Question 1: [2:35] - “With ever increasing levels of social unrest associated with alien elements of our societies, and immigration being closely tied to the expansion of state power, do you think that liberty can realistically be achieved without first restoring homogeneity?"Question 2: [52:45] - “The communist mindset heavily relies on the idea that the rich are only rich because they have ‘stolen’ it from the poor. The opposition tends to lean toward calling that ‘nonsense’ because wealth is largely created by adding value. I have, for a long time, agreed with the latter perspective, but recently as you've been discussing the effects of IQ on society and how environmental factors can have negative effects on one's general intelligence level, I have begun wondering how much of an impact that has on people's sense that ‘something’ is missing; namely bits and pieces of the very essence of what it means to be human. With consciousness being such a vital part of what it means to be human, is it possible that the communist mindset is correct in that ‘something’ has been robbed from the poor and low IQ populations, but it has just been misidentified; that society has indeed taken away from their ability to reach the full potential of their person-hood?”Question 3: [1:17:46] – “People say do not do business with friends. What advice can you give someone who is planning on starting a business with a friend? Are there any benefits? What are the negatives? How do you keep the relationships separate?”Question 4: [1:24:52] – “Stefan has mentioned that his writing a book about ethics is an admission he knew nothing about ethics. When you say writing a book about ethics means you don't know anything about ethics, we can deduce that you're also meaning to say that people who haven't written a book about ethics at least know something about ethics. This goes against Stefan's own world view. He often says that society isn't following ethics, beating kids, government power, etc. I haven't written a book about cooking, does that mean I know plenty about cooking? Almost everyone hasn't written a book at all, are those people all knowing?”Question 5: [1:34:57] – "Many young people, including myself, have run into the issue of choice paralysis when it comes to a long term career. This, combined with the lie of 'just follow your dreams' they spoon feed to students in schools and the breakdown of the nuclear family support system, leaves many teenagers and young adults an array of paths with little to no direction. The issue seems to be more present in the modern day than in generations long since past. Is it caution or coddling by our parents that has stunted our ability to be successful? Is it the lack of training or knowledge of the adult world? Is it the habitual or addictive nature of present day entertainment that we pour hours upon hours into? Or is it something simpler than it appears? What can we as millennials do to cure, or stunt the growth of, our choice paralysis in the modern day, and prevent it from greatly affecting our future children?"Your support is essential to Freedomain Radio, which is 100% funded by viewers like you. Please support the show by making a one time donation or signing up for a monthly recurring donation at: http://www.freedomainradio.com/donate
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So, five great questions tonight, great conversations.
The first is, can we have a free society without restoring cultural homogeneity, ethnic homogeneity?
Well, that's an interesting question.
I know there's a lot of conjecture floating around on the interwebs about that.
I had a great conversation about that.
And someone else wanted to dig into some of the resentment that seems to be concentrated in socialist populations or communist mindsets.
Intelligence is such an important part of humanity.
The poor and low IQ populations, do they feel that something has been taken from them?
Do they feel that something is missing, which is perhaps IQ, which can be exploited by socialists?
There's a great conversation about that.
Now, there's an old saying, you know, it's not really a saying, I guess it's more of a mindset, it says, don't do business with friends, don't do business with family.
Well, I've had some experience with that, and a young fellow wanted to call in, or did call in, and ask, what advice can I give someone who's planning on starting a business with a friend?
Concise, effective, powerful, useful, I think.
The fourth caller, it was an interesting one.
So I said years ago that, you know, people think I'm arrogant or whatever, but I wrote a book on ethics, which was to organize my thoughts about ethics and explain ethics and understand ethics, which meant that I had a significant knowledge gap regarding ethics before I wrote books.
The book.
And he thinks that I said I don't know anything about ethics, therefore I'm going to write a book about ethics.
And helping to unpack people's misperceptions about what you said is pretty, pretty important.
So I hope you'll find that conversation helpful.
I know I did.
And young people, millennials, you ever feel paralyzed?
You ever feel like you really can't get much done in the world?
Nothing's going to change.
Can't win.
Don't try.
Don't.
Well, we had a young fellow calling in saying, how can we rouse the sleeping and slumbering energies of the millennials and get them on the motion to helping us build a freer society?
Well, we went pretty deep, but it was very productive.
So, I hope you enjoy the show.
Alright, up first today we have Jordan.
Jordan wrote in and said, With ever-increasing levels of social unrest associated with alien elements of our societies, and immigration being closely tied to the expansion of state power, do you think that liberty can realistically be achieved without first restoring homogeneity?
Once the question has been read, I will be happy to expand upon my premise, referencing countries that have historically collapsed or face balkanization as a result of demographic conflict, as well as some of the reasons why I believe that immigration specifically facilitates expansion of the state's control over the population.
That's from Jordan.
Hey Jordan, how are you doing?
I'm doing fantastic, Steph.
It's great to finally get to talk to you.
I've been a really big fan for years.
Well, let's hope I don't blow it then and destroy any positive impact you have from the show.
So, do you want to talk a little bit, for those who aren't aware, and it's not like this is taught in government schools a lot, do you want to talk a little bit about some of the countries that you wanted to reference?
Yeah, I'd be glad to.
First off, I just want to say that after the Manchester terrorist attack, Thank you.
we don't get the option to talk about this publicly.
So thankfully you offer the call-in show.
It's been a fantastic utility to people like me.
So I've written down quite a few examples of countries that have collapsed and been separated into separate states along ethnic lines or religious lines.
You have Pakistan that separated from India in 1947, due primarily to their religious differences, where the Muslims and Hindus were unable to live peacefully side by side.
And then further, the Bangladesh Liberation War was fought then in 1971 Where the cultural and linguistic differences between the Bengalis and the Pakistanis outweighed any religious unity between those two Muslim regions is Czech Slovakia in Europe in 1993 The country obviously split in half.
You had the ethnic Czechs and the Slovaks living under one state, which was previously communist.
But the Czechs were much more influential in the communist government and the Slovaks were very resentful of that.
They separated into what we have today, the Czech Republic and Slovakia.
Yugoslavia We broke up into a whole mess of different countries over the Yugoslav Wars between 1991 and 2001 into Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Slovenia, Montenegro, Macedonia and Kosovo.
And the theme amongst all of these countries is that It was either ethnic groups or religious groups that separated apart and balkanized the country and went and lived in their own areas under their own governments.
And the list goes on, but I think you're getting...
Right, right.
Did you just say more you wanted to add before I sort of weigh in with this challenging question?
Yeah, well, what made me first sort of realize this, I was reading 18th century conservative writer Edmund Burke, and he said, And these restraints then come from within when a population shares cultural and moral values,
but when they don't, external force has to be provided to impose those restraints.
So what that means then is if you want freedom on a stable political basis, you have to have, or this implies, if it's given to be true, that you have to have a homogenous culture and society composed of people who share the same values and actually want to live together.
And they don't want to hurt each other.
If you have people with conflicting cultures and values and traditions, then those people can only be held together by the force of an increasingly authoritarian state.
Well, as is the case in many countries in the Middle East and in Africa and so on, where you have a population that is...
Unable or unwilling to restrain themselves according to universal principles, then you're going to end up with increasingly authoritarian regimes.
And of course, as multiculturalism has grown, so has the state grown in the West.
I don't think these two things are unrelated.
I'm not saying they're exactly causal, but they're certainly coincidental.
Yeah, of course.
What I said in my question as well, I added on to the bottom of it, why I think that governments in the West may actually be using immigration specifically to facilitate expansion of their own state power.
And this is evidenced by the fact that they aren't actually taking measures that That we know will prevent things like terrorist attacks taking place in the future.
Instead, they impose things like the Patriot Act or Theresa May in the UK is now proposing sweeping new internet regulations here, massive spying on our own British citizens as a result of a few terrorist attacks taking place.
So the reason why I think they aren't Preventing immigration into the country, which we know from countries like Poland, which have no terrorist attacks because they don't have a Muslim population, is 100% effective, more or less, at preventing terrorism.
People in government, who I think have an innate desire to expand their own power, Right, right.
I think that they are profiting, state powers profiting from a divided culture, but I don't know that it's fundamentally due to that because the policies were put in place Well, I guess they're just about as old as I am, right, in the mid-1960s.
In the mid-1960s was when the decision was made throughout the Western world, and it was driven by the leftists, it was driven by the liberals, it was driven by the Labour and by the Democrats and so on, to bring the Third World into the West.
To switch, and in particular in America, to switch immigration from white Europeans to...
Well, everyone but.
And so that, it wasn't like the current crop of politicians is just attempting to ride that wave.
And sure, they can use terrorist attacks on someone to expand their own power, but fundamentally it was all put in place.
I mean, before some of these politicians were even born.
So I think laying that at their feet may be a bit...
Right.
But I will say this, and this is an analogy...
Which I know is not an argument, but imagine you own a sporting goods store, and you're in a Sopranos episode, and you get in deep, because you've got a gambling problem, you get in deep with the mob.
And...
Man, the mob, the mafia, you've got to pay these guys.
Like, you owe them $150,000 or $200,000.
Like, you're just not going to be able to pay them with the money that you have.
And let's say you're married and you can't hoover up that amount of money out of the family account to pay off.
And you can't take a loan out on your business because your wife's got a cosign, whatever.
Like, you're stuck.
You're stuck.
And let's say you're so worried and you're so nervous and you're so anxious that you're not being good at managing your store.
It falls into disrepair.
You don't order new replacements for your sporting goods and people stop coming to your store.
And of course, the mafia is charging more and more interest on you and guys are starting to circle you with baseball bats.
And things are looking pretty hopeless in terms of you being able to pay off your bills and continue.
Well...
What out do some people have in that situation?
What do they do?
There's not much they can do.
Sure.
Sure there's something they can do.
You know what they can do?
They can burn down their store.
I guess that's right.
They can burn down their store, they can collect the insurance, they can pay off the mob, and they can ride off into the sunset, right?
Right.
When you can't pay your bills?
And it has struck me.
There's no chance.
That the West has to pay off its unfunded liabilities.
Like, there's so many multiple times bigger than the entire economy of the West.
I mean, we're not just talking Illinois, even Chicago.
We're not, you know, we're talking California or even Ontario.
I mean, the province I live in, it's a five times per capita debt larger than California, which is called commie fauna or the left coast or madhead with a suntan.
And there's no, like, you can't pay it off.
Now, the traditional answer...
That governments have when they can't pay off what they owe the population is to start a war.
Right.
Because you start a war and people are willing to accept sacrifices if there's a war on it.
So in times of peacetime, you know, if you go, I don't know, let's say you go to people who are either receiving or about to receive old age pensions and you say, sorry, folks.
Funny story.
You voted for all this free stuff, but you didn't really vote to pay for it now, did you?
So there's really nothing here and we can't keep preying on the young because they're already burdened down with student debts that lead them to nowhere but a Starbucks job and a lifetime of writing bitter, angsty, anarchist poetry about the powers that be, mistaking the government for the free market at all times.
We don't really have enough money for you, so sorry.
We're going to have to cut your pension significantly, and you're going to have to double up, and you're going to have to find some way to get by.
Well, if you try that, of course, everyone's going to go mental, because they're not in a fight-or-flight state where they're willing to accept the concept of sacrifice.
Now, in a war...
I mean, people will accept rationing, like little food stamps.
They'll accept like getting one stick of butter a week.
The women will accept not having stockings, which if you've ever seen British women's legs, stocking is not always the worst idea in the world, or at least when I was a kid.
Hey, let's put some fog over those varicose veins a little, shall we?
So people will accept privations.
They will accept reduced standard of living.
They will accept when their fight-or-flight mechanism gets activated, Then they will accept privations.
They won't otherwise.
And there is this general snowball with regards to immigration in the West.
And it's all founded on one basic idea that everyone's interchangeable, right?
What is the difference if someone comes from Yemen or Somalia or...
Papua New Guinea or, like, what's the difference?
If you think there's any difference, it must be racist, right?
I mean, this is...
Thousands of years of divergent evolution.
That's the difference.
Yeah, I mean, there's, you know, different brain volumes, different number of spinal columns, different histories, different cultures, different methodologies for dealing with gender, different concepts of the state, different, I mean, different religions.
I mean, you name it.
You don't have to be racist to notice that some fruits are different from other fruits, right?
No, it's absolutely right.
Right, so...
So for the politicians to restrict immigration, they would have to say, I mean, basically they would have to say, in England, they would have to say, well, we prefer the people who are here to the people who could be here.
And that is going to make the press go mental.
Because the press is going to start screaming racism.
I mean, I don't know if you've ever heard this.
You probably have.
It was in the 60s.
Enoch Powell, British politician, had a speech called Rivers of Blood, which is well worth looking up and reading through about how he thought this third world migration was going to end up.
And let's just say it's worth reading.
But of course, even back in the 60s, He was decried as a racist and so on.
And so now things have become even more hysterical in that regard.
Plus, of course, you have a massive voting bloc of people who want their own countrymen to keep coming in.
You know, if you've just come in from Pakistan, you want people from Pakistan, your relatives, your friends, your childhood friends, all the people you grew up in, come on over, right?
It's great here.
Oh, lots of free welfare, free healthcare, best stuff in the world, right?
The fact that the burden in cracking the system is another matter.
So you have a huge voting bloc that you didn't have before, and you have even more hysteria regarding racism than you did in the past.
So what politician is going to really want to have anything to do with that, right?
Right.
That's a very important thing you bring up, how the different ethnic groups that are coming into the West maintain their own ethnic identities and they don't assimilate to the Western nations that they're inhabiting.
And why should they?
No, seriously, why should they?
It's not in their best interest to do so.
Why should they?
I mean, they're being paid to not assimilate.
That's the whole point of welfare.
Exactly.
The whole point of welfare is you don't have to learn English.
You don't have to adapt to local customs.
You don't have to adapt to local work environments.
I mean, can you imagine if some horrible...
Let's imagine.
Let's imagine, just for the sake of argument, Jordan, that there's someone in the third world who's sexist.
Doesn't want to work for a woman, right?
So they come to England and then they have a female boss.
They mouth after that female boss.
And what happens?
Well, they get fired in the West.
Yeah, they get fired.
And then they go in with their resume saying, well, I worked for 14 days at this place until I called my female manager some unholy word and she fired me.
And then the new boss is going to be like, no, we got women working here.
This is not going to work out, right?
So he got no job.
What's he going to do then?
Well, he's going to do what a third of the people who moved to America in the 19th century, they're going to move back home because he didn't assimilate.
