Sept. 26, 2015 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:41:32
3084 How to Fail Your Way to the Top - Call In Show - September 25th, 2015
Question 1: [1:30] - What are your thoughts on law of attraction? Do you believe in it - why or why not? What do you think is the limit of what man can achieve by simply thinking and working towards an ideal? In other words, how far do you think one can go using law of attraction?Question 2: [1:01:43] - A discussion about escaping a toxic romantic relationship, the value of the Real Time Relationships approach, finding somebody you want to spend the rest of your life with and dangerous red flags to look out for in the dating world.
Hi everybody, Stefan Molyneux from Freedomain Radio.
This was a great set of conversations.
We had two conversations, but both of them were really in-depth and I think very, very helpful for you in your life.
The first caller wanted to talk about the degree to which dreaming, fantasizing, imagining your future can help you achieve what you want And we really compared and contrasted that motivation aspect of things to actually having a tangible plan that you can execute on to get what you want in life.
The difference, the value of fantasizing, but the difference between fantasizing and actually planning and achieving is really important and we really touched in great depth upon One of my favorite topics, the joy of failure.
So that was a great conversation.
And then a young man who got out of a bad relationship and is imminently about to be married to the love of his life, which he got out of my free book, Real-Time Relationships, The Logic of Love, which you can get at freedomainradio.com slash free.
And we talked about some of the warning signs that he saw in his earlier relationship.
This is a seven-year relationship, that they were heading to the altar and he bailed out at the last minute, which he's enormously relieved to have done so.
And the difference in the very first conversation he had with the woman he spent seven years with, it didn't work out, and this woman he spent less than a year with, and he's getting married.
And he dropped a bombshell.
I don't think I've ever been more surprised in a call or a conversation.
So wait for that.
You'll certainly know it when you see it.
So here we go.
This is the show.
Up first today is Lansana.
He wrote in and said, what are your thoughts on law of attraction?
Do you believe it?
And if so, why or why not?
What do you think is the limit case for credulity in terms of what man can achieve simply by thinking and working towards an ideal?
In other words, how far do you think one can go using law of attraction?
That's from Lanzana.
Right.
Well, would you like me to enlist my daughter's help in this?
Um, sure.
Okay.
So here's our conversation.
And I said, okay.
So Izzy, if...
There are two people, and they're both about as good at singing.
They're both good singers.
And one of them thinks she's a really good singer and really is going to do a great job.
And the other one thinks she's really not a good singer and is very shy.
Who do you think is going to be better at performing and singing?
And what do you think she said?
The one who thinks she's going to do a great job.
Yeah, the one who's reasonably confident, rationally confident in her abilities, right?
Right.
And I said, now let's say that Daddy thinks he's the best singer and dancer in the whole world.
How do you think he's going to do in putting on a singing and dancing show?
Great.
Not well, was the entirely appropriate answer.
Not well at all.
And so I said, you know, so believing it, like if everything else is equal...
Having a rational belief in yourself is very helpful.
However, confidence in the absence of rational evidence is delusion.
So, we sort of, we worked through that.
Now, the law of attraction, if I understand it correctly, we did something on this a while ago, but it's sort of like, you know, if you need money in your life, just keep picture money coming into your life and next thing you know.
Money will show up in your life.
Hopefully not in some sort of horrifying monkey's paw scenario if you've ever read that old short story.
And if you haven't read that old short story, you need to read what people used to think of the law of attraction and what a nightmare it could be.
It's on the internet.
It's called The Monkey's Paw.
It's a great, great story.
The guy only wrote like one.
He wrote like so many short stories.
Nobody read that one.
If you have any kind of heart at all.
Now, of course, if you do it entirely silently, then it's mad, right?
I'd like a turtle.
I'm going to think of turtles.
I live in a condo in downtown New York.
I'm not going to get a lot of turtles unless the universe is playful and I get chocolates with caramel in them.
Ooh, I love turtles.
So...
You know, where things are possible, like if you say, oh, I really want to work in advertising, and you tell all your friends, and your friends care about you, and they look out for jobs in advertising, and they call you up and say, hey, a friend of a friend wants someone in advertising, and, you know, well, that's not the law of attraction, that's networking.
So that, you know, it's entirely possible.
But merely thinking something does not cause the universe to react in any way.
The universe is not like a TSA scanner constantly looking for your desires and trying to provide them.
If people believe that that's possible, my only guess can be that there is a time when your desires are supposed to change the universe to provide what you want.
And that time is called infancy.
Right?
Because You can't fulfill things for yourself.
You cry and you're supposed to get picked up and you're supposed to get cuddled and you're supposed to get fed food or breast milk or something like that.
You wake up with a bad dream.
Someone's supposed to take care of you.
And so, yeah, there's a time where your yearnings and needs should cause a bewildering universe to provide your needs.
It's just in the realm of giant boob-hanging trees of lactose, right?
And so, if people are adults and they still have this need, Then I imagine it's based upon they didn't get that when they were a kid and they sort of hope that some – they have this deep down need to get those needs met without them lifting a finger.
That's called infancy and you've got to deal with the fact if that didn't happen that it didn't happen and it's never going to happen and it never should happen because the only way you can deal with things that happen in infancy when you're an adult – It's by regressing back to infancy, which does not seem like a very good thing if you don't want to end up with poop in your Buster Browns.
So, I think that the law of attraction is nonsense.
I think it's deluded.
And I'm also concerned that it takes the place of rational action.
Because if you say, well, I'm broke, man.
I got a lot of bills.
I need some money.
So I'm going to sit in the dark corner of my rented room and think about money.
Money coming in through the window.
I sneeze and out comes money.
And down there floating in my leftover Indian food logs in the toilet in the morning, A rolls of bills and money is going to appear.
It's like, you know, you could get a job.
No.
No, I'm thinking about money.
And so my concern is that if people believe in this law of attraction, they're going to do a whole lot of dreaming and not a whole lot of action, right?
People say, don't you have dreams?
No, I don't have dreams.
I have goals because I'm not four anymore.
Sorry, go ahead.
I guess that's kind of a question I should have asked instead.
Are thoughts paired with action, sort of, can they make you limitless in a sense?
Because I kind of have a story, if you'd like to allow me to share that.
Well, hang on, hang on.
I must exercise caution in the reception of stories.
So when you say a story, what do you mean?
Do you mean like an anecdote that seems to provide some indication that thoughts control reality?
Well, not just thoughts, but thoughts paired with action.
Okay.
Hang on, hang on, hang on.
Is this something that could survive objective empirical testing and statistical scrutiny?
By you, sure.
I wouldn't be sure.
Okay, if you believe that it can survive rational scrutiny, then I'm happy to hear the story.
I'm kind of concerned that if you are a restaurant, you serve food to people and you have to make sure there isn't salmonella and all of that in it.
I just remember when I was in McGill, this guy wrote a play called Catching Sam and Ella.
It was a sort of murder mystery, so to speak, and catching Sam and Ella, catching Sam and Ella.
And it's kind of a clever title and a fun play.
Anyway, so I am serving up thoughts and ideas to hundreds of thousands and eventually millions of people.
And I have to make sure there's no crap in it.
If you're going to give me a woo-woo story, I caution you ahead of time that I'm not going to be kind to woo-woo.
You know, like John with the remote viewing.
What am I looking at?
I was actually looking at blood worms, because I knew he wasn't going to think of...
It doesn't work that way, right?
I'm not kind with the woo-woo in the same way that I don't serve customers in a restaurant if I owned a 19-day-old meat that's been sitting in the New Delhi sun.
Okay, go for it.
All right, well, I'm 20 years old, and I was born in a third-world country, Guinea.
And I came to America when I was five years old.
And growing up, I had a really sort of bad experience growing up because I went to several different schools because I was always moving around.
And that kind of made me...
I'm sorry?
Sorry, you said you went to several different schools.
You got a bit of mumble-itis on you.
Oh, I'm sorry.
Because I was always moving around.
And that kind of made me socially anxious.
And as a result of this, I kind of isolated myself from people and society.
I was always alone.
Hang on, man.
Hang on.
I thought that the story was going to be in the future, but the story is in your description.
No, it leads to that.
No, no.
Hang on.
But you're already off in your description.
Right.
Right?
So you said that you went to a bunch of different schools because you moved around.
Right.
As a kid.
That's not true.
Why did you go to a lot of different schools?
Was it because you just up and decided to move one day?
No, because my mother was moving us around because she was always changing her jobs.
Okay, so why was she always changing her jobs?
Because I wouldn't know the answer to that question.
But it was something out of my control.
I think I know the answer to that question.
At least I can put a guess out as to what the answer to that question is.
Why?
Well, you change jobs a lot, usually, because you get fired.
Unless you ended up living in a mansion and she was just so good at her job that she had to keep upgrading.
But that's usually not what happens, right?
You're right.
She did a couple of times, about 50% of the time.
But the other times, it was simply because she just didn't like the area and wanted something new and really didn't think about it as much.
Well, okay.
So you moved around a lot because your mom was not competent at her job.
Right.
And...
Did your mother ever talk to you about any possible social anxiety that you might be experiencing or did she ever help you to integrate into your new environments by inviting new kids over and showing them a great time at your house so that they would welcome you with open arms?
