Oct. 30, 2014 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
02:32:27
2831 Sex, Polyamory and Reproductive Strategies - Wednesday Call In Show October 29th, 2014
How is self-knowledge defined or manifest in young children, and how do I know if I'm helping my daughter to develop it? Should I teach my daughter to say please and thank you- and how does one do that, without using the concept of obligation/subjugation? There is no doubt monogamy is a higher cost on men in general as we are built to spread our seed and woman are built to be selective, what do you think about this in reference to your recent comments on polyamory? Sometimes our child hits us when he’s tired, how should we react in the moment and how do we stop this behavior? What are your thoughts on the Waldorf education model?Includes: Action is the purpose of self-knowledge, resistance through never-ending ‘whys’ from children, monogamy as white knighting, acidic sperm preventing pregnancy, parental investment impacting, r/k selection reproductive strategies, female erotica, the practicality of threesomes, the gift of monogamy vs. the gift of child-rearing, the demonization of men, governments are needed for spray and pray selected species, if you want to grow the state you attack the pair bonding of human beings, r-selection reproductive strategies lead to totalitarianism, monogamy vs. polyamory, the hazard of dismissing annoyance towards your children, the benefits of peer mentoring, the nature of the world spirituality, technology displaces conversation and screen time for children.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R/K_selection_theoryhttp://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/2012/01/monogamous-societies-superior-to-polygamous-societies/#.VFGUexYfRddhttp://rstb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/367/1589/657.full.pdf
Hi everybody, Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain Radio.
I hope you're doing well these two days before Halloween-y.
So I hope you have your costumes all ready and a nice new coating of shellac on your teeth to ward off the caries.
I'd just like to start the show by giving a serious shout-out of encouragement to Kevin B., a listener of the show, fan of the show, who started chemotherapy for Halloween.
Lymphoma on Monday, and I hope it is going to go well.
As somebody who's had some experience with chemotherapy and radiation, my suggestion is to take it easy, respect your body, listen to your body.
It won't hit you for a little while, at least it didn't for me, but be aware that when it does, it will not be wildly gentle, but it certainly is not as bad as it used to be, at least according to what I I am incredibly sorry that you're going through this, a younger man than I, and I'm keeping fingers and toes crossed that all goes well for you.
And I also hope that you don't get the nurse that I had in chemotherapy who, when attempting to put the needle into my vein, apparently felt that she was dealing with an Islamic thief and attempting to take off my entire hand.
So I am incredibly sorry for what you're going through.
Be brave.
Stay strong.
Rest.
And all will be well.
I do very sincerely hope so.
So best of luck to you, Kevin, and keep us posted about how it's going.
Yeah, best going out to you, Kevin, and also one of the tips I think Steph told me is chips with very strong...
What kind of dip was it to get rid of the chemo mouth, Steph?
Oh, it was actually Satan's armpit dip, which is...
No, it's weird.
Like, so...
Okay, boring stuff, right?
So I... Before Izzy was born...
I was kind of packing on the pounds quite a little bit.
And I've always sort of been 212, 214, and then I went up to like 225, 226, and then I panicked, right?
And then I dropped down to, I think, 198 or something like that.
And that was all going well.
Like, I sort of adjusted to it.
But man, chemo.
You know, it basically feels like an evil penguin shit in your mouth.
Like, I just had the worst...
It was like having just licked a battery soaked in urine.
And that was really in many ways, other than the tiredness and the body of a Viennese schoolboy, that was really the worst thing for me.
And the only thing for me that – I'm not saying this is not a prescription.
But the only thing that worked for me in terms of getting rid of the taste was – Like rippled chips, just regular rippled chips and the strongest onion dip that can be borne by a mortal body.
And that did take away the taste while I was eating and even for a short period of time after that.
Unfortunately, chip dip, you basically don't even need to eat it.
You just apply it directly to your ass and work it in and net it in because that's where it's going anyway, just from the inside out.
So I went back up.
Oh, gosh.
I think I gained about 10 pounds over chemo because, you know, I'm a contrarian.
Lose weight during chemo?
No!
I'm going to become an onion-based life form.
And so I put on about 10 pounds and then I've just sort of recently, like over the last year, I've lost it back down to 197 or whatever.
So, you know, I'm not saying it's the healthiest way to deal with the bad taste, but boy, I've never had anything quite like that.
And, you know, if Beelzebub were to regularly produce a wet fart between my cheeks, the other ones, that would be somewhat similar.
So that was my big symptom from it, and I hope that isn't the case with you.
But, you know, if you feel like it, you might want to give it a try.
Maybe not to the point where you're inserting your head into the bag with a face full of chip dip and coming out and just basically licking it off to yourself like James Simmons attempting to groom an eyebrow.
It doesn't have to be like you're a hungry horse with a head in a bag.
But a little bit more measured, that was something that certainly helped me.
Do you remember anything else from that, Mike?
Any other tips?
Oh, gosh.
That's a good question.
I should have put some thought into it before the show.
Well, I mean, the biggest thing that I took from your experience of having cancer, that's a weird thing to say, was don't automatically assume stuff is bad.
Don't immediately assume something is going to be a negative.
And it's a weird thing to say, like, diagnosed with cancer, don't assume this is going to be a negative long-term for your life.
You know, it's just thinking of the possible silver linings that things can have and how it can make you better or make your life better long-term, and the different perspectives it can give you and the things that you wouldn't have gained or gleaned otherwise.
I've really trained myself to kind of get in that mindset, and I found it to be incredibly helpful, and I think you'd exactly say the same thing, Steph, so...
It's good to get the rational impatience of mortality before you're actually on your deathbed.
Yes, yes.
You don't want that last-minute conversation where you're like, oh, I didn't get all that stuff done in my life that I wanted to get done.
Crap.
Goodbye.
It's over.
I've always been fascinated by people, you know, they say, so-and-so does not suffer fools gladly.
And it's supposed to be some cantankerous old diabetes kind of character or personality.
And of course, you know, raised in England, I've had to work to overcome some of my self-erasing spineless politeness memes or metrics.
And I found that having a could-kill-you disease was very important in giving me the impatience of mortality.
And there's something, you know, for me, maybe it's, you know, the cancer thing or maybe it's just being 48.
Something in me that is getting that I'm never going to learn piano.
Because when you're young, you've got all this shit down the road.
I've always been interested in keyboards.
I can type.
How much more difficult is the flight of the bumblebee?
Well, quite difficult, in fact.
And I'm never going to be X or Y or Z. And I'm never going to win American Idol.
Actually, that probably isn't affected with age, but...
So, all of the – there is a kind of sense that, I mean, you know, even all going well, I'm probably past the halfway mark, right?
I mean, twice what I am is old, 96.
And so, past the halfway mark, even though the first 15 years were largely, you know, a press throwaway time for me, past the halfway mark is, yeah – I'm not going to get a bunch of stuff done.
I'm going to close a bunch of doors.
Not leave them ajar.
I have books where I live.
I've got boxes of books.
And they were like, I liked this book.
I might read it again someday.
And the great thing about 48 plus life-threatening disease is, nope.
I'm not going to be doing that.
I'm not going to read this book again.
I've got this book called White Man's Burden, which is about foreign aid.
I read it years and years ago.
And I'm like, oh, I should do a show on this.
And I've sort of kept it around with my highlights and my post-its.
And now I'm like, never going to do that show.
It hasn't happened yet.
Throw the book out!
And I think that is something that the younger you get that, I think the better off your life will be.
Like the younger you get that you're going to die.
I know this is like the least positive speech for somebody going through chemo.
But the young...
I mean, chemo and cancer, they really bring that right nose to nose with you.
And the younger that you understand that you're going to die, the tougher but better your life will be.
The tougher because when you get you're going to die, short-term gains become...
It's somewhat more important because you realize that in the long run, there are no long-term gains because as Keynes famously said, when someone said – well, he would say, well, this policy will benefit the economy in the short run and then somebody said, but in the long run – and Keynes said, in the long run, we're all dead and that's kind of true and kind of douchey.
Again, some people have theorized it's because he was gay that he didn't really care that much about the next generation because he didn't have any kids.
But that's neither here nor there at the moment.
But your life will be tougher when you get that you're going to die because you have to get off your ass and make better decisions about your health, about your social engagements, about your hobbies, about your friends, about your education, about your career, about your life.
You have to get off your ass and make better decisions because you can't sit in the soft, sticky cobweb hammock Of I've got eternity cooking around in your brain.
So your life gets harder in the short run, but I really genuinely believe it gets much more rewarding in the long run if you, like, the younger that you really get that you're going to die.
And so that, I think, is the big positive of something like that.
And we'd all kind of like to get that philosophically, and in some ways I did.
The very first video I ever did was called Live Like You're Dying.
You know, live like...
You just came back from your deathbed.
So it's been an important part of my thinking for quite a few years.
But when you get that you're going to die, you get dissatisfied with mediocrity.
When you get that you're going to die, you say, this boyfriend or this girlfriend, you know, I don't really love them.
And we're just kind of plodding through day to day.
But I'm going to die.
And wouldn't I like to taste true love before I'm dead?
And you know the friends that maybe you've just hung out with a long time and everything's kind of easy but pretty predictable and nothing's really new and nobody's really encouraging anyone else for excellence or challenge or anything like that.
You say, well, you know, maybe I should start to push the envelope with these relationships a little bit and maybe I should challenge people more or confront people more or be honest with people more and say, you know, guys, I'm kind of bored.
It feels like we just get together and do the same thing all the time, but, you know, we're all getting older and maybe we should do something new.
Maybe we should be more honest.
Maybe we should talk more about our thoughts and feelings and really connect.
And, right, you get bored of the mediocre.
You know, if you go to a bunch of sports games, I mean, I don't know why people over 40 are at sports games.
You know, fundamentally, I mean, watching other people do stuff is not the definition of living.
And I can understand it when you're young, but it just means when you get older, it's like, well, I've already watched sports.
You know, I've already done that.
And there is deeper and richer things that you could be doing.
So it is challenging in the short run when you get the death cloak of mortality streaming across your vision and And blanking out the all-too-distant future wherein, like Magic Johnson, we lob the balls of our ambitions into the net that never is.
And it can be, and I think is, a very powerful feeling, a very powerful liberation, and a very powerful moment that lasts and lasts and lasts when you really ned the grey dust of mortality into your skin.
And so it is not the end of the world if it's not the end of the world.
And it is an illumination if it's not endless darkness.
So I hope that that helps and works for you, Kevin.
And again, please keep us posted on how it's doing and we've got our fingers crossed for you.
Absolutely.
Take care, Kevin.
All right.
Well, up first today is Scott.
Scott wrote in and Scott is actually a brand new father, like brand spanking new, like happened in the parking lot five minutes ago now.
Sweet.
And has some questions about parenting.
He says, Steph often talks about self-knowledge.
How is that defined or manifest in young children?
And how do I know if I'm helping my daughter to develop it?
Great question.
So, Mike, aside, how recent is this all?
Yeah, I mean, our daughter is one week and one day old last Tuesday.
So, yeah, her eyes are open.
Someone's in there.
And, yeah, it's a very, very new first daughter.
So, yeah.
Well, congratulations.
I mean, that's so cool.
Yes, it's really amazing.
I mean, it is night and day.
Like, there's no bigger change in my experience.
So, good for you.
How's the mom doing?
How's the...
She's great.
Yeah, they're both breastfeeding and just enjoying life.
I mean, it really is like the way life is supposed to be, you know, so it's pretty special.
Well, fantastic.
I mean, the question of self-knowledge for children, I think, is a completely fascinating one.
And I think you're, you know, if you don't mind me saying so, wise to ask.
That may be a form of self-praise just because it's so interesting to me, but I think it's very important.
So the first step, of course, is getting the child to verbalize feelings.
I mean, babies have no trouble, but they can't tell you what's going on.
They just tell you something going on, negative or positive, for the most part.
So the first thing is to give the child feeling words.
Do you feel sad?
Do you feel happy?
Do you feel angry?
Do you feel frustrated?
Do you feel...
Bemused resignation.
Actually, that's next year.
But so, you know, be free with your own feelings and model, right?
Everything you want from your children, you model first, right?
And so, if you say, like, I'm angry, I'm frustrated, and so on, then the child learns to associate words or, you know.
So, for me, you know, I sort of thought originally that I just have the emotional state and the child would get it.
And there's some truth in that.
But I think it's important to verbalize your feelings and then you can get the child to verbalize her feelings.
And I think that's sort of step one.
Now, once the child is able to verbalize feelings, the next step is to have the child understand that she can figure out the source of those feelings.
The first step of self-knowledge is knowing you feel something, which is surprisingly difficult for a lot of people.
I feel happy!
Once you get accurate feeling words being expressed, then you get Why do you think you feel that way?
Or what happened?
And why do you think you feel that way?
I've not found helpful because my daughter didn't really understand it.
But when I said, what happened right before?
Or did you feel anything right before?
Or what did your body feel like right before you got frustrated?
Or whatever, right?
Sort of like holding up a mirror sort of thing to the situation.
Yeah, I mean, self-knowledge is...
Knowing your feelings before, well, certainly before you act them out, right?
So, you know, somebody who doesn't have self-knowledge, you know, just notices that they punched someone and then feels angry.
You know, like the emotions are acted out in some ways before that person is even aware of the emotions that they're experiencing.
So the first step, you know, towards self-knowledge is the person knows that they're angry, and the second step is, okay, well, what happened before you got angry?
And then you get Why do you think you got angry, right?
So, you know, I'm angry.
What happened before you got angry?
Well, this.
Okay, well, why do you think that made you angry if it did or whatever?
And getting the why, I think, is important because then you can figure out the triggers.
And then, you know, infants are helpless in the face of their emotions.
I mean, infants are like to emotions as trees are to storms, you know, they bend or they break or they don't, but they're just sort of helpless victims of the turmoil around them.
