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June 15, 2014 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

02:56:50

2723 The Dangers of Unschooling - Saturday Call In Show June 14th, 2014

My unschooled teenage daughter is incredibly unmotivated, what do I do? I’m financially dependent and isolated as I cannot keep a job, how do I escape this destructive pattern? Includes: Unparenting, taking responsibility for parenting mistakes, the difference between children and adults, synthetic cannabis, real vs. imaginary paranoid and passive aggressive suicide threats.

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	Hi, everybody.
	Stefan Molyneux from Freedom Aid Radio.
	Hope you're doing well.
	Saturday night.
	Yes.
	This is where ravers go to become unbefuddled.
	How are you doing, Mike?
	I am fantastic, Steph.
	Just a couple of announcements to start off the show.
	This coming Monday, June 16th, Steph will be teaching a class for Jeffrey Tucker's project, Liberty.me, which is pretty much a social network specifically for libertarians.
	Worth checking out.
	The class is going to be titled The Philosophy of Liberty, and there's going to be a Q&A and all that fun stuff.
	It's happening at 9 p.m. Eastern, and you can go to that if you go to fdrurl.com slash libertyme.
	And if you use code FDR, you can get $5 off their subscription rate.
	I think there's a 30-day free trial as well, so – Definitely worth checking out Liberty.me.
	Check out Jeff's project.
	And Steph's class should be pretty fun.
	And also, the Voice for Men conference, the international conference on men's issues, is going to be happening, despite getting chased out of the previous venue due to all types of threats and feminist chicanery.
	June 26th through 28th, Detroit, Michigan, of voiceformen.com.
	The event will be taking place.
	They have found a new venue.
	And I just talked to Paul Elam today.
	Things are going on full force, so should be a good time.
	Stuff will be there.
	I know lots of listeners are coming in.
	So if you are within the Detroit area, we hope to see you there.
	Yeah, I just listened to an interview with a woman who's a feminist on Canadian radio where she talks about being heavily concerned about microaggressions as she calls them which is like men sprawling a little bit too much on bus seats and what she calls mansplaining which is she wrote a book on some topic and a man was explaining that topic to her And I think her friend mentioned that she'd written the book, but the man didn't listen.
	You know, it's tough.
	You know, it's tough being a modern Western woman.
	But I don't think that feminist get-togethers have to move venues because of bomb threats and death threats and other satanic arseholery coming from the estrogen brigade.
	So how often it is that revolutions become what they despise revolutions.
	And of course, the lack of mainstream media coverage on this.
	Can you imagine if the International Feminist Conference had to move because men were sending in bomb threats and death threats and murder threats?
	People would go completely insane.
	But it can happen to men.
	And remember, we are as disposable as a spiteful child's led toy soldiers in an endless inferno.
	So this is why the conference needs to happen because of this kind of stuff.
	So I hope that you will join us.
	I try not to be shocked by the prevalence and depth of human evil and indoctrinated indifference to that exact same evil.
	And the people who are making these threats are pretty crazy.
	I mean, there's a sitting Canadian senator who's going to be there.
	Talking about going to blow up senators and stuff, it might get you a couple of meetings with the cats in blue.
	But again, it seems unlikely because it's only men who are getting together to talk about their issues that are receiving bomb threats and death threats, not women.
	Because remember, patriarchy.
	All right, Mike, who do we have up first?
	All right, up first is Mark.
	Mark wrote in and said, We have suggested to our unschooled 15-year-old daughter to study for high school exams, so she has the option of progressing to college.
	She had great difficulty self-motivating at home to study, despite much help from us parents with structure, books, etc.
	She tried school a couple of days ago and came home crying, and cried most of the evening at the thought of going back to school.
	The question was, should I advise her to go back to school or give another chance or let her stay home?
	And this situation happened a couple days ago, and I think it's progressed a bit since then, but it's an interesting subject to discuss.
	Well, has it?
	I mean, hasn't it just happened that she doesn't have to go back to school and there's no particular structure for her studying for university?
	Is that what sort of happened, Mark?
	Yeah, she's...
	Well, being home educated, we noticed that her motivation, her intrinsic motivation to study was kind of dropped off in the last year or so.
	And she's also dropped a lot of her friends, her local friends.
	We live in a small village in the UK. And we felt that maybe a solution to the problem was to send her back to school where she could both make some more friends and be able to get her qualifications, which I thought would be a good way for her to keep her options open for higher education.
	What does she want to do with her life?
	She doesn't know.
	Well, does she have any ideas at all?
	I mean, even outlandish ones like, first space veterinarian!
	I mean, anything?
	She's very musical.
	We have asked her, we have spoken to her about this, and she doesn't have anything definite.
	But we know what her interests are, but...
	Well, interests, you know, what does that have to do with what you're going to do with your life?
	It's not unimportant, but, you know, I have an interest in ancient Etruscan art, but that doesn't mean I'm going to be an ancient Etruscan artist, right?
	But she's only 15.
	Yeah.
	But she's supposed to be advanced because she's unschooled, right?
	True.
	Right, so at 15, so she might go to university in two years, right?
	Now, by the time you get to university, you have to have some idea of what you want to do with your life, or at least the areas in which you want to study, right?
	Well, the way we put it to her is follow your interests, follow what you love.
	But she's become inert as a result of that, right?
	Right.
	And do you guys feel like you need to...
	I mean, again, I'm no expert on the unschooling thing.
	The story, of course, is every parent's nightmare of unschooling.
	Is that fair to say?
	Well, I went down this path quite reluctantly.
	It was my wife that suggested it to me and we started it about three years ago and I was not convinced.
	However, when I looked into the horrors of state education, I thought, well, it can't be as bad as that, can it?
	So we reluctantly took this path and we thought to ourselves, well, they've been in school, state education for 10 years, so we'll give her a year to do whatever she likes, even if it's playing computer games all day or whatever.
	And then we'll try and, you know, nurture into doing things that we felt were valuable, you know, like pursuing, maybe, you know, preparing for examinations, that kind of thing for, you know, because I want her to be, have her options open for higher education because I want her to be, have her options open for higher education But she's not pursuing any intrinsically driven goal as far as I understand it.
	She's played a lot of computer games.
	What else has she done?
	Has she studied anything hard?
	I mean, has she done anything where, wow, I really don't know how to do vector calculus, but by God, I'm going to figure it out, right?
	Well, the thing is, is I think she doesn't have any goals.
	So there's nothing...
	No, you're not answering my question.
	So has she pursued anything over the last couple of years that has been really tough that she has struggled with?
	Um...
	She plays the guitar and the piano and she set her a piano exam.
	But that's pretty much it.
	But nothing really tough.
	So, I mean, the brain is like a muscle, right?
	It needs resistance.
	It needs to overcome challenges.
	How we achieve self-esteem, according to the research that I've read, how we achieve self-esteem is through the successful completion of difficult tasks.
	I don't think I can do it.
	I don't really think I can do it.
	Sometimes I'm going to be in tears with my frustration at not being able to do it.
	But then, aha, you know, I break through and I achieve it and I get a mastery of some particular task or challenge.
	And I don't I don't imagine that many kids are going to really want to go and do stuff that is really tough for them, which is one of the ways in which you discipline yourself to do that, which is tough.
	Like for the first 20 years of my life, I didn't like going to work.
	And that's true for a lot of people, right?
	I mean, but you have to eat.
	I don't mean to be Mr.
	Dream Killer or anything like that.
	I'm all one for having dreams.
	I mean, from the very early on, I wanted to be a playwright, an actor, a director, and I pursued all of those things.
	I went to the National Theatre School for two years.
	I wrote and produced plays.
	And then I realized that rent was a very important thing to have in my life.
	So...
	The idea that she's not put in situations where she overcomes challenges and gains the self-esteem to do the gritty of life.
	I mean, my show is a fantastic occupation.
	I wouldn't trade it for anything.
	But a lot of it is really dull.
	Now, fortunately for Michael, I take most of that dullness for myself and let Mike do all the fun stuff.
	Oh, are you still on the line, Mike?
	Yeah, yeah.
	How much of FDR is transcendental fun, Mike?
	Oh, there's a lot of dull stuff.
	It'd be hard to really put a percentage on it, but it's probably more than 50%.
	Not probably, it is more than 50%.
	You know, the great times where we're doing a show with Joe Rogan in his hotel room or at a meetup that's going fantastic or, you know, you really pull something off that you're really excited with.
	For the call-in shows, you know, the percentage of the week that's spent doing the call-in shows, which are a blast, it's a very small percentage of the actual workload.
	Yeah, I mean, to me, if you can get an occupation that is 10% to 20% really fun, that's about as great as it can be.
	How do you do that for a 15 year old girl who doesn't feel any kind of pressure, either externally or intrinsically, to go and seek obstacles to overcome in her life?
	I mean, she's got a great life at home, but she's finding it a little bit dull, but not really sure.
	The point is that what 15-year-old is...
	And there'll be exceptions, right?
	But like I was reading about this 12-year-old kid who took a thousand bucks, invested them in bitcoins, made $100,000 and now is starting his own business.
	And those kids are in the newspaper because they are freaks.
	This doesn't mean they're bad.
	It's just way off the bell curve, right?
	So if she's not motivated to do anything, right?
	If she just wants to hang out online and...
	Play computer games and chat.
	One of the things that's very different...
	How old are you, just out of curiosity?
	Roughly.
	You don't have to tell me the exact...
	I'm early 40s.
	Early 40s.
	Okay.
	So, I mean, you're a little bit younger than me.
	So, when I was a kid, I read because I was, like, incredibly bored.
	And so I dug into the classics.
	I taught myself cool stuff.
	I was into computers because when I was little, I started programming at about the age of 11, and I got a little inheritance from my grandmother, which was about $1,000, and I used it to buy a personal computer that I learned how to program.
	But one of the reasons I did that was because games were boring.
	I mean, you're Pac-Man, you're just space invaders, you can't spend much time playing them, so you make up your own games, right?
	Well, this is the trouble.
	The games these days are so massive.
	Well, hang on.
	Let me finish my thought, right?
	Sorry.
	And back in the day, I couldn't, you know, there were no VCRs.
	We had, like, a couple of channels.
	Cartoons were on, like, one hour a week, and they were always the same cartoons.
	Or you get to watch stuff like Star Rangers or whatever it was.
	It's a completely freaky Japanese snort this and it'll all make sense kind of anime pornographic nonsense.
	Yeah.
	But there was no accessibility to pornography.
	There was no accessibility to endless, stimulating computer games or online.
	Computers have elbowed aside the boredom that drives creativity.
	I'm a big fan of computers.
	I like computer games and all that, though I guess I played them a lot more before I became a dad.
	But the childhood that we have is very different than the childhood that's available for Kids Now.
	Kids Now can get so externally stimulated.
	You can browse YouTube.
	You can go to Dailymotion.
	You can go to MTV. There are 10,000 channels.
	You've got tablets.
	There are new games.
	You can browse the games.
	They only cost a couple of bucks each.
	I mean, you name it, right?
	There's Kinect, immersive 3D nonsense and all that stuff, right?
	And so there's stuff coming at you as a kid these days that is like a tsunami of stimulation.
	And I believe that tsunami of stimulation washes away the boredom that drives creativity.
	Like...
	When I was a kid, I scripted space adventures and got my friends to act them out.
	And we had this tiny little tape recorder and we would act out space adventures.
	And that's when I learned you could make a great explosion sound by blowing into the microphone and stuff like that.
	So this I would sort of do as a kid.
	But when you have...
	Like GTA or Minecraft, like who on earth is going to sit there and script adventures and have their kids read them and play them back?
	Well, I did try that with a, you know, we tried to play Dungeons and Dragons.
	Did you play that?
	Oh, yeah, yeah.
	Yeah, and Dungeons and Dragons.
	Let's play Dungeons and Dragons.
	And I said, well, why don't you write your own dungeon level?
	And it's like, well, yeah, yeah.
	But why?
	Back to Minecraft.
	Yeah.
	Right, right.
	Because when I was a kid, the dungeon levels were...
	There was no internet.
	There's billions of them out there.
	You could just go and print off and all that.
	But when I was a kid, you wrote your own dungeon levels because it cost $20 to buy them.
	And who had $20, right?
	And so the limits of financial and stimulation-based...
	It was important.
	Dungeons& Dragons is fantastic because for a couple of books and some dice you can get years of entertainment, imaginative storytelling entertainment and Satanism for very little money and all that.
	So I think it's really important to understand that childhood is not the same now.
	Robert Louis Stevenson, one of the great adventure writers of the English language, We wrote Treasure Island and other great stories.
	He was, as a kid, he was sick a lot.
	I can't remember what he got.
	And he was in hospital beds like half his childhood.
	And he just was going insane with boredom.
	And because he was going insane with boredom, he became very creative.
	And you see this kind of going on over and over again.
	In situations, Marlon Brando had a very lonely childhood with an abusive mom and developed storytelling and alter ego and all that kind of stuff, storytelling.
	So you can sort of look through a lot of childhoods where there's great creativity that comes out as an adult.
	There's loneliness, there's isolation, there's a lack of stimulation, right?
	So when we're bored, we have amazing dreams.
	You know, when our lives are very exciting, we tend to not have Very exciting dreams.
	And I'll sort of give you a tiny example, right?
	So my daughter really likes to play Monopoly.
	Now, Monopoly takes a while to set up, and you get to count out all the money and all this sort of junk.
	And then it slows down because, you know, I want her to learn how to do the change, you know, whatever costs 240 bucks, 500, 260, and I wanted to figure that sort of stuff out.
	Now, We got, just because we were having a long drive one day, I got an iPad version of Monopoly.
	And, you know, boom!
	We're playing, and it handles all of the currency and all the buying and selling and this and that.
	Now, she's still working on it, but so much has been taken out of the equation that I've actually just said, let's not play this, because, you know, I want the physical, tangible math that she has to learn, all that kind of stuff.
	So, it is a very different...
	The environment for children these days.
	The boredom and the lack of resources and the lack of money that drove a lot of creativity.
	Like when I was a kid, we learned how to build bikes because none of my kids could afford to build a bike.
	So we'd find old bits of bikes in junkyards or whatever and we'd sort of build bikes.
	Or when I was younger in England, we would build go-karts with like pram wheels and wood and stuff like that.
	Now, you know, Mario go-kart racing full-on Kinect in stereo surround sound on a 60-inch television doesn't lead a lot of kids to go wander the neighborhood and try and piece together go-karts.
	So, I just sort of wanted to put this over as a general idea.
	I don't have proof for this, right?
	I just want to understand this is not some sort of philosophical proof that I'm talking about here.
	But the fact that your children's involvement with screen time has made them passive consumers of entertainment, right?
	I mean, Minecraft, I mean, you're building stuff in Minecraft for sure, but you're a passive consumer of the entertainment.
	And...
	This is a trouble.
	Yeah, go ahead.
	When we did start on with home education, on her computer, I did limit her time.
	And I felt that I was being a little bit authoritarian and I didn't feel comfortable by physically limiting her time to the resources she wanted because she may have been getting really into something and wanting to spend time with that thing.
	So I removed the restrictions and said, look, I'm going to allow you to be responsible for your own time, but just don't play the computer games too much.
	Find other things.
	And to her credit, she has.
	I mean, she's been pursuing piano, guitar and some other stuff.
	But lately, the last year, those other activities have started to drop away.
	And I've also noticed that she's dropped a lot of her local friends.
	Because she perceives a lot of her friends to be what she terms to be idiots, is how she puts it.
	They're all stupid.
	They're all trying to get me to go to school And she's kind of become alienated, I think, from her local community, which is a bit worrying as well.
	Let's go back a bit.
	So tell me what you mean when you say, I feel authoritarian.
	Well, if I... There's a computer program called Time's Up Kids.
	And it allows...
	You can say you can be on the computer for four hours per day or whatever.
	And then the computer program then limits their time.
	So I feel that's an imposition on her from me.
	You know, I'm kind of the authoritarian person.
	But what I want to do is...
	Give her the freedom to find the right measure and the right balance herself with guidance from me.
	Well, no, no, but sorry, maybe again, this is something I'm sure I'm going to get in lots of trouble for, but nonetheless, I think it's an important discussion to have.
	Why is she still living at home?
	Why hasn't she moved out and got a job?
	She's a kid.
	She's a kid, right?
	Yeah.
	So the idea that she can make wise decisions about her future, just as an adult hopefully will, is not a valid argument, right?
	Because if you're an adult, like if you can make really great decisions as an adult, like an adult, then you should be an adult.
	You should move out.
	You should go start a business or go work at Starbucks or whatever, right?
