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March 26, 2017 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

02:45:40

3630 Triggered Goalpost Moving - Call in Show - March 22nd, 2017

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	Hello, hello everybody.
	Stefan Mullen from Free Domain Radio.
	I hope you're doing well.
	Very, very interesting series of callers that we had on the show tonight.
	First up was a couple kind of escalating in their conflicts in ways not very productive.
	She actually scratched him in the face and wanted to know, since she says she had a good childhood, what the source of this kind of aggression might be.
	I'm pretty sure we found it, and I'm even more sure you're going to be very surprised at where it came from.
	The second caller wanted to know how she was able to maintain her faith, given that the Pope, she's a Catholic, that the Pope seemed to be going all kinds of lefty lunacy on her.
	And she wanted to know if he's...
	Claiming infallibility but is acting against her values or even some historical Catholic values.
	How is she supposed to maintain her faith?
	I know, I know.
	A Catholic calling into a philosophy show to ask about the maintenance of faith.
	But it was a great conversation.
	I really appreciated the trust and openness of that.
	The third caller had questions about how socialism could do things better.
	He claimed to be a great teacher of people with an IQ of 40.
	A very interesting call.
	I found it very, very illuminating.
	The fourth caller, well, I think it's safe to say, I think he'd agree with me, I think he did, that he may have chosen the wrong woman to be the mother of his children.
	She was, you know what, I'll just let you listen.
	Go listen to it.
	But his main question was, how does he avoid infecting his sons with his issues regarding women?
	Which is a great and noble question about how to break the cycle of dysfunction in a family, so...
	I appreciated his call, as I appreciated all the people who called in.
	Thank you so much, because I really want to appreciate you too, which means please, please, please go to freedomainradio.com slash donate and help out the show.
	Don't forget to follow me on Twitter at Stefan Molyneux and use our affiliate link at fdrurl.com slash Amazon.
	Also, freedomainradio.com slash donate.
	Alright, well up first today we have Sierra and Chris.
	Now this was written from the first person perspective of Sierra.
	She says, I had a really great childhood and I think I've made it to adulthood pretty successfully.
	I'm happily married to a wonderful man and have extremely high hopes for our future.
	However, in the first months of my marriage, I was so frustrated during an argument with my husband that I scratched his face and left a mark.
	I haven't done it again, but I don't ever want a repeat.
	Can you help me uncover where this propensity for violence is coming from before we bring children into this house?
	That's from Sierra and Chris.
	Yes.
	Oh, hey guys, how's it going?
	We're doing well.
	How are you?
	Good, good.
	So, two things.
	First of all, I just hope it was like a cool pirate scar so that he can, you know, talk about adventures in the outback.
	Number one.
	Number two...
	It doesn't look terrible.
	Yeah.
	Number two, as a husband, I regret to inform you, Chris, that I'm very sorry that you provoked your innocent wife to this degree and that she attacked you for absolutely no reason.
	And please stop throwing your face into her nails.
	That's...
	I just need to get that across.
	What was the fight about?
	Do you recall?
	Oh, God.
	So, to be clear, for most of our marriage, our arguments have been about extremely topical things.
	And never, very seriously, we have very few arguments about like what the definition of doing the dishes is.
	And like, damn it, you keep leaving the garage door open and stuff like that.
	We really don't argue about those kinds of things very often.
	Chris was in the process of writing a book.
	So we're, at one point, we're talking about the book.
	In the book, he's talking about how there are these existential conflicts.
	It was an argument about grammar.
	That's the short story.
	The long story is we were arguing specifically about the context for why gays and Evangelical Christians so often get into conflict over the definition of sin and whether people who are gay are any worse off as sinners because they are homosexual as their orientation and these sorts of things.
	So we're arguing...
	Okay, yes, you can.
	Well, so there was a phrasing in there where I said that people will conflate hatred and fear and then confuse the two or something.
	And we were arguing about the ordering of those words and the intention behind it.
	It's hard to hate something that can't do you any damage.
	Right.
	So you have to be afraid of something in order to get...
	The fear is the flight and the hate is the fight, right?
	Fight or flight.
	Exactly, yeah.
	And they like to conflate...
	Because no one wants to be thought of as fearful or cowardly.
	So they'll conflate the opposition with fear and then call you fearful.
	And in that conflation, they can call you hateful as well.
	And we had been arguing about syntax and it got fairly heated, but it was still...
	About the writing and Sierra said something about my ability as a writer and I wanted to go outside for a walk to sort of cool off a little bit and I decided to come back first and This is where my innocence comes into play where I did nothing wrong I wanted to remove her as an editor from the work as it was because I didn't want her to Change anything while I was gone.
	And she really didn't want to do that.
	Attempted to physically stop me.
	And I think I tried to leave.
	And you were so frustrated with me leaving that you just sort of lashed out.
	Yeah, it was...
	I mean...
	Yeah, it was a...
	It was the worst thing because so much of our arguing at that time was about his stupid book.
	And, I mean, there were...
	I mean, we were also working through, I mean, we had just gotten married.
	We got married in October, so we'd only by that time been married two months.
	And you're working on a challenging book, which is...
	Yeah, and like, within, so I mean, we've had a, 2016 was a really busy year for us because we had dated previously and then got back together.
	We decided if we're going to date again, like, what's your intention?
	Wait, wait, hang on, hang on.
	You had dated previously and then gotten back together.
	I feel like part of that story may be missing.
	Yeah.
	You may have edited just a little bit too much.
	Sierra there.
	Chris, I know what you mean.
	Sorry, go on.
	We met in debate a long time ago.
	We rode back from a tournament together.
	He was the single most interesting person I've ever talked to in my entire life.
	We weren't dating at that time.
	Until now.
	We didn't date at that time.
	We dated a little bit later.
	We were together for almost a year.
	Broke up for just over a year and then reconnected at the beginning of 2016.
	Why did you break up?
	He wasn't working on another book, was he?
	No.
	At that time, I got accepted to a study abroad trip between my junior and senior year of college.
	I went to Ireland for three weeks and it was fantastic.
	I loved it there.
	But I came back with a little bit of the...
	I'd bought in a little bit, especially because I was at college where it's fresh meat everywhere.
	I'd bought into very much the idea that somewhere out there, there is a Completely perfect, totally ideal, in no way at all annoying person.
	And I just need to find that one person.
	That is actually true.
	That is completely true.
	But I'm married, so you have to go with what else is out there.
	That's the challenge for all the other women.
	Sorry, go ahead.
	No, what I have determined since getting married is that that person, 99% of the time, my husband is the world's most adorable person.
	I love the crap out of him.
	You don't understand how much I love this man.
	I didn't realize how much I would feel like that when I was 21 and having come back from Ireland, being like, oh my god, there's a huge world out here.
	I was so starstruck and whatever.
	So I came back I'll admit now, at the time, I didn't think I was, but definitely now I can see that I was sort of already emotionally stepping myself back and keeping some other options open and stuff and thinking about the big world out there and that Chris and I were...
	I mean, he has been committed and been the kind of guy who wanted to commit and wanted to have a family and wanted to be a husband and all those sorts of things.
	He's always been that way throughout our entire time dating.
	And at that time, I wasn't ready for that.
	Yeah.
	And so through some well-placed proclamations, I decided that we should break up, and so we did.
	And we tried briefly to be friends for a little bit, and in addition to being full of really smart declarations, I'm also I'm extremely jealous, so we had to stop being friends, too.
	Oh, yeah.
	No, like, once you've dated, this whole let's be friends stuff, I mean, maybe it worked on Seinfeld, which is probably what your grandparents watched, but it doesn't work in real life, because it's like, hey, hey, lady, I used to bang.
	Let me tell you about the new lady I want to bang.
	That's what friends do, right?
	Yeah, that's exactly.
	No, that's not.
	That's exactly what's going on.
	Well, and so, I mean, I don't want to dig too much into all the nuance of it, but in the time between when we broke up and when we got back together, I dated a guy who'd been one of my backburner guys because, like I said, I was keeping my options open, which, in hindsight, I just want to shake myself.
	But, you know, it's what you did when you were 21.
	So I dated my backburner guy, and I had the, like, oh, shit moment of, like, I don't want to accidentally make the wrong guy's babies.
	And then I swore off sex for the next year and a half until Chris and I got back together.
	Wait, you had a puck past the goalie scare?
	Yeah.
	I was a couple of days late and I was like, holy shit, we already broke up and I have no intention of having this guy in my life.
	And it was...
	Yeah, it was not a good time.
	For like four days.
	It was terrifying.
	You should mention the conversation about skeletons in our closet.
	Well, okay.
	So, I feel like you're...
	I hope you have the reaction I'm expecting, because I'm 90% confident you're going to laugh at this also.
	So...
	You know when you're dating somebody at the beginning and you've been dating them for a little bit and then you're like, should we go exclusive and date each other, just each other, whatever?
	So in that conversation, there's usually the divestment of your deepest, darkest skeletons.
	And so mine has always been that I'm a lifelong Republican.
	And as someone who lives in the Seattle area, I'm a pariah.
	Yeah.
	So that's when I like to get right out there.
	I was a Tea Party patriot when that was a thing.
	I've been a Republican my whole life.
	I used to listen to Rush Limbaugh on the radio.
	Yes, I was a classic Republican.
	I've gone further right, much to my chagrin ever since.
	It's not that you've gone further right.
	It's just that the world keeps pushing you further right, is that?
	Yes.
	If people would meet you in the middle, that'd be a whole different matter.
	Even my beautiful, wonderful...
	Very normal parents have had to go further and further right, because the world is leaving them behind as it marches left.
	So anyway, so that's my skeleton.
	His was that he had done meth.
	I'm sorry, did you say math?
	Because math is tough.
	Like, math is challenging, and that can be an incompatibility.
	No, he was an accounting major, so he had...
	Okay, math and math.
	So he did do math.
	Right.
	He also did methamphetamines, so...
	Yeah, apparently, unbeknownst to me, in the, like, sexual market value, like, hard drugs and republicanism are roughly equivalent.
	No, really?
	Yeah.
	I hear only one of them makes your teeth fall out.
	I can't remember which one.
	I know, right?
	I know.
	Now, Chris, do you mind if I ask for a wee bit of backstory there?
	Or do you want to just keep moving?
	No, that's a different guy.
	That's not Chris.
	Chris is not a meth addict.
	Oh, the other guy had done...
	Wait, the guy you thought you got pregnant with had done meth?
	Yeah.
	So needless to say, we didn't date for much longer after that.
	No, I've never done meth.
	Okay, I'm just trying to keep track of this rotation here.
	Yeah, no, absolutely.
	So you're not only concerned about being pregnant, but possibly a child with squid arms, three nipples, and a melon head.
	Yeah, no.
	So, I mean, like, this is like, you know, immediately.
	So, after Chris and I dated, yeah, I dated this other guy.
	I found out that he, like, I'm a Republican.
	He's like, great, I do math.
	And I'm like, whoa.
	Or I did.
	And then I was like, okay, well, you know, obviously we have different life paths.
	So, we parted ways.
	And then I was a little bit late.
	And I was like, oh, shit.
	My mind is not heading towards homelessness, cannibalism, and prison.
	You know?
	This is not what I had in mind for my life.
	And it was a really, it was the beginning of, I guess, sort of my red pilling toward seeing through the feminist mantra, because there are a lot of things where, there are a lot of places where that breaks down for me, where, like, it doesn't It's not even like I was sexually promiscuous.
	I'm obviously sitting here with my husband now, but I was never super casual, but I definitely didn't view it as something that was super terrible if you had sex before marriage.
	Obviously, I had sex before marriage, but...
	I'm starting to see all the places where those little nuggets of that, of those kinds of ideologies, can slip into even someone who is really pretty traditionally and conservatively raised.
	Oh, well, it's everywhere.
	The promotion of promiscuity is everywhere.
	Mostly aimed at white girls.
	And by the way, I just wanted to mention that, Chris, I just wanted to know man-to-man.
	If you're going to have one of the backburner guys date your ex, You wanted to be the meth guy because she's just going to come running back.
	It's hard to look worse than the meth guy.
	So, you know, once she's had sex with the meth guy and maybe thought she was pregnant, I think your sexual market value kind of goes up a little bit.
	And I think that's, is that fair to say, Sierra, that you kind of experienced that?
	Oh my God.
	Oh my God.
	Not to pat myself on the back too much, but I had actually told her when she was contemplating breaking up with me after Ireland, like, look, you're not You're not going to find a better guy than me.
	Yeah, no, I mean, I always thought with the girls who weren't dating me, it's like, you're kidding, right?
	Like, what are you looking for?
	What are you waiting for?
	I'm a great boyfriend and a great husband.
	And yeah, no, they...
	So what was...
	Just out of curiosity, what was it with this other guy?
	I mean, what was so appealing about him?
	Well, I mean, bearing in mind that I was a 21-year-old girl who was at university and I was in the business school, so...
	All of the people, I mean, in the scheme of like, if I had to make a recommendation to other girls about where to find your prospective mate, good God, go hunt out the business school, because you've got nothing but frickin' accountants and finance guys and like people who are going to be very, very wealthy.
	And if you can stay awake.
	No, I'm just kidding.
	No, yeah, that's where you go to get reasonable guys who'll be great providers, right?
	Yeah.
	And yeah, the biggest one was that he had really, really nice hair.
	That was the, like, saw him across the room, and I was like, that guy's pretty cool.
	And yeah, that was the extent of my great logic.
	And this is, not a lot of people know this, although this is widely known throughout human history.
	All guys with great hair are stone evil.
	This is the one, it's where I started from my moral education, was guys with hair, particularly great hair, stone evil.
	And that's just, that was my first major contribution to ethics, and then I came up with UPB just as an afterthought.
	Nice.
	Nice.
	Yeah.
	Especially when they have mustaches, right?
	Yeah.
	And they're drummers!
	Wait, don't get me started!
	No, stay focused on listeners.
	Stay focused on listeners.
	All right.
	So, yeah.
	So, I mean, that was my, like, oh shit moment.
	And I decided I'm never, I realized what that meant to be, like, a totally involuntary statistic.
	I was like, holy shit.
	I'm smart.
	I'm capable.
	I have a good education.
	I have all this potential.
	And I was going to fuck it up on a guy like this?
	No.
	No way.
	No way am I ever going to put myself in peril of accidentally mixing genes with someone who I don't want to mix genes with.
	I mean, I dated a little bit more during the next year, but I also was busy as all get-out.
	I was finishing school, so that was senior year, so I was finishing school, and then I went to work full-time.
	So I was working while I was in college, so I graduated without any debt.
	I lived at home with my parents, who didn't murder me for some reason, even though I was terrible while I was in college, and made it through college with...
	With my degree, with no debt, and a job, full-time job when I came out.
	So I was, I mean, I was busy as all get out by the end of school year, so I didn't have time to do a ton of dating anyway.
	But it was that school stuff and the work stuff that, like, as soon as I got out of school, as soon as I got out, I was at work all the time, and I immediately burnt myself out.
	And I discovered how catty people are.
	I didn't I I so more backstory on me I was homeschooled so I skipped over a lot of that like high school BS and I was so I mean with the exception of a little bit of dating I pretty much had my blinders on mostly through Through college where I was I was really pretty focused on trying to get my degree and and working and stuff like that so I I really didn't do a lot of the interpersonal crap with other people so when I came out at the office and I was suddenly there all the time and I
	worked at a helicopter company.
	I worked at a flight school.
	It was a great job, and I loved it.
	Sorry to interrupt.
	A right-wing person who works at a helicopter factory.
	I'm just anticipating all of the comments we're going to get in the video for this.
	A right-wing person who works at a helicopter factory.
	And if you don't understand that reference, you will when you read the comments below.
	I have several pilot friends, and I happen to know...
	They give tours.
	All I'm saying is they give tours.
	And I happen to know that the inside of a Robinson R44, it's just a handle that you flip up and flip to the side and doors open.
	I'm just saying.
	That's all you need.
	That's all you need to know.
	What was the helicopter company called?
	Leftists, sing after me.
	I believe I can fly.
	I think it was called Hans-Hermann Hoppe's Physical Removal Services.
	Right.
	All right, go on.