But when you can identify the source of your emotions and the triggers for your emotions, then comes the most challenging part.
Once the child has said, it happens when this occurs, then you have to give them the purpose of self-knowledge.
Because everybody wants self-knowledge, but nobody wants to act on self-knowledge, right?
So...
Let's say that she's got, I don't know, well, every time this friend is around, I feel anxious, or I feel scared, or I feel jumpy, or I feel nervous.
Well, it's great to know that, but the purpose of self-knowledge is to adjust your environment so that you're not just self-managing.
Sorry, that's a complicated way of putting it.
But, I mean, the purpose of feeling pain when you touch fire is to remove your hand from the fire.
Right, it's a guidance mechanism.
Right.
It's a guidance.
And so, like, if the child says, I feel resentful going to grandma's because I always have to kiss her stubbly cheek and she smells like old peppermints from World War I. Well, so most parents then say, well, basically, too bad you have to kiss her because I'm uncomfortable telling granny she needs breath mints or something, right?
Yes.
And so what that does is it tells the child that knowing the source of your feelings...
It doesn't do any good because nothing will change as a result of that.
And that's when feelings tend to get cut off.
When feelings cannot manifest themselves into changed circumstances, feelings tend to get sort of paralyzed.
And we get enough of that crap in terms of like, well, you've got to go to school.
I don't like school.
It's boring.
Too bad.
We paid the taxes.
You have to go to school.
And there's a sort of example of, well, it's boring and this and that, and then the feelings and the sources Of the feelings can't change the environment.
And the best gift you can give to anyone in the pursuit of self-knowledge is to encourage them or help them.
And of course, in particular, with your own children, to define changes in the environment as a response to the self-knowledge, right?
So, you know, it could be as simple as, are you cranky?
Why do you think you're cranky?
Well, I'm tired.
Well, why do you think you're tired?
Well, I don't think I got enough sleep.
Why didn't you get enough sleep?
Because I went to bed An hour later last night.
And then, okay, so going to bed an hour later makes you cranky.
And then, of course, you have to change that, right?
Or, you know, why don't you want to go visit your uncle?
Well, you know, he's too rough with me.
Okay, well, then you have to, we, or me as the parent when the child is young, I have to go into the uncle and say, listen, you know, my daughter is a bit anxious about your rough play, so you need to tone it down, right?
And that way, the child knows that her feelings will alter her environment.
And that's the purpose.
I mean, why the hell would anyone want self-knowledge if it wasn't to change the environment?
And people have this sort of Buddhistic, you know, go in deep until you can't even hear the echoes of your echoes, and it's all internal, and you just try and come to equanimity and Zen-like feelinglessness about your circumstances.
Right.
And that just seems to me an extraordinary amount of narcissistic bullshit.
I think that the purpose of self-knowledge is to help you change your environment.
It's like saying, okay, you've got to study piano, but you can never touch a piano.
It's like, well, but what?
What sense does that make?
And so, yeah, so those to me are the four steps.
The first is to model the feeling words and give her the feeling words.
The second is to say, what are you feeling now?
And then the third is to say what came before you were feeling self-knowledge.
And then the fourth is, and how is that going to change our environment?
Because so many times we just expect the children to adjust to the environment.
But the moment you demand someone adjust to the environment, you're saying, well, there's no point having self-knowledge.
Because the point of self-knowledge is to use your self-knowledge to adjust your environment.
And there's some adjustment to the self and all that.
I'm not sort of saying...
It's only one way, but that's the major value, and that helps children really understand why self-knowledge is important.
Yeah, I think that's very interesting.
I agree with that, but then what I'm trying to understand then is, I mean, what are the signals if you're getting it right, getting it wrong?
I mean, if my daughter goes I mean,
I wouldn't recommend sending your daughter off to relatives for the weekend without spending extensive time I think we've already been
doing that.
She's only a week old and we've already had...
Words with a relative recently.
It's amazing to me how short a time it takes for people to start becoming passive-aggressive towards an infant.
Someone gave her a nickname that we considered to be sort of passive-aggressive and negative, and we had to have words sort of immediately.
And it's just alarming to me that we have spent so much time planning our behavior for the next few years and planning everything carefully of what we're going to do.
And then it's like...
We really have to forget about social protocol here and be strong with people.
So I've started writing a letter to some of my family who haven't met her yet, like this is what we expect and blah blah blah.
But you really have to have courage and be quite assertive.
So I think already we've noticed that.
Yeah, definitely your first loyalty is to the quality of your child's experience of the world.
And that's the selflessness that people don't really get.
I mean, yeah, so maybe it's uncomfortable for you.
Like Isabella, when she was, I think, maybe two and a half or maybe three, a guy came over.
Who was like basically ooga booga booga, you know, like just pretty intense and could not meet her halfway but attempted to sort of basically invade her neurological system with overstimulation.
Right.
And he had a mustache and holy, I mean, for like a year and a half, she's like, that guy's got a mustache.
You know, I don't know about the guy with a mustache.
And that is – and he's a thoroughly nice guy.
He just obviously has some – A little bit of tension around kids.
I've just suddenly realized how careful you have to be.
It's like the tiniest thing.
You never know how it's going to affect someone.
With me, I always wanted to...
As a parent, you can easily overwhelm your child's body just in terms of stimulation and all of that because they don't have a lot of filters and they're very focused on their surroundings.
So you can go, you know, and get them all kind of riled up and so on.
It's kind of a takeover.
And again, I think that the sort of play and even roughhouse play can get huge amounts of fun.
But you do have to meet the child halfway.
And there are some people who will not meet the child halfway.
In other words, not go halfway and wait for the child to reciprocate, but just kind of keep going until they're sort of nose to nose with the child.
And the child's got their eyes wide and they're basically trying to pee on the person's chest to get them to move back.
Yeah.
Yeah, I mean...
This led me to the second half of my question.
Obviously, you've got your physical environment, but I think a lot of the reason people don't take children's needs first is they think the world is harsh, kids have to learn how harsh the world is.
When I feel like I'm preparing my daughter for society in a way.
It's a hard question to answer.
To what degree do I teach her about cause and effect versus obligation?
I don't like the concept of obligation.
Like you said earlier, I was brought up in the UK as well.
You know, there's a lot of that sort of etiquette, sort of negating the self, you know, we are this, you're not an individual, you know.
Yeah, don't make anyone uncomfortable because there are 80 million of us on a tiny island.
So, right, okay.
Well, that actually leads into...
Oh, sorry, Scott.
I'll just mention, Scott, that leads into your second question, which you wrote down.
It's, should I teach my daughter to say please and thank you?
How does one do that without using the concept of obligation or subjugation?
Right.
Yeah, I mean, we've not had any particular rules about please and thank you, but...
I use please and thank you with my daughter all the time.
And, you know, I mean, I mean, yesterday, we just we had like the most amazing evening.
It was just so much fun.
You know, Jenga blocks and conversations and making silly pictures and stuff.
And, you know, I like I took her to bed and just was cuddling.
And I just said, I said, you know, thank you so much for a wonderful evening.
Like I I don't want to sound like I don't have wonderful evenings all the time, but I mean, this was just great.
You were just so much, so much great company, so much fun.
And, you know, thank you.
You know, thank you for that every day.
And that's, I mean, that's great.
So showing appreciation, I think, is important.
And you obviously don't expect it from babies or even toddlers in particular, but I think when she was about, I think she just turned four And I actually began to get a bit annoyed with her when she was giving me orders, so to speak.
You know, Dad, get me milk.
Now, when she's just learning how to speak, that's cute as dickens, right?
Like, wow, she knows how to ask for milk.
That's amazing!
I was so excited by it.
And I wasn't annoyed at it at all.
But if you trust your own emotions, and if you notice when you start getting annoyed, that's usually a sign that she's ready.
Okay.
And so, you know, I sat her down and I explained to her and I said, look, big difference.
If I tell you to do something, Isabella, pick up your toys.
What do you think?
She's like, don't want to.
But if I said, Isabella, it would be really helpful to me if you could please pick up your toys.
She'd say, well, better, right?
And I said, so it's...
It's different when you ask someone to do something, they're much more likely to want to do it than if you tell someone to do something.
And when you tell someone to do something, they immediately just – instinctually, they just push back because it feels like a very dominant position.
And I said, look, I mean, when we're in a restaurant, I ask the waitress nicely for my food.
I don't say, bring me soup, woman or man, right?
And so helping her to understand – Why should children be polite?
A lot of times it's because the parents feel awkward if they're not.
And that's not a good reason.
Be polite because otherwise mommy or daddy feel uncomfortable.
It's not a good reason.
Because it doesn't teach them anything other than be compliant to anyone who might feel uncomfortable.
Make other people's discomfort go away.
And I don't think that's a very healthy lesson.
Then you just learn to submit to whatever.
Yeah.
And so I said, look, when you say to me, get me milk, you're not asking me You're telling me to do it.
And I said, I didn't mind that when you, in fact, I didn't mind it at all when you were younger.
But now that you're old enough, if you really want me to want to get the milk, then if you say, Daddy, could you please?
Or something like that.
Please is a way of saying, could you do me a favor?
And doing people favors is a lot nicer than obeying their orders.
And so, you know, I appeal to her greed.
Like, you know, you want your friends to do stuff.
You want mommy to do this.
You want daddy to do that.
And the best way for that to happen is to ask.
And we know that's true because if I tell you to do something, you don't want to do it.
So by appealing to her greed, so to speak, by saying this is how you can most beneficially get people to do stuff, then she has an incentive for sustained politeness.
And I think it is a fairly important thing in relationships because politeness signals not being taken for granted.
And the moment that people feel taken for granted, then resentment builds up.
And that's not what you want in your personal relationships, right?
Yeah, I agree with that.
I think it's a sign of respect, but, you know, it's...
It's one of those things that is very fashionable to sort of say there's no rules, do whatever you want.
I think there's a difference between correcting her if she fails to say thank you, please, and just letting her do it.
But no, it's not a correction though.
I'm sorry to interrupt you, but to me it wasn't a correction.
I was just being honest with her.
Saying, look, if you just tell me to get your milk, I really don't want to do it.
I don't mean in your example, I just… Oh, yeah.
Oh, you mean just correcting like, what do we say?
Yeah, exactly.
Like, if I insert the mechanical word please here, it's a magic thing that gets me what I want as opposed to what it means to say please.
I mean, I try never to teach her the form of anything, right?
Because it's important to really understand the why behind it, right?
I mean, you can get any kid to say please, just give him a piece of candy every time they say please.
They walk around saying please all day long.
It's really not that complicated.
It's no more difficult than getting a dolphin to do a flip.
But getting a child to understand what please means and why it works and how it's beneficial to the child and to others.
Do you think that asking the question why all the time is the key to things, or do you think children naturally need to know why, or is it an empathy thing?
I mean, what's your opinion on that?
You mean why kids say why all the time?
No, I mean, the key to being a parent, I think, is to sort of guide rather than sort of push.
From what I can understand at the moment.
And I just wonder if you think they have a natural curiosity to the way things work, or if it's part of empathy.
I mean...
Yeah, I mean, I know a lot of parents have gone through this, you know, it's 20 whys a minute.
You know, why, why, why, why, why?
Yeah.
My daughter never went through that.
I mean, she's got a lot of curiosity.
We talk about a lot of different things.
You know, like yesterday, she's just asked me, well, who do you think the meanest man in the world is, or ever was?
You know, Okay.
But she never went through a why, why, why, why, why phase.
I think that that, in my opinion, happens because children are skeptical and don't believe the reasons they're being given.
Okay.
So it's a form of resistance in a way.
Well, why?
Why do I have to do this?
Or why is that important?
And I think they feel that they're not being given answers that are honest.
That's interesting, yeah.
And I think then where you don't get an honest answer, you tend to keep asking the question.
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense, yeah.
And I've always found that the best way to satisfy curiosity is just with sort of relentless honesty, even if it feels weird.
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, I think I've gone down that road for myself the last couple of years, and this is why it's strange for me now, because since I met my wife four years ago, we've been married a year.
It's one of those things, we have a great relationship, we make each other better, and that's discovering self-knowledge for me.
Your shows as well, I've been following for a couple of years, and this is all new to me.
And sort of every example you've said tonight, it's all sort of happened to me in my childhood.
It's like textbook irrationality.
And it's new to me.
It's like I've only really been sort of living consciously on purpose for a couple of years.
You know what I mean?
Right.
It's exciting.
It's great.
I mean, but it's hard.
And just so you know, although he doesn't sound excited, he is from England.
Scotland.
Get it right.
So Scotland.
So Scotland, basically he just had an orgasm on the air.
You just wouldn't even have a clue.
Just think groundskeeper Willie.
There you go.
Yeah, yeah, there you go.
Just think, but without the yelling.
Actually, no, there are a couple of emotions that are acceptable in Scotland.
I think the most important emotion that's acceptable in Scotland is a giant flashing pain up your right arm as you have a heart attack at 45 from too much haggis.
That's my, I think, the most common sensation that's accepted in Scotland.
Yeah.
Well, was there anything else that you wanted to ask?
Obviously, feel free to call back in any time.
I mean, but these are certainly great questions.
And I just wanted to compliment you and your wife on the approach that you're going to be taking.
I think it's going to be, I mean, it's fantastic.
So exciting.
No, I mean, just thanks for, I mean, I've been donating for a while.
And just thanks for having the shows have been very helpful.
I take, I work away and I take the podcasts with me and everything.
And it's a good, good sort of compass.
So thanks.
Keep it up.
Well, thank you for your support of the show and for fantastic questions.
And best of luck over the next little while.
It's a wonderful time.
I look back on it with enormous fondness, the early days.
All right.
Thank you very much.
And nexty, nexty, next one.
Next, Phil.
All right.
Up next is our friend Max, who we met down in Texas at the Texas Bitcoin Conference.
He wants to call you out on your white knighting stuff.
