Feb. 19, 2017 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
03:54:27
3597 Out of Control - Call In Show - February 15th, 2017
Question 1. [1:44] – “I have been wondering about this for some time now. It seems that we have become much more 'segmented', and 'boxed' into little groups. This occurs in the political realm with identity politics, as well as the echo chambers we build for ourselves on social media. So my questions for you are the following: Why has the public sphere become less universal (regarding the rise of identity politics and the decline of the public intellectual)? How can 'we' re-universalize an understanding, or at least an interest in philosophy (and politics more generally)?”Question 2: [20:50] – “I am wondering; what is the reason or mentality behind the desire of the progressive movement to divide people into subcategories? I have noticed that people that choose to divide themselves also tend to be more aggressive to anyone whom they view as opposition, regardless of that person's actual beliefs or actions. Why is this and how did this mentality come about?”Question 3: [55:39] – “I am a 24-year-old gay man with a stable job and very little college debt. I find it hard to find someone, as many gays are very left leaning and we inevitably end up fighting about politics, or are not willing to commit to a single person. I would like to know: What does Stefan thinks gay sexual market value is? Also what advice does Stefan have for someone in my position, how many of my values should I compromise to be with someone, based on what gay sexual market value means?”Question 4: [1:08:06] – “Do you think that my refusal to adopt the racialized world view of the US is the denial of reality or the maintenance of a healthy mindset? Is it impossible for us as humans to not place persons into categories or in-groups and out-groups, and assign value judgements to these categories, particularly in the realm of politics?”Question 5: [2:05:48] – “Our two-year-old has out of control tantrums that have been getting worse since he was 18 months old. We have just celebrated the birth of our daughter who was born in January are trying to figure out how to handle my son's temper tantrums before I go back to work in March. I'm on maternity leave now, and my husband is a stay at home dad, but with these tantrums, we can't figure out how he will handle our son and an infant. Please help!"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
Hi everybody, Stefan Mullen from Freedom Aid Radio.
Hope you're doing well.
Great set of callers tonight.
Five.
Top shelf, as they used to say when I was growing up.
First question is, why has the public sphere become less universal?
You know, identity politics and divide and conquer sort of stuff.
How can we re-universalize an understanding, or at least an interest in philosophy and politics?
In general.
So we dive deep into the leftist agenda of race politics and gender politics and so on.
It was really, really great.
The second caller wanted to know, why?
Why does the progressive movement so much want to divide people into subcategories?
You see how we grouped these questions together for your listening convenience?
A great call as well.
Third caller, a fine young gay man who wanted to know, where are all the gay conservatives?
I mean, outside of Milo.
And we talked about how he might be able to find the love of his life.
Fourth, a delightful Jamaican woman called in who wanted to know why are U.S. race relations so spiky and how on earth is she supposed to navigate these complexities?
And it was a great conversation, most enjoyable.
Now the fifth is a long call.
I hope you make it through.
It's very important, very powerful.
Two parents, long-term listeners, called in about their son's temper tantrums and we had to go so deep.
It was fantastic and amazing and I think very, very positive.
So please, please make it through that one.
And please don't forget to help us out at the show.
We need your money.
Everything costs something.
And we'd like your support at freedomainradio.com slash donate.
Don't forget to follow me on Twitter at Stefan Molyneux.
And use our affiliate link at fdrurl.com slash Amazon.
Alright, up next we have Jordan.
Jordan wrote in and said, So my question for you is the following.
1.
Why has the public sphere become less universal regarding the rise of identity politics and the decline of the public intellectual?
And two, how can we re-universalize an understanding, or at least an interest in philosophy and politics more generally?
That is from Jordan.
Hey Jordan, how are you doing tonight?
Very good.
Can you hear me alright?
Yeah, yeah, that's just fine.
That's just fine.
Do you have any thoughts as to...
Why you think this might be occurring?
I'm not quite sure.
I mean, I was reading an article in the New Statesman, maybe two weeks ago, and this particular article sort of lamented the decline of the publicly known intellectual or philosopher, and it didn't have an answer of why it was happening.
But I mean, I was thinking over the last week or so, there's probably two reasons.
The first one was technology, but the second one was just the change in our culture or our politics, whereby identity politics has come to the fore.
I don't quite know.
I mean, there doesn't seem to be, like, if we look on sort of the mainstream media outlets, there doesn't seem to be the long television programs like the fire The lines of William F. Buckley or the long interviews, it tends to be very boxed interviews where you have like 30 seconds to get your talking points across and that's it.
And I don't think that, well, obviously that's not conducive with a long discussion of philosophy or economics or history.
So I'm not quite sure why...
Yeah, I just wanted to reinforce that.
Like, I mean, when I do interviews, you know, we chat before and we chat afterwards and...
The number of times I've heard from people, especially afterwards, that I've been interviewing, like what a relief it was to have a long format without interruptions for them to be actually able to build a case and get an idea across.
So yeah, I hear what you're saying.
But sorry, go ahead.
Well, yeah, I mean, the same sort of thing.
I remember, I think I was reading something that Christopher Hitchens wrote, and he said that, you know, he may dislike or he may get angry with William F. Buckley, but he said after every appearance, you've always had the chance to reply, and there's never a time when you...
There's like, you know, after a conversation or whatever, that you're always like, oh, I should have said this, I should have said that.
There was never really an opportunity.
There never was that time.
But I'm not quite sure.
Is this like something you've been thinking about, particularly with philosophy?
You're a philosopher.
Like, why don't we see the, you know, A philosopher on television that we sort of all...
No, I mean, like most people...
In the article it said that most people in Britain, but the same thing would be said for Australia, probably America as well, probably couldn't even name a philosopher that's currently in the universities or studying philosophy.
I'm not sure what you think.
Oh yeah, no, they're terrible in general.
Terrible.
Worse than terrible.
Not only...
Like, it would be better if there were no philosophers than bad philosophers, because bad philosophers give philosophy a bad name and make it tougher for the good ones to have an impact.
So, no, I mean, they're just bought over.
In general, there's some exceptions, but they're paid for by the state and serve the social narrative.
And they often purposefully...
Drive themselves towards inconsequentiality so that they don't rouse anyone's upset and continue to pull their salaries by distracting the most intelligent students away from actually being able to analyze and solve problems in society.
Yeah.
I mean, when it comes to historians, publicly known historians in Britain, there's Simon Shamer, there's Andrew Roberts, there's Niall Ferguson, and they tend to be quite well known.
But philosophers, not so much.
Why do you think historians have a greater ability to be the public intellectual and philosophers not necessarily so much today?
Well, the best historians are great storytellers.
Right.
And if you, I mean, philosophy is not about storytelling, although having analogies, as I think I've proved over the last 10 years or so, having analogies is enormously helpful for philosophy.
And this goes back to Plato, who divided human beings into sort of the gold, the silver, and the bronze categories.
And if you look at his treatise on love, he has wonderful analogies and metaphors.
for us.
It's one of the great tragedies of history that Aristotle, who was considered a fantastic writer, even better than Plato, his original works are lost, but Plato's were retained.
And so because Plato's writings that we have are better stories, better told, better written than Aristotle's cobbled together from a bunch of student notes and stuff like that, they've had disproportionate influence on the mind.
But the best historians tend to be, the most popular historians, I should say, tend to have the following characteristics.
They're great storytellers.
They infuse their stories with a lot of passion and quote meaning, but they don't derive any actionable moral conclusions from their recounting of history.
So they give people a sense of tradition.
They give people a sense of being embedded in a larger story.
But they don't actually make any demands on people to change their behavior and act with moral courage in the present.
So people love that kind of stuff, right?
It's all the benefit with none of the risk.
Right.
Would you consider Noam Chomsky to be the exception to our rule here?
Because he is quite well known.
Would you consider him a philosopher?
And if so, would he be the exception to the rule, and why?
A philosopher?
I don't...
I'm afraid, like...
I will say this.
I mean, I've read, I don't know, maybe four of his books, and none of them have been philosophical, to my knowledge.
I know that some of the work he's done in linguistics has philosophical elements to it in our acquisition of language and so on.
But I have not seen him work with, you know, Aristotelian reasoning from first principles.
So, again, he may have done it in areas I'm not aware of, but I would not put him into that particular category.
But, again, that just could be because of my lack of knowledge.
Well, I suppose I was just using the word philosopher quite loosely.
But, do you know, like, I guess, you know, the second part of my question is, is it possible to recreate philosophy The situation we used to have whereby there were publicly known philosophers.
How can we get philosophy back into the public sphere like it once was?
Well, I mean, you have a choice in society.
You can have philosophy or you can have diversity.
And for the past 50, 60 years, largely as the result of communist infiltration of formerly at least decently noble leftist institutions, society has chosen diversity over philosophy.
The reason for that is that diversity says, well, you see, divergence of opinion is a good thing.
It's enriching to have diverse or opposing opinions all clustered together in society.
Well, of course, the job of philosophy is to make sure that Anybody who tells or who makes truth claims knows what the hell they're talking about.
And nobody ever talks about diversity in science, right?
Nobody ever says, well, you know, it's great that we have Newtonian physics coexisting with Einsteinian physics and, you know, it'd be great if we have all these contradictory theories of everything that pretend to explain everything because in science, diversity is its strength, right?
I've never heard anything.
I mean, they may say diversity is a strength like we want You know, more, I don't know, Indian dwarves in science or something, but they don't say that having a multiplicity of opposing theories in science is the strength of science.
They'd say, well, no.
The whole point of science is you're supposed to end up with a generally accepted coherent theory.
You don't hear biologists say, well, Darwinian evolution is a strength, and so is 6,000-year-old creationism.
We like to have them both in there because diversity is a strength.
You know what I mean?
So if you want diversity, what you're saying is there are no foundational principles that supersede culture.
If there are no foundational principles that supersede culture, then the job of a philosopher is considered a negative, right?
Because it doesn't encourage diversity, right?
I mean, the whole point of a philosopher is to tamp down all of the poking up random Historical superstitious gopher heads of nonsense cultures that come before the throne of reason and make their case, right?
And so no, I mean, you're supposed to end up with one set of rules, one set of ethics, one set of justifications, because reasoning doesn't produce multiplicities.
Reasoning produces unity.
But you can't have unity and diversity.
Of course not.
I mean, that's almost by definition.
So, the left has wanted to destroy the bulwark of Christianity that has kept the West safe for at least 1,500 years, you could say, or at least has kept it relatively free for the past 500 years or so.
So, the left has wanted to destroy Christianity, and in order to destroy Christianity, it has had to import diversity, in other words, clearly non-Christian diversity, elements around the world and the result has been that you have neither theology nor philosophy nor any unifying principle in society that everyone is willing to bow down to, right?
There's this thing going on at the moment in Canada.
I think Justin Trudeau referred to so-called quote, quote, Canadian values.
You know, do we expect people to conform to so-called Canadian values?
There's this big debate.
Are immigrants expected to conform to Canadian values?
What are Canadian values?
A philosopher would say, well, there's no such thing.
A philosopher would say, there's no such thing as Canadian values any more than there is Icelandic math or Tanzanian physics.
So the job of the philosopher is to unify the wayward and disparate perspectives into a rational, empirical and cohesive whole, but Given the lefts and now indeed society as a whole, given the addiction to diversity, the job of a philosopher is directly threatening the goals that the left has of destroying the remnants of Christianity and the Enlightenment and so on in order to bring about socialism and communism.
Does that make sense?
Yeah, it does.
I mean, I guess, you know, the last point I probably make or ask of you is, you know, what's our action plan?
How can we reach a segmented audience when we can see that, you know, our Facebook friends, sometimes, you know, they de-friend us if we make a little post that they disagree with?
Or how do we...
How do we be that tamping tool of a philosopher?
How do we do that with the constraints of a segmented public space that we have?
You mean how do we chase people who block us for giving them information they don't like?
Yeah.
Well, you don't.
No, all right.
Well, you're going to try and...
Are you going to try and chase down and bring integrity to people whose reaction to information they don't like is to put their fingers in their ears and go la la la la in this autistic screeching manner?
No, you can't.
I mean, just, sorry, you're now on the side of the enemy and there's got to be a fight.
A verbal fight.
A fight of values and reason and evidence.
We hope.
We hope to keep it that way.
But there's another factor as well as far as this fragmentation goes.
When the law was small, When the law was passive, when the law was comprehensible, when the law was common, in other words, there was common law, right?
You had to not use force against people and you had to keep your word, right?
That was criminal law and civil law.
You had to maintain your contracts and you had to not use violence against people.
Everyone could understand that and everyone was united in that perspective, except for a small group that everyone recognized were criminals.
Everybody was United under the banner of a fairly just and fairly universal and fair set of laws.
Now society is divided into farmers and livestock because there are people who are forced to contribute to the state and people who Take from the state.
The state is one big giant conveying mechanism.
It's like this big giant robot arm that goes between two sandboxes taking sand from the productive and now dumping it onto the increasingly numerous unproductive.
Like in America, 94 million, 93 million people who are of working age but not in the workforce.
And more than half of American households now rely On the government for substantial, if not all, of their income.
So we have the farmers and the farmers' dependents.
The farmers are the tax collectors and the farmers' dependents are everyone they pay off with the stolen money of the productive.
How can there be unity in a win-lose environment?
How can there be unity when some people are feeding off The stolen labor of other people.
There can't be any unity there.
At all.
You know, that's like the cancer in your body saying, we're all in this together.
It's like, well, no, actually, we're kind of not.
One of us is going to go, or both of us are going to go.
So there can't be any unifying principles when the predation happens.
Upon human beings has reached such an escalation.
I mean, this was the case in the founding of America, right?
All men are created equal, yet we have slavery.
Well, pick one, right?
You can't have both, sorry.
That's just not the way that logic works.
When everybody was united under a common, comprehensible, fairly passive, in other words, it waited for a complaint before leaping into action, when everyone was united under common moral rules, and the law was ideally, of course, supposed to represent moral rules, then you could have unity.
I mean, there was society, and then there were the criminals, and the criminals were not considered to be part of society, which is why they were locked up away from society.
But now, you have this massive wealth redistribution And you can see this with Trump, right?
I mean, you can see this with Trump getting in, and there are fears among the dependent classes, among those who are dependent on the farmers, the tax farmers.
They're freaking out.
They're panicking.
How can there be unity between the farmers and victims in a vampire landscape?
It's not possible.
I can't go to...
The chickens, I keep and say, well, we're all in this together.
It's like, well, no, you keep stealing and eating our eggs and babies, right?
So when you have a predatory state that's constantly grabbing resources from one group and handing them off to another, how could there possibly be unity?
Because these two groups, by their very nature, exist in an oppositional relationship.
You can't possibly have unity in that situation.
Hmm.
It sounds rather ominous.
What do you think the future holds for philosophy, though?
Holds?
What do you mean?
Well, I mean, we see this trend.
No, no, no.
Don't give me the passive encasement.
What's going to unravel?
What's going to unfold?
You know, to hell with that.
I mean, I'm making a difference in philosophy.
I'm making a difference in the world.
You know, a couple hundred million downloads of this show is making an immeasurable impact in the consciousness of the world.
So, what does the future hold for philosophy?
Well, as far as I'm concerned, whatever I damn well want it to hold, because that's what I'm working at.
So, I just don't give me this, well, how are things going to unroll like it's some carpet unrolling in a shop or something?
It's like, no, I mean, what do you want philosophy to do?
Then make it do that.
Fair enough.
Fair enough.
Sorry about that.
Anyway, good talk.
I don't quite know.
Interesting talking to you.
Any further thoughts?
No, that's great.
I appreciate the question.
It's a great question.
And I invite people to mull over.
What would it require for society to actually have unity, for us not to fragment into these warring and opposing groups?
And it's not just having different opinions.
At all.
It's having different opinions plus the state proactively moving resources around.
Turns people into winners and losers.
And it's basically a civil war.
Literally, it's a civil war.
An uncivil war is when the money runs out.
But a civil war is when the government is moving money around to buy votes and allegiance and so on.
So, no, it's a great set of questions.
I'm glad it was helpful in terms of the answer.
And let's move on to the next caller.
Thank you.
Alright, up next we have Matthew.
Matthew wrote in and said, I am wondering, what is the reason or mentality behind the desire of the progressive movement to divide people into subcategories?
I've noticed that people that choose to divide themselves also tend to be more aggressive to anyone whom they view as opposition, regardless of that person's actual beliefs or actions.
Why is this, and how did this mentality come about?
That's from Matthew.
Hey, Matt.
How's it going?
I'm quite well, Stefan.
How are you?
Well, well, thank you.
Well, I think the first thing to understand is that the left is a giant factory that manufactures losers.
Yeah.
Right?
I mean, for the left to work, there have to be victims.
There have to be people who are failing.
There have to be people whose lives are disastrous, right?
Yeah.
You can't sell salvation to a happy man, right?
In order to save someone, you have to damn them first.
The left is not in the business of providing solutions.
The left is in the business of stimulating problems.
Of course, right?
Of course.
You can't sell a diet book to a thin person easily, right?
So you want to fatten them up, right?
So the left is in a continual process of manufacturing people who are doomed to fail And that way they can mine the resentment that that failure creates in order to, you know, shatter and prey upon the productive in society, right?
So you can...
There's a tragic series of pictures around there on the internet.
You can go to Google this and find them for yourself.
Women before and after feminism, like women before and after becoming social justice warriors.
And it's horrible.
It's literally heartbreaking because you see these women...
Look nice, normal, attractive, healthy, happy.
You know, and then they've got half-shaved heads and weird piercings and tattoos and fat.
You know, it's like, ugh, it's gross, right?
So they're producing women who are unmarriable, unlovable.
And so these women are going to fail and they're going to be miserable and They're going to be resentful.
And so they've created this army of resentful people, this army of people who are doomed to fail.
Not because of anything inherent in the system that they live in, but because they've been filled full of victimhood and rage and resentment by the left.
And the left produces this army, this mob, this unthinking, chaotic, epistemological masses of human beings doomed to fail.
Doomed to fail, doomed to be poor, doomed to be unloved, doomed to get STDs, doomed to be single moms, doomed to just live a life that is a complete mess.
And this is how you know it's a new form of an old-time religion, right?
Because the old-time religion, and I'm talking about sort of the more sinister medieval aspects of Christianity here.
I think the modern flavors are much more benign.
But, you know, old-time religion, this is not just Christianity.
This is other religions too.
What do they say?
You're damned as a sinner.
You're damned as a bad person.
You're going straight to hell.
Satan is the ruler of this world.
You're doomed, but I can save you.
They have to create sinners in order to sell salvation.
And the left, it's the same thing.
They have to create victims in order to sell salvation.
Now, in fundamentalist religion, you're a victim of Satan and of your own lusts and your own drives and your own dark desires and all this.
You're the victim.
But we'll sell you salvation.
And in the left, you see you're a victim of patriarchy and racism, homophobia, sexism, Islamophobia.
You're a victim, victim, victim.
But we'll sell you salvation in the form of state power.
It's the same scam, right?
Old-timey religion was in the business of producing sinners so that it could sell salvation.
And Christianity, I think, has largely moved beyond that in many circles.
But the left is in the process of producing failures so that it can sell them resources.
See, if you're a successful person paying taxes, you don't like the left.
Why?
Because they take all your stuff, man.
They rip you off, right?
If you're out there, there's a great...
Dilbert cartoon, right, from our good friend Scott Adams.
And in the cartoon, Ashok, I think his name is A-S-O-K, Ashok, he's this intern, and he gets a job, and everyone gathers around when Ashok opens his first paycheck, and they want to see his face.
Do you know why?
Because they're expecting it to be a setting down?
Yeah, because you say, wow, I'm making X amount of dollars per year.
Woo-hoo!
It's my first real job.
And then you get your paycheck, and it's like...
Mule kick of tax reality and deduction reality.
I'm left with what?
It's like the government just wiped its ass with your paycheck and handed you the smelly remains.
Sorry, are you going to say?
No, nothing, nothing.
I was laughing.
Did you have that when you had your first job?
I had my first job when I was 15.
I can't even remember the feeling at the time.
It wasn't until much later that I started to really notice how much of my money was going down.
And much so more after the ACA was passed, the Affordable Act and Obamacare, because then you were required basically to pay for it in one way or the other, whether it came out through the, what does the government call it?
They didn't call it a tax, because then it would be taxation without representation.
They called it something else, the fine.
A fee or whatever it was.
Yeah, a fee or fine.
So you had that, or you actually had to pay the exorbitant, you know, ever-increasing...
Yeah, I mean, when I was a waiter, yeah, when I was a waiter, you know, this is back in the day before credit cards were prevalent.
But after abacuses and stone tablets from my young listeners, but back in the day when I was a waiter, right, I mean, people would just leave you tips in cash, right?
It could come the end of the evening, you're walking around like a A night of the round table in full chainmail.
Because in your pockets is like so much change.
It's ridiculous.
I mean, literally, you could take bullets to your nutsack and be fine.
And now, of course, I declared everything as income.
