March 21, 2015 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
02:53:45
2934 The Isolated Male - Call In Show - March 18th, 2015
Ayn Rand's novel ‘Anthem,’ the difficulty of achieving excellence, putting people in personality type cages, to categorization is dehumanization, the chains of unchosen familial roles, pushing circumcision on new parents, children as proxy wars, preserving sibling relationships, trying to escape emotions through immediate action, society as a self-correcting system, the evolution of individualism, having the back of the people you care about and female driven male isolation.
I saw quite possibly the single greatest YouTube comment in the history of YouTube comments today.
I don't know if you saw my note about it.
Dinosaurs and blowjobs?
Prove that there isn't an invisible space dinosaur giving me a blowjob at this very moment.
That wins every award for greatest YouTube comment.
Now, I just wanted to point out to those who don't know that Mike is attempting to voice this off on a YouTube comment when basically his only Google Alerts is for dinosaur blowjobs.
It just happened to pick it up.
Just so people don't get confused or, you know, not understanding.
There's a lack of websites devoted to my fetish, unfortunately.
Yeah, yeah.
Now I get it.
I get it.
Chissozoic?
Is that the...
You don't want to go to the theater and see the new Jurassic Park movie with me.
That's all I'm saying.
Oh!
You, P.B. Herman, George Michael, all one big happy family.
Yeah.
But whoever wrote that, you win YouTube comment of the week, at least.
All right, anyway.
Could probably do this for a while.
Have a couple of listeners on the line.
And several people that have been bummed from previous shows due to time constraints.
You know the shows where you only get through one call or stuff?
I have no idea what you're talking about.
Unfortunately, there's no evidence of this whatsoever in any way, shape, or form.
Well, I'll shut up so you can do an intro.
Intro.
Um, alright, hey everyone, how you doing?
Stefan Molyne from Freedomain Radio.
Um, we have a show, and this show has started.
Okay!
I was working on that for most of the afternoon.
Whew!
I know!
I picture a bead of sweat dripping down your forehead as you said.
This kind of quality doesn't just emerge from the swamp.
I mean, it takes patient and careful consideration.
All right, well, Keith is up first today.
And Keith wrote in with a question.
He's curious, did Ayn Rand's anthem affect you emotionally?
I found myself crying over and over again.
I think that I was raised as a we and not a me, and it affected my life badly.
I will say that I did not find it emotionally too resonant.
Transfictions that I have found very emotionally resonant, the two that popped to mind.
It's more than this in general, but the first is Kira had a wonderful speech in We the Living about her life being something precious and powerful and that she really needed to guard it.
It's just a wonderful, wonderful speech and that It gave me a very strong emotional reaction.
And the other was the character called The Wet Nurse that Hank Reardon finds in a bad way in Atlas Shrugged.
It's a scene of great tenderness and great pathos.
I found that quite meaningful.
I did see The Night of January 16th, which I thought was interesting and had unexpected moments of comedy to it.
But Anthem did not affect me very powerfully.
Although, you know, technically and from a creative and writing standpoint, I think it's a great book.
But I was raised in a kind of peculiar collective.
The collective for me was raised to be in the warrior class.
And a good Christian.
And that did not have exactly the same kind of unity and submerge yourself into the collective that would be going on, say, in Eastern Europe or China or the Soviet Union or Cambodia or places like that.
But tell me more about what you thought.
I think for me it just...
There were a lot of...
Feelings I had that I had trouble putting words to, but after reading it, or listening to it, it was free on audibles.
Or I don't think I would have.
A lot of it just rang in my head, wow, that's how I felt.
And I felt like it was the progressive upbringing I had where everything was, you know, think of others, think of equality.
And in particular, the way I think my skills and talents were...
I was kind of forced to curb them most of my life for others.
In particular, I think my brother and sister.
I can remember specifically, I think, just for a specific thing, I know...
I was three years older than my brother, so that age from like 6 till 13, that's a big difference on what you can do for fun and play.
My stepfather was kind of a jerk, and he never really let me win at things.
My mother would pull me aside and say, hey, it doesn't make you feel good when your father does that to you, does it?
I'd say no.
She'd say, well, you need to think about that when you're playing with your brother and sister.
move on to sports, it would be the same thing, think about the other kids.
And I ended up curbing my talents throughout my life for fear of making other people feel bad.
Does that make sense?
Oh, no, of course.
Absolutely.
And that's a very strong commandment for the most part.
The average have a very challenging relationship with the excellent, or those are smart.
The average always loves the fruits of intelligence, but don't like to be around intelligent people because it prickles their vanity.
It does.
Look, I mean, as I've said before, when you become really good at something, it actually makes you very humble.
It makes you exceedingly humble.
And there's no vainglorious megalomaniac out there like somebody who's never dedicated themselves to excellence in anything.
Because then everything, you know, they don't understand what excellence is.
They think everything's easy.
And it's also a pretty early state in life in that kids often think that things are a lot easier.
Than they are.
Because kids, of course, have mastered so much simply by the age of three or four or five.
Massive amounts of language and reasoning and numbers and walking and cartwheels and swimming.
I mean, they've just mastered so much.
And they're justly and rightly very proud of what it is that they've been able to achieve.
And so it's a pretty early phase in kids' lives.
And a lot of people...
Never outgrow it.
But the relationship that the average has.
And look, the average is not a global statement.
You know, like I'm a mediocre, say, singer, right?
Like I'm okay.
I'd never be headlining anywhere.
But you know, I can hold a tune.
So I'm, you know.
If 100% is the greatest singer, I'm like 70, 72, maybe something like that, right?
So I'm a mediocre sort of average kind of singer.
And so I get just how amazing it is what really great singers do.
Like I'm constantly just astounded by the quality that really great singers can bring to what they do.
And so I'm humble as a singer, because I'm like, yeah, I'm not really that good, right?
So everybody is average in just about everything, or below average in just about everything, like guitars.
Guitars.
I was in a heavy metal show when I was in high school.
And the guitarist was really quite good.
And, you know, I tried learning guitar like just about everyone does.
And, you know, I've got sort of these stubby little fingerlets and so on.
It doesn't really work that well for me.
And just, you know, never really kind of got it.
I did 10 years of violin, so I know a little bit about music, but...
I was just not that great at that or a really great guitarist or a good guitarist.
I'm like, wow, it's amazing, right?
Because I've tried and I get how hard it is and when people can really do it well, that's really impressive to me.
And so most people, of course, don't know how difficult things are because they've never gotten good at anything.
And that is...
It's an annoying thing to be around.
And in school in particular...
You know, everybody sort of understands that with unions, like government unions, or even private sector unions, there's kind of this problem.
Like, you know, if you're too good, if you work too hard, if you do a really great job, what do people say?
Trying to make us look bad.
Yeah, you're raising the stakes here, man.
Stop working so hard.
We'll all have to.
Yeah, take a break.
Take a break or, you know, they're going to up our quotas for everyone, right?
Those things have specifically been said to me, yeah.
Oh yeah, no, I get it.
And of course people forget that exactly the same, but to a much stronger and worse degree, that occurs in government schools.
Like the average do not want the pace to be set by the intelligent.
Right.
Right?
Because if the pace is set by the intelligent, the average have to work a lot harder.
And this is why in public schools, because there's no differentiation or little differentiation by ability, at least certainly in the early days of public school there isn't.
Later on, at least back in the day, for me, you could sort of go advanced or advanced average in general or something like that.
There were some streams that you could go into.
But certainly for the vast majority of your schooling, your education, the last thing that people want you to do is do really well.
It's a threat.
And it's not just a threat to them in terms of like they'll have to work harder.
It's a threat to them in terms of they have to recognize that they're average.
And of course, being inside everyone's head, everybody feels that they're special, you know, that There's lines from Fight Club, you know, you are not a unique snowflake, you are the all-singing, all-dancing crap of the universe, right?
And that's true.
You know, most people will pass through life leaving virtually no impression in their wake.
You know, and a generation or two from now, it's as if they never existed.
And even people who achieve quite a lot Right.
And yet they were a big deal.
Can you name the best violinist in the world in 1780?
You can't.
And so from the inside, everybody feels precious.
And from the outside, they're like these backdrops in a pointillist painting.
These little daubs of paint designed to show the crowds in a stadium behind a horse race that someone's painting or something.
And again, it's just nothing good or bad, it's nothing right or wrong, it's just the way that it is.
And it's hard for people, though it should be appropriate for them, but of course it takes a certain amount of intelligence to have humility.
It really does.
Because it's giving yourself an objective and useful scale against which you measure yourself.
And knowing the 10,000 hours, right?
I mean, the 10,000 hours of study it takes to become really good at something makes you humble about everything else because you know how you haven't put the 10,000 hours into other things.
And this is why it's just so funny to me that the average voter is like, yeah, I should vote for so-and-so.
They have no idea.
They have no idea.
Less than no idea.
Or as Winston Churchill once said, the best cure for any belief or faith in democracy is five minutes conversation with the average voter.
This is why democracy is just so funny.
But democracy appeals to the vanity of people because it's like, yeah, yeah, this guy works for me.
Gruber works for me.
Right.
You know, I get to judge this guy, you know, this highly, you know, whatever, accomplished, you know, whether you can say moral probably is another story.
But I, you know, my opinion's as good as yours.
I'm worth the same.
And democracy, of course, the politicians all pander to the people.
Oh, you have the right instincts.
You care about the poor.
You're doing all the right things.
They don't...
Leadership should be a lot like Simon Cowell in American Idol, you know, where just people are auditioning and he's like, dude, you must never ever sing again.
Here's 50 bucks to never ever sing again, like even in the shower, because the shower will cry more tears and California can't afford it these days.
And that's what leadership should be, is just constantly saying like, no, no, you're bad, no, no, you're bad.
And of course, a lot of parenting is that way too, right?
I mean, a lot of parenting is, yeah, you know that painting you did?
It's pretty bad.
Right.
You know, like, I mean, it's like age appropriately and all that, not to be mean or anything like that.
But, you know, if my daughter says, do you like this painting?
I'm like, yeah, I think it's great.
You know, and she says, you know, does it look like the tree?
And I said, oh, no.
It really does not look like a tree.
Right.
I mean, let's go hold this painting up to a tree.
Can you tell me what's different?
I remember you telling that story about your daughter and the music also, and that was really poignant for me.
I mean, I really understood what you were trying to say.
Yeah, I love it because you're doing it.
I got the opposite.
Yeah, like, you do this in the subway with a violin case and people will pay you to stop.
Yeah.
And I like my daughter singing and I like the songs that she...
We have sort of make up your song contests.
Sometimes we even write down lyrics and stuff.
And she's not got a bad voice and she's musical and she's on key.
But yeah, she strains too much.
You know all the things that people who just don't have those naturally great voices generally do.
And, you know, at the top end, it's like, well, you did hit the note, but it was really more of a punch than a caress.
The note is not standing anymore.
And, of course, there's a lot of this equality going on these days.
You know, your opinion is just as valid and, you know, well, I've read so-and-so and therefore I know such-and-such.
And this is terrible.
I'm sorry.
I know I'm going on a ramble and I'll shut up in a sec.
Yeah.
But there's this terrible, terrible, terrible incapacity that people have to read good arguments that contradict them, that contradict their opinions or perspectives.
Right.
In Reason magazine, Reason.com, a site well worth visiting, there was a rebuttal to some article that someone put out that basically was like, you know, libertarians oppose welfare, therefore libertarians hate the poor.
I've read books.
And what that says is just how pitifully weak someone's perspective is that they've not read competent counter-arguments to their position.
I mean, Frederick Bastiat, hundreds of years ago, rebutted this argument about as clearly as you could imagine when he says, so because I'm against the government growing and distributing grain, does that mean I don't want people to eat?
No, quite the opposite.
It's because I do want people to eat.
And this idea that just because I oppose the government doing something doesn't mean that I don't want anyone to do it at all.
So this argument was rebutted hundreds of years ago.
In a very clear and cogent way.
I mean, Bastiat is an incredibly accessible writer.
This is not like you've got to learn calculus.
Vector calculus, who always sounds like a villain in a Bond movie.
I used to know I'm endo-vector calculus.
And it's just pitiful.
I mean, read someone who competently disagrees with you before mouthing off about stuff you don't really understand.
But how many people read...
That's part of it.
Yeah, I mean, because we went through government schools.
I've gone through quite a lot of the works of Martin Luther, St.
Augustine.
I've got some really good theists under my belt.
And I can argue their position and really get into what they're doing and what they're saying.
I've done videos and podcasts where listeners came on and I defended the social contract and did a good job and all these other kinds of things.
Right?
If you really want to be competent at something, Then you need to read competent oppositions to your perspective.
Right.
To your arguments.
And the number of times where people just dismiss other people.
Like, you know, this modern habit of something tarred, you know, libtards, demon-crats, you know, republi-twats, or faux-news, like F-A-U-X, like false news and so on, right?
Right.
I mean, it's just, oh my God.
YouTube comments is where the last brain cell of humanity is going to go to commit seppuku.
Right.
And, you know, on its own sophistry.
And so I just, the fact is that, yeah, in schools in particular, there's this drag down the summit.
Everybody's got to become part of this stupid, sociopathic, empty-headed, shallow, over-made-up, work-on-your-abs-not-your-moral-posture goo of nothingness.
And that is a brutal, brutal aspect of growing up.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah, absolutely.
And my stepfather, he was my stepfather from when I was four or five on, so I'm going to say father just because it gets confusing for me.
He was my father for the most part.
He was an evil philosopher, I'm realizing now.
I didn't just go through public schools.
My father was the youngest dean of philosophy of education in this nation.
To be a teacher, you had to take his class, so I spent a lot of time in school with my father's students also.
And during, like, summers and whatnot, I often was taking tests, writing papers.
I mean, I wrote essays for allowance, and he did a lot of study on us, basically.
He would experiment with us, have us do different things each year.
So, I wasn't just in the school system.
My stepfather was part of that system from the top down.
And he taught me evil philosophy in many ways.
And what are the tenets of evil philosophy, just in case I've decided to turn to humanity into notice?
You know, look, it might pay better.
It might pay better than this gig right now.
So, you know, I'm a free market guy.
You know, if there's a bid, if there's a bid out, if there's a bid out, you know, I'm still waiting for my invitation to speak at the medic.
I don't have any tenure, so it's kind of tempting.
I got no sabbaticals, baby.
I don't get summers off.
Yeah, I know he said to my mom once that I convinced him on it's nature, not nurture.
So at some point as a teenager, he kind of just flipped on me and he kind of just treated me as a workhorse.
I mean, we lived out in a farm raising...
I worked very hard as a young man on farms and raising animals and killing them and eating them.
And he just kind of shoved me into that as much as he could and made it clear that I was like the physical one and my little brother was the intelligent one.
And so then he kind of raised us that way, and I think he thought teaching me...
Oh, sorry to interrupt.
You mean like the family archetypes?
Oh, he's the clumsy one.
Oh, she's the musical one.
Oh, that person's the funny one.
And he's like, I can't breathe this great jacket of preconceptions.
It's like concrete being poured over my spine.
You know what?
He even did IQ tests on us once.
And this bothered me my whole life that he wouldn't tell me what I got.
And he basically said, I'm afraid if I tell you what your IQ is you won't try hard enough in school.
And it left me on and off throughout my life feeling smart and then stupid and then smart and then stupid.
And I'm pretty severely dyslexic, so I had trouble in school.
You know, I could get A's in chemistry, but I flunked just one English class after another.
So it really fed into me feeling like a more physical person as opposed to an intellectual person.
