Sept. 4, 2015 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
03:45:13
3067 Appreciation as Currency - Call In Show - September 2nd, 2015
Question 1: We are a married couple with three young children, but we fight about everything – including money, household chores, responsibility, etc. I realize now that we probably should have fixed our issues before getting married, but we simply chose to ignore all the red flags. Is there any chance to fix this marriage, or are we just simply too cowardly to let go and face the consequences of divorce?Question 2: If we accept that the political process is unethical, wouldn’t it be wise to vote for Bernie Sanders, since a socialist president would speed up the eventual economic collapse of the American empire?Question 3: I have been progressing through the stages of grief that people go through with a loss. I was very depressed and sad for a while as I realized that my religion was not true and all the consequences of that realization. Now, as I am figuring out what it means for me and my family for me to not believe while they do, I am angry at the very real situation created by nonsense stories. How do I channel this anger to keep it from seeping into my relationships? How do I hold back anger against the religion I feel so betrayed by to protect relationships with those who still believe?
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Let's move on to the callers, because this is your part of the show.
All right.
Well, up for today, we have Rod and Erica.
And they wrote in and said, We are a married couple with two girls, five and seven, and a boy, 18 months.
Even though we grew up in the same town, we have different ideas about money, house chores, responsibility, etc.
You name the subject, it's very likely that we will not agree.
We moved to the US because of my work, this was Rod who wrote this, and have no extended family nearby.
Needless to say that we are always tired and stressed by everyday things.
We argue a lot in front of the kids and have been aggressive to each other a number of times, also while the kids have been present.
We have been in and out of couples therapy with many different counselors, making no significant improvements.
Each one of us is trying to win the argument rather than do what's best for the family.
Our arguments are mostly about money, taking responsibility for our actions, and house chores.
She complains that I do not include her in decisions about money, although most of the things we buy are for the kids, which I do not necessarily agree whether they are a need or a want.
On the other hand, I feel increasingly frustrated that I do a lot of the house chores and all the yard work while I am the only provider for the house.
I realize now that we probably should have detected and fixed our issues before getting married, and we simply chose to ignore all the red flags.
Is there any chance to fix this marriage, or are we simply too cowardly to let go and face the consequences of divorce?
That's from Rod and Erica.
Now, but Rod's the only one on the line, right?
Actually, we have Erica too.
There's a slight language barrier, but we're going to try and make it work.
Well, hello, guys.
Welcome.
Thank you so much for calling in, and I really appreciate it.
It's a very brave message, a very brave email, and I respect you very much for taking a swing at this.
Thank you so much.
Thank you, Stefan.
So, well, yeah, so as I was writing, so the issues are You know, the girls, the kids have, you know, witnessed us fighting and arguing, and it's very stressful sometimes.
We feel like, you know, they're mimicking the same behaviors, like they are starting to yell at each other, and And pretty much we like to, you know,
don't really know, you know, because we started going to therapy, couples therapy, but it's the same thing, like, you know, what is the main issue and what, you know, basically just making agreements, like, okay, you help with the dishes, you do this, you do that, but it's never the actual bottom of the issue.
Is that we don't agree about the subjects or the topics that we discussed.
If there's a money issue, we end up discussing, you know, issues from the past, going back to the past, and not really focusing on the problem that it's, you know, what needs to be spent.
And this goes on and on and on for months, and we never get resolution on anything.
Right.
So, the other issue, I guess, is that we don't have an extended family, so it's kind of, for example, for making this call, we had to rush, get the people to find somebody that can watch over for them for a couple of hours.
It's very expensive, and we are always worried about what's going to happen to them, and we really can't enjoy anything.
Having family over has proven to be complicated when they've been here.
This is on both sides, basically.
I want to know your opinion about...
First, maybe you can talk and explain how this...
I've heard your podcast before and how basically how bad Kids witnessing arguments and fights on local parents is actually very bad for them.
Well, it's fine, I think, for kids to witness, in fact, it's important for children to witness disagreements.
It's fine to watch, for kids to see parents being upset with or even angry with each other.
They just, you know, they can't hear yelling, abuse, you know, and they need to see how adults resolve differences.
And if they're not getting that last part, Then, like if they're just seeing you guys nag at each other without resolution, that's not going to be too positive for them, right?
And how do you...
I mean, what's your suggestion in regards of talking about the issues that we have?
And there's actually a couple therapy, the way to go, because I think that sometimes we...
I don't really feel like I'm being hurt.
You know, it's always like, it's a thought of being a mom and stuff like that.
And I really don't necessarily agree with all that because I think I... Sorry, you don't agree with...
Sorry, you said something about...
I just couldn't quite hear you said something about being a mom.
You don't quite agree with that.
And what was that?
Right.
They say that it's tough being a mom, right?
And it's so difficult to be in a new country and trying to learn the culture.
And so it's always like I have to be the one that has to understand her side of the things.
And I really feel like I'm not really getting hurt or getting anything from the sessions, therapy sessions.
Sorry, I just want to make sure I understand.
It was Erica, right?
When Erica says that it's really hard being a mom in a new country without family and so on, do you feel that it's not that hard and she's exaggerating?
Sometimes I do, yes.
Right.
Well, I mean, I've been a stay-at-home dad with one kid and a very supportive wife, and it can be tough.
So I've got to imagine with three plus, you know, a conflict kind of marriage, I can certainly see it being tough.
That may not be an exaggeration.
But usually when we don't feel heard, we want to diminish what other people are saying.
In other words, I'll listen to your complaints if you listen to my complaints.
But if you don't listen to my complaints, I'm not going to listen to your complaints.
Does that happen at all?
Yeah, that pretty much happens every time.
Like, she would start discussing a topic, and I would change, and then sometimes it's the opposite.
Like, I would say, you know, we're spending too much money, or we are not, you know, we need to pay for this, and all that, you know, but the girls really want that birthday party, for example, stuff like that.
So it's always like going back and forth.
You don't Basically not listening to each other.
And it's not that I think that she exaggerates, but I think that because of my upbringing, basically, that I tend to try to please her in ways that maybe they're not really, you know, what she wants.
But on the other hand, there's stuff that I want that I don't get either.
So, you know, it does kind of things like you.
Nobody is, you know, really doing anything on the marriage week.
We don't...
There are very rare occasions where we are nice to each other and loving to each other.
They're very rare.
And I like to change that.
Basically because I want my kids to grow up in a healthy relationship and identify...
Okay, so hang on.
You can choose to be more affectionate, right?
I mean, you can't will love.
You know, you can't sort of squeeze it out of your heart.
But you can choose to listen more.
You can choose to sympathize more.
You can choose to be more affectionate.
And you can also choose to not have fights in front of the children, right?
Like if someone paid you a million dollars, right?
Somebody pays you a million dollars to get through the day without fighting with your wife.
Could you achieve that?
I probably will try harder, I guess.
No, no, but you could...
It's like if I said, here's a million dollars if you can get through the day without fighting with your wife.
Could you do that?
I probably could.
Okay.
Well, I would hope you could.
Because if you can't even do it for a million dollars, then you can't do it at all, right?
Right.
Right.
Okay, so you have...
Hang on.
If you have enough of an incentive...
Then you cannot have these conflicts with your wife.
If you have enough of an incentive, right?
Right.
And I don't mean that your wife becomes perfect.
And I don't mean that she's not going to have problems with you.
I don't even mean that you're not going to have problems with her.
But just in terms of the stuff like fighting in front of the children and all of that, you could achieve that.
And you don't need your wife's participation to achieve that.
Because if somebody wants to fight with you, you don't have to fight back, right?
So if you have enough of an incentive, then you can change your behavior for the better, right?
Yeah, yeah.
Okay, so why is your family not worth a million dollars to you?
I guess because I'm also always stressed and not really feeling like...
I feel like an ATM, basically.
Okay, now hang on, hang on.
Okay, first of all, being stressed does not mean that you fight with your wife.
Being stressed can mean that you go to your wife for comfort, to feel better, right?
Right?
Like, saying, I'm stressed, therefore I fight with my wife is like saying, I'm sick, therefore I avoid doctors.
no, you should go to the doctor when you're sick, and if you have a good and loving relationship with your wife, then when you're stressed, you should go and spend time with her and feel better, right?
So the problem is not the stress, and I'm not saying that stress isn't a problem, but it's not causal.
It doesn't make you fight with your wife.
It exposes problems in the relationship, but it's not creating those problems.
So that's number one.
Number two, you feel like an ATM, right?
Right.
And you have a stay-at-home wife with three children.
Right.
So that's like having a job in a car dealership and complaining that people want to buy cars all the time.
I'm sorry, man.
That's the job.
If you are the working dad and you have a stay-at-home wife with three children, you are a flow-through device from your employer to your family.
Now, that doesn't mean that you can't fix spending issues and so on, but the problem is that it isn't, I think, that you feel like you just are only providing money.
It's that you don't feel valued in other ways.
But the fact that a working dad is an ATM, well, yeah, a working dad provides money for the family.
I mean, if your wife said, I just feel like all I do is take care of children, well, yeah, she's a stay-at-home mom.
That's the gig.
That's what you do, right?
Right.
So those two job descriptions make sense to me, but my question is, do you feel valued for your contributions to the family?
Right.
In other words, does your wife enjoy not living under a bridge and putting her children to bed in shoeboxes?
Not at all, and that's also another kind of argument that we have, that she would say that, well, this is not what I want, or I'm basically not comfortable here.
Wait, hang on, hang on.
What is not what she wants?
Like being in the U.S., for example?
Right?
So, that's one of the things.
Okay, but hang on, hang on, hang on.
You decided as a family to come to the U.S. for your work, right?
Yeah, well...
Wait, did she...
I mean, I assume you didn't bring her across the border in a sack, right?
Well, no, I mean...
No, I mean, it's basically where I could find work, so...
Right.
So she chose to marry you.
She chose to have three children with you.
I'm sorry, Erica, I guess you can hear this.
I don't mean to talk about you like you're on the moon, right?
But Erica, you chose to get married to this man.
You chose to have three children with him, and you chose to move to America.
And I'm not saying that's easy.
I mean, of course, there are some difficult things about that.
But complaining about the predictable results of your decisions is kind of pointless.
Like, that's why I was saying to your husband that...
Complaining about being an ATM for the family when you're a working dad is sort of pointless.
It's like me getting a job as a singer and then complaining about singing.
I guess I'd be meatloaf then.
But if you choose to come to America because that's where your husband gets his work, then complaining about being in America, which is the result of your decisions, doesn't make any sense, right?
I mean, it may not be ideal, but so what?
Nothing in this world is ideal.
I'd like a world without governments.
I'm not expected to wake up tomorrow and find that to be the case.
I'd like to be as flexible as I was when I was 20.
Well, I'm going to be 49 this month, so that's not about to happen.
I'd like more people to listen to this show, even though we've got lots of growth, but, you know, it takes time.
So there's nothing in this world that's ideal, and we all have to make compromises, and we all end up having to get some of what we want and some of what we don't want, particularly, of course, if we're married.
So there's a great quote from Nietzsche, which I like.
He says, never leave your actions in the lurch.
In other words, don't make a decision, and then just pretend that the decision was done to you, Don't say, I want to be a nurse, and then say to yourself, I can't believe I ended up as a nurse.
You can change your mind, of course.
But you chose to come to America, and of course, as I'm sure you're aware, there are literally billions of people around the world.
Who would be willing to risk their life and limb to get into America.
I mean, it's not like you guys ended up in, I don't know, Botswana or Syria or something.
You did end up in America, which is the envy of most of the world.
Like 70% of the UN refugees end up settling in America because that's where they want to go.
So you have...
It's not like you're stuck in Ireland in the Dark Ages or something, but...
So I'm not sure I see a lot of real complaints here.
I'll just be honest with you.
Because if you have unrealistic expectations, then you're going to end up...
I call it chafing against your life.
Which means like a chaf is when you've got something rubbing against your skin...
Like if you've ever done a long walk when you've had flip-flops on and no shoes or sandals and no shoes and the strap rubs up against your heel and you end up with these blisters, that's like chafing, right?
And so right now, I see that you guys chose to date, chose to get engaged, chose to get married, chose to have three children, chose to come to the United States, and you chose to be the working dad.
And so I'm not sure what there is to complain about decisions that you have made.
You may want to change those decisions, that's fine, but I don't understand.
And I'm perfectly happy to be enlightened about what I'm missing, but I don't quite understand how you get to complain about choices that you've made.
So it's probably not complaining, it's like...
You mentioned that if I had a million bucks for getting through a day without fighting, I would do it.
That's precisely what I think that we feel.
At least I feel that there's no incentive to really go through the day other than for the kids.
And there should be incentive enough, but sometimes it is.
Oh, no, no, no.
God, no.
Kids aren't incentive enough.
Good heavens.
I mean, if kids were incentive enough, then wolves would be the most fulfilled beings in the known universe.
You can't just be a parent and expect that your life is good.
You need to have love with each other.
You need to be doing some good in the world.
And of course, a lot of that has to do with parenting and all stuff.
So I don't, you know, the problem is the relationship between you two, right?
Right.
I mean, if that relationship was working well, then everything else would fall into place.
Because you've got kids that were supposed to be the product of love, but you're not in love with each other at the moment.
Okay, so how do we get there then?
How do you fall in love?
Well, were you ever in love?
I think we were at the beginning.
Somehow it has eroded, you know, with all these restrictions.
You think you were?
We were.
We've been together for a really long time.
Okay, so here, first of all, you've got to just talk for yourself.
You can't talk for her.
I'll ask Erika in a sec, right?
But if you speak for both of you, I can guarantee you that Erika's going to get annoyed.
Because you're having conflicts, and if you speak for the other person when you're having conflicts, that's going to annoy them.
Erika, am I wrong about that?
You'd rather me ask you directly rather than have Rod speak for you?
I'm not sure if she has a mic or not.
Tell me if she's not.
We're trying to get the translation here.
Okay, don't worry about it.
She can listen to it later.
She would prefer for questions to be read directly to her.
Okay, I will.
I'll get to her.
Are you saying that you did once love Erika?
Right.
And for how long would you say that you felt strong love for Erika?
I don't know.
I would say, you know, before we were married, you know, things changed after we got married.
Like, our first girl was born really, you know, very early in their marriage.
Sorry, how long were you guys together before you got married?
Oh, like eight years.
Oh my god, really?
You guys were together for eight years before you got married.
We didn't live together, so we were together.
No, I don't care whether you lived together.
You dated, you were a couple for eight years before you got married.
And you never saw fit to figure out whether you had the same philosophies of money or child raising or stuff like that.
What were you talking about?
Was there really good stuff on TV that over eight years you just never got around to having these conversations about basic values and compatibility?
Well, so one of the things that happened is that I always had to work in a different city where we grew up.
Oh, that's right.
And of course, eight years ago, there weren't any phones.
Yes!
It's all clear to me now.
Come on, don't give me this nonsense.
Over eight years.
I don't care if you went on the moon.
You have time to have those conversations.
That's probably so.
We figured out, you know, we had different ideas and things really late.
I agree.
You didn't figure out.
No, you avoided asking those questions.
I mean, you had to know they were important questions, right?
There's no one alive who doesn't think that you need compatible values for a happy relationship, right?
There's no one who says, boy, you know, I am a Mormon.
The best person for me to get with is an atheist, right?
I mean, there's nobody who's...
Some compatibility in values is important.
And you guys avoided...
I'm not trying to blame you.
I'm just...
You need to accept the facts, right?
Because where you are is the result of earlier choices, right?
So you avoided for eight years having conversations about fundamental values, and you did that because you suspected that the fundamental values were not the same.
And now you have three kids and you're staring at each other and you're facing the consequences.
And I'm trying to empower you here, right?
Which is that where you have ended up is the result of choices.
And that's good news because it means that if you change those choices, you can change where you are.
But first of all, you have to accept that you didn't end up here.
And what you've provided me so far is a lot of avoidance and excuses.
Why didn't you have these kind of, oh, I worked in different cities and stuff.
No, come on.
Come on, man.
Eight years.
You could have had sex three times less and had these conversations at some point in those eight years and if you choose to have the sex or go to dinner or talk about something else that's fine but you have to own that both of you did not have these conversations About values, about money, about child raising, about chores, about accepting responsibility for your actions.
And you also spend eight years together, before you got married and had children, you spent eight years not figuring out how to resolve disputes.
So now you've got a lot of catching up to do.
But that's entirely the result of avoiding challenging conversations while you were dating.
So that you don't feel like victims.
You don't feel like, well, just bad stuff is happening to us.
You don't feel the frustration.
This is all the predictable result of particular choices that you made for eight years before your first child was born.
And if you can accept that, then you can accept that you both got into a bit of a mess by choice, with benefits, Which means that once you accept that you both got into this mess by avoiding important conversations, then you will feel less frustrated at each other.
Because when we own our own lives completely, everything is our choice that we have control over.
I don't mean how other people react to us or whatever.
But everything that we...
Have in our life we choose.
Everyone we have in our life we choose to be with them.
Every conversation we avoid is a choice.
Every conversation we pursue is a choice.
So where you guys are is the completely predictable result of avoiding important conversations.
And that means when you really get that, you stop blaming other people for your life.
Because you're blaming her She's blaming you.
As if you both just happened to each other.
Or there's some weird mystery.
You had an initial attraction based on obviously some compatible values, some sexual attraction, some chemistry.
And you didn't build your house on rock.
Because you started getting married and having children without figuring out Where your values overlapped, how you were going to negotiate differences in values, how you were going to resolve disputes.
You just started pumping out the kids without doing all the groundwork.
And again, that doesn't mean that your relationship can't work, in my opinion.
It doesn't mean you can't have a happy marriage.
But you're blaming each other for choices that you both made mutually.
It's like you both linked your arms and you said, we're going to spend eight years walking north.
And then you turn around and you say, Damn, we're really north.
It's your fault.
No, it's both of your fault.
Does that make sense?
It does.
