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May 29, 2017 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
02:50:21
3699 Sins of the Father - Call In Show - May 24th, 2017
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Hey, hey, hey, everybody.
Stefan Molyneux from Freedom Aid Radio.
Hope you're doing well.
Great, great set of callers tonight.
The first one was, how can the men of my generation avoid the traps of hedonism and anger and live a moral life full of meanings?
There's a young man who feels a little bit paralyzed in moving forward.
Now, you know, scratch that.
He's massively paralyzed in moving forward in his life.
A lot of people are facing this, men and women, and we blow through that With great verbal alacrity.
The second caller wants to know, okay, so if you're rich, if you have money, don't you have more freedom and more opportunities to help spread the message of freedom?
And how can you go about achieving that?
What's the best way to get yourself jump-started as an entrepreneur or as somebody who just wants to get the freedom that additional resources can give you?
Very, very important question.
The third caller wanted to know, what Are the intellectual and economic roots of this narrative called white privilege that is taking hold so strongly in the West.
Now, of course, if you identify the causes, you can treat the symptoms.
So we did both in that conversation.
Now, the last caller was a brave, very brave and wonderful man.
Comes from a pretty far off island and had a terrible, terrible upbringing.
Brutal and violent and vicious.
He has one child, has another child on the way, and is desperate.
Tearful to find some way to avoid repeating the cycle of abuse that he went through as a child.
Very brave, very powerful conversation.
I really, really appreciate his courage and willingness to open up his heart in this way.
It's very, very important to listen to that.
And also very important, if you don't mind me piggybacking, is to come to freedomainradio.com slash donate to help out the show.
Very, very important.
We need your resources more than ever, I would say, to help spread the message of freedom, self-knowledge, virtue, integrity, rationality, and philosophy around the world.
That's freedomainradio.com slash donate.
Do it.
You'll feel better.
You know you will.
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Help me.
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Don't forget to follow me on Twitter at Stefan Molyneux, and please feel free to use the Amazon affiliate link at FDRURL.com slash Amazon.
Alright, well up first today we have Minwoo.
He wrote in and said, After coming from a background of public schools and soul-mashing parenting, I've only recently started tackling some of my issues in the form of therapy, audiobooks, and exercise.
I've managed to make some good progress in an isolated bubble from the world, bought and paid for by my own parents, and But crutch time has arrived.
Long story short, I can either choose to go to college, play video games, smoke marijuana, and murder my own values just so I can live comfortably, or move out and be either destroyed or forged into a man by that hardship.
I know that I would be happier moving out and doing things I know are important to me, i.e.
philosophy, mental self-improvement, exercise, preparing for the future, etc.
But the allure of just going with the flow is also strong.
My question is, how can the men of my generation avoid the traps of hedonism and anger and live a moral life full of meaning?
That's from Minwoo.
Hello, Stefan.
How are you today?
I'm well.
I'm well.
How are you doing?
I'm doing fantastic.
I've been looking forward to this conversation.
Good.
Let's hope we can keep it that way.
Or not, if that's helpful too.
So, what happened with your parenting, like your parents?
What happened with your history?
I mean, the public schools, I assume it's just generally horrible stuff to do with public schools, but what was it with the parenting you experienced?
I mean, my dad, I found he was a very bad role model for me.
He would Make promises with people.
And then when people confronted him about those promises, he would blow raspberries at them.
He would not really spend any time with me.
He would hit people, lie.
And I didn't really feel like that was a positive experience growing up as my role model.
Where was your mom in all this?
She was home and she just kind of watched it happen a lot of the time.
And I felt like my role in the family, because there was a lot of problems in the family, because my sister and my parents all moved to America, and I felt that I couldn't have any problems or voice any complaints as a child.
So whenever this kind of stuff happened to me, I didn't feel like I could say anything about it.
Or if I did tell my parents about it, I wouldn't get a response that I felt was helpful.
And when did you get into marijuana?
Near my last year of high school, I think.
And it's been maybe three years since then.
How often do you smoke?
Pretty often.
I say at least five times a week.
And how were you first introduced?
I mean, I guess I knew of the kids who used marijuana in high school.
You could sort of see them in the haze of smoke.
They were called the Quad Gang or the Outback.
And...
Well, I was introduced through a friend I had, but I kind of didn't really know a lot about marijuana.
And I read your video about addictive personalities, and I knew that after a bad childhood, it wouldn't be a smart idea to get into that.
But after I stayed off, I kind of improved my mental state a little bit.
Didn't have a state where I felt like I would need that to survive.
And I got a little bit more educated and learned about the effects of marijuana.
Joe Rogan podcast, listen to him talk about it, and I then started marijuana then.
Right.
Would you say that you're addicted?
No, I don't think I am.
Right.
And how often do you play video games in a week?
How many hours do you think?
It's definitely gone down recently, but It used to be almost at least three hours a day, and some days I would have time or not, but I would say at least five to seven days of the week, I used to play three hours, and that was mainly when I was in school, because that was just my coping mechanism, I guess, my escapism.
And after I've stopped going to school, I've done less and less of video games and tried to branch off, but it's kind of hard to kick the habit.
What did you play, or what do you play?
I played League of Legends mostly.
That's an online one, is that right?
Yes, that is one of the MOBO games.
MOBO stands for?
I don't know, actually, but it's where you basically have two bases and you attack each other in simple terms.
Got it.
Got it.
All right.
And what does your day look like now?
Well, when I do have work, I go to work.
And I work currently as a delivery driver.
And if I'm doing that, I mainly...
To smoke and listen to podcasts or read audiobooks while doing that.
If I'm not doing that, I kind of spend my time at home just laundering around and just reading books or things like that that interest me, but not really get anything a lot done, I think.
But you don't smoke while you're driving?
I do, actually.
What?
Why?
I thought you're not addicted.
But don't you get fired if you get caught?
Not really.
Really?
Nope.
But you mean that the companies out there with fleets of delivery drivers with big vans or trucks, they know that their drivers...
I'm not like a truck delivery driver.
I'm a pizza delivery driver.
Sorry, pizza delivery driver.
And it's fairly common for the drivers to...
Well, I guess if you get snacky, you're all set.
But it's common for the drivers.
You say in your neck of the woods, it's common for the drivers to smoke marijuana.
I have a very small sample size, but just looking at the different places of employment, I'd say it's very commonplace.
And you wouldn't get fired if you were caught?
No.
Wow.
And do you think it affects your driving at all?
No, I don't believe so.
I've been driving for maybe three and a half years now, and I've never been in an accident or anything.
Well, you might want to look up some of the studies about reaction time and marijuana.
But is it legal?
I'm not very proud of my use during it, but I guess it's just what other people do.
And I never personally felt the negative effects.
And another aspect is I'm going to stop working there in like maybe a week also.
Yes, but I'm guessing you're hoping to have a job where...
Marijuana use would not be optimal, right?
Yes.
Right, okay.
I mean, I know that there are studies that say that there's no increase in car accidents for people who are using pot.
But I'm just, as far as I understand it, there is a reduction in response time, reaction time.
So that's just something to look up.
All right.
And the idea of moving out, it seems to be kind of extreme for you.
Yeah, there's a lot of...
You say, I got this isolated bubble, go to college, move out and either be destroyed or forged into a man by that hardship.
I mean, that sounds kind of extreme, if that makes any sense.
I think...
It's because I view it as extreme.
It's not just a simple decision.
I feel like it's burning of a lot of bridges and a major crossway in my life.
Right.
But why, I mean, this is what human animals do, right?
I mean, we're supposed to do that kind of stuff, right?
Can you clarify what you mean by that kind of stuff?
Well, we're supposed to grow up and move out, right?
Mm-hmm.
And so, it's a, you know, like, everybody goes through puberty, right?
Yes.
It's not like the furnace-forged fires of hell that you have to transverse with headless monkeys and zombies attacking you.
You grow up, you move out, right?
Now, as you know, I've been sort of mostly, not entirely, but without parenting from about the age of 15 onwards.
So, this idea that it's...
A huge step to move out and start your own life.
Help me sort of understand why this seems like such a huge deal for you.
Well, one is I don't consider my family a good support group, obviously.
But I guess it's because of my low self-esteem or self-confidence, I just find it hard to believe that I'm going to find anything else.
So if I do move out, it's kind of like the idea of the person who doesn't want to lose their old best friend even though they don't like them because they don't think they can make new friends.
Well, sure, but I understand that.
But isn't that kind of a good reason for moving out?
Like if your family is not supportive or whatever?
And plus, they also kind of said that they cut ties with me and kind of stopped supporting me financially if I moved out.
Well, hang on.
Which is not a deal breaker.
They would both cut ties with you in terms of never speaking to you?
And obviously, I assume that would mean they would not give you money as well, right?
But why would they cut ties with you if you move out?
Because they don't think...
Well, in their mind, the only successful path in life is going to college.
And if I'm not going to follow their kind of plan of how life works...
And it's not just a moving out.
Our relationship is already really bad.
Even in the house.
So it's not like there would be much change if I moved out.
We're pretty much not talking even now.
Why do you want to go to college?
Not really.
I don't.
They want me to go to college.
Okay.
They want you to go to college, right?
What do they want you to take?
They want me to take mathematics.
And do you like mathematics?
Yes, I do.
All right.
And what do they think you're going to do with...
I know that there are things you can do, obviously, with a degree in mathematics.
A lot of that stuff has to do with finance.
But what do they think you can do with mathematics?
What do they want you to do?
Well, they just want me to go to college for a little bit and get a job as either an actuary or accountant, something along those lines, and just invest in my career over a long time span.
I guess that's their view.
Right, right, right.
I don't think you need to have a mathematics degree to be an accountant.
I also think that, too.
I mean, the math is not that complicated.
I mean, don't get me wrong.
Being an accountant is a big deal.
It's tough work and all that.
But it's not like you need really advanced mathematics to be an accountant.
I think me and my parents are past the point of rational conversation, though.
So I don't know if that would work.
That's a tough decision to make.
And I really sympathize.
I sympathize.
I don't agree with going to college to please your parents.
Right?
I mean, just because something worked for your parents, assuming it did, and I think given how you described your father and your mother, maybe it didn't work that well.
But you don't...
It's not a good idea to live your life to fulfill other people's preferences and expectations, right?
It's...
That's true, but it's also that I've lived that way for maybe the first 19 years of my life.
There's also that kind of sunken in habit ingrained in me that kind of whispers in my ear.
You know what I mean?
Right.
Right.
Do you think that your government school, your public school, do you think that it prepared you for adult life at all?
Oh, no.
Isn't it terrible?
It provided me nothing.
It gave me a fake view of history, had terrible teachers, all-female teachers, female environment.
It was just the lowest...
What's that word you say?
Like the lowest social rung or the lowest common denominator.
That's how we rules the social environment.
It was just terrible.
Yeah, I've been thinking about this lately.
People like and I think it's useful to talk about sort of my own personal experiences.
I won't go off on a long thing here, but it is just appalling.
How bad government schools are at preparing you for anything to do with the real world.
Anything to do with the real world.
I mean, I don't even know what, like, you don't have competent people, you don't have intelligent people, you don't have motivated people, you don't have dedicated people, you don't have motivating people.
Who are your teachers?
Teachers are just standing up there, droning in these immature, piggy, selfish ways as a whole.
Exercising their little petty crow wings of diminished power over a helpless and captive audience.
And it is really...
It's terrible...
Just how little... Schools...
In the government realm prepare you for anything to do with the Delta...
Now...
You could sort of argue back in the day...
They're all based on the Prussian model...
Which was supposed to make you into a good little soldier and factory worker...
That maybe it was preparing you for that kind of horrible...
Diminished surf-like existence...
But now... In this knowledge economy...
Where thinking and initiative and creativity... Motivation... Entrepreneurship...
All of that is key...
You've got nothing in school to prepare you for that.
No successful people, in general, want to teach in government schools.
Nobody, well, Tony Danza perhaps accepted, but nobody wants to teach in government schools.
Why on earth?
It would be like me saying, well, I'm a really great public speaker because everywhere I go, people are dragged off the street, chained to a seat and forced to listen to me say things.
I mean, how much would I work on my speeches?
It wouldn't matter.
I get paid either way.
I could just show up and mumble some stuff into a mic and do a little scat and a little bit of 10cc lyric recitation and that's about it.
Boom!
Move on and get up the next paycheck.
So they don't teach you that the people we desperately need for children and their motivation and education are local or online.
They're not in the government schools.
And I think increasingly they're not even in the private schools either.
The private schools have to follow the government.
Garbage.
The irrelevant government garbage.
And it's terrible.
I was talking to my daughter tonight about commas and quotes and question marks and explanations, you know, all of the grammar and so on.
And, you know, we talked for an hour about why there was such a thing.
Why would you need grammar?
Why do you need question marks?
Why do you need exclamation marks?
Why do you need commas and quotes?
And I explained it to her, it's because English is a sung language, like most languages are sung language, you know.
I remember studying this in college back in the day.
I still remember the sentence.
What a marvelous old steam engine.
Like how you, it's a sung language, right?
Do you want to go to the mall?
Mall?
Goes up, right?
And because English is a sung language, you get people's meaning.
On the tonality, on the sing-song nature of the language.
When you write something down, you cannot replicate the sing-song nature, the sung emotionally annotated characteristic of English.
So you need Grammar, you need punctuation and all that so that you can get the nuance of what's being communicated without the singsong nature of the language.
So we're going to talk about that.
She's enjoying reading particular books.
And I was saying, you know, it's really annoying if you're reading a sentence and then it turns out it's what someone is saying and you only find that later on.
And we wrote out a couple of those, right?
So without the quotation marks, you can't tell who's speaking and so on.
And what a comma's for and when do people normally take a breath and all caps.
It's either somebody angry, insane, or both on the internet.
But so just something like that.
And I remember learning all of this stuff.
I remember in particular in boarding school, I remember there was a tiny, tiny little memories that made me nothing to anyone.
But I remember I had to write words and there were dots.