But I knew some waiters who didn't.
And I bet you those waiters who didn't kind of liked it.
And then if they got a real job with a salary, they're like, oh, now I'm on the paying side.
Oh, it's not free.
This is why I had to pay so little for college.
And so, the left can't have too many people who are successful, because if there are too many people who are successful, then there's lots of people who are on the paying side of the leftist equation.
And being on the paying side, well, this is why Churchill said, if you're not a socialist when you're 20, you have no heart.
If you're not a conservative when you're 40, you have no head.
It's because you go from the being paid to the paying side.
As the old saying goes, Hunting ain't so much fun when the rabbit's got a gun.
Yeah.
And so, yeah, so the left can't manufacture too many successful people.
I mean, it needs there to be successful people so that it has groups to pillage, but it doesn't want, it's in the business of manufacturing losers and failures and, you know, resentful people who are just, who just telegraph emotional disaster-ville, like somebody's got an air horn attached to both nipples.
Me!
Me!
I mean, they just want to telegraph and you can see, you know, these social justice warriors with the blue hair and the half shaved and black lipstick and shit like that.
It's like, yeah, okay.
So, sorry.
You've been all twisted into a tiny bag of socialist nuts.
And that way, they can keep people on the receiving end of largesse, of the state of...
That's why they want so many people to go into school, right?
Because when you graduate from school with a huge amount of debt, Sorry, you're a loser.
And I mean this with sympathy.
I mean with genuine sympathy.
I graduated with some debt, but not too much.
Because you really don't have any options.
You've got to get a job.
You can't really negotiate.
It's like the H-1B visas.
It's a form of serfdom.
And so you're resentful.
So if they can breed low rent, low earning, crazy telegraphing losers, Then those people will say, well, of course I need a government.
Because there are all these people out there who just want to exploit me.
Boy, you know, I've got to tell you, looking at these people, I'm not sure that's entirely true.
I'm not sure.
It'd be nice if they did have more to exploit.
I mean that from a sort of financial human capital standpoint.
It'd be great if there were some capitalists out there who actually could and wanted to exploit you because that would mean there'd be a huge amount of value that you're providing to society.
The problem is nobody wants to exploit them because they're losers.
And again, this sounds like a pejorative, like, oh, they're just, no, they've been made.
This is why I hate the left so much is they take human potential and smash and crush and grind it up.
For the sake of their pursuit of power.
You know, they care much about individuals as your average coke addict cares for a cocoa plunge.
Just grind it up for my addiction.
Grind up the people.
Smash up the people.
Make women fat and unmarriable and ugly.
Unlovable.
What do we care?
They'll be miserable.
And they'll be dependent on us.
The givers of disaster.
The bringers of ruin.
Yeah.
You ruin people for the sake of power.
You are a nasty, nasty specimen.
So they have been bamboozled and lied to and manipulated into disaster.
Disaster.
Absolutely disaster.
And it seems to be very unrecoverable in general.
I mean, I know that with a few people who've recovered from this that I know of, but it leaves a big, uh...
It leaves a big scar.
And, um...
It's pretty brutal.
So that would sort of be my first take if that helps.
Well, I guess I was wondering more specifically on a smaller scale.
I mean, the system itself, I totally agree with the way you look at that.
I haven't actually looked at it on that large of a scale before as why...
The left, as a whole, decides to make, like you said, losers create the fulfilling prophecy of, oh, you need us because now we made you need us.
But I was more specifically wondering about, like, on a personal level, why are there people of, especially their ability to get people from the collegiate society and universities to fight these battles, these supposed educated people to fight To come to this calling that quite literally leads you, like you said, to being a lifelong loser.
I didn't quite get the last part of the question.
If you could rephrase, please.
Well, personally, on a smaller scale, how do people find themselves, align themselves to this cause, to these people in universities and these educated people to come and Fight for this cause that quite clearly, I mean, you can look at it, these people, what they want is exactly the opposite of what they say.
They almost lack the ability to recognize irony.
Oh, I see, I see.
Okay, well, people want drama without danger.
Some people, right?
Especially young people, right?
If you can get drama without danger, it's a pretty thrilling thing.
It's sort of like a video game, right?
With a video game, you get drama without danger.
Right?
Yeah.
I remember I used to play, oh gosh, I used to play Unreal Tournament, I can't remember which version.
Unreal Tournament 3?
No, before that, 2004?
Anyway.
And we used to play on GWAR's server, G-W-A-R. GWAR's server.
And they used to have this great map called Facing Worlds.
It was sort of two giant pillar-like structures on opposite ends of a floating boomerang, it looked like.
And I was playing with a friend of mine.
We were playing in this sort of tech pit.
And we used to play Capture the Flag, which I'm sure everyone knows about, even if you've never played it or you've played it as kids, if you've not played it online.
And this game, they're supposed to last for 10 minutes, but if there's a tie...
Then I'm so glad to never go to my grave without telling this story.
Not that it's hugely important, but it allows me to unburden myself of things.
Anyway, but if there's a tie in the game, then your game goes until you get a tiebreaker.
So these games are supposed to be for 10 minutes.
It was two all, and we kept playing, and no one could get it.
Everyone's had games like this, like whether it's sports or video games.
Just can't quite get the advantage.
And eventually...
I had the flag, raced across the middle, climbed up the side and got into the top and there were these little portals and so on and I literally made it Like with a rocket two inches behind my heel when I finally got the flag to their flag.
I had the flag, and then they didn't have the flag, so I couldn't score.
Anyway, and so it was like, this game went on for like, I think it was close to an hour of just back and forth, couldn't quite get the advantage, and I ended up, you know, scoring the winning touchdown in this game, and I remember it very vividly, and then the game freezes when you do it, and I could see just how close all of the explosions were, and it was very, like it was very cool.
But see, that's, It's drama with no danger.
Of the Stalinist system of government that he was ensconced under, right?
So he was this captain, I think, of the Red Guard or something, a captain in the Soviet military, and he wrote some letters, I think, critical, and they arrested him.
And so he was 10 years in the Gulag, and Dostoevsky, memoirs or notes from the House of the Dead, fantastic book to read about what it was like.
Dostoevsky was part of a socialist group and he was arrested.
He was sentenced to death and he was locked in a prison for, I think it was eight months or so.
And this prison, they sort of had this idea that quietness and reflection, think about what you've done, you know, go to the naughty room and think about what you've done.
And so they wanted to keep things so quiet.
It was pitch black and they wanted to keep things so quiet.
Even the guards wore felt on the bottom of their shoes so they wouldn't make any sound when they're going up and down the hallway.
They finally drag Dostoevsky out, and they line him up to be shot, just like everyone else.
Right before he gets shot, his sentence is commuted to 10 years in Siberia, which he goes and serves some portion thereof.
Then he ends up as a horrible gambling addict.
Anyway, so Dostoevsky, yeah, genuine victim, genuine victim of this Cesarist regime.
And So he had drama and danger.
But you see, if you're an imaginary victim, if you're paranoid, in other words, if you think people are out to get you, but no one is in fact out to get you, then you have all the drama without the danger.
Now that can be very, very addictive for people.
Again, in the same way video games have so much replaced sports.
For people these days, particularly young people these days.
Video games have replaced sports because sports does carry some danger within.
You trip, fall, hurt yourself, get smashed into by someone.
So you have to be alert.
There's some excitement and there's some danger.
But if you can, and this is the way it generally works, you pick the safest group in society, the group that is least likely to attack you, And then what you do is you say, they have all the power, they're horrible, and they're out to get us.
Ooh, now you've got excitement, but no danger.
Ooh, that Christian Baker is a fascist!
Ooh, hey, you know what's probably the least terrifying category of people?
I'm going to go with Christian Baker.
I'm pretty much going to go with that.
They haven't made their horror movie yet.
Ticking Middle Easterner, not quite the same category as Christian Baker.
White middle class male.
Ooh, yes, the roving gangs of white middle class males who are out there beating the hell out of people.
So you set up a category of imaginary persecution.
And you do that by picking the safest group of people and then pretending that they're all horrible and they're out to get you.
Ooh, we're being chased.
We've got all the excitement, but none of the danger.
We wouldn't want to pick on any real enemies, right?
Which is why, you know, these feminists and all these junky people, they go for white Christian males.
That's the bigger passive group that's out to get them, right?
And this is why they ally themselves with certain, you know, it's a woman who was foundational in getting the Women's March running, a big fan of Sharia law.
Well, you see, you don't want to say necessarily that big proponents of Sharia law are out to get you because they may actually end up being out to get you.
I mean, that's a little bit too much reality to your thrill-seeking, right?
So they don't want to go parachuting like jump out of a plane.
They want to go parachuting like virtual reality, right?
It's the live-action role-play.
They're LARPing moral courage.
Look out!
That bunny may be hunting us now!
The hunter has become the hunted!
It's like this old Monty Python joke from Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
The Vorpal bunny, the bunny that attacks people and bites their heads off.
This is social justice warriors, except the bunny is just a regular bunny.
It's a death bunny!
It's a killer bunny!
And they're like, oh no, the killer bunny is out to get us.
Oh no, the killer bunny is patriarchy and cisgendered privilege and whiteness and...
Right?
Pick the safest group you can find.
Pretend that they're all out to get you.
And then you can pretend to be a victim without actually ever being in any kind of danger whatsoever.
Which is why, you know, Paul Joseph Watson's got this great new bit about conservatism is the new counterculture.
Also Hitler's a social justice warrior.
Yeah, because he's saying, ooh, and this is when I was talking about the Netflix thing I did the other day, right?
The dear white people, ooh, so edgy, ooh, wow, you're making fun of preppy white people, ooh, wow, so edgy.
This is why comedians have become so boring to me.
Oh, exactly.
Because they're so not edgy, right?
How brave is it to go up and make fun of the people that have been beaten this entire time just kick the dead horse just repeatedly?
Saturday Night Live reiterated the exact same skit they did last week, again this week.
It wasn't clever or anything.
It was a repetition.
Trump is orange and can be kind of loud.
Oh, wow, you're just like cutting-edge Lenny Bruce comic stylings of edginess.
And it's just like, oh, so boring.
It's so boring.
Oh, it's so boring.
Go on, go on, make some fun of Jews.
I'm not saying that you should or shouldn't, but be edgy.
Be edgy, you know?
Be edgy.
Be really edgy.
Do something actually risky.
I think that's why...
White people are kind of stodgy and...
It's like, oh my god.
It's so boring.
They become so...
They become such fraidy cats.
And this is why, yeah, conservatism, I think Paul's got a very good point.
Yeah, I was going to say, he's probably...
The reason people like him so much is because of his ability to add humor to the situation and actually attack people that you're not supposed to attack.
Oh, his squeaky voice, the high-pitched mocking of social justice outrage is a thing of beauty.
It really is.
It wants my dreams, obviously.
It is, yeah, so, I mean, if you can pretend you're being chased, you know, I mean, it literally is like when you see toddlers, right?
You know, I used to do this with my daughter when she was like, oh, daddy's gonna get you!
And she runs away giggling.
She's like, no, daddy, chase me!
Here I'm coming to get you, you know, and it's like, this is social justice warriors.
It's like, White people are coming to get us.
Oh, no, we're really not.
Oh, they're coming to get us.
Oh, Trump's going to be a fascist.
They're coming to get us.
And it's like, no, that's not really what's happening.
Okay, fine.
You can live in your own little thing about how dramatic and exciting your life is, but no one's coming to get you.
The sad part, though, the part that bothers me the most about this, and it has bothered me, the reason I even started...
I was previously not that invested in politics or anything having to do with leftism and conservatism.
I stayed deliciously ignorant for a while, but then I noticed around the Trump...
Not even the Trump, during the GOP running, I started to notice that people were...
Like you said, they use LARPing as their way of pretending that they're being attacked, but they also use faux wisdom, like an imaginary empiricism or understanding of how the world works that's not real.
I mean, it's not factual.
And then when they're confronted with facts or something like that, they retreat back into this Stephen Fry, I forgot how he calls it.
He calls it this infantilism that they, as soon as you start to point out, you know, well, there hasn't been a Christian terrorist attack in the United States this entire time, but there's been several Muslim terrorists.
Oh, God, no.
No, no, no.
Now you're attacking Muslims.
You're xenophobe, Islamophobe.
And we'll also throw in some homophobes and some other phobes along the lines.
Well, you know, if they're really concerned about attacking Muslims, which I think is actually a very legitimate concern in the West, how about we stop bombing their damn countries?
You know, that to me would be a very, very good way of stopping to attack Muslims.
I think that would just be excellent.
Yeah, so where were they when Obama was dropping 100,000 bombs on largely Muslim countries?
What, 11 of them or 7 of them?
I can't remember, some ridiculous number.
Yeah, and when George H.W. Bush – now, of course, a lot of them were against – sorry, George Bush the Younger because he was conservative and all that, supposedly.
It's just another damn globalist with, hey, he became a painter after he was kind of like a dictator.
Kind of the reverse Hitler thing.
Yeah, the reverse Hitler, yeah.
He's vegetarian now.
But here's the thing, too.
I mean, you can see this, too, with groups when they feel that they're being persecuted, but they're not actually being persecuted.
What they generally, what some deranged members of those groups do is they invent their own hate crimes.
You seen this?
Oh yeah, oh my god, I can quote them.
I can quote them.
Yeah, but one just came out today, right?
They just arrested a guy, spray painted, right?
F Arabs are in a little swastika or something.
It turned out it was, anyway.
Just, yeah, make up.
Oh, you're coming to get me.
No one's coming to get me.
Okay, I'll mail a swastika to myself and pretend that someone's coming to get me.
Right?
Or was it Sarah Silverman?
Yeah, the Swaston.
Who's becoming like an art parody piece of her own self.
Like, she saw these squiggles on...
Oh, they're Nazi symbols!
Don't these people even know how to look up a Nazi symbol?
They're drawing them very badly.
Yeah, honey, it's because they're markers on road work that needs to be done.
Ooh.
Ooh.
They're coming to get me!
The squiggles are coming to get me!
They're Nazi symbols!
No, no, they're not.
It doesn't matter.
It doesn't matter.
Because...
It'll be something else tomorrow.
Trust me.
I know this one.
I have known someone, up close and personal, who's paranoid.
Facts don't matter.
And generally, in my experience, it arises from people who've done such horrible things to other people that it's their conscience that's trying to get back at them and remind them that they might want to try being a halfway decent human being for a change.
But they can't internalize or accept Their conscience because they have vanity and cold-heartedness and sadism.
And so they feel that something's out to get them.
They think it's out there in the world.
They think it's Donald Trump.
They think it's construction markings.
But it's their own conscience.
That's why it can't be solved.
Do you also believe that has a lot to do?
Because all of these people that follow this ideal, they lean towards being more aggressive.
Because if you're...
Right now, that almost seems to be the separation between right and left.
It used to be that it was, you know, a kind of socialist mentality and a kind of capitalist mentality.
But now it seems that even former left members are walking the aisle across like, oh gosh, Mark Rubin.
Dave Rubin.
Dave Rubin.
Yeah, Mark Rubin.
Dave Rubin, he was just on Tucker Carlson talking about how the left left him, right?
Yeah, that's what he said.
He also calls this the war on speech right now, which is what I'm talking about.
It's now become, like you said just a little bit ago, that it's a civil war.
It's leading towards a point like that because they they're so predisposed or whatever, whatever the whatever it is, they seem to lean towards aggressive acts.
My cousin happens to be one of the young Republicans at UC Berkeley who was responsible for actually arranging Milo's visit.
And he was he was even the one on the television that they interviewed.
But I mean, they they assaulted the actual president of that organization shortly after that.
Oh, yeah.
No, it's it's it's it's it's literally dangerous to be an openly identified conservative in significant portions of America these days.
It's openly dangerous.
Oh, it is.
See, if you really want to hurt people, but you don't want to look in the mirror and say, I'm a fucking asshole.
Like, if you really want to go out and just hurt people, like you want to put acid in their ventilation systems, you want to beat them up, you want to punch them in the head.
Like, if you're just a sadistic psycho, You don't want to look in the mirror and say, hey, I guess I'm just a fucking asshole.
What you want to do is say, oh no, I'm fighting back.
I'm part of the resistance.
I'm not a stormtrooper.
I'm a Jedi.
I mean, you want to create this fantasy universe where you've justified your actions as self-defense, either on behalf of yourself or some downtrodden, underprivileged group or whatever.
But no, I mean, you want to do damage, you want to watch the world burn, but you don't want to think of yourself as an arsonist, right?
So you make up a situation, you make up an environment, you make up a worldview, which justifies your preference for an addiction to violence.
And the other thing too is that the people who are violent, they're in way over their head.
They're not smart people.
If you're smart, then you know that rioting, that this study just came out, rioting makes people hate your cause.
I mean, if you go rioting, you just...
The French, the no-go zones, right?
The Muslims, I mean, they're setting fire to cars, they're rioting, they're attacking.
Okay, so Le Pen is now starting to lead in the Pulse.
Geert Wilders is ahead of the Pulse in the Netherlands, and...
Now, what, 63 or 64% of Germans want Merkel out?
Raus, be gone, right?
So, if you had any brains at all, you'd say, okay, well, this is really bad for my cause.
I'm going to make a recent argument.
I'm going to go and make my cause look better.
But these are not smart people.
They're not smart people.
And if you're not a smart person, You shouldn't be in the realm of ideas, right?
Of course, right?
Listen, I'm not very good at math.
I can get by, but I'm having a natural affinity to math.
So I don't go to math conferences.
I don't take advanced math degrees.
It's not my area of expertise.
It's not my skill set.
I don't like it in particular.
So I know my limitations.
And these are people who have been brought into the realm of ideas who aren't smart enough to debate, aren't smart enough to make a case, right?
Escalation to emotional aggression, to physical violence, to verbal abuse, well, that is generally the sign that someone is not competent in debate.
Now, I'm fully aware, I just call people assholes, and I'm fully aware of all of that.
It's fine if you make the case.
If you make the case that someone's an asshole and you say they're an asshole, but if you just scream at people that they're assholes without making a case, well, then You're an asshole.
So there's just way too many people in the sphere, in the realm of ideas, who have no business being there.
Occasionally they call into this show.
We just put out that video.
Anyway, it's just, it's not, they're not good at it, but they don't know that they're good at it.
They think that they're singing at the Met, and it's karaoke night, last call, and everyone's leaving because they can't stand this screeching.
Sorry, go ahead.
I was just going to say that the I trailed off when you were talking about, I was actually imagining what you were talking about and trailed off.
I was wondering, is it, how do you, how does this actually, oh yeah, the last guy asked, you didn't want to go there.
Never mind.
I was going to say, is there any way for this to lead down a non-violent alley?
Because you said, not that long ago.
No, no, sorry, it's already turned violent.
Well, I meant that how do we keep it from escalating?
How does it go from this one act of violence being a mar on the record rather than being par for the course?
I don't know.
You don't know either.
Society has reason, ostracism, or violence.
That's all there is.
That's all there is.
Nothing else.
And the left fully understands the power of ostracism.
I love it.
Which is why they try and get you fired and they try and get everyone to hate you and contact your friends.
So they understand.
So is reason going to work?
Well, probably not.
Is ostracism going to work?
Well, ostracism only works if people are susceptible to social pressure.
And if they already have enough of their own group, then ostracism doesn't particularly work.
So is it going to escalate to violence?
Well, it already has.
And the problem is, of course, that once the right starts really fighting back, I mean really fighting back.
It'll be over in five minutes.
Well, I wouldn't be so sure about that, because the left can be sneaky fighters, right?
I mean, it wasn't like when we saw the eruption of street fighting in the Weimar Republic between the communists and the National Socialists, right?
Well, it wasn't over in five minutes.
No, I guess not.
I mean, the left in general will fight pretty sneakily, right?
Like, they won't try and beat you up out front of the venue.
They'll Get the sprinkler system going and they'll pour acid into your ventilation system, right?
They don't want a direct fight because they're usually pencil-neck dweebs, right?
And cowards.
That's why it's always 12 to 1 with leftists, right?
They won't go up mano a mano, 1 to 1, right?
So they fight sneaky, they fight mean, they fight dirty.
And that's in the rulebook, right?
Saul Alinsky's rulebook.
No sympathy for the devil.
So I wouldn't assume this, oh, well, we've got all the guns, say the right will be over in five minutes.
No, no, no.
Come on.
If it was that easy, it would have been done and dusted already.
No, it's going to be a brutal fight, and it's going to be a fight on many fronts.
And I predict, though I do not wish for it to be the case, but it certainly will be violent.
Because when the right starts really fighting back, then the left will be overjoyed.
Oh, yeah, because then they get to declare all the fascination.
Now they, we know they're out to get us.
Yeah.
All the violence they've wanted to enact.
Now the fact that, you know, people being hit with flagpoles and maced and sprayed and tripped and kicked and punched, right, for years by the time the right, once the right starts fighting back, the left will become a howling, feral, chimpanzee-style mob of feral retribution.
Aha!
Now we know!