Really wasn't until recently, I've done over 10,000 hours in Austrian economics, that I've realized, hey, I am cerebral!
Right.
There is a kind of, there's a phrase that I think was Lawrence Scheingold, if I remember the psychiatrist correctly.
I read a book many years ago called Soul Murder.
And I try and try and try as strongly as I can in my relationships.
I mean, Even the sort of single-serve friendships we have on this show at the call-ins and all.
But I really try to avoid putting people into categories.
Categories are a significant diminishment of humanity.
Right.
And this is why it troubles me.
You know, that's why I've said, like, I don't want to create a school of thought.
That's terrible.
I mean, this is why I disagree very much with the naming of objectivism or even libertarianism.
Right.
Like, it's just, it's philosophy, because as soon as you put an ism at the end, uh, jismnasium, actually that's an old Bill Murray joke, but anyway, uh, use the word jism in a sentence, uh, jismnasium.
But, um, I just, it can't be confined.
You know, like, oh, he's an anarchist.
It's like, no, not really.
No, no, I mean, that's the point.
It's just, it's a, you're constantly evolving, constantly growing, listener-participated, hopefully, school of wisdom.
Uh, and, and, um, Proof of methodology and aim at conclusions.
And then families, this idea that, oh, he's the huh one.
You know, I had an aunt who had four kids.
And you know, one was the difficult one.
And one was the dreamy one.
And one was the clumsy one.
And one was the bookworm and so on.
And it's just like, it became really confining.
Because what would happen is, they'd go through a phase.
Because everyone goes through phases, right?
I mean, you're into this, you're into that, you're like this.
And this happens even now.
And they go through, and then...
Fossilized.
You know, now you cannot change, right?
You fell asleep and we made a cast of you and that's who you are now forever.
And I've really, really tried to, and I think that's why long-term relationships fall apart.
If people just get tired of being stereotyped and they work to free themselves of this stereotype, and this is what I think you're saying, you know, oh, you're the physical one, oh, the other one is the intellectual one or whatever.
I hate this stuff because you change.
Yeah.
You change.
And to me, rigidity in a relationship is saying, oh, I know who this person is.
And what's even more annoying is I know who this person is more than this person knows who they are.
Because if this person disagrees with my assessment, then they are just incorrect because I know they are whatever that is going to be.
And the moment you get these labels for personalities, I mean, there's nothing more complex in the universe than a personality.
I mean, and a personality, particularly one that's driving for self-knowledge and authenticity, because it's such a mix of the old and the new, of the historical and the possible, of the traumatized and the growing, of the conformity and intellectual rebelliousness, and also just reactive, to some degree, pointless rebelliousness.
I mean, there's so much that goes on in a human personality that That saying you know someone, again, all that says to me is at the moment somebody stereotypes someone else, it just tells me they know nothing about self-knowledge.
Like, I can't stereotype you.
I know your ACE score, your Adverse Childhood Experience score.
I can't stereotype you.
Right.
Because, I mean, that would be to say, oh, I know you are such and such a type of person.
I can't even say that about myself.
Right.
And anybody who's really pursued self-knowledge knows how incredibly deep and wondrous and complex a personality is.
And therefore, to categorize is to dehumanize.
It is to diminish.
It is an attempt to freeze in time an incandescent waterfall of perpetual change and growth.
I think that's exactly what my stepfather was doing.
And I think it was as simple as just pure jealousy, too.
I think there's...
A lot more of that comes from a parental jealousy of, you know, watching their kid grow and seeing them get stronger or faster or smarter than them.
That category gives them the ability to stop that, hey, don't break out of this cage I'm giving you.
And I know my stepfather in particular was really an egotistic person and he was a star his whole life.
And I think he needed to box me in because he saw so much.
And I know that I was a three or four sport athlete, soccer, wrestling, football, Well, of course you were.
You're a physical one.
I did commercials by the time I was 19, 20.
I was doing commercial work, fashion shows.
I could sing, I could dance, I could act.
And I was the only kid that liked to sit up late at night and listen to him and all the philosophers.
They would have discussions, and I think it bothered him that he'd try to get my little brother to sit and listen.
It just bored him, and me, the physical one, would sit up until I couldn't sleep.
I'd fall asleep on the floor, you know, listening to them talk about Plato or Socrates, and I really enjoyed it.
And I think it bothered him, made him jealous that this This punk kid with a horrible real father might actually succeed further than him.
And so I think he was curbing me.
And I know he had that kind of jealousy in his own family, too, with his own brothers and his own father.
That was an issue there.
So it's not until I'm getting older that I realize he was just jealous.
Yes, there is that.
And people who define you are trying to have power over you.
Right.
People who try to categorize you are just, they're trying to have power over you.
Because the moment you start thinking of yourself, not in terms of your own self-knowledge, but in terms of other people's perception of you, then they have power over you.
Because you're either conforming or rebelling.
Right?
I mean, this is why I really could care less what people say about me.
I know people like to say stuff, and I'm sure they think it matters.
I mean, I guess it's fun for them, right?
But I simply cannot have any shred of authenticity while focusing on what other people say about me.
Because, first of all, anybody who cares about me and not my arguments does not understand philosophy at all.
It's just not even close, right?
It's literally saying, I'm a great biologist because I think Richard Dawkins uses too little gel.
I don't think you understand biology, because it doesn't matter what Richard Dawkins says or does.
It matters what his arguments are.
And they're trying to have control over you.
And you end up in this no-win situation.
When someone has a rigid perspective of you, We're good to go.
Chafing against who you are.
Somebody tries to put you in a box.
It's human enslavement.
And this is true for things like religiosity, nationality, communism, leftism, multiculturalism, all the isms around.
It's just put you in a box.
My brother had a great one.
He had a great one where he would define who someone was.
This is when he was younger, right?
I mean, it's way different now.
What do I know, right?
My brother would say, oh, you're just like this, you're like this, you're like this, you're like this.
And of course somebody, whoever they were saying that to, might be kind of insulted, right?
Right, yeah.
What are you talking about?
I've not done that.
And then he'd say, wow, you're getting mighty defensive.
Right.
What a setup.
You see?
Yeah.
There's the no-win.
Right.
You either agree with his sort of half-insulting characterization of you, or if you disagree...
You're being defensive because he's right.
That is my little brother.
Yeah, and it's like, wow, that's a great gig you've got there.
Let's go for a long walk in this revolving door.
And, you know, I used to think, and I never really thought this seriously, but I have had the thought, I don't know if you've ever had this thought at times, I have had the thought that I'm in a story.
I'm in a story.
And one of the first times I thought of that is my brother and I used to flip coins.
You know, like heads or tails, right?
We'd have some decision or whatever, right?
Something was non-divisible and it would be like, who gets it or who gets their way or what do we get to do?
And it's like heads or tails, right?
Can I tell you something?
No.
I gotta tell you this.
This is really wild.
And this is one of the reasons why I know that mathematics is a complete illusion.
Is that I'm telling you, and I'm not exaggerating this, we did this hundreds of times.
And I never once won.
Like it became this bizarre running gag.
And he'd be like, heads or tails?
I'm like, I'm not doing that.
He's like, come on, come on.
The last 200 times you've lost, you do.
And I'd be like, you know what?
Mathematically, you're right.
I mean, I know it doesn't affect the next coin talk or anything, but mathematically, it's got to even happen.
Flip the coin, Lucy.
Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
Because for me, it's like...
She at least took the...
This is the Charlie Brown thing.
She at least took the damn ball away.
That was voluntary.
This is like defying the laws of mathematics, physics, and reality.
There's no bell curve to this at all.
Because I'd also think...
You know what else, too?
This is like the fallacy of the sun costing, because I'd also think, well, shit, I got 200 wins coming.
I got a streak coming.
I got a streak coming.
I got to not stop now, right?
Yeah.
I mean, if I've lost in a random game of chance 200 times, it's got to even out!
And, holy God, I tell you, I eventually, so eventually I just stopped doing it, right?
But this is one of the reasons why I had trouble with math, because it's like, but of course, if this was a play, it would be too obvious.
You can't win.
Right.
Do you know what I mean?
I remember thinking this when I was a kid.
I'm like, am I in a story?
Is this like the true Steph show?
Is it like cue the sun?
Am I in a story?
And I've had that happen a couple of times.
Years and years ago, there was a woman I was interested in, and every time there was an opportunity for us to start something, Something would happen to completely spoil the mood.
It got kind of ridiculous.
You know, we're sitting in a hot tub.
We're chatting.
And this was like in a hotel.
We're sitting in a hot tub.
We're chatting.
Nothing's happened.
But, you know, we're chatting.
And this has never happened before or since.
But like four drunken, tattooed, fat guys jump into the hot tub with us.
Now, everybody has their things for, you know, for drunken tattooed guys.
Right, but...
Not mine, right?
For you, a bit of a boner killer.
Yeah, and, you know, another time it was like, you know, she was asking me, you know, have you ever been attracted to someone like me?
All this sort of stuff, right?
I've had to tell her and the phone rings and there was some family emergency or whatever.
And it's just like, I swear to God, it was like the universe saying, don't do it, no Porky!
Ha ha ha!
Not with the hide the sausage salami game, right?
Right.
Keep your bratwurst where the sky can see it.
But anyway, it's just – anyway, I mean obviously these are just coincidences and so it's like all the dreams you have that don't come – that don't mirror anything the next day.
You forget but all the couple that you do.
But it does sometimes occasionally feel like, wait a minute, is there a script here?
Because if this was in a novel, people would say what they say in the theater world is too on the nose.
The metaphor is too obvious.
It's too clear.
Come on.
Make it more subtle than that.
And that can be the case.
And so I just, you know, when you're defined by someone, It really is a power grab.
And if you conform, they own you.
And if you defy, they own you.
And if you try to prove something different, they say, oh, well, you're just trying to prove something different because I nailed you on the head.
Like, I got you.
Because I nailed it, now you're just trying to be different for the sake of being different, right?
Like, oh, you know, you're such an exercise nut.
You're not being yourself.
Yeah, and then every time you go to exercise, off he goes, the exercise nut, right?
And then you say, well, fuck you, I'm not going to exercise today.
They're like, oh, well, you're just doing that because I defined you as an exercise nut, which you are.
Now you're just rebelling against it.
You're no more free.
When you're around people who've got a fixed definition of you, All they're trying to do is control you.
And they have fundamentally dehumanized you.
And they are, in my view, empty inside of anything except the will to power, which is the emptiest thing in the world is the will to power.
Yeah.
Well, he moved up the ladder in the academic world in education, so...
And I imagine that's because he's about as vicious as a human being can be, right?
Yeah, I truly believe.
Because that's how you move up in a bureaucracy based upon your capacity for viciousness.
I mean, you ever see Condoleezza Rice's stink eye?
Holy crap!
Nothing could burn through the wall of the Library of Alexandria should it still exist, right?
And I spent my whole life thinking he was just one of the most intelligent, godlike people I'd ever met.
My mother didn't learn to read until I think I was three or four.
What?
Yeah.
Your mother did not learn to read until you were three or four?
Correct.
She was illiterate until she was like 21, 22.
Oh no, I know what didn't know how to read means.
Oh, I just meant I was giving you the age period, not really the...
Wait, but...
And when did your stepdad come along?
When I was like four, soon after, so...
Oh, so this godlike intelligent philosopher academic was like, oh, you're in your 20s.
You're newly literate.
I'm sure we're going to have so much in common.
And you have three kids.
I've read Kierkegaard's.
I can help you with C. Jane Run.
So he picked a good one.
I really think he was in some ways showing that he was going to I mean, my mother was beautiful, so I think as a woman, he really was attracted to her.
But I think the whole, I'm an educator, I'm going to take on this poor ghetto family and make their life better kind of attitude.
Because everyone around him was saying, you know, what are you doing?
His mom wouldn't even come to the wedding.
She refused to be a part of it.
Well, no, but maybe your mom – no, it could be that your mom sent her directions and she couldn't read them.
It could be hieroglyphics.
It could be, you know, little smiley faces.
It could be the picture of a tree because the wedding is near a tree.
It could be any number of things, right?
She might have used those like – she might have used those crayons that like have nice smells to them because it was in a park or something.
So it just might have been just hard to find.
Yeah.
Exactly.
Wow.
So hang on a sec.
So you're American, right?
Chicago.
Yeah.
And look, I don't mean to drag race into stuff.
I really don't.
Not at all.
But I'm curious.
No, I'm not.
So when I hear Chicago, inner city… Yeah, you know what?
I really didn't understand racism until I was probably nine or ten.
Most of the areas I grew up in until that point, I was the minority.
I was the kid getting beat up in the neighborhood for being white.
When I was in preschool and daycare, it was American Indians' neighborhoods, and it's just insane.
No, no, no, no.
I don't understand.
Why didn't you use your privilege shield?
Right.
No, no.
You've got this privilege.
It's like a little button somewhere on your wrist, I think it is.
You push it, and Captain Paleface Avenger comes down from the sky and shields you from all missiles.
Right.
I wish.
I truly wish.
No, and you're not the first caller.
I was the sore thought.
You are not the first, and you're certainly not the first listener that I've talked to who has been beaten up for being white by minorities.
All right.
And this is why, you know, this is why when people, I've never met, you know, I've never met a white racist.
It doesn't mean I've never read white racist stuff online.
It shows up from time to time.
But guess what?
I mean, go to my videos on Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King and even to some degree Gandhi and have a look at the black avatars and what they have to say about me.
Well, it's not just white racism I run into online, but some other stuff as well.
And I had both sides of it, too.
At one point, my parents were counselors on a camp for 18-year-old felons and under.
Instead of sending them to prison, they sent them out to this farm where we raised horses and whatnot.
And they were counselors.
Wait, who was counselors?
My mom and my dad.
They were counselors and we all lived.
How old was your mom when this was going on?
25, 26 maybe.
I think I was...
So she'd been reading for a couple of years, so she should probably counsel people.
Right.
Well, it wasn't like teaching counseling.
It was that progressive attitude of we're going to teach them how to take care of themselves like pilgrims and somehow they're going to take those work skills to the city and then not want to do crimes.
You know, we're going to teach you how to raise horses and grow your own food and that work skill is going to benefit you when you go back to the city of Chicago and then You won't want to rob people because now you can grow corn.
Just the dumbest ideas.
No, absolutely not.
I mean, why would you shoplift when you can grow corn?
Exactly.
Yeah, no, and I've heard about these sort of, they have these wilderness camps.
Yes, exactly.
And they send these troubled teens out and they, you know, whatever, right?
Yeah.
Okay.
Do you know if there's any, is there any science behind this?
Is there any?
No, there's got to be.
I don't know any science, but I know what I lived through and it didn't help anyone.
It was actually made a lot of kids worse.
It was just a horrible thing to take a couple kids into.
And then when we moved the camp, the local rednecks, like one week We burnt down everything we built while we left.
And next week they came and they burnt all our tents.
Another time they tried to run us off the road and about killed all of us.
And then I think the program finally folded after they surrounded the vans.
I wasn't in the vans.
The kids weren't.
And blew out all the windows with shotgun screaming, you know, just horrible things because it was all black and Hispanic kids.
Almost all, but yeah.
Yeah, except for the three that shouldn't be there.
So very early I had both sides of it.
So to me it wasn't racism as much as a lot of really evil people in the world that it was my job to protect my brother and sister from.
So I spent a lot of time just...
I mean, that kind of goes with this whole anthem thing is it wasn't really about me.
It was about my mother needing me to co-parent.