I had to write the letters down and there was one dot for each letter.
And then there was a period at the end of the sentence.
And I was always forever until I realized that I was looking for that one last letter because there was a dot, but it turned out to be a period.
It was slightly lower and to the right, but I thought it was just another dot for a letter.
And nobody ever explained to me why grammar matters.
It was just, well, you have to learn this.
Why?
Well, what does it mean?
Now, I understand it later, but wouldn't it be great if you understood what the hell you were learning before you learned it so you knew why you were learning it?
Why you were learning it?
And in school, almost without exception, they never tell you.
Why what you're learning is important.
The BNA Act, 1867.
Why are you learning these things?
Why are you learning?
What does it matter?
Why is it important?
Why is it important?
Well, of course, now in the West, you have to learn your history.
You have to learn your history so you have something to mourn when it's ground under, when the statues are pulled down.
So they just don't do anything to prepare you at all for adult life.
How are they supposed to teach you how to supply a good and service in a voluntary manner?
How are they going to teach you how to provide value?
How are they going to teach you how to win over customers?
How are they going to teach you to earn your way?
They're all just a bunch of propagandizing thugs.
Hanging off the bloody teats of state power, lecturing, to a prison.
With some exceptions.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Okay, teachers, I get it.
You're the exception.
Once you listen to this show, good for you.
But you know what I'm talking about in general.
We got a bunch of state-sucking government bureaucrats pretending to educate the young.
And then, like yourself...
They view adulthood as an incomprehensible riddle.
They don't even know what it says, let alone how to solve it.
And in particular, when it comes to sexual matters, when it comes to romantic matters, when it comes to When it comes to marriage, when it comes to parenting, when it comes to childhood.
And I know, of course, some of that is supposed to be taught to you by your own parents, of course.
And I don't like the fact that that's sex education in school.
I mean, I really, really don't.
It is absolutely not where this should be occurring.
But of course, they are selected.
Leftists, right?
They want to hypersexualize childhood.
That's how you provoke and replicate our selection.
And it's how you make Women unmarriable is you expose them to a lot of sexual information when they're children and then they have a lot of sex and then they're unmarriable or at least the marriages that you're going to have are going to be largely unstable because the more sexual partners a woman has, the less fit she is to be a wife and a mother.
And then what happens is you put a lot of sexual information in front of the kids, the girls.
Girls have a lot of sexual partners and then they grow up They divorce their husbands.
And the sons see that and they say, whoa, MGTOW's the way, baby.
Good job, sex ed.
Way to reduce certain populations.
And I knew nothing.
Nothing about how to have a decent relationship.
Nothing about how to be mature.
Nothing about how to have boundaries and lines and how to be assertive.
Because teachers don't have to be assertive.
They can just be bullies because you're not going anywhere, are you?
You can't go anywhere.
It's just a sick, chilly shed to dump your children in during the day so you can go and be liberated at work.
Grind out a paycheck and some taxes for the powers that be and let your children be raised by strong-armed sophists in service of the state.
So, man, I sympathize with you, Minwoo.
I really do.
We're so ridiculously unprepared for adulthood.
It's hard.
So, I mean, I really, really get it.
But it's important.
What you think is very important about things.
Right?
I don't go as far as Hamlet.
There is nothing good or bad, but thinking makes it so.
But it matters how you describe things to yourself.
Right?
If you feel there's this fiery fork in the road, one leads to absolute irreversible doom of your life, the other one leads to majestic heights of symphonic glory.
Well, that's a way of paralyzing yourself because the stakes become so high.
How can you decide?
Right?
Mm-hmm.
It's...
One aspect of the decision to move out or not is I feel that I don't have a lot of time to get the things done.
The way I view the moving out and all that is I have a general idea of what I want to do and the things I need to commit to to live a more happy life.
But I feel like I've been set back so much by my society.
I mean, the public education I've gone through, the parenting that I've gone through.
And I feel like I have so many issues to deal with.
And if I look at the collapse in my society around me, like the economic, social, political, immigration, any of those issues, I just feel that how can I start making these steps to fix myself when everything around me is already breaking?
Right.
And I understand that's difficult, too.
But let me tell you the upside of that.
The downside is very, very clear to see.
Oh, God, what's in my feed now?
Right?
The downside is very, very clear and easy to see.
I'll give you the upside to that as well.
When you are in the closing phase of a social cycle, yeah, a lot of horrible stuff going on.
I get that.
But there's a lot of opportunity as well.
What I mean by that is that when it comes, when your society is reaching the end of its falsehoods, like an addict, Reaching the end of their self-justifications and facing a physical end to the addiction in one way or another.
Death or change.
When your society has run out of excuses and run out of monopoly money to paper over the crimes of the boomers, terrible stuff is going on, but let me tell you one thing that's absolutely wonderful about it is that you don't have to believe a single goddamn thing that anyone in authority tells you.
You may have to obey them.
Certainly if there's a law, you should.
Because they have the guns.
But you don't have to believe anything that they say.
When a morality is cracking and breaking, when a false morality is cracking and breaking under its own weighty self-contradictions, there's a lot of rubble falling from the sky and some people are going to get smashed and squished.
But you can't be guilted anymore.
You're like the media going after Sean Hattie, going after our friends.
People trying to cut advertising at the rebel.media.
Check them out!
And the media attacking people.
How's the media got any credibility at all?
After they cheerleaded the war into Iraq and after they cheerleaded the war into other places.
I mean, after they covered up the crimes of the Clintons, after they covered up the destruction of Libya and Syria and Iraq and Afghanistan.
Well, they have no credibility.
They have no credibility at all.
For anybody with half an eyeball, the emperor has no clothes.
And you don't have to believe anything that people say to you in authority.
You don't have to believe the goddamn thing the media says, or the academics.
The academics in particular, they're supposed to be the first goddamn guard against creeping immorality, slithering socialism, craptacular communism, jihadism.
They're supposed to be your defenders.
You don't have to believe anything.
Anyone says to you, you can forge your own way.
You can forge your own identity.
Now, for a lot of people, and myself included, that's tough, very tough.
We always have a tendency, in a sense, like water.
We feel formless, and we want to pour ourselves into a container or some sort of fixed ideology or belief system that can give us dimension, shape, form, purpose, and the anxiety of free-falling.
Without a container.
It's liquid we feel almost...
I feel.
I felt.
I was just going to turn into vapor.
Into a cloud and be blown to the four corners of the earth.
And that there would be nothing left.
I mean, I was raised a Christian.
I was a socialist.
Those all fell away.
I became an objectivist.
Found the limits of that.
That all fell away.
And when I... Like a drowning man running out of barrels to cling onto because they just keep crumbling underneath you.
Eventually you just say, fuck it, I have to learn to swim.
If I can't get to an island, I have to become an island.
If I can't land on a continent, I have to be a continent.
If physics are contradictory, incomprehensible, I have to become physics!
And you have that opportunity, and it is a very, very rare opportunity in human history, and we stand on that volcano right now, the volcano called originality, authenticity, self-actualization, original identity, clear thought.
We stand on that volcano.
That is shooting a skyward.
And that is the sparks throwing up.
You know, when a fire...
You build...
I was in the Boy Scouts.
You build a little teepee...
Of sticks.
And branches.
And you light it.
And the teepee...
At some point will collapse.
And when the teepee collapses...
A cloud of sparks goes up.
And they have the capacity to light something else.
Now, we don't have any chance to stop the tipi from collapsing.
That chance was missed probably 40 years ago.
The welfare state, third world immigration, and the failure of atheists to replace Christianity with true rational ethics.
I can criticize that because I did it.
The teepee is collapsing.
We are the sparks that must rise.
And what the sparks need to do is find something else to bring light to.
Not die off and fall and hiss into the frog pond, but find a way to light something.
Sounds like setting a forest fire.
The analogy is kind of running a little thin here, but you have the opportunity for true originality.
Because before...
When the fire is still warm and the teepee looks strong, you don't...
You don't look for a restaurant when you've just finished eating, right?
And so, when society is content enough that you just trundle along, you gain security at the price of originality.
You gain conformity and the comforts, not inconsiderable comforts of conformity, at the expense of authenticity.
Now...
We have the opportunity for authenticity because I believe nothing that is said.
I laugh at what is said.
You read stuff that goes on in the media and, I mean, it's hilarious.
It is, I mean, obviously tragic, but it's hilarious.
It is like, see those funny videos.
Funny kid videos.
And there's some kid, he's got like a jar of hazelnut spread in his hands and his face is just covered in this brown syrupy palm olive based goo.
And you see the parent with the camera says, have you been eating that hazelnut spread?
No.
Are you sure?
No.
I didn't eat any.
That's the media.
Except, it's blood.
Have you guys been provoking war?
No!
Have you guys been race baiting?
No!
Have you guys been setting men and women against each other?
No!
Have you guys been covering foreign defending terrorists?
No!
Have you been calling people racist?
No!
You can't read what you just wrote, can't you?
Apparently not.
So you have this incredible opportunity, Minwoo.
You don't have to be anyone for anything.
You can think for yourself.
You can reason for yourself.
You can come up with your own life.
Every train track you see around you leads someplace god-awful.
A festering swamp with...
Ticks bearing horrible diseases and off cliffs and onto volcanoes.
Everywhere you look where there's a preformed track leads to someplace horrible.
Great.
Sucks in a way.
Kind of like the efficiency of culture leading you someplace useful so you don't have to reinvent the wheel.
But when all the wheels have come off the wagon you don't get the ride of the wagon but you get to explore on foot.
And if you're only going to focus on, eh, you know, the wheels are off the train, can't get anywhere, bus ain't coming, you gotta walk, right?
So that would be my suggestion to focus on that.
And I am sorry for the lack of preparation that you have, and there's a lot about that that really sucks, but there are some glorious opportunities in that as well.
One thing I wanted to ask is when I'm going through these hardships, because I understand that even with the new forged path, there's going to be difficulties and whether it's going to be unresolved issues in my childhood or anything.
I was wondering what kind of mindset or belief I could hold to kind of get me through those more difficult patches.
The current idea I'm trying to Implement is whenever things look particularly rough or difficult I allow myself to delusion that I can achieve it and I am unlimited and I can do it and I've been trying to peer through that window and That's been helping a little bit, but I was wondering what your opinion would be on that kind of mindset When did you last smoke?
Yesterday I believe You sure?
Mm-hmm.
You sure?
Yep.
You believe?
I smoked yesterday.
Right.
I'm not a big fan of the self-medication.
I think you've got to face your demons head on.
No biochemical allies to soften the blow.
Because everything you do to self-medicate makes you weaker and your demons stronger.
You stand and face those fuckers down.
And the kind of self-medications that can occur.
Yes.
Video games, I believe are a form of self-medication.
Marijuana is a form of self-medication.
Sex is a form of self-medication.
The instant high of sudden romance is a form of self-medication.
And even No, exercise, not so much.
Depends.
Depends.
College.
Form of self-medication.
I'm going to pour myself into a container called degree.
I'm going to let other people tell me what I need to learn and when and how.
I'm not going to think for myself.
I'm going to be dragged through courses, taking notes along the way.
And...
College for things you need to have a college degree for?
Yeah, okay, I understand.
Engineering, I want to be an accountant and so on.
But college for the arts?
Good lord, why would you want to pay to be indoctrinated?
Think for yourself.
Figure out what you're interested in, what you want to study.
And other people set your agenda when you're a grown-ass man or woman.
Follow your interests, your bliss.
Trust me, the people in college have no clue.
Philosophically speaking, they have no clue what you should learn and why from a rational standpoint.
They have an agenda to push.
And...
They have indoctrination to implant, and they need you there so they can get paid by the state.
There's something wending its way through potential US legislation, which is about allowing, if I remember rightly, it's about allowing students to discharge student loans through bankruptcy.
God, please, please, Lord above, Keck himself, please, let this legislation pass.
Brothers and sisters, let us be free of student debt.
Because if student debt can be discharged through bankruptcy...
Then people will be more hesitant to make student loans.
If people are more hesitant to make student loans, there'll be fewer students going to college.
In the arts.
Less indoctrination.
Less bullshit.
Less debt.
Less slavery.
Less bureaucracy.
Ooh!
Maybe slightly fewer $150,000 a year heads of diversity training.
Just maybe.
Many years ago I knew a guy who worked in a bank and the bank did not want to make student loans and oh my god did they ever get a shitstorm laid down on them by the irate propagandistic Jupiter of the state.
The negative consequences they were going to face for not making student loans, which they just didn't want to make, were huge.
This is why things are so expensive.
Because so much money is getting diverted into student loans, which are ridiculously in arrears.
It costs $38.
It costs $38 to the American taxpayer to collect $1 of student debt.
In what potentially sane world is that business model sustainable?
I can go and pick up your debt for you, get you a dollar.
It's going to cost you $38.
You want to sign on the dotted line?
Sorry to my Southern listeners.
That's a bad habit.
I'll try and stop.
I just can't do it.
So, just don't let people think for you.
Just learn how to think.
I mean, I've got the book.
It's coming.
It's coming.
It's coming, brothers and sisters.
The art of the argument.
It's a great book.
And it's a paucity of thinking out there.
It's appalling.
You see these comments all the time.
I like stuff.
I like Steph, but...
But...
I disagree with him on some things.
But people say...
I'm a fan.
Please don't be a fan.
Be a fan of yourself, of your own capacity to think.
I agree, but I don't agree.
I like, but I don't like.
I agree with this, I don't agree with that.
It's not a buffet!
Philosophy is not about faith.
The arguments are solid.
Sucks to be you.
You've got to follow them.
If they're not solid, if they're invalid or irrational, anti-rational, it's not a sports team cheering.
It's not allowed in philosophy.
Just try and stay away from the self-medication, video games, drugs, cigarettes, overeating.
I've actually used that as a starting point because when I looked at the kind of venues of self-improvement and a lot of them, as you said, felt like train tracks, I started with the body because it doesn't really matter what happens in two years.
If I'm healthy, I'm healthy.
