Child as human shield against spouse, how people feel about you being successful, undermining the success of others, celebrating birthdays, having empathy for your romantic partner, dating somebody twice your age, self-protection in dating and the moving goalposts of those who argue the validity of religion.
| Time | Text |
|---|---|
| Good evening, everybody. | |
| Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain Radio, 22nd of January 2014. | |
| Hope you're doing well. | |
| All right, let's get to the callers. | |
| What more needs to be said, only to be listened? | |
| All right, Joelle, you're first. | |
| Go ahead. | |
| Hi. | |
| Hello, how are you doing? | |
| I'm good, thank you. | |
| Thank you so much for taking this call and just for everything you do. | |
| I found... | |
| Freedom Main Radio and stuff in about May of last year, and my life is very different now. | |
| So thank you so much for just everything that you do. | |
| It is my absolute delight. | |
| I'm very glad to hear that. | |
| So I've got a couple of dreams. | |
| Should I just read them? | |
| We're going to milk the host now, right? | |
| Not just a dream, not just a long dream, a couple of dreams. | |
| Nice. | |
| They're little ones. | |
| They're kind of short-ish. | |
| When I say play an encore, I mean start the concert again. | |
| Yeah. | |
| Should I just read it? | |
| Do you have them typed? | |
| Yep. | |
| Okay. | |
| Can you throw them into, just so I can read them back into the Skype chat window? | |
| I can. | |
| I just have to open up my email. | |
| I had it printed. | |
| I'm sure I'd be all tech, high tech. | |
| No sweat. | |
| If there's nothing that Mike loves more, it's a show with some editing. | |
| Helps him fill up those endless hours waiting for an email to show up. | |
| So bored. | |
| There's endless 30 seconds waiting for an email to show up. | |
| Especially an email that I might not be able to find. | |
| Dear Stefan Molyneux, I've written a 19-volume exposition on the relationship between Christianity, Spaceship, Scientology, and Jesus. | |
| If you have, I don't know, six or seven months straight of uninterrupted sleepless time, would you mind having a look and let me know what you think? | |
| So you read that one, huh? | |
| What are your favorites, Mike? | |
| English is not my first language, but help with you I would love to if you could find resume attached, please, thanks. | |
| I actually get those. | |
| Yes, we do. | |
| Any luck finding it? | |
| Yeah, I don't know if I put it in the right place. | |
| I'm kind of blonde, but... | |
| Did you say you're kind of blonde? | |
| I'm Skype blonde. | |
| I'm very Skype blonde. | |
| Skype blonde. | |
| So is blonde like an adjective now for not too smart? | |
| Yes. | |
| Yeah. | |
| Got it. | |
| Got it. | |
| All right. | |
| Okay. | |
| So the first stream, I had this when I was a child. | |
| I was maybe five. | |
| I've never forgot it. | |
| When I think of it, it really truly horrifies me. | |
| I used to actually try to remember this on purpose when I was feeling angry towards my mom because it just seems to make me feel guilty instead of angry. | |
| Anyway, so in the dream, we're all sitting around the dinner table. | |
| So it's my mom, my brother, my grandparents, and myself. | |
| This is who I lived with as a child after my mom and my dad split up. | |
| Everybody's kind of jovial and laughing and everybody's making well-received jokes and doing like funny, clever tricks and stuff like that. | |
| I don't really know what, but just that kind of a feeling. | |
| And then my mom asked me to pass her the ice cream and then I pick up this pail and I'm trying to be funny so I toss it to her and like in the style of like a clown pie in the face type thing it hits her and then it's like all of a sudden all the fun stops and it's such a shift in the setting that it feels like one of those moments when someone pulls a needle from a plain record it's just like all the fun and lightness is gone instantly. | |
| And her face gets stuck in the ice cream, and she's completely still, almost frozen, and then her upper body drops, kind of bending at the waist, and her face, still in the pail, hits the table, and she is, like, motionless. | |
| I realize what I've done, and somehow, without trying, like, I sort of just know that I can't pull it off, and then I can't fix it. | |
| Like, I just knew that I wouldn't be able to kind of fix it. | |
| Like, I wouldn't be capable. | |
| I wouldn't be fast enough. | |
| I wouldn't be strong enough. | |
| And there was no undoing this horrible, horrible thing that I'd done. | |
| And then I just kind of knew that she, like, just drowned or suffocated in the ice cream. | |
| So... | |
| And I, like, I remember this vividly. | |
| I think it was five... | |
| Sorry, what is the pail? | |
| I'm trying to sort of figure that out here. | |
| Oh, it's like this pail of ice cream. | |
| I don't know if that's like a Canadian thing. | |
| It's like a... | |
| I don't know, like a two-gallon pail thing of ice cream thing. | |
| Oh, so people would call it like a bucket of ice cream, right? | |
| Oh, yeah, right, a bucket, yeah, same thing, yeah. | |
| Okay, got it, got it. | |
| So then the second dream, I had this... | |
| Was your mother very light-skinned? | |
| Pale? | |
| With an L-E? Yeah. | |
| I guess so. | |
| Okay. | |
| Just, you know, pale-faced. | |
| It's an odd word to substitute because bucket of ice cream is usually... | |
| I've never ordered a pail of ice cream. | |
| I think you'd get something you'd get from, like, the pig yard or something. | |
| Right. | |
| Alright, so that's the first dream. | |
| That's the end of the first dream, is that right? | |
| Yeah, yeah. | |
| And do you want to talk about the other dream, like, first or then do one at a time? | |
| It's whatever kind of works for you. | |
| Do you think they're related? | |
| I don't know. | |
| I think they're related. | |
| Let's do the first one. | |
| Let's do the first one, if you don't mind, and then we'll see how it fits with maybe the second one. | |
| Sure. | |
| All right. | |
| And why is your dad not there? | |
| I know you said that your parents split up, but did your parents not hang out at all again after that, or was it really like a nasty breakup? | |
| Well, it's funny. | |
| So we moved in with my grandparents, my mother's parents. | |
| When I was about three and my brother was about five and we would still go to my dad's on the weekends like he's pretty abusive and stuff so they would see each other and they would sort of be amicable and kind of fake to one another's face for you know the the pass off type thing when when like somebody is picking up or dropping us off that type thing but and when you say abusive you were talking about that with relation to your mom is that right? | |
| Well, this is something I've learned from Free Domain Radio. | |
| So my dad was very physically, very emotionally, sexually abusive to me and my brother when we were little. | |
| I think he was abusive to her physically and certainly yelling and stuff like that when they were still married. | |
| My mother was definitely abusive if I look at it now, but for so long I believed that she was the victim in all of this. | |
| She was a humongous martyr and stuff like that. | |
| I really think any time when I was a child, if I had needs, she would somehow turn it to be about her. | |
| I'm just sort of making a note here. | |
| Are you saying that a woman married an abusive man and then claimed to be a victim of that man? | |
| It's shocking. | |
| I've never... | |
| Gosh, let me just make a note of that. | |
| Victimhood for voluntary choice. | |
| Okay, got it. | |
| Got it. | |
| I think I understand. | |
| Yeah. | |
| So... | |
| Yeah, it's like for years and years, like she would... | |
| I remember like when we were little, we'd ask, you know, we don't want to go to our dad's house because it was awful, right? | |
| And it was like she'd get like, you know... | |
| Kind of like, how dare you, you know, how dare you put me in this position because you don't make me stand up to him. | |
| Like he's, you know, that kind of thing. | |
| It was like, or, you know, if my brother and I were, you know, fighting with one another, which I realize now, like she definitely kind of pinned us against each other a lot of the time because then she could be the really popular common denominator. | |
| Um, She would just anything, just anything. | |
| She would always make it all about her. | |
| Like, anything. | |
| We come home from my dad's house with cuts and bruises and stuff like that. | |
| And she'd take photos of it and take pictures of us with freaking adult male bite marks on her ass and crazy crap like that. | |
| And she'd take pictures of this and then take it to her work so people would feel sorry for her type thing. | |
| It's just nuts when I think about it now. | |
| So your father would bite you on the butt, is that right? | |
| Yeah. | |
| Good God, what a monster. | |
| And your mother knew about this, obviously took pictures of it, and didn't see fit to say, call the fucking police? | |
| No, actually, an incident that I sort of really... | |
| It kind of made a lot of sense to me about July of this year. | |
| It just sort of was a huge catalyst for... | |
| I stopped talking to her in August because I tried to talk to her about this stuff. | |
| I remember when I was like about four or something, or no, I was probably six or seven, and my brother was gone to like some Boy Scouts weekend thing away, so it was just me that was going to be going to my dad's. | |
| And I remember like just being terrified, and so she... | |
| Um, you know, she was telling me, tell him that you're not going this week. | |
| And this is, like, right before he's supposed to come pick me up. | |
| And I was, like, shocked. | |
| Like, you don't say no to this person. | |
| Like, what? | |
| You want me to tell him I'm not going? | |
| Like, I have no idea what to do with that information, right? | |
| So we were kind of, like, standing at the back door where he was... | |
| There was, like, a little landing in the back of the house type thing where he'd just come and stand in there while I got my boots or whatever. | |
| And, uh... | |
| So she's standing behind me, like, tell him, come on, tell him, tell him you're not going. | |
| Like, just kind of trying to get me to just... | |
| And how old, sorry, how old were you at this time? | |
| I was like six or seven or something like this. | |
| I was... | |
| Six years old. | |
| So scared, so scared, and... | |
| Six years old, and your mother is pushing you in front of her, telling you to deal with this situation. | |
| Yeah, and... | |
| And I think I had like, I don't know, I remember feeling like nauseous and like just fuzzy and like I was going to faint and just terrified. | |
| But I was like, I'll do it if I don't have to go, right? | |
| But then I still had to go anyway, so it's just totally fucking pointless, right? | |
| And that was like the worst weekend because now I had to like pay for this too, right? | |
| But so, and it's funny because like, it's just like this moment that I never really thought about When I was little, but like a few months ago, I realized like this was a big moment in my life because like my whole life I've never really had an easy time sticking up for myself. | |
| I can definitely do it for other people, but when something happens to me, I just freeze. | |
| Like I just freeze. | |
| Words will not come out of my mouth type thing. | |
| Of course not. | |
| And I'm sure it's from like that was a big moment. | |
| Yeah, I mean you say this like you just have some flaw. | |
| That's what I thought for so many years. | |
| God no. | |
| Like I'm just... | |
| Yeah, so like, you have this mysterious flaw called not being able to stand up for yourself, which just happens to coincide with abusive, attacking, psychotic, narcissistic, asshole parents, right? | |
| Yeah. | |
| Yeah. | |
| But it's just like, yeah, so that's kind of where I'm at now. | |
| It's like, I'm still like, stunned, like, how did I not get, like, how can a person do this at all, right? | |
| But it's like, wow. | |
| I'm incredibly sorry. | |
| I just want to interrupt that as a whole. | |
| I'm trying to have a parental fucktard aneurysm in my head here. | |
| That's so mind-boggling that your mother knows that you're being assaulted. | |
| Bitten. | |
| Bitten! | |
| Like a shark? | |
| This is insane! | |
| Being bitten takes photographs and uses that as a sympathy generator for herself. | |
| That's sick, right? | |
| And it's evil. | |
| It's beyond sick. | |
| Yeah. | |
| It's evil. | |
| And then out there, all these people she's showing these pictures to, like, is there not one person with half a common sense God gave your average rodent to say, you've got to protect these kids? | |
| Are you crazy? | |
| The father is biting them. | |
| It makes you wonder. | |
| Why are you showing us these pictures? | |
| You should be showing these pictures to the cops. | |
| What are you doing? | |
| Yeah, exactly. | |
| Exactly. | |
| And I asked her about all that stuff in August, because it's funny. | |
| Honest to God, I'd spend time with her, and I would be so irritated most of the time just being around her. | |
| And I'm like, wow, I really need to grow up. | |
| I'm just being a bitch. | |
| She's not doing anything for me. | |
| And just her being around me just irritates me, right? | |
| Because she's so suffocatingly needy, and she just... | |
| Right? | |
| And I'd just be around her and just be so irritated and annoyed and I'd feel really guilty for feeling like that. | |
| And I would literally remember stuff like this dream to try and like not be so angry with her. | |
| And so in August when I like kind of put all this stuff together and I was really remembering that day that she made me kind of say this to my dad, I brought this up to her very gently knowing that this is not going to be something she wants to hear, right? | |
| And I was like, you know, can we talk about these things? | |
| There's been events that have like really, really impacted like my self-worth and like how I, how I feel like I kind of, you know, measure up compared to other people in terms of like deserving to be treated and things like that. | |
| And she just, she just did exactly like what I'm sure you can already assume, like just, oh, well, I don't remember it like that. | |
| Or like, well, I loved you so much and I didn't know what to do. | |
| And I would never, you know, why would you say these things? | |
| You're just hurting me. | |
| You're just trying to make me feel bad. | |
| And actually, one of the things she said that made me so angry, she said, you must be having problems with your husband. | |
| And it was just like, are you fucking kidding me? | |
| Wow. | |
| Yeah, so I haven't even, like I'm just so done. | |
| Yeah, there's some certainty, right? | |
| Oh, yeah. | |
| There's some closure. | |
| Yeah, and it's like, you know, over Christmas and stuff, I was like, oh, this is going to be really hard. | |
| And it was like, no, this is great. | |
| Like, swear to God, I feel like I've lost... | |
| And I was joking around with my husband this morning. | |
| I'm like, I've lost like 400 pounds this year. | |
| It's great. | |
| My mother's just gone. | |
| Oh, not the slimmest Twiggy on the block? | |
| Not exactly. | |
| Not exactly. | |
| Like, many issues, right? | |
| Yeah. | |
| Yeah, and like, so my brother still lives with her, which is awful, because she, like, he's, he's 30, he's not working, he doesn't have any, like, he's got nothing, he doesn't know how to do anything for himself, because she basically, like, wipes his nose and stuff. | |
| Totally serves her purpose, right? | |
| Because she always has, like, a baby, right? | |
| And, uh, so him and I have been talking about that, and about, like, I took him out for lunch on Christmas Eve, and, uh, He kind of came and he's like, Oh, you know, Mom wanted me to say this and blah blah. | |
| And I'm just like, I just don't even want to hear it. | |
| And I really don't want you to get involved. | |
| Like, I wanted to spend time with you. | |
| So, like, you know, I get that you want to sew everything together, make it all happy and whatever. | |
| But, like, I'm okay. | |
| And I don't feel like Mom and I are in a fight. | |
| It's not like I'm waiting for her to say something that's going to change anything. | |
| Like, I tried that and that's not where it's going to happen. | |
| And I'm totally fine. | |
| Like, so let's have a relationship with you and me. | |
| And since then, like, it's been really different. | |
| It's wild. | |
| So our entire lives, we were either fighting or we were just not talking. | |
| And it's like, now we're talking. | |
| Over the past couple of years, we've been trying this. | |
| And ever since this whole thing, I've just told them, let's look at this situation. | |
| Let's look at what happened to us when we were kids with the lens of make sure it serves her or whatever. | |
| And it's like, He's, like, actually interested in having a relationship. | |
| It's just very different. | |
| It's so different. | |
| But, yeah. | |
| So, yeah. | |
| Sorry. | |
| Blah, blah, blah. | |
| Closure, for sure. | |
| Like, done. | |
| No, no. | |
| Don't apologize. | |
| That's no problem at all. | |
| I mean, it's tragic that you had to wait until you were an adult to even have a conversation like this. | |
| Yeah. | |
| You take your time. | |
| Take your time. | |
| My God. | |
| Yeah, it's just... | |
| I don't know. | |
| I think I was kind of thinking that my brother was going to be stuck in her little vortex of fucking sickness or whatever. | |
| But it's kind of like I can just see this little glimmer in his eyes of like, what do you mean you're not talking? | |
| Okay, what? | |
| I don't know what that means and whatever. | |
| It means that, because I always get these questions, which I'm sure have occurred to you as well significantly, which is... | |
| How do I help somebody who's still stuck there? | |
| Well, in my opinion, you help them by providing a good example. | |
| Yeah. | |
| How do you help someone who's overweight and doesn't want to lose weight if you're both overweight? | |
| Yeah. | |
| Well, you can talk to them about it if you want, but just go lose weight. | |
| And if they're interested and they're willing to learn and grow and be curious, then fantastic. | |
| And if they're not, then they're not. | |
| But at least you've lost weight, right? | |
| Yeah. | |
| Yeah. | |
| And, like, I didn't think that we would have had the conversations that we've even had so far. | |
| Like, I mean, over the past few years, I've really tried to sort of just even create a relationship because literally, like, when we were kids, it was like we were at each other's throats, like, bad. | |
| Or we were just absolutely not talking, like... | |
| Um, we get into a fight and, uh, nobody would intervene. | |
| We would just be like ripping each other to shreds. | |
| And then, you know, I'd go to my mom, oh, this is what he did. | |
| And of course she, oh yeah, he's such a little jerk and blah, blah, blah. | |
| And then, you know, he'd go to her and same thing. | |
| Oh, this is what Joelle did. | |
| And he'd, she'd do the same. | |
| Oh yeah, that little bitch and blah, blah, blah. | |
| Right. | |
| So then she was always super popular. | |
| Like one time, actually I came home, I was about 12 or 13 and I came home and like everything in my room was trashed like broken and pictures were like ripped off the wall and everything and of course I'm assuming that's my brother that did that right because like who would think that that their mother or their grandparents would do that right so I went into his room and I trashed his room right and for years and years he was like I never did that and of course he did like whatever right and so a | |
| few years ago when I was like I don't know 20 or something. | |
| I was with my mother at the mall and she's just, oh yeah, I remember that time that you came home and blah blah. | |
| Yeah, that was me. | |
| I really hated that poster on your wall. | |
| And she thought it was like this cute little story. | |
| It's just insane. | |
| Just nuts. | |
| So like... | |
| Me and my brother could talk about that kind of stuff and be like, you know, yeah, I can admit it. | |
| Like when I came home in this and I thought that was you, I went to your room and I, you know, we did these horrible things to each other totally intentionally to hurt each other, right? | |
| And that was kind of messed up. | |
| But like, where were the parents? | |
| Like, where were the adults in this? | |
| Like, where did we learn this from? | |
| And like, how come you and I can be like, Wow, that was really shitty of me, and I'm sorry, and I care about you now, and I'm really invested in us having a relationship, and how come we can kind of own that? | |
| And then these other people who did these horrible things to us when we were children, it's all about, you know, well, they had a bad day, or like, oh well, you don't know what it was like being married to him, and like, what the hell, right? | |
| It's just insane. | |
| Yeah. | |
| Do you mind if I have a tiny little rant before we get on with the dream? | |
| Please do. | |
| Otherwise, I think my kneecap is going to explode. | |
| I'll tell you a good way to know when someone doesn't have something to offer you. | |
| This is an important thing to kind of understand. | |
| I'm sure you get it, but it's more for others. | |
| How do you know When someone doesn't have anything to offer you. | |
| Or when an entire group of people, in general, don't have a whole lot to offer you. | |
| And that's when the voodoo curse arises. | |
| My wife, my daughter, my friends, they enjoy my company. | |
| It's nice. | |
| I think I'm a good friend, I'm a good husband, good father. | |
| So they enjoy my company. | |
| So I don't have to say, come have dinner with me, or I'll set fire to your bed tonight. | |
| Right? | |
| Because the moment I say, or I'll set fire to your bed tonight, what am I saying? | |
| I'm confessing that I have nothing of positive value to offer, and so voodoo curse, threats, whatever you want to call it, that's what you then are left with. | |
| I want to have the appearance of a happy family or kids at the... | |
| But if they don't do what I want them to do, then I'm going to curse them. | |
| I'm going to attack them. | |
| I'm going to undermine them. | |
| I'm going to bully them. | |
| I'm going to frighten them. | |
| I'm going to reject them. | |
| Whatever, right? | |
| The moment that you hear me or catastrophe... | |
| Me or catastrophe. | |
| That is your warning bells to grab your skirts, lift them high, and run! | |
| As fast as you can for any secure and protected place. | |
| Me or catastrophe. | |
| What does Jesus say? | |
| Me or catastrophe. | |
| Why? | |
| Because Jesus don't exist. | |
| He's got nothing to offer you. | |
| So what he has to do is substitute catastrophe. | |
| Government. | |
| Me? | |
| Or catastrophe? | |
| Without the government, there'd be anarchy. | |
| Yeah. | |
| Got it. | |
| Lovely. | |
| Without rape, there'd be lovemaking. | |
| Yeah. | |
| Good. | |
| So far, so good. | |
| Go on. | |
| And this is true with... | |
| I mean, again, I'm a parent. | |
| Lots of great parents out there. | |
| But this general curse that society holds over people regarding parents... | |
| If you don't see them, you'll regret it, right? | |
| Maybe not now, maybe tomorrow, maybe not in a year, but you'll regret it. | |
| They'll die. | |
| You'll suffer this loss. | |
| You'll never reconcile. | |
| You'll be trashed. | |
| Your love will die. | |
| Fingernails will explode. | |
| Tongues will turn into serpents. | |
| Eyeballs will reach around and butt-slap the back of your head. | |
| This is what people say. | |
| It's like me or catastrophe. | |
| But the moment that this generic curse is put on people, you know that the relationship is negative. | |
| In other words, the relationship is destructive for you. | |
| I can't make it constructive for you, but what I can do is threaten you with something even more destructive in order for you to put up with the destructive relationship. | |
| Right? | |
| That's why parents say, like abusive parents say, me or a catastrophe. | |
| And bad lovers do this too. | |
| Like bad husbands, bad boyfriends, bad girlfriends, bad wives, they do this too. | |
| You know, when I was younger, I had a few fairly crappy girlfriends and their mantra was always the same. | |
| Well, if you just leave me, you'll just be taking your problems to your next relationship. | |
| No. | |
| Not if my problem is you, then I won't be taking you to my next relationship. | |
| You know, you can't fix your problems by running away from them. | |
| Really? | |
| What if my problem is a bear? | |
| What if it's a raging fire? | |
| I'm allowed to run away from it then? | |
| You know, if you fall into a shark tank, you can't solve your problems by getting out of the shark tank. | |
| Actually, you can! | |
| You really can! | |
| And I've heard this curse, oh my god, in so many... | |
| Even before the NSA, what did they say? | |
| If you don't do right, if you get too many detentions, it's going on your permanent record. | |
| Hey, you know what? | |
| There is no permanent record. | |
| Tell that to Eliot Spitzer or Bill Clinton or any of the other sexually deviant, licentious, finger-grabby weirdos who get their own TV shows. | |
| I mean, Bill Clinton gets impeached for subordinating perjury and lying under oath and you name it. | |
| And he gets to swear in the governor of New York and gets to give speeches to the Democratic Party convention and gets to charge $150,000 a speech. | |
| No permanent record. | |
| A lot of the people in the Weather Underground from the 1960s who planted bombs and were domestic terrorists, a large number of them are now professors at universities with tenure, pulling in six figures working five hours a week. | |
| If you can call it working. | |
| There's no permanent record. | |
| Hillary Clinton stands by a lecherous lying sex addict who betrays her with anything that has half a vagina and quarter of a pulse. | |
| And what does she become? | |
| Secretary of State? | |
| A presidential candidate? | |
| There's no permanent record! | |
| This is what we continually teach the young. | |
| This is just a curse that's supposed to keep you out of seeking power. | |
| I've heard that curse. | |
| Oh, you don't see your mom. | |
| You'll feel bad. | |
| Oh, it's great. | |
| Oh, it's great. | |
| It's great. | |
| It's great. | |
| It's like unalloyedly, unambivalently, unambiguously great to not see that woman. | |
| It's a delight. | |
| It puts a song in my heart and a spring in my step just about every day. | |
| People said, oh, you know, you don't discipline your daughter. | |
| When she hits the terrible twos, you'll regret it. | |
| And it'll be too late! | |
| Curse! | |
| Voodoo! | |
| Complete bullshit. | |
| She's a complete delight. | |
| A great listener. | |
| Great company. | |
| I mean, I took her swimming this morning. | |
| We went for a long and leisurely lunch. | |
| Then we went to Starbucks. | |
| Then we went to Home Depot. | |
| And then we tootled on home. | |
| I had like four hours hanging out, chatting, playing, doing errands. | |
| Complete delight. | |
| Couldn't be more enjoyable. | |
| Or they said, oh, but after terrible twos, you know, when they get to be three or four, and they get defiant, even more defiant, then you'll see what your lack of desire is. | |
| It's like, so you have nothing to offer me but scare stories, which basically says, you have nothing to offer me but scare stories. | |
| I mean, you know, the doom porn that floats around the libertarian world is, buy my newsletter, or... | |
| Your gold will rise up in shiny globular zombie form and eat your brains while you sleep. | |
| I'm sorry for the rant, but I really wanted to point out that, you know, with a mom like this, I mean, what conceivable plus could she have to offer you? | |