Did she help you adjust to this new environment or did she kind of just put you down like an old suitcase in the back of a closet and let you fend for yourself?
The second option.
Okay, so she moved around a lot because she was fired a lot and she was pretty incompetent at her job and then she didn't even bother to try and help you to I feel like I have the same conversation over and over again about female responsibility.
It's like every single week I get this giant water cannon of whitewashing estrogen nonsense.
I'm sorry.
I'm going to have to have a rant.
Oh, don't worry.
I do it myself.
I will step into the rant room.
I will bathe myself in massive testosterone, wash juices of my own outrage.
I will shake myself off like a St.
Bernard deep in the snow and I will return in just a moment.
The Bing sound will be me exiting the conversation and entering the antechamber of infinite screaming.
Bing!
Mike, is it just me?
Do we have the same conversation every single week of my life?
There may have been one show in the year 2000 where you didn't talk about female response.
Mike, don't tweak me, man!
I'm in the room!
I'm in the room!
I'm full of radioactive male testosterone frustration with the fact that everyone keeps treating children, everyone keeps treating women like ragdolls in a thunderstorm, just blowing around!
No one ever does anything!
It just happens to them!
It just...
They're just dominoes.
They just fall.
They're like leaves going over a waterfall.
They have no limbs.
They have no choice.
God Almighty, please, people, in 20 years, when you meet my daughter out in the world, I beg you, I beg you, please, please, people, treat her like an adult with choice, like an adult who actually has a brain and can think and is responsible for Please,
God, just let's try shoving a little bit of responsibility on those delicate, pearl-like little shoulders of the Ferris X. I'm pretty sure they can handle it.
They want to be army rangers.
They want to be firemen.
They want to be cops.
They want to drag people out of burning buildings.
I've been told this my whole life.
I'm pretty sure they can handle some moral choice and free will and responsibility allocation.
Oh god, please stop.
All these men calling in and covering up.
All of these women who seem to be these blank ciphers of pure reaction.
Just ghosts blown about by the psychic wings of other people's decisions, never making any choices of their own.
I just moved around because I was four and I said, fuck this place, I'm going to get me a Greyhound.
And I'm getting out of here.
I hear Reno is shitloads of fun.
I can get a box, a cardboard box, climb up on top of it and play some Kino and look at some fucking cleavage.
I'm moving on, baby.
I'm four and a half.
I'm blowing this popsicle stand.
As Sam Cooke said, I'm going to grab me an armful of Greyhound and ride right out of town.
No!
You moved because your mom got fired and she didn't help you adjust.
That's why you had social anxiety.
Because your mom got fired and she didn't care enough about you to help you adjust.
You know, you're absolutely right.
Well, basically, when I got to college, I was just bored with life.
And I was really disinterested in everything.
And I'd come home from school and I'd just kind of throw my backpack down and I'd just kind of sit and look through a window.
And I was trying to find myself and find goals or find passion or something to live for.
And that kind of led me to People like you and Terence McKenna and just watching a lot of philosophy and reading a lot of self-help books and things of that nature.
About eight months ago, I heard about Law of Attraction for the first time.
I applied it in my life.
I'm not saying I just sat around and just thought.
Actually, about a year ago, Something really bad happened in my life.
I was on summer break and I went to my mom's house and I was working at Walmart for the summer and I met this girl.
Long story short, I got her pregnant and she's actually 10 years older than me.
How old were you when you were working at Walmart and got a woman pregnant?
I think you might have needed a bit more training on what they mean by greeter.
Hi, welcome to Walmart.
No, no, no, not in Walmart.
Oh, not in Walmart.
I thought the Walmart thing was somehow relevant.
Sure, I've got exactly what you want.
It's down here at Isle Cork.
So anyways, about two months later, she got pregnant and The thing is, I was at school.
She was here where I live and a few hours away from me and she got pregnant.
To this day, I don't know if the child is mine because she refuses to let me take a paternity test.
I went through hell, I'm not going to say because of her, because of myself, because it was my decision to sort of affiliate myself with her.
Sorry, how did she get...
Did you have unprotected sex?
Yes.
And you were how old?
19.
So you were 19 and she was almost 30.
Right.
And she was like, hey, let's have unprotected sex.
And you were like, sounds good.
Right.
Why?
I don't know, you know.
Nope.
If you don't know, this is not the conversation for you.
You know I don't take that from people, right?
Of course you know.
Why did you have unprotected sex with an older woman?
I was young.
Well, I still am.
I'm 20.
Nope.
Nope.
It's not enough.
Lots of young people don't have underprotected sex.
Right.
I don't know why that's the answer.
Would you like to know the answer why?
I would like to know.
I will tell you the answer why.
Because she wanted it.
And I gave it to her.
She wanted it, and because you were raised by a single mom who yanked you from place to place because she was incompetent at her job and doesn't even think To help you adjust to your new environment, it means that you were not allowed to grow up with any needs of your own around your selfish single mom.
Which means that when another woman, a woman has a desire, when a woman has a need, when a woman has a preference, you were trained, as I was trained.
I'm not putting you in a box here that I'm not also in or wasn't in when I was younger.
But you're in a box where when you're around a woman's needs, you're like, okay.
How could I possibly have a need different or in opposition to the women around me?
Because you never, I bet you never saw anyone successfully stand up to your mom, especially a man.
Especially not me.
Especially, well how could you?
You can't possibly.
Right?
There's no dictator in the world like a single mom.
They are the source of all the other dictatorships.
Because you then are raised and you end up like this Poor fellow Matthew in the call, right?
Actually, I think his last name was Matt.
His first name was Dor.
Where the woman's like, I want to sleep around.
And he's like, okay.
Right?
And so this woman's like, let's have hard, unprotected sex.
And because you're raised by a single mom and don't know how to say no to women, you can't.
You weren't raised that way.
You're like, okay.
Right.
Is that fair to say?
That's fair to say.
And I'm sorry for that.
Okay, good.
I just really wanted to...
I completely agree with you and I've even told my mom this, you know, she's neurotic, but, you know, of course she doesn't listen.
Right.
So, yeah, just, and, you know, you probably have some awareness of this.
But for those who don't, right?
I mean, it took me for a while in my 20s to say, well, wait a minute.
Shouldn't I have some needs here, too, other than lust?
Definitely.
Lust is a way of eclipsing the other person, especially a woman, of course.
And wait a minute.
Shouldn't I have some needs and preferences here?
Shouldn't I also fight for what I want out of respect for the woman?
Out of respect.
And the moment you start bringing needs of your own that may be inconvenient to others into your life, whoa!
Oh, definitely.
Quite a change.
Alright.
So, because you were raised by a single mom who never let you get a word in edgewise and bullied and dominated you and didn't care about your needs, you ended up impregnating an older woman just because she wanted to have unprotected sex.
Alright.
And so, while all of this was happening, I was doing really poorly in school because I just always had the mentality that school is, at least in my opinion, useless.
And so I caught myself in a really bad situation where I had basically expired my time at university and I didn't have a high enough GPA to get into a major.
I, you know, thought, presumably had a baby on the way.
Still to this day, don't know if it's mine.
And I was basically hopeless.
So I began just sort of doing a lot of research, trying to find myself, you know, because I kind of refused to just give up and just kind of I didn't let life or let those events take me somewhere I didn't want to go.
And I found Law of Attraction and I started applying it in my life and I didn't just sit around and just kind of hope, you know, because hope never did anything for anybody.
I had positive intent and I practiced every day.
I taught myself how to program basically, how to write software, how to make websites, how to make apps.
I did this for about 10-12 hours every single day for about 6 months straight.
At the beginning of that, I had a vision for myself.
I don't want to sound pretentious or anything, but I had a sort of epiphany.
I saw myself 5 years in the future standing in front of a big crowd and sort of preaching to others what I've learned during this whole journey.
I saw myself six months into the future, six to eight months, something like that, at getting a job or an internship at some tech startup and kind of having all of that hard work being paid off.
And two months ago, which was six months into the future, I got an internship at a tech startup after, I'd say, 1,500 hours of hard work.
And I said, You know, I told myself, wow, you know, we did it.
We made it.
All that hard work paid off.
And one thing I learned about law of attraction is, I know you don't believe in it, but I do.
But I don't believe in just sitting around and hoping for things to happen.
Hang on, hang on though.
What does what you say, what you just described, I don't understand what that has to do with the law of attraction.
Okay, well, let me tell you at least what I think it has to do with it.
The thought that you can be or do anything in life, that thought will make you do an action, and that action will lead you somewhere.
That's what I see in law of attraction.
But you're talking about having a goal.
Right.
Wanting an end point, taking the steps necessary to achieve it, and achieving it.
I don't see how that...
I mean, I'm not an expert on the law of attraction, but I don't see how that's not just having a goal and working to achieve it.
I think...
Can I give you a course example?
Yes.
Okay, this is nothing to...
I'm not trying to denigrate your goals and what you've achieved, which is very admirable and noble.
So, once, when I was on my way to a business meeting, this is...
I guess I was in my late 20s or early 30s.
I didn't even have a driver's license yet, so I had to be driven around like the prince.
