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Three deranged tech founders discuss dating and society.
The greatest irony of the late twentieth century is women complaining about the gender pay gap and simultaneously refusing to date men who make less money than them. You wouldn't think taxes and dating or even low taxes and dating are necessarily intertwined,
Stony:but I think they are.
Cody:None of us are sovereign. We are all sort of beta to the government and to these real power players. And so really, the government is the alpha in the room.
Stony:And I wanted to touch on the USAID article about a woman who was making $272,000 a year as a senior VP at USAID, where at a USAID funded nonprofit, her job evaporated as USAID was shut down, and she's been unable to find any job other than a $19 an hour retail job. And The New York Times was casting this as, I think, a travesty. But for me, this fits into and women are saying, oh, I want to find a guy who makes more than me. I want to find a guy who's impressive. And I think the NGO world created all of these fake jobs Yeah.
Stony:Which often went to women. And then the women are like, why can't I find a guy who is at my level? Her level was not $2.72 ks a year. Her level was $19 an hour, at least on a strictly financial level. And how long before she realizes that?
Stony:I think never, maybe. But when you know, if she had been making $19 an hour forever, I I think she would have been very grateful to meet a plumber making $150,000 a year. But at $2.70, and on top of that, where did her salary come from? It came from the plumber. It came from the person who was doing a job that produced something of value unlike her job.
Stony:So so we're extracting value from men, redistributing it to NGO workers, often female, giving them a completely inflated sense of market value, and driving up the cost of housing on top of everything else.
Wes:Yeah. I I mean, it's it's demand side economics. The the greatest irony of the late twentieth century is women complaining about the gender pay gap and simultaneously refusing to date men who make less money than them. But it's like you you can't have both. The gender pay gap is largely a myth.
Wes:But you see this everywhere. Have you ever watched The Sopranos? In in The Sopranos, a big money making thing for the family is that they'll have no work, no show and no work jobs with construction companies. And what a no work job is is where you get a bunch of your boys on payroll and then they just go sit around in lawn chairs and tan and drink beer and and shoot the shit all day at some construction site while everyone around them, you know, the actual workers work. And it's because they have to be on the site to give the company deniability or something.
Wes:But that's fake jobs, you see that everywhere. You see it I remember at college, like my my college had all types of event coordinators and their entire job was to be like a glorified resident administrator, you know, like a dorm hall monitor and to plan parties every two weeks that nobody went to. And you look at that and it's just like, this is this if this is not a patronage system, you know, at at the highest level of government, like, literally is a patronage system. It's like, it's they did they did this with toll workers in Massachusetts. There used to be a huge thing where like the the toll workers made like 100 k a year and all they did was stand there and take your dollar bills and say have a nice day and give you a couple quarters.
Wes:And but what it was is like, you know, you would get support from people in the legislature to support your campaign and then their brothers and sisters got these cushy toll worker easy to do jobs for, you know, as a as a reward for, hey, thanks for supporting my campaign. And, you know, it's just there's so much money in politics that you have so much of that. But then the other thing that happens too is, I'm very much on a soapbox here, so feel free to interrupt me. Like on college campuses, what happens is, you know, we've created these student loan programs where anyone can pay to go to college and everybody needs to go to college or so they think. So there's no there's no price competition.
Wes:So colleges have to compete with each other in some respect and it's really just a microcosm of of other places, but the colleges can't compete on price, they have to compete on amenities and services. So you you get these dorms that look like the Taj Mahal and you get all of these these huge administrative staffs who who throw events that no one gives a shit about and all these security services that are unnecessary and stuff and it's like, well, the government's gonna just keep paying people to go to school and the colleges are going keep wanting to bring in more money and so they're going to keep hiring people. And and, you know, like the rise in the price of college is almost completely attributable to bloated administrative staffs. And and I assume the same sort of dynamic is playing out in all types of places. Quote
Stony:I come quote I come back to is no raindrop thinks they're responsible for the flood. Right. And so you can look at this and say, that's just one overpaid NGO employee or just one resident advisor who isn't doing very much. But when you multiply that by the millions of people who are deriving their salary from people doing something productive and working hard. And I think of the plumber who's not given the status or the salary.