And I feel like that's the one area of my life I've made the most progress so far.
Good.
Well, I'm going to leave it at that because I've got a bunch of callers tonight, but I really do appreciate the call.
And I hope that...
You know, I mean, if the choice is going to a college to a degree you don't want, being stuck at home, smoking, playing video games, well, that's comfort.
But that's comfort like relaxing into quicksand.
Hey, look, I'm not fighting anymore.
So, no.
We all want ease.
We all want ease.
But we need struggle.
We need challenge.
We need conflict.
We need it.
Our souls are like muscles.
They get flaccid and lazy and useless without opposition.
There's a series, a very interesting series.
I'll do a review on it at some point, but it's called Billions.
With the very great Paul Giamatti and the guy from Homeland.
But there's a scene where these two kids...
They have a private chef who makes them these lovely omelets and they're like, oh, these omelets suck.
We got them every day.
They're kind of rubbery.
And the chef is like, oh, let me prepare something else for you.
I'm so sorry, mate.
And the mom's like, get up, get out of here.
We're going down.
They live on the sea, of course, right?
Rich family.
And she has them digging around with their toes for clams.
She's saying, well, that's what I had to do for food sometimes.
Come down, dig for clams.
And that is the concern.
Those of us who have had great struggles and great challenges, we resent those struggles and challenges at the time.
And there's still reason to resent them afterwards.
A lot of them are artificial based upon the dysfunction, madness of others.
But we say, oh, we want for our kids to grow up in safety and security and comfort and peace.
And I agree with all of that.
But there's a great risk in it as well.
The kids who are raised well, they have the responsibility of the moral battle.
And I know them, I can see them very, very clearly across the web.
The kids who are raised well, who are now adults, good families, strong foundations, good upbringings, they have a moral center and a clarity and a courage that is wonderful to see.
If you're raised well, you have an obligation to the shattered masses of parent-broken children.
You were lucky.
Didn't earn it, right?
You understand.
It wasn't like I was a bad kid and that's why I got my family, but my daughter was a great kid and that's why.
Just luck of the draw.
Luck of the draw.
If you're raised well, really help others.
Being well-parented creates a substantial obligation, I believe.
So, all right.
Well, thanks for the call.
I appreciate it.
I'm going to move on, but best of luck with your decision.
And I hope, well, I think it's fairly clear where I stand.
So, thanks, man.
All right, up next we have Alexander.
He wrote into the show and said, Shouldn't the end goal of the freedom movement be to produce more economic value than socialists in many industries as possible?
So the purpose of making socialists financially dependent on libertarians and anarchists, and is the best way of doing this to start a business?
How does one find the best balance between a career and a supporter of Western civilization, and what does one use to measure progress in the latter?
That's from Alexander.
Oh, hey Alex, how you doing?
I'm doing very well, thanks.
Thank you for having me.
Good.
Why is there no price mechanism for the freedom movement?
Oh, I think what I mean is there is...
Maybe I don't understand the relationship as well.
Sorry, the reason I'm saying is that if you write a book, then you see if the book sells, right?
If you do a podcast, you're either going to get revenue from advertisers or you can ask for donations or whatever it is going to be.
And you're going to get some feedback based on that, right?
Or even if you're doing it just for shits and giggles, you're going to get it.
Because...
You're going to get more subscribers or more likes or more shares or whatever it is, right?
So there is both monetary and non-monetary impact feedback very much available for whatever you're doing in public, even if you're not on the web, right?
I mean, again, book sales and stuff, right?
Right.
Actually, that makes sense.
And I think more of my concern is...
It's not that there isn't—it's really that I'm just really sick and really concerned and tired of being dependent on, well, basically socialists paying me.
And I'm really not convinced that if I tried to do anything like Free Domain Radio that they would want to have anything to do with me just because of my political values.
Yeah.
Yeah, does that make any sense?
So basically a price mechanism with politics attached, I just kind of, I'm not convinced that, or I don't understand how that works when this really heavily politicized America is kind of muddying the waters.
I don't know, I'm sorry if that's not very clear.
In corporations, there's a lot of power.
There's a lot of power in being able to give people work, which is, I guess, the sorest thing, right?
So if you can create value and you can give people work, then you have, to some degree, authority over them.
Now, leftists are not very good at providing value in a free market scenario.
They hate the market, right?
So how do leftists get into corporations?
How do they get into somewhat free market entities that Where they can provide a lot of value.
Well...
They create artificial emergencies like sexism, racism, discrimination of all kinds, and then they create these vast bloated HR and diversity training departments where they can worm their way in and gain control over the corporation by creating these non-market, generally legalistic and lawsuit-driven pseudo-businesses.
Entrepreneurship based on addictions to state power and the creation of artificial narratives of bigotry So this is how they work their way in, right?
And they work their way in and then they try to, not all but some, and maybe it's an unconscious process, but what happens is they worm their way into these corporations and then they start to mess with the corporations.
They start to move people out who are on the right and they start to move people in who are on the left.
And then they slowly begin to twist and turn and take over the culture of these organizations.
And we can see this happening in tech companies, Twitter, Facebook, Google.
You can see this stuff happening over and over again.
And they infiltrate these companies in order to harm people who aren't leftist, to promote leftist causes.
And then they end up by destroying those companies.
Like termites.
You know, like the old episode of The Sopranos where a guy who runs a sporting goods store gets into gambling debts and they just rage through his store and destroy everything and sell everything and then move on.
And he's like, you guys are a bunch of termites.
He's like, yeah, that's what we do.
That's what we do.
So it is very tough to have any kind of freedom.
And this is one of the reasons why people on the left so much want government laws and government money.
This is why they need diversity quotas.
This is why they need gender hiring quotas.
They need laws.
So now they can provide value, which is, I can keep you from being hit by the state.
So they promote these intrusive property rights-destroying...
Laws, right?
Oh, don't worry.
Affirmative action, never going to be a quota system.
Boom!
It's a quota system, right?
So they promote all of this stuff, and then they sell you the cure to a disease that they invented.
And the only value, it's not positive economics, like they're providing something good to the customer.
It's negative economics in that they're selling a reduced exposure to lawsuits and fines and investigations.
From laws that they have themselves supported and promulgated.
So it's more like the mafia, you know?
We'll protect you from fires.
Wait, aren't you the guy setting the fires?
Well, sure.
I mean, that's the cover story.
But we're not going to say that.
We'll protect you from discrimination lawsuits.
Hey, wouldn't you have some?
All really keen on...
Anyway.
So they create all of this stuff and it becomes increasingly difficult.
If you look at universities, it's the same thing, right?
When universities actually had to provide value to the culture as a whole, to the society as a whole.
Leftists couldn't really get in.
So leftists need a lot of excess money so that the need to actually provide measurable value diminishes.
And then they need threatening stuff from the state and from aggrieved people so that they can sell you protection from those aggrieved people or those unjust laws.
And so they work like hell to try and get Before they can get into the universities and corrupt the intellectuals, they have to petition and advocate and push for government money coming sweeping in like a tsunami into universities.
Because once the money starts sweeping in like crazy, along with that comes a whole lot of quota systems and diversity systems and anti-sexism crap.
And then they come right again On all this free money to rescue you from a disease that they themselves invented and then they start to do the usual thing which leftists do when they get into any kind of position of authority is they start to block anybody who's not on the left and they start to promote everyone who is on the left and they just take it over.
It's like pouring milk into water.
So it spreads.
And it's very tough.
It's very tough.
In any large organization there's an old rule.
It says any organization that's not specifically on the right will inevitably drift to the left.
And the only thing that prevents organizations from drifting to the left is efficiency.
And so the leftists need to get rid of the efficiency principle, which again is creating all these laws and lawsuits and then getting a whole bunch of free government money.
That's how they corrupt, right?
They reduce the discipline of the market by distorting it.
So it is very, very tough.
I was...
It's a funny...
I mean, it's odd...
Alexander, that you were just talking about this.
Because I was just thinking yesterday about the challenges that I had in the business world with regards to...
Certain ethical situations.
Not in all areas in the business world, but in some areas in the business world.
It's really a challenge.
And it's particularly a challenge in the larger organizations.
Sure, they'll pay more.
A lot more political correctness.
A lot more of walking on eggshells.
A lot more of you don't have meetings with closed doors.
A lot more of you need witnesses for everything.
A lot more of you got a document to cover your ass for everything.
A lot more shady rules.
Shady rules.
You know, the guy...
Who blew up the young people, the children, in cases, at the Ariana Grande concert in England.
Guy was hanging an ISIS flag outside of his window.
It's not subtle.
Ooh, how could we have known?
Under surveillance by the police, flew to Libya, flew back!
Apparently the big problem for people in England, not all people, I bet, big problem, Michael Savage might come to England.
Donald Trump!
Remember, there was that petition.
Keep Donald Trump out of England.
You can hang an ISIS flag and fly off to Libya.
Fly back.
Eh, no problem.
Why didn't people report?
Maybe they're afraid of being called racist.
I don't know.
I don't know.
I genuinely don't know.
So, yeah, I mean, the more independence you can get, the better.
That's my thought.
What do you think?
Well, that makes a lot of sense, and I've worked in a big company, a couple of big companies before very briefly, so it's very consistent with my experience.
So there are two kind of points that I've been thinking about related to that more specifically, and that is kind of when you're young and just out of school and you have no skills and you're just really pissed off because Because of how worthless you are in the free market.
And then, well, at least like I did, I started to teach myself, tried to find industries that don't have high barriers of entry, that I can't become a lawyer if you don't go to an accredited law school.
You can't even take the bar.
You can't do this or that.
You can go in IT and teach yourself.
So that's kind of what I did.
I'm still new to it.
So basically what I'm convinced of currently is if you're new to a career path and you're just starting to build a skill set, you're very dependent on socialists.
And it's really, in order to start, my impression is in order to start a business, you have to Come to some point where your skills are just right to provide a product or service that you can sell on your own.
I'm not sure at what point I get there, but I'm figuring it out.
And in the meantime, I'm kind of working at this, well, happens to be a big company, while I acquire my skill set.
And I've just realized, while I've been going from job to job, and now I've finally kind of landed this really This great job in terms of technical experience.
I'm just horrified by...
If I mention one word about politics, it's like...
The first thought that comes into my head is I could get fired if I say the wrong thing.
It's that intense and extreme now.
I'm so sick of it that I really want to start my business, but I want to make sure that I'm the right person to do it, that I do it the right way.
I just want guidance on how to find out your desire to start a business.
Is realistic or not.
Right.
Right.
Did you ever see the movie Boy?
It's an old movie now.
Tom Cruise's breakout movie, Risky Business.
You ever seen that?
No.
Sorry.
It's a pretty good movie.
I'll check it out.
It's a pretty good movie.
It's 1983.
Oh my gosh.
He was 19 back in the day.
And the reason I bring this up...
There's a quote in it.
It's a pimp.
And...
The quote is...
In a recession...
Never...
Fuck with another man's source of income.
Because this guy's rescuing cookers.
And...
Why you have to get fired, I think is pretty clear, right?
Because if women, let's just say women, right?
So if women were so incredibly economically valuable, you wouldn't need any laws to hire them, right?
When Steve Jobs was alive, you didn't need the Steve Jobs, please hire him law, right?
Because if Steve Jobs went for a job, Steve Jobs went for a job, he would get a job for the most part, right?
Unless it was a job as captain of humility, but that's alright.
So...
Women are hired in access to their economic value because there are laws that...
And not just laws, but also, you know, government contracts.
If you want government contracts, you have to have certain quotas for races, for...
Genders and so on.
No, who's kidding?
Women.
And so...
The reason why you have to have the laws is that people know that the women aren't worth what they're being paid.
Of course, right?
If women were worth what they were being paid, it would be because they're producing such enormous value that of course you'd want to hire them.
But of course the reality is that significant proportions of women who go through and get MBAs end up not being in the workforce at all.
It's like 40% of some huge number.
Women take time off?
To go and have kids and be moms, it's great.
It's wonderful.
But it means that economically, in the free market, they're less valuable.
Why?
Because they're creating the next generation of human beings.
Incredible.
Wonderful.
Glad you're doing it, ladies.
But understand it cuts into the old paycheck a little.
And because of this basic fact, women are less economically valuable.
If you have the choice to choose between a man and a woman...
In their 20s or whatever for the same job.
There are economic arguments to say, well, you would hire the man because the woman has some possibility.
Maybe she doesn't want to have kids, but I'd be not allowed to ask that anymore, right?
So I can't make her sign a contract saying I'm not going to have kids, right?
And so you have to weigh the probabilities.
And most, 90% of women want to get married and have kids.
And...
So corporations end up hiring all these women who can't produce the economic value of the men.
So where are they going to put them?
Right?
Well, you have to create entire swaths of the corporation's building for women to wander around doing I don't know what.
Well, actually, I mean, I worked in an HR department.
I'm not speaking completely without knowledge here.
But...
They're kept away from production.
They're kept away from sales.
They're kept away from design.
They're kept away from R&D. They're kept away from accounting.
They're kept away from taxes.
They're kept away from the legal department.
They just...
It's called the pink ghetto, right?
They just do stuff.
Come up with diversity plans.
Have meetings and all, right?
Now, it's a pretty sweet gig.
Because you're kind of there because of the laws and because of the...
Government contracts which require you to have certain diversity plans and quotas and stuff like that.
It's an artificial situation.
So if you're on the right, or at least if you're not on the left, then you probably don't want any of these diversity quotas.
I mean, they're wrong.
They're immoral.
They're insulting.
They're terrible.
Now, if these laws, these diversity hires, the gender quotas and all this, if these were repealed, which would be a free market perspective, a freedom perspective, well, that...
That kind of sweet gig's going to dry up pretty much as the ink dries on the signature.
Those opportunities are going to dry up.
It's like, whoa, we don't have to have these quotas?
Okay.
HR department and other places, off you go.
We have real work to do with real stuff we sell in the real world.
So you are their enemy, financially, economically, from an income standpoint, right?
