is the only thing I know is that I am thinking. And I think he kind of went on a weird brain controlled by a demon, like brain in a vat, hooked up to electrodes controlled by a demon. It went kind of weird that way, but you start with nothing. And we only have to start with nothing because we're lied to so much. Like in the future, when philosophy is taught to children from an early age onwards, we won't have to do all of this, right? We won't have to unlearn all of the bad teachings we've been given, but lying to people is so profitable that it's like the ultimate human crop is delusion.
[28:55] So we, at the moment, we have to kind of undo a bunch of stuff and say, okay, let's assume that I know nothing. Okay, what is true? And so we study the principles of objective reality, which is reason and evidence right reason is the art of non-contradictory identification of information evidence is the consistency of the behavior of matter and energy and so we say okay well if i have self-contradictory beliefs they can't be true because truth is relative to reality and reality is not contradictory an elephant doesn't turn into an airplane does not turn into a cloud and there's no such thing as a square circle and two and two never make five like there's a pleasing kind of rationality and objectivity to reality as a whole.
[29:37] That is a beautiful thing. It's a beautiful thing that we live in a sane universe because it gives us the opportunity to not be mad, to actually be sane. So you build your knowledge base up with reference to reason and evidence. This is a sort of scientific method rather than saying, is the world run by sort of ghosts and goblins and demons and spirits and so on? What is true out there in the world that we can verify and reproduce and that is rational and consistent? And so yeah the first test is is our ideas about the world rational and consistent then they might be true if they're irrational anti-rational or inconsistent they can't be true and then we take are the thoughts within our mind compare them to the principles we've extracted from objective reality reason and evidence and see if they match and we build that up in a sometimes slow painful and difficult manner and the reason why that's so tough is not only does our identity fundamentally change when we go the blank slate route and build things up from scratch.
[30:38] But it threatens all of our relationships. And when I say relationships, most people are in relationships based upon mutual falsehoods, mutually accepted falsehoods, rather than the actual truth. But you can only connect with another person through the truth and through reality. If you and I both agree to accept particular fictions, the only relationship we have is with the fiction, not with each other, with our agreed upon mutually reinforcing falsehoods. And connection and love and intimacy and relationships are based upon the truth. We can't mind melt. We can only meet in reality. We can only have a conversation in reality. You and I having this conversation is relying upon, you know, sound waves and the science of all of this data transfer and all of that. We can only meet in reality and we can only have a relationship with another person if both people believe things that are true. Otherwise, we only have a relationship with other people who reinforce our own delusions. And intimacy does require that you pursue the truth. And pursuing the truth will often shed false, quote, relationships. And that is a difficult and painful process. I sort of liken it to leaving.
[31:54] Like you wake up at a city, you realize that the city is full of zombies, but then you have to cross the desert to find the village of real people. And it feels like you're going to die in the desert, but you can't go back because it's just zombies. And going forward is kind of scary because you don't know where the village of people is. And that's a, it's a rough passage. I write about this in the first book that I wrote on truth, the tyranny of illusion. I sort of talk about this, this journey away from unreality towards real people. And, uh, it's a tough journey. I mean, it won't be that tough in the future when we actually start teaching children things that are true rather than false. It's kind of tough at the moment, but I don't really know what the alternative is because once you wake up to zombie-ville, it's kind of tough to enjoy the parade.
[32:37] What is it that truth can do for our relationships when it comes to intimacy? For example, I could see a lot of people who feel much closer with other people when it's based on a myth or something that you can't exactly verify. And I've seen a number of studies, Edward Dutton was on my show recently saying religious people tend to be happier regardless of the religion because shared mythology increases the amount of intimacy. For example, if I said, hey, I want you to join my organization, we believe that the sun is hot. Well, that's not unique. That's not you really showing me your allegiance to me. But if I said, Muhammad justly married a six-year-old, then flew a horse into heaven. Now, if I can get you to believe that, well, then we really got something going there. So what is the main incentive people should have when it comes to embracing truth and holding people in their lives accountable to the truth when the costs are so extraordinarily high, leaving zombie bill for an unknown destination?
[33:44] Yeah, I mean, it's that the happiness of religious people should not escape anyone's attention. And then the question is, why are they happier? Which then begs that sort of philosopher's wife question, compared to what? So, let's just take Christianity, which is in many ways a noble religion whose values I share enormously. So, Christians have larger purpose, larger meaning. They surrender themselves to.
[34:13] Universal moral standards. They introspect, they pray, they work within their community, they help others. There's a lot of charity work. There's a lot of reaching out to the lonely, the isolated, the harmed, the broken to help them. And so they have a larger conceptual purpose in their lives than most agnostics and atheists do. So is it the religion or is it the fact that Christians tend to live in the realm of concepts, community, and morality. Now, the concepts of morality, community, and conceptual living as a whole is not denied to atheists or to agnostics. I certainly have worked very hard to provide a rational proof of secular ethics, right? Ethics that don't require the force of the state or the compunctions or compulsions of religiosity. So living a conceptual life, living a communal life, living a life of abstract virtue and moral purpose is very much centered on religion at the moment. Religious people tend to live more conceptual and abstractly moral lives than most agnostics or atheists. And of course, a lot of people become agnostics or atheists because they dislike moral rules and communal obligations as a whole. And so I think that.
