Sept. 24, 2017 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
03:31:09
3833 Toilet Trained at Gunpoint? - Call In Show - September 20th, 2017
Question 1: [1:24] – “Recent Conflict: ‘We went to the park because we both enjoy running. We walk to the entrance and I ask when are we starting to run. She says no we shouldn’t run because I don’t want to slow you down. I say that I want to run with you and it’s not about being slower/that’s my choice. She says no. Then an argument starts because I try to understand why she is unreasonable (which I define as being unable to shift a position based on logic/reason/evidence). Then we end up just doing our own thing. I do not like these conflicts because they make me feel powerless and she understands. She says she gets in moods and stuff and was even open to me recording her in a mood (which I did). I think it is normal to have ups and downs. All conflicts seem to start with the formula: I don’t want to do this because it will make you feel x which I consider not good for you.’”Question 2: [1:14:35] – “Given the amount of income inequality in the United States today, critics almost always cite the ever-nefarious force behind it all: corporate greed. After a debate I recently had, I began to question whether or not ‘greed’ was even a valid concept or simply something subjectively ascribed to those with - from those without. How can we establish what and how much people ‘need’ and when/if that consumption becomes ‘greed?’”Question 3: [1:30:38] – "Years ago I was in an abusive relationship and now I struggle with anxiety and depression. Then, in the last few years the SJW era began, which I feel essentially compounded my post-abuse condition due to its key feature of bullying and hating. I’m always so wrapped up in how I’m viewed and I'm hyper critical of myself all the time. I take everything personally and always worry whether I'm doing something wrong. It's also left me feeling jaded and bitter about the world. How can I stop criticizing myself so much and stop all these unproductive feelings?"Question 4: [2:49:43] – “I wholeheartedly agree with your arguments on the necessity of a stay at home parent for children. I would only feel at ease if I stayed at home with my children. This attitude is curtailing my career and romantic ambitions, as I cannot imagine earning resources away from my future children. How can I reluctantly accept the utility of a wife as a caregiver of my children and allow myself to unlock my male ambition as a provider?”Your support is essential to Freedomain Radio, which is 100% funded by viewers like you. Please support the show by making a one time donation or signing up for a monthly recurring donation at: http://www.freedomainradio.com/donate
Please don't forget to check out theartoftheargument.com and also if you can help out the show at freedomainradio.com slash donate, I, and I dare say the future, will be enormously grateful.
So the first caller, it's a dual call.
It was a couple who called in.
They had a little conflict about jogging, but they had an inkling or a sense that it might be about something much deeper.
So we dug in deep and found a real fiery fork in the road of life possibilities out of this one little conflict.
They're very, very important to take note of.
The second caller wanted to know what is the definition of greed?
When is enough enough?
When is too much too much?
And we had a good conversation about some of the rigorous ways you can define greed.
The third caller is a woman, and this is common for a lot of people, a little bit more so for women.
She wanted to know how she can stop criticizing herself and stop all of these unproductive thoughts and feelings that paralyze her day.
The fourth caller, well, his mother has for many years run a daycare out of the home, and she is, well, let's just say she's a vivid daycare provider, and he wanted to know How can he unlock his male ambition as a provider, given that he desperately wants to stay home with his kids after he saw what happened with his mom and the kids who were put in her care?
So we talked about that for quite a bit.
That was a great conversation. Please don't forget to follow me on Twitter at Stefan Molyneux.
Once again, freedomainradio.com slash donate.
And remember, if you've got some shopping to do, you can go to FDRURL.com slash Amazon.
Alright, well up for us today we have Tom and his girlfriend Jackie.
Tom wrote in about recent conflicts they had and was hoping to get your thoughts.
Tom said, We went to the park because we both enjoy running.
We walk to the entrance and I ask, when are we starting to run?
She says, no we shouldn't because I don't want to slow you down.
I said that I want to run with you, and it's not about being slower.
That's my choice. She said no.
Then an argument starts because I try to understand why she is unreasonable, which I define as being unable to shift a position based on logic, reason, evidence, etc.
Then we end up just doing our own thing.
I do not like these conflicts because they make me feel powerless, and she understands that.
She says that she gets in moods and was even open to me recording her in a mood, which I did.
I think it is normal to have ups and downs.
All conflicts seem to start with this formula, though.
I don't want to do this because it will make you feel X, which I consider not good for you.
That's from Tom. Welcome to the show, Tom and Jackie.
Hi, guys. How you doing? Hey, how you doing?
Good. You know, this is really wise of you, in my opinion, to look at a conflict like this and say, what could be going on?
There's so much gold to be mined in these seemingly inconsequential things, like, oh, it's just a little discussion about jogging and so on.
But, you know, in my view, like, it's really wise and...
Important and a powerful thing to do to say, okay, what's really, really going on, right?
And the reason you chose this one, I would assume, is because there's kind of like a pattern of this stuff in your relationship as a whole.
Is that fair to say? Yeah, that's fair to say.
It actually happened recently as well.
Yesterday we had a similar conflict, which did follow a similar pattern and That's actually why I wrote in to begin with, because I'm kind of fearful as if this could be like a roadblock that could, you know, end up with us not being able to pass.
Oh yeah, no listen, but if you're willing to work on it, this kind of stuff is, that's where relationships grow.
You know, I mean, so we have a tendency to want to avoid conflict or to minimize stuff or to say, well, you know, it's just a little jogging thing.
What does it really matter? But if we avoid conflict, we avoid each other because we're always going to have conflict in relationships.
And if we avoid conflict, we're avoiding intimacy.
Conflict and working through conflict is really the essence of intimacy because we don't bother working through conflicts with people we don't care about.
You know, like if some cashier is rude to us, then, you know, we probably just don't go back to the store or we don't try and do that, you know, don't deal with that cashier.
We don't care. But if it's like a brother or a wife or a girlfriend or a kid, then we hopefully will dig down and work through the conflict.
And that to me is what, it's not like relationships are about conflict, but you can measure it.
The quality of a relationship, the commitment to a relationship, by the degree to which you're willing to dig in and work through conflict.
So I just wanted to point out this is a very wise thing to do.
And people will say, oh, come on, how often does it happen?
How big a deal of it? But that's...
You want to stop problems early, and you want to start going in the opposite direction.
So I just sort of wanted to point out that, yes, we go in this show all the way from catastrophic effects of the DREAM Act to a jogging conflict, but there's a reason for that, and I wanted to just point that out before we started.
So let me just give you a theory, and then we'll dig in and see if it applies.
So my theory is that if you're experiencing a negative state that you can't or won't communicate to others, you will attempt to recreate that emotional state in other people.
Let me sort of rephrase that, and it's an important idea to come at it a couple of different ways.
So if I'm feeling frustrated in my life, if I'm feeling helpless, say, in my life, And if I'm not able or willing to talk about that honestly and openly, then what I'm most likely to end up doing is making those around me feel helpless and frustrated.
In other words, you're going to experience my helplessness and frustration one of two ways.
I'm either going to describe it to you and talk about it and take ownership of it, or you're going to feel it because I'm going to provoke in you what I'm not communicating in myself.
Does this make any sense?
Yeah, it does. It does.
All right. So I guess the bigger question is, this would start with Jackie.
The bigger question is, is there any place in your life...
Well, hang on. No, sorry.
Let's just back up for a sec. Tom, could you do me a favor and describe the feelings that you had?
With this particular jogging conflict where she says, oh, we shouldn't run.
I don't want to slow you down. And you're like, well, that's fine.
I'd rather spend time running with you than running as fast as I possibly could.
And then she says no.
Like she's trying to tell you what you want.
So how does that make you feel?
Originally, it made me feel frustrated.
Because I felt as if I couldn't do anything about it and my brain usually goes when something like this occurs it goes to like what does this mean in potential conflicts in the future so I thought You know, if I can't reason here, which is, you know, it's a mundane, we're going running.
Like, so for example, like, you know, that it's a simple task.
So like, what else could this imply?
So that makes me feel frustrated.
And what if we have twins?
Right. Right.
So frustrated, helpless, sort of scared for the future that it's a pattern.
Yeah, that about sums it up.
Okay. Now, Jackie, Is there anywhere, and you know, obviously there's no reason to agree with me if we're not, it's just a theory, but is there anywhere in your life where you feel frustrated or helpless that's not being maybe that well expressed or much expressed?
Well, that probably is.
Yeah. See, you're doing it to me now too, you realize that?
Yeah. Well, probably.
It's like, I don't know.
You've got to tell me.
If you say probably, I don't know what you're talking about.
Hey, look, I feel frustrated and helpless.
Beautiful. You know, that's the kind of conversation we need to be having right here, right now, tonight.
Okay. So, what are the areas, if there are, in your life where you feel sort of frustrated and helpless?
It's probably just the standard that I'm...
Could you get a little closer to the mic?
I'm just having a little trouble hearing you.
Oh, I'm sorry. Is that better?
Yeah, thank you. It's probably just like I'm applying high standards to myself and I'm not reaching them at the moment.
So that is what is frustrating for me, I guess.
Which is very frustrating.
Right. And in what area do you have the high standards?
I do have the high educational standards with college and everything.
I'm still going to college and yeah.
And are you not doing as well in college as you want?
No, I just feel like I spent a year abroad and everything and I just feel like that it might have been a waste of time, I guess.
And I could have just studied and be already done with college and everything.
I just feel like that I might have wasted time.
And what are you taking in college?
I'm an international management bachelor of thing.
International management? And you want to get into business, is that right?
Yeah. Why?
I actually don't know.
I went to business high school and this is just the thing I did.
And my parents are business owners and I always wanted to be my own boss.
And did your parents also take degrees in international business management?
Oh, no, no, no. They never went to college.
Oh! What?
So your parents became business owners, didn't go to college, but you're going to college to become a business owner.
Yeah, pretty much.
What do they say about that?
I mean, my dad is happy for me that I want to go to college or that I'm going to college and my mom wanted me to go.
Do they regret not going?
No, they don't. And who's paying for this?
Oh, I'm studying in Germany, so you don't really have to pay a lot.
But I'm financing myself.
But your parents don't regret going.
They're successful, I assume, as business owners.
Yeah. So why do they want you to go?
I never asked that question.
It's sort of me like saying to my daughter, hey...
If you want to do anything to do with philosophy on the internet, you better get a PhD from Harvard in philosophy.
Yeah, true. I think it's just maybe because of that I'll be the first one in the family and this is sort of like a statute thing, especially like...
My mom's sister, her kids went to college and everything.
So I think maybe that...
You mean your sisterly competition is why you've got to burn up these years of your life?
I don't know. Maybe.
Do you want to go to college?
I mean, when I went back in high school, I did want to go to college and I did want to get a degree and everything.
No, I'm not quite sure about that anymore because I don't see the reason why I should go to college instead of working and building my own thing.
But I still think it might benefit me to go to college because I'll be having a degree in everything.
I'll be having a degree in everything?
Come on. You know that's not a business plan, right?
You know I really should start a business because then I'll have profit and everything.
Yeah. No, no.
I don't. It's definitely not a business plan.
Can I just jump straight to the answer here?
Sure. You know, because let's go with efficiency here, right?
Yeah. I agree.
Your conflict with Tom is because you don't want to go at the pace he wants to go at.
You don't like your pace, your direction, being set by someone else. - I'm not sure if it, I do agree with that, but I also, I just I do agree with that, but I also, I just don't want to be a burden or anything.
No, I understand that. You want to run at your own pace.
You don't want your pace to be determined by someone else.
and you don't wanna feel like you're rushing to fulfill somebody else's running goals instead of your own. - Yeah, I mean, I'm not sure if it's about my own goals But you want to run, don't you?
We're just talking about the running thing.
I do want to run, but I know that he's faster and that's why I don't want to slow him down.
Yes, I understand. So you want to do things at your own pace and in your own way rather than following someone else's pace or goal.
Yes. Do you see how this relates to college?
Go ahead. Take me there.
Take me there. Go ahead.
I mean, I probably just want to do my own thing instead of following what my parents want or what, like, everyone is doing.
And I don't know.
That's probably it.
Now, the word probably and the word breakthrough are never occurring in the same moment.
That might be true.
So, what does it feel like?
Does it feel true or do you think we should pursue another avenue?
Uh... I know, I think...
I really think it is true.
And, yeah, I think I just like to do things my own way.
When you would go running with Tom, Jackie, was there kind of an implicit understanding that you were going to run together?
I mean, you went at the same time, right?
I assume you didn't bring headphones to listen to me.
Obviously, that would be wise.
But that way you can pretend you're out running the reason.
But... The goal when you go to the park to go running, the implicit assumption, would you agree, is to go running together?
Yes. Right.
So, there's an implicit assumption that you're breaking and you're not allowing Tom to give any particular input, which means that you want to, I think, it means you want to change something in your life and But you're afraid of negative consequences if you voice your preferences.
Now, if this has to do with college, I don't know, maybe it has to do with Tom, but let's just go with college for the moment.
Right? So if this has to do with college, Jackie, what happens to your parents if you say, okay, wait a second, guys.
You didn't go to college. You don't regret not going to college.
You're both successful in what you do.
I don't feel like I'm learning that much in college.
I mean, good Lord...
Jackie, your parents are both entrepreneurs.
If you want to learn entrepreneurship, why can't they teach you?
Why can't they bring you into the business?
Why can't they take you under their wing?
Why can't they tutor you and teach you what's good?
You know, even if you do it for free, it's still cheaper than school.
True. So why not?
Um... I mean, I brought that topic up to my parents before, and they weren't that happy about it.
Especially my mother.
My dad is kind of like, do what you want, but just make sure you don't end up on welfare and everything.
Try your best, and I think that you...
End up on welfare? Yeah, that's my dad.
Why would you end up on welfare?
No, really? What kind of message is that sending to you?
Good luck with that long jump, honey.
Just, you know, try not to drive your head through that tree and kill yourself.
Hey, Stefan, man.
Yeah, go ahead. It's your life.
Please jump in. I kind of have a theory also, and I brought this up to her as well.
And this is also kind of like a fear that I share.
I think it could also be a fear of dependence.
I feel as if, you know, perhaps like when we get into these arguments and like she closes herself off and I, you know, I'm trying to poke at it, trying to, you know, you know, just be like, why aren't you moving?
You know, like do something with me.
I think there could be like ultimately like a fear, I guess, maybe that she doesn't want to become dependent on like not only welfare, but like my, you know, You see what I'm saying?
I feel like there's a mutual fear there as well.
That's great. It's nothing to do with what we're talking about at the moment, but I'll bookmark it.
We'll talk about why you're running White Knight Interference on our conversation about Jackie's parents in a moment, Tom, but right now we'll focus on Jackie's parents if you don't mind.
Yes, sir. All right. So help me understand this.
Don't end up on welfare stuff.
Did they spend time on welfare?
Are their family members on welfare?
I mean, why would that even come up?
Go out and enjoy the world, honey.
Just don't do too much heroin.
Where's that coming from?
I think I should mention that I'm German and my family is still living in Germany, so this whole welfare thing is very big there.
