The Scott Adams School - 08/27/26 Stefan Molyneux returns!

Oh, surprise! We're early. That's I think this is a first, by the way, in the 160-something shows. But who's counting? So let's get this going. Good morning, everybody. Good morning, locals. We're just gonna give a second for YouTube and Rumble and X. and Spotify to kick in. Look who's here, Stefan Molyneux! Could you just be so excited or what? I am. Oh, and Owen. Owen's here too.

Oh, and Owen. Just a little parenthetical afterthought.

Don't worry, Stefan. He gives me heck all the time, so I can give him some hell back. Trust me. Trust me. So Marcela's off today, you guys. I'm hoping she'll be back tomorrow. She's just just working some stuff and hoping to finish it up by tomorrow. She'll be back for fun time Friday or Friday or F it Friday, whatever you want to call it. But in the meantime, we are so excited, Stefan, to have you here for the hour. You have a lot going on, and we're going to talk about all of it and. There's my girlfriend Mindy. Hey, Mindy. All right, so let's do the thing that we, we can't wait to do before we can do anything else. Was that persuasive? No? Okay, here we go.

And everything's starting to go really well for you anyway. Too bad about other people, but you're doing great. And the only way that you could do better is with the simultaneous sip, and all it takes is a cup or a mug or a glass of Tiger Chalice or Steiner Kantine. Joker flask, a vessel of any kind. Fill it with your favorite liquid. I like coffee. And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure, the dopamine hit of the day, the thing that makes everything better except my air quality. It's called the simultaneous sip, and it happens now. Go. Ah, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's good.

Yep, that was good. Air quality. The day before was taxes, this day was air quality. So we know kind of what's been going on in Scott's world at that time, those fires. So, Stefan, welcome back. How are you?

I'm well. You know, I gotta tell you, every time I see Scott, it's this bittersweet wave of nostalgia, sorrow, and sadness, and only the good die young. And, uh, it's It moves me and I still miss him. He was a big influence on my life. I was fortunate to have a couple of shows together with him over the years. It hits me in the heart and the feels to see him again. They should take that set and put it in the Smithsonian or something like that. It should be preserved. This is where huge amounts of geyser-like wisdom flowed out of that lovely man. I hope someone— something's being done to preserve it all.

I feel exactly the same way. And, you know, we were fortunate enough, Owen and I, to be there and to see Scott's desk and the whole setup. And I even said to his family, I'm like, can I just, like, purchase all of that and somehow maneuver that huge thing just back here? Like, 'cause, you know, the house is for sale, it's gonna be sold. And, you know, I'm like, they're, you know, I hope the person that buys it will at least see some of his, uh, YouTube videos and just be like, oh wow, you know. But it's, uh, it's a bummer. It's a bummer.

It was so homey, you know. It really just felt like you were having coffee with a friend in the morning. Uh, you know, my studio setup is like the afterlife. Uh, like it's a gray limbo from your grandmother's, uh, dreams. And so having that sort of homey setting is really— it was really nice.

It was really nice. I know, it was really nice. And it was, um, I, I tried to explain it to people because, you know, you imagine it in your head. It was a very big room and it had a beautiful vista and a wraparound balcony, and it was on the second floor of his house, which a lot of people didn't know. Um, like the Spanish tile floors, and you'd hear him rolling his chair over the tiles when he'd push back. And, uh, from his desk to the shelves behind him was a good distance, so he had a lot of space and room and It was just a perfect spot for him to work his magic. So, yeah, it is a magical set, if I had to put a word to it. And I wish there was a museum right now that it could just be placed into, and people could take pictures behind the desk. I mean, that's how I see it, like an Oval Office. Owen, any more on walking into Scott's office?

Yeah, it was kind of surreal, but also just magical. I mean, I think it was great to see it. I was lucky enough to— visit with Scott before he had his final days. And, um, he gave me a tour, showed me his balcony. Um, and it was an interesting story that he told me where apparently when he built his house, he didn't realize what an awesome view he had from the second floor. And he told me, he's like, if I had known, like if I'd gone up on a ladder and seen how incredible this view from the balcony is, I would have designed my house completely differently with like lots of windows and, you know, views. And like, he just didn't know. Because there were trees around his property. So he built his house just thinking, okay, I'm just gonna see my neighbors in the trees. And then when he went out there, he's like, oh my God, like, there's all the mountains in the distance. And it was just beautiful. But, and that's right outside his office. So it was, it was kind of incredible just to see what his daily life was like.

Yeah, the best view is definitely from his office. So that worked out well, for sure. That is interesting, you guys, when you buy a house, maybe to have someone take a drone up a little bit for you so you can see what the view is going to be like from the second floor, and you might want to design things differently. Lesson learned. Okay, so, Stefan, so many things. Let's do one thing first. So we make sure people know that you have a debate coming up in Nashville. And is it Nashville?

Yes, Nashville.

Okay. Why don't you tell everybody what that is? In case— are there tickets still available?

They're almost out. Yeah, wordwardebate.com. It's September 12th in Nashville. I'll be debating Jay Dyer on the existence of God and virtue and all kinds of great things. And it's sort of like this scene, you know, at the end of the horror movie. Maybe that's not the best way to tell it, but you know the scene at the end of the horror movie where they buried the vampire or something like that, and then, you know, they try to leave and the hand comes up and grabs them at the leg? So I have been recently shocked back into existence by a variety of folks because I guess, like Scott, I did my time in the wilderness. After the election cycle of 2020, I was cast into the outer rim, into the outer darkness, and spent, uh, I'm half a decade, you know, I wasn't playing stadiums, I was playing jazz clubs, which is fun and, and fine too. And Locals platform, of course, was very, uh, great for that. And I wrote a couple more books. I wrote my big book on parenting and so on, because no philosophers have ever really dealt with parenting throughout all of human history, which is one of these absolutely tragic, uh, situations in the world. And then I just— something happened in the zeitgeist. Something happened, like all the stuff that was controversial that got me, quote, banned just became kind of common parlance. And people started having me back on their shows. It was lovely to hear from you guys again. It was a funny coincidence because you just contacted me, I think, a day or two ago. And I was just thinking about, did I annoy those guys? Because I really enjoyed them. Anyway, so, you know, because I never know. I never know. My wife has to tell me.

Not at all.

Yeah, so coming back from the dead, Sam Hyde had me on for an extremely chaotic but enjoyable show, as you would imagine with Sam Hyde. I've been on a couple of other people's shows back here. And I'm coming— I used to do a lot of public speaking and used to spend, like, when my daughter was young, spent like a third of the year sort of traveling around and speaking. And this— but I've never really done public debates as much. I did some stuff at Porkfest many years ago. So I'm really pumped and excited to get out into the world. It's going to be like, I'm going to have a meetup there for free domain and philosophy fans. Then we're going to do the debate. There's going to be a VIP evening thing. If people want to book tickets, you should, because they're almost out. And you can use the promo code STEFAN. That's with an F. It's not a pretentious Stephen, it's pretentious Stefan. So S-T-E-F-A-N, and you can get 10% off. And honestly, it's like a back from the dead tour, resurrection tour. And then I'm going to do some more. I think it's going to be a 1v10. in Vegas in November. So 10 people come up and swarm me, uh, you know, which is, which is great. You know, just like at my high school dances, pretty much the same thing.