[35:42] Religious people, and again, the one I'm most familiar with is Christianity, having raised a Christian, Christianity gives you a life of abstract depth. You think about morals, you think about meaning, you think about purpose, you think about virtues, and you dedicate yourself to the pursuit of virtues that are universal. And you also dedicate yourself to a lot of helpful charity work and all kinds of good stuff. And you have a community of people who are also following abstract conceptual virtues and morals. And I mean, I go to church and one of the things that happens in church that's fascinating is people will sit there for an hour and discuss morality and discuss virtue and discuss community and discuss how to live a meaningful life. What is the equivalent in the atheist community of people getting together once or twice a week to talk about virtue, moral obligation, and subjugation to conceptual absolutes? Where is the introspection? I mean, I know that, of course, atheists can meditate and things like that, but they're not trying to develop a kind of strictness to follow abstract moral purpose and virtues.
[36:54] So, is it the religion per se that is bringing more happiness and meaning? I would say not. And I would say that is the subjugation of the sort of mammalian will to a larger and higher purpose. And of course, children bring a lot of happiness. Religious people tend to have more children and have a community through that way. There's often a kind of selfishness in agnosticism and atheism because it is living for the pleasures of the moment and not necessarily subjugating yourself to a larger moral cause, which is where I think the greatest meaning and happiness is in the world.
[37:31] So I would look at the content of religious life, and say it's not the religion per se it is having a larger vision of life having a meaning in life having a purpose in life and having something that you tame your selfish angry will to follow.
[37:51] On page 25 you say closure is the achievement of self-trust in your own judgment going on to say generosity always provides certainty. So if I'm unsure or I'm insecure about a relationship I'm in, whether it's romantic relationship, friendship, a business relationship, how can I look towards generosity to providing certainty in whether or not the other party that I'm engaged in really does care about me and this is something worth investing time and effort into? do?
[38:25] Well, if you are uncertain about reciprocity, then be generous. And, you know, if you're completely uncertain as to whether your friend cares about you as much as you care about him, lend him 500 bucks if he needs it, right? And then see if he, you know, thinks about you, works to pay it back. And then at some point, if you need to borrow 500 bucks and he's flush with cash for whatever reason. I mean, when I was growing up, I grew up very poor. And so my friends and I, every now and then we'd be, we'd get some windfall and we'd help each other out. And it was, it was not quite socialist, but it was kind of collective pool of money that we all sort of take, take and give from.
[39:03] And so generosity is saying, look, I can handle it if people aren't generous back, but I need to find out. I need to find out if people are generous back. So, you know, typical example when you're younger is, you know, gosh, I think I worked it out once in like 10 years, I moved 18 times because I was constantly going to various universities and then had to come back home to work in the summers and all that. So when you move, what do you often do? Well, you often get some friends over, give them a couple of beers and a couple of pizzas, and they'll help you move, right? So if you have a friend and you go and help them move, and then they're just, oh dear, I'm just not feeling well when you need me to help you move, oh dear, I can't, right, if that's sort of a consistent thing, then you're in a one-sided relationship. Now, if you won't help them move and then they won't help you move, you never come to any particular resolution. So just go out, be generous, help them move. And then if they will never help you move, you've got to some important truth about the relationship. But sort of hoarding your generosity because you're afraid the other person might not be generous just keeps you trapped in a state of not knowing.
[40:09] And that not knowing stuff is where people get really trapped. So I'm just a big fan of, you know, be generous and see how it plays out. So be generous, but don't be a sucker, right?
[40:20] So be generous and track how that plays out.
[40:26] On page 76, you discuss the importance of empathy. If I remember correctly, you had said something to the extent of one spouse is extremely angry that the other spouse is just not empathizing with them, which you point out is a contradiction. The spouse saying, you should empathize with me while in the process of not empathizing with the other person, asking what might be going on with them.
[40:51] What is empathy? Why is it important in relationships?
[40:54] So empathy is when you correctly understand the emotions of others. And it's very important in life. Empathy is not the same as sympathy, right? So if a woman is walking down, let's get back to a traditional Baldoni comment, right? So a woman's walking down a dark alley and some guy's creeping up behind her. She can barely hear him. He's obviously sneaking, right? So empathy then would be, he wants to do me harm. And that would be a reasonable belief. That's why he's kind of sneaking up like some sort of predator.
[41:30] Now, empathy is when you correctly and accurately interpret the emotional state of other people. In this case, it would be the desire for the man to attack or assault or rape or something like that. Sympathy is when you agree with the validity of those emotions. So if our best friend, his mother, his beloved mother dies, and he's very, very sad, we correctly empathize with his sadness, and we agree with it. I mean, if our beloved mother died, we would also be very sad. So empathy is when you correctly identify somebody else's emotional state, and sympathy is when you agree with it and think it's a positive or natural or healthy thing. So if you judge someone as having, let's go back to the example, let me just sort of reset and just go back to the example that you gave where let's say the woman is like, you never empathize with me. You never empathize with me. Okay. So the big question, and this is really comes back to what we talked about in the first part about curiosity and relationships. The big question is, okay, so for the woman, let's say you're dating a guy who is not very empathetic. Okay.
[42:50] Why? Why are you dating a guy who's not very empathetic? And we look at these states as if they're just purely negative. Well, male success, and it's true for females as well, we just talked male success, but male success relies on selective empathy.
[43:09] Right. So when I was in the business world, we would write what are called RFPs or request for proposal. We respond to requests for proposals and we would try and sell the software that I'd written in prices that range from like a hundred thousand to over a million dollars. Now, of course, there would be half a dozen other companies that wanted to sell the software as well. Right. Did we want to win? Yes, we did. If we won, did the other companies feel bad? Yes, they did. How did I know that because sometimes we didn't win and I felt bad, right? If you're in a running race, you want to win, and that means that the other people are going to lose. So you can't have excessive empathy in male competition because male competition tends to be win-lose. I mean, it's win-win for society in general in the long run, but with regards to your specific competitors, right? If you're playing basketball, you want to win, that means the other team's going to be sad, right? If you want to get a job and there's 10 other applicants, you want the job, which means the other 10 other applicants are going to be sad. So a woman who chooses a man who does not have a lot of empathy is choosing a man with a significant ability or advantage in competition. He's going to win a lot because he can just focus on winning and he's not going to empathize. A man with excessive empathy is going to feel bad that other people are losing and that probably going to interfere with his capacity to.