Stony:They're just having their money taken from them. Yeah. It's it's all connected. Sorry, Cody?
Cody:No. I was just gonna say it reminds me of, like, it's like an arms race. It's like almost like a fisherian runaway sexual selection like Evo Bio, where, like, you have, you know, it's like a peacock tail or something, right, where, you know, they they're all all the colleges are competing with each other, so they have to have more extravagant tails. Yeah. It's it's I mean, is that is it just what what is explanatory of this?
Cody:Is it just because you would think, like, you know, one perspective would say that, like, I don't know if this is where we wanna go spend a long time on this topic, but, like, you know, one perspective would say that, you know, like, the like, the efficient market should eliminate stuff like this fairly, you know, with Well Fair fairly regularly.
Stony:But I want to tie this back to to dating. You know, this is this is a podcast ostensibly about dating. How does an overpaid NGO worker, particularly female, distort the market, particularly where
Cody:Sure.
Stony:Her source of finance is coming from traditionally, men are the the the men are the only net like, men net contribute to the federal government. Women net do not contribute to the federal government. Just to be clear, I know there are some women who do and some men who don't. But net, if you just divide all the federal contributions by either men or women, the male side is making a federal contribution, and the female side is receiving a federal contribution. So ultimately, it is men who are paying the net taxes for this job.
Stony:And this, to me, magnified, you know, across America is distorting the dating market badly. You know, guys if no woman wants to date a guy who's living in his parents' basement, you know, they might be willing to, but it's never a checklist. Oh, what I'm really looking for is that. And what what causes people to live in their parents' basement? It's lack of good jobs, lack of ability to to afford a house, and this this distortion of the market trickles down to distortion of dating.
Wes:Yeah. I I think that you know, I wouldn't have a problem with make work programs if they were at least doing something very immediately productive. Like if they wanted to take these USAID workers and deploy them on the sides of the highways of every state, picking up garbage so we could have highways that were free of garbage, I would be totally fine with that. But part of the problem is is that that is undignified in these people's minds, right? Like they don't want to be a garbage collector.
Wes:I'm using a very obscene example here, but it doesn't have to be something as explicit as literally picking up garbage, right? There's there's there's plenty of places they could be deployed to to have an immediate benefit on society, right, like food kitchens, I don't know. There's a lot of things. But you have these people and and I think we need to just remove the dignity from these jobs. It's like your your your job in the managerial state is not a dignified position.
Wes:It's a it's to touch on another topic, like it's it's a self perpetuating cycle that like once you end up with a bloated administration, the administration can only become more bloated because you have all of these people in middle management who need to show that they have done something, right? Because if they they don't actually have to do anything, but they have to show that they've done something. So they create systems and they create requirements for paperwork that other people have to comply with. Well, and it's like in the army, can remember, like, I wanted to use a Humvee for an afternoon, I had to file paperwork with two or three different departments where you don't really need that. What you need is one competent NCO in the maintenance bay that I can go to and say, hey, need a Humvee, okay, I got this one for you, it's all fixed up and ready to go.
Wes:You know, fill out one form, do the form, here's the Humvee, go take That's all you actually need. But you have like this bloated middle management system where everyone needs to show that they're keeping maximum accountability at all times for all things. So this this one small task that should be an incredibly small task, even if you're going to a Hertz Rent A Car, it's a very small task. It becomes this, like, bloated nightmare that you need to report to six different people about. But that's just the that's just how bureaucracy perpetuates itself.
Wes:But the the original point that I was making is that society has needs and someone who wants to think of themselves as someone who has status and prestige isn't going to go pick up trash on the side of the highway. They want a job that maybe sounds impressive. But the thing is too that like a lot of women will not be impressed by your make work government job. They will see it as bullshit and they will think less of you no matter how much money you make doing that job. Not all women, right?
Wes:But like she she might have to be from sort of the same milieu as you to like not feel that way.
Cody:Yeah. I don't know if there's, like, an answer here. Like, there's no there's not, like, some easy fix. It's not like, oh, well, sorry. Sorry, he got a rough plumber, but all you gotta do is this.