	Actually, and the guy who owned it is a conservative as well.
	So the way I got these, I had two jobs while I was in college.
	And the way that that happened was my boss was my boss at both jobs.
	He made his money in fishing.
	I worked as an accounts payable accountant for a fishing company.
	And then he took that money and decided to become a helicopter pilot and then ended up buying the flight school where he trained.
	So I worked for the same guy and he was a very awesome guy.
	I'm a conservative, right-leaning guy.
	Greg was awesome.
	He was a great guy to work for.
	The thing I'm working at a flight school, though, is we had one female pilot.
	I feel like you might be able to guess where this is going.
	We had a bunch of male students, mostly vets who were using their VA benefits to become pilots, and one female pilot.
	The amount of time it took for the serious screwing the students rumor to get around was like zero flat.
	It was...
	Sorry, I just missed that.
	The what rumor?
	There...
	I swear to God, one of our pilots became convinced that I was having sex with the students.
	That I was being improper.
	As in my official capacity as someone who filed paperwork on behalf of these students.
	That I was...
	Acting improperly with them outside of work hours.
	Right.
	Now, to be fair, you did go out and grab a sandwich with one, which is basically sex.
	Which is basically sex, yeah.
	So, yeah.
	So, okay, they just heard sandwich and they thought of like you and two students.
	They didn't think of like, you know, bacon, lettuce, tomato.
	Okay, got it.
	Yeah.
	So, well, and I mean, literally, I mean, this was just mind-blowing amounts of drama.
	I've never experienced not only somebody being catty like that, but also specifically women trying to tear each other down like that.
	I had never, I mean, she was At least 15 years my senior at that time.
	I mean, seriously, like, this was an adult woman who had nothing to do to compete with me.
	But I was, I can understand why she was frustrated that I was suddenly there all the time and I was making all these administrative changes and I was actually, like, demanding that the pilots do some of the ancillary stuff to their job that they were supposed to be doing, you know?
	So, I mean, I can understand why she would be really annoyed with me.
	But the idea that, like, and so the way to get back at Sierra is to tell everyone that she's screwing the students is just, like...
	It's freaking beyond me.
	Right, right.
	But not uncommon, sadly.
	Not uncommon, sadly.
	Yeah.
	So anyway, that was the summer after I graduated.
	That fall, I was trying to, I mean, through a series of misadventures, I was trying to get my life together as far as like reining in the amount of BS I was having to deal with.
	So I was trying to I was cutting back on hours and not working so much, and I was trying to go to the gym, and I tried to write a book and stuff.
	So I got about 30,000 words into a book about Ireland, which is still my favorite thing.
	And I was writing a little bit about Catholicism, and I realized I didn't know anything about it, so I was like, okay, well, I better research this.
	And then I was like, well, I don't know that much about Christianity in general.
	It's been available to me my whole life, but I never really, like, for instance, I never bothered to read the Bible, and So I did.
	So I started reading, I started with the Gospels.
	I still haven't read the whole, it's a big book, but I started with the Gospels and I did eventually become a Christian at the beginning of 2016.
	And for me, it was like a very, very de facto and matter of fact kind of thing where I was like, I was just looking at my life and realizing that the things that I cared about all pretty much consistently pointed in a Christianly direction.
	And I was like, this is literally like the one thing I'm not doing.
	Not doing and actively participating in.
	So anyway, that was me becoming a Christian.
	But it's my little testimony thing that I say to other Christians.
	And it's the God's honest truth.
	That two days after I admitted and acknowledged to God that, look, I am not in charge of my plan.
	I'm not in charge of my life.
	I'm clearly trying to muscle my way through this.
	It's not working.
	Literally within 48 hours, Chris just...
	and I was like, well, how the hell are you?
	Right.
	And in that interim, we both had, so we started talking again and we were both like, okay, look, if we're gonna do this, we gotta like, what's your plan?
	Well, I'd like to get married.
	I'd like to have kids.
	He still wanted to get married, wanted to have a lot of kids.
	We'd initially, when we dated previously, we'd always talked about having four kids or something like that.
	We both had been moving further to the rights, and now we both were kind of like, well, I mean, what about six?
	Yeah.
	You know, if we could do it, I mean, like, you know, let's have as many as we can have.
	So we were like, if we're going to do this, I'm not here to joke around.
	So we pretty quickly, we got back together at the end of January, got engaged in April, got married in October.
	So pretty bam, bam, bam.
	Good.
	Babies later this year, ideally.
	Well, not like I haven't made one yet, but I mean, we're practicing vigorously.
	Excellent.
	Excellent.
	Well, great.
	I appreciate the backstory.
	That's good to know.
	Is there anything, Chris, you wanted to add?
	Well, I mean, I don't think so.
	Not to the story.
	Not really.
	Going back to sort of the reason for the call, I guess, something that might be relevant is that Sierra is not the only...
	I've gotten to physically attack me before.
	My sister goes to Berkeley.
	Oh dear.
	Well, first of all, she's your sister.
	Secondly, Berkeley.
	She's not attacking you.
	She's bringing down the patriarchy.
	Right.
	I'm worried about her.
	Okay, fine.
	She's actually beginning to get rather sick of the social justice thing.
	She didn't quite agree with me when I said that Black Lives Matter was a terrorist organization.
	I was a truck driver at the time, so I got to swing through there every once in a while on Ikea deliveries or whatever.
	And we got to chat.
	She's quite sick of the SJW stuff, but she's got friends who are...
	Uh, illegal immigrants, for example.
	And I don't remember what the conversation was exactly, but we were at my parents' house and we were discussing, I don't know, either Trump or immigration or something.
	And, uh, she got extremely upset at me and I, I don't remember exactly how I responded, but it was something that made her storm off.
	And then she come back and attempted to, uh, Richard Spencer style clock me in the, in the face.
	I mean, she's a, you know, I'm a 17, 18-year-old girl.
	I'm a 23, 24-year-old guy with martial arts experience.
	I could basically just let her hit me and nothing bad happens.
	So I just sort of walked away from that.
	But I've also pissed off...
	Which is to say, he was asking for it, but that's okay.
	Right.
	I was dressing provocatively.
	But I've also annoyed Sierra's mom and she's never gotten into any altercation like that too.
	Now we were talking on the phone at the time.
	So, but, but she was about ready to, to murder him.
	Yeah.
	So, so this is not to excuse any of these actions, but it does make me wonder if there's something that I might have done to, um, to, to sort of instigate it.
	Because, I mean, with domestic violence, when men are committing violence against their wives, there's usually something the wife did to escalate things on a path of escalation as well.
	Well, sorry, remind me, Chris, what you said to your sister right before she clocked you.
	I actually don't remember.
	Because she had left for about a minute or so.
	And then she came back...
	But it was something rather dismissive of an emotional non-argument that she'd been making.
	Right.
	Right.
	So, in both situations, you picked female self-esteem or female vanity.
	Right.
	Well, I mean, just to throw one last detail of this into the mix, his sister is...
	Measurably, extremely brilliant.
	My mom has been tested and is in Mensa level, and I'm no fool either.
	So, I mean, these are three very, very intelligent women who were, at the very least, I've witnessed being just brought to tears by how infuriating Chris can be when you're arguing with him.
	Just...
	Yeah, it can sometimes feel a little bit like you're negotiating with a terrorist.
	Hang on.
	So what's infuriating about him when you argue?
	So he has a thing that he's tried to explain to me, because obviously, like I think most normal people do, we will argue and then have the meta-argument for the next two days afterward.
	The argument about arguing.
	He told me on a number of occasions that his dad would sometimes come home from work.
	His dad works in finance.
	And his dad would come home and not yell at anybody in particular, but just be on a very short fuse.
	Like very clearly agitated and very visibly anxious about the stock market or whatever.
	And that Chris never wanted to be that visibly out of control of his own emotions.
	Is that an okay characterization?
	Yeah, that's about right.
	So to that end, he stays extremely implacable during arguments.
	And now a lot of this stuff is stuff that we have been working on.
	Because throughout our relationship, I tried really, really, really hard to be...
	Very clear about specifically, not just like that you should do this or, you know, you should stop being like that, but very specific.
	This is the behavior that I need changed.
	Can you swap this phrase for that phrase?
	Things like that.
	I try really hard to be very, like, doable and very specific and very clear about what it is that I'm upset about.
	And it's part of why it's so frustrating when I get to a point where I feel like there's just nothing I can say to him that is making any sense at all.
	So...
	One of the things he said is that he doesn't want to be like his dad who is very visibly emotional and very visibly gets upset.
	So he maintains such a flat affect.
	Even in an argument in which I've gotten really angry and I've started to yell and to get upset.
	And to his credit, he has never yelled at me.
	He has never physically touched me during an argument.
	He has never picked up an object and thrown it.
	Has never done anything.
	But the flip side of that is also, it doesn't ever feel like he's really coming with me as far as how angry he is, too.
	He feels like he...
	As a person who's getting progressively more and more upset, it sounds like he's just staying cool and rational and being reasonable, and you look more and more like an idiot.
	And as that happens, at least I can't not continue to spiral up into more...
	To try and provoke him into reacting to me with any level of emotion at all.
	Why do you need him to react to you with the level of emotion that you want?
	If he doesn't do that, if he stays inscrutable, as they used to say, if he stays dispassionate, what's bad about that?
	What's wrong with that?
	I'm just curious.
	I don't have an answer.
	I'm just what it means to you.
	Yeah, yeah, yeah.
	No, two things.
	One is that it makes you feel like you're going a little bit crazy to be Very emotionally upset at somebody who keeps refusing to say anything that carries any emotional weight and kind of not acknowledging, not verbally acknowledging or saying, like, I get that you're upset or anything like, I mean, he never says anything to that effect.
	He deals with, he theoretically is dealing with only the argument of what I'm saying and at least in a marriage relationship, like, you can't always meet me with only the Logic and reality.
	Sometimes the biggest logic and reality thing that you need to deal with right now is the way that I feel.
	I'm your wife.
	I am an emotional person.
	You want your feelings to win a debate?
	No.
	I don't want them to win a debate, but sometimes the thing that we are arguing about carries a hurt feelings or carries a personal implication that now has metastasized.
	And just so like with the, what brought us to that level with the argument about his book is that, you know, in the process of editing, like this book was always something that was pulling time away from me in my mind.
	No, no, no, no, no, no, no.
	I'm sorry, I've given you a lot of latitude, but I gotta keep you focused on this part.
	Like, the history of the book, I can't go there.
	So, let's get down there.
	No, no, no, I know.
	There's an idea or an argument that's at the basis of this, that we just need to find out what it is.
	Whether it's right or wrong, we just need to find out what it is.
	No, so, I did think that, okay, so two things about the way that we...
	No, no, I wasn't done.
	Oh, sorry.
	I wasn't done.
	Sorry.
	There is a cliche, you know.
	And listen, you're not the first male-female couple where he's too rational and she's too emotional.
	Trust me, you are not alone in this planet and this reality.
	Sometimes if you feel like you're losing an argument rationally, you get upset and then you demand the person deal with your emotions because you're not getting what you want intellectually.
	You can't get there intellectually, right?
	And so it can feel, and I'm not saying this is happening, but it can feel like an unfair tactic.
	If, as the man, you're beginning to win the argument and then the woman gets really emotional and then demands that you deal with the emotions, it's like that's kind of a red herring because you're trying to decide something, especially when it's around a book and editing and who's going to edit and how it's going to go and so on.
	So, I mean, Chris, I don't want to speak for you, but if that does resonate, we could start from there, you know, that it's like, well, we're trying to discuss, you know, passionately or intensely or whatever, we're trying to discuss something factual-based or something practical-based or something with a defined outcome, and next thing you know, I'm being demanded to deal with feelings rather than finish the debate.
	That's exactly it.
	And ironically, it was something that I became frustrated with my dad, actually.
	Because he would, whenever he started to lose, he's a huge Obama supporter, support Hillary Clinton, huge Rachel Maddow fan.
	You know the type.
	He's not, I don't think, a progressive in his heart, but he's become sort of ideologically possessed.
	By a particular information bubble.
	And whenever he starts to lose an argument, he gets sort of flustered and flounders and gets generally agitated.
	And he was never abusive or particularly potent in his anger or anything.
	But it was the wall beyond which conversation ended.
	There was no debate with just...
	Just raw irritation and frustration.
	And I hated that growing up because we were always taught, use your head, use your head.
	I was like, well, now I use my head and there's an emotional barrier.
	It always seemed like an unfair tactic to me.
	And it was one of the reasons why I would force myself.
	And I actually cried very easily as a kid.
	And it took a lot of personal training to get myself not to do that, to be able to separate my emotions from Not completely.
	You know, you're not uninformed by your emotions, but you don't express them in a way that's unfair.
	Alright, so if someone's losing the argument, I'm not saying this is the case necessarily with your wife, but if someone's losing the argument and then they say, I'm really upset now and you're a bad person for not dealing with my emotions, that kind of feels like a dick move for me when it comes to debates.
	Well, okay, and the thing is, I know that it is, and that's why I said previously, like, I try really hard to make it very specific about, like, this behavior needs to change for this reason, and, like, this is what I need from you.
	Wait, sorry, his behavior needs to change for some reason?
	I mean, that's a general term for, like, there's...
	So, for instance, in previous arguments, when we were...
	whatever for some period of time.
	I noticed that we would have a lot of arguments that weren't like interpersonal, but they would get really heated about topics, much like what we're doing now is that we've gotten married.
	But like, he has a really annoying habit of not at all affirming or addressing the fact that he even heard you.
	And then he will say his next point, which is usually something building off of what you said.
	But it's like the difference between saying, here's an example.
	And then somebody else goes, here's a very similar example that has some a couple of striking differences.
	And then you're like, okay, are you like repeating what I just said?
	Are you agreeing with what I just said?
	I know that that's a different situation, which that also applies, but that doesn't seem to apply to what we're talking about now because of these specific differences that are the thing that make these two examples different.
	Hang on, hang on, hang on.
	You'd be married for how long now?
	Five months.
	Right.
	Can I pull age?
	Sure.
	Absolutely.
	Okay.
	15 years.
	You've chosen each other.
	You've chosen each other.
	You're going to make 322 babies together.
	So you don't get to want to change each other anymore.
	I'm serious.
	This is the one thing that is such a useless and waste of time in marriage.
	I need you to be different.
	I need you to alter what you're doing.
	I need you to take this different approach.
	I need you...
	No.
	No.
	You don't go out, research a computer, buy a computer and then say, well, I need you to have a different processor and I need you to have different memory and I need you to have different graphics card and I need you to be a different operating system and I need...
	No!
	You've chosen each other.
	There's nothing to fix with who you've chosen.
	There's an arrogance in wanting to change other people, first of all, where you say, well, you know, what he does is so annoying, and therefore he needs to change what he's doing because I'm annoyed.
	But that makes your emotions dictators.
	And by dictators, I don't mean like Kim Jong-il.
	I mean they dictate how the other person should behave.
	My feelings dictate your actions, should dictate your actions.
	No, no, no, no.
	That is a rollercoaster that you will never, ever be able to get off.
	Well, okay, hang on.
	Because the end of that story is that...
	So we would have these stupid arguments about not...
	I don't feel like you're addressing what I just said.
	And I thought a lot about it.
	I spent a lot of time thinking about it.
	And I was like, okay, the thing I need you to say is to just add yes and and then continue.
	And I swear to God, he started doing it and he started implementing it.
	Because the thing is, we both want to be having productive arguments.
	We want to talk about these things.
	And we spend a lot, I mean, for a period of time, he was truck driving.
	And so that meant I was able to be on the phone with him as much as like four or six hours a day.
	I mean, seriously, we talked so much.
	So talking is our favorite thing to do.
	And the idea that there's ever a subject that we can't talk about it, that we're really struggling with because it falls behind one of those emotional barriers is something that neither of us want to perpetuate.
	And so you're trying really hard to find strategies for how can we keep the wheels of that conversation And so things like him saying yes and.
	And things like...
	I have improved a lot in our arguments where I've started to recognize...
	Because he does a slightly different thing when we're having an argument that starts to get emotional.
	If I pull any kind of emotionality, he will...
	He hates this characterization, but I swear to God that this is what's happening.
