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Aug. 28, 2017 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

03:44:51

3806 Former ‘Antifa’ Speaks Out - Call In Show - August 23rd, 2017

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	Hey, hey, hey everybody, Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain Radio.
	I hope you're doing magnificently, my friends, my boon companions in this journey to truth.
	Please don't forget to help out the show at freedomainradio.com slash donate.
	Follow me on Twitter at Stefan Molyneux and use our affiliate link, if you will, for some shopping you have to do at fdurl.com slash Amazon.
	Wow, what a set of calls tonight.
	The first caller was a woman who wanted to know Whether it was worth avoiding public school for her kids, and her husband was supposed to be there, turns out he couldn't make it, but we had a very deep conversation about why she gets so angry at her son, In particular, and a deep family history call there.
	Second caller was a victim of diversity, a white male businessman who has provided excellent service to a particular client for many years, who then was told he was no longer welcome to provide those services because he was not a minority-owned business or a woman-owned business, and we talked about that.
	The third caller sent to us pretty much an alphabet soup of syllogisms, which I actually appreciate.
	It's good to Now the fourth caller.
	Yes, best for last, perhaps.
	The fourth caller is a former radical leftist.
	And he left the movement after growing concerns about its tendencies towards violence.
	And we started, of course, not necessarily with the ideology, but with the personal history, which was explosive and highly revelatory.
	And we talked about what goes on in these organizations, how they operate, How they recruit, how they groom.
	Very, very important information to have in this growing conflict, which still remains largely in the realm of free speech, but may not stay there forever.
	So I hope you will really, really listen to that.
	And thanks everyone so much for your support.
	Alright, well at first today we have Chrissy, and Chrissy was going to call in with her husband, but unfortunately he couldn't make it today.
	She said, As of last month, our finances became strained since we unexpectedly are carrying two mortgages.
	Our plans to place both children in private school may have to be cancelled.
	Thank you. My plan to only be at work while the kids are at school may also have to change to me working full-time hours and the kids moving from school to aftercare.
	I'm very frugal with the money I spend.
	I feel my husband is more of a spender than I am, but there are certain expenses he is unwilling to cut.
	What more can I sacrifice to truly put my kids first?
	How can I convey to my husband that we both don't need to be chasing finances while finances are tight?
	That's from Chrissy. Hey Chrissy, how you doing?
	Good, how are you? Well, thanks.
	I'm sorry that your husband couldn't make it.
	He was invited, but something came up.
	How are you ending up with the two mortgages?
	So, it's never happened to us before.
	We've sold a lot of homes since we've been married in our nine years together.
	And that's how we've been also making our money.
	Sold a lot of what? Houses, sorry.
	Oh, okay. You said phones.
	Okay. Houses.
	Got it. All right. Sold a lot of houses.
	Yeah. So we'd buy it at a low price or in a good market that we saw was climbing, put some money into it, sell it again.
	It's always worked out for us recently.
	Yeah. I mean, it's, you know, Chinese people need a place not to live as well.
	So that's important.
	Right. So...
	Being Canadian, you understand this, but maybe Americans don't know that the housing market just changed.
	Some new regulations came through in end of May, beginning of June, and that was to deter foreign buyers.
	So right away, the housing market seized up, and we sold two weeks after that happened.
	So our expectation for what we would sell for was About $150,000 less.
	Nevertheless, even though the buyer agreed upon that price, the housing market regulations continued to affect the market so they were dropping further.
	So today, as it sits, we expect it's probably going to sell another $100,000 less than that.
	When it came to closing, we were supposed to sit at the table and our lawyer prepared the papers and they never showed up.
	So what they're doing is completely illegal.
	They disappeared on us.
	It's unfortunate. We will be suing them with a litigation lawyer, but in the meantime, we have to get the house ready for sale again, this time with nobody living in it, and Put it back on the market and accept a lower price than what we paid for the new house.
	Sorry to interrupt.
	The regulations you're talking about, they were...
	I know that there's some stuff out in Vancouver that put a tax on condos that are not inhabited.
	I mean, some crazy number.
	I was talking to someone from Vancouver the other day.
	Some crazy number of condos are bought as investment by foreign buyers, largely Chinese, and not lived in.
	Is it those regulations?
	Is it other ones? Yeah, they're trying to deter any foreign buyers, so there's some of that.
	I don't know, honestly, all of the different ones.
	I just know that some of it is going to be like, if they know you're not a citizen, then they're going to make you pay more tax on land transfer or acquiring or whatever they can do to dissuade foreign buyers so that Canadian buyers can get into the market.
	At the end of the day, it's positive for younger families and first-time buyers that are Canadian who would never be able to afford a home.
	Yeah. Well, it just shows you how things like zoning and restrictions on building houses leads to more regulations because there's an undersupply of houses.
	And of course, what, 400,000 immigrants crashing into Canada every year driving up the price of housing.
	So you get these government programs called zoning and immigration, which then result in more government programs called suppress foreign buyers, which, you know, just makes everything such a roller coaster.
	Yeah. So it's good for Canadians.
	I'm not... Or against the regulations.
	I don't know enough about them.
	I don't have the time to research.
	But in the meantime, this is the first time we've been caught up in all of this.
	We were selling a house that was in a market that was growing so rapidly that we had to put our money there, even though we didn't want to live in that community.
	We just knew that it was such a good bet, I guess.
	And although it grew all that amount, we didn't get out soon enough.
	So you were riding a wave.
	Yeah. We knew it was a wave.
	No, you knew it was a wave.
	But, you know, I don't want to use the term flipping because that sounds kind of derogatory, you know, flipping houses and so on.
	No, no. But you weren't putting a lot of value at.
	You were acquiring houses.
	You were waiting for the price to go up and then you were selling them, right?
	No, we were doing a lot of...
	Like, construction and remodeling.
	We were flipping. It's fine.
	It's not the rock toy to me.
	But it wouldn't have been as valuable if the general house prices weren't going up, right?
	Right. Because, I mean, for you to buy and to renovate doesn't make a whole lot of sense relative to, like in a more free market environment, it wouldn't make a hell of a lot of sense relative to someone just buying a place and putting the stuff in that they wanted, right?
	Well... So the houses we acquired was very carefully selected, so it had to be in a market that was growing, that we knew was going to double in price in the next year, or a lot of specifics to the neighborhood.
	So we have been moving neighborhoods for this reason, because we could see when it was coming up.
	And did you make some good money from doing this?
	Yeah, over time.
	So you had some savings, right?
	Well, we don't have, like, savings in the bank, but we're safe for RRSPs, our kids can all go to school, and they're five and four, so, you know, they're quite a while away from it, but we have life insurance, we have...
	No, but what I mean is you had significant, you could say sort of windfall profits, but in any kind of situation where you're getting excessive profit, that's not going to last, right?
	Yeah. And excessive is one of these socialistic terms.
	I don't mean that at all, but I just mean that where you're in an environment where prices are rising faster than can be sustained, at some point there's going to be a crash.
	So I'm going to assume you put some money aside for when things didn't work out because something like this was going to happen, right?
	Sooner or later, Housing Marketing Canada is going to correct and it's going to be a pretty brutal thing.
	Right. So this is kind of a secondary issue.
	Our main form of income is that my husband owns his own business and it's rapidly growing into more and more locations and that's doing well.
	So the flipping thing is kind of a secondary income because it was...
	I don't know how to explain it.
	Almost like a hobby. I get a general sense of the family finances, Chrissy.
	Help me understand.
	Just give me a ballpark figure of how much gross you might be likely to make from working full-time.
	Just roughly. I don't need anything down to the last dollar.
	If I were to work full-time now, I'm thinking between what I'm being offered right now, taking some interviews, is between $32,000, which we feel is too low, to $42,000.
	I think that's generally what I could make.
	So that would be your cost before school, after school, care, clothing, commuting, the need for a second car, maybe you already have one, and taxes.
	Right. So how would you be making any money?
	I don't know. So I don't understand why you'd want to go to work.
	I mean, maybe if you were making, I don't know, some crazy quarter million dollars a year, well, okay, then you can hire 12 nannies, whatever, I don't know, right?
	But if you're going to be making 32 to 40k, Canadian, just want to remind everyone, Canadian, then I don't see how on earth it's going to be economically worthwhile to put your kids in school.
	I don't see either, but I don't know.
	Then we've solved our problem, then, haven't we?
	Okay, goodbye. Um, I don't know.
	I think it's just my husband's business is seasonal sometimes and he is a good saver, but, uh, he just, I think emotionally he feels like if I had just a steady income, even if it's a very little bit, even if it could just Pay for the house taxes or pay for the lights or just one element.
	So basically, okay.
	I don't know if it's a feminism thing.
	I have no idea. No, no, no. Okay, forget all this emotional crap, right?
	Because we're just dealing with a spreadsheet here, okay?
	I'm sorry to be so abrupt.
	Okay, so let's just make it easy.
	You get 40k a year, right?
	Yeah. So that's, I don't know what, $900 a week or something like that.
	So, you know, $3,500 or so.
	Just off the top of my head, $3,500 or so a month, right?
	And you're going to be paying, I don't know, $1,500 of that in taxes, leaving you, I don't know, $20 to $2,500 a month.
	You've got two kids in private school.
	That's going to be $800, $900 a month.
	You're done. Right.
	If concern is for future income, then having you stay home And getting rid of a second car if you don't need it.
	I mean, depending on where you are relative to public transit.
	I grew up, I didn't have a car until I was in my 30s.
	There was no car in my family when we grew up.
	We survived. So you're going to be exposing yourself to a significant future liability if you want two kids in private school because they're going to get embedded in that school.
	That's how their education is going to go.
	That's where their friendships are going to sprout up.
	And then if you need to change that at some point in the future...
	Like, let's say you lose your job or his business slows down, well, you still have this, like, you know, $1,500 to $2,000 a month after-tax burn of two kids in private school, and it's going to be pretty heartbreaking to have to change that if family circumstances change.
	Whereas if you're home, you have that flexibility.
	You're not signing up for that, you know, 15 years of $2,000 a month stuff for 10 months a year, right?
	Okay. So, if I'm home, you're saying if I'm home without the private school?
	Yeah. Well, if you're home, sending your kids to private school doesn't make much sense.
	Certainly, I'm sure if you listen to this show, you're probably smart enough to educate them through the end of university, but you can certainly handle it through junior high if you need to, right?
	Right. That's like a no-go for my husband.
	He doesn't believe in homeschooling at all.
	He has this massive stigma against it, and I haven't been able to break down that wall, and I don't know why.
	Yeah, see, tell me why he's not here, Chrissy.
	He's fixing the other house.
	So that's a higher priority than this.
	Right. I know it's not imminently sold, because you're just talking about legal action, and Lord knows the legal system moves like slow molasses on a frozen ass's leg.
	So this is nothing imminent, so he chose to go and do that rather than stay here, which I think is important.
	Because this is important stuff, right?
	So what the hell is he doing somewhere else?
	He's trying to fix it for, like, the real estate agents are coming to take photos tomorrow, and then it's being relisted, so he's on a deadline for that.
	Right. But, yeah.
	So, what does it mean? So, I don't, like, I don't, maybe I have a unique marriage, Chrissy, maybe.
	Okay. Maybe I'm way off the beaten path as far as this goes.
	I don't know how one person in a marriage gets to lay down the law for the other person.
	I don't believe in homeschooling.
	No, no, no, I've seen it.
	Well, it's not valid. Well, the studies show that it is.
	Well, no, like I don't, I don't have that.
	And my wife doesn't have that grenade, so to speak, you know?
	No, like I don't.
	How does that work?
	Does he just get to say no to stuff that affects your entire parenting and stuff?
	So we based it off hockey, being Canadian.
	We have this kind of rule between us that the no wins.
	So whoever says no, that's who wins.
	Okay, good. So you can say, no, no, I'm not going to work.
	Oh, look, you just solved the whole problem.
	Not an argument. Okay.
	Well, I think it comes from if you're uncomfortable, we can't make the other one uncomfortable.
	But you're not asking him to homeschool.
	You'd be homeschooling, right? Right.
	So, I mean, his day is relatively unaffected, right?
	Right. He gets up, he goes to work, you take care of the kids and you enjoy your parenting time with them.
	And, you know, homeschooling, man, you can get a lot of education in.
	In a very short amount of time.
	You know, you think of kids in a public or private school, think of kids in a school, you know, how much concentrated time do they get from the teacher every day?
	20 minutes? 25 minutes?
	Maybe 30 minutes? And then there's a lot of, you know, for guys at least, you know, putting...
	You know, putting those markers together in a row and having sword fights in the corner hoping no one's going to notice.
	Whereas if you're home and schooling, you can really get concentrated time and you can also get time when you're telling stories.
	You can also, you know, flip through the newspaper or magazine and talk about what's going on in the world.
	You can go to a wide variety of websites to have them take quizzes and so on.
	You know, there's a lot more quality education that can go on at home without all of that freaky-deaky, hey, let's teach you about anal sex when you're nine stuff, if nine is now too old these days.
	So, you know, it's your life that he's trying to organize with his no.
	Surely the person whose life is most affected gets a little bit more of a say.
	Am I wrong? I didn't form that argument.
	That's a good point, yes.
	Would you rather be working for some place for 35k a year or would you rather be showing the wonders of the world to your children?
	Every part of me thinks that's wrong.
	So like, unfortunately, I think the other thing is there's a little bit of a bait and switch with us because when I got married, I thought I was a feminist and, you know, Even, like, we're going to have kids and I'm going to work because I don't want you to work too hard.
	I'm going to be dependent on that man.
	I'm going to make the courts dependent on, I'm going to make him dependent on fending me for the fun of that.
	Okay, well, of course, the fact that you're not that kind of feminist anymore, I'm sure he doesn't want to change that part of things, right?
	Right. Oh, no. I mean, this last year, especially, like, I don't know.
	Our relationship got a lot better because I started this.
	I don't know. I think it was because of Jordan Peterson.
	But anyway, I just started to appreciate him more and, you know, Really push myself into, like, this is my role, being at home, taking care of my husband and my kids.
	Yeah, he wanted to have kids.
	He wanted to have kids, I assume.
	You didn't, like, oopsie him twice, right?
	No. So he wanted to have kids.
	And, you know, his life, his life is a working...
	Like, there's a reason why feminists want women to go work outside the home.
	It's because if you're a career feminist, you're a career woman, and you're not married...
	Then you don't have someone organizing your household for you, so you really have a tough time competing with men.
	This is one of the reasons why they're always trying to convince their male colleagues or competitors' wives to go work.
	Because when both of you are working and there are kids in the picture, your life becomes crap.
	Crap! I mean, you know how it works.
	You blast it out.
	You know, you never get enough sleep because you never have enough time to do everything.
	And you get out of bed, you know, 7, 7.30 in the morning.
	Your kids are tired. They've been...
	You know, maybe they want to get up in the morning.
	Yeah, and you've got to drag them up.
	You've got to snap them. You've got to get them ready for the bus or drop them off or whatever it is.
	And, you know, there's a big mess everywhere.
	And then you've got to run off to work.
	And you're bored. And you're tired.
	And you're missing your kids.
	And then you're worrying how they're doing.
	And every time the phone rings, it's like, oh, is there a problem at the daycare?
	Is there a problem at the school?
	Is there a mean kid around?
	Is there a mean teacher? Is something bad going on?
	Is there a fight? Is there a problem?
	Is my son, as you point out, kind of hyper?
	Is he considered too hyper?
	Are they going to want to drive? And then you barrel out of work.
	And Lord forbid, you're actually in the middle of something at like 4.53 or something like that.
	Or you're in a meeting and you've got to sweat it out.
	And you've got to battle traffic and it's slow and you've got to go and pick up your kids from the daycare.
	And if you're late, it's a big problem.
	And then you've got to get home and then you've got to get them unpacked.
	And you're trying to ask them how their day was and everyone's kind of spaced out and disconnected.
	Then you've got to throw some food at them, get them bathed and get them to bed.
	It sucks. I've seen it up close.
	Chrissy, it's a terrible, terrible life.
	I don't want to do it.
	I don't know. Okay, so his argument sometimes is that, well, he comes home late.
	He has the kind of job that would not support a working wife.
	Like, he needs me at home.
	He doesn't want to admit it, maybe, but he works all sorts of hours.
	He's never available to Like, watch the kids ever.
	Yeah, if you have two people, and heaven forbid, a kid is sick.
	And they will be. Right?
	I mean, there's a certain phase where kids go through and, you know, you open the window upstairs and they get a cold in the basement.
	You know, it's just the way it goes.
	And if your husband has a kind of non-flexible job and you have a kind of non-flexible job, the children will pay the price.
	But sorry, Chrissy, go ahead. Yeah, so...
	We were saying that...
	I don't know. He thinks I should work.
	And then...
	I can't remember.
	But what? It's not going to make you any money.
	It makes your life more complicated and other people end up raising your kids.
	I don't understand. Like, help me understand the logic here.
	It makes no sense to me at all.
	I remember he was, I was gonna say, like, it's, I think he has this idea of how it's going to be because of TV or whatever, but he grew up in a home where his mom was always there when he was home.
	When he went to school, she volunteered.
	And does he like his mother, Chrissy?
	Yeah, oh, like, the two of them should be an example for how mothers and children should be.
	Beautiful! So he had the wonderful example of a stay-at-home mom, but his children, you gotta go to work, right?
	And I had a stay-at-home mom, but we don't have a good relationship.
	So I think, I don't know, I think that's his fear or he thinks that I'm repeating her patterns.
	My parents had at one point bought a homeschooling program for some of my siblings and didn't teach them.
	So they were left to kind of learn on their own and that did not work.
	So I think that also adds to his perception that homeschooling doesn't work.
	Because in the end, my siblings had to go back to the public system.
	Right, because... Yeah, well, my parents were neglectful.
	At the end of the day, they neglected doing the stay-at-home thing very positively.
	They neglected doing homeschooling positively.
	But that's just one example, and I don't know.
	I guess it's the closest one or the only one.
	Does he think that you're better than that?
	Um, no, maybe.
	Like, one of his arguments he brings up is that, oh, because he comes home late, and I've never, like, I'll have a moment where I can see adults alone once every three or four months.
	Like, it's very infrequent.
	Um, so, so he comes home late.
	I'm tired. I'm snapping at the kids, and I don't want to be that type of parent.
	I'm Attempting to be a peaceful parent as much as I can.
	Wait, sorry, he's talking about himself?
	No, me. You would come home late and be snapping at the kids.
	He comes home late generally.
	Like, every night he's home late.
	He's just coming in for dinner.
	The kids are having dinner or we're starting dinner and maybe, like, my son is jumping on the couches and I'm like, you know, get off the couch, sit down.
	I've already asked you that. You know, I'm at that point in the night where I'm repetitive and I'm not...
	Speaking in my kindest voice.
	And he's saying to me that, you know, I'm not...
	If I stayed out of the house and I worked the whole day, then when I see them, I'd appreciate them.
	And I wouldn't be so snippy and angry.
	I think I'd just be more tired and angry.
	And I wouldn't get all the good stuff that we do in the day.
	Wait, so you would be more tired...
	If you had a job and you were a parent than if you were just a parent.
	Right, but for some reason he thinks that we'd have better quality time because there'd be less of it.
	So I would try to really give it my all.
	I don't know. I think it's a bad argument.
	How often do you get this sort of snippy and angry stuff going on?
	Just every evening.
	Every day? Come on, Chrissy.
	What are you doing? I'm tired.
	I don't know. And what are you tired of?
	Well, I think it's just physically my energy level.
	My son has a lot of energy.
	We took him to the pediatrician and he's ADHD, they say.
	And now I'm in between doctors, so I haven't done anything about it.
	But the suggestion is eventually you'll have to be on some kind of medication.
	However, during the day, we can talk about Electronics, math, science, like he's five years old, he can do really incredible things for someone his age.
	So he's very intelligent.
	Yeah, but he also doesn't have to sit still while we do it.
	Like, I can teach him math by drawing on the walls in the bathroom.
	My daughter thinks by walking.