And so through all this evilness and just chaos, it was my job.
And so I saw a lot of both sides of racism and just didn't understand either side.
Just didn't get it.
Right, right.
So yeah, I mean, I think that...
If you were raised as sort of the unwilling inhabitant of a highly restrictive stereotype, whether that was racism against you as a white person, whether that was being the physical one and not the intellectual one and so on, all of that is the opposite of individuation.
Right.
And so therefore, so for those who don't know, and it's been a long time since I've read it, but Anthem is a science fiction story about a person who's part of a totalitarian collective in the future discovering the word I. I actually, many years ago at a libertarian conference, the guy had actually put the final speech to music, and he played piano and sang the whole final speech.
It was really quite something.
And...
So, yeah, the identity, you know, I mean, there's a fundamental question.
You know, it's so bizarre to me that we even have such a thing as an identity, given our history as a species.
It's so incomprehensible that we have something called an identity.
I mean, what the hell is it for?
It's even worse than the appendix, because authenticity gets you killed far more often than appendicitis wipes you off the planet throughout history.
I'm going to think for myself!
And it changes like weather.
It's just silly to, you know, identity changes constantly.
Then what's the point?
What's the point of that being this vestigial eye in such a conformist planet?
I mean, it's really bizarre.
And I think, basically, it's because human beings, you know, as I've said before, the most amazing capacity of the human mind and the human body is to adapt on the fly, to have evolution not intergenerational, but intra-generational, right?
right?
So you respond to cues in your environment and develop physically and psychologically according to the cues in your environment.
So if you grow up and, you know, loud violences, noises, no dads around, you're going to become, you know, you know, a different kind of person than if you grow up in a peaceful, quiet.
And so I think that this tension between the collective and the individual, societies tend too much towards the collective.
And here I'm thinking of the stagnation of ancient China, which went on for thousands and thousands of years.
When societies stagnate because they've been too far towards the collective, then those societies tend to get overrun And it doesn't mean militarily, it can mean ideologically, but they tend to get overrun by more individualistic cultures, right?
And so if you think of a place like Japan where the young people were so programmed and so brainwashed into service towards the collective that they would take drugs and fly airplanes in suicide missions into American ships in the war.
This is how unbelievably conformist they were.
And now you can't even get them to have sex with each other in Japan anymore.
Right.
The young people, like significant numbers of them just don't have sex.
Right.
And this is like, you know, what's that, again, fight club line, you know, I fucking hate the pandas who won't even screw to save their own species.
Right.
Let them die.
Fuck them, right?
Fuck them.
You know, fire up the panda porn and go to it because you guys are cute as all hell, you know?
Right.
I don't care if mosquitoes never have sex again, but you pandas, you've better...
Bang, like you're in a Rocco Siffredi video.
Right.
You know what else?
Sorry, go ahead.
Sorry, and just because I read somewhere a long time ago that Rocco Siffredi was into Ayn Rand, so this all does tie together in some bizarre...
It always does.
It always does.
Yeah, bizarre fashion, but if you look at that difference, it's really astonishing just how far individualism has, you know, in a couple of generations...
Really changed the culture in Japan.
I mean, it's astounding.
Now, I mean, what's going to happen, of course, is that you have a political structure, which is semi-socialist and central planning and based on collectivism and so on, and people are opting out.
It's like the MGTOW movement, like the Say No to Marriage movement, and it's just people opting out.
When the society has gone too far.
And this is why I have, you know, pretty good confidence that philosophy is going to win in the long run because society, like the planet itself, is kind of self-regulating.
When things go too far one way, well, the pendulum just swings back.
Like young people are taking fewer drugs and they're more conservative in a lot of ways and this whole hippy-dippy thing has just become kind of like a bad joke of history.
And younger people are looking at the excesses of their parents' selfishness.
And selfishness and collectivism always go hand in hand, because where there's collectivism, there's people who claim to know what's good for the collective, which is massive egomania, right?
It's just massive megalomania to say, I know what's good for the collective.
And then there's people who are willing to defer to those people, which is also a kind of selfishness, because they want to be good, and therefore they're willing to defer to selfish people, which also makes them selfish.
And it's going to swing the other way, and we hope to catch it.
And this is not a pendulum that should rest in the middle.
We need an individualistic society.
But it's just strange to me that this drive towards individualism and authenticity and self-knowledge has remained in the human psyche, despite it being one of the most attacked and vilified aspects of the human personality.
You'd think it would have just died out.
You know, I made another connection that I'd just like to run by and see what you think.
Part of it, a lot from my mother's side of it, a lot of the collectivists pushing had to do with my brother and sister and making sure they're having a good time, they're happy, I make, you know, not...
Not making them feel bad, making sure they're happy and constantly making sure they're having a good time.
But it was also a protection thing.
And since things were so violent around us pretty much nonstop, I had to really fight, I think, or maybe it just came naturally, but to kind of drown out the flight side of my flight response.
And it's now at this age, I just can't run.
When things get scary or crisis-filled, and it's followed me my whole life, I felt like, why does trouble always follow me?
But I realized that it kind of, to be eight, nine years old and standing up to adults, I had to bury the flight side and over-accentuate my fight side so that I could protect my brother and sister.
And as I got older, I realized it really became a part of me to the point where after even high school, I spent 11, 12 years as a bouncer getting into fights 3, 4, 10 times a week for a decade.
And I felt like I was protecting people.
Lots of things throughout my life, you know, if there's a car accident, I have to walk towards it.
And I think there was something about being forced to constantly consider for my brother and sister and whatever other kids were around at the time.
Having to ignore my own desire to run when things got bad kind of bled into the rest of my life.
And I think about the bomb in the brain stuff and I wonder if literally my flight side has just been shrunken so much because it just wasn't used.
Does that make sense?
Hmm.
It does, but you still have what I would call a false dichotomy, which is it has to be fight or flight.
Oh, gotcha.
Right.
Right?
It's like, well, I have too much fight, therefore I need to – no, no.
Right, right.
It doesn't have to be one or the other.
Right, I gotcha.
Right.
But because that's how you grew up, right?
Right, right.
I see what you're saying.
Huh.
Alright.
But without a doubt, you know, you were well trained years before you became a bouncer to be a bouncer.
Yeah.
Well, they even taught me to box.
People don't end up in their occupations by accident.
They were teaching me to box at like 10.
I mean, you don't teach a 9, 10-year-old to box, how to wrestle.
I mean, by the time I was in high school, I could fight.
And that's, why would you teach me someone who's obviously having emotional and Right.
Yeah, no, I mean, it is a question.
I've certainly asked myself that, you know, I mean, given that I had a difficult childhood, you know, why would I take on this particular role of doing what I do?
Right.
And it's a tough question, because, I mean, you don't want to be stuck in this revolving door of history.
You say, well, I had this difficult childhood and was abused a lot, and so I'm going to go out and speak truth to power and risk all the things that can come from that.
You know, you have to really, I mean, I have to really check myself, and I've had to check myself over the years, make sure, look, I'm not...
This isn't a Simon the Boxer for me too, which is a reference to a repetition compulsion of trauma that's in the free book Real-Time Relationships at freedomainradio.com.
Now you've got to really ask yourself those questions.
Why am I a bouncer?
Why am I a philosopher?
And why am I in a situation where there's potential for conflicts?
Why am I doing that?
You know, why am I not a barista?
Well, I guess in Starbucks now they want their baristas to talk about race, so maybe they'll need more bouncer too.
They'll need more now.
Yeah, so I mean, these are all important questions.
And why do I feel so comfortable?
I mean, it's the bomb in the brain series really helped me understand why when...
The world just blows up why I feel so calm and in control.
Right.
You know, it's really made me kind of finally be able to understand, right, okay, that's why I feel most comfortable at that time.
Because it's the, you know, like PTSD symptoms that I have really picked up after the bouncing, after I stopped bouncing.
And it was just like, why now?
I don't get it.
Now I get it.
Because you're not managing it.
I'm not doing it.
You're not managing it by repetition.
Correct.
Yeah, and so, I mean, those are important questions and how, you know, how we choose to answer them.
It's not really a choice to answer.
Self-knowledge is really the explanation of how to answer.
And, you know, for me, it's basically just I'm doing what I wish had been done.
That's all.
I'm doing what I desperately wish had been done.
And there is just a kind of integrity.
To me, this is an honoring of the past pain that was inflicted upon me and the massive indifference of society to the suffering, particularly of children.
And so I am doing what I desperately wish had been done, which I think is really the best way to deal with...
Pain.
It's the best way to turn pain into something positive and something healthy and good for the world.
It's like the guy whose wife dies of cancer and so he puts a lot of money in the cancer research.
It's the best you can do under those situations.
And so I don't think it's any kind of repetition compulsion like, oh, I just want to relive my childhood over and over again.
And it's really not that way at all.
But I think that if you really recognize what was desperately missing Yeah.
In your life, then you recognize because of your common humanity with others that it was missing for them too.
And you can do your best to provide it.
You don't have to start a podcast or anything.
It's just a matter of helping people, helping to provide to people what you wish had been provided to you.
And I think that's the most healing thing you can do.
Listen, man, I got to move on to the next caller because I'm vowing to get to at least a couple of calls.
Yeah, I had a feeling.
I really appreciate your call.
Yeah.
Yeah, no problem, especially after the last Wednesday.
Let me just say thank you to everybody, and just thank you for what you guys do, and I hope everybody listening will please give you some money.
All right, that's all.
That's right.
You know what we're going to do?
We're going to send a big-ass bouncer around to your house.
That's all right.
That's right.
We know where you live.
We know, so yeah, at predomainradio.com to help us out.
All right, great.
Thank you so much.
Thanks, Mike.
Thanks, man.
Thanks, Keith.
Bye-bye.
All right.
Well, Matthew is up next, and Matthew wrote in with a letter of his experience of circumcision and hospitals.
So I'm going to let Matthew read his letter.
It was incredibly interesting.
So go ahead, Matthew.
Stefan, do you mind if I ask you a question about doing philosophy based on the previous call?
No, no.
Whatever you like, man.
It's your call.
Well, you said you felt that it was honoring it.
Is it Are you really honoring it, or are you giving it the metaphorical finger by rejecting the authority that your past has on you?
You know what I mean?
I have a vicious anti-authoritarian streak.
No, it's the old thing.
If you've grown up hungry, if you know, oh god, I sound like the guy from Fifty Shades of Grey now, if you've grown up hungry, And you really connect with that, then you want to feed the world, because you really do empathize with what it's like to be hungry, right?
And there is, of course, there's a screw you, but it's a screw you to the indifference of the world, right?
Like, just help people, for God's sake.
This is all I want to say to people.
Just help people.
I mean, I want to say, you know, parents, stop hitting your children, of course, and we're doing that by the hundreds of thousands of families through this show.
I mean, That's what people don't get when they donate.
It's not like, oh look, Steph gets a new set of grills for his mouth.
There's nothing like that.
It's like, well, we use this to grow the show.
And you can have lots of parents stop hitting their children.
Hundreds and hundreds of thousands of families have stopped hitting their kids by our best guesstimates as a result of this show.
And that's fantastic.
You know, if a family has two kids, half a million kids not getting hit because of this show.
I mean, you really can't do better things with your life than I can think of.
And, well, jetpacks.
But I'm not really great at engineering.
If you can't do jetpacks, then don't.
So just help people.
That's all I want to say.
Just help people.
You know, if you know of a kid who's getting hit, go talk to the parents or, you know, find some way to help.
If you know people who are parents, talk to them about peaceful parenting.
You know, I just read yesterday, I read this article that says children who are breastfed For like a reasonable amount of time.
Six months to 12 months.
Children who are breastfed end up with four more IQ points.
Four more IQ points.
And when they have an extra year of education and when they're in their 30s they have an income a third higher than the average.
Well the income a third higher is significant but four more IQ points when you're talking about like 140 doesn't strike me as a whole lot.
What do you mean 140?
I mean, when I took an IQ test when I was, I don't know, 10, it was like 160 something.
But what does this have to do with you?
It doesn't have to do with me.
We're talking about the average.
So the average person might go from 100 to 104.
That's not insignificant.
Alright, that's 4%.
You know that not everyone...
Wait, were you just trying to work your IQ in here?
No, I think it's a meaningless, stupid number.
That's the other problem.
Oh, okay.
Like, basically, the test...
Why do you think it's a meaningless...
Okay, now, let's go down this rabbit path.
Okay, that's fine.
Why do you think it's a meaningless stupid number?
Because the test that I took was inherently flawed.
It was based on the speed at which you answered math questions, and I didn't realize that when I was taking the test, so I was doing them, like, two or three different ways to make sure I got the correct answer.
Because as an engineer, or at that point I was a prospective engineer, I always had this engineering mindset, correctness is more important than speed.
Because if you get it wrong, people die.
But if you get it right and take too long, it doesn't matter.
Your project's just a little delayed and over budget.
Who cares?
Was it that you did not read the instructions like all engineers?
Yeah, pretty much.
Yeah, so you didn't read the instructions and somehow the test is flawed.
Exactly!
I reject reality and substitute my own.
But anyway, I would like to...
So your IQ is so high, you can have your own physics.
That's really quite impressive.
Pretty much.
Okay, got it.
The two things on it, then in that case, I guess I say that I respect your nobility because if I were in your shoes, it would all be about, like, I am getting my revenge on my past by being successful.
Are you kidding me, man?
You're getting your revenge on your IQ test, for God's sakes.
I get that there's a vengeance streak in you.
I get it.
But with regards to the stopping hitting, I have to say that you have definitely fostered a lot of very interesting conversations at work.
Because we've been talking about this because we have a broad mix of older fathers, grandfathers, young fathers, etc.
Myself included being a new father.
And it's definitely a lot of people come down on the side of strict authoritarianism.
And it has led to an interesting dialogue that has, we'll say, gotten heated at times.
Good.
It means the passions are there and the change is potentially there.
Yeah.
I hope I'm doing justice championing the cause of not smacking your kids because my kids are 15 months old.
I can't say that we have ever been in any situation that I could ever think of that hitting them would have improved that situation.
In no way did this even...
Even before I came across the Don't Spank Your Children Because, I wasn't super opposed to it.
It was kind of just one of those things like water is wet.
You hit your children to make them obey.
And I never questioned that until your show, which I think has been very good because I thought critically about it.
But I started listening to your show when they were about eight months old.
And previous to that time...
There's nothing that would have been done.
I mean, they're infants.
They're only making noise because they need something, and you need to figure out what baby needs to be happy, idiot.
Hitting baby is not going to solve this.
Right.
No, no, I get it.
It's like, you know, what are the plants?
Feed the dog, hit the kids.
It's what you do.
Yeah.
But it's just so ridiculous.
I'm bigger.
I am bigger.
That's all he tells you.
I am bigger and willing to hit you.
It's parenting.
No, it's not parenting.
It's like a roof cave-in, for Christ's sake.
It's nothing to do with parenting.
I am bigger.
It's funny, you know, because, I don't know, like if I'm hungry and some kid has two hot dogs, I push the kid into the pool and take his hot dogs, people are like, that's terrible.
We need to shield it through voting.
I don't know.
It's just ridiculous.
Well, and one of the counter examples that one of the fellows I work with gave was his, I don't know, two-year-old daughter.
He was taking out the garbage and they live in a condo complex and he didn't shut the door all the way.
So she followed him out and he turns around from throwing the garbage in the dumpster and she's standing there in the middle of the parking lot.
So he grabbed her, brought her upstairs, and spanked her for going outside.