	He kind of pulls his logic.
	His ability to give me any grace on misstepping words goes straight to zero.
	As soon as he starts feeling emotional...
	Hang on, hang on, hang on.
	Do you want him to be a pushover?
	No, no, and...
	Okay, so listen, no, listen, listen, hang on, hang on.
	And the point of this is not to talk about him, but to talk about me.
	No, I get it, I get it.
	So, Sierra, you don't want Chris to be a pushover.
	Do you want him to be rational?
	Yes.
	Do you want him to get carried away with his emotions or by his emotions to the point where he becomes irrational?
	No.
	So, so far, he's not a pushover, he's rational, and he doesn't get swept away by his emotions.
	Things that you respect, right?
	Yes.
	So, so far, how is this annoying when it's things that you want?
	Because it has been an evolution to get to this point, and we've reduced to the amount of annoyance as the techniques that we both are implementing in these arguments are improving.
	Okay, but we're not talking about tiny increments.
	We're not talking about tiny increments, Sierra.
	We're talking about you scratching him in the face.
	If it was tiny increments, we probably wouldn't be having this call, right?
	You have something in your head.
	Where that is somehow in the moment, and I know you don't like it and you haven't done it again, which is great, but there's something in you where it's like, okay, that's legitimate.
	And we need to know what you believe deep down that allows that to be legitimated in the moment in your mind, right?
	Right.
	So he behaves better than you do in...
	Debates, right, in arguments, because he doesn't get over-emotional, he hasn't scratched you, you say he'd never laid a hand on you in anger, doesn't raise his voice, right?
	So he behaves better than you, right?
	Yes.
	So who the hell are you to lecture him about how to behave when he behaves better than you?
	Why shouldn't he tell you how to behave, since he doesn't do the things that you don't like that you do?
	I don't quite understand.
	You're like the fat person lecturing the lean person on what to eat.
	He behaves better, so why shouldn't...
	Look, there are areas where you have better ideas and you're better at stuff and you should have...
	It's about the division of labor, right?
	Stuff my wife's better at, stuff that I'm better at, and we give each other those sphere of influences.
	So I'm not sure why you're lecturing him about how he should change when he behaves better than you do.
	Um...
	You don't want to give that up, right?
	You don't want to cede that authority to him that he has something to teach you in this area.
	Why not?
	not?
	What's wrong with what's wrong with him being better than you at something and teaching you how to do it, do it better?
	Well, Sierra is very competitive.
	I guess that might be a start.
	Well, if you're competitive...
	No, no, that's not the answer.
	That's a very, very nice...
	White Knight answer, Chris, let me tell you this.
	It was more of a joke than anything else.
	No, no, it wasn't.
	Come on.
	If she's competitive, then she should want to learn from you.
	Like, if I'm really competitive with something, I'd want to learn from people who are better than me so I could be even better at what I do.
	So competitive means coachable, right?
	Well, okay.
	So this, I mean, the face-scratching incident happened in December of We've had a couple of decent-sized arguments since then.
	An ancillary detail also about...
	Why are we talking here?
	This better be an important ancillary detail or this is the last interruption you get.
	Please bear with me.
	Please bear with me.
	I promise this relates.
	So I don't take any hormonal birth control.
	And so for me, my experience of my cycle is completely like my hippie organic.
	Any man who has ever proclaimed that women have wild mood swings, yes, we do.
	It's a real thing.
	I highly encourage more women to do it because I think the more you medicate yourself out of your own biological experience, the less you understand how your body works and how you work and how your actual brain works.
	But one of the things I know about myself is that in the couple of days right before the end of the cycle, I get this like...
	First of all, I'm...
	You know, obviously a number of other premenstrual things that make you weird as a girl.
	But also...
	Specifically, I really consistently feel like a three or four day period will have this low grade migraine and I will lose access to entire sections of my vocabulary.
	So like a bunch of my nouns will go away.
	Oh, so what you're saying is that there are times in debating when, for reasons that you're even worse at it, objectively, right?
	Yeah, exactly.
	We have arguments that are just as contentious and can get through them just fine at any other time of the month.
	But there are certain times when I just can't communicate effectively, and then he's not necessarily giving me very much grace either, and then that's when I'm...
	Okay, so if you know this about yourself, then you should not have debates during those times, right?
	Yes.
	Because you're mad at them.
	It's really hard, though.
	They start super stupid things.
	I mean, like every argument does, it's a stupid trigger.
	And so it's hard not to get looped into them.
	What I'm trying to do and what I'm striving for right now is I also have a really hard time...
	Letting go of an argument once I've started it.
	I don't want to, like, step away from it, but I'm trying really hard.
	No, you have a hard time letting go of an argument because Chris doesn't succumb to your emotional stuff.
	And so you don't end up being able to satisfy yourself with regards to victory or even detente because he's not emotional enough to get sucked into this stuff that you do when you can't win logically.
	Yeah, absolutely.
	It's hard to let go of a loss, I agree.
	Yeah, but it's hard to walk away.
	Cognitively, I know that it's not necessarily a loss if we come away having met minds on whatever it is that we're talking about.
	So I know cognitively, but emotionally in that moment, it's really hard to say, can we talk about this again in 10 minutes and let me sing my favorite song in my head for a little while and then come back.
	But that's what I'm trying to do.
	Okay, let's go back to what we were talking about before.
	What's wrong with him being better at debating than you are?
	Nothing.
	Nothing at all.
	I want...
	Now, that's a real thing, though.
	There's things that my wife is better at than I am, and there's lots of them.
	And she has authority in those areas.
	I don't...
	I mean, I can put in my...
	Viewpoint, I can make suggestions, but she has authority in those areas.
	Because competence.
	Right?
	In the same way, like, in a non-romantic relationship, my dentist has authority over my teeth, right?
	She says, you need to do X, Y, and Z. I'm like, okay, I'll do X, Y, and Z, right?
	Well, no, that's the...
	I have...
	I recognize that he is better at this than I am.
	So what's wrong with just surrendering to his expertise in this area?
	It's entirely a purely emotional one.
	I don't know why...
	Okay, good, good.
	So we don't know.
	You don't know.
	Okay, so that's important.
	I don't want to lose these conversations with him either.
	Like, they're always about something topical.
	Stuff about, like, you know...
	How we run the house and whatever is easily settled one way or the other.
	Because like you said, I mean, it's a division of labor.
	It's really easy to settle.
	But Ciara, you are losing them.
	Hang on.
	You are losing them because you're getting over-emotional.
	And once you get over-emotional, you get over-invested in victory.
	You get over-invested in a win-lose situation.
	And so you've already lost.
	You've already lost when you get over-emotional.
	And when the conversation shifts from whatever objective thing you're trying to debate and figure out into managing your emotional haywire-iness, then you've both lost.
	There's nothing productive that can come out of that other than, you know, well, no, nothing productive can come out of it other than the knowledge of, let's not do it that way.
	So what's wrong with him?
	Okay, tell me, Chris and Sierra, what does Chris have authority over in the marriage?
	Because you can't negotiate everything all the time.
	Like with my dentist, it's not 50-50.
	She tells me what to do with my teeth and she says, here's some polishing, here's a good, okay, fantastic.
	So, what does Chris have where he has authority?
	And what does Sierra have where she has authority?
	And this doesn't mean the other person can't disagree, but just fundamentally, right?
	I would say I have authority, simply from time invested in reading and researching and thinking, on matters of how we align ourselves politically, religiously, and...
	Socially, I think.
	Always spending time with friends.
	Is that authority that you both recognize?
	Yeah.
	We have a little bit of conflict on...
	Well, I'm not going to hedge it.
	Yeah, I mean, we have disagreements about it, but he's...
	Well, I enjoy the disagreements too.
	I'm sure you do as well.
	As far as politics, he is the primary gleaner of information.
	He's been listening to you since your kid was a toddler.
	He brought me to you and a bunch of other YouTubers.
	We don't have a TV because he didn't want one.
	We have a ton of books because we both love books.
	Right, but you don't have a lot of interpersonal disagreements about that stuff, right?
	Some of the little interpersonal arguments that we might have are occasionally...
	Chris is much more externally socially motivated than I am.
	I really am pretty much content to hang out with Chris and my mom and my one friend.
	And I'm like, I'm good.
	I'll text my one friend once a month or something and just make sure she's alive.
	I don't need a lot as far as...
	Like, social engagement.
	But Chris is much more externally motivated.
	So we, I mean, we have his best man comes to dinner probably once a week.
	And we see his other groomsmen And his girlfriend probably at least twice a month.
	And he's gotten us involved in a couple of different social groups for, like, people who are our age and our political persuasion.
	And so between those two groups, I mean, we're busy almost every weekend.
	We spend a lot of time on Sundays with my mom and my parents.
	Okay, I'm sorry.
	You're an oversharer in this conversation.
	I need shorter answers because I've got...
	Six callers tonight, okay?
	So there are areas where Chris has authority.
	And what about you, Sierra?
	Where are the areas where you have authority?
	I mean, I run everything that happens on the inside of the house.
	I mean, I do all of the housework-y things and the basic operations of the house.
	I have a background in accounting, so I run all of our finance stuff.
	I filed our taxes, stuff like that.
	The daily schedule of how we interact has been an ongoing negotiation, but I think the lion's share of it is now set by...
	It's pretty equally, but it used to be more kind of Chris-task, accomplishment-oriented.
	So, I mean, a lot of the nuance of how we run our houses is...
	It centers around Chris's schedule and Chris coming home from work and which of Chris's friends we have to see and things like that.
	And it works fairly well, right, where one person has authority and the other, right?
	Yeah.
	Yeah, I'd say so.
	Okay.
	So if one of you is better at arguments or debating or whatever it is, then that person should have authority.
	Yeah.
	I mean, why not?
	I mean, if, let's just say, Chris is better at it, less emotional, less, right, and more rational, then let him be in charge of it.
	And see if it works.
	If it doesn't work, you can try something else, but let him be in charge of it.
	Like, hey, remember we had, you know, we got this whole thing where you get too emotional and it goes to a bad place, so let me just let, no, this decide.
	And this doesn't mean you have to self-erase, because you're not self-erasing when you're giving someone authority over you that you have chosen, right?
	Mm-hmm.
	And, Sierra, are you very attractive?
	Physically?
	Yes.
	Apparently.
	Chris, what are you giving her out of ten?
	Uh, nine.
	So she's used to deferral from men, right?
	Eggs!
	Yes.
	Let me bow down before the eggs, right?
	So, Sierra, you're used to guys bending your way, so to speak, because they hope that you'll bend their way.
	But you're used to having that high sexual market value, which breeds male compliance, right?
	Yeah, definitely.
	Okay.
	So, you could get what you want, With Chris, and then you wouldn't like him as much anymore, right?
	You could get him to conform to your emotional extravagance, right?
	Or your emotional passions, right?
	You could get him to, oh, okay, well, she's passionate, so I better tiptoe her, I better step around.
	But you would not respect him if he did that.
	Do you know why you're with him?
	Because he's annoying to you.
	Because he won't bow down before you.
	Because he won't serve your emotional needs.
	You need him to not serve your emotional needs so you can remain romantically, physically, and sexually attracted to him.
	Because the moment you get what you want, what you think you want, you won't like the result.
	Guaranteed.
	I'm just staring at him.
	I'm sorry.
	The thing is, as I said, he's been watching you a long time.
	So I've definitely heard this from him before.
	If I bend too much, you will not like what I've turned into.
	That's the old joke about the woman who wants her boyfriend to shave and then breaks up with him to go for the guy with the beautiful, luxurious beard again.
	Yeah, listen...
	When you're thinking of having babies with a man, you need to test his strength.
	It's part of the courting and mating ritual, and it's not just particular to human beings.
	It's all...
	All sexually differentiated species.
	The man has to prove himself in some manner, right?
	So for some birds, it's building an elaborate nest.
	For others, it's bringing lots of food.
	You know, they have to prove themselves.
	For frogs, it's combat between the males and so on.
	And for other frogs, it's like the capacity to carry the babies up the branch on their backs.
	I mean, there's tons of fitness tests, of quality tests for men.
	And Women do this.
	And I think it's unconscious and I don't have any problem with it.
	No problem with biology or evolution or anything like that.
	But when you're thinking of having babies with a guy, you need to make sure that he's stable and strong.
	And so you get very emotional and you rage against him and you test his strength.
	Sure, that's perfectly natural.
	And you want him to conform to you, and he's put in this position, right, which is a very uncomfortable position for a man, which is, if you loved me, you would conform to my irrationality.
	Well, how can a man win with that, right?
	I mean, you don't want to conform and serve and feed irrationality or over-emotionalism or subjectivity or whatever it is.
	You don't, right?
	But at the same time, the woman's saying, well, if you loved me, you would.
	Bow down to me in this area.
	And Chris is particularly indomitable.
	Right!
	That's why you're with him!
	I know.
	Like, you know, I want a man who's going to be very strong in the world, who's going to stand up for what he believes in so that I can admire his spine as straight as his penis.
	Oh, he's not bowing to me.
	That's really, really annoying.
	Well, come on, pick one, right?
	Do you want a guy who's going to fold to your irrational demands, or do you want a guy you can respect and love, who's going to be a great provider?
	And, and, do you want to have children, Sierra, who are going to be able to wrap Debbie's steady spine around their little finger, who are just going to play him like a Stradivarius?
	No.
	You need him to be strong so your kids don't go mental, right?
	You need him to not be manipulated by your children's emotional storms.
	It doesn't mean don't be emotionally available and it doesn't mean don't be emotionally accessible and don't be sensitive, but it just means don't roll over.
	Because imagine if you push him around and then your kids come along and they push him around, what's going to happen to his capacity to go out into the world and get resources by not being pushed around?
	Not, uh...
	It won't go well, right?
	It's not, yeah.
	One can't live one way in public and one way at home and expect to keep the two separate.
	It won't work.
	No, it won't work.
	It won't work.
	It won't work.
	You need him to be annoying.
	I'm sorry.
	It's just the way that it works.
	Now, you don't have to spend the rest of your life being annoyed by him.
	But understand that him not bending to your emotionality...
	It's exactly what makes him fit to be the father of your children.
	Don't fuck with that.
	Well, I mean, I have no intention.
	You have some intention.
	Figuratively, figuratively.
	You have some intention.
	You have some intention.
	I have many intentions, but...
	Listen, Chris, I don't mean to speak on your behalf, so how am I doing?
	Spot on.
	I've been just letting you roll because you're nailing all the points.
	Right, right.
	Love it.
	Yeah.
	Enjoy his strength.
	Take comfort and security in the fact that he's not going to be pushed around by emotionality.
	But it's so annoying.
	It is.
	I absolutely understand it.
	It's so attractive at the same time and so annoying.
	It is.
	It is.
	But you know what?
	Don't you have girlfriends that you can manipulate emotionally, just get it out of your system and leave the man in your life alone?
	Well, her mom is a professor of psychology, so her best friend isn't easy to manipulate that way.
	Oh, God.
	And how does it work, Sierra, in your family?
	Your family of origin, I mean by that.
	So, does your mom do any of this stuff?
	I mean, where did you do?
	You seem quite fluent in this, and maybe it's hormonal, or maybe it's whatever.
	I'll give you the cliff notes on my parents.
	So, my...
	So my parents are a very non-traditional situation.
	My dad was a Coast Guard rescue swimmer in the 80s when that first became a thing.
	So he swam with Navy SEALs and stuff like that.
	He's used to bodybuild and he met Arnold Schwarzenegger at the gym and worked out with him.
	My dad is a big guy who looks like a Neanderthal.
	My mom got a PhD in psychology.
	My parents got married very, very young when they were 20 and 21 so that my mom could follow my dad around while he was in the Coast Guard.
	They moved up to Seattle in the early 90s and she was at the time the only college teacher at the community college where she got a job who was willing to teach online.
	That was a really big deal because Obviously, the internet became a really big deal.
	And so she was a forerunner.
	And they figured out pretty quickly that like, after my dad had gotten out of the Coast Guard, they figured out that his entire income was going to his uniforms and my daycare and stuff like that when I was first born.
	Or first, you know, like a toddler.
	And they realized that it just didn't make financial sense for him to continue working.