	Yeah.
	But the reality is that her brain is still 10 years away from physical maturity, right?
	So what that means is she is physically unable to understand the cost of foregoing immediate enjoyable stimulation for the sake of her long-term career goals, right?
	Yeah, but we have explained that exact point.
	We have said to her, look, if you spend all your time playing computer games and you're not reading literature and you're not, you know, developing yourself and your skills and talents in other areas, then you're selling yourself short.
	You're not going to be able to achieve things in your life.
	And how's that?
	And she says, yeah, yeah, yeah.
	And she gets it.
	And then?
	And then goes and plays Minecraft.
	Of course, of course she does.
	Because she's been doing this for two years at home, right?
	So she started when she was 13?
	Yeah.
	Right.
	So at 13, she's still 12 years away from physical maturity in her brain, from brain maturity, right?
	So she can't make decisions about what is best for her in the long run because she's got an immature brain.
	And you can explain it to her, but that's sort of like explaining to a kid who's four feet tall how to dunk a basketball.
	They're just not tall enough.
	They might nod and say, yeah, okay, I guess I understand it.
	And then they're going to go back to pushing the basketball around because they can't dunk it because they're too short, right?
	I really struggle with this because I want to give her credit.
	I want to...
	I want her to feel that she can make her own decisions in her life.
	I don't want to be the kind of parent that says, no, you should be doing this, you should do that.
	Because I remember, I was a child.
	Why are you focusing on your needs, what you want?
	Well, I'm not.
	Right?
	I mean, I don't want to be authoritarian.
	I want to do this.
	I wanted to be like that.
	I mean, you're the parent.
	I'm sorry.
	Your needs come last.
	I mean, this is just the basic reality of parenting, right?
	Like, if you want to be liked or you don't want to be some kind of parent who's authoritarian, what does that matter?
	You know, I'd like to be a 21-year-old Calvin Klein underwear model.
	I mean, so what, right?
	But I'm making those decisions in her interests, I think.
	Are you?
	I believe I am.
	Has it turned out to be the case?
	Well, it's too early to tell, I guess.
	I don't think it is.
	I don't think it is.
	You have a 15-year-old girl.
	Why did she get so bothered by going to school?
	Was she ready for school?
	Like, I mean, was she at the level, say, of mathematics and geography and science and English and grammar?
	She can't have been at the right level because she just spent a couple of years, I'm simplifying, right?
	She just spent a couple of years not doing stuff that was hard for her, not studying stuff that was hard for her, right?
	So she can't possibly have been at the right level of mathematics to go into that classroom, right?
	I don't think that was the issue, Stefan.
	I think it was more the environment, the kind of...
	Wait, wait.
	Sorry.
	You could absolutely be right, but how do you know that wasn't the issue?
	Because she told me.
	Well, she came home crying her eyes out.
	And one of the issues, well, she had a Spanish class, right?
	She doesn't even want to do Spanish.
	And she said, no, you know, your timetable is Spanish.
	She didn't want to be there.
	A few of the kids in the class were messing around.
	She got frustrated with them because she'd chosen to go to school.
	So she wanted to work.
	Kids in the class were mucking about.
	And the teacher of the class said, okay, you're all mucking around.
	We're going to sit in silence for the next half an hour and do nothing.
	Hang on, hang on.
	Look, you don't have to sell me on school being crappy from a disciplinarian standpoint or a bunch of subjects being taught that kids have no particular interest in.
	But when you say she wanted to work, she just spent three years at home, right, where she was inert to a large degree.
	So if she wanted to work, why did she even need to go to school?
	The whole problem was that she had exams she could have taken to get into university, right?
	Sorry, I was going to say uni, which is the British way of saying it, but that won't be clear to other people.
	So she didn't want to work.
	That's why she ended up having to go to school.
	So going to school saying she wanted to work seems a bit precious when she just had a whole bunch of opportunities to work and go to college and didn't take them.
	Right.
	Right.
	Now, clearly she wouldn't have known squat about Spanish.
	I assume she didn't study Spanish in the three years she had off, right?
	Right.
	So how could she possibly have been ready for a Spanish class?
	What about mathematics?
	Where would you gauge her grade level in mathematics?
	Pretty poor.
	So how is she possibly going to go into a school when she's probably, like, let's just say she didn't really study mathematics for the last three years.
	That means her skill has decayed.
	So she's probably four or five years behind her contemporaries in mathematics in school.
	Now, you can't possibly leap vault into that level of competence when you go to school.
	That would be like me saying, well, I studied high school physics, you know, 25 years ago, so I'm going to go and take a grade four university graduate physics exam, right?
	I mean, it's not going to happen, right?
	Right.
	But we did put her into the year below.
	So she didn't go in with her age group.
	She went down a year to kind of make up.
	Right.
	But how do you know?
	Like, did you know the level of math that she was going to be exposed to?
	Let's just take math, right?
	But I don't think that's relevant.
	What do you mean you don't think it's relevant?
	Because I don't think that's why she was so upset and wanted to come out.
	I don't think the issue here was that she didn't feel that her ability was up to scratch.
	Mark, come on.
	It is relevant.
	Because if you're going to put her into an academic stream, which she's woefully unprepared for, she's going to have a miserable time.
	She's not going to be able to follow.
	She's not going to have the grounding.
	She's not going to have the background.
	She's not going to know the prior concepts.
	And she's going to fail.
	Right?
	So, let's say if she hadn't studied math in any rigorous way for three years, then she would have had worse math skills than when she was last in school.
	Then putting her into a math class, even a year behind, means that she's still three years behind that math class.
	You can't just leap ahead three years.
	I'm sorry?
	We prepared her.
	I said to her, look, you're going to go back into school.
	You haven't been to school for a few years.
	You're going to feel behind.
	You're going to feel everyone's alien.
	You're going to feel disorientated.
	But once you get through it, you'll be fine.
	Mark, how is she going to cram...
	Three years of math homework into one year.
	I'll help her.
	But why didn't you help her before she went to school, so that she was able to meet the requirements ahead of time?
	Well, we did.
	I mean, we sat her down and we had a, you know...
	So we started off autonomous homeschooling, which is all child-led, and then we said to her, we think you should not neglect...
	Getting qualifications, because that's what society demands.
	And we devised a timetable for her.
	Okay, Lamarck, I'm sorry.
	Look, I appreciate you hanging in this conversation.
	And I'm fully aware I might be completely wrong.
	Right?
	I'm not trying to lecture you from some situation of infinite knowledge, right?
	I mean, you've been a parent 10 years longer than I've been a parent, so I'm not trying to lecture you.
	But I don't feel like you're answering the question.
	Okay.
	Right?
	So...
	If she is three or four years behind in mathematics, a pep talk will not catch her up.
	I'm just telling you what I would do.
	It's not the right thing to do.
	I'm just telling you what I would do.
	Maybe it's helpful.
	Maybe it's not.
	So if my daughter had been out of school for three years and she wanted to go back into school or she wanted to go to school, then I would get all of the textbooks that she was going to be studying.
	Right, and maybe they're halfway through the year, so we'd go, and I would say, I would do what's called a gap analysis, right, which is, okay, here's the skills that she needs to succeed at this school, and then I would test my daughter to find out where her skills actually were.
	Yeah, we did actually do that.
	And then I would note the gaps.
	Yeah, we did that.
	We did do that.
	You did that, okay.
	You did.
	But her skills weren't great.
	I don't know what that means.
	That's very nonspecific.
	Well, we sat down and went through the...
	In England, it's called the GCSEs.
	We went through the GCSE course syllabus for mathematics.
	And, yeah, she was lacking in a lot of the areas.
	Okay, but you're just giving me these statements that don't mean anything.
	Lacking.
	You know, if I say, well, I want to buy a $5 million house, but I'm lacking in funds, does that mean I have $4,900,000?
	Or do I have $5?
	So, I'm sorry to try and figure out what the grades are.
	So, for a 15-year-old girl, what age level were her math skills tested at?
	What was her math age?
	Probably two years lower.
	That can't be possible.
	When you say probably, I don't know what that means either.
	But it can't be that she hadn't studied math for three years, but she'd somehow advanced a year in math.
	Well, we didn't precisely measure it, because we didn't deem it necessary, because she was going down a year.
	You told me you measured it, so tell me what you measured.
	But it wasn't a test, Stephanie.
	It wasn't like a formal maths test that we did.
	We just went through the book and found out which areas she was good at and which areas she wasn't.
	So you don't know what her math age is, really.
	I mean, and not just looking at the book, but actually doing, everybody studies the math test by looking at the book, and then they get to the math test and they fail it, because just looking at the book and saying, well, I recognize those questions, I think I'm pretty good at them, is not quite the same as actually working through all the problems and being confident in your skill set and so on, right?
	Right.
	Okay, yeah.
	Okay, so you didn't have her evaluated or you didn't say, look, here's a test in math.
	Can you do this one?
	And if she fails that, then you go to a test lower and then you go to a test lower and you go to a test lower until she can pass the test.
	And then you say, okay, well, so you're four years lower than your contemporaries in math, right?
	Right.
	No, we didn't do it as rigorous as that, no.
	That's not hugely rigorous, right?
	I mean, I think in hindsight, you can see that that probably would have been a useful thing to do.
	Because just if she was four years back in math, throwing her into a math class is a complete recipe for failure.
	I mean, you couldn't set her up for more failure, right?
	I'm not sure about that.
	All right.
	What do you do for a living?
	I work in computer software.
	Okay, so do you have a PhD in computer science?
	No.
	Okay, how long do you think it would take for you to take a PhD exam in computer science and pass it?
	Probably four years.
	Okay, so just going to join the PhD, the last year of the PhD, would be a recipe for a failure, right?
	Yeah, but this is not PhD level that we're talking about.
	It is for her because she's four years behind.
	Really?
	Of course.
	Look, she last went to school three years ago and she hasn't studied math since then, which means her skills have decayed, right?
	You use it or lose it when it comes to knowledge, right?
	Right.
	And so at a bare minimum, she's four years back.
	Half the kids at school aren't using it anyway.
	They're all half asleep.
	Look, do you want to have a conversation where you avoid facts that I'm pointing out?
	Well, what do you care about half the kids?
	Half the kids aren't your child.
	Well, that's the point, is that I feel that if she went to school, that the school is not as demanding as a PhD course would be.
	She would easily be able to catch up because it's not that hard.
	Okay, you can't be this concrete.
	You can't possibly think that I'm suggesting that grade 15 math is the equivalent of a PhD.
	You have to be being defensive here, right?
	Because otherwise you don't have the IQ to tie your own shoelaces, right?
	Because I'm saying that if she's four years back, it's like you being four years back from a PhD.
	Not that it's the same, right?
	Okay.
	Okay, so all I'm pointing out is at a bare minimum, she's four years back in math.
	Mm-hmm.
	Right?
	She's probably four years back in science.
	Right.
	She may be ahead.
	She may be ahead in music.
	I don't know if she's interested in geography or I don't know what political science or whatever they're studying these days.
	She may be ahead in some areas.
	So with English, I mean, her language skills are very good.
	And what about her writing skills?
	And writing, yeah.
	She's written books herself at home.
	Oh, okay.
	So fantastic.
	So she would be ahead in English because that's her interest, but she would be woefully behind in math and science and geography and history or whatever it is, right?
	Yeah, I agree.
	Yeah.
	Okay.
	And she would be at least four years behind if she hasn't studied those things since she left school, right?
	Mm-hmm.
	Wait, you're giving me that mm-hmm?
	Like, which is I'm not sure whether that's agreement or...
	Yes, he's finished talking, so I'll make a noise.
	Yeah, I agree.
	Yeah.
	Okay.
	Okay.
	So, it's not just one class that she's four years behind in.
	It's probably four or five classes.
	And Spanish, she's infinitely behind in because I assume she's never studied Spanish, right?
	Yeah, and has no interest in it.
	No, look, I'm not defending school here.
	I'm just pointing out that I think that she cried, not because some teacher said, now sit in silence, right?
	I think she cried because she felt a huge knowledge gap.
	But it was quite shocking to me because her crying, I mean, it went on for hours.
	Of course.
	I mean, I've never seen her so upset.
	I felt...
	And that can't possibly come from seeing a half hour of silence in school, right?
	Okay.
	It has to come from something bigger.
	It has to come from, I'm not ready for where other kids are. - Right.
	Okay.
	So what do I do now?
	Well, let's get back to your question of what it means to be authoritarian, right?
	Like when your kids were little, did you let them eat whatever they wanted or did you try and suggest the healthiest choices?
	And did you sometimes not let them have things that they didn't, that were not good for them?
	I know, we gave them healthy food, on the whole.
	Right, so if they wanted to eat candy and chocolate all day, you'd say, well, no.
	And if they didn't want to brush their teeth, you'd say, well, I'm sorry, you have to.
	And if they didn't, right?
	Right.
	I mean, you would try and guide them towards healthier choices, right?
	Mm-hmm.
	Yeah, I mean, I've heard of a kid who, you know, the parents, you know, didn't brush really, didn't floss.
	I'll show you, 11 cavities.
	Wow.
	11 cavities.
	You have to put her out to fix them, right?
	So this is an example of, you know, the five-year-old brain wants candy.
	And look, I mean, so do I sometimes, right?
	I have to sort of, every now and then I'll have a sugar binge and then I have to retrain my palate back to enjoying more subtle tastes and more refined tastes like salads and beetroot and stuff like that.
	So when your children...
	Were little, you controlled what they put in their bodies and what they had access to in order to help them maintain their health, right?
	Yeah.
	Would you call that authoritarian?
	Well, no.
	It's being a responsible parent.
	Okay, so with the unschooling thing, if your children aren't learning anything, then it's not schooling, right?
	I don't think anyone who says unschooling is good says children shouldn't learn stuff, right?
	Right, so what we have found is that they will become interested in a subject and we'll talk about it over dinner or lying around in the garden, you know, like the Second World War or whatever.
	Whatever topic comes up, we'll go into it and then we'll get a laptop out and look at it on Wikipedia together or whatever.
	If that's the type of Education they're receiving at home.
	So it's based on what they're interested in.
	Sorry, does it ever go past the point of difficulty?
	How do you define difficulty?
	They follow what they're interested in.
	Right, but does it ever go deep?
	I mean, do they ever become experts in something other than computers and computer games?
	She's become very good at the guitar, but apart from that, no.
	Right, right.
	Okay, okay.
	That's not a profession, right?
	I mean, if she wants to write songs, that's different, right?
	But writing songs is emotionally very difficult.
	There's a lot of rejection and so on, right?
	Practicing mechanical skills, nothing wrong with it.
	Nothing wrong with it at all.
	Nobody's really going to pay her to play guitar.
	Now, if she writes songs...
	Unless she wants to be in a cover band and eat leftover par food for the next 10 years, right?
	But nobody's going to pay her to listen to her play guitar.
	And so if you want to be a musician, certainly if you want to be a rock musician or a pop musician, you have to write songs.
	Singers and musicians, they're literally a dime a dozen.
	You can just change them.
	They're like the background of a Of a white wedding.
	You just need to change all those guys.
	It doesn't really matter.
	And this is coming from music producers that I know.
	Like really great singers, totally a dime a dozen.
	But people who can write good songs, I mean, there's a reason why they let Bob Dylan sing his own stuff.
	Even though he sounds like an angry hornet's nest that's taken too many quaaludes, they let him do that because he writes these great songs.
	And so it's like, hey, if you want to sing it, I guess so, because the song is more important than the singer.
	And so what I mean when I say have they gone beyond difficulty, it means have they done stuff that is emotionally challenging, that is grueling, that is vulnerable, that is fearful for them?
	Have they pushed through all of that, which is always the barrier between mediocrity and success?
	No.
	Well, she has in some areas.
	Can you give me an example?
	Well, we lived in Switzerland for a few years, so we did a lot of skiing, so she learned how to ski.
	That was quite demanding.
	Yeah, but there's no vulnerability in that.
	There's no vulnerability in that.
	There's no emotional terror.
	I'm sorry?
	Falling off a mountain.
	No, listen, I've skied for many years.
	Nobody falls off a mountain, right?
	Okay, fair enough.
	Right.
	I mean, and she enjoyed skiing and she worked at it.
	But let me ask you this.
	Did she ever say, I want to become an expert skier and I'm going to get up at six o'clock in the morning and I'm going to work two jobs in order to pay for my coaching?
	And I'm, you know, did she ever do that?
	Or did she do like, hey, I like skiing, right?
	Yeah.
	Did you see the difference between, that's sort of the difference that I'm talking about.
	Yeah.