[44:36] Win so you know if you're hunting to go back in time if you're hunting on the plains and there's some other tribe that's also hunting and uh you know they do you want them to get the deer or do you want yourself to get the deer because if they get the deer well they're happy and you're sad if you get the deer you're happy and they're sad or hungry or whatever right now of course evolution would demand that we get the deer for ourselves. And that means having a lack of empathy for others. So women who complain about men being emotionally unavailable, okay, but to some degree, in order to win, we have to be emotionally unavailable. We have to be kind of bloody-minded and cold-hearted and be willing to have a lot of people be unhappy because we win and others lose. So a woman who just complains that the man is not empathetic is not looking at all the upside of that lack of empathy.
[45:28] Which is that he's going to win and gain more resources for her and for the children. That's sort of one aspect. The other is the imputation of immoral conclusions to other people's emotional states. You know, you are cold and unempathetic and uncaring and bad, and you're just lacerating the man's heart. Well, I mean, that's like saying to, it's like smacking someone on the face saying you're flinching. It's like, well, the attack is causing the response. If a man feels nagged, belittled, criticized, and that there's something fundamentally wrong with his entire emotional makeup, how's that supposed to fix his emotional distance? You're just attacking and it just creates scar tissue after scar tissue after scar tissue.
[46:15] It doesn't give you access to people's inner lives to morally condemn them for characteristics that were part of what you chose, right? I mean, to choose a romantic partner and then to condemn or criticize that romantic partner is morally crazy. It's so dysfunctional. It's like watching a bird attack its reflection. I mean, the women who complain about the men they choose or the men who complain about the women they choose, you're just condemning your own choice.
[46:43] I mean, especially in marital partners, I mean, if I get a chance to test drive a car for 18 months, and then I get to use that car for another year, and then I finally buy that car, and then five minutes later, I'm like, this is the worst car ever. And it's like, but you got to test drive it. Nobody forced you to buy the car.
[47:08] You got to evaluate it for years, which is the dating life. You get to date someone usually for a year or two. maybe you spend six to 12 months engaged and you finally get married. So you've had years and years to figure out if that's the right person for you. And then to morally condemn that person is the strangest thing in the world. It is the strangest thing in the world. And the fact that people don't just roll their eyes at this stuff is one of the reasons why these complaints continue in a very negative and destructive way. And so, yeah, if a man is, let's say the man is kind of cold and unempathetic. Okay. Well, you chose him in part because of that. There's a real upside to that, which he gets to win without his conscience being overly disturbed.
[47:46] And if it is a big problem in the relationship, then you need to get to the cause. What is the cause of someone lacking empathy? What is the cause? And you have to then go back to early childhood. You know, a lot of times, you know, there's this meme, it's kind of a bitter meme, but I think there's some truth in it in some circumstances where the woman is saying to the man, no, no, no, you need to tell me your deepest thoughts and fears. And he's like, no, I'm good. You keep using those against me. So I'm not gonna, no, thanks. Thanks, but no thanks. And that was.
[48:21] Where vulnerability has been used to manage or control people, to bully them, that's not a small consideration, particularly for men, right? So the typical thing is some guy says, I'm afraid of spiders to his friends, right? So what are his friends' first impulse is to cover him in spiders. Now, you could say, no, no, no, there's just exposure therapy and they're trying to help, but that's not really the motive, right? Or if a man says, oh, I really like that girl, a lot of times he'll be mocked or they'll make, oh, why don't you go talk to her? They'll say really loudly with the girl in the vicinity and so on. And this can happen with women as well. But a lot of times for men, when we're growing up and we're open and we're vulnerable and we talk about what we think and feel, well, that's kind of used against us. And that just makes you a little bit more guarded. And so going back and trying to figure that stuff out is really important. So if somebody lacks empathy, let's say that the woman is entirely correct. He just lacks empathy. Okay, well, why? Why does he lack empathy? And that is a very interesting story and journey to go on, rather than just morally condemning someone, which just drives them further away.
[49:38] How can men deal with a fear of rejection productively?
[49:46] Hmm yeah that's that's one of the biggest passages in a man's life and i'm old enough now that i've seen that fork in the road right that fork in the road where somebody's like the young men are like i really want to go talk to girls but i don't know they turn to you know the usual substitutes of video games and pornography instead that is catastrophic for men as a whole It's very hard to recover from taking that route of avoidance, particularly in your teens and early twenties, because it just gets worse and worse later on. A fear, a necessary fear that is avoided tends to strengthen. And it's sort of like if you're on an airplane and the door's open and you've been kidnapped, but you've managed to chew your way free and it's coming out over the water, but it's climbing. It's like, when's the time to jump? Well, the answer is as soon as possible, because it doesn't get better from here. Like if you jump to 50 feet, you're probably okay. 150 feet, kind of rough, 1,000 feet, I don't know what happens, but it's probably not good.
[50:48] So things, necessary fears avoided tend to strengthen over time. And if you think you can't do it now, it's probably not going to be any easier. In fact, it's probably going to be harder down the road. And of course, in the modern world, if men avoid that process of just asking girls out and some say yes, some say no, some laugh at you, some whatever will spread rumors, some will be offended, whatever, right? I mean, if you avoid that and then you stay single into your 20s or maybe your 30s, then most women will assume that you're just a video game pornography or weed addict or something like that. and then you lack necessary skills. Like it's one thing if, you know, you go out and get your job in your teens or whatever and you start your work experience that way. Okay, you can get jobs. You can learn how to navigate because, you know, the worst bosses are at the bottom. Like good bosses don't end up managing teenagers. They end up managing professionals. So the worst bosses are all at the bottom. So it's real trial by fire. When you get your first jobs and if you wait and don't get a job until and you're still unemployed with no work experience in your 20s or your 30s or whatever, I mean, who's going to hire you?
