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April 14, 2014 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

02:35:30

2665 The Photocopier of History - Sunday Call In Show April 13th, 2014

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	Good morning, everyone.
	Stefan Molyneux from Freedom Main Radio.
	Hope you're doing well.
	Sunday, the 13th of April.
	Or as I like to call it, T minus two days.
	Tax minus two days.
	Oh, isn't it lovely to be able to pay for the roads that aren't paid for, to be able to pay for the wars that aren't funded, to be able to pay for the Social Security, which is bankrupt, to be able to have your money sucked up into the giant ass hoover Of monolith government to be doled out in vote-buying, poor shredding ways.
	It's just lovely to be able to donate to these arch criminals and call it support.
	But we'll be doing a rant on that soon.
	Let's move straight on.
	To the callers, the brains of the outfit, the dollars behind our wallets.
	I mean, the lovely listeners.
	Who do we have up first, Mike?
	Alright, up first today is James.
	He's kind of got a two-part question.
	So he's just cheating.
	I have a question buried in a thesis, buried in another question, buried in a request, and here's my novel.
	What do you think?
	Alright, go ahead.
	He writes it, it says, socialism, fascism, and communism all revolve around central planning via the state or corporate state.
	And property is either owned by the state or by the corporate state.
	Are these systems of government nothing more than a modern-day version of feudalism?
	And also on there, he writes, is paper money the root of all evil?
	Yeah, I mean, one of the things I've been trying to do, Lo, these many years is to strip away the euphemisms, right?
	Yeah.
	Central planning, you know, sounds good.
	I have nothing against things that are central.
	I don't hate the middle of a city.
	I have no particular beef with my spleen or whatever is in it.
	My spine is a good friend of mine.
	So I do not find central.
	And I mean, hey, what's wrong with planning?
	Central planning.
	It sounds like, you know, things are going to be organized.
	We have a plan.
	That line from the Joker...
	If it's part of the plan, if it's not part of the plan, everyone goes insane.
	But, yeah, I just...
	It's coercion.
	I mean, all the isms, except for capitalism in its theoretical form, they're all just coercion.
	Different flavors of coercion.
	You know, we don't call one flavor of torture a surgery.
	It's just torture.
	It doesn't matter if they're nailing your scrotum to a wooden chair or pulling out your fingernails or anything else that you pay a Germanic woman to do on a Saturday night around 11.30 with Bitcoin.
	Theoretically.
	So...
	Hi Helga.
	You she-wolf of the SSU. But...
	Hey, it's not my fault I was raised by a German woman.
	Oh, sorry.
	Mama.
	So...
	These things, they're all just coercion.
	So, you know, all the isms, I think it's just important to boil down, is anyone pointing a gun at anyone else?
	And if so, then it's not an ism, it's just coercion, it's just violence.
	And so, yeah, they are all flavors of the initiation of force, they're all violation of The fact that we need to make up different names for various kinds of violence is because some people like certain types of violence and don't like other types of violence.
	You know, like the sadist who's into hot wax on the nipples calls that a gentle caress of fiery essence.
	I don't know.
	But they won't just call it torture because that's a turn-on for them, right?
	And of course, a lot of people are excited by violence.
	A lot of people are excited by violence.
	Look at the bloodlust When a war is declared, I mean, you read Churchill's statements about war.
	Mike, if you get a chance, look one up.
	Just look up Churchill, excited, war.
	I mean, the man basically wanted to hump a bomb.
	I mean, it was just, the bloodlust is truly astonishing.
	A lot of people are turned on emotionally and sometimes even erotically by violence.
	And the kind of violence that they like They generally want to cloak in some sort of political ideology, but they're all just itching to wrap their hands around the neck of humanity.
	They'll dress it up in a whole bunch of fancy words and so on, but these people who are excited by, who get endorphins when exposed to or participating in cruelty or violence, are legion.
	And, of course, they've got to invent a bunch of fancy names for what it is that they're turned on by.
	But, you know, just petty sexual or quasi-sexual sadists.
	And, I mean, there was this guy named Jules Stryker who was part of the Nazi hierarchy, who was an open sexual sadist who enjoyed whipping Jewish women with, you know, whips and all that.
	I mean, just an open sexual sadist.
	But I would argue that the sublimation of sexuality, which is, of course, the reason why we're all here, into sexual sadism, is the root of a lot of these ideologies that.
	I mean, that's not a proof, and it's just an argument.
	Mike, did you find anything?
	Yeah, I found a quote from him, which is, politics is almost as exciting as war and quite as dangerous.
	In war, you can only be killed once, but in politics, many times.
	Yeah, he said on the openings of hostilities at the beginning of Second World War, when Hitler went into France and England declared war on Germany, he said, you know, I can't sleep.
	I've never been as excited in my life.
	I'm perfectly...
	I mean, the man had a significant bloodlust and...
	Did not sleep with his wife who had affairs with men on sailboats, which you could, I guess, look up if you want.
	But I think that his sexuality was to some degree sublimated into this war lust.
	And so, yeah, I mean, this is, I think, quite common.
	So I think that it's important to understand that it's just the categories are violence or nonviolence.
	That's all, you know, and it's boxing versus assault.
	You know, I mean, these categories are pretty easy.
	Is it okay if I do X to you?
	Sure.
	Okay, then it's not violence, right?
	But the state, of course, is doing that which people do not want done unto them, unto them.
	So, and, you know, most people vote either out of greed or Or self-protection or the attempt to self-protect.
	So I think that I'd like it when all these categories dissolve and we simply look at does someone have a gun pointing it at an unwilling victim and then it doesn't matter if they're a mugger or the mafia or a soldier or a policeman or a politician giving orders.
	It's violence or non-violence.
	That's I think the two categories that matter.
	Does that make any sense?
	Oh yeah, definitely.
	I think you're right about how it's just like, you know, just find a brand new word, like that whole Chaney and what was it called?
	Enhanced interrogation?
	Something like that?
	Enhanced interrogation.
	Yeah, no, that's interrogation with like hand puppets and candy and movies.
	You want a Jolly Rancher?
	We have a Jolly Rancher.
	He's an arseless chaps.
	He would like to enhance you.
	Can you imagine saying that rape is an enhanced date?
	Imagine how people would go completely insane.
	Interrogation, of course, asking people a bunch of questions.
	Interrogation is an interesting one around the non-aggression principle because if there's the threat of force behind the interrogation, then the interrogation is right on the border of the non-aggression principle if force is openly mentioned or threatened or at least perceived by the victim.
	Then an interrogation is already violence.
	You know, if you think the guy might have kidnapped your kids, then you're probably going to pay him a little bit more attention than if he's just some guy screaming at his hand puppets on a street corner.
	Now, your second question was about paper money?
	Yeah, let me just rephrase it.
	I'm reading Creature from Jekyll Island right now, so we'll call it this.
	Is fiat money the root of all evil or just a tyrannical state?
	I mean, to be technical, fiat money, it's paper.
	And paper has no moral.
	Just to be annoyingly technical.
	But paper money is a catalyst and an enabler and a subsidizer of evil.
	And there's a statement, I think it came from Ayn Rand, that all evil is the desire for the unearned.
	And I think there's some truth in that, but I think it goes back a lot more to childhood trauma and abuse and the unfortunate capacity of the human brain to be hardwired for sadism, particularly sexual sadism.
	But, I mean, if you think about the number of rapes that occur in the military, the co-joining of violence and sexual sadism, I think is pretty clear.
	But the major problem, of course, with Paper currency with fiat currency with made up monopoly money by the state is that it allows for the bribing and slaughtering of the present with the bill being diffused across geography and across the generations through national debt.
	It allows the government to administer steroids to itself in a bodybuilding competition of 98 pound weaklings.
	Because you simply can't compete with any entity that can create its own money.
	The amount of destruction that it does to the economy is enormous.
	Inflation is incredibly harmful to the poor.
	The constant jigging of interest rates, which the government needs to do to both attract investors in its enslaving T-bills and bonds as well as not have too much inflation on its already existing debt or too much interest rates, too many high interest rates on its already existing debt,
	constantly sends the wrong signals to To the economy and being an entrepreneur is sort of like trying to be a runner in a long-distance race where they say, start, stop.
	No, you, start.
	No, you, start, stop.
	Go back to the beginning.
	You, go forward.
	You, no, no, go around that tree.
	You have to go up that hill.
	You have to dig through this culvert.
	The end is at the beginning.
	It's before the beginning.
	It's tomorrow.
	It's yesterday.
	It's blue.
	It's a unicorn.
	Win!
	I mean, it just becomes like, I don't know, I'm here, I bought all these shoes, so I guess I'll just run around until someone has declared a winner.
	And I'll try and make friends with the judge, because clearly this whole goddamn thing is completely arbitrary.
	And that is all enabled by paper currency.
	Wars, modern wars, total wars, are entirely the product of fiat currency.
	A fiat currency is...
	You know, you can put fiat currency in a paper shredder, but generally fiat currency is a human shredder in that it allows for total war.
	It allows for war to continue beyond all available resources in the present.
	So World War II cost America, which was never even invaded.
	World War II cost America almost twice the gold that has ever been refined in human history.
	Well, this, of course, is complete.
	And that's just one country which was never even invaded or had to rebuild.
	So how is that even remotely possible?
	The First World War destroyed almost down to the last dollar all the wealth that was created through the Industrial Revolution.
	Well, how is that possible?
	Well, it's possible through fiat currency, through the manufacture of money.
	When you run out of gold to pay your soldiers, suddenly the soldiers find that patriotism A little bit deflating.
	Wait, wait.
	I mean, I love that flag.
	Don't get me wrong.
	That guy with the mustache, he's killer, man.
	He looks fucking great on that horse.
	He's like Tom Selleck on a unicorn with Fabio hair and Stefan Molyneux cheekbones.
	I mean, he's a good-looking guy.
	He's fantastic.
	But I've got to tell you, much though I love this country and much though I want to have sex with that flag, like Amish with a hole through it, I gotta tell you, if I'm not getting paid in gold, I find my patriotic bloodlust somewhat evaporating.
	So as long as you can continue to pay your soldiers, you will continue to have a war.
	And the horror, of course, is that in a gold-based currency, or a Bitcoin-based currency, you quickly run out of murder money.
	You quickly run out of being able to pay the hitman's cable bills.
	And Bril Cream bills and I don't know whatever goes on with Hitman.
	So you have this infinite, near infinite conveyor belts of humanity to feed into the chomping moor of the motorbots.
	And that really is the hell that fiat currency allows you to leap over the limitations of resources in the here and now and have Mortgaged murder from the future.
	And this can go on for generations as it has.
	As it has.
	Some countries are still paying off their debts from World War I a hundred years ago.
	Some countries are still paying off their debts from World War I a hundred years ago.
	So war is insanely profitable for the financial classes.
	War is insanely profitable for the political classes.
	And the people are bought off with imaginary money to lick the boots of the people kicking their infants in the face.
	And the true horror of war is the degree to which you see sheep bleating for the slaughter.
	Yay, war.
	Let's go.
	War is cool.
	War is fun.
	War is exciting.
	Let's go watch a movie.
	Let's go make a movie.
	Let's go play war.
	Let's go play cowboys and Indians.
	I'm the cop.
	You're the robber.
	Bang, bang, bang!
	This is all we play.
	It's all I played when I was a kid.
	It's all that the children, the boys in particular, live for, is the chance to shoot at people.
	I mean, we're all raised to be hitmen, as I talked about in How a Man's Heart is Murdered.
	It is horrible.
	Seeing the spectacle of humanity baying with bloodlust to murder people they don't even know, with whom they have more in common than with their leaders.
	I mean, the two people, The British and the Germans facing each other in the trenches of France in World War I. They had much more in common with each other than they did with their leaders, for God's sakes.
	I mean, what the hell did Lloyd George, what the hell did the average poor British kid have in common with?
	Lloyd George, I say what?
	Nothing.
	And this was well known.
	I mean, Christmas 1914 or 1915, I think it was 1914, they put down their weapons and And they played soccer.
	What was called football in England.
	They played soccer in the trenches and stopped shooting at each other.
	They drank together.
	They sang Christmas carols together.
	They were bonding.
	Lloyd George, when Prime Minister, he never went to a trench.
	When you're facing some other poor bastard in a trench, you're in common with him.
	He's got your life.
	He's the same poor victim bastard as you are.
	And they were playing football with each other, singing Christmas songs and drinking together.
	And the ruling classes freaked out.
	Oh my God, they're fraternizing with the enemy.
	No, no, no, no.
	Fraternizing with the enemy is putting a fucking postage stamp with the face of the guy who sent you to war On the letter being mailed to his relatives saying he got blown the fuck up.
	That's fraternizing with the enemy.
	Let's put these murderers on a postage stamp.
	Literally, having leaders who've declared war on postage stamps It's like going to the FBI and saying, hey, you know how you have those most wanted posters?
	The most wanted, ten most wanted criminals!
	You know what would get much more exposure?
	Let's create a postage stamp series with the ten most wanted serial killers in the world.
	Put Ted Bundy up there and all these other guys who murder lots of people.
	Let's put them on postage stamps, you know, with flags behind them and eagles and shit like that.
	Well, the most wanted in any rational universe are the people who order the death of millions, not the people who kill a dozen or two.
	So those...
	Put the merely private serial killers on the postage stamps and put the most wanted with the political leaders up in the post office.
	That would make more sense.
	So, yeah, I have a lot of problems with it, but basically...
	Giving fiat currency to governments is like putting a vampire in charge of a blood bank.
	Mmm.
	A tasty array of buffet blood.
	That's what you get.
	So it is something that is, I think, underappreciated as far as its capacity to create debt, enslavement, war, murder, genocide, and so on.
	It is wretched.
