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June 13, 2022 - Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
01:52:08
Avoiding School Shootings and the Boy Crisis | Dr. Warren Farrell | EP 261
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If there's anybody out there, any young guy, for example, who's watching this, who's been having vengeful fantasies, and who has been developing and toying with fantasies of revenge, and who is feeling isolated and lonesome and oppressed and isolated, and is starting to spin up fantasies of violence in revenge, and you'll know that if you're one of these people.
Like, find someone to talk to.
There's better ways you can deal with this.
And you're young, you're 16, you're 17, you don't have to be doomed, you know?
You've got your whole life ahead of you.
And maybe just getting out of the place that you're in where you're unpopular might do it for you.
You know, you can move to somewhere else and be a new person.
There's all sorts of pathways in life.
And so you don't have to explosively demonstrate your competence, you know, in a single vengeful, violent act.
There are better ways to deal with the world.
And you might have reason to be bitter and vengeful, but...
But there are better paths forward.
So don't do it.
Do what this young man we talked about earlier did.
Have enough sense to reach out to somebody.
Find someone.
A teacher, a principal, someone.
A policeman if it has to be.
Someone.
Someone.
Farrell has been chosen by the Financial Times of London as one of the world's top 100 thought leaders and by the Centre for World Spirituality as one of the world's spiritual leaders.
His books have been published in more than 50 countries and in 19 languages.
His most recent book, The Boy Crisis, co-authored with John Gray, was a finalist for the Indie Book Publishing Award.
His other books include the New York Times bestseller, Why Men Are the Way They Are, plus the international bestseller, The Myth of Male Power.
A book on couples communication, Women Can't Hear What Men Don't Say, was a selection of the Book of the Month Club.
And Why Men Earn More was selected by U.S. News and World Report in 2006 as one of the top four books on career.
A very practical book, by the way, for men and women alike, contemplating how they might maximize their earning power over the course of their career, although that comes at other costs, obviously.
Dr.
Farrell has taught at the university level in five disciplines and appeared on more than a thousand TV shows, being interviewed repeatedly by Oprah and Barbara Walters, as well as by Peter Jennings, Charlie Rose, and Larry King.
He's been featured multiple times in Forbes, the New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal.
He's also the only man ever elected and three times to the board of the National Organization for Women in New York City and currently as chair of the Coalition to Create a White House Council on Boys and Men.
He is working with the White House to create such a council.
He teaches couples communication courses around the country and speaks internationally and On the global boy crisis, its causes and solutions.
And today, unfortunately, we're going to be discussing a series, a duo, let's say, of recent tragedies, catastrophes, acts of malevolence in the United States, both in New York and in Texas.
Unfortunately, all too present and all too preoccupying mass school shooting and We're going to delve into that pleasant topic and try to see if we can make some headway in a practical, what would you say, in a conceptual and practical sense.
Very good to see you again, Warren.
It's a real pleasure to see you, although I'm sorry about the stimulus for this, of course.
Yeah.
Well, so let's dive right into it.
I'll offer some ideas about what I think is motivating this, but I want to hear what you've written so much about, well, as we can see in the background, crisis of masculinity, the crisis among boys.
Maybe you want to define what that crisis constitutes and then maybe zero in to the issue of what's happening with these mass homicides committed almost always by young men, almost invariably.
Yeah, we've seen a lot of theories recently.
We've seen, you know, in Buffalo, we saw the replacement theory style, you know, hatred, and everybody zoomed in on that.
Then we looked at the access to guns as an issue.
We looked at toxic politics.
We look at family values are really bad in this generation in particular.
We look at violence in the media.
We look at violence in video games.
We look at mental illness.
Obviously, anyone who does a mass shooting has a mental illness problem.
And then you ask a different question, which is, wait a minute, our daughters are exposed to the same replacement theory style hatred, the same access to the same guns in the same homes, the same family values, the same toxic politics, the same violence in video games, the same violence in the media, and our daughters are not doing the mass shootings.
And they're doing very little shootings, period.
Our sons are.
And so it should be obvious to us that there's something happening with our sons.
And in fact, there is.
And it's not just happening in the United States.
It's happening globally.
And it's happening not in all countries, it's happening in all developed nations.
In the 53 largest developed nations, boys are falling behind in every academic subject, but especially reading and writing.
And reading and writing, as you know, are the two biggest predictors of success or failure.
Failing in school is one thing, but then that failing, if boys who are dropping out of high school at a much higher rate than girls, and even though they're being admitted to college at a 60-40 rate only, they graduate from college now at about one-half the rate of daughters.
Our daughters who graduate from college are not usually looking for a boy who has been a dropout in either high school or college.
and boys who are drop out drop out are also are perceived as losers and um and yeah well that's a that's a critical point there that we don't want to gloss over which is that girls tend to be attracted to winners
and so we know cross-culturally that girls when they're looking for a permanent long-term mate so young women tend to prefer boys who are four to five years older and that's pretty stable cross-culturally and that they tend to be attracted to males who are their equivalent in terms of socioeconomic success Or above.
Whereas with males, the relationship between socioeconomic success and female attractiveness is virtually nil for boys.
It's almost the only determinant of their attractiveness.
So for a boy to be a loser on the, let's say, competition front, especially given extreme female sexual choosiness, I was looking at data today that showed that Women on dating sites rate 80% of men as below average.
And whereas men find 60% of the women they look at on online dating sites acceptably attractive, women find 4.5% of them acceptably attractive.
And so there's this nexus between success in the competitive workplace and between men say and attractiveness to women that drives male motivation in a way that's virtually inconceivable on the female front.
We don't take this sort of thing with any degree of seriousness.
We don't.
And it really is very crucial because it makes the boy crisis globally more than just a boy crisis.
It means that the boy is feeling like he's being rejected sexually and rejected in relationship-wise.
And very few of us know that when boys and girls break up in a relationship, we usually think of the girls as being more depressed.
In fact, the data shows that the boys are more depressed when you know how to measure boy depression.
But most of the measures of depression have been based on females' expression of depression, not males' repression of depression.
And so that's a whole other area that has to be worked on.
But when a boy is feeling like he's being rejected sexually and relationship-wise, And is feeling like his teachers are not speaking well of him because he's not doing well in class.
And his parents are maybe speaking about his brother or sister with pride in their voice, but sort of leaving him out.
He begins to feel this enormous vulnerability, but also that vulnerability is expressed by anger as well.
Bitterness, resentment, desire for revenge.
Yep.
Yeah, all of that.
And fantasies that emerge as a consequence of that, too.
Fantasies of revenge and the acquisition of status.
That's exactly right.
And these boys, and so they sort of turn to, they may turn to guns as a way of saying, you know, I'm strong.
I'm not the loser that you think I am, as you know, in Texas.
And not only did he show the guns on TikTok and on Instagram, but also tried to tease Anita, a girl that he thought he knew who didn't know him at all, basically.
And he was hoping to sort of get her attention by saying, you know, I'm going to be doing something important.
Watch out for me.
Oh, I didn't know it had become that detailed in relationship to a relationship.
Yes.
Well, she would say it was not a relationship.
Right, right, right.
It was a fantasy on his part.
It was a fantasy on his part, for sure.
And so, you know, as I started studying this, I saw that it is not just the boy crisis, but that the boy crisis resides where dads do not reside.
And so when we look at the six mass shooters in the 21st century who have been school shooters, All six of those mass shooters who have been school shooters in the 21st century, all six of them for whom we know the family background, every single one of them were dad-deprived boys, including in Texas.
And the stories are so amazingly similar.
The dads are not involved.
The mothers become involved.
They care for the children a great deal, but the boy feels he has no structure, no purpose, no discipline.
Dads are far more likely, especially with their sons, to require their sons to be very good with boundary enforcement.
Mothers tend to be more effective with just empathy and saying, Sweetie, you have a wonderful voice.
You should sing.
You're really good at acting.
You should act.
But acting and singing and any accomplishment takes a great deal of discipline.
And the dad is more likely to say, don't expect us to get a tutor for you or for me to drive you to school for this special practice that you're doing for basketball if you're not practicing at home and doing these other things.
And the mom is saying, don't be mean.
He's upset that you're not doing that.
Whereas the dad will say, no, I need to make it clear to him that he can't just manipulate everything, do everything he wants to do and expect us to take him everywhere and not have the discipline to succeed himself.
Not without a quid pro quo.
So what do you mean by exactly by boundary enforcement in that situation and the difference between mothers and fathers in that?
Yes, a mom will be much more likely to say, moms and dads will both set boundaries almost the same way.
One of the biggest misunderstandings in parenting is not understanding the difference between setting boundaries versus enforcing boundaries.
So moms and dads, when both When a mom is with a child more than a dad, she tends to set bedtimes that are earlier.
Dads set later bedtimes, so you'd think, oh, the dad is more lenient.
But the studies show that the children with dads get to bed, in fact, earlier than the children with moms.
Because moms tend to do something like they set the bedtime, let's say, at 8.30, And the child, it comes to 8.30 and the child says, oh, I haven't finished my homework.
And mom goes, oh my goodness, I definitely don't want you to go into school without finishing your homework.
Okay, sweetie, you know, you can spend a little bit more time finishing your homework.
And she monitors and sees.
And then that becomes nine o'clock.
Oh, you didn't leave me a story.
Okay, I'll be great.
Since you did your homework, that was good that you did that.
And now it's 9.15, 9.30.
Dad is more likely to say some version of, you know, the data bears this out.
Dad is more likely to say some version of, I'm sorry, you didn't do your homework.
You had all this time to do it.
You're going to have to go to class and not do your homework well.
Tough luck for you, Rat.
Go to bed.
Do better next time.
Yeah.
Do you know, Warren, if there's been any studies linking that capacity for boundary enforcement to personality traits like agreeableness?
Has the work been done at that fine grain to level?