	Because I think this internet thing is really going to get going.
	And I think I'm going to be able to teach a lot and stuff.
	So My parents...
	My dad was a stay-at-home dad from 1995 until now.
	He never went back to work.
	And my mom...
	Okay, I need to...
	I'm sorry, again.
	I mean, what I'm asking is the psychodynamics between your parents, not their resumes.
	Yeah, that's what I'm getting to.
	Sorry.
	So, like, that's their...
	I mean, my dad is...
	Yeah.
	Yes, go ahead and summarize.
	Her parents are direct, no bullshit.
	They have zero tolerance for lying, and they'll call each other out if they think that they're beating around the bush or trying to manipulate each other.
	Yeah.
	Well, and then they also do the, like, argue to the point of, like, we're both slightly crazy, and then realize how crazy it got, and then stop and go back to being normal.
	And so, like, it's the bell curve of their arguments.
	We'll get, like, escalated to something silly.
	Do they have defined areas of authority that each other differ to?
	Absolutely.
	Yeah.
	Right.
	So then where do you get it from?
	I mean, surely they've told you about all of these areas of authority and how you need to divvy up division of labor and, you know, you hopefully have married someone that you trust with your money and your children and, you know, so surrendering to the authority of someone that you trust is not an act of self-destruction but an act of self-affirmation in that you say, well, of course I will give this person all my money.
	I trust them.
	I mean, why would I marry them if I didn't trust them, right?
	It's an affirmation.
	Of your choice of partners.
	So is the stuff that I'm talking about, have your parents talked about it with you?
	Not, I mean, not this particular thing and not in this particular way.
	My parents have been really, I don't even want to say it's compromised because there are obviously things that my mom still, you know, 30 years into marriage is complaining about, about the things that my dad does that are just, you know, His various masculine idiosyncrasies that annoy the crap out of her.
	Hang on, hang on.
	Your mother is annoyed after 30 years by your father's certain aspects of your father's masculinity.
	Yes.
	Right.
	So that's where you're getting it from.
	You understand?
	You can continue to be annoyed by the fact that a man is a man.
	Somewhat less emotional.
	A little bit more emotionally stable.
	Under stress, the reason center activates in a man rather than the emotional center which activates in a woman.
	Guess what?
	We're different.
	Celebrate it.
	Love it.
	Enjoy it.
	Men and women emotionally fit together as nice as our naughty squishy bits do.
	Enjoy it.
	Don't try and turn him into you.
	You won't like it.
	Yes.
	No, I know I won't.
	And I don't want to.
	You kind of do.
	But I want to also make it clear.
	It's not like my parents...
	It's not like my mom constantly natters on about my dad and how annoying he is.
	It's like there are the...
	Just like there's the one or two occasional things that pop up that are annoying that she...
	She doesn't pull any punches either, so she shares that those are things that are annoying.
	And they both try to, you know, accommodate each other.
	But yeah, I mean, my mom is like a person holding on to this bull of a person who is my dad, who just runs around and does all of his guy stuff, and she's along for the ride on those things, and he's with her on whatever income thing she does.
	Does she view her continued annoyance for your father's character As a fault, as a problem, as an immaturity on her part.
	Uh, no.
	Right.
	So it's not a problem for her, which is why it never gets solved, right?
	Or if there is a problem, the problem is your father's behavior, not her wanting to change it.
	Yeah, I can.
	I feel like it's a slight oversimplification because they both try to be really forgiving about stuff.
	No, just give up your desire to change the person.
	It won't work.
	And it's a way of condemning your own choice of the person.
	When you choose someone, give them all your heart.
	Here's the bit where I lecture you in a most annoying way, so...
	Get comfortable.
	When you love someone give them all your heart.
	Give them all your trust.
	Give them all your resources.
	Give them everything.
	If they hurt you Then move on, right?
	But you have chosen this man.
	You are married.
	You are planning a life together until death.
	Do you part in sickness and in health for better or for worse?
	And there's worse, right?
	You get sick.
	Your kids may, heaven forbid, get sick.
	There's going to be challenges, tough stuff in your life.
	That's the nature of being alive.
	Give that person everything.
	Give that person the exalted status of always being right.
	And you can both do this.
	And I know it's complicated and there's navigation.
	This is not a magic spell.
	But every time you say, this person is annoying, you're saying, I don't trust my judgment.
	To yourself.
	Why would I choose to be with an annoying person?
	Why would I choose to get married to someone who's annoying?
	Who's unemotional?
	Who's this?
	Who's that?
	Whatever.
	Emotionally unavailable?
	No.
	Be with someone or don't be with someone.
	Don't be with someone like one foot on the boat, one foot on the pier.
	One foot in, one foot out.
	I'm there, but I'm hedging.
	I'm in, but I'm out.
	I'm here, but I'm judging.
	I love, but I'm reserved.
	I approve, and I disapprove.
	No.
	Give that person everything.
	Everything.
	Why not?
	It's called love.
	Give that person.
	Don't reserve this little acid bombs of I disapprove and this is a problem and you should change this and this is unacceptable to me and I don't like this and you've got to manage my feelings.
	You've got to change what you're doing so I feel better.
	Oh my God.
	It will turn into a nightmare in a way.
	It doesn't need to be that way.
	Give the person everything.
	If you end up...
	I don't know.
	I think you guys are going to do very well, and I think you're going to have a wonderful life together.
	You just got to sand down this, yeah, well, but, you know?
	There's no...
	You know, you'll listen back to this.
	I hope you will listen back to this, and you'll hear, like, I gave this great speech about...
	Leave him the way he is.
	Or if you break him, you'll regret it.
	And you're like, but he's so annoying.
	The yes but is the killer of true and glorious love.
	I do love him, but there is this thing that...
	Right?
	Well, first of all, if you want to start criticizing other people's imperfections, you better damn well be perfect yourself.
	And I know for a fact that you're not, and I'm not, and no one is.
	So I don't like this.
	I'm going to stand up here and I'm going to hand out these little cards.
	This is a good card because you did something nice and right.
	This is a bad card because you did something...
	Like, you know exactly what is right and what is wrong throughout the long arc of life and in the long trials and joys of the future.
	You know...
	What he's doing is right or what he's doing is bad and he should just change it.
	Well, how about you try changing?
	You're handing out the black and white cards of approval and disapproval.
	And if you can't do that, don't expect someone else to change.
	If you can't change in yourself that which finds someone you claim to love annoying at times, don't expect them to change their behavior if you can't even change your perspective.
	Your own perspective is infinitely easier to change than trying to convince someone else to change.
	There is an arrogance that we all have.
	Trust me.
	I mean, I've been there.
	I've been there.
	We all have this arrogance, which is to say, I know what you should and should not do.
	I know what is right.
	You're being annoying and you should change because objectively, universally, morally, abstractly, from my perfect standpoint of perfect behavior, I know for a fact that the fault is 100% yours and you must change.
	Good Lord.
	That's the script that runs in our heads that comes from vanity and a fear of the giant relaxing surrender called giving someone everything.
	He's right.
	He's not annoying.
	He's perfect.
	Nothing needs to change in him.
	Nothing.
	Can you say that?
	Can you think that even?
	Nothing needs to change in him.
	And the only thing that needs to change in you is thinking that something needs to change in Him.
	Doesn't mean you can't disagree.
	Doesn't mean you can't speak your mind against what the other person...
	I get all of that.
	But nothing needs to change in Him.
	Nothing.
	Because you already chose Him.
	And you don't get to tinker with what you already chose.
	Does that make any sense?
	Yeah, absolutely.
	Not to make this call too long.
	I know you have a lot of other people on the line.
	But I, being 26, have got a long way to go still.
	And I don't plan on being the same person even five years from now, let alone 10.
	And I came into this marriage encouraging my wife to help me become the sort of person that I want to be.
	And to continue on that, is there a good way to navigate that?
	Or is it better to keep the mindset of the other person is perfect?
	And I don't know how to phrase it.
	How do you navigate that desire to continue to improve while at the same time accepting that they're perfect as they are because you chose them?
	Is a five year old short?
	Just because she's five?
	I suppose so.
	No.
	No, a five-year-old is not short just because she's five.
	She's shorter than someone who's 10 or 15 or 20, but she's not short because she's a kid.
	She is perfect in her height for where she is.
	Does that mean she's never going to grow?
	Does that mean she's never going to get taller?
	No.
	It's perfect for a baby to shit its own pants.
	It is not perfect for me to shit my own pants, you understand?
	The baby is perfect in shitting, and you'll find this green stuff that's like weird, the first one.
	It's like, don't freak out, right?
	But the baby, and babies have really, you know, big asses.
	Big asses.
	It's like a convention of Jamaican nannies.
	They have big asses.
	And it's perfect for them.
	It's absolutely perfect.
	Now, you wouldn't necessarily want to be, say, 25 with an ass like that.
	But babies, it's perfect.
	It's what they need, right?
	Babies' eyes are disproportionately large, right?
	Your eye is the only thing that doesn't change in size from birth to death.
	So they're disproportionately large relative to your body, which is why all the Disney princesses have these giant eyes to remind you of babies.
	It's all this creepy pedophilia crap.
	But anyway, the baby's eyes are weird.
	If you had, like, the head-size body ratio if you were an adult that you had as a baby, you'd be, like, on death's door.
	So babies are perfect.
	And we love them for the perfection of their physicality, and we love them for the perfection of...
	Of their mental abilities, which, you know, if you remain a baby your whole life, you're severely cognitively impaired.
	But a baby is perfect, and we love a baby for being perfect.
	Does that mean we don't expect a baby to grow?
	No, because part of the baby's perfection is the potentiality.
	Part of the baby's perfection is that I remember watching my daughter struggling and fighting mightily to learn how to turn over.
	Just roll over something we all just take for granted.
	Oh, I left my coffee over there?
	Roll over and get it, right?
	My baby is perfect in her potentiality.
	And you, Chris, are perfect in your potentiality.
	Sierra, you are perfect in your potentiality.
	You do not need to be pulled.
	All you need is sunshine and rain.
	Like, you pull on a rose bush, what happens?
	You just rip it out.
	Just pull it out.
	Pull it out of the earth and it dies.
	You don't pull at it.
	Its growth is innate within its very structure, within its biological structure.
	It gets sunlight.
	It gets nutrients.
	It gets water.
	It's going to grow.
	You guys get love and acceptance and trust.
	You're going to grow.
	You are perfect as you are.
	This does not mean that you never change.
	Because your potentiality for change is part of your perfection.
	And trusting each other that you will grow.
	Based on love and acceptance and support...
	Rather than nagging and nudging and pushing and pulling and punishing and praising, manipulation.
	That's not how things grow.
	That's how they can form, which is the opposite of growth.
	You know, if you're a tree, you grow as your nature is.
	If you are clinging ivy, you grow as the wall is, right?
	You can't grow on your own.
	You're attached to something else.
	You're dependent for support upon something else, and you never achieve independence.
	If you have, like, you've seen these big ivy-covered houses in England and other places.
	If the house falls down, so does the ivy.
	Whereas if the house falls down, the trees in the garden do not.
	Trust that growth will occur because the perfection that you chose for each other is curiosity, is intelligence, is humility, is a willingness and a desire to learn new things and explore new things.
	You are perfect in your potentiality.
	An adult who is the height of a five-year-old child has had stunted growth.
	But the child is perfect, though short, relative to an adult.
	It's perfect for its own height.
	And the perfection and the potentiality go hand in hand.
	And if you trust each other to grow based upon love, support, curiosity, all the things that you fell in love for and that you married for, If you trust each other to grow, which you should, because you're calling into this show, which means growth is going to happen no matter what.
	You've got the sunlight.
	You've got the nutrients.
	You've got the water.
	You're going to grow.
	You don't need to push and poke and pull and drag and...
	It's going to happen of its own accord.
	That is the perfection that you have found in each other.
	Trust that.
	You're perfect as you are, but perfect doesn't mean immobility.
	A baby is perfect.
	As it is and in its potentiality, and the same is true for you.
	Well, that's a beautiful answer to what was formerly a difficult question.
	I do those once in a while.
	I won't tell you where they come from, but you can check out the video and watch me do my acrobatics, but that's what I would say.
	No, we're mouthing to each other our awe at the off-the-cuff analogies and metaphors that just...
	Just sort of stream from the show.
	It's one of the reasons why we enjoy listening so much.
	This is how I can afford this magnificent studio wherein I stand.
	Also known as the Great Wall of Ice Thought.
	Alright, can I move on to the next caller?
	Have we had enough utility?
	Absolutely.
	Thanks so much, Stefan.
	It was helpful?
	It was useful?
	Yes.
	Very much so.
	Good.
	Keep us posted and best of luck with your rehearsals, I think you were saying before.
	Alright, thanks very much, guys.
	Talk to you later.
	Alright, well up next we have Nicole.
	Nicole wrote in and said, With the corruption and hypocrisy in the Catholic Church, i.e.
	Vatican City holding the most restrictive immigration policy, Pope Francis often contradicting doctrines and Paris' adapting to political agendas, how can I believe in Catholicism as the true religion?
	Is it too naive to think the corruption can be fixed?
	That's from Nicole.
	Hey Nicole, how you doing?
	Hi, I'm good.
	How are you?
	All right.
	Crisis of faith, is that where you're at?
	Yes, that adequately sums it up.
	Right.
	I'm sorry for that.
	What are the aspects of papal choices or edicts or decisions that have been made lately?
	What are the ones that are bothering you the most?
	Just how parishes won't talk about modern issues like homosexuality or Even abortion, because a lot of parishioners in my church, they're pro-choice, which completely contradicts the Catholic faith.
	Like, my pastors won't call them out on that.
	And then I know recently Pope Francis even advocated for a priest getting married, which is not Catholic.
	I mean, we have Catholic priests, but you have to become Episcopalian and then transfer into the Catholic Church.
	Right.
	Right.
	And were there other things that you have found objectionable that the Pope has said lately?
	Well, he said with the homosexuality, like, who am I to judge, which is controversial.
	I mean, it's true, but it seems like he's pushing towards accepting active homosexuality.
	Right, right.
	He seems lefty to me.
	He is.
	Yeah, he seems like a leftist to me.
	And he seems to be following most of the leftist script.
	And that to me is a challenge.
	And, you know, he's urging, I assume he's urging Catholics to have fewer children to make the world more sustainable?
	Yes.
	Yeah, I don't think it's the first world having fewer children that's going to make the world more sustainable.
	You know, if you look at the exploding populations in Africa and other places, I think he kind of needs to go to the third world, and particularly, you know, to Muslims who are having lots of children, particularly in Europe, and he needs to go to them and say, listen, guys...
	You know, especially now that you've moved to the first world, you need to have fewer kids because, you know, you're used to having all these kids because you come from poorer countries where you need the kids for your old age and so on.
	But now you've got pensions and all of this kind of good stuff and you can make enough money, those of you who get jobs, in the West.
	So he needs to go and talk to third world migrants, particularly to Europe, and try and convince them to have fewer children.
	I haven't really noticed him doing that, right?
	He has.
	Instead, he's been talking about political candidates offside, which he shouldn't be doing either.
	Right.
	Right.
	Yeah, and this idea that you should take in more and more migrants, that that's sort of charitable stuff.
	I fail to see the difference between your average hard socialist, leftist, multiculturalist, and the current pope.
	And Christians, as I'm sure you're aware, Christians are being relentlessly persecuted around the world at the moment.
	Right.
	And it would be my hope and goal that the leader of, you know, the massive Catholic Church might have something to say about the persecution of Christians around the world.
	So, in Canada, the last Prime Minister would put a priority on Christians from the Third World coming to Canada because they were persecuted minorities in many countries.
	I don't know.
	Maybe I'm not an expert on what the Pope has said, but I haven't seen a whole lot of the Pope saying, we've really got to rescue Christians from persecution in the Middle East, or persecution in Islamic countries or other countries.
	We've really got to go in there and rescue the Christians because...
	Because Christ is the way to heaven, and it's different from what is practiced in other religions, and I assume that he believes it's the only way, since he is, of course, head of the Catholic Church.
	And so it just seems it's very, very globalist, and it's very, very lefty, and to me, it's like seeing an extreme leftist sociology prof in a funny hat.
