Oct. 24, 2016 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
03:13:06
3465 Makeup on the Mirror - Call In Show - October 21th, 2016
Question 1: [2:36] - “I have been listening to your videos on peaceful parenting and it has changed the way I plan on parenting my children in the future. After thinking about the way my mother taught me to parent in comparison, it has made me doubt the methods I've learned to use for my 10-month-old. Do you have any information on how to peacefully and productively guide children who are not quite yet toddlers and are beginning to push boundaries?"Question 2: [48:48] - “I’m a university student tasked with writing a research paper for my sociology class, with the topic of explaining the assertion that race is a social construct. The worst part about it is the requirement to use only sources provided by my extremely liberal professor. Under freedom of speech I would assume that I couldn't be penalized if I also presented in an objective manner the other perspective that race is biological/genetic. Would it be a violation of free speech if I was penalized for presenting both perspectives in the paper using outside credible resources?”Question 3: [1:17:12] - “Have you ever questioned how far you should discuss philosophy with students in a school setting? Do you consider age or parent perceptions when the minors are not your own children? When discussing men and women’s value in society, how do you approach these concepts with women if you are not married and do not have your own children, without the women getting emotional?”Question 4: [2:16:24] – “I’m in a committed relationship and for the first time, my partner has the same family values as mine does. Hard work, ethics, education starts at home, etc. We were friends a lot of time and he knows my goals and we agree on them, he's a good and handsome man and I’d be happy to form a family with him.”“The problem is, we are from different religions and different countries. I don't have a problem with the logistics, I’m very open to live wherever we will live better. But since I will be raising the children when they are young: How does one handle teaching children about their mother and father's respective religions, cultures and countries, and at the same time give them a strong sense of belonging and connection to their heritage?”Question 5: [2:44:20] - “I'm writing in because I'm curious what your take is on the educational statistics/trends regarding boys and girls. Specifically, girls outperforming boys in grade school and college and more boys failing. I'm a mother of two boys and a girl. While my daughter excels in school, my high school son is constantly challenged and struggles. Outside of school he's highly creative, productive and motivated with his own projects. I want to support all my children equally in my becoming healthy, whole, confident, functioning adults but I wonder if the struggle he experiences is more than his personal journey and that the system is set up to favor girls. I would appreciate your thoughts to help get clarity on the best way to support him.”Freedomain Radio is 100% funded by viewers like you. Please support the show by signing up for a monthly subscription or making a one time donation at: http://www.freedomainradio.com/donate
Hey everybody, Stefan Mullen here from Free Domain Radio.
Hope you're doing magnificently.
Well, everything kind of came together in this show tonight.
Had some fantastic callers, some fantastic questions, and just amazing conversations.
You know, I've been doing this for quite a few number of years now, and it's just fantastic for me when...
We really get to break new ground with bone-chilling insights and depth.
The first caller is a mom.
She wanted to know, why has my daughter suddenly become a hitter and a biter over the last month or two?
I'm not going to give away the answer, but when you hear it, it will be pretty clear.
The second caller wanted to write about race in his sociology class in university and ran into a professor's intransigence and pushback against this particular topic and what was he supposed to do?
How was he supposed to solve it?
We talked about that.
What's possible and what's not possible in college these days.
The third caller was a woman who works at high school.
She's a vice principal and a teacher.
And wanted to know, how far can I discuss philosophy with students in my school?
That's a great question, and we had a fantastic and wide-ranging discussion about men and women in society as a whole.
It really went fantastically original and valuable places, I dare say, so I hope you'll listen to that.
And the fourth caller, a woman who says that she was in a committed relationship and her partner has the same family values, ethics, education, starts at home, all that kind of stuff.
Good and handsome man, but they're from different religions and different countries.
How are they going to raise their children?
And she had a startling question that took me completely by surprise.
But I will say that I arose to the occasion with a great answer.
And the fifth caller was a mom who wanted to know why her son was disliking school so much.
He's sort of in his mid-teens and he's really creative and productive and motivated outside of school.
Gets into school and gets kind of inert and bored and distracted.
What can be done?
We together put our heads together and tried to figure out some solutions to that.
Another great conversation.
Thank you everyone so much for listening.
Please, please, please, don't forget, come and support the show at freedomainradio.com slash donate.
Follow me on Twitter at Stefan Molyneux.
And you can use our affiliate link fdrurl.com slash Amazon.
Alright, well up for us today we have Christiana.
She wrote in and said, Stefan, I've been listening to your videos on peaceful parenting and has changed the way I plan on parenting my children in the future.
After thinking about the way my mother taught me to parent in comparison, it has made me doubt the methods I've learned to use for my 10-month-old.
Do you have any information on how to peacefully and productively guide children who are not quite yet toddlers and are beginning to push boundaries?
That's from Christiana.
Hey Christiana, how are you doing tonight?
I'm good, how are you?
I'm very well.
Thank you.
I'm very well.
Boy or girl?
She's a girl.
She's a girl.
And what do you mean when you say push boundaries?
What are we talking about?
Really like hitting, biting, you know, just doing things, thinking that it's funny.
You know what I mean?
Like it's a game.
She's been kicking and hitting.
It's really just come out of nowhere.
Um, which I mean, I know it's normal for kids to do, but, um, you know, my mom, um, had told me if she bites, you know, to like, um, kind of flick her in the mouth or if, um, which I haven't done, um, or if she hits or something to Restrain her.
I just didn't know if you had any...
I've really started to doubt a lot of the things my mom has told me.
And I didn't know if you knew of any just methods to use for children that aren't quite toddlers yet whenever they're doing things like this that I don't have to use my size against her or to restrain her or something.
It's a great question, and I appreciate you calling in with it because, especially in the pre-verbal phase, right, it's tough to know.
I mean, if they have the verbal skills of puppies, are you supposed to train them like puppies?
I mean, these are difficult questions, and I really, really appreciate you calling in with it.
So, when did the, let's say, this hitting and biting, did they start at about the same time?
The biting started a lot earlier.
Um, maybe three months ago, um, she just out of nowhere, um, cause we co-sleep, um, and so I just kind of walk around with her or rock her to sleep still, um, and out of nowhere she just bit me really hard, um, and she's been doing it ever since.
Sometimes she'll accidentally bite, you know, like, um, her dad will give her, like, Nutella or something from his finger, and She'll accidentally bite him, and whenever he reacts, she gets really upset and realizes that she shouldn't have done that.
But that's really the only time that it happens.
If she's, you know, just biting while playing or something, she really thinks that it's a game or that it's funny.
Right, right.
Obvious question, did anything happen a couple of months ago that was a change in circumstances, a change in environment, a change in exposure to different kinds of people that may have caused a change?
Yeah, she and I had gone to stay with my dad for a month or so.
Her dad and I were having some problems and...
We just kind of needed a little bit of space.
And so I went to stay with my dad.
And then we just recently moved into a new place.
And so she's been...
We've been with her dad since then.
The new place thing is not...
So she was...
You moved out for a month, right?
Right.
And then...
And you took her with you.
And how much did she see her dad?
She wasn't able to see him for that month.
And you really don't know why she might be aggressive?
No.
I didn't realize that those two coincided.
The hitting didn't start until really more in the last couple weeks.
But I didn't even realize the biting.
No, no.
We've got to stay on this thing, right?
Okay, so what was happening before you moved out for a month and she didn't see her father?
It was pretty tense at home.
Give it to me from the view of your daughter.
What would she see?
What would she hear that would impact her?
Her dad and I were not sleeping in the same room anymore.
And we were just kind of avoiding each other, and when we spoke to each other, it usually didn't get too heated, but it wasn't how it was before, I guess.
It was just a lot more tension.
You're kind of skirting this, right?
I mean, we can do this dance, or you can just be frank, right?
Right, well...
You know, it was kind of tense, and we'd be skirting it, and we weren't sleeping together.
Right.
Well, I mean, it was tense.
It was...
Well, there was hostility.
Yeah, right?
Exactly.
Yeah.
Okay.
So you and the father, you and your husband, had a lot of hostility towards each other.
Yeah.
And do you know why?
Yeah.
Um, he had just lost his job, and money was a big issue, and I think that that's where most of the arguing started from, but then...
No.
No, no, no, no.
No, look.
Adversity does not breed hostility.
There's no reason, logical reason, why he loses his job.
Right.
Right.
Money is tight.
Okay.
It's sort of like saying, well, you and I, we were on a ship, and the ship sank, and here we are on a life raft, and we're automatically going to turn on each other.
No.
When you face adversity, that can bring you closer together.
Hey, you know who faced a lot of adversity?
Men in trenches.
Men in wartime.
And do you know, well, the number of men I've talked to over the years who've said, oh, I've never been as close to men as I was in wartime.
You know, we really stuck it out together.
We hung in there together.
We helped each other.
So I've got to assume that him losing his job and money being tight was not as bad as, say, being in a trench in the First World War.
And the soldiers didn't turn on each other.
In that kind of adversity, they became closer.
Right.
The difference is blame.
Right.
The soldiers didn't blame each other for the war.
Whereas if you blame your husband for losing his job and for money being tight, then that's going to breed resentment and hostility and all this kind of stuff, right?
Yeah, no, that's completely true.
Sorry, go ahead.
I mean, it did.
It was really...
It was hard, I guess, not for me in the moment.
Looking back, it was really hard for me not to be hostile under the circumstances of him losing his job, I guess.
Did he make a mistake that cost him his job, or was it layoffs?
No, it was a mistake that he had made.
Okay, okay.
I mean, I can certainly understand that's frustrating.
And was it tough for him to get new work?
He just wasn't looking at that time.
I'm sorry about now?
He just wasn't looking at that time.
So he lost his job because he made a mistake.
Money is tight.
He's got a new kid.
You're not working for money, I assume, right?
Right.
No, I... So, what was his plan, then?
I don't quite understand.
I mean, isn't that sort of all-hands-on-deck emergency, get paycheck?
Yeah, that was kind of it.
So, what was...
So, you know, he'd be home, and he wouldn't be looking for work, and money would be tight.
And was his, like...
What was his...
Narrative?
What was his story about that?
Um...
I mean, he just, if I had brought it up, it would be an argument.
He just said that he was going to do it or he didn't want to do it one way.
He wanted to do it, you know, he didn't want to look online.
He wanted to do it his own way or whatever else, but then he wasn't doing it.
And so that's kind of why a lot of the hostility grew.
How long after the birth of your daughter did he lose his job?
It was in May, so I guess she was five and a half, almost six months old.
Does he want to be a father?
Yeah, no, I mean, he's a great dad.
I mean, he takes amazing care of her.
He's always been really helpful with her.
Okay, so he's enjoying being a father, but he wasn't, at least at that time, Enjoying being a co-parent with you.
Yeah.
Right.
And did he like or dislike the job that he had before he was fired?
He liked it, but there were obviously things he really didn't like about it, but he seemed to enjoy it.
He ended up getting the job back later on.
Oh.
So he's been doing that.
It was like a trial firing.
Yeah, I guess so.
Like a timeout.
Yeah.
Now that you've learned your lesson.
Exactly.
Okay.
All right.
All right.
And how long have you guys been in a relationship?
About, I think it'll be five years on New Year's.
Yeah.
And was this behavior where he lost his job when he's a sole provider and wasn't looking for a new job, is that new?
Had that occurred before or had you seen any habit that way in the five years you've known him?
No.
He's always been a hard worker.
He's always had a job.
He's always put in a lot of hours.
Hmm.
So...
Hmm.
When people behave in my experience, when people behave in a way that causes other people frustration or anger It's because they themselves are experiencing frustration and anger that they're not communicating.
Right.
Does that make any sense?
Yeah, definitely.
Some people call it passive aggression or something like that.
So when I'm in a situation, for instance, where somebody is...
Like I'm in a situation and I'm feeling angry and there's nothing in the immediate circumstance that would make me feel that way or give me that trigger.
I usually try and figure out if the other person is angry and provoking me So that they can legitimately express their anger as a reaction rather than proactively.
Does that make sense?
Yeah.
It's sort of like, here's an example, right?
I think everyone's known a couple like this where, let's say the woman decides she wants to break up with the guy, but he's a nice guy.
There's no real good reason for it.
And so she'll just start provoking him and being a bad girlfriend until he breaks up with her.
She's the one who wants to break up, but it's the same thing with anger, right?
But she can't express that she wants to break up, so she'll just provoke him until he dumps her and then, I don't know, plays the victim or breathes a sigh of relief.
So, do you think it's possible that your husband was feeling somewhere, somehow...
The emotions that you felt when he...
Because it's very frustrating, right?
You're the sole provider.
You're not out looking for work.
You don't have a job.
Ah!
I mean, that's a pretty...
Right?
So you feel trapped and helpless and frustrated and angry.
Was there anything in his life that may have had him feel that way leading up to and during this time?
Not really that I can think of...
I can't think of anything.
I mean, really, it was mostly just working and being at home with me and the baby.
I mean, if it was something that was work, I wouldn't know.
Right.
How was he adjusting to...
I mean, there's a huge thing that changes, of course, for a man when your wife gives birth, right?
Which is that it used to be somewhat about you, and now it's very little about you, if that makes any sense.
Right.
You know, I mean, you used to have a lot more.
I mean, the purpose of romantic relationships is, of course, the production of children, and we all like to be the center of our lover's attention, but then when a child comes along, particularly if you're staying home, if you're breastfeeding, if you're co-sleeping, if you're doing all the stuff that I think you should be doing as a parent, then it can feel to the man.
There are other ways in which this occurs for the woman.
For women, it occurs with work.
With men, it occurs with children, right?
So women feel that work is taking the man away from them and they don't get enough attention.
And men feel that children take, particularly babies, take focus away from them and they're not getting enough attention.
Does that seem like it might fit at all, or should we keep whacking the bushes?
Maybe so.
In the beginning, when she was first born, He did take a three-month break from work which I had had an emergency c-section and my recovery was just especially terrible and for the first two I really I needed someone there and so in the beginning We really
shared the time with the baby.
It wasn't too much me or too much him or anything.
We really shared it.
So I don't know if the attention being away from him for the baby could have been a part of that.
But certainly when he was working long hours after that, it was upsetting to me.
For him to be working, you know, from 6am to sometimes 8 or 9pm.
Wow, that is a lot.
Yeah, it was rough.
I mean, I've known married couples, or couples who've become parents, and I think it's kind of a typical story.
If the woman's staying home, the man sort of gets up, goes to work, He's working all day, comes to drive, battles traffic, comes home, tired, wants to put his feet up.
And the mom is like, oh, you've got to take the baby because I haven't even showered today.
So the husband comes home and says, wait a minute, I don't ask you to come to my work.
Why am I suddenly getting baby bombs on me?
Not that I don't want to spend time with the baby, but give me a little bit of time to unwind, to transition.
These kinds of things can definitely occur.
Because, of course, you know, if you've been home all day with a baby for like 15 hours or 12 hours or whatever, yeah, you get a little snake-eyed, right?
There's only so many bubbles you can blow.
Only so many blocks you could stack.
There's only so many songs you can sing.
And not having any adult interaction was hard for me to not have conversations with people, you know, and then once he got home, he was tired and, you know, Would shower and go to bed usually and so it was...
Yeah, it was rough when he was working those hours.
And why was he working those hours?
I guess that he was doing landscaping work.
I guess that at that time they just...
Sometimes it was not, you know, not 12 hours a day.
Sometimes it was less.
It just kind of depended on the season.
Yeah, and I mean, landscapers in general don't like to say no.
Right.
So, if there's work to be done.
Yeah.
Right.
So, for your daughter, you're saying that your husband was home for the first couple of months, is that right?
Yeah, the first three.
Right.
And then, boom, he's gone.
Yeah.
To work, right?
Right.
Now, that's confusing.
Right.
Right.
And as you say, he's a great dad, right?
Yeah.
And so he's got a great relationship with his daughter.
She loves him.
She wants to spend time with him.
He's the center of her world in many ways, as are you, of course.
But you're there.
And then, poof, he's gone.
Right.
And if he's working that many, how long did those hours go on for?
Probably a month or two.
And then it was shortly after that that he had lost the job.
Because here's the thing.
You know, speaking as a man, and I'm obviously not speaking for your husband, but this is a vague possibility in my mind, and you can mull it over.
So speaking as a man, if you have a child, like you get married, you have a kid, you have a kid.
And you then have to work harder.
Why?
Because, you know, three miles to feed, right?
And so you have to work harder.
Now, if you're working a tough physical job, what happens is, as you say, you're working, you know, 12 hours a day in landscaping.
That's rough, right?
That's rough on the body.
That's, you know, like that's, you know, your ache.
You know, there's a kind of thing where you go to the gym and you feel the burn and then there's a kind of thing where you have a manual labor job and you just feel the ache and the creaks and the, you know.