| And if she suddenly turned into someone who was great now, that'd kind of be even more painful, right? | |
| Because then it's like, well, why weren't you doing that before? | |
| When I actually, when my brain was forming and I needed the protection and I had no independence, too much, too late, like virtue, is worse than none at all. | |
| Because if the person is capable of that, then why didn't they do it earlier, right? | |
| It's sort of like this... | |
| You're taking your grandmother out for a walk and you decide to go down a dark alley and like five guys jump on you and beat the crap out of you. | |
| And then later ten cops rush up to save you and your grandmother beats them all up. | |
| It's like, why are you protecting me from the cops who weren't going to hurt me and you didn't protect me from the thugs who were? | |
| Why are you cowering in the corner when the five guys are here and then when the ten cops come, you break out this ancient blue-rinse Van Damme demon from hell move? | |
| And with parents, finding virtue when your children are grown adds insult to injury. | |
| Do it when they need it. | |
| Not when they've I mean, you know, it's nice to hear and if you can validate and all that, but I mean, that doesn't generally happen anyway. | |
| But what could your mom possibly have to offer you other than more manipulation, more avoidance, more erasure of yourself, more narcissism, more taking, more focusing only on her needs at your expense? | |
| I mean, what could she possibly have to offer you? | |
| And everyone gets that with, you know, particularly monstrous people. | |
| Deep down. | |
| And they can't come up with any answer other than, you'll regret it! | |
| Ooh, voodoo curse! | |
| Right? | |
| All of the Mother's Day cards in the Hallmark store are going to stack up together, jump you, and give you vicious paper cuts! | |
| Okay, so you're saying my mom doesn't have anything to offer me, right? | |
| So you've just got to give me doom porn instead, right? | |
| So beware people who say in this, and it's always emotionally pressured, right? | |
| It's always like really emphatic. | |
| Well, you'll regret it if you don't. | |
| She's your mother. | |
| Yeah. | |
| Yeah. | |
| Well, so why don't you deal with the facts of who she is and then explain to me how I can get a positive interaction with someone like that rather than just, you'll go to hell! | |
| Okay? | |
| Can you just tell me how Jesus bent? | |
| You'll go to hell if you don't accept him. | |
| So there's nothing to offer me, but just... | |
| And the bribery comes, you know, sort of... | |
| It's the boomerang of the voodoo curse, right? | |
| Ah! | |
| You get to heaven! | |
| Well, they can't offer that with parents or other abusive people, right? | |
| If they're abusive, they can't offer that. | |
| So all they can do is threaten the frowny, zoosy, storm clouds... | |
| Of disapproval and regret and, you know, you'll regret it later. | |
| Oh, really? | |
| So I haven't seen my mom in 13 years or so. | |
| You'll regret it later. | |
| Really? | |
| It's later. | |
| Well, year 14 is going to be a bitch, though. | |
| Really? | |
| That's what you're going with? | |
| 13 years is great, but 14 years, whoa, there's a whiplash there. | |
| It's like, well, okay, let's say 14 years is a bitch, but at least I didn't have the bitch in my life for 13 years, right? | |
| So that's a plus. | |
| Anyway, just wanted to sort of mention that it's really, really tragic in society. | |
| I hope that nobody ever says you should listen to Free Domain Radio, otherwise undefined bad things will happen. | |
| It's just a way of saying, that podcast sucks. | |
| Well, it's funny actually because like everything you just said about how people kind of respond, it's exactly this is what I lived, but I feel like I kind of went in with a bit of a map because I had some of you, like the things that you said have really stuck with me. | |
| Like, okay, so replace the word mother with like abusive husband. | |
| If my husband was abusive and I left him, would you be like, oh, I hope you guys can patch it up soon because he's your husband, you know? | |
| And people are like, oh yeah. | |
| You'll regret it. | |
| Yeah. | |
| No, but you see, in that instance, it's you versus a man's interest. | |
| Right? | |
| And it's the mom's generally, right? | |
| Because then it's you versus a woman's interest and a matriarch's interest, right? | |
| So, it's a different kind of thing. | |
| You don't hear it quite as much with dads as you do with moms, right? | |
| Yeah, that's true. | |
| Because for us to stand up against the interests of women, well, that's tough, right? | |
| And, you know, I know you're a woman and all that, but particularly abusive women, of course, you're not, I'm assuming, and no reason to disbelieve. | |
| But, yeah, it's tragic. | |
| And can I tell you just one last thing? | |
| I'll make this brief, but this is the one last thing. | |
| As long as parents have the voodoo curse card, they have almost no incentive from a consequentialist standpoint to improve. | |
| You know, we all understand this as libertarians, people who can't be fired, what's their job performance like? | |
| Well, pretty crappy, right? | |
| What do libertarians hate about teachers in public schools so much? | |
| Can't be fired. | |
| Doesn't mean they're all bad. | |
| Some of them are good. | |
| Some of them are conscientious. | |
| Some of them are hardworking. | |
| But a lot of them are bad. | |
| And what do libertarians want most of all? | |
| Oh, just make the relationship voluntary. | |
| Don't enforce it on me. | |
| Mitt Romney said, I really like the ability to fire people. | |
| Don't we all? | |
| Women fought hard for that and fired their husbands. | |
| No fault divorce, right? | |
| If people can't be fired, their job performance is worse, on average, and in particular cases, really bad. | |
| On the wire, there are a bunch of Old cops just rank drunks and so on just rolling around and they're completely useless and people just put them on assignments to get them out of the way. | |
| They just sit in the corner and bullshit and drink. | |
| I mean, in a private company, they'd be gone years ago, right? | |
| And so if people can't be fired, their job performance usually doesn't improve and generally tends towards worse and worse. | |
| And the second corollary of that is that the people who are the worst at stuff are the ones who promote the ideal of not firing. | |
| The see your parents or you'll regret it in some intangible voodoo curse way. | |
| The people who promote that are the shitty parents. | |
| Because good parents don't need to. | |
| There are lots of public school teachers who would love for teachers to get fired. | |
| They would love it! | |
| If the bad teachers could get fired. | |
| But it's the bad teachers who promote involuntarism in relationships. | |
| It's the bad teachers who say, no one should ever be able to get fired. | |
| They can't just say, I don't want to get fired. | |
| They have to put it out as a general rule because we all understand the power of ethics and UPB and all that kind of stuff, universally preferable behavior. | |
| And so the people who say, see your parents or be cursed, are the shitty parents. | |
| The most important job in the world is parenting, and if parents can't be fired, they're going to do progressively shittier jobs. | |
| Public school education since the 1960s, when basically immunity from firing was one, has gotten worse. | |
| If you can't fire people, things don't improve. | |
| And it's all the people who do a really crappy job who say, no one should ever get fired. | |
| Jobs for life. | |
| I'm going to launch a grievance. | |
| I need a process that takes 90 years and pays me a million dollars a year if you want to fire me. | |
| Confident people, people who are good at their jobs, don't say that. | |
| I mean, I get fired, what, a thousand times a day? | |
| Probably people stop listening to this podcast. | |
| I don't like that guy. | |
| He's arrogant. | |
| So full of himself. | |
| So I just really wanted to point that out, that promoting voluntarism in the parent-child relationship when children become adults is fully in accordance with libertarian principles of voluntarism. | |
| And it is by far, what you're doing has an effect, not just on you and your happiness and your future family, but it has an effect as a whole. | |
| Because the more people who say, I have fired my parents for being abusers, unrepentant, unrelenting abusers, unwilling to change, unwilling to listen, unwilling to enter therapy, and I have gone through therapy for the whole process, which if you're thinking of separating from Parents, I've always suggested the therapist is the place to go. | |
| I've been emphatically suggested as best I can. | |
| But if you fire your parents, it's not just your life that you affect. | |
| This is why I'm public about this subject, which for a lot of people is considered very shameful. | |
| Because I want parents to know they can be fired. | |
| Right? | |
| Because if they can't be fired, they will do generally worse jobs in the most important job that there is. | |
| Alright, that's it for my rant. | |
| Please go ahead. | |
| Should I just read the second one? | |
| We didn't even do the first one yet, did we? | |
| No, the second one kind of... | |
| I'm sorry. | |
| I'm so sorry. | |
| I'm the worst listener in the known universe. | |
| I apologize. | |
| Right! | |
| I am now taping my mouth. | |
| Go ahead. | |
| Yeah, read the second one. | |
| I'm sure there's stuff here that I can't see. | |
| It feels like there's more hidden little things that I don't get. | |
| So this was, I don't know, maybe a month after I stopped talking to her. | |
| So I was walking through what was kind of like a cross between my old college and like a rec center and a shopping mall, weird type thing. | |
| I was trying to get something I needed. | |
| I don't know if it was a paper or books or something. | |
| And I needed it for a class at the gym that I was going to go to. | |
| And the class was going to start in a short time and I was feeling anxiety about missing it. | |
| So I wanted to get what I needed and just get to the class. | |
| Uh, my mother was following me around, seemingly unaware of my need to accomplish whatever I was doing, but I felt like she was kind of like hindering me by knocking things off of shelves I was looking through and making it look like she was unaware of her hitting and shuffling around, um, books and papers and stuff. | |
| Um, I was trying to get away from her and she kept physically blocking me, again, as if she was aware of her, like aware of, yeah, um, I'm unaware of it, you say, in your text. | |
| I'm just following with the text. | |
| Yeah, or of my anxiety to accomplish my task. | |
| She kept saying stuff like, it's okay, you don't have to go to your class, it's too hard, I understand, just give me a hug. | |
| And then she kept saying, it's okay. | |
| Stop pretending. | |
| I know you didn't quit smoking. | |
| I can smell it when you're singing. | |
| It's okay. | |
| It's too hard to stop. | |
| And this is really weird because I actually had quit smoking like over a year ago. | |
| And I wasn't singing in the dream, so it doesn't make sense. | |
| Like that, I don't get. | |
| But it felt important. | |
| It felt like there's something. | |
| Anyway, she just kept saying stuff like that. | |
| I was trying to get away just to get to this class, and I don't think she was actually touching me, but I kind of felt on like a visceral, metaphysical kind of level, like a sensation. | |
| She was clinging to me, and I felt suffocated and annoyed, but also guilty, like I was failing her and myself because I just could not get to this class I was trying to get to. | |
| And when I woke up, I had the same kind of defeated and hopeless feeling Um, like the similar to archetypal dreams of like where you're trying to run but your feet are stuck in cement type thing. | |
| Yeah. | |
| And that's the dream. | |
| Right. | |
| Okay, let's talk about the first one. | |
| I think I get the second one. | |
| The first one's a little tougher for me because it's early, right? | |
| So it's pre a lot of more language sophistication. | |
| So everybody's laughing and joking. | |
| And you're about five in the dream, right? | |
| Something like that. | |
| Like you're the same age? | |
| Yeah. | |
| That's when you had it? | |
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | |
| And you're trying to be funny, you throw. | |
| Now that's, my daughter does that. | |
| Right? | |
| Like I'll ask her to pass me something and she'll throw it to me. | |
| And sometimes it's okay and sometimes kind of annoying. | |
| You know? | |
| Like once it was a tablet. | |
| Right? | |
| So, you know, she says, and I said, hey, don't throw that. | |
| And she's like, I'm trying to be funny. | |
| And sometimes she is genuinely funny. | |
| She just makes me break up sometimes, she's so funny. | |
| But she's exploring what it is to be funny. | |
| And in the same way, and she's been doing this for about a year, and you're doing this in the dream when you're five, she just turned five, so it seems about right. | |
| You're trying to join in with everyone, but You know, what is appropriate to humor? | |
| What is the right timing? | |
| What are the right topics? | |
| What are the right subjects? | |
| That's really advanced stuff. | |
| And a five-year-old will get it sometimes, but certainly not all the time, right? | |
| Does that make sense? | |
| Yeah. | |
| Okay, good. | |
| You're just like, oh, he's going off in another speech. | |
| Maybe I'll just curl up. | |
| I want to smoke. | |
| Anyway. | |
| So, the fact that you tossed some ice cream... | |
| Now, does the ice cream come out of the bucket and plop her in the face? | |
| No, it's just like the bucket just kind of fits over her face. | |
| Like, I couldn't see her face at all. | |
| Oh, it's like this giant beak, in a sense, right? | |
| Yeah, kind of. | |
| Well, kind of, kind of not, right? | |
| Well, it's hard to explain. | |
| So, it's not like... | |
| It's like a big... | |
| I don't even know if they make them anymore. | |
| Ice cream came in when I was a kid. | |
| It's like a plastic bucket type thing. | |
| It's like a foot round type thing and it just completely covered her whole face. | |
| Right. | |
| I'm just trying to get the visual here. | |
| When you say it covered her whole face, do you mean the opening of the bucket, the round hole, goes over her forehead and her jaw? | |
| Yeah. | |
| Alright. | |
| Now that That's more than a five-year-old could probably do, right? | |
| Yeah. | |
| Right? | |
| So I think the dream is more about aggression than it is about you making a joke that didn't turn out to be funny. | |
| Okay. | |
| So, for instance, these are not people that you like. | |
| Right? | |
| You didn't like your mom when you were a kid. | |
| You said you fought all the time with your brother. | |
| Yeah. | |
| I don't remember if you said much about your grandparents, but given the family tree, they're not likely to be paragons of virtue, right? | |
| Not quite. | |
| Yeah. | |
| Yeah. | |
| So these are not people that you like, and your childhood is completely screwed up, right? | |
| How old were you when your parents separated? | |
| I think I was two or three, something in there. | |
| Right. | |
| So you're already spending weekends, I assume, at your dad's place, who's like creepy and criminal and all kinds of horrible, like at just about every dimension, right? | |
| Yeah. | |
| Right. | |
| So I would imagine that if your childhood was really shitty at this time and everyone is laughing and joking, that's going to make you angry. | |
| Yeah. | |
| Yeah. | |
| And anger is a very strong emotion, you know, particularly when you're that age, right? | |
| Because it's very sensitive to helplessness, right? | |
| Anger tends to get fueled by helplessness. | |
| If you think he's out pinned under something, you keep getting more and more angry, right? | |
| Yes. | |
| Yeah. | |
| It's really making sense. | |
| Yeah, go ahead. | |
| No, I was just going to say it really makes sense. | |
| And it's almost like I was kind of like pinned under this whole scenario, right? | |
| Because everybody's joking and laughing and stuff. | |
| And I don't remember in the dream being angry. | |
| I don't think I was kind of on the surface, but this really makes sense. | |
| That really makes sense to me. | |
| Yeah, I think, I mean, it would be really unhealthy for you to be perfectly happy and want to make all these lovely people laugh, right? | |
| Yeah. | |
| So you pick up the pail and throw it at your mom. | |
| I mean, the reason, the pail, you're five, the pail is heavy, right? | |
| And you throw it at your mom. | |
| The funny thing is you say she is completely still, almost frozen. | |
| And of course her face is stuck in ice cream, right? | |
| Yeah. | |
| And she can't be really hurt. | |
| It's ice cream, right? | |
| Right? | |
| Mm-hmm. | |
| And then her Upper body drops, as you say, bends at the waist. | |
| Her face still in the pail hits the table. | |
| This is a manipulation, right? | |
| Wow. | |
| Because she can't really be that hurt. | |
| I mean, she's got some ice cream on the face. | |
| She's got a pail around her head. | |
| So now she's playing the victim, right? | |
| Thank you. | |
| You got angry. | |
| And you couldn't express that anger honestly and openly, so it came across like I was trying to be funny, right? | |
| And then your mother plays the victim. | |
| Wow. | |
| Yeah, totally. | |
| Again, tell me, this is just my thoughts. | |
| There's no answer here, right? | |
| I'm like stunned because that sounds so, like that's, yeah, I'm like nodding. | |
| You can't see me. | |
| I'm just like nodding. | |
| Well, no, no, it's worse than that. | |
| I mean, sorry to, no, no, but it's worse than that, right? | |
| Because she's pretending that she's, what, unconscious or dead? | |
| Yeah. | |
| I mean, good God Almighty, talk about a completely hysterical Issue, right? | |
| I mean, talk about a completely hysterical response on the part of your mom. | |
| Like, she didn't say, hey, that's no good, or why did you throw that at me? | |
| me or even your mom didn't even say, well, I'm upset, right? | |
| Nothing like that, right? | |
| Nothing. | |
| Like, it was like game over right now type thing. | |
| As soon as I threw it, it was like, done. | |
| Right. | |
| Right. | |
| Now, does anyone else do anything? | |
| I think they just all were sort of still, too, and just sort of frozen in the horror of what I had done. | |
| Well, see, again, you keep using frozen, right? | |
| Yeah. | |
| Which is interesting, obviously, right? | |
| It was just like the entire focus was on me and that I had done this. | |
| Thank you. | |
| Right. | |
| But nobody did anything really. | |
| Right. | |
| Now that again is very interesting because nobody is saying what are you doing you crazy woman? | |
| You just got some ice cream on the face. | |
| Right? | |
| Yeah. | |
| Everyone is frozen because your mom is doing incredibly high stakes, terrifying you manipulation, right? | |
| Yeah. | |
| You have the knowledge that she drowns and suffocates. | |
| Right? | |
| Yeah. | |
| You have killed your mother. | |
| Yeah. | |
| And is anyone saying... | |
| Oh come on, sit up. | |
| You're scaring your child. | |
| Don't be ridiculous. | |
| What are you doing? | |
| No. | |
| You are left to believe that you have killed your mother. | |
| Yeah. | |
| Your mother is engineering it so that you believe that she has died because you wanted to make a joke or you were upset. | |
| In other words, for you to have an emotion that differs from your mother will kill your mother. | |
| She will let you know that she dies. | |
| She will pretend to die if you do something that displeases her. | |
| How's that feel to a kid? | |
| Wow. | |
| Yeah. | |
| Right? | |
| That's psychotic. | |
| Yeah. | |
| Stone evil, right? | |
| I didn't see that at all, but yeah, wow. | |
| Or at the end of it, you're horrified and your mother is dead? | |
| Yeah. | |
| From a joke? | |
| So this is a win-lose, right? | |
| Your existence equals your mother's death. | |
| Your mother's existence equals your spiritual death, right? | |
| At least for the time, right? | |
| Hibernation, let's say. | |
| Yeah. | |
| And it's good that you found your mother chronically irritating because it meant that you were still fighting her. | |
| Right? | |
| Yeah. | |
| Because your mother was this way and what was the rest of your family doing? | |
| Were they fighting her? | |
| Were they disagreeing with her? | |
| Were they trying to help her? | |
| Were they trying to improve her? | |
| No! | |
| Everything's so great and funny. | |
| Right? | |
| Or making excuses or poor her or all that. | |
| No, in the dream, sorry. | |
| Oh, in the dream. | |
| For sure. | |
| They're all just laughing and joking. | |
| Yeah, totally. | |
| So they're not fighting her anymore. | |
| And as a result, they can't protect you or bring any reality to the situation whatsoever. | |
| And this is evil. | |
| To allow a mother to... | |
| Like in the dream, right? | |
| To allow a mother to give the impression to her daughter that her daughter has killed her is about as fucked up a thing as you could conceivably do to a child. | |
| Your joke just killed your mother. | |
| And nobody's jumping up and telling you, oh, it's okay. | |
| She's just joking. | |
| Get that thing off your face. | |
| You're scaring her. | |
| Right? | |
| That's insane. | |
| It is insane. | |
| and evil. | |
| I mean, good heavens. | |
| is, It doesn't sound like you have kids yet. | |
| No. | |
| Right. | |
| But if you have kids, could you ever imagine playing a joke or doing something where a little harmless joke would make your daughter think that she'd killed you? | |
| Not for a second. | |
| Of course not, because you have a conscience. | |
| And you are what's colloquially called a human being. | |
| Now, let me tell you a story. | |
| It's a quick story. | |
| It's a quick story, but I put this in perspective because what I'm telling you is much less worse than what you did. | |
| So, one time, it doesn't matter the circumstances, it doesn't matter the person. | |
| A man was telling me a story about how he said, this is what he said. | |
| He said, so my daughter had to do a project for school. | |
| She had to build like the CN Tower. | |
| And she was building it out of like chicken wire and papier-mâché, and then she needed to nail the chicken wire to a big board, like a big wooden board. | |
| Oh man, it was so funny. | |
| So what I did was I got a nail gun, like a little nail gun, which I'd use for some stuff in the backyard. | |
| I got this little nail gun, and oh man, you'll die laughing. | |
| I got this little nail gun, and I got some ketchup packets, and my daughter didn't want to use the nail gun. | |
| She was scared of it, and I just encouraged her, and I said, don't worry, I'll look closely and make sure that you do it right. | |
| I'll make sure you do it right. | |
| And I leaned in close, and I leaned in close, and she was really scared, and she was crying a little bit, but I said, It's okay, honey. | |
| It's okay. | |
| Trust me. | |
| I will make sure everything's safe. | |
| I'm just going to go look close and see. | |
| And then she finally pulled the trigger with the nail gun. | |
| There was a big bang, and I squished the ketchup packet into my eyeball. | |
| And then I screamed, and I said, You hit me with the nail gun in the eye. | |
| And I got up, and I started staggering around. | |
| And then I just started laughing. | |
| It was the funniest thing, don't you think? | |
| And what do you think of that story? | |
| I'm disgusted. | |
| Oh, it's completely sadistic. | |
| Right? | |
| I can't get my head around it. | |
| How could anybody think that was a funny thing or in any way not just a totally ridiculous, horrible, awful thing to do? | |
| Yeah. | |
| I mean, it's monstrous. | |
| It's monstrous. | |
| It's a trust fuck of the first order, right? | |
| Totally. | |
| That's a trust rape. | |
| Wow. | |
| And this man who was telling me this story, like, I literally could not believe it. | |
| He was giggling and tittering. | |
| And I said, well, what did your daughter do? | |
| Oh, she was completely hysterical. | |
| She could barely breathe. | |
| She was sobbing and screaming so hard. | |
| It was hilarious. | |
| I said, what? | |
| What? | |
| Like, what? | |
| How could that possibly be funny to you? | |
| I said, that's just completely monstrous behavior. | |
| What have you just done to your daughter? | |
| You encouraged her to use this dangerous thing, you promised to keep her safe, and then you pretended that she'd shot your eyeball out. | |
| Like, what is the matter with you? | |
| And what can you do with someone like that? | |
| I mean, that's just a tragic sadist. | |
| That's someone who gets the kind of pleasure you and I would get from seeing a beautiful painting or a wonderful play or hearing a gorgeous piece of music they get from sadistically torturing an eight-year-old girl. | |
| That's just sick. | |
| That's just sick. | |
| But what your mother did was worse. | |
| Huh. | |
| In the dream. | |
| Because he didn't pretend to be dead. | |
| Yeah. | |
| Yeah. | |
| That's messed up. | |
| Yes, it is. | |
| So that is, I think that would be something to do with the first dream. | |
| Yeah. | |
| Wow, I see that very differently now. | |
| No, I don't think you did. | |
| What's the first thing you told me about this dream? | |
| You said that you think of it when you remember, when you have to remember how much you're angry at your mom. | |
| Yeah. | |
| Yeah. | |
| That's true. | |
| I used to use this dream to torture myself, actually. | |
| To re-horrify myself, I think. | |
| Yeah. | |
| Yeah, to remind yourself just what a sadistic and brutal environment that was, right? | |
| For which I am incredibly sorry. | |
| Humor with kids is something that parents have to be so exquisitely sensitive about. | |
| I mean, it's sort of like tickling, but much more complicated. | |
| Tickling is like, yay, that's lots of fun, but the moment someone says to stop, you absolutely have to stop. | |
| Because you want it to be fun and enjoyable and cuddly, but you don't want it to be where they feel that they don't have control over their own nervous system anymore, right? | |
| Yeah. | |
| It's the same thing with humor, right? | |
| Humor is... | |
| I mean, a wonderful and delightful part of life. | |
| But it's so easily just cowardly manipulation, right? | |
| Like people just make jokes at your expense and you say, hey, and they're like, oh, come on, don't take yourself so seriously. | |
| You know, the best way to do it is start making jokes at their expense and see how they handle it. | |
| Hey, not cool, man. | |
| No, don't take yourself so seriously. | |
| No, this is different. | |
| That was too much. | |
| That was too far. | |
| Yeah, right Should we do the second dream? | |
| Sure. | |
| Alright. | |
| The second dream seems easier to me, which probably means I've got it wrong. | |
| So, I'll just tell you that right up front. | |
| So, the class is going to start and you have to go back and get something, right? | |
| Yeah. | |
| I read a book about anorexia. | |
| It was a novel about a woman who had anorexia nervosa. | |
| And... | |
| She ended up having a nervous breakdown. | |
| I mentioned this on the show once before, but it reminds me of this. | |
| She had a nervous breakdown, which I remember very vividly from the book. | |
| The nervous breakdown was because she couldn't be late to her math class, and she was walking to the math class, and she realized she didn't have her book for the math class. | |
| And she was not allowed to be in the math class without her book, and she was not allowed to be late to the math class. | |
| So if she went into the math class, she would get in trouble because she didn't have her book. | |
| But if she went back to get her book... | |
| She wouldn't be allowed into the math class and she'd be in trouble because she'd be late. | |