We knew it all along.
They finally have shown their true face and now the battle is on, right?
And they'll love it.
So, I don't know.
I don't know how to avoid it other than to continue to try and bring reason and evidence as much as possible.
No.
Alright, so I'm going to move on to the next caller.
Thank you so much for an excellent series of questions.
I hope it was a productive discussion and I appreciate it.
Thank you.
Right up next we have Thomas.
Thomas wrote in and said, "I'm a 24-year-old gay male with a stable job and very little college debt.
I find it hard to find someone as many gays are very left-leaning and we inevitably end up fighting about politics or they're not willing to commit to a single person.
I would like to know, what does Stefan think gay sexual market value is?
Also, what advice does Stefan have for someone in my position?
How many of my values should I compromise to be with someone based on what gay sexual market value means?
That's from Thomas.
Oh, hey Thomas, how you doing?
I'm doing great.
Glad to be in the ping pong ball.
Now, listen, Thomas, I don't want to tell you how to be gay, but I think you may have missed the memo where your goal really is just a lot of random, anonymous, meaningless sex where you never even learn the person's name, often through a wall.
Did you not check your inbox for that particular memo?
Yeah, I kind of missed out on that part of it.
Yeah, yeah.
See, that's a challenge.
So you want like a sort of meaningful, long-term life partnership kind of thing and...
Yeah, yeah.
And I'd also like to clarify something, because I know in my question I said something where I say, we're not willing to commit to a single person.
I meant the other person, not me, because I obviously want to be with a stable person.
Right, right.
Yeah, okay, I understand, I understand.
Well, the stereotypes do appear to be truthy, right?
I mean, you know, lefty gays, right?
Oh, absolutely.
Right.
Have you met non-lefty gays?
It's actually really funny.
My first boyfriend, when I was in high school and stuff, was the person who introduced me to libertarian ideals.
I.e., through a course of time, that's actually how I found you.
So, him, but things didn't work out between us, and since then, no.
Right, right.
And what is the typical response that you get if a gay friend or potential lover or whatever finds out your godforsaken political leanings?
Normally it's, how can you be like that?
It's especially escalated with the whole Donald Trump thing because I was a Donald Trump supporter.
It's, how can you support somebody who cares about all this hate and preaches all these terrible things and is, you know, fascist?
And my replies always are, I have seen him be the most gay-friendly Republican president in history.
I think what he's doing is going to be safe.
It's usually met with a very hard, like, you're wrong, I'm right, and you need to change how you are because this is not how you're supposed to be.
Right.
It is, you know, and I'm sorry to be using this disrespectful phrase, but it can be a little bit disheartening how the left fastens on certain groups and keeps them as their domesticated socialist pets, right?
Yeah.
While not doing anything in particular to protect them from certain forces in society, right?
Yeah.
Do gay people where you are, do they feel oppressed?
Do they feel at risk?
I'm from what you would call Pencil Tucky.
So I'm pretty sure I wouldn't call it that since I've never heard the word, but go ahead.
Okay, so I'm from Pennsylvania, and I'm not from any of the big cities, so it's pretty hard.
When I find other gay people who live around me, they're pretty far left-leaning because they've been told their whole lives, from the conservative part, I think from other conservative individuals in their lives, that it's wrong to be gay, and it's wrong to be this way.
Right.
So...
They definitely have much more of a left-leaning.
And I see it as kind of like a conundrum, because if I go to a city, then I'm probably going to run into the same thing, if not worse.
Yes, and this is an error.
And saying it's an error is putting it too mildly.
It is an error on the part of religious people to imagine.
And I understand why they feel this way, because if you are born gay, I believe people are born gay.
Maybe there's, you know...
A gray area in the gayness, but I didn't sort of sit there and say, well, I'm going to flip a coin, see if I'm attracted to either males or females.
And, oh, look at that.
It came down tails, not heads.
Right?
So, I mean, and I would assume, and correct me if I'm wrong, but I would assume that for you, that wasn't a choice.
This is just who you're attracted to, right?
Right.
That's correct.
Right.
And, of course, for religious people, this can be a challenge because It seems like an error, which is a terrible thing to say to you, and it's not what I believe, but if God is supposed to create people in his image for the purpose of procreation and so on,
then there is something Darwinian about homosexuality that doesn't look too kindly upon the soul thesis and the You know, heterosexual is the norm thesis.
And, you know, this level of diversity?
Fantastic.
Fantastic.
You know, I mean, no problem.
I think it's perfectly fine.
And it is how people are born.
And gay people make fantastic warriors.
Not W-O as in the new, but W-A as in the old.
I mean, just look at the ancient Greeks.
They kicked everyone's ass while they were getting lots of ass.
So...
I think this is one of the big problems that the right has, and I think Trump is doing quite a lot to help that out.
But it is, you know, some of the third world cultures that come in, that the left is encouraging to come in, are way more unfriendly to homosexuals than any Christian, sort of native American Christian that I can picture.
So it's sort of like the relationship that the blacks have with the Democrats as well, right?
It seems like they're helping you and they like you, but they're kind of doing a lot of things that aren't going to be that great for you in the long run, you know, like the welfare state and encouragement of single motherhood and the normalization of all this kind of stuff.
And what the left is doing in terms of importing not the most gay-friendly cultures in the world is not particularly friendly to the gay community in the long run, as of course was found out in San Bernardino and maybe found out in other places over time.
Yeah, and the other thing is, too, me personally, I don't know a whole lot of gay guys that have...
I'm an engineer, so I don't know a lot of gay guys that have really high-quality jobs like that either.
So I see my paycheck, and I see how much is coming out for my taxes and things, and I'm like, don't you care about that?
Whenever I get into conversations with other guys, I'm like, do you not care about how much of your money is being stolen from you?
I don't know if that's just a question.
I'm sorry to interrupt.
I was just thinking you're a gay, Trump-supporting engineer.
You suck at being a stereotype.
I just wanted to point this.
Please get back in the box.
You are confusing lots of people with this individuality and individuation and having your own personality and not being easily categorizable.
Damn you!
Non-stereotypical people.
I have to tell you too, Stefan, I'm not a huge fan of shopping, so, you know, just label me deplorable.
Okay, Freddie Mercury?
I wasn't sure where you were going with that, I'm sorry.
I don't need to go anywhere with that.
Thoughts on Freddie Mercury?
That's all I need to know.
Oh, yeah, excellent, excellent.
Okay, good, good.
That's not a stereotypical question, by the way, it's just, you know, my mark of quality.
With Mike, it's Michael Jackson, but anyway.
So there is...
I mean, have you looked...
I'm sure you have, obviously.
But have you looked or explored much of the sort of gays for Trump phenomenon or gay conservative online groups or anything like that?
I'm part of those groups, but...
I haven't really, like, pursued anything beyond, like, friendships from them just because I've tried the long distance thing and...
Oh yeah, no, that sucks.
Yeah, that's not gonna happen for me, so...
Long distance, it's a wonderful way to put your life on hold.
For infinity.
And I think especially for gay men, too, the tendency to be able to just be like, oh, hey, I could just quick hook up with somebody else, since you're not here.
Yeah, yeah.
Countdown to promiscuity begins now.
Does anyone have an egg timer?
Right, right.
No, I mean, there's that risk in all of those relationships, but...
No, I'm not a big one for managing people's relationships, but without a doubt, long-distance relationships should be completely illegal.
That's the only law that I'm willing to, because they just waste so much time.
They're incredibly environmentally unfriendly because everyone's got to travel to shag all the time, and they just put everyone's life on hold.
And I say this having had a few long-distance relationships.
Hey, we met in university, and now we're going not to be...
No, no, take the Band-Aid off, people!
It goes nowhere!
No!
But anyway.
Never can say goodbye, boy.
So, yeah, as far as that goes, you know, I've had this question from a lot of people.
You probably heard it on the show before.
Or if you haven't, good, because then this will sound original.
But you have to become famous.
If you're looking for a rare person, you have to become famous.
You have to start being out there.
You have to be...
Online you have to be known, because then people can find you.
People of a like mind can find you.
Like, I was happily married before I started the show, but if I was looking for a particular kind of woman, I'm pretty sure that I'd meet her through this show, right, through doing this show.
And you just, when you're looking for things that are scarce, you have to be so visible that the scarce things can find you, if that makes sense.
Yeah, I think before I actually have it written down that you said, do great things and great people will come to you, so...
Yeah.
So, you know, and you do good things for the world as well.
Because, you know, the relationships between sort of conservatives and gays, I mean, now it's both sides, in a sense, being kind of jerks, right?
Right.
Because, you know, the conservatives are like, well, why the hell would we want to try and woo over the gay community because they're just going to vote for the Democrats anyway?
Right.
Right?
And then the gays are like, well, Republicans don't show any interest in us, so we might as well vote Democrat.
It's like, you know, this is kind of a loop, right?
Just a little bit.
Yeah, so just be, I don't know, it's such gay advice.
Just be out there.
Like, I'm sorry.
Like, it is.
It's just because you know this, right?
You know, but maybe sometimes it's helpful to hear it from someone, but you're just going to have to be out there and be visible, and great people will find you.
But, you know, sort of in a sense, beating the bushes around where you are, you're probably going to come up pretty empty.
Yeah, yeah.
All right.
All right?
Yeah.
Do you want us to forward any communication?
Never mind.
We don't do dating services here.
But yeah, go be famous and get yourself the man of your dreams.
Alright, thank you.
Alright, thanks man.
All the best.
Alright, bye-bye.
I get so many emails from people with the exact same problem.
So stand up, people.
Be the tall poppy.
You'll find each other.
It's helpful.
I don't think we want to necessarily bring in the tall poppy analogy.
Do you remember how that ends?
Whack!
Decapitation!
Finding a tremendous romantic relationship?
Or not?
Or decapitation.
Either way, your problems will be solved.
That's true.
That is true.
Right up next we have Desiree.
She wrote in and said, Do you think that my refusal to adopt the racialized worldview of the United States is the denial of reality or merely the maintenance of a healthy mindset?
Is it impossible for us as humans to not place persons into categories or in groups and out groups and assign value judgments to these categories, particularly in the realm of politics?
She also has some questions regarding IQ, but we'll stop with that for now.
That's from Desiree.
Hello, Desiree.
How are you doing tonight?
Hi.
Hi, Stefan.
I want to point out, my name is actually pronounced Desiree.
You put the stress on the ray.
Desiree?
Yeah, I just keep hearing it and my mind just wants to correct it.
I appreciate that.
I will also try and mispronounce appellation during this show as well.
That's an interview for a call in the Y. Alright, is there more that you wanted to explain about your question or perspective?
Yes, I felt like I had to sort of form it into a question, but I'm just sort of frustrated as someone who came from another country.
I'm from Jamaica, and basically I feel as if I've been thrown into this, I guess, identity politics that I'm not used to and having to...
I'm sorry to interrupt.
I'm going to guess that you're black, right?
Yes, yes I am.
Right.
So you're now on one team or another team.
There's no other option for you.
Is that like you're on this team or you're that?
You're either with us or you're an Uncle Tom.
You're with us or you're an art.
Is it something like that?
Is that what you mean?
Well, that's what I'm afraid of.
I just don't speak to anybody about it because I don't want that to happen.
And that's the thing.
I feel almost silenced because I'm worried about the backlash, I guess, if I... I'm sorry to interrupt.
What is the speech that you hear in your head that's keeping you from talking?
What is it that you're afraid of hearing from those around you?
Well, there are a couple of things to factor in.
I guess what I hear is something like...
You haven't been here long enough to understand.
You don't care about the struggles of Black people in this country.
I also, throughout college, I dated someone who was white.
And I feel as if I would get some kind of...
I don't know, I'm worried about people saying this because I was, you know, so into that world.
And I also went to school in upstate New York.
Which is pretty wide.
And that's the other thing.
I think I'm kind of going off from the question.
But the other thing is that I didn't think about any of this while I was going to college, which says a lot.
Because, you know, if I was being so horribly mistreated, I probably would have thought about it a lot more.
But I didn't think about it until I came to the city.
Right.
I mean, wasn't it nice to not have to think about race every four minutes?
Yeah, well, that's the thing.
It's like, I can't escape it.
I just can't escape it.
I don't know if you watched, did you watch the Grammys at all?
No, I don't have time, really.
Okay, no.
I didn't either, because I don't have cable.
But, so apparently Adele, like the British singer, she won.
And Beyonce didn't.
And So within like eight minutes, it's like the newspaper article, did Beyonce lose to Adele because of racism?
And it's like, okay, right.
Okay, sure, of course, because we can't spend five minutes on this damn planet without talking about racism and making everybody hyperconscious and hyperaware and paranoid and frustrated.
And oh my God, like, can we just stop for five minutes?
That's all we're asking.
Anyway, go on.
Yeah, and I guess the big thing for me is that moving here, I just found it very difficult to relate to people.
And I like people a lot.
I really like talking to people and hearing from them and just interacting with them.
But I discovered through a couple of means.
I worked as an EMT for a bit, which is a pretty low-wage sort of job.
And I ran into a lot of people, Black people specifically.
I didn't like them because the way they interacted with me was sort of like, why do you talk so well?
I don't know, they just did make me feel comfortable for me being who I was because I wasn't who they expected.
And sorry, which group was this?
Just a job I had as an EMT working with mostly black people.
And I guess, I don't know, I just, I find it hard.
And then the other thing that I've been thinking about a lot is when I was in college, I felt this sort of pressure to hang out with the Black people because there weren't that many on campus.
And I mean, I was, I pretty much ignored it because I was too busy doing what I was doing.
But looking back on it, I don't know, I felt like, I definitely felt it and then I sort of got over it and ignored it, but I felt this like, you know, let's bond together and I don't know, I'm just not, I'm not used to that, like I'm not used to making friends in that way and it seems very, very common here that like, yeah.
So two things.
First of all, it's really cool hearing your Jamaican accent creep up from time to time.
I just wanted to mention that.
That's really cool.
Everybody says that.
No, it's great.
You know what?
I'm getting a tan from my...
Because, you know, not only am I white, like I'm in Canada, it's February.
So I'm actually getting vitamin D from your accent.
It's a beautiful thing for me.
I don't want to mention that.
So that's number one.
And number two, so when you grew up in Jamaica, were you in like a mostly black neighborhood or community?
Well, that's the thing.
Jamaica is mostly black.
Yeah, that's right.
Like 90-95% or something, right?
Maybe less than that because there are lots of mixed people but they would probably not consider themselves anything but black, I guess.
I would say I'm not sure how to answer that because where I lived Isn't really...
No, no, no.
Okay.
I would say yes, it was mostly black, but it was also lots of Asians and some whites.
And that's the other thing about hair is like Asians and black people do not interact hair from white.
No, sorry.
When you say Asians, do you mean like Chinese-Japanese or do you mean Indian or...?
Both.
Mostly Chinese.
There are lots of Chinese.
Chinese and Indians are like pretty big groups in Jamaica.
Right, okay.
It's just like a world that I'm not used to and you know I didn't really think about it but now I've really started thinking about everything that's going on and like the other person was saying I also I get very annoyed because I find that I was writing I wrote this long email to Mike because I feel as if There are these people who have my colour who claim to be speaking for me and they don't share my ideas whatsoever and perhaps they share the idea of
the majority but I don't really know because I feel like extreme people sort of drown out the voices of all the people who don't necessarily agree with everything you have to say but then they say that they're like talking for you and it's like are you talking for me because I don't really feel like you are.
Now do you mean sort of the Black Lives Matter groups and so on?
Yeah, I don't like them.
Yeah, I mean, listen, if I claim to speak for white people, white people would just laugh at me.
Yeah.
You know, like, thanks, thanks.
You know, please don't think of us as just one big blob.
And it's the same thing with the black community, right?
I mean, there's blacks from Somalia.
There's blacks from Jamaica.
There's blacks from South Africa.
There's blacks from Iceland, I'm sure, right?
I mean, then there's lots of different cultures, lots of different histories.
We can't, you know, saying that you speak for black people is as ridiculous as one person saying that he speaks for everyone from Japan.
You know, I mean, it's not how things work at all, right?
So I understand that.
Well, the problem I see with it is I realize that different races don't interact With each other.
Like, I've met people very much.
I've met people who are like...
You mean, sorry, you mean in America?
In America.
Yeah, I've met people who are like, you're my first black friend.
Or I like introduce them to my white friend and they're like, this is like my first, you know, like getting to really know someone.
And like, that's really crazy to me.
This is mostly in the city because you're, I don't know, you're like these groups living side by side, but you are so, so...
It was very shocking to me when I moved to the city.
When they're hearing people speak about the struggles of a certain group on the TV, that's not real life.
That's not actually interacting with people.
As you probably know, West African Blacks are physically indistinguishable from American Blacks.
West African Blacks have a higher per capita income in America than whites do.
Still not as high as Asians because of that IQ thing, but, you know, that's just the way the brain rolls, that neck of the woods.
But this, you know, in Jamaica, of course, I would assume that people don't necessarily feel oppressed by white people because it's such a majority non-white population.
Exactly.
Right.
Whereas in America, of course, you know, is it 12 or 13 percent of the population is black?
And and they feel, of course, I shouldn't say here.
I'm just like, I see how easy it is damn well to do like here.
Don't talk about everyone.
But there are some sections within the black community, particularly sort of the militant, right?
The activist group.
They're like, well, all of the problems in the black community stem from, you know, white racism, white privilege and this kind of stuff.
It's kind of tough to feel that, of course, if you're in Haiti or you're in Jamaica or other places with a very low white population.
It's tough to feel oppressed by like three guys putting on sunscreen.
Right.
But.
In America, of course, because of the majority white population, well, it's gone down a lot.
It used to be 90%.
Now I think it's 65% and heading south pretty quickly.
But I think there is that feeling that, well, we're not in charge.
And if we were, boy, things would be so much better.
But then, of course, you look at places like Detroit, right?
Detroit has been run by blacks and Democrats for, what, 50 years now?
And it's gone from like the richest city in North America in the 1950s, in 1960s, to like one of the poorest.
And it's just been a complete mess and a complete disaster despite the fact that blacks have been in charge and so on.
So it's not just, you know, whites are in charge, therefore blacks are oppressed.
Of course that happens from time to time.
It can happen the other way too, as you can sort of see in South Africa now.
Yeah, there is this answer for some sections of the black community, which is, well, you know, if we blame whitey, then everything's going to be all right.
And I think they've been doing that for a while.
I'm pretty sure that things haven't become alright.
Yeah, that's what makes it hard for me to sort of accept that because where I'm coming from, there are lots of problems in society and there isn't that automatic, you know, it's the legacy of, I don't know, like slavery or segregation laws or redlining or et cetera, et cetera.
They don't have that immediate Blame scapegoat.
And here they do.
But it's hard for me to...
And the other thing, too...
Well, you know, the whole thing about slavery, you know, I know it's a big, big topic.
I've got this whole thing, the truth about slavery and all that.
So I don't want to get...
But the reality is that if the blacks had remained in Africa, a good proportion of them would still be slaves because slavery is still going on a lot in Africa.
You know, the white race actually practiced slavery for the least amount of time in all of human history.
Right.
In the Middle East, in Africa, in other places around the world, slavery was practiced for, you know, thousands and thousands and thousands of years.
The sort of white slave trade that is taught, the Atlantic slave trade, it went on for like 200, 240 years.
And then the British ended slavery around the world, like not just in the British Empire, worked to end slavery as much as they could around the world.
And, you know, the old like no good deed goes unpunished.
You know, hey, did the British people get a lot of thanks for that?
No, racist and, you know, all that kind of stuff.
And, you know, the slavery thing's got to have a half-life at some point.
I mean, it can go on and on, right?
I mean, there is no end to history.
History will always be there.
History, you know, will always be a part of the past and will never, ever go away.
It'll sort of recede through time, but it won't ever.
And, you know, I say this to individuals.
I don't know if you've known people in your life who, even wrongs that have been done to them personally, have you ever known anyone?
Or maybe you've done it yourself, where they just, they brood on the wrongs that have done to themselves, and it kind of rods them of a lot of joy and opportunity?
Yeah, yes I do.
Yes I do.
I do know people like that.
It's a painful thing to see, right?
Yes.
Yeah, it is because you can't help them, because it's all in their head, no matter what you say.
Right.
Now, what do you, just if you don't mind, I know you've got questions as well, but dammit, I have a question if you don't mind.
So when you came from Jamaica to America and you had some exposure to sort of the black culture and black lifestyles in the areas where you were, obviously not a big collective, but what were your thoughts and impressions on encountering black culture in the U.S.? Not a difficult question at all, would you say?
Nice and easy.
Well, I have to specify that every time I talk about America, I try to remind myself, I've only been in the Northeast, and I travel a lot for my job, but I don't know that much.
So, I would say that, actually, I only really encountered it after I left college.
And I've only been where I am now for about a year and a half.
And I want to leave.
It's actually a lot of Caribbean people who are around me, who I guess there's sort of this fusion between Black American culture and Caribbean people.