But you're not from Syria.
That is true. So the odds of being on welfare just a little diminished I think it's fair to say.
I mean like before the whole refugee crisis started there were still like there were a few people on welfare also Germans and my dad just because he didn't went to college I mean he made it but he didn't went to college he just He doesn't want me to end up on welfare.
I don't know. No, I understand that.
But I mean, the reason you wouldn't end up on welfare is because you've been raised well and have some pride and you know what I mean?
Like, and some smarts and parental resources and wisdom and input.
And it's not just random, you know?
Like, oh, well, you know, I raised you really well, you know, poured a lot of investment into your human capital, taught you how to negotiate from an early age, taught you how to manage your own emotions, taught you all this wonderful stuff, and you're pretty smart.
But don't become a coke addict.
You know, there's not these hooks out there randomly in the world that snatch people up with no rhyme or reason.
That's true. I don't know why he said that.
And, like, out of my knowledge, there's no one on welfare in my family, so...
I don't know.
Was there anything in his parenting that may have provided you...
Some insecurity, some lack of sense of your own power and efficacy or anything like that?
Because it's horrible. It's a bad thought to put in someone's head.
I know, I know. My parents always wanted me to be good at stuff, but they never told me, hey, you're doing a good job or anything.
That's it. They never said what?
They never said, like, when I did something good, for instance, that I did a good job.
They were, like, they wanted to have a daughter that you can, like, brag with, I guess.
Oh, so their sort of ego invested in your success as sort of parental bragging rights, is that what you mean?
Oh, yeah. Rights.
Right. And so the other thing that you have pointed out is, let me just check my note here, you said that you're frustrated, or you feel helpless and frustrated because you have these high educational standards that you're not meeting, right?
Mm-hmm. And you understand that a lot of what goes on in life as an adult has to do with parental praise or punishment, right?
Right. So if your parents never said, good job, well done, then it's going to be very tough for you to say to yourself, good job, well done.
Yeah, that's logical.
Right. So why do you think that they did not say, good job, well done?
What would it cost them to say that to you?
Or what negative things do they think might happen if they did say that?
I don't have a clue.
I don't know why they've never said that or I just, I don't know.
Maybe it's because they were expecting it or they wanted it and at some point it just like happened all the time.
So there was nothing special about it maybe.
Did they ever praise people outside the family?
Uh, sure they do, yeah.
So, they're not averse to praise as a whole?
You know, like, let's say they went over to their parents' place and, you know, the grandmom, your grandmom cooked a good meal or something, but they say, that's a good meal, thanks, that was great?
I mean, they probably wouldn't be, like, wouldn't say that to, like, little things, like, very little things, but, um, if someone, like, I don't know, if someone...
Succeeded in something, they would say, hey, that's cool, man.
Good job. Ah, okay.
So they recognize the value and virtue of praise.
Praise is simply the payment that we owe to excellence, if we're going to verbalize about it at all.
I mean, praise for a good job is simply a species of honesty and integrity, right?
I mean, when kids are very little, we praise the striving, right?
Right. Like, oh, she's trying to use the couch to get up and walk, assuming she's not 19 and drunk.
The baby is trying to say, good job, you can do it.
You're not praising them for a great job, you're praising them to encourage them to pursue the effort that will result in competence, right?
So your parents understand the value and virtue of praising people for doing a good job, but why not with you?
I don't know. I've never understood.
In your ACE, which is two, Adverse Childhood Experience score, you've got two, Verbal Abuse and Threats and No Family Love or Support.
Yeah. What was the number one, Verbal Abuse and Threats?
What were those? I mean, when my mom is very stressed and everything because of work, she does punish me for it.
We get in conflict and it just gets very bad, I guess you can say.
And that's that.
Is she like, I mean, the sort of image I always get with this kind of stuff, and correct me if I'm wrong, is like the kitchen door slammer?
You know, like the kitchen cupboard door slammer?
Pretty much. You know, like their home and their red face and their, I can't find anything in this kitchen kind of thing, right?
Yeah. Like I remember, I've said this before on the show, but I remember my mom, when she was in a bad mood, she'd come home and she'd stalk around the house looking for something wrong.
Looking for a cap off the toothpaste tube or looking for a cup that was somewhere without a coaster or looking for a sock under the couch or whatever it was.
She'd be stalking around looking like a lion looking for a baby zebra.
Just stalking around looking.
And you could see like this countdown.
Ding, ding, ding, ding. Countdown, countdown.
You know, until she finds, you know, you can always find something.
You can always find something. And they're like, ah, suddenly it becomes everything.
This one sock on the floor is emblematic of everything wrong with the family, with the world, with her marriage, with the future, with civilization, with children, with, you know, like, right?
Now, that may be a little stronger than where your mother goes, but that's sort of the image I have, just to share where I'm coming from.
Yeah, that's a pretty good image.
No, my mom is similar.
Your mom is what? Similar, very much the same.
Right. Has she ever admitted that that's a bit of an unjust way to treat her kids?
Especially if it's not their fault, which it almost never is, that she's upset?
No, she never admits anything.
Does she have a thirst for praise herself?
I don't know.
No?
So if she cooks a big meal or a nice meal, does she expect to be appreciated?
Oh yeah, she does. She does.
Oh, so she likes to be praised for the things that she does well, but she doesn't like to praise you for the things that you do well.
Yep. Right.
Has your father ever intervened in these stalky kind of blow-ups and said, dear, that's not the way to deal with things?
No, he rather stays quiet and doesn't, like, talk.
That's his way of dealing with it.
Is he intimidated by her?
I think so.
I mean, I talked to him in private and everything, and he said, like, yeah, I understand, like, how you feel and that mom is wrong, but I'm not going to talk to her about it because she's going to freak out even more.
Ah, wait a minute, wait a minute.
So your father recognizes that your mother is not doing things fairly or right or justly.
Yeah. But he feels that if he tries to fix it, he's only going to make it worse.
Exactly. So what does he feel?
Frustrated and helpless and scared for the future that it's a pattern.
Mm-hmm. Which is what who said at the beginning?
I don't remember.
It's what Tom said. Right?
Yes. Yes.
So, Jackie, your father thinks that your mother cannot be corrected, right?
And that if you try to correct her, she's going to get worse or more angry or more bullying or more hostile or whatever, right?
Mm-hmm. Yes.
Do they work in the same business together?
Yeah, they do.
They work together all the time.
Right. So he has...
Ah, okay, okay, okay.
So is it fair to say that she runs the emotional life in the family?
Yes, that's fair to say.
Right. Do you mind if I say something shocking?
Well, there's no point asking that since you don't know what it is, so I'm going to say it anyway.
Okay. Women can do wonderful, amazing, fantastic things.
Women have enormously influenced me intellectually.
Women can produce and create life, run wonderful households, and run giant businesses if they want.
But I'll tell you something, Jackie.
The one thing that women cannot do is run the emotional life in a relationship.
I'll tell you why.
Okay. Because women are statistically significantly more what's called neurotic than men, which is, you know, up and down, a little bit of mood swing enough, and experience more negative emotions and more fight-or-flight responses to fairly innocuous stimuli.
You know, putting a woman in charge of the emotional life relationship is like putting a coked-up bus driver in charge of a school bus.
You're going to get somewhere down the road, but it's countdown to ditch, right?
And men, I don't know if it's hormonal, I don't know if it's brain structure, I don't know.
But men are more even-tempered, more even-keeled.
And in my sort of looking at the world and thinking sort of back over my own life, women can be in charge of a lot of things.
You know, there's a lot of great division of labor that goes on In relationships.
But women, in general, cannot be in charge of the emotional life of a relationship.
It's too rollercoaster.
Yes. Yes, I had that in mind too, that word.
Right. Men Have a kind of stability wherein there's a deviation that's fairly obvious.
Whereas a woman's emotional life generally is a little more scattered, a little more contradictory.
I mean, there's an old phrase.
I think it's too far.
But there's an old phrase that says a woman's mind is a torture prison.
Yeah. It's hard to feel peace of mind.
It's hard to get that serenity, which is why, you know, they keep selling serenity to women.
Join this yoga class like I was getting a juice the other day.
And I saw this little picture on the wall and it's all these women, you know, in that yoga position that makes you look like half of a fleshy shark, that dorsal fin going down your leg.
And it's like, be serene, be at peace.
And you always see like these ads for these spas, you know?
Women, is your mind a torture chamber?
Don't worry, we'll lie your face down in mud and put giant hot rocks on your back and you'll be fine.
And so the world sells stability and peace of mind and serenity.
You don't see that for men. With men, it's like, join the squash court and run around till you throw up on the floor.
And then kick it aside and run around some more.
Come to a NASCAR race where we'll blow your eardrums wide with 6,000 volts of my octane energy.
So women, they're constantly dangling this, oh, serenity, serenity, serenity.
Peace, peace, peace.
We'll give you a foot rub. We'll give you an in-home pampering, anything.
We'll distract you from your own brain for 12 minutes and you can pretend you're at peace.
And the reason, of course, why there's all of this selling of peace of mind, of serenity, oh, the welfare state, oh, you have a free health care, is because women are kind of uneasy and statistically, in general, again, tons of exceptions, but statistically, in general, more neurotic than men.
And since we know that, and there are things where women have the clear edge over men.
Certain aspects of conscientiousness, certain aspects of being agreeable and so on, clear edge on men.
And therefore, the traditional way that the family works is the woman is the social director, right?
And the man tries to balance out some of the highs and lows of the woman's emotional state.
I mean, it's one of the things that happens when women give up that role or if there's a divorce or something, what happens?
Well, the man stops having a social life because the social life is all run by the woman.
And so there are particular strengths that happen in relationships.
But putting a woman in charge of the emotional life of the relationship...
That is, that's like having women vote on borders.
It's really not a good idea at all.
You know, and I just was watching a documentary the other day where I never understood this, just by the by.
Since you're from Germany, this may be somewhat of relevance, but I never understood this.
It's the female lions who go hunting.
And it's true. For the most part, the female lions go hunting.
And I never understood that. I used to sort of say, ah, you know, well, that's why, for the male, that's why he's called a lion.
Why? Because he's lying around a lot.
Not doing much of anything. And it never made much sense to me.
Anyway, so this documentary cleared it up for me.
So the female lions hunt, for the most part, although the male lions will join in from time to time, and the female lions hunt.
Do you know what the male lions are doing?
The male lions go like in a kilometer, 100 kilometer square radius around the pride of lions, around the family of lions.
Do you know what they're looking for? They're looking for other male lions who are going to come in and attack his pride.
They're looking for the other male lions who are going to come in and kill his male offspring and mate with his women And it is the male lions who patrol and maintain the borders of the tribe.
Just something to think about, Europe.
Just a state of mind you might want to have.
Just, you know, something to mull over a little bit.
Because, you know, it hasn't really been that long since we were that way inclined as a species.
So, here's the thing.
Jackie, what do you defer to with Tom?
What do you say to Tom?
Okay, you've got this.
You're the expert in this. I'm going to defer to you.
And I'll ask the question of Tom as well, but is there anything for you, Jackie, that you'd defer to?
Question?
Yes.
Come first.
You've got to get closer to that mic.
You've got to defer to me about mic proximity at the moment.
I was just asking, can you ask him first?
I need to think. You know, the pause tells you everything.
Productive relationships are about giving up control.
Do you ever hire a mover?
They call them removers.
In England, I don't know what they call them in Germany, probably something with at least 400 syllables, but the mover, you hire a mover, a bunch of guys, often not a lot of feminists, but a bunch of guys come with a van or truck, and they load up your stuff and they take it someplace new.
And you defer to them, right?
I mean, you might hover around and say, watch the vase, because, you know, it's like me when someone comes around, I'll hover around and try and learn what they do and get in their way.
But you defer to the movers.
They pack it up. You go to the dentist and they say, do this, do that, do the other.
Rinse with salt.
Okay. You defer.
It's a lot easier. If you've got to second guess everything and you don't defer to anyone, that's an exhausting life, right?
Yeah. So, in what does Tom have authority and what do you defer to him?
If you don't know, that's important.
Because you know what? A lot of The message that women get these days, Jackie, you may have heard of this.
The message that women get these days, Jackie, is this.
Defer to no man.
If you defer to anything that a man says or wants or needs or demands or requests, you're a slave to the patriarchy and a betrayer of all the women who fought and bled.
To bring you freedom.
Defer to no one.
Stand alone like a statue in a storm.
Defer to no man.
And the reason they say that is they know that that's going to set up exhausting, debilitating relationships where you're not going to have that many kids, if any.
Daniel Crittenden wrote a book many years ago, which I thought was great.
What Our Mothers Couldn't Tell Us or something like that.
And she's got a little story in it. She's playing doubles tennis.
And it's male-female.
She's there with her husband. And the husband is tying up his shoelace, and he says to his wife, Oh, I'm sorry.
I'm just doing my shoe. Could you just go to the clubhouse and grab my racket?
I forgot it. And do you know what the wife says?
I don't think so. Get it yourself.
What? That's really rude.
It's really nasty.
So this, I'm not doing anything...
And people troll this with the get-me-a-sandwich kind of thing, right?
But I'm not going to do anything nice for a man because that's submitting to the patriarchy, right?
And that just makes women tired.
And when women get tired, you know the famous phrase of women, I feel overwhelmed.
Overwhelmed. I'm overwhelmed.
Well, you're overwhelmed... Because you're not deferring to anyone.
You're not deferring to other people.
And so because you won't defer to other people, then you don't learn the value of trust, you don't learn the value of surrender.
You know, my wife and I, she runs a whole bunch of stuff, and she does it fantastically.
And I run a bunch of stuff, and I do it well.
And we trust each other.
And that's how you become productive.
You know, like if you're a businesswoman and you want to, you know, paint your office and buy the furniture or make the furniture and you want to set up your own internet and you want to, like if you want to do it all yourself and then design your own ads.
Like if you don't defer to anyone, if you don't offload to people, ah, it's so tiring.
It's exhausting. And then you feel trapped and helpless.
Tom, did you come up with anything about what Jackie refers to you on?
I mean, he's very good at the logic things and the thinking process.
Oh, no, no, no, no. Jackie, I'm sorry.
I hate to interrupt you. That is a catastrophic fail on your part.
Do you know why? The whole reason you guys called in is because Tom says you won't defer to his logic.
So when you say, well, no, he's really good at the logic stuff, it's like, but that's not how you act, right?
That is true. Okay, so let's cast aside praising him for something you won't obey him on when I'm asking what you defer to.
Let's try that again.
I mean, he is really good, like, not looking at our relationship, but when it comes to like theories and like, how to plan like but when it comes to like theories and like, how to plan like financial stuff and everything, he's very Okay, and do you defer to him on that?
Is that part of your relationship? Sure.
What do you mean, sure? You sound like you're just waving me off with a syllable.
I don't know what that means. Sure!
That was a yes. And would you agree with that assessment, Tom?
Sure. Oh my god, you guys.
I am not going to feel frustrated and helpless because that's taking the onus off you.
I'm sorry. Listen, if it wasn't this way, there'd be no point talking, right?