I don't know for sure about the agreeableness per se, but I think one of the misunderstandings about moms and dads is that behavior, that agreeable behavior, is considered by moms as being like unconditional love, whereas we don't use the word unconditional love nearly as often with our dads.
But in fact, our dads have unconditional love, but for them, part of unconditional love is having conditional approval.
Yeah, well, I think maybe that's the distinction between—it's something like the distinction between that all-encompassing maternal acceptance that's maybe at the core of infant care and the encouragement that's more patriarchal or patristic— To develop.
And those things are juxtaposed to some degree because the universal love is, well, you're okay exactly the way you are and we accept you, but the conditional love is, no, you have to grow up.
And because we love you, we don't want you to stay infantile.
We want you to develop competence.
We want you to be not only socially acceptable, but socially sophisticated, productive, generous, and that's all conditional on, well, a very high level of behavior.
Absolutely.
And we see this also, exactly right.
And we see this even in the way family dinner nights are constructed.
And we all know that family dinner nights are highly correlated with a healthy family and healthy children.
But many family nights deteriorate into family dinner nightmares by the mother and father sort of interrupting the child when she or he is talking or arguing a different perspective on something.
And then you notice the child is talking quite voluminously to their girlfriend or boyfriend, but not to the parents.
And when the parents ask them something, they just shut up before they start up because they don't want to be interrupted.
But the parents that are really good at listening to the children are oftentimes filled with empathy without understanding that being only empathetic toward a child does not produce an empathetic child.
It produces often a self-centered child that is filled with himself.
And so part of what I discovered was so important in family dinner nights Is to make sure that the children also are required, not encouraged, but required to also listen to the parents' perspective without interrupting them and to empathize with it and say, Mom, Dad, what I hear you say is this.
Is that correct?
Did I distort anything?
Did I miss anything?
Is there anything you want to add, Mom or Dad?
Well, very few children do that to their moms and dads.
Right.
Unfortunately.
That's that great technique that was pioneered by Carl Rogers, right?
Listen and summarize to the other person's satisfaction.
Yes.
It's a great communication style.
It's very annoying if you're trying to win an argument with someone and just crush them.
But if you actually want peace, then it's a wonderful communication style.
And so, yeah, well, this...
See, let me run a couple of things by you.
Tell me what you think about this.
So...
I was talking to friends DeWall the other day, primatologists who studied chimp behavior.
And one of the things he said was that you give female juveniles, chimps, a block of wood that's, you know, about this big, say, they'll frequently carry it around in their arms or carry it around in their back like an infant and care for it like a doll, even though it's just a block of wood.
And the males, juveniles, do not do that.
And if you give the female chimps a doll, a teddy bear or a doll or a chimp doll, whatever, they will definitely care for that.
And then they will share it with their compatriots because chimps essentially have friendships and they will become extraordinarily upset if the people that are the chimpanzees that they're associating with don't take proper care of the doll and If you give a doll to a juvenile male, he'll tear it apart to see what it's made of.
And so that it's the infantile, it's the projection of the infant onto the block of wood that's particularly interesting to me, because one of the things I see happening, I would say, on a broad scale level in our society, this is perhaps where this might get somewhat contentious,
is that I think with the feminine ethos that's centered on infant care, which is an extraordinarily important thing to be centered on, given the dependency of our infants, Imagine the world is sort of divided into three parts.
There's infants, there's infant caregivers and there's predators.
And so, infants can do no wrong.
Infant caregivers are motivated by the highest and noblest of motivations, which is essentially an all-encompassing empathy.
And anyone who isn't either of those two things is to be regarded with severe suspicion.
And that's a very good ethos if you're dealing with infants, but it's a very bad ethos if you're dealing with, well, larger-scale social organizations.
And I see...
I was...
Reading these guidelines for faculty members at Mount Royal College in Calgary and for a faculty retreat, you know, which is really not one of the world's most dangerous What would you say?
Happenings.
yes and all of the faculty members were assured that trained counselors would be at hand in case the discussion became intense beyond the point of tolerability and i thought what's going on here it's like well the faculty members are infants and those who oppose their ideas are predators and the appropriate moral ethos is to care for the infants and it's like well yeah except no because they're not infants and this is not mother and baby and this is also to me
it's also an extension of the freudian nightmare the oedipal nightmare that produces both dependency and narcissism as a consequence of the overextension the unregulated overextension of that essential ethos directed at infants yes is that too harsh I don't think so at all.
And I think that mothers and fathers just have such different styles of parenting.
And, you know, with the common goal, we all want our children to do well.
We all care about them.
But what we know, what I saw when I did the research for the boy crisis is that the children that didn't have dads in their lives, even the girls did worse in 50 different areas.
They were more likely the boys as well, but the boys more intensely in those areas.
Both boys and girls who didn't have a lot of dad involvement, by the age of nine and a half, their telomeres were shorter.
Wow.
14% shorter on average.
That's the average between boys and girls when a father was not involved in a significant way by the time that child was nine and a half.
However, the telomeres of the boys were yet again 40% shorter than the telomeres of the girls.
And many people don't know that the length of telomeres when you're nine and a half years of age It's one of the best predictors of your life expectancy.
You know, the telomeres, you know, carry, of course, you know, the genes that tell you whether you're subject to cancer or vulnerable to any, you know, any set of diseases.
And so the fact that...
Right, they're determiners of senescence, right?
Of the onset of senescence, essentially.
Yes.
Wow, and so it's that basic...
It's that basic.
And that early.
And the impact on both girls and boys.
I mean, there are certain differences between the lack of father on girls versus boys.
For example, girls who don't have very much father involvement are far more likely to be pregnant as teenagers because...
They either, that's oftentimes by not having father involvement, they don't know how to interact in a very socially nuanced way with a boy.
They do know, though, that when they're 13, 14 years of age, that that boy wants sex.
And so if there's another girl that might give him sex, and she wants to keep the boy and not have him go to the other girl, she'll go ahead and be sexual.
And if he doesn't want to wear a condom, okay.
She doesn't want to make his sexual experience one less.
Well, she has no experience under those conditions negotiating with any male.
I know the data, the data I remember, it's a few years old now, indicated quite clearly that girls with fewer brothers were much more likely to be raped.
And I presume, and I've seen brotherless girls among my clients, for example, some of whom were prone to sexual assault for all sorts of reasons, Yes.
So by the time they were frightened enough to object, it was often so far along the unwanted amorous advance cycle that it was very difficult for things to stop.
And of course, the guy on the other end presumes often as unsophisticated as his victim is presumes that consent has already been obtained at that point.
The girls with brothers have learned how to negotiate at that really embodied level, you know, the same embodied level that probably emerges or underlies society.
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
Yeah, I know.
I mean, the paternal involvement seems really to me to boil down to something like a kind of conditional encouragement.
It's like, I really want the best for who you could be, and I'm also confident in your ability to attain that, and so I can hold you to high standards and enforce it, because I think so much of you, so much of what you could be, Yes.
And I think that is a lovely juxtaposition with that more maternal sense of, you always have a home here, we'll accept you in some real sense, no matter what you do.
Not that women don't put conditions on their children, because of course they do, but we're talking about the way that's expressed in a very practical sense.
Yes.
Okay, so these boys that...
Let's look at the more extreme case for a minute, these school shooters.
So my understanding of their psychology is that...
They're resentful.
They're low down on the status hierarchy.
They're not attractive to potential mates.
They're not necessarily very popular.
And they don't have a lot of hope for attaining any of that in the future.
So they're very, very frustrated by that.
Lowly position.
And that makes them angry.
It makes them resentful.
Then it starts to generate compensatory fantasies, which would be...
Well, I'll do something.
I'll show them.
I'm going to be famous.
Everybody's going to know who I am.
And then they drift.
And they drift into...
They can drift into these violent fantasies.
Sometimes that's motivated also by thoughts of direct revenge, because they've been bullied and they've been pushed around.
And so they have...
Reasons to be angry, let's say.
I'm not saying any of this is justified, by the way.
I'm just saying how it works.
And then they brood for months, weeks, months, and years, developing these fantasies of violence.
But more importantly, focusing on the consequences for notoriety of the violent act.
And so, one of the things that I've been...
Suggesting to people who are interested in this sort of thing, especially people on the media side, is that they don't use the shooters' names.
They don't report the shooters' names.
and i think because the thing about this the mass shooters in particular is they've learned how to hijack the media world to provide themselves with hundreds of millions of dollars worth of free publicity to draw attention to their manifestos for example but also and then they can have these fantasies it's like a the same kind of fantasy that a suicidal teenager will have because the suicidal teenager will often fantasize about as if he's a spirit that will be there at his funeral
everybody huddled around the coffin including the boys and girls who who rejected him expressing their sympathy for the way that he behaved expressing their sorrow for for for the mistreatment that he The parents are doing the same thing.
And he sees this in a very dramatic sense, and there's an elaboration of that on the violent side.
And they want to be notorious.
And you ask why, and why boys, not girls?
And the answer is, well, success to boys is linked with Popularity with girls, for example, in a way that it's simply not linked for girls with boys.
And it's a huge difference.
So do you see anything wrong in that?
You and I had an interesting experience that I wanted to touch on.
So part of the reason I reached out to Warren in the aftermath of these events is because he got a letter six months ago, something like that, from a...
Do you want to tell the story?
Go ahead and tell the story.
I opened my email and I saw a letter from somebody who was a Hispanic young man in Texas, actually.
And he said to me, you know, thank you for the boy crisis book.
And he said, I was raised by my dad and I was raised by, I'm sorry, I was raised by my mom without a dad.
And then I was passed on to my aunts, who both neither had a father or a man in A husband in their life or a man or boyfriend in their life that has passed on to my grandmother.
She didn't have a man in their life.
None of them liked men very much.
I heard negative things about my father, but I never really saw much or anything of him.
