 I got a May 40 here, so please don't pay any attention to the thunderstorm going on in the background here. So Sydney weather is something else. It was a beautiful sunny day. I was down at the beach, the beach was filled, like the first like blue sky sunny day since I've been here. And now it's, it's, there's a thunderstorm outside, so at least I got in a good swim. No more topless, topless beauties on the beaches. So in the Australia I grew up in, in the 1970s, about a quarter of the young women on the beach would be topless, but they've covered up the tops, but boy, there sure isn't much to the bottoms. I mean, the bottoms are just a piece of string, not that I was noticing. I mean, there are quite a few very attractive young women in very flimsy bottoms who I wanted to talk to about the great importance of modesty. But I thought I'd just play it cool and I'd come here and I'd talk to you about the great importance of modesty. So if you're, if you're going to the beach, don't just, you know, wear a piece of string to cover up your backsides, all right? So one of the most important books of the past 20 years is called Bowling Alone by Robert Putnam. We noticed as America becomes more diverse, that means Americans have less in common with each other. And guess what happens when Americans have less in common with each other, as Americans become more diverse, they have less trust in each other, they feel less comfortable socializing with each other, they have less willingness to sacrifice for each other, and they tend to lead lies that are more insular. The people go to work and then they go home and watch TV. But in Sydney, particularly in the eastern suburbs, all right, people seem to have a lot in common. I mean, I just love the experience of using public transport in Sydney. It's a perfectly pleasant experience. It's easy to get along with people. Like you walk into the lavish public restroom facilities in Sydney and you can meet new friends about taking a leak. Like you go to the beach and you can have a chat because Australia is a cohesive, far more homogeneous society than the United States of America. So England and Australia have always been more cohesive and homogeneous than the United States. So there's just a high quality of life here in Sydney. There's almost no crime. And I went bowling last night and I did not go bowling alone and I don't give a toss about but bowling, all right? As far as the things that interest me, bowling is not on them. I've never thought about bowling. I've only gone bowling once before. That's I think my brother wanted us to do something together as a family. So we all went bowling about 20 years ago. That's the only time in my life that I went bowling. And I think it was, I don't remember my father was particularly into bowling. So I decided I'm just saying yes on this Sydney trip. Like every time someone invites me, I'm just saying yes, as long as it's not illegal or immoral or against the Torah. Man, the rain's coming down. It rains as much in Sydney as in London. So yeah, much to Robert Putnam's chagrin, his left-wing views about the beauties of multiculturalism, well, it turned out that all that diversity destroys social cohesion and social trust and diversity leads to bowling alone. But I wasn't bowling alone last night. I was bowling with 50 other Jews here in Sydney and I had a blast. Now I am incredibly sore. I had no idea these muscles that I've got in my legs. I don't know why my thigh muscles, leg muscles, hamstrings are just killing me today. Now I was just bowling. I bowled three games. I think my first game was a 91, then my second game was a 142. And then I think my third game was a 192. So I steadily got better. But man, I have a heck of a hard time just getting in and out of a chair. Whoa. Yeah, I can come down, come down, then right about there. Oh, man. So that's the thing getting older. I'm 55 now, so so do anything new and the muscles start aching. But it was great. I was bowling with 50 other Jews. There were Blunts, there were Sheela's, there were oldies, there were youngies. It was great fun. Like it was a way to meet people, it was a way to bond. Like you do anything with a group and it's tops. It's like, you know, walking a mile on your own. All right, it's not necessarily a particularly fun experience, you know, particularly if you don't have headphones, all right, if you can't be distracted by something. But you walk a mile with a friend, it just goes by like that. All right, walking five miles on your own can be quite onerous without headphones, without distraction. But you walk five miles with friends and at times just flies by. Everything goes better with friends. And so, I mean, whether it's bowling or going to the beach or going for a walk. I'm going for a walk with new friends tomorrow morning. So I've been going out to eat with friends. I've been hiking around Sydney. Yeah, look, I'm happy for you. I can tell you're really living in the moment. Yeah, I'm having a blast. I went to the rabbi's home for lunch. I went to the park for a Barbie for the eighth day of Hanukkah. And I've been working on my rugby league skills and my Aussie rules football skills. So the rugby league ball is a bit bigger than the American gridiron football. So I was kicking around the rugby