	Well, this is the point.
	I mean, what I really would like to see in her is this intrinsic desire herself rather than me having to structure her life and impose it on her.
	I think that's the root of the problem.
	Well, I don't know.
	I don't know what the root of the problem is and that, you know, I've just been talking to you for like, what, 50 minutes.
	So I don't know.
	And I'm not saying I'll ever know.
	I mean, what do I know?
	I'm just some guy on the internet asking the annoying questions as usual.
	But I don't know what the...
	Well, would you agree, Stefan, that it is better for a child of her age to be intrinsically motivated to do things rather than having to do things because they've been told by their mum and dad?
	I mean, I don't think that's a relevant question because she's not.
	So saying it's better, you know, it would be better if she had a beautiful operatic singing voice.
	Is it better to have a beautiful operatic singing voice or to sound like the aforementioned Mr.
	Dillon?
	Well, I think it's better to have a beautiful operatic singing voice, but if you sound like Dr.
	Dillon, Bob Dylan, who said about Dylan Thomas, I've done far more for him than he ever did for me.
	But then you work with what you have.
	And the fact is that your daughter does not have intrinsic motivation, right?
	At the moment.
	Well, no, you're not talking about a moment.
	You've been talking about the last three years.
	Right, well maybe she will mature next year and then she will find what she loves and really go for it.
	Oh, magic!
	Cross your fingers, magic will solve the problem.
	Here, a miracle occurs and all my problems are solved, right?
	Yeah, I saw your Frozen video.
	Yeah, yeah, listen, don't go down that road, right?
	Don't go down that road.
	Well, I think I am down that road, actually.
	Well, you're down that road because you're trying to slice things into minutes, right?
	Like at the moment and, you know, maybe next year.
	Like the reality is that the best predictor of future behavior is past behavior by far, right?
	If by the age of 15, she has not found something she's really passionate about, then it's not going to just magically happen next year.
	I mean, I guarantee you that.
	That's something you have to put right out of your mind.
	Look, it's a very difficult and frustrating place to be.
	I don't want to sound like I've got all the answers and I'm just going to give you some annoying piece of period advice.
	Do this, period.
	It's really difficult.
	It's a really difficult situation.
	Of course we want our children to want to do the right things.
	Absolutely, completely and totally.
	And when they don't, it's a real challenge.
	As parents, right?
	Because we know that we can't just go into them like flesh puppets and move their arms around and make them do the right thing, because that displaces their identity.
	At the same time, they're too young to just let them go and fail, right?
	And at the same time, if they're not putting forward this motivation, then they are going to fail, right?
	I mean, what is the plan right now?
	She's not going back to school, right?
	But what's the plan?
	Yeah, so we decided to...
	Well, she decided that she really did not want to go back.
	She remembered what it was like, and we had kind of forgotten the reasons why we took her out in the first place, I think.
	And the reaction against Score was so strong that we felt deep down inside, this is wrong.
	We've obviously made the wrong decision here.
	But now we're left with a situation where...
	We're not really sure what to do next.
	And I have this reluctance to force her to do things.
	Hey, Stefan, I just remembered.
	She did say to me a few months ago, you need to force me to do things.
	Other parents I know who've tried this unschooling approach, their daughter has literally said to their dad, Dad, I'm eating sugar packets in a restaurant.
	Stop me.
	You need to stop me.
	Be a father.
	So I think it may be important to listen to her.
	Yeah.
	Now, force, of course, is...
	It's the wrong way of putting it.
	I mean, you're not jumping someone in an alley for their wallet, right?
	But the reality is that children need structure.
	Children's brains are immature.
	They cannot see over the horizon of their immediate behaviors to that which is beneficial for them.
	Hell, a lot of adults can't do it either, but I think that's because they didn't get those lessons as children, right?
	I mean, I've explained a lot about oral hygiene to my daughter, that I have a responsibility to protect her future self.
	I have a responsibility to deliver her to adulthood as a functional and healthy human being.
	And I said, I know a lot about how to do that, but you're five, and you don't know a lot about how to do that.
	There's nothing wrong with that.
	You're just five.
	And so you can't know, right?
	And so, as parents, we absolutely need to override our children's preferences at times.
	There's no...
	I mean, otherwise, they should just be out getting...
	Like, they're adults.
	Go earn a living.
	I don't go out and interfere with other people's decisions, unless they're initiating force against me, because they're adults.
	They can go and live and fall by their own efforts and ambitions and choices and all that, right?
	But children can't.
	And so, there is something in the old saying which says, when you live...
	Under my roof, you do as I say.
	Now, that's all kinds of wrong on so many levels.
	No, but there's truth in it.
	And the truth is, if you are dependent on me for your income and shelter, it means that you are not ready for the world yet, which means I know a lot more about you because I'm in the position of providing you the shelter.
	You are in the receiving position of charity.
	I am in the provision of charity.
	And therefore, I am going to...
	I know more about what you need than you do because you are a child.
	And if you knew everything about what you needed and you could make all these wise decisions, you wouldn't need me to pay your bills, right?
	Hmm.
	Wow.
	Your daughter cannot make wise decisions about how to spend her time because she was 12...
	So you don't think advising is enough?
	Well, you tell me.
	Has advising been enough?
	Well, no.
	Listen, do you know how many people call into the show and get what I think is stellar advice?
	Mike, how many people really dig in and do the things which we talk about in this show?
	Not as many as I'd like.
	Oh, Mike.
	Good dodge modeling, Mike.
	You must have been like a squid at dodgeball, just slithering all over the walls and putting out ink into the air and shit like that.
	It's a small percentage.
	It's definitely a small percentage.
	You know, I would say maybe 10% or maybe 15% of people really dig in.
	And the people who sustain it over a long period of time, you know, I think that we're at about diet book level.
	Which is like 2-3% of people really get it, really dig in, and really hang in there for the long haul.
	Would you say that's about right?
	Yeah, I'd say so.
	Now, I think many more people than that take useful advice in the short run and fix immediate problems.
	But then they're like, oh good, my problem is solved, right?
	So you say, oh, you know, this person doesn't sound like a healthy person to go out with.
	Great!
	I've broken up with this person, right?
	And then the next relationship is, you know, whatever, right?
	But they will take advice and deal with an immediate problem, but...
	Do they actually dig to the root of things and get the therapy and the self-knowledge and live by their principles and continue to study philosophy for the rest of their lives?
	Well, no.
	Most people who diet end up gaining back more weight and most people who dabble in philosophy end up with their lives worse off in many ways.
	But people who really dig in and change their lifestyle, well, they end up like the 2-3% of dieters who actually lose the weight and keep it off, right?
	And we know this from donations, right?
	I mean, we're actually doing less this month than we have last month.
	And donations being 2% to 3% of listeners, well, those are the 2% to 3% of listeners who are really not treating the show as, you know, strangely accented, hyperactive entertainment, but are actually saying, wow, you know, I could really live this way.
	So advice, I'm telling you, as somebody who kind of gives advice for a living, doesn't that work?
	Even with adults.
	So you're saying I have to force her?
	No, I'm not saying you have to force her.
	Because you've got, like, you're either consultant or Stalin.
	You know?
	This may be a bit of a false dichotomy, right?
	Yeah, I don't want to be a Stalin.
	No, of course you don't want to be a Stalin.
	Absolutely.
	Absolutely.
	Yeah, absolutely you don't want to be a Stalin, of course.
	I don't have to tie my child down to make her brush her teeth.
	Hmm.
	Right?
	I don't have to tie my child down to make her eat her vegetables.
	But if you advise your child to clean her teeth, then she doesn't.
	No, I say, I'm sorry, we have to clean her teeth.
	Like, I'm sorry, we have to.
	Right.
	You're like, well, I don't want to.
	Well, look, I'm sorry that you don't want to.
	If it's any consolation, I hate brushing my teeth, too.
	If it's any other consolation, there are six billion people in the world, and six billion people in the world hate brushing their teeth and hate flossing.
	It's boring!
	Right?
	Nobody likes it.
	You just have to do it.
	And, you know, we go over the explanations and this and that and the other, right?
	But you have to.
	It's not you imposing your will, it's you relating reality to your children, right?
	See, Stalin was just an asshole who imposed his will on people, right?
	But if you say to your child, fire burns you, are you imposing your personal will on your child?
	you know you are informing them of the facts of reality.
	Yeah.
	It's not your fault that studying is hard sometimes.
	It's not your fault that a lot of life is not a huge amount of fun.
	And we actually have more fun than most people had throughout history.
	It's not your fault.
	That we have to take shits in the morning.
	It's not your fault that we can't eat chocolate all the time.
	This is just reality.
	It's not your fault that gravity means don't jump off that wall.
	You're not imposing your will on her.
	You are informing her of the facts of reality.
	And the facts of reality is that if you play computer games all the time, you will live under a bridge in a van down by the river on a steady diet of government cheese for the rest of your natural days, right?
	I have said that to her several times.
	So she has to study.
	Time to get off the computer.
	Time to study.
	My daughter, she loves numbers.
	She's not a huge fan at all of reading.
	In fact, sometimes she cries.
	When she's learning how to read, she gets so frustrated, she gets so upset, she cries.
	And I give her a big hug and I tell her, I'm so sorry.
	I remember her learning how to read for every rule.
	It's like there are 10 exceptions.
	It's really frustrating.
	English is a weird language.
	It used to be pronounced plough, but now it's plough, which is why it's O-U-G-H. You know, plough, but enough is O-U-G-H, but it's U-F-F. And I told her about that old George Bernard Shaw thing where he spells out G-H-O-T-I and says, using English rules, you can pronounce that Fish, right?
	And from station and enough and all that, right?
	It's ridiculous.
	And I said, you know, but it just evolved, right?
	I mean, so people used to say plach and they used to pronounce things differently and that's how they spelt it.
	And then the pronunciation changed because people's throats got sore speaking like Germans all the time.
	But they couldn't go back and change all the spelling, so they just kept the spelling of the old.
	It doesn't make a lot of sense sometimes, and it's really frustrating, and it is annoying, and it's absolutely essential.
	And I say to her, I said, you don't know yet how cool reading is, because it's really, really, really tough to read, to learn how to read.
	It's really tough.
	And you, at the age of five, do not know why reading is important.
	Because right now, You can just have people read for you.
	If you need something in Dragonvale, I can read it for you.
	If there's a cartoon on TV, you don't need to know how to read.
	So you don't know how important reading is.
	You don't even know all of the fantastic books that you will be able to read and the lifelong learning that you will be able to achieve, the self-education that will keep you at the forefront of human value.
	You don't know all of that.
	You don't even know all the books in the world you can't read.
	You don't know all of the knowledge that you will not get if you don't learn how to read.
	You don't know.
	All you know is that reading is really annoying right now at times.
	Sometimes she likes it, but most times she doesn't want to.
	And so...
	I'm sorry that it's frustrating for her.
	I sympathize and I understand that it's frustrating for her, but she needs to learn how to read.
	Because if we don't do it now, like between the age of five and a half to like seven or eight is like the brain's window for learning how to read.
	And if you don't learn during that time, it's really hard to learn later.
	And I think that you never really become that great at it.
	So it's like, if you and I as adults have to go learn Japanese, it's going to take a hell of a long time.
	But Japanese kids just prattle away, no problem, right?
	And so there is a window of opportunity that you have to get this information layer down in the brain.
	And if you do it, then it becomes easy and second nature and automatic and provides a lifetime of value.
	But why on earth would my daughter want, from her perspective, to learn how to read?
	I mean, it makes no sense to her, and I understand it.
	It's like I'm just forcing her, not forcing her.
	It's like I'm saying we have to do something.
	That she doesn't understand the value of.
	She doesn't know what amazing, wondrous gates open up when you love to read.
	That you will never be bored.
	That you will never be alone.
	That you will develop empathy.
	That reading is a chance to try somebody else's life on for size.
	That reading is a chance to see and truly understand somebody else's thought processes in a direct way, which we can never do, except through reading.
	Reading is a way to commune with the dead.
	Reading is the great gift passed through the portal of time from people who are now dust, that we can read the thoughts of people 2,500 years ago.
	I mean, it's a brain borg miracle of 26 letters.
	And so I explained that to her.
	And of course, that doesn't make any sense to her.
	I mean, it does at an abstract level, but she doesn't know what it means.
	And so I'm sorry, I have to.
	I have to teach you how to read.
	You have to learn how to read.
	This is not a choice.
	And you have to do it now because later it's going to be a hundred times, literally a hundred times harder.
	I mean, basically you think you're crying now trying learning it when you're 10 or 11, right?
	So I'm not imposing my will on her.
	I'm not forcing her to do something.
	I'm not just being an authoritarian jerk.
	I am informing her of the facts of reality.
	Her brain is ready now.
	It will be way easier if she does it now.
	She has to learn how to read.
	I'm simply informing her of the facts.
	And then if she says, well, I really don't want to, then I say, well, I'm sorry, you don't get to make that choice.
	Because you are not responsible for delivering yourself to an adult.
	To an adult, Isabella, you are not responsible for delivering a literate child to an adult.
	That's my responsibility as a father.
	That's my job.
	In the same way, you are not responsible to deliver a child with fewer than 11 cavities to the age of 6.
	That's my job as a father.
	That's not your job.
	Your job is to learn and play and have fun and get hugs and giggles and chats and fantastic stuff and we play ice dragons and kitties with wings and all that great kind of junk.
	But It is my job as a father to deliver a literate child to you as an adult.
	And that's not my fault.
	I didn't invent English.
	I didn't invent all these books.
	It's just the reality.
	Well, I don't want to do it.
	Well, that's not your choice.
	Like, I'm sorry, but it's not.
	And that's a true statement.
	It is not her choice.
	What she gets to eat.
	It is not her choice whether she wants to watch four seasons of The Walking Dead.
	It is not her choice whether she wants to play through Grand Theft Auto.
	It is not her choice to watch all the Saw movies at three o'clock in the morning.
	Because I need to deliver a non-traumatized child to her adult self.
	Right?
	And that's not me imposing my will.
	It's just a simple fact that her brain is one quarter the size of mine.
	Her life experience is infinitely less than mine.
	Her studying of parenting, her study of education is infinitely less than mine.
	I've had the great good fortune to talk to dozens of parenting experts as part of this show.
	My wife is trained in child development.
	It's why our marriage works.
	So it is not her choice.
	I'm not imposing my will.
	I'm informing her of the facts of reality.
	Sorry, you have to learn how to read.
	I get it's frustrating.
	I sympathize with that.
	I will try and make it as fun and as easy as possible.
	But you don't have the choice to not do it.
	Sorry, go ahead.
	But don't you think at the age of 15, they have the mental capacity to appreciate that if they sit around playing computer games all day, that they're not going to have any value to offer society?
	I mean, that's just obvious.
	I don't know why you're giving me all these theoreticals when you have a child who has done just that for three years.
	Well, this is what's baffling me so much, is that she...
	It's not baffling because you won't impose any authority on her.
	You won't impose any reality in her.
	Authority is the wrong word.
	You won't impose any reality on her.
	But I did when she was younger.
	The reality is that she's not getting it.
	The reality is that she's not intrinsically motivated.
	So she's just going to have to do things until she understands the reward of intrinsic motivation.
	In other words, when you are a kid, I'm sorry to interrupt.
	I'll shut up in a sec.
	But when you're a kid, you don't understand the value of hard work.
	It is only after The value of hard work that you understand why it's so important.
	So the idea that a 15 year old would rather, or a 13 or a 12 year old when she started, would rather play computer games than learn vector calculus, it would be incomprehensible if that was the opposite way.
	Yeah, but she has enriched her mind in other ways, like she's interested in history and English and languages and guitar and music, you know.
	So it's not been completely...
	No, no, no, no.
	But being interested in doesn't mean shit in life, Mark.
	Yeah, but she's still young.
	Being interested in stuff doesn't...
	Like, I'm interested in antiques.
	Does that mean I get a TV show?
	No, and I'm not actually interested in antiques.
	Having interests is...
	Who cares?
	I like playing bridge.
	Can I have a paycheck?
	No.
	Well, no, because if you want to play bridge for a living, you've got to put your 10,000 hours in of studying strategy and reading books and practicing and doing all the boring, stupid shit that it takes to become really good at something.
	If you want to write great songs, you've got to spend about 10,000 hours writing shitty derivative songs, and then you get your magic key to the kingdom of originality.
	So you have to do the hard work with the knowledge that there's simply no other way to do it.
	There's simply no other way to do it.
	But you're withholding that reality from her.
	I'm just trying to work out how to motivate her.
	You can't motivate her.
	You can't.