And, and so I didn't, I didn't have any structure, I didn't have any purpose.
So I got involved with 4chan, and then I got involved with 8chan and 8chan is a fascist group.
And the fascist group gave me something I could count on an ideology, it gave me structure, it gave me purpose, it gave me a sense like a gang.
Yes, it's very much like a gang.
Gangs give you respect when you don't feel you have respect.
The gangs promise you respect, I should say.
And so you become part of that family.
And he felt very much part of that family.
So he told me, so I wrote up a 52-page manifesto that was overlapping in its effectiveness.
I thought it was even better than the two other people at 8chan who had become celebrated mass shooters.
And he said, I was making the plans to carry it out.
And in the process, I stumbled across the Boy Crisis book.
And what he said to me was very powerful.
He said, it wasn't the data.
That got to me.
It was being seen, that you saw, it was like you were a spy in my life, telling me what I was feeling, the hurt that I had, the lack of structure, the lack of purpose, the loss of self, the feeling that I didn't have that boundary enforcement, therefore I didn't have that discipline.
I didn't have anything that anybody that would tell me, that's too much, that's too little, that's, you know, you're doing that wrong.
And you could do better.
And you were explaining all that.
And just being seen from my vulnerabilities made me not have the energy that I had to begin to continue carrying out what I had outlined in my manifesto.
And so we ended it by saying, you know, thank you for saving not just my life, but the lives of countless others, because I was really working this.
So there would have been countless others.
So I would have been seen as doing something that he felt was positive, that is helping the fascist ideology to be more broad spread.
And so, you know, what I really...
My heart is saying to people that I hear is that when we see a mass shooter, we see somebody in this type of modality, we see that they're angry.
And we tend to have anger at their anger, as opposed to having empathy at their vulnerability.
And what this fellow was telling me was, you had empathy about my vulnerability.
and when I saw that you saw my vulnerability I lost my anger or my anger diminished enough to not make me want to follow up follow through so systematically on my 52 page manifesto and I did end up going to a couple of psychologists I did a few sessions with him as well I have talked uh wrote to you about it
you gave me some guidance guidance as to what to do with him and so and and almost the exact same pattern happened with also in Texas as He was doing poorly in school.
He dropped out of school.
He had a speech impediment.
He was being bullied.
He was feeling like he was a failure on almost every aspect of life.
And then he began, I was mentioning to you, I think, offline, that he had this fantasy about a girl named Anita.
And he was texting her and saying, I'm going to be, see my guns here on TikTok, see my guns on Instagram, and watch out for me, Anita.
I'm going to be doing something.
And he's going, get out of here.
You know, just like, I don't know you.
Yeah.
Well, that shows you the degree of fantasizing, right?
Because what that means in some sense is that to put myself in his position, which is, of course, an uncomfortable thing to do, is he's constructed this girl in his imagination.
And she would be, you know, maybe she looked at him one day and that would be enough.
And now he's imagining that if he can only elevate himself...
To notorious status that he would become an object of admiration.
And God only knows how many hundreds of hours he might have spent fantasizing about that.
Fantasizing about the relationship he'd have with the girl and how much she would admire him and how everyone would know his name.
And you don't get to the point where you do something like shoot up the school without, I would say, literally hundreds of hours of fantastic dreaming.
About the event, about the day, mostly about what's going to happen afterwards and how your name is going to be on everyone's lips.
It's so striking, A, that that young man who reached out to you Was deterred by what was essentially an accurate diagnosis of his situation and that that was sufficient.
You know, when I'm out on my tours talking to audiences, many of whom are young men who are suffering the consequences of the sorts of things that we've been discussing, the thing that's been so terrible to me to see is...
To the degree to which so many of them are suffering so intensely for lack of a single encouraging word.
And it's so sad that they have to get that from me on YouTube or in a lecture, that they haven't had anyone in their life.
And we're in this situation now where frequently any manifestation of masculine ambition, and even in juvenile forms, so the desire to engage in rambunctious play, let's say, is instantly associated not only with pathology that needs to be medicated, let's say in the case of ADHD, which I do think is a disorder of repressed play.
And Yach Panksepp did a lot of work showing that that might be the case.
But also that, you know, we associate that male ambition with, well, the force that's literally the patriarchal oppressive force that's literally destroying the world.
It's like, well, how the hell do you expect young men to react to that?
And the answer might be something like, well, there's too bloody many people on the planet anyway, and if we stopped running around doing things, things would be a lot better.
It's like, well, that really leaves them nowhere to go, doesn't it?
So, except, well, except to some very dark places in some situations.
I was doing some, somebody was filming me talking about these issues the other day, and we were in the middle of, we were in a little island in the middle of a creek, and a young man who looked like he was about 16, 15, was passing by, and I said, and he showed some curiosity about the filming.
And I said, I asked, I signaled him over here.
I said, could you join us for a moment?
I said, you know, in high school, are you in high school?
And he says, yes.
And he said, I was a sophomore.
And he said, you know, do you, what do you learn about men and women or boys and girls or sexuality and stuff like that in high school?
And he said, oh, you know, I hear, I guess, the word toxic masculinity a lot.
Mm-hmm.
And I said, anything else?
And he said, oh, yeah, the teachers are always talking about we're part of the patriarchy.
And, you know, men, especially white men, are really the oppressors.
And then I said, anything else?
And he said, yeah, male privilege is always coming up.
If I do well, it's because I have male privileges.
If I don't do well, it's because I don't do well.
I'm a loser.
Anything else?
And he says, you always hear the future is female.
Right.
And I said, how does that make you feel about your future?
He laughed, you know, in accordance.
Good, he could laugh.
Yeah, I mean, he laughed sadly.
So I said then, if you're out on a date, are you going out on dates yet?
Yes, yes, I am.
And he said, I said, do you talk to your girl, the girl you're dating about this?
And he goes, no, what?
No way.
I'd never bring it up.
I said, I said, well, why not?
And he said, because I just assumed that we'd get into an argument and that would be the end of any further romance.
Right.
And I said, well, what about if you really got to know her well, like a year or two, and you were really intimate with her?
And then he said, well, I haven't had that long a relationship yet, but I really hope I could.
And it was almost like this deep sadness.
I really hope I could share what was in my heart about that.
And there's so many...
Yeah, what we're doing is awful.
It's absolutely awful.
When I was talking to Franz De Waal, I read part of his book on difference, and there was this section that he cited from a female author who...
She said she threw up her hands in dismay because she couldn't stop her young boy from playing with guns.
She took everything that was even remotely resembling a gun out of the house.
And then she caught him one day, you know, shooting the toothbrush at the cat.
Bang, bang, bang.
And instead of noticing that he had this male propensity to aim and shoot that was deeply rooted in her son...
She was appalled to the core by his intractable masculinity and believed that her, what would you say, ideologically addled sense of what constituted masculine behavior was so morally admirable that it was perfectly fine to her to be disgusted by the fact that no matter how hard she oppressed her son, he was still a boy.
And all of that was couched in this moral terms.
And I thought, you witch!
That's absolutely unforgivable.
To see that as such an intrinsic part of your boy's character, and then to throw your hands up in moral dismay about exactly this.
Patriarchal oppression and the toxic masculinity and all of that.
And then the boy you talk to, too.
So he's damned if he does and he's damned if he doesn't.
And why is that?
Here's a hypothesis for you.
So I don't know what you make of this, but...
Imagine that you have a woman who's never had a good relationship with a man in her life.
And maybe this is a consequence of disrupted familial structure too, right?
So multi-generational consequence of disrupted familial structure.
And so she's...
Maybe the relationships she's had have not only been absent, but bad.
And so then, that woman has a very difficult time discriminating between male competence and male power compulsion, right?
Because it's not easy to distinguish in authority power and And competence from compulsion.
And so imagine you don't have much experience with that and so you're so terrified of anything that's male because you've had a pathological history with males.
Not that I'm attributing that to the women.
I'm saying this is part of this pattern of disruption is that you're primed to regard any display of masculine will as It's indistinguishable from oppression and compulsion.
And so then, well, what are you going to do?
Well, when your son manifests that, you're going to crush it because you think it's bad because you can't discriminate.
And that seems to me to be, well, another one of the consequences, let's say, of The multi-generational and cumulative consequences of fatherlessness.
Yeah, and we see this so much.
Even with this young man that I was just talking to you about, he said in school, they learn, and in California, it is the law, by the way, something called affirmative consent, and in half the states of the United States.
That's in the legislative process at the moment.
And affirmative consent means if you're in college, mostly in college, if you ask a girl or woman on a date and she says yes, and you reach out and touch her hand and hold her hand before she says, without asking her, may I hold your hand, you have violated affirmative consent and you can be considered or sued by her as being a sexual harasser.
Right.
Well, that's exactly that.
Well, and that's why you brought up, that's a cardinal example of the inability to distinguish between male will and oppression.
So let me ask you about that.
So I've been thinking about the violation of the principle of non-contradiction in our society, which I think is a hallmark of a looming insanity.
So here's what college kids are asked to swallow now, as far as I can tell.
Mm-hmm.
Every single manifestation of sexual interest or sexual orientation of any conceivable type is to not only be tolerated but to be celebrated and celebrated in some sense under compulsion and by force of law.
No discrimination whatsoever on the basis of sexual behavior or sexual preference.
Okay.
And simultaneously...
So, no sexual interest is so...
Abnormal, let's say, in the technical sense that you can put up any barriers against its expression whatsoever, conceptually or otherwise.
And, simultaneously...
Every single act of sexual interest between a young man and a woman is so dangerous and so pathological that you need something approximating contractual consent to engage in the simplest acts of initial physical intimacy.
So how the hell can both of those things be true at the same time?
Yeah, and the feedback I'm getting from kids, young people this age is, on the one hand, I'm being told this, you know, don't take an initiative unless you ask for permission and And get a yes.