league ball, building up my skills. And it's a blast because you're with mates. You're with friends. So if people want to create societies where we're not bowling alone, then maybe it's a good thing that people have things in common, right? The more you have in common, wow, that rain is coming down. The more you have in common, easier everything gets. The better everything gets. The easier it is to make sacrifices for other people. Like, someone went and picked me up to go bowling and then took me home, all right? Because we have things in common, right? If you're watching the Bathurst, I think the Bathurst 1000 kilometer road race was on Sunday. And it's not something that I particularly give a toss about. But if I'm watching it with mates, right, then it becomes interesting. The group strategy outcompetes the individual strategy. We need other people. And so it just felt so good not to be bowling alone. Felt so good to just go to the beach. And here's what I love about the beaches in Sydney as compared to the beaches in Los Angeles. When you go to the beach in Sydney, nobody is wearing their t-shirt into the water, all right? You go to the beach in Los Angeles and a lot of the people are wearing shirts into the water, all right? Hardly any fat people in Sydney beaches. You go to beaches in Los Angeles, a ton of fat people. And when you walk down the sidewalk in the eastern suburbs of Sydney and the central business district of Sydney, there's a lot more room on the sidewalk. Because there aren't that many fat people, very few fat people. So you can just walk along, you can jog along, you can carry on conversations, you can meet people, you can have your headphones in, and you're not gonna get bowled over by some 300 pounder, right? Not a lot of fatsoes on the eastern suburbs. So yeah, yeah, I'm having a good time. I'm thinking about staying here. I'm talking to all my friends to see what I might be missing. And it's just, I just feel like there's a higher quality of life here. For me, I mean, I like getting on public transport, whereas a pleasant experience. Do you have a pleasant experience riding public transport? Like, does the bus driver look like you? Like, when I go through public transport, ride the bus, ride the train, the driver looks like me. Right? When I get off the plane in Australia and I'm going through customs, I don't feel like I'm the enemy, right? The people who process me in customs that just like me. When I walk along the beach, the people look like me, they sound like me. We have common interests, we dress similarly, right? We've got the ashes coming up, the cricket going on against England. Next week starts in Brisbane at the Gabba, right? And the nation can unite around the cricket. I never once felt unsafe, like anywhere I've been in Sydney. Like, never felt any sense of menace or threat or like some screaming meth head, insane yelling homeless person. No one asking for a dollar on public transport, underlain by some kind of massive threat. And pretty much everyone speaks English. So I'd say the people I've encountered, 99% speak English perfectly nicely. In Los Angeles, half the population doesn't speak English. So I'm going out pretty much every day hanging out with new mates, going out to all the nice kosher restaurants and vegetarian restaurants. And yeah, a lot of non-religious synagogues, non-religious Orthodox synagogues in Sydney because it's mateship, all right? Orthodox Jewish synagogue in Australia is mateship. Orthodox Jewish synagogue anywhere is a great place to find mateship because Orthodox Judaism, you segregate the sexes. So when you're just around blokes, you can let your hair down. So I've been letting my hair down. Oh, I've lost five pounds. So I came here as 169, so now I'm 164. Now I'm walking about five or six miles a day, swimming in the ocean. And yeah, it's great. Like in Orthodox Judaism, you can let your hair down because you're primarily just around other blokes. And you can talk with an honesty and a directness and you can use phrases and expressions that you can't use around the sheilets. So that's one thing I love about Orthodox Judaism is that it provides a plentiful opportunity to just be with the blokes. And it's just so relaxing being around blokes because blokes are just tops, right? Yeah, in Las Vegas, about two-thirds speak English. Yeah, how are you gonna build social trust? Now, when you're out and about and mixing with people, there are some people you obviously don't wanna bring into your life, right? So people who bring misery and unhappiness into their life with their destructive actions and their unsettling effect on others, obviously you wanna keep your distance. So I'm reading a good book by Robert Green, The Daily Laws, 366 Meditations on Power, Seduction, Mastery, Strategy, and Human Nature. What is a Sheila? Sheila is Aussie slang for woman, for females. So it's a great thing if we could help the unhappy and the unfortunate people who are addicted to under-earning or to debting or to under-achieving, right? But what's most likely gonna happen is that they're gonna infect you, right? You gotta be able to smell the stench of addiction and under-earning and debting and stench of addiction on other people. And unless people are in recovery, then we have to