And I'm like, I didn't say this because I work with the guy, but are you telling me that essentially you're spanking your child for your failing as a parent to adequately secure the situation?
Absolutely.
But that's not something that you say to a co-worker.
That's one of those, I'll meet you in the parking lot outside and we'll have a, you know, Marquita-Queensbury rules type altercation, you know?
No, no, no.
This is what they say at the pet store.
Look, they say at the pet store, look, I will sell you this goldfish.
Absolutely, you can have this goldfish.
There's only one rule to owning a goldfish.
Only one rule to owning a goldfish.
And the rule is this, my friend.
If you knock the goldfish bowl off the table and the goldfish is flopping around...
You fucking hit that goldfish for wetting your carpet.
That's the only rule?
Yeah.
So, I mean, the way it works in a pet store is the way it should work at home, too.
If you've just made a mistake, then you should hit the innocent victim of that mistake for causing the problem.
So, would you like to hear about circumcision?
Sure.
That's an interesting way to put it.
So the letter that I wrote was, in December of 2013, my wife gave birth to twin baby boys.
Unsurprisingly, we were asked if we wanted them circumcised.
We said no, and we figured that would be that.
However, in the following 24-hour period, we were asked at least four more times, like I honestly lost count whether we were circumcising.
Of particular note is that there was an age breakdown here.
All the nurses under approximately 50 years of age seemed visibly relieved and one even closed the door so as to not be overheard and thanked us for not circumcising them.
Everyone over 50 seemed a bit disapproving and said nothing and then turned and left.
And as an aside, my wife thinks I I'm over-exaggerating the level of disapproval that was unspoken.
But then again, she was recovering from an epidural in childbirth, so she might have been somewhat out of it.
We finally stopped being asked when one of the younger nurses, who was sitting with us doing some other business, yelled at one of the older nurses, they've said no like five times now, stop asking, and had no CERC in all caps written on the charts so that they would make sure to not do it accidentally and would stop asking.
Reading into this a bit, it seems we're in the midst of a culture shift in the better direction.
All the young nurses seem against it.
They're rejecting the bullshit, hate assisting in the procedure.
And I had a footnote here.
That's kind of the way it's phrased.
Elect not to circumcise, which is indicative of the presumed normative state of circumcision.
perhaps circumnormativity is an appropriate term to construct though we were both circumcised neither my brother nor I circumcised our boys none of my friends, most of whom are circumcised are circumcising their boys and assuming this is a broad trend then this practice will largely end with our generation we can only hope right
And as an aside, I mentioned this, being on the show in the letter to a friend of mine who came to visit, and he mentioned two things that were interesting to me.
One, his father actually apologized to him when my friend was in high school.
And also, another mutual friend of ours, whose family had a long history of military service, Apparently, the men in his family started getting circumcised because it was a requirement to join to fight the Nazis in World War II. And I looked this up, and this kind of squares something that never really made sense.
I mean, if you think about it, circumcision is not a general thing in Catholic religions, and it's not a general thing in, you know, folks of the German tradition.
And so being French-German ancestry myself, how did this happen?
Where did it come from?
And apparently, we all know that Dr.
Kellogg was a nut and didn't want people to masturbate, so you circumcise them.
And apparently, there were instances of phimosis in the trenches in World War I and at the beginnings of World War II, so they said, well, if we do prophylactic circumcisions, then that won't happen, and I have to wonder if there's Some other shadowy thing of French girls are dirty and we'll lure away our boys so if we make it non-pleasurable they won't be so tempted.
And then after that, the GIs came back, had memories of this and said, well, since the babies are being born in hospitals now, let's have them circumcised ahead of time in case they ever want to join the service.
And the doctors in the army told me it was all bad, etc.
And so that's, I think, where you get roughly 50 years of circumnormativity.
Right.
Just for the numbers, we've got this video called The Truth About Circumcision, which people should check out.
Over the decades, the rate of circumcision in hospitals varied from a high of nearly 65% in 1981 to a low of slightly more than 55% in 2007.
And, yeah, I mean, this is, you know, credit where credit is due.
This is one thing my mom got right.
That she did not allow myself.
She didn't allow me to be circumcised.
Which was, I mean, especially given the family background, was, let's just say, a pretty ballsy move in 1966.
So, yeah, I mean, credit where credit is due.
I'm very grateful to that decision.
And, you know, it's an interesting question.
And I'm sorry, Matthew, just to...
But in for a second.
And I do want to get your thoughts on this.
It won't be an eternal rant, but I don't have a good answer for this.
And, you know, the great thing is, as I get wiser, perhaps I'll say that even more.
I have a good answer for this, which is, what is our relationship when standards change to the people of the prior standard?
It's a very interesting question.
It's a very interesting question.
And There's been a whole bunch of answers that have been scattered around.
But in general, and I want to know what you think too, but in general what I experienced was pretty bottomless and venomous hatred and intolerance for people of the prior standard.
I think that's too far to a large degree.
I think that's too far.
So for instance, spousal abuse.
Right.
There was a standard, and I get this out of Erin Pizzi, who's been on the show and who's well worth looking over, that, you know, she opened up the first battered women's shelter in England.
And the women would come by, and the priests would all come by, and the rabbis would all come by and say, you have to go back to your husband, God has put it together, it's a trial, he's testing you, whatever, right, just to get...
And so there was, I don't want to sort of feed the, you know, wife beating was acceptable.
It never was.
It was hundreds of years ago.
It was illegal.
And I mean, it's just been forever that it's been illegal.
But separation, family separation based upon a man hitting his wife was considered unacceptable in general.
Now that changed pretty rapidly in the late 60s and early 70s.
And the way that it changed was husband became demon.
You know, obviously the priest would tell the wife to go back to the husband if he was hitting her.
And so husbands, well, of course they were raised by moms who hit them pretty much.
So they've got a lot of anger towards women, let's just say.
Because People always forget that women are part of the cycle of violence because fragility and hibiscus vagininess.
And a terrible name for a punk band.
But...
There was just like, okay, now demon, right?
Even though this had been something that the church had, the church and the synagogues and so on, had to some degree, again, I'm going off Aaron Pizzi's descriptions here, had to some degree facilitated.
But suddenly it was just like, okay, it has been bad.
Think of something like racism, too.
Racism.
It just became absolutely, completely, and bottomlessly, and fathomlessly horrible.
Just use slavery.
It was perfectly acceptable.
I don't know what people's views were of, you know, well, I'm an abolitionist, but my dad is a slave owner.
I don't know enough about the history of that particular transition.
I'm just thinking about the ones that I was sort of around for.
Oh, you're not thinking about the long view of history.
You're thinking about the immediate, short-term, intergenerational history.
Yeah.
Okay, sorry, I missed that.
I mean, even slavery was an intergenerational thing, right?
Right, but we don't do that.
Yeah, I'm just...
I'm thinking of the things...
Like, I'm trying to think of a moral that really changed, where the previous standard holders were not demonized, right?
And I'm like, I'm really...
Curious about this.
Because it just really, it really changed.
Now, circumcision is an interesting one because it is lowering in its rates.
And the tragic thing is it lowers significantly when parents are charged for it.
You know, so apparently the price of not hacking a third of your children's foreskin off is about 300 bucks.
And it is just...
It's horrendous.
Anesthesia is only used in less than half of circumcisions.
Circumcision often removes 75% of penile sensitivity.
You remove the ridged band, the foreskin, lips, and often the entire frenulum.
As adults, males circumcised in infancy are five times more likely to be diagnosed with erectile dysfunction.
About 117 newborn males die each year as a result of their circumcision.
Most from infections or blood loss.
This is 1.3% of all male neonatal deaths from all causes.
5.1% of males will have significant complications from circumcision.
The rate can be as high as 55% for all complications.
Mike, can you look up the number of women who die of anorexia in America every year?
I know that there was some ridiculous statistic.
There was like 150,000 that came out of some goofy feminist nonsense a little while back ago.
24% is a neonatal male circumcision rate differential of 24% between states with and without Medicaid coverage.
In Arizona, a year before the Medicaid provision was cut, 41% of males were circumcised.
Two years later, that number had fallen to 26%.
It's just horrendous.
So at least 18 states have eliminated Medicaid coverage of routine circumcision.
That's by July of 2011.
It would be an interesting thing to look at, and when I have some more time, I will.
But what are your thoughts about the fact that it generally tends to be men who are demonized when Situations or circumstances change.
You know, so when we go from racism to, like, not that everyone was racist, but, you know, the sort of stereotype, you know, well, there was this racist society, and now racism is bad.
And it suddenly is like, then anyone who has anything that could be conceived of as racism is just like the devil incarnate.
Like, nobody says, well, you know, you have to think about the way they grew up and the standards they grew up with and so on.
There's some excuse made for some jokes about sort of, you know, grandma and, you know, grandpa is kind of a little bit racist, but, you know, he's old or whatever.
But for the most part, anyone who others anything that could even be remotely construed as racist, and this includes facts, you know, like, they're just unbelievably demonized.
And even if they're older, like you think of this cook in the United States.
Dear Lord, I'm not up my celebrity gossip.
Paula Deen.
Paula Deen.
Yeah, Paula Deen used a racial epithet like many, many years ago.
And she's from the South.
Was she in her 60s or something like that?
Yeah, she is.
She's pretty old.
She also had a party, and that was the big scandal.
There was a party where she wanted it to be, I don't know, Plantation South themed, and that was in ill taste.
68.
She's 68 years old.
Okay, so she's 68, right?
So, I mean, she grew up middle of the last century, right?
So were there a lot of people who were like, well, you know, but you gotta look where she came from, and this and that and the other, right?
I My God, demon, racist queen, right?
And so it seems to me that when there is a change, a fundamental change in social mores, and again, I'm not saying the racism thing is very complicated, but let's just take the mainstream narrative of it, right?
Like then anybody who's even, could be construed of as having said something that could be racist or suggested something that could be racist, Suddenly that person is just like the devil themselves.
And so that to me is, and I think that's too far.
Honestly, I really, really think that's too far.
But there does seem to be this like, you know, burn the witch kind of stuff going on.
This real pitchforks and torches kind of mob after Shrek kind of stuff that goes on.
What have you noticed, Matthew, about when these kinds of things change?
What is the relationship to people from the prior belief system?
Well, to be honest, until this conversation, I hadn't really thought about it.
Specifically talking about racism, I think it's being used as a smokescreen to cover a lot of ill deeds.
I mean, you accuse the president of being a socialist and all of a sudden you're a racist.
So that, in and of itself, is a...
I mean, that's a problem.
Not that racism is good or acceptable in any way, but the, you know, you can use it as, when stuff like that is happening, it's actually gotten so much that it's comical.
Well, hang on, Matthew, I'm so sorry to interrupt you, because you say you haven't really thought about it, but you have, and you told me already.
Okay.
I'm sorry to be annoying, but you said that at work you've got a broad range of fathers, right?
Granddads and new dads and older dads and so on, right?
Yes.
And you said there's this intergenerational thing, right?
And you also talked about it with regards to circumcision, that the older nurses versus the younger nurses, right?
So what is your relationship, emotional relationship, to people from the previous belief set?
Like those who say you've got to discipline your kids or those who are like, well, you've got to circumcise or whatever, right?
I'm an engineer, so I compartmentalize.
So let's start with hitting your kids.
The answer is I don't know.
The jury's kind of still out.
As in, I... The most honest answer I can give is that I've not had any situation that I think that that would help with my twin boys.
I can only go from my own experience.
I can't speak for somebody else's experience, and just because there has not been does not mean that there never will be.
Does that make sense?
Right.
So, no, but what that means, of course, is that you're very consequentialist, which is an engineering perspective, right?
Which is what, Jolie, you said, well, you know, if you make a mistake, people die.
If you take longer, it doesn't matter, right?
Right.
Consequentialist.
But I'm curious what your emotional...
And I know, I know, asking an engineer about their emotions is sometimes like asking me about engineering.
But what do you think or feel about Let's just take the stereotype of the older dads who are like, you've got to hit your kids.
I feel, well, I feel something that I thought when the previous caller, when he said that his dad essentially wrote him off as nature, not nurture.
In both cases, it sounds like you're giving up.
You're giving up on being a parent because it's too hard.
It's like being in a discussion where you say, well, we'll just have to agree to disagree.
It's a freaking cop-out and you're a coward.
Is that strongly opinionated enough?
Totally fine.
Now, do you mind if we go back to circumcision?
No, go for it.
I have two thoughts.
One, I have no basis for comparison as far as being circumcised versus not.
I read a report from a...
Doctor who actually anesthetized his foreskin to do the test and then engaged in coitus to see what it was like.
And he reports a tremendous loss of sensitivity.
But to kind of express it for guys that don't know, if you take your index finger and take a pen...
And rub it along the back of your index finger, that's about the level of sensitivity that I have.
With the exception of, I have like a half centimeter by one centimeter remnant of my frenulum, which actually is as sensitive as you would expect all your bits and pieces to be.
So that's what we're dealing with.
The other thing that I mentioned to Michael, that wasn't in the original letter, is according to my mother, they actually botched it.
In terms of not cutting enough?
No.
Well, the first one mangled it apparently so badly that there was—I don't know.
She didn't go into tremendous detail, but the point is I was circumcised twice.
Something didn't go right the first time.
It didn't heal correctly.
It wasn't structured correctly, something like that.
And so she confessed to me that— And this is as an adult, I mean, I'm married at this point, that she was actually worried about there being a much greater loss of sensitivity or erectile dysfunction or whatnot because they had to go in again and finish it.
Yet despite this, they still had my brother circumcised.
And that just strikes me as a bit silly.
But I can actually speak to...
I did ask both my mother and father individually about this.
And my mom...
things in her relationship with my father, picks her battles, which basically comes down to oftentimes buckles under and doesn't stand.
And so she just ceded that authority to him because he's the man, he has the penis, you can make decisions for boys.
Which I can't criticize her too harshly because my wife basically said the same thing because she was uninformed.
And so I sent her information about this is what circumcision does.
And she says, okay, now that I'm fully informed, if you had wanted to do this to our children, I would have fought you tooth and nail.
And I think this...
Well, wait a second here.
Wait a second here.
So I don't...
I've never looked at the actual what happens with female circumcision.
Yeah.
Right?
Yeah.
I mean, but I don't need to.
Because it's cutting healthy tissue, incredibly sensitive healthy tissue from a child.
Do you know what I mean?
Like, there's people who say, well, I'm uninformed.
I mean, that just seems sort of odd to me.
I mean, it is cutting healthy tissue off a child.
It's even more odd because my mom's a nurse, so you would expect her to have, like, in these pre-internet dark ages, perhaps access to a bit more expertise.
But essentially what this came down to is...
I've heard two answers from my dad, depending on how rabidly religious he's feeling at the moment.
The first answer was, when he was in his 20s, a friend of his developed phimosis and had to have his foreskin removed at that point, and it was tremendously painful, so he believed in doing it prophylactically, so he wouldn't have to endure this as an adult.
And the other...
Right, so it's too painful for an adult to do, so let's give it to a newborn.
Well, the medical...
Yeah, well, and this is...
Segway.
You know, a friend of mine pulled a muscle lifting a 50-pound weight, so I thought I'd give it to you when you were an infant.
Yeah.
So it really hurt that muscle.
But apparently the doctors at the time told them they didn't feel it.
And that is, on its face, observationally bullshit.
Because...
Twins are often born prematurely.
Ours were not like scary NICU prematurely, but no body fat and heavily jaundiced.
So there was concern about bilirubin toxicity and needing to go under UV lights and all of those things that you would expect.
