In other words, it’s not just the information you hear, but the way you receive it that shapes the way you think.

At first glance, that might not make much sense.

But consider the attention span you needed to listen to the famous Lincoln-Douglas debates, which started with a 60-minute speech, followed by a 90-minute response, and ended with the original speaker getting a 30-minute rebuttal, versus the attention spans of people who get their political information through TikTok.

When newspapers first came out in the 1600s, it sometimes took 6 months to a year to hear news from the other side of the world, while today you can almost watch it happen. Think about your sense of how fast-paced and quickly changing the world is depending on which of those ways you’re getting your information.

The first televised debates between Nixon and Kennedy also hammer this home. People who listened to the debate on the radio thought Nixon won, but the people who saw him looking tired with a 5 o’clock shadow thought Kennedy won. That was the moment it became clear that it was no longer just the words and arguments of a person, but how attractive the person saying them was that greatly influenced what people thought about the issues.

In other words, McLuhan was generally right that the media people use to communicate shapes how they think.

That brings us to the modern dating market, which a large percentage of younger Americans would tell you is horribly broken.

There are a number of reasons why that is, but one of them is most certainly that the medium through which people get together these days has heavily swung toward online dating:

Now, if you’re older, you may not have ever experienced online dating, so this little experiment done by Murray Hill Guy (we’ll be talking about another experiment of his in a moment) will start to give you a feel for what it’s like:

If you’ll notice, the “average man” there is actually a fairly good-looking dude who is in decent shape, albeit dressed a bit plainly – and yet, he draws minimal interest. On the other hand, the woman, who is overweight, also plainly dressed and has bad skin, is DELUGED with male attention.

This is now the norm in online dating.

It’s almost as if online dating is a job interview with several hundred applications and the woman gets to choose who gets hired. So, what happens in that situation? She gets picky. Very, very picky because she feels like she has infinite options. It’s hard to blame her for that.

The other thing worth noting here is that when you meet someone through your mutual friends, work, college, family, etc., you get at least a certain sense of what they’re like. Do they look you in the eye? Are they rude, crude or awkward in person? Do you have a good vibe with them, or at least not a bad one? Your friends, family, or people at work may fill in a lot of those details, too. “Oh, Jimmy? Yeah, he has a really good job, goes to church every week, and everybody likes him.”

With online dating, for the most part, you get none of this. As a man, most of the profiles you read sound something like, “I love the beach, horses, and laughter! Also, I hate liars!” Do you feel like you know what a woman is like from reading that? No, of course, not – and I’m sure most men’s profiles aren’t much better.

So, what’s left to judge people on if you’re online dating?

Looks.

Now you might think, “Wait, that guy isn’t bad-looking. He’s AT LEAST like a 7 out of 10 or something, right?”

That may be true, but women grade looks EXTREMELY HARSHLY compared to men. There’s a notorious chart with data compiled in 2009 from the OKCupid website that shows you how differently men and women judge each other on looks:

You may notice that according to women on that site, 81% of men were below average in looks.

That brings us to another one of Murray Hill Guy’s experiments: Terra Chad.

He created fake profiles featuring an extraordinarily handsome man with various types of flaws. The men didn’t look exactly the same, but this gives you the general idea:

Know what he found? As long as the man was good-looking enough, almost nothing else mattered, with the possible exception of height. No, really…

What this suggests is that, for an increasing number of women, looks are becoming the be-all and end-all of dating. Maybe other things like fame, status, or money also matter, but if you have looks, the rest doesn’t matter very much.

Is that all women? Absolutely not. Can we say exactly what percentage of women have started treating looks like it’s all that matters? No, but I would suggest to you that it’s not an accident that “looksmaxxing” for guys has now become a thing:

There are young guys out there getting on dangerous drugs, getting surgeries, and jamming needles into their faces to try to make themselves more attractive because they’ve concluded, perhaps correctly with a big percentage of women, that looks are ALL THAT MATTER.

In any case, the point of this is not to beat up on women or suggest that they’re shallow (especially since I believe EVERYBODY, myself included, is fairly shallow in an awful lot of ways); it’s to get people to consider how online dating may be negatively changing the way they see the world.

Looks ARE important. Everybody likes looking good and dating people they think look good, but when it comes to picking a long-term partner, that’s the kind of thing where they should meet a basic threshold, instead of it being the key selling point.

Beautiful doesn’t help take care of you when you’re sick, treat you with more kindness than you deserve after you’ve been a pain in the @ss, or do a good job of parenting your children with you. Handsome may look good beside you on Instagram, but it’s not synonymous with goodness, intelligence, humor, loyalty or any of the other things you want from someone in a relationship.

There are extremely good-looking people who have some or all of those qualities, but those traits are actually RARER among the best-looking people because people gifted in one area tend to fall short in others. Besides, the truth is the best-looking people often don’t feel the need to try as hard in other areas because they can get a long, long way based on nothing more than their appearance.

At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter if you’re male or female; be careful about putting too much emphasis on beauty. If looks are “everything” to you, you’re going to miss out on a lot of the things that matter the most and lose “everything” far sooner than you expect because Father Time comes for us all.

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101 Things All Young Adults Should Know

I’ve also been fortunate enough to talk to people who’ve lived in places all over the world at one time or another, and you know what? If you’re just a regular person who wants a nice place to live, America is the best place on Earth.

That doesn’t mean we’re perfect or that there aren’t other fairly nice places to live. For example, personally? I really liked Tokyo. It was clean, the people were nice, the public transportation was efficient, and it was advanced. The Japanese know how to run a proper country… but it was also so orderly and rule bound, I think it would drive my “chaotic good” American brain a little crazy over time if I lived there. That doesn’t make it bad – it’s certainly not – but, even if I spoke Japanese, I’d rather live here.

If you live in America, not only do you live in the strongest country in the world, with the best economy, but you live in a country where people have the most disposable income, the best doctors, and the best lifestyle of anywhere else. Furthermore, because the country is so vast, you have a lot of choices about where to live. Want to live in a far left-wing enclave like Berkeley? An overwhelmingly red, rural town? A giant city with unlimited things to do like NYC? A big city like Denver or Las Vegas with lots of beautiful nature around it? Desert? Coast? Nearly tropical places like Florida or freezing cold like Alaska? It’s all in one country waiting for you. If you want options and opportunities, this is THE SPOT to be in.

Some left-wingers who fled America because Trump wanted secure borders, fair elections, and nobody mutilating kids, found that out the hard way. Furthermore, although you wouldn’t normally expect to see this, the lefties at Wired did a whole article about them called, They Fled Trump’s America. Now They Regret It: The internet told them Europe was a social paradise. Turns out the trains are awful, the health care isn’t free, and people can be really mean. The most entertaining story is about a woman named Annie:

In the autumn of 2024, Annie was ready for something new. She was living in the southern United States when her husband received an unexpected job offer that would move them to a town just outside London. They were in their twenties with no kids. “We wanted to take a risk,” she says.

While researching their new destination on Reddit, TikTok, and Instagram, Annie found Americans eager to explain how enchanting life in the British suburbs could be—all the benefits of a small town, just a short train ride away from one of the biggest cities in the world. The more she read, the sunnier her expectations about the UK’s health care system, social culture, and European transportation systems became.

But the reality of life in the UK was dramatically different to what she’d imagined. “There are huge misconceptions about access to quality health care, standard of living … the quality of life is significantly lower than in the US,” she says, citing the challenges she experienced with the National Health Service’s maternity care—having moved while pregnant with her first child—as well as the lack of disposable income in Britain, thanks to lower salaries. “Things in the UK that are considered luxury items are very common” in America, like a dishwasher and dryer, she adds.

Annie says she experienced a high amount of anti-American sentiment straight away. “I found it particularly surprising how people feel so comfortable mocking my accent and culture, even in a workplace environment,” she says. “The UK is very much a place of ‘it is what it is,’ but as Americans we are taught to always improve and strive for better things.” Annie and her husband now have an exit plan for summer next year, the earliest their employers would allow them to relocate back home.

Annie is not her real name—in fact, she chose not to share any of the specifics of her work background, her husband’s industry, or the precise places they had lived when we spoke about her desperation to get back to America. Like several other Americans WIRED spoke to about their decision to leave and subsequent regret, Annie wanted to remain anonymous because she is concerned about the professional risks of publicly criticizing life abroad. Others cited recent online backlash when other Americans said they missed home, or, in one case, a realization that the political climate of Trump’s America was not something they could escape by heading to Europe.

...“I thought that ‘British politeness’ existed as it does in movies,” Annie says, “but unfortunately, the reality is that present-day British culture is very individualistic, as well as without the sense of charity and helpfulness that many parts of American culture value.” She says she had negative experiences with the NHS maternal care, compared to the smooth experience of her private health insurance in the US, and didn’t expect it to cost her anything: “I pay huge amounts of taxes and an immigration surcharge to access the NHS services—so no, the health care is not free here.” She also expected train travel to be low cost, based on what she’d read about Europe (despite the extortionate train prices and terrible service quality being one of the biggest political conversations in the UK).

A noticeable number of American influencers and anonymous social media users are calling it quits, often sheepishly confessing that life wasn’t what they expected—and that they missed their old lives back in the US. On subreddits dedicated to these kinds of discussions, like r/expats, r/GoingToSpain, r/AmericanExpatsUK, r/AmerExit, you can now find a number of stories about difficulties building a new community, trouble finding work, icier cultural norms compared to the open friendliness of America, and sometimes a higher-than-expected European cost of living. Many posts now feature people asking for a new kind of advice: Is it okay for me to miss, or even to want to move, back home?

These posts are usually met with a huge amount of backlash. Commenters are quick to imply that the poster must be right-wing and privileged, in for a nasty shock if they did return home. Ironically, many times, they parrot the right-wing notion that they probably aren’t trying hard enough to assimilate into their new country. When one person recently said they badly missed their community of friends in a “blue city in a blue state” and were considering moving back, the majority of top comments agreed the user was “insane.”

It’s funny that in an article about liberals leaving the US, mostly because they fear Trump oppressing them, the closest thing to “oppression” they experienced was other liberals bullying them for telling them a truth they didn’t want to hear. In other words, liberals have bought into the idea of Trump being scary and America being a terrible place to live to such an extent that even other liberals who moved away, found out otherwise, and are coming back, can’t crack through.

This is important not just because knowing the truth is important, but because there are an awful lot of people on the Left that are very cavalier about radically changing the best country on planet Earth today. They think if they can just shatter everything that makes America what it is, then they can create some kind of Utopia that doesn’t actually exist anywhere. The problem with that is that once you break something and find out your pie-in-the-sky ideas don’t work, it’s not so easy to put it back together. Once Rome lost its Republic status, it never regained it. The Ottoman Empire and the Brits didn’t lose their Empire status and just turn it around a few years later. Argentina used to be one of the most prosperous nations in the world, and today the per capita income there is about $15,000.

That can happen in the United States, too. Everything we have? We can lose it all, and if liberals had their way, we would. Then, they’d be left scratching their heads, wondering what happened and blaming everyone but themselves. All because they never realized how good they had it in the first place.

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101 Things All Young Adults Should Know

You’ll notice that in three years’ time, the battlefront has stayed roughly the same, although Russia has now taken another 1 to 2% of Ukraine. That tells you that this whole conflict has turned into what Donald Rumsfeld might have called a “long, hard slog.”

Furthermore, if you’re wondering who’s more likely to win this war of attrition, keep in mind that Russia has roughly 3.5 times as many people as Ukraine. That may explain why some Ukrainian front-line units are already reportedly operating at half strength, and why there’s no real possibility of Ukraine pushing Russia out of its territory and taking the fight in the other direction.

So, where does that leave us? Well, I wrote this back in August of 2023, and it’s just as true today as it was back then:

The one thing I would change in retrospect at this point is that if Ukraine gets completely depleted of manpower and Russian forces break through across the country, I doubt they’d keep it long-term. They’d probably just murder, rape, and loot everything they could find and then pull out to lick their wounds, rather than continue to endure long-term guerrilla warfare… but who knows? Russians still have a capacity for suffering that too many of us in the West seem to have lost.