	So I think you're under something there.
	I just did a speech...
	About this yesterday at the Toronto Bitcoin Conference.
	Thanks for the invite.
	It was a lot of fun.
	And I hope that you will check it out.
	I go into it in more detail.
	And we try to turn Bitcoin evil.
	So you'll see how that works.
	But yeah, thank you very much for those questions.
	Yeah, no problem.
	I'm going to shoot this out too before I go.
	I just went to university and I realized it was just a whole bunch of propaganda.
	Shit like that.
	Like I would love to send you one of my textbooks.
	You'd have a blast going through it.
	Would you recommend just going to work or something like that and getting out of that bullshit propaganda school?
	Well, look, if you can do what you love without going to college, clearly going to college is a complete waste of time.
	It's worse than a waste of time.
	You might as well check yourself into propaganda jail where you have to pay to be there for a couple of years.
	Yeah, so I would, yeah, if you can do what you love.
	I mean, I was into software and business, and you can do all that shit without a license.
	So, yeah.
	I'm a licensed developer.
	Yeah, whatever.
	If you could do something without requiring a government stamp of approval, I think that's something that's probably something better to do.
	All right, cool.
	All right.
	Well, thanks, man.
	Great questions, and best of luck to you.
	Yeah, no problem.
	Last thing, good luck with your lymphoma.
	I just recently had my mother go through that.
	So yeah, good luck.
	Look up Richard Simpson.
	I think he's on.
	She's doing good.
	She hasn't gone through any remission.
	She's been a year off the chemo.
	But I keep trying to get her into...
	I really think that Rick Simpson guy, if you ever looked him up, he thinks he can cure cancer with marijuana oil.
	I really think he's on to something.
	But other than that, she's just doing self-healing, meditation, stuff like that.
	Well, I certainly think state of mind is important.
	I don't have any particular opinions about alternative cures.
	I recognize that some of the cures are for government profits and, you know, you need to be taken with a grain of salt, but I don't know.
	These alternative cures, until the science comes in, the cancer is a very tricky thing to prove cures for because there's so much spontaneous remission.
	Not massive amounts, but it happens, right?
	And there's stuff that's misdiagnosed as cancerous when it's in fact benign or vice versa.
	So it's a lot of cloud and it requires a lot of double-blind experiments to figure out.
	The cure.
	And so somebody who's not invested the, I don't know, tens of millions of dollars it would take to do these double-blind experiments is, and who claims a cure, I think is not necessarily on the up and up.
	So those are just my thoughts, but I certainly wish the best for your mom and tell her that, you know, you have cancer.
	Cancer doesn't have you.
	So I hope that helps.
	And who's up?
	Yeah, thanks, man.
	Who's up next?
	Alright, up next is Olav.
	And Olav writes in and says, a lot of big changes in society have happened via ideas presented first at the theatre, women's rights specifically.
	I'm interested in Stefan's view about theatre and anarchic ideologies delivered via art.
	Good, Olav.
	Well, that's great.
	Great questions.
	I mean, I think you're talking about Henri Gibson.
	Who wrote some great plays about women and women's rights.
	There's one, it's by the by, one of his, Ghosts is a great one of his to read, Doll's House.
	It's basically about a woman who's treated as an infant by...
	Her husband, and there's just some fantastic, ferocious, quasi-Germanic female characters in his works.
	There's one great one where people say, why are you living in this big house?
	This woman's living in a house with her husband.
	Why are you living in this big house?
	And she says, oh, it's the weirdest thing.
	So my husband, who was not my husband, takes me out on this date.
	And he's so boring.
	I have nothing to say to the man whatsoever.
	I mean, he's just...
	My eyeballs are rolling round and round like slot machine readouts in my head.
	The guy's so boring.
	And we're driving by this house, and I say, oh, that's a nice house.
	I like that house.
	Like, this is how desperate I am for something to say to this chucklehead, right?
	Anyway, so I want to get into the whole story, but I end up getting married to the guy, and...
	He ends up surprising me with this house that I'm now living in that I saw on this hill.
	I don't even think it's that nice a house.
	I was just so desperate for something to say to the guy because I was so bored.
	I said, well, that's a nice house and he's so boring.
	It sits in his head and years later he went out and bought me this house and thinks he's doing me some huge favor when all I was trying to do was kill some time.
	And now I get to kill time in this house for the rest of my life.
	So it's...
	I'm paraphrasing quite a bit from the original New Virgin.
	He was a guy...
	He actually wrote His plays with a scorpion on his desk under glass.
	And he used to tap it.
	And they used to feed it pieces of fruit and shit like that.
	And he used to love to watch the scorpion sting with venom its prey.
	I mean, he was a complete lunatic.
	And like most people in the theater, he was basically...
	Being in the theater was like being a rock star.
	You know, if you wanted to bang lots of women, particularly women who thought they were attractive or who wanted to be actresses and so on, you would go into the theater.
	Bertolt Brecht, who was a communist, one of the truly vilest human beings in the history of the theater, and one day I'll do a truth about him, but nobody really remembers who he is anymore.
	Mack the Knife, he wrote the words, Kurt Weill wrote the music from Three Penny Opera.
	Oh, the shark has pearly teeth, dear, and he shows them pearly white.
	It's a great song.
	Actually, Sting played the character in Three Penny Opera, which...
	Yeah, it comes from an old 18th century play called The Beggar's Opera.
	I think that's where the story comes from.
	So they very much had a great deal of success presenting women's rights, although this all came after Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, the author of Frankenstein and wife of Percy Shelley's book on the vindication of rights of women, which was, I think, early 19th century.
	I think she wrote that before she wrote Frankenstein.
	Or, as Gene Wilder would have it, "Frökenstein." Those who read Blazing Sand.
	Anyway, so you can have a great deal of luck introducing ideas through art, but those ideas already have to have emotional resonance in people's hearts.
	So, George Bernard Shaw, in a play called Arms and the Man, made fun of soldiers, right?
	There's a professional soldier in there who basically is like, yeah, I'll take the money, but I mostly just hide.
	I mean, I'm not stupid.
	I mean, they don't pay me enough to get shot at.
	So I mostly just hide.
	There's this woman who's like – he basically comes into this woman's house because there's a war going on somewhere and he's like, I want to run away from it.
	I'm just going to get paid.
	And she's like, oh, you're a noble fighting hero.
	He's like, no, I'm just running from bullets.
	You know, if I can hide in your closet, that would be fantastic.
	You know, in case anybody comes looking for me, that would be great.
	And she thinks he's some hero and he basically is just a working guy trying to get paid without getting shot.
	And it's a funny play and he was a great playwright.
	But a socialist and was very consciously part of the Fabian Socialist, which in America was the progressive movement of the early 20th century, where the goal was not to have a revolution, but to create socialism through incremental appeal to democratic sentimentality, right?
	To say to people, oh, but the poor and the tortoises and the snail daughters and global warming and don't you care about this, right?
	So they appealed to people's sentimentality, right?
	And through that, they were going to continue to expand the power of the state.
	Good thing we foiled that plan!
	Yay!
	We won!
	So, you can, but there has to be an existing sentiment that exists, that the art speaks to.
	Art can't convey intellectual ideas very well at all.
	So artists always have to cheat, right?
	So they make the person who they sympathize with the best looking, the most articulate, the non-smoker, the guy with abs, the guy who's always calm in the face of danger.
	Like, Ayn Rand did exactly the same thing.
	She cheats all the time, right?
	So Wesley Mooch is like slump-shouldered and big belly and looks like a question mark with a gut.
	Whereas Howard Rourke is tall and lean and full-headed of hair and would be great at badminton and, you know, John Galt is copper-haired and craggy-jawed and, you know, she just makes them and Dominique who is, you know, like...
	A bad witch on a period.
	She's beautiful and perfectly apportioned and so on.
	She does this aesthetic cheat all the time.
	You can't help but like people who effortlessly fight for what they want and are unfazed or unafraid of the attacks of evil and who are physically gorgeous.
	She cheats all the time.
	So it's sort of impossible To put ideas across.
	I think Ayn Rand did about the best job that anyone could ever do in history.
	I mean, which is why people have to talk about the bullshit.
	She took social security.
	She took social security, so that's why she's wrong.
	Yeah, these are the same guy who say, well, Marx banged his maid, so he's wrong about exploitation.
	Oh, wait, no, they never say that.
	Because it's a lot easier to just say, well, Ayn Rand was a hypocrite because she took Social Security and therefore, therefore.
	And the funny thing is, of course, that even by her own standards, Ayn Rand was not a hypocrite for taking Social Security.
	Because she basically said, they forced me to pay into it.
	I'm just getting some money back.
	Well, you know, if you're so for property rights, how come you stole back the bike that someone stole from you?
	Why aren't you respecting their property?
	Yeah, shut the fuck up.
	You know, sorry, big people are talking here.
	There's some Play-Doh over there.
	Why don't you make me a bunny?
	And stop flapping what you think of as your philosophy hole, but which you are just farting nonsense syllables and fuming up the air where adults are talking.
	Off you go.
	Off you go.
	Watch out for the stairs.
	They're steep.
	But, you know, this is the level of debate that passes for conversations in society.
	Really, so what problems do you have with Ayn Rand's metaphysics?
	She was a smoker!
	Wow, that's a lot of spittle for a little person.
	I'm going to give you some soup.
	It's not going to be too warm.
	Try not to put it in your eyeball.
	I'm going to give you a spork because I'm not sure you can handle big people cutlery yet.
	So I think Ayn Rand did a magnificent job of bringing intellectual arguments, but she's like really one of a kind.
	For the most part, you have to use all these aesthetic cheats to make your characters sympathetic.
	And when Brecht wrote a play about Galileo, he made Galileo heroic and noble.
	You have to put all these emotional qualities in and physical qualities that are innately attractive.
	You know, my philosophical heroine is Kim Kardashian.
	Don't worry, your penis will point towards whoever is right.
	I could just see that meme floating around already.
	Going from Ayn Rand to Kim Kardashian is like going from Ayn Rand to Kim Kardashian.
	There's no bigger comparison.
	I'm out of metaphors.
	That's it.
	It's been a good run for these eight years.
	I'm done.
	I'm dried out.
	That's it.
	I'm as out of metaphors as a bucket that has no metaphors.
	Oh yeah, that's it.
	I'm dry.
	Okay.
	Plan B. Plan B. I guess I better start making sense.
	Uh-oh.
	No, that plan can't be achieved.
	No.
	So...
	Yeah, so you can make the case for socialism among people who used to be religious, right?
	Because socialism is just religion with the state where God used to be, right?
	I mean, there's just another asshole in charge.
	And so, yeah, so you can go to people who have outgrown religion and you can say, hey...
	Let's have a central authority that everyone has to obey who's supposed to take care of the poor.
	Oh wait, wasn't that the Old Testament and the New Testament?
	No, no, no!
	This is socialism!
	And particularly for Jewish people, right?
	I mean, a very intelligent group of people who were formerly religious outgrew their religion to a large degree.
	Ooh, let's go to communism and socialism and bestow that lovely gift on humanity as a whole.
	Here, Goyim!
	Here's some totalitarianism for you!
	Good luck with that!
	We're going to go make movies and run your media, right?
	So you can make the case artistically, but it has to be something that people have an imprint for already.
	And I say this out of bitter experience.
	I mean, I wrote plays.
	I wrote like 30 plays.
	I produced a play, which was an adaptation of Turgene's Fathers and Sons.
	And I wrote novels and poems and short stories, although I was never very good at short stories.
	But the problem is that there was no emotional template that could receive the artistic values that I was presenting.
	And so people recognized the technical excellence and artistic excellence of what it is that I was doing, but nobody would ever give me any money because they had brains and I had hope.
	And sometimes in the modern world, Brains and hope are mortal enemies.
	It's like a mongoose and a cobra.
	To walk in, only one can walk out.
	So if you're trying to portray anarchic values or atheist values through art, you have to believe that humanity is further advanced than it is.
	In other words, that there's some kind of emotional template ready to take, for instance, a godless universe without a state to contain the nihilism that a lack of authority produces.
	Oh my god, that was a complex thought.
	I think it makes sense.
	Yeah, it does.
	Okay, so let's refer to it very briefly.
	When you grow up in an authoritarian universe, your identity fails to develop because you just respond to what people tell you to do.
	You just become a Roomba, you know?
	Ooh, I hit a wall.
	Ooh, there's a cat on me.
	Ooh, but it's going to go viral on YouTube.
	Ooh, look out for the hamster.
	Ooh, dust bunny.
	Ooh, hit the wall.
	This is your day.
	You're just bumping around like a Roomba.
	You fail to develop any kind of cohesive identity.
	You fail to become what Jung used to call actualized, which is that you think for yourself and you process reality through your own cognition and through rational values, and you will listen to what authority says, but you won't take it with any more seriousness than anything else.
	And you recognize the self-interest in everything authority says to you is bullshit.
	And authority, I mean unjust authority.
	I don't mean like someone who's good at being your doctor.
	But everything that coercive authority tells you is a lie.
	Because if the first thing they tell you isn't, I'm your coercive authority, then they're lying by omission pretty much till the end of time.
	And so if you have failed to develop, or the reality is you've been prevented from developing a sovereign consciousness which Processes reality according to rational values.
	Then you are forever a body in search of a head.
	Right?
	Brains are zombies, right?
	I mean, zombies eat brains, but they never get smarter.
	Right?
	Which is like people consuming the mainstream media.
	And so you can say to people, I will present to you A godless, stateless universe, but that provokes such incredible existential anxiety in people that they recoil from it and don't even know why and can't even admit to themselves that they know why because they don't want to know that they are walking corpses.