	And the Pope isn't infallible constantly.
	It's only when he's given a doctrine.
	But I know that there's corruption in the Catholic Church and I still want to believe in it.
	Right.
	Well, I mean, the Church is a human institution, obviously, and I know that the Pope has certain aspects of infallibility and the direct line to God and so on, so I don't know how things are resolved in the Catholic Church.
	Priests, of course, may sin, being human and fallible.
	The Church as a whole may manifest sin and be human and fallible, but the Pope— Again, you know, let me know if I go astray on Catholic doctrine, but there is an infallibility to the Pope that is really quite a challenge to overcome in terms of human fallibility.
	Yes, for some of the time, because I think the Catholic Church has narrowed it down to it only being when he's given a specific doctrine, and so that will compensate for his human error, because obviously no human is perfect.
	Right.
	Right.
	So, what does this mean for you, emotionally and intellectually?
	Well, I'm just trying to figure out, can a religion be true even though there is corruption?
	Well, no, and it depends what you mean by the word religion, right?
	The definition is everything.
	So, tell me what you mean a little bit more about that.
	So, a faith of the truth of God.
	I guess in his will, like how to live out life, can that be a true understanding and still have corruption and the teaching authority?
	Yeah.
	Do you think...
	It's a big question and it may be a nonsense question, but I'll ask it anyway.
	Do you think that...
	The Pope could ever be a tool of other ideas or agencies in the world.
	Definitely.
	That's what's happening with the liberal agenda.
	Right.
	So who's running the Pope if the Pope is being run?
	Do you think?
	Well, it's supposed to be God.
	No, no, no.
	But I mean the liberal agenda thing.
	Oh.
	Gosh, I don't know.
	Right.
	Right.
	I don't...
	This globalist thing, which is communism 2.0, because it's all about central planning, big government, extra bureaucracy, state control of property and resources, and the destruction of private property and limited government, and I mean, just all this sort of stuff.
	And...
	The complicity of religious leaders in this, it's not just occurring in the papacy.
	There are, of course, religious leaders who are taking enormous amounts of money to help resettle these economic migrants from the Middle East.
	And that is...
	That is a challenge.
	I mean, again, I'm no theologian, but I can't understand, I can't really imagine how it can be theologically defensible to, as Christians, to bring in members of a religion whose leaders are persecuting other Christians.
	I mean, I just, I don't quite understand that.
	I mean, there's tolerance, and then there's just, I don't even know what to call it.
	So there is a fair amount of corruption, I think, going on in the Christian world.
	You know, the 30 pieces of silver from the state.
	So I would say that your relationship is with Jesus, and your relationship is with God, and your relationship is with the divinity of the text and the conversations that you have with God.
	The human intermediary, to me, is always...
	Prone to corruption.
	Always prone to corruption.
	So, can you be a Christian and question the Pope?
	Well, yes, of course.
	Can you be a Catholic and question the Pope?
	I don't know, because I don't know enough about the doctrine.
	I think that there are arguments.
	It depends.
	It depends in what capacity he's speaking.
	Certainly, if he's saying, vote for such and such, or elect the policies of such and such, then I think that's a fairly secular thing to talk about.
	If he's invoking the big giant lever of infallibility, then you have a challenge.
	You have a challenge, because...
	Would God allow a pope into power who would go against what God would want?
	Well, certainly I can see that the infusion of anti-Christian elements into the West, which the pope seems to be praising, right?
	I mean, washing the feet of this, that, and the other.
	I can't imagine how Jesus would be in approval of that.
	And, I mean, Jesus was willing to go against the Jews of his time, right?
	I mean, and significantly and dangerously so.
	And the Jews were closer than other religions to Christianity.
	So, again, this is not my area of expertise at all, but I would certainly say that your conscience is Would be aligned with God and with Christianity and with the Bible, rather than an individual.
	You know, maybe a bad pope is a test of faith.
	I mean, I don't know.
	Maybe it's hard to say.
	Okay, yes.
	So, like, the pope could have been a mistake and Catholicism still be true, like, in the election process.
	Because the pope is decided by the Vatican Council.
	Yep.
	But the Vatican Council claims its authority, I would assume, not just because they're dudes, but because they pray and they have a relationship with God, and God will instruct them on the best Pope, right?
	Which they may not have achieved this last round.
	And I know a lot of the hype with Pope Francis was because he was the first American priest, because he's from South America.
	Right.
	And there was a lot of communist infiltration within South America, even within certain areas within the Church.
	So, you know, has the satanic doctrine of communism infested itself even into the highest reaches of the clergy?
	I would leave that to, you know, I would pray on that if I were in your shoes and had your faith.
	I would pray on that, and that this might be a very large test of piety.
	Definitely.
	Does that help at all?
	Yes, it does.
	Is there anything else that you wanted to talk about?
	Can the corruption be fixed if it's manifested that far?
	Yes.
	Until we're actually in camps, the corruption can be fixed.
	Right?
	While there's still a shred of free speech out there, the corruption can still be fixed.
	And that is the challenge.
	That is a challenge.
	But no, don't give up, right?
	You know that despair is the first and last tool of the devil, right?
	You're helpless.
	You can't do anything.
	The powers that be are too big.
	There's too much of a social edifice.
	Everyone believes things differently from you.
	Nobody will listen.
	Nobody will reason.
	Nothing, nothing, nothing can be done.
	A total self-fulfilling prophecy.
	Europe is lost!
	Well, if everyone believes that...
	I guess it's true, but I don't know that it's true if people don't all believe that.
	So, no.
	While there is life, while there is breath, there is hope.
	While there is this incredible communication device called the internet, there is hope.
	While there are people out there willing to speak the truth, to spread the truth, to support the truth, to fund the truth, there is hope.
	Never say die, never give in, never surrender.
	Until they close that last cement door in your face or drop you into a six-foot grave.
	And even then, hopefully your works will live on and inspire people after you're dead.
	So give up nothing.
	Give back nothing.
	Surrender nothing.
	It all can be fixed.
	Virtue or vice is a matter of willpower, passion, and commitment.
	That's all it is.
	If the bad people care more...
	If the bad people care more, then they win.
	If you care more, then you win.
	And this basic reality is so foundational.
	What does everybody say to you all the time?
	You see this all the time in the world.
	It's either explicit or it's implicit.
	And what they say to you is, can't be fixed.
	It can't be fixed.
	Nothing can be changed.
	This is the cycle of history!
	Yeah, yeah, because the cycle of history always had the International Global Telecommunications Network of the Internet before, and new voices are being raised in opposition to evil that had no scope before.
	You know, I know he may not be your favorite guy, but think of Martin Luther.
	Martin Luther looked at the corruption of the Catholic Church, what was called Christendom back then.
	Right?
	And he called them out.
	He called them out.
	So for those who don't know, he started his life as a monk and therefore celibate under the Catholic doctrine and ended his life as a married man with lots of children because he split, provoked a break with the Catholic Church.
	And early 16th century nailed 94 theses to a church door in Wittenberg, Germany.
	And one of his major beefs was these things called indulgences.
	Do you remember those?
	Do you study those?
	Yes, the pain for sins to be removed.
	Yeah, I mean, and ahead of time too, right?
	So the idea was that the Catholic Church was in repository of an excess of virtue.
	They had it stored up in some psychic vat somewhere.
	They were in possession of an excess of virtue in the world, because Jesus was far more virtuous than he needed to be to get into heaven, as were many of the saints and so on.
	And therefore, the church had this store of this excess of virtue.
	Now, if you had been a bad man or woman, you had done something that was a sin, not a mortal sin, but a venal sin, Then you could go to the church and you could say, okay, can you scrape off some of that excess goodness and just rub it on me?
	Give me a deep tissue massage of excess Jesus virtue.
	Hey, we have a show title.
	And that way I can still get into heaven.
	And the priest would charge you for that, for this imaginary extra virtue that they possessed, and therefore you could get it and wash away your sins.
	And they would sell you...
	Time out of purgatory, right?
	So purgatory is where you go after you die, according to some doctrines, and you stay in purgatory for 10,000 years or 50,000 years or 500 years or whatever it is, and you slowly become purified.
	That way you get into heaven.
	And so they would say, well, if you give me...
	Twelve gold pieces.
	I can knock 5,000 years off your time in purgatory with this excess virtue I have from Jesus and the saints.
	And he found this particularly reprehensible because what happened was it got to the point where people were saying, well, I have a tidy little scrumpet, a fit bird down the road.
	I'm going to go for a naughty weekend next weekend, and I'm married, so it's a sin, but I need to pay you.
	I'm going to pay you ahead of time.
	Give me that excess virtue so I don't feel bad while I'm doing it.
	So you were able to buy...
	Indulgences.
	Ahead of time, you were able to rent salvation from sins that were upcoming.
	And he found this and many of the other things reprehensible.
	Now, he had no internet.
	He had no telephone, no television, no nothing, right?
	He just had the power.
	He was also, I think, one of the first to translate the Bible into the vernacular, right?
	Into the local tongue.
	Because before it had been largely kept in reserve in...
	In Latin, right?
	So only the priests could really understand what was going on.
	And people read the Bible and everyone took different interpretations and you end up with a lot of different Christian sects and so on.
	It's a very, very brief history.
	But I think it could be fairly safely said that Martin Luther faced a more corrupt church with far fewer resources with which to fight it.
	Yes.
	I'm not saying you necessarily want to go and split Christendom down the middle or anything, or shatter it into a million pieces, but you know what one man can do?
	Another man can do.
	Don't surrender to the despair.
	It's tempting.
	It's tempting because...
	For many people, and for a lot of our minds, it is better to not try than to try and fail.
	To not try and solve the corruptions and the evils in the world.
	It is better to not try to solve the corruptions and evils in the world.
	Because if you try and you fail, you are in full knowledge of your agony.
	Whereas if you just kind of let the evil creep slowly overgrow your mind, your heart, and your soul, It's like freezing to death.
	When you freeze to death, you kind of feel warm, and then you go to sleep, and then you're dead.
	To die in battle is terrifying, but at least you have a chance to win.
	To die in the creeping cold of expanding evil is to sleep and never to wake.
	Now, evil, of course, wants you to believe that evil is inevitable because it wants you to put down your weapons and crawl into the ice cave of eventual demise without them having to lift a finger because evil is fundamentally weak and evil fundamentally works through the state and through despair and these two work together.
	So if evil can get the state to shut you up, if evil can get you to stop you telling the truth, then evil has won because the opposite of evil is the truth.
	With the truth, you get love.
	And when you get love, you get something to fight for.
	It's that old rap song.
	If you never know truth, then you never know love.
	It's true.
	You get the truth by being honest, by being outspoken, by being direct, by having courage in the face of attacks for honesty.
	And when you get the truth and you have the courage to speak it, then you can build a world that has things in it you want to love and to protect and to keep.
	And the reason why people say don't have kids is when you don't have kids, you don't fight for the future as much.
	Why bother?
	I mean, you fight when you're a parent.
	To keep the world open and free for your children, Partly.
	I mean, for the joy of fighting and for the virtue and honor and integrity of fighting, but also because you want your kids to grow up at least with the freedoms that you had as a child.
	And if they can convince you to not have children, they can convince you to be what is even worse than in despair.
	At least if you're in despair, you know that something bad is happening.
	You've just decided to give up and surrender to it.
	But what's even worse?
	You're actually helping them destroy it.
	But with the other way, you're actually helping them destroy it.
	Well, the worst thing for me, other than outright evil, which you're never going to listen to this or whatever, right?
	But the worst sin than despair to me is frivolity.
	It's giggling at important and significant things.
	It's this constant breakdown of anything deep and important into smears and sexual innuendo.
	And, I mean, you know, it's funny.
	There's a funny thing on the internet, and I don't know where it comes from or what it's all about.
	And I'm sorry for the coarseness, but, you know, people are like, well, if you could just stop sucking Trump's dick for five minutes, you know, like, it's this, like, base...
	Coarse sexualization of, you know, important ideas.
	That is what I mean by frivolity.
	It doesn't just mean like giddiness and silliness.
	It means taking important things and making them ridiculous or making them gross or making them base or making them rank and animalistic.
	I'm sorry?
	It's terrible.
	It is.
	It is.
	And the frivolity of like, well, I don't know how I ended up on this weird part of the internet.
	It's not an argument.
	Or the people who just write ZZZZ in comments.
	It's frivolity.
	It's not an argument.
	It's just this attitude that nothing's particularly important.
	Nothing's particularly interesting.
	You know, like the number of times if I do a podcast, it's over eight minutes long, or video, it's over eight minutes long.
	People are like...
	TLDR! Too long, don't read.
	It's like, well, I'll take your TLDR and raise you one ADHD, you frivolous, empty person.
	I'm sorry that the salvation of Western civilization can't be encapsulated into one jerk-off scene in gay porn.
	Sorry, it's a little bit longer.
	Hey, I just did that too.
	It's just a little bit longer, a little bit more complex, a little bit more involved in that.
	You don't have 20 to 25 minutes to help save Western civilization because...
	Because why?
	You know the people who are typing that are the least busy people in the known universe.
	Well...
	I might have to go and check that the little edge I cut off the milk bag is perfectly straight, because I sure hate it when it pours and goes off to one side.
	So I'm in a hurry, can't watch your videos about saving Western civilization.
	No time.
	It's true that my forefathers were dragged off to war in Europe for six long, straight, brutal, ugly, human disassembly machining years.
	But your videos are a little long, so I just don't think I can really get round to sitting through them.
	I mean, yeah, it's true that I could, you know, use that two-click YouTube feature to speed them up to one and a half if you find them just a little slow.
	Not busy at all, but too busy, too distracted, too frivolous to have any gravitas, to have any seriousness about these issues.
	So, they will try, and they are companions to the great devils of despair, these frivolous people, these distractions.
	They are the companions of despair.
	Because despair is great terrible things are happening and you're helpless to stop them.
	But at least it's reminding you that great terrible things are happening.
	But despair teams up with the frivolous.
	Because the frivolous are constantly indicating to you that you have no good companions with which to join the fight.
	So it's one thing to be a German panzer division marching across barbed wire in France in 1940.
	That's the despair.
	I can't win against a tank.
	I'm going to surrender.
	That's the one thing.
	But the frivolity is when you look to the left and the right for your boon companions and warding off the Wehrmacht, the panzer divisions, and to the left you see a clown and to the right you see a joker.
	Neither of them are armed and they have those little horns and one of them has a fart cushion.
	And that's your despair.
	You see how it works together?
	The despair of the tanks and the frivolous people say, there's no one here to join you in this fight because we're all frivolous and dumb and useless.
	And that is often the final nail in the coffin in people's despair.
	But if you show up to a tank fight in a clown costume, you deserve tread marks on your huge shoes.
	All right.
	Does that help at all?
	Yes.
	Good.
	All right.
	Well, thanks very much for the call.
	I will move on to the next caller, but I appreciate your question and do let us know what you decide.
	Thank you so much.
	All right.
	Thanks.
	Alright, up next we have Robert.
	Robert wrote in and said, Capitalism is best at dealing with things where the cost and benefits are measured in money.
	Socialism is best at dealing with things where the cost and benefits are measured in human lives.
	For example, socialism is bad at running a for-profit business.
	Capitalism is bad at running your local police department and court system.
	At least I don't want my trial to be run by the free market.
	Since in effect every form of government is on some level a form of socialism, is it possible to ever get the right balance of capitalism and socialism in a society?
	And if so, what might it look like?
	If not, why is it doomed to fail?
	That's from Robert.
	Oh hey Robert, how you doing tonight?
	Ah, doing fine.
	Glad to be here at the Thunderdome of Philosophical Debate.
	How are you doing?
	Excellent.
	I should bring my Tina to the Tina Turner fishnets and wig.
	Are you ready for a tussle?
	Yes, I am.
	Good, good.
	Okay.
	I'm not sure I understand this first division.
	Costs and benefits are measured in money, whereas costs and benefits are measured in human lives.
	Can you just sort of help me to...
	Okay, I'll...
	I understand that I do a lot of game theory, so I look at a lot of systems and how to break them down personally for hobby.
	But I also deal with a lot of people who are mentally and physically disabled.