Exactly.

So yeah, so I'm, I'm thrilled and pleased to be back out there in the flesh, on the planet, in, in person, because I've been a studio band forever, and it's really nice to be back out there. And I, of course, appreciate everyone who's extended the invitations, of course, yourselves included.

Well, everyone will be better off for seeing you, and, uh, whether on platforms or in debates or on your podcast, and it's wordwardebate.com?

Yes.

Okay, guys, wordwardebate.com, and use the code Stefan, S-T-E-F as in Frank, A-N. Okay, awesome. That's gonna be great.

Are you arguing for or against God?

Against. I'm arguing for ethics that you can't escape, because one of the problems we see in the modern world is that if you get your ethics from religion, which, you know, I agree with most of what Christians say. I was raised a Christian, so, you know, thou shalt not murder, thou shalt not steal, A-okay from a philosophical standpoint. It's hard to argue against. But the problem is, of course, is that you can simply stop believing in God, as most people or a significant portion of the population has done over the last sort of 50 years, and then your ethics turn into this weird, emotional, subjective relativism stuff that doesn't defend you against any creeping immorality. So, uh, it's not so much like, ooh, I want to, you know, snap God out of existence, is that, uh, God as a basis for morality doesn't really survive modern travel, modern culture mixing, modern immigration, and so on. And just the skepticism that comes particularly out of the French philosophy school, which is sort of an anti-philosophy school. So it's not so much against God as it is for virtues and ethics that you simply cannot escape by, you know, snapping your fingers and disbelieving in stuff that's not particularly empirical. So that's sort of the rescue mission that I'm on.

What do you think? Yeah, what do you think about that, Owen?

Well, I don't want to turn this into a debate. I probably would be on the other side of it, but—

That's fine.

Well, I mean, I think the way I think about it in terms of belief in God is partly where it comes down to, I think, for me, is that I see God as like an infinite resource, like an infinite set of strength, like the ultimate good. And I feel like if you cut that off, that there is something missing. People talk about the God-shaped hole or whatever, but I think it's just when you say, okay, I'm just going to rely on myself and what I can see and what I can touch and what I can believe, you're always going to be finite. You're always going to be limited in that. And, and I think especially when people hit hard times, if they don't have that faith, I think it's just a lot harder to get through. And so I just, I see a lot of value in it from that perspective. And, you know, that to me, that's maybe apart from just, you know, do you actually believe or not, which maybe is a separate question. But I think, you know, to me, I do see it as something that gives a lot of people strength, a lot of people the ability to get through hard times because they have that infinite resource to draw upon, that infinite source of strength.

And that's very nice, but that is, with all due respect, a kind of hedonism, which it feels good, it feels better, it makes life easier. Philosophy has to just focus on what is true, valid, logical, empirical. Now, you don't just rely upon yourself when it comes to philosophy. A mathematician doesn't just rely on his own preference for numbers and calculations. You're following objective universal rational methodologies to get to the truth. But the idea that it feels good, and— or it feels better, or it feels less bad, hey, I mean, I'm not going to argue with that. Of course, it does give people a lot of comfort. But we can't base what is true on what feels better. We do really have to continue to move forward as a society to try and get to rational, universal, empirical, rational truths that are consistent logically and validated empirically. And there's no real going back to the way things used to be. And the other thing too is, much though I love Christianity, boy, it has a very bad track record of holding onto countries. They've just fallen like ninepins around the world.

Mm-hmm.

I mean, if you sort of look back over the history of Christianity, I mean, Egypt, North Africa used to be fully Christian. All the Middle East used to be fully Christian. Of course, that's where it started. And if you can just do a search in AI for like, The number of countries that have gone from majority Christian to minority Christian over the last 2,000 years has been enormous. And we see, you know, Islam and other religious viewpoints expanding rapidly while Christianity is sort of falling and fading. And I don't know that there's a way supposed— I don't want to say there's a way to resurrect Christianity because resurrection is one of the central tenets of Christianity, but it seems pretty hard to turn that tide and bring it back.

Yeah.

because the success of the sort of rational, objective, scientific worldview has just been so overwhelming. I mean, of course, that's what we're basing this entire conversation on, is the science. Sorry, go ahead.

I guess I just see like a couple of things. Like, one, I do think there is somewhat of a resurgence of Christianity in the US. At least I see a lot of news stories about it with the younger generations, how there's a lot more people going to Mass, going to church, returning to the faith. I, you know, I don't know statistically what that looks like, but I think it does seem like there's a lot more interest in it. And I do think that— I don't know, I separate how successful a religion is, and I also separate religion from faith. I went to a Christian sort of university and took some theology classes, and one of the classes I took was early Christianity. And it was interesting to me that early Christianity had almost none of what's in the current Catholic faith. Or Christian faith. Like, there was very little in terms of ceremony or rules. It was just love each other and treat each other well. And like, you know, yeah, believe in God, believe in Jesus Christ. But there was like— I don't even know if there was even an official mass. There might have been that, but that was it. And that, like, it was— there was not much more than that. And, um, it wasn't until the whole, you know, battle where they— the, the leader had the dream and decided that everyone was gonna suddenly be Christian. That a lot of the other ceremony and religious stuff came in, and most of it came from other places. It wasn't from the early Christians. It wasn't from Jesus Christ's teachings. It was from, okay, we came with all these other traditions. We're going to now have all these holidays, and we're going to have all these ceremonies and rituals and other things that were taken from other places. And so I think personally, at the time, I wasn't believing really, and I've kind of come back to it. But I think I've always thought of my faith as kind of more of a personal relationship between me and God, not, you know, mediated through a priest or based on whether or not I go to Mass or all that. It's just, you know, to me it's more of a personal thing, and it's about just what I believe as opposed to, you know, did I follow all the practices that the priest told me I should.

And I'm sorry, I know we don't want to make this a whole debate, so I'll just keep this brief, but I mean, that drift is a real challenge philosophically, right? So if you look at mathematics and the laws of logic that Aristotle developed, the Pythagorean theorem, you know, the scientific principles of the relationship between mass and energy and the inverse square law, they don't change. They don't drift. They don't alter. 2 and 2 make 4 is as true when mathematics was first conceived of by some guy who had a coconut fall on his head and said, well, I'm glad it wasn't 2. They've all stayed the same. They've all stayed objective. The drift in Christianity just over the course of my lifetime, Absolutely staggering. I mean, you know, absolutely the relationship with homosexuality. You got the Pope kissing the feet of migrants and massive changes in the doctrines. That doesn't really happen in logic. It doesn't happen in science. It doesn't happen in mathematics. And, you know, the definition of a mammal doesn't suddenly drift from, you know, one year to the next. So I do think that we're going to need to find some way to ground our belief systems in stuff that doesn't change.