	She thinks by walking. If we're having an intense conversation about something deep or challenging intellectually, I mean, she'll leave footprints on the ceiling.
	She just gets up and walks.
	And I'm the same way.
	You know, I write now on a treadmill.
	I've written while walking for years.
	I do my show standing up.
	I find that when I sit, my whole energy collapses in like an old busted tent.
	So I think that this is what pulls me towards the...
	Okay, so in my mind, I've excluded the chance of doing homeschooling because my husband thinks I'm not qualified to do it at the end of the day.
	He has this stigma against moms that anyone who's in the school system is more highly educated than just any mom off the street.
	I guess that's the big first hurdle he has.
	You taught your kids how to read.
	I taught him.
	He could read in junior kindergarten.
	Does he think that teaching kids multiplication or division is more complicated than teaching them how to read?
	Yeah, I guess he does because it's next in the school lineup, right?
	Right. I want to get back to your snappiness.
	Okay. So, on my side, trying to deal with that, I tried to see if it was hormonal, and I went to a very...
	How do I do this?
	I went to kind of out of the normal way of doing things.
	So, there's some fertility doctors who usually help you achieve pregnancy, but I overheard another lady who had Fertility problems explain that they do it through managing your hormones and that they find sometimes like that's women with similar cycles have a proximity to cancers and and so that they in this way like they they they monitor it and they solve problems so I I noticed because I am not taking birth control and um I think I'm going to have to stop you.
	I apologize. I'm asking you a fairly direct question, and I think I've had now three or four massive avoidances and excuses.
	Okay. My son is hyper.
	He might have ADHD. I might need to drug him.
	I'm tired. It could be my hormones.
	Come on. Yeah. Come on.
	You know, this is a philosophy show where you've got to take ownership for what you do.
	Okay. Right? Okay.
	So why do you have permission?
	Why do you give yourself permission to be snippy and angry?
	You've given me a lot of excuses, which guarantees that the behavior is going to continue.
	And Chrissy, the reason I'm asking you this is because I want you to be able to stay home.
	But if you're snipping and angry with your kids, if your husband comes home, you say he comes home late.
	It's not late if he's always late.
	It's just on time, right?
	But if he comes home and he sees you snapping with the kids, that's not going to be easy to sell him on homeschooling, right?
	That's right. Okay, so the question I have is...
	If you were at work and you were tired, would you be snippy and snappy and angry at your boss?
	No. So you can change it.
	You can control it, right?
	My patients, yeah. I mean, to take a silly example, if a cop knocked on the door because you'd left your garage door open or something, you'd be like, Officer, I'm busy!
	Okay, yeah. You understand?
	Yeah. So you can control this behavior.
	My question is, why don't you?
	I'm not trying to answer that.
	No, no. No, you're specifically trying to not answer it.
	You're specifically trying to give me a no free will argument.
	It's my son's fault.
	It's my hormone's fault. It's right.
	Yep. You're right.
	Well, I read that it's hard to give up the anger because you get something out of it.
	And I don't know what I'm getting out of it.
	Do you? I don't know.
	There must be something that I don't know.
	Well, you said that you don't have a great relationship with your mother.
	Was your mother this way, snippy and angry?
	Yes. Yeah, and I don't think I remember that.
	So it may not be quite as complicated as you think it is.
	Well, I feel like I don't remember her being that way, but as soon as I say it, I can hear her voice and then all these memories kind of come back, if that makes sense.
	Right. So this is your model for parenting?
	Yes. And have you rejected that model for parenting?
	I guess not, if you're still doing it, right?
	Yeah, like, mentally I'm like, every day I'm not doing that, can't do that.
	I have a really good example of my older sister who grew up in the same situation and she has completely not done it.
	Well, it sounds to me, Chrissy, and discard everything I say that doesn't fit, but it sounds to me, Chrissy, that unmourned behavior is much easier to repeat.
	If you don't know how much your mom's anger hurt you, then it's going to be a lot easier to reproduce it against your children because without empathizing with yourself, you can't empathize with them.
	Oh. Okay.
	Because you say you can't remember it, but you hear it in your voice when you do it, right?
	Right. So what do you mean you can't remember it?
	If she did it a lot to the point where you hear it and it's influencing your behavior strongly, then it must have happened a lot, right?
	You say it happens to you daily, right?
	But you can't remember your mother doing it to you at all?
	Well, there's this funny thing.
	When we were kids, she used to say, everything was my dad's fault.
	Do you know why I'm laughing?
	Because, I don't know.
	Because for you, your anger was everything else's fault.
	Your hormones, your tiredness, your hyper child, your whatever, right?
	Okay, yeah. So, when I... Kind of went off to college.
	She had this way of saying, like, she loves us, but she has to do this because my dad is going to be angry or she has to yell at us because he's going to come home.
	And I don't... Now that I have more of a relationship as an adult, I don't think he was this way.
	I don't know. It's weird.
	And then... So when I left and went off to college, I kind of felt like, oh, you know, I have this great relationship with my mom.
	I always thought we had a really good relationship.
	And... I don't know what else to say about that.
	I don't know if I kind of forgot that she was so aggressive.
	And then if someone says something, then I remember it.
	Have you not talked about this with your sister?
	No, I have.
	My sister, when she was having her kids and got married, she kind of just isolated herself completely.
	Well, I didn't understand why she did it.
	She didn't isolate herself completely, I would assume.
	She had a husband, right?
	She had a kid.
	She may have had other friends in the neighborhood.
	What you mean is that she didn't spend time with you and your mom, is that right?
	And we have a very kind of overbearing family, lots of aunts and everybody, and she cut that family out.
	So she was alone with her.
	Okay, hang on, hang on.
	So we've got to take this slowly, right?
	Okay. So your sister has been able to overcome the bad temper that might have been implanted by your mom, right?
	Right. And she did that by not exposing herself to the source of the problem, which could be your mom, right?
	Right. And her siblings.
	They're very similar.
	My mom and her siblings are all like, I don't know, like little clones of each other.
	So there's one example, right?
	Like, you know, if you have a bad habit to break, you can't really, as far as I understand it, the perceived wisdom or the common wisdom is don't spend time around people who manifest that habit.
	Like, if you want to quit drinking, stop hanging around people who drink all the time.
	If you want to quit smoking, stop hanging around with people who smoke all the time and that kind of stuff, right?
	Like, you have to change your environment if you want to Change of habit, right?
	Right. And have you ever asked your sister how she was able to overcome this legacy of temper?
	She said she saw something on TV and she realized that was her kind of thing.
	And then she said to me, like she told me, just act like they're not your kids.
	Don't treat them like they belong to you, like they're someone else's that you're taking care of.
	Right. Did you talk to her about her decision to not see your mom or the aunts and uncles after she had her child?
	I'm starting to talk to her now.
	Like now she's coming back into my life because she realizes that I'm seeing the other side of things.
	So while she was not a part of the group, the group think of this angry family, she was talked about a lot and everybody made her out to be like either making fun of her or It's a lot of rumors.
	There's a lot of females in this family.
	There's not a lot of males.
	You get all that catty talking about each other all the time.
	If you make a mistake, they all have to discuss it and make sure that the group thinks you're doing something right or wrong.
	If you don't do what they say, then you're ostracized.
	I believed a lot of things about her that I didn't know about.
	Some bullies, right? Even, yeah, at the end of the day, the parenting style was bullying too.
	I don't know. You mean your mom's parenting style?
	Yeah, I think so.
	So, let me ask you this, Chrissy.
	Let's say I'm your son.
	Right. And my question to you is, what percentage of the day that he spends with you Does he experience as positive?
	And what percentage of the day that he spends with you does he experience as negative?
	And by negative, I don't mean like he fell down and bumped himself or whatever, but that you have a negative reaction to something or him.
	to think about just a regular day I don't think it's I would think the negative would be...
	I want to say like 30%.
	I don't think I'm angry all the time.
	I think it's just the end.
	I don't know. So 30%?
	Yeah. That's terrible.
	Yeah. I hate to say it.
	I mean, I got to be blunt with you, but that's terrible.
	Okay. How many hours a night does your son sleep?
	About 10. 10 hours?
	Yeah. Okay.
	So we've got 14 hours of wakefulness.
	Maybe he naps a little bit during the day.
	He may be past that now.
	No, he's past it, yeah. So he's got 14 hours of wakefulness, right?
	Right. So that's over four, well, sorry, that is, yeah, that's over four hours of negative, like experiencing you being negative, right?
	Right. Four hours?
	A day? That's too much.
	Right? Yeah.
	Can you imagine? Sorry, you said he was asleep for 10 hours a day?
	Sorry, three and a half hours, is it?
	No, hang on a second. I'm sorry.
	I just had a brain fart with regards to the math.
	So, 49.3.
	There we go. Yeah, 4.2 hours.
	So, 4.2 hours. So, can you imagine being on a date for three hours and one of the hour that you were on a date, the man was having a negative reaction to you?
	It's like tearing you down, yeah?
	Yeah. Can you imagine a 90-minute movie, a third of which you hate it?
	That would be easier to deal with than a mean mom.
	Is it different for your girl?
	Yeah, it's a lot different.
	It's because she's just calmer.
	Like, a lot of me yelling at him, I'm scared, honestly.
	Like, he's jumping off something, or I think he's going to get hurt, and I'm just like, stop it.
	I already said stop it, you know?
	I want you to understand something, Chrissy.
	Mm-hmm. For your son, your negativity is close to a full-time job for him.
	It's almost 30 hours a week.
	Right. I don't think you get it.
	Yeah, it's like the worst work environment of your life.
	I imagine if you go to work and your boss is negative or angry or snappy for 30 hours a week.
	You wouldn't work there again.
	Thank you.
	Thank you.
	You know, maybe he's hyper.
	I don't know. Maybe he's scared.
	Maybe he's nervous.
	Maybe he's trying to please you.
	Because it's an astonishing amount of time, right?
	We're talking like over 120 hours a month that he experiences your negativity.
	Right? Two months solid out of the year, 24-7.
	Two months solid he's experiencing your negativity, right?
	Yeah. I still don't think you're getting it.
	No, I get it.
	Too much.
	Kids calm down when they feel treasured.
	Kids calm down when they feel secure.
	Kids calm down when they feel that they are a positive and beloved part of the family structure.
	Yes.
	And, of course, I understand that your moodiness is scattered throughout the day, right?
	Oh.
	It's not like you concentrate at, you know, 4.2 hours starting at noon and ending at 4.20, right? - I feel like it's only in the evening, honestly.
	In the day, we don't have as much time constraints.
	I don't know. What are the time constraints in the evening?
	Just, like, you get the dinner ready, get, you know, get the meeting, get them to bed.
	As soon as, like, it's Six o'clock, we have everything lined up, like one thing after the other.
	So they have a dinner, they're in the bath, they're in the beds, they're reading their stories.
	Like, by the end of it, I sing them to sleep and everyone's happy and then goodnight.
	No, but is it that frustrating time, sort of from six to eight or whatever it is, is that the frustrating time?
	Yeah, I think so. Why?
	It feels like maybe because I'm anticipating a fight, but just...
	Yeah, but why is there a fight?
	What is the time constraint? It's not coming from outside.
	It's not like you've got a delivery that you've got to make, right?
	So where is the constraint?
	Where is the tension coming from?
	I don't know. I just think they have to be embedded in time because otherwise then, like, we don't have any...
	Like, I guess it's the only time I can spend with my husband after he's asleep.
	Well, sure, sure, I understand all of that.
	I'm sorry to interrupt again. But I'm sure your husband would rather spend time with you when you hadn't been angry and snappy with your kids right beforehand, right?
	Yeah, that's for sure.
	Right, so if your husband has the choice, he'd say, well, I'd rather have an hour and a half with you in a happy and content mood than two hours with you right after you've spent two hours snapping at the kids.
	Right. Does that make sense?
	Yeah. Is it that your husband has the need for you to have the kids in bed by a certain time because he's coming home late?
	Like, is there something outside you and your kids that's causing this time pressure?
	I think that also the pressure is, like, sometimes my husband's coming home and he's snappy.
	And he's not snapping at the kids, right?
	But he's just...
	So done. The days are long and hard on him.
	So I think that I'm putting this pressure that they have to be perfect when he comes home.
	Exactly what I'm trying to do is the exact opposite of what I'm doing.
	I'm trying to make everything...
	I don't know.
	I'm trying to make everything go smoothly.
	The search for perfection is all very well.
	But to look for heaven is to live here in hell.
	There's nothing as hellish as the drive for perfection, right?
	Okay, yeah. So what are the consequences, what negative things happen if things aren't perfect with regards to the bedtime?
	I think there's like a sweet spot.
	If I can't get them down, then they get hyper that they're up late and then it's like I get stuck in the room or I try and sleep, lay down and Sneak out when they're sleeping and then I fall asleep.
	I miss everything after that.
	Have you noticed that when you're tense with them that it takes longer for them to get to sleep?
	I don't know.
	I think by the time we get into pajamas, I kind of calm down because I know it's the end.
	But the tension is more like through dinner and the bath and brushing teeth.
	I usually don't, yeah, I usually don't get to...
	I like the routine, I think they understand it, but they kind of, I don't know, not the right word is, they kind of taught me through it.
	Like, they're just pushing the borders a little bit, like...
	You know that's the job, right?
	For kids. Yeah. I guess, yeah.
	No, because here's the thing. You're kind of in the middle here, Chrissy.
	Here's where I put on my annoying lecture hand, all right?
	So you're kind of in the middle here.
	You have committed to peaceful parenting, but you have allowed yourself irritated parenting.
	Right. Yeah. No, no, no, no, no.
	Backsliding. That is the worst of both worlds.
	See, if you're a tyrant, if the kids are just terrified of you, then you have a certain amount of authority in the moment that may work, right?
	But you have to escalate your aggression to the point where they're going to thumb down so much that it's brutal and soul-searing and destructive of their individuality and so on, right?
	Right. So if you've made the commitment, you say, well, I'm not going to call them names, I'm not going to hit them, I'm not going to yell at them from, you know, noon till midnight...
	Then you said, okay, peaceful parenting.
	But peaceful parenting means peaceful parenting.
	It doesn't mean peaceful parenting with a light smattering of snarling.
	Yeah. Right?
	Yeah, so...
	It's all kissing, no biting.
	Right? And if you make that commitment...
	Then you are saying no to all of the bullying habits that may have been inculcated in you by your upbringing that you can't remember.
	And the fact that you can't remember them again.
	Talk about this stuff with your mom.
	Talk about it with your sister.
	Try it and exhume and examine your childhood.
	Because if you can't remember your childhood, but you sound just like your mom in your own ears, it means that this is a history unexamined that's coming back to life, right?
	Right. Well, now I'm talking to my sister.
	If I talk to my mom, she denies it or she makes tons of excuses.
	Well, then you and your sister sit down with your mom and talk about it together because if you both remember something, it's going to be a little bit harder for her to do what?
	Yes, that's right. Make up excuses.
	Right. Or avoidance.
	If you both remember something, it's going to be tougher.
	What's the end we're trying to get to?
	Right. So we get her and tell her that this has happened.
	And if she just denies, denies, is there a point where you just walk away and leave it?
	What do you do? What's the end?
	I don't understand how this ends.
	What do you mean? You mean if you are confronting your mom or talking to your mom about things that happened and she just denies, denies, denies?
	Correct, yeah. You tell her that it's very destructive and painful for you that she's denying.
	And you find out how much your mom cares about you, frankly.
	Well, I don't think a lot.
	In the past, I've confronted her, and she just, like, in no uncertain terms has told me that she likes other people more than me, and she's a bully.
	She says horrible things, so I'm kind of at the point where I don't want to talk to her anymore.
	Right. I'm sorry, and I know that there's a little nervous laughter here, but it's not funny.
	I'm laughing all the time because I'm nervous, yeah.
	Sorry. Yeah. And I'm really sorry about that.
	It's a terrible thing to hear from your mom, right?
	I want to say I'm over it, but I don't know if you...
	If you were over it, then you wouldn't have this permission for irritation, right?
	Yeah. And I've even said that in anger to my son that, you know, you're so lucky.
	My mom was never this nice, and I don't know.
	It's not fair to put it on him, though.
	And you said that to you?
	To my son. Like, something about how he wasn't cleaning his toys and everything.
	Like, oh, you know, you're lucky.
	When I was a kid, they threw out all my toys.
	That might be a little heavy to put on a five-year-old, Chrissy.
	Yeah, it is.
	You know, he doesn't want to see you as human quite yet.
	Right. Right, because humans are fallible and you're in charge of everything.
	There's a God phase that kids need to have, I think.
	Well, he said, like, we're driving, and I yelled at him, and then I put him in the car.
	At one point, every time I was about to have a tamper, I put him in the car because he'd be in the car so he could listen to music, and I felt like I could calm down.
	So then we'd have a quiet drive.
	And then wherever we got to, if it was a park or something, It kind of like ended that anger moment, you know?
	It was like a transition.
	I think it was more for me. So we're driving, he's quiet and thinking, and then all of a sudden he said, sorry, mommy.
	I said, why? And he says, I'm sorry that your mom was really mean to you.
	And I said, she wasn't mean to me.
	And then I just heard it, and I was like, maybe she was mean to me.
	Wait, wait. Hang on, hang on.
	You said to your son that your mom would throw out your toys, and then he says, I'm sorry your mom was mean to you, and you said she wasn't mean to me?
	Yeah. That was just my gut reaction, because I didn't know what he was talking about, actually.
	I said that in the house.
	No, no, no, no.
	Oh, my God. You are an excuse machine, woman.
	No, no, no, no, no, stop, stop, please, please, please.
	You told stories, no, no, hang on.
	You told stories to your son that your mother was mean to you.
	He shows you empathy and you deny it happened.
	Yeah. Well, after, like, as soon as I said it, then I realized what was happening.
	And since then, I think he was the first person to point it out, honestly.
	And it's so sad because he's so little.
	No, no, you were the first person to point it out.
	Okay. Because you said my mom would throw out my toys.
	Right. Hmm.
	Good for him, though, for giving you some sympathy.
	And good for him is the brilliance of children, Chrissy.
	Right. Do you know what he was trying to do?
	So I could be empathetic, too.
	He was trying to stop you from yelling at him.
	Yeah. And do you know the brilliance of what he did?
	He, after you yelled at him, he extended his heart in love.
	Right. Right?
	That is not an easy thing to do, right?
	You ever been yelled at and then said to somebody, I empathize and sympathize with what you went through 30 years ago?
	Have you ever done that as an adult?
	Like, in my mind, but I wouldn't.
	But not for real. Yeah.
	Yeah. So your five-year-old son made the connection between you yelling at him and your mother yelling at you.
	And he tried to stop you yelling at him by expressing sympathy and empathy for you being yelled at as a child.
	That is freaking genius.
	He's a genius. You cannot let him be better than you.
	You see, you yelled at him.
	He extended his hand in sympathy.
	That's better than you treated him.
	and he's five the moment Chrissy that he thinks that he's more mature than you the moment that he thinks he's more in control than you the moment that he thinks he's wiser than you your job as a parent becomes pretty much unbearable You have to stay ahead of your children, Chrissy, at all times.
	You cannot be showing them your pettiness.
	You cannot be showing them your ill temper.
	You cannot be showing them your immaturity, your self-avoidance, your own being owned by history.
	You can't do it.
	It's like there's a commander on a beach on D-Day who all the soldiers look up to, and then they see he's peeing himself.
	When children outgrow their parents, the relationship that should be is done.
	You have to have a bigger and wiser and deeper heart than your five-year-old.
	You yelled at him.
	He gave you sympathy and empathy.
	And then you denied it.
	Yeah, in the moment.
	And did you apologize to him?
	Yeah, later I did.
	Okay. Or I apologized to him in the moment.
	And you did say that he was right.
	I think in the moment I denied it, but later I hugged him and I said, thank you for telling me that, and you're right, yeah.
	So he's ahead of you here, and he's five.
	So don't drug him, in my humble opinion.
	And I don't want to do that.
	I think that there's no way for him to go to public school and not be drugged, though.
	So that's another big...
	So where are we not, like, you're very much sort of in my mind, Chrissy.