Yeah. So, Tom, you're good at the financial stuff?
Yeah. So does Jackie give you her money to handle?
Currently, no. Okay, so when I'm asking for something that Jackie defers to you on, I'm not talking in theory.
In practice. I mean, he's very good at, like, encouraging me To do things, like for instance, to work out and everything, to keep that up.
And he's doing that, like, all the time.
But your entire conflict is about you not working out together because you won't listen to his reasonable arguments about what he wants for you to run the same speed together.
Not working out together, but working out on my own.
Okay, but taking his advice is not quite the same as deferring to him.
Okay. Then I still like to think about it.
It's okay. And listen, that's fine.
We don't have to sort this out right now, but I just think it's an important thing.
If you guys want to have a relationship that's really productive, that really has value, you know, like why do so many relationships break up?
It's a big question. But one of the answers, I think a very important answer that's not often discussed, is because it's bloody ridiculous the way people try to live together.
Do you guys live together?
Currently, yeah. My God, I feel like I'm cornering you with a broken bottle or something.
It's like, well, I assume you weren't born living together, so of course, currently.
It's true. It's like you've got to hedge everything.
Why is he asking that?
How is he going to trap me? What's happening next?
Okay, so you're currently living together.
How long have you been going out? Officially since...
Officially! He did it again!
Here we go, qualifying, I know.
Germans! You're all toilet trained at gunpoint.
You feel poop! Anyway, go on.
So, officially about almost two months.
Wait, you've been going out for two months?
Am I allowed to qualify again?
Wait, you've been going out for two months?
Well... You haven't on at all.
Yeah, it was difficult.
Let's call it difficult.
Yes. But officially for tomorrow.
How long have you been going out?
Just answer the question.
I'm half German.
Don't make me uncork that side.
My jaw gets even bigger.
Eyes get bluer.
And Poland runs in fear.
I guess six months.
I'd say six months, maybe.
And would you mind explaining to me the gap between two and six months in your answer, please?
Sure. Well, when we first met, which was roughly a year and a half, two years ago.
Yeah, two years ago.
Thank you. She was an outpair in America.
You want to explain that to our non-German listeners?
Sure. An au pair is somebody who serves as a nanny, essentially, and does various services for a family.
It's like cook, nanny, a little bit of cleaning.
It's like a homemaker for a woman who has kids but doesn't want to spend too much time around them.
Yeah, precisely. Okay.
See, look at that. There's a woman who's deferring, but all the wrong things.
Anyway, go on. Not you.
So we met then.
We started talking.
Sorry, how did you meet?
We met on Tinder.
Come on, I gotta tell the truth.
We met on Tinder originally and then we met up.
And then we talked, hung out more.
And there was a period in which she went back to Germany.
Question. Yes.
And I apologize. You don't have to answer anything you don't want to, but we're being pretty frank here.
Isn't Tinder to some degree a sex app?
It's not Grindr territory.
Yes, but don't go by associate me, Stefan.
I'm just checking.
I'm just checking. So how long after you first did the swipe did you have the sex?
We didn't... That was not immediate.
I'd say maybe like three to four months and then we didn't really do it.
Yeah. Okay. Yeah. All right.
Okay. So she heads back to Germany.
And this was all, you said a year, year and a half ago?
Correct. So she heads back to Germany.
We maintain communication.
We talk, we Skype a lot.
Were you still dating? Were you still monogamous?
Were you still in a relationship? At that point, no.
So you had the conversation like, we're half a world apart, we're going to date other people, but let's stay in touch.
Well, yeah. And we started to become, over the past, I'd say, six months to a year, we started to talk a lot more.
And, you know, and start a lot, like, Communicate, you know, what's going on in our lives more.
And I'm sorry to interrupt, Tom.
Tom, how long were you guys in the same geographical area before she went back to Germany and left the traumatized children who bonded with her in a squalling mess?
Seven months.
Seven months. All right. So you were dating monogamous exclusive for those seven months before you went back to Germany?
Nope. No.
Okay, help an old guy out here.
What does that mean? You were having an open relationship?
What is that? Yeah, that was...
I think that was more on my part, because at that point in time, I was more afraid to commit, especially considering the things that occurred in my past, which I'm more than willing to talk about if you...
Yeah, please do tell.
Well, you know, when we met, I was working, like I graduated college, got a job, was working for a little bit, saving money.
And, you know, college for me was, I had relationships And then I had a period where I wasn't in any relationships kind of doing an open thing.
And then I was... Wait, wait, sorry.
Not in any relationships kind of doing the open thing.
If you're not in a relationship, why would you do the open thing?
What does that mean? Just, I mean, I'm not saying you're wrong.
I just, this is a lingo that I don't follow.
Well, an open thing is not a closed thing.
Oh, no. Please tell me you didn't just give me the definition of open.
Oh, no. Thank you, Captain Obvious.
No, but does that mean like you just pump and dump?
I mean, what are you talking here?
Well, throughout college, like especially early college for me, I was, you know, going through high school, I was more of a relationship person, right?
So I was into being with one person.
And then...
Like second, third year of college, I stopped dating people because I had a bad experience, a really bad experience with someone.
You mean with a breakup or?
Yeah, with a breakup.
You mean like bunny boiling stalking stuff or what?
Oh, no, no, no, no, no, no.
A Title IX accusation?
I mean, what are we talking here? No, I had an experience where I was the main cause of the breakup.
I had a phase where I didn't trust myself because, and I've told Jackie about this, I'm just going to be frank with it.
I cheated on one of my girlfriends that I was dating for a while, and I didn't trust myself.
Oh, so it wasn't so much that you had a bad situation, you had a bad situation, it's that you inflicted a bad situation.
She had a bad situation.
Correct. But regarding that, me admitting that I cheated, that That idea comes with a lot of negative connotations, but when I look back on it, I realize that there were things in the relationship that I wasn't satisfied with.
For example, I dated that woman for a year and we never had sex.
So I mean, I'm not trying to justify that I did something that she deserved, because obviously that's horrible of me.
But I realize now that there are certain things in relationships- Wait, wait, wait.
You dated for a year in college?
Yes. And did not do the do, so to speak.
Now, when you say no sex, do you mean like no intercourse?
Do you mean like no sexual play?
I mean, no necking, no kissing?
What are we talking here? Very rare, handy stuff.
Very rare. Oh, like a handjob?
You know, no blowjobs either.
It was very not satisfying at that point.
I can understand that.
I'm sorry, I shouldn't be laughing, but yeah.
I can understand...
Yeah, it blew pretty bad.
It was a multiple tabs kind of relationship, if I understand it correctly.
All right. Yeah.
And it's funny, because the way that that ended, I remember I was in the car with her, right?
And my ex's name was...
I can only assume the front seat, but all right.
Yeah, it was a fun scene.
And, you know, I told her what happened, like, and just the feeling right there kind of just, you know, was pretty bad.
But, you know...
But, Jackie, I'm sorry to be digging up all of these bodies while you're around, but did you talk to her about your preference for...
Sexual activity? I mean, was that...
Did she say up front, you know, I mean, look, maybe she's a woman who doesn't want to have sex until she gets married.
You know, there's very strong arguments.
Yeah. To make for that, right?
I mean, if you want to have success in a marriage, like a 90% chance of your marriage working out, if you get married not too young, and if you get married to a woman who's had five or fewer sexual partners, and if she has no kids from prior relationships, 90% now.
If she's just got kids from prior relationships or a kid, it goes down to like 30% success rate, right?
So if she wanted to be a woman who wanted to not have sex until she got married, good arguments have been made for that.
Was that something she talked about up front?
With the X in college, no.
With Jackie, I actually knew that statistic before.
And I know the inverse doesn't necessarily apply to men, which is interesting to look at as well.
Oh no, we can carpetbomb the planet with sperm and it's fine.
As far as emotional, it just is.
Yeah. But what made me interested in In wanting to date Jackie officially was the fact that she was more traditional in many regards, and I felt as if that could be something that could end up with long-term possibilities, so I was open-minded in pursuing that.
Right.
Okay.
And so then you guys were apart.
You were together in the same country for seven months.
And then you were apart for five, six months.
And then you've been living together for two.
Is that right?
Five, six months.
Yeah.
Then I like, well, yeah.
Yeah.
So she visited me for a period and then back and then visited me for another period, which is...
Here I am thinking that women plan those visits around their period.
But anyway, just kidding. Bad joke.
Keep going. Yeah, so she visited for a period of about a month.
Sorry to keep the pun consistent.
But so a month there and then a couple months, you know, we still continue to talk more.
And then she, you know, she's visiting me now for a similar period of time.
And we have had this discussion regarding, like, who's going to end up where and open-minded to the ideas of moving and stuff like that.
And I mean, I feel pretty comfortable with my background, you know, employment-wise, whereas I could Reliably get employment if I went to, for example, if I went to Germany, even though I would be pissed off at the taxes and all the implications of that.
Sorry, Jackie, where are you in your college degree?
Early, middle? Early.
So you're like in the first year of a four or what are we talking?
First year of three years and I have to spend another year abroad next year.
So aren't you guys like three-plus years from...
I mean, Jackie, if you go through with this college stuff, aren't you guys like three-plus years from being together?
No, not really, because my degree...
I mean, I can study here, for example, we have partner universities, or if Tom is up to moving, so we could actually live together by next year, like, around summer.
And then that would be the second year and then I have to do internships and I can do the internships wherever I want to.
And then I have to like do my bachelor thesis and I have to do that with the company again.
And I can do that wherever I want to.
And Jackie, do you want to have kids?
Yes, I do. So why don't you do that first?
That is a good question.
I try to come up with at least one an hour, so...
Yeah, that is a good question.
I don't know. I think I was just always thinking about graduating high school, then maybe spending a year abroad, which I did, then college, and then working, then family.
Do you want to stay home with your kids?
Or do you want to be the au pair who has an au pair?
I don't want an au pair, no.
So you want to stay home with the kids? I do want to stay home, but I also want to work a little from home because I do really want to work.
Why? But also with the kids.
Why do you want to work? Sorry to interrupt you just after I asked you a question.
I apologize. What I mean by that is not, do you ever want to work in your life?
But depending on how many kids you have, for like the half decade or eight years or ten years that you're home raising your kids, why do you want to work at the same time?
I mean, I probably don't want to work when they are very little.
Because, I mean, you're going to be tired.
And it's going to be a big investment.
And I just, you know, if Tom's making decent coin, if this works out for you guys, if Tom's pulling decent bank, why?
Because there's this other thing that women are told.
Never be dependent on a man.
You ever heard that? If you're dependent on a man, you're serving the evil international Western snake of patriarchy.
You've got to keep your job skills up.
What if he leaves you for a flight attendant or a stewardess or puts the two together for a threesome?
I don't know. What if he...
Well, not dies.
You get some life insurance or whatever.
What if he... What if he uses his financial power over you to control you?
It's like, well, don't marry the douchebag.
If he's that guy, find a nice guy who's going to be reasonable with the money and marry him, right?
But this is always just like this...
This background program, they used to call them TSRs back in the days of 640K DOS, Terminate and Stay Resident program.
It's like a virus in the back of females' brains.
I can't ever lose my job skills.
I have to keep working.
I have to keep my contacts.
Why? If you trust your husband, if you trust the father of your children, he'll provide for you when the kids are very young.
And when the kids get older, if you want to work...
You know, if you have kids in your early to mid-20s and you spend eight years or whatever, it's your early 30s, you've still got 35 or 40 years to work without a big interruption, without a big break.
Because here's what happens.
Your career is like a bobsled run.
You ever see those crazy guys going down really, really fast?
In Whistler, you can see the bobsled run still there from the Winter Olympics from many years back.
There's a momentum to it.
Dave Rubin found this out when he took a month off in one of the biggest social media event happenings of the entire planet.
Sorry, Dave, with the bad timing.
What can I tell you? But there's a momentum to your career.
And what happens is when you start getting going on your career as a woman, what happens?
Well, you want to have kids?
And he's like, well, yes, but I've got a big promotion coming and I've got to go on this trip and I've got to deal with this client thing.
I'll do it. I'll do it. I don't want to go in and say that.
And they'll say, oh, well, we're part time.
Jordan Peterson talks about this.
He's saying that law firms can't keep women in their 30s because women in their 30s who can do...
Law work who can be lawyers, who are on a partner track and so on, they're very high-functioning, smart women, and so naturally, they're generally going to marry men who make even more than they do, and if they're making $150,000 or $200,000 a year, their husbands are probably making $250,000 or $300,000 a year, so in their 30s, they can't keep them in the law firms.
They're heading out in droves. Only 40% of women who take an MBA are actually working in business.
A huge waste of time and money, at least at that time in your life.
They leave because their husbands are making so much money.
They're like, well, what's the point? What's the point of me working all the time?
I want to have kids. I want to spend time with my kids.
And so, Jackie, for your life as a whole, if you get your education now and work for 5 or 10 years, well, listen, getting pregnant in your 30s, not always the easiest thing.
I'm telling you, it's not always the easiest thing.
And I'm not just talking your late 30s.
You got to check your FSH levels in your early to mid 30s, too.
Not always the easiest thing.
And then you've got a distraction and you've got a frustration and you might have miscarriages.
Oh man, it's a mess.
It's a mess. So if you want to have kids and if you found the right guy, and I know you guys have been together for...
A while, but I'm just pointing it out.
Let's say Tom is the guy, and if he's calling into this show, he's got my vote.
That's not common.
So, maybe it's more than just your parents in school.
Maybe, if you want to have kids, do it when you're young, for God's sakes.
Do it when you're young so you have 20 or 30 years to enjoy your grandchildren.
Do it when you're young so you can bounce back from two hours sleep a night.
Do it when you're young so you have...
The joint flexibility and tendon strength and energy and musculature to crawl your way through the lower intestines of a McDonald's play center tube.
Do it when you're young.
So your sperm is strong, your eggs are strong, your milk is strong.
Do it when you're young.
If you've got a yearning and a burning to work, and I understand that kids get older, they get their own lives and, you know, Jackie, you're a smart woman, a lot to offer the world.
Then you can have your career.
You can do all of that. But there's a huge amount of pressure on women.
Have your kids somewhere down the road.
Of course politicians want you to do that.
Goddamn universities want you to do that because they want your money now.
They don't want your money in 10 years if you're taking part-time studies.
They want your money now. Governments want you to go to school and start working now so you can pay your taxes so that they can pay for migrants.
They don't want you having kids because, you see, when you have kids, the government has to provide services, right?
It's healthcare services and you're not paying taxes.
So governments are out of pocket in terms of providing services, whether it's daycares or whatever, right?
And you're not paying taxes.
Governments want you to pay taxes and not have kids.
So it's a whole bunch of propaganda you're being sold.
It's got nothing to do with what's good for you.
It's got nothing to do with what's good for your children.
It's got nothing to do with what's good for the future of your country or your civilization or your culture, however you want to put it.
It's all to do with dangling stupid incentives in front of women to serve the state, and to serve politicians, and to serve the banksters, not to serve you.