And then other times, girls are laughing at me for doing that.
And in real life, I don't see the problem with that nearly as much as the guys that are behaving that way.
They're thought of as wimps.
Or they don't take the initiatives at all because they're not secure in the possibility that they will be rejected.
So they're invisible to the girls that they're interested in.
Right.
Well the girls can't distinguish between That deep inadequacy that emerges as a consequence of not being attended to enough, and that would include not engaging enough in rough and tumble play and all the things that make you like a sophisticated dancer, let's say.
The girls cannot distinguish between that and the enforced awkwardness that comes with imposing an arbitrary imposition on the initial stages of physical intimacy.
How could they distinguish?
Especially when they're like 13 or 14.
And so we're definitely putting boys and girls in a completely impossible position.
And we're doing something really also awful, which is we're saying to boys that if you move too quickly, you're a harasser.
If you don't move quickly enough, you're a wimp or you'll never be seen.
But we're not saying to girls that...
What to do, how to assert themselves.
We're not saying to girls, it is not just an option to share the risks of rejection.
It is an expectation on you to share the risks of rejection.
Not just the risks of rejection with the 20% of boys that are the superstars and really outstanding, but with any boy you have an interest in that you're Expect yourself to reach out.
Will you be rejected more?
Absolutely.
Anyone who takes risks in life will be rejected, but our job is to prepare you as girls to take risks because there's no...
Entrepreneur who's successful without taking risks.
And so your job is to take risks.
Now, what about if a boy reaches out to you and it's moving too quickly?
So your job is to say, no, no.
Not now, and maybe not ever, but if I change my mind, I'll let you know, because I now see that you're interested, and so I don't have to worry about rejection, but don't keep trying to be sexual with me.
I'll take the responsibility for reaching out, because feminists say, what is there about no that you don't understand?
Well, here's what there is about no that is often not understood.
Is it no forever?
Not interested in me at all?
Is it no until maybe I say yes to another date?
Is it no until I have maybe some wine to relax me?
Is it no until I have some coffee to wake me up?
Is it no until we play some music and I feel very intimate with you after the music is being played?
Should I turn the music up?
Should I turn the music down?
Or were you talking too much about yourself and not about me?
Or were you talking too much about me and not about yourself?
Right, right.
Well, part of that is, well, that's exactly it.
I mean, when you object to someone, you see this in fights between couples.
It's like, well...
Is this like a divorce fight or is this a like we talk for 10 minutes and make peace fight?
Or is it one of the intermediary stages along that pathway?
How serious is this?
And no has exactly that ambiguity.
Like, is this an outright rejection by every female in the world forever?
Is it a harbinger of that?
Because it could be.
And that is certainly the lot of many men because there are, I would say, what, 5% of men, maybe 10% of men Are in the category of so undesirable socially that they have virtually no chance whatsoever in the mating market.
There's a great documentary about that, by the way.
Documentary called Crumb that was done about probably 25 years ago that focuses on Three brothers, one who became very famous, a very famous artist.
All three extremely talented men, but all three of them toxically unpopular in high school to a degree almost unimaginable by anyone who was actually in a, you know, an acceptant peer group and who had at least some chance on the dating market.
One of the brothers committed suicide soon after the movie was finished, documentary, and the other was put in prison as a sexual offender.
So it's a very dark movie, but documentary.
It's about the best documentary I've ever seen on anything.
But if you're interested in the psychopathological fantasies of sexual offenders, that's definitely the documentary for you because they're extraordinarily well documented in a way that Well, that anyone with any sense would shy away from.
It's very dark stuff.
The successful brother, Robert Crum, who is a A very successful underground comic artist in the 1960s, late 60s in San Francisco.
It really started the whole underground comic movement.
He became quite famous as a consequence of his artistic work and then became quite popular with women.
And he tells the story.
It was an absolute shock to him because he went from...
He wasn't no one.
He was way less than no one.
No one would have been to move up the ladder by a large margin.
You know, he was in the detestable category, which is...
That's disgust, right?
That's damn low on the hierarchy.
And then when he became successful, that all switched on him pretty much overnight.
And so part of the...
Documentary, which is done so unbelievably brilliantly, is an exploration of that dynamic.
I've never seen anything like it, so I would highly recommend that.
It's called Crumb.
It's a great documentary.
I've shown it like 20 years in a row in my personality class to illustrate the Freudian dynamic of Oedipal and smothering-mothering, essentially, and all the toxic consequences of that.
So, anyways, yeah, back to...
To know.
Yeah, well, no and yes, those are very difficult things to negotiate.
I don't think there's anything more difficult to negotiate between a man and a woman than no and yes, or between any two people that are in an intimate relationship or beginning one.
It's like, what don't you understand?
Well, there's an infinite number of things I don't understand.
And what makes you so sure you're so damn clear about your communication?
And we have this perfect opportunity for teaching our daughters that you can say no and say, I'll take responsibility for anything I am interested from this point on, as opposed to you keeping on trying.
We're doing tongue kissing and the average girl knows that if there's no no somewhere, they'll be having intercourse in about 5, 6, 10 minutes.
And for many girls or women, that's too quick.
So she pulls out the tongue.
But then the pulling out of the tongue, does that mean respect her, that the tongue is being pulled out?
And then when do you put the tongue back in?
When do you restart the process again?
Well, it's also quite difficult if she's confused about it, which she's likely to be, because it's not like that's not a maelstrom of conflicting motivations and emotions.
Should I continue?
How much do I like this boy?
Am I going to be a slut?
Is this something I'm going to enjoy?
What are my girlfriends going to think?
Is this the guy for me?
Is this something casual?
Is casual sex okay?
Am I going to get pregnant?
Can I take revenge on my absent father by falling in love with this loser?
Et cetera, et cetera.
A hundredfold.
And if that wasn't complex, we wouldn't have any movies or novels.
It's unbelievably complex.
Yes.
I just came back from Mexico and almost every woman that was reading a book was reading some type of romance novel.
And one of them was a very strong feminist that I got into a conversation with and I sort of challenged her on that.
And she goes, I know.
I know.
But I still love it.
Yeah, but that's also not funny in some deep sense.
So I read this book called Billion Wicked Thoughts that Google engineers had put together by analyzing patterns of pornography use among men and women.
And it's really quite a brilliant book.
Yeah.
Because they're engineers, it's really apolitical.
They just looked at the data.
They are not political.
They just said what it said.
And they found that men and women both used pornography.
With men, it was all pictures.
And with women, it was all written.
It was all literary.
And they identified the five categories of porn star in these romance, in these literary romance pornography representations.
Pirate, vampire, surgeon, billionaire.
I can never remember the fifth.
But they're all...
It's the same pattern.
They identified it perfectly.
It's Beauty and the Beast.
High-status, dangerous male, tamed by attractive female animals.
And enticed into a reciprocal relationship.
Yes.
But with difficulty, right?
And then the sexual component of it is mutual exploration, yes and no, tension, conflict, and the resolution of that.
Yes.
But what's so interesting about it, and it's the same pattern in Fifty Shades of Grey, it's exactly the same thing, is that the guy isn't a pushover.
He's actually someone very forward in every way, but capable of being restricted, capable of responding to the imposition of boundaries, and then also capable of establishing a relationship.
But the fact of his willfulness, in some sense, is core to the sexual attractiveness.
That's no different than the manifestation of male ambition on the status hierarchy.
It's exactly the same thing.
And why we have to lie about this is it's sickening to me and it's unbelievably destructive, both for men and women.
I mean, it's not like the girls are benefiting from any of this.
They're having catastrophic relationships in college.
You know, you get these colleges now where it's like 60% or 65% girls.
And you think, well, that's a hell of a good thing for the guys because they have this plethora of women.
And it's not because, first of all, it's still 10% of the guys.
And maybe they have carte blanche on the sexual front.
But all that does is teach them to be narcissistic psychopaths because they can have a different one night stand every day of the week.
And that's a hell of a training ground for establishing a permanent relationship.
And then the other guys, well, they're in the same position that guys generally are, which is they're chasing after scarce resources.
And the girls, they're completely frustrated because...
The high-status guys have zero interest in pursuing a long-term relationship.
And so that's a lovely situation.
I heard some recent, not so much data, but some stories from people in universities where the girl-to-boy ratio is climbing above 70, and they say the girls stop applying at about that point.
Well, it isn't only the application to schools and the getting in schools, which is, of course, creating a whole possibility and in some cases actuality of affirmative action in favor of the boys now.
But the dropout rate among the boys in college is much greater.
And so in the next few years, it's predicted that the ratio of female to male graduates will be two to one.
Two female to one male.
And that creates this whole, you know, the thing that I was saying before about, you know, the women are not, women who graduate from college, generally speaking, want a man who's at least a college graduate.
And so if she's only half as likely to have a college graduate around her, and a lot of males are dropouts, the average woman, especially when a woman starts looking for the possibility of having a child and wanting a good father to be involved, she doesn't usually look in Among the dropouts, and 66% of the people between 25 and 31 who live back at home are male.
She's not likely to go back to go to bed with a guy who lives in his parents' basement.
And she's not likely to search unemployment lines in high school dropouts.
Twenty-some-odd percent of high school dropouts are unemployed for most of their 20s.
And so this leaves a terrible market for girls.
And this is one of the reasons I say we're all in the same family boat.
Right, right.
Definitely.
Right.
When only one sex wins, both sexes lose.
And unfortunately...
Yes, it's really sad that we even have to say that because it's so bloody obvious.
It's like, whatever you do to boys, you do to girls.
Yes.
Instantly.
And if you're not wise enough to see that, well, then you should clue in.
And if you do see it, you proceed nonetheless.
It's like, yeah, well, we know what you're up to.
Nothing but trouble.
And that is the huge challenge with where feminism has been going recently.