In a recession, and the recession will come for these people if free market principles win the day and people are allowed to voluntarily choose and hire and fire based upon their perceptions of economic value, accurate perceptions of economic value, because if you're not good at accurately perceiving economic value, you generally don't end up in a hiring and firing position.
But...
In a recession, don't fuck with another man or woman's source of income.
So if you are not on the left, you represent an existential threat to their income, to their money, to their prestige, to their success, to their whole thing.
So you understand why, and this is what I keep saying on this show, the left understands it's a battle.
I don't think the non-leftists do.
It's a traditional battle.
The left and the right are two subspecies fighting over the same resources.
The resources being the productivity of society.
You get a gray squirrel and a red squirrel in the same neighborhood.
One kicks the other out.
They don't coexist because they're both fighting for the same resources.
Biological principle.
Two subspecies never inhabit the same environment for very long.
One dominates the other one, wins over the other one, wins one, loses because they're both fighting for the same resources.
Now, in a free market, you can have lots of lovely, peaceful coexistence because people aren't fighting for the same resources because more and more resources are getting created.
But in the leftist world, it's a zero-sum game.
They consume the resources through the state that other people have to produce.
Someone goes on welfare, your taxes go up.
You have to pay for that person who's on welfare.
Or your kids will have to pay with the debt or whatever.
Or you pay through inflation if they print money.
So...
The state turns competition into viciousness because it's a zero-sum game.
It's a negative-sum game, in fact.
Whereas the free market turns competition into productivity, where more and more is created.
Instead of fighting over a steadily diminishing pie, you're creating just more and more and more pies.
The conflict is diminished.
The state is civil war.
The state is civil war, not just in terms of its internal, but its civil in that its laws and procedures and All of the rituals of the priesthood of the judiciary.
People think, oh, the Pope's got a funny hat.
What about these funny robes and these silly rituals?
A judge in Hawaii feels this way.
Sorry, no security for you.
So, yeah, they're going to fight.
They're going to fight like hell.
They don't want to be exposed to free market forces.
That produces the recession that fucks with their income.
And they recognize you as an existential enemy to what they have achieved.
Now, the fact is, of course, if you won, they'd end up with more and it would be better for them and so on.
If they were that smart, they would be in engineering or sales or whatever already, right?
Does that make any sense?
Yes.
Oh, definitely.
Yeah.
So yeah, you got to find your own way, I think.
Yeah.
Okay, I think kind of just the last part of that question that I'm still fuzzy on is, you know, is it possible to have like a really technical job that is kind of apolitical, but still, you know, have a really, but still have a real impact on, you know, Western civilization in a positive way?
Or do you kind of have to make your job?
No, come on.
I'm sorry, I didn't interrupt.
Let's say you have a technical job, right?
How are you going to have a positive impact on Western Civilization?
Well, I have a blog on the side.
Oh dear, your boss has just found out about your blog.
Yep.
That's pretty much it.
It is tough.
I mean, if you say, and I get these messages all the time, people are like, well, I'd really like to fight for freedom.
Yeah.
But the problem is, if anybody finds out, I'm going to get fired.
Now, of course, that's the left's confession that it's not an argument, right?
But that is the reality.
I don't think...
I mean, let's say you produce some wonderful technology.
The Saudis own a significant portion of Twitter now.
Oh, look, I made a great platform for spreading ideas.
How many of the ideas that are spread on that platform are really good?
Good job white people inventing the internet and technology and cell phones.
That way all the migrants can coordinate their way to Europe.
Great!
Go Rand Paul!
Oh, good luck with your bill on Saudi Arabia.
You're either vocal or you're not helping.
And if you're vocal, you're vulnerable.
So I think that's a basic reality.
All right, we've got this weird, awkward pauser, so I'm going to move on to the next caller, but I do appreciate you calling in.
Thanks, man.
All right, thanks.
Bye.
Alright, up next we have Elizabeth.
Elizabeth wrote in and said, We were outsiders.
I was bullied.
I was emotionally abused by my mother on a daily basis.
But when I share my experiences with people claiming I'm privileged, I'm told that it's irrelevant because I was still privileged, based on nothing but my skin color.
Needless to say, my ancestors were British and my skin is very pale.
colonialism gets thrown at me, but when I respond with stories about how the convicts suffered, they're dismissed.
As if they don't count, or perhaps they don't fit into the narrative.
I've been told that I have white privilege, which means I've never had to notice race.
I've been told that race is just a concept that white people invented in order to oppress people of color.
I don't even know what that means.
Probably most frustrating of all, I've been told that, even though I'm a lovely person with good intentions, and that I obviously have a very caring heart, that I'm a racist.
Unless I admit to myself that I was raised in a privileged position that taught me to be racist, which all white people were, that I can never truly be an ally of people of color, whatever that means.
And that I'm just part of the problem.
I refuse to accept this accusation, so I'm pushing back where I see it.
But it is wearing me down.
That's from Elizabeth.
Oh, hey, Elizabeth.
How you doing?
Well, I mean, I guess you've...
I kind of answered that with that story.
It's horrible, right?
It's horrible.
It's a horrible, abusive, no-win situation.
It's vicious.
It's nasty.
It's racist.
It's hideous.
It is absolutely hideous.
And if it was directed at any group other than white people, it would be condemned, as it should be, in the widest and most emphatic possible terms.
Yeah, like, it's gotten to the point now where I just call them racists whenever they say, oh, white privilege.
I'm like, uh, so you're a racist?
Okay.
What more to say, really?
It's just ridiculous.
I had sort of similar upbringing to yourself, in that I have...
Jamaican friends, Indian friends, black friends.
And when you're kids, it doesn't really matter.
Yeah.
I was thinking about my high school friends and thinking, what race were they?
There was like, I don't even know.
There were some tan people, some white people, some black people, and I didn't care.
They were all mostly guys, and they were all mostly just great.
We just talked about other stuff.
I don't understand it.
Right.
Now, one of the challenges with race and IQ is it tends to diverge a little bit later on in life.
So sort of early to mid-teens, everyone's kind of on the same level, but the race and IQ stuff tends to diverge a little bit later in life, which is one of the reasons why.
And it's one of these great tragedies, right?
It's one of the reasons why people are like, well, I was doing fine and now I'm finishing up school and I'm not doing as well as others.
And part of that is biological and all of that.
But There are these people, of course, constantly screaming race all the time.
And it is kind of exhausting because it is so irrational.
It is so irrational.
And it occurs because of resources.
It occurs because of the state.
It occurs because if you can get white people to feel guilty, white people will give you money.
Like a vending machine, you hit it.
And down comes the bag of chips.
So if you're really hungry and you don't have any money, what do you do?
You hit the vending machine.
Boom!
There go your chips, right?
Free stuff, right?
Yeah.
Sorry, go ahead.
Oh, sorry.
I was just going to say, like the Aboriginal people in Australia get basically 0% loans and all this stuff.
And it's like, that's great, but it's based on nothing but skin and, you know, There was the stuff that was awful in the past, but it wasn't just white people against black people.
And, you know, the Aboriginal society, I've been doing a lot of research on them, they were really quite brutal, particularly towards their women.
So it's like, I don't know.
67, if I remember rightly.
Average IQ of 67, right?
Yeah.
I mean, it's crazy.
And it's really tragic.
And of course, you know, there is this short-term feeling of...
Virtue signaling, smug self-satisfaction.
I'm helping people.
I'm going to give them lots of resources.
No?
It's not helping them.
It's not helping them.
We see the same with the indigenous people up here in Canada and in America.
It does not help them.
I had a call on a show, I think about a year and a half ago with a guy who was talking about this.
It does not help them.
It does not help them.
Free stuff does not help them.
And it is not out of kindness.
It is out of guilt.
And it provokes the worst behavior in people.
I feel no guilt.
No guilt.
No guilt.
I feel no guilt for any of the stuff that happened.
Boy, if you ever want to get punished in the world, just do good things.
Just do good things.
Come on.
White people, I mean, come on.
I mean, if white people are so bad, why don't you just boycott everything that white people have made?
Like the free market, like science, medicine, air conditioning.
Exactly.
I mean, come on.
The white race has given enormous benefits to the world as a whole.
And, you know, there are 30 million South African blacks alive because of white medicine, white science, white free market, and so on.
It seems like it's like, okay, well, if you're doing really good things in the world, hey, anyone recently thanked white people for ending slavery?
No.
You end slavery?
Oh, oh, oh, wait a minute.
You guys feel bad about slavery enough to end it?
No.
Oh, I bet you feel bad enough for reparations, too.
I bet you feel bad enough for guilt and privilege and affirmative action and quotas.
Oh, have you exposed that you feel bad about something?
Oh, we can work that shiv in and bleed resources out of you.
Nobody ever talks about East Asian privilege, Japanese privilege, Chinese privilege.
Japanese and Chinese people make more!
In white countries than white people do.
Why aren't people focusing on those people?
Where's that privilege?
There's two reasons.
Number one, there aren't enough of them to bleed dry.
Number two, they really don't feel bad about this stuff.
The late Canadian psychologist J. Philip Brushnan...
He wrote, he dealt a lot with R and K and IQ and race and so on.
Now, he's the guy, he went, he didn't believe the sub-Saharan Africa, right, average IQ of seven.
He just didn't believe it.
So he went down to a big project, tested God knows how many sub-Saharan blacks.
They had as much time as they wanted.
They were highly motivated, highly enthusiastic.
They were in colleges.
They had their own...
Proctors going up and down and no rush and no pressure.
Average IQ was exactly in the range that had been anticipated.
So J. Philip Rushden had lots of correspondence with people in Japan and people in China.
People in China understand race realism.
People in Japan understand race realism.
In fact, people in China are doing the most incredible work on actually trying to figure out the genetics regarding intelligence.
Just recently, 56 new genes were identified specifically affecting intelligence.
Good God, can you imagine?
These people who are actually accepting race realism, that there are IQ differences between the races, they're doing the research that could actually help with the issue.
Because they can do it, they can talk about it, they can research it, and there's not some insane media...
Screaming racism at anyone who identifies basic biological differences between the races.
Yes, human beings are subspecies.
We have subspecies.
They're called races.
Do you know what a subspecies is?
Here's the technical definition of a subspecies.
Just for you, Elizabeth, I'm never going to tell anyone else about this.
But here's the technical definition of a subspecies.
A subspecies is a variant of a species you can reliably separate 90% of the time.
If 90% of the time you can say, oh, it's a red squirrel, it's a gray squirrel, at least 90%, right?
If you look at a guy from Ethiopia and you look at a guy from Sweden, you know, in the past, I think pretty much most of the time you could figure out which is which, right?
So, yeah, there are subspecies.
The genetic markers for intelligence are being mapped in China.
You can't do this research in the West because the leftist media goes mental, right?
And we'll destroy you.
Because we value diversity, which is why we're going to hunt you down and destroy you if you disagree with us.
So there are potentials.
There are potentials in science for solving this now.
Apparently there are thousands of, like, it's like height.
There are thousands of genes that affect a tiny bit each one.
But this is research that needs to be done.
Maybe there's a way to solve the problem, which would be fantastic.
Wouldn't that be great?
Yeah.
Wouldn't that be great?
Wouldn't that be wonderful for everyone, I think?
Call me crazy, I just think that would be great.
And they're doing amazing work when it comes to that.
I do think there is such a thing as white privilege, which is...
Somewhat higher IQ than other groups.
But there's even more Japanese privilege.
You don't hear a lot about Ashkenazi Jew privilege.
Average IQ 115 and 120 is in the verbal skills.
So you get the West Wing and a lot of conspiracy theories.
But there is privilege, and I think that the privilege needs to be acknowledged.
And I actually, I mean, I didn't earn my own intelligence.
I think I'm doing a good job with the intelligence that I was born with, but I didn't earn it.
And I think that there is noblesse oblige to higher intelligence.
And I think that helping people, I think doing the research to figure out if it can be remediated, It's really important.
And I'm happy to help.
I'm happy to give money.
But not out of guilt.
Not out of guilt.
It's not because I didn't steal anyone else's intelligence.
My ancestors just suffered like shit.
I mean, the amount of suffering that produces higher intelligence is beyond calculation.
Oh, I didn't quite plan for enough food to get through the winter.
Now we get to starve to death all throughout February.
Oh, and now we eat the cat.
And now we're looking like Andy's airplane crash survivors at the half-frozen corpses of those who died ahead of us and maybe will eat them.
Like the amount of suffering that goes into producing.
The only way you get higher intelligence is the less intelligent people die horrible, gruesome, ugly deaths.
And they have to be horrible, gruesome, ugly deaths because it's about a failure to plan.
To defer gratification, you need higher intelligence.
Winter requires a deferral of gratification and the amount of suffering that's produced.
I mean, it's even worse in the East Asia.
I mean, the amount of suffering that it takes to produce your average IQ of 103, 106, and that very high spatial rate, unbelievable.
So you could say, well, black privilege, indigenous privilege, that was great because they weren't dying these horrible winter deaths, you know, for thousands and thousands of years.
And now there's a new theory that says human beings originated in Europe, not Africa.
I don't know.
What do I know?
Really?
Oh, yeah.
People can look it up.
It just came out hot off the press.
And I don't know, what does it matter in a way?
But, you know, different environments produce different outcomes.
So...
Let me...
And I'm sorry to just...
I'll do one last rant and then you can tell me all about what you think.
No, it's fine.
I do enjoy a stiff rant.
Good.
So...
It's got nothing to do with ethics.
It's got nothing to do with racism.
It's got nothing to do with any of that stuff.
I just really, really want people to understand that these verbal attacks, these abuses, nothing to do with ethics, nothing to do with good or bad or right or wrong or anything like that.
Clearly...
Ascribing negative or bad qualities to an entire race is racism.
Of course, of course it is.
Particularly when there's no proof to any of it, right?
Now, there is no proof that anyone in any race can be categorized in any way.
Individually.
I mean, this is, again, it's important to reinforce this for everyone.