It's rough on the body.
It's rough on the knees.
It's rough on the back.
It's like the whole thing is rough on the hands.
I mean, it's rough.
So, for a man, it can sort of go something like this.
Well...
Before I became a father, I could work pretty reasonable hours, and if I had to work overtime, nobody got that mad.
In fact, people would be like, well, thank you, right?
Right.
Now, after I became a father, I have to work like a dog, and then when I work like a dog, my wife gets upset with me, and I have this mouth to feed, but I never see it.
Like, I have this daughter, and I don't get to see her because I leave before she wakes up, and I go to bed regularly.
I get home and she's already in bed.
And so what happens is you kind of end up going from a guy who used to have a job to a guy who kind of feels like a beast of burden, like a gray horse, like a, oh, Chris is great.
Fantastic.
So now I get to work more, my wife's upset with me, and I never get to see my kid.
How is this a good thing for me?
And that is, I mean, you know, motherhood, of course, is a huge transition.
So is fatherhood.
Yeah.
And I assume that he was appreciative of you staying home and taking care of your daughter, right?
Yeah.
He wasn't like, well, what do you mean you didn't earn any money today?
According to the comment section at Reason.com, you can earn $725 or whatever.
Yeah.
No, we both wanted for me to stay home.
At least until she starts kindergarten.
We just found out that we are pregnant with our second.
I guess until this one goes to kindergarten.
When did you...
I'm sorry.
You are pregnant with your second?
Yes.
Yes.
When did you find that out?
Last month.
After he lost his job?
Well, he had started working there again already.
Okay.
Yeah.
Okay, so let's, I mean, congratulations, but let's go back to earlier.
So, he may have felt...
I don't know if you've ever been in a situation in your life where you feel like you can't do anything right.
Yeah.
Fighter pilots.
Sitting on $20 million planes.
When they can't do anything right, do you know what they do?
No.
They hit the eject button.
Right.
And usually when people make these kinds of decisions, and I'm not saying getting fired was a decision, but sometimes there are subconscious motives for these kinds of things that are important to process, right?
Yeah.
So, if he feels like he can't do anything right, well, he's got his boss saying, you've got to work more.
He's got his wife saying, you've got to be home.
He's got his daughter missing him enormously.
What can he do?
Like, if you were in his situation, what would you do?
I really don't know.
And there's no real answer, right?
Yeah, I know.
I mean, the more he works, so if he works, okay, he's making some money, but maybe you're upset with him about working and his daughter misses him because he's never home.
If he cuts back on his work, he risks getting fired because bosses, I don't know, I've never worked.
It's one of the few manual labor jobs I've never had is landscaping, but I can't imagine they're all like, you know, well, you should take your time because I'm sure the client will be fine with it.
Right, so he can't come back in his hours.
He can't make you happier.
He can't see more of his kid.
It's easy to slip into a slave mentality.
Yeah.
You know, like, I can't satisfy anyone.
And you know, when people can't satisfy anyone in their life, their boss, their wife, their kid, whoever, they tend to become sort of inert.
Yeah.
And careless.
Because they want something to change.
They don't know how to make it change.
They feel helpless.
So it's possible...
That he said, well, I can't tell my boss to limit my hours.
I can't find a way to make my wife grateful that I'm working this hard.
So maybe, just maybe, I can get fired.
That solves two of my problems.
Doesn't solve the money problem, but at least I'm home and I don't have to negotiate with my boss.
Yeah.
And if...
I mean, the reason why I'm saying this is that he's been a hard worker his whole life, as you say.
Never had a problem with laziness.
And then suddenly he's like, well, I'm not looking for work.
That means that he doesn't want to work.
And the question is, why doesn't he want to work?
Well, it's not because he doesn't want to work in general, because he worked in the past.
It's not because he doesn't understand his responsibilities as a father and a provider.
He understands those very well, I'm sure.
It's because...
Going to work puts him in an impossible situation.
Yeah.
And that makes sense.
Thank you.
So, how did you handle and how did you communicate his working so hard?
Well, whenever he was working those long hours...
I mean, sometimes I did get upset, but for the most part, I did tell him that I appreciated it.
And when he would get home, I would try to make him comfortable or whatever else, whenever he first got home.
And I did tell him that I appreciated him much more often than I got upset, but I did sometimes get upset.
What would you say to him when you got upset?
Here's where we need to be scoldingly honest because otherwise I don't think there's any way to figure out what's going on.
Right.
I told him that I wish that he had a job that didn't have such long hours.
One that he wasn't such hard manual labor.
Like you were saying, it really is hard on the body.
And you don't recover overnight.
No, exactly.
You don't spring out of bed the next day.
It's like, okay, 5%, that's creaky, let's go back to work.
Yeah, and on the weekends he would be sore from the work too.
I would just try to think of other things that he could do for work so that he wasn't experiencing that and so that he could...
But this was his gig before you had a kid, right?
No.
What did he do before you had a child?
Did he change to becoming a landscaper after you had a child?
Yeah.
It was after he went back to work whenever she was three months old.
He got the job from my brother.
No, but what was he doing before?
He was a vet technician.
A vet technician?
Yeah.
What happened to that?
He did like that job.
He ended up quitting.
They told him that he couldn't have any paternity leave and my older brother had told him that if he wanted a job with the landscaping place he could Go up there at any time.
My brother was the boss.
And we had money saved up so that he could have paternity leave.
So he went from sort of like an office job to landscaping.
Well, not so much office.
He would help with the surgeries.
No, but it wasn't physical labor, right?
Some of it was, but for the most part, no.
And did you support this choice to leave the vet technician business and go into landscaping?
Yeah, I supported if he didn't want to work there anymore and he could find a job that paid better With my brother.
Oh, so it paid better with your brother?
But more hours, right?
Yes.
Right.
Benefits?
Yes.
For the brother?
Yeah.
Was it a good or bad idea to switch from vet technician to landscaping?
Well, looking back, I think that it would have been better for him to be working at the As a vet technician, even though it was a little bit less money and less hours.
Well, there's nowhere to go in landscaping, especially if your brother owns the business, right?
It's not like you can upgrade.
Put a competitive, hostile takeover bid for your brother's business, right?
Yeah, exactly.
Now, as a couple, were you able to say, we made a mistake?
We both decided to do this thing, and it turns out that this was the wrong thing to do.
We made a mistake.
No, I guess we haven't really talked about it like that.
Okay, so now we're probably getting close to the center, right?
And I appreciate, I know this is tough stuff to talk about, but we are the whole time talking about your daughter.
Okay, so mistake.
It's really, really important to admit mistakes.
Right.
And because what happens is, if you don't admit mistakes, then the negative consequences of those mistakes tend to get blamed on the other person, right?
Right.
So if you as a couple say, ooh, we thought that switching from vet technician to landscape guy was a great idea, it turns out, other than the three months you got to stay at home, it was not a great idea.
Right.
And so what are we going to do?
How are we going to handle it, right?
Because if you're kind of just plowing on, and it was a bad idea...
Like, let's say you move to some neighborhood.
You say, oh, we're going to leave the country and move to the city.
And you move to the city, and there's crime, and it's loud, and it's smelly, and it's dirty, and all that kind of stuff, right?
Right.
It's going to make you irritable, right?
Because it's like, well, I miss the peace and quiet, I miss the frogs, whatever it is.
Oh, yeah.
So it's going to make you irritable, but if you can't say there was a mistake, you tend to blame the other person for the environment if you can't accept that a mistake was made.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Does that make any sense?
Definitely.
Right.
So, could he go back to the vet technician?
We've been talking about that, him going up there and finding out what the options are.
So, yeah, we've definitely been speaking about that in the last couple weeks.
And some of it, of course, as you had mentioned, it wasn't a choice, right?
At the emergency C-section, you needed.
I mean, you were out of commission, right?
You needed.
And he couldn't take a leave of absence from the vet technician or anything like that?
Right.
Like, they were just like, nope, you don't show up, you're done, right?
Yeah.
Right.
So, but the mistake would have been not, you know, if he had to leave the job to take care of you, he had to leave the job to take care of you.
Yeah.
Although, the argument could also be made that if you went to go and live with your father, maybe your father could have come and lived with you for a while while he continued to work and he could have taken care of you with the baby, right?
Right.
At the time, my father was working out of town and traveling a lot.
Yeah, it's funny how these communities...
Sorry to interrupt, but it's just kind of funny and sad how communities have just kind of evaporated, right?
Right, yeah.
You know, it used to be you have a baby and like everyone gathers around and there are great aunts you've barely even known before who are coming over with lasagna and like there used to be this, ah, a baby has been born, now the family will alter its orbit to take care of the mother because especially if there's some medical emergency, right?
Yeah, yeah.
And I have, on my mom's side, I have a really big family and, um, Even when I was a kid, it used to be more like that, but it's just not anymore.
I had a lot of family that would say, oh, we're going to come stay with you for a couple weeks and help you out, but it just never ended up happening.
People just make those noises.
I found that out after I had her.
Anybody who actually follows through on promises of help, hold them close to you forever.
Right.
So, let me just see if I sort of follow this pattern or this story correctly.
So, your brother fired your husband when he had a new baby at home.
Well, my brother doesn't own the business.
He was one of the main bosses.
It wasn't his decision to fire him.
Oh.
Yeah.
That's kind of harsh.
Yeah.
Otherwise, okay.
All right.
But then you got the job back, is that right?
Yes.
Is there anyone who can be available to you during the day for some adult time?
Neighbors, friends, family?
Oh.
People you can tackle on the street?
Right.
Right.
Yeah, since I moved to a different part of town, my family's a little bit closer, and I have an aunt who comes over a couple times a week, so I have been getting a lot.
And also, now that she's older, I leave the house more often.
When she was smaller, I just didn't feel comfortable taking her around a bunch of people, but We go out pretty frequently now, so I feel a lot more connected with the world again.
Okay, so these tensions in particular are receding.
Now, of course, there will be more tensions in life.
Life is a series of...
What is it?
That was an old cartoon I saw somewhere where one man...
Two men are walking down the street and they see two misshapen, grotesque monsters with bat wings running down the street.
And one of them turns to the other and says, look, it's just one goddamn thing after another.
To some degree.
To some degree.
There's lots of beauty and wonder and fun and magic and great stuff in life.
But there are times where it kind of feels like one goddamn thing after another.
So there will be those phases, right?
Right.
And so you all need to...
Get your communication squared away around this kind of stuff.
I mean, if you resent the other person, it's a lot better to say, I resent you.
It's a lot better to say, I'm angry and I don't know why.
I'm frustrated and I don't know why.
I'm lonely and I don't know why, right?
Real-time relationship, it's the book that I wrote a couple of years ago, which is available for free at freedomainradio.com slash free, so I hope people will imbibe it.
I think it's very helpful and useful.
So things are kind of settling.
As far as immediate stressors go right now this this I think is the big point that I want to make which is kind of why we did this Backstory, right?
I Think looking at it now.
Is it fair to say that your daughter's aggression didn't come out of nowhere?
Yeah, definitely If she's in a tense environment where her parents are not getting along If her father who was present for the first two months of her life vanishes to work and then her environment changes completely, right?
How do you get along with your dad?
Oh We get along very well All right.
So, yeah, her environment changes and her father is gone.
Right.
And he's the play dad.
He's the fun dad and all that kind of stuff.
So, she's going to be angry.
Yeah.
She's going to be frustrated.
She's going to feel helpless.
All the things that you and your husband felt.
Yeah.
Now, she, like you, did not express these feelings.
Right.
Right.
And when you don't express the feelings, you act them out, right?
If you don't express your feelings of frustration or helplessness or maybe you made a wrong decision or whatever, then you act it out with name-calling, with put-downs, with frustration, with emotional withdrawal, with holding, you know, coldness, slamming doors, whatever it is, right?
I mean, whatever, it's just going to get acted out if you don't, you know, you say it or play it.
There's only sort of two ways that it can go.
So, you guys acted out Your emotions, I would guess, against each other.
And so she imbibes all of that.
She imbibes all of that.
And she says, okay, well this is what adults do.
Parenting requires such humility because all of our bad habits get expressed by our children.
All of our bad habits Get expressed by our children.
So when...
This is what happens.
Maybe this is what the perspective your mom has, which I really disagree with, by the way.
I'm sure you know that.
But the perspective is, well, your child is acting badly, so you need to correct that because it's your child's fault.
Yeah, that's exactly how I was raised.
You know, and it's sort of like, you know, you're going to have a family portrait done, right?
You stand in front of the mirror and you've got a big-ass pimple on your nose, right?
And it's sort of like saying, okay, what I need to do is put the makeup on the mirror.
Right.
Okay, as long as you don't move, it looks like you don't have a pimple, but you're putting it on the wrong thing.
Childhood is the same thing.
We have a pimple on our personality, we have a wart in our character, and we think we need to fix it on the mirror, who is the child?
The child is mysteriously doing something negative, and therefore I need to do something more negative to correct the negative things the child is doing, which is actually a mirror of my negative behavior, which I'm not acknowledging.
Right.
That's not...
Right?
Exactly.
You will correct things in the moment, but it's like saying, well, you know, people are taking drugs, so rather than improve their childhoods and listen and give them sympathy and empathy, we're going to throw them in jail.
No, no.
Yeah.
Right?
So, that's the humility.
Right?
Which, you know, I enjoin all parents to look into this and to think about it deeply.
If your child is acting out, look in the mirror first.
Right.
Right?
And after, you know, this separation that we had, we have been a lot better about expressing ourselves and keeping calmer and And, you know, trying to work things out without getting heated.
And things have been a lot better between us.
And especially after the last month or so, listening to your videos about this.
Because you had mentioned that, you know, the peaceful parenting method not only helps you with Your relationship with your child, but also people around you.
And I completely agree.
We've really been trying to take steps to do better in our own relationship because I always have tried to be careful about how we act in front of her, but it was just that one month that just...
We weren't doing a good job at all.
And then he was gone for a month after that too, right?
Right, yeah.
So at that point, about half of her life had been chaos and missing dad and fighting parents or distant parents or whatever.
Right.
So yeah, we are definitely trying to correct that within ourselves.
And how are her language skills at the moment, your daughter?
They're pretty good.
She can repeat words.
She says, mama, daddy, baby.
She's repeated a few words that I've said to her.
So maybe what you can do, and this is a creative challenge, right?
Which is try and find some way to communicate that you're sorry.
To her, right?
You can draw a picture of you all together and then a picture of daddy apart and then draw a picture of sad face and point to yourself.
Have her understand because remember, it's like when you learn a foreign language, you can understand it more quickly than you can speak it.
Right.
So her language skills are hard to measure because they're in the receptivity rather than in the speaking.
Yeah.
They're more advanced in listening than speaking.
Oh, yeah.
So finding a way to acknowledge...
That she's upset.
She's got a legitimate reason to be upset.
Yeah.
She's angry at you because her life was one thing and then it was the opposite for a little while.
Right.
And that is where I think the aggression is going to come from.
Like we know the R, at least I've talked about the R versus K stuff.
If there's father absence, and this is not a long period of time, right?
But if there's prolonged father absence, and of course it was an eternity for her because a month for a toddler is...
You know, like if you think you live to sort of 80 years old and sort of three-eighths of that, which is how long he was gone when she was five months old or four months old, I mean, that's like 30 years.
Yeah.
Right?
So a toddler time is...
And at least we can conceive of 30 years, right?
But a toddler time is very long.
And so she was...
I would imagine that she was...
Changing personality aspects in order to become more aggressive.
One thing we know about father absence is it generally provokes our selected behavior where the females become less feminine and more masculine because they have to take care of babies without a father around.
Right.
So, the fact that she began exhibiting, in a sense, quote, "male patterns of aggression, hitting and biting," when there was father absence would seem to me entirely in alignment with this R versus K theory.
And if you haven't seen it, or for those who haven't, it's the Gene Wars presentations on the channel GENE Wars.
So, that aspect of things is not something to be punished.
Right, yeah, exactly.
You know, if you put nothing but candy in front of a kid and then they get a cavity, you don't punch them in the teeth saying, bad teeth, right?
I mean, it's the environment that needs to be looked at with all humility first.
Yeah.
Now, I mean, the plus thing is you guys are back together, you're happier, his job situation is more stable, I assume the money worries have diminished, or at least 12 hours a day, I'd hope so.
Yeah.
And so, you have another kid coming, and that, again, I think is your opportunity to really make that commitment To be honest with each other.
You know, there's a lot of secrecy in a lot of people's relationships.
A lot of orbit without contact.
And just sit down and be frank and honest with your thoughts and feelings.
That takes a lot of pressure off.
And there's no reason for adversity to drive people against each other.
It can unite us together.
And we can be better people because of adversity.