	They don't want to know that they were pretty much strangled in the crib And interred in the giant 12-year procession known as public school with a couple of side funerals in church and that their bodies, their headless bodies, have been served up for the vampiric elders to feast on.
	They don't want to know that.
	They don't want to know that what they think of as a benevolent society is a giant brain disassembly machine designed to turn sovereign, beautiful, precious...
	Magnificent human beings into faceless drones to be disassembled by shrapnel on foreign battlefields if called upon and certainly to sacrifice half of every waking hour for the endless money lusts and power lusts of those in charge.
	They don't want to know that what they think of as civilization is a giant blood-soaked asylum Where children's brains are pounded and mashed up and disassembled and then reassembled into a giant yes to authority and a giant fear of thought.
	And so you can present a godless universe if you present a statist universe.
	Because then people say, oh shit, the person I'm supposed to obey?
	God?
	He doesn't exist?
	Well, fuck, who am I supposed to obey then?
	Oh, that guy!
	Guy with the mustache!
	Great!
	Okay, good.
	So...
	I don't mind if you get rid of God, but you've got to replace him with someone else.
	Which is why those who used to be priests become socialist politicians and fascists and all that kind of stuff.
	But the idea that no one should tell you what to do, or the idea that's even worse for people, is that being told what to do and accepting it and loving it is a shameful thing.
	Confession that you are a corpse is too much for people to bear.
	They've Stockholm syndromed with the people who used the giant ice cream scoop of propaganda and threats to literally scoop out their brains and replace it with centrally coerced Wi-Fi controlled murder bots and child abuse bots.
	It's too horrifying.
	You think you're in the army of the liberators and you're actually a foot soldier in the Legion of the Dead.
	Mike, can you look up?
	There's a quote from Einstein about the people he has the least respect for.
	So you can actually spine or something like that.
	Einstein, spine, respect or something.
	It's a great quote from him about that.
	Of course, he was a socialist, but that's...
	But, you know, he was a Jewish guy who didn't really believe in God and therefore he had to have a government, right?
	Because Lord knows that thinking for yourself in philosophical terms rather than mere scientific terms is very, very harmful to people.
	So I think it's too soon and I think that humanity has been too shredded and evacuated and destroyed by those in power to present to them An artistic view of no gods, no governments.
	And skepticism of parental authority, to put it as mildly as possible.
	It's quite dangerous to take away people's delusions.
	It is very dangerous.
	It's a very dangerous process to take away people's illusions.
	When you confront people who think they're alive, And say you are simply filled with the noise of the dead and are marching with the dead to create more deaths.
	Because it's not just that people are victims and they have died.
	It's that they kill too.
	They indoctrinate their children.
	They hit their children.
	They bully their children.
	They abandon their children.
	So they are not just victims.
	They are victimizers of the innocent.
	So it's one thing to suffer evil.
	It's quite another thing to do evil.
	So when you say to people, children should not be harmed, well, to me, that's like, well, of course, of course not, right?
	But to people who've harmed children, that is terrifying and enraging, because it provokes their conscience, what's left of the UPB remnants in their brain, which is fundamentally what the conscience is, UPB. So, which is why people have such a tough time with it.
	It's like, whoa, you've codified my conscience?
	Did you find the quote?
	I did.
	The quote is, he who joyfully marches to music and rank and file has already earned my contempt.
	He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him, a spinal cord would suffice.
	Yeah, it's terrifying.
	The only wise thing the man ever did was refuse to be in charge of Israel.
	But anyway, so I think it's too soon to confront the dead and those who slaughter childhood With an artistic reality, they would ignore it, they would not go to it, and if forced to take notice of it, they would heap it with such contempt that it would chase away other people from reviewing it.
	I think that we need a lot more philosophy before we get any kind of art that will Not to terrify people with their own early demise.
	Does that make any sense?
	I'm sorry, you've got to speak up a little bit, brother.
	In your experience when you started your show, how was the comments and how did you take it?
	How did you manage to deconstruct it about them?
	Oh, you mean sort of negative comments about the show?
	Yeah.
	Yeah, yeah.
	Negative or positive?
	What kind of news to you?
	Well, it's not...
	First of all, not a lot of people have a lot of problems with the show.
	I mean, there's a few people who make a lot of noise, as far as I know.
	I don't know.
	I haven't reviewed or followed any of that stuff for half a decade or more, but...
	Yeah, I mean, there are a few people who make a lot of noise, and they serve an intensely valuable service to...
	They perform an intensely valuable service to the show, which is wonderful.
	And, you know, I openly thank them for their service to philosophy.
	They, you know, pour hate on to what it is that I do, which is great, because then they draw the haters to go their way rather than come to this show.
	Right?
	I mean, it's delicious.
	I'm sorry?
	They also enforce the appealing of their values in others when they call it stupid comments or...
	Yeah, but see, but no, but...
	Stupid comments are – in general, that's the rule of thumb.
	People can't think and they don't know that they can't think.
	They simply don't know that they can't think.
	I'm sorry to keep asking you for this, Mike.
	Would you mind digging up that comment I posted about the YouTube guy who said my knowledge of science was ridiculous?
	Remember I posted that on Facebook?
	Yeah, so stupid comments are inevitable, and the stupider people are, the more aggressive they are.
	It's the Don and Kruger effect, which is that people who are dumb vastly overrate their own abilities, and people who are smart are very humble.
	I am incredibly humble about what it is that I can do, and People think that UPB is some sort of arrogant thing, and I keep telling people, no, I'm saying that until I wrote UPB, I didn't even know what virtue was.
	I mean, how many people can be out there admitting that they don't know what virtue is, but they can find out?
	Right, most people who say, I don't know what virtue is, say, well, there's no such thing as virtue.
	Like, they just say it, like it's just proven somehow.
	There's no such thing as goodness.
	It's all a cultural construct, blah-de-blah-de-blah, right?
	But I had the humility to say, I don't know what virtue is, and the humility to say...
	I don't know that there's no such thing as virtue.
	And so it's hard.
	You know, when people see somebody whose confidence arises out of humility...
	I'm sorry?
	Also, when you have the best intentions, because the reason I call it so, because I run this company, this art and music company.
	And one of my ideas is that I give some of my money to charity.
	Which works with kids.
	And I gave my money to Palestine last year.
	And my first reactions from my family was like, it was condemnating what they're trying to do here.
	It was like, I really hit in the face, really.
	And it's a great idea.
	I gave a lot of money and I'm really proud of it.
	Really, I did what I was supposed to do.
	But it was a cold shoulder from the one that's supposed to be the one that knows about business and family.
	It's really very strange because they say they want you to succeed and everything, but when it comes to it, they act different.
	Right, right.
	Well, is there anything I'd make to be found out?
	Still poking around?
	All right.
	Yeah, so when people, my confidence comes out of humility, right?
	I really try to avoid asserting that which I cannot prove and it's unsettling for people because most people's confidence comes out of the denial of information or the assumption That emotional prejudice is philosophical truth.
	And they just go with that.
	And I don't know.
	I don't know what the cause of disparities among minorities are.
	And therefore I would go and try and find out.
	I don't know why some women are paid less than men, so I would go and try and find out.
	You know, people who want the easy answers of, well, women are paid less than men because of exploitation.
	It's like...
	And God came because – the world came because God sneezed.
	You know that – you don't know that, right?
	It's just a made-up answer, right?
	So it's disconcerting for people and it's shameful for people because everybody knows that you shouldn't assert things that you don't know.
	Everybody knows that.
	To pretend you know something you don't know is bullshit cowardice.
	I mean, it's just silly.
	It's embarrassing.
	And it reveals a huge amount of trauma.
	And what it reveals is that people have been attacked for their ignorance, right?
	And therefore they pretend their knowledge in order to avoid attack, right?
	And it reveals a lot of trauma.
	And so people just assert stuff.
	Mike, what was that quote that somebody posted?
	I thought it was delightful.
	I can't do it justice and read it in your whiny person voice, but the quote was, consciousness without matter?
	Your voice is coming to me over radio waves which have no matter.
	Do you really understand what you mean when you use the word matter?
	Light, radio waves have no matter.
	Otherwise, they could not move at the speed of light.
	Yet they exist.
	They can carry vast amounts of information.
	You claim to be an empiricist, yet your knowledge of empirical science is sometimes shocking.
	Perhaps you should spend some time reading those, parentheses, nerdy physics books.
	You know, that one doesn't get old.
	It encapsulates so much mental dysfunction in one paragraph that we just could spend a lot of time on it.
	We won't, right?
	But, you know, because I'm saying consciousness is an effective matter.
	And he's saying, what do you mean consciousness is an effective matter?
	I'm listening to you on a computer which was transmitted through, you know, I guess, I don't know, radio waves or...
	I mean, I know it's not radio that runs the network or anything like that, but basically there's intangible stuff which transmits information and therefore consciousness is non-material or can be.
	As if, you know...
	Hey, I'm watching a Johnny Depp movie.
	He must be right here with me.
	Hey, he's taking my popcorn.
	The representation of something is not the thing itself.
	Information which transmits the contents of consciousness It's not conscious.
	It's like you don't have a conversation with your radio.
	I mean, I guess this guy probably does.
	Sane people don't.
	And it's not so much that he's making this completely obvious mistake of mistaking the transmission of something for the thing itself.
	It's that he's so completely arrogant and dismissive and contemptuous of my lack of knowledge.
	That's really the icing.
	On the shit sandwich that is served up on the buffet ignoramus.
	But it is...
	I mean, this is pretty common.
	I posted that one and I called him a sublime idiot.
	And then, of course, people got very upset with me saying, Steph, you've got to be nicer, man.
	You've got to woo people over to the cause.
	It's like, I don't want to woo this guy over to the cause.
	I don't.
	You know, if Danny DeVito wants to join the Marines, you know what they say?
	Sorry, short stuff.
	Great actor.
	You can't come in.
	You can't do it.
	Go voice Hercules.
	Ha, ha, ha.
	I mean, saying no is really, really important.
	Really important.
	I don't want idiots to say they love my show.
	I want idiots to say they hate my show.
	Because anyone with any brains will say, oh, the stuff that the idiot hates probably has some value, right?
	You know, I mean, Hitler really, really, really dislikes Churchill, right?
	Do we then say, well, you know, obviously there must be something wrong with Churchill because, man, Hitler really didn't like him.
	You know, the importance of being hated by idiots and bad people can't really be overstated.
	Because idiots, when they're faced with the limitations of their own thinking, they have two choices, right?
	They can say, whoa, shit, I guess I got schooled.
	I'm not as smart as I thought I was.
	I guess I'd better not say stupid stuff.
	I go and learn some more, right?
	That's one option that they have.
	But being idiots, they so rarely take that option.
	What they do is they just double down on their hostility and hatred and think that they've done anything other than transmit how idiotic they are to anyone with any brains and eyeballs.
	So, no, it is really important that, as I've said before, people should...
	I don't want people to be into this show.
	Driving away listeners who are idiots is really as important as getting new smart people.
	If you have a problem with this, then any graduate school program, you should say, well, just let anyone in.
	They tend to say, listen, you've got to write your LSATs, you've got to write your exams, we've got to look at your transcripts from your undergraduate, and we're going to take the cream of the cream.
	And it's funny.
	These are exactly the same people who say, oh, Brad Pitt movie.
	That's great.
	I love Brad Pitt.
	I'm going to go and see it.
	It's like, okay.
	So not just anyone should be in the lead of a movie, but only the best of the best should be in the lead of the movie, right?
	But these are the people who say, Steph, you've got to be nicer to people.
	And it's like, you don't understand the basic concept of self-defense, do you, right?
	So the idea that I should not reply to rudeness with rudeness is identical to the idea that I should not respond to the initiation of force with force, right?
	I mean, this is what people don't understand.
	Saying that you should not reply to rudeness with rudeness is being a radical pacifist that says that you have no right of self-defense, right?
	It's the person who initiates force Who is the moral reprobate, right?
	I mean, that's the guy who's doing wrong.
	It's the initiation of force.
	Responding to force with force is perfectly acceptable.
	And this is directly analogous to if people are rude to you, you could be rude back.
	I mean, this idea that we have to rise above rudeness and we have to be nice to people who are being snarky and bitchy and calling us outwardly, publicly, for everyone in the world to see calling us morons.
	The idea that we have to be nice to those people is literally like saying, oh, I know jujitsu, and I'm heavily armed, but a guy is threatening to slap me on the nipple if I don't give him my wallet.
	Well, I give him my wallet and my watch, too, because I'm a good libertarian, and I believe in rising above provocations and the initiation of force.
	Well, anybody who did that, we'd say...
	You're an idiot.
	You don't understand.
	You have the right of self-defense.
	You don't have to do it, but you have the right of self-defense.
	And nobody is going to bitch at you for exercising your right of self-defense.
	In other words, for responding to the initiation of aggression with aggression.
	For responding to the initiation of force with force.
	And to respond to the initiation of rudeness with rudeness is perfectly in line with that.
	It's not the person who is responding Who is at fault is the person who is initiating.
	But people just don't like confrontation.
	And, you know, I get the guy wasn't using force against me.
	But, you know, I treat people the best I can when I meet them first.
	And after that, I treat them like they treat me.
	And if they start off by treating me like dirt, then I'll be like, okay, so this is how we're playing.
	Fine.
	I do not raise my standards above those I fight.
	My God, I don't bring a knife to a gunfight.
	If that's going to be the case, I ain't going.
	So, anyway, sorry, you were going to ask?
	Yeah, yeah, because the reason I can ask, I haven't got a lot of bad comments really from anyone on the internet.
	It's really a family issue, actually.
	Right.
	Because the people you are used to, yeah, like, you would tell the people you are proud of what you're doing or your plans and dreams or, yeah, anything.
	I have a lot of...