It was very lovely.
And one morning, man, I had to take a dump.
Oh, God.
Ah, it was horrible.
I don't know if, like, normally, like, I've never run out of gas, right?
Because, you know, you go and get gas in your car when you need it, right?
And, you know, and of course, you know, when it comes to getting to a washroom, it's usually not a big problem in my life.
I don't have to carry around a bucket or something, right?
I mean, here, let me squat over a plastic bag and continue the meeting.
Like I'm not some Borat character in the business world, right?
And, but this, I was driving with a guy and We were on our way to a meeting, and it was just like, I don't know if I'd eaten something, but it was just like, uh-oh.
Uh-oh.
We're talking triplets.
This is going to be a breached birth.
Emergency.
Emergency.
Right?
I mean, and it's like, I'm like, and of course you don't want to like freak the person out.
It's like, I'm like, hey man, listen, we really, I hate to say this, we really need to get to a washroom.
And I'm like, he's like, man, we're going to be late.
And I'm like, we might be late.
That's still better than me arriving with shit on my pants.
So if we could get to a washroom, I'd be really, really excited by that, right?
And we were in just one of these stretches of highways somewhere, I think it was in Texas, somewhere in America, and oh man, like no exits, right?
No exits.
And then the nightmare of having to take a crap when you're in a car, the nightmare happened, and you know what that is?
Lots of red lights ahead of you.
Everybody's slowing down.
And not only are they slowing down, but they're not slowing down to the point where you can actually stop and go in the bushes by the side of the road and wipe your ass with something that hopefully is not poison ivy, right?
And I don't know, like about a mile up, there was an exit or something, and I'm like, man...
I got to tell you, and I hope you get the urgency in my voice, but I'm basically like a woman who's going to give birth to nine children.
I'm like Octomom on a trampoline right now, like in like stage 10 month of pregnancy or something.
You got to take the shoulder, you know?
And it says right there, only for emergencies.
And I'm like...
This is a rental, man.
This is a rental car.
I think this qualifies.
You have got to get me to a washroom or I'm going to fill this car up and the jaws of life won't be enough to make you want to draw your next breath.
So long story short, we got to the washroom and oh my god.
I've had moments of joy in my life.
I've had lots of moments of joy.
I really have.
Like, I have been very fortunate in the joys and pleasures and happiness.
You know, birth of my daughter, marriage to my wife, success in this show, great friendships, good health, surviving illness.
Like, I've got lots and lots of joy in my life.
I'm not saying I'm proud of this.
That was one of my top ten.
Like, have you ever had it where you're like, I don't...
Please, God...
Don't let the buckle get stuck.
Your body is counting down.
I don't know if it's just because you get close to the toilet, but man, when you've really got to go, it's like...
It's like a countdown clock, you know?
It's like one of those James Bond LEDs.
Ten.
Nine.
Eight.
Come on, man.
Seven.
I don't care if your pants are halfway around your feet.
You better sprint like Donovan Bailey on Crisco.
Six.
Five.
Oh, God.
And then you get into the washroom and it's like...
I swear to God, if these stalls are all full, I'm ripping a deuce in a urinal because I just can't hold it anymore.
And anyway, it was just like, I've never had a fundamentally religious experience, but I swear to God, there were angels, ghostly angels rising around me and a celestial chorus.
And the angels, I could see the shitty graffiti through the angels' ghostly wings.
But that, oh, God, oh, God.
Oh, God.
And it was really quite, quite impressive.
I don't know if you've ever seen the movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind, but the guy keeps building all these devil's mountain.
I'm telling you, I didn't even want to flush.
I was so proud of what I had done.
If I had a cell phone, I'd have taken a picture, posted it on the internet, and said, proud father of approximately my equal body weight in human kaka.
And that it's there and not everywhere else around me, I consider myself a very, very fortunate man.
Steph, you should have tried to get a grant for it.
It's a piece of modern art, as far as I'm concerned.
Oh, I tell you.
I tell you.
If relief took tangible shape, it would look like a deuce mountain that reaches almost to the rim.
That's all I'm telling you.
That is one of the moments in my life where, you know, when I'm in great pain, or I think back on that moment of, and now, you know, yeah, yeah, you've given birth, so what?
I didn't have an epidural for this guy.
And this was like basically passing a couple of watermelons.
Anyway, so now, I had a goal.
The reason I'm telling you this, I had a goal, and my goal was get thee to a toilet.
And I took some very significant and necessary, if not downright threatening to my driver's steps in order to get...
To the washroom.
My concern wasn't that I wouldn't be able to meet the meeting.
My concern that what was going on below my nipples was so explosive that neither of us were going to be able to make it to the meeting if I let Rip in the car.
My concern was that we end up with a hole in the bottom of the rental car and a trail approximately a mile long on the highway.
With...
It flies on it.
And so I had a goal, which was get to a toilet, and I told the guy, and I insisted, and I really made it, I made it tangibly urgent, and I came out of that toilet a much lesser man.
I felt like I basically deflated, you know, like, oh, I could barely fit into this stall, and now I can slide out through the crack without opening the door.
And so was that the law of attraction that got me to the toilet?
I would argue no.
I would argue I had a goal, which was basically letting more bombs fly than a B-52, and I took the steps necessary to get to that goal, and I did the ridiculous waddle, don't crap your socks dance to the toilet, and I let rip.
And, you know, again, it's a funny story, I hope, but it's not trying to denigrate I guess it's all just perception then, because had it not been for the law of attraction, I don't think I'd be where I'm at today.
Even if it was just the perception that law of attraction works, and then that made me take the necessary steps to just do what any other goal setter would do.
Right.
So I don't know that we need anything mystical or, you know, the universe or anything, you know.
I think it's pretty hard to work at something 12 hours a day for six months and not succeed.
Well, it wasn't hard at all because I enjoy doing it, so...
Okay, but you worked hard.
It doesn't mean it was unpleasant, right?
Right.
But you worked hard to...
And, you know, if you're designing websites and learning to code and so on, you know, I mean, working really hard for six months...
Yeah.
I don't think there's anything mystical or magical.
And my concern is that if you put it out to the law of attraction, no, dude, it was you!
You did it!
It wasn't the universe!
You!
You and you alone!
Against all odds!
Take pride in that!
You know, it's like some guy who practices running, probably happens to come from Kenya, but practices running for years and years, and it's like, wow, the universe just delivered a gold medal to me!
No.
The law of attraction is the universe delivering a sprinting gold medal to me.
Now that would be the law of attraction.
Some guy who's practicing for 10 years and then wins a gold medal, that ain't the universe.
That's getting up early in the morning and running with goats on your back or whatever they do.
So then what would you call it that somebody could be in such a bad situation and just suddenly find courage?
To sort of pick themselves up and keep on moving.
What would you call that?
I don't know.
No, because anything I call it, it's going to leave so many gaps.
You know, it's like trying to put a squid in a tackle box.
Like, no matter what you do, there's always a little bit hanging out, right?
I mean, so I don't know if I could give...
Is it an epiphany?
Right?
Like, when I was a kid, I grew up in this, you know, crappy welfare single mom ghetto, pretty much.
I remember when I was a kid, I thought, I'm going to be 34 in Y2K. Yeah, I'm that old.
Get over it.
And I thought, I'm going to have a nice office.
I'm going to wear a suit.
I'm going to have a car.
I'm going to have a nice place.
I never thought I'm going to be here still.
Oh, God.
I mean, if somebody had told me that, I'd have, I don't know.
Made really bad decisions and probably ended up there anyway.
I don't know what made that.
Is it IQ? You sound like a very intelligent young man.
Is it IQ? Is it having a role model that you can respect?
There was a family when I was growing up where the dad was a professional, the mom was a stay-at-home, they were very nice people, they had a very calm and productive and fun household, and I used to spend a lot of time over there.
I was best friend at this guy's wedding, a best man at this guy's wedding when he grew up and we were great friends and all that.
And, you know, that had an influence in me looking outside of my immediate environment to find a goal that I could shoot for, aim for.
And so, but at some point it just comes down to...
Choices.
You made choices.
Right.
You made choices.
And you should be proud of that.
And you should own that and you should honor what you did.
And I'm concerned about you fobbing it off on some cosmic force.
I think the reason I'm doing that is because I basically don't believe in religion anymore for my own reasons.
But I think that conditioned me a little bit To sort of believe in something like law of attraction, believe in something like belief, having the belief that you can be whatever you want will actually like attract that to you, you know?
Oh, yeah.
I mean, if you can say no to God, you can say yes to life.
I mean, that's...
Right, right, right.
So...
There is an X factor when it comes to success.
Not everything is under our control, but a lot of it was under your control, and I think you did some heroic and great stuff, and you should be proud of that.
There is always a temptation to humility, and I feel this slippery slope myself pretty continually.
There is a temptation, and to me, the law of attraction has something to do with humility, right?
So, like Malcolm Gladwell has made this case that a lot of the people who started in the high-tech world were all born within a couple of months of each other, and all from, in particular, upper-middle-class families, and all in places where they had access to computing power that was unavailable to the rest of the population, and so on.
And there is this circumstances-produced X. And, yeah, I get that.
