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June 11, 2015 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

03:57:43

2997 The Horror of Depression - Call In Show - June 10th, 2015

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	Good evening!
	Hope you're doing well.
	It is Wednesday night, which means 14 tacos and philosophy.
	So I'll just wait while you finish those off.
	And 14.
	Good job.
	Remarkably fast.
	You might want to chew next time.
	Mike, who do we have on first?
	Alright, up first today is Toby.
	And Toby wrote in and said, in a world overrun by a lack of self-knowledge, who holds responsibility in ensuring people at high risk of mental illness seek treatment before they raise children?
	That's from Toby.
	Now, do you...
	Hey, how's it going?
	Hi.
	So, you mean sort of in the present world, right?
	Yeah.
	Yeah, I mean, in the present world, in the situation that we are today, I mean, I'm talking about today and slightly in the past, in the short past, I would say.
	I mean, when we're talking about free society, it's a completely different question, but I'm talking today, yeah.
	Right.
	Okay.
	And what do you think would the answer to that be?
	I don't...
	I don't really have an answer, unfortunately.
	I mean, it's not a simple question in my mind.
	You know, often when you run into these questions of responsibility, it's hard to say.
	I mean, ultimately, it is the responsibility of each person to take care of themselves.
	I mean, that seems fair that, you know, we understand that People in certain positions, without certain information, it's hard to hold them responsible for certain choices.
	And I think when people aren't aware that these are things that are going to result in problems, it's hard to judge them as if they were, if you know what I mean.
	So you think people who are crazy, for want of a better word, don't have responsibility?
	Perhaps crazy and a bit harsh, but I see where you're going with that, and it's not far off.
	I'm happy to use another word if you'd rather.
	I mean, perhaps it would be helpful if I sort of talked about it in precise how I mean it in relation to me.
	I mean, maybe that would be a better way to clarify it.
	If this is a personal question, it's usually good to start off with its personal relevance, so I certainly am happy there.
	Let's start with that then.
	My father, for a lot of my childhood, let's say from basically when I was born up until...
	The age of 14 was very severely depressed and didn't get any treatment up until that point.
	So, you know, this is obviously, I'm sure you can imagine, is something that had a pretty big effect on my upbringing.
	I'm sorry, can you just cut out for that for a sec?
	Was he diagnosed?
	He was diagnosed when he tried to commit suicide and then went into Can you just remind me what the symptoms were beforehand?
	It's hard to describe the symptoms of depression, I would say.
	Sort of extreme fatigue and also just a series of sort of inability to deal with the world.
	Depression is something that I've suffered with as well over the last couple of years and I would say it's It's characterized by this weird kind of numbness that one has towards the world and an ability to feel joy and feel happiness and feel satisfaction in any grand sense.
	I mean, you can feel pleasure in a moment, but it's hard to feel happy in a larger sense.
	That's something that you can't quite reach for when that has a whole host of effects on your behaviors in that you end up taking less care of yourself and you Sort of seclude yourself from other people and it drives a whole lot of behaviors that sort of worsen the situation overall.
	But I would say it's more...
	Depression is often thought of sort of deep sadness and I wouldn't say that's quite accurate.
	I'd say it's closer to numbness.
	Yeah, again, I'm no expert, but I've always had the feeling, which, you know, this is not an argument or anything, but I've always sort of had the feeling that the feeling I most associate with depression is horror.
	Because sadness is a rich feeling.
	I remember reading a book called...
	I can't remember what it was called.
	Some book about some old woman.
	And it bawled at the end.
	It cried so much.
	And it was a really – a very beautifully written book and all that.
	And people pay for that.
	You go to see sad movies.
	And sadness is not a debilitating or negative emotion at all.
	And – I find that...
	The Stone Diaries, it was called.
	It came out like 1993 or something.
	The woman's name is Carol Shields, S-H-I-E-L-D-S. It's The Stone Diaries.
	It's a wonderful book.
	And particularly at the end, it's just fascinating and beautiful.
	And I... I've found that sadness has never – I've never felt alarmed by it.
	I've never felt debilitated by it because that's a grieving process.
	But the emotional constipation, so to speak, of sadness.
	Depression, to me, is a lot more akin to revulsion, to horror, to what some of the French existentialists used to call nausea, which was just a great revulsion in living with the six-foot-tall cockroaches known as your fellow human beings, seeing the horror and the hypocrisy and the falseness and the betrayal and the seething,
	self-congratulatory, pompous mass of a revolting set of pseudo-human beings that You are not surrounded by anything great, anything inspiring, anything noble, but rather you are surrounded by people whose only knowledge of nobility is how to fake it to advance their own nefarious and repulsive agendas.
	This occurs in Dostoevsky's work in particular in Crime and Punishment, just this revulsion to the world and the people.
	The world around you are the people in it.
	There's a great play, a terrifying play by Jean-Paul Sartre, called Pas la sortie, or No Exit.
	And, spoiler, it's been around for a while, so hopefully people won't mind.
	But this man arrives, he dies, he arrives in a room.
	And in the room there are a number of other people.
	And he can't figure out where is he.
	And the people all pick at each other and torture each other and make fun of each other and mock each other and tease each other.
	And not in fun ways, but in nasty, underhanded, mean girl style, vicious ways.
	And he realizes that he's in hell.
	And he keeps saying, well, if we're in hell, where are the demons?
	Where are the devils who is going to come and torture us?
	And slowly he begins to realize towards the end of the play that they don't need to send in any devils.
	Or demons to torture the victims of hell because other people do that job for them.
	And it's a source of the famous idea that hell is other people.
	That we don't need any supernatural agencies of evil and betrayal and viciousness in order to experience hell.
	Hell is other people.
	None of these is my perspective in particular, but certainly I think if people feel that they're surrounded by empty, hollow, robotic, cold-eyed predators who only use virtue as a weapon, who only use the building up of trust in order to break it down as a weapon, I think that there is a revulsion and a horror in that kind of existence that I think short-circuits.
	If you have maggots eating your arm after a while, you'll just want to wish yourself out of your body, because if you can't do anything about it, if you're tied down or something.
	And I think if there's horror plus paralysis, to me, short-circuits the emotions, and I think people end up, in my opinion, I think people end up in the worst kinds of depression.
	William Styron talks about this in his book, Darkness Visible, where he talks about, he's a An author who wrote several books before noticing that every single one of his books, the main character, committed suicide.
	And he had a horrifying time battling depression.
	It just sort of came upon him and kept him in its grip for years.
	And he speaks quite eloquently about the horror of depression.
	And it is...
	It is a vile state of mind and I think in particular the worst kinds of depression to my way of thinking occur when you universalize the horror of those around you.
	Not the people who surround me are horrible but people are horrible.
	Not hell is the people around me but hell is other people.
	Yeah, I mean...
	Sorry, go ahead.
	If you don't mind, Steph, just...
	No, no, please, it's your show.
	Just give me some of my thoughts.
	...and just say how right you are and how, like, That's exactly how I feel about it, so much so that the quote you have from Jean-Paul Sartre is actually a quote that I have hanging up on my wall because it is so beautifully spot on exactly how depression felt for me.
	I can only speculate about what my father's experience with depression was like.
	I sometimes get trapped into this sort of trying to understand how this could have come about for my father because I tried to understand how it came about for me.
	And it's not really fair.
	I try to make judgment about his experience without being really listening to him as much as I should, although he's not very communicative about it yet.
	But this idea of hell as other people and this sort of revulsion with the world and how you perceive other people to be is definitely a huge part of what I felt as depression.
	I mean, it grows out of the people who are around you, but it becomes everyone very, very quickly.
	Well, the people around you want you to believe that it's everyone, because then you won't leave them for better people, right?
	If I said, I'm only going to marry a woman who's 10 foot tall, right, then clearly some sane people would have to say, look, there are no people out there who's 10 feet tall, so you've got to make do with the women in a vaguely human range of height, right?
	And so if you have horrible people around you, they will attempt to infect you with the idea that that's everyone.
	So that, you know, if you're in a desert where there's an oasis with like a tiny bit of brackish water that has like vulture crap in it and stuff like that, but if people convince you that this is the only water there is and that the rest of the planet is a desert, then you'll stay there, right?
	Whereas if...
	Five miles over the horizon is the lush valley with waterfalls and Starbucks and all that kind of stuff.
	Then you'll strike off for that, right?
	So one of the ways that ghastly people keep you in their circle of rotten-headed zombie-ville is to try and give you the impression or the idea that this is everyone.
	And of course people who are that horrible Don't have any nice people around, right?
	So there's waves and waves of layers of ghastliness that you have to get out.
	If you're like with people who are like maximum 100% ghastly people, then they'll know people who might be 95% and those 95% people might know people who are 90%.
	But there are these concentric rings of horror that you have to pierce through before you can start to get to people who are 5% nice or 10% nice.
	You have to go like through 20 layers of people to get to really virtuous people.
	And so I think people look at that everywhere they see, everywhere that goes from here, it seems to infinity, is just full of ghastly people.
	And I think people say, even if there are good people somewhere out there, I'm never going to find them.
	And they're never going to like me.
	And by the time I find them, if I ever did, I'm too broken to trust them.
	And that way...
	Bad people keep you in their grip.
	And one of the things that I try to do is to...
	I mean, I think I'm a good person.
	I think I work hard to spread virtue.
	I think I take on the necessary fights.
	I think that I graciously roll with the inevitable punches of taking on bad people.
	And I hope that people can look at me as an example of hell doesn't have to be other people.
	Yeah, I mean, when I first started therapy as a result of my situation, that's around the same sort of time, I think it was a couple of months into therapy that I discovered the show.
	And it was really a relief to see that there's a group of people who, you know, want to understand themselves and We don't live in this world where the idea of exploring how you feel and why you feel it is completely foreign,
	but it's something that comes as second nature to hopefully Certainly you and hopefully a lot of the listeners to the show, but it's a community where that's something that's embraced instead of being like, oh, you go to therapy?
	What's wrong with you?
	What's wrong with me is that I'm surrounded by people who ask me what's wrong with me when I go to therapy.
	My discovery for therapy was that I was fine, the world was sick.
	You go to therapy not to find out what's wrong with you but what's right with you and what's wrong with the world.
	Of course the world wants you to think it's you so the world doesn't have to change.
	So yeah, I think that kind of horror is underappreciated and horror is a very debilitating frame of mind because horror is supposed to be life or death, fight or flight.
	And if you live in a world That is full of horrible people who have a lot of power.
	There's no fight and there is no fight, yeah.
	Yeah, then you're in a constant state of fight or flight and that wears you out and burns out your adrenals.
	It's a hard thing.
	Learning to...
	And this is the old quote from Nietzsche that...
	When you fight monsters, take care.
	You do not become a monster.
	If you look into the abyss too deeply, the abyss also looks into you.
	The way that we deal with evil is we fight it.
	But, of course, the sad thing is that evil never fights fair.
	Evil never fights fair.
	You develop all of these reasoning capacities and you learn all this evidence and empiricism and then you bring it to the world.
	And some people listen and some people don't, but the evil people that reason and evidence threatens, they don't fight fair.
	They don't just call you names.
	I mean, it's nothing to do with anything that's – here's my disagreement with your position, you know?
	You know, it's like the people who do, racist!
	Okay, so you're just a bad person who doesn't fight fair.
	You know, I think we're playing chess and you're calling in a drone strike from another town.
	Swiping the pieces off the board, yeah.
	I mean...
	I think the thing that I was getting out with the question is that being in that situation and sort of like you were saying sort of horror and this deep existential pain is no situation in which you should raise a child and that was unfortunately my situation is that I was raised under those circumstances and the way that I express it now.
	Well hang on, hang on, hang on.
	See, unfortunately you are trying to shape I don't think you're trying to do it consciously, but you're trying to shape my response to this, unfortunately, is a big wide brush that says no moral responsibility.
	Yeah, I don't mean it in that way, but I guess it's...
	Wait a minute?
	What do you mean you don't mean it in that way?
	Let me rephrase this as best I can.
	I agree with you absolutely.
	I am trying to do that.
	It's not me consciously.
	No, I agree.
	I understand that it's not a situation where there is no moral responsibility, and that's precisely why I'm asking you the question that I'm asking you.
	Okay, so let's look a little bit at your...
	I'm fighting myself.
	You understand that I'm fighting.
	No, no, I get it.
	I never say this stuff with any hostility.
	I'm just out of respect for you and the fact that particularly since you're in therapy, right?
	So, Toby, what was the story of your dad and his family and his environment and his childhood?
	Yeah, let's start.
	Let's go back as far as we possibly can.
	My father's side of the family on my grandfather's side is Jewish and they come from Austria-Hungary around the time of the Anschluss.
	That's when they left shortly before the Anschluss.
	You've spoken, I think, about the Jewish communities in Eastern Europe and the problems that existed in those communities.
	There's a lot of issues there, just starting all the way back there.
	Let's move forward to more precision.
	And sorry, it's been a while since I've done my World War II course, but Anschluss is the annexation of Austria by Germany?
	Precisely, precisely.
	At 37?
	Something like that.
	So the Germans considered parts of Czechoslovakia and Alsace-Lorraine and Austria to be traditional German territory.
	Going all the way back, I think, to the Prussian Empire.
	And so some of it was taken away after the First World War.
	Some had been lost earlier, and they went back in to reclaim this.
	And of course, the Jews were treated brutally, as you can imagine, in these...
	I think Hitler had tried previously to get the Jews to leave.
	I think he wanted to set up someplace in the Middle East and ship all of the The Jews out.
	I don't know what exactly happened with that, but yeah, they were treated brutally, of course, by the occupying Nazis.
	Yeah, I mean, let's not get into questions of sort of how the Holocaust worked itself out, but...
	Certainly, I mean, it was a very difficult situation for that side of the family.
	But that's sort of the environment that we're coming out of.
	And then, so that's my great-grandfather with his son moves to the UK. And my grandfather then grows up to the UK. He converts to Roman Catholicism at some point.
	I mean, a lot of Jewish people converted after the war with a lot of people I had a hard time.
	This is a terrible reason to change religion and to lose your religion, but the idea of sort of like, oh, why would my God ever do this to his people?
	This sort of idea is a lot of reason why a lot of Jewish people left and joined other churches, because they didn't really want to let go of the idea of God.
	And then he married my grandmother.
	At some point and they had a pretty terrible relationship.
	Both my father and my mother tell me about their relationship and my mother when she first met my father's family and my father going all the way back sort of they argued a huge amount.
	There was a huge amount of just vitriol between my grandfather and my grandmother.
	They were very horrible to one another and this is all in front of the children of course and We both know what that does to a child.
	Then at a fairly young age, my father gets sent off to boarding school, English boarding school, which you know perfectly well the horrors of that system, although he's not very keen to admit how bad it was.
	Yeah, I mean, just for those who don't know, at least it was.
	It's a pretty ghastly system.
	And of course, since it's designed to groom people for the ruling class, it has to bayonet your empathy.
	It literally has to try and gouge out your heart through repeated exposures to cruelty and physical punishment and deprivation.
	And, yeah, it is a brutal environment.
	George Orwell, of course, has written about this for people who want to check it out.
	But, yeah, so he went to this – how long did he go to the boarding school for?
	I believe he went to Eton.
	I think he went all the – Way from maybe age seven to his A-levels.
	So if not, perhaps a bit older, starting a bit older, but I'm not quite sure about the dates.
	But Eton is one of the big sort of very prestigious high-level sort of schools still in the UK. He was the pinnacle of British boarding school, so all the worst parts of British boarding school and all the best parts of British boarding school were certainly present at Eton.
	My father's situation was probably worse by the fact that he was there on the basis of being very smart and not on the basis of his family background.
	So, you know, you're surrounded by people who are there because their parents are wealthy or of a certain social class, which is still very real in the UK. You've spoken about that before.
	Oh, yeah.
	So you're like the poor boy who didn't get there based upon pedigree, but has lucked his way in through an unfair distribution of proletariat brain.
	So, yeah, I get it.
	It's not a very kind environment.
	You'd be somewhat ostracized, to put it mildly.
	Yeah, exactly.
	And then after boarding school, which, I mean, several years of just this toxic environment and then coming home when he did come home to a toxic environment at home, you know, that does a lot to someone.
	And then he went off to Cambridge.
	And I think sometime into his second year at Cambridge, his sister died in a car accident on her way to pick him up from Cambridge to bring him home.
	She was driving, is that right?
	She was driving, yeah.
	And the way that it's been, I mean, all of these things are things that I'm sort of getting to a certain degree on second hand, and I can only trust my sources to a certain extent, considering they are my father and my mother, for the most part.
	He was made to feel very guilty for that and made to feel responsible because she was going to pick him up.
	Yeah, if you hadn't been in school, then she wouldn't have had to come and drive, and she would still be alive.
	This is terrible logic, but nonetheless, you know, when your parents are the same kind of parents...
	Well, it's the magical thinking that, I mean, it's very common, and I think we're all susceptible to it.
	It's, you know, when something bad happens, we look back through the dominoes of...
	Of everything.
	And say, well, if this domino hadn't fallen, that domino hadn't fallen, who had their hand on this domino?
	As if blame can be ascribed.
	Or responsibility can be prescribed in accidents.
	And, I mean, I get that.
	You know, I've often, you know, you see these movies sometimes where there's a car crash and, you know, you think you could sort of rewind the movie to see both the people who end up in the car crash.
	They're getting born, they're living lives apart from each other, you know.
	And everything that happens is the one, it brings them to that one fatal moment, you know, where they end up crossing paths in a A street and crashing into each other or whatever.
	It is tempting to look back and imagine.
	People do that.
	They say, I left my glasses at the restaurant, so I went back to get my glasses.
	And on the way, I had a car accident, so if only I hadn't forgotten my glasses at the restaurant, then I never would have had that car crash.
	And yeah, people...
	And it's natural.
	We will always try to avoid disasters, but a lot of times it's through creating spurious and illogical cause and effect.
	Yeah, okay.
	If he hadn't gone to Cambridge, then the system would not have died in that car crash.
	But...
	If the guy who made the car wasn't born, she'd have been driving something different, which had gone at a slightly different speed, and if the people hadn't built the roads, and if the other driver, and if the rain, right?
	The amount of non-moral causes that go into any particular accident are so infinite that you can get a silly cord out of plucking any of those strings.
	Yeah, and he was made to feel very guilty for that, or at least this is an impression that I've been given.
	You know, these are just, this is enough to ruin someone.
	But my father went on functioning in a sort of, in the way that, you know, this is a society who just wants us to keep working enough to sort of, Stay on marty feet and keep on paying taxes, if you will.
	So he keeps on doing that and eventually, and this is something that I've talked about with my mother at some length because she has progressed further, I would say, than my father has in some ways, although she doesn't come from nearly as difficult as a background.
	And she's concerned about how it came to be that she made these choices and why she made this bad choice.
	But she meets my father and eventually...
	Sorry, which bad choice?
	The bad choice to stay with my father when she met his family and realised how disastrously dysfunctional they were, you know.
	You know, the first question that when I started really examining this stuff is I asked my mother, you know, when you met my father and you met his family, what on earth were you thinking, you know, having children with this man that is the result of this family that just sort of two parents who hate each other and A man who has been made feel guilty for his sister's death,
	and none of this has been addressed through any kind of therapy or anything, you know.
	This is all just being swept under the carpet and let to rot for later.
	I'm sorry to interrupt, Toby, but is it your theory that your mother is healthier mentally than your father?
	I would say she's progressed further, yes.