Incidentally, if you’re wondering what could change this equation, we already have some answers. Biden tried to break the Russians with crippling sanctions that failed, in large part because the Europeans have allowed themselves to become completely reliant on Russian energy. How reliant? Well, Trump said this:

Incidentally, the numbers vary depending on how they’re compiled, but Europe does appear to have paid more money to Russia for energy since this war started than they’ve given in aid to Ukraine.

This is a huge problem because realistically, there were two potential ways for Ukraine to “win” the war.

The first was that the sanctions Biden put in place would work, but they did not. They failed miserably.

The other possibility would be putting American and/or European troops on the ground.

However, Ukraine is not a friend, not an ally, not a member of NATO, and our obligations to them under the Budapest Memorandum are very minimal. This is very clearly a war of choice that really doesn’t have much to do with America’s interests. Even if Trump were inclined to put American troops on the ground in a situation like this, which he’s not, the American people’s appetite for it would be pretty close to zero.

Theoretically, the EU could send troops into Ukraine, but that would also be a war of choice, which would mean America would have no NATO obligations to join them. Could they turn the tide? Probably, yes – it’s hard to say because Europe SHOULD be able to do that, but they’re timid, let their militaries degrade, and are out of practice. However, even in the best-case scenario, they’d likely see a lot of their troops come home in body bags.

Nobody really knows how many people have died on each side of the war so far, but some estimates say somewhere around half a million for the Russians and 150k for Ukraine. You think European nations are willing to lose 20k, 40k, 60k, or more of their troops to turn the tide of the ground war against a country they’re STILL buying energy from (although less than they used to)? Highly doubtful.

Against this backdrop, Trump has been trying very hard to end this war, but he hasn’t had much luck.

Part of that is because dictators like Putin, who start looking weak or incompetent to their people, don’t have a long life ahead of them. Putin probably feels as if he HAS TO WIN.

Incidentally, Zelenskyy may not be in a much better position if he acknowledges the inevitable and signs a deal that cedes Ukrainian land and rights to Russia on favorable terms. He could end up dead, in prison, or perhaps end up as a pariah in his own country or even much of the world if he’s blamed for giving in to Putin too soon. According to Trump, Zelenskyy has actively thwarted attempts to make peace on multiple occasions, and that’s probably why:

“Zelensky could have settled this war many times, many many times, and he chooses not to. Very difficult. It’s a war that should have never been started. If I were president, if the election weren’t rigged, I would have been president, and that war would have never started. But he could have settled it many times, and he chose not to. We said you can do whatever you want to Russia. Don’t hit the refineries because that’s a world problem that’s caused. And he wants to make problems for the world. He wants to make problems for our farmers, our ranchers with diesel fuel because Russia supplies a large portion of the diesel fuel throughout the world, and we told them, do whatever you want, but don’t hit the diesel fuel because there’s a big problem, a big shortage. And what does he do? He goes and hits the diesel fuel….”

The best thing Ukraine could have done would have been to make peace back in 2022, when people were furious at Elon Musk for pointing out the obvious:

That deal? It’s CONSIDERABLY BETTER than anything Ukraine could get today. Today, in a PRETTY MUCH BEST-CASE SCENARIO, Ukraine is going to lose MORE of its country than they would have with that deal. Russia is going to demand MORE and Ukraine is going to be in a considerably worse condition than they were back then.

One of the reasons Trump has been trying so hard to push for peace and offering up all sorts of potential concessions for Putin is because it DOESN’T GET BETTER from here for Ukraine. All that happens for them is more death and more damage, ASSUMING they have a country at all, which they could lose if their manpower gets low enough to stop the Russians from breaking through their lines and rolling through the whole country.

This is reality.

What we hear from far too many politicians, people on social media, and in the mainstream media about all of this is magical thinking.

It’s basically:

“Ukraine shouldn’t lose any territory! There can be no concessions to Putin! Putin must be defeated and made to pay for his war crimes!”

That sounds nice, but how do you do that? The truth is you probably don’t unless you want to put American troops on the ground.

What these people really want is to run out the clock instead of admitting the obvious. That would mean probably sometime in 2027 or 2028, you’d hear them go, “It’s not my fault that Ukraine was overrun. I put a Ukrainian flag in my bio, pledged my support for Zelenskyy, and called for us to give them all the money they wanted. It’s terrible what Putin did to those people after they broke through Ukraine’s defensive lines, but it’s not my fault!”

The truth is that it would take an unforeseeable miracle for Ukraine to end this war without losing part of their country and at least promising not to join NATO. Miracles certainly do happen, but being in a position where you need a miracle to win is never where you want to be.

If people want to waste massive amounts of money and watch human beings die by the hundreds of thousands because they don’t want to admit the truth, okay, but that’s not smart, moral, or the right thing to do. Trying to make peace between Ukraine and Russia, like Trump is doing? That is the right thing to do.

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101 Things All Young Adults Should Know

Today, when you’re trying to find out what’s going on, you get exposed to influencers paid by a foreign country while being propped up by AI and bot farms, mixed in with deliberate lies designed to promote liberals, commercials disguised as content, and opinions offered up by people with an IQ of 80 who’ve never kissed a girl and spent the last 3 years in and out of the psych ward.

The incredible, endless, nasty negativity that we’re fed day in and day out is just one aspect of that, but we’re going to talk about it today because what could fairly be called one of the greatest moments in all of human history happened on Thursday of this week.

Tesla actually made a FLYING CAR.

Now we could argue about whether or not that’s cooler than making a car that drives itself or a reusable rocket ship and how all of those things compare to say putting a man on the Moon, the first flight of the Wright brothers and say the creation of the aircraft carrier, microwave, air conditioner, indoor plumbing, or refrigerator, but out of all the amazing things that have been created in the 5,000 or so years of recorded human history, flying cars have got to be pretty high on the list.

I mean, the first time I saw this, I was like, “This can’t be real. Is this AI?” As it turned out, it was real:

As a human being, how do you not look at that and go, “That is INCREDIBLE!” It’s like one of those moments in human history, like the building of the Egyptian pyramids or the Roman Coliseum, where you just marvel at the incredible things our species is capable of doing.

Yet, it’s amazing how much whining, complaining and negativity this amazing display produced. Just to give you a little sample of it…

Folks, we’re getting closer to the world of the Jetsons…

…and we have all sorts of whiny people who’ve never built anything and done anything for anybody basically going, “I don’t like this because I would prefer that something else had been created instead! If I earned all that money, which I never will because that requires far more effort over multiple decades than I’ve ever put into anything, let me tell you what charitable things I’d do with it despite the fact that I don’t do anything for anybody now.”

As a side note, we always hear about the magical things people would do with the 900 billion dollars Elon Musk has earned by making incredibly cool things like self-driving cars, reusable rockets, and the world’s best electric car company. According to them, if they had that money, they’d fix homelessness, end world hunger, or make sure everybody in the world has a 3,000-square-foot beachfront house and a new Lambo every 5 years.

Meanwhile, I asked ChatGPT to compile how much money every government on earth spent in 2025. Granted, that’s a tough number to compile, so this may not be perfectly accurate, but…

Incidentally, the United States alone spent something like 11.6 trillion dollars locally and federally last year.

If there’s any problem that can be fixed by money, it can be fixed many, many times over with that much dough. So, why isn’t it being done? It’s not because we haven’t looted Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos and the other 1,000 or so billionaires in America; it’s because governments are naturally slow, stupid and wasteful – and that’s setting aside the fact that most real problems can’t really be fixed with money in the first place.

But, getting back to the topic at hand, I agree with Zuby on this:

We’re all constantly being deluged with people who whine, complain, and cry about everything. You could stand on the street corner handing out free $50 bills and they’d bitterly complain because you should have been handing out hundreds.

No matter how good it gets, they can tell you why it used to be better and why it’s still terrible because there’s something they wanted that they didn’t get. It’s always, “Here’s why it’s actually worse than ever…” Meanwhile, we have flying cars, food that can be delivered to our houses, and billion-dollar drugs being used to cure what ails us. I tend to think that maybe Americans who lived through the Revolutionary War, War of 1812, Civil War, WWI, WWII, the Vietnam War, and the Depression might prefer DoorDash and flying cars to what they had to deal with.

Maybe we should all appreciate how amazingly well it’s going in so many different areas in this country. Yeah, it’s not in our nature as humans to be completely satisfied with life, but don’t lose sight of the forest for the trees. This is still THE PLACE more people all over the world want to be than anywhere else. If you’re here and all you’re hearing is how grim, horrible and cataclysmic everything is, maybe you need to consider whether the eternal pessimists out there are getting so negative that they can’t even appreciate a flying car.

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101 Things All Young Adults Should Know

Not only is he worth more than $200 million, but he also has an incredible understanding of technology, networks, systems, and human beings. In fact, I’d feel comfortable saying he’s one of the smartest, most original thinkers out there today. So, even if you haven’t heard of Balaji Srinivasan, you can still learn a lot from him.

Enjoy!

20) Democrats need to learn experts aren’t always right. Republicans need to learn experts aren’t always wrong. Libertarians need to learn that a state can succeed. Progressives need to learn that a state can fail.

19) When you launch something new, people will say, “This product sucks, this company should die, and you are a horrible person.” Actual translation? Sell more units. This is counterintuitive. Why would many of the people who seem to want the company to die actually want you to sell more units? Short answer: Because sales give you social proof the product doesn’t suck after all and gives you revenue to improve it. Over time, skeptics flip. Longer answer: Your staying power shows that haters can’t beat you. So they join you (by buying). The crowd’s expectations change quickly. Many will strike out at you casually. Later, they will recant, also casually! That’s the bit to remember: Most hatred is a mile wide and an inch deep. Strip away the negative adjectives and distill legitimate criticism into bugs to fix. Then just plow on.

18) Popularity can be measured by likes. Truth can’t be. Status is a zero-sum game. Wealth creation isn’t.

17) Haters actually just hate themselves, though. They are rooting for somebody else’s failure because they don’t have the courage to try themselves. They can no longer make calculated bets because, to protect their egos, they’ve convinced themselves everything is going to fail.

16) If you go to Google Trends and type in a recent headline, you’ll see the topic often goes totally vertical. Everybody cares about the topic suddenly. Then interest in the topic drops off just as quickly. People go manic over something they didn’t even know about two weeks ago. It’s life and death to them; they’re willing to fight, kill, and burn things down. Then, three weeks later, they don’t care at all and will never care again.

15) Good: Helping others without concern for yourself. Smart: Helping others while helping yourself. Evil: Harming others while helping yourself. Stupid: Harming others while harming yourself.

14) Another piece of the solution could be to directly incentivize correctness. Imagine a new media outlet where every post is accompanied by a prediction market bet, and thus writers have personal skin in the game. This kind of news would be by investors, for investors. You might not even use the term reporter.

13) The media you consume changes the decisions you make. The technology you have changes the decisions you can make.

12) As states lose trust, their soft power declines. Less deference to the state means less voluntary compliance. Then, only hard power is left. The more states use hard power (coercion), the less soft power (persuasion) they have, which means yet more use of hard power. It’s a negative feedback loop.

11) People are running on scripts. They don’t even realize they’re running on scripts. Media scripts humans, just as computer code scripts machines.

10) You’re pursuing truth, health, and wealth, in that order. That’s actually the right priority order. For example, you’d never want to do something that’s untrue to make money or sacrifice your long-term health for wealth. Learn to determine what is true. Pursue health because, without that, you have really nothing else. Then wealth is important, but it’s third—though it’s important to have that third.

9) Everyone thinks the censor will agree with them. Actually, the censor will censor them.

8) In any functional society, you can just start yelling that 51 percent is oppressed by 49 percent. That will always work to get attention and arouse passion. You can find some unjust axis and start agitating that issue. Conflict gets attention, and attention is currency. If you’re shameless, you level up. Socialism is the lowest-skill way to put yourself at the head of a mob. This and variants on it, like demagoguery, will work in almost every country. You’re pitting some faction against another.

7) Without something to build, any intellectual movement degenerates into a status competition, where participants feel the righteousness of finding everyone else wanting without the responsibility of building what they actually want.

6) The hard way to gain status is to build something, to accomplish something, to add value. The easy way to gain status is to accuse someone else of being a bad person. It’s a status-acquisition hack, a quick way to gain relative status. Your critique of the existing system may be correct. But you need a product, not just a critique.