Cody:Like, yeah, it really sucks where, like, it's a very difficult situation that, yeah, there are all these systemic forces that sort of we as individual daters, like, have to deal with. I don't know if there's it's like the best you can do is just look, the the the best you can do is just go, I didn't want that woman anyway. Yeah.
Stony:But unfortunately, you're still you're still paying for her salary. You know, that's Yeah.
Cody:I mean, that's fucked.
Stony:You wouldn't you wouldn't think taxes and dating, or even low taxes and dating, are necessarily intertwined. But I think they are. I think not having enough money in your pocket to get a car, take a girl out for a burger and a movie, and and possibly go back to your own home, you take away those three things, you're not going on a date.
Cody:Oh, yeah. Totally. Yeah. No. I mean, this is just another this is like a sort of a subset of the larger thing where, you know, men are evolved to interface with the natural world.
Cody:Women are evolved to interface with society in some sense. And the modern world is so domesticated and so you know, to to use the the the bap phrase, you know, it's it's controlled space. It's like we are really like, none of us are sovereign. We are all sort of beta to the government and to these real power players. And so, really, the government is the alpha in the room.
Cody:Really, the institutions are the alpha in the room. And, and so you're we're kind of all of us are cosplaying as as powerful men or alphas or whatever. Like, unless you're Bezos, unless you're Musk and you really are a state level actor, like, making 200 and you know, you could be a sick, quote, unquote, successful man making 500 k a year, driving a nice car with a nice house, but really like, you're still subject to the at any time, the system can take that away from you. You can there can be some bigger thing that steps on you and squashes you. And so you have to sort of pretend to the to your to the to your woman and to the the female marketplace that you are this hotshot who's in control of your own destiny.
Cody:But it's not really true. The system is in control.
Wes:Yeah. Well, I I think go go ahead. Please go I
Stony:was just I wanna disagree with you, but, yeah, I think you're right.
Wes:Yeah, I mean, well, you have to establish a framework for understanding the world that that preserves your own sense of agency and I think that ultimately for a lot of people that's just faith in God, which is, know, if anything bad happens to them, they'll just, you know, use God to replace, you know, they'll just say, well, you know, God has a plan for me and I think that's perfectly valid and might be correct. It's like, but how do you solve the meta level issue? I think there is one answer to that and I think that it's it's 's something it that you it sounds controversial when you say it out loud, but it's something that I I believe very sincerely. And to to speak of women in particular and also men, but we're gonna talk about women right now, is I didn't have a mother when I was a child. And that had a lot of like consequences on my life.
Wes:Right? And I had to learn a lot of lessons later in life that I would have learned earlier and I, you know, missing a certain type of love. The point I'm making is that a man cannot be a mother. And I think that being a mother is truly the most valuable thing any man or woman can do, is to be a mother and be a good mother. And I think that is how if you are a human being, that is how you can have the greatest net positive in the world because you get to establish all of these things for one particular person and basically decide the course of their life and teach them how to love and be loved and and and basically show them what all of the good things, the purpose of living, what that is all about.
Wes:And only a mother can do that to her children. So I think what we need to do is is venerate motherhood more. It's like you look at some societies and even like totalitarian states and they give women medals for for having children. And I'm not saying you have to do that, but you look at what The United States does and it's it's actually, if you were a welfare recipient, it is against your interests to get married because of how the the regulation is set up that you will receive less welfare if you get married. Now, that's just the microcosm of the larger problem, but when when I think a lot of people get this wrong and they say, women will hear a man say what I'm saying right now and they'll be like, oh, you just view me as a baby factory.
Wes:It's like, no, I view you as someone who's capable of providing something for a human being that I could never provide. And I have to fill that void by working hard and making money and you know, trying to be the best dad that I can be one day and to to provide my family security and safety and and all of these other
Cody:things.
Wes:But I can never do, I can never do that. And I think that it's the most valuable thing anyone can do and so, you know, we don't you don't need all these people at the DMV, you don't need all these people in the in the State Department. I mean, you need the State Department, that's a bad example, but like, don't know, the Department of Agriculture or something, like, just just be a mom. Just be a great mom. Like, don't depress wages for the, you know, everyone else.
