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May 22, 2014 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

02:34:20

2704 How to Become an Asshole - Wednesday Call In Show May 21st, 2014

Is it possible to have a good relationship with one parent, but not the other? Infection through dissociation and irritation. How do I know when I’m being overly self-critical? What parenting situations have tested Stefan’s resolve? The importance of saying no to your children and highly profitable human evil.

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	Hi everybody, Stefan Molyneux from Freedom Aid Radio.
	Hope you're doing well.
	Just returned from my very first vacation with my daughter, just her and I time, which was massive amounts of fun.
	It's something actually a Canadian entertainer, a sitcom star, and I don't know if he's a comedian, Alan Thicke.
	I think his son was tweaked at by the Miley Cyrus glutes.
	But he said you should at least do one vacation, just you and a child of yours.
	You just get to know them in a whole different kind of way.
	And it really was delightful.
	We just did an overnighter, but it was just great fun.
	So if you are a parent, I'd really, really recommend it.
	It's just a fantastic way to connect.
	And we spent a good chunk of the drive on the way home.
	Talking about the movie Frozen, which is a very tough nut to crack.
	Obviously, it's a monster hit, the biggest for Disney since Toy Story 3, but it's a very opaque film to try and really crack to figure out what's going on.
	I think I've done it, but I won't do it now because I know we've got a whole bunch of callers, but we'll be doing that review soon.
	Please check out the release of Against the Gods on YouTube with subtitles, just in case any gods out there Interesting
	question.
	Interesting question, Joe.
	What do you think?
	Well, I mean, at this point, I'm kind of at a loss because I feel like with what I'm mad at my dad about, not having an honest relationship with him is disrespectful to me.
	Like, I feel like I'm not respecting myself by not having an honest relationship with him, if that makes sense.
	Not hugely, but I'm certainly willing to hear more about it if that helps.
	Yeah, so I'm in a real weird place now with what I think can be done with this solution, and so my goals are actually kind of broad.
	I feel like if I can tackle this issue, because I feel like it stems deeply with my dad's inability to emote and connect.
	I mean, he's one of these guys who tells the same stories over and over again.
	He doesn't really listen to you.
	I still don't think he knows what I do for a living.
	I'm 35 years old.
	And I love him, you know, he gave me a lot of good- Sorry, it was you who doesn't know what he wants to do for a living, is that right?
	Well, no, no, no, he doesn't know what I do for a living.
	Like, he just doesn't know.
	Like, I tell him over and over again, but he still doesn't know because he's completely disinterested in who I am.
	You know, it's like I could tell him all day long, but he'll forget it, you know?
	Was what you do for a living very hard to understand?
	I mean, you're not like an internet philosopher or something, are you?
	Because that's what he says to explain to people.
	No, I did start doing a show just inspired by what I've been learning from you.
	I think the self-knowledge and just exploring sort of the roots of where my behaviors have come from has taught me a lot.
	And I've come a long way in just the last few years.
	I had a near-death experience that I think completely changed my life.
	It opened me up to It's terrifying how it takes a near-death experience for some people to experience a near-life experience, but go on.
	No, but I wouldn't trade it for the world.
	It was a lot of suffering, and it was a lot of pain, and I was diagnosed with PTSD, and I tried to commit suicide afterwards, and honestly, for as low as I had gotten, I don't think I've ever been this optimistic and confident in my whole life.
	I must ask, what happened?
	Well, it's somewhat of a complicated story, but I grew up in an abusive home.
	My parents did hit a lot.
	They fought all the time.
	They threw bottles.
	They threw plates.
	They screamed and ran out on each other in the middle of the night, you know.
	And at one point, I remember we were young kids and my dad came to us and was like, oh, sorry kids, I guess we're getting a divorce.
	And then he took us out for ice cream and then nothing ever came of it, you know.
	So it was like all kinds of this wild weirdness, you know.
	I remember I was molested at a very young age and I'm pretty sure he knew or had some idea of what happened.
	No one ever talked to me about it.
	I just buried it, you know.
	And I am gay.
	I don't know if the molestation has anything to do with it, but as I was growing up, I'm Being told by everybody around me that being gay is wrong.
	Culture is sort of telling you being gay is wrong.
	It's just not right.
	I grew up in a family that had recently abandoned religion.
	My parents were both raised in religious families, and so the cultural...
	could say such a thing about being gay was a non-existent thing even though my parents or my mother rather she has a gay brother and sister who are kind of just wildly out of control they suffered much abuse too but i think that that's what they saw as gay people and so that i think they thought that that's who gay people were or something
	but i remember at one point as a child saying to my mother that i i think i'm depressed and she told my dad and my dad came back to me with something about how america is the greatest country on earth and you shouldn't be depressed and get get over it you know And this is how sort of my feelings and stuff were treated.
	Wait, wait, hang on, hang on, hang on.
	Okay, so it's a lot of information, but I just, so your dad thought that you should just be able to get over stuff.
	But he would fight with your mom all the time?
	Yeah, and they would ask me things all the time like, well, why do you treat people the way you treat them?
	You don't treat your friends the way you treat us.
	No, no, hang on.
	Go back.
	You missed the point.
	You missed the point.
	Okay.
	Your dad says that you should be able to get over things, which he basically means don't let things bother you.
	Right.
	Right?
	But didn't he fight with your mom a lot?
	Yeah.
	So was he at all good at, quote, getting over things and not letting things get under his skin?
	No, of course not.
	In fact, he's the biggest hypocrite.
	I mean, when they caught me with marijuana, you know, it was like I already found their stash and was stealing from it.
	So he grounded me and yelled at me and, you know, was very abusive.
	Wait, wait, wait.
	Well, how old were you?
	This was, I was probably about 18 years old when they found that, 17, 18 or so.
	Yeah, look, I mean, I'm not saying that I agree with marijuana, but there's a difference Smoking it when you're 35 or 40 and smoking it when you're 17 or 18, right?
	Your brain is still developing at 17 or 18.
	It's not...
	To me, this is probably not even the top 20 list of hypocrisies, though.
	I can certainly understand why it's bothersome, but it's not...
	Like a parent can say, don't smoke marijuana when you're 17 if that parent is smoking marijuana.
	They can still make a good case for it.
	I don't think there's a great case to be made for smoking marijuana except for a medical...
	But he can make a case for it that's not entirely hypocritical, if that makes any sense.
	I think it does make sense.
	And I think that that's actually where I became upset because...
	Rather than having a discussion about that and talking to me as though I'm an adult capable of understanding things, he assumed an authoritative role even though I was nearly in college and everything.
	I've always been treated like a child, even into my 20s.
	Ultimately, it culminated into this moment where we were on a family camping trip, which used to be this ritual that we did.
	And what happened was I was talking to my mom around the campfire and everybody else, it's a family reunion camping thing, talking to my mom around the campfire and we start talking about the gay thing and it starts to devolve.
	And my mom's a very irrational person, but I think it's changed quite a bit.
	And this is based on conversations I've had ever since, especially the suicide incident.
	But At that time, this is when I was about 22 years old, I believe, and we're on this camping trip, and she starts just railing into me about how, you know, I'll never accept it.
	I don't have to accept it.
	I don't have to accept you.
	I don't appreciate what you're doing.
	I don't appreciate your lifestyle.
	And, you know, and I kept trying to say, well, it's like, I mean, I'm still your son and all these things.
	And it just evolved into this irrational place where I remember her saying things like, well, why don't you just go suck dick and die of AIDS like your Uncle Tommy?
	And all this just rude, terrible shit.
	Oh my God.
	Yeah.
	Are you kidding me?
	No, I'm not kidding you.
	She basically wished that you would die of a horrible, agonizing, wasting disease.
	She said it to me, but she was just being irrational, and I understand that, but it was an awful thing to say.
	All right, all right.
	Okay, I got to stop because this is just pissing me off.
	I'm sorry.
	I am.
	No, you're pissing me off.
	Oh, sorry.
	No, no, don't apologize.
	I could be entirely wrong.
	I'm just telling you what I'm feeling.
	Okay?
	Okay.
	All right.
	You know you're reading this like you're reading off a laundry list, right?
	You're talking about this stuff.
	If you're calling into the show, I assume it's because this is super important to you, and you don't have a massive amount of people in your life to talk about this stuff with, right?
	I do, and I talk to my husband about this.
	I've talked to my friends about this.
	I've tried to talk to my brother about this.
	Okay, something's missing if you're calling into the show about this, right?
	That's true, yes.
	Okay, so if something is missing...
	Why are you presenting it in such an emotionally empty way?
	I mean, I assume that this is a pretty core issue of desperation and trauma, and you're so disconnected from what you're saying, I'm annoyed because what you're saying, if I'm reading it, it sounds important, but the way you're saying it, it's almost like it's boring to you.
	Okay, well, and I understand where you're coming from with that, and to that I will just say that I feel like I have dealt with these We're good to go.
	Sure.
	See, you kind of want to blow past the fact that I'm annoyed.
	I'm annoyed doesn't mean that you're annoying.
	I hope you know that, right?
	It doesn't mean that you may be doing absolutely nothing wrong at all, if wrong is even the right word, right?
	But it's kind of rude to blow past it, right?
	Well, I'm sorry.
	I'm not trying to blow past it, but I do feel as though...
	No, no.
	Don't stop bullshitting me.
	When you said, I want to move on with the story, that is blowing past it, right?
	Okay.
	Okay.
	And you are trying to blow past it, whether consciously or not, right?
	Maybe, yeah.
	No, you are.
	I'm not trying to corner you, but that's the reality of what you're doing, right?
	I just feel like I've dealt with this trauma already with my mother, and that's why my relationship- No, no, you haven't, Scott.
	Come on.
	Are you telling me you have a good relationship with your mom?
	Yeah, because I can talk to him about this.
	That's what you said.
	You said at the beginning, when you called into Mike, and I'm sorry to be annoying, but you said, I have a good relationship with my mom, but I have some doubts about my dad, right?
	Right, and the reason why I believe I have a good relationship with my mom...
	No, no, no.
	Stop going into your reasons.
	Stop blowing past everything.
	Because you're not asking me any questions about my experience, right?
	Sure.
	You're just on a talking jack.
	You are...
	You are just trying to talk me out of existence.
	You're trying to talk over me because I'm telling you, look, there's something about this conversation that is annoying me.
	You haven't asked me one question about it.
	You've shown no curiosity about it.
	You just want to keep on telling your story.
	So I'm telling you to stop doing that because we cannot connect at the level we need to connect at to deal with this issue if I don't feel visible and Absolutely.
	It does.
	Okay, so when you tell me you've dealt with the trauma and you tell me you have a good relationship with the mother who wished that you would get a wasting disease and die in agony, you're full of shit.
	I hate to put it so bluntly, but if you tell me you've dealt with this trauma and then you blandly tell me that your mother wished that you were dead of a horrible disease, but you, you know, but she was being irrational and blah, blah, blah, but we have a good relationship, you've dealt with nothing.
	Okay, I hear what you're saying, and I think that where I was trying to go actually...
	We'll reveal a little bit more about this story that I think is relevant.
	It really is relevant.
	You're not going to pause with me.
	I get that.
	You don't want to pause with me.
	You don't want to understand what I'm feeling.
	So why don't you tell me where you want us to go and hopefully we'll clarify something.
	And thank you, because I really do feel as though you're misunderstanding where I'm coming from.
	Because when I tried to commit suicide, I was committed to an institution.
	And in that institution, I was held there for 72 hours, and I was faced with these demons for that period of time.
	And I was in groups, and I've taken much therapy before this time, but I never really...
	I never put it together with what happened with my parents and their history and my history.
	I never put any of that stuff together, but while I was in this institution, I really started to put it all together for myself and understand where the root of my irrational behavior was coming from.
	And when I got out, the very first call I made was to my parents.
	And before I even knew what your show was, I expressed my deepest connection with anger and frustration with them.
	And I was very, very...
	And I can't do that for my mother on this show because I already had that experience with both my parents.
	And my mother listened and she, you know, at first she didn't get it, but she called me up the next day and she was very, you know...
	I got it.
	She was very regretful.
	I think she thought about it.
	I think she understood it.
	What was she regretful about?
	I'm really losing track of what you're talking about because, again, there's a lot of compressed stuff here.
	What did you tell them?
	What was she apologetic about?
	What amendments or what reconciliations has she made?
	What recompensation has she made?
	I don't know what you're talking about in anything tangible.
	Okay.
	Well, I mean, I feel like I've been pretty derailed from, I mean, I think the story is kind of important.
	Oh, dude.
	Dude, that's such an, look, that's an insulting thing to say to me.
	This is not a train track.
	This is a conversation.
	This is not your show.
	It's not my show either.
	This is a conversation between us, right?
	But the fact that you, when I, and bringing to you legitimate confusion and upset about what you're saying, and you call it derailed, what you're saying is you just want to talk and not have me interrupt you.
	Is that what you want?
	No, that's not what I want.
	I just wanted to fill in all the gaps to where I am now because I'm 35 years old and a lot of this trauma happened to me at 22 and that's really the root of all this trauma.
	And my biggest problem is that my mother apologized for her actions in this incidence where what it ultimately became, you know, was my mother says this awful, terrible thing to me and I decide I want to leave, you know, the campsite and just go home to college because I was at college at the time.
	I was in Columbus, Ohio at the time, and they lived in Cleveland or around there.
	When I tried to leave, she tried to stop me, and then she woke up my father, who was drunk, and they're big drinkers.
	When he came out, he has no idea what was being said, what my mother was being said, what the conversation was, but she had this history of irrationality that I thought my dad was pretty familiar with, and I tried to explain this to him.
	And I'm in my car and I'm getting ready to go and I'm trying to get out of there.
	And my brother's out and my family members are woken up at this campsite and so now everybody's sort of around there.
	And the conversation turns and I distinctly remember this where I'm sitting in my truck and I'm getting ready to drive away.
	If only we could just stop talking and I can just go and be away from all this.
	And my brother starts saying something to my mom or my dad or something and I'm not even paying attention to my dad at this point but he just comes out of nowhere and just punches me in the fucking face and just like takes me to the ground and he's gonna punch me again and my brother and my dad's brother.
	Grab my dad, you know, and pull him off of me.
	And so, you know, that's how that whole situation ended.
	And it was very, very fucking traumatic for me.
	And, you know, when I got out of the funny farm, you know, the very first thing I did is I said, God damn it, my dad never, you know, he never really apologized for that.
	And so I got out of the funny farm and I said, fuck you people.
	Fuck you people for your behavior.
	And that was unacceptable, the way you treated me and the fact that you didn't even fucking apologize.
	And my mother, she heard me and she had excuses at the time.
	But like I said, she called back the day after and she...
	I made amends, but when I was explaining this to my dad on the phone after I got out, and I nearly killed myself over all this shit, and when I explained this to my dad, he's like, well, but you were being rude to your mother, and the way you were talking was very disrespectful, and I don't think you understand what you were saying at the time, but you were being real dick, blah, blah, blah.
	So he basically doubled down on punching me in the face, And that's sort of where I find myself today.
	So I don't mean to obfuscate or hide the emotions that I'm feeling.
	I feel them very real.
	And I've just been ignoring it.
	I go home for Christmas, but I hate the guy.
	I have no fucking respect for him.
	And that's sort of why.
	Hang on.
	So you were molested as a child, as you think your father knew.
	Your parents fought and screamed at each other.
	Your father said, you're getting a divorce, let's go to Dairy Queen, and nothing happened.
	And, you know, physically abusive, emotionally abusive, you were sexually abused without the protection of your parents.
	Your mother wishes you dead of a wasting disease and your father punches you in the face and then says that he was perfectly justified in that, right?
	Yeah.
	And you go home, why?
	Well, I mean, like I said, I didn't go home for a very long time.
	After my dad punched me in the face...