I guess we try this therapy, you know, and even before we get kids, you know, before we get married, we went to see a couple of people trying to figure this out.
But, I mean, that's, I guess, I understand Okay, good.
So then if you were going to couples counseling and it didn't work, then tell me, for the love of all that's holy, why did you get married and have kids if even before you had kids you were going to marriage counselors and it wasn't working?
I'm not saying you shouldn't have kids.
Please help me understand.
I'm sure they're very happy to be around.
I'm sure you love being a dad in a lot of ways.
But help me understand the thinking that says, well, we're not getting along to the point where we're going to marriage counseling.
The marriage counseling isn't working.
Let's have three children.
Who wanted the kids more?
That's, I guess, the part where you say that if you weren't in love, that's probably the part when we were in love, when I was in love.
No, you said that you went to marriage counselors, you went to relationship counselors before you got married, and it didn't work.
You were still having these conflicts.
We thought it would take time for us to agree on the values that we wanted to share, and we do actually share a couple of them.
It's just that the way we attack them is not very productive.
Okay, I don't know what you're filibustering me with something or other here.
I don't know what you're saying, but my point is that you say that you're in love, but this is when you went to relationship therapy, And it didn't work.
So you were having enough conflict to go to see a therapist and it wasn't working.
So that has to be a problem with love.
No, again, I agree.
Okay, good.
So at some point...
Sorry, go ahead.
I mean, we want to stop these complaining, right?
Okay, good.
So then let's try and make this conversation more efficient.
So then before you got married, you were already falling out of love.
Is that right?
Yes.
Okay.
Was that true for Erica?
You can translate or do what you need.
I just want to know where she's coming from.
Give me one second.
Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
If we hear the sound of a frypan, we'll know what her answer is.
So, I mean, she says no.
In her case, no.
Okay, so she was in love with you before you got married, but you were falling out of love with her.
Is that right?
I would say so, yes.
Okay.
And so she was still in love with you.
Now, why did you have children so quickly after being married?
Was there one or both of you who wanted that more?
We both wanted it.
We both wanted kids.
Okay.
and why did you want to have children?
Actually I have a question and I mean, it's...
I guess, in my case, I wanted a family.
I wanted, you know, having, basically, passing on what you know, having that opportunity to be, you know, create something, or not create, but I don't know how to say it.
To leave something behind.
Okay.
Now, did you decide when you were going to have children that you were going to be the provider and your wife was going to stay home with the children?
Yes.
Okay.
And she agreed with that?
Well, no.
Can you give me a second so she can answer for her?
Oh, sure.
Okay.
Okay.
Alright, so you knew that you were going to be paying all the bills, right?
Yes, I knew.
Okay, great.
And she knew that as the person who pays the bills, you might have a little bit more to say about how the money is spent, right?
Well, no, that's not...
I don't think that she agrees with that statement.
That's another paradigm.
Okay, let me ask you this with regards to Erika.
When it comes to decorating your home, who has more to say about it?
Oh, you shouldn't need to ask her that.
You should know that.
When it comes to decorating your home, who makes more of the decisions and chooses more stuff?
Both.
Oh, you both do?
That's unusual.
That's unusual.
In my experience, and this is obviously different for you guys, but in my experience, it's the woman who cares more about how the home is decorated.
She's the one that decides where stuff gets stored, where to put stuff and how to, not decorate it, but how to arrange it.
Okay, so because she's in charge of the house, she has more say over how the house is organized and run, right?
Right.
And as the person who earns the money, you have more say.
Over how the money is spent.
That's the deal, right?
Women get control.
We stay-at-home moms get control over the house and working dads get control over the finances.
Now, that doesn't mean, of course, it's total control, but it's not 50-50.
It may be 60-40 or 70-30 or whatever, but that's the way it works.
Now, if she has trouble understanding why you want control over the finances when you're the one making all the money, Then you can just ask her, not right now, but at some point you can ask her and say, well, you're at home with the kids.
How would you like it if I organized the house for you?
And told you, like, he's like, no, this is the house I'm in.
I'm in the house all day with the kids.
I need to organize how it goes.
It's like, okay, right, because that's your domain and my domain is the money.
And so I have to have a little more say over how the money is spent, right?
Does that make sense?
Well, it does, but that's one of the arguments that we have.
She feels like I don't...
If I say no to something, I mean, she can't really say anything about money, for example.
If she wants to decorate the house or buy something new, she has to go through me for that.
And I guess that's what you're saying, that if I make the money, I should be the one making...
At least have a bigger weight in the decisions?
Well, I mean, it's the question of final say.
Now, of course, whatever you guys agree on, that's great, right?
But it's the question of final say.
So where you can't find a way to agree, someone has to have the final say in any relationship.
Right?
So in every relationship, if you can't find a way to agree, someone has to have the final say.
Now, for societies, tragically, that tends to be government.
For superstitious societies, that tends to be a god.
Somebody has to have the final say.
Now, Erica has the final say about how the household is kind of run and managed inside the four walls, right?
Mm-hmm.
Right?
So you say, well, I think it should go this way.
Maybe you go back and forth.
But eventually, it's just her decision, right?
Yes.
Okay.
And so, in the same way, if there's conflict about finances...
Then you can try to negotiate and so on, but it doesn't matter whether it's a man or a woman, but my suggestion is whoever's earning the money, that is the person who has the final say.
In the same way that the woman who's home, she has the final say about how the home is organized.
That's her domain.
But your domain is the money, so you have to have the final say.
And of course, you know, I mean, maybe that makes her feel like a child.
Maybe that makes her feel like you're the boss and so on.
So what?
So you're the boss about the money.
She's the boss about the home.
It's not the end of the world that you guys both have areas where your boss is, right?
Right.
Again, that's one of the disagreements, I guess.
No, no, but I'm giving you a way of solving disagreements, right?
Okay.
So you try to negotiate.
But if you can't successfully negotiate, someone has the final say and the other person has to smile and put up with it.
And that's the only...
I mean, you can't just keep fighting.
I mean, you can keep fighting about the same stuff, but that's no fun, right?
Like, let me give you another example, right?
Just because I know this is tough for people to understand because we're raised in this, well, basically men-knuckle-under kind of society.
But here's another example for you.
So, let's say that you want to have sex and your wife doesn't want to have sex.
Who has the final say over whether she has sex with you or not?
I'll give you a hint.
It's not you.
Right?
So, I mean, you can try kissing her.
You can do your sexy little dance.
You can put on your German tourist sunburnt thong outfit or whatever.
You can put on your chicken suit if that's what gets her going.
So you can try to, quote, negotiate to have sex with your wife, but if she doesn't want to have sex, she is the final arbiter over whether she has sex or not.
And if you don't want to have sex, you're the final arbiter over whether you have sex or not.
You can negotiate, but someone is the final arbiter.
You know, like if you're negotiating for a raise at work, you can negotiate and negotiate, but your boss eventually is the one who has to make that final decision, and you can live with it, or you can't live with it, or whatever.
But someone has to, where you can't find a win-win, someone has to be the final arbiter in a relationship.
Otherwise, these fights just go on and on and on and on and on and on until people want to blow their own brains out, right?
And so...
I think your wife would certainly agree with me.
You don't have to translate this to her, but everyone would agree.
Yeah, you can try and get someone to have sex with you, but it's their choice.
They're the final arbiter.
They're the final decider.
Now, when it comes to finances, you're making the money, so you're responsible for the finances.
And so you can negotiate with your wife.
But you're the final arbiter about that.
And there's other areas where she'll be the final arbiter.
Maybe it's got to do with the kids and what they eat or whatever it is, right?
Someone has to be the final arbiter and the other person has to shut up and smile and accept that.
Because otherwise, these fights just go on and on and on and on and on.
Which is kind of where you guys are at, right?
Yes.
So, I guess...
The money is one of the examples, right?
Like, she wanted to buy something, like a dress or something, and I would say no, and that would make her feel upset, and, you know, she would feel like she's, like, you know, like a kid, like another kid, and I don't really...
Wait, wait, she's like a what?
She's like a kid?
Oh, like another kid.
Yeah.
Like, your kids want something, you say no, and they get upset.
Yeah, so, and that's one of the issues.
So, again...
If we can go back to how can we actually have civil conversations about these topics?
No, no.
I've just been telling you.
I've just been telling you.
Hang on.
Let's say that she wants a dress, right?
Now, assuming that she's not currently wearing like a potato sack, a new dress is a nice-to-have, not a have-to-have, right?
And depending on what your finances are like, It may not be a good time, right?
In other words, men, and this doesn't matter, again, doesn't matter if it's a man or woman, but in this case, it's a man, and it's the majority of the cases in these situations.
Men are pretty good at instinctually knowing How far the resources can go?
How far the money can go?
When you should spend and when you should save?
So she wants a new dress and she can come to you and say, I'd like a new dress.
And you can negotiate about that.
Okay, well, if you want a new dress that costs $200, where can we save $200?
Maybe we cannot give each other birthday presents this year.
In which case, we've just saved $200 and go and enjoy your dress, right?
I mean, you can negotiate to try and find a way, if she wants to go and spend $200, To try and find a way to save $200.
And if you can save $200, I'm sure you'll be fine with her buying a dress.
But if you can't find a way to save $200, and you don't feel comfortable spending the $200, then she comes and says, I'd like a new dress.
And you say, well, you know, can we find a way to save that money?
You say, well, you can't.
I'm sorry, we can't afford it.
Or you can say, because we can't afford it, you can always afford just about anything, credit and visa and all those other kind of noose tightening balls and advice kind of stuff.
But you can say, I'm not comfortable spending that money, right?
I'm not comfortable, because isn't that the reality when it comes to spending?
That you...
I'm not comfortable with her buying the dress.
It's not like you don't want her to be happy or don't want her to have a dress.
You're just not comfortable with it, right?
It makes you uneasy.
It makes you feel like a bit too much money is being spent, right?
Yeah, we're here.
So, Stefan, she wanted to maybe rephrase that, what I just said, but you know...
Sure.
Okay.
Yeah, my...
Okay, sorry for my English, but...
No problem.
The problem is that Rodrigo decided how, when, who paid the dress.
This is my problem because I like it.
Okay, I go to the store, I buy this dress because it's my decision.
But my husband tells me, okay, no, no, I like this if you buy this.
But he's telling you the dress?
Hang on, hang on.
Is he telling you the dress that you can buy?
Yes.
This is my problem.
And is it because it's cheaper, the dress that he wants you to buy?
No, it's for he like it or not like it.
Alright, so if I can get back to you, Rod.
So, Rod, you tell Erica the dress that she can buy based upon what you want to see her wearing?
Is that what she said?
I mean, I thought it was, like she would say, you know, which one you like.
That's what I thought it was.
Because what she seemed to be saying was that you would tell her, no, you can't buy this dress.
You have to buy this other dress because I like this other dress more.
And it's not about money.
It's just what you like to see.
Is that what she was saying?
Okay.
I mean, that makes sense.
No, no.
Is that what she was saying?
Yes.
It's for the one example.
No, no.
That's all the example I need.
Okay.
Rod, you cannot be telling your wife what dress to put on.
You cannot be telling your wife what dress she can buy.
You can tell her what you like.
But if you've got no problem with the purchase, you cannot tell her what dress to buy.
I mean, if you have to buy a new car, and there's a car that you love, and a car that you hate, and your wife tells you that you have to buy the car you hate, and they're both the same price, what would you say?
Well, no, but it's...
At least to me, it's another example that probably is...
No, no!
No, hang on!
Hang on!
Right!
Right!
Erika just gave an example, which you confirmed.
You can't say it's a bad example because it doesn't make you look good.
That's not fair.
No, it's not that.
No, no, you can't dismiss it as a bad example.
That is the example that was important to her.
Okay.
So you can't just say, well, it's a bad example.
It's important to her.
Okay.
In that case, can I talk about...
I understand what you're saying.
I cannot tell what she would wear.
I didn't see it that way.
We were shopping and she wanted my opinion.
That's what I thought.
No, she doesn't experience it as your opinion.
And I'm sure she's not just making that up.
So you are probably telling her what she can and can't buy to wear.
And that's not your job.
If you're making the money, you can say, well, I don't like this purchase or I do like this purchase, but you can't tell her what dress she can buy.
That's not reasonable.
Yes.
Okay.
And you can get her in the dress you want, but I'd rather have a happy wife in a dress I don't like as much than an unhappy wife in a dress I like a little more.
You know, I don't go to bed with the dress, I go to bed with the wife.
So I don't see how that priority makes sense.
And I totally understand that, you know, with that example.
But if we talk about, you know, whether the kids should go to a class that we cannot afford, it's basically the same argument.
Okay, so hang on.
So you're going to let her buy the dress she wants, right?
Because you want a happy wife, not a wife who's unhappy and sharpening her knives in a dress that you like.
No dress looks good with a husband's blood spatters on it, so you don't want that.
Okay, now as far as classes that the kids want?
Like they want to go to dance class or, I don't know, gymnastics class?
Is it that kind of stuff?
Yes, exactly.
Okay.
And these, of course, are quite expensive.
And you have two older girls, so you can't do one and not the other.
So you've got a double price, right?
Right.
Now, did you guys grow up as children with these classes?
I didn't.
And I just want to understand if you guys did or didn't.
Because these classes is kind of like a new thing in the world.
I mean, I did some...
Some Boy Scouts when I was younger, and I guess I took some swimming lessons very early on, although I mostly taught myself to swim.
And I had some activities at school, like I was on the swim team, I was on the water polo team, I was on the cross-country team, you name it.
Soccer team, I played and played and played.
But that was all free because it was part of the school.
And so I didn't have...
I mean, my childhood was very different in that now it seems like every time you want to take a kid somewhere, it's 20 or 40 bucks or something like that.
Whereas when I was a kid, you just had to go out and find your own amusement for no money until the streetlights came on, right?
And so did you guys grow up with these expensive childhood activities or is this kind of new for you?
It is new to me.
I took swimming classes, but I learned how to swim and then I was done.
We played organized sports.
Like American football, basketball.
She did gymnastics when she was a kid and swimming too.
So hers were more expensive than yours, is that right?
Like her childhood activities?
Because there's no free gymnastics that I know of.
It's all quite pricey.
So she grew up with expensive hobbies and you didn't, is that right?
Yes.
Okay, so there's a difference in expectation, in that she wants to give her children, I'm not saying it's right or wrong, just so you know where she's coming from, but she wants to give her children the fun stuff that she had, right?
And did her father work and her mother stay home?
Erica's, when she was little.
Yeah, my mom is working, but is working hard time.
She works part time, her mother.
Okay, so Erika, your dad would be the one who paid the most for your gymnastics and other stuff, right?
Yes.
Okay, so if you want to provide something for your children that you didn't receive yourself, It's a little bit harder to do it, right?
Like, I mean, I don't know.
My daughter came up and said, Daddy, I really want helicopter lessons.
I want to learn how to fly a helicopter.
I'd be like, what?
You know, I didn't have helicopter lessons, and that wasn't the problem with my childhood.
It was a lack of helicopter lessons.
And so...
If a parent wants to provide...
So, like, Erica, you want to provide to your kids, say, the gymnastics that you had, but Rod didn't have these expensive hobbies or expensive pastimes or activities when he was young.
So there's a difference of experience.
So for you, Erica, it was, I assume, an important and positive part of your childhood.
But because it wasn't part of Rod's childhood...
It's probably a little harder for him to understand the importance of what you experienced.
I don't know if I'm making any sense or if I'm even being accurate, but that's the thought that's in my mind.
Yes, we were nodding.
Okay, good.
So understanding that different experiences, everything about childhood seems to have become It's professionalized.
When I was a kid, you went out and you found kids to play with.
Even if you didn't have a ball, you'd find something to do.
You'd have a tree climbing contest.
You'd play Red Rover.
Whatever.
You'd go and explore the woods and you'd make forts in the woods out of whatever you could find.
It was all free.
And it was all self-generated.
But I don't know if it's because there's a lot of working parents around.
It doesn't really matter.
But why?
But now it seems like everything to do with childhood is just this endless ka-ching, ka-ching, ka-ching, ka-ching.
Childhood used to be expensive enough.
Now it just seems like you're just taking this big pile of money and burning it on the front lawn so your kids can do stuff.
And so, for me at least, it's harder to get Over to that place where it's like, well, of course she needs dance lessons that cost $200 a month.
I'm like, what?
I used to just dance in my living room.
What are you doing, right?
And so it's harder because you've got Rod's experience of not having these expensive activities combined with him paying the bills or him making the money that pays the bills makes it tougher to...
To have him say, yay, let's spend the money.
Does that make sense?
Yeah.
Thank you.
And this doesn't mean whether your kids should or should not have ballet lessons or gymnastics lessons or whatever it's going to be.
But recognize that you're coming from a different place, right?
And so that's going to cause some challenge, right?
So for you, Erica, I assume it's very important that your daughters have gymnastics lessons.
And for you, Rod, I guess it's more of a challenge to feel that that's important, right?
So for you, Erica, it might be something, the importance is like 8 out of 10, 80% important.
Whereas for Rod, it might be like 30% important.
Yeah, it'd be nice.
You know, if we win the lottery, then they can go, right?
And where you have 80% importance and 30% importance, that's tough.
And the only way to fix that, there's only three ways to fix that.
When you have 80% important gymnastics and 30% important gymnastics, there's only three ways to fix that.
I guess four.
There's four ways to fix it.
So, Erica, you can get Rod's enthusiasm for...
Gymnastics, from 30% to 80%, and then you're both in agreement.
You can lower your importance from 80% to 30%, and then it probably doesn't happen, and you're both in agreement.
You can both meet at 50%, in which case maybe it will, maybe it won't, but at least you're not fighting about how important it is.
Or, you don't have to negotiate any change in percentage, but Rod has the final say.
In which case, his 30% vetoes your 80% just because He's making the money.
So those are the only...
But if you just keep having the same...
Well, it's important to me.
Well, it's not that important to me.
Well, you're just going to keep chafing, you know, like that strap on the back of your sandals when you're on a long walk.