	But when they met, I would imagine not so much, right?
	Like tends to attract like...
	I would say she had definitely issues of her own, yeah, I would say.
	A different set of issues, but yeah, absolutely.
	I mean, it's not a healthy...
	You know, you have to put down people making terrible, terrible choices to something, and that was a terrible, terrible choice, any way you look at it.
	You know, it's easy, just like it's easy and it's tempting in a lot of situations to draw up sort of like, oh, well, there were these circumstances and these circumstances that sort of make it more reasonable for you to make that decision.
	But when you think about it at any serious level, it's actually a really, really bad decision.
	But you're using, sorry, you're back on morally neutral terms.
	I'm not saying we shouldn't be, I just want to point out.
	No, how do you mean?
	Sorry, how do you mean?
	I didn't realize I was being there.
	Well, bad choices, terrible choices, that's not a moral.
	Okay.
	Wrong?
	Is that what you mean?
	You'd rather...
	You can make a wrong choice.
	Immoral choice would be...
	And look, I understand...
	I would say it's immoral.
	You may be perfectly right.
	I just want to point out that...
	That is what I mean, at least consciously.
	I mean, I understand that if that's the language that I'm using, it's probably because, like I said, it's tempting for me and I want to, at some level, sort of just forgive and sort of...
	Allow a lot of these decisions to just go by and not hold people responsible.
	That's something that deep down at some level I want to do, but it's something that I'm trying to fight.
	Yeah, I apologize if my language is sort of swearing that way and trying to take me that way.
	But it's not how I feel.
	I do feel like these are things that she's certainly responsible for, and I do think they were morally definitely very good.
	Now, your voice does sound thick with passion to me.
	It's thick with passion and also the hay fever, but yes.
	And is there something about, I can't find any philosophical significance in the hay fever, but is there something in your emotional, in the emotionality of your voice that you'd like to talk about?
	Well, I mean, all of this is very deeply emotional for me because all of it is tied to sort of how I came very close to really ruining my life, you know.
	I'm fortunate in that sort of the idea of suicide was never something that I really contemplated.
	But, you know, it doesn't take a lot of time for a person who's severely depressed to really, really, especially at a young age, to really, really put a dent in the things that they want to do for a living.
	Yeah, how would you like 50 more years of this?
	It's like, no, thank you.
	Exactly.
	You make a lot of pretty, and in this situation, I don't mean morally bad, but just bad choices.
	I mean, for me, the depression basically meant that whilst I was attending university, in name at least, I basically wasn't because I was spending my time in my room.
	I'm sleeping, feeling terrible about myself in this all-consuming depression, which is just debilitating.
	And we'll get to that.
	Before we get to that, terrible decision, bad decision, immoral decision, whatever we want to call it, I think it's important to find some kind of causality that allows us to avoid these decisions.
	And so we can say, oh, you know, my parents made bad decisions or whatever.
	But unless we have a methodology that allows us to make better decisions, you know, it's sort of like saying, well, you know, the Allies made these decisions to go to war in 1914.
	And that was a bad decision.
	Bad decision to go to war!
	That doesn't give us any particular insight into what drove that decision, what was the context, and how to avoid it, right?
	So I've, you know, done videos of the truth about World War I. Oh, by the way, I remembered Angela was in 1938, but anyway.
	But where I talk about, you know, the...
	Government schools and fiat currency and all created this environment wherein the war could be begun and sustained and so on.
	And Lloyd DeMoss' book that I've read, The Origins of War in Child Abuse, which I've just finished reading and people can get that at freedomainradio.com for free.
	It gives us some methodology by which we can say, bad decision to go to war, and here's how we can not have that decision come to us or make that decision in the future.
	So my question around that is, okay, why did they get married?
	You say, well, it was a bad decision, but that's sort of like saying, well, where did life come from?
	God made it.
	It doesn't actually illuminate much.
	Okay, well, it's hard for me to speak as much about my mother's family because I'm not as close to my mother's family and so they're very distant from me and I don't really understand as much of her history and I haven't really known that side of my family nearly as well and I'm not as much as I know my grandmother and I know how horrible she can be.
	I don't know...
	Sorry, how much she can be?
	How?
	Horrible is the word I used.
	She can be very, very, very mean.
	For lack of a better way of putting it.
	I don't have that with my mother's side of the family, so it's hard for me to speculate exactly how that came about on her side.
	I think the resulting effect was that she was very easy to manipulate amongst other things, and that, I think, is what attracted my father, in that, you know, you come out of this background and People have been manipulating you and sort of controlling you and the first thing that you want to do,
	the primary drive that comes out of that is to manipulate other people and that's what drove him to my mother as to what drove my mother to him.
	Like I said, it's harder to say but I certainly don't sort of relieve her of any responsibility in that situation.
	I mean, I think My mother was sort of...
	I hate this as a buzzword, but has self-esteem issues.
	You know, I hate this as a buzzword, but it's the best way I can think of explaining it.
	And my father's side of the family is certainly very, very, very smart overall.
	Perhaps not emotionally, but intellectually very successful in that sense.
	Do you mind if I just mention something?
	Yeah, go ahead.
	Emotional intelligence, you know, you say you're not very smart emotionally.
	I just wanted to mention this because I've had this question a bit, and it's a reasonable thing, I think, to sort of mention at this point, that while IQ predicts 25 or more percent of people's job performance, EQ measurements account for only 3 percent of people's job performance.
	I just wanted to mention that because I've had questions about IQ and EQ recently, and that's not the whole story, but...
	So, okay, so they're intellectually smart.
	Of course, if you go to Cambridge and Eaton, you don't get in there by banging two sticks together and calling it a symphony.
	Do you know the degree of physical attraction that occurred between your parents?
	My father was a handsome young man and my mother was a very pretty young lady.
	They were both very, I would say, my father was probably a seven and my mother was probably an eight.
	Right.
	And was your father...
	It's odd things to say about your parents, but...
	No, it's not at all.
	I think it makes perfect sense.
	I've seen younger pictures of them around that age.
	My mother has a large Jewish nose that you would expect him to have, but nonetheless, you know, handsome man, certainly.
	And my mother was a very pretty young woman, and in my eyes still very, very beautiful, even at her age now.
	But Right.
	Definitely, there was a degree of physical attraction, I would say, yeah.
	Was your father, you don't have to get into any particular details, but was your father going places?
	Was the anticipation that he was going to be a good earner, a good provider, that kind of thing?
	I think you don't become...
	Poor owner coming out of Cambridge, but he came out of Cambridge with a 2-1, which is not, you know, top honours, but nonetheless it's a good degree.
	But he's always been a fairly driven person in that sense, or at least up until the point in which he really started suffering from depression.
	He was very driven.
	And I'm sorry to interrupt.
	Is it too reductionist to say that some of the explanation might be that your mother thought, you know, here's a high-status, handsome...
	Oh, you know, my fiancé just graduated from Cambridge, whatever, right?
	I mean, whatever is, like a high-status young man.
	And so a high-status young man, good-looking, intelligent, ambitious, going places, going to be a good provider.
	And she's like, okay, so I will, you know, my looks and his money, and together we have an evolutionary biology cliché, right?
	Yeah.
	Without a shadow of a doubt, yeah, absolutely.
	I mean, it's hard to, you sort of cross into, you start crossing into the boundary of what is making excuses.
	But, you know, my mother was from New Zealand on the end of her visa in the UK. And, you know, these are all sort of, there were a lot of economical drives to why it was, quote unquote, worthwhile for my mother to shack up with my father in that sense.
	Yeah, there was certainly sort of Genetic, if you will, drive in that sense.
	Okay, so that would lend us some principle to try and avoid these mistakes.
	If your parents were focused on the virtue and self-knowledge and kindness and compassion of each other and if they could not Look at his future earning potential or her physical attractiveness or both of their physical attractiveness.
	If they simply were to put on their shallow hell blinders and look at the quality of the person rather than these markers of fertility and resource provision, they would have run from each other, right?
	Absolutely.
	I would think so.
	Okay.
	Yeah, because I'm trying to get people to take off the Of course, and I agree wholeheartedly with all that stuff.
	It's such a strange thing to wish because obviously the result is I wouldn't be born, and that's not particularly something that's desirable to me.
	But at the same time, I don't wish on any child to be the result of That kind of attraction where it's not based on really looking into a person and determining exactly what their values are instead of being taken off course by physical attraction or genetic drives.
	Right.
	Yeah, no, I believe that statement that no matter how good-looking a woman is, somewhere on the planet, there's a guy who's sick and tired of having sex with her.
	Because that's not a great basis.
	So, okay, they got together.
	Are they interested in status?
	Are they interested in appearances?
	Do you mean today or what?
	No, I would say back in the day.
	I don't really know.
	I think my father certainly was interested in proving his parents and sort of proving himself to be successful in that sense, demonstrating that, yeah.
	And I mean, the trappings of sort of success are attractive to just about I've always loved that word, the trappings of success.
	I mean, the trap.
	Yeah, I mean, I think it's actually pretty apt in some ways.
	Oh, it's very apt.
	Sorry, the reason I interrupted, it's very apt because you had this question, like, why did they stay together?
	Well, I think a lot of times that people who are unhappy stay together is status.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	And people – and it's one of these – so people who have what you refer to as self-esteem issues, people who think poorly of themselves will often try and snort the cocaine of status to overcome a poor view of oneself.
	In the hopes that provoking envy will somehow substitute positive self-regard or substitute for a lack of positive self-regard.
	If I can get other people to want to be me, maybe I'll want to be me.
	Exactly.
	And so they get addicted to the status stuff and then the idea of getting divorced is giving up that status and having to confront a poor self-image that has only been made worse.
	By the focus on status.
	Status is basically a giant elegant fuck you to the rest of the planet.
	Fuck you, I got the car.
	Fuck you, I got the hot chick.
	Fuck you, I got the big house.
	Fuck you, I got the Armani suit.
	Fuck you, I got this or that or the other, right?
	And because there's so much insecurity and dominance and aggression in status, it is really...
	Status is win-lose.
	Status is win-lose, right?
	I feel better because you feel worse.
	And because you feel worse, I feel better.
	It's win-lose.
	It's fundamentally socialist.
	And so what happens is I think people don't figure out how to behave in a way that makes them really like or love themselves, so they pursue status as a way of pretending that they feel good about themselves.
	Other people want to be me, so I must be worth something.
	And then what happens is they get trapped like every addiction.
	Every addiction will trap you because it's a way of avoiding legitimate suffering, in this case, legitimate suffering of low self-regard and dealing with that.
	And so people get trapped in marriage.
	It's the same reason that people get trapped in cocaine addiction or alcohol addiction or whatever.
	It's a way of avoiding early trauma and the pain thereof.
	Yeah.
	I mean, the one thing that I would raise in a sense that's sort of relevant just in sort of factual terms to this whole idea of sort of status and how that was a drive for my mother, I would say, is that once my father started being severely depressed, I mean, and throughout a lot of his career, my father is not an easy person to get along with.
	This is, again, the kindest possible way to say that.
	Okay, why are you giving me the kindest possible way to say this?
	If I could just falsify my experience for a moment with you, Steph, I really feel like we could connect.
	Well, I don't know to what extent I can say that my father is – comment on my father as someone to work with.
	You know, I've never had to work with my father, but – He had severe disagreements with everyone he has ever worked with, slash under, rather.
	The people he worked under, he had a lot of problems with them because I think a lot of the time he felt he was smarter than them, better than them and, you know, more qualified than them and that he would not be able to deal with That's the vanity of frustrated status-seeking, right?
	Yeah.
	I mean, this is the problems that come with, you know, you tell someone that they should achieve, they have to achieve, they have to achieve, they have to achieve, and then they suddenly see people who are achieving, and they feel like they have to find a way in which those people are less good than them so that they can surpass them.
	Oh, you mean surpass them in their own minds?
	In terms of success, I would say, yeah.
	I'm sorry, I missed something then.
	So your father saw other people succeed more than he did?
	Yeah.
	His superiors, I mean, most of the problems he had were with people who were working above him.
	In terms of in the companies that he was working, it was his boss generally.
	Oh, yeah.
	I mean, there'll always be someone above you or below you.
	Always.
	If you want to feel bad by looking up, go for it.
	If you want to feel good by looking down, go for it.
	But just recognize that that's completely relative and there'll always be somebody better than you and always somebody worse than you.
	And defining yourself relative to that pecking order...
	It's kind of a sad thing because I think one's ambition should be driven by one's relationship to objective and universal standards, particularly ethical standards, rather than, you know, well, I'm doing better than so-and-so.
	Or as Gore Vidal, the American writer, once said, it is not enough that we succeed.
	Our friends must also fail for us to be happy, basically.
	Yeah.
	I mean, so not only did he have problems when he was employed, but then from about when I was about six to when I was about 14, when my father committed suicide, he was unemployed.
	What?
	Yeah.
	This is how much, if you make a lot of money for a while, you can go a long time being unemployed.
	Especially in France.
	Well, then the money is not the issue, right?
	The money is not the issue, it's the failure.
	Yeah.
	Well, this is what depression does to you.
	Well, hang on.
	No, I mean, obviously, it's a choice to continue.
	This is what depression, the third-party monkey that burrowed into my father's brain through no invitation, right?
	I mean, we don't know.
	I mean, you can do something about your depression, but, I mean, he was depressed for that time, is what I'm trying to say.
	I'm like...
	And do you have any idea why he remained unemployed?
	Essentially because he did try to find a job.
	I guess that will do it.
	But even if you're really good at stuff, even if you, you know, if Brad Pitt doesn't send out his resume, he's still going to get some calls, right?
	No, of course, yeah.
	But, I mean, my father isn't Brad Pitt, dare I say.
	I'm sorry, your father's what?
	Not Brad Pitt, and had grown to a certain degree, I'd expect, within his industry or a reputation.
	Made a bad reputation.
	A bad reputation.
	I mean, when you always...
	If you disagree with your boss, you're going to end up in a situation where your bosses all talk to each other and all agree that you're difficult to work with and they ought not really give you work.
	And like Marlon Brando is difficult to work with, but he paid off for a lot of people, right?
	Yeah.
	Freddie Mercury produced a solo album that the guy who signed the deal said was the worst deal he'd ever heard of or ever participated in in the music industry in his entire career.
	So sometimes it pays off even if you're difficult and sometimes it doesn't.
	But for people, they didn't want to work with your dad.
	And your dad...
	His view was that he was too good for the world and people are just idiots.
	Is that...?
	I would say so, yeah.
	He started being unemployed.
	When he first came to France, he was going back to university to get a degree in Japanese in France.
	Don't ask me why in France, but there are good schools for Japanese in Paris, amongst other things.
	And once I was done, the idea was to continue or rather start up a consultancy business because that's what he's been doing.
	I mean, consulting in marketing is generally the area that my father worked in.
	And he was going to start up this consultancy business, but this never happened, basically.
	So, you know, you don't start up a business.
	You don't have a job if you don't try to find a job.
	This is what happens.
	Jobs don't always come knocking at your door, especially when you've pissed a lot of people off.
	In fact, they almost never come knocking at your door.
	I can't imagine the number of people who are unemployed who wake up at 3 o'clock in the afternoon with a job offer at their door.
	I mean, I guess it happens, but people win the lottery too.
	It doesn't mean it's a viable life strategy.
	Exactly, exactly.
	And my point originally when I brought this up was that my mother didn't leave my father over the gross majority of this time.
	And in fact, my mother worked to support our family to the best degree that she could.
	I mean, her earnings were not in any way comparable to what my father was earning back when he was working, but she was the working member in the family.
	Sort of paying the bills week to week and so much as also very much living off the money that my father had accumulated up to that point.
	But she was working for most of those, what, eight years.
	Yeah.
	It's something I've often thought of, Toby, that there's almost nothing in the world more dangerous than somebody who's highly intelligent and highly defensive.
	Yeah.
	Like, high intelligence plus pathological self-righteousness is a wickedly dangerous combination.
	Absolutely, I'd agree.
	But how did he make, and again, you don't have to go into any details, just for my sort of curiosity.
	I find, you know, I'm not a good bourgeois.
	But I'm always fascinated by money.
	I always want to know, well, how much did you make?
	And how much did you pay in taxes?
	And what's your mortgage?
	If I could rip open everyone's finances, I just find it fascinating.
	It's the stuff of life.
	And so I guess my question is, well, how did you able to make enough money to not work for eight years?
	Well, my father worked in marketing.
	So, yeah, I mean, there's plenty of money.
	They only worked particularly in Asia, which at the time was a growing market and still a growing market, especially for...
	So it's pretty big money in that situation.
	But basically, when my parents moved to France, My brother and I both went to public school for a while and eventually we both ended up in private or part private school,
	still much cheaper than any private school in the UK. I mean, schooling is, even the school that we went to that was quote-unquote private was heavily state subsidised.
	Sure.
	Alright, so I don't quite understand how he made so much money.
	I guess maybe some real estate, maybe some salary or whatever.
	I'm just kind of curious.
	Neither do I. Yeah, because if he could make enough money to retire early and not work for eight years, then he must have made a significant amount of money.
	I mean, even if he's contributing, I don't know, $50,000 a year to the family finances, then assuming a tax rate of about 40% or 50%, the guy had to earn like a million dollars and spend none of it in order to be able to bleed the 50K off for 10 years or whatever.
	And that's just a lot of money.
	And the reason that that's interesting to me is because if he could make that kind of money...
	Then he must have been producing massive amounts of value for the companies, because they don't pay you unless you're creating value for them, right?
	And so if he's creating that amount of value for the companies that he's working for, but nobody wants to work with him, he must have been a giant dick on the job.
	Yeah, I can imagine.
	A company will usually pay you, I don't know, depends on the metric, depends on a wide variety of factors, but companies will often pay you a third or a quarter of your salary.
	And if he's making, I don't know, $200,000 a year, then he's got to be making probably close to Three quarters of a million dollars a year for a company or more.
	And boy, if you can't get a job and you can produce three quarters of a million dollars a year of value to a company, man, people must be heavily invested in not working with you.
	I wouldn't say that the situation when he first stopped working was that he couldn't get a job.
	He didn't want to.
	I mean, I think I don't think it would have been true at that time that he couldn't have gotten a job.
	I think he could have.
	My father, in many ways, he doesn't have much going for him anymore, but he still is and certainly was a very, very smart person.
	There's no doubt about that.
	He must have been extremely productive for the companies that he worked for, for them to keep him on as long as they did.
	But even more of a pain in the arse than to let him go if he was making that much money for them.
	Right.
	Right.
	Okay.
	All right.
	Got it.
	So let's get to when you hit the mud of horror or whatever we want to call it with depression.
	Yeah.
	So...
	It's hard for me to put exactly a spot on when I first started feeling a lot of the feelings that I felt around depression.
	I mean, it's something that grew for me mostly out of my teenage years.
	You know, in your teenage years you start feeling a lot of things and You're told to put a lot of down of it to just to be a teenager and you know, oh, you're so, you're taught, you're hormonal, it's normal to feel weird and feel like all your relationships are topsy-turvy and you don't understand them.
	And the biggest feeling that I had was that there was something really lacking in my life that I was Missing out on something.
	That somehow everybody else had something figured that I didn't have.
	And the way that I sort of I decided that that was the case at the time was that I was missing out on some kind of external affection from a girlfriend or something like that, you know, that there was something like that missing in my life.
	I mean, what I feel now is that I thought, I think what I was missing out on the time was a father basically, because I didn't have a, my father was basically not part of my life.