	You kind of still appear in your head.
	I'm just wondering where your heart is in this conversation.
	I can't quite get a mental map.
	Because I keep laughing because I'm nervous.
	I laugh at, like, when there's an accident and stuff, too.
	Okay, so in my heart, I love these kids so much.
	I don't know what to do.
	You don't want to look back at this time and say, well, I sure yelled at them a lot.
	I feel that already, that I'm looking back at every year.
	Like, every year that passes, it feels like it's happening very fast.
	Well, you are, to some degree, carving them into who they're going to be.
	Because you say you love them, right?
	But do you love them enough to not snap at them?
	That's the real question with regards to love.
	You know, love is an easy word.
	Right. But it's in the actions that it manifests, right?
	Do you love them enough to say, no excuses, no yelling, no snapping, no...
	Look, it's not like we're always going to be perfectly even-tempered.
	Yeah. With our kids.
	And occasionally we can snap at them, and occasionally they can snap at them.
	I mean, you know what I mean? I mean, nobody's looking for this, you know, pure elven zen, you know, like Buddhism, everybody's combined.
	I mean, there's going to be a little bit of friction from time to time, but it should be extraordinarily rare.
	I feel like when there's that power struggle, I just don't have the tools.
	Like, I don't know what to do in that situation.
	Right. Well, you do know what to do in that situation.
	It's just the wrong thing to do, right?
	I mean, you escalate and become more aggressive.
	I only know the wrong thing to do.
	But here's the thing. You keep doing the wrong thing because you give yourself permission to do the wrong thing.
	Because you kind of have a tool for dealing with that, so you're not looking for other tools, right?
	So, blunt instrument.
	Yeah, so what if you just don't give yourself permission to do that?
	Let me tell you a little something that's interesting, I think.
	They call this thing the patriarchy, right?
	You were a feminist, right? So you've heard of this thing called the patriarchy, right?
	I mean, I don't think I was a full feminist, but I thought, you know, a good woman would, I don't know, go to work.
	I don't know. Yeah. I can tell you what the patriarchy is.
	I'm breaking ranks here.
	I'm not supposed to tell you this.
	But I'm going to tell you what the patriarchy is, Chrissy.
	Are you ready? The patriarchy is what happens when you grow up without excuses.
	What? I've never heard that.
	It's true. You ask just about any man.
	What happened when he did badly as a child?
	And do you know what he's going to tell you?
	People said, that sucked.
	That was terrible.
	That was bad. That was wrong.
	That was dumb. It's like a constant buzzer, just pinball back and forth.
	Bad, wrong, no, no.
	Right? And no excuses. Did you know I had...
	When I was in grade 6, I'd just come to Canada.
	First I was in grade 8, and then I was put back in grade 6.
	And I was talking in class or something like that.
	It was ungodly boring.
	Oh my God, it's so terribly boring.
	And I was given lines.
	I was supposed to say, I will not speak in class.
	And That evening, while playing a sport, I fell and sprained my wrist.
	I'm left-handed. It was my right hand.
	It hurt my right wrist, but really, you know, it was swollen and all that.
	Shouldn't laugh, right? Get me off to talking about you.
	But I went in the next morning, and I couldn't do the lines.
	My hand was hurting. So I go in to the teacher.
	And I say to her, she says, where are the lions?
	I said, look, look at my wrist.
	I'm left-handed. I couldn't do them.
	Like, well, do them tonight then.
	Right? No excuses.
	While sitting by a pool in grade seven and pushed a guy into a pool and the teacher saw and said, why did you push him in the pool?
	I said, well, he was trying to push me in the pool.
	It was like a game. I don't care!
	I saw you do it.
	You're in trouble. Right?
	The stupid thing that you hear when you're a kid, which, you know, is not that bad, but...
	Why did you do it?
	Well, they told me to.
	Really? And if they told you to jump off the CN Tower, would you do that too?
	No excuses. You try formulating an excuse...
	As a child, as a boy...
	Oh, as a girl, you're fine.
	But as a boy, you try formulating excuses.
	Hey, teacher!
	Your school sucks and your class is boring.
	No excuses.
	You get drugs.
	That is the patriarchy.
	That's all it is. No excuses.
	Dog ate my homework?
	Too bad. You get another detention.
	No excuses. No excuses.
	And that's the patriarchy.
	It's all it is. And you have a mother, I'm sorry to say, Chrissie, who, it sounds like to me, is not unfamiliar with the concept of excuses.
	Oh my gosh. I think she wrote the book.
	See how nice it'd be?
	It's not easy, let me tell you, but I don't have any excuse.
	So you have received this foggy infection of, I have an excuse.
	while I snapped but he was doing this and I am tired and it is late and I was up early this morning and blah blah blah right so you always will have an excuse in life you understand There's always something that you can say.
	Well, here's why I did this.
	And it gives you this momentary relief, right?
	But it guarantees repetition.
	You, Chrissy, are in charge of what you say and do as a mother.
	You are in charge.
	I bet you sometimes, and in particular your son, I bet you sometimes your son...
	Really annoys you because he can be impulsive, right?
	You said, he's going to jump on something.
	He's going to jump off something, right?
	He could hurt himself, right?
	Is that what you said? Yes, yes.
	Do you know why that bothers you so much, Chrissy?
	I'm scared, I thought.
	No. No.
	Because you are impulsive and you do things that are damaging, which is lose your temper.
	Right, right. Oh no, my son is impulsive.
	He doesn't seem to have enough control over his emotions when he's five!
	He can actually make me when I'm 30.
	Boom! Mommy's really angry because you can't keep control of your emotions and you're too...
	impulsive!
	Thanks, Mom. I think I learned that lesson.
	Good job. You shouldn't do things that are damaging my son, so I'm going to yell at you, which damages our relationship.
	You know, most times when people have a reaction to us, they're not...
	They're not showing us their reaction to ourselves.
	Sorry, let me say that again.
	Most times when people have a reaction to us, they're not displaying their reaction to us or their relationship to us.
	They're displaying their reaction to themselves.
	You want your son to restrain his behavior and act in a way that is not dangerous.
	And you do it by modeling a non-restraint in your own behavior and doing an action which is dangerous, namely yelling at your children.
	I'm trying to yell at my childhood self.
	That sounds like a DPD. What do you mean?
	Like, I think I'm...
	I don't know.
	It's just that. Like, I see him, and I think...
	I think, like, I... I could create a person who's not me.
	No, come on. That's just something you read off the back of a book somewhere.
	Come on. Carissa, are you saying that as a child, you didn't enjoy doing risky stuff from time to time?
	I was not that personality.
	You were not that what?
	That person. Like, no.
	Oh, you didn't do risky stuff?
	I played it really safe.
	I had older siblings who were doing bad things and getting yelled at.
	So I was really...
	I didn't say bad things. I just said risky things.
	And did you have elder siblings who would do risky things?
	Did you have a brother? Yes.
	I had a... Yeah, my brother was younger, but my older sisters were doing risky things.
	They were... Sneaking out and, you know, saying they'll do one thing and then do something else.
	So I saw them get these negative consequences, so I just always try to just do everything right.
	Okay, let me ask you to picture this, Chrissy.
	So imagine you're five years old and your sister is in the house and she's doing something risky or something that your mother would be very upset about and your mother's in the house.
	How do you feel? Right.
	There is grave risk when someone's doing something risky, right?
	And the risk isn't primarily, if I understand this correctly, correct me if I'm wrong, the risk isn't primarily that your sister might hurt yourself.
	The risk is that your mother will become angry.
	Right. Right? Yeah.
	Yeah, that's right. If she, you know, she's going to come out and yell at everybody, why didn't you stop her?
	Okay. Right.
	So when your son is about to do something risky, if your mother is mentally in the house, how do you feel?
	Scared. And he's got to stop, right?
	Right. Or there's going to be big trouble.
	So it may not be that you're yelling at your younger self.
	You might be yelling at your sister for fear of your mother.
	Okay, wow.
	When your children defy you, when your children disagree with you, when your children won't listen, you probably feel that they must do these things, they must listen, they must obey,
	they must whatever, right? I think I'm...
	Sometimes it's 50-50, like sometimes I'm just so tired, I'll just tell them like, I don't know.
	You'll tell them what? I think the other problem is because he's so strong-willed that he's like, he knows that if he pushes me enough, then I'll give in, so then that kind of also repeats the whole behavior again, so we have more confrontation.
	Oh, so sometimes you're overly harsh, and other times you fault.
	Yes, completely. What's the most important thing with parenting here, Chrissy?
	It actually starts with the first letter of your name.
	Control. No.
	No. Consistency.
	Consistency. Consistency, right.
	So if you're too aggressive and then you fold, that's not helpful, right?
	It's guaranteed to create a situation where you're going to have more of these roller coasters, right?
	Right.
	Because if the child can strongly...
	influence your behavior or get you to reverse a position that's too much power for a child yeah right you know there's that old oh i don't know it was old when i was young There's the Sorcerer's Apprentice with Mickey Mouse, you know, where he gets a spell book and it all goes to crap, right?
	Because it's too much power for him. If children can get the parents, can play their parents like a xylophone or like a violin or, you know, like a squeeze box, then it's too much power for them, right? Mm-hmm.
	It's like that Terminator 2.
	Cool! My very own Terminator, right?
	I mean, it's too much power for a kid.
	So that's why consistency is so important, that it doesn't get kids drunk on power they can't handle you.
	So if you can handle this kind of stuff, if you can, first of all, I would say, you just have to grit your teeth and give yourself the, you know, sit down, apologize to your kids and say, you know, I am now committing.
	I'm not yelling at you. I'm not yelling at you.
	It's not going to happen. And if it does happen, I'm wrong, and you tell me that.
	You make it a public.
	You know, all the commitments we intend to break, we keep quiet, right?
	And if you make that commitment, then I think you can look forward, if you're going to homeschool, you can look forward to it more, and maybe your husband would See better things coming out of the parenting.
	Please understand, I'm not saying you're a terrible mom or anything like that.
	I mean, we all have habits as parents that we need to improve.
	That's really all I'm saying.
	I'm not trying to, you know, call down an airstrike on your sense of efficacy as a parent or anything like that.
	I just want to sort of be clear on that, right?
	At the end of the day, like, I can respect that because, you know, I talk to my dad about it.
	I'm like, why didn't you step in when my mom was screaming at me, right?
	So... The fact that he's pushing back against homeschooling, I can kind of respect it, right?
	Right. Now, I do like parent effectiveness training.
	I've had an expert or two on the show here.
	You might want to check out that book.
	But to me, first and foremost, it just comes from a commitment to, you've just got to not allow that.
	Just not have that be part of your repertoire.
	And, you know, your sister advised, treat them like they're not your kids, like your baby.
	If you were babysitting someone else's kids, you wouldn't be treating them that way, right?
	So... That would be my suggestion.
	Now, if your husband wants to call back in and talk about some of the finances or school stuff, I'm certainly happy to entertain that.
	I hope you guys do all right. With the house, but I don't think it's about the money.
	That's sort of what the whole, I guess, hour and a quarter we've been on has been about.
	I don't think it's about the money. I think it's about other stuff.
	And if the other stuff is dealt with, if you feel more comfortable being at home and educating your kids and your husband sees that that's more fun and enjoyable for everyone involved, I think that's probably closer to what the real issue is, because the finances don't add up.
	Will you keep us posted?
	Sure. All right.
	Well, thanks, Chrissy. I appreciate that, and I look forward to hearing an update.
	All right, let's move on to the next caller, but thanks again.
	Thank you. All right.
	Up next, we have John.
	John wrote in and said, I work for a supplier that deals in electronics selling to large manufacturers.
	Recently this year, I was told by a corporate purchasing manager that there is nothing she can do to maintain our business relationship as my company is not female-owned or classified as a diversity supplier.
	I've got a great deal of unchecked power.
	I also believe this female manager who happens to be working for an American company in another country in North America, whom I've known for 16 years, is finally acting out her own vision of either payback or just implementing a diversity program in the worst-slash-wrong way possible.
	Another factor to consider is the fact that women in her country have been rather kept down.
	This company, I believe, is quite wealthy enough to install a new corporate culture as a systems operator could install a new operating system.
	The company is a technology company, and I have worked with many women over my 23-year career, all of whom are professional and have not harbored the least scrap of negativity towards me and my work, and I assume are assets to their team.
	This perhaps is the greatest challenge to me in my career.
	We can always get a new customer and shame on me for creating and living off a multi-million dollar account having kept most of my eggs in one basket.
	Given the circumstances, what are my choices?
	Stay, network, and fight?
	Jump to a woman-owned or diversity company and start all over again?
	Or stay and have my quotes get redirected to new vendors coming on board that fit the diversity bill?
	What does a man who works for a white male-owned company do when his best Fortune 50 customer says we no longer want to work with you because the company you work for is not classified as a diversity source?
	That's from John.
	Hi, John. It's an enraging and heartbreaking story.
	I am really angry that it happened, and I'm really sorry that it happened.
	I do. Thanks for having me on.
	I've always admired your work and become quite a bit of a rabid fan, but you never think it's going to happen to you when suddenly a table turns and you're fighting against an onslaught of tide.
	Basically, it's like you're holding a piece of spaghetti against a sword.
	You don't know how to fight anymore. You say, well, I shouldn't have kept all my eggs in one basket, but...
	In a way, you weren't, because you were doing a great job in satisfying what the customer wanted, right?
	Yeah. You've got the 80-20 rule.
	80% of your time is going to be spent with the top 20% of your customers that are keeping you busy, and so you're quite right there.
	You're But the mantra is diversify, diversify, diversify your account portfolio.
	But when you've been climbing a big mountain all your career, which has been a fantastic one, and one I've never been bored of, this has just been probably one of the most interesting scenarios that I've been subjected to in my career.
	So you said women in her country have been rather kept down.
	Is that so she's not from North America?
	She's not European originally?
	No. I would say that They are definitely on the rise as far as their numbers at this company.
	I've seen this particular facility open up about 16 years ago in this particular country, I should say.
	And there weren't as many female counterparts, but now there are quite a bit.
	Which country is she from?
	Oh, it's in Mexico? So, yeah, it's definitely...
	It's been a growth experience, I guess, through this one facility over the years.
	But, you know, when you look at a company that can just install a corporate culture, like I had said in the opening, that's when they take the needle off the record and say, okay, we're going to do this this way now.
	And everybody counts goosebumps, much like James Damore.
	I watched your article, I actually watched your interview with I'm a very brave individual.
	I'm on the other side of the fence, but when you look at having so much success and working with a company and then they just change the corner, I've always been able to diversify and reinvent my services to keep things going.
	But when they preclude you, From a quote process...
	Could I trouble you to put your phone on mute, please?
	I will. A quote process...
	It's more along the lines of inclusion.
	You include people into the quote process.
	What that does is it invites people to the opportunity to quote and it gives a greater or a wider swath for a buyer to get their quotes from and choose the best product or service or delivery or what have you that's going to match that company's demand.
	We always call it the jump ball, being on the basketball court.
	It's got to be a jump ball on a playing field.
	We're all expected to be around the referee ready to hand up the basketball, and wherever the ball lies, the ball lies.
	That's sort of like a meritocracy.
	But in this case, we've started to see things just not even get directed to us, where you're not even included in the quote process.
	And that's where I find it, you know, expansion of a diversity program.
	Instead of being inclusive, I see it being exclusive.
	They're excluding vendors that don't fit the profile that they want.
	Well, white males, right?
	I guess. I mean, you guess?
	Tell me where that's not correct.
	Well, Asian. Maybe East Asian males as well, right?
	That comes out of fear, Stefan, because obviously the almighty dollar, you know, they're going to point you in the back with that pointy green dollar that needs to go in your bank account to pay the bills and keep things running.
	But yeah, you're right.
	Diversity is anti-white male.
	Diversity is certainly anti-white, but in particular it's anti-white.
	And diversity in academia and in Hollywood and in the mainstream media, diversity means anti-conservative.
	I mean, just so everyone knows what it actually means.
	Because, of course, if there was a great Hispanic or female-owned business...
	Then they wouldn't need these set-asides, right?
	They wouldn't need all of these diversity rules.
	They wouldn't need this prop-up, right?
	You know, it's meant to...
	They're really intended to give a more equitable opportunity to a small business who they say would be more likely to face a social or practical barrier to success.
	And that's sort of the ideology.
	And I throw that aside.
	No, I understand. Just for those who don't know how this works.
	Women, give or take, 50% of the population, and therefore women should be 50% of everything, right?
	Should be 50% of all CEOs, should be 50% of all executives, should be 50% of all politicians.
	Like, it's just, that's the 50 rule, right?
	And it's the same thing that if there's a certain proportion of Hispanics or Blacks or whatever in a particular geographical area, then that number should be reflected everywhere in all situations, right?
	And... It's a fantasy.
	It is not real.
	It's not true. It doesn't take into account cultural differences, IQ differences, work availability differences, child raising responsibilities.
	It doesn't take into account breastfeeding.
	Like all of these things, right?
	We know that, right?
	So this idea that, well, we have to, you know, there's been this unjust focus on white males and now we need to change the focus to put it on others.
	I just let the market handle it.
	Let the market handle it.
	The free market is going to dictate.
	Just one other thing, I had heard recently that they were looking for LGBTQ-owned businesses in our market space.
	And I started to scratch my head and thinking, you know, in 26 years that I've been doing this, You know, you'll hear an advertisement on a company website.
	We're a woman-owned company. We're a diversity supplier.
	We're a minority-owned business, which they're quite common.
	And they participate in government bids and they get set-aside businesses, as you mentioned.
	But I've never quite heard of an LGBTQ advertised business on their website.
	People are not just coming out saying, you know, we've got that, you know, the woman-owned seal, the woman-in-business seal.
	That's actually a certificate that you can get if you work for a woman-owned business and then a minority-owned business as well, the National Minority Business Council.
	You can get that certificate as well as a host that you can get.
	But, you know, I've never seen, hey, we don't...
	We're LGBTQ. Not that they wouldn't be just as effective or whatever, but I scratched my head.
	We're looking for suppliers at LGBTQ. And I just thought to myself, you're going to be looking for a needle in a haystack.
	Not that they don't exist. Maybe they do.
	I don't know. If it's profitable, you'll get this three's company situation.
	But here's the thing, too.
	So... This question of, do I then go to a woman-owned or minority-owned business?
	Well, that would be a front, wouldn't it?
	I mean, in general, it would be the idea of, well, I'm the competent guy, but I need this woman or this minority in order to get the contract, right?
	In other words, they're not particularly important to the business, but they're necessary to get in through the door, to get into the RFP process, right?
	You bring up a good point, because there are so many Women-owned businesses that are run by the husband.
	Where the women are, you know, they're supposed to be a 60% active participant in the business for X amount of hours or work hours in any given week period.
	And often you find them as kind of like the unspoken silent partner where they don't even exist.
	The husband runs the show and it's just to get that, like you said, foot in the door.
	Which I think is just a self-imposed abuse of the system itself.
	Well, it's like you're a trophy CEO in the same way that I guess maybe some women want to be a trophy wife.
	I don't know. You know, like, I mean, you're just a piece of window dressing in order to fulfill a particular number.
	I'm sure that happens from time to time in the business world.
	And of course, you know, women should say no to that.
	No, I'm not going to be a piece of window dressing.
	I mean, I'm going to go start my own company and I'm going to be damn good at it.
	I'm going to compete and I don't want any of these set-asides or any of these things, right?
	And I worked for one. Probably one of the greatest experiences of my life was working for a woman-owned business and she was probably one of the best mentors I've ever had in my career and was the driving force and the owner present on board every single day.
	So an extremely competent negotiator at that and So, you know, it's not to say it's not needed because they'll, like you said, laissez-faire, let the market dictate.
	They will get hired based on their merit.
	They will climb the ladders and they will find their places.
	But this push seems to be a little bit over the top and causing separation of who we used to do business with to who we want to do business with.
	I guess that would be the question, right?
	Well, if the...
	If the company has shifted its focus away from efficiency and productivity and service to a quota system, they're doomed.