	You're saying, how can I climb into my child's skin and move the levers of her brain so she does what I want?
	I have said to her, I said, look, Lucy, it's your life.
	What are you going to do with it?
	I have said it so many times.
	No, but you're asking her questions, which isn't working.
	I still don't know what to do then.
	She's told you what to do.
	She's begging you for what to do.
	She has the wisdom, at least, of knowing what she doesn't know.
	Right?
	What has she asked you and begged you and requested that you do?
	Yeah, she wants structure.
	She wants me to say, this is what you're going to do these times.
	And yeah, I get it.
	So, my suggestion is...
	Yeah, yeah, go ahead.
	We have tried that.
	And when she comes up against something...
	You don't try that.
	You don't try having authority.
	Well, we've tried that method of having a structured time for learning.
	I'll sit down with her and go through the maths.
	And she'll come up against something that she finds confusing.
	And she'll say, well, you're not explaining it to me.
	And then she'll run off.
	Right.
	So then you recognize that you are unable to teach your daughter and you get someone else to teach her.
	Right, and that's why she went back to school, but that didn't work either.
	Well, no, but that's because, I mean, I hope you understand that you set her up for failure with that.
	I have to be blunt with you.
	You didn't measure, you didn't do a knowledge gap, right?
	You didn't do a skills gap and you didn't find ways to help her close that skills gap.
	You didn't get a tutor in who's used to teaching 15-year-olds.
	Have that tutor assess your daughter and create a six-month game plan to get her up to speed to get ready for school, right?
	Somebody just wrote and said, well, there are four kids in Australia who were unschooled and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and they all have high-powered careers.
	My God, I mean...
	I know a tall Chinese guy, right?
	Yes, there are kids who are born with extraordinary motivation.
	There are kids who are born with extraordinary IQs.
	I get it.
	I get it.
	I understand that.
	But that's not everyone.
	Right?
	My daughter is not some super genius who's now, like there are some kids who are there five and they've read like 50 books, right?
	That's not my daughter, right?
	So most of us have to deal with somewhere in the middle of the bell curve.
	Yes, it's true that Einstein was working in a patent office when he came up with the general theory of relativity.
	That doesn't mean that everyone who works at the patent office is a budding physics genius, right?
	That's because he was taught, right?
	Yeah, probably, yeah.
	No, it's because he was Einstein and when they cut open his brain after he was dead, they found like a massively enlarged mathematical center.
	Whether that was genetic or trained, I don't know.
	But there was a giant, the numerical processing center was like a tumor.
	It was so huge, right?
	So these sort of isolated stories of kids who end up doing Fantastically, you know, with the unschooling thing, okay, that's fine.
	But, accountantly, you could look at all the kids who are heads of industry and have become great poets and novelists and film directors who all went to government schools and say, well, see, government schools produce even more people like that.
	So, I'll tell you what my thoughts are, and I'll keep it brief.
	Then, obviously, you can do whatever you want, because you're the dad, right?
	So I think she needs to at least understand that she was not ready for school.
	And that you have to apologize for.
	Again, I'm not telling you what to do.
	I'm telling you what I would do.
	You have to apologize to her for putting her in a situation where she couldn't possibly succeed.
	Where you did not have a knowledge of the gap between what she currently knew and was competent at and what the children were studying.
	And that's on you.
	Right?
	You should have done That gap analysis and figured out a game plan for closing it, right?
	You can't just throw her into school when she's been out of school and studied non-school stuff and expect her to succeed.
	I mean, school, for whatever its deficiencies are, does tend to build year upon year on previously acquired skills.
	And if she doesn't have those skills, she's just not going to be able to.
	I mean, you know, it's just not going to happen, right?
	I mean, it's sort of like she was doing slow training for a marathon, and then she basically sat on the couch for three years, and you put her in a marathon.
	Well, of course she's going to get injured, right?
	So, recognize that there have been mistakes.
	Recognize that...
	She has to.
	She will.
	She has the intelligence.
	And if she wants to come on this show, I'd be happy to chat with her as well, of course.
	Right.
	But she has the intelligence, of course, to understand that what she's doing isn't going to work out for her life.
	Right.
	She's three years away from adulthood.
	You know, girl's got some catch up to do.
	So this isn't going to work.
	And so you need to sort of sit down and have a frank discussion and ask her, say, well, what did you mean when you said, Dad, you have to make me do stuff?
	Really dig into that, figure out.
	I bet you there's going to be a lot of emotion in that, because she feels lost and she feels adrift.
	Because she has satisfied her whims, and frankly, Mark, you have satisfied your whims to be a, quote, non-authoritarian parent, to avoid conflict, to have fun with your kids, which is great.
	Nothing wrong with having fun with your kids, but...
	Your job as a parent is not to have fun with your kids, but to prepare them for adulthood.
	And I think you've been doing a bit too much of the fun stuff and a bit too much of the not preparing them for adulthood.
	And then you get upset because your kids are doing too much fun stuff and not preparing themselves for adulthood.
	But that's what you're doing!
	You're not doing the hard work of parenting necessary to prepare them for adulthood, in my humble opinion.
	And so she needs to know that she has big deficiencies.
	She doesn't know what she wants to do.
	She's not studied math.
	She's not studied stuff that's difficult.
	She doesn't really have much understanding of science or philosophy or maybe she's read a little in history.
	But she's not dug in to become really good.
	Because when you get older, as the old saying goes, people pay you for what you know.
	And if you don't know much or you don't know much very deeply, then you won't make much money for that either.
	And it'll be like, well, can you make a latte?
	Okay, well, let's pay you for that because I don't care about the fact that you read about it.
	You know, half a book on the French Revolution when you were 14.
	So if you want to get paid any kind of reasonable amount of money, you need to dig in and become really, really good at stuff, which means battling through all the stuff which stops people all the time, all the frustration, all the distractions, all the, oh my god, there's an expansion pack for Oblivion.
	I think I'll go and play that.
	Sorry.
	Whatever, right?
	Oh my gosh!
	Minecraft!
	There's a new server!
	A friend of mine's running!
	Right?
	All that stuff.
	You gotta think it's like a...
	The excellence is like this big giant race.
	And everyone loves the idea.
	Eric Clapton is God!
	Freddie Mercury wrote great songs!
	Mozart was a genius!
	Steven Spielberg makes really cool films!
	And everyone's like, I'd like to do that!
	And then they go and get a Little camera.
	And when they start writing and stuff like that, and then people say, well, my stuff isn't really that good.
	The feedback I get from people isn't really that great.
	And I'm kind of bored.
	And hey, look!
	A new Halo came out.
	And the Xbox One is here.
	So let me, you know, I'll watch a couple of shows.
	And so people just peel off from that race.
	And people just peel off from the race.
	And then people who stay on it, they hit some real rejection.
	People say their stuff stinks or is boring or they're indifferent or their family is not that interested.
	More people fall off and go do something that's more immediately fun at the expense of their long-term possibility for excellence.
	And I could go on and on, but basically people get whittled out.
	They get weeded out, get weeded out.
	And finally, of like literally of the 10,000 people who start on that road to excellent, there are like five people.
	Which is a shame because there's like 50 jobs for excellent people.
	But there are like five people, right?
	There's a Black Eyed Peas song where they say, but the race is not for the swift, but for who can endure it.
	And that's true.
	It doesn't matter how fast you go.
	It matters how long you stay.
	It doesn't matter...
	It matters how smart you are.
	It matters how much you apply yourself.
	You know, am I the smartest guy in philosophy?
	I really don't think so.
	I mean, I'm a long way from the smartest guy in philosophy.
	But I listen to customers and I grind my brain to try and come up with relevant solutions based upon what people are talking to me about.
	I study.
	I read.
	I am just an endurance war horse.
	I'm just the guy who like, if my legs fall off, then I go forward on my hips.
	And if my hips fall off, I go forward on my elbows.
	And if my elbows fall off, I go forward on my teeth.
	I just don't stop.
	And that is the only thing.
	That's why we've got the biggest philosophy show here.
	Because I just don't stop.
	I don't care what people say.
	I don't care what slander is thrown around.
	I don't care what hostile people.
	I don't care about death threats.
	I don't care about that stuff.
	Philosophy is going to win if I have to fucking pile drive it through a wall with my forehead.
	Philosophy is going to...
	Fucking win in this world because I'm sick and tired of philosophy getting its ass kicked by religion.
	I'm sick and tired of philosophy getting its ass kicked by relativism and by governments and by religions and oh my god, it's just hideous.
	And philosophy getting beaten by people who beat children and philosophy getting beaten by feminism.
	Oh my god.
	God, of all the government programs that are screwing up the world, the government program called Gender Relations is just about the worst.
	So I am going to make this son of a bitch win no matter what.
	And there's nothing that can stop me except death itself.
	And so hopefully we can stave that off long enough for me to push philosophy forward as much as necessary.
	Your daughter will understand that that is not the life that she is aiming for or that she's going to achieve.
	And so you have to say, look...
	I indulge myself as a parent, right?
	You can never, ever, ever change your children's minds about mistakes that you've made without first talking about all the mistakes that you've made.
	And look, I mean with good intentions.
	It sounds like you're a very involved dad.
	It sounds like you hugely care about your kids and you are better than I bet 99% of the dads out there, right?
	So I'm giving you my perspective in watching your back as I hope people give me perspective in me watching my back when I make mistakes as a parent.
	But your daughter has to recognize that this self-indulgence stuff is not going to work.
	Nothing wrong with self-indulgence.
	Again, there's nothing wrong with a piece of cake.
	Just not...
	All day, every day for three years, right?
	So she's got an underdeveloped muscle of willpower.
	You know, willpower is a vastly underrated muscle in the world.
	Everyone loves to talk about talent, but the only people who talk about talent are the people who are too lazy to apply willpower.
	And they just make up this magic called talent which doesn't exist.
	There is nothing in life but hard work and persistence.
	Everything else is bullshit.
	And so she has this underdeveloped muscle of self-discipline, of just pushing through to get things done that need to damn well get done.
	And recognizing that, then you need to start her off slow, right?
	Give her small challenges, but say, look, let's pick a goal.
	Let's just say that you should have a decent understanding of algebra.
	And I think a decent understanding of algebra is not an outlandish expectation.
	Yeah.
	Right?
	Yeah.
	It's useful, as you know, as a computer program, variables are all about things.
	It's great logical training.
	Maybe it's logic.
	It doesn't have to be algebra.
	Whatever is going to get her mind to understand absolutes, right?
	And English literature is not going to do that, right?
	She's got no problem with, as you say, creativity, the music, and the writing, but she needs to understand that there's black and white, right and wrong absolutes in this world.
	Otherwise, she's going to be paranoid about absolutes and amount to nothing but a pile of relativism and failure, I would argue, her whole life.
	So get her into a discipline where she says, look, okay, I understand that I have self-indulged, and you, Dad, have self-indulged, which is really the primary cause of my self-indulgence, and we need to find something that's going to be rigorous, and maybe you need to join on this as well, right?
	So if she's going to study logic, maybe you can study logic as well.
	I'm not saying you're not logical, but studying it is different from just being, quote, logical.
	And then say, okay, look, I'm not going to teach you this.
	Because we have a history of not pushing through and doing the tough stuff.
	And so I'm going to hire for you a tutor and we're going to start slow and we're going to start on developing this muscle to just will yourself through difficult stuff.
	I'm sorry that success in life sometimes feels like walking through a wall, but it really does.
	You just keep walking and you get bloody and bruised and you just keep doing it.
	And that's the only difference between people who end up succeeding and people who don't end up succeeding.
	It's just persistence.
	I'm not the first person to say this.
	I'm far from the first person to say this.
	What was it?
	I think it was Edison or Ford who said success is 99% perspiration and 1% inspiration, right?
	Everyone has 10 great ideas in their life, the degree to which you just buckle down and push and push and push until they...
	Get through until they become aloft.
	Everyone's had a great idea for a story.
	How many people sit down and write a screenplay and then push to get it made?
	Well, very few.
	So start her off in some rigorous discipline where there's right and wrong and black and white, and she will start to develop that muscle to recognize the value of pushing through things.
	And it will also give her great life skills, particularly studying logic or algebra or something like that, where there is black and white and right and wrong.
	And Then you say, you know, are we on board?
	Because the only thing you need to get from your kids is a commitment.
	Now, once you have a commitment, you are no longer imposing your will on them.
	You are reminding them of their commitment.
	Does that make sense?
	Do you think the commitment needs to be towards a tangible goal?
	Like, you know, we're going to work for our maths qualification in two years' time or something like that.
	Well, no, don't give two years.
	It's too long for a 15-year-old.
	That's like me saying in 20 years' time, right?
	Yeah.
	Right, so maybe that's a long-term goal, but break it down into something that's smaller, right?
	So the first thing, you know, let's say it's math, so whatever it's going to be, right?
	So first thing we need to do, honey, is a gap analysis between where other kids are and where you are, right?
	Which means that you get a tutor in, not you, pay to get a tutor in, and that tutor is going to Test her and find out what her actual skills are in a variety of areas, right?
	Let's just focus on maths, right?
	I think it would be good to get a gap analysis on the major areas that you and her find valuable.
	Spanish, who gives a shit, right?
	If she doesn't want to study it, who cares, right?
	Get a gap analysis done and then say, look, we've got to work to close some of this stuff.
	Because if you want to go to university, you're going to need to be more skilled in certain areas, right?
	And then, you know, just say, look, first thing we're going to do is logic 101 or, you know, maths for 13-year-olds.
	We're going to do that, right?
	Because we need to start working this muscle.
	You need to get used to doing things that are tough and boring and all the satisfaction that comes out of the gritty intellectual hard work of climbing up the mountain with your teeth sometimes.
	And so at some point, she's going to have to agree to that because you're just telling her things that are true.
	Now, once she has agreed to it, Then she doesn't back down because you're not imposing your will.
	If I sign a contract to buy a car, let's say I break it up into 12 payments of $1,000 a month and I sign that contract, is someone stealing from me and imposing their will on me if they come every month to get the $1,000?
	Yeah.
	No?
	Right.
	Right?
	So you have to get a commitment out of her, right?
	Now, I'm, you know, I know that there's some controversy in this community about rewards.
	I was tired of fighting with my daughter about doing letters, reading.
	And so I bought her two kitties in return for, like, two toy kitties in return for seven weeks of not complaining about letters.
	And she loves the kitties, and I love that she's not complaining about letters.
	And every now and then she'll say, well, I want to do my letters.
	And I'm like, hey, remember those two kitties?
	She's like, oh, fine, yeah, that's right.
	Right?
	So, getting a commitment out of someone is really, really important.
	Now, once you get a commitment out of her, then she doesn't have the option of backing down or backing off that commitment.
	Right?
	Right.
	The reason for that is that that's life.
	Yeah.
	That is life.
	You make a commitment to someone, I'm going to show up tomorrow to work, you go or you get fired.
	Right?
	You make a commitment to buy a house, you pay your mortgage, or you're on the street.
	That's life.
	And so she just doesn't have the option to back down.
	It's like, yeah, I know it's frustrating.
	Oh my gosh, you must be really upset.
	Well, and she'll cry, and she'll want to back down, and she'll make the commitment in all enthusiasm, like we all do, and then she'll want to back down and not do it and crap like that.
	I understand all of that.
	And then she has to go.
	Because she needs to know that her commitment means something, right?
	Right.
	Yeah.
	And negotiate for what she wants to learn, right?
	But get an outside expert to just start to guide her through the process, to give her tests to figure out whether she's got the knowledge or not, or whether she's just kind of faking it.
	But get her to start developing that muscle to just push through stuff that is boring or scary or frustrating or annoying.
	You know, when I was in business world, And I was working on a really tough problem, and I don't want to get into the details.
	A couple of times, I would just burst into tears.
	A couple of times, I actually had run to the washroom, and I was weeping with frustration over something that I was...
	And then, you know what you do?
	You say, wow, I'm really upset about this.
	I totally get that.
	You dry your eyes, you splash water on your face, and you go back and you dry again.
	Right?
	Right.
	Wow!
	Give me a lot to think about there.
	I agree.
	I agree with what you said.
	I think I'm too authoritative.
	I haven't been structured enough and she's been demanding that and I've been resisting it for all the reasons you said about government and religion and all those kinds of things.
	Well, you probably were raised by someone who imposed his will rather than informing you of reality in a bland, diplomatic way, which is kind of what parents do, right?
	Yeah.
	Yeah, exactly.
	Exactly.
	Yeah, but if you don't hold her to commitments and you don't teach her the value, the essential part of keeping commitments...