It's just going to get worse and worse.
And then you're just fighting about fighting.
You're not even fighting about the thing itself.
You're not even fighting about gymnastics or money or responsibilities or chores.
You're just fighting about fighting.
You're just fighting about fighting.
In the same way that if you walk around for long enough with shoes that don't fit and you get some blister on your heel, then every shoe you put on becomes painful.
And just walking barefoot can become painful.
And it just becomes annoying.
And then it gets infected.
It was originally just something about you walked in your sandals and now it's become this big problem that doesn't have anything to do with sandals anymore.
So you have to really try and find ways to solve conflicts quickly, because the longer they last, the more likelihood they are to go toxic, to go sepsis-based, to get infected, and then you end up fighting about fighting rather than about anything in particular, and then it'll never end until you decide to stop it.
So you have to find some way that you can both have a way of solving conflicts that you both agree on.
If it's about money, who wins?
My vote.
You negotiate, you negotiate.
If you can't find a solution, Rod wins.
How about chores?
Well, chores are Erica's job, right?
And what I mean is Erica's in charge of the chores.
So, Rod, you can have final say in the money.
Erica, you have final say in the chores.
Right?
So, if he's like, well, I don't like doing these chores, well, you can negotiate.
But if you can't find a way that you can sort it out, then, Erica, you win.
And you can divide these things up and you can say, look, sure we want to negotiate, and we'll try negotiating.
But if we can't negotiate, who wins?
Who gets the final say?
And you have to love and respect each other to know, enough to know, you've made children together, you've lived together, you've known each other for 14 or 15 or 16 years.
So you have to trust each other to know that if Rod says no about something to do with money, that's okay.
He could do that.
He's not going to do that just to be mean.
And if Erica says no to something about chores, you just have to do it this way.
Right?
Like cleaning the bathrooms, right?
Cleaning the bathrooms.
Men have a standard called cleaning the bathroom, which is...
Well, one day it might rain in the house and then the bathroom will get clean.
Whereas women have, you know, I need something that scrubs every piece of foreign matter off the tiles at the atomic level.
So when it comes to, say, cleaning the bathrooms, it's Erica's standards who win.
You can negotiate and say, well, you know...
My wife was like, clean behind the bathroom.
Clean behind the toilet.
I'm like, there's a behind the toilet?
And she wins, right?
I mean, I barely made a bed.
Like most men, I barely made a bed before I got married.
Now if I get up second, I'll make the bed in the morning.
Because my wife is in charge of that.
She's in charge of the home.
So I do things to her satisfaction.
There are other things that I'm in charge of, which I'm sure I'll be informed of at some point.
No, I'm kidding.
Right?
So it just makes things easier.
She's in charge of the home, you're in charge of the money.
You can negotiate, but who gets the final say?
And if you just accept that, it's so much easier.
My dentist is in charge of my teeth.
Because my dentist, she knows what she's doing, and I'm just like, okay, whatever you say, doc.
It's just so much easier.
To surrender your authority is the very definition of trust.
Trust is to surrender your will to someone else.
If I get sick and my doctor says, take these pills, yeah, I might do a bit of research, but yeah, okay, that's what I'm going to do.
If I go to three mechanics and they all say, you need a new carburetor, I guess I need a new carburetor.
And life gets progressively better the more you find people you can surrender your will to.
Because that's trust.
And the person you can surrender your will to the most is the person you love the most.
And if you guys are hoarding your willpower, like, I'm going to do it my way, and I want to get it my way, and I'm not going to surrender my will to someone else.
You know, and I'm not saying this is the case with you guys, of course, but, you know, feminists have been proking and prodding at women.
Don't you surrender yourself.
You know, when I say a man should be in charge of the finances if he's making the money, I'm like, oh, right?
No, that's love.
That's trust.
That's love.
That's trust.
Surrender your will to someone else's expertise.
Erica's got her areas of expertise.
Rod has got his areas of expertise.
Surrender.
Merge.
Be the sum of the parts that is greater than the pieces.
Nobody can live under a brick, but you put enough bricks together and a roof, you got a house, you can live there.
The only way for the sum to be greater than the parts is through trust and the surrender of autonomy and the surrender of willpower.
And the more you can do that, the more the other person, if they're a good person, will feel honored, will feel treasured, will feel respected.
You know, my wife went on a glucose-fructose kick.
She did the research and she's like, this stuff ain't coming into our house anymore.
I'm like, okay.
I trust you.
I assume you're not taking from things that I rightfully and honestly need to be a healthy human being.
You know, I guess I could go do the research too, but okay.
It's gone.
Right?
Like two months ago, I just basically cut sugar out of my diet.
Okay.
I'm sure it's fine.
You know?
I trust her.
I trust her.
But if you guys want to be married and you want to be co-parents and you want to be merged, hopefully for the next 60 years, you need to give each other power over you.
Like the way that I give my mechanic and my dentist and my doctor and whoever I trust power over me.
Now, if you have a bad dentist, you can change your dentist, but you guys are wedded here, right?
You guys don't have that choice to come and go as you see pleased, as you see fit about this.
And if you can find ways to trust each other, if you can find ways to surrender your autonomy to Then you will find that the amount of conflict you have will go down.
You will also find that the amount of stress that you have will go down.
Don't you guys wake up every morning worried about your conflicts, worried about your fighting, worried about your disagreements, worried about your marriage, worried about your hearts, worried about your futures, worried about the emotional and financial and parenting catastrophe called divorce?
That is really stressful.
Why would you want that?
Why would you want that?
When you can simply surrender to what your naughty bits have done in the creation of children and surrender to the other person's expertise and you get down and you get a big piece of paper and you say, okay, here's what we fight about.
We fight about money.
We fight about chores.
We fight about this.
We fight about responsibility.
We fight about this.
Okay.
Who's better at these things?
And be honest.
My guess is that Rod's better at money.
Erica's better at home management.
That's my guess.
I don't know, you guys.
It's just my thought.
It could be different.
It could be the opposite.
I don't know.
But you've got to figure out who's better at these things.
Whoever's better at these things, that person becomes the decision maker.
The final...
Still negotiate, of course, right?
But that person is the final decision maker.
You make your case, that person decides.
That's the only way life works.
Think of the number of people whose judgment you defer to every day.
You put your key in your car.
Hope it doesn't blow up, because I hope the engineers and the people who made the car know what they're doing.
Every time you cross a bridge, I hope the engineers weren't stoned.
I hope they built a bridge that will stay up.
Every time you ride in an elevator, I hope the people who made the cables weren't insane and weakening them.
Every time you flip on a light switch, hope the people who built the house weren't crazy suicidal electricians who just want to kill people, right?
Every time you download something from the internet, everything you do involves massive amounts of trust in other people.
If you didn't trust other people, you could neither get out of bed nor get into bed.
You wouldn't even get into bed because you wouldn't trust the people who made the mattress.
They wouldn't make a spring that would go through and pierce your heart or something.
Life is only bearable when we surrender our will and trust other people.
And I'm not saying this is a smooth and easy thing, oh, just draw some circles, but you need to find areas where you can surrender your will to others.
If you had to get out every time you're about to cross a bridge, if you had to get out and manually inspect that bridge from top to bottom to make sure it was safe and you had to look at the blueprints and you had to call up the...
you'd never get anywhere.
So trust in each other, find areas where you can trust the other person's judgment, and then just surrender to that person.
Because right now, you guys are going to a restaurant and elbowing aside the waiter and going in and cooking your own food, and what's the point?
You go to a restaurant, you're kind of trusting the cook to not spit in your food.
I mean, it doesn't even have to be one of those crazy restaurants where you eat that Japanese poison fish that if it's not cooked correctly, your head explodes.
We're just talking about Can I buy a dress?
Okay.
Can I buy a dress?
Rod, can you afford it?
Yes or no?
If you can afford it, yes.
Okay.
Who's better at choosing dresses?
Erica, because they're her dresses.
So there you go.
That doesn't need to be a conflict.
When it comes to negotiating standards around the house and how things work, okay, Erica's job.
There are other things that you can do, and you will find it astounding.
You will find it astounding at how relaxing it is to surrender your autonomy, to surrender your skepticism, to surrender your will, and to conform to your partner's expertise.
And of course, it's always open to renegotiation, and of course, Sometimes your partner will make a mistake.
That's fine.
Sometimes you get into a cab and the cab takes you to the wrong place.
It's happened to me a couple of times in my life.
It doesn't mean I'll never get into a cab again.
Well, okay, now there's Uber, so that's different.
But trust.
You guys are trying to hoard all the decision-making to yourself, and that is going to cause you nothing but friction.
And it's not necessary at all.
We're going to try that.
I don't think I've ever thought about it that way.
But before my time's up, can we go back to why then I feel that basically I have no value here?
All I do is work, all I do is help around the house and still feel like nothing is valued enough?
Is there anything we can talk about that?
Right.
Absolutely.
Absolutely we can.
Because I'm with you on this one, which doesn't mean That you're right.
It just means that we're either both right or both wrong together.
I put my prejudice out there up front.
In my experience, and Erica, I'm not trying to speak for what you do in your experience, but in my experience, women expect to be praised for what they bring every day to the relationship.
They expect to be appreciated.
I cooked you this lovely meal.
You didn't even say thank you or how wonderful it was.
And that's just kind of something that is taken for granted that a woman who cleans the house, you've got to come home and say, the fact that this house is clean is wonderful.
Let me kneel down and kiss the hardwood or whatever, right?
And I think that's fine.
Great.
Appreciation is wonderful.
But I think, and this is just part of The propaganda that women throughout the world, particularly in the West, have been exposed to.
Which is, what a woman does needs to be praised and needs to be recognized and needs to be appreciated.
Otherwise you're selfish and ungrateful.
But the fact that a man is going out there working 10 hours a day for the family is often not visible.
So, I mean, if your wife went out and spent 10 hours doing something for you, she went out that you really liked, that you really cared about, she just did spend 10 hours doing something wonderful for you, of course, you'd be like, wow, thank you so much.
That is so thoughtful.
That's so wonderful, right?
Now, you go out and you work 10 hours a day and it's not like you're keeping a lot of that money for yourself.
As you say, you feel like an ATM, right?
You're just this flow-through person.
For money.
I mean, if you were a single guy, you'd be off picking grapes in Queensland or something like that.
Travel the world and, you know, all the hookers you can eat.
Whatever, right?
And it is generally the case in the modern world, and I don't know if this is more true throughout history or not, that a woman wants to be appreciated for what she brings to the family, but the hard work and the money that men do to keep those families Alive is generally not appreciated.
In other words, and maybe I'm completely wrong about this, and maybe I'm just, my own experiences is clouding, but let me ask you this, Rod.
When was the last time where you came home and Erica said, thank you so much for going for work today for us, for going to work today?
I know you don't always enjoy your job.
I know there's times where you You get up and you'd rather rip off one of your own fingers and feed it to ducks than go to work.
But you get up and you go to work.
And I know that you go and make all this money and basically we just hoover it up and that's the deal, right?
But I just wanted to tell you how much I enormously appreciate the fact that you get up.
And you shave, and you get dressed, and you drive, you fight traffic, you go to work, it's stressful and it's difficult.
And the government takes half and we take the other half.
I just wanted to tell you how much I appreciate that.
You should be hearing that a lot.
Do you hear that?
No.
You've never heard that ever?
No.
That's terrible.
I'm not saying Erica's a terrible person.
Sadly, that's just where our culture is.
Men are just disposable machines that produce goods like mystery.
If you go out and plant a tomato plant in the ground, you don't sit there and say, thank you, rain, thank you, earth.
It's just what nature does.
And sadly, when it comes to men providing for their families, it used to be more respected, I think.
It used to be more appreciated.
But now it's just like, what are you complaining about?
It's just taken for granted.
Like the man just goes and...
Right?
But you don't have to be doing this.
You could be doing lots of other things.
You could go and quit and become somebody who mimes in the subway.
I don't know.
Whatever you want to do.
But it is...
I assume that Erica likes it when you appreciate the things that she does that make the family life better.
Right?
I mean, is that fair to say?
She likes it when you're appreciative?
This is the part where you can reply.
So, I guess...
Hang on, hang on.
I just asked you a question.
I think you're about to go off in some other direction.
Does Erica like it when you appreciate what she does for the family?
I don't do that much either.
Okay.
Well, I think that...
You don't want to wait until you get divorced to find out how much the other person is doing for the family.
Because, boy, I'll tell you, if you get divorced, it will become very clear how much Erica is doing for the family.
And, Erica, if you get divorced, it will become abundantly clear how much Rod is providing for the family.
You don't want to wait until after the disaster has occurred to appreciate what you have in the here and now.
Now, I would assume that at some point you've obviously, you know, I mean, if Erica spent four hours making your favorite meal, you probably would say, thank you, right?
No, again, that doesn't come the other way either.
I don't appreciate much.
Sometimes I would do it, but it's not a custom.
I don't really do it.
Is she a good mom to your children?
She is.
Okay.
Are you happy that she's a good mom to your children?
Yes.
Have you thanked her for being such a good mom to your children?
Have you said, not thanked her like it's a favor, but you appreciate it?
No, don't say that.
Right.
So then you're not appreciating her, and then you're complaining that she's not appreciating you.
Well, someone's got to take the first step.
You know, like when you're stuck, someone's got to take the first step.
Maybe it'll be her, maybe it'll be you, but you can't count on her, you can only count on you.
So how about showing her some appreciation?
Now, if you show her some appreciation, after a while you can say, I like to be appreciated too.
It takes a lot of the sting out of working for your family if you come home and your family says, thank you so much for working so hard for us.
We really appreciate it.
We recognize that we'd be living in a ladder if you didn't go to work for us.
Thank you so much.
Thank you for dealing with the stress.
Thank you for dealing with the problems.
Thank you for dealing with the customers and the bosses and the impossible deadlines and all the problems that come with working.
We really appreciate it.
Thank you so much.
That would help a lot, right?
I mean, I'm not saying it would make every day like skipping through the rainbows, but it would help a lot to know that what you were doing was actually appreciated.
Yes, it would.
So, show your appreciation.
Express your need for appreciation.
We all need it.
We all need it.
We all need to be appreciated.
Because that's the currency.
Right?
I mean, restaurants don't like it if you come to their dining room, eat a meal, and don't pay for it.
Now, your wife can't pay you to go to work because it's your money to begin with, right?
Here's a hundred bucks.
Here, I'd like to give you back ten bucks.
Thank you for going to work, right?
So the only coinage...
In a family is appreciation.
And nobody likes to do a job and not get paid.
And in families, nobody likes to work hard and surrender their own immediate self-interest for the sake of the good of everyone else and not be appreciated.
You know, like, an economy can't work without price.
It can't work without price.
The value of something that people are willing to...
And families can't work without appreciation because appreciation is the family version of currency, of price.
You need to know what your family appreciates the most so that you can supply that the most.
In the same way that people who produce diamonds need to know how valuable diamonds are to know whether they should produce more diamonds or not.
Appreciation is the economic incentive of a cashless economy like a family.
And where you have a family that is short of appreciation, you have a family that is operating without market signals.
That sounds kind of cold and calculated, but any economy that operates without market signals is going to collapse over time.
And appreciation is the coin with which we buy the services provided in a family.
So if she's providing a great service as a mom, which is hugely important, and you're not appreciating it, then you're not paying her for the service she's providing.
You might as well have called an electrician over, have him work for you for a week full-time, and then just refuse to pay his bill.
Well, guess what?
Here comes resentment.
Here comes conflict.
Here comes anger.
Here comes a massive waste of resources, chasing bills, avoiding phone calls.
Big mess.
You don't pay for the services you consume.
Big mess.
That's why I'm constantly reminding people to donate at freedomainradio.com slash donate.
And so if you are consuming through your children her great parenting and you're not showing appreciation, Then you're stealing.
And if she is consuming the money that you go out and work hard to bring home for the family and she is not showing appreciation, then she is stealing.
You need to pay for what you consume.
That's fair.
That's just.
That's right.
That's healthy.
That's good.
You need to pay for what you consume.
You are consuming her parenting through your children and she is consuming your money through her spending.
Not on dresses, but on having a house and having food and all that.
And if you take someone's services without paying them, you will just end up with a lot of resentment and conflict.
Appreciation is foundational.
To the long-term happiness of any cashless economy.
I mean, you ever give money to charity, they don't turn around and say, well, screw you.
Right?
Oh, thank you, thank you, thank you so much.
Right?
I say this to people who donate.
Sometimes I say it to them individually.
Thank you, thank you so much.
You probably heard me on this show.
The end of these call-in shows.
I thank people so much for their trust.
In talking to me about that which is most important to them, I say I feel honored.
I do.
I give them the honest appreciation.
I said at the very beginning of this call a very brave letter.
Do you remember me saying?
I appreciate the courage of you guys bringing this stuff up.
Because I am consuming your time.
I'm fully conscious that every minute I'm speaking is another dollar you have to pay for someone to take care of your three kids.
So I appreciate it.
That you're coming to this conversation after having failed with marriage therapists and so on.
Appreciation is the coin with which you must pay those you love.
And if you don't, you are withholding payment.
If you're consuming services, if she's taking your money, using it for shelter and stuff for the kids, and she's not appreciating it from you, that's a kind of thievery.
And if you are taking her parenting for your children and not appreciating it, that's a kind of thievery.
And whenever we don't pay our bills, we end up with a lot of conflict, right?
Makes a lot of sense.
I've never really thought about, you know, that you have to pay for, you know, how you pay in a family.
I never thought about it that way.
But it makes a lot of sense.
You do.
I mean, I'm sure you have it with your kids sometimes.
I know I do.
That you feel like an ATM and they just assume.
I'm like, don't you take me for granted, right?
Just assume I'm going to buy something for you.
I'm not a magic free robot of stuff.
Because you have to guard being appreciated.
In the same way that if you run a business, you have to make sure you get paid.
And if you're providing services in the family, and a family is all about providing services, you have to make sure that you get paid.