You know, at least when I was on the board of NOW in New York City, at least a portion of feminism was saying, I am woman, I am strong, as a la Helen Reddy.
And now it's mostly, I am woman, I've been wronged.
And so we have this hashtag Me Too.
And I know a lot of women who have been able to feel...
Able to speak up as a result of the hashtag MeToo.
But having hashtag MeToo as a monologue rather than having hashtag MeToo as a dialogue is really a crime because it makes women feel that they must be right.
There's no response.
There's no male experience of him being rejected by a woman or him being in a divorce situation and the woman badmouthing him to the child or whatever.
There's no understanding that men who are going through divorce are eight times as likely as their female counterparts to commit suicide.
There's just no understanding of that male experience.
I've talked about this several times and become very unpopular as a consequence, but when I studied antisocial behavior, particularly at McGill, I studied female and male antisocial behavior, and male antisocial behavior tends to be much more physically violent, and so most of the people who are imprisoned are male, mostly because we imprison violent offenders, which is kind of interesting.
We don't necessarily imprison white-collar criminals, even if they defraud, like, 60,000 people, but, you know, a mugger, well, we're going to lock them up, and Yeah, I can understand that, although not entirely, because defrauding 60,000 people out of their pension isn't exactly nothing either.
But in any case, it's almost all men in prison, and it's almost all violent offenders.
And so then you say, well, what's the female equivalent of antisocial personality?
And that's a tough question, because it's much more subtle.
But a lot of it is reputation destruction and exclusion, mean girl syndrome.
And everyone understands that.
You can't play with us, for example.
That's a nice expression of female antisocial behavior.
And that reputation destruction also scales really nicely on social media.
And so one of the things I think is happening to our whole culture is that we're suffering from a radical influx of female-type antisocial behavior.
That's cancel culture.
That's reputation destruction and savaging.
But we can't have a conversation about that because all the pathology is on the male side.
It's like...
No, all the pathology isn't on the male side.
Plain and simple.
There's social pathologies that have a feminine orientation.
That would be the infantilization of everything.
And then there's toxic femininity, which is this tendency to derogate into savage reputations and to escape scot-free in the aftermath of that.
And the use of manipulation and innuendo and...
All of that.
Very, very difficult to cope with.
Very difficult to put boundaries around, too.
So, especially on social media.
And we tend to have very little empathy for the way these behaviors have evolved over the years.
You know, women had to sort of have...
Talk about men reputation-wise because before birth control and when mores were extremely strict, if a male wanted to be sexual with a woman and maybe promised her that he would be marrying her and she said, okay, maybe we'll be married.
But then she talks to other women and she finds out from eight or ten other women, well, wait a minute, he's been saying that to me, he said that to me, he said that to Mary.
Over there and then suddenly so that that will the thing that we call gossip was very much a protective mechanism on the part of women to protect themselves from being becoming pregnant with somebody that really was not at all interested in a long term relationship and being a long term father conversely with with guys and women in terms of the no with what no means no what no means maybe what no means yes It was very helpful for women to be able to say no before birth control for obvious reasons.
But even short of birth control, she discovers how does a man handle rejection?
If she says a no and he stops right away and never tries again, how will that translate into him being a good salesperson?
What successful man have you ever seen or a woman have you ever seen stopped At the no and didn't try again.
But on the other hand, the way he tried, the manner in which he tried, the respect he showed as he tried, the way he manipulated his persistence in a positive or negative way, those were things that gave her a great deal of information about what type of father, what type of breadwinner he would be.
Yeah, well, and if she puts obstacles in his way and frustrates him and he gets violent, well, then that's a pretty good marker of his inability to deal with, let's say, the frustration of a toddler.
Precisely.
And those are all...
Where I was going with that is that we need to look at the behaviors we castigate and have...
An understanding of where they came from and why.
And you're talking about oftentimes chimpanzees and different types of animals.
Well, among all animals, from insects right on up to humans, for the most part, the insects with a couple of exceptions, I'm sorry, all the animals seek males to reproduce with that are alpha males.
And they have no interest in the non-alpha males.
And you see what the result of that is among buck antelope.
The moment those males and females get together, she chooses the male that has the largest rack.
But that rack is such a burden on him that he has to get rid of it immediately after intercourse.
Otherwise, because the rack, in order to develop that rack, exhausts 30% of the minerals and nutrition and calcium in his system.
And if he doesn't immediately get rid of the rack, He's going to end up having to probably die if winter sets in before he gets rid of that and he doesn't have a chance to replenish all his nutrients.
And what that amounts to is that here is the male that looked the strongest, the alpha male.
And it was served a purpose from the female's point of view of being able to keep away other people that wanted to have sex with her that were not as strong as he.
But it was really a very good example of men's weakness being their facade of strength.
Whether it's saying, I'm strong because I have my guns, or the fellow that wrote me, also from Texas, saying, I got my guns together.
I was going to do this mass shooting.
I'm going to be really a strong man.
These are all vulnerabilities, and these are masks.
The gun is the mask of vulnerability.
It's the expression of anger.
Yeah.
Also stunningly unsophisticated, you know, one of the things you do with aggressive young boys, so I don't remember if we talked about this before, but there's a large branch of literature focusing on violent two-year-olds.
So about five percent of two-year-olds, males, almost all males, kick, hit, bite, and steal.
And so if you put them with other two-year-olds, that's what they do.
Most of them are socialized out of that by the age of four.
The ones who aren't become unpopular with their peers, and then they get outcast, and then they're alienated, and then they're bullies and juvenile delinquents, and then they tend to be criminals.
So it's basically career criminality that begins at the age of two.
Now the question is, what happens to the two-year-old's Who are aggressive?
Who are socialized?
And the Freudian answer would be that that aggression is repressed.
But I don't buy that.
I think really what happens is that if those boys are fortunate, they have a sophisticated father or father surrogate who helps them develop Much more effective and sophisticated strategies for their competitive dominance.
And that can be unbelievably useful.
Then you can have the man who is the beast in Beauty and Beast, who's very capable and competent and competitive and willing to strive forward, but also sophisticated in his strategy choice.
And so the two-year-old, the aggressive two-year-olds who are socialized out of it, They get popular by the age of four because they learn to play with others.
And it's not because they're repressing, it's because they're integrating.
And that should be the model for us, is the integration.
And so that's why I'm really never happy when I hear, well, we should all play non-competitive games.
It's like, first of all, it's not obvious that that's a game, by the way.
And second, says who?
How about we regulate the expression of ambition and aggression in the course of competitive games like a good coach does on the football field?
Like, what the hell's wrong with that exactly?
Why is that not the right model?
And like roughhousing does.
I mean, the father that roughhouses and does boundary enforcement requires the child to think of his brother's or sister's needs, and which is one of the reasons why roughhousing is statistically related to roughhousing combined with boundary enforcement.
It's statistically related to empathy, because you're requiring your child to understand that somebody else other than you has to be considered here.
You can't stick your elbow in your brother or sister's face in order to win at the roughhousing.
You have to know the difference between being assertive versus aggressive.
And it's only under the activation of that and things like roughhousing Yeah, well, the roughhousing is a really good example of that, because...
Imagine what you're learning when you're rough and tumble playing.
First of all, you learn, how much can I be bent, twisted, and hurt before the game isn't fun?
And that's not theoretical.
It's like, well, you're going to get bumped around a bit.
You're going to get thrown into the air.
There's actual physical threat occurring, but it can occur at a level that actually heightens the thrill of the game.
And so, of course, most of the competitive games, especially the physical ones, Run right on that edge.
So it's like, it's not no threat, it's optimal threat.
And that's a really tough thing.
And then, so you've got to figure out how dangerous can this be so that the fun is optimized.
That's really tricky.
And you negotiate that with your play partner.
And then...
Well, how far can I bend dad's arm or his finger or his nose?
And can I grab his mustache?
Can I grab his beard?
What can I do to the other person that they're going to find provocative and teasy and fun, but not painful and threatening?
Same thing you're doing when you're playing with a dog.
And all of that's deeply embodied.
Right?
It's not conceptual.
It actually constitutes the prerequisite for the conceptualization of something like empathy.
I think the empathy emerges in part because, well, we're going to rough and tumble play or we're going to play football or soccer for that matter.
We're going to be rough with each other.
As much as we possibly can, but we all want the game to continue.
Yes.
And that's the crucial issue there, is to play in a manner that enables you to win, but that also enables the game to continue.
And you learn that in competitive games.
And that's where some very important lessons come in.
So when a dad stops the game because the roughhousing has gone too far and somebody's gotten hurt, or it looks like they will get hurt, and then the children that are doing the roughhousing with the dad have to say, all right, if my roughhousing is being stopped, that means what I really want immediately, my immediate gratification, which is to push my brother or sister aside, is...
I have to learn postponed gratification because I really want the roughhousing, but that roughhousing is going to be over with if I don't consider somebody else's needs per my dad's recognition.
the extension of that into sexual behavior with women is quite obvious it's like there has to be a physical there has to be physical contact but it has to be undertaken in a subtle enough manner so that it's going to continue and so that's a way more sophisticated application of the same issue but it's on the same continuum that's partly why people dance and partly that is too the women are checking out the men is like well Can we be reasonably close together in a manner highly suggestive
of intimacy and you're still able to control yourself in a socially acceptable manner?
Is there a more direct test of your socialization history than that?
Probably not.
Absolutely.
And that dance, I mean, you know, the tango is a perfect expression of male-female relationships.
And, you know, it has to be a two-sided affair to happen.
But back on that roughhousing issue, the importance of what that child is learning is that postponed gratification.
And that postponed gratification, as we both know, is the biggest predictor of success or failure in life.
And the kids that don't have that tend to fail in the postponed gratification area, that that leads them to being depressed about their own abilities and ashamed, like with Salvador Ramos, the mass shooter in Texas.