So brace yourself.
Wait, first of all, for those who've not met Max, Max is actually named for his height.
I actually just thought he was two giant nostrils when I first met him.
I couldn't quite figure out why I was being followed by two red voids.
But he is a tall guy, is basically what I'm saying.
Max wrote in and said, there's no doubt monogamy is a higher cost on men in general as we're built to spread our seed and women are built to be selective.
To not acknowledge that fact is white knighting.
Further, to teach women to be humiliated to find out the true nature of man is the opposite of real-time relationships.
It makes it hard for her to hear his feelings and preferences and teaches her she should feel not worthy and insecure when a man's natural feelings are finally revealed to her after her father was forced to hide his true self from her mother because she felt so hurt to hear it.
The cycle goes round.
This was in reference to that sex at dawn polyamory conversation from a couple weeks back.
That we had on the show.
Right.
All right.
I'm open, wide open to hearing...
You've got the body armor strapped on, Steph?
You ready for this?
Yeah, yeah.
No, no.
Take the body armor off.
You know, give me a flesh wound of healing.
I'm not sure I follow.
If we could just not talk with reference to that conversation just because, you know, a lot of people may not have heard it or whatever, but...
No problem.
So I'm white knighting in what way again?
Okay, so this comes as a general concern I have, an experience that my wife and I went through pretty much as a result from reading real-time relationships.
I should mention that we're not polyamorous.
I've never been in a polyamorous relationship.
I'm not advocating polyamorous relationships or open relationships.
Not left and right hand when you were a teenager, like you just stuck to one?
Exactly.
Okay, got it, got it.
But yeah, so in kind of going through the feelings of real-time open relationships, it kind of dawned on me late.
I'm embarrassed to say.
It's like I was 30 years old or so.
And I was like, you know what?
I got told that when I fell in love with a woman – I don't know if I was ever told explicitly, but I got told when I fell in love with a woman – I would only want to have sex with them and I'd be all happy about monogamy and those kinds of things.
And having fallen in love with a woman, I now know that to be not true.
And I still have those desires and those urges and I felt some guilt about it for a time.
And then I even started to doubt myself.
Wow, do I really love this woman or am I in the wrong?
Wow, this is scary.
And I got past all that pretty quickly because I know I absolutely do.
And I realized that why have I been programmed to hide this?
Why have I been programmed to not to hide my true self and to even be surprised by myself when I found that woman and was in love with her?
And I kind of tracked it all back and went through it.
And I realized that I believe I've observed this cycle in that women are generally told or expected to, because they are who they are.
They're generally selective about sexual partners.
They know their feelings and unless it's revealed to them the nature of man early in life, they go through their entire formative years in early dating with the expectation that a man is not going to look at members of the opposite sex with lustful eyes in the same way that they don't look with lustful eyes.
And it hurts their feelings once they become young women to find out the true nature of man.
And I just think it's kind of – it's sad that they should feel – they should get – they should be humiliated was the word you used on that call that – to find that out about man and to find out that they should start thinking that they're not worthy because a man feels that.
I think – sorry, I'll reference that call again.
But I think it was a Paul Newman quote you used and you said, you know, why go out for a burger when I've got steak at home?
And it's like, well, that's not kind of fair.
Even the analogy doesn't hold because I'm sure Paul Newman, like everybody else, has had burger in their time.
Even though there's steak aplenty, variety is valuable.
And in the world of the sexual arena, variety is especially valuable to men.
And it's just sad that women find that out late.
And it's even sad for guys to find that out late too.
What are your thoughts about that?
Well, I mean, it's very interesting, the stuff that you're talking about.
I mean...
So, for those who haven't got that sort of under their belt, very, very briefly, women have to be much more choosy because they have to put much more into raising a child, right?
I mean, just in terms of pregnancy and childbirth and breastfeeding and so on.
And so, women have to be a lot more choosy about a mate.
And men proportionately put much less into creating a child, right?
I mean, it's like, you know, eight and a half minutes and then falling asleep so the woman can't breathe.
And so women have to be much more picky and men, in general, as a whole, tend to benefit from a different reproductive strategy, right?
Yeah, well, there's also another important point there.
As you mentioned, we're kind of photocopying machines and we'd like to reproduce as much as possible.
A woman can only be impregnated by one man at a time.
So that's another reason why she's selective for the genes.
Whereas a man can impregnate many women at a time, therefore there's no need for him to be selective.
Right, right, right, right.
Now, that having been said, there are factors, I think, which stimulate...
A man's reproductive strategy around sort of spray and pray, so to speak, because this is not the case all over the world.
There are different cultures which have different reproductive strategies.
So in Japan, it tends to be one kind of strategy.
Say, in parts of Africa, it tends to be another kind of strategy.
So, there is, and I'm trying to remember, Mike, maybe if you can just look this up for me, it's something like K1 or R1 reproductive strategies.
And I'm going to just touch on this very briefly, but the reason I think it's important is that not all men are the same with regards to reproductive strategies.
Yeah, I'm sure there's variations there, yeah.
There's variations.
So, basically, there's two poles of reproductive strategies.
One is To spray and pray, right?
You just, you have enormous numbers of eggs and sperm and you just basically, a few of them will survive, right?
Like, I mean, how many tadpoles survive to being an adult frog?
I don't know, like one in a hundred or something like that.
And, you know, sea turtles lay like crazy numbers of eggs and then like one grows to be an adult.
And that's sort of one strategy.
And it tends to be, you could say, more primitive or whatever, lower on the evolutionary chain.
And then there's another strategy which is heavy investment in children.
And so you have few children and you invest massive amounts of resources into them and that's – right?
So if you look at a human being versus a frog, I mean it's obviously very different, right?
I mean frogs don't even know who their kids are.
Right.
And so if, in my, this is sort of my theorizing, those things I think are fairly clear biological facts, but in my way of looking at it, it has to do with whether there are, it's K and R selection, K and R selection.
And Mike, if you find a good paragraph about that, feel free to break in in the next pause and give a slightly better explanation than I'm giving.
It's in your window right now, if you'd like to take a screen.
Oh!
Oh, it's in my window, but not my I have eyes under 40 window.
I can read it if you want.
Okay, I got it.
Our selection.
So as the name implies, our selected species are those that place an emphasis on a high growth rate and typically exploit less crowded ecological niches and produce many offspring, each of which has a relatively low probability of surviving to adulthood.
High R, low K. By contrast, K-selected species display traits associated with living at densities close to carrying capacity and typically are strong competitors in such crowded niches that invest more heavily in fewer offspring, each of which has a relatively high probability of surviving to adulthood.
Low R, high K. In scientific literature, R-selected species are occasionally referred to as opportunistic, whereas K-selected species are described as equilibrium.
Now, human males...
Go along this spectrum as well.
Because in various cultures, there is a higher likelihood of male investment and involvement in raising offspring.
It can even translate into the degree to which, in various societies, women have eggs that can split.
It changes depending on where you go in the world.
So if a man is brought up in a Case selected, right?
In heavy investment, slow growth, fewer offspring.
If a man is raised in that environment, then he will lean much more towards that emotionally, culturally, and so on.
We have the capacity.
This is the amazing thing about us as a species.
It's not just us, but I think it really reaches its culmination in us, is that we can adapt on the fly.
We don't need genetics because we have epigenetics.
We have social adaptability and so on, right?
I mean, if local customs were like temperature, we couldn't adjust.
Like, you can't take a frog and throw it in the Arctic and have it thrive, and you can't take a polar pair and put it in the equator and have it thrive.
But you can take a child and have it raised in just about any culture, and it's going to adapt and survive.
So, human males go along the spectrum from heavy, and it's not just biologically, but also culturally, heavy K and heavy R selection, right?
I don't think that it's necessarily true of the nature of man to be – well, men are selected and women are K-selected.
I think that it depends a lot on the kind of culture that you're brought up in.
Men in general also will adapt to what women want.
That's sort of the nature of the beast given the disparate investment in offspring.
So I think if a man is raised – In a heavy case-selected and investment-selected environment, and that's what women want, I think that's more like it was going to be.
Now, the question to come back to you is, do you think that you had, Max, in your upbringing, any social cues that may have made you more R-selected, in other words, quote, indiscriminate, and less case-selected?
There's a couple of different aspects to that.
I'll just back up one step if I can, just to share some thoughts on that.
I have kind of heard of that aspect before, and I have no doubt across the male species there is that kind of trend.
Hang on, I've lost my thought.
From one perspective...
It only really matters in the generalization between men and women for the purposes of this conversation, I think, that if you take the median man and the median woman in these spectrums, if there's a higher cost to monogamy, let's say, for the median man versus the median woman, then that would just be useful for both genders to know about up front about their own natures.
The other thing I wanted to mention is that I've heard the argument that sometimes it's to do with physiology.
So I've heard this argument, and I have no idea if it's true.
But in one of the books I've read, it suggested that the size of the man's testicles actually changes this, because the larger the testicles, the more sperm he creates.
And when he has sex with a woman, if he puts too much sperm in her, it actually becomes so acidic in there that she becomes infertile from that particular session of sex.
Whereas Wait a second.
I'm sorry to interrupt your thought.
It sounds like you're describing some evil superhero.
Acid sperm!
I shake your hand.
It melts with my fertility.
I just sort of wanted to.
I had to get that out of my head.
Giant ball man.
I walk through walls because I'm crawling with acidic sperm.
I am so fertile, I kill all that I come in contact with.
It's an odd definition of fertility, but okay.
I think it's out of my system, so...
Okay, good.
Giant ball man.
He's done.
We've dealt with him.
Rolling into town!
Right.
Yeah, so I'm not sure if it's true or not, but this argument is that big balls, lots of sperm, too acidic for the female, and actually it's beneficial to that man's reproductive likelihood if that woman actually has sperm from another man inside of her, because the sperms attack each other and kill out, and the acidity goes down.
And as you know, I'm sure you know, the foreskin is partially developed to hoover out Another man's sperm from the vagina, right?
Yes, yes.
So there's an interesting thing, the idea of where you fit on the spectrum of, sorry, was it R and K? There can be two aspects there.
One, there can be a physiology thing, and I'm not sure if it's true or not.
I just heard that once.
And I've just heard this other aspect, which you're suggesting is it's more cultural or upbringing.
I don't know about more.
I'm just saying that there is a factor, and so not all men.
So why is it that boys raised without Fathers tend to be promiscuous, and why is it the girls raised without fathers tend to be promiscuous?
Because not having a father around clearly delineates R as the...
Reproductive strategy.
Why?
Because there's no dad.
So clearly, parental investment is not where you're going, so promiscuity is the key.
Whereas if you have a stable father around, that signals to the offspring that you're in a case-election environment, and therefore, you're going to have sex later, you're going to have sex protected, you're not going to have kids you can't afford, you know, all that kind of stuff.
It certainly could be that.
I could give you, and I don't know if it's true or not, but I could give you another argument that it could be something else as well.
Go on.
I'll go on.
Well, I mean, it could, in the environments where dad's not there, there is probably the scenario where, well, this could be a scenario where, you know, either mother, well, a dad may have cheated and that's why the family was broken, or it could be that certainly mother might be telling the children, male or female, that, you know, this is what to expect from life.
You know, men run off and men cheat and they go everywhere or whatever else, and maybe that's the factor why.
I don't know.
No, but that's still – that's another way.
Basically, we're both saying the same thing, right?
So if there's a strong tendency for men to cheat, then they're doing our selection.
And if the mom is saying, well, men just – they'll have sex with you and they'll leave, what she's saying is we have our selected men around, not K-selected men or K-selecting men, sorry.
Yeah, well, there's the manifestation of the cheat.
But the question is, let's say in that held together environment, the mother and father are still together, there was never any cheating and that's how they were raised in a monogamous relationship.
Is it that the nature of the man has changed, or is it the man, the little boy, and the little girl just grew up with the expectation that you're going to conform to this culture?
And that's something that's a pretty important distinction to know whether or not the nature has changed or whether or not you've just become accustomed that the little boy grew up.
No, no, but it's not just culture.
I'm sorry.
It's not just culture.
So women – I'm sorry.
Girls who don't have a father around hit puberty sooner than girls who do have a father around.
That's interesting.
Right?
Their bodies, their hormones, their entire reproductive system is aligning itself to R-selected rather than K-selected because the entire physiology is getting the guy not around R-selected.
So they're like, well, if we're doing spray and pray, I guess I better hit puberty earlier, right?
Like, it's more than just what's going on in the mind.
The entire body reacts differently.
And I think we'll find lots more as this sort of human genome project continues.
We'll find lots more genetic changes that occur to adapt a body to R-selected rather than K-selected based upon The familial and social and cultural cues around.
But it literally changes the body.
Yes, that's really interesting.
We are incredibly adaptive people, are we not?
Oh, we are.
This is why when people talk to me about human nature, I'm like, God, go read some biology.
Don't give me this human nature at all.
I mean, it's nonsense.
Let's go back to the point of...
Does it matter?
Or are you suggesting that, let me think of how I want to phrase this, but I would suggest that there is a, whether, either way, given the same environments or whatever else, there is more of a feeling in men to want to be not monogamous compared to women.
I think that's true in the general world.
Maybe the origins are what we've been talking about here.
Does it really matter in terms of those real-time relationships and man being able to share those feelings with his wife without her feeling humiliated or betrayed or something just because being found out that that's his nature?
Well, you know, it's a tough call.
I don't have any big answers to this.
There's something I read many, many years ago.
Okay, so tiny bit of background.
So I grew up in this fairly crappy little estate.
Estate is the wrong word because it makes me sound like Downton Abbey.
But in this little apartment in London.
And in the basement, we found like giant stacks.
Somebody was throwing them out.
Giant stacks of Reader's Digest.
Reader's Digest had a huge influence on me when I was growing up.
I learned a lot from Reader's Digest.
And...
How dramatic real life can be?