Right.
Right.
Those would be my suggestions.
And it sounds like you guys are on the right path.
And if you make a commitment to be that open and honest with each other, I can't imagine the behavior is going to continue or escalate.
Okay.
Sounds like you're being summoned?
Yes, I am.
All right.
Okay.
And for those who want more about this, we've got The Truth About Single Moms.
There's this whole section on puberty and so on.
And you were, at least from your kid's perspective, a single mom for a while.
And...
I don't think punishing the situation will do any good.
I mean, it may suppress the behavior for a short amount of time, but it will guarantee it to escalate.
And in particular, when you punish toddlers and young kids because you're bigger, All you're doing is pushing things, kicking the can down the road and escalating it until puberty, right?
Because then the kids get bigger and you get older and it just goes downhill from there.
So I'm really glad you called in.
Thank you so much.
Keep us posted about how things are going.
And we're going to move on to the next caller.
But thank you again so much for a great call.
All right.
Thank you.
Welcome.
Alright, well up next we have Alec.
Alec wrote in and said, I'm a university student tasked with writing a research paper for my sociology class with the topic of explaining the assertion that race is a social construct.
The worst part of it is a requirement to use only sources provided by my extremely liberal professor.
Right.
Good.
Good.
That sounds like she's really...
Wait, I don't even know if it's a male or a female, but it sounds like the teacher's really encouraging some good old independent thinking and a challenging of their own beliefs.
Under freedom of speech, I would assume that I couldn't be penalized if I also presented in an objective manner the other perspective that race is biological slash genetic.
Yeah.
Would it be a violation of free speech if I was penalized for presenting both perspectives in the paper using outside credible resources?
That's from Alec.
Yeah.
Hey Alec, how's it going?
Hey, just peachy.
Sounds like you're getting quite an education.
Yes.
Perhaps inadvertently.
Why are you taking a sociology class and listening to this show?
I mean, it's got to be one or the other, right?
Yes, so the weird thing is I'm actually a computer science major.
Oh, so you're looking for a logical solution to this.
A structured solution that you can encapsulate in a DLL and bury it.
Right, right.
So, you know, with most universities, we have all these core classes we have to take.
And, you know, I was just looking at some of the cores that I had to get out of the way, and I saw sociology as one of them.
And I was like, hmm, I wonder how this would go if I actually took this.
Because I already knew, I mean, you know, in a pretty liberal university, how it might turn out.
But I just wanted to see how, really, how much bull crap there is.
So, you know, it was just really curiosity, to be honest, to see what it would be like.
So, yeah, anyway, I mean, I've already turned in the paper.
Oh, you have?
Yes, last Tuesday.
So I did end up presenting both perspectives in the paper.
I definitely made sure to answer everything about her question Really to the best of my ability as to not really give her an excuse to take points off or anything.
So I made sure to answer her part of it, but at the other side of it, I made sure to present as objectively as possible the other side that race could be biological slash genetic.
Right.
So yeah, I'm just really eagerly awaiting the results.
Oh, you don't have it back yet, right?
No, not yet.
Right.
Right.
Well, first of all, free speech doesn't protect you from getting an F, to my knowledge.
You know, I'm no lawyer, but, you know, let me take sort of an extreme example.
Let's say I'm a salesman for some company and I go to their biggest customer and say, you're a douchebag and we hate you.
Yeah.
Will I go to jail for that?
No, I'm protected under free speech.
Does that mean I won't get fired?
No.
No.
Right.
So, I mean, and again, the universities are supposed to allow, you know, if you have properly sourced arguments and so on, the universities are supposed to allow all of this.
And I think Mark Zuckerberg is someone, I don't know if it was like leaked or just came out, some internal memo where he's saying, you know, you can't just demonize everyone who disagrees with you and so on, right?
I mean, so, yeah, mature people.
You know, I would love, and I've read some, and, you know, If people believe that race is a social construct, call in.
You know, I can hear those arguments.
I can listen to those arguments.
I can probably adopt and argue those arguments quite convincingly.
But if the professor is saying, only use the sources I provide, I think that's a clue as to whether independent thought is encouraged or not.
Right, and I mean...
You know, all this really started, I would say, about a month ago when she was actually going over the rubric at first.
And, you know, the first thing that really caught my attention was that she said that we didn't need a reference page for any of our sources.
And I was like, what?
And what kind of academic research paper is it okay not to include a reference page?
And then, you know, she would go on and she explained, oh, the reason why is because you only have to use the sources that I've given you.
So she, it's a she, right?
Yes, it is.
Yeah.
I mean, I was kind of, you know, it was kind of amusing, but I was kind of in shock.
Like, did this really just happen?
Right.
Right.
Well, you're used to dude world, right?
I mean, computer science, still a bit of a sausage fest.
But it's good, because now, you see, you're going to get indoctrinated, or they're going to try and indoctrinate you into anti-racism, anti-sexism.
So it's really great.
Are you a white male?
Yes, I am.
Yeah, God help you.
So now you're going to be entirely clear on why, after you graduate, you can't get a job because diversity.
So it's, you know, the fact that you're dipping into sociology is going to help you understand all of that.
See, race is a social construct.
But we can only hire a black guy.
It's like, wait, what?
I'm a black guy?
Hire me!
Oh no, you're a white guy.
How do you know?
It's a social construct.
You look like one.
Oh, you're saying my genetics make my skin look...
Okay, so...
Yeah, that's...
Yeah.
You might want to...
I don't know.
Are there reviews?
Can you order the class first?
Can you get a list of the reading materials?
I mean, as far as where your education dollar is going to go, this is quite a dilemma, right?
I mean...
It's not bad, in a way, to know how this kind of mindset works, but it is quite a dilemma, right?
It is.
I kind of wanted to get your perspective on this.
That class is one of the situations where I tend to stay quiet.
I don't know if this is a good thing, but I do remember in one of your videos how you kind of explained, you know, you want to pick and choose the right battles.
And, you know, in that kind of course, with such a liberal atmosphere, the students are very, very liberal, very politically correct.
You know, I don't think...
I don't know if anything that I say will actually make a difference.
Oh, it'll make a difference?
Well, it might.
But, I mean, the thing also...
This was also, I believe, a couple weeks ago.
I don't know how this happened, but we decided that it would be a good idea to watch the 2005 Trump video on the bus.
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
So we were watching that, and afterwards she opened up the class to discussion, and everybody was just slamming Trump, saying how unfit he was.
Yeah.
And I was kind of scared.
I'm sure she balanced it by playing the Juanita Broderick interview, I think it was on NBC, where she was crying about having been She claims raped by Bill Clinton, you know, to balance it out.
Right, right.
And that actually did come up.
But my professor was like, well, you know, it doesn't matter because Bill Clinton is not running for president.
And there's so many problems with that logic because, first of all, Bill Clinton would be in the White House.
I mean, he is going to have a considerable amount of...
But he was president.
Right, and that too.
But I mean, people are saying...
Did it matter when he was running for president?
Also, you know who else is not running for president?
Melania Trump.
Is it worse to inadvertently use some parts of Michelle Obama's speech from a couple years back, or is it worse to rape a woman?
And Michelle, I mean, Melania Trump, she's not running for president, and the media was all over her about this, you know, someone wrote a speech for her and included inadvertently some bits of an old Michelle Obama.
Right, she's not running.
You know who else wasn't running for president?
Corey Lewandowski was not running for president, but the fact that he was reputed to have grabbed Michelle Field's arm, which turned out to be nonsense, I mean...
So the idea, well, you can't talk about Bill because he's not running for president.
It's like, ah, he's married to the woman who's going to try to be president.
And he was president!
And does that mean, oh, you know who else isn't running for president?
Bill Cosby, not running to be president.
So I guess we can't talk about anything else to do with Bill Cosby.
You know who else wasn't running for president?
John Gomeshi was not running for president.
Nor were the guys who supposedly had raped this woman, according to Rolling Stone, at the UVA campus.
And the Duke Lacrosse team, who was supposed to have raped a stripper, turned out to be nonsense.
You know, none of these people.
So if you're not running for president, crimes just don't matter.
In fact, there should only be one courthouse and one law, which is if you're running for president.
That's it.
Right, and I mean the other side that I guess everybody overlooks is the things that Hillary herself has actually done to some of these women, the women that have accused, you know, her husband.
And, you know, she defended the alleged rapist of a 12-year-old.
And I guess nobody really cares about bringing this up.
And, you know, what really concerns me most, I guess, is just how lopsided...
Sorry to interrupt you, I just want to be clear about something.
The issue was not that she defended the rapist.
Okay.
Because that was her job, right?
She was a lawyer.
And, you know, according to the anguish-wracked LA Law episodes from my youth, sometimes you have to defend people who are bad.
And not that she defended him.
I think there were two things about that story that are disconcerting to people.
Number one, she...
Implied, if not openly stated, that the young victim, I think she was 12, was in pursuit, in sexual pursuit of her rapist.
That's pretty unsavory.
And the second thing is that she was giggling about he took a lie detector and passed it and she'll never trust lie detectors again and laugh, laugh, laugh.
It's the emotional incongruity with the content.
But sorry, go ahead.
Yeah, I mean, yeah, I wasn't really...
I don't think that really came out right.
But yeah, I mean, I do recall the giggling thing.
But what really concerns me the most is how lopsided everything is.
You know something is really, really wrong when a presidential candidate is threatening to shut down Media outlets who oppose her views.
In what world is that okay?
But liberals do that all the time.
In liberal worlds.
Liberals will continually attack and shut down speech that they consider wrong.
And so it's in the liberal world, and it's in the world of Less intelligent people who are intellectually in way over their heads.
If you don't have the wit and intelligence to debate challenging ideas, then you're going to reach for your baseball bat.
Because the moral absolutism, which tends to be more common among less intelligent people, I know I'm a moral absolutist, but I'm talking about This is racist.
This is evil.
The dogmatism of unproven things that are associated with morality, right?
So it's not.
The question of, is race a social construct?
It's an interesting question.
And it's one of these, you know what?
It's blurry.
There are biological components to race.
There's no question of that.
And you'd have to be woefully ignorant of any kind of evolutionary science to deny that.
And you'd also have to continually be baffled as to why Blonde-haired people in Finland don't give birth to kids who look like they're from Somalia.
Or why Eskimos don't give birth to Chinese people.
You just have to...
There is a biological component to it.
And there is a social component to it as well.
And so it's complicated.
Race is a big, complicated topic like gender.
There are biological elements of gender.
And there are social elements of gender.
And some of those social elements...
Derived from the biology, and some don't.
And so it is, it's a bit complicated, and I think enjoyable, and deep and rich topic.
But it's like, no, it's 100% a social construct, and anyone who disagrees is evil.
That is moral absolutism.
And like how you mentioned, yeah, I know you mentioned how, you know, people who aren't Smart enough to challenge these ideas.
I think that's a really big problem.
The average person, you've heard the term fact check brought up so many times in this election cycle.
The average person, what do they do?
They go to Google, they type in fact check, blah blah blah, and then one of the first things that comes up is PolitiFact, which is owned and run by I believe a pretty liberal publication.
Very liberal.
Even the fact-checking.
The average person doesn't really understand how to discern some of these things.
We have to do stupid things like fact-check because people don't know how to think.
If you know how to think and you can work with principles and you can work with syllogisms and you can use Socratic reasoning, PolitiFact has no sway over you.
You know, I don't care what PolitiFact says.
If something reduces the non-aggression principle in society, I'm good for it.
You know, I can talk about the evils of spanking without having to cite all the research.
I mean, I think the research is helpful.
But if you have principles, facts become less addictive.
And the other thing, too, of course, Hillary Clinton says, Google this.
Why does she say Google?
Why doesn't she say search or Bing or Yahoo or whatever it is, right?
She says, Google this.
Well, because Google has this indications that Google is not entirely unsympathetic to particular Democrat goals.
Let's be as circumspect as possible.
So yeah, I mean, it works really well for it.
The other thing too, you know, it's a chicken and an egg thing as well.
I mean, how successful do you think I would be teaching a sociology class to these kids?
Probably, I mean, in this kind of context, probably not very successful, I would guess.
That would be a disaster.
Yeah.
It would be a complete and total disaster.
I mean, I just had a conversation with Duke Pester, Dr.
Duke Pester, about cultural Marxism.
It's a great conversation.
People should really listen to it.
FreedomMainRadio.com.
For more, or youtube.com slash freedomainradio, just do a search for Pesta, P-E-S-T-A. And yeah, he made an argument some woman didn't like, and she went and reported him for assault.
I mean, there would be like open revolt.
They'd be marching down.
There'd be protests.
There'd be like nobody could...
I mean, it's not just that the professors are indoctrinating the kids.
Again, speaking sort of in general terms here, not about your specific class, but it's not just that the teachers are indoctrinating the kids.
It's that the kids are the way they are, which requires a certain kind of teacher.
The kids are in, unable to think, way over their heads.
Way over their heads.
They don't know what they're doing.
And so, competent, intelligent, rigorous, skeptical, thought-provoking teachers can't survive in modern education.
With some exceptions, but I'm not, you know, it's not impossible.
But particularly newer ones, so if you're an older professor, like I had a professor of Victorian poetry once who was so old, he only had a bachelor's degree, and he was a full professor.
That's how old the guy was.
And so all the people who got in before tenure, who got in with tenure and, you know, can't be kicked out and so on, they can get by.
Although Philip Rushton, a professor in Canada, sometimes had to give his lectures remotely because he talked about race in a more foundational way.
And he included genetic aspects, as he saw in the RK selection theory with regards to race.
So it's not just, oh, you know, these dewy-eyed kids are showing up and being, you know, mercilessly propagandized by their professors.
It's like, given the kids that are coming into university and how little knowledge they have, how little reasoning capacity they have, how few language skills they have.
You've got a generation of kids who are texting and who are watching videos and who are playing video games and who are looking at YouTube videos online and all that kind of stuff.
And it's like, okay...
We know that reading stories, reading stories, particularly novels, increases empathy.
Well, how many kids read novels when you were growing up?
I don't know.
I mean, I feel like growing up they did, but nowadays probably not as much.
That's cool.
So your friends did read novels.
That's actually good to hear.
I don't know.
I mean...
I kind of thought you meant like in the older days, but yeah, I mean...
No, no, your kids, your friends.
Right, yeah, today that really is not a thing, unfortunately.
Right, it's not.
And so I used to have really ferocious debates.
And that really helped, you know.
So by the time I got to university and I joined the debate club...
I was miles ahead.
Like, I was sixth best in Canada the first year I was in my debate club because I'd had lots of debates and arguments and so on growing up.
Well, how do kids compete these days?
Well, they attempt to get high scores and trophies on Xbox and PS4, right?
Yeah.
It's not a match of wits.
It's not verbal dueling.
It's not any of that kind of stuff.
And so, given the nature of the kids who are coming into school...
I think the best teachers wouldn't have anything to do with them.
It's sort of like giving Vincent van Gogh, or as a Dutch girlfriend once told me emphatically, Vincent van Gogh, Vincent van Herbal.
Anyway, so Vincent van Gogh, if you give him Giant pieces of chalk and crayons, can he make a masterpiece?
Not really.
If you tell him to take oil and paint on wet paper, what's he gonna come up with?
Some crazy Jackson Pollock brain monstrosity or something.
So, it's not just the innocence of the children and the nefariousness of the teachers.
If the children Who are probably not that smart.
I mean, so many kids are piling into university these days that you just have to lower the standards.
Of course you do, right?
Yeah.
And so the standards get lowered, and how many really great teachers want to deal with kids who aren't that smart, who don't know how to debate, who don't know how to think, who don't know how to write?
I mean, kids going to university these days need remedial courses.
I've heard reports that a lot of them are writing at an eighth grade level.
Yeah, that's pretty good.
And they're in university?
University is supposed to be for like the elite.
So, I mean, looking at sort of the possibilities, I think it's really important to preserve one's capacity for efficacy in this world.
Really, really important.
Don't do things that are going to blunt your sense of power, of competence.
It doesn't mean avoid challenges or anything like that.
But it means measure what you can do and what you can't do.
Because if you try to enact some big change in an environment where that's impossible, my concern is that you're going to come out of that with the idea that trying to enact big change is useless.
I remember that time I tried it in university.
I think in this situation, I mean, I hope that you get...
Some reasonable mark on your paper, but it seems very unlikely that you're going to change anyone's mind.
The fact that you have the capacity to see both sides of a complex argument about race and genetics and race and environment is great, and you'll get that benefit out of it.
And it is good to read the arguments that race is a social construct.
I mean, those are It's good to read those arguments, just as it's good to read arguments for the existence of God, and it's good to read arguments as to why socialism is wonderful for everyone.
It's just great to read arguments.