	No, I didn't ask you why you...
	No, no.
	Why do you go home?
	Yeah.
	No, seriously, what's the value?
	I mean, you understand, this sounds like a completely psychotically abusive relationship with complete...
	It is.
	I don't even know what to call them.
	But so what's...
	What's the value of going there?
	I mean, you understand, if I was talking about this, you'd be like, you went home?
	You what?
	First of all, that's not your home, right?
	I mean, you're 35 years old.
	That's just your parents' home.
	So why, I mean, what's the value?
	What do you get?
	Is there some massive inheritance?
	Are they really great storytellers?
	Are they good at jokes?
	I mean, what is, I don't understand.
	I think it's more pressure from the family in general.
	My brother and my sister, they're all very close with my parents.
	No, they're not.
	I'm close with my daughter.
	Don't use the word close when you're talking about people who enable users.
	They believe they are.
	That's actually part of what the goal of this call is.
	I feel like I want to try to Get at the root of where I believe this problem lies, which I do believe is with my dad, because like I've seen, my brother, I believe, is an innocent.
	No, no, no.
	You're 35 years old.
	The problem is no longer with your dad.
	If you were 17, I'd say, yeah, the problem's probably with your dad.
	If you were 20 or maybe even 25, you're 35 years old.
	Yeah.
	Right?
	Your life is probably half done.
	So I don't know that the problem is still with your dad when you've been on your own for like, what, 12 or 14 or 15 years, right?
	Sure.
	So you're saying it's just not worth it to maintain the relationship?
	I didn't say that at all.
	I'm just saying that the problem...
	I mean, we can talk about your dad if you want, but at this point in your life, I would be hard-pressed to figure out how the problem could be your dad, right?
	At some point, at some point, the fulcrum of responsibility swings to the child, right?
	Like, I mean, if you were 75 or 80 or 85 years old and blaming your problems with women on your mom, at some point someone has to say, dude, your mom's been dead for 30 years.
	It ain't your mom anymore, right?
	Well, I really, and don't take offense to this, but I do feel like you're misunderstanding where I come from because...
	Hey, hey, hey!
	That's really, I am going to take offense at that.
	I'm giving you my honest thoughts and all you keep telling me is that I'm misunderstanding you.
	Look, if all you want for me is to reflect back to you what you want to hear, then let's not bother having a conversation.
	But if every time I give you something that you don't like, you tell me that I'm just misunderstanding you, I'm not trying to understand you at the moment.
	I'm trying to tell you what I think of your situation.
	Okay.
	Well, and I understand where you're coming from, but I do feel like the apology that I received from my mom was a very genuine one.
	And I do appreciate the relationship that I've grown with her in the meantime because I talk to her about everything and she listens to me as though I'm a real person and I don't feel like...
	Sorry to interrupt.
	Are your parents still married?
	Yes.
	Okay, so your mom is still married to the guy who unapologetically tried to clean your clock by punching you out, right?
	Right, and that's where the problem is.
	That's what I'm trying to figure out.
	So she's still fucking the guy who beat you up, right?
	I know, and it pisses me off.
	All right.
	Thank you.
	Why does it piss you off?
	Because I feel like he's a coward, you know?
	I mean, if you had any idea what the problems are with our family right now, I feel like I'm calling on behalf of all my family because right now, I mean, I don't know if I could get into the situation that's going on with my sister, but she needs the guidance of a man who knows what the fuck he's doing.
	Because she married a fucking rapist who she waited for, who she knew was a rapist, who waited for him to get out of prison, married him the day he got out, and now they're getting a divorce, which of course I tried to warn her about.
	But she needs guidance from somebody who has the ability to connect with her on a real emotional level.
	And I don't think she has it.
	Are you saying that you think you have the ability to connect with guidance at a real emotional level?
	I definitely think I'm better than my father at this.
	Yeah.
	And I feel like I've been working on self-knowledge for a very long time.
	I feel like I'm a very balanced individual.
	My career has been going up ever since I began this process.
	Everything in my life has been, from what I can tell, improving.
	And it's this thing that is sitting there like, I mean, not...
	I mean, it's like a cancer.
	My dad is a fucking time bomb I don't trust, and I hate being around, but I have my nieces, and I have my nephew, and I have my brother, and his wife, and all these people who I really care about, and they're all part of the same package, you know?
	Wait, so there are people who are virtuous and good and kind in this family system, who have earned your love through their generosity and compassion and moral courage and so on?
	Certainly, yes.
	My brother has been very supportive, and he's always been there.
	My sister tries, but I think she's really caught up in her own stuff right now.
	And the kids, they love me.
	They send me letters.
	I don't know if this is manipulation on the part of her mother.
	I get that impression sometimes.
	Alright, so sorry, just because I feel like we could turn the page of the family history from here until the end of the time and not get any closer to a connection.
	Is there a specific question that I could help you with?
	Yeah, I was sort of hoping you could advise me on how to deal with this, you know, how to deal with it.
	Because I feel like I've been setting myself up for this confrontation again with my dad to try to salvage the relationship, but I I guess I'm getting the impression you say I shouldn't do it.
	So I guess my question at this point is...
	No, no.
	See, you keep saying that I'm misunderstanding you.
	I haven't told you anything to do.
	I've asked you some questions.
	Right?
	I mean, you need to slow down and listen to people.
	Be in a conversation rather than jumping around to conclusions and all that, right?
	I haven't told you to do anything.
	Do you get that?
	Yeah, but I sort of get the impression that you feel like...
	No, no, no, no, no.
	Don't do things like say, I get the impression.
	That's your way of saying, I'm going to believe what I want to believe, no matter what you say.
	And I'm going to call it, I get an impression, or reading between the lines, or what you really mean is, or, you know, what you're trying to say is, it's like, no, no, deal with what I'm saying, and not saying, right?
	I haven't told you to do anything.
	All right.
	So I think my question would be...
	So just take a deep breath and slow down a little, right?
	Because you've got a very fast brain, obviously.
	I mean, it's trauma, right?
	Trauma makes you think really fast, right?
	So I haven't told you to do anything.
	I've asked some questions.
	Okay.
	So your parents are a system, right?
	Right.
	My daughter was asking why I don't see my mom, and I said, well, if you had a friend who punched you several times, and I said, I'm still going to stay friends with that person, what would you think?
	And she said, I think that was terrible, right?
	Because at five, we understand these things, right?
	There's a man who unapologetically punched you.
	And your mother still claims to love him, I assume.
	Sure.
	And so, I'm not sure what else needs to be said.
	I don't know how much more complicated things are, right?
	You say you have virtuous people in the family system, great.
	Then I think that's wonderful.
	Then you should work at isolating the evil people in the family system, right?
	Okay.
	And ejecting them, right?
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	In Alien, Ripley doesn't have tea with the alien.
	She flushes it out of the fucking airlock.
	I mean, that's how you deal with predators, right?
	Yeah.
	So, again, I'm not saying what you should do, but if your father is as malevolent and immoral as you say, I'm just going to go by what you say.
	I can tell you I wouldn't hang around with someone like that.
	And if somebody...
	Was really great friends with someone like that there would be kind of a ripple effect Right so anybody who who goes out and supports evil people is Not a virtuous person.
	I mean just by definition right the guy who drives the getaway car Even though he's not robbing the bank is still a criminal and he gets charged accordingly, right?
	Yeah So you're trying to find a way to separate Your father from your mother, but I assume since they've been married for many, many years, that they're a system, right?
	And if you had a friend who beat you up, and another friend who still wanted to hang out with that friend all the time, what would you think of that other friend?
	I mean, those people leave my life all the time.
	I have no problem with that, you know, and I get it.
	You didn't answer my question.
	I wouldn't hang around with them.
	This is what I mean by listening.
	I'm sorry?
	I said I wouldn't hang around with them, and I've done this many times in the past.
	I think what you're not understanding, though, is that I love my mother, and she doesn't have the information that I have.
	She doesn't know about self-knowledge.
	Coming to the point where I've gotten took me time, and I'm not ready to write off my mother and my brother and my sister, which I think is what will happen if I go, yeah, well, dad's a dick, and he is.
	And I think he is.
	And I agree he is.
	And I sent my brother an email yesterday about it because I called him.
	You know, it's like, I get that.
	But I know what the consequences are going to be because they're all going to think I'm just digging up the past.
	You know, that's how they think.
	I'm sorry to interrupt, but here's where we kind of run into a brick wall, right?
	Which is, if we speak such a different language, I don't think there's any way to productively communicate.
	So if your mother was a violent drunk throughout your childhood, wished you die of a wasteful disease and still continues to support and love and sleep with the man who is, as you say, like this rampaging evil monster, and you tell me that you love her, I'm not going and you tell me that you love her, I'm not going to disagree with you at I mean, I can't tell you what you feel.
	But I can tell you that my definition of love is so different that we can't connect.
	My definition of love would not, like I say, well, I love my wife, I love my daughter, and I love my friends.
	So my definition of the word love is so opposite to your definition of the word love that I don't think there's any way, I'm sorry?
	I find that very insulting, and I'm very sorry to say that, but I, my parents have made improvements, and I recognize them for their improvements, you know?
	And I don't.
	That's the problem, is he's the one who's not.
	Everyone else is making improvements, and I don't think they understand how much I still hold this inside me.
	Sorry, why are you insulted?
	I mean, I was telling you that my definition of love is very different than yours.
	Because I don't think it's all that different, really.
	I think love is love, and I'm pretty sure I know what it is.
	Wait, so you think that the love that I have for my wife...
	Is the same word that you use for the love that you have for your mother?
	My mother owned her mistakes.
	So I love her.
	But she's still married to your dad.
	True.
	But I don't think she understands just how much this affects me because I think she just isn't aware of all this stuff, you know?
	But she was there when he punched you.
	She woke him up, right?
	He was drunk.
	She's very subservient to him.
	And he's not a monster.
	He's made improvements, too.
	I mean, this is one mistake he just refuses to own, you know?
	What, his only way of my mistake?
	He's owned the drunkenness, the wife beating, the child beating, the we're getting divorced, let's go to Dairy Queen.
	He's owned all that, too?
	Yeah, you're right.
	Yeah, you're right.
	Well, look, I mean, so I guess the only thing that I can say is, you know, continue to talk to your parents and just be aware, though, that I don't think you can take married people and separate them into opposing moral categories.
	You know, like my father's this really bad guy, but I really love my mom.
	That's my feeling.
	I can't prove that.
	I can't tell you that, you know, follow the hidden lines of ethical concordance between the two.
	But I would be I would be doubtful of whether you can separate them into opposing moral categories.
	But I think if you continue to talk to your mom and maybe your dad, but if you feel safe, but if you continue certainly to talk to your mom about how much it does affect you, how much your relationship with your father has affected you about whether he knew about your molestation, for which, of course, and for your whole childhood, I'm just incredibly sorry for. of course, and for your whole childhood, I'm just incredibly What an unholy mess to have to try and deal with and unravel.
	I'm really sorry about all of that.
	But yeah, we just keep on talking and try and help them to understand how much it affects you.
	My particular feeling is by the time you're 35, if your parents don't really understand you, I'm not sure that another 10 minutes or 10 years is going to make a huge amount of difference.
	Like if I'm trying to study Japanese for 35 years and I can't get the basics down, I'm not sure that 36 years is going to make a huge difference.
	Just try and stay in conversation and stay open about what you experience and have experienced at the hands of your parents.
	I think certainty then comes through honesty.
	That's the great thing about honesty, is it will always bring certainty.
	And I'm sorry if the conversation was upsetting to you.
	I'm sorry, certainly, that it was upsetting to me.
	But I do appreciate you calling in.
	And Mike, if we could move on to the next caller, I would appreciate that.
	Alright, up next is Mike.
	Mike wrote in and said, how do I know when I'm being overly critical of myself compared to a healthy self-criticism?
	Great question.
	Great question.
	Have you experienced both, or is one more of a mystery?
	Oh, no, absolutely.
	Again, I don't even know...
	I'm sure that I'm hypercritical of myself and that I'm definitely guilty of, you know, rampant self-attack.
	And have you experienced any sort of what you would call healthy self-criticism?
	Again, without a definition, I guess I don't even know the difference, to be quite honest.
	No, I appreciate that.
	That's good honesty to have.
	All right.
	Have you experienced criticism from other people that you have found helpful?
	Very rarely.
	My response to criticism is usually the, you know, the kind of stomach-churning, face-flushing, you know, full-on, you know, adrenaline embarrassment kind of reaction.
	There's very few people that I feel I'm confident enough in my life that can give me honest criticism and I don't feel like I'm being attacked.
	Right.
	Right.
	Yeah, and it's funny, you know, my daughter and I are learning how to fly a little remote control helicopter.
	And, you know, when I got it and unpacked it and put the batteries in, I had this...
	Almost overwhelming urge to sit down and have the serious talk with her, you know, about how stuff is so fucking serious, you know?
	This is an expensive toy.
	It can be dangerous.
	It can fly into things.
	You need to be very responsible.
	Just that piling fucking brick upon brick on a human child until they break and can't have any fun with anything, right?
	And that's just because, you know, when I was a kid, it's like, you do understand that I guess when we went from grade 6 to grade 7, we went from primary to junior high school.
	And the vice principal, who's universally a dick in a suit, and a bad suit, like polyester and a clip-on fucking tie.
	Vice principals are just...
	Dick in suits.
	And this guy came in and he gave us this giant...
	He was, I'm going to give you a gift.
	This is a very serious gift.
	This is a gift that will grant you entrance to all the portals of productive citizenry in the future.
	Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, right?
	And it was a fucking thesaurus, you know?
	And I was old enough to know that a thesaurus was not a cool dinosaur pet.
	And...
	The seriousness.
	These are library books.
	It is essential.
	You do not deface the library books.
	It is, you know, just all that kind of stuff, right?
	All this seriousness.
	Everything was so fucking serious, right?
	I mentioned this before in the show.
	A friend of mine was an animator, and he did a couple of flip pictures in a math book.
	Didn't, you know, just over the page numbers even, or beside the page numbers.
	It didn't obscure any text or whatever, right?
	And he got such a huge fucking lecture in front of the whole class about how he defaced school property and just fucking ground him into the earth.
	And I had the same thing when I was a kid.
	We'd go through these manias in boarding school.
	You know, one's chestnuts, hitting chestnuts, and then there was marbles, and then there was paper airplanes.
	And we just would go through these hysterical crazes because we were fucking caged and beaten animals.
	So naturally we'd go through these insane crazes, fads or whatever, right?
	And I remember tearing out a page from an...
	It was the Guinness Book of World Records.
	And there was a page with a Roman coin.
	It was one of the oldest coins or something.
	I ripped it out to make a paper airplane.
	Because we were always out of paper because everybody was using them to make these paper airplanes that could fly faster or do more tricks.
	And, you know, my...
	My teacher found out about it.
	The vice principal!
	Dick in a suit.
	Although the dicks in the suits in England had not just the bad polyester suits and clip-on ties, but they also had like porn stashes and 70s I think?
	And he gave me this whole big long, you know, your mother worked very hard for that book and you have destroyed what she worked hard for to provide you with an education for virtue, you evil little bastard.
	You know, I wish we were in the Mayan times so I could rip your own heart out and hold it up to the gods of parental sacrifice and education so that everyone could see how much evil was dripping between my fingers.
	I mean, just this heavy conversation.
	And so many times you get...
	You sat down, you know, and this is a very big responsibility and blah, blah, blah, right?
	Of course, all I saw when my friend was being castigated over a book or when I was being castigated over a book was...
	This inanimate object is far more important than any self-respect or social stature or human feeling that you might have or that I might conceivably have for you.
	I will grind you into the dust over a piece of paper, right?
	I mean, it just shows you where you are in the hierarchy of the values of the educators.