How much laughter is the best medicine and what life is like in uniform?
Things like that.
But one of the things that I remember was, you know, a question of honesty, right?
And this is dating the entire magazine or I guess whatever it was, magazine.
And the question was, you know, you're sitting in the chair and you're thinking how great Raquel Welch looks.
In a bikini, right?
You'll have to look her up.
I mean, she did look pretty spectacular.
She's a hottie.
Yeah, no, I just mean for other people who only know her as the wizened love interest of wizened guys in movies.
Now, if your wife comes up to you and says, what are you thinking?
Do you say...
I'm thinking of how incredible Raquel Welch looks in a bikini.
It's an interesting question.
What do you think?
What's the or?
Do I say that or what?
I'm thinking about how much my life has been enriched by knowing you.
Now blow me!
I don't know.
I don't know the answer to that question.
I mean, yeah, this is like one of the really, like when it comes to real-time relationships, and it's just such a fantastic book, by the way.
Thank you.
And it's helped my relationships considerably.
I mean, there's a whole bunch of questions down this line.
It's like, you know, your wife is eight months pregnant, as mine is right now, and she looks at me and says, do you find me sexy?
It's like, what do you say to that?
There's all these, how truthful do you get in these real-time relationships on truth?
Well, but I would say that, I mean, a sensible woman, you know, and I apologize if this goes against sort of what your wife has been saying or whatever, but, you know, in my opinion, a sensible woman would not ask that question.
Yes, and I have a sensible wife, fortunately.
No, listen, I mean, if I show a picture of myself at 18, you know, with smooth, clear, beautiful skin, weighing a trim, 180 pounds of...
Water polo, long distance running, and swimming team muscle, and say, do I look better now or when I was 18?
Then I'm an idiot for asking that question, right?
Of course I look better now.
Who could doubt it?
Well, actually, I did until YouTube went beyond 240p, and then I would jump forward and age about 400 years.
So, of course I looked better when I was 18 than I look now.
I mean...
That would be insane to think otherwise, right?
Right.
And so, of course, a woman, I mean, unless you have some bizarre bowling ball fetish and just, like, get really turned on by tiny bladders and back pain, I mean, of course a woman's not going to say, am I sexier now that I have a giant ball of life hanging off my spine?
I mean, yeah, of course not, right?
So, I mean, I don't think a sensible woman would ask that.
And to me, the question that I would really want to know if my wife asked me that, she didn't.
But if my wife asked me that, I'd say, what are you getting at here?
Right.
Like, no, why is this important to you?
What are you feeling insecure?
Are you feeling right?
And so, you know, you remind your wife how beautiful she is and pregnant women are beautiful.
Right.
So, you know, to get to the real issue.
Now, if you find yourself constantly fantasizing about Kim Kardashian and a vat of butter, then, you know, you might have something to examine within yourself.
I asked you not to talk about that on air, Steph.
You promised me.
No.
You said don't demonstrate it on air.
Oh, right.
Would you have the webcam going?
With my handball and somewhat hairy cleavage.
But...
Kim Karstevian.
Worst and least well-received sex tape ever was me with that watermelon.
Anyway, so the fact that, I don't know, people in marriages occasionally think – like thoughts of attraction to other women or other men.
I mean it happens for women too.
I mean I don't know.
That's – Isn't that so taken for granted that you just wouldn't even talk about it?
It's not like there's some mystery, horrible dishonesty that's going on.
It's an interesting question, and I don't know the degree to which you would or wouldn't talk about that.
It's never really come up in my marriage.
Well, it's never come up in my marriage, so that's all right.
That's the catch.
It is, and it isn't understood.
I'll give you an example.
You can imagine a group of girlfriends sitting around, and the husband's birthday is coming up, and one of the girlfriends says...
Wait, hang on, hang on.
Are they practicing French kissing?
No.
They're just at lunch.
Okay, I will try to keep paying attention, but...
I'm just telling you that's a black mark against it for me.
Go ahead.
A group of women sitting around.
One of the women says, my husband's birthday is coming up.
What should I get in?
One girl says, why don't you go and invite another girl into the relationship and give him a threesome.
I bet he'd love that.
Wife rolls her eyes and says, oh, yes, of course.
I bet he would.
Joke laugh.
No problem.
It's completely understood that he likes it, but that's a joke, right?
Wait, wait, Max.
I mean, outside of a porn movie, have you ever heard a woman say that?
They weren't saying it seriously.
It's a joke.
The point is it could be said, and the woman's reaction would be, roll eyes, yeah, I bet he'd love that.
That's never going to happen.
Move on.
They accept that the guy's like that.
Of course he'd love that.
That's not going to happen.
Let's talk about a new hammer.
So now, let's say the guy trying to attempt real-time relationships, she says, what do you want for your birthday?
He says exactly the same thing.
Does he get rolled eyes now?
No.
He gets...
I can't believe you'd say that.
How hurtful is it that you would say that?
That's humiliating that you've just said that.
I'm like, well, hang on a minute.
You accept that this is my nature.
No, no, no, no.
Hang on, hang on.
Because, look, a threesome is a very different thing from thinking about how great Raquel Welsh looks in a bikini.
Like, an actual threesome is very different.
Like, it's...
I mean, to use an inelegant analogy, like if I tell my wife I'd like to go and play some, like I'd go to learn some karate, or however you pronounce it.
I always feel like pretentious, like I'm Ross from Friends or something.
But let's say I want to go learn some jujitsu, right?
And she's like, it's a sport and, you know, exercise and health and all that.
Oh, yes, I remember what I said.
And then I say, I want to go and beat up people.
Those are two very different things.
Yeah, I'm not comparing what they said compared to the Raquel Welsh scenario.
I'm saying that the girlfriend sitting in the group of girls talking about what to get the husband for his birthday said it and elicited one response.
And the guy said exactly the same thing and elicited a totally different response.
No, no, but the women were joking.
No, I mean, the point is, in the example, she rolled her eyes and she recognized that, yeah, my husband would love that.
I get that.
I understand that about him.
I get it.
When the guy says, you're right, I would love that.
I'm not expecting it.
I'm just saying, I would love that.
Some women, not all women, but they would feel, they would have hurt feelings.
And that's what I'm talking about.
Well, wait, wait, wait a minute.
Are you saying, wait, Max, are you saying that if your wife said, If you could order me up one David Beckham to join us Saturday night, that would be thrilling for me that you wouldn't be upset and offended?
I mean, depending in context.
Well, Ayo would be surprised because I don't think that that's necessarily what she wants.
And we have conversations like that and she doesn't actually go down that path.
Oh, man.
Do not underestimate the degree to which women can get their kink on.
Oh, no.
And I agree.
I mean, just read some of women's erotica.
And it's like, oh my god.
I mean, women have got some serious humpback freak camels dragging them across the sex desert.
I'm telling you.
I'm just – in my experience and thoughts, I mean, there's some left turns at Albuquerque.
No, I get it.
I get it.
I certainly didn't marry someone.
I don't even know what it is.
Victorian is the word I think I've heard you use once before.
Yes, no, I get that.
I totally get that.
But I'm just, you know, do you disagree with my point that there's this, in answer to your questions, it's kind of accepted, like people kind of know that, you know, I'm saying it is known and it is unknown.
It's known that, yes, I get that, you know, some women might think, I get that my husband would want that.
However, it's also kind of accepted that he's not to even bring it up.
He's not to act upon it.
He's not to reveal it to me.
His job is to hide that from me.
And that's the part that I have the issue with.
But I think that if a man really wants a threesome, that is an indication that there's a problem with the relationship.
I mean, not like I find the idea sexy in an abstract way, right?
But I mean, if he genuinely like, God, I can't wait.
You know, Jane Fonda wrote about this, that when she was younger, she was dating some French director and had threesomes, and it was just gross and horrible.
And again, I'm just...
From what I've read and what I've heard, people who've sort of gone through it just find it kind of tawdry and messy and all that.
So if you really, really do want to have sex with someone alongside your wife or your husband, I think that is something to talk about.
Do you know what I mean?
No, I totally get what you mean.
I totally get what you mean.
And I'll definitely meet you halfway and I'll say that as opposed to, it's kind of like, I want the chocolate bar, but I recognize that I shouldn't have it because I'm going to get diabetes.
I want a chocolate bar every day.
I recognize I'm going to get diabetes, so I choose not to.
But just acknowledging the desire.
Not even suggesting that it be done, just acknowledging the desire.
Again, just wanting to be known and understood and have your partner into your mind and understand all of your thoughts and desires.
Not necessarily suggesting you take action on it.
I don't think I can even calculate the amount of dollars that I would pay to not have a threesome.
Like, I don't think there's enough money in the world.
Like, I guess I would just, oh my god.
I mean, that just, to me, would be a nightmare.
Like, again, I can understand in an abstract, you know, particular reproductive strategy kind of way, it's like, eh.
But, oh man, I just...
I mean, it's an odd thing to talk about, but it's like, there's just no amount of money in the world that's high enough that I wouldn't pay to not have that.
I mean, so...
I think if a man is really like, God, if I don't have a threesome before I'm dead, I just haven't lived.
I think that maybe a person who entered into a monogamous relationship, a tad prematurely.
Right.
Yeah, let me cut to the end here and I'll share an experience that my wife and I are not a sexual one.
It's a conversation.
And it really, really helped me.
And even though there was some kind of a growth process to go through, it definitely was hurtful for a time, but I think our relationships are much better on the other side of it.
And that is that I think I was coming from the perspective of, and she was coming from the perspective of, and that all goes back to our parents and upbringing, is that I kind of disagree with you a little bit.
I think it's more of a natural feeling for a guy to have that desire, not necessarily do all the equations and think that it's actually worth it, but just have the desire, then women, right?
And I think that it's kind of like to be acknowledged that this is a – it's more of a gift.
It's a bigger gift that a man gives a woman than it is a gift that a woman gives a man, that of monogamy.
Because – and when – and so anyway, when we're having this conversation and thrashing it out, at the end of it, Rather than, like, how dare you?
You're childish.
You're immature.
You're stupid.
You're going through a phase.
Don't ever bring that up again.
You're just wrong.
When it was seen as, you know what?
I kind of get that men are different than guys.
I understand that they want more sexual variety than women.
I get that.
And I really appreciate you because you are giving me a gift that I certainly, like, it's a much higher cost on you than the same gift that I'm giving you.
And I really appreciate that.
And it made it so much better.
I was so much more joyful in giving that gift when it was seen as a gift as opposed to being told I'm childish and stupid for being a man who's – that kind of angle.
So in aggregate, it's harder for men to be monogamous so they're bestowing more of a gift?
Yes, I think so.
Right.
So like I mean it's less pleasant to carry a baby than not carry a baby?
And so the gift that the woman gives is bearing the baby, giving birth to the baby, breastfeeding and all that.
So that's a gift that the woman gives the man, which is one-sided.
And then the gift that the man gives the woman is monogamy.
And again, one is binary and one is not.
Exactly.
In the same way that I thank her for carrying a baby and doing all those things, she thanks me for monogamy.
And it makes it so much easier to give that gift.
It makes it so much easier for me.
And I'm sure it makes it easier for her to, not that she had the choice, but it makes it more joyful for her to carry our baby, knowing that I'm so appreciative of that fact and all those changes that are going through her body, she appreciates that I appreciate it.
And it made it a lot better for us.
And that original call, the fact that most men can't talk about this with their wives because they'll feel humiliated or they'll feel like burger instead of steak.
I think that women sell themselves short because it doesn't mean that.
It doesn't mean that you're not enough or you're not good enough.
It just means that, as a generalization, men like variety in this realm, and you should never think of yourself any less.
I think the fact that women don't get this early on, and I think most husbands and wives don't convey this to their children, whether that's a good thing or a bad thing, I don't know.
I think that, sadly, a young girl will get to the age of 16, 17, whatever, start dating, Yeah,
and I take it personally, men are basically just biological creatures with testicles for eyeballs.
Exactly.
And, yeah, no, I mean, I think that's a good point.
I mean, I can't for the life of me imagine why mirrored sunglasses were invented except for that very point that you can rotate your eyeballs around like some sort of sea slug without getting the ire of your date up.
And, yeah, I mean, like it or not, men are scanning for attractive females, fertile females.
I mean, that's the gig.
Now, again, I was raised – In a very spray-and-pray reproductive environment.
You know, no dad around and no dads around at all.
So, you know, I was not...
So, I sort of recognized that for me, monogamy was not something that I was particularly selected for.
I mean, I love it now, but that was quite different.
But I was very much...
Like spray and pay rather than for K.
Now I've moved over to K because you can do all of these things with correct self-knowledge and love and all that.
But yeah, I think there is in general this demonization of men as a whole in society.
And there is this – along with that comes the demonization of male sexuality.
And I think it's tragic.
I think the degree to which gender sexuality is not respected for what it brings to the table, on the table, over the table.
Anyway, I think that for either gender, the idea that – the stereotype of female sexuality that it's about – Connection and candle lights and staring into each other's eyes and gentle rhythms and all that kind of stuff.
Whereas male is like, you know, porn lighting and hammering and, you know, that sort of stuff.
And cold and...
I just think that's sad all the way around.
I think that anything that sets agendas against each other or promotes skepticism or cynicism or a negative view of the other gender as a whole is really, really tragic.
I mean, we were...
Designed to be more than just physically compatible.
And given that in the modern world, the heavy investment, the K reproductive strategy is the way to succeed as a whole.
And given that that requires a very strong pair bond between the husband and the wife, anything which undermines that pair bond Promotes the state.
I mean, tragically.
And this is why leftists tend to promote that which disrupts the pair bonding of human beings.
Because a government is heavily necessary, is heavily necessary in our selected environmental strategy, a reproductive strategy.
So the spray and pray requires the government.
Because we as a species don't do much until we're like at least 15 people.
I mean, which is crazy late, right?