5) The reason the US eventually beat the Soviet Union is because communism required more lies. The Soviet Union had to make up factory production numbers because they didn’t have prices, so supply chains didn’t work, which meant factories didn’t produce. Holy lies, like the ones that animated the Soviet Regime, unfortunately work surprisingly well in the short term because you can bully or trick people into conforming with them. But in the medium- to long-term, they don’t work. Your machines don’t work, and your people don’t work. You become poorer as a society. You’re screaming these holy lies, but it doesn’t matter because other societies who found real truths have exceeded you technologically and economically. That’s why finding truths in a decentralized environment is important.

4) Popularity does not equal truth.

3) The consumer economy actually creates a form of equality. At a massive, massive scale, you produce the same product for everybody. There’s not that much difference between a top-end smartphone and a low-end one.

2) It’s not just about free speech. It’s about the cost of speech. If you’re jailed by the state for speech, you may not speak out. But if you’re fired by an employer for speech, that is costly too—a cost greater than most can pay. Costly speech means only the wealthy speak freely.

1) Many people do not reason forward from logical premises, but backward from social consequences. This has its own logic because social capital is capital. Screaming at the outgroup is much cheaper than investing in the ingroup.

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101 Things All Young Adults Should Know

ABOUT WOMEN?

That’s a harder call, because for whatever reason, far too many women (in all fairness, mostly liberal women) in our society have become hypersensitive to anything that can be perceived as even mildly critical of women.

The incredible MULTI-DAY overreaction to a single joke Shane Gillis made on Saturday Night Live is a perfect example of this:

“I haven’t been to the gym in so long. I didn’t know that women just dress like whores now. I’m sorry, there’s no other way to describe — have you seen it? I’ve seen it. The shorts? Have you seen the shorts? Those neon — they’re like artificial bait colors. The wrinkles go around the cheeks, and all combine at the butthole. And don’t look. You’re not allowed to look. For real, don’t look because they are filming. I’m in the background of like 10 TikToks right now.”

By the reaction to this joke from feminists and liberal soy boys, you’d think that Shane Gillis proposed to Congress that all women be impregnated, chained barefoot in the kitchen to bake until they gave birth. At which point they’d obviously need to clean up the mess and get back to making pies.

Seriously, look at the joke above and start looking at some of these insane reactions, which are fairly representative of the lunacy we’ve been seeing across social media:

There have been endless claims that the Gillis joke was “misogyny,” but how can it be misogyny if it’s true?

I’ve been going to the same gym for over a decade at this point, and yes, these days a lot of the women wear skintight, neon clothing. In fact, the best argument you could make about this comparison being inappropriate is that a lot of whores wear MORE CLOTHING than women at the gym do:

“Oh, so you’re saying women are whores!”

No, not at all.

Dressing that way doesn’t make women whores. That’s just the way gym culture leads a lot of women to dress in 2026.

But the reason the Shane Gillis JOKE (Not social commentary, JOKE) lands is that they are DRESSED LIKE WHORES. We’ve all just normalized it to the point that we don’t even notice it anymore unless a woman dressed that way is making a TikTok claiming that she’s upset some guy is looking at the skintight clothing barely covering her body that she’s wearing for an audience of people who are also looking at her wearing the same clothing:

If men were this sensitive about attacks aimed at us – of which there are probably 50 for every attack on “women,” we’d never make it through the day. However, a weird trait of many modern women on the Left (Has it always been like this, or has it gotten worse?) is to treat general comments, especially from men, as if they’re personally aimed at them.

In other words, it’s “Shane Gillis said something negative about women wearing skimpy clothes in the gym, and I sometimes wear skimpy clothes in the gym (or my friend does or I just want to) and therefore, this is a PERSONAL ATTACK ON ME.”

But no, it’s not.

It’s not even a mean-spirited joke. After all, he didn’t call the women dressed like that whores, he just pointed out that they’re in public not wearing a lot of clothing, just like a prostitute would be if they were trying to drum up business, and isn’t it weird that that’s normal now and that we’re supposed to pretend not to notice?

In other words, the reaction to this is just hypersensitivity on the part of mostly liberal women who have no problem aiming the most scathing criticism imaginable at anybody they don’t like, especially men, but who can’t stand any sort of criticism, jokes, or pretty much anything they don’t like coming back in the other direction.

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101 Things All Young Adults Should Know

In any case, Abdulrahman Mohamed El-Sayed did make a point about poverty that seemed worth discussing in detail.

First of all, here’s what he said:

“We’ve got this culture in our society that we’ve allowed to fester, where we think that when people... when people don’t have means, it’s because they have failed. Poverty is not a failure; when people live in persistent poverty, it is a failure on our society and not on those people. ...And we should be driving that conversation and have the courage to have that conversation against this “Cult of Hard Work,” like everyone’s got bootstraps to be pulling up.”

So, as a starting point, it’s worth noting that poverty is man’s natural state. It’s impossible to give the exact numbers, but if we were making an educated guess, something like 90% of the human beings that ever lived were trapped in a state of extreme poverty. Hunter-gatherers, subsistence farming, living off the land, being some feudal lord’s serf, or being a tribesman doesn’t put a lot of money in your pocket. You don’t hear this a lot, but even in the United States, people were relatively poor throughout most of our history:

In fact, the lion’s share of the wealth in America was created in the last fifty years.

It’s important to note that throughout much of history and even in many places in the world today, people are poor because even if you are smart, talented, ambitious, and work hard, there simply isn’t a lot of opportunity. Someone like Elon Musk would never even have become a billionaire if he’d stayed home in South Africa or gone somewhere like Somalia, Yemen, or Haiti.

What that all adds up to is that there’s more opportunity for people to succeed in the United States than anywhere else across the globe. Yet and still, not everyone succeeds:

In other words, despite all the socialists, doomers, and “We have it so hard today” people, you arguably have more of an opportunity to reach the lowest rung on the ladder of success in America today than at any point in all of human history. We may not like foreigners trying to cross the border illegally or people abusing their H1-B status to take jobs that could be going to Americans, but we should be willing to acknowledge that they’re doing that because this is where the best opportunities are on planet Earth today. It’s not in Canada, it’s not in France, it’s not in Belgium, Brazil, or China – it’s here in the United States.

That’s why just over 1% of Americans make the minimum wage and only roughly 10% of Americans are under the poverty rate.

So, why are these people struggling? Some small percentage of them are undoubtedly just starting out in the workforce, disabled in a way that makes work difficult, or they’ve had incredibly bad luck, but mostly? It’s their own fault.

Unfortunately, there are a lot of people in the world who make terrible decisions, are addicted to substances that make it difficult to work, are incredibly disagreeable or unambitious, refuse to build any skills, are just so unreliable that they can’t hold a job, or are just plain old lazy.

Socialists would tell you that we need to penalize everyone else and reorder our entire society to drag these people across the finish line in spite of themselves, but that approach has failed over and over again all across the world because it ends up impoverishing the many to carry along the mediocre few who refuse to do what it takes to succeed.

Why is it that society is supposed to have a responsibility to people who not only refuse to contribute to society, but who refuse even to do the basics to take care of themselves? After all, when you say “society” is responsible for something, that includes you and me. Why are you and I supposed to be responsible for bums like this?

What about the mother with 5 kids by 5 different men who refuses to get a job? What about the guy who lives with his parents, only works a part-time job, and spends most of his time getting high and playing video games? Why is their failure in life supposed to be our failure?

Why is it that those people aren’t supposed to join the “Cult of Hard Work” and pay their own way, but you and I are supposed to work extra hard to pay for ourselves AND pay for them? Because that’s what socialism is. It’s the productive people having the leeches in society attached to them like an anchor. It’s the makers carrying the takers on their backs. It’s the people who make society work being forced to pay the way for people that don’t want to work. Worse yet, it may make life easier for the worst people among us, but it inevitably makes EVERYONE ELSE much poorer.

Here’s an alternative idea: YOU are responsible for you. If you want to join the “Cult of Hard Work” and have a nice life, then you should do it. If you don’t, then you should suffer the consequences, and that should be a problem FOR YOU, not a problem for the rest of US, AKA as society.

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101 Things All Young Adults Should Know

Of course, like far too many things in America, the scale didn’t just shift back to even; it kept going all the way to the other abusive extreme.

We had people prosecuted for refusing to bake cakes for gay marriages, drag queens reading stories to kids, perverted gay pride parades in the streets, gay porn in schools, gay scenes in mainstream movies, tampons in the boys’ bathroom, perverted men pretending to be women and demanding to be treated as women – and, let’s be honest, flat-out grooming, along with gay and trans recruiting in public schools masquerading as “Pride Week”:

These grotesqueries were almost universally encouraged and celebrated on the Left, while criticizing them or, for that matter, gays in general, was treated as homophobic and out of bounds.

There’s a reason people made jokes about the “gay mafia” and “alphabet people” because for a while in America, it was considered completely unacceptable to criticize them on the Left:

We’re often told that “being gay is not a choice.” For some people, that is almost certainly true, but also, very clearly, there have been an enormous number of young Americans looking at all of this and CHOOSING to identify as gay in recent years.

If you don’t believe that, look at this chart:

This did not just organically happen.

Impressionable kids were constantly told how great it is to be gay or trans; they saw other people escape criticism and get praised for being gay or trans, and then, not so coincidentally, they decided that they were gay or trans. Intriguingly, a large percentage of that increase was in women identifying as “bisexual,” which theoretically means that they could claim to be gay, while continuing to actually date as if they’re straight:

Well, guess what? The surge of gay students has now crested and is starting to rapidly recede:

An analysis of newly released Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data shows a sharp decline in young teenagers identifying as lesbian, gay, or bisexual, particularly among ninth-grade girls, although researchers say the reasons remain unclear.

Jean Twenge, a San Diego State University psychology professor, found that identification as lesbian or bisexual among ninth-grade girls fell from 30% in 2021 to 17% in 2025. The share identifying as bisexual dropped from 26% to 13%.

“It really does look like a free fall,” Twenge told The Washington Post. “But what’s causing it is unclear.”

...The changes differ substantially by age. Among ninth-graders overall, lesbian, gay, or bisexual identification fell from 17% in 2023 to 11% in 2025, Twenge reported. Among 12th-graders, it declined from 18% to 16%.

Supposedly, the reasons this is happening are “unclear,” but if you believe this is a case of social contagion, the causes are very clear. The Left is far less culturally dominant than they were a few years ago, and the Trump administration has aggressively stepped up to the plate on these issues.

Today, people are pushing back hard on letting mentally ill men play women’s sports; Sydney Sweeney and Sophie Cunningham, neither of whom are liberal, are the two closest things to “it girls” in America, and X has gone from a censored bastion of Left-wing speech to the world’s #1 place to go for free speech.

As to what Trump did, this is from a piece I did in November of 2024, talking about how he intended to approach these issues:

In case you’re wondering, Trump has already started on or done all of those things and more, including kicking trans soldiers out of the military, requiring passports to reflect the sex at birth, and winning a settlement with a Texas hospital that forced them to create a detransition clinic.

As a result, a lot of young, easily influenced women are concluding that it’s cooler NOT TO BE bisexual and they’re reacting accordingly. In other words, they’re CHOOSING NOT TO BE GAY because it’s no longer as culturally celebrated as it was a few years ago.

This is a good thing.

I don’t hate gay people or wish them ill in any way, shape, or form. There are absolutely a lot of well-meaning, fantastic human beings in the world that are gay. Biblically, I think what they’re doing is a sin, but who among us hasn’t sinned? It’s also a sin when two straight people have sex outside of marriage, and I’m not going to be the one to cast the first stone:

That being said, gay culture is disgusting, creepy, and borderline pedophilic. The less of that there is in the world, the better.

Gay people shouldn’t be hated, abused, disowned, or mistreated, but they also shouldn’t be promoted, celebrated, treated as beyond criticism, or allowed to recruit kids. That’s the direction we’re moving toward today, and that kind of balance is good for the country.

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101 Things All Young Adults Should Know

So, as a starting point, let’s just note that it’s not really popular to be racist…on the Right anyway (there are all sorts of wildly popular anti-white and anti-Semitic racists on the Left). Granted, some racist, increasingly fringy people on the Right are “Internet popular,” but in the real world, they have very little pull or influence.