He didn't learn the local customs.
I mean, you can't move to some new place and not assimilate unless you're independently wealthy.
And as you and I both know, a lot of the people coming into the West from the Third World, not exactly the poster childs of independent wealth.
So they're being paid to not integrate.
Now, integration takes a long time anyway.
Like if you look at Chinatown or whatever in the States, right on the West Coast in particular...
The people from China, they lived in Chinatown, and a lot of them never particularly learned English that well.
Their kids, it was a different matter, and then their grandkids were more assimilated.
But it takes 75 to 100 years to find out if the assimilation thing is working out, and that was during a time when there was no welfare state.
And so in order to succeed, to grow.
There was a fruit called success and a punishment called you can't live here because you have no money.
And that, even then, it took a long time.
To integrate.
And that, of course, when you're talking about East Asian and Chinese and Japanese and so on, they've got an IQ of 106 on average.
They're going to do really well.
The welfare state holds very little appeal to people of high IQ because it's going to trap you in a low-rent occupation or a low-rent situation.
And you can earn much more going out into the free market and getting a job.
But if you've got an IQ of 80 or 85, the welfare state is the very best deal for you on the planet.
There's no possible incentive for you to want to leave the welfare state, to go out into the free market, to learn a cultural morals that you may find abhorrent, to learn a language you find particularly complicated.
Like, you won't do better.
Like, you won't even come close to doing as well as the kind of income you're getting on the welfare state.
So, it's like they're building sections of another country, they're putting a big wall around it, and they're throwing money and resources into it, and then they're saying, gosh, I wonder why people aren't integrating.
Plus, of course, you know, there's interviews with people from the third world saying, you know, we don't want to integrate.
Integration, that's your idea.
It's not our idea.
We don't want to integrate at all.
We love our values.
We love where we came from.
It's not that.
They're openly telling you they don't want to integrate a lot of people.
You've got examples of ethnic groups then who have maintained their own ethnic identity after hundreds or thousands of years of not having a state of their own.
They've permanently inhabited other people's nations.
And maintained a very strong ethnic identity.
For example, you have the Jews, the most obvious example here.
Five, six thousand years!
Not even a country managed to maintain their cultural and religious identity in a very strong fashion.
Now, the Jews are also facing problems with integration because, like, significant portions of Jewish women are marrying non-Jews and that is becoming a problem.
But yeah, thousands.
It's funny because, of course, you know, there are Jews out there who are preaching multiculturalism and integration and so on.
It's like, have you looked in the mirror lately?
Not so much with the integration.
Yeah, they're having a lot of the same problems that the rest of the West is having in general.
The main thing I'm calling up to address is whether...
I know economically there's no incentive for these foreigners coming into the West to integrate themselves into Western society, but more I wanted to focus on the social and ideological differences, because in a lot of the examples that I've looked up historically,
and there's hundreds and hundreds of historical examples of countries facing balkanization, or worse, one group being Completely removed by whatever means that entails by another group over either religious differences or ethnic differences.
And people just end up resenting each other over more social and identitarian differences that they have rather than economic ones.
Well, okay.
So, I mean, I understand what you're saying, Jordan.
Let me give you sort of a very brief thing about Religious differences.
Let's just—fundamentally, we're talking about religious differences.
That's the major source of contention with these kinds of things.
And communists, or leftists, I should say.
So the question is, how did the West sort out the problem of religious differences?
Well, separation of church and state.
Because when there was a state religion, then every single religion, as you know, would try and get hold of state power to impose or enforce its version of religiosity on everyone else.
And if they couldn't stand aside from that battle, they had to try, because if they didn't, Then some other group would get it and their religion would be hunted or extinguished or driven out or whatever it was, right?
So the problem of religious warfare, which plagued Europe for hundreds and hundreds of years, resulting in millions of deaths, the problem was solved by saying, okay, everybody, back to your corners.
The government will not legislate religion.
And then everyone was like, ah, okay.
I'm willing to give that up if everyone else is willing to give that up.
I'm willing to have a separation of church and state as long as no one's trying to weasel in through the back door and impose their religion through the state in some nefarious manner.
So when it comes to how we live together, the only example I think that really matters, that really works, is freedom of religion.
We need freedom of culture.
What that means is a separation of culture and the state.
It means a separation of religion and the state.
It means a separation of race or ethnicity and the state.
Which means you need truly colorblind laws.
You need laws that will not favor one group over another.
You need no welfare state.
You need all of the economic freedoms that you can imagine.
Then...
The productive people will all work together.
The unproductive people will probably leave in the long run.
And there may be self-segregation in two communities.
And this is not due to racism.
It's due to the fact that people are bloody busy.
You know, you got a job.
You got a job.
You're raising kids.
You know, you got your bills to pay.
You got your house to maintain.
I mean, you're busy.
You don't have time to learn 12 different languages because there's 12 different languages in your neighborhood.
You don't have time to learn 12 different cultures and what people like and don't like and find offensive and don't find offensive.
And you don't have time to figure out everyone's religious preferences.
It's just easier to deal with people like yourself.
And the only people who love diversity tend to be the young who've got lots of time on their hands and love, frankly, banging people from exotic cultures.
You've got people...
That have been through government schooling programs.
Well, yes, but it's one thing to go through government schooling programs.
It's another thing to try and actually raise your children in a highly diverse environment.
Where you're worried, everyone's got different religious views, so you're worried about your kid, you know, maybe your kid's your Zoroastrian household, and across a Buddhist, and then down the road is a Muslim or two, and over here are some Christians, and there's some atheists.
And, you know, if your kid's all mixed together, how long's your religion going to last?
Because they're all going to be talking about their own particular things, and they're going to come back with questions and say, well, Bobby does it this way, and Ahmed does it this way, and, you know, Naira does it this way, and it's not going to hold together.
I haven't read it myself, but I've seen it referenced in some of the research that I've done preparing for this.
Are you familiar with the Bowling Alone studies?
Oh, yeah.
Putnam was his name, right?
Yes.
Suggested that...
The results that he found were that positive social outcomes were...
Or rather, I'm getting that backwards.
Homogeneity in a community was associated with almost exclusively positive social outcomes.
Sure.
And diversity is like a neutron bomb.
Or I guess it's like the democratic control or the leftist control of a city.
The buildings are standing, but nobody goes outside.
Everyone cocoons in.
So diversity is great.
For people who make movies and television and video games, because nobody goes out.
You know what the great competitor is to corporations that want you sitting on a couch?
It's the great outdoors.
So I think one of the reasons why the media loves pushing diversity is that diversity means that your neighborhood falls apart.
You can't go outside, so you sit home and watch TV. But as you mentioned, if we had a state where we had...
Laws that were entirely founded upon universal principles.
We had separation of church and state.
We avoided letting culture influence our political policies, etc.
Then we may be able to live in a diverse society.
But that is a hypothetical.
What we'd have right now is the polar opposite of that.
We do have governments currently who...
Are passing policies that do benefit certain groups more than they benefit others.
Well, and third world immigrants overwhelmingly vote for the left, right?
Yeah.
I mean, you've got imams in England, as you know, saying that the Muslims who don't vote Labour are going to hell.
Yeah, that's exactly how democracy was supposed to function.
Good job, everyone.
Yeah, we know statistically immigrants overwhelmingly vote for the left.
But...
Realistically, I want to talk about, from our current standpoint, do you think that we can realistically move towards a society that's more founded upon liberty and universal principles from where we are now?
Oh no, that's going to happen no matter what.
I mean, that's going to happen no matter what, because the welfare state is going to break.
Would it require a collapse of our current system?
Oh, I mean, I don't know.
What's it like for you, Jordan, talking to people about this stuff?
Are they open to it or are they just close their eyes, put their fingers in their ears, stick their asses in the air, stick their ostrich hedge in the sand and go, la la la la, I can't hear you.
I would 100% lose my job if I spoke to this about anyone, to anyone in the UK and anyone found out about it.
Right.
So yeah, if people won't listen to reason, then they're going to have to listen to bitter experience.
I mean, that's just the way the world works.
An addict either finds a way to curb his addiction, or he dies, or he ends up broke, or he ends up in prison.
I mean, you either learn from reason and evidence, or you're going to have to learn from bitter experience.
People don't even want to talk about it.
Well, I shouldn't say that.
People do want to talk about it.
I mean, the majority of people Right.
The problem is the media won't let anyone talk about it.
Well, and the police, who seem to be entirely keen on.
Well, it's a lot more fun to police people typing mean things on Facebook than it is to go into a no-go zone and try and arrest someone, right?
I mean, I understand what the police are doing.
I mean, it's a lot more fun to kick down someone's door if you know they're not going to fight back, right?
Exactly.
The people typing on Facebook aren't going to fight back.
If you try to go into one of the many Muslim no-go zones and arrest someone, then they'll riot.
There was a gif recently that was floating around on, I think it was just this last week, about a bunch of migrants chasing a bunch of British policemen who were sprinting, hot-footing it down the street in full retreat.
I mean, it's...
I mean, just over last weekend, 13,500 migrants from North Africa or from Africa come to Italy.
You can't sustain that.
You can't sustain it.
So the welfare state, I mean, government's going to run out of money even faster.
The migrant crisis is going to accelerate the destruction of the socialist redistribution system known as sort of modern democracy.
I mean, it's going to take it out that much faster.
But then what's going to happen after that?
Because we are getting a huge amount of resentment towards the groups in society who we perceive, whether it's accurate or not, to reality.
The groups that we perceive to be the cause of these negative social changes that we're experiencing.
People have a huge amount of resentment towards those groups.
Tommy Robinson.
I'm sure you're familiar with him.
Tommy Robinson.
Oh, yeah, yeah.
He's been on the show.
I'm sorry to interrupt you, Jordan.
This pisses me off.
This pisses me off.
Blaming the migrants is stupid.
Come on.
You have a giant welfare state and no borders.
I don't blame the migrants at all.
They're doing exactly what you would do in their situation.
I would.
I absolutely would.
Of course you would.
Well, you know, I might be a burden on the taxpayers.
Come on.
I mean, if you leave huge piles of gold out on the front yard and say, we've gone on vacation for a month and you come back and some of your gold is gone, oh my goodness, those terrible thieves.
Okay, maybe what they're doing is wrong, but...
It's not the fault of the migrants.
It's not the fault of the immigrant groups.
They're doing exactly what any sane, rational actor would do in their situation.
The problem is people have not wanted to talk about the danger and destructiveness of the welfare state, which has now been known for well on 50 years.
People have not wanted to take that topic on.
The politicians aren't going to take it on.
Of course not, because they need a groundswell of opposition to the welfare state before they're even willing to tackle the topic.
And so you need people who are going to talk about the welfare state, who are going to talk about the destructiveness of social engineering, who are going to talk about the eugenics of the welfare state, where you're taking money from smart people and giving it to less smart people to have more babies.
I mean, it's immoral.
It's a violation of property rights.
It's a violation of what Europe and the West have stood for for hundreds and hundreds of years.
It is a new aristocracy with the bottom at the top.
And so the fact is that the West got greedy.
Women got kind of crazy with their vote and wanted to vote away all the consequences to bad decisions.
And so now this is one of the final symptoms.
The migrant crisis is a symptom of the self-betrayal.
Of thou shalt not steal, the West has been gorging itself on for the past 50 years.
And the wages of sin are problems.
You know, if you indulge in a sin, if you indulge in immoral behavior, if you're a drug addict, if you're a food addict, if you're a sex addict or a gambling addict, yes, it is going to harm you.
But it's like the gambling addict who blows all of his money, and then the bank comes and repossesses his home because he can't pay his mortgage, and he says, the problem is the bank.
No.
The bank is the symptom.
The migrants are a symptom of your failure in the West to deal with the immorality of the welfare state that has been pointed out since...
The last couple of hundred years.
The last...
One of the first things that happened.
And it's been done before.
I did a whole Peter Schiff show on this years ago about Spenumland, which you should look up.
S-P-E-E-N-H-A-M-L-A-N-D. Spenumland.
It's been done millions of times before.
That's the entire example of the goddamn Roman Empire and the welfare state and how it falls down.
This has been well known for thousands of years, and Europe just said, well, we'll get it right this time.
This socialism, this redistribution, this destruction of the family, this letting the government control the vast movement of trillions of pounds in society, we got it.
Never worked before, destroyed entire cultures and civilizations before, but we can taste of this fruit and it'll be just fine.
Fine!
We got this one.
We got no problems with it.
Magic has happened and we can suddenly have massive amounts of money going through the hands of very few people.
They're never going to use it to buy votes.
They're never going to be corrupted by that power.
People are never going to get dependent on that money.
Families won't be destroyed.
Neighborhoods won't be destroyed.
All of the things that were easily and ably predicted in 1957 by Atlas Shrug, not to mention the Moynihan Report, Not to mention Enoch Powell, not to mention all the people who've been demonized, Joseph McCarthy among them.
This redistribution, this socialization of wealth, it was a deal with the devil.
Everybody had been told that it was going to be a bad idea, and everybody went for it anyway, and has refused to talk about it since.
And then they say, well, the problem is the migrants.
No.
Well, a lot of the resentment of the migrants obviously comes from the individual actions of the migrants once they're in the country.
Of course, it's the government's fault for allowing, for creating the circumstances under which the migrants can come here in the first place.
But when you have something like Rotherham in the UK, where you have, what is it, like 1,500 girls molested over a period of several years, for example.
More than molested.
Doused in gasoline, threatened with weapons, passed around, raped into near-atomic oblivion.
I mean, it's the most unholy pedophile sex slave ring that can be conceived of.
And I just wanted to sort of point that out.
I mean, it's a very mild term that you're using, even though it's a horrifying term.
Very weak language, yeah.
I'm used to having to self-censor, being a British citizen.
But that sort of thing going on creates the resentment between the population groups in the country.
And I do agree with you that eventually Western nations will start to collapse.
But that resentment's already there, and it's only going to get...
Worse as we go further towards this panic situation.
No, but you're taking away everyone's agency.
Look, racial IQ differences have been known for hundreds of years.
I mean, it wasn't called IQ in the past.
I mean, the IQ test is about 100 years old, give or take, right?
Racial IQ differences have been known for a long time.
Incompatibilities between certain ideologies have been known for a long time.
So here's the problem.
This is empowering to everyone in the West.
Stop blaming other people.
Stop blaming your politicians.
Stop blaming the media.
It's you.
You're the problem.
When people bring up uncomfortable topics, do you scream that they're racist?