	My daughter, I think, has tried once or twice to get out of keeping her commitments, and I absolutely can't let her do that.
	That would be, like, a really cruel thing to do.
	And...
	So that's my thought about it.
	Mike, did you have anything to add?
	No, nothing specifically.
	Thank you for calling in, Mark, and thanks, Steph, for talking about this subject.
	It's a really important subject.
	I know there's been some controversy in the unschooling movement, and hopefully these types of conversations can continue to be had.
	Yeah, I mean, unschooling isn't unparenting, right?
	I mean, I'm not saying you've been an unparent, so please don't, you know, I don't want you to, I mean, again, I want to give all due props and respect to you for the way that you're treating your children.
	It's fantastic in many ways.
	But I think a lot of people sort of say, okay, well, unschooling means, like, no conflicts, stay up as late as you want, do whatever you want, consume whatever media you want.
	Play as much games as you want, avoid reading or math as much as you want.
	That's unparenting.
	Unparenting is a whole lot different than unschooling because parenting is being sensitive to the realities of where your child is and adhering 150% to your responsibility to deliver an adult functioning child to his or her own adulthood.
	And just not having any rules or any consequences and so on, that's not reality, let alone human society.
	And I think it creates a very unrealistic world for children where their parents never demand anything from them, therefore they never demand anything of themselves.
	And then there's a massive shock, I think, that's going to happen when they get out into the world and people are like, oh, you didn't show up, you're fired.
	You don't want that to be your kid's first experience of really the consequences of reality.
	There has to be, you know, stuff earlier than that so that that doesn't come as a shock to them because then they're really going to get mad at their parents for not preparing them in that way.
	So that's more than what you're doing.
	So I just wanted to point that out.
	Thanks very much, Stefan.
	Appreciate it.
	Will you let us know how it goes?
	And again, if your daughter wants to chat, she's certainly welcome on this show anytime.
	Absolutely.
	If you don't mind, if you can let us know how it goes, I really want to know.
	Okay, great.
	Yeah, will do.
	Thank you.
	All right.
	Thanks, man.
	I appreciate your call.
	Cheers.
	Alright, up next is Josh.
	And Josh wrote in and said, I want to move forward from my current situation of financial dependence and isolation, but I seem to have a problem with work.
	I've only lasted about three weeks for the jobs I've had.
	I find myself waiting in the parking lot debating with myself as to whether I want to go in or not, and it's always ended in me giving up.
	What advice do you have for me?
	Okay.
	What do you mean?
	You sit in the parking lot saying, do I want to go to work today or not?
	Actually, I find myself almost unable to get myself to go in.
	Like, it's really anxiety.
	I mean...
	Oh, so it's just like you feel really anxious about it?
	There's like a fear of going to work?
	Yeah, yeah, pretty much.
	What are you afraid of?
	I'm not trying to say, like, well, what are you afraid of?
	There's nothing to be afraid of.
	I mean, I meant that sort of in a really genuine way.
	Like, what is it that you are afraid of?
	It's hard to say.
	I think it's just when I am on the clock, it feels like I'm a slave in a way.
	I feel like I lose my personhood, almost.
	And I just have to sort of slog through whatever someone tells me to do, which I am okay with.
	No, you're not.
	Don't tell me that you're a slave.
	You have no personhood, but you're okay with that.
	Not what I'm trying to say.
	I'm sorry.
	I'm okay with working for people, but when it's on a scale full-time of eight hours a day, five days a week, on and on and on, it just...
	I don't know.
	It really gets to me.
	Yeah, I mean, you're not giving me anything to work with here, right?
	You said you feel like a slave, you're anxious, and it's basically beneath you.
	I don't know how to make sense of any of that because none of that hangs together.
	Hmm.
	Okay, so which is it?
	Are you offended at the fact that you're a slave?
	Are you anxious, emotionally anxious about the work?
	Or is it just like something you don't want to do because it's boring or beneath you?
	Okay, yeah.
	That last one pretty much fits.
	But it's worse than that because I feel like I should be able to go into work.
	No problem.
	Just like most people do.
	And I feel very ashamed that I... Have ended up in this situation, but it's been consistent with every job that I've gone to.
	And there are a lot of factors.
	Drug use being one of them, which I am very glad to have given up.
	It's been over a year.
	Wait, so you would go to work or you wouldn't go to work sometimes because you'd be hungover from drugs?
	That's potentially a huge factor.
	I haven't worked.
	What do you mean potentially?
	I don't know what that means.
	Oh, okay.
	I haven't tried to work since I stopped using.
	You haven't tried to work.
	So you were a stoned employee?
	Yeah, I guess.
	I mean, if you want to put it that way.
	Well, did you go to work stoned?
	I did drugs at work once when I was working at Walmart.
	That's not what I asked.
	Did you go to work stoned?
	In other words, were you still high when you went to work?
	Oh, no.
	Oh, so just once you did.
	So you were always sober when you went to work?
	Yeah.
	Okay, so it's not potentially a huge factor.
	Well...
	I think the factor is being sober as a comparison to as soon as I get home from work I get high.
	Okay, and what was your childhood like?
	Pretty terrible.
	I ended up in foster care when I was three.
	It's fuzzy for me, because no one can seem to tell me a straight story, but from what I have heard all my life, my stepmom broke my arm by picking me up, and I twisted around.
	And I had bruises all over my legs, so I was put into foster care.
	And my mother fought to get me to live with her.
	And I did.
	But I was always in an abusive environment there.
	She was an alcoholic and she had untreated, undiagnosed schizophrenia.
	And she would always have these guys over, like, not guys over.
	I mean, she was married to these guys, but they were violent, unpredictable almost.
	I mean, it was almost, it was just constant fear.
	And, um...
	When I was nine, I moved in with my dad, who was not abusive.
	I fought to try and do this for a couple of years.
	And of course I was told, you know, by even the stepdad, oh you're You know, you have any idea how horrible that makes me feel, that you just want to leave or whatever?
	Like I'm supposed to feel bad?
	But...
	I'm sorry, I pictured myself being a lot more articulate when I was talking here.
	Well, I'm glad you're not being more articulate because that would be in practice.
	What happened at your dad's?
	My dad, he wasn't abusive, but he was much like the last caller.
	He never made me do anything.
	And I feel like that is a huge thing.
	I never really learned discipline.
	And there was a time in high school where my grades were slipping, which was very important to me because I... At the time, I had gotten pretty much perfect grades up until my freshman year in high school.
	So I went to my dad and my stepmom and I said, you guys have to ground me.
	So it's kind of similar to that situation with Mark.
	You guys have to ground me.
	And my advice to Mark would be to just completely get rid of the computer and all electronics.
	Because that has been a poison to my life and many other people.
	I mean, there are exceptions, but it takes over if you let it.
	Yeah.
	And it really has taken over for me because...
	Well, it kills your motivation because you're in somebody else's structured environment pursuing somebody else's defined goals, which means you're not working your own goal-finding muscles, right?
	Yeah, and I'm stimulated, you know, so I don't need to go out and find some other stimulation.
	Yeah.
	It's an extremely compelling simulation of having a life, right?
	Well, it does get boring, but...
	But there are upsides to it.
	Like Minecraft, it's not really a terrible game intrinsically.
	You can be very creative with it, but this is all besides the point.
	So anyway, yeah, my childhood...
	Look, look, look.
	The moment that somebody says, I played Minecraft...
	And I was so excited by it that I designed my own computer game and coded it.
	I'd be like, hey, yay Minecraft, right?
	Well, I'm more talking about using Minecraft as a creative tool.
	I don't know how much you know about Minecraft.
	But it's like a very open game.
	It's like Infinite Lego, right?
	Yeah, Lego.
	I mean, it's Infinite Digital Lego.
	Yeah, yeah.
	And you're supposed to outgrow Lego by about eight or nine.
	Sure.
	Yeah.
	But I don't think most eight- or nine-year-olds are building, you know, cathedrals with Legos, and there is some value to that.
	But in Minecraft, you're not building cathedrals.
	Well, yeah, I am, actually.
	Cathedrals are things that people go and pray in.
	You're building digital nothing that looks like a cathedral.
	It's an illusion.
	Sure, just like any sculpture, really.
	No!
	A sculpture is something that exists in the real world.
	Somebody goes and builds a cathedral.
	I love Minecraft so much I went out and built a cathedral in the real world.
	I'm like, yay Minecraft!
	Well, in a way, Minecraft allows for more depth because you don't have any restrictions and you can actually walk through your sculpture.
	Look, trying to imagine that you're doing something real by building shit in Minecraft is like imagining that you're making a child by masturbating to pornography.
	Right?
	It's just virtual.
	It's not real.
	It's virtual, but virtual stuff is real in that it's really virtual.
	I mean, it's...
	Alright, I'm not going to go down this rabbit hole of conundrums with you.
	It's digital.
	It is nothing that exists in the real world.
	So let's get back to your childhood, right?
	Okay.
	All right.
	Where should I... So you were with your dad, right?
	Yeah.
	I had never had trouble in school up until the point where I moved in with my dad.
	So I was no longer abused by my parents, but when I went into school, everyone was horrible to me.
	I mean, I have memory gaps in middle school.
	I mean, they were...
	Among the worst years of my life, people would do terrible things.
	For example, if you need an example, there was this kid who would, and this was before middle school, it was grade school, so probably about fifth grade, he would go up to me and slap me in the ass and then run away.
	And he would not leave me alone like this.
	And he would constantly say things to me like, you know, I have sex with my uncle or something.
	I don't know.
	Really immature things that actually, you know, can get to you when you're that age.
	And I ended up sitting on a bench He got a bunch of other kids over, told them I was bullying him.
	And then they came over and started throwing snow at me and cursing me.
	And I was basically crying and snot was all over my face and I went into the school and hid in the bathroom.
	And that was just one example.
	Right.
	And what age were you at that point?
	Well, it was around fifth grade, so...
	I think 10 or 11.
	All right.
	And what happened then?
	What do you mean?
	Well, what happened in your life after that?
	that.
	I'm not sure what you want me to go over.
	Okay.
	Well, it's your life, man.
	I don't know.
	I mean, anything else you wanted to...
	Do you want examples?
	I mean, because I could just say it was basically...
	No, I get that the bullying happened because of a lack of attachment to your parents.
	Okay.
	And the bullying then, I assume, continued.
	Give me sort of what were you doing at 15?
	At 15, I had my first girlfriend.
	And the bullying largely stopped because I had developed a, I don't know, a defense against it, which was basically to disconnect myself and act like I didn't care about what people had to say or anything.
	And I started going to the gym, so I guess I built up confidence there.
	Those were probably the best years of my life.
	The 15 to 16 years.
	I was healthy, had a girlfriend, wasn't bullied, had freedom.
	And it was around this time, right towards the end, when I was about 17, that I was introduced to drugs by my friends.
	Well, that's not...
	I mean, frankly, that's a bullshit way of putting it.
	Well, I mean, they introduced me like, hey, Josh, here's drugs.
	I mean, obviously, I made the choice.
	And so what?
	You chose to take them?
	Yeah, I was just going to say I made the choice to take them.
	Yeah, but you framed it like your friends introduced you to drugs.
	Drugs are all over the place in high school.
	Everybody's introduced to drugs.
	Everybody has friends who'll say, try this.
	Oh, yeah, no, no.
	I was obviously...
	But why would you take drugs if you were that happy?
	I'm just trying to...
	Curiosity.
	I guess.
	Well, no.
	Come on.
	I wanted to see what it felt like.
	No, you knew that drugs could have a negative outcome, right?
	Yes, but I must have had more faith in myself, in my strength, than I should have.
	So you were happy.
	Did you think the drugs would make you happier?
	No, I... Like I said, I just wanted to see what it was like.
	And my friends were kind of egging me on.
	They're saying, oh, it's awesome, man, you should see it.
	Okay, so you took, what, marijuana?
	No, it was, even worse, a synthetic compound designed to mimic the effects of marijuana.
	They called it K2 at the time.
	And it's dangerous and it was incredibly stupid to do.
	And I guess the selling point was that it was legal.
	Otherwise it was just a risk, which I guess is a pretty normal behavior for someone.
	Who has experienced a certain kind of trauma.
	Did you look up the drug before you took it?
	Yeah.
	I tried to look up as much information as I could, but there was barely any information available.
	It's something that has...
	What, you mean on Google there was no information available?
	Oh, no, no.
	There was information of people's experiences with it and the name of the chemical compounds, but there was no testing for it.
	Right.
	It was completely new at the time, I guess.
	Which is why it was legal.
	But it was designed to simulate something else, right?
	Yeah, it was supposed to mimic the effects of cannabis.
	It was supposed to react with your cannabinoid receptors.
	Alright, okay.
	Alright, and what was your experience of the drug?
	I am embarrassed to talk about it because, I mean, I have not made good decisions.
	Disclaimer, I guess.
	I have had the worst experiences of my life, beside, you know, real non-drug-induced experiences, with that drug.
	I have been through hell with that drug.
	And I've also sort of been through heaven, I guess.
	I mean, there were really good parts.
	That was why I did it.
	And then there were the really terrible...
	And I'm talking delusions, paranoia, severe sensory changes.
	I remember that almost every time that I did it, I thought that I was going to die.
	Yeah, just Mike pulled me up something here which says, seeking medical care after taking synthetic cannabinoids, compared to cannabis and its activating cannabinoid THC, the adverse effects are often much more severe and can include hypertension,
	tachycardia, myocardial infarction, Agitation, vomiting, hallucinations, psychosis, seizures, convulsions, and panic attacks among individuals who need emergency treatment after using synthetic cannabinoids.
	The most common symptoms are accelerated heartbeat, high blood pressure, nausea, blurred vision, hallucination, and agitation.
	Other symptoms include...
	What do we got here?
	Sorry, let me just get this last bit here.
	Other symptoms include epileptic seizure, acute psychosis, and heart attacks.
	Studies are currently available which suggest an association between synthetic cannabinoids and psychosis.
	physicians should be aware that the use of synthetic cannabinoids can be associated with psychosis and investigate possible use of synthetic cannabinoids in patients with inexplicable psychotic symptoms.
	In contrast to most other recreational drugs, the dramatic psychotic state induced by the use of synthetic cannabinoids has been reported in multiple cases to persist for several weeks and in one case for seven months.
	After complete cessation of drug use, individuals with risk factors for psychiatric psychotic disorders could be cancelled should be cancelled against using synthetic cannabinoids.
	Yes and a wide array of those those symptoms I have experienced and it's uh It's been known to kill people.
	I don't know if it says that anywhere.
	Not in what I've read, but I certainly don't doubt it.
	It's a very unpredictable drug, and somehow I was drawn to it, I guess.
	It must have some sort of addictive quality.
	And aside from that, I was addicted to the risk, the rush that it gave me.
	I told you every time I thought I was going to die, you might think that's something you definitely want to avoid, but I don't know what it was.
	It was just the excitement of not only that, but the delusions and the paranoia.
	The change in my perception of reality, very interesting, albeit unpleasant.
	And exciting.
	Yeah, well, of course, managing stress and danger was your early childhood experience, right?
	So the fact that you would seek that out after a peaceful and happy period in your life in which you had not had the skill or support to deal with your childhood trauma is not shocking, right?
	Yeah, I suppose.
	And I think that it's really hard to...
	Go back to my childhood to uncover a lot of the reasons for the problems that I'm having now because that drug must have had some pretty severe psychological effects.
	But after that, I didn't care anymore whether I did die.
	I just wanted to take the drug.
	After what?
	After probably about...
	A couple months of using.
	Then how often did you use?
	My parents would give me $20 a week for lunch.
	I used to spend it on lunch, but then I ended up spending it on that.
	And it was $20 a package for about three grams, which would last me about that week.
	So pretty much every night.
	And it was always at night because that was the only time that I would knock the car.
	Right, so you would take the strike every night alone?
	Alone.
	It was something that I mostly liked to do alone.
	Okay.
	And so you did this daily for a couple of months?
	Yeah.
	Right.
	And then?
	I was off to college.
	I graduated from high school.
	I had been accepted at UNH. And...
	I got a job at a machine shop, which was pretty successful.
	I mean, I was only there for a month.
	But the reason that I quit was, one, it was awful.
	It was miserable.
	I had to stand all day for 12 hours a day and perform the same five-second task over and over with no break.
	Of course, a lunch break.
	And I just sort of mostly chalked up my quitting to I'm going to college soon.
	And once I got to college, that's when the dysfunction really started to show.
	What do you mean?
	Like after the months of brain-destroying drug use, you felt the dysfunction?