	Because he wasn't part of anyone's life, really, because he just sat in a room most days doing very little.
	Having a father who's physically present but emotionally unavailable is in many ways worse, in my view.
	I don't have a lot of evidence to support this, but I think in some ways it could be worse to having no father at all.
	You're confronted every day with the sort of reality that this person is here, but you still don't have access to them emotionally.
	I mean, just to back you up there, if your father leaves, the rejection happens once, right?
	But if your father stays but doesn't talk to you, the reaction is – the rejection is forever, right?
	Yeah.
	It's forever and it's every day.
	Yeah.
	I mean, I don't want to tell people how they should feel and I don't want to reduce other people's experiences, but certainly it was very painful.
	And I say now that basically I didn't have a father for that period.
	But at the time, I thought, hey, it must be something that's missing because the idea of something being wrong in my family, as is the case with most children, is inconceivable.
	So, I signed it to...
	Well, you had a...
	I mean, sorry, it sounds like your father's professional paralysis occurred because of a lack of capacity for self-criticism, right?
	Yeah.
	And if people around us, particularly our parents, have no capacity for self-criticism, then they invite all sorts of mysticism on the part of their kids as to explain their problems because the option of actually criticizing the parents is impossible because they would reject any kind of criticism.
	And so you internalize that.
	If your father's like, well, I can't possibly be doing anything wrong, then you're like, well...
	You would internalize that as a survival mechanism and say, well, whatever my problems are, can't have anything to do with my dad, right?
	Yeah, absolutely, absolutely.
	So, at the time, I signed it to someone missing out on something external.
	But when depression as sort of a problem in my ability to function really came up was when I first moved away to university.
	And started living on my own in many ways or in halls as they're called here in the UK. And it's a weird kind of situation because you're living with other people, but you're in no means obligated by your circumstances in the way that you are in school, obligated by your circumstances to spend time with them.
	You can just sort of very much live in isolation whilst also living amidst other people.
	And for me, you know, all of this, that's when really things sort of broke out, and I stopped attending classes, I stopped participating in quote-unquote real life, and just sort of spent my days mostly in front of my computer or asleep.
	Which is your dad, right?
	Yeah, exactly.
	It's almost a mirror image of my father.
	And why, I'm sorry if I missed this Toby, but why did this occur do you think?
	I don't know if it was just a question of being drawn out of the situation in my family for long enough that things became more clear.
	In some way, or not having any kind of semblance of support from my brother and my mother, who were the people who still lived with me before I moved away to university.
	Not having that anymore was enough to push me over the edge.
	And not doing well on my final exams at school was very hard for me because one of the things that I was sort of inculcated with by my father in the same way that he was inculcated with by his father is academic success, academic success, academic success, academic success, and therefore not to succeed academically is devastating in many ways, especially when you're told again and again and again that you're very smart.
	To then fail is all the more Devastating.
	So not doing well on my final exams was one of the things, but you know, it's not something that I've figured out in therapy yet, particularly why it happened at that time.
	It's not something that I've got figured out.
	It's something that's still a work in progress.
	And what were you taking in uni?
	Zoology.
	I'm a student in zoology still to this day.
	That's animal sciences, basically.
	No, no, I mean, yeah, I know, but I mean, it's got the word zoo in it.
	It's for everybody else.
	Everybody else.
	It's not the zoo people.
	I assume that it's something to do with zoos.
	But...
	And I hate to be the dickhead who asks this question, because it's just, you know, I was asked for it too.
	And what do you do with the zoology degree?
	So, interestingly, last time I was in the waiting list for the calls, you were talking about...
	A certain person who makes native documentaries and the way that you felt that he presented all this beauty in the world and then made you feel guilty for somehow being responsible for its destruction, which is oddly enough not something that I ever felt towards those documentaries.
	It was very much for me I feel compelled to say something before I let you continue just because people really misunderstood that thing as a whole.
	Sorry, go ahead.
	I'm not clear.
	Go ahead.
	I was just trying to be funny.
	I'm not like, oh my god, this guy's making me feel guilty.
	I don't like having to explain the death of everything she loves to my daughter just after she'd been told that she loves it, but it was mostly just a joke.
	It's not a big problem in my life.
	I don't hate the planet.
	I don't want to pee in the eyeball of Mother Nature or anything like that, but So yeah, I guess that struck a chord with people, but it was not something that was meant to be taken particularly seriously.
	Me driving over baby seals may have been a hint for people, but not you, Toby, but other people.
	Boy, you put environmentalism together with comedy, and only one of them walks out the ring, and it's not comedy.
	And there's nothing that seems more humorless than people whose core beliefs are being mocked.
	But anyway...
	I just mentioned it because it was sort of a funny coincidence that the day that you happen to have someone who's studying the animal sciences and sort of leaning towards an ecological sort of career, that's the day that you happen to make that show.
	Okay, so you still have to tell me what you're doing with the zoology career.
	The idea is either to go into teaching or to end up doing something like what David Atterborough does.
	So, wait, you take a zoology degree to teach zoology so other people can teach zoology?
	Not necessarily just zoology, but the sciences.
	I don't know whether I want to teach at a lower level or whether I'd rather go on and teach in academia.
	I mean, academia would be my preferred career.
	I know how you might feel about that.
	Wait, wait.
	Okay, picture a free market if you'll go with me down this road.
	What would you do in a free market?
	I think people find value in knowing things.
	I think people in a free market would support institutions that try to do research and try to understand new things about the world that we live in, in whatever way that might be.
	And I think that will continue to have value.
	Or will have value in every market.
	And I think that's basically what I would like to do.
	Do research.
	Research into preservation, into...
	Animal life as a general idea would be a nice place to start.
	I mean, I have a particular interest in sort of marine life, but...
	Yeah, preservation of marine life and how...
	Things came to be as they are in terms of life on Earth.
	Again, just probably being an ignorant dick, but isn't this a hobby?
	I mean, and the reason I'm saying, like, I look...
	I think at the levels at which we're doing it now, it's not a hobby, no.
	No, but I mean, the reason I'm saying this, sorry, I just asked you a question, interrupted, I apologize, and I'll shut up after this.
	Like, I was in theatre school, and I loved doing history plays.
	I was in King Lear, The Seagull, and, you know, very minor part and all that.
	But anyway, I mean, so I was like, man, I really want to write historical novels, historical stories, historical plays, so I got a degree in history.
	Um...
	And then I really got into philosophy and some economics and so I studied more of that stuff in graduate school and so on.
	But for me, it had a lot to do with really writing books and I would keep writing books and I wrote two historical novels while learning all of the cool stuff about history.
	And so I'm trying to figure out how this is not a hobby.
	And the reason I'm saying this is that I'm concerned to some degree, Toby, that you ended up in a field with vague demand, partly because of your father.
	I can sort of see where you're coming from.
	I mean, I don't foresee the situation of Academia, as it exists today, changing, particularly in Anytime Soon.
	I think it's an institution that has a lot of things tied into whatever tools of power exist today.
	And unfortunately, or fortunately, it's going to continue to exist as it is for some time being.
	I think it does provide value in many ways.
	Okay, I can't go with you into pure abstract land when we're just trying to talk about some really personal stuff here.
	I don't really know how to answer that question is the short answer.
	Would you like me to keep commenting on it until you get annoyed?
	That's usually my plan.
	I just don't really know where...
	I understand your concern.
	Let me be clear.
	Let's say you want to preserve some barrier reef, Let's say something easier.
	You want to preserve some forest land.
	What you can do, of course, is you can go and make a bucket load of money and buy that land.
	Then you can study to your heart's content.
	You can go and do your job and then you can fulfill or do your hobby.
	I wanted to write a novel.
	And so I applied to the Humber School for Writers, which is a pretty prestigious writing program in Canada.
	I was accepted and I graduated and all that.
	And I took like a year off to research and write The God of Atheists.
	And I also wrote a crazy long novel called Almost, about the British family and the German family from World War I to World War II. And so I went and did a bunch of work in the market, made some money, not a lot, but made some money, and then lived like a monk for a year and wrote my stuff.
	And I guess my question is, what's up with the zoology thing?
	I still don't really understand what you mean, Stefan.
	I'm sorry.
	No, I'll keep asking then, because I'm sure my question is...
	Let me give it one more shot before you ask another question.
	I would like...
	I don't think it's a hobby insofar that people want to learn things.
	I would think especially people who are bright and people who are turned on to life and to themselves want to learn things both about themselves and about the world that they live in.
	That sort of quest for knowledge takes many faces.
	Okay, dude, I'm so sorry.
	You already told me all this stuff.
	I fully accept that people like to learn things.
	I get that.
	I do.
	Okay, so if you want to make another point, please don't make that point again.
	Okay, I'm sorry.
	People want to learn things.
	I want to teach things.
	But why do you need a degree for that?
	Because to teach things, you have to know things.
	But why do you need a degree to know things?
	It's one of the most accelerated ways of learning, I would say.
	Oh, God, no.
	Oh, no, no.
	No, no, no.
	Oh, God, no.
	Don't tell me that academia is accelerated learning.
	How many classes a week do you have?
	How many hours?
	Well, right now I'm on break, but normally I have about 20 or so.
	Plus practicals, which is another six hours a week.
	So you have six hours a week of classes?
	No, no, no.
	In total, I have maybe 30 hours.
	Oh, you have 30 hours of classes a week, really?
	Of time that I have to spend in university, yeah.
	No, no, no.
	Classes, I said.
	But you are being taught something.
	Pure classes, not including practicals, 24.
	You have...
	So really, because that's way more than I had.
	Yeah.
	The science is a lot more demanding than most of the humanities.
	Okay.
	No, that's fair.
	So you have a part-time job's worth of classes a week.
	Yeah.
	And as far as...
	I'm trying to think of how to put this.
	As far as what you want to teach and what you're passionate about, what proportion of what you're learning do you think you will end up teaching?
	Now you get into why I don't like my university course.
	You made the case it's accelerated, right?
	Which means it must be incredibly efficient.
	Well, accelerated versus what is the question, but it doesn't have to be incredibly efficient.
	You're talking to a guy who's running a philosophy show.
	I don't have a PhD in philosophy.
	No, no, no, no.
	In fact, if I was going for a PhD in philosophy, I'd never be doing this show.
	No, of course.
	I think you'd need more time than you would.
	Well, no, it's not just the time.
	I mean, it's, you know, I mean...
	Who the hell would hire me to teach at a university after running this show, right?
	I mean, there's a reason why there are no academics doing these kinds of shows.
	Yeah, of course.
	But that's my point.
	That's my point, is how, I mean, like, philosophy, I would say, you do have an undergraduate degree in philosophy, though, don't you?
	No?
	I thought you did.
	No, I have an undergraduate degree in history.
	Now, I certainly focused on some aspects of philosophy.
	My graduate work, my graduate thesis was on the history of philosophy.
	But no, I don't have a degree in philosophy.
	I think...
	Perhaps this is just...
	But it's okay, because neither did Nietzsche, and neither did Aristotle, and neither did Socrates, and neither did...
	So I'm okay.
	I mean, very few people...
	Nietzsche, in fact, well, he has a degree, I think, in philology, but he had to leave the university system to start doing any philosophy.
	He couldn't stay in there.
	So...
	But for me, the whole history of massive contributions to human thought, the philosophers who've actually kicked some ethics down the throat of humanity have almost never come from academia.
	Spinoza was like a lens grinder.
	He helped people to see better.
	But oh, you know.
	And so, you know, Jesus...
	Certainly true of philosophers, I don't disagree, but I think that's not true of scientists.
	I mean, you want to look at the great scientists, they are all part of academic institutions, or at least were at some point part of academic institutions.
	Okay, I can think of a few off the top of my head who weren't.
	Charles Darwin.
	Was or wasn't?
	Was.
	I thought he got his big thoughts on the Beagle for five years.
	Yes, but before that, he went to school.
	And he went to school to be a doctorate.
	He had a degree in the natural sciences.
	All right.
	Einstein?
	Einstein, I don't know whether Einstein had any kind of degree.
	I don't know what degrees he did.
	You came up with this series as a patent clerk.
	But they weren't.
	I mean, neither Einstein nor Darwin were involved in academia when they did their big work, right?
	But Isaac Newton was a fellow at Cambridge at the time.
	Yeah.
	Particularly in the biosciences, Thomas Crick was working at universities.
	I mean, when you talk about the discoveries of DNA or, you know, What is the cutting edge in research and the sciences is all happening at universities.
	It's not happening with people just on their own doing research.
	I mean, there are certainly fields where that's the case.
	And I agree with you that I don't think academia is particularly a good situation for philosophy to grow out of.
	Academia is all about sort of just rote learning in many ways.
	But in certain fields, I do think it's productive.
	I do think it's productive in certain fields.
	And I think the sciences are one of those situations where you have to get to a certain level before you can make progress on your own.
	Right.
	Yeah, I mean, I just...
	I don't know any particular – this could just be my lack of knowledge.
	So as far as philosophy goes, the biggest philosophical issue is child abuse because it's the most prevalent violation of the non-aggression principle in the world and it's also the one that people can have the most effect on.
	I've never come across a philosopher who deals with child abuse in any fundamental way.
	And they're all academics.
	Famous scientists throughout history who never had a science degree.
	Leonardo da Vinci.
	Mathematician, engineer, anatomist, botanist, inventor, artist.
	I disagree.
	Leonardo da Vinci was not a scientist in my eyes.
	Geologist and botanist?
	Those are areas of science, aren't they?
	Anatomist?
	That would be an area of science.
	Engineer?
	Eh, practical science, right?
	I don't know.
	I think what he did, as brilliant as it was, and I'm not disputing that it was brilliant, most of it was not based in sort of scientific method.
	I mean, like, what his work in botany and geology was, that's true, but that's not what he's most known for.
	As for anatomy, okay, yes, I'll give you anatomy.
	He certainly was.
	You'll give me anatomy.
	All right.
	Benjamin Franklin, physicist, inventor.
	He's been called America's first scientist.
	Also very good at stealing other people's ideas.
	Well, isn't that part of being genius, right?
	Good artists borrow, great artists steal, according to, right?
	These guys, Charles Goodyear, chemist, discoverer of the process of vulcanizing rubber, which I think is, what, giving rubber pointy ears, I think.
	William Darwin Fox, naturalist, etymologist, or an insect researcher.
	They have Charles Darwin here, a naturalist, evolutionary theorist, geologist.
	They don't have him down as having a science degree.
	Again, Maybe I'm wrong.
	Henry David Thoreau, naturalist, also a famous author.
	Thomas Henry Huxley, T.H. Huxley, biologist, anatomist, coined the term agnostic.
	That bastard.
	Thomas Edison, Gregor Mendel, botanist, naturalist, considered to be the father of modern genetics, no science degree.
	Vladimir Nabokov, Oh, Jesus, I didn't know that.
	Of course, I know him from Lolita and other novels.
	Entomologist, an insect researcher, lepidopterist, butterfly researcher, butterfly evolutionary theorist.
	He was a curator of lepidoptera at the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University and no science degree.
	But he worked in academia.
	Well, not really.
	He was a curator at the museum.
	I don't know if that's the same as working in academia.
	Fair enough, fair enough.
	Richard Leakey, paleoanthropologist, human evolutionary theorist.
	He has no science degree.
	He's still alive.
	Robert Evans, the Australian-born astronomer, no science degree.
	Stephen Felton, American-born paleontologist and fossilist.
	Anyway...
	But I mean, there are a lot of people who have been very successful in the sciences who do have degrees.
	Absolutely.
	I mean, it's like, I think you're doing the same kind of thing that people who sort of point at Steve Jobs and say, oh, Steve Jobs left university early.
	That's the key to his success.
	No, I mean, the key to his success was that he was a very driven...
	Although apparently very difficult to work with person and was in many ways sort of a genius in what he did.
	It wasn't that he was particularly a genius because he left university.
	I mean, a lot of people have been successful through going through university, just as many, if not more, than have been successful by not pursuing education to that level.
	But I mean...
	My point is, though, that...
	You don't need to be an academic to teach.
	Because you can learn stuff that you're passionate about, And, like, Ayn Rand obviously didn't get a degree in creative writing.
	Of course, neither did Shakespeare.
	Shakespeare didn't go to theatre school and study playwriting like I did, which is probably one of the reasons he was way better at it.
	And Coulter has written, what, ten New York Times number one bestsellers on a variety of topics that she has researched and studied herself.
	And, you know, agree or disagree, but it's all well-sourced and it's all Got interesting data and arguments and so on behind it.
	So I guess I'm questioning the degree to which You feel that you need a degree in order to teach.
	Because, I mean, there are people, I'm sure, who say about me, well, you know, guy doesn't have a PhD in philosophy, so what's he doing running a philosophy show, right?
	And that's interesting.
	I don't care because I either am making good arguments or I'm not.
	The fact that I would have kowtowed to some academic...
	Rigor or some academic hoop-jumping mechanism is not relevant to the arguments or not.
	And it's, you know, people, if they themselves had studied even as much philosophy as I've studied, they would recognize that the argument from PhD is completely irrelevant to the question of the validity of my arguments.
	And, you know, my concern is that academia might be a kind of security blanket.
	It might be, well, you know, I can teach once I have this degree in zoology or I have this validation from some institution and then people will listen to me.
	Well, I don't think that's completely wrong, but I don't think it's completely true either.
	I think, like, you're...
	You didn't just say that, right?
	Sorry, sorry.
	Do you think I'm saying that it's completely 100% true or 100% false?
	I apologize.
	I apologize.
	I'm sorry.
	I'm tired.
	It's all right.
	You know that was a bit...
	Yeah, I know.
	And that's why I'm saying this.
	But this is good, because it means you're annoyed, which is the opposite of being depressed.
	Yes.
	Just shout out on the show, Therapy, everyone.
	Please, please, please.
	Do it.
	Do it.
	Please.
	It will do wonders for you, even if you don't think it will already.
	Anyhow...
	It is a security blanket in some ways.
	It gives you structure, right?
	It gives me structure.
	It gives you credibility.
	It gives me credibility and it makes it easier.
	And I don't particularly necessarily see a virtue in making it harder for myself, especially at this point in time.
	Wait a minute.
	Weren't you depressed in college to the point of feeling suicidal?
	No, I was never suicidal.
	This is one of the things that I'm fortunate in that sense.
	Okay, sorry.
	But you were very depressed.
	You said you basically started school.
	I don't think that was because of my situation in university, by any means.
	I think that's almost entirely a result of my situation precisely when I wasn't in university, when I was at home.
	Right.
	The fact that it appeared when I happened to go to university, I think it's more a coincidence than anything else.
	What drove me further and further into depression was precisely avoiding taking part in the sense of structure and having mechanisms that allow me to organize my life.
	Without that, that's precisely how I felt into the worst parts of my depression.
	I don't object to this idea of striking out and doing it on your own at all.
	I think there's very much value in that, but I don't think necessarily it's the right choice for everyone.
	I think there is...
	Look, dude, you've got this great abstract fogging, right?
	But if you said you wanted to teach and...
	You want to learn, and I asked you how much of what you are learning will you end up wanting to teach?
	And you wouldn't answer me, but you basically said that's why I don't like my college, right?
	Yes.
	So if there's stuff, you can't be passionate about everything in zoology the same way I'm not passionate about everything in philosophy.
	No.
	But the things that you are most passionate about You could study on your own.
	You could hire a mentor.
	You could whatever number of things, right?
	And you could start talking about what you're passionate about.
	Because academia evolved before the internet.