[51:59] Because the one thing your boss knows for sure is you're fine not working and it hasn't bothered you. And that's just going to be negative for the boss as a whole. You know, there's the old saying in business, if you want something done, give it to the busy guy, right? Because the guys who aren't busy aren't good at doing things and just are bad places to park your necessary tasks. So a fear of rejection, it is, you know, it is tough. You know, most men, we have a strategy, which is we aim high, right? We aim high. And then we just lower our standards until a woman says yes, or a girl says yes. And that's entirely reasonable. That's, that's entirely the right, the right approach, because it's hard for a man to gauge his own sexual marketplace value. At least it was when I was a teenager. So yeah, you, you sort of aim at the top and work your way down until the girl says, a girl says yes. And then you just try to flail your way forward and see what's going to happen. And hopefully you have parents who can help you with this kind of stuff and give you good advice. Um, that's not as common as it used to be, I think, because values have changed so much. The parental advice is not particularly helpful for a lot of people these days, but yeah, To overcome your fear of rejection is you just have to take the long view, which is it's going to hurt now to be told no. Sure, I get that.
[53:21] But what's it going to do in 10 years if you avoid that? You know, if you're 18 and 17 or whatever, you don't ask any girls out. Okay, 27, 28, early 30s, you still haven't asked a girl out. Well, then what?
[53:35] It's going to be almost infinitely worse. Because either you're going to ask a girl out who's got, or a woman, I guess, by that time, who's got a lot of experience in dating. That doesn't necessarily mean she's got a high body count, but she's had some experience in dating, in which case you're trying to play chess with someone you're just starting to learn and they've already been doing it for five or 10 years, they're not going to want to play with you because the skill disparity is too wide, right?
[54:01] And, or it's going to be some other woman who doesn't know what she's doing because she's never dated. And then you've got two people trying to flail away, trying to figure out relationships on the fly with no experience. And that the odds of that working are low. And of course, the other thing too, when you start asking women out in your teens, you have a pretty wide market to choose from because very few of the women are, married and, you know, have kids and all that kind of stuff. But, you know, women get, do you think the claw, right? The claw, like in the arcades, right? The claw is taking, constantly taking great women out of circulation, right? If there's a great woman, you know, she's moral, virtuous, and courageous, and all these kinds of wonderful stuff, beautiful. Then And some guy's going to date her and snap her up real quick and marry her and make sure she's happy and stay with her and so on. And so the pickings get real slim, real slim in your early 30s in particular. What do they say in Japan? The Christmas cake girls, which is after the age of 25, nobody wants them. After the age of 20, after the 25th, nobody wants the Christmas cake anymore because it gets kind of brittle. So, who's left?
[55:16] Who's left? Do you want to go to a garage sale first thing in the morning or last thing in the afternoon? Well, if there are going to be treasures to be found, it's going to be first thing in the morning because last thing in the afternoon, what's left? You know, busted bicycles and John Anderson cassette tapes and, you know, just nothing of any particular value is left over. Um actually believe it or not i found a john anderson tape of a great a great um album called animation uh at a garage sale and i listened to it for years but anyway that's just my he's a he's a squeaky voice mickey mouse kind of singer but uh it is it's going to be way harder down the road.
[55:58] And you will be less skilled more time will have gone by and there will be very very few quality women left. And it just gets harder the longer you wait. It's like that, you know, just think of that airplane going up over water, right? The longer you wait, the harder it is when you hit that water. And, you know, whether you succeed or not in your early relationships, and it's better if you do, obviously, but it really matters that you're in relationships, figuring out what you like, what you don't like, what standards you're willing to put up with, what standards you won't put up with how to lead and be led in various instances in the relationship, how to navigate and try and figure out win-win negotiations, all of that kind of stuff, that there's really no substitute for experience. And...
[56:50] You just have to be, like a lot of fears, you have to be more afraid of not doing it than doing it. And that means casting yourself down the road. And also, you know, when you ask a woman out, and I mean, almost all men have had this experience. You ask a woman out and she says no. Most women will say no in a nice way. They're real. You know, oh, I'm busy or I have to wash my hair that night or, you know, the old time standard. oh, maybe we can all just go out as a group rather than just you and I or something like that, right? So most women will say no in a fairly positive or friendly manner.
[57:27] And it's tough for women because they want to say no, but they don't want to encourage you, right? So they want to say no, but not in a way that you're like, oh, I'll just try again. Oh, I'll just try again. So it's tough. It's tough for women from that standpoint. But most women will say no in a fairly friendly manner. and if a woman is says no in a really rude or aggressive or belittling manner well thank goodness you didn't date her like that's just you know that's that's like um you try to get a job you think it'll be a good job but the bot like the guy who would be a hiring guy you know just kind of screams and belittles at you in the interview it'd be like well that's kind of unpleasant but man thank goodness i didn't get that job and find out later about the nastiness of this person so and you know what you'll be fine people will be fine rejection is fine you know four and a half or five years ago i got deplatformed it's fine i'm actually happier doing what i'm doing now and i think i'm providing more value to philosophy in the long run rather than just endlessly analyzing current events so you'll be fine you'll be fine the only thing that you can survive is death and everything else will make you stronger.
[58:34] Would you agree that the level of confidence that almost anyone has in anything, in life in general, men in relationships, women in relationships, the level of confidence people have is determined by the number of options they have available to them? Is that more or less true?