I mean...
I mean, as Bill Gates himself has pointed out, he says, you know, like I'm a smart guy, but I'm physically pretty weak.
So in the Middle Ages, I would have been pretty useless.
But now, right, obviously I provide some value.
And I think it's important to have that humility.
You know, I was born with a particular set of gifts, but it still takes strength and will and effort and courage to go and speak to the world in this way.
And to give stories about how you almost shit your pants, that's a way of keeping me humble, I guess, right?
So I think it's important to have humility to recognize that you may have been just biologically blessed with particular gifts of intelligence or whatever it is.
Or there are people whose writing I really like.
And like I think a lot of people, I'll certainly read.
Like I do a lot of reading for the show.
Like all the people that we interview and all that.
I can't just listen to their interviews because I need to make notes and highlights and all that kind of stuff.
But there's people whose writing I really like.
And I would consume a lot more of their thoughts.
If they didn't have voices that sounded like this when they spoke.
Yeah.
You know, if I had a voice that sounded like this when I spoke, it would be a little tougher for me to be successful.
Is that pedantic guy on helium?
What happened?
I think that's what Madonna's son sounds like.
I don't know.
But no, it's a shame, right?
I mean, I happen to have what they call a good instrument, which is I have a voice that's flexible and relatively pleasant to listen to and a fairly decent timbre and some range and all that.
And it comes out of voice training.
In theater school, it comes out of taking a lot of singing lessons and singing training and all that.
So I have a good instrument for this.
I also have an accent.
Like I thought, okay, I can either get a PhD or I can not lose my accent.
I really felt that not losing my accent saved me a lot of time and money.
Because if I had a southern accent and I was trying to talk about UPB, that would be tougher, right?
It's like what Jeff Foxworthy says, like, People hear a Southern accent, they just shave 20 points off your IQ, whether you like it or not.
You a doctor of moonshine?
And they hear a British accent or whatever the hell I cling on to or the colonies crap that I managed to pull off.
And people are like, I don't know.
It sounds smarter, so let's pile another 20.
Let's take the 20 that took off Jeff Foxworthy and put it on staff.
And so, you know, I happen to have certain, I mean, lucky, right?
The voice I have is a voice.
Lucky, right?
And, you know, I think you can, with humility, say, well, I'm going to put that to the service of mankind.
But listen, man, I'm telling you, pride and self-respect demand that we don't surrender more to circumstance than circumstance warrants.
We don't surrender more to accident.
Then accident warrants.
Yes, I was born with a good brain.
Yes, I was born with a nice voice.
Yes, I was born with X, Y, and Z. That has helped what I do.
But, when you think about, there are a lot of smart people in the world who have nice voices.
Right?
And who have decent educations.
And who were born in the West.
And who happen to be well-versed in the most dominant language in the world.
Right?
And it's not like we're all up here occasionally poking the ceiling of number one on iTunes, right?
And so, yes, the necessary but not sufficient, right?
Necessary means, you know, if you want to drive somewhere, if you want to drive to the next town, well, you need a car.
And if you don't have a car, you can't drive there.
You can be driven, but you can't drive, right?
So having a car is necessary to drive to the next town, but you still have to drive to the next town to achieve that.
And so there are things that you have that were necessary to your success, right?
I mean, if you'd had some god-awful brain parasite that ate out half your neofrontal cortex, then you'd be, you know, doing the same paint-by-numbers for 20 years and drooling on yourself, right?
With all due sympathy, right?
And so there's necessary, but those things aren't sufficient for you to achieve what you have achieved.
Lots of people, good brains, nice voices, decent educations, and they don't do what I do.
So I'm happy that the circumstances and accidents have helped facilitate what I do, just as I'm sure you're happy that having the opportunity and the interest and the enthusiasm and the brains to do what you're doing, that's necessary, but it's not sufficient.
The necessary we cannot take pride in, the sufficient that we can take pride in, because that is the result of our choices and virtues.
So we have the humility for those who We do not have what is needed to succeed.
And I think there we have charity and we have help.
But where we have succeeded, there we must take pride.
There we must take pride because if we refuse to take pride in what we have achieved, we refuse to grant other people the vision of the happiness and pride that comes from success.
If I'm around a lot of people and we're all fat, and I lose a bunch of weight and get healthy, if I say, well, it was just an accident.
You know, I ate something and I got worms and the worms sucked up half my diet coke juice and next thing you know, I'm down to 40 pounds, right?
Well, then they're going to say, well, okay, I don't want that parasite.
But if I say, well, no, I made a whole bunch of choices and I lost the weight.
If we are over humble, which when you're not Self-flagellating the humble when you're beating yourself up, saying, oh, you know, I guess I was just lucky, and I guess I, you know, I was in the right place at the right time, and, and, you know, next thing you know, right?
Right, there's an old Dave Barry thing about, like, nobody ever plans their life, shit just happens, like, like, you know what it says, I'm gonna become a heavy metal singer, what happens is they stub their toe, and they're in the emergency room screaming, and some guy's like, whoa, that's a pretty musical scream, maybe you could be the singer for my son's garage band, and next thing you know, they've got a Grammy, right?
But enough about Chad Kruger, but, but, uh, So, if you are over-humble, then you avoid the attacks of people who get annoyed when you are rightly proud of your achievements.
You say, yeah, I worked hard for it.
Yes, I took some bullets for it.
I have fulfilled my obligation to making the world a better place and I am damn proud of what we have done at this show.
And I am damn proud of everything that we do in this show.
Every single show.
The amount of shit we sometimes have to go through to get a show out.
The amount of conversations.
The amount of work.
The amount of doubt.
The amount of caution.
The amount of fear sometimes.
The amount of work.
You all just see a tip of the iceberg.
You see a tip of the iceberg, and that's fine.
That's what you should see, right?
I mean, that's what you should see.
But the amount of work it takes to put out some shows.
Oh yeah!
We're standing up against the lynch mob who thinks all cops are racist murderers.
Oh yeah!
We're standing up against the politically correct people who think that all migrants are fantastic.
Oh yeah!
We're standing up against the politically correct crowd who think that women are always victims.
Taking these stands is hard sometimes, and I am damn proud Of what we have done, the choices that we have made, what we have achieved.
I am very, very, very proud of that.
And if there was an afterlife and I stood before St.
Peter or whoever it's going to be to judge everyone, I would stand there and say, by God, I did what was necessary to the maximum of my ability to make the world a better place.
And if that's where If that's who you take into heaven, I'm there.
And if that's who you send to hell, I'm going there too.
Because I could not have done more.
I could not have done better.
I put every ounce of my ability.
I took every reasonable risk.
I squeezed every bit of energy out of my communications.
And I am incredibly proud of what we have done.
I am incredibly proud of the children whose lives we have scrubbed violence from, of the peaceful homes we have created, of the marriages we have created, of the children we have helped to create.
Not with Matthew and Christina, but I am very proud of the reason we have brought to the world.
I am very proud of the challenges we have brought to convention.
I am very proud Of the annoyance we have brought to complacency of the gadflies that we have been in this conversation in the world.
You know, it's ridiculous.
I can sometimes be in my recording room.
I call it a studio, right?
I can sometimes be in my recording room to get 10 or 15 minutes of a show can take two hours.
Take after take after take after take.
Where I don't stumble on my words.
Where I don't go off on a tangent.
Where I don't make a mistake.
I mean, it's ridiculous.
Plus, you have to stay enthusiastic.
You have to stay peppy.
You have to stay positive.
I try to minimize the jump cuts.
And it is, you know, sometimes it's ridiculous.
And some of it's just lack of plan.
You've just done the speech of your lifetime.
And right in the middle of it, Oh, the phone rings.
I forgot to mute it, you know?
Or some stupid thing.
You're doing a screen recording.
I do the PowerPoint screen recordings.
Oh, you know what you're doing?
You're recording a presentation that's hugely important that you've worked on for weeks that you've just spent an hour and a half trying to get done.
You've almost got it right.
You know what?
Now is a great time to update fucking iTunes.
Arrgh!
Hey, I know you're busy.
You know what would be great?
I'm going to install a whole bunch of Windows updates and reboot.
I mean, you're not doing anything important, are you?
Hey, if the CPU and GPU are over 50%, stay the fuck off my hard drive, man!
Bastards!
Stop helping me!
So, yeah, it's hard work, and it's a challenge, and it's exciting, and it's scary, and it's...
So be proud.
Be proud of what you've achieved because that encourages other people to know that if you're proud of it, you're proud of it because you did it.
You're proud of it because you willed it.
You're proud of it because it's not the momentum of history that is driving you forward like a leaf On Whitewater Rapids, it is your choice.
It is your will that has made your life.
And if you show that, yes, all of the lazy, weak-willed people will rail against you.
Rail against you.
Hey man, what are you doing showing willpower?
We squids are totally offended by that.
Hey man, what are you doing showing that you have a jetpack?
We aimless, drifting helium balloons filled with marijuana smoke are totally offended by that, man.
What are you doing with a spine, man?
We worms are really upset by that, man.
What do you mean I have to date higher quality women, man?
I like scooping in like a vulture on low quality poontang, man.