keep our distance because what usually happens when we allow dysfunctional people into our lives is that their patterns get inside of us and they infect us and they change us. And you can die from someone else's misery, right? Because emotional states are every bit as infectious as diseases, right? You may feel like you're hopping a drowning man, but often you're only precipitating your own disaster. You can recognize people who are addicts and infectious by the misfortune that they draw on themselves, on their turbulent past, their long list of broken relationships, their unstable careers, their in nature of their character, which kind of sweeps you up and makes you lose your reason. So watch out for the infector. Like see the discontent in their eyes, smell the stench of their under-earning and their compulsions and the chaos that they sow. And don't take pity. Don't enmesh yourself in trying to help. The infector will remain unchanged, but you will be unhinged. So people sometimes draw misfortune on themselves, but they will also draw it on you. So in general, associate with happy people. Like I'm a happy guy. You come on this stream and you don't leave it. That's happy, right? You come on this stream and it's even gonna have no effect on your happiness level or you might get a little bit of a boost or a bump. But most live streamers and most journalists, I noticed, they traffic in negative drama. Like isn't this awful? They peddle to you outrage porn. And that doesn't make you happier and it doesn't make you more effective in life. It does give you a powerful feeling of righteousness about how your side's been aggrieved, but it doesn't make you more effective at dealing with life. So I've got some breaking news. The Justice Department has closed a second investigation into the infamous 1955 killing of Emmett Till and they have failed to prove a key witness lied and they don't really know who killed him. Looking at Steve Saylor's blog, Stalin's pronouns. Who, who? So CNN has an interesting special on Charlottesville. Has anyone seen it? So CNN special report, White Power on Trial Return to Charlottesville that aired on December 5th on CNN. So CNN correspondent, L. Reeve, returns to the scene of the deadly and violent unite the right white supremacist rally in Charlottesville and talks to defendants in a federal civil suit, including Richard Spencer about their roles that weekend. So this is an example of, you could probably find somewhere in the literature or the propaganda for this program, like you could probably find some good reasons to be there but a wise and sage person would have stayed the hell away from that sort of event. So even if you were a wise and sage person, you end up at that event, you get contaminated by all the wackos and the crazies of that event. So when I go to like a Jewish barbecue here in Sydney for the community, it's filled with lots of security guards, right? There's no like law breaking and bad behavior going on and people know each other and if you're new, then you have to kind of register and show your identification, show your proof of vaccination. So there are all sorts of people and all sorts of events where you get caught up and it is just absolutely toxic for you, right? So you may have had very good rational, reasonable, responsible reasons for going to that rally in Charlottesville but that doesn't matter. If you're gonna be there around a lot of bad actors around a lot of socially destructive people, that's just gonna pull you down. So you may agree with certain personalities but given the trajectory of their lives and the toxic nature of their personalities, you don't want to associate with them even if you agree with them. Like often really bad people would take on a dissonant cause, right? Normally responsible people don't take on dissonant causes. Sometimes dissonant causes are correct, whether it's on the left or the right. Sometimes the dissonance are right and even if the dissonance are right, if they're socially maladjusted, they're antisocial, if they're toxic, if they're narcissistic, if they tend to bring misfortune and chaos in their wake then even if you agree with them you still want to avoid them cause they're just gonna drag you down. So you're saying that your surroundings affect your mental well-being, yes. So you're saying you feel happier and more comfortable in Sydney than in Los Angeles, yes. I feel happy and I feel comfortable in Los Angeles. I feel happier and more comfortable in Sydney. So I am not running away from Los Angeles. I have synagogues in Los Angeles that I love. I have rabbis in Los Angeles that I love. I have people in Los Angeles that I love. I don't have any outstanding debts in Los Angeles. I don't have any feuds. There's nothing in nobody that I'm running away from in Los Angeles and I could live very happily for the rest of my life in Los Angeles. But I'm at this point, I'm about 75% certain that I am going to move to Sydney. I've no history in Sydney. Probably prior to this trip, I've spent no more than a total of two weeks in Sydney in my life, but there's just a high quality of life here. Beautiful beaches, virtually no crime, very little social dysfunction, a very little graffiti. It's just relaxed, comfortable. It just feels like home. Bye-bye.