	Of course, from my family, but a really good audience and a lot of good friends that are really supporting me, people I really can call friends that I really love.
	And so I started to listen to your book, These Real-Time Relationships, and I'm working myself through it.
	At this point, I have stated that Yeah, I think that's really important.
	Yeah, I think it's really important.
	People who want to get stuff done quite often take way too much ownership in relationships.
	I think it's exceedingly dangerous.
	Relationships have to be 50-50.
	If you try and work both sides of the fence, then you're like a pickup artist who goes home and masturbates and thinks he's scored.
	I'm very afraid of leaving my family, of course, but they cannot have left me already.
	Yeah, be who you are.
	And if people hate you for who you are, then...
	What is your choice to then conform to people who use hatred and emotional bullying as their mechanism or go be who you are?
	I'm so sorry.
	I do have to move on to the next caller, but I really do appreciate your call.
	It was a great question, great comments.
	I certainly wish you the very best with your family.
	Remember, you are not beholden.
	To the accidents of history.
	And that really is what family is.
	Hopefully it's a happy, productive, loving accident.
	But it is fundamentally an accident.
	Being born to parents, being born to a culture has no moral content, no moral value.
	It should make us skeptical of the value of those biologically involuntary relationships.
	And to me, parents have the very highest burden of earning love of anyone else because they have created a dependent person who can't leave and isn't there by choice and all that, all those synonyms for dependent.
	So I have the very highest moral standards for parents.
	Historically, of course, they've been subjected to the very lowest moral standards.
	Anytime you switch those moral standards, people got upset, right?
	Parenting largely is a racket of abuse that has lasted for about 10,000 years and it kind of is a bummer that people like me are coming along and saying let's raise the moral standards for parents.
	It sucks to be the person who is subjected to raised moral standards.
	It sucks that there were 6,000 years of slavery and then the sloveners suddenly were bastards.
	I get it.
	It sucks.
	It sucks that, you know, in the 50s and 60s, it sucks that men who were bad to their wives suddenly were called pigs and the wives could leave them.
	Yeah, you know, it really...
	Yeah, sorry, you know, but what's our alternative?
	Fucking live in caves because we don't want to offend people who can paint cave walls with having to build houses?
	Too bad.
	Life moves on.
	All right, who's next to...
	All right, up next is Michael F. He writes in and says, how does one balance a fulfilling life, purpose, and work?
	Michael F. Great.
	We don't often have Kafka protagonists in the show, so go ahead.
	Good morning, Steph.
	How are you?
	I'm well.
	How are you doing?
	I'm doing great.
	My question is kind of basic, actually.
	It's really nothing to do with libertarianism and philosophy.
	I just find that lately the...
	The hardware engineering market has become quite demanding, especially with the death of Blackberry in my area.
	And I just can't seem to meet the competition with having a doctorate and a master's in my field.
	Wait, sorry, wait.
	Other people in your field have doctorates and masters and you don't?
	Yeah.
	I just don't believe I have the means to pay for the $30,000 to $40,000 in education on top of my college diploma.
	I'm just a technologist, a computer engineering technologist at this time, and I specialize in embedded systems.
	And my question to you basically is, how did you get into the market of philosophy and get in on your own, I guess?
	Well, I mean, I just did it.
	I practiced speeches all my life.
	This didn't come out of nowhere.
	Freddie Mercury singing at Live Aid is the result of 20 years of Freddie Mercury singing in front of people.
	It doesn't come out of nowhere and that's the result of him singing.
	I had an ex-girlfriend who was cousins with one of his cousins or whatever and she said that he would sing in front of the bathroom mirror with his hairbrush from when he was a little kid.
	Sam Cooke, one of the most amazing singers and songwriters of the 20th century, his brother was saying that Sam Cooke, when he was like a toddler, used to line up little toys like an audience and would go in front of those toys and sing and he'd say, I'm going to be a singer and I'm going to entertain the world and all this kind of stuff.
	And so excellence comes out of very early, early, early stuff.
	And so I had a lot of thoughts and a lot of ideas and I had worked very hard on my capacity for self-expression, which I'm still pushing.
	I've still got a long way to go as far as clearly and powerfully and rationally expressing myself in a way that connects and moves people.
	I'm not even halfway there as far as where I want to go.
	But it comes out of a huge amount of preparation.
	I did calculations years and years ago that I put 35,000 hours in to just developing thoughts.
	And this doesn't count things like theater school and all of that.
	So yeah, I've done a lot of body work, done a lot of theater school work, which is improv, which is of course thinking on your feet, communicating on the fly.
	A lot of...
	Reading of philosophy, a lot of education in the realm of philosophy, and to a smaller degree, economics and all that.
	So there's just a huge amount of preparation, and then you go and you do it, and you do the very best that you can do.
	And I stay very connected to the audience through these call-in shows, like I do six hours of call-in shows every week, not even counting the listener conversations, some of which go out and some of which remain private.
	So I have a huge amount of feedback.
	I read some YouTube comments.
	I check the board out once a day trying to get a sense of what people are talking about.
	So you prepare a lot.
	You do the very best you can.
	You are humble about areas of improvement and you listen like hell to your customers.
	There's no other magic sauce I guess that you can come up with.
	So I would recommend really Focusing on those attributes.
	Now, so BlackBerry is shutting down.
	Like ever since the playbook and all that, they've had these big losses and they're kind of behind the curve.
	And I think their last OS and smartphone was not hugely well received.
	So they're moving out of your area, right?
	So why don't you move to where the jobs are?
	That would help a lot, right?
	Yeah, I was actually thinking of doing that or spending another four years in education, but I honestly don't really want to do that anymore.
	I see the folly of education.
	Mostly the professors are lazy and they don't really want to challenge themselves or the students.
	That's what really upset me and makes me want to go out on the market my own.
	Well, yeah, I mean, saying professors are lazy is like saying that post office workers are unmotivated.
	I mean, it's...
	Yeah, of course they're lazy.
	I mean, if they wanted real jobs, then they wouldn't be in a government-mandated diploma mill with four months off in the summer and sabbaticals every third year and having to work What, 10 hours a week maybe?
	And throwing everything off on their TAs, teachers assistants and so on.
	I mean, the arrogance and laziness, which always tends to go hand in hand, the arrogance and laziness and conformity of those in academia knows almost literally no bounds.
	Sorry, but yeah, so you just move.
	I think that's the easiest thing to do is to move to where the jobs are rather than cross your fingers to where the jobs aren't.
	And also, you know, if you go and get education, I mentioned this on a show I think last week, if you go for your education, then you will limit yourself to people who will only hire you if you have the right credentials.
	In other words, people who don't trust their own judgment when it comes to people.
	And you will also be working for people who themselves probably have a master's or a PhD.
	In other words, they went a very conventional route and they basically were slaves to academia and slaves to other people's perceptions, which means slaves to fear.
	And I do not imagine that those people will be hugely successful in the long run or will be a lot of fun to work for.
	Thank you.
	That's really all I have to say, because I'm just curious.
	I don't really want to spend my life constantly working behind the desk, because I started my own website, and I don't want to say it right now, without a plug.
	Wait, why don't you want to say your website?
	Oh, okay.
	It's in bedelectronics.org.
	I just don't want to make a social faux pas here.
	What I do is I write a lot of libraries, and I write a lot of tutorials for people who are getting into the hardware engineering department, and I just...
	That's what I'm doing right now.
	And I don't really want to spend my life behind the desk.
	I've spent about 16 to 18 hours most days behind the desk writing and tutoring other students.
	And I kind of...
	I would like to have some free time.
	I'm just curious, how much free time do you have for yourself?
	Like when you're getting into...
	For myself?
	Oh God, none.
	For myself.
	That's funny.
	For myself.
	Yeah, so like yesterday, I woke up...
	Grabbed a very quick meal.
	Basically, it was some half-warmed up...
	A small piece of half-warmed up quiche that I wolfed down on the way out the door to drive downtown to be at a conference by 11 o'clock.
	I did four interviews, three speeches, including one for 90 minutes.
	Drove home, put my daughter to bed, chatted with my wife, went to sleep.
	Ah!
	There's a day of intense selfhood.
	So, no, we were just talking to the car about...
	I used to actually play video games, and I have actually, like...
	Two video games sitting on my computer that have no time to play.
	Like, I have a...
	Crisis 3 and some other one I kind of remember.
	And, like, I used to be able to play through video games.
	I really did.
	And now, I mean, God, I know.
	So, yeah, in terms of, like, time for myself, it's not...
	And I'm not complaining, right?
	But, you know, simply ask about time for myself.
	You know, I dream of a day in which I'm bored.
	Like, that to me would be a very exciting...
	Yeah, so today I'm doing a call-in show.
	I have to prepare.
	I'm doing a Peter Schiff show in the morning and then I'm doing an interview in the afternoon.
	And then I have to stop preparing for the speech in the Netherlands.
	And so, yeah, no, it's pretty constant.
	But, you know, this is my commitment.
	I'm parenting, right?
	I mean, my daughter's awake for 13, 14 hours a day and is not entirely self-directed as yet.
	So, yeah.
	And this is one reason why, you know, people sort of say, oh, Steph, someone did a video critical of your perspective and so on, right?
	And I don't have time.
	Like, I literally do not have time to go and go through people's articles and videos criticizing me and so on.
	But, as always, We put the invitation out to people that if you disagree with me, we guarantee you will get to the front of the queue for a call-in show.
	And the stronger your disagreements, the more at the front you will be.
	You'll be at the front plus one.
	I don't want to get involved in Passive-aggressive, mudslinging across YouTube videos.
	You know, let's have a conversation.
	Let's have a debate.
	I'm happy to debate.
	Happy to hear people who disagree with me.
	Happy to sharpen my blade on the whetstone of other people's discontent.
	Wonderful.
	But I don't have time to sit there and say, well, this person said this, and here's my rebuttal, and blah-de-blah-de-blah.
	So, yeah.
	I mean, because it's not usually a very productive philosophy, it's meant to be a conversation.
	And most of what I do...
	It's trying to lure people into a conversation with myself or with others.
	So, yeah, not a huge amount of time.
	Okay, that's pretty much all I really have to ask or say.
	All right, best of luck.
	And it was betterelectronics.org?
	Oh, sorry, it's just embeddedelectronics.org.
	Embedded?
	Yes.
	Embeddedelectronics.org.
	Okay, well, go check it out.
	And, of course, if anybody has a job that they'd like to talk to you about, I'm sure you could be contacted through there.
	And thanks very much for your call.
	Thank you.
	Alright, up next is Melashina.
	She writes in and says, After having been introduced to FDR and presented with the Food Talk by my son in 2012, I would now like to turn and approach my daughter to have the same discussion.
	She is seven months into a difficult pregnancy, and although she desperately needs my help and has been accepting it, I sense conflict in her emotions with me.
	I want her to know it's alright to talk to me about her feelings, especially regarding her childhood and how she feels about it.
	Can you help me with how to approach this with her, so she and I can have this discussion?
	Well, welcome.
	Thank you for calling in, of course.
	What is the Foo talk that you had with your son?
	Oh, Foo, for those who don't know, because we got new listeners, right, every week.
	So Foo is family of origin.
	So we say Foo rather than family because for those who are married and have kids, we don't know whether we're talking about the current family or the family when they were kids.
	So Foo is family of origin.
	But sorry, go ahead.
	Good morning, Steph.
	When my son first approached me, it was just simply to tell me about FDR and your books and your podcasts.
	He wanted me to read the material and start listening to it.
	And it wasn't until a few months after that that he sat down and said, Mom, I need to talk to you about how I feel about how I was raised, about when I was a kid.
	And I did spank my kids and I did yell at them.
	And that was the talk that we had.
	And it took – we had several talks.
	We would meet on a weekly basis and he's a truck driver so he was on the road a lot.
	But on those days when he was back in town, we'd get together and we'd talk at length.
	We've talked for hours and hours over the past couple of years about that very thing.
	And we're in a healthy place now and comfortable.
	I just really strongly feel that now is a conversation that I would really like to have with my daughter, especially since now she's not actually pregnant anymore.
	The baby was born two weeks ago today.
	He was born seven weeks premature.
	So now I have a grandson.
	Wow.
	Just go ahead.
	I have lots of thoughts, but I'll wait till you finish with the intro.
	I see in her that she wants to be a wonderful parent.
	She's really grasped on to the non-aggression principle, not circumcising.
	She's listened to a lot of your podcasts about parenting, and she's doing a great job.
	But I see in her a lot of fear that she's not going to get it right.
	And for instance, When he was born premature, normally when a child is full term, the mother gets to hold the baby skin to skin immediately and usually for quite a long time.
	And she didn't get to at all because they had to rush him to the nursery to make sure that he was going to be breathing all right and everything.
	He's so tiny.
	He was three pounds, 15 ounces, so very small.
	And she said the other day that now she's afraid that since she didn't get to have that initial skin to skin contact, That, you know, now their bond won't be as strong.
	So there's just this fear that she has, and I just feel like if she were able to share her feelings with me about her own childhood and the fears that she has of being a parent and the possibility of doing it wrong, that it would really help her to progress.
	And I'm not sure if I should wait for her to initiate the conversation.
	Should I initiate it?
	And if so, how?
	I mean, we've talked about things on occasion, but not in great depth because she knows that my son and I have had conversations and what they've been about, but it's just not something that she and I have delved into in depth about how she feels about it.
	Hmm.
	Right.
	Well, I mean, I appreciate, obviously, you bringing all this stuff up.
	Not the most fun conversation I'm sure you've ever had, either with your son or with me today, but I really appreciate the courage in bringing this stuff up.
	How are you feeling?
	I'm very shaky, nervous, scared.
	No, it's tough.
	I mean, but this is the kind of moral courage that you need to make the world better.