| This sort of seems similar, right? | |
| Yeah. | |
| Your yeah has a lot of no in it. | |
| Which is fine. | |
| I just want to make sure I'm clear on what that is. | |
| Yeah, because I'm just thinking it's like... | |
| Because I wasn't feeling like if I was late for this class, like... | |
| The world was going to end. | |
| It wasn't like that. | |
| It was just like... | |
| You know, I've, like, prepared myself. | |
| I've, like, done all these things to try and be there. | |
| And, like, I've... | |
| You know, I've been, like, mindful about kind of taking care of everything I need to take care of in order to do this thing. | |
| And it's for me. | |
| It's for my own enjoyment type thing. | |
| And it was just... | |
| Oh, so it's more of a pleasure thing. | |
| You just... | |
| But you feel... | |
| So it's mild anxiety, right? | |
| Yeah. | |
| But it was just, like... | |
| It wasn't a breakdown thing. | |
| It was just something where you were in a hurry, right? | |
| Yeah, yeah. | |
| Okay, okay. | |
| So, what's interesting about this dream is the isolation of it, right? | |
| So, imagine that this is, you're my daughter, right? | |
| Imagine you're my daughter, and she's grown up or whatever. | |
| So, you're my daughter, and I'm with you, and this is the dilemma. | |
| What do you think I would do to help her? | |
| You'd try and help me find whatever I need to find. | |
| You'd ask me what am I looking for. | |
| You'd stop blocking my way where I'm trying to walk. | |
| Well, that's actually technically not helping, but just avoiding hindering. | |
| Yeah. | |
| No, and it's tragic that you don't know enough about parental help or maybe help as a whole, but that's not what I would do. | |
| What would you do? | |
| Well, I would say, you know, give me the key. | |
| You go to the class and I'll bring you the book. | |
| Yeah, that didn't even occur to me. | |
| No, it doesn't occur to you, right? | |
| Because the idea of a parent helping in that kind of way, like making the problem go away, as opposed to, like, you're always like, well, I guess you'd come help me look, or you'd stop tackling me when I was in a hurry or something, right? | |
| That's the vocabulary you have for parental help, right? | |
| Yeah. | |
| And that's tragic. | |
| Yeah. | |
| But the idea that I can just, as a parent, look, I just make the problem go away. | |
| What's the name of the book? | |
| Give me your key. | |
| I'll go get the book, meet you at class, give you your key back. | |
| Ah, whew, thanks. | |
| Got it. | |
| Done. | |
| Right, so the woman in the story that I read when I was 15 or so did not have a friend. | |
| Who would say, go get your math book. | |
| I'll explain to the math teacher what happened and that you'll be a few minutes late because you need to get your book, right? | |
| That would have solved the problem. | |
| But she didn't have anyone who could genuinely help her. | |
| Does that make sense? | |
| Yeah. | |
| Yeah. | |
| What are you thinking? | |
| Well, actually, what are you feeling? | |
| You sound a bit sad. | |
| Well, it's like when you said that, you know, in this scenario, if you were a parent, then you'd be like, I'll just, you know, just give me your cane. | |
| I'll just go do it. | |
| Like, and I was thinking about that, like what, you know, imagining my mom in that role. | |
| And it's like, I'd feel so bad if she did that. | |
| And I'm like, that's like, why would I feel bad? | |
| I'd do that for her. | |
| I'd do that for my friend. | |
| Why would you feel bad? | |
| Yeah, but that's just what I felt when I thought of that. | |
| I'm like, that's messed up. | |
| I'd feel guilty. | |
| Why would you feel bad? | |
| Because you would pay for it in some way, right? | |
| Yeah. | |
| Like, she'd either then say, you know, she'd use it forever as the time she helped you, or you'd be the person who'd be continually, you're the forgetful one, right? | |
| Yeah. | |
| Like, it would be a negative in some way, shape, or form, right? | |
| Or she'd get the wrong book after promising you should get the right book, she'd get the wrong book, and it wouldn't even be close, and then she'd get angry at your ingratitude. | |
| Yeah, and it would be... | |
| Or she'd be late, and she'd say, oh, I got a phone call on my cell. | |
| I had to answer it. | |
| It was important, but here's the book. | |
| Mom, the class is almost over. | |
| What's the point of bringing me the book now? | |
| Oh, you're so ungrateful. | |
| I did all this for you. | |
| I'm sorry that I have a phone. | |
| I'm sorry that I have a phone where people call me. | |
| Yeah. | |
| Right, so you'd end up being in a worse situation because of that kind of help. | |
| I'm guessing. | |
| I'm guessing. | |
| I don't know. | |
| She would do that, and then it would be like... | |
| She'd have a big... | |
| You know, sobbing meltdown about how I hurt her so much. | |
| Yeah, and then you'd end up having to apologize, right? | |
| To smooth things over, and you'd feel humiliated and bullied for needing some help and her offering to help, right? | |
| Yeah. | |
| So that is very, very hard. | |
| Because let's look at what your mom does, right? | |
| She's following you, and she's unaware of my need to accomplish whatever I was doing. | |
| Why? | |
| You shouldn't even need to say it. | |
| I know when my daughter's sad, I'm not even in the same room. | |
| If something makes her sad or she has a thought, whatever. | |
| I mean, oh, you know, whatever, right? | |
| I mean, if anyone knows you, it should be your parents. | |
| Yeah. | |
| And so you shouldn't need to explain a whole lot to your parents. | |
| They should be actually helping you figure out stuff that you're not feeling. | |
| You shouldn't be helping them figure out stuff that you are feeling, right? | |
| She's hindering knocking things off shelves that you're looking through and making it look like she's unaware of her hitting and shuffling around books and papers. | |
| So you're looking and she's knocking stuff about, right? | |
| Yeah. | |
| That's charming. | |
| And can you say anything? | |
| I don't think so. | |
| No, you can't because you don't in the dream. | |
| No. | |
| Empirically, we know you can't say something. | |
| Sorry to interrupt because you don't, right? | |
| Yeah. | |
| Again, we can be empiricists in dreams as well, right? | |
| They're self-contained pieces of information, right? | |
| Yeah. | |
| Now, you normally would, right? | |
| You'd say, look, if you're not going to help, at least don't hinder, right? | |
| Well, see, and even, like, because there was that thing where she, it was weird, she was saying that, you know, oh, it's okay, I know that you didn't stop smoking or whatever. | |
| It was like I was saying inside my own head, what the fuck are you talking about? | |
| Yeah, I did. | |
| Like, what? | |
| But I didn't say that. | |
| It was just in my own mind, even. | |
| Like, I didn't say it. | |
| Okay, so then she's all, she's physically blocking you, and then she's like, oh, you know, you don't have to go to your class, blah, blah, blah, right? | |
| It's okay. | |
| Stop pretending. | |
| Well, she's pretending to help, right? | |
| Anyway. | |
| So, the question is, why is she attempting to talk you out of what is important to you? | |
| As if it's an objective value, right? | |
| Yeah. | |
| Why is she attempting to talk you out of what's important to you? | |
| It's not important to her Yeah, exactly. | |
| Because it's not important to her. | |
| And its importance to you is inconvenient to her, right? | |
| Yeah. | |
| And she doesn't even know... | |
| So she thinks you're smoking, but you haven't smoked in a year. | |
| And you weren't even singing, right? | |
| Yeah. | |
| So she's just... | |
| She's completely out of touch with who you are and what you're doing. | |
| She's not helping you. | |
| She's hindering you. | |
| She's telling you something shouldn't be important to you that is important to you. | |
| She's telling you you need to stop smoking or you haven't stopped smoking when you have a year ago. | |
| She tells you she could smell it while you were singing when you weren't even singing, right? | |
| Yeah. | |
| And it wasn't like she was telling me to stop smoking. | |
| It's like, oh, it's okay. | |
| You're a smoker. | |
| It's fine. | |
| It's okay. | |
| Right. | |
| I know you're lying, like that kind of thing, right? | |
| Right. | |
| And that's a way of just, it's a way of basically saying, I'm giving up on you, or you can't possibly achieve what you say. | |
| You poor little thing, right? | |
| It's condescending. | |
| Yeah. | |
| A sensation that she's clinging to you. | |
| Suffocated and annoyed, but also really guilty. | |
| Right. | |
| Yeah. | |
| Right. | |
| And it's interesting how you get that she's clinging to you when she is telling you that stuff shouldn't be important to you and this, that, and the other, right? | |
| Because she seems hindering you and indifferent to you, but you get that she's clinging to you, right? | |
| Yeah. | |
| So why is she clinging to you? | |
| What does the clinging mean? | |
| I don't know. | |
| It's just like she's pulling me down or something. | |
| Okay, go on. | |
| I don't know. | |
| The stuff in the dream that I was trying to do is stuff that she would never do. | |
| If I was doing it in real life, she'd sort of like... | |
| Be really dismissive of it or like almost try and encourage me to not do it type thing, right? | |
| Like when I went to school, like she never went to school. | |
| Like when I went to school, it was always kind of like, you know, it's really hard. | |
| Oh, it's okay. | |
| You don't, you know, oh, you don't have to and stuff like that. | |
| Or like if I... So she didn't want you particularly to do well in school? | |
| No. | |
| Why? | |
| I think she, well, I mean, I look at my brother... | |
| Right? | |
| And, like, he's my older brother, and, like, literally, he's like an infant still. | |
| Like, he... | |
| Yeah, so he remains dependent on her. | |
| Yeah. | |
| And, like, this is a really sick analogy, but it just... | |
| I don't know. | |
| To me, it just makes so much sense, right? | |
| There was, like, this thing, I don't know, in the late 90s that went around the internet. | |
| It was, like, bonsai kittens and sign the protest and blah, blah. | |
| Do you remember this? | |
| It was, like... | |
| It was a hoax or whatever, but it was like some guy was, you know, stuffing kittens into these glass vases and feeding them this weird melamine stuff so that their bones would like soften and they would kind of conform and contort so that they fit these jars and it was supposed to be like this weird art pet type thing. | |
| Oh, I didn't follow that, but I can certainly understand the meme. | |
| Yeah, and it's just like my mother wanted to have bonsai children, and she's kind of got one, and it really pissed her off. | |
| Like, when I was little, if I tried to do anything independently or whatever, like, it would really rub her the wrong way. | |
| And, like, I don't know, when my brother and I were talking a few months ago or whatever, or a couple weeks ago, sorry, um... | |
| He made some comment like, you were really independent when you were little. | |
| It just occurred to me that I had to be. | |
| I didn't have a choice in that. | |
| It's not that I wanted to be. | |
| It's that I had to. | |
| That's the opposite of her. | |
| Whenever I've tried to do something or try something new or take a chance to just do something or put myself out there, it just bothered her. | |
| Because it's stuff that you never do, right? | |
| Sure. | |
| Sure. | |
| I mean, look, if you want to achieve anything in your life other than a blind, dumb replication of all the prior mistakes of the hairless apes we call relatives, if you want to do something decent and good and noble in this life, or even if you just want to be a success in any way, shape, and form, then... | |
| There's only one question that you really need to ask yourself if you want to know whether you're going to be successful or not, which is, how do people around me feel about me being successful? | |
| How do people around me feel about me being successful? | |
| Look, I mean, the moment that I decided to do something really important with my life, i.e., it's all been leading up to talking to you here now. | |
| Tonight! | |
| That's it! | |
| The whole thing. | |
| Then, you know, I had to ask myself that question. | |
| How do people feel about me being successful? | |
| I'm aiming for about the biggest success a human being can aim for, which is a moral revolution in the species. | |
| You can't do bigger than that, right? | |
| How do people feel about it? | |
| Do they believe in me? | |
| Are they interested in helping me? | |
| Are they curious? | |
| Do they care? | |
| Are they interested? | |
| Would they be thrilled? | |
| Are they on the same page? | |
| Would they be thrilled if it happened? | |
| Right? | |
| How do people feel about me being successful? | |
| And look, it doesn't have to be a philosophy podcast. | |
| It can be anything. | |
| You can be starting a roofing business. | |
| How do people feel about you being successful? | |
| Because I'll tell you this, and you know this very well. | |
| There are a lot of people in the world who do not want other people to succeed, right? | |
| Right? | |
| A lot of people. | |
| Why do you think we have zombie movies, right? | |
| A lot of people in the world, as you know, that do not want other people to succeed, right? | |
| Joelle, you understand? | |
| Yeah. | |
| Yeah, you understand. | |
| I don't need to tell you. | |
| But they also don't want to openly tell you that they don't want you to succeed, right? | |
| Well, it would be like... | |
| So what they'll do is they'll be kind of... | |
| You tell me. | |
| me what what do they do when they don't want you to succeed but they don't want to tell you openly because it makes them look like assholes what do they do they just passive aggressively try and make it seem like they're your fucking buddy like oh it's a i'll still like you even though you're gonna fail i'll still love you even though you suck at this like they try and make it so it's like they're a great person even though you're not kind of thing right you have your little dream i'll be here to catch you when you fall yeah Thank you. | |
| Yeah. | |
| And it's like... | |
| Who do you think you are to blah, blah, blah, right? | |
| It's like a veiled insult, but in the guise of like a compliment. | |
| It's so weird, but yeah. | |
| Yeah. | |
| And what else? | |
| What else do they do? | |
| Well... | |
| There's like that thing... | |
| I don't know what to call it. | |
| It's like... | |
| The sort of like pretend support. | |
| Like, oh, yeah. | |
| Oh, that's good. | |
| Okay. | |
| Okay, like kind of like sarcastic thing. | |
| Yeah, where there's sort of a thinly veiled boredom. | |
| But if you look at the script without any of the emotions behind it, like if it's just like, oh, that person sounds kind of supportive, I guess. | |
| But the emotion is, you know, yeah, no, okay, that's interesting. | |
| Yeah. | |
| No, that must be cool. | |
| Yeah. | |
| Yeah, yeah. | |
| Okay. | |
| And you know that they're just waiting for the conversation to end, right? | |
| It's like a verbal eye roll type thing, right? | |
| Yeah, or another great one they do is they just pretend nothing's happening. | |
| Yeah, that's what's happening in this dream. | |
| Yeah, they pretend nothing's happening. | |
| Like, they will not reference what you're doing. | |
| Or they do these snippy little put-downs I remember I was dating a girl when I first got my first office as an entrepreneur. | |
| She came up to see the office, looked out of my office and said, well, that's a great view of the parking lot. | |
| Oh my God! | |
| I mean, oh my God! | |
| I mean, there's raining on your parade and then there's just peeing on your eyeball, right? | |
| Yeah. | |
| Wow. | |
| Wow. | |
| It's like, oh, I'm sorry, do you have an entire floor of some office downtown? | |
| I'm sorry, is this not enough square footage for you for my first year as an entrepreneur? | |
| Because you're a secretary, you see. | |
| But she got it, which is that my success was going to be the end of our relationship. | |
| That's why people hold you down. | |
| That's why people pull you down. | |
| That's why people diminish you and eat away at you. | |
| A lot of people are just like this acid, this fine little acid. | |
| It just wears you away. | |
| And you don't even notice it. | |
| You just wake up every day a little more tired, a little less motivated. | |
| You know, have you ever done it where you're doing a long walk and you don't even notice that there's been a slight incline for a while? | |
| And, you know, you've got a big hill, you're like, ah, and I climb the hill, right? | |
| Brr, get us up the hill, right? | |
| But when you're on this slight incline, It's like after 10 or 50 minutes, you're like, fuck, I'm tired. | |
| Why am I so tired? | |
| I didn't even notice that, right? | |
| That's why people, they don't want to be a cliff wall because it's obvious. | |
| Yeah. | |
| Right? | |
| They just want to be a slight incline to wear you down from whatever it is that you dream of doing. | |
| Which is especially convenient if they want to, like, at the end of it, when you, you know, if you fail or if you give up or something, then they get to be there and kind of make it all about them and how they were right, but they won't rub it in and they're there and I'll make it all better. | |
| Oh, yeah. | |
| Like, anybody who says, I don't believe in violations of the non-aggression principle, but any human being who says, I'm not going to tell you I told you so, instant airstrike. | |
| That's the only thing that I would condone. | |
| Yeah. | |
| Yeah. | |
| But yeah, no, I mean, if you're surrounded by failures, then your success makes them feel like crap. | |
| It's win-lose. | |
| And failures, by definition, are failures because they have not pursued win-win, right? | |
| Yeah. | |
| Now, people say, how do I ensure my job security? | |
| It's easy. | |
| Make money for people. | |
| Right? | |
| Nobody who's Making a company five times their salary ever gets fired. | |
| Right? | |
| Because that's win-win. | |
| You pay me a salary, I make you money. | |
| Win-win. | |
| Can't lose, right? | |
| And if you are in relationships with people who are losers, who are failures, then your success will cost them more than you can imagine. | |
| Because they don't feel like failures as long as they're pulling someone down. | |
| Right? | |
| Like, you and I probably want to get to the top of a mountain. | |
| We climb it. | |
| What these people want to do It's just be the slow water and rain that wears the mountain down. | |
| Then they step on a pebble and say, look, I climbed Everest. | |
| No, you just wore it down. | |
| They feel like they're rising as long as they're pulling someone down. | |
| You know what I mean? | |
| Yeah. | |
| Because then something's going down in their vision. | |
| So it feels like they're going up, right? | |
| A vampire only dies when he stops eating people. | |
| Drinking their blood, right? | |
| A vampire feels alive as long as he's draining someone else. | |
| And there's so many people out in the world who only taste of success is undermining the success of others. | |
| That's all they got. | |
| It's tragic. | |
| I mean, their histories are tragic, but so what? | |
| The reality is you've got your life to live, and you can either spend it fighting off zombies and attempting to get to a higher place, or find people who will challenge you, who will mentor you, who will help you rise, who will be enthusiastic about your successes, who will be overjoyed at your victories, and will help you lick the wounds of your defeats, And who will be comrades in arms and brothers and sisters in the passionate search for truth. | |
| And those are the people you find and you keep close to you. | |
| And the other people... | |
| Well... | |
| Yeah. | |
| And I think that's... | |
| When you say that your mother is clinging to you in the dream, I think that's... | |
| If you succeed... | |
| What happens, right? | |
| Well, then failure is not an absolute. | |
| Failure is then a choice. | |
| You know, when my mom would turn on the light, you know, you turn the light sometimes and there's a little pop and the light bulb breaks, right? | |
| I mean, she'd go into hysterics. | |
| Scream, throw herself on the couch. | |
| Nothing works! | |
| Nothing works! | |
| And she's like, no, you don't work. | |
| But she has to make it that nothing works. | |
| It has to be an absolute. | |
| Otherwise, she's the one who doesn't work, right? | |
| Then she's responsible for fixing herself. | |
| But if she can make it some existential absolute, every time... | |
| And people like this always talk in absolutes. | |
| Every time I try... | |
| Right? | |
| Yeah. | |
| If I've told you once, I've told you a thousand times, there's this grim... | |
| Ugh! | |
| Like a fucking demon hummingbird going round in your brain, scraping it with an ice pick. | |
| Of repetition. | |
| They can say the same things over and over and over again. | |
| And it's like they don't even notice it. | |
| They're just stuck in this tiny loop, right? | |
| You use this record scratching. | |
| They're stuck in a tiny loop. | |
| And anytime they see anyone breaking the orbit of that tiny, dismal, loser loop... | |
| Outcome the foggy knives, right? | |
| So it really matters, the company that you keep. | |
| Thank you. | |
| Everyone, like our personality is everyone around us and ourselves. | |
| We don't have some isolated Randian, superhero, Nietzschean, ubermensch, Personality that can survive constant mixing with crappy narcissistic loser town and not have that rub off on us. | |
| It really matters who you surround yourself with. | |
| Who you are with is who you will be. | |
| You want to know who you're going to be in 20 years? | |
| Look at the people around you 20 years older. | |
| If that excites you, fantastic. | |
| If it terrifies you, well, you've got some choices to make. | |
| Because they will mentor you into their dead end with everything they've got. | |
| There is something that you said in a call or something. | |
| I was listening to you the other day and it was like, if you have like 10,000 friends, it just means you have really low standards. | |
| But that like it makes a lot of sense and like, yeah, I don't know, like over the past six months or something like that, like my husband and I have a really good relationship and he's really close with his eldest brother. | |
| And, uh, I don't know, like, over the last few weeks, I've been thinking, like, I have so much respect for him, because there's all this shit going on with his family, too, and, like, our niece, she's just little, and, like, oh, my God, there's, like, all this sickness, it's, like, ugh, all this stuff, but anyway, so the, my brother-in-law is just, he's just really doing things that are gonna benefit his daughter, and it's just, like, awesome, you know, because they had a shit example big time growing up, too, right? | |
| And, I don't know. | |
| I've just been thinking about that. | |
| I'm so happy that I have the opportunity. | |
| We're creating our own family and screw this. | |
| Yeah, but no, I'm sorry. | |
| I've got to tell you one thing that I would suggest with your husband. | |
| All due respect and knowing absolutely nothing about your relationship. | |
| Do you know one place I want to see your husband? | |
| Where? | |
| There's one place that I would love if you called back and said, here's where I met my husband. | |
| Where? | |
| In your dreams. | |
| Yeah. | |
| Right? | |
| Yeah. | |
| And what that tells me, which doesn't mean that it's true, it's just what the dream tells me. | |
| Again, you know, it could be broken telephone. | |
| But what it tells me is that your brother is not as clear about your mom and your family as he could be. | |
| Yeah. | |
| Like, I think I'm pretty clear about it, right? | |
| I don't think I've pulled too many punches. | |
| I try not to, right? | |
| Yeah. | |
| I think that you should talk to your husband again. | |
| He may be entirely on board and I might be entirely wrong, but I would like to see him show up in your dreams. | |
| Because in your dreams, you don't have a husband. | |
| And I would say that in your unconscious, you don't feel as supported by him as you need to be in this area. | |
| And it's not his fault. | |
| There's so much propaganda about this stuff. | |
| Parents and obligation and guilt and duty, right? | |
| Yeah. | |
| I know when I first stopped talking to her, he was really uncomfortable with it, just because, again, I think it's all the propaganda and all that stuff, but I don't know. | |
| We could talk about it, right? | |
| Because he actually said to me, well, but she's your mother, and then we kind of talked to her on that, and he was like, oh, you're right. | |
| I get that. | |
| Right. | |
| Yeah. | |
| But I think he needs to proactively get there and really help you with it. | |
| Yeah. | |
| Like, if someone's going through struggle, you can't be reactive. | |
| You have to be proactive. | |
| Yeah. | |
| And I would feel more comfortable with your support structure if your dreams weren't so isolated. | |
| Because who's not in your dreams is as important as who is, right? | |
| Yeah, I never thought about that. | |
| So talk to him and just say, look, I need you to stay on me about this. | |
| I need you to remind me that this is a good decision. | |
| I need you to help me with this stuff, right? | |
| Yeah. | |
| Like, tell me every day. | |
| Ask me how. | |
| Like, it's really, he's got to be proactive. | |
| Otherwise, you will slip back into feeling alone. | |
| Because culture then ends up winning again, right? | |
| All the culture about, but she's your mother, right? | |
| All that. | |
| Yeah. | |
| Yeah, that makes sense. | |
| Good. | |
| Yeah. | |
| Okay. | |
| Thank you so much. | |
| You're welcome. | |
| Thank you for possibly the longest call today. | |
| But I think it was really important. | |
| Mike, did you want to add something? | |
| One thing you mentioned in the chat a story about your dad was we were talking about this inappropriate humor and how easy it is to alarm children. | |
| Yeah, I mean humor around kids can easily turn sadistic. | |
| I remember a story when I was really young. | |
| My father ate a dog biscuit as a joke and pretended that he had turned into a dog. | |
| And he kept on it and kept on it to the point where, I mean, I was really young at the time. | |
| I legitimately thought that I had lost my father and that he had turned into a dog and that I was, you know, never going to see my father again. | |
| And here's, you know, my father is now a dog. | |
| And it kept on and kept on and kept on and I was just terrified. | |
| And it's a really young memory and it stood out to me to this day. | |
| How old did you think you were? | |
| Probably four or five. | |
| Somewhere in there. | |
| And yeah, just, I mean, talk about damaging trust. | |
| And of course at the end it was funny. | |
| It's like, oh, it was funny. | |
| It's just a joke kind of thing. | |
| And it wasn't just a joke to me. | |
| I went in a total fight or flight and it's like, oh my god, what am I going to do now? | |
| The person that I'm dependent on is now a dog. | |
| Like, it was a really significant moment for me. | |
| Yeah, and of course, I mean, because when you're a kid, there's two possibilities. | |
| Either your dad knows that you're scared and is keeping scaring you, or he doesn't even know that you're scared. | |
| Yeah. | |
| I'm not sure which one is worse as a kid. | |
| They're both horrible options. | |
| Anyway, yeah, so it is very, very important to be very, very sensitive around kids with humor. | |
| It is a real challenge to have things be enjoyable for kids without it being alarming to them. | |
| Kids get humor when they're young, but it's really, really important. | |
| All right, well, thanks, Joval. | |
