July 30, 2017 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
03:02:22
3766 Kneeling in the Sewer of False $h!t - Call In Show - July 26th, 2017
Question 1: [1:46] – “I've been dating a girl for two years now. She is absolutely perfect for me. We're compatible on almost every level: spiritual, emotional, politically, background is similar, we have similar dreams for families ext. My problem comes down to the issue of attraction. I'm a very attractive man, probably an 8/10 and getting more attractive every year. She is probably a 5/10. Although she is perfect for me in every way, I can't help from having ‘wondering eyes’ and wanting to pursue other women (this is based purely on physicality). I do not do this because I know it is wrong, but still, the desire is there constantly. I want to pursue marriage with my girlfriend, but before I do, I need to know how to better fight this desire intrinsic desire in me, so I don't repeat the mistakes of my father, grandfather, great grandfather, etc. and get divorce after I’m married.”Question 2: [43:44] – “Due to the appalling decisions made by the UK's family court system I have had no contact with my son for over 9 years, a thing that grieves my heart bitterly. After contacting numerous other fathers, who also have been unjustly removed from their children's lives, we are convinced that the courts are biased against fathers in favor of mothers. We believe that child custody statistics support our contention, since overwhelmingly they suggest that mothers get a better deal than do we fathers from the court system. My questions are why do you think this is the case? And is there something mendacious going on that reaches far beyond the family court system and is a specific policy of our government to remove the role of fatherhood? If this is the case what is their plan?”Question 3: [1:33:51] – “People mostly attribute a dictatorship to the extreme right. However, there seems to be a conflict of definition where for some, the right means 'free market & liberty', and for others it means a fascist tyranny. Could you help clarify the concepts of 'Left' and 'Right', why people don't agree on their definition and explain both extremes and how they may?”Question 4: [1:54:56] – “What should we do to protect women from psycho alpha male predators? My sister made bad choices and I watched her crash. I watched my parents, especially my dad struggle with how to reach her. I tried to help her when I could, but she often rejected my help. I have an 8-year-old son and 10-year-old daughter. I am demonstrating my love for my wife and building my relationship with my son and daughter. I am leading my family so that they understand what a good husband and father looks like. I am teaching my daughter to set expectations for her curfew so that she knows it is for her benefit. At around 16 I expect her to bring her date home so that I can have a conversation with him, my bat and shotgun in hand, and set ground rules for their time together. There are lines in our society that have changed and yet I believe like you that we must be the village elders that protect our family and other women from aggressive men and their own poor choices.”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
His eyes are wandering. Hot girls are hitting on him.
What's he going to do? It's a great question.
Surprisingly philosophical. The second caller, kind of McDowey, I think, he says that the family court in the UK stopped him from seeing his son nine years ago.
And we went into the cause and effect and all that's going wrong.
And then, well, let's just say I asked him to take some responsibility and to get some insight into how things ended up the way that they did.
And, well, you'll just see what happens after that.
The third caller wanted to talk about this sort of false dichotomy of the left versus the right.
You know, extreme left communism, extreme right fascism, and how on earth can we resolve all of this kind of stuff and help people understand the value of freedom.
The fourth caller...
Wow. You ever see those videos where explosives place at the bottom of a building to demolish it and down it comes?
Boy, talk about a narrative collapse.
Wow. He's concerned about protecting women and his daughter from psycho alpha male predators.
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Alright, well up first today we have Caleb.
Caleb wrote into the show and said, I'm a very attractive man, probably an 8 out of 10, and getting more attractive every year.
She is probably a 5 out of 10.
Although she is perfect for me in every way, I can't help but having wandering eyes and wanting to pursue other women.
This is based purely on physicality.
I do not do this because I know it is wrong, but still, my desire is there constantly.
I want to pursue marriage with my girlfriend, but before I do, I need to know how to better fight this desire intrinsic within me.
So I don't repeat the mistakes of my father, grandfather, great-grandfather, etc., and get divorced after I'm married.
That's from Caleb. Oh, hey, Caleb.
How are you doing tonight? I'm really good, Stefan.
Thank you so much for having me on the show, by the way.
I'm a huge fan, and I've been for years of you, so thank you so much for letting me be on.
Oh, my pleasure. And to the guy I met in the sub shop the other day, nice chatting with you.
So... You know, the first question I have is probably pretty obvious.
Tell me about your father, grandfather, great-grandfather, etc., and the divorce statistics in your family.
Yeah, the divorce statistics is almost 100%, actually.
My mom and dad have been divorced.
My dad almost was divorced twice.
My mom has been divorced three times.
My grandfather and grandma on every side except for one has been divorced.
My aunts and uncles have been divorced.
All my friends, the two close friends I have, their parents have been divorced.
So divorce has pretty much been a big part of my life, that's for sure.
Do you know who initiates the divorces in these situations?
Depends on them.
There's a couple that were the guys, but the majority were the girls.
For example, my parents, my mom and dad, because my mom was cheating.
I don't speak to my mom.
I haven't seen her since I was 14.
My mom actually told me that she didn't love me.
I've never been hugged by my mom.
She was one of those parents that just hated being a mom.
But a lot of the times it's the women, but there's been a couple where it's the man.
Now, do you know why your mother had an affair?
Yeah, my parents weren't really good for each other.
I think their relationship was based off of attraction more than anything, and my dad was pretty religious.
But my dad's always been kind of sexually promiscuous at the same time, or struggled with that.
It's kind of around in the family.
And so he had sex with my mom and so he kind of felt like obligated to be with her if that makes sense.
Right. And so and my mom is just kind of has always been kind of crazy she comes her parents were crazy like legitimately crazy like clinically and so she I think they were just unhappy with each other like they like she hit him the night after they got married she started hitting him and And being verbally and physically abusive, and he was verbally abusive.
They just weren't good for each other, if that makes sense.
Right. So they base their marriage on attraction?
I believe so, yeah.
So this is case-selected values versus our selected flesh, right?
Yeah. If that gene wars analogy makes sense to you?
Yeah, it does.
Right. Right.
What is, and I'm sorry if she ends up listening to this, sometimes it can be tough to hear, but these are important questions.
What is it that downgrades your girlfriend's physical appearance for you?
Actually, yeah, she does. She knows I'm going to be on the show.
Me and my girlfriend are extremely open with each other, which is another great thing.
So she loves you too.
I introduced you to her about two years ago.
Yeah. When I first met her, she was severely overweight.
I'm attracted to very curvy women.
Big boobs, big butts.
She just was not that.
She has a fantastic personality.
She's very funny. She's very kind.
She's the kindest person I've ever met.
She is chubbier now.
She's lost a lot of weight, but she still is not ideal skinniness and I don't know if she'll ever be actually because her mom and it kind of runs in the family on her side just bigger people but she's from Kentucky and it's kind of cultural at the same time so and so in terms of doing things to increase her attractiveness to you the losing weight I guess is a big one what about like exercise dressing habits any skin problems any hygiene issues No skin or hygiene problems.
She's very clean. I probably wouldn't have been with her in the first place if she was nasty, to be honest with you.
But she's very clean.
Her skin's always clean.
She takes care of herself.
She just has smaller breasts and smaller boobs and is chubbier.
And I get flirted with quite often, a lot, a lot.
I'm sorry, say that last sentence again, please.
Yeah, I get flirted with quite often and so usually by very very attractive women and so that's kind of where my trouble comes in because I'd rather have somebody who's compatible and who I can have a family with and kids than somebody who's just a physical like something to tug on and feel who won't last but still at the same time I'm still having that constant struggle Internally,
where I constantly want the physicality, and I don't really have anybody to talk to to help with those thoughts.
My dad, for example, sorry for talking so much, but my dad, for example, would say, oh, it's just your age.
Grass is always greener, it's just your age.
But I don't think that's true, because my mom still is grass is always greener.
She jumps from relationship to relationship, and my dad, in a lot of aspects, is grass is always greener.
I know some people who are my age who don't have that, so that does make sense.
I feel like that's just an excuse.
Right. Now, you say her family is, I guess, what's the euphemistically called, big-boned?
What's that old Dennis Lira line?
No, no, no. Dinosaurs are big-boned.
So, on average, would you say, how much overweight is her family?
I... I can't tell you for sure, but I can guess.
Her mom looks about 75 pounds overweight.
Her grandma, probably 150.
Wait, 150 overweight?
Yeah. As far as I understand it, I'm no doctor or anything, but I think it's well worth researching the degree to which Overweight men, overweight women, their genes can change to the point where their kids are more susceptible to weight.
So if you end up getting married and having kids with this woman, you're going to have to keep a pretty strict eye on their weight.
And of course, the other challenge too is that if pregnancy, for women who've had...
How heavy was your girlfriend in her maximum?
She's 5'5", and she weighed 220 when I first met her.
Wow. Yeah.
She weighs...
She'll probably kill me, but there's no way for her to get back to this.
But she weighs about 170 now, so...
So, still overweight?
Yeah, still overweight, but she's lost significant amounts.
Are you concerned about, you know, if she gets pregnant, then she's going to be eating and all that, and sometimes losing that baby weight can be a challenge?
Yeah, I definitely am concerned about that.
We've had two fights in two years, and both of them were over that discussion.
And what were the conflicts?
Basically, I was just being honest with her and said, I don't want to be unattracted to you when we're 30 and you be severely overweight.
I don't want to ever...
I don't want it to be difficult to crawl into bed with her.
I don't want to be 30 and not be attracted to my wife, basically.
And if she is really overweight, I'm not going to be attracted to my wife.
Yes. Understandable.
And what was her response to that conversation?
A lot of tears.
She's not an emotional type of person.
She doesn't cry very easily.
But she cried pretty hard.
And there was one time where a girl who I liked previous to us dating, I had a crush on her all of high school, kind of came on to me.
And I told her about it.
I didn't do anything with the girl who came on to me.
But I told her about it, and she was very upset because she worried about me choosing somebody who's more attractive than her.
You said it was a fight, though?
Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was a fight.
So what was the fight? Do you want, like...
No, I mean, so, I mean, if you say, you know, you have a history of being significantly overweight, like what you said, 220 at 5'5"?
Yeah. I mean, that's a body mass index of high, right?
Yeah. And to me, that limits your activities, can't do a lot of sports, mobility issues, and so on.
Again, tell me if I'm wrong.
She was pretty active, but she just doesn't lose weight very easily.
Her diet wasn't great, but she was relatively active.
Right. So when you said, listen, I don't want to have a fat wife, You said it was a fight.
So what was her position that turned it into a fight?
She was kind of...
I guess fight wouldn't be a better term.
Argument would be more...
Yeah, yeah, okay. What was the oppositional point that she had, man?
Don't make me come over there. Yeah, I love you, Stefan.
on you're so great um uh she she was very frustrated she thought i was calling her fat she thought i was things that telling her that she was unattractive she kind of jumped the gun and assumed that i thought she was on basically that she's unworthy um she she said that her her words were kind of goofy but she said i know i'm not new and and um shiny but i still love you um and she was she was just very frustrated with the whole new and shiny
Yeah. Like, there's some girls who are very, like, when you first get into a relationship, like, it's new, and if you get somebody who's attractive, they're kind of shiny.
That was her words. I wouldn't use those words, but I'm just trying to tell you what.
But that wasn't the issue, right?
No. The issue is, you wanted her to remain attractive 10 years in the future, so the newness of her is exactly what you weren't talking about.
You were saying, I want to be attracted to you when we've been together for a long time.
So the idea that you just want some shiny new upgrade, you know what I mean?
Now, when you guys had this discussion, was she fat?
The first time she was, the second time was about three months ago.
She was still chubby. I'm trying to get her back into the gym, and that's kind of when the fight happened.
You're trying to get her back into the gym, so she went for a while and then didn't?
Yeah, three months ago was when the last one happened.
And how long has it been since she went to the gym?
We started going back to the gym now regularly for the last three months, but not a whole lot of weight has lost.
I don't know if some people aren't able to lose weight as easily.
And I feel like it's more of my issue than her issue, because I feel like I should...
There's something wrong with me that I'm not able to commit, I guess.
Well, no, no. Hang on. As far as losing weight goes, again, I'm no expert just having done it myself.
First of all, you can't get rid of fat cells outside of lipo.
The fat cells that you form, they're there forever.
And you can shrink them, but they're there forever.
And that, of course, is the big challenge of losing weight.
These statistics for losing weight are very bad.
Doesn't mean impossible, but like the number of people who lose weight and keep it off for like 10 years, if I remember rightly, it's like 2% or 3% of people.
And the reason being, you have to change everything, and you can never go back.
You can never go back.
Chips, cookies, chocolates, candy, whatever.
You can never go back.
And now, it doesn't mean you can't, you know, have a piece of chocolate once in a while.
But you can never go back to your former lifestyle.
Because this is what happens. It's people, they say, oh, I've lost weight.
Great, I can reward myself with food or whatever it is, right?
I mean, there's this...
And the yo-yo stuff is pretty bad for you as far as I understand it.
So you just...
You have to say goodbye to that stuff and you just...
You can't go back.
And people don't seem to understand.
They think they lose weight and they can resume their former lifestyle.
Like, you can't ever go back.
It's sort of like... Being an alcoholic.
I mean, I think I remember it was Steve Tyler from Aerosmith.
You know, he and Joe Perry were called like the toxic twins, and they snorted, as they said, half of Peru up their noses.
And he quit cold turkey, I think Joe Perry did, roughly around the same time, drinking and drugs and so on.
And they just couldn't be around anybody who did that.
And, you know, I think decades later he said, you know, maybe I can have a beer now once in a while.
But you just, you can't, you have to change everything and you can't change it back.
And the problem, of course, I'm guessing, Caleb, and, you know, I don't want to speak for your girlfriend here, but my guess is that she's kind of torn between two poles.
Your pole, so to speak, and her family, right?
So clearly, if she loses weight and gets healthier, is that going to impact, I just had a call about this last week as well, but is that going to impact her relationship with her family and her family's relationship to food and to her and to body image and to weight and to attractiveness and all that very complicated stuff, which is complicated enough for men, but for women, it's like complicated plus N-dimensional Mobius stripness.
Um, I, her, her family is kind of, uh, like noticing her weight loss, um, because she has lost about 50 pounds in the last two years.
Um, and every time they see her, they comment on it.
And every time, uh, they see her, they comment on her weight and say, you're, you're going to weigh to nothing.
You're, you're getting too skinny.
You're getting, um, and her dad said something like, uh, you don't look like more, um, Yeah, so her family is saying, you don't look like one of us anymore, you're getting too skinny, and so on, which at 170 and 5'5 is still, I don't categorize that as skinny, or light, maybe on the moon.
But her family, you know, it's a very challenging thing to lose weight because of your boyfriend.
Because what it does is it puts your face right up against the cheese grater of historical family dysfunction that allowed you to get to 220 pounds.
Right? You should, as a parent, not let your children get fat.
I don't know why this needs to keep me saying that.
Obesity is incredibly destructive for kids.
I mean, it's one thing to gain extra weight in middle age, bad enough.