	And so now you have the – so academia was the gatekeeper that allows whether you can talk to people or not.
	And there's maybe some value in that for sure.
	But there's also a huge mess in academia.
	Which is an avoidance of controversy and a confirmation bias.
	And groupthink.
	And I don't know the degree...
	According to Noam Chomsky, that doesn't show up as much in the sciences.
	It certainly shows up in the arts in absolutely brutal ways.
	And...
	If you want to teach, I'm not sure why you need a degree when you have YouTube.
	Because you're right.
	Intelligent people want to learn about stuff.
	And you can...
	Create videos for very little money that will grab people's attention.
	I'm not convinced that I'm at a point at which I can.
	That's the issue.
	Well, nobody's convinced of that.
	That's an empirical thing.
	You try it and see if you can, right?
	Are you asking for, I'm not convinced that I can do something that I haven't done before.
	I'm not convinced 100% I can do it.
	Well, yeah.
	I'm not convinced 100% I can do stuff I have done before.
	I'm not even convinced 10% is the issue.
	There was no means by which I would be astonished to see a 20-year-old create content on YouTube that I thought I would really, really learn something about, from what I already understand about zoology.
	Even at an undergraduate level, the level at which I'm really challenged by something that I'm learning I just can't imagine that being expressed by a 20-year-old in a YouTube video.
	But it's not a question.
	20-year-old doesn't really matter.
	I'm 20.
	No, no.
	20-year-old doesn't matter because what matters is do you know more than the average YouTube audience about zoology?
	I would say yes.
	I don't want to just teach at that level.
	I'd like to teach at a higher level.
	But why not practice?
	Yes, but it's not a...
	See, it's a funny thing, right?
	I'm giving you the option, and you do whatever you want.
	I'm just putting out some options, right?
	Because you say, well, I really want to teach.
	I'm like, well, here, you can start.
	Oh, no, I don't want to do any teaching.
	It's like, well, but why not?
	What's the harm?
	It's a time investment, and there's always a concern of sort of...
	I'm not getting value out of your time assessment.
	I feel like, yes, you're tapping on something that is not making sense and I recognize that.
	I need to give it more thoughts.
	What's the emotion that comes up when I I'm annoying and say, you know, if you want to teach, then do it.
	Okay.
	That's not really an emotion.
	Okay.
	I would say self-loathing.
	Okay.
	That's closer to an emotion.
	So like fear, anger.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	I would say fear, anger.
	Yeah.
	Right.
	Yeah.
	It bothers me that 15-year-old girls can get 2 million views talking about makeup.
	But a very intelligent young man like yourself is like, well, you know, all I have is very high IQ and access to some of the best educational materials in the world, so what would I have to say?
	Well, you know, maybe if you were talking about putting powdered shit on your lips, that would be a different conversation, but I just, right?
	So the self-loathing, right?
	Because I'm telling you, man, my belief is that if you go through academia, And, you know, what, are you going to get a PhD in, what, 10 years from now?
	You get, what, two more years of undergrad?
	Yeah.
	Another year or two of a master's?
	Another, what, five to seven years of a PhD?
	Yeah.
	Is it going to be a lot easier in 10 years if you've avoided this?
	No.
	It's not.
	It's like brushing your teeth.
	If you don't do it now, it gets a lot worse later, right?
	Yeah.
	Thank you.
	And so do you really feel that you're not going to have anything to contribute to the general public until you're 30 or more?
	No, I don't think that's true.
	And you've spent like half a million pounds in opportunity costs and debt and conformity and whatever, right?
	I mean...
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	So what's the self-loathing?
	Um… The self-loathing is a big part of what I call my depression.
	I forget.
	Sorry, I'm a bit flustered.
	But...
	Basically, when I feel really poorly, My inner voice, if you will, has a tendency to say pretty horrible things about me, about my conscious self, and be very critical.
	I think this is an internalization of How my father was very critical towards me when I was younger and sort of this idea, the thing that always comes up to mind is both the way that my father would always tell me that I was very smart and then this is always in situations when I had somehow failed or failed to meet his expectations When you fail,
	the last thing you want to hear is you really, really shouldn't have failed because you're very smart.
	It's not going to help you progress beyond that failure.
	Especially from a guy who's been unemployed for eight years.
	Yeah, I mean of course this is not something I was particularly switched onto at the time, but it's not something you want to hear, especially from someone like that.
	If you don't mind, I'll just talk very briefly about sort of the French education system and how terrible it is, particularly French public schools.
	I think you've spoken a lot about how public schools are pretty stressful just about everywhere.
	But particularly in France, there's this thing that when you fail in France, you're told, and I'll say it in French first, which if you translate it roughly to English, it means you are nothing.
	But in a sort of more, perhaps, non-literal translation, it means you're rubbish, you're useless.
	And this is something that's told to you from, like, what Elise was told to me from age six to age 12, pretty much, if not twice a week, maybe three or four times a week by my teacher.
	And this was not just you, I would assume.
	No, no, no.
	This was me and just about, if not every, then most child in that classroom.
	Anyone who ever failed at anything, which is just about everyone.
	And you are taught that any failure It's a measure of your value as a person, as a human being.
	And that if you fail, you're worth less.
	You're worth less.
	And that's really what you grasp onto, is this idea that every time that you Do anything that's a bad choice or anything wrong or incorrect in some way.
	It's all because you're not good enough, you're wrong, you're useless, you're nothing.
	And I think where I'm coming from right now is sort of not in a way that's deliberate by any means, but Having this idea of perhaps what I'm doing and what I've done sort of without giving it huge amounts of thoughts really,
	a huge amount of thought really, just because it's sort of the path that's sort of made clear to you by society in a sense, made obvious and you're told this is what you should do.
	I've sort of just sort of gone headfirst into that without really giving it much thought and now sort of Being addressed with maybe there's the idea, maybe it's not the right decision, that's sort of playing on a lot of that, is what I would say, is where that's coming from.
	Right.
	But I hate...
	I'm sorry, strong words, strong words.
	I am always concerned when I talk about how I feel in the way that I just spoke about, how I feel in terms of sort of removing myself from it in many ways that I'm not really experiencing it.
	Right.
	But I haven't figured out yet a totally better way to do it, but it's a work in progress.
	Yeah, I never know what that means, but I think that the keyword you used had four letters.
	Yeah.
	Hate.
	Yeah.
	Hate.
	You said, well, that's a strong word.
	I mean that as in, it is what I feel, but I wish I didn't feel that way.
	Why?
	Why?
	When weren't you emotionally abused and told you were nothing and told that you failed and that you were smart and had no right to fail?
	Were you given a soft place to land?
	Were you given encouragement?
	Were you dusted off and helped back on your feet?
	Were you encouraged to fail?
	Because without failure there can be no success.
	Without failure there can be no glory.
	Without risk, there can be no reward.
	People can take away your right to fail.
	They take away your right to live.
	I mean, you know as a zoologist or somebody studying zoology that the only reason that evolution exists is because of failure.
	The only reason we have this giant brain is because of failure.
	Because all the shit that didn't work out genetically gets weeded out of the gene pool.
	Failure is the polish that And the whetstone that makes the blades of our intellect so sharp.
	Yeah.
	And so the idea that we developed a giant brain as the result of approximately four billion years of significantly failure-based evolution, like, what, 90%, 95% of all the species that have ever lived on the planet have gone extinct?
	Fail!
	Fail!
	I mean, you know how fast evolution can work, right?
	You get a bunch of crickets.
	In June, there's a sudden frost.
	Half the crickets have a gene that lets them resist frost and half the crickets don't.
	From 2 to 3 o'clock in the morning, boom!
	Evolution, baby!
	Half of them are dead and the other half get to reproduce.
	Evolution can be incredibly rapid and is a result of massive failures.
	So to take away failure from a living organism is to take away the very stuff and whetstone that sharpens and enhances life at all.
	The thrill of victory must, must be sweetened by the possibility of failure.
	No possibility of failure.
	Give me a man who has no possibility of failure.
	I can't understand why that man gets out of bed in the morning.
	I was frog hunting with my daughter the other day.
	And let me tell you, they're fast.
	And they're slippery.
	And toads will pee on you when you grab them.
	And, you know, sometimes we get a toad and sometimes we don't.
	And then, tonight we eat!
	And so she's like, ah, it's so frustrating.
	I wish we got a toad every time.
	I said, but we're only here because we don't.
	Because it's a hunt.
	We would not be out here if it was wall-to-wall toads and we could just pick him up.
	She's like, oh, that'd be so great.
	And I, yeah, I get that, but we wouldn't, it would be no fun.
	Be no fun.
	There's no real success without failure.
	They say, if you fail, you are nothing.
	If you fail, you are nothing.
	I mean, that's very Darwinian, right?
	Yeah.
	And it's unbelievably abusive.
	And incredibly destructive.
	Particularly to the more intelligent...
	Like, intelligent people can take sensible risks, right?
	Yeah.
	Male intelligence is more on the extremes than female intelligence.
	There's more super smart and super dumb.
	More guys end up in the top of the sciences and more guys end up on the front page of the Darwin Awards every single year.
	Particularly for men, progress is the embrace of failure.
	There is simply no progress in society without the embrace of failure.
	Were the people who were telling you, outside of your dad, were the people who were telling you about how terrible failure was, were they men or women?
	Women.
	Women, right?
	Women.
	A lot of women don't really get the male risk thing.
	Which is why they think that men...
	Like, why you have this meme around that men are dumb.
	Because women don't get it.
	Stop wrestling.
	Right?
	Like, I had friends when I was a teenager.
	Like, this guy was a bit too far on the risk side of things.
	But, I mean, he would just do some crazy stuff on his dirt bike.
	Drive off bridges and into rivers and stuff.
	And I think women are kind of baffled by this, right?
	It's okay.
	I don't understand why a bed needs so many pillows.
	We make these compromises in the world of male and female relationships.
	Like every man on the planet, I don't understand why you make a bed that you're going to mess up again, blah, blah, blah, right?
	I don't know why you need bags full of scented shit in the bathroom.
	I just want to escape anyway.
	There's no amount of potpourri that's going to cover up my neck.
	Garlic naan exit strategy.
	But anyway, I accept it's a nice, lovely thing and all that.
	I appreciate it.
	And when I think back to me living in a bachelor pad looking for peanut butter with a lit piece of newspaper like some caveman, I get.
	That's a great and wonderful thing.
	And, you know, Testosterone drives us to take risks, for God's sakes.
	Testosterone drives us to compete, to be ambitious, to roll some fucking dice.
	Two dice, two balls.
	Not a coincidence.
	So this idea to make you scared of risk, this wild feminization of the Western male that has been occurring for the past 50 or 60 years, Is one of the most wretched phenomena in human history.
	It sounds like hyperbole, but it's not.
	And you're caught up in it, I think.
	I'm caught up in it.
	And I don't mean to pin an agenda to your nutsack or anything like that, but it's true.
	I mean, you know the R versus K reproductive strategies, right?
	And in the R reproductive strategy, which is...
	In a situation of massive resources, especially with predators, you just have as many babies as humanly possible.
	And you don't invest in raising them, right?
	It's rabbits versus wolves, right?
	The wolves have fewer kids and train them well.
	The rabbits just have a bunch of kids and let the hawks have their way.
	And what's true is that in our selected species...
	The males are increasingly feminized, and this seems to be happening.
	Government funding, government spending has created this limitless resource illusion.
	Deer and rabbits never run out of vegetation to eat.
	They can just keep reproducing because their numbers are culled by the predators.
	Our numbers used to be culled by simple economic reality.
	Oh, I've run out of money to have more kids, so I'm not going to have more kids.
	The predator is called the limitation of...
	But now with government and deficit financing and the welfare state and corporate welfare and all that, it's got this illusion.
	So it's provoking all of these very R-style reproductive strategy situations.
	And one of those that is consistent, as far as I know, throughout the animal kingdom is that in the R-selected species, the females become increasingly masculine and the men become increasingly feminized.
	Depends what you mean by masculine, I suppose.
	Sorry, in terms of females becoming...
	Well, because the females are sort of left more alone to raise the young, so they generally have to be tougher, right?
	Larger, yeah.
	Larger, tougher, and so on.
	The size differential tends to shrink.
	Again, I'm not...
	Yeah, I mean, a lot of species will be characterized by larger females than there are males, yeah.
	Right.
	And...
	And so, in what I would argue is an increasingly R-selected society, and the R and K sort of differentiated by left and right wing ideologies, left being on the R and conservative being on the K side, there's this feminization of males and masculization of females is a pressure.
	And I don't know about you.
	I mean, obviously, we grew up in different eras and just somewhat different countries.
	Do you feel that masculinity is a positive in the world that you grew up in?
	It certainly wasn't portrayed that way.
	I don't think...
	I mean, I think it's done by creating this sort of straw man of masculinity in taking all the things...
	There's nothing about masculinity that means that it can't be taken to a degree in which it is bad or dangerous or problematic.
	Intellectual.
	Sorry, I apologize.
	The short answer is yes.
	I mean, yeah, masculinity.
	And how did it make you feel that masculinity was not held up to be It made me feel like the best way to conform was to be less masculine and take less risks and be easy and passive.
	To be girlified, right?
	Yeah.
	Not that those are the only characteristics of girls, but in particular to be girlified, right?
	And this girlification of men is, I think, particularly horrendous.
	I mean, the toxic way that men are told to conform isn't good for women either.
	I mean, becoming the kind of person who just sort of concedes and doesn't take control of their own life is not good for women either.
	It's a toxic idea for anyone that's involved, but definitely...
	You're girlifying right now, right?
	Well, yes, but the ladies.
	I'm not talking about the ladies.
	We're talking about you.
	I'm not talking about women, right?
	Because you've got this knee-jerk thing where we have to balance it out and remember that it's not always that great for the women.
	No, no, no, no.
	We're talking about you and manhood.
	Don't worry.
	Women have plenty of protectors.
	They don't need you, at least in this conversation, right?
	Yeah.
	Did your mother respect your father's masculinity?
	I mean, my father wasn't particularly masculine, I would say.
	I mean, it's hard for me to point out particular traits that my father had by the time that I grew to knew him that were terribly masculine.
	That had already been, dare I say, beaten out of him.
	Not so much by my mother, but by his parents and his schooling.
	Right.
	So, I mean, there's definitely your issues, Toby, and I don't want to minimize those.
	But I think to look at your issues solely as your issues and not part of a larger social phenomenon, I think is going to end up with you absorbing more personal dysfunction than the environment has provoked.
	I see what you mean.
	I think I see what you mean.
	We all grew up, but you more so than me, in a radical, anti-male, feminist environment.
	Yeah.
	And that is very, very toxic.
	I mean, if you're black and you've grown up in some very anti-black or racist environment, we would say, well, your self-esteem issues are not just because you happen to be who you are, but also because you grew up in a very bigoted, anti-black, anti-you environment, right?
	You can't just absorb that as personal dysfunction.
	Like, there's me, and there's these white guys, and I just ended up kind of insecure.
	Not seeing the bigotry is tough, right?
	Yeah.
	And it was certainly there when I was a student.
	I like to debate.
	I like to argue.
	I don't mind pounding the odd table because I'm very passionate about what I care about, what I think is good for the world.
	I remember even in grad school, we'd be talking about, I took a course on Martin Luther, on medieval economics, and I'm like, I'm pumped by some of this stuff.
	I really care about it, and I'm getting into it.
	And the women in the glass slowly backing away from the table.
	And it's like it's kind of incomprehensible.
	And again, not all, but this was a sort of pattern, right?
	I did actually – the woman who taught me Aristotle was pretty kick-ass that way.
	So I certainly appreciated that.
	And some of the guys were very feminized.
	So this is not just a purely gender thing.
	But man – This tiptoeing around bullshit, this trigger warnings bullshit.
	Probably less of it in the sciences than there is in the arts, but all of this tiptoeing around thing.
	Like both Chris Rock and Jerry Seinfeld have said, oh fuck, I hate playing college crowds.
	I mean you can't make a joke about anything without somebody fainting, getting upset and running off complaining.
	You can't, I mean, and so it's, you know, probably not as bad in zoology, but...
	Yeah, can I just say one thing about that very quickly, is that I run the Atheist Society at my university, and...
	The amount of pushback you get just trying to organize a simple debate between our society and one of the religious societies is incredible because there's so much concern about, oh, you're going to offend someone, you're going to hurt someone's feelings.
	Oh my god, you can't possibly do that.
	It'll be horrible.
	It'll be disastrous.
	There's going to be people with hurt feelings everywhere laying across the floor.
	It's going to be a disaster.
	And this idea that university is this place you go to to have your ideas reinforced is such a disastrous idea and a disastrous way to think about education as a whole.
	I don't know to what extent it comes from, like, the university in and of itself and how much it comes from the student organizations.
	I feel like it comes a lot from the student organizations, but it's part of the whole culture, I would say.
	Yeah, because, I mean, I can't imagine...
	Like, to me, like, I grew up playing a variety of...
	a lot of sports.
	And...
	The idea that I'd say, basically, don't score that goal because it's upsetting to me is incomprehensible.
	It would be embarrassing.
	It would be like, can you imagine this?
	I mean, you grew up as a guy, right?
	Can you imagine this?
	You're playing soccer or football or something.
	Don't score that goal.
	I'll be upset.
	Yeah, preposterous.
	It is preposterous.
	I mean, it would be like you could not – there's no amount of money in the world that would have made me say that as a kid.
	It's nonsense.
	Except in intellectual – like in intellectual debates – Don't say things that are upsetting to me is exactly the same as saying don't score the goal because it's upsetting to me.
	Don't show your superior ability.
	Don't get one past me because it's upsetting to me.
	It's exactly the same with debates.
	And that's such a chick planet.
	And I have no objection to it whatsoever.
	As far as the evolutionary drivers for that, I mean, guys went out and hunted and competed in the hunting.
	And the guy who came back with the stag most often got the hottest woman.
	I got no problem with that.
	Some men got the testosterone.
	We want to go out.
	We want to compete.
	We want to thump some tables in the pursuit of good virtue and truth.
	And there's nothing wrong with that.
	And the women...
	Kind of had to stay around with the kids and had to not rock the boat and not upset each other.
	I've got no problem.
	I have no problem.
	It's complimentary.
	Women can help me remember to be nicer.
	That's fine.
	It's complimentary.
	It's a great perspective.
	I have no problem with it.
	It's not like, man, good.
	Women, bad.
	There's nothing wrong with it whatsoever.
	But oh my God, is it out of control.
	Oh my God, is it out of control.
	The idea that nobody's feelings can get hurt, well, except for white males, of course, punch them all you want.
	But the idea that at a university, nobody can get upset, nobody can be exposed to contradictory information, you know, this hypersensitivity is fundamentally fascistic.
	Yeah, really, it really, really is.
	Oh yeah, I mean, Ann Coulter tries to give a speech, Warren Farrell tried to give a speech at Canadian University, they're screamed and shouted down.
	I go out to give a speech at a men's conference in Detroit, we get death threats, bomb threats.
	It's insanity.
	Yeah, this like, I am so sensitive, is like this right before the fucking brown shirts come out with truncheons.
	Yeah, you've got to paint yourself as a victim so that you can then oppress someone else.
	Oh yeah, no, I think you're right.
	You're absolutely right about that.
	So, this is sort of why I'm pushing this risk thing.
	Because, you know, you can browbeat a man into becoming a woman, but that doesn't make his testosterone stop, and it doesn't make his male nature stop.
	You know, women are slightly better at finding things in a known space.