Do you scream that they're phobic?
Do you scream all of this crap at them and shut them down?
What about when the media goes and attacks people?
When the media goes and attacks people for speaking the truth, do you continue to buy that media?
Do you continue to tune in?
Do you continue to consume the ads?
Now, I know in England there's the BBC, which is this fascist, Stalinist kind of forced, literally fascist, right?
I mean, it's a publicly owned propaganda arm.
And so, in England, there's a challenge with regards to that, and that's not the only place in Europe where that happens.
But trust me, there's a lot of private or semi-private media outlets that are still eagerly consumed by the British people, even though those media outlets are putting out the most abominable and abhorrent trash imaginable.
So do you encourage?
Are you curious?
Do you look things up?
Do you allow for the exercise of the free speech rights that you still have to some degree in the West?
I mean, particularly, of course, in America.
Do you continue to buy and consume media that is harmful to any kind of productive conversation about these challenges?
Do you encourage people to look these things up?
Are you open?
Or do you shut your mouth with fear of disapproval?
Do you continue to fund the media that is promoting all these lies and falsehoods?
It's you!
This looking at other people and, oh, these giant power structures and all that.
No!
Do you send your kids off to uni?
Do you send your kids off to university so they can be propagandized into leftist, self-destructive androids?
Well, if you do, It's not the government.
It's not the media.
It's not the universities.
It's not the politicians.
It's you.
Who do you vote for?
What do you promote?
What stand do you take?
I'm not saying go get yourself fired.
But it's up to every single individual to look in the mirror and say, what can I do?
I don't have to be self-destructive, but there's still so many things that you can do that aren't self-destructive.
There's still so many things that you can talk about that aren't going to get you in trouble.
Of course, you don't want to be the guy who taught his dog to do a Hitler salute, but there's still so much that you can do in private conversation.
There's still so much information you can bring to bear with people.
And if...
No one's willing to do that.
You know, it's an old thing that the late Nathaniel Brandon used to say.
He used to say to the people who would complain about their lives, oh, my life's not getting better, I've got all these problems, this, that, and the other.
He would say, the essence of what I want to tell you is this.
No one is coming.
No one is coming to save you.
No one is coming to make things better.
No one is coming to turn things around.
It's up to you and only you.
Because the moment you think someone else is going to solve the problem and everyone thinks that, the problem will never get solved.
You must take action.
Inspire other people through your action and do it.
I'm not going to do it.
Tommy Robinson's not going to do it.
Nigel Farage?
Okay, maybe.
He's going to get close.
Nobody can do it.
I mean, Donald Trump, he's just one guy.
He can't do it.
He needs the support of millions and millions of people, and everyone has their part to play.
Can you look in the mirror and say, you know what?
The welfare state was a terrible, terrible idea and is really endangering Western civilization just as it brought down the Roman Empire.
And the Roman Empire was swept in and overtaken by people from outside its borders.
Oh, it's all so repetitive for words, right?
And so this idea, well, but the media and the politicians and this and that and the other, it's like, come on.
Not you, but if people feel that passive, then don't even get out of bed.
Don't bother fighting because you're going to lose.
You have to act in some manner and there's still more scope and less courage that is required to act now To save your culture and your civilization that's ever been asked of any group before in history.
This is not the First World War.
You're not being dragged into a trench and having to rub goose fat on your frozen feet so the toes don't snap off like the ends of a popsicle in a car door.
You're not being asked to walk into withering German machine gun fire.
You're not being bombed by the Luftwaffe with searchlights stabbing up like ghostly fingers to Hitler in the sky.
I mean, you have to have some difficult conversations.
You have to look into your heart.
You have to be courageous.
Still in language only.
We knew who the enemy was, though, right?
I'm telling you who the enemy is.
The enemy is people in the West's avoidance of the basic reality of what has been told to them over and over and over again.
Welfare state is a bad idea.
It's a violation of property rights.
And races and ethnicities are different, and we don't know how to bridge that gap as yet.
This is all facts.
It's all basically empirically proven, right?
So the enemy is whoever doesn't want to talk about this stuff.
And listen, I know, England, one thing you fuckers are great at is shaming the living shit out of people.
There's no...
Okay, maybe a constipated, highly angry, potentially sumo-wrestling Japanese father has a greater and more contemptuous sneer than your average British person, particularly the upper-class toughs.
Oh, you're so pathetic.
You know, like that contempt that British people can pour upon those who step out of line?
How about using that contempt for good?
And how about saying, we're in a desperate strait here.
We need to start talking openly and honestly about things.
And you see someone holding up one of those pitiful, shitty excuses for newspapers called British tabloids.
You say, did you give those people a fucking penny?
Get the fuck out of my house.
People are tuned into some shitty TV show that's programming and broadcasting all this propaganda.
Say, I know you're forced to pay for it.
Nobody's forcing you to watch it.
Turn that shit off.
Or get out of my house.
You need to start exercising social ostracism.
It's peaceful.
It's voluntary.
It's perfectly moral.
In fact, I would say it's positively moral.
And if you're not willing to do that, well, then you're like someone who's like standing on the train tracks.
And I guess like that old painting of the horse thundering towards the train, you're just standing there.
Train's coming.
What do you have to do?
Lift your fucking foot, step off the tracks.
And look, you've survived!
But if you don't want to lift your foot off the tracks and step off, well...
I guess the train is going to wear a new bloodied nose called, this is where the West used to be.
So, shall I take from that to bring it back to my original question, that you do believe that liberty can still be realistically achieved without first...
Well, restoring homogeneity.
That is more of what I saw as a possible result.
Restoring homogeneity is the rivers of blood.
You know that, right?
Come on.
I mean, there has been peaceful balkanizations in the past, but they're rare.
Most of the time it is a war.
Right.
It is, no, that is an extraordinarily violent thing that I hope never ever comes to pass.
But is it not, it seems, I know you've told me now there's ways that it can be avoided, but it seems sort of inevitable.
That when the government, who is restraining people at the moment, finally steps out of the way, The people are going to kill each other.
That's what it seems like to me, at least.
Well, this is why you're not hearing what I'm saying.
Without the welfare state, there's nothing...
Hang on.
Without the welfare state, there's nothing to fight over.
The problem...
Look, if there's a big group of people from Bangladeshi, from Bangladesh or Syria or whoever, if they're like, I don't know, living down the road, but they're not taking over the government, that they're not...
I don't know, forcing blasphemy laws down my throat.
Or they're not digging in my wallet for their welfare payments and so on.
I got a life to live.
They got a life to live.
Maybe we'll cross paths.
Maybe we'll enjoy each other's food.
Maybe we'll chat over the backyard fence from time to time.
I don't care.
It's fine.
I got no problem with it at all.
The problem is when they're going to grab the power of the state.
To control me.
Then I'm like, oh no.
Now I've got to group up with a bunch of people and try and grab the power of the state before they do.
And when the hell does that ever end, right?
It's like in prison.
You know, you go to prison.
And, you know, if you're a white guy and you go to prison, maybe there's going to be a bunch of ethnic tensions with other races and groups, ethnicities within the prison.
And now, I don't know, like I say, gay for this day, you got to go find some group of white people.
And it's like, you know, I don't want this gang warfare, but that's because it's prison.
So what I'm saying is start to talk with people about the real source of the problem.
The real source of the problem is Western immorality.
It is Western immorality.
It is the welfare state.
And other things, but I'm going to focus on that, because that to me is the big central issue.
If you can find a way to start convincing people, like, I know you love this thing, man.
I know you think it's this beautiful little Himalayan toilet paper playing cat.
I know you think this is wonderful.
I know you think this is security.
I know you think this is safety.
I know you think this is a roof over your head and food for your kids and dentures for your toddlers.
I know there's all these wonderful things that you think the welfare state is.
In the same way that a cocaine addict thinks that that little white powder is not only the basis for great stick songs, but also your friend.
But it's not your friend.
It's eating you alive from the inside out.
And if people can look at that, at the welfare state, and say, this was a terrible idea, this has decayed our civilization, destroyed our families, undone our neighborhoods, and made us a giant magnet for everyone with a cell phone and some legs to walk to come in from all over the world, this was a bad idea and we must undo it.
Now, if you can undo the welfare state and the coercive redistribution of wealth, Then the people who want to stay and can contribute to society will stay and contribute to society.
I don't care what color they are.
I don't care where they've come from.
If they can't, again, I don't care where they come from.
If they can't, then they'll leave.
It's the way.
Things work.
You know, if you're in the Rockettes and you can do a high kick and do all of that complicated dance moves, I'm just, I saw them once, that's a pretty good show.
But if you can't, then you don't get to stay.
And we have to get back to that kind of freedom and responsibility.
Because if we won't Resurrect our thirst for freedom and responsibility and community.
If there's no welfare state, people will still help each other.
They'll just actually help each other rather than surrender money to the government and just think that everything's been solved when everything's in fact been made worse.
So forget about all this homogeneity and this and that and the other.
You cannot re-establish, even if I thought it was a great goal, you cannot re-establish homogeneity without unbelievable amounts of blood and violence and I think it would happen naturally without the state because, like I touched on a little bit earlier, people want to and tend to form intentional homogenous communities because it just creates more positive social outcomes.
It's because we don't live forever and we can't learn everyone else's language and culture and religion and offense and jokes and humor.
I mean, you can't.
So, I mean, if there's a little Italy here and there's a little Bangladesh there and there's a little...
Wherever they...
I mean, it's fine.
It's fine.
You know, go enjoy your culture.
Maybe come dip into mine.
I'll go enjoy your culture.
It's fine.
Just no coercion.
No coercion.
No centralized agency that controls how this plays out and gives vast amounts of power to one group versus another.
Either regain freedom or everything's going to get worse.
And if we focus on Immigrant groups.
And we think that that is the problem.
We are missing it.
They are not the problem.
The problem is ourselves.
The problem is that our ancestors fought for freedom of the state.
And then a generation after women got the vote, we just sold it right back again then, didn't we?
Yeah, that's all true.
So, yeah, I totally agree with you.
It is the state that is the root of all evils.
No, no, no.
My God, Jordan, this is like getting you to connect with this is insane.
I'm like trying to push two giant magnets.
Opposing magnets together.
They touch and fly apart.
You're now saying the state is the problem.
What have I said?
And you don't have to agree with me.
The state is the facilitator of the problem.
I'd just like you to understand what I'm saying, even if you disagree with me.
Because when you repeat back to me what you think I've said, it's not what I've said.
What did I say the problem is?
The problem is that the state facilitates the...
No!
The state is another symptom.
It's like the media.
It's like migrants.
It's a symptom.
What is the problem?
People not being informed of the fact of Western immorality, as you put it.
It's the individual who turns away from facts and arguments and realities.
It's the people who scream racism and fund the media who then uses it to promote lies and infestigate more conversations and so on.
It's each individual who is the problem.
It's the people who want the welfare state because they don't want either personal responsibility or helping those people genuinely in need.
I mean, get rid of the welfare state, you open up the solution to people's problems.
Right now, the welfare state is not solving anyone's damn problem, except for the politicians who want to buy votes and people who want to sell their freedoms in return for a food card.
So it is each individual that is the problem.
We cannot solve this thing institutionally.
You have to solve it at the level of individuals.
Once individuals say, no more welfare state.
It's destructive.
It's destroying our culture.
It's destroyed our families.
It's destroying our communities.
And it's making us a giant magnet for everyone who wants to come and exploit our system.
No more welfare state.
And I'm going to commit to helping people who need it.
Personally.
If you go down and bake them a cake, I'm going to go down and help clear their garden.
I'm going to go down and watch their kids for an hour while they go look for a job.
Oh, I don't know.
Get involved.
Live as a human community, the selfish atomism of the welfare state and post-welfare state society.
I don't need to get to know the poor.
I don't need to help the poor.
I don't need to roll my sleeves up.
I don't need to do any of that stuff.
I'm just going to ship money off to the government and everything's going to be fine.
I'm going to be just peachy.
No.
Give up the welfare state and get engaged with people again.
It's a joyful, wonderful thing.
It really helps people.
It brings communities back together.
It brings neighbors back together.
And it helps us need each other again because the welfare state has made us no longer need each other at all.
Now, communities are like an appendix.
You just hope it doesn't blow up on you.
I guess so.
Sorry, Tucker.
I mean, that's not a great joke for you these days.
Glad you're feeling better.
But no, it is each individual.
Are they willing to give up their addiction to the fruits of state power?
Are they willing to give up their addiction to the fruits of state power?
If they're not...
They're the problem.
If they are, they're the solution.
And it comes down to that individual choice, that individual decision, those individual conversations.
And it means enforcing that in your social circle wherever you can.
Right.
Okay.
Yeah, I agree with that.
I think you're right.
Okay, good.
I'm going to move on to the next one.
Thank you so much for your call.
And here's hoping nobody at work listens to this.
Yeah, that would be a bit of a problem.
Alright, up next we have Daniel.
Daniel wrote in and said, I have for a long time agreed with the latter perspective,
but recently, as you've been discussing the effects of IQ on society and how environmental factors can have negative effects on one's general intelligence level, I have begun wondering how much of an impact that has on people's sense that something is missing.
Namely, bits and pieces of the very essence of what it means to be human.
With consciousness being such a vital part of what it means to be human, is it possible that the communist mindset is correct in that something has been robbed from the poor and low IQ populations, but it has just been misidentified?
That society has indeed taken away from their ability to reach their full potential of their personhood.
That's from Daniel.
Hey Daniel, how are you doing tonight?
Hey Stefan, glad to be here.
Alright.
It's a great question, and if there's anything else you wanted to expand on it?
Yeah, actually, just a couple quick notes here.
After I submitted the question initially, I started to think that my question really has more to do with the people who are sold the idea of communism and the ones that buy into it, rather than the people who use it to control others.
I can easily see how I could have Walked down this path and never had a second thought about the validity of it.
And it would have seemed true to me, you know, especially with my public education level critical thinking skills at the time.
And the only other thing I wanted to add before we get started was, you know, as the great philosopher and rock star Dexter Holland from The Offspring asked, have you ever felt like there was something more, like someone else was keeping score and what could make you whole was simply out of reach?
I'm really, really disappointed you didn't sing that, but that's all right.
It's all right.
Oh boy, you wouldn't want to hear that.
All right.
Yeah, no, listen, it's a great question, and I've been mulling it over this day.
People who are not smart, and I wish there was a nice way to put it, but But there is a bell curve of intelligence and people who are not smart.
And there's things I'm not smart at at all or not particularly good at.