I also want to say, but the truth is, when I came here, I thought to myself, I didn't leave Jamaica to come and interact with people here.
And I also met people who would be like, oh, you're not like other Jamaicans I've met.
And I think to myself, well, that's because if I were in Jamaica, these people, I wouldn't really interact with them or be friends with them.
There are certain things, like when you're walking on the road in Jamaica, guys will talk to you, not in a nice way.
I never really experienced that in the US until I came to where I am now.
Little things like that, I wish you would just stay there and not be here, because that's not what I'm trying to experience.
You mean like guys who'd say, that's a nice outfit?
No, no.
I mean, guys can say things to you.
Those must be very expensive shoes?
No, no.
Guys can say things to you and it's funny, even if you don't like them.
But it feels like disrespect or...
I don't know, like one guy...
I don't remember what he said to me, but it was...
He just said it in a sleazy way that makes you feel uncomfortable.
It just makes you feel uncomfortable.
And I actually started talking...
They were always very shocked and I like doing that, but sometimes I don't have the time because I usually end up in a discussion.
A minor discussion with them.
What else?
And then they also drive, but that might just be New York people, so I won't say that one.
But there's some things I like, you know, like I like parent music from Caribbean I guess in some ways it's nice to be around familiar faces but in some ways it's not because it's like if I'm in Jamaica and I'm making friends, I don't connect with you instantly because you're from where I'm from.
I connect with you because I like you and we have interesting discussions and we share similar values and you like to think and we can talk and debate.
But here, it's like because there are these different groups that it's so easy to separate them.
It's very easy to like, "Oh, let's just be friends because you look like me or you talk like me," or et cetera.
And I can't do that.
And I feel like that happens a lot when you have these.
I mean, I would imagine that you'd have more in common with a white person who grew up in Jamaica than with a black person who's never been there.
I mean, in many ways, right?
Yeah, I feel like there's, I have one best friend, I don't know if she'll listen to this, and she is half Chinese, half black.
And I feel like if she came here, people, like if we just like, If I went to the same place, say she was put in my place, she would probably have a very different experience here just because she went to school in Canada,
she's back in Jamaica though, and she said that people always thought she was Filipino and I feel like Different people would be attracted to talking to her or making friends with her than me, even though we're similar.
We have different cultures and whatever.
Just because over here, I know she was up there in town, but over here, the cultures are divided in some way along color lines.
In Jamaica, it's mixed, but I think it's like an actual melting pot.
There are some tensions a little bit, but not really.
But, you know, like, I'm going to go back to tangent.
There are some tensions, but it's pretty homogenous, I would say.
Like, people, they have the same identity.
And here, like, the identity is just, I don't know.
People are just in these groups, and they don't interact, and it's sad.
It is.
No.
It is sad.
It is sad.
And just, we just, Mike looked this up.
So in Jamaica, this is the most recent stuff we could find.
So blacks, 92.1%.
Mixed, 6.1%.
East Indian, 0.8%.
Other, 0.4%.
Unspecified, 0.7%.
I assume that's the lizard people or whatever the hell.
I don't know what that is.
But so it's largely, I mean, there are more blacks, Proportionally in Jamaica, and I assume the mix is, you know, blacks and half black or something like that.
So, you know, more blacks than there were, you know, a white majority in America like 100 years ago.
And so it is a largely homogenous society, racially homogenous society.
And racially homogenous societies do have, you know, some real benefits.
And, you know, maybe this is kind of what you're talking about.
And, you know, tell me if I'm, I don't mean to sort of tell you your own experience, so tell me if I'm going wrong here at all.
You might be.
But tell me, obviously, this is just my sort of thoughts about it.
Like, I mean, if you look at a place like South Korea, right?
My daughter was very interested in South Korea, so we looked it all up the other day.
It's like 99% homogenous, right?
And, you know, very low crime rate and no racial tensions.
Why?
Because it's the same race, right?
And when you start to get a lot of mixing of races, and I don't think this is a problem necessarily because of the mixture of races.
When you get the mixture of races and you get a highly activist race, Racially motivated government that wants to wade in and solve all these problems and give affirmative action to this group, which then causes resentment among this group, and then give advantageous test scores to this group, which then cause problems for this group.
Like in certain colleges in America, lots of them, in fact, Asians are penalized in their entrance exams.
And blacks' scores are increased artificially, right?
So blacks go up 10%.
I think whites stay about the same.
Asians reduce 10%.
So then the Asians get upset, saying, well, wait a minute.
I worked hard.
You know, I got my scores.
Why are my scores going down?
And the blacks are going up.
And there are lots of problems.
And then when the welfare state comes in, it tends to capture the poorest sections in society and keep them that way.
And so then, if you have a disproportionately high number of blacks in America who are on welfare, that causes resentment among other groups who feel like, well, you know, gosh, I mean, I don't want to pay all these taxes for this, you know, dysfunctional environment where lots of single moms and, you know...
Crime and so on.
So I think, you know, the possibility of sort of people from different races getting along more benevolently, I think that could happen, but I don't think it happens when you get a lot of different races and ethnicities together with a government that plays favorites.
I think that's just like a recipe.
Because the same thing happened with religions, right?
When the government was playing favorites with religion in Europe a couple of hundred years ago, then Religions, they couldn't get along because everybody wanted to get the favor of the government and use the government to advance their own interests at the expense of other people's interests or other religions' interests.
And eventually you just had to separate church and state, right?
You had to say the state can't favor one religion over the other because the moment it does, I mean, you know, you try this as a parent, you know, you have eight kids and try having one favorite.
I mean, you just create conflict all over the place, right?
And so I think that if we separate race and the state, in other words, if there was no laws that could be passed sort of pro or against any race or ethnicity, I mean, ideally gender too, if we had a race-neutral state in the way that we have a religion-neutral state, I think that people would get along a lot better.
And I think a lot of this tension and frustration and hostility would diminish.
I don't know if that makes any sense to you, but that's sort of my thoughts on it.
Yeah, it makes sense to me.
I... I just lost my thought.
Did I completely make you lose your train of thought?
I'm so sorry.
I had a response and it sort of disappeared.
Do you want me to just keep rambling until it comes back or is that just going to make it worse?
I think it will make it worse because I'm trying to pay attention to you.
Because at first you were asking, you were talking about the countries being...
The race is a lot of homogeneity.
Yeah, homogenous countries.
The ladies don't have racial problems.
You never get called a racist in Iceland.
Right?
Because it's just white people or Jamaica.
You're not really going to get called a racist much, right?
I have my thoughts.
I'm sorry?
Okay, go ahead.
Yeah, I wanted to say that I see all of that stuff as hypocrisy.
Because it's like they're trying to level the playing field.
Well, first First of all, I find a lot of it insulting and it doesn't give people the chance to prove themselves and to be their best.
It's hard, I know personally, but it's good to forge yourself in a way, in a hard world, because it makes you grow.
But if you're trying to level the playing field, you can't then be Be treating others on the basis of something that they have no control over.
It's the same thing that you're trying to fix, and then you're just doing it to other people to fix the other group.
I know it's like you're trying to correct the wrongs of the past, but it's unfair to the people in the present.
So I just don't get that.
Well, it'll never end, right?
Because let's say that, you know, and I remember I think it was Eric Holder who said, oh, affirmative action, because, you know, it was supposed to be a temporary measure, I think put into the 60s or early 70s.
It was supposed to be a temporary measure, you know, help American blacks get a leg up.
Although the sad thing is, before the welfare state, the American blacks were doing pretty well as far as getting into the middle class and gaining wealth and all of that.
The welfare state stopped all of that progress, which is really heartbreaking.
But there was supposed to be a temporary measure, and someone, I think it was Eric Holder, the former Attorney General, people were saying, well, when do you think affirmative action might be ending?
And he's like, oh, it's barely even begun.
And people are like, really?
50 years?
It's barely even begun?
Because what's going to happen then is there's going to be affirmative action for 100 years, and then we're going to need affirmative action for whites.
Because, you know, they've been locked out and diminished from their opportunities in certain professions.
And then after 100 years, they'll need to go to the Chinese.
And, you know, the kid will never end.
Yeah.
Because it'll just be a pendulum, go back and forth forever and ever.
Yeah.
And I think this also has to do with my upbringing.
You know, like, it was very important to me to...
To treat other people as how you want to be treated.
My family is very Christian.
I'm not.
But I was raised that way and those values really instilled in me and I didn't realize it until recently, meeting other people who don't really agree with me.
But I strive to be a good person.
And to follow the golden rule and things like that.
Like, if I see someone being, I don't know, like, being seen as a bad person for something that they did not do, it hurts my heart, in a way.
Like, I met this, not met, I knew him, sorry, friend.
This guy, and he was saying, he was saying that he, I can't give you his exact words, but he was basically, I know you won't like this, but he was saying that He was deriding his culture as a white male.
He was mocking things like what you would say.
White people should be proud of their history and the things that they've done.
Not the bad things, obviously.
He was responding to that and saying that's not true because in his mind being white is like Just the legacy of European colonization, etc.
It's also interesting because if you ever listen to it, he will know who he is.
He's Quaker.
From my history, growing up in Jamaica, they were always like, Quakers were fighting for the abolition of slavery and blah, blah, blah, blah.
But he associates, he identifies with all the bad stuff.
And I think that's really sad because it's like every group, every single group has its evils.
And I also think that because I see evils in my country and they're black people.
So, I don't know.
I just, I find that really...
Really sad.
It is sad.
And I mean, I try to counsel against taking pride in things that you haven't personally achieved because it's kind of sometimes can be a way of substituting other people's achievements for your own.
But I think there's stuff to admire in white culture.
I mean, there's stuff to admire in black culture.
I mean, there's stuff to admire.
Sociability in black culture is fantastic.
Yeah.
And that's something that, you know, as I mean, I grew up as a sort of shy British kid and I was sort of yanked from school to school and from place to place and country to country.
And so I was sometimes for me, the socialization aspect, like just going up and chatting to people, you know, like when I was when I was younger.
But, you know, my black friends were like, eh, just go up and chat.
You know, like, it was so easy.
The social ease, the ease of socialization.
Through the best parties.
My friend from Jamaica, man, I would kill to go to one of his parties just once more in my life.
Yeah, they're doing this party really hard, and I do miss that.
Yes, they do.
Yes, they do.
And there's this ease of...
Of socialization, this ease of social comfort that I admire and learned a lot from my black friends about how to just be more comfortable going up and chatting with people and not being so British and white.
You know what I mean?
It's brutal.
I really want to say something.
Yeah, go ahead.
If anybody ever visits Jamaica who's not from Jamaica, the one way I could tell very quickly that someone was not from Jamaica is Not just if they were wearing socks and sandals, which is another indicator of being a tourist.
If they walk into a room and they just don't make eye contact with anybody, they look at the person they're going to talk to, instantly you know that they're not Jewish.
You have to acknowledge people.
People still say good morning and good evening, which is unheard of, at least where I've been here.
I just find that very interesting.
Yeah, there's stuff to admire in the white culture.
There's stuff to admire in the black culture, oriental cultures, and even black culture and white culture.
I mean, there's lots of different cultures, but there's lots of different Things that various groups have added to the human story, which I think is great.
But, you know, to sit there and say, well, you know, white culture is bad or European culture is bad.
I mean, that's just ridiculous and so counterfactual.
So counterfactual.
I mean, the idea that Europeans get singled out for the slave trade.
I mean, good lord.
I mean, how ridiculous and how racist and how stupid.
Yeah, because, I mean, like, I studied, I took a course in...
Not that I remember a lot of it, but I took a course in African history, which made me cry, actually, multiple times, from the 1800s to the present.
And, you know, it was very clear that...
I know people say that they didn't know that the slavery was going to be different, etc.
But it couldn't have happened without cooperation from the people in Africa.
So it's just...
It's not...
I don't know, evil is not unique.
Because at some point, they must realize what is happening.
Well, it's an interesting question, and I don't have any answers to it.
It's sort of just a mind exercise.
If I were, and this is obviously a bit of a stretch in many ways, but let's say that I was a black guy, you know, 500 or 600 years ago in Africa.
Knowing the future of the continent of Africa versus knowing that my descendants, like American blacks, are like 30 times richer.
Than blacks in Africa?
Would I want to be captured?
I don't think so.
I don't know.
It's a weird question.
I don't have any answer.
But I can see the case being made both ways.
Sorry, go ahead.
That's something else that I think about.
I know just because you have things doesn't mean you can't complain.
But I don't really feel like poverty here.
It's a real poverty you know like everybody like if you if you want it you can you can do something like you can get help or I don't know like I feel like the kind of poverty that I see here is not as like in your face and like heartbreaking like seeing kids like begging Like, people driving by.
You don't see that kind of stuff here.
And it's just sort of slightly annoying when people complain about how awful the US is in terms of how they deny things and opportunities to people when there are places where that actually happens, where you have no way out.
And I don't really think like that.
I don't know if that was directly related to what you were saying, but it made me think about that.
No, I think it's a fair addition.
Now, did you want to do some of the Race and IQ stuff, or do you want to skip it?
I mean, I know you mentioned it in the email at the beginning, because it's interesting, because I've talked about Race and IQ with blacks before, and whites and Asians and so on.
I actually find that the blacks...
That I've talked to about it.
Maybe it's of course a self-selected group of people like yourself who want to talk to me and so on.
But I haven't found it to be that volatile a topic.
It tends to be volatile among white leftists.
Not so much, like, you know, the people in the black, blacks in the black community want to solve the problems, you know, and if this is part of the challenge, then, you know, let's sit down and wrestle with it and try and figure it out and all that, but the white leftists go kind of mental about it, but, you know, these are sort of the facts on the ground as it stands, so I don't know if you wanted to dig into that at all, because that may be a challenging topic for you, maybe more so in America than in Jamaica.
Well, I don't know if I would bring it up.
I think more so in America.
Because in Jamaica, the schools you go to, I don't know, you're selected based on how well you do and blah, blah, blah.
There are lots of black people who are in the good schools.
They're probably more represented by lighter colors, but it's definitely based on your aptitude.
There's just no question about that.
You can't...
Are you?
Let me tell you an old joke about skin color.
So here's an old joke.
It's not offensive and I think it's quite illustrative.
So there's this old joke about how in South Africa they got so sick and tired of everyone being graded by their skin color that they just decided to paint everyone blue.
They painted everyone blue.
All the kids, everyone was blue.
And then immediately, in the lineup for the school bus, they said, okay, all the light blue people first, please.
You know, just how gradations of skin color are so hard for us to avoid in terms of consciousness and preference and so on.
In Jamaica, is there a gradation or a sense of prestige based on skin tone, skin color, lightness to darkness, or darkness to lightness for that matter?
Well, I know historically there was, and I know that people still think that, but I personally have not experienced that.
And I would say, too, that I told someone, this might sound absolutely crazy, but I didn't see myself.
I still kind of don't.
I didn't see myself as a black person.
I just saw myself as a person.
And I didn't really think of seeing myself as that until coming here.
And isn't that nice?
Yeah, I prefer it.
Yeah, no kidding.
I mean, I honestly, until racial politics began to emerge, you know, and I know that they've always been there, but I think they've really gone through the stratosphere over the last couple of decades.
But I grew up and I didn't think about race and I didn't think about black or white or Asians.
I had and have friends of every ethnicity and so on.
And I just, I never thought of myself as white.
I just thought of myself as deaf.
Yeah, like I thought of myself as someone who's artistic, someone who talks a lot, someone who sings.
I don't know, just like personality traits.
Oh, I bet you love a good debate, too.
Huh?
Sorry?
I bet you love a good debate, too.
Yeah, I'm very argumentative.
Oh, yeah, yeah.
I can picture that.
I can picture that.
But I have most arguments with people who are close to me.
Yeah.
Because then they know who I am and they know I'm not.
They know what I stand for.
Other people, they assume things.
For me, I would have been very happy to go to my grave without particularly talking about race.
I'd love to have lived in a world where that was not such a constant topic, but it became that way.
Maybe it was always there and I sort of grew into it or grew into an awareness of it.
But for me, Not really thinking much about race growing up and not thinking of myself as white, but just as me and with my characteristics rather than my skin color.
But for me, you know, when it was just this incest and, you know, white people are bad and racist and slave owners and, you know, all this kind of stuff, and particularly when I became a father.
When I became a father, it's like, I don't want my daughter to be told that.
I don't want my daughter to grow up thinking that she's part of some Demonic breed of human beings.
I mean, that's a strong way to put it, but that's not right.
I can't say that about any other group, and I would never imagine saying that about black people or oriental people.
It's sort of like, okay, fine.
Okay, fine.
What the hell is going on?
And that's when I started really digging in and doing the research and coming up with some of the stuff that I've talked about in the show, culture and IQ and all that kind of stuff.
So, yeah, I'm not this willing race warrior.
It's just like, okay, well, I guess I've got to figure this out because this doesn't seem to be going well at all.
Yeah, I want to say something because I want to say, when I heard you first start talking about race and IQ, this is what happened to me.
I heard it, I was like, I don't really like where Steph is going with this, but maybe he won't talk about it that much.
But then you started talking about it all the time.
And then I stopped listening to your show for a few months because I was like, I don't want to listen to this.
Not because I was, I had a reaction to it, like an emotional reaction.
I was like, Tell me that, tell me that just before we go on, if that's alright.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Well, uh...
Let's see, what was it?
My emotional reaction...
I think I felt some anger.
I think I felt a little bit of anger.
Now, towards me in particular, towards the information?
I mean...
Uh...
It's fine if you're mad at me.
No, I'm not mad at you.
I love your show.
Um...
Uh...
I think towards the information because I wrote about it a little bit but I just don't like the idea like if I had a son I wouldn't want him hearing like You know, like, this is, you're automatically, and I know it's not, it's like an average, so people can be outstanding, but it's, I don't want that to be like the theme that they would hear growing up, so I had a, I had a problem with that, but, um, at the same time...
And it comes down to our kids too, right?
I mean, it comes down to what we don't want our kids to hear, and I completely understand that, and I would, of course, never, ever say...
To any group's children.
Oh, well, you know, this is the bell curve.
And you're like, no, of course, God, aim for the maximum you can.
That's what we all do.
Yeah, but then I started to...
Well, I came back, first of all, because your show makes me think, and that's wonderful.
But...
Also, I realized that it would be up to me to instill that sense of self-worth and ambition, etc.
I wouldn't need to really worry about outside influences.
I have faith in that, just because knowing myself and how my parents raised me, all that, I feel like That bothered by a lot of things that people are bothered about because I feel very strong in my sense of self, I guess.
So I worry about that.
And then to actually answer my question, I thought about it after I wrote it to you.
I don't think Mike read it, so I'm going to read it because I have it written down.
It was how would I bring up a discussion of race and IQ with others, considering that when I first heard Stefan talking about it, after listening and loving his show for years, I couldn't initially handle it.
And I decided that I just wouldn't bring it up.
I think it's a pretty...
Volatile sort of discussion to bring up.
And I think it's better if people start to discover it on their own and then have their reaction.
I actually started looking at the research papers.
I only read the abstracts and stuff.
And I think there should be more research, by the way.
Oh, gosh.
Can you imagine if we could solve it?
Yeah.
I'm sorry to interrupt, but I'll be real quick.
But imagine if it's like, okay, well, we can do this.
And the problem can be solved.
And now, whether that's environmental or whether that's something genetic, I don't...
But can you imagine if the problem could be solved and it could be solved relatively easily?
And for decade after decade after decade, we've had all of these problems when it could be solved so easily.
Could be.
I don't know.
I don't know, right?
Yeah.
But how incredibly frustrating that would be.
When you don't talk about something, it never gets solved.
It's just assumptions and fears and et cetera.
So...
I don't know how it's going to happen, because I just don't think...
I think people would just be very afraid of just the past, I guess, because I know that people did think that blacks weren't fully human, and people did think that they were property.
I think people are just afraid of that sort of mentality going in that direction.
Yes, and I agree with that.
And of course, I mean, there's no question.
I mean, equality under the law, full humanity for everyone.
There's no doubt and no mind.
But here's the thing.
I understand.
I mean, it's alarming and it's frustrating and it's annoying and enraging at times.
I understand that.
But the solution can't be to call white people racist.
No, it's not.
That can't be considered a just solution, right?
I mean, you know the statistics as well as I do.
I mean, 20% of African-American blacks are smarter than the average white.
But there are a lot of people In minority communities who don't think that 20% of whites are not at all racist.
A lot of people think whites are just racist and that's why blacks do badly.
The answer can't be That whites are racist.
That's unfair and unjust.
And again, I'm not saying no whites are racist.
Of course, there's some white racists and so on, but...
And vice versa, too.
Yeah, that's a challenge in every community because, you know, some whites are horribly dumb, right?
I know.
That's part of the bell curve.
But I just...
I can't...
Have my daughter growing up and whatever I can do about it.
I can't have my daughter growing up and thinking that she's somehow collectively responsible for problems in the black community.
Like, I just...
I can't allow that.
I can't...