Don't make me feel bad about that.
I mean, whenever you show a better way, whenever you show something that's superior and you take pride in it, Well, lots of people out there don't want to be reminded that they're wasting their lives.
That leads me to one question, if you could answer that.
You're a person I really revere, and I really want to one day make an impact on the world similar to what you're doing.
And I want to help people realize that they can set a goal and achieve it.
And I guess the best place to start is at home with my mom.
And she's very...
Hang on, hang on.
Hang on.
I'm sorry.
Why is the best...
You want to change the world.
Why is the best place to start at home with your mom?
The easiest that I can do right now, I guess.
It's the what?
The easiest I can do right now.
Oh, no.
Oh, no.
Oh, no, no.
Not the easiest.
Not the easiest thing you can do by far.
I would actually say, do not start skiing by being fired out of a cannon at the top of, say, Mount St.
Helens.
Right?
I mean, that's...
Because, I mean, have you had any luck changing your mom's mind?
No.
And how long have you been trying?
For how many years have you been trying to influence your mom?
Well, for as long as I've been trying to influence myself.
And, you know, I've made it, right?
So, years and years?
For a couple...
Well, no, I'm sure when you were a kid, you tried to change your mom's mind.
I mean, I can't be the only parent whose kid tries to change his mind, right?
Right, right.
So for years and years and years, you have been trying to influence or change your mom's thinking, right?
Something like that.
Hey, man.
Don't fog me, bro.
What do you mean something like that?
Have you been using electroshock therapy?
Are you using tasers?
Are you using carrier pigeons with messages from the future?
I mean, what do you mean something like that?
Of course you've been trying to change your mind.
You can't be in a relationship without trying to change people's minds.
Right, great.
Have you had much success?
No, I have not.
If you've been trying to do something for 20 plus years, you've had no success, and you say, well, that's where I should really start.
Because I hate quitting.
I don't like quitting.
I don't like investing time and stopping.
Oh no, man, listen.
Can I tell you?
Great secret to life.
Great secret to life.
Are you ready?
Yes.
Okay.
To truly succeed at life, You have to love quitting.
You have to love quitting.
Because most of what we do is wrong.
Most of what we do, especially when we're young, is a misallocation of resources.
Did you quit the relationship with the 29-year-old woman who made you get her pregnant?
I mean, if you want, I can give you backstory, but no, I didn't.
Wait, wait, are you still dating her?
No, no, no.
Okay, good, so you quit.
Right, right.
Good!
Good!
No good!
It's good, but it's bad.
Because I'm in a situation where, like I said, I still have not been able to get a paternity test, and I don't know if it's mine or not, and her and her attorney...
No, no, no, and I get that.
I get that.
And we'll work, right?
I mean, that's something you've got to deal with, right?
That's outside the realm of philosophy.
That's more in the realm of biology and adrenaline.
Right.
But if you're not the dad, right, then...
Great.
Good, you're off, right?
I mean...
I don't mean to shock the tender Victorian sensibilities of the younger listeners to the show, but it is actually true that the woman I'm married to now was not the first woman I ever dated.
I know.
Take a moment.
You know, I hope that that didn't make your copy of Jane Austen jump right out of your shaky hands.
But no, I quit on a lot of women before I found the women I'll never quit on.
The women I'll never quit on.
I mean, do you know Mike quit his job?
To do this?
Okay, that's not a good example.
Because sometimes it would.
No, I'm kidding.
Right?
Was that fun, Mike?
Oh, that was pretty scary, leaving great benefits, a well-paying job for a donation-based philosophy show in the middle of a recession.
You know, a little scary.
Oh, wait, Mike, thanks for quitting your job.
I have cancer!
Yeah, that was a little scary.
A little scary.
Just a smidge.
Yeah, Mike actually just wanted to come over and give me chemotherapy with a steam iron.
It's...
A very heavy one it looked like, but it's okay.
I had some blow darts when we talked.
But yeah, you've got to quit on a whole bunch of stuff.
Knowing when to quit, cut your losses.
You know who doesn't quit?
Addicts.
They don't quit.
You know who doesn't quit?
Government spending.
People who like spending, they don't quit, right?
You know who else doesn't quit?
Terrorists.
They don't quit, man.
You know who should have quit?
Hitler.
Great job.
Great job not quitting and being a workaholic, right?
I mean, knowing when to cut your losses, knowing when to quit, knowing when to get out.
Oh, beautiful.
You know, looks kind of stormy out there.
I am currently sailing in a skiff made almost entirely of popsicle sticks held together by rubber bands.
But I don't want to be a quitter, so let's sail right into the middle of that water spout.
Because I don't want to be a quitter.
No, quit.
Quit.
You go for help.
I'll photo the bloody footprints into the basement.
Because I don't want to turn around and be a quitter.
No, no, be a quitter.
That would be excellent.
Excellent.
So, no, listen.
I mean, be a quitter.
I'm telling you.
Being a quitter is something...
You know who...
I'm a libertarian!
I would love to see change and a free society.
So I'm going to spend about 9,000 years attempting to achieve this through the political process.
I mean, come on!
It's important to quit.
I wouldn't have come up with 95% of the useful things I've come up in this show if I didn't quit already, right?
Oh, Kant's categorical imperative seems a little shaky.
I'm going to quit believing in that and I'm going to start looking for something new.
Oh, objectivism.
I guess I can just read stuff rather than think for myself.
She has a lot of answers that are very compelling.
Old Miss Rand.
But no, at some point, I've got to quit.
I've got to quit being an objective.
I've got to go a little further, right?
I still believe in most of it, but, you know, I've got to go a little further.
I mean, you quit or you quit on God.
Quit her.
Well, I didn't quit on God.
I quit on religion.
Okay.
And I did quit on God in the sense that I don't believe in a traditional God.
Like, God.
I feel God doesn't exist.
I was created by a man.
But I believe in something, you know?
But you quit your religion.
Right.
Right?
And we're working on your law of attraction stuff, right?
But quitting is essential.
Quitting is essential.
You know, people use ideas a lot to keep competitors away.
Keep competition at bay.
And if you want to keep people from competing with you, you tell them never to quit.
Because whatever they're doing is probably not competing with you directly.
So Brad Pitt drove a delivery truck or something stupid before he became a movie star.
Now all of the other guys who want Brad Pitt's job would have been saying to him, Being a delivery driver, that's the wave of the future, man.
You could end up owning your own wheel.
Or two.
Or, I don't know, you could hand down two to your kids.
They could own three or four.
You never know.
Sky's the limit.
The world is your oyster, man.
Don't quit being a delivery driver.
Otherwise, you're going to get those jobs that otherwise Danny DeVito would have gotten.
Right?
So, yeah, people always tell you not to quit.
But that's because they don't want you to compete with them.
Quitting is very, very important.
Because if we say we can't quit, you know what we've given up?
Free will.
Like Terrence McKenna said, if you believe in something, then you're automatically precluded from believing in its opposite.
You become a train.
On a track.
No choice.
It's also the fallacy of sunk costs.
I put 20 years into objectivism, and walking away from that, It was important.
And please, again, I understand I'm still mostly an objectivist, right?
So, you know, people invested a lot in slavery.
Slavery went on for tens of thousands of years.
And it's still going on.
Slavery of the mind.
But a lot of places in the world, they've quit, man.
They've just totally given up on slavery.
Like, they weren't even committed to it.
Like, they're just lazy.
Like, where's their commitment to slavery?
It's been going on forever.
Who would they say it's wrong?
No.
Quit, man.
Quit, quit, quit.
Always explore the joy of quitting.
Always explore the joy of walking away from stuff.
Because if you're not free to leave, you're not really there.
I love my country.
Can you leave?
Can you go live anywhere you want with no problems and no hassle and no paperwork?
Yes, because we're from the Middle East.
Well, no, let's put that thing off to the side.
I love my country.
Can you leave it?
No!
I love my husband.
Does he let you out of the basement?
No.
Tied with leg irons to the water heater?
No!
Then I don't think you love him.
If you can't leave, you can't love.
If you can't get out, you can't be where you are.
Commitment is staying because you choose to be there.
And if you say, well, I can't quit, guess what?
You're not choosing to be there, you're not really there, and you don't have any commitment.
All you have is a leg iron of habit.
And a virtue called, it's great to give up my choice completely.
You know what would be great?
Not to have any choice in the matter whatsoever, but to have a mindless, blind, dogged determination to just keep struggling on no matter what.
Because I really feel that's called having free will, choice, and a spine.
No, no, no.
Every morning I'm like, do I want to quit?
No.
Okay, let's do a show, right?
Every day.
Like 7.30 o'clock, right?
We're doing a show on a Friday night instead of 7.30.
I'm like, ah, do I want to do the show?
I'm free to do the show.
I'm free not to do the show.
Mike's free to show up.
He's free to not show up.
Stoyan, no.
No choice of Stoyan.
He's not.
No.
Anyway, that's a topic for another time and possibly for a tribe.
But no, you have a choice.
So I could not be doing this show right now.
I could be doing six million other things.
So I'm here because I choose to be here.
I don't have to be here.
I don't have to be here.
I could go and become an optician.
I could become an undertaker.