	So, I don't know, did you ever experience any of those, like, really heavy, serious, oh, fucking serious conversations from dicks in suits?
	Yeah, no.
	I mean, my time in the public education was full of that.
	I just, you know, I had no social skills whatsoever, but I was extremely intelligent.
	And it was very frustrating for a lot of the people that are, you know, so-called teachers.
	They just couldn't deal with me.
	And so, you know, I faced a lot of Just, you know, I mean, direct and indirect, you know, belittling at their hands.
	And it was horrible.
	I mean, it was horrible.
	It was absolutely terrible.
	Yeah, it is.
	And it is, you know, like I'm sitting there with this remote control helicopter, which cost us all of $24, right?
	Right.
	And it's not like $24 is not insignificant.
	I'll never, I don't care if I win the lottery, $24 is not a small amount of money.
	It's just what happens when you grow up poor.
	But...
	Again, I thought to myself, well, and this is sort of why I brought this up.
	So the question is, it is not insignificant, right?
	I mean, she shouldn't turn it on, but I'm holding it, right?
	Take off a couple of four on here, whatever, right?
	So it's not like serious, serious, right?
	But, you know...
	Don't, you know, if she flies it up and breaks it right away, she'll be unhappy or whatever, right?
	So there is a little bit of, you know, here's what we need to do.
	We need to be careful because of X, Y, and Z, right?
	But my goal in communicating this toy or this activity to her is I want to find a way to maximize her fun, right?
	Right.
	And this is, so you know that I think healthy...
	Criticism or a healthy interaction is when someone knows what you want and is committed to try and help you get there, right?
	Right.
	So let's say that you have a personal trainer, right?
	I don't know, let's say you're 50 pounds overweight.
	And your personal trainer, you know, you go to your personal trainer, you hire a personal trainer because you want to lose weight.
	Well, he knows what your goal is.
	You want to lose weight.
	Yep.
	And hopefully he knows the best ways that you can go about losing that weight and keeping it off or whatever, right?
	Right.
	And so the first thing is that you enter into it voluntarily and the person either has inquired about or implicitly knows what your goals are, right?
	And that's any kind of good sales, right?
	You go into a car showroom, they'll say, you know, do you have kids or, you know, what kind of car are you looking for or what was your last car or what didn't you like about your last car?
	They'll try to figure out what you want and facilitate you getting there.
	Does that make sense?
	Yeah.
	So I wanted my daughter to have a good time with the remote control helicopter.
	So I diagrammed a little bit about how flight works and I talked about let's do it outside so we don't break anything, blah, blah, blah.
	You know what the ironic thing was?
	What's that?
	So first I flew it into a tree and then I broke the leg off.
	Like this is the funny thing and this is why it's so important not to have those heavy conversations, right?
	Is that my daughter has never broken it.
	And I fix the leg or whatever, right?
	But I flew it into a tree because I'm the overconfident adult who's, you know, I always try to show off to my daughter because I want her to think I'm the coolest guy ever.
	And what I'm actually showing her how to deal with, I'm actually showing her how someone who's remotely mature deals with trying to be cool and failing, which is usually what happens when I try and do that stuff, right?
	And so if someone is criticizing you in a healthy way, then you feel encouraged to achieve your goals, right?
	Yeah.
	Like, I mean, if you go to someone who personal trainer who's like, you fat flabby beluga whale Rob Ford ass size asshole, you got to come here and fucking work.
	And I can smell chocolate on your breath, you fat fuck, you know, all this sort of shit, right?
	I mean, the guy's just I mean, anybody with a shred of self respect is not going to show up back up, right?
	Yeah.
	Whereas if you're like, oh, you know, we have a plan, we have a goal, how you're doing with it, and so on.
	And if someone has a block, like they go on a cheesecake binge or something, figure out was there a trigger?
	Well, you know, what happened?
	Were you stressed?
	Were you upset?
	You know, helping the person to try and figure it out.
	Because somebody who's fat doesn't want to eat cheesecake fundamentally, right?
	Because it's, you know, not going to help them lose weight, right?
	So trying to figure out what they want, right?
	And whether what that person wants includes whether you can give them feedback on it.
	Because if somebody just wants you to agree with them, then you can't give them any feedback because then you have to self-erase in order to be in the conversation.
	So if somebody has a criticism of you, can you give me something which someone has criticized you about in the past that was bad?
	Um...
	It's amazing to draw a blank, being on the spot here.
	It's short-circuited, right?
	My wife and I speak about this on a regular basis, that both of us are broken in the way that we can't give each other feedback without...
	You know, triggering just, you know, at least defensive feelings.
	Okay, so maybe you can take the asshole hat on.
	So what's something that you give feedback to your wife about that she doesn't like or doesn't appreciate?
	Okay, small thing.
	Leaving teabags in the sink, right?
	Rather than Depositing them in the trash.
	It's a small, petty thing.
	No, no, no.
	That's a great example.
	Why do you care?
	To some small extent, it grosses me out.
	It feels like it shouldn't be my responsibility to grab the nasty teabag when I didn't use it.
	Okay, but it's not like furry.
	It doesn't have, like, typhus in it.
	You know, it's not like a color on it, right?
	It's a cold wet tea bag you've got to pick up and put it in the garbage, right?
	And I'm a farmer.
	I've done, you know, any kind of poop imaginable has been on my head.
	Yeah, so if it's not directly coming out of a cow's ass, you're okay with it.
	And even then, you're probably weighing it for sale, right?
	Okay.
	And this is good, because this is a criticism, right?
	Yeah.
	You know, my wife has this insane Greek mane of hair.
	It looks like she basically held her nose and exploded four tons of protein out of her scalp, right, when she sneezed.
	And she washes her hair in my bathtub, and there's like a, basically, if you look at it sideways, it's like a giant rat in the bathtub, right?
	Yeah.
	And this has been going on for years, and every night when I bathe, I pick that up and I put it in the garbage, right?
	Right.
	Because, you know, I just burn with hair envy every time.
	It's a terrible, terrible feeling.
	Anyway.
	But, you know, she doesn't remember it.
	She doesn't.
	I mean, I could sort of take a stand on this, right?
	I could if I wanted.
	But in order to take a stand on it, I would have to have it mean something really important.
	Right.
	You know, like this is disrespectful to me.
	If I've told you once, I've told you a thousand times, I feel invisible.
	You just don't pay attention.
	You don't listen to me when I speak.
	I've been talking about this stuff for years.
	Like, I'd have to make a giant fucking deal out of half a fistful of hair in the bathtub, right?
	Yep.
	And it's not a big deal.
	I pick it up, I throw it out, I have a bite, right?
	It's just not a big deal, right?
	So tell me how the...
	What does the teabag transform itself in your mind into?
	Because literally, if you...
	Let's say, does it happen every day?
	No.
	No.
	Every time she has tea, which is, you know, a couple times a week, but sure.
	Okay, okay.
	No, hang on.
	Seriously, like, does it take you—is your garbage right under the sink?
	No.
	Oh, fuck no.
	No, it's not physically— No, no, but it is important, because you want constructive criticism, how to do it, right?
	Right.
	So the first thing you have to do is—and if you can do this yourself, you will recognize it in others, right?
	Right.
	Okay.
	Right?
	So it literally will take you about, let's see, one steamboat, two steamboat, three steamboat, maybe three seconds or four seconds to pick it up and put it in the garbage, right?
	Sure.
	Sure.
	In other words, given that a conversation about this probably takes at least five to ten minutes, you have close to like, what, six months or eight months worth of just throwing it out for one conversation, right?
	Yeah, yeah.
	All right.
	So the question is then, why is it A big deal for you.
	I think I can answer that for sure.
	I don't...
	In general, I don't...
	No, I can.
	I don't feel...
	I don't feel heard.
	Right?
	I don't feel...
	Okay, okay, okay.
	My needs are met.
	I don't feel...
	I matter.
	Okay, but...
	So now there's two ways in which you may not feel heard.
	The first...
	It's because of the past and the second is because of the present, right?
	So if in your family when you were growing up you didn't feel heard, right?
	Which is when you say you don't have social skills if you I think you said that then that's sort of an indication that you didn't feel heard so then Anytime It's kind of a form of mild form to me at least of PTSD or whatever, right?
	Which is not clinical.
	I'm just talking about it in an amateur sense But it's like, if you weren't heard as a kid, then anytime something happens which is against your particular desires, you are going to not feel heard.
	But that's all the past backing up, right?
	It's not about the present, right?
	No.
	Does that make sense?
	No.
	No, I understand.
	And I completely understand that my inability to decipher these things comes from not fixing things.
	You know, what happened in the past.
	And the reason I'm saying this to you, and I'm sorry to keep interrupting, the reason I'm saying this is not because of the tea bags.
	The reason I'm saying this is because when you get that in yourself, you will get, most times you will really, really understand that when people are criticizing you, it has nothing to do with you.
	Okay.
	Um...
	To not take people seriously is really important.
	If a three-year-old is angry and comes up and thumps you on the knee, do you give him a roundhouse kick to the head?
	No, obviously not.
	Of course not, because he's three, right?
	You say, listen, I don't want you doing this when you're 13.
	It can really punch my nipples through my back, but we've got to figure out what's going on and how you can do it differently or whatever, right?
	Yeah.
	Most people's maturity is an insult to three-year-olds.
	Yeah.
	Right?
	So most people are like three years old coming up and hitting you on the leg with their pudgy little hands saying, no, right?
	Because that's where their emotional development got stymied or stopped or whatever.
	The terrible twos, which is called the terrible twos because it's when the children attempt to first individuate from the parents, which is terrible for the ego-invested parents who are empty and Clinging like ice to a glass for their identity with the kid.
	So most people who are criticizing you are using you as a poison container.
	They are attempting to discharge the venom of their past.
	And they are attempting to...
	It's hot potato.
	It's emotional hot potato.
	It's like either you feel shitty or I feel shitty.
	And I would rather you feel shitty.
	Oh, yeah.
	I learned that game very well.
	If you're going to make me feel shitty, I'm going to throw it back.
	With your wife, it's like, I feel shitty about the teabag, which has nothing to do with any rational analysis of the teabag, right?
	I feel shitty about the teabag.
	I'm going to complain about it so you feel shitty and so I feel less shitty, right?
	Because if you really get what the teabag's about, then you're going to feel a lot worse because it goes back into your childhood and what happened to you as a kid and how you weren't hurt and ignored and not listened to and not respected and blah, blah, blah, right?
	The teabag is your parents, right?
	And once you get that...
	Like, at a really basic level...
	I mean, the amount of criticism that is sort of fired in my direction on any given day could, you know, could sandblast a...
	could sandblast a supertanker in dry dock, right?
	Yep.
	And...
	Can I... Go ahead.
	I mean, it's like...
	It's like watching a bird peck at a mirror and thinking that that's going to give you an owie.
	They're entirely dealing with their own histories or avoiding dealing with their own histories.
	They're avoiding dealing with their own parents.
	They're avoiding dealing with any wrongs that they've done.
	There's nothing of any value in what they're saying other than as a confession of unprocessed emotional pain.
	Almost all human communication...
	That's conflictual, that's conflict-based, is a confession of undealt-with emotional pain.
	They're not saying anything about you.
	They're confessing something very clear about themselves.
	Now, the danger is that when you point that out to people, they tend to escalate enormously.
	Right?
	Yeah.
	And that's why it is dangerous to be around people without self-knowledge.
	Because they think that they're criticizing you when they're actually angry about something in their past.
	And when you point that out, they escalate, right?
	Oh, yeah.
	No, it's...
	That specific thing is...
	We just posted...
	Mike and I were just having a chat earlier today about...
	We just posted against the gods on YouTube.
	So we get the lovely influx of religiously inclined comments.
	Hmm.
	And, I mean, it's, I feel no, like, I'm never like, oh my god, did I make a mistake in the book?
	Or, oh, this book is full of straw men, and this book is, you know, full of so many fallacies, I can't even, it's like trying to push a watermelon through a straw or a baby out of a woman.
	Yeah, I can't, right?
	You're going to need a C-section to get all these quintuplets of errors out of every syllable of the book or whatever.
	Now, you know, nobody actually points out what those really are or if they do, it's so ridiculously incompetent.
	But what they're trying to like, the book is provoking anxiety in them.
	And so it's like, well, either the author feels shitty or I feel shitty.
	And I care a lot more about myself than this author.
	So I'm going to try and make the author feel shitty.
	Right?
	I fully get that, right?
	Like, people say that, well, the whole point of God is that God is undefinable and undefined.
	It's like, well, then why use the word God?
	Why not pray to something called undefined?
	Oh, undefined, who art in undefinable, undefinable be thy undefined.
	Right?
	I mean, you couldn't have a religion.
	There would be no such thing as God if you had to use the word undefined for everything.
	Another guy is saying, well, I've moved beyond, I used to be an atheist, but I've moved beyond the five senses, right?
	And therefore I'm not.
	It's like, well, then why the fuck are you writing something I have to read?
	If you've got some superior sense that is so vastly amazing, why, you know, and it's available to everyone, because otherwise it's just me-ism, it's you and whatever god you're making up, which is probably psychosis.
	But it has to be...
	It has to be so superior.
	It's literally like me running to your house, running like 60 blocks to your house and saying, there's this fantastic technology called email.
	It's so much better than running to people's houses.
	It's like, well, why the fuck didn't you send me the message on email then?
	Yeah.
	Right?
	It's like...
	Or people say, well, you can't tell the difference between existence and non-existence.
	And they're typing this, which has to show up in black and white on a screen.
	Right?
	And so the only reason that I know...
	That they have letters and are making an argument is that there's a difference between the existence of white and the non-existence of white, which is black, right?
	So it's so insane what they're saying that the idea that this has something to do with me would be narcissistic.
	Does that make sense?
	Like it would be entirely narcissistic for me to believe that these broken-brained...
	Anxiety-spewing, self-damaged robots.
	They're self-damaging now because they're reenacting the abuse that they were formerly hiding from.
	It would be narcissistic to think it's about me.
	This is the great mistake that people make, right?
	And if you're taking people's criticisms, most people's, almost all people's criticisms seriously, it's because you think it's about you.
	And you're not correctly identifying that...
	People are almost never talking about you when they talk.
	Does that make sense?
	Anyway, I'll shut up now because I've talked a lot, but tell me what you think.
	Yeah, no, I mean, with day-to-day people, that definitely makes sense.
	There's one other area of, I don't know if it's criticism or advice, that is a little bit to the side.
	And I've gone to various different therapists over a number of years, and I've always seemed to reach an impasse where things just weren't moving forward.
	And I've had a conversation recently with a fellow I met casually who said he was a therapist, and I said...
	I've come recently through your show, actually, I've come to realize that the way I was disciplining my kids, that yelling at my children was wrong, it was abusive, it was horrible, it's undoubtedly had some lasting effect, and that I've come to realize that I really need to change that.
	And asking anything further, he goes, oh, well, you know, no, you're just self-attacking.
	You know, I'm sure it wasn't that bad.
	And to me, it was very confusing.
	It's kind of the root of this question, when I get my thoughts back together here, of where this came from.
	Because, again, this fellow is supposed to be a professional.
	And this kind of echoes some of the stuff that other therapists have told me.
	They seem to want to downplay...
	What I think are things that I am doing or traits that I have that I find destructive.
	And their first inclination is to downplay them.
	Yeah, yeah.
	Well, I mean, there is a sort of hypersensitivity to self-criticism in the therapeutic community.
	Well, there's a hypersensitivity to criticism of any kind in the therapeutic community, right?
	Forgive.
	Forget.
	They did the best they could with the knowledge they had.
	Be a jackal.
	Don't be a jackal.
	Be a giraffe.
	Be gentle.
	Be curious.
	Be nice.
	Right?
	There's this incredibly, and I view this as a sort of hyper-feminine social metaphysics.