I mean, horses can be born walking.
We take like a year.
A chimpanzee is fully independent at 10 months.
I went into all this in a recent show.
So when you have a – are selected, right?
There's a spray and prey selected species.
You have to grow the state because human children can't be birthed like tadpoles because you just – you need so many resources for each child.
So if you want to grow the state, you attack the pair bonding of human beings because then people have kids they can't afford and nobody wants to see kids starving.
And the image of, well, we're going to take this child away from this irresponsible mother who has no one around to give her resources and give that child to a responsible couple who want kids or is infertile or something – Well, that, you know, it tugs at the heartstrings and is considered horrible punishment and the woman's sobbing and this and that and the other.
The child is, oh, mommy, I won't be bad or, you know, whatever happens, right?
I mean, it used to be the case that women would just give the child up for adoption if they had a child that they couldn't afford.
And that limited that.
And then there was, you know, ostracism and so on.
And your reputation was ruined and good men probably or might not want to marry you.
You'd have to move away or something.
I've got a podcast coming out, The Philosophy of Downton Abbey, which is really along those lines.
And so if you want to grow the state, if you want to put situations in place that require massive growth in the size and power of the state and the redistributionist system, then all you need to do is hack at the bonds that unite the Husband and wife and just wait for the inevitable fallout.
The tragedy is how, gosh, many, many years ago I read a book, a series of books called The Thomas Covenant Chronicles by Stephen R. Donaldson.
And in it, there was just this doom-like sense.
It was a fantasy novel.
And there's a doom-like sense of how hard it is to build things that are beautiful and how easy it is to destroy them.
You know, like how many...
Billions of years of evolution is required to produce a beautiful meadow.
How many matches in a dry season are required to burn it down?
Well, one.
It's so much easier to destroy than it is to create.
And the pair-bonding case selection strategy that evolved for thousands and thousands and thousands of years for humanity has basically been more than half-torched in 50 years.
So the rise of feminism, the rise of the welfare state, the rise of contempt for men, you know, and all that.
I mean, this hacking at the roots of the pair bonding of the species is such a fundamental driver for statism.
It comes from the left, and this is why people on the right who want smaller government are sort of defending the nuclear family, and people who are on the left who are...
Wanting to grow the government are hacking away at the family in a variety of ways.
And selling sex, right?
I mean, people on the right don't sell sex.
People on the left sell sex.
And most young men will just follow the sex and whatever ideological crap I have to spout is whatever I'll have to spout in order to get sex, right?
So, you know, if you can get enough women in college...
To believe all of this gender stuff and feminism stuff and especially the radical stuff, then men are like, okay, well, that's what I need to say in order to get access to sex, so that's what I'll say.
And it is a horrible virus.
When you get rid of the big rules, you don't get no rules.
You get an infinity of tiny rules that just go on forever and ever and strangle the human condition.
And so it has been a fairly conscious policy of the left to attack the nuclear family.
And one of the things that I think is important is to recognize that if you are going to pursue our selected reproductive strategies, you're going to end up with totalitarianism.
But that's just the way it works because if you have a nuclear family, you have far less crime.
You have far less dysfunction.
You have far less single motherhood.
You have all of these great things that produce a stable society which can get by on a minimal or ideally no government.
But if you are going to have a society that pursues these R-selected reproductive strategies, it's going to be a complete catastrophe.
And so for me, one of the things that I needed to do And this was not, you know, this is a fairly conscious process for me, Max.
But one of the things I really needed to do was these R versus K reproductive strategies are literally brain viruses.
And they're not just brain viruses, but they adjust your entire system.
And so for me, I had to get away from the R selected tribe.
I had to get away from the R-selected tribe, from the spray and pray tribe, which is the tribe I grew up with.
And I had to get to the K-selected tribe.
Because these two are, in a weird way, they're kind of like mortal enemies.
Because if one tends to displace the other, and the spray and pray reproduces pair-bonded monogamy, it displaces that.
Through state power and through propaganda.
You know, like all the families that are the white picket fence and the leave it to beaver and all of that.
I mean, how many people sneer at that and think that that's just pitiful and petty and ridiculous and embarrassing and bourgeoisie and blind and stupid and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
I mean, the amount of hostile propaganda that I had both growing up, which was a lot of sour grapes from the Destroyed families of the 70s.
And also then through high school and through college and even undergraduate school, you know, women are oppressed and men are patriarchs.
It just messes up the whole natural affinity and compatibility between men and women.
And I had to get away from that tribe.
I had to get away from that spray-and-pray tribe because...
They are relentless, and they are the source of our growing tyranny in many ways.
I mean, it's a circle, right?
I mean, there's propaganda, there's culture, there's anti-religiosity, which then enables this, and then they vote, and the politicians pander to them, and as soon as the spray-and-pray crowd get enough momentum, then they start taking over society.
People appeal to them and so on.
And they have a lot to lose, right?
I mean, if the government gets smaller, what the hell do I lose?
Not much.
In fact, I'm going to gain.
But if the government gets smaller, holy, the R-selected crowd, like the spray and pray crowd, they're kind of doomed.
So they get pretty ferocious.
And it is win-lose.
It is win-lose.
Sorry, go ahead.
I'm not competent to ask.
I've neither experienced nor read on the topic of open relationships or so, so I'm certainly not advocating it, and I'm probably in your camp.
I think the pair bonding is certainly what I'm most experienced with.
The pair bonding child rearing is what I'm most experienced with and makes sense to me.
But I just want to be cautious about strawmanning that and during the false dichotomy of either it's either spray and pray or it's monogamous pair bonding.
I'm only guessing that the Pollyann crew would suggest that there are loving relationships where there might be To me,
it's not a bell curve with everyone in the middle.
To me, it's a double bell curve.
And, you know, like Sofia Vergara lying on her back, or front, I guess.
Anyway, so it is a continuum, but, you know, I would really be interested in knowing, and people, you know, give me the data on this.
I mean, from what I've seen, from what I've read, it's scarcely exhaustive.
But I can't think of an R-selected strategy society that is not hierarchical.
And I can't think of a case-elected society that's not less hierarchical.
And I also can't think of a way in which it doesn't move together, right?
So as fatherhood, as pair bonding has gone down, government has gone up.
And as government has gone up, pair bonding has gone down.
It's a sort of vicious cycle.
I probably agree with you if you just phrase it slightly differently to loving parental environment versus non-lovel parental environment.
But again, I'm assuming the Polyam crew would argue that two or three or four loving parents in a stable home could be even more advantageous than just two.
Well, okay, so you can't have that many loving parents.
Because parents is a biological relationship, right?
So you can't have four parents unless you've got some weird gene-splicing thing going on, right?
You've got two parents.
I totally agree, from a biological level, and I don't really know the stats on this either.
I'm getting this from something I heard you say, is that if, you know, adoptive parents are, children work out reasonably as well as biological parents, certainly a lot better than, you know, raising them in single-parent homes.
So, again, maybe, I'm not really out for their camp, but I'm just saying perhaps the polyam argument might be that they're actually, although you can't have biological parents, but you can have parental figures, more than two, and it may be beneficial, I don't know.
Oh, it would be hugely beneficial, and I would call those grandparents, and I would call those aunts and uncles.
I mean, there's lots of research that shows the more positive role models that children have around who are parents, right, the better off they are.
So I agree with you.
I just don't think they have to be screwing each other in order for the child to have the benefit of having a tribe of good and kind and nice and helpful adults around.
Children require a lot of resources and having more adults around is helpful.
I'm sure they don't need to be screwing.
I just think that once you bring – the purpose of sex is not recreational.
This is the great – I'm not saying this is your argument.
Then you're doing it wrong.
No, no.
The purpose of sex is not recreational.
It's recreational so that it can make more people.
The recreational aspect of sex, like the orgasm part of sex, is not the purpose of sex.
The purpose of sex is to make new people.
And the method by which it does that is making it enormous amounts of fun.
And so to me, people who treat sex as recreational are not using it right.
Because the recreation part is to make people.
Now, I'm not saying, of course, I'm not Catholic.
Every time you have sex, you have to make a person or whatever it is.
Because the purpose of sex is to also maintain pair bonding.
And so this is why your dick doesn't fall off when you lose fertility, as it also happens to men, or why a woman stops wanting to have sex after she goes through menopause.
So the purpose of sexuality is to make children and promote pair bonding by releasing all the endorphins and Goo hormones that keep us all happy in each other's arms during and after sex.
Now, it's fun so that it makes people and it promotes pair bonding because it's fun.
I was just going to say, again, I'm just taking the polyam side of the argument here.
Again, you're using the word pair bonding.
If you just reduce that to, let's say, connection and bonding as opposed to pair bonding, I'm sure the polyam crew would say, yes, we have multiple people in these connected relationships.
And you're right.
Grandparents work and you don't need to screw, but if we are screwing, it's not detrimental to the children.
Well, it is.
It certainly is detrimental to the children as a whole.
Why is that?
Because either more children are being produced or they're not, right?
Yeah.
Now, if you have, let's say, four people – let's call them Ross Rachel.
Let's say you have four people and they're all having sex and no one has any birth control.
So there is a challenge, of course, of knowing which child is yours.
And like it or not, we have biological preferences to our own children.
It doesn't mean that adoptive parents can't be wonderful parents and all that.
But, you know, I'm sure it doesn't come a shock to anyone who knows anything about biology and evolution that we prefer genes similar to our own than distant from our own.
That's kind of why we have species and why we have brains and why we've evolved and all that, right?
It's gene preference.
And so if they're all having – like you've got four people and they're having sex with each other, then there is going to be less bonding because nobody knows whose kids are whose.
I guess the women do, but the men don't.
And it's been pretty well shown that when men don't know their offspring, they're much less likely to invest resources in their offspring, right?
Because men want to keep their genes going, just as women do.
But women, as Strindberg noted in a play many years ago, women always know that the child is theirs, but men don't, certainly prior to DNA testing, which is when all of this stuff evolved.
So if a father does not know that the child is his, then the child is going to receive less or fewer resources.
Yeah, that certainly makes sense to me for sure.
Yeah, so this is why the polyamory stuff, I mean, you know, it's fun.
I get it, right?
I'm sure it's quite exciting.
But it's not using sex the right way.
It's using sex as a recreational vehicle when the recreational vehicle is not the purpose of sex.
And I'm not saying it's wrong or anything like that.
It's not immoral as long as everyone's being honest and so on about STDs and feelings and plans and purposes.
It's not immoral.
But it's certainly not beneficial to the children because the children get less commitment and fewer resources.
So, like I said, what you said makes sense to me, and I've heard stats saying the same kind of thing.
How do you reconcile that with adoptive parents raising equally successful, happy children?
Well, motivation is higher, right?
And why is the motivation higher?
Because they've adopted parents.
They're adoptive parents, which means they've gone through significant bureaucratic and legal hurdles, not to mention cost, perhaps, to become parents, which means that they really, really want to become parents.
And so because their desire is that much higher, it's likely that they're doing as fine a job.
Yeah.
But again – I mean what I mean is if you – sorry to interrupt.
But if you just randomly distributed, quote, excess children randomly across the population, we would not assume that to be better, right?
But it's a self-selecting group of people who really, really want to become parents and are desperate to become parents and therefore are likely to really invest well in their kids.
Yeah, it makes total sense.
Again, just for the spirit of the conversation, for the polyams, they might say that they are, yeah, we've chosen this environment, we've chosen the loved ones, and we've committed to this, and we're really, really excited about all the children that this posse is going to have.
I don't know how they word it.
But, so again, I'd really love to, if you had this conversation with someone and knew what the hell they were talking about, the polyam world is doing it.
No, listen to what you're saying, but look, anyone can say anything.
Right.
Sure, say what you want, but biology is biology.
And there will be dads, quote dads, who heavily invest in children who aren't their own.
You're just talking about exceptions, right?
Well, I mean, I think the criteria, the important criteria, which you kind of spelled out, was desire and knowledge.
And, you know, they went into it hoping that they would have children out of it, understanding that they would not be theirs.
And in the adoptive situation, it worked out quite well.
Maybe in the polyam environment, you could enter it into it in the same way, and that would work.
And if you went into it in the wrong way, it would not work.
And again, I'm not experiencing this, but I kind of think this is kind of true with the polyam stuff.
I would guess that probably 90% of them are in it for the wrong reasons, and it's actually childhood trauma and all sorts of things going on like that.
But I don't know if there's any research done on this, but perhaps there's maybe a relatively small minority where they're in it for the right reasons.
They're doing it very well, and maybe it's working very well.
I don't know.
It just all depends on how you approach it and if you do it well or not.
Yeah, and because they're not initiating the use of force, I don't really care.
I'm just telling you what the biology seems to indicate, which is best for the children.
It doesn't mean that...
The other thing I wanted to mention about adoptive parents as well is that they go through rigorous tests to see if they're fit parents.
They have to show...
They usually go through training.
They have to show that they have the resources.
So it's...
Every – as Keanu Reeves says in parenthood, every butt-wielding asshole basically can become a parent, right?
So you can – you could have just got out of prison and you don't go back to prison for having a kid.
But if you have just got out of prison, there's no way they're going to let you adopt a baby, right?
So adoptive parents are just better selected, right, than self-selecting people.
Yeah.
Sounds good.
Let me just mention something.
Sorry, just before we end, let's see here.
So there's an article, Monogamous Societies Superior to Polygamous Societies.
In the abstract, they declare that normative monogamy reduces crime rates, including rape, murder, assault, robbery, and fraud, as well as decreasing personal abuses.
If polygamy, as a friend of mine once observed, is polygamy is awesome, how come polygamous societies...
Sucks so much.
Case in point of Saudi Arabia, everyone assumes if it didn't sit on a pile of hydrocarbons, Saudi Arabia would be dirt poor and sick.
As it is, it sucks, but with an oil subsidy.