[58:52] Hmm, that's interesting. The number of options.
[58:58] I'm not, I mean, certainly I can see that point, and I think that there's some value in it. But when you're out of options, you can be incredibly strong. You know, think of the sort of cornered rat, you know, they'll attack a bear if they have to, if there's no other option for them. So sometimes being out of options gives you some real commitment and strength. I remember sort of going back in time, my first professional job, which was a maintenance programmer on a tandem system with COBOL 74.
[59:28] 74 is the year that it came out. So, you know, we're going back a ways year. But it was in fact 1974, not 18. Anyway. So, and I remember I got that job because I was out of options. I was, I was like, I had no money. It was a recession. And I remember I had a woman I was working with to try and get work. And I was like, I just called her up. I was completely desperate. Like I'd love to work with something in computers. I absolutely need a job. I'm desperate. I'll clean computers. I'll move computers. I'll dust computers. I don't, but just please, and she ended up sending me on this interview. I got the job and sort of built my career up from there. So certainly options are helpful, but sometimes having only one choice or being out of options can make you incredibly strong and forthright. And of course, there is the other issue as well with options, which is, you know, fairly well known, particularly for women in dating apps, which is option paralysis, which is a woman who has, you know, 10 guys a day sliding into her DMS.
[1:00:30] Who does she choose? And who does she settle down with? And so, I wonder if it's an Aristotelian mean, like a medium amount of options. Too many options can paralyze you, and too few options can weaken your confidence. And of course, one of the things you have to do in life is you have to, and I think this is to your point, Keith, I think you have to really work to expand your options.
[1:00:57] And to have your you know in a sense dip your toes in a bunch of different pools have a lot of fishing rods in the water so um to to make yeah i think certainly if you if you have more choices you you have more options but sometimes it takes confidence to just try a bunch of different things and uh keep your options open but yeah i think too many options i've seen that with a lot of people too many options can paralyze this is sort of what's the guy who sold, minecraft to to um microsoft for like two and a half billion dollars because he didn't really want to um be a manager um and then he's like yeah i can go anywhere do anything i can buy anything i want and um nothing has any particular meaning and i'm kind of depressed so options can be a problem, too few options can really sharpen your, think of the concentration. If you're like, I don't know, stuck on a desert island, you absolutely need to catch that fish or you're going to starve. Well, you're really going to be locked in, as my daughter said, really focused, right? But if you have too many options, I think that can weaken people's resolution and have them not settle for much of anything, if that makes sense.
[1:02:13] One of the things that my generation had been told for so long was that women really want a nice, kind guy. Therefore, if you want a lot of options in the dating market, be a nice guy, approach a woman with flowers, give her gifts, etc. Now, this was just waiting to backfire, and it's come in the form of guys really liking Andrew Tate's content, which is basically a reflection of this advice being so bad, it took someone like Andrew Tate and Jordan Peterson, both of which I think have very, well, respecting attributes. Attributes, it took them to actually lay out the truth that women look much more for social status, look much more for income, and care a great deal about confidence. Kindness, while it exists, is a little further down the list. When it comes to what men can do to increase the number of options they have in the dating market, what is some advice you would give?
[1:03:17] Well you know women are individuals and while they obviously share some characteristics it's kind of tough to put them into one blob like you know when you'd have that play-doh you get it all of these strips with different colors and then every now and then you try and merge it into big, undifferentiated multicolored diversity blob of of various marbled stuff and so So women with regards to kindness, sure. I mean, look, men want things that are contradictory in women sometimes, and sometimes women want things that are contradictory in men. So a woman wants a man who's tough and unempathetic outside the home and then sensitive and warm inside the home, right? So she wants him to be able to go out and elbow other guys aside and get the prize and get the money and get the victories and win and so on. So she wants him to be sort of cold-eyed and James Bondy outside the home and then um.
[1:04:15] She wants him to be warm-hearted, caring, and empathetic inside the home, in particular with regards to the children. So that's an ideal. Men have to straddle that divide. And yes, we have to be tough as nails outside the home, and then we have to be playful and warm-hearted with regards to our children, and so on. But of course, men want things that are contradictory in women as well. So men want, you know, a skinny, sexy, cold, great in bed, slightly unstable women sometimes, but also matronly and warm hearted mothers for their children, right?
[1:04:54] So because the purpose of being sexy is to have children, having children is less sexy because, you know, you're covered in spit up and you've probably gained a bit of weight and you're not getting much sleep and so on, So men want women to be sexy and also to be great mothers. And those two things are not necessarily always going hand in hand as easily. So yeah, okay, so we want contradictory things from each other. I mean, that keeps things spicy, that keeps things interesting. I don't think there's anything wrong with that fundamentally, or even if you think there is, it still is a fact. So, with regards to these contradictions with women, if you are a nice guy...
[1:05:41] Then you will tend to attract nicer women. If you are a cold-hearted guy, then you will tend to attract cold-hearted women. And then what people do is they say, well, the women that I'm attracted, well, that's foundational female nature. And that's just not true, right? I mean, we recognize, as men, we recognize this if some woman has a habit of dating assholes or bastards, right? There's cold-hearted, mean, selfish guys. And she says, well, men are just like that, right? And it's like, no, no, the men you choose are like that, right? There's another one of these bitter tweets, and I won't use the rude word, but this woman said, oh, I only seem to attract F boys, right? And her friend said, no, no, no, you're a very attractive woman. You attract every man. You just choose F boys.