	So, massive kudos to you for doing that.
	But what is the relationship like between...
	Your son and your daughter.
	It's a little foggy to me because if your son is having all of these intense conversations with you about his upbringing, is it right to understand that the daughter is not part or is not informed of, is not participating, is not enmeshed in those conversations?
	She has not been a part of the conversations where he and I are discussing, but there have been occasion when the three of us are together and we'll bring up such topics about FDR and philosophy and different stuff like that.
	And what she comes away with is saying that she feels like she's out of the loop, like she doesn't feel like she's a part of it.
	And one of the things that she has expressed is from her childhood, you know, memory of her childhood was that she always kind of felt like where there was a A bond between my son and I, you know, we would play video games together and we'd play tag, you know, and just have a lot of fun that she always kind of felt like she didn't quite get it and she didn't quite fit into that.
	And she feels the same way about this now, like she doesn't quite get it and that somehow she's lacking in that area.
	And though she wants to understand that somehow she's just She's not getting it.
	And I know that recently she listened to one of your podcasts on single parenting and it really shook her.
	She is a single parent.
	So now she doesn't really want to listen.
	To the podcast anymore.
	Oh dear.
	Oh, that's a shame.
	I know.
	Oh, something that offends me.
	I'll stop listening.
	No, no, that's where you need to dig in further.
	Offense is a great...
	Like, what offends me is what I really need to pursue and understand.
	That's the body signal for...
	Right?
	Pain is the body signal to avoid.
	Offense is the brain signal to explore.
	But anyway.
	Okay.
	Keep going.
	I'll keep my questions.
	Um...
	I'm not sure where to go with it at this point.
	I don't know what kind of back history you might want.
	I know that right now the current situation is that I'm usually at her house 24-7 except for a few hours during the day when I go out and run errands.
	I'd taken off work vacation the past two weeks since the baby was born.
	The baby was in the hospital for nine days before she got to bring him home.
	And so I've been helping with Everything.
	And I have to go back to work next week.
	And I just feel this urgency that I want her to feel confident as a parent that she can do this, you know, that she can handle the feedings overnight.
	And I don't know what to do To instill that confidence in her, because I don't feel like she feels good enough about how she feels about me to even take my word for it, if that makes sense.
	Yeah, it does.
	Now, I'm going to accuse you of not using a four-letter word, which is dada.
	Now, I understand that your daughter is a single mom, but what about your children's father?
	I was married to their father for 30 years.
	And got divorced six years ago, you know, long after the kids had been out on their own as adults for a few years.
	And he's still in the area, and they still talk to him and everything.
	I don't, but they do.
	And why did you get divorced?
	I know that's a big question, but just roughly...
	I got divorced because I just realized that it was an extremely unhealthy relationship to be in.
	And after 29 years I decided that we needed to separate and a year later we were divorced.
	And why was it unhealthy?
	He was a very controlling person through just my own Exploration of my past, I've come to realize that basically I married my mom, really.
	I literally also moved from my parents' house at 18 into my husband's house when we got married.
	I never had actually even lived on my own until I got separated and divorced, and that was the first apartment I'd ever even had on my own.
	But he was very controlling.
	I was very much under his thumb.
	He was very dismissive of my feelings or emotions, and they didn't count for anything.
	Just a lot of things like that.
	So dismissive and controlling.
	How was he controlling?
	I wasn't allowed to...
	Like, have friends or anything like that.
	I was to go to work.
	I was to give him my paycheck.
	I was given an allowance every week to spend to pay for lunch and gas for the car.
	And other than that, I was to be home and any friends we had were his friends and usually business associates.
	And so it was all very controlled environment.
	Right.
	Do you think that had an effect on your spanking and yelling?
	Yeah, I do.
	Go on.
	I was actually having this discussion with my son yesterday, as a matter of fact, and we were talking about my daughter and how she's feeling about being a parent and We got to talking about how I felt as a parent when they were babies.
	And it was like when I brought him home from the hospital, I wasn't allowed to pick him up when they cried.
	It was like at night, they went to their crib, he'd shut the nursery door, and I wasn't allowed to go back in.
	And when they would cry in the night for feedings, I'd have to sneak out of bed so I wouldn't wake him up, because if I woke him up, he'd get really angry.
	So I'd have to sneak out of bed to sneak to the nursery to give them their feedings.
	It was...
	It was not a pleasant time.
	It was difficult.
	Did you notice these trends in him before you had babies?
	Yeah.
	We were married for four years before we started a family.
	And it was very isolating.
	All the friends that I had had in high school, he simply wouldn't let me get together with them or talk to them anymore.
	Okay.
	Melisina, I've got to treat you with the respect I would give a man.
	And I got to call you on the helpless stuff.
	I'm so sorry, but I have to.
	I have to.
	Because, you know, I want to treat women as equal, right?
	Because you're giving me a huge amount of I couldn't and I didn't and he wouldn't let me and things like that, right?
	Mm-hmm.
	Right.
	I mean, you're playing the V card, right?
	By that, I actually mean victim, not the other one, right?
	But you're playing the victim card, right?
	Okay.
	Well, because you're telling me that, well, I had to do this or he would get upset or he'd wake or this and that and the other, right?
	And you were an adult.
	You chose to get married to the man.
	You were 18.
	I understand that.
	You chose to have children.
	You knew his behavior before, right?
	This is the self-ownership thing, which is tough, right?
	And the reason I'm saying all of this is not to make you feel bad about the past because But my belief, right, you know, this is just my amateur internet opinion, so you can take it with all the grains of salt of a salt lick in Utah, but if you want your daughter to respect you, there can't be anything you don't take ownership of.
	If you want to have influence over your daughter, you can't give yourself all the outs in the world for your younger self who is now your daughter's age and then ask your daughter to take ownership.
	You have to take ownership for everything that happened from the day 18 onwards with sympathy to your history and your mom and all of that.
	But if you don't take ownership of your own history, you cannot evoke ownership in your daughter who's the same age as roughly as you giving up ownership on yourself.
	I'm not putting that very well, but does that make any sense?
	It does.
	It absolutely does.
	And I say this with sympathy as I do with all the callers who had difficult childhoods.
	I say this with sympathy, but you want your daughter to take ownership and accept responsibility for where she is, which is going to not have her just react.
	Abuse comes out of reaction.
	Abuse, unless she's a sadist, which I'm sure she's not, abuse is almost always reactive.
	You kids are driving me crazy.
	If I've told you once, I've told you a thousand times.
	It's just a hyperreaction to repetitive stimuli that is not being managed.
	It's a lashing out.
	You know, you poke the bear often enough, right?
	The bear is just reacting to the poking.
	And there's a passivity in most abusive situations, right?
	And there's a passivity in what you're telling me about your early marriage, right?
	You could have done differently.
	If you couldn't have done differently, then asking your daughter to do differently is irrational.
	But you can't give your daughter any more responsibility, choice, freedom, or self-ownership than you're willing to accept for yourself at her age.
	Does that make sense?
	It does.
	You're saying it does, but at the same time, you're like, I don't want it to, right?
	I'm wondering now, the person I am now, how do I make that so?
	That's in my past.
	How do I make that so now?
	I'm not sure what you're asking about how you make what so.
	I mean, do I just look at my past and say, okay, I own that.
	I chose to live that way.
	My responsibility, I could have, should have done it differently, but obviously I didn't.
	I can't change it, but I own it.
	I mean, is that just as simple as that?
	Oh, who's looking for the easy out here?
	I think that would be a machine.
	No, no, look.
	Look, I'm doing my very best to try and help you connect with your daughter and to prevent a repetition because your daughter is set up for failure as a parent, right?
	Tragically, right?
	She has to go back to work, right?
	I'm sorry, you have to go back to work.
	What's her situation in terms of being able to stay home?
	She's off medical leave because she was on bed rest for the 11 weeks prior to his premature birth because she kept going into preterm labor.
	But then in about, we're thinking 12 weeks, she's going to need to return to work.
	Right, so this is pretty catastrophic in terms of its origins, right?
	And I'm sorry to say that, but statistically that's the case, right?
	She's a single mom who has to work, and you have to work, so where's the baby going?
	We're hoping that she'll be able to arrange her work hours so that, like I work four days and I'm off three, so that we can reverse it, so that I babysit the three days I'm off, and then the days I'm working she can be home with him.
	Yeah, grandmothers don't babysit.
	12-year-old girls babysit.
	Grandmothers are co-parents in this situation.
	That would be my way of looking at it.
	I would just avoid that language because it diminishes, I think, your role, which is a co-parent, I would assume, in this situation.
	I guess her brother's on the road a lot, so he can't Pseudo dad, right?
	He has basically the same schedule I do, where he's driving on the road Tuesday through Friday, and then he has off Saturday, Sunday, Monday.
	So he'll be able to help out, too.
	Basically the same schedule I have.
	And they're in a situation where right now he's planning to move in with her this fall, make it easier on them both financially, and he truly will be the male role model for his nephew.
	Well...
	He's going to be kind of a neutered male role model, right?
	Because does he not want to get married and have kids?
	He just got divorced.
	Oh, gosh.
	Okay.
	Yeah.
	And does he have kids?
	No.
	All right.
	Well, I guess small blessings there, I suppose.
	But at some point he may.
	Does he want to have kids in the future, do you know?
	Yes.
	Right.
	So this isn't going to last, right?
	No, not forever.
	Not permanently, no.
	Right, right.
	And where is the baby mama's baby data?
	Not involved.
	No, I understand that.
	Where is he?
	What happened?
	Well, he's still in the area but he has expressed no desire to find out Anything about the baby at all.
	They had been seeing each other for a few months and it actually just broken up the relationship when she found out she was pregnant.
	Right.
	And how did she get pregnant?
	How?
	No, seriously.
	How?
	There were like 18 different methods of birth control.
	They did not practice any birth control, apparently, that particular episode.
	So she wanted to get pregnant?
	If you were to ask her that, she would say no, I'm sure.
	Oh, come on.
	This helplessness stuff, come on.
	I mean, you have sex.
	I don't know.
	When you're in your 20s without birth control, you want to get pregnant.
	Did the guy know that she wasn't practicing birth control?
	Yes.
	How do you know that?
	Have you asked him?
	I haven't asked him.
	I just talked to her about it.
	You know, I had the same question.
	How did this happen?
	And she said, the man knowingly had sex with me after we'd broken up and we're kind of in the middle of breaking up or whatever.
	The man knowingly had sex with me when he knew I wasn't on birth control.
	Right.
	Was she expecting the man to Marry her?
	To become a father?
	To stick around?
	What was she thinking would happen when she found out she was pregnant?
	When she found out she was pregnant, she did not want to get back in a relationship with him.
	She did not...
	I mean, after the breakup, she didn't see any point in continuing the relationship at all.
	It just simply wasn't going to work.
	She didn't see any point...
	Wait, she didn't see any point...
	In having a father for her...
	Is it a boy or a girl?
	As a boy.
	Yeah, I think you mentioned no circumcision, which is good.
	So she didn't see any point in having a father for her son?
	I don't...
	I'm not sure that...
	As a man and a former son who grew up without a father, I must say that that seems a little bit one-sided, to put it as mildly as possible, right?
	I think her hope was that he would want to be around and that he would want to help.
	And when he expressed no desire in that, she just lost...
	Any hope in that?
	She just said, fine, I can do this on my own.
	Except she's not doing it on her own.
	She's doing it with you and with her brother.
	Right?
	It's not like her need for support.
	I mean, this independence of the single, I'll do it by myself.
	It's like, yeah, good luck with that.
	You need resources, right?
	So they're just this giant black hole that sucks in everyone else's resources.
	I mean, this kind of scooches your capacity to date, right?
	Oh, yeah.
	Kind of scooches your brother's capacity to find a woman.
	Hey, you're living with your sister and you're the pseudo-parent to her son.
	Hmm.
	And you travel three days a week or four days a week, right?
	So, it's kind of...
	This is a detonation across the whole family, right?
	Yeah.
	What did you think of the boyfriend?
	I... I thought he was a polite enough young man.
	Whenever he was around me, he was always very polite and always calling me ma'am.
	Anything else?
	I personally didn't see the relationship lasting for very long.
	Why not?
	Just… Well, first and foremost, because of how she would tell me how they got along, which wasn't always very well.
	And secondly, because he was very, I don't know what the word is, maybe flamboyant.
	He loved to tell stories.
	You mean he was a liar?
	I don't know what flamboyant love to tell stories.
	I mean, so did my theater school teacher.
	That doesn't mean he was a deadbeat dad, right?
	Right.
	He would just tell stories about, like, any topic would come up and he'd been there, done that, and to the 10th degree.
	You know, I wouldn't have been surprised if he'd told me that he'd been to the moon and back.
	You know, it was just like his stories were very outrageous and, you know, Harry was so young and it's like, wow, you know, he's...
	He's lived triple the life I have, and I'm twice his age.
	And you thought he was lying about this stuff?
	Yeah, I thought he was just...
	But it's okay, because at least he called you ma'am.
	So this guy had mental problems, right?
	Yeah.
	I mean, that's deranged.
	This grandiloquence, this megalomania, this needing to impress everyone with bullshit, I mean, that's mental problems, right?
	Right.
	Certainly nobody who's fit to be a dad.
	I mean, somebody with those kinds of mental problems to date your daughter?
	Did you express to your daughter your discontent with this mad hatter of a booty call?
	Yes.
	And what did she say?
	Uh...
	Basically, I think she pretty much agreed with me, and it's just like she could see that the relationship was on a downward spiral.
	I think for a while she just didn't quite know how to break it off.
	Well, I tell you, a good way to not break it off is to not have unprotected sex with a guy who's this way, right?
	Yeah.