So if you want to have kids, why wait?
Do it when you're young, do it when you're healthy, do it when you have boundless energy.
But the idea of, if you get educated now, you get a couple of years of work under your belt, First of all, it seems almost inevitable that your future career prospects are going to be limited because business owners aren't dumb.
They know that a married woman in her late 20s, early 30s is probably going to have kids at some point statistically.
They know that. There's no law in the world that can change that knowledge.
It can change some of the effects, but it can't change the basic fact.
So your career is going to be stalled.
Your career is going to be interrupted.
If you want to be a decent mom and stay home and breastfeed your kids, your career is going to Lie fallow for five, eight, ten years, which will be wonderful years in your life.
I've been home with my daughter for, it's coming up for nine years now.
It's the best time.
The best time.
Fantastic. I would trade it for nothing.
There is no prize, no money, no fame, no glory, no cheering.
That could possibly replace that time that I have spent with my daughter.
It has been an unbelievable treasure.
So why wait for such glory?
You understand, if you're looking at it objectively from the outside, from outside propaganda, from outside all of this leftist crap, I don't notice them lecturing people in Africa or in no-go zones.
Don't have any more kids!
Go have a career! I'm talking to those people.
But maybe the picture is very different.
Maybe it's a very, very big picture that this little conflict is talking about.
Yeah, I mean, if you...
Look at it from that point of view.
I mean, you're right. Like, why not having kids very early and then working or working when they're 10?
What if you want a lot of kids?
You know, if you start having kids in your early to mid-30s, if you squeeze out two, you're doing pretty well.
But what if you want three or four or five?
Well, I don't want to have a whole soccer team.
How do you know you haven't even had one yet?
I'd love a dozen! We just, you know, for a variety of reasons, which I will never talk about, we couldn't.
So, you don't know!
Because the more you have, the easier it is, because they play with each other.
Well... There is something glorious about a house full of childish noise.
Something enormously uplifting.
Enormously life-affirming.
It's a geyser of future.
Life. Possibility.
It's like this old Michelle Pfeiffer movie.
She says this. She's a bit of a bitch in the movie.
Well, she is. Michelle Pfeiffer, after all.
Alabaster goddess of cold-hearted scrotum freezing.
But she says, in the movie, she says, there were no people, and now there are people!
It's true. I look at my daughter.
There was no person. Now there's a person.
It's a kind of magic.
It's wild. So you don't know.
You may love being a mom so much.
I just had some friends over.
And they got a four.
They got two. The woman is entering the house like the Titanic breaking into a 7-Eleven.
Yeah. I believe I can fly.
And yeah, she's got a place to set her coffee.
Decaf, that is. But yeah, other friends came over.
Kids played all day.
Three beautiful boys.
You don't know? When you have the capacity to create life and thought and joy, cuddles connection.
It's hard to say. And that isn't even your line, the soccer team.
That's a line that's been fed to you.
You always have to ask why.
So my thought about this conflict about the jargon, guys, is that I think, Jackie, you want more control Jackie, you want more control over your life and your future.
Why are you in school?
It's not particularly clear to you.
Why are you going to school now rather than later?
Why are you going to work first, then have kids later?
Why? Because when Tom says, I want to run with you, you're like, well, I don't want to slow you down.
That's being obstructive and annoying.
And it's breaking sort of the implicit contract of going to run together.
And I think... That wanting to match someone else's pace makes you feel like you don't have control over your own life.
Like you're not making decisions about your own life.
That you're on somebody else's program, somebody else's track, somebody else's schedule, somebody else's calendar.
And what do you want?
Forget what everybody says.
Forget what all the media says.
Forget what all the programming is.
People work very hard to control other people's fertility.
Very hard to control other people's fertility.
Almost never with good intent.
So I would say that you need to jump the tracks.
Maybe you feel like you're on train tracks.
Maybe you feel like, well, I'm just doing the next thing.
You know, like...
That line from one of the great nihilistic, barbaric yorps of the world, the movie Fight Club, where the guy says, phone my father once a year, graduated from high school, said, what should I do?
Go to college. Graduated, what should I do?
Get married. Get a job.
And now? I don't know.
The generations that came before have almost nothing to teach us except the horrible consequences of bad examples.
The generations that came before have as much to teach us about life as the guy smoking from a hole in his throat has to teach us about smoking.
Be suspicious.
More than skeptical, downright suspicious.
Of everything you've been told about how your life should go and what shape your life should take.
The boomers couldn't stop the escalation of the surveillance state.
They couldn't stop the escalation of the bankster state.
They couldn't stop the escalation of the tyrannical state.
They could not stop the escalation of the hyper-regulatory state.
They could not save the free market in medicine from encroaching government.
They could not Maintain any decent set of quality in the schools.
They could not protect the fucking borders that millions had died to maintain.
They cuck and they bow and they scrape and they find Benedict Cumberbatch, what the fuck his name is.
He finishes his run as Hamlet, screaming into the audience, we need to do more for the refugees!
Guys, unbelievably rich.
You know, people think he played smorg in The Hobbit.
No, he paid the fucking gold.
He played the treasure.
That's how rich this guy is.
And people say, well, why don't you take some migrants in?
He says, well...
I mean, I guess I could, but frankly, I don't want them around my newborn baby.
Great. Great.
Good. Good fucking plan.
Oh, actors. Actors make ghosts look like statues when it comes to personal integrity and substance.
There's a reason they can inhabit everybody else's personality because they've got nothing of their own.
They don't exist. It's an old joke.
It says, how do you give an actor CPR? So, trust nothing that you were told.
Nothing that has been handed to us is worth a goddamn thing.
Except as an example of what not to do these days.
Do the opposite of what you've been told and you're probably in the right path.
So, yeah, set your own pace.
It's not about the running, it's about everything.
It's about your eggs, your future, your life, your brain, your love, your motherhood, the soup and mix and nuts of life.
And don't let anyone tell you what the shape of your life should be.
And for sure as hell, don't take a fucking shred of advice from the boomers.
They have no credibility left.
In any way, shape, or form, they have handed to us a world that is heading to war.
They won't even admit any fault.
All they do is double down. So that's what I mean when I say it's a really, really good idea to dig deep into these little conflicts.
I'm not saying this is a perfect analysis or everything's perfectly true about it, but those are certainly my thoughts.
All right, well, I'm going to move on.
Thank you very much for your call.
I really, really appreciate it and hope you'll let us know how it goes.
Thank you, Stefan. Thanks, guys. Thank you.
Alright, well up next we have Sean.
Sean wrote in and said, Given the amount of income inequality in the United States today, critics almost always cite the ever-nefarious force behind it all.
Corporate greed. After a debate I had recently, I began to question whether or not greed was even a valid concept or simply something subjectively ascribed to those with from those without.
How can we establish what and how much people need and when slash if that consumption becomes greed?
That's from Sean. Hey, Sean.
How you doing? Hey, Stefan.
How's it going? All right.
So, greed. Greed is a very simple concept to understand.
Greed is what a sophist uses to describe someone else's desire that conflicts with his own.
Yeah. That's all it is.
Your legitimate desires, well, they're healthy.
That's self-actualization.
That's being assertive. When someone else has a desire that conflicts with yours and you're an immature jerk, you call it greed.
I have no...
I mean, greed is a $20 trillion national debt.
Is that considered to be greedy, wanting stuff you don't want to pay for?
Personal greed, who cares?
If people are greedy...
In a free society, they're greedy for something that is self-destructive, if they're greedy for sex that gives them unwanted pregnancies or STDs or shatters their heart into a million pieces, if they're greedy for food that makes them fat, if they're greedy for drink that makes them drunk, if they're greedy for drugs that make them stoned, if they're greedy for all of these things, then the consequences accrue to them and their family and friends should intervene to solve it.
That greed does not directly impact you or me or anyone else Outside of their immediate circle in any way, shape or form.
But to go back to the boomers, if the boomers say, want to pretend that they're helping the poor and don't particularly rouse themselves to oppose the endless imperialism of America and other countries as well,
England, Britain. If they run up a giant national debt, if you're greedy as a government worker for a pension that can't possibly be sustained, if you demand massive amounts of pay and benefits in healthcare, far more than you ever paid into, well, that's greedy.
But that greed, that greed, that's imposed on On other people.
That is the toxic greed.
The greed that is self-contained is bad enough.
The greed that becomes an environmental economic toxin for everyone else, that is the greed that needs to be talked about.
Corporate greed. Fuck that shit.
Corporate greed? If the corporation is greedy, what does that mean?
It means that they charge too much.
So they go out of business. And the greed is punished.
And I don't have to lift a finger.
Now, the shareholders are upset, but of course the shareholders are going to say, well, wait a minute.
Wait a minute. What are you doing, right?
If the corporation is greedy, what does that mean?
They underpay their workers.
Okay, well then, the Pareto principle kicks in.
And the Pareto principle being that the square root of the total workers produces half the value.
So out of 100 workers, 10 produce the great value.
Out of 10,000 workers, 100 produce half the value.
If they underpay people, the smartest people leave.
And you get into this Toys R Us death spiral, right?
Just declaring bankruptcy, I think, at the moment because, well, there have been so many concerns about Toys R Us' bankruptcy that what's happened is that 40% of their Sales occur in the Christmas season, but they normally will take the money from the consumers over the Christmas season and use it to pay the people who sent them the toys after the Christmas season, but everybody's scared they're going to go out of business, so they won't ship them unless they pay up front, which they don't have the money for.
So they're paying. Let's say they were greedy.
I mean, they did get heavily into debt.
So, some corporate greed?
There's a greedy... Gas station owner on the corner.
He's charging $18 for a gallon of gas.
And according to the Federal Reserve, that's not supposed to happen for two or three years.
So what happens? Nobody shops there.
I don't need to do anything.
His greed is punished.
But greed that is enacted through the political system, greed that is imposed upon taxpayers, both current and future and generally future, that It's the true income inequality.
You want to talk about income inequality?
How about the boomers who are getting hundreds of thousands of dollars more out of government services than they ever paid in?
And how about the children who are born hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt?
Now that's what I call income inequality.
We're not even talking about the unfunded liabilities, which is well north of a million dollars per person born in the United States.
And trust me, they're not all going to be making that much in their entire life.
Greed. The state-imposed greed is the greatest income inequality between the people who benefit from the state and the people who, in the future, will be forced to pay for that, either directly or indirectly.
That's the real greed, and of course, No one talks about it.
Really. Not in this context, right?
Socialists aren't saying, oh man, you want to talk about greed?
Look at that national debt. It's crazy.
Yeah, I mean, it seems like it's a way to kind of create a boogeyman in a way.
You know, you say these corporations are just greedy and all of a sudden that, you know, it makes them the bad guys.
I was ever trying to make that argument's eyes.
Well, and you know, if people are really concerned about income inequality, one thing that they can do is change the immigration policy to stop importing people from low IQ areas where they're barely going to make any money, if at all, in the entire free market.
Or if they're concerned about income inequality, how about privatizing education so poor kids have a decent shot?
No, can't do any of that.
Now, the corporations are just set up as the boogeyman wherein the left gets to project all of their own psychotic greed and exploitation and pretend that it's all the fault of the free market.
All the fault of the free market.
That's right. Right.
Free market can't take one goddamn thin dime out of my pocket without my permission.
Yeah, exactly. So, you know, when I first started to think about this question, I was wondering if there's a way to objectively define what would constitute greed.
Or if it's all just based on a relative standard that's been set up.
You're talking about the symptom, not the cause.
What we want to do, I think, is morally oppose the initiation of force that is required for intergenerational wealth transfers like a national debt.
That people are selling off the unborn into near-perpetual slavery to foreign banksters.
I want to focus on the moral issue rather than the aesthetic issue of where greed is or what the difference is between need and greed.
Because there's a more foundational issue, which is the violation of the non-aggression principle and the selling off of the unborn into slavery for the sake of psychotic greed in the here and now.
You either limit yourself or you exploit others, right?
You either produce or you are a consumer of other people's production.
Voluntarily, we hope. So I'm not sure, like I'd rather, instead of dealing with the effects, I'd rather deal with the cause, which is the violation of the non-aggression principle.
That is the essence of state control of money and debt and credit.
I mean, you might be able to help me dig myself out of this hole if I've created one for myself, but, you know, if we're thinking of greed as a moral issue, then wouldn't, you know, I'm up to speed on UPB, would greed have to be universally, you know, applicable in order for it to be a moral issue?
But greed is not a moral issue.
Because greed in no way contains a violation of the non-aggression principle.
Right? I mean, if it violates the non-aggression principle, like if I take somebody's property by force or fraud, that's theft.
It's not greed. But could you do it out of...
Could the intention be because one is greedy and therefore they resort to theft No, but that's making a state of mind a moral issue.
And a state of mind can never be a moral issue.
It's universally preferable behavior, not universally preferable emotionality or state of mind or viewpoint or perspective or whatever, right?
Because there are plenty of people who are greedy who don't steal.
So, because greed isn't an action.
Yes. Greed is a state of mind and it's a fairly subjective state of mind.
Right. How do you objectively define greed?
It seems to me mostly just a pejorative that you apply against people's desires you disagree with, and most times, as I said in the beginning, people disagree with other people's desires if they conflict.
Right. I mean, if you and I are both bidding for something and we bid each other high, we can both call each other greedy, but that's just because we're interfering with each other's plans for acquisition.
So really, there's no such thing as an act of greed.
It's an act with the mindset of greed.
Yeah, I mean, greed is just one of these words.
I don't know that it's become so corrupted by ad hominems and slanderer, and it's so subjective.
It's one of those words that I just don't find particularly helpful.
Desire for the unearned.
Sure, you could say that's greed.
But, you know, it's that...
Gordon Gekko's speech from Wall Street, right?
Greed is good. Greed, for want of a better word, is good.
We're all greedy for something. Greed cuts through.
It clarifies. It captures.
Yeah, exactly. I mean, you know, I was trying to search for some kind of basic mainstream definitions that were out there.
And, you know, it's, you know, the desire for something, but then they tack on, you know, usually more than you need.
And it's like, at what point do you define or can you establish more than what you need?
You can't even define what people need.
Yeah. I mean, I guess a bare minimum of calories to survive.
I mean, does a family that lives in the country, do they need a car?
Need a car? Well, they could hitchhike, they could bicycle, they could ride.
I don't know. I mean, the idea that someone can define what someone else needs, I need philosophy.
But most people don't.
Even if you're talking financial needs, you know, they have the poverty line, you know, for a one-person household is $12,000.
I mean, is that saying that if anyone makes more than that, they are some greedy, nefarious person?
Well, the other thing too is that if you say, we want to fix, we want to give people their bare minimum their need, then you need a whole bunch of political power in order to achieve that.
You need the capacity to transfer trillions of dollars from the productive to the unproductive.
Do you need that much political power to transfer trillions of dollars?
Well, you know what I mean? It's just one of these subjective statements that is used to cover up a massive pickpocket.
Yeah, that was the kind of preliminary conclusion that I came to, and so it was good to hear.