Now, the problem is, of course, she can't go on strike.
I can say to my daughter, and it doesn't happen very often, I can say, look, I'm not going to buy you anything.
The last two times I bought you something, you barely even said thanks, so no.
Because she needs to know that if I'm going to buy her something, she needs to appreciate what I'm doing.
Otherwise, no buyee.
That's an important lesson for her to learn.
Appreciation is the coinage.
Now, you can't go on strike.
You can't say, well, I'm not feeling appreciated, so I'm quitting my job, you know, because you guys are probably addicted to food and shelter and stuff like that, so you can't quit.
And she can't exactly say, that's it.
Mom's on strike.
Go hunting and foraging, 18-month-old boy.
Good luck, right?
So because you can't go on strike, you...
Because you can't quit, right?
And that's, I mean, I think, in my opinion, I'm just some guy.
It's my amateur opinion.
You guys can more than save this.
You can make it great.
First of all, you need to.
Because you've got three children who are going to be devastated by a divorce.
Devastated.
And that will last them.
That devastation will last them for the rest of their lives.
And unless you're in immediate physical danger, I don't believe you have the right to inflict divorce on children.
You know, two years ago, you decided to have another child...
Two years ago and a half or whatever.
And that child has the right to stability.
You guys aren't abusive.
You aren't setting fire to each other.
You're not screaming epithets at each other.
I know you're getting into conflicts in front of the kids and that's something that needs to be fixed.
But you're not in any immediate physical danger.
You're not depressed or suicidal based on your relationships.
So, yeah, fix it.
Fix it.
Just make that commitment.
Make that million dollar commitment to yourself every morning.
I'm going to appreciate.
I'm going to negotiate.
We're going to sit down and plan out how we're going to resolve these disputes and then we're damn well going to stick to it.
There's no point having a project plan and then flying blindfold, right?
I bought a GPS so I could throw it in the river.
So you just, you sit down, you draw these circles of expertise.
Where am I going to surrender?
Who's going to have the final say?
You try and get your percentages of importance close to each other, and if you can't, figure out a way to resolve it.
You wake up every morning saying, if this person wasn't in my life, how much more difficult would my life be?
I mean, gosh, imagine.
Imagine.
Rod, you wake up, no one's there to take care of your kids.
What's your life like?
It's a disaster.
Erica, you wake up, nobody's there making any money for the family.
What's your life like?
It's a disaster.
Don't wait for that to happen in order for you to find appreciation.
Don't wait until you've broken something to realize how important it was for you that it not be broken.
Don't smash something and only afterwards realize that what you broke It was your own life support system.
Don't harm your children to the extent that divorce harms your children for something as ridiculous as not being appreciative, for something as ridiculous as fighting over dresses, for something as ridiculous As not surrendering your will to someone because you don't trust them, even though you made three brand new human beings with them.
That is not the time to give up your trust on someone after you happen to have made three human beings who are completely dependent on you.
A little too late to say, I don't trust you.
So now you've got to grit your teeth and trust each other and it's new and you'll make mistakes and you'll feel like withdrawing your trust.
Too bad.
You've got that million dollar incentive and the good of your children.
You wake up and you commit.
To making your family life as great as you possibly can.
And there's so much of this that is under your control that if you fail, it's on you and your wife.
Not on anyone else.
So don't fail.
Does that make sense?
Yeah, it does.
And we will not fail.
Will you keep us posted?
I'm sorry?
Will you keep us posted?
Yeah.
Let us know how it's going?
Yeah, just quickly.
So, again, mainly the reason is that we see that the kids are, you know, showing some of the behaviors, so we want to stop that now.
And apologize to them for that, right?
Yes.
Yes.
It's not their fault, right?
They didn't ask for that.
And, you know, once you make that commitment to your kids to do better, it's a great incentive to do better.
When I said to my daughter when she was young, I will never raise my voice at you.
That's a pretty good incentive for not raising your voice.
All right.
Keep us posted and listen.
If you get stuck, feel free to call back in if there's anything else I can do to help.
And let me just ask you this before you guys jump off.
How was my feedback for you?
Was it useful, different, interesting, something you can actually act on?
Helpful?
To me, it's different from what I heard from, you know, from the therapists.
You know, we always have to, you know, they force you to make an agreement on everything, and they never say, you know, sometimes you need to refer.
I don't think I've ever heard that.
So that's different, it's refreshing from my point of view.
Good.
The other stuff about how to pay enough In a coinless economy, like a family, that's also neat to me, so I appreciate that feedback.
Good.
Yeah, division of labor is essential, and you can't have division of labor without trust.
All right.
Thank you so much, guys.
I really appreciate, again, you guys calling in.
It's a raw, raw topic.
And the fact that you would put even a smidgen of the success of your marriage in my idiot hands on the internet, I hugely, hugely appreciate.
So I'm very glad that what I said was of some value, and please let us know how it's going.
And thank you for The help that you provide to other people, at least in talking about these issues, because they're common.
I mean, you're not alone in this.
All right, so let's move on to the next caller, Mr.
Mike.
All right.
Well, up next is Josh, and Josh wrote in and said, Before we dive into the Bernie Sanders apocalypse debate, I must have a chance to tell Steph that he is wrong about the characters in Goodfellas.
They are evil people, but they are also pure K in its most primal form.
Okay, so Josh, be sure to tell Steph about Goodfellas.
Then he continued, it's actually linked to my argument for Bernie Sanders.
If we accept that a political process is unethical, could it be that a Sanders election could be best by speeding up the collapse of the semi-imperial, semi-socialist American empire, which is leaning and thus should be pushed over?
So Josh has the argument for voting for Bernie Sanders because he's the one most likely to lead to the quickest collapse of the United States government.
I don't think you're going to find on a Bernie Sanders 2016 placard.
Hey, man.
It's the movie.
So basically what you're saying is the movie Titanic is just way too long for you.
And what you really want to do is just call in some giant meteor to evaporate the whole thing just after it leaves America.
So, you know, because it's kind of agonizing.
All of that.
I think I told this story before.
I went out with a woman to go and see Titanic way back in the day.
And I got one of these giant pops.
And Drank it and, you know, I had to go to the washroom, but, you know, I always feel like you can't pee on a date, you know, especially a first date.
You can't fart, you can't pee, because, you know, you've got to be a perfect glowing prince of biological immaterialism, and so I just didn't want to go and pee, but I really had to, and man, I'm telling you, quite a lot of sloshing water in the second half of that film.
Oh, good.
They're running through water in slow motion again.
I really, I've got to pee like a racehorse.
So instead of watching all of Titanic, you hope they just drown Leo DiCaprio in a bathtub in the first five minutes?
I've had that feeling on more than one occasion.
I really have.
I like Leo's movies.
Never mind his global warming nonsense.
But enough about The Great Gatsby and his environmental hypocrisy.
You know, it's really important.
We don't consume many resources, so I'm going to take a private jet back and forth six times to Los Angeles in a month because, you know, I've got some fucking movie deals to work on.
Wow, wow, wow.
Anyway.
He is a great acting talent and a colossal douchebag of almost immeasurable hypocrisy.
Not as bad as Jorge Ramos, though.
Jorge Ramos, who really believes that immigrants are fantastic and diversity is so wonderful and the public school system will have no problems bringing in people who speak more languages than there are Face masks at a Star Trek convention, but he takes his children, Jorge Ramos takes his children.
Where does he put them?
Well, he puts them pretty much where most rich people who praise the public school system put their children.
His children actually are in a $30,000 a year private school, where I don't imagine there are a lot of children of illegal immigrants hanging out.
I'm not, you know, I'm just going to get, oh, well, no, no, that's not true, because I'm sure they need groundskeeping as well.
But anyway.
That's neither here nor there.
Because I made this argument, oh gosh, way back in the day.
Way back in the day.
I think it was like my third or fourth article or something like that.
I made this case, which was, and I sent it off, I think, Lou Rockwell.
He didn't publish it because he said, you know, he'd heard the worse is better argument.
Like, let's just, you know, let's just shoot this patient who's not going to recover anyway and everything will be fine.
And I've certainly made that case before, you know, like back in the day with Ron Paul, like if Ron Paul wants to say, deal with teachers' pensions because they're breaking the economy.
And I know this is like, it's not a federal blah, blah, blah.
But, you know, just as sort of an example, you want to go and you want to deal with the teachers' pensions.
Well, the teachers go on strike, which means that your economy is going to collapse because parents can't go off to work.
And so at some point, you have to break the teacher's strike, and then you're going to have to call in the police or the National Guard if it gets hairy.
And then some teacher is going to fall or...
Bloody their nose or something like that.
And, you know, next thing you know, it's like, oh, this is what happens when you have a libertarian president and there's some weeping, angel-faced teacher with a bloody nose and it's like, what has happened to this country?
And, you know, everybody is horrified, horrified, I tell you, that the government involves force, right?
Like there's this poll that just, I'll shut up in a second, this poll that just came out about how, I think it was 60 or 60-odd percent of Americans Americans support the forced deportation of illegal immigrants.
Now, putting all of my political opinions to the side, as I sometimes do to people's confusion, I can play devil's advocate.
Doesn't mean that anyway.
And 40% of Hispanics support the forced deportation of illegal immigrants.
And, of course, the media does its best staggering backwards, knocking over the China pearl-clutching routine of infinite horror Oh, Stanley!
As if the forced deportation, that's what illegal immigration means.
That's what illegal means.
What do you mean it's illegal and there's force involved?
It's like, that's what illegal means.
It means the government can use force.
You don't pay your taxes, they'll use force to take you to prison and they'll shoot you dead if you resist.
That's what it means, people, for there to be a law.
Well, wait a minute, they're here illegally?
And you support force to deport them?
It's like, yes, because...
Well, I don't, but that's the reality of what the government does.
You know, it's like people saying, I really want liquor to be illegal.
Wait a minute.
You're using force to put people in jail who are using liquor?
I don't think you really know what the word illegal means, if this is confusing to you.
So the fact that there would be force used to deport illegal immigrants and that anybody might be shocked...
It's ridiculous.
You can't comment on anything to do with politics if you don't understand that the government has a monopoly on the initiation of force.
If you don't understand that, then you're like a doctor who doesn't understand that health is not a ghost that lives in your body.
You just have nothing to say.
Sorry, Mike got me the facts.
59% of Americans favor forced deportation of illegal aliens.
Even 40% of Hispanics support forced deportation.
And people are like, that's terrible!
It's like, no, that's statism.
Anyway, so yeah, I understand the case that worse is better.
But I supported that case when I was more optimistic about people's capacity to listen to rational arguments.
You know, like I started as a public figure, I guess just a little under a decade ago.
So I've got a decade and 120 million downloads and thousands of shows and dozens of conferences and interviews.
I've got enough experience now that I can say, with some credibility, that I have a fairly good view of where we are as a movement.
And it's not good.
It's not good.
So I would be more willing to say worse is better, right?
If there are enough people who really, really want to live in a free society, and by free society I don't mean all the way to anarcho-capitalism or anything like that, but just, okay, so the government runs into its fiscal challenges and everyone's like, great, well now we're ready to really shrink the size and power of the state because it's the compulsion that has failed and blah-de-blah-de-blah, right?
So, like most people who launch themselves into the public sphere, I did so with great energy, enthusiasm, and optimism.
Because it's like, well, I've got some pretty unassailable arguments.
Taxation is forced, and blah-de-blah-de-blah.
And, you know, as I sort of detailed recently in the presentation, which I think people should really check out, called The Death of Reason, Why People Don't Listen to Reason and Evidence.
And you can look at the associated YouTube comments proving them wrong, but fuck them.
I've got my own opinions.
Just kidding.
But...
We are not at the place where the collapse of the state is going to bring about an even remotely free society.
I'm not looking for a free society in this moment, actually.
Wait, wait, hang on.
Hang on, hang on.
I don't even know what your sentence meant there.
I'm not looking for a free society at this moment?
Yes, no.
I don't even know what that means.
Okay, I'll explain that.
What I mean by that is I am not saying Bernie Sanders collapses the federal government as a result, yay freedom.
No.
I don't think that whatsoever.
And also, too, Just a little running back to what you said earlier, you were saying that the rational argument doesn't work.
Well, actually, I say that that's actually a beneficial thing, because right now, the United States still has the illusion of wealth.
People like you, me, people who understand economics, it's all Mickey Mouse.
It's all made up.
It's all just based off debt.
But the average person doesn't realize that.
The average person still thinks that We still have wealth.
And what's happening is, but there's problems and they can be fixed.
And now Bernie Sanders is coming in and saying, well, yay, socialism, and we're going to live like everybody knows, everybody's perfect.
In all of these little fairytale socialist areas that we all know it's BS, but the average person doesn't know that.
So what's going to happen is that we both know it's just math.
It's going to collapse.
So I say to the, let the leftists have it.
Let them hold the bag and say to them, great, go for it.
Let's try socialism.
Then, when what is going to happen does happen, and people get bitch slapped by reality and math, we can go, yeah, dumb shit.
That's what happens when you think that something is free.
Remember when your grandparents told you that if somebody told you something's for free, that they're full of it, and that you shouldn't trust that?
Well, you forgot that.
I'm sorry that you're stupid, but...
That's reality.
So what you don't learn...
Yeah, but hang on, hang on, hang on.
But how on earth are you going to get that message across to the general population?
Because that's not what the mainstream media is going to say.
The mainstream media is going to say that the bankers screwed socialism, that socialism was about to work, but then the financial interests intervened and destroyed it.
And, you know, boy, you know, if we just give a little bit more control over these banking interests, then we'll be fine next time.
I mean, how on earth are you going to get a message of reality across to the general population?
And again, I say this as a guy with 120 million plus podcast downloads and all that.
How are you going to get that message across?
Oh, I agree with you.
Now, I'm not saying that, as in, I'm saying that it's a 100% yay, this will work.
No, this is just a theory that's possible.
So now, what's more, and one of my arguments with what I say to that is, is thank goodness for, and you're going to shudder when I say this, Obama, because I'm a millennial.
It was with the first elections that I was able to vote with was when Obama was able to be elected.
Now, I didn't vote, but the whole thing was is that people of my generation were convinced this was the once-in-a-lifetime candidate, that everything was going to be great now, and he is really, really—you see the growth of alternative media.
People—you say it yourself, and I agree with you—there is a seething, underlying hatred Of the mainstream media and really of all things mainstream in the states.
So what I'm saying with that is that this is statism's double down.
This is the, yeah, the last guy, it didn't really work out, but this dude really, really means it.
And I think there are, of course, going to be people that are stupid enough to where even if you see that, Even if what I'm saying happens, they still won't reach them.
But those are people that you just got to write off.
You'll never reach them.
It's like arguing with a communist on Facebook.
It's just a complete and utter waste of time.
They will never be anything but that.
But my thought is that if the quote-unquote statist, socialist, leftist, whatever you want to call it, doubles down on, well, yeah, the last guy, yeah, that kind of got away from us.
But this one really means it.
Well, and then if what happens happens, because you and I both know it's a matter of time.
I know I've repeated myself now, but it's just math.
So I don't want someone pro-free market, pro-liberty, pro-anything anywhere near the helm of the ship when it smashes into the rocks.
So that's just my opening argument with that.
and just so I can if I can just rattle off some of my points and I say that it's that's one of the political ways of it.
Hang on hang on hang on.
I'm sorry go ahead.
You just made an argument do you want me to not respond to it or do you want to just keep going?
I just wanted to let you know that it's multifaceted it's It's political, economic, peaceful parenting.
I just see how this happening could benefit all of these different sectors.
But if you want to stay on political right now, I'm more than happy to do that.
I don't want you to feel like I'm trying to go into some long No, I mean, I thought we were going to have a bit of a debate.
Oh, absolutely.
Yeah, no, please.
Yeah, please.
I'm sorry.
I'm sorry.
Okay.
No, if you want to keep going, I can save my points for later.
No, no, no.
We'll tackle them each as we go.
All right.
Oh, and we still haven't talked about Goodfellas.
There are, of course, as you know, what is it?
150,000 people a month coming out of government schools.
So there's a continual replenishment Of state zombie brain sucked idiots coming out of the public school system.
And I say idiots not in that they're dumb, it's just that they're propagandized.
There's no, you know, maybe it's their fault, maybe it's not, but that's the reality, right?
If I never do squats, my legs are going to be quite weak.
If I never think in school, I'm never going to learn how to.
Yeah, absolutely.
Well, it's not just that.
I mean, because not doing squats, nobody punishes you for doing squats, but you get punished.
For thinking in school.
You get marked down, you get problems, right?
And so it's punished.
You're punished for thinking in government schools, whether they're in a primary high school or university.
Yeah, university is brutal that way.
It's absolutely brutal that way.
And it's even worse now than it was when I was a student.
So, you know, I get that it's hard.
Hang on now.
You can't keep talking if I'm making a point.
You're about to interrupt me.
I'll be quiet in a sec, right?
But we can't both be hitting the ball at the same time or it's like tennis, right?
So you have this continual inflow, not to mention, of course, that, yeah, Obama has driven a lot of people away from socialism, I guess.
But so what?
They've just imported, you know, 10 or 15 million more people from Mexico who are probably socialists, right, for the most part.
And so, you know, they are based to a large degree.
And so, you know, so, okay, so I've alienated a few customers, but so what?
I have millions of new customers.
They're being pumped out of the government schools, and they're being drawn in through, you know, free crap across the border.
And so the idea, in order to even stay even with where things are, we would have to be converting at least a quarter million to 300,000 people a month to significant, and that's just to stay people a month to significant, and that's just to stay even.
That's not to win.
That's just to stay even with the mindless production of government sheeple that comes out of the factories of illegal immigration and government schools.
And that's just two, right?
There's other sources as well.
And, of course, there's simply no way that the libertarian movement is coming anywhere close to that.
If people had decided to stand with me many years ago with the against me argument and with peaceful parenting and opposition to spanking and so on, if that movement had gotten going, Then we might have a chance.