Additionally, it’s worth noting that not only is Trump not responsible for this, he has denounced racism and white supremacism over and over. In fact, he has done it so many times that it could be an article unto itself. I asked ChatGPT, “How many times has Donald Trump denounced racism, racists, white supremacists, antisemitism, or Nazis?” The response?

“At least 40 separate public occasions since 2015, including antisemitism, in my tally. That is a documented minimum, rather than an exhaustive total.”

However, I would absolutely agree that racism has become more socially acceptable among young Americans than at any point in decades.

If you want to know why that’s the case, the answer is that liberals made that happen. Not by endorsing white racism, but by rejecting the idea of being colorblind and by relentlessly, year after year, decade after decade, targeting white people with racism and painting them as the fall guy for all of America’s problems. Again, we could point out hundreds, maybe even thousands of examples if we dug deep enough, but this sort of nauseating drek has been incessantly vomited out by the Left for more than two decades now:

As someone who has been around for a while, I can tell you that throughout my adult life, all the way up until recent years, contrary to what liberals will tell you, white racism has been scarce.

I grew up in a mostly white, small southern town. All my white friends listened to gangster rap, and there’s not a single one of them that I’d categorize as racist. There were a few people from older generations who were genuinely racist because of their upbringing and the world they grew up in, but they were the exceptions, not the rule.

When I got to college and in my twenties? It was mostly the same thing. In fact, other than an older white guy who was racist against Asians because he fought them in Vietnam, there’s no one I knew that I would categorize as racist.

Additionally, I’ve been in conservative politics for 25 years. I was one of the biggest names in the blogosphere, met a lot of big-name conservatives, interacted with congressional staffers and politicians – you want to know how many times I heard the “N-word” in private in all that time? It was once, from an ambitious guy younger than me – and I immediately had a talk with him about it and explained to him that he shouldn’t use that word because it would be considered toxic in every conservative circle he wanted to run in.

It’s also worth noting that I ran a big conservative website and one of the largest conservative Facebook pages that has ever existed – and for a long time, you rarely saw racist content in the comments. Eventually, that started to change.

Do you know why? It’s not because Donald Trump encouraged it. In a sense, it was because liberals won an argument. They endlessly tried to convince people that being colorblind was wrong and that every group (admittedly, except white people) should see the world through the lens of race and look out for their race first:

Liberals have never been blunt and honest enough to say this outright, but basically their argument for years has been, “First and foremost, support your racial group – unless you’re white. If you’re white, you have a duty to cater to every other group, give them special privileges, and accept the blame for all of their problems. If you don’t do that and vote Democrat, you’re an irredeemable racist, no different from a member of the KKK.”

Of course, this is all bullsh*t. A liberal might be so full of white guilt that they’re willing to literally kiss the feet of black people and apologize for…who even knows what at this point? However, this is not most white people.

Most white people don’t hate other races, but they also don’t feel responsible for slavery, don’t care about black gangbangers shooting each other in Chicago, and their heart doesn’t bleed for violent black criminals who get killed attacking the police. They also, quite correctly, think that black mothers having kids out of wedlock, Latinos crossing the border illegally, and Muslims blowing each other (and everyone else) up created their own problems and white people aren’t responsible for that. They also resent being racially discriminated against via Affirmative Action and DEI while they’re told they’re privileged for… what exactly? Going to work? Paying their bills? Doing what they’re supposed to do?

You know, Eddie Murphy once did a hilarious skit about making himself white and finding out that white people just handed each other all sorts of things for free, but that’s actually not what happens in the real world:

In the real world, being a minority is often a huge advantage when it comes to getting a job or getting into college. At the same time, Hollywood, mainstream media, and elite left-wing culture that demonizes white people, particularly Christians, conservatives, and southern white people, will celebrate minorities at every opportunity and paint any disagreement they have with white people as a result of racism.

White Americans have been aware of this for a long time, but previous generations were raised to be colorblind, and they felt like they had such a majority that they didn’t feel threatened by it.

What changed? Three things really.

First off, because of the Democrats’ Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, America is very intentionally being made demographically less white. This is also the point of the Democrats opening the borders. They’re hoping to flood the country with so many poor, ignorant, Hispanic socialists who rely on welfare that they’ll have an unshakable hold on power forever:

If you’re white, being a minority in a country where everyone else has been encouraged to hate and discriminate against you at every opportunity doesn’t seem very appealing.

Secondly, as the Left has gotten closer to their goal, their abusive behavior against white people has ramped up. According to the Left, everything white people do is racism; it’s okay to discriminate against white people via DEI, and every disagreement a white Republican has with someone that’s non-white is because of racism.

Last but not least, especially with younger Americans, liberals convinced them that we shouldn’t have a colorblind world. Unsurprisingly, they didn’t like the idea of being designated the fall guy for every problem in American society. So, many of them are doing the same thing that liberals have encouraged other groups to do – treat life as a battle between groups instead of individuals.

Do I think that’s a good thing or even something good for the country long term? Not in the least, but it is a natural consequence of the way the Left has been deliberately trying to change the racial demographics of America while pitting all of us against each other.

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101 Things All Young Adults Should Know

When I walked into my room, I got a surprise. There was a girl from down the hall I didn’t know very well. I don’t even remember her name now, but I do remember she was a busty redhead. She was also drunk as a skunk, lying in MY BED, and when I came in, the first words out of her mouth were, “Please f*** me.”

On the one hand, I was stone cold sober and didn’t know this girl very well. On the other hand, there was a girl IN MY BED that I would have liked to have had sex with, ASKING ME to have sex with her.

I paused for a moment. She said, “f*** me” again, and… the moral core hammered into me through many years of Baptist church services held. I sighed, and I went down the hall to ask the other guys why this drunk girl was in my bed.

Did I do the right thing? I’m pretty sure I did, but it wasn’t necessarily easy, and let’s be honest, through her own behavior, she put herself in a VERY risky situation. If some other guy had walked through that door, things could have gone very differently. Lord knows I heard enough rumors about women I knew from school getting drunk and getting gangbanged, dancing naked on tables in front of a room, or giving blowjobs to multiple guys to know that these kinds of situations often don’t end as innocently as that one ultimately did.

As a matter of fact, there’s a somewhat similar situation in the news that DID NOT end as well as that one that happened at Cornell and is now in the news. To begin with, here’s a basic synopsis of the situation from John Nolte at Breitbart:

Two years ago, in the early hours of October 20, 2024, 20-year-old Jane Doe claims she was gang raped by seven members of Cornell University’s Chi Phi fraternity. Until she filed a massive civil suit earlier this week alleging it was rape, all the contemporaneous statements from Jane Doe (that we’ve seen) indicate she voluntarily took drugs and engaged in four hours of consensual group sex with the men.

This includes a statement Jane Doe gave to the campus police about three weeks after the event on November 8.

The campus police showed this statement to the local district attorney, Matthew Van Houten, who said then that “Jane Doe’s statement described her participation in drug use and sexual conduct as voluntary, conscious, and consensual.”

Earlier this week, CBS News uncovered texts it says are between Jane Doe and one of the accused where she flat-out says that “none of the sexual stuff was illegal,” that she enjoyed being with him and another guy, and would like to get together again.

Now ABC News has uncovered even more texts where Jane Doe expresses regret for her behavior, especially after gossip about the group sex made its way around campus, but she still says it was consensual...

...From what we know so far, all I see is a Jane Doe who went into a group sex encounter believing, in her own words, that such behavior reflected how “sexuality and sex is changing and stuff like this going to become more common.”

Then reality struck. Campus gossip labeled her a whore, and the Chi Phi frat wanted nothing more to do with her, even though she longed to be accepted.

This made her angry, bitter, and desperate to be seen as a victim as opposed to someone who agreed to be treated like a piece of meat.

To add a little more depth to this scenario, apparently “Jane Doe” was extremely drunk before she ever went to visit her “friend” at the frat house. Her “friend” suggested they do a threesome with another guy; more alcohol, marijuana, and ketamine were ingested, and the other guy sent a “free p*ssy” text out, basically telling other frat members she was down for a gangbang. By the time it was over, she had apparently engaged in sexual acts with seven guys.

Afterward, she noted in texts that it was consensual, that nothing illegal happened, and that she would be willing to do another threesome. However, word apparently got around about what she did. This humiliated her; there was controversy about whether the frat was letting her come to a party, and then down the road she was accusing all these men of rape. Although I initially kept an open mind about this case, it’s now clear she’s making a false allegation, and she deserves to go to jail for it, though she likely will not get what she deserves.

So, setting the particulars of this case aside, let’s break down some of the contrasting assumptions that went into creating this whole mess, aside from the obvious fact that whether you are male or female, you should probably be cautious about engaging in drunken orgies or gang sexual encounters for moral, legal, and potentially health-related reasons (“Yeah, I’m not sure where the herpes came from. There were a lot of people involved.”)

As a starting point, there was a time in American society where people went too far in putting all the onus on the woman for whether sex occurred or not. You know, “If they had sex, she must have been asking for it.” Was that unfair? Yes, it was.

However, we’ve now gone too far in the other direction. If a man and a woman both get drunk, then consensually have sex, the man can be accused of rape. Well, why is that? Are women hapless children with no control over themselves? I thought women could do “anything a man can do,” but if a woman slams down a beer, she’s no longer responsible for her own actions? That’s ridiculous, but it’s also how our society often treats it.

Similarly, while again I think we need to be careful about assuming women are “asking for it,” there does need to be some line somewhere, doesn’t there? Like, this was not a woman who was dragged into the bushes. She was extremely drunk and willingly went to a FRATERNITY HOUSE to hook up, where at a minimum, she was willing to engage in a threesome. Very clearly, she was THERE TO HAVE SEX and was good with HAVING SEX WITH MORE THAN ONE PERSON.

Incidentally, so many of these sketchy “rape” cases on college campuses end up looking something like this. Some guy and girl get trashed, make out ferociously, go back to someone’s room, sex happens, and then there are accusations from the woman that something non-consensual happened while the guy claims it was just normal sex.

At what point do you say, “If you didn’t want to have sex, why would you get drunk with a guy, let him grope you on the dance floor, and then go back to his room? Did you think he planned to play checkers with you once he got there? Any reasonable person would assume both of you were going to a private spot to have sex.” That doesn’t mean the man shouldn’t have to get consent. Absolutely, he should, but it also means the woman’s actions should be considered if there’s a dispute about whether consent was given.

Similarly, we hear that, “Women don’t lie about rape.” Of course, that’s ridiculous. PEOPLE LIE when it serves them, and women are people. Women can and absolutely do lie about rape. We could list many cases, but two of the most famous were the Tawana Brawley case and the Duke Lacrosse case. If they lied – and they indisputably did – many other women have lied as well.

We could even note that perhaps the reason this woman didn’t realize she would be humiliated around campus by being labeled a slut after word got around was because so many people openly PRAISE sexually promiscuous behavior.

After all, the end result of Bonnie Blue having sex with 1,000 men was her becoming famous and getting Newsweek articles written about her:

Teen Vogue cheerleads for prostitution:

Stories like this one, that praise extremely promiscuous behavior, are also very common:

Last but not least, we also can’t forget the fact that the names of seven frat brothers who are being falsely accused of rape have been released while the woman who is falsely accusing them is still being called “Jane Doe.” That’s a huge double standard that should never be allowed to stand. Yes, it’s stigmatizing to be raped, but it’s also stigmatizing to be accused of rape. The accuser, especially a false accuser, should be exposed to every bit as much scrutiny as the people she’s accusing.

At the end of the day, the whole frat got shut down, and the lives of all seven men who were falsely accused, along with the woman involved, are likely to be a mess for years to come as this case winds its way through the public square, political system, and courts. There won’t be any “winners” in this case, and that’s just another reason for everyone, men and women both, to steer clear of these kinds of situations.

No matter how much the media tries to glamorize these sorts of sexual exploits, you’re taking a significant risk when you participate in them. Ultimately, it can hurt your reputation, your life, and your very soul.

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101 Things All Young Adults Should Know

Well, you have to understand that depression is very hot these days. In fact, Americans are so depressed that we use more antidepressants than any other nation on the planet!