You know, my whole life, I was raised saying, you know, Like, the East Asian, Japanese or Chinese or Korean actors in Hollywood were like, we never get to be the love interest.
It's a good point.
Who do we get to be as East Asian actors?
Who do we get to be?
Oh, good.
I get to be another lab guy.
I get to be another evil genius making dinosaurs in Jurassic Park.
I get to be the guy in the pharmacy.
You know, I get to be the engineer.
There's these cliches, right?
And I remember watching, it's a pretty delightful film.
I have no idea what the title of it was.
But it was about a black guy who was complaining about the roles that black men were getting in Hollywood.
I get to be a thug.
I get to be a rapper.
I get, you know, whatever.
I get to be a single mom.
And it was a really, really good film.
It made me think at the time.
I think I actually went to the theaters and watched it twice.
It was very thought-provoking.
Great stuff.
You can't ever judge individuals.
But when you zoom back enough, there are patterns and so on, right?
Not every Danish guy is tall, but Danes are the tallest people in the movement, right?
So, oh, and I remember a friend of mine, who was like a black guy, you know, when he was at a party and there would be dancing, the white guys would all like make a space around him.
And he's like, no, no, no, don't do that.
That's not right.
That's not fair.
And he's right.
He's absolutely right about that.
Although he was a great dancer, so I just want to point that out.
This is a cliche, hell true.
But no, you have to stop feeling guilty.
It's toxic for everyone.
It's toxic for everyone.
Appeasement breeds more bullying.
Appeasement breeds more bullying.
It's bad for the black community.
It's bad for the white community.
It's bad for everyone, except for, you know, the race baiters and the people who are in charge of shoveling all of this money around.
Buying people off with guilt money is just bribing them to abuse you more.
And it's really, it's really bad.
I mean, you can acknowledge that you have a benefit, higher intelligence, and, you know, maybe it's a little bit more in East Asians, a little bit more in Ashkenazi Jews, a little bit more in whites.
You can acknowledge that and you can say, yeah, I'd like to help people.
I'd like to fund the research.
I'd like to, you know, I'm happy to transfer, but not out of guilt.
Not out of guilt.
It's not my fault.
It's not their fault.
It's no one's fault.
It's just nature.
It's evolution.
It's the way things work.
And you just have to stop feeling guilt about this stuff.
And I know it's easier said than done.
And until people are no longer paid for this stuff, the arguments won't stop.
The arguments are so profitable that expecting them to stop is like expecting somebody who just...
Got a $100,000 winning lottery ticket to not cash it because it's not a free market situation and it might drive inflation up a tiny bit, right?
I mean, the arguments are so profitable at the moment that they're not going to stop.
But they've nothing to do with virtue.
It's just resource transfers.
That's it.
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.
Actually, ironically, the last person who actually called me up for white privilege and actually prompted my letter to you was an Asian guy who was complaining about not enough Asian people being represented in Australian performing arts.
And his solution was basically everyone who's white, I'm going to make a column over here of how many people are in plays and how many are directors and And then I'm going to put over here everybody else, all people of color in this thing.
And so if there's a large percentage that are just white people, then that means racism.
No, it's because it's like, is he willing to trade the engineering departments?
Yeah, if I'd really thought it through instead of trying to reason at the time, which was a fruitless effort, I would have just put a graph of how many Asians are actually outperforming whites.
But I thought, yeah, in hindsight...
And again, once you get the IQ stuff, right?
I mean, Ashkenazi Jews are very high on the language scale, not so high on the spatial reasoning, which is why they tend to be, you know, writers and directors and communicators rather than engineers and rather than architects.
And so...
And, you know, it's complicated, especially when it comes to the arts.
Racial blind casting is a challenge because it's a little bit distracting.
It's a little bit distracting.
Go ahead.
Yeah, it's important because, I mean, one of the examples I like to use is there's a Disney film of Cinderella back when, I think it was 99, where Brandy was Cinderella, which was great.
And then...
But the king in that was white, the queen was black, and the prince was Asian.
And I was watching it and I'm like, I had to create this whole backstory for myself.
Okay, so maybe he was adopted and no one ever told him and they all love him and it's great.
But, you know, he's starting to feel like he doesn't quite belong.
And so then that's why he, you know, connects with Cinderella.
But I had to like do all that in my brain first.
And they were just like, yeah, yeah.
It doesn't matter.
It does.
It doesn't make sense.
Especially in a medieval setting.
Yes!
You know, like, did you see The Beauty of the Beast with, like, uber cuck witch queen, Emma, what's her name?
Emma Watson.
Oh, God.
The librarian's just some brother from Kenya.
And it's like, this is France in the Middle Ages.
What the...
I don't know.
It's just...
It's distracting.
And I don't know.
I mean...
I think it can work if you shift the whole thing.
Like when I was in theater school, I watched a French production of Rashomon, which is a Japanese story, and it was actually pretty cool because they just switched the whole thing over to like a non-Japanese setting, and that can work.
I mean, Ran is an adaptation, I think, of King Lear, which was by Kurosawa, or Shakespeare, and then Kurosawa did it, and it works.
So, I mean, it can work.
But it's a challenge.
You know, I mean, I don't know if this is way back in the day, but there was a film by Steve Martin called The Jerk.
I think it was his first big, big film.
And it starts, you know, he's in this black family and he's, I was born a poor black child.
And he sort of plays and plays.
And then at one point, his mom's big, Bertha, black mom, sits him down and says, son, I got to tell you, you're adopted.
And he looks at her and he says...
You mean I'm gonna stay this color?
It's pretty funny.
It was a funny film.
So it is challenging.
And to me, just go write a great play.
Stop.
Oh, I gotta get the people.
I gotta get white people banned from the theater.
Fuck off.
Just go write a great play.
Cast all Asian people.
I don't care.
Go write a great play.
I'll come watch it.
Cast whoever you want.
You can have a dog and a tooth.
I don't care.
Just write a great play.
Stop whining and complaining and wanting the government to go fix your problems.
Just go write better stuff.
Go do better stuff.
Like I've spent all my life frustrated by abstract, out-of-touch intellectuals who don't have real conversations with real people about real things.
What am I going to do?
I need to go to the government to fund me a university and fund me a speaking platform and get me a publishing house.
What am I, the Canadian media?
No, I just go and do better stuff.
Let's do better stuff.
Stop trying to run to the government.
Stop trying to bribe the referee.
Just go play better.
Yeah, absolutely.
I'm actually at university at the moment and I'm ending it.
Oh my god, that sounded pretty sinister.
I'm ending it.
I can't take it anymore.
I'm ending it.
You mean just the university, right?
Not your actual life or anything?
No, I was trying to like...
I doggedly finished my degree because I only had a year left and I'm like, oh, it's just, it's not going to help me.
And so like, my boyfriend and I are going to start our own little company that we've got a great idea for.
So it's kind of like, this is pointless.
And like one of the units- I think the way you put that, I only had a year, dot, dot, dot, left.
Yes, it's very left.
Yeah.
It's very left.
Yeah.
I've got one week left of retirement.
So you're going to ditch it, right, rather than finish?
Yeah, it's pointless and it's costing me money that- It's pointless, because I'm going to have to pay it back, obviously, and it's wasting money.
And it's unpleasant.
I mean, it's unpleasant, right?
Yeah, and the reason I got it, well, I was starting to get it, was because there's a company, Bell Shakespeare, in Australia that does amazing work, but they won't even let you audition if you don't have a university degree.
So I'm like, oh, well, damn it, okay.
What?!
Wait, they won't let you audition to be on the stage unless you have a university degree?
Yeah, it's in their audition notice, and I still applied.
Wait, wait, do you know why that is?
Why?
I can tell you exactly why that is.
Do you think a lot of people with accounting degrees and engineering degrees and medical degrees are going to go audition there?
No.
No, it's going to be people with arts degrees.
Now, who are the only people who can stomach getting arts degrees these days?
Hardcore leftists.
Which means that, and this is, the arts degree has become a giant signal of, are you a hardcore leftist?
Which is why you can't finish it, and good for you.
Right?
But so they're basically saying, we for sure don't want any...
People from the right in here, which means that we have to have arts degrees, because you can say degrees, but they mean arts degrees.
And I know this.
I mean, when I was doing my theater training, oh my god, it was lefty.
Oh my goodness.
Oh man.
It was rough, rough, rough.
Yeah, like one of the units.
Oh, sorry.
One of the units I've got at the moment is video editing and sound in film, but we've only had two actual classes in the lab with the computers and all the rest of the time has been discussing racism and sexism in old movies.
I'm sitting there just going, I know exactly what you're doing.
I speak up and the racism thing is harder for me to speak up on, but if there's something where she's attacking men, I'll just be like, no, I don't think that actually says that and kind of put a case and then There's a couple of other people in the class who kind of go, oh, yeah, I agree with that.
That doesn't really say that.
And she'll just stand there staring at you like you're an idiot and she doesn't understand why you're even speaking.
But I'll just keep speaking because it's ridiculous.
And in some areas, things are getting a little bit more bad.
I think we've hit peak leftism and it's on its way down.
Like I was mentioning the show Billions.
And there is a prosecutor who goes after financial criminals.
And I'm not spoiling anything, because this is how the show starts.
And I'm telling you, if it wasn't for the recommendation of Mike, I would have stopped it right there.
So this is a guy, and normally this would be like your Elliot Ness, right?
This would be your...
Hero!
The guy who goes after these corrupt capitalists and financial guys.
And the way the show starts, oh, Elizabeth, I hate to even bring it to your attention, but he's in a sadism and masochism situation where a woman crushes out a cigarette on his chest and then it's hot and she needs to Stop it from smoking.
And she...
Let's just say she...
Oh, no.
Okay.
Yeah, I don't need to say it anymore.
I get it.
Let's just...
Nice quads.
And I guess you relaxed the kegels a little there, didn't you, honey?
Yeah, it's true.
I'd give him a prison break, so...
Yeah, so here you have a situation where this guy, you know, oh, we've got to get these guys.
He's all Nietzschean, like beyond conventional morality.
It's like, yeah, well, you do are licking things off the ground at an S&M club at one point.
So there are some...
Although that is dangerously close to nihilism as well.
So it's another one of these Sorkin-inspired things where there really aren't any good guys to anybody with any eyeballs.
But it's well-written.
So, yeah, this is...
It is a challenge.
And I, you know, gosh, can you imagine?
I mean, if I had gone into...
It was tough enough being in the acting world when all I was was an objectivist.
When you get truly woke, like when you get like clockwork orange style woke, it's like, man, oh man, I couldn't imagine.
I could sit there.
I mean, I'd have to be so ridiculously talented that people would hire me despite the fact that I'd rewrite every scene I was in.
I mean, you'd have to be really talented for that.
I don't think that was my bag.
But can you imagine?
Oh, I'm sorry.
I can't do this scene.
This man is portrayed as a buffoon, and he's actually quite a noble guy.
Oh, I can't do this scene because blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Well, this scene, no, no, no, no.
I can't do this because this promotes this kind of thing, which I think is not a good idea.
Man, oh, man.
Man, oh, man.
It would have been just brutal.
I've got too many words of my own to have them inserted into me like a colonoscopy camera.
So, yeah, I mean, when people come up with this stuff, it's very tough.
Because the only—the key to unlock this, the key to understand this, is race realism, right?
I mean, it's race and IQ differences.
This is what makes it all not right, not justified, but it puts it into place, right?
Like the old—they used to put the Earth at the center of the solar system.
It got ridiculously complicated to figure out what it means.
You just put the Sun at the center of the solar system, click, it all makes sense.
And this is something that it's because I care about race relations and I want everyone to be in the very best possible position.
We need to have this understanding.
We can work on this problem.
It might be solvable.
Maybe there's an environmental thing that can be done.
Maybe there's a diet thing that can be done.
Maybe there is genetics stuff that can be...
I don't know.
Maybe we can get massive transfers from higher intelligence groups to lower intelligence groups voluntarily because of noblesse oblige.
But this toxic rage and guilt and, oh my God, this is just...
Well, of course, it's going to end exactly where the hardcore leftists want it to end, which is violence.
And this is why I'm desperately...
You know, you push back against the mob and you say, stop!
Here are the facts.
Put down your pitchforks.
Put down your tortures.
We need facts, not feels.
Because these feels are particularly volatile.
When you start provoking and inflaming somewhat natural...
Animosities that groups sometimes have.
I mean, oh my goodness.
It really can escalate.
And this stuff is...
It's going to end one way or the other.
And I hope it ends soft landing peacefully.
And that's certainly my particular goal.
Because I think there are...
We can't get along.
We just have to have facts.
And if we don't have facts and we just have rage and prejudice and bigotry and hatred being inflamed instead...
That is not going to end well.
Yeah, there needs to be an open conversation about it.
Otherwise, what else is there to do?
Yeah, it's got to be conversation.
It's got to be person to person and honest conversation and Yeah, I mean, if you look at the Indigenous in Australia, right?
If you don't understand the race and IQ stuff, and there's tons of exceptions and blah, blah, blah, but if you don't understand the race and IQ stuff, you have to end up with contempt for someone.
Yeah.
Like, either you're going to say, well, they're exactly the same as white Australians or But they're just lazy.
Or they're dumb.
Or they're greedy.
Or you're going to end up with contempt for them.
Or if you say, well, they're exactly the same as white Australians, then you're going to end up and say, well, they're exactly the same, but they're doing really badly, which means they must have been really crushed by the white Australians, and there must be really bigots in the white Australian group, and they must hate these people.
If you don't have the basic facts, it inflames an insane amount of hatred.
Yeah.
One way or the other.
And if you have facts, you say, okay, well, so there's this IQ difference between some Australians and other Australians, and let's figure it out.
Let's see if we can find a way to remediate it or find a way you can transfer resources.
It's somewhat accidental.
It's luck of the draw.
It's genetics.
It's evolution.
Lots of kind things can be done about it.
But suppressing facts Human biodiversity provokes psychotic rage.