But libertarians didn't really want to hear that message, and they preferred to go back and pound lawn signs for Rand Paul and think they were changing the world, which decidedly did not change the world.
People say to me, well, what about Rand Paul?
It's like, well, at the national political level, Rand Paul doesn't even exist.
He might as well be a hand puppet.
I mean, he's a nice guy, smart guy, and a good public speaker in some ways, and obviously very dedicated to a lot of libertarian ideals, but he has no chance of getting into power.
It doesn't...
Well, he's there to educate people.
Well, we tried that with Ron Paul and that led to Obama.
So we can't possibly keep up with the production of socialists in the world.
And that's largely the fault of libertarians who don't listen to good arguments and don't take a stand and aren't committed and aren't willing to have the fight.
And the reality is, you know, Donald Trump has shown that the fight is easy to win.
You just keep speaking the truth and the media will scream at you.
And you just keep speaking the truth and then the media fades and falls away and people continue to support you even if the media pulls out the most ridiculous stuff and tells the most ridiculous lies.
People just keep speaking truth.
But libertarians didn't want to do that.
Okay, I understand.
Cowardly as hell, but You betrayed your ideals.
You gave up the future.
You gave up your chance to make a mark on society and change things for the better.
But it's okay.
Because, you know, you've got, I don't know, some lawn signs in your basement.
So yay, Rita.
And Steph, I agree with you there.
Yeah, so we can't, and I'm almost done.
So we can't keep up with the number of people who want socialism, which means it doesn't matter if a socialist is in power.
When things fall apart, it doesn't matter.
It doesn't matter.
I mean, the Pope was in power when a lot of priests were raping children.
They don't listen to reason anyway.
So we need more time for peaceful parenting to spread.
So I'm not on my knees begging for a collapse right now, because it's more like the end of Rome leading to a thousand years of the Dark Ages than it is breaking any shackles in any fundamental way.
See now, here are my counters to that.
Is that now you talk about those things and now I guess we first have to decide what all would go away in the event of what I predict of with a dollar collapse that would be spurred on hopefully quicker by a Bernie Sanders election from the standpoint that I'm arguing for.
Well, the question is, as I would say, is that what you talk about with public schools and that, well, if the federal government goes broke, I don't see a fall of Rome.
I see a fall of, like, for example, what we saw with the USSR, where we'll see the welfare state, which is cranking out unbelievable amounts of single-parent households of, well, you can speak of that far better than I can.
You and I both know what that means.
It would see an end to the empire in terms of producing more and more traumatized fathers and mothers coming back from godforsaken war zones.
And also, too, you can make the argument of drone strikes, et cetera, et cetera, with that, producing a lot more dead people.
So that would go away.
Because the federal government would simply run out of money.
Because why?
They tried to have even more free shit.
On top of that too, I mean, okay.
Sorry to interrupt.
Sorry, just very briefly.
But the criminal classes are already preparing for the fall of Rome in America.
I think, I mean, if you simply look at the random shooting of cops and stuff, right?
And the fact that you can incite people to riots, as happened in Ferguson, and the fact that you can incite people to go and shoot cops and nothing bad happens to you, and the fact that cops aren't finding anyone to recruit anymore because anybody with half a brain doesn't want to have anything to do with that.
And that's something else that worries me.
Hey!
Hey!
Will you please let me finish my thought?
I'm sorry.
I appreciate your enthusiasm, but I've got to be able to take a breath without you jumping in.
Okay?
Thank you.
And the fact that you have...
There was a cop recently who was willing to just get the living shit beaten out of him by some black guy because he didn't want to defend himself.
And the reason he didn't want to defend himself is because he didn't want to go the way that Darren Wilson went and the way that George Zimmerman went.
He just didn't want to do that.
I'll take virtually being beaten to death now rather than being tried for defending myself.
And so the breakdown of the remnants of law and order in our society is being directly engineered by criminal classes.
Because they're getting ready for the collapse.
They know it's coming.
I mean, criminals understand the government better than voters do because they've got a lot more in common with the government.
And so, yeah, the criminal classes, they're getting all ready to ride.
They're getting all ready to roll.
To me, that's a wonderful thing.
I mean, that's one of the few reasons why I'm...
Oh, no!
Because what is the one thing that America has that no other nation has with its citizenry?
Giant criminal class?
There are other nations that have that as well.
But what's 300 million guns in the hands of citizens?
So what I say to that is that then at that point, if the federal government shuts down, federal police stop being paid, state local police stop being paid, It's not like everybody's just going to close up shop and it's going to stop.
Well, now what's going to happen is the power basis of communities will become more local at that point.
Who knows?
Hang on, hang on.
You know that a lot of people are going to get...
I'm sorry.
I don't want you to go on, and I'm sorry.
I just complained about you interrupting, and I'm interrupting.
I apologize for that.
But you're talking about a lot of people getting killed.
A lot of people are going to die no matter what, Stefan.
I mean, it's the step...
You've talked about it yourself.
Okay, but we don't have to say, great.
Mm-hmm.
We don't have to say great.
A lot of smokers are going to die from smoking.
That doesn't mean great.
Well, here, would you agree with this now?
Your average person who's on welfare right now is stealing from people who are being forced to pay into the system.
The only difference is that right now the government's holding the gun to the people's heads as opposed to that individual, right?
Just a yes or no.
Certainly it's theft, but it's legal.
Okay, so you and I agree with that.
Hang on.
It's more complicated than that, though, because most people define their ethics by what is legal.
Okay, that's fine.
And then at that point, they'll still be able to do that with what is legal.
When the government checks stop coming, and now you're given the stark choice of, I can either A, become a criminal and do it for real, and rob and do those things.
Or I can find out how I can be a productive member in my society and be a peaceful person.
Well, then you're going to have a stark choice.
And now at this point, those people who have said, you know what?
Yeah, the gravy chain's over.
It's time to go and work.
It's time to see what in my local community can be done now that, hey, if the federal government goes away, now we have an $18 trillion debt plus hundreds of millions of, I mean, hundreds of trillions, I'm sorry, of unfunded liabilities gone, regulations gone for the most part.
Just the parasite of the federal government is gone, provided if you have local states go into, let's just, I'm theorizing, into confederations.
Who knows?
Certain areas could be much better off.
And then at that point, good people can vote with their feet.
But if you're going to make a choice of, no, I'm entitled to those things, and you know what?
If I want some shit, I'm going to take it.
Well, at least now you're being more honest as a thief and as a horrible person, and at least now when you come through my door, I can shoot you.
I get that.
I get that.
But I just don't think you want to say, there's going to be a giant die-off.
Great.
No, because the whole thing is, this is where it goes back to my Goodfellas argument.
No, this is R&K. Because you see, you talked about with Goodfellas and that, the Goodfellas were one, they were evil, but they were 100% K because within the mafia there is a two things, a top-down hierarchy and extreme hierarchy.
Absolutely not.
Did you not see that movie?
Yeah, Joe Pesci was not killed by Robert De Niro.
Joe Pesci was killed by the boss because he killed a made member of the mafia when he himself was not a made member and without approval.
So he stepped out of line.
And if you look at wolves, what is it?
There's the alpha wolf who barks orders and the other ones get in line.
And there's that hierarchy.
There's a set rule structure.
Well, Joe Pesci stepped out of line, and Joe Pesci, as a result, was killed.
And everybody outside of that— Are you saying—hang on, hang on, hang on, hang on.
Oh, my God.
Are you saying that Joe Pesci, in randomly shooting the heel off a waiter, is somehow K? No, that's not why—that's not—oh, you're asking if it's somehow K? No, that's evil.
I said that they're K, but that they're evil.
I mean, people who are K can also be evil.
Well, I don't even know what that means, because you're claiming there's some overlap here.
No, I understand the sentence structure, I just don't understand the argument, because you're saying people who are this can also be that.
I don't know what that even means, but I fail to see...
Are you saying that somebody who is case-selected, with the argument that you've put forward with your gene wars, that if you're case-selected, therefore you are good and virtuous?
I didn't say that at all, but what I am saying...
Okay, dude, dude, dude.
Okay, that's the last chance we've got for this conversation.
It's just too annoying.
It's too fucking annoying.
Because I'm trying to respond to something you're saying and just immediately blow past me.
I'm listening.
Okay, so please, let's not do this interruption thing.
I know you're enthusiastic and I appreciate that, but it's just too annoying.
Okay, so it's been a long time since I've seen the movie, but I don't see how K it is to attack your own females.
Right?
I don't see how K it is to get addicted to drugs.
I don't see how K it is to shoot people because you're in a bad mood.
And I certainly don't see how K it is for Ray Liotta's character to have an affair.
Because K is pair bonding and investing in your children.
And Ray Liotta was not doing that.
So I don't think you get the K thing.
Which is, you know, pair bonding, high investment in children, and a minimum of violence.
Because wolves, they will play fight with each other, but they will not kill each other.
I disagree with that.
Dogs in general, no, they growl, and then there's a submission, right?
You submit when you can't win.
If one wolf challenged is the alpha wolf and it doesn't back down, it is a fight to the death for who is the alpha.
No, no, they do back down.
They do back down.
Because they cannot afford for every time there's a disagreement to lose key members of the hunting pack.
No, I'm not saying every single time there's a disagreement, though.
I didn't say that.
I said for as in who's in charge.
Yes, but they do it by submission.
So you'll have a fight, right?
Like deer, right?
They'll fight to the point where one submits to the other, but they don't fight to the death, because that's a huge race.
Again, Steph, I grew up out in the woods.
That's wrong.
No, they will fight to the death.
I've seen that.
Let's see here.
Mike's got something here.
It says, usually they do it for rank.
They usually just injure them, not kill them.
In very extreme cases, they will kill each other for food.
Oh, so that's if they're really starving.
They'll kill each other for food, but only in very extreme cases.
So according to, I don't know, biologists, they don't generally kill for disagreements.
They don't care for status.
Yeah, generally.
Okay.
Okay.
And...
So I would not say that there's a strong K thing.
But it's not.
I can see that point.
I did not think about those elements that you brought up.
I was more thinking about the extreme in-group preferences in terms of, you know, mafia-made members are allowed to do X. The outside people are sheep, etc.
But yeah, now that you've said that, I concede I am wrong.
I agree with you.
But to argue your point a little bit, it just sort of reminded me that if I remember the film right, Lee, Ray Liotta's character is lectured to by Joe Pesci and Robert De Niro's characters that, okay, he can have some crumpet on the side, but he's got to go back to his wife.
He can't leave his wife.
They really do focus on that monogamy aspect.
It's just a little bit that goes towards your side of things.
Yeah, I just always looked at it was that they were more K, but they were still, you know, that's when I saw that because, but anyway, like I say, no, I'm willing to say that in terms of them being as what we would, within what you've put forward with the Gene Wars argument, I'm willing to say, no, I was wrong in my thinking of classifying them as K, just because they have a large in-group preference and that doesn't necessarily mean, yeah, it doesn't, there's not enough there to support that.
Now, I will say this, though, and sorry to interrupt if you were just about to finish another point, but I will say that I can certainly conceive, I can see how a K-selected human being could be perceived as evil, but I think it would only generally happen when the people around him had become so R that you no longer had an in-group preference of humanity.
In other words, if everyone around a few group of K-selected people is so R, Then what will happen is the K-selected human being will look at the people around him in the same way that wolves look at rabbits.
And now, of course, then to the rabbits, the wolf will look evil.
But to the wolf, it's like, but you don't qualify for in-group preferences because we no longer have enough genetic similarity that our interests abound together genetically.
Right?
You now have become so are that you have become legitimate prey to the Ks.
And from that standpoint, I can certainly see how the case would be perceived as evil by the R's, but you could certainly make a case for that.
I was just saying, I can understand what you mean, too, because anyone who is, again, I don't mean to keep repeating it, but has the argument you put forward with the gene wars, they wouldn't necessarily do anything that even UPB, non-aggression principle standpoint, would be considered evil.
Evil because it would just be the risk reward simply wouldn't be there even if we throw ethics to the side because if you're doing those types of things that's just going to create such incredible instability and problems for your family and for your gene pool that it would just it's like it's like you know missing a dollar to pick up a dime it's just not worth it so I can see where that would where I guess I was incorrect.
Well, and if I understand where you're coming from correctly, I don't mean to explain you to you, but my sort of thought would be that when you said sort of great, you know, for this potential great die-off, would it be fair to say that you are a K perspective relative to the R's?
Or to put it in another way, since we were talking about people's capacity to listen to reason, let's say that the capacity to listen to reason I'm sorry.
I thought you were done.
That refusal to listen to reason has a genetic basis.
If it is true that it has a genetic basis, and this is just off the top of my head, I'm not going to say I'll take this to my grave, but if the refusal to listen to reason has a very strong genetic basis, then the only chance for reason to spread is for irrational people or anti-rational people.
To not win the gene wars.
Whatever that means, right?
My goal would hopefully be, you know, less reproduction.
Here, have some condoms and go to it, but please don't leave us with your spawn, right?
But if for you, you want a rational world, a peaceful world, a world of free trade and philosophy and virtue or whatever, and if you're surrounded by people whose genetics are the opposite of that, then you're in a predator-prey, win-lose relationship.
Either you're the wolf or they're the wolf, but one of you is going to be a rabbit.
And so for you, you're looking like a rabbit looking at all the wolves saying, oh good, the wolves are really sick.
Yay, great!
Or you're looking as a wolf at all the rabbits and saying, the rabbits are all slow.
Yes, great, or whatever.
But there's an interference for the spread of more rational genes and the irrational gene set is in the way and therefore some sort of winning the gene wars has to occur for the more rational gene set.
Well, I guess the best way I can say it is, if we want to continue with the RK or the animal metaphor there, it would be as a K wolf in that, and you're surrounded by R rabbits, but for whatever reason, there was people in some agency decided that the rabbits were cute and cuddly, and they don't like wolves.
So now, every single time I get hungry or there needs to be...
Rabbits are able to run roughshod over wolves and that every single time as a wolf you try and let nature take its course, you get a tranquilizer in the ass and tofu because there's this monolithic...
Thing that, of course, you don't understand, comes in a helicopter and shoots you with a tranquilizer dart.
What I'm talking about is that, I guess what we never really established was, is what I say is that with a Bernie Sanders presidency, and that I see it bringing about a USSR-style collapse much quicker.
And what I say by that is that you have to remember, now, I'm speaking purely also from self-interest.
I am a millennial.
I was born into this world, and I had zero say in it.
Now I'm being stuck with a bill of, of course, all the debt.
I'm expected to pay Social Security, which I know I will never receive a dime for, because there is no possible way.
No matter who's in charge of the system, it'll last that long.
All the other things that I see with that.
And so...
What I would like to see is, in the event of that collapse, in the event of things getting really, really bad, I don't believe as in it's just going to be some gigantic, horrible Sierra Leone-style bloodbath.
No, I don't think that at all.
Now, will there be that element?
Will leftists finally try and make their 1920s plan of having their hostile takeover and installing a...
Yeah, I do believe that.
But that's also where I sit back and say, too, is that say what you want about the founding fathers here and there.
That was one very good thing that they did, is that there is armed people.
And in the event that those people are no longer going to use the weaselly Well, there's 50% of us plus one, so now you have to lay down and submit.
But the moment that they pick up and try to impose their will in naked violence, well, now honest people can do that.
So what I say is that, first off, from the hopefully, like I used earlier, bitch slap of reality of, yes, you went full socialist.
This is the result.
Hopefully that'll get people saying, wow, that's a bad idea.
But also what's more, too, is that then this giant...
Whack-a-mole hammer of everybody has to do this because we get about 50 people plus one to agree with us will be gone.
Maybe in the event, I don't know, I don't even really follow that closely with normal news anymore, but maybe Texas would say, no, we are going to secede from the union because we're not doing this.
And you're not going to...
The other problem that I see is that the police, the military, etc., etc., are becoming more and more fascist over time.
If it was to happen, if Texas or the West or something of that nature was to declare independence, you're not going to have the United States military marching in there and shooting American civilians to impose the federal government's will.
They're not going to do that yet.
Now, in another 20 years, I don't know.
I don't know because I have a lot of friends who are ex-army, ex-marines.
A lot of them were special forces.
And a lot of them talk to me and say, I would love to do what I did over there in America.
I want to shoot people.
I want to do those things.
And it scares me.
What?
These are your friends?
Let me put it to you this way.
Yeah, friends was the wrong term.
No, no, no.
I'm sorry.
These are...
Acquaintances of friends that I do have, yes.
There are a large number of...
If you don't talk with people that you disagree with, you're never going to...
No, no, it's fine.
Friends was the wrong term.
Yeah, I shouldn't say friends.
These people have never been in my home.
Let me put it to you that way.
That you know of.
Yes, that I know of, yes.
And I think, sorry, just to clarify a little bit.
Looking at R versus K in terms of looking at predator versus prey relationships is not quite, I think, correct.
I think R versus K are two subspecies of human beings, and it's a fairly well-known biological fact that two subspecies cannot inhabit the same geographical area for long.
One of them will displace the other, and I think it's two, like, you know, the red squirrel and the gray squirrel or whatever are And I think it's looking at two subspecies, one of whom is going to displace.
The other is probably the better.
I just want to sort of clarify that as a better way of saying that.
Yes, yes, yes.
But just going back to what I was saying before, just from a purely rational calculation standpoint from where I sit, in the event that there was a USSR-style collapse, I'm 26 now.
So you may as well figure there would be about somewhere between four to five years of extreme economic hardship before things even could get better, okay?
Okay.
So I look at that and I say, okay, do I sacrifice those years now?
And in which actually, like most libertarians, I'm more prepared than anybody else would be financially for something like that to happen.
Or let's just pretend for a moment that Trump, or let's just say that our prayers were answered and Ron Paul said, Got in and everything worked out great.
Like, all the problems that you described by some miracle didn't happen.
Well, that means that I still have to pay Social Security and all this debt all my life.