	I help people transitioning out of mental hospitals.
	So I deal with a lot of not-for-profits and I volunteer, et cetera, et cetera.
	So I'm down in the trenches.
	And what I've seen is, listening to you, I agree with you a lot.
	Capitalism is definitely the way to go for 90% of things when it comes to government.
	But I've dealt with the private sector with some of these group homes, and I've worked for the state.
	And while the state definitely wastes a lot of money, when it comes to the actual treatment of the people, I would never send anybody to these private organizations.
	And it isn't just like one or two bad apples, it's pretty consistent.
	There are some places that try really hard, but it's been my experience that there's usually one dominant, really strong personality which pushes ahead with the private organization, and those are the ones that work, but the minute that one strong leader fades and you get the social justice warriors making a committee, it's doomed.
	However, in my experience, the private charities, private Non-for-profits, they don't do a real good job when it comes to directly helping people who are paralyzed from the neck down.
	They don't do a good job.
	I'm not talking about people who are on disability because they're afraid of open spaces.
	People who have genuine physical challenges that aren't in their head.
	You're talking to somebody who wipes people's butts when they're paralyzed from the neck down.
	That's my job.
	I help them with everything.
	Now, how are these private companies paid?
	Robert, how do they get their money?
	They get their money from the state.
	Okay, so they're not private companies.
	Well, technically they are.
	They're labeled as such.
	Well, no, I understand that.
	Legally and all that, they would be classified.
	But if you're being paid by the state, if being paid by the state makes you a private company in the free market, then getting welfare is exactly the same as having a job.
	Because in both situations, you're receiving money from the government.
	I agree, yes.
	The primary amount of funds is from Medicare, Medicaid, and you don't even want to hear the numbers.
	It's kind of scary.
	Part of me goes, my God, how can you not afford gasoline?
	Because I worked at a place where we couldn't have gasoline.
	And I'm going, but we're getting like $10,000 a month here?
	What the heck's going on?
	I mean, but that's neither here nor there.
	Okay, so having the government pay private entities to do stuff is not capitalism.
	Capitalism is when everybody involved in the interaction is there voluntarily, and if the government is paying things, then they're paying for things with money taken from companies.
	Other people by force, right?
	Directly or indirectly through money printing or debt or taxation, right?
	So that's not in the free market.
	When the government pays private agencies, that's closer to fascism.
	Socialism is when the government runs the things.
	But when it's publicly funded but privately owned, that's closer to fascism than it is to socialism.
	So I just really want to...
	The example you gave is not a capitalist example.
	I understand, but the problem is there's no pure capitalist example.
	I mean, not dealing with this population.
	I understand that.
	But I just still want to point at that.
	I'm getting off topic.
	I'm getting off topic here.
	My example is that when you're dealing with straight up money, capitalism is the way to go.
	The problem is, is in Western society, you can't buy and sell people.
	There's no slavery allowed, and so effectively, numerically, a human life is worth an infinite amount of money.
	Practically it's not, but on the books it is.
	And so you run into problems like, I'm gonna mangle the numbers, but there was recently that auto place that had a problem with cars accelerating suddenly, and for them, they weighed the value and said, it's just cheaper to let people die and deal with the lawsuits than it is to fix the problem, until it became revealed that the problem existed.
	That's where, as an example of capitalism...
	Wait, wait, I'm sorry.
	I've not heard of this.
	I think it was...
	Oh, it was Toyota.
	One of their cars was having unexplained accelerations.
	Like, they couldn't stop the accelerator.
	And Toyota knew about it.
	I'm not sure if it's Toyota.
	I believe it is.
	I didn't...
	I should have looked this up at a time.
	Yeah, try not to give examples unless you have, because that's actually criminal.
	Oh, yeah.
	No, it was.
	It was.
	And they got a huge lawsuit once it finally got revealed, but they knew about it for years.
	And they kind of, somebody lower down in lower management, kind of hit it.
	Oh, here we go.
	No, I just found something.
	I just want to give people context.
	Okay.
	So here we go.
	This is from March 19, 2014.
	This is from ABC News.
	Toyota to pay $1.2 billion for hiding deadly unintended acceleration.
	Car manufacturer Toyota has agreed to pay a staggering $1.2 billion to avoid prosecution.
	For covering up severe safety problems with unintended acceleration.
	According to court documents and continuing to make cars with parts, the FBI said Toyota, quote, knew were deadly.
	A deferred prosecution agreement filed today forced Toyota to admit that it misled U.S. consumers by concealing and making deceptive statements about two safety-related issues affecting its vehicles, each of which caused a type of unintended acceleration.
	Toyota, quote, put sales over safety and profit over principle, according to FBI Assistant Director George Venizelos.
	Right, that's what I was thinking.
	Okay, no, that's good to hear.
	Now, I don't know anything about this.
	I will say, though, that...
	Not everyone who agrees that they're guilty when faced with prosecution by the state, I automatically assume is guilty.
	I'm just telling you that.
	I know they admitted it, and maybe it's completely true, but I've just known a lot of people, I've heard stories and actually spoken to people directly who are like, well, you know, they threatened me with 10 years, so I comped a plea for 18 months.
	Oh, no, no, I'm with you 100%.
	I'm not trying to single out Toyota for this.
	They paid their money as far as I'm concerned.
	It's over.
	But I'm using it as an example here.
	It sounds like to me is a case where somebody somewhere said, hmm, what is the value of a human life?
	What is the value of fixing the cars?
	It's cheaper just to let people die.
	Now, I don't have a problem with capitalism allowing people to suffer if they make bad mistakes.
	Okay, I think competition is great.
	Oh, and it's even worse than you think in some ways.
	I'm sorry, the death is terrible enough.
	I was just reading this, just about to close it, and I saw this.
	A Minnesota man was serving an eight-year prison sentence for vehicular manslaughter when evidence emerged suggesting he could have been a victim of Toyota's acceleration problem.
	After serving two years in prison, this fellow was released and charges against him were dropped in 2010.
	Ouch.
	Oh, that's, I mean, and, you know, so there's, you know, death and jails and, I mean, just wretched, wretched stuff.
	So, yes, but this is not a feature of capitalism, right?
	No, no, no.
	This is a feature of human nature that sometimes people are greedy and sometimes they make very terrible and corrupt decisions and put...
	What's called profit.
	And profit is one of these big complicated words.
	A profit for a politician is a vote.
	And we all know politicians who put this profit, like getting votes, ahead of the good of society as a whole.
	So the fact that people are susceptible to making very bad, very immoral decisions is not a feature of capitalism.
	It is a feature of human nature.
	Well, I would say that, yes, it is a feature of human nature, and capitalism counts on that, so that you have competition, you have various...
	It counts on it.
	It counts on what?
	People making bad and terrible decisions?
	No, people being greedy.
	Sometimes they make the wrong greedy decision, but greed...
	Are you saying that politics doesn't count on people being greedy?
	It doesn't count on people wanting something for nothing?
	It doesn't count on people wanting to socialize their expenses and privatize their profits?
	Are you saying that somehow politics doesn't work according to human greed?
	Well, I didn't want to get on the politics things, but if you want to get around to that, sure.
	We're talking socialism, right?
	So socialism is the expansion of state control over property.
	And, I mean, if people weren't greedy in the political arena, why is there a national debt?
	Oh, yeah, no, clearly socialism had gotten out of control.
	No, no, no, not out of control.
	You're talking about, here's an example of, and it's a terrible thing, I mean, I assume it's true, I mean, there's no reason to disbelieve it, that Toyota executives made a very bad decision and put profits over people's lives, and that's bad, very bad.
	And they have paid their price, not a high enough price as far as I'm concerned.
	I think that that should be criminal, but that's not my, again, not my area of expertise.
	I'm no lawyer.
	But if you're going to say that that's somehow a feature of capitalism, then we're opening up to, okay, human beings have a desire for the unearned.
	They have a desire to use force or fraud to get resources for themselves, which they don't have to work for.
	And that is an outlier in capitalism.
	That is the way the state and politicians work in general.
	Well, yes, but in my opinion, somebody needs to step in to prevent that.
	You have the consumer, you have the producer, and somebody needs to step in every once in a while and say, okay, too many consumers have ganged up on the producers, and too many producers have all come together to gang up on the consumers.
	And somebody's got to be that third party, unfortunately.
	Okay, so who's the third party?
	I see that as government.
	Who's the third party with the state?
	Right, so when the state gets too greedy, and the state starts printing too much money, and the state starts starting unjust wars, and the state starts borrowing and all of that, and the state starts raising too many taxes, and the state allows education to decay, and it allows infrastructure to decay, and it sells massive amounts of weapons overseas and so on.
	So when the state goes corrupt, Who steps in?
	That's the problem.
	Well, of course, you have to have the people who are sponsoring the state have to step in.
	And originally, the state was set up to work against itself.
	Wait, sorry, the people who are sponsoring the state step in?
	Well, I mean, the voters have to make a change, and you have to have the people elected who will say, we need to get back to the original way it was.
	No, you've already said that human nature is greedy, so the voters won't want to make a change, because the voters are benefiting from what the state is giving them, and they're greedy, right?
	Like the Toyota executives, right?
	So why would the voters want to make a change if the system is serving their short-term needs and greeds well?
	Hmm...
	Well, I suppose that enlightened people would understand it's not.
	Have you seen any evidence of that, just out of curiosity?
	Have I seen that?
	No, no, I haven't.
	In fact, that's why I have the debates and that's why I do my own arguments to try and understand this problem and explain it to other people.
	That's what I'm doing.
	Well, but I'm just saying that I agree with you that human beings want something for nothing.
	And that is a great strength and weakness of human nature.
	The great strength is it allows us to have labor-saving devices.
	And the great weakness is it makes us very susceptible to exploitation and getting things for nothing through corruption and through force, particularly through the state.
	But the problem is that every sin that you lay at the feet of capitalism, in capitalism there is a self-correcting mechanism.
	Yes.
	Whereas in the States, there's not.
	Correct.
	There was supposed to be, and the system has failed.
	What was it supposed to be?
	You mean the separation of powers?
	Yeah, it's supposed to work against itself, and it's designed to slow itself down.
	I mean, it never made sense to me originally when I was growing up.
	Why is there a House of Representatives, and why is there a Senate?
	And now I know.
	I understand now the whole point of it.
	Is to give each state, you know, some sort of say in things.
	The Senate exists so you can't repeal Obamacare.
	I think that's the reality.
	Well, that's the system, as I'm saying.
	However, you're going back to proving my point, which is, we need to scale it all back.
	But the question is, how far?
	What is the bare minimum necessary?
	I mean, we need police officers.
	I understand some people are like, oh, we can have private forces.
	I don't know.
	One thing I hear you and other people say is, we need to rely more on charity.
	If we just weren't taxing people as much, we'd have more charity.
	I'm working with these charities.
	I'm working with the ones that aren't getting money from the state.
	I've worked with all sorts of groups.
	And I'm telling you this, Well, maybe normally they work well, but right now it's completely overrun by social justice warriors.
	Well, that's because we've got a government program called Education, which takes kids from about three minutes old up until their early to mid-twenties, often with government-guaranteed student loans.
	So I don't think you can blame charities for the outcome of a near-quarter century of government indoctrination paid for by unwilling taxpayers.
	I'm not blaming them for that.
	I'm saying the indoctrination has basically turned charities...
	Upside down.
	Sure.
	They're so inefficient, they're next to useless.
	I don't know if there's any way to...
	I don't know how they would ever work.
	Well, they would work the way they used to work before the government took over the education system.
	They worked very well.
	Didn't they mostly in the past have some sort of agenda?
	Most charities that were pushing things were like, this isn't just a charity just to help people.
	This is a charity to help people and convert them to Jesus Christ or whatever.
	That's kind of been my impression in the past, right?
	Well, I mean, that's certainly a possibility, and there certainly were charities that had that.
	But so what?
	Because my experience has been, when it comes to donating money, It goes to the biggest eyes.
	The kittens, the puppies, the kids.
	Then it might go to the women.
	And if you're a man, God help you.
	If you're a veteran, you're dead last.
	If you were talking about, oh, we just donate more money, it just means more money for kittens and puppies, in my opinion.
	Well, this might be just my microcosm here, where I'm living in central New York.
	This might be just the microcosm.
	It may not be a reflection of the system as a whole, but my experience is that when you let people donate, they don't donate to the ugly people.
	They don't donate to the people who are paralyzed from the neck down.
	We've got a guy whose wheelchair is probably more than my first house, and he drives it by jiggling his neck.
	But he's got a job, and he busts his tables, and God help you, if you try to do his job for him, he will take out your shins.
	Because he takes pride in his work.
	But no, I can't think of any charity in the world that would ever help this guy.
	Because it's just too expensive.
	And the money to help him be any sort of person is really high.
	I mean, most people when they think about charities, they're thinking about people who still have arms and legs.
	When you get all the way down to the bottom there, there's people who, it's not pretty.
	These aren't the beautiful people.
	These are the ugly people.
	These are the people who, you know, you volunteer to deal with kittens.
	That's great.
	Would you volunteer to wipe someone's ass?
	Yeah, I'm sorry.
	I mean, I'm not sure what your point is.
	Well, my point is that there is a point where charities are just going to say, well, I'm not going to help that person.
	What do we do?
	Put them on a nice flow and push them out to sea?
	I'm sorry, but you care about these people, right?
	Right.
	So you would do it.
	I care about these people, so I would help.
	I've got bills to pay.
	I've got way a lot of medical bills.
	No, no, no.
	But if you are running a charity, then you would get donations because people would help, right?
	Yeah, well, my experience has been those aren't the charities that get the money.
	Wait, so are you saying that voters don't want any government support for people who have significant injuries?
	Oh, I do.
	And I believe they should have that.
	No, no, no, no.
	That's not what I said.
	Should they have them?
	Do you think that it's going against democracy that these programs exist?
	In other words, people don't want them.
	They'd love to get rid of them because they just want these people to die in the streets or whatever.
	So is it that the democratic system isn't working at all and the government is putting in programs that people don't want to exist?
	No, people do want the programs to exist.
	Good.
	Okay, then they'll pay for them.
	Because they're already paying for them by voting for politicians, knowing that the politicians are going to tax them.
	It'll just be more efficient if it's run through private charities.
	Because you're saying people don't want to pay for this, but they do, because they vote for this stuff.
	Okay, maybe I'm not being myself clear.
	A minority of people want these programs, and they've convinced the government that this is the right thing to do.
	Well, no, but people have to vote anyway, right?
	Correct.
	So, I mean, people vote for this stuff.
	Hang on.
	If you ran as a politician, let me ask you this.
	If you ran as a politician saying that you wanted to cut funding for all of this stuff, what do you think would happen to your political prospects?
	I'd be the governor of New York State.
	Oh, is that what he did?
	He cut all of this?
	No, well, no, he is.
	Oh, yeah, he is cutting everything.
	Well, he's doing it kind of quietly.
	But trust me, he is.
	I fully suspect the New York City is going to privatize everything in the next couple of years.
	You if I wish I was allowed to.
	No, but privatizing is not getting rid of things, right?
	It's not like if there's privatization, it no longer exists, right?
	Like if they privatize the post office.
	It won't exist when they file bankruptcy and disappear.
	We are dealing with clients who bite you, attack you.
	I've been out of work multiple times from getting the plain beat to crap, and I'm a big guy.
	The ones that go to the state are the hard ones.
	There's more than enough private organizations willing to take quiet, comatose clients.
	But when you get those guys who toss me around like I'm nothing, nobody wants them.
	Nobody will take those people.
	And when he privatizes something, I know exactly what's going to happen.
	He's going to sell it to some person for a dollar, and a year later, it's going to file bankruptcy.
	He's going to milk everything where he can, and then it's going to fold.
	it's going to.
	Because nobody wants these.
	And I...
	Oh, okay.
	So I understand.
	So I understand that.
	So the issue here then...
	I'm not saying that people don't want to help.
	No, I understand.
	The issue here, then, is that the governments have driven charities out of these areas, and if governments are corrupt and want to cut their budgets, then there's going to be a transition time that is painful and ugly, because everyone thinks this stuff's taken care of, so you can't really run a charity this way.