I could start finger painting.
I could become a mime.
No.
I'm here because I could not be here.
And that's my commitment.
And I know that's a practical thing to do, right?
And with government, we can't quit the government, right?
People say, I love my government.
Okay, can you quit them?
No!
Then you can't love them.
Okay, so I've got to move on to the next caller, but that's my advice.
Don't hand over to the universe what you've achieved yourself, and don't take pride in the stuff that's accidental.
And inspire other people with the rational pride of your own achievements.
That gives them the choice to do what you do.
And love, love quitting long time.
Alright, thanks man.
I appreciate it, Paul.
Keep us posted and best of luck to you.
You deserve it.
Thank you.
You too.
Good luck.
Alright, well up next is John.
And John wrote in a very kind email that I invited him to come on the show and read to us.
And then afterwards, we're going to have a bit of a discussion from what he's learned, which he'll describe as he reads the email.
So welcome to the show, John.
Hey there.
Hello.
I'm going to read the email now.
I just wanted to say thank you to you and all of the Freedom Man Radio staff for what you're doing.
I encourage you not to stop.
Quite a while ago, I contacted Michael about calling into the show for some relationship advice, and he recommended that me and my fiancé at the time read real-time relationships together.
We began to do so, but she quickly lost interest in reading, so I continued on my own.
I implemented the concepts in the book to our relationship, and it pretty quickly led to the end of the relationship.
Listening to FDR and reading real-time relationships literally saved my life.
If I had not began to become curious about myself and about my relationship with my fiancé at the time, I would most likely have been stuck in an extremely toxic relationship that could have led to untold horrors not only for me, but for any potential children we could have had.
I'm now in a relationship with a woman that I'll be getting married to in about a month now, which is now a couple weeks.
We are both dedicated to peaceful parenting and regularly practice the concepts in real-time relationship by being completely honest about our feelings with one another.
I've never experienced the kind of joy and intimacy that I have with her.
It's completely blown me away.
So, thank you.
Well, thank you.
That's wonderfully Kind and generous message.
That's lovely to hear.
What was...
I don't mean to sort of...
You know, you're happy with the new woman in your life and you're going to get married soon, which I'm thrilled about.
What was the...
Ah!
About the previous...
Well, it was a bit of an interesting situation because we had quite a long-term relationship.
We met when we were young teenagers and we're both immature and kind of grew up and...
I kind of matured and kind of grew on in ambitions and things like that and began to listen to your show and think about all these things that you talk about, about relationships and thought about parenting and raising children and things like that.
And she didn't really grow up in terms of maturity.
And there were just a lot of Issues with the relationship that were not good.
Hang on, hang on.
Sorry, let's circle back.
Hey, did you feel that?
Did we hit something?
I think we should circle back.
She didn't really grow up?
Right, yeah.
I don't know if I have another female responsibility rant in me.
So please help me.
Help me.
She chose not to grow up.
Okay, good.
Thank you.
Yes.
You didn't hit puberty because...
In terms of maturity though, there was a lot about the relationship that was not good.
And there were a lot of things about the way that she treated me that were not good.
And I really don't know why I put up with it for so long.
That was something that I might...
I have been interested in talking to you about...
Hello?
Yes, I'm still here.
Okay, sorry.
It was like, just like I didn't want to, if you'd inhaled a lot, you know?
If you're like some sort of narwhal, you can speak for 30 minutes.
You take a big breath, I didn't want to interrupt, right?
Do you want me to give you the answer to that?
I mean, it's very quick.
Sure.
Well, the reason that you were in that relationship for so long was because the people around you supported you being in that relationship for their own selfish needs.
It was beneficial to them for you to be in that relationship and the fact that it was at your expense sadly was not that relevant to them.
I feel like...
That may be part of it.
I feel like it also may have been part of me trying to hide the truth about that relationship from people, because I do consider my family to be a good family.
Well, then, would they know when you're hiding very important things from them?
I mean, listen, I know every time that Stoyan and Bessel's from the company.
Well, I think I do.
Mike, do I? Stoyan has not got his mic on, right?
So I can pretty much abuse him publicly.
He's got no recourse.
Is that right?
Wait, is he listening?
Stoyan.
Actually, I meant to say someone else.
Love you, man.
No, wouldn't they know if you said I was hiding something, you know, hiding?
They know, right?
I think that to an extent they did notice.
But I don't know that anyone really knew that it was as bad as it was in terms of my family.
Yeah.
I think that part of it was me being afraid to talk about that with them.
Not because I felt like they would invalidate my feelings or anything like that, but just because I was embarrassed about the situation.
I feel like...
You know you're not exactly putting any of my concerns at rest here, right?
I'm not saying your family's bad, right?
I'm just saying that especially parents know their kids really, really well.
You know, I can see my daughter across a football field and know what her mood is, right?
And she's the same with me too, right?
I mean, we really, really know each other well.
And I think it's pretty hard to hide things from people who are close to you with whom there's sort of open communication.
I'm not saying bad, right?
But in terms of like Where the standard could be, if that makes sense.
I could be wrong.
Listen, I'd like to think that if my daughter, she grows up and she's in some, I don't know, I can't imagine she would, but let's say she's in some bad relationship.
Like, I'm just gonna keep asking, like, I'm just not, I'm a dog with a bone, right?
You know, I'm not gonna pour energy into listeners that I wouldn't pour 10 times more energy or 100 times more into my family, right?
In terms of, you know, figuring things out and sorting things out and so on, right?
Well, I will say for sure that my mom, um, With what I did talk to her about and with what she did notice in me, she did share her concerns about that relationship a lot, especially near the end, like once it started to become clear to me that things were not good in the relationship and I started to doubt that it would last.
She definitely did express her concerns about red flags that she saw.
What were her concerns?
Well, some of her concerns were with some of the things that my girlfriend at the time, just the way that she is.
She's kind of passive-aggressive, kind of overdramatic about things.
She's kind of not very committed to improving herself.
There were a lot of examples where she would be in a class at school that she would just not really commit herself to and would fail the class and not take ownership for it.
Say that again?
How pretty was she?
She was pretty.
I thought that she was prettier when we were younger.
Of course now, I mean, I'm not attracted to her at all, just knowing the kind of person that she is.
But I would say that she was pretty.
Right.
It's funny how when you see, when the sort of scales, the physical attractiveness falls away, just how unrecoverable it is.
At least for me.
Right.
Every now and then, if I'm looking at a British website, if I'm looking up something, In the sort of mainstream media, they always have this, like, on the sidebar, it's always like, you know, so-and-so shows off her wonderful legs in Ibiza or something like that, and then it's like, so-and-so shows off her revenge body.
You know, and I guess she got dumped by some guy, she went to the gym, and now she has a revenge body, right?
I remember going out with some woman, and we broke up, I broke up with her, and I don't know.
I had to talk to her for some reason a little bit later, and she's like, I'm now an aerobics instructor.
Oh, no, Pilates.
I'm a Pilates instructor or something like that, right?
I guess she'd got her revenge body, and it's just like, yeah, okay.
I've still seen beyond the surface, so...
I don't care if the car's been repainted.
If there ain't no engine, I still can't take it out for a drive.
It's funny.
You're like, wow, this person's so wonderful.
And then you crack through that fine layer and you see perhaps the inner hellscape of their personality and it's like, whoa.
If a woman you're having sex with changes to a giant cockroach, it doesn't really matter if she changes back.
It's still pretty much a boner killer.
Right.
All right.
Would you like me to share some of the things that I learned, some of the warning signs that I saw?
I want the red flags that are more specific.
You've given me passive-aggressive.
Those are big categories.
I'm curious what the red flags were.
And the reason, because you got out, right?
Yeah, that click was a bear trap.
I now have one leg.
But it's helpful if other people can hear that click and keep their legs, right?
So what was it early on that played out later that you saw?
Well, it's funny that you put it that way because very early on in the relationship there was a situation where she had another guy that she was talking to that they were kind of boyfriend-girlfriend type situation and she didn't tell that to me and I found out about that and this was pretty early on in the relationship.
How early?
Just a few months.
Anything earlier than that?
We'll get to that.
I'll bookmark that.
I'm just curious.
Once guys have invested a couple of months in, they're dicknapped and they're still in the flush of Rome.
I'm talking about the really early stuff.
I'm trying to think.
It was quite a while ago.
I guess one of the things that I could have...
One of the warning signs that I could see was that just the situation that we met in, I met her at a skating rink, actually, and I found out that she was there actually looking for a relationship.
Not, I guess in my opinion, the best place to go if you're looking for a relationship, but I don't know, it just seemed a little immature.
Wait, she wanted a quality man, she went to a skating rink.
I'm not saying there can't be quality men at skating rinks, and what was your first conversation like?
Did you approach her?
Well, it was one of those situations where I was with a group of friends, and I think that several of us noticed that she was looking at our group, and then I later found out that she was looking at me, and so I did approach her and talk to her.
But why?
And I don't really remember a whole lot about what the conversation was about.
Why did you do it?
Why?
Hello?
Hello?
Why?
Why did you approach her?
Why did you approach her?
I guess because I thought that she was pretty.
Okay.
Right, so there's a warning sign.