There may be great stuff in there, there may be useful stuff in there, and the rebutting of it in your own mind or in company is going to help.
It's going to help you think better.
So, I would say that it's not going to change anyone's mind there.
And you can probably tell this from talking with Your fellow students, did you chat with them at all about any of this stuff?
No, I mean, usually when we open it up to class discussion, it's just, you know, people raise their hands and they just say whatever, contribute to the general discussion.
I like tomatoes!
No, I mean...
A bee stung me last week.
It was painful.
No, but what about, I mean, for me, a lot of that university value was...
Talking with people at lunch table and talking with people in the quad and, you know, we're playing Frisbee and talking.
I mean, do you have any socializing or socialization with people outside of the classroom who are in your class?
Not in this particular class.
I mean, again, I'm not really, you know, being a computer science major, this is kind of out of my realm.
I don't really talk to these people.
You could though, right?
My Marxist professors, and I've mentioned this before, so I'll just touch on it briefly, but my Marxist professors were not actually too bad.
And this is old school Marxists.
They weren't just like, I think, some of the more crazy social justice warrior stuff.
I mean, they were all about the proletariat.
And I had some pretty good, ferocious, but good debates with a couple of them.
And They were reasonable.
I mean, I had to work three times as hard to get the same mark as someone who agreed with him.
And that's not necessarily just because of bias, but it's also because I had to source everything, which if the professor agrees with you, they require fewer sources, as you sort of noticed.
So it made me stronger, and I got more out of my education because they disagreed with me, and I disagreed with them.
I got more out of my education.
Going to hear an echo chamber, like if the kids already believe...
That race is a social construct.
Going to have a professor tell them that race is a social construct is really pointless.
But what else can you do if they're not that smart?
What else can you do?
I mean, they can't handle, they can't process, they don't have the intellectual strength, the emotional strength, the strength of character, anything to handle diversion or different opinions.
And you can see this when conservatives show up on campus.
I mean, people go insane.
Mental.
Mental.
I mean, Ann Coulter trying to speak at the University of Ottawa.
I mean, I was insane.
Yeah, Canadians are real nice.
Just such a polite people.
Unless you're Ann Coulter, in which case you better run for the hills with the security detail hard on your tail.
So what else can you do?
They're there to just parrot back and learn nothing and waste time and waste resources and then wonder why they don't get an executive level position when they get out of college.
Because it's got nothing to do with the free market anymore.
And it's just about indoctrination and vote buying and all that kind of stuff.
And of course, people in the workforce love it when young people go to college.
Because when young people go to college, they're not competing with those people in the workforce driving down their wages.
I mean, everyone wins except truth, reality, financial stability in the future.
But yeah, those are my thoughts.
I mean, you're not required to do it.
You certainly...
The idea that you'd go to...
You'd pay...
You'd pay thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars a year to attempt to indoctrinate professors.
You understand that's a crazy notion, right?
Yes.
You know, you're paying them because they're supposed to teach you something.
Why would you pay in order to get stressed, imperil your peace of mind, imperil your marks, in order to teach them something that they have no indication they want to learn?
When, if they believe what you say, their teaching career is probably over.
I mean, why would they...
You understand from a basic human incentive standpoint, it makes no sense.
Yeah, exactly.
Alright.
Yeah, and I mean, I guess kind of relating to that topic, I was just reading a report how across so many schools around the country, the freedom of press, just student press, it's being severely limited, and just...
Any kind of conservative viewpoint that wants to get published is usually met with some crazy opposition.
In the specific report I was actually reading, it's kind of funny.
Some of the student journalists had to deal with protesters of basically free speech.
It's kind of ironic that protesters implementing their freedom of speech to protest the freedom of speech.
It's just bizarre.
But the left are the new fascists.
I mean, I think that much needs to be really clear to people.
The left are the new fascists.
I mean, I've studied the phenomenon fairly extensively, and I can't think of a single fascistic approach that was taken in the past that's not being taken by the left now.
I mean, the left are the new fascists.
And if people can tell me where there are deviations, I'd be really happy to hear them, but...
I don't think there are.
And so it is a risky environment.
And so I try and close this out with as little conflict as possible and get the hell back to the rationality of computer science.
Right.
All right.
Well, let us know how it goes.
Do give us a ping and let us know what your mark is.
I'm certainly curious about it.
And thank you so much for calling in.
Yes, thank you.
Take care.
Alright, well up next is Tammy with a question that is not entirely unrelated to the last one.
Tammy wrote in and said, That's from Tammy.
Hi, Tammy.
How are you doing?
I'm great.
It's a pleasure to be talking with you.
Well, thanks.
Let's hope you feel that way soon as well.
Yes.
Always better when it has followed through.
Yes, totally.
Is this something sort of more personal to your life?
Is it a more abstract question?
No.
Those two things are very personal.
I'm a vice principal at a charter school.
And I teach.
I'm also a teacher at the school.
So I teach GT students.
And we do the Socrative seminars.
And I was listening to one of your other...
Videos where someone had spoken about trying to talk to people about peaceful parenting, and you cautioned him on that because they weren't your own children.
And I wondered if you had considered, so that you could sort of talk me through that, if I should be considering how far I should take the truth with students who aren't my own children.
Like, especially if their parents aren't really truly awake.
Do you see any issue?
Yeah, I do.
I do.
Okay, do you want to give me, I don't know, what's the most generally considered to be most startling or most shocking thing that you would want to bring to your students?
Well, everything.
Okay, I like that.
I have several students that almost act as an old soul.
They act like a 40 or 50-year-old person who already understands what education is, who already understands what the government is doing.
And so if I were to spin it a cutesy way...
Then those kids that already know the truth are then going to look at me as a liar.
And so they really want to discuss truth in government, truth in, you know, just everything, core level.
Right, right.
Okay, no, and this old soul thing, it sort of reminded me, I had a friend who worked for me when I was in the software world as an entrepreneur.
And he was a bit of a, you know, expecting with like really high pants and suspenders whittling a porch complaining about some kids bulbing in his yard, you know.
But he was only like 24 and one of the project managers of the company just aptly described him as he's like he's the body, he's like the soul of a 67-year-old man trapped in the body of a 24-year-old.
That was a really great way of putting it.
And there is that, I call them the period people.
I don't know if you know people like this.
I don't anymore.
But I used to when I was younger.
Period.
Race is a social construct.
Period.
They put this period.
End of discussion.
Nobody can disagree with it.
There's no nuances.
Nothing more to research.
The period.
Now, when you get older, you either get arrogant or you get humble.
I don't see anything in between myself.
And the arrogant people are the ones who have all the answers.
And they view...
Their life experiences having given them every fact that needs to be known and every perspective.
And it's just this way, period.
As I get older, I become increasingly humbled because there's just so much I don't know and so much I didn't know.
And when you discover massive new swaths of human information and you say, okay, well, for the last 45 years, I didn't know any of this stuff.
What don't I know now that I'm going to learn next year?
That's one of the things that kind of draws me on into the future is...
The joyous possibility that I've missed out enormous swaths of information, like Ann Coulter was talking about this when she was writing her book on American, Adios America, about immigration.
Immigration was only going to be a small part of it, but as she dug in, she realized that huge amounts of immigration and demographic information had been kept from her, and so she had changed everything she was doing, and it altered her entire perspective, and It's wonderful when you just realize how little knowledge you have.
And that draws me back further to principles and so on.
And so if you've got kids who just think they know, have all the answers, there's nothing more to learn, that's tough.
That's tough.
Because in order to be interested in answers, you have to know that there are questions.
And if all you have are answers, you're not going to be in any pursuit of questions at all.
So do you think the kids' culture...
And this is something I used to always argue vertically.
I now think it's more horizontal.
Is the culture or the mindset of the children, is it coming more from their parents or is it coming more from their peers, do you think?
Oh, I think it's definitely parents.
Just the school that I'm at.
Because we're rural, but we're a tech school, and we're a charter school, I see a lot of parents more so than I do peer.
I mean, I have a select group of kids, so I have gifted and talented kids, 12 of them.
So, you know, Some of the things that they want to discuss maybe isn't being discussed in the regular classroom.
So they do want to think on a higher level, not argue, but they want to be able to have a space where they can discuss things that they see that maybe the media is portraying as false.
They want to call out the lies.
And so I agree with them because if you're just looking at mainstream media, you see all these dishonest things going on in the world.
But a lot of times school isn't discussing the dishonest things.
School is sort of sugarcoating it.
So they really want to be able to call what they see.
And I just wondered, you know, about like The parent perspective when you are dealing with truth in things.
No, and the dyno media is a big challenge.
I mean, I've heard a whole different number of ways of talking about the...
The media.
Some YouTuber, Stixenhexenhammer666 refers to them as the legacy media.
But, I don't know, legacy software was valuable to someone at some point, so I don't like to...
A legacy is also an inheritance of things that are positive and so on.
For me, the dino media is kind of what it...
Because, you know, they're big, they're dangerous, and they're going to die off.
The dino media is the closest...
I'll probably settle somewhere else, but the closest I can get to it.
So...
I think teaching children the principles of thinking is very important.
And you're an educator, I don't need to tell you this, but you can teach children philosophy in terms of here's how you think, here's how you evaluate information, here's things you can look for, here are logical fallacies and so on.
And it is, you know this, you teach people how to think rather than what to think.
And so...
I had the parent of a kid once say to me, oh no, the kid came up to me and said, do you believe in God?
Now, if I say yes, or I say no, I've taught that child nothing.
I've taught them one tiny piece of information, which is my particular belief, which could be based on faith, it could be based on reason, it could be based on something I read on a cereal box, it could be based on a head injury, it could be anything, right?
I may not even know the language very well.
I thought, do I have a dog?
Anyway, so with those kinds of questions, what I do is I say, well, let's talk about it.
What a great question.
So, you say, do I believe in God?
Well, let's talk about belief.
So, do you believe, if it's daytime, do you believe it's daytime?
Yes.
Do you believe in fairies?
No.
Okay, so belief...
It's interesting, because you can use the same word for things that are true and things that are false.
I don't believe, right?
It's the same word.
Now, if I say, do fairies exist?
You'd say no.
And if I say, does the sun exist?
You'd say yes.
So how do we know the difference, right?
So that's sort of what I would do.
I don't want to answer the question.
But I do want to have them start to understand that sentences exist.
Are things to be productively disassembled, right?
I mean, I don't know if you ever did this when you were a kid, but, you know, they gave us frogs to open up.
My daughter can never know this.
They gave me frogs.
You had to cut open the frogs.
You had to look at all the various parts of the frog and all that kind of stuff.
And that's how you learn a lot about biology.
And it's the same thing.
With their sentences.
Somebody says, do you believe in God?
Okay, well, what do you mean by belief?
What do you mean by God?
What does it even mean to believe in something?
How would you know the difference?
Those things are very productive because that gives them a framework for thinking about questions as a whole.
You know, they had a caller, I think it was last show, had a great question.
Said, look, 90% of what we say we believe is reported to us by other people.
How do we know?
What they're saying is true.
Great question.
How do we know that?
Whether the mainstream media is telling us the truth or not.
Compared to what?
And I think those kinds of questions...
I don't think that there are a lot of parents who are going to get upset if you teach their children sort of Socratic reasoning and disassembling sentences.
If you refrain from giving the children conclusions, which is, I think, important.
And I mean...
It's my consistent pattern here.
You always hear me saying, well, does that make sense to you?
Does that fit?
Is it something else?
I'm not going to tell people what the issue is.
I'm going to say, here's a possibility.
What do you think?
And I don't think much harm, well, harm can come out of it, but it won't be because of you, right?
So, I mean, obviously, if the parents are like, I don't know, emotionally stunted, aggressive people, Ideologues or bigots, then if the kid comes, you know, dancing home all sprightly and feather-winged from Socratic reasoning, it's going to annoy the parents.
But because you haven't taught the child any conclusions, it would be tough for them to get really upset with you.
Like if you go to the kid of religious parents and you say, God doesn't exist.
Well, the religious parents, quite rightly, are going to be upset with you.
Right.
In the same way that if someone comes to the kid of atheist parents and says, Jesus died for your sins, the atheist parents will be upset.
Because these are conclusions.
They don't teach the child anything other than there are perspectives out there that some people find very important.
And so I would say really work with the methodology rather than the conclusions.
And not only is that better for the kids, but I think it's better for you.
Got it.
That's great.
That's great.
So, on just that other separate note was the fact of the men and women's value, market value.
Because when I watched your videos, I had always thought that.
And I had the exact same thought on it forever, for my whole life.
Except no one, like my mom, grandmother, my sisters, no.
No one ever told that to me.
And so when I tried to talk about it and relate it into my conversations with the women, my girlfriends that I have, I was kind of met with a lot of hostility about that.
And so my question was, can knowledge be objective?
And certain.
Can you be certain of some knowledge that you have without acquiring it through experience?
Because my friends say, well, because you're not married, you don't know.
Or because you haven't had children with someone, you don't understand.
And so I was wondering that piece.
Well, if you can't have any knowledge of something you haven't experienced or you haven't inhabited...
Then how on earth could feminists talk about a patriarchy because a patriarchy is a man thing and they're not men?
How on earth could black people say that white...
You know, there's some social justice warriors out there who say, well, only white people can be racist.
And let's say that a black person is saying that or a Hispanic person or whatever.
Well, how could they know if they're not white?
So people regularly claim to have knowledge of things they have not inhabited and have not experienced.
And that's entirely correct.
The whole point of having...
A conceptual brain is to be able to manipulate things you've not directly experienced, right?
I mean, I know there are trees in Argentina.
I've never been to Argentina, but I'm pretty sure there are trees there.
And I'm pretty sure there's gravity there, and clouds, and rain, and socialism, and all these things, right?
I've never been there, but the whole point is to be able to extrapolate into the future Into distant areas and know things for certain that you have not directly experienced.
I mean, protozoa and the lowest forms of life deal with what directly impacts their sense organs in the moment.
Jellyfish and stuff, right?
I mean, they're not out there planning to build a bridge to the new jellyfish city or anything.
So it's really asking human beings to operate at the lowest level of not even consciousness, but of sense receptivity and reaction.
It's asking you not to have a brain, but primitive reflexes to say that you cannot use your concepts to come up with things that are true.
And the people who make these claims, again, it's like, okay, it's the old, there's no such thing as truth.
Is that a true statement?
It sounds like a gotcha, but it's one of the basic questions to ask.
And if people say, well, you can't have knowledge of things you don't directly experience...
They're almost certainly going to be making knowledge claims of things they haven't directly experienced.
And I think it's just a way of getting people who have opinions you differ with to not talk.
Because almost for certain people like that would never apply those perspectives to opinions they agreed with.
Hello? Hello?
Hello?
Hello? Hello?
Yes.
I'm sorry.
I thought you had more to that sentence.
Yes.
Exactly.
I just think that it's...
I just wonder why...
I have never met another female, other than listening to probably like Ann Coulter, but no one in my realm of friends who feels that way or sees that.
That has been the oddest thing for me, is that until I listened to that video, I had never heard anyone state that before.
I had never thought about it from the man's point of view.
How men value more.
I didn't really connect that to their job and things like that.
But I could totally see the woman's perspective.
But I just wonder why other women Can't see that for what that truly, truly is.
Why?
Why is it so rare?
Because I have not found anyone that shares my point of view.
Now, I'm sorry if we got...
I went one, two...
You know, there's an old Simpsons with the escalator to nowhere.
I went one too many layers of abstractions up.
So when you say women don't really see that, what is the that we're talking about again?
They don't really see that as, well, it mainly has to deal with, like, my friends that are married, and after they got married and had children.
They got really bitter and sort of withdrawn from their husbands and they weren't really doing a great job anymore.
And so when I tried to talk them through that and say, you know, like, well...
You know, you spend all this time on your wedding and you spend all this time looking for somebody and now you found that person and now, you know, you have children.
Why are you miserable?
Why are you unhappy?
That kind of thing.
They can't connect any of that together.
And so that was what I was saying.
The thing on how women should be, maybe how you should be looking toward marriage.
As you get older, it almost caused them to go bitter.
Now they're angry.
Now they've got resentments toward their husband.
And I've just never been able to find anyone that shares my belief on that feeling.
Right.
It's a bit of a change in direction, but I have a few thoughts as to why.
I've noticed the same thing.
I've noticed the same thing, and I have a few thoughts on it, which I'm certainly happy to pitch your way and see if they connect with anything that makes sense to you.
Let me ask a few questions about your friends, just sort of feel out the theory first.
Your friends, when they were younger, did they date a lot, a little, or somewhere in the middle?
A little bit.
A little, okay.
And did they focus on their appearance a lot, a little, or somewhere in the middle?
Somewhere in the middle.
Right.
And at what age roughly did they get married?