So they had to have blood drawn a couple of times for the first week of their being alive.
And as it turns out, there are no complications.
Everything's fine.
Nobody needs to fret about that.
But I got to hold them.
As the heel of their foot was pricked and a couple of drops of blood, and they screamed and screamed and screamed, and I started to cry as I was holding them and caressing their faces.
There's a reason those rooms are soundproof.
There's a reason those nurses don't like to do it.
Right.
I mean, I generally would assume that any doctor who's willing to do circumcision is just a complete sociopath.
From what they're saying with, I don't feel anything.
And, I mean, outright liar.
Like, you cannot say that she don't feel it.
I know, I know, I know.
I mean, children are unbelievably sensitive to pain.
I mean, hold your child if she gets a shot.
Hold your baby if they get shots.
I mean, it's unbelievably agonizing.
But his other answer is, it's the sign of God's covenant with Abraham.
Which, of course...
It was widely propagated despite the fact that the traditional cutting of the foreskin wasn't necessarily nearly as much as it is now.
This is a Victorian thing.
That's one of the other things that I learned as I started doing research prompted by your show.
It used to be they cut a little slit and drop some blood and that was it.
That's different than cutting off 90% of your erogenous tissue.
Well, and, you know, the people who cite biblical justifications, it's like, I'm fine with that, but, you know, there's no fucking epidurals in the Bible, so I assume you're not doing that shit.
There's no fucking Novocaine in the Bible, so I assume you get your drilled teeth using 5th century BC or 5,000 years BC. You're not using any cell phones, are you?
Because, you know, there wasn't any of that shit.
So, I mean, I'm fine with people who want to do medical procedures according to what the Bible says, but you better stop there.
Nothing after the Old Testament.
No new shit.
I mean, if you're currently screaming at it, pretending that your rock in a cave is a phone, fine.
But if you took antibiotics, then shut the fuck up and leave your kid's penis alone.
Well, and this gets into the question that you asked me and I told you I'd get back to, which is how do I feel?
I can't speak to in the broad societal sense.
I can just speak to how I feel with my parents and I've addressed my mother and essentially she gets a pass because she copped out and maybe that's cutting her a bit too much slack, but I actually have a fairly good relationship with my mother and it would Open up a lot of unproductive wounds.
I think she's bad about it.
I think she feels bad about it.
I think she thinks it was the wrong decision, but there's no going back.
And I don't need an apology.
I just want her to know that everything's okay.
She has beautiful grandkids.
And, you know, we didn't do that to them.
It stops here.
There's a great many things in my upbringing that stopped with this with me, with my generation.
And my brother and I have talked about this at length.
There's a lot of things that our parents believed were the right things to do at the time that we reject outright and are not doing, hitting children being a lot of it.
And if you want to talk about my father, This was at the short end of the list of the things I could feel bad about my father or I could feel resentful of towards my relationship with my father.
But again, that's not Bringing that up doesn't do anything.
In fact, I talked my brother down because he was going to confront my father about how he would always promise to do things and spend time and all of that and then would be too busy doing something else.
When we were kids it was working.
Now he's starting to promise spending time with the grandkids and instead would rather play World of Warcraft.
And so my brother is very upset about this.
My argument to my brother would be, what is this going to accomplish?
Dad is going to get defensive, because Dad always gets defensive.
He's going to claim how much he's sacrificed.
Dude, dude, dude, dude, hang on, hang on, hang on.
Oh my God.
I'm sorry.
You know I'm no psychologist, right?
Yeah.
But you're trying to squelch your brother's emotions with an appeal to consequences.
I am.
What right do you have to do that?
relationships that he has with my father.
No, no, that's it.
That's another appeal to consequences.
You're telling me you can make a totally emotional, uninformed or a totally emotional decision without considering all consequences.
No.
What I'm saying is listen to his feelings.
Listen to his thoughts.
They don't have to result in action.
The idea that somehow emotions must result in action is one of the fundamental reasons why people are emotionally repressed.
But he was coming to me...
You know, like...
Sorry, sorry to interrupt.
But what I mean by that is like, well, if I get angry at someone, I'm going to punch a wall and break my hand.
Or if I get angry at someone, I'm going to scream at them and the relationship's going to be over.
If I feel angry towards someone, disaster will occur.
Right?
And what that means is that there's no imposition of will between emotion and action.
Your brother can be incredibly angry at your father and he can talk to you about it.
And nothing has to happen in terms of action.
But if you immediately say, well, what's the point of feeling that?
What's it going to achieve?
You're saying that the feeling must result in action.
The action will not result in something positive and therefore the emotion is useless.
That was not what I was saying.
My apologies then.
Go ahead.
Clarify what I have mistaken.
He came to me explaining the situation and asking for counsel on the best way to handle it, and his immediate thought was, my intention is to confront Dad and make him change his behavior.
And my argument is confronting him will not result in him changing his behavior.
I know you feel bad about this.
I know it's an open wound.
But if your goal is to modify his behavior, I don't think you will do that and you will make your relationship with him worse.
I think you just need to protect your children from his eccentricity and you need to, you know, talk about the feelings of abandonment that you have.
Because he really...
The kind of sad running joke is it's a good thing he's a guy because otherwise he'd be a stripper with daddy issues.
Because he really feels a...
What your family considers jokes?
Anyway, but go on.
It may not be that funny to an outsider, but go on.
I was a firefighter for several years, and I have a very graveyard sense of humor.
I'm an engineer, and I'm emotionally repressed.
Up until about my 20s, I largely went through life not feeling anything, and it took me a lot of work to actually start to come to terms with and deal with my emotions.
Ironically, you referenced Fight Club earlier in the thing and that was kind of a pivotal moment for me because I actually started to listen to my inner voice rather than squashing it down.
I actually wrote out a whole dialogue between the two voices in my head and then after that it became a lot easier because 20 years of not paying attention to stuff kind of all came out in this one very cathartic moment and that helped a lot.
I just want to circle back to your brother for a second, and I apologize for getting it wrong.
But what I would say, you know, he's your brother, what the hell do I know?
But just my sort of first impulse would be to say, it's like, well, let's just talk about the feelings.
Forget about what you might do.
Yeah.
Like, let's just talk about your thoughts and feelings.
Let's put what you do about them way off the table.
Right.
Because that's, you know...
A lot of times when people say, I feel this and therefore I want to do that, people talk about the doing rather than the feeling.
Yeah.
And what that means is that it's a way, it's nothing you're doing, right?
I'm just saying what it communicates to people is, if your feelings will not, like if the action you're proposing based on your feelings won't achieve your goals, then your feelings are not helpful.
Right?
And it's a way that we castrate the value of our feelings is by attaching an action to them and then evaluating the success or failure potential of that action.
But the feelings are there to inform you and enrich your experience.
And the moment we attach actions to them, we end up talking about the actions rather than the feelings.
Anyway, I just want to sort of mention that as a flyby.
And I'm sorry for getting it wrong again before.
No, that's fair.
Sorry, please go on with your thought.
No, that's fair.
I can see how you got that impression.
I apologize for being imprecise.
But again, that's going to be—well, not again, but that would be a good advice to talking with my brother, except as a general case, he and I don't really talk anymore.
We had a bit of a falling out, and it's never been remedied, and I'm— If you don't want to talk, that's fine.
No, no, no.
It sounds stupid to say it.
But basically what it came down to is...
He refuses to come to my house.
As foolish as this sounds, like, they came to visit once, and we have a spare room, and it's like a three-hour drive, and they were so unhappy.
It was this laundry list of things that were wrong with their stay, and so much so that he says that, you know, if we were to ever come back again, we would stay in a hotel rather than your house, and that's it.
And I didn't He never really did tell me what was wrong in any way that I could remedy it.
Was this before or after your sons were born?
This was before my sons were born.
He had just had his daughter.
So this was three years ago.
How long did they stay?
A weekend.
We can't.
Yeah.
And so they live very close to my parents and they don't have a spare room.
So when we go over, we spend time...
Wait, sorry.
Sorry.
They being...
Your brother doesn't have a spare room or your parents?
My brother does not have a spare room.
Okay, good.
And my parents do.
And so when we go and visit, we stay with my parents and we all get together.
And, you know, we've gone over their house, but at this point, we see them at holidays.
I see my parents much more than I see my brother, and it's gotten to the point where we were not actually going to my parents for holidays because they, being my brother and his family, would not want to come over with And while we were there, they would always be busy.
They would always have something else to do.
And so my parents finally last year just said, you've got newborns.
I don't see the point of you coming out because they never come over whenever you're here anyway.
So we'll just come to you because it'll be easier for you.
And I mean, previous to this, he and I would meet once a week and we would play video games online and Skype and talk about our week.
And what ended up happening was, I think, that same evening that he...
I had invited him up for Thanksgiving, and it was essentially a laundry list of excuses that basically comes down to, we don't want to ever come to your house again.
And then his wife pulled him away and told him that he couldn't game anymore, at least that evening.
And he asked if we were gaming again, and I said, basically, I'm kind of tired of getting yelled at for everything that you don't like about Whatever.
And so, I mean, if you want to have games and talk, that's fine, but I'm not sure.
And I realized this was possibly me shutting him down.
Actually, no, it was definitely me shutting him down.
But, like, I don't know.
I guess I don't understand where this litany of shit came from.
And now that I think about it...
I can tell you where the litany of shit came from.
Okay, go ahead.
Would you like me to...
I can confidently tell you...
I kind of feel like I'm about to be called an asshole, but go ahead.
No, no, no, no.
Not at all.
No, quite the contrary.
Quite the contrary.
Okay, so when did you start getting into self-knowledge, my friend?
I don't know.
I was about 20.
Okay.
Yeah.
And when did it really start to take effect in your life?
Because, you know, there's a lot of preparation before you play the Carnegie Hall of putting values into practice, right?
Yeah.
I have to feel—so I started to realize—and my wife—when I met my wife, I was 22.
And one of the things that she has very much given me and continues to do so to this day is a mirror that— I can see my behavior and emotions and thoughts through the eyes of somebody else.
Essentially, I oftentimes refer to her as my sanity check.
Because my benchmark for normal is what I grew up with.
And so just taking a totally benign example of I'm doing some chore.
Why do you do that chore that way?
Because that's the way I was raised to do it.
Take a critical look at this chore and think about that.
Well, dear, that's a horribly inefficient way to do that.
You're right, I should do it this other way.
She's like, yes, that would be smarter, wouldn't it?
Yes, it would.
Now, apply that to every aspect of your life, and she's very good at doing it without coming across as being bitchy or criticizing, because I know it's done out of love and help and growth.
And so, when I become angry For some reason that I don't know, she can say, you are getting angry and there's no reason for you to be angry in this situation, so what's up?
And that is a...
Having her presence in that way definitely accelerated things.
So I was really, I would say, very far along to the journey of self-knowledge when I was 24.
So we'll say...
And your brother's wife...
It's not like this at all, right?
Very much not.
Very much.
Now, how did I know that?
Because I'm magic.
I'm a unicorn.
No, because he's attempting to use me in exactly the same thing.
Because when he started on this knowledge of self, when he was dealing with these things, he's four years younger than me, so he was about the age that I was when I was coming out on the far side of it.
I don't know what that answer is, but it's not the question I asked.
How did I know that your brother's wife is not this way inclined, either yourself or your wife?
Self-knowledge, criticism, which is constructive, helpful, positive, welcomed.
How did I know your brother's wife is not like this?
Because he's talking to me instead of her?
No, because...
She separated her husband from you because you and your wife are threatening her authority in her relationship with your brother.
That is...
That is very true and brings up one of the things that I... We've actually been thrown out of her house.
I don't doubt it.
And now she has inserted herself between...
You and your brother.
So it was the 4th of July, which for those not in the United States is a big deal where people go out and do foolish things in the name of independence.
So we went to the gun range and shot a lot of stuff and we ran long.
And when we came back, she was very upset that we had taken too long because he only had this small allocated amount of time.
You mean from her?
Yes, from her.
He couldn't get the warden's permission to be out a little longer, is that right?
Correct.
This is that we went out at 9 o'clock and we were supposed to be back for lunch.
We rolled in at noon and that's not enough time because he needed to fire up the grill and cook the chickens.
Because she and the two other women, one of whom was my wife but who didn't want to overstep her authority, apparently were not capable of running the grill and cooking some chicken breasts.
That had to be my brother's doing.
But that wasn't what got us thrown out.
That just made her mad to begin with.
What got us thrown out was we're all sitting down to eat and their daughter comes in and sits down at the table and starts to cry.
And how old's the daughter?
Young, right?
Yeah, young.
She's like three at the time.
So I asked her – she was probably younger.
She was probably two at the time.
So I asked her what was wrong.
Why are you crying?
And mom says, oh, she doesn't like it when there's a bunch of people around because she doesn't like to eat when there's a lot of people at the table.
And so I looked at her, the girl, and I said, well, suck it up, dear.
I'm sorry, but you're not going to get a lot of sympathy from that because we're all here having a good time and you should join us and have fun.
You said that to the daughter?
I said that to the daughter.
The three-year-old?
The three-year-old.
And she stopped crying.
And she looked at me and she started to eat her chicken.
And then mom leaned over and whispered something in her ear and then she started bawling and ran out of the room.
Alright.
And after that, it was like, everybody eat your food and go because the kids won't eat when you're around and leave.
Right.
I don't know.
Maybe I was a little harsh to the child, but she stopped crying.
Yes, in my opinion, you were pretty harsh to the child.
Suck it up is not something that's very helpful for a three-year-old.
Because the three-year-old was being manipulated by the mom, right?
The mom was upset at the company and so the mom was pretending that the three-year-old was upset at the company.
But it was the mom who was upset at the company so she was being used as an emotional sock puppet for the dysfunction of the mom and therefore telling the kid to suck it up when she's just a channel for the immature outrage of the mom is probably not the fairest, right?
That's not fair.
And I didn't realize that at the time, but that's not an excuse.
Sorry, when you say that's not fair, do you mean what I'm saying or what?
I'm saying my actions were not fair to the child.
And I didn't realize that she was...
See, again, I learned that this happens all the time from my mother after the fact.
What happens all the time?
The mother uses the child as an emotional sock puppet all the time.
So the child comes up and says, you need to leave.
Grandma and grandpa are hanging out.
They're all over the house.
You need to leave because it's late now.
Right.
So, obviously, this is not the child.
This is the voice of the mother.
Oh, yeah.
Because children hate staying up late with the company.
Yeah, exactly.
Oh, my God.
That's the worst thing in the world where they're just like, can I do math homework instead?
Yeah, I'll get it.
I get it.
Actually.
Because I'm removed from this dynamic because of, you know, 200 miles of distance, I was not aware of the subtleties of this.
And my actual fear, and this is It's hard for me to not say stuff.
My filter's very low, as you've probably guessed from this conversation.
Sorry to interrupt.
I do apologize.
But you were talking to the mom.
That's why it came out so harsh.
Because you were both using the child as a proxy.
Because the mom was using the child as a proxy for her upset with you guys.
And you were actually mad at the wife of your brother and you used the child as a proxy for that.
You were kind of talking to the mom, right?
It wasn't your suck it up like, just put the goddamn chicken on the barbecue for Christ's sake.
Yeah, so the poor little child was Afghanistan.
I feel bad.
Yeah, she got it both sides, right?
She's used to the proxy both sides.
And she's a sweet kid.
I feel really bad now.
So then she conforms to you, and then when her mom says something that upsets her, then she runs out crying.
So it's pretty alarming for the kid.