Mm-hmm.

just based upon the winds of political tides or infiltration or subversion or people just going a particular way. And so that's my sort of argument is that if the morals are based upon what feels better, the problem is then with political correctness, they just apply negative pressure to people to get them to change their beliefs. And you can see these beliefs drifting all the time. And Christianity, as you point out now, would be unrecognizable even to the Christianity that I was instructed in as a child, lo those many moons ago. And that, that's troubling for me, that if the basic values are that drifty, where do we stand?

Well, and the final point I would make on this is just I also separate faith from philosophy or rationality, frankly. Like, I see it as a different type of thing because the nature of faith to me is believing in something that you can't see or you can't verify. You can't prove the way you can with logic and rationality and science and all these other things. And so I see it as kind of a fundamentally different thing. You have to either choose to believe or not, and you can't prove it. And, you know, it would be similar in a lot of ways to what Scott Adams used to talk about with the simulation theory, because he sort of seemed to believe in that. And he had, you know, examples, evidence, things that happened in his life that I think led him to believe that. But, um, I think there's a lot of parallels. I mean, I used to say, like, believing in the simulation theory is also an act of faith because you can't prove it. You can't prove that there's a simulation and that we're living in it. You just have to kind of choose whether or not you believe that or not. You can't really definitively prove it. And Scott would kind of argue that point and say, well, you know, look at this that happened, look at that that happened, and, you know, look at these things. But In reality, it's just the way he's explaining it, right? It's his interpretation of what's going on behind that that he can't see and he can't prove and he can't really see. Maybe he knows today after he left this life, but none of us can really know what's on the other side or what isn't.

I just want to put my 2 cents in. So for me, I see that Chris— so back in the day, we never really talked about religion, politics, and money, right? Which was kind of nice. It was like a much more peaceful existence. And I think things were pretty good going on in the world, going on in America. And then I think that we just didn't talk about it for so long that people couldn't really instill their faith on other people because it was a thing you just didn't do. And every, you know, everybody was allowed to have their own opinions and you just left it alone. And then I see with I'm going to link it right to social media. I'm going to link it to immigration, illegal or otherwise, and influences from around the world. I think that because people didn't talk about their faith, and I'm not even saying whether I am religious or not in this, I'm just saying, but because people didn't talk about it, or maybe didn't pass it down to their children, Or, you know, just maybe people got lazy and didn't go to church and didn't put their kids in whatever that school's called, like when you do the school for your religion. I think that people just got lazy and got away from it. And in the meantime, there was a vacuum and these other things came in. And I remember when Kabbalah became like a trend, you know, and everyone's wearing their red string around their wrist. And I'm like, do you really know what that's all about? But, you know, so these things became trendy. Oh, now I'm a Buddhist, and I like meditating. And, you know, so then everybody wanted to find their own little identity. And I think that that had a lot to do with whether it was, you know, Christianity or Catholicism or whatever it was just fading away from people because now people wanted to kind of, you know, get trendy. And then as far as Christianity, you know, going by the wayside, like in Africa, like you're saying, I think that just has a lot to do with barbarians coming in. And murdering so many of them. You notice churches are burning to the ground at a number I cannot even believe. And I always compare it to, I never saw a mosque on fire, but I've seen plenty of churches on fire. So I think that there's a lot of societal changes, lazy people, people that want to feel trendy and different and want their own identity. And Going right back to I, I know that you believe in the family unit, Stefan, and I think that that's that's part of the deterioration of the family, of religion. Everybody just got trendy and and we allowed a vacuum and we allowed evil to come in. And I'm not saying that everything about religion is like the way the Bible is. I really don't know. I because I just don't know. But I do like the philosophy of Jordan Peterson saying, act as if God exists. I think if you could at least act as if God exists and those things might be true, then you have a much more civilized world where people have parameters of what might be decent and what might not be. I just think if you don't have any guardrails, we're seeing complete and total chaos. And to me, it's frightening. And I'm not a religious person. So I'd rather see people acting as if there is a God than not, because when I see Islam and what they're allowed to do under Sharia law and what they're allowed to do in their mosques and what they can use them for, that terrifies me. So I just think that's just my philosophy on it. I don't know if it's so black or white, but—

Definitely more than your 2 cents worth. That was very Very eloquently put. Oh, and sorry, I don't want to barge in if you had thoughts about that.

No, go ahead, Stéphane.

I mean, there's a lot in what you said. The simulation theory, this is an old Cartesian idea that, like, what if I'm just a brain in a tank, Matrix style, and being manipulated by some external consciousness? So simulation theory can be rigorously opposed just by looking at the problem of turtles all the way down, right? So there's an old story, I think it was Babylonian cosmology, they said, you know, the world is sitting on turtle, uh, it's sitting on elephants, and the elephants are sitting on walruses, and, and, and then underneath that is turtles. And then people would say, well, but what's underneath the turtles? They know it's turtles all the way down. It keeps going, infinity of turtles. It's like, that would be a very deep soup bowl. And so the, the question of simulation theory is the sort of 2 principles that are important in science and math and philosophy, uh, Occam's razor and parsimony. Now, Occam's razor basically just says, don't unnecessarily multiply explanations. In other words, don't say, well, you know, gravity is a property of matter. And it's angels with their little beating wings pushing down. And on the backs of those angels are more angels pushing down. It's like, it's, it's an additional couple of layers of explanation. Doesn't really explain anything and is not necessary to dealing with reality. So if we are in a simulation, let's say that we are in a simulation, well, then there has to be something outside the simulation that is running the simulation, right? Some, like in, in The Matrix, it was the robots that were using human beings as batteries. So, so they were in the real world. So somewhere outside of the simulation, there must be a real world with entities entities and beings or whatever that's running the simulation. And how do they know they're not in a simulation? Well, there could be another layer, like it just— and there's turtles all the way up. It's simulations all the way up, and you have the problem of infinite regression. So you can simply say about simulation theory, I mean, obviously there's no evidence for it, and that there must be a non-simulation universe out there. Like, again, if we're a simulation, there's got to be something outside of us that is the real world. And since there's no evidence of simulation theory at all, And we have to accept with simulation theory that there's a real world out there, then why not just make this the real world? You don't add anything by adding simulation layers. Now, the simulation theory though, as far as I understand Scott putting it forward, was absolutely fascinating because it unleashes the power of your mind and your potential. If you say, I control reality, let's just say, I mean, I know you don't want to go too far, and I can fly, jump out of building. But if you say there's no practical limit to what my mind can achieve, that unleashes a whole load of potential. The unconscious mind is really not examined much by philosophers, maybe even by theologians, but the unconscious mind has been clocked at 8,000 times faster than the conscious mind in particular calculations. And the people who don't understand math at all, when they're given Things of sort of social fairness. They run through the calculations at blinding speed. And so if you're sitting on a part of the brain, a foundation of the brain that is thousands and thousands of times faster than what your conscious mind can do, you really want to harness that. And you don't want to pretend that your conscious mind knows what your unconscious mind and your instincts and your second gut brain in your belly, which actually has a bunch of neurons and is really, really important, the gut feeling, the gut sense. What I love about simulation theory as a sort of mental exercise is if you say, well, what if there's no practical limit outside of physics to what my brain can accomplish? And of course, seeing the arc of Scott Adams' life from relatively dweebish, and I say this myself as a teen dweeb, relatively dweebish to sort of bank teller, to cartoonist, to successful author, people don't recognize, or maybe they don't know, the degree to which he was absolutely incredible public speaker. And of course, that was his big income prior to COVID and the deplatforming and so on, to astute political analyst, to incredible podcaster, the talent stack. He didn't put any practical limit on what he felt his brain was capable of. And you just try. You just try things and see whether you're good at them. And Scott was so brilliant and so accomplished and so It's a kind of modesty that is really, really important. Immodest people say, I know the limits of my brain's capabilities. Modest people say, I don't know. I have no idea. I don't know what I'm capable of because there's layers to the brain, right? And there's the conscious mind, there's the unconscious mind, there's the gut reptilian instincts, there's creativity, there's dreams at night. There's so much going on in the brain that we can't really understand that saying, well, I can't do that. That's beyond my capabilities, is a form of vanity. Like you're putting a cap on what you think you can do. So I do love simulation theory as a mental exercise to say, well, what if I can just kind of control everything and I'm capable of doing anything and there's no limit to my abilities? The amount of human potential that gets unleashed by taking that ceiling off and taking that lid off is just incredible. And I think Scott did an amazing job of not just displaying that, but also reminding his audience and saying, you are way more powerful than you think. And if you put a cap on your power, it's unnecessary and kind of dehumanizes you in a way. Owen?