	So why was she susceptible, do you think, to this kind of lunatic?
	Because...
	Was he pretty?
	Yeah.
	Oh, good-looking guy!
	I also think that...
	I know, I don't think, I know that she needed him at the time.
	She had just...
	She moved back from out of state and had renters in her house that she has owned for several years now.
	And the renters had torn it up and that's how they initially started their friendship was that he offered to help her do the repairs to the home and was very helpful.
	You're kidding me, right?
	No, I'm not kidding.
	So she got free labor from the guy in return for sex?
	Is that what you're telling me?
	I guess that would be what I just said, yes.
	I mean, no, I'm, you know, trying to boil it down to the basics, right?
	Mm-hmm.
	So she was exploiting him.
	Yeah.
	I mean, he brought lots of free labor and she brought sex, right?
	Again, I hate to be so blunt, but, you know, trying to treat you as an equal, right?
	You're right.
	All right.
	All right.
	Okay, alright, so was your husband physically attractive?
	In his youth, yeah.
	Did he make a lot of money?
	He did, in the later years, yes.
	Right.
	Does he pay alimony?
	No.
	Oh, so you didn't go for any alimony or support or anything like that?
	No. Alright.
	Alright.
	Well...
	I'm just mulling here.
	Sorry to give you the dead air.
	I appreciate your honesty.
	I mean, this is a mess, right?
	I think we can both agree on that.
	What does your ex-husband think?
	Was he involved in knowing this Grandiloquent nut job with, I guess, good handiwork skills.
	What did he think of this guy?
	I'm not sure that he ever actually met him.
	I don't...
	Oh, you don't talk to him, right?
	So you don't know, right?
	I don't talk to him.
	And no, I just don't know.
	I'm not aware that he did.
	And actually, to date, he's not even met his grandchild yet.
	With him being so premature, visitors were limited in the hospital, and she just simply told her dad, you know, don't come to the hospital.
	Oh, come on.
	Are you saying the grandparents couldn't look at him even through glass?
	They could, but she didn't want him up there.
	She didn't want to have to deal with him.
	It was her decision, and so he's not met him yet.
	Hmm.
	So I assume, of course, that your daughter's relationship with her father is bad, right?
	Very strained, yes.
	On her part.
	Well, no, that's more than strained.
	Yeah.
	Strained is come over, but it's a bit awkward, right?
	Don't come over is more than strained, right?
	Yeah.
	Right.
	Right.
	Well, so my prescription, which...
	I think is probably the best that can be done in this situation is it's tough.
	You know, honestly, I mean, this is what's very tough about the single mom universe, right?
	Your daughter made catastrophic decisions, like harming children, catastrophic decision.
	This boy is going to grow up without a dad, right?
	And statistically, that is the single worst predictor for a child's outcome.
	He's going to grow up without a dad.
	It sounds like he might even grow up without much of a granddad.
	Now, he's going to grow up with an uncle, but that uncle is either neutered or is going to move on, right?
	So I think to be aware that, like, this is a catastrophe is really important, right?
	To downplay the catastrophic nature of this, I think, is a mistake.
	But the challenge is that you as a parent...
	In a sense, I mean you can and you can't assign 100% responsibility to your daughter.
	You can like she's an adult, but you can't in that you raised her, right?
	Right, exactly.
	You chose the man, I assume that you had more than one date offer in your life?
	Yeah.
	Right?
	I assume that you are or certainly were at 18 very attractive?
	I suppose so, yeah.
	Come on, seriously.
	When you were 1 to 10, when you were 18, you've seen pictures.
	Come on, we always look better.
	When we look back, like at the time, we're like, oh, I don't know if I'm that attractive.
	And you look at pictures of you 20 years ago, you're like, damn, I was hot, right?
	Well, I've never thought I was very good looking.
	But I would say if you look back at me at 18, I'm probably like an 8 or a 9.
	I'm real skinny.
	I weighed like 100 pounds.
	Yeah, so you were like a javelin, right?
	Got it.
	Right.
	So it's funny.
	I don't think I was that attractive.
	Only an eight or a nine.
	I don't think I passed the test.
	I only got 80 or 90 percent and passing is 300,000 percent.
	So I don't know, right?
	The topping out.
	If you're 80 to 90 percent attractive, then you're attractive, right?
	Mm-hmm.
	And so you did not choose for virtue.
	Your daughter did not choose for virtue, right?
	You did not choose to breed with virtue, right?
	But you bred with attractive, controlling, in this case, grandiloquent guys, right?
	Not quality men in terms of their virtues.
	At the time, I thought he was.
	He provided me with a sense of security at the time, which for some reason at that point in my life I really felt I needed because Sorry, let me just rewind you a second here when I asked you whether his controlling and isolating nature showed up before children and you said yes.
	Before children, yeah.
	Yeah, so now you're telling me that...
	And look, he did provide you a sense of security, sure.
	I mean, if you've been bullied as a child and then you have a bully of a husband, there is a sense of security, which is, hey, I know this, right?
	This is familiar.
	I can do this, right?
	When we were dating, I felt a strong sense of security.
	I had a previous boyfriend at the time who was stalking me, and he just kind of took care of it and made the guy go away and just made everything seem like the world was a lot safer place.
	He was dangerously stalking you?
	The old boyfriend prior, yes.
	Like, would follow me in his car and then try and run me off the road and show up at my house and, you know, bang on my, you know, when I'm living with my parents and bang on the door trying to let me in.
	Who the hell are you people, like, oh my god, first of all, where do you find these guys?
	Who the hell are you people meeting with?
	Like, oh my god, first of all, if I met a woman who had an ex-boyfriend who was trying to run her off the road, I'd be like, call the cops, don't call me ever again.
	Right, so your husband was, what, went and threatened this guy?
	Is that this ape-thumping shit that happened?
	Yeah.
	Oog, leave this woman alone.
	She's mine.
	Throw coconut.
	And you're like, ooh, that guy.
	Oh yeah, let's give him some children because he threatened the guy who was trying to run me off the road.
	Great!
	I'm all soggy now!
	Steph, where were you in 1978?
	Oh my god!
	Oh my god.
	Is there like some planet of screwed up men that is like the biggest Chippendales party for women?
	Like, I just...
	This astounds me.
	And look, I'm not...
	Putting the guy off the hook.
	The guy who stalked you was an evil nutjob and your husband who threatened him.
	But this is like a National Geographic special.
	I'm serious.
	This is like, did you feed him a steady diet of bananas and visitors?
	I mean, oh my god.
	And you're like, yeah, this sounds great.
	This guy was going to run me off the road, but this guy said he was going to run off the road.
	The guy who was going to run me off the road, 30 years, I'm in.
	in let's give him kids so and this is you know when i was saying you were doing the victim card you know like oh he was so controlled He just told me what to do.
	I couldn't.
	Like, you chose him because you found it sexy that he was violent, right?
	Well, I looked at it at the time as being protective, not violent, but yeah.
	Yeah, yeah.
	But see, protective is what women call violence, right?
	Yeah.
	That's the female word for violence.
	Right?
	Yeah.
	And then you're like, wow, this guy who threatened to beat up or kill the guy who was threatening to ride me off the road, you know he ended up not having a lot of empathy and sensitivity?
	And it's like, duh, of course he didn't!
	Because he threatened the guy.
	Yeah.
	Rather than saying, you've got to get a restraining order, you've got to call the cops.
	He's like, oh, I will chase away from this vagina the man who used to have access to the vagina and...
	And it's like, you know, he just didn't seem to have a lot of sensitivity and empathy.
	But he really, really did like his bananas.
	So...
	Yeah, I realized that later.
	Yeah, okay.
	Good.
	So don't play the victim card with me.
	You chose the guy.
	He excited you.
	He felt you feel safe and you had already dated one nutjob and now some other nutjob was threatening the first nutjob and now you've had a nutjob impregnate your daughter...
	Lot of nut jobs is what I'm saying, right?
	Yeah.
	Okay.
	So this is the ownership, right?
	What I'm saying.
	And you'll listen back to your conversation about, you know, there was a stirring amount of Stradivarius violins playing in the background about how just badly treated you'd been by your husband, right?
	And you chose to marry him.
	You chose to have children with him.
	You chose...
	To stay married to him, right?
	And you also, you hit your children, right?
	I did.
	So let's talk about that for a minute or two if that's alright, and then I guess I can give you my final thoughts if that's of any use.
	And look, again, I know I'm being dick-ish, but it's, you know, this is important, right?
	This is important to really, really get, I think.
	So how many times did you spank your children?
	Let's say a month, on average.
	Uh, four or five.
	Four or five times a month each?
	Yeah.
	And was it about equal to both brother and sister?
	Yeah.
	Okay, so let's say ten times a month.
	And did you spank them when they were, or did you hit them when they were babies?
	No.
	At what age did you start hitting them?
	Four or five.
	Four or five?
	Okay.
	And at what age did you stop hitting them?
	Probably pre-teen.
	Yeah.
	So like 12?
	Yeah.
	Okay.
	So 10 times a month 120 times a year, times seven or eight years.
	I don't believe the four, but I'm just going to go with what you're saying.
	So 10, 120 times 7, 840.
	So you hit your children 840 times.
	Do I have that right?
	Okay.
	Well, no, this is based on your information.
	I'm not trying to corner you here.
	Sounds like it.
	Sounds like it.
	I'm just going to double check that mask.
	I'm artistic.
	Yeah, 840 times.
	And at any time during hitting your children 840 times, did you think that it would not be correct?
	Yes.
	And when did you think it might not be correct?
	Pretty much every single time.
	Tell me what you're feeling if you don't mind.
	Sad?
	Ashamed.
	And what do you think it was that brought the feeling on?
	Because I know it was wrong to hit him.
	I let him.
	And why do you think you did?
	Looking back, it was frustration.
	Frustration of mine.
	Oh no.
	Oh no.
	Yes, you do.
	You don't do something 840 times and have no idea why you did it, right?
	You may not want to say, and then you can say, I don't want to say, but you can tell me you don't know.
	Frustration at what?
	Frustration.
	I mean, were they supposed to do whatever you said?
	Were they...
	What behavior was deviating that hitting them was acceptable to you at the time?
	It's not doing what they were told.
	Right.
	Right.
	Would you have accepted being hit by your husband if you had not done what he said?
	Or did he in fact hit you?
	Oh, he only ever hit me once.
	He only hit you once?
	Oh, he didn't hit you, or he only hit you once.
	Okay.
	He only hit me once.
	Right, so it was not acceptable for your husband to hit you if you didn't do what he wanted.
	Right.
	But it's acceptable for you to hit your children when they don't do what you want.
	It shouldn't have been, but it did.
	Yeah, no, I mean, empirically it was, right?
	Again, I'm not trying to bag on you.
	I'm just, empirically, you do something 840 times, then it's obviously acceptable to you, right?
	And yelling.
	How often did you yell at your kids?
	Pretty regularly.
	Yeah.
	And now's the time to be honest, right?
	I mean, I don't imagine another conversation like this is going to cruise into your life anytime soon, so now's the time to grab the gold, right?
	So, did you yell at your children daily?
	Right.
	Nearly daily, yes.
	And did you call them names?
	Not that I recall, no.
	Okay, so you didn't call them stupid or mean or whatever.
	Did you use things like disrespectful?
	So give me a sense of how would you yell at them?
	What would you say?
	It would be things like Having asked them to get their homework done and two hours later it not being done and then yelling at them to just get it done because now it's time to get ready for bed and ask it done and that type of thing.
	Right.
	So it was important for them to study.
	Yeah.
	It was important for them to learn new things.
	And how much did you study about being a parent?
	How many books did you read?
	How many experts did you consult?
	How many courses did you take on being a parent?
	We took one course on parenting, but I don't recall ever reading any books or anything other than taking that one course.
	And what did the course say about spanking?
	I don't recall that it even addressed it.
	Thank you.
	What did it say about discipline?
	I don't remember.
	I don't remember.
	What did it say about parenting?
	Yeah, I remember the course was more about like how to talk with your kids and reason with them and that type of thing.
	Oh, and did it say the best way to reason with them is to yell at them?
	No, I'm certain it didn't.
	Right.
	So it suggested reasoning with your children, not yelling and hitting, right?
	Right.
	So you were exposed to information that was the opposite of what you did as a parent, right?
	Yes.
	And then you complained that your kids aren't learning.
	Well, what's more important, right?
	the grade four math homework, or whether you hit your children?
	What happened when they disobeyed you?
	I'm sorry, go ahead.
	No, go ahead.
	No, you're right.
	No, no, what you said was important.
	The homework wasn't that important.
	What happens, like, because we're trying to get to the etymology or the source of why they're hitting, right?
	Because you were told the course you took said reason with the kids, right?
	And obviously we know yelling and hitting is not reasoning, right?
	I mean, you don't see a presidential debate where they just haul off and crack each other, right?
	I mean, I'd pay good money for that, but sadly you never see it, right?
	So let's say that they didn't do their homework.
	What happened then?
	I'd yell at them and...
	No, I know, but you would yell at them because you felt it was really important for them to do their homework, right?
	Right, right.
	I had to get done.
	Why?
	What's the disaster scenario?
	Okay, so they go to school the next day and then what happens?
	Okay, so they get a failing grade.
	then what?
	And I'm not trying to criticize here.
	Like, I'm genuinely curious.
	I really want to know what happens if they get a failing grade.
	Well, they risk the possibility of failing the class and or failing the entire grade in school.
	Okay.
	So let's say they fail the class.
	Let's say they fail the grade.
	Then what?
	Like, what is the disaster scenario here?
	Right?
	Because if you don't know why you hit them, you can't help your daughter do differently.
	You need to know why you hit them.
	I just didn't want them to get in trouble.
	I wanted them to succeed.