	Interesting. Now, because they're doomed, they're going to end up...
	Going to try and get more and more government contracts and they're going to start exiting the free market.
	Slowly but surely they're going to start exiting the free market.
	Because the free market is very punishing, very punishing as you know, on all decisions that aren't centered around profit and efficiency.
	I got a brother-in-law who could fix that.
	No, I just want the very best guy to fix it.
	I don't care who he's related to.
	This is why family-owned businesses so often founder in the second or third generation, because the chance that the talent flows down the gene pool is not very high.
	And so, you know, there's that.
	So, no, and I remember once interviewing to take over.
	A guy was running a business, and he was...
	Looking to gear back and to retire.
	And I was put in touch with the guy and we had a bunch of interviews and I examined his business and figured out his model and all of that.
	And, you know, with the first question when I sat down, it's a family business.
	And I said, okay, well, why aren't your sons taking it over?
	He's like, you hit the nail right on the head, right?
	That's why I want you to take over the business, right?
	Because people make decisions like...
	Ivanka, sorry. People make decisions like, let's give all of this authority to people who haven't earned it in the free market, and it generally goes badly.
	So you don't want to get involved, I think, in a social justice warrior culture.
	First of all, you can't win.
	Because as a white male...
	They think you're, in general, they think you're a patriarch, that you're racist, that you're sexist, that you're unjust, that you've, you and your kind have pillaged the planet of all of its resources, right?
	And so, yeah, they may smile to your face, but they'll probably stab you in the back.
	You know, it's important to understand when you're in a situation of prejudice against you, and as a white male in this social justice warrior situation, Culture, the only protection you have is self-flagellating leftism, right?
	That's the only camouflage you have for these predators.
	That's the price of being involved in that environment.
	And that's one of the reasons why, you know, they'll give you prejudice and then they'll give you forgiveness from prejudice, right?
	Like, well, you're a bourgeois, but if you join the Communist Party and give us your farm, we'll let you live, kind of thing, right?
	So I don't think you want to put yourself in a situation where you're going to be facing direct prejudices against you on a daily basis.
	That's going to be...
	I mean, that'll sand your balls down to ball bearings, right?
	So I don't think that's what you want to do.
	Do you want to go and have, like, a diversity front company or diversity company?
	You know, I don't know.
	I mean... I can't obviously tell you what to do with your career and there's lots of complexities involved.
	If you can find a woman you want to work for who's really competent, you know, maybe that would be if you can still do a good job and she's great at what she does, then good.
	Same thing with, you know, diversity or Hispanic company or whatever.
	But... There will always be a doubt, right?
	Which is why is the woman in charge?
	This is one of the frustrating things about this kind of stuff, is that, you know, the competent minorities, the competent women, they kind of blur in with all of this stuff.
	It's like affirmative action in school, right?
	The competent blacks get blurred in with the blacks who are there to fill a quota, or the Hispanics, or whoever, right?
	But you know, the Asians who were there are really smart, because they get marked down, in America at least.
	So, it is a challenge.
	I don't Are there many options or opportunities out there for you to do the work that you want to do avoiding this kind of stuff as a whole, John?
	It's become so much more prevalent in this space when you've got a certain size of a company that you're going to go to and they have certain specialties and When you're looking at a niche market or a niche technology that you supply, you support, and a niche service, You get relied on for your word of mouth.
	I have legions of people that are fighting to utilize our service because we're fast, we're efficient, we help them get their jobs done.
	And we're relied on, thankfully, still so.
	It's like the Willy Loman in sales.
	You're going to keep your name.
	You walk in and everybody knows you.
	But when you hit that one office, man...
	Well, thanks for your service, but we're going to give this business to Susie now.
	You've done a great job, and you've helped us get started.
	You know, it's like looking, I think I heard on one of your shows you were making the same comparison with children and playing with toys.
	You know, a teacher coming over and taking that, okay, you did a great job with it and we're going to hand this over to this kid now.
	It's kind of like your thoughts were on the gamut of how you can craft your services around to stay on board, to stay relevant, to stay alive.
	And when that comes to moving to a Well, there's one way to look at this,
	John, which may be a bit of an effort, but could be very productive.
	Would you say that the mainstream media is fairly corrupt in America?
	Oh yes.
	Now that's a terrible thing, right?
	Except it's not.
	Because if the mainstream media were honest, far fewer people would be watching me or listening to us have this conversation, right?
	There is a great opportunity that is opening up in the tech world.
	Because the social justice warriors, the leftists, the quota people are swarming the big companies, right?
	Ooh, that's where the money is.
	That's where the power is.
	So they're all swarming into those companies.
	And those companies are succumbing, in general, as a whole, to this.
	And that's terrible.
	And, you know, what's happening to you is terrible.
	And what happens in the mainstream media is terrible.
	But what an opportunity.
	Because as the big companies get more corrupt and more inefficient as a result of all this political correctness and quota stuff, well...
	It's like, there's the dinosaurs, there's the mammals.
	The mammals are never going to get ahead.
	But then this giant meteor falls called Social Justice Warriorville.
	Terrible, terrible stuff.
	But boy, there's a little bit more room for the mammals to grow now, right?
	Like, if academia wasn't so corrupt and leftist, well, let's start off only.
	So, for me, right?
	I mean, if academia wasn't so corrupt and leftist, I might have been more tempted by academia.
	If the art world were not...
	Corrupt and leftist, then I would be more tempted.
	I would have been more tempted by the art world, like I went to the National Theatre School and so on.
	And if the business world had its ethical challenges, then, you know, I would have been...
	More tempted to stay in the business world.
	If the publishing world had not been so relentlessly leftist, then I would have been more tempted to work.
	I would have had enough success to keep me working that way in the publishing world.
	And if the mainstream media was more honest or remotely honest, then there would be not enough of a demand for what it is that I supply.
	So I can look at all of this corruption and I can say, well, that's terrible stuff.
	And it is. But it's a great opportunity as well.
	Because it's like the movie Titanic.
	It's a hell of a long time between hitting the iceberg and the last propeller going down.
	And it's the same thing with these big companies.
	You know, there are certain types of people, they just, where's the money at?
	Where's the money at? We're going to go to where the money is.
	Go to where the money is. Go to where the power is.
	Someone's created something that's great and beautiful and wonderful.
	Let's go in and screw it up.
	And profit thereby. We're not competent, but we're whiny as hell.
	We're not smart, but we're willing to nag relentlessly.
	And so we're going to go in and You know, this is the great challenge.
	It's one of the reasons I don't really want to grow that much.
	You know, I want to grow in views.
	I want to grow in influence. Grow in size?
	Well, that's challenge.
	The more people who are around, the more cracks in the armor there are for the stuff to get through.
	So maybe this is an opportunity.
	You have, in a sense, inside information in the potential fall of a big company.
	Yeah, but maybe the time analogy that you put from hitting the iceberg to actually going down may take the decades.
	But, you know, I do agree with the dangers in these These policies taking hold and taking over.
	When you're making large financial decisions, it's much like the previous caller.
	There are no excuses.
	I used to have a boss that said, I'll accept three versions when you make a bad decision that didn't work out so well.
	You have a good decision, bad decision, or no decision.
	Have a reason for making Each three.
	Each one is acceptable. You can make a bad decision.
	I know you have to make that bad decision.
	But as long as you have a reason making any of those three choices, he was happy because you applied some thought process to try and create an outcome that was going to be good for the company overall.
	And I'll tell you, just so you can put this in context as a whole, people...
	I think that the world should be, you know, fair and nice and everybody should try and get along and so on.
	But I think it's really hard to understand the world as it is without understanding that there is a fairly brutal Darwinian struggle for resources going on at all times in society.
	It's nasty.
	It's usually underhanded.
	It's good that it's underhanded in many ways.
	It's good that it's based on language and manipulation and falsehoods, rather than, you know, the femur of a saber-toothed tiger through the eyeball or something.
	But groups want resources.
	There is a gene pool that is striving to gain resources.
	And North America, European countries have a lot of resources.
	And whatever people can say or do or imply or insinuate that gives them access to those resources, they will do it.
	Because most human beings are amoral resource seekers.
	They want stuff.
	They really don't care where it comes from.
	And if they're not that smart, they really won't even understand that much where it comes from.
	And so, if you want resources, and you are not particularly good at getting resources, maybe you're not that smart, maybe you want to have a bunch of kids, which is great, but maybe you're just not that good at getting resources for yourself, so what do you do? Well...
	You create a system, or you advocate for a system where you're going to get those resources anyway.
	You want a welfare state?
	Boom! You're going to get resources, right?
	You want a military-industrial complex?
	You want to go blow people up in foreign lands?
	Boom! You get your resources.
	You say, ah, men are sexist, so we've got to promote the interests of women.
	So then you get resources.
	It's the brutal Darwinian struggle, and ideology is just one of the very many mechanisms that groups have to get those resources.
	It's no different than bonobos fighting over a fruit tree, which they do, right?
	If there's some fruit tree or some date tree where it's all in flower, the monkeys fight over it.
	And the productivity of the working people, the working classes, and I don't by that mean employees, but whoever works and produces things of value to the world for a living.
	We are the fruit tree, and everyone's going to fight over us.
	Everyone's going to fight to get our resources.
	Socialists want everything that I have, except my job.
	Because then they have to work for themselves, right?
	So, if you look at society as a whole, and this is, you know, this is a big challenge for multiculturalism, it's a big challenge for diversity and so on.
	If you look at society as a whole, not between countries, within countries, between countries as well, but between countries everybody knows, state of nature, within countries.
	It is a brutal Darwinian struggle for the resources of productive people for the most part.
	So there are the productive people, then everyone who wants the productive people stuff without having to compete or work for them or anything like that.
	And if you understand that about society, then there's this like click moment where everything just kind of falls into place and it makes sense.
	Yeah, okay.
	That's why such and such is happening.
	Now, people will dress it up in the most pretty and wonderful and lovely and scintillating and Shakespearean phrases, which is just another kind of camouflage, right?
	The predators, you know, the lion...
	The tiger in particular hides in the tall grass, right?
	It needs a camouflage so it can get close enough.
	And language is the camouflage of these soft predators.
	And so... Maybe this woman, I don't know her, obviously I'm just hypothesizing, but maybe this woman, she's like, well, I want to get resources for my people, whoever her people happen to be.
	I want to get resources for my people, so I'm going to go in, I'm going to complain about sexism and racism and injustice, I'm going to nag people and call them bad and sexist and racist and misogynist and then, boom!
	They're going to give me resources which I can hand out to my people.
	Look, she's a good hunter. In a purely amoral grab-the-resources, she's a fine hunter.
	She's like one of those centaur-style people who can shoot a bow from the back of a horse and hit a target.
	She's a good hunter. She's come into the company, and she has probably got millions and millions and millions of dollars of resources which she can now hand out to her people, whoever those people are.
	It may be racial, it may be gender, it may be her town, it may be, right?
	It's the same thing where you get a politician who goes to Washington.
	He's a hunter. He's going to go get resources from the government and bring them back to his people, in this case, his district.
	Everyone's a hunter. Now, you either hunt on the free market honestly and openly, or you hunt using government power dishonestly and manipulatively.
	So right now, you are the prey, and she's just the hunter.
	She's getting resources for her people.
	It's not right, it's not just, it's not moral, it's not free, but darwinially speaking, biologically speaking, what does that matter?
	Get the resources.
	It's like the The third world African governments.
	Go get resources.
	Go call Bono.
	Get him to warble on about all of this stuff, right?
	Go get resources. Go get your foreign aid.
	Go get your stuff.
	Go get paid.
	Go get your resources for your people.
	Now, of course, if you're a white male and you say, well, I'd like to keep some of my resources for my people, please, you Nazi!
	Right? Of course!
	How dare you work in the jungle to take care of your family?
	Yeah! You don't want the livestock stampeding.
	You don't want the livestock getting away.
	You get fenced in by these verbal abusive attacks and legal attacks sometimes.
	You know, you get fenced in and you're not supposed to have any of your own in-group preferences because if you have your own in-group preferences, if you build a fence against the people stealing your sheep, they don't like that.
	Right? And if you look at the cultural civil war, hopefully it stays that way in America.
	Well, you have a bunch of people depending on the size and power and redistributive capacity of the state.
	And they want to get paid.
	They want their resources.
	And they sure as hell don't want to have to work for them.
	And again, poor, rich, some of the middle class as well.
	It's all over the place. And if Trump gets his way and reduces regulations and cuts off the flow of illegal immigration and cuts taxes and more jobs are available,
	well, it's going to be tougher for people to justify sitting on their asses and collecting paychecks or collecting welfare or collecting whatever, right?
	They want their resources.
	Like union leaders, they sit down with the management.
	You've got two hunting parties just out there, like in the jungle, and there's a fruit tree.
	Now, of course, the genius of capitalism is you don't have to fight over a fruit tree, you can plant more trees.
	The free market. But that's not where society is, and it's certainly not where it's heading.
	But if you understand that about society, that it's just a boiling mass of people all trying to get resources out.
	For their own people. Then it allows you to just put aside all of this other crap that people talk about.
	And it's all it is. Just resource acquisition.
	And I'm not nihilistic about it because I don't think it's the way it always needs to be.
	And it's certainly not the way that I operate.
	But you had a hunter who came in.
	She kicked you out of your fruit tree.
	Because she wants the fruit for her tribe.
	For her people. And unfortunately she has the power to do that.
	So you've got to go make your own fruit tree or find something else, but that's my suggestion.
	Well, I appreciate the opportunity to share some ideas with you.
	I've always been a great fan.
	Thanks for having me on. Thanks, John.
	I wish you the very best. Thank you, sir.
	All right, up next we have Neil.
	Neil wrote in and said, Below I have laid out an argument that the concept of identity is logically invalid or meaningless within the domain of human being.
	I also have an argument that the contradiction of identity is significant because it sets the conditions necessary for the initiation of violence against people, thus violating the non-aggression principle.
	And Neil wrote out an entire syllogism on this topic, and how would you like to start, Steph?
	Would you like to go through the syllogism line by line?
	Well, let's just, you know, start off.
	First of all, Neil, thanks for taking the time to put them in syllogisms.
	We go from A to N. So whether we'll get that far or not, we shall see, but I really appreciate you calling in.
	Oh, it's great to be on. If you would like, I can give you the gist of the entire argument in less than 90 seconds to start.
	Sold! To the man on the other end of the line.
	Alright, I'll start my timer.
	Here we go. Alright, so the gist is this.
	Identity is the perception of our own self-image.
	It's the most intimate and fundamental construction of the self.
	When we try to define our identity and ask who or what we are, we come up with countlessly many differentiating traits.
	Now, if we overlay the distributions of all possible traits, then we can identify the domain of traits which commonality and exclusion are maximized.
	For people, nothing in the universe can have more in common with a human being than another human.
	And any domain larger than human starts to introduce ambiguity into the domain.
	Thus, I argue that humanity is the most accurate and meaningful of all possible domains to identify as.
	Now, why is this important?
	It's important because if one's most intimate perception of their self-image is anything but human, then their self-image is something less than human and contradicts their humanity.
	The consequence of this contradiction of identity is that it establishes the conditions necessary to initiate violence on another person and violate the non-aggression principle.
	Since human beings only initiate violence on those other than themselves, the perception of ourselves as something less than human creates the other by distinguishing all people who fall outside of your subset.
	I don't know if that made any sense or not, but maybe it's a place we could start from.
	Right. So, identity defined as the foundational basis from which one constructs their self-image.
	Yeah. See, the thing is, you know, when people start off with something quite controversial like that, Neil, and then just kind of blow past it, I'm just telling you my spider sense starts to tingle.
	Like, okay, well, what's going on here?
	Because identity, you say, is like A is A, right?
	Yeah. So you're taking identity and changing the definition, or at least creating a very subset of the definition, because the identity principle is a rock is a rock.
	It's one of Aristotle's three laws of logic.
	And if you then say, well, I'm going to redefine identity as the foundational basis from which one constructs your self-image, that is a subset of Of A is A, but I'm not even sure, because now we have the verb constructs, right? Which is not part of the identity principle.
	A rock is a rock, but a rock is not constructing its own self-image.
	So that's where I sort of get a bit confused from the beginning.
	Okay, so I'm trying to...
	To articulate kind of identity as it is used today in the social, political arena.
	Oh, you mean like identity politics kind of thing?
	Yeah, it's like identity as it's a functional thing that we use in our life.
	That's kind of where I'm trying to...
	To piece out, to flush out that idea of, like, what are people talking about when they're saying, oh, I identify as this?
	Or even just the statement, I am Neil.
	Or, you know, I'm a, you know, my, whatever, like, I'm white.
	Or I'm a male. Or, you know, any of these quote-unquote identities.
	I'm trying to flush out what that functionally is.
	And how we use it today.
	So that's kind of what I'm trying to get at.
	Because it is something we construct.
	Because I can change who I fundamentally think I am and how I see myself, that innermost image of that.
	No, not completely. To a certain extent, I mean, that's what growing up is.
	It's about seeing yourself and that as you grow and change, you see and perceive yourself in the world completely differently, you know, every day or even multiple times a day.
	No, no, no, but there's no identity politics called maturity.
	Or wisdom. Or personal growth, right?
	Identity politics is usually racial and gender collectivist concepts that are utilized for political gain.
	Correct. And those generally are not, you know, there's some blurry edges as a whole, but I generally would not be able to pass as Japanese.
	Correct. Um...
	So do you think that just because you're a white person that you have to identify as a white person?
	Are you bound to that?
	Well, no, but if somebody asks me about race and gender, I'm going to say I'm a white male.
	I don't have that absorbed into my definition of myself.
	Like, I don't... Wake up in the morning, look at my inner forearm and say, still white!
	I don't reach down to my nether regions and say, still hanging heavy, still got that big swing castanet set, twigs and berries.
	So I don't have within my identity white male.
	Now, I know that there are other people who, other groups or other people who do have much more of an embedded identity.
	I would imagine that's because for them, I don't view identity as something, these collectivist identities like race and gender and so on, I don't view them as innate to human beings.
	I view them as something that is a government program, something that is highly subsidized.
	So for instance, if you self-identify as X, which we talked about with John recently, another caller on this show, maybe you can get preferential treatment of business.
	Maybe you can get a student loan. Maybe you can get into college more easily.
	So you're paid for pursuing this identity, for accepting and absorbing and checking off The box.
	You know, there's this Elizabeth Warren question, right?
	By the way, she's really quite obsessed with marketing her own knickknacks.
	You should look that up. It's kind of weird.
	But there's...
	She... Apparently, in order to get a job or two, she marked herself down as Native American or Indigenous American.
	And it turned out that, you know, she sure as heck doesn't look at that.
	Oh, high cheekbones! It's like, well, you know, that's not quite a genetic test.
	Um... But why did she mark that down?
	Well, I would assume that if she's not Native American, she marked it down because it gave her an easier entrance into whatever it was.
	I think it was to become faculty or whatever it was in some university.
	So that's paying someone to do something.
	I guess you could pay a woman to identify as your girlfriend for the night, but that doesn't mean she's your girlfriend.
	It's just what you're paying her to do.
	And so the identity, I think, in general, is developed by government programs and paid for by government programs, with this tiny exception that where there are objective and measurable group differences, then those group differences, it would be rational to have As part of your understanding of how the group operates.
	So, it's what I've talked about before.
	Chinese people tend to be a little bit shorter in general, and therefore we're less likely to see them in the NBA. It doesn't mean that there can't be wonderful NBA players who are Chinese, but it's less likely.
	If you're going to evaluate differences in statistics as a whole, that can be valuable.
	But that's more sociological.
	That's less... Personal, because if you are a really great Chinese basketball player, what do you care about the collective?
	And if you're really short of any race, then you're less likely to want to play.
	Ball, basketball, at least at the professional level.
	So as far as, you know, it costs in general to be a white male these days.
	The only group that it costs more in terms of ethnicity is East Asians or Japanese, Chinese and so on because they're marked down in America and trying to get into universities and so on.
	So it probably has never struck me as a particularly important part of my identity because I've never been bribed to focus on it.