So at this point, it's a dollars and cents thing of, well, that collapse, sure, it wipes out my earning potential for the next five years, but I'm saving all this money on a debt that I never accrued, and I have the sweet satisfaction of knowing that the boomers and other older people Get stuck with the bill before they die, and they don't get to screw me one last time before they enter into eternity.
So, yeah, that's kind of the standpoint that I'm from.
I guess the best way I can say is I really, really love the work that you do, but you're kind of like Batman, and I'm the Joker.
Yeah, no, I think I see where you're coming from.
And I'll tell you, man, this is just instinct off the top of my head and has no philosophical value whatsoever, but I think that...
I think the world is on the brink of something, some big change, some big something.
I haven't felt this before and it just sort of hit me over the last day or two doing a bunch of research for various things.
It seems like a vast amount of crap is coming together or coming to a head at the same time.
I think that there is A panic of non-postponement that is happening to the world.
I think the general population is realizing that there is no more road to which the can can be kicked down.
And I think this is part of what's driving Donald Trump.
I also think this is part of what's driving Bernie Sanders, that people are realizing that we are at the end of what we used to call civilization.
I mean, we see this going on in Europe.
This massive migrant crisis, the biggest shift in human souls since the end of the Second World War.
I think that...
I feel...
It's not a thought.
I feel that we are...
Close to something big, which is one of the reasons why I am pushing harder on topics that are difficult for people at the moment, like race, culture, freedom club.
I'm pushing harder on that because I think that we are...
We're close to a big shift and I think now is the time for us to speak as loudly as possible about where the world needs to go because I think it's going to go one place or the other sooner rather than later.
And that's just a little personal thing in my life too is what you talk about that is now my wife is black and it's just one of those things of like with her and her family they don't fall into The standard narrative that is expected of them.
And it's, I mean...
Right, you mean the standard media narrative of like...
Yes, yes, of course.
Yeah, well, I'm white.
So, of course, you know, they don't fall into that.
You know, the moment that you said your wife was black, I didn't assume you were black.
So, you know, when I say my wife is Greek, nobody thinks I'm Greek.
Otherwise, I'd say we're both Greek.
Yeah.
Yeah, but it's just one of those things of, you know, her family in that of, it's just the things that I have seen being called, you know, said to them.
It's just, it's horrible.
And it's, I just see it as the vast majority of the ills in society are being subsidized and perpetuated by this, really, I'll just say, you know, you and me both hate with a passion, is that It's fiat money, the dollar, and that illusion that it creates.
And what I say is that if that goes away, of course, it's going to be like a cold turkey heroin addict.
Things will get ugly and bad.
But you've got to stop the poison.
And the thing is, I am a huge believer in the peaceful parenting.
I mean, yeah, if you really take the time to analyze what your argument is, aside from just making fun of you for whatever, just ridiculous things, Yeah, that is the cause of it.
But I just look at it as this gigantic thing that's been created, what is the federal government?
I mean, there's never been a bigger, larger, more evil state in all of history.
And as long as that is there, producing traumatized people all around the world, whether it's wars in Afghanistan and the Middle East, or through aid and keeping horrible dictators in charge in Africa, I'm not insulting you when I say this, but you're pissing into a river.
It's not going to be able to overcome those numbers.
So I look at it as, too, is that you have the end of all those institutions that are creating so many traumatized people through war, welfare, whatever you want.
And I'm sorry, I just blanked out and lost my train of thought there for a moment.
I mean, you have the end of those institutions.
So, yeah, that's basically my argument with that.
Well, I guess time will tell, and we'll have to see where things go.
I mean, I view any potential wrenching transition with hope and with fear and with a tremendous sense of sadness.
Oh, absolutely.
You know, it's just one of the tragic aspects of certain kinds of human nature that the amount of suffering that has to occur for people to listen to reason is so insane.
People would literally die rather than listen to reason.
I mean, what did it take to break the growing socialism of the 1930s, the Second World War?
And what is it going to take to break the growing socialism of the early 21st century?
I don't know.
But I do know that it's not going to be pretty no matter what happens.
Even the best case scenario is extraordinarily ugly.
And I'll be honest with you, like I say, it scares me.
I mean, I guess the way that I can describe it is that, you know, as the state grows more and more, people become poorer and poorer and more desperate.
And that's everybody.
And I guess I almost feel, going back to our animal reference, like this is back in the ice age, like a woolly mammoth, and my feet are caught in a tar pit, and I'm sinking in.
And right now, as I'm sinking, I see, you know, saber-toothed tigers or wolves coming around.
And, you know, as I sink, that's like the growth of the state.
I would rather face those things of evil now Rather than sit back and avoid it, avoid it as my position becomes worse and worse.
And I mean, I kind of look at the internet as the Gutenberg press, printing press, and I personally, and I'm not trying to just flatter you when I say this.
I look at you as like Sir Francis Bacon, what he did for science, I believe you've done for philosophy with UPB. And yes, I'm not just saying that offhand.
I truly understand what that entails.
I appreciate that.
I mean, and not to deflect it with a joke, but I think my closest...
The thing I most have in common with Francis Bacon is, much like Bacon, I'm quite well marbled.
That would be my...
But I appreciate it.
It's very, very kind.
Yeah.
But, I mean, and it's unbelievably sad.
It's unbelievably scary.
But, I mean, personally, like I say, I mean, it's...
I really, really, really, really wish that my grandfather's generation and the generations before then hadn't knuckled under like they did, but the cold, simple fact is that we are facing a giant shit sandwich, and everybody's going to have to take a bite.
I mean, there was this...
I can't help but sort of notice the psyops that are going on these days.
So I saw on Drudge Report...
There's a picture of a drowned two-year-old Syrian boy from one of these refugee ships.
And, of course, this is a way of provoking a sort of cave response sympathy.
And, you see, Donald Trump is speaking out against immigration.
And so now you have to, of course, say that anybody who speaks out in immigration doesn't care about And don't you dare say that,
because then, well...
I haven't thought of an epithet yet, but fuck you.
Oh, well, I gotta tell you, I mean, this whole thing, you know, Jesus Christ.
I could go on and on about this stuff, but the degree to which Europe is just hated and European culture is just hated around the world until people need something.
And then it's like, Okay, I know that they're racists.
I know that they're xenophobic.
I know that they're Nazis.
I know that they were colonialists.
I know that the white man is evil.
But shit, man, I'm really in trouble.
I gotta get to a white person's country.
And it's just like, are you kidding me?
I mean, come on.
At least apologize.
You know?
Hey, you know, Steph, you're a total asshole.
I hate your guts.
Oh, listen, man, I'm out of money.
Can I borrow some money?
I really need some.
Actually, just give me some money.
I don't even want to borrow it.
I'm going to come live in your house.
And it's like, no, no, remember I'm a big asshole that you don't want to have anything to do with.
So now that you're in trouble, don't come running to me.
But this is how insane the West is, where nobody's even saying, well, wait a second.
I mean, there's Middle Eastern countries that are killing Christians and hate the West and the great Satan, and it's like, then...
The fuck do these people want to come to the great Satan?
Make up your minds, people.
At the same time, too, can I play devil's advocate on that real fast?
I can understand, too, why, especially in areas in the Middle East, why they can be a little bit not exactly keen on Western culture because they're being bombed by its governments.
But, of course, not even the Western people say, well, no, that's our government, not us.
No, they do, because there's a huge anti-war movement in the West, particularly before Iraq.
I mean, before the invasion of Iraq in 2003, that was the biggest anti-war movement that the world has ever seen.
Until Obama was elected, then that went away.
Oh yeah, and then the Prince of Peace gets to airbomb whoever the hell he points his crooked fingers at.
But those people don't care.
People don't understand that the dead Syrian boy in the waters, he is the product of statism.
He is the product of statism.
So why?
Of course, there's the push and the pull for this kind of migration.
And the push is that the cultures are disintegrating into internecine violence, right?
And that's true in Syria and Libya and Afghanistan and lots of these countries.
The countries are collapsing.
And why are the countries collapsing?
Because, you see, America wanted to bring freedom to the Middle East.
See?
Regime change.
Don't you know?
Once we kill Saddam Hussein, it'll be great.
Don't you remember those wonderful pictures?
Of people in Iraq and Afghanistan showing their inky fingers because they got to vote, therefore freedom?
So the fact is, of course, you decapitate this monster, it just grows two heads.
It's a hydra, right?
You get rid of one dictator.
A dictator is a reflection of people's childhoods.
And destroying the dictator does not destroy people's childhoods.
It does not destroy their terror and need to Stockholm Syndrome with brutal authority figures.
It just means that the one you know who stabilized things is gone and then a new and probably more terrifying authority figure will take the place of the one you destroyed.
Because the authority figure is required by the trauma of people's childhoods.
That's number one.
So the fact is that people only believed in the Middle Eastern missions and they only continue to believe in the Middle Eastern missions of the United States because of fiat currency.
Because they Do not have to pay for the wars that they support.
And patriotism that is subsidized by counterfeiting is the cheapest form of moral pseudo heroism in the world.
So, you know, people said, oh, let's go invade Iraq.
It's like, okay, would you like a bill for $50,000 if you support the war?
Whoa, hey, let's look at this more critically now.
But no, it's like people supported the welfare state because they didn't have to pay for it.
And people supported Social Security because they didn't have to pay for it.
And people support Medicare.
Yeah, and now you have to pay for it and you won't even get it.
And that's why I want to see it go away.
But it's only fiat currency that allows for these wars of adventure and horror in the Middle East.
Because when something is free, the only reason you'd oppose it is if you're some weird pacifist.
If war is both virtuous and free, you would only oppose it if you just want to let Genghis Khan rape your poodle.
So it's like, well, if healthcare is free, you know, like these comments that got this burning, holy asshole would not want Americans to get healthcare for free.
It's like, yes, I want to take away everyone's oxygen because I'm just that evil because it's free, right?
It's like, hey, if you want to give healthcare for free, go become a doctor and give your services away for nothing.
And so it's fiat currency that has produced all of these wars and it is fiat currency That is producing all of these immigrants.
Because the immigrants, people's taxes aren't going up proportionate to the number of immigrants coming into the country because it's all being paid for through fiat currency.
So fiat currency produces the wars which arm and destabilize the regions and decapitate the existing dictatorships where you get a hydra of new dictatorships.
Fiat currency arms the war that destroys the host countries and fiat currency creates the incentives to move that draws people across borders.
So it is fiat currency that is responsible for the two-year-old Syrian boy dead in the surf.
And everyone thinks that what we should do, you see, is we should bring more immigrants in which will be paid for by more fiat currency and what that will do is mean that more fiat currency is available to start wars and more fiat currency is available to pay for welfare.
What that means is that more people will come across these waters which means that where you had one Syrian boy drowning you will soon have ten or a hundred or a thousand and people will not understand that relationship and they'll say well what we need is more generosity Because apparently there's just no amount of bodies that make people wake up to the evils they support.
And that's why I want Sanders opposed to Trump because let's say that Trump gets in with his tax plan and he makes things better.
Let's say he puts more money into people's pockets.
Let's say that For whatever reason, he's able to hold off, make the system last another 8 to 10 years.
Let's just say that.
Well, then it's like you're saying.
Now we're having more dead Syrian boys.
Now, as opposed to if Bernie Sanders gets in there and collapses the system and we have 10 Syrian boys within a day, whereas with Trump gets in there, now we have two dead Syrian boys a day, but over 10 months.
So...
Well, we'll see.
It's the Band-Aid question.
And yeah, yeah.
I'm just arguing as in it would be better.
Of course, you and I have no control over any of that.
One of us can't vote and the other one won't, so it doesn't matter.
I can see the argument for it.
To me, you're not a dad yet, right?
Me and my wife are trying right now.
We just got married.
It's one of those things that's scary.
I hate to pull the D card, but as a dad, I'm okay with another 8 to 10 years of stability.
Because then my daughter's an adult, almost.
Alright, man.
I've got to move on to the last caller, but I really appreciate the call.
And thanks so much for complying with the request for non-interruptions.
That was much better.
I really appreciate that.
I just need to settle down.
Thank you for your time.
Thanks, man.
All right.
Thanks, Josh.
All right.
Up last today is Scott, who's been on the show before from one of our more noteworthy calls, An Atheist Apologizes to Christians, that show, if you remember it.
And Scott wrote in and said, Really,
a confirmation-seeking mindset that ignores the origination of a claim and demands belief first, I am disgusted at how easy it is to trick intelligent people.
I am angry that my religion has been such an abuser-enabling self-serving organization, only speaking out against abuse with vague criticisms against either everyone or no one due to their vagueness.
I am angry that within a year of my 40th birthday, 16 years married, with teen and younger children having to navigate such a heart-wrenching situation, that it is ultimately about nonsensical stories, bogus claims, and original corruption.
How do I channel this anger to keep it from seeping into my relationships?
How do I hold back anger against a religion I feel so betrayed by to protect relationships with those who still believe?
Those are very tough questions, man.
I very much sympathize with that.
I very much sympathize with that.
And I mean, through no particular virtue of my own, I happened to end up in a non-religious environment by the time I became an adult.
So, I mean, I could certainly imagine the difficulties.
And I was interested in a Christian woman at once.
We almost dated, but we didn't, you know, basically because I said that we couldn't teach our children.
We didn't even date.
We hadn't even kissed.
We're having these conversations, right, where I'm saying, well, I'm an atheist.
And she was like, that's fine.
My dad's an atheist.
And I said, yeah, but if we have kids, then they have to be able to choose religion when they get older.
It can't be told as true to them when they're young.
And she wouldn't go for that, right?
And so we ended up not even having a date, not even having a kiss.
But once you're already married, right?
Am I right in assuming that your wife is religious?
Yeah.
Yeah.
And you can imagine having that same conversation with her to somebody you've been married to for nearly 16 years.
And there's so much wrapped up in it, too.
The biggest thing for me is that I'm realizing all this about my religion at the same time that I'm also realizing how Unbelievably sexist my upbringing was against me as a boy and against me as a man.
At the same time, and I mean, my wife is very, very nice on both of these aspects.
My wife is really trying hard, but it's a lot of pressure.
And at the same time, I'm like, I'm recognizing like, All these little pain points when I was growing up, these little moments where they flip stories on their head and turn the man into a villain.
That stuff, like the more that I hear it, the angrier I get.
I hear it so often.
It's like this bell ringing.
And this is very counterintuitive to people because people tend to think of Mormonism as being very male-centric because of the whole priesthood thing and, you know, Women cannot have the priesthood, therefore they can't be the leader of the church and all that stuff.
But people don't understand that the priesthood against us peons is used as a way to get us to submit.
And I see this so much.
I see it everywhere.
Like, when I was a kid, I remember being told that the reason why men had the priesthood and women didn't have the priesthood was because women were naturally closer to God and men needed the priesthood for that.
Right.
And I was just like, you know, and now that I look back on that, I'm just like, I'm disgusted that they would tell somebody like that, that they would tell me of all people.
I grew up in a just absolute crazy woman-controlled household.
And they're telling me who's...
Hello?
...got about her.
Sorry, go ahead.
I think we lost the last part of what you were saying, Scott.
You cut out for a second.
I'm sorry.
I'm sorry.
Where was I? I was just saying that what they would say to me growing up in this environment was that there was something wrong with me.
And this person who was this selfish person Character.
That she was naturally closer to God.
And that I needed priesthood.
I needed something.
I needed something to help me to be closer to God because I was not naturally closer to God.
Right.
And the other thing about my...
Are you saying that a movement has somehow succeeded by appealing to female vanity?
No.
Yeah.
Wait a minute.
Unprecedented.
I never knew that.
I've never heard of such a thing.
How could this be possible?
Right.
Well, I mean...
I mean, next thing you know, they'll be appealing to men's lust.
I mean, you never know.
Well, and the thing is, is that I have a unique perspective on the church.
I have a By the time...
So, you know, Mormon missionaries, when I was growing up, it's changed now, but when I was growing up, they leave on missions at age 19.
Men do.
Now, men are required to go on a mission, or at least it's a commandment, whereas women have the option, and they don't have to go if they don't...
You know, it's not a commandment for them.
Wait, hang on, but...
Unless you pull the book of male privilege, right?
Then you're okay.
Because then you're supposed to have all these advantages.
I'm just kidding.
Go on.
Yeah, right.
By age 19, I'm leaving on a mission somewhat later than most guys do.
It's almost by 20 that I'm getting ready to go.
By the time that I left on my mission, I had lived in 18 houses with my family and in three different states and you know every other move about four to five hundred miles away and I have seen every side of my religion.
I've seen it in foreign countries.
I served a mission in Brazil.
I've seen it in You know, on the East Coast, I've seen it all over.
And so people can't just say to me, well, that was just the local area and the way that that particular...
That was his imperfection and that's not the rest of us.
Because that doesn't work for me.
That bounces right off of me.
Because I saw it way differently.
I mean, I saw the same kind of...
It was just this...
It's the ultimate me plus, this God stuff.
Right.
And they even say that.
They even say that a marriage is a covenant between you, your wife, and God.
Yeah.
Apparently, when it comes to marriage, God likes to watch.
Yeah.
Oh, man, that voyeur stuff, man.
God is the ultimate voyeur.
Because how on earth is he supposed to record all the things you ever do with yourself?
It's just...
These things that people just don't think through.
And the position that they put both...
I mean, in this case, the whole covenant between man and woman and God, that is both of them being in a me-plus situation.
But the men have the extra pressure of being you plus the priesthood plus this so-called covenant.
And it's just...
I look back on this and I see all this pressure and I'm dealing with a particular...
I have to thank you for all the talk about therapy.
I stopped going to one bad therapist and then stopping for two years.
You know, I stopped letting that be an excuse and started going to therapy on a regular basis.
And, you know, I have extra issues on top of all this stuff.
Things that are very, very difficult.
Bullying, and I don't want to go into everything, but, you know, there's a lot of bullying and constantly being separated, every one of these moves.
I'm having my friends stripped away from me.
And I have no control over this.
And at the same time, they're just saying, no, it's got to be you plus.