You ever heard Hillary Clinton described as greedy?
I don't think I have, not at least by her supporters.
Well, I mean, the woman's worth hundreds of millions of dollars, I guess, in combination with a spanky-fingered bill.
Still wants more. Wants more power.
Wants more money. Is sitting there next to milk cartons in a superstore signing copies of her book, which sure beats better her signing war orders against Russia or open borders orders for refugees.
But yeah, then we talk about her.
When is it enough? When is enough power enough?
Money for the Clintons.
When is it enough? Are they greedy?
Do they have more than people? It's just...
But then would that also kind of fall under the subjective impossible to define, you know, in terms of, like, what is enough power?
Or is there no amount?
Well, the other thing, too, is that if you, in order for people to get what they need, other people have to have more than they need.
Right? So if you want people to have a job, other people have to have enough savings to In order to start a business, right?
You have to have saved enough money to go and open the supermarket which hires 20 people.
So you have to have more than you need in order to have the access to invest in creating a business.
If everybody's on subsistence, nobody has much of anything.
So inequality is essential for progress.
And I imagine you could say the same for starting a family.
I mean, you obviously need more than just your self-needs to support a new child you're bringing into this world for 18 or some odd years.
Yeah, do people need children?
It's like... And the very idea that someone would put themselves forward...
I'm not saying you, right? The very idea, Sean, that someone would put themselves forward As an expert who says, well, I know what people need.
And I know what's greedy and I know what's excessive.
It's like, fuck off.
Go away. Let people be free.
If you want to make a case for the simple life for people.
If you want to make that case, yeah, go for it.
You can tell people to live in tents, anything you want.
But the idea that you somehow know what people need, and you're going to dole out what they need, and you're going to take away what people have too much of, that's communism.
It's totalitarian.
You have to have a vast excess of power.
You have to be greedy for the most destructive and vicious and violent kind of power in order to enforce your definitions of greed on others.
Now, this is just a smear that leftists use against people they don't like, and they exempt themselves from Any of those standards.
Well, I'm going to move on to the next caller.
I think that's all I had to say on that topic.
But yeah, it's a very interesting question. Thanks for holding in.
You summed it up very well. Thank you for the time.
All right, up next we have Tanya.
She wrote in and said, Years ago, I was in an abusive relationship and I now struggle with anxiety and depression.
Then, in the last few years, the social justice warrior era began, which I feel essentially compounded my post-abuse condition due to its key feature of bullying and hating.
I'm so wrapped up in how I'm viewed, and I'm hypercritical of myself all the time.
I take everything personally and always worry whether I am doing something wrong.
It's also left me feeling jaded and bitter about the world.
How can I stop criticizing myself so much and stop all these unproductive feelings?
That's from Tanya. Oh, hey, Tanya.
How are you doing tonight? Hi, good, thanks.
How are you? Well, it's a very astute, I think, and wise observation to point out the verbal abuse that is endemic to some of this leftist or social justice warrior stuff.
Sorry, go ahead. I was just going to say, I mean, if you experience it, you kind of get to know the symptoms.
Yeah, if you've experienced verbal abuse, then you can see the key symptoms that go in.
And women... So there's this aspect or something that people study in psychology, and it's called self-construal, which is, you know, I hate these.
I mean, I shouldn't say I hate.
The people who invent all of these terms, right?
Like, there were some people, they looked at the art of the argument, and they're like, well, you didn't use the exact technical terms used by professional logicians for part of this.
I was like, yeah, but I'm not talking to professional logicians.
I'm not writing a book on formal logic.
I'm writing a book on how to win arguments in an emergency situation.
Like, let me teach you about the difference between sound.
Anyway, so there is this thing called self-construal.
And the reason I'm sort of pointing this out is I don't want you to feel like you're weak for this kind of stuff.
So... This is, I'm working on a presentation, so this is just sort of very, very briefly.
So self-construal, it sort of refers to how you define yourself, and in particular, the extent to which yourself is defined independently of others or interdependently with others.
And women, there are sort of these big five personality traits.
I want to sort of get into all of them here.
One of them is agreeableness. And there are gender differences in agreeableness.
And there's some good theories that say they result from gender differences in what's called self-construal.
So men have an independent self-construal in general.
So men have a sense of self that is separate from how they are cognitively represented in the minds of others.
saying, I don't care what people think of me, right?
Now, there's no one except psychotics who don't care at all.
Actually, even psychotics probably do care.
So, it's a continuum.
But women, according to the research, seem to have a more interdependent self-construal.
So, they have a sense of self, which includes others.
And that's because women cooperate more and men compete more, right?
If you think of sort of our evolution, men are out there hunting and men are out there trying to gather resources.
And if you have more resources, you get a higher quality woman, right?
Your daddy's rich, your mama's good looking, as the old song says.
Whereas women are cooperating in order to raise their children.
You've got to watch each other's children.
You've got to keep an eye out for a lot of, you know, people need to bring you food while you're breastfeeding and your husbands are out hunting.
So women need each other to raise the kids.
And so empathy and including others in every minute consideration of social calculation is essential.
Whereas for a man to compete and win against another man, to win the resources, well, that's win-lose, right?
And so the man can't be overburdened with empathy, because otherwise it'll be like, oh, the guy I'm winning against, well, he feels bad.
You know, he, I mean, this is a running race for a million dollars, and if I win, I get a million dollars, and if I lose, I get nothing.
If I come in second, I get nothing.
It's a running race for a million dollars.
There are 20 people in this running race.
If I win, each one of those 19 people are going to be sad that they didn't win.
I can't run my best.
I feel so bad for those people who are going to lose.
You understand that?
Yeah. That can't work.
That's not how men evolved.
Any man who evolved that way, his genes lasted.
About as long as a $50 bill in the champagne room, right?
I mean, it doesn't...
It won't last, right?
So women tend to be more, like, sensitive to what people think and more sensitive to verbal abuse, right?
And to me, it's not an accident that when more and more women get invited into higher education, higher education gets more and more verbally abusive in order to get its way.
Because women know...
Like, how do boys fight?
Punch each other in the head.
Right? How do girls fight?
Slander. Whisper campaigns.
Setting people against each other, right?
Yeah. It's verbal abuse.
It's not to say that men can't be verbally abusive.
I mean, you're in a relationship, so I don't want to minimize that.
But verbal abuse generally works better against women than it does against men.
Men, we do have a bit of a...
Eh, who cares, right?
You know, whatever you do in life, someone's going to hate you for it, no matter what, right?
So you can't, right? So the fact that you would be sensitive to some of the social justice warrior stuff, it's not weakness, I think.
And it's not like, again, I don't want to sort of make this absolutes.
There's lots of tendencies for different ways, but...
I think that's what I mean when I say it's wise and perceptive, I think, for you to point out this bullying stuff that's going on.
There is, to me, a sort of feminine aspect to it.
When I was growing up, it was very clear that if you had a problem with another boy and it got really difficult and unpleasant, You'd have a confrontation.
And that confrontation would probably end up being physical.
And the idea that you would sit there and undermine your opponent's friendships by whisper campaigns of what they said or, you know, that you would invite that person to say something bad.
Don't you agree that Bob is really selfish and mean?
Yeah, kind of. And then you run off to Bob and say, oh, that person said you were selfish and mean.
Like, the idea that you'd fight that way for men would be absolutely incomprehensible.
And if you tried to fight that way as a man...
You would be rejected and scorned like it would be so gross for every other boy.
But this is a lot of what girls do, right?
Mm-hmm. And that's where the social justice warrior stuff comes in, right?
I mean, so...
And to me, it's, again, not fundamentally a female thing in terms of higher education.
It's the fact that higher education has been rejected to accommodate women.
So many women that, of course, it's changed the culture because men and women are different.
And so now we have this situation where, you know, the punching Nazi stuff wasn't really around before.
The average social justice warrior would never have come up with the First Amendment.
That was all men.
Mm-hmm.
You get women into higher education, you get women more and more into intellectual fields, and women emotionally react very strongly to negative stimuli, more so than men, and lash out and get angry and, right, throw buckets of blood around and freak out Jigglypuff style, right?
So...
Yeah.
This storm that happens in women's head with negative stimuli is not a figment of people's There's very strong psychological studies and explanations behind it.
So anyway, I just wanted to sort of give you that background for people who aren't aware of it and again to praise you for this, the insight into what you're saying.
Oh, thank you. So you wrapped up in how you're viewed, hypercritical of myself all the time.
Usually, yeah. And where do you think you're falling short?
Like, what is the bully voice in your head?
What does it say?
Well, it usually says, like, I'll do something or say something, and then it'll say, is that true?
What if you're wrong? Are you sure you're right?
Like, what if you're wrong?
What if you're being mean?
What if you're a bad person?
That's usually what it says.
Okay, now that's interesting.
It mostly revolves around whether I'm a good or bad person or if I'm doing the right thing or not.
Right, right.
So it's interesting how you go from error to immorality.
That is a big jump, right?
A mistake is not immoral.
Right. Even a moral mistake is not immoral.
Because it's a mistake. Now, I mean, if you don't...
I guess it's like, what if I unconsciously am being immoral?
I just don't recognize it.
You can't unconsciously be immoral because if something...
Okay, sorry. Well, I mean, there's people who are bad and they don't know...
No, let me just clarify this a little because I don't want to sound like I'm giving carte blanche to people, right?
So... If you pursue self-knowledge, but you do not achieve self-knowledge, and it is, of course, what's really motivating me?
Whose agenda am I following?
Is it my own? Is it rational?
Am I doing things for the approval of others or to avoid being attacked and then calling it moral?
All of these things, right? You pursue self-knowledge.
But I'm telling you from my own experience, and I'm sure this is true for you as well, Tanya, you can pursue self-knowledge for a long time, and then suddenly, like out of nowhere, out of a bolt of lightning from a clear blue sky, something hits you like, oh man, that's why I did this, or that's why I do that, and boom!
Right? Yeah, that's true.
Now, the pursuit of self-knowledge gives you that Potential of those insights where you go, boom, right?
Mm-hmm. But you can't make that boom happen, that insight which changes the direction of the course of your life.
So you pursue that self-knowledge.
And I had...
I was in pursuit of self-knowledge.
I was actually more in pursuit of philosophy than I was in pursuit of self-knowledge until I was in my late 20s, early 30s in particular.
Yeah. And then I got the real self-knowledge stuff, and in particular when I went into therapy and started journaling and really worked to unearth and understand my deeper motivations.
So I pursued philosophical values, and they did not help me reform my life and achieve freedom in my personal life.
When I pursued self-knowledge, that occurred.
Now coming from objectivism, There is the Nathaniel Brandon arm of objectivism, but then there's also the Peek of Rand version of objectivism, which is not so much in pursuit of self-knowledge.
Ayn Rand herself said she didn't really understand psychology at all.
And if you're in pursuit of self-knowledge, then what happens is You accumulate insight after insight after insight, and then at some point, it hits you.
Oh, man. And then you have that wisdom, that knowledge, and it changes everything.
So, if you're in pursuit of self-knowledge, you may still make mistakes prior to the big blinding flash of insight, like the biblical thunderbolt of lightening up your spine and changing your entire future.
I've talked about these on the show before, so I won't...
Reiterate them now, but there have been a whole bunch of them in my life, and I'm sure more will be coming.
So if, on the other hand, you're studiously avoiding self-knowledge, then your mistakes are no longer accidental.
So what I mean is if you're in pursuit of self-knowledge, let me give you a better way of putting it, because I know I'm flailing a little bit here.
So I played a lot of tennis when I was younger, and I practiced my serve like crazy.
And I have a very good serve.
I have a blistering serve. But it took a long time, took years of practice and lessons and so on to get that serve.
And it's still a little uncertain.
Now if...
So it took years and then I was able to get the serve.
And I remember the time I got the serve, I'm like, oh yeah, reach right over the top, power it down, boom!
Fantastic. And so everything that I studied and practiced that led up to that serve, where I finally got it, well, I hadn't had the serve yet.
Now, if I just played randomly and never took any lessons, oh, I'm great, I don't need any lessons, I'm never going to get that serve.
So for a long time I didn't get the serve, but I was in the direction of the serve, and then I got the serve.
But if I never took lessons and said I was already perfect, then I would still be in a situation of not getting the serve, but I'd never get the serve.
Like, if you're in the direction of getting the serve, you can't be blamed for not having it if you're working towards it.
However, if you're rejecting the study, if you're rejecting self-knowledge, then you're not even in the direction of the insights of the things that really change your mind and change your life.
So that is something that I've learned over time, that you can't know before you know.
Like, you can know in your head, but knowing in your whole body, knowing in your gut, knowing in your heart, knowing in a way that changes you without uncertainty, without regret.
That's different. And you work towards that with self-knowledge.
So that's what I mean when I say we make mistakes.
Sure, we make mistakes. But when I was learning how to serve, I kept hitting it out, kept hitting it out.
But I was on my way to that great serve, which I could then reproduce.
So if you're pursuing self-knowledge, you're going to make mistakes.
But that's still different from the mistakes that you're going to make when you're not in pursuit of self-knowledge.
At least you have, in the first instance, a chance to end them, if that makes sense.
Right, that makes sense.
I definitely don't Shy away from self-knowledge.
I do tons of self-introspection and thinking about why I think things and do things.
So it's been helpful for sure.
Are there people in your life or in your environment that know that you have a self-critical side to yourself and use that to try and attack or control or abuse you?
No. No.
I don't think that's true.
I'm not saying you're lying to me, and I'll tell you why.
Well, I mean, there's like, they're not friends.
In your environment, I said, not necessarily, like, that you love.
Oh, okay. I assume you wouldn't, after your experience with the abusive relationship, I would assume that you wouldn't love that kind of abuse anymore, or even pretend to.
No, no, no. I don't, I mean...
The people who bother me now are just random people on the internet, pretty much.
Not even people I know sometimes.
Most of the time, it's not anybody I know.
It's just people I see online.
So it's not any friends I have or...
Well, okay, that's not true.
There's a couple people. But they're not...
I don't know if they're actively...
Well, they're doing some things that bother me, but it's not...
It's mostly people online that I don't know.
It's not really people that I'm around a lot.
Right. And the people that, the maybe one or two friends that bother me sometimes, I don't speak to them very often, so.
Right. But I mean, I do think about the whole, I don't know, I think about the whole situation and think, well, man.
Oh yeah, no, listen, if you want an abusive relationship in your life, all you have to do is openly embrace the internet.
Oh, yeah. You know, and speak truth.
Be honest and go online.
Oh, look, I am now in an abusive relationship.
And I've been, I mean, I've examined myself six ways from Sunday with regards to this.
You know, I grew up managing a crazy mom.
Have I now Simon the Box at myself and a repetition compulsion syndrome to manage the crazy world?
And I did not have the power to change my mom and make her sane.
And I do not have the power to change the world and make it sane.
Am I just reproducing my childhood with a webcam?
I mean, I'm aware of that very distinct possibility, and I've examined it myself significantly.
And it is important.
You know, if you have a history with verbal abuse, then the Internet is, you know, what they call a trigger point, right?