Stony:I mean, what you're what you're talking about in in terms of reverence and public recognition, I just looked this up now, Poland has these kind of family marches where they're celebrating life and family and children. We don't really have that in America. We have the Pride Parade, but we don't have a mom parade. We don't have a family parade. We don't have anything like that.
Stony:So it would be, I think, a very different world if we said we value functional families, reproductive families so much that we're gonna literally have a parade for them.
Wes:Yeah. And it has to come from a place of everybody wanting to do it. It's not something you can induce with, you know, market pressures only, but I do think a lot of people have that repressed desire and aren't fulfilling it and aren't able to fulfill it because our our, you know, our markets and our dating market and our society around courtship has become so distorted.
Cody:Well, while I don't necessarily disagree, this does have the ring of the, you know, can't we all just, you know
Wes:It does, absolutely. Don't have any actionable solution to actually get to that point. It's like it's become so Right. Beyond recognition. Yeah.
Stony:I don't know. There's there's some you could have the Miss Pregnant America. You could have the family marches.
Cody:Sure. No. I mean, yes. I mean, you know, individuals can try to found these things. Well, ultimately, like, I think all of this is you know, I I I always take a, the point of the system is what it does, qui bono sort of approach.
Cody:Right? Yes. I tend to believe that these things are not accidents. There are people benefiting from, from the structure of civilization that we that we find ourselves in. And, and so even if everybody tomorrow woke up and decided, you know, that they totally were in agreement with this perspective, it probably still wouldn't change.
Cody:I mean, a, not the not the least of which, because there are forces preventing them from doing that waking up and they're actively preventing them from having that thought. But even if they did have that thought, that would be the only other first layer of defense. Goliath has 14 more layers of defense preventing change in a way that it won't be beneficial to it. So, like, you know, I think that the individual only has two, like, responses to that. You can either try to change it, which good fucking luck, but if you wanna try to become a civilizational actor yourself, you can.
Cody:Go try to be a tech founder or go try to become a politician and climb the ranks of the government. You can try to change the system. Good luck, they're gonna kill you. But but you can try. Or you can just try to, you know, like, at the individual level, just sort accept accept the way things are and find your little niche.
Cody:Like, there's always a way for the minnow. Like, you know, this is the sort of the yin yang of it. This is the intrinsic balance, which is that, like, the whales are are fighting, but they are slow and and and unwieldy. And the advantage the minnow has is that they're nimble. We are minnows, relatively speaking, but you can be nimble.
Cody:You can dodge and duck and dive around, around the the, you know, the Goliaths entities fighting. And so that's the the mindset they have to have is, like, okay, yeah, it's fucked up. There are systemic forces that are acting against me, but, there's still alpha to be had. And how do you find it? If the alpha in the fifties used to be that you could just, you know, you could just simply by virtue of, like, having a decent job, you could, like, make a bunch of money and the rain, you could knock up the random girl at your your girlfriend at your high school or whatever, and you could marry her and she would respect you because you made you made more money than her and you could do that relatively effortlessly.
Cody:Yeah. That world is gone. That's true. But there are different advantages that you have now. Now you have different tools at your disposal.
Cody:And so, you know, you can have You have more reach now than you ever had before. There's more optionality now than there ever was before. Optionality in terms of the tool, I don't mean in terms of the people you can date. I mean, in terms of the tools that you can use to try to solve this problem. So look, I'm not trying to be, like, overly optimistic or Pollyanna ish.
Cody:That's the opposite. I'm trying to have a steely eyed, realist approach, pragmatic approach, which is just like, I think the best advice I wanted to give to an individual and a man in this dating environment is just like, use the tools that you have available to you. You know? Yes. You're right.
Cody:Like, if your if your hope was to just compete on salary alone, you're probably you're gonna have a hard time, buddy. It's gonna be a rough road. Find other ways to compete, find other ways to be valuable and to be attractive to women and to find the one who's gonna be uniquely compatible with you.