I mean, it's very, very dysfunctional.
Yeah.
But anyway...
Part of the problem, and I think this is partly me, why I don't actually want to try and reach out and talk to my brother all that much, is because I'm realizing that that relationship's dysfunctional, and the winter this year has largely done him in, and they're all gonna be moving to not have to deal with the snow.
And that's fine if you don't want to deal with the snow and cold, but he seems to think that somehow this is gonna magically fix everything in his life.
Like, he's gonna buy a smaller house so that he can actually spend time with his children, And not have to worry about property maintenance.
And it's like, I have a house and property that's...
Well, the property is five...
It takes him an hour to mow his lawn.
It takes me six hours to mow my lawn.
It takes him a half hour to shovel his driveway.
It takes me an hour to plow my driveway.
But my wife helps me with all of these things.
And his wife doesn't.
And so I fear that moving is not going to be the panacea that it...
Oh no, of course it's not.
No matter where you go, all your shit follows you.
In fact, it usually arrives there ahead of you and paints the house.
But let me ask you this.
Sorry, sorry to interrupt, but let me ask you this.
Okay, so what did you think of his wife when she was his girlfriend?
Do you know the expression barnacle, babe?
Oh, clinger.
Yeah.
So the irony is she came from a very messed up house.
I'm sure this comes as a shock to you.
And was thrown out at like 17 and was on her own.
So you figure that she's, you know, resourceful and good at...
Dealing with things by herself.
She got herself an apartment.
She got herself a job.
She was taking care of things.
But it seems like her...
No, but she had unmet needs for being taken care of.
And therefore, when she finds someone that she has power over, she then has to manipulate them into pretending that they're the parent to her.
And then she reenacts that relationship with the parents and bloody blah, right?
Yeah.
And this is why my wife and I are both...
Essentially career professionals, and she has taken a break from her career to stay home with the children when they're very young, whereas my sister-in-law is not taking a break from her career because before she had kids, she was a waitress, and I don't think she wants to go back to waitressing, and so she's going to be a stay-at-home mom for the foreseeable future.
So why did you...
Why did you let him marry her?
Because of that.
Did you fight tooth and nail to keep this voracious man-eating neat basket case out of your gene pool?
No, I did not.
Because you're the older brother, right?
I am the older brother.
Yeah, so I don't mean to get all Marlon Brando on you, but shouldn't you have looked out for him a little more?
Or did you try?
I tried to sit him down and have a serious conversation about it, but he said that he was happy and he really loved this girl and that I am judging her not having really gotten to know her.
And how many times did you have that conversation?
I had that conversation.
I'm being annoying here.
I know I'm being annoying and I could be totally wrong.
I'm just curious.
I had that conversation once.
Again, because I was away at university and starting my job.
We physically were not close.
It was an hour drive between us.
So that was a period of time.
I mean, Steph, I went to college and had very little contact with the rest of my family.
No, listen, listen.
I mean, look, I get that you only had the conversation once.
There may have been impediments.
But clearly, if he was in the hospital, you'd have made it, right?
Yeah.
Right, so, and the reason I'm saying this, I don't want to make you feel bad or anything like that, because this is not just a conversation you and I are having, this is a conversation you and I in the world are having, right?
Yes, that's fine.
And, you know, if you're older and so on, you know, look out for your gene pool.
Look out for the wayward, you know, the wayward ducks in the row behind you.
And it's not, look, you're not the dad, it should have been your parents.
But, you know, your parents obviously didn't do it.
But it's like, you know, I will set fire to the church if you marry this woman, right?
Like, oh my God.
Because this is what happens.
You fight.
If your sibling marries a dysfunctional person, you fight like hell, or wants to marry, or dates.
You fight like hell.
You know, and if you've got to provoke the woman into showing her craziness, Right in front of everyone.
You've got to show it on videotape.
You've got to do whatever, right?
You've got to sit down and watch this tape again.
Now, you see how her eyes roll up in her head?
Her head spins around, and next thing you know, her arms have been replaced by talons of fire.
You cannot marry this woman because I'm marrying a functional woman, or I'm married to a functional woman.
If you marry this, nine pounds of crazy, in a three-pound bag, we won't have a relationship.
I'm fighting to have a relationship.
You are my brother.
I want you there for me.
Because after our parents die, you're the only person who knew me as a kid.
I want you to go through the whole of life with me.
We're only four years apart.
I'm 60.
You'll be 56.
It's close as damn it, right?
I need someone to go through my whole life with me.
And if you marry this nutcase...
We will not be able...
That's the stakes, right?
So you know this in hindsight.
And I'm trying to tell other people that this is what the stakes are.
Right?
Yes.
But...
So one conversation, oh, well, we were an hour apart and so on.
Right?
I mean, you must miss him like crazy, at least the relationship you used to have, right?
But that's the thing, we didn't have a relationship.
You said you'd talk about your week.
That was actually after they were married.
That was because he reached out and said, I want to have a relationship with you.
And this was about three years ago.
And I said, I do too.
And it was one of the...
It sounds horribly stupid, but it was one of the most moving gifts I have ever received.
And that was for my birthday.
Now, okay, I'm a Linux nut.
I have no Windows machine.
You just have to say Linux.
The nut is assumed, but okay.
He wanted to play video games.
And this is before Steam actually had lots of video games.
This was before Steam for Linux.
He said, you and I used to play Doom as kids.
I miss that.
Battlefield is awesome.
And he plunked down his old gaming rig and said, happy birthday.
I want to play video games with you and talk over Skype.
It is one of the most...
And we did that for like a year and a half until the whole thing collapsed, as I've detailed before.
Before that, we didn't have a relationship from the time from about like...
We fought a lot as kids, and from about the time that I was 18 and left for college, until then, that birthday, about six years later, we pretty much didn't talk.
It was more than that.
It was about eight years later.
Right.
When you say you fought a lot as kids, what that means is that you were not well-parented as kids, right?
I... Yes, that's probably true, but that doesn't excuse...
The job of the parents, look, the job of the parents is to find a way that the siblings value each other.
I mean, look, I have no relationship with my brother, and it's a sad thing.
It's a sad thing.
And I just, you know, when I see siblings, and this is, you know, after the case for you, although there may still be a chance, but...
When I see siblings not valuing and not treasuring each other, I don't want to just shake them and say, look, this is the one person who can go through your whole life with you.
Basically, cradle to grave.
It's the one person.
It won't be your wife.
It won't be your kids who only know you as an adult.
It won't be your parents who are going to die long before you.
I was going to say with any luck, but you know what I mean, right?
But...
The sibling, it's an incredibly positive and powerful relationship.
Statistics are that I think at least 50% of sibling relationships are considered abusive, and I think that's just bad parenting.
And I'm not a parent to siblings, so people can discount all of this.
But I grew up with a sibling, and the dysfunction in the sibling relationship is a reflection of the dysfunction in the parenting relationship.
Well, and ours probably could be considered in that way very much dysfunctional.
I mean, as we got older and we were both very physical and big, you know, we got in, you know, knock-down drag-out fights and that we could have I could have handled things a lot better with regards to my frustration with him.
I was the one who always did what he was told.
He was the one that would rather ask for forgiveness than permission.
In fact, he actually eloped and got married because his solution to...
They were having some disagreement with my parents about money.
I don't even remember what the full context was.
well, we're going to elope and just not tell anybody, whereas I would have laid out the rational argument as to why what I wanted to do should be permitted.
Those are the two differences in our personalities or whatever.
And so I was angry with him.
I didn't know how to express it.
My father was always intermittently absent and violent.
And so I had a lot of anger and it took self-knowledge and talking with my wife and all of that.
And that was one of the big things to come out of this is I don't want to treat my kids the way that my father treated us.
And my brother doesn't either.
And he and I both talked about this.
That was one of the things that we talked about a lot was how we were treated as children and how we did not want to do that to our kids.
Right, right and so Basically, I would guess, and I'm pretty confident, but I can't prove it, that because he married this woman, when she's around more functional people, she has a choice, right?
Because she shows up as less functional when she's around more functional people, right?
And I can't picture you or your wife using your children to manipulatively and passive-aggressively punish guests who you have disapproved of for irrational reasons when they're three, right?
That's not how you're going to roll as parents, right?
No, no.
And you're not going to use them as emotional sock puppets to vent irrationally and insanely.
And this is particularly true after...
Crazy can hide, not to anybody with any perception, real perception, but crazy can hide when you're dating.
Gracie can hide less when you're engaged.
It can hide less after you're married, and it can't hide at all after you have kids.
It's just unmasking of the full-on fruit and nut bar that goes on.
Now, you could see the dysfunction, and bad family, underperforming professionally, and so on.
You could see all of this stuff when your brother was younger, right?
Yes, but I want to ask a question about that.
It was something that you said earlier, which is, did I fight tooth and nail to keep this from happening?
It actually really bothered me because at what point do you accept that he is an adult and can make his own decisions?
I mean, isn't that the worst type of patronizing egomania to think that I know what's best for him?
I mean, essentially, I'm removing his agency in the discussion by saying, I know what's best for you.
No, I get it.
I get it.
Okay, let me ask you this.
How pretty is the lady?
Or was she?
No, she's still pretty.
Okay, so one to ten, what are we talking?
Seven.
Seven, okay.
And your brother?
What's his level?
Oh, I don't know.
Probably back when he had hair, he was more like an eight.
I know that he never had problems meeting girls like I did.
He's got a much better personality.
He's better as a qualifier.
He's more outgoing.
He's more approachable.
He and I had long conversations about he feels that I intimidate people because I use big words and all of that, and he tries to bring...
It's not big words, just a lot of them.
Well, that's true.
He tries to bring the level of discourse down to where people are comfortable.
He's much better at reading a room.
So why was he drawn to her?
I don't know.
I gotta think you do.
I gotta think you do.
At some level, you must, right?
I mean, because he's your brother.
You know him incredibly well.
I mean, you know him probably better than you know anyone.
Um, I fail to believe it's that he wanted to have his life run and be told what to do, because he's always been even more of an independent person who rejected what he was being told to do and did whatever he wanted to anyway, yet that's kind of what he's fallen into.
Hmm.
Does she have a body part that he has a particular fetish for?
I don't know, long legs, big boobs, whatever, right?
You know, ironically, my brother and I never really talked about what type of bits and pieces he likes the most.
But, you know, given the choice, I mean, she buys the, what, apple-bottom jeans that all the girls with the junk in the trunk buy.
So maybe that's it.
Maybe he's a butt man and he likes the big butt.
And he cannot lie.
Right.
Right.
Okay.
Well, if you're a flat-stomach man, parenthood doesn't help.
If you're a big-butt guy, apparently.
Yeah.
So, look, because he could have been pussy blinded, right?
Well, he could have been, but the thing is that he was always awash in it.
She had some hook.
And I don't know what that is.
Some hook over him.
Yeah, and I don't know what that is.
And it was either sexual or psychological or that there was some hook that she had over him.
Now, my guess is, and I'm trying to sort of project my own third prior experiences on this.
So, again, this is all just conjecture.
But my guess is that she found some way in which he viewed her as a superior to him.
I would accept that as a very likely possibility, but I can't put my finger on what that way was, which is essentially what you were asking.
And it wouldn't necessarily be rational.
Like I dated a woman when I was younger who thought there was something wrong with me.
And as I sort of continued to...
She never really quite defined it, you know, but I was just...
There was something wrong with me.
And as I sort of went from success to success, you know, building a company and writing books and all this kind of stuff, right?
She continued to chug along as a secretary.
Right?
And I just remember one day she was...
I don't know.
Again, intimating, you know, well, you just, you don't approach life right.
You're not doing this right.
You're not doing that right or whatever, right?
You need to do more of this or less of this.
I just, I remember I turned to her and I said, but you're a secretary.
And I'm running the technical arm of a software company.
And I said, that doesn't make me a better person in any fundamental way.
It doesn't make me more moral or anything like this.
But I said, it kind of feels weird being lectured to on how to be successful, right?
By someone who's a secretary.
And she was well-educated and smart and all that.
So, for a variety of reasons we don't have to get into here, I kind of bought into that she was somehow superior.
And as sort of the evidence of life accumulated, it became ridiculous, right?
And again, it's not like being a secretary is bad and doing what I'm doing is somehow magically better or anything like that.
But in terms of like, well, you need to listen to me to be a success in life, it just kind of got silly.
You know, I mean, call up Taylor Swift and say, you know, you really need to focus on this genre of music.
She just turned to pop and reinvented the genre, right?
I mean, this is not...
So...
And the reason I'm saying all of that is it's probably not anything rational or anything true, but she probably convinced him in some manner that he was inferior to her or he needed her approval or he needed her to tell him what to do because he was just somehow not right.
And she was, you know, this is what nagging is.
It's just this, I know...
What you need to do, and you just damn well need to shut up and do it.
And he believed that for some reason.
And the reason I'm sort of focusing on this is, I mean, the cure for nagging would change the world.
I mean, and I don't mean that literally would change the world.
And nagging is just this nails on a blackboard shit.
Where somebody is just 100% convinced that they're right.
There's no ambiguity.
It's very primitive, very immature, black and white thinking.
You just need to do it this way.
Right?
And this mom, well, she's just not comfortable with people around when she's eating.
How do you know?
She's three.
And why do you say that like it's just some fact of nature when you're the parent?
Right?
I mean...
Isn't that part of your job as a parent?
To help her be comfortable with...
They're not strangers.
It's not like, here are nine hobos off the street.
Let's break bread with them.
One of them has a pharaoh living in his pants.
Okay, honey, make friends.
So...
In some way, she was able to diminish him to the point where she was in charge, right?
Yeah, I mean, that's the only thing that makes sense.
Um...
You know, I wonder if it was something as simple as she was the rebound girl.
Well, I don't think that's enough.
Yeah, no, I get that.
But, you know, I mean, a rebound girl is like pushing the side of a balloon in, right?
You pick your finger out, the balloon pops out again, right?
I mean, it doesn't lead to this, I don't think, in particular.
Wait a minute, wait a minute.
You said that he was the rebellious one, right?
Yeah.
And was he castigated for that perpetually in your family?
Not generally.
He oftentimes got away with it.
I mean, I wasn't about to...
No, no, no.
I didn't mean did he get away with it.
Castigated means was he criticized for it?
I would view criticism as not having gotten away with it.
No, no, no.
Criticism is consequences, right?
I mean, if somebody could get away with lying, I would still criticize him for it, right?
No.
Basically, I think the only one...
If my parents were aware of all of the stuff that he was getting into, it would be news to me.
So he was not criticized by them.
And once we were older, I didn't criticize him because he was enjoying himself and not...
Even though he was breaking the rules, quote unquote, he wasn't actually doing anything morally wrong.
He was breaking curfew and going out with his friends and riding dirt bikes and not doing his homework and those types of things.
Do you know what's in common?
Hang on a sec.
Do you know what's in common with breaking curfew and the story you told me earlier?
Not at all.
Well, you went to the gun range, right?
Yeah.
And did he break his wife's, quote, curfew?
Yeah.
Right?
So he's using, he needs the structure.
No, no, no, no, don't jump to conclusions yet.
Absorb what we just said.
Absorb, okay.
Absorb, which means just go, huh, right?
But don't immediately, ah, is he doing this?
No, just absorb, right?
Can I throw another fact into it?
Yeah, yeah.
There's a curfew on our video games.
All right.
So essentially the way that it worked is we would be playing from, I don't know, 6.30 to 8 o'clock at night.
