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July 28, 2010 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
09:43
1714 My Shockingly Low Level of Self-Knowledge

Sing with me - 'If I don't know me by nowwwww'

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Alright, shockingly low levels of self-knowledge podcast.
I don't particularly have labels for myself.
It's like calling a stream a fixed thing.
I mean, I guess you can call it a stream, but a stream is a process, right?
Not a thing. Can never step.
In the same stream twice, I watch the ripples change the side, but never leave the stream in any permanent sense.
Permanent way. Oh, David Bowie.
And so, I must admit to a shocking lack of self-knowledge in one particular area that just popped up this last week.
I was talking with the beloved C about the beloved I. Isabella, not me.
Although, beloved for me as well.
But I was talking about Her intensity.
I said, she's a really intense kid.
And this we've noticed from the very beginning.
I mean... From the very beginning, she always wanted to be carried and held, and we couldn't sit.
We couldn't sit. And she had a very tough time getting into the car seat.
She always hated it. And she was a very light sleeper and very hyper and exploratory and so on, and vocal.
And that, I mean, that was fairly exhausting.
I mean, I gotta tell you, I mean, much worse for Christina than for myself.
No, it's fairly exhausting to have that.
She slept maybe an hour or two at most at night at any given time.
She'd wake up and cry.
She always had a very fierce will.
I mean, I remember she was just a little over four months, and I mentioned this before.
But we took her to a Mommy's and Me movie, and there were like maybe 100, 120 other moms with kids in the cinema.
And Isabella was not like any of the other kids, just like...
Just a little over four months, she was not like any of the other kids.
I know that sounds funny.
Oh, my kid is unique and so on, but this is true.
I'll pile on the empirical evidence so that my shocking lack of self-knowledge will make sense.
But the other kids literally were sitting there like dewy-eyed sacks of potatoes, and they were about the same age, some a little younger, some a little older, you know, a couple of months to maybe six or eight months.
And they're all sitting there watching the movie, maybe sipping a little juice, having a little snack, but they're all sitting on their mama's lap.
Now, Isabella did manage five or ten minutes into the movie, but then she's going...
Twisting around in her chair, looking at all of the other kids and pointing at things and making vocal sounds and loud and all of that.
And we ended up having to...
Christina took her for the first, I guess, half hour.
I took her for the second, 40 minutes or whatever, until the end of the film.
And Isabella, in order to not be restless and upset...
She wasn't a crier, but she was upset.
We had to fly her up and down the aisles that lead to the cinema.
I mean, we had to literally fly her, hold her up and swoop her and fly her around.
And then she was very happy. But if we held her still, or we couldn't conceivably sit down, but then she would get very, very upset.
So she's always been very high stimulus and very intense and very strong-willed.
She... We're really noticing this if we take her on Saturday mornings to gymnastics.
And there are other kids there.
Most are a little older, but there's one or two there who are her age or even slightly younger.
And they're also, I hate to say well-behaved, but they're well-behaved.
So the instructor says, and I want everyone to sit nicely.
On the blue line. And all the other kids go shuffling over and sit nicely on the blue line.
And Isabella sprints off at high velocity to the trampoline or the rings or the beam or the long bouncy runway to do her thing.
And she won't. I mean, you pick her up to try and put her on the blue line, she'll sort of twist away.
And she's not angry, she's not crying, she just won't do it.
And that's very different from all of the other children.
I mean, we were just at the library this morning and there was a baby who was a couple of months old just sitting.
She sat for like an hour in her little...
Jeez, I should know this.
I should know this. A little car seat thing, right?
And she was awake and Isabella would never, like not even three minutes, wouldn't last three minutes doing that before she would be twisting and turning and yelping and wanting to come out and And be carried around and so on.
I mean, we see this everywhere.
And we're starting to, of course, chat with our neighbors who have kids the same age.
And she's just really, really different.
I mean, she's great. Don't get me wrong.
I mean, I love all of this about her.
But she's really driven and intense.
And she's very good-natured and a very happy kid and very affectionate and all sorts of wonderful.
But... She's very intense.
And, yeah, there's a kid that we see at the playground who's like a month and a half younger than Isabella, who just sits placidly or walks around a little bit and plays in the sand and barely says boo to a mouse.
You know, Isabella is struggling to heave herself up.
Like, we've just got it to the point where she can climb two or three of the levels and she can go down this big twisty slide on her own, which for, you know, just 19 months is pretty good.
But none of the other kids that we see seem to have that really energetic drive to master things.
Isabella will literally do things 50 times like we were at a...
Park the other day, and she wanted to go up and down the sidewalk, like 50 times, about.
I mean, I'm not exaggerating. It was a long time we were there.
And then she did go down the stairs, a set of steps, on her own.
And, I mean, she's just great.
This morning, she said, library.
Like, baby, she wants to go to the library.
She knows where it is. She knows what it is.
She knows that she wants to...
So anyway, she's a monster-proud parent, though I am.
But she's not like any other kid.
And I've had a lot of exposure to kids, of course, right?
I worked in a daycare.
I was around for my nieces when they were very young.
I was living with my brother for a while when my nieces were very young.
And so I've had some...
I was an assistant teacher in a gifted kids program for a while.
I've spent some real time around kids and, I mean, Isabella's...
I mean, her whole body is tense and quivering with intensity when she wants something or she's just really intense.
And I don't mean that at all in a bad way.
I'm just sort of noticing. Anyway, so I was going through this long explanation to Christina and Christina couldn't help but laugh.
And I said, what's so funny?
She said, where do you think she gets this from?
And literally, it was a classic double take.
It was a classic double take because I was like, what, me?
Intense? And then it all fell into place.
I say, you know, I think I am a little intense.
I think I'm actually quite intense.
I mean, I guess when you sit in this hot tub, you don't notice heat in the bubbles after a while, but I guess it's not exactly a mountain pond.
And I just kind of wanted to share that, that I sort of been thinking about that.
Yeah, I was looking at my video.
I just did Why You're Unemployed Part 2.
I just did this video.
And it was like, wow, I'm kind of intense.
I'm kind of intense and kind of driven and kind of strong-willed and all this, that, and the other.
And that's, you know, it's strengths and its weaknesses, though I'm certainly happy to have those attributes.
I think there are more strengths than weaknesses.
And I'm good-natured and I'm a happy person, though I can definitely get angry when abused or...
I'm justly treated. But it was just very interesting.
And now, of course, I'm looking at Isabella.
Not that, huh, there's this interesting aspect of her called incredibly strong-willed, smart and intense.
I'm not looking at that like, well, that's an interesting foreign thing for me to manage as a parent, but I'm looking at it as a...
A small, cuter, and much hairier little mirror, and it's really helped me with my empathy to...
You don't want to sort of confuse the baby for yourself, or the kid for yourself, but it really has helped my empathy for what she is experiencing, right?
I mean, I sometimes surf the storms of my emotions three quarters underwater.
And so, the sort of passions that she feels, the intensity that she feels, the very strong will that she feels, the intense curiosity and lust for mastery and knowledge and all that.
I mean, before we even wake her up, right?
So, we've got to get her up.
Sometimes we have to wake her up because she's been sleeping too long.
Do you want to go to bed too late? And...
So we'll go and wake her up.
And even before she opens her eyes, like if I go to wake her up, I just gently stroke her cheek and murmur her name.
And so before she even opened her eyes, she's starting to name things, right?
Nose, toes, bed, turtle, there's turtles on her sheets and so on, right?
Even before she opens her eyes. That's how fascinated and dedicated and devoted she is to language.
So, you know, very strong language skills, very strong will, very intense, very smart.
It's like, wow. Wow.
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