But, you know, and it seems like a lot of places I go, you know, as I'm with my daughter, there are like, fat kids.
And it's abusive.
It's wrong. It's destructive.
It's harmful. It's like getting your 8-year-old to start smoking, for God's sakes.
It's bad.
It's wrong.
It's lazy.
It's appeasing.
And it's getting kids addicted to bad things that are having serious health consequences.
If you can't resolve this, and I don't know what the answer is to this killer, but if you can't resolve this, then her family allowing her to get fat might cost her the love of her life.
So you're saying, lose weight, be healthy, be attractive.
And a family is saying, when she's still overweight, you're too thin, you're wasting away.
You don't look like one of us anymore.
That is a tough place for anyone to be, but a young woman in particular.
Because the reason why, in my opinion, the reason why People in fat families don't lose weight as they get undermined by those around them.
Those around them who are addicted to overeating, to lack of exercise, to all of that unhealthy crap that passes for lifestyle, particularly in America, those people don't want to see someone losing weight and getting healthy in many ways.
It's ambivalent, right?
They like it, but at the same time it's threatening, right?
For obvious reasons. So, that is the challenge.
Have you talked, and look, this is a big discussion to have, so no problem if you haven't, but have you talked to her family about weight at all?
Um, no. Her family has like a love-hate relationship with me, and so I try to keep it on the love side.
I think if I had a discussion with her family about that, it would be tilted to the hate side.
Well, it's tough, right? Because if your kids are going to have a susceptibility to obesity because of the lifestyle habits going back generations, perhaps, probably, in her family, then what's going to happen when your kids are over with their grandparents for the weekend?
Eat! You're so thin!
You're wasting away!
You don't look like one of us!
Here's another plate of X, right?
And that's tough.
That is very tough.
Because the kids love...
I mean, when I was a kid, I had a babysitter.
Let me stay up as late as I wanted, and every time I went over there, I had a British candy bar, which is like a satanic spiderweb of sugar, called Curly Whirly.
She had a Curly Whirly for me, and I could stay up late.
I remember watching the news for the first time.
I think it came on at 10 o'clock or 11 o'clock.
I was only about 4 or 5, and I just remember that...
Staying up late. I got a curly-wurly.
And I remember one night I was supposed to go there and things canceled.
I was like, unconsolable.
I was inconsolable. Because kids gravitate towards permissiveness, right?
Of course. It's natural. And so it's not just the food that they might feed your kids, it's the level of permissiveness that may occur, which makes it that much more difficult for you as a parent.
Because if your kids are there for two weeks in the summer, they might put on a couple of pounds.
And then you've got to remediate that when they come back, which means they can't even have as much food as they had before when they were with you.
And then, if you're all together, what are you going to do?
Your kids are sitting there at the table.
Her family may be saying, eat, have some more, enjoy, have another slice of pie.
You only live once. It's like, yeah, but hopefully for a decent amount of time.
And then you have to say, no, no, no, come on.
Enough sugar. And then, oh, what are you talking about?
You know, these kids... This can be complicated stuff.
You're not marrying a person most times.
You're marrying a family.
You're marrying a clan. You're marrying a gene pool.
Right? Mm-hmm.
So what do you think of that kind of stuff?
I definitely have seen that firsthand.
You're spot on. I guess I'm just curious what I should do in more of an applicable situation because I really do.
I love her to death. Since I was young, I've always wanted a family.
That's all I've ever wanted, is to be a good dad and to have a wife who loves me and we can grow and die together.
And I can see that in her more than anybody I've ever seen.
I've dated a lot, and she's perfect in all those ways.
I just don't know how to keep myself from craving...
The physicality of other relationships.
Well, sure, sure. No, I understand that.
Does she recognize that her family has a not wildly productive relationship with food and maybe exercise?
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Right. Well, I'll tell you what I think.
As usual, all the caveats, do with it what you will.
I'm not giving you any absolutes.
Marriage is not about looks.
Because people always say, I want a spark.
Well, sure, and cocaine users want to hit.
But that spark will fade.
That spark will die out. You do need the base values to go through life together.
You need the compatibility of values to go through life together.
Marriage is not about being pretty.
Marriage is not about being hot.
It's about, like, babies and money and property and wills and illness and death and love and virtue and courage, empathy, parenting, decency, honor. It's not about tits or hair, for that matter.
Marriage is the partnership It's the soil out of which civilization itself grows, or doesn't.
You treasure the aspects of your girlfriend's personality that you find honorable, funny, decent, empathetic, compassionate.
It's entirely possible, Caleb, that those characteristics grew out of unattractiveness.
You know, this is the, you know, the hot crazy matrix that's sort of on the internet and so on.
It's worth having a look at. Now, it has struck me, you know, it's funny, I don't have any data for this, but it's something I've been turning around in my mind.
I can sort of bookmark this for another time, perhaps, but...
I think Americans are getting fatter because of the welfare state.
Because, you know, men are always like, how do I keep my wife thin?
Answer? Make some money.
Because, you know, you barely see a rich guy with a fat wife.
He's probably not accepted, but that's a Catholic thing.
So... The pluses of a wife who is less attractive is she's less likely to have an affair.
Guys aren't going to be pouring all over her, trying to seduce her away from you and all that kind of crap, right?
So there is some value in that.
But as I've said before, and I'll probably say again, you choose your future partner, not as if your balls depended on it, but their contents depended on it.
It is your sperm and your reproduction and your future children who should get the final say on who you marry, right?
Not who your dick is pointing at in the moment.
Because when you think of a wife, when you think of a partner, when we think of looks and self-presentation, we think of the best of us.
The best of us, right?
I mean, when you go on a date with someone you're very attracted to, what do you do?
Well, you... You buff up, you shave, you put a little cologne on, you dress your best, you take her to just the right lit restaurant and so on.
It's like there's this glow, this nostalgia.
You know, like there's old movies that look like somebody jammed a honey brand muffin on the camera lens and they shoot it that way.
You put your best foot forward.
And dating and physical attractiveness is about putting your best foot forward.
Looking your best, being your best.
That is not a realistic standard to go your whole life through.
You know, when you think about a partner, when you think about a wife, think about what it's going to be like when you're not at your best.
Think about, what if you're worried about something?
What if you can't sleep? What if you get sick?
What if you get fired?
What if you make a big mistake?
What if...
What then?
Well, hotness isn't going to help you a damn bit when it comes to that.
Is she, in a sense, a soft place to land from the harsh tumbling rocks of the world?
And so we think of dating and courtship as being on our best behavior, of doing our best, of being our best.
And that is, and there's nothing wrong with that, of course.
But you cannot go through your life being at your best.
And no matter if you base anything on physical attractiveness, as you know, It fades, it falls, it dies.
You show me an attractive 90-year-old and I'll show you someone with eyesight problems, right?
So that is going to fade.
You know, if your baby is sick and is thrown up for the fourth time in one night, there is no amount of hotness that is going to get up and get the job done and comfort your baby.
It doesn't mean hot women can't do it or anything like that, but that's not the standard.
Your baby doesn't care how pretty your wife is.
Maybe a little later, but...
Now, at the same time, you don't want to end up with the Gilbert Great Mom scenario where you need a forklift and a crane to get the woman into a car, and, you know, we all understand all of that, that there are limits.
Overweight women are prone to fertility issues, menstrual irregularities, and cleaning body issues, and you want to have a fit mom.
One of the reasons I work out is I became a father a little bit later in life than Methuselah.
And so I need to be limber and fit.
And my daughter and I were having running races this afternoon.
And she's like this eight-year-old blur, like a pink streak of light.
And... I want to keep up.
I want to stay healthy. I want to, you know, when we go hiking, I want to, you know, she barely cuts her breath up and down like a sine wave.
And I want to have that flexibility and that strength to be able to keep up with her.
And if the moms don't, this is one of the reasons why it becomes cyclical in terms of weight in generations, because the moms maybe aren't Aren't healthy, aren't strong, and so they gravitate to less physically demanding activities, which means that the kids end up And if the mom's snacking, the kid wants a snack.
I mean, one of the things you have to do is, you know, my daughter doesn't get sugar for most of the week.
She gets a little bit, a day or two a week.
And so I have to, well, no sugar, right?
I mean, so you can't have habits for the parents that are wildly different from habits for the kids, or they're just going to wear you down, man.
Water wears away the stone.
They're just going to do it. So...
It is a tough call because if the weight to me is an issue, she can do something about it, but there is the bounce back issue when it comes to weight, particularly with pregnancy and with...
With babies. Now breastfeeding, of course, if she breastfeeds, that helps, right?
Breastfeeding drains a lot of calories.
I learned that from Desperate Housewives.
But breastfeeding drains a lot of calories out of the woman, and it's one of the ways in which nature helps women get back to the pre-baby weight.
So is she ever going to be a swimsuit model?
Well, I don't know. I mean, as far as I understand it, and I've heard conflicting reports about this, but of course you have a lot of weight and you lose weight, then your skin can kind of You know, hang down like curtains too long for the wall.
So the values thing is obviously very important.
If it was simply a matter of, you know, she's reasonably the correct weight, but, you know, her face looks a little funny or her hair is not the way that I like it or something, then that to me would be kind of a no-brainer.
Like, you know, it's not that important.
Now, the fact that you are going to get women hitting on you is something that's very easy to mistake for, therefore you have value.
But you did not earn being attractive, right?
You did not earn your looks.
I mean, I assume that you take care of yourself, and to some degree you've earned that, but I assume your family, I mean, you weren't a fat kid, right?
Actually, I was a...
Pretty chubby kid. Before puberty.
But after puberty, I sprouted up and I got much more attractive.
Yeah. Huh.
How much overweight were you as a kid?
Oh my goodness. Probably 40 pounds.
See, it's kind of...
40 what? What?
40 pounds? Yeah.
I work out a lot to maintain.
No, no. Holy crap.
40 pounds. What the hell was going on in your home?
Okay, so my real mom is very, very skinny, very attractive woman.
And my stepmom is not.
She's been way overweight as well.
She's like 5'2", and she's like 240 right now.
What?! Yeah.
So she's like two people for the price of one.
Yeah, she's like two people.
She's as mean as two people too sometimes.
And she was always overweight, you say?
Your stepmom? Yeah. My stepmom, yeah.
She's pretty much always been overweight.
Wow. Wow.
And so your dad was, he was, you said the witness, if I remember rightly, the women initiated.
So he was divorced, or the skinny mom divorced him and then he remarried the fat woman, right?
Or married the fat woman. Wow.
And was the stepmom, was she responsible for your diet growing up?
I mean, she bought groceries.
My dad didn't buy groceries, so yeah.
And what was in your house?
What did you eat?
What was your schedule that you ended up 40 pounds overweight?
I snacked a lot.
Lots of oatmeal cream pies, lots of junk food, lots of chips.
And is your father overweight?
No, my dad's very skinny.
My dad's 6'4", probably 180.
So why would your father let you get that fat?
I don't know.
I think he just figured I'd sprout up after puberty.
And I did for the most part.
I still had to lose some weight.
Boy, that's kind of taking a bit of a chance, isn't it?
Yeah, well, like, yeah, I would say so.
So what's the real reason why your father let you get so fat?
Um, I really don't know.
I do. Do you?
Yeah. Yeah, because to have you not be fat, I mean, the easiest way is, you know, my big diet secret.
Just don't buy it.
Just don't have it in the house.
If you don't have it in the house and you can't hunt it in the woods, you're not going to eat it, right?
And so for your father to say, you know, sorry, Caleb is fat.
He's getting fat or he's starting to get overweight.
So we need to change that.
He would have to say to his wife, stop buying all this shit.
Stop buying all of this chemical, processed, fat, salt, sugar shit.
Don't have it in the house.
Right? I have a responsibility to my son, and my responsibility to my son is to have him not get fat.
Because you lose the weight, you know, you still have the fat cells, right?
They're lurking, ready to snack and pounce and spread, right?
Right? So for your father to control your weight gain, it would have meant to put his foot down or to set some rules or standards with his fat wife, right?
And how would that have gone?
My dad and stepmom have had several conversations about weight loss, and they fight quite often about that.
And I've seen that as well.
And so, I don't know.
I'm just trying to not make the same mistakes as my My father and grandfathers and everything before then, I want to be a good man and be a good husband.
Yeah. Yeah, it's funny, you know, I mean, America is like all these big, complicated questions about healthcare, and some of them are complicated, don't get me wrong, but some of them are not.
You know, put down the oatmeal cream pies, whatever they are.
I mean, I bet you they're good, but I don't even know what they are.
Butter tarts, my particular weakness.
But anyway, yeah, just, you know, put down the food, go for a walk.
That's, you know, that's a lot of health care right there.
So you're going to have some concerns with your kids, both with your stepmom and with your girlfriend's parents over time, right?
Yeah, yeah. But your girlfriend seems pretty committed to going the distance as far as weight loss and healthier living goes, right?
Yeah, she's very committed.
Yeah, definitely. And I assume she's seeing some benefits and getting some compliments and feeling some increased, you know, hopefully some increased energy and all that kind of stuff, right?
Mm-hmm, yeah. I mean, food is by far the biggest drug we ever consume.
By far the biggest drug that we ever consume in terms of how we feel and all of that.
So... Well, you know, I mean, you certainly know the show well enough to know that I'm not going to tell you what to do, right?
Because I'm not going to have to live with the woman or not.
The values thing is the most important thing.
And look, we're all going to come from families that have dysfunctions of one kind or another.
The real question, the real issue, Caleb, in my opinion, is not, well, there's dysfunctional elements to her family.
The question is, does she know them?
Is she aware of them? And does she have a way of working around them?
Now, the working around them can be any number of things.
Doesn't have to be direct confrontation and changing all of their habits, which, you know, you don't have any direct control over anyway.
But does she know the issues within her family and does she have a way of keeping them conscious and working around them?
In other words, does she know when she loses weight, her family may have some incentive or motivation to sabotage that effort?
Does she know that when she goes over there, they may try and ply her with more food and the same thing may happen again?
With your stepmom, right?
Does she know? Like, if you're quitting being an alcoholic, and you come from a family where everyone drinks, and you're like, I don't want to drink, I don't want to drink, you know, you know there's going to be some pressure.
The family isn't going to be like, well, I'm glad somebody broke the ice, let's all stop drinking, right?
A lot of times, particularly among the older people who have more invested in the dysfunction, have more invested in the bad habits.
There is often some sabotage that comes from dysfunctional people when you try to break that dysfunction.
If she knows that, if she's aware of that possibility or that reality, that is a very big step forward.
And she's young, and you're young, so it's complicated and it's challenging to manage family dysfunction when you're younger and you're doing something against the grain of the family, in this case being fat.
But if she's aware of it and she's committed and you both stay conscious of what's sort of floating around in the family air, I think that gives you your best options, your best chances, I would say.
Yeah, and she does. So that's really good advice.
Thank you, sir. You're very welcome.
I hope it works out well.
And if she listens to this, good on you for breaking the cycle.
Thank you. I have a super quick question.