Not having graduated from high school that led him to feeling so ashamed of himself when his mother and he got into a fight, grandmother, and he got into a fight about it.
He shoots the grandmother.
So people that do not have that postponed gratification And they don't have a way of being victorious in their playing when they're two years old, like you were talking about.
I don't think it's a matter of repression.
I think it's a matter of when you are able to play and get along with other kids and have the game, you have the capacity for expression.
And you don't have to worry about it.
Repression becomes a non-issue.
Yeah, that's right.
Yeah, I think that's absolutely right.
I mean, you know, Piaget pointed out quite clearly when he analyzed the structure of iterable games.
And there's a morality that comes out of that, is that you have to regulate your behavior in accordance with the willingness of others to voluntarily play with you.
And so that spirit of voluntary play, in some sense, is a marker for a sustainable reciprocal ethos.
And so, and you also, I mean, one of the things that I did with my kids when they were little, because we used to exchange jokes all the time, and the rule was, you get to be funny, but you don't, but you can stay, you stay on the fun end of funny, because funny can easily degenerate into teasing, and it can become mean, and what's really interesting about that is that The fun part of that is right on the edge, right?
It's right where I'm saying something to you that's so provocative that it's almost too much, but not quite.
That's where it's really funny.
And you can see that as a really subtle testing of the boundary.
So my son was quite...
Assertive as a young child.
He was a kid.
He had his own will, man.
He's really still like that as an adult.
And it was very interesting to interact with him because he would come home, say, from daycare, and he'd absorbed a bunch of evil spirits at daycare.
And he'd come home and manifest all sorts of behavioral patterns that we were just not putting up with.
And now and then he'd push it too far for a couple of days.
And I'd get together with my wife and we would negotiate.
It's like, okay, that kid's getting out of control.
We're not going to let him do anything out of the proper bounds of propriety whatsoever for like a week.
Watch him like a hawk.
And we'd agree on that.
And every single time we did that, he liked both of us better.
Yes.
And it was so interesting to watch.
And partly, I realized, to some degree in retrospect, is that that focused attention, man, from adults, there is nothing more valuable than that to a kid.
And they'll misbehave to evoke that boundary setting because it's so utterly crucial for their development.
I wonder why kids will misbehave to attract attention.
It's like there's nothing they, just like the school shooters, there's nothing they want more than attention.
Really, it is amazing to me the degree to which the need for attention is so dominant among all of us.
And many of us have learned to channel it, and you and I have learned to channel it in ways that help others, or we think help others, and I believe that.
Some people would disagree.
Yeah, yeah.
We delusionally believe that we help others.
Right, right, right, right.
Let's go to the teasing thing for a moment.
I think one of the differences between dad-style parenting and mom-style parenting is that when dads will often tease and moms will often feed, and then the child will sometimes, the child that has not been teased much or at all before, that is predominantly brought up usually by a mom who is much less likely to tease, When the dad teases, the child will often cry.
And the mom will feel that the dad is being very insensitive because he made the child cry.
And you therefore don't know much about parenting and how to not make the child cry.
And dads aren't very good at explaining that, well, when I tease, it's a way of like...
Teasing is like, at its best, it's like having a vitamin in a fruit smoothie.
The vitamin is the criticism, and the fruit smoothie makes the criticism more palatable by not tasting it so directly.
The wheatgrass does not sting your mouth.
And so dads will often say something like, well, you got away with that one, didn't you?
Or you lied to that little boy and he believed what you said.
That's great.
Are you going to be a champion liar someday?
Mm-hmm.
You think lying should be in the Olympics, you know, that type of thing.
And the boy will be able, or the girl, will be able to pick up the fact that dad has noticed that she or he lies, notices that lying is not really being approved of, but at the same time is not being yelled at and being told, you know, you just lied.
You shouldn't lie.
Right, right.
Well, it's also a good way of developing resilience.
It's like, because you're going to be tested differently.
With frustration and disappointment constantly in the social and natural world.
And so to prod a bit is to also build up resilience the same way the immune system adapts to a certain level of pathogen in the environment.
You don't want a pathogen-free environment.
You want a pathogen-representative environment.
And so by, what would you say, challenging your children on a variety of fronts, emotional and physical, First of all, they get used to the fact that that can happen because it is definitely going to happen to them.
And one of the things that's very interesting about bullies is Dan always wrote a great book on bullying.
I don't know if it's in print anymore.
Bullying, what we know and what we can do about it.
Very straightforward title.
He cut bullying rates in Scandinavia by 50%, by the way.
And he showed that, you know, there's typical bullies, but there's also typical bully victims.
And the bully victims are typically selected by the bullies.
Because what the bullies will do is throw out some teasing, you know, one person after another.
And the victim who responds with too much infantile behavior to the teasing, which might mean bursting into tears, for example, or running to a teacher, then it's like, well, now you're the target.
And so without that preparation...
Of teasing and comedy and all of that.
Then you send your children unarmed out into the world to face, well, people who are going to be far worse for them than, you know, the little devil that's the glint in the father's eye when he says something witty but with a barb in it.
Yes.
You were talking about this gentleman being from Scandinavia.
And when I was in Denmark doing some speaking, I went to some Danish schools and they do communication skills training.
In first, second, third grade, where the bully and the bullied will come off from, you know, not just the bully and the bullied, but, you know, the kids in the playground will, you know, once a week or so, talk about what happened on that playground.
And the bullied person gets to share what happened from his or her perspective.
The bully gets to share what happens from his or her, from their perspective.
Right, right.
So they get to negotiate.
Well, not only...
Yes, negotiate and also just see that what they've just done has hurt somebody else.
Right, right, right, right.
Yeah, when my kids were little and one of them would tease the other into tears, let's say, or I always made the bully, let's say, look at the other child.
Because one of the things I noticed was that if they were on a little bullying binge and they made the other person cry, then they would avoid...
Noticing.
Yes.
No, no, you look, you look, you look and you see what happened.
And generally, that would evoke that empathic response.
Yeah.
One of the things that might be interesting for people to hear is that, well, if you're a single mother, you have a dearth of positive male role models in your life for your son, for your daughter.
What do you think might be done about that that would be productive?
Yeah.
Yeah, a number of things.
First is to understand what dads do that is different from what moms do.
And because when dads are appreciated for what they do, appreciated for their teasing up to a point, Appreciate it for their roughhousing up to a point.
Appreciate it for their encouragement of kids to take risks up to a point.
And you're counterbalancing.
Well, first, you're letting your dad know that that roughhousing leads to empathy, that they focus on a good boundary approach.
Leads to postpone gratification, that leads to success, that leads to them feeling better about themselves.
So when you let a biological dad know that you need that from him, men are biologically programmed to respond to being needed.
When every generation had its war, and we told men, we need you to be willing to die.
Men were willing to die in the millions in order to serve, to do something to keep other people alive.
So just don't underestimate, if you're a mom listening to this, don't underestimate how much dads, how much we need to learn about what dads do and the value of what they contribute.
I want to add something to that that's practical too.
This is good for couples to know in general.
You've got to have some sense, first of all.
Imagine your mother and you think, well, I'd like my son and my daughter to have a good relationship with their father.
Now you've got to think about, well, you want a good relationship.
You want them to love each other.
You want them to play together.
You want them to communicate together.
Okay, so you kind of got that as a distant vision.
But now you're watching your husband and your kids.
And now and then you're going to see something happening that really makes you pretty happy.
That's a really good time to say, hey, you know what?
I just saw that and it made me really happy.
We could have some more of that.
And that, like even Skinner, B.F. Skinner, the animal behaviorist, he learned...
That the best way to train animals was to use reward, not punishment or threat.
And it's a hell of a skill to develop, to watch your family members interact, and then to see when they're doing something that makes you think, oh my God, if we had that happening 10 times a day, wouldn't this be a much better household?
And then to say that, you can get a tremendous way with that.
So, single mothers, women listening to this, if you see your husband and your kids interacting together, And it's going well, and they're smiling, they're laughing, they're playing, and it's going nicely.
You want to reward that, and you definitely don't want to punish it unless you want it to disappear.
And, you know, some distrust might emerge.
Is it okay if my husband's doing that?
It's like, if the kids are enjoying it, you know, that's not a bad marker.
Absolutely.
And as you know, Joe and I teach couples communication courses.
And one of the things that is really important is both appreciating and also training, developing the discipline to take that appreciation to a deeper level.
So a man might say, you know, I love, you're a great cook.
But when he says, you know, I really love...
I really love the way you cook that turkey.
That begins to feel a little bit more like I was really seeing.
Right, right.
That specificity, right?
Man, that gravy you made, you know, I noticed that you put just exactly the right amount of flour in it.
It was browned perfectly, and you brought it to the table heated and Like, it was spiced so well.
That specificity of reward, that's an unbelievably powerful technique.
Because it shows that you attended, eh?
Exactly.
And you're saying, is that parsley, sage, rosemary?
The specificity of appreciation combined with curiosity.
Right, right.
How did you do it so well?
Tell me more about it.
Yeah, show me what you did.
Is there a way we could do more of that?
Man, that's a great thing to sprinkle through your entire relationship.
Yes, and sprinkle through.
Let's work with what you just said there is so important.
Most couples, they hear that in a couples communication workshop, and they say, oh, that's really important, very nice.
But then they never go out and do it.
Part of what I do with my couples is to work on the subtitle of the course is The Art and Discipline of Love.
Right, right.
Almost nobody associates discipline with love.
But doing this appreciation, and three of them, like my wife and I do, every Wednesday night, in our case, or with a routine, doesn't leave the appreciations coming to your partner at a wake.
Which is often what happens.
And so this training to appreciate and then doing it frequently and doing it systematically, this is so much an important part of a couple of...
Yeah, well, it really works well with kids, too, in terms of encouraging them.
So if you see your kid doing something, you know, like maybe they bring you a picture to show you.