	You know, where's the ketchup or whatever, right?
	Where are the keys?
	Women are slightly better at finding things and quite a bit better by some measures at finding things in a known space.
	Men are much better at finding things In a new space and keeping their orientation in a new space, which makes sense, right?
	Women are, you know, growing vegetables and herding chickens and they need to know where everything is in a known space, whereas guys are out hunting, need to find things and keep their orientation.
	And that's true.
	I mean, that is ridiculously true for me.
	Like, I'm not that great in a car without a GPS, but man, put me in the woods, I never get lost.
	And there's nothing wrong with this.
	One is not better than the other, the complementary.
	And the idea that our brains, like male and female brains, are immune from evolution because magic is just ridiculous.
	It's our most expensive organ.
	It's the one most susceptible to evolution because it's ridiculously costly for us to build and maintain.
	So I get there's a personal history here, and the personal history you can deal with, but Toby, what I want to sort of get your focus on is the degree of anti-male prejudice that That you grew up with and are still surrounded by, right?
	You deal with family stuff, for sure, and you're in therapy for that.
	But the degree of anti-male hysteria in your environment is horrifying.
	And I dare to start to circle, to begin to call it fascistic, in that it is so...
	So brutal.
	But at least the fascists openly called themselves fascists, not like my little ponies of infinite anti-testicle hostility.
	And so, if you're scared of risk, yeah, that's something to do with your dad, something to do with history, something to do with your mom.
	But women...
	Evolutionarily speaking, needed a lot of help to raise their kids and could not afford to alienate or offend or upset people around them, particularly other women.
	So this is why, in general, after dinner, the men talk politics and the women go into the kitchen and talk about their kids.
	Because the men are willing to have it out.
	I'm willing to disagree because men have been trained from, like, sports, right?
	You fight the other guy and then you go have a Coke together, right?
	The disagreements don't harden into these Hatfield and McCoy grudges, right?
	Because you're trained on, yeah, we can oppose each other and then we can be pals afterwards.
	And girls, again, this is all generalization, not true for everyone, but Boy, when enmity sets in with women, man, it sits there till it grows a beard.
	It's not the same.
	They're not trained to compete and then be friendly afterwards.
	And so for them, it's much scarier when there's aggression or competition and so on, right?
	Yeah.
	I mean, I think there is a danger in this idea of sort of Disagree and then just be pals.
	I think there's certain things that if you disagree with someone about, you should not just, hey, we just disagree.
	You know, we can still be best of friends, you know?
	Oh, I agree.
	I'm the guy who came up with the against me argument, so I completely agree with that.
	I mean, I know you do.
	And it's...
	There's a degree to which, especially when it comes to approaches to truth.
	No, but that's after the debate.
	Yeah.
	With this gynocentric planet of higher miseducation, you can't even get to the debate.
	No, yeah, yeah, yeah.
	The anxiety shows in not after, oh my god, you're a horrible racist.
	Once that, oh my god, okay, then maybe our friendship is at an end here.
	That's after the debate, but you can't even get to the debate, right?
	Yeah.
	Women are fainting and going to hug rooms and shit, right?
	Yeah.
	And that's the environment you're in.
	Again, less in the sciences.
	I get that.
	But it's still there.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	Especially in sort of the social aspects of diversity, I would say.
	Yeah.
	So my suggestion would be that, you know, nothing risked.
	I think that an acceptance and pursuit of risk changes everything about you.
	An acceptance and pursuit of risk is it rewires you.
	If there's epigenetics still cooking in my 48-year-old carcass, then risk is still working its mojo on them.
	Because risk tells your body a whole bunch of cool things.
	Risk tells your body you have hope.
	Risk says to your body, we can achieve.
	Risk says to your body, we can break through to something better.
	Risk says to your body, we are competent to try.
	Risk says to your body, I want to achieve something difficult and worthwhile.
	Help me out.
	Depression, as we talked at the beginning, is this horror that you can't get out of.
	But risk is when you think you can and are willing to try.
	The opposition of the ruling class to risk is obviously very strong.
	And the ruling class these days tends to be women plus government.
	And Jews!
	No, I'm just throwing that in there for...
	Just throwing that in there to screw people up.
	But to embrace and accept risk is to really activate the most healthy and masculine parts of your identity.
	You know, hunting is risk.
	Agriculture is risk.
	Providing for your family involves competition and risk.
	It is essential in how we have evolved as men.
	And your father avoided risk.
	The risk of failure, the risk of criticism, the risk of being hated.
	To which the balls can only say...
	Yeah, yeah, yeah.
	Everything that people love, truly love, is the result of risk.
	Life is the result of risk.
	To reject risk is to reject life.
	And to reject risk, as your father did, is to enter into a state of living death and self-delusion.
	Lying to yourself.
	is the inevitable result of avoiding risk because very, very few people are ever honest about why they've avoided risk.
	And so when I say, yeah, you can start a channel talking about cool stuff to do with zoology or whatever turns you on, that's not so you have to do it tomorrow or anything like that.
	That was just to see, well...
	Are you like, well, that's scary, but exciting, right?
	No, you were like, well, that is self-loathing, right?
	Yeah, that's really, really, really scary.
	Right, right.
	And I think that fear is something worth examining.
	Yeah, definitely, definitely, absolutely.
	And I'm trying to remember my therapist was female.
	I can't remember if we had many conversations about risk, but...
	My therapist is male, if that makes any difference.
	Yeah, maybe talk to him about risk.
	Because women also, evolutionary, sort of, I think, grew up or evolved to manage risk, to reduce risk, the risk of getting pregnant, the risk of getting married to the wrong guy, to reduce risk, whereas males, you're going hunting, you have to embrace risk, you have to go further, you have to hunt smarter, you have to try stuff that's going to fail, all technology.
	Is stuff that fails 9,000 times before you get some success 9,001 times, right?
	I can't remember how many times Edison tried to get a light bulb that worked, but it was in the hundreds, if not more.
	And I think that this rejection of risk, you know, so why is the economies of the West sort of faltering and all that?
	There's lots of reasons.
	Lots of reasons.
	I mean, quota-based promotion of less competent people, currency misallocation of resources.
	But fundamentally, it's like, well, you've terrified two fucking generations of boys to reject risk.
	How's your economy doing?
	Pretty fucking bad.
	It's all hiding out.
	You think that risk will be reduced by academia without recognizing that academia itself is a risk.
	So, sorry if that didn't help at all with your initial question, but that's...
	That's okay.
	I mean, I think it was more useful this way than just answering...
	The question I already had, it's better to end up with a question I didn't have in the beginning.
	Yeah, I'm one for maximum possible responsibility, unless there are wildly clear signals to the contrary.
	I think people are responsible to themselves more than anything else.
	All right.
	Would you mind if we move on?
	No, absolutely.
	Thank you.
	Great call.
	I appreciate your calling in with that.
	So much.
	Thank you.
	All right.
	Up next is Omar.
	Omar wrote in and said, I think my self-doubt comes from the conclusion that I reached recently that my parents are not intelligent.
	They've made terrible decisions.
	They are immature and bad judges of character, amongst other things.
	I believe that intelligence is genetic.
	Since I am a product of my parents, I see myself as unintelligent also.
	If my success depends on my genetics, something which I have no control over, then I believe somehow that I am destined to lead an unhappy life.
	What is the origin of self-doubt, and how can we overcome such negative beliefs?
	That's from Omar.
	Right.
	Hello, Stefan.
	Hello, how are you doing?
	Hi, I'm very well, thank you.
	First of all, I just want to...
	I mean, for an idiot, you're doing okay.
	I mean, that's your...
	Thank you.
	I mean, because you may be doing really badly, but you just may be too dumb to know.
	We're going to explore that, just kidding.
	We're going to explore that in a conversation.
	Well, first of all, I just wanted to say how deeply moved I was by the previous caller.
	There is a slight risk, of course, that your show is going to be a little bit repetitive because myself and the previous caller are going through very similar emotions, it seems.
	And of course, I hope you don't mind.
	Of course, there are Inevitably there are going to be some differences between our experiences but what you said I've taken on board and certainly risk is something that I need more of in my life because in some ways I think I've oversimplified my problems to one source.
	Self-doubt is probably one of the most dominant feelings I've had.
	Not feeling intelligent, feeling worthless and hopeless are, of course, symptoms of depression, which is probably what I should have asked initially.
	But nonetheless, I'm confident that this is going to be a very fruitful discussion.
	I don't mind a theme show at all.
	We can do a theme show, and this theme show can be Risk.
	Risk slash depression or whatever.
	Cool, cool.
	Now, before we start, Omar, I just wanted to mention, you have an Adverse Childhood Experience score of 8.
	Yes.
	Oh, man.
	I am so sorry.
	I'm so sorry.
	Thank you.
	Just for those who don't know, verbal abuse threats, no family love or support, neglect, not enough food, dirty clothes, no protection or medical treatment, parents divorced, physical abuse towards female adults, lived with alcoholic or drug user, household member depressed, mentally ill or suicide attempt, household member in prison.
	And I just wanted to say, damn, that is a lot of bad stuff.
	Yes, it is.
	And It's something that's very difficult for me to deal with.
	I mean, to state the obvious, of course.
	Now, dumb or evil?
	Always a challenging question.
	Yeah, yeah.
	Well, I think both, actually.
	I think both are apt Words to use when describing my parents.
	I've actually been appalled by some of the things that I found out about them which have previously not come to light because you know they're very dishonest and they're very good at hiding things but I have my ways of finding out.
	Recently I got a phone call from a former friend of my father's who at one point were inseparable and He just revealed to me the betrayal of trust, the lies that were spread by my dad, which caused a lot of harm to his best friend and his family.
	I mean, that's just merely one thing amongst many, far too many, to go into in such a short space of time, because it's a lifetime of fuck-ups and cruelty.
	Done against others.
	So, of course, I'm profoundly ashamed that I am a product of someone like that.
	Wait, wait, wait.
	Hang on.
	Left turn.
	You are ashamed.
	I'm not sure I follow.
	Why would you be ashamed?
	I think you've hit the nail on the head, really, because...
	I mean, did you have a choice that I wasn't aware of before being born?
	I didn't see any turnstiles that say, here's the elevator up to happiness and a stable family and a wonderful environment, and here's the bladed drop zone down to a living hell on earth populated by horrible people.
	And you're like, you know...
	I think I'm going to just go dark.
	I'm going to go deep.
	I'm going to go dark.
	And I don't want to go to the happy place.
	I mean, I don't remember getting that choice.
	I'm fairly sure you didn't either.
	Well, yeah, you're absolutely right.
	I guess what I was trying to say is that I would be ashamed if I was him.
	If I had...
	Enough self-awareness, which he seems to be lacking in, of both my parents actually, then I would be thoroughly ashamed of myself and I wouldn't be able to live with the choices.
	No, no, but dude, again, I don't know.
	I don't know your dad, obviously, right?
	But my guess would be that you're saying, well, I'd be ashamed if I was him, but if you were him and you had the capacity to feel shame, you wouldn't do that stuff.
	Oh, yeah, of course, of course.
	Yeah, it's a completely hypothetical scenario.
	You know, if I was a bad guy with a really strong conscience, well, then you wouldn't be a bad guy, right?
	Well, exactly, exactly, yeah.
	Of course, it's an impossible scenario.
	If I was that blind guy but could also see, well, no, I think, right?
	Yeah, absolutely.
	Yeah, of course.
	Yeah.
	I'm still waiting, Omar, for this supposed unintelligence to show up, because right now, I mean, you're getting everything, you know, super quick, unless you're totally faking it, which I can usually tell.
	But so far, I'm still waiting for this supposed lack of intelligence to show up.
	Yeah, well...
	If you could hurry it along, that would really help.
	I think that you have to distinguish between what is called raw intelligence, the intelligence...
	In the intelligence that's innate, the intelligence that you're born with, and what is called, I believe, crystallized intelligence, which is the intelligence that you've acquired through experience, curiosity, learning.
	I would say that the intelligence that I have tends towards the latter.
	I, for instance...
	Wait, wait.
	I'm sorry.
	I'm sorry to interrupt you.
	I really am.
	But, you know, if...
	If you've taken a left when you're supposed to take a right, I don't want to wait until we're 20 miles further along in the wrong direction.
	That's why I'm sorry to interrupt.
	No, that's fine.
	The arguments that I'm sort of making here, have you heard them before a lot?
	Sorry.
	The perspectives that I'm putting forward, like, is it dumb?
	Is it evil?
	Well, if I were him, well, but if you were him and you wouldn't feel shame, like, are these arguments or perspectives that you've heard a lot of before?
	Not from you, but now that I'm hearing them, I can certainly...
	No, no, no!
	Have you heard them a lot before tonight?
	Oh, yes, of course.
	Yeah, like how you said that the source of a lot of the previous callers...
	I'm really glad that you're avoiding this because this tells me that we're onto something useful.
	So I put forward, you say, well, first of all, you said, I'm ashamed to be born of them.
	And I said, well, why?
	And you said, well, actually, I guess I feel that if I were them, I'd be ashamed.
	And I said, well, if you have capacity for shame and you're them, you're not them.
	Those particular perspectives and arguments, have you heard those a lot before our conversation today?
	Yes, I think I have, just not put in precisely the same terms as they have been now, but yes.
	So if you already knew those perspectives, why are you giving me perspectives that are false?
	I guess because a lot of the thoughts that I have So you haven't heard a lot of these arguments before if you haven't submitted them to a lot of – like if you still have these habits, you've maybe heard them but you haven't absorbed them or whatever.
	Is that what you're saying?
	Yes, I think that's what I'm saying.
	Sorry to interrupt, but the reason I'm pointing this out is that you say, well, you think that your intelligence is more experiential, right?
	Like it's not raw native processing power.
	It's something that you develop and so on, right?
	But my counter argument to that is that you came in with a particular perspective...
	I turned you around 180 in a minute or two with, I think, some very good arguments, and you processed them right away.
	Now, if you haven't had a lot of experience with those arguments, we're talking raw processing power, not learned intelligence.
	Okay, well, I guess that's a mistake on my part in not knowing that, or at least underestimating my raw intelligence.
	Because you just did some fantastic footwork here, and you're saying...
	Let me put it to you this way.
	I'm some fantastic dancer.
	I showed you some wildly complicated moves, right?
	And then you copied them exactly, like a four-minute complicated routine.
	You copied it exactly, and you said, well, I don't really have any native talent as a dancer, but I guess after a certain amount of learning stuff over and over and over again, I can do it.
	And I'm like, but you just did this.
	Okay, well, I can assure you it's not false modesty.
	Okay, I can assure you of that.
	I don't know what it is.
	But yeah, okay, we have that cleared up, I hope.
	Okay, so as far as intelligence goes, smart parents can give birth to dumb children.
	Dumb parents can give birth to smart children.
	I didn't know that actually, no.
	Absolutely.
	Short people can give birth to a tall person and a tall person.
	Tall people can give birth to short.
	It's called the regression to the mean.
	And what that means is that if everybody who was smart just kept giving birth to smarter and smarter and smarter kids, you'd end up with some giant megamind people and other people with tiny little Amazon hanging from a tree shrunken heads.
	If all the tall people got really just taller and taller and taller, right?
	So there's a regression to the mean, which means that genetics are like an elastic, right?
	You can pull them, but they generally tend to snap back, which is why everyone kind of ends up with an average height, you know, big enough sort of population sphere and so on, absent, you know, better nutrition that might raise things and so on.
	And so there's no, I mean, there's a higher chance of smart people giving birth to smart kids.
	I think, if I remember right, Mike, maybe if you can check this out, I think it's like a.6 correlation.
	So one is like perfect and zero is no correlation.
	I think it's 0.6, parental intelligence to offspring intelligence.
	But that's pretty loosey-goosey as far as correlations go.
	So your parents can be dumb as a bag of hammers and they can give birth to very smart you.
	There's no reason that that can't be the case at all.
	Well, that's startling and it's also a very liberating thing Fact, because I don't know why.
	I guess it's...
	Well, I do know why.
	It's a result of not knowing the facts that you just told me.
	But I always believed that somehow I was predestined by my genetics to be as, I suppose, dumb as they are.
	But given what you just told me, I certainly look into it a bit more.
	But that's very interesting.
	I've always heard that there are certain environmental factors that can trigger certain genetic predispositions.
	Just because Mike and Stoyan got some data.
	Estimates in the academic research of the heritability of IQ. And IQ, of course, not the only, but probably the most important measure of intelligence.
	The heritability of IQ have varied from below 0.5 to a high of 0.8.
	So 1.0 would indicate that monozygotic twins have no variance on IQ and 0 indicates that their IQs are completely unrelated.
	So 0.5 to 0.8.
	A 1994 review in behavior genetics based on identical or fraternal twin studies found that heritability is as high as 0.8 in general cognitive ability, but it also varies based on the trait, with 0.6 for verbal tests, 0.5 for spatial and speed of processing tests, and only 0.4 0.5 for spatial and speed of processing tests, and only 0.4 for memory So the point is, Omar, there's plenty of room for you to be super smart genetically.
	Well, that's very encouraging to know.
	Though I think a lot of my self-doubt about my intelligence is based on the fact that throughout school, which I suppose is unsurprising given How I was treated as a child, I didn't really excel in the maths or the sciences and apparently when you do take an IQ test,
	if you're generally good at one section, then you'll be good at all the others and I've never seen myself as particularly Well, hang on, hang on though.
	I'm sorry to interrupt again, but Omar, how conducive was your Adverse Childhood Experience score of 8 household to doing homework?
	Well, yes, I think the answer would be so obvious as to be needless to say it.
	Of course, It's very difficult to thrive academically in the environment that I grew up in.
	Yeah, I mean, it's sort of like somebody hits you in the knee with a baseball bat and then says, hey, go into this running race, and oh, I guess you're just lazy, right?
	Yeah, absolutely.
	Yeah, you're right.
	And the reason I say that is that my home life was terrible as a kid.
	I'm sorry.
	Thank you.
	Chaotic and violent and abusive.
	And so I took refuge in books, right?
	I took refuge in books.
	And some people take refuge in math and some people take refuge in science.
	So whatever is your shelter is what you become good at.
	Okay.
	And some people take shelter in video games and they become really, really good at video games.
	And so whatever your cave is of survival, well, that's where you get good.
	And so expertise in child abuse victims is where you flee to, not where you are encouraged or where you have room to excel.
	Yes, yes.
	Well, thank you again.
	Those facts that you've just given me are quite mind-blowing.
	I only wish that I knew them before because it's, you know, it's very difficult, of course, to, going back to what the previous caller discussed, to live with self-hatred.
	And depression, which has been something that has been troubling me for a very long time.
	And I have had suicidal thoughts on many occasions.
	Well, would that be fair to say, or would it be fair to say that if you felt, as you used the term earlier, predestined, I think it was?
	If you felt predestined to have the life of your parents, is that a life you would want?
	Oh, absolutely not.
	I would rather die.
	Right.
	And I agree with you.
	If somebody said to me, I don't know, at the age of 18, hey, you're going to turn out just like your mom, you'd be like, no, I'm not.
	It's a no-brainer.
	It's a brain stainer on the roader.
	Right.
	Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely.
	Yeah.
	So, uh, that's, um, as I said, uh, very helpful and I will take that on board.
	Um, Of course, I think one of the major Symptoms of my depression is, as well as having lots of debilitating psychological effects, it's actually physical as well.
	It's not too dissimilar, I suppose, to anyone who's going through the same experience.