I grew up being spanked and everybody in my family has been spanked.
And I know your position on spanking, and I want to not spank my children.
It's not a position.
I know your position on the world being a sphere.
I know your position on two and two making four.
It's not a position. There's plenty of people who say that you need to spank, though, and whatever.
I tend to agree with you.
I know it messed me up in a lot of ways, being flogged as a kid.
But what are good pieces of literature to learn more about no spanking?
Because I want to be informed.
I know very little about how to parent without spanking.
Well, I think it's NoSpank.net.
It has some good materials.
I have, of course, The Truth About Spanking, and Does Spanking Violate the Non-Aggression Principle?
Sort of theoretical foundations.
I'm looking for more applicable type of books, though, or things of learning, I guess.
I think parent effectiveness training can be quite helpful with these kinds of things, but it's a lot easier than you think it is to not hit.
To not spank.
You know, like, I mean, you don't, you know, I'm sure somewhere back in your family, men hit the women.
But you don't sort of have to sit there and say every day, well, how do I have a relationship with my girlfriend without cracking her one in the jaw, right?
It's really, it's not that hard.
Once you get the values, and once you get the science, and once you understand the morals of it, it's...
I mean, I was hit relentlessly growing up and I never even have the remotest desire to hold back the claw of death.
It never happens, right? So just keep steeping yourself in the literature, the material, the ethics.
And yeah, I think parent effectiveness training is pretty good.
Just negotiate. When you don't have...
A particular tool, you just, we like water.
We just, you know, if you have a big rock in the middle of the stream, the stream just goes around it.
And if you just say, well, no spanking, you'll figure out other things.
You know, it's when you have a free market, everyone adapts to it pretty quickly, right?
Okay, well, we're not allowed to use force.
Okay, well, we'll just trade and negotiate.
And, you know, we just adapt to it.
So I wouldn't worry too much about that myself.
But yeah, I think there's some good materials out there for learning how to negotiate, but probably will be a lot easier than you think.
Thank you so much, sir. I really, really appreciate it.
Thanks, Kevin. All right.
Up next, we have Paul. Paul wrote in and said, Due to the appalling decisions made by the United Kingdom's family court system, I have no contact with my son and haven't for over nine years.
A thing that grieves my heart bitterly.
After contacting numerous other fathers who also have been unjustly removed from their children's lives, we are convinced that the courts are biased against fathers in favor of mothers.
We believe that child custody statistics support our contention, since overwhelmingly they suggest that mothers get a better deal than do we fathers from the court system.
My questions are, why do you think this is the case?
And is there something mendacious going on that reaches far beyond the family court system and is a specific policy of our government to remove the role of fatherhood?
If this is the case, what is their plan?
That's from Paul. Oh, hey Paul, how you doing?
Hello, Stefan. Thank you very much for letting me on your show.
You can hear me okay? Yeah.
Now, I don't know if you want to get into any details, that of course is up to you, but what happened?
I mean, not seeing your son for nine years.
I mean, assuming you're not currently in prison, I mean, what happened?
No, I'm not. Well, actually, before I start, Stefan, you can ask me whatever you want.
That's no problem whatsoever.
It's a long story, which I'm quite happy to go into.
I had a former family when I was 19.
I got married quite early.
I was a very religious man at that time and had a family in Ireland, which, due to religious reasons, I think I was rather a bit strict And basically, I was a bit over-controlling with my family, although I was very loving and over-protective, I think.
That did not work out, and I accept a degree of blame for that.
But that was one family many years ago, because I'm not a youngster anymore by any means.
But then I met someone else after that, And I realized that there was no way I was going to indoctrinate any forthcoming children religiously.
And I'd abandoned all idea of religion.
Actually through watching such people as you on YouTube and sort of educating myself in a more secular idea.
But anyway, I eventually met a woman I fell deeply in love with.
We had a child.
I won't mention his name, but it's on the internet.
But he was a child that was loved greatly by me and his mother, I have to admit.
She wanted to get a carer, but I... Didn't want to do that.
I thought that I really wanted to give my everything to a son.
Sorry, Akira, you mean like what would you call a nanny, someone to come in and take care of the son?
Yeah, that's right, Stefan.
She was a very career-minded kind of woman.
She just started up a sort of a reflexology clinic and she didn't want to give up her career in that and also as a A teacher of foreign languages.
I decided that I didn't want to do that and I was willing to give up my business which was as a professional flaw layer and I decided to shelve that business and rent my house out and try and live off our incomes together which proved quite successful.
So we had the child We had our son.
It was a very moving experience.
He was born in a birth pool at home.
I delivered him myself, lifted him from the water, and I cried my eyes out.
I was so moved by the whole experience.
And from that down, we bonded wonderfully.
She went back to work.
I left the house.
Everything was wonderful.
I changed his nappies.
I fed him. It was just wonderful.
Was she breastfeeding?
Or was she giving you breast milk? Yes.
Oh yeah, she was breastfeeding.
But she had a maternity leave which lasted for six, seven months.
So she breastfed him for the first six, seven months.
And she also breastfed him when she came home in the afternoons.
So he was well breastfed.
But it Not wanting to sound kind of too biased, but I really do think he was more attached to me because I was his main carer.
Well, you were the primary caregiver, right?
I loved the job.
Actually, it wasn't a job.
That's not the right description at all.
He was my boy.
He was just...
It was just great. I'm getting a...
Sorry, with this sort of the home birth and reflexology and so on, I'm getting a bit of a hippie vibe, if that makes any sense.
Yeah, that's...
I don't think that would be true, Stefan.
I think she was...
I don't know how far I can go down that road.
No, that's fine. I'm just curious.
But sorry, go on with your story. Let's go to the massive derailment part of the story.
She was a little bit that way, but not very much.
Because woo-woo people tend to be pretty ferocious when they have power, because the woo-woo people, like the mystics, they don't have any rational way to negotiate.
So when things go wrong, they tend to snowball, and then they reach for the state, and then kaboom, right?
Smoking crater where your heart and mind was.
But anyway, go on. Yeah, she had a strong mind.
Many French people do.
But I would have to give in a lot and let her have her own way.
You mean domineering or bullying or what?
Yeah, she was, not to use the word bullying, but certainly she liked to think she was in charge.
And I let her be in charge because unless there was an issue at stake, I didn't think it amounted to a hill of beans.
But what happened if you disagreed with her while you guys were still together?
If it was something to disagree over, I would discuss it with her.
But if I considered it worthless, I would just Well, except, of course, that you're training the person to dominate you.
That's the challenge, right? Each individual appeasement and so on doesn't particularly matter, but they add up to a sense of dominance within the relationship that can be tough to undo later.
Yeah, that could be true.
But if you spoke to her, I don't think she would say that.
She would say that I would...
I would certainly stick my toes in hard when it came to a matter of principle, which I would.
Okay, so let's move on to how it came apart.
I think after two years, three years of being together, I think she saw me as being someone who had become probably too domesticated.
She got two daughters of her own from a previous marriage.
By the way, we weren't married.
We were living together as partners.
We were not married. I'm sorry, Paul.
Are you moving away from the microphone?
Because it starts to get muffled and then you're clearer.
Yeah, it's tough to hear you right now.
Yeah, I'll try. Yeah, it sounds great right now.
Okay, I'll try and leave it there.
Okay. Yeah, where was I? Uh...
That you had become too domesticated?
Yeah, I felt like I had become too.
She'd got two daughters. I was cooking.
I think she started to come home very late.
She got appointments with people who she was doing reflexology with.
I don't know. I was becoming a little bit suspicious.
We would then argue about where she'd been.
But to cut a long story short, she asked me to leave.
And I decided that rather than be a maggot, because I wasn't going to get down on my knees, I left.
But she assured me that I would always be able to see my son.
And we decided to share his care half and half.
Half at my home and half at her home.
Sorry to interrupt, Paul, but you were on the birth certificate of your son, your son's birth certificate.
You were down as the father? Yeah, that's correct.
Fortunately, yes, that gave me a degree of power, if you like, with the courts.
Yeah, because, I mean, I don't know if people know this or not, but as far as I understand it, in the UK... There's only two ways you gain parental rights as a father.
Number one, you're married to the mom, or number two, you're on the birth certificate.
If you don't have either of those, you're kind of out of luck, as far as I know.
That's correct. But I was later to find out, but even though my name was on the birth certificate, it didn't count for very much at all.
In fact, under law here, it doesn't really count.
It can be disregarded.
Yeah, well, after two years, She then decided to ask me to stop picking him up from school, which was my particular scheduled time to pick him up.
So I refused to do that.
She said, look, don't pick him up.
She'd met someone else by that time and she'd arranged for someone else to pick him up from school.
And I said, no, it's my time to pick him up.
So I went to pick him up as scheduled and Took him from school, brought him to my home, as usual, and the next thing I knew I had the police knocking on my door, asking me why I kidnapped my son.
Oh, so when she didn't get her way with you, she escalated straight to calling the police and reporting you as a kidnapper, is that right?
I don't know if she reported me as a kidnapper as such, but...
Well, she called the police, right?
She called the police, but it was the police that suggested that I had kidnapped my son, not her.
I wasn't obviously addressing her at the time.
I don't know where that term came from.
But the problem is, I then told the police that they had no right to take my son from me or to send him back to her.
I told them I got a birth certificate.
My name was on it. We got a shared care arrangement, which we had agreed to.
The police were reticent to come into my house.
I wouldn't let them. They left.
I then decided to take my son away for a visit to a friend.
And when I got to my friends, I got a phone call from the police ordering me to take my son back to his mother.
I refused to obey the order and said that he was quite well and he was with me, his father, who he loved.
I then realized I needed to switch off my phone in case they traced me, which I did so, and I stayed at my friends overnight.
Unbeknown to me, the police are searching for me throughout the city because she had told them that I was going to harm my son, which is a load of bullshit.
But as it was, I came home the next day, took him to school as normal and found my door had been knocked off the hinges by the police.
Then they came again and I I put my hands out in front of them and say you better handcuff me.
It seemed like I broke the law.
But they didn't handcuff me.
They phoned their boss up and the boss said that I'd done nothing wrong.
I hadn't broken any laws.
To cut a long story short, within a week I'd got a letter from her solicitor, not that I knew she had one, but all of a sudden she had a solicitor, telling me that I had no right to Pick up my son from school anymore.
Right, so she had gotten a lawyer, but you were making all these decisions without consulting a lawyer, right?
Yeah, I didn't want to go see a lawyer.
Well, in hindsight, it might have been a wiser...
Well, I didn't get the chance.
I mean, all this happened within three days, and he was going back to school, and I thought that she would see the wisdom of just not being...
So stupid. But it all happened within the space of five days.
So it was out of the blue I got this letter from her solicitor telling me that I would have to apply to court to have any contact with my son.
I didn't want to do that.
I went straight round to her house and said, look, why are you forcing me to take part in a system I don't approve of?
Can't we just carry on the way we were?
And she wouldn't. She said, you need to go and get yourself a solicitor.
I then went to the solicitor and the solicitor was dumbfounded at the way she dealt with the matter and said, it's ridiculous.
You have an agreement, a written agreement.
I showed him the written agreement.
We both signed it, and he then sent a letter to her saying that she ought to stick to the agreement we had, but she wouldn't.
The thing is, Stefan, all this ended up in court.
It cost me, not that that's the big issue, but I started forking out sums of money.
It lasted for four years.
The whole battle lasted for four years.
I was sent to see a psychologist who came up with the most ridiculous reports I've ever read.
She lied in court.
Eventually I just couldn't stand...
She being who?
My wife, my former partner.
She lied in court.
The short and long of it is that it made me kind of ill.
I lost All my savings, which amounted to about £40,000, the solicitor ended up with that.
I just became rather ill, went to the doctor.
I couldn't work. Losing my son became very stressful.
I was seeing my son and she had made me supervise when I saw my son.
Which I also had to pay for, which was very humiliating for me.
I had not done anything wrong.
But after having lost contact with him, I couldn't go on with it.
It wasn't due to cowardice.
It was due to being advised that if I carried on with it, the stress would kill me.
And my doctor said that I ought to stop fighting in the courts.
But after going through the court system for four years, I I started to get back on my feet again and got my strength bike and decided, looking back on it, that I'd been put on a hamster wheel where I was forced to pay out vast sums of money.
The court system seemed to be approving of lies.
They didn't check up on anything.
And it seemed to me, after meeting up with many other fathers, that they'd all been shafted too.
I got myself more educated in the law and realized that I wasn't the only one and started to check out statistics and realized that fathers were getting a raw deal in Great Britain and also checked out some statistics in America, found out that this was a common problem.
But the wider issue to me is, having not seen my son now for nine years, I've spent my time trying to help other fathers through the court process, and I've tried to advise them not to go at all.
You know, that it will only, you know, mess them up, cause them psychological problems, and they'll lose a whole lot of money doing it.
But I came to the conclusion that, on another aspect of this, Stephanie, I don't know if you agree with this, but there's something strange going on that I've determined that Is this part of the master plan?
I don't want to sound conspiratorial, but is this some sort of plan where we are being reminded that we don't really own our children, that the state owns our children, that they are the ones that have the power over our children, and that when they want to force us to go to their institutions, such as the court system, we have to abide by them and we don't have an option to opt out.
Paul, Paul, it's not the state that forced you into this situation.
In a way, Stephen, it was, because if I wouldn't have attended court...
No, no, no. It was your ex-partner.
Yes, I understand. She applied to the court.
She used it as a tool to help her.
No, I understand that. It's not the state that imposed itself upon you.
It is a weapon, I suppose, that was available to your ex-partner.
But let's not forget the causality, right?
That the state was a weapon, but it was your ex-partner who unleashed the state upon you in this manner.
Yes, but... Being green at the time, I just thought that the courts would be honest, fair, and would stick to a legal routine.
It took me four years to work out that they didn't, and that they were totally biased.
But I'm just wondering, Stephanie, is there some sort of big conspiracy where the state is trying to sort of emasculate fathers from the family nowadays?
Because I'm coming across it Far too much in trying to help other fathers.
Listen, okay, there's a number of things that are going on here, and these are just my thoughts.
This is not a fully fleshed out thesis, but these are just my thoughts.
Of course the government in general is happy when fathers are absent from the home, because it creates a whole bunch of, I mean leftist governments, because it creates a whole bunch of dependent women and And it makes solicitors and lawyers rich and so on.
So that is part of it.
One of the reasons why this happens, of course, is what's kind of twofold.
One is that women outvote men.
I mean, anytime you look at anything going on in a Western democracy or a democracy where women have the vote, is that women will outvote men in general and certainly over time.
Women live longer than men, fundamentally.
Women have more incentive in a way to have a big state because the state gives security to women that is negative for men.
For men, men want the opportunity in general to compete, to strive, to try and get the most resources, to get the most attractive women.
Men in general are drawn towards the free market.
Women in general are drawn towards socialism.
Because if a man fails, what happens?
Well, he loses some money, he loses some pride, he picks himself up, and he goes and tries again, and, you know, that's not the end of the world.