And, you know, you glance at it and you say, well, that's nice.
And that's the end of it.
It's like...
Yeah, they came to show you that.
So maybe you take the picture and you say, was that a sun?
It's like, you see, you drew the rays there.
The rays look really good.
And well, those flowers look good.
And what were you trying to do with this?
And maybe you could put a chimney on.
You did a real good job here.
And this part's particularly good.
And here's why.
Like to do a differentiated analysis of that.
Well, people love that, especially if you can...
When my students used to write me essays, a lot of them, especially the initial essays, were just bloody awful.
Like, almost everything about them was awful.
But now and then, they'd throw in a sentence, you know, that was real.
It would just sort of stand out like a diamond, and I'd circle it and say, yeah, more of this.
And then the next essay would be like 30% that, and then 60% that, you know?
Yes, it really is.
We are, you know, we have a part of our brain is called the RCZ, rostral singlet zone.
And when we get approval, that sends dopamine to that part of our brain.
It is just amazing how much we are all, you know, we are all in need of that, of that dopamine, and it makes us feel so much more loved.
Let me go back for a second, if I may, to the, what are the things a mom can do?
So let's say that the mom does not have a biological father that it is possible to bring in their life.
A lot of moms look out for stepfathers, but oftentimes, particularly if they have daughters, they are very, the father behavior is Combined with being a stepfather often makes the biological mom feel that the stepfather does not have as much investment in protecting the child.
And so when the mom sees that the child is crying as a result of the roughhousing, crying as a result of the teasing, or maybe fell from too high a spot that the father let them go to, I've
seen lots of mothers in particular.
for interacting with their children so that the husband will take some steps he'll he'll start to play and maybe he does it somewhat roughly and she'll just be in there protecting the child from the father like right now and you do that like a hundred times and the game's over you've permanently disrupted the relationship between the father and the child because you're also broadcasting massive signals of distrust to the child It's like, well, your father's so dangerous that we can't even let him play with you a little bit.
It's like, not good.
And it doesn't allow the father to develop any skills either that way.
Andy ends up developing what I call the father's catch-22.
He learns to love the family by being away from the love of the family and earning more money.
Okay, I will take that job selling product X nationwide.
I'm really not needed around here so much.
But the one thing my wife does appreciate is my bringing in more income so we can buy a better home and a better neighborhood, a better school district.
Okay, I'm rewarded for that.
I'm definitely not being rewarded for the playing that I'm doing.
And so a lot of dads, you know, in wanting that reward, they see the one way that they're lovable.
And they don't realize that, you know, the data shows that once a family has, depending on where in the United States they live, They're earning between $50,000 and $75,000 a year.
What the children need is more of dad's time, not more attention.
Yeah, you bet.
Not more of dad's time.
And so that's important to remember.
But let's say there's no stepfather and no biological dad.
It's very important for parents, the mother, to get the child involved with Cub Scouts.
Two years in Cub Scouts.
It's shown very good studies with control groups of kids that do and don't go to Cub Scouts, leading to children developing better character.
And I don't know a single mother who doesn't want their child to have better character.
To get them involved, not just in sports.
But in what I call the liberal arts of sports, by liberal arts of sports, I mean, organized sports really helps them to pay attention to somebody who is creating structure for them and know what structure to do.
But it's also if they want to be an entrepreneur or an original thinker, it's pick up team sports is really helpful for that because you're saying, okay, are we negotiating everything?
Right.
We're going to play full court.
We're going to play half court in basketball.
Who do I choose?
Last time that Jordan and I played together, I passed the ball to him and he got the point.
Okay, I can pass that ball to him again.
I can trust when he reaches out for it.
But I threw that ball to Bill and every time he missed.
Okay, and what's a foul?
Is a foul being pushed a little bit or a lot?
How am I exhausting myself quickly by running back and forth in the court?
And so all these things become so many things that are unsupervised behavior and the ability of people to sort of like gauge All the subtleties of like we were talking about with what no means no, what no means maybe.
All these subtleties are much more easily able to be picked up from pickup team sports.
And because of so many of our fears as parents, we've often been discouraging our children from doing pickup team sports.
We haven't been willing to lead them at the school.
And maybe they do get into a fight at school.
But it's important.
It's important to allow them to get into that fight and then process.
What were the red flags that told you that this was a situation that might lead to a fight?
It's also an opportunity to practice reconciliation.
I mean, one of the things DeWall has shown, and this is very interesting in relationship to this Alpha idea, and this is a good thing for the young men who are listening to really take note of, is DeWall has shown quite clearly that sometimes it's the smallest male chimp in the troop who's the Alpha.
And that's often a male who's very good at negotiating reciprocal relationships, very good at reconciliation post-conflict, and often allied with a powerful female who's kin related to many of the other chimps in the group and has powerful social standing.
DeWall has shown very clearly that if a chimp uses...
Pure physical power as a means of attaining alpha status, that the troop is fractious, that his rule is short, and that his end is brutal, and that the alphas that are successful are the most reciprocal individuals often in the entire troop.
Yes.
It's all friendship, coalition, reconciliation, alliance building.
And chimps have a patriarchal structure, fundamentally, a patriarchal social structure.
So they're a good analog of the evil patriarchy in some real sense.
But even among the animals, the chimpanzees, the mere expression of power is a...
It's an unstable social strategy.
It's by no means optimal.
And I think that's very tightly associated with our discussion earlier about delay of gratification and the spirit of play.
You have to integrate that aggression into an iterable and desirable social game.
A mating game and a friendship game and a cooperation game and a competition game.
All of that.
That's not repression.
And that's not...
That's not the eradication of toxic masculinity.
It's the socialization of ambition.
Crucially important.
We're going to talk a little bit about what might be done on the legislative front as well.
Yeah, I, on a personal level, I got a letter from Chris Sprouse about six months ago, saying that he had three, Chris Sprouse was the speaker of the House of Florida, saying that he had three sons, and he did a lot of these things that we were talking about, like the rough housing and that helped him explain this to his wife.
And then he gave it to two of the Republican and Democratic leaders in the relevant areas of legislation in the House of Representatives of Florida.
And they drew up legislation based on a need to bring more fathers and developing something that they called a fatherhood crisis.
And what was most rewarding to me Was that the legislation passed the House with a 100% or a unanimous vote on the part of both the Democrats and Republicans.
Hooray!
And usually Democrats are much more resistant to understanding the value of dads and the family.
And so I was really proud of them.
Yeah, yeah.
No kidding.
That's great.
For doing that.
Yeah.
So what do you think that'll translate into practically?
Well, so far they've allocated $75 million to develop programs.
Some of it is traditional stuff around child support, but others is stuff that isn't just child support by money, but child support by dad involvement, which is the more important type of support.
And to the degree that they execute, and there's a number of fathers groups in Florida that are really very, I imagine will be very much involved in the helpful execution of that.
And so what I would like to see in Florida is the development of fatherhood programs that tell men, A, you're needed.
B, here's what you do differently.
See, here's how you communicate with your wife respectfully so that when she says it's not okay to climb the tree, you're too young to the child.
And the dad says, oh, don't be overprotective.
How to negotiate some way of like climbing that tree so the child can climb up to a certain point but not beyond a certain point.
So dad can be under the tree to be able to cushion a fall and not have a cell phone with him.
And so the mom and dad can do what I call checks and balance parenting.
Mm-hmm.
The data shows that the children that do best have both a mom and dad that are actively involved.
And obviously the children that do the best have parents that end up staying together rather than getting divorced.
Well, they do opponent processing, you know, because...
So if you want to move your hand smoothly this way...
The best way to do it is to put your other hand there and push against it.
Then you can make...
Yeah, yeah.
So that's an opponent process.
And a lot of very fine-grained attunements and calibrations are opponent processes.
And so you imagine how lenient versus...
How permissive should you be with a child?
And the answer is, well, it depends on the child and the situation.
And so how do you negotiate that?
And the answer is, well, imagine you have on the maternal side this more all-encompassing love that's forgiving but can move towards overprotectiveness.
And on the paternal side, you have this forward encouragement that can be too pushy.
And that has to be calibrated to the child.
How do you calibrate it?
And the answer is, well, the parents negotiate.
And the woman pushes, and the man pushes, and they find a balance that optimizes that situation for the child.
And then everybody gets what they need, if we're lucky.
And the challenge there is each person negotiating...
Often feels the person hearing that negotiation of, well, we could do it differently in this way.
The person making the suggestion of the negotiation is often perceives himself or herself as making a suggestion for a better connection with the children, etc.
The person hearing any suggestion of a change in behavior or attitude that is expected or required of that person perceives him or herself as being criticized.
Right, right, right.
Yeah, that's a tough one to negotiate.
And the single biggest flaw and the single biggest Achilles heel of human beings is our inability to handle personal criticism without becoming defensive.
Well, you know, you can open up a discussion.
I did this a lot with my clinical clients because there were often things they didn't want to discuss.
And I said, well, look, here's the deal here.
We're going to open up the discussion and lay out a whole variety of options.
We are not going to start with the assumption that any of these options are correct or that they're mandatory or that they're criticisms of you.
And we're not going to proceed until we agree.
And that actually works quite nicely in familial interactions like...
Well, let's have a talk.
We're not going to assume that you're right and I'm right, and we're not going to try to establish who's right.
We're going to open up the discussion space.
We're going to evaluate all the different possibilities.
And then before we move forward, we're going to agree.
And it's so interesting to me, too, that, you know, we're so bad at teaching people to negotiate.
They have no idea how to do it.
And so they do hear any suggestion of something different as a criticism.
That's just a non-starter, right?
Because if you're trying to negotiate with your partner and every time you make a suggestion, you're treated as if you're disrupting their self-esteem in some fundamental way.
It's like it's too much effort.
Yes.
I also counsel people to make the discussion about the smallest thing possible.