	No, no, no, no, no, no.
	They were getting in trouble when you were hitting and yelling at them.
	Saying, I don't want my kids to get in trouble, so I'm going to hit them, is not rational.
	Right?
	Right.
	I want to keep my kids safe by hitting them 840 times.
	Right?
	That's like trying to keep dents off your car by cubing it.
	So it was not to keep them safe.
	I mean, that's the same logic as people saying I need taxation to protect my property.
	So what happens if your children fail a class?
	They repeat the grade.
	Okay, so they repeat the grade.
	and then what?
	And then they just keep going.
	They just keep repeating the grade until they're like, what, 40?
	No, they advance eventually.
	Right.
	So what you're saying is that you believe that your children were so dumb that they could not change their behavior based upon negative consequences.
	Right?
	So if you just said, hey, do homework or don't do homework, it's your choice.
	Or if you just said, oh, if you really don't like homework, let's find some alternative to this school.
	Right?
	It's like, okay, so don't do your homework.
	And then you have to show up the next day and face the negative consequences of not doing your homework.
	Right?
	Mm-hmm.
	And you're saying that you don't think your children would have learned anything from that.
	They would have just kept repeating the grade with no desire to progress, with no desire to advance with their friends, with no shame at looking like the dumb kids.
	They would have just kept repeating.
	If you hadn't hit them, they would have just kept repeating this grade, right?
	Do you think that's true?
	No.
	Do you not think they would have said, oh, really?
	I have to stay here if I don't do well?
	I guess I'll do my...
	So, there must be...
	And I'm genuinely trying to understand.
	I don't have an answer, just so you know.
	I'm not trying to lead you somewhere.
	Genuinely trying to understand what happens if you don't hit them.
	They would have learned for themselves.
	They would have been exposed to their own consequences, right?
	Yeah.
	And that would have been better parenting, right?
	Right.
	Because you don't want your children to fear being hit.
	You want your children to learn that their actions have consequences and that they need to change their own behavior based upon their own values, right?
	And you denied them that by hitting them.
	Yeah.
	Now, when I'm saying it this way, there's no particular disagreement in this, right?
	Right.
	Why did you hit them?
	Because it's so obvious that that would happen.
	It means...
	Let me tell you what I think it might be.
	Because now I do have a theory.
	It doesn't mean I'm right.
	When my daughter does something that I perceive as negative, I feel anxiety.
	If she grabs onto a toy and doesn't want to share it, I feel this urge to say, no, no, no, share.
	Right?
	Yeah.
	When she was at a party, a boy stepped on her foot by accident, and the mom clamped onto him.
	You just stepped on that little girl's foot.
	He just kind of shrugged, right?
	Because she was so intense about it, so ego-invested.
	You have to apologize.
	And the little boy was overwhelmed.
	You could see his head shrunk into his neck like a turtle trying to kiss its own ass.
	You have to apologize.
	You've stepped on that little girl's foot.
	Apologize.
	This instant.
	Now, come on.
	You and I both know that if you bully an apology out of a child, all the child has learned how to do is obey a bully.
	Out of fear.
	They haven't learned any goddamn thing about apologizing.
	All she wanted was the appearance of She wanted him to say sorry because she felt negatively judged or she would be negatively judged if the boy didn't apologize.
	And look, I have the same urge.
	I'm not, ah, I float above these petty human considerations.
	I have the same urge.
	But I know.
	Would you possibly have felt negatively judged If your children had not done their homework.
	Yes.
	Go on.
	Absolutely.
	I would have felt it a reflection on myself as well.
	So you were managing your inner critic by hitting your children.
	Is that fair to say?
	You were appeasing your inner bully By bullying your children, you were feeding your children to your mother.
	Yeah.
	What would your mother have said if your children had failed the test or, heaven forbid, a grade.
	She would have been highly disappointed and irate.
	Thank you.
	Right.
	Right, and this is the hell, that intergenerational bullying.
	This is why it replicates, right?
	We bully our children for fear of criticism by bullies, and thus we create dysfunctional people, right?
	Mm-hmm.
	The degree to which bullying children arises out of fear of criticism is enormous.
	Now, I'm going to give you some sympathy.
	I mean, I feel it.
	I'm going to give you some sympathy in that the way we evolved as a species was we kind of had to bully our children or our children would get killed, right?
	You grow up in some ancient fundamentalist superstitious religious nutjob tribe.
	In other words, any of them or all of them.
	And if your children did not conform to the rituals of the tribe, guess what?
	Aztecs don't sacrifice, cut their heart out, and throw the rest to the sharks, right?
	So we had to bully our children to get them to conform to the tribe, otherwise the tribe would kill them.
	Not a lot of dissent in ancient Egypt or ancient Sumeria or any of those places, right?
	If you were a slave and you did not bully your child, your child would grow up to be, quote, defiant, and back then they didn't have ADD, they just killed them.
	Or sold them or whatever, right?
	So we do have a drive within us to have our children conform to the tribal standards and there's great terror and anxiety.
	When we fail to do that, and there's a fear for our children.
	So in a weird way, we do have this impulse to say to our children, it's conformity or death by bullying you to conform to the standards around you, whether it's homework or religion or nationalism or communism or Judaism or whatever.
	To conform to the tribe is to protect you.
	You can't live without the tribe, and the tribe can kill you at any time.
	So, I mean, when I look at my impulse myself, I understand that.
	We have this biological drive to protect our children from the viciousness of the tribe and to gain from the tribe its protection.
	You've got to sleep, you've got to have kids, you've got to mate.
	So conformity, the drive to beat children into conformity, historically was a kind of way of protecting them.
	I don't know if this resonates with you at all.
	It makes any sense to you at all?
	It does, absolutely.
	And this is how it replicates.
	And I think that's the why, but, you know, we know we have grown beyond tribalism, right?
	Because, look, I don't know if you're an explicit feminist, but I'm sure you believe in equality between the genders, and I'm sure you believe that, let's say that there was this massive patriarchy throughout history.
	I think that you would say we should outgrow that, right?
	I don't know.
	I never thought about it.
	I mean, you outgrew it personally.
	Weren't you any kind of patriarchy there, young lady?
	With your husband?
	Right?
	You surrendered to the protection of a man who was protecting you from another man.
	Yeah.
	And then you didn't like that protection.
	You found it too stifling and you escaped it.
	Yes.
	Because the protection was control, right?
	Yes.
	So you want to outgrow that.
	And it happened when your children were grown because you didn't need the resources from the man anymore, fundamentally, right?
	That's why it's 30 years, right?
	So women say, and I'm not saying you, but women as a whole say...
	Yeah, okay, there was a patriarchy.
	We need to outgrow it.
	And I'm saying, yeah, yeah, yeah, okay.
	Let's go without growing the tribe.
	Let's go without growing the biological dictates of history.
	And that means that women have to deal with their goddamn anxiety around their children not conforming to social standards and not take it out on their children.
	This is what You can't fix about the past, but you can understand about the precious boy who's in your life now, right?
	Right.
	Because your daughter is going to have the urge to hit him when he steps out of line, to hit him when he will do things that will bring upon your daughter social criticism, and you will feel the same way.
	And I feel the same way.
	And I believe...
	Every parent with any kind of conscience feels the same way.
	Oh, kids disobeying social rules!
	Oh, must get them to conform!
	It's not an accident that this fucking stupid photocopy of history keeps printing almost perfect pages.
	Why is every Muslim society kind of like the last one?
	Kind of like the last generation?
	Because kids get beaten into the distorted bullshit of culture through violence.
	And I understand the impulse.
	I do.
	But it has to stop, right?
	I mean, we cannot keep performing these metaphorical sacrifices of children like we're blood-soaked Incan priests on a fucking mountaintop.
	We have to stop sacrificing the integrity and individualism of children for the sake of frowns.
	Like if there were real Aztec priests out there going to cut the hearts out of our children, yeah, I get it.
	Let's conform.
	What happens now?
	People frown.
	You know, the funny thing is, this woman who thought, I'm going to get my son to apologize.
	First of all, he's four.
	He's four.
	I do not expect him to be Ann fucking Landers here.
	I don't expect a nice written apology with scented candles and a cupcake.
	He's four!
	Apologies, empathy, maybe just a little bit beyond him.
	I'm not offended he's not doing advanced physics, and I'm not offended that he doesn't say, oh, I'm so sorry, young lady.
	I believe I absolutely stepped upon your walking bit.
	I apologize.
	Let us go back to playing with our granulated rock in the sandpit.
	Good lord.
	He's four!
	And you know what?
	You think that you're looking good as a parent by bullying him into making apology sounds with his mouth hole?
	You look like a bitch!
	You look like a terrible parent who is managing her own anxiety and self-criticism by bullying a four-year-old!
	Her four-year-old boy wanted To put his finger on a little icing on a birthday cake.
	Guess what?
	He's four.
	Right?
	Right.
	And she grabbed him.
	He screamed.
	She pulled him out of the room.
	He complained.
	And, oh my God, like, what a fight.
	Why?
	Because, I mean, who gives a shit if a four-year-old who's about to eat cake anyway puts his finger in some icing?
	What?
	Oh my god!
	The skies darken!
	The moon bursts into flame!
	Great chasms open up in the ground and swallow up humanity because the boy touched the icing!
	Seriously, this is what she was fighting with her child about?
	Putting icing in front of a four-year-old and saying, don't touch it, is like saying, well, I know you're a single man who hasn't had sex in a year.
	I'm going to play wall-to-wall porn when you're completely alone.
	No one's watching you now.
	Don't touch yourself.
	I mean, my God!
	And I see this a lot.
	And it's not just women, right?
	But I'm talking to a woman.
	So stop managing your own anxiety by trying to beat your kids into conformity because you're afraid of a frown.
	You know, in the past we had to take on really dangerous things, you know, saber-toothed tigers, bullies in school, people who could hit you, war, privation, starvation, disease.
	Those were things that we had to fight through.
	Religious nutjobs who burn you at the stake for questioning sky ghosts.
	Yes, we had real battles in the past.
	What if we've been reduced to now?
	We are surrendering to frowns.
	We're surrendering to, hmm, I disapprove.
	Really?
	That's who we're now sacrificing our children to?
	Is other women who just say, hmm, well that's not very productive.
	I don't think that's very good parenting.
	Hmm.
	Your children aren't doing their homework.
	Yeah, because they're not stupid robots who do whatever anybody tells them to.
	I'm raising them to think for themselves because guess what?
	They're going into a knowledge economy.
	And you don't get anywhere in a knowledge economy by obeying orders.
	There's a study now that says half of American jobs or three quarters, some huge number of American jobs can be replaced by automation over the next few decades.
	What does that say about our goddamn public schools?
	A robot can replace the child we trained for 12 years.
	Well, didn't you just make a bad robot then?
	God.
	We can't survive in a global economy, in a competitive economy, with robots, right?
	You want your grandson to grow up thinking for himself, and you don't want to inflict the tyranny of frowns on his tender Right?
	You don't want to brand him for the sake of disapproval, right?
	Right.
	And it makes so much sense now because for a long time, as long as I can remember, and especially even more so recently, She's been so concerned with, well, what's everybody going to think about the situation that she's in?
	And I would say, well, it doesn't matter what those people think.
	It doesn't matter what they think.
	This is your life.
	Oh, you didn't say that.
	You didn't say that to your daughter, did you?
	I did.
	I did.
	Oh, you didn't.
	Oh, my God.
	I did.
	Oh, you know what?
	I'm so horrified, I actually just took a dump in my chair.
	That's a very unusual physiological reaction to me.
	I'm just going to move away a little here.
	Now I've got my slippery walk on.
	Oh, my God.
	You beat your children eight, sorry, you hit your children 840 times to get them to conform, and now you're saying to the child, you beat to conform?
	Don't worry about what other people think.
	I mean, okay, it's fine that I hit you when you were a child because I was so terrified of what other people might think, but don't you worry about what people might think.
	You're going to make her head explode.
	Like, literally, you will make her boob explode.
	I didn't realize that it was me that she got it from.
	How long have you been listening to this?
	Oh, it's okay.
	I just farted it out of my armpit now.
	I don't know what's happening to my body.
	It's reacting so strongly to this, right?
	No.
	Look, you harmed her to get her to conform and you must, of course, empathize with her fear of other people.
	She was hit for your fear of other people 840 times.
	Well, 420, right?
	Since it was doled out between her and her brother.
	So no.
	You both enormously care about what other people think.
	Thank you.
	Thank you.
	And other people are going to think that this is a catastrophe and they'll be right.
	And the only way to make it less of a catastrophe is to understand that it is a catastrophe.
	And to take all of the emergency appropriate responsiveness that is necessary for a catastrophe, right?
	I mean, if your house is on fire, you kind of want to know it's a catastrophe, right?
	If you think the toast got a little burnt, you're going to sit there and get consumed by flames.
	You want to know when something's an emergency.
	Right?
	Right.
	And it is.
	Your grandson is not going to have a consistent caregiver.
	I don't mean that your daughter's going to be inconsistent, but she's not going to be there.
	You're going to bungee in.
	Her brother's going to bungee in.
	She's not going to have a consistent caregiver.
	If there's any way to create a space wherein your daughter can stay home, I believe that you should try and make that space.
	Right?
	So we're just going to go to practical stuff now because I think we've done some of the theoretical enough.
	How are you feeling, by the way?
	I mean, how are you doing?
	Um...
	I'm okay.
	I'm a little bit confused on some things, but I... How are you feeling?
	Scared.
	Well, don't let the confusion rob you of your fear.
	You need the fear.
	Right?
	Because the fear will propel you into action.
	What else are you feeling?
	Share with me, sister.
	We can't come this far.
	You closed your heart off.
	What else are you feeling?
	Feeling like a sense of urgency.