I mean, it is something which can trigger, right?
Yeah. Yeah. Now, how bad did it get in your relationship, your prior relationship?
Well, I guess a good way of, I don't know, wrapping it all up for presentation, I suppose, is I've never, ever, ever hurt myself in my entire life.
And then during that relationship, that's the only time I hurt myself.
You mean like self-cutting or what do you mean?
Yeah, well, I'm a baby.
I can't even cut myself.
I actually just scratched my face up.
Now, was that out of frustration or rage?
Well, it's like, I mean, I guess the feeling is like, pay attention to me, I'm suffering.
Right. And so, if I scratch myself or hurt myself, then I can feel like, look what you're doing to me, that sort of thing.
Here's the manifestation of your abuse, and that's because you feel that if you can connect with a conscience in them, then the abuse will stop.
Yeah. Is that, I mean, don't tell me, sorry, don't let me tell you your experience, but that's what popped into my mind.
Well, I mean, yeah, that's pretty much, that's pretty much how it felt.
It was, I mean, I didn't really think it through.
It was just a, you know, I mean, I imagine that's what let other people go through when they cut or whatever.
I don't, but that was the only time I did it.
And it was just, I reached a point where I, I just, I didn't, I couldn't take it anymore.
And I just, I did that.
And And can I go out on a limb here, Tanya, and suggest that it didn't work?
Um, wait, my...
Scratching your face did not make the boyfriend or the husband any kinder.
Oh yeah, of course.
And that's sadly because, you know, the great lack in modern education...
Is the understanding of evil.
We don't have evil taught to us anymore.
We have ridiculous, monocle-wearing, monopoly caricatures of exploitive bosses and crap like that, and racism and sexism.
These are all cartoon villains.
But we don't understand...
Evil that does not conform to Marxist economic determinism.
We don't understand that.
Because, you know, you had this theory, which is that if the guy I'm in a relationship with, if he really understood how much he's hurting me, he'd stop.
You know, which is sort of like saying, well, this guy who's torturing me for information, if he really understood how much he's hurting me, he'd stop.
It's like, no, that's kind of the point.
I didn't even tell him that I scratched myself.
So I don't think I, I think I knew that it wouldn't do anything.
I just, I think I did it to, I don't know.
Didn't he see the scratches?
Wouldn't he see them? Oh, no, no.
We were in a long distance.
So he wasn't, he wasn't, he wasn't looking at me.
We wouldn't, we even webcam either.
So he wouldn't, he wouldn't do that.
So. Ah, so maybe then the scratching was for the people around you.
Yeah, I think that was it.
That was it. If people around me see how much I'm hurting, they'll give a shit and intervene, right?
Yeah. At the time, I was seeing a...
I guess like a...
They have like counselors at schools for...
Like if you're going through a rough time and you need help while you're taking your classes, that sort of thing.
So I went to see this school counselor and I told her about the problems that I was having in this relationship.
And she was saying stuff like, oh, that you really care about him.
You obviously really care about him that you're here and talking about this and you just want to fix things.
And I keep thinking back to that, like, I can't believe this woman didn't tell me I was being abused.
And I didn't know.
I didn't know I was being abused.
It took me... I was in that relationship for two years.
And it took me that long to get out.
Well, you have an adverse childhood experience of four, right?
Mm-hmm. No family, love or support, parents divorced, lived with an alcoholic or drug user.
And you had a household member depressed, mentally ill, or a suicide attempt.
Yeah. So it probably was not the case, Tanya, that there were those around you who either could or would intervene to save you from this abusive man.
No, my mom, she kept asking me, you know, why are you with this guy?
You know, he doesn't sound like...
Because I would call her all the time crying and she, you know, she would call me and I would already be crying and then She'd say, oh, you know, what did he do now?
And this guy isn't good.
You know, I don't know about this.
But she never really pushed me to get away from him.
And then later she did express regret that she didn't push for me to separate from him.
Was she the alcoholic or drug eater?
She was the alcoholic, yeah.
She was drinking a lot when I was a kid because, as far as I understand, she was upset because my dad wasn't paying child support.
My parents divorced when I was seven, but I live with my mom most of the time.
But she would go out and drink a lot because she was depressed.
Wait, so your father wasn't paying child support, so she thought that spending a lot of money on alcohol was going to solve the problem.
Yeah, it's not good.
Goddamn alcohol, I'm telling you.
No, I know. Goddamn alcohol.
Yeah. Horrifying.
But I had a theory that...
The reason I ended up with this guy and I didn't realize what was going on is that he did a lot of the stuff that my dad used to do.
And so... Like what? Just like...
He was very big on control.
Like a control freak.
So... Like my dad, it would be like his way Or, well, the highway is not an option.
It's just his way or that's it.
And with my ex, it was kind of like the same thing where he would say how he felt and then that would be it and I can't really bargain with it or explain, you know, he didn't give a crap about my feelings or anything and that was kind of how it was with My dad sometimes, it was just, you know, whatever he says goes.
I know, amongst other stuff.
But it was mostly the, I don't know, maybe I have some sort of response to power plays or something, or some sort of being controlled.
Sorry to interrupt, but to me, this stuff is not psychological, it's biological.
So what I mean by that is, All cultures are singular in their courtship and mating and reproduction rituals.
And if you have to wear a funny hat, like we all get imprinted on how best to reproduce in our cultural environment by our parents.
So we look at our parents and we say, that's how you reproduce.
Our genes don't know anything about the fact that we live in a multicultural, diverse, optional, choice-based, find-your-own-tribe kind of community, because we all evolved in, like, tribes of a couple of dozen to 100 or 200 people, right?
Where there was no variety.
No variety. If you wear a funny hat and you shake your butt at the moon in order to get married, well, what do our genes do?
Our genes say, okay, I'll put a funny hat on and I'll shake my butt at the moon.
Because that's the ritual in this tribe.
That's how we reproduce.
And remember, your genes are just using you to make more copies of themselves.
They're just passengers. They don't care about your happiness.
Yeah. It's interesting you say that because my mom's dad was also abusive.
And my dad also abused my mom.
So if the tribe...
And we don't have a tribe that we judge outside of our own family when we're young.
Our family is the tribe. It is the future.
It's everything and all that you have to do.
Because there was no change throughout most of human evolution.
So you look at your parents and you say, oh, well, that's what you do.
And your genes say, okay, do what they did.
Do what they did. Because it worked.
Because you're here. Whatever they did worked.
And that's all the genes. The genes say photocopy the parents because the parents, by definition, are the most vivid, proximate, and successful example of a good reproductive strategy that can be imagined.
Does that make sense? Yeah.
So, if your father abused your mother, then your genes say, oh, okay, so we're in an abusive culture.
So, allow yourself to be abused, and that's how we get more, that's how you have sex, that's how you have babies.
And remember, there was no birth control, there was no, right, none of that.
I actually, I didn't know that the abuse was going on until I was out of high school, and then my mom told me about what was going on when I was a child.
But she hid it from me.
You didn't know, okay. No, she didn't.
She didn't tell me.
I mean, I knew that they, I mean, I knew that obviously they didn't get along, but I didn't know to the extent the things that he did to her.
No, no, no, no. This is two different statements you're making.
What? I never stole from anyone.
Well, I didn't steal much.
I didn't know about the abuse.
Well, I didn't know about the extent of the abuse.
Those are two very, very different things.
No, no. I didn't know at all that...
I mean, all I knew is that they didn't get along and that...
That's all I knew until I got out of high school.
Like, all I knew is that my parents were fighting and they didn't get along and...
But I didn't know. She told me certain things that...
Like, I wouldn't call them not getting along abuse, but the stuff I'm talking about...
What if they're not getting along and they're calling each other horrible names or escalating or yelling or threatening?
I never heard them...
I don't...
I might have heard them fight.
Like I said, she hid them fighting from me so I wouldn't know that it was going on when I was a kid because she didn't want me to know that my parents were fighting.
So I didn't know.
So I grew up just thinking, you know, mom and dad don't really like each other.
But I didn't know that he was doing terrible things until she told me when I was older.
And what was he doing that was terrible?
She had to pay him to babysit me because he wouldn't just do it because he's my dad.
Did he not work? She helped him start his own business, as far as I remember.
He also threw a wrench at her.
Didn't hit her, but he threw it.
He also, after I was born, He forced her to sleep on the couch for about three years, four years.
He wouldn't let her leave the house.
He wouldn't let her go out anywhere.
He would kind of monitor her, make sure she's only going out to get groceries or something like that.
And then if she didn't get the groceries that he likes, then he would get upset.
She said there's more, but she didn't tell me anything else.
You're giving her quite a victim thing here.
Well, she had problems too.
She didn't know anything about his controlling side?
Before she married him.
No, I mean, I know what you're going to say.
Like, it's totally her fault that she hooked up with the guy.
No, no, no. Don't you stop putting words in my mouth, young lady.
No, no, no. I don't want to be talking to your mom right now.
I want to be talking to you. Right, right.
Yeah. I didn't say it was 100% her fault.
Right. But you never said she chose a guy who did this.
She decided to have children with a guy who did this.
It's just this happened to her. No, of course.
Of course. No, no.
Well, I knew that.
Is your mom pretty? Yeah.
Yeah, she is. So she had a choice.
She had probably lots of nice guys around, right?
Lots of nice guys who were incredibly frustrated that she would go with your dad.
Yeah, she actually told me about a guy that she regrets not marrying because he was nice and he had a job.
That's too bad. I was actually in accident, she told me that.
They hooked up, but she said that they were in love, so I guess that makes it all better.
Wait, you have an accident like she doesn't know how birth control works?
She didn't know that you could get pregnant on your period.
So... That's quite the mistake to make.
Well, I guess at least you weren't called Flo.
Wow. Wow.
And did you never ask?
So your parents divorced when you were seven.
I guess you were too young to really notice that she didn't leave the house or that she was forced to sleep on the couch and this is all.
Oh, I was like two, three years old.
I had no idea what was going on.
And was it your mom who was depressed or mentally ill or a suicide attempt?
She was depressed.
She did almost commit suicide.
There was a time where, well, what happened was, again, she has a bad habit of lying as well sometimes.
Well, yeah, we're only getting your mom's side of things, too.
I just wanted to point that out.
Yeah. Sorry to interrupt, but have you ever talked to your dad about what your mom said?
Oh, the abuse that she claims happened?
No, no, I haven't.
Ooh, that sounded like a bit of a shaky no there.
Oh, no, I don't talk to my dad about...
But she did almost commit suicide.
She told me when there was a year where I was living with my dad where they wouldn't allow her to phone me and she kind of went...
She kind of fell into a deep depression because of that.
So, you know, so she says...
How old were you then? Um, 15, 16.
I was in high school.
And you weren't allowed to phone your mom?
She... No, actually, I don't know if I was...
Oh, I think I did phone her, but I think it was a secret.
But I know that she, my stepmom, blocked my mom's phone number from calling the house because she admitted it in a letter that she sent to my mom, and my mom showed me the letter.
So, I guess that part of the story is true.
I'm not trying to say that there was, your mom was causal in this, but do you have any idea why they would have blocked it?
Well, my stepmom hated her because she said, oh, she's a deadbeat mom.
She doesn't pull her own weight and get a job.
And she just makes excuses for why she can't get a job.
And I mean, there's some truth to that.
But obviously, it's pretty cruel to block her from talking to her daughter.
Did she not have a job at this time?
No. I think that's when she had an injury.
It was like an arm shoulder injury that she got when she was working at a factory.
And she said that she couldn't work for, I don't know how long a period it was, but that was the reason she wasn't working.
Again, I don't know how true, like if she was exaggerating or not, because I've heard conflicting stories.
And why did you go and live with your dad when you were 16?
Because my mom said that my dad stopped paying child support, so she couldn't afford to keep me anymore.
So what happened was, I was going to visit my dad, and...
While I was on visit with my dad, he got a letter in the mail basically saying, you have to keep her.
I can't afford to keep her.
You have to look after her now.
And that obviously made him very angry.
So then I lived with him for five years while I was in high school.
Because, I mean, if he's not paying child support, having you come and live with him is not going to save him any money, right?
Might even be more expensive. Yeah, it doesn't make sense.
I don't really understand what happened.
And you know, it's so funny, Tanya, because there are these questions that float around in families.
They float around in families.
And I remember very clearly, when I was young, my mom went to Germany.
My brother went to stay with relatives in England, and I was sent to a friend's grandparents.
I didn't know them. The grandmother was ill, and it was a very odd and isolated kind of summer.
And I remember somebody, many, many, well, this is when I was in my early 20s, I think, maybe early, yeah, 23, 24.
A woman I knew, we were talking about this, I can't remember why.
And she said, well, why weren't you sent with your brother to stay with your relatives in England?
Because I knew them, I grew up with them, off and on.
That was a really important question.
Why would we be separated?
Why would I be sent to people I didn't know to stay?
While my brother, he ended up staying for another couple of years in England.
Why would I be sent to these people I didn't know when there were relatives who were willing to take family member in?
And I won't get into sort of a whole thing about why I ended up figuring out why this happened and all of that.
But there are these questions.
It's like, well, your father, he wouldn't pay child support, so he took you in for five years.
It's like, well, that's more than child support, right?
If you were 16, you lived with him for five years.
He's paying beyond the 18 that he needs to.
So it was not for money saving, right?
Right. Well, I think his plan failed.
I think he was trying to get my mom to get a job, and then maybe that backfired.
No, but you don't get people to take a job by taking away their financial responsibilities, right?
Um... Well, it would be incentive.
Like, if she's not getting a monthly paycheck, right, then she would have to find some other source of income.
I guess that was his line of thinking.
No, no, but you see, if you go to live with him, then her costs go down, right?
Right. So she would have less incentive to get a job, or at least to get a sustainable job if her costs are lower, right?
Right. So it might be worth...
Trying to figure some of this stuff out.
I mean, I've heard from both my parents what happened in the marriage.
You know that old phrase, same planet, different worlds.
Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I don't know.
No, I would hate to think that she just didn't want me around.
I don't really think that's the case.
No, I'm not suggesting that. I don't know.
I don't know. Yeah.
How old were you when she told you that she almost committed suicide?
Um, 21, I think.
Or 19, actually, 19.
Why did she tell you? Um, I don't know.
I guess she just thought I was the age that she could unload all this on me and that maybe I would, it would be the right time.
I'd just like to say to parents as a whole, shut up.
No, shut up. You know, this, this, oh, you know, I want to be honest with my children.
It's like, no, shut up.
You got your cross to bear.
You got your cross to carry.
Carry it and shut up.
Your children are not your emotional tampons.
They're not your vomit bucket.
They're not, it is not appropriate to talk about these kinds of difficulties with your children.
I don't care if you're 90 and they're 70.
Yeah. This is something you talk about with your friends.
This is something you talk about with a therapist.
I don't think...
I really don't like this parental vomitorium of history.
Mm-hmm. Well, there's a lot of going back and forth.
You know, like I would...
I would go see my mom and then she would say, your dad's doing this.