I'd say late 20s, 27, 28.
Okay, all right.
And they were with the same guy for a while and then got married and so on?
Yes, yes.
Right.
Now, if you were to go to your friends at the age when they were sort of 24, 25, no, it's 22, 23.
Let's go 22 or 23.
Would they have high, medium, or low self-confidence?
And that doesn't mean like rational self-confidence.
I mean, sociopaths can have high self-confidence.
I just mean, would they think that they were bringing good value to the world?
I would say they would probably have low.
Ah, okay.
So what would they feel they were not bringing to the world?
Or what deficiencies would they have?
Probably, like, not good enough or not pretty enough.
Okay, so they would have insecurities, right?
Correct.
About their appearance.
Maybe, yes.
Right.
Which is selfish.
Right.
Yes.
Focusing on one's own appearance.
And I understand it.
I understand.
There's nothing wrong with it, you know, but an over-focus on one's appearance is not...
It's not like you're out there helping burn victims or, you know, helping hoarders clean up their house or, you know, you're concerned about, do my hips look big in these jeans?
Like, it's kind of inward-focused and it's kind of selfish.
And again, it's not terrible or anything like...
We all have to be somewhat concerned with appearance, particularly when we're younger, but...
It seems to have metastasized in a lot of places to the point where that's just a really, really big thing.
If you're worried about your appearance, go help out people in a burn ward.
Trust me, you'll feel fine about your hips afterwards.
Something has changed in the West over the past maybe two generations.
And I've said this before, but it seems like there used to be two forces that needed to be tamed in order for society to work.
And the two forces that are not negative forces, but left untrammeled, they're incredibly destructive.
The two forces that need to be tamed are male aggression and female vanity.
We all understand that untrammeled male aggression leads to a very destabilized society.
I mean, just look at gangs and inner cities and fatherless children growing up with too much Aggression.
And you know this.
You're a teacher.
There's boys.
And they're aggressive, right?
They're play fighting.
They're rolling.
They're screaming.
They're yelling.
You know, these kinds of things.
We got some friends.
They got three boys.
And I go and visit.
And they charge at me with swords because they come through the door.
I've never had girls greet me that way.
The girls are all like, I made a picture.
And the men are all like, die, stormtrooper.
It's like, I know I'm pale, but not quite that bad.
And so we all understand that male aggression...
It's a great force.
It's a wonderful thing.
It's a good thing.
But it needs to be tempered.
It needs to be tamed.
And one of the primary ways of taming male aggression is marriage and children.
I mean, marriage causes men to buckle down and get more serious as having children and also marriage and children reduce testosterone in a man.
We know that biologically.
Children in particular.
And the more time you, it does depend on the more time you spend around children, the more your testosterone goes down.
So, for the last couple of generations, there's been a lot of focus on taming male aggression.
On the other hand, it seems like everyone has gotten behind female vanity and has just cranked it through the roof.
Cranked it through the roof.
So, women got the vote after An eternity of not having the vote.
Now, the question is then, was there a significant amount of education poured into women to help them understand politics, to help them understand economics, to help women understand the effect their votes could have on the world?
Didn't really seem to be the case.
Didn't really seem to be the case.
What seemed to happen was the politicians all said, women are wonderful.
Women are wise.
Women are good.
Women are caring.
Women are nurturing.
If women ran the world, there'd be nothing but peace.
Well, let's see how it works out with Angela Merkel, shall we?
I don't think it will be peace.
So, politicians basically, and from politicians to the media and so on, there's just this constant Praise of women and denigration of boys.
Praise of women, praise of girls, denigration of boys.
And you see this, once you see this, you can't unsee it.
Everywhere you go, all the shows, the girls are nice and pretty and tidy and neat and the boys are noisy and loud and smelly and, you know, and this is, you know, it's been a habit for a long time.
And the basic reason for it, of course, is that we live in a culture where men propose and women dispose.
Men ask for reproductive capacity and women say yes or no.
And so nobody really wants to upset women.
Nobody wants to sort of say to women, here are your limitations, here's your challenge.
You know, there was an old saying, I think it's from Shakespeare, vanity, thy name is woman.
This is not to say women are bad, and it's not to say that vanity is bad any more than men are bad or aggression is bad, but it's something that is a weakness.
Men have a weakness for aggression, women have a weakness for vanity.
And the opposite of vanity is wisdom, because vanity is thinking you have value where you don't actually have value.
And wisdom is having a reasonable and realistic assessment of your strengths and weaknesses.
So, young women and women as a whole are told they're wonderful, are told they're goddesses, are told they can do anything and everything they want.
There's no restrictions, no limitations, and they're exactly the same as men.
But they're not.
Y'all are not, right?
I mean...
Right.
Physically, biologically, mentally, right?
I mean, we've gone through this a million times before and Milo talked about it in a recent talk and it's, right, so men inhabit more of the extremes of the IQ scale.
There are more brilliant men than women and there are more idiotic men than women.
Correct.
And women have the blessing and the burden of being giant incubation machines who need to breastfeed babies for 18 months in order for the babies to develop optimally.
It takes them a little bit out of the workforce, takes them a little bit out of intellectual pursuits, which is why there are fewer women at the top of these fields and fewer women who are able to achieve good or great things in various fields.
Women tend towards more helping professions and less abstract, rigorous professions like mathematics or economics or physics or even engineering to some degree.
And I know, and this is so boring to have to say, and I know you don't think it, but everyone else, oh, I know exceptions to this rule.
Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah.
We're talking about trends, not everyone.
And so women are told not, look, here are your strengths.
And women have fantastic and wonderful strengths.
Here are your strengths, ladies, and here are your weaknesses.
Now, unfortunately, the scale has tipped so much, the seesaw is so off its hinge, that men are only told about their weaknesses and never about their strengths, and women are only ever told about their strengths and never about their weaknesses.
Ladies, you suck in the army.
You're terrible.
And in general, you suck as firefighters.
And you're terrible at it.
And you suck at national defense, ladies in Europe, and you're terrible at it.
And there's lots of things you're great at, and there's lots of things, on average, you're terrible at.
And there are lots of things that men are great at, and lots of things they're terrible at.
And I don't know if it's because women live longer, and I don't know if it's because women vote more, but ladies, the most important and the biggest thing that you need to understand, if there's only one thing you ever get from Ladies, if you're raising a child without a father, you suck at it.
You're terrible at it, particularly boys, but also girls.
I believe this is true for single fathers as well, but there's just so few of them, it's not really worth focusing on.
Nobody, like, why hasn't anyone said to women, Single moms are terrible at raising children.
And it's not because they're bad people.
It's not possible to raise a son without a father and do a good job.
It's not possible.
So...
Why isn't anyone...
I mean, this is one of the great disasters of the modern world as a single motherhood and the attendant dysfunction and crime and promiscuity and drug addiction and cigarettes and alcoholism and...
I mean, not that every kid of a single mother...
but in general, right?
So I ask you, Tammy, this is one of the giant problems of the modern world, if not the biggest problem in the modern world.
Why are women being lied to about their capacities...
As single mothers.
You're not a single mom, are you?
No, I'm not.
Hey!
Didn't think you were.
Tammy, live in the country.
The name, the location.
I was like, no way.
No way.
So, tell me why.
Why?
Why?
Why aren't women being told about this?
I think it comes from...
That whole perception of doing it all.
Like, you can do it all.
You know, I mean, that's what I was told, you know, when I was a little girl, and I'm sure no one meant it badly to tell me that.
But you can do it all.
You know, you can have a career.
You can have a family.
Absolutely no way.
No way.
You can, but they'll both suffer.
You will do both badly.
Yeah.
Because one has to be your focus.
And I wish that someone had said that to me when I was...
Okay, so why?
That's an even better one because that's more universal even than single motherhood.
Why?
And I'm sorry to interrupt you.
I'll shut up in a second.
I just asked you for something.
But the reason why this is so important to me is A, for the thesis, but also every time we talk about this stuff, and I know we're going to get these messages too, We get two kinds of messages.
One is like, man, I wish people had told me the truth before I became a single mom.
And the other is, I'm a great single mom, and how dare you?
I work three jobs, and I don't take it.
Okay, but then you're not being there for your kids.
Correct.
So, why do people say this insane thing to women that only a moment's thought Only a moment's thought is needed to dispel it.
No, you cannot have a great career and be a great mom.
You can't.
I'm sorry, you can't.
Because one feeds off the other.
To have a great career, I know this.
I know this because I was top flight career guy in the business world.
Late nights.
Travel.
Weekends.
Availability, social gatherings, networking.
It's a big investment.
You know, the average guy or woman who becomes CEO of a big company, they've been working 70-hour weeks for 20 years or more.
Yeah.
So, this doesn't even take a lot of brains to figure out.
But I think that...
I think, like, for me, I'm not married, and I don't have any children, right?
But if I had met someone when I could have had children, I would have.
It just didn't happen.
Everything did not fall into place for me.
So instead of, you know, well, I could adopt.
Sure, you know, that's what my friend said.
Well, you're single.
You could adopt.
And I'm like, what?
Are you ludicrous?
I mean...
There's so many pieces of that that are wrong.
And just because things didn't work out for me doesn't mean that I'm...
Not work out, but I mean, just because things didn't line up where...
It would have been possible.
Doesn't mean now I'm going to subject children to be in this world with me without a father figure.
That's so disconnected.
To me, that doesn't even make sense.
It's like one plus one equals four.
Well, you're alone and you work all the time, so why don't you just adopt?
Well, let me ask you this.
When you were younger, were you told...
Hey, you know, your fertility is going to start to decline in your mid-20s and, you know, you shouldn't waste your youth on whoever.
You should really, you know, when your sexual market value is the highest, that's when you should try and snag yourself the best guy.
I mean, because this also, it's so incredibly, like, you read the studies of what women think about fertility.
Well, Janet Jackson is having a baby at 50.
It's like, yes, and it's a cyborg.
She's giving birth to a Terminator.
Exactly.
Exactly.
I mean, were you aware of all of this stuff when you were younger?
No.
No!
It's kept from women!
Right.
It's the most important thing to know if you have any interest in children.
When's your expiry date?
Right.
When does it...
How does it accelerate?
And who the hell is going to be available to you to marry in your mid-30s when your clocks are...
Ticking louder than the gong at the end of Bohemian Rhapsody.
Exactly.
And I spent two and a half years in Japan.
I taught Japanese students English right out of college.
Maybe you caught the no-breathing bug from Japan anyway.
Yes.
But my Japanese students would say, you know, why are you here?
And I would be like, what do you mean?
And they said, well, when you get back to America, in Japanese, they said, aren't you going to be Christmas cake?
And I said, what does that mean?
And they said, you know, the cake that's left over after Christmas that no one wants, if you're 29 here and you're not married, we call you Christmas cake.
Yeah.
And I was like...
Oh, wow.
That was the very first time I had ever actually thought about my life in terms of years in order to do things.
Do you know what I mean?
Right.
So why is this information kept from women?
Because the number of...
I'm not saying this is your circumstance.
Right.
But the number of women who kind of wake up in a cold sweat because they spend 12 years hanging around with guys who I weren't going to commit.
And there's so much information that's kept from people.
I mean, I could get into a whole lengthy rant just about the incredible information that's been kept from me that was absolutely essential for me to live my life.
Why is this information kept from women?
It's so important.
Not because women have to have kids, but a lot of women do want to have kids.
And having kids is a big plan.
If you want to be a good parent, you've got to find the right guy.
You've got to engineer your career.
You've got to figure out how and when you get educated and in what.
You've got to get to the right location.
You've got to have a support system.
You've got lots of things.
And you've got to do it when you're young.
Yes.
Why is this kept from women?
Female teachers...
Shouldn't they be giving this information?
I mean, dear God alive.
Yes.
When I was in, I think it was junior high school, we were given the most god-awful, terrifying, apocalyptic, end-of-the-world, Blade Runner-style sex ed.
And I still remember some of it, which I will not repeat here because it was gruesome and horrifying about all the horrible things that you can catch and all the terrible things that can happen and all this kind of stuff.
And no one ever said, by the way, ladies...
Here's the thing.
About fertility, if you want to have kids, here's what you need.
It would have been a five-minute conversation, right?
You say, okay, 35, you're really pushing it, so you've got to work back from there.
If you want to be married for a couple of years, you want to date for a couple of years, and so on, all the way back to, you've got to spend your early 20s time to find the right guy.
Five-minute conversation.
They have children for 12 years, and they can't manage a five-minute conversation about fertility for women.
Why?
Because they want to perpetuate the myth that you can do exactly everything that a man can do.
You can go to the head of a company.
You can have a family.
You can work 40-hour weeks.
You can have 2.5 kids and a dog and a white picket fence.
I think it's that whole thing that is like stereotype of a perfect life.
I think it's like the Cinderella story.
I think it's like that, where instead of really telling people the way it is, it's being sugar-coated.
Like, it's a white picket fence.
It's a house.
It's a husband there.
You know what I mean?
It's so...
But you can also work.
Well, those two things don't go together.
Work and all of that other stuff does not go together.
Work will be your baby.
Yeah, so this ties it back to the vanity for me, Tammy, which is people who are vain don't like to be told of limitations.
Right?
Right.
I mean, they're allergic in a sense to boundaries, to constraints.
The vanity is megalomaniacal, it's narcissistic, it's, you know, I can do anything, anyone.
It's magical thinking.
And, I mean, I think that there's some political elements to it as well.
Because, you know, if you say to women, well, listen, your fertility is going to decline.
If you want to have kids, here's what you need to do.
Here's what you need to do.
Here's what you need to do.
Well, that's putting limitations on women.
I was thinking about this just because the subject of abortion came up in the last presidential debate.
And...
Why is abortion such a problem?
Because people aren't getting married anymore, right?
They still have sexual desire, they're still sleeping with each other, some of them very irresponsibly, but there was a reason why people said, don't have sex until you get married.
Because if you have sex, there's always a slight chance of pregnancy.
If you're married, it's not the end of the world.
If you're single, you're more likely to have an abortion.
So it's like, no, no!
Don't worry about getting married.
We'll give you abortions.
And it's like, why?
What's wrong with getting married?
So, the political element, of course, is that if they said to young women...
Sorry, I sound like I'm yelling.
If they said to young women, listen, here's your fertility window.
Here's what you've got to plan for.
A lot of those women might decide not to go to college.
A lot of those women might decide to get married and have children and not enter the workforce.
Now, if women don't go to college...
Then women can't be indoctrinated.
And if women can't be indoctrinated, then it's a lot harder to indoctrinate the next generation because women are the ones who parent for the most part.
And also, if women understand their fertility window and decide to have children in their early to mid-twenties, and then if they want a career, they can start later on in life, well, it doesn't matter, right?
If you objectively have the choice, you'd much rather have a career you could continue on through than one you...
You have to interrupt for five or ten years to have children, right?
You'd have your kids 20, 25, 30.
Come 30, they're older, you can boot off to work, and you can keep working for the next 35 years.
Boom.
Much better.
Much more sensible, right?
As opposed to, well, get out, get educated, get into the workforce.
Don't worry, the right guy will come along somewhere, and you'll figure out the babies, and it's like, no.
No.
That's a terrible plan.
And if women decided to issue university, and if women...
Decided to eschew the workplace.
Government's less capacity to propagandize and less taxes.
Yep.
Less taxes.
Women are in the workforce paying their taxes.
And daycares have to shut down.
I mean, there's a reason why Hillary Clinton's like, we need to expand the amount of care that governments give to children of America.
We need pre-kindergarten, you know?
We're going to put radios of my speeches into their womb.
We're going to swallow a pill that's going to blare the MP3 to the kids.
I mean...
This vanity, but the vanity thing, because if someone came to me and said, Steph, you can travel the world, and you can have a great career in one place, and you can get married to a woman who expects monogamy, and you can have as many mistresses as you want, and no one will have any problems with it, and, you know, like it just piles on all these things that I could do, do you know what I'd say?
I hope you'd say you're lying.
Pull the other one.
Pull the other leg.
I know that that person would be trying to manipulate me.
People who promise the impossible are just out to control your brainstem, to awaken your fantasies of omnipotence so that they can control your life.
So if you say to men, oh yes, you can have everything and you can have it all and you don't have to compromise with anything, men say, bull.
But women are like, yeah, yes I do.
And that's the female weakness.
That's vanity.
Yes, I can do it all.
I'm better than men.
Men can't have it all, but I can have it all because I'm...
That's the vanity.
And we used to, as a society, expend a lot of energy trying to rein in and control female vanity, just as we did male aggression.
Because female vanity is extremely dangerous for society.
Yes.
Because, you know what?
Since you're saying yes, and as a female...
Tell me.
Tell me all about it.
Well, I mean, it's going to...