Like, whatever I can do to push back against that, that's not fair.
It's not her fault.
It's not my fault.
Yeah, it's the question of...
You've written this up a lot in your show, but I think it's very similar to original sin.
You know, like, you grew up and...
You're just dabbed instantly.
Original sunburn.
That's the problem.
Original pastiness.
That's not right.
It's not right.
I don't think it's right.
No, it is a complex problem.
There is environment, there may be genetics, there are behaviors, right?
I mean, I don't know if you listened to a conversation I had with a great man, the Reverend Jesse Peterson, where he's saying, well, we don't judge race, we judge behavior.
He's a black preacher for what that's worth, right?
He really just blew my mind on so many levels, right?
He's saying, look, we don't judge race, we judge behavior.
And if the black community exhibits certain behaviors, then they're going to get judged by those behaviors.
Again, not all, but, you know, where there's a disproportionate amount of, say, criminality or single motherhood or dysfunctional communities or neighborhoods or addictions or whatever, then people aren't judging skin color, they're judging behavior.
And that's a powerful statement.
Yeah, it's also true that, you know, like speaking about all these issues, Racial stuff ignores the real important stuff, which is looking at yourself and working on yourself.
That's the most important thing.
It's a disservice to pretty much everybody because there are people who feel like solving the ills of the world It comes down to stopping some people from not liking some people based on their skin color.
And I feel like that may...
I mean, hopefully it does, but that might never happen because you can't police people's thoughts.
You can only police their actions.
And...
I lost it.
Now, is the IQ stuff, again, it's not like you're some sort of mole for me or anything like that, but is the IQ topic, does that come up at all in the communities that you've talked to or been a part of, or is it even known, or is it just known but not discussed or not even known?
No, I think I would say no.
The word, like, IQ, no.
I don't really hear people talk about that.
But people do say, like, some people just aren't intelligent enough.
So I guess it's a very similar thing.
Like, I think people recognize that people don't make good decisions and that does have to do with how much they think before they act.
So I would say that, but I don't think they think about it so, like, they take in the big picture so much.
Right, right.
Mm-hmm.
Now, how is it for you dating?
If you date.
I mean, I don't know.
Because you've got a cross-cultural thing going on, too, right?
Yeah.
Well, I pretty much...
I've dated one person.
I'm in contact with this person.
He's just very far away, so we're not together.
So I don't really...
Oh, no.
Is it still a long-distance relationship?
Because then I apologize for my rant about long-distance relationships, which may have come from a rather personal place.
But, you know, if he's the guy and you've got a plan to get together, good.
But just be careful.
It can be a bit of a time sink.
I know, I know.
I'm actually, remember I told you I was going to Spain, I'm going to visit him.
And he's supposed to come back soon, but I don't know.
Holy Atlantic?
Atlantic?
Really?
An entire ocean?
Oh my gosh.
Oh, I'm so sorry.
It's okay.
No, because I've known him for such a long time that it's sort of hard to imagine myself being it.
He's like my best friend in a lot of ways.
Right, right.
Do you have any plans to close this distance or this gap?
Of course.
He's from here.
He's coming back.
I'm not an American citizen, so I'm not sure how things will work out.
But I'm not really worried about it, to be honest.
I think my life will work out.
I have faith in my abilities and, you know, making things work out.
I don't know if I'm stressed about it at all, but in the end, I think it will be fine.
All right.
What do you mean in terms of...
Well, I would say, like...
First of all, I don't interact with that many people.
And if you're talking about color-wise...
I find it hard, like I said, to relate to both Black people and white people who are stuck in that someone's a victim and someone's the perpetrator mindset.
So a lot of times I meet someone and I'm like, oh, you're so cool and I want to get to know you more and let's talk.
But then they say certain things.
I met this girl who was from Jamaica.
But she had moved here when she was a lot younger.
And I hope she doesn't listen to this.
But she said to me that she doesn't...
I don't know if she had a bad experience.
Maybe that's true.
But she was saying that she really feels like white people are evil.
She said it in pretty much those words.
And I remember...
Thinking that I don't know how to respond to her because in my mind, if you have that mindset and you're going around interacting with people, you're probably giving that kind of vibe off and you're not going to have a good experience.
The white people I think are evil don't seem to be responding very positively to me.
Really?
Really?
Okay.
I don't know.
Yeah, no, I mean, there was, yeah, I think a woman who was in charge of the Black Lives Matter group in Toronto had some rather surprising posts about white people.
People can go and look that up if they want.
Yeah, the countdown to resentment stuff is pretty tough.
It's pretty tough.
You know, I mean, you and I have been talking about some, you know, delicate and sensitive topics very enjoyably, at least from my standpoint, and very productively, I think, as well.
And, you know, what's nice is that we're not going to have this countdown to resentment.
Yes, but this is all well and good, but, you know, X, Y, Z, you know, some big racist statement or whatever, some bigoted statement about some group or whatever.
You know, you and I are wrestling with, you know, some of the thorniest issues that are going on.
In the world, not just like in your country or my country, in the world.
And these are challenging issues.
And it bothers me that we can't have these kinds of conversations more often.
I do think that that has to do with what I see as Pretty deep segregation, just if I compare it to where I'm from.
I know there's not as much of it.
It's not like all the Indians live together and all the Chinese live together.
They have their organizations and they assemble sometimes.
My friend knows kung fu and I don't know it.
But you go to school with them and you go to their houses after school.
I don't really see that happening here.
And I think that does contribute to it.
And maybe it never will.
I'm sorry, say again?
I said maybe it never will.
I don't know.
Because the other thing too is those groups in Jamaica, they have a shared struggle.
You know, like...
Not so much, no, but like there were poor whites in Jamaica.
Our national motto is all that many want people.
So that's probably also jumped into our heads because you have to say like the pledge, like when every assembly and whatever, when you're in prep school or primary school.
There's just a shared thing.
Hair, there is not a shared thing.
You're kind of strange to me.
And that's fine.
I think it's fine when people are curious and want to know how I wash my hair.
I don't find that offensive.
Because they're not used to it.
I remember the days when people were curious how I washed my hair.
I have lost, by the way.
Now it's just bowling ball polish.
Anyway, go on.
Also, before we end the show, Mike didn't really answer me, but I was asked if I could direct people to go to my website.
I don't know if I should have asked it again beforehand.
It's perfectly fine with me.
I'll love to check it out.
I'm sure your website will be perfectly delightful, so please go ahead.
I hope so.
It's desi-rae.com.
And then that's the other thing.
I was thinking of starting a YouTube channel Sort of discussing this stuff.
And I think that's kind of what made me want to call in.
Because I have this fear, as I said at the beginning, of just like what people's response will be.
You know, like from what I've seen, people are just very, very emotional.
And, you know, like I like to, I want to be liked, I guess is the core of it.
You know, like I am a social media.
Yes, but you want to be, you want to be, you want to be liked by the right people.
That's right.
Because, I mean, bad people will withhold approval from you in the hopes of getting you to conform to them.
And I can only speak from, obviously, my own experience, but I will say this, that I think if you're honest and have good intentions, which I'm sure that you are and will, but if you're honest and have good intentions, it can carry you through a lot of trouble.
Because you know, as well as I do, that there are people in society who will try to divide us, and they can try and divide us along race, or class, or gender, or religion, or whatever it is.
There are people who want to divide us.
And those people will sow resentment, and sow hostility, and so on.
And then there are other people who want to have open conversations about difficult topics, and aren't interested in dividing, and want to unite us.
And If you're in the latter group, which you are, I have no doubt, but if you're in the latter group, you can do a lot of good in this world.
And yes, okay, so the people who are trying to divide everyone will be upset with you.
To heck with them.
You know what I mean?
Let them win and divide us all against each other so that we all end up glaring at each other from various bunkers around the social landscape, you know, plotting to overthrow each other and undermine each other and insult each other.
That's not the kind of world we want to live in.
It's so negative.
Do what you can to unite.
And we must unite in the facts.
And if there are uncomfortable facts, sure, we have to unite in those as well.
But...
Some people may dislike you, but you have a good heart, good facts, come from a good place, and speak the truth.
Then the only people who will dislike you are people whose approval you shouldn't be really after in the first place.
Does that make any sense?
Yeah, it makes sense.
It does.
It does make sense.
But you still don't want to do it.
Fine, it makes sense.
But in one ear, not the other.
No, I do.
I do.
I do.
I think I will.
I already, like, I'm doing stuff with my art.
And that's the other thing, too.
You know, because I'm trying to, like, do things with my art.
So, eventually, you know, like, I'm going to, if I... When people find out about my art, which I hope they do, eventually I'm going to have to speak what my actual opinions are.
So I feel like it's better.
I'm just upfront rather than disappoint anyone.
And also because I paint a lot of black people.
So I don't want them to form an attachment to me without understanding exactly what my ideas and ideals are.
There are people who really want to solve problems in the world, and they're willing to swallow the bitter pills of truth.
Now, if the race and IQ stuff turns out to be, and I think it is, it's a big challenge for us to deal with as a society, okay, there are people who are going to want to ignore it, and that just means that they're not really interested in solving problems, but rather causing problems.
And So I think that, you know, I mean, I follow some black YouTubers, not because they're black, but just because I find them really, really interesting and thought-provoking.
And, you know, if you follow some, find some people you admire on YouTube or other places, regardless of their race or their gender and, you know, find out what they do.
And you could even contact them, PM them.
And I'm sure most people will be happy to chat with you and give you the pluses and minuses and give you some suggestions and so on.
You know, never refuse other people's hard won wisdom.
It's a mistake I've made a couple of times in my life.
You know, and people are usually very happy to share their thoughts and experiences with you to help you avoid some of the mistakes that they probably made and so on.
So, you know, you can plan for it well and execute it well.
And I think you'll be surprised at what a positive impact it can make and how little hate there is actually out there for people who come from a good place and tell the truth.
I hope so.
Yeah, I hope so.
So, well, thanks for the website.
Thanks for a great conversation.
You're certainly, of course, welcome back anytime.
Yes, thanks for having me.
Yeah, if you do get a channel going, let us know and we'll do what we can to get you some eyeballs and some views.
Thank you so much, Stefan.
It was great to share my talk.
Thanks so much.
A great chat.
I really enjoyed it.
So, alright, let's move on.
Alright, up next we have Lauren.
Lauren wrote in and said, Our two-year-old has out-of-control temper tantrums that have been getting worse since he was 18 months old.
We've just celebrated the birth of our daughter who was born in January and are trying to figure out how to handle my son's temper tantrums before I go back to work in March.
I am on maternity leave now, and my husband is a stay-at-home dad.
But with these tantrums, we can't figure out how he will handle our son and an infant.
Please help.
That's from Lauren.
Hey, Lauren, how are you doing?
Oh, I'm very tired, seeing double, but I'm covering up one of my eyes, so I'll be okay.
How are you doing?
Oh, this is not the poster for motherhood that most people want to see.
I'm so exhausted, and my boobs are drained.
Wow.
I'm sorry.
Well, congratulations on number two.
And that's very exciting.
I mean, two kids, two and under, that's a handful and a half.
It is.
But she was born on Trump Day, so that's got to be a sign, right?
Is that right?
Is she orange?
No, I'm just kidding.
That's never a good sign in a baby.
And so, yeah, congratulations.
Thrilled.
Great stuff.
But let's get to the meat of the matter.
Your son.
Yes.
When did this all begin?
Well, about when he was 18 months.
It started with whenever he didn't get his way with something or felt that we didn't understand what he wanted to tell us.
He would start hitting himself.
Like he'd smack himself in the face or he would throw himself on the ground and hit his head on the floor.
And this was kind of alarming to us.
And apparently one out of five boys have this problem.
They don't know what causes it.
And it's been getting worse where he doesn't hit himself as much now, but he will reach out and try to hit us, or he'll start screeching at the top of his lungs.
Just a little background.
My husband and I, we've been listening to your show.
Gosh, I think the first episode might have been around 2008.
We've been donating since 2012.
Oh, 30 days.
Car days?
Are we going that far back?
Oh, yes.
Yes, in the car.
It was great.
We talked before.
You and I have talked once before, right?
You have had a big impact on my family.
Red-pilled family.
My dad started with you, shared your show with me.
I shared it with my husband and he shared it back with me when I had stopped listening for a while.
I can't remember why.
My brother listens to you now.
My dad died very suddenly in 2013 and you were so kind enough, I'm going to start crying again, to have a private call with me through that ordeal.
And we have kind of designed our parenting style around your show.
And so we are peaceful parents.
We don't hit.
They don't go to daycare.
We work very hard so my husband could quit his job.
We had to go with the one that made the most amount of money to work.
So that happened to be me.
But he's a stay-at-home dad.
And he doesn't play with any kids that aren't from a peaceful household.
And there's only really one other kid he sees every once in a while.
Yeah, it thins down a bit when you have those standards, doesn't it?
Yeah, and I seem to remember, Steph, I just want to see if this is true.
You said one time in one of your shows, I couldn't find it, but you said that your daughter had never had a temper tantrum.
And she was around two at the time.
Is this true?
My daughter is eight and she's never had a temper tantrum.
I, on the other hand, as you know from the show, have them fairly regularly, but my daughter has not.
Now, again, this is not all parenting, right?
I mean, the kids come in a wide variety of shapes and sizes and the majority, the vast majority of personality traits, this doesn't mean necessarily temper tantrums, but You know, personality traits, the big five and so on, right?
It's likely genetic, right?
So, just to be aware, right?
And kids' IQ varies substantially.
I think the average IQ difference between siblings is on the order of eight IQ points, plus and minus.
So, I mean, I'm fully aware that, you know, good parenting and all of that, but, you know, you're committed to that too.
It's luck of the draw sometimes, too, as you know, right?
I mean, so it's not like, ooh, well, you see, because I'm such an excellent parent, my daughter's never had a temper tantrum.
She just has a fairly even-keeled personality.
And I dare say I think we both know which side of the family that comes from.
So I would say that that is the case.
But don't take that as some sort of praise of my parenting and repudiation of yours because you get the kid you get, right?
Yeah.
So I guess that begs the question, what do we do?
And this is probably nothing, but breastfeeding?
Yes.
With my son and working and everything, I only could breastfeed for about three months.
My job changed slightly, so I'm hoping to go at least a year this time around.
With your daughter, right?
Yes.
Yes.
Okay.
Okay.
So, I mean, that's shorter than ideal, as you know.
Did you do pumping?
Did your husband bottle feed or anything?
Yes, and I didn't know this at the time, but my son had a very weak latch, and I had a very bad pump, so I guess it kind of worked hand in hand.
I never had a very good supply.
Now I kind of do, so...
Can I tell you, too?
Let me tell you this.
Having been an admirer of boobs since puberty...
And I believe that for some time before that I was a fan as well, but I'm too young to remember.
Having been a giant fan of boobs for most of my adult life, let me tell you that it can be a little bit disappointing when you actually see them in action and they don't really work as well as you hope.
You know, it's like, wow, that's a beautiful car.
Can we get it to start?
It's like, man, it looks so great, shouldn't it?
Anyway, so I'm sorry about that.
The breastfeeding stuff can be exciting and...
You know, it wasn't so bad for us, but I mean, we have a friend who, oh, I mean, she'd sit there for like six hours.
It'd be completely hysterical at the end of it.
She'd be like, lactating sweat, I think, at the end of it, because it's like, it's four o'clock in the morning.
Can I get some nutrition into my child, for God's sakes?
And then when you're bumping, and you're so tired, and you trip, and you fall, and you spill the milk.
That's what they're talking about.
Don't cry over spilled milk.
That is what they're talking about.
If it's your milk and it took you ours, yes.
So, yeah, I just wanted to point out, I mean, I thought that they were just kind of like, you know, like, you know, in the movies where you see that the truck drives into the fire hydrant, you know, like, I thought that's kind of how it worked.
And like, stand back.
We're going to get across the room.
We're going to get a squirt gun going.
But no, it's, I don't know.
It's...
It's a challenge.
So I sympathize with that.
If that was, I mean, since you say that was going on, that can be very frustrating and very challenging.
And, you know, turn something that you look forward to, you know, the cuddling and the breastfeeding and all that into, you know, kind of a stressful exercise.
Yeah.
All right.
So you got breast milk into him for three months and then there was a little bit of bottle feeding after, is that right, from your breast milk?
Yes, that's correct.
Okay.
And how long did that last for?
Um, I think, I think I made it to a total of five months with breastfeeding.
At the end of it, we were kind of substituting some formula in with it.
And, um, but I was completely dry, I think at about five, five and a half months.
And then, um, we stopped the formula at a year.
Right.
Right.
Okay.
How was his transition to solids?
Oh man, this kid has been, okay.
I do want to say.
Take your time.
This is like, this is no, no rush.
I know there's a lot of detail that's needed.
So go ahead.
Gotcha.
90% of the time, at least 90% of the time, he is wonderful.
Didn't have any trouble transferring from the bottle to the sippy cup.
You know, the solid foods at first.
Okay, not now, but at first, great.
You know, he would eat just about anything and he was really fine with that.
Yeah.
Physically, he's in the 95th percentile, so he's a very tall child, kind of slender.
And physically, he's excelled, but verbally, he was a little behind until just recently.
So that's kind of where he's at.
Right.
And how are his feeling words?
Can he describe his emotions prior to the tantrum?
No, actually, now that you mention it.
I think he is used scared once or twice, but more like he was repeating something that we said, made a loud noise, and Ellie, an infant, she jumped at something, and I said, ooh, that scared Ellie.
And he looked at me and said, that scared Eldon, which is his name, Eldon.
So he was saying it scared him too, but yeah, he doesn't really use a lot of feeling words.
And I've tried to get him to use some of these words, but we haven't quite made it there yet.
Right.
The feeling words, again, you know, I'm no expert in my sort of opinion and experience, but the feeling words I think are very important to teach to children because feelings rule childhood, right?
I mean, you remember this, the storms of passion and emotion that rock the sort of fragile vessel of a child's body are pretty strong.
And maybe more so for boys, I don't know, right?
So the earlier that you can teach a child feeling words and the more practice, and it could be like you can get these little diagrams of happy face, sad face, angry face, and so on.
And if they're pre-verbal or having trouble with the word, they can point, say, okay, do you feel right?
And they can point it.
I think the tantrums occur when the needs can't be met, and the needs can't be met if they can't be verbalized.
Mm-hmm.
So the more he gets the feeling words and learns to identify his own feelings and vocalize them, then the more he can get, perhaps, if there's a way to give him what he needs, not sort of the appeasing thing, I know you want candy, here's some candy, I don't mean that, right, bribe him for not getting angry, but if there's an emotional need that he has that he can verbalize, then he's going to be, it's going to be easier to head off the tantrums, I think.
Okay.
Can I ask you about a couple of situations I've kind of been keeping track of them in the last week and kind of let you know what happened?
Yeah, I know.
That's perfect.
I was going to ask about sort of more details about the sequence.
Sure.
Okay.
So one thing that is plaguing us right now is food.
So I think he's on a cleanse diet.
He will only eat pancakes and sometimes goldfish.
Now for the non-American listeners...
That's a kind of cracker.
I just...
I don't want people to be freaking out.
End live fish.
Okay, just, you know, because there's people who don't know what that means in a worldwide audience.
Go ahead.
Okay, so yeah, pancakes and goldfish crackers.
But...
It's not a frat ritual.
I just wanted everyone to understand that.
It's not a hazing thing.
Yeah, okay.
Hey, he's acting like an SJW. Why not?
Okay.
So anyway, we keep cooking food, you know, that is somewhat healthy, and we try to get him to eat it, and his word is done.
Like, he doesn't say no as often.
He'll just scream, done.
And he just looks at the food and yells, done.
It was like pork chops, macaroni and cheese, and applesauce.
Something like that.
Yeah.
Baked potatoes.
I forget.
Anyway, all of the things that he won't eat.
And he says, done.
And I said, well, what do you want to eat?
And he runs to the fridge and he opens up the fridge and he points and says, I want yellow cheese.
Okay, well, I tell you what, take one bite of anything on your plate and you can have some yellow cheese.
He kind of took up the Muslim prayer ritual thing where he falls to the floor and hits his head on the floor and yells, done.
And he refused to eat anything off of his plate.
Well, I just made the deal with him that if he eats the yellow cheese or if he eats one bite, he can have the cheese.
But now all he wants is the cheese.
So if I give in, am I rewarding the behavior by letting him have cheese?
And if I don't, am I depriving my son of food?
I'm just not sure how to handle this.
Right.
Right.
Okay.
Moms and food.
That's a whole book right there.
If my child does not get nutrition...
He shall die.
Right?
No.
He'll eat when he's hungry.
Okay.
And it's a balance, right?
I understand it's a balance, but if he gets hungry enough, he'll eat something.
He'll eat roadkill if he's hungry enough, right?
And hunger is not fatal for him, right?
But until then, I have a screaming toddler yelling, eat, eat, cheese, cheese.
Right.
Okay, so there is that.