	Get along with everyone no matter what.
	Don't rock the boat.
	Don't criticize.
	Don't have any problems with anyone.
	Just be this big, giant, Borg sponge goop of forgiveness and acceptance.
	Right.
	Right.
	I mean, this is what happens when you have fear without philosophy.
	This is what happens when you have an avoidance of negative emotions without philosophy, is you become, I think, compliant, and in many ways, enablers of abusers, right?
	Which is where the whole, you know, forgive your parents stuff comes from.
	Yeah, no, it's...
	And it's maddening.
	I mean, before I even ran into your show, and it really had some great positive effects on how I saw things, I mean, I had cut my abusive mother completely out of my life, despite everyone's, oh, you can't do that, you'll regret it, and all that shit.
	It's just ridiculous.
	But I'm so frustrated with the community of therapists that I have gone to, and hopefully with the help of your show on How to Choose a Therapist and some of the suggestions that Mike sent me on Qualifications of therapists.
	I mean, I live in a fairly rural area.
	Hopefully, I'll find somebody who I can connect with, who is down to earth and wants to put me through the hard work that I need to do to fix these kinds of issues.
	But it's really difficult.
	There is an unbelievably tragic lack of masculine energy in the world.
	Yeah.
	No, I don't know if you feel this to be true, right?
	No, no, that's...
	Yeah, go ahead, go ahead.
	No, I mean, I think you're absolutely right.
	Right.
	I mean, your shows on recently on, you know, the myth of the patriarchy and things along those lines.
	I mean, they really struck home with me because it just shows I can't even imagine sharing this information, you know, with the women that are in my life.
	I feel like, you know, the knives would come out like, you know, heresy.
	What are you doing speaking against, you know, badly against women?
	So, you know, I feel that.
	I feel that completely.
	And, you know, it's become such a sort of maligned and hunted and hounded group that.
	That, you know, whenever I hear like women saying, well, I just need to have a voice.
	I don't have a voice.
	It's like, well, how about a deeper voice once in a while, you know?
	I mean, it's, it's, there's this old joke about a married couple going in for counseling and the wife says, well, my husband hasn't talked to me in 10 years.
	The therapist says to the husband, why not?
	He says, well, I didn't want to interrupt.
	And this is sort of what it feels like in the social discourse.
	There was a caller the other day who was like, yeah, I got my mistress pregnant, but it's okay because my sister is going to raise the kid, even though her husband doesn't want kids or something like that.
	It's like, God, where's the man?
	No, I'm not raising your brother's bastard mistress child.
	No, no.
	Sorry if that's inconvenient.
	No to the fucking no.
	And, I mean, women and men have very different views of the world, I believe, and it can be very complimentary, and it can be wonderful, and it can be great.
	But I think it's just got a little bit one-sided.
	Just a little bit one-sided.
	Like there's no failure bullshit and everyone gets a medal and all this.
	It's like, God, no.
	Life is win-lose.
	Sorry.
	Some people get the girl.
	Other people don't.
	Some people get the contract or the job.
	Other people don't.
	Some people are first and best and other people aren't.
	And...
	Men get the sort of win-lose, right?
	But with women, it's all about cooperation.
	And there's nothing wrong with that, right?
	The men went out and hunted, and either you got the deer or you didn't.
	You know, I mean, that's about, you come home with the meat or you don't.
	But with, you know, the sort of growing of the vegetables and the crops at home, that's all, and the raising of the children, that's all collaborative, right?
	You all work together, then you can raise the crops and take care of the children.
	So I guess there's nothing wrong with the way that women approach it.
	It's all about collaboration and so on, right?
	And if you all work together, then you get the tomatoes and you get the peaches and you get the lettuce and all that sort of shit.
	And there's nothing wrong with that.
	But that's not how hunting works.
	It's not how war works.
	I mean, you fucking live or you die.
	You get the food or you don't.
	It's kind of binary.
	Whereas women, it's all like balancing of this, that, and the other.
	And it's all about false friendships and verbal poisoning the wells for people who disagree with you.
	And it's all about under-the-table power plays with men.
	It's like a fist to the face or not.
	And I find that kind of refreshing.
	So...
	And this sort of let's all work together and so on.
	This is where the weird environmental movement, I find both religious and extremely feminine, right?
	Because men kind of get like nature is like saber-toothed tigers and shit that rips your head off and, you know, all that, right?
	Whereas for women, it's all like, you know, balance and nature and nurture and because, you know, you're growing a fucking tomato and unless your tomatoes are really aggressive, they're not going to take your fucking head off in the middle of the night with a giant fell swoop of their little red mouths.
	So, anyway, you know, the whole point of the men was to keep the dangerous predators away from the women, and the whole point of the women was to grow some vegetables so we didn't fart cow bits out every time we took a shit, right?
	So, I mean, you get some roughage and you get some protein.
	That's how it works.
	And so, I just find that the male perspective, like, that nature is kind of an asshole.
	Nature is like this sociopathic bitch who will kill you as soon as they look at you.
	Yeah, that's, you know, there's a...
	A scene in Rio 1 where the female bird is like, well, we're part of nature and this is how we live and blah, blah, blah.
	And the male bird is like, well, yeah, but doesn't nature eat each other?
	And she goes past and then he sees like a frog grab a little lightning bug.
	A little firefly and eat it and then a snake eats the frog and that's what he sees and she's all about like nature is nice and this and that and the other and we're like well yeah but that's because you're growing a non-lethal non-predatory piece of fucking lettuce and I'm out here trying to hunt a lion so it's a little different our experience of nature and anyway I just sort of feel that that A man's energy, men's knowledge, men's perspective, which is not to say right, it's a perspective.
	There is a lot of cooperation in nature, and nature will also kill you pretty quickly.
	You know, just go walk in a bathing suit through the Amazon forest for a day and see if you come out alive, right?
	I mean, it's not going to work out too well.
	Even if something big doesn't get you, something extremely tiny probably will, right?
	So, it's just a perspective, that's all.
	And women are, in general, shielded from the demands of hard labor, right?
	You know, when the power went out here, it was all men who came to fix it.
	There weren't a lot of women volunteering to help out.
	So, women have, you know, a gentler view of the world because men are out there building all the shit that makes women's lives comfortable, right?
	Yeah.
	and sewage and plumbing and, I mean, all that kind of stuff, right?
	I've never called a plumber and had some 25-year-old woman come over, right?
	It's always some guy who looks like he's having two belugas fight together in his back pockets, right, when he bends over.
	So, I mean, men create this safe world and then women sort of enjoy it and say the world is very nice.
	And it's like, yes, that's because 96% of the workplace deaths involve men.
	And the worst you have to deal with is office gollops.
	The worst that women generally have to deal with is office gossip and a couple of paper cuts.
	So, again, I just wish that the male perspective was a little bit more.
	And in the therapeutic community, it's all about...
	Oh.
	It's completely non-existent.
	I mean, yeah.
	No, it's completely non-existent in the therapeutic community.
	Even the men that I've been to see are, you know, I don't know.
	They're just, they're so soft.
	You know, they're such, you know, just NPR devotees.
	I just, I can't.
	Yeah, it's men with significant air quotes, right?
	Yeah.
	Right.
	Yeah, no, absolutely.
	I never wanted to be a man in air quotes, you know?
	I mean, right or wrong, I just, I want to put forward a male perspective.
	And this is not to discount the female perspective.
	I think I've written credible female characters in plays and novels.
	I think I understand women pretty well.
	But man alive, it's okay to hear from the hairy balls once in a while.
	It doesn't always have to be the vagina echo chamber of infinite collaboration.
	So...
	Go ahead.
	In this specific instance, it's even more difficult.
	My wife's father was the youngest of a whole bunch, raised by his sisters, and he is just a complete emasculated limp noodle.
	And so she just never had anyone like that.
	And the one person who was masculine in her life took advantage and And molested her in her teenage years.
	And so that's pretty much her only exposure to the male of the species besides me.
	I mean, who's pointing out just how ridiculous some of this stuff is, right?
	So there are all of these women in women's studies in university, and they're saying, we need more women in STEM, right?
	Science, technology, engineering, and medicine, right?
	We need more women in these technology and medical and engineering fields, right?
	And it's like, but you're in a fucking women's studies program.
	Yeah.
	Like, why aren't you in those fields if you want people to be in those fields, right?
	All these fucking feminists in academia complaining about the lack of female CEOs.
	Go found a fucking company!
	God!
	You know, like, I won't...
	Just the movie Frozen, right?
	I mean, for those who've seen it, right?
	I'm not giving any spoilers away here, but...
	It starts with this incredibly long sequence of men going out into the fucking wilderness when it's minus six trillion outside and hacking off chunks of ice because that's how men make ice.
	They go out in the cold with hooks and saws and they wrestle it from the frozen lake and they carry that shit back home, which weighs 9,000 tons, right?
	That's how men...
	Make ice!
	That's the whole opening sequence, right?
	And how do women make ice?
	It's magic!
	They're born with this magical power to make ice, and they can just make ice castles by singing and dancing and having tits!
	God!
	And even when she's singing and dancing, her skirt goes way up.
	It's like, whores, get ice!
	Just by singing and dancing!
	Men...
	Fuck, this ice is heavy.
	I hope I don't crack my knees in three pieces.
	Carry it down the mountain.
	The women are like, I believe I've got ice because I got a vagina.
	And it's like, oh my God, what horrible messages.
	There's not one woman who works in that film.
	None of them have a job.
	All the jobs are done by men.
	And it's like, why would we work?
	We've got nipples!
	Well, I have nipples too, but I'm all taps and no plumbing, so sorry, I've got to go get a job.
	Anyway, I don't want to get into the whole movie review coming up.
	Who's pointing out some of this nutty stuff?
	Who's there reminding women that, hey, go camping.
	Go camping near your period.
	Have fun, right?
	Nature.
	Anyway.
	If I could be so inclined, one more real quick question.
	It's a little bit of a pivot, but I think it's really important in my life.
	Actually, I know it's really important in my life.
	Yeah.
	I spoke about, you know, you convinced me, you know, that yelling was abuse.
	And I don't go on screaming tirades at my children anymore.
	Yay.
	Well...
	No, good for you.
	No, I mean, I... Yeah.
	Yeah.
	Yes, to be honest.
	What did you do screaming tirades about them for?
	Oh, it wasn't...
	For over-discipline issues, if they were not behaving in the way that I wanted, if they were doing, you know, what is typical children stuff.
	You know what I mean?
	Yeah, you have to tell them five times because they have no attention span.
	It's part of their age.
	You know, I mean, I understand this.
	It was just...
	You know, and again, afterwards it sounds obvious, and it makes me feel really stupid and really foolish.
	But, you know, I knew no different, and as soon as I was exposed, you know, it shocked me.
	And, you know, I knew immediately, you know, not one more day.
	What did your wife think about your Tourette's?
	I appreciate you being honest about this.
	I mean, that's really, really tough stuff to talk about.
	What did your wife think about your verbal abuse?
	She didn't...
	She thought it was bad.
	She thought that it was negative.
	But she didn't...
	She spoke up sporadically about it, and only when it was exceptionally strong.
	Did she know about your capacity for this kind of abuse before she had children with you?
	Um...
	Yeah, probably yes.
	I mean, yes.
	Not regularly, not on a regular basis, but yeah, absolutely.
	I mean, I have had issues in that way.
	Absolutely.
	You mean you've yelled at her?
	Yes.
	We were married a couple of years before we had our first kid and maybe once or twice in those two years we got into arguments to the point where I laid into it verbally.
	I honed those skills very well when I was younger.
	How did you hone them when you were younger?
	I was bullied horribly in school and It was just the law was laid down that it's not all right to put your hands on people.
	It's not all right, you know, to hit and to aggress that way.
	And so everybody else got a free pass on their words.
	And so I just developed, you know, my language skills, you know, to just cut like a sword.
	You know, I can find, you know, I can find your button and I can, you know, I can not push it.
	You know, I'm going to slam a sword right into it.
	Well, what would you say to me then if you wanted to wound me?
	What would you say to me?
	You know, I don't think I can draw on command, Steph.
	It's one of those things when you get that adrenaline surge, when that part of your brain, the thinking part of your brain, the frontal cortex, shuts down, and you're just in...
	Literally fight or flight.
	I couldn't, you know.
	Right, okay, okay.
	I was just curious.
	And that's where, I guess that's where my question comes in, is that that's still the part that's there, is that I will find myself...
	Verbally snapping.
	It's not more than a word or sentence, but the way that it comes out and the tone that it comes out is abusive.
	It's horrible.
	And I just want it to stop.
	And I can stop from going on.
	What do you want to stop?
	The language or the provocation?
	No.
	They're my kids.
	They're not provoking me.
	They're children.
	What they're doing is eliciting a completely irrational response from me that I want to stop.
	And this is where...
	I mean, I know the solution to it is a good therapist.
	And that's where I'm headed.
	And, you know, I've...
	No?
	All right.
	I'm happy to hear.
	No, no, no.
	Listen, I'm...
	You know, I'm a big fan of talk therapy, but the right non-estrogen-based, necessarily, for men's issues.
	Or maybe, you know, my therapist was a woman who was more macho than most of the men I've ever met, but in a good way.
	But...
	I mean, the first thing is just willpower, right?
	And that's where that's gotten me to not...
	You know what I mean?
	As soon as it comes out...
	Yeah, just don't do it, right?
	I mean, that's...
	You count to ten, you leave the room, you whatever, right?
	Right.
	But, I mean, it's...
	And again, I'm not trying to make excuses.
	I just want it to stop.
	But it's almost like the reaction of you get hit in the toe with a hammer, you know, and you react towards the object that's hitting you or, you know, you yell out an expletive.
	I mean, it feels like...
	And as soon as my thinking part of my brain intercepts that, I can de-escalate, talk myself down, apologize, you know...
	But I still look at the look on my kids' faces when this happens.
	And I can't do this to them anymore.
	You know?
	Because, I mean, obviously I've set it up.
	I mean, the history, I mean, I'm sure that, well, uh-oh, here comes another tirade.
	Because it's only been, you know, seven or eight months now that I completely pivoted away from behaving like that.
	Right.
	Right.
	Why do you think you were bullied?
	I was completely, completely vulnerable.
	I mean, I had parents that did horrible things.
	I mean, again, I don't want to draw time out, but my mother was a completely, let's be specific.
	My mother came from alcoholism.
	She continued to be an alcoholic, didn't seek any kind of treatment.
	My father and her moved completely out of any of their element to the middle of the country and proceeded to fight and fight and fight and verbally throwing things, things like that.
	Eventually, my father decided that he was going to take up with another woman.
	You know, they decided to drag the divorce out for about three years, going back and forth and back and forth, you know, and eventually when the divorce was complete, we lived for a year with my father, but then I made his life such hell because I was being manipulated by my mother at the age of nine to do this, to do these things, spy on my father, gather information.
	All that manner of stuff that he decided, I've had enough.
	I'm sending you back to live with the psycho bitch that I couldn't even live with.
	And so the three of us, I'm the oldest of three, we went back to live with my mother, and I instantly got the role of being the man of the house.
	I mean, I'm brilliant with my hands.
	I can fix anything, even at age 10.
	There was no need to call the furnace repairman.
	There was no need to call a plumber.
	I could just do it.
	And she leaned on me heavily for that stuff.
	You know, but it just...
	Wait, so...
	I mean, physically, but emotionally?
	Did you become like the substitute husband?
	Oh, absolutely.
	Absolutely.
	And, you know, again, I see similar comparisons to some of the stuff.
	My mother had no filter.
	I knew every single thing, you know, down to what was going on with her private bits in her life.
	All right?
	Everything.
	Everything.
	You know, and at the time, you don't know that this is wrong.
	You don't know that the kids at school...
	Oh, no.
	No, no, no.
	You know.