Wes:That's why looks maxing has become a thing. Jake said this to me the other day. Yeah. And it's, you know, why are why are young men so obsessed with lux maxing now? It's like, well, they feel like they can't compete economically and they feel like they can't compete socially, so they have to find alpha somewhere.
Wes:I've been
Cody:seeing trees like this. It's like you're seeing the hot young hot young male, older cougar wealthy woman dynamic becoming more and more common for precisely this reason. Sorry, go ahead.
Wes:Right. Well, maybe that's not maybe that's not maladaptive. Maybe that's okay. Maybe if you have, you know, women who are wanting to have kids and realizing that later in life than they like ideally would have, and they find a young man and they can be happy together, like, I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing. I think that's the market adapting and I think that there's definitely good and bad manifestations of it, but, you know, that it might be better than the alternative.
Wes:I have something else I wanted to say. Oh, well, the thing so the nice thing about like the nineteen fifties, right, if it would be that to be an upstart, the the bar is relatively low. It's like the jobs that need to be done are like, you know, Homer Simpson jobs, right? You know, you're you're a safety monitor at the nuclear plant and you don't have to be hyper competent. You can be a normal person.
Wes:You can derive a sense of worth from what you do by, you know, sitting there monitoring the machines. Or you can be a sanitation worker or you can be a firefighter. I got a beef with firefighters right now. We can talk about that too. But but now it's like yes.
Wes:What what you were saying, Cody, your advice that the the world is ripe with opportunity is correct. And obviously, we're all here of that same mindset. We are tech founders. And to us, the notion that you can just do things rings so obviously true. But we're also, like, relatively high IQ, some of us more than others.
Wes:And we're, like, we're we're high agency people, again, some of us more than others. I'm the I'm the more than others in in both of those, but Thank you. I was wondering. Yeah. Well, it's just it's it's it's obviously I was talking to my friend the other day and he's like, I don't understand how anyone could be unemployed.
Wes:Just walk into a business and say, what problem are you having? Let try to solve this problem for you. A lot of people don't have the wherewithal to do that. A lot of people do not have the wherewithal to do that and they have the wherewithal to do all of these other things that are seen as less prestigious. But I in my mind, being a firefighter or being a garbage worker is way more honorable than being in middle management at, you know, the Department of Labor.
Wes:And regardless of what the relative salaries between those positions are, like, I can tell you who I would rather spend time with, I'd much rather spend time with a garbage collector.
Cody:Here's what it all collapses to. Yeah. I think that's alright. And I think if you had it, like because I, you know, yeah, it's it's it's That's totally true. Like, these are all these things are true.
Cody:It's incredibly complex. And, you know, the the high agency person is more is more empowered today than ever. But it's incredibly difficult, in fairness, from the other perspective, it's incredibly difficult to be high agency. And the modern world rewards being high IQ and high agency more than ever before. And if you're an average guy with average agency and average IQ, you're gonna struggle.
Cody:Like, a 145 IQ, you know, person, who's like, then it's like, yeah, like, life, like, it's gonna be great. You're probably gonna figure it out. If you're not that guy, then it's, yeah, it's gonna be tough. But I think what it collapses to is, it really just collapses to volume. It's really just It's just in That's really what it It's like, if you're If you don't know what to do, just do a lot of things.
Cody:If you don't have the IQ to make a lot of to make really great decisions in in a complex environment, just make a lot of decisions. And then the right ones will stick and the rest won't. If you can't
Stony:Go ahead. No. Go ahead.
Cody:If you can't and then apply to dating to bring it home. It's like it's and so I've said this before. It's like it's what I always say. It's like, if you can't if you're having trouble meeting the right it's like, just meet a lot of women. And it you won't have to be.
Cody:You don't have to be attractive to 90% of them. One of them will stick. I think most people just are failing to sufficiently just play the I'm not saying that's optimal. If you can do a better better to just choose the right avenue. But if you can't failing that, just do a lot.
Cody:Most things can be solved with sufficient quantity.