Now, my suggestion is, and this, you know, the level of, okay, give me a sentence that he can sort of handle.
Where is he at verbally?
What does he sort of, give me a sort of complex sentence since he's coughed up lately.
Oh, so like three words kind of thing, right?
That was his first three words.
He's using it a lot because he'll eat cake.
So get more cake.
Eldon, eat cheese.
Sometimes four words.
Right.
And he just about understands everything we say.
I mean, his comprehension is brilliant.
That's the challenge because you think the language skills are what they're saying, but it's way more than that.
It's what they're hearing, right?
So he'll grow up to be like that joke of...
How does Arnold Schwarzenegger...
It was at an awards ceremony at Oscars where the film Eat, Drink, Man, Woman was up for...
This is how Arnold Schwarzenegger asks a woman out on a date.
Eat, drink, man, woman.
Anyway.
So he's got limited vocabulary, which of course, you know, he's two in a bit, right?
So that makes sense.
But you can't negotiate in the moment.
All negotiations must occur before the conflict.
Oh.
Once the conflict is underway, it's too late.
Because he's already tense.
He's already frustrated.
You can't negotiate during the conflict.
All negotiations must occur before the conflict.
Because you must get agreement and understanding before the conflict, which you can then refer to to head off the conflict.
Okay.
So, he must know, and you can diagram it, you can explain it, right?
He must know.
His body needs food.
His brain needs food.
And, you know, the way I explained it was, you know, there's the tongue and there's the belly.
Now, the tongue likes stuff the belly doesn't like.
And the belly likes stuff the tongue doesn't like.
And you can explain why.
Like, our tongue loves sweet stuff because if we didn't eat fruit, we'd get sick.
And so our bodies wanted to make us really want to hunt and get fruit.
Which is sweet and gives us special food stuff that we can't get anywhere else to keep us healthy.
So our tongues never knew anything about chocolate.
Never knew anything about pancakes.
Never knew anything about sugar or godforsaken chemical substitutes for sugar.
Our tongues don't know anything about this stuff.
All they know is, go eat some fruit.
Otherwise you'll get scurvy, which is when your teeth fall out.
So you can explain, your tongue loves stuff, but your belly doesn't.
Like, your tongue loves sugar, your belly does not love sugar.
Your belly, and then you can sort of, you know, what is your belly like?
Okay, what does your tongue like the least?
Cabbage or whatever.
What does he like the least?
Other than everything that's not goldfish and pancakes.
Well, that's another thing that he hasn't started using.
Like, I say, ooh, looks like Eldon likes that or doesn't like that.
Which one do you like?
And he'll just stare at me.
Like, I feel like he knows what I'm saying, but he doesn't.
Oh, yeah.
He knows you're plotting.
He knows that you're going to get an agreement on what he likes, and next thing you know, that's what he's going to have to eat.
Oh, no, don't worry.
They're ten steps ahead of us.
All children do is plot things.
They're cunning little vixens.
That's all they do is they plot and they plot and they plot.
And there's nothing wrong with that.
That's perfectly natural.
But be aware of it.
It's a constant palace coup going on with seething resentment and desire at all times with no exceptions whatsoever.
And they're 10 steps ahead of you.
They see down the tunnel of every single question you're asking if it's not perfectly honest and curious, right?
It makes sense, because he'll have these periods of times where we'll just kind of stare off into space after I got done talking to him.
He's processing and plotting.
Oh, yeah.
I knew it.
Yes.
Oh, yeah.
You ever see Monsters, Inc.?
Always watching, Wazowski.
Always watching.
And that's what they're always saying.
They're always watching.
She starred in that one.
Yeah, I saw it.
Yeah.
So just be aware of that.
I'm very aware of this.
You can't say a thing without it.
It's like meeting with the Washington Post when you're a Republican.
Nothing is going to come out straight, right?
So anyway, you can say, would you like to eat squid?
Well, no.
Well, your tongue doesn't like squid.
Maybe your belly does.
Or cabbage, your tongue doesn't like it.
Or Brussels sprouts, or my particular, that's like Satan's Indian food crap is like Brussels sprouts, the nastiest things on the planet.
Not only are they repulsive tasting, but they are like old naughty eyeballs.
So you've got to get them to understand the difference between the tongue and the belly.
What the belly likes and what the tongue likes can sometimes be at war with each other.
And it's your job as a parent to deliver him to adulthood healthy.
He needs sleep, he needs exercise, he needs good food, he needs good conversation.
So, you know, you can say, you're two, so your job, you only think about your tongue.
But I'm older, so I have to think about your belly and your future, right?
You can't just eat, sorry.
Like, I wish you could, right?
And I have found, you know, like, I have a sweet tooth, which I have to rigidly control, because 50.
Anyway.
And so, you know, when we go, if we're at a buffet or something, and there's a dessert buffet, I'm like, oh man, I could eat that whole row.
And I could.
I could eat that whole row.
I don't even know what it is.
I could probably eat the foil packets that came in and be happy.
And I find that if I express my desire for the stuff that my daughter wants, and it's honest, Then when I say no, it's easy for her to say no, rather than she wants it and I'm telling her no, if that makes sense.
Like if I express that I want it and I say no, it's easy for her to say no.
So, you know, we all have that war between the tongue and the belly, right?
And so, is this tongue food or is this belly food, right?
You can sort of set up these categories so you can start to understand why You know, and the other thing too is that if he's not getting, as you know, if he's not getting healthy food, that's going to affect his mood, right?
I don't know if you've ever had a day, occasionally, it doesn't happen to me much anymore, but I'd have these days, I would just like, you know like goats, they just eat anything.
You just dump a pile of slop and garbage, goats will eat the cans and crap.
Like I've just had those days where I just like, I don't know what happened, but I just, I ended up eating a handful of this and a couple of bites of that.
Try breastfeeding.
Yeah.
Oh yeah, because you've got to sit there, right?
You basically are planted, right?
You don't want to disturb the whole magical ritual that's going on, you know?
It's voodoo!
Don't touch me!
So, yeah, no, of course, right?
And those days, it's just like, ugh, I feel like, ugh, right?
You just don't feel right, and you don't feel energetic, and you feel kind of sour, and all that kind of stuff.
So, if he understands the difference between the tongue and the belly, and I think, too, he can at least start to, you can make a game out of it as his tongue food or belly food, right?
And you can reward him, right?
I mean, I have no problem with rewards at that age.
I mean, it's not like you're training a dolphin or anything.
You're just trying to get cause and effect going.
But the key thing is, have the negotiation when there's no conflict.
Because what happens is, when you're getting along, you don't want to start negotiating for something because you're afraid of provoking a conflict.
So then you wait until you're actually in the conflict to start negotiating.
And what that means is that the child associates negotiation with conflict.
But when you're happiest and most peaceful, then you say, okay, bud, we've got to work out this food thing.
Are you having fun at dinner?
No.
Am I having fun at dinner?
No.
Would we like to have fun at dinner?
I guess so, right?
You know, whatever, you know, this sort of like...
They're always like political prisoners being cross-examined by someone with a Gestapo truncheon and a swinging electrical light in a dark cellar somewhere.
But, you know, they're like, how was your day?
So, have the conversations when you're not in the moment, in the conflict, because that's...
That's too stressful and the decision point is too imminent.
You want to get agreement from kids on a principle when it's not right there in front.
In other words, you can't negotiate about cheesecake when the child is staring at a cheesecake two inches from their mouth, right?
It's got to be in between.
It's got to be when there's no stressor in the moment, if that makes sense.
It does.
In fact, I remember this from a previous video, and somehow it didn't click.
I'm trying to negotiate after the fact.
Or during, even, right?
Yes, during.
Well, I have another situation that is a little different.
Sure.
Okay, so today, my mom was...
By the way, there's three people here.
I've got my husband next to me and my mom to my left.
Hello, everybody.
What was that?
Well, hello, everybody.
Throw them some Brussels sprouts.
No, I'm just kidding.
Hello.
Just out of curiosity, do you have any I'm sorry, do I have one?
Apparently my mom says you would like Brussels sprouts if she made them for you.
So you're going to have to come over one day and my mom will make you some Brussels sprouts.
It'll be really good.
Are they deep fried with calamari?
No, I'm just kidding.
Okay, you know what?
If I am in your neck of the woods, I am open-minded enough and I will pry open my childhood frozen jaw rejection of Brussels sprouts and give your moms a try and I appreciate the offer.
All right.
Sounds great.
Okay.
So she decided to take my son over because we're at her house right now first.
And while she's cooking dinner, she looks over and sees, my son's got the dog around the neck and is hitting the dog on top of the head with his other arm.
I have no idea why he is hitting the dog.
He also hasn't been hurting the dog, but because he's not capable, strong enough yet.
And he does tend to try to kick the cats at home.
I don't know if you have any pets, but We try to explain to him that it hurts the dog.
It's ow.
Be nice to the dog.
Pet the dog.
And he'll nod and say, just pet.
We'll start petting the dog.
And as soon as you turn around to walk away, he's trying to poke her in the eye or hit her again.
I don't know how to stop this.
Right.
Right.
I tried to look it up online, by the way, and all I find is articles about serial killers.
Yeah, no, that's, you know, cruelty to pets, bedwetting and setting fire.
You know, you don't want to look up any of that stuff because it's just going to scare the hell out of you.
No, I get that.
I get that.
How's your son's relationship with his dad?
Oh, it's pretty good.
I will say, though, that another question on here is they both have Issue with temper.
It can almost be cute if it wasn't so explosive sometimes, but Eldon's very strong-willed.
Okay, wait, wait.
Now, hang on.
Hang on a second here, my friend.
Are you perhaps saving some of the more important parts of the conversation for later?
I'm not sure.
Possibly.
So his father has a temper?
Yes, and it's something that we're aware of and we've been working on for a long time, and he does a very good job most of the time.
A couple of times it does come out in sarcasm.
Like he'll say, oh, well, of course you want that, or something like that.
Sometimes he walks away from the situation.
If Eldon's getting a little explosive, he'll walk away.
We did have one incident, I think it was a week ago, where Eldon reached out to Hit Daddy.
And Daddy grabbed ahold of both arms and says, you will not hit!
And he used his big, we call it the fear of God voice, which we never tried to use it with Eldon at all, but, you know, it comes out mostly on Call of Duty.
But it came out this time, and that's when I feel like we really had the issue, and we needed to call you to try to find some ways of solving these issues.
Yeah, because, you know, your son's just going to get bigger and bigger, right?
Right.
But I mean, like I said, we haven't done any kind of hitting or anything like that.
It mostly comes out in negative language.
And we're trying to work on the words we use.
What about conflicts that you have with your husband?
Well, there you go.
Well, if I get frustrated with Eldon...
I take it out on my husband.
My husband gets frustrated with Eldon.
He can take it out on Eldon as well, like I said in the negative language.
But it's mostly when I witness something, I'll jump all over him and say something like, no, watch your language, or don't say it like that, or be kinder, more positive.
Be kinder.
Isn't that exactly what you're saying to Eldon and the dog, right?
Yeah.
Right.
Right.
Are you hitting my domino here?
Okay, come on.
What am I doing?
Well, correcting the other parent in front of the child who's very young is a challenge.
Children are very sensitive to pecking order.
Well, we all are, right?
This is the Tom Wolfe thing, right?
Children are very sensitive to status, hierarchy, humiliation, pecking order, and so on, right?
Mm-hmm.
If you correct...
The father harshly in front of the son.
The son is very aware of that, right?
That you disapprove of daddy, that you could be harsh in your disapproval of daddy, and you're right to do so.
Oh.
There's an old saying, because I knew this from when I was a manager many years ago, which is praise in public, criticize in private.
Okay.
You need to be unified as parents.
It's very confusing for children if there are contradictory standards in the expectations they experience.
Makes a lot of sense.
I'm turning to him and telling him to watch his language and what he says in here.
I'm saying that right in front of Eldon.
And what's it like for your husband when you correct him in front of his son?
It's not pleasant, but should I pass him the microphone?
Sure, if he's there, yeah.
Oh yeah, he's right here.
There you go.
Alright, I guess I'm up for the firing squad here.
Oh, for heaven's sakes.
I'm joking, I'm joking.
I know, I know.
I know it's going to be tough, so.
No, no, listen, I mean, first of all, like, kudos on the stuff you guys are doing that's great.
You know, like, yay.
I mean, we all need feedback, I get it.
I mean, I consult with people, I ask people.
I mean, we all need feedback, right?
Especially for doing something new.
I'm going to go out on a limb here, my friend, and I'm going to assume that you're raising your son a little bit differently than how you were raised.
Oh, yes.
Oh, yes.
I called in once before, too, and was talking about having difficulty relating to my dad and siblings and stuff and how my dad had taken on this other family and kind of felt like I was left in the lurch or something.
It's been a few years since that call.
The temper thing, how it meets your wife, was she describing it fairly accurately?
In all fairness, I think she was gentle.
I got that sense, I wanted to know.
I do have a problem with yelling.
I know that can be just as bad as physical harm.
I find it extremely challenging to try to curtail, to try to keep it under wraps.
You're raising up your voice, you mean?
Yeah.
Right, right.
And what's the circumstance that we all have one?
Like, I have one too, right?
We all have the button, right?
What is the thing that is the hardest for you to sort of manage in your reaction, like what your sound does?
Well, I guess a lot of it can be tied to, yeah, if he hits me or if he's yelling or whatever, you know, the hitting can hurt. you know, the hitting can hurt.
There's been a few times he's jumped and knocked his head into my chin, and that doesn't feel particularly good.
And their fists seem to be perpetually at groin level, pretty much, right?
Yeah, yeah, yeah, that too.
And that can spark a pretty immediate negative response from me.
Right.
He'll flail when I pick him up, and it's difficult to hold on to him, and I'm deathly afraid of dropping him.
And something hitting you, could the eye or the nose?
When he's flailing like that, I'm more worried about his head hitting the floor.
But yeah, it can...
And do you remember...
Earlier times or what the earliest time was when you felt that frustration with him?
I mean, did it happen when he was a baby or was it when he started to crawl or walk or more recently?
The consensus seems to be about two months ago.
A lot of times I defer to them as far as My behavior because I kind of have trouble being objective with myself and everything.
So what, you started yelling only two months ago?
I think that's all the longer it's been.
That's how long it's been really bad.
But he has lost his temper off and on.
We're talking maybe once a week.
Starting with, I think around the time Eldon started, you know the grabby stage?
They get to about one year old or one and a half where they just grab everything no matter where you're at.
Especially coffee.
Yeah.
That's where I think it started.
But like I said, about once a week, he might lose his temper.
Now it's like, you know, once or twice a day.
Right.
Right.
Okay.
It's not peaceful parenting if you're yelling.
I know.
No, and I'm not trying to make you feel bad, just because your wife was very like, well, we do the peaceful parenting thing.
No, not with the yelling, right?
The yelling is not part of the peaceful parenting thing, as you know.
And I do get you in my ear from time to time.
Nagging away, right?
Yeah, yeah.
No, and I appreciate that, but it's not enough, right?
I mean, it's not enough to change the behavior.
Let me ask you this question.
It's a tough question.
So, you know, take your time.
But is there...
You know, my mom was a screamer.
So when my daughter was younger and she was screaming...
It's completely unfair, obviously, right?
But that doesn't matter to your reptile brain, right?
It's like, oh no, similar situation.
Oh no, somebody's screaming in my face, right?
Is there anything that your son does that has any kind of echo of something unpleasant in your childhood?
Yeah, I think...
You know, what my wife was saying about two months ago, it's starting getting worse.
There was...
I mean, my siblings and I were hard on each other, and I know that my...
I feel like yelling is...
Kind of a foundational part of my relationship with my parents.
I mean, I felt like yelling was always present.
So, yeah.
Well, you say part of your relationship, like it was sort of equals, right?
Yeah.
So, but I would assume that they introduced the yelling.
Yeah.
And what would your parents yell at you about?
Oh.
And, yeah, the negative...
Negative stuff.
I mean, anytime I did anything wrong, a lot of times it was a yell.
There really wasn't much in the way of discussion or figuring out solutions or anything like that.
You know, like if the grades had slipped, it's, well, you need to do better with that pretty much being the end of it.
You know, no really real suggestions.
Yeah.
And how often would your parents yell at you when you were growing up?
Oh, my God.
It was all the time.
I mean, I don't know if I can put a number on it, but I mean, there's just always...
Like a continual thing, right?
Like the default position, right?
So you've made huge improvements if you're down to like...
Once a week for a while, you know, once or twice a day.
From continual, right, it's not enough, but it's definitely an improvement, right?
Yeah, yeah, but of course I try not to rest on that either.
Well, hey, I'm doing better than my parents, you know.
What happens if you don't yell?
Like, we yell because we think the alternative is worse.
I mean, most times what people do is because they think the alternative is worse, right?
I mean, I've...
Had millions of comments on the videos, particularly those about spanking.
It's like, ah, well, the problem kids these days are snowflakes because they weren't spanked.
This is what happens if you don't spank.
So a lot of times we do something because we think, okay, this is not great, but the alternative is much worse.
You know, like the guy fell down the chasm and trapped his arm in the rock.
He had to cut off his own arm.
Okay, but the alternative was worse, which was dying, right?
Right.
So what happens if you don't yell?
You mean the times that I've tried not to yell or...
No, like what happens if you don't yell at all?
Like if it's just not part of your behavior?
Do things get better or worse?
I mean, I'm not talking about like the rational, but the irrational or the historical part of your mind.
What happens if you don't yell?
I really don't know.
I mean, it gets to just like this emotional knee-jerk reaction.
I... I don't know.
It's a reaction.
I really don't know.
Okay, so let's go back to the moment where you grabbed your son by the arms.
Because he hit, right?
Yeah, I was trying to get him to stop.
He was repeated.
No, I understand that.
And of course, if he's hitting, he can't keep hitting, right?
So, I mean, I understand that.
But what happens if you don't do that?
Does he just keep hitting?
Does he escalate?
Does he injure someone?
Like, what happens if you don't become aggressive with your son?
What's the disaster scenario?
What's the worst case scenario?
He just keeps doing it.
So, you may be trying to contain his aggression through your behavior, right?
Yeah, which if I'm being aggressive, I don't see how that's going to happen.
Well, you contain it in the moment, perhaps, right?
Because aggression will trigger, for a lot of kids, it will trigger fairly quick compliance.
I mean, it's seething, resentful compliance.
Oh, yes.
But it's compliance.
And then what happens?
It's not long before there's another situation that comes up and things escalate.
They revert back, right?
Right.
And they've seen this with spanking studies, right?
I know you're not spanking, but I mean, they've seen this with spanking studies.
It does gain immediate compliance, but kids go right back to the behavior again, right?
Because, you know, kids have no power.
They have no power.
Kids can't get their own food.
They can't cook.
They can't drink coffee.
Can't drink beer.
They can't drive a car.
They can't choose their own movies.
They can't operate technology.
They...
They can't even turn on a light.
He's two, right?
No power.
No power at all.
He's actually pretty proficient at light switches.
Oh, is he?
I'm thinking of the lamps where you turn them on the base.
Gotcha, gotcha.
I see what you mean.
The light switch is on the wall.
He can do that.
They're really helpless.
They're completely dependent.
I don't know how you'd feel if you got Like, if you were, I don't know, paralyzed or something for a while, and other people had to feed you and wipe your ass, and, you know, you had to have a catheter, I mean, it would be really humiliating, right?
Oh, yeah.
Yeah, I've told my wife before, if I get to that point, just take me out back and shoot me.
Right.
Great pillow talk.
Well, not in bed.
I know what you mean, but that's childhood.
Yeah.
That's childhood.
And I remember being taunted as a kid.
I was like 10 months of age.
And I couldn't even walk yet.
My head was so giant.
I had this giant Winston Churchill head.
I probably still do.
But I couldn't even get up and move away from the kid who was taunting me.
It was really helpless.
It is like being injured or paralyzed or incapacitated.
And so kids are very sensitive to Humiliation, because in a sense, particularly when you're young, being a kid is kind of humiliating.
I think maybe a little more true for boys and girls, I don't know, but you want to be able to do your own thing.
You want to be independent, but your body doesn't do what you want it to.
You watch kids trying to learn to tie a shoelace.
I don't know if kids do that with Velcro anymore, but they really want to.
It's really frustrating.
My daughter wants to draw exactly what's in her head.
She can't yet.
It's really frustrating sometimes.
When we're adults, we're just so used to it.
Oh, I would like a cup of coffee, so I'm going to go.
You just go and get a cup of coffee.
But if you couldn't do that, if you have to rely on everyone else to do everything for you, and you couldn't even choose your own meals, and people kept feeding you, I don't know, I'm pretty open to all kinds of food with one exception.
That dim sum thing, I can't get into it.
I just, I feel like I'm opening the container and there's gonna be like a big van of monkey brains there or something.
Like I just, that's the only food that I've just not been, well, maybe Korean soups a little bit, but they're okay.
But dim sum, I can't do it.
I had a guy I worked with just crazy for dim sum.