I mean, I played violin for 10 years and could probably not even get away with earning more than 50 bucks in a busking session in a subway.
But there's lots of things that I'm not particularly good at.
But I recognize those.
And of course, there are things that I'm very good at.
So it balances out for me to the point where, you know, my existence is very much a net positive for me.
But here's the thing.
People who aren't smart, I don't know if they're going to hear that they're not smart.
Like, if you say to them they're not smart, I mean, take IQ tests or figure things out.
Or, you know, the market will give you feedback.
The market will give you feedback on how much you're worth and a lot of how much you're worth has to do with intelligence.
This has been really hidden.
From people, there's disparities in IQ. And I don't just mean between races and ethnicities, but between genders and even within particular groups.
And if we think of all the disastrous decisions that could have been avoided if differences in IQ had been accepted, immigration would be very different.
Because there's regression to the mean, right?
So if you've got a population like sub-Saharan Africa with an average IQ of 70, then you're going to get some brilliant people coming in from sub-Saharan Africa, but then their kids are going to slide back to, over time, the IQ of 70.
Now, again, in a free market, that's fine.
You know, they come in and go out, and it's perfectly fine.
But when you have the welfare state, as I talked about before, it's more of a problem.
But since intelligence...
Has been scrubbed from everyone's vocabulary.
Things have gotten worse and worse.
Terrible decisions are being made with regards to immigration.
Terrible decisions are being made with regard to income redistribution.
Terrible decisions are being made with regards to hatred of the police.
Terrible decisions are being made with regard to hatred of white people.
Which is, I mean, becoming pathological throughout the world.
I mean, Just, I mean, look at comments on anything I do that touch with race.
There's a virulent streak and stream of anti-white hatred out there.
And I can understand it.
I can really, I don't sympathize with it, but I understand it.
Because if no one talks about IQ differences, if no one talks about enthusiasm differences, if no one talks about potential testosterone differences, then of course it makes no sense.
You know, there are people who genuinely think that Africa, sub-Saharan Africa, had all of its wealth stolen by colonialism.
They genuinely think that.
Sub-Saharan Africa is far richer now than it was before the colonists came along.
I mean, they weren't living on one dollar a day because of no concept of currency or really written languages or two-story buildings or the wheel, you know, all the stuff I've talked about before.
So, when you look, if there's differences between ethnicities in terms of intelligence, if it's been hidden, then, of course, everyone's going to look at white people and say, well, they're the richest, so they must have been the most assholes in there, right?
They must have been the meanest.
They must have taken the most.
They must have stolen the most.
And so I understand why there's this anti-white hatred all over the place.
Because the facts of the matter are kept from people.
And so, understanding and acceptance of strengths and weaknesses, right?
There's no such thing as racial superiority or inferiority.
There's just adaptation to local circumstances.
So, the communists need to inflame hatred among people, between peoples, right?
And they work and widen that hatred.
It just seems like it's so appealing.
For someone who doesn't have the ability to think 20 steps ahead or even 5 steps ahead, you've delivered this nice, basic, neatly packaged idea that you're victimized and you've been stolen from and there's the guy over there.
He's the one that did this to you.
It's like if you really feel like something has been stolen from you, You know, on some level in terms of the, say, the negative effects of spanking on IQ, you know, you actually have had something stolen from you.
You just don't know what it is.
And to have that packaged for you, it just seems so, so, what's the word I'm looking for?
Appealing, I guess, for somebody to just go ahead and grab it and just consider the thinking work's been done.
I've got it figured out.
Yeah, I mean, Steve Jobs didn't make me poorer.
Steve Jobs didn't take anything from me.
But the people who did take things from me, because I thought about this in sort of my own history.
Daniel, I mean, who took things from me?
My father left.
My mother continually opposed.
My thought processes.
You know, she'd give me instructions and I think I would understand them.
And she'd get really angry.
I mean, sometimes violently angry when I didn't do what she wanted.
And I would say...
It's so funny because, you know, you have these grindingly repetitive conversations sometimes in families.
And I really resist them in my own failure to push back against these highly repetitive conversations because they drive me kind of crazy.
But I have the same conversation.
My mother would say, why didn't you do this?
And I'd say, but I thought...
And she'd say, don't think!
It's a good thing I'm not spending my entire life pushing back against that narrative now, isn't it?
Don't worry, I have the self-knowledge to understand it.
I really do.
And so what was stolen from me?
Well...
The teachers, I went to a wide variety of schools as a child.
The teachers, I didn't have one of the hundreds, maybe, I don't know, 50, 75, 100 teachers I had all the way through grad school.
Not one.
I shouldn't say.
Okay, there was one woman who taught me Aristotle a little bit.
She helped.
But teaching critical thinking, teaching reasoning from first principles, teaching philosophy in any sort of practical, productive way.
No.
I had to go to an aging school.
Russian woman with a smoky voice to get that from Ayn Rand and then to more self-knowledge with Nathaniel Brandon and others.
So you do have things stolen from you.
And they're stolen from you by irresponsible, immature parents.
They're stolen from you by greedy, destructive, and sometimes tyrannical teachers.
And a society as a whole that we all know deep down as kids, society doesn't give a shit about kids.
Kids are like hostages for single moms.
Well, how is my kid going to eat if I don't have welfare?
It's like, so basically it's just a hostage or a kind of farm crop if they get more money for having more kids.
Kids are hostages for government teachers to...
To hold them or to mistreat them or to not show up so the parents have to scramble if they both work so that they can get more time off, they can get more pensions, they can get more job security.
Children are collateral for politicians.
Children are future taxpayers to be used as collateral To borrow against so that you can bribe voters in the present to hold their nose and pretend you're a halfway decent human being and cast their vote for you.
Not realizing that they made themselves a sordid set of intergenerational judases in the entire process of selling off the next generation in the greed for the unearned in the here and now.
Who cares about kids?
I mean, the beatings that I received as a child on a regular basis, I lived in a remote farmhouse.
I lived in a thin-walled series of apartment buildings right in the center of town.
And there were dozens, if not hundreds, of people who could hear the beatings and the screamings.
And not one of them picked up the phone.
Either to call my mother.
Not one of them knocked on the door and said, hey, what's happening?
Anything I can do to help?
Not one of them called the police.
Not one of them called child services.
Not one of them called anything.
So, for me, I grew up in a society, oh, we care about the kids.
It's like, well...
I got beat within an inch of my life.
Head pounded against metal doors like I got beat within an inch of my life surrounded by my fellow human beings and not one of them bothered to do a damn thing about it in three different continents and probably seven or eight different apartments.
Hundreds and hundreds of people.
And then they say, well, you know, we need a welfare state because we really care about people.
We really care about people.
They don't care.
They don't care.
Maybe some of them liked hearing those screams.
I don't know.
Maybe they were sadists around.
Maybe they didn't care.
Maybe they didn't want to get involved.
I understand all the justifications.
But I did say to myself that if I was ever in a position to help people in this realm...
That I would never say no to that opportunity because I know what it's like to be attacked in that kind of way among foundational, cold-hearted indifference.
You know, it's one thing to be taken down by a wolf in the middle of nowhere because you're an idiot out hiking alone.
It's quite another thing to be taken down by a wolf in the lineup to a bus at a bus stop, right?
Fifty people around.
Oh, let me step out of the way, Mr.
Wolf.
Please don't interrupt my newspaper with your blood splatters.
So what really, the way I'm connecting with this right now is I'm sitting there thinking, and this is something that's bothered me for a while, and I remember sitting at like a state fair, and I saw this father getting on to his two kids, and it wasn't just a regular, you know, scolding or anything like that.
He was pretty, like, I could tell he was drunk.
I could tell he was very violent, and the way he was behaving told me that I can only imagine how those kids are treated at home.
Now, this is bothering me.
It has been bothering me periodically over the years.
This is before I started listening to your show that I seen this, and I was also in The Matrix, so to speak, a very pro-spanking Which I've completely changed.
But it bothered you, sorry to interrupt, Daniel, but it bothered you what this father was doing even when you were post-banking, right?
Yes.
Yeah.
So you can only imagine how...
He didn't hit them or anything like that in public, but just the aggressiveness and the towering over them, it took me back to just a number of times in my own childhood where I experienced that with my father, which, you know...
To be fair has improved since we've already come to terms with that but like I said I can only imagine how those kids felt thinking back on it just like you were saying where you have all these people standing around I mean there was hundreds of people standing around and nobody said anything people were intentionally averting their eyes I couldn't stop staring myself but Most people are just intentionally kind of avoiding it as if it didn't exist.
And it's right there in the middle of everybody.
It's like, come on, people.
And it bothers me.
How old were you when this happened?
Gosh, I was probably 26, I would say.
And do you know what that was like for those kids?
This probably happened every day.
And this is why the parents can do what they do, because they know everyone's going to look away.
Everyone's going to...
Step around.
Everyone's going to step over.
They can get away with it, because they can do this in broad daylight.
They can abuse their kids in broad daylight.
No one's going to do a goddamn thing.
This is the permission that makes it possible.
You are a participant, I hate to say, but it's true.
You are a participant, and everyone who ignores this is a participant and an enabler of this type of abuse.
And, of course, the kids, well, they look around and they say, well, this is the society that I live in.
And the society, at one point, is going to lecture me to be good, to respect people, to be honorable, to respect property, to not use violence to get the way I want.
And it's going to come across as such hollow, hypocritical bullshit.
If you've not experienced it, it's really hard to know how it looks when society, the society that allowed you to be abused year after year in full public view of everyone, and then the society comes up and says, well, you've got to be a good person.
You've got to be honorable.
You've got to stand up for the right things in this life.
All right.
Boom!
You just want to, well, deal with it.
I can certainly see how kids like that, that are coming up in situations like that, like I connected with it, I can see how, like, taking it back to the original question, is this concept of something being taken from you is so appealing and it's so seductive.
That was the word I was looking for earlier, seductive.
It allows you to discharge your hatred of those around you into safer, distant, conceptual objects.
You know, the...
The kids you witnessed being abused, being treated roughly, being screamed at or yelled at or whatever, they're gonna grow up feeling that they were stolen from.
from.
They're going to go with a huge amount of resentment and anger towards the people in their society, particularly the people who had more wealth and power who could have done something about what was done to them.
And then the communist is going to come along and say, oh yeah, rich, powerful people, they're your enemies.
And it's going to connect with them in a very personal way.
And it's going to be alarming though, if it connects with them in a personal way because it threatens personal relationships.
And they're going to say, and the real problem you see is not that you were beaten and not that you were abused and not that you were screamed at and not that you were molested and not, and I'm not talking about these kids in general, and not that all these terrible things happened to you.
Thank you.
The problem, you see, is who owns the means of production.
And people are like, oh great, now I have a target to hate!
That isn't personal to me anymore.
That doesn't threaten my relationships anymore.
Now I have something to hate, a category to hate called the rich, the successful, the productive, the positive, whoever.
But now this person who controls the direction of my hate now controls me because my hate is avoidance of what actually happened and who was responsible.
And once you can get people to substitute a category for personal abusers, you own them.
And then...
They become tools of abusers called communists, where before they were victims of abusers called whoever had authority over them.
Yeah, that's something that's been on my mind quite a bit in terms of Raising my own children as well because things have changed for me and my children.
I want to, again, credit my discovery of your show with that and your well-developed research in that.
It actually kind of awakened me, if you will, and it helped tremendously with my relationship with my children and I wanted to thank you personally for that.
I've been waiting quite some time to do just that.
Well, thank you.
And I appreciate that.
You know, this show could be analogized as a diet book.
You're the one who has to put down the ice cream.
So I really appreciate that, Daniel.
It's very kind.
And I hope that you give yourself an inordinate and healthy amount of praise for that as well.
I got one quick story I want to tell you about how this kind of manifested, if you will.
After I heard your video about the truth about spanking, and I started thinking about it and thinking about it, I was sitting down with my son and we're playing a board game of some sort.
I can't remember what the board game was.
It's not really critically important to the story.
But I remember he started to challenge me on a rule.
There was something that I did that was an illegal move, if you will.
It was something pretty innocuous.
And he started to challenge me on it.
And as soon as he, he almost started to say, I could tell, he started to say something.
And he just like shut down.
He stopped.
As if he knew better than to challenge me.
Like, he was afraid of me.
And it never clicked with me before, until I saw this.
And I was sitting there thinking, man, what in the world?
Okay, it's okay, bud.
You can tell me what happened.
You can tell me what the problem was.
And he was shut down at such a level.
And where my normal...
I guess my previous normal would have been to just slowly escalate and eventually kind of force him to tell me what happened.
Or what was on his mind.
I could see fear.
I didn't like it.
I hated it because I realized I can't use this tool anymore.
I need to get...
I want him to feel comfortable talking to me and feel free to challenge me without fear of retribution that I'm going to punish him or get on to him or be angry with him.
I never really considered that that was an effect I was having on him.
I thought I was just doing it the way everybody else did it.
That was just how it was done.
It was how I was raised.
It's how people do it.
And it took me another 45 minutes for him to finally, you know, just talking to him and trying to, you know, figure it out.
And it was a 45 minutes well spent because I feel like we did move forward and he finally did tell me what the move was.
And I was like, okay, I get it.
That's awesome.
I appreciate, I pointed out, I appreciate him challenging me on that and it's okay if he does that.
I'm not going to get mad at him anymore.
And I have apologized to him Like, profusely, and all my children for that matter.
And they love you all the more for it, right?
Dude, that's really eloquent.
Anyway, yeah, over the whole course of, it's been, gosh, it's been a few years since I've started doing this, and the relationship with my kids versus the relationship I see other parents and their children Is night and day.
Like, no joke.
Night and day.
I get along with them so well.
We have such a great time.
We talk to each other.
I can't even begin to tell you the amounts of changes that have happened.
I can still see the effects of what happened before.
And we're still working through that.
I can still see.
I don't think they really connect that that's what's going on.
Oh, before when you were not as gentle or curious?
Yeah, when I was very authoritarian in my parenting and pro-spanking and that kind of thing, I can see some apprehension and things, especially with my son, because I don't understand why, but for some reason, as a father, I'm harder on my son than I am on my daughters.
That one I'm still trying to figure out is why that is, and I have some pretty good ideas why, and I think it has a lot to do with how hard my father was on me, but That is something I'm still working on.
But overall, it has been an incredible change.
I can't even begin to tell you how different our relationship is since that.
That's great.
It's wonderful to hear.
It's wonderful to hear.