Yeah, and he has, uh, you know, the, the whole user interface to reality, which is kind of based on that idea to some extent. Um, and I think a lot of that was just sort of empowering people, empowering people to do that. And I also just like the way he thought about things in terms of their utility, or, you know, is this useful? Like, he had all these different frames he would put on things, filters he would call them, like persuasion filter and other things, ways of interpreting things and ways of predicting things. And It did seem to me like he would just take what's useful and say, oh, well, if this makes me more effective or gives me more options or allows me to do more, then it's useful and I'm going to use it and I'm going to believe it, or I'm going to at least, you know, put it to use. And I thought the same thing about his idea of us not having free will, that, you know, that was another thing that a lot of people in the comments would argue about all the time. And it's kind of a hard thing for a lot of people to accept that you don't have free will because it certainly seems like you do. And, um, but he would argue that you don't and that everything's determined and that, you know, I mean, there is some science, I think, backing that to some extent where they've shown that when you make a decision or when you think you made a decision, it actually happened earlier than that. And so, like, you, you apparently there is at least some brain evidence that when you make a choice, it happens before you're aware of it. And so like when you think you made a decision, it actually happened a half second or a second before that. And, um, but I think when I really thought about that lack of free will, I just kind of stepped back and said, okay, well, what does that do? Like, what's the utility of believing that? And for the most part, I kind of concluded, well, it really doesn't matter whether you believe it or not, because he even— Scott would even say like there's the illusion of free will. We all kind of have this illusion.

Yeah.

And it's like, well, why does it matter whether you believe it or not? And what I came to conclude was if you believe there's no free will, then you're going to be a lot less judgmental of people. And that seems to be the fundamental difference in my mind where like— and Scott was very nonjudgmental, like he was very accepting of other people. He was— he would say that people would reveal stuff to him all the time that he wouldn't expect them to. And I think it came from that just aura of being nonjudgmental. Like, you felt safe saying anything to him because you just knew that he wasn't going to judge you for it. And I think people can sense that in other people, you know, is it safe to reveal this thing to them? And some people just naturally would be like, yeah, all the weirdos and wackos just talk to me and say all this stuff to me. And other people would be like, no one ever does that to me. And I think it's because they You can kind of sense when you're talking to someone, is this person judging me right now? Or are they, you know, open and willing to accept the way I am?

Yeah.

Um, we're going deep today, man.

I know, I know.

History, God, uh, culture, religion, free will, simulation theory. I love it, man. This is, this is the waters I swim in, so I'm happy to keep going, but it's your show, so take it where you want.

Somebody, Boo Dog in the chat. Boo, what is your question about the 10 Commandments, that they're unchanging? I don't know exactly what your question for Stefan is about that, but if you let me know, I'll ask him.

Oh, I think I know what he means. So I was talking about how Christianity drifts, and yet the 10 Commandments are sort of solid and foundational. Well, but science and math don't drift, and logic doesn't drift, right? So, you know, the sort of classic formulation of the first syllogism, right? Uh, all men are mortal. Socrates is a man. Therefore, Socrates is mortal. Sort of the 3 laws of logic developed by Aristotle, or at least first identified by Aristotle. They haven't changed. Nothing has changed in terms of logic and math and geometry and, and so on. But that has— sorry, but Christian doctrines have drifted. Sorry, go ahead.

I was just going to say, I don't know if I would completely agree with that. Only I think we discover new things about science and logic and other things as well. I mean, even the philosophers, it's evolved over time, these different schools of thought. And certainly, our understanding of reality changes all the time. And I think there are a lot of things that we really don't understand. We might think we do, but then it ends up being disproven over time. So, I do think that I don't think science is something that just doesn't change.

Well, no, but that's a bit of a straw man, right? I'm not saying that our knowledge doesn't change. Of course, our knowledge expands and grows all the time. What I'm talking about is principles of geometry and logic and so on, and the scientific method as a whole. And, you know, that sort of scientific gravity, uh, we can maybe get a deeper understanding of gravity, but gravity doesn't sort of flip around like you're dialing it up and down in some video game. And so the principles of reason and the principles of geometry Uh, don't change over time. And sure, yeah, absolutely, of course, of course. I mean, it's a, it's a completely obvious thing to say our knowledge grows and our understandings of things changing— changes. But the principles of rational proof and consistency, particularly in reason and the art of logic and in mathematics and geometry, they don't change, right? The opposite angle theory is as true now as when it was first, uh, synthesized, and so on. So yeah, the principles don't change, but yes, certainly the content does.

Owen satisfied?

Yeah, I am.