| It was a great call, and I really appreciate you opening up about, obviously, a very, very difficult topic, and I'm incredibly sorry about it. | |
| This nasty, nonsensical, evil mess that occurred to you as a kid that's just completely wretched and, you know, of course, massive congratulations for the relationship that you have now and the resolution that you have now to have a better life. | |
| I mean, this is how we change the world. | |
| Rather, this is how you change the world. | |
| And I ramble about it, but good job. | |
| Thank you so much. | |
| You're welcome. | |
| All right, Jed, you're up next. | |
| Go ahead. | |
| Thank you for your patience. | |
| All right. | |
| Hopefully I don't come off too much like the Darth Vader. | |
| I found a boom for my mic, so I think that's where all the air was coming from. | |
| Oh, good, good. | |
| Okay. | |
| Well, I hope you have 12 dreams for me. | |
| No, I'm kidding. | |
| What's the new mic? | |
| No, not 12 dreams. | |
| Just two questions, and before I get to them, well, I mean, I have... | |
| Everybody's already said it. | |
| I mean... | |
| Thank you so much for the work that you do. | |
| It profoundly changed my life, the life of my wife. | |
| Her whole family is now kind of turning the corner. | |
| We're not sure just how far they're willing to turn, but her dad was a big, big influence. | |
| You made a big influence in his life. | |
| He's called in before. | |
| So thank you. | |
| Massive, massive thanks. | |
| So I just want to, you know, in no light way, put that on the table. | |
| Well, thank you very much. | |
| And I look, Obviously, you do the work, and I don't want to diminish the value of the ideas being put forward here. | |
| FDRUL.com forward slash donate. | |
| Not for you, but for others. | |
| I may put out a book about lifting weights, but everybody else lifts the weights, and you should be very happy on that. | |
| Yes, and thank you. | |
| Thank you for making it so approachable. | |
| Thank you for defining it in a way that No one has been able to define it, at least for me, before, and making it easy for me to see and to accept. | |
| So, I love it. | |
| Love the work. | |
| I hope I keep doing it. | |
| If I could donate more, I would, and I will. | |
| Oh, I appreciate that. | |
| So, what's on your mind? | |
| So, questions. | |
| The first one's kind of simple. | |
| I thought I'd get the simple one out of the way. | |
| And if we have time, if it becomes complex, it becomes complex. | |
| But my wife and I have had discussions about holidays. | |
| And I grew up around holidays. | |
| It's not like I wasn't away from them. | |
| We did Christmas. | |
| We did birthdays. | |
| But I was never really into it. | |
| And I got into a relationship and... | |
| With my wife and she, in the beginning, she was very, she's very adamant about the birthday celebrations, the Christmases. | |
| I mean, she really likes that. | |
| She likes the celebration. | |
| And I'm not really into it. | |
| We seem to come ahead with that. | |
| And I'm not sure, because they can get pretty, I don't want to say emotional, but they can get pretty hard into the reasonings and why I may not like them, why I may like them, and how it's very important for her that they're celebrated. | |
| So I kind of just wanted to get your take on that in terms of whether we should be celebrating them together, if they are experiences that are worthwhile. | |
| Sorry, because you talked about birthdays and Christmases. | |
| Do you mean anniversaries and stuff like that or what? | |
| Yes, anniversaries too. | |
| And you don't particularly care about them? | |
| It's not that I don't care about them. | |
| I guess I don't put as much thought into them. | |
| So yes, the care is lacking. | |
| Yeah, that's what I mean by particularly. | |
| I mean, it's not like you're completely indifferent, but it's not a big deal. | |
| There's a great old line from Dave Barry who says, you know, there comes a time in every man's life when he really has to stop expecting everyone to make a big deal of his birthday. | |
| For most men, it's really around the age of 12. | |
| And that may be a bit young, but I don't really do birthdays much. | |
| I don't really... | |
| I don't really care. | |
| I mean, you know, I mean, I don't sort of, ooh, I can't wait. | |
| I hope I get this for my birthday. | |
| You know, like, yeah, anytime I'll buy it, right? | |
| I mean, it's, you know, I'm not 12. | |
| Right. | |
| So I don't really do birthdays that much. | |
| I don't, anniversaries are nice, but I don't, we don't really do much for it. | |
| I mean, obviously, we chat about, you know, the marriage and all that. | |
| They're not bad reminders. | |
| You know, birthdays are like, hey, I'm one year less alive. | |
| One year less of living has gone by, right? | |
| Because you're one year older, but you're one year younger towards your grave, right? | |
| Right, right. | |
| So they're not bad things to remind you. | |
| Especially guys. | |
| We don't have periods. | |
| We don't, you know... | |
| I mean, time is a blur. | |
| Nothing changes, you know? | |
| It's the same damn thing, right? | |
| So I think that these... | |
| Celebrations or markers or whatever. | |
| I think they're helpful. | |
| I just can't really get into making a big deal. | |
| Now, I'm not talking about your wife here because I don't know her, but I will tell you that the people in my life who most make big deals out of things are bullies. | |
| Again, I'm not talking about your wife. | |
| I'm talking about my personal experience since you asked me sort of what I thought. | |
| In other words, people who are like, you know, they really expect you to do a big thing for their birthday. | |
| It's a whole lot of or else, you know? | |
| Like, it better be a good deal for my birthday. | |
| I better be happy or, you know, bad things are going to happen to your pets or something, right? | |
| So I've never sort of... | |
| Like the moms who make a big deal about Mother's Day. | |
| I mean, my wife doesn't make a big deal about Mother's Day because she knows how much she's adored, right? | |
| Right. | |
| But the moms who make a big deal about Mother's Day is like, oh, why? | |
| Why do you need to make a big deal about Mother's Day? | |
| I mean, what would that mean? | |
| Yeah. | |
| So, again, I'm not trying to talk about... | |
| Your wife here. | |
| But my concern, I guess, would be... | |
| Like, if somebody says, well, our anniversary... | |
| Basically, it's our anniversary. | |
| You know, there's this... | |
| It's sitcom humor, which means it's just tired and cliched. | |
| But the sitcom humor is... | |
| The wife has something spectacular planned for the anniversary and the husband doesn't. | |
| Now, that's funny because it makes the husband feel anxious even if there's a husband or boyfriend just watching the show. | |
| It's like, oh, I don't want that, right? | |
| But that sense of anxiety or, you know, that's not a good feeling. | |
| That's not why guys should be doing anything, right? | |
| Right, right. | |
| We kind of, when we talk, we're like, we should be able to celebrate Just whatever, you know, whenever we want. | |
| We shouldn't really have to have the markers. | |
| I think for more, because when we really get further into the conversation, it kind of does flip. | |
| I don't really get a sense of bullying as much as I think she really feels bad about being forgotten. | |
| Right. | |
| So the important thing there is don't talk about being forgotten once a year. | |
| So if she feels forgotten or ignored, an anniversary won't help her. | |
| Right. | |
| Because then what will happen is people will say, oh, I roused myself to notice you today. | |
| I can now put it off for another year. | |
| Well, that's no good, right? | |
| You want to solve these problems on a real-time basis, right? | |
| Exactly. | |
| Yeah. | |
| So figure out where is the invisibility. | |
| I mean, men in general, we've grown kind of immune to not being appreciated. | |
| It's not bad in my household, but in the past... | |
| The woman would be like, well, I cooked you. | |
| I spent an hour cooking that meal. | |
| And I'd be like, well, I spent 10 hours working today to bring home a paycheck. | |
| You know, I don't see you 10 times as enthusiastic about my working today as I'm supposed to be about your meal. | |
| Until I met my wife, I thought that women just were these neurotic house of cards that need to be propped up with these volcanoes of insane praise at all times. | |
| Yeah. | |
| And that men were just these plodding dray horses that could whip and keep moving and you never even notice anything, right? | |
| Right. | |
| And it's, you know, I just, you know, be careful about the black hole of appreciation and support. | |
| The appreciation and support are two very dangerous areas with a lot of women. | |
| Again, it may not be for all, but, you know, because I remember when... | |
| What I would say to a woman I was living with, well, who was looking for work and I was supporting us, and I, you know, she'd say, well, I, you know, I cleaned the bathrooms today. | |
| I said, well, we have one. | |
| It took you, what, half an hour? | |
| You know, I just came back from working 12 hours. | |
| Like, you need to, like, if I'm supposed to praise you every day for the stuff you do, then you've got to praise me every day for the stuff that I do, called paying the bills. | |
| And that, you know, she literally stomped her in her tracks, and she was like, it was like trying to watch a An egret swallow a narwhal sideways. | |
| I mean, she just couldn't process that, that a man would actually have to be appreciated for something like working 12 hours a day to pay the bills. | |
| And that that's a little bit more important than running some comet over the toilet. | |
| Yeah. | |
| You know? | |
| I mean, so... | |
| Be careful with the woman's need to be appreciated. | |
| I think it's fine. | |
| Appreciate people. | |
| But as a man, you need to be sure... | |
| That your contributions are equally appreciated, whatever they happen to be. | |
| So, sorry. | |
| Just wanted to mention that. | |
| Okay. | |
| No, I mean, we... | |
| And I do that a lot because I know she's... | |
| Do what a lot? | |
| Oh, I show my appreciation. | |
| And she does to me, too. | |
| I feel like the appreciation is equally shared. | |
| Then why does she feel invisible? | |
| That's what we're trying to get at. | |
| It's like we know... | |
| Is she there? | |
| Yeah, she's here. | |
| Would she like to talk? | |
| Well, let me ask her. | |
| Go startle her. | |
| Yeah. | |
| Would you be willing to? | |
| Oh, yeah. | |
| Yeah, here we go. | |
| She will ask you. | |
| I will pass the mic to her. | |
| What's her name? | |
| Oh, no, don't worry. | |
| She wants to stay anonymous. | |
| It's fine. | |
| Hello? | |
| Hello. | |
| Hi, how are you doing? | |
| I appreciate you jumping on at short notice. | |
| I just got a question or two. | |
| You know, you seem invisible to me because, you know, it's radio. | |
| Anyway, but yeah, so we were just talking about, so you have these moments in the year, these days in the year, when you feel like some stuff should be especially visible or celebrated. | |
| Is that right? | |
| Yes. | |
| And is that because you feel it's not as present on those other days? | |
| I don't know. - Okay. | |
| Is it birthday a big one or anniversary or whatever? | |
| Yes. | |
| I didn't really have... | |
| Growing up, I'm sorry. | |
| Growing up, I didn't really have anyone to share anything with. | |
| How come? | |
| Well, I'm sorry. | |
| No, don't apologize. | |
| It's just feelings. | |
| That's fine. | |
| I'm happy to listen. | |
| My parents were always gone and my sisters were not nice to me. | |
| And I was kind of kept under house arrest because... | |
| I don't know. | |
| My mom was overprotective. | |
| So, outside of school, I just stayed home and I was kind of isolated from everything. | |
| Did your sister stay home too? | |
| No. | |
| Just me. | |
| How did you get this target on your forehead of having to stay home? | |
| That's a very good question and I have not found the answer yet. | |
| Did some random arrow happen to hit you and pin you to the wall or something? | |
| Well, we can't move her. | |
| She'll bleed. | |
| How come you? | |
| Well, I was... | |
| I was the youngest of six. | |
| Oh, right. | |
| And my family kind of went through some really hard times when all of my sisters were younger and when I was a baby, so my mom kind of saw them. | |
| What were the hard times? | |
| Homelessness, no food kind of stuff. | |
| How did that happen? | |
| Well, we lived in Texas. | |
| Sorry, I know that's the beginning, but it sounds like, how did you end up homeless while we lived in Texas? | |
| That's the story. | |
| Well, that's just what happens in Texas. | |
| Everybody goes through that. | |
| I know that's not the end, but how did it come about? | |
| We lived in Texas and we moved to Vegas. | |
| My mom moved all of her kids away from her family. | |
| They were kind of bad influence anyway, but that's another story. | |
| So she moved everyone to Vegas and we didn't really have any money. | |
| Where was your dad? | |
| He was there. | |
| He would do construction work and sell plasma and stuff to get us food when he could. | |
| Plasma, you mean like the blood thing? | |
| Yes. | |
| Okay, so plasma TVs? | |
| I'm sorry. | |
| Hopefully his own. | |
| Got it? | |
| Yes. | |
| But yeah, he was... | |
| Before he found your site, he was really kind of submissive. | |
| He went along with whatever my mom was doing. | |
| He didn't really argue. | |
| He was kind of like in the shadow of my mom. | |
| She was kind of dominating over... | |
| Everything. | |
| Like her whole situation, she had to control. | |
| And I think that might be because she didn't have any control herself. | |
| She grew up in a very abusive situation. | |
| Environment. | |
| Her father was an alcoholic. | |
| Her mother kind of didn't really stand up for her kids. | |
| And she was one of 11 kids. | |
| 11 kids? | |
| Yeah. | |
| She lived in poverty for most of her life. | |
| Wow. | |
| 11 kids. | |
| I mean, that's mental. | |
| I mean, that's like a... | |
| I mean, most wombs are like single shot, you know? | |
| This is like automatic. | |
| Anyway, that's mad. | |
| And so, okay, so you were in Vegas and no jobs? | |
| I'm not exactly sure on all of the details. | |
| I was a baby and toddler. | |
| We moved up to Washington when I was four, almost five. | |
| But once we got to Washington, it was... | |
| Not necessarily better. | |
| It was still hard for several years, but we had homes and food and stuff. | |
| Well, yeah, I guess that would make it better. | |
| I'm sorry. | |
| But it was... | |
| Vegas supposedly matured my siblings more, so they were able to go out and have their own lives, but I guess since I was a baby. | |
| I didn't really experience it in my mom's eyes, so I was still immature. | |
| I think that's... | |
| Well, also, if your mom's identity was really wrapped up in being a mom, then she probably would have a tough time letting the youngest go, right? | |
| Yeah, yeah. | |
| She's always... | |
| I remember she always would tell my dad that... | |
| She wanted to have another baby and she wished that she did before she got too old. | |
| Right, because for a lot of women who really focus on being moms, when the kids grow up, it's an ache. | |
| It's like, now what? | |
| I've got another 40 years to live or 30 years to live or I don't know how long, right? | |
| And now what? | |
| And they don't have much of an identity outside of that, right? | |
| And, you know, normally what would happen is your kids would have kids and you'd start it all over again as a grandmother. | |
| But these days, you know, everyone waits a long time before they have kids. | |
| So there's this kind of void. | |
| And I think that there is this kind of clinging sometimes, right? | |
| Yeah. | |
| I mean, she has grandkids. | |
| My oldest sister... | |
| I had a child when she was 19. | |
| So, since I was 11, there has been, because my sister lived with my mom, so she had a baby, but she still did this to me. | |
| Right, right. | |
| Right. | |
| So, And so there was a lot of, obviously, a lot of deprivation, a lot of fear, a lot of uncertainty, and a real feeling of familial isolation, right? | |
| So you can be isolated within a family, but there's also families. | |
| I mean, homelessness results from significant isolation, right? | |
| Like not having friends and family to help you prevent mistakes, to get you jobs, to give you a place to stay, to lend you money, to whatever it takes, right? | |
| Right. | |
| So that is – that's tough. | |
| That is a really, really tough thing. | |
| Now, you know, obviously, logically, that getting stuff now isn't going to make up for that, right? | |
| Right. | |
| And it's not the presence. | |
| I don't really care about the presence. | |
| It's just even completely forgotten. | |
| What is forgotten? | |
| Like, For example, our anniversary or my birthday in general, he doesn't even remember that it's happening. | |
| I think that's what bothers me the most. | |
| I'm not expecting a party or presents or anything. | |
| I know it sounds really silly. | |
| I'm sorry. | |
| No, no, no. | |
| It's not silly. | |
| It's not silly at all. | |
| It's not silly at all. | |
| Look, I'd be upset if everyone forgot my birthday. | |
| I mean, it's not silly at all. | |
| People get tired of it because I consider September my birthday month. | |
| And I expect, like, ever-escalating presents every day. | |
| Culminating in a massive fireworks display with mostly Brazilian dancers. | |
| Anyway, I don't have to get into the whole detail. | |
| But no, it's a big deal. | |
| So, your husband forgets your birthday completely? | |
| Well, I think it has to do with... | |
| Wait, no, that was... | |
| This was the yes-no part. | |
| Um, most years. | |
| Right. | |
| Right. | |
| Can you put your husband back on, please? | |
| Hello. | |
| I'm back. | |
| Alright. | |
| I've been here. | |
| Is that true? | |
| Is that true? | |
| Uh... | |
| In this way, and I will admit, yes. | |
| And it's the realization, because she'll say, okay, my month is coming up, the birthday is coming up, and then it dawns on me. | |
| And so it's almost as if I'm not... | |
| Sorry, what dawns on you? | |
| What dawns on you? | |
| The realization that her birthday is coming up, and I think that's what bothers her the most. | |
| What do you mean it dawns on you? | |
| I mean, dude, it's every year. | |
| Yeah, I know. | |
| I mean, are you shocked when it gets cold in the winter every year? | |
| Well, here's the thing. | |
| Here's the thing. | |
| I don't even recognize my own birthday. | |
| I don't recognize, like, and this is why we have- What do you mean you don't recognize it? | |
| I don't know when it's coming. | |
| Like, she'll have to remind me of my- What do you mean you don't know when it's coming? | |
| I don't keep tabs on it. | |
| Like you said, I stopped counting. | |
| When I was either 16 or 17, I just stopped. | |
| No, no, no, I don't. | |
| That's not what I'm saying. | |
| But you know when your birthday is, right? | |
| I know the date. | |
| But when it comes up, it's like, oh, okay, now it's the 28th. | |
| Oh my gosh, it's the 29th tomorrow. | |
| It's that like, oh, it's coming up. | |
| I'm not even really mentally keeping track even when it's that close. | |
| The only time I really see my birthday anymore is when I have to fill in some form or submit something. | |
| But I'm not like, oh, it's May, it's my birthday month, it's coming up. | |
| I don't do that. | |
| It's like completely out of my mind. | |
| And I guess... | |
| Okay, so the next obvious question, sorry to interrupt, is how were birthdays dealt with when you were a child? | |
| How was your birthday dealt with? | |
| Oh, it was... | |
| Well, when I was a young... | |
| I grew up in the Philippines, and I moved to the States when I was about seven, but I remember in the Philippines, my earlier birthday, it was a big thing. | |
| They were all big deals for me and my sisters. | |
| I think up until I was almost 14, my mom would still throw huge parties, invite over the whole class. | |
| My family dealt with birthdays, and I was more or less ambivalent. | |
| By the time I reached my teen years, I was just, okay, why are we still kind of throwing these things? | |
| Is this really a big deal? | |
| I didn't see the significance of that. | |
| I'm an artist by trade. | |
| I did spend a lot of time in isolation. | |
| I'm not sure. | |
| I can only guess that might have had something to do with it. | |
| Maybe the disconnect. | |
| I experienced through middle school when I really got into my artwork and I just stopped focusing on people. | |
| And even to the point maybe I stopped focusing on myself as much. | |
| But these celebrations just... | |
| I don't want to say they became a nuisance, but they kind of became one of these things like, oh, I guess we got to do this thing, you know, or... | |
| Why is it a nuisance? | |
| Well, or not a nuisance, but an inconvenience, I guess. | |
| Okay, you can give me another synonym if you want, but why does it become an inconvenience or a nuisance? | |
| I mean, what's wrong with a cake and a party or a cake and a card or whatever, right? | |
| Yeah, there's nothing wrong with it. | |
| It's just... | |
| I would rather be doing... | |
| No, hang on, hang on. | |
| There is something wrong with it because you said it was an inconvenience, right? | |
| Right. | |
| I'd rather be doing other things. | |
| There are others... | |
| Well, again, what's wrong? | |
| Again, help me understand what's wrong with cake and some candles and happy birthday. | |
| I mean... | |
| That's not a bad thing, right? | |
| I mean, nobody's saying, go get your appendix out with a spoon, right? | |
| It's not a bad thing. | |
| And I don't want to sound like a cynic. | |
| I mean, I'll go to a birthday party. | |
| I'll chat with people. | |
| I'm not going to avoid them. | |
| Just like, don't call Jed if it's your birthday. | |
| He's not going to come. | |
| I'm not going to go out of my way to avoid them. | |
| But I think when it comes to my own life or my own preferences, I'd rather not Have them, or I'd rather not think about them. | |
| Okay, I'm trying to be sympathetic here. | |
| I'm having a tough time, and let me tell you why. | |
| Okay. | |
| You know that your wife had this really shitty aspect to her childhood, right? | |
| Yes, yes. | |
| And she was homeless. | |
| There was nothing there for presents or anything like that, right? | |
| Right. | |
| You love your wife, I assume? | |
| I do. | |
| So what are you talking to me about? | |
| This seems incredibly selfish to me. | |
| Like it's really important to her and you're like, well, I'd rather be doing something else. | |
| Why is this about you and not her needs and preferences? | |
| - Well, huh. | |
| - Yeah, look, I'm fully aware. | |
| I just said it doesn't make it better, right? | |
| Right, right. | |
| And it won't fix her childhood, but it will help her to understand that you get it about her childhood. | |
| Yeah. | |
| I mean, we talk about it. | |
| I mean, I'm always readily available for her when she needs to. | |
| No, no, this is a proactive thing. | |
| This is a proactive thing. | |
| No, I mean... | |
| It's important to her, and she's not, again, she's not asking for a big thing, right? | |
| She's not saying I need a three-carat diamond ring every third Wednesday, right? | |
| Yeah. | |
| But I just heard your wife, very emotional, for obviously legitimate reasons, about... | |
| What happened in her childhood, right? | |
| And, again, you can't fix her childhood, but you can be sensitive to what is upsetting to her. | |
| Right? | |
| So, if I marry a woman who's got abandonment issues, I should never threaten to abandon her. | |
| That's clear, right? | |
| That makes sense, yes. | |
| Right? | |
| And if I... If I marry a woman who was overweight as a kid, I shouldn't make a lot of fat jokes, right? | |
| Right. | |
| Because we all have our histories, right? | |
| And we all have our triggers. | |
| Now, your wife came from a place where there was neither time, capacity, money, energy, or social support, or extended family to celebrate important milestones, right? | |
| Right. | |
| And all you're doing is telling me, well, it's just not that big a deal to me. | |
| Because I had happy celebrations as a kid, right? | |
| But you get that she didn't, right? | |
| I do. | |
| I do. | |
| And that's what we were trying to figure out. | |
| That's where our discussions were trying to go. | |
| I was honestly trying to figure out, am I just being a dick? | |
| Am I just being a dick about it? | |
| Because... | |
| I don't remember birthdays, or I don't put them in the forefront, or I don't acknowledge them. | |
| Okay, look, come on. | |
| The I don't remember is... | |
| Look, do you have a cell phone? | |
| Yes, we have one. | |
| Okay, you know it has reminders, right? | |
| It does, yeah. | |
| So the I don't remember is... | |
| Come on. | |
| I mean, you're insulting my intelligence. | |
| Okay, that's... | |
| And this is what we're... | |
| No, I'm not trying to insult your intelligence. | |
| You can have it beep every day for a month beforehand. | |
| Wife's birthday! | |
| Wife's birthday! | |
| Coming up! | |
| Right? | |
| Right, right. | |
| Maybe we just have to set one. | |
| And that's the thing. | |
| The closer it gets, I do know it's coming. | |
| It's just... | |
| She just gets upset that I can't... | |
| You know, she has to remind me when it's coming. | |
| I can get it. | |
| You understand, but you understand that solving this problem, like I went to the dentist yesterday, right? | |
| Right. | |
| And they said, here's where your next appointment is. | |
| Pulled out my cell phone. | |
| It took me about 30 seconds to put that next appointment into my cell phone, right? | |
| Right. | |
| Done. | |
| Reminder two weeks beforehand. | |
| One week beforehand. | |
| Done. | |
| Right? | |
| 30 seconds. | |
| I almost feel like that's the problem. | |
| The fact that I do need a reminder at all, I think that's why she gets upset, I think. | |
| Put it on vibrate! | |
| I mean, she doesn't need to see it reminding you. | |
| Again, I would get a tattoo of it somewhere, just so I know. | |
| I have no reason to forget, but I think that the fact that I need a reminder at all is also bothering to her. | |
| Yeah, well, it's important to her. | |
| Okay, okay, okay. | |
| No, but my question is why isn't it important to you if it's really important to her? | |
| Like, you're married, right? | |
| And the deal about being married, I mean, I'm sure you know this because I hesitate to even say it. | |
| If it's important to her, it is now important to you. | |
| Okay. | |
| It's not you get to have completely separate important things because you're married. | |
| Okay. | |
| Right? | |
| So if you have some friend who's really into mixed martial arts and you don't really care about it, he can be into mixed martial arts and you don't have to care about it. | |
| Right? | |
| Right. | |
| But you're married now. | |
| I mean, you're living together, you're sleeping together, you're eating together, you're bathing together, you're having sex together, you might be having kids together, whatever, right? | |
| If it's really important to your wife It is important to you. | |
| I mean, it has to be. | |
| Because that's the vow you make. | |
| If you love your wife, that means you respect your wife. | |
| It means you care about your wife. | |
| If you love your wife, what's important to her must be important to you. | |
| That doesn't mean agree with everything that she says. | |
| But it means that her need... | |
| For these celebrations must be important to you. | |
| And again, that doesn't mean that you go out and buy a five-carat golden ring, whatever, right? | |
| Right, right. | |
| Just that it's remembered. | |
| Remembering is important. | |
| Remembering is important because we all have our histories. | |
| Your history was you're satisfied with all the great stuff that happened to you when you were a kid with birthdays, right? | |