Stony:I think your advice is directionally correct. I think the reason a lot of people feel resentment against boomers, particularly when boomers give advice, is there doesn't seem to be a recognition among boomers that the average effort was enough, whereas the average effort is not enough now. And the other challenge is if everyone steps up their game, but it's still only those at the top are going to make it, then all we've done is work harder and not actually change our place. So in some ways, yes, I'd agree with you that if it's not working, you gotta keep on you gotta keep on trying. But to to act like the average person is going to succeed just by trying more, I'm not too sure.
Stony:Or at least it's a lot less frequent than it was for the boomers.
Cody:Well, depends on what we mean by succeed. I I agree with you. That's obnoxious when the boomers do that. But, yes, not everybody is gonna be a captain of industry. Totally true.
Cody:But and if that's what you need to be happy, good luck, pal. The man who needs to be Julius Caesar, you know, yeah, what's He's that
Stony:The the metric people often say is by the age of 30, do you are you married and own your house? And that metric has been dramatically falling.
Cody:Part of my point, though, is that we're using historical metrics of what success is. And, really, the truth is that, like, the yeah. You know, this sort of fifties era that we always compare to was a very unique time in all of this entire scope of human history. That was this unique post war surplus, that was, you know, just a specific you had to be in a specific place in America at a specific time. Most of history is not like that.
Cody:Most of history is brutal competition battling against the forces of nature and other humans, and then you die. Well, a state of nature. Right? What's the quote? Brutus shortened.
Cody:So like, yeah, it's that, you know, that that's that's the truth of human life. Sorry. I don't there's nothing that's gonna be there's no magic solve that's gonna emancipate you from having to work really hard all the time forever, and for a lot of that to be suffering. That's life. But, you know, so, yes, I think it's, like, both both sides are true.
Cody:That doesn't also mean you can't probably material improve materially improve your condition beyond what it is with, you know, with the right approach. And the easiest approach that most people are just not doing is quantity. Again, I'm not saying that's optimal. I'm saying failing all else, there's something that you probably can be doing that you're probably not doing.
Wes:Well, something about boomers too. And first of all, let me call this out. Stoney is a boomer.
Cody:He's a born boomers. Stoney is the greatest generation.
Wes:The Stoney yeah. Greatest generation.
Cody:Sony's from the eighteen nineties.
Wes:Sony's a World War two draft, Roger. So he can't be from the greatest generation. He has to be from the the worst generation. Dub it. The the thing with boomers too is like, you know, Stoney's an Uncle Tom boomer, that's what we'll call him.
Wes:But he not Stoney, but but He's
Cody:a generation trader.
Wes:Yeah. Well, I I think that a legacy of the boomers is the idea that career and work is something that you're supposed to derive your primary sense of purpose from, which is why they've also sort of pulled the ladder up behind them. It's like, why is Nancy Pelosi still in Congress? Why is the average age of a congressperson so high? What's supposed to happen is that you work hard your entire life and you build a family and you do all these things, and then you reach an age where you're starting to go downhill cognitively and and your priorities shift and you want to live for your grandkids and maybe do some other type of philanthropic work or something.
Wes:But what they're doing is they're just staying in these positions and they're not giving and it's having a trickle down effect and it's making it harder to advance everywhere where, you know, if you look at this look at the senior executives at hedge funds and investment banks and how old are they? It's like, well, they're supposed to be retired. They're supposed to be like letting younger people take those positions so even younger people can step up into more important roles. And you know, I can't think of any other why are they doing that? Does anyone have an answer?
Wes:Why are they doing that?
Stony:I don't think that's new.
Cody:Why are who doing what?
Stony:Exact My favorite same quote says
Wes:Why are the boomers not retiring?
Cody:Because they don't because they can continue reaping the rewards of not retiring. It's pure game theory. They can continue their positions of power and they can continue making hay while the sun is shining.
Wes:Yeah. But that's always been the case and we didn't you know, the presidents were a lot younger than they used, know, than they are now. Joe Biden I mean, even Trump is old as hell. I mean, he ages slowly, but are they just a dick? I I I find it hard to buy that argument because that's a that's a a human nature argument and human nature shouldn't have changed that much.
Wes:Has the has the is it that, like, you know, the average congressperson in 1880 didn't actually have that much influence and power? Is that they
Cody:were fucking died earlier.