Okay, so I do want to switch up for a second because, um, Stefan, I just crack up at your Twitter account. I was telling you prior. So you guys, I'm sure you're all following Stefan by now. If you're not, come on, let's get in the game. Um, if you guys in the chat could drop his handle, um, so other people can click on it and follow Uh, Stefan on X, but I just— I'm just gonna pull up your X account. I just— I'm gonna read like a few posts that you made. Okay, so I know a lot of this has been kicked off. We talked about the Lindsay Clancy case just a little bit yesterday, um, and now there's these women that are just again like Kabbalah trying to find their cliques and their attention by You know, thinking they're doing something. I don't know if they think it's virtuous. I think they just want to have attention or feel relevant, or I don't know, have a say in something. But so some of your posts have been amazing. I'm just going to read a few. I love this: normalize asking for women how many cookbooks they have on the first date. Another one is women are mostly repressed by their own ridiculous standards. Um, you wrote— oh, this one here. Um, oh no, that one's there. Okay, then let me scroll a little bit. Countless women are revealing the grim reality of false accusations against men by blaming Patrick Clancy for the murder of his children. Um, and then you have a lot of clips that you show of the, you know, these women. I was telling them yesterday, there's just countless clips of women Holding their babies. It's so sad and just complaining and everything. Then you wrote, seeing how many appalling mothers there are out there, I hope people understand why I said it was fine for adults to go no contact with abusive parents decades ago and got relentlessly attacked for it, of course. So, I mean, and it goes on and on. And again, I love all of it because people are so afraid. I think I don't know if afraid's the word, but they just have a fear of not being in their place. And so on my X bio, I always write, it says, saying the things that you're thinking, because I rail against women, not on purpose, but often because maybe because I am a woman. And so maybe some— usually the men are like, thank God someone's saying it, because they feel like they can't. But I love that you— Can, and you are, and I think it's perfectly appropriate for a man to have an opinion about things with women. I know Scott and I disagreed, not about whether abortion should be legal or illegal, but he just felt like, I'm a man, I shouldn't have a say in this, and my opinion was, well, if you're the baby's father, you should absolutely have a say in this. So I just want to give you the floor now because there is definitely something wrong in the universe with family, marriage, babies, traditional roles. You know, what's your take on what you're seeing and how do we fix it? I'm just kidding.

No problem. We've got 3 minutes. I can do all of that in 3 minutes. Well, yeah. So I mean, the cookbook thing I think is very interesting because one of the things that has become a challenge for a lot of modern women, and I absolutely adore and love women. Of course, I'm married to a wonderful wife. I have a daughter who I absolutely adore. And so when crazy women are out there, it lowers the reputation of rational women. And I don't want the crazy women out there flooding everyone's timeline and having men walk away with this bewildered impression that estrogen is some sort of scrub factor that takes away human reason. And that is not— women can reason beautifully. And I've been very influenced by female— I've actually been influenced more by female philosophers and thinkers than male philosophers. So the cookbook thing I think is interesting because among young women, there is a sense, there's this question like, well, what do you bring to the table? I am the table. And it's like, no, that's not really a thing. Because basically that's saying that for a young woman, that what you bring to the table is the potential for sexual access. And that is not something that is given to you by your reason. It is not something that's given to you by your virtue. It's just something that is implanted in nature, right? That men have high sex drives, particularly young men, and they want to have sex. And so they'll, they'll take these women out and the women just have to exist and don't have to provide a value back to the man. So if the man— and 90% of dates are initiated by men, and 90% of those dates, the man offers to pay and usually does pay. And so if the woman says, I want you to pay, okay, that's fine. I want you to ask. I want you to risk rejection. I want you to pay. That's totally fine. I have no issue with that. I hear men get rejected. Of course, I never experienced that myself, but I hear tell from the drums in the wilderness that this happens. But then of course, the man is bringing value. He's risking his ego. He's going to ask the woman out. He's going to pay. He's going to plan things and so on. And that's fine. But where's the reciprocal value? And it cannot be just sexual access. That is degrading to women's potential. Men and women desperately need each other. We are the yin and the yang. I just did a show about this 2 days ago. We desperately need to balance each other. Women's empathy balances man's somewhat cold rationality at times. Men's meritocracy needs to be blunted by women's redistributive instincts in the family and so on. So we really need each other. And women can provide and do provide enormous value to men. And if women come on a date with the expectation that only the man has to provide value and they just have to sort of sit there like royalty and just have people kiss the hem of her garment, that produces an appalling sense of vanity and entitlement. And it doesn't help women understand that for relationships to sustain, both parties need to be providing a significant amount of value. And if the woman is just like, well, you provide me value, like, again, like the queen with the courtiers, you know, you just have to praise me, you have to provide me value, I don't have to provide you value, actually heads off a cliff of depopulation. Because if women don't feel like, well, they need to provide value— and why do men pay? Men pay because we want to show that we're good earners and providers and we're generous. In return for what? In return for the woman having children and hopefully raising the children so our culture can, I don't know, continue. And so women— men show resource acquisition and generosity so that women traditionally would become running households and have a bushel load of children, a bushel load of children, and then all of that. So if the man is saying— and I know this is compressing the tweet down considerably— but if the man is saying, listen, I'm happy to ask you out, I'm happy to take you out, I'm just curious how many cookbooks do you have? In other words, do you know something about running a household? Because sex is about children and sex is about continuing the culture, the lineage. lineage, the bloodline, and so on. And so do you know something about running a household? Now, if the woman says, I don't cook for no man, I don't run no household, I ain't going to have no children, then she's saying, I'm not going to provide the value of children, lineage continuation, education, household running. And that's fine. Women can absolutely choose to do that, but then they got to pay half.

Right.

And don't be in a situation where you're showing your resource provision and generosity in return for the continuation of the bloodline with a woman who doesn't want any of those roles. Then that's fine. Then she wants to live kind of like a man.

Then she No, I was just gonna say it's the same thing. Like when I know someone who's, you know, starting to date someone or whatever, I'm always like, can they change a tire? You know, like, it's the same thing. Can you cook? Can you change a tire? I mean, you know, and I don't, I don't like the idea of like, oh, things should be 50/50. I'm like, no, they should be 100/100. So bring 100% of yourself, you bring 100% of yourself. Why would you want 50/50? Like, you know, give it your all. And, you know, And there's, you know, a reason that we're attracted to our mates. It's like, but I think, again, I hate social media. I just feel like it has ruined everything. I think if it all went away, people had to like look at themselves in the mirror and look around and not, you know, just be doing things for people to fake admire them. You would have to see like, yeah, I actually don't bring anything to the table. I'm doing everything for people that don't know me to like my posts. And at the end of the day, I'm left with this shell of a person who really isn't providing anything to anyone. And I think that's what I see mostly from, you know, the younger generation. It's pretty gross. And I can't imagine— I can't imagine being a man or a woman right now trying to date because it's, it's so, it's so fake and it's so transactional. And shallow. And I don't know, from meeting people to weddings and all these elaborate weddings that are all performative. It's like, you guys, what the hell is going on? So I feel like we've really lost our way and we're so distracted that all of the things that are really important are slipping away. Yeah.