And some of you being harsher on your son than your daughter may have to do with the fact that your son is going to have to compete for resources, whereas your daughter is probably only going to have to compete for men, to some degree.
And so he's going to have to compete for resources by being tough, and she's going to have to compete for men by being charming.
You know, it may not just be because of your dad.
There may be something more foundational and biological to it.
But yeah, you should call back in if you want to about that, because it's a great question.
And so, you know, it's wonderful to hear.
And you apologize to your kids.
Everyone thinks, well, they got to respect me.
It's like...
You know how hard it is to respect people who just don't apologize when they've done something wrong?
They don't look strong.
Those people don't look strong.
They look very weak and brittle and petty and ridiculous.
And they look like more than half children themselves.
So an honest apology for when you've done wrong is not a sign of weakness.
Now, idiots and weak people will try to interpret it and make you feel like it's a sign of weakness because they don't want to see what a strong action it is, to just be honest.
And of course, if you've done someone wrong and you don't apologize, you can't then ask them to own responsibility for their own actions.
And that's what we want to transfer to our kids.
But it has to be done empirically, not through lectures.
So it's wonderful to hear, Daniel.
I really appreciate the question.
I move on to the next caller.
But thanks so much for calling in.
Do you mind if I give a shout out to my website and stuff?
Because I also did start one just as a result of your calling to do so.
I decided now is the time to finally start.
Do you mind if I just tell people what?
Actually, if you want to go to unframeofmind.com, we like to have uncomfortable conversations without a condom.
That's what we do.
We're on YouTube and on podcast, iTunes, Stitcher, etc., all under Unframe of Mind.
And I would be glad to speak with anybody, especially from your audience.
You guys are such a smart crew, man.
I love getting into conversations with you folks, so that would be amazing.
Well, thanks, Daniel.
I appreciate that, and I'm sure we'll talk again.
It's fantastic.
Take care.
All right.
Up next, we have Dominic.
Dominic wrote in and said, people say do not do business with friends.
What advice can you give someone who is planning and starting a business with a friend?
Are there any benefits?
What are the negatives?
How do you keep the relationships separate?
That's from Dominic.
Hey, Dominic.
How you doing?
Stefan, I'm doing great.
How are you doing?
Can you hear me all right?
Yeah, yeah.
You sound fine.
All right.
All right.
How long have you known your friend for?
Since I was like five.
So probably over, definitely over 20 years.
And do you share values?
We actually do.
So I just, quick thing, I've listened to your show probably for like definitely over six years.
Yeah.
I've actually, it makes perfect sense to me.
I usually debate, like I was always argumentative and debated with people and whatnot, including my parents.
And until I listened to your show, you kind of put things into perfect perspective for me, where it was at the point where I felt alienated, where I didn't, like I didn't have any moral compass and I didn't have any principles and I wasn't very religious.
So with the non-aggression principle, the anti-spanking, you put everything into sense for me.
I started following these principles.
And when you say, like me and my friend, do we share the same principles?
I introduced what you showed me to him, and he's actually adapted a lot of these same principles.
Fantastic.
Because if you have shared values, Relationships just become so much easier.
I mean, and really that to me is the foundation to relationships.
You know, I mean, I've met some people through this show and sometimes we've become friends and never been any real problems.
Never been any real problems.
Some people I've known through the show for like, let's see now, six, seven, eight years.
Mike and I met through the show.
And as long as I don't disagree with him, it's fine.
But if you have the same values, it's so much easier.
And if you don't have the same values, you know, I mean, I've been in business with family before.
It didn't work out.
Well, it worked out for quite a while and then really didn't work out.
But that's not because it was family.
It's because it was a lack of shared values.
So...
So if you, again, I don't have a huge answer for this.
If you're comfortable with the fact that you share rational, empirical, objective values.
And I was going to ask, you know, does he listen to this show?
Because that's kind of important.
Not that you have the show in common, but you have the values that we talk about in the show in common, which, of course, is the way to resolve.
You're going to have disputes.
You're going to have disagreements with your friend.
Are there going to be times when you really don't like each other in moments?
And there are going to be times when one of you convinces the other that you should go this way, and this way turns out to be a disaster, and you're going to have, you know, the other person's going to have the temptation to say, you dragged me in, like, but as long as you have self-ownership, self-responsibility, and an objective way, Of figuring out how things are going to go.
That's the best you can get in any kind of relationship.
Whether it is a marriage, or a friendship, or a business relationship, or anything like that.
So I would say if the values are in sync, you can ask for more.
Yeah, I agree.
It's evolved.
So in the beginning, it wasn't a business.
It was me helping him, doing him favors.
And then, if you want to, I can go into details.
But then eventually, I'm saying, you should do this.
You should do this.
This would make it even better.
And I could see the potential in what he's already started.
However, I'll just give an example.
He didn't have a website.
And Me, like, I said you need to have a website.
You need to have a website.
You have to put this content on a website.
He's very into social media.
He would push back against me disagreeing.
And eventually what ended up happening was I just made it myself.
Said, fuck it.
I'm doing it myself.
And he fell in love with it.
To the point where it became a major part of his business.
And what he used to do was, and he still does, is music.
He was an entertainer.
He makes music and whatnot.
And he was in a band.
And he didn't have a website.
So we pushed the website.
And then it got to the point where instead of me helping him, I actually became invested in what he was doing with my time.
I would give him ideas and I would help him implement it.
So I did the website all by myself.
And he gave me a lot of pushback.
He said it's a lot of work.
And are you willing to do it?
Like he said, he told me, just do it yourself.
So I said, all right.
But then it comes to the point where I wasn't getting paid by him.
I was doing favors where I said, hey, listen, if I start taking on these additional responsibilities and helping you and I'm not getting paid, I want 50 percent ownership.
Like we're going to turn this into a business and I want 50 percent, which he agreed to.
And this is like six months ago.
Fast forward.
Recently, we got into a big dispute, and since he's getting married soon this year, and I'm in the wedding, I'm in the bachelor party and all this stuff, and we just got into a really serious conflict where our relationship, our personal relationship, not the business, has suffered.
The things we used to do as friends, we don't do anymore.
And this is what I mean between business relationships and personal relationships.
Because we do have disagreements, and he knows how I am.
I'm very reason and evidence-based facts.
I need the facts, right?
And I don't have access to finances.
So eventually now that it's been a year and I've invested a lot of time, like he asked me to do videos.
I have zero.
Okay.
I'm sorry to interrupt you, but if you're going to start getting into the nitty gritty of the business, I'm afraid we moved a little bit beyond the philosophy show aspect of things.
So I just wanted to sort of reiterate that if you share the same values and you're willing to stick with those values to have self-ownership, you know, when you're in a partnership, you're still 100% you.
You're going to want to blame your partner at times for things.
But if your partner convinces you to do something, you're still 100% responsible for being convinced and going along with that.
So as long as you're willing to retain reason, evidence, and self-ownership, then that's the best shot that you've got.
So I hope that helps.
Thanks very much for the call, but I can move on to the next caller, and I certainly wish you the very, very best of luck, Dominic, with your venture.
Thank you.
Thanks, man.
Right up next we have Wouter.
He wrote in and said, A book is the ultimate permanent source of information, meaning you probably have a lot to say about the subject and have a high degree of certainty.
2.
Knowing more about a subject puts you at a huge advantage when researching a subject.
Why would the person who needs to do the most research know the least, where to look, go for writing a book?
3.
People write books to establish authority on a subject or to change the world, because they think they know better than other people on a subject having something to say.
If you don't know anything about a subject, you should read about it, rather than telling other people what's going on.
4.
When you say writing a book about ethics means you don't know anything about ethics, we can deduce that you're also meaning to say that people who haven't written a book about ethics at least know something about ethics.
This goes against Stefan's own worldview.
He often says that society isn't following ethics.
Beating kids, government power, etc.
I haven't written a book about cooking.
Does that mean I know plenty about cooking?
5.
Almost everyone hasn't written a book at all.
Are those people all all-knowing?
That's from Wouter.
Wouter, is that right?
Did I get that correct?
Yes.
All right.
How are you doing tonight?
Good.
Good.
Did I say I knew nothing about ethics or that I didn't have solid arguments for the root of ethics?
I mean, I don't think I would have said I knew nothing about ethics whatsoever.
Yeah.
Okay, well, I thought you did say that, but there was certainly the idea that if you know less about something, then you are more likely to write a book about it.
Wait, so do you think the argument I was making is that if you know less about something, you're more likely to write a book about it?
Yes, that's what I got from it.
But do you...
Do you think this through before you...
I'm just curious if you think this stuff through.
No, the reason I'm asking...
Hang on, hang on.
Let's not both do this thing where we talk at the same time, okay?
Let me finish my thought and then you go ahead with yours, all right?
Let me ask you this.
How many things, Wouter, do you not know much about?
Plenty.
Wouldn't it be, like me, nearly infinite?
Yes.
Okay.
Are you planning on writing a book about a near infinity of topics or writing books, a near infinity of books about a near infinity of topics?
No.
Okay.
So do you understand the problem if you say, well, if you don't know much about a subject, you're more likely to write a book about it.
Yeah, and I didn't understand why you made that argument.
The arguments that you think I might have made.
Do you think I ever said that if you don't know...
The less you know about a topic, the more you're going to want to write a book about it.
I mean, that's an argument that makes no sense, right?
Yes, you said writing a book is an admission that you didn't know what you were talking about when it came to ethics.
Writing a book is an admission...
Oh, no.
I mean, I remember the argument that I've made.
Which is that, you know, people say, oh, you know, Steph, you're so arrogant, you wrote a book, you think you've solved the eternal problem that has plagued philosophy.
How do you have morality without God and without the state and so on?
It's so arrogant.
It's like, no, if I write a book about ethics...
It's because there's something I really don't understand about ethics, and I need to write a book to work it through.
So it's not that if I don't know something about a topic, I have to write a book about it.
I mean, that's not...
Because, again, there's a near infinity of topics I don't know much about or anything about, really.
And I'm not going to write a book about a near infinity of topics.
I don't know the best methodology for translating ancient Hebrew into modern...
Sanskrit, right?
But I'm not going to write a book about it because I don't think it's that important.
It may be to some people certainly not that important to me and certainly in realms of philosophy I don't think it's that important as well.
In terms of my argument, I wrote a book about ethics because I needed to organize my thoughts about ethics.
Now, it wasn't that I didn't know anything about ethics before, right?
So let me give you an example.
Let's say I'm a baseball player, I'm a really good baseball player, and I can throw a wicked curveball, like something that breaks the sound barrier and blows a hole in people's gloves or whatever, right?
Now, it's not like I don't know anything about throwing a ball.
I'm very good at throwing a ball.
But if I then become a physicist and study how baseballs are thrown, and then I write a book about all the physics of it, I can say I didn't really understand how, down to the level of physics, a ball was thrown before.
But that doesn't mean I didn't know anything about throwing a ball.
Does that make any sense?
Yeah, okay.
Yeah, but...
I would say that there's a lot of other ways to work through an idea.
You could have conversations and comments on websites.
I don't see why writing a book would be the best method.
Wait, you don't understand the value of writing a book?
I'm not sure what you mean.
Do you not understand the value of books as a whole?
I don't quite follow it.
Yeah, but if you have to work through an argument why would writing a book be a good method of doing that?
I don't understand that.
Do you want me to explain to you the value of human literacy or organizing ideas into syllogistical or coherent formats?
I'm not sure what you mean.
The fact that people can underline and write notes and reread and really absorb that.
I don't know.
Do you want me to explain the value of human literacy and writing things down?
I don't quite understand.
No, but I think that comes after you have a wealth of knowledge about the subject.
What do you mean, after you have a wealth of knowledge about a subject?
Like after you've studied it and discussed it with a lot of people.
Well, do you think I hadn't studied philosophy and ethics and talked about it with a lot of people when I wrote my book on ethics?
I'm just not sure where you're coming from here.
But you did know a lot about ethics.
That's why you were able to write a good book about it, I think.
Well, but I didn't write a book just to codify everything I already knew.
I wrote a book also to introduce new arguments and new examples and to make sure that I knew it all in the right way, that I had a very solid foundation for secular ethics.
But you discussed those arguments before putting them in a book format, right?
Right.
And putting them all together in one format was a wonderful way to help people understand the arguments that I was putting forward.
And one of the reasons I wrote the book was that I kept having conversations about UPB and explaining it, and people still didn't understand it.
Now, that either meant...
I wasn't being a good communicator or there wasn't a way that they could understand it through language or, you know, the reason I wrote the book was I kept having these conversations and people wouldn't understand it and they'd push back against it and then we'd have another conversation on call-in shows or whatever.
Or I'd write little rebuttals on the message board.
I guess like, no, I need to put it all together in one place.
And so when I put the book together, this is the book, people can check it out, Universally Preferable Behavior, Irrational Proof of Secular Ethics, available at freedomainradio.com slash free.
I put the book together so that there was one place that I could say to people, okay, if you don't understand UPB, go read this book.
Right?
And then if you have questions, you can come back to me with your questions.
But that's how you make knowledge transfer more efficient, rather than saying, well, it was in the third call in this podcast, and then it was on the fourth call of this podcast two months later, and then there's this.
It was scattered all over the place, right?
There's a message board post, and then there's this article on a website, and, you know, then I did one solo cast, and, you know, then I did an interpretive dance, my move about all of that.
So just putting it all together in one place is a way for me to communicate as best as I could the ideas behind the arguments and the arguments themselves.
And then when people want to call in, I can say, read this book first.
This has as much as I could put together, as rationally as I could put it together.
And then if they don't bother reading the book, they don't care that much about it.
If they read the book and it answers their questions, it's been very efficient.
If they read the book and it doesn't answer their questions, then there's one of two possibilities.
Either they don't understand the book, and we've had calls with people who haven't done that, or the book has a mistake or an error in it or something that could be explained better and so on, which I've had some of those as well.
There's going to be a UPB 2.0 at some point when I have time.
And so that's why I put the book together.
But it was a confession that there were things that I still needed to work out in my presentation.
And in writing the book, I learned more about how to better argue for my position.
So that's the idea.
Okay, thanks.
Then I understand the position.
Excellent.
All right, well, let's move on to the next caller.
I really appreciate you calling.
Thank you.
Okay, up next we have Logan.
Logan wrote in and said, Many young people, including myself, have run into the issue of choice paralysis when it comes to a long-term career.
This combined with the lie of just follow your dreams that they spoon-feed to students in schools and the breakdown of the nuclear family support system leaves many teenagers and young adults in a ray of paths with little to no direction.