And it would drag me out sometimes.
I'm like, okay, maybe I just ordered the wrong things.
So let's try it again.
Nope, still horrible.
So yeah, imagine like you're starving and what comes to you is like the food you like the least.
I mean, it's really, it's a frustrating situation.
And so whatever you can do to facilitate and empower your children is going to reduce their frustration levels.
Now, of course, Everyone thinks that means appeasing them or whatever you want.
That's not what I'm talking about.
Jordan Peterson makes this point in Maps of Meaning and in other lectures that you don't do for people what they can do for themselves.
Anything they can do for themselves, they should do for themselves.
Anything you encourage them to do for themselves.
The more control he has over his environment, the more effect he has over his environment.
Then the less frustrated he's going to be.
As you said, I wouldn't want to live if I was incapacitated.
Just take me out back and shoot me, right?
Yeah.
But being a child is being functionally incapacitated in an adult environment where you're dependent on these big, loud, smelly people to get everything you need.
Right?
I mean, it's annoying.
Yeah.
And it sounds like your son is...
I don't know.
Does he have an independent streak?
Does he have a, I'll do it my way kind of thing?
Yeah, I wanted to interject here.
We do try to empower him as much as possible.
And I think where some of the frustration on my husband's part comes into play, and mine too sometimes, is that he wants us to do it with him.
He wants us to carry him.
He wants us to open the thing, and he wants us to make the Play-Doh shape, and he actually wants us to do just about everything.
And after a while, you get tired and you tell him to go play by himself, and he'll get frustrated and upset.
So there's still a big want of interaction.
And another reason why I wanted to interject is I think when my husband loses his, when he gets frustrated, it's not like he's trying to contain Eldon's aggression.
It's more like he's getting upset and it's a reaction.
Rather than trying to correct Eldon, it's more like he's reacting to him.
Oftentimes when Eldon keeps coming to him for more interaction after two hours of playing with Play-Doh and making little train cars out of Play-Doh, it just gets a little much.
Does that make sense?
Well, does it get a little much, though?
I mean, isn't that the job?
Yeah, but I think it's kind of just some of the repetition involved in everything.
I mean, I get that's how they learn.
And everything, but after a certain point, the repetition is kind of mind-numbing on my end, and I'm asking him, can't we please do something else?
Right.
Right.
And, I mean, that's perfectly reasonable, right?
That you don't want to be, like, the slave to your child's play whims, right?
It's not healthy, right?
They're not going to negotiate, right?
But...
I mean, this is just my perspective.
I don't know what the data is or the facts on it.
I'll just tell you my perspective.
That, you know, as a stay-at-home dad, like, that's my job.
I mean, he's two.
Can he play by himself much?
I don't know.
Sometimes he does.
Sometimes he'll play by himself fine.
But a lot of times he wants me right there.
Like we can go to the play place at our McDonald's and I can see him.
I'm not too far away, but he wants me right up there next to the play place while he's up climbing around and everything.
Yes, that's the job.
Okay.
Yeah, he's two.
That's the job.
I'll tell you that very confidently.
That's the job.
You've got to get right in there in the play center with them.
And for a long time, I mean, there's a reason I haven't written a book in eight years.
I don't know if I'm that limber.
Well, you got to stretch it out, baby, because that's the job, right?
If I can do it at 50, right?
Yes, you're younger than me, right?
So that's the job, right?
I mean, you can fight it if you want, but it just means that it's going to be a less fun job.
Like, you got to just throw yourself into it, right?
Yeah.
And I really don't want to fight it.
Like I said, it's mostly when it gets to the repetition, I'm just like, oh my God, please let it stop.
But for the most part...
Sorry, but that must come from some earlier place as well.
Right?
Did your parents bore you?
Were you bored as a child?
I mean...
I don't really...
I don't think I was.
Yeah.
Is there a conversation that you can have with your son while you're doing these things that makes that part less boring?
I'm sure.
Is there any, you know, and the conversation doesn't have to be always two-way, right?
It can be sort of a monologue.
It can be, you know, when I was a kid, I did this, and, you know, what's your favorite color, and what would you like to make, and, you know, did you have any dreams last night?
Well, I don't know.
Like, again, I don't know what your son can chat about or whatever, but...
Is there a conversation that you can have?
Because, I mean, I get this.
I mean, kids, there's a reason we don't play with Play-Doh when we're adults, because it's really boring.
So, I get all of that.
I mean, it is boring.
But the point is not to play with Play-Doh.
The point is to interact with your son.
Not both of you facing the Play-Doh, but having a conversation.
Yeah.
It's just...
I guess it's kind of a challenge on my end, because if I... If I don't really have anything to say or if I'm focused on the task in front of me, like molding the newest thing he wants me to come up with, I don't really talk.
I kind of keep to myself.
And I guess I need to kind of break that habit.
Let's just be really honest with each other.
Do you have conversations with your son much during the day?
Yeah.
I mean, yeah.
I don't know.
I mean, I'm not sure about, you know, what to compare to or anything, but I mean, I don't spend my day ignoring him, but I'm not constantly...
No, but you said when you play with him, you're quiet.
And I'm not trying to catch you out or something.
I could just try to sort of understand the environment, right?
So you said that when you play with him, you get...
Yeah, I can get quiet, yeah.
Get quiet, right?
Yeah, yeah.
Sometimes I'm just, you know, sometimes it can be just an admiration of what he's able to do, of his creativity and so forth.
And sometimes he comes up with a little...
Yeah, yeah, no, hang on.
We're drifting.
We're drifting from this.
Okay, okay.
Okay, so of the 10 hours a day you spend with your son while your wife is commuting and working, is that fair to say 10, 11 hours?
How much time out of that time do you spend in conversation?
And here's why we just need to be very frank, right?
I'm not sure.
Well, then measure it, right?
Like tomorrow, I guess not tomorrow because your wife's home, but Just measure it.
I guess you can measure it when your wife's home.
How much are you spending in conversation?
Because if you're sort of playing side by side and getting bored, do you know what your son experiences?
Probably boredom as well?
No.
He experiences, my dad finds me boring.
Oh.
My dad would rather be doing something else.
My dad is bored.
I'm not interesting to him.
My dad would rather be on the computer.
My dad would rather be playing Call of Duty.
My dad would rather be doing anything.
And of course, if all you're doing is playing Play-Doh, sure.
I mean, if you were your age and playing Play-Doh for fun, that would be a sign of a problem.
So, of course, it's not about the Play-Doh.
You have to find a way to enjoy Enjoy, enjoy, enjoy your time with your son.
Because the bond is in the enjoyment.
The bond isn't in proximity.
The bond isn't in just, well, we're in the same house, right?
Otherwise, prison cell inmates would fall in love, right?
I mean, it's not proximity.
The bond arises from knowing that the other person really enjoys and values your company.
Does that make sense?
Yeah.
And if your son feels that he is a great treasure to you, that you look forward to your time with him, that, you know, this, that, and the other, right?
Then that is where the richness and that's where the peace comes from.
That's where the trust and the negotiation has to come from.
Because if he perceives himself as boring, as not interesting, as not stimulating, as not Enjoyable company.
Do you know what he's gonna do?
He's gonna get attention other ways.
Do you know what that means?
Look out, Mr.
Dog.
Yeah.
Right?
Yeah.
Now that I have your attention, right?
Children will get their parents' attention one way or another because children who don't get their parents' attention tend to get left behind, right?
I mean, it's home alone territory, right?
Which was pretty bad in the jungle or the forest or the ice floes or whatever the hell we evolved, right?
Children will get their parents' attention one damn way or another.
It's either through positive actions or it's through negative actions.
And if the child does not feel that he can get your attention through a positive action, Then he'll make sure he keeps your attention in a negative way.
This can be through hitting.
This can be through tantrums.
This can be through refusing food.
Right?
Your focus is really on him during these times of, quote, misbehavior, right?
Yeah.
He's got your attention, right?
Yep.
How much do you enjoy parenting?
Last couple months, not a lot.
Before then?
Before then, yeah.
I enjoyed it.
I mean, it was cool seeing the new things develop.
It was cool having him want to...
Always, you know, be around me, always wanting to kind of shadow me and stuff like that.
When my wife was working, we would go to where she works a lot and pick her up for lunch and stuff.
I mean, we're a big hit at the store, so...
Sure.
Now, that's all big picture stuff, right?
You know, development over time and so on.
I'm talking about most of the individual days.
Mm-hmm.
The moments of the day, the hours, right?
And listen, again, I mean, I understand it's boring.
I mean, to be honest, there have been times when I've been like, okay, it's two o'clock.
And how many hours, right?
I mean, it happens, right?
Yeah, yeah.
Six hours till bed, yeah.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I mean, also, you know, when you're tired or if you haven't slept that well or something like that, right?
Mm-hmm.
But the individual moments of the day.
Not just so the big picture, now he can walk kind of thing, but...
I don't know.
It's...
I mean...
It's...
It just seems like so much of it is based on...
How things are going.
I mean, it's easy to say, oh, it's great when things are going well and then, you know, this really sucks whenever we're in one of our fights.
To kind of get an overall, you know, each day, yeah, I do think I like What I'm doing.
I like being the stay-at-home parent and being able to try to raise them properly and everything.
I know there are very important things that I'm not getting right.
I'll tell you this, man.
You sound depressed about the whole thing.
I'm just telling you how you sound.
I'm not saying what you are.
My impression.
You sound drained.
You sound like dragging yourself.
To a degree I do feel like I'm fighting.
I feel like I'm fighting myself.
I feel like I'm fighting my past.
And then to have in the moment fights with him as well.
To a degree it is exhausting.
And it turns into a bit of a vicious circle, right?
Sorry to interrupt, but it turns into a bit of a vicious circle, right?
Because if your son is reacting to a lack of your enjoyment of his company, if he reacts negatively and then starts acting out negatively to get your attention, well, the initial problem is you're not enjoying his company that much, and then the way he deals with that is to have you enjoy his company even less, right?
Yeah, yeah.
Which then means that he's right.
This is maybe one of the patterns that has caused this kind of escalation, if that makes sense.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah, definitely.
Video game consumption?
What are we talking?
I haven't touched it since the second one was born.
Okay, so before that?
Facebook.
My wife keeps saying Facebook, Facebook.
Technically that's not a video game.
Yeah, yeah, I know, I know, I know.
I am a little bit of a Facebook junkie, shitposting and things.
You have a lot of tablet-handed parenting, or phone-handed parenting?
Yeah.
Alright.
What else do you think your son is thinking?
That the phone's more interesting than he is.
Well, it is, right?
I mean, I'm an empiricist, right?
And children are empiricists, right?
You can say whatever you want.
All they care about is what you do, right?
That's true.
So, if the phone is fascinating and he's not, he's going to get your attention one way or another.
Yeah.
I don't want to hear it.
Yeah.
Yeah, I do.
And there's a lot of time.
Sorry to interrupt.
How much time do you spend on the, what did you say, on electronics during the day?
I don't know.
Sorry, I just wanted to take the microphone for a second.
Do you mean electronics that he's doing, you know, by himself or electronics that we do with Eldon as well, like all around electronics?
I mean, we're talking about stuff where he ideally should be parenting, but has a phone in hand.
Okay, so that's him.
I always have my phone with me, but I'm actively looking at it and on it.
I would say probably about three hours in total during the Yeah, okay.
About three hours in total, you know, spanned out across the day.
Now, if you had a job, right, and you had a job for 10 hours a day, like, let's say you've been an accountant or something, do you think that you would be allowed to play on your phone for three hours during the day?
No.
Why do you think I'm mentioning that?
Yeah, because that's my job.
My boy is my job.
Your boy is your job.
And look, it's not like you can't ever look at your phone or anything, although it may be wise for you to take a bit more of a structured break from it if it's become that kind of habit.
Because if you're in a sort of mental mindset, especially if you say you're shitposting on Facebook and stuff like that, you're in completely the wrong mindset.
For parenting, right?
Yeah.
Especially a toddler.
It's a totally different mindset.
Yeah.
This past year has just been so interesting, internet-wise.
Yes, but I'm trying to have your next couple of years not be so interesting.
Yeah.
At least as far as your parenting and child raising goes.
One more thing to blame on Donald Trump.
I'm sorry, say again?
She said one more thing to blame on Donald Trump.
Which, of course, it's not his fault.
It's all on me.
Right.
Yeah, that's a lot of...
And listen, you're not alone in this, just so you know.
You know, when I take my...
I don't as much anymore.
She's kind of agronom.
But when I took my daughter to play centers and stuff, and I'm not trying to, ooh, you know, best parent ever.
But, I mean, the basic fact is that When I would go to play centers, almost without exception, like literally four times over six years or seven years, all the moms would be on their phones and the kids would just be sitting there.
Because they've got these couches that ring around the outside of these play centers.
And the moms...
Now, again, occasionally there'd be moms in there mixing it up.
And occasionally, I think once I saw a dad in there mixing it up too.
But, yeah, it was like...
Here you go.
Rami's going to sit on her phone and you go and find some way to amuse yourself.
Yeah, I see it all the time too.
You see it too, right?
I will say in the public settings I'm not on the phone hardly at all.
It's mostly at home.
Not that that makes it any better or anything.
Well, it's a little better, but I think that electronics...
Have done a lot to disrupt parent-child relations.
A lot.
When your son gets hold of a tablet, maybe he is already, and then he's going to be, he's going to model that behavior, right?
Yeah.
I just went out for dinner with my family for Valentine's Day.
And next to us, a family.
A family with, it was mostly older people, but there was a boy there who was about a four or a five, and what did they do?
They sit him down, they prop up the tablet, and he watches a movie.
He might as well be on Mars.
Now, again, you know, it's not like, oh, that can't ever happen.
I mean, yeah, okay.
But I just, I seem to see it everywhere I go.
And you gotta, you gotta disconnect from the electronics that you gotta reconnect with your son.
Let me ask you this question.
I'd say you're going to the...
Your wife and your son are home.
And your daughter, obviously, right?
Yeah.
And let's say you've got to go to the grocery store.
Do you want your son to come?
Not really.
I like being able to just zip through the store and get back home.
Right.
I invite you to correct that mindset.
I strongly urge you to correct that mindset.
Because that's what, when I was a kid, there was a saying, penny wise, pound foolish.
It means there's no point watching your pennies if you blow the big money.
Because if you don't want your son to come with you, then he is going to be exquisitely aware of the fact that you don't want him to come with you.
Making him feel what?
Making him feel horrible, worthless, undervalued, same sorts of things I felt with my parents.
Same sort of things you felt with your parents.
Okay, tell me a little bit more about that.
There is something going on here from your history.
Oh yeah.
I just feel haunted a lot.
Just a lot of fighting.
I think the best times my siblings and I had was once a week when my parents would go on their date night.
Having them out of the house, we felt like we could just be ourselves again, kind of thing.
Me being the oldest, everything was my responsibility.
I'm supposed to be setting an example for my younger siblings.
I'm supposed to keep track of what they're doing and everything else.
And I recognized that I was being held to standards that my parents were not willing to fulfill themselves.
And it did make for...
I was, and to a degree still am, very resentful towards them.
Especially the more I learn listening to the show and some of the stuff on parenting you've already put out.
Just how much...
Of my childhood, I was expected to dismiss or get passed quickly.
And, you know, especially with the fights with my son, a lot of that stuff comes back.
Not necessarily specific situations, but the feelings that were there.
What do you mean?
It's all my fault.
You know, whatever's going on, it's my fault.
And I suppose it's more true now being the dad and, you know, supposed to be taking lead and taking responsibility and everything.
But it still rings echoes of the past, you know, when...
It wasn't so much my responsibility back then.
It wasn't, you know, everything wasn't my fault back then.
But the feelings are still there, the guilt.
I tend to be very hard on myself.
I mean, just the stuff we're talking about now, I mean, I... Well, everyone thinks they're joking when they talk to me.
What was the first thing you said to me?
Yeah, my turn for the firing squad.
And what did you say your wife should do with you if you become disabled?
Right.
Just take me out back, shoot me.
Right.
Being shot was mentioned twice, which is unusual for the average, right?
Yeah.
But you're not that hard on yourself.
You know, I mean, people say that.
But you give yourself permission to spend hours on the phone when you're supposed to be parenting, right?
Yeah.
It's...
Because for you, and I can tell you why.
Sorry to interrupt.
I can tell you why, because I want you to absorb this like a sponge.
I can tell you why.
Because...
Because for you, an absent parent...
Was the only chance you had to have an identity, to have fun.
For you, parental absence was permission to be yourself, right?
Mm-hmm.
So...
So, for you being absent to your son was a benefit for you, but it's not a benefit for him.
Like parental absence was a benefit for you, but paying it forward to your son in the way that you're doing is not a benefit to him.
Yeah.
And now, your daughter was born a month ago or so?
Mm-hmm.
What has she heard a lot of in her first month of life?
Yelling.
Right.
Just me and my son.
Yelling, tantrums, escalations, screaming.
Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
What's her introduction to the planet like?
Loud.
Loud.
Terrifying.
Yeah.
Right?
She has no idea what the world is like with a father who doesn't yell and a brother who doesn't have crazy tantrums, right?
Thank you.
Mm-hmm.
It's not peaceful parenting.
No.
That's good news.
How's that?
This is all good news.
This is all good news.
You know why, right?
So I can fix it?
Yeah.
Because if you're doing everything right and this was the outcome, I wouldn't even know what to say.
Well, there goes that theory.
You know, the important thing is my theory.
Remember that.
But no, this is great news.
Because there's so much that can be changed here and should be changed.
To turn this around?
If there was nothing that could be changed?
Then you're really in trouble, right?
Yeah.
So what needs to change?
What needs to happen?
Now, what do you need to commit to?
Well, first of all, unplugging.
Being actually there for him instead of just in proximity.
Yeah, don't be just around.
Don't be just sitting by him.
That's torture for a child.
Engage, engage, engage.
Conversation.
Get to know him.
Get to understand his thinking.
What else?
I don't know.
I feel like if It just seems like if I'm more engaged with him, that would take care of a lot of what's going on, potentially.
I mean, I don't know.
I don't know how much is...
Well, it's not going to hurt, I'll tell you that.
Well, I know that, I know.
I just don't know how much of what's been going on is kind of set, or if he's still...
No, no, the personality is still in flux, some aspects of personality still in flux as far as I understand it, until he's five.
So, you know, you're not even halfway there.
What else?
Um...
I know I gotta do something about my temper.
I'm just...
And that something is actually very simple.
Okay.
You give yourself permission to yell.
You have in your mindset...
It's not magic, right?
But you have in your repertoire of allowable behaviors yelling.
Intimidating.
Man, you're 10 times this kid's size, right?
Yeah.
How would you feel it if somebody who was like 60 feet tall came and screamed at you?
Well, I used to be in that position.
We all, well, a lot of us were.
A lot of us were.
But it's a hell of a lot of not fun.
It's overwhelming.
It's short circuits, right?
Yeah.
The tantrum is saying, I've short circuited.
There's too much stimulation.
Yeah.
The dad in my head...
Has exploded.
You understand?
Your yelling has implanted in him a yelling alter ego.
Right?
You need to not feed that yelling dad in his head anymore.
Which means no yelling.
I don't care if you've got to stuff socks in your mouth.
I don't care if you've got to do a jig.
You cannot yell.
And I think an apology might be in order.
Thank you.
And I promise to not do it again.
Yeah.
I do spend a lot of time apologizing to him.
Which is worse.
After things calm down and everything.
Yeah, I know.
Because I'm repeating...
It's worse.
If you don't change...
If you apologize and don't change your behavior, then he doesn't trust you for the behavior and he also doesn't trust you for the apology either.
Right.
I try not to apologize unless I'm really committed to changing.
Because an apology is a promise for change.
Otherwise it's nothing.
It's a manipulation.
It's about you feeling bad rather than wanting to do good, right?
Yeah.
So, it's the million dollar question.
Like if somebody paid you a million dollars to not yell for a day, would you be able to achieve it?
I don't know.
Oh, come on, man.
Come on.
I know, I know.
A million dollars.
I will cut you a check for a million dollars if you spend one day not yelling.
Can you do it?
I feel like I wouldn't be honest with myself if I said that I could.
I mean, it's...
It's physically impossible.
Like, you get possessed.
Well, I mean, I... See, this is the part of you that's not good.
I know, I know.
What are you giving yourself permission to yell at a two-year-old for?
Come on.
And you think he lacks self-discipline?
Yeah, I know.
You think he lacks control of his temper?
He's too.
What's your excuse?
I know.
I know that's part of the dialogue I have with myself.
It's like if you're...
Well, stop having a dialogue with yourself about it and just give yourself a goddamn rule.
You understand?
Yeah.
Stop having a dialogue with yourself and say, no, I am not going to yell.
I'm not going to yell.
As long as it's on the maybe, it's going to happen.
Because I'll tell you something, man.
Oh, I'll tell you something.
And this is nothing you don't know.
If you don't change this...
I'll talk to your wife in a sec.