The founder of modern Saudi Arabia was a polygamist, as are many of his male descendants out of about 2,000.
The total number of children he fathered is unknown.
The major sons are accounted for, blah-de-blah-de-blah.
If you want a stateless society, you have to promote monogamy.
It doesn't mean that everybody who's not monogamous or everybody who's polyamorous is like some enemy of freedom.
You know, we're talking about the mean here.
You know, not everyone who smokes dies of smoking, right?
I mean, there are exceptions to every rule, almost every rule.
But the point is that if in society you want...
A stateless society or a smaller state society, biologically, statistically, and factually, you must promote monogamy and pair bonding because that's what produces stable, peaceful, nonviolent children.
And there's no way around that that I know.
And again, this is not to say, I mean, obviously not everyone who's monogamous is an anarchist and not everyone who's polyamorous is a communist or anything.
I'm not trying to say that.
But You know, if you want a really great basketball team, you're not going to have a lot of Chinese guys on it.
It doesn't mean that there aren't great Chinese basketball players, but like 70% of the NBA is black.
So, you know, at least until affirmative action comes in for white and Chinese guys, which I think is just about to be put forward by Al Sharpton for obvious reasons.
But the reality is that once you understand these RNK selection strategies, the reproduction strategies, And you understand the effect it has on kids and all of that is really important to understand.
You simply can't shortcut it.
And so this idea that without anarchy, we just end up with this free-for-all is not true at all.
I mean, society needs structure, children need resources, and people need stability to raise children.
And any society that's not concerned with raising children is not a society we need to worry about for...
Very long because they're not going to reproduce.
But in 1985, GDP per capita in highly polygamous countries, $975.
But there's close to $3,000 for comparative monogamous countries.
North America, Western Europe for the same year, almost $12,000.
Again, this is from 1985.
So...
So somebody said, so then a polygamous relationship of one man and two women is just dandy then because the man knows it's his child.
But again, people are just looking at individuals here.
So let's say you have a society where half the men have all the women.
So if you have not just individuals, we're talking at a social level, right?
Individually, a single mom might be able to raise a pretty well-adjusted kid.
And of course, married families might screw them up completely.
But at a social level, in an aggregate level, it's not good to have single motherhood, right?
I mean, so people always – this is sort of – I'm not saying you're a prey to this, but when you start talking individually, yeah.
I mean, so some of the biological conditions of providing resources for your children is dealt with in a polyamorous relationship of one man and two women.
Sure, I accept that.
But when we're talking at a social level, if this is the general pattern, then 50% of the men are going to have 100% of the women, right?
Let's pretend that everyone gets involved or whatever, right?
But what that means is that you have a huge cohort of men who aren't getting married and aren't raising children.
And the men who don't get married and don't raise children tend to be problematic for society.
They tend to get involved in crime more.
They tend not to be as ambitious.
They just don't tend to contribute as much.
And again, it's not true for everyone, but in general, if you have a large cohort of men who cannot get access to women, then you have a pretty rough tribe in your neck of the woods.
And that's going to be huge.
So again, individually fine.
I'm talking at a social level.
At a social level, Polyamory really doesn't work, and it doesn't work for children very well at all, and I don't think it works emotionally in the long run for the adults.
But yeah, individuals, you know, go get your cabin on the mountain top and get your free con.
So that would be my thought.
Awesome.
It's been an absolute pleasure, Stefan.
Thank you.
Thank you for the call.
Very, very interesting, and I look forward to everyone's feedback in that.
Max, do you want to plug your stuff before you go?
Oh, yeah.
Let me think.
Well, my YouTube channel's actually got a lot of cool stuff that the Free Domain Radio crowd would be interested in, so that's youtube.com slash successcouncil.
Yeah, lots of freedom-orientated stuff, anarchy stuff, how society will work without a government.
I'm also a Bitcoin expert, lots of Bitcoin videos on there, so I think they'll really enjoy it.
Alright, thanks, Max, and everyone check out his channel.
Alright, up next is Travis.
Travis wrote in and said, I have a 21-month-old baby boy.
Who's just awesome.
Peaceful parented, no yelling, never spank, etc.
My son sometimes hits us with objects or his hands.
He does this most often when he's tired.
He's a little slow on his verbal skills, so it could be just him getting frustrated, can't communicate verbally, wants to go to bed, yadda yadda, that kind of thing.
The hitting has become a more rare occurrence, and I'm not sure if it's something else in his development or the full reasoning behind it.
The main question is, how should we react when he does hit us, when he kind of lashes out in this way?
I'm sorry, I'm not laughing at the situation at all, and I understand that's troubling, and I don't mean to sound insensitive.
But the reason that I laughed a little there was that you have a thought about manipulation rather than honesty, right?
How should I react?
Well, my question is, what do you feel?
Yeah, it's kind of...
There's a lot that happens when he hits us because it's frustrating because obviously I don't want him to be hitting us, but I understand from his point of view that he's frustrated and just trying to communicate in some way.
Well, I mean, how do you know that for sure?
Well, I mean, the occurrence of him hitting us goes down when we're more attentive to when he's getting tired and stuff, rather than if we let it go too long or something before putting him down for a nap or sleep.
I'm sorry to interrupt, but you bring up a very, very interesting question here.
Obviously, in this, as in most things, I don't have any exact answers, but it's a fascinating question.
Which is, if he's just acting out because he's tired, then it's not rational for you to get hurt or irritated or annoyed or angry, right?
So then you have a problem that you're ascribing motive to something that doesn't have any motive to it.
In other words, he's just tired, right?
Now, if he's just tired, then emotionally, you shouldn't be really annoyed, right?
Like, I mean, if your child...
Is six months old and, you know, accidentally pokes you in the eye, you're not going to be angry and say, damn it, why did you do that, right?
I mean, you'd be hurt, you'd be upset, but you wouldn't be like, you malevolent little beast or something like that, because, you know, a kid can barely control his own motion at that point, right?
Yeah, yeah.
Now, if my daughter, if we're sort of playing around, and I keep asking her to be careful, And then she's careless, that provokes a different emotional reaction in me than if it's completely out of the blue, like completely unexpected.
Yeah.
In the same way that if your child knocks over a glass of milk at dinner time, well, that's too bad, right?
But if you say to your child, I'm going to move this milk away because I don't want it to get knocked over.
I'm going to move it out of Arm's reach.
And then your child moves back and says, I'm going to be really careful, and then knocks it over.
I mean, you're going to be more annoyed, right?
Yeah, yeah.
So your annoyance is saying something different than your empathy?
And that's the fascinating question.
I wouldn't be so quick to dismiss the annoyance and embrace the empathy any more than I would be to say embrace the annoyance but not the empathy, right?
Because you have these two poles, one of which is ascribing Some level of responsibility to your son, and part of you is not, right?
It's more so that I'm worried that the hitting and stuff will continue, right?
Because he's at an age right now where he doesn't really...
You ask him to stop, and he's kind of borderline understanding.
So...
It's not that, like, I'm telling him not to and he does and then I get frustrated because I know he understands what I'm saying.
It's kind of pre that stage.
Well, how do you know, though?
Because, again, if you listen, like, knowing when your children are changing, I mean, I don't mean to give you something so obvious.
I mean, obviously, you're a fine parent, but knowing when your children are going through something different is usually trackable by your emotions, right?
And if you...
Dismiss your irritation at your son's hitting.
You are dismissing his responsibility for hitting.
Now, obviously, when he's a baby, that's appropriate.
When he's 10, it's not.
At some point in the middle, it begins to change.
And I have found it very helpful for me as a parent to track my irritation to find out if something is changing.
Because your kid's brain is growing at a ferocious rate.
You know, when a baby is born, the brain consumes 75% of its calories and it's like a third the size that it is when they're like five or six or something like that.
Your kid's brain is making like tens of millions or hundreds of millions of connections like every day.
And knowing when they begin to develop moral responsibility is a fascinating question.
And I have found, I'm not saying it's perfect, but it's an indication or it's a rough rule, it's a rule of thumb.
I have found that My irritation is a pretty good measure of a child's moral responsibility.
In other words, I'm not going to get irrationally angry at a baby for poking me in the eye.
But at the same time, if my daughter knocks over the glass for the third time after promising not to, and she's five, that's kind of exasperating because she should be able to do that by now, right?
Yeah.
Yeah.
It means that she has a capacity for focus that she's not exercising.
So when, you know, when I first started to help her get dressed or whatever, you know, I would dress her, obviously, right?
And now, and then for a while it was like, you know, okay, go get dressed, get your pants, bring them here, right?
That kind of stuff, right?
And I get it.
She was like three or whatever.
But now she's old enough to get dressed, for the most part.
And so if I have to keep reminding her, I get annoyed.
And the annoyance is my signal That at least part of me believes that she has the capacity to concentrate on getting dressed, but is not exercised at that capacity, which I never would have inflicted when she was a year or, you know, 18 months old or whatever.
So your irritation, it's not exactly a perfect oracle, but remember, your entire emotional apparatus is developed to be good at parenting.
Right?
This is something that Because I was surrounded when I was growing up by parents who weren't very good at it, your entire emotional instincts and apparatus are kind of dedicated to being good at parenting, to reading where your kid's at, to helping them develop, right?
The parent and the child are in a symbiotic relationship that is as ancient as life itself.
And they're there to help each other and your kid gives you signals and your instincts give you signals and It's a very deep process.
And having sensitivity to your, quote, negative emotions in the role of parenting, I have found to be an essential guide for gauging at least what I think of as her level of moral responsibility.
Again, it doesn't mean that it's absolute and, well, I'm irritated, therefore, you know, she's doing something wrong.
But I wouldn't dismiss it, if that makes any sense.
Yeah.
And even if he's tired...
That doesn't mean...
I think your instincts are saying, okay, well, he's tired, but that doesn't mean he has zero moral responsibility.
Right?
Because if you...
I'm not saying...
22 months, obviously, he's young.
But if you were to continue, and I'm not saying you would, but if you were to continue giving him excuses for being tired, then you would be undermining self-discipline for him.
Right?
Because...
If he says, well, I'm not really responsible because I'm tired, then he doesn't need to develop self-discipline when he most needs it.
That's a really good point, yeah.
I mean, yeah.
So now that we know that you hit when you're tired, you're more responsible for not hitting when you're tired.
Not less.
Like, the excuses usually—I mean, in my experience, parents make up excuses— Because they want to avoid conflict, right?
And because sometimes it can feel odd to say to a 22-month-old boy, what you did was not nice.
I don't like that.
It makes me upset.
It hurts me.
And to show the child that – to be honest with the child.
And, you know, I don't say to – like with Isabella, I say to her clearly, it doesn't mean I'm right.
It just means I'm annoyed.
Right?
I'm not telling you this because you're wrong and I'm right.
I'm just telling you because I always want to be honest with you.
This upsets me what you did.
And if she's ever tempted to say, oh, I'm sorry, I said, no, no, no, don't apologize.
I don't know if I'm right.
I don't know.
But I'm telling you honestly, this really bothers me.
I mean, the other day, as kids would want to do, I said, it's time to head to bed.
And She sort of jumped across my lap to pin me down, and her elbow went across the bridge of my nose, and her eyes watered and all that.
It was painful.
I knew it was a complete accident.
I mean, I knew she was not being hugely careful, but, you know, that's fine.
And she sat down very seriously, and she said to me, Dad, I mean, you need to know, and I know you know this, she said, but you need to know, I never, ever will hurt anyone on purpose.
Anytime, Anyone gets hurt.
It's always by accident.
I would never, ever, ever even imagine hurting somebody on purpose.
And I said, I mean, I know that.
I appreciate that.
I respect that.
I love that about you.
I think it's completely wonderful.
And I know it was an accident.
We can always remember to be a little bit more careful, but at the same time, I don't want you to feel like you have to walk around wrapped up, and I wrapped her up in a little blanket like this where you can't move so nobody ever gets hurt.
It's a balance, right?
So we talked about it, and it was helpful.
So your irritation might be very, very important for your son.
So if he's got...
Hitting when tired, then that's something that you need to have him understand to make the connection.
And then once he understands and makes the connection, then he can't hit when he's tired anymore.
The whole point of making that connection is so you don't do it, right?
I mean, I don't drive well when I'm drunk, so don't drive drunk, right?
I mean, once you make the connection, then you don't do that, right?
And, you know, whether you need to draw it out or act it out or bring out hand puppets to mime it out, oh, you know, Judy's sleepy.
She gets, you know, whatever, right?
Then I think that you do want to start introducing, you know, we need good habits when we're tempted by bad habits.
And if tiredness makes him feel aggressive, then that's, you know, what you need to start layering in is that, oh, you're tired now, you know, and it's all about the preparation, right?
So you talk about it with him when he's not tired.
I noticed yesterday that blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Do you think that's true?
And whatever.
I know it's 22 months or whatever.
You can draw it out.
But then next time he's tired, you say, do you remember we talked about what happens when you're tired?
I hit.
Okay, so let's remember that so that we don't hit even though you're tired.
And that's when you start layering in the self-discipline.
It goes back to the first caller who basically was asking, what is the purpose of self-knowledge?
Well, the purpose of self-knowledge is to adjust yourself or your environment to greater compatibility with right action.
And so does this make any sense at all?
Yeah, because I was kind of thinking like, you know, how early is too early to, you know, be honest with your kid about, you know, the hitting and stuff like that.
When you feel annoyed.
Right, okay.
Because that's honest, right?
You don't, again, trust your instincts.
And I'm sorry to interrupt, but that bothers me.
You just hit me.
That bothers me.
I don't like that.
And again, I'm not saying you're bad or wrong.
I'm just telling you, I don't like that.
That makes me unhappy.
It makes me angry.
And you don't do it with, and therefore you need to stop it, right?
Because you're simply being honest about your feelings.
And as I talk about in real-time relationships...
The free book at freedomainradio.com slash free.