Female vanity does shape the direction that every girl goes in and then the type of mother they become or lack of.
I mean, it's every piece of it.
It's so important.
Right.
And women, of course, when women are young, they have extremely high sexual market value.
Youth, fertility, beauty, you know, all that kind of stuff, right?
Fresh eggs!
And that extraordinarily high sexual market value is very tempting for women to think, I have value because I'm desired.
Yes.
I am special because people want me.
And it's like, no, no, they don't want you.
No.
They want the eggs.
Yes.
Right?
It's a sexual matter.
And again, nothing wrong with the sexual matter, nothing wrong with that at all.
But it's like me being super rich and thinking everybody wants to Be my friend and have me invest in their companies because they love me and think I'm such a wise business person.
It's like, nope, they want the money.
And so there used to be a focus on reminding women that beauty is fleeting.
Beauty fades.
Physical beauty, right?
Right.
And that the important thing is to remember that beauty fades and you need to build a life on your beauty And of course, if you want a great man, use your beauty, use your wit, use your guile, use your charm, all the wonderful things.
Use your intelligence.
Use your sense of humor.
But remember that beauty fades, and you need to build a life.
Because young women are so desired in society that it's so easy for them to translate that into personal value.
And personal value that is going to maintain over the course of their life.
Right, which it's not.
It's not.
And so we're lying.
We're lying because the lack of discussion is going to be misconstrued as the truth, which is actually a lie.
Right.
Right.
And everyone seems to be, almost everyone seems to be afraid to say to women, you're being lied to.
And your happiness is going to be vastly undermined because your weakness is being exploited.
Yes!
And you're not that great!
No!
You're not great because you have eggs!
You didn't earn those eggs!
You didn't earn the fact that men have sexual desire!
You didn't earn the fact that men find your form pleasing!
You didn't earn the fact that nature has programmed men to shower you with resources and attention!
That's just biology!
That's like me saying, I'm incredibly proud to have two eyes.
I believe that makes me a fantastic human being and the very best thing on the planet.
It's like, did you work to get those two eyes?
No.
Nothing whatsoever.
That's a product of evolution.
So the desire that society of men in particular have for young women is a scalding, powerful, gravity-based physical thing And it's very easy.
I can totally understand that to be on the receiving end of that amount of attention and resources and, you know, men want to shower with all these good things.
That can go to your head, right?
I mean, wow, I'm fantastic.
I'm precious.
I'm wonderful.
I am all that and more.
And it's not you.
It's not an individual.
It's body, form, flesh, egg.
It's just DNA. Trying to grab control of the photocopier to make more DNA. It doesn't mean you're worth anything as an individual.
So if we cared really about women, then what we would try to do is try to educate them on how to be empathetic and In a family situation and how to create harmony in a family and not keep pumping them full of accolades.
Right.
Right.
You know, there's two things, right?
One is enjoy it while it lasts, which is bad advice.
Youth and beauty are not to be enjoyed.
They're to be utilized.
Right.
My argument is not...
My advice to women, to young women, is not enjoy it while it lasts because it's not there for your enjoyment.
It's there for you to get a quality man if you want to have kids.
Right?
So use it.
Not enjoy it while it lasts.
Use it while it lasts so that when it runs out, you'll have used it properly.
Use your youth and your beauty and your attractiveness to snare yourself a good, quality, stable provider if you want to have kids.
But that's putting limits, right?
And that's saying to women...
You are not your vagina.
You are not your tits.
You are not the lust that men have been biologically programmed to feel for you when you're young.
That does not give you value.
That does not give you purpose.
That does not give you wisdom.
That does not make you a contributor to society.
It's just biology.
It's just lust.
It's no different from Does food feel special because I eat it when I'm hungry?
No.
Does water feel precious and all that because I drink it when I'm thirsty?
No.
It's just a biological drive.
Again, I'm not down on the biological drive.
That's why we're all here.
But let's not mistake that for we have personal value and we are wonderful creatures because we are all programmed to feel lust for young women.
I mean, that's...
That's not reality and why this is not being reinforced, right?
Because women are going to feel this no matter.
They're going to feel vanity when they're young.
They are and there's nothing wrong with that.
In the same way that little boys are going to play sword fighting when they're young.
We need to focus it.
We need to tame that energy and we need to remind women.
We need to remind boys, hey, aggression is a wonderful thing but you need to temper it and you need to tame it and you need to use it To get productive things in life in the long run.
But why aren't the older women that have already realized what you are saying here, why aren't the older women...
Why didn't they do that, like, for my generation?
Why aren't older women now saying that to younger women?
I feel like...
Because that would require that older women had the capacity to say we were wrong.
We were wrong.
But if you've been raised with your vanity being pumped through the roof...
How are you going to turn around and say, wow, really messed up?
That's the opposite of vanity.
Humility is what you experience when you say, wow, I made a huge, giant, terrible mistake, and I'm going to save the next generation for making that mistake.
But if you've been pumped full of vanity your whole life, or your natural vanity has been expanded and extended, are you really going to have the capacity at some point to say, oh, I made a terrible mistake and I need to save other people?
That requires humility, which is the opposite of everything you've been trained for.
Yeah.
Exactly.
And the worst thing is, it hits the smartest women the hardest, right?
All of this is feminist, Marxist, socialist, leftist propaganda.
And it hits the smartest women the most.
It hits the smartest women the strongest.
You know, two of the big intellectual influencers in my life, Ayn Rand and Ann Coulter, no kids.
Boy, if it wasn't for that Phyllis Schlafly evening things out, I don't even know what to say, right?
You are a very intelligent, perceptive, and verbally acute woman, and you didn't have kids, right?
Right.
And I had no particular plan on having kids.
You know, as you say, if you meet the right person, that's a different matter.
But no, I mean, the pushback against female vanity...
And feminism, by exploiting female vanity, is tapping into the oldest weakness of women that there is.
It's so regressive.
It's so regressive.
It's not progressive at all.
Appealing to female vanity is not a new thing, and it's not a progressive thing, and it's not a what's next thing.
It's the oldest regressive thing.
I mean, women, it's funny, you know, because a lot of feminists dislike things like Makeup and body image stuff.
But all of that stuff is appealing to female vanity.
Ooh, I want to have the shape of the woman in the after picture of that before.
It's all vanity, right?
Right.
And again, you pick open a woman's magazine and flip through it.
I mean, it's just vanity canon after vanity canon straight to this neofrontal cortex to the point where it becomes a little reptilian heap of history.
And...
This...
Makeup and body image stuff, it's all an appeal to female vanity.
But how the hell is feminism not an appeal to female vanity?
You can have it all.
You can do it all.
You can postpone.
Don't worry.
You'll have as much sexual value when you're 40 as when you're 20.
No, you won't.
No, you won't.
It's the worst because it's abstract.
It isn't even something concrete, at least with makeup, at least with those kinds of things.
Women can utilize them and they can make an adjustment if they feel like, oh, that does make my eyes look better or that does make my lips look better.
But being abstract concepts and spouting that is so dangerous because you won't be able to prove...
It wrong until it's too late.
Right.
And if women are so all-powerful, why is the flip side of all of this appeal to female vanity a reliance on females' capacity for victimhood?
Right?
Why is feminism, if it's supposed to empower women, why is it so constantly making them feel like victims?
Because the flip side of vanity is victimhood.
The flip side of vanity is victimhood.
Because with vanity, you're constantly making bad decisions which end up with your life in a bad place.
Now, when your life ends up in a bad place, because you're vain, you can't accept responsibility for your own bad decisions, so you have to feel that there are dark malevolent forces out there that have made your life so bad.
No.
Your vanity made your life bad, and your vanity prevents you from taking the ownership that can actually make your life better.
So therefore you must blame these dark, sinister forces out there in the universe, the patriarchy or racism or sexism or whatever it is going to be.
The vast right-wing conspiracy, who knows, right?
And so the flip side of vanity is always victimhood.
I don't know if the V is just vagina, vanity, victimhood.
I don't know.
It's triple V day.
And this is one of the reasons why feminism, by appealing to women's vanity, also appeals to their sense of victimhood because we all know when people are blowing smoke up our ass and telling us we're all great and we're all so great and we're all so wonderful that they're trying to control us.
What they're trying to do is they're trying to make us dependent on their words of praise like a drug dealer makes you dependent on the drug of choice.
People who praise you, who inflate your ego, are lifting you like a helium balloon up above the human landscape to bob around among the clouds of uselessness.
You know, you get a great view but you're not actually planted anywhere in the ground and you can't get anything actually done.
And what happens is when people praise you and praise you and praise you, they're trying to hook you, they're trying to control you, they're trying to capture you so that you can become a slave to their praise.
And this is again the great weakness of women.
The state praises women.
The state praises women.
Women get captured by the state through praise.
And then women become dependent on the state.
Because, and this is not just psychologically, this is basic fact.
You can be a great single mom.
You don't have to worry.
Single moms are heroes.
Okay, I guess it doesn't really matter who I pick that much to be my, because, you know, I can just do a great job on my own.
Boom!
You have a kid with some useless guy, he buggers off, and lo and behold, you're dependent on the state.
See, they have captured you with vanity.
And they used to capture men with aggressiveness.
They used to go be a soldier.
They would capture men with aggressiveness.
They capture women with vanity, and I'm hard-pressed, Tammy, to know which is the more dangerous.
Telling the truth to women has become A revolutionary act, almost a suicidal act for a lot of people.
Can you imagine, I mean, just putting a show on, putting a show on TV, 60 minutes, interviewing some fertility expert, going through the steps, going through the stages.
A little bit of biological reality would hit women.
North American women, European women, a little bit of biological reality.
Here are the eggs.
Here are the eggs aging.
Here's the fertility drop-off.
Here's what's happened.
Here's the number of men who are available to you.
What's that old line?
Rosie O'Donnell said it.
I think it was, it doesn't matter, some Meg Ryan movie.
A woman who's 35 has more chance of being killed by a terrorist than getting married.
And she said, it's not true.
It feels true, but it's not true.
Right?
So that's, you know, that was just a little bit of comedy that could come in.
But imagine, imagine the great service you would do to young women and to women who are thinking about having kids who are cruising into their early 30s.
Imagine the great, wonderful good you could do with facts about female reproductions.
I mean, women, and imagine, you put that on 60 Minutes, you put that on TV somewhere, can you imagine the blowback?
I mean, there was an Italian ministry that recently put out some advertising saying to women, you know, if you want to have kids, you know, here's the time, you should probably do it.
And of course, the feminists all went mental, oh, we're just breeding animals to you people.
It's like, oh my God, people are insane.
What's wrong with women wanting to have kids?
You know, all the feminists are alive because some woman wanted to have a child!
So, it is a brutal situation.
And, of course, depopulation of Western countries is one of the primary reasons for the potential end of Western civilization.
So, it's not a small thing.
The West could never have been conquered from the outside, but it has been conquered through its women.
It has been conquered through the vanity of women.
If the Western societies had failed to restrain the aggressiveness of men, the West would never fall.
But if Western societies fail to arrest the vanity of women, the West is at an end.
That's what I mean when I say I'm not sure which is more dangerous, but I lean more towards female vanity being more dangerous for the continuance of civilization than male aggression.
I agree.
Great call.
I'm really looking forward to the feedback.
Thank you so much.
I really appreciate it.
You're welcome.
And if you do figure out or have some interactions with the kids that turn out either way, I hope that you'll call back in and let us know how it went.
I sure will.
Thank you very much for your time this evening.
Thank you.
Thank you very much, Tammy.
A great pleasure.
Alright, up next is Sophia.
Sophia wrote in and said, I am in a committed relationship, and for the first time, my partner has the same family values as mine does.
Hard work, ethics, education starts at home, etc., etc.
We were friends a lot of the time and he knows my goals and we agree on them.
And he's a good and handsome man and I'd be happy to form a family with him.
The problem is, we are from different religions and different countries.
I don't have a problem with the logistics.
I'm very open to live wherever we will live better.
But since I will be raising the children when they are young, how does one handle teaching children about their mother and father's respective religions, cultures, and countries, and at the same time, give them a strong sense of belonging in connection to their heritage?
That's from Sophia.
Hello, Greek for Wisdom.
How are you?
Hey, I'm great.
I'm so happy to be calling, finally.
Oh, I'm very happy to be chatting with you.
Very, very interesting question.
Thank you very much.
Do you want to talk about any details of a religion?
We're just going to go with generic, not the same, or...?
No, I don't have a problem.
I'm a Catholic.
Right.
From, you know, the Latin American version of Catholicism, which is with a lot of worshipping to Virgin Mary and a lot of saints.
And I take more of Asturias' approach to religion.
Like the scientific part that studies that religion inherently like deep down wants to find the truth and the virtue of things and I think that can be taught through any religion and my current partner is Jewish and I think that those Those beautiful things and the universal values lie also there.
And I'm understanding how to get there.
Well, and of course the challenge is that you worship the Virgin Mary and he worships his mother.
So that's a challenge.
I'm kidding!
No, I understand.
So it's basically...
Okay, so I know...
I know how to do it through Christianity and Catholicism and I know how it works through Judaism because I have now a lot of Jewish friends who are wonderful people and share my values but now I come to the challenge with teaching to children two different ways at the same time and I fear that I will overload them and confuse them because for me I first was raised as a Catholic.
Right.
Because my family is the kind of family that if I ask stuff, they will give me books.
I started studying and I converted to Buddhism and then I converted to something else.
And I was just like, no religion ever satisfied me until I discovered that what I was really looking for was the truth that lied beyond all of them.
And of course, I started watching your shows and all that you just talked about, about women and biology.
I've seen every single one of your videos for the last two years.
Oh, great.
I'm glad you found them helpful.
So, I have all this information, and how do I manage to transfer these to my kids?
Right.
Right.
Now, I mean, I had this very question.
I mentioned this on the show before, but when I was younger, I was kind of, not dating, but we were We were close with a woman, she was a Christian.
Really, really nice woman, great woman, very smart woman.
And we never even kissed, but we did talk about a future.
It was very chaste.
And she said, she knew I was an atheist, and she said, that's alright, my father's an atheist, my mother's religious, he just gets to sleep in on Sundays, right?
And I said, well, when it comes to kids, I'm not comfortable teaching them either atheism or religion.
I want to teach them how to think and let them come to their own conclusions.
Now, she, with an integrity I can still admire after these many years, she said, no, no, the kids are going to be taught Christianity, her brand of Christianity.
And we weren't able to get past that.
And I'm sad about that in some ways.
I mean, she was a great person.
You know, anyone whose absence makes the place for my current wife, or my only wife, is great for me.
But it was sad because there was so much in which we were compatible.
For reasons I didn't really understand at the time, I understand them more later now, as somebody who's developed a much better rapprochement with Christians.
But...
That remains my perspective.
And I hope that she's out there and she met the man that she wants and she got what she wanted out of life.
But you can teach children about religion.
You can teach children about atheism.
You can teach children about various religions.
The problem is, when you say that things are true...
Which the children have not come to their conclusions themselves.
I have never said to any child there is or is not a God.
Okay.
I don't think that you can fairly say to your children there is a God.
Whether it's the Old Testament or Jesus or the Old Testament for the Jews or the New Testament for Jesus.
Jesus is part of the Holy Trinity in the New Testament.
The question is, what can you reasonably teach your children?
And the purpose, of course, is not to have your children believe what you believe because you're bigger.
That's an exercise of authority, not of education.
So, with your children, you can say, here's what I believe.
You can be honest with them.
If a child says to me, do you believe in God?
Well, I will try and divert it to a conversation about existence and the senses and reason and evidence and all that.
So that they can think for themselves.
Now, if a child really pushes me, I'm not going to lie and say, well, no, I don't.
But that's not important.
It's not important what I believe.
The important thing is why I believe it.
And with your own children, teach them The form of the religion, in my opinion, I think this is the reasonable approach, is to teach them a form of religion.
This is what I believe.
This is what your father believes.
The important thing is, though, that you think for yourselves.
Now, they're going to say, well, did you come to these conclusions because you thought for yourselves?
And those are going to be challenging conversations.
I'm not going to sugarcoat it for you.
Those are going to be challenging.
But I don't think that we have the right to teach children conclusions.
I think we only have the right to teach them a methodology.
For thinking, so that they can draw their own conclusions as they move forward through life.
Okay.
That makes a lot of sense with me, to me.
Until your parents find out about it, in which case.
Why are your children not in church?
The cool thing is that both my parents and my boyfriend's parents have a very atheist approach to religion.
They believe in getting together on Sundays, not because of going to church or God particularly.
It's because that's an excuse to get together as families.
Right.
It's social religion, right?
Yes.
It's a club where you sing, right?
Yeah.
They have no problem with...
Neither of the parents involved have a problem with us being together.
They actually understand that we are people with values.