| Right, right. | |
| Now, if you put yourself in her shoes and really picture what it was like to be homeless on your birthday, I mean, can you get that? | |
| How unbelievably heartbreaking that would be? | |
| Because not only... | |
| The problem isn't that she didn't get stuff from her birthday. | |
| I guarantee you that. | |
| That's not the problem. | |
| And that's why I'm saying giving her stuff won't solve it. | |
| The problem is not the bad stuff that happens to us. | |
| It's the bad stuff that happens to us that we cannot talk about. | |
| So, if you come from a comfortable household and someone forgets your birthday, then you can say, oh, you guys forgot my birthday. | |
| And everyone's like, oh, I can't believe it. | |
| They just feel terrible. | |
| We'll make it up to you. | |
| And you cry and they comfort you and all that kind of stuff when you were a kid, right? | |
| You don't get any of that when you're homeless. | |
| Your wife can jump in any time I get this wrong. | |
| When you're homeless, you don't get to complain about not getting stuff for your birthday. | |
| Why? | |
| Why, when I talked to her on the phone, were her emotions so fresh and so present? | |
| Because she couldn't talk about it when it happened, and she probably hasn't been able to talk about it much ever since. | |
| Because her parents probably felt bad enough already that they were homeless. | |
| And so they didn't have any extra emotional resources to provide to comforting her, right? | |
| So she had all of this sorrow and pain and fear which climaxed around anniversaries and birthdays, right? | |
| Right. | |
| And she didn't get to express any of it because they were poor homeless vagabonds. | |
| They were looking up at the gypsies, right? | |
| So she couldn't get the comfort she needed for the sorrows that she experienced, right? | |
| Right. | |
| No, she couldn't. | |
| So that's why it's so fresh for her. | |
| And if you put yourself in her shoes and imagine what life was like, being homeless, knowing that you weren't going to get anything for your birthday, knowing that your parents probably couldn't even acknowledge your birthday because it was too painful, knowing that you weren't going to get any comfort and couldn't complain and couldn't cry and couldn't do any of that stuff about it, leaves you with a lot of unprocessed emotion that's right below the surface in the right environment, right? | |
| Yeah. | |
| Yeah. | |
| So that's why it's important to her. | |
| Thank you. | |
| And because you love her, it needs to be important to you, because that is your wife. | |
| And that doesn't mean go make a big production on her birthday, because that time is gone. | |
| But it means really listen to her about what it was like to be homeless on her birthday. | |
| She's got a lot of tears in her about that, right? | |
| I mean, you heard them, right? | |
| You saw them. | |
| Yeah, yeah. | |
| Her family... | |
| And any... | |
| Actually, the sad thing is most stories involving her early childhood are just as significantly traumatic and painful, and it's very hard. | |
| These are very hard conversations to talk about. | |
| So I never... | |
| I mean, just not having enough... | |
| It's important. | |
| It's absolutely important. | |
| But also the abuses that she went through when she got older. | |
| Just a lot of stuff to process. | |
| Okay, well let me tell you something because I really, really want your marriage to work, right? | |
| Yeah, yeah. | |
| Okay. | |
| I really, really want your marriage to work. | |
| And I'll tell you how I think it won't work. | |
| So this is very important. | |
| I could be entirely full of shit. | |
| I'll tell you this right now. | |
| Right? | |
| I'm just sitting here telling you what I think. | |
| So don't take anything I say as anything definitive. | |
| She grew up in an environment where people couldn't listen to her complaints. | |
| Right? | |
| She's married to a guy now who won't listen to her complaints, right? | |
| That is right. | |
| That's correct. | |
| Now, if you are a continuation of her past, then she will most likely outgrow you. | |
| In other words, if she married you partly because she's used to people around her not having sympathy for her complaints, then if she gets therapy, works on self-growth, listens to this show, does whatever, then she's going to realize, oh my God, I might have chosen my husband Because of my childhood. | |
| So you cannot be like anyone in her childhood if you want your marriage to work in the long term. | |
| If people in her childhood did not listen to her when she had complaints and work assiduously to address them, and if you're the same way, she's going to outgrow you. | |
| Or you're going to try and hold her back. | |
| Yeah. | |
| So that's why I'm telling you, you need to listen to your wife because you want to have a wife in the long run, right? | |
| Right. | |
| Yeah, either way, repeating the behavior or repeating the actions that were done against her, yeah, I don't see how that could ever lead to a positive thing. | |
| Yeah, you're correct. | |
| I am a giant asshole. | |
| No, no, no. | |
| Oh, no, no, I didn't say that. | |
| I didn't say that. | |
| I didn't say that. | |
| Well, I know it. | |
| I didn't say that at all. | |
| And we want to get the second opinion. | |
| I mean, we're really struggling with this. | |
| No, no, listen. | |
| If we had more time, I would talk to you about your childhood. | |
| Yeah. | |
| Right? | |
| And why you might have chosen someone with these kinds of needs that you could avoid, right? | |
| Right. | |
| Because if you find needs... | |
| I get the sense that you find a woman's needs overwhelming... | |
| And maybe you had a bit of a kick around dad? | |
| Maybe your mom was the matriarch? | |
| Maybe there was no dad? | |
| Oh, there were two. | |
| And my dad was the head. | |
| But my mom had needs, too. | |
| And did your dad listen to your mom's needs? | |
| No. | |
| No, he did not. | |
| And how did that work out for them? | |
| He's a pastor, so he has to keep up the appearances. | |
| Their marriage is being held together by God and not really anything else. | |
| Because they can barely talk to each other. | |
| She's always calling and venting about him. | |
| And yeah, she's not completely not at fault either. | |
| She chooses to be in the relationship. | |
| Are you religious? | |
| No. | |
| No, no, no. | |
| So you don't have the... | |
| You don't have the backup. | |
| You don't have the, it's a sin if we part, right? | |
| No, don't have that. | |
| If they didn't have any of that stuff, do you think they'd still be together? | |
| They honestly would have ended it a long time ago, probably a year after I was born. | |
| They keep telling me the only reason we are still together is because of, you know, God. | |
| Right. | |
| So listen, if your wife doesn't want A marriage like her parents had, and if you don't want a marriage like your parents had, you gotta do the opposite. | |
| I do. | |
| Right? | |
| You know that. | |
| I mean, you're imprinted to do the same. | |
| Trust me. | |
| Look, I'm not preaching from a mountain here. | |
| I'm the same way. | |
| I'm struggling with the same shit every day. | |
| Right? | |
| Yeah. | |
| I mean, I had a dad who had all his big plans and wanted to work, work, work, didn't have time for kids, right? | |
| Yeah. | |
| I could argue that I'm engaged in something slightly more important than he was engaged in. | |
| But I have to remember that if I don't want a marriage like my parents, I gotta at least not do the same things and hopefully do the opposite things, right? | |
| My parents are like... | |
| You know when you're a really... | |
| Okay, this is way back in the day. | |
| So way back in the day, before digital photography, you used to take pictures. | |
| And these chemicals used to go on this film. | |
| And then you'd put the film in and you'd see a negative and then you'd process it in some magic way. | |
| Pixies would shit on it and then you'd get your picture, right? | |
| And now somebody who's really good at processing film could look at the negative and see what the picture looked like in their own mind's eye because they'd taken so many negatives to positives, right? | |
| Right. | |
| And I've stared so much at my parents' marriage and my parents' lives That they are now, to me, negative guides. | |
| Like I can look at their lives and know exactly what the opposite looks like. | |
| Which is really a great thing. | |
| Right? | |
| You've got a mom who is fat and smoking and sedentary. | |
| Right? | |
| It's like, oh, I don't want that. | |
| So what are you going to do? | |
| Not gain weight, not smoke, and be active, right? | |
| They're a negative. | |
| Do the opposite. | |
| Yay! | |
| Not easy, but it's obvious, right? | |
| Yeah. | |
| I've been trying. | |
| Look at your parents. | |
| Well, no, because with me, you were making excuses. | |
| That's not trying, right? | |
| Excuses are the opposite of trying. | |
| I mean, with all due respect, I'm just being frank with you, right? | |
| I'm not criticizing you. | |
| I'm just pointing it out. | |
| You weren't saying, I've really got to find a way to get there. | |
| Steph, help me how to get there. | |
| there. | |
| You were like, well, no, I had this happy childhood and I, you know, I don't remember and I, you know, I don't get why it's important. | |
| And by you're just making excuses, right? | |
| That's not trying. | |
| Yeah. | |
| Yeah. | |
| Right. | |
| And again, I mean that with respect and kindness and concern and care, I'm just telling you the way that I see it and what's worked for me. | |
| But you don't want to be anywhere close to the family portrait of a person with a dysfunctional history. | |
| You don't want to be anywhere in that neighborhood. | |
| Anywhere. | |
| Yeah, you're right. | |
| Especially if we're thinking about having kids of our own. | |
| I mean, I've got to get rid of all that. | |
| Yeah. | |
| You know, the family portrait is at one side of the room and you are on the other side of the planet. | |
| Yeah. | |
| If it's a dysfunctional history. | |
| And that's with sympathy and with empathy to the history and all of that. | |
| But, you know... | |
| There's nothing more terrible that I could say to my wife than, you're acting just like my mother. | |
| That would be like a marriage-threatening sentence. | |
| Yeah. | |
| And she never has, and I never will. | |
| Because she never has, and she never will. | |
| But can you imagine? | |
| Especially after she knows all the stories. | |
| I mean... | |
| Right. | |
| And you don't want your wife ever, if she's got a family that dysfunctional, to say to you or to think or to be familiar with your behavior. | |
| You want your behavior to be surprising to your wife if she comes from a dysfunctional history, right? | |
| Yeah. | |
| Yeah, you're right. | |
| So, you know, stop talking to me. | |
| Talk to your wife and just ask her. | |
| Really, really dig in deep. | |
| Understand her childhood. | |
| Understand how it's affected her. | |
| And then do the opposite of what was done to her. | |
| It's not a bad place to start, I would say. | |
| No, I definitely have a lot to talk about tonight, that's for sure. | |
| Okay, good. | |
| Well, thank you for calling in. | |
| Yeah, absolutely. | |
| Thank you for calling in. | |
| I really, really appreciate that. | |
| All right. | |
| Do we have time for Ashley? | |
| Is she... | |
| All right, Ashley, go ahead. | |
| Good evening. | |
| Thank you for taking my call. | |
| Thank you for taking your call. | |
| Thank me for taking your call again. | |
| Good to chat with you. | |
| How are you? | |
| I'm well. | |
| I'm really happy to be on the call. | |
| Thank you so much. | |
| When did we last talk? | |
| Four years ago? | |
| Oh, man. | |
| We last spoke, I think, about three. | |
| I had a Mohawk. | |
| I think it was three years ago. | |
| It's been a while. | |
| It's been a while. | |
| Yeah, it's been a while. | |
| Wow, I discovered your show in 2008 and my life has taken so many turns and twists and I've experienced many, | |
| many Awesome realizations and revelations and transformations since having your philosophy show to kind of bounce ideas off of and Have with me. | |
| And we saw each other in Philly. | |
| Yeah, yeah. | |
| Was that 09? | |
| That was wild. | |
| That was wonderful meeting you and being able to thank you for all of your support in person. | |
| And you reminded me... | |
| It was great to meet you too. | |
| Oh, sorry? | |
| It was great to meet you too. | |
| I have to enjoy believing. | |
| Thank you. | |
| Yeah, you reminded me that you didn't change my life, that I changed my life. | |
| So that stayed with me as well. | |
| Thank you for that confidence. | |
| I make some paints, you know, great people make the paintings. | |
| Yeah, great tools to work with. | |
| Yeah, so along with many philosophical tools I've learned from your show and from interacting with you personally, I've gained a lot of tools, you know, psychologically. | |
| And curiosity always seems to be the... | |
| The baseline here, right? | |
| I wrote to Michael about an issue that I noticed in my life currently that has been something I never really had to deal with before. | |
| And it's an issue that I have been speaking to with my therapist for about a year now, but I haven't really found many insights from it. | |
| It just seems to be A lot of our conversations have been around romance or at least my relationships and And how they really reflect my history, just like you were mentioning with the last call with the married couple. | |
| Yeah, so our history is they come out in our relationships. | |
| And what I'm noticing is that for the past year, I've been attracting and attracted to gentlemen who are much older than myself. | |
| And it It's like alarming, I guess, but I had engaged in a relationship with someone significantly older than myself, and I was strangely comfortable in it. | |
| Do you mind if we don't use too many euphemisms? | |
| That's fine. | |
| Are we talking middle-aged, a cryptkeeper? | |
| Was he an urn of ashes? | |
| Was he someone from the Old Testament? | |
| How old are we talking about? | |
| I'm like twice my age. | |
| I'm 31. | |
| Wow. | |
| Yeah. | |
| All right. | |
| I know. | |
| So that would be, I think, fall under the category significantly older, right? | |
| Yeah. | |
| I mean, I'm not convoluting this at all. | |
| It is... | |
| Interesting to me. | |
| And I'm not, you know, I know of one or two couples that I knew from FDR who had drastic age differences, but nothing like this. | |
| And I've never, you know, it's just kind of like tailspinning, you know, just Weird. | |
| It's weird. | |
| I know it's weird. | |
| Well, no, I don't know. | |
| I don't know. | |
| We're curious about it, right? | |
| I don't know that it's weird. | |
| Yeah, I'm totally curious about it. | |
| Most of, and this is just something to put out there for people who are kind of delving into, like, why am I attracted to this person? | |
| Or why do I attract these people, right? | |
| Most of the relationships that I had experienced up until I was about 29... | |
| They were all images or resurrections of the dynamic I had with my mother. | |
| But suddenly, I'm experiencing dynamics from my father. | |
| Now, there's never been a feeling of violation. | |
| There's never been a feeling... | |
| Of, you know, neglect or abandonment come up. | |
| It just seems to be I'm visiting these kind of paradigms or dynamics that I hadn't before. | |
| And my therapist calls it a chapter. | |
| I'm really not sure what to do with any of it. | |
| I'm confused. | |
| This is all very abstract. | |
| Isn't it complete? | |
| I've got paradigms and chapters. | |
| I know. | |
| What are you saying? | |
| Well, actually, this is like I'm actually wondering if I need to see a different therapist because it doesn't seem to be too specific. | |
| Our conversations about it aren't very specific. | |
| They're not you know, we don't Examine as much as I think we should, and I'm not sure if, you know, I guess I don't really know what I'm asking. | |
| I know, it's very abstract, and I'm trying to really focus and pay attention, but I feel it's getting more foggy rather than less. | |
| So I can ask you some more specific questions if you like, or I'm happy to hear more. | |
| Yeah, I guess I would like to be experiencing this call more like, yeah, I would like to have more specifics. | |
| But I think because I'm so confused by it, I'm really not, I really don't have much to offer. | |
| And I think I'm reaching out to somebody I know who is very detailed and very specific and very curious to kind of help me, you know, figure out some questions that I might want to ask myself. | |
| Sure. | |
| If you could help me. . | |
| Sure, I'd be happy to. | |
| Can we call him Bob, your 61-year-old gentleman caller? | |
| I'm not with him anymore. | |
| It was just... | |
| I don't know. | |
| I got it. | |
| And actually, you can call him that, I guess. | |
| Yeah. | |
| You can call him Bob. | |
| Okay. | |
| So all we know is his name probably isn't Bob. | |
| Actually, wait. | |
| We shouldn't call him Bob because that was his name. | |
| Oh, dear. | |
| Okay. | |
| Okay. | |
| Now, you know what? | |
| If you hadn't told me that, he never would have been found. | |
| Alright, we will call him Wolfgang. | |
| To make him sound exotic and dangerous and potentially vampiric, but anyway. | |
| Okay, so where did you meet him? | |
| Where did I meet him? | |
| I met him at work. | |
| I was a cashier and he was a customer. | |
| Right. | |
| Okay. | |
| And was he wealthy? | |
| No. | |
| And was he handsome? | |
| No. | |
| Was he athletic? | |
| Yes. | |
| Artistic? | |
| Yes. | |
| Literary? | |
| Yes. | |
| Well-educated? | |
| Yes. | |
| Sexy? | |
| No. | |
| Okay. | |
| Okay. | |
| Alright, and so did he ask you out on a date at the beginning? | |
| It was... | |
| He asked me out not as a date per se. | |
| It was more like a meeting. | |
| Yeah, it was more a meeting. | |
| I was an up-and-coming health coach in the community, and he was a psychophysiologist who had a program that he wanted to sell. | |
| And we thought about collaborating. | |
| So that's... | |
| Yeah, just for those who don't know, a psychophysiologist is one word. | |
| He's not a physiologist who happens to be a psycho. | |
| I just wanted to sort of mention that for people who might be confused. | |
| Unless he introduces himself as his, I'm a psycho. | |
| A physiologist. | |
| I mean, physiologist. | |
| Yeah. | |
| Yeah, because you're doing nutrition stuff, nutrition counseling and all. | |
| Is that right? | |
| Yeah, it's more lifestyle stuff. | |
| I'm not a nutritionist or a dietician. | |
| Right, right, right. | |
| Okay. | |
| Can you believe it? | |
| Offering people advice when you're not credentialed. | |
| I'm shocked. | |
| Ashley, I'm shocked. | |
| No, I'm kidding. | |
| Hey, I'm working on it. | |
| Absolutely. | |
| You know, if I can do it, who can't, right? | |
| Okay, so you went for the meeting and I guess at some point it turned romantic, right? | |
| Yeah, at some point. | |
| And how did that happen? | |
| He was teaching methods. | |
| He was teaching Qigong. | |
| And he became, well, I was interested in taking some lessons from him. | |
| And since we were meeting so frequently and we were sharing some pretty kind of very personal things about each other, there was just some kind of a connection that we felt and we got closer. | |
| closer. | |
| We got physically close. | |
| Do you think preferred that the relationship stay friends or were you happy that it moved to romance? | |
| I think that in hindsight, most definitely wish that we had just remained friends. | |
| But in the time, I was... | |
| Challenging myself to experience things and understand, experience the world beyond any way that I had prior. | |
| And I think that had a lot to do with the school that I was attending. | |
| It's a very, like, they're really into metaphysics and mysticism. | |
| Yeah. | |
| Yeah, just so I could get my certification, I had to go through a couple courses that challenged our view of spirituality. | |
| So yeah, I think that opened some negotiation within myself on how I interacted with My world a little bit. | |
| Does that make sense? | |
| Yes, I think it does. | |
| I really think it does. | |
| And how long did the relationship last? | |
| It lasted three months. | |
| I learned more and more that he was not as stable as Wait, he's into mysticism and he's not stable? | |
| Would you believe? | |
| It's like you've never even heard this show before. | |
| I know. | |
| Sorry, I shouldn't laugh. | |
| There is a lot of truth to that. | |
| I mean, it does seem like, wow. | |
| Yeah, I have, like I said, my life has taken, I've made a lot of decisions to test the waters of my life. | |
| My own, you know, my personal philosophies. | |
| And this definitely was part of it. | |
| And I do feel that I compromised a lot of self-trust with this experience. | |
| Sorry, could you just repeat that about self-trust? | |
| I just missed it. | |
| Sure, yeah. | |
| I think I was just saying that I feel like I compromised some self-trust and reliance on I believe it compromised a little bit of my self-confidence as well. | |
| And my health coaching in general has not been of the caliber that I know it can be. | |
| And I really do think that it has to do with integrity. | |
| But I do not think that there's anything wrong... | |
| I really don't think that there's anything wrong with expressing physically an emotional connection that you have with somebody because of their age. | |
| And I don't think that... | |
| Yeah, I don't think that's wrong. | |
| Well, wrong, of course. | |
| I mean, it's not immoral, of course, right? | |
| I mean, there's no... | |
| Assuming that he didn't lie or defraud you in some manner, you know, if he was not falsifying things, then no. | |
| I mean, it's not a question of wrong in terms of immoral. | |
| I mean, it may have a question relative to what you want out of life. | |
| I mean, do you want to be a mom? | |
| Well, that is another... | |
| I do. | |
| I do want to be a mom. | |
| I do want to be a mom. | |
| Then that's not going to serve that purpose, really? | |
| Right. | |
| I mean, I assume you don't want to be a mom with a 62 or 63-year-old dad, right? | |
| Right, right. | |
| And, you know, that relationship was the first one that I had with somebody who was much older than myself. | |
| And this year, I was involved with a gentleman who was like 20 years older than myself. | |
| And, um, you know, the concern there was, well, you're not going to, um, you're not going to be able to have kids if you're with me. | |
| And, um, for some reason I wasn't too concerned about that though when I was with him. | |
| Yeah. | |
| Um, yeah. | |
| So, I mean, You're 31, so if you want to have kids, you've got to focus, right? | |
| Right. | |
| I mean, you know the statistics, right? | |
| Fertility begins to drop off in your late 20s, right? | |
| Well, I think that's... | |
| Where did you grab that statistic from, if you don't mind me asking? | |
| Oh, it was in McLean's, which is a Canadian magazine. | |
| Because in Canada, so many women are trying to get pregnant in their late 30s and early 40s, while having no idea of the amount of risk that is entailed in that. | |
| That they've actually had National Fertility Awareness Week has been instituted in Canada because there's just such a, it seems to be a dearth of information. | |
| And it's been organized by a bunch of obstetricians and so on who are just trying to get women to understand that if you want to have kids, again, it's not like it can't happen and so on. | |
| But I mean, we have friends that kids in their early 40s and all that, but it's It's a challenge and it's not ideal, right? | |
| And of course the risks of downs and other things do tend to go up at that age and so on. | |
| So you should be focusing on it. | |
| It's not like you're 20, right? | |
| So if you want to have kids... | |
| I think I would suggest it. | |
| It needs to be on the radar, right? | |
| Like, I mean, that should be an important, if not the most important thing that you look for in a romantic partner is suitability to the goals of having kids, right? | |
| Right. | |
| Right. | |
| Within my... | |
| I just would like to say within my training, we're... | |
| As a health coach, I'm focused on certain lifestyle changes, right? | |
| And those lifestyle changes are to promote joy and health and happiness. | |
| So I help people change their habits around food. | |
| And the food The food that we've been accustomed to eating has a lot to do with the infertility rate in America. | |
| I don't know about Canada, but I'm pretty sure that it's probably pervasive in both countries. | |
| I guess I would say that I haven't been too concerned about not being fertile and I didn't even, you know, I'm not even concerned about that because I do think that I'm not driven to be, I'm not, I'm really not driven to be a mom, okay? | |
| I'm more driven to be an effective role model, If I can't have children, then I just can't have children. | |
| I understand that. | |
| I would accept that. | |
| That's kind of where... | |
| Well, I know. | |
| Look, I understand that. | |
| But there's decisions you can make, right? | |
| So I just... | |
| I've had this in my bookmarks. | |
| This is from... | |
| Babycenter.com. | |
| Many consider the 30s the happy medium age. | |
| For motherhood, you're more apt to be secure in your career and in your relationship, blah-de-blah. | |
| The bad news is that there's a tremendous difference between your ability to get pregnant in your early 30s and your late 30s. | |
| As the decade progresses, a woman's fertility goes into freefall. | |
| That's why fertility experts caution women in their 30s not to wait too long, particularly if they want more. | |
| Than one child. | |
| And that's something to look at. | |
| So, you know, given that it might, you know, you've got to find a man, develop a relationship with a man, I would hope, aim for marriage. | |
| That would be my suggestion. | |
| So, you know, if you want to have kids into your mid-30s, I think that needs to be your focus now. | |
| And it's not one of these things where the universe will whatever, right? | |
| No, this is one of these things that you need to make a priority for. | |
| If it's what you want. | |
| And dating guys in their 60s is not going to get you that, right? | |
| So that's, I just wanted to sort of mention that. | |
| But there's something else, and I'm happy to listen, but there's a few thoughts that I've had that I could share that might be of use. | |
| Yeah, I'd love to hear your thoughts. | |
| Okay. | |
| Thank you. | |
| Well, in your history, which I won't go into details here, it's up to you, but in your history... | |
| The word no and asserting your preferences against the preferences of your authority figures was not exactly encouraged, if I remember correctly. | |
| Yeah, you're right. | |
| And for those who've not met Ashley, she's very pretty. | |
| That's nothing that's too much of a surprise to you, I hope, because a realistic self-assessment is important. | |
| And of course, one of the challenges of being a very pretty woman is that lots of guys are going to want to date you, right? | |
| And I guess my... | |
| I mean, I've often thought, like, well, I would love to be a pretty woman for a day. | |
| I really would. | |
| I would be fascinated to see what it was like. | |
| I can be going through the door with nine bags of groceries, and maybe people will help, but maybe they won't. | |
| But one pretty woman with half a chihuahua coming out of her purse has nine guys diving through the... | |
| Uh, so it's, um, I've, I've, I've been curious what it would be like. | |
| And I actually think that although the attention would be nice, I'm sure. | |
| And the, you know, I see this with my daughter, you know, life is, life has some advantages for the pretty people. | |
| I mean, she's, she's very pretty. | |