Having feelings is not being a dictator, right?
Having feelings does not mean that you're right, and it doesn't mean that anyone has to change what he or she does because of your feelings.
All it means is that you have those feelings.
And to express feelings without conclusions is, to me, the essence of invitational intimacy.
And if you hide your feelings from your son...
I don't think you're doing him a lot of good in the long run.
And again, most of us who are raised badly don't know the difference between having feelings and having demands, right?
Don't know the difference between having feelings and giving orders.
Because for a lot of people, if you have a feeling, that is a command to other people, right?
So if you feel sad or you feel bad or you feel whatever, right?
There was a car commercial, I can't remember, a year or two ago, and it was a pretty edgy commercial, and it was basically talking about how clean this car was, like how little pollutants it put out.
And it was about a guy who wanted to kill himself by locking himself in the garage with the car running, which produces enough, what, carbon monoxide or something like that, that you end up dying.
And he didn't die because the car burned so clean that it didn't produce enough pollutants to kill him and he was fine and whatever, right?
Now that's – I'm not saying the commercial was even in good taste or, you know, whatever.
And it certainly was pretty edgy.
But, you know, some woman was like, you know, oh, you know, I sobbed, you know, because my father killed himself by locking himself in the garage and this and that and the other, right?
And running the car until he asphyxiated and so on and so on.
I was sobbing.
I was rocking back and forth.
I couldn't even get up to turn off the TV and so on, right?
And this was like, well, you can't have that commercial, right?
Now, again, I'm not defending the commercial.
I mean, I don't think I'd ever make anything like that, even if I was in the ad business.
I'm not sure that suicide is ever a good way to sell anything.
But this idea that something upsets me, therefore the world must change, is so ingrained in us.
It comes from governments and gods, right?
I mean, when gods get angry, yeah, you better damn well change, right?
And when governments get angry, well, you go to a gulag or whatever, right?
And so this idea that when you have power, your emotions must be dictatorial to others.
To have emotions is to have other people change to make negative emotions go away and promote positive emotions, right?
It makes me happy when you give mommy a hug.
Okay, so do I just hug you?
The demand for happiness means the demand for hugs.
Hugs must be provided.
It makes me unhappy.
I get very angry when you don't do this.
It's like, okay, well then I should do that.
You don't bring your dishes.
That makes me angry.
But the idea that we can express our feelings without them being any demand or requirement for other people to change a thing is kind of counterintuitive, but I think The essence.
And so if you say to your son and express to your son, it bothers me.
I don't like that.
You know, if you're honest with him, then say, you know, well, however, I don't know, 22 months, it's tough to, you said his language is a little laggy or whatever, but, you know, just even, you know, an unhappy face, kids are very good at reading facial expressions.
And so...
I think if you are just, you say, well, how should I react to it?
You already are reacting to it.
I would just say react to it transparently and honestly, but without the demand for change.
Does that make sense?
Yeah.
Yeah, it's definitely a good way to look at it because that is something that I've struggled with with my childhood.
It was, you know, succumbing to emotions rather than, you know, you can have them and no one needs to change anything, right?
Yeah.
No, I mean, I grew up with the same kind of environment.
I'm very unhappy, and therefore you need to change.
And that's not intimacy.
That's just bullying.
I'm not saying you're a bully or whatever, but that's the kind of mindset that we need to break out of.
Because then, you know, our feelings, we can't be intimate because we're trying to control other people with their feelings.
They've become tools rather than statements of honest experience.
Right.
Right.
My wife's here as well.
I wanted to let her talk a bit.
She wanted to maybe explain the approach that she took, and I think it's better than the one I was taking.
Sure.
Hello.
Hi.
Nice to meet you.
Nice to meet you, too.
Well, that's kind of when you were talking about how to talk to Corbin, who is our son.
That's kind of what I normally do is I kind of get down onto his level and I take his hands and I say, you know, we don't hit people.
We don't like to hurt people.
If you don't want to be hurt, then don't hurt other people kind of thing and try to explain to him just why we don't hit.
Not necessarily that we just don't hit, but why.
Well, but you see, but you're giving him rules rather than telling him about your experience.
Yeah.
And it's not really working, right?
Yeah.
Because if you say we don't hit, that's actually contradicting what just happened, which was he did hit.
Yeah.
Because I've heard parents say that same thing, you know, like the kid whacks the pear and the parent says, we don't hit.
It's like, I think he just did.
I mean, it's like, we don't drink whiskey, cheers.
Yeah.
I mean, I think we do.
Right.
So saying we don't hit is confusing because there is no we.
And also it's not giving him the...
Empathy, I believe, empathy grows when we see the emotional impact of our actions on other people rather than they gave us a rule called don't hit.
Yeah.
Right?
So if you say hitting hurts and you're saying it sort of very gently, he's not going to hear the hitting hurts.
He's going to hear mommy's not upset.
Right?
Whereas if he hits you and you show him you're honest upset, That, I think, is going to teach him a lot more about empathy than rules.
Because if you have the empathy, you don't need the rules.
Yeah.
I mean, I've never had to say to my daughter, don't hit other children.
Because if you have the empathy, and the empathy is the emotional effect that the other person has on you, that's how you teach them empathy, that your actions have a strong emotional impact on me.
And so if you show your son...
The emotional impact that his hitting has on you, which is obviously shocking and hurtful and so on, that I think will teach him much more so than abstract rules about the effects of hitting.
Again, I just want to – because I can't see anyone on this show.
To keep asking, does that make any sense or are you completely rolling?
No, no, that really does make sense.
It's a bit hard for me because I grew up in a very violent household.
Well, sorry, my dad was very violent and my mom – Looked the other way and didn't think anything had happened.
So it's very hard for me to not resort to it initially with anger to begin with, because that was just how I grew up, was initially you get angry at things.
So I really worked very hard on myself to not take that as a first, you know...
Response.
It's more hurtful deep down, right?
Yes.
It makes you incredibly vulnerable and hurt when your son hits you, right?
Yes.
And I think if that is communicated to him in an honest way, I'm not saying, you know, pump up the tears and throw yourself in a ball or the floor or anything, right?
But your genuine experience of, oh, that makes me feel hurt and angry and upset, then he's going to be like, oh, wow, this has an emotional impact.
But if you come back with rules, I think like rules are a way of shielding yourself from the vulnerability of being hurt, right?
So when we get hurt, we often react with rules as a kind of shaming tactic.
And it avoids the vulnerability of showing that we're hurt.
One way I did, I tried in the very beginning, but unfortunately it seemed to make him hit me more, was when he'd hit me, I'd kind of be like, ow!
Ow, that hurts, mommy!
And kind of do that, but then he thought that was fun and would go at it.
Yeah, yeah.
Because even when you're saying it, that sounds almost like a game.
Yeah.
Right?
Because it's the tone of voice, whereas if it's like...
Ow, that really, really hurt me.
Like, all seriousness, right?
No smiles, no...
Like, that really hurt me and upset me.
That, I think, will have a lot of impact.
It's almost like the overacting is even worse.
Oh, no, yeah, because it's got to be genuine, right?
Don't fake any of it, right?
It's got to be genuine.
And I think that's when he'll see the effects of his actions on others.
And because, you know, if he gets – and I'm sure he will, right?
But if he gets the mirror neurons, right, if he can feel what other people feel, you won't need rules.
Yes.
That's very true.
Whereas if you go for rules without the empathy, and look, I'm not saying you don't have empathy.
I'm not saying he doesn't have empathy.
I'm just sort of giving you real extreme ridiculous scenarios just for clarity.
But if you go for the rules without the empathy, then he may conform to the rules, but it won't be the same as him genuinely getting what the action does to you emotionally.
Yeah.
And also to talk about it outside of the moment is important.
You know, we're all so busy as parents that it often just becomes so reactive, right?
Like, oh, you know, I gotta cook, I gotta clean, I gotta make dinner, I gotta wash up the dishes, empty the dishwasher, all this.
And so then we don't talk about it, but then the next time he hits.
But the important time to talk about hitting is when he's not tired and not hitting.
Ah, yes.
Right?
So the next day, because you want to reinforce it when he's not already in an aggressive state.
So that he's not defensive when you talk about it, right?
Yeah, when he's in a different mindset.
Yeah, and, you know, you could say, I've noticed when you get sleepy, pow, pow, pow, you get punchy, right?
And now that we know that, we should, you know, how can I help you, right?
How can I, like, well, you know, get the child enrolled in how to make the solution, right?
Because it's so often about imposing these defensive vulnerability, avoiding rules, and then getting frustrated when the rules don't stick, right?
But if you get him enrolled into, you know, I don't want you to hit me.
Do you want to hit me?
He's going to say no, right?
And, you know, well, how can we get that?
How can we get no hitting?
Yeah.
And that's the thing, is I don't want him to live by rules.
I want him to...
Do what makes him happy, not worry about what the rules of the world are, per se.
I also don't want him in jail.
I get that.
But if you're just going to teach him rules, you're basically teaching him what he can do when he can get away with it.
Yeah.
Right?
And that's the great challenge with rules, is...
Okay, well, if mommy can see me, then that she's going to impose a rule, but if she can't, there aren't any rules.
In other words, it's not internalized.
I know that all too well.
Why do you mean?
Oh, that's just, I was like that as a child.
Oh, right, right.
If you're turning your back, I'm going to do everything.
Yeah, I mean, if, you know, my daughter's candy is all where she can reach it.
And she's had candy there.
Like, we had to just throw it out, because it was from, like, last Halloween.
So, because we've, you know, been boring and annoying and diagrammed diabetes and cavities and fatness and all that kind of stuff, and so it's not like she doesn't want candy or whatever.
She does, but she's pretty good at not...
Not eating it.
And again, I'm sorry to be annoying, like, ooh, it's all solved here.
These are all challenges that parents continue to work on.
And just when you've solved the last set of challenges, an exciting new set come along.
So I'll call you next week and ask you how to deal with this or that.
But at least that's the stuff that I worked with in terms of aggression.
I mean, kids try strategies, right?
I mean, they just, you know, they're like octopuses feeling along the coral, right?
You know, they're just trying a variety of strategies.
What if I try being nice?
What if I try crying?
Will that get me what I want?
What if I try hitting?
Will that get me what I want?
It's not bad, like in terms of like they're being mean.
They're just trying a variety of strategies to get what they want.
They're probing the social norms and the cultural norms and the tribal norms that are around them to figure out what they need to do to get what they want.
And because, you know, they don't have a lot of power to get what they want, they often will try, you know, whining or crying or aggression or whatever, right?
And those are perfectly natural things for children to try out.
You just, of course, want to select them so that they're doing the stuff that's more productive in the long run in some ways.
Sorry, I just got back.
I was looking after us.
I wasn't part of the conversation.
I'll have to listen to it later.
No problem.
I want to do one more call, but does that sort of give you maybe an approach that might be helpful?
Yeah, definitely.
Definitely.
It's a known thing for me to use emotions as demands rather than things you can listen to.
Yeah, and trying to turn around the ship of The state, so to speak, is pretty tough.
It is like a supertanker trying to turn around how many generations of aggression and dysfunction, at least on your wife's part, as she mentioned.
Turning that around is hard.
What you guys are doing is incredibly heroic and so foundational to not only making your son's life, of course, a better place to be, but making the world as a whole a better place for everyone to be.
Just recognize you're taking on a huge task here.
It's incredibly courageous.
And these are the little challenges.
And I only say little relative to, I don't know, splitting the atom and inventing plastic.
But these are the sort of big personal but little worldwide changes that I think are what is necessary to really change the future.
So, you know, fantastic work in philosophy.
And good, good for you guys for everything you're doing.
It is incredibly heroic for you to break this cycle.
Thank you.
Thank you.
That really means a lot.
I'll let you get to the next caller.
All right.
Thanks, man.
Thanks.
Bye.
Alright, up next is Nick.
And Nick wrote in to say that he has a 16-month-old daughter, and looking into alternative education methods, his wife and him are now training-slash-learning in the Waldorf education philosophy, and his questions are, do you have any thoughts on Waldorf education model?
And in your study of philosophy, have you delved into the work of Rudolf Steiner at all?
I don't think Steiner rings a bell.
But I've certainly looked into the Waldorf thing, and it seems pretty great.
I mean, it's democratic.
It mixes ages, which seems to be pretty essential for the development of empathy.
There's a lot of self-study and self-studying stuff that goes on, so I think it sounds pretty great.
What do you guys think?
Yeah, I mean, so far we've just really stumbled across it over the last six months.
I've been listening to the show for a while.
I heard about your views on early child or daycares and homeschooling and found out with the Waldorf program, a lot of homeschooling takes the curriculum of Waldorf and incorporates it into it.
So we've kind of immersed ourselves into it, but there's so much information.
I visited some of the schools and they're really unlike anything I've ever seen as far as public schools or Um, just the philosophy involved, um, seems to fit really well with, uh, developing kids.
A lot of free play from the age of zero to seven.
Um, and then it's a structured curriculum.
So it's, it kind of mirrors some of the aspects of, uh, Montessori early on.
Um, but it has more structure, um, I guess to the program, uh, Progressing up through the ages.
I thought you might have heard of it.
I hadn't heard you mentioned it until I went back and heard a podcast where there's a journalism college student who was into protesting.
I heard you mention it in there, so that was the first mention I had heard of it.
I was just kind of curious what you knew about it.
You mean the Waldorf stuff?
Yeah, as I said, I mean, I think it sounds pretty great.
I mean, boy, you know, it would be nicer to go there than boarding school.
So, yeah, I think there's, you know, a lot of opportunity for mentoring and mentoring younger kids.
You know, I mentioned this on the show before a number of times, so I'll keep it very brief.
But when you get kids of a like age together, they tend to be pretty competitive.
And there's nothing wrong with that.
Of course, everybody wants to measure themselves against their peers and see how they're doing.