And then I would go see my dad and then he would say, your mom's fault, she's doing this.
So they kind of caught me in the middle and I didn't know who to trust.
My dad actually apologized for that a few years ago.
I had to call him to ask if he cares about me because that's really messed up.
Yeah, and then he apologized for how he treated—well, no, he didn't.
He apologized for, you know, putting me in the middle between him and my mom because he could understand how that would be very hard for a child, but that was the only thing he really apologized for.
What has your mom apologized for?
Well, she apologized for going out drinking and leaving me alone as a kid.
And how old were you when she did that?
I would say from maybe six until 14?
Wait, you were six years old?
Six years... Okay, wait, sorry.
My parents divorced when I was seven.
So it would be...
When I was around, probably when I was around 8, 8 to 14.
Yeah. So you're 8 years old.
I spent a lot of time by myself. You're 8 years old.
Do you have no siblings, right?
No, I'm only child.
So you're 8 years old and you're home alone while your mother is out drinking.
Yeah. I am so sorry, Tanya.
That is... Terrible.
So you're home alone, your mom's out drinking, what, you gotta put yourself to bed, you gotta read your own stories, you gotta tuck yourself in, you gotta wait for her to come home, you gotta see, can you even get to sleep if she's not home?
Is she home? Is she loud?
Is she drunk? Is there a guy?
Yeah, well, we had a guy living with us when I was around 10, 11, and he would also drink, and that was not good.
So, yeah, when she would come home and she would be uncontrollable and belligerent at times, and that was not fun.
You mean belligerent with you or with the guy, or both?
Oh, belligerent with me.
Just, you know, a little snappy, that sort of thing.
But yeah, I put myself to bed a lot of the times.
I mean, she put me to bed like maybe...
I don't want to give like a ratio here because I can't really remember.
But I would say like half the time, roughly.
But the other half, I would just...
I don't know.
I feel like I became really independent at a young age because I had to do all this stuff.
So... That's an upside, I guess.
No, not really. I mean, you can take it if you want.
It's the silver lining, you know?
No, but you do end up with this self-criticism and this inability to self-soothe, right?
Which is what happens when you have a very anxious childhood.
You know, babies are born anxious.
When they don't get what they want, they think they're going to die, which is why they scream and cry.
It's a death cry. It's a death cry.
They scream like you would scream if you're thrown out of a plane without a parachute, right?
They scream because they don't know how to self-soothe and they panic.
And we understand. You see the little sows going for their mother's teats on a female mom pig and they're all screaming and kicking and it's life or death.
It's life or death. Am I going to get my resources or am I going to die?
And so when your needs are met, you get this sense of, okay, well, bad things are happening, but...
My needs will be met. I'll find a way.
And you learn to trust yourself.
You learn to trust your environment. You learn to self-soothe, right?
And so if you don't, if you're always anxious about that, you know, is she going to be in a good mood?
Is she going to be in a bad mood?
Is she going to be drunk?
Is she going to be sober? Is there going to be enough money this month?
Are we going to get evicted? Right?
Yeah. Honestly, you're too stressed to learn how to self-soothe, and self-soothing would be crazy.
You don't self-soothe when there's a tiger in front of you.
Sorry, go ahead. Honestly, I don't remember being that anxious about what was going on.
I didn't really know that it wasn't normal.
I guess that's kind of messed up.
But I feel like a lot of the anxiety I have is from my dad because he...
Like, my mom was actually pretty...
I don't know what to say.
Like... Oh, sorry, my word recall is really bad.
He's very strict.
And then my mom is the opposite.
So she's very easygoing.
And she would, you know, if I hurt myself, she'd be like, oh, you poor baby, that sort of thing.
But my dad would, yeah, but she would be very, well, I mean, you know, just in case to make the, you know, differentiation, some moms might be really strict.
But she was very, Warm and caring.
No, no, no. I know what you're going to say.
No, no, no. Don't you give me this propaganda brochure.
Don't you give me this North Korea is a wonderful paradise of democracy brochure.
Thank you. But no, Rocket Lady.
No, no. I mean, like, she was...
Hang on a sec. Coddling, maybe, is the word to say.
No, no. Come on. She was out drinking.
Right. Don't give me this.
She's warm and fucking...
Jesus. Well, I don't know what I'm trying to say.
I'm just trying to say that she was easy.
Now I'm talking to your mom. I don't want to talk to your mom.
I'm talking to your mom.
I don't want to talk to your mom. Okay.
Can you understand? I'm not defending anything your dad did, but can you understand why he was a little fucking worried that she might leave the house?
Oh, yeah. Of course, I can understand.
Right? I can definitely understand.
She goes out. She maybe drinks. She maybe does something terrible.
No, of course. There's no way to parent at all.
Did your father drink? Nope.
When you lived with your father for the five years that you did from around 16 onwards, was it 16 onwards, is that right?
I think it was about 15.
15 onwards, okay. 15 onwards, yeah.
Was it, there was drinking?
Was there substance abuse? Was there that kind of craziness?
No. Do you think that your mother's Alcoholism, if that's what it was.
It sounds like it.
I don't know.
Do you think that that may have driven your father away as well?
I don't really know what if she was drinking before their divorce.
I don't think so.
But I could be wrong.
I don't know. Well, let's put it this way.
They got together on a fling.
There was no birth control.
That doesn't sound like very sober thinking to me.
Well, from what she told me, that he just had no interest in her after I was born, and he was very mature.
You know addicts lie, right?
Of course, yeah. Okay, and I'm not saying that she's lying about this, but I'm just saying, be skeptical.
You say all of this stuff like, well, this is just a fact, you know, I didn't have any interest.
You know, maybe he didn't have any interest in her because she was a drunk and maybe she was yelling at him, maybe she was calling him terrible names, maybe she was threatening suicide, I don't know.
It's kind of tough to be hot for some mess like that, right?
Yeah, I've never seen her...
I mean, even when she was drunk, she didn't do anything violent or anything like that.
You said she was very aggressive, though, when she was drunk?
Oh, I said she was belligerent in that she might have swore, but she never was violent or screaming or anything.
Okay, but she's an ugly drunk sometimes, right?
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, so that's not quite attractive.
Not fun to be around, yeah.
So... I would say...
You say, how can you stop criticizing myself so much and stop all these unproductive feelings?
Mm-hmm. Are you ready for a tiny speech?
Okay. Hopefully it'll be helpful.
Let's cross our fingers. It could happen.
It could happen. Tanya, when people have done wrong, criticisms must be made.
When people have done wrong to us, and whatever was done to us as children by our parents, whatever ugliness or unpleasantness, if that's what happened, whatever was done to us that was wrong by our parents, criticism must be made.
Unfortunately, because we bond with whoever raises us, we have a fundamental inability or unwillingness to criticize our parents, even if they're not good parents, even if they're bad parents, even if they're abusive parents or irresponsible or neglectful or whatever.
We have a very tough time biting the hand that feeds us.
When we're children, And again, because of sexual success strategies, we don't want to criticize abusive parents or neglectful parents because our genes say, well, that's how you have to be to reproduce in this tribe, so we better become that ourselves, and so we can't criticize it because we have to become that, because that's how people screw and reproduce in this tribe.
And again, the people who were highly critical of abusive parenting practices throughout history would not reproduce those parenting practices and therefore would not reproduce their genes for the most part.
Mm-hmm. You know, there's this Moroccan woman I saw.
I think it was a Moroccan woman. Ah, you know, the husband, he beats you because he cares about you.
And they say, well, what about a husband who doesn't beat you?
Ah, this is not a real man.
I wouldn't want to have anything to do with him.
This is not a man who could be assertive and so on.
You understand? Yeah.
Yeah. They were beaten by their fathers, I would assume, and they can't criticize the beating because then they'll want a man who doesn't beat them, and such men are probably not easily to be found in certain places.
Right. So, we're in this weird situation of now having to evolve way too quickly.
Way too quickly. And...
If you don't criticize your parents for the things they did wrong, you will criticize yourself for the things you're doing right.
I'm going to say that again because I need this to PJW style sink in.
If you don't criticize your parents for what they're doing wrong or what they did wrong, you will criticize yourself for what you're doing right.
Yeah. It's...
I was pretty messed up that all these years, especially my dad, would just criticize and control.
And then when I approach him and tell him that I really was upset and hurt by what he did, then he's just, oh...
Sorry, you know...
I was having problems and making excuses and stuff, and it just...
I don't know, it's just...
It's messed up.
Well, parents make excuses for the same reason that everybody makes excuses.
Because excuses work, because as children, we're so desperate to accept these excuses, right?
Yeah. No, neither of them...
Oh, sorry. No, go ahead.
Well, I'm just saying neither of them actually showed up to my graduation.
I'm so sorry.
I'm so sorry. That really hurt?
Do you mean college?
Or high school? Yeah.
My college graduation.
Did they say they would, or did they know it was, or...?
They knew when it was and when it was going on.
My mom's excuse was that she was across the country and couldn't afford a plane ticket.
My dad's excuse was that he wasn't feeling well.
Did they call at least?
No, no, I don't think so.
Yeah. Well, apparently there are phone lines across the entire country these days.
No, the only person who showed up was a friend of my mom's, a friend of the family, mutual friend.
But it just hurt because everybody had their families.
Right. Everybody had their families and then you're exposed as the person who doesn't have the family, right?
It just feels like I've had to be alone.
I've had to fight through life alone all my life.
And I actually, since I do so much self-thinking, or self-reflection, I kind of realized another thing that...
I mean, this is just a theory, but it seems like I've been trying to find...
I think you've mentioned this before, trying to find, like, trying to replace my dad with, like, a boyfriend.
Because I would always be trying to look for a boyfriend and find it.
You know, and then if that one didn't work out, I'd immediately go to another one.
And I... No, that probably also happened because I felt like I didn't have anybody.
Well, yeah, so when you were saying earlier, Tanya, about, well, I was independent and, right?
No. No.
Just isolated, right? Yeah.
And then we have the big question, right?
We have the big question is, was I ignored because I'm unworthy of attention?
Was I ignored or neglected?
Because I'm uninteresting because...
Yeah, there's no closure.
There's just no answer.
No, there is an answer.
There is an answer. Children are fascinating.
Children are fascinating.
You can never get bored of children because they're constantly growing, constantly learning new things.
My daughter is writing music now.
It's incredible. And it's nice music.
It's good music. It's music that would not exist in the world if she wasn't doing what she was doing.
Right. There are songs that live because of her.
She's got nice lyrics.
She writes the melodies. She plays them.
And there's nothing to be bored about with kids.
There are times where it's like, oh, it's kind of repetitive and But then it breaks through.
Children are incredibly interesting.
So I guarantee you, Tanya, that you were not ignored or neglected because you weren't worthy of attention or weren't interesting.
So the question is, who's not interested in something that's fascinated?
Well, it's sort of like if you're sitting on a porch with someone What's the most beautiful sunset you've ever seen, Tanya?
Pretty much every sunset I've ever seen in Arizona.
Every single sunset.
Right. Yeah, they...
Or California too.
That lovely line from Hamlet about sunsets, fretted with golden fire.
So sunsets, like if you're sitting there on the porch...
You're having a coffee, the sun is setting over the trees, and it is beautiful, you know, like a paint-spattered, angel-winged tapestry of the gods, of the sun sinking.
Or some of those weird moons, you know, like those weird, freaky Stephen King moons that are, like, just over the treetops, and they look like giant swollen orange eyeballs, just crazy stuff.
And so you see something beautiful like that.
And you're sitting next to someone, and that someone is really depressed.
And you look at that sunset and you say, that sunset, isn't it beautiful?
And they look at it and they say, eh.
Is that the fault of the sunset?
No. Is the sunset doing something wrong?
Is the sunset suddenly ugly or boring?
No. They're depressed.
They cannot experience pleasure.
They cannot experience enthusiasm.
They consider it sometimes as self-betrayal to be positive about anything.
Yeah. Why did your mother go out drinking, probably picking up guys, doing whatever?
Was it because you were boring?
No. No.
Sadly, it didn't have anything to do with you.
Yeah. And so, if you're ignored as a child, I mean, I'm so interesting, I talk to millions.
Seriously, I mean, I'm not perfect, but I'm not boring, right?
Well, as proof, if you weren't interesting, then you wouldn't have so many people listening.
And I will speak to millions for hundreds of years, maybe thousands.
It took me a second to understand.
Yeah, that's right. For a second, I thought you were just like an infinite being.
Although... We'll figure that out, maybe.
If there's one potion in the world, give it to me.
But... No, I'm not...
I'm not boring.
And, yes, I was ignored a lot as a child.
So... If you are ignored, no matter how beautiful a sunset you are, it's because people are depressed or empty or greedy for validation of a declining sexual market value or whatever.
Or simply wildly dissociated because their brains are steeped in endless destructive vats of alcohol.
Right. You deserved attention.
The sun and the sky put on this amazing show for us every single day.
I mean, I sometimes, honestly, it's ridiculous, but I stand there under a big sky looking at these clouds thinking, if there was like a galaxy-wide tourist agency...
Earth would be one of the top destinations.
I mean, come on, we've got a sun and a moon that's about the same size, based on the relative distance.
There's eclipses. We've got a moon.
You can see the credits. We've got clouds, rainbows, crazy shit going on in the sky all the time.
Amazing stuff. Lightning storms, thunder.
It rains frogs, for God's sakes.
You know, this is an insane planet we live on.
It's beautiful. It's extraordinary.
It's fantastic. There are salamanders that knit their baby eggs into leaves underwater.
There are spiders that live in bubbles under the lakes.
I mean, it's an insane place to live.
There is no end of wonders and glories and shocks and surprises and beauty in this world.
We live in a culture where people spend their entire lives trying to find out where the hell monarch butterflies go in the winter.
We live in a glorious thunderdome of gorgeous stimulation.
I mean, you've got the crazy-ass drunk drivers of butterflies careening all over the place, yet strangely getting places.
You know, there's a kind of bee.
They have a hive and they have a guardian bee out front.
And that guardian bee can tell how closely genetically related every bee is who tries to get into the hive.
And if you're really closely related, he lets you right in.
If you're not that closely related, he pushes you back a little bit but may let you in.
They've got 14 different degrees of genetic relatedness that this tiny pea-brained little bee can differentiate and let you in based or not.
If you're 14, he just doesn't let you in.
A bee can figure out how genetically related it is to 14 different degrees of separation to another bee.
Are you kidding me? We are number one on the intergalactic planet of amazing places to visit.
And the sun puts on this incredible show every single night.
Oh, look at this painting I've made!
No human being can paint like I paint with my mighty muscles of fire!
And people are like, eh?
They'd rather check Twitter.
Yeah. Yeah.
Oh, yeah. No, listen.
I mean, the number of times where I'm at a play center courting certain death by touching surface.
It's bubonic plague now, probably.
And the number of times I've seen the kids, they go down the monkey bars and they do it for the first time and they're calling for their parents to watch.
Face deep in some phone, looking at some stupid crap.
I guarantee it's stupid crap.
And it's like, you just missed a milestone for your child.