They just have values from different places, which happens to be something that you cannot choose.
I was born there, he was born there.
We made the best out of it.
But I'm thinking more about the logistics because both, since we are people that we do go to gatherings and we do uphold rituals, like it was just like the Jew holidays this fall and it was so much and so much information because right now it's like my turn to learn all about Judaism just because it happened to be that That was the community that united here.
So, I know that my side has the equal amount of intense gathering for the times and different rituals.
This is more from a logistical and practical approach, like how to handle so much time expended.
Well, I mean, there's no magic answer, right?
You have a choice.
You can please your social circle.
And you can teach children that all the rituals are true and everything's valid and all this and that and the other.
Which, of course, as you point out, is going to bring up contradictions between your two religions.
Or you can say, this is our ritual.
It's mostly for family gatherings and mostly for get-togethers.
And it's not meant to all be taken literally as absolutely true.
It's just part of our culture and part of our heritage and so on.
And there's God stuff that's involved, but it's not really...
People aren't getting together just because they...
Believe in a God.
They're getting together because there's rituals and there's ethics and there's community and there's food, good food too, and all of these things.
That is why we are doing what we're doing.
And, you know, it sounds like that's the most honest approach.
So it all goes back to conversation.
Yeah, it just comes down to being as honest as you can.
And...
Recognizing that the way we get to know people is through how they think, not what they think.
And there's this idea that intimacy...
I don't know.
This is a bit of a rant, but they see this way that intimacy is portrayed in movies.
And intimacy in movies, it's always about the coughing up of secrets.
You know, like in this sort of Ordinary People is this old movie where...
Girl Interrupted is one of the few exceptions, but there's no particular secret, but somebody's carrying a secret, holding a secret, and then they finally cough up that secret to someone, and they're so close.
And to me, I've heard people cough up lots of secrets in my life.
I'm one of these people that people can talk to.
It's just partly why I do what I do, but...
I've never found that I've become closer to someone because they've coughed up a secret.
I'll tell you what happens most times.
People cough up secrets and then they resent you because they think you have power over them because now you know they're a secret.
So you think you're getting closer but usually it's just the warming up of the jetpack of exit strategies.
That makes sense.
So I don't want to cough up your secrets but the way that we get to know people is through how they think.
I mean, I'm happy when my daughter draws a particular picture, but I want to know why she drew that picture.
What was she thinking of?
How did she come to those ideas?
Why does she like certain things?
Why does she not like certain things?
That, to me, is really, really important.
So if you want to be close to your kids, if you tell them your conclusions, they're inevitably going to try and absorb your conclusions, either directly or as in a reaction to it.
And that's not getting to know them.
That's not getting to know them.
And if you withhold the imposition of your opinions on them, then you get to see how they think.
Now once you get to know how someone thinks, then you have intimacy.
Not like intimacy results like some weird gravitational pull that comes up when they cough up their hairball of secret histories.
Intimacy comes when you sort of sweetly and deeply understand how someone thinks.
Now in order to understand how your children think, you need to refrain from imposing your conclusions on them.
Because you're looking at it, how do I explain things to my kids?
Like it's just a waterfall.
Like you're the water and the, you know, the waterfall, how does it end up in the pond?
My argument would be this, or my perspective would be this.
What are my children going to think?
Of my beliefs.
Yeah, that's a totally different way of looking at it.
It gives me less work.
It's hard to avoid this top-down thing, right?
Like the first caller was like, well, how do I get my shower to stop biting?
Yeah.
One of my children...
At some point, your kids are going to figure out or find out that you went through a bunch of different religions.
You settled on this one.
And...
You know, the truth or falsehood of it, I mean, right, when they're kids, you know, but if you really want to get close to your children, then you need to be available to them to explore your thought processes.
Not, well, is, you know, is Catholicism more true than Buddhism?
Those are all conclusions, and that's not intimacy.
The intimacy is, what drew you to Buddhism?
What changed, right?
You know, my daughter the other day said, why do you do your show?
It's a great question.
It's a great question.
And we had a great conversation about it.
And people have said to me, why are you so focused on philosophy?
And to me, it's like saying to somebody with a history of heart disease, why do you exercise?
Well, because if I don't, I'm going to die.
Yeah, I understand.
You know, I have a lot of unstable people in my family on both sides.
Very intelligent, very unstable.
And I saw what happened when people had high intelligence, high energy, and disordered thinking.
Oh boy, it is not pretty at all.
It is, in fact, the living definition of hell, as far as I can see.
It's the worst thing that can happen.
The only blessed thing is it doesn't go on forever.
And so, seeing that history in my family...
As soon as I found a source of organized thinking, I grabbed onto it and have never let go because, oh, I've seen the alternative.
And it is absolutely horrible and horrifying.
And I couldn't sustain the way that goes.
So, yeah, I mean, it's a life raft.
It was this or death.
And that's not a tough choice for me to make since I enjoy this and not so much the death.
So yeah, I mean, it's not, well, how do I get my kids to, you know, how do I imprint upon my kids or get them to do this or get them to think that or how am I going to explain this to them?
It's like, just be curious about what they're going to think and be honest.
You know, the best way to solve it is to say, hey kids, you know, I have no idea how to explain this to you.
And I have no good reason as to why it is the way it is.
I'm really, really keen on exploring it.
But you're trying to figure out how to fool them into accepting something that's really contradictory.
This is your father's beliefs.
These are my beliefs.
They are different and in some ways oppositional.
Ooh, how do I get them?
How do I fool them?
No!
You just say, hey, these beliefs are oppositional.
They work for us.
That's a challenge.
We're in a process of evolution.
Please ask me your questions.
I'll do my best to answer, but I'm not going to pretend I have a lot of answers where I don't.
That makes perfect, perfect sense.
It's all honesty.
It encourages them to search on their own, which is the ideal.
And it's honest, right?
Because, I mean, you'll listen back to this, you know, maybe now, maybe at some point in the future.
And I mean this in no critical way whatsoever, because it's our natural response when it comes to kids.
A natural response is manipulation.
How do I use my size, superior verbal skills, bigger brain, and authority to manipulate my kids into accepting things that are patently contradictory?
Right?
I mean, it's very manipulative.
And again, it's not a criticism.
It's natural.
We all have this response when it comes to kids.
Oh, they're catching me in something.
How do I explain it away?
I understand.
But no, just be honest.
Just be as ruthlessly honest as you can be, and they will love you forever.
But the moment you fake things, the distancing begins.
I think that's great.
That's really helpful.
Just, I have a final quick question.
Why, Sean?
In regards of children, but how...
There are some things that need to be dealt with, like circumcision.
Yeah, so...
No, no, no.
I've got to give you a conclusion there.
I'm sorry.
Over my dead body.
Yeah, please, God, don't do that.
Like, for the love of all that's holy, do not do that.
You do not own a third of your child's penis, then you can just hack it away at will.
Look, if it's a big deal for your husband, hey, if he wants to do it as an adult, he could do it as an adult, but that is a brutal procedure with long-ranging consequences.
I have the whole Truth About Circumcision video.
I know.
Watch it.
You don't have the right to...
Mutilate your child in that way.
It's wrong on every conceivable level.
I absolutely agree with you.
I could never be in peace with myself if somebody touched my kid, whatever part of his body it is.
I believe in the integrity of the human body.
But how...
And I know there's a way to portray things so that both of the parents can be in peace with the decision.
But perhaps you don't have exact scripts, of course, but just like the mindset with the kids would be I'm asking them instead of preaching what could be the right mindset for my partner to solve that.
You mean how you would explain to your Jewish husband?
Yes.
About this?
Yes.
Having had a distinct paucity of Jewish husbands in my life, I'm going to tell you I don't have a good script in my head.
Let me just think for a moment about how I might approach it.
It's a tough question.
No, no, and I... Good!
I mean, if they were all easy questions, I'd be too bored to do the show, so I appreciate that.
It's good to give me a workout.
So, first of all, I think we would want to Work on things that you would be in agreement on, right?
So, there are commandments in the Bible and there are commandments in religion that no sane person follows anymore, right?
Death to homosexuals, death to witches, death to unbelievers.
You get to kill the men and rape the women of cities.
We don't do that anymore, right?
And your husband will doubtless accept and understand that.
Yes.
So, you know, people have absolutes because they isolate them, particularly in religion, right?
So there are things that are in the Bible, and there are also things that used to be part of Jewish, of the Jewish faith that he does not follow.
Marrying a Gentile might be one of them.
Right?
So he can't claim to be some hyper-orthodox fundamentalist Jew if he's marrying outside the faith and if he's not following Hasidic Jew practices, right?
Yeah, that's...
And I don't know, I have no idea if that's, you know, the truly authentic or whatever it is.
There's stuff, let's just basically say, he has to accept and admit that there's stuff In Judaism, he ain't following.
Right?
Mm-hmm.
So that's good.
So that's a step forward, because now the question is, why don't you follow Jewish teachings?
Well, for a number of reasons.
One is that they're no longer considered to be moral, although they were moral at the time.
Yes.
Okay?
Mm-hmm.
So circumcision could conceivably fall into that category of things that were considered moral in the past which are no longer considered moral now.
At some point in the past, female genital mutilation was considered fine, and now, at least in the West, it's not, right?
At least in the West, it's not from the East.
It's not, right?
So he has to accept that there are things that are commandments which he does not follow.
Yes.
So that would be, you know, once he accepts that, then it becomes a choice.
It's no longer an absolute.
Because if Jewish commandments are an absolute, then he's got to follow them all.
And if they're not, then he gets to pick and choose.
And if he gets to pick and choose, he can't claim that they're all absolutes, right?
That's sort of the basic step forward.
But that's not the coup de grace.
I will tell you exactly how to change his mind.
Okay.
If you like.
I think I've got it.
I think I'm there, baby!
I think I am ready to do it.
And of course, we'll do the data, right?
We'll do the data.
You're given the data and the long-term effects and the fact that the body still has higher cortisol levels of stress.
You know, six months after the circumcision, the fact that it's often done without anesthetic, the fact that it has erectile dysfunction problems in the future, the fact that sensation gets enormously diminished, all this and this and this and this, right?
But...
Are you ready?
Yes, please.
For exactly what you need to say.
Do you like the build-up?
Is that fun for you?
I love the build-up.
Do you like teas?
It fits my dramatic stuff.
No, Steph!
I'm dying.
Okay.
This is my life at stake.
Is he supposed to marry a Jew?
Yeah, he is.
Supposedly.
Yeah.
Okay, so he's supposed to marry a Jew, right?
Mm-hmm.
So, why is he breaking the rule with you?
Well, because I think he sees certain values in me that match...
Because he loves you.
Let's cut to the chase.
He loves you.
And I agree with you about the value stuff.
It's just interrupting my poetic flow.
So, he loves you.
Sorry about that.
No, that's fine.
That's fine.
Hey, I tease you with the waiting.
You can take me on a different direction.
Okay, so Sophie, here's what I would say to him.
Can you be him?
I'll be him.
Okay, pretend to be him.
So I would say, dude, you don't have to give me his name.
Dude, you are supposed to marry a Jew, but you're marrying me because you love me.
Right?
Mm-hmm.
Now, you are willing to break a rule for love.
Yes.
There's another rule called cut the third of the skin off your son's penis.
And you go through the data, whatever, right?
And I would say to him, husband, my husband...
If you are willing to break a Jewish rule to marry me for love, why would you not be willing to break a rule for your son for love?
You would leave me speechless.
I would not know how to answer that.
That's good, right?
There's nowhere to go.
Give me some props.
That's pretty good.
Off the cuff, I tell you.
That's pretty amazing.
I have nothing.
No.
I mean, can you say, well, no, I love you but not my son?
You can't say, well, I'm not willing to break a rule for love because he's marrying you.
I mean, that's the beauty of philosophy.
Boom, boom, boom.
Yes.
And yes, I stride into the night having saved yet another foreskin from the chainsaw of barbaric history.
Good job.
All right.
No, that was great.
Now, it's up to you now.
I've just given you some words.
You've got to make it happen.
Yes.
Just to let the listeners be easy and at peace, I would never...
No man is worth cutting your child into pieces.
Well, and you've got to stay alert.
Because I've heard tales that this stuff just happens.
You've got to get doctors to write this stuff down.
You've got to stay alert.
You've got to make sure it doesn't happen.
Not that your husband would.
I'm just saying it happens.
Yeah.
And it's not like reversible or anything, so you've got to stay alert and make sure it doesn't.
Wonderful.
Thanks.
Well, that's just your husband.
He's got a family.
But once you convince him, it's his job to convince the family.
I mean, you can do it together, right?
But it's something he has to take the lead on.
Thankfully, they're very respectful people, which is part of our values.
And I think it won't be a problem as much, because we're very private people, and they seem to respect boundaries.
From the outside, it looks like that, so far.
Okay, good.
I hope it continues like that.
Good.
Well, listen, I'm thrilled.
What a great conversation.
And thank you for that curveball.
I've got to tell you, I think I hit it out of the park, but I'm really pleased that we were able to have this conversation and just think how much good it's going to do, not only for your future sons, but for the sons of the millions of people who are going to hear this over time.
Yeah.
Thank you so much for taking the call and doing the show.
I think you're doing a great job for humanity.
I really appreciate that.
Thank you so much.
All right.
Last one, the caller.
Let's get it on.
Alright, up next we have Rebecca.
Rebecca wrote in and said, I'm writing in because I'm curious what your take is on the educational statistics slash trends regarding boys and girls.
Specifically girls outperforming boys in grade school, in college, and more boys failing.
I'm a mother of two boys and a girl.
While my daughter excels in school, my high school son is consistently challenged and struggles.
Outside of school, he's highly creative, productive, and motivated with his own projects.
I want to support all my children equally in becoming healthy, whole, confident, functioning adults, but I wonder if the struggle he experiences is more than his personal journey and that the system is set up to favor girls.
I would appreciate your thoughts to help get clarity on the best way to support him.
That's from Rebecca.
I would appreciate your thoughts to help get clarity on the best way to support him.
That is from Rebecca.
Is it Rebecca with an H at the end?
Hi.
Ah, okay.
Yeah, I had, when I worked in a daycare for a couple of years, there was another daycare teacher there, and there was a woman named Rebecca who had an H, a girl, sorry, a girl named Rebecca, one of the kids, who had an H, and he would all say, hello, Rebecca!
It used to drive her crazy.
I thought it was kind of cruel, but I was just, that popped into my mind, and I was reminded of it, so I thought I would get that out of my way so I could concentrate on your most important question and problem.
Have you read Christina Hoffs' The War on Boys?
No, I haven't.
Ah, I will put that out as a recommendation.
Christina Hoffsummer, S-U-M-M-E-R-S, of course, has written a really, really good book.
A great book, I would say, called The War on Boys.
So, just a recommendation.
Is your son, roughly, is he sort of young, puberty?
He's 15.
15, okay.
When he was younger, Rebecca...
Sorry, I will try not to do that, but it's going to happen.
I'm just thankful for Rebecca because the other option was Bilbo from The Hobbit from my hippie parents when I was a kid.
So I'm just thankful for Rebecca.
Yes.
Yeah, okay.
You can take the odd H from an obnoxious YouTuber.
Okay, that's good enough.
Yeah.
But...
When he was younger, I feel like I already know the answer to this, but let's get confirmation.
When he was younger in grade school, was he mostly taught by ladies, perchance?
Yes.
Mostly taught by ladies.
How good were they at teaching boys?
I would say they were very loving and caring and kind.
Yeah, yeah.
But how good were they at teaching you?
That's a great female solidarity answer, but how good were they at teaching boys at motivating and inspiring and capturing and harnessing all of that wild boy energy and all that?
Well, it's funny because I didn't really think about it so much when he was younger.
I just cared that he enjoyed going to school and he was happy.
But as he's gotten older, I notice that I don't think he's being I'm taught in the way that resonates with him and turns him on, you know?
Makes him come alive.
Right.
So I think my, I think, you know, what was important to me when he was younger is different from what's important to me now.
Right.
I, this is not any proof of anything, but it's just something that popped into my mind and apparently I'm just random grab bag tonight, but that's all right.
I can go with that.
Hopefully it's for value.
But some years ago I was in an art museum and there was an art exhibit that was done by children in the lobby.
And a bunch of kids came through with a woman, teacher, riding shotgun.
And she said, now, circulate and enjoy the art.
And one of the pictures was of a goofy cartoon character.
I think it might have been a minion, you know, from Despicable Me or something like that.
And the kids were, and it was making a funny face, and I thought it was a funny picture.
And the kids were giggling at it.
And the eyes of the teacher turned around and got kind of cold.
And I was like, oh, here it comes.
And the teacher came over and said, children, stop laughing.
I am very disappointed in you.