But if a woman ends up with three kids and a drunken husband, how is she going to feed the kids?
Like, the downside of bad decisions for women is generally, historically, has been worse than the downside of bad decisions for men.
Now, the fact that women are Is combines to create this gynocentric or female-centric approach to organizing society.
Also, women ferociously will often turn and guard each other's interests, right?
So like recently put out a tweet, birth control is not healthcare, right?
And, you know, a lot of women kind of circled the wagons and made all of these insults and attacks and somewhat arguments kind of thing.
There was a circling of the wagons.
The same thing happens when you talk about things like abortion and so on, women's right to choose.
They circle the wagons, and they have a ferocious in-group preference a lot of times, and they're willing to, in a sense, go to the wall to protect the perceived interests of the group, right?
Women want to have sexual activity with the least possible negative consequences, right?
Which is why, you know, birth control and abortion and the welfare state and so on, they exist to take away the negative consequences of irresponsible female sexuality.
So I'm not positive to say that it's some conspiracy.
I think it's just kind of the way the wind blows in a democracy.
You know, women's in group preference.
The women are wonderful effect, which is actually fairly well documented in psychological circles that, you know, girls are nice and, you know, they're made of sugar and spice and all things nice.
And boys are like snips and snails and puppy dog tails.
And so men are like coarse and smelly and scratch themselves and aren't that smart.
You know, like you have the elf women and the Andathal men.
That's kind of the cliche that has arisen since the welfare state.
I mean, you look at the 1950s, men were treated very respectfully in significant numbers of popular sitcoms, you know, like Leave it to Beaver, My Three Sons and things like that.
But when the welfare state came along, that all went by the wayside because men's productivity and men's honor and men's decency and men's generosity became irrelevant to the survival of a woman and her children.
So that which you do not need, you can very easily scorn.
So I think that there's a number of factors that come together in this.
And men's natural...
See, in the West, men defer to women.
In other cultures, women are supposed to defer to men.
But in the West, men defer to women, and it has been that way for thousands of years off and on.
For the most part, that's been the way it is.
So when men defer to women, then a woman comes and needs something.
A Western man's instinct is to give her what she needs.
Why? Because... There are no arranged marriages for the most part in the West, and so the West does not have a strong tradition of arranged marriages, which means that you have to please the woman in order to get access to eggs.
Now, in history, there were like...
The numbers are crazy.
The ratio somewhat escapes me perfectly, but it's like, you know, for every, you know, 12 women who reproduced, one man reproduced something like that.
So getting the favor of women in order to be able to reproduce was enormously...
Well, it was required.
It was an absolute. It was a necessity for men for the genes to pass along.
So in the West, the genetics for deference to women's wishes, women's preferences...
We're just kind of bred that way.
It's deep in our bones.
I think it's deep in our DNA to defer to women.
And that's one thing if deferral to women is balanced by the dependence of women upon male generosity later on, right?
All which is not voluntary gets corrupt.
All which is not balanced gets corrupt.
And because...
Women choose men, and men have to please women in the West.
When the women then get the vote and start going to the state for things, then politicians want to say yes to women.
Because if they say no, what are they?
They're misogynists, they hate women, and we're not programmed to take that on because...
Everybody who accepted that in the past in the voluntary West, well, their DNA went by the wayside.
They just didn't breed, right?
Which is why a lot of times when you criticize women, what do women do?
Well, again, I'm generalizing, so, you know, excuse that.
I just, you know, I can't put every caveat and it gets too boring.
But when you criticize women or the status of women or laws that women believe protect themselves...
What happens? Well, they will attack you with scorn designed to lower your sexual market value, right?
You're ugly. Nobody wants to date you.
You can't get laid. You just can't get a girlfriend.
You're a neck-bearded, mouth-breathing, basement-dwelling loser.
They will attempt to portray you, and the white knights will ride alongside them with their lances that never penetrate anything female but seem to go through the hides of men pretty easily.
And so women, the return attack from women is...
No eggs for you. We're going to form a phalanx around the eggs and you can't get in.
In other words, they condemn you not to personal death, but to genetic death.
And in a free society, that is fine.
The fact that females sort of band together and so on, well, that evolved from the basic fact that if a woman slept around with men prior to the welfare state and the pill and so on, that was very bad.
And so women would generally sort of They have an in-group preference, they have a sort of tribal phalanx that they work together with to make sure that sexual market value stays high.
Because sexual market value in the past was not about getting laid, it was about getting married, right?
If you liked it, then you should have put a ring on it, right?
And so women had to say, well, no sex until we get married.
And control of sexual access was very key, but it required that women police each other, that there be this phalanx and this female in-group preference to put what was valuable to women above what was desired for men.
Because, you know, young men want sex and young women want marriage in the past, and that was the exchange, right?
You don't get sex until you get married.
And so there's a lot of sort of factors that come together.
Women have so much power in the Western world, even without votes, even without the state.
But when you get the Western man's desire to defer to women, combined with women's control of a state apparatus because they outvote men, well, you end up with this gynocracy, right?
You end up with this female tyranny that each individual actor, what they're doing makes sense.
The outcome of it, though, tends to be extraordinarily tragic.
Now, just to put a couple of In the UK, according to a recent report, in 96% of cases, it is men who are applying to court for access to their children.
And the average case takes between six months and two years to complete.
Now, if your kid is young, you know, let's say you can't see your kid from the age of four to six, well, those memories are going to be pretty damn foggy.
I mean, the bond has been largely, well, it's been significantly harmed, I would say.
I would believe. But the majority of child custody cases are not always decided by the courts, right?
So in 51% of custody cases, both parents agreed on their own that the mom should become the custodial parent.
29% of custody cases, the decision is made without any third party involved, and it sort of goes down the list.
Only 4% of custody cases went to trial, and of that 4%, only 1.5% completed custody litigation.
So, over 90% of child custody after divorce is decided with no interference from the family court system.
Now, of course, I think that the men who encounter the family court system, it's pretty rough.
And the American example of that is a film that I interviewed the director on this show called Divorce Corps, C-O-R-P, Divorce Corps, or Corp.
And it is really quite an enormous...
And so I think that's really important to understand.
And 88% of the dads who applied to court for contact with the kids were awarded some kind of access.
But the crazy thing, of course, which you're aware of, I'm sure, is that if the woman should lie about the father, if she should say he was abusing the kids or he was molesting the kids or whatever it was, Then a lot of times, if that lie is not proven, no sanctions occur to the mother who makes such an accusation.
In fact, it's so common in America, it's called SAID, Sexual Allegation in Divorce, Allegations of Sexual Impropriety by the Mom's It's against the father.
And of course, you know, I would imagine a lot of lawyers, it's possible that they would say, well, if you make these accusations, you get the kids right away and he's barred of access and so on.
And if a woman is on a rampage, that is a fairly, I guess, that can be a very tempting grenade pin to pull.
So I don't know that it's, you know, the state does benefit from it, but...
I think all of the currents, all of the trends, all of the beautiful and tragic tendencies of Western culture, combined with state interference in the family, combined with female voting privileges and so on, that is...
I think that has combined to produce this kind of situation, but I don't know.
It's been flowcharted from the beginning, if that makes sense.
Yeah. The statistics that you just read out to me were similar statistics that I got.
Actually, many of those were published in the Daily Telegraph in Great Britain.
Sound very familiar to me, what you were reading.
But it would seem, in private law cases, looking at reports I've seen, out of private law cases in Great Britain, In 85% of those cases the mother is awarded custody of the children and the father has to apply for what's called contact.
Now that seems quite an overwhelming statistic that in 85% of low cases the mother gets custody and it would seem that there is a bias within the family courts in this country Well,
and I've heard some arguments, sorry to interrupt, I've heard some arguments that the number is even higher, because of the 15% where the men get custody, in some of those, a significant portion of those are what's called uncontested, whereas the mom basically doesn't even show up or doesn't care, and it kind of hands over to the father by default because the mom isn't there trying to get her rights.
So I think it's even higher, in a sense, in terms of contested ones.
Mm-hmm. But I really do feel that there is a kind of a, in the UK, there's a presumption that mothers know best for their children, and that fathers are just an add-on, and that mother is the one that there is no way that the children can be withdrawn from.
And I think that that's where the bias comes in.
And I think in Great Britain, the judges Still have this old-fashioned idea that children should go to the mother and we have to apply for contact.
Now, I'm in contact with so many fathers who've been withdrawn from their kids and they've done nothing wrong at all.
I'm not saying that there are not cases where some fathers have been violent or they've harmed their children.
Of course there are. But that goes for mothers too.
But statistically speaking, it's...
It's obvious to me that there is something going on within the family courts here.
And also, there's been an awful rising father suicide that's on the rise all the time.
Males are committing suicide far more And especially fathers are committing suicide.
And one of the factors is because they've been taken away from their children.
I mean, I even considered it myself.
I miss my son that much that it was so distressing for me.
I thought, I just can't go through this.
But eventually I managed to get back on my feet again.
But can I just ask you one thing, Stefan?
Well, sorry, just before you do that, I wanted to mention that, of course, this is why a lot of people, a lot of men are going galt from the institution of marriage and family.
Because they're saying, look, on a whim, on a passion with a very, very tiny chance of negative consequences, the woman can just call the airstrike of the state in on your life, on your finances.
She can destroy your life, destroy your health, destroy your savings, and shred your heart, which is based upon your bond with and your love for your child or your children, and it's not worth it.
The risk is not worth it.
And I have my issues with that perspective, but I certainly understand that perspective, and I can understand how people come to those conclusions.
And this is a case, of course, of the government putting immediate gratification, which it does, right?
Above the long-term survival of the society, because if men are checking out, if men are not getting married, if men are not having kids, then there's no next generation of taxpayers to fund all of the unfunded liabilities that the government has promised to existing taxpayers.
So it's like the women have, you know, it's like they can shred the family and then men check out a marriage.
There are fewer kids, which means, well, people from other cultures who don't have as much of a deferral to women perspective come into the country.
Or failing that, of course, Japanese-style.
There's just no money.
So, yeah, women get some alimony, they get some child support, they get some of that stuff, but then what happens is the society collapses when it comes time for them to get healthcare in their old age.
Yeah. Yeah, that's true.
I just wanted to ask you, Stefan, I know that you've got children yourself listening to you in times past.
You don't have to answer this, but how far would you go, Stefan, if the state told you you couldn't see your child anymore?
How far does a father have to listen to the state when he says, right, okay, you get to see your child three hours a week and the mother gets custody?
I mean, how far do we go?
Okay, but here's where the conversation gets tough and possibly even annoying for you.
So here's what I need from you, because this is something, and I sympathize enormously with your plight, Paul, and I'm incredibly sorry about what happened with your son.
But are you trying to tell me that there was no indication that the woman you had a child with Was unstable or had a problem with her temper or had a problem with bullying or had a problem with infidelity.
There was no indications of instability on her part because it matters where you put your seed.
It matters where you sow your seed.
It matters where you put your dick.
You know that. So my question is, we want prevention rather than cure.
My question is, what were the signs...
Of the fact that the woman was able to do this or willing to do this for you, what were the signs that men can look out for to try and avoid this kind of situation?
I guess none of us are perfect, Stefan.
No, no, listen. If you're going to start fogging me, I'm not going to do it.
You're a wise man.
You say you're an older man.
You've had time to think about this.
How can you help men avoid this kind of situation?
What were the signs beforehand that the woman you chose to be the mother of your son had this in her to do?
I'm not sure what you mean by that, but...
Was there any signs of instability or aggression or this kind of capacity to put you through this grueling situation?
She was a professional. She had dignity.
She had morals. She was educated.
She was not an employee.
She worked all her life.
All right. Let me ask you this then, because I don't need the praising resume.
You said she had kids from a prior relationship?
Yep. She was married before?
Yeah. And were those kids in close contact with their father?
Yes, they were. And why did she get divorced?
Well, that is...
I'm not sure if I should answer that, Stefan, but...
Well, let's just put it this way.
Was there...
In the divorce that she had in the past, was she married to the father?
Yes, she was. Okay, so in the divorce that she had in the past, was there any indication that it might be a problem for you in the future on how her past marriage broke up?
Not at the time, no.
I mean, lots of people have more than one partner in life, Steph.
Okay, but Paul, are you trying to tell me that this woman just went completely insane, and let's assume that she did everything that you...
Hang on, let me finish, let me finish.
That this woman just went completely insane...
And she phoned the cops and basically tried to have you arrested.
She dragged you through the court.
She destroyed your relationship with your son.
She just about killed you with stress by pursuing this.
She destroyed your capacity to work.
This went on, as you say, for four years.
Are you saying that there was no indication ahead of time that she was capable of this kind of behavior?
Not really, but I certainly found out after that she turned into a very selfish, inward-looking person.
I wanted what she wanted.
I'm sorry, I can't tell you a lie.
I didn't see that, no.
When we were together, I loved her very much.
Did you ever talk to her ex-husband about their marriage?
Slightly. And did he seem to have a sort of good and happy life and a good relationship with his ex?
I would think not, no.
He suffered from some depression, I think.
He was very artistic.
He painted and I think he was kind of really into his art to such a degree, I think.
It got her down.
That's all I know.
And they ended up getting divorced.
Wait, hang on a sec.
So you said she was a professional and he was into his art, is that right?
Yeah. So did he end up pursuing his art and not contributing as much to the family income?
I'm not in the know about that stuff and I can't answer that question.
Is he a successful artist?
Does he have gallery openings?
Is he a successful artist?
To some degree here, yes.
To some degree. Not enough to match her income?
Yeah, I don't think money was a problem between them.
It wasn't a problem for me either at the time when I was with her.
But, you know, I was more concerned, Depp, and not wanting to Yes, but the mom still has to call the cops.
She still has to sick the state on you.
Yes, the state does what it does, and I disagree with just about all of it.
But my question is, and I know I'm not going to get an answer from you, and maybe you don't know the answer, or maybe you do and you don't want to say...
I'll tell you the truth, Stefan.
I mean, if you ask me a question, if I know the answer, I'll give it to you.
I'm not hiding anything.
But the idea that a woman is capable of doing this to the father of her child, right?
So I'm thinking of Cassie J's movie, The Red Pill.
I don't know. Have you seen that?
No, I haven't, no. Okay.
So in it, there's a man—I'm paraphrasing this story, and I hope I don't get it wrong, but go see The Red Pill.
Watch The Red Pill. Okay.
So there's a man who went through years of custody battles— And lost his capacity.
He had to give up, much like yourself, and I can completely understand all of this.
He had to give up attempting to gain any kind of custody with his son because his health just gave out.
He just, like, he couldn't function.
I mean, men are designed to do things, to fight or flight.
You know, you win or you lose, but you don't just sit there circling the bear for four years, right?
That's too much for the system, right?
But he says, he says, look...
This is what she did to me through the court system, but she was verbally abusive for years before.