	I'm sorry to laugh, but it seems to me like you may have been missing a bit of a bump in the road there, right?
	Yeah, the brain-destroying part, yeah.
	But I mean, it was sustainable, other than the fact that I might have been killed or whatever.
	It was noticeable to me more so because it was in a new environment, I guess.
	Anyway, I wasn't speaking to people.
	I could not bring myself to speak any words to people.
	They would say hi to me in the hall, and I would avoid eye contact and not respond.
	But why?
	You're just giving me a description of behavior, but why?
	I don't know.
	I was terrified to say anything.
	Why?
	It's hard to put my finger on.
	and I guess that's why I'm calling.
	But you were off the drug at this point, right?
	Yeah.
	And how long had you been off the drug?
	About three weeks, I'd say.
	Yeah, so you could have still been going through some paranoia, right?
	Well, the psychoactive effects, to my knowledge, never manifested after a day of use.
	Well, unless one of those was paranoia, in which case it did, right?
	Maybe.
	Maybe that could be the cause for why I didn't speak to people.
	Um...
	Wasn't paranoia one of the symptoms?
	Yeah.
	But that was...
	Yeah, I just read that, right?
	Yeah, that was more an immediate effect that went away after a couple...
	Well, but if you're repeatedly taking a drug that makes you feel paranoid, you're training your brain to feel paranoid, right?
	I suppose.
	I almost feel like I was training my brain...
	To recognize paranoia, understand how paranoid it was, and understand that it's delusional.
	But didn't you get your arm broken at the age of three?
	Why would your paranoia be delusional?
	Because I think that's included in the definition of paranoia.
	No, no.
	Paranoia is when you are afraid without a reason.
	You think people are out to get you, but nobody's out to get you.
	But if you grew up with a violent mom who may have...
	Did she break your arm?
	Was it an aunt?
	I can't recall.
	It was my sister's mom, which was my stepmom at the time.
	Your stepmom at the time.
	Yeah, I mean...
	I can't think of any circumstances under which I would break my daughter's arm and say, oops.
	I mean, Jesus.
	I'm so sorry for that.
	She's a compulsive liar.
	So the idea that you...
	Yeah, so the idea that...
	Was it a twist fracture?
	Yeah, it wasn't like she did it on purpose.
	Oh, no, no, no, no.
	A twist fracture is to my...
	Look, to my understanding, twist fracture is a pretty clear sign of child abuse.
	I know, it's abuse, but I'm trying to say...
	It's not like she said, I'm going to break your arm.
	She picked me up by my arm, which is awful.
	How do you know?
	You were three.
	Well, I guess, yeah, that's a good point.
	But the...
	The point I'm trying to make is that your caregiver broke your arm.
	Yeah.
	And so the idea that you would feel scared of your environment is not paranoia, right?
	No, yeah.
	I am generally afraid of other people.
	It sort of waxes and wanes in intensity.
	I find myself sometimes able to talk to people and be more or less comfortable.
	I mean, not completely comfortable, but when I was at college, it was like there was no support.
	I didn't have my friends or parents around.
	I didn't have my familiar environment.
	I didn't have anywhere to escape to, really.
	I hated high school, and it almost felt like I was living at high school.
	Okay, so what would you like to get out of this conversation?
	I would draw a lot of similarities between me and the daughter of Mark, the last caller.
	I want to know what I can do to step ahead because aside from...
	See, Mark's daughter is 15, so it's Mark's responsibility, like you said.
	But I'm 21, so it's my responsibility, which...
	I mean, he didn't know what to do with his daughter.
	I don't know what to do with myself, basically.
	Right.
	Well, look, I mean, I hugely just want to say, first off, that I feel incredible sympathy for the brutality, the horror, the chaos, the madness, and then the neglect that you experienced as a child.
	You went from, like, terror with your mom to neglect that From your dad, right?
	Yeah.
	It's weird.
	I mean, it's not weird.
	Well, I'll just say, every time my dad put the keys in the door, I would feel uncomfortable because I knew that he was going to come upstairs and ask me what I did today and I was going to say nothing and he was going to say what's nothing and I was going to say I don't know and he was going to just bug me to no end which he always did but the thing is he never he never went through with anything I guess it was almost just like he was
	berating me Say I was taking a nap, which was a completely normal thing to do as a teenager.
	My best friend is at Dartmouth College.
	He has a perfect score.
	In four classes, you only need to take three.
	He napped every day.
	I don't know what problem he had with it.
	He had to give me hell like I was the laziest kid in the world for taking a nap in the evening.
	I mean, it was all little things like that.
	Constant sort of I'm disappointed kind of thing.
	Yeah, you know, I mean, of course he was disappointed.
	I mean, he left you in an environment where your arm got twist-fucking-broken.
	So, obviously, he has every right to lord it over you for your fucking bad decisions.
	Jesus, these goddamn parents, I'm telling you.
	Hmm.
	You're lazy!
	Well, you left me with a psychotic bitch who broke my arm, so fuck you.
	Well, that's another thing.
	He is also very lazy himself.
	Well...
	You know, I mean, look, let me tell you something really important that I think is related to drug use.
	So relax for a sec.
	I'll try and keep this brief, but this is really important.
	Almost all what people call life is the avoidance of essential conversations.
	I'm going to say that again, because if you get this, you will be incredibly free in your life.
	Almost everything that people call life is the avoidance of essential conversations.
	There was an essential conversation that you needed to have with your dad, right?
	Is that rhetorical?
	Well, I tell you that there was, but you tell me what you think it was.
	What's the one thing you really, really needed to say to your dad but never could?
	Or never did?
	I suppose it would be something along the lines of, why didn't you push me to be better?
	Why didn't you parent me, I guess.
	Right.
	I mean, I actually...
	I'm not sure that would be the exact thing to say.
	I've thought about that before, as the reason it comes up.
	But what did you have in mind?
	What the hell is wrong with you that you married my mother?
	Yeah.
	Why the hell didn't you fight to get me out of there?
	That's a good point.
	What the hell is wrong with you that you think you have some right to judge me negatively when I came out of this bitch's concentration camp for 11 years, which you birthed me into and you left me into?
	And then you complain that there are some after effects from me living in this violent, fucked up, dangerous, arm-breaking environment?
	You have the nerve after having children with this crazy bitch and leaving me in the orbit of this crazy bitch for 11 years?
	You have the goddamn nerve to complain about the post-traumatic effects of life in that estrogen hell?
	The fuck is wrong with you?
	You need to think a little bit.
	And stop blaming me for the effects of your fucked up choices.
	I'm just trying to survive.
	I'm trying to survive in the hell that you left me behind in, that you put me in.
	Don't you fucking tell me that I'm lazy for napping when I'm trying to cool my nervous system from being wildly overstimulated by tit-based hellish bitch factory that you left me behind in.
	Hmm.
	You know, that could be a good explanation of why I had so much pent-up anger toward him.
	You think?
	Yeah, look, the dads who leave their kid behind with a bitch they couldn't stand have no right to criticize their children, particularly their sons, for the effect of 11 years of full-on, face, deep, radioactive, titch-bit exposure.
	What a fact that has.
	You know, the fucking Marines leave no one behind.
	But a lot of these dads are like, oh man, she's crazy.
	I'm out of here.
	I'm 35.
	I can't deal with her crazy shit.
	She's mad.
	But my kid, who's two, is gonna be great.
	Yeah, it's just not taking responsibility.
	It's a...
	Well, literally, it's like, wow, it's really hot in here.
	This building, I think there's a fire.
	Oh shit, there is a fire.
	I've got to get out, because I'm 35 and this fucking building's on fire.
	I've got to get out of here.
	I don't want to get burnt to a crisp.
	My two-year-old is in the crib he can't climb out of.
	I'm out of here.
	I'm sure he'll be fine.
	Yeah.
	Fucking great.
	Remember, I probably never saw a Seinfeld where George Costanza runs out of a burning building and pushes over a lady in a walker, right?
	That's fucking dads getting out of crazy bitch town that they chose to get into.
	You chose to marry the crazy bitch.
	You chose to fuck the crazy bitch.
	You chose to give her children.
	Stay and deal, you shitwad!
	You know, she, uh...
	Stay and deal!
	Don't you fucking run away when you voluntarily chose to bang 12 pounds of crazy in a 5-pound bag.
	Don't you run away and then say, well, the kids who never chose to be here, who are 2 or 3 or 5 or 10, they're gonna be fine.
	I can't stand the bitch.
	She drives me insane.
	I can't sleep.
	I can't relax in my own fucking household.
	So I'm out of here.
	Hey, you chose the bitch.
	You choose the fucking consequences.
	You stay and you deal.
	Now, I don't mean stay and get married, but at least get your fucking kids out.
	Yeah, exactly.
	Or let's say that the family court system is so fucked up that you couldn't.
	Then at least tell that to the child when you get the child.
	Say, I stayed.
	I tried.
	Here's everything I tried to do.
	Here's everything I tried to work on.
	Here's everything I tried to figure out.
	I've been saving money, the money that I would have spent if I'd had you.
	I've been putting that fucking money aside.
	Do you know what we're going to do?
	We're going to go to family therapy.
	And you're going to go to family therapy.
	And you get a fucking new shiny bike and an Xbox.
	Because I didn't have to spend money on being a dad.
	So I saved that money up so you could have a vaguely fucking happy teenage life.
	But I'm not going to shit on you for the effects of a crazy bitch exposure that I couldn't stand that I left you behind in, that I chose to be in and you never did.
	He told me that if I stayed with him one day when I was eight years old, I tried to move...
	You tried to what?
	I tried to move in with him.
	I was visiting.
	It was weekend visits.
	And I said, I want to stay.
	And he called my mom and she basically said no.
	And then he told me, if I let you stay, police are going to come and they're going to put me in jail, basically.
	But, of course, I don't know how much he tried, really.
	He never told me how much he tried to get me out from Look, for good, decent dads, it's tough, right?
	Because you don't want to alienate and you don't want the woman to just move states or something like that.
	So I'm not saying, like, maybe he tried.
	You know, maybe.
	Right?
	But given that he tried and failed to get you out of crazy bitch town, that he put you in of his own choice and free will, given that he tried and failed, at least he can stop shitting on you for the consequences of his fucking failures.
	I don't know how he could have tolerated me being there, given the fact that My mom would beat him.
	Bloody.
	Regularly.
	I mean, what's he thinking that is going to happen to me?
	I... But, you know, I mean, and I... Yeah, look, I... I understand that.
	And I... I'm incredibly sorry.
	But, you know, and this is the great tragedy of all of this stuff, man, which is that...
	I mean, if your dad gets involved with someone that insane and evil and violent...
	Is he going to do any of the stuff?
	This is the great tragedy.
	Is he going to do any of the stuff that I'm talking about?
	Is he going to really own stuff?
	Is he really going to grow?
	Is he going to use every opportunity to figure out his past?
	I mean, almost no by definition.
	And I'm not trying to say that means don't get angry at him.
	But it does mean that At least with my own father.
	Look, he married my mom.
	That's all I need to know.
	Here's the thing.
	He is moving toward self-improvement.
	He's in his 40s, of course.
	Naturally, he's going to be moving toward self-improvement.
	He's doing very well.
	He has a very functional life.
	Here I am in the bleachers.
	I don't know.
	I don't know what to do with my situation.
	Well, how do you know he's maturing?
	I don't know that he's maturing, but he is...
	You said he's moving towards self-improvement.
	What does that mean?
	How do you know?
	Well, I guess what I mean is he's having a happy life.
	Oh yeah, you're gonna love this.
	He thinks that it's hilarious, that joke, life starts at 40.
	Yeah?
	For parents.
	Because that's when the kids leave.
	Oh, because your kids move out?
	Now he can finally live, right?
	Yeah, listen, you'll know your dad's moving towards self-improvement when he thinks of throwing himself off a bridge because of what he did to you.
	Yeah, when I said self-improvement, I guess I just meant trying to make himself have a more comfortable life, which isn't really...
	Yeah, self-congratulation.
	Yeah.
	Patting himself on the back for being such a great guy, that's not self-improvement.
	That's like the final nail in the coffin for any potential self-improvement.
	But I want to be functional.
	I mean, that goal of excellence that you said in the last call was like a wall.
	It feels like walking through walls.
	Just having a job and sustaining myself without external help seems to be on the same level for me.
	Yeah, look, you have trained your brain out of work.
	And part of that was your brain has been trained out of work and it started in your childhood.
	And it culminated with your drug use.
	Now, are you doing any drugs now?
	No.
	Drinking?
	Very rarely, like maybe once a month when I see my friends.
	Not a big deal.
	Okay.
	Acceptance of drudgery is essential for success.
	Drudgery?
	Drudgery.
	Drudgery.
	It's Walmart.
	It's drudgery, right?
	It's drudgery.
	Nothing wrong with Walmart, you know, it's fine, you know, whatever, right?
	But it's drudgery, right?
	Yeah, I've really tried.
	I mean, I have really tried to...
	No, no, no, no, no, no.
	No, let me finish.
	No, no, no, no, no, no.
	Listen, I'm successful and you're not.
	So please don't tell me all the things you've done.
	Because what you have done has resulted in you being not successful, right?
	Okay, yeah, okay, that's a good point.
	So the fact that you used the word tried...
	Is indicative of why you're not successful as yet.
	You can be, but...
	I mean, it's the Yoda thing, right?
	You do it or you don't do it.
	Trying is an excuse.
	Trying is a backdoor that you can back out and say, well, I tried.
	What if you don't have try in your vocabulary?
	It can potentially be, but I'd say trying is more of an action that...
	No, no, no.
	It goes in between...
	Can you try to sit in a chair?
	Well, no, it's a different story, though, when it comes to trying to balance on a chair that's on a 50-foot pole or something like that.
	I mean, you are trying to do it at that point.
	Sitting in a chair is either you're sitting in a chair or you're not.
	You should be practicing.
	No, you shouldn't be trying to do that.
	You should be practicing to the point where you know you can do it.
	Practicing that.
	I mean, it's synonymous with...
	No, this is important.
	This is important.
	Like, if you make a commitment to go to work, you go to work.
	If you make a commitment to get paid for eight hours, and that's what you're going to get paid for, then you work for eight hours.
	You don't try, you just, you do it.
	You don't try to brush your teeth every morning, right?
	Just brush your teeth every morning.
	Yeah, I had a feeling that you would get down to the, just do it.
	I mean, look, I hate to reduce it to that, but...
	I mean, I've heard that a million times.
	It doesn't help.
	Well, no, it doesn't help because you're not doing it.
	Yeah, exactly.
	So, no, it doesn't help.
	There is no it.
	There's you.
	There's no it doesn't help.
	They're fucking words.
	What are they supposed to do?
	Drag you out of bed and make you stock shelves in the right way?
	They're words.
	There's no it to help you.
	There's no it-ness that's going to help you in that.
	It doesn't help.
	No, you don't help.
	I have to help.
	Yeah.
	You help.
	You listen to the words and you say, well...
	If I'm going to have integrity, if I'm going to be honest, then if I make a commitment, I must follow through on it, right?
	Yeah.
	And that's painful for you, because who the hell ever modeled that for you?
	Yes, and I feel like I have made progress.
	And I am working toward getting a job now.
	And now that I am not doing drugs, and now that I'm getting treated for sleep apnea, I feel like I... We'll probably be able to succeed.
	Right, and there's not much you need to hear from me then, right?
	Yeah, I mean, it's another...
	No, no, listen, you're doing fine.
	I'm trying to give you some advice here, and you're telling me that you're doing fine.
	I'm not trying to say I'm doing fine.
	No, hang on.
	My triage is, like, I want to talk to people who are, you know, really need some feedback or need some philosophy in their life.
	So if you're working towards things and you feel you're doing well, then, you know, I think we'll move on to the next caller.
	Yeah, okay, I guess so.
	Well, are you doing well?
	Do you need any more feedback?
	Well, I am not currently doing well.
	I am not.
	My days are mostly spent on the computer doing nothing.
	Is that doing well?
	I mean, I feel like I am moving towards...
	So listen, listen, man, listen.
	So you're lying to me.
	I said I've made progress.
	And how have you made progress?
	Oh, not trying to kill myself anymore.
	Were you suicidal in the past?
	I was, and I was hospitalized.
	So for you, progress is you're still pissing your life away on the computer, but you're not thinking about killing yourself.
	Progress is going from trying to kill myself to not trying to kill myself.
	That is progress.
	I mean, but now there needs to be more.
	Now, why do you think you've waited for almost an hour into our conversation to talk about suicidality?
	I'm not sure.
	Well, take a moment to think about it.
	Do you not think that's kind of a bomb to drop?