And so far, well, for the past generation, maybe two generations, it's been aimed at white people.
But that doesn't last forever.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Do it peacefully and with facts.
Let's be realistic.
Let's be compassionate.
Let's be kind.
Let's be generous.
But let's be real.
That's my perspective.
And this stuff is very, very dangerous.
And completely understandable if facts are kept away from people.
Yeah.
I kind of like try to share facts with people and it just, it produces an emotional outburst and I'm kind of learning to kind of simplify it and Yeah, trying to kind of get past the emotional response and get to kind of what they're actually trying to do, like deflect it or something.
It's really hard because a lot of them just don't really want to talk about it.
Well, there's been an investment in a certain mindset in society.
And it's a huge investment.
It's a demographic investment.
It's an intellectual investment.
It's an emotional, artistic investment.
It's a legal investment.
And the investment goes something like this.
Everyone's the same, and all disparities between any group is a result of bigotry.
Racism, sexism, whatever, right?
Phobias of various kinds.
And that has been the answer.
That the left has promoted for generations now.
Everyone's the same, therefore the only differences between groups must be the result of the dominant group being bigoted.
Unless the dominant group is black, in which case it's just redress for colonialism.
I mean, the Japanese had a hugely horrific and ugly and vicious colonial past, as did the Asians, as did the Chinese.
I mean, horrible, ghastly stuff.
I mean, they found evidence of mass murder in indigenous America.
You've got hundreds of skeletons piled in pits with their skulls caved in.
They practiced slavery, child beating, and torture.
I mean, look at the Aztecs.
Sacrifices where they ripped out the beating heart of a child and held it up to their weird sky gods.
They played football with human heads, for God's sakes.
You point out to me a human ape without a brutal history, and I'll point out to you a children's book.
It's the only place that shows up!
But only one race ever must be criticized.
Coincidentally, it's the race with the most empathy and the most resources.
Isn't that a strange coincidence?
The only race that constantly gets attacked for being racist is the only race that really feels bad about it.
Being racist.
Interesting.
And the racist that has a lot of resources, and we'll hand them over if you yell racism at them.
So yeah, there's been this big investment, and it's very, very tough.
When society has conformed itself significantly, emotionally, psychologically, legally, immigration, and when a society has conformed itself to a particular belief set, everyone's equal, all discrepancies are the result of bigotry, changing that?
I mean, look how long it took to just...
Move the sun to the center of the solar system.
Hundreds of years for some people.
Some people still aren't there.
Some people still think it's 3,000 miles away.
Right above their windows.
Yeah, did you see the video of that guy who took a leveller onto a plane to prove that the world was flat?
Like a spirit level?
Yeah, it was interesting.
That was recent.
Elizabeth, you are draining my will to live.
Do you know, not you, no, it's the world, but you're its messenger, because I'm going to check this.
I don't know.
Have you seen that video that I did with the guy?
No.
Oh, I did a video where I, I guess you could say debated a guy about Flat Earth, the Flat Earth.
It's worth watching because you and, I guess, a lot of other people will have watched it.
So, yeah.
Big videos I've done.
The Story of Your Enslavement, 5.7 million.
Take the Red Pill, which is the landing page, almost 2 million.
Truth About Robin Williams, 1.2 million.
Truth About George Zimmerman, 1.1 million.
Those are my top four videos and only three of them count.
Do you know what the fourth most popular video is that isn't on the landing page?
Is it the Flat Earth?
The Flat Earth Conspiracy Debate!
Yes, really.
Over one million views!
And this is why I have to stand on camera every time I do a call a joke.
What can I tell you?
After him.
And truth about Donald Trump.
Truth about Nelson Mandela.
There will be no economic recovery.
Prepare yourself accordingly.
Recorded before the aforementioned Donald Trump.
But anyway.
Truth about slavery.
Yeah, they were good.
Since my email talking about slavery, I didn't even know about the Irish who were enslaved and then were considered inferior and less valuable slaves, and then they were bred with black slaves to make more valuable slaves.
I didn't even know about that.
It's this whole absence of that part of history that's like, wow.
Like, you just hear this slavery, slavery, slavery, and it's like, well, I saw one of your videos the other day, it was talking about, you know, it was only like 5% or something of slaves actually made it to America, and, you know, the ones in the Middle East were castrated.
And that was during the slavery at the time.
During the slavery at the time, the majority that went to South America, other places, if you look at the entire history of slavery, 100 million went to the Middle East, where they were castrated and murdered and killed, I mean, after being used.
Yeah, no, it's ridiculous.
And white people ended slavery.
Yeah.
Sorry, I mean, it's nothing to do with me.
I'm not proud of it.
It wasn't my doing, but I can recognize facts.
I try to be colorblind, just deal with the facts.
Yeah.
I posted this thing about just a simple video of...
You know, Abraham Lincoln was a Republican, the first Republican president.
And, you know, the Democrats were the KKK and the Democrats have been against black rights and civil rights.
And I just got all these replies like, yeah, but these days...
They switched, man, in the 60s.
They switched magically.
They switched, man, totally.
Yeah, and I'm like, what about all the people on campus at the moment being racist assholes and screaming things at people?
Seems like a lot of racists are still over there.
And this whole white privilege thing, although on the white privilege thing, I heard Bill Whittle say, white privilege is just, you've got nobody to blame.
You're responsible for your red actions.
And I just, yeah, that's actually, yeah, because you're forced to actually step up and take control of your own life.
You can't just cry racism and get stuff for free.
So yeah, that's white privilege in a way.
Right.
Which, you know, also has something to do with East Asian privilege as well.
Yes.
Yes.
It's funny how the privilege and the hard work often seem to go hand in hand.
Yeah.
All right.
Can I move on?
I appreciate your call.
You're welcome back anytime.
Best of luck getting out of prison.
Turn your parole into a break-free zone.
And I'm glad that you kept your sanity.
Great.
Yeah.
Thanks so much for the call.
I really enjoyed the conversation.
Great.
Thanks so much for you.
Thank you for calling it a conversation.
Thanks, Mike.
See you later.
Alright, up next we have Poe.
He wrote in and said,"'My wonderful wife is pregnant with our second child, and I'm very excited to have another kid.
As I ponder fatherhood, I get so scared that my kids might feel the same darkness and loneliness I felt when growing up.
I'm afraid because I haven't really addressed the pain of my childhood that history will repeat itself, and I'll be like my father, and my kids will cry as I did.'" What can I do to make sure that if my kids feel pain, it's not because of their father?
How do I break the chains of bitterness so that it doesn't affect my children?
How can I keep my emotional baggage from impacting my children's development?
That's from Po.
Hey Po, how are you doing?
Doing good.
Hey Stefan.
Po?
Pal?
Po like Kung Fu Panda.
Okay.
Or Edgar Allen.
Alright.
Yeah.
I got a funny story to tell about Edgar Allan Poe.
This is complete non sequitur.
So years ago, I was visiting a friend of mine who's now a professor, and I visited Edgar Allan Poe's student room at the university.
And out front was a bat with a broken wing, like lying right on the concrete in front of Edgar Allan Poe's Dormitory door.
Not just in the actual room he was in.
It was just like the strangest thing.
Oh, I've never ever seen a bat with a broken wing in daylight in my life, except when I went to go and visit horror story writer Edgar Allan Poe's dorm room.
Anyway, just kind of interesting.
All right.
Tell me about the darkness that you fear your kids might be exposed to.
Just recently, I... I went to therapy and there were two therapists that suggested I take a certain treatment for PTSD. And that was probably the first time that I thought, okay, maybe there really was something that wasn't normal about back then.
But yeah, I told them things that happened growing up and how I came to America I'm on my own at age 15 and just hustled my way throughout my life here in America.
And sorry, where are you from?
I'm from Tonga.
It's an island by Fiji.
Okay.
And just for those who don't know, and I won't go into the details unless they just happen to come up, But you have an adverse childhood experience score of 12.
Sorry, of 8.
Which is extraordinarily high, and I just want to express my very, very deep sympathy for all that you went through as a child.
I mean, there really wasn't any bad thing that could happen to a child that didn't happen to you, I think it's fair to say.
So I really just want to tell you how incredibly sorry I am for all of that and how much I admire you trying to work through these things and not...
I know you're not going to pass the abuse on, but as you say, the loneliness and the darkness that you experienced as a child, it's very brave for you to do what you're doing.
I would want to express great admiration and also just enormous sympathy for what you went through as a child.
No, I appreciate that.
No, it's nice to hear things like that because I didn't get a chance to talk to anyone about it.
And it took my...
It's just my wife and I had marriage problems and I told her I would try to figure things out.
And...
It's okay, man.
You don't have to fight the feelings.
It's fine with me.
And so I told her that...
I'm gonna figure it out.
So that's when I went to therapy and then as I told him about my marriage and stuff, they shifted the direction somewhere else and said that the first therapist said that he's not trained to do a certain kind of treatment, it's called EMDR or something like that, and that he would have to refer me to someone that did.
And then that person told me about that treatment And so, yeah, I appreciate you saying that.
And being able to talk about those things openly and to know that it wasn't normal is nice.
It's nice to hear.
So I appreciate that.
Can I just ask you something?
Because I don't know anything about the island that you came from, Po.
Okay.
Was it...
Was it very unusual what was going on in your house, or were there a lot of dysfunctional, abusive, or brutal households around?
You know, it's definitely part of the culture that it's okay to be kids.
I remember I didn't want to do shot put or discus and track.
And one of my coaches told me to come to his office after school.
And I went.
And he started beating me.
Was there any reason?
Did it come out of nowhere?
Was there any excuse that he made for attacking you in this way?
No, he just...
Basically what happened is I went in and he said, are you going to join the team?
And I said, I'm not sure.
And he punched me in the face.
And then he asked me again, are you going to join the team?
And I said, I don't know.
And he pushed me again.
And he just repeated this until I said, yes, I'll join the team.
God.
God Almighty.
So, I joined the team.
And the funny thing is, is I actually won the Shophood gold medal.
But it started, maybe he saw potential.
I don't know.
But But in Tonga, it is acceptable to beat kids.
And our parents, when they come to school for report cards, they'll tell the teacher, if he misbehaves, I want you to beat him with the biggest stick.
And they said that about my big brother, too.
So in that culture, beating is normal.
And I remember a Caucasian kid came to America, or came to Tonga, Because his dad was teaching.
And for some reason, the kid thought, you know, you can't touch me kind of thing.
And so he started making remarks to one of the deputy principal.
And I just remember the principal coming in and telling that Caucasian kid to put his hands on the blackboard.
And then He didn't know what was going to happen, and I just remember the principal picking up our chair and breaking it on his back, and we never saw that kid again.
God, how old was the kid?
We were in, I think in America, it's 7th grade or 8th grade.
Right.
So like 12 years old or so?
Yeah, yeah, I would say that.
Well, you know, I'm sorry, I mean, just from what I've read, right, black culture is pretty rough on the kids, to put it mildly, right?
I mean, there's sort of this hierarchy, right, like the East Asians don't hit their kids much, whites a little more, Hispanics a little more, but blacks is rough, right?
Well, I'm not black, but in the islands, yeah, beating is a normal thing.
They don't beat women, though.
They only beat Men.
Or boys, I guess.
Sure.
Because of male privilege, I guess.
Yeah, I guess so.
But yeah, so in the school, it's acceptable.
So at home, I just didn't talk.
I didn't have friends growing up.
I didn't.
Yeah, no rush.
I can wait.
Yeah.
I didn't know how to make...
it happened for such a long time.
Just growing up, it just...
I never really had any friends, and...
It was so scary to go home.
But the first time that I, The first time I thought as a kid that maybe what I was going through wasn't normal was my dad made us sell cigarettes and alcohol.
And so I would go around the villages and sell those things.
And then I brought money home.
And then I laid in front of my dad and I went.
And then the next morning, the money was gone.
He said I took it.
Then he said if I don't bring it back by the time I get home from school, they was going And then I just tried to figure out ways to find that kind of money, but I couldn't find a way.
And then it turns out that my brother took it, and then my brother gave it to his friend and made his friend come talk to me and say, hey, here's the money, go give it to your dad.
And so I took it and then my dad, he made me stand on the table and Then he broke off one of the table legs of another table.
And he said that if I fell off the table, he'll beat me more.
And then...
And then he started swinging on the back of my knees.
And then I fell off the table, and then as I tried to get up, he had hit my back with that leg twice, where I created an X, a long bruise across my back that made a big X on it.
And then he took me to a corner and just started Boxing mirror, you know, just uppercuts and hooks and all that.
And then I remember going to school the next day and in Tonga we play rugby and to make sure we don't rip our uniform, we take our shirts off.
And I remember taking my shirt off and all the kids circled around me and they And they saw the big bruised X on my back, and they were touching it, and they were saying, does that hurt?
And I was like, yeah.
But it felt so good to get some attention.
I'll make a joke that I was an X-Man, but it probably wasn't the funniest thing.
And so that was the first time that I thought to myself, wait a minute, why are these kids so intrigued by this?
Right.
How do they not know where it comes from?
Right.
And so I just thought maybe they get hit too, don't they?
Like, they pissed their dad off, don't they?
Well, they probably did, but not to that extent, right?
Not to that sadistic extent.
Right.
And so...
Like a cuff or a hit, but not a beating.
Right.
And there were so many instances like that.
And my dad...
At age 15, my mom found an opportunity to send me away.
So she sent me to Kansas.
And there was no friends or family there.
But she said that it's a way that I can be safe.
So that's me coming to America and just trying to figure out how America works and all of that.
And yeah, it was the best thing that ever happened to me.
And I love America for it.
But yeah, there's been a lot of incidents.
That I didn't know was not normal.
And my therapist said that this kind of trauma, you've normalized it.
And I never went to a therapist or talked to anyone before because number one, I thought it was normal.
And then number two, I was just...
I just told myself, you know, let's suck it up.
There's oceans apart.
There's an ocean between us and...