Stony:Well, that's I'm gonna I'm gonna jump out here. They didn't really die that much earlier. The life the life expectancy thing is is a complete distortion around infant mortality.
Cody:Yeah. Know that. I'm not making that claim. I'm saying that was a flippant way of saying, they're they they were less healthy. I think there's improvements in health care.
Stony:They ate organic? They they got 10,000 steps in? What are you talking about? No, I'm I'm half joking here.
Cody:Yeah. No, I think the modern medicine's ability to keep boomers functional, not necessarily, like, you know, in a great physical state, but just alive. Right? We have all, you know, we have hip replacements and organ transplants and, you can excise tumors and etcetera. I don't need to list them all.
Cody:Right? That you can just keep boomers, like, you just keep them alive and functioning longer. Like, I think that's explanatory of, like, 70% of it.
Stony:There's an old quote. Science advances one funeral at a time. And I think this is an old quote. And it refers to the fact that whoever's running the lab doesn't relinquish power. So whoever's running the lab is doing the same doing it the same way they learned fifty, sixty years ago.
Stony:So you you need the clearing out effect. Steve Jobs talked about that in his famous graduation speech. The greatest invention was death to, you know, clear out the dead wood.
Cody:Sure. Yeah. I think it was Max Planck who said that. Yeah. No.
Cody:I mean, I think yeah. You know? Like, that's people are always gonna be maxed like, they're just gonna try to they're just gonna be maxed my selfish, and they're just gonna try to accumulate as much power and resources as they can. You can always rely on that being the defining, you know, explanatory factor in any market.
Stony:Mean, look at the pharaohs. They they wanted to take everything with them. Buried in boats with slaves and everything. I mean, that
Wes:was They also had a 13 year old pharaoh.
Stony:I'm not sure about that.
Wes:King Tut. He was 13. He wasn't a boomer. You know?
Stony:I'm not sure what that generation was called. The Tut generation.
Cody:Yeah. So, yeah. So funny. So that was some of the I I think my point is just, like, it's it's not yeah. Human nature has not changed.
Cody:It's that other thing other contributing forces have been removed.
Wes:The zoom camera did a really dramatic zoom in on your face for for whatever reason. It's because you, like, you you tilted your face. And so as you said that, every time you do that, it like zooms in very slowly on you and it makes it feel like you're making this like very like, magnitudinal point. Very nice. A little flavor for the listeners there.
Wes:We can probably wrap this up soon. Think that but I think this is a good topic. I mean, I think it doesn't touch on dating that much, but I do think this is like a good conversation. I do think this is the kind of stuff we can start to branch out into as we
Cody:I don't know. I I feel this is very self, like, self conscious. Is this good content? I I I feel like don't I know. Is this like something that somebody would benefit from
Wes:from looking This is this is good. This is good. Yes.
Stony:I mean, I don't think it hurts to tie the larger social forces into the microcosm of dating. We're not the only ones to do this.
Cody:I I feel like bringing up don't I'm not saying covering the topic per se is bad. I'm saying specifically the way that we're engaging with it, and frankly, specifically the way I'm engaging with it. I'm just not sure it feels it's gonna feel don't I know. I guess I'm just self conscious about always coming from this place of feeling like I'm lecturing, but I just don't know how else to engage. Like, I don't know how else to engage with the topic like this except to say like, I I only can ever find two ways into engaging on our top the topics that we talk about.
Cody:To either just, like, joke around and, like, talk shit and, like, just say, like, nonsense and, like, just high openness bullshit, or, like, say what I actually believe, and that's, like, a lecture. Like, I don't know what else to do. I
Wes:think you're doing I think you're doing fine. I Yeah. People like the show. I bring enough I bring enough irreverence that we don't need to depend on, you know, you for that and I bring enough Okay. Lecturing and and Stoney brings enough wisdom and we so Stoney's really good at bringing in a reference to something else and like doing idea association and saying this connects to this other thing very well.
Wes:Sure. And so it it, like, I think that we that's it's part of our dynamic here. You don't you don't I listen to all the episodes, dude. You don't sound like you're lecturing.