[1:06:37] And so the standards that we have are the people we attract and it's very easy to say that the people i attract are somehow foundational to human nature like i happen to run this philosophy show i've been doing it for almost 20 years and so i could say well it is the nature of friends family and listeners to be you know deeply introspective and philosophical and think about. That's human nature. It's like, well, no, that's just the values that I have and the people who are around me. There are lots of people who aren't that way at all, right? It's this kind of projection is one of the foundations, believe it or not, of socialism and communism. So in socialism and communism, these sort of abstract, no calluses, weak-fingered intellectuals look at to toiling workers, right? And they say, God, I'd hate to do that. Oh, that would just be the worst thing ever. And then they say, well, because I would hate doing that job, they must hate it too. Because I would much rather own the means of production rather than.
[1:07:48] Be a worker. All the workers must also want to own the means of production rather than be workers. And all it tells you is that people have never worked with, quote, workers, right? I mean, I got my first job at the age of 10. I worked in hardware stores. I worked cleaning offices. I worked at restaurants. And a lot of times, the workers had nothing but pity for the bosses because the bosses had to deal with all the yelling customers. The bosses had to sit there grinding over paperwork. The bosses had to fire people and deal with all that unpleasantness. They got yelled at by head office for not meeting quotas. Whereas, if you're a worker, you just come in, you punch your clock, you do your work, you head out. And the bosses had to take phone calls or do work outside of hours. They had to work weekends, nights sometimes.
[1:08:36] And whenever the employees were going home, the bosses were still up there grinding through paychecks and and doing accounting and paperwork so a lot of people looked at the bosses like man you couldn't pay me to do that job like what a nightmare i want to just you know i i just i work to live right i i come in i put my eight hours i go home and i uh i play my hockey and i have my barbecues on the weekend and we go to the beach and and that they didn't want right that so you just have to understand um rather than say well um if i would hate that then the people who are doing it must hate it. And that's not the way it is. And so if you're a nice guy, then you're more likely to attract a nice woman. Now, the nice woman is going to need to know that you have the capacity to not be a nice guy, because otherwise you can't win, right? You can't go out there and compete and win in any kind of consistent way. And so it's more like our drives are driven by the needs of our children. Most like why does sexuality develop? What do we find attractive? A lot of it has to do with the needs of the children.
[1:09:47] So we want to marry the most attractive woman around because attractiveness is a sign of good genes, right? Clear skin, clear eyes, a good hip to waist ratio, a relative slenderness in a time of plenty shows self-discipline, which shows intelligence. BMI is a proxy for IQ to a not insignificant degree. And so we want to choose genetic fitness for our children and genetic fitness for men has to do a lot with what is considered attractive in women. And so why are men visual creatures? Because we scan for genes. Now, the woman is scanning for genes as well, but not quite the physical attraction genes. That's more of a modern phenomenon. What she's scanning for is the combination of kindness and coldness, kindness within the family, coldness when it comes to competing outside the family. So she's looking for a guy who's nice but tough.
[1:10:44] And so, you know, we have these challenges, these contradictions, and so on. You know, like guys like women who are really attractive, but really attractive women, especially in the age of social media, are often addicted to male attention and have a tough time pair bonding. So we want a woman who's really attractive, you know, the male fantasy of the librarian that we talked about before, you know, that she doesn't even know, she doesn't even know how attractive she is.
[1:11:10] That's not a very realistic phenomenon. Women have to know how attractive they are in order to get the maximum resources out of the men. But all of this has to do with what's best for the children. The hijacking of sexuality to serve the needs of vanity or lust is to uncouple sexuality from its purpose, which is to create a healthy and productive and good gene environment for your offspring. That's really the purpose of sexuality.
[1:11:36] And to hijack that and say, the purpose of sexuality is to make me money by showing my skin, or the purpose of sexuality is my own personal orgasm pleasure, regardless of pair bonding or what's good for kids. Why is human sexuality so powerful and so strong? Because it's supposed to unite people in a pair bonded marriage for like 60 years. That's a lot of glue. You need a pretty strong, you know, that guy's hanging from the beam with his construction helmet on all of those ads for crazy glue. You need that. And then to sort of hijack that for just money or for sexual gratification and so on, it's really not a great idea. And this is a wisdom that we used to have that we don't as much anymore. So yeah, there are nice women out there and there are nice guys out there and there are cold-hearted men and women out there but to say that my particular preferences somehow reflect essential elemental human nature no i mean it's the old thing like hypergamy yeah that's a thing that's a thing for sure but sometimes women sleep at the pool boy and that's not hypergamy at all so it's it's complicated.
[1:12:49] On page 117, you say, the first thing that you need to do in order to begin the process of destroying a child's mind is you set up categories, empty categories, which are moral absolutes. Can you explain what you mean by this?
[1:13:08] Do I say what those empty categories are? I'm sorry to ask you to sort of flail around in the book for a moment. Empty categories that are moral absolutes. I think I know what it is, but go ahead.
[1:13:22] I know it's not exactly in the kindergarten book, but trust me. Well, don't trust me. Let me reason it out and see if you believe me. This is how it works. You, with great reverence, as a corrupting teacher or parent or person with authority, you get, with great reverence, you vividly describe and are enormously passionate about things which the child cannot see. You go on to say, you speak with enormous reverence and passion about things which the child cannot see. And the child, of course, is baffled. You familiar with this section?
[1:13:57] Yeah, yeah. Okay, I understand that. I understand that. So, we are supposed to love virtue, and virtue is supposed to be empirical, right? I mean, if somebody says, I'm a good person, well, compared to what? And what's the evidence, right? Because anybody can say anything, right? It's that old New Yorker cartoon from many years ago where dogs typing says, you know, the great thing about the internet, nobody knows you're a dog. So, I mean, this is sort of a catfishing thing. And, you know, those big drum rolls when the woman steps back with a slender face to the camera to reveal this bulbous Jabba the Hutt sort of frame. So.