	And because the government's driven out charities by taking things over, if the government privatizes, they declare bankruptcy and so on, that's terrible.
	And it'll take a little while for charities to realize that these people aren't being helped and to rush back in.
	And this is a problem of having the government take things over, because then you are susceptible to this kind of political manipulation.
	There should have been charities dealing with this stuff from the beginning.
	You seem to have a higher opinion of charities than I do.
	No, no, no, it's not that.
	I just, I don't have a high opinion of coercive solutions.
	And a charity is a voluntary solution and statism is a coercive solution.
	Okay, well then let's do a theoretical here.
	Let's assume on some degree I'm right that the charities are willing to help 90% of these people.
	But there's a 10% where the charities go, oh, that's just too much.
	That's too much in the lawsuits.
	That's too dangerous.
	We're not going to handle that.
	That last 10% that the charities aren't helping What do we do about them?
	Assuming that that's the scenario.
	So are you saying that there are people who are so...
	We get the government out.
	Hang on.
	Let me at least get half my question out, okay?
	Okay, I'm sorry.
	I just wanted to clarify.
	All right.
	So, are you saying that there are 10% of recipients of charity that are so violent that charities would not be able to handle them, that they would assault the staff and so on?
	Well, then, of course, they should be in prison, right?
	I mean, because they're violent, or they should be in some place other than charity, right?
	I would actually agree with you to some degree, but how do you...
	It's a very legal gray area.
	It's a very weird gray area.
	Because you're dealing with somebody who's been committed their whole lives.
	I have been bitten so hard through a coat that he took a chunk out of me.
	But I would not blame him for what he did.
	Because the scenario that had happened, I don't want to go into the details, was...
	I know what his behaviors were and I missed something and he can't talk.
	It's how he expressed himself.
	Odd way of doing it, but if you understand the situations and you create a very controlled environment that's very structured to help them, they can be good people.
	They can get things done, but the problem is when the system breaks down, people make mistakes.
	I don't want to get into all the details, but that happens.
	The problem is it requires a lot of work, a lot of training, a lot of on-the-nose, you can never let your guard down, 24-hour-7 paranoid alert.
	So hang on, are you saying that the guy who bit you so hard through your jacket that he took out a chunk of you can be a good person?
	Oh yeah, yeah.
	I don't even believe in providing me.
	He can be cured.
	He can be a consistently good person and go out into society.
	No, no, no.
	He will react a certain way in a given situation always.
	Like, if I had been thinking and hadn't been tired that morning, it wouldn't have happened.
	But I missed cues.
	I made mistakes.
	And it happened.
	He is blameless because he cannot help himself.
	He has no IQ of 40, 30, maybe.
	Right.
	Okay, so there are some people who can't be cured.
	Right.
	Now, hopefully, I mean, unless they've had some sort of physical brain damage, I mean, hopefully better parenting and all of this kind of stuff can ameliorate some of these sorts of problems.
	But yeah, there are very dangerous people out there who are impossible to cure.
	And I don't know, 10% of victims of charitable recipients?
	I'm not saying that they're so violent they need to be in jail.
	That's the problem.
	They're not.
	Well, no.
	If he bit you, isn't that assault?
	Yes, but he's not responsible for his actions.
	Yeah, but that doesn't mean you put him in jail because he's a bad person.
	You just put him in jail because he's dangerous.
	You know, I mean, you could put a rabid dog in a cage, not because you think the dog is morally responsible for biting people, but just because he's dangerous.
	He is in an institution.
	Okay?
	I'm the guy who works in the institution.
	Do you understand?
	You're talking about putting him in jail.
	He is technically in jail.
	He can never get out of the system.
	He will never be released.
	He is in the system.
	And this is basically, if you want to put it in your terms, he bit one of the guards.
	Right.
	Okay, but there's going out into the community.
	We help them.
	We try to get them to be as good at, you know, develop themselves as much as possible as a human being.
	That's my job.
	To improve these people.
	Right.
	As best I can.
	And I didn't care about all of them.
	I've been talking to people out of suicide at 3 a.m.
	in the morning.
	You wouldn't believe it.
	And just out of curiosity, I mean, this is a pretty tough way to spend your short life in this world.
	What is your gain out of this?
	You want the whole story or the cliff?
	No, no.
	Just want to know what...
	My gain out of this is I'm good at it.
	This is my skill set.
	I work best when everybody else is at their worst.
	I'm a great teacher.
	I'm great at reading people and getting through the bullshit real quick.
	You can teach people with an IQ of 30 or 40 much, right?
	I've taught some people.
	I helped the guy.
	I don't want to get into the details.
	But yeah, you can.
	Even that low.
	And it's not much of a gain.
	It's a little bit of a gain.
	But I've improved a lot of lives.
	Good.
	Well, I mean, I appreciate that.
	And I respect what you're doing there.
	So good.
	But you're clearly not the only person who has this inclination, right?
	But if I wasn't getting paid, I don't know if I could do this.
	Because I couldn't afford to.
	And how many, do you know what the population is of these very extreme, very low IQ, violent groups?
	Do you have any idea what the population is?
	Only in my general area, and I would probably say somewhere around, do you want me to include private and public?
	Sure.
	I would say somewhere around 3,000 to 4,000 on the, well, no, if you want to go with the extreme side, I'd probably only say about 1,800.
	If you want to go with everybody who's in some way, maybe they have an apartment and they just have somebody who's a counselor and helps them out like every day, you might be 30, 40, 50,000.
	And what sort of, you don't know how to give me geographical specifics, but what sort of geographical area are you in?
	Well, I'll say it.
	It's these whole central, all the counties of central New York.
	Okay.
	All right.
	And do you know what the population is as a whole of this area, not just a bit of the population at all?
	Oh, God, off the top of my head, I want to say three or four million, adding everything up, but that's if you include all the counties, and I'm including Auburn all the way out to Utica.
	I mean, the whole area, a couple million.
	I mean, you've got to understand, though, is that we're also getting concentrated.
	A lot of other places are closing all over.
	So we're talking one-tenth of one percent of the population?
	A couple of thousand, a couple of million?
	I'd probably go closer to two or three-tenths, but yeah, about that.
	Okay.
	So that's manageable from a charitable standpoint?
	If the charity exists.
	Okay, but see, now here we're just talking about, you're setting up the situation where you're saying it's impossible for anybody to want to help these people, in which case the government won't help them because no politician will ever get votes for doing it.
	Oh, I'm not saying that people don't want to be charitable.
	Okay, so people want to be charitable and that's how it will be sorted out.
	People want to be charitable to the easy charities.
	No, no, no.
	We're back to this again.
	Either people care about these people or they don't.
	If nobody cares about these people other than you, then it makes no sense that there's government programs to help them.
	People vote for this stuff because they care about these people, even if they only care about these people to the point where they'd rather have them in the institution than roaming around a playground biting children on the neck, right?
	So they do care about it, even from a self-protection standpoint.
	Maybe they care about it from a compassionate or altruistic standpoint as well.
	So people will fund the solution to this problem, since we're talking about a tiny, tiny percentage, sub one percentage of people who need this kind of help.
	You don't know for sure that that's going to happen, but I know for sure that it's going to stop happening because the government has taken over this area.
	It has driven out a lot of charities who formerly used to deal with this kind of stuff.
	There were charities that dealt with this kind of stuff in the past.
	So the government has stepped in.
	It has driven out charities.
	And now the government is way overextended.
	The U.S. is $20 trillion in debt.
	It has $180 trillion of unfunded liabilities.
	So the money's going to run out.
	So you can say, well, I want the government to do it.
	And yeah, maybe it'll work for a little while.
	So cocaine works to make you happy for a little while.
	But the point is, it's absolutely unsustainable.
	Is it a perfect system if it's a private system?
	Not necessarily, but at least it's a sustainable system.
	And that is what matters to me.
	I'm seeing where the problem is.
	Okay, have you heard of Willowbrook?
	I know what the word means, but I don't have any particular reference for it.
	Okay, there was an institution which basically was not regulated at all.
	It pretty much was privately run, even though it got money from the government, and it was a hellhole.
	It got exposed, I think it was like 30, 40 years ago, and it was the cause for the change from institutions to Where everybody was warehoused out to the group home setting that we have currently.
	And it was horrific.
	Naked people running around.
	It was horrible.
	And my father was one of the ones who helped disassemble the place.
	When you say, oh, it'll just be taken care of, because there was a lot of charity there, a lot of stuff, and the money just poof.
	Wait, so the charity didn't care how the money was spent?
	It's easy for people to just say, here's some money and take care of it, and they look away because these are not the beautiful people.
	These are not the ones that people stand next to and say, photoshoot, let's take a selfie.
	They don't do that.
	They do that with kittens, they do that with puppies, they do that with children, they do that at women's shelters.
	This was run by the state, right?
	Sort of.
	I'm just looking it up here.
	Willowbrook State School was a state-supported institution for children with intellectual disability.
	Supported, yes, but I don't want to get all the nuances of details on it.
	Hang on.
	It was the biggest state-run institution for people with mental disabilities in the United States.
	So how on earth is this?
	You're selling this to me like it's a charity, but it's state-run and state-supported.
	It's...
	It's hard to explain the situation.
	Okay, I'm going to tell you what I'm going to do.
	I'm going to move on to the next caller because I don't think there's much honesty going on at this point.
	Don't try and sell me something as a charity when it's state-supported.
	And if you don't even have that much information about it, then I just don't feel like we're going from a very honest place.
	Sorry, I've given you a lot of time.
	I'm going to move on to the next caller, but I do appreciate the call.
	Right up next we have Jason.
	Jason wrote in and said, And I haven't really seen any single dads talked about much lately.
	So my question is this.
	How can I avoid imposing my beliefs of women and liberals as a whole onto my two sons?
	I want them to grow up and form their own opinions, and I make every effort to keep my more extreme beliefs away from them.
	And as they get older, I will answer any questions they have, but I really want to avoid indoctrinating them in the way some other parents do.
	That's from Jason.
	Oh, hey, Jason.
	How's it going?
	Hey, Stefan.
	Great to speak with you.
	I was just, you know, I was thinking with the last caller who was saying, you know, socialism is great at running the police department of the court system.
	I think that Men in America who've gone through a divorce and gone through the family court system might not feel that the government is really great at running court systems.
	That's just my particular thought.
	I wanted to sort of shoehorn this in just to make sure I got that thought off of my mind.
	Are you divorced?
	Is that right?
	Yes, I am.
	I have full custody.
	I'm a full-time single dad.
	So how did that do?
	You're like one of the unicorns, right?
	I mean, are you in the States?
	Yes, I am.
	I live in the upper Midwest.
	And how did you get sole custody in the American court system, which is fairly female friendly?
	Is it fair?
	I think 80-85% of women get custody and a lot of the remainers who don't just don't bother showing up?
	It is.
	The ex-wife was a complete basket case.
	It wasn't a marriage out of love.
	It was for financial reasons once she got pregnant.
	Three years ago, I got a phone call and she told me she was moving to Phoenix in two days and that the kids were mine.
	How did you end up banging a big bag of crazy like that?
	Bartended in Las Vegas strip clubs for a long time.
	And that's where we ended up meeting.
	Enough said.
	I believe I've got the entire...
	You know, it's funny because the woman earlier needed like half an hour to do one-tenth of one percent of the backstory.
	You just gave me the whole backstory in like less than a sentence.
	And so she kind of fell off the wagon when we moved to Wisconsin.
	And then she just decided to disappear.
	And why do you think you were attracted to such a lady?
	There was an alcohol incident involved, which I really don't drink at all.
	Oh, you got drunk, and you banged a stripper?
	Yes, I did.
	And we slipped one past the goalie, got pregnant, and I grew up without a father, so I wanted to try and make a go of it.
	Moved out of Vegas and all the bad influences there, and things just kind of went downhill.
	Once we got here, I thought that we'd give it a real shot, had a second kid, and then she up and left.
	You're like the fading afterimage of the penthouse letter.
	Dear penthouse, I remember that time in Vegas when I banged a stripper and it's like, oh man.
	Okay, but so that may explain one.
	Boy.
	I believe it does have a part in it.
	I've done a lot of growing up.
	My oldest son is nine.
	So there's a huge difference between the person I was 10 years ago and the person I am today.
	Good for you.
	Good for you.
	So you stayed with the woman for a while, right?
	Yes, about three years.
	Once we got here, I really wanted to try and make a go of it as a family.
	That's like 300 years in stripper years, as far as relationship goes.
	I got the scars and the miles to prove it from her.
	Was it as crazy as one can imagine?
	Probably more so.
	She was an alcoholic and used to do a lot of meth, heroin, you name it.
	Wow.
	I'm sorry about all of that.
	Ultimately, it's a good thing she's gone for the boys, but the first year of being a full-time single parent took some adjustment.
	Right.
	How have you found it, being a single?
	Because I get this question a lot, right?
	Because I talk a lot about single moms.
	Always praiseworthy, of course.
	But I talk a lot about single moms, and I do sort of get this question, well, what about single dads?
	It's like, well, there's really not a lot of information out there about them.
	So how's it been for you as a whole?
	It's been, you know, it's definitely had its ups and downs.
	My youngest son, somewhat special needs, he has extremely bad ADHD, and that's been a little trying.
	Now that he's in school, a little bit more structure and discipline, he's like a totally different kid.
	And that's been a huge benefit to all of us as a family.
	Right, right.
	How did the ADHD show up?
	Just extreme behavior dysfunction.
	Talk about the world's worst kid and then, you know, an hour or so later, his behavior, he was a perfect angel.
	He was absolutely lovable, but the slightest little thing set him off.
	And we had to wait till he turned five years old before doctors would even diagnose him and kind of do some therapy with him for that.
	Did mom take any drugs while she was pregnant?
	Not to my knowledge, but I cannot say 100% for sure.
	What about drinking and smoking?
	Again, not to my knowledge, not that I ever saw, but while I was out working, it's very well possible.
	She was an alcoholic, former meth junkie.
	After we got divorced, she fell in with heroin, you name it.
	Every drunk that there was to do, she would do.
	Wow.
	Did you know if she took antidepressants?
	Was she on any psychotropics?
	I know she was on, I believe it was Prozac or Paxil for a while.
	I don't believe that was going on while she was pregnant.
	Right.
	Okay.
	Okay.
	And was she, I guess, it's hard to tell for what's the drugs and what's the personality, but was she like an uppy-downy kind of person as well?
	Extremely.
	There were nights I would sleep with one eye open just because I wasn't sure what person was going to be coming home.
	Right.
	So was she violent as well?
	Yes, she was.
	Wow.
	And the police came one time.
	It was after my youngest son was born and I had her removed from the home.
	She had arrested twice for domestic violence out in Las Vegas.
	Whenever life got too tough, she would commit herself to the mental hospital under a 72-hour cycle because she would cut her wrists.
	And that was like her little get away from reality.
	Wow.
	Have you had any contact with her recently?
	Frequent texts when she first moved and kind of sporadic emails.
	I know that she's a prostitute now, and she also just gave birth to another baby.
	I just felt the sphincter on a million American tax wallets tighten.
	Exactly.
	If that baby's going to have any chance, it needs to be removed from her custody right away.
	Aye, aye, aye.
	And she was the type that would always blame me for her life-sucking.
	Even after we got divorced and she left, it was always my fault no matter what happened.
	And then I'm the reason she abandoned the kids, according to her.
	Yeah, yeah.
	I wouldn't expect a huge amount of locus of control internalization from such a personality structure.
	Now, she left how long ago?
	Three years.
	And have you dated since then?
	Yes, I have.
	I've had a girlfriend for about that long.
	Actually, about four years because my ex, we were divorced for about two years before she left.
	Right.
	And I've been with the same girl ever since.
	She's significantly younger than I am, but we hit it off great.
	We're two sides of the same coin.
	Does she want kids?
	No, she doesn't.
	But she's fine with yours?
	Yes, she is.
	And I guess she met your ex?
	She's only met her once very briefly, but that was my ex, you know, being the bag of problems that she was, I really tried to insulate my girlfriend from that portion of my life.
	Man, you must be a little burned out from that.
	That's like...
	It definitely could use a vacation every year, for sure.
	Yeah, no kidding.
	Wow, that's tough for the adrenals.