Cody:Okay. I do feel like we should I I think this is fine. Like, it's it's good to cover topics like this. I do think I think it'd be good if we could find more avenues into like, I think sometimes when we're at when we're at our best, like, we're just we're we're flowing in between those two, like, I guess, where it's, we're tight we're we're seriously trying to tackle a topic, but then we're able to pretty, like, seamlessly spend like, we're able to, like, split the different not split the difference. We're able to spend a good amount, a healthy chunk of time in both modes, where we're, like, seriously trying to engage with the topic and, like, actually have, like, useful things to say on it.
Cody:But then also just, like, keeping it light and high energy and, like like, talking shit about each other or whatever.
Stony:Calling each other game retarded, man. Yeah.
Cody:Yeah. We should have brought that up. It's like, should have said, like, you know, we got this feedback. Well,
Wes:Well, wanna hear we can we can wrap this up here.
Cody:Yeah, think
Wes:it's probably a good stopping point. We're But I I just wanna put a bookend on the topic and and we can get Stoney's take here and then sort of close it off. I do have one little story I wanna tell, but it's a micro story, it'll take less than a minute. Stoney, when I was going on my diatribe a minute ago, you shook your head vehemently when I said that boomers had created the idea that your primary sense of like purpose in life should come from work. Do you have a do you have
Stony:a thought on that that we can wrap with? Oh, I don't remember shaking my head. They they might have said that, but it was clear that wasn't their purpose. If you look at boomers, they were they were the hippies. They were the ones they were the counterculture, and they also were able to raise families.
Stony:So I don't I don't think that was they they certainly worked hard. I'm not saying they didn't. And they were rewarded for it, but I think they had a pretty full life. You know, they had they had the boat or the whatever.
Wes:Well, maybe for a lot of them, it's all they have left now. It's like the kids have moved away, the kids are having grandkids later in life, they don't have like that vessel to pour themselves into anymore and they're bored. Maybe that's a part of it. I'll just tell you just we we can include this or not, I know we're up on time, but I did meet the saddest man I've ever met a few weeks ago. He was in his sixties, he had no family, no kids or anything.
Wes:He was at a party at his house, he was throwing a party. He has a mansion in North Carolina, nine bedrooms, ton of money. And he was, you know, throwing a wild party for people my age, thirties, younger, and he clearly was, you know, he's still working, he has a very successful business, he's still grinding away on it, but he's clearly doing that because he has nothing else to do. Like he has no one depending on him and he's telling me about his, you know, 25 year old girlfriend in in Miami and how he bought her a house and how he takes care of her kid for from the other family with money and stuff. And it's clearly like, I tried to get him to kind of say this and he wouldn't do it, but it's like, I'm like, you you feel good about being able to take care of this person though.
Wes:Like that's sort of a vessel for you to feel like you're like helping someone, right? And you like wouldn't admit it, but it felt like that's what it was. And it's just like that's a very sad position to end up in, and I feel like that's kind of where you can where you can end up if you put career over family and everything else for your entire life. You get to a point where you look back and you're like, that's not what this is all about.
Stony:Don't be that person.
Cody:Agreed. Oh, I you know, I let me while we're let me briefly circle back, because while we were talking about this sort of the civilizational level problem and, know, Wes, you're saying, like, you know, we gotta venerate motherhood. Don't necessarily disagree. I think as long as we're having, you know, can't we all just solutions, I think another another one is, like, we have to expand. We have to go to Mars.
Cody:We have to find new land to settle, because that's where men shine. Like, if if we're going to Mars or whatever the equivalent is, that's new that's new territory that you can explore as a man, that's something that you're gonna be uniquely good at. If you're, you know, if there are as a Mars colony and you're the guy who's going out into the harsh Martian, you know, the harsh Martian landscape or whatever and doing the bio or the the terraforming, like, that's hot. That's Girls are gonna dig that, and that's something that you can uniquely do. That they
Wes:Well, like I always say, we should invade Mexico. You could 10 x Mexico.
Cody:I I would hope at least. Yeah. It's like nature is gone. Right? And so, like, you need new nature to to expand into, and that's, like, how you can build your your wealth and your status and your all these things.