She was mean, she had a bad temper, she was overweight, she, you know, and she said to me, you know, because he's a guy who gave lots of talks about marriage and the law, if I remember rightly, and she said to him, listen, I've watched you, I know exactly what to do.
You've taught me exactly what to do to hurt you, to get my son.
And, I mean, one of the stories is whenever his son was over at the mom's, you know what?
Watch the movie. No spoilers, just watch the movie.
So he says, he looks back and he says, look, I had a child with a woman who was verbally abusive.
If I'm remembering this correctly.
Let's just put it this way. I had a child with a woman who had indications of instability or hostility or dysfunction before.
Before I ended up staring down...
The eyeballs of a policeman or before I came home and the, as you say, your door was off your hinges, right?
Yes. So that's my question.
The state is what it is.
I don't know that you or I in particular can do much to change it.
We can bring people's awareness to it and all of that.
But given that the state is the way that it is, that having children is riskier business now than it has been in the past, what are the signs?
What are the signs that a woman is capable of doing something like this to you?
And if you don't know those signs, or if you're trying to tell me that she was perfectly nice and then just kind of went crazy, well, I don't believe that that's the way personality works.
I don't believe that people are perfectly nice and then just get kind of crazy during a divorce period.
I think that that's always part of what's going on in the relationship.
It just manifests when they have the power of the state.
Yep. Well, we do know, though, don't we, Stephan, that In this country, is it one and a half marriages end up in divorce?
So obviously there is some disagreement with That statistic is woefully incomplete.
Woefully incomplete. I won't go into all of the math right now, but it's not as simple as half the marriages end up in divorce.
If you look at, you know, upper class, value-similar, educated people, high IQ people and so on, divorce rates are extraordinarily low.
And so, or if you look among Christians of the same denomination, like where there's values in common, where there's a pursuit of self-knowledge, where there's a degree of education or at least of high intelligence or whatever, then divorce rates are very low.
So you can't just take this across the entire spectrum and say, well, no matter where you are in the class or no matter where you are in the religion, no matter where you are in the races and so on, it's 50%.
It's not. It's like taking Chicago and some town 50 miles outside of Chicago and putting the two murder rates together and say, well, these two towns have crazy high murder rates.
It's like, well, no, that's like a lack of differentiation in the data.
Oh, I always thought that.
I always thought that the divorce rate in Great Britain was very high.
Maybe I'm wrong about that. Well, again, but it's like saying, you know what it's like?
It's like saying the rate of muggings...
In England is very high.
But that doesn't mean you have the same rate of mugging in downtown London or downtown Liverpool or Tower Hamlets that you would have in some sleepy little town in the backwater of Yorkshire.
Yeah. Right?
There is variation in the data, to put it mildly.
It's not just 50% of everyone.
No. I don't know.
I guess what I'm saying is that Divorce happens, shit happens, and it happened to me.
But that's what I'm...
Okay, I mean, I guess we're not going to get anywhere, but that's what I'm trying to say.
I'm trying to open you up to the possibility, and this doesn't mean that I have any less sympathy for what you're going through.
I have enormous sympathy for what you're going through.
But if it's in the category of shit happens, stuff happens...
That rescues you from regret about the woman you chose to be the mother of your child, but unfortunately, it also blindfolds the next generation of men to not see warning signs.
Like, you can rescue your own—look, you had a—I'm sorry to be so blunt—you had a kid with the wrong woman.
I'm sorry about that. I wish it had turned out differently.
But you had a kid with the wrong woman.
This was not the right woman to have a kid with.
And if you're going to say, well, there was no possible way to know that ahead of time.
It was only after she called the cops and destroyed my savings, destroyed my health, and dragged me through the court for four years, and then I ended up getting nothing out of it.
It just happened. It's like weather.
And I understand why people have that perspective.
But if you're going to call into this show, it's not a perspective that I can support and sustain.
Because what that means is you may feel less bad about your decision on who to have a child with.
But it means that the dysfunction which I'm positive was there ahead of time, you keep hidden.
And that means that the next generation of men...
It doesn't get the wisdom of your hard-earned experience.
So I'm going to move on to the next caller, but I appreciate the call in, and I hope that someday, I hope that someday you get to see your son again.
And it's challenging, you know, I mean, it's challenging because let's say you get time with your son, you know, next year or the year after, and your son says, Dad, why haven't I seen you for 10 years?
Well, that's a very tough conversation to have when you say, well, because your mom wouldn't, like your mom used the courts and tried to have all these terrible things happen to me.
And he goes back and says, well, dad said, right?
It's very, very challenging, but it really matters.
It's the most important decision you make.
As an adult, as a man or as a woman, is who you're going to marry and who is going to be a partner in child racing.
It's hugely, hugely important.
And I think that there are ways that you can tell better people from worse people, but those aren't ways we're going to find out about today.
So thanks so much for your call.
I appreciate it. Let's move on to the next caller.
Alright, up next we have Patrick.
Patrick wrote in and said, Could you help clarify the concept of left and right, and why people don't agree on their definition, and explain both extremes and how they may connect?
I.e. extreme left, extreme right!
That's from Patrick.
Yeah, as if there's any such phrase in the media as extreme left.
Thanks, Pat. I'll give you a very brief definition.
You can let me know what you think.
And I don't like that I have to use left and right, but this is the established nomenclature, so I have to suck it up and work with what I've got.
So the reality is that the left means big government.
The left means more coercion.
The left means moving things from voluntary to coercive relationships.
Moving things from the free market into the sphere of the state.
Moving things from the private sector into the public sector.
The left is about bigger government.
The right is about smaller government.
The right is about more voluntarism, more community.
And so the left is about security and the right is about freedom.
That is the reality.
And the left is willing to trade long-term freedom for short-term security and the right is willing to take less security in the short run for more freedom and, in fact, more security in the long run.
Now, that is the reality of the left and the right.
But it's been redefined as, tell me if this sounds at all familiar, the left is caring about people, the right is violence.
That is the way it's been generally redefined.
And there is some, I think, some gender stuff.
The left is a little bit more appealing to the women, the right is a bit more appealing too.
To men, particularly white men.
I mean, like, white evangelical Christians voted, 81% of them voted for Trump, and like 13% of them voted for Hillary.
More women voted for Hillary than voted for Trump.
More men voted for Trump than voted for Hillary.
And so, but they've set it up in such a way.
I mean, I love this little wraparound deal they've got going on, right?
The extreme right is Hitler.
The extreme left is Marx.
Yeah, exactly. What does that want?
No extremes! Extremes is such a boring argument.
The word extremes, not an argument.
It doesn't mean anything.
He's an extremist.
What does that mean?
He's against slavery.
He's an extremist, anti-slaver.
Yeah. He's against torture and murdering kittens.
He's an extremist on the non-torture and murder of kittens.
Like, it doesn't mean anything.
This extremist label, it's like thesis, antithesis, synthesis.
You know, all this boring, bullshit, holy trinity of Marxism that I was indoctrinated in when I was younger.
You have a thesis, the free market.
You have an antithesis called communism.
And the synthesis is a mixed economy.
There's a pendulum. It swings part of the middle.
It doesn't mean anything.
None of this shit means anything other than shut up and pay up your fucking taxes.
And we're going to increase it, by the way, pretty much to infinity.
And so it is just a bunch of nonsense.
It's a bunch of crap. It designs to keep you away.
It's designed to keep you away from absolutes of any kind.
Absolute certainty of any kind.
Well, if you're an absolutist, you see, then you're not seeing the sophisticated, subtle shades of grey that make up the composite, detailed, braille painting of all complex social issues.
Just stay in the middle.
Don't have any perspectives. Don't have any opinions.
Be a pragmatist, which means obey the government when they want to sell your children's future off for votes in the moment.
So it's this setup.
It's a trap as a whole.
If you think of it correctly...
You know, that the left is big government and the right is free market.
Well, that is, right, that's more accurate.
But of course, it won't ever be talked about that way in the mainstream media because the left is caring and the right is violence, right?
Well, that's the challenge, right?
And the challenge is to get a conversation with, you know, family, friends and people that have this view where, you If you're on the right, you're automatically a fascist.
And they will demonize their right to stop the conversation from the beginning.
I'm in discussions with people in Europe, and it's very difficult to start a conversation at all about left and right because we don't have the same definition to start with.
But the right feels like violence to a lot of people.
And again, I hate to sort of circle back to this, but it makes sense.
If you're a woman and you've had three kids by three different guys, and none of them are in the picture, two of them are in jail, and one of them has decided to become a gold miner in the outback somewhere, a failure of a one.
And so you've got three kids, they're all under the age of eight, let's say, and you genuinely believe that you need this government money.
right like small government less lower taxes less redistribution of wealth the reason is that this mom is going to look at these like you know like you see these beaks of these babies you know the the baby birds the the mom regurgitate up the worms all the whole time right and they just that They need to be fed. They need dental care.
They need braces, maybe.
They need health care.
They need clothing.
They need education.
Children are just this bottomless well of resource consumption.
And historically, women were resource-consuming machines.
They're just producing more and more useless eaters for quite some time until they end up holding up civilization as a whole as they grow up.
And so women, moms, and children were like this net resource consumption.
They were net negative. They were drains upon the immediate resources of society.
And so women, like they need this, moms, they need this steady conveyor belt of resources for their kids.
And anything that interrupts or threatens to interrupt or could conceivably interrupt that flow of resources to their kids feels like violence.
Like, you are not responsible for feeding me.
But if you lock me in your basement, you are responsible for feeding me.
You know, if you don't cook me a meal, or you don't cook me three meals and throw them down the stairs at my house every day, you're not responsible if I starve to death.
But if you lock me in the basement, I need a conveyor belt of food and water in order to not die in the basement, right?
And it's the same thing, like, when you have kids...
Saying no to your kids is really hard.
Your kids being hungry is really hard.
Like I remember when I was a kid.
I remember when I was a kid, I was reading this...
We found this giant crate of Reader's Digest condensed books when I was a kid.
And I don't even know if they're around anymore.
But they would take these novels and they would sort of strip them down to their bare plot elements and so on.
And I read like crazy because TV was...
There were no computers and TV was boring as hell.
So I read like crazy and I remember reading this book...
This poor family and the mom, I said this on the show many, many years ago, but the mom, the kids would say, Mom, I'm hungry!
You're like this giant vampiric future-generating leech off the current jugular of society.
And it's wonderful. It's why we're all here, right?
I mean, and so anything, like if you have made your decisions and your kids are dependent on that steady rolling ball of government cheese, right?
If the government... It's the only worm that you can cough up into those beaks, throats of your kids.
What are you going to do? Anything that interrupts that.
Anything that says, ooh.
The people who are dependent on the welfare state, or as I was talking about in a video I just did today about how much the disability is bigger than the welfare state and food stamps combined.
If you're dependent on that, and you hear someone saying, Let's lower taxes!
Do you know what you hear? Let's shut off the conveyor belt.
Or the conveyor belt's going to keep running, but you're going to get only one meal a day instead of three.
Or only two meals a day instead of three.
Yeah. Well, this is clear for you and I, but when we start a conversation with people that have a mindset that socialism is absolutely nothing else, Compared to communism, i.e., they're not linked at all.
And you start explaining the difference between left and right in those terms.
We don't even start on the same level.
No, but you can get the gradation, right?
I mean, because you say, okay, so slavery is what?
Somebody else owns your productivity 100%.
That's slavery, right?
Yeah, exactly. And so if somebody else owns your productivity 50%, then you're 50% a slave.
And in fact, slaves got to keep more of their resources in the 19th century and the 18th century than workers do now.
Because like 80% or sometimes more, 80% of the slaves' productivity was returned to the slave in terms of food and shelter and healthcare and this, that, and the other, right?
And now if we had a taxation rate of 20%, most of us in the West would be like giddy with joy.
I mean, like, wow, we have slave wages.
This is a huge improvement.
Right? And so, I mean, this sort of slippery slope stuff.
But yeah, I mean, people don't like the definitions.
What is socialism? Socialism is giving a small group of people in society all the weapons in society, pretty much, and giving them the right to take other people's property by force at will.
Well, I guess we have to start by the definition when we get into those discussions, because if not, it just goes nowhere, like the Front National in France, or Trump, you know, or by many people, fascists.
And just people don't have the correct reference of what fascism is.
And when I try to Explain that fascism can occur on the left side.
They just go, well, what are you talking about?
Fascism is a right-wing phenomenon.
And you see, that means that free and voluntary trade and association is exactly the same as Nazism.
Exactly the same.
And, of course, I mean, the left...
I mean, there's a reason why they use the word Nazism rather than National Socialism, which is the correct term.
Right. They don't want the correct reference.
They want to...
Well, now, I mean, now, I don't...
You know, when people talk about the welfare state or they talk about socialism or they talk about income redistribution or food stamps or SNAP or anything like that, the only thing that I think of is they're saying, please, let's not have a revolution.
I mean, that's all they're saying.
I mean, generations have now been bred into dependence upon the state.
And you should read a book called The Welfare Trait about the employment-resistant personality, that there are personality structures that are significantly genetic that are called employment-resistant personalities.
And they are exactly as they sound, right?
And people have got really short fuses.
They get angry very quickly.
They can't defer gratification.
They don't like to negotiate.
And we have now bred, like hothouse flowers, we have bred in the greenhouse of the state, people who are dependent upon the state itself.
And we can say, you know, it'll be better for you in the long run.
And, you know, of course, I think that's true.
But of course, if they could think in the long run, they wouldn't be dependent on the state, right?
I mean, because people who think in the long run say, well, why would I want to have a bunch of kids and not have fathers around?
And that's going to miss out. I mean, if you can think in the long run, you don't get caught in state stuff because if you're smart, the upside of you and the free market vastly outstrips the upside of you on welfare.
And so when people talk about all of this stuff now, I mean, I don't hear anything other than, well, if we trim welfare, if we cut welfare, there's going to be riots.
There's going to be, you know, Ferguson is going to burn.
Everything's like they're just going to be riots because, you know, there's a lot more.
The Marxists have been, you know, sending their brain rot deep into the minds of certain sections of the lower classes for decades and decades now, generations really, to the point where any interruption in the conveyor belt is considered to be...
An act of aggression for which violent response is perfectly justified.
And so everyone now is like, the welfare state, I mean, no, we can't control the welfare state, we can't limit the welfare state, we can't end the welfare state, because there'll be blood in the streets.
And I don't think anyone anymore is talking about it as some kind of ideal.
Oh, don't worry, the welfare state was going to get rid of poverty completely.
And it's just about to do that.
All we need is a couple more years and a couple more trillion dollars.
Nobody's arguing that anymore.
Nobody's arguing like the welfare state is just about to achieve its mandate of eliminating poverty.
That's what LBJ said.
Well, be poverty in a generation.
It's going to end. No poverty.
Everyone's going to be... Nobody's saying that anymore.
Nobody's saying that at all.
All they're saying is, well...
Things are going to burn if we try and trim it, so let's just pretend it's moral, shall we?
I mean, I don't believe that there are any arguments from compassion or it's going to work or it's going to be excellent.