| And I mean, you can see. | |
| I mean, people just respond really positively and they're really curious. | |
| They come down to her level. | |
| They smile. | |
| And I mean, she's a really nice person. | |
| She's a great person. | |
| And she's only now becoming aware of how pretty she is. | |
| And it's not because I'm telling her. | |
| It's just, you know, she can... | |
| She's understanding that. | |
| She's trying to measure whether she's pretty. | |
| When she sees someone, one of the things she says is, is she pretty or not? | |
| I don't think she's pretty or she is pretty. | |
| What can I do? | |
| This is nature focusing on replication. | |
| There's not much I can do other than to remind her that it's not the only thing that counts. | |
| But her mom's pretty and all that. | |
| So you can't do much about it. | |
| But I actually think it would be really tough to be a pretty woman on one hand. | |
| But I think in particular, if I was a pretty woman who'd been raised in a household where saying no really wasn't much of an option, then sort of sexually I'm like an unguarded treasure, if that makes any sense. | |
| Unguarded treasure. | |
| Yeah. | |
| You know, like no one's going to break into my house to steal 20 bucks, but if I leave 20 bucks lying around, people are much more likely, like if I don't have protection around it. | |
| And I guess I'm concerned that my question would be the degree to which you feel that, you know, if a guy finds you attractive and a guy is pursuing you and a guy is interested in you, do you feel comfortable? | |
| How comfortable do you feel saying, this does not, you know, you're a nice guy, maybe we can be friends, although I think friends after the sexual attraction thing is kind of tricky to say the least. | |
| But do you feel that you can really affect what it is or get what you want in a sort of romantic or sexual or relationship way? | |
| Because, I mean, if guys want to date you and you don't have much of a history of self-assertion, I just wonder if it's not really tricky that way. | |
| Well, first of all... | |
| Sorry, that's a lot to whatever. | |
| No, it's a very thoughtful... | |
| You presented that very thoughtfully. | |
| Thank you. | |
| I've always... | |
| Yeah, I've always had... | |
| Curiosity around how much I prevent people from seeing my true beauty, actually. | |
| I developed a lot of tendencies growing up that did not support my beauty, like picking at my face or just... | |
| I would always walk around with some kind of a wound on my face. | |
| Something that projected an image of an unhealthy woman or a sad, depressed, angry woman. | |
| Or it's a way, I guess, of physically saying no in a way that was tougher for you personally, right? | |
| Right, because I do want to feel as beautiful. | |
| I want to be as beautiful as I feel. | |
| I want to feel as beautiful as people perceive me to be, and I don't. | |
| I think that shines through in the people that I surround myself with, actually. | |
| Yeah, so it is difficult. | |
| So if you could, sorry, so if you could, like if some 61-year-old guy wants to be your lover and you're like, look, I'm interested in kids. | |
| This doesn't work for me. | |
| Mm-hmm. | |
| Right? | |
| How would that feel? | |
| I'm not saying that would be true, but saying no, right? | |
| Because how would that feel? | |
| I mean, how would that be for you, saying that kind of no? | |
| Well, I know how it feels. | |
| I mean, I have... | |
| I remember the first time I asserted myself like that. | |
| It was really difficult. | |
| I had to do it in a text message. | |
| It's really hard. | |
| Oh, right. | |
| It's really hard for me to do that in person. | |
| Because it's like the death of the self. | |
| It just feels like whoever is with me in my presence is absolutely with me in my presence. | |
| They're actually proof that I'm alive. | |
| You know, I have suffered from PTSD my entire life, so... | |
| Yeah, no, I mean, that may be true, but I would probably characterize it more as you were attacked for self-assertion as a child, and saying no to anyone is an act of self-assertion. | |
| And if you've been attacked for self-assertion as a child, saying no to someone as an adult, recreated Yeah. | |
| Yeah. | |
| Yeah. | |
| Yeah, it happens to this day. | |
| I was working as a hostess in a restaurant and I had to assert myself around some issues with the scheduling system. | |
| Some waiters were meddling in with my scheduling system. | |
| I was very patient and very conscientious of how I approached myself, you know, this situation. | |
| And because I was so steady on my feet with it, I was the brunt of a huge blow up with one of the waitresses who looked like she was about to beat me. | |
| And I'm aware, you know, I was very aware that she wasn't going to hurt me. | |
| And if she was going to hurt me, then it wasn't my fault. | |
| But, you know, it's a crazy world. | |
| And I can't... | |
| Well, especially in restaurants. | |
| Oh, right? | |
| Restaurants are like, they're like asylums with sneeze shields. | |
| Anyway. | |
| Right. | |
| I guess I'll have to re-listen to that. | |
| Oh, I've worked in my share of restaurants. | |
| I mean, it's like, you know, right before you become homeless and scream at the sky waving a dog-eared Bible, you work in a restaurant. | |
| Anyway, this is my experience. | |
| Yeah. | |
| Wow, I'm just reading something in the chat. | |
| It's, I don't know, can you read that? | |
| By Fatty Watt. | |
| What was her incident that initially provoked the post-traumatic stress disorder? | |
| No, it was purely making assumptions. | |
| It's a little lower. | |
| Was she raped by a 30-year-old when she was 15? | |
| Let me see here. | |
| So she's like, I need someone twice my age. | |
| That's weird. | |
| I don't know. | |
| Yeah, I mean, some people will hypothesize. | |
| I wouldn't worry about that too much. | |
| But, yeah, I mean, if you want to share, I mean, you can if you want. | |
| But certainly you can say no to me at any time. | |
| I welcome all of that. | |
| But, no, I don't think that... | |
| I mean, I don't think it's a daddy thing for what that's worth. | |
| I think it's a guy who's attracted to you and who you can connect with, right? | |
| Because you had stuff that you were able to talk about with this guy, right? | |
| Right, right. | |
| The connections, I mean, and I observed it from the standpoint, oh, is this daddy stuff? | |
| And with the first, you know, the first gentleman who was much older than myself, I thought, okay, let's figure it out. | |
| Is it daddy stuff? | |
| And then I thought, no, it's actually not daddy stuff. | |
| But if there was anything I could contribute to that along those lines, It would be, wow, it's really refreshing to have an older man see me as a woman instead of a little girl. | |
| Yes, and I can understand that if you were 20, but at 31, I think the little girl stuff may be safely tucked in the rear view, right? | |
| Yeah. | |
| I don't think so, actually. | |
| Sorry, go ahead. | |
| No? | |
| No, I don't think so. | |
| Why not, do you think? | |
| Well, I consider the gentleman that I've been with up until this point, up until last year, and they've been all like little boys in man's bodies. | |
| And I mean, I think back to the days when I was in Al-Anon growing up, and There was a book called The Adult Children of Alcoholics, and I remember skimming through it and feeling like it was pretty accurate, that there is a population of people who don't really feel like they're part of society, that they feel like they're just stuck in their child years. | |
| But how is the 61-year-old guy not a child in an old man's body? | |
| Well, that was the last part of it, and I realize that... | |
| Yeah, I mean, and I say that just because, you know, he's... | |
| I mean, he's in this mystical community, which is to me childish. | |
| I'm not partial to mystics in any way, shape, or form. | |
| I consider them to be sophists and dangerous and manipulators. | |
| He's got no resources. | |
| He doesn't have any money, which is not a particularly smart or wise thing to end up with in your early 60s and all that. | |
| So how is he not just another... | |
| Childs in a man's body. | |
| That was the realization I needed to end it, because it just seemed, after a few months of him not picking up work and him, you know, it just, it wasn't what I thought it was, and it's exactly what that, you know, mystical kind of approach to your relationships does. | |
| It gives you a false impression of a person's power. | |
| And it's... | |
| It's muddying your thinking, in my opinion. | |
| You'll hear this when you listen back to what you're saying. | |
| But you're not very crisp in your communication these days. | |
| I'm not. | |
| Or at least, no. | |
| No. | |
| And you'll hear this back when you start talking about food and stuff like that, and it's like, hello! | |
| Focus, focus! | |
| Shine a bright light to keep you looking over here or something like that. | |
| And, you know, that's spending some time with mystics and stuff like that. | |
| It's not a lot of demands for concision and clarity in mysticism, because, you know, you can just speak things slowly and stare at people without blinking and suddenly hear deep, right? | |
| So, I don't mean you, I just mean sort of mystical community as a whole, so... | |
| But I think, you know, and I just wanted to mention this as a general principle, if this helps. | |
| There's, you know, if there's sort of one thing that I would really like to give to the world, it would be for parents to really encourage their daughters to say no to things. | |
| And the reason for that is sort of fairly involved, but sort of Briefly, it's that, you know, men want to be with women, you know, whether that's just sexually or romantically or marriage or whatever, right? | |
| And I would really like for women to be better at saying no to this sort of stuff because then they could, you know, it would raise the standards of what men do and what are required for men and so on. | |
| In a lot of ways, the male personality is a shadow of Female desire. | |
| I've sort of argued this case before. | |
| And men will rise to the occasion, so to speak, for what is demanded of by women. | |
| And if what is demanded of by women is not very much, then men won't grow into very much. | |
| We do a lot of what we do to win the woman. | |
| And if the woman is not that hard to win, so to speak, then men don't End up as very much. | |
| This is all very loosey-goosey and there's tons of exceptions and so on. | |
| But I think in particular for physically attractive women, that's, you know, extra super duper challenging, right? | |
| Because you're in demand for biological reasons or romantic reasons or whatever. | |
| And if you haven't got a good grasp on saying no, and I say this as someone who has similar difficulties. | |
| Not with, you know, being hit on all the time. | |
| But although my hand puppets can be extremely grabby, so I count that. | |
| But no, just, I mean, I get requests for, you know, everything under the sun. | |
| And, you know, if Mike wasn't the gatekeeper, I'd be whoring myself out in extremely useless ways to the entire planet and possibly a good section of Mars as well. | |
| And so, yeah, I have a tough time saying no, and so I really get it. | |
| And I didn't really get it as much until I became a bit more of a public figure, just how much people want stuff from you. | |
| And so I sympathize with and I really understand it. | |
| And again, I'm not sort of saying this from someone who's got it all figured out, but the capacity to say no is so elemental. | |
| I actually almost think that is the personality. | |
| Like the capacity to say no is the personality. | |
| It's not like a part of the personality. | |
| Because otherwise you're conforming. | |
| And when you're conforming, you're not yourself. | |
| Right. | |
| And you can't say yes if you can't say no. | |
| All that kind of stuff. | |
| It sounds like DVDs, but I think there's actually some truth to it. | |
| And so I think that, you know, my suggestion would be... | |
| You are a woman with a lot to offer. | |
| You have great depths. | |
| You have beauty. | |
| You have... | |
| You have intelligence, you have wisdom, you have self-knowledge, you have philosophy. | |
| Yay, sexiest thing ever. | |
| But I think that, you know, so years and years ago, I signed, I can't remember, dating, online dating was in it so early, and I was curious about it, tried it out. | |
| And so they said, you know, what are you looking for in a woman? | |
| There was one of these questionnaires or whatever, right? | |
| You know, I don't even know. | |
| It's almost never even crossed my mind. | |
| Availability? | |
| That was it, you know? | |
| Willing to go out with me or whatever. | |
| And it was, I mean, this is where I met the woman through this. | |
| We went on a coffee and This is the woman who was complaining to me all about her ex-boyfriend who ran up $17,000 in credit card debt. | |
| You know, this is back when $17,000 really meant something. | |
| And then I sort of thought, you know what? | |
| I mean, God, I mean, I guess I want someone university educated. | |
| I guess I want someone who's traveled. | |
| I guess I want someone who's got some literary... | |
| I guess I want someone who, you know, and then I started all sort of poured out. | |
| I started to think about, well, what is it that I am actually looking for? | |
| And then sort of things began to change. | |
| I began to look for women more appropriate to what it is that I wanted or what it is that suited me. | |
| And I think that for you... | |
| I would try and figure that out. | |
| Like, what do I want in a man? | |
| Give yourself an age range, an educational level, hobbies, and all that kind of stuff. | |
| Ideally, what books would you have loved them to have read and loved, and that kind of stuff. | |
| And then, you know, I think there's just a kind of grit your teeth, don't settle stuff that I had to sort of wrestle with that was important and very helpful for me. | |
| Mm-hmm. | |
| Yeah, that reminds me. | |
| I have an OkCupid profile. | |
| It's an online dating thing. | |
| And I just pulled up my self-summary and then what I'm looking for. | |
| It's not really that specific. | |
| And it has really nothing to do with... | |
| What does it say? | |
| What does it say? | |
| You want to hear it? | |
| It goes... | |
| It says... | |
| Carbon-based pulse extra. | |
| No! | |
| Only one foot in the grave, please. | |
| Not two. | |
| I'm not that face. | |
| Just kidding. | |
| I'm just kidding. | |
| I'm just having some fun. | |
| I'm not that face. | |
| Okay. | |
| I wrote, I admire integrity. | |
| I consider all forms of self-expression art. | |
| Overall, I am a sensitive and analytical woman who loves being active, learning, and helping others. | |
| I am looking for someone who is deep, relaxed, spontaneous, and who is a great communicator. | |
| So, I don't really have any, you know, education level here. | |
| I don't have... | |
| Wait, sorry. | |
| Did I miss the bit where it's ideal if they smell of mothballs, have suspenders, you know, an inch and a half long and have to go to bed at 6pm? | |
| I'm kidding, I'm kidding. | |
| Just one minute. | |
| I love to help people upstairs. | |
| You know, because I'm 47, I can make these jokes. | |
| In five years, they won't be funny anymore. | |
| You're too young for me. | |
| That's right. | |
| Oh my god, it's pathetic. | |
| No, it's not pathetic. | |
| It's silly. | |
| It's just, I don't know. | |
| I think I am very much trying to find clarity in my decision-making, you know? | |
| Right. | |
| And, you know, you can't get clarity from people highly susceptible to cataracts. | |
| Okay, that was the last one. | |
| The last possible one. | |
| Oh, my goodness. | |
| Right. | |
| So, I mean, okay, but let's say that that is your standard, right? | |
| I mean, did the guy... | |
| That you went out with, did they meet that standard? | |
| Yeah. | |
| You had integrity? | |
| Oh, come on! | |
| That was the first one! | |
| You know what it is around people who are lifestyle-driven? | |
| It's... | |
| They have great integrity in their lifestyle, but not such great integrity in maybe how they treat themselves on a different level. | |
| That might sound muddy and foggy, but let me explain. | |
| I deal a lot with people who are very in tune with how food and allergens, their environment... | |
| How all of that affects their bodies, right? | |
| So I end up dealing with very highly sensitive individuals. | |
| And the highly sensitive individual, if they're not revered as sensitive, but they are considered overtly sensitive or fussy or anxious or anything negative around that, | |
| and they accept that, they accept I believe and I think I've seen that they carry themselves through life as almost a ghost. | |
| Like they're not part of society. | |
| So I think that's why they're very prone to becoming kind of mystical and Blurry on their boundaries, but they're very specific about what they put in their bodies, and they're very specific about their environment. | |
| Does that make sense? | |
| Environment meaning not people, but the quality of air they are around, the quality of water they drink, you know, all those very specific things that People who are into philosophy don't necessarily pay too much attention to because they're more involved with the ethics of things rather than how much pH their water is. | |
| Does that make sense? | |
| Yeah, I mean, I would call people like that pretentious, which is that they really care about the minutiae of what goes into their bodies. | |
| But they don't have anything in their bank accounts or they don't have any grounding. | |
| By the age of 61, you should spend a little bit more time figuring out what's virtue, what's right and what's wrong rather than exactly what you should be putting in your body, right? | |
| Well, to this population, it's more virtuous to be considering the amount of mining going on in the country as opposed to the amount of child abuse going on in the country. | |
| You know what I mean? | |
| Right. | |
| Right. | |
| But that's just, that's lefty granola conformity, right? | |
| It's... | |
| I mean, sorry, I know you're part of this, I mean, you're orbiting this community, but I'm just pointing it out, right? | |
| I mean, if they're really concerned about exploitation, right, then they shouldn't be exploiting people, right? | |
| Right. | |
| I remember... | |
| And, yeah... | |
| I remember one very specific instance that told me I was not supposed to be with that man anymore because of how he treated a certain situation involving a small child. | |
| And I had no problem with standing up to the parent. | |
| And then when I went, you know, back in his presence, he said, that was really, really brave of you, but probably unnecessary. | |
| And, you know... | |
| All that. | |
| But then my, you know, my integrity... | |
| Unnecessary. | |
| What does that mean? | |
| Unnecessary. | |
| I don't know what that means in that. | |
| It's like the word inappropriate. | |
| I don't know what unnecessary means. | |
| I mean, other than oxygen, what does oxygen I consider necessary? | |
| What does he mean by unnecessary? | |
| Unnecessary. | |
| Well, obviously, something I did triggered some kind of anxiety in him that probably mirrored his own childhood experience. | |
| And, you know, his god or his identity that he... | |
| Believes in, wasn't there to protect him, so... | |
| No person was there to protect him, so... | |
| Whoa. | |
| You have become quite expert at making excuses for people. | |
| I mean, could he not just potentially be a manipulative dick? | |
| Well, isn't that the underlining cause of manipulative dickism, right? | |
| No, not when you're 61. | |
| By 61, you don't get to claim childhood anymore. | |
| Hmm. | |
| Right? | |
| Childhood is, you know, fine, 20s, maybe, you know, early 30s. | |
| I think for you it's fair, because, I mean, you just had a completely wretched experience as a kid. | |
| But not 61. | |
| But consider this not as an excuse given, but as an understanding, and that is when I decided it was done. | |
| You know what I mean? | |
| It was, okay, he obviously wasn't applying his... | |
| Experience to some personal knowledge and then implementing that in his life. | |
| So somebody incapable of doing that is not somebody that I wanted to be around. | |
| I really want to be able to assert myself in front of abusive parents and assert the child's right. | |
| No, what you did is incredible. | |
| And for people who, you know, For people who haven't tried it, I mean, it's a challenging thing to do, and I think it's fantastic that you're doing that. | |
| Thanks. | |
| I do it a lot. | |
| I could have known. | |
| It's incredible. | |
| But let me ask you this. | |
| Good. | |
| How could you have known before three months that this was who the guy was? | |
| I can tell you if you stuck. | |
| Do you want to help me? | |
| Could you help me? | |
| I'd love to help you. | |
| Really? | |
| You'd like to help? | |
| Yeah, yeah. | |
| Okay, go ahead. | |
| I mean, I'm on the assumption that I'm helping. | |
| Okay, so when you first started dating this guy, did he ask you if you want children? | |
| No. | |
| No, he didn't. | |
| Well, that's all you need to know. | |
| Really? | |
| Yeah. | |
| That's it. | |
| Really? | |
| That's it. | |
| Why? | |
| Why is that all you need to know? | |
| Wow. | |
| Okay. | |
| All right. | |
| I'm getting it now. | |
| Ah, yes. | |
| Clever cookie. | |
| Okay, what do you got? | |
| What do you got? | |
| Well, it seems that from the beginning, I could, I would, well, the narcissism in him is pretty much, it's huge, right? | |
| For some, well, self-centered, pretentious, yeah. | |
| because if you're engaging in, you know, if you're spending time with somebody that is, you know, very personal and intimate, you're going to want to know these details about them. | |
| And if... | |
| You're close. | |
| You're close. | |
| Not quite it, but that's close. | |
| I would just say that he wasn't really interested in who I was, yet he was spending time with me. | |
| Does that make sense? | |
| No, it's not. | |
| Because he could have asked you about anything. | |
| Why did I specifically say about kids? | |
| I don't know. | |
| All I can think about is his consideration for the future together with me. | |
| I don't know. | |
| Help? | |
| No. | |
| Any man who dates a woman in her early 30s who doesn't ask her about children is a dick. | |
| And an exploiter. | |
| He's an exploiter. | |
| Can I tell you why? | |
| Oh, yeah, yeah, please. | |
| Why? | |
| No, you can tell me. | |
| Um... | |
| I really... | |
| Can I... I don't want... | |
| You can guess wrong. | |
| And look, I could be wrong, too. | |
| Yes, you know. | |
| Oracle, right? | |
| I could get completely wrong. | |
| I'll tell you what I think, and then you can tell me if I'm, you know, you are the woman in her early 30s, so you can tell me what you think. | |
| Yeah, I'm calling to hear what you think. | |
| I'd like to hear what you think. | |
| All right. | |
| So when I was in my early 30s, I dated a woman who was older, a lot older. | |
| I think she was 39 or something like that. | |
| And I said to her, I said, you know, I like you a lot, but I'm aware that, like, do you want to have kids? | |
| She said, I do want to have kids. | |
| And I said, well, then I get that this is a serious thing, right? | |
| Because let's say I date you for a year, and then you're 40, and then I'm like, oh, you know, I found someone else, right? | |
| I've just taken away possibly your chance to have kids. | |
| Now, I was going through therapy, and I was like, you know, when I'm just kind of first becoming who I am now, I don't really feel like I'm ready to have kids soon. | |
| So I'm aware about your fertility window and that you want kids, and that's your choice. | |
| I'd like to date, but I'm not going to have kids in the next year or two. | |
| Right? | |
| Well, this is the conversation. | |
| Right? | |
| It means you're present with this person. | |
| No, it means I'm not using her for my own purposes. | |
| Right. | |
| If you want to have, like, if he says, look, do you want to have kids? | |
| And you say yes. | |
| And he says, would you like a father who, when he rocks the baby in the cradle, creaks more than the cradle does? | |
| Right. | |
| And you'd say, no, I don't really want a father in his 60s. | |
| What am I, Anthony Quinn's mistress? | |
| And you'd say, okay, well then, we shouldn't date. | |
| Right? | |
| Because you care about integrity, right? | |
| Yeah. | |
| Yeah. | |
| I mean, that's the great thing about being a woman in your early 30s is anybody who doesn't talk about kids up front is a fool or an exploiter. | |
| Or is completely clueless, which is, I don't know if it's even worse or it doesn't matter, right? | |
| But not someone to date. | |
| You don't date women in their early to mid-30s or any time in their 30s without having the conversation about kids. | |
| That's just decency 101. | |
| I really wonder why I'm not, why I hadn't grasped that. | |
| Honestly, it makes me very, I guess, concerned about my understanding of this time in my life. | |
| Go on. | |
| Well, I really never thought that I would make it this far. | |
| What do you mean just in terms of your life as a whole? | |
| Yeah. | |
| Right. | |
| Go on. | |
| And I suffered three years of anxiety around what I was going to do for an occupation. | |
| Right. | |
| I remember that. | |
| And I remember the call I had with you when I was really excited about becoming a certified dog trainer. | |
| And then the call ended up, at the end of the call, I felt lost again because of a comment you made about how If a world of happy dogs is what I wanted, then that was fine. | |
| And I thought, no, I don't want happy dogs. | |
| I want happy people and I want happy children in the world. | |
| And I don't want abuse. | |
| And I don't want any more of this trauma going around. | |
| And I wanted to change the world. | |
| So I started looking into psychology programs and every step of the way getting into community college seemed to torment my mind and I couldn't really get myself to go through any of it. | |
| So then I found the health coaching certification program And I kind of looked at it like it was baby steps towards helping people without taking it too seriously. | |
| Right. | |
| Right? | |
| It's ridiculous. | |
| No. | |
| No, not ridiculous either. | |
| It is because I don't really have a focus. | |
| My focus is like gluten-free and dairy-free people. | |
| And then we talk about child abuse, you know, within... | |
| A conversation. | |
| And then it turns out that we're not even talking about food anymore, you know? | |
| So then now I'm looking at the college programs again to become a psychologist. | |
| But I've faced my graduation for the health coaching program with a lot of anxiety. | |
| And Right as I was graduating, I lost my job. | |
| So all of this self-defeatist stuff was coming out and The Critic has been coming out. | |
| It was around that time that I started seeing that older gentleman. | |
| which is interesting. | |
| So I'm doing a couple things. | |
| I'm living and breathing in my 30s, and that was never really a thought. | |
| You know, I never, I really didn't want to be living and breathing in my 30s, and having graduated anything is scary and daunting. | |
| So, you know, living among A mindset that's not so clear is probably benefiting the part of me that just wants to be very comfortable and not scared by a world. | |
| But it is scary. | |
| The idea that comfort in the fogginess of history is safe, it's not. | |
| Right? | |
| It's not. | |
| The familiar... | |
| It feels safe, but it's not. | |
| Right? | |
| Because you had a guy who was 61, who got to date a pretty girl 30 years younger, and he's thinking about his own needs. | |
| He's not thinking about your needs. | |
| Yeah. | |
| That's not safe. | |
| Right! | |