So they tend to be pretty competitive, and that, of course, competition and empathy, kind of not on the same side of the spectrum of human emotions.
Both, I think, can be important and helpful, but they generally don't occur simultaneously because if you're in a race with someone and you empathize with them wanting to win as much as you wanting to win, it's going to blunt your capacity to win because only one of you can win, right?
So when you are in situations where the things are win-lose rather than win-win, Then empathy is a liability.
And as the old thing George Patton said, the purpose of war is not to die for your country but to make the other poor bastard die for his country, not yours.
And so in win-lose situations, of which there are many in society that are perfectly legitimate and healthy – So if you want to sell someone a car, empathy is a good thing.
If you are trying to win a legal battle, then empathy is a bad thing.
And so there's things that are complicated when it comes to competition and empathy.
One thing I do like about schools that mix ages is then you tend to get mentoring rather than competition.
There aren't a lot of, like, nine-year-olds who really want to compete with five-year-olds, and so you get nurturing and mentoring, which develops empathy.
And so, to me, the mixing of ages together is really beneficial for kids.
And that's one of the big problems with age-segregated schools, like government schools, where it's just for the convenience of the teachers and not the benefit of the kids.
So, I think it certainly gets my vote from that standpoint.
Again, I'm certainly no expert on it, but it seems pretty great.
One of the cool things that they do is the teacher stays with the class as they progress up through grades.
The reason I was asking about Rudolf Steiner is he was the one who created this method of education and he was a turn-of-the-century philosopher, Austrian, polymath.
He wrote thousands of works on Biodynamic farming, but he does have a slant to his philosophy of spirituality, and I know that I've heard you touch on some stuff related to that, and I was just curious if you had heard of this anthroposophy or theosophy and any of that type of philosophy.
I guess how that would be incorporated into Western philosophy in your eyes.
Yeah, I don't think I could give you anything intelligent on that.
I mean, I could make something up, but I try not to in general.
So I don't think I could give you anything truly intelligent about that.
I mean, I'm always a bit concerned about the word spirituality because it is not a philosophical term.
It has as much relationship to philosophy as it does to physics.
You know, what is the spirituality of the moon?
Well, I don't know.
It doesn't really make much sense to even ask the question.
So, in terms of empiricism and philosophy and all of that, it is really not a...
Spirituality is not really a very helpful term.
And in general, I found the word spirituality to just mean I want to have some irrational beliefs, but I don't want to call them irrational.
So, I'm going to, you know...
Dress them up and call them spirituality because that is a nicer way of saying irrationality.
You know, like faith is a nicer way of saying irrationality or anti-rationality in really its most fundamental way.
So I'm always concerned, you know, I want people to call things by their proper names.
And, you know, if people say, well, my spiritual belief is, you know, reincarnation and karma and stuff like that, it's like, nope.
Those are not spiritual beliefs.
Those are anti-rational arguments.
And, you know, just call them by what they are.
Don't use some sophist title.
I mean, you, right?
But just don't use some sophist title for what is essentially just a commitment to anti-rationality.
I mean, what possible evidence is there for souls leaving the body and being reincarnated in new bodies?
I mean, that's not just anecdotal or whatever.
Like, oh, I knew a guy who, right?
But it doesn't...
It doesn't happen.
It doesn't happen.
It's like, you know, I was reading somewhere recently that they said, ah, we have finally proven psychic phenomenon.
And it's like, oh, no, you haven't.
I mean, of course you haven't.
I mean, unless there's been some massive evolutionary leap over the past six months.
Because any...
I mean, imagine what an incredible benefit it would be for a hunter-gatherer society to have psychic abilities.
I mean, so that they could surround...
Pray and plan attacks and win battles against, you know, food and foe without having to talk to each other.
They could just mentally communicate what they wanted.
I mean, that genetic adaptation would rule the world in like two generations because they would be so victorious against everyone else that that gene would have just spread like wildfire, whatever genetic capacities or whatever biological capacities we would have.
I mean, it wouldn't be, well, it shows up once in a while, randomly, and, you know, it can't be controlled and all that.
It's like, no, no, no.
If there is any capacity for any animal to communicate with another animal telepathically, that animal rules the planet.
And...
So, the idea that it's just sort of latent and in there and so on, I mean, there has to be a biological capacity for it to be real, and the idea that it's just sort of lurking around there, it's possible, but it's randomized and all that, it's like, no, no, no, no, nature would grab that and totally run with it.
So, yeah, so I just sort of have some concerns about the word spiritual, because usually it's just a cover for things that make no sense and go against reason and evidence, but I don't want to say that they make no sense and go against reason and evidence, so I need a $10 word for a 20-cent prejudice.
Definitely, definitely agree.
Yeah, I've had a hard time wrapping my head around a lot of the stuff that they classify as this anthroposophy.
One cool thing that they do focus on studying mythology, whether it be Greek mythology, Norse mythology, Egyptian mythology from age 7 to 14.
It seems like this storytelling somehow fosters the kids at this age.
The way he lays it out is he has paths that the kids go through at certain ages.
They learn certain things.
I know some people complain and say, well, it can't be a public school because they're teaching I'm trying to grasp my head around what benefit that could be, you know, once my daughter's older.
Yeah, I mean, I obviously studied some mythology.
You have to if you're studying English literature at the college level because, I mean, in the same way you have to know the Bible.
Because, at least until recently, this is where a significant amount of literary references came from.
They came from the Bible, and they came from mostly Greek and Roman mythology, to a smaller degree.
Norse mythology, but stories and literary allusions and so on, came from the mythological traditions, which, of course, I would classify religions as mythologies and mythologies as Old fiction.
It's fiction with dust on it, and probably a spear through it, and probably currently on fire with Divine Wind.
So there used to be a significant value in terms of understanding literature.
There was a significant value in knowing the older mythologies, but I think that's mostly gone by the wayside, and now the mythologies tend to be zombies and It's pretty new stuff and it doesn't have really the time-tested seasoning of thousands of years old stories.
But yeah, it used to be pretty important to study that stuff.
I mean, I guess at one point it was important to study Latin and I think most of the mythologies have gone by the wayside.
That having been said, it's just popped into my head that there have been a bunch of movies that have come out about Greek mythology recently, Percy and the Something Something and some of that stuff.
But it's not really as important to study now, I think, as it used to be.
I still think it's good to study.
I mean, this is part of our Greco-Roman tradition, our Judeo-Christian and Greco-Roman tradition.
But...
I don't think it's studied as much anymore, but I think there's value in it.
One of the reasons sometimes people teach mythology and religion is to pretend that the two are separate.
Like, here we're going to study Greek mythology, and then we turn to Christian religion.
And it's like, I don't know that that's entirely justified, logically.
Yeah, yeah.
I'm tangentially related to the, well, related to the Waldorf and my wife's daycare centers.
So in the Waldorf school, they stress no reading or writing till the age of like six or seven.
And in her centers, the parents really...
The parents want the kids to be able to write their letters and be able to read, start reading and, you know, start processing this information, you know, as young as like three and four.
I know, like, a lot of times it's like, well, the parents always are thinking, like, I want my kids to know the most.
It's almost kind of the opposite approach.
And I was wondering if you had read anything on that or know what your thoughts were on that delaying the reading and writing process.
I mean, I've talked – I know a little bit about this.
I've talked to an educator or two about this, and there are some – I think it's in the Scandinavian countries.
They don't really start teaching reading until seven or so, but then they don't usually have kids in school until six or seven.
So the capacity for letters – It's quite individual to my understanding.
In other words, it's not like, well, every kid is five and therefore it's good to teach them letters.
Some kids are interested in them earlier and some kids are interested in them later.
And usually until about maybe seven or eight, it's usually not an issue.
Now, if the kid is still eight and not interested in letters, then I think that's more important.
Of an issue that might need to be addressed.
Now, if you try to get children to do letters too soon, they can become averse to it.
I don't think generally there's a problem with withholding it, but if you try to get them into it too soon when their brains are not ready for it, then it's a real challenge.
But if you can, like if you wait until the moment is right, then I think it's a pretty fast and easy process and the kids will naturally draw towards figuring all that stuff out.
You know, like half the time I'm coming into the room, my daughter is with a pen and paper going, right?
She's trying to figure out what she wants to write down and all of her butterflies have voice balloons now and are telling stories and this and that and the spelling is usually quite Interesting and logical, but unfortunately that's not the language that we have in many ways because it's developed over time.
So I don't think that there's necessarily a right time in general to teach letters, but I think that if you wait till the right time for each child, then I think it becomes a lot easier.
Yeah, yeah, I agree.
I know you're an IT expert or you worked in the programming field.
One thing I heard about this Waldorf is they're very popular in San Francisco and Marin County and all in California and a lot of the tech bubble or tech industry people send their children to these schools.
I know that Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation funds Waldorf schools.
But one of the things they stress in Waldorf schools is not to let children use tablets, computers, or no television, limit television.
Have you heard anything along those lines with development?
Yeah, I mean, I've heard some things.
And again, some of the data is pretty raw.
Steve Jobs didn't let his kids have an iPad.
I mean, he's sort of foundational in the creation of them.
There does seem to be some challenges.
So some schools have worked really hard to try and get tablets and iPads and notebooks and all that into school, and they found that kids are so drawn to them that they end up decaying on social skills, going outside, running around, and hands-on stuff.
So they get very good at swiping and not very good at manipulating, right?
Because swiping is a two-dimensional activity.
Unless you're in Dora the Explorer, you need three-dimensional manipulation, pens, crayons, plasticine, whatever, Lego.
Manipulation helps to grow the brain, and swiping is just two-dimensional.
Tablets are just so engaging.
It also doesn't help kids overcome frustration.
If you get frustrated at something, you just switch to another app, or go browse the web, or go chat with your friends, or whatever.
It doesn't teach them a lot of keep going until you push through.
That So I've heard some recommendations about screen time as a whole.
I can't remember exactly what they are, like an hour or two a day when they're young, max kind of thing.
And I think that there is, you know, I don't want to sound crabby or anything, but I think there is a little bit of a tendency sometimes for parents to use screens as babysitters, right?
I mean, I don't think this is anything particularly shocking that I'm saying.
But I think it does happen.
Like, you know, just go watch TV. I've got to make dinner, right?
It's like, well, maybe have the kids in the kitchen and chat with them, right?
The challenge of parents is to compete with an increasingly technological world, right?
I mean, I have to make it so that chatting with me is even more enjoyable than grabbing a tablet.
I don't forbid my daughter screen time.
She used to watch some TV. She hasn't watched TV in, I think, at least a year now.
And she used to like going to movies.
She doesn't like going to movies at all now.
And, you know, her big thing is drawing, which I'm, you know, happy to sit down and, you know, there's like three things I can draw and I'm sort of trying to branch out, but it's pretty embarrassing.
If it's not a shark, a spaceship, or a volcano, I'm, you know, sort of out of luck.
But, so...
I think that there are real challenges for technology.
Technology displaces conversation in general.
As I keep saying to everyone who will listen, to me, the essence of family life is the conversation.
It is the talking.
It is the chatting.
It's fine to sit down and play a game My daughter likes creating levels in games, so we'll sit down and we'll create a level or two, but we're chatting about that, and sitting and chatting about stuff that you're doing is not bad or anything.
To me, that is not the same as having a conversation.
If we go to the Santa Claus parade and we say, what a lovely float, or whatever, it's fine.
It's not bad, but it's not the same as having a conversation.
Having a conversation is we sit down and we just talk.
And we're not talking about something that we're doing or watching.
We're just talking about wherever the conversation takes us.
And that is, to me, the big challenge of parenting, or at least my parenting, is to make the conversations more enjoyable, more compelling, more rich than anything that burps and beeps and lights can offer her.
And that doesn't mean we can't ever pick up a tablet.
I mean, we do.
But it does mean that I recognize that when we are on screens, we are not facing each other and talking about what's going on in our minds.
That we are helping each other to figure something out or try this or maybe we need that.
And it's fine.
Again, there is some of that in life.
I mean, if you've got to sit down with a bunch of people to build a bridge...
Then you're not talking about your thoughts and feelings that much.
You're trying to solve the problem of building a bridge.
So I'm not saying that that's bad, but I try to not have that be the default and really try to work on making sure that we are connecting as people about thoughts and feelings.
And when we sit down for those conversations, I mean, they can last like Half an hour, sometimes even an hour.
And that to me, that's the meat and drink of family.
That's what I'm in it for.
That's what it's all about.
And I think that parents sometimes don't think about that as much or don't have as much, you know, like it's family time.
Let's go to the zoo.
Oh, look, a coaxial, right?
I mean, and again, the zoo is fine.
We go to zoos and it's nothing.
Again, I'm not sure either or.
But to me, family time is...
It's even better than dinner because, you know, you've got dinner.
You know, someone's getting up to get something.
Someone needs a glass of something and something's going on, right?
But I really am in it for the unstructured, open-ended conversation time.
That's my drug of choice.
And I don't have any...
Problem with tablets as long as that's not what people think of as we're connecting.
Does that make sense?
Yeah, definitely.
You touched on a lot of great things.
Your advice on parenting has really guided me as a parent.
I know when you were touching on the chemo thing earlier, my mom went through the same thing eight years ago.
She's stronger than an ox now.
She's competing in triathlons.
I just wanted to say to you and the other listener who's going through it, stay strong.
I love you, brother.
Thank you so much.
That's great to hear.
I always like to hear the success stories.
I really, really appreciate that.
I guess we'll call it a show for tonight.
I just wanted to thank everyone so much for calling in.
As always, it is a deep conversation.
honor.
You guys bring out the best in me, and I hope that I help bring out some good stuff in you.
So I hugely respect, admire, and thank everyone who calls in.
And if you'd like to, of course, to help out the show, fdrurl.com slash donate.
If you'd like to kick in something to help us grow, I would massively appreciate that too.
And thanks again to Mike for running the I think his third great show.