They're not going to be here to feed you, so you better go to work and try to figure out a way to live here in America.
And so I just never looked back, and I found happiness in America.
It was great.
But now that I have a wife, and I have a son, and then I now have another baby coming, and talking to a therapist kind of opened my eyes to To what really happened and how bad that was.
And I just want to make sure that my kids...
That I protect them.
And so...
I just want to be a good dad, you know?
Just...
So that's why I'm reaching out.
I respect that you're straightforward and all that stuff, and so I just want to try to get help as much as I can as far as learning, self-reflection, see what I can do to make sure that whatever my dad went through, because I don't understand.
And look at my son.
And the love I feel for him.
I don't understand.
What has to happen to me in order to do to him what my dad did?
you Right.
No, I think it's hard to process the immorality of brutal parenting until you become a kind parent yourself and you look at your child and how much you would give to never see rank terror in your child's face when they look at you.
Whereas other people specifically engineer situations where they can inflict that terror, right?
Right.
I mean, I would do anything to avoid that, but other parents will engineer to create that situation.
That's...
why?
Why would they do that?
That just sounds so...
I don't know.
I can tell you why, if you want, but you won't like me after I tell you.
Well, I don't know if there's anything you can tell me that would hurt me more than I have been, so...
No, and it's not...
I mean, maybe you will, but you haven't talked much about your mom.
The reason that your father was able to do that was because you're...
Mom gave him children.
So those genes, thank heavens, not in you, but those genes replicate because the women are willing to have sex with brutal, violent, ugly, destructive men.
Right?
If women shunned violent men, then the genes associated with violence would diminish.
But they don't.
They give them children, they give them children, they give them children.
Significant portions of...
I'm not saying that there's determinism here.
I'm not saying, Poe, that your father had no moral responsibility.
The average IQ in Tonga is 86.
That's right in the sweet spot of where violence is at its maximum.
Impulse control and brutality are problems.
But if the women in Tonga shunned and would not reproduce with violent men, Then genes associated with violence, they're not deterministic, they're a tendency.
Genes associated with violence would diminish.
The men, the women choose, are the foundation of the next generation.
I'm very glad in your case this is not the case.
Right.
I'm not putting you anywhere close to the average IQ of Tonga, which is probably one of the reasons why you've become such a better, I mean, I hate to say better man than your father, like that's taller than Danny DeVito, but But you have become a great man.
Despite your upbringing, some of that has to do with intelligence.
Some of that has to do with the choice to go to therapy.
I'm pretty sure in your culture, therapy wasn't like, you know, it's not like you're living in Manhattan or something.
You know, everyone seems to be in therapy.
Yeah, in Tonga, you're weak if you talk about your emotions.
Right, right.
But my mom wasn't...
She hit us too.
I remember she was so mad one time, she got the hanger, one of the hangers that you hang clothes on, and she beat our hands until they bled.
And so, and then she stopped when she started seeing that it was cutting through our hands.
And I think it's more, it's not just a man thing in Tonga.
Mm-hmm.
And it's actually, if you don't hit your kids, especially in public, you're not raising them.
Because at church, it just blew my mind.
Church in Tonga and church in America.
Church in America, they let the kids cry, they let the kids...
They let the kids just be kids, but in tanga, it's silent.
And if a kid makes a sound and you don't, they call it la usi, pretty much pinch the kid, then they say you're not raising your kid.
And so I think it's more of a culture thing where beating is the way that you teach.
Pain is the way that you teach your kids...
But I think that kind of went overboard with my parents.
And it's just hard because I still love them.
You love them.
And I do.
You love your father?
I love my father and my mother.
What do you love about your father?
He taught me how to work.
Let me ask you another way.
Sorry to interrupt you.
Let me ask you another way.
Let's say that you had a babysitter.
Yes.
For your child.
And you came home and you found that the babysitter had done to your child what your father did to you.
What would you think of that babysitter?
That your babysitter had made your child stand on a table and beat him around the legs and threatened to beat him more if he fell off the table.
I'll probably kill him.
Do you think that feeling that murderous rage is compatible with love?
It just comes back to the question that I ask myself all the time.
Thank you.
How can someone feel the way I feel for my son?
No, no, no, no.
Now, Po, you're dodging the question here, man.
You asked me my opinion, and it's just my opinion, I'm certainly no psychologist, but you asked me my opinion about how to avoid your children experiencing any of the darkness and loneliness you felt when you grew up.
So let's get back to, if you had a babysitter who did to your child what your father did to you, you would feel murderous rage.
You say that you love your father.
Is there any relationship, Poe, in which you think murderous rage, I'm not disagreeing with you, not the action, but the emotion, murderous rage, is it compatible with love?
Like if your wife came up to you and said, Poe, I feel so angry at you I want to beat you to death with a table leg.
Would you think that that's compatible with her loving you?
No.
Okay, so help me understand how you love a man whose actions would cause you to feel murderous rage towards anyone else.
That's a hard question.
I don't know how to answer that.
This is something to ponder, right?
The thing is I've cut them out.
I told them that I'm going down a different path than they are and I want to adopt a different culture and it hasn't been easy extracting myself from them but But I still...
It's hard.
It's hard because I... I feel like I know what loneliness is.
And...
I don't know if my father loves me.
But all I know is that when you're in such...
When you experience such deep pain...
It builds compassion...
I agree, but compassion towards your abuser?
I hope that he's okay and I hope that he learns and that he doesn't do that to my mom or to my little brother.
Hang on, hang on.
Your mother chose him.
You did not.
Your mother had a choice.
Assuming she didn't have two heads, although maybe some guys are into that, she had a choice of suitors.
And she chose your father.
And she knew that he was violent, I assume.
She chose to give him children.
And then he was violent to the children.
How many siblings do you have, Bo?
I have, including my half-siblings, or just the full siblings?
Let's hear both.
So there's four full siblings, and then there's four, five, six, seven, eight.
It's about nine.
Nine kids.
And is it because your father has two families?
They both had kids before they got married.
Oh, okay.
Okay.
So...
She knew that he was violent when she gave him children, right?
I can't confirm that.
Really?
I don't know.
Do you think that his violent nature only manifested when he had you?
I think I was the easiest target.
Well, he had children beforehand.
Have you ever had any conversations, or did you ever have any conversations with the kids from your father's previous marriage about how he treated them?
No.
Right.
I mean, I would bet good money on that he was violent.
And even if, even if by some miracle, he was perfectly nice and wonderful and a gentleman, peaceful and loving, until you or your brother came along and then he just mysteriously became a very violent person, don't believe it for a moment, but let's say it's true.
Okay.
She's still responsible for keeping you safe.
Right?
If you have a dog that is...
Peaceful and nice and loving and wonderful, and then the dog gets some brain illness or rabies and then turns violent.
Do you say, well, we have to keep the dog because he was peaceful before?
He's ripping your kids apart?
What do you do?
You say, well, I'm sorry, but we can't keep the dog around because he's attacking the children.
Right.
And my mom...
You're right.
She wasn't there to protect us.
No, no, no.
No, that's not far enough.
I have to have these conversations so quickly, but that's part of the efficiency principle, right?
It wasn't that she wasn't there to protect you.
She created the situation.
She chose a violent man, she had children with that violent man, and she kept children around that violent man.
She was the engineer of the situation.
She wasn't somebody who stumbled across you being beaten.
She chose the man, had sex with the man, had the children with the man, and stayed with the man who was beating you.
Correct.
It's not a bystander.
It's not a drive-by.
Okay.
No, I agree with you.
So accepting all of this, in my humble opinion...
It's how you keep the darkness away.
The way, Poe, that you keep the darkness away is you very clearly and consistently and courageously identify it as what it is.
It's going to be very confusing, I think, for your children.
If you say, at any point in their lives, and it's going to affect them whether you say it or not, in one way or another, Poe, if you say...
I love the man who half beat me to death on a regular basis.
And then, what are they going to think of the word love?
I love the man who half beat me half to death.
And kids, I love you too.
I use the same word for both.
You can't use the same word for both.
You can say Stockholm Syndrome.
You can say unholy attachment for the sake of survival.
You can say blood loyalty for tribal reasons.
You can say anything, but please don't use the word love for both.
Can people change?
Of course.
Of course.
But not forever.
So you're saying they'll change back?
You mean you?
No, I'm talking...
My family's reaching out to me to try to mend things.
And I don't know what to do with that.
And...
I don't know if that's even a safe thing to do.
Sorry, Po, now you've had kids.
Your decisions about your social life, your family of origin life, in my opinion, now that you have kids, it's not up to you that much anymore.
Okay.
It's up to whether it negatively affects you as a father to be in contact with certain people.
Because your responsibility now, as you know, Is to your children?
And I know you know that, and I massively admire you for your dedication in this area, Poe, but...
Is it going to negatively affect your fathering?
Is it going to negatively affect your relationship with your children?
To be in contact with your biological mother and father?
Is it going to mess you up?
Is it going to make you dissociated?
Is it going to make you distracted?
Is it going to make you tense?
Is it going to make you emotionally unavailable?
Is it going to make you sad?
Is it going to make you angry?
Is it going to be confusing for them?
Are you asking that question?
Yeah.
Yeah.
So last year, our church, we do baby blessings where we bless the baby and give him a name.
And I let my family come.
And it was terrible.
My brother got so mad he almost attacked me because he said that I challenged his authority and then for the first time my wife, my sister came over to our house and just started yelling on the top of her lungs and my wife and I and that was the first time my I think that was the first time my wife actually thought,
hmm, maybe everything you said was true.
And it just created such a...
It was so hard, and I remember calling my parents to try to figure out everything that had happened, and I challenged my mom.
I challenged her intellectually, I tried.
And then my dad got on the phone and said, don't ever call and talk to your mother that way, and then hung up on me.
Yeah, because your father is all about being nice and polite and not upsetting people, right?
I'm being sarcastic, but...
Yeah, no, he's not.
Is this the same brother...
Sorry to interrupt, but the brother who almost attacked you, is this the same brother who let you get beaten for the money he stole?
Yes.
Right, because he's all about...
Being respectful and being honorable and being decent.
Is he older than you?
Yes.
Right.
So he's the guy who let his younger brother be beaten rather than confess to the money he stole.
He let you take the rap as the kid for him.
Yes.
And he's going to lecture you about how to behave.
Oh, unless he's apologized for that and taken ownership for it.
No.
No, of course.
Yeah.
For me, it was trees, Poe.
That's where I went.
I went to trees.
I built tree houses.
I lived in trees to get away from home, to get away from the violence at home.
I spent so much time in trees, I could have been the star of a Bonobo documentary.
I lived in trees.
No money.
Until I got jobs, right?
I lived in trees when I was younger.
Where could I go?
Couldn't just sit on the street.
So I took my comic books and I climbed up trees.
Built tree houses.
You know, refugees, nomads, gypsies.
Those fleeing violence.
I think we have enough of them in the West already.
Just from violent houses.
I don't know that we need the rest of the world to deal with those fleeing violence, those refugees of domestic war.
We got enough to deal with already.
So if being in contact with the family of origin, it's your choice.
I mean, I don't tell people what to do.
I'm just trying to give you some perspectives that have been helpful.
I don't want it.
What's in it for you?
What's the benefit for you?
How does it add positive things to your life?
It doesn't.
Among my experiences with my family, not all, there's been some good experiences.
But all of them just have been so...
So bad.
And the beatings are not even the hardest part.
It's the...
It's what they made you feel like.
It's not letting you play with the other kids.
And it's just...
and just not having, just crying and then looking up and no one's there.
Thank you.
Right.
Or you cry and look up and they say, stop crying because you're stupid.
You're crying for nothing.
You're being weak.
Right.
I already know that there is nothing positive or anything that I want with my family and that's why I cut them off.
But in a sense, with my marriage with my wife, there are times that I get very dark.
And I don't feel anymore.
Like, I just don't feel.
I don't know how to explain it.
It's like, I get to a certain point when I argue with my wife.
I've never hit her.
I've never...
I never said I was going to hit her.
I never threatened to hit her.
I don't even want to do that at all.
But there's a point where I can get to where all my emotions go away.
And it doesn't matter what my wife says or if she cries, I don't feel for her.
And I don't know why that is the way it is.
I'm assuming it's because What happened in the past.
But the reason I'm looking into this is because my new family.
But the therapist is saying, in order to help your new family, I have to go into the past again.
And the things they make me relive just kind of sucks.
And I... I don't know.
I just...
Just the feeling...
The beating...
I'm a big guy.
So I'm able to, like, take the beating.
What, you mean as a kid?
Yeah.
You were a kid?
What do you mean you're a big guy?
You're a big guy now.
Not when you were 12, right?
I guess I could withstand the blows without breaking it.
Oh, no, no.
Listen, the physical violence is far from the worst part in my experience.
Right.
Because the physical violence heals.
The physical violence, your body smooths over.
The bruises, right?
And they fade.
But the mental impacts, the infestation, the inhabitation of your mind with the personalities who are abusing you, that is...
You say there's an ocean between us, but not in your head, right?
That is absolutely true.
When my wife tells me that I deserve better.
Something about me rejects that so bad.
And the something is your parents' interest, right?
Your parents don't want you to think that you deserve better, right?
Because if you think you deserve better, then your chance of engaging with them tends to go down, right?
Your chance of wanting to spend time with them goes down, right?
Right.
Yeah, they weren't there.
And I remember, and you can tell me when to stop, Stefan, but there was, I think one of the hardest parts is when I won that gold medal for shot put, and just looking into the crowd, just hoping you see them, and then not seeing them, and then walking home with your medal, and just hoping that there was a party.
Yeah.
That there would be a celebration of your achievement.
Yeah, I was hoping for that.
When I got home, there was no one there, and the lights were off, and I remember being hungry, and I went to the kitchen, and all I see was leftover boats.
Right.
They didn't want to recognize anything that you had done that was positive, right?
I don't know what they were feeling at all at that time, but that hurt.
And then I remember going into my room, into my dad's room, and I showed him my medal, and there was a...