And then after 8 o'clock, he had to go downstairs so that they could watch television together for an hour or two before they went to bed because they had to have, they being my brother and my sister-in-law, because they had to have family time.
And family time does not include children.
That was the key.
They had to have them time, which does not include children.
Was their family time really watching TV? Yes.
I mean, unless that was a euphemism for squeaking the bed springs.
I don't know.
Two hours?
Dude, I don't care if he's 17.
That's pretty impressive.
Yeah, I mean, he might just be that good.
No, in which case he'd be in charge.
But...
Yeah, no, I mean, there's a lot of this.
Look, it's together time.
We are watching television.
It's like, video games, when you're chatting, is far more interactive than watching TV together.
Oh, hello?
Yes, I'm still here.
Sorry.
Oh, sorry, I just...
You can't see me nodding on the audio.
Okay.
That's very true.
That's very true.
So...
So, in terms of...
Your parents set him curfews and he broke curfews, right?
Yeah.
And I assume they were not happy with that.
Well, I don't know that they ever caught him.
Because it was like...
What?
Well, so...
It wasn't curfews in the sense of...
I use curfews as a colloquialism.
It was like, you're supposed to come home from school and do your homework and this and that, and the parents come home at five.
As long as he's home by five, they don't know that he wasn't home because as soon as he got home, he took off on his dirt bike and went off and didn't stay home and was out running around the neighborhood.
So he was home in time, but he wasn't home when he was supposed to be, if that made any sense.
He was home early enough to not get caught.
Okay, no, I get it.
I get it.
Okay, and did consequences not accrue?
Like, if he didn't do his homework, did he end up, like, failing?
Yes, but, you know, he would fail.
He would squeak by with seas.
I mean, essentially, he was never really that into school.
He very much is a very hands-on sort of guy.
It took him...
So he went to high school, he did a semester of college, he stopped It was community college, and he basically dropped classes the day before you couldn't get your money back, so he was able to say, college isn't for me, and then he worked at a shop for a couple of years before he realized that he really liked hands-on work,
the job was going nowhere, so he became a technician, which is a union job and pays like 45 bucks an hour, so he actually makes a really good living right now, plus he works like 60 hours, 60 to 80 hours a week, because he gets a ton of overtime, which is why his wife doesn't have to work, But he's working himself to death.
It broke my heart when he told me over texting last week that part of the reason he's moving to Florida is because he heard his daughter say to a friend of hers or whatever, that daddy can't play with us because he's a working man.
And this was on a weekend because he had to go out and shovel a walk because it was snow.
So you're still in contact with him?
Yeah, more because I talked to my mom and she said, oh yeah, we're all going to move to Florida.
Now, I knew my folks were moving to Florida.
No, no, but he texted you.
I texted him first.
No, I get it.
I get it.
But he texted you.
Yes, he did.
So you're not like incommunicado, right?
Right.
I texted him and said, so I hear you're moving.
That sounds interesting.
And I wanted to at least kind of open up a dialogue there.
Right.
Okay, you said your IQ was 160?
Yeah.
Yeah, something like that.
That was when I took it.
What's his IQ? I don't know.
I only took it because a girlfriend of mine thought it would be funny.
No, no, no.
Let's go back into that.
What would you guess?
Has he ever given you...
This has nothing to do with his qualities.
Right.
Maybe you got the extra brains.
I don't think so.
Give me some evidence, please.
I'm not saying you're wrong.
I'm infinitely better than I do.
I'm trying to come up with...
Let's take IQ out of it because that implies a certain specific skill set of being able to do mathematics quickly.
At least that was the test that I took.
No, no, no.
The IQ test is...
Come on, man.
You don't...
IQ test is much more than can you do mathematics quickly.
An IQ test is highly predictive of where you end up in life.
It is not a guesswork.
It's not like the Myers-Briggs test that we talked about recently in the show.
It's not crap that's made up by people.
I mean, it's very relevant to how you end up.
It's not a perfect measure, but it is one of the greatest ways or the most accurate ways to predict where people are going to end up in life, right?
Yeah.
And so, um, don't just say, well, it's just, you know, I mean, you can say it, but it's just not accurate to say, well, it doesn't really measure anything except this particular skill.
It is a broad measure of cognitive ability when done correctly, right, with the right metrics and all that.
I would say he's easily as smart as I am.
He has a tremendous diagnostic ability, especially for mechanical machines, and, um, uh, The problem is that he has a lack of patience.
Like, I can be an engineer because I can deal with all of the boring shit of filling out TPS reports and documenting code and doing all of that.
But he is like, this machine is broken.
Let me take it apart, divine its workings, and fix it, possibly even fabricating, jerry-rigging, MacGyvering, some solution to that.
Now, why would you assume that patience is not related to IQ? I don't know.
It just never occurred to me as...
Because you say, well, he's as smart as me.
He just lacks this quality called patience.
But patience is part of intelligence.
Right?
Because patience is saying, I'm going to defer gratification because I know I can see further ahead down the road of time and know that it's going to pay off.
Right?
And this is why higher IQ people are generally not overweight.
Well, you're swinging a miss there.
No, no.
Generally.
You know the word generally, right?
Please don't grant me a single exception and say, that disproves a bell curve, right?
I know.
But what it means is that generally, people who are intelligent can say, oh, well, if I keep...
Down this road, right?
I mean, because every time I see someone who's overweight, I'm like, didn't you notice?
Hey, can't see my pee-pee, can't see my toes, can't see my bath mat, can't see my steering wheel, right?
I mean, wouldn't you notice and correct your behavior, but it takes a certain amount of intelligence to say.
It's not like all intelligent people are patient, but patience to some degree is, it's worth They're sacrificing my comfort in the moment for the sake of a greater good down the road, right?
This is called the marshmallow test, and this has been, it's again, highly predictive of future success, right?
So they take kids when they're little, I can't remember, three or four or whatever, and they say, okay, I'm going to give you a marshmallow, and I'm going to come back in ten minutes, and if you haven't eaten the marshmallow in ten minutes, I'll give you two.
And some kids eat the marshmallow, and some kids wait.
Now, the kids who can wait...
Have higher IQs and are much more successful in life in general.
Right?
So it's not...
It's possible.
I don't know.
I'm just saying it's possible that your brother may not lack, may be as intelligent as you and lack a certain skill set called patience.
Well, he's always been more instant gratification.
Right.
But that may be a mark of intelligence.
Also working in shop.
Right?
You've probably seen the bell curve with intelligence, right?
That You know, there's a certain level of intelligence you need to be a lawyer or to be a doctor or to be in management or to be a professor or, you know, whatever, an engineer, right?
And people who don't have that native capacity end up doing other things, right?
I mean, it's nothing good or bad.
It's just, you know, tall people do this and short people don't, right?
Basketball or whatever, right?
And so I'm just sort of opening up this as a possibility.
What would you say about his wife's intelligence?
Where would you rate that?
On the bell curve, we don't have to use IQ or anything.
Yeah, he's definitely smarter than she is.
And how do you know that?
Because she was a waiter?
It wasn't just because...
I don't know if this counts as smarter or less knowledgeable, but she just seems very unaware and, it sounds mean to say, but base.
There's not a lot of high-level...
He and I can talk about philosophy and discourse and, I don't know, how...
Putting money in a savings account that pays a quarter of a percent interest is horrible because of the wonders of compound interest as it relates to inflation and all those types of things.
And he gets that.
It's all over his head and she's bored.
Or it's all over her head and she's bored.
Are you familiar with the card game Apples to Apples?
Card game?
Apples to apples, I'm not, no.
The card game.
Oh, card game, no.
Yeah, there's ones called Cards Against Humanity.
It's the same idea.
But the basic idea in Apples to Apples is that there's one person who has a card and it's like, so-and-so is blank.
And then everybody else has answers that are...
People or things or activities or whatever.
And so, through playing this game, one of the cards that came up was Mahatma Gandhi.
She had no idea who that was.
Another one was Lucille Ball.
Also had no idea who that was.
And I mean, I don't know if that directly relates to intelligence or more like, have you been living in a cave?
There's also like a lack of ambition and follow through, which I find disappointing.
I mean, she started college for a couple different majors and after like a semester or so basically is no longer interested and never follows through.
Hence why I think he met her when she was working at a waitress.
Right.
Yeah.
Right.
Okay.
Now, if he is as intelligent as you are, or smarter than she is, then how could the relationship sustain itself?
I want to be base and say she's really good in bed.
Yeah, but this is something that men know, right?
Right.
A man's cognitive faculties shut down, right?
I mean, to be perfectly honest, and he and I have never talked about this, for all I know, this might be the first girl who let him stick it in the back door.
Like, that may be the whole reason behind the whole thing.
I don't know.
Right.
Right.
Well, so this, you know, I mean, this is sort of the warning to other people, right?
Which is that if your brother marries someone who's going to run into conflict with you, your relationship is most likely doomed.
And the reason being, not that your brother doesn't love you, not that your brother wouldn't necessarily choose you over this woman, but just because, given the way, particularly in the States, right, given the way that the family court system is, he can't leave.
You know, he can't leave.
Because he's toast, right?
Particularly because she's not worked, right?
And he's making good coin, right?
Yeah.
So what's going to happen?
He's going to be on alimony and child support.
And yeah, I mean, there's no...
He has no out.
I'm not sure that he wants an out.
Modern marriage is closer to a cult than...
A romance novel these days.
You can't get out.
This is why it's so important to really help people make the right decision on who to marry if they want to get married.
You can't get out.
It's like a roach motel.
I mean, once you're in, you are fucking in.
And this is why she has so much power.
It's not just her, right?
It's the whole system.
And, you know, she's probably cunning enough to know that and she can say whatever the hell she wants and bully whoever she wants and, no, you can't do video games anymore and, you know, she's doing a number on her relationship, your relationship with your brother and so on, right?
And, wow.
Wow.
I mean, this is the unbelievable power that this ridiculous system.
And of course, you know, feminism has trained women to have no respect for men in general.
Radical feminism in particular has taught women to have any respect for men.
And therefore, when a man tries to assert any kind of authority, and this doesn't mean bossing over someone, But nobody has trained women to say, listen to men, they've got really useful things to say, really important things to say.
You need to listen as much as you talk, right?
I mean, women are basically just programmed from the beginning that men are idiots and you just, you know, sex-crazed, beer-swilling, football-obsessed maniacs who you just kind of have to put up with because they have an unfortunate monopoly on sperm.
And the idea that a woman will listen and say...
Wow, you know, help me understand this.
You're a guy.
You know, help me really to learn something new and important.
It's like that show we did a while back ago where it's like a beauty contestant was asked, what can women learn from men?
Holy!
Can be quite a pause for a lot of women.
And I'm sure your wife would answer honorably, and I'm sure that...
This, your brother's wife would not, really.
And it is, you know, it's really important to try and protect people from the future.
Now, of course, you're right.
I mean, it's an interesting question, you know, what kind of free will does he have and so on?
And I get that.
I really get that.
But we know that men's brains shut down when pussy blinded.
And, you know, it's sort of like keeping, not to keep the phallic imagery going, but Keeping a brother's penis out of the wrong pussy is like taking away his keys when he's drunk.
Well, at what point does he have free will?
It's like he doesn't have the free will to drive off a cliff because he's drunk, right?
Because he doesn't have free will because he's drunk.
Yeah.
That's fair.
And if you've got to sit down and provoke...
Sorry, go ahead.
Go ahead.
No, go ahead.
I was going to say, once again, it seems like your show just boils down to the axiom, don't stick your dick in crazy.
Well, and expect to get it back in one piece, you know?
You know, there's a...
I can't remember the name of it, but there's a bush in Africa.
Look at that.
I'm keeping the imagery going.
There's a bush in Africa, and it's called...
Wait a moment.
And what it is, is all those spikes go one way.
So you can walk into the bush and you're like, hey, this is comfortable, but the moment you turn around and try and get back out, you are shredded, man.
I mean, you are shredded.
And, yeah, I mean, crazy for JJ is, wait a minute, hey, this is easy!
Oh my god.
I'm clamped!
Right?
It's, yeah, it's a Bengal tiger trap with mascara.
And you gotta try and keep people away from this.
Because, I mean, it's going to be very tough to have a relationship with your brother, which his wife disapproves of, right?
Well, and that's probably why it didn't happen immediately.
It happened slowly over time.
But basically, I'm still in touch with all of my guy friends from college.
And I see them...
And it's a bigger group.
We try and get together with all of our families, despite the fact that we're scattered all over.
And, you know, we try to...
It's a tiny state.
It's not like, we are scattered to the four corners of the world like the dwarves after Moria.
Yeah, it's a six-hour drive from here to the guy in...
Oh, is it?
Okay.
We try and get together at least once a year, especially now that we all have kids and we'll all meet up and do something.
And then individually, you know, we'll all go over this guy's house and like that.
So we're all kind of in touch.
It's the group of college buddies and, you know, it's been 10 years and we're still...
Talking with each other and all that.
And to be honest, I see them more than I see my brother.
And I think that that's not just true about me and my brother.
I don't think he has that relationship with any of his friends anymore.
I think that He has not been able to keep those relationships.
It happened gradually.
It's the frog in the boiling water.
And I don't know what he has in his life anymore aside from his wife, his kids, and the people at his job.
Well, he's got the cracked spine of a broken husband.
You know, that sort of sloping shoulder, staring at the sidewalk, shuffling along, yes dear, no dear.
You know, he's got shrew clamp around the testicles.
And, you know, I hate to put it that bluntly, but it does not sound good.
It does not sound good.
So then I'm sat here left wondering, how do I help my brother?
I mean, it's going to probably be painful for me to reach out and try and talk to him.
And I don't know that I would engage him directly.
I would just say something a bit oblique that would be like, I miss playing video games with you.
And maybe we should play video games again.
No.
No?
No.
I mean, oblique?
I mean, what are you, gonna live forever?
I mean, this is your brother.
So what do you suggest?
Thank you.
Thank you.
How are things at home?
I talked to him a bit about him moving.
And I suppose if I re-engage that conversation.
But I feel like if I were to say, I know you want to move, but you've basically given me every reason for moving, except I hate the damn cold.
Like, if your reason for moving is, I'm tired of how cold it is, I totally get that and that makes sense.
However, you've given me every reason other than that for your move.
So what the hell's going on?
What are you trying to fix?
And why do you think that moving would fix it?
Is that too direct or do you think that's a legit question?
I think that's a highly incurious question.
Because curiosity, Matthew, is asking a question you don't already know the answer to.
That's a manipulative approach because you're basically saying, I know the answer and I want you to fess up.
That's not really listening, right?
Okay.
And that's very much, I mean, I know I told you to look out for him and all that.
That's pretty much an older brother know-it-all thing.
Like, I gotcha.
I know the deal.
I need you to confess what the real deal is and stop bullshitting, right?
I don't think that's too invitational, if that makes sense.
Okay.
So then, how are things at home?
How are things at home?
And it may take ten conversations before you get anything really real.
But just keep asking.
Okay.
What do you think of this move?
And also, I miss you.
I'm not happy with...
I feel sad.
We grew up together.
We have kids together.
We're more or less the same time kind of thing.
And, you know, it's kind of heartbreaking that we don't see each other.
I said, I don't know what the answer is.
I mean, it's not your fault, not my fault.
Who knows, right?
But I'm just telling you how I feel, right?
You know, feelings without conclusions, feelings without action plans.
Because, you know, everybody says what they feel and then immediately wants to leap into action.
And you can hear this all the time in the calls that I have on this show.
I want to jump to conclusions, leap into action.