	I often feel very fatigued, unmotivated, and I'm just caught in this rut, in this Endless cycle whereby it's really difficult to, I suppose, do what's necessary to make something of my life.
	What is necessary?
	Hang on.
	What is necessary to make something of your life?
	Well, of course you need a lot.
	You need health, one thing.
	That goes without saying.
	You need to be able to Well, be able to function and I'm not very functional at all at the moment.
	I've had to postpone my exams at university because I just haven't been able to concentrate because of just the severity of the symptoms.
	It's very physical as well.
	I have adrenal burnout.
	It has definitely taken its toll on my body and I don't feel the same.
	I feel Although I've read people like Thomas Sass and I've discovered that, of course, depression, the extent to which depression is physiological, has been questioned.
	But I do feel sick.
	I don't feel like I'm a well person.
	And, of course, that's very, very difficult to understand.
	Just go about your daily business to perform your tasks.
	You stick to a routine.
	If the slightest amount of exertion just makes you overwhelmed and tired.
	But that's a matter for a physician, I guess.
	But it's something I'm working on.
	I'm also...
	Well, I recently started therapy.
	I've had three sessions the past week.
	And it's very difficult to judge now how it's going to go because it's just began.
	Just like with anything of value, it takes lots of time and patience and commitment.
	But I've got the ball rolling, so to speak, with the therapy and I've started.
	But yes, I just feel stagnant at the moment, like I'm not able to do anything.
	It is at times very difficult to get out of bed.
	I do feel numb.
	I think what the existentialists said about depression, that it's a feeling of nausea or sickness for life is very apt in my case.
	Sorry, not life.
	Others.
	People.
	People.
	Yes, that's certainly true as well.
	Though the exception is I don't feel misanthropic.
	I completely...
	Well, I'm very privileged to have lots of good influences in my life.
	My grandma is one of them.
	I have lots of healthy relationships with very supportive and close friends, and that's just very life-affirming.
	It's a sign to me that not everyone Has to be as evil and immoral as certain people in my life.
	Is this your mom's mom or your dad's mom?
	My mom's mom.
	Of course, she failed in a number of ways.
	And as a result, my mom is a very damaged person because she had A very challenging upbringing.
	My grandfather was a very ruthless, unkind man who was only really motivated by Fulfilling his sexual desires and money.
	He was a womanizer.
	He wasn't really a good family man.
	He also...
	Well, I recall one moment when...
	Well, I was told I wasn't there, but someone told me that...
	It's quite a horrific story, but my mum...
	I was at a resort with my grandfather.
	They were walking down a hotel lobby.
	My mum must have been no more than the age of 14.
	She exchanged glances with a boy her age and my grandfather felt a great surge of rage and when they got back up to the hotel room he He picked her up by the hair and swung her from one end of the hotel room to the other.
	Needless to say, that experience is one amongst many that have been so traumatic towards my mom.
	Now, these aren't excuses, of course.
	They're just explanations for why she is...
	I'm not sure how they're explanations.
	I mean, so your mother knew exactly what it was like to be abused, right?
	Yes, she did.
	She did.
	So, wouldn't that be a very strong incentive to not abuse others?
	Like, wow, I know how bad that feels, so I sure as hell don't want to inflict that on anyone else.
	Well, I guess my mom has a deep misunderstanding of what actually constitutes abuse.
	I mean, as far as she's concerned, probably the fact that she was never...
	Well, I'm guessing.
	I'm trying to read her mind.
	We've never had this conversation, though I have tried to communicate with her, and it's been to no avail.
	She's emotionally...
	Distant and absent and she's unable to see any of her faults.
	It's very difficult to get through to her.
	But yes, as far as she's concerned, because she wasn't overtly aggressive, maybe, or violent, like my grandfather was, that means that she didn't do anything wrong.
	She just doesn't understand the fundamentals of What is required of a parent.
	you when you bring a child into this world you enter into a contract of love and commitment and empathy and okay yeah no I'm sorry I I'm just trying to understand what's going on here.
	Sorry, I thought we got cut off.
	No, no, we're fine.
	Let me just, let me go back to your, okay, so you got an ACE of eight.
	Okay.
	Did you grow up with your mother?
	For the first 13 years of my life until she decided to move abroad, yes.
	Okay.
	Well, so, okay, let me just make a note of that.
	We'll come back to that.
	Mm-hmm.
	Move abroad.
	Okay, so we've got verbal abuse and threats.
	Did they come from your mother?
	Mainly from my father.
	So what percentage from your mother?
	They weren't overt threats, but they were...
	Well, if emotional blackmail counts as a threat, then yes.
	What do you mean by emotional blackmail?
	Well, once she tried to convince me to go...
	Abroad with her and leave my school, leave the home that I grew up in.
	She threatened me by saying that if I didn't, there would be certain consequences.
	That's just one example.
	Free candy?
	Like what?
	I don't know what that means.
	Consequences to my future, I guess.
	I was very easily led when I... I don't know what that means.
	Of course there'll be consequences to your future.
	I mean, every decision we make has consequences to our future.
	I understand now that's blackmail.
	Adverse consequences to...
	No, I get that.
	...our relationship.
	She would...
	I'm struggling to remember it precisely because I was quite young.
	But there was some threat, like if you don't get bored of me, bad things will happen to your future.
	She made me lie, for instance, to everyone.
	Well, she didn't make me, of course, because I have agency, although I was very young.
	No, no.
	If you're a child, you do not have agency.
	Okay.
	Fundamentally, right?
	Because, I mean, you don't have independence, right?
	Well, yeah, that's true.
	Okay, I didn't have agency.
	She made me lie to everyone around me about what was going to happen in the next month.
	And of course, I was supposed to go abroad with her and everyone thought that it was a holiday and I just went along with that lie.
	But my mum had no intention of actually bringing me back.
	Wait, was this after your parents divorced?
	Yes, my parents divorced when I was 18 months old, but my mother had custody, so I lived with her.
	And where was your father in this?
	My father was nearby.
	He didn't live too far away, and I would see him every weekend, but he was quite...
	Although he was close geographically, he was quite distant from what was happening in my life, partly because my mum saw it as imperative that my dad wouldn't find out anything.
	So he was kept in the dark a lot.
	I don't...
	So why did your mom want him to not find out anything?
	Because my mom has a fear of conflict, I guess.
	My dad can be very intimidating.
	He abused her in the past.
	If he heard about my mother's intention to take me abroad with her, then he would perhaps react very violently.
	He's not a stable person.
	Wait, so she's afraid of conflict or violence?
	Yeah, she is.
	Sorry, sorry.
	I hope you'll forgive me, Omar.
	Do you mind if I speak crudely about this, or do you want me to be very polite?
	It's up to you, whatever you feel is most appropriate.
	So, let me tell you something.
	I'm scared of sharks.
	Maybe it's because I'm the Jaws generation, like the movie.
	I'm scared of sharks.
	Do you know what I don't do?
	I don't fuck sharks.
	Because they're scary.
	Of course.
	So, if you're scared of violent people, why would you fuck violent people?
	Well...
	That's a question that you'll have to put to her, but I think it's just as illogical as you.
	Of course, women who have low self-esteem often attract abusive partners.
	So she's a victim?
	Well, yes, I think so.
	Was she raped?
	I don't know, but I do recall that she was pushed out.
	No, no, hang on.
	Hang on.
	What do you mean you don't know?
	If she was raped, she should not – first of all, she should have pressed charges, and secondly, she shouldn't send you over to a rapist every weekend.
	Well, I don't think she was.
	Okay, so she wasn't raped.
	No.
	So she voluntarily had sex with this guy.
	They were married, right?
	Yes.
	So she dated him.
	She got engaged.
	She had sex with him.
	She got married.
	She had more sex with him.
	Do you have any siblings?
	No.
	Okay.
	She had a child with him.
	And the reason I'm saying all of this is I'm not trying to be mean to your mom or shock your conscience.
	But she is turned on.
	By violence.
	Because she had sex with a violent guy.
	Yeah, and by the way, it's not the first time she's been in abusive relationships.
	Right.
	And I don't mean to say that this means she's a bad person.
	I don't mean to say that this means she's not a victim of child abuse.
	But you need to have a clear map of the dysfunction.
	I... I don't know.
	I'm scared of spiders, so I don't bring a big fucking bucket full of spiders to bed with me.
	Exactly.
	See what I'm saying?
	She's not conflict-averse.
	She's conflict-pursuant.
	That's what it seems like when you put it that way.
	No, no, no.
	This is not a seems.
	Yes, yes.
	Right?
	Most people don't have sex with something they generally find repulsive or negative.
	And she's rewarding violence with sexual access and fertility.
	You're not a violent guy, I'm going to assume that, but she is breeding with violent guys.
	She's rewarding violent guys with sexual access and with fertility.
	Your mother is part of the cycle of violence.
	There is no subsidy like fertility.
	Fertility is the only subsidy that fundamentally matters in the world.
	Whatever women have sex with, whoever women have sex with, they are providing the ultimate subsidy and reward too.
	Because genetically, that's how evolution works, right?
	Yes.
	There are nice guys around your mom.
	There are guys who would have treated her well.
	There are guys who would have respected her.
	There are guys who would have been gentlemen.
	But she didn't want any of that.
	She wanted to have sex with – I can't even call it making love because he's violent.
	She wanted to fuck a guy who's violent.
	Yes.
	that's the way it seems Sorry, not seems.
	I don't mean to use that word.
	That's absolutely right.
	If it seems, then you seem.
	Because you're the evidence, right?
	Absolutely.
	No.
	Yes.
	And in fact, someone mentioned that to me quite recently, actually.
	And I suppose it has more authority when it comes from someone...
	Like yourself.
	But I didn't really think much of it, partly because I didn't really know just how abusive my dad was until recently.
	But your mother did, because the abuse doesn't just show up after you get married, right?
	Oh, yeah.
	Yeah, of course not.
	So your mother...
	And again, this is with all due respect to her trauma and all of that, right?
	And what happened.
	But I can't give people the get-out-of-jail-free card.
	I can't, like, if I really had nothing but contempt for your mother, then I'd give her all the excuses in the known universe.
	But then the problem is that if I gave her all of the excuses for trauma, then how on earth, Omar, could I give you any higher standards?
	Like, how could I say to you, Omar, well, you have to do better than how you were raised.
	I'm sorry that you were raised that way.
	I'm sorry you had such a shitty childhood, but you have to aim for something higher.
	How could I honestly say that to you and then say about your mom, well, she was a victim, she was raised badly, right?
	She didn't have any responsibility to do any better because that would be so contemptuous towards women or towards your mom.
	And it would be a double standard, right?
	I'm a philosopher, so, you know, like it or not, I have to be consistent.
	And so if I'm going to say to myself, yeah, I had a shitty childhood, so I've got to do better.
	I've got to take those lessons and I've got to do better.
	And that's how I'm a loving husband and a great dad and hopefully doing some decent amount of good in the world with the time that I have.
	So I have to say to myself, look, You know what abuse is like, man.
	So don't ever do that.
	Don't ever do that to other people.
	If you've experienced the sting of bad treatment, don't do that to other people.
	Absolutely.
	And I can't have that standard with myself and then not have that standard with your mom.
	I can't have that standard with you and then not have it with your mom.
	I can't have that standard With our last caller and not have that standard with your mom.
	Because if I have these standards for all these guys and then I say, oh, but this poor woman, I mean, she was put upon.
	She had low self-esteem.
	She was a victim.
	Like, oh my God.
	Anybody who wouldn't get that that's like the most rampant sexism.
	And stripping women of Any kind of moral responsibility and autonomy.
	I've known enough powerful women who've overcome child abuse to know that it can be done.
	And it's not just a matter of intelligence.
	There are choices involved.
	And I am goddamn well going to hold people accountable for their choices unless they're currently undergoing some sort of epileptic attack or demonic possession.
	I'm going to assume this was not the case with your mother.
	You didn't have a massive brain injury or a tumor or possession by the Beelzebub high parts of Bohemian Rhapsody or anything, and so I'm going to go with moral responsibility.
	Yes, and I totally agree with you.
	I don't think I could call myself honest and consistent if I were to I have these special lenient standards for my mother and not for anyone else.
	Right.
	Now, your mother was raised by her mother, who you said, the reason we went down this road, is that you said that she was a great person.
	In my opinion, at least towards me, I think that she has been.
	She's given me encouragement.
	She's been very affectionate.
	And probably the only stable figure that I... One of the only stable figures, rather, that I had growing up.
	And I love her very dearly.
	Though I do acknowledge that her major flaw was...
	Her inability, I suppose, to raise her children...
	Inability?
	Sorry?
	No, sorry, not...
	Yes, sorry, not in the ability, her failure to raise her children correctly.
	And I, of course, I acknowledge that flaw, but I still...
	Did she oppose your mother's marriage to your father?
	I don't think she...
	I think my grandmother is very passive.
	She didn't give any of her children boundaries of any sort, and she didn't really want to interfere with their decisions.
	So no, in short, I don't think she did.
	In fact...
	She didn't want to interfere with their decisions?
	No, she didn't.
	She seemed to let them run wild, do exactly what they want, gave no guidance or anything.
	What does that mean?
	Does that mean they didn't have to go to school?
	They didn't have to go to the dentist?
	They didn't have to do homework?
	They didn't have to bathe?
	They didn't have to go to bed at any particular time?
	She didn't interfere with their decisions at all?
	Not quite to those extremes, Stefan.
	Oh, so she did interfere with some of their decisions?
	Some of them, but...
	Just not the ones that involve having sex and children with violent men?
	Like the unimportant ones?
	Well...
	Yes, exactly.
	And that is profoundly stupid of her, of course.
	Well, stupid is not a moral judgment.
	Well, it's irresponsible.
	It's a judgment of capacity.
	It's irresponsible.
	And when she...
	Was your father violent towards...
	Your mother?
	Towards my mother?
	Yes.
	Yes.
	I assume so, right?
	Of course.
	And did your grandmother know of the violence...
	Sorry to interrupt.
	Did your grandmother know of the violence towards your mother?
	Yes.
	She was all too aware of it, in fact.
	And what did she do?
	By the way, just to say, that wasn't the only...
	Time she's been aware of my mum in an abusive relationship.
	And what does she do with this?
	She tolerated all of it.
	For some strange, inexplicable reason that I just don't understand.
	Then, if you don't understand why she both raised and then enabled a woman who exposed herself and her children to violent abuse...
	And sent you over to a violent abuser's house every weekend.
	If you don't understand all of that, how can you give me the story about what a great person she is?
	I'm not saying she's not a great person, but if you don't understand that stuff...
	Well...
	I don't understand this math, but it's great math.
	Okay, okay.
	She is a deeply flawed person who was perhaps not a good parent, but...
	Oddly enough, and I know this sounds like a complete contradiction, she was a very affectionate and loving person towards me.
	And...
	Who also did not protect you from the violence you were exposed to?
	No, she didn't.
	Though I should say I've only been physically abused...
	A handful of times and they were not very severe.
	Of course, that's not to diminish their impact.
	I still remember them and they're still a source of trauma, but it wasn't as if I was disciplined in a very harsh, violent, physically abusive way consistently.
	It wasn't as if I was like a lamb being sent to a slaughterhouse whenever I went to my dad.
	You have an adverse childhood experience score of 8.
	Yes.
	That's bad.
	Oh yeah.
	I'm not denying that.
	Please don't.
	No, you are.
	You're minimizing.
	Okay.
	Yeah.
	Well, I was certain...
	You're saying, well, it could have been worse or it wasn't constant or whatever, right?
	Yes, I suppose that's wrong of me, and I take that back.
	She willingly, or not willingly, but unthinkingly, I suppose, exposed me to abuse.
	Well, you know, if she cares about you, and I'm not going to say she doesn't, I don't know the woman, right?
	But if she cares about you, Omar, my suggestion would be To ask her about all this stuff?
	Well, my grandmother, in fact, probably one of the reasons why I feel strongly about her, sorry, tenderly towards her compared to other relatives, is precisely because I feel like I can communicate with her in a rational, measured and calm way.
	I can't say the same for either of my parents.
	Okay, but you say you don't know a lot about her motivations for these things, right?
	No, so I better talk to her about it.
	You're right.
	And I think I've been, for some strange reason, putting it off for far too long.
	And yes, I will almost definitely speak to her about it.
	I mean, it's very difficult, of course, to I mean, she doesn't have a time machine.
	She will probably acknowledge that.
	In fact, I think she knows that she's wrong deep down.
	In fact, she often says very candidly, actually, with a sense of guilt that I didn't raise my children properly.
	She has openly admitted that several times, yet I suppose I have to probe more deeply into the reasons why she hasn't tried to rectify it.
	Because I think she knows.
	I can't say this with certainty, Omar, but I would say that there's probably a reason why you haven't brought this stuff up with her.
	And I think when you do bring it up with her, that reason may be clear.
	And the reason as to why your mother had these influences may also be clear.
	But I think it's worth doing because...
	Knowledge about the past is how we avoid the disasters of the future.
	And you have needs to know what the hell happened with your life, why you had this kind of childhood.
	And your grandmother sounds like the person you have the closest relationship to.
	Yes, yes.
	I don't think it would be difficult for me to talk to her because she is very, very...
	Open and easy to talk to.
	So I will definitely do that.
	And you may also be glad to hear, well, speaking of taking lessons from the past, one of my ambitions in life is to break the cycle that I inherited.
	I want to be a good father.
	And I think family...
	Life, raising children on my own is something that I aspire towards.
	And I know for sure, I have many doubts about myself, Stefan.
	I'm not very confident in many areas of my life.
	But one thing I'm certain of is that I will be the best father that I possibly can be.
	I would do everything in my power.
	To be as loving and as available to my children as I possibly can be.
	And I really, really believe that you will achieve that.
	Thank you.
	And I really want to applaud you for being such an intelligent and honorable young man to have come through this kind of childhood with your commitment to virtue so strong.
	And I hope that you know that Everything that I do is designed to be encouraging even though it may be annoying and difficult at times and I really stand in awe of your abilities and sensitivity and intelligence and courage and commitment in this area.
	It is inspiring to me and I just really wanted to be clear about that and I certainly wish you the very best in your conversation with your grandmother and hopefully you'll get a chance to drop us a line And let us know how it goes.
	Well thank you Stefan and right back at you.
	I feel the same sense of awe and inspiration whenever I listen to you.
	There is no doubt that you have been a tremendous influence on my life and I can't thank you enough for it.
	Thank you very much.
	You know, this show just reminds me every day, you're never too old to have a happy childhood.
	So thank you very much for calling in and keep us posted, all right?
	Thank you very much.
	Take care, Stefan.
	Bye-bye.
	Take care, Omar.
	All right.
	Up next is Jamie.
	Jamie wrote in and said, does not having kids change what you ultimately look for in a partner?
	Is it now less about good parenting ability and more about enjoyment and self-development?
	That's from Jamie.
	How old are you?
	I'm 25.
	25.
	Do you not want kids?
	No, I do not.
	Why not?
	To be honest, there's a large amount of reasons, to be honest.
	It seems like an accumulation of them all leads me to that decision that it would not be in my best interests.
	Sorry, and just so you know, I'm not saying this like it's deviant or bad.
	Like if you said, I want to have kids, I'd be like, well, why do you want to have kids, right?
	That's not like, I'm not trying to get you some sort of, well, what the hell do you want to have kids for?
	Everybody should want to have kids.
	Okay, so it's not in your best interest.
	What do you mean by that?
	Mental health reasons.