| This low-rent foggy world of people who obsess about food and don't focus on virtue and give you bullshit criticisms when you stand up for a child being yelled at like, that was unnecessary. | |
| Compared to what, you old fuck? | |
| Right. | |
| Right. | |
| Compared to how much gluten is in your fucking pizza dough? | |
| That's necessary? | |
| Are you kidding me? | |
| Are you fucking kidding me? | |
| You pretentious old fart. | |
| I love you. | |
| But, I mean, it's right, right? | |
| Yeah. | |
| This brave fucking woman who went through unbelievable shit as a kid is standing up for a kid. | |
| She's being like, well, that's unnecessary. | |
| Right? | |
| Yeah, right. | |
| Thank you. | |
| Metaphysics is necessary. | |
| Apparently. | |
| Whatever that is for these mystics. | |
| But standing up for kids being abused? | |
| Not necessary. | |
| Yeah, craggy old mothball smelling son of a bitch. | |
| Sorry. | |
| I know this is a guy you felt something for, but excuse me. | |
| Thank you. - Thank you. | |
| You're welcome. | |
| You're having fun on this call. | |
| Don't even pretend you're not. | |
| You know, I'm just showing up to work, putting my shoulder to the wheel, you know me, taking another bullet for the cause. | |
| You know, I had to go to California in December. | |
| I mean, don't tell me. | |
| It's like storming the beach at Normandy being a philosopher. | |
| It's just work, work, work. | |
| To put up at Joe Rogan being, like, entertaining and funny and shit. | |
| Anyway. | |
| You're a multi-faceted philosopher, that's for sure. | |
| Thank you. | |
| But you did make it, right? | |
| You did make it. | |
| And you've got, like, women, you guys can't be killed. | |
| Like, you're, like, undead. | |
| Like, guys, what, are dying eight years younger than women these days? | |
| I mean, you're like the zombie horde. | |
| I mean, you and Social Security get some very exciting emotional changes, right? | |
| So you could have like 60 more years to go, right? | |
| Yeah. | |
| Or more. | |
| Yeah, I plan on it now. | |
| Good. | |
| Well, start planning for it. | |
| Right. | |
| I don't mean the career thing. | |
| Yeah. | |
| I mean, you're tootling along on that, right? | |
| And I think that's great. | |
| And tootling sounds dismissive, but I mean, I know how anxious you were before. | |
| You found something which is relatively enjoyable for you, right? | |
| Yeah, I guess. | |
| I mean, the work, not the people necessarily. | |
| Yeah, I'm very much grappling with it on a daily basis, though. | |
| It's something that I might need to find another, a more suitable therapist to help me with. | |
| But yes, that is a path that I... Right, so... | |
| Yeah. | |
| So, I mean, if you want to have kids, then you need to be clear about that within yourself. | |
| Now, the desire and the achievement are not the same thing. | |
| You can't know for sure if you're going to have kids. | |
| I mean, you might meet the right guy. | |
| Lord knows you might have premature ovarian failure. | |
| Your FSH could be high. | |
| Who knows, right? | |
| But you can plan for it, right? | |
| And that means... | |
| That you've got to look for a guy who's got some kind of income. | |
| You've got to look for a guy who's not looking like he's slowly deflating with age, right? | |
| And look for a guy who wants kids and look for a guy who's sensitive enough to know that he's dating a woman in his early 30s and if you don't talk about kids, you're an asshole. | |
| Man... | |
| Yeah, well, that's terrifying. | |
| That actually is so terrifying. | |
| Maybe, okay, I think I need to work on that, actually. | |
| The image of the person, right, to have a relationship with. | |
| That is a scary thought, considering... | |
| I think it just brings back memories of seeing wedding photos of my parents. | |
| That's, you know, they're in their 30s. | |
| And they found each other, right? | |
| And they're not... | |
| They didn't last very long. | |
| Why is it scary to have a functional man who is empathetic and sensitive? | |
| Um... | |
| I mean, are you in fact just a cold-hearted witch who will eat him alive? | |
| Is that, like, you're that way, right? | |
| I mean, you've always seemed very sensitive to me and empathetic. | |
| And why is that wrong to have, you know, you but with testicles? | |
| I mean, why is that? | |
| Well, I would say that I thought I found somebody like that a few years ago. | |
| And it just turned out that they talked the talk. | |
| They didn't really actually walk it. | |
| And I was very disappointed. | |
| And at the end of it, he basically said that philosophy was just a bunch of mental masturbation and You know, he wanted to smoke weed and drink. | |
| Alright, so how could you... | |
| Okay, tell you what. | |
| I will extend to you this offer. | |
| I will extend to you this offer. | |
| Next guy who you're romantically interested in, have a conversation with him and call me. | |
| And call you. | |
| And tell you what he said. | |
| Yeah, tell me, because you're 31, right? | |
| And for a mother, that's 30 wonderful. | |
| Good time to start planning, right? | |
| Mother-to-be. | |
| So you call me and I will tell you what the signs are. | |
| Really? | |
| You do that? | |
| Absolutely. | |
| Absolutely. | |
| I want my listeners to breed. | |
| I think... | |
| It's a whole lot easier than finding new people. | |
| Just get you people to replicate. | |
| I'm just taking a page from the Muslims. | |
| I think that's just, you know... | |
| Breeding is easier than conversion. | |
| That's all. | |
| That's basically all I'm saying. | |
| So yes, absolutely. | |
| All the fertile women who listen to this show can call me for advice on dating. | |
| Absolutely. | |
| No, I will. | |
| And, you know, I bet you if you... | |
| Give me the first conversation with this guy, and I said, well, here's a warning sign, and here's a warning sign, and here's a warning sign, asking about this, this, and this. | |
| And then you call, oh, okay, well, here you go, right? | |
| Mm-hmm. | |
| I would love that support. | |
| That would be fantastic. | |
| Don't, you know, don't reinvent, you know, the wheel all alone. | |
| Oh, that's so amazing. | |
| Yeah. | |
| You know, you could have asked any time in four years. | |
| No, you see, you don't want to ask me, but your ovaries do. | |
| You put your ovaries on the line and have them talk to me. | |
| We're channeling the potential. | |
| Your eggs are like, don't listen to the vagina. | |
| Talk to Steph. | |
| Don't listen to the hormones. | |
| We want to breathe. | |
| Talk to Steph. | |
| Put the X on the line. | |
| We'll talk. | |
| Okay. | |
| I'll give them your phone number. | |
| Absolutely. | |
| All right. | |
| Well... | |
| No, I'm serious about that. | |
| It doesn't have to be a show or anything like that. | |
| I'm serious about that. | |
| I mean, you deserve a great guy. | |
| I mean, you're going to therapy, you're doing the work, you listen to this show for years. | |
| I mean, you deserve a great guy, but, you know, it's not something that you are... | |
| None of the doofuses want your doofus alert functioning, right? | |
| No, they don't. | |
| They don't. | |
| Yeah. | |
| So give me a call and I'll give you my thoughts. | |
| I mean, what do I know, right? | |
| But I might have something useful to offer. | |
| But I think certainly with this guy, I'd be like, hey, did you have your back kids? | |
| No? | |
| Well, what does that tell you? | |
| Uh-huh. | |
| He's not thinking about your needs or how his needs might negatively impact your entire life. | |
| Our genes made it from the primordial soup, what, four billion years ago? | |
| Our genes made it to here. | |
| It feels kind of dickish to not keep them going. | |
| Well, it's been four billion years. | |
| Great ride. | |
| I think we're done. | |
| Thank you for the last four billion years. | |
| Nah, we're done. | |
| It's just like, come on, keep it going. | |
| Four billion years. | |
| It feels like dropping the last egg in an egg race, so to speak, right? | |
| Thanks for your help, everyone. | |
| Oh, shoot. | |
| dropped it. | |
| And I mean, look, I mean, you care so much about child abuse. | |
| You obviously be such a great mom relative to, I mean, God, the people who breed. | |
| I'm a nanny. | |
| I'm a nanny these days. | |
| And Yeah. | |
| I work out of an agency, so I have seen over 100 families in the past year. | |
| And it's really helped me realize that I really want to be doing the work. | |
| I really want to be helping people who want to make the changes and want to help Understanding why they behave the way they do. | |
| So, thank you. | |
| Thank you for this call, Steph. | |
| Thanks for your support. | |
| Oh, you're welcome. | |
| You are welcome. | |
| And, yeah, we'll find you next time. | |
| Yeah, I'm sure we can. | |
| All right. | |
| Mike, do we have a short call? | |
| One more? | |
| Manu, is it a short call? | |
| Manu. | |
| Manu, Manu. | |
| I think we lost him. | |
| I'm sorry. | |
| I'm here. | |
| I'm here. | |
| Yeah. | |
| Oh, sorry. | |
| How are you doing? | |
| I'm so sorry that we got to you so late. | |
| I really appreciate your patience. | |
| Sorry for the lengthy, lengthy wait. | |
| Oh, hey, Stefan. | |
| Yeah, then... | |
| I have been listening to your show for over a year. | |
| It's been really great. | |
| Oh, thank you. | |
| I know that you are very critical of religion. | |
| And I consider Catholicism to be a rational religion. | |
| Like, you know, I accept the claims of Catholicism for two... | |
| And you seem to be aware of the differences among, like, you know, different groups of Christianity. | |
| So I would like to know what are, like, some of your main objections to Catholicism. | |
| Main objections to Catholicism? | |
| You mean the sort of specific doctrines that I have a problem with? | |
| Well, like all religions, I really focus on the doctrines that most negatively affect children, and those two would be the doctrine of hell and the doctrine of original sin. | |
| I think those, and the things like the evils of masturbation and the anti-sexual pleasure focus, sex is for procreation and so on. | |
| Some of the stuff that the Pope does, opposition to condoms in Africa, where, of course, HIV is spreading like wildfire, and so on. | |
| Some of the policies that accrue to that. | |
| I think the Pope, the last Pope, I think, said that a woman had to have sex with her husband, even if he had herpes, or even if he had AIDS or gonorrhea. | |
| And this I've considered to be pretty wretched. | |
| So, yeah, those were just off the top of my head. | |
| Those would be a few of the things that I would have some trouble with. | |
| I wish this was a long call, but I think we have constraints in time. | |
| I accept all the arguments for anarcho-capitalism. | |
| I recently became an anarcho-capitalist from a libertarian. | |
| But, you know, when I hear the objections you make to Catholicism, I don't know. | |
| I feel like you are not giving a fair treatment of the arguments made by Catholicism. | |
| I'm not sure what fair means in that context. | |
| Have Catholics spent 1,500 or 1,800 years, however you want to count it, Since the Council of Worms, I mean, have they spent years telling children that they're going to burn in hell for, for instance, impure thoughts? | |
| Like, to me, like, you know, the fundamental question is, like, whether hell exists or not, right? | |
| You know, the feelings and all, that comes next, right? | |
| No, but they have no proof that hell exists. | |
| Like, we have, like, according to Catholicism, like, we have revelation regarding the existence of hell. | |
| Okay, but revelation to a philosopher, revelation is meaningless. | |
| Why is it meaningless? | |
| Because it's as meaningless to a philosopher as it is to a scientist. | |
| I have a revelation that cancer is caused by invisible bats. | |
| Okay, well, the scientist says that there's a meaningless thing. | |
| Okay, I would say no, revelation doesn't contradict reason. | |
| Yes. | |
| No. | |
| By definition, revelation contradicts reason. | |
| Because if it didn't contradict reason, it would be called rational. | |
| It would not be called revelation. | |
| Revelation, by its very definition, must contradict reason. | |
| No, there could be rational revelation, right? | |
| For example, like No, give me an example of a rational revelation. | |
| Like, for example, I would say the doctrine of Trinity, right? | |
| So, the Trinity, like, according to Catholicism and many other Christian, you know, sectors, we could not know about Trinity if we hadn't had a revelation. | |
| How is that, but how, sorry, how is the Holy Trinity rational? | |
| Like, How is it irrational? | |
| No, how is it rational? | |
| See, look, I can have a revelation that the Earth is a sphere, right? | |
| But the only way I'll know if it's rational is if it's proven, right? | |
| So you can have an inspiration, like the guy who figured out the structure of the carbon atom dreamt of a snake eating its own tail. | |
| So the revelation was he had a dream about it. | |
| But then the only way that we know it's true is he worked it out rationally and it ended up being empirically proven. | |
| Right? | |
| So, you could have a revelation, but you cannot have a rational revelation because once it has been rationally proven, empirically validated, it is no longer a revelation. | |
| Like, we don't say now that the Earth is a sphere. | |
| That's a revelation, right? | |
| That's an empirically established fact, right? | |
| We don't say that the sun is a star. | |
| That's a revelation, right? | |
| Okay. | |
| So once it has been proven, it cannot exist in the realm of revelation anymore. | |
| Like once something is rationally proven, it no longer exists in the realm of faith anymore. | |
| I don't take it on faith that gases expand when heated, right? | |
| That's just... | |
| Proven, right? | |
| So, yeah, revelation must, by its very definition, be anti-rational. | |
| Okay. | |
| Okay. | |
| But I don't know, like, I don't know how, like, you're saying, like, revelation by, you know, by definition is irrational, right? | |
| Mm-hmm. | |
| I don't know how, like, How could that be? | |
| I would say, no, no, there could be a revelation that are rational, but that doesn't... | |
| No, but how would you know whether... | |
| Sorry, you've got to follow the argument, though, right? | |
| So how would you know if a revelation was rational or not? | |
| You would have to prove it using reason. | |
| But once you've proven it using reason, it's just a fact or a truth. | |
| It's not a revelation anymore, right? | |
| Well, let's say, like, the revelation about, you know, heaven or hell, right? | |
| I cannot... | |
| Right. | |
| So, okay, so you have a dream, sorry, you have a dream that if you masturbate, you go to hell, right? | |
| Or you have a vision or whatever, and it feels very real to you. | |
| It feels very vivid, okay? | |
| Well, that's a dream, or you could say that's a revelation or inspiration or something like that. | |
| But there's no truth value in that whatsoever. | |
| I mean, I have dreams every night that I can fly that I still have a car to get me around. | |
| It could be true as well as false, right? | |
| We don't know. | |
| I just had a dream or an inspiration regarding the existence of heaven or hell. | |
| It could be true or it could be false, right? | |
| Like the origin of the belief doesn't necessarily... | |
| Yes, but sorry, but it has no truth or false value. | |
| It cannot be evaluated. | |
| Until there's a rational theory, and in the case of heaven or hell, there would need to be empirical evidence for its existence, right? | |
| Like, we don't read Lord of the Rings and say, well, it could be that Middle Earth exists, right? | |
| We don't say that. | |
| We say this is a work of fiction. | |
| And Tolkien's world is a whole lot more consistent than religious doctrine, right? | |
| So we don't say, well, the existence of Middle Earth, eh, you know, it's up in the air. | |
| We say, well, that's a work of fiction. | |
| It came out of a man's prodigious imagination over many years. | |
| But it's not in the realm of maybe, right? | |
| That's just a work of fiction, right? | |
| It's a fictional world. | |
| Okay. | |
| So the existence of hell, if you have a revelation about it, then that is something that might prompt you to look for its existence and to evaluate its possibility. | |
| Mm-hmm. | |
| Now, hell, of course, is a place populated by demons who are sadistic and evil and love to torture eternal souls because they have been sent there by the arbitrary and often contradictory rules of an all-loving God, right? | |
| So if you're going to say hell exists, then you have to prove God, you have to prove demons, you have to prove soul, you have to produce eternal fire that burns without a fire source. | |
| You have to prove the malevolence of demons and the benevolence of God. | |
| You have to prove that life exists after death. | |
| All of these things, all of them, would have to be established both rationally and empirically in order for hell to be possible. | |
| I have a problem with proving it empirically. | |
| I think there are good arguments for the existence of God, and there is no contradiction in revelation. | |
| There could be revelation. | |
| But there's no such thing as good arguments. | |
| An argument is true or false. | |
| It's valid or it's invalid. | |
| Arguments are not like cakes. | |
| Some of them taste better than others. | |
| But you cannot, you know, you cannot have, you know, like 100% certainty regarding to arguments, right? | |
| Arguments make it more probable than not, right? | |
| Not some arguments. | |
| Two and two make four. | |
| That's not a probability. | |
| That's an absolute, right? | |
| Yeah, that is right, yeah. | |
| Gases expand when heated? | |
| Yeah, I mean, that's, I guess, theoretically, you could find a gas that doesn't. | |
| I mean, whatever, right? | |
| There is an exception right there. | |
| Yeah, you exist and I exist. | |
| These are absolutes. | |
| When it comes to logical truths and mathematical truths, maybe you cannot find any exceptions, okay? | |
| You have to just take it as self-evident truths. | |
| But when it comes to laws of nature and all, we don't know. | |
| Maybe there could be exceptions, right? | |
| Sure, absolutely. | |
| But I don't see how that helps with the existence of a deity. | |
| Because a deity is two and two make five. | |
| A deity isn't, maybe we'll find some strange thing orbiting the dark side of the moon. | |
| How is deity like two and two makes five? | |
| I don't think there is a contradiction, you know, when it comes to deity. | |
| Well, no, because when you say a deity exists, you're saying that existence is that which can, is not logically self-contradictory. | |
| What do you mean? | |
| Hang on. | |
| God is logically self-contradictory, and God has never been empirically validated, which means that that is exactly the same as non-existence. | |
| So when we say God exists, we're saying non-existence exists, which is a contradiction and needs no further examination. | |
| May I ask you, what do you mean by empirical validation? | |
| Well, I mean, if I say a car exists, right? | |
| Like, let's say I have some BMW. And I say, I have a BMW. Well, the BMW is not a self-contradictory entity. | |
| So it could exist. | |
| I could have a car, right? | |
| Now, then if I say, here's my car, here's my name, here's my driver's license, here's the ownership papers, this is my BMW, you can sit in and drive it around, then it's empirically proven that I have a BMW, right? | |
| So that's, it's theoretically possible because cars are not self-contradictory, and now it's empirically proven because we've driven around in it, right? | |
| Okay, so God is consciousness without matter, but consciousness is an effect of matter, right? | |
| There's no consciousness without a nearby brain, right? | |
| There's no consciousness without the brain. | |
| You're just asserting it, right? | |
| We don't know that. | |
| No, I'm not. | |
| Have you ever seen or heard of, or is there any empirical proof of consciousness without matter? | |
| Like, absence of evidence is not, you know, evidence of absent, right? | |
| Well, it kind of is in a way. | |
| So, for instance, gravity requires mass, right? | |
| Okay. | |
| Can there be gravity without mass? | |
| Gravity is the force of attraction, right? | |
| Yeah, I mean, it's the gravity well, it's like the things that keeps the moon going around the Earth. | |
| I can think of it. | |
| I can, in my mind, possibly think of it. | |
| No, you really can't, because gravity is an effect of mass, so you're just taking the two concepts and stripping mass out of it, right? | |
| But you can't have gravity without mass. | |
| Can you have life without a living body? | |
| Well, no, life is an effect of biochemical reactions in a living body. | |
| Can you have light without a light source? | |
| Well, no. | |
| And so if people want to say that there's an entity that has consciousness with no material form whatsoever, then what they're saying is that there is a mind without a brain. | |
| Yes, right. | |
| In other words, there's an effect of matter without the matter. | |
| That's not possible. | |
| You cannot have the effect of matter without the matter. | |
| I disagree when you say that consciousness is an effect of matter. | |
| I don't know. | |
| Maybe it doesn't follow. | |
| But you're using your consciousness to argue that, which is an effect of your brain. | |
| You're using your brain To tell me I don't agree that consciousness is an effect of the brain. | |
| But you're using the consciousness that is an effect of your brain to tell me that. | |
| If you can tell me that without using your brain, well, then we've gotten somewhere. | |
| But I don't know. | |
| Maybe I will survive my death at all, right? | |
| But then that's to say that your consciousness is not dependent upon matter. | |
| I don't know. | |
| Which is to say that there's gravity that is not dependent upon mass. | |
| Do you see a logical contradiction there? | |
| I don't see one. | |
| Well, if consciousness is an effect of matter, then consciousness cannot exist without matter. | |
| If God is consciousness without matter, then God cannot exist. | |
| So we have a problem there, right? | |
| Like you're saying, in order for consciousness to exist, you need matter, right? | |
| I don't know. | |
| I don't know. | |
| How can you say it is true? | |
| Like, I can say that all the consciousness we know are, you know, dependent on matter. | |
| No, but it's... | |
| Okay, I believe it's true. | |
| I mean, just because I can't... | |
| I mean, the idea that there would be an effect of matter without matter is self-contradictory. | |
| But let's say that I'm wrong. | |
| Could be, right? | |
| I'm not a philosopher of science. | |
| So, but if you are going to claim that there's consciousness without matter... | |
| That is an extraordinary claim. | |
| It's like going to a physics conference and saying, I can produce gravity without mass, right? | |
| Now, will they believe you? | |
| No, you're talking about science, right? | |
| So, no. | |
| No, I'm talking about proof. | |
| Science is just one subset of proof. | |
| If you go to a physics conference and you say, I can produce gravity without matter, without mass, They will say, I don't believe you. | |
| That's an extraordinary claim. | |
| You need to prove it to me. | |
| Because you're the one making the extraordinary claim. | |
| I don't believe that in order for something to be true, you need to have scientific evidence, right? | |
| But no, you're making the claim that there's consciousness without anger. | |
| You're saying it's true. | |
| I'm not telling you. | |
| You're saying God exists. | |
| You're saying it's true. | |
| I'm saying it is possible, okay? | |
| It is possible. | |
| You're asking... | |
| No. | |
| No. | |
| Religious people, if you're talking about Catholicism or whatever, they don't say it's possible. | |
| They say it's true. | |
| Okay, so in order... | |
| The Bible isn't like, well... | |
| Could be, maybe, I don't know. | |
| In order to show that there is no contradiction in religion, first you have to establish there is no philosophical contradiction in believing that consciousness can exist without matter, right? | |
| First you have to establish that, right? | |
| That's what I'm pointing out. | |
| First, there is no philosophical contradiction there, okay? | |
| In consciousness, like, existing without matter. | |
| It is possible, okay? | |
| First, you have to admit that, right? | |
| Well, I personally don't believe that it is. | |
| And I don't think that's just a personal belief. | |
| That's as axiomatic as saying that gravity can exist without mass. | |
| And consciousness is far more complicated than gravity. | |
| And God's consciousness is far more complicated, infinitely more complicated than human consciousness, right? | |
| Yes, yeah. | |
| So you're saying infinite complexity can exist without any brain or any physical dependence whatsoever? | |
| Yes, it is possible. | |
| It's a completely outlandish claim. | |
| I reject that it's possible. | |
| I know that a squared circle or a married bachelor cannot exist. | |
| We both agree, I say, right? | |
| Right, and if consciousness is an effective matter, immaterial consciousness cannot exist. | |
| Okay, then you need to prove that if consciousness is an effective matter, and the only consciousness that we've ever been aware of, and that could conceivably exist, depends on matter. | |
| Well, immaterial consciousness... | |
| Is immaterial. | |
| In other words, if something is immaterial, it does not exist. | |
| I don't know. | |
| How can you make that clear? | |
| No, listen, this is important. | |
| If something is immaterial, then it does not exist. | |
| I don't know. | |
| I don't know how it is true. | |
| Like, you know, souls can exist, right? | |
| Thoughts can exist, right? | |
| Thoughts are not immaterial. | |
| Okay. | |
| Thoughts are very specific and can be measured, almost down to the last detail. | |
| Do you think thoughts can be measured? | |
| How can it be measured? | |
| You can create religious visions in people by inducing certain epileptic seizures in certain parts of the brain. | |
| They'll even see particular cherubs and angels and so on, right? | |
| So thoughts can certainly be measured. | |
| You can ask people to concentrate on something and you can see all the neurons firing and the fMRIs deep in the brain. | |
| They can absolutely be measured. | |
| They're not immaterial at all. | |
| No, like I have... | |
| They're as detectable as a heartbeat. | |
| You cannot see a thought right. | |
| How easy, like... | |
| What you can see is like electrons moving around, right? | |
| You can see some parts of the brain lighting up. | |
| You cannot see the thought that the person is seeing, right? | |
| I'm not sure what you mean. | |
| What are you saying? | |
| You mean is the inside of the brain like a movie theater? | |
| No, of course not. | |
| I understand. | |
| In order to have a thought, I think we have to have a brain, right? | |
| Yeah, I understand that, but what I'm saying is that you cannot just say, okay, therefore, thoughts can only be produced if they're reciprocated. | |
| Do you see what I mean? | |
| I mean, I kind of see what you mean, because you're saying that there could be some... | |
| Because we've only ever seen it doesn't mean that we'll never see any other kind of thing, right? | |
| Yeah, except that's not correct, though. | |
| No, I understand that. | |
| I understand that. | |
| But this is not just an empirical observation. | |
| Because a thought is the action of a biological mechanism, like the brain. | |
| brain. | |
| What we are familiar with until right now. | |
| Okay. | |
| Yeah, I accept it. | |
| Yeah. | |
| Right. | |
| And therefore, in the absence, we're just saying the same thing over and over again, so it doesn't really matter. | |
| But let's say that you don't accept my argument, which is fine. | |
| You don't. | |
| It still means, it doesn't mean that there might be a God. | |