The issue seems to be more present in the modern day than in generations long since past.
Is it caution or coddling by our parents that has stunted our ability to be successful?
Is it the lack of training or knowledge of the adult world?
Is it the habitual or addictive nature of present-day entertainment that we pour hours upon hours into?
Or is it something simpler than it appears?
What can we as millennials do to cure, or stunt the growth of, our choice paralysis in the modern day and prevent it from greatly affecting our future children?
That's from Logan.
Hey Logan, how you doing?
I'm doing good, Steph.
How are you?
I'm doing well.
Thank you.
Hopefully doing good as well.
So yeah, tell me what is the status of the climb every mountain, just follow your dreams?
Where is that these days in school?
Is it kind of everywhere?
Just believe.
I mean, how's it coming across?
Well, it's pretty much at every level.
I've been churned through the college system like everybody else, a basic state school, and When I got out, they told you the entire way, like, oh, if you do this, you're going to be great.
Just be passionate.
Just be believing in what you believe in and you'll do fine.
And when you get out, it's like, no, that's not how the world works at all.
Have fun with that.
And so for the past two years, I've been floundering about trying to recollect myself and adjust to the adult world.
Over the course of the two years, I've talked to people, discussed the issue, and I've found that a lot of people are in the same place I am.
You pass the successful people that get into careers, maybe by chance, or by people they know, or maybe they've worked their way up to it.
It can be fairly demoralizing sometimes when you go through the system to come out of it and go, oh wow, I've been kind of lied to my whole life and I've been working so hard to get to this point and now I have to basically start over.
But maybe that's how the adult world is and I wanted to get your opinion on that.
From somebody older than myself, I wanted to Hear out your opinion.
I know you've gone through many degrees in college and many careers after I've heard you through your show.
What's your opinion on the matter?
Do you think it's a problem with my generation in particular?
Or do you think it's more cross-generational?
Let's start with that.
Is your family wealthy?
Um, we're middle class.
I grew up in a suburb.
I grew up fairly...
Fairly well off.
I won't say that I was rich by any means.
I wasn't more rich than anyone else in my neighborhood.
No, but rich compared to the average of human history or average across the world, you're like in the top 100th of 1%, I would assume.
I'm not calling you like super rich, but, you know, I mean, yeah, compared to Bill Gates or, you know, we're all poor, but you know what I mean?
Compared to human history and across the world, y'all had some resources, right?
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
Right.
And when did you get your first job?
I got my first job at the age of 14 when I became a little league umpire, of all things.
Seriously?
Yeah.
That's a job?
Yeah.
Yep.
I don't mean to diss you, man, but that sounds like a little bit of a hobby.
But all right, Little League umpire.
Okay.
I mean, I played baseball for, you know, a lot of my youth.
I knew that, man.
That's why I did the baseball analogy in the last...
I didn't, so go ahead.
Saw right through me.
But...
And I will agree with that.
It was more of like, oh, you pick your schedule, do whatever games you want, you get paid like $15 a game.
Okay, sorry, I should rephrase that.
When did you get your first real job?
I guess I should have answered from that point instead.
When I first moved away to college, I got my first job working as a salesman at a retail store.
And how old were you, like 18, 19?
18, yeah.
18.
And were you kind of an eat what you kill?
Like, were you on salary, commission?
How did that work?
I was on hourly, actually.
And you made commission on specific products that were of high value in the store.
Right, right, right, right.
Okay, okay.
And is your parents' house worth a lot?
There is a rhyme and reason to these questions, and I'm sorry to probe, and you don't have to answer anything you don't want to.
No, no, I'm perfectly comfortable answering most questions, actually.
Well, the problem is answering, I guess my childhood home was worth a good amount of the time.
I could give you a ballpark answer, but I couldn't give you an exact number, but that house is gone.
My parents got divorced as soon as I left for college.
Really?
Yes.
Really?
Okay.
Bookmark, we shall return, but...
Yeah, I figured you would come back to that point.
So, yeah, if I had to guess with...
If I had to take a stab at it, it was probably worth around...
300,000?
No, not in your childhood home.
I guess they've gone through acid mitosis, right?
So they sort everything into thirds, the parents got a third each, and then the lawyers got a third?
Yeah, something like that.
There's been a bit of a diminishment of the family fortunes, is that a way to put it?
Yes.
Through my college life, I was solely supported by my dad.
He was...
The one bringing in the income when the family was together.
And he made a good sum of money, but my mom walked away with most of it.
And he tried his best to support me through college.
And I did my best as soon as I got up or got to where I was, as soon as I moved out and went to college to get a job and start funding myself because I knew that I was going to have to start doing that.
I was going to have to be independent in that regard.
Right.
So your dad worked his whole life to accumulate resources, and your mom used the court system to pick him clean like a Brahmin cow in an Amazonian piranha fish vat, right?
That is absolutely correct, yes.
Do you think that that might have had just a little bit of an impact on your ambition to get ahead?
I have come across that point many times, and it's actually your show that has brought me to sort of that conclusion on how much the divorce influenced my choices throughout my college career.
You've heard the Serpico story, right?
Remind me of it.
I can't remember.
Serpico?
It's a movie with a young Al Pacino about a guy who takes on a corrupt police force.
He's a cop.
Now this guy, I mean, he was dragged to hell and back.
He took a bullet in the line of duty.
I mean, he just worked like a dog and got shot and recovered.
And he retired.
He got a pension.
And then his wife divorced him.
Took him to court, and she got his pension.
So he had to walk the mean streets, get shot, take down criminals, take on an entire corrupt police department, and almost get killed six different ways from Sunday.
But all his wife had to do was have sex with him for a while and divorce him, and she got the entire pension.
It sounds like a...
As weird as this...
Maybe not as weird, I guess.
I'm sure you've heard many stories, but...
It sounds like a normalcy in my generation in particular nowadays.
I mean, at least my parents' generation giving us as kids seeing that result.
It's a common occurrence.
I could work really hard, get up early, defer gratification, work into the night.
I could take at all the stress and difficulty of advancing my career And then some woman could just carve it all off with a giant legal knife and walk away into the sunset with the whole damn lot of it.
Why?
Because vagina.
Vagina ATM for the win!
And it's a little tough.
You know, basically, if you knew that the Communist Revolution was coming in 1917 and the government was going to take your factory anyway, would you work really hard to create a factory in Russia?
I don't think you would.
Because why do men accumulate resources?
You know what a man needs to live in.
I mean, if it was up to men, we'd still be living in caves.
It's true.
We would have developed high-definition televisions and amazing sound systems, but we'd still be living in caves otherwise.
Men accumulate resources to attract a high-quality woman and to provide for his family.
That's the seat and route and driving force of male ambition, right?
That's why men fight hard to get the best woman and to provide for your family.
Now, if women can use a man's ambition to get all of his stuff together and make all of this stuff, if women can use the court system to strip it off him, like they're pulling skin off a heretic...
Well, it's kind of hard to say I'm going to accumulate all of this stuff.
Logan, how much money, let's say you don't get married, how much money do you need to have a reasonably happy life?
Give me a ballpark annual.
A ballpark annual?
Gosh, I mean, I wouldn't really need much, so, I mean...
At most, I would ask for maybe $60,000, $50,000.
Like, best answer.
And that may be even more than you need.
Yeah, definitely.
That's living super lavishly, in my opinion.
You know, when I was a student, I got by on $600 a month.
I did!
That's crazy to hear just because of the area I live in, but...
No, listen, I lived in an expensive neighborhood.
But I had a little room in a house with four gay guys and a lesbian.
Boy, it was a really tidy place, except for the lesbian room.
That was messy as hell.
But it was $270 for everything, like internet and utilities.
It's just a little room in a house.
No cell phones, no nothing like that.
I biked everywhere, didn't even have a bus pass, cooked a lot, big vats of pasta, big vats of vegetables, big soups, you know, just so you can carve stuff.
I almost never ate out, and when I did, I'd literally go to the student newspaper.
You would have two-for-one coupons for a subway shop.
And, you know, I'd go, you know, eat one, freeze the other.
You know, you can really live on very little.
It's amazing how much ramen noodles you can fit into a balding head.
It really is quite astonishing.
And so you can, you know, it's pretty good life.
I mean, you don't want to be raising a family on that particular way of doing things.
But I wasn't sitting there like, oh, man, if I only had a hat, you know?
I mean, I worked in the summers, I pulled money in, and, you know, I had a little 386 I had a notebook back in the day, and man, it was a disaster.
I was in a bank, it fell, broke the backlight, cost me 200 bucks.
Boy, that's back, man.
200 bucks?
Oh no, now I can't eat for June.
I have to go to people's friends.
I go to friends' parents' houses and just be hungry and hope that they notice, right?
Hey, given that you're chewing on the tablecloth, would you like some soup?
So, no, you could live.
And I'm talking like no dating, like if you just wanted to do your thing, you know, travel a little bit, you know, have a reasonably comfortable little place or whatever, I mean, you don't need much, right?
I mean, if you live in a city, you really don't need a car.
In fact, a car is just a pain in the ass, right?
So I'm just saying you could get by on not much.
I mean, I think, honestly, if you got two grand a month after taxes, you know, you're not living lavishly, but it's pretty comfortable.
Yeah, agreed.
And at the job, I do now.
I make a very comfortable living with the place that I've set myself up with, despite the area that I live in.
So it's worked out very well for me as a person.
It's worked out very well for me as a single individual white male.
Yeah, and you can get some roommates.
I mean, who doesn't like to come home from a hard day at work to a masturbating Welshman?
I mean, come on!
The basic roommate situation.
I mean, I've been without, you know, parental support since I was 15.
And, you know, I just took in roommates and worked a bunch of jobs.
And, you know, I'm not saying it.
I don't want to say it's blasé like it was just so much fun.
But, you know, you can make things happen.
And so we live, like a lot of young men in particular, live in this world of...
Random family court theft.
They've seen it.
They've seen how, I mean, how did it affect your father?
Oh, man.
Well, it was really rough for a while, and he did, I mean, there's one thing that I take away from my dad more than anything else, and He values his family more than anyone, despite that.
And more importantly, he values his kids more than anybody else.
Wait, wait, wait, wait.
He values his wife, who took all this stuff from him?
Oh, no, no, no, no, no.
Sorry.
When the family's together, obviously.
No, he values his kids.
He survived his wife.
Yes, exactly.
Okay, I just wanted to make sure I understood what the word family meant.
No, no.
That is not the situation going on.
I'm not trying to put words in your mouth.
I just want to be clear on what's going down.
No, I understand.
Well, and to make a very long, very hard story short, because I'm sure it's going to sound much like the same through how a lot of fathers have gone through He lost pretty much everything and was homeless.
He was sleeping on his best friend's couch in my hometown and I couldn't do anything to help him because he was figuring out how to get his life back on track.
And if you owe and you miss a payment, you can go straight to jail.
And then your payments accumulate and then you've got to come out of jail and you've got to try and pay those accumulated payments by trying to get a job.
Having gone to jail.
And not only that, my mother in the time of the divorce had racked up his credit cards to pass the point of the ability to – I'm blanking on the term at the moment – but basically racking up past their limits before the divorce went through.
Wow.
It was rough.
He lost the house to her.
He lost everything except his job and us.
Hang on.
Was she doing that to rack up her expenses to the point where his alimony was even higher?
Possibly.
She knows her way around money.
I won't deny that she's intelligent in that regard.
Yeah.
But I wouldn't put it past her to do something like that.
Sounds like he knows her way around money the way a hunter knows his way around bullets.
Yes.
Yikes.
That is somewhat exactly right.
But even despite all of that, he kept supporting me and my younger sister and even my older brothers who were from a different marriage entirely for him.
And he did everything he could to support us.
Wait, this was his second divorce?
Yes.
What's with his choices?
I've asked that question myself, but I've never asked him in particular.
Logan, if you want to free up your ambitions, you might need to understand what happened with your father and his choices so that you feel a little more comfortable not making the same ones.
Okay, that's...
Does that make sense?
Like, if your father chose two women and got two divorces, you really need to figure out where he went wrong so you don't make the same mistake, right?
Because if you make the same mistake, I mean, God, what a nightmare, right?
Oh, yeah, definitely.
And, um...
I mean, it...
My older brother's...
My one older brother has a family of his own, um, now.
And, um...
But the people that felt the brunt of this particular divorce was me and my sister.
And my sister was stuck at home dealing with all of it.
She was, I guess, in custody of my mom.
I don't even know if that battle even really happened.
Wait, wait, what?
Oh, your mom had custody of your sister?
I think so.
I couldn't tell you one way or another, but she stayed with my mom.
Right.
Right.
And I mean, my dad didn't have anywhere to go for the first year, so I don't blame her in that regard.
She was still in high school.
So, but anyways...
Do you know what the precipitating incident was for the divorce?
Oh, that's a complicated answer, but I have asked this question to him and to my mom, but she...
Has given me an answer that I think you've heard a thousand times.
And you even said on your show, and I've sat there listening to them like, oh my god, those same words came out of my mom's mouth.
I mean, it's the same...
For her, it was the same script as any other woman who has divorced a man and taken everything he has.
It's, oh, it was his fault.
He was cheating on me.
I had letters, but I don't really know where they are.
Um...
Wait, do you think she's lying about accusing your father of infidelity?
Absolutely, 100%.
Because she was committing it herself during the divorce.
So she's saying to you, and you think she's lying, Logan, your father cheated on me.
She's disparaging your father to gain points with you about the divorce.
That is correct.
Oh, gross.
That's so gross.
I mean, even if it was true, you should never know about it.
No, and I only know my mom was cheating on my dad before the divorce was official because I saw some guy that I didn't know walking around outside my house with her at two in the morning, and it was a traumatic experience for a 18-year-old leaving home and lost everything in terms of a family.
I mean, I've analyzed that through and through for the past five, six, seven years now.
I'm sorry, Logan, can I just interrupt what you're saying?
Oh, no, go ahead, please.
With all due sympathy, I hate to do this, but I just wanted to mention something to parents going through a divorce.
Can I just mention something and tell me if it makes sense to you?
No, go ahead, please.
Okay, parents going through divorce?
Shut up.
Stop talking to your children.
Shut up.
They're not your little fucking therapists.
They're not your friends.
They're not your buddies.
They're your kids.
Shut up.
Stop talking to them about what happened in the marriage.
Stop talking to them about your new lover.
Stop talking to them about infidelities.