You know, it's the same thing with the immigration into Germany, right?
You've got these, what, a million immigrants and, like, 53 of them got jobs.
I mean, come on. I mean, nobody's saying this is how we're going to prop up our economy because our birth rates are low.
And it's like, nobody's saying that anymore.
They're just like... I don't know.
I hope it's not too much around here.
It's nothing to do with any of the ideals anymore.
Now it's just about managing the titanic damage it's inflicted.
What would be an efficient way to demonstrate to people like that what left fascism is?
Because this seems to be clear that this is where we're heading to.
No, but fascism is one of these words that...
It's like racism. It's one of these words that's become so co-opted and owned and turned into a gaseous, farty nothingness.
I don't even know that the word is worth bringing up anymore.
It's like the Nazism thing, you know?
It's like the Hitler thing. It's become so debased by sophists.
That I don't know that there's much point even bringing up the term fascism.
Because when you bring up words that have been so pumped full of sophistry and emotional hyperextension, I mean, you know, it's like trying to eat your sushi with two giant oars, you know, while the sushi is still in fish form in the ocean, right? It's too big, it's too bulky.
Just start with principles. What is moral?
Is the initiation of force moral?
And if people can't agree on that, then forget it, right?
But starting near the end with something as charged up as fascism or racism, it's become so boring and so high voltage and so useless that I think that those words need to be abandoned as the traps they are.
Yeah, I agree.
But sometimes, or many times, we lose them.
We start the conversation and they go into these names and I feel the only way we need to or we can follow up discussion with people like that is to use their terms and redefine them and show them why their terms is not this and that.
If we just start like a blank sheet with them, they're going to say, oh, you're crazy and just shut up the discussion.
Well, sure. And, you know, it's important to recognize what the motivations are, which is, you know, a lot of the left-wing protesters are just out there because their single moms are basically unconsciously or maybe even consciously saying, go out and cause trouble because mommy wants the conveyor belt to keep coming.
Right? I mean, they're out there.
They're actually kind of, I mean, they're black clad, but they're kind of white knights for single moms.
And the single moms, you know, like women are fairly, some kinds of women are fairly well versed in stirring up trouble to get their way.
You go fight with that person, you go fight with that person, I'm going to pick up the pieces and the remnants.
And so causing trouble to get their way is something that women, you know, they're physically weaker and smaller and so they have to kind of fight by proxy.
And so they send out these agitators so that Anybody who tries to talk about a smaller government is going to run into these agitators who are kind of unconsciously programmed by their state-dependent moms to go out there and fight for mommy's booze and cigarette money.
You see, since I started listening to you, I changed my views on those aspects, maybe 180 degrees.
And most of my friends have stayed on the other side.
And I can still see their point of view.
And I'm hoping that this is a strength in order to have a Constructive discussion with them.
Hang on a sec.
Have you ever known...
I'll put this out to the general audience as well.
Let me know below the video.
But have you ever known for someone to change their mind slowly and remain stable in their new convictions?
Well, besides my immediate family, Maybe not.
But it takes a long time.
It takes years. Did it take a long time for you to start to change your mind?
I think it took three years, yes.
Oh, it took three years of what?
What exposure to start changing your mind?
Of listening to everything you produced.
And you didn't start changing your mind for three years?
What is your head filled with?
Frozen molasses? I don't understand.
What are you, three years? Why would you keep listening?
You know, it doesn't make any sense.
What makes sense to me answering this is...
So one day, three years ago, I found Jon Stewart very funny, and now I don't find him very funny anymore.
And it slowly took that time to fully understand your arguments, the basic of why things are this way, and also acquire the ability to explain it to others.
Right. Right. Well, you know, if you're asking as to sort of how do you best make the case, I mean, I would say make the case from principles.
Like, you have to find something that you can agree with before you can build any kind of bridge to people, right?
I mean, you can build the bridge halfway.
They have to build the bridge the other half, right?
I mean, if you keep building the bridge the whole way, they'll just think you're an invader.
Right. You know, like you're just coming over the Mediterranean or something.
That's true. Can we at least agree that if there's a choice between a coercive interaction and a voluntary interaction, all other things being equal, voluntary is better?
Can we at least agree that the initiation of the use of force is immoral?
You have to find something that you agree on, and then you can start to build things from there.
Yeah, and it takes a lot of time.
And I thought maybe if I can demonstrate what the extreme left is and show them that it's the same as the extreme right, then they can start to change their view on what social is.
Yeah, but I see if you go into the extreme left, extreme right paradigm, you're trying to pick up the weapons of the enemy and use them.
It doesn't work there. There's a reason why.
This has all been designed by centrists who are aiming to lead you towards bigger governments.
So I think arguing sort of extreme left, extreme right stuff is...
I mean, you have to fight against the current.
It's like why I don't use the word anarchy that much anymore.
The word has been so debased and corrupted by people, you know, heaving garbage cans through Starbucks windows.
I mean, start with principles.
Don't use the hypercharged propaganda language of sophists.
It takes too much unpacking.
Just start with basic principles, I would say.
All right. Sounds good.
All right. Well, thanks very much for your call.
I appreciate it. Let's move on.
Alright, up next we have Jeff.
Jeff wrote in and said, What should we do to protect women from psycho alpha male predators?
My sister made bad choices and I watched her crash.
I watched my parents, especially my dad, struggle with how to reach her.
I tried to help her when I could, but she often rejected my help.
I have an 8-year-old son and a 10-year-old daughter.
I am demonstrating my love for my wife and building my relationship with my son and daughter.
I am leading my family so that they understand what a good husband and father looks like.
I am teaching my daughter to set expectations for her curfew so that she knows it is for her benefit.
At around 16, I expect her to bring home a date so that I can have a conversation with him, my bat and shotgun in hand, and set ground rules for their time together.
There are lines in our society that have changed and yet I believe, like you, that we must be the village elders and protect our family and other women from aggressive men and their poor choices.
That's from Jeff. Hi, Jeff.
How are you doing tonight? Doing well, Stefan.
How are you? Well, thank you.
Why did your sister make bad choices?
Why did she make bad choices?
I think it was a rebellion.
I think she had a rebellious streak.
She was... You know, third child in a family of five.
You know, so middle child and just kind of wanted to do her own thing.
Felt like she kind of, you know, through high school started going to parties, going to raves, doing stuff that she shouldn't do.
And that led to some relationships and some bad choices.
That is a spectacularly terrible explanation, with all due respect.
I mean, that's the kind of bad explanation you can see from space, if you don't mind.
You know, I'm just telling you what I think.
Maybe you're right. You know, rebellious streak?
Come on. Yeah. No, okay, why did she make bad decisions?
Was there any example within the family structure of people having made bad decisions?
No. And I'm not saying that out of a—I've heard you talk with other people, and there's this feeling of it came out of nowhere.
I'm not saying that it came out of nowhere, but I am saying within our immediate family, there was no divorce.
There was no—what?
I mean, you have a father who is, my dad, who is trying to provide for his family, and he would describe himself as focused on the external money-making breadwinner kind of stuff.
Mom's taking care of the family at home, raising kids, right?
It's a good marriage. They've been married for, what, 40 years now plus?
They work things out. Not always perfect.
Marriages have their bumps, but it wasn't one where there was any major issues.
And there was efforts made by him to raise his children right, raise his daughter right.
I think he probably gravitated more towards the guys than the girl in that case.
So maybe she kind of got washed out.
I don't think my mom would protect her from My dad's expectations and allow her to get away with some stuff.
Is that a little better?
Well, it's not performance art.
I mean, I'm just curious.
What do you mean with your mom who tried to protect your sister from your father's expectations?
What does that mean? So, if she would...
You know, want to go out on a weekend and party with her friends.
Mom's going to be there when she comes home.
You know, whether it's intoxicated or otherwise.
Wait, at what age was she doing this?
Yeah, 16, 17, 18.
So she was, what, going to parties and drinking illegally?
Was she doing drugs? Sure, yeah.
So she's doing drugs...
Illegal drugs, and she's drinking illegally at the age of 16?
Right, yes.
And what happened with your mom?
Yeah, I mean, she would be making excuses for her, or, you know, we're not going to come down too hard on her.
I don't know exactly what that would look like, but she can still have the keys to the car or do other things.
So your mother...
Set up a situation wherein your sister could escape negative consequences for her illegal behavior.
True. Well, no, not true.
I mean, that's what you're telling me as far as I understand it.
That is correct. And how did that work out?
Not well. Not well for her.
And has your mother acknowledged that this was undermining consequences and that your mother may have played a significant role in enabling this behavior?
I don't think so. Why not?
Because that would mean taking responsibility.
So are you saying that your mother does not take responsibility for her own bad decisions and therefore she wants your sister to not take responsibility for her bad decisions?
Is that what you mean? That would be true.
Yes. So when I said, was there any example in the family of, right, you really weren't squaring off with me there, were you?
Sometimes it takes a while to peel back the onion, let's just put it that way.
Didn't take that long. Okay, so give me examples of how your mom doesn't take responsibility for her bad decisions, to some degree.
Yeah, I mean, so this continued with my younger brother's Who also got into some drugs and was protected by my mom.
Again, baby of the family.
Wait, your brothers got into drugs as well?
Yes. At what age?
About the same. My sister and brother were close.
So it was a couple years younger.
So he was probably doing it even into 14, 15.
It was around the same time.
Wait, wait, wait. Hang on, hang on, hang on.
Yeah. Okay.
So, she's the middle child.
She got two elder, two younger brothers?
Right. Okay. I'm the older.
Okay. And so your sister was close to one or both of your younger brothers ended up with the drugs and the drinking?
Just one. Just one.
Was this the one that she was close to?
Yes.
Do you know if she had any hand in introducing him to the drinking and the drug use?
So quite possibly, yes.
I think so. Well, she would warn him against those things to some degree, right?
I would assume, right?
I mean, she's like, I'm a couple of years older, I've taken this bad path, learned from my example kind of thing.
Do you know if she had any of those conversations with him?
I'm sure she did. Yeah, absolutely.
Absolutely. No, no, no. You can't say absolutely and then say, I'm sure she did.
I'm saying absolutely yes, she did.
I'm sure that she did. Yes, I did.
I've seen that kind of dynamic take place.
So I'm confirming your...
And did your sister ever take him to any of these parties or introduce him to any of the people who did the drinking and the drugs?
Yes, yes. Yes, she did.
And I'd say that in some sense it was, okay, here's my friend's But you're not going to hang out with them.
I'm going to show you.
We're going to have a good time.
But then, you know, of course, he started getting his own collection of friends that were like that type of friend.
She would take him to parties when he was, you said, 14 to 16.
She would take him to parties where drinking and drug use was going on.
And I assume then she would drink and use drugs with her 14-year-old brother at the party.
Yes. Yeah, I'm sure that happened.
Yes. I mean, again, I'm older, so I didn't see this happening.
I was out of the house. Kind of on my own.
Out of the house? I was in college.
No, I understand that, but you went back home from time to time, didn't you?
Yeah, I did. Hey, look at you, not taking responsibility.
There you go. Right, and that's the thing.
Well, okay, so here's my real question, right, is how...
I regret not taking responsibility.
I regret not stepping up in a family that didn't show how to step up, and I want to make sure I correct that for my own family.
Well, the first thing you can do is stop bullshitting me about your family and say, well, I was at college.
Right? Because that is modeling not taking responsibility.
My parents had a great marriage, no dysfunction in my household.
Right? Well, other than the fact that two of my siblings were underage drinkers and drug users, and the fact that my sister may have introduced my younger brother to drinking and drug use, and the fact that my mother undermined any consequences and enabled this behavior...
Every family is dysfunctional in their own way.
Now you're doing it in a different way.
You understand? Okay, we've been caught out with some dysfunction, but hey, that's everyone, man.
Sure, everyone has a drug conviction.
Everyone drinks of a dirt rage.
It's what people do. You understand that's called normalizing?
Yes. And it doesn't make it any better.
And it doesn't make it right.
And it doesn't make it any more excusable.
What kind of drugs were your siblings taking?
So, marijuana and...
Some ecstasy, stuff like that.
You know, that's not good for a developing brain, right?
Particularly the ecstasy.
It can cause permanent brain impairment, right?
Yeah, it probably did.
So how the fuck is this not a massive crisis?
Like do anything, pay anything, bear any burden, bring in any experts, go to family therapy.
How is this not a massive crisis in the family that everyone throws all the resources possible to try and solve?
There was a lot of that.
Interventions, therapy.
But no, but interventions with the kids or the parents?
The kids. Oh, did anyone say maybe mom should stop enabling the behavior and undermining consequences?
No. Huh.
So the only problem was the 14-year-old, not the 40-year-old.
Right. Right.
Ah, psychiatrists and psychologists.
You better hope there's no God sometimes.
So, neither of your parents, I'm going to assume, have any substance abuse problems.
*kiss* No. My mom does come from a family with alcoholism, but she is not an alcoholic.
So she comes from a family with alcoholism, and she wanted to minimize the siblings drinking.
I mean, I can understand that psychologically.
Right? I mean, if her parents, I mean, she would have to minimize the fear she would feel that her own parents drinking, so maybe she minimizes that with regards to the siblings.
But I'm sure she understands that if there is a genetic or even if there's a genetic component to alcoholism, then her kids being exposed to alcohol underage is very risky.
Right. Right?
Yeah, and it took hold.
It took hold for your brother and sister?
Your brother was an alcoholic.
He actually passed away not too long ago.
How did he die?
Driving. Driving?
While drunk.
Oh man. Oh Jeff, I am so sorry.
He crashed his car while driving drunk.
How old was he? 30.
Oh, God almighty.
Had he been an alcoholic for a while?
Yes. Since 14?
Yes. And this is what I mean by giant fucking emergency, right?
Yeah. Yeah, it was.
And, you know, just waiting for the phone call.
At some point. Just knowing that he was unwilling to correct this or really do it himself, right?
You can't do it for him. And we try.
I mean, we had conversations again, and I understand that there's stepping up and this type of thing, and it's tough.
But at some level for him, he needed to change, and he was unwilling to do so.
Well, didn't you say that your mother would argue that your sister should still have the car keys?
Yes. Give me more about that context, please.
Well, I think that, yeah, there's this...
I'm trying to describe the dynamic of, you know, father sees...
My dad sees his daughter doing this stuff.
That becomes an argument because he's more strict.
She's more, my mom's more lenient and, um, you know, whether it's, you know, she's 16.
Okay, you're fucking me like crazy. So, do you mean that one of the punishments your father would have if your sister drank was for her not to be able to use a car?
Right. I assume this is not while she's drunk.
This is like in general, right?
This is in general. Exactly right.
Right. And your mother is like, no, my daughter, our daughter should still have access to the car keys even though she's drinking.
Yeah. Do you not see any connection here?
Yeah, I don't even know how to describe it.
It sounds insane. Drinking should not prevent you from having access to car keys.
And how does your brother die?
driving drunk.
These things are not as random sometimes, I believe, as we sometimes think they are.
Yeah, that's a connection.