[1:14:35] We must love virtue, and virtue must be empirical. Now, if you're going to create categories of things that you're supposed to love, that don't exist in the real world, then you are taking people's passionate attachments and putting them to manipulatable objects. So, one example would be, love your country, right? Love your country, okay? Well, the country is a concept. The country does not exist in reality. And I know people have a tough time because they'll say, well, look, there are borders, there are walls, there's different colors on the map. I get all of that, but it still doesn't exist.
[1:15:17] There was a sort of very bad plane landed a couple of years ago in Canada, and people just wandered off the plane and into Canada. You know, they didn't have to, I mean, obviously they would be rounded up and then end up going through customs, but they just walked off the tarmac into Canada or the 7 million people under Biden who came sort of pouring into the country as if there was no border, right? So they said, well, so people can just walk across the line on the map and it's not a Grand Canyon. It's not a fiery pit. It's not, you know, a 500 foot tall wall. It's just a line on a map and you can just walk across it. This is not to say that, you know, countries don't exist conceptually. They certainly do. And the laws certainly change, or at least they used to, from one country to another. So when you take children's desire for love and attachment and you then jam it into a concept, then you are taking away the empiricism and value of loving virtue. So if you say, well, I should love my country. Okay. Let's say love America. Okay. Well, what is it that you love? Okay.
[1:16:30] Do you love the geography? That's kind of odd, isn't it? I mean, there's nice geography in America, but there's also not so nice geography in America. Do you love the leaders? That's really dicey. And historically, that doesn't end too well when people get over-attached to the value and imaginary virtues of the leaders. Do you love the values your country represents? Okay, but then why not just love those values, right? So if you say, well, America has a First Amendment, So we love freedom of speech. Okay, freedom of speech is a core value for me and one of the greatest values in the known universe because without freedom of speech, people can't really think. And the denial of thinking is the denial of humanity. And the only people who want to deny your capacity to think are people who want you to not be critical of their lies. So you say, okay, so wouldn't you just love freedom of speech? Rather than, because there are lots of people in America who really dislike freedom of speech and want it gone. So, rather than having a proxy, just love the virtues and values themselves. And the same thing can happen with gods, the same thing can happen with races, the same thing can happen with classes, the same thing can happen. You are just taking children's.
[1:17:48] Affection and attachments, and rather than connecting them to the actual practical virtues manifested by an individual, you're plugging them into empty concepts that almost always turn out to be serving the needs of those in power, right? So, we saw this happen under COVID. Well, you're supposed to love science. Just trust the science. And it's like, but science is specifically founded on a lack of trust.
[1:18:16] It is, I mean, this is all scientific thinking is founded upon skepticism of experts, right? And this is, I think that was an old quote by a scientist. And so science is not to be trusted. Otherwise, there wouldn't be a peer review process, however crappy it is often. You wouldn't need to be able to reproduce the experiments. You wouldn't share your data so that other people could re-evaluate and re-interpret and make sure you came to the right conclusions. So trust the science is one of the greatest oxymorons in human history because you're taking, like, who should we trust? We should trust people who have exhibited the empirical characteristics of trustworthiness, right? They've acted in a consistent, self-critical manner. They release their sources. They accept criticisms. They entertain alternate hypotheses. They can steel man, the opposing arguments, and all of that, right? So trust the science. Well, the science is an empty concept. There are some scientists who are trustworthy, very few these days, in my opinion, because science has just become another government program. So you don't trust the science. That's an empty concept. And it turns out to mean just trust the pronouncements of people who keep changing their minds. Like Fauci was pro-mask and then anti-mask. And he was very pro that six foot distancing thing. Then later he said, Oh, it didn't actually come out of nowhere. We don't really know where that came from. So trust the science means do not...
[1:19:43] Critically think about the pronouncements of people who are contradicting themselves a lot.
[1:19:49] And that's not a good idea. So you're creating this empty category called the science and Fauci even said to criticize him is to criticize science or something like that, which is not very scientific in my humble opinion. So that's, that was an example of like, trust the science. It's like, but no, no, I trust people who have exhibited the characteristics of trustworthiness, which means all the stuff I said before, but I'm not going to trust an abstract category with no personal content in it, if that makes sense.
[1:20:20] I think one of the great red flags to look for in relationships is people who are ever terrified of like a little bit of accountability.
[1:20:30] And this came to mind because you mentioned the COVID thing. I had asked someone who was a big masker, a big lockdowner, and just could not wait for the vaccine. She had explicitly said she would be getting the vaccine before a single vaccine existed and before there were peer-reviewed studies. So immediately, I know this isn't anything scientific. And I asked her, hey, we just published a book called Diary of A-Psychosis at the Libertarian Institute by Tom Woods.
[1:21:00] Yeah, I've read that. It's very good.
[1:21:02] And he found that there was no noticeable difference between the 25 most locked down states and the 25 states that had the most lax lockdown restrictions. And when it came to mask mandates, he actually found there was no difference. Now, at the time, you never said, hey, if some states lock down and some don't, the results will be similar. You didn't say that. You said there's going to be mass death if there isn't mass mandates and lockdowns. And I said, does this give you a little insecurity?
[1:21:37] Is this something you're going to have to rethink? Is it the people you listen to who are wrong? Is it just you were scared and you went with what the television was saying? I have asked this to about probably three or four big masters that I know. Each time, the look on their face was so shocked that I was even pushing back on this at all because they just came in this with the best of intentions. And for me to even be questioning them, this was a stressful time. What are you picking out numbers for? I was doing the best I could. That is one of the best litmus tests that I've come up with for good relationships is to hold them accountable in something that's more or less cut and dry at this point. People are just not bragging about the lockdowns. John Ratcliffe coming out saying that the lab leak was the most likely explanation for the origin of COVID-19. something Tucker Carlson said, I think, in 2020 on his show. So that is one of my favorite litmus tests for relationships. Bring up something that you more or less have them dead to rights to and see whether or not they're open-minded. What are some litmus tests that you like to use in relationships to see if someone is really worth investing time into?