But if you don't change this...
You know how I said, million dollars to not yell for a day?
Mm-hmm.
You'll look back and say, if your son continues this path, right, what's it going to be like when he's 15?
When he's as big as you?
Yeah.
What's he going to be like?
Tell me.
No, I remember what it was like when I was in that position.
I mean, I did get into physical altercations with my dad.
He's going to be hitting you, and he's going to be as big as you, and you're going to be a hell of a lot older.
Yeah.
I mean, you say you're not limber enough now to go into a play center.
I don't think you want to take on an angry 15-year-old full of hormones.
Not really, no.
You won't win.
No.
And then you get the joyful task of, do I call the cops on my son?
Yeah.
And you'll look back and say, well, I yelled at him a lot when he was two.
I would pay a million dollars to go back in time.
I'd pay 10 million dollars if I had it to go back in time and change my behavior then.
Well, you have the chance to change it right now.
You don't have to wait for the disasters of the future to make the past irrevocably troubled.
You can change it right now by not giving yourself permission.
Now, that's not the end of it.
Of course, you've got to do self-knowledge if you can do some therapy.
Well, you know, all the stuff that I say.
But you've heard, you've listened for a long time.
I don't need to repeat the whole laundry list.
You know it.
Oh, yes.
Yeah.
So I'm not saying, you know, white-knuckle yourself for the next 15 years, right?
Right.
What I'm saying is that stop letting your parents parent your child.
Stop letting them win in your heart and mind.
You understand?
I do.
When I say don't give yourself permission, what you hear is, what, I have to really criticize my parents now?
I have to really say that what they did was absolutely wrong?
So wrong that I can't give myself permission to indulge in it even once?
That's how bad what it was that they did?
Yeah.
If that's what it takes for you.
To not have the permission to do this anymore, then that's what it takes.
Because I don't care about your relationship with your parents, and I don't care about your parents because they had their parenting.
That's all in the past.
This is occurring right now.
I care about your son because he's two.
Your parents made their decisions as adults.
I care about you as a child, but I can't fix that.
But we can fix what's going on now, right?
No permission.
Thank you.
Not, well, if he pushes my buttons or if I feel like it.
No.
No permissions.
Zero chance.
And you deal with the fallout of that.
But you do not have the right to aggress against your son.
And it's not working anyway.
This is the thing, right?
I'm not telling you to stop doing something that's working.
It's doing the exact opposite of working, right?
Yeah.
Put down the phone...
Engage.
And be honest.
Listen, there's absolutely nothing wrong with saying, I'm bored of this.
Let's do something else.
Now, understand, he's two and you're not, so give him some latitude.
He's not going to get bored as quickly as you are.
But then it's your job to find something that's going to interest him more.
Say, oh, I want to keep doing this.
It's like, okay, I've got an idea.
How about this?
The other day, trying to negotiate what to do with my daughter in the afternoon, she wanted to go to a play center.
I wanted to go trampolining.
Why?
Because apparently I don't think I'm 50.
I wanted to go trampolining.
For me, an hour of trampolining is like God's gift to exercise.
Because exercise is ungodly boring.
But that's fun, right?
Good old game of motorball with a bunch of kids.
Man, I can do that all day.
And I couldn't convince her to go to the trampolining place.
So we went to the play center.
And we were there for a while.
And after a while, I suggest something else we do at the play center.
She turns to me and she says, Dad, you know what?
I think I might be too old for the play center.
Do you know what I said?
In my heart?
Yes!
Thank Jesus, God Almighty, I will never have to come to a play center until she has grandchildren.
Praise be to Baal.
Thank you, gods above.
I'll never have to come to a smelly place where I get a cold ever again.
I can understand that feeling.
Oh yeah, of course.
What do you think?
Hey, let's go to a play center, honey.
It's Valentine's Day.
Right?
Cuddle on the praise Jesus.
It looks like my sacrifice of the goat worked.
Now, so...
But the cool thing is, I wanted to go trampolining.
She wanted to go to a play center.
Now we've had a back and forth and fine.
So we go to a play center.
And it turns out that she was right to want to go to a play center because she didn't want to go to a play center.
She wanted to stop going to a play center because she wanted to recognize how old she was.
So she had to go one last time, right?
And we've all had that experience, right?
Oh, yeah.
I remember the last time I played Dungeons and Dragons.
I'm like, ah, you know, yeah, I think I'll start dating.
Whatever, right?
Last time you go dirt biking.
Last time you play Monopoly.
Last time you just go, eh.
I'm done with this.
And it's kind of funny because we're playing this epic Monopoly game.
And I was saying to her, you know, do you think...
I said, you know, that was the very same day.
I said, you know, I said, there will come a time.
I said, do you ever think you're going to get tired of Monopoly?
And she said, oh no.
Oh no, it's great.
And I remember feeling that at her age too.
And I was like 12 or 13 when I got tired of Monopoly.
So she's got some time to go.
And I said, you know, because I was just sitting here thinking that if you ever did get tired of Monopoly...
It would be like we'd pack away the Monopoly game knowing that that was the last time.
And I actually always get emotional even just thinking about these kinds of transitions.
We're going to pack away that Monopoly game and we'll both know that it's the last time that we're going to play.
And we're packing away and we'll pack it away carefully because we know it won't come out for 20 years.
Until you have kids or whatever.
10 years.
I don't know.
And we're closing.
We're not just packing away the Monopoly game.
We're packing away that whole phase.
That whole phase of childhood is being closed, put in a sealed plastic bag, and going into the basement where in 15 years we'll forget we have it and buy a new one anyway.
I'm telling you this, which you need to understand in the moment.
There will come a time, and it's not going to be too long, where your son will have outgrown Plato.
And there will come a time when with an ache in your heart you will look at that Plato and wish you had one more go with him.
My wife has said that to me before.
And the only way to survive that moment and to cherish it rather than mourn it Is if you've really played properly, deeply, rightly.
Or as an old theatre teacher of mine, he was my movement teacher in theatre school.
He said, I want you to play like children, which means play seriously.
Always stuck in my head, that phrase.
It's very true.
And today we went skating.
Because she's made some friends at the skating rink.
We go and play tag.
Because it's pretty empty ice.
And I didn't really feel like going.
I didn't really feel like going.
February in Canada, I mean.
Yeah, what are we going to do, right?
But we went and it turned out to be a lot of fun.
Because if I'm going to go...
I'm going to go.
Right?
Nothing's more annoying than somebody who kind of drags himself along making like the toxic cloud of everyone else's no funness.
Fine, I'll come.
Fine, fine, we'll go skating.
Grumble, grumble, grumble.
Like, no.
I'm either going to stay home or I'm going to go.
If I'm going to go, I'm going to go.
I'm going to lace up.
I'm going to chase after the kids making growling wolf noises.
I'm gonna go.
I'm not do this one foot on the pier, one foot on the boat thing.
If you're with your son, be with your son.
Don't be with your son and Facebook.
Because that's not being with your son.
And as I said, it clearly communicates to him where he stands, In your priorities.
And you have to, this is emergency, you have to stop this downward spiral.
Where he behaves badly and you withdraw, so he behaves badly, so you withdraw, so he behaves badly, so you withdraw.
There's no end to that, you understand?
Do you?
Oh yes, yeah.
And he's not gonna change, why?
Because he's two.
You have to, you're the only variable.
Outside of your wife and the rest of your family, but the adults are the only variables who can change this equation.
The only variable that can change here is you.
It's not your son.
He's not going to magically change.
Right?
You don't sound like you want to change.
I'll be frank with you.
You're giving me these empty mm-hmms.
Do you get it's an emergency?
Oh yes, definitely.
Okay, so where the hell is your motivation here?
Why am I doing all the work?
It's your damn family.
It's kind of pissing me off, to be honest with you.
Why am I doing all the work here?
Where are you?
Not on the phone, are you?
No, no.
So where are you?
I am in my own head.
I'm trying to process it, trying to absorb it.
No, that's nonsense.
That's not anything like that.
That's not what you're doing.
You're going limp.
Do you ever say this when you're a kid?
I'm going rubber bones.
You ever try that?
No.
You're just going rubber bones on me.
Why?
It's your family's on fire.
why am I the only one running for the fire extinguisher?
Yeah, I mean, I just, I knew all this stuff, and I didn't, and I didn't, I didn't want to face it, and I know I need to, and I do need to, I do need to change it.
definitely.
Why do you sound like you're reading a grocery list?
Where's the urgency here?
I have no idea where you are emotionally.
I have no sense of contact with you as a person.
I don't know.
I...
Thank you.
Do you feel anything at the moment?
Yeah.
What do you feel?
A lot of guilt.
You know, feel like a pretty horrible parent.
That's abstract.
What are the physical sensations?
What's going on in your body?
It's almost like tension and weakness at the same time.
Where is that?
In your chest?
Your belly?
Somewhere else?
Just kind of a...
In my limbs, I guess.
Yeah, a little bit in my chest.
Just kind of an all-around thing.
I don't know.
I know it's not too late, but I feel a sense of failure already.
So, I mean, that doesn't It doesn't excuse changing it now.
No, no, no.
It's all abstract.
It's all abstract bullshit.
I want to know where your heart is.
Where are your feelings?
Where's your passion?
Where's your hope?
Where's your despair?
Where's anything?
I... Are you numb?
I suppose so.
Well, supposing is kind of a yes, right?
Yeah.
So, do you think that there's any chance for you to change if you're numb?
No.
Okay.
So, am I wasting my breath?
Is this like a waste of time for me?
Why do I care more about this than you do?
I don't I've been completely at a loss here I don't I really don't know I I My wife's asking to talk.
Okay.
I can't see him, so I don't know what the body language is.
I can only go by the voice.
Sorry, go ahead.
Well, I just...
My husband is very good sometimes at taking in information, but he kind of freezes and wants to retreat from that information.
And after he gets to a certain point, he sort of shuts down.
And it's like a day later is when you're going to hit the fire, you know, where he tries to change things and he really starts going to work.
But if this is the case, if you know how to change him, why have you let him be yelling at your son for this time?
Because I don't know how...
I'm trying to gather the information and present it.
No, no, no.
This is not a research project.
Someone's yelling at your baby boy.
And that's why I... But I ended up correcting him in front of our son.
Then that was wrong on my...
But has it worked?
No.
No, it's gotten worse.
Right.
Now, I appreciate that you're calling in here.
It's two and a half years.
But this has been a big problem in the last two months.
It's been something I'm gradually working on.
I'm a good listener.
Sorry to interrupt you.
I'm a good listener, my friend.
You said that he yelled at your son.
Now, a couple of times a day.
Before, once a week, right?
My mom put it better than I did.
He yells around Eldon.
That's the way it used to be.
He would yell maybe around Eldon or he'd walk away or he would do something.
He never yelled at Eldon before.
But the last two months something has changed and he started yelling at him.
Hang on, hang on.
So what?
Do you think if you discharge a gun around someone but don't point it at them that it's totally fine?
I suppose only if you're at a firing range, but...
You know what I mean.
I do.
Okay, is that fine?
No.
Watching your father be out of control, watching your father's temper be out of control, is that comforting and secure for a child?
No.
So, how did this happen for you?
How is this commission for him, for you?
It's been a struggle that I have.
I've tried various things.
Of course, listening to your show, trying to go back to some things my dad taught.
A lot of what my dad taught me when I was younger, of course, going back to parenting, is You put a sentinel on your thoughts.
Your mind is like a garden.
You've got these weeds that grow, and you get too many weeds.
It comes out in your language to other people, and it can be like a poison.
I noticed my husband, he uses a lot of very negative language in our concepts, the way we think about everything.
The words hold the concept.
Okay, I don't know what any of this means.
Let me just ask you this question.
I'm sorry because everybody gets so abstract when I'm asking the basic questions.
Does your son see his father be emotionally present in situations other than anger?
Yes.
Okay, what are those situations?
Um, there's a lot of, a lot of play, a lot of giggling, a lot of laughter in the house.
My husband, I think, does a great job playing with him most of the time.
They chase each other around the house.
There's tickle fights.
Um, there's situations where when he gets hurt, you know, my husband actually has, um, I, I've, I can, I can say I've seen my husband cry twice.
And once was, well, actually both times it was when my son got hurt.
And he was very, very concerned with him.
And he just, he thinks it's a failure, I think, to cry.
But, you know, he cried when my son got hurt.
I mean, I think the image here of the problem...
I'm just checking.
Listen, I'm just checking.
I mean, you're the expert, so I'm just asking the question.
So I'm glad here that he has all of this stuff, all of these other emotional forms.
Of expression.
But if you had a babysitter who did what your husband did, what would happen?
I wouldn't have the babysitter anymore.
Right.
You'd fire her.
Yeah.
Right.
Now, I'm not suggesting you fire your husband.
Please understand that, right?
You're married and you've got to work it out, right?
Correct.
But here's the thing, is that, you know, one day your son is going to be able to fire you both.
Right.
He's going to grow up, right?
Mm-hmm.
And he can move to Timbuktu if he wants.
Right.
I don't want that to happen, right?
Right.
So you need to treat this like it's a voluntary relationship, like you're working at a daycare, like you're babysitting someone else's kids.
You wouldn't yell at strangers' kids, would you?
No.
So why the hell would you have higher standards for strangers' kids than you would for your own flesh and blood?
I don't.
I am not what you would call passive in this situation.
No, no.
I appreciate that.
I appreciate that.
I'm glad you called in.
And I'm I'm not trying to yank your chain or throw you under the bus or bust your balls or anything like that.
I need to give you this perspective to help you jolt your husband and yourself into this is no longer acceptable.
This can't happen.
This is no longer on the list of options.
This is not on the menu.
And you can't order off-menu.
There's no cheating in this restaurant.
No cheating at all.
Right?
Right.
Not allowable.
You can't yell at a two-year-old.
It's not his fault.
You're the environment.
You've shaped him.
If he has a temper tantrum, after he's been yelled at or around 50 times a year and now 50 times a month, that's on you.
That's not on him.
He's the child.
So you've got some undoing to do and you're only going to...
You're not going to...
This is why I say it's an emergency.
Not because he's, you know, you're talking about serial killer.
But what I'm saying is that if you commit to change and you slip up, you have a real problem.
That's what I mean when I say it's got to be off the table.
You can't do it.
Not allowed.
Understood.
Not allowed, like setting fire to your neighbor's house is not allowed.
You're not like, well, you know, he has been stealing my fruit.
Right?
It's just not allowed.
Wouldn't happen.
Right?
Can't happen.
Because if you make this, it's going to take...
I'm going to go out on a limb here.
I don't know the exact figure.
This is the figure that popped into my head, so this is not scientific.
It's going to take a year of perfectly consistent, non-angry behavior to reverse what's been done.
A year.
You slip up at any time in that year, it's worse than if you'd never tried it at all, because you gave them hope.
You understand?
This is what I mean when I say, as an emergency.
And if you wait another couple of months, it'll be two years.
And if you wait another couple of months, it'll be four years.
I understand.
You know, they say it takes double the time to get over something.
You know, like if you've been in a relationship for two years, it'll take you a year to get over it.
And they also say it takes seven times positive behavior to overcome one instance of bad behavior.
But he's young, so more flexible, I guess.
Well, that's good.
But it has to be.
Right?
You've got to sit down with your son, apologize, explain what you did wrong.
Because he's not going to criticize his own behavior if you don't criticize your behavior that produced it or influenced it.
You're asking him to say no to his temper tantrums, right?
Right.
But if you can't model as adults the behavior of saying no to getting angry, You're asking him.
It's even more frustrating for him.
Because you're asking him to do it too, what you're not doing in your 30s.
Right.
You can't have that standard.
He shouldn't be having tantrums!
Right?
You understand, for a kid, this is scary.
Not just the temper, but the hypocrisy.
You too should control what I can't control at 36.
Yeah, it's just something that I kind of understood in the very beginning.
I mean, he's not being difficult.
He's not a difficult toddler.
We are difficult parents and we need to figure out what we're doing wrong and fix it now.
And if the dad can't do it, you need to.
If he can't control it, if he can't control his temper, you need to stay home.
Mm-hmm.
You know that, right?
Yes.
And if it means a reduction in circumstances, it's cheap compared to what comes if he doesn't control his temper.
I'd rather live in a poor, peaceful house than a mansion of conflict.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Hell, I'd rather live under a bridge at peace.
Than in a palace of temper.
Yeah.
And we have sat down and worked out the numbers and worked out a plan B and a plan C. But the bridge I want to burn is just like you said, you burn that bridge that leads to yelling.
So you just don't have it as a tool.
You just don't do it.
That's the best solution here.
It's a million dollar question.
I mean, it troubles me that he says, I mean, I get it's defensive, right?
I mean, I understand that.
But, you know, when he says, oh, I don't know, maybe I would end up yelling even if it cost me a million dollars.
Yeah.
That's a confession of impotence in the face of temper.
That means maybe he should take that temper and go out and use all that testosterone to make you all some money and you stay home.
Mm-hmm.
But either way, the yelling's got to stop.
We all agree on that.
Good.
I wasn't sure if I did, and I'm sure I didn't, but I thought I heard somebody laughing in the background while I was having the conversation with your husband.
I'm not sure which part.
If nobody was, I just thought I heard it.
Maybe it was a TV or something.
Anyway.
Oh, I think we're laughing at something you said.
I think you started talking about how you'd go trampolining and My mom and I just looked at each other because that just sounded like such a fun thing to do.
We had a trampoline.
It might have been that.
I was picturing how fun it would be.
I think that might have been the only time I laughed.
I know it's completely off topic, but I didn't even know there was such a place.
So now I'm going to have to go look that up.
I'm sorry.
Oh, do, yeah.
And you can take it to an half-year-old.
They have these big foam pits, right?
So you've got these trampolines, they've got these big foam blocks, and you can just, little kids can jump into, you do flips and stuff.
It's great.
Getting out of them can be tough, but it's great fun.
Wow.
Sounds like it.
All right.
So, do we at least have a rough standard in plan?
Oh, yes, we do.
And I gotta say, as a listener that has been listening to your show for so long, it's tempting to say, we know what Stefan might say in this situation.
We have an idea of how to fix it ourselves.
But honestly, it's like a couple of light bulbs went off.
And I mean, we've all been listening for so long.
It's like I thought that...
I thought you'd be, I mean, big picture, we knew what we needed to do with the yelling, but as far as trying to relate to what is going through our two-year-old's head and how he would see himself as being boring or not interesting enough, I mean, these are just invaluable light bulbs to just trying to understand what our son is going through, and I'm just absolutely impressed as always, and thank you so much for your insights.
Oh, thanks.
Yeah, just remember that if kids don't feel like treasured, then they feel at mortal risk.
It's very stressful.
Because remember, throughout most of human history, very few kids made it.
Right?
Infant mortality was ridiculous.
And so, kids who don't feel treasured, there's like a death panic sets in.
And we look at it and say, well, why is it such a big deal?
Why are you kicking and screaming?
It's survival.
Yeah.
Remember, there was never enough food to go around.
Predators were everywhere.
Disease was everywhere.
You see those, I mean, you see piglets trying to get at the nipples of the sow.
I mean, they're in like Black and Decker drills, trying to kick, screaming, they'll kick, because there's never enough food to go around.
It's evolution.
So, if the kid feels like he's not treasured, they really panic.
I mean, those of us who had tough childhoods, we know that.
Some of that experience, right?
It's heartbreaking.
Yeah, it's that whole terrible Bill Cosby joke.
And I know this isn't in your minds, right?
I'm just sort of pointing it out.
But he's like, you know, his father said, oh, you can be replaced, right?
Just make another one.
We can make another one of you, right?
Well, actually, no, you can't, because it's only one.
But that is an existential threat for children if they don't feel treasured.
They freak out, and they need their parents' attention no matter what.
So, yeah, make sure you negotiate ahead of time.
Make sure you get agreement.
Make sure you keep your word, right?
Because if you keep your word to your child, you have every right, UPB style, to expect your child to keep I keep my word to my daughter.
And if she starts breaking her word, I'm like, oh, is that what we're doing?
We're breaking words to each other now?
Is that her plan?
Because I'm not going to have higher standards than you are.
I mean, I know I'm the parent and all, so I'll pay the bills, but I'm not, you know, if we're going to do this thing where we don't have to keep our word to each other, just let me know.
No, no, no.
She doesn't want that, right?
So, that kind of leverage is really helpful.
Just get agreement ahead of time.
I think that the tongue and the belly, I have found to be helpful, and kids, I think, kind of get that pretty instinctively.
And, yeah, just the apology, the commitment to change, and just having it off the table, I think will cool him down over time, in my humble opinion.
Okay.
We'll definitely do that.
All right.
Will you keep us posted?
Oh, yes.
Definitely will.
Thank you.
All right.
Thank you.
Thank you very much.
And thanks everyone so much for opening up your hearts and minds and thoughts to me, to the world.
Always a great privilege and a great pleasure to be part of these conversations.
So please everyone check out my new video, Why Free Speech is All That Matters.
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