	Yeah, I guess so.
	Well, do you guess so or do you know so?
	I'm not sure why I neglected to mention it.
	Well, take a moment to think about it.
	I was distracted?
	No.
	Nope.
	It's because I got angry at you and you threw suicide back at me.
	Right?
	Yeah, yeah, that makes a lot of sense.
	I got angry at you because I'm giving you some advice that I think is helpful, and then you say, well, I'm doing fine, I'm moving in the right direction, things are going well, and I'm like, okay, well, then I move on to the next call.
	And you're like, oh, but I'm suicidal.
	No, I'm not suicidal.
	No, but you say, well, I was suicidal, right?
	I guess I was hoping that this call would really help, and...
	No, no, no.
	See, you still...
	I'm trying to...
	What I'm trying to do, Josh, is remind you that this call is not going to help you.
	The words aren't going to help you.
	Right?
	I'm trying to give you the locus of control.
	Right?
	Don't drop the S-bomb on me because I got pissed off at you.
	That's your way to try and dominate the conversation.
	I'm just going to keep pissing away my life, though.
	If I... No, no.
	Listen, I got angry at you because you were bullshitting me.
	And then you dropped the suicide bomb on me as a way of reasserting control over the conversation, right?
	Yeah, yeah.
	Sorry.
	I understand.
	No, it's okay.
	If you get emotional, I'm hugely relieved.
	Like, if you give me some emotion, I'm like, I'm a camel at the water well, right?
	Yeah.
	So tell me what you're feeling.
	Well, that's not an emotion.
	I was going to say I feel like I'm not going to succeed.
	That obviously is very distressing.
	It's okay.
	It's okay to feel.
	Look, feeling is good.
	Feeling is going to get you out of This Groundhog Day of emptiness, right?
	Same day over and over.
	Sense of hopelessness, sense of the future is going to be just the same empty shell of nothing that you've got going on right.
	Yeah, that's...
	That's...
	I mean, a certain degree of hopelessness leads to suicidality.
	I mean...
	I have felt a sprig of hope.
	And that's enough to keep me from being suicidal, but...
	I don't know.
	I just...
	I am terrified of being...
	Inferior of being not good enough.
	Lesser than people incapable and generally capable of performing tasks that normal people should be able to perform.
	Are you terrified that your dad was right?
	That my peers were right, I would say.
	For the most part.
	It's partially my dad and my peers.
	They...
	Constant...
	What did they say?
	Constant...
	Invalidation.
	Constant...
	Reminding me that I'm stupid.
	That I'm...
	Worthless or something.
	Right.
	Go on, Josh.
	I'm happy to hear it.
	Just tell me what's in your heart.
	- Sometimes I am afraid that I am like retarded and I just don't know it.
	I don't know.
	I don't know what to say.
	Oh, come on.
	Of course you do.
	This is the secret heart of what's frightening for you, right?
	Yeah.
	What's really terrifying for you.
	So don't tell me you've run out of things to say in two minutes.
	You don't get an opportunity to talk like this much in your life, right?
	Yeah, I guess not.
	So I'm here to listen.
	I'm not going to interrupt.
	I'm Open heart, open mind.
	I'm the guy who's gonna listen.
	Forget about everyone else.
	We never have to release this call if you don't want to.
	It can be just you and me.
	Just tell me what is in your heart that is so secret to others.
	Well, I've already said it.
	I don't want to be inferior.
	I don't want to fail.
	I don't know.
	I don't want to be a waste.
	When I was a little kid, I always thought that I would maybe be famous or something.
	Like I'd be a scientist and I'd discover something or invent something really.
	And, you know, it's kind of like that realization, except tenfold, because it's almost like instead of that, you're just going to be a loser who can't even take care of himself.
	Right, so the gap between the image of your life and your life, right?
	I'm not going to be a scientist who cures cancer.
	I'm going to be a guy who can't hold a job at Walmart.
	Yeah.
	That's harsh.
	That's tough.
	There's something that popped into my mind, and I'll just mention this briefly.
	I'll get back to you, right?
	But I'm not comparing you to this character, but Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment imagines that he's some kind of Napoleon, that he's going to just use violence to get what he wants.
	And he ends up scrabbling around looking for money under the bed of someone he murdered and That gap between being the world-conquering hero and scrabbling around under the bed for the few rubles of someone he murdered is so horrifying to him.
	It's so horrendous to him.
	I'm not comparing you morally to that character, but this gap, we all want to do great things when we're kids.
	Because we have yet to realize fundamentally how far our family extends.
	I won't go into that in more detail, but we all want to do great things when we're a kid because we imagine, oh man, when I get out of this fucking family, woo!
	World's my oyster, baby!
	I can do anything!
	I'll fly!
	I can run faster than bullets, higher than airplanes, and bullets will bounce off my chest because I'll be out of this family!
	You try and get out of the fucking family, and then you get to the next people, and they're like, fuck, you people are kind of the same.
	You're kind of similar.
	Or you're supporting the people who beat the shit out of me.
	And then you say, okay, well, that's just, you know, two bits of bad luck.
	And you go to more people, you go to more people like, holy shit, the fuck does this end?
	And that's where death becomes tempting, right?
	Yeah.
	You burst out of hell, and hey, it's a hotter hell.
	And you burst out of that hell, and oh my god, it's an even hotter hell.
	Oh my god, this hell is different.
	It's not hot, but it's really dry and there's no water.
	And we get to the next hell, oh my god, this place is really wet and there's no air.
	You know something?
	When I was doing those drugs, they made me feel important.
	They made me feel like...
	I don't know, like...
	It's like I was the only real person in the world, I guess.
	I mean, I recognize intellectually that that wasn't, but that's how I felt, I guess.
	I was completely focused on, that's why I like to do it alone, on everything in my surrounding environment and nothing else existed, basically.
	So when it comes to that level of existence, when I am a Measurable percentage of everything that exists, I guess.
	That's the allure, I guess.
	Well, and especially when you're pushed down a lot, you get delusions of grandeur.
	They're not necessarily delusions, right?
	I think great ambition can come out of crushed souls.
	But when you are ground down a lot and humiliated a lot and pushed down, we all have the fantasies that...
	You know, everyone's gonna look with envy upon us in the future.
	You know, we're gonna show them, right?
	We are gonna vastly outstrip these crushed and crippled origins.
	We are gonna fly because people want us to crawl.
	We are going to be strong because people want us to be weak.
	We are going to react like explosive scar tissue against every wound that we receive.
	Yeah, fly in the face of their doubt, I guess.
	I mean, it's not doubt.
	It's not that your parents doubt.
	Doubt is not a bad thing.
	It's not that your parents doubted you.
	you is that you were abused and ignored, right?
	Yeah.
	And it's not your fear that you can't get out of that world.
	You can't get out of that underworld of failure and self-contempt and having your ambitions be little more than torture devices in your diminished present.
	Yeah.
	Where life, like Mark Twain said, is like...
	Happiness, brief bits of happiness interspersed with long, agonizing disappointments.
	Right.
	And that the happiness are only the tools that the disappointment uses to grow itself.
	Yeah, exactly.
	It's made worse by the happiness.
	It's like this.
	Yeah, the happiness is the torture, right?
	It's the reprieve between the torture that makes it hurt more later.
	Yeah.
	Yeah, which means that the happiness serves masochism, right?
	And once you get that, it doesn't even work, and then you just have the horror without even the hope, right?
	I don't know, and I guess, you know, a lot of the time, just non-existence obviously seems better than that.
	But it's nothing new.
	I mean, suicide is not in the future.
	The death of your existence is etched in the very bones of your past, isn't it?
	What do you mean?
	Well...
	Like that I was, like, made to not exist by other people, sort of.
	All right, let me ask you this.
	You are now 21.
	Yeah.
	In your 21 years of life, Josh, who has taken great pleasure in your existence?
	My best friend.
	Yeah.
	Thank you.
	Anyone else?
	I'm sure that my dad has at points.
	And how has your dad taken pleasure in your existence?
	What in you does she take pleasure in?
	Seeing or being exposed to?
	Well, I certainly don't think any part of me now is dysfunctional, but when I was in high school, my grades were So he could be sort of proud, I guess.
	And we would have discussions about metaphysics and all that.
	That was entertaining for both of us.
	I mean, it didn't happen very much, but...
	like out of a hundred hours you would spend with your dad, how much would be pleasure in who you were?
	I don't know, two? - Thank you.
	Right.
	So 98% not taking pleasure in who you are.
	Yeah, I mean, I avoided contact with him a lot.
	And I felt uncomfortable talking to him.
	And that made him mad at me, you know, because I'm making the situation uncomfortable or something.
	Is it comprehensible to you that someone could take deep pleasure Out of you disagreeing with them?
	Well, from what I've seen on the internet, yeah.
	Yeah.
	The internet, really?
	Well, um...
	Not in your household?
	Sure, in your household, but...
	Explaining metaphysics is fun, you know, whatever.
	Oh, no, no, you're talking about debate.
	Disagreeing, right?
	Yeah, no, just disagreeing, right?
	Well, I... I take great pleasure in people who disagree with me.
	Well, because they let you know where you stand.
	Well, I mean, because if I don't take great pleasure in them disagreeing with me, then I have no choice but to only like them when they conform to my expectations, which is a form of bullying.
	When my wife disagrees with me, it's positive, right?
	Mike, you and I have had our disagreements.
	Would you say that they've...
	Rounded in a positive way?
	Rounded off in a positive way?
	Yeah, and they've always made the relationship stronger.
	Knowing that you can have a disagreement and negotiate through it and talk through it.
	If you don't have disagreements in relationships, you never know if the first one's going to topple over the entire tower.
	That's going to be that.
	Well, and you also know that you're avoiding disagreements because they're always going to come up.
	I mean, I don't think I've ever said to you, Mike, you really shouldn't disagree with me.
	That's not polite.
	That's not nice.
	That's not whatever.
	I mean, in this show, people say, well, why don't you have more people on the show who disagree with you?
	Steph is like, because they don't show up.
	They talk trash on the internet.
	Anybody who wants to disagree with me, where do they go in the queue?
	Mike?
	Normally the front.
	We had a gentleman who may not get on the show today that does have a disagreement that is not at the front just because people got bumped.
	But normally I try and move him to the front of the queue.
	Right, right.
	Okay, well, so that's what we try to do.
	In most families, in most relationships, disagreement is punished.
	Yeah.
	To disagree with someone is punished.
	Most families, most relationships are paramilitary people.
	Firing squads of empty-headed conformity to long-dead absolutes from highly bigoted and prejudiced idiots.
	There's a meme for someone.
	Fit that on a picture of Sean Bean.
	I mean, we're talking light-hearted disagreements, bringing pleasure, not something like, you should get an abortion, no, I want to keep the baby.
	I mean, that doesn't sound particularly...
	Oh no!
	Those not light-hearted disagreements, not light-hearted disagreements, significant disagreements are the most pleasurable.
	Like the one that I just...
	If my wife disagrees with me about something fundamental, what an incredible opportunity.
	To understand each other.
	We know we have, because the methodology for resolving disputes is always going to be the same for all of us, right?
	It's emotional honesty, it's reason, it's evidence, and so on, right?
	And listening and respect and all that.
	You keep working that and you get to amazing things that are fantastic and positive.
	But no, I'm not talking about lighthearted.
	Now, if somebody says to me, you know, Steph, rape is wonderful, right?
	That's not a disagreement.
	That's just an assertion.
	I'll even debate that with someone.
	We've had debates.
	I would cut them because they're just so traumatic to people.
	I've had debates with people on this show about how sex with children is good, right?
	Now, obviously, that's not my perspective at all.
	But I'll even entertain those.
	Someone actually came on here and argued that.
	Oh, we've had a couple of those people on there.
	Oh, my God.
	I can't imagine what their argument was.
	Oh, yeah, well, of course, they don't want to talk anything about their histories.
	Those people, they're just insane.
	You can't have disagreements with crazy people.
	Disagreement means we have a divergence of opinion plus a methodology to resolve it.
	There's no methodology to resolve it.
	There's no such thing as a disagreement.
	There's just two crazy people shouting at each other.
	That's not a debate.
	That's just nothing.
	It's just noise.
	but disagreement with me might mean that I'm disagreeing with reason and evidence right Because people could have better arguments all the time.
	I might have missed something.
	I might not have the information.
	So what I'm sort of trying to get you to understand is that I don't think you have modeled in your life somebody intensely valuing your disagreement with them.
	So I try to be agreeable.
	So you can't disagree with yourself, which means your disagreements with yourself escalate to self-destruction.
	I welcome disagreement from myself, which means I never get so frustrated and angry and unexpressed that I get self-destructive.
	So you have a part of you that doesn't want to go to work at Walmart.
	I understand that.
	I can't imagine there are too many people who work at Walmart who wake up saying yay, right?
	Yeah.
	And then there's a part of me...
	And you can have that disagreement.
	And there's a part of me that wants to function in a work environment and make money.
	Yeah, and look, obviously you're too smart to work at Walmart for the long run.
	I mean, no question of that.
	And you don't want to work at Walmart, and you do want to work at Walmart, right?
	Well, yeah, I mean...
	And you can't negotiate that.
	You can't negotiate those disagreements, right?
	I suppose because when I'm there, it's like the, I don't want to be here is predominant.
	Yeah, but you can listen to that, right?
	And you can say, I get, you really don't want to be here.
	So what's the best way of not being here?
	Working toward being somewhere else.
	Moving on up, right?
	If you don't want to play the piano bar, write songs as good as Billy Joel's, right?
	Yeah, and I've come to realize through watching your show that really with the right amount of effort you can get good at anything.
	You can master being a pianist, you can be a master violinist, whatever you really choose as long as you put in the effort.
	I mean, that is very encouraging to me.
	The only problem is I'm not quite sure what I want to choose to master, I guess.
	Well, the first thing you need to choose to master is taking a job and showing up.
	You need baby steps, right?
	And I'm sorry that genuinely tragic life circumstances and some bad decisions in your late teens have led to you needing baby steps, right?
	And I'm really sorry about that.
	And it's humiliating to need baby steps.
	But the baby steps that you need are you take a job, it's no longer optional to show up.
	Yeah.
	Do you know what I mean?
	You made a promise to your employer that you would show up.
	Yeah, I mean, it's this basic empathy, right?
	I mean, they're relying on you to show up.
	I've been a boss.
	People who don't show up are real pains in the ass.
	It makes your job incredibly difficult.
	Because people make commitments, right?
	No, I don't mean you get sick or you go, I get all that, right?
	Yeah.
	But I'm talking about like, when you, and that allows you to take your commitments really seriously.
	Because if you sign on the dotted line saying, well, I may not live up to this, right?
	Yeah.
	Well, that's not very self-respectful, right?
	You need to sign on the dotted line saying, this is now my physics.
	This is now my absolute, right?
	And now you can quit.
	Yeah, absolutely.
	You can go hand your two weeks notice in and so on, right?
	Yeah.
	You know, first of all, recognize that if you've taken the training, you kind of should stay for a while because they just invested in your training or whatever, right?
	Plus, it's bad for your resume if you keep quitting jobs, right?
	Yeah.
	Building success in the future is brick by boring brick in the present, right?
	You go to a job and you stay at the job and you do a good job and you get a good reference.
	And I'm telling you, at Walmart, they're always looking for people to move up.
	You can get free training at Walmart.
	They'll put you on management training.
	They're always looking.
	Now, I'm not saying you go be a manager at Walmart, you understand, right?
	But what I mean is that if you want to work and work smart and work well, they won't leave you stock in shelves, right?
	Nobody puts Brad Pitt as an extra in the background.
	It's not impossible to move up.
	It's...
	Very possible.
	No, that's not what I want you to think.
	Because that is not impossible for me to be the second coming.
	Then I clarified that.
	That's very possible.
	No, no.
	It's inevitable that you will move up.
	If you do these things that you need to do.
	Yeah.
	And the best way to get out of crappy jobs is to do crappy jobs really well.
	Well, see, I mean, one of the problems was I had this mentality that I would be stuck at the bottom, I guess.
	Well, and that mentality is going to be a self-fulfilling prophecy because you're going to cut yourself slack.
	You're going to say, well, I don't have to do that great a job.
	I don't have to work that hard.
	Your customer, if it's not the customer, it's your boss, right?
	And if your boss is happy, then you're secure.
	And if you do a good job at Walmart, then people will give you something more important to do, whether at Walmart or something else.
	Or you will learn the life skills that are necessary to start your own business if you want to, right?
	Yeah.
	Another thing that gives me hope is, that just made me think of it, is the sheer possibility ahead of me.