In fact, the number of depressed Americans has almost DOUBLED since 2010, and almost 20% of Americans are now depressed:

If depression keeps increasing at this same pace, a majority of Americans will be depressed by 2066, and it’s always great to get in on a big trend early, right?

So, the first thing we need to address is the idea that depression is genetic and there’s nothing you can do about it. Certainly, a small percentage of people like that exist, but in 2005, roughly 6.6% of Americans had a major depressive episode in a year, according to the National Survey on Drug Use and Health (NSDUH). Then, as we see above, in 2015, 10.5% of Americans had been treated for depression or were depressed. In 2025? That number was up to 18.3%.

In the famous words of our most brain-decayed president, Joe Biden, “Come on, man!” There’s just no way the number of depressed people in America could have increased that fast because of genetics or their natural brain chemistry.

So, you’re probably thinking, “Okay, you’re right, but I’m a pretty cheerful person, so won’t it be hard for me to learn to be depressed? How do I do it? Like, watch The View every day? Start going to WNBA games? Wait, oh no… am I going to have to start dating a feminist? That’s just wrong, man. Wrong!”

Whoa, ease off the gas there, buddy. You’re not going to be asked to do anything that horrible. On the contrary, I’m going to have you do common things that you see other people do all the time – but keep in mind, it’s very important to stack all of these things to maximize your chances of success. You don’t want to go at it from just one angle. You want to hit it from every angle like a professional fighter punching out a group of 10-year-olds:

First of all, try to get your brain chemistry as off-kilter as possible while making yourself feel physically terrible. This is surprisingly easy to do in the modern world. You can start by eating lots of candy, junk food, and fast food:

Your goal here is to constantly feel like you’re rotating between sugar crashes and eating so much fat that you can feel your arteries harden.

It’s also important NOT to exercise. Don’t walk. Don’t play sports with friends. Don’t go to the gym. Just sit on that nice, comfy couch. You bought it to sit on, right? So, sit!

Some mind-altering substances, preferably taken in frequent doses, can help, too. Get drunk multiple times per week. Smoke a bowl to “help you sleep.” If you really want to go all out, try some of the harder stuff. If your goal is to become depressed, having meth sores or stealing your grandma’s jewelry to sell to buy cocaine can work wonders!

Also, we can’t forget sleep. That’s why it’s important to stay on social media and regularly play a lot of video games late into the night, so that you’re constantly getting 5 or 6 hours of sleep.

You do all of this stuff, and even if you’re young, you’ll be flabby, tired all the time, achy, generally feeling bad, and worried about your health. You want to set the stage for depression? Well, it doesn’t get much better than that. It’s like three feet of snow falling the night before you hit the slopes to ski.

Of course, even if you’re physically primed for depression, you’ll probably need a little more than that to push you over the edge, so it’s important to make your mental state as negative as possible. We can all choose to focus on positive or negative things, so you want to gulp down negativity the way most people drink coffee in the morning.

So, pay attention to the news. It will always be full of negativity, even if they have to invent it. What about social media? Yes, please! Where else are you going to see constant outrage bait, argue with dumb people, and get attacked by weird, anonymous strangers at the same time? If you want to be depressed, it’s important to have this kind of toxicity in your life.

Along similar lines, there are some things you will want to avoid, like human contact. You don’t need some cheery friend or a change of scenery making you feel better. Instead, you need to just sit on your couch, eat your DoorDash Burger King, and chat with weird, damaged strangers somewhere like Reddit. Who needs real-world friends when you can chat with Rodenteater34, Trumpisaturd91, and sexyfurrygoatman69 on the Internet?

Furthermore, it helps to have a job you don’t care about, avoid dating (not showering helps with this), don’t go to church, and stay out of the park. God, friendly people, nature, and relationships all have a way of undermining depression and making you feel… good:

Now that the ground has been prepared, it’s time to seed it with toxic thinking. Talk to yourself like a wicked stepmother from an old Disney film, try to grieve for the people you’ve lost in your life, think of yourself as a victim who’s helpless to change anything, and get focused almost entirely on you. How do you feel right this second? What’s wrong in your life? How does this impact you? That’s what you should do, right? Why should you care about what’s going on with other people? After all, you’re depressed, and they’re not, so what does it matter if they’re having issues or problems?

In other words, become self-obsessed. Obsessed with minor inconveniences, with problems, and with what’s wrong with you. The more you blow these things up in your head, the easier it becomes to focus on the negative and become depressed. If you do this well enough, you can turn a minor mistake in your drive-thru order into a day-ruining screw-up, an ambiguous comment from a stranger into a justification that you can never let anyone know the real you, and getting laid off from a job you didn’t like anyway into proof that you’re a hopeless loser and always will be.

Listen, people… in the end, what you have to remember is that there are very few people that depression “just happens” to. Even if they don’t realize it, most people who are depressed work at it like it’s their job. They persistently and consistently do what it takes to get themselves depressed and keep themselves there, sometimes for years or even decades at a time. If you’re willing to put in this kind of effort consistently over time and you are disciplined enough to stay the course, you too can be depressed!

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101 Things All Young Adults Should Know

So, how do we fix this? By choosing merit-based immigration that revolves around some simple, common-sense principles.

1) Immigrants should be ineligible for welfare long-term: If we allow someone into our country who works for 10 years, then breaks his back in an accident, there’s certainly a good case for giving them disability pay. However, as a general rule, immigrants simply shouldn’t be allowed to collect welfare of any sort except under unusual circumstances. There’s simply no benefit to bringing welfare queens into our society.

2) Immigration should not significantly change the racial or religious demographics of the country: There’s no way we should be massively changing the racial and religious demographics of our country via immigration. That’s not saying that every immigrant should be a white Christian, but it is saying we shouldn’t be demographically replacing white and Christian Americans via immigration, which is something our current immigration system is doing.

3) Blue-chip prospects and people who marry US citizens should get special treatment: Should we be willing to fast-track a leading AI researcher or the owner of a half-billion-dollar business who wants to move it here? You bet we should. We should make allowances for elite talent that can add to our country. It’s also ridiculous how time-consuming and difficult it is for people who marry someone from a foreign country to get them here as citizens. In the best-case scenario, it usually takes 12-15 months and costs up to $10,000. If we take some basic steps to ensure that marriages aren’t fraudulent, there’s no reason it should be so punitive and time-consuming to bring a spouse here.

4) We should prioritize needed skills: If we need doctors, nurses, engineers, or rocket scientists, why not make adding those people a priority for our immigration system? Let’s be honest, we don’t need manual laborers. We could easily get five times as many strawberry pickers, roofers, and maids as we need through guest worker programs, while making sure they pay taxes. There would be no need or legitimate reason to give those people citizenship here that will ultimately hurt Americans as they grow older, get too broken to do manual labor, and live the rest of their lives on the dole.

5) Being fluent in English should be mandatory: This is an English-speaking country, and if you can’t speak English, what are you going to do here? Wash dishes? Pick fruit? The idea that we should have signs in foreign languages or politicians speaking in a foreign language to appeal to their constituents is repellent. If you can’t handle English, then this isn’t the country for you.

6) The vast majority of our immigrants should be coming from successful countries or countries with proven track records: Yes, there are diamonds in the rough everywhere, but every country and culture is not equal. If we’re talking about a group of a thousand immigrants, the chances that the ones from Sweden or Japan are going to be successful here are many orders of magnitude higher than it is if we’re talking about immigrants from Yemen or Somalia. Why bring people here who we statistically know are more likely to fail and be a drag on our society when we could bring people here that are much more likely to succeed?

7) Committing a felony should cost an immigrant their citizenship: Granting citizenship to a foreigner is a great privilege, and it should come with some very basic strings attached. You commit a felony? You lose your citizenship. You join a terrorist group or a gang? You lose your citizenship. We don’t need people like that in our country, and it is only common sense to get rid of them if we make the mistake of bringing one here.

If we put all these rules in place, immigration would become a huge plus for America instead of a mixed bag, and as an added bonus, it would be ten times less controversial with everyone who isn’t trying to use it to fundamentally change America for the worse.

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101 Things All Young Adults Should Know

Why?

Part of it is that you may want to change something about your life, but it’s still the way that it is for a reason. Changing that trajectory can sometimes be harder than people think. Furthermore, the longer you repeat a pattern, the more likely it is to become a habit, which makes it harder to do something different. If it’s a good habit? That’s great. If it’s a bad habit? Not so great.

So, how do you get over this and actually change things?

Well, the traditional answer is to just make a decision, decide how things are going to be, and use your willpower to make it happen! This absolutely can work, but for most of us, willpower is a limited resource. When we spend day after day grinding it out, on the verge of failing, oftentimes we give in and go back to the easier, more natural “wrong” way of doing things.

If you’ve ever tried to change something in your life and kept trying and failing, this article will be incredibly useful because it will help you break that pattern.

So, just as a starter, forgive yourself for not being perfect, read this article, and tackle that problem you’ve been struggling with in a different way.

What are the steps you need to take to make a change stick in your life?

1) Start small and expand: It’s brutally hard to go from not working out at all to working out for an hour per day five days per week or to suddenly start getting up two hours per day earlier to work on your business. Do you know what’s not brutal? Going from nothing to two 30-minute workouts with light weights per week or getting up 15 minutes early to work on a business plan for a couple of weeks.

People don’t like this kind of thing because it feels trivial to them, and they wonder how they’re ever going to make progress going so slow. However, starting small helps you build the habit of keeping promises to yourself and creates momentum. Soon, instead of lifting easier, you’ll want to move heavier weights or start thinking, “If I’m doing this much in 15 minutes, imagine what I could do with 30.” You wouldn’t even think of going from sitting on your couch to running a marathon without building up to it, so why would you think it would be different for these other important things you want to do?

2) Only commit to what you can do: There is nothing easier than saying, “I’ll start on Monday,” but then putting it off another day. Then two. Then another week. The problem is that if you do this enough, you lose faith in yourself and your ability to change.

That’s another reason why making small promises to yourself that you can ABSOLUTELY COMMIT TO KEEPING is important. Because if you promise to drink a glass of water when you wake up each morning, look at a gratitude journal each night, watch one YouTube “how to” video on something you’re learning about each day, and you do it, then you do the next thing, and the next thing. Suddenly, when you want to step it up, you will BELIEVE that you can do it and make it happen.

3) Measure it: This is one of my all-time favorite quotes because over and over again, I’ve found it’s true:

If you’re a competent, hard-working, or ambitious person, there’s just something in you that WANTS TO GET BETTER. But how do you definitively know if you’re getting better if you aren’t measuring your performance?

Once you measure your performance, you will often find yourself trying to beat your old marks, almost without thinking about it.

Let me give you a personal example: I had a serious surgery and the number of steps per day I walked dropped significantly. Then, even as I got healthier, it stayed below my previous numbers. I averaged 7k, 8k, or 9k steps per day over the course of a month, but I wasn’t back to 10,000. Then, I went on a vacation and ended up having several 15k-20k step days. When I got back, I realized I was on track to hit 10k again. Suddenly, I was inspired to get after it hard for the rest of the month, and I made it. Today? Barring injuries, I average 10k steps per day every month. It’s now the STANDARD for me, and a lot of that has to do with tracking and keeping up with my step count. If you measure what you’re trying to change, it can happen for you, too.

4) The mixed blessing of tools: Tools can be extremely helpful when you’re trying to change something. There are all sorts of trackers that help you with measuring your health. If you’re having trouble with getting off your cell phone, one of these bad boys would probably also be a big difference maker:

On the other hand, let’s say you want to get into biking. It’s very easy to wait until you can find some super expensive mountain bike you want for sale on Facebook Marketplace, which may or may not ever occur. WAITING ON TOOLS can easily turn into an excuse NOT TO CHANGE. If a tool can help you change, and you can afford it and get it, great. USE IT, but don’t let it turn into a brake on making your life better.

5) Structure your environment in a way that favors you: If your favorite food is Krispy Kreme donuts, you binge on them every week, and you drive by their store on the way home from work each night, DRIVE A DIFFERENT ROUTE home. If you only want to drink on the weekends and constantly get tempted to partake during the week, don’t keep beer in your fridge all week. Get it on Saturday. If you want to get up 30 minutes early and you keep hitting the snooze button, get 3 alarm clocks and put them in different places around the room so that you HAVE TO get out of bed. Create an environment that increases your odds of success and, ideally, makes it easier to change than not to change.