	I've had my own fair share of difficulties with it, and I've been Close to other families who have dealt with similar things.
	And I think part of it too would just be seeing a child go through the same things that I have gone through would be a real struggle for me.
	And I know it's not a 100% thing, but there does seem to be a genetic linkage within my family in particular that it does tend to transcend.
	What sort of form of mental health issues do you think are genetic?
	Well, depression, suicides, those are the main ones.
	Anxiety issues and stuff as well, but those are the big ones.
	Alright, and why do you think they're genetic?
	Well, I actually studied and did my Bachelor of Science in Psych, so I have a bit of a background on it, but there has been studies that have shown genetic components to it, and just the fact that Specifically on my dad's side of my family.
	Basically, I guess my grandfather, both my aunts, and now me specifically, have all had some major issues with that kind of thing.
	And my dad never diagnosed or anything, but it wouldn't be a stretch to say that he has some issues as well.
	Yeah, I mean the mental health issues on both of my Family sides.
	My daughter is about the happiest human being I've ever met.
	Wait, is that...
	I assume that's not your background noise, right?
	No, it's not.
	Are you cooking or something?
	What the hell's going on?
	Are you further away from the microphone?
	It sounds like you're quite a ways away from the microphone, Jamie.
	It might be...
	If you're busy, we could do this another time.
	If you've got something going on, I don't mean...
	It's on a Bluetooth connection.
	Okay, yeah.
	So I'm wondering if that's breaking up.
	Stay close, that would be helpful.
	Yeah, for sure.
	Is that any better?
	Yeah, thank you.
	Okay, yeah, no problem.
	So, yeah, so you've got some stuff in the family that's dysfunctional.
	You know, it's funny, I never...
	It's funny because you just mentioned this, and it never actually occurred to me, given sort of family histories of instability on both sides, that I should be worried about some sort of genetic transmission.
	Because...
	You know, depressed people who don't deal with it, often not great parents, which might make their kids depressed.
	But I don't know.
	It never occurred to me.
	It's interesting.
	It never occurred to me that, oh, I better watch out for my daughter because of the family's genetic this, that, or the other.
	I'm more of an environmentalist.
	There's some stuff I'm obviously fine with in terms of genetics.
	There's a significant genetic influence on intelligence, as we talked about in the last call.
	There's an even more significant genetic influence on personality, extroversion and introversion and some aspects of personality.
	But to me...
	Saying that there's a genetic predisposition towards mental illness is – I say this obviously not being an expert on the literature with all the caveats of being an amateur and all that.
	But to me, it's like saying, well, my family is really abusive and they keep breaking their children's legs.
	So my family has a genetic predisposition to broken femurs.
	Yeah, fair enough.
	I guess for that kind of thing, though, it also depends on activity where mental issues are a little different, right?
	Well, the brain is an organ, right?
	Is the brain born broken?
	No, but it can be proteins and stuff that are coded for genes that do program for the brain.
	It may not be defined as broken, but it could be, I don't want to say compromised, but different, I guess.
	But you know what's true is that cognitive behavioral therapy or other forms of therapy don't seem to have much luck with truly genetic illnesses.
	But they really are quite effective in treatment of things like depression and anxiety.
	Mm-hmm.
	So, if you could unriddle that one for me, I'd be thankful.
	Yeah, no, I hadn't actually considered that point before, but that is true.
	I mean, I guess from my understanding, especially with treatments of PTSD and the research that I have read, is that...
	The way your brain responds is what changes, which ultimately can change the physiological aspects of it as well.
	Yeah, so Down syndrome is a genetic disease as far as I understand it.
	And I don't think that a psychologist or a therapist can talk someone out of having Down syndrome.
	No, no.
	Or spina bifida, or I don't know, whatever else there is that's genetic in origin.
	But depression and anxiety respond very well, as far as I understand it, to various forms of talk therapy.
	So I'm just not sure the degree to which that supports the notion that this stuff is even largely genetic.
	I think there may be genetic susceptibilities to things, like people can check out this presentation at bombinthebrain.com, but...
	There are children who have a particular gene sequence, and if they are exposed to physical abuse, almost all of them become criminals.
	But if they're not exposed to physical abuse, they don't become criminals.
	But other children who don't have this gene don't mostly become criminals.
	So I think that if they're physically abused.
	So I get this genetic susceptibility plus environmental factors.
	But that's not the same as saying it's genetic, right?
	So there are some people who have a genetic susceptibility to lung cancer if they smoke, but you've still got to smoke.
	And that doesn't mean that lung cancer is a genetic disease.
	It means that there's a genetic susceptibility to getting lung cancer in conjunction with a carcinogenic like tobacco smoke.
	Right.
	And that's probably a better term is that a susceptibility to it.
	I mean, I have two siblings as well, and they don't have...
	The same level of stuff that I have had.
	So obviously there is varying things within the genetics because it's how genetics work, obviously.
	No, but epigenetics means genetics plus environment, right?
	So if you have different genetics, you can have the same environment, the epigenetics.
	You can end up with different genes based on similar experiences.
	But if you're concerned that...
	I mean, again, as far as I understand it, there may be some genetic component to things like schizophrenia.
	Again, don't trust me on any of this stuff, but go look it up or talk to an expert.
	But the idea is that, of course, you put as much into being a great parent as possible, and I think that that pretty much remediates as much as can be remediated as far as genetic influences go, which I think is a hell of a lot.
	Yeah, no, I agree with that.
	Now, that was only one of the particular reasons.
	Okay, but you know, we're taking it step by step.
	Yeah, no, for sure.
	Yeah.
	Well, you mentioned the environmental impact kind of thing.
	And I mean, there's no way to get around it that if you have a child or children that they are going to be consuming.
	And I don't think the earth is in any danger of being insured of people.
	So, I mean, that side of it, it's not really a strong argument.
	Oh, no.
	The Earth is in huge danger of being short of people.
	And why would you say that?
	Well, you listen to this show, right?
	I do, yes.
	I haven't listened to a lot of the older stuff, but yes.
	No, that's fine.
	You know, we're coming up on show 3,000.
	You're okay to have missed a few.
	Yeah, exactly.
	But...
	Do you think that—so if you did become a parent for whatever reason, I assume that you would try to approach parenting from a sort of peaceful and philosophical and negotiation-based standpoint, right?
	Oh, absolutely, yeah.
	And you would try and keep your kids away from soul-crushing institutions like government-mandated schools and stuff like that, right?
	Yes.
	If you could, right?
	I mean, you'd work in that direction.
	There'd be no spanking, I would hope, and stuff like that, right?
	Do you think that the world is overpopulated by people raised in that kind of way?
	Yeah.
	See, I did recall hearing your talk on this, and I didn't get lost, but I was kind of intrigued to get into this with you.
	Now, I do agree, because I think you used the analogy of vaccines before.
	Would that sound familiar?
	I don't know.
	Most of these shows are a blur to me, so feel free to throw me in more detail.
	No, you mentioned that to treat...
	To negate the problems of this, you need to have more people that are, I don't want to say above, but can go against it and make it a better place kind of thing.
	Because if they are exposed to proper parenting and personal development, that the They can have a positive influence as opposed to people who have been exposed or are a product of dysfunctional...
	Let me simplify it for you.
	I'd like some sane people in the world that my daughter's going to grow up into.
	Yeah, okay.
	Fair enough.
	That's a good simplification for it.
	And sorry, you wanted to get into with me about what?
	No, just I do...
	I see that point completely.
	But I guess from the literature and stuff that I've read, it seems that you're almost fighting an uphill battle because, you know...
	You think?
	I haven't noticed that.
	I haven't noticed that at all.
	You can find me right after Dr.
	Phil, as far as meeting millions and millions of people on daytime television.
	I haven't noticed any uphill battle in promoting it.
	Peaceful parenting.
	Sorry, don't mean to be sarcastic, but go ahead.
	From the statistical standpoint, uneducated people are having children earlier and also having substantially more children, right?
	So even if you have two or three kids, the chances that those two or three are going to be able to kind of mitigate or go against the five or six that someone who is engaging in practices that are maladaptive, it's Yeah, you're going up against a huge thing there.
	No, but that's like saying that Albert Einstein is only 10 times the physicist is 10 non-physicists.
	It's like, nope, he's infinitely more physicists than non-physicists, right?
	Mm-hmm.
	Right.
	So it's not a body weight ratio that we're dealing with here.
	So people who are really good at commuting.
	In terms of inoculation, somebody like me who is willing to really go onto the mat and to the wall and take and give punches for the cause of peaceful parenting, child liberation, and the voluntary family, people like me have a disproportionate effect than people who are just home hitting their kids.
	Because they'll produce a couple of traumatized people, but by the time I'm done, I want to produce hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of thousands of peaceful parents.
	It's not linear.
	It's exponential.
	And that actually leads perfectly into my next point, is that I do enjoy kids and I get along well with them, but I feel that you can have a greater impact by not having children.
	Now, I understand there's that kind of not having that bond, so it's hard to relate.
	Wait, I'm sorry.
	I'm not sure what you mean by impact.
	Well, I was going to explain that a little more in terms of...
	Sorry, it just sounded like you were heading off somewhere else and I didn't want to have the impact go by without...
	No, for sure.
	No, impacting kids in terms of having them develop positive morals or positive life skills.
	And like you said, that you want to have positive parenting roles.
	And impacting 100 versus not doing anything about it at all.
	Whereas I feel that if you assist with programs that can impact kids that don't have that positive and stability in their lives, that you can have a greater impact by putting your efforts to work.
	Can you give me a practical example?
	I'm not sure what you're saying.
	Sure.
	Yeah, no, that's cool.
	I have my own personal idea that I was actually a competitive athlete, so weightlifting became a big part of that.
	So I actually have a group that we're thinking about doing weightlifting, basically a gym, for high school kids.
	And it would be basically geared towards them having, first of all, physical activity, but also having life skills that school doesn't necessarily teach them.
	And specifically underprivileged kids that otherwise wouldn't be engaging in positive behaviors.
	So that's just something that hasn't been thought hugely through.
	But I just feel that there's so much more you can do in terms of being involved in kids' lives that wouldn't otherwise have positive role models.
	Wait, so let's say there's some kid who's got some horrible single mom, to take a cliche, And you then would sort of teach that kid weightlifting and talk to the kid about virtue or honor or...
	Yeah, more or less.
	I mean...
	And then what happens when the kid goes home to his mom and says, you know, basically, according to the coach, you're not a very good person?
	Yeah, no, that...
	Definitely a difficult thing to go through there, but I think it's also...
	You think?
	Right?
	Because, I mean, that's the challenge of working with kids, right?
	Which is why a lot of people burn out who work with kids.
	Because, you know, in a way, the more you help somebody who's 13 or 14 who's got an abusive parent or parents, the more you help that person, the more you make their life difficult.
	And the more you expose yourself to retaliations from abusers, right?
	Now, would you say in that situation you're better off to – or what would be your way of helping as opposed to trying to help?
	But obviously I don't talk to kids, right?
	That's the point, right?
	Because they're not free, right?
	To say to – like to bring philosophy to a child is to pretend that the child is a moral agent, a free moral agent, and the child is not a free moral agent.
	And so you can't bring philosophy.
	This is why I don't write kids' books on philosophy.
	This is why I don't go and talk to, I guess I gave a talk on Shakespeare once, but I don't go to talk to kids in schools because they're not free moral agents, right?
	And so I like to talk to adults.
	Right.
	No, that's a good point.
	I really appreciate the feedback and challenging of it.
	Was there another point about how having children would be negative for you?
	So we have overpopulation and you think you can have more impact on other people's children?
	I guess the freedom aspect to it.
	The inability to do big things spontaneously.
	Ultimately I want to have my own company kind of thing.
	For me personally, I would love to be able to just get up and go without second thought kind of thing.
	So, you know, it's...
	So you don't want to get married at all then, right?
	Well, and see, that's one of those things that it's, you know...
	Because, you know, if you get married, you ain't going to stay married long if you want to do stuff without a second thought to the other people, right?
	Other person.
	Yeah, and it's not a second thought, I guess, but it's the ability...
	No, that was your word, right?
	You said you want to be able to do stuff without a second thought.
	That was probably a poor choice of words then.
	It's, you know, assuming a partner kind of thing, we can go away for two months and live in another place, basically.
	Oh, so hang on.
	So your wife would not have a job?
	Oh, I mean, I would assume they would.
	Well, then how is she going to get off for two months?
	I think most people I know have been able to take significant amounts of time off, but But yes, no, that is...
	How?
	I'd like to know.
	Seriously, are they teachers?
	I mean, how?
	Well, actually, the one that I know is actually a doctor.
	She's able to get that time off as an ER physician, so they're able to.
	I guess the other thing is, any teacher technically has, what, two and a half months off, right?
	So, not that that's what I'm aspiring to, or having a partner that is, but it's...
	One of those things.
	I guess my parents as well.
	I think if you get married to an ER doctor, you might find that your spontaneity might be somewhat inhibited because they have pretty strict schedules where if they don't show up for work, people bleed out and die.
	I'm just mentioning if freedom and flexibility and happy-go-luckyville is where you want to go, the choo-choo train filled with blood-spattered doctors may not be the way to get there.
	Yeah, no, for sure.
	I guess the thing is for me too, it's my parents both had that ability to kind of do as they please.
	And what did they do?
	My mom actually did event planning for major trade shows and stuff.
	So she basically had an uptime and downtime.
	And then my dad was in sales of telecommunications stuff.
	So it was more commission-based.
	So as long as he It was above its quota.
	No one really cared for it, basically.
	Right, okay.
	Yeah, so that's kind of...
	But I assume they had to work pretty hard to get to that level of flexibility, right?
	Because if you could just walk into those jobs, nobody else would do anything else for a living, right?
	No, for sure.
	And they did.
	And it was one of those things that, you know, if they want to go somewhere, it's okay.
	What do I need to do in order to attain this?
	Or have basically a backlog of things that they've Built up over time, that's okay.
	I've got more than that now.
	Sorry to interrupt, but did your parents resent your presence in their life as being inhibiting to what they wanted to do?
	I think my dad at some point, more than my mom, with sports and stuff especially.
	Both of my siblings and I were pretty involved in sports, and I think my Dad specifically would have rather gone and done other things on weekends as opposed to going to tournaments or going to other places within the province for competitions kind of thing.
	So, I mean, I don't think he'd flat out say he resented it, but I do in fact know there would be other things that he'd rather do.
	Sometimes.
	I mean, not always, I would assume, but there were some times where there may have been other things.
	I'm sure not every single time did he hate being there, right?
	I don't think so, no.
	But I'm sure more often than not, there would be something else that would rather be.
	And how many hours a week did you guys do sports that he had to go to?
	That he had to go to was basically, in the summers, basically every other weekend anyways.
	And for how long?
	It would have been the whole weekend kind of thing.
	And then from age 10 to 18, I guess?
	Oh, so every other weekend he'd have to spend the whole weekend doing sports stuff?
	Something along those lines, yeah.
	And you said most times he didn't want to be there?
	That's correct, yeah.
	It wasn't necessarily things that he particularly found interesting.
	Why didn't he just say no?
	Um...
	I think there was some obligation to it, and because my mom and my brothers all kind of had the same passion and enjoyment out of it, and he was just kind of left out, so I'm assuming that there was, you know, these are my kids, I have to support them.
	Wait, so he did prefer to do it?
	I think he preferred to do it than not do it, out of guilt, maybe.
	But if given the option that, you know, we could go do this as a family or we could go do what the kids are currently doing, he would take the other avenue.
	Right.
	So did he ever sit down with the family and say, I'm just not into sports that much.
	Like, this is consuming too much of my time.
	We need to find something else that we can all do because, you know, no sports, but not this much, right?
	Yeah, I... I'm trying to think of a good way to explain this.
	I guess the one thing is that it was hard for him to understand the, I guess, intensity and passion in which the kids engaged in.
	It was very much part of what we knew.
	Every second weekend for eight years, that's a lot, right?
	It is.
	The reason I'm bringing this up is because If your father was not assertive in this way, then that's a template for you that fatherhood is you just suck it up and give up two weekends a month for eight years.
	But that doesn't how it has to be.
	You mean my daughter wants to do stuff and I'm like, nope, I don't feel like that at all.
	You know, maybe we can find something else or we could talk about it or whatever, right?
	Or maybe we can do some deal or, right?
	I don't want to self-erase with regards to what my daughter wants to do.
	Now, when she was a baby, of course, absolutely, you know?
	When she wants to be, like, made her the tow truck for, like, six months in a row, yeah, fine, I'll put on a cheesy accent, which I'm sure I can polish for the show to offend all our Southern listeners.
	But, you know, now that she's getting older, we negotiate, right?
	Mm-hmm.
	And...
	I don't think it's particularly healthy for me to just do stuff I don't want to do perpetually because I think that gives her an unrealistic sense of what it is to be in a relationship with someone.
	I can see that point.
	It doesn't have to be like that for you as a parent.
	That's what I'm saying.
	You can look at your dad and say, look, on the bell curve of family compromises, that was a little bit too much on the no-dad side.
	Or quite a bit too much.
	But that doesn't have to be how it is for you.
	That's not right.
	I mean, you can learn from that over-sacrifice.
	And also, I mean, there's a problem with the family structure, fundamentally, like in that this is sort of the male disposability stuff that I've talked about before.
	And, you know, I'm not sure, Jamie, whether this applies in particular to your dad or not.
	But it seems to me it's pretty fucking rude of the family to not notice that your dad's not happy twice a Two weekends a month for eight years and not say, okay, well, let's sort this out so Dad's more happy.
	Yeah, and don't get me wrong, too.
	I mean, he would do his own thing.
	I mean, he would go to places for...
	No, no, no, no, no.
	Let's get back to just what we've established, not all the other stuff, right?
	So, I mean, wouldn't you say that...
	Shouldn't the mom say, well, hang on a second.
	I don't think Dad's really enjoying himself here, so let's sit down and figure out what we could do that's going to be more fun for everyone.
	No, I guess that's the thing is...
	I'm not sure about the background situations and the discussions that occurred, but it was part of the thing that, I guess, four out of five enjoyed it kind of thing.
	And that's not to say that majority should always rule, but I guess it's tough when...
	Well, no, you're not understanding what I'm saying.
	What I'm saying is, how can everyone enjoy it if your dad is not enjoying it?
	That's my fundamental empathy question, right?
	I mean, my daughter does not like going to computer stores.
	I get that.
	Occasionally, I have to go for just technical crap.
	Like the other day, I have memory cards for my video recorder, a camcorder, and I pushed one of them in a bit too fast, and one of those little black things got bent, and I didn't know how to fix it.
	And I didn't want to buy another memory card because they're expensive.
	And so, you know, we had to go to the computer store.
	And she doesn't like going to the computer store.
	And I get that.
	And, you know, I say it'll be quick.
	I could spend like half a day in a computer store and be happy as a pig and shit.
	But I know that she doesn't like it.
	So I can't really enjoy it because she's not really enjoying it.
	And that's sort of my question.
	Which is, how are four out of five people enjoying it when one person is not?
	To be honest, I'm not sure.
	Well, did you notice, sorry to interrupt, but did you notice that your dad wasn't enjoying it?
	I guess growing up, I kind of, at some point I could tell, but other parts...
	Yeah, so at some point you got that he wasn't really enjoying it.
	Yeah, I knew that it wasn't his favorite kind of thing, but I guess part of it was...
	So what did you think or feel about that?
	Too bad for you, I like it.