	Like, I could start my own business.
	Within however many years.
	You are not even close to ready to start your own business.
	I'm telling you that.
	I'm not saying anytime soon.
	I'm saying that's what I'm talking about, the possibility.
	Like years ahead.
	Absolutely.
	Absolutely you could.
	Absolutely you could.
	But you need to develop your discipline muscle.
	in order to start your own business.
	Otherwise, you're going to end up losing a lot of money and time and disappointing a lot of people.
	And then that will, for you, be a closed avenue, which when you go through the great archway called self-employment, then I want you to succeed as much as possible.
	I think the first thing that I need to do is take my own advice when it comes to electronics.
	Thanks.
	Yeah, it's funny.
	Electronics is a fantastic simulation of existence, but it is only a simulation.
	I mean, you can kill yourself forever, which I obviously hope you will never do.
	You can kill yourself forever, or you can just kill your life one day at a time through various addictions and distractions.
	Yeah, I mean, it's the same basic thing, I guess.
	Yeah, don't stay in the middle, right?
	I mean, don't go to suicide, I don't understand, but, you know, choose life, right?
	Which means you turn off the video games and, like, uninstall them, like, whatever it takes, right?
	You go sell your computer your gaming rig and buy a Celeron processor, you know, with one gig of RAM and Vista, right?
	So that it's so maddeningly slow you can't play any games.
	Just a typewriter.
	And then...
	No, because you need to get online to get the job applications, right?
	And you make the job applications and you have to have a...
	You know, give a man a why he can bear almost any how.
	What is the point of you going to work...
	At Walmart or wherever you're going to go to work.
	work what is the point well the point is for you to get some self-trust and some self-regard when it comes to consistency the choice the the option is to to work your willpower muscle to the point where you can trust yourself in an economic and sustainable situation and if you zone out when you're at work then you will stay stock boy forever right so You have to say to yourself, why am I stocking the shelves here and not over there?
	And ask the manager, you know, how did you figure out the layout of the store?
	The manager won't mind telling you.
	She's going to be happy that you show interest.
	Walmart is an incredibly complex economic entity.
	Right?
	I mean, it's a very interesting place.
	Like, they'll let people set up their own sales for local stuff.
	It's very entrepreneurial within the store.
	You could come up with a great idea.
	You could do some research.
	You can come to work and say, listen, I did some research about this.
	You know, I think this product is going to sell really well, and here's why.
	And, you know, maybe we can get this celebrity to come into the store and sign some DVDs.
	Like, there's tons of shit that you can do at Walmart that they will actively support and encourage you to do.
	If you go there like, oh, I hate this.
	It's so beneath me.
	I hate this, right?
	I'm so much better than this.
	Of course nobody's going to want to be around you, right?
	But go in and figure out how much can you figure out About Walmart.
	How much can you figure out about retail?
	How much can you figure out about the market and capitalism?
	How much can you figure out about negotiation, right?
	There's a huge amount.
	You could spend your whole life working at Walmart and never finish learning about it.
	And about the market.
	And you're intelligent enough to process and absorb and expand on all that, right?
	Maybe.
	Is this, like, a suggestion of how to rehabilitate myself, or is this, like, after I rehabilitate myself, I should do this, or what?
	Oh, no.
	I mean, look, I don't know you, right?
	I mean, I'm just telling you that if I were in your shoes, I would put away the stuff that is eating my life to no value.
	Oh, yeah, and I'm not saying you were talking...
	Electronics, right?
	You just have to put that stuff away.
	This is your new K2, right?
	And...
	Your I3 is your K2. Or I7, probably for you, right?
	But, yeah, I would just say, look, I've got to get my shit together.
	I've got to get my life started.
	I need to stop doing all these electronics.
	I need to go out and either retrain myself to do something more skilled or...
	You can, you know, there's the ABCs of learning how to build websites or learning how to program.
	All of that is good mental discipline.
	It's absorbing.
	I love programming.
	It's hugely fun.
	If you can get a job based upon something you're educating yourself on or you can create your own job, that's fine.
	But if you need to go out and get a job for money, just go get a job.
	And you know that you're just going to have to work there for six months.
	And like, this is not like a, well, I hope that I, you know, like, I'm sorry.
	Like, this is like gravity.
	This is like, I have to, right?
	And I can still be happy, too.
	I mean, it's like a, I don't have to go in and...
	I can't guarantee that at all.
	I can't be, is what I'm saying.
	Well, you certainly can't be happy doing what you're doing.
	Yeah.
	Right?
	Happiness is the result of discipline.
	You know, a lot of people don't like to hear that.
	Because they want to get all Zen and shit and be happiness, being at one with the universe and a peace in the moment.
	Actually, Zen is the result of discipline.
	It follows that.
	It's very discipline-oriented.
	No, sorry, I know what you mean.
	I mean, the general bullshit Western understanding of Zen.
	Yeah, the bullshit Zen, yeah.
	Yeah, the Zen is like 10,000 hours.
	They do that in the morning, right?
	But...
	If you don't have the discipline to floss your teeth, a toothache is going to make you mighty unhappy, right?
	If you don't have the discipline to exercise, then osteoporosis and loss of muscle mass and general ill health is going to make you pretty unhappy.
	Almost 30 million Americans have type 2 diabetes, the one that's pretty lifestyle related.
	So if you can't put down the cheesecake...
	And pick up the vegetables, your life is going to be pretty unhappy.
	So even at a very basic level, happiness is the result of discipline.
	That's absolutely true.
	And so without discipline, you can't achieve happiness.
	Wiling your way, pissing your life away on computer games is exercising zero discipline.
	It's self-indulgent.
	And I don't mean that like you're lazy.
	You're self-indulgent like the way I speak English.
	It's just what I was taught when I was growing up.
	And so it's not a crime.
	It's not a sin.
	I don't want you to get down on yourself about it.
	But you have to call things by their proper names in order to change them, right?
	Yes, and I would call it lazy.
	If I want to go to the airport, I don't say, get me a car, right?
	If I need to take a plane, I say, I have to identify the thing I'm talking about to get where I want to go.
	Yeah, I would call it lazy, though.
	I would not call it lazy, because what else have you been told?
	Who has modeled for you disciplined, productive, healthy, happy, respectful, virtuous behavior?
	Yes, I mean, that's true.
	I haven't had that model.
	But, I mean, it's still laziness.
	It's just...
	It doesn't have that negative connotation attached to it, I guess.
	It shouldn't, anyway.
	What doesn't have that negative connotation?
	The word lazy.
	I mean...
	Well, I try not to use words that I would consider abusive towards my daughter, towards myself.
	If my daughter's being lazy, the first place I need to look is, well, what can I be doing better, right?
	I would say that you are...
	Over-focusing on short-term gains.
	Yeah.
	Play video games is easier than going to work.
	Yeah, of course.
	That's why you pay to have video games and they pay you to go to work.
	Because video games are more fun than work.
	This is the exact subject I was on the line.
	Yeah, you're focusing on short-term rewards.
	And when you come from an abusive background, that's all people ever do.
	People blow up and yell at their kids because they'd rather vent their anger than exercise self-control in the protection of their relationship with their children.
	People beat each other up because they'd rather vent their anger than focus on the long-term happiness and self-respect that comes from mastering your temper.
	So when you come from an abusive background, abuse fundamentally is focusing on short-term gains at the expense of long-term and sustainable gains, right?
	Yes.
	And so you grew up in an environment where your dad comes and finds you napping and says, you lazy bastard, right?
	Well, he's venting his temper rather than have a sustained positive relationship with his son.
	And also as a model, he did exactly that.
	He focused on, you know, instant gratification.
	Well, yeah, look, I mean, somebody who's focused on long-term happiness doesn't have sex with a crazy bitch like your mom, right?
	Yeah.
	I bet you she was hot, but, you know, dipping your dick in a deep vat of schizoid crazy is not the best way to walk tall into the sunset of long-term happiness, right?
	And what's better is he was 18 when I was born.
	Aye, aye, aye.
	Right.
	And, of course, if you get some money, then you can get some therapy, all the stuff that I think is really good and so on.
	Reparent yourself.
	Therapy is a lot about just reparenting yourself or, in a sense, being parented for the first time.
	Actually, I am getting therapy.
	Oh, fantastic.
	Okay, fantastic.
	So, does that give you something to focus on?
	It is.
	Like, you know, bullshit stuff that people say one step in front of another, step by step, blah, blah, blah.
	You know, you just...
	Make a commitment and show up.
	Just give yourself that discipline and don't give yourself that out.
	But listen to your, you know, I really don't want to go to work.
	Hey man, tell me more, you know.
	Tell me more about, tell me more, oh part of me that doesn't want to go to work.
	You know, tell me what you want.
	Well, I want to play video games all day.
	Fantastic.
	I can totally understand that.
	I agree with you.
	Do you want to be happy today or do you want to be happy today?
	For the next 20 years, or 50 years, or 100 years.
	Take this example from my friend.
	He could sit down for an assignment and say, this sucks.
	And then what does he do?
	He opens up the book and he gets cracking.
	Based on the typical behavior I would have is I would toss it aside and do something else that has instant gratification.
	And now you're finding out the long-term consequences of that instant gratification.
	And fortunately, you're not a guy who finds out he has lung cancer from 30 years of smoking, right?
	Like, I've got it early now.
	Because then it's, you know, too late, right?
	Yeah, you've got it.
	You're only 21, for God's sakes.
	Cut yourself some slack.
	You know, you've not tossed your life away.
	You're not like 51, right?
	I talked to a guy recently who was, what was he, in his late 40s?
	He was living in a garage.
	I'm like, oh, don't be that guy, right?
	I mean, that was rough.
	So, no, look, you've got time.
	You've got time to turn this around.
	You can have a great life.
	You can make great decisions.
	You can do and get what you want.
	But, you know...
	Every day you indulge bad habits, they get stronger and your good habits get weaker, right?
	And so this is why if you can't stop tomorrow, it's going to be a hell of a lot harder to stop the day after tomorrow.
	And it's a hell of a lot harder to stop the year after tomorrow, a year after this.
	So this is a kind of now or never kind of scenario.
	Yeah.
	Just do what you need to do.
	Get the electronics out of your life.
	Focus on stuff that's going to build skills.
	For me, it was learning how to code, which was fantastic.
	Whatever it's going to be that's going to build your skills, take an online course on logic, do something that's difficult, and stick with it.
	There is a lot of willpower in life that is the difference between succeeding and failing.
	One good thing about being a shut-in, I guess, is that I have been thoroughly exposed to your show.
	Well, I do like to expose myself to people, so I understand that.
	But it's only digital, it's not real.
	So, how are you feeling now at this point in the conversation?
	Much better.
	Probably due to the endorphins that were released when I cried.
	But no, I feel more hopeful.
	You almost gave me a compliment.
	Almost.
	No, I really appreciate it.
	Everything about your show.
	And I mean, it's helped me even when it wasn't me being the, you know, the caller.
	I mean, just that last caller.
	So many things were relevant to my situation.
	Yeah, he was hesitant.
	He said he didn't need to talk.
	And we were like, harpoon that guy, bring him on the boat, bring him on the boat.
	Now, Mike, if you wanted to add something, I know that you went through a fair amount of not being parented in your teens.
	I'm sure there's some relating that you can do here.
	I certainly went through a period of pretty much neglect.
	I would have loved for someone to say, hey, you should be doing something, or hey, don't watch television for eight hours a day, ten hours a day kind of thing.
	I would have loved that, much like the first caller's child kind of, you know, begging for it.
	And I wasn't taught any negotiation.
	I wasn't given any experience or skill, so...
	And on top of that, I was trained that the people around me were dangerous, would yell at me, and there was no one I could go to, so I just kind of escaped to isolation.
	And then when it came time to enter the workforce, oh my god, I was terrified to leave my room.
	There's people out there, and they're all mean.
	And I would have, you know, I got my first job, and it was installing above-ground swimming pools.
	It was a job my father got me, and I was surrounded by these incredibly toxic 40-somethings that would just go out to the bar and drink away their entire paycheck after.
	And they continued that...
	To bolster up that theory that all the people I'd come in contact with were incredibly mean because here I am, some 21-year-old kid.
	And, you know, with no social skills, no negotiation skills, just kind of thrust on this as a favor for somebody.
	It went very, very poorly and didn't last very long.
	Matter of fact, you mentioned jobs not lasting more than three weeks.
	I think that's what that first job lasted for me.
	And that was because I stopped calling the guy in the morning to see if he needed me on his crew.
	I just kind of eased my way out of it.
	And it was really going into the world without being prepared for it is fucking hell.
	It's fucking hell.
	Not being given the skills to negotiate, not being able to identify dangerous people.
	Oh my god.
	Not having an asshole detector that works.
	You don't know if someone's a friendly face, you can trust the smile on them, or someone that's going to just look for a place where they can stab the knife and steal your wallet.
	So it makes you sitting in your car not wanting to go in, I mean, my God, I can definitely relate to that, Josh.
	I can definitely relate to that.
	Well, thanks.
	And it reminds me of something Stefan said, that all the toxic people kind of stay at the bottom rung of the workforce.
	Yep.
	So when teens go in, that's who they are exposed to.
	Right.
	Yeah, if you're at the bottom rung, I mean, it's not very empirical to expect everyone to go in there to be high-functioning human beings that are capable of great empathy and negotiation.
	Those people don't last on the lower rung very long.
	And the ones that do normally have other stuff that's going on that keeps them there, the very, very, very small minority.
	So it's – I mean I can tell you you can get through it.
	It's really hard and it's great that you're going to therapy.
	I mean my therapist was so incredibly helpful in helping me come to understand my social anxiety, which was at the root of me sitting in my car and not wanting to go into work.
	And, um, enabled me to identify the assholes and keep myself safe.
	You know, if you don't have that ability to determine who around you is safe and who isn't.
	And, my God, I mean, I know I was just on, like, fight or flight 24-7, not having that.
	In post-therapy now, that's a whole lot different, and that's been incredibly crucial for me.
	Yeah, that gives me hope.
	Thank you.
	Thank you.
	Thank you for sharing, I mean, your emotion with us too, Josh.
	Oh yeah, I'm a touch embarrassed by that, but...
	Why?
	Social pressure, you know.
	God, that's the best part of the show.
	No, seriously, connecting to real emotions, how you feel, that level of honesty, it's fucking beautiful.
	I mean, it's been a while too.
	You said you still had an endorphin high going on.
	Life can be not crying all the time, but life can be like that.
	It can be connected to your emotions, the ability to be honest with the people around you and not have to shield yourself and hide away.
	Life can be like that.
	You can have quality people around you That you don't have to be scared or put up walls with.
	That is an option, and I know that wasn't modeled for you with what you described with your childhood.
	You got the exact opposite in modeling.
	But that is something that you can obtain, something you can reach for.
	Yeah, I do have my best friend, though.
	Right.
	I mean, one in a million.
	Like, I'm super lucky to have met him.
	Um...
	Pretty much one of the only people that I can actually be truly comfortable with.
	Right.
	And do you share that level of emotion around him?
	Yeah, well, when necessary, I guess when it comes up.
	Right.
	Well, that's great.
	Yeah, life doesn't have to be stuck at the bottom rung.
	Life doesn't have to be sitting around toxic people.
	You can make a much better situation for yourself.
	And it can happen pretty quick when you really, you know, put foot to pavement and put the work in.
	Yes.
	Okay, so...
	Yeah, thanks for calling in, Josh.
	Yeah, thank you.
	Yeah, and thanks.
	I'm sorry we didn't get to the other people tonight, but we will hopefully put them first on the queue for next week.
	And yeah, I know it's a pretty detailed topic stuff, so I really appreciate it.
	All the callers and appreciate the patience of the people who are waiting to call.
	It's always hard to guess how long.
	I'm glad Josh's conversation went longer than I thought it was going to, which was great.
	And, yeah, of course, if you want to help out the show, it's FDRURL.com forward slash donate.
	We'd really love to get some shekels coming our way and keep the growth of the show.
	Expensive new camera, of course, still paying off the...
	I need some pants.
	Yeah, if you want to buy Mike's and Pants, I have a short list.
	And let me tell you, it's a very, very short list of chaps and thongs that are pretty much standard office on casual day and non-casual days.
	But yeah, thanks everyone.
	The uniform stuff makes me wear everybody.
	Olga, the SSG cat, I think is your look.
	That's all I can say.
	But yeah, have a great week, everyone.
	We will talk to you Wednesday, and I guess I'll be seeing people in Detroit in a short amount of time.
	And love you guys so much.

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