	Yeah, so, I mean, you said that the definition of self, is that...
	I think if that's a term, how you want to define identity, I think that that's fine.
	That's probably a better way of articulating that image.
	But why is self-image...
	So, do you mean in terms of identity politics, if that's what you're focusing on, why is self-image important?
	It's a very subjective thing in many ways, right?
	Yeah. And it's something...
	So if how we see ourself is something that every individual person has to do, and if racism, sexism, like all the isms, all the identity politics, if we've already started down the wrong path at the individual level, how you see yourself...
	Well, I mean, it makes sense that socially those same missteps and mistakes would perpetuate and, you know, create the chaos, which were, you know, all the issues that we're having with these things.
	That's kind of why I was starting to think about how we see ourself.
	You know, how do I see myself?
	When I wake up in the morning, you know, What are the things that I associate myself with?
	What am I proud of?
	What am I ego?
	All these different things that whatever it is that makes up me, I put those things together.
	And I was just trying to come in and see if there's not something to how, if it's not important to the way in which we classify ourselves or the way in which we see the world.
	That's kind of what I was trying to get with.
	Do you have a challenge when it comes to thinking of your own identity?
	A challenge? Yeah, I mean, I must say, I don't really think about my identity.
	Whether that's a failing or not, I don't know, but I don't really think about my identity.
	I mean, I feel like I'm engaged in a Titanic struggle to put out the fires of irrationality that are trying to consume the world.
	And, you know, when you're battling a forest fire, it doesn't seem to be Well, battling a foreign forest fire does not seem to be conducive to existential identity questions.
	It seems to me that there's a certain amount of leisure, maybe even a certain amount of self-indulgence that's necessary in order to think deeply about identity issues.
	And just, sorry, just by the by, because I wanted to mention this a while back ago.
	So I was watching my daughter and I, this is kind of funny, it's a bit of a tangent, but forgive me.
	My daughter and I were watching a show about the forest fires that are raging in British Columbia, which is the left coast of Canada.
	And there was a woman in a, you know, sort of semi-skin-tight dress who was gesturing away at the computer screen and talking about all the forest fires and so on.
	And she was very pretty and made up nicely, had a nice figure in all of that.
	And then they cut to these...
	Men out there, you know, in the deepening dark with sparks flying through their hair and smoke and heat blowing in their faces, half their beards burnt off as they battle this place and so on.
	And I was like, hey, honey, look, it's like male privilege.
	She's in an air-conditioned studio in high heels and a dress, and they're out there battling the elements.
	Look at all that privilege.
	Anyway, so I don't think that much about identity.
	My thought is that...
	If you're busy and doing urgently important things, it seems less likely that you could.
	And that's why I just was sort of wondering whether you think a lot about your identity or whether it kind of seems ill-defined in your mind?
	Well, I do think a lot about identity.
	I do think, I don't know, I do my work.
	I take care of my family and all the time that I don't.
	For my leisure time, I love this stuff.
	I love thinking. I love putting together arguments.
	So that's kind of what I do.
	And are you a white male?
	Yep. Yep.
	As I kind of got to, I would say that I just so happen to be white.
	Because when I think of myself and I think about the things that I identify as, Historically, coming through this, that's why the whole concept of identity to me is kind of meaningless because all I can really identify really is as a human being.
	All the things that I might say, like, oh, I'm this, this, that, or that, I mean, these are all subsets of the larger human being.
	It started with the question of why do people, kind of with the non-aggression principle.
	So it makes sense that, yeah, I don't initiate violence on another, right?
	If they attack me, I hit them back.
	That's fine. But it's the initiation.
	That's the big no-no.
	But yet, constantly throughout history, there's always this initiation of violence on other human beings.
	So I'm thinking about, well, why is that?
	Well, because you view the other person as another.
	Because of Darwinian evolution, isn't it?
	Well, if we look back, it's so tribalism.
	You go from the single person, people identify it as larger and larger groups.
	Yeah, but the larger and larger groups are not genetically homogenous.
	So there's a particular group, and they have in-group preferences for genetic proximity.
	You have a preference for, I would assume, your child over some child on the other side of the world.
	And so a preference for genetic proximity is the foundation of evolution in many ways, right?
	If you cared for other people's children more than you cared for your children, you'd be serving their genetic needs, not your own, and those genes would die out, right?
	So you have to prefer your own genes rather than other people's genes.
	I'm not talking morally. I'm just talking evolution.
	This is all across the animal world.
	So you prefer your own genes.
	You'll fight for your own tribe, your own tribal genetic structure, over another tribe's.
	And we are all built to do that.
	And given that throughout the vast majority of human history, it was a zero-sum game.
	Right? If I get the fruit tree, you don't get the fruit tree.
	If my tribe gets the fruit tree, they kick your tribe out of the fruit tree.
	The idea of like planting fruit trees and having agriculture and then an industrial revolution, that's a very small part.
	Human history, 150,000 years, it's been 10,000 years since agriculture, so it's way less than 7.5% of human history is to do with...
	And even then, it was like, well, I'll take the land or you'll take the land.
	The idea of being able to produce a lot of stuff is really only 200 years old in the world.
	So the reason why we initiate force against each other is that resources...
	Are very limited throughout most of human history.
	And if you can take resources from another genetic set and use them to enhance the survival of your genetic set, then your genes are going to flourish.
	And anybody who didn't do that, those genes died out.
	So as human beings, we're built to acquire resources and we can get those through hunting, we can get those through farming more recently, we can get those through production even more recently, or we can get them by taking stuff from other tribes, other groups.
	So the initiation of the use of force, I mean, it's a lot like asking, well, why does the lion hunt the zebra?
	It's like, because that's where the meat is and that's what it needs to eat.
	And so human beings, it's been a battle throughout human history.
	For the acquisition of resources, usually at the expense of another gene set.
	But we have advanced in our social structure.
	And how people, the rallying cry, which has unified those groups, has not just been the genetics or the preference.
	I mean, the separation of church and state.
	That is, people identify, like people used to, their religion.
	And they said, hey, we're going to put this religion thing aside, and we're going to come together as a nation.
	But why did they do that? Well, I think because the larger and larger...
	If you can see yourself as part of a larger and larger group, that means that the larger and larger group can behave and cooperate.
	Well, they did that because...
	Free markets. No, a couple hundred years of religious warfare.
	I mean, there was just so much suffering, and society was in danger of collapsing, so they tried something else.
	I mean, it'd be great, don't get me wrong, it would be great if people listened to reason and proactively made good decisions in society, but, you know, it's a pretty grim constant throughout human history, Neil, that it is when there is an unbelievable disaster that threatens to take down an entire civilization.
	Maybe, just maybe, then people will try something different, but they really have to be on the ropes, and...
	That, I think, had more to do with the separation of church and state than anything else.
	I mean, Marx and Lenin thought that the class would be the identifying factor which people would rally behind.
	It didn't happen. Mussolini said, no, but it's the nation.
	I think you can look back and you can say that there's some level at which the The object of what brings and kind of structures society can change.
	Is that... I don't think that's...
	No, I mean, the class...
	The reason my class failed is it's not a genetic category.
	The reason my nation succeeded is it was.
	I mean, well, the free trade today isn't a genetic thing.
	I'm sorry? Like...
	I'm not genetically related to you, but we still can discuss and we see each other as other people.
	We still can interact.
	We can still both mutually benefit from trade.
	I don't quite understand how the genetic thing is supposed to encompass how we organize our social structure in today's world.
	I'm not saying it's how we should.
	So I want a state, if there is even going to be one, which I don't want at all, but if there is going to be one, I want it to be agnostic regarding these things.
	But we do have to understand that the reason why we have to have a separation of church and state is that there is an in-group preference among religions, and if the state controls religious expression, every group will try to use the power of the state to impose its religion on everyone else, because it's win-lose.
	If you win, you get a very big religion.
	If you lose, your religion gets pretty much wiped out.
	I mean, just ask the Armenians, right?
	Post-First World War period.
	And so, because we have in-group preferences, because it is a battle for resources based on genetic proximity, that is one of the reasons why we can't have a state that picks favorites among genders or races or ethnicities or religions or anything like that,
	because... I mean, it's one thing to have these things competing in a free market, which, you know, I don't think is a huge impact, but it's quite another thing when these identity issues then end up controlling the awesome power of the state, then they really go cancerous.
	Okay, well maybe...
	Okay, so in terms of like fratricide, or if I'm to fight my brother, we're genetically come from the same material, we're very close...
	And people do fight their family.
	That initiation of violence against them, I would argue, is because they fundamentally identify themselves as something other than in that family.
	They say, we're not on the same team.
	I don't think twice to crush a cockroach.
	And if I don't think twice to punch my brother, It's because I have to see him differently.
	Hang on, hang on. First of all, it's very rare.
	And secondly, how do you know he's your brother?
	I mean, are you saying that no woman ever slept around throughout history?
	No woman ever had a child outside of a monogamous relationship and tried to pass it off as that guy's kid?
	Well, I mean, that is true.
	I mean, I wouldn't know like that, but...
	Oh, it's common. I don't think that that would explain...
	Every single time.
	I wouldn't think that that would mean that only family violence is because of that.
	Well, come on. Neil, come on.
	You can't do that to me. Come on.
	Did I say at all that the only explanation for all family violence is that brothers might not be related?
	You can't, like, if you're there and you're thinking, I don't even want to have a conversation because that's so irrational, right?
	So saying, here's an explanation as to why brothers might fight, that they might suspect that they're not actually brothers, or they might have some sense that they're not actually brothers, and that means that they're more likely to have conflict if there's a preference for genetic proximity and they're not that proximate genetically, and then you're saying, so that explains all family violence?
	Come on. I apologize.
	Okay. I just want to make sure we don't go down that wasted path because I'll never be...
	I could live forever and still not want to waste one more minute of my life down that nonsense.
	Okay. So, no, I think people can overcome it for sure.
	I think people can overcome it for sure.
	My proximity, if this makes any sense, my proximity is not based upon genetics, but based upon values.
	And I've had tons of conversations with this with just about every race and gender on this show that you can imagine.
	Okay. So for me, I remember having a conversation with a black guy some time back.
	And I remember saying to him, I said, look, you're a great guy.
	We agree on the free market.
	We enjoy discussing these ideas for the non-aggression principle and peaceful parenting.
	And I said, so if you move in next door to me as a black guy who believes these things, we are going to be great friends.
	Whereas if there's some communist white family that moves in, we're going to be not friends, right?
	So for there, it's not genetic proximity that matters to me.
	It's value proximity that matters to me.
	Because... My genetics are ideas, right?
	That's what I'm trying to spread.
	I want to be the Genghis Khan of memes.
	Basically, I want to be like giant seed-spraying idea guy who goes out and fertilizes the brain with the content, brains around the world, millions of brains around the world with the contents of my own mind and replicate that way.
	A giant philosophy phallus.
	Big dick rational spurt money shot molyneux.
	That's my... That's going to be right there on my gravestone.
	I only had one child.
	Because it started a little late.
	But FSHU enemy.
	So only had one child. But doesn't mean...
	It's the old Mr. Chips thing, right?
	Mr. Chips was a very influential school master in an old story, and people said, didn't you have any children?
	He said, I had thousands of them, right?
	Because he imprinted his thoughts and his minds and his way of doing things on so many children who came through his school.
	So I am, you know, the master of mental money shot, the...
	Spraying across the world forever, attempting to fertilize minds in my own image, in the image of philosophy, reason, evidence, and so on.
	And so I identify with ideas, not genetics.
	And I think that is where society needs to get to.
	And that's a value.
	Sorry, are you asking me or telling me?
	So you're saying that you're able to choose to shape and somehow you can see yourself not from a genetic proximity, like not from a genetic perspective, but from a values perspective.
	That's true. Now, whether those values are themselves genetic, I don't know.
	Like, if you look at the big five personality traits, and I won't go through them all here, I'm going to do a presentation on it at some point soon, you can look up the big five personality traits.
	They're very genetic.
	I mean, they're very genetic.
	And so I don't know whether my mindset has anything to do with my genetics or not.
	I act as if it doesn't.
	Because I think that's the best way to spread good ideas and good arguments.
	But I identify with values, with philosophy, with reasoned arguments, with evidence.
	And that's what I'm working to replicate perfectly.
	Across the world. I'm not doing it genetically by, you know, banging everything that reaches down to tie its shoes, but I'm doing it through the internet.
	I'm doing it through arguments.
	I'm doing it through books and podcasts and videos and Twitter and memes.
	I am replicating like you wouldn't believe.
	So even if you have agency or you don't have agency, you could say that the Your quote-unquote identity of the value-based perspective just so happens to be.
	I would just say that it's either violence or reason.
	It's either philosophy or violence.
	We either have genetic in-group preference, which means violence eventually, or violence.
	We have values that we fight for.
	We fight for our genes or we fight for our values.
	Fighting for genes is usually violent, whether it's overtly violent or covertly violent, like I was talking about with sort of diversity programs and set-asides and welfare states, military-industrial complex.
	These are all just dishonest and usually immoral ways of getting resources for a particular gene set.
	And So we either fight for our genetics, which takes us back to the swamp, to the prehistory, to the Darwinian struggle of all against all, or we fight for values, which we can do through language, which we can do peacefully, I damn well hope. So I don't really know if we have a definition of identity or not.
	Well, it was definitely a good show.
	I appreciate the call in, and we can have another talk about it at some point.
	I mean, when I say I might identify as values, that's my identity, I certainly have addition for...
	And I put forward two definitions as genetic in-group or there's values.
	But if we haven't got very far in sort of half an hour, we'll drop our losses and move on.
	But I really do appreciate the call.
	Let's move on to the next caller. Thanks for having me.
	Thank you. Alright, up next we have Steve.
	Steve wrote in and said, I'm a former Antifa-style anarchist.
	In 2011, I was part of the Occupy movement, but in 2016, I voted for Trump after a long and difficult intellectual journey from radical leftism to conservatism.
	My hope now is to help other people trapped in the radical left to dehypnotize themselves.
	Do you have any thoughts on how to do this or any advice on how to transition back into society?
	That's from Steve. Steve, how you doing?
	I'm doing alright.
	How are you? What a journey, my friend.
	Holy crap and a half.
	That's the kind of journey that you get in a Ridley Scott movie when people sleep for three years and wake up on a different planet.
	That's pretty wild.
	That is pretty wild.
	So let's start with where you started from, if that's all right.
	So how did you get to the Occupy movement?
	And just before that, you know, I mean, I don't have sort of the knee-jerk reaction to the Occupy movement had some great critiques, some great critiques, some important critiques of...
	The money masters on the planet, and the 1%.
	I mean, the 1% who earn their money in the free market, more or less, yeah, no problem, great.
	But the 1% who earn it because the Fed's lending them money first, that's scuzzbag 101.
	So I just wanted to point that out.
	But so how did you go from childhood to where you were in the Occupy movement?
	I don't even know where to start.
	It usually starts with a squirt, if I remember rightly, but anyway, just kidding.
	Well, that took place sometime around the year 1983.
	I think I heard that. Occupy.
	So, I joined, I kind of got involved in the anarchist movement, anarchism in particular, and especially, I know you've had, you're a libertarian, you've Lean in this kind of anarcho-capitalist direction, maybe, but I'm talking about communist anarchism.
	That's quite a big difference.
	You know, this is like Spain in 1937, anarchy, right?
	Yes, yes, that's exactly.
	In fact, the Spanish anarchists, I mean, if you listen to people who are in the movement talk, there's a big kind of a hagiographic perspective on the Spanish anarchists, and...
	This is getting ahead of things, but one of the things that led me away from the movement was reading more about those anarchists in Spain and discovering, hey, actually, they committed mass murder, they carried out mass rape of nuns, they would force priests to watch parodies of the mass and then murder them.
	So, anyway, those were the guys that I really looked up to, that we all really looked up to.
	I'll do a show on this at one point, but yeah, it was the usual freak show of totalitarian, mass-murdering, nightmarishness.
	Yeah, exactly. Exactly that.
	But so, um, why did I get involved in anarchism, though, and in communism in general?
	Because I was a huge fan of Marx, too, and we all were.
	Wait, wait, wait. Who we are?
	Who's the we there? Oh, yeah.
	People who are communist anarchists are often big fans of Marx.
	The reason is that other than Kropotkin and Bakunin, who are two Russians, anarchist thinkers don't really have...
	Their own theory and their own Bible.
	So they need Marx. They need Marx because he kind of...
	Well, he promised it, right?
	He breaks it down and he makes sense of things.
	Yeah. He promised.
	He promised withering away of the stage in a stateless society.
	So if you really want to take a deep hit on the Marxist vong, you can see your way through to anarchism in the afterlife, so to speak.
	Yes, exactly. Exactly.
	It's kind of funny. If you look at communism and you see it as a parody of Christianity, which it sort of is, anarchism is sort of a parody of Gnosticism and not in the Gnostic Christian movements.
	But anyway, so I had gotten involved with it early in like, when I was 17, 18, 19, and I was reading, I was this size.
	Sorry to interrupt. So your family structure?
	What was your family structure?
	Oh, interesting question.
	Very interesting question. I was raised at once by a single mother, but in an extended family context.
	So I was raised in a house with grandparents, mom, aunts and uncles who are close in age to me, so they're almost sibling age.
	Big family. Very good in many ways, chaotic in other ways.
	But it did give you the idea...
	Where was your dad?
	My dad...
	Where the hell was my dad?
	My dad... Was a drug addict, and he was an alcoholic.
	When I was four years old, he went crazy, and we didn't see much of him after that.
	Did he go crazy from drugs?
	Presumably. I mean, did he have mental health issues before that?
	Probably, but, you know, the cocaine didn't help.
	Yeah, exactly. So, was he a drug addict when your mom chose him as the father of her child?
	It's a very good question.
	And I kind of thought you would go down that avenue.
	But I don't know.
	I don't know the answer to that.
	Well, I'm guessing he wasn't an architect.
	Well, he was very smart.
	He was a very smart guy.
	IQ 160 kind of guy, you know?
	And I think...
	You know, he went to college.
	And for a while, they were actually happy.
	They had a nice little house in Pennsylvania.
	It was... You know, it was American Dream-style suburbia, but then I think...
	Again, the warning signs have to have been there the whole time, but what I've gotten...
	What I've pieced together is that the drinking got worse and worse.
	Eventually, he moved the family to a slum in...
	And...
	This may be too much information, but...
	Yeah, just leave off the geography, but I do like the details.
	Yeah, yeah, yeah. Thank you.
	So he moved the family to a slum in a major city...
	And eventually, his nervous breakdown happened.
	My mom moved back in with her parents, who had three relatively young children of their own.
	And we all went from there in the house with three parents, six kids, and a few college-age kids coming in and out from time to time.
	And what did your mom live on?
	For a while, she was a waitress.
	She did get some government assistance.
	She put herself through school, became a substitute teacher.
	Eventually she became a teacher in the Catholic schools and then eventually a public school teacher.
	So that was the journey.
	She didn't make a ton of money as a public school teacher, but I remember when she got that job and we suddenly...
	We weren't getting free lunch at school anymore and we had Pop-Tarts at home all the time.
	It felt like being rich kids.
	And did she date again?
	From time to time.
	And then she stopped doing that.
	Or she kept it under wraps if she did.
	Right. And did you ever meet your father again?
	Yeah, we... Okay, so we saw him on and off for a couple of years.
	He would turn off...
	On and off, I don't know, once a month maybe?
	I'm thinking back to when I was very young, right?
	So the separation happened when I was four or five.
	We saw him on and off until I was maybe eight or nine, maybe ten at the most, at which point he kind of...
	He started a new family.
	We saw him less and less.
	The last time I saw him, I was 16.
	We hadn't seen him in a number of years.
	He came up with his new family.
	We hung out and spent the afternoon in a bar.
	Didn't he have a drinking problem?
	Yes. Did he still have a drinking problem?
	Well, I would think so.
	I mostly call bullshit on the IQ 160, by the way, but it's very rare for an IQ 160 person to destroy their lives through drugs.
	You get the deferral of gratification, you can see the consequences of your actions.