	Didn't you get kind of grossed at?
	No.
	You know, honestly, I can honestly say I felt so bad for my mother.
	I felt that she was such a victim.
	You know, I defended her.
	You know, I didn't...
	I just didn't...
	No, but when she was talking about her vagina, I mean, was that like, yeah, mom, tell me more?
	No, no, no, you're right.
	That was uncomfortable, yes.
	Okay, so you knew.
	I mean, you know it's gross.
	But you can't say anything because you get attacked, right?
	Yeah, absolutely.
	Yeah.
	And I carried this with me.
	I was an emotional mess at school.
	And the public school trash, they were horrible.
	All of them.
	No, I mean...
	You know, the men sense when there's no male protector, right?
	Oh yeah.
	Right, when there's no male protector around, it's sensed by the other men, the other boys so often, and maybe the girls too, and then all their frustrations get poured into that.
	But this substitute dad stuff, to me, it's a strong phrase, and I hope it doesn't sound too Hyperbolic, but it has always struck me as emotional incest.
	Yeah.
	To treat a child with the same kind of requirements and emotional openness or neediness or whatever you'd call it, that would only really be appropriate to an adult husband.
	And I find, in general...
	That women tend to be a little bit more prone to this than men.
	This sort of promotion of the eldest son to this little Lord Fauntleroy perfect husband role.
	It does sometimes happen if there's a single dad with an eldest girl.
	But it does seem to happen a hell of a lot with moms that you are like the safe male who she can pretend is intimate.
	It's sort of the equivalent at a much more sinister level of the women who were single in their 40s or 50s who dress their cats up in little kid costumes and call them my babies.
	I mean, it's such an obviously pathological redirect of maternal emotion.
	But the moms who do this to the boys...
	It's very common.
	I've found, again, certainly I may have a filter on my own experience having grown up in the milieu that I did.
	Some of it's horrifying.
	I'm sorry, go ahead.
	Some of it's a lot like you've said that they're resource holes.
	They don't care where these resources are coming from.
	They will suck any kind of resources they can have from anybody that gets within their gravitational pull.
	They don't They don't care that it's their kid.
	They don't care that this is harmful.
	They're just desperate.
	Mommy needs!
	Mommy needs!
	And just whatever they can grab, they'll just stuff into the crack.
	I mean, almost literally, right?
	Of whatever vacuum they feel within themselves.
	Yeah, my mom used to sit and corner me and tell me all the stories of her dating life and all the guys she was interested in and what they did and what they said and how this guy was too rough.
	And it's just like, oh my god, like...
	I mean, literally, if we'd had enough money for a Black and Dell deck and drill, there'd be like two drill bits coming out of either side of my ears.
	And, you know, why did she do that?
	You know, one of my main goals as a philosopher is to deny people what they have not earned.
	To deny people what they have not earned.
	You know, if you want to have a friend to talk about your sexcapades with, fine, go be a friend, go have a reciprocal relationship with some other fucked up adult or whatever, but at least have a voluntary relationship.
	Relationship with someone who could say no.
	But when you sort of hover over like this giant skinny sex bat, you hover over your children and suck the very will to live out of their own bone marrow because you can't find a fucking friend who can stand you for more than five minutes.
	Well, fuck you, you know, like you have not earned that.
	They're just your helpless kids who can't fight back and can't get out.
	And they're basically your biological prisoners, as all children are.
	My child is a biological prisoner as well.
	It's why I treat her as well as I can.
	And my whole goal as a philosopher in many ways can be summed up as I want to take away things from people that they did not earn.
	You know, like welfare, like the military-industrial complex, like government contracts, take away things from people that they did not earn.
	And the emotional incestuousness on children is a way of pretending you have a friendship with someone who can't get away.
	Well, you know, when you pretend to have sex with someone who can't get away, it's called rape.
	And I find this a very disturbing form of emotional rape on the part of parents, particularly others.
	Yeah.
	Oh, I agree.
	But, I mean, that's a little bit of my background, and it just – All right, so...
	The teasing never stopped.
	Yeah, let's move on to one.
	Look, the teasing is horrifying, and the teasing is a symptom.
	I mean, the fact...
	I mean, there's so many abused kids in the world that teasing is almost inevitable.
	But the victims are people without parental support.
	I'm sorry?
	Thanks to you, I see them everywhere.
	I walk around and all I see is broken people everywhere.
	Yeah, sorry about that.
	Well, no.
	You can't put the blinders back on.
	I don't know what to say.
	You know, it's atrocious.
	It's terrible.
	Right.
	I can't fix them, hopefully.
	No, you can't.
	You can't fix them.
	I mean, the metaphor of World War Z that you poison yourself and then they won't attack you, it's like, yeah, you may get away.
	But the problem is if you have an excess of self-attack, then you will draw abusers.
	So I guess there's some value in that metaphor, but it has limits.
	But as far as self-attack goes, I mean, come on, you knew you shouldn't have been yelling at your kids like that, right?
	I mean, it doesn't hurt to have someone outside, but it wasn't like you finished doing that and felt good about yourself, right?
	No, certainly.
	The differentiation for me was that it's not just what's part of childhood and that, you know, you slough off the bad things to move on.
	You know, I mean, I've read, you know, Dr.
	Mate's book and, you know, I understand.
	Stop, stop, stop, stop, stop.
	Don't give me a library tour.
	Don't give me a library tour.
	I'm talking about you just directly about your emotional experience.
	So what did you feel after you had been screaming at your kids?
	Awful.
	Awful.
	You know, out of control.
	Yeah, it's a sickening feeling to see that your children, like to have exercised so much unjust power over helpless, independent children, right?
	I mean, that's pretty horrendous, right?
	Yeah.
	And so the reason that you can have some legitimate self-criticism is your emotions were telling you that what you were doing was wrong, right?
	Okay.
	Don't say okay, like, if you disagree, disagree.
	But I'm not sure what the okay means there.
	No, I'm sorry.
	It's just a filler for mentally digesting.
	All right.
	Yeah, so if you had no idea, right, then you're innocent until you get greater knowledge.
	Like, if some doctor picks up a bottle marked aspirin, and inside there's those little things with the A on them, and then he gives it to someone, turns out to be arsenic?
	That doctor is obviously upset, but he's not guilty, right?
	Yeah.
	Right, but if a doctor grabs some tube and stuffs some bottle of pills and just throws them in the patient's mouth and they turn out to be something dangerous, then the doctor has been careless, right?
	The doctor had some reason to know ahead of time that what he was doing was negative, right?
	Yeah.
	And your emotions were telling you that this was negative, right?
	Now, You, of course, were raised to ignore your emotions, to suppress your emotions, to not say to your mom, listen mom, I do not want to hear about your feminine hygiene or plumbing or shit like that.
	I don't care what girl.
	I don't care if you've got like four anacondas and a pickup truck in there.
	I don't want to know about it, right?
	And...
	You weren't allowed to do that, so you can be self-critical for not listening to your emotions, but you can be sympathetic as to the reasons why you didn't listen to your emotions, and out of that you can commit to really listen to your emotions.
	Like, if you feel bad about something, it's very dangerous to say, well, I'm just self-attacking, right?
	Which is what the therapists are trying to do, which tells you that the therapists are managing their own self-criticisms rather than yours, right?
	I'm not a therapist, but I don't think a therapist should jump in and say, well, you're just self-attacking.
	A therapist should say, well, tell me more.
	He should try and understand.
	Maybe you have legitimate self-criticisms that are important.
	It doesn't mean that you say, I'm now an evil guy and I'm going to hit my head against the wall for the eternity, right?
	But if you don't listen to your emotions because of your history and bad things happen as a result, you can make that additional commitment to listen to your Emotions, right?
	To listen to your instincts, to not dismiss what your gut is telling you about what you're doing, right?
	And is that self-criticism?
	I think so, right?
	Yeah.
	It's a completely foreign concept.
	The idea of listening to my emotions and letting them guide me is...
	I'm not saying it's impossible.
	I have no idea.
	It's just a foreign language.
	Well, no, but see, here's the challenge, right?
	Oh, fuck, you're married now, right?
	Oh, I... No, no, you know, right?
	See, this is the challenge of relationships, is that your wife chose you based on who you were, and now you're going to change that, right?
	Yeah, that's becoming difficult.
	Yeah, I mean, it's tough to turn the plane into a helicopter while it's flying, right?
	Right.
	But, again, I have two kids that having, you know, a partner with me who is there, who is present, who is doing this is, you know, it's going to have to happen.
	A way has to be found.
	I mean, I don't...
	You will, and you will.
	Listen, I'm quite sure you sound like a guy who's really on the way and doing great work.
	Right?
	And...
	Yeah, I'm in that terrible middle phase that I think you described in programs.
	Don't worry, it ends when you're about 87, I think.
	No, I'm kidding.
	No, it is tough.
	And one of the things that I would suggest is you probably imbibed through family, through culture and so on, a sort of vision or version of masculinity that was about aggression.
	And that's a straw man version of masculinity.
	It's so easy to dismiss.
	Yeah.
	I mean, in a weird way, you probably thought you were being asserted by screaming at your children, right?
	Of course.
	Right?
	That kid stepped on my foot.
	Boom!
	Look, I'm standing up for my ground and asserting my personal space.
	That's why I need him in the head, right?
	Right.
	But there's a version, I think, which is sort of more true of masculinity, which is...
	Sort of a bluntness and a straightness and a take-no-shittingness, if that makes any sense.
	I mean, I could be assertive with my daughter when she's doing something that is unpleasant for me or is upsetting me.
	It doesn't, you know, because it's like screaming or complying are not two options that anybody wants to have.
	But we've kind of got this whole world set up.
	Where nobody can tell the truth, and therefore everybody has to manipulate.
	And I think it's a pretty feminine world in the West.
	Right?
	Nobody can tell the truth, therefore everybody has to manipulate.
	And this is why, you know, when I... Yeah, this is when I sort of say basic truths about femininity, as it stands right now, everyone gets upset.
	And when I talk about race issues that are pretty clear right now, like how it is horribly racist not to hate Barack Obama.
	I mean, he's such I mean, at least as much as George Bush, if not more.
	Right.
	Just based on the statistics.
	If you don't hate if you hated George Bush and you don't hate Barack Obama, then you're a fucking racist.
	I mean, you are just a southern fried watermelon chewing racist.
	You might as well have just this big ass sunburn on your back.
	You know, redneck actually came from the Irish slaves who couldn't handle the sun anyway.
	And so when I sort of point out basic facts, you know, like you don't you know, I grew up my whole life hearing you should get away from abusive people.
	I.e.
	women should leave abusive husbands.
	I heard my whole life get away from abusive people, right?
	But see, that only harmed men's interests because women were leaving men and getting welfare and alimony and child support and all that kind of stuff, right?
	Because they don't need men.
	They just need men in blue suits to go and get money from the men that they don't need so that they don't Have to suffer the consequences of their own bad decisions.
	So I was told, you know, my whole life, don't be in abusive relationships.
	You should leave abusive relationships.
	Have nothing to do with abusive people, right?
	And then I say, oh, you know what?
	If you don't like your parents, you don't have to see them because they're abusive people.
	If they're abusive people, right?
	And then suddenly, you're shitstorm pregnant.
	Because now this is harming the interests of women, right?
	Because moms are the primary caregivers, moms choose...
	When I say moms choose the husband, right?
	My body, my choice!
	When it comes about, you know, sucking out a human life from your innards, suddenly it's about your body, your choice, like there's no fucking baby there that could live.
	And...
	But then when it comes to...
	Actually, letting other people make choices in a woman's life, like maybe the son was the victim of emotional incest and doesn't want to have anything to do with his mom anymore.
	Well, then it's suddenly, it's not his body, his choice.
	Suddenly, it's just bad, right?
	And so you just, there's a version of masculinity which is like, you know, maybe it's because we don't live as long.
	I don't know.
	But it's like, I don't have time to massage this message into just the right form for other people to consume so that they never get upset about anything.
	I mean, if I lived forever, I wouldn't have enough time to do that.
	You know, I speak the facts as directly and as clearly as I can, as entertainingly as I can.
	And then people are like, well, Steph, you know, if you changed it a little bit this way and you massaged it a little bit this way and you didn't talk about this so much, it's like, fuck no!
	Fuck no!
	I don't have time!
	No, I mean, deal with the fucking truth or go tune into some reality show where people aren't eating as much pizza anymore.
	Fine.
	If you don't...
	I mean, I don't...
	How do you...
	Two and two make four.
	I can't shape the two and two into little sausages and put roses on the four and make the equal sign smell like fucking lilacs.
	Two and two make four.
	I don't have to change everything that I'm doing because there are hypersensitive hyacinth-like hibiscus plants out there who can't fucking...
	Handle a 0.1 degree in temperature change in a slight breeze up their fucking pedal noses.
	Anyway.
	Truth is the truth.
	And there's this bluntness.
	And I, you know, I try not to be abusive.
	Sometimes we get angry, but it's like there's just a bluntness that men can sort of be direct about, you know?
	Like, women, you all need to cooperate to raise the kids and raise the plants.
	Fine, then you can manipulate and bullshit and never have any direct confrontations and blah-de-blah-de-blah, right?
	You and I got to go and bring down a woolly mammoth.
	Sorry, you have the spear or you don't.
	You hit the fucking thing or you didn't.
	It's dead or it's eating us.
	Okay, it's not a man if he wouldn't eat us.
	But there's kind of like a binary.
	Like, I don't have time.
	We're at war with a whole bunch of other men.
	I don't have time to figure out if I've handed the fucking spear to you in the right way that doesn't make you feel underprivileged.
	Just throw it into the fucker's eyeball and let's go home.
	And unfortunately, I find that I fall back into the trap of using manipulation to get what I want when I find my needs aren't met.
	It's like the only skill I ever used.
	And being aware of it, it's gotten better.
	But that was a primary tool in my toolbox for a long time to get my needs met.
	The idea of just asking for it and having it met.
	Was that dealing with women or dealing with men that gave you that?
	Oh, no.
	It was dealing with women.
	There's no...
	No, I didn't.
	No, dealing with men was direct, and those that couldn't handle it, there were issues there.
	But, you know, I had no problem being direct with men.
	It's with women that it's been a problem.
	Yeah.
	No, I mean, because if you try to, like, if you're not direct with a man, he assumes that you're screwing with him somehow, in some negative way.
	Yeah.
	Right?
	Like, just, you know, if I go to a hardware store and say, I need some kind of tool, I want you to guess what it is.
	Right?
	They'd be like, what, are you trying to distract me so someone can shoplift?
	Like, tell me what fucking tool you want, or at least draw a picture or describe it, right?
	Right.
	You know, whereas we say, I need a hammer.
	Oh, no, no, that's too blunt.
	You have to, you know, work people up to it.
	You have to think about their feelings.
	You have to have a considerate.
	No, God, God, God Almighty, God Almighty, can we just be direct with each other?
	Because this passive aggression of, deliver me the message in a way that doesn't offend me, offends me.
	That offends me.
	Because it says, I must shape myself for the insecurities of other people.
	I have to tread so carefully around the world because there are all these people who are so insecure that any bluntness makes them hysterical.
	Well, you know, I was raised to treat women as equals.
	Now, I know a lot of people are shocked when I do treat women as equals.
	But I try to treat women as equals, which means I'm not going to shape my messages because there are hysterical women around, or hysterical men for that matter.
	So, yeah, it's just, whereas somehow if you're direct with a woman, she just finds it overbearing or something and it's like, we'll find your bearings and get your shit together, right?
	I mean, unless you want to admit that we have to treat women totally differently than men.
	Fine, okay, then make that case.
	Then stop looking for equality.
	Because you're costing me time by having to have me massage this goddamn message and tell you that taxation is theft with a nice pretty bow on it, some butterflies and little hearts over the eyes.
	Right?