6) Make it part of your daily routine: When I enter my office, there’s a set of very basic exercises I do (Indian clubs, massage gun work, neck stretches, etc.). When I get in the car and go somewhere that isn’t extremely close, I do a different set of small things for my health (jaw stretches, breathing exercises, finger exercises, etc.). When I get up, I do certain things. When I go to bed? There are other things I do. My supplements sit on my kitchen table so that when I eat, I am reminded to take them with my food.

If you weave the changes you want to make into regular activities in your life, you are more likely to do them consistently. Maybe you don’t turn on the TV at night until you finish your homework or only go home for the night if you’ve at least spoken to 3 strangers SOMEWHERE to help get over your shyness. The more the change you want becomes a natural part of your routine, the more likely it is to stick.

7) Accountability: I lift weights on my own every single week, but I also have a trainer. I have been doing Muay Thai for a long time, and I could probably practice what I already know and do fairly well with it. Yet, I still have a very good coach. I also have a life coach I have talked to once per quarter for like a decade, and to be perfectly honest, I don’t need her to coach me on anything. So, why do I do all those things? Because…

When you’re sleepy, tired, or don’t feel like doing something, there’s nothing easier than to come up with an excuse not to do it. It’s even easier if you’re smart, because smart people can come up with even better-sounding bullsh*t.

That’s why we all need accountability. We need someone who gives us a reason to show up when we said we’d show up, live up to our word, and make sure we’re not fooling ourselves about how hard we’re working.

If you have any pride (and some of us, myself included, probably have too much of it), you feel a twinge of SHAME and EMBARRASSMENT if another person sees you go back on your word or fall short because of a lack of effort. That can be the difference between success and failure if you’re trying to change something in your life. Take full advantage of that at every opportunity to lock in those changes you want.

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101 Things All Young Adults Should Know

Thanks to the two of them, Berkshire Hathaway manages over a trillion dollars in assets, and both became billionaires. Buffett built a larger public profile, but both are legends in the investing world.

Both of them were also known for “value investing.” They’d buy underpriced assets they understood extremely well that also had a big competitive advantage and were likely to be profitable for a long time.

This is not a sexy way to invest, and they missed a few opportunities because of that, but their philosophy was wildly successful over the long term, and investors paid close attention. Their Berkshire Hathaway Annual Shareholders meetings were called “Woodstock for capitalists,” and they drew as many as 40,000 people who came to hear Buffett and Munger talk and answer questions for hours.

Philosophically, there are a few things I disagree with both of them on (Bitcoin is one big example). Still, they’re both brilliant people who were extremely successful for an extremely long time, and, as you can see from these quotes, there’s a lot we can all learn from them.

30) “Acquire worldly wisdom and adjust your behavior accordingly. If your new behavior gives you a little temporary unpopularity with your peer group, then to hell with them.” -- Charlie Munger

29) “It’s never paid to bet against America. We come through things, but it’s not always a smooth ride.” -- Warren Buffett

28) “I think the reason why we got into such idiocy in investment management is best illustrated by a story that I tell about the guy who sold fishing tackle. I asked him, ‘My God, they’re purple and green. Do fish really take these lures?’ And he said, ‘Mister, I don’t sell to fish.’” -- Charlie Munger

27) “It’s only when the tide goes out that you learn who’s been swimming naked.” -- Warren Buffett

26) “Opportunities come infrequently. When it rains gold, put out the bucket, not the thimble.” -- Warren Buffett

25) “Predicting rain doesn’t count. Building arks does.” -- Warren Buffett

24) “Capitalism without failure is like religion without Hell.” -- Charlie Munger

23) “The most important thing to do if you find yourself in a hole is to stop digging.” -- Warren Buffett

22) “The safest way to get what you want is to deserve what you want.” -- Charlie Munger

21) “In my whole life, I have known no wise people (over a broad subject matter area) who didn’t read all the time - none, zero. You’d be amazed at how much Warren reads - and at how much I read. My children laugh at me. They think I’m a book with a couple of legs sticking out.” -- Charlie Munger

20) “Envy is a really stupid sin because it’s the only one you could never possibly have any fun at. There’s a lot of pain and no fun. Why would you want to get on that trolley?” -- Charlie Munger

19) “It’s the work on your desk. Do well with what you already have, and more will come in.” -- Charlie Munger

18) “I never allow myself to hold an opinion on anything that I don’t know the other side’s argument better than they do.” -- Charlie Munger

17) “Too often, a vast collection of possessions ends up possessing its owner. The asset I most value, aside from health, is interesting, diverse, and long-standing friends.” -- Warren Buffett

16) “Most people get interested in stocks when everyone else is. The time to get interested is when no one else is. You can’t buy what is popular and do well.” -- Warren Buffett

15) “Another thing, of course, is life will have terrible blows, horrible blows, unfair blows. Doesn’t matter. And some people recover, and others don’t. And there I think the attitude of Epictetus is the best. He thought that every mischance in life was an opportunity to behave well. Every mischance in life was an opportunity to learn something, and your duty was not to be submerged in self-pity, but to utilize the terrible blow in a constructive fashion. That is a very good idea.” -- Charlie Munger

14) “Never ask a barber if you need a haircut.” -- Warren Buffett

13) “Anything can happen anytime in markets. And no advisor, economist, or TV commentator - and definitely not Charlie nor I - can tell you when chaos will occur. Market forecasters will fill your ear but will never fill your wallet.” -- Warren Buffett

12) “Only buy something that you’d be perfectly happy to hold if the market shut down for 10 years.” -- Warren Buffett

11) “It’s not supposed to be easy. Anyone who finds it easy is stupid.” -- Charlie Munger

10) “You only have to do a very few things right in your life so long as you don’t do too many things wrong.” -- Warren Buffett

9) “It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you’ll do things differently.” -- Warren Buffett

8) “The iron rule of nature is you get what you reward for. If you want ants to come, you put sugar on the floor.” -- Charlie Munger

7) “What the wise do in the beginning, fools do in the end.” -- Warren Buffett

6) “Someone’s sitting in the shade today because someone planted a tree a long time ago.” -- Warren Buffett

5) “No matter how great the talent or efforts, some things just take time. You can’t produce a baby in one month by getting nine women pregnant.” -- Warren Buffett

4) “You’d be amazed at how much long-term advantage you get by refusing to be actively stupid.” -- Charlie Munger

3) “Mimicking the herd invites regression to the mean (merely average performance).” -- Charlie Munger

2) “Rule No. 1: Never lose money. Rule No. 2: Never forget Rule No. 1.” -- Warren Buffett

1) “Be fearful when others are greedy and greedy when others are fearful.” -- Warren Buffett

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101 Things All Young Adults Should Know

Liberal Fascism is centered around the idea that fascism/Nazism are not rightward-leaning ideologies at all. On the contrary, they’re a kissing cousin of modern liberalism/progressivism.

Before I echo Goldberg’s arguments, let’s drop a few quotes from Liberal Fascism to help you get an idea of where he’s coming from:

* “Before the war, fascism was widely viewed as a progressive social movement with many liberal and left-wing adherents in Europe and the United States…”

* “Heinrich Himmler was a certified animal rights activist and an aggressive promoter of ‘natural healing.’ Rudolf Hess, Hitler’s deputy, championed homeopathy and herbal remedies. Hitler and his advisers dedicated hours of their time to discussions of the need to move the entire nation to vegetarianism as a response to the unhealthiness promoted by capitalism. Dachau hosted the world’s largest alternative and organic medicine research lab and produced its own organic honey. In profound ways, the Nazi anti-smoking and public health drives foreshadowed today’s crusades against junk food, trans fat, and the like. A Hitler Youth manual proclaimed, ‘Nutrition is not a private matter!’”

* “What distinguished Nazism from other brands of socialism and communism was not so much that it included more aspects from the political right (though there were some). What distinguished Nazism was that it forthrightly included a worldview we now associate almost completely with the political left: identity politics. This was what distinguished Nazism from doctrinaire communism, and it seems hard to argue the marriage of one leftist vision to another can somehow produce right-wing progeny. If this was how the world worked, we would have to label nationalist-socialist organizations like the PLO and Cuban Communist Party right-wing.”

* “Fascism, at its core, is the view that every nook and cranny of society should work together in spiritual union toward the same goals overseen by the state. ‘Everything in the state, nothing outside the state,’ is how Mussolini defined it. Mussolini coined the word ‘totalitarian’ to describe not a tyrannical society but a humane one in which everyone is taken care of and contributes equally.”

* “Today, liberals remember the progressives as do-gooders who cleaned up the food supply and agitated for a more generous social welfare state and better working conditions. Fine, the progressives did that. But so did the Nazis and the Italian fascists. And they did it for the same reasons and in loyalty to roughly the same principles.”

* “One of the most illuminating symptoms of left-wing revolutionary movements is their tendency to blur the difference between common crime and political rebellion. The Brownshirts beat up storekeepers, shook down businessmen, and vandalized property, rationalizing all of it in the name of the ‘movement.’ Left-wing activists still refer to the L.A. riots as an ‘uprising’ or ‘rebellion.’”

* “The National Socialist German Workers’ Party was in every respect a grassroots populist party. Party leaders spouted all sorts of socialist prattle about seizing the wealth of the rich. Mein Kampf is replete with attacks on ‘dividend-hungry businessmen’ whose ‘greed,’ ‘ruthlessness,’ and ‘short-sighted narrow-mindedness’ were ruining the country. Hitler adamantly took the side of the trade union movement over ‘dishonorable employers.’”

* “Upon seizing power, the radicals in the Nazi Party Labor Union threatened to put business leaders in concentration camps if they didn’t increase workers’ wages.”

* “The Nazis played the same games against Jews that today’s left plays against ‘Eurocentrism,’ ‘whiteness,’ and ‘logocentrism.’ When you hear a campus radical denounce ‘white logic’ or ‘male logic,’ she is standing on the shoulders of a Nazi who denounced ‘Jewish logic’ and the ‘Hebrew disease.’”

* “The Nazis were among the first to put fighting air pollution, creating nature preserves, and pushing for sustainable forestry central plants in their platform.”

The core principles of Nazism, fascism, communism, socialism, and progressivism/modern liberalism are all the same, and they all differ from conservatism. A “small government fascist” is just as much of a contradiction in terms as a “communist capitalist.” Look at the central tenets of all these systems, which I had ChatGPT compare, and it becomes obvious which one is the odd man out:

As a conservative, I want to reduce the size of the government, weaken the power of the state, and fully embrace capitalism. This all runs completely counter to what progressives/modern liberals, socialists, communists, fascists, and Nazis believe.

Furthermore, with the rise of the Democratic Socialists of America in particular, it’s hard to miss that progressive/modern liberals and socialists may have minor disagreements, but they share the same voter base and are ultimately supported by the Democratic Party. In fact, it’s nearly impossible to tell the difference between socialists and progressives/modern liberals when you look at the policies they support.

Fewer people openly admit to being communist because it’s unpopular, but it has never been a secret that socialism and communism are just different pathways to the same goals:

As for fascism and Nazism, only a tiny number of fringe weirdos are willing to adopt those labels today.

Back when it mattered, in the run-up to WWII, most of the left or right in America disliked the Nazis, but the left was downright warm to fascists and considered them fellow travelers until they started to more closely ally with Hitler. In fact, some of the most significant leftists of the time had some very nice things to say about fascism:

At the end of the day, if you gave people like me total charge of America for 20 years, the federal government would be much smaller, we’d have no deficit, you’d have more freedom, and we’d be more pro-capitalist, with lower taxes, and fewer welfare programs. Our Republic would be the strongest it has been in decades.

If progressives/modern liberals were in total charge of America for 20 years, at the end of that time, the country would be a cross between China under Mao and Italy under Mussolini, the government would be all powerful, pretty much everyone reading this (along with the Jews and anybody that was a threat to the regime) would be dead or in a gulag, and you wouldn’t be able to so much as buy a potato without the permission of the government, which you would never get to vote out of power.