It was like a grunt.
It was like...
And I just remember walking out, I threw my medal away and just moved on.
And it was so hard to, I don't know, I didn't know how to be angry because when I got angry, I got beat.
Right.
And my mom was gone as long as we can remember.
You know, we only saw her like maybe once a year.
Right.
And because she came to America to get an education, and they always told us that once she gets her education, they'll be able to support our family, and we can be a family forever.
And then 15 years go by, and I just never understood, why do you need a doctorate degree?
I think you can provide with a master's at least.
And then when she finally came back, that's when I left to Kansas.
And, but yeah, I put all these emotions away just because I didn't think, I just thought no one really cares.
Just buckle up, be a man, move forward, work hard, provide.
But I didn't know that it would affect my closest relationships with my wife.
And I don't want it to affect my relationships with my son and my newborn baby.
So anything I can do to just annihilate this past and just move forward with just brightness and goodness and love and just give my kids everything I didn't have and that would be my life's dream is for them to just grow up safe.
Just know And that they just know that their parents love them?
If I can do that, that's it.
That's all I want to do.
So, yeah.
Right.
If there's not a huge benefit for you in seeing your parents, if your parents have not Gone to therapy, pursued self-knowledge, even if it's not through therapy, if they've not understood, if they've not made amends, if they've not asked for forgiveness, if they've not acknowledged wrongdoing.
In other words, if they're still committed to the idea or the argument that what they did was right and good as parents, then it's going to be, I think, quite disturbing because you hold the memory Right, right, Poe, you hold the memory of what actually happened, of the truth of what was done to you.
And if you're around people whose very existence is a giant denial of that truth, of the truth of how you were abused, And we've talked about the beatings, and I just want to remind other people that's just one, one of the eight adverse childhood experiences that Poe went through.
So if you're around people who deny the reality of what you experienced as a child...
That is very traumatic, because you have to self erase.
As a child, you could not express how unpleasant, how difficult, how terrifying, how upsetting all of this was.
And you have You have a self-defense called self-erasure, which is natural and the healthiest possible response to an impossible situation.
So you say that when you're in certain situations of conflict or other things with your wife, that you cease to exist, you don't have any feelings, you don't connect.
Correct.
Yeah, that is the self-defense, in my opinion, called self-erasure.
It's what happens when you can't possibly win in a situation, and when you're in the presence of somebody who's abusive, you can't have any existence.
Because if you have an existence, it's hard for them to abuse you.
You must become an object to them, for them to vent, for them to beat, for them to use, for them to manipulate, for them to punish, for them to torture.
You have to become an object to them.
And the only way you can successfully minimize the abuse is to become an object to yourself, to cease to exist.
Because that's the purpose of abuse.
The purpose of abuse is the erasure and destruction of a personality.
The abuser was destroyed and the virus of destruction passes through his fists and through his rapes and through his beatings or whatever it is that various people are doing, or hers, for that matter.
That's not specific to your parents, but...
The destruction of the personality is the essence of abuse.
And so the abuse tends to minimize when you cease to exist.
It's the only way of stopping the abuse.
You know, like there are these scenes in movies or scenes in real life where someone has a key piece of information and he's being tortured.
To give that information.
And the way that he makes the torture stop is he gives up the truth, or gives up some information at least.
And in many ways, I think, when you're being tortured in this situation, these kinds of situations, the way that you make the torture stop is not to just give up the truth, but to give up yourself, to not be there anymore.
When the personality, the identity, has been driven from the body like an angel possessing your mere flesh, it seems that when you cease to exist, the abuser experiences the momentary flash of satisfaction, of success.
And so in situations where you feel you cannot win, where there's nothing you can do to prevent, all you can do is comply with the wishes of the abuser.
And if the wishes of the abuser are that you cease to exist, then that's what you will do, of course.
We do everything that we can.
What do animals do?
You see these goats going down slides.
They lie on their backs, stiff-legged.
What do all animals do when they can't escape and they can't fight back?
They play dead, right?
They play dead.
And we wonder why zombie movies are popular.
Wow.
So, you become death in life when you're in an impossible situation.
And this is why I was focusing on this issue of Love, and your word for love, it is an impossible situation to use the same word for your feelings for your children and for your wife as the murderous rage you would feel towards someone who treated your children the way that you were treated by your father and your mother.
mother, if you came home, or if you heard that there was a teacher at school who had taken your child's hands and beat it with a hanger until the hands were raw and bruised and bleeding, what would you feel towards that teacher?
You would not say, well, that teacher taught my child a few good things, so I love that teacher.
Thank you.
True.
We can have all the sentimentality we want, but I think, Poe, that deep down in our heart and our bones and the very essence of our soul, nothing is relative.
Nothing is confused.
Everything is clear.
Everything is consistent.
And where we have consistency, we no longer have a place where we need to cease to exist.
Where we have the same word to meet the same things throughout the basic threads of our life.
We no longer need to vanish because we can live consistently in the joy of the moment without feeling we need to abandon our own bodies in order to survive impossible situations.
Contradictory definitions are a kind of impossible situation.
And as I said before, it finally comes down to what is best for your children.
What is best for you is very important, and I don't want you to not think about what's best for you, because, of course, when you grow up in an abusive household...
Having needs is very dangerous.
If you have needs that contradict a conflict with what your abusers want, oh, God help you.
I wish he would.
I wish he had.
So I don't want you to not, now I have to self-erase because it's only what my kids need.
Your need is to be the best father that you can.
And so when I say what your children need the most, that is serving your needs.
Your children's needs and your being a good father needs are the same.
Does that make sense?
Yes.
So I'm not asking you to be a good father at the expense of your needs or your preferences.
That is so admirably core to what it is that you want to achieve in your life.
To break this cycle which has gone on for...
Well...
Generations could be back to the beginning of time, as far as we know.
But how was your parenting when your family of origin was around?
How were you as a father?
How did your children view the situation?
How did your wife view the situation?
What did it do to the great treasures in your life which you have chosen, your wife and your children?
My son was still an infant, so I don't know.
As far as me being a father, I did go to a place...
I wasn't as happy as I usually am.
I wasn't as joyful and optimistic and go-getter.
It's amazing that their presence...
My business took a nosedive when that happened.
And I actually am deciding to quit the business because of how bad it got.
And it's just hard to...
It's like I lost the confidence again.
It's like I asked myself, maybe they were right.
Maybe everything that I've been building since I left Tonga was just a lie and they were right.
And I know that it's not true, but for some reason when they're there...
And they say the same things they said before.
And the image of the same things seem to be present.
It's like there's a deep, dark part of me that's fighting what I've been trying to build since I left.
And I definitely wasn't performing at my best.
Sure, they turned you into a scared kid again, right?
Yes.
Of course.
I mean, how else really could that occur?
How could it really be different?
Right.
So, I didn't take it out on my wife or my kid or anything.
It just paralyzed me for a few months, actually.
I tried my best to go to work and try to make things work, but Probably have the lowest income year for that.
But yeah, I'm trying to...
So it certainly interferes with your ability to provide for your family, right?
Absolutely.
Right.
Absolutely.
Right.
And what does your wife think of all of this to your family when they came to visit and what happened?
I think she...
When I tell her my stories...
It's so foreign to her that sometimes she just doesn't...
She's like, it just can't be that bad.
And you can't turn out this good from something so bad.
But I think when she just got a taste of what it was like when they were there, I think it helped me a lot that she...
It seemed more real to her now that she saw just a tiny bit of what it was like to be around them.
And so she's protective of me and just tells me she doesn't know how to deal with things like this, but just tell her what I need and she'll help me, but I don't even know what I need.
So that's why I'm going to therapy and trying to get help through talking to you and stuff like that.
But she's very supportive and is very kind.
Right.
Does she see the change in your personality after you spend time with your family of origin?
Absolutely.
Does she feel the urge to protect you from this outcome?
Yes.
And what does she think you should do regarding your family of origin to protect you from this outcome?
Well, the hardest thing was that she She's so...
Now that you helped me separate love away so that I don't confuse my kids, I think my wife was also confused when I would say I love my father.
And so she doesn't know what to do with that.
And she's like, I don't...
And so she's just kind of waiting and seeing what I come up with as I talk to you and the therapist and just kind of go off of The professionals and what they think.
And to her, she just doesn't understand why I love my father, which is the same point that you brought up.
But now I'm hoping to find some better words to describe how I feel rather than that word.
Right.
Right.
And I'm sorry that your wife, you know, maybe she's got her own sort of...
There's a lot of...
A lot of propaganda around families.
And maybe she...
You know, I'm not a professional, of course.
I think even in the mental health professions, there can be a lot of, you know, you've got to work things out with your family and so on.
And they don't say this to women being abused by their husbands.
I mean, if you were, as a child, right, if you were a woman...
Whose husband made her stand up on a table and beat her with a table leg and demand that she not fall down?
Would a therapist say you've got to go back and work it out?
I don't know.
Seems hard to imagine.
That's a good point.
Would she say, well, you know, in order to move forward, you're going to have to resolve things with the husband who beats you with a table leg?
I don't know that they would say that.
And it's a challenge.
It's a challenge.
So, I've got a book called Real-Time Relationships, The Logic of Love, which is available for free at freedomainradio.com slash free, and it's got some of my sort of thoughts about this.
But she says that she's confused because you say that you love your father, right?
Yes.
And to be honest, I understand where she's coming from.
I understand that now.
So, I don't think you want to use the same word.
And I think once you start to separate the words...
I'm not saying you don't have any loyalty or any affection or anything like that towards your father.
I mean...
I can speak of positive things my mother did.
And it's not beyond the pale for me.
It was a little bit more in the past, but...
Age bludgeons you with nuance over time.
And...
But I think at this point, a pretty clear delineation is important that you are as important...
You must be at least as important to yourself, my friend, as a stranger is.
If you saw...
If you saw just any child being treated the way that your father treated you in his worst moments, if you saw any...
In a park, in a restaurant, in some public place, if you saw any child...
Being treated that way, would you go to that child and say, it's important that you love your father?
No, I would not.
So why is your integrity and honesty with yourself less important than some random child?
I guess that's where my self-worth is at at this point.
No, I wouldn't, because that makes it somehow your fault.
Like, oh, well, my self-worth is just this way.
No, this is what you were taught, right?
It's easy to talk about...
It's easy to say it's not your fault.
But it's hard to say that to the pain.
What do you mean?
Like, I don't...
People say you've got to love yourself, you've got to have self-worth, and...
And you've got to believe that you deserve good things and all of that.
No, I hate that shit.
Yeah, I hate it too.
I'm sorry, I hate that shit.
No, no, I do.
I hate it too.
You've got to earn your love for yourself by being secure, by being honest, by being courageous.
I'm sorry that you had such a horrible, horrible upbringing, and I wish that self-love came easier, but because it comes harder means it's going to be more certain when you actually have it.
This, oh, just believe and like and love yourself.
You can't just will love for yourself.
Love is an involuntary response to virtue.
You must be honest and courageous and you've been given a hell of a high wall to climb over, to have honesty and integrity, because...
There's so many contradictions and brutalities in how you were raised, so massive sympathies for that.
But the idea, and I'm not saying it's your idea, of course, but the idea that you just, oh, I've got to feel better about myself, I've got to just love myself, and then everything's going to be great, and it's like, no, I'm sorry, but you have to earn it.
It can't happen.
It's like saying, well, if I just keep saying the word diet, I'm going to get thinner.
No, you have to change your behavior.
You have to earn getting thinner.
You have to earn loving yourself.
And the way that you earn it is through virtue, and you have great opportunities for virtue, and they come at a very high challenge because of how you were raised.
And I'm really sorry for that, but that's what we have to work with, right?
Right, right.
And that's why I'm trying to reach out and try to develop this.
But you're right, it's not easy to look at yourself.
It just bugs me when I see Beautiful people think that they lose confidence, even though they're beautiful, right?
But then I also understand if they went through hardships like I did and stuff, people can take that away from you.
They say you just got positive thinking and all that stuff, and I feel like people that say that, it's just...
I don't know.
It's kind of annoying when I hear that.
The last thing I want Stefan is my son to be a teenager and then he does something and then I go into this self-eration or whatever you're saying and I can't love him.
I can't be there for him because I'm just gone.
My emotions are gone.
And so that's why I'm doing a therapy, because I want to be able to be there for my kids, even when they're challenging me.
I don't know if that makes sense.
Right.
And so hopefully all this works out.
And I hate thinking of this as a soft story, but sometimes it needs to be spoken of.
But just to let you know, man, I have found such great happiness in America.
And I freaking love America.
I hate liberals because they take advantage of what they have.
It's such a great country and it really is a place of opportunity.
Even if it's a place to flee from, but then you add back to the economy and you try to add to the society, this country is great and America was my tree.
And it was such a huge blessing and I hope Americans don't destroy this country because it's wonderful and I love it.
Well, I appreciate what you're saying about America.
And is there anything that you wanted to add to this?
My particular thought is you really got to meditate on what it means to love.
What it means to use the word love.
And I have found it useful.
To think of how I would react if my child was treated the way that I was treated or if some random child was treated the way that I was treated and I'm worth at least as much as that in terms of a moral response.
I think that's how you keep yourself protected.
That's a good exercise to run myself through when I'm feeling a certain way.
So, no, I appreciate Stefan and And I appreciate Mike too, so thank you for letting me come on.
You're welcome.
Keep us posted.
How long until your new child comes along?
My wife, we haven't went to the doctor to see how far along she is.
Oh, it's early days, right?
Yeah, early days.
Okay, well, best of luck for a peaceful pregnancy and just wanted to say again, I'm incredibly sorry for what you experienced as a child.
I feel enormous, enormous admiration for the commitment that you've made as a husband and a father to have your children experience nothing of what you experienced and all of the opposite.
That's noble and gracious and courageous and they're lucky.
Thanks, Stefan.
Appreciate it.
Take care, man.
Bye.
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Thanks, everyone, for a wonderful, wonderful evening's conversation.
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