Stop bringing out all of this marital family shit and spreading it all over their fucking cupcakes.
Okay?
Shut up.
Stop talking.
Go talk to your therapist.
Go talk to your lawyer.
Okay, no, don't talk to your lawyer.
It's too expensive.
Go talk to your friends.
Do not talk to your children.
Do not bring them in to what happened.
I don't care if you're 80 and your kids are 60.
Shut up.
Zip it.
Close.
Throw away the key.
Your kids should not hear it.
Now, if your kids come to you with a question, answer honestly.
But don't bring this stuff up.
And don't let your kids see you walking around with a guy at 2 o'clock in the morning unless he's 70 years old and it's an emergency plumbing situation.
Okay, that's it.
You can go ahead.
I just wanted to mention that.
I couldn't have said it better myself, honestly.
So what I'm getting at here is that I don't think, and to answer your question fully as to what happened, I don't think I'll ever get the absolute truth of what happened.
I can put pieces together and make my own assumptions.
But I know that, according to my dad and people that I've talked to in the family, that my dad did everything to try and put it back together and my mom refused to fix it.
At first, it started with the reason of, oh, you ride a motorcycle and you're going to get hurt and I can't keep dealing with this.
Wait, how long were they married for?
At the time of the divorce, it was coming up on 20 years.
And had he ridden a motorcycle for, I guess, when he was younger or is this something he just jumped into later in life?
He jumped into it later in life.
He rode motorcycles before, but never street bikes.
It was always dirt bikes and stuff.
He started riding street motorcycles because the commute to work was atrocious in a car.
He had to drive a truck.
In order to cut the commute time in literally half so he wasn't coming home at 10 o'clock at night, he decided to ride a motorcycle.
And he is a bit of a speed junkie, too.
So he goes fast, and sometimes, I mean, he did get into big accidents, and I certainly wasn't happy that he did, even though I ride motorcycles myself.
But I don't blame him for what he did.
I knew he was thinking of his family in that regard.
He wouldn't have done it.
I don't think he would put himself in harm's way like that unless he was, because that's just the type of guy he is.
And maybe I'm wrong, but what I do know is that this issue wasn't an issue until she made it such a big issue that it caused a divorce.
Wait, so she divorced him because he rode a motorcycle and got into an accident or two?
Yeah, and the accident wasn't even immediately before the divorce.
I mean, the last accident he had was, like, I think when I was 14.
Yeah.
So, four years prior?
Three years prior?
So, it really wasn't the motorcycle?
No, it wasn't.
We all knew it wasn't the motorcycle.
Did she share that with someone else fairly quickly afterwards?
That's the thing, Stefan.
She got married, so they got divorced in August of 2011.
No, no, no.
Too much detail.
Just say they got divorced in August of X and go on.
Excuse me.
Sorry about that.
They got divorced in August and she remarried in November.
August, September, October.
Wow!
Three to four months.
Ugh.
Fairly safe to say she had a bit of a side piece waiting in the wings.
Okay.
Yeah, easily.
But wait, wait, wait.
She got remarried and the kids are mostly grown.
Doesn't that mess up her alimony?
I have no idea on that regard.
I didn't get any of the financial details.
And I read the divorce papers and um before I left home and that was all I saw in terms of finances um afterwards I I was so far removed from everything that um I didn't get any information on that and I well I would say try and get some information on that I mean I sure as hell hope your dad wasn't given money to a woman who shacked up with a new guy within months after divorcing him after being married for 20 years yeah how's the new guy The
new guy who was happy to sleep with a married woman, we're going to assume, and happy to take in a woman who just bounced out of a 20-year relationship and has a daughter living with her who's pretty traumatized, as are all the other kids, and still going through high school.
So, how was he?
I didn't like him for obvious reasons.
I didn't like him as somebody who moved in So quickly and without a second thought and thought that it was okay and tried to play the part that my dad did and failed horribly.
I refuse to still call him stepfather because I don't believe he is, even if that is true.
So you still have a relationship with your mom, right?
Recently, she has reached out and attempted to have a relationship with me, and I have...
I'm not criticizing, I just wanted to clarify.
No, no, no.
I struggled with that for a long time.
I shut her out of my life for a long time.
And then she reached out to me and wanted to have a mother and son relationship again.
I said, okay.
But, you know, we're, we're, I, this is, this is where it gets difficult to explain, but, and this might trudge into a whole other subject.
But she, my biggest problem with my mom was that she was an alcoholic.
Oh right, but you see, it was your father's risky motorcycling that was the problem.
Nothing risky about being an alcoholic, say.
She emotionally abused me and my sister when we were growing up.
How so?
Well, I'll give you one example.
My sister...
Wasn't the cleanest of persons.
And so her mirroring was messy one day.
And she was about...
You mean tidiest or cleanest?
The two things are...
Tidiest, excuse me.
She wasn't very tight.
So she bathed, she just didn't organize her environment.
Yeah, yes, yes, yes.
And so my mom walked in drunk and she started telling my sister to...
You need to clean this room up right now.
And the situation started escalating.
And my sister kept telling my mom, I'll do it tomorrow, I'll do it tomorrow.
And she wanted her to do it now.
And it was like 9 o'clock at night.
We have school tomorrow.
And we're sure your mom was obviously drunk in this situation.
Very much so, yes.
Right.
Yeah, so the whole problem in the household isn't that mom's coming home drunk and yelling at people.
The problem is some mess on the floor.
Yeah, got it.
Okay.
And she yelled at my sister and caused her to cry to the point where she was bawling in a room telling my mom, please stop yelling at me.
And so I couldn't, not being able to take it anymore, I jumped out of my room and got in between them and I told my mom to back off.
And she...
I honestly don't remember the comment, because I was just so filled with adrenaline at that point, that it was something snarky about me being an older brother and standing up for my sister.
And then she walked out and left my sister alone.
But I had to do a similar thing to break up a fight between her and my dad, close to divorce, because they were screaming at, like, 1130 at each other.
And so, I don't know.
She would yell at us, me and my sister, a lot when she was drinking.
And when she wasn't, it was like a completely different person.
But now all I see is the composed person.
Now that I'm older, I feel like I can see for who she truly is.
Wait, sorry, she stopped drinking?
No.
Even though she claims that she has.
When I go home, well, home, when I go to her house and have dinner with her and what's left of my extended family, she gets drunk every time I go there still.
It hasn't stopped.
But I will say something.
Something maybe to her credit.
Maybe.
And she was drunk the last time I was there.
She said that she really messed up during the relationship with my dad.
And she's really sorry for it.
I don't know if I necessarily believe her in her drunken splendor, but she's never owned up to anything she's ever done like that.
Even drunk.
And I'm not really sure what to make of that.
And I know this has gone off, fairly off from the original question, but maybe you have that in mind.
No, no, it's not at all off.
But after seven years, she's finally said something along the lines as if she's owning up to a semblance of what she did to me.
Nah, she said it while she was drunk.
If she says it while she's sober...
To your father?
That's different.
Was she drunk?
How much of your childhood was she drunk for?
It was a lot less when I was younger, although there were certain situations that I don't feel very comfortable getting into.
When I was very young, like five years old, there were events with her being drunk when I was younger.
That were still...
I wouldn't call them...
They were more or less scarring on me to the point where I don't drink at all.
Where she was verbally abusive or dangerous?
Again, you don't have to talk about it if you don't want to.
I'm just kind of quite picturing.
It was...
Let me paint a picture for you, Stefan.
Imagine as a five-year-old young boy, I don't mind telling the story, really.
This particular one, at least.
But imagine as a five-year-old boy, you wake up, and your mom is standing in the doorway.
It's completely dark, and she's not responding to you.
She walks over and then collapses on you.
In the middle of the night.
And you can't get up because her weight is too much for me to push her off.
So I'm stuck under her for about 30 minutes.
And she's dead drunk, like passed out?
She's passed out completely.
Until my dad, who has been looking for her, found her collapsed on top of me and brought her out of the room and helped me get back to sleep.
Of course, as a kid, you think she's either sick or dead or what, right?
I honestly didn't even...
I thought it was a dream for a while, but...
When I talk to my dad about it, he remembers that time vividly, and he told me that they were at a party, and she had come home, and he was in the bathroom.
Why did your dad marry a drunk, though?
I want to say, and again, before you even say it, this is probably a question I... You should ask him.
Yeah, no, go ask him.
Did your mom ever drive you when she was drunk?
No, no.
Okay, that you know of.
No, that I know of, no.
But she never drove us around drunk.
She never hit us.
There was never any physical abuse in my house.
But there was a lot of verbal abuse.
Some people who are drunk drink, and some people who aren't, they have this amazing ability to say, and the reason I bring this up is when you talked about how she said something about you being the older brother and protecting, they have this ability to say stuff that's just like, you know, shiv in the chink of the armor.
It's just the right thing and the right tone in the right way that's just like, I don't know if she's one of those kinds of drunks.
No, she's exactly that.
That's absolutely right.
Right.
She...
She gains a very fiery tongue when she's drunk.
Vicious, right?
Yeah, vicious.
And it doesn't matter who she's talking to.
It could be to anyone.
In the grand scheme of things, I've confronted the issue more or less to a degree for a long time.
I don't forgive my mom for what she did, and I never will.
Um, there's no amount of therapy that will convince me of that.
But, and I don't think I ever should.
Um, but if she's willing to try and have a relationship with me, I'm willing to give way on that, as long as I can keep her at arm's length.
Okay.
If that makes any sense.
No, it makes sense.
It makes sense.
But I just want to...
You know, whatever decision you make is your decision.
Obviously, I don't tell people what to do, but I think it's important to understand the ramifications of this decision, Logan.
Okay.
Let's say tomorrow, you meet the woman of your dreams.
I don't know, are you dating at the moment?
Are you...
Yes, I've been dating a girl for about six months.
Okay.
Seven months now.
Is she, would you say she's a mature...
Woman?
Yeah.
Wise and all that?
Sure.
Yeah.
I think...
Yeah, sure.
It sounds a little off the cuff there, brother.
Yes-ish.
Yeah.
I think...
I don't know if I would particularly use the word wise, but she knows she's very much a mature person who can take care of Not only herself, but because I think of this and I told her when we got together that I'm in this for a long haul.
I want a long-term relationship.
I'm looking for a future with somebody.
And I mean, she was on board with it, and she understands where I'm coming from, and I've made very clear of what my...
Okay, sorry, you're just making a bunch of noise here, so let's get back to the issue.
Sorry, sorry, sorry.
It's fine, it happens to all of us.
Yeah.
So, let's say that you're thinking at some point in the future of marrying her, right?
Right.
How does she feel about you getting back in touch and getting back into a relationship with your mom, given that now that's her mom-in-law, and she's going to be all over the place, particularly if you have kids, right?
Right.
Which is the goal.
Yeah, so, because, you see, it's not just you, it's your future, and it's everyone in your future who's going to be impacted by your mother, your drunken, verbally abusive mother.
Right.
How does she feel about it?
What does she think about it?
She's met my mom once.
We live I live fairly far apart from my hometown.
But sure, I understand all of that, and you can do the distance thing, but trust me, you're still a young man.
When parents get older, the pressure to be involved ratchets up.
And this is true even more for moms who tend to outlive dads by years and years and years, right?
Right.
Right now, she may not need that much.
What happens when she does?
You gonna ditch it on your sister?
Well, you're the girl, you gotta take care of the aging mom.
My girlfriend isn't fond of her at all.
She can sympathize with the idea that I'm trying to have a relationship with my mother, but she also...
Can see that it can be damaging in the future.
Like you've put out, she doesn't want to put a ton of pressure on me or anything about it, but she does want me to consider the idea of it might not be a good idea.
Especially if she keeps in her old habits.
Especially if she hasn't changed at all.
And if I've learned anything, it's that people are very, very, very difficult to change.
They'll either change for a minute and go right back to what they're doing or never do it at all.
Okay.
Yeah, I mean, because with regards to...
If you want to become a father, then...
Who you expose your children to isn't just your personal choice anymore, right?
Your children, when they're born, they have no relationship with your mother.
And that's the decision that you have to make with your social circle.
You know, when you become a father, then who your children are exposed to, that's on you.
Yes.
Right, and I'm just pointing that out.
Obviously, your decision is your decision, but you can't expose your...
I don't think you can reasonably or morally expose your children to massive bucket loads of drunken, verbally abusive grandma because they have no history.
You don't have the right to inflict that on your kids, if that makes any sense.
No, I... That's a valid point.
I... Looking at it that way, I agree with you.
Because you're talking about it in isolation.
You know, well, my mother wants this, and I've decided this.
But I'm just saying...
If you open that door and you have kids, your mom needs to, like, not be ever drunk around them.
She needs to not verbally abuse them, and she needs not to verbally abuse you as a father.
Certainly never in front of your kids, because that'll be entirely destructive to your authority.
And let's say you go visit her and she starts screaming at you, whatever, then you've got to Drive back and be a father while you're jangled up from all of this history and so on.
It comes down to your kids.
You have to do what is best for your kids, what keeps you in the right mindset for being an effective and competent father who's in control, who is worthy of respect, and your kids are going to judge you by the company you keep.
If I can pose a question for you, Stefan, really quick.
It's related to what we were just talking about.
The reason I even gave my mom a chance was actually because of my dad.
He said that even though I hate your mom...
And I don't blame you for disliking the person that she is.
She's still your mom.
Not an argument.
Identification of correct womb holder, not an argument.
So, just to clarify, in your opinion, you don't think that's a valid point or an argument at all?
Well, it's a statement of fact.
With the threat that she poses.
It's a statement of fact that she is your mother.
You did not choose her, right?
No.
Your father chose your mother and hates her.
But dad, that's the mother of your children.
That's the wife you chose, you lived with for decades, who gave birth to your flesh and blood.
Now he gets to hate her.
He chose her.
You didn't choose her.
Yeah, that's...
I mean, tell me if I'm wrong.
I can't see how that goes astray, but I'm certainly happy to hear arguments of the contrary.
No, I... I'm willing to admit when I could potentially be wrong in my way of thinking.
And I think I was taking his implication of, it's your mom...
No, it is significant.
It is significant, Logan, because she's your mother and had power and authority over you.
She had the greatest possible responsibility for positive, peaceful, respectful, wise, and mature parenting of you.
See, it's funny because people, it sounds to me, tell me if I'm wrong, but it sounds to me, Logan, like your father is saying to you, but she's your mom, like that imposes some obligation on you.
I mean, didn't he ever goddamn well say to her, you're a mom, stop drinking and falling on the children and scaring the shit out of them.