	They may dabble a little bit, but it's just rare.
	It's not impossible, but it's rare.
	I don't know, because I've known many drug addicts and many recovering addicts, and I've known a lot of them that are very smart and that have still nevertheless managed to...
	How do you become a recovering addict? Because I'm a recovering addict.
	Oh, you're yourself a recovering addict?
	Okay. Yeah, well, call me a recovering alcoholic, but yes, an addict of some of the harder drugs as well.
	That kind of actually ties in with the anarchism thing.
	It's extremely common in that scene.
	And the people who aren't addicted to drugs or to alcohol are very often addicted to rage.
	And violence, of course.
	And violence. And violence.
	And violence, yes.
	Oh no, there's a dopamine hit for some people with violence, as far as I understand it.
	Like, it can be physically addictive.
	It's where sadism makes sense.
	That makes sense. And I really feel like the...
	I feel like the sense of the rush that you get from that kind of hatred that you direct at everyone else in society, it feels like a drug.
	And it feels like addiction.
	Like, knowing it from both angles, I really, really, really...
	Well, you feel superior, too, right?
	Like, the world is corrupt, and you're pure, and the world is evil, and you're at night in shining armor.
	My God, it's a rush of power.
	Oh, yeah? Yes, it's a rush of power.
	The regular rules don't apply to you because you're above them.
	Yeah. Better than them.
	You steal to survive, and you think that makes you better.
	You... Well, property is theft.
	Why shouldn't I steal, right? Exactly.
	Yeah. Exactly. I know. Oh, if I could count the number of times I've heard that line, yes.
	I know. Yeah. I know.
	Yeah. So, where were we?
	So, you have no siblings, is that right?
	Oh, no. I have a couple of siblings.
	I have two younger brothers.
	Two younger brothers. Yes.
	Didn't your father go crazy when you were four?
	When I was four, yes.
	So my younger brother, one of them was one year younger than me.
	The other is three years younger than me.
	He was born when I was three.
	So your father was on drugs when your mother was getting pregnant.
	He must have been. You see where I'm going here, brother?
	Yeah, I see exactly where you're going.
	Take me there. Yeah.
	What's that? Take me where you are.
	With the who. Well, I mean, you're pointing out that he was on drugs when my mom was becoming pregnant with my youngest brother.
	And you're almost certainly right.
	Happy to see him. I don't know.
	I don't know what it was because the youngest...
	These are like...
	These are details and I wonder if anybody who is going to listen to this is following it.
	But the older two siblings, that's me and middle brother, were born in one place, which was a relatively nice, relatively stable household, although I know there was a drinking issue.
	Certainly a drinking issue.
	Was there a cocaine issue too?
	An acid? Do you mean like her parents who had the young kids?
	No, no, no. This is my parents living in a stable, sort of two-parent house of their own, with their two oldest.
	It was before the youngest was born that we moved to the other place, to the bigger city, living in a kind of slum.
	That's where the third brother was born, in that environment.
	Although, interestingly enough, since he did not know my father very much at all and has barely seen him, he's probably the most stable out of all of us.
	He has a very nice job.
	I'm sorry to interrupt, Stephen. Call me a...
	Petit bourgeois. Maybe I am.
	But I go back to the Benjamins.
	I go back to the money. So your mom was a waitress before she was on welfare, before she was a teacher.
	Your mom was a waitress.
	Your father was a drug addict.
	How are they having this house?
	I mean, my whole life had grown up so poor.
	To me, it's all about, well, where's the money coming from?
	So, I think the details are getting confused.
	My mom was not a waitress when I was very young.
	She was a waitress later when she moved in with my grandparents.
	When my mom and my dad lived together in a relatively stable union, they had a house.
	I can't give you the details of how much it might have cost, although in that place, property values are very cheap, so who knows?
	I don't know. My mom didn't work at that time, actually.
	And my dad did support the family.
	How? What did he do? You're not going to believe me.
	He worked in a greenhouse.
	Oh, sorry. I should not laugh.
	I'm going to hell. I'm just telling you.
	And I should. But the fuck?
	He worked in a greenhouse.
	I swear to God. Is this code for he dealt drugs?
	I'm trying to understand this here.
	No, no, no, no. No, it was literally a greenhouse.
	His uncle owned a greenhouse.
	He worked in the greenhouse. All right.
	Okay. All right.
	All right. All right.
	Not a grow up. A greenhouse.
	No. Regular old, probably growing flowers for Aunt Mabel greenhouse, you know?
	And what were your mom's parents like?
	My mom's parents...
	My mom's father...
	Well, they were Catholics.
	They were...
	They were petty bourgeois, right?
	They were relatively prominent, but not overly wealthy members of the community where they lived, which is a small town.
	They had 10 children.
	My grandfather did many different things, and he was one of these...
	I don't even know how to describe him.
	He's a larger-than-life character sometimes.
	At one point, he had a business, the purpose of which was to get from four small businesses.
	At one point, I know he...
	Hold on a sec, Steve.
	We've just got to wait. You just garbled for a sec.
	We just got to wait for the internet to catch up.
	Alright, so just to make a note, we switched to a landline because Skype was garbling.
	Sorry about that, but we were just picking up that your grandfather was sort of larger than life character, and one of his jobs was to help secure loans for businesses.
	Steve, is that right? Yeah, I think that's what they did.
	I know they got funding for businesses, loans, grants probably too, but yeah.
	From the government?
	I don't know. Probably. I was young when they had that office.
	After that, he did different stuff.
	Right. Yeah, it probably wouldn't be for the bank, because the bank would do it itself, right?
	Well, you would think, yeah.
	All right. Now, how do you think they ended up raising a mom who had kids with a drug addict?
	That seems not overly Catholic to me.
	Well, it is and it isn't.
	I'm afraid to share too many of these details.
	Oh, yeah, don't worry about it then.
	I don't want you to put anything at risk, so don't worry about that.
	If it's any concern of yours, don't worry about it.
	But it's a very chaotic, to some degree, very chaotic beginning, right?
	For you. To some degree, yeah.
	Oh, God, yeah. And more chaotic.
	I've learned since I've both gotten away from radicalism And gotten away from intoxication, just how chaotic and kind of abnormal it was in some ways, so yeah.
	And what do you think were the most chaotic or abnormal aspects?
	What are the most chaotic or abnormal aspects?
	I mean, there's abnormal and there's chaotic.
	Those are kind of two different things.
	I think that it's actually very good To have access to an extended family.
	The nuclear family is important, and also, it doesn't always work.
	Sometimes dad's a drug addict, but sometimes dad just gets killed, you know?
	Or sometimes mom gets cancer or something, and it's very good, I think, to have access to this extended family of grandparents, aunts, uncles that can help.
	Well, the studies certainly support you on that.
	I mean, studies are very clear that extended family, if it's healthy, is very good.
	I didn't know that, but that really bears out what I've experienced in my life, and I think that is important.
	And at the same time, I mean, what's chaotic about it?
	I mean, I told you about, you know, my father is a drug addict.
	That was chaotic because that's the first four years of my life.
	I don't always remember that stuff.
	I don't have a ton of memories from it.
	But imagine you're raising a family, and you move a whole other family, and you've got two competing groups of children that don't.
	They try to get along. They don't always get along.
	You've got sibling dynamics, which clash with parental dynamics.
	And there was, you know, we fought sometimes.
	There are the ingredients of some chaos there.
	And what about discipline?
	How did that work for you, Steve?
	Well, there are two kinds of discipline.
	The discipline... I'll give you one example.
	My grandmother, you did not cross.
	And we were very much taught old-fashioned manners.
	The family, when I was young, and there were so many of us, would gather at the table.
	We would pray before meals.
	You would ask to be excused.
	And I remember at times praying a rosary prayer.
	At my grandmother's command after dinner, the group of kids sitting around.
	As a child, I thought that was very boring.
	As an adult, I look back and have some gratitude around it.
	Sometimes discipline can be very lax, though.
	Again, my grandparents are there and they're exerting an influence, but they're not the parents.
	My mom is often not there.
	She's working. She did the best.
	With the resources she had.
	She really, really did.
	And also, it was a difficult situation.
	And it was...
	It was difficult.
	It was not always ideal.
	Go on. No, that's kind of where I was going with that.
	I'm kind of wondering...
	Can you tell me a little about where...
	I think that my background, my family background, affected my later political involvement and a lot of my views in a lot of ways.
	But I'm sort of wondering where you're going with it and what you're thinking at this point.
	Sure, yeah. No, I mean, I can tell you, I mean, I'm generally...
	I think that people's ideology has a lot to do with their early childhood.
	It's not always the case, and it can certainly switch, but, you know, I grew up with a crazy mom, so the fact that I battle hard for rationality, these are not new skills for me, right?
	These are like skills that I developed in the crib, for God's sakes, right?
	Totally follow you on that, yeah.
	Yeah, so striving for rationality, striving for objectivity, there's a reason why I pushed so hard for that, because the alternative was not good, not good at all.
	And of course, I saw what happened down that tunnel of subjectivity and irrationality and self-indulgence.
	So I'll tell you what I think, Steve, and it's most likely crap, right?
	So it's most likely crap, and then we'll get more into the journey if you have time.
	I hope you do, because it's a great conversation.
	I do, I do, absolutely.
	But I think a lot of the people who are radicals on the left are white knighting for their single moms.
	They're sent out, in a sense, by the single moms to terrorize the world into giving them single moms resources through the state.
	And this is why they hate the free market, and this is why, because the free market would put personal responsibility on irresponsible moms.
	The free market would require that the moms or whoever the dysfunctional parents are actually grow up and exchange value voluntarily in a marketplace.
	And so I think that a lot of the...
	Leftist radicals. And look, there are rightist radicals.
	We'll get to those the next time one of those calls in, but we're talking about this particular style now.
	But I'm not surprised that your mom got resources from the government through welfare, that she gets resources through the government through being a government teacher.
	teacher.
	I'm not saying she doesn't work, but there's a lot of benefits and extra goodies that come from the state through that.
	And if your grandfather got loans for businesses through the government, then his part of his flow through was the government.
	So when conservatives come along and say, we want a smaller government, we want more community, we want people to take responsibility, we want to cut the welfare state, we want to privatize stuff.
	I think a lot of people in society really freak the hell out about that and get really scared and angry about that.
	And I think sometimes they send out their shock troop kids to go and make sure that that kind of privatization, that kind of shrinkage in the size and power of the state and its capacity to redistribute resources to them, damn well doesn't happen.
	Thank you.
	That's interesting.
	I've actually never heard that take on it before.
	Now I'll have to think about it.
	From my perspective, I think that there were...
	My journey to leftism had a couple of components, both related to my upbringing, but not necessarily related to that.
	Can I share that with you and then get your take?
	Steve, I am thrilled at everything you want to share, so please help yourself.
	That's awesome. So, there's two things.
	There were two things that really, I think, impacted me.
	Probably there were a hundred things, but these two are jumping out at me right now.
	And the first is, whether my dad was all that smart or not, I actually did have a very high IQ. I was one of these kids that was tested and put in the gifted class.
	And I lived in a place and at a time and in a culture where that wasn't, and I don't mean my family, I mean my peers at the school, the public school, the government school, if you like, where that wasn't really respected or was looked down on very strongly.
	I had to fight a lot when I was a kid.
	And relatively early on, because it was early on, we can kick around, well, where did you really get that idea?
	But, as far as I know...
	Wait, sorry, which idea? Oh, the one I'm about to share.
	Okay. I just want to make sure I didn't miss the entire...
	Right, okay, go ahead. Oh, goodness.
	No, no, no, no, no. I'm about...
	I'm going there. So, early on, I get this idea.
	People are picking on me, bullying me, hurting me for something I can't...
	I can't really help, you know?
	I'm a smart kid.
	I'm interested in smart things, books, Star Trek, whatever, you know?
	And so I identified, when I heard, as I thought about it, you do get these ideas from television and so forth.
	When I heard about other people being mistreated because of things they couldn't help, they were black or they were gay or whatever, I identified really strongly with that.
	And I remember being a kid and thinking that and thinking, Even though racism was common among my peers, I remember thinking that's why I shouldn't be racist, because these same kids were coming after me for being a nerd in the gifted class.
	So that was sort of thing one.
	And then thing two, I talked about growing up, and we've just talked about growing up in an extended family, and yes, there's some issues, and we can circle back to that.
	But in some ways, it was so good.
	And I think I got this idea in my head that small communities of people who have common traditions, maybe they care about the land they live on, maybe they're a little bit closer to nature, that that was a good way of organizing human society.
	And as far as I knew, that idea was contained in the radical left.
	Right? Because when I was encountering leftism, especially by the most sort of eco-radical strains of anarchism, thinkers like Derek Jensen, groups like Earth First, that's what I saw in them.
	And it was only much later that I looked more closely into it.
	After a hundred things had happened, and I realized that there is a name for a political belief that we should prioritize Smaller groups, customs, traditions, localism, little platoons.
	And the name is not communism, it's conservatism.
	Right. So that's...
	Those are two of the major ways that I think that growing up in the place I did, the way I did, affected that kind of journey.
	And I think it's also... You know, leftism, it kind of comes at you from a lot of angles.
	It's sort of presented, I felt it was presented to me, if you care about community, that's a leftist ideal.
	Right. Right-wingers love corporations and hate communities.
	Right. You know, you've heard the refrain a million times, so you know what I'm talking about.
	Yeah. Yeah, no, of course.
	And I mean, the rightist argument or the free market argument is human beings desperately need communities and governments can't provide them.
	Governments can provide you resources, but when they provide you resources like money and healthcare and all the stuff and free this and free that, it destroys communities because it destroys our natural need for each other.
	Our tribal instincts to have communities gets destroyed when you're given stuff.
	It's like the work ethic is destroyed if you win the lottery kind of thing.
	Yeah, absolutely. And that's not an idea I could have interfaced with, God, until the last few years, really.
	Not until I had to see exactly what an absolutely vicious, toxic, abusive hate culture the radical left is.
	And then I had to really go searching for alternatives.
	And I had to clear up my own head by...
	Ceasing to drink alcohol and to use other toxins.
	Sorry to interrupt. How did you end up becoming addicted to, you said mostly booze, but also some drugs?
	Yeah. I mean, that's a story, and that's always a question, right?
	Is it because you saw your parents doing it?
	Is it genetic? Is it because you saw the cool kids doing it?
	You wanted to be cool? Is it because you saw the cool guys on TV doing it?
	For me, is it all those things?
	Plus, did I read Jack Kerouac and think he was cool and I wanted to be like him?
	And did I, you know, admire others?
	Damn that Hunter S. Thompson!
	Right. Exactly.
	So, who knows? Maybe it's all of those things.
	Maybe it's some of them and not the others.
	Maybe it's just one, though I doubt it.
	Were you hurt?
	In your heart, when you drank?
	Like, were you pursuing pleasure or escaping pain or combat?
	It was everything. I loved the taste of alcohol.
	I didn't...
	I was always...
	I'm not this way anymore.
	Like, I was nervous when we began our conversation today, but I'm able to sort of carry on this interaction.
	But years ago, and especially when I was younger, I would have needed to be drunk even to talk to you, you know?
	Because it was very socially awkward for a long time.
	And it wasn't until my late 20s that I became comfortable enough in my own skin to where I could be in a social setting without being drunk.
	And I also used it to escape from pain.
	I talked about my grandfather earlier when I heard that he was dying.
	I walked to the store. I bought two 40s of Old English and a pack of cigarettes, and I plowed through them as fast as I could.
	So, yeah, that was that good thing.
	What did your mom or your grandparents or extended family, did they know you were being bullied at school, Steve?
	Oh, they had some idea.
	And what did they do? Well, my grandfather insisted on calling the police at one point when I was in eighth grade.
	He said, just call the police and that'll be the end of it.
	To some extent, it was the end of it, but...
	So it was pretty serious stuff if the police were called, right?
	You know, at that point, it was.
	At that point, yes. I mean, at that point, I was 13.
	I had been in a fight with, like, 12 people at a football game, you know?
	You're not supposed to fight 12 people, and I didn't start it.
	Wow. Yeah.
	I mean, I was not an angel of any kind.
	None of us were. But, well, that's what was going on then.
	Right. And did you fight a lot as a teen?
	What's that? Did you get into a lot of physical fights as a teen?
	As a teen, the older I got in high school, the less that I fought.
	And I... It's sort of funny because I was thinking about him before I talk.
	I had a friend. I made a friend when I was 16, 15, 16, and we became closer friends.
	And he was a coward.
	He would never fight. And that sounds bad, but I didn't know that you could not fight.
	I didn't know you could just kind of like...
	Walk away? Wait, that's an option?
	I didn't see that on the video game command console.
	Exactly. That button was not there.
	Okay, so let me ask you this, just before we get into...
	When you think about the people that you knew in the left, how many of them do you know who had good relationships with their fathers?
	It's a great question.
	And I think...
	I can't say this with a certainty, but I don't think very many did.
	And... No, I don't think very many did at all.
	And I think I know where you're going with that, and I think that there's some truth to it, for sure.
	You know, the state is dead.
	You know, there's a lot of complex stuff that goes on.
	Our relationship to political authority is very much in line with, often, our relationship to more personal authority that we had as children.
	Yeah, yeah, yeah.
	That makes sense. Let me ask you this.
	Did your mother ever say, you're better off without your father?
	Or we're better off without your father?
	Or did you ever get that impression?
	I don't think...
	I don't remember. I honestly don't remember.
	I, in my view, we were better off without him in particular.
	And that's why...
	When you talk about the issue of single parenthood and single motherhood, I'm with you to a great extent, but not to the full extent.
	Because my father was crap, and I bet a lot of people's were.
	And so I see it, rather than a problem that we have single mothers, I see it as a tragedy that we have to have single mothers.
	And I wish it weren't the case.
	I wish that...
	In addition to recognizing the problem that actually does come from many single mothers and single women themselves, I also think it's a problem that so many men fail their children and fail to be men.
	Wait, but...
	Hang on, hang on, hang on, Steve.
	Remember I was talking about the white knighting?
	This would be an example of that.
	You have given no agency or responsibility to your mother at all.
	In this entire conversation.
	She dated, I don't know, did they get married or were they just together?
	Oh no, they were married.
	Okay, she dated, courted, got engaged to, married, and had three kids that I know of with a guy who was crazy and a drug addict.
	Does she bear... I mean, he's responsible, although he was an addict, and addicts are less responsible because they're addicted, right?
	But she was not an addict, and she chose this man to be the father of her children.
	No agency there.
	And it doesn't strike me as coincidental, although it may well be, Steve, but it doesn't strike me as coincidental that you think...
	We're better off without my father, and society would be better off without the state.
	I don't know that I'm with you 100% of the way on this, but that's a very interesting insight and not one that I would have thought of beforehand.
	To be fair, Steve, I don't know if I'm with me 100% on this.
	It's just a hypothesis. It's a conjecture.
	It's not even a hypothesis. It's very interesting.
	But you say it's a tragedy like it just happens to women.
	It doesn't just happen to women.
	Women target and choose and spread their legs for men.
	They make choices, right?
	I mean, you're not so Victorian that you think that women are just leaves on a stream cast.
	Like, they make choices, right?
	Yeah, I'm following you.
	I'm following you, and I'm following you.
	I understand, I think, where you're going with it.
	Because if your mom's a victim, then you're going to be mad at society.
	If your mom has agency, if your mom made choices, you might be a little more mad at your mom.
	Which, you know, could be considerably more fair in terms of negative impacts on your life.
	I'm not saying she's a bad person or a bad mom or anything like that.
	But in terms of these decisions, it's a little bit different now, right?
	I mean, if your mom's a victim, then someone victimized her and you can get really angry at society.
	If your mom has responsibility, then she made bad decisions and she's not a victim.
	Now, if she's not a victim, who are you going to get mad at?
	For the things you legitimately have a reason and right to be mad about in your childhood.
	That's what I mean by the white knight.
	Okay, okay, okay.
	I follow you. And so I think that's a good point.
	And I don't... It's a little more relevant to me then than to me now.
	Right now I'm... I'm not mad at society.
