Modern Wisdom

I wrote a book for my 10-year-old daughter called Don't Be a Feminist.

Is it really true that our society generally treats men more fairly than women?

I said like you don't want to have a philosophy that encourages antipathy and self-pity, human nature already naturally does way too much of both of these.

When I tell my daughter is like it is just not true that men in general are out to get you or won't like you.

One of my big piece of advice to my daughter is never be afraid to play the 'I'm not one of those feminist' cards with men.

The main ones we talked about today were Don't Be a Feminist as well as How Evil Are Politicians and Voters.

I read Meghan Markle's book The Bench and that's worse that's worse wow what an inspiring tale

Well this is why I've spent two books trying to explain these paradoxes. Books called Adam and Eve After the Pill and Adam and Eve After the Pill Revisited because it is a lot of paradoxical fallout.

and I think that's important to establish because this kind of talk about what happened after the birth control pill what did the sexual revolution really do tends to get confined to a religious ghetto.

but essentially what contraception does is make pregnancy a woman's problem and this is the big cultural change that we see.

I rely here on the work of a sociologist named Lionel Tiger who wrote a book in 1999 called The Decline of Males and once again Tiger is not a religious thinker, he even said that he regarded religion as toxic

In one chapter of one of my books I go through the music of the 1990s for example when Eminem is the big bad boy rap superstar.

Well this is why I've spent two books trying to explain these paradoxes. Books called Adam and Eve After the Pill and Adam and Eve After the Pill Revisited because it is a lot of paradoxical fallout.

I rely here on the work of a sociologist named Lionel Tiger who wrote a book in 1999 called The Decline of Males and once again Tiger is not a religious thinker, he even said that he regarded religion as toxic

I was talking to one of my friends and immediately you know what I think about I imagine it like if my attention span or if my attention and focus is an apartment let's say I consider a penthouse like this space in here is actually quite nice and it's very expensive and everything that I allow into that apartment is me airbnb and out I'm renting my mind out to these people and I have just given these two dudes you know this apartment for a week free you know they've gotten this penthouse level attention which has some cost and it's not been a benefit to me and so I've rented it out to them for nothing and uh and every time I rephrase it that way I'm like oh yeah I would I wouldn't do that I wouldn't allow these type of people to steal my attention for a week if my attention was an actual house in which I lived and by the way my brain your brain is much more valuable than some airbnb penthouse you could have and so my mind always goes back to the numerical calculus of what is it costing you so you can feel it in your energy you can certainly feel it in in your output which I guess could be monetarily driven but yeah at the end of it I was just thinking god these two idiots are living rent free in my mind for much too long it's totally my fault big hidden metric again uh I love contrarian thinking I love your newsletter where should people go if they want to sign up to that thank you it's contrae and thinking dot co fantastic and where else should they go if they want to follow the things that you do on all the socials uh we do a lot on youtube we do a lot on instagram and uh yeah I hope they tell me if they end up buying a business which is what we talk about the most hell yeah I appreciate you thank you go ahead me

There's a book called what color is your parachute which I read at the time which is kind of asking questions that lead you to that what are you going to do there's loads of that kind of self-authoring stuff on the internet now which is I always think it's like uh it's horoscopes for people with alibles you know the kind of it whether it's myas brigg or whatever but those are fascinating because you kind of go why do people like horoscopes I just want to read about myself yeah just yeah I'm a little bit self-obsessed and narcissistic but doing those personality tests actually if you do them seriously and the self-authoring sort of things it fantastic for kind of what who am I am I charismatic am I charming am I what's my edge what's the thing that I do that I find easy that other people find difficult and there's a little bit of gold there and I could pursue that that would be a purpose that would be something that's a true north

I was listening to this and I was reading quentin tarantino's Cinema Speculation I just want why am I watching new stuff yeah who gives a fuck about new stuff I want the best stuff so you go back to 1970s cinema and books that you read years ago that meant something to you and read them again

She looked at how pride is this thing that basically tells you makes you feel good about yourself. You need to accomplish something. There's two types of pride. There's authentic pride and hubrisic pride she lays out.

brad wilcox from the institute of family studies has got a book coming out i think on valentine's day it's like The Case for Marriage um and i think that that'll be a lovely one too with what you've done as well i actually i think our books are very complimentary because my book is all it's really all data driven and it's really focusing on what's what's the cause of the decline in marriage in terms of what role has economics played what's the impact for kids and what are the impacts for you know i show very clearly that this has exacerbated inequality it's impeded social mobility brad's book is really complimentary in the sense that it draws on a lot more of this research that's saying hey for you as an individual like she's talking about these societal problems for you as an individual you're actually most likely to achieve high levels of well-being and happiness if you're married um and so they are complementary in that in that sense

do you know rob henderson's work so of course i know rob henry he wrote first this is luxury police right um defund the police

You must make pressure your privilege is on a lot of t shirts by Chris Bumstead who is the current Mr Olympia classic physique champion he was on the podcast a little while ago made t shirts with pressure as your privilege on it turns out that one of my best friends in Austin his godmother first came up with that the tennis player yeah and sued Chris no I was like oh yeah her book is called pressure is a Pressure is a Privilege this is awkward yeah that the guy that I and it was the first question I asked him and then I spoke to Sky and I was like if I there been as this recreated some trauma inside of the family is Thanksgiving dinner going to be ruined because I brought it back up again but yeah you must make pressure your privilege why?

Sapolsky wrote a book many years ago called Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers. Or I think I got the title right.

And where he's basically arguing exactly the quote that you just read, which is look, a prey animal doesn't sit around as far as we know, with an existential looming thought.

Brian Word Perkins wrote a book called 'The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire' where he was looking at well the zenith of the Roman Empire and then the collapse and he said that the reason why the Roman Empire was not able to sustain itself was because it was not able to perpetuate institutions from one generation to the next

there was a American psychologist by the name of George Murdoc who wrote a very influential book uh called 'The Ethnographic Atlas' where he surveyed 1170 societies and what he found was that 850 of those societies partook in polygyny of some of some kind they're polygynous in nature

Tomas Soul has has looked at this issue in in a great level of a great level in his books or at least one of his books was 'White Liberals and Black Rednecks' I believe I have that had that mixed up but he looked at rates of of intact black families and the success that they had and it's only when the model cities act came into effect in the 1960s in that stage that we saw a degradation of the black family structure and therefore increases in crime within black communities

Professor Michael Ray the folks at Barbell Medicine who talk about the biopsychosocial method which I think came from Larimer Mosley's work Explain Pain Out of Australia there on the front lines of this where manual therapy not as effective as movement it's a facilitator of movement someone by touching you can distract you from that pain signal from the brain to the location that you're experiencing pain call it placebo call it distraction therapy and that then allows you to move with less inhibition Greg calls it kinesophobic when people have pain they stop moving which is exactly the opposite of what you want to do you want to begin moving as pain as possible and that's what's going to help facilitate the recovery

About a couple of years ago I created the Galileo project along with a colleague of mine, Frank Laokyan. That was the result of my previous book, Extraterrestrial, where I discussed the first reported interstellar object, 'Oumuamua, that was discovered by a telescope in Hawaii and this word means scout in the Hawaiian language.