Sorry to interrupt. It's very tough for dating these days. And believe it or not, although I'm getting up there, I certainly do have a window on younger dating for a variety of reasons. In general, what seems to have to happen with dating these days, and I'd love to hear from your audience and if they have questions or comments that change this, what I've seen is that women, young women need to help build the men up because particularly white males are so attacked and racists and colonizers and slave owners and they're just really, really torn down. in the modern culture because, well, for a variety of reasons. And so boys need to be kind of built up to have a healthy level of self-assessment and potential and all of that. And women, I think, can do that in a very effective way. But so a deficiency in self-esteem needs to be corrected among young men. But I would also argue an excess of self-esteem needs to be pulled back for women as a whole. You are not of value just because you're That's accidental. That's given to you by nature or God or whatever you want to say. You can't claim that you're a valuable person because men have 18 times the testosterone levels of women and tend to be lusty young beasts and so on. That doesn't actually make you of value. That's just accidental. That's like being born into a huge amount of wealth and saying, look what a great businessman I am. It's like, that's just not a real thing. And so helping for women to help build up the confidence of boys who've had it sort of ground down and stripped down through like media and education and other things. But also women need to be able to sacrifice some of their vanity and say, look, I actually need to provide value. I can't just be born royalty. And of course, all the simps pouring into their DMs and so on, it's just terrible for women because it makes them feel like you put a low-cut top on and then you've got 1,000 guys who think you're some sort of green glowing Venus goddess of all time. That's really, really unhealthy. So I think the combination of the two, raise men's self-esteem, maybe maybe bring women's vanity down, uh, just a smidge so that there's an even playing field. But it's, it's easier to build someone up than it is to try and claw back some of their vanity, because people want to be built up, but people don't like getting that vanity punctured a little bit. Which is sort of the cookbook question. It's like, okay, well, what do you provide other than being attractive? What do you provide other than being sort of a young, fertile female? And so on. And that is really, really important, because if you just feel You don't have to bring anything to the table. You just have to breathe and exist and maybe not eat too many muffins. That is not going to work out for relationships in the long run because men are really good at assessing value. Otherwise, the free market wouldn't be so productive.

Yeah. So, Owen, we were talking about that Lindsay Clancy case yesterday. And I was talking to a friend yesterday and I was like, I don't know too much about it. I know the gist. Okay. And I was like, wow, I really feel bad for her husband. You know, my God, like now he's got to sit there and relive this again. And he's, you know, and I said to one of my girlfriends last night, I said, oh, you know, I feel bad for him. And she was like, oh. And I was like, what? And I'm like, do you think he's guilty or something? And she's like, I do. I think he killed the kids. And I was like, but he's not on trial. She admitted it. There's absolutely zero doubt. Zero proof that he did anything to hurt his kids. Um, and it's just weird that it was taken there. And so I, you know, I, I'm just so flabbergasted. And Owen, you just take it for a second, but it just seems like wherever a woman can blame a man, that that's what they're doing anymore. And I'm just like, how is this a conspiracy theory? Like, how— where did the conspiracy come from?

I don't know. I mean, I don't know the theory, but, like, I don't know what people are arguing in terms of saying it was the man that did it. Like, are they actually saying that he literally killed the kids?

Yes.

Like, the—

Yes.

I'm sorry to interrupt, but one of the arguments is that the horrible exercise bands that were used to strangle the children, that they have his DNA on them, and therefore he did it. And of course, the answer is that he was desperately trying to get his children back to life by pulling the bands off. And so, little things like that that— but she has— she's completely confessed. The trial is not about whether she did it or not. She said, I did it. Her lawyer has said she did it. The question is whether she was mentally competent and should be held criminally liable, or whether she was suffering from a mental illness severe enough to remove moral responsibility. Sorry, Owen, go ahead.

No, that's fine.

Well, I mean, I do think that there is an issue that— and I think it's aligned with what you were saying earlier— that there are at least some women that just have trouble taking accountability for anything and don't want women to have accountability for anything. They, in this case, did something horrible. And, you know, for some reason, women are rallying to her defense as if there was some justification for that. And that's certainly something I don't understand. Like, I mean, to your point, there are good women and there are crazy women. And this seems to be one in the crazy category. Whether or not she's mentally competent to stand trial is a totally different question. But I think, you know, someone who kills their kids, I don't think is someone anyone should be defending. And I think we should be looking for what caused it to say, how can we prevent more of these things from happening? And I pointed to SSRIs as a potential cause to look at. But I think, you know, it, it does certainly surprise me that people are rallying to her defense and somehow blaming the man for what she did in any sense. And I understand there is real depression in the world, that people are depressed and they have hard times, whether it's postpartum depression or other things. But again, it doesn't justify bad actions. It doesn't justify killing your kids. And killing your own kids seems like almost one of the most horrible things you can do to me.

Yeah, absolutely. But Stefan, you're all over this, so give us your assessment.

Oh, oh, it's too much.

It's too much.

I do want to clarify, okay, you guys, like, you know I don't like qualifiers, but I'm gonna say it for those of you in the chat. Yes, not all women and not all men. Whenever we're saying something, not all. Maybe Andy, maybe it's 25%, as Scott would say. But we're just saying that this is like a, um, this is like an epidemic now where everything gets turned into a conspiracy theory. Typically, the man ends up becoming a victim no matter what's happening, and you know it's not a good look. And and women, you know, it's like so interesting what you'll band with women to, like what subjects and like what you won't. None of it makes sense. So you know again, the lawyer is saying yes, she killed her kids. So you guys, like you got to get that out of your head. It's kind of a gross reaction to something. The man lost his 3 children. They were murdered. Whether you liked him as a husband or not has nothing to do with the fact that his 3 children were murdered. And postpartum psychosis or not, she— you know, Megyn Kelly was talking about this case and she made a great point, was that who was the cannibal guy that was like killing everybody?

Jeffrey Dahmer.

Jeffrey Dahmer. So he tried to use insanity, okay, for what he was doing, and it— the judge was like, no, it— like, you knew what you were doing. You weren't insane. Like, you had a thought process and it was methodical. So if Jeffrey Dahmer isn't gonna get insanity, this woman Lindsay is not gonna get it because she was very coherent. And yes, she had mental illness, but that doesn't mean she was psychotic and out of her mind. So, um, you know, you can't— I can feel sorry that she was so messed up for so long, but she knew what she was doing, is my opinion. But go ahead, Stefan, this is your wheelhouse.

Well, she had a lot of support. So saying that the system failed her, she had huge amounts of support. Her husband made like $300,000, $400,000 a year. He switched to working from home, and she had her mother, she had her father come over and help. They had a nanny. And of course, every modern convenience that, you know, when I grew up, we had to feed quarters into the heat meter in winter to stay warm. And we didn't have any laundry in the place. And things were just nuts. And I actually worked after high school up north in Canada, gold panning and prospecting, lived in a tent for like a year and no amenities and so on. And so, she had like every modern conceivable amenity she had access to. to the top-notch healthcare. I mean, I'm not a big fan of the SSRIs, but it's not known exactly how many she was taking, whether she was doctor shopping. That doesn't seem as likely as people guess because a lot of the same doctors were prescribing her stuff. So that's not exactly doctor shopping, but she had a lot of support. So the question to me is, what has happened to women's sense of virtue and consequences? And again, not all women.

Yeah.