And the warning sign is not that you can't find a quality woman who's pretty.
Of course you can, right?
But why you're approaching her?
Because she's pretty.
Now, that already puts you in dicknapped territory, right?
Dicknapped is when your hormones are taking over your brain to blind you to potential low-quality mates, right?
And so if you're approaching a woman because she's physically attractive, obviously that's fine, right?
But you have to be very alert to the justifications, right?
Right.
I mean, I dated a woman when I was quite young.
Stunning.
And I was like, I kept waiting for her to say something really intelligent.
And once she did, right?
She did, you know, something came out, you know, we were talking about...
And I hung on to that, like, grim death, you know?
Well, I remember that time months ago, whatever, right?
And it is, you know, the justifications we can come up with to make our physical attractions palatable to our sensibilities can be pretty prodigious, right?
I mean, we work pretty hard to talk ourself into attractive proximity, right?
Right.
All right.
So then – and when you first talked with her, what was the conversation about or what was the conversation like?
It's hard to remember – I think it was really basic stuff about where you go to school and that type of thing.
And I think that we traded phone numbers.
I think that was really about the extent of the conversation.
The conversation was really boring, in other words, is what you're saying.
I can remember the first 20 sentences my wife and I spoke verbatim, right?
Because it was just such an electrifying conversation.
And So, you know, where do you go to school?
I go to school here.
It's cold in the ice rink.
The ice is shiny.
It rained today.
Let's exchange numbers because tits, right?
I mean, what was there in the conversation that made you want to have more of the conversation?
I guess there wasn't really anything about the conversation itself that made me want to have more of the conversation, to be honest.
So why did you want her number?
I guess we're back to the physical attractiveness thing.
Because you're pretty, right?
Right.
And part of it, I think, had to do with being young and just being around this mindset that having a girlfriend was something that kind of made you cool or something like that.
Was she a data symbol for you?
In other words, was she pretty enough that...
You know, like, I remember dating a woman once.
Really pretty.
And I was just, I was talking about it with my boss at work.
And, you know, just like, you know, when we're out, I assume that everyone just thinks I'm her bodyguard.
You know what I mean?
And she was a status symbol, right?
I mean, she's like...
Boy, he must be really well hung.
Whatever it is, he's really rich.
I don't know, just making stuff up.
But was she the kind of woman who, it's a status symbol, like it puts your balls on a big high pedestal for everyone to bow down and salute before?
I don't know that it was quite that much.
I feel like maybe that played into you.
That initial desire to go have the conversation or to maybe try to have a relationship.
I don't think that I would say that she was so pretty that I felt like it would put me on some kind of a pedestal for having her as a...
So was she about as attractive as you are?
I would say so.
At the time, yeah, I think so.
Now, you know that the number one predictor of the end of a relationship is the emotion or the Feeling called contempt, right?
And the reason I'm sort of grilling you at the beginning of things here is that if you're only attracted to the physicality, then the end result will be contempt.
If you don't find the woman fascinating, stimulating, verbally, intellectually, Emotionally.
Spiritually, you could say.
Let's put it all together.
Then what happens is...
And again, I don't want to tell you your experience.
So if this is not what it was for you, then of course let me know.
But what happens in my experience is...
Penis like egg.
Egg holder, not very interesting.
Penis still want egg.
Tells Brain, lie, pretend Eggholder is interesting.
Eggholder knows the actual truth, sees penis lying to Brain, loses respect for man.
Loss of respect eventually as man continues to lie and make up imaginary qualities of Eggholder. - Sure.
Eggholder gains nothing but a bottomless feeling of contempt for self-lying man who wants egg proximity regardless of emotional quality.
I'd say that's definitely true.
The end is in the beginning.
If she's not that interesting to you, she's going to watch you lie to yourself repeatedly and Why are you there?
It's a fundamental question.
Why are you there?
Why are you in her bedroom?
Why are you watching a movie with her?
Why are you going to get burgers with her?
Why are you there?
And if it's not because she's really a fascinating and interesting and stimulating person to be with, then you're there because nature likes babies.
And you can't be honest and say, well, I don't really find you that interesting, but I'm physically attracted to you.
So you basically, the whole thing is founded on a lie where you pretend that each other is interesting and lovable when it's just, it's lust, right?
And that that always grows into a kind of contempt.
Not because there's anything contemptuous about lust.
Lust is a wonderful thing.
But it's the lies that you have to tell yourself.
And the lies you have to tell the other person.
I love your tits.
I mean, you!
You!
Nothing but you, right?
Or whatever.
I mean, again, it is the lies that make the other person imaginarily interesting and then you have to kind of believe that and you have to, you know, if it's just physical attraction, you have to make up all these qualities that the other person doesn't have.
Mm-hmm.
And that inevitably leads to manipulation and contempt and the end.
I think it was actually on your show that I heard the phrase, I think you said, that when you are in a relationship with someone, you should think about whether you would still be friends with that person if they were the opposite gender.
And I think that that statement was one of the things that really made me Do a double take and just go, man, what am I doing?
Why am I in this relationship?
Because I don't think...
At the time, I was thinking about it and I said to myself, I don't think I would be here in this relationship if she was a guy.
I don't think I would hang out with her.
Yeah, or if she was 300 pounds or an elderly Asian gentleman, as the phrase goes, or whatever, right?
I mean, it is important.
Because, of course, if it's love...
It's got to survive getting old and ugly.
Liver spotted and saggy and all that kind of crap, right?
And it can't be based on looks alone.
Nothing wrong with looks, of course.
But, you know, it's just like saying, I'm on a steady diet of icing.
Really tasty and I'm losing my teeth.
Okay, so some of it was at the end was in the beginning to some degree in that it wasn't Her personality that you were attracted to.
Right.
And were you warned when you were growing up?
I'm not sounding like I'm picking a family.
I'm just curious, right?
So were you warned when you were growing up that...
Were you warned that you would be susceptible to looks and you really had to focus on the quality of the woman you wanted to date?
I want to say yes, but thinking about it, I can't really think of a specific situation where it was put that way.
I think those values were Communicated to me, but I didn't really hold on to them.
What?
I'm sorry.
I just felt we went around the foggy mulberry bush there.
So, was it reinforced to you that there's nothing wrong with, you know, being attracted to someone because she's pretty, but you can't date her unless she's interesting?
Like, you shouldn't.
Like, it's bad, right?
It's gonna be a big waste of time, effort, and it could be dangerous.
I don't think that it was put to me that way, no.
Why do you think?
Why do you think it wasn't?
It's important, right?
I mean, I hope that you're going to be a dad and you're going to have sons and daughters or maybe a dozen of each and you don't want them to go through what you went through.
You don't want them to waste time and money and possibly getting involved in something complicated which could be easily averted by just reminding and saying, okay, well, the You got this woman's number.
Would you call her if it was just some guy that you would like to maybe go hang out with or whatever, right?
I'm not sure.
I'm not sure why it wasn't communicated to me that way.
Okay.
You know that I never ever accept that answer, right?
You do.
You do know the answer.
And the reason I'm saying this is that this used to be very common knowledge, right?
And it used to be, to some degree, what was taught.
Not perfectly, but it was taught to men, right?
And to women, right?
So the question is, why wasn't it taught to you?
You'll be teaching your kids.
I'm in the process of teaching my daughter not to use her looks, right?
She's very pretty.
Don't do it.
Nothing wrong with being pretty.
Don't use it.
Hmm.
And that's important, right?
It's very obvious, right?
Like when you look back on it, it's like, well, of course, right?
I only took her number.
I only started dating her because she was pretty, not because she was interesting.
And it was clear that you can't spend a whole lifetime faking to yourself that someone is not who they are, right?
Or is who they aren't, which is interesting, right?
So why weren't you talking about that?
I don't know.
The more I think about it, I feel like something along those lines did come up later in the relationship about when it started to drift in a more serious direction as we got older.
My mom did talk to me about not using physical attraction as a reason for having a relationship in terms of getting married.
But I don't think that I was really talked to very much about dating and about things like that when I was young, like before I dated.
And I feel like maybe one of the justifications my parents had for that was that they didn't want me to be thinking about dating or they didn't want me to be thinking about getting into a relationship when they felt like I was too young to do that.
How old were you when you started dating this woman?
I was young.
I was 15.
What?
I was 15.
You were 15?
Right.
Okay, but that makes meeting on the ice wrinkle a little more logical.
And how long were you with this girl?
Seven years, about.
Long time.
Wow.
And how long were you engaged for?
Two years.
You'd spent seven years...
Pretending somebody was really interesting who wasn't.
Right.
That is some tiring stuff, man.
Yes.
Oh, let's rent another movie!
Otherwise we must talk.
An expansion to Skyrim is out.
Or we must talk.
Let's play cards!
Let's go see some music.
It's tiring, right?
You're like a nomad of boredom.
You can't rest.
You're like a shark.
You can't stop or I'm going to sink.
Right.
And I think that part of the reason why I stayed in the relationship for so long was a little bit of self-esteem.
It was a little bit of not in the sense that I felt like I needed to stay in a relationship to be happy but in the sense that I wasn't sure of my level of attractiveness in finding another person and what I would do if I were to move on and try to date someone else.