	So it's more expensive to communicate with women because you have to spend so much fucking time massaging it into a way that doesn't startle their Victorian delicate smelling salt sensibilities.
	So okay, then it's going to be, I'm going to want to talk to men more than women, blah, blah, blah, blah, right?
	But women are like, no, no, no, we're the same.
	We're all equal.
	It's okay, then I'm going to be as blunt with you as I am with men.
	No, no, no, don't do that!
	Be diplomatic!
	Massage!
	Change!
	Think of my sensitivities!
	I could faint!
	Okay, then you want me to spend, like, then you're different from men.
	No, no, we're the same!
	It's just nonsense.
	Yeah.
	Alright, sorry, we've got to move on.
	I hope that helps.
	Just, you know, real brief, Cole's notes, right?
	Most people aren't criticizing you Your wife can't criticize you if she let you get away with yelling at your kids because it means she's got so much work to do on herself that criticizing you is pretty premature.
	And there are things that you can be legitimately unhappy about that you did that were mistakes.
	I have them, you have them, everyone has them.
	And you own them because if you don't own them, you repeat them, right?
	So I hope that helps.
	Thank you so much.
	Thank you for the conversation.
	Have a good night.
	Alright, up next, the first caller, Joe, wanted to come in and say something real quick.
	Joe, are you there?
	I am here.
	Can you hear me?
	Yes, go ahead, Joe.
	I had a little bit of time to actually write this a little bit.
	I don't want it to sound like I've rehearsed it, but I do want to apologize for my behavior on the phone because I think you ultimately got to the point where your advice was right on the money.
	You were...
	I recorded it on my end and everything you said I believe is right but I think that the question I asked was wrong and I think that I probably should have asked you is if I was becoming a dick for trying to hold my family together while holding on to such resentment and I feel like I have my answer.
	I think that that question was asked and answered, wasn't it?
	I think you did it in a very efficient way.
	Yeah, I know and All the calls are useful.
	I hope you know that.
	Your call was extremely useful.
	And that's why I let it go on, right?
	Or that's why I continued with it, right?
	Your call was incredibly useful and helpful to me, to other people.
	And it annoyed Mike.
	And, you know, so that's obviously...
	Sometimes, you know, you get words with one stone and that obviously is great.
	But no, it was a very helpful call and a very important and powerful call.
	Your, you know, honest resistance was very...
	I don't mean that in any snarky way.
	Genuine is very important, but go ahead.
	I just feel like I'm on the track to repeat my past.
	I'm on the track to become my father if I hold on to this resentment.
	I don't want to do that, so I just need to do the right thing, which is exactly what you told me at the end of the call.
	I don't want to add you to a pile of people I resent and come away with a Bad experience because I feel like it was important to me and I feel like I see something that I didn't even know what to call.
	I didn't recognize that in myself and I feel like I see it.
	Right.
	If you're around people who are treating you badly or who are not up to the values that you hold, you're going to Continue to feel resentment.
	And it's important to, I think, act on that resentment.
	And that means either find a way to have their behavior improve or find a way to not be as exposed to their behavior, if that makes any sense.
	Yeah, it makes total sense.
	And if I wasn't able to say this to you, I feel like I would resent you in a way that would just make my life worse.
	Right?
	Well, you resented me at the end of the call.
	You resented me a lot during the call, too, right?
	Oh, I do.
	I do.
	I do.
	I recognize...
	And I'm so sorry for that because...
	Yeah, I mean, like you said, I was on a train track.
	I listened back and you said I was on a train track, you know?
	And I was.
	And I recognize it.
	And I'm sorry that I didn't listen to your questions and your words because that's why...
	Right.
	Well, I mean, you have an enormous challenge in conversing with me as a gay man, too, which is that I'm so fucking sexy.
	That it is almost impossible to think straight because all you're doing is thinking about getting into my pants, right?
	So I, you know, I sympathize.
	I feel that every morning when I'm shaving and I lovingly tongue kiss myself in the mirror.
	So I, you know.
	You have all your t-shirts too.
	Yeah, I get it.
	No, and you probably wish that they were mine so you could sniff them and put them under your pillow.
	No, I'm kidding.
	Yes.
	No, it's a great apology.
	I think it's very heartfelt.
	I was not satisfied with the way the conversation ended, but I didn't know what else to do.
	So, I mean, again, that could be a failing on my part, but I just wasn't sure what else to do.
	But I'm very glad that you were able to...
	I asked the wrong question.
	I asked the wrong question.
	That was totally my fault, and I wasn't even prepared to even learn.
	What I had just learned.
	And so I feel like...
	But you learned it, you know?
	I mean, what a great ending to the call that you got something of real value out of it.
	And I really do appreciate you coming back and saying that.
	And I hope you'll let us know how it goes with your family.
	Yes.
	Thank you so much.
	All right.
	Thanks, man.
	Appreciate it.
	Best of luck.
	Yeah.
	Thanks, Joe.
	All right.
	Up next is Bob and Rose.
	Wait, wait.
	Mike?
	Mike?
	Yes.
	How are you feeling?
	As soon as the second caller...
	I felt during the call pretty irritated, to put it mildly.
	Hang on.
	Let me just go back to your Skype messages here.
	Hang on.
	I don't know what that symbol is, but I think it's some and some small devil on my computer, so...
	You were a little annoyed.
	Yeah, it comes from...
	I guess this is worth saying and giving you this feedback too, Joe.
	It's...
	Right now we have a waiting list of people out to July that want to come on the show.
	So I'm really sensitive as to where time is attributed and the people that are waiting.
	There's someone on standby right now that I talked to earlier today that has something really important to him.
	And he's really emotionally together.
	And it really was fantastic just to have a short conversation.
	And I really would like to get to his call.
	And there's people that show up and they really, during the call, they want to work and they've waited for a month and they really want to talk about something that's a big challenge and a big problem or something that they just can't wrap their head around.
	And when I call...
	Goes like the first call didn't.
	I'm so glad you got something out of it, Joe, and you came back on.
	But when a call goes like that, and I know that there's other people waiting on the line, and people have waited for an extremely long time to come on.
	And I look forward to these calls every single week.
	Some of my favorite parts of the week are the call-in shows, and I find a call to be incredibly infuriating.
	And I'm sitting through the second call on the show because I'm not even really to I'm not able to pay attention because I'm angry from the first call.
	The first call wasn't very pleasant in the moment.
	I experienced it incredibly negatively, coming on and insulting the host and brushing through some absolutely horrible stuff you were describing with your childhood.
	And I had a really difficult time connecting to any level of empathy as you're describing this.
	I cannot fathom worse stuff.
	Being described.
	One after another, things were described near death, experienced threats of divorce, suicidality, your mother wishing that you would die of AIDS, saying you were committed to an asylum, talking about being molested, your parents being near alcoholics, being hit as a kid, punched in the face by your father, your sister marrying a rapist.
	I started jotting it down because it was listening to that without any emotionality on your end behind it was incredibly jarring.
	And You know, I consider myself a pretty empathetic person and I was having a very difficult time connecting to any level of empathy for you and what you experienced the way you were presenting it.
	And, you know, I just want to give you that feedback is when you run through stuff and you're not emotionally connected to it and you describe really difficult things that happened.
	Just horrendous, horrendous stuff.
	That happened and you're not emotionally connected to it.
	When you share that with other people, if they have empathy, it's going to lead to them experiencing what you're not feeling.
	All the emotions that you weren't feeling about that stuff in the call, I was feeling.
	I'm sure Steph was feeling.
	People that were listening live on the stream are feeling.
	And it's really an aggressive thing in a way to impact people with that kind of dissociation.
	And I just want to provide that feedback because that's something you have to be incredibly aware of moving forward.
	Otherwise, people that are empathetic They're not going to want to be near you because they're going to experience everything that you're not feeling.
	And, you know, you don't strike me as a guy who wants empathetic people to go in the other direction.
	So I just wanted to share that.
	And thanks, Steph, for prodding that out of me.
	But, yeah, I didn't have a first positive experience of the call.
	And I'm so glad you came back and you sent me an email while the second call was going on to describe...
	What you thought about it.
	And I really appreciate that.
	And thanks again for coming back and apologizing and describing your experience.
	It's definitely a nice way to wrap it up.
	Amen to that.
	All right.
	Who do you have next?
	Alright, up next is Bob and Rose.
	And Bob and Rose rode in and...
	Wait, we don't normally do first name and last name?
	Bob and Rose.
	Bob is the husband, Rose is the wife.
	Bob wrote in and said, my wife is eight months pregnant.
	Having spent the last two years doing rigorous research and working on myself and my marriage, I feel super ready to take on this whole parenting thing I keep hearing about.
	But I'm concerned about my ability to follow through.
	I'd like to know if there were situations as a parent that really tested your resolve and if there's any aspects of parenting that no amount of research had prepared you for.
	Hmm.
	Thank you.
	Yeah, sorry to lead off with such an easy question.
	No, that's great.
	No, I can think of one today.
	No, I can think of one today.
	It's not every day.
	You know, I didn't realize how vulnerable I was going to be to my own child.
	And I think that very vulnerability is at the root of a lot of parent-child conflicts, both healthy conflicts and unhealthy conflicts.
	And I'll give you a very brief sort of synopsis of what happened.
	So, you know, we had this vacation and we were driving home and she wanted to watch Frozen.
	And so she did.
	She's in the back seat.
	And then we started chatting and I was telling her some of my thoughts about the movie and asking her questions or whatever, right?
	And she seemed to be really enjoying the conversation and...
	We were doing something like, I couldn't remember the name of the yellow-haired guy who's got the reindeer as a friend.
	I thought his name was Sven, but she said it wasn't, and so we couldn't.
	We said, okay, so we'll call him.
	She said Sven was the name of the reindeer.
	And I said, okay, we'll call Sven, who I thought was Sven, we'll call him Sven's friend.
	And, you know, seriously, try saying that three times fast.
	Sven's friend, Sven's friend.
	It's tough, right?
	So anyway, we're having a lot of fun in the conversation and talking about how nobody has any...
	The women don't have any jobs.
	And about how Anna, who's the youngest, grows up basically isolated in a castle that she can actually walk out of and leave at any time and go to a town where everyone's going to be nice to her because she's the princess.
	And then she's just an expert at everything and how bad it is that you don't see...
	Women learning how to become good at stuff, they're just, because of girl power, they're just good at everything and that's considered to be empowering when it's incredibly disempowering.
	Anyway, so we were chatting about it and we were laughing and making jokes and all that.
	And then at one point, you know, I had to stop and get gas and I came back in and said, do you want to keep chatting about this?
	Are you enjoying it?
	And she said, I'm not enjoying it too much.
	And I was like, ooh.
	I said, well, would you rather watch the movie or would you rather chat about it?
	She's like, I think I'd like to watch the movie.
	And it was like, Oh, you know, punch to the heart, you know, because we just had this.
	And then so she was quiet.
	She said, are you OK? I said, well, actually, I'm kind of upset.
	That sort of makes me feel sad that I thought we were having a good chat and you weren't really enjoying it as much.
	And we chatted about it for a bit.
	I wasn't sure.
	Sometimes she just makes a mistake because she's five and she uses the wrong words.
	And she says, I'm not enjoying it, which means that she is.
	And she said, well, we can keep talking about it if you want to.
	Like if it's upsetting you that we're not talking about it, we can keep talking about it.
	And I said, well, I don't want to talk about it just because I'm upset.
	That's not right.
	And we talked about it for a little longer.
	I think I kind of got the impression that she meant to say that she was enjoying it and she got kind of confused because then we did continue to talk about it and we had really great chats on the way back.
	But I'm surprised at the degree of vulnerability that I have towards my daughter and how much I want to look good in her eyes.
	Like, if we're doing some stupid physical thing, like we're at some...
	You know, we were at this place where you can go with this rope ladder over the swimming pool with these big lily pads that float and stuff.
	And she learned how to do it really well.
	And I was like...
	She's like, Daddy, you do it.
	And I'm like, I really want to do a great job, you know, because I want to be the coolest guy for her.
	And...
	Suddenly became really important.
	And, you know, because I'm big and it's designed for kids, I didn't do a great job.
	I kind of struggled to cross, but I sort of did okay.
	And so we were sort of joking about that afterwards, that she was sort of laughing because I was, you know, swaying and all that kind of stuff.
	Relying on brute strength rather than any delicacy whatsoever or anything.
	Flexibility.
	And so it was really, it remains a surprise to me, the degree of vulnerability that I feel towards my daughter's good opinion of me or good impression of me or good thoughts about me.
	That's something that I've not really heard a lot of parents talk about.
	In fact, I don't think I've ever read or heard about it.
	But I think you will find, particularly as your kids get older, that if you're really in touch with yourself and in touch with them, There's a lot of vulnerability in being a parent.
	Like, there's vulnerability that everyone talks about, like that children before the age of five are just death magnets and you're just trying to basically get them through the conveyor belt of machetes called early childhood and have them come out in one piece.
	And the vulnerability of you don't want anyone to hurt your children, and that's all true.
	I mean, you know, they say that being a parent is having a piece of your heart ripped out and walk around for the rest of your life.
	And there's truth in that too.
	But the one thing that remains a surprise to me is the degree of vulnerability that I have If she doesn't want to chat or if she wants to do something else or whatever it's not like she's got a chat with me all day or anything like that but So and it's tough because I don't want her to change her behavior because I'm upset I don't want to manipulate her because I'm upset but I also don't want to hide that I'm upset because that's genuinely sort of how I'm feeling but I don't want it to be punitive and I don't want it to change her behavior so that vulnerability
	is is Just because, you know, to ask the question, that's sort of what popped into my mind based on what happened today.
	Does it sort of make sense?
	I don't know.
	Do you agree or whatever?
	Do you sort of make sense?
	Do you understand what I'm saying?
	Yeah, you're right.
	I haven't heard much about that kind of vulnerability, but it kind of makes sense to me a lot, like, you know, because we pour so much of ourselves.
	Well, I... I presume we pour so much of ourselves into our children, and they're in a way kind of the most purest litmus test for who we are, right?
	Anyone else, you know, they treat you poorly, it's like, well, they have the entire past they're dragging around with them.
	Your child is just dragging you around with them.
	So in that way, it's kind of a much more of a pure reflection of yourself.
	Does that make sense?
	Yeah, and how many times have you been at a dinner party and you're telling a story and you say, are you guys interested in what I'm saying?
	And people say, no, not really.
	Yeah, that's true.
	They're not going to say that.
	Hey, man, don't be blunt.
	Be polite.
	Be diplomatic.
	Massage it in a way that makes me feel better now.
	I mean, so I wanted to be really honest.
	I said, I'm glad you told me.
	I want you to be honest.
	Is there anything you'd like to talk about?
	And all that, right?
	Because I don't want to be the guy who she tunes out, if that makes sense.
	Yeah, absolutely.
	Actually, I'd like to ask a specific, I know that the question I sent to Michael is pretty broad, but since then, I've been mulling over this one question.
	It's true, you know, I've often thought that Michael is a pretty broad, but anyway, go on.
	Gorgeous.
	Why thank you!
	Yeah, it's a question about money.
	That's not a sensitive topic.
	And specifically, I was thinking to myself, well, my wife and I, we're pretty frugal people.
	We're both students, and so we live on next to nothing.
	But we are pretty comfortable because we don't spend much.
	A child is not going to know that kind of restraint.
	They're not going to understand it, I presume.
	And let's say we're strolling through a store, and we're going to have a daughter.
	And she points to this...
	Big ass Barbie castle that costs $150 and says, hey, mommy, daddy, will you buy me that?
	And I was thinking to myself, what would I say?
	Well, normally I would think, well, I'm just saying, well, no, we can't afford that.
	Then I realized, well, that's a lie.
	Yeah, it is.
	I can pay for it.
	I can afford it.