| And it certainly doesn't mean that there might be a Catholic God, and it certainly doesn't mean that people 2,000 years ago who inherited a lot of these religions from other religious thoughts are even remotely correct. | |
| No, you have independent arguments, right? | |
| Yeah, I accept that. | |
| Okay, so how do you differentiate between truth and falsehood? | |
| How do you know the difference between what is true and what is false? | |
| How do you know? | |
| Okay, let's say there is a religion, and in that religion, the god mandates that rape is good or something like that, okay? | |
| So that conflicts with... | |
| No, no, no, sorry. | |
| I'm talking about epistemology, not ethics. | |
| Yeah, so forget about rape and Bibles and gods. | |
| How do you know the difference between truth and falsehood in your approach? | |
| My approach is reason and evidence, but you have a different approach because you want to allow for deities. | |
| So how do you know the difference between truth and false? | |
| I think we may disagree to what is reason and what is evidence, right? | |
| there is evidence with regards to scientific evidence, you know, and like, you know, like, so what do you mean by reason and evidence? | |
| That would be my question. | |
| What do I mean? | |
| Well, reason is non-contradictory identification of theories, propositions, and evidence is a sensual record, record through the senses, directly or indirectly, of the consistent behavior of matter and energy. | |
| Yeah, like, yeah, then I would say, I would agree with you, yeah, reason and evidence, yeah. | |
| Okay, so, um... | |
| You are not a skeptic, right? | |
| Consciousness exists... | |
| No, the evidence exists... | |
| Okay, let's forget... | |
| I'm not even going to go with the consciousness one. | |
| Let's switch to omnipotence and omniscience, right? | |
| So God is all-knowing and God is all-powerful, right? | |
| These are... | |
| A square circle. | |
| They can't both be true. | |
| Because if you're all-powerful, you can change anything you want. | |
| And if you're all-knowing, you know everything you're going to do in the future and everything that's going to happen in the future. | |
| Therefore, you can't change it. | |
| So if you're all-knowing, that invalidates all-powerful. | |
| If you're all-powerful, you cannot be all-knowing. | |
| Yeah, I know about this thing. | |
| But the thing is, like, you know, all-powerful or omnipotent doesn't mean, like, you can do just anything, okay? | |
| God cannot sin. | |
| He cannot die. | |
| No, no, all-powerful technically means you can do anything. | |
| No, that is a conditional thing, okay? | |
| All-powerful doesn't mean like, you know, you can do anything, okay? | |
| Whatever, you know, there is a condition to that. | |
| Whenever Christians make that claim, they just assume it, okay? | |
| They don't just, even, I think they can see the contradiction if it is, if it means what you say it means, okay? | |
| It doesn't mean like God can die, you know, all those things. | |
| God can create a square circle. | |
| God can forget things, you know? | |
| All-powerful just means... | |
| Okay, so God is not all-powerful. | |
| ...with regard to, he can act, you know, he can do whatever that is logically consistent, right? | |
| That's what we are saying. | |
| He can create a universe, but he cannot sin, you know, all those things. | |
| Well, I don't know if sin is logically consistent and all that kind of stuff, right? | |
| But God can sin, of course, because God, at least in the Bible, God kills, drowns the whole world except for Noah and the family, right? | |
| Even babies in the womb, right? | |
| Okay, there you have to know that God is the giver of life, right? | |
| If not for God, nothing exists, okay? | |
| God is the reason behind, you know, why is there something rather than nothing, okay? | |
| God can take life or give life as he wills it, okay? | |
| So God can murder. | |
| If I kill somebody, if I kill an innocent man, it is murder. | |
| But when God takes life, it is not murder. | |
| You just said that. | |
| I don't know what the argument is. | |
| Sorry, but you just stated that. | |
| I don't know what the argument is. | |
| I would say the moral duties are constituted by the commandments of a holy and loving God. | |
| But the loving God shouldn't be killing everyone, right? | |
| No, like taking a life doesn't mean he's killing, right? | |
| What? | |
| How is that not killing? | |
| God is the author of morality. | |
| If not for God, there will be no morality. | |
| What? | |
| I don't know what you're saying. | |
| So he kills everyone in the world except for Noah, his family, and the animals on the ark. | |
| You mean... | |
| Which is a universal, a near-universal genocide, killing animals and people throughout the entire world. | |
| Okay, then I would ask, why is there a Noah in the first place? | |
| Why is there Noah and all the animals there in the first place? | |
| How... | |
| Oh, so the argument is because God created the life, God can kill it. | |
| No, not kill it. | |
| I wouldn't... | |
| Okay, so then that would be true for parents, right? | |
| Parents create life, and therefore parents can kill children. | |
| No, no, no. | |
| Parents don't create life, okay? | |
| They participate in the life-giving act. | |
| They don't create it, okay, as God creates. | |
| God could create something from nothing, right? | |
| We cannot do that. | |
| No, I thought you said God couldn't do that, which violates the laws of physics. | |
| God couldn't do that. | |
| No, I mean... | |
| I'm sorry? | |
| Like... | |
| You said God can create something from nothing, but I thought you said that God couldn't do that which would violate the laws of physics. | |
| No, no, no. | |
| God can create something from nothing. | |
| Yeah. | |
| So God can violate the laws of physics. | |
| How is like laws of physics violated? | |
| Well, matter can neither be created nor destroyed. | |
| It can only be transferred from one form, matter and energy, from one form to another. | |
| That is a scientific law. | |
| Yeah, I accept that. | |
| But, you know, that doesn't... | |
| But creating something... | |
| God creating something from nothing doesn't violate any logical principles. | |
| I'm more concerned... | |
| Oh, so he can violate the laws of physics, but not the laws of logic. | |
| I don't... | |
| Like, for example, loss of... | |
| Like, yeah, miracle is a violation of the law of physics, right? | |
| Right? | |
| Yes. | |
| Yeah, he can do that. | |
| Yes. | |
| But he cannot violate the law of logic. | |
| Okay. | |
| Okay, so he can make Jesus walk on water, but he can't make a square circle or two and two make five. | |
| Okay, and how do you know this? | |
| You know, arguments... | |
| I mean, you're saying stuff, right? | |
| But my question is back to how do you know whether it's true or false? | |
| I mean, you're saying stuff. | |
| God can do this and God can do that. | |
| But how do you know? | |
| You have these traditional arguments for the existence of God from Aquinas, Dunst gods, and all those guys. | |
| And even Aristotle, right? | |
| Primor, all those things. | |
| And there are like accumulative arguments. | |
| We have this thing called morality. | |
| So we'll add all these things. | |
| And yeah, I think we can reach the point where you know that God exists and all. | |
| Yeah, that's, again, you're just making word salads here, right? | |
| I'm asking you, well, you're saying, well, God can do this and God can't do that and so on, and I'm asking you, how do you know? | |
| How do you know? | |
| Not what did other people say, but how do you know? | |
| You're the one making the argument, not Aquinas, right? | |
| No, I will, you know, I will, okay, I will start by saying, like, there is an external world, right? | |
| Yeah? | |
| You mean extended by consciousness? | |
| Okay, so since there is something, okay, from that something, you know, you could reach, you know, using this cosmological argument or argument for contingency, like you can reach a, you know, self-existent being. | |
| We call it God, right? | |
| That's how, you know... | |
| No, but I'm asking you, you're describing to me how one could conceivably do the argument if someone else did it. | |
| I'm asking you how you know that God can do this and can't do that and so on, right? | |
| Because you're telling me what God can and he can't violate the laws of logic, he can't be immoral, he can violate the laws of physics and so on. | |
| I'm asking you how you know these things. | |
| Because that's, this is some, I mean, you've said not only that he exists, but what he can and cannot do, and how good and bad and moral and immoral, how he's immune from his own moral, like you've gone way, way further than whether some consciousness can exist without matter, to now what that consciousness can and can't do, how moral it is, what moral rules it's bound by, which ones it can violate and why, and how those standards don't apply to people. | |
| You see, you've gone way far and you haven't even noticed. | |
| Because it seems plausible to you. | |
| And it seems plausible to you because you've been exposed to these religious thoughts probably for your whole life. | |
| And so they seem plausible to you. | |
| Well, God does miracles in the Bible, therefore God must be able to do miracles. | |
| Well, these things are logically contradictory, so we have to tweak them so they don't seem logically contradictory. | |
| This is called begging the question, right? | |
| I mean, well, God does exist, and the Bible must be true, and therefore this is how I know what God can and cannot do. | |
| But none of this is a valid methodology for determining truth from falsehood. | |
| As you know, there are 10,000 gods all around the world, and not even count the ones that were there throughout history and so on. | |
| And you don't have a valid methodology for determining truth from falsehood. | |
| I will start with the reason and evidence, right? | |
| I will start with the reason and evidence. | |
| And from the reason, okay, just by reasoning, I can know that, you know, God exists. | |
| Yeah, I'm sorry. | |
| I think we're going to have to end here because you're just saying that you know it, but you're not actually giving me the opportunity to see how you know it, other than things which seem plausible according to the religious texts. | |
| And that's not a very good methodology for approaching this. | |
| No, no, no. | |
| The way I know God exists is by reason. | |
| No, the way that you know God exists is because God revealed himself to people in the past, according to the stories, right? | |
| If God had never revealed himself, hang on, if God had never revealed himself in any way, shape, or form, then God would be synonymous with non-existence. | |
| So God exists in our minds as a species, or gods exist, because they have revealed themselves to people in the past. | |
| They've dictated Bibles, they've done miracles, they've done all of these things, And that's how we know that gods exist. | |
| It's not through any philosophical arguments whatsoever. | |
| It's because they have revealed themselves to people in the past. | |
| That's the only standard we have, because otherwise, gods would be entirely synonymous with non-existence. | |
| No, but Aristotle... | |
| And so God's... | |
| No, but Aristotle, okay? | |
| Aristotle, he was a Greek guy, right? | |
| So he argued for the existence of a prime war, right? | |
| He didn't have it. | |
| Do you think he did? | |
| Do you think that might have something to do with the fact that Socrates had been put to death for atheism? | |
| His charge was not believing in the God of that timeline. | |
| Yeah. | |
| Do you think that might have had a bit of an effect on philosophers? | |
| I mean, that's like saying that somebody who faced a firing squad, if he didn't salute Hitler, was automatically a committed mass. | |
| No, I'm saying, like, in the case of Socrates, yeah, he was right, you know. | |
| He didn't believe in the god of the Greeks. | |
| Even I don't believe in the god of the Greeks, right? | |
| I don't believe in the god of the Hindus. | |
| So he was right on that, yeah. | |
| You just believe in a different set of... | |
| Yeah, but what I'm saying is, so, when philosophers get murdered... | |
| For impiety, do not be too surprised if philosophers find ways to justify the existence of deities. | |
| Because if you kind of take the gun out of the room, it's really hard to understand what philosophers are up to. | |
| I think we all understand that a man with a gun to his head may not be professing his true opinions. | |
| And in fact, we don't, in any just legal system, we don't prosecute people for things they say or do under coercion. | |
| And philosophers, largely as a result of religious fanatics—I'm not putting you in that category—but philosophers, largely as a result of religious fanatics, have faced murder throughout history, torture and murder throughout history. | |
| And so it should not be too surprising that a lot of philosophers— I would just like to ask you, do you think like... | |
| Like, you know, all the people who have ever believed in God, they believe in God because they face this, you know, threat and all, if they don't believe in it? | |
| Well, I know that that's what religious people believe. | |
| Because very few religious people, there are a few religions, but very few religious people will attempt to instruct children in their religions without bribes and threats. | |
| So I know for sure that All the successful religions in the world believe that threats and bribes are how you motivate people, and that's certainly how they've dealt with philosophers. | |
| But it's important to understand that speaking of atheism or non-belief throughout most of human history would get you killed. | |
| Yeah, that doesn't make atheism true or false. | |
| You need arguments. | |
| No, but you're quoting Aristotle. | |
| You're quoting Aristotle's arguments Which is like quoting someone stuck in a Stalinist Gulag for what he wrote about Stalin. | |
| The fact that he's in a Gulag might be conditioning his arguments just a little bit. | |
| I'm just pointing it out. | |
| He's not a free agent. | |
| We don't know what Aristotle's conscience was about the existence of a deity because his beloved philosophical grandfather got killed by religious fanatics for questioning the gods. | |
| Okay, let's say Aristotle goes to... | |
| He believed in God or he proposed arguments for the existence of God. | |
| Otherwise, he could have killed. | |
| That's why he did it. | |
| Let's assume that. | |
| Does that... | |
| So... | |
| Okay, that doesn't make his arguments true or false, right? | |
| But it means that his arguments are probably not worth examining in any particular detail, because they're under coercion. | |
| And it also means that the people who believed in the gods did not believe in their own arguments, because they felt the need to threaten and kill people who disagreed with them, which means that they don't believe in their own arguments either. | |
| Because if you're certain about the truth of your argument, you don't want to go and kill people who disagree with you. | |
| I know that two and two make four. | |
| If some guy says two and two make five, I don't want to go and torture him and kill him, make him drink hemlock and all that nonsense. | |
| So I know, I'm pretty sure at least, that the people who have religious arguments don't believe those arguments, which is why they need to threaten children with hell and bribe them with heaven. | |
| I also know that they don't believe their arguments because they have to keep persecuting people who disagree with and question them. | |
| I mean, you can be a religious people and scientists aren't going to try and kill you, but throughout most of history, if you question the dominant religious doctrines, your days are numbered. | |
| So I don't know what Aristotle believed. | |
| I know that he was writing under coercion, and also I don't know what Aristotle wrote. | |
| I'm sorry, I don't know. | |
| Socrates was the one who didn't write down. | |
| Oh no, Aristotle didn't write down anything. | |
| It was mostly cobbled together from all of his students and stuff like that. | |
| So I don't know what Aristotle wrote exactly. | |
| I know what was interpreted. | |
| I don't know what Aristotle wrote in private. | |
| I don't know what was burned in the sack of Alexandria in all the great libraries that were burned from the ancient world. | |
| I don't know the degree to which religious people who appropriated Aristotle to further their own arguments have cobbled or changed or translated. | |
| I don't know. | |
| I don't know any of that stuff. | |
| I do know that he had a gun to his head. | |
| And I do know that means the people with the gun to their heads did not believe their own arguments and that Aristotle, whatever he did believe, was writing or speaking or operating in a world with a gun to his head. | |
| Yeah, but that doesn't make his arguments, that doesn't make his argument true or false, right? | |
| Right, that's the basic point. | |
| Like, he could have motivated by many, many things. | |
| That doesn't make, you know, that doesn't add anything to his argument. | |
| Either arguments are Yeah, no, I just wanted to point that out, but go ahead. | |
| Okay, so we have to just look at arguments, right? | |
| That's what we will come down to, right? | |
| So like, okay, one argument which is very persuasive to me is like, you know, the argument for causality, you know, cosmological argument, like why the universe exists and all. | |
| Like, I would say, because the universe exists, there has to be something that has existence within itself, okay? | |
| Self-existent being, okay. | |
| And that is what I call God. | |
| And my argument, I don't think it, I am not caused by anybody to make this argument, or judge the argument, right? | |
| So, yeah, the argument is that which exists must have an anti-decent core, a prior cause, right? | |
| Right. | |
| Yeah, I know. | |
| Otherwise, you can have turtles all the way down, right? | |
| Yeah, so if God exists, then God must have had a prior course and will cause that one God, and then you get turtles. | |
| It's infinite regression, right? | |
| So that doesn't solve the problem of an unmoved mover, right? | |
| Many mathematical arguments showing that, you know, infinite cannot exist, right? | |
| Past infinite cannot exist, okay? | |
| I think, like, mathematicians like David Hilbert and all, they propose many arguments saying, like, a past infinite series cannot exist, okay? | |
| So if that is true, like, the past infinite cannot exist, that would necessarily make a self-existent being, right? | |
| No, I don't see how that... | |
| I mean, you could have... | |
| Look, I don't see how you get consciousness without matter out of that. | |
| I understand, but the thing is, I agree with you. | |
| We have never observed consciousness without matter. | |
| I know that, okay. | |
| But if I have to show, you know, prove it scientifically, if I have to go to some physicist and explain to them, they will maintain evidence which is worthy of, you know, scientific, I don't know, scientific approval, right? | |
| But we are dealing with logical. | |
| There is nothing illogical. | |
| No, wait, wait, wait. | |
| You proposed an Aristotelian argument. | |
| I counterproposed and now you're talking about something else. | |
| Okay, what was the counterproposal? | |
| Sorry, I will remain to the topic, yeah. | |
| You don't remember what it was? | |
| I told you, like, you know, past infinite cannot exist, but you told me, like, if God exists, God has to have a cause, and the God also have this, you know, turtles all the way down problem, right? | |
| Yeah, and then you replied that mathematics says that prior infinite sets cannot exist, and then you said, basically, and therefore God, and I said, no, I mean, the fact that prior infinite sets cannot exist, Means that you can't have an infinity of prior universes. | |
| It has nothing to do with consciousness without matter. | |
| That can violate the laws of physics by creating things out of nothing. | |
| That's a completely unwarranted conclusion from the fact. | |
| That means there was a time when there was no matter, right? | |
| If prior... | |
| Well, I know, Steve. | |
| Prior to the universe is an absolute unknown. | |
| We have no way of knowing anything about it whatsoever. | |
| Yeah, but... | |
| So this has no bearing whatsoever on any truth claim until science investigates the matter further and comes to some conclusions. | |
| About the Big Bang prior to the universe. | |
| There's nothing that can be said about it whatsoever. | |
| It's like trying to fantasize about what's the shape of the craters on the dark side of the moon before we get there. | |
| Or some imaginary land. | |
| There's nothing to be said whatsoever about prior to the universe. | |
| We have no way of knowing it whatsoever. | |
| And I'll tell you this too. | |
| All the people who wrote religious books thought that the universe was 6,000 years old. | |
| So their statements about what is true and what is real have no bearing on the matter whatsoever. | |
| I think we're down to, what, 14 billion years or something like that? | |
| The universe is old. | |
| We have no way whatsoever of saying what is occurring before the universe. | |
| And there's absolutely no way to get consciousness without matter out of a complete unknown. | |
| I would ask you, like, prior to the universe, does logic cease to exist? | |
| What possible bearing could that have? | |
| You're saying, like, There's nothing that can be said about prior to the universe. | |
| You can make arguments like it has to follow logic right. | |
| Prior to the universe, No, prior to the universe, what on earth could that possibly mean and how could we possibly discuss it or theorize anything about it whatsoever? | |
| It's a matter for scientific investigation and science will progress along those lines. | |
| But there's absolutely nothing that can be said about it. | |
| And the only people who are interested about it are theoretical physicists and religious people. | |
| What possible difference does it make about anything that we have to do in this world or the good that we try to achieve in this world? | |
| It is only religious people and theoretical physicists who obsess about this before the universe stuff. | |
| Whether there's logic or not, what on earth could that possibly matter? | |
| It does matter because, like, if, you know, like today... | |
| Why does it matter? | |
| In regard to the existence of God and all the things that... | |
| But if you don't believe in God, it doesn't matter. | |
| You care about what goes on before the universe. | |
| I've got to get up and take care of my daughter in the morning and I'm going to do a show on philosophy and I'm going to answer some emails and try and bring some good to the world. | |
| What on earth could it possibly matter to me where the logic was valid prior to the beginning of the universe? | |
| You care because you think you can find a way to pull God out of this rabbit's hat. | |
| I don't care. | |
| I'm curious. | |
| Hey, if science can answer it, I'll read it and go, hey, that's really cool. | |
| And then get right back on with my day. | |
| It matters to you. | |
| But it's not a black hole that I get sucked into because it has no bearing on the validity of logic now, the validity of the scientific method, how philosophy works, how empiricism works. | |
| It has no validity what happened before the universe. | |
| It's like saying, what was my heartbeat before I was conceived? | |
| It has no meaning, no bearing. | |
| No, I would say we are discussing the existence of God and all. | |
| When we discuss existence of God, yeah, it matters. | |
| I don't go... | |
| No. | |
| No, it doesn't. | |
| Because you can't claim anything about prior to the universe. | |
| You can't claim consciousness without matter. | |
| You can't claim an all-loving God. | |
| You can't claim anything. | |
| But can I claim that the past infinite series is finite? | |
| Can I claim that? | |
| I don't care. | |
| You can claim it if you want. | |
| I'm not a mathematician. | |
| I don't really know what that means in any level of detail. | |
| If you want to claim it, go for it. | |
| Either it is finite or infinite, right? | |
| It could be anything else, right? | |
| Again, I'm not a mathematician. | |
| Prior infinite series, not finite? | |
| Whatever. | |
| The answer is either it is finite or it is infinite, right? | |
| That's what I'm saying. | |
| I'm just saying, if the past series is finite, it has tremendous influence regarding to arguments of God and all of this. | |
| Don't you? | |
| Look, I'm just going to end at this point. | |
| I'm sorry, it's late and it's been a long show. | |
| So let me just end at this point. | |
| We start with the existence of hell and now you're talking about mathematical sets and how they might apply prior to the universe. | |
| Every time you chase religious people with reason and evidence, they just retreat further and further and further away from anything comprehensible and then they end up burrowing like moles, docked down in the dungeons of irrationality before the universe even began and then say that, well, that's it. | |
| You see, this is where God is. | |
| But if whenever confronted with reason and evidence or reasonably rigorous arguments, and my arguments weren't perfect, I'm sorry, I'm a little tired, but we end up in this mathematical infinite sets prior to the beginning of the universe. | |
| I mean, that has nothing to do with religion. | |
| That has nothing to do with the Ten Commandments, has nothing to do with the Bible whatsoever. | |
| But what happens is you push people who are religious back, and the same thing happens with status too. | |
| You push them back, and you push them back, and they end up in these realms of complete incomprehensibility and insanity, where nothing means anything to anyone. | |
| Look, my mission is to get people to stop hitting their children. | |
| I don't give a flying fuck what happened before the beginning of the universe, because nothing that happened, whether logic is valid or not, before the beginning of the universe has no bearing on my goal to have people stop hitting their children. | |
| That's no meaning to me. | |
| Now, if religious people want to go back there, and great, go, go, go back there. | |
| Close down your churches and become theoretical physicists. | |
| I think that would be fantastic. | |
| But it is frustrating to see the vast amount of intellectual energy, you're obviously a very smart guy, a lot of intellectual energy, defending the irrational, defending the impossible, burrowing back to the beginning of time and thinking you can find some sewage grate where you can pull a deity out of. | |
| It's complete nonsense. | |
| There are far more important things to do in this world, far more important moral and practical goals to achieve, than trying to find some justification For the sun-baked theories of bullshit Bedouins from 6,000 years ago. | |
| We've got more important things to do. | |
| This is all medieval nonsense. | |
| We should put it behind us and focus on a clear, rational explication of ethics, which I've been working on. | |
| A clear, rational explication of how society should be organized. | |
| Free market principles, voluntarism, these things have no bearing. | |
| There's no bearing on what happened prior to the beginning of the universe in any of those things that are so essential for us to do. | |
| So I'm sorry to take the last word. | |
| I'm going to have to just leave it there. | |
| I can't possibly stay on the show for another minute. | |
| Okay, you're obviously not listening, but I'm going to hang up from you anyway. | |
| Thank you again for your time, everyone. | |
| Have yourself a wonderful, wonderful week. | |
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| If you would like to help out the show, I would, of course, hugely appreciate it. | |
| Thank you for your patience. | |
| Thank you to all of the callers. |