Right.
Yeah, bird in the hand, right?
Right.
Right, okay.
And how long after you started dating did it turn into a serious relationship?
I'm trying to think specifically.
I guess that we probably talked about making it more serious, I want to say, like three or four years?
Are you kidding me?
After three or four years you decided to become serious?
Were you exclusive during those three or four years?
Yes, we were.
I guess when you say serious, I'm thinking marriage.
Oh, marriage, yeah.
Right.
Your parents would know, right, you came home, you come home and you say, oh, I met this really great girl, I'm going to phone her, I'm going to ask her out or whatever, right?
Right.
I'm saying this to all the parents out there, be on that, like white on rice, right?
Be on that.
Be all over that.
Go to meet the girl.
Go talk to the girl.
Go meet her family.
Go be all over that.
Not to be intrusive, not to, you know, but just get the facts.
And then ask your kid, okay, so if this was another guy, would you be really interested in hanging out?
If not, well, hello hormones.
Goodbye girl, right?
Right.
I feel like that's something that didn't happen that should have happened.
For sure.
And this is pretty high standards these days, right?
I mean, these goddamn hippies in the 60s turned all of this to shit, right?
I mean, they just got rid of all sexual standards.
I mean, they just completely nuked the foundation of Western civilization.
R.G. Pitt, man!
And I'm not putting your parents in that category, obviously, right?
I mean, they're just dominoes that fell from this whole mess.
This Marxist-driven breakdown of the entire family structure and reason for I've actually known her for 10 months.
It's been a very short time that we've known each other and been together.
It's progressed really quickly.
It's been kind of amazing to me how it's happened because, I mean, obviously at the end of the previous relationship, my initial reaction was that I wasn't going to date again for a long time and that I was going to do some serious thinking and things like that.
And when I met the girl that I'm with now, I told her about everything that was going on.
I told her my situation and We talked about that, and we definitely agreed that we would take it slow as we got to know each other, but just through getting to know each other, it progressed really quickly, and we realized that we were very compatible.
It's just been kind of amazing.
It's almost like...
I'm thinking about the...
Conversation that you had with Michael and Christina, where you told them that you couldn't have designed someone that was better for you than your wife.
When I heard that, it really sunk in with me and it resonated with me.
Because with the girl that I'm with now, I definitely feel that way.
She and I have really taken a lot of steps in learning about each other.
We went through...
A series of conversations to have before you get married or think about getting married.
And it was something like 50 conversations that we talked about that ranged from how we communicate to how we handle conflicts to how we want to parent and all these different things.
And really put a lot of work into figuring out who the other person was and if we would be compatible Before we took it any further, but it's just been really amazing to see how compatible we are and how alike we think.
That is great.
And, you know, I got no problem with that.
I mean, not that it would matter if I did, right?
Right.
I'm Cupid or something, but yeah, my wife and I met and married in less than a year.
Yeah, you know, right?
Especially if you've been something different.
You're like, oh, this is what it's supposed to be like.
I get it.
Oh, I see.
Reasonableness, empathy, curiosity, maturity, an equal partner, intellectual stimulation, learning new things, respect.
Oh, I get it.
I understand now.
I don't know what I was doing before, but it was not this.
That's exactly how it felt, for sure.
Right.
Oh, that's what a real singer sounds like.
I was just a drunken karaoke for 20 years.
Ah, I see why there's music now, and it's not supposed to make your ears bleed.
Okay.
Okay.
That's great.
That's fantastic.
Good for you.
Good for you.
Very excited, for sure.
And what was your first interaction with this fine young lady?
Well, it's interesting.
We actually met at my church.
I'm actually a minister at a church where I live, and Wait a minute.
This is like the evening of surprising conversations, just so you know.
Just dropping that in there.
Hey, Mr.
Atheist, just wanted to mention, I'm actually a minister at the church, so we don't need to pause on that, do we?
Hey, did we hit something in the car?
Should we circle?
Go on.
Right.
Well, just explaining how we met.
I mean, that's where we met was at a service that we had at a Thanksgiving service last year.
And she came and we met there and we just started to talk.
And yeah, my first interaction with her was just discussing just like Obviously, when you first meet someone, you talk about the various things, your history and things like that.
We talked about interests, and we talked about what we wanted to do in life, some different things like that.
I'm still here, sorry.
Okay.
Dude, I hope you don't do that when you're preaching.
Everyone leans forward like, uh, what?
Is he, what?
What?
It's like...
I'm actually a music minister.
I do music at the church.
Oh, okay.
So that was like a coda.
All right.
Got it.
Right.
And so you had conversation of substance about things that mattered and all that, right?
Right.
So you're not like the preacher minister, but the music minister?
Right.
Mm-hmm.
You don't just administer music.
I guess that's not the way we can phrase it.
No, I lead worship.
I lead the songs.
I plan the services and put together the songs that we'll sing and lead on Sundays, play and sing, and do that.
I mean, I'm involved in a few other different things here, but mostly that's what I do is the music and leading worship.
Wow.
May have bumped up against a few atheist arguments on this show from time to time?
Yes.
And actually, that's something that I wanted to mention.
We don't have to resolve it now.
I just, you know, for the listeners out there who currently have just driven into a pole while they're listening to this in their car, I just wanted to acknowledge that for them, so that the jaws of life can help extract them from their shock.
Yes.
No, yeah.
Yeah.
That's something that I wanted to mention because I've definitely been listening to the show for a while now and I've heard some of the conversations that you've had with people that have faith and people that have lost faith.
I mean, all the different conversations.
And one of the things that I wanted to mention to you was that I'm sorry for some of the people that you've talked to that have been so disrespectful and so just arrogant and not reasonable when they talk with you.
Kind of Oh, I think just scared mostly, right?
Right, yeah.
It's alarming.
They don't know who they are without it.
Right.
Yes, yeah.
And it's a little upsetting to me because part of the faith, like I'm a Christian, and so part of the Christian faith is...
Being prepared to defend your faith and being prepared to give reasons for your faith, but do it with gentleness and respect.
And that's actually in the Bible.
It's 1 Peter 3.15 says that you should give a reason for the hope that you have with gentleness and respect.
And so when I hear people that try to argue for Christianity or for faith in God or for something like that and Well, yeah, I mean, but their emotional attitude is the least of their problems, right?
I mean, the fact that they fail is more important to me than how they fail, right?
Right.
I mean, if someone crashes a bike, I don't care what song they were singing at the time, the fact that they crashed their bike is probably more relevant, right?
That's true.
Yeah.
So, yeah, we can certainly talk another time if you're interested and wanted to have another conversation about faith.
I think that I'm always fascinated to talk about that, and I'm sure it would be a very engaging and enjoyable conversation, but we could talk about that right now.
Right.
But I am completely thrilled, of course, that the book was Real-Time Relationships, which if people want to read it, it's available for free at freedomainradio.com slash free.
I'm completely thrilled that the book was helpful, and I'm also glad, of course, that...
which was not going to be spiritually satisfying, to put it mildly, right, to you.
Right.
Hopefully, you know, it's not like you're deep and she's shallow.
I mean, it could just be wrong jigsaw puzzle pieces, right?
She might find someone with whom she can have a more engaged relationship than you if there was some incompatibility at some X factor level.
So it's good.
You know, we were just talking in the last show about the last conversation about the joys of quitting.
You know, it's really important to know when to fold them, right?
Yes, for sure.
Alright.
Well, are you married in three weeks?
Yeah, I will be married in three weeks.
Fantastic.
Well, I'm not going to convince you to not have it in a church.
We can talk about that later.
Disco, have it in a church, obviously, right?
But, yeah, and thank you, of course.
I mean, it was a very lovely email that you sent in, and I really, really appreciate the kindness in you doing that.
That's a wonderful thing to hear, and I hope that you will accept my congratulations on your upcoming nuptials.
Yeah, thank you.
Thank you for all that you do.
And thank you for that book, definitely.
Like I said, I mean, reading that and thinking about these things and applying it to the relationship really, man, I mean, it saved my life.
And fantastic.
Now, of course, given that you're still a virgin, if I understand the internet correctly, there may be some research materials available on the internet to help with your wedding night.
I think it's also just called the internet.
The entire internet!
Or whatever, but no, I'm just kidding.
I hope that you guys are going away for, you don't have to tell me where, but you're going away for your honeymoon?
Yes, yeah.
Mm-hmm.
Fantastic.
We'll be going on my way for a week.
I hope you have a great time and enjoy basking in the sunshine of love and keep us posted.
And yeah, anytime you want to come back and talk about faith, it would be an enjoyable and engaging chat, I'm sure.
Thank you.
All right.
Well, thanks, man.
I appreciate that.
Thanks, of course, for everyone for calling in, for supporting the show, for making this conversation with the world exactly what it is.
And freedomainradio.com Slash, like a scimitar, donate.
Freedomainradio.com slash donate to help out the show.
Very, very important for you to do so.
Get behind what you treasure.
Get behind what you think will save the world.
We're all pushing like mad here.
And we could certainly use some hands on our backside.
I believe that's our business plan.
So have yourselves a wonderful, wonderful week, everyone.