And that's just a way of avoiding the feelings.
And I'm not talking about you in particular in this.
I'm not trying to be indirect with you.
I'm oblique with you.
But just talk about the thoughts and feelings.
That's where the real connection is.
The moment you start making plans, you're making distance.
Well, and that's fair, but it almost feels like a little disingenuous because I don't feel like I miss him.
Does that make sense?
No, I get it.
You don't miss him as it is, but do you miss missing him?
Well, I guess the thing is that it seems like...
I guess every time I think about I miss our interactions, it's like I remember the level of frustration that I have with the whole situation that he's in, and it makes me so angry that it's easier just not to deal with it.
And the way to not deal with this is to not have a relationship.
And that makes it all about me.
Right.
Right.
So let's have it not be about you.
Right.
Listen, you know who the person to ask about how to deal with this is?
My brother?
Your wife.
Oh.
Isn't she great at constructive criticism?
Yes.
Because if you make it about you, of course, and I don't have to tell you this, you know, right?
But if you make it about you, and if you're frustrated at his situation, you are going to end up feeling his feelings, which is going to paralyze him, right?
He's the one who needs to be frustrated with his situation, not you.
And if you let yourself get all frustrated, then he gets to not feel it.
He gets to manage and reject your frustration rather than feel any of his own, right?
I have talked to my wife about this because her brother is in a very similar situation.
And basically the takeaway that she has is...
Her brother's in a similar situation.
She's worried about him, especially since he's going to be in ill health if he's not, because he's very heavy, if he's not already.
And his parents are worried about him, but they can't really talk to him about it for largely some of the same reasons.
Both of us feel powerless that there's nothing that we can do to help.
And, you know, it comes down to we can't save the world and we're just going to...
No, I get it.
Look, and I'm not saying that you're responsible for saving your brother, Matthew.
I'm not trying to say that at all.
What I am saying is that, in my opinion, look, it's your relationship.
I never tell people what to do if I can at all help it.
And I don't want to tell you what to do because I don't know.
But I will say this.
He is your brother and it's better to burn out than fade away.
You know that old saying?
Better to burn out than fade away.
He worked in a motorcycle shop.
I'm sure there's a couple of t-shirts with that on it.
Some guy in a Harley in flames or something.
And what I mean by that is if a relationship can't be sustained, if a relationship can't function, It is better to know why and it is better to have it out than it is to just have it fade away.
In my opinion.
I don't have any scientific proof for this, you understand, right?
This is why I say to people, okay, you got problems with your parents, you got problems with your siblings, sit down, like, have it out, for God's sakes.
Talk about it.
Give it a chance.
Give it a chance to succeed before it's written off.
Give it a chance.
Because the reason why we avoid those conversations is we're really afraid that they're going to go really badly and it's going to make us very unhappy.
And that's a rational fear.
Of course it is.
I mean, nobody wants to put themselves through that if it's at all avoidable.
But what is the alternative?
Well, what is the alternative?
It's to end up with this hole in your life.
You don't even know what it's there for, how it came about.
Well, I guess the thing is, is that I actually, that's not what I fear.
What I fear is success.
Like, let's just say that I can convince him to have a serious conversation with his wife.
And as a result, she leaves him.
Now he's way worse off than he would have been otherwise.
No, you see, and this is the challenge where we started with.
Because you're saying that a connection with your brother is going to result in these tangible actions.
This is exactly a mirror, Matthew, of the conversation we had about an hour ago Where your brother was saying, well, I want to talk to this about with dad, and you say, well, you're not going to change it, and it's going to get worse, or something bad's going to happen, or nothing's going to get frustrated.
So, honesty results in action, results in negative outcome.
You're judging it by the outcome.
Not the connection.
It is impossible to know what intimacy and a connection will do.
And the idea that, well, you see, if you connect with your brother, then he is going to have a conversation with his wife that is going to result in the destruction of their family and their marriage.
Look, he has no family.
I mean, what does his daughter say?
I don't get to play with daddy because he's a working man.
Look, the reason why he's working 60 or 70 or 80 hours a week is not because he wants the money.
It's because he doesn't want his wife.
It's just, I mean, half of workaholism is, I don't want to go home.
And it becomes self-feeding, right?
because the less you go home, the worse your relationship gets, which means the less you want to go home.
So he's spinning off into space.
Right?
He's got, you know, I'm not saying they should get divorced.
I have no idea.
But it could well be the case that he'd have a far better relationship with his children if he did get divorced.
Because right now, what's he got?
Well, and that was the thing that I... That was the thing that I don't understand...
That I didn't understand about our conversation, you know, a week ago we were texting about that movie.
Is that, you know...
We have a bigger property and we do more stuff and we keep a garden and they don't and all of these things.
And yet every day I come home from work and I generally cook dinner because I like to cook.
And from dinner time till they go to bed, which is usually between an hour and a two, I play on the floor with my sons.
And I do this every night.
But you like your wife.
I love my wife.
I love my children.
You love your wife.
Right.
Right.
And look, and the other reason why he's having a terrible relationship with his children is his wife uses the children, I'm guessing, right, based upon what we've talked about, his wife uses the children as passive aggressive emotional sock puppets, right?
Yes.
And so all the resentment she may have against him, all the problems she may have, are poured into the children.
Which harms the relationship with the father.
So he's going to work himself into an early grave like a lot of disposable males.
Because he's never been taught to stand his ground emotionally.
He's never been taught how to get respect from a woman.
And women have never been taught how to respect a man in general.
And so he's just become this workhorse.
You know, I worked with a guy.
His...
He's dead now, actually.
But anyway, I worked with a guy, and he had a cottage.
And his wife and his kids would go up to the cottage for the whole summer.
The whole summer, up there, you know, fishing and swimming and water skiing and having a grand old time.
And he was working away in the city.
And, you know, he's trying to get up.
He's like a four-hour driver.
So he's trying to get up to the cottage for the weekend.
You know, he just said, he burns in my brain, he said.
It burns in my brain.
Sometimes.
Though they're up there for the whole summer, I'm sitting here, sweating in traffic, going to meetings, getting up early, making my own food.
And they're up there the whole summer.
Do they come down?
And say, how can we make your life better, Dad?
No.
That is up there consuming my life.
Well, that's no way to live, right?
Well, and that's why both my wife and I rejected that.
I mean, we were like, we want to do this.
And so we worked towards that.
And, you know...
You really, really, really have a tough time keeping it about your brother, right?
Say again?
You really have a tough time keeping it about your brother, right?
We're talking about your brother.
That's true.
And you keep bringing it back to you.
Well, I've made better decisions.
Well, my wife and I don't do that.
Well, I come home and I play with my kids.
We're trying to talk about your brother.
I get that you've made better decisions.
I applaud you for that.
I accept that.
Can we get back to your brother?
It's hard for you, right?
It is.
It also occurs to me that the daughter saying dad can't play, he's a working man, that's the mother again.
There's no way she would have come up with that on her own.
You know the phrase, just the way that it's said, those are mom's words.
Oh yeah.
And if the mom wanted him home, he'd be home.
Because the mom wants him to not have any contact with you and he's obeying her in that, right?
The fragility of men, of course, is the great unspoken physics of the world.
The fragility of men and their subjugation by women.
Which is not to say the reverse doesn't always occur, but we know that.
We know the reverse occur.
Men subjugate women sometimes, but the great fragility of men.
I mean, as Dr.
Warren Farrell said, that the seeming weakness of women is their greatest strength, and the seeming strength of men is their greatest weakness.
Because if Your sister-in-law wanted your brother home, he'd be home.
She's like, go make money.
Make money and don't be here.
And anyone who's going to interfere with my emotional acting out can't be around.
And anyone who has the slightest chance of helping you stand up to me cannot be around.
Women, dysfunctional women isolate men For the same reason, all dysfunctional organizations isolate people.
So that there's not outside criticism of the dysfunction.
Which is why I say to people, go to a therapist.
Go talk to a therapist.
Go see a therapist.
I mean, I've said this six million times in this show.
Because, not that I'm running any kind of organization, I'm just doing a podcast.
But if I was doing something dysfunctional, I wouldn't say to people, go see a therapist, right?
Because then a therapist would say, oh my God, this podcast is crazy.
So she's isolating him so that outside influences can't highlight how dysfunctional she's becoming.
There's a reason Reverend Jim Jones had to take everyone to Ghana.
Thank you.
So he's in trouble.
And I get it.
He's an adult.
It's not your responsibility to fix him.
But fixing him is looking at an outcome.
And a relationship is not a series of plans or to-dos or action items.
It's not a project plan.
It's not a tick list.
It's just listening and spontaneously responding without making plans or fearing consequences.
And I think he needs that.
You don't owe him that, but I think you would greatly benefit from offering it.
I think I shall.
I hope you will.
I hope you'll let us know how it goes.
Yeah.
And you know, it's funny, and I say this simply because, you know, I mean, people say, oh, marital therapy is good.
You don't often hear of sibling therapy, right?
I can't say I've ever heard of it.
No, but, I mean, when you think about it...
You're in a long-term relationship that, assuming that it doesn't fall apart, is probably going to be longer than your marriage.
Assuming that your relationship with your brother and the relationship with your wife both go until everybody dies, you're probably going to be in a longer-term relationship with your sibling than you are with your wife.
I hate to correct your math.
You are definitely going to be in a longer-term relationship with your sibling unless you get married upon exiting the womb as an older sibling.
If you stay together, your sibling relationship is going to be the longest relationship you'll have.
And you never, ever hear of sibling therapy, which I think is terrible.
It's terrible.
And again, it's...
I don't know.
I don't know what prejudice it comes from or whatever, but it's something that people don't really think of.
But I think it's a desperate shame.
And...
So anyway, I mean, I know we went on quite a walkabout there, but I hope that was of help to you.
And, you know, I want to really just say huge respect for the conversation.
I really appreciate your thoughts, your sharing.
And, dude, I mean, congratulations on your parenting, too, and your wife.
You know, give her a completely platonic peck on the cheek for me and just say, good on you, mate.
When you meet a Solaris administrator who's pretty cute in the computer lab, and she's actually willing to give you the time of day, you're starting in a pretty good place.
Oh, for those who don't know a Solaris administrator, a Solaris is an E-class of starship similar to the Enterprise.
So he's actually just talking about a cardboard cutout fictional character, which is a bit of a disappointing end to what I thought was going to be a great marriage story.
No, I'm just kidding.
That's it.
Can of OS? Who makes Flores?
Sun, which is now owned by Oracle, so we call them Snoracle.
I love your filthy pillow talk.
I don't know what that means.
It's somewhat open-sourcy now, because Linux is basically eating their lunch.
Did it come off BOS, or are I completely waived?
No, it predates BOS by some time.
But I think they all share like a common Unix root.
I don't know.
I'd have to pull out my Unix lineage to actually be certain because that gets all tangled and incestuous at times.
Right.
Okay.
Cool.
Well, I mean, and congratulations on your twins.
That's exciting.
And I'm extremely happy that they're doing well.
I know premiums can be a bit exciting.
So good on everyone.
How old are they now?
They're 15 months.
Yeah, they're doing really well.
It's amazing.
We're just doing what we think comes naturally.
We're doing a mix of what's logical and what's working.
It's amazing when we take them out to restaurants, everybody's like, oh, they're so well-behaved.
It's like, yeah, we're sitting in their favorite Japanese place and they're eating shumai.
What do you expect them to do?
They're happy.
They're eating.
They like all the waitresses.
Everybody waves at them.
They wave back.
It strikes me as totally surprising that everybody's reaction is that your children are well-behaved.
Why wouldn't they be?
Well, and well-behaved, too.
You have well-trained monkey offspring.
You know, I mean, can you imagine someone coming up to you and saying, Matthew, your wife is extraordinarily well-behaved.
I mean, she really is quite civilized.
I mean, good heavens she's not throwing monkey pee or anything.
Good job training her.
I don't know.
Well, and that's the thing is that I can't, like, what's the right answer there?
Thank you?
Yes, I know?
It's like, thank you, I'm taking credit for something that I basically had no hand in doing.
They kind of came this way, and I made a very good effort to not break them.
Yeah, that's right.
It's like, congratulations, your car still works.
No, it's worse, because at least you have to maintain the car.
It's sort of like, congratulations, your tablet screen is not cracked.
It's like, well, because I didn't drop it.
So that's kind of how they come, and just don't break them, and you'll be happy for it.
Well, in all fairness, there is a bit of maintenance required with the babies.
You do need to change the diapers and make sure they don't get rashes and put them in the crib so that they're sleeping in an appropriate place as opposed to in the middle of the floor with the dog, although I've caught them doing that too.
I have been informed that Solaris is based on Unix, as is pretty much every OS. Well, that's not entirely true.
Linux and Minix are technically Unix-like but have no real Unix heritage.
Oh, I've had an italics which are still in use.
Oh, I'm sorry.
Are you saying that there's no Amiga machines running anymore?
Nothing running in emulation?
I think you might want to check that.
You might want to go have a look.
Anyway, sorry.
Heck, FreeDOS isn't Unix-based.
I'm sure there's a ZX80 emulator which somebody will email me the ROM to.
I'm not old enough for that, says somebody associated with the show.
It's okay, because he didn't use caps.
He may have said that.
I don't have my reading glasses on, so I can't possibly tell.
Hey, back in the day, caps is all there was, you young whippersnappers with your multi-case keys.
Oh, yeah.
How decadent.
How decadent.
Emoticons.
Give me a break.
All right.
Listen, man, I'm going to close off the show, but I really appreciate you calling in.
Great story.
Congratulations, too, on keeping your sons intact.
The Intactivists will be thrilled about that.
And thanks, of course, for helping us spread the word.
Please, people, go and listen to or watch the truth about circumcision.
It's really important.
You know, there's, yeah, medical opinion.
Yeah, well, you know, 40 years ago, medical opinion, or 50 years ago, medical opinion was that smoking was fine.
You know, these things do change.
I just found out cholesterol is good for you.
And therefore, we see the patent whiny demise of the all-white egg omelet, which actually usually just tasted like rubber warmed over.
So, yeah, apparently salt is good for you now.
Cholesterol is not bad for you.
And people wonder why.
that Scott Adams had this thing recently about how people wonder why there's skepticism about global warming, global cooling, climate change and people saying that they can confidently predict what the temperature is going to be a hundred years from now.
How about telling us what we can eat that won't kill us now in any consistent way and maybe we'll believe the stuff that goes on a hundred years in the future.
I'm paraphrasing but that's...
If I might interject something on that point, Larry Correa, who does the Monster Hunter International and a few other books, said something that I thought was very interesting.
He said, back in the day, eugenics was settled science, too.
Oh, absolutely.
Oh, no question.
And, I mean, scientists now, I mean, race is a social construct.
Really?
Would you like to try telling that to forensic anthropologists?
I don't know.
I mean, it's, you know, science is subject to as many social pressures as everything else is.
And that just means that skepticism remains the best approach to just about everything.
So, thanks a lot, everyone.
Please help out the show.
As usual, we are on bended knee.
Mouth's in round O surprise position.
No, that's Lars and the Real Girl.
But we are on Bended Knee asking, begging, nay, beseeching you for your support, which you can supply and help us out at freedomainradio.com slash donate.
Thank you, thank you so much everyone.
Have yourselves a wonderful week and we will talk to you Saturday.
Happy St.
Patrick's Day.
I'm sorry I didn't say that.
I didn't say that loud at all because you're probably still enjoying the day after St.
Patrick's Day through one bloodshot rheumatic Drunken eyeball.