It's part of that specificity.
Well, exactly what time do we want our child to go to bed?
Precisely.
And why?
Well, you know, is it 7.30?
Is it 7.45?
Is it 8 o'clock?
How much time do we need to spend for ourselves so that we don't get irritated at the child?
What's appropriate developmentally?
Let's get it precise.
And then we can negotiate, well, exactly what is the routine going to be when we put the child to bed and what deviations are we going to tolerate and how do we deal with the deviations jointly?
And that, it's so nice for a child to have a parental unit that is unified in relationship to boundary enforcement.
Because the children will play one parent against the other if they can, because they're conniving little devils and very, very smart, and they're motivated to do that.
But it's such a relief to them to see that the walls hold.
They'll test them.
And you think, well, it's mean to put up the walls.
It's like, no, it's not.
Paradise is a walled garden.
And the children need the walls, because otherwise they face an infinite expanse of complexity.
And so they'll test, not because they don't want the walls, but because they bloody well want to know where they are.
Yeah, the children without the boundary enforcement or without those walls, most children feel like they're walking in the dark on a platform that they don't know where they're going to fall off.
Right, right, right.
That's a good metaphor.
But when they see the walls, they know that it engenders much more security.
The process I use in the couples workshop that I do is because I feel it's biologically unnatural to hear personal criticism from a loved one without becoming defensive.
I have people alter their natural biological space first so that they alter their consciousness into six mindsets that they say, for example, like I thought when I call the love guarantee in which they say that if I provide a safe environment for all of your feelings,
your fears, your anger, Without becoming defensive and just to hold that space for you, you'll feel safer with me and therefore more love from me and therefore more love for me.
And that's just that I ask people to say whether or not they would be willing to take a 50% risk of dying if their partner was about ready to be killed.
But they knew with 100% certainty that they could save their life.
And about 95% of men say that they would risk their life for their partner.
And understand that some of these partners that come to the couples workshop, many of them are very secure in the relationship, but others are thinking about getting a divorce or just breaking up or not, you know, that type of thing.
So even among there, 95% of the men are willing to take a 50% risk of dying in order to save their partner's life if they know with 100% certainty they can do that.
And surprisingly, 85% or so of the women say the same thing about the men.
And they're all making these statements on pieces of yellow paper that their partner, that they wrinkle, throw into the room.
Center of the room, and their partner never discovers what their answer is.
But the first mindset then becomes, if I'm willing to die to give you life, Then I can listen to give you life.
And then when they've meditated themselves into that and other mindsets like that, for about a half hour, but not much more than a half hour, they're able to hear anything their partner says in whatever way they say it.
Yeah, well you have to be willing to let your partner go off the mark a bit, because otherwise you can't have a discussion.
The other thing I recommended to people, which I think is very useful, tell me what you think about this, is...
I always suggested that they specify their conditions for satisfaction.
It's like, so let's say I have a beef with you.
It's like, okay, well, here's some things about what you did I don't like.
Well, that's pretty generic and I don't know how to bind that.
It's like, well, is this a criticism of me right to the core or what's going on?
It's like, what do you want me to do?
Like, if I could redo that and you would be satisfied with what I did, what exactly would I have to do or say?
And I think you can even do that You know, maybe you respond badly to your wife's new outfit, and she's disappointed.
That can be very subtle.
And maybe you do that because you're just not that bright.
And so she's not happy because you didn't respond well.
You can say...
What would you like to have heard me say?
And, you know, the first response to that is, well, if I have to tell you, then it doesn't mean anything or you don't really care.
But the response to that is, well, assume I'm stupid and I need to do this 50 times before I'll be even vaguely sophisticated at it and give me a break.
I'll deliver what you want badly in the hopes of being able to do it better in the future.
And that, I think, is a very effective technique.
But it's combined with that willingness to let your partner do for you what you need badly to begin with.
Because then you get to learn, at least, you know?
I think that's an important way.
And I also find that when someone is just complaining and they know it's safe to complain and they can say it in whatever tone of voice they want or exaggerated or whatever, And even if they incorporated that complaint, a request for it to be done differently.
When they're finished the process, if they're really heard well and seen, let them know what you've heard them say, and so on.
I have learned not to respond by telling my wife, I will agree to do what she mentions in the process because oftentimes when she feels adequately heard, what she was asking for in that process is no longer...
Yeah, well, that's part of the calibration, right?
It's like the person is going to have to bitch and whine a lot to kind of cover the territory.
And one of the things you discover, this is certainly something you discover in clinical work, is that people have to listen to what they think.
And that makes you can discard like 80% of it.
It's like, oh, well, actually, you know, some of that I just, I didn't really mean or doesn't seem relevant anymore.
But you don't bloody well know that when it's bubbling up inside you.
Yes.
And so that's another reason to, that's a difficult thing to learn to forestall that sense of guilt and criticism that comes in listening to the other person express some negative emotion.
But knowing that a fair bit of that will dissipate in the telling is definitely a useful thing to a meta strategy to learn.
So we should stop here pretty quick.
We've been going for almost two hours.
So I thought maybe one thing we should do, maybe both of us separately.
If there's anybody out there, any young guy, for example, Who's watching this?
Who's been having vengeful fantasies?
And who has been developing and toying with fantasies of revenge?
And who is feeling isolated and lonesome and oppressed and isolated?
And is starting to spin up fantasies of violence in revenge?
You know, and you'll know that if you're one of these people.
Like, find someone to talk to.
There's better ways you can deal with this.
And you're young, you're 16, you're 17, you don't have to be doomed, you know?
You've got your whole life ahead of you.
And maybe just getting out of the place that you're in where you're unpopular might do it for you.
You know, you can move to somewhere else and be a new person.
There's all sorts of pathways in life.
And so you don't have to explosively demonstrate your competence, you know, in a single vengeful, violent act.
There are better ways to deal with the world.
And you might have reason to be bitter and vengeful, but...
But there are better paths forward.
So don't do it.
Do what this young man we talked about earlier did.
Have enough sense to reach out to somebody.
Find someone.
A teacher, a principal, someone.
A policeman if it has to be.
Someone.
Yes, and I really encourage every school system to, in the Boy Crisis book, I have a suicide depression inventory, and every mass shooting is a suicide.
I'd love to see that passed out to everyone in school so that no one feels singled out for being told that you should take this inventory.
So, for example, with boys, when boys say that three or four of the principles that tend to be very true for almost all boys, thinking these things is feeling that no one loves them, that no one needs them, There's no hope of that changing.
Right.
And if they do tell someone that respects them, that that person will lose respect for them.
Those are just four examples of that.
And if these red flags of depression or suicide are happening, then we need to reach out to these girls and boys, girls for different reasons.
They're not going to shoot up the school, but they may shoot up their own lives in an internal type of way.
And we don't want that for any of our girls or our boys.
Yeah, well, it's not nothing to go and admit to someone that you've been having this sort of idea and that you're in that much trouble.
That takes a fair bit of reorientation and moral courage, but the alternative is so cataclysmic and so unnecessary and so appalling.
Mm-hmm.
And it's so important that if you're a legislator listening to this, like what Kentucky is doing, which is getting both making sure that after a divorce that both mothers and fathers are involved, that equal shared parenting is one of the four things that is absolutely crucial for children having the best opportunity.
Right, I want to chime in on that too.
I would definitely second that motion.
I thought for a long time maybe that giving women of very young children primary custody might be the best default solution, but I don't believe that anymore.
I think 50-50 custody should be the default.
And we have to start with this whole understanding of the importance of father right from the beginning.
We have in the culture at this moment, right to life versus a woman's body, a woman's choice.
The discussion should be an understanding that almost all rights are rights intention.
The fetus has a right to live.
The mother does have a right to choose, but also the right that's been completely left out is the dad's right to have a choice.
The dad's right to be notified immediately when there's a pregnancy about the fact that the mother's considering abortion and being able to sign a piece of a legal document that's an affidavit saying, I will take responsibility for this child For 18 years to raise the child financially and emotionally,
and then instead of having it be a debate between aborting the child and a mother's right, a mother's choice, we have a whole third option there that may allow that fetus to become a real live infant that's taken care of for 18 years.
The mother and father both did sex together.
They both have responsibilities.
If for a woman to take nine months of responsibility During pregnancy and a man taking 18 years of responsibility in order to be able to allow that child to live and be loved, that's a fair trade-off, but that's not even in the discussion now.
We're a long way in our society from being able to have a mature discussion about sexuality, that's for sure, and about the consequences.
Maybe that's something we can try to do and Absolutely.
Yeah.
All right.
So is there anything else that we should close off with?
I mean, that was a pretty comprehensive discussion and hopefully people will find it useful.
Just the importance of family dinner night and knowing how to do that because the children that are listened to that are also required to listen to their brothers, their sisters and their parents are the children in conjunction with checks and balance parenting that those those are the children that do the best.
And if people want to read what you've written that, say, specifically focuses on familial communication patterns, what's the best book for them, do you think?
The boy crisis is definitely the best and the portions of the boy.
And I have to say that a lot of men in particular are saying to me that they really like to hear it on audible because I read my part and I hope my voice allows some of the what I'm saying to have another dimension to it.
Right, right, right, right.
And John Gray did a terrific job on, the guy who wrote Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus, he did a terrific job on preventing and reversing ADHD without using drugs.
Okay.
Okay.
Well, thank you very much for talking to me again.
It's always appreciated.
It's always a pleasure.
It's really...
I enjoy it.
And when I go back over the show, I say, oh, yes, he said that.
That was so interesting and so good.
It's really...
I learn a lot from the process as well.
Well, and hopefully we'll get...
One of the consequences of these sorts of discussions is that we're going to decrease the probability of the sorts of terrible things that we're talking about because that would be in everyone's interests clearly.
So thank you.
Thank you again.
Absolutely.
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