	And I can tell her, well, no, we don't spend money on stuff like that.
	And then she can point, well, what about the $200 phone you just bought for yourself?
	Sorry, but that's a tautology.
	And that's not a good argument.
	It's a tautology saying we don't spend money on stuff like that.
	But if you decided to, then you would.
	That's not an argument, right?
	Yeah, exactly.
	So I was thinking, well, I can't say we can't afford it because we can.
	And I'd find a way to pay for it even though we don't have a lot of money.
	And so how do I explain to her that she's probably not going to get $150.
	Well, actually, I don't even know that.
	So I'm completely lost with this one, I'll be honest.
	Yeah.
	No, and it's tough.
	There's lots of studies that have shown that really wealthy parents who have, like, Lamborghinis in the driveway don't have the I can't afford it excuse.
	And they have a great deal of difficulty with their kids about that.
	Because the kids know that it's bullshit that they can't afford it, right?
	Sorry, I know your child is not yet born, but I don't mean to swear in front of her or him.
	But...
	But it is tough, you know.
	I can't say to my daughter, you know, if she wants something in the store that's not, you know, she's a big fan of collecting stuffed cats.
	And, you know, they're like eight bucks each or whatever.
	And so if she wants a stuffed cat, I can't say we can't afford it, right?
	Because, you know, we're not living in a van down by the river on a steady diet of government cheese, right?
	So I can't say that to her.
	I can't say to her you don't really need it because she really feels like she does need it at the moment.
	I can say I don't want to buy it for you, but that doesn't give her any knowledge other than about my emotions.
	It doesn't give her any perspective that's of value to her.
	And so it's a tough question.
	It's a tough question.
	I mean, I can tell you the way that I've tried to deal with it, and I think it's been fairly successful.
	So first, I bought her a bunch of stuff that was cheap.
	You know, she wanted it, right?
	And I kept track of it.
	Because you'll notice that there's like this tide comes in of interest, tide goes out, and just stuff goes elsewhere in the place, or it goes into cupboards, it goes into the basement or whatever, right?
	And when she says she wants something, then I say, do you remember those shells that you really wanted, right?
	And she says, well, yeah.
	I said, where are they?
	And she says, I don't know.
	I said, right!
	Like, we went once to get a keys made from a hardware store, and there was, like, one of these rainbow keys, and she really wanted it.
	I think she was three at the time.
	And anyway, the guy, I didn't want to buy it for her, but the guy gave it to her because she was, you know, Pretty people get away with everything.
	And, right, so, and I knew that she really, she liked this key, and within three days, it was gone, right?
	It just, it went, tide had gone out somewhere in the house, right?
	It was gone.
	And I, you know, that, to me, was great.
	I actually should have bought it for her, because it was a great example.
	So the next thing she wanted, I'd say, do you remember that rainbow key that you really wanted?
	She said, yes.
	I said, where is it?
	And she didn't know, right?
	I said, do you understand why I don't want to buy you something else?
	Because we keep buying you stuff and you're interested in it for a day or two and then it's just kind of around the place.
	Right?
	So helping her to understand that She's going to lose interest, right?
	And that's trying to stretch her sense of perspective, right?
	Kids in the moment, and this happens to adults as well, right?
	Like, I just saw an ad for a Surface 3.
	I have a Surface 2.
	And I'm like, Surface 3?
	I should really get a Surface 3.
	I should sell my Surface 2.
	And I'm like, what?
	I don't even know what features it has, except it has one more number.
	Right?
	And that's, it's bigger.
	It's one better.
	In fact, it's three better than the first one, and it has to be at least a third better than the second one because it's bigger.
	So we're all like that to some degree, right?
	I mean, there would be no obesity in the world if that wasn't a basic human impulse.
	Neither would there be any technology.
	But anyway, so get her stuff.
	I'm just going to assume it's a girl because I don't want to switch genders when I'm talking about my daughter.
	So get her stuff, but then track it.
	And when she's got language, this started around two and a half, three.
	Before that, it's okay.
	She won't mind that much.
	But get herself and keep track of it and help her to understand that what seems really important to her now will be something she doesn't even know where it is next week.
	And you have to give her empirical examples of that, right?
	Build your case.
	Like, being a good parent is like being an expert prosecutor.
	You know, you have to have the smoking gun, you have to have the eyewitnesses, you have to have the video footage, and eventually it's just like, okay, I'm going to cop a plea because the evidence is overwhelming, right?
	So really help her to track her future self and her future interest in something.
	And that will help a lot because what you don't want, I was just talking about this with some other parents the other day, what you don't want is every time you go out for like a third of your time to be fighting over stuff she wants, right?
	Yeah.
	Now also figure out the stuff that she wants that she's going to keep using because I mean to her credit there's some stuff my daughter wanted when she's two which she still uses now.
	Which is great.
	And so get more of those things.
	You won't mind buying stuff for her if she keeps using it.
	What burns in the gut of every parent is the stuff that you buy because she's desperate for it, which she doesn't care about in two or three days, right?
	And doesn't even know where it is next week.
	That burns!
	Because then you just feel like an idiot.
	If she's still using something a year from now, then it was a good purchase, right?
	I mean, I'm not saying $150 worth of good purchases or whatever.
	So, help her, like, put little GPSs on her, you know, parental GPSs on her stuff and help her to understand that her feelings now are not going to be her feelings next week.
	When you can start, then she can start to manage stuff, right?
	If that makes any sense.
	Yeah, I wonder if it's also, it might be useful to, like, make a deal with her then if she wants something like this.
	Like, well, how about this?
	Like, if in a week we discuss it together, it seems like you still want it, you've wanted it for the entire week, then it might be a worthwhile purchase.
	No, I think, I've never tried that because I think that's just training her to whine longer.
	Yeah.
	Because then it's like, okay, if I keep bucking my parents for a week, I get it.
	I can do that.
	I'm three.
	This is my entire world, right?
	You can try it.
	You may be completely right.
	I don't have the courage for that myself.
	That's too scary.
	I'm losing consistency and delayed gratification.
	Yeah.
	Yeah, but basically you're teaching her that if she kind of holds it and keeps, in a sense, bugging you about it, then she can get it.
	Maybe, again, I can see the case for it, and let me know if you try it and if it works, but I personally would not.
	Now, another thing that we've done is ask three times.
	That's sort of the rule.
	You can ask for something three times, but then you have to stop asking.
	Because it's annoying as hell.
	And if the kid doubts it, then all you have to do is mirror their own behavior back to them.
	So I'll say to Isabella, when I was trying to teach her this, Isabella, I want to go to a computer store.
	Can we?
	No.
	Like two minutes later, Isabella, I really want to go to a computer store.
	Can we go?
	No.
	90 seconds later, Isabella, I really, really, really want to go to a computer store.
	And she says, Dad, I said no.
	Why do you keep asking?
	Aha!
	Right?
	Because once she experiences herself through you, then she'll get that what she's doing is annoying.
	Because she's just fixated on getting some stuff.
	She's not thinking about how she's landing for other people on a repetitive basis, right?
	Right.
	And again, I mean, hey, if she said yes to go to a computer store, I can always go to a computer store because, you know, toys are fun.
	But if you can mirror her own behavior back to her and get her to understand that and to say, look, if I've asked three times, I would say this.
	So I asked to go to the computer store three times.
	What do you think is going to happen if I ask for four times?
	She says, well, I'm not going to change my mind.
	I don't want to go to a computer store, right?
	And I said, so is it going to do me any good to ask four times, right?
	And she's going to say no.
	I said, okay, so can we have a rule that I can only ask you to do something three times, right?
	Now, once she says yes, boom!
	Once you've got a rule, you've got a rule.
	This is UPB 101, babies.
	Once you've got a rule, she cannot logically resist the extension of that rule, right?
	She'll try, but you have to just be persistent and say, look...
	Can't have a rule for me, but this doesn't apply to you, right?
	A rule is a rule.
	I've been thinking about that too.
	I think it's great to come up with rules together.
	You both agree on them.
	But at the same time, as an adult, especially when they're in the earlier ages, You're going to be able to understand the implications of these rules, the long-term implications of them, far better than they will.
	And in a way...
	Oh, no, no, no, no, no.
	Sorry to interrupt, but that's not what I was talking about.
	She was annoyed at me continuing to ask to go to the computer store.
	This is not...
	It was annoying for her.
	Like, Dad, I already said no three times, right?
	And then I say, hey, do you remember this morning when you wanted that stuffed kitty and you asked me like ten times?
	Do you see why it's annoying?
	Yeah, right?
	If she experiences annoyance at me continuing to ask to go to a computer store, then she understands what I feel when she keeps asking for a toy.
	That's true.
	Does that make sense?
	This is not long-term gratification and deferral.
	This is just basic empathy.
	To understand that if it's annoying when I do it to her, it's annoying when she does it to me.
	This is just empathy 101, right?
	No, sorry.
	Empathy 101 is just being, modeling the empathy towards the child.
	But she needs to, because, you know, when the baby is born, it's all about the baby, right?
	The baby doesn't care about your needs.
	Oh, you need sleep?
	Too bad.
	I'm hungry, right?
	Get up.
	Give me some boob, right?
	Wait.
	It's either your husband or it's your baby.
	It's probably going to be your baby.
	You know, it depends.
	So the baby learns nothing about empathy for the parents, right?
	And they shouldn't because it's all about you just take care of the baby's needs and whatever the baby needs you try to provide, right?
	And so getting the child, and so they're all monstrous narcissists at the beginning, right?
	Completely self-absorbed.
	They don't care about your needs.
	They don't care about anything like that, right?
	And it's fine.
	It's exactly how they should be, right?
	But then you have to kind of realign them over time and get them to think about the needs of other people.
	And so what I'm talking about, so the empathy 101 is just showing empathy towards the infant.
	But I think that a lot of heavy self-involvement or narcissistic behavior comes out of the natural, you put your own needs aside and focus on the needs of the baby.
	But then, when it comes time to negotiate and to have the toddler or the child recognize that parents have needs as well, A lot of parents don't negotiate that too well, and it becomes win-lose.
	Like, you win or I win.
	And damn it, I've had enough losing when you were a baby, so now it's your turn to lose, and I'm going to get what I want.
	And yes, we'll go to a play center, but I'm going to sit on my phone.
	Right?
	So...
	So, I'm not talking sort of really long-term abstract stuff.
	It's just that if she gets that it's annoying for me to keep asking her for something, then she will also understand...
	So the next time after we did this, the next time she asked for something, it was like a toy snake, and she asked me three times in a row, right?
	And I said, Izzy, do you remember when I kept asking you to go to the computer store?
	What did you feel?
	She said, annoyed.
	I said, so do you understand what I'm feeling?
	Annoyed, right?
	Did you want me to keep asking?
	If we could go to the computer source, she said, no, I wanted you to stop because I already told you I didn't want to go.
	And I said, yes, and I'm not getting you the toy snake.
	I've told you why.
	And I would like you to stop asking for the same reason.
	And she can't fight that.
	Like, I'm telling you, she won't.
	She won't fight that because children are UPB machines.
	The same way they learn that a chair is a chair is a chair, they learn that a rule is a rule is a rule.
	You just have to be consistent and model back to them what they're experiencing from you.
	Like, you can't do that with a baby, right?
	A baby wakes you up at 3 o'clock in the morning, you can't poke it awake at 5 o'clock in the morning and say, how do you like it, right?
	How do you like being woken up?
	Go make me a sandwich, damn it!
	I pooped myself!
	Do something.
	That's not going to work.
	I sped up a little.
	It's not going to work very well.
	But you can do it when they get older.
	And it's not in a mean or punitive way at all.
	I really did want to go to the computer store, right?
	But...
	Helping the child to understand what you experience by modeling the child's behavior to the child, and not in a manipulative, punitive way, I think is really, really helpful.
	So she agreed to the ask three times rule, right?
	Like if I want to do something she doesn't want to do, I only get to ask three times.
	We agreed that that was a rule, and then it became a rule for her.
	And that's been a huge solution.
	So that's the second thing.
	The last thing, and there's lots more strategies I could put forward.
	The last thing that I would say is a kid doesn't really understand what $150 is.
	Yeah.
	Right?
	I mean, you might as well say, you know, a Googleplex pieces of stardust, right?
	It doesn't really mean anything, right?
	Yeah.
	But at some point, the child is going to understand a unit of value, right?
	So for my daughter, it was toy kitties, right?
	She understood.
	She didn't understand eight bucks, but she understood a toy kitty, right?
	So if she wanted something that was $24, I'd say, that's three toy kitties.
	She's like, ooh, that's a lot, right?
	And so if it's like 150 bucks, right?
	Then that's a lot of toy kitties, right?
	Or whatever the, you know, it could be candy bars, you know, yogurt cups, anything, right?
	So to give them a sense of scale means not using money but using stuff that they understand as having some kind of value, if that makes sense.
	Yeah, absolutely.
	That they can really understand it.
	And now then what they'll say is, you know, okay, well, I don't want this, I want three kitties.
	It's like, no, no, no, that's not the point of what we're saying, right?
	And of course, I mean, you want them to do that.
	You want them to negotiate for what they want.
	It's really one of the most important skills that you'll teach them as a child, but getting them to understand that stuff really does have value.
	And also, I don't know when your son or daughter will be capable of this.
	I probably could have started a little bit earlier.
	But helping my daughter to understand That it is really important for me to say no to her, right?
	And I say, look, I have to say no to myself a lot too.
	You know, I have a sweet tooth.
	I have to say no to sugar a lot because I like sugar a lot.
	I have to say no to it a lot.
	I don't want to get fat.
	I don't want to get diabetes.
	And I have to say no to myself about a lot.
	Like sometimes I want to stay up late.
	I have to say no, no, no, no.
	I'm taking Izzy and like you wake up in the morning.
	I need to be rested for you to spend the day together, right?
	So I need to say no to myself about staying up late and I need to go to bed, right?
	And so if I said yes to you about everything, you would never learn how to say no to yourself.
	And saying no to yourself is a really important part of growing up.
	And I say to her, I said, look, I could go out and I could buy a hundred candy bars and eat them if I wanted.
	And when I was a kid, I thought about doing just that because I always wanted more candy.
	And I thought, you know, when I get big, I'm going to take my whole paycheck, I'm going to buy the whole candy store, and I'm just going to eat it all, right?
	And now that I'm bigger, I'm like, no, I can't do that.
	I eat cavities and fat and diabetes, shit like that, right?
	So helping to...
	Helping to understand why you're saying no.
	And I said also, I need to prepare you for life.
	My daughter doesn't really get...
	She's still going to marry me when she gets bigger, right?
	She doesn't really get that she's going to move out and go somewhere.
	And that's a scary thought for her at the age of five, right?
	But...
	I'm going to say, like I say, I said, look, the majority of people who listen to my show and I say, please donate at FDRURL.com forward slash donate.
	I said the majority, the vast majority of them say no to me.
	Like 97, 98% of people say no to donations, right?
	Lots of people say no.
	My dentist says, you know, no sugar, right?
	Or whatever, right?
	And so lots of people say no to me, and that's natural.
	That's part of life.
	You know, mommy dated people, I dated people, and we didn't get married to them.
	We met each other when we got married.
	We said yes to each other for marriage, but lots of people said no beforehand.
	And so learning how to deal with no is really important for you, and you need to learn how to do that to yourself.
	Not yet, you're still five, and you need to start to do it a little bit.
	But...
	Helping her to understand that it is actually good parenting to put restrictions on stuff, right?
	And showing that by you saying, you know, the waiter comes over and says, do you want dessert?
	You say no, because, you know, it's too much sugar.
	And you model that kind of behavior of saying no, and then they sort of understand it.
	So I probably could have started about six months ago.
	I was a little behind the ball on that one.
	But helping her to understand that no is not mean.
	It's not because I don't want you to have fun.