	That's a hell of a lot of stress.
	And it just, I was the type, I never really wanted to be a parent initially.
	So accepting the fact that I was a parent, you know, took a lot of growing up and maturing on my part, whether I wanted to do it or not.
	And what do you do for a living now?
	I'm a bartender.
	Right.
	Okay.
	Not at a strip club, I hope.
	No, no, not at all.
	Not at a resort.
	All right.
	A little bit more mature and adult and a stable place.
	Now, what's happening, like, you've got a girlfriend that you love, although, you know, I mean, well, no, if she doesn't want kids or whatever, but you have a girlfriend that you love and respect, so why would you, you know, you got away from the crazy woman, or the crazy woman got away from you and reality, and you have a girlfriend that you love, you've been with for four years, why do you think now you're starting to despise women?
	I look at it as women as a whole, not the individual.
	I understand what a category means.
	I know you're not talking about an individual woman, but you have a much more positive example of femininity in your life now than you did when you were with the mother of your children.
	So you have more exposure to positive femininity now.
	I guess the question is, why now?
	It's, I believe that it's, I'm starting to take more of a look at what they're doing to not only our country, but the Western world in general.
	You know, you can name up Sweden, Germany, the US here, especially, you know, the single mom voting bloc is, you know, responsible for a lot of damage done to the United States.
	Right.
	You know, those who look at government as a quasi-husband slash daddy versus those who, you know, will do it themselves and they'll work, you know, as many number of jobs as it takes to get the job done to support their family.
	Right.
	Right.
	I mean, there used to be a sense that engagement in political life, voting or whatever it would be, required...
	At least one of two things, often two.
	It required that, number one, you be draftable, and number two, that you own property.
	And not just like a toothbrush, but like you have land or you have a house or some.
	You have some investment at the concept of property.
	Now, since women in general didn't own property directly, they would inherit property from their husbands, right, if their husbands died or whatever.
	But in general, women didn't have the same investment in property they had earned, and they weren't subject to the draft.
	So, that requirement for engagement in the political sphere was considered to be necessary because you would have a caution about government power if it could draft you and if it could take your property, right?
	So, you wouldn't want to work for 20 years to buy your plot of land, build your house, and then just vote for runaway taxation, which would strip you of all of that.
	And so, this sort of dual requirement that you be invested...
	In the state, in that it would have control over you in terms of war through the draft, and that you would have an investment in the protection of property rights because you would have significant investment in property.
	This was kind of a given throughout most of human history.
	Now, women, of course, had great influence in...
	In political life and in social life, right?
	They could talk to their husbands, they could convince their husbands, they could run charitable groups, they could have marches, they could write books, they could write political pamphlets, they could have a huge influence.
	But as far as direct voting goes, the idea was that people who don't have property will not be invested in property rights, will not be invested in keeping the state small.
	If you let poor people vote, people without property, then they will vote to take away the property of the rich and everyone will become poor.
	And this is just the way that things worked in the past.
	And then, of course, we got what I used to think of as a wonderful gift called universalism, which I now have some questions about, right?
	Which is like, well, we gotta have the same rights for everyone.
	And the voting was, in many places in America, was held out as a lure to bring women.
	In Wisconsin, they were like, no women.
	And so they wanted to bring women into the states.
	I said, oh, you can vote.
	I believe that's why Wyoming was the first state to allow women to vote.
	Yeah, yeah.
	And as long as there was no welfare state, that was...
	Okay, right?
	But once you get a welfare state, then someone's got to be doing the paying, and somebody's going to end up on the receiving end.
	And once you have the welfare state, which women will often vote for, and politicians will offer to women, right?
	Being a woman is an anxiety-provoking state, right?
	I mean, because you're dependent.
	I mean, biologically, historically, right?
	I mean, you're dependent upon men and other women, right?
	Which is why women tend to be a little bit more on the socially conformist side.
	But you're dependent.
	You're a dependent life form.
	Because you're making babies, having babies, breastfeeding babies, raising babies.
	I mean, it just goes on and on, and then you get grandkids.
	So it's not, you know, you're dependent upon other people.
	You're not out there hunting down the buffalo and all that kind of stuff, hoeing the back 40, so to speak.
	And so women have a thirst for security.
	Women thirst for security the same way that men thirst for sexuality.
	And that's fine.
	And that's a great thing.
	An equal trade-off at that point.
	Yeah, women thirst for security, which means that they have to find the best man, the most stable, the most secure, the best man, in order to gain that security.
	So security is what men offer to women.
	And that means that the woman has to choose the man who's the most stable, the most responsible, the most hardworking, all that kind of stuff, right?
	Right.
	But when women can get security from the state, as you know, then they don't look for security in a man.
	Then you have kind of the degeneracy that we see today.
	Exactly, exactly.
	And the least intelligent have the most incentive to have the most children, and the most intelligent have the least incentive to have the most children.
	And there we go.
	How do we go about changing that?
	I'm sorry?
	Yeah.
	How do we go about changing that, you know, flipping that to where those who should have children, you know, have more, and those least capable of being a parent shouldn't be having any.
	Is there a way to change that?
	I think that we need to keep telling the truth.
	I mean, I know that sounds like kind of a boring thing to say, but we just...
	Right, so there's been this lie that has been told to women that...
	Men and women intellectually are the same, completely equal, and that childbirth should never in any way, shape, or form interfere with a woman's economic potential.
	And so...
	That is what has been solved.
	And so because women don't end up at the highest reaches of their professions in general, because women at the highest levels of intelligence are vastly outnumbered by men, and women do have children, and women do decide to leave the workforce, like 40% of women who got MBAs recently, they're not even in the workforce.
	A complete waste of time.
	More than a waste.
	That's like 40 other business entrepreneurs who could be men who would be out there creating jobs.
	And people wonder why the economy is slowing.
	It's because we keep pouring all these resources into women who go off and have babies.
	Don't get me wrong.
	Love the babies thing.
	But, you know, of course, there's going to be a social cost to it all.
	So we need to tell the truth.
	I was talking to a couple earlier tonight, and part of the conversation was respect for the man.
	I heard that conversation.
	Yeah, so what's he good at that you can respect?
	And don't break him because you'll regret it, right?
	And so we keep telling the truth that men are not trying to hold you down.
	Just you don't have the same intellectual equipment.
	You have other things that are wonderful and other strengths.
	But it's, you know, for women to say, well, we're not at the top of our professions.
	We don't make as much as men, therefore patriarchy.
	Well, that's like saying, well, women live longer than men on average, and therefore the entire medical system is biased towards women and hates men.
	Okay, well, that's maybe a little true when it comes to, you know, breast cancer research versus prostate cancer research.
	But it's not just that, you know, well, the system is biased against...
	Against men, larger organisms tend to live less long.
	Certainly taller people, because you've got to pump that blood all over the place, and it's harder on the heart.
	So taller people live a little less long, and shorter people live longer.
	It's one of the payoffs for a lack of height.
	So just keep telling the truth.
	It's really tough.
	I've got this whole bit in the book, The Art of the Argument, coming up about ostracism and its Power in society.
	It's really, really tough to ostracize with the welfare state, because all you can do is nag people and they don't listen.
	So I think just keep telling the truth.
	And remember, women also, to some degree, run on guilt, right?
	And so putting the information out about how bad single motherhood is for women.
	For women, for kids, sorry, single mothers, bad for women, bad for the kids, is important.
	Like, so that people, society can at least understand that if you're a single mom, then that's bad for the kids.
	Now, you have two sons and you're a single dad.
	I don't know how bad or good that is.
	Clearly, I don't need to tell you this.
	You chose an absolute train wreck to be the mother of your children.
	And I'm sure you love your kids, but if there was one thing you could change in your life, at least your adult life, I'm sure it would be something like that.
	I'd like to have an equal partner because men and women are different.
	I am not the most nurturing person in the world, but I am also the provider and the security in our house.
	Right, right, right.
	So I would say that it's not...
	To despise women is, to me, not fair or reasonable for a number of reasons.
	And I'll just say them and you can tell me if they make any sense or not.
	To you.
	Okay.
	Everyone gets corrupted by the state.
	Everyone.
	Everyone gets corrupted by the state.
	You know, there are tech companies with Big contracts from the CIA that they're not really talking about that much, even though they're writing about the CIA. And everyone goes for subsidies.
	Everyone goes for their benefits from the state.
	You know, the tech companies want the H-1B visa.
	Tech surfs coming in and manning their cubicles with substandard coding algorithms and so on.
	Everyone gets corrupted by the state.
	So singling out women for being corrupted by the state, I think, is...
	You know, there's a whole military-industrial complex, right?
	There's whole corporate welfare.
	Corporate welfare is enormous.
	It doesn't mean we have to hate all businessmen.
	It's just we recognize that when there is a bad system, people are going to get messed up.
	You know, in the Soviet Union, there were people who...
	Run things through the black market, not because they love criminality, they just needed to get toilet paper or they needed to get razor blades or whatever it was, right?
	So, despise, like, singling out women and saying, well, women are uniquely corrupted by state power and we should focus on them to the exclusion of everything else.
	Everyone gets corrupted by state power.
	I think the less intelligent you are, in some ways, the more I know, even that's not fair, because lots of smart people in the military, industrial complex, and in corporate welfare are thoroughly corrupted by the state.
	Lots of people who are in the media with high verbal IQs and abilities thoroughly corrupted by the state.
	So the state turns everything to shit.
	You know, the fact that it also turns women to shit should not let us say, well, the only thing that stinks around here is the women.
	Now, do you believe that it seems recently there's been a lot more calls for paid maternity leave?
	And, you know, naturally it seems to be women leading that charge.
	And to me, that seems like they're asking their employer to pay for their personal decision so that they can kind of double dip between the government and the employer so they really don't have to do anything at all.
	Yeah.
	I mean, there used to be something called a paid maternity leave called having a husband.
	Yes.
	And...
	The one thing that is a challenge is there is more emotional, quote, thinking in women than there is in men.
	And there is a lot of sentimentality around this.
	And I was not a huge fan when the Trump administration came out with, well, we're meeting with Justin Trudeau to figure out how we can help women achieve more in business.
	And it's like, oh, come on.
	Come on.
	I mean, do we really need more affirmative action after a hundred years of feminism?
	I mean, is this ever going to end?
	No!
	Because you're fighting biology.
	But how much truth can the world take?
	You know, I talk about ethnicity and IQ. I talk about inbreeding.
	I talk about gender and differences in the economy and so on.
	And it doesn't seem to matter.
	In some ways, right?
	I mean, I know it's a slow and steady progress and so on.
	Sometimes I feel the world is manufacturing more idiots than I can cure at a faster rate.
	I know that feeling.
	Yeah, I mean, but, you know, we do have this amazing capacity to, you know, I reach millions of people.
	You're now part of this reaching millions of people, which I appreciate.
	And that's millions more than would have happened otherwise.
	So I do think that we can continue to just tell the truth.
	And...
	When you tell the truth to try and avert a disaster, one or two things are going to happen.
	When you break things down, it makes things a lot easier to work with.
	One or two things are going to happen.
	If you predict that bad things are going to happen, then either the bad things happen or they don't.
	Now, if the bad things don't happen, good.
	Yay!
	You know?
	If you're a doctor and you say, stop eating so much sugar or you're going to get diabetes, if the guy doesn't get diabetes, you're happy to be wrong.
	Exactly.
	Or, the bad things do happen, in which case you gain a massive amount of credibility.
	A massive amount of credibility just because you said, this is what's going to happen, these are the bad things that are going to happen, let's...
	Try to work to avert it, right?
	I mean, it's the Churchill.
	Why did Churchill so decisively replace Chamberlain?
	Because Chamberlain said he had achieved peace in our time, and Churchill said, nope, it's going to be a war, it's going to be a war, it's going to be a war.
	And then when the war came, Churchill was falsed to be the Prime Minister.
	Do you believe that the same method of just telling the truth and hammering the truth into people will work in terms of the progressive problem we have here?
	Or has it gotten to that point, like you said, to where there are no more arguments?
	Right.
	Yeah, I mean, I don't know.
	I don't know.
	I mean, I don't know.
	And I don't think there's any way to know.
	But until I know for sure, I'm going to keep making the arguments.
	I'm going to keep bringing the facts to the people.
	At what point, though, do we know that there are no more?
	Oh, when you have no free speech left, then it's all done.
	And that doesn't mean that it's done forever, right?
	There was no free speech in the Soviet Union.
	But Solzhenitsyn wrote his works, right?
	Put together and typed up by hand, and you were given two hours or three hours or overnight to read the Gulag Archipelago and so on.
	He eventually was able to publish them and so on.
	So even if you go into the long, dark night of disaster, I mean, eventually, at some point, the light, you know, the civilization arises even out of the ashes of Rome and so on.
	Although with multiculturalism, it might be a little longer.
	Who knows?
	But, no, while you still have the freedom to make arguments in the public sphere, then you should do so when the arguments become Functionally and practically impossible, which in America is not likely to happen anytime soon.
	The First Amendment is a pretty strong bulwark in America, which is why the left goes so much towards hysterical verbal abuse and trying to destroy your life and rip up your source of income and so on, because at least in America and in the West, there's a pretty strong commitment to freedom of speech.
	So as long as you can keep talking, you keep talking.
	And then when you can't...
	Depending on your level of courage and your willingness to defy the authorities, I would never counsel anyone to do anything illegal, but you keep talking until it becomes impossible.
	You fight until you're out of ammo.
	You do.
	My worry is, how do I prepare my children for the world that I believe is going to be waiting for them in 20 or 30 years?
	Your kids are incredibly lucky, Jason.
	You view this as a problem.
	No, no, no, no, no.
	Your kids are incredibly lucky.
	Do you think your kids are going to end up getting a stripper pregnant?
	No.
	No.
	So they'll be way up on you, even as far as that goes.
	No, I mean, I, you know, the fact that your kids are going to grow up knowing some of the darker elements of female nature, which is important, you know, we all have our light side and our dark side.
	The fact that they're going to grow up knowing about all of this stuff is fantastic.
	It's great.
	What hard-won wisdom you will be able to provide to them.
	Tell them to be wary of women.
	Absolutely.
	I tell women, be wary of men.
	You know, sometimes men will just lie to you to have sex.
	Do you know that women will sometimes lie to you just to get your resources?
	Of course we need to know this.
	This used to be common knowledge.
	And you're reaching back through a tunnel of time, hard one from stripper fertility crazy land, and you're able to bring this hard one masculine wisdom to your children.
	It's not going to poison them.
	them, it's going to harden them, it's going to make them wary, it's going to make them safe, right?
	I mean, you wouldn't want your...
	Imagine if your two boys were being raised by their mom, like their bio mom.
	I mean, do you get how vulnerable they would be to being exploited by women in the future?
	Thank you.
	Thank you.
	Yeah, and that's one thing, you know, me, even somebody like me who never wanted to be a parent, I know that I'm a better parent than the train wreck that their mother is.
	Yes, I have no doubt of that.
	And my worry is just for their future.
	I want them to be, you know, prepared, but I also don't want to influence their opinions.
	That's why I try and just keep it...
	No, no, you're the parent.
	It's your job to influence their opinions.
	Sorry, that's your job.
	Up to how much, though, like you said, how much truth can people handle?
	Well, you'll know.
	Age appropriate, right?
	I mean, they don't have to worry too much about getting strippers pregnant at their age.
	No.
	Not yet.
	So I would say just...
	You'll know.
	And, you know, be aware of who they're dating when they get older.
	Be aware of who their circle is and be aware of who their peers are and be aware of what they're doing on the computer and, you know, just be aware of all of this kind of stuff and help guide them towards better and righteous decisions.
	You are going to be a very important source of wisdom to them that they wouldn't probably get from a single mom and may not even get from sort of a happily married couple who hadn't gone through these kinds of learning situations.
	That's a very good point, yes.
	Alright.
	All right.
	Thank you very much, Stefan.
	You're very welcome.
	And thanks, everyone, so much for calling in.
	It was a great, great show.
	I appreciate everybody's conversation and everyone's chat time.
	It's delightful to share all of this stuff with you.
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	Please, please help us out.
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	Okay, I'll beg.
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	So much.

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