We are not the same kind of people as them.

But modern liberalism/progressivism, socialism, communism, fascism, and Nazism? They’re all just different roads that ultimately lead to the same horrifying destination, and nobody smart wants to go there.

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101 Things All Young Adults Should Know

All that being said, one thing you don’t hear discussed very often is, “What is a weak man and what makes him different from a strong man?”

Of course, some of this is subjective, and there might be an exception to the rule here and there, but this is not an impossible question to answer. We can look at the differences between the Romans when their empire was expanding and when it was about to end. The Greeks were once the Cradle of Civilization, and today, they’re a giant welfare state. The Brits had an empire that spanned the world and they fought the Nazis to a standstill in WWII, while today? They’re arresting people for hurting someone’s feelings with a meme. Even in our country, what type of men were the Founding Fathers or the Greatest Generation, and how do worst men today compare to them?

In other words, what are the men like at the apex of a civilization compared to the nadir?

As a starting point, a strong man is harder, tougher, and more capable of bearing hardships than a weak man. The world can crash down on him and beat him to the ground, but somehow, someway, he finds a way to stand back up and move forward.

But, a weak man? He’s comfortable, soft, and can’t bear inconveniences or difficulties. When the going gets tough, the weak man is fragile, so he crumbles under the pressure. He needs other people to cater to him, protect him, and solve his problems because he can’t do it himself.

Strong men also have a clear vision of the world and their place in it. They have beliefs and principles they’re willing to stand up for even when it’s inconvenient. It’s Nathan Hale saying, “I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country,” Martin Luther nailing his theses to the door of the Castle Church, and even Donald Trump standing up and saying, “Fight, fight, fight!” after an assassin tried to kill him:

At their core, weak men are not principled men. They may mouth slogans they think are popular, but they don’t really believe them. When you get right down to it, they go along with the crowd, and they’ll never stand against it. That’s because they have no deeply held beliefs, nothing they’re willing to fight for and nothing they’re willing to die for. They’re empty vessels floating in the ocean, being filled with whatever the latest propaganda or cultural bilge is that comes along.

Strong men are determined to make their own way, carry their share of the load, and prove themselves. These are men you can put in charge of something and not have to check up on them a dozen times because they take pride in what they do. These men find the idea that they’re victims or need to be babied offensive. That’s not them. That’s not who they are.

When boxer James J. Braddock was injured and so down on his luck that he had to take public assistance to keep his family together, he swallowed his pride and did it. Then, one of the first things he did after winning an upset victory to become champion was PAY THE MONEY BACK. They recreated that scene for the movie Cinderella Man:

Weak men? They don’t think like that. They’re looking for the easy way out — the path of least resistance. A way to cheat the system – and worst yet, they tell themselves they deserve it because life’s hard. Awwww. Because what do you expect when it’s all rigged and they’re victims, and it’s not fair and wah, wah, wah, wah. These are not really men, they’re undisciplined boys ruled by their impulses, feelings, and desperation to fit in somewhere.

Strong men? They find ways to make things happen. They don’t necessarily love hard work more than other people, but they’re not scared of it either and are willing to do as much of it as it takes to achieve their aims. When these men get stopped one way, they try another; if that doesn’t work, they try a third. Imagine the guts it took soldiers to use one of these to take out Germany’s superior tanks during WWII:

On the other hand, weak men love excuses. They love to give a half-hearted effort, then explain why they’re a victim and why it wasn’t their fault they failed to make it happen yet again. They’re content to make just enough to scrape by, and they resent the people who do hustle, save, and sacrifice to succeed because it makes them look bad. They can always explain to you why someone else doesn’t deserve their success, but they can never seem to make it happen for themselves.

The sort of men who built societies, nations, and empires believed in something bigger than themselves. It wasn’t just about them; it was about fulfilling their God-given purpose, taking care of their family or clan, or even “The Glory of Rome.”

Everything weak men do revolves around themselves. They may go out of their way to give you THE IMPRESSION that they care deeply or they want to help people IF they believe it benefits them somehow, but they’re really obsessed with themselves. They allow themselves to be consumed with addictions, childish interests, and trivia because the big things don’t matter to them. What does? How comfortable are they? How can they make life easier? How do they look to other people?

If you’re looking for these sorts of weak men in America today, you’ll see them everywhere from Congress to the media to universities to Hollywood. You’ll hear them whining on social media, begging for special privileges and giving impassioned speeches about how unfair everything is on TikTok.

Eventually, as more and more of these weak men take charge of important things, you will see them create disaster after disaster. It’s already started, and it’s going to accelerate from here. We can only hope that there are enough strong men left in our society to keep these mediocrities from ruining the country with their weakness.

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101 Things All Young Adults Should Know

This post was highlighted on X, but it seemed worthwhile to go to the socialist subreddit where he posed the question and read some of the answers the socialists there gave. These seemed to be the sort of standard answers people were giving:

* “I would say it goes back to the early Puritans with ’idle hands are the devil’s work.’ That morphed into hard work will bring success, and that was true I feel thru the 70s. Currently, it has been bastardized into some flex to work away your life to make someone else wealthy. Weird how a system based on greed can end up that way...”

* “They’re brainwashed and mainly uneducated.”

* “Americans don’t. Shills for Capitalism or ignorant folks who’ve been brainwashed and propagandized do. It’s like asking abused people why they stay in abusive relationships. The hyper-normalization of a valorized subservience to the Billionaire bottom line is the punchline of every piece of media and educational loop here. This culture teaches you to be hostile towards anything else.”

* “Because they got scammed into working their life away and don’t want to admit it.”

So, according to these people, if you want to work, you’re basically dumb and brainwashed, while the smart people who aren’t tools of billionaires understand that you really shouldn’t have to work very hard.

However, if these people are so smart (Are they? Are they really?), then you have to wonder why they’re missing the obvious, unspoken thing that always goes with “I don’t want to work,” that all of you reading this are probably thinking about right now.

You see, nobody has to work. There are bums all over the country sleeping in tents and under bridges who don’t have jobs. When people like this say they don’t want to work, what they REALLY MEAN is, “I don’t want to work, but I want THE SAME LIFESTYLE as people who do work, and I want those people to pay for it.”

Going back to the original post, he says the person who doesn’t want to work is called a “leech,” “bum,” and a “loser.” Of course, he is. Bums don’t work, and what else do you call someone who wants everyone else to pay his way other than a leech? There are certainly no winners in life who think like that, so someone who does is a loser.

Other people said he should be homeless. Right. What else should happen to someone who doesn’t want to work or provide anything else to other human beings?

He wants people like me to pay his way? Why? I don’t know him. I don’t care about him. I owe him nothing. He’s not my child. Why would I want a penny of my money to go to him? Because he wants it? So what? I want him to pay his own way. Does he care about that? No? Then why should I care what he wants?

If you want to tell me that’s selfish, no, it’s not. A selfish person isn’t someone who wants to keep more of the money they earn; a selfish person wants what he didn’t earn – and he hasn’t earned any of my money. If he wants to do that, he’d have to work, and let’s be honest: a socialist probably wouldn’t even have the work ethic to do a decent job of raking your yard, so what good are they? That’s one of the many problems with socialists and communists. They want the good life at the expense of people who earn it instead of earning it themselves.

Also, I’m not going to tell anyone to kill themselves because everyone can add something to the world if they live up to their potential, but if your argument is, “The rest of the world owes me a living because I never asked to be born,” that implies that you don’t want to be here and you have no choice about it – but, of course, you do. Don’t kill yourself, but don’t say, “I didn’t ask to be born,” because that’s a whiny child’s line that no adult should ever use.

As the great Thomas Sowell said:

Parasites like this who want to live off of everyone while contributing nothing are worse than useless to our society. In a better world, not only would they not be allowed to vote or get long-term welfare, we’d take away their citizenship and force them to leave the country.

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101 Things All Young Adults Should Know

Islam is the most toxic, problematic major religion on Earth by a lot. There are no good outcomes that come from having the number of Muslims increase in a Western country. Absolutely none. This is so obviously true it shouldn’t even be controversial. I say that even though I would also say that most Muslims seem to be decent people, there are Muslims I admire, and there are Muslim nations I’d love to visit.

While it is worthwhile to mention some of the horrible things the Quran endorses to give context for some of what you’re about to see, all you have to do to understand the problem with is Islam is look at the world around us to see what happens when Muslims are in charge in a nation, or when they enter Western countries in large numbers. If you can do that, you will understand the problem.

First of all, there are 48 majority Muslim countries on Earth, and out of that number, there are only 4 heavily flawed, crooked democracies (Malaysia, Indonesia, Albania, and Senegal). Some of the others have votes on certain things, but NONE OF THEM, including our NATO ally Turkey, are democracies in the way that, say, the United States, Canada, or Britain are democracies.

Most of these countries are also fairly poor, with a few exceptions like Qatar and Brunei that are rolling in oil money. Technologically, they’re not very advanced either, although Turkey seems pretty good at making drones and Saudi Arabia is pretty good at desalination.

We also cannot forget that American soldiers have spent a great deal of time in Muslim countries since the War on Terror began and you continuously hear things like this from them.

In other words, just as a starting point, you’re simply not going to find a lot of blue-chip prospect immigrants in the Muslim world compared to the world outside of it. They exist, but they’re few and far between in most Muslim countries. Just on that basis alone, you wouldn’t want to bring a lot of Muslim immigrants into your country.

Of course, that’s just where the problems START with Muslims, not where they end.

Islam and terrorism go together like steak and potatoes. The number of terrorist attacks committed by Muslims is practically endless. For example, if you look at the deadliest terrorist attacks in the world from 9/11 to the present day, every single one of them was perpetrated by Muslims:

If blue people committed 100% of major crimes, you wouldn’t go, “Well, there are some blue people that are very nice, and we don’t want to be bluepeoplephobic, so let’s bring them into our country by the millions.” Yet, that’s exactly what we’re doing with Muslims in America. Granted, not EVERY terrorist attack is committed by Muslims, but the vast majority of them are, and you don’t have to worry about a “lone wolf” Buddhist or Hindu trying to blow up a building full of innocent people for his faith.

Furthermore, even if you accept the idea that most Muslims are decent people, albeit with very different values than people in the West, there is absolutely no realistic way to tell the difference between those people and crazy Muhammad the Jihadist who wants to murder as many Americans as possible. It really is just like saying, “In that bag of M&Ms, 10 of them are poisoned and there’s absolutely no way to identify them. So, do you want to eat M&M’s or something else?” Do you understand how stupid you’d have to be to keep eating M&M’s after that? Yet, we’ve done something JUST AS STUPID in the United States since 9/11:

Realistically, we could just stop right here and say, “We have all the reasons we need to no longer allow Muslims to immigrate to America,” and what could anyone say in return? “Oh, it’s Islamophobic to point out all those terrorist attacks,” which is just another way of saying it’s true, but it makes Islam look really bad, so we don’t want you to talk about it.

However, the problems that come along with Muslims don’t stop there. Where Muslims go, conflict follows. There is literally no nation in the world that has benefited from having a large Muslim minority population, and that goes double for the West. Just look at these headlines to see what happens when Muslim populations get big enough in Western countries:

Do you know what the difference is between the Muslims in these European nations and the Muslims in America? Percentagewise, there are far fewer Muslims in America. That’s it. That’s why we don’t have rape gangs, riots, and “no-go zones” in America…yet. Will that change for the worse if we keep flooding the country with Muslim immigrants? Yes, it will.

If you’re wondering why Muslims in particular would have problems with this sort of thing, consider that the Quran explicitly justifies violence and rape against non-believers. Granted, other verses in the Quran say hurting and raping people are bad, but the reality is whichever approach you take, there is support for it in the Quran. This is why, if you asked members of al-Qaeda, ISIS, or Hamas if they were going against their religion by doing what they do, they would say, “No” – and large percentages of Muslims around the world agree with them.