I mean, it's a connection I haven't even made until you've pointed it out.
My belief, I don't know if this is proven or not, so I'll just, you know, as usual, it's just my particular belief, Jeff, but I believe that when people get involved in substance abuse, their emotional development, and I think sometimes even their intellectual development just kind of stops, but in particular, their emotional development.
See, we all face challenges in life, and we either grow or we fail based on those challenges.
But the challenge is everything.
Not knowing how to handle something, not knowing how to deal with something, learning to manage your own anxiety and your own fear at the new.
I mean, I give you a completely stupid example because what we're talking about here is so volatile, and I want to just take a break from the depth because we need to keep processing, but...
Back in the day, I developed a software program and my partner and I were selling it at a bank.
It was my first presentation of the software to a group of fairly senior-ish people at the bank.
And I was up there and I was gesticulating to the, this is, I don't know, I guess they still do presentations this way.
We had this old VGA projector and a little white screen on the wall.
And I was explaining things up at the wall and stepping them through the software and so on.
And then we finished and we just started chatting about the stuff or however it might work or implementation or whatever.
And I had no idea, honestly.
And I was standing there going, I don't know.
Do I sit down now?
Do I keep standing?
I don't know. And then my partner wrote down, sit down.
Okay, thanks. Right?
I didn't know. I didn't know.
Another time, I gave a presentation of the software with my partner.
And it turns out that the guy we were presenting to, he said, oh, yeah, I'm...
I'm thinking of building something just like this.
And I got kind of cheesed, right?
I mean, it's like, well, wait, you invited us in for a demo, and you're thinking of building something like this.
That doesn't seem right.
That's not right. You know, not only are you wasting your time, but you might be picking our brains here.
And is that good?
Is that bad? Is that right?
I don't know, but, you know, I just kind of...
But there's anxiety, right?
There's, I don't know, is it right, is it wrong?
This is years ago, and I'm pretty comfortable with just about everything I'm doing now, but it's having to deal with that.
Now, when you get involved in substance abuse, in particular, You know, I mean, I think that there's a truism, like a lot of alcoholics are like, they're socially anxious.
They don't necessarily feel that comfortable around people.
But if everyone's drinking, that's okay, because it's like lowest common denominator.
And everything's funny, you know, because people do stupid things when they're drunk and everyone laughs.
And then you have these stories forever.
You have this whole built in narrative.
Hey, do you remember that time when?
Right? He tried to climb up to change the light bulb and, you know, fell on his butt.
And, you know, there was a guy who I mentioned before, he fell asleep with his beer in his lap and someone tried to take the beer away because it was going to spill.
And he woke up, I don't take my beer.
And it was some big funny thing, you know, because he only woke up because somebody was trying to take his beer.
And it just becomes like this whole, you can't conceivably get together without drinking.
And it's a lot of anxiety management, a lot of self-actualization management, and people get kind of stuck.
They don't progress.
And we wouldn't let a 14-year-old drive a car, usually.
Okay?
And if your brother got into drugs and drinking at 14, to me, you know, there was some significant arrested development.
And where do you go when you haven't grown in many ways from when you were 14 but you're 30?
Because that argument, sorry, that stress, that just gets worse and worse because you feel like you're losing time and you're falling down.
Behind everyone else, right?
Everyone else's lives are moving ahead and you're kind of stuck.
And that makes you stressed, so you drink more.
And if you have a mom who, when you were growing up, removed consequences from your bad choices.
Then it's hard to stop making those bad choices.
You know, like there's this, I guess, a stereotypical story of the guy who's the drunk.
And he drinks too much one night, and it's Sunday night.
And he wakes up Monday morning, splitting headache.
Feels like, you know, a cat threw up in his mouth.
And he groans and he says to his wife, Oh, honey, just...
Just call in sick for me at work.
I cannot go to work today.
And he tries to rope her into having him escape the consequences of his actions.
And that's a tough thing for his wife.
You know, part of her is like, well, okay, I'll just take away this negative consequence, I'll talk to him about it, and then he won't get mad at me because I'm not doing this thing for him or whatever, right?
But we all know what the responsible, honest thing to do is in that situation, right?
What do you do, Jeff? What do you do in that situation?
You tell him that it's on him.
Make your own calls. Make your own calls, exactly right.
I'm not lying for you. Right.
And you damn well should go to work anyway.
You knew you had to go to work today.
You drank too much last night. I told you not to.
I'm not covering up for you.
But that produces a lot of anger because in this particular scenario, who knows how long that husband has been drinking for and avoiding the consequences and avoiding stressful situations and self-medicating with alcohol and avoiding growth and avoiding self-knowledge.
Therapists usually won't treat anyone who's drunk or high because the person's not there.
Really. You're talking to the alcohol, you're talking to the drug.
You're not talking to the person.
It's like the same demon sits inside the chest of every addict.
And there's no individuation there.
And so by removing the consequences...
I'm going to assume...
I shouldn't assume.
Let me ask the question... Did your mom's parents stay alcoholics or did they ever kick it?
So my mom's parents were not alcoholics.
Her brothers were. She had two brothers and both of them were.
And both of them are to this day, well, one of them had health issues.
The other one is kind of on his own.
He's been separated from the family.
He's kind of got his own separate life going.
So I haven't talked to him in years.
Her mom and dad were not the alcoholics, although...
Just without getting into too many specifics, because I know the way the show goes, the mom...
So my grandmother worked outside the house because my grandfather had a sickness that...
Well, I don't know the point of the last part, but I will say this, that your mother knew from the example of her own parents how to parent or...
Let me restart that and try and think of a better way to put it.
It's kind of a tough double negative to squeeze out, but...
Your mother saw her brothers descend into alcoholism, right?
Right. So whatever her parents were doing to prevent that didn't work.
Correct. So what did they do or not do that resulted in such a failure?
Passivity. Ah!
Passivity combined with enablement or something else?
Yes, absolutely. Yeah, that's a deadly cocktail right there.
And is that what happened?
It was. That was exactly what happened.
So... Would it be unfair...
It's a brutal thing to say, so I'm not saying all of this is conscious knowledge and so on.
But would it be unfair to say that your mother knew the outcome of what she was doing because she saw it happen to her own brothers?
Yeah, it's...
That's entirely possible, again, because her brothers were...
What am I trying to say here?
So your mom saw parental passivity facilitate the slide of her brothers into alcoholism, and she repeated, as far as I understand it, the same behavior with regards to your siblings that resulted in them sliding into alcoholism and one of them dying.
And what's going on with your sister?
So, she's not an alcoholic.
She drinks, but it wasn't too much.
I guess in some sense, you could say she's had a child from a previous marriage.
It didn't last very long. Two childs with her current marriage, and things seem to be going okay for her.
How long ago did your brother die?
Less than a year. Well, I assume things aren't going super great for her.
Didn't she facilitate your brother's introduction to drugs and drinking?
Absolutely. So in terms of her feelings towards my brother, they are steeped in anger and resentment towards him in many ways.
Wait, there's an emotion there that I was expecting that I didn't hear.
She doesn't take responsibility for it.
No guilt? Not really.
But again, and Jeff, correct me where I go astray.
I'm always trying to play catch-up with these conversations, but didn't your sister help facilitate his getting into drugs and drinking at an even younger age than she was?
She was 16, you say, and he was like 14.
Right, yeah. So what am I missing here?
She introduces a 14-year-old little boy or boy to drinking and drugs.
He ends up becoming an alcoholic.
Was he a drug abuser as well?
Yes. Okay, so she introduces him to alcohol and drugs.
He becomes an alcoholic and a drug abuser and dies at 30.
And she resents him for this?
What? Because she could handle it.
It didn't affect her in that way.
But she was older!
She was. By two years.
Those are two not insignificant years!
And... What does it matter?
We don't know in advance if smoking is going to kill us or not.
Smoking only kills half of smokers.
But if you introduce a kid to smoking and he dies of smoking and you're still alive, do you get to say, well, I shouldn't feel any guilt because I'm still fine.
It didn't affect me. I agree.
I mean, I don't mean to be harsh.
Your sister was 16, so, I mean, I have sympathy for that as well, but the fact that she said she felt anger and resentment towards him when she introduced him to the drink of the drugs that killed him, I mean, maybe I'm just old-fashioned, but it seems like something's kind of missing.
Yeah.
And I guess that gets to what I would consider the deeper question.
And that is that idea of the village elders that you've mentioned before, this idea of men protecting women from, in this case, their own bad choices, but certainly other men. But your father was protecting your mother's bad choices in enabling your siblings to drink and use drugs.
Which isn't protecting anyone.
It's endangering people.
It is. It absolutely is.
What if your brother had plowed into children?
That was the one thing that was not the case and added whatever you want to say that there wasn't anyone else hurt was a bit of solace, if you will.
Well, there may have been the people hurt that you don't know about in his life as an addict.
Right. Was your father the village elder who held people accountable?
Yeah, yeah, I think he was.
I mean, so in the village, you know, or in, let's see, let's see.
So I'm thinking of a friend of his who's also an officer.
Let's not bring anybody else into the mix.
I think we've got enough to work with, Jeff, just with your own family.
The pieces are on the table.
All right. Your sister introduces your brother to drinking and drugs when he's 14 years old.
What were the consequences for that behavior?
I'm guessing not from your mom, but your father, I assume, had more consequences.
Otherwise, there wouldn't have been any need for your mother to enable or to diffuse the consequences.
So what were the consequences for your sister introducing a 14-year-old to drinking and drugs?
Yeah, again, attempts to take away the car, other privileges.
No, no, what do you mean by attempts? I don't understand that.
It wasn't successful.
What does that mean, attempts? Maybe it's for a weekend or a week.
You know, you can't drive the car for a week.
Well, she gets the car back.
But who's...
Who's...
Who's... Who's lobbying for the car to be returned?
The young girl. And?
And the mom. And the mom.
And was the car returned because your mom thought it was a good idea or she's suffered enough or whatever?
Was the car returned against your father's preferences?
Yeah, somewhat.
I mean, his preferences, you know, were that this discipline would serve as a corrective measure and that the daughter in this case would not make that mistake again.
So, hey, you know, it's...
Wait, wait, what do you mean by mistake?
Breaking curfew? We generally shouldn't, I mean, we generally can't justly punish for mere mistakes, right?
It has to be some moral choice, some free will involved, some responsibility involved for punishment to be just, right?
Absolutely. So give me an example of why she would have the car taken away.
And I appreciate your patience with this.
I'm just trying to map it, Jeff. So what actions on behalf of your sister would result in the car being taken away?
I think it's usually just coming home after curfew.
I'm not sure what Her state was, whether she was, again, inebriated or under the influence at that time.
Did your parents know that she introduced your brother to drinking and drugs?
Not really.
And again, it's...
He's 14. Shouldn't they have some idea where he is and what he's doing?
If he's going out with your party or sister, or your partying sister, wouldn't they know that?
They would. And in that case, the only crime, if you will, is coming home late.
What? What do you mean? The only crime in taking a 14-year-old boy to a drinking and drugs party is coming home late?
What am I missing? They didn't know that they were drinking and doing drugs.
What do you mean they didn't know?
They didn't know your sister's friends?
They didn't know, they didn't meet their parents?
They didn't, I don't, you know, because everyone says, oh, the peer group is so important, but the parents have authority over the peer group.
They have authority on who's in the peer group.
They have authority on who their kids hang out with.
I mean, did your parents not know that there was drinking and drugs at the party that their 14-year-old and their 16-year-old were going to?
You would think that they would know that.
Would you like to know that when your daughter's 14?
Yes, absolutely.
Do you think you will? Yes, I will.
My question is, how could you not?
You'd have to be willfully ignorant.
I mean, if they give you the slip, you find out where the party is somehow, and you go.
And you embarrass the living shit out of them.
And take them home. Like, I don't know how a 14-year-old ends up at a party where he's doing drugs and he's drinking alcohol.
I don't know how that happens.
Honestly, I mean, I genuinely don't know.
Yeah, I think it happens way too frequently.
Again, you're normalizing. - Yeah, I'm just saying it's common.
It's become common. I went to parties, but I didn't participate that way.
I didn't want to disappoint my parents, as funny as that may sound, because I knew what their expectations were.
I realized the consequences of going down that path.
What age did you find out that your brother and sister were doing this?
Yeah, I mean, so I was probably 20, 2018, 19, 20, yeah.
So you were pretty when you found out that your 14-year-old brother was going to drinking and drugs parties?
Yeah. What happened?
I didn't get in his grill.
I didn't, you know, set him down.
I didn't...
What did you do?
I just went about my business.
You know, I continued...
Just went about the way of saying nothing? Yeah, pretty much.
I mean, I was focused on my, you know, class, school, you know, some work, that kind of stuff.
What do you think of that now? I wish I could go back.
What would you say? What would you do if you could go back?
I think this is one of the hard things as a man because part of me wants to physically accost him and shake him.
Shake him awake. There's that tendency to feel like I could I could mold him and shape him and convince him that if you realize all the pain that you're going to cause over the next 15 years, 16, then you wouldn't do this.
You wouldn't do this to yourself. You wouldn't do this to other people.
I don't know what argument I could give him.
I don't know what persuasive argument I could use to convince him not to do this.
Now that's interesting, Jeff.
I mean, a lot of what you say is very interesting, but this in particular.
Who's missing? The parents.
Right. Sister.
Parents, mostly.
Because you think it's about you shaking and guilting your brother.
What would you say to your parents?
Thank you.
Yeah, so I would, you know, there's a real danger there in terms of getting between My parents.
All of a sudden, I'm taking sides.
What do you mean between your parents?
I'm taking the side of, say, my father who wants to be more of a strict disciplinarian and against my mother who wants to be an enabler.
And I'm telling my mom she's wrong.
Okay, but what's wrong with telling your mom she's wrong?
I mean, we all can be wrong.
We all are wrong from time to time.
What's wrong with telling your mom she's wrong?
I'm 20 years old.
I'm still...
Yeah, and I still view my mom as someone that deserves my respect and deference.
Her child.
Alcoholism and drug addiction.
Well, yeah. Knowing now, to be able to go back, it would change the things I would say.
Let's just say it would be worth the fight, right, Jeff?
It definitely would be.
Okay, so what happens if you tell your mom she's wrong?
What happens if your father tells your mom she's wrong?
What are the consequences?
Because remember, this is a woman who thinks there shouldn't be many negative consequences to bad decisions or bad behavior, right?
So surely she would not inflict bad consequences on you or negative consequences I'm sure she wouldn't punish anyone for criticizing her,
right? I think you crack the nut in that sense, because the scale of justice, so to speak, in her mind, goes that criminal and near, whatever you want to say, not homicidal, but death, things that could cause death and crime and massive hardship and suffering in an entire family, those things could be excused.
How did you put it? You know, just disagreeing with her.
What happens, Jeff, if you disagree with your mom or you went back in time to disagree with your mom?
What are the consequences of disagreeing with your mom?
In many cases, I think it's either some veiled anger, some possible threats, and then radio silence and subversion.