My aunts, when I was younger, very strict in enforcing social norms. If a woman had an affair, she was cut out of the friend group. She'd never be invited anywhere. Women can be amazingly powerful at enforcing social norms in the soft power of ostracism and exclusion. Really just amazing. Men, we tend to thump people in the head when they do wrong, but women can freeze out and ostracize, which is even more powerful in many ways. So what's happened with modern women, I don't think it's super Excuse me, complicated. What's happened is when women got the vote and men, of course, we love to please women. We live to please women because evolutionarily speaking, tons of men didn't reproduce if they didn't please women. So we had to please women. So what's happened is women get upset and men and politicians and the government and the treasury throw infinite resources, or at least as infinite as they can be in a fiat currency system, at women So that they don't experience negative consequences from their bad decisions. So if a woman doesn't get married, she still gets huge amounts of welfare and she still gets huge amounts of government support and she can get a job that's mandated by equality laws and so on. If a woman gets an STD, well, she just gets healthcare and she gets, certainly in most socialized countries and a lot of places in America with healthcare for the poor, she gets cured for free. If she has a child outside of wedlock, well, she just gets government support and free healthcare and free education and so on. And if she doesn't save for her retirement, then people will step in and sort of help her out. And morality comes from negative consequences. I mean, if you didn't feel any pain, you probably wouldn't really worry that much about getting injured. Morality comes out of negative consequences. And what we've done as a society is we have taken from women away, oh, if you got pregnant, oopsie, oh, you can just have an abortion and it'll be paid for by the government. So the negative decisions that women make, which are really the most important decisions that women make, like who they have children with and how they're going to raise those children and so on, that is the future of society, right? If women have children with responsible men, you tend to have responsible children growing up. If women have children with irresponsible men, you tend to have dysfunctional children growing up, fatherless children, lower IQ children, and so on. And so So it's really, really important that women make good decisions about who they mate with. And the negative consequences of those bad decisions have largely been stripped away. And if the woman is just dissatisfied in the marriage, even if she has an affair, goes and sleeps with other men, she could just divorce the guy. She gets custody 90% of the time, alimony, child support, welfare. And so what we've done is we've just said to women, you will never suffer any negative material consequences from your bad decisions, which is a terrible thing. I mean, imagine if we had a school system where you could never fail. I mean, who would study? Who would be hardworking? Well, a few autistic people maybe, whatever, right? But most people would be like, oh, I can't fail. You remember that thing? I don't know. When I was a kid in school, they'd wheel in the AV unit and the teacher who was hungover would just put on a movie and just sit in the back, just regretting his life choices. But of course, the first question we asked was, is this going to be on the test? And if it wasn't on the test, I mean, we just pass notes and fool around and doodle in our textbooks and so on. And now we've said there's nothing that is going to suffer any negative consequences for bad decisions. And so women have kind of drifted into a kind of massive debt and government-subsidized unreality where they just can't make any bad decisions. And if they do make a bad decision, it's a man's fault.

Yeah.

Everybody knows that any reasonably attractive women has like 20 or 30 guys who would love to date her. And if she chooses the bad boy, well, it's just the bad boy's fault and he fooled her. And so this lack of agency that happens with women in a highly redistributive welfare state where they're protected from negative consequences makes women less moral. Because in the same way that if you know you can't fail a course, you're just not going to study as hard. And so taking away negative consequences from people turns them crazy. We are designed as a species to rub up against reality, to have the resistance of, ooh, what if I make a bad choice? What if I make a bad decision? I've got to do the right thing because otherwise really, really bad things will happen. We've taken that away in a material way from women as a whole and shifted the burden to men. Women get much more out of the tax system than they pay in, and vice versa for men. And when you take away negative consequences, from people. We know this with kids, right? I mean, oh, you broke it? I'll buy you another one. Oh, you made a mistake? I'll just fix it. Oh, you're doing badly in school? I'll just go yell at the teacher and make sure you pass. If you take away negative consequences from anyone, they go kind of slowly crazy over time. And we've now had 2 or 3 generations of women where in the West, there really aren't any catastrophic decisions that they can make. And then when women have made bad decisions, and I used to get in trouble for this in I'll stop in a sec. Back in the day, and probably still will, because I was pointing out to women, if you don't have kids, it's fine. If you've got some big absorbing thing that you want to do with your life rather than have kids, totally fine. But for most people, for most people, the big creative and wonderful thing they can do is raise a family, have children. Because from the age of 40 to 85, that's a long stretch of years. And if you don't have kids and you're not being pursued in the way that you were when you were a young woman, That's more than half your life and more than double your adult life that you're going to have to find something to do. And so what we do is the women who've made bad decisions, which is they haven't invested in relationships, they haven't invested in children, and maybe they've just gone to work and made money, but that doesn't fulfill you when you get older and certainly not in the 20 years of retirement. We just take them out of the equation. We just don't show them anymore. They're just gone. So those slow-burn bad decisions, men have a lot of time to turn around bad decisions. We can wake up at 40 and be like, oh man, I got to get serious. I got to stop watching porn and playing video games and I got to buckle down and I got— and you've still got 30 years of productivity ahead of you. But a woman who doesn't want to have kids, who's sailing past 40, who doesn't want kids, sails past 40 and changes her mind, it's kind of too late.

Yeah.

Then you've got a long time to regret. So taking away negative consequences drives people crazy, makes them amoral. And I think that's one of the reasons why women are like, oh, is there a woman experiencing negative consequences for bad decisions? Oh, that makes me upset. I don't like that.

Yeah.

Well, and I would throw in, I would throw in that, and I know you talked about this and probably got in a lot of trouble for it, about, I think women are lied to and it leads to these bad outcomes where, you know, women in their 20s have a lot easier time having kids than women in their 30s and women in their 30s 30s have an easier time than in their 40s. And I think a lot of women were told, oh, you have time, you should have a career first, you, you know, you can have a family later, or you can do it all, or whatever. And it's just not true. And so a lot of women, I think, were deceived by that and were led down this path where suddenly they don't have kids, they can't have kids, and now they're just stuck and nobody cares. You know, nobody comes to save them because they can't. I mean, biologically, you can't. So like, I, I think— and you still have it happening with see freezing her eggs and all this stuff. And nobody seems to talk about the fact that that's a very unlikely process to be successful statistically, that it doesn't often happen. I mean, it, it happens sometimes, but the, the success rate isn't like as certain as people make it seem, where you can just take your frozen embryos and just, you know, thaw them whenever you feel like it and it'll be fine. Um, because a lot of people have tried that and failed. And a lot of people have gone through the IVF stuff and failed, and then they're just stuck. They just don't have those kids that they wanted. And I think unfortunately a lot of women realize that too late where they just thought that this was all going to work out and it didn't. And I think at a minimum, I would hope we could just be honest about these things with women to give them the advice. Or at least knowledge that, you know, if you make this choice, if you go down this path of having your career and putting off having kids, you might come to regret it later, and no one's going to be able to save you.

Well, it's a, it's a lot more fun to date than it is to raise a baby. I mean, I'm jetting off to Ibiza, you know, like, that's, that's a lot of fun, hanging out on a yacht, you know, like, I mean, who wouldn't want to do that, you know? Whereas I'm breastfeeding and I've been up 5 times tonight and I haven't cut my hair in 3 weeks.

It's a sacrifice. It's hard work, you guys. I mean, you know, no one's saying it's easy to have a child and to raise a family. It's, it's hard.