We don’t know how many Muslims around the world support every one of these practices, but Pew has at least done some polling on Muslim support for terrorism and on their support for Sharia, which is a primitive, backward form of Muslim law that draws on the Quran and is absolutely, unconditionally incompatible with Western society. None of it is encouraging for people who think Muslims can be integrated into Western society en masse:

Again, the response to this kind of thing is usually to ignore it because there is no good counterresponse to it, or to respond, “You must hate Muslims to say this!” But, like most Americans, I don’t hate Muslims at all. However, I do have eyes and I do have ears. So, it’s not hard to see how Muslims as a group create problems wherever they go, all across the planet. What people on the Left and in the Muslim world call Islamophobia is just noticing this incredibly obvious fact and trying to get everyone to shut up about it instead of pointing out the obvious.

Granted, because of the First Amendment, we can’t ban people from converting to Islam in America, but there is absolutely no reason we should want large numbers of immigrants from any Muslim state here, or why we should be bringing in large numbers of Muslims immigrants. There is literally no upside to it because anything they can offer, people from other nations can also offer without any explosions, rape gangs, Shariah, or “no-go zones.” Islam is truly the worst major religion on Earth, and it’s time we start taking that into account when we allow people to become citizens of our country.

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101 Things All Young Adults Should Know

The thing that seems to have really caught people’s attention was when Coxon said, “The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade.”

Of course, as anyone who regularly reads Culturcidal knows, this sentiment is not new. In fact, more than a year ago, in an article called “Can We Stop AI from Destroying the Future?” I wrote:

“However, one of the biggest goals of people working with AI – and it’s impossible to say at this point if this is something that will happen in a few years or never – is Advanced General Intelligence (AGI). When people talk about the potential of AI ending the human race, this is the danger they’re talking about… Some people don’t think this is a serious concern. Those people are foolish and naïve.”

In that same article, I linked to Elon Musk’s famous interview with Joe Rogan in 2024. Apparently, many people have forgotten this, but during that interview, Musk openly said there was a 20% chance that AI would annihilate us:

Why is this sentiment, which has been floating around in circles that are familiar with AI for years, suddenly catching fire now? Good question, but people unfamiliar with AI are grappling with a lot of good questions right now, like…

* Why are the AI companies moving at such breakneck speed?

* If AI is extremely dangerous (and it is), why are we making it at all?

* Why do we need so many data centers?

In this article, we’ll answer those questions, but to do that, we’ll need to go all the way back to WWII and the development of the nuclear bomb.

Germany started working on nukes first and America had to play catch-up. Fortunately, for a variety of reasons, we did win the race to build nuclear weapons. That meant we had and used a nuclear bomb first. If Germany had beaten us to the punch, we might all be living in an eternal Nazi state.

Incidentally, setting off a nuke was not risk-free. There were serious discussions about whether a nuclear bomb might ignite the atmosphere and wipe out all life on Earth, although the scientists had concluded that wouldn’t happen when they tested it… probably.

So, what does that have to do with AI?

Well, AI is the most revolutionary technology ever created, and once again, two countries are ahead of the pack in developing it: the United States and China. Just as the world would look very different today if Hitler had beaten us to a nuke, the world will look very different if China beats us on AI.

Doing so would allow them to pass us economically and militarily and replace us as the world’s dominant superpower. The people who run China are not good people. They believe in harsh, stifling, top-down control, and the world under China’s rule could be just as grim over the long term as a world ruled by the Third Reich.

If the United States wants to keep its place in the world and the world wants to remain free, beating China on AI is not optional; it’s a necessity.

This is where the data centers come in. There are already several thousand of them across the United States, and these AI companies are DESPERATELY trying to build more for the same basic reasons phone companies relentlessly laid fiber optic cable everywhere in the early days of the Internet. Getting “more compute” lets AI advance faster, and data centers are what let AI get “more compute.”

The problem with that has been twofold: First, to gain an edge in the AI race, China has run influence operations in the US to make data centers unpopular, and they’ve had some success. Additionally, there have also been some REAL problems with data centers in the past. Most use a lot of power, some use a lot of water, and others are loud.

Are these fixable problems? Yes – and increasingly, as American public opinion has gotten more hostile to data centers, they are getting fixed in a way that makes data centers a huge plus for areas they move into:

Still, some people may be asking: If it’s dangerous, why can’t we just stop working on AI?

The answer is that the genie is already out of the bottle. If we stop working on AI, that doesn’t mean China will stop. Right now, they are behind us, but not WAY behind us. Would they suddenly launch so far ahead of us that we couldn’t catch up if we stopped working on it for a year or two? HOPEFULLY NOT, but we don’t know for sure. Especially since if the best talent can’t work on AI here and China is willing to pay a premium, how many of them might go to work for Chinese firms? We don’t know.

The real solution to this takes us right back to nuclear weapons. Over time, although there are an enormous number of countries with the resources and capability to develop nuclear weapons, only a small number of them have done so in the last 80 years.

We could do something similar with AI, and when our country and China are far ahead of everyone else, there’s every reason to think we could reach an agreement because, although both of us want to win the AI race, we also share many interests. Neither country wants nut-jobs to develop bioweapons with AI, rogue AGI getting out of control, cyberattacks exposing our government secrets, or to risk the future of the human race. Could we agree to some verifiable safety protocols that would dramatically lessen the chances of AI wiping out our species? You’d have to think so… and this is the way.

AI is here, and NO MATTER WHAT WE DO, it’s going to keep advancing and changing things. We can’t predict how all of that will play out at this early stage, but we can at least make moves that lessen the danger to the whole human race.

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101 Things All Young Adults Should Know

Now, you may not want to be a Super Bowl Champion or win a World Series, but everybody has things they want to be good at. Listen to what these coaches are saying and follow their advice, and you will go further than you ever thought you could.

1) “If you want to win, do the ordinary things better than anyone else does them day in and day out.” — George Allen (Pro Football Hall of Fame coach who led the Rams and Redskins, never had a losing season, and was twice named NFL Coach of the Year.)

2) “Adversity is inevitable, but it’s how you respond that defines your character.” -- Dusty Baker (Three-time Manager of the Year who won more than 2,000 games and led the Astros to the 2022 World Series championship.)

3) “Don’t let a bad play become a bad day!” -- Bill Belichick (Six-time Super Bowl-winning head coach of the New England Patriots and the winningest playoff coach in NFL history.)

4) “Discipline to me is sacrifice; it’s willingness to give up something you want to do, so you can better yourself.” -- Bobby Bowden (College Football Hall of Fame coach who won two national championships and 12 ACC titles at Florida State.)

5) “A whiner is almost always wrong. A winner never whines.” -- Paul Brown (Pro Football Hall of Fame innovator who won seven professional championships and helped found both the Cleveland Browns and Cincinnati Bengals.)

6) “If anything goes bad, I did it. If anything goes semi-good, we did it. If anything goes real good, then you did it. That’s all it takes to get people to win football games for you.” -- Bear Bryant (College Football Hall of Fame coach who won six national championships and 14 SEC titles at Alabama.)

7) “If I were playing third base and my mother were rounding third with the run that was going to beat us, I’d trip her. Oh, I’d pick her up and brush her off and say, ‘Sorry, Mom,’ but nobody beats me.” -- Leo Durocher (Baseball Hall of Fame manager who won more than 2,000 games, three National League pennants, and the 1954 World Series.)

8) “The will to win is meaningless without the will to prepare!” -- Joe Gibbs (Pro Football Hall of Fame coach who won three Super Bowls with three different starting quarterbacks.)

9) “You might reduce Lombardi’s coaching philosophy to a single sentence: In any game, you do the things you do best, and you do them over and over and over.” -- George Halas (Pro Football Hall of Fame coach, cofounder of the NFL, and longtime Bears leader who won six NFL championships.)

10) “Nothing that comes easy in this world is worth a damn.” -- Woody Hayes (College Football Hall of Fame coach who won five national championships and 13 Big Ten titles at Ohio State.)

11) “It’s like most anything. If you want to be a loser, there’s always a way to dwell on the negative. If you want to win, there’s always a way to think positively.” -- Tony La Russa (Baseball Hall of Fame manager who won three World Series championships, six league pennants, and more than 2,900 games.)

12) “Setting a goal is not the main thing. It is deciding how you will go about achieving it and staying with that plan.” -- Tom Landry (Pro Football Hall of Fame coach who led the Cowboys to two Super Bowl titles and 20 consecutive winning seasons.)

13) “Lads, you’re not to miss practice unless your parents died or you died.” -- Frank Leahy (College Football Hall of Fame coach who won four national championships at Notre Dame and produced six undefeated seasons.)

14) “The quality of a person’s life is in direct proportion to their commitment to excellence, regardless of their chosen field of endeavor.” -- Vince Lombardi (Pro Football Hall of Fame coach who won five NFL championships in seven years, including the first two Super Bowls.)

15) “Everybody hears, but few listen.” -- Bobby Knight (Basketball Hall of Fame coach who won three NCAA championships at Indiana, including an undefeated 1976 season.)

16) “Too many rules get in the way of leadership. They just put you in a box. People set rules to keep from making decisions.” -- Mike Krzyzewski (Basketball Hall of Fame coach who won five NCAA championships at Duke and three Olympic gold medals as head coach of Team USA.)

17) “Trust is earned through your behavior, not granted by your position. And it is earned through repeated behavior over time.” -- Urban Meyer (Three-time national championship coach who won titles at Florida and Ohio State.)

18) “Pressure is what you feel when you don’t know what’s going on.” -- Chuck Noll (Pro Football Hall of Fame coach who led the Pittsburgh Steelers to four Super Bowl championships in six seasons.)

19) “The odds are always against you no matter what your previous history is. You have to overcome the tendency to relax.” -- Tom Osborne (College Football Hall of Fame coach who won three national championships, 13 conference titles, and 255 games at Nebraska.)

20) “You have to learn how to get comfortable with being uncomfortable.” -- Lou Piniella (Three-time Manager of the Year who led the Cincinnati Reds to the 1990 World Series championship.)

21) “Lying makes a problem part of the future; truth makes a problem part of the past.” -- Rick Pitino (Basketball Hall of Fame coach who guided Kentucky to the 1996 national championship and became the first coach to take three schools to the Final Four.)

22) “The measure of who we are is how we react to something that doesn’t go our way.” -- Gregg Popovich (Five-time NBA champion and three-time NBA Coach of the Year who built the San Antonio Spurs into one of basketball’s most successful franchises.)

23) “Excellence is the gradual result of always striving to do better.” -- Pat Riley (Basketball Hall of Fame coach who won five NBA championships as a head coach and nine overall as a player, coach, and executive.)

24) “Do the right thing. It’s that simple. Do the right thing when the right thing is not popular. Do the right thing when no one else is around. Do the right thing when temptation tells you otherwise. Do the right thing all the time.” -- Nick Saban (College Football Hall of Fame coach who won a record seven national championships, six of them at Alabama.)

25) “The superior man blames himself. The inferior man blames others.” -- Don Shula (Pro Football Hall of Fame coach, two-time Super Bowl champion, and NFL career leader with 347 victories, including the league’s only perfect season.)

26) “What to do with a mistake: recognize it, admit it, learn from it, forget it.” -- Dean Smith (Basketball Hall of Fame coach who won two NCAA championships, reached 11 Final Fours, and recorded 879 victories at North Carolina.)

27) “It never changes. Football is a game of repetition, mental and physical. You may try to articulate it a little differently, but it’s the same thing: Get better players, make fewer mistakes, and drill the fundamentals into your players’ heads. The rest of it is a joke. Teams aren’t winning because of what they had for breakfast or what some coach said in the locker room.” -- Barry Switzer (College Football Hall of Fame coach who won three national championships at Oklahoma and a Super Bowl with the Dallas Cowboys.)

28) “For me, the starting point for everything—before strategy, tactics, theories, managing, organizing, philosophy, methodology, talent, or experience—is work ethic.” -- Bill Walsh (Pro Football Hall of Fame coach who won three Super Bowls with the 49ers and popularized the West Coast offense.)

29) “The man who tried his best and failed is superior to the man who never tried.” -- Bud Wilkinson — College Football Hall of Fame coach who won three national championships and produced an NCAA-record 47-game winning streak at Oklahoma.

30) “If you’re not making mistakes, then you’re not doing anything. I’m positive that a doer makes mistakes.” -- John Wooden — Basketball Hall of Fame coach who won 10 NCAA championships in 12 seasons at UCLA, including seven consecutively.

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101 Things All Young Adults Should Know