	You know? I'm a little...
	I'm angry with myself a little bit.
	I went down a road that was not healthy, to say the least.
	I'm angry at a lot of things in society.
	I was very...
	You know? Okay. But you're not angry at your mom.
	Oh, I didn't say that.
	I have a... I didn't say that, but I don't, because I actually am very angry with her.
	And I'm actually working through that right now with a therapist.
	That's something that I don't know how much I want to kind of bring out in public.
	No, that's fine. And I'm sorry, I should have been more precise.
	And I should have said, you haven't said you're angry with your mom, rather than you're not, because you hadn't.
	But if you're working on it with a therapist, kudos to you, man.
	That's very powerful stuff. Yeah, no, and it's been difficult.
	It's come out a lot more in recent months, and it has been a challenge, and I plan to continue very much down that road.
	So what's the view from inside these kinds of groups, right?
	So obviously they didn't sort of drag you along and say, here, stick a spear in a horse, right?
	I mean, there was something that...
	I don't know if it's a grooming or there's some transition point from, you know, we really want more localized societies to, you know, let's throw a bottle of urine at a cop.
	There is. And here's what's interesting.
	There is some of that, what you call grooming.
	And there's a lot more trying...
	How do I say this?
	Let me back up and sort of talk about the structure.
	Because a lot of people on the right have the idea...
	The groups like Antifa, you know, George Soros turns up with money.
	He says, I need 50 guys this weekend, and 50 guys show up off the labor line.
	And it's not like that.
	The sort of social structure of a lot of the left is a scene, like an art scene or a music scene.
	And like in any scene, people are always trying to get to the center and get into the cool kids clique, which is the center.
	And like in any scene, I mean, what is, what are we really talking about is a primate dominance hierarchy.
	There's no, leftists love to use the phrase, we have no leaders.
	We have no leaders means we have no formal leadership structure.
	So the only leadership structure we have is the one that primates naturally default to, which is the hierarchy of a pack of chimpanzees.
	Everybody knows, in every local activist crew, Who the big guys are.
	Everybody knows who the cool kids are.
	They want to be their friend.
	They want to impress them.
	It's straight up primate social dynamics.
	And they get in deeper and deeper and deeper until they are throwing bottles of urine at cops.
	And that's what makes them cool.
	Because that gives them cred at the next big radical get-together.
	And those happen regularly all over the country.
	Are you following? Yep, I am.
	I am. And was there a moment when you got the real willies, or was it a slow growth in williness, so to speak?
	Before we talked, I kind of hoped you would ask that, and I felt like I would need to have an answer, and I thought back, because it was a slow growth, but there were specific incidents.
	And can I tell you about one of them?
	Yeah, please. There was a protest in 2010.
	I have no idea at this point what it was about.
	Probably, who knows, globalization or something.
	What? Wasn't this show in particular?
	No? Okay. Not on that occasion.
	I don't know if you were broadcasting in 2010.
	Oh yeah. Anyway, so they go down to DC and they get together.
	What happens is that there will be a house, like a safe house or something like that.
	They'll get together. They have a conversation about what's going to happen at, quote, the action, unquote, which is the protest.
	They discuss something they call redecorating, which means property destruction.
	Property destruction does indeed take place.
	They think if you give it a code name, then the feds can't get you.
	Right. Because they don't know what it means.
	They're stupid. Property destruction does indeed take place.
	Later on, a grand jury is convened, and a friend of mine, a Nice guy, little guy, not tough, not big.
	It's subpoenaed to talk to the grand jury, who is not investigating Chris with somebody else, but Chris is subpoenaed.
	Okay? So he goes down to D.C. and he refuses to talk to the grand jury.
	And what do they do? They put him in jail.
	That's what they do. This goes on until eventually, and there's a lot of support in the city that he comes from initially, Because they love to tout grand jury resistors.
	So initially, they're making a big deal out.
	And eventually, the grand jury threatens him with contempt of court, which carries, I think, an 18-month sentence.
	And somehow, and I don't remember the details, but they were also going to be able to put him in for a year or a year and a half on top of that.
	So he was going to go to jail for up to three years.
	And what does he do? He talks to the grand jury.
	He comes back and now the support disappears because now the snitch face is plastered all over with information about how he's a snitch and you should go after him.
	And that's what they did. They attacked him in the street.
	They attacked him with bear mace.
	A play of his was being performed at a local pub.
	They attacked the play. They stole his bike.
	They made it so that he had to flee town.
	And you're going to probably say, well, wasn't that enough of a warning that you should get out?
	And the answer was no, I stayed in for a number of years after that.
	But that was a warning sign.
	Sorry to interrupt. What did you think of that process at the time?
	So what I thought was that they were wrong to go after Chris that way.
	But what I did not think was there's something wrong with our entire radical structure and our entire radical culture that it would create that kind of thing that happens all the time.
	It happens all the time.
	And you've seen that because you've seen the way the leftists will tear down somebody.
	Social justice warriors will swarm on Some unsuspecting liberal who said something that was okay to say two years ago, but now it's verboten.
	And so they swarm them. They do the public apology.
	It's never good enough.
	That's what they do. And it wasn't until I saw a few more...
	I think it was later that year I saw another one.
	So there was a woman who wrote a book.
	She is a second-wave feminist.
	Radical communist.
	Not great person in terms of her politics.
	She wrote a book, Critical of Veganism.
	And she gave a talk about it at one of these events.
	They call it an anarchist book fair.
	It's one of the anarchist get-togethers.
	What happened to her?
	Three vegans, all wearing masks, swarm her and hit her in the face with a cream pie laced with cayenne pepper.
	In other words, they freaking pepper spray a woman for speaking against them in public.
	And they did this.
	And she ended up, and what was the news all over the anarchist internet?
	She had asked the organizers to call the police, and that meant she was a terrible person and had to be purged from the movement.
	It wasn't terrible to physically assault somebody for disagreeing with you, but it was terrible to call the cops after being physically assaulted.
	That was a warning sign.
	Well, and terrifying too, because it probably feels like acid.
	You don't know that it's pepper only.
	Exactly. I think she had an infection, but whatever.
	You know, they caused her pain, severe pain.
	And in a way, you know, because they'll go to a protest and then they'll whine about the police pepper spraying them when they're breaking other people's property.
	But they have no problem doing the same thing to somebody whose only crime was disagreeing with them in public.
	Right. And when you heard about this incident, was that the tripwire, or was there more to come?
	Nope. Oh, there was plenty more to come.
	I was disturbed, but I blamed that on the vegan anarchists, because I couldn't go down the road of, well, maybe all anarchists are wrong.
	It's just the vegans are their own faction, they don't get it, you know.
	They're a problem, but, you know.
	It's like... It's the couple of bad apples argument, right?
	Yeah. Yeah, exactly.
	Yeah, yeah. Trotsky is the example, too, right?
	Like, he went off the grid and ends up with an ice pick through his head in Mexico, so...
	Exactly. Exactly.
	Exactly. And I really think they would be doing that if they weren't constrained by law.
	But, no, those kind of things built up over the course of years.
	And there were a few other things.
	Do you want me to talk about the other things that led me to question, criticize, and then break with the movement?
	I assume we're going till dawn, so the answer to that would be yes.
	Okay. And interrupt me at any point if you want to go into details on whatever.
	Just assume that I'm staring across the table, my hands resting on my chin with rapt attention, barely blinking.
	I wish you could get the I'm-so-fascinated face, but everything you're saying is fantastic, so please go on.
	I'm visualizing it.
	You're out here in the apartment with me.
	So that kind of thing happened over and over, though, and still I didn't break from it.
	And Occupy happened, and I was actually kind of questioning some things prior to Occupy, but the energy of that movement was so exciting.
	And as you said, there were actually some legitimate and serious complaints and critiques in that movement.
	Even Steve Bannon has said that.
	He said, and I didn't know this, because at the time, if I had heard of him, it was that he was some monster.
	But he said, we have to listen to Occupy.
	But anyway, Occupy was happening, and I was really excited to get involved with it.
	I went and stayed at Occupy.
	That's a GI I occupied in some city.
	I went back to the city I was living.
	I got involved there.
	In the city I was living, I have this penchant for missing the big thing.
	So the week before I got there, all of my friends in that city had been in a big fight with the police.
	And man, I wanted to participate in a big fight.
	But by the time I got there, they were all fought out.
	And so the biggest thing that we did when I was there We put a huge American flag in the middle of the street and we had a dance party where we danced all over and we were wearing masks so they couldn't see us.
	And eventually we noticed that we were surrounded by police on all four sides and they were all wearing riot gear so instead of fighting we went away.
	Later I was interviewed by people with cameras actually and I think that they were from Breitbart but I don't think I gave them anything interesting enough to use in their Occupy documentary.
	But that happened, and the thing about Occupy was that it failed.
	And it fizzled.
	And I wanted to know why, and so I really started reading.
	And I was...
	I had some time on my hands.
	I was living on a kind of relatively isolated homestead somewhere in the woods, but I had internet access.
	And there's...
	The people that run it are probably not the best, but it's a great resource.
	It's Marxists. They have all of the writings of every important Marxist in the whole tradition.
	They have internal Communist Party documents from Russia and from China and from other locations.
	And I really started delving into this and really reading Marx, reading Lenin, reading the more obscure figures like Kropotkin, Zinoviev, Kamenev.
	I'm reading the speeches of Stalin, reading Trotsky, reading the letters that the Chinese communists and the Russian communists sent back and forth between them, especially as they were breaking up.
	And I was reading this stuff, and the other thing that had gone on over the course of years was that the identity politics had gotten worse and worse and worse and worse and worse.
	And I did notice, because it's hard not to notice that you're being targeted when you are, and I'm a white male, so of course...
	I am. And I noticed a few things delving into these Marxists and these theorists.
	And the first thing I noticed was that the cliché that communism looks great on paper is utterly wrong.
	It looks like a catastrophe on paper and like a nightmare.
	I blame the font.
	That was the problem.
	They should have used Courier.
	More wingdings and we've got it made.
	Exactly. But no, it looked terrible.
	If you read Lenin, this is what he says socialism is.
	And he says this in an essay entitled "What is to be Done" that was written right before the Bolshevik Revolution.
	He says, "After the revolution, the whole society will be organized as one big factory or office." It's like, okay, great.
	So all of society is Walmart and Sam Walton is dictator.
	That's literally what you want.
	Right.
	Holy shit.
	I didn't know that.
	I thought we were for something else.
	And of course, I was a libertarian communist rather than a Leninist, so I could go, oh, scoff, scoff, that's just Lenin.
	But still, as I read it off, I started seeing patterns.
	And what I started seeing was the kind of language and the kind of behavior I'd seen in the anarchist movement and in the radical left as a whole.
	You can see it all.
	In what happened in Russia between 1917 and, say, 1945, all you've got to do is go into the show trials and remove references to Trotsky and remove references to class and make the whole thing about race, gender, and sexual orientation, and it's happening today.
	You can read, and even Slavoj Zizek, who's a Marxist philosopher, has a good essay on this about the trial, especially of Nikolai Bukharin, And I read that more than once, the transcripts of that trial, and also Zizek's essay on it, because it's so horrifying.
	And it's exactly what they do today.
	Like, what were those...
	You remember those guys, the Christakis?
	Christakis, am I saying that right, at Yale?
	It was the Yale schoolmaster and his wife that they drove out?
	I'm not an expert on the pronunciation, but that probably sounds about right.
	But yeah, it's those guys.
	And if you look at that incident, then the mobs that were...
	Rouse against them and the way that they weren't allowed to say anything that could be accepted in their defense.
	And then you go and you read the transcript of the trial of Bukharin.
	It's the same damn thing.
	The exact same thing.
	The only thing different is some of the language.
	Leftists don't talk about class anymore because most of them are upper class.
	So they have to talk about other stuff.
	Right. I saw that over and over.
	It's still all about just creating these irrevocable and ever-escalating differences and oppositions and provoking fights and, I mean, splitting and, yeah, the whole thing.
	Yeah, yeah, yes.
	And then there were many more things, but there's maybe one more big thing that's worth touching on, although it's maybe still controversial.
	But I was getting away from my leftist friends and Sorry to interrupt, but that was the result of the reading.
	Was this the first time you'd gone to, like, the source of and really delved deep into the Marxist literature?
	I'd delved superficially into some of it over the course of years.
	Like, I'd read the Communist Manifesto, but I hadn't read the Critique of the Gotham Program, Capital, the other, the deep Marxist stuff.
	And I'd read some of Kropotkin, because he's this very important thinker in anarchist communism, But I'd never really gone in and read the deep history of the Spanish anarchists, for example.
	I'd never read Lenin, I'd never read any of these other guys.
	I certainly had never read the speeches of Joseph Stalin or anything like that.
	Right, okay. Okay.
	So the drifting from your leftist friends, was it to do with something in the movement, or was it to do with the reading, or was it a combo, or was it something else?
	Yeah, there were three things. First, it was backing away from the movement in general as I started to realize that the thing that went wrong was that it was all wrong from the beginning.
	The second was getting away from my friends in particular because I've said this sometimes and it's not true, but it's kind of true.
	At some point when you're a radical leftist, you hit a point, you're in your late 20s or early 30s and you've got two choices.
	You either become a college professor or you become a full-time drug dealer.
	And I wasn't in a position to become either of these things.
	You know, I've got to tell you, much less dangerous to be a drug dealer for society as a whole.
	If I had a choice!
	Just kidding. If I could give all of them some advice, start growing pot.
	Don't go to A lot of my friends actually were going down one of these two rows.
	Becoming a college professor didn't really seem possible, and I was really alarmed at the way some of my friends were really just becoming full-time criminals.
	Another history that opened my eyes to a lot of stuff was reading and watching the documentary on the Weather Underground, because that's sort of the trajectory that they went down.
	They're all either in jail or they're in tenure, you know?
	I gotta tell you, Steve, like, when I first started reading about that...
	Yeah. It blew...
	It was a big, like, blow-my-mind, life-changing thing.
	Like, these terrorists are now...
	Yeah. They've got tenure, they're professors, they're respected, they publish, they influence the young, and it's like...
	Now, don't get me wrong.
	People make mistakes, you know?
	Like, I'm not saying, oh, you're...
	Yeah, but come on. But it's not like they've all said, well, that was the worst thing ever.
	I can't believe I did that.
	I'm going to dedicate my life to making sure that never happens again anywhere.
	Some of them are never even disavowed!
	I know. I know.
	And isn't that insane? When you learn that, don't you feel like you've woken up in a madhouse?
	Absolutely. I remember where I was.
	I was in... Phoenix, Arizona.
	I remember I was at a conference, and I was reading, and I was just like, no fucking way.
	I'm checking the notes, like, no, this has got to be a typo.
	Like, I'm reading, and I'm reading, and I'm like, okay.
	Well, there's another pill.
	Sure wish I'd had to take that one, Orly.
	Christ. That's one that is going to take some time to swallow, too.
	And you can't get around it.
	It's true. And learning that kind of thing is when you're a leftist, you think that you're a rebel, that you're fighting against the dominant culture.
	You really believe that in your heart of hearts, and then you discover, wait, you are the dominant culture.
	You're just, it's shock truth.
	Nothing says rebellion like tenure.
	Yeah, right? I'm right here on the edge where I can't possibly get fired and get summers off.
	Ooh, do I get a new sabbatical?
	How lovely for me. Oh my God.
	Talk about exploiting the workers, eh?
	Yeah, right. I want to be paid $175,000 a year for teaching about six or seven hours a week, and I sure want to be paid by the proletariat so I can sit on the beach and write another book no one's going to read.
	They make the average capitalist look like Engels.
	Oh wait, no, Engels was an average capitalist.
	Yeah, exactly. There you go.
	It was an epiphany around that, actually, that really kind of shocked my senses.
	And maybe I'll tell you that, and then we'll go from there.
	Because that was really...
	It was 2012 or 2013.
	Like I said, I've been getting away from my friends for these two reasons.
	One, my reading, and two, they're becoming terrible people.
	They're good people, some of them in some ways, but no, they're not.
	Shut up. Hey, I like your little Gollum moment there.
	He loves Imprecious.
	No. Imprecious wants to hurt us.
	And it dies. So...
	Anyway, so I encountered, from a completely out of left field angle, this idea.
	And it's unrelated to anything else that we've talked about, but it'll only take like a second to introduce it.
	And it's this practice called resolving binaries.
	And it's a mental practice meant to teach you to think.
	Whenever you see the news media presenting a story with only two possible sides, You learn each side until you can understand it and articulate its point of view, and then you come up with a third side.
	And I thought that was really cool, and I wanted to try it.
	I'm almost afraid to even say what I tried it on, because this is that fear, but I'm going to say it anyway.
	It was the time of the Trayvon Martin case.
	And despite shifting away from my friends and despite shifting away from radicalism, As far as I knew, what had happened in that case was a white male had stalked and murdered a young black man.
	That was what I knew. That was what I understood.
	And so, it's nerve-wracking to talk about.
	I wanted to see if there was another side, how there could possibly be another side.
	And so I did.
	And I think you know exactly what I learned.
	I learned that the stuff that I thought I knew was altogether wrong.
	And that it was being pushed by people in power.
	I thought, again, that I was a rebel.
	And finding out that this rebel narrative that I believed in, that I was against power on behalf, it's always on someone else's behalf, isn't it?
	And so in this case, on behalf of oppressed black people.
	As it turned out, I was completely wrong.
	The media was selling me a pack of horse shit.
	And yes, there were two sides to that story, but my side was completely and totally wrong and built on lies.
	And one of the great tragedies there as well, as you know, Steve, is swallowing the narrative of, you know, white guy.
	And he was like, they put these little kid photos of him up, like this boy shooting him, you know, it's like the hands up, don't shoot.
	In order to supposedly protect black people from harm and being stalked and killed, you create riots, you create the Ferguson effect, cops don't want to go in and police neighborhoods, and you get like horror shows in the inner city where blacks get shot down, innocent blacks, kids.
	Like in order to supposedly protect from racism, you end up creating like a living hell in a lot of black communities that they don't really have much of a chance to get out of.
	I know, and I know that somebody is going to hear me say this and call me a fucking Nazi on the internet, but it's true anyway.
	Like, the details that were pushed by people like Jon Stewart, like the mainstream news media, ABC News, CNN, were all false.
	And they were a radical left narrative.
	When I thought the radical left was the guys way out here on the outside fighting against the establishment, And again, no.
	Turns out we're the establishment's idiot shock troops.
	Yeah, there was one news outlet edited the 911 tape to make George Zimmerman sound like a racist.
	I know. I heard that.
	I had no idea that his nose had been broken, that he had lacerations on the back of his head, consistent with his head being bashed against concrete, which is what he said happened.
	No idea that it was a fight, not just an execution-style murder.
	No idea that Stand Your Ground laws were never invoked.
	No idea about any of this.
	And the idea, to me, the idea of using genuine and legitimate and horrifying black suffering just to milk and destroy communities for votes is, to me, the most vicious exploitation that has occurred this side of Jim Crow.
	That's profoundly evil.
	And it really, really is.
	And it's just like, you say that, and they'll call you a racist.
	And you know that, because you deal with it regularly.
	And I deal with it regularly now, too.
	And it still never stops shocking me, because it doesn't make any actual rational sense.
	And in some ways, I'm a lot like you.
	Things not making sense really bothers me.
	It bugs me.
	There's an old joke a comedian used to make about her...
	You know, very fussy, anal retentive father.
	She said, if you ever want to drive my father insane, you know, you Velcro him to a wall and then you just fold up a road map the wrong way right there in front of him.
	That's sort of like, that's it for me.
	Like, I hear a bad argument. It's like, it can't.
	It's like, there are these photos on the internet of, like, things that drive OCD people crazy, like the wrong tile is in the wrong place, and, you know, something's not aligned, and so on.
	That's me looking at arguments in the world.
	It's like, I can't take it. Must fix it.
	Must stop. Your conclusions don't follow from your premises, and that's a problem.
	That's right. That's right.
	So what happened then when you looked into the Zimmerman case, the Trayvon Martin case?