It's got to be you plus.
And I just look back on...
I'm looking back on my life as I see that particular mindset and how damaging that was to me for people to tell me that I... That I wasn't happy because I just wasn't enough plus.
Right.
You know, and I have a lot of anxiety issues.
There's a lot to climb out of now that I'm much more aware of, you know, kind of How my past and my present and everything kind of intertwine and fear about the future and fear about Donald Trump and whoever, whatever that is.
And are you tempted by hatred?
I'm not saying this bad.
I'm not judging the emotion.
You said you want to talk about feelings and you're giving me a lot of analysis.
When you look at your history and what you were told and the degree of falsehoods you were given and you really put it beautifully and you said the amount of problems caused by false stories, by silly stories.
What is your emotional relationship to the people who told you all of this stuff?
The hardest thing for me...
I try not to get into it now.
I'm an analysis junkie.
I actually do that.
Forget the analysis.
You can do that with anyone.
What are your feelings about What you were told The moments that really tipped me Like And Anything could...
All the metaphysical stuff never worked on me as a faithful person.
It was...
When I'm asking for your feelings, you cannot give me the word metaphysical.
That is not a feeling.
Try it again.
How do you feel about what you were told?
Recognizing that my...
that most of the people who I grew up with did not love me and that the church was telling me that they did and that they had an eternal nature and that they're just imperfect and someday they'll have a better view and a higher view but But in the present,
with no more excuses for eternity and whatever, but just recognizing that objectively, my parents did not love me.
That leaders of the church were more interested in, at the age of 14, whether I was masturbating Then the sad look on my face.
I'm sitting there with...
I was a really late bloomer.
I played with toys until I was like 12 or 13 years old.
And I didn't know...
I mean, I knew about it, but I didn't know it in the Latin sense.
And I didn't Scott?
Yeah.
Where did we go?
We went back to analysis.
Thank you.
Come back.
I'm sitting there.
I look back on these moments where people could have done something.
They could have...
People could have seen...
what was happening in that household.
And they didn't do anything.
Thank you.
And this was at congregation after congregation across the country.
And nobody did anything.
When you...
I kept on getting these Christmas presents from my folks when I got older of old family videos and some new format would come out and they'd give me the whole set again.
And I'd have to destroy the set again.
Every time.
Because it wasn't a Christmas present for me to look back on my face in most of those videos.
They see someone Age six struggling with the alphabet and they just think it's cute that he's trying, but...
I know what was in my heart at that moment.
And what was in your heart at that moment?
No matter what I did...
I got no attention from anyone.
And I was...
shut in and people knew this and This was not a case of me being homeschooled and nobody knows about what's going on inside that household.
People at church could see us.
People at these Myriad of public schools that I went to could see my face.
face.
They could see what I see in those videos.
So when I now have the internet at my beck and call, And I can now go back through all those old talks that were coming from church leaders in that time.
What are they saying about here we are?
We're talking about an institution that is there to help the family morally.
you This is their job.
This isn't like a side job for them.
This is their stated goal.
And they don't say anything about it.
There are two talks in the 1980s when I'm growing up that talk about it.
And they're all like, well, maybe, kind of, sort of, possibly it's a bad thing.
And then nothing, no one ever says anything definitive about it.
And that's the end of it.
And there's no, there's no, there's no Mormon.org for you to go up and look up these talks later on and ruminate on them or anything.
They're out of sight and out of mind.
And, and, and What were these people doing?
They're focusing on whether or not a light-blooming 14-year-old is maybe possibly masturbating.
Or whatever else they focused on.
It's just endless distractions.
How on earth Am I supposed to sit in a room with all positive advice?
Well, you've got to read scriptures with your family.
You've got to pray as a family.
You've got to do all that stuff.
How the heck am I supposed to do that when the people who just smacked me upside the head are right there praying with me?
telling me that I got to pray to be closer to God when this person just whipped me with a belt or whatever.
So you go back to church, you've got I've got that look on my face.
I see it in those old videos.
And no one says anything.
And here I am.
Coming up on my middle age.
And I can see that look on my face.
And I can see that look on other people's faces as they're going to my church.
And here, this is not a sideshow.
This is the cause.
I mean, this is the thing that they're so worried about.
This is, you know, how are we going to prepare the world for the second coming of Jesus Christ?
And what are they doing?
They're saying nothing.
Nothing of any consequence or definition of It's just vagueness.
So you're either on the side of the guy who will never yell, never raise a hand, never do anything, right up until molestation.
Everyone's the same.
It's this massive range of vagueness that means nothing.
Nothing can be verified.
That's the whole point, right?
Yeah.
And the second that you point out a fallacy, the second that you point out a Something that's nonsense about a story, a contradiction, whatever.
Everyone just says, well, it's amazing that God had to work with such imperfect people.
Yeah.
God, you can only be as good as your clay.
Right.
You know, and the stuff that really ticks me off is now the Mormon church is having to respond.
Right.
Because they can't control the news anymore.
They can't control what gets out there about Joseph Smith or whoever.
So they're having to respond and they're finally doing it.
But it's all just more vagueness.
It's like, hey, we already said something about that.
And, you know, that's just, you know, you married a 14-year-old because that's just how things were back then and all this stuff.
I mean, just total garbage.
It's just dismissiveness, and it's amazing that God has to work with such imperfect people sort of crap.
Right.
And it's like, well, at what point does the imperfection finally disqualify you from this position?
Right.
At what point do you cease being my moral instructor because 30% of your wives are teenagers?
Right.
And it makes me angry that I had to go and find the names of these ladies, for example, somewhere else.
And the second that I do that, I immediately have all these stereotypes of, oh, you're going to the wrong...
I mean, this really happens in the Mormon Church.
Oh, you're going to the wrong places.
Is it true or not?
Right.
It's like, here I am, Mr.
Analysis.
I do it for a living.
So I find all the names, find what their ages are, roll them into a spreadsheet like I do with user testing or something like that.
And then break him down.
And what do I find?
I find this decaying monster of a person.
He's not.
You know, and I didn't go to some anti-Mormon website that they're so afraid of me getting the wrong spirit or ghost or whatever.
I'm just looking at the facts that they told me about in their own article.
Okay, what are the names of these 34 women?
Holy shit.
Everyone talks about polygamy in the Mormon church.
Do they ever talk about polyamory?
Did they ever even talk about that even being a thing?
It is just all this stuff that is hidden from you.
Thank you.
You have revelation after revelation coming out in the news, pictures of some artifact from back in the day that most people didn't even know even existed, didn't even know that was part of our mythology.
Everyone's like, what the hell is that little rock thing or whatever?
And what I want to know is it's 2015 people.
This is a prophetic religion.
This is a religion led by people who are supposed to know the trends before they happen.
And they can't see that maybe someday somebody is going to ask about these weird ideas that you weren't even talking about until you were having to talk about them.
Right.
And then they say, well, that's probably the reason why you're losing your faith is because you're asking all these questions.
Well, yeah.
Yeah, hell yes it is!
God damn it!
You know, you're losing your illiteracy because you're reading stuff.
Right.
Yes.
The thing is, is that I still feel the same way that I felt in the last call, although I'm not as deep into I'm more in the anger stage than in the depressed stage, but I still need a place to raise my kids where they're going to be surrounded by the young girls that are going to be a good community for them not to engage in things that are going to destroy
them.
But that's more the, I mean, outside of living in some godforsaken ghetto, that's you as a parent will keep them safe from that.
Right.
Well, and I still have to, I'm still in a by-faith relationship now.
And my wife never saw this coming, and I have to deal with that feeling of her very legitimate feeling that she doesn't understand where I'm coming from.
And she has to go through the same stuff that I had to go through, and it was hard for me to go through it.
And it's still hard for me to go through it.
And, you know, to her, I think very legitimately feels like...
feels like a betrayal of some kind.
Right.
And I've had to explain many times that...
Dammit, I keep on getting into the analysis.
I'm just...
I get the anger.
I get the anger, for sure.
Like, for me, belief is involuntary.
It's like forgiveness.
In fact, forgiveness is a subset of belief.
Belief is...
I cannot choose to believe in this stuff.
It's too late.
I did not close my eyes enough to believe in this anymore.
Right.
And I've always been inquisitive, but on this issue, I could never dig into it.
I always, you know, falling back on the confirmation bias because it was so easy, because confirmation bias did not threaten everything that I hold dear.
But I still go back to these experiences growing up and how people sat there and watched it happen.
And I... I can't...
I look back on some of these people.
I can see their faces...
I would go on camping trips with some of these people as a Boy Scout or whatever.
I was not terribly active in Boy Scouts, but I saw these people a lot and these people saw me a lot and they just didn't do anything.
And it's just like, well, what the hell good are you?
What good are you?
I just...
I mean, I was...
I was despairing when I was an early teen, and then I was angry as hell when I was an older teen.
And showing all the signs of anger, all the signs of getting older and realizing that all the signs of getting older and realizing that all the adults around you or not doing anything.
But I don't have the language for this.
I can't express the anger.
So it comes out in long hair.
It comes out in a...
Believe it or not, I had a mouth like a sailor.
It comes out in every kind of way.
Except for the way that it should come out, and that is a responsible adult beckoning it out of you and asking you, what the hell is going on?
What is the matter?
And Scott, can I ask you a question?
Would you like some freedom from that anger?
Because I can offer you that if you like.
I don't want to say your anger is bad or anything like that, but your original question was, what can I do about it?
And I can free you from the anger if you want to.
If you're still working through it and you want to keep doing it, I don't want to interrupt that.
But if you want to put it behind you, You can.
I'd really like to know that.
Are you ready?
Yeah.
This is going to be me talking a bit.
Please feel free to interrupt, but you might want to get comfortable.
Are you ready?
Yes.
A huge amount of human misery And anger arises from a basic misperception that people have about the world.
And by misperception, I mean they're lied to.
And there is no institution that will ever have any fundamental interest in you except as a profit center.
That sounds like very abstract, so let me be clear on that.
We all understand this with business, right?
You know, you go to Starbucks, it's like, we're a family.
No, you're not.
No, you're not, because if you work at Starbucks, their only real interest in you is as a profit center.
There's nothing wrong with that, because it's a business.
That's their job.
I mean, Steven Spielberg has a lot of friends, I'm sure.
But he doesn't cast his friends to be leads in his movies unless they happen to be very bankable actors, right?
I mean, he's got friends who aren't Tom Hanks.
He doesn't put them in his movies.
Because with regards to making movies...
The interest that the studio has in Tom Hanks or Steven Spielberg or Chris Pratt or whoever is as a profit center.
If you go and work at some corporation, you have to make the money.
That doesn't mean you can't chit-chat with people and you can't play Nerf ball and you can't play Quake on their servers, but fundamentally their only interest in you is as a profit center.
Now, do you see where I'm going with this?
In your church, their only fundamental relationship with you is as a profit center.
And I guarantee you, Scott, if you look back over your history, your eyes turned dull And your mouth grew resentful because it was dawning on you that their profit center, the driver of their profits, is the pretense of love.
You know, whenever a business says, we're like a family, what they're usually saying is, We want you to accept lower wages by appealing to your sentimentality and whatever dysfunction in your family left you to still think that we could be a family despite the fact that we're a business.
Right?
So you were hearing all of these stories and all of these perspectives.
Don't go to that website because that interferes with you as a profit center.
Don't ask these questions because that interferes with you as a profit center for us.
It's a wonderful irony of language that at the center of every religion is a profit.
I don't think it's even accidental that the word is used as a hominid.
This church was an institution.
As an institution, it has no interest in you except as a profit center.
And everything that is said to you is fundamentally driven by that fact.
Everything that is said to you is fundamentally driven by that fact.
Now families and friendships, they're not profit centrists from a financial standpoint.
Extended families, grandparents, charging you rent, charging you for meals and you don't have to buy their time, you don't have to give them a tithe.
So wherever there's not money changing hands, the fundamental relationship is not as a profit But whenever there's money changing hands, then the fundamental relationship that the institution has with you is as a profit center.
And the fact that people delude, that they're lied to about it, and then they continue to delude themselves about it.
It's remarkable.
And I think that people's unhealthy relationship to the free market has to do with the fact that the free market won't give them the love they didn't get from their parents but expects to deal with them as mutually advantageous, dry calculations of mutual utility, as the phrase goes.
It's not about feelings.
It's about profit.
And now, that's fine if you've grown up with a loving family and you have a loving family and you have loving friends and you have great relationships.
Then you're not shocked and appalled by the fact that there's a profit motive at Starbucks.
But if you grow up without that love, then you're hungry for it.
You want that love.
I was a Marxist when I was a 20-something.
You want that love.
You want the love of the proletariat and the collective.
And you want the love of your fellow travelers.
You know, why do people care so much about Bernie Sanders?
Because Bernie Sanders will give them what their parents didn't.
Children should get free stuff.
Children raised in dysfunctional environments did not get the physical, emotional, spiritual nutrition and services from their parents.
And so when some kindly old dodger comes along, I meant to say codger, but dodger, artful dodger is probably better, When some kindly old contra comes along and says, you should get some free school.
You know, I'm here for you.
I'm going to get you some free health care because you deserve it.
I'm going to make sure that you get paid well.
I'm going to make sure you're taken care of.
Now, to somebody with real, loving, kind, supportive parents and friends, they're like, ew, get away from me.
I have that already.
Thank you.
I don't need some old creepy guy from Washington to offer it to me.
I'm okay.
Thanks.
You know, it's like if you're a millionaire sitting at Starbucks and you got an empty coffee cup and someone comes along and puts a dollar into it because they think you're begging, you're like, thanks.
Please take the dollar back.
I'm okay.
But if you are, in fact, hungry, Somebody gives you a couple of bucks, you're grateful.
Because you're hungry.
You need.
And so, people who grow up without love and support and care and concern from their parents then end up with these unholy relationships of need and manipulation and pathology with institutions.
And this is why people get so angry at corporations.
Cooperation is just a legal construct.
It's just a bunch of people.
They're evil, predatory, sociopathic.
Because people have this hunger for their institutions, their countries, their political parties, even their bands.
Oh, yeah.
Something as inconsequential as I sing this way, not that way.
Massive Marxist loyalty to Green Day at all times.
And so the way to, for me at least, and I think I made some bold claims at the beginning of this little speech, so hopefully I can promise a landing and fulfill.
But We do not get angry at the lion for being a lion.
Now, you've got a lot of anger at the church.
I get it.
I understand it.
And I really sympathize.
And I'm not saying there's anything wrong with that anger.
But it's like getting angry at Starbucks for having a profit motive.
It's only because you separate That particular institution from another money-making institution that you are angry and outraged.
Anger fundamentally is driven by a perception of hypocrisy.
I'm not saying that it's not hypocritical what you are facing.
It is.
But when you pierce through, the hypocrisy is just part of the profit motive.
They can't say to you, we're going to sell you these silly stories as true so that you'll give us 10% of your income and two years of your life and you'll let your children make sure that they become part of this and you'll marry people within the faith and you'll come and do this and you'll provide this.
They can't say that, right?
That's a very expensive fairy tale book, right?
I mean, I can pick up Aesop's Fables for $1.99 on Kobo.
I don't have to give it 10% of my income for the rest of my life and then go and serve the ghost of Aesop for two years, right?
I mean, that's a very expensive book of stories, right?
You know, it's like eight bucks for the trilogy of Lord of the Rings.
They do not require your foreskin to buy it.
So, I mean, the anger is the hypocrisy, the how could you, right?
How could you?
How could you?
What good were these people, you say?
How could they have done this to me?
How could they have misrepresented to me?
How could they have lied to me?
But the lies are part of the sales pitch in a lot of places.
In a lot of places.
I mean, come on.
You ever go shopping for underwear?
You know, you've got those torsos.
No, not in the wild.
Okay, you might want to go shopping.
I know you're married, but a little fresh underwear can do wonders.
No, no, you're talking to a Mormon.
I don't go shopping for underwear as much as me.
Oh, that's right.
I'm sorry.
Yours is delivered by seraphim and cherubim, so you get your underwear express holy rollers.
But for those mortals like I who go shopping for underwear, you go to shopping and they're these like This is the last time they'll ever be this white.
You get these packages of underwear and they're these torsos.
These Greek god torsos of guys who've done 12 billion sit-ups and haven't drunk a cup of water in four days.
You know, these torsos.
You know, of course, that you're going to put the underwear on when you get home and you're going to wear it around and you're not going to look like that guy.
You're not going to look like those torsos.
And...
A few more folds in my ripples.
And you just know.
You're going to get that little bit of back fat.
You know, I'm pushing 49 now.
You're getting a little bit of back fat going over the elastic on the back.
And you know, it's just a tiny muffin top.
It's just the way it goes, right?
You know, you pick up the glasses.
You're not going to look like the model who doesn't need glasses who put the glasses on to sell the glasses, right?
You pick up this beer and you're not going to be at a pool with a bunch of Hawaiian Tropic bikini models.
You're probably going to be cracking it open while watching Orange is the New Black at 2 o'clock in the morning on a Friday, right?
And so there's a lot of deception in all of this kind of advertising.
They're selling you the image.
They're selling you things that you can't possibly get from the thing itself.
And The institution you grew up in, it's only there because it's profitable.
It's only there because it's profitable.
And what they did was they wanted to ensure that you would remain a good tithe livestock your whole life long.
They're doing what institutions do.
They're a corporation looking for profit, and the way that they look for profit Is to tell you stories that aren't true as if they're true.
Just like the diet industry.
Hey, you know, if you buy this book, you can go from this picture to this picture.
Well, you really can't.
Because only about 2% of people lose weight and keep it off.
And I think those are people who have a leg amputated.
I don't know.
But only 2%.
So no, you can't.
Or they show you some woman who's like 60 or 70 pounds overweight and then she slims down.
They don't show her belly hanging over her groin like some old plastic bag with water in it.
They don't show you the corrective surgery to scoop up all that extra flab because when you lose weight your skin is still stretched out.