Okay, okay. So veiled anger, what does that look like?
It could be an argument. You bring up all the bad stuff in the past.
Oh, you said this to me and you did this back then and this is all your fault because of how you were raised wrong and you yelled at me and you said this that time.
That's why you weren't there for us when you needed to be.
You were too busy working instead of taking care of the kids, this kind of thing or something like that.
That was a little bit of a blur.
If you could unpack that for me a little more, please.
So, the veiled anger tends to come in the form of a litany or a list of past ills that discredit the person.
In this case, my father, in some cases, you know, if I were to do it, I'm not, you know, I'm sure that there would be...
Again, I rarely argued with my mom, but I observed my mom arguing with my dad, and it was a list of things that he did that discredit him from being able to take that stand.
Okay, so she goes for character assassination if somebody criticizes her specific choices.
Right. Is that right?
Yeah, yeah, I think it is.
Yeah, but, I mean, ad hominem is not a particularly valid argument, right?
No, but it can silence the critics.
Well, it certainly seems to have silenced one member of the family.
And what was the second one?
Veiled anger. Oh, threats.
What were the threats? Um...
Yeah, I mean, I don't know if it's withholding or...
Like the silent treatment?
Yeah, that would kind of follow on, but it was almost...
I mean, I got like...
Yeah, um...
So, let's say that the threats to me may have been behind closed doors, or the conversations between mom and dad, where there's...
Yeah, I don't know what goes on there.
I just know that... Have you seen her, like, the threats?
The threats are of what?
I mean, it's not like I'm going to burn you to the ground in your sleep.
I mean, it's not that, right?
Is it like this cold, chilly heart of stone that some women can, I guess some men too, but some women can sort of generate?
None shall pass the avenues of my heart until whatever I get my way.
Like the withdrawal.
Yeah, that's it.
Yes. Yeah, that's exactly it.
Because it wasn't a threat to leave, anything like that.
It wasn't a threat to leave either.
You know, that's kind of, as we've talked, I thought to myself, that was never really on the table.
Right. And what do you think, I mean, this is very speculative, so I understand that, but just if you have a gut sense, Jeff, what do you think...
Would have happened if people had just kept going.
Because when we criticize people, sometimes they have strategies.
They put up barriers.
If they don't have the ego strength to handle criticism.
In other words, if they have that combination of insecurity and vanity that the Simple Minds song talks about.
If they have this combination of...
The need for perfection to cover up a feeling of emptiness.
Then they have a series of strategies that they use.
I mean, listen, trust me, man.
I'm with you in the trenches, Jeff, insofar as I would not...
Hang a portrait of my own mother, say, in the hall of those who are great with criticism, who take criticism and who roll with it and who grow with it and who you get closer to because you've talked to them honestly about what you think and feel.
So... I know what it's like to have criticisms of someone and to have this ever escalating series of maneuvers and aggressions and manipulations and hostilities and withdrawals and so on.
There's this whole series of tactics.
Designed to throw you off the scent, to make this sort of climb up of this ever steeper, ever more greased hill of hostility and coldness to just make you kind of give up and slide back down.
I know what it's like to try and bring truth and reason to people and maybe even in this conversation, like hit a whole series of defenses, right?
But what happens if you push through?
Those defenses. What happens if you just walk past them like they're not there?
What happens if you get inside the secret chamber?
What happens if you get inside the defenses and stand firm with your criticism?
What happens then?
I don't know, because I never got there.
But the reason you never got there was because you have a theory about what's in there, right?
Think of a whole bunch of boxes, right?
Six boxes in a row, right?
And I think in the sixth box is a feral badger.
Now in the other box, stuff I want, right?
And so while I open the first five boxes, man, I'm not opening that sixth box.
Well, that's because I have a theory about what's in there.
I have a thesis about what's in there.
So the reason that you backed down in the face of this escalation, in the face of this fogging, these defenses, these aggressions, this coldness, this withdrawal, the reason that you stopped, Jeff, is because you had a theory or a hypothesis about what happened if you kept going.
What is that hypothesis?
So, okay, so what's that?
I don't want to avoid this because I'm thinking about the situation where Okay, so I have to reflect on more of my mom and dad, right?
My dad did press because he's very logical, rational, hard-nosed, stubborn at times, bullheaded.
So he would press, press, press.
And eventually, again, my mom would close down and...
And then subvert on the side.
So what's in the box of pressing, pressing through?
What does subvert on the side mean?
That it's maybe a tacit, you know, face agreement, but then allowing, say, the kids to go out, or whatever that looks like later on.
Oh, so she would pretend to agree and then lie and betray her implicit promise, is that right?
Right. That is some pretty weaselly shit, I'll tell you that.
And it breaks trust, right?
It does. Were you allowed to break your word to your mom?
No. Ah, wait a minute.
A mom with a double standard.
Well, I guess we finally found one.
Ah, husbands have it too.
All right. So she would say, okay, I agree, but then she would back out of it and...
Yeah, and even as you described this, the rational, logical side, it's all feely.
It's all touchy-feely. It's abstract, random, touchy-feelyness.
So it's very hard to crack that.
Wait, what do you mean by that? That the logical connections of A to B to C. If we do this, this will happen.
Do you agree that there's a high probability of B happening if we do A? Even that level of thinking, just smoke comes out of her ears.
It doesn't necessarily compute that way.
Because I know I've had it in arguments with women where you sort of make the logical case and they feel like you're trying to entrap them or they're always looking down the road to see what the consequences of agreement are.
They just can't follow along with each step.
Right. So I'm going to bail.
I'm going to bail out. I'm going to exit the...
I see what you're trying to do.
You're trying to... It's like, no, I'm just making a case here.
I'm just building the case, right?
Right. If A, then B. If B, then C. Yeah.
I know what D is.
I'm not going... It's like, well, no, this is not...
You know, jumping down to the conclusions and then denying the process is not rational, right?
It isn't. Yeah.
Yeah, I mean, this... Yeah.
Yeah. This kind of thinking has gotten me to the point where I believe so much of what we think about in our lives as human beings is that syllogism of premise one, what's true.
And then premise two is, do you believe that it's true?
And if you believe that it's true, the conclusion is you must act on it.
Well, sure. I mean, what's the point of reasoning through stuff if it doesn't change your behavior?
And what's the point of having random behavior?
I mean, that's just disastrous all around.
I mean, who drives you to an unknown place without turning on a GPS or checking a map?
I mean, it's just a recipe for wandering around back lanes and you run out of gas.
Right. Yeah.
So the choice is people choose to believe whatever they want to believe so they can avoid the truth.
And if they choose not to believe it, then they don't have to act on it.
And this continues.
I don't mean to get too theoretical, but that's how I see a lot of these types of things.
I appreciate that. I'm sorry, so what happened with your father when your father would push?
So would he eventually get to a place where your mother would pretend to give in but then undermine later on?
Yeah. And when he found out about that, what happened?
He would get angry and accuse her of undermining him.
And then what would happen?
And repeat, recycle, the same process of, you know, some anger, some litany of...
So your mother faced no consequences for her bad decisions and she transferred that virus to her kids?
Yeah, I think so.
I mean, what would the consequences be?
What do you think the consequences would be or should be for her making promises and breaking promises?
I don't know. You know, again, as a husband, what are the consequences to a wife?
The first thing you do is you try not to marry someone like that.
I mean, I hate to be that blunt, but I hope you didn't, and I'm sure you didn't if you're calling in here.
No, I didn't, actually, and that's one of the encouraging things.
People will pull their bullshit on you as long as that bullshit works.
Right. Right. I mean, I know this.
I mean, I won't get it.
So yeah, people will just keep pulling.
Like, I'm telling you, Jeff, I hope you'll listen back to this conversation.
Because you're telling me, well, there was no dysfunction in my family.
And you, I'm sure you believe it, in the moment.
My parents were happily married.
40 years they've been married.
My sister, well, she just had a rebellious streak.
You have taken this virus of excuses and giving people outs and taking away their agency.
And your sister is angry at the child she helped corrupt.
And your mother hates it when you break words and punishes you.
Punishes. There are negative consequences for defying your mother's will, for calling her out.
On her falsehoods, on her manipulations, on her fundamental errors as a parent.
I don't mean everything that she did was wrong, but I mean there were mistakes.
Usually when there's a dead son from addiction, it's entirely conceivable that there was a mistake or two along the way.
And so your mother inflicted negative consequences to people who questioned her.
So she has no problem whatsoever with negative consequences.
Right, Jeff? Negative consequences should accrue to people who question me.
Right? Right.
People who question me must be punished.
But my daughter introduces a 14-year-old boy to the drugs and alcohol that will kill him.
But she should get the keys later.
No negative consequences there.
Really. Really. But you try crossing her will.
Boom! Right?
She can break her word.
Don't even bring it up.
You break your word.
Boom! I'm sorry?
She has the right to change her mind.
She's whatever, the merciful judge or the compassionate whoever.
She can give mercy.
She's loving. She's loving.
She's loving, but you can't be honest with her if you have a negative thought in your head, right?
Right. You must be punished for honesty.
You must be punished for feedback.
You must be punished for truth.
You must be punished for intimacy.
My love, my approval, Is dependent on your obedience.
My love requires your obsequiousness.
I only kiss those with bowed heads on bended knees.
If you fail to please me, I will punish you.
That's highly conditional, you understand.
And that is not a strong bond.
It is fundamentally humiliating to have to praise people out of fear.
You understand? It is fundamentally alienating and lonely to feel that your only value is false approval.
That you must kneel and worship.
The great goddess of the family for fear of being punished.
That's very painful. That's very humiliating.
And maybe to deal with that lack of a bond, to deal with that pain, to deal with that humiliation, to deal with that shame, to deal with that hated obsequiousness, it's vaguely possible.
That a drink in a bong might look pretty good.
To escape those feelings.
Because in that hierarchy of values, Jeff, introducing a 14-year-old to the Jeff, introducing a 14-year-old to the drink and the drugs that will kill him,
is far less egregious in action than criticizing mommy.
Yeah, I agree with you.
I hear you loud and clear, Stefan.
Because one of those things, there should be no real consequences, but another one of those things must be ferociously punished and stopped at all costs.
Yeah. So real men are more assertive, not aggressive, but assertive enough to Press on, press through. You're honest.
Honesty is the first virtue.
You don't have honesty, you've got nothing.
You know, you're honest.
If somebody says, you can't criticize me, it's like, why?
Are you perfect? Was your mom critical of other people at all?
Not so much, but the perfect side of things was there, you know.
Yeah. I'm trying to think.
I wouldn't say that she was judgmental or kind of like, you know, poking holes in other people or pointing out all the flaws in other people.
I think she was happy just to try and be and look as perfect as she could.
Well, that was a bit of a trick question, Jeff.
I apologize. I hope I'm not being manipulative.
But of course your mother was critical.
Your mother was very critical of people who criticized her?
That's true.
Yeah.
You've got to watch this stuff, right?
You've got to be alert. You've got to be with it.
And I know this is a drinking from the high fire hose of new perspective.
But here's the thing, like...
Yeah, it's hard to view myself in that role.
It's hard to view myself as the one who's being criticized.
Or the one that's being attacked.
Right. Right.
Right. And I don't know, like, I don't know if your brother would have survived or not, if the family dynamics have been different.
I don't know. I'm not a psychologist.
I'm just telling you what I think.
But I will say that I don't pretend to have relationships with people I can't be honest with.
Like, if I can't tell people the truth, if I can't tell them what I think, it doesn't mean I'm right!
I mean, you've listened to this show, every single show, the call-in shows in particular, half the time I'm saying, I don't know, this is just my thoughts.
This is not proven. This is not an established thesis.
This is just my opinion. You understand?
When I say this is what I think, I don't mean I'm right and it's some absolute truth.
It's just what I think. I can't be in relationships where I can't be honest.
I hate those fucking bladed little mazes where you can't say this and then you can't say that and then you can't bring up that last thing and you can't bring up that thing before and you can't...
It's like that fucking garbage thing in Star Wars.
You know, it closes and gets smaller and smaller and finally you just can't say anything.
And there's a snake in there just looking to grab you and suck you down.
Oh, Christ, that would be a blessing.
Fuck, drag me down.
End it now. I can't live in this sugar cube.
The snake would be a godsend!
Oh, boy. There's my rendition of Genesis.
So, like, I rebel and push back against these relationships where I have to shut up.
Where there's petty, vicious local censorship.
I won't do it.
I can't do it. I can't do it.
I had to grow up like that.
I don't have to live like that now.
I won't. It's the only homage I can give to the suffering and the silencing of my younger self to speak the fucking truth now.
Speak the truth or the heavens fall.
Speak the truth, though, society cracks.
If it cracks in the face of the truth, well, guess what?
That's how the light gets in.
And I can't do it.
And Jeff, if you want to protect your children from being manipulated and used and abused and controlled...
You speak the truth.
You speak the truth to the people in your life.
You don't let bullies win.
Children are constantly scanning their environment as they grow up, and they're asking themselves, Jeff, one question and one question only.
What works?
You understand? Not because they're amoral, but because they're DNA-based life forms that want to reproduce.
What works?
What works? And if...
If they see that bullying works, if they see that manipulation works, if they see that punishment and withdrawal and forcing people to kneel in a sewer of false shit around you all the time, if they see that that works, boom.
They'll learn that like a Japanese kid learns Japanese.
Hi, Jared! Right?
So, if you want your kids to be safe, and I massively respect the question, then accept no substitutes for honesty.
You know, I'm not talking like autistic honesty.
You know, you've got a boner at the sub shop.
Hey, I have a... You know what I mean?
I'm not saying this like overshare.
But where things are important and where there's a relationship, you're honest.
You're honest. If you refuse to be silenced, that transfers the virtue of honesty.
And the one thing that is true about dangerous people is they're always manipulative.
They're always manipulative.
And if you want your kids to be safe from manipulators, show them the consistent virtue of honesty.
Do not worship the tiny gods of silencing.
Thank you.
Do not kneel before the empty altar of insecurity and do not crush your independence and your thought and your virtue for the sake of appeasing those whose existence is somehow fed through avoidance and how they are somehow filled up with emptiness and consider themselves content.
Just be honest.
Tell the truth. And if your children see that, Well, as Polonius says, above all else, to thine own self be true, and then it shall follow as night follows day.
Thou canst not be false to anyone.
Speak the truth, do not be silenced.
And then the corruptors and the psychos, as you call them, and the moralizing, virtue-signaling manipulators...
We'll avoid your children like the plague.
Because to liars, honesty is a fatal disease of the soul for them.
Or the soulless, I should say.
Protect them with straight-faced, open eye-contact honesty in the world.
and they will walk through corruption like Moses through the Red Sea, parting it on either side.
Thanks a lot, Stephen.
I really do appreciate it.
You're very welcome. And Jeff, thank you so much for your honesty in the conversation tonight.
I hope it works out well.
I'm sure it will. And I really, really appreciate you having the chat.
And thanks everyone so much for listening to this Free Domain Media Show.
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