	Like a sort of panic or anxiety around that?
	Yeah.
	And that feeling pops up a lot lately because I do recognize that there's, like you said, you termed it a catastrophe.
	There is this catastrophe in this family and It needs to be addressed, and that's why I wanted to talk to you.
	I need to know where to go with this.
	What's the right thing to do?
	What steps do I take to make sure that history doesn't repeat itself, that this grandson will Not endure what I went through or what I put my own kids through.
	Your grandson would be better off being your son because you were able to stay home, right?
	No, I worked.
	You worked?
	With your kids?
	When I was raising a family, I worked full-time.
	Why?
	Uh-huh.
	Okay, I don't want to sound like a victim here and It's not my intent, but my...
	No, thank you very much for saying that.
	That's huge progress.
	I mean, my ex-husband insisted that I work, that I contribute money to the household.
	That was just, that was how it was going to be.
	And so I worked.
	Did you talk about that before you had kids?
	Did you know you were going to have to work before you had kids?
	Actually, when we married, we didn't either one want kids.
	It wasn't until about four years into the marriage that we decided to start a family.
	And I'm not so sure at that point that we did discuss that.
	And I stayed home with them until my son started kindergarten.
	And then that's, I mean, I worked up until...
	Wait, no, but so you stayed home for the first couple of years, right?
	Yeah, the first couple and then went back to work again.
	Well, that's good, right?
	Mm-hmm.
	First couple of years are like 80% of the child's formation, right?
	Mm-hmm.
	So you did, right?
	So...
	Your son and your daughter grew up in a two-parent household with a mother who stayed home for the first couple of years, right?
	Right.
	Your grandson is growing up in a one-person household with a mom who has to go back to work basically a couple of weeks after, right?
	When he was born premature.
	So she's basically going back to work before he should have even been born, right?
	Well, is there any conceivable way To prevent that.
	Is there any conceivable way that you can provide her a haven with which to stay home with her son?
	She has the opportunity where she might be able to do that.
	She had saved up a lot of money in, I don't know, it was like a 401k or something, which she just recently cashed out.
	And put it in the bank with the intentions of either living off of it for a couple of years or using it to pay down her mortgage to where it would be affordable.
	I convinced her to just hang on to the money for now and until we could do the math in hopes that that would provide her the income that she needed to stay home and be a full-time mom for the next two to three years.
	Right.
	So that's what she needs to do.
	Like this is, it's not even a choice thing.
	I mean, she's got to breastfeed the kid for a year and a half.
	That's recommended.
	That's essential for brain development, for immune system development, for neurological development, for emotional development.
	And she can't be breastfeeding from work, right?
	Right.
	So she has to stay home.
	I agree.
	I don't care how many people get pissed off at me about this.
	I'm sorry.
	I go with the science.
	Rather than political correctness.
	She had the kid.
	Kid ain't there by choice.
	Kid didn't choose to be born.
	She made that choice.
	She didn't give it up for adoption.
	She didn't have an abortion.
	She has chosen to keep the child.
	Which means she owes that child at least a year and a half of breastfeeding.
	Not optional.
	Not be nice to have if, right?
	I mean, more important than the mortgage.
	More important than all but What you need to live on in terms of food.
	So if she's got to go live in a trailer, she's got to go live in your basement, she owes that child a year and a half of breastfeeding, at least!
	Right?
	Right.
	So that, in terms of practical things that she needs to do, that's what she needs to do.
	Okay.
	Whatever it takes to keep that fine young lady home with her precious son for a couple of years, That's what needs to happen in the family.
	That's what all resources need to be bent towards.
	That's how you break the cycle.
	And boy, she thinks she can't afford it now.
	Oh man, I'm telling you, if she really wants to make the next 20 years of her life, if not 50 years of her life a living hell, dump that kid in the daycare, don't breastfeed it, and then see what happens.
	This is not just, I'm not telling you to do something against your own self-interest here or your daughter.
	This is the best guarantee that she's going to enjoy parenting.
	That is not going to be one continual shitfest of like, oh my god, my kid needs to be in school.
	I got to work.
	They're telling me to medicate my child.
	And if I don't medicate my child, they're going to take my child away.
	What do I do?
	Like, my child is in trouble with the law.
	My child is an arsonist.
	My child is wetting their bed at the age of 10.
	My child just blew up a frog with a firecracker.
	You don't want that stuff.
	She doesn't want that stuff.
	That means stay home, bond, right?
	So I'm not saying make this big sacrifice.
	I'm saying enjoy being a parent.
	Right.
	I'm appealing to her greed and to your greed.
	There's no paycheck that is worth raising a kid with an attachment disorder.
	Right.
	If you can get her to therapy, great.
	If you can get to therapy, I always recommend it.
	She needs to read up on parenting.
	She needs to take parenting courses.
	She needs to read The Philosophical Baby by Alison Gopnik.
	She needs to read up on the latest.
	There's a book called Scientific Parenting, which I'm reading at the moment.
	She needs to read this stuff.
	She needs to see the truth about spanking.
	She needs to see the truth about breastfeeding.
	She needs to read up on parenting.
	It's the most important thing she's going to do.
	Which means education, education, education.
	Now, now, she's got to do her homework.
	You can tell her as a mom.
	Now, you have to do your homework.
	It's not optional, right?
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	And that way, she's not going to have a future boyfriend repelling child.
	Thank you.
	Right?
	If she ever wants to have a man in her life, she needs to have like a quality man in her life, not a single mom using dipstick.
	Right.
	Right?
	Some guy sent me an email.
	I mean, this is the future that awaits her if she doesn't bond with her child.
	Some guy sent me a message about the single moms.
	He said, ah, single moms, they're great for sex because they're always horny and they're always broke.
	So here's what I do.
	I go over to this woman's house.
	I order a big pizza.
	And the kids gorge on pizza and then they fall asleep.
	And then we have sex and then I go home.
	And then I call her in a couple of weeks.
	And she's broke and we'll do it again.
	Right?
	This is not quality men.
	So the best way to have a quality man in your life is to have a great relationship with your son.
	If your son is sullen, defiant, obnoxious, avoidant, you know, then the guy is going to be like, oh, thanks, I think I'll not do that, right?
	You can buy this new car that comes with a warranty or this one that farts gas juice into your eyeballs every time you turn on the radio.
	What choice would that be?
	So I'm really trying to appeal to your daughter's greed and to your greed.
	That she's already striked down as a single mom to get a quality man, but if she also has a difficult relationship with her son, no quality man is going to want to get involved in that, right?
	Not my kid.
	Really fractious family.
	Sullen resents me.
	No idea where the dad is.
	Sounds great.
	Yeah, I agree.
	How do I... I mean...
	In the meantime, with being a co-parent in this, what steps do I take to improve the relationship between she and I so that it's a healthy relationship and it's on the right track?
	Well, it's honesty, right?
	There's no relationship except for honesty.
	When people say relationship, what they mean is honesty.
	So what you're saying is, how do I improve my honesty?
	Whenever people say the word relationship, just submit the word honesty.
	I have a really difficult relationship with so-and-so.
	I have a really difficult time being honest with so-and-so.
	I have a bad relationship.
	I have bad honesty with this person.
	How do you improve your relationship with your daughter?
	You improve your honesty with your daughter.
	The vulnerability that you showed to me The regret, the sorrow, the heartbroken remorse that you had about hitting your children 840 plus times, that's honest, right?
	I'm not saying you weren't honest at other times, but that was really honest and brave, right?
	Yeah.
	And if you want people to avoid your mistakes, simply show them your regrets.
	You regret that.
	You regret bullying your children, yelling at them and hitting them.
	Yes.
	And now you're lecturing her about not caring what other people think.
	That is going to alienate her from you.
	Because now you're going to be like, well, why would you care what other people think, right?
	When you hit your children because you are afraid of what other people think.
	Right.
	Which is hypocritical to the max.
	That is going to drive her away from you.
	Okay.
	You regret...
	Some things.
	I'm sure you did some fine things as a parent.
	Some things you regret.
	The fine things you can certainly talk about, but she's going to do them anyway based on imprinting.
	What you want her is to avoid the things you did that you're not proud of, right?
	Right.
	Be honest with your regrets.
	Be honest with your sorrows.
	When you allow yourself to regret hitting your children, they will be more easily able to experience the sorrow of having been hit.
	When they experience the sorrow of having been hit and they process the shame and pain of having been hit so many times, they will not hit.
	You self-empathize, you empathize with others.
	There is no empathy with others without empathy with the self.
	That which you cannot grieve, you will re-inflict.
	And that means not blaming other people.
	Thank you.
	For the choices that you made.
	Because even if other people were causal, you were still causal in not dealing with that or knowing that.
	I mean, you sound a little bit younger than me.
	And when I was growing up, I mean, self-help books, psychology, the effects of parents, generational stuff, anti-spanking, was all over the place.
	Right?
	So, I'm sorry about your mom.
	I'm sorry about your husband.
	But you're still responsible.
	Mm-hmm.
	It's not like we're talking to someone from the 14th century who has no idea of the unconscious, right?
	Right.
	Or of habits.
	I mean, we were 150 years past Freud, right?
	Yeah.
	This is like not knowing physics, right?
	And that's the sorrow, right?
	And that's why we don't want ownership, because with ownership comes sorrow, which comes release from the cycle, right?
	Mm-hmm.
	So you will be tempted, as we all are, to shift blame upon externalities.
	Look, do you not think that I have about as many excuses to be a bad parent as you could imagine?
	Raised by a crazy, violent mom who was institutionalized and been on my own since I was 15.
	No dad.
	All my friends came from abusive households.
	Single mom, predatory, messy, horrible.
	I went to terrible public schools.
	I was beaten with a cane when I was in boarding school.
	I was in boarding school when I was six.
	My mom didn't bond with me.
	She was in hospital for depression for months after I was born.
	In hospital in the 60s, that's some serious fucking depression.
	Right?
	So I could, if I want, lean all kinds of superstructural assholery on my history.
	And it would stand.
	And people would be like, well, yeah, well, I can understand that, right?
	Except I don't.
	Because I don't want the assholes to win, right?
	Everything that I place on assholes is a victory for the assholes.
	I've never looked at it like that.
	You don't want your mom to win with her great-grandchild, right?
	The negative aspects of your mom.
	Exactly.
	But that means taking 100% ownership for your choices.
	I made bad choices as a teenager.
	I made bad choices as a teenager, even as a teenager.
	But I only was able to avoid repeating those bad mistakes by saying, yes, I had a terrible environment, and I have a choice.
	I have a choice.
	I can either accept bad behavior On my part, because I had a bad environment, I can either lower my standards for myself because other people were assholes in my life when I was growing up, I can no longer reach for the gold ring of virtue because I was surrounded by Nazgul, or I can say that I now own my life and I am 100% responsible for my life.
	I will blame no one.
	I will blame no one for my choices.
	I get all the glory and terror of full and total and complete self-ownership.
	And by the by, all those people who say I have problems with the philosophical self-ownership concept, I know what they're really saying.
	Don't take away from me the opportunity to lower my standards by blaming bad people.
	I don't want that self-ownership.
	I want the drug of blame.
	A shrugging off of responsibility.
	So you have to take 100% responsibility and when you listen to this podcast back as I hope you will with your daughter and your son and that you will play my voice nightly to your grandchild.
	I'm kidding.
	You will see the shift, right?
	And you will hear the shift.
	You'll hear it in your voice.
	When people accept responsibility, there is sorrow and pride and opportunity and hope.
	Right?
	I mean, do you feel a little bit more positive about your grandson's opportunities now than at the beginning of the call?
	I do, most definitely.
	Right.
	And that's why, and that's because I sympathize with your environment, but I forgive you nothing for it.
	I sympathize with how you were parented I really do.
	I will give you no excuses.
	Because giving people excuses is so fundamentally disrespectful.
	I will give my daughter excuses because she's five.
	I will give that little boy doesn't have to say sorry, at least not because he's bullied, because he's four and he's got this kind of mom.
	How often is she going to apologize to her son?
	Is she modeling apologies?
	Right?
	So whenever you give people excuses, You are stripping them of any respect you might have for them.
	Oh, you poor little thing had a bad upbringing, did you?
	Well, then you can do whatever you want.
	No, that's what we say to kittens who pee on the couch.
	It's not what we say to sovereign adults.
	Responsibility is responsibility.
	Respect is the granting of responsibility.
	And I cannot give you the out That sometimes you desperately want, that I desperately want, that everybody desperately wants.
	The great excuse.
	Oh, that was a burden.
	I can hand over this thing to evil people.
	I can hand over my sovereignty to bad people.
	Well, that's how evil replicates.
	That's how the gene replicates.
	That's how the meme reproduces.
	So that's, those are my suggestions.
	Okay.
	I'll be, I'll be very anxious to be able to hear this back.
	And I really appreciate all of your.
	I'll make the same offer to you that I made to this heroic military man too.
	I hope you guys can make it work financially.
	If you can't, give us a call.
	We'll see what we can do to help.
	All right.
	Thank you, Steph, very much.
	You are very welcome.
	Thank you for an amazing call.
	I really appreciate that.
	Thanks.
	Alright.
	Well, we are now cruising on to our 3.9, 2.9.
	So, thank you everybody so much for the calls, for the conversations.
	It is a unique privilege.
	I appreciate everyone's trust and curiosity, honesty and openness.
	I, of course, appreciate everybody's support.
	If you would like to help out the conversation, fdrurl.com forward slash Donate.
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	Let us know how you're doing.
	Operations of FreeDomainRadio.com.
	If you have questions you want to run through the chattering dental teeth wind-up toy of my head, you can send your questions to Mailbag at FreeDomainRadio.com.
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	Thank you everybody so much.

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