But the reward is, you know, you, you've raised a family and, you know, anyone who has had, anyone who has had kids would, would certainly, number one, agree that, yeah, it's a lot of hard work. It's a lot of sacrifice. It's not fun a lot of the time, but at the same time, At least for most people, putting apart this case we just talked about, most parents would say, I don't regret it at all, and I can't imagine not having done it. And my kids are like the best thing I've ever done in my life. I mean, my, my wife has said that, that having our 2 boys is the best thing she ever did.

Oh, and please, sorry to interrupt, but please, I would get on my knees and beg your audience, except I'd go out of frame and they'd just see the tip of my hat. Please, Lord above, I am an older dad. If you can avoid being an older dad, that's a big plus. Please, please, please do it in your 20s, because in your 20s you can get very little sleep and you can just bounce back like a trampoline. Uh, you know, when my daughter was 10 and I was not 10— when my daughter was 10 and I'm in my 50s, she's like, Daddy, Daddy, come climb a tree with me. And I'm like, yeah, I guess I could climb the tree, but But my back and my— you know, like, she was like, oh, come on the zipline with me. And it's like, I'd love to. I'm gonna come on the zipline. I'm just telling you my arms are gonna hurt for 2 weeks. Uh, it's just, it's just, please, please, Lord above, do it when you're young. That's when nature wants you to have babies. That's when it's the easiest to get pregnant. It's the easiest to bounce back.

I love that.

You'll have tons of energy. Oh, and also, you won't be some cryptkeeper Methuselah like I'm gonna be when I become a grandparent. I mean, all that happens when you delay having kids is you have fewer years with your grandchildren and fewer years to support your children having their own children. So, for a variety of reasons— That's great advice. I'm the smoker telling you not to smoke, so to speak, for a variety of reasons. Become an older dad if it's your only option or if that's what happens, totally fine. But please, Lord above, recognize that you're going to get all kinds of dusty and creaky over time and trying to keep up with a toddler and the sprint-around situation of, Dad, let's play tag. I just pay a younger guy to have.

You're like, I lose. Just catch me.

Oh, my knees!

My knees!

So please, Lord above, do it young and you'll thank me later.

I totally understand. I totally agree that it's, you know, it's true for men too, that like if you, you know, if you have your kids younger, then you get to see them grow up. You get to see their kids. You get to see them get married and go through all the things that are just really satisfying in life. You know, it's just, I'm really looking forward to seeing my kids get married one day. And to have their own kids one day. And I'm enjoying right now because my kids are home, just seeing them as adults and just who they became and being able to spend time with them that way. And, you know, my brother had kids much later and they're still young and he's the same age as me pretty much. And like, I just, I think I made a better choice. I'm sure you did. And it wasn't necessarily his choice. I mean, like, you know, it took him as long as it did to find a mate and to, you know, start that process. So, There's nothing wrong with what my brother did. It's just if I could choose one or the other, I would certainly have chosen what I did in terms of getting married in my 20s, a few years later starting to have kids. It just seems like I look at his situation and I'm like, man, I'm glad I did it when I did it. If I had waited 10 years, it just seems like everything would have been a lot harder and I would have gotten 10 less years with my kids.

Well, and when your kids say, Daddy, chase me on the monkey bars, you can be like, I'm it, kid. I'm chasing you on the monkey bars, as opposed Hey, let me warm up for a little bit first. I need some massage. I need to stretch. You know, all of that kind of stuff. So yeah, the spontaneity of younger parenting is just a consummation devoutly to be wished.

I love it, you guys. Thank you so much, Stefan. So you guys, listen, I think it's best that we have Stefan on more frequently. Wouldn't you guys agree? So Stefan, we gotta get you back here. We'd love you to come back after the debate too and tell us how it went.

We'll do a postmortem.

Yes, let's do a little wrap-up. And I also want to say, this is why I say men should have a say in everything, because here's 2 men right here that are fathers and husbands and have a great family unit and life— lives, and men should have a say in everything. Okay, so I hope we can change the trend of just trashing men and—

Well, then women can vote on war and they can't get drafted. I mean, everyone welcomes that conversation, right?

Sure, sure. So to the men, thank you for being you. We appreciate you. And Stefan, thank you so much for coming on today. We went a little bit late. Owen, thank you for being here and talking about your personal life. I do too. Totally get it.

It was all me.

But thank you. Thank you for, you know, sharing about your lives too. And, you know, personal stories, you know, to you, Owen, too, like with, you know, your family It's good for women and men to hear all about these things. There's not enough conversation about it. So, all right, Stéphane, we'll have you back sooner than later. And thank you so, so much. We hope you enjoyed being here today. And listen, we always say a special thank you to Scott and to Shelley for allowing the Scott Adams School to continue and go on. And thank you to every single person that shows up here on all the platforms and all the replays that are going to happen later. We truly appreciate you. And let's have a closing sip to our beloved Scott. And you guys get out there, be useful, make the most of every single day. Tomorrow's not promised. Okay? All right. To Scott.

Take care. Thank you for the invitation. It was a great chat.

Thanks, Stéphane. We appreciate you. All right, guys. I can stay for a couple of seconds. Let's just wrap it up. Isn't that great? I love when he comes on, and it's he hasn't been on in so long. It's crazy. Let's see, Beverly. I like your thing too. I I think it's probably advantageous to have your family first, and then and then do a career later. I like it.

Ah.

Ooh, people are going to work out. Who's going to the beach? Anyone going on a boat? EJ, did you like that conversation? It was deep. Oh, you just spent 2 weeks with the 4-year-old grandson. That's nice. Hey, Annie, how are you? Annie, are you gonna join Locals? I think you should. You guys are so sweet. I'll see all your comments later, you guys. I am gonna run. I'm gonna get some things done. And tomorrow, let's hope Marcella's back. If she can finish up her project, she'll be back with us tomorrow to finish out the week. I also realized, so Walter, I know a lot of you are asking when Walter's coming on. It's just like a timing issue right now. But my lesson learned is I have to not tell you when someone's coming on. Because if their schedule changes, then it like everyone's like, but wait, what happened to So I think I'll, I'll probably just try to announce who the guests are like the day before, maybe something like that. So expectations are managed. But you know, let's see who's no longer in New Jersey. Oh, I'm looking at somebody else. Okay. Yeah, I'd like to know too. I'll miss you also, Metal Seer. All right, you guys. Thanks, Boo. Yes, and yes, it would be nice if everybody would follow the Ten Commandments. I mean, Like I feel like we all need guidelines, right? It's just good to have guidelines. Ah, yeah, he's in. He's an interesting person. And if you guys haven't seen Mike Cernovich's first movie called Hoaxed, I recommend it. And Stefan is in Hoaxed. And at the every time I watch Hoaxed, I've watched it several times. There's a scene with Stefan at the end. And I cry every single time. There's something about his voice and the way he delivers it. Every time I cry. Anyway, all right, you guys say goodbye. I don't want to cut you off, but we will see you tomorrow. Have the best day ever, you guys.

Bye.