Boys, stop laughing.
Children have put so much work into these pictures and it's not right and it's not fair and it's not decent for you to laugh at their work.
How would you like it if you had put all of this effort into your art and someone came along and just laughed at it and giggled it and made fun of it and she just went on and on, right?
And the kids was like, it's like watching an elephant slowly sit on a child.
I can't breathe from the guilt and the hurt, right?
And it's like, it was a funny picture, you know?
I mean, if there's a comedian on stage and you laugh, does the comedian's mother come out and say, don't you dare laugh at my boy?
He's working hard up here.
He travels a lot.
He writes these things called jokes.
I don't understand them, but don't you laugh at him.
It makes him feel...
How would you like it if you were working and someone just came along and laughed and pointed at you?
Now, that's maybe somewhat of an extreme example, but it just sort of popped into my head about some of the stuff that occurs with...
Women.
And wonderful stuff around women and so on, but can be a little oversensitive, can be a little bit less with the horseplay, can be a little bit less of the rough, tough stuff.
And boys need that.
Boys need visceral, hands-on, active, energetic stuff to work on.
And girls are more comfortable with sitting and working quietly and peacefully and all that kind of stuff.
And that's more convenient for teachers, which is why teachers so often think that boys are just broken girls.
If only we could get these boys to act like girls, my job would be so much easier.
But that's only because you're a female teacher.
If you were a male teacher, you'd be frustrated at the passivity of the girls.
And you'd be emboldened and inheartened by the energy of the boys, right?
So we put, now I guess it's two generations, but at least a generation and a half, but probably closer to two generations of boys under the almost exclusive tutelage of women until puberty.
Women, women, women, women, women, women, women.
Right?
I mean, it's women in school, women in the daycare, single moms, you know, women throughout the neighborhood.
I mean, it's just women.
And, you know, as the old saying goes from the great movie Fight Club, we're a generation of men raised by women.
I'm not sure another woman is what we need.
Now, how's his relationship with his father?
Great.
Yeah, very good.
And have you or your father tried sitting in, sorry, you or his father tried sitting in on any of the classes or education that he's experiencing?
Yeah.
His educational background, he was in public school until he was in third grade.
And then we didn't like how he had to basically sit at a desk the whole time.
They didn't get recess.
They made them study through recess if they were behind.
So we pulled him out and put him into a Montessori charter school.
And he did well there.
I think, because they could move around the classroom, they could go outside and play if they wanted to get their ya-ya's out.
So he did well there, and I think that the system supported him in his personality more than the public school, the regular state school did.
And now that he's in high school, it seems that it's back to that system that we pulled him out from in the beginning.
And yes, we have sat in on the classes, but what's interesting is that when you sit in the classes as a parent and you're invited to go along, I think there's a disconnect between the class that the teacher gives the parents and then what I see my son studying, you know, every day during the semester.
Is he back to like sort of the sitting in class?
Yeah, it's all sitting.
It's all classroom.
It's very classroom, desk-heavy, book-heavy, tests and quizzes on a weekly basis.
And then there's not much choice.
You know, I mean, you might just say, oh, suck it up, get on with it.
I don't know.
But there's not much choice in the curriculum.
And there's not very much creative work or...
I mean, when I look at it...
Hands on.
It's all writing and reading and...
Yeah.
To me, I look and it's like one way of learning.
And I think, especially with my son, I think there's more than one way of learning, but I don't know about being...
So frustrating.
I mean, I want to...
Take these female teachers to the window and say, hey, look at that city.
That city was built by men doing things not in a classroom.
That city was built by men not by reading and writing in a book.
That city was built by men who were out there doing things with their hands.
Yes, but you know what?
In high school, he only has one female teacher.
They're all men except for one.
Yes, but it's a government union.
And it's just, it caters to the women.
It's all feminized.
Oh, you're talking about his previous, or generally, or talking about his situation?
No, just in general, the whole school environment has become ridiculously feminized.
Because the majority of teachers, as far as I understand it, are women.
And so the teachers' union is representing women.
And look, if the teachers' union represented men, then men would say, we need a better environment for the boys.
But you know, he's in a private school.
He's in a private school.
It's mostly men.
You know, I thought...
But they have to follow the standard curriculum, right?
Yeah, yeah.
Right.
So you're saying that the curriculum is created by women?
I think the curriculum is catered to girls, for sure.
And we know that, because girls are doing so much better than boys.
Right.
Now, there is a time, just I'm sure you know this, but just for those who don't, there is a time when...
Girls do better than boys in school, and it's perfectly natural.
That which develops quicker becomes less complex.
And girls mature faster, but girls' brains stop growing in their early twenties, and boys' brains stop growing in their late twenties.
So boys get another five to seven years of brain growth, So girls' brains, because they don't have to grow as much, grow faster.
And again, it's just averages, lots of bell curve stuff and all of that.
And so for a while, you know, there's this thing in sort of early to mid-teens where the girls are like, oh, the boys are so immature, you know?
Like we're doing semi-adult stuff and the boys are still playing tag and all that.
And that's perfectly natural because the boys are gathering.
They're energies for the big brain growth that occurs in the 20s, right?
So there is a time where it looks, and this is confusing for people, and it's frustrating for feminists, and I understand it, and I sympathize, but because feminists never want to talk about biology, it's going to remain a mystery and a frustrating mystery for a long time, because they say, well, look, how come girls are doing so well in school, so well in school, and then they don't do as well?
Ah, it must be environment, it must be sexism, it must be, no, it's biology.
It's sort of like saying, wait a minute.
Boys and girls are the same height when they're little.
And they're the same height pretty much up until puberty.
But then you look at 25-year-old men and women, and boys are just way taller.
The men are way taller on average.
It must be the women aren't getting enough nutrition.
We've got to get more nutrition, more protein.
Maybe we need to stretch them, put them on racks.
It's just biology.
And Women, girls race ahead of boys for a little while and then fall behind in the end, on average, in general.
So that's just confusing for people and it's frustrating for people who don't like to look at anything to do with biology.
And sitting is bad.
Listen, I felt like an old man when I was in high school.
Like I literally felt like I was 80.
Because, I mean, I was on the swim team.
I played tennis.
I played water polo.
I was a long-distance runner.
I did so many soccer, so many sports.
Never figured out football.
Colonial game of brain-twisting nonsense.
But anyway.
At least you called it by the right name.
Yeah, true.
But I never felt so old and so dusty and so creaky and so bored and so uninspired As sitting, we had this high school history teacher, Mr.
Schnurr.
Schnurr.
Sounds so close to snore.
It sounds like you're too lazy even to say the word snore.
And it was so boring.
And it was so inconsequential.
And I just, I honestly have never felt that old.
I moved like an old man.
It was so boring and so inconsequential and I felt so trapped.
And I at least had the bleed off energy of, you know, I grew up in a community where kids were out all the time.
Now that's, I don't know where you live and you can certainly tell me if that's, but the outdoor community of kids seems to have largely vaporized.
You know, they've been all drawn inwards by fearful parents and computers and tablets and Xboxes and so on and so on.
At least I had the runaround, but sitting in the class, I literally felt like I was a dinosaur.
I felt like old, like my bones were just turning to brittle dust and porous nonsense and couldn't concentrate and had to struggle to stay awake, and it's so boring.
And all the kids around me had these tics, you know, like there was one girl just waggle her legs back and forth, another kid would scratch his ear constantly, like we all just had these, you know, monkey in a tiny cage spasms, you know, sort of Physical Tourette's of boredom and instability and inconsequentiality.
And, you know, sitting is terrible for children.
You know, I mean, sitting is the new smoking.
I mean, people say, why do you stand while you do your show?
Because sitting, well, have you looked at Rush Limbaugh?
You know, great broadcaster apparently, but it's not good for you.
And sitting is, you know, I mean, if they said to your kids, well, you can stand but smoke, you'd be like, oh, that's appalling.
But sitting is apparently about as bad for you as smoking.
So it's a very toxic environment for kids, and in particular so for boys.
When boys are growing, you know, at his age, I mean, he's, what is he eating, like four quarts of pasta at a dinner?
I mean, he's just piling it on and growing like crazy.
And it's tough.
You know, it's tough on the muscles, tough on the tendons, tough on the bones.
You need to move.
And I would spend time in school bored to the point where I wasn't even frustrated.
I was just like mentally dead.
Just waiting to get to the next.
And of course the whole thing, you find in the occasional times you get interested in something, bell goes off and you just go off to something new.
It was brutal.
And then you know what I would do is on Saturdays there was a computer lab that was open in the school if the parent could sit in.
And I would get up.
And I would go to that computer lab for like eight hours.
And I would learn how to program the PET and the Atari 400 and the TRS-80 and we'd all exchange tips and all that kind of stuff.
And I'm sure all these guys are probably bazillionaires by now and good for them.
More power to them.
Or when I bought my first computer.
I'm not a morning person.
And I would get up at six o'clock in the morning and I would program that computer until I would tear myself away from it at the last minute and race off to school where my brain would completely collapse into dust bunnies and boredom.
And how much I love learning now, it literally breaks my heart looking back and thinking about how much of a missed opportunity my entire government education was.
How much fun I could have been having.
How much I could have been learning.
How much I could have been growing.
How much I could have been Jumping out of bed looking forward to the day, as opposed to just dragging my ass there and going through the motions like you're in prison.
The only witty thing I ever got from school was there was a piece of graffiti in the bathroom, in the boys' bathroom, this is during the Cold War, and it said, mutate now before the post-war rush, which I thought was kind of clever.
So I don't know if there's any particular solution in the environment, but I think recognizing what the issues are is important.
But it is not a boy-friendly environment.
Because there was this, just very briefly, and Christina Hoffsama goes into this in more detail, Janice Fiamengo has talked about this as well, there was this misinterpretation of data.
You know, like how so many disasters arise from bad studies.
It's ridiculous.
The entire financial crisis, the entire financial crash of 07-08 came out of A bad piece of research from, I think it was the New York branch of the Federal Reserve that said, well, minorities aren't getting their fair share of loans.
Blacks and Hispanics, minorities always means blacks and Hispanics, based upon the IQ stuff, we know why.
Blacks and Hispanics are not getting their fair share of mortgages, loans from the banks.
Now, It turned out that it was false.
The whole study was completely false.
They hadn't normalized by income.
They hadn't normalized by bankruptcy history.
They hadn't normalized by, I mean, you name it, right?
Credit rating.
I mean, once they did all of that, then it was all perfectly fair.
But of course, you know, you can't undo.
They can't unring the bell.
So when this study came out, everyone was like, oh, this is terrible.
Society is so racist.
We have to go and force banks to lend to minorities.
Okay, great.
So, and it's not to do with minorities, it's just forcing banks to lend to people who are not going to be able to pay the loans back.
And who maybe don't understand variable rate mortgages and the effect it's going to have for the mortgage rate moves partly because of the IQ bell curve and partly because government schools are just terrible at teaching people any useful skills.
So, you know, that forced, they ended up forcing banks to lend to unqualified people.
They had to bundle all these mortgages, the bad mortgages that went worldwide and all blew up.
In the same way, there was some study about, I think it was girls' self-confidence is really high at some point and then it craters down later on and so on.
And the methodology was just terrible and they didn't take into account a whole variety of things.
And it turned out to be mostly nonsense.
But of course, people were like, ah, we've got to fix schools.
They're terrible for girls.
Look, they're destroying their self-confidence.
It's wretched.
It's horrible.
And so all of these massive changes in the curriculum went through.
And yeah, girls did a little bit better.
But boys did a whole lot worse.
And of course, no one cares about the boys.
I'm sorry to say this, you know, but I'm just giving you the facts.
I'm telling you the way that society runs.
You know, a girl stubs her toe and everyone screams and runs over to help.
And, you know, a boy gets his leg blown off and people are like, walk it off!
You know, obviously in a small circle.
So, the school is not going to come to the rescue of your son.
Society is not going to come to the rescue of your son.
Men are disposable.
Men are utility robots.
They're designed to provide resources to women.
That's the way it is in a state of society.
That's the way it is in a society, as I was talking about before, where female vanity is not challenged.
So, I would not expect things to turn around in the environment that you're in.
It is, of course, the school's job to engage your son.
I mean, it's a private school.
You're paying, I assume, a pretty penny.
Now you can go down there and say, my child is bored.
My child is not stimulated.
My child is not enjoying school.
My child is not reaching his potential.
What are you going to do about it?
Maybe there is something they can do.
But I would think if there was something they could do, they probably already would have done it.
But maybe there is.
I mean, you can certainly go down and make that case.
You could maybe find other parents who have boys in the school and...
Ask them how their boys are doing and maybe you all can come and sit down with the principal, with the faculty or whoever it's going to be and say, listen, we are half a dozen or a dozen parents of kids of boys who aren't doing well in your school and we're not happy about it and what are you going to do about it?
These are things that may work, but in order to initiate the kind of changes that That would impact your son in the short run.
You know, all, you know, schools, I think in particular, public or private, it's probably slightly better than the private.
I mean, they're big, unwieldy, bulky institutions that, you know, they don't exactly turn on a dime.
So maybe they can say, well, you know, we're going to start to work in something new in the curriculum over the next couple of years.
I was like, well, I mean, how many brain cells are you going to lose till then?
So I don't know.
I mean, I'm not a big fan of formal school, whether it's public or private.
We all know how the school was developed.
It was developed out of the Prussian bottle designed to breed compliance in soldiers and to make people cogs in a machine of the elites.
And this is all, you know, read John Taylor Gatto, G-A-T-T-O. It's all well documented.
It's not a conspiracy theory.
It's just people who founded the system said, yep, we want to dumb down the population so that they're really good soldiers and really good factory workers and don't ever think about questioning anything important.
And, of course, governments around the world said, sounds good to us.
Excellent.
So, you know, how much can be fixed in that situation?
I don't know.
I don't have to face that.
I was one of the reasons I was glad to have a girl.
But you can try and fix it within the environment.
I don't know whether it's your son's duty to fix it.
As you say, when he's outside of school, he's humming and happy and making things and being creative and learning things.
Isn't that weird, right?
The only time I don't want to exercise is when I'm with my personal trainer.
The moment he leaves, I'm like, whew, exercise is great.
It's like, what?
So, I don't have any particularly great answers for you.
There are, of course, lots of resources.
Duke Pesta runs Freedom Academy, which is, I'm sure, a fine institution for, you know, there's homeschooling, there's unschooling, there's lots of options.
This has actually been very helpful because part of my reticence for going to speak to the school was that I guess I just wanted some validation that there was an issue that was bigger than just what was going on with my son and his grades.
I wasn't doing that overprotective parent thing and you know that archetypal mother that everybody Yeah.
Totally.
Totally.
Yeah.
So, you know, overprotective is, what do you mean you're going to put him on the football field?
He might get an hour.
But you just want him to not be bored and not be dying of understimulation.
Yeah.
But then sometimes in those environments, they turn it back on your kid.
Well, he's not paying attention.
Well, he's not paying attention because it's boring.
Have you seen what you're doing?
It's worksheet, it's book, it's worksheet, thought on, quiz, test.
It's boring.
He's not paying attention because he's bored.
But then...
Well, can you imagine...
I'm sorry to interrupt you, but can you imagine if...
Someone makes a kid's movie and tries to show it to kids.
The kids hate it.
And he's like, well, they're just not paying attention.
They're not watching the movie right.
It's like, no, no, no.
It's your job as the filmmaker to engage the children.
If they're bored, you suck.
That's okay to say to the teacher.
You might want to massage that a little.
You know what I mean, right?
Yeah.
Yeah.
No, so this was very, very useful.
Thank you.
Even though we don't have an actual answer how to go forward, it gives me more confidence in going and approaching the school and not looking like I'm just trying to defend my kid, but, you know.
Well, you're not asking him to be given grades he didn't earn, and you're not asking him to be excused from Jim because he has a sniffle.
I mean, you're saying, I'm paying for you guys to engage my child in education.
I know he's engaged when he's not in school, so what's going on?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Great.
Great.
Thank you.
Let us know how it goes.
I will do.
I appreciate it very much.
I appreciate that.
And I also appreciate the fact that you're standing up for your son.
Well, son or daughter, I appreciate that either way.
A lot of parents are just like, well, it'll work out somehow and it'll resolve itself.
And it was him who turned me on to your show.
Your son?
Yeah, he turned me on to you last year.
We've both listened to you for a while now.
Oh, well, that's fantastic.
I hope he appreciates what I'm saying.
Yeah, no, definitely.
I'm glad to hear that.
That's wonderful to hear.
All right.
Well, thanks very much for your call.
Thank you.
That's it for us, Mike.
Take care.
Bye.
Bye, Mike.
Bye.
Bye, Rebecca.
Yep, that's it, Steph.
All right.
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