[1:22:49] I mean, most people... Don't do what's right. They do what's approved of. So I think you said it was a woman who was, you know, I'll take the vaccine. Well, that's because she would be praised for doing that. Right. So her friends, her family, her doctor would praise her. Oh, it's so responsible. You're really taking care of the elderly and the sick and you're doing your part. And right. So they're not doing the right thing. They're doing what is approved of.
[1:23:17] And I can't trust people who have as their morality that which people approve. Because that's the reason why propaganda exists. Propaganda exists to create an imaginary consensus to sway people who do what others approve of, right? So if it's on the television and they say X, Y, and Z, right? Anybody who's skeptical of the COVID vaccine is an anti-science, anti-vaxxer who's threatening people's lives, extending the pandemic and causing all kinds of selfish mayhem for blah, blah, blah, blah, right? So, and for this, de-platforming works, you know, people just attach all these negative labels to me to the point where, well, boy, anybody who defends that guy clearly agrees with all of these negative labels we've attached to the guy. So, I can't possibly trust people who don't have an abstract standard of virtue and truth that exists independent of approval. How could you? Because they're just any way the wind blows kinds of people so when i meet people and um i do so quite a bit in the world when i meet people um i will you know ask them we'll talk and some at some point they'll bring up something that's not true i'll bring up something that's not true and, you know the big one of course is safe and effective right um well not after a couple of months of testing you can't possibly know the long-term effects of a novel.
[1:24:46] Treatment or prophylactic that there is no long-term safety data. And you can't possibly know that it's safe after a couple of months of testing, especially when the manufacturer is demanding immunity from liability and won't release the data. I mean, that was not a complicated one. That was not the toughest IQ test in the known universe. So when people say things that are false, I'll just ask them how they know and provide them some counter evidence. It's really that simple. And if they wave away the counter evidence or they poo-poo or they get emotionally aggressive or they escalate or they get distant or they signal disapproval, it's like, okay, well, you know, good luck with your so-called life, but I'm tapping out. So yeah, just provide people some contradictory information and see if they can process it. You know, I mean, the typical one is, you know, the fine people hoax, right? Oh, Trump referred to neo-Nazis as very fine people. It's like, nope, nope. And here's the video. I can beam the video to your butt in less than a second.
[1:25:53] If people reject that, then they don't have any allegiance to the truth. They don't have any abstract moral standards. They will do whatever the mob tells them to do. They don't, from a moral standpoint, they don't have any free will. They don't exist as an independent thinking, choosing consciousness. They simply do what they perceive of as the safest thing.
[1:26:22] So the media by amplifying all of the covet hysteria created a sense of consensus that it was safer to agree with the media and less safe to be skeptical of the media and so most people make decisions based upon safety now this sounds like a big moral condemnation i'm not meaning it like that because if all of our ancestors were indifferent to social approval we probably wouldn't be here because we all have to navigate social approval and we all have to try and find a way to deal with the random attacks of the highly programmable and dangerous mob and that's just you know that's just a factor you can you can hike through africa pretending that there are no predators, but you're probably not going to get very far. Or if you do, it's just going to be by luck. So we do have to recognize that we do have to make choices sometimes for the sake of safety rather than the truth. So there's a continuum, but the people who were just 100% on the side of safety rather than truth are too easy to manipulate and they'll turn on you like that if they're told to, and therefore you can't really trust them.
[1:27:43] How long have you and your wife been married?
[1:27:46] We've been together 24 years, married 23.
[1:27:49] And if you could go back 24 years and give yourself any advice about marriage, what would you say to yourself? Last question.
[1:27:58] Yeah, I sort of hate to say this, but because I'm very happy with where my life is at and how it's all turned out, I would be concerned about any butterfly effect, which is to go back and change something, then I would end up with something that wasn't, um, the way, the way that it is. So I would not in particular, I mean, it's been such a wonderful journey and, uh, it's been, you know, we just spent all morning chatting and laughing about stuff and, and she's just the best company on the planet for me. And, um, I'm looking forward to growing old with her. And I really wouldn't want to go back and change anything because where we are is so great that I wouldn't want to mess with whatever formula got us here, if that makes any sense.
[1:28:45] Yeah. And is it because you guys read a lot of books and try a lot of different things? Like your curiosity is what makes the relationship so interesting? Because you're always coming at each other every day with new experiences about the world and ideas to share. Is curiosity the thing that keeps you guys together because you're both individually growing so much?
[1:29:07] I think curiosity is a tertiary factor. The primary factor is, I mean, I think we're the most moral people that each other knows. And, you know, her moral courage, her steadfastness, her honesty, her directness, um it's just amazing to me and i know that she has respect for um what i've done in the world over the years and what i've done at home over the years i love her as a mother she loves me as a dad and so i think virtue is the foundational thing and when you really respect someone's virtues you just want to know more and more about them every thought is generally pleasant or enjoyable Or if it's challenging, it's challenging in a kind of hard-worked-out, good way. So I think it is the moral virtues that keep us so united. And it is the—because I love her virtues, I'm always curious about her thoughts, if that makes sense.
[1:30:04] The book is Real-Time Relationships, The Logic of Love by Stefan Molyneux. Thanks to everyone for watching. T-Site Don't Tread on Anyone and the Libertarian Institute. Mr. Molyneux, thank you.
[1:30:15] At freedomain.com. Thanks, Keith. Always a great pleasure.
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