	What happened for you then?
	Was it a moment again, or was it another one of these slow burns?
	At that point, I was near the break.
	At that point, the break was nearly total.
	That really, really flipped a switch for me.
	And the way that not just my radical left friends, but my very nice mainstream liberal friends We're all convinced of the left-wing narrative in that case and repeated it.
	The way that, I mean, Barack Obama could come out and say, Trayvon Martin could have been me.
	Okay, I appreciate, I really do, your sympathy for a 15-year-old kid that's struggling, but for God's sake, don't lie about what happened.
	Don't misrepresent it.
	It could have been you.
	Does that mean you were robbing houses like he might have been?
	And it is, you know, the people who I push back against these lies, partly because they're dangerous lies for everyone, but in particular, because they're so destructive for the black community, who I'm really, really sick and tired of people using blacks for political advantage.
	I think it is a despicable, despicable way to use an entire community.
	And I'm willing to be called racist if it pushes back against this narrative that is so harmful to some of the most vulnerable people in society.
	And if that's the cross you have to bear, that's the cross you have to bear.
	But I care more about those communities than my reputation among assholes.
	The thing is, it hurts to be called racist, but it hurts to be called racist because you're actually not one.
	Right. Then you wouldn't care.
	You'd say, hell yeah, I'm racist.
	I know plenty of people that say that.
	Come to the podunk town where I grew up.
	I'll find you five of them.
	We'll be gathered at the bar tonight, you know?
	But anyway, so that was a big moment.
	And then there were other big moments that kind of happened.
	But at that point, I was a conservative.
	And that really...
	I started reading more from the conservative tradition.
	Not necessarily libertarian and not the emerging alternative right or new right or whatever you want to call it, but very much the kind of classic Edmund Burke.
	I was very taken with G.K. Chesterton.
	I read...
	What's Christopher Hitchens' brother?
	It's Peter Hitchens. I read him and liked him a great deal.
	I read Kirk's Conservative Mind, and it...
	Things started to make sense in a different way.
	And then in the last few years, things have gotten nuts because what I've seen in the last few years, you know, when I was a kid, I'm young, but I'm not a kid.
	When I was 19, leftists were people who opposed foreign wars and unaccountable free trade agreements.
	And now leftists are like, we need more foreign wars, more free trade agreements, and we need to be really afraid of Russia.
	Like, when the hell did that happen?
	It's a funny thing, too. I'm sorry to interrupt, Steve, but it's a funny thing, too, how leftists now are creating blacklists for wrongthink after spending, what, 50 years saying that McCarthyism was a complete nightmare and a moral abomination and a completely destroyed free speech.
	And it's like... Pick one, people.
	A blacklist, good or bad?
	Oh, your team blacklist, good.
	Their team blacklist, bad.
	Okay, no moral high ground.
	And this is the thing that frustrates me so much, too, is they say this.
	There's no such thing as truth.
	We, you know, we follow the Alinsky principles.
	We don't have any principles, but we know that the right does.
	We're going to use those principles against them.
	They openly say, this is what's so frustrating in people who deal with the left, they openly say, no truth, no honor, no dignity, no reality, and then we're surprised when they're two-faced, hypocritical, and manipulative.
	It's like That's just what they said they were going to do.
	That's a good point. That's well said.
	It feels like waking up in a madhouse, you know?
	The election in particular, I lost friends over the election.
	There are people that don't speak to me now because I openly came out and I said, you know what, I voted for Obama, I voted for Jill Stein in 2012, and in 2016 I voted for Trump.
	And if you want to know why, you can talk to me about it.
	The first response was a guy who had been a good friend.
	This was on Facebook, of course.
	Where all intellectual conversations happen, saying, well, now we're on the opposite side of a war, and then he blocks me.
	Another person does the same thing shortly thereafter.
	They're also, you know, on Facebook, people are rarely talking to you.
	They're usually just playing to the crowd, right?
	That's true. Or talking to the voices in their head.
	Right. Which you've suddenly become.
	So... So that's kind of the story.
	Are there anything else?
	Anything you want me to go into more detail on?
	Now, how far did you go down the sort of non-leftist?
	And again, I wish there was different language for it, but we'll go with the mainstream definition, Steve.
	I mean, did you go Rothbard?
	Did you go von Mises? Did you go Hayek?
	I mean, how far did you go into sort of like free market or voluntarist or anarcho-capitalist kind of thought?
	That's an interesting...
	I mean, I am on the phone here with Stefan Molyneux, who I think is a well-known libertarian thinker, so I went at least that far.
	I didn't really...
	I had known that Hayek was evil, and I read Hayek...
	I don't think I read the whole thing.
	I think I might have... You know that condensed version of...
	What's the big Hayek book?
	Road to Serfdom? Yeah. I read that.
	I read... I read more thinkers in the conservative and the traditionalist vein, and I still interface with them more than the libertarian tradition, more than the anarcho-capitalist tradition.
	I have a bit of an anarcho-anything allergy at this point.
	I can understand that.
	Some of that is trauma.
	Anarchophobia, that's what you have.
	Anarchophobia. I'm proud to have it be an anarchophobe.
	Right. Sorry, you were about to say something else?
	I don't think so. Okay.
	So, trapped in the radical left to dehypnotize themselves.
	That was just sort of one of your original questions, and it's a very, very powerful question.
	And there's a reason why this big giant moat is trying to be erected around particular thinkers in the world, like this far-right, this alt-right, this moat of like, oh, well, that's bad.
	You can't listen to those people.
	They're automatically evil.
	They're automatically wrong. They're automatically bad.
	And there's a reason for that, which is that, I mean, some stuff that the left wants, well, I want it too.
	You know, I mean, I really, really dislike this, you know, Wall Street, hyper-stock market-driven pseudo-economy.
	It's bullshit, and it harms the folks, and it's predatory upon the middle class, and it's very predatory upon the poor.
	I want people to get their goddamn communities back.
	I hate this isolation and atomization of the welfare state.
	Getting stuff is not much when you lose your soul, you lose your community, you lose your neighborhood.
	Everything is done from that standpoint.
	I really hate this imperialistic stuff, this world policeman bullshit, this 750 military bases around the world.
	And so there's a lot of stuff that the left...
	Have issues with that, like I'm right there with them in terms of goals, you know, objectives, probably not so, I mean, I guess tactics, not so much.
	So I do think that this...
	This polarization of thought is really tragic, where there are people on conservatives who say, oh, the radical lefts, they're all, you know, this crazy, and it's like, no, they have some stuff that's important to talk about.
	They have some stuff that's important to say.
	In every group, there are crazy people.
	In every group, there are bad people.
	I mean, literally, there was the get-together, the rally in Charlottesville, and this guy plows into the leftist protesters or the counter-protesters, and I mean, he's diagnosed schizophrenic.
	He's on psychotic meds, anti-psychotic meds.
	I mean, you can't judge the movement by that guy, and you can't judge all leftist criticisms of society by people stabbing horses with sticks.
	So I do think that there are decent people in almost every movement who want...
	Good things, decent things.
	It's very much a platitude, but there are things that we can agree on.
	The question is, what is the ethics of how to achieve it, and what specifically do we want to achieve?
	Promoting a giant government to take care of corporations when corporations are children of the government is not going to work.
	And collectivizing all property, having central control of prices and the means of production, that's tyranny.
	Everybody has to recognize that's not the way to go.
	So I think just making them the pure enemy, I have been very critical of the left.
	I've been somewhat less critical of the right, but also I have a bit of a, you know, the right to me has been pretty hard done by and lied about.
	And the left has all the power, so I have a bit more of a sympathy for the underdog, and the right is a little bit more original these days.
	The left seems to be a little bit kind of repeating the same chants and platitudes, you know, hey, hey, ho, ho.
	No, no, this is not a syllogism.
	So I think that...
	If they want good things and they have bad information, then I think we solve that by giving them better information.
	If they want bad things and they need an ideological cover, like if they're just, they're mean, they're sadists, they're violent, they're brutal, they're traumatized, they're addicted, they're criminals, but they don't want to look in the mirror and see a criminal, they want to see a freedom fighter for the underclass, Then they want to put on this superhero cape of bullshit in order to cover up a merely sadistic or psychopathic or sociopathic or criminal nature.
	Well, there's nothing we can do with those people, I think, because they don't want what we want.
	They don't want what decent people want.
	What they want is the expense of decent people.
	So I do think that there's ways to get out of it.
	But what I do want to know, this is sort of the most essential question, which I think is right at the heart of how to undo this stuff, Steve.
	Help me understand, help my listeners understand, please.
	What are the arguments that are used?
	What is the ideology that is deployed to justify the violence, to remove the restraint or the necessity for discourse?
	How is that justified?
	What is said to make that okay or good?
	There are a number of things that I said, but it really...
	It makes so little sense.
	It's not violence when it's property destruction, is one of the things.
	Violence can only flow down the hierarchy, so violence that flows up the hierarchy is okay.
	It's the same way that they'll say a black person cannot be racist or a woman cannot be sexist because Racism and sexism are only about power, blah-de-blah-de-blah.
	You know the... Yeah, so if a slave is...
	They deploy those same ideas.
	Sorry, if a slave is sawing off his manacles, it's destroying property, but it's perfectly just because the manacles are a form of theft.
	That's good.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	So you hear that kind of thing.
	And I mean, lately what you hear is Nazi, Nazi, Nazi, Nazi, Nazi, Nazi, Nazi.
	And I wish that it was more coherent than that, but it's not.
	That's why I'm... One of the things I was thinking about when you were talking, like, leftist than one could...
	Do you know, I listened to Ann Coulter, who's someone I would have thought was a demon.
	I listened to her the other day, and she said, what I want is fewer terrible free trade agreements and no new foreign wars and taxing Wall Street.
	And I was like, wait, what the hell?
	That's what Ann Coulter wants?
	Like, even still, that can shock me.
	And that's the kind of, where I'm going with this, is that's the kind of thing I heard from Donald Trump.
	From my old-fashioned left-wing perspective, Donald Trump was well to Hillary Clinton's left.
	And I could not convince a single person of this.
	I could not, like Hillary, you had a guy on your show who talked about the persecution of Christians in the Middle East in wars that Hillary Clinton helped create.
	Donald Trump didn't help create them.
	Hillary Clinton helped start wars in Libya, Syria, Iraq.
	If you want fewer wars, therefore, maybe you don't vote for the lady that keeps starting wars even after they turn into disasters.
	And I've tried to say that, and it's like it just bounces off a wall.
	And I can't figure out how you get through that.
	Or if you care about the wages of the poor, then massive hyper-subsidized immigration is bad, particularly for blacks and Hispanics, is bad for the poor.
	And if you want better schools for the poor, then maybe more privatization, more parental choice, or school vouchers, or something like that.
	If you have a goal to help people, then you should keep trying different things to help them.
	But if your goal is to just do those things, to have power, to control the education of the kids, or to basically hold the kids hostage so you can deliver union money to the Democrat Party, if your goal is simply to serve the powers that be, you can't help those people because there's no goal that you share.
	If they genuinely do want to help the poor, if they do want to help inner-city communities, if they do want to help raise the wages of the unskilled in society, then you can show them a different way.
	And I think Trying to figure out, and I don't have any magic wand for that, but in general, if you and I are walking in the woods and I say, I really, really want to go north, right?
	And we're walking for a while and you start to get a little uneasy.
	You take out your compass and you say, well, actually, we're heading south.
	But I still keep walking in that direction even after you show me the compass, then clearly I don't want to go north.
	I just said that in order to, for some other reason, right?
	So when you provide key people counter information when they say they want a particular goal, When you provide people counter information and they completely discard it, it's because they don't want the goal they say they do, if that makes sense.
	Like, if you can prove to me that I'm walking south and I want to go north, and then I change my direction, then clearly I do want to go north.
	Yeah, you know, you had, I think you've had him on a couple of times, but you've had Jordan Peterson on, and he said something to that effect, where if people are doing something And it keeps causing results that are terrible, and you can't figure out why, what their motives are.
	You infer the motive from the results.
	And I listened to that.
	I listened to him say that in one of his talks, and I listened to the show about Christian genocide in the Middle East.
	And even that was an eye-opener.
	It's like, oh, maybe if you can't figure out why Hillary Clinton keeps causing wars when each one is a disaster, maybe she's trying to cause the disaster.
	Maybe not. Maybe she's stupid.
	But maybe she's evil.
	You see what I'm saying? No, no, I completely understand.
	And particularly, when the disasters have come to light and there's no reassessment, then that to me is sort of the nail in the coffin of my judgment of someone.
	Because you could say, well, ahead of time, well, they had the very best of intentions.
	And, you know, I care, I guess, more about intention than, say, ex-director Comey does.
	But once the data is in, like, to me, it's one thing to be a communist in 1915.
	It's quite another thing to be a communist in 2017.
	We got a century of data.
	There's something wrong there.
	Something did not – and it's not just where we just need slightly better people or we need to try it in a different climate or we need to try it with a different race or we need to try – like, come on.
	So there are people, I think, who, you know, just want to watch the world burn.
	And they're full of, you know, violent and destructive impulses.
	They're full of self-hatred.
	And they're usually driven by alter egos from other people, which is why I was sort of talking about that some of these radicals may be hit squads send out to make sure mommy keeps getting her gravy train coming in from the state.
	But there are people who genuinely want good things and have been given bad information.
	And when they're given better information, it may take a while.
	I mean, you know, very few people change on a dime.
	But there is a curiosity.
	And, of course, you would be one of those people, right, because you wanted good things.
	The movement that you were in proved not only unable to deliver them but seemed to be heading in the wrong direction completely.
	And when you brought up reasonable arguments against particular positions, well, I guess you'd seen what happened to some people ahead of time, you know, with the cream pies and pepper in the face and all of that.
	And you wanted good things for the world.
	You recognize that the path that you were on wasn't going to get you there, it was taken in the opposite direction, so you changed course.
	There are a number of people out there who will do that, and what that will do, it will do if we can sort of rescue people from this bad path.
	And, you know, I want to reinforce to people who are leftists who are listening to this and watching this, first of all, thank you.
	I mean, this is hard to listen for a lot of people, but But the purpose then is not to join Steve or me or conservatives.
	It's to think for yourself, right? To evaluate your data.
	Yes, yes, yes.
	Evaluate your data. Please, please, the opposite of one gang is not another gang.
	The opposite of the left is not the right.
	The opposite of the right is not the left.
	The opposite of both of these is thinking for yourself.
	And you don't want to take anyone as an authority.
	You don't want to accept everyone's say-so because of charisma or humor or...
	You must get the data and think for yourself.
	Because if we can get more people out of the radical left, then the more feral nature of those who remain will become more and more evident.
	And I think that's really the only way to discredit some of the more extreme elements.
	That's a great point.
	And can I put a suggestion to you and get your take on it?
	Sure. So, I mean, and one of the main reasons I wanted to talk to you And I was terrified to talk to him.
	I still am a little terrified, but that's okay.
	Was in the hopes that somebody else who's caught up in that culture, and maybe they've seen where it can go wrong, maybe they can hear my experience, maybe they can learn from it, and maybe they can make that transition too.
	And again, it doesn't have to be a transition to being a conservative.
	I certainly don't want a world full of Steve clones, the world I don't think could handle it, but to become who they are rather than the culture that they've gotten caught up in.
	And I just really hope that that's possible for some people.
	And here's the thing.
	Over the last few years, I've collected a very small but real number of other people who have made that journey from radical left to...
	One was an anarchist in my old hometown, and now she's a conservative.
	She's an Eastern Orthodox Christian, very active in her church, and much happier about her life.
	One was a radical transgender activist who, and this will be controversial, but it's true anyway, feels like they were caught up in a cult and is detransitioning.
	One is a close friend of mine.
	And I have this idea, and I don't know what it looks like yet, but if there was somewhere, a book, a blog, a website, something, where people who are in radicalism and questioning it,
	or they're detransitioning themselves and suddenly they're waking up into a world gone mad, they're finding that they don't have any friends anymore and they don't know what to do, Something that they could look at and they could hear or read about the journeys that others of us have gone down, how it's worked out for us, and get some inspiration and some hope and some ideas from that.
	Do you follow what I'm saying?
	Do you think that there's a possibility there?
	Absolutely. The first thing that pops into my mind, Steve, is you interview people and you put a transcription of the interview together and you put it out as a book.
	That's the quickest and easiest way to get the message out.
	And I do think the time is of the essence in these ever-escalating cultural war.
	I think so too. I was very keen to talk with you because I think it's urgent, right?
	There might be people getting caught up on the radical right that might be helped too, but we haven't talked about them today.
	We should mention that as well, you know, in the interest of fairness, that there are people who would be traditionally called on the extreme right who are also getting swept up in horrible politics and potential justifications for violence and hatred and I mean, we're looking at the most obvious group.
	My concern, of course, is that the one group is going to provoke the other group, which justifies neither of them, but it could help people who are on fringes of every political spectrum, where they have abandoned restraint, reason, and morality, and they're acting like they're in a civil war, which, if you keep doing long enough, might become true.
	Exactly. And that's kind of a terrifying thought.
	Look at modern civil wars.
	It's not two armies meet in a field somewhere.
	Our civil war in America was bloody, very bloody, but it was decent compared to what they're dealing with in Syria.
	You know, this idea of non-combatants, that doesn't exist anymore so much.
	You can romanticize the revolution all you like, but in real life that means roadside bombs between New York and D.C. It means dying of starvation in Philadelphia or San Francisco, you know?
	It means somebody sabotaging the power grid and the lights and the refrigerators going out across 10 million homes.
	This is very very serious stuff that is occurring and the potential for escalation and I wish there was a nicer way to put it and this is not a radical depopulation in a very final way.
	The possibilities and the stakes are enormously high We've never had, to my knowledge, there's never been this kind of open provocation to civil war in a nuclear power, or certainly not in a power that has this capacity for surveillance and drone strikes and satellites and, you know, we really, really don't want to go down that road.
	Even the people who think they love violence won't love that much.
	and uh yeah exactly uh people don't know what they're getting into i don't either i just know it's going to be worse than anything that's been seen before in human history so uh that's another reason why i wanted to spend a lot of time on this conversation and if you wanted to put something like that together um you know certainly keep us apprised and and whatever i can do to help uh get the word out i would be uh i would be happy to do but um
	Especially because, you know, we do have this mainstream media, and I guess as a former radical, you must see this more clearly than everyone, Steve.
	It's just, you know, you turn on the news, or you turn on CNN, you turn on other places, and you see this provocation and this polarization and this escalation.
	Provocation is exactly the word I would use.
	It's shocking.
	And it's so blatant.
	And it's on the news.
	It's in the fictional media, too.
	It's in the movies. It's on TV shows.
	Racial violence.
	Gender stuff.
	Well, keep a surprise at that.
	I really, really want to thank you for, you know, I don't think people who've not been around any of these more radical organizations, I don't think that they know just how courageous Steve has been in talking about this.
	And obviously, we'll give you a chance to listen to this.
	But it is a brave thing to be doing because there is blowback involved in this, which I'm sensitive to and aware of.
	And I really, really want to thank you for your courage in talking about this.
	I think it's fantastic and a great good that you can do for the world.
	I appreciate your trust in using this, using Free Domain Radio as a platform to get this message out.
	We will push this conversation hard out there.
	And we will look forward to people's feedback and let's cool our jets, everyone.
	We are not at all in a place where we have to go to bricks.
	We are in a place where we can still solve things through words.
	We're in a place where we can still get what we want to achieve a decent society through language and debate.
	We are not there yet. Because once we get there, It really, really becomes virtually impossible to turn it around.
	That stuff plays out in ways that we can't even imagine, and whatever we can imagine, it's going to be a hundred times worse.
	So thanks, Steve, so much for a very, very powerful call.
	Thanks everyone so much for calling in.
	Always a great pleasure and a privilege to talk to everyone out there.
	Please follow me on Twitter at Stefan Molyneux.
	Don't forget to Subscribe to donate to help out the show at freedomainradio.com slash donate.
	And I appreciate everyone's time and support.
	Let's keep it peaceful. Let's keep it real.

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