	Well, I think part of it was that I didn't understand what he didn't enjoy about it kind of thing, because it was...
	Wait, wait, wait.
	Is he just standing there watching stuff?
	Well, he'd be socializing with other parents and stuff as well kind of thing.
	Yeah, but he didn't...
	He's basically...
	He wouldn't be there if it wasn't for you guys.
	He wouldn't like...
	I mean, nobody sits there and says, I'm going to now spend two days watching amateur sports, right?
	Yeah, no, for sure.
	Okay, so you knew that your dad didn't enjoy it at some point, right?
	At least...
	I'm simplifying it.
	Obviously, it's complex, right?
	But, you know, just to boil it down to something discussable.
	So do you remember roughly how old you were when you realized that your dad didn't enjoy it as much?
	Probably 12.
	12?
	Okay.
	So you still had six years to go, right?
	Mm-hmm.
	So what did you tell yourself over those six years about your dad not liking it as much?
	Well, I guess...
	I might want to preface this with...
	I think part of the thing with him was that he never understood the competitive aspect Dude, I get that.
	I get that.
	But we get that there's differences of opinion.
	We've already gone over that a number of times.
	My question was, at the age of 12, you had the empathy to understand that your dad didn't enjoy it as much.
	and what were your thoughts and feelings about your dad not enjoying it? - I think there's probably some of it that it was just kind of like you said with the too bad I like it kind of thing.
	Why is that funny?
	It's funny because it's lacking a whole lot of empathy.
	I mean, it's abundantly clear that there's basically none there.
	Yeah, but why is that funny?
	Because I can see it now.
	But why is that funny?
	I'm still asking the same question.
	Because of the simplicity in it, that I wasn't able to see that at that age, and it's quite obvious, and it's almost embarrassing that I was missing that.
	And when you made that connection, that it basically was, screw you, I like it, what are your thoughts?
	What are your thoughts or feelings about making that connection now while we're talking?
	I think it's kind of embarrassing that, you know, it went on for that long and that I never really thought about it that deeply prior to now.
	Where do you think you got that perspective from?
	Like that your father's feelings didn't matter, he's just this utility to get you to the sports games?
	I'm not sure, to be honest.
	Um, Really?
	Come on.
	There's some questions in this show that are tough.
	This is not one of them.
	Who taught you how to treat your dad as a utility?
	Well...
	Yeah.
	Yeah, I guess it's...
	I mean, obviously the answer is my mom, but it's one of those things where I'm trying to see the utility side of it kind of thing.
	Well, the sports games is one example, right?
	But I guess it's one of those things, too, that for the first...
	Well, I guess probably until I was...
	At least until all of the kids were born, my mom was actually greater income than my dad kind of thing.
	And the provider...
	Wait, hang on a sec.
	Are you saying that...
	If you have more money, you can treat someone with less money without empathy?
	No, absolutely.
	And therefore, because your mom had more money...
	Wait, I'm trying to figure this one out.
	I'm trying to figure out what your point is here.
	So he's not a utility if she makes more money?
	That was the line of thought I was taking.
	Obviously, that's very...
	But hang on.
	So did your mom make less money after the kids were born?
	So then by that logic, she should have been – oh, then she's not – okay, so she's not treated as a utility because she's making less money, and your theory is that she wouldn't have treated your dad as a utility because he was making less money before you were born.
	It's a very flawed theory, obviously.
	Yeah, I think that's not – I'd hate to think that our capacity for empathy is based upon dollar ratios.
	No, for sure.
	Well, if you're making more money, then my empathy for you changes completely.
	So let's toss that aside as not something really worth exploring at the moment as far as the theory goes.
	And let's try again.
	So when you were born, I think you said you had two siblings, a brother and a sister, is that right?
	Two brothers.
	Two brothers, okay, three births.
	So, when you guys were born, did your mom stay home with you guys?
	Yes, once all three of us were born, she stayed home with us.
	Okay, so how long did that go on for?
	I guess until age I would have been 12 or 13, and then she did start doing part-time stuff again.
	Okay, and...
	Did your dad...
	Did he like being the major provider?
	Was this a situation that was satisfying and happy for him?
	Yeah, I genuinely believe that, yes.
	All right.
	And...
	Was the...
	When your father came home from work...
	What was your mother's attitude to him in general?
	To be honest, most of the time he worked from home.
	When he emerged from his study or whatever it is from working from home.
	Yeah.
	It was always good as far as I recall.
	I don't remember any hostility or anything towards him.
	I mean, obviously there's Always discussion or disagreements that occur.
	Oh, natural, yeah.
	Yeah, and I don't ever remember, though, that it was consistently hostility or derogatory comments towards him or anything like that.
	Nothing that I recall.
	Right, okay.
	And...
	As far as your father's preferences being expressed within the family, how did that work?
	Well, I guess when there was something that he really kind of wanted, it was his way or the highway kind of thing.
	It was very, nope, this is what I want.
	And he would basically use, I'm the sole provider.
	I'm I'm making the money here, so to speak.
	Was this money?
	Was this money issues?
	No, it was never money issues, just in terms of what was going to be purchased, for example.
	But that's money!
	Yeah, no, for sure.
	You're saying it's not to do with money, it's about things we would buy.
	What, do you use seashells or salt or dwarf ears as your currency?
	I mean, it sounds like money to me.
	Yeah, we are birders, that's all.
	Yeah, yeah.
	It's all labor-based.
	Yeah, exactly.
	Yeah, I guess it was one of those things that it was at points if other people, or I guess if there was a For example, if we really wanted to go to a sporting event that was far away, he would at some points draw the line and say, nope, we're doing this, this is how it's going to be kind of thing.
	And that was that, and kind of just lay it down.
	Yeah, so he'd say, look, we can't afford it, or I'm not going to pay for it, right?
	Yeah, basically.
	Right.
	Right.
	Okay.
	And as far as other preferences that he had in the family other than we can't afford it, which is more of a limit than a preference, but were there other times where he expressed preferences?
	I don't think it was ever we can't afford it.
	Or I'm not going to pay.
	Yeah.
	That's a better preference.
	He was...
	I guess he's...
	As a whole, he's a lot more social than the rest of us, I guess.
	He's a lot more outgoing.
	That's just one of his preferences.
	Even if we do go on vacations or things, if we go down to Mexico or Panama or whatever, that would be his opportunity to do his own thing.
	He would just...
	Literally go and do his own thing at times and be like, I'll be back in two days.
	And that's what he would do.
	And for example, he went to Africa for six weeks to two months and he did the same for India and Nepal.
	And those were the things that he enjoyed.
	So he went off on those trips on his own?
	Yes, yep.
	He took time off of work and went on his own and traveled.
	And did you guys want to go with him?
	We were always kind of offered if we wanted to go.
	But at that time, there was little interest for many of us, really.
	To go to Africa or Nepal?
	Yep.
	Wait, did that interfere with the sports?
	Is that the problem?
	I mean, I was offered the chance to go to Africa twice when I was a kid, and I'm like, sign me up.
	I'm in.
	Yeah, um...
	I don't know.
	I mean, it was all three of us as well that we...
	It was never really a huge desire, as bad as that sounds now.
	No, it's not bad.
	It's just different strokes for different folks.
	I'm just sort of curious.
	Yeah.
	We were offered kind of thing.
	Was there any concern about getting along with your dad on trips or anything like that?
	Yep.
	Yep, there was.
	Oh, okay.
	Okay.
	So that might be something to do with it.
	That may be a little less of a mystery then, right?
	Well, yeah.
	I mean, even today kind of thing, it would be difficult to go on a three-day canoe trip kind of thing.
	To go on hymn with that would be difficult.
	And it's not even just the immediate family.
	It's other people that have friends of mine and stuff could...
	Can see why it would be a difficult experience.
	Right.
	And what about your mom?
	Did she not want to go on vacation with him?
	Not for when it was that extended time.
	Anything more than two weeks for her.
	She's kind of ready to go back kind of thing.
	Where he'll go for months at a time.
	I mean, I guess the most recent time...
	He went to Europe for six weeks before, and she met him four weeks in and then did the last two weeks with him kind of thing.
	Well, yeah, so I mean, it doesn't sound like there's a huge amount of negotiation.
	I mean, there's some, obviously, your mom going in two weeks or whatever, right?
	But your dad's like, well, I want to go, and so off I'm going to go, right?
	But as far as win-win negotiations, it may be a little bit shy.
	Yeah.
	I agree.
	In the family.
	Without win-win, you end up with win-lose.
	That doesn't mean anything catastrophic.
	I keep pounding away on things until I can find a win-win.
	Usually, it can take a while.
	It can take quite a while.
	If in your family it was more like win-lose, then for you, the idea of having children is, okay, well, Either I win and my children lose, which is going to make me feel bad, or my children win and I lose, which is going to make me feel bad, right?
	There's not a lot of opportunities for everyone to be equally happy, if that makes sense.
	Yeah, no, and that's a good way of putting it, is that, you know, if there's no way I'm able to do everything I want, and there'd be no way for them to do everything they want, and yes, that's part of growing up.
	You don't always get your way.
	Sorry, but what I'm trying to get across is that If everything that you want includes what other people want, you have overlapping circles of win-win.
	Because you're looking at, well, everything I want to do, but then if other people want to do stuff, that takes away from what I want to do.
	Right.
	And I guess that's the thing with kids especially, is that you have no say in that, right?
	You have what?
	No say.
	It's...
	You can't make your child like something.
	I mean, you can't make your daughter like going to the computer store kind of thing, right?
	I mean, obviously, getting a winning situation.
	I can try and make it as much fun as possible.
	Yeah.
	You know, I have some influence over her.
	I can try and make it as much fun as possible.
	And we can negotiate, right, so that we can do something fun for her and something fun for me.
	And I enjoy her company even in a computer store, right?
	And so there's lots of ways to make it win-win.
	Parenting is a huge time investment.
	It's the biggest thing, right?
	But I don't view it as a sacrifice.
	I don't experience it as a sacrifice.
	It's a real joy getting to know this person.
	I enjoy the challenge of trying to figure out what a six-year-old and I can both equally want to do.
	It's a fun challenge.
	It's part of the enjoyment of being a parent is to figure that stuff out.
	Yeah, go ahead.
	You're getting joy out of the challenge that it's putting forth kind of thing.
	Is that correct?
	Yeah, so I mean it's not like I would be going to hang around at a park without a daughter.
	So it's not a question of, well, I want to go and work on an article and you want to go to the park.
	So I'm going to go to the park and lose out, or you're going to sit there and play with something while I work on my article, right?
	That would be a pretty stark and not particularly enjoyable set of options, if that makes sense.
	But that's not how it has to be.
	Right.
	Yeah.
	Sorry, go ahead.
	No, I was just going to say you led into it with the commitment aspect of it too.
	That's the kind of thing that, you know, once it happens, there's no going back, right?
	It's a forever thing.
	And I don't know if that kind of aspect just scares me that, you know, there's...
	You can always give the kid up for adoption.
	You can drop him off at a hospital or a fire station and somebody will find a home for it.
	Or him or her.
	But yeah, obviously that's not really one you want to be heading.
	So back to your question around what kind of values do you want in a partner if you don't want to have kids?
	Does it change?
	Well, I mean, the obvious one, which I'm merely stating for the sake of conscientiousness, not that it's anything you haven't thought of, obviously the value that you want if you don't want to have kids is a partner who also doesn't want to have kids.
	Correct, yes.
	And it's going to stick with that belief because you may not want to have kids, but man, when baby rabies hits women in their 30s, I mean, it's a force of nature, right?
	It's nature saying, got some good eggs hanging here, like fattening bats, they're going to fall.
	So going to squeeze out a few pops before we get all dusty up in here.
	And so, yeah, so women describe it like constantly having to pee or constantly feeling hungry.
	It's that kind of baby hunger.
	And so that's something to be aware of.
	It may hit you.
	It may hit her.
	If it hits both of you, so much the better.
	But if it only hits one of you, that's a huge challenge.
	So obviously the first thing is somebody who's got real self-knowledge and who also knows why she doesn't want to have children.
	And...
	If she doesn't want to have children, I'm not saying this is you, but if she's like, well, I don't want to have children because I never ever want to not do anything I don't want to be doing, then don't marry that person.
	Because they're horribly selfish, right?
	I mean, there's just no compromise, right?
	I mean, no win-win.
	It's just like, fuck you or fuck me, and not in the fun way, right?
	So, I would not marry someone like that.
	And...
	You might want to marry someone from a long-lived family who's got healthy habits, because it'll be you and her in your old age, right?
	But as far as other stuff goes, yeah, gentleness, patience, virtue, empathy, consideration, curiosity, maturity, affection, spontaneity, like all of those things that are great to have in a co-parent are also great to have in a partner.
	So I think outside of the practical aspects of making sure life goals are compatible, I don't think that there's a single virtue that...
	You'd want in a co-parent that you wouldn't also want in a wife or husband and vice versa.
	Yeah, and that's kind of what I thought originally, too, that I couldn't see aside from the obvious ones.
	But it is good that you mentioned the aspect of having a healthy background kind of thing.
	For old age aspects, I hadn't really considered that before, but it's definitely something to at least pay attention to.
	And she's going to need...
	Look, she's...
	We all need something.
	I think we all need something that's bigger than us that we can commit to.
	You talk about helping kids in high school and so on.
	She's going to be like a...
	I'm not saying this would be the case with you, but she's going to be a supermarket checkout girl for 40 years.
	That's just going to make her want to put a bullet in her head or yours or both, right?
	Because you can get enormous meaning out of having children.
	If you've made the world a better place by a couple of Now, In Star Trek, where they teleport to a planet, people, right?
	Barren wasteland, people, right?
	And that's the same people.
	You've just made people.
	And that's like Frankenstein Central.
	It's fantastic.
	Now, do you think so?
	Go ahead, sir.
	Well, so if you have – and I think for women in particular, fulfillment is around having kids.
	Like women, it's sort of designed to have like eight kids running around.
	And I think some of the emptiness and frustration and unhappiness of women is – I think they're kind of understimulated relative to the bustling joys of a full household.
	And I'm not sure that producing another corporate member on diversity is necessarily the best way to replace – The creation of half a dozen real-life human beings.
	So I think that if you want a partner, you have to sort of figure out where you're both going to be when you're 55 and also where you're going to be when your friends all have kids and they're too busy to hang out with the singletons because that's just how it works, sadly, at least for a certain amount of time, which is quite a lot of time.
	And also then, you know, when your friends are like, oh, you know, my kids are walking down the aisle, they're getting married to great people, oh, we're having grandkids, you know, they're going to be busy in a way that you guys aren't.
	And so because of that, knowing that that's not going to be part of your life and friendships are going to be...
	Because your friends are going to have kids and their lives are going to revolve around that and you'll have less in common as time goes along.
	I think it's important to figure out what you're going to do that is going to produce meaning and value for yourselves and for the world.
	And I think that's the best way to maintain long-term happiness.
	And I think being aware of that, I think, will cause any midlife crisis to be diminished in intensity.
	Right, and I was really thinking that it's really important to, in this situation specifically, to make sure the other person is self-aware about exactly what they do want and not just kind of lying to themselves saying, yeah, this is what I want and they're content with that, but actually getting deep into why do you want this kind of thing and what's motivating you as opposed to just, I'm content and go along with it.
	Yeah, or, you know, I've I want this career or whatever.
	And it's like, yeah, the values of a career.
	You know, I had a great career.
	And the values of a career, like everything, they diminish over time.
	And particularly intelligent people, you know, need novelty.
	There's a reason Charles Murray's written a new book or other people have written.
	It's like you need novelty.
	You need growth.
	I mean, that's what keeps us happy.
	It's like exercise.
	You've got to keep doing stuff in order to be happy.
	The same old thing just doesn't.
	Doesn't really do that much good for you after a while.
	And so, you know, I'd really recommend having somebody who, you know, if they want to travel, if they want to write books, or if they want to do something where they can continue to grow in expertise and meaning and contribution to society, I think that's important.
	Because it's just, you know, well, I want to be a lawyer, and I don't want to have kids because I want to be a lawyer.
	But it's like, okay, well, after 20 years of being a lawyer, is 20 years in one day going to be all that you need to be happy?
	It's hard to imagine, so...
	Right.
	I was just going to say, it's diversity in their interest and things that are sustainable through all stages of life kind of thing.
	If you're really into sports, you may not be able to do that at age 65, or depending on the sports you're in.
	Oh, shit.
	Try 48 sometimes, it feels good.
	Yeah.
	I'm a pretty healthy guy, but yeah.
	No, I understand that.
	I had a major injury, so I've been having to change my life.
	I understand the struggles of I've always had injuries.
	In the past, they used to heal.
	I pulled my arm doing weights six weeks ago.
	It's only now just getting better.
	Mine's a lifer kind of thing.
	What happened?
	I shattered both of my ankles, actually.
	Yeah, I went from a lead athlete to not walking.
	Opening the parachute, I hear, could be a big advantage in those kinds of landings.
	I'm no expert.
	Yeah, yeah.
	What happened?
	I just fell from a good height and wasn't expecting it kind of thing, so I broke both of them.
	Very badly.
	Three surgeries since kind of thing.
	I can walk, but not very long.
	So that's where we're at.
	Finding new things.
	Is it worth asking what happened?
	This wasn't like some frat party pool dive.
	No, no, no.
	I was being responsible and everything.
	Okay.
	I'm sorry, you know, the fragility of the body is something that is always just a, you know, especially, I mean, I never had any health problems in any fundamental way my whole life, and then it's like, hey, cancer!
	It's like, what now?
	Yeah, exactly.
	Like, the fragility of the body is like, holy shit, I mean, stuff you take for granted, right?
	Well, and that's the thing, too, like, being 23 and have that happen, it's a lot different than being, you know, having experienced things for another 25 years, so...
	Do you have time for another quick question as well?
	If it's quick, I mean, we've done four and a half hours, so I do need to get to hell to bed, but I can do a quick one.
	No, I was just going to say, especially in Canada, are you for or against the income splitting?
	Oh, you mean in terms of taxation?
	Yes.
	You know, I think that would be under the larger section called, I dislike taxation.
	No, for sure.
	But given the economic situation we live in in Canada, do you have any...
	So income splitting, let me refresh my memory and other people's memories.
	Income splitting is if you have a husband who makes $100,000 and a wife who makes zero, they both claim taxes on $50,000, right?
	Correct.
	That's very simplified and I'm sure it's more complex than that.
	I'm a big fan of that.
	I'm a big fan of anything that puts a parent at home to raise the children.
	I'm a huge fan of that.
	That's all I needed to know.
	That's what I figured you were going to say.
	I really appreciate this conversation.
	It's been good.
	A quick question that was a quick question.
	Hang on, I'm just picking myself back up off the floor.
	Good for you.
	Thank you.
	I appreciate that.
	Keep us posted.
	I'm very sorry to hear about your ankles.
	I hope that it sorts itself out.
	How long ago did it happen?
	Almost two years now.
	Wow.
	I can't even imagine how agonizing that must have been at the time.
	And the recuperation.
	It's not like you can't put that shit in a sling.
	And it's not even like one ankle where you can put a...
	Like you can get crutches and stuff, right?
	I was in a wheelchair for three months.
	So it was an experience.
	I'm so sorry.
	I'm so sorry.
	But I hope it works out.
	And yeah, thanks for great questions.
	I appreciate your call.
	Thanks everyone so much for calling in.
	Look at that.
	We started on the 10th.
	Now it's the 11th.
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