People lose weight and they say, oh my god, I look even worse having lost this weight unless I want to go in for really expensive and painful surgery that's still going to leave me heavily scarred.
You know, once you've really, I don't mean a lot, once you've gained a lot of weight, you're doomed.
You will never, ever, ever, ever look like someone who didn't gain a lot of weight.
You will never, ever, ever look like someone who didn't gain a lot of weight.
That's a fact.
Doesn't mean you shouldn't lose the weight.
It's better for you.
But you're not going to look like the after shot in that bikini.
There was some woman who lost weight on some diet and she posted pictures of herself.
She got in trouble.
Because she posted pictures without, I don't know, whatever, they tie knots of back fat behind these women to pull that extra stomach skin back.
She got in trouble with the company.
You can't post this picture.
Put a shirt on, for God's sakes.
People can't know that this is what you look like when you lose weight after you've been significantly overweight.
You look like half a collapsed tent.
I'm not trying to be mean.
This is just the reality.
Now, you can, of course, and I'm not trying to compare a very serious epistemological and metaphysical issue that you had with this church to just something as simple as diet.
I'm just giving you the analogy.
So if you understand that the diet industry is selling a lie, not that you can't ever lose weight.
You can, although most people...
Most people put on more weight after they try and lose it.
The whole point is you've got to prevent, but that's a topic for another time.
But they're telling you, you can be this woman who's 50 pounds overweight or 60 pounds overweight, then you can lose this weight and you can look like this gymnast.
No, you can't.
If it's been a long time in particular, skin is stretched.
I'm not talking pregnancy.
And That's the nature.
You can get angry at the diet industry, but that's their job.
If they gave you accurate before and after photos, they'd actually do a lot better for people because people would then say, oh, so if I gain a lot of weight and then I lose a lot of weight, I really am not going to look very good and I'm going to have all this extra skin hanging around and it's whatever, right?
Then people would, like that would actually be, people then wouldn't be as cavalier about gaining weight.
Oh, I'll just lose it later.
Oh, no, no.
Look at the pictures.
Seriously.
But given that there are a lot of people out there who are overweight and you can make a lot of money selling them the illusion of getting thin and looking good, you know, people will profit from delusion.
And there is great profit in delusion.
Because delusion, unlike truth, needs constant maintenance.
Delusion is like some screechy supermodel girlfriend.
You can't ever bring in enough diamonds.
And so the institution that you had viewed you as a profit center and it was not being hypocritical.
It was being true to the nature of the institution.
It was feeding on lies, and it was provoking lies in order to feed on lies.
It's like the Catholic concept of original sin.
Can't go to a happy man and say, I'm going to save you.
He'll say, from what?
You have to damn someone in order to save them.
You have to infect someone with an imaginary illness in order to sell them a cure.
Is it hypocritical?
Is it this?
Well...
I guess you can look at it that way, that's going to make you angry, but you can only really get angry at hypocrisy if there was some other alternative.
But there's no possibility for the institution you describe to start off by telling the truth.
It wouldn't be there if it did.
So the fact that it is there means that you can get angry at it if you want, but that makes about as much sense as People putting thin people on the cover of a diet book.
Is it perfectly accurate?
Is it manipulative?
Yeah, but if they put the actual after pictures of someone who was significantly overweight having lost weight, people would not buy that book.
People want the delusion that they can lose weight and look great.
Now, the differences that they're creating through, because it's multi-generational, they're creating the delusions in the kids that result in them being profit-centrists But that's the most efficient way for them to develop profit centric.
It is cheaper to breed a cow than to buy a cow.
And in this case, it's cheaper to breed a cow to a domesticated cow than it is to go and capture some crazy bull in the wild.
Indoctrination is easier, far easier than conversion when it comes to religion.
So children are the profit centers that are necessary for these institutions to continue.
It's like me, if I get really angry at public school teachers for not telling me the truth about the state, well of course they're not going to tell me the truth about the state.
It's impossible that they could.
There's no way that public school would continue to exist if they did.
I can get really angry about it, but that literally is like getting angry at a dog for barking.
We can get frustrated and we get exasperated and so on, but anybody who's chronically angry at dogs for barking is angry against reality.
And the reality is, this is a very efficient way to make money.
To lie to people, to threaten them with eternal punishment, to offer them eternal reward, to make them feel part of a special in-group, and to threaten ostracism from those around them should they ever question the belief.
That is incredibly efficient when it comes to making money.
It is an institution that cares about your money and invents a soul to have something to sell.
It is doing what institutions do.
It is doing what Starbucks does.
Doesn't make it right.
But in terms of chronic anger, the chronic anger comes from thinking it should somehow be otherwise and it was really bad that it was the way it was and how come they didn't do it different and how come they didn't do it better?
Well, how come they don't put droopy stomach fat on the after pictures in ads for diet pills?
Of course they don't.
How come Mormons don't tell you about everything, all the ages of all the young girls married to the founding prophets of the church?
Why?
Because, of course they're not going to tell you that.
And they're going to give up the church over it?
Right.
Yeah.
So, is it hypocritical?
I have a tough time saying that it is.
I have a tough time.
It's only rhetorically hypocritical.
Yeah, and it's okay.
It's kind of hypocritical.
But, you know, do beer commercials show you pictures of people who haven't had a beer in a year?
Of course they do.
Because, you know, people who drink a lot of beer have beer guts in general.
Do beer commercials show you people who have beer guts or people who don't have more than three alcoholic drinks every year?
Right?
Do beer commercials show you the complete opposite of what a beer drinker looks like in general?
Of course they do.
Is that hypocritical?
Should we spend our lives being angry at it?
That is the nature of, that's what they do.
And it's mostly because people believe that crap.
But I don't know that, and this is not supposed to say that your anger is unjust, your anger is wrong, or your anger is bad.
I don't mean any of that.
But what I mean is that it was absolutely inevitable.
It could not have ever been any other possible way.
It's tragic that you were caught up in it.
But chronic anger for the inevitable is something to be outgrown.
I've already been through this process with politics, and I've already been through this process with certain people in my life that I just give up on.
Yeah.
A politician didn't keep his word.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And the moment you stop being angry at it is the moment that you're free of it because you've accepted the truth.
A politician will almost never keep his word.
Yeah.
Oh, and it frees me up so much.
I mean, the amount of time that I have not spent listening to talk radio and...
And getting upset about...
Right.
Can you believe what so-and-so said?
Clinton seems to have lied.
In other news, water is still wet.
The war on women.
The war on women.
Yeah.
Boy, I see some of those female fetuses being dropped alive out of the Planned Parenthood vids.
Yeah, yeah.
But yeah, I mean, I could get mad about that stuff, but I... It was just sucking up so much of My life when I was getting mad about it, that I just...
It was...
I just...
I just had to give it up.
I mean, it was almost cold turkey with politics.
And I still have people all around me talking about politics all the time, especially right now.
And the headphones on my head just keep getting bigger and bigger and more and more noise isolating.
Because it's just so obnoxious.
Listening to people, and I can totally see your point, because I am getting mad at the inevitable.
Of course, of course they're not going to come out and tell me everything that would shake their own foundation.
Right.
I mean, Starbucks isn't going to hand you leaflets about don't drink too much coffee or this latte has like 4,000 calories or whatever, right?
Yeah.
Yeah, it does make a lot of sense.
I mean, I'm still...
I think more...
Like, I have...
To be honest, like, since...
In the last while, I'm looking more at this situation with my wife and how she is coping with this.
And...
No, no, I'm sorry.
I've got to stay away from your wife for a second.
Sure, sure.
I say that a lot these days.
No, but I have to stay away from your wife because this is...
The anger is...
The you and the church thing, right?
The anger that becomes chronic is the literal, how could they?
Yeah.
Yeah.
And the antidote to the how could they is, well, how couldn't they?
How could they do otherwise?
How could there be an institution called Mormonism who focused the way that Chris Hitchens focused on the beginnings of Mormonism, on Joseph Smith, on, as you say, the teenage brides?
I mean, if they focused on that, how could there be one?
It only exists because they don't.
I mean, it's not how could they.
Why wouldn't they?
They couldn't do anything else.
Yeah.
There was no possibility of them doing anything else.
And when they see that long look in your face, like they did with me, they...
Are they going to go...
They're happy!
Are they going to go to the parents...
When you finally break a horse, you're happy.
It's a lot of work to break a horse, but the horse isn't worth much until you do.
You know, you get a wild horse.
It's jumping all over the place.
It doesn't take a bridle.
It doesn't take a saddle.
It doesn't take stirrups.
It's crazy.
Undomesticated.
Well, when you break that horse and you...
Right?
It doesn't look like anti-horse websites.
Yeah, that's when the horse becomes, oh good, they're broken.
Should I get angry at the public school teachers for not celebrating my individuality and asking me what I was really interested in and recognizing and respecting my intelligence?
No.
That's the point.
It's like the horse saying, I can't believe the guy who was trained to broke me actually broke me.
Yeah, that's his job.
How could he?
How couldn't he?
That's what he does.
How could he not?
There's no other possibility.
It doesn't mean don't be angry or anything like that, but it takes the horror and the urgency out of it.
Because anger should want to change something.
And anger fuels itself when you think something could have been different.
I am not angry at my mother.
Given the choices that my mother made, well, the life she had plus the choices that she made, there is no possibility it could have been different between us.
There's no possibility she could have been a different person.
If I had a cousin who smoked like a chimney for 40 years, there's no possibility he's going to win the Boston Marathon.
I'm not going to be enraged because he won't run.
He can't.
It wasn't deterministic because he chose to smoke, but...
Anger is supposed to give you the energy to change something.
It's called fight or flight, right?
But...
When you get looped into an anger towards something that can't possibly change, in particular the past, the past can't change by definition, right?
You can change your perspective of it, but you can no more change the past than you can travel through time.
And so, once you get that your anger That what you're angry about couldn't have been any other way.
your anger sinks back down and waits for something that it can actually make a difference about.
And I see how this connects with so many other things that I've kind of like just finally set aside.
Like what you're saying makes perfect sense.
I'm so angry that the Democrats did this, the Republicans did that.
But you can't change it.
The death of reason thing, I want people to even stop getting angry at people who don't listen to reason.
The choice to not listen to reason, or the result of not listening to reason, of rejecting reason and evidence, is the result of so much trauma and so many bad decisions, and perhaps even some genetic susceptibility, Trying to reason with people is like trying to talk them into changing their genders.
And I don't mean like through medicine and hormones, I mean like just magically.
Different.
Yeah.
Can't do it.
Oh yeah, and when I'm talking to people that I do like as co-workers or Or people in my community, they want to find out why I don't believe.
And I'm just like, I don't want to argue with you.
I don't want to tell you why I don't believe.
I don't think that anything is going to come of it.
I'm not into proselyting anymore.
I mean, not in that sense.
Now, when it is something that I can change, what you're saying makes a lot of sense because I see where this fits.
I'm going into analysis mode, but from a feeling standpoint, that's what made a difference to me.
It is having someone finally explain what real ethics are and being able to It was like this missing puzzle piece that I've just been looking for forever.
And I fit it right into it everywhere where it was missing and...
It was very empowering.
And it did allow me to...
Oh, man.
When I realized that I could just not think about politics anymore...
You know, it's not like I don't fear the results of everyone else thinking about politics.
But there's not a damn...
That's the thing I can do about it.
I mean, I can talk to people when they're open, but I can't.
What the hell am I going to do about the Federal Reserve?
What the hell am I going to do about monetary crises?
That stuff was very powerful to me.
me.
It just like released me from this burden like so quickly.
The thing that was really funny in all this is that I, as I was, I've been doing a lot of this as I've been going through therapy I've been going back and watching movies that I used to be really interested in, but watched multiple times.
I go back and I'll watch them and discover why I was so subconsciously interested in those shows.
It's a really valuable exercise.
And I remember watching these kind of disaster type shows, the Mad Maxes and the Walking Deads and all that sort of stuff.
And all throughout those, the funny thing is that for 10 years, since right around age 30, this stuff started to crack for me, but I just couldn't let stuff go.
But I remember watching these shows and just like, oh yeah, I wouldn't believe after that.
Just like this little tiny thought that would pop out.
I would totally not believe in God if that happened.
And it happened so often.
It happened like almost every movie I'd watch.
I'm a real sci-fi fan and comic book net and all that stuff from when I was growing up.
For me, like...
This happens so often.
After a while, I'm just like...
I go back and I look at all those times when I thought that on this movie or that movie or whatever.
And...
It's like, yeah.
Your subconscious knew about this shit before you did.
And...
Maybe that's...
I mean, I kind of feel like that's...
Sorry, just more analysis.
But...
That feeling, that empowering feeling when I go back and I... You know, I'm doing this exercise, going through these old movies and all that stuff.
Just this...
This powerful feeling that I don't have to...
I don't have to...
Worry about Whatever was happening in those I mean People always like tried to get me into some TV series and I could not watch it I Tried to watch the office a thousand times.
I could not watch it.
I Couldn't watch everybody loves Raymond.
I've never been able to watch that show That was a depressing show.
Oh good heavens Trapped in hell.
Yeah.
And you see the inevitable.
You see these characters walking right into what you know is going to happen now.
And you're just like, no, don't say that.
Oh, no, shit.
Don't say that.
So I'm seeing this all over my life.
I'm just going back and looking at all these little events.
These little turning points.
These little I mean, that stuff can drive you crazy, I know, but they were questions that I had at the time, and I didn't know how to solve whatever those things were kind of like bringing up in my mind to solve.
I mean, some of this stuff happened so rapidly for me.
I remember talking to an atheist friend of mine who, you know, I used to tell him faith stories.
Bear my testimony, as they say in the Mormon Church.
And I look back on him now and I just see how absurd the things that I was saying to him were.
And how I would take those things if someone were saying them to me now.
But as I was talking to him, as I was really starting to crack on the politics stuff, was – I remember telling him that this stuff is like a damn breaking for me.
I don't know where this is going.
This is before I've lost my faith.
This is before a lot of stuff in the last two, three years.
This is before addressing the problems in my family.
This is before a lot of things.
And I'm like, I don't know where this damn breaking is going to lead me, but it's happening.
Right.
I just wanted to mention that I wanted to remind people that my earlier argument was not determinism.
Because I said repeatedly, because I know people are going to get mad at your parents because they couldn't do any different.
No, I always said, well, with my mother, it's based upon the childhood she had and the choices that she made.
Correct.
Yeah, absolutely.
And the choices that she made.
I didn't just say based upon the childhood to the age.
You can get, no, there's nothing wrong.
I've been angry at my mother.
There's nothing wrong with that.
That's healthy.
But once you're in a situation where you can't do anything more about something, anger becomes self-destructive.
Yeah.
You know, once you are in a situation which your will cannot affect anymore, anger becomes self-destructive.
And so, while I was angry, I still had hope.
Because my anger was trying to get something done, get something changed.
I'm angry so I can change something.
Now, when you accept that change is not going to happen, you lose your anger and you lose your hope.
And anger is often a way of holding on to hope.
Long past reason and evidence has disproven its value.
Yeah, my wife, I told her about how I don't believe in faith.
To me, faith has become the opposite of a virtue now.
Yeah, it's conformity to madness.
Yeah, and she said, don't you have faith in people?
I said, hell no, I don't.
I have...
I mean, I didn't say it like that to her because I understand what she was trying to say, so I didn't say that to her.
I said, no, I don't.
I have the evidence that they have given me.
I have trust in people.
You know, that recognition alone was...
That was very empowering because I had so long, I had held out for people to change without the evidence that they ever will.
And being able to just sit and let that go.
Let it go that they aren't going to change.
Yeah.
And so anger can be a way of imagining that there's change when there can't be change.
And when you accept what you can't change, as the old saying goes, you accept that you can't change something, that's the way to be free of both anger, and that's the plus, and the pain is being free or letting go of hope.
When I accepted in my life that there were relationships that I simply had no effect upon, people didn't listen, they didn't change, they didn't grow, they just were impervious to anything that I could bring to the table.
And also that they viewed me in a certain way that I couldn't affect.
It didn't matter what I did.
I could not change the way that they viewed me.
When people won't reform their view of you, if people view you, I don't know, as a loser or something like that, if people won't change their view of you, you're trapped in that view.
We have social selves as well as individual selves, and we are social animals.
The opinions of those around us matter enormously.
And when I wanted to do something different with my life, but everyone thought I was still the same person, that created a growing tension.
And I was hoping, you know, people would recognize I've changed, I'm different, I'm grown.
They wouldn't.
They kept wanting to put me back in the same old box.
It's like, well, sorry, I can't change the way they view me.
I give up anger and I give up hope at the same time.
And you accept.
You accept.
And acceptance frees you from anger.
And that's why I was talking about there was no possibility of it having been different.
And there's no possibility that your anger will change how it is now.
So save your anger for something you can change.
So I hope that helps.
Listen, I got to wind the show down.
Enjoyable chat, though it's been.
I really do appreciate it.
I thank you so much.
Oh, you're welcome.
You're absolutely welcome.
Feel free to call back in anytime.
I want to say one real quick thing.
Sure.
There is something I'll be eternally angry for, and that is that when I went to go buy my first album at a record store when I was a kid, I was pressured into getting Nirvana instead of Innuendo.
I'm going to ignore that you said Innuendo came out when you were a kid.
It came out when I was in college.
I was at McGill, I think.
It was not a bad album.
I think there's some decent songs.
The middle part of the Innuendo song is great.
Delilah is a pretty fun song.
Yeah, it's a good album for sure.
And I appreciate that, although I did suddenly feel a mortality flash.
But that's okay.
I'm trying to get people to respect reality.
That's coming up.
All right.
Well, listen, Scott, thanks again for your call.
Feel free to call back in anytime.
And I appreciate your sharing.
I really do.
I know you get pretty analytical.
That's your thing, man.
That's fine.
And I hope you'll listen back to this and get more out of it the second time around.
So thanks, Emil, everyone, so much.
Have yourselves a wonderful, wonderful evening.
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