You're the mom, grow up.
The obligation is on the parent.
Yeah.
Not the child.
Because the parent chooses to have a child, the child does not choose the parent.
The parent has authority.
The child does not.
The parent is bigger.
The child is smaller.
The parent has legal authority.
The child does not.
The parent has freedom.
The child does not.
The parent can leave the relationship.
The child cannot.
So because there's this massive power disparity...
The obligation, she's your mom, yes.
That means the obligation for good behavior falls infinitely more on her than on you.
And by the way, given that you live a long way away now, motherhood is past.
You know, these people who say, well, I'll always be your father.
It's like, yeah, well, biologically, that's true.
But if you always have to remain someone's father, you haven't done a good job as a father.
They're supposed to grow up.
The kids are supposed to grow up and not need you.
I hope my daughter will always want me in her life.
But I hope she's not always going to come running to me for advice about everything because that means I haven't really done a very good job, right?
But if your mom is not, if you're not calling her up for advice and finding her a positive impact in your life and doing all, she's like really important and you know, your experience is not complete until you've chatted about it with your mom and you always enjoy her perspective and she brings warmth and humor and wisdom and great things to your life and so on.
If she just lives a long way away and you haven't talked to her for years, mother is a historical biological relationship, not a current obligation, if that makes sense.
Yes.
Yes, it does.
It does.
I... Parent.
It's a verb, not a noun.
Well, and...
I... I... From the parenting standpoint, I... I've heard your talks in other colors, especially on here, on the parenting idea, and I couldn't agree with you more.
I guess I just never put two and two together in my own life.
Your father is not talking about your mother, Logan.
He's talking about himself.
He's trying to create parental obligations to your mom in the hopes of getting the spillover to dad, in my humble opinion.
I... I... I... Don't have to answer.
I'm just telling you it's a possibility.
I can't say for sure.
I'm just saying what might be possible.
Logan, big giant obligation to parent unit.
There might be a slight conflict of interest in this advice.
It's just a possibility.
I just wanted to mention that.
So, like regarding...
Okay, the follow your dreams stuff.
Just believe in yourself.
Magic.
Follow your dreams.
That's all girl talk.
And that's young, attractive girl talk.
You know, like, the world is such a friendly place, says the woman who's a 10.
It's like, sure is, because eggs, right?
So, you know, now that more and more women are teaching boys and young women, like the teachers and so on, the follow-your-dream stuff, well, sure, because when you're a young, attractive woman, the world is your oyster, and people throw stuff at you.
And, like, I told this story before.
I used to go to a yoga class, and there was this...
Woman in it who was jaw-droppingly stunning, like just, you know, so I would chat her up and all the chat with her and so on.
And, you know, like one day she's like, yeah, I'm thinking of opening a boutique, you know, but I'm having trouble finding investors.
And part of me, like I had spoken to this woman, like, I don't know, 10 or 15 times for like a few minutes at a time.
And part of me is like, hey, you need investors?
You know, and it's like, this isn't even an acquaintance.
And I had to literally, you know, I had to like...
Whip my dick with a wet towel.
Stop it!
Stop spraying money at this woman.
It's not how you want to get it, right?
And like a literate to bite my tongue.
Like, I'll punch you in the nads, man.
I'll do it to myself.
I'll punch you in the nads if you say anything about investing in this woman because she's pretty...
Like, I literally had to force my...
Because it's like, resources must provide resources.
We'll have business meetings.
And then when we have business meetings and we're planning things, she'll realize what a great guy I am.
I'm an egg champion of the world, right?
I mean, that's, you know, that's the way it rolls.
That's the way it is.
Right, right.
So, yeah, so she can say, well, you know, you follow your dreams.
You want to become an entrepreneur.
Next thing you know, you're an entrepreneur.
It's like, well, sure, because eggs.
But for men, it's just a little bit harder than that, right?
I mean, if you're Steve Wozniak looking for investors and going to yoga class, you're not going to have a whole lot of hot women throwing money at you because you're Steve Wozniak, even though if they were wise, they would.
But, you know, the follow your dream stuff and just believe and faith in yourself and it will happen.
It's like, well, sure.
If you're a young, attractive woman, you're operating in an entirely different economic universe than men.
Now, maybe if you're some hot guy or whatever, but all that means is you're going to get ass.
It doesn't mean you're going to get money.
Well, I guess some of them, like if you're a real himbo and you want to become a sugar mommy's plaything or whatever, you know, the life-scived Ken doll with the anatomically incorrect, according to Ken doll genitalia.
But for the most, you know, except for like the one in the thousand guys who's that way inclined and that hot and that concerned with their physical appearance and not gay.
But for most men, it's like, yeah, we don't We don't get that kind of greasy slide towards infinite resources that young women experience.
And then, of course, when women hit the wall and they, hey, I followed my dreams and now it's a nightmare, right?
So this lie of follow your dreams does, I think, come a lot from women not, like they confuse their own sexual market value with personal worth.
You know, like, maybe this woman from the yoga class from many years ago in a galaxy far, far away, maybe she did end up with a whole bunch of cucked-up, waiting-in-line, beta-orbiting male investors.
And she's like, I just believe in myself, and next thing you know, I have a boutique.
And it's like, and they think that that's maybe because they're such great business people.
It's like, no, you're a young, attractive woman.
Yeah.
Guys want to throw resources at you in the hopes of lassoing an egg or two, right?
I mean, so that is not how the world works in reality for men.
And so, yeah, the follow your dream stuff.
Yeah.
I just...
I don't know why anyone goes to a bar with money.
You just make so many friends and they'll just buy you drinks.
It's like, yeah, not if you're a guy.
I guess unless you're some new ballet dancer at a gay bar just moved into town or the chicken hooks are...
Right?
So, yeah, this follow your dream stuff...
You know, men don't get the massive geyser of resources sprayed at them, to use a rather unsubtle analogy, that young, attractive women do.
So, women have a lot of this, click your heels three times and you're the Kansas of riches, right?
So, and look at your mom, right?
Your mom didn't work for the money.
She just got it through the lawyers.
I just believed in myself, sued the shit out of your dad, and next thing you know, I had money.
And her...
I mean, she's well off now because of her new husband as well.
He brings home a lot of money too.
Right.
So yeah, you've got the example of one guy who worked hard and has nothing, your dad, and another mom, like another parent, who was drunk and has ended up wealthy.
Drunk, didn't work outside the home and ended up wealthy.
Yeah.
But you don't have tits, man.
At least I hope not.
So, I'm sorry.
You don't have the V card, you gotta play the P card, and the P card, you turn it over, and it's a whole lot of work.
Sorry, you don't get the freebies.
You do get the self-respect, autonomy, and independence, which does suck a little bit at some times, but I think it's worth it in the long run.
But you don't get to pay the V card, you didn't win the V lottery, and therefore, you're gonna have to work for it.
But, given that your dad worked for it, and Enjoyed your mom's company so much he drove dangerously on a motorbike.
Maybe traction would be better than going home.
But yeah, I think the follow your dream stuff, it's a lie that attractive women tell themselves so that they sound more competent to themselves than they are.
And some of them are, it's just that...
It's resources because they're pretty and young and fertile and that's the way it works.
So, you know, if you want a family, if you have a woman who you love and trust enough with your life, because that's the way it works these days, right?
In America in particular, I mean, you get divorced.
Male suicide rate is not low among men who are divorced.
I mean, it is a death sentence at times.
And it's certainly a death of sexual market value for a lot of men.
Like, hey, I'm 52.
I'm living in a car.
Would you like to go on a date?
Hello?
Hello?
Anyone?
Echo.
Right?
So it is a nightmare existence if you get divorced these days.
Now, this doesn't mean you can't get married.
I mean, I'm married and very, very happy with it.
But you've really got to choose well.
And in order to choose well, you've really got to understand what went wrong in the past, what went wrong with your family.
And...
If you don't feel like you have enough trustworthy people in your life, particularly your girlfriend, that if you get married, she's never going to do to you what your mom did to your dad, your ambition is not going to activate.
You know, why would I want to?
It's more painful.
It's more painful to have worked hard, made all this money, and then have someone you hate take it all from you.
And it's one thing to be robbed blind in an alley.
Of your week's earnings.
It's another thing for someone who claimed to love you at one point to scoop out your money through your ass with a giant flaming ice cream cone or scooper thing, right?
I mean, that's terrible.
You know, that old joke is like, I'm not going to get married next time.
I'm just going to go out, find a woman I hate, and buy her a house.
So that is an awful, awful experience.
It destroys not just...
Love in the present, love in the future, but love even in the past.
Even the idea of love, you end up thinking you were loved, thinking you were treasured, thinking you were respected.
Boom!
Cold, female hypergamy kicked in.
Out comes the money.
Out comes the heart.
Out comes the future.
And as kids, me and my sister, I understood...
For a portion of it, what was going on, but to be battered around like we were, and to really not understand it, and it was...
I don't want to try and victimize myself here by any means, but it was hard on us as well.
I mean, I'm not trying to say that my dad's agony was any...
No, no, but your dad chose your mom.
He's causally responsible in the marriage because he chose her.
She was drinking when he chose her.
She was drinking, I hope she wasn't drinking when she was pregnant, but she was drinking, she was falling on the kids, and your dad had the choice.
You didn't.
So he, you know, he can kick himself, but you sure as hell were just, it's the ABC, the accidental biological cage, just where you happened to be born.
Your father chose, you didn't.
So in many ways it was harder on you.
I can say with certainty that the drinking started after me and my sister were born.
I I know why it started.
Are you going to try and make the case, and I appreciate you telling me that, Logan, and I'm sorry to interrupt you.
You're not going to try and make the case that your mother didn't have any dysfunction before she drank or before you guys were born?
Oh, no, no, no.
Okay, good.
So he married a problematic woman, and he either didn't try and stop her from drinking, or, I mean, she would stay at home with you guys, right?
For the first 10 years, yes.
And then she...
And she was drinking.
Yes.
You know what you can't do when you're a parent?
You can't drink.
I mean, maybe a beer at dinner when your kids are older or whatever, but you just can't drink.
What if there's an emergency?
What if you've got to drive somewhere?
What if you really need your wits about you because one of your kids fell down and cracked their heads?
You can't drink.
Sorry.
It's one of the things you give up, like clubbing and shaving.
You can't drink.
So he had a mom who was supposed to be a parent.
You're operating...
The light machinery of childhood.
Well, you know, you can't go operate a forklift truck when you're drinking.
You can't drive a car and you damn well shouldn't.
You can't operate heavy machinery.
How about you don't parent when you're drinking?
There's a line of movie I'm sure you've heard before.
I can't remember off the top of my head what the name of the movie was called, but it's, you know...
You need a license to fish.
Parenthood.
Yeah, parenthood.
Thank you.
Yes, thank you.
You need a license to fish.
You need a license to have a cat.
You need a license to own a dog.
But any butt-wielding asshole can be a parent.
Yeah, that one.
It's a great movie.
It's a great movie.
His head shake in that movie is a thing of beauty.
But anyway.
Or the bit at the end.
Did we win?
Did I win?
Anyway, okay.
And...
But that line rings absolutely true.
And I guess bringing this all sort of back around, I will obviously wouldn't deny that this absolutely...
I would never deny that this doesn't contribute at all to the original question.
I think it contributes a lot to it, and it's something I've come to but hasn't really...
I guess I fully accepted it like I have with this conversation.
I'm sure you've guessed it by now.
In college, I had no guidance.
None.
Not even from my dad, because he was too busy fixing his life.
How on earth are your parents who've just detonated their own marriage and their own lives and destroyed massive amounts of wealth and traumatized their children?
And how is your dad who chose a woman who's going to, within a couple of months, get married to some new guy?
And how's your mom who did that?
How the hell are they going to give you advice with any credibility whatsoever?
Yeah.
People say, but she's your mom.
Yeah.
When they have nothing to offer you.
I mean, if the only thing that I have to say to my daughter is, but I'm your father!
It's like, that's the saddest, most pitiful thing I could say.
I will never say that.
I mean, it's a cry for authority where, you know, it's trying to dominate over somebody when, you know, you can't make an argument for it.
But I was the sperm donor!
Come on.
That's all you got?
You got nothing.
It's an association of title.
It's trying to imply that it has as much weight as trying to logically talk something out.
Yeah, I mean, imagine if there was a universe where women who detonated their families because of selfishness never got to see their grandkids.
You know, you can't really do much as an individual to reform the family courts.
You know, there's a whole bunch of legal interests and lawyers and judges and women and, like, all of that.
And you can't as an individual.
But what if there was a socially imposed cost...
For detonating your family out of selfishness.
What if there was a socially imposed cost?
Just theoretically.
What if there was ostracism to selfish women who detonated their families for no damn good reason other than perhaps monkey branching up to some other richer guy or who knows what, right?
What if there was social cost to that?
Would they think twice about it?
Oh, you can get all the money if you want.
You just can't get anything else.
I don't know.
I'm a big one for voluntary solutions, and I'm a big one for ostracism where ostracism is due.
But, and I'm not, you know, maybe your mom's in this category or not, I don't know, but I'm just saying, when you can't reform the state, and none of us have that power to do that individually, when you can't reform the state, there are still a whole host of other incentives available to people to alter people's behavior so that they think twice before pulling the pin on the family grenade.
It creates that incentive to keep the nuclear family together, if anything.
Sure does.
Sure does.
As you're implying, at least in this universe.
Oh, my daughter knows I don't see my mom.
You know what that means?
She's not going to have to see me when she gets older either.
You think that has some effect on my parenting?
I know I can get fired.
I'm not a government worker, so to speak.
Can't ever not get fired.
I can get fired.
If I can get fired, I do a better job.
Right.
Right.
All right, man.
I hope this helps.
And, you know, we didn't deal that much with sort of the...
But I think this is the source of...
You live with this constant fear of nationalization.
You're like some factory owner in Venezuela.
I mean, it's hard to grow.
It's hard to have ambition if everything can just be taken away.
And I think once you get to the root of what happened with your parents and you figure out how much you trust your girlfriend to the point where you're willing to put yourself in that kind of position, I think you'll find that your ambition will take off because nobody wants to work for what they cannot keep.
All right.
Thanks, Logan.
I appreciate the call and let us know how it goes.
Thank you very much, Stefan.
Keep doing good work.
Thanks everyone so much for your calls, for your comments, for your criticisms, for your feedback.
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You'll understand when you watch.
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Yes, that's right.
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