	It's actually because I want you to grow up to be somebody who's got some...
	Control and some restraint and can say no to things that are not healthy.
	And if I just say yes to you, then you won't ever learn what the importance of no and all that.
	So that kind of stuff is helpful as well.
	Does that help at all?
	Yeah, absolutely.
	Yeah, that helps a lot.
	Actually, one thing I noticed on the forums is that someone actually did begin a thread saying that they would like people to put up experiences where they've had, you know, success with peaceful parenting.
	And, you know, we understand a good deal of the philosophy and stuff, and we practice on each other.
	But at the same time, since we're a first generation of peaceful We don't know much.
	We've never had a child before.
	It would really be helpful if anyone and everyone who could go on and give some advice because I'm much better with concrete thoughts and he's much better at the philosophical.
	It would just be nice to have some ideas or some game plans or something to make sure that we can make this as successful as humanly possible.
	It is.
	All I can say is that I just took my daughter on a two-day trip and We had no conflicts.
	She was just a blast to spend time with.
	She woke up before me in the same hotel room.
	I said, oh, if I could get a little bit more sleep, that'd be great.
	And she let me have sort of a half hour more sleep and then woke me up, which was great.
	And, you know, she's, you know, what would you like to do now, Daddy?
	Or here, I have a piece of food that's really good.
	Would you like to try it or whatever?
	She's just a real delight to spend time with.
	And very honest and very blunt and very affectionate.
	And...
	You know, again, you go see these parents all having conflicts with their kids and all that and it really is just a very, you know, you put that work in and it just, it's so easy and so enjoyable.
	You know, most people seem like they're having kids, like they're dragging their asses backwards through bladed sandpaper or something, you know?
	Like, why would you do this?
	You just sentenced yourself to, like, 20 years of fighting.
	Like, why would you, what sane human being would sign up for that?
	And seeing, like, experiencing just how, I'm sorry?
	As I said, it makes me cringe anytime I see that kind of, like, there's so much potential for a fantastic relationship there.
	But these conflicts start so early.
	I mean, heck, we were just interviewing at the hospital where my wife is going to give birth, and they just casually, like, brought out the idea of circumcision.
	You know, every time I hear that, it makes me cringe.
	Like really you like that's going to be like one of the first things your baby experiences in this world.
	Is this really how you want your relationship to start?
	And then when they found out we have a girl and say almost jokingly, oh, no, we don't circumcise girls here.
	Yeah.
	Well, look, I mean, the circumcision is big business, right?
	I mean, they sell the foreskins to the manufacturers of facial creams for women that actually have been praised by being on the Oprah show, which, again, just shows you how insane the society is around disposable males.
	I mean, can you imagine if men had...
	Facial cream or shaving lotion that was made from the labias or clitorises of genitally mutilated girls.
	I mean, society would go insane.
	But women can have facial creams made from foreskins and nobody even really notices.
	It's just part of the insanity of the world that we live in.
	I'm sorry?
	I said I had no idea.
	That is disgusting.
	Oh, I mean, it's cannibalistic.
	It's absolutely unholy.
	But it's big business, right?
	You take the four skins and you sell them to cosmetics companies.
	And of course, the doctors make money off the procedure.
	It's highly profitable human evil.
	It is just astonishing.
	But again, this is, you know...
	This is why we need feminism, I guess, to cover this shit up.
	But anyway, so, yeah, I mean, it is a great deal of fun.
	It's like everything.
	You put the time in and you get the rewards, right?
	You put down the cheesecake and you go to the bike machine and you get the rewards.
	So it is worth it, certainly from my experience.
	And...
	I just wish I'd done it sooner.
	I guess I feel a little bit like a creaky dad from time to time, although it's not really too bad.
	You guys sound like a younger couple than I was, but yeah, it is.
	You put a huge amount of time in at the beginning, and you put these course corrections as you go, and like a great marriage, it just becomes pretty self-sustaining after that gains a momentum of itself that makes it so much easier.
	Yeah, I believe it.
	Yeah, absolutely.
	Yeah, and plus it makes her life easier in the future.
	It'll make her life happier and she'll pick a better spouse and she'll be even better to her kid than we were and just continuing.
	Yeah, I hope so.
	You know, I'm not sure I can promise her the whole happiness thing at a consistent basis.
	You know, philosophy has a way of doing a bit of a Acid-handed reach around from time to time where, you know, it's like, Dad, I'm waiting for the conversation where it's like, Dad, couldn't you just raise me to be a little bit more mainstream?
	You know, just a little bit more like, Dad, God, I mean, couldn't you just give me a little bit of matrix?
	I got to go and deal with these pod people, right?
	So, I mean, and I don't know what I'm going to say as yet.
	I don't.
	Because she'll take all of the good stuff for granted, but the degree to which she does not fit into her culture is something she's going to feel pretty strongly, right?
	Yeah, so I guess happiness is, yeah, definitely we can't guarantee that.
	But we can at least guarantee that our child will have the ability to notice evil and stay away from it.
	Yes, I think that's very true.
	And I think basically I'm just going to have to say to her that I... I just kind of made a vow that I wasn't going to lie to her.
	And if there's people out there who prefer lies, you shouldn't prefer them.
	At least I hope you won't in the long run.
	But it's going to be tough.
	She's going to be a teenager.
	She's going to have hormones.
	And she's going to be interested in pretty guys who are muggles.
	And it's going to be a challenge.
	I guess we'll cross that bridge.
	I can't lie to her because people lied to me.
	I can't do that.
	I mean, I'm sorry that the world is so screwed up that telling your children the truth could make them outcasts, but I just can't lie to her.
	I just can't do it.
	And as a result, she doesn't lie either, which is great.
	We were just talking about that today.
	She's like, Daddy, I don't think I've ever told a lie.
	And I said, you know, I don't think you have either.
	I can't think of one.
	But that just makes things so much easier.
	Wow.
	Yeah, that is amazing.
	Yeah, definitely.
	But I mean, I wouldn't expect her to tell a lie any more than I'd expect her to speak Gaelic.
	She's never been exposed to it.
	So if she did, I would take her to a priest or something, right?
	She's speaking ancient Aramaic and her head's spinning all the way around.
	Yeah, that's another thing that's going to be, I think, That's going to make children of peaceful parents, make it a little more difficult for them to navigate because they'll be so surprised, I think, when they discover the degree to which people lie.
	I remember being, like, when I was a child myself, like, you know, my mom would drop me off at daycare and I'd be, like, screaming and crying, clinging on to her, begging her not to leave.
	And the way she would get me to let go is say, I'm going to stay right here in the waiting room.
	You go in there.
	I'll be right here.
	You can come out and see me anytime.
	And of course, you know, she was never there.
	And that was one of the earliest things I remember about my mom when I was like three or four years old, her lying to me.
	Right.
	Sorry, somebody in the chat room just said, I've heard Steph say his daughter was experimenting with lying before.
	That's right.
	Yeah, no, and she did.
	She would say things, she would experiment a little bit, but she's never, like, really openly committed to a lie and just had it, like, it was all obvious stuff, and it's like, oh, yeah.
	So she's experimented a little bit.
	I shouldn't say she's never told anything that's not at all true, but she did.
	Yeah, she has experimented with lying before, but she's not told a lie that was serious or that she stuck to or that, you know, whatever, right?
	So I just wanted to mention that.
	That's a good correction.
	I've forgotten.
	I've talked about that before.
	But yeah, I mean, it is tough.
	I mean, I don't like the white lies to children, right?
	I mean, I just don't like, you know, when she says, Daddy, are we going to live forever?
	I say, well, no.
	The reason you're here is we don't live forever, right?
	I mean, if we live forever, we wouldn't need replacements.
	So that's the deal, I'm afraid, right?
	Mm-hmm.
	And she seems fine with it.
	She accepts that we're going to die.
	She doesn't know if she knows what it means or whatever, right?
	But she still says, how old is so-and-so?
	Oh, they're 45.
	Oh, you're 47.
	You win.
	It's like, I'm not sure.
	I'm not sure that's exactly how it goes.
	But, yeah.
	I guess I win.
	I win more experience.
	More gray in my hair and all that.
	I like that.
	It's adorable.
	Alright, listen, hopefully you'll have a chance to call in if you have any sort of challenges or questions as you go forward.
	I know that there's a lot of interest in the topic, and it's certainly one of my favorite topics.
	But if you want to keep calling in, if you hit any snags, if I've had any experience with it, or we can bring in some experts who have, that would be great.
	Absolutely, yeah.
	We'll keep you posted.
	I hope it's an easy birth.
	You know, it certainly kept me up a bit, and so it's tough for me.
	I think my wife's still a little traumatized after earlier in the show you compared pushing a baby out of a vagina to pushing a watermelon through a straw.
	Yeah, I'm not good with spatial relations, so don't worry about that.
	No, no, that's the glory of the epidural, right?
	I mean...
	Otherwise, there's a whole lot of inconvenient screaming that keeps the daddy up.
	But anyway, it's, you know, what I've heard is that it's painful, but it's the kind of pain that you forget.
	That's what I've sort of heard about from women, so I'm going to accept that.
	Whether they're just saying that so that I can not wake up screaming every night, I don't know.
	But, you know, this is something I hugely admire women for, because I'm not...
	A friend of mine once, he said, oh, I don't take any...
	I don't take any Novocaine at the dentist.
	If they've got a drill, they've got a drill, right?
	And I haven't had a cavity in like 20 years, but I thought, like, oh, I had a little cavity or whatever.
	It's like, okay, I'll give that a shot.
	And, you know, like 10 minutes later, it's like, okay, I don't think I'm going to give that a shot anymore because that's really good.
	So, but yeah, I hope you'll call in and let us know how it goes.
	It is, it's, I mean, it's a cliche, but it's true.
	It's an absolutely life A changing event.
	And I, you know, I'm certainly thrilled for the journey that you're about to embark on.
	And I can't even remember what it's like.
	I guess I remembered when I went to Amsterdam, which is the first time it's sort of been without my family for, well, I guess without my daughter for five years, other than maybe an overnighter here or there.
	But it is hard to remember what it was like before.
	But...
	You know, I can't even remember what I used to do with my time other than write books, but I certainly wish you the very best.
	It's a very, very exciting thing to be embarking on.
	And of course, what an incredibly lucky kid you've got growing in there.
	Definitely read as you, I'm sure you have been, but read to your son or daughter before they're born.
	That really helps.
	And particularly a dad's voice, the kids react, the fetuses react much more strongly to the dad's voice.
	Just probably the deeper resonance, they can probably hear a little bit more.
	I hear it better.
	But I think that really helps with bonding.
	She reacts a lot more to his touch than to mine, also, I noticed.
	Oh, yeah.
	You know, this is...
	Yeah, no, and, you know, the degree to which dads are missed on the planet is truly heartbreaking when they're not there, so what a lucky kid you've got about the commitment you have to each other, the commitment you have to peaceful parenting.
	That is one lucky kid, you know.
	I'm definitely going to pray to the gods of reincarnation to come back as your next one.
	Oh, no, I don't want to die that quickly, but, you know, good for you.
	Congratulations, and do let us know how it goes if you can.
	Thank you, and I really hope that your book on parenting is going to be out soon.
	Oh, yes.
	Hopefully before she's 18.
	Yeah.
	No, it will.
	I will continue.
	The problem is now I can't remember what I've written, so I have to sort of go back and reread it all and all that.
	But I will keep working on it.
	All right.
	Take care.
	All right.
	Thanks, Matt.
	Thank you.
	Thank you very much.
	All right.
	We're closing in on our third hour.
	I guess almost our fourth.
	I guess I'll pack it in for the night.
	But Mike, did we have anything we wanted to add at the end here?
	Let me just mention the speaking dates.
	We've got the Toronto Domestic Violence Symposium, which is June 6th and 7th, Downtown Toronto Convention Center.
	You can get more information on that at torontodv.com, torontodv.com for domestic violence.
	And also the International Conference on Men's Issues, which is June 26th through 28th in Detroit, Michigan.
	And you can get tickets for that at avoiceformen.com, avoiceformen.com.
	I'm going to be there...
	And a lot of other Freedom Inn Radio listeners are coming in for the Detroit event.
	So if you can make it in any way, shape, or form, be there.
	It's going to be a good time.
	Sorry, Mike, I forgot to mention as well.
	Sorry to mention this without mentioning it to you first.
	I will be appearing at a wide variety of North American Chippendales at least until they realize that I Photoshopped the torso.
	So we'll keep you posted on that.
	But sorry, Mike, go ahead.
	I was receiving a lot of strange emails.
	I wasn't quite sure the origin of those, but I think I can fill in the blanks now.
	Excellent.
	I also want to say on the heels of the last call, if there's any parents that want to call in with parenting-related issues, I mean, operations at freedomainradio.com.
	Let me know.
	We'll move you to the front of the line.
	Frankly, there's nothing more important than those kind of calls.
	So I'd love to bring more parents onto the show to discuss problems or situations they're having or things they're not sure about.
	And if I can connect other parents that want to talk amongst themselves...
	About issues that they're having or how they approach things.
	If we could put together some type of support group for people that are doing peaceful parenting, I'd be happy to help arrange that or do anything within my power to connect people.
	So just email me, operationsoffreedomainradio.com.
	Happy to put you on the show and happy to connect you to anyone else.
	Fantastic.
	All right.
	Well, I guess we'll see you again.
	No, it's not Sunday morning anymore, people.
	This show is so far ahead of its time.
	We do a Sunday show on Saturday nights.
	Saturday nights at 8 p.m.
	Eastern is when we're doing our next call-in show.
	Sorry for all our European listeners, but frankly, nobody can understand you accented people anyway.
	I'm just kidding.
	No, I mean, sorry.
	Something coming from you.
	Yeah, yeah.
	Oh, I say, what?!
	But, yeah, I'm sorry.
	It is just a better show.
	Probably my non-morning person.
	And also, Mike, as he generally rounds the clock around Singapore on Sunday mornings, it's not really good to get him up at the equivalent of, I think, 4 o'clock Mars time at some point in Wodensville is not good for him.
	So, yeah, we're doing the Saturday night show, 8 p.m.
	Eastern.
	FDRURL.com forward slash donate to help out.
	The show, we of course really appreciate it.
	We've got a bunch of footage which we're putting together from Amsterdam.
	Which is sort of my walking tour and commentary on the city.
	That costs some money to get that all together and to get audio and all that music and all that.
	So if you'd like to help out, I think it will be great.
	So Saturday night, we'll see you 8 p.m.
	Eastern.
	Not Sunday.
	Don't get up.
	Or if you do, you're just going to hear.
	Oh, last thing.
	I guess let's mention our bandwidth costs a little bit, Mike.
	Just so people can get some sense of where their money is going or could be going if they donate.
	Oh yeah, this past week has been absolutely gigantic when it comes to podcast downloads.
	The last two days have been 800 gigs per day in podcast downloads.
	The call-in shows tend to be by far the most popular downloads, and when Steph did a full week of Peter Schiff last week, it really hit our CDN server hard.
	So we're probably going to be going over our contract term, which is going to cost a pretty penny.
	So if any fine folks want to chip in specifically for bandwidth costs, that's very appreciated.
	But yeah, those call-in shows, people are downloading them at a record pace on the server.
	Yeah, 800 gigs a day is pretty smoking.
	There'd be a giant Arizona-sized meteor crater where our server would be in California if we'd had to rely on a single server.
	So we have the podcasters spread out over a variety of servers and bandwidth requests go to the least busy server.
	But all of that is extremely expensive.
	And we are going to sail right past what we contracted for.
	And it is...
	It is very helpful if you could help out with the cast.
	We appreciate that.
	So have a great week, everyone.
	Love the calls.
	Love the callers.
	Thanks again to Mike.
	And we will talk to you Saturday night, babies.

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