But it's okay, because you found out what your second cousin's roommate from college had for breakfast.
Yeah, that's true.
There's phones now. They have a setting for photographing food.
Oh, yeah. Are you kidding me?
Important. Important functions.
That's what we've done with our technology.
I found a way to make pasta look better.
How about you be a better cook?
No! No, I am not going to use face cream.
I'm just going to use the beauty setting on my selfie.
Anyway, people miss amazing stuff all the time.
They miss amazing stuff all the time.
And I'm sorry, Tanya. I'm really, really sorry that you were missed.
You deserve to have an entire clan at your graduation.
You deserve to have them cheer.
All the bees that are related to me.
Yeah. The 14 degrees of separation.
And I am sorry that you were ignored.
But you were ignored, not because you were boring, but because people were empty, you know?
Mm-hmm. I once heard something in therapy.
I was told something in therapy about a relationship I had.
My therapist said, this person is terrified of your depth.
You understand it is your capacity for self-reflection, for self-criticism.
It is your interest in yourself, your interest in the world, your depth, your intelligence, your curiosity, Tanya, that drives the empty people away.
You were not ignored for your faults.
You were not ignored for your vices or your emptiness.
You were ignored, I believe, because of your depth.
You were ignored because of your richness, because of your capacity, because of your intelligence, because of your insight, because You were ignored in the same way that someone looks away from a searchlight that gets suddenly pointed in their face.
And they run in the opposite direction and their eyes hurt.
You were ignored because you were too bright.
And it was painful, I think, for those around you.
And it was horrible and it was unjust.
And of course, they would like you to continue thinking at some level that you were uninteresting.
Because that way they don't have to confront why they ignored you and what that means about them.
You know, I mean, my parents never...
Somehow the dishonesty, I don't know, maybe it feels like if they were just honest and said they weren't interested, maybe that would be better than...
No, no, you're not.
No, no, you're not understanding what I'm saying.
Tanya, Tanya, Tanya, Tanya.
No, no, no, no, no.
Listen, listen, listen. Please, please.
I'm begging you. I'd get on my knees if I could still reach the mic.
If they had the capacity for that kind of honesty, they would never have ignored you.
That's my point. Oh.
That's my point. Do you understand?
Okay, yeah. If they were that honest and direct...
They never would have left your side.
They never would have ignored you.
Your mother would not have found a sleazy dive bar and a bottle of cheap beer more interesting than her own daughter.
It was avoiding the truth.
It was avoiding connection.
That's what it was all about. If they could be honest and connect with you in that way, they would never be tempted by beer.
That's true. That's my point.
You're still trying to find some honorable way that they could have ignored you.
I just, I always try and make logical sense of what people do, and it took me years, but I finally realized a lot of people don't...
No, no! You're not making logical sense!
You're making excuses! No, yeah.
No, I'm saying, in general, I try and make logical sense of what people do, but it took me years to realize a lot of people don't use logic at all, and they don't make any sense.
And so you shouldn't even try and wrap your head around it half the time.
No, no, no, no, no, no.
So now you're sliding from insight to nihilism.
And again, no, I can tell when your parents are coming in the room.
I can tell when your parents are coming in the room because I'm saying there was causality and there was logic and reason behind what they did.
Oh. Right?
So I'm saying your depth drove your parents away because otherwise they'd have to confront their own emptiness.
And then you're saying, well, there's no reason behind any of this.
I'm saying that I think that is the reason.
I think. I don't know. I think.
Right. I'm sorry. I didn't mean to...
Sorry. Yeah. I don't think that's what I meant to imply.
No, that's what you directly said.
You said, well, I try to make sense of people's behavior, and it turns out it's completely random.
Now, I could be wrong about my hypothesis.
And you could say, well, it doesn't fit the evidence because of this, this, and this, in which case, of course, I'm an empiricist.
I'll abandon it completely. But if I say, here's the causality, I know I'm right when people avoid it.
Because I'm saying, here's the causality behind why you were ignored.
And then you say, well, people are just so random.
I can't figure out any reason why what they do.
Well, it's not that they're random.
It's that they don't follow...
Like, the logic would be, like, it's your child, so you should care.
But that's not a logical...
No, no, no. Tanya, Tanya, everybody makes sense if you understand their premises.
Everybody makes sense if you understand where they're coming from.
It doesn't mean that they're right.
It doesn't mean that they're good. Certainly doesn't mean that they're good.
But people aren't random.
That's true.
Everybody makes sense.
Well, I guess it's not random.
Maybe my definition of logic is not correct.
No, you want them to be good.
You want them to have good reasons.
Okay, when I say logical, I mean, like, you know, makes sense in that, like, they're moral and...
You mean true premises.
You mean... Yeah. Right?
You mean valid reasoning. You mean sound conclusions.
You know, the sort of thing, the sort of stuff that you talk about.
Right, right. Well...
Social justice warriors themselves make sense if you understand where they're coming from.
Right. Communists make sense if you understand where they're coming from.
You know, this gene wars thing, the R versus K. It all makes sense if you understand where people are coming from.
Nothing human is alien, to me, as the saying goes.
It makes sense.
But you have to cast aside your ego when you are trying to figure out why people do what they do.
And you certainly, sadly, have to cast aside your belief that people have good reasons for what they do.
Hitler had reasons for what he did.
Doesn't mean they're good reasons.
Right. So if you say, I want, and this is why it's so tough with parents, because we want our parents to have good reasons for what they did.
Mm-hmm. Because if our parents, certainly when we're children, it's too terrifying to look into the abyss of parental misbehavior and say, these people have no good reasons for what they're doing.
They're out of control. They have bad motives, bad intentions, no self-knowledge, their avoidance, their whatever, right?
Because it's like, oh, well, hey, guess who's in charge of you for the next 15 years?
Enjoy your perspective, kid.
Can't do it. Can't do it.
Too terrifying. We have to say, okay...
My mom's ignoring me.
Why? It can't be because she's messed up and empty and an alcoholic and an addict and has no capacity to connect with me at any fundamental human level.
That's too terrifying. So what you say is, well, I'm boring.
She's making perfectly sensible decisions because I'm just not interesting.
Right. I'm annoying.
I'm frustrating. I have bad attitude.
Whatever. We have to give them a good reason for their bad behavior.
Right. Otherwise, you're not getting out of bed tomorrow, kid.
Of course. You know, the other thing I wanted to ask was how do you stop being bitter and resentful because of all of this and because of basically everything that has happened to you and then you just see the world and you think, wow, a lot of people suck.
Well, that's true, but there's an equal number of people who blow as well.
So, hopefully that balances out in some manner.
I think that's a great question.
I've been mulling that one over.
You know, I've been thinking a lot about some of the stuff that the good Reverend Jesse Lee Peterson has talked about in terms of forgiveness.
And I've been... Melting my brain, mulling that stuff over.
And so I won't answer that now, but I'm telling you I'm going to do a podcast over the next week when I get the emotional courage to do so.
And I will put that out.
So hopefully that will help.
But I don't want to do the whole thing right now.
Right. Criticize others justly and you'll stop criticizing yourself unjustly.
That's my only advice, if that helps.
What if you're a fantastically greater than anything you ever thought of?
That makes other people who mistreated you even worse, but what if you are?
Well, it's funny because I actually, I feel like I have a pretty good ego slash self-esteem, but then it's like it flip-flops between, oh, I feel awful about myself.
What if I did something wrong and then I'm the best, everyone else sucks.
It goes back and forth.
I don't know why. I can tell you why.
Because you're flipping between your child self and your inner parental alter ego.
Because your parents don't seem to have internalized a lot of self-criticism, right?
No. Right? So there may be some grandiosity in there.
If your parents haven't internalized a lot of self-criticism, then you have to end up carrying the burdens.
You know, whatever people in the family, whatever other people don't carry, you carry.
There's a weight in every family.
Some families, it's a big, heavy, soul-crushing weight.
In others, it's lighter. There's a burden in every family.
And the damn parents should take that burden because they're responsible for the family.
And if there's a heavy burden in your family, we've got abuse, we've got addiction, we've got suicidality, we've got maybe promiscuity, we've got like terrible stuff, heavy burden in your family.
And if your parents are shrugging it off and saying, well, you know, stuff happened, we did the best we could, I'm sorry about this, but hey, boom, it all slides down the generational decline to you.
You got to push it back.
Yeah. They were in charge.
You were the kid. You were responsible for nothing.
They're responsible for everything.
Now, you're an adult. You get that burden of responsibility.
But to be fair, to be honest, to have integrity.
Integrity, you know, it's funny because integrity, it's always considered to be an internal state.
Well, I have to have integrity, right?
I'm into free speech, so I've got to talk about this person and that person and the other person and this situation, that person.
It's all integrity. No, no, no.
My integrity... Is internal and external.
My integrity is not just how I act.
My integrity is how I expect others to act as well.
Integrity is just considered to be this monkish-like self-lacerating bullshit.
You've got to flagellate yourself, hit yourself.
Integrity is something that is this big giant button that people use to try and control you.
Well, you said you had this value, so you have to do this.
Fuck you. Don't try and control me through my virtues.
I will decide, thank you very much, what I will focus on and when and how.
So your integrity is to be honest with your parents' virtues and vices.
Integrity is to the truth.
It's to virtue. And it means judging.
And judging others. If you judge yourself too harshly, Tanya, it's because you're judging other people far too leniently.
And therefore you carry a burden that should be theirs.
That makes sense.
And you know I wasn't swearing at you, right?
Just so you know.
You know I wasn't swearing at you, right?
You swore? Did you just hear a beep?
How sensitive are you?
Beep, beep, beep, beep, beep. I did.
But not at you. It must have missed it.
Nothing to do with you. Just in the vicinity, but not at you.
All right. Oh, no. I understand.
I understand. Good. Just, you know, since you had a history of being verbally abused, I just didn't want you to think in any way, shape, or form.
Anyway. Oh, no. I'm triggered.
Oh, no. Nick gets a puppy video in a hug room.
It's a grass. I got to go to BuzzFeed and tell everyone.
Oh. All right.
Well, listen, I got to move on to the next caller.
But was this helpful?
Was this of use?
Yeah. Yeah.
It opens new avenues for thinking about the whole situation.
So I really appreciate it.
All right. Well, I appreciate that, too.
And I wish you the very best.
Keep us posted, all right? Okay.
Thank you. Thanks, Anya. Great pleasure.
Bye. Alright, up next we have Brandon.
Brandon wrote in and said, I wholeheartedly agree with your arguments on the necessity of a stay-at-home parent for children.
I would only feel at ease if I stayed at home with my children.
This attitude is curtailing my career and romantic ambitions, as I cannot imagine earning resources away from my future children.
How can I reluctantly accept the utility of a wife as a caregiver of my children and allow myself to unlock my male ambition as a provider?
And that's from Brandon.
Well, thank you and Michael so much for making the time tonight.
Oh, it's my pleasure.
It's what I do.
So, are you on the verge?
Do you have an ever-expanding belly and odd dietary requirements in the household at the moment?
No, actually, I'm still at my mother's household.
Right. She's not pregnant, is she?
No, she just got married for the third time.
Ah. Well, we'll get to that maybe.
All right. So, I cannot imagine earning resources away from my future children.
How can I reluctantly accept the utility of a wife as a caregiver of my children and allow myself to unlock my male ambition as a provider?
Interesting. All right, let's start with your template.
How did your parents organize this stuff?
Well, my mother, she has a home daycare since I was born.
And all my life, I've seen her mistreat the children that she watches.
Now, I'm not saying she abuses the children, but you like to use analogies.
If I go on a date and I mistreat my date, I just insult her.
I'm not making it enjoyable for her.
I'm not necessarily abusing her, but I've certainly not provided her the care and affection a partner or, in this case, a child deserves.
So we have, interesting, normally the criticism and the defense of the mother is just slightly further apart, but you've really compressed them down.
So tell me what she did that you would consider to be mistreatment.
Well, it's what she still does every day.
You know, like you said with the first caller, there's something uplifting about a household of children, but most days I wake up and it's just a household.
No, no, your children, not, you know, not a bunch of kids from the neighborhood.
Okay, well, you understand that. For me, it's just a house full of crying children, and it's very traumatic.
Right. So you are studiously not answering my question.
What did she do that you would call mistreating?
She mostly just verbally abuses the children.
So she verbally abuses them, but it's not abuse.
Legally, I don't feel that there's much I can do about it.
No, no, that's nobody asked you about the law.
So abuse is not illegal.
Not all abuse, right? Exactly.
Okay, so she does abuse the children.
It's just not criminal abuse.
In my opinion, yes.
That's exactly. Well, give me an example of what she says to the children, so we can find out if it's your opinion or not.
She'll just say, I don't want to hear you anymore.
Stop. Don't cry or I'll give you a reason to cry.
She frequently hits the children with spanking or she'll smack their hands.
The parents are complicit in this and some encourage it.
Well, is that legal?
Yes. Really?
I didn't know that daycare workers could hit children.
It certainly wasn't legal when I was a daycare worker.
Or where I was.
All right. So she hits the kids and she threatens the children.
Does she call them names?
No. All right.
She won't mock them, though.
Oh, she doesn't call them dumb or stupid or idiots or whatever, right?
Oh, she will insult them frequently, especially while she's teaching them on many occasions.
And what will she say to them that's insulting?
Her and my aunt, my aunt also picks up on this, because my aunt also participates.
But they'll just be very impatient with the children, and I don't think they teach them anything that's particularly relevant, but they'll say that they're purposely acting stupid and they don't want to learn this, or they're not paying attention, or they don't care, or my mother will frequently mock children that start to cry.
Mock them how? She'll, like, contort her face to mimic the crying.
That kind of thing, right?
Yeah, or she'll take photos of the crying children and send it to the parents.
She takes photos of the crying children and sends them to the parents.
And, of course, the parents are like, yeah, good job.
Yeah, it's disgusting.
And this is what we call daycare sometimes, right?
There is something that's important for people to understand.
That genetics matter when it comes to parenting.
So children who are dissimilar to a parent are actually more at risk for abuse.
This is one of the reasons why a disproportionate number of battered babies are stepchildren.
Because they're not your blood.
They're not your genes.
You don't care genetically about them.
In fact, they kind of interfere with your genes, right?
We all know this, that when one male lion takes over another pride, what does he do?
He kills all the kids. Kills all the cubs.
Because they're actually interfering with it, right?
If you've got some woman and she's got a baby and you want to have babies, then her baby's taking away resources from your baby.
So children are over 30 times more likely to be abused by an unrelated adult than two biological parents, like some boyfriend or stepdad or whatever, right?
Even adoptions.
Adoptions are more likely to be successful when the parents perceive or believe that the child is similar to them.
There are examples that if If a husband believes that his wife has been unfaithful, he actually pours more resources into his sister's children than into his wife's children, because his sister's children are related to him, whereas his wife's children are not if she's been unfaithful.
And the studies have shown, countlessly, that people are more likely to help members of their own race Rather than members of other races, people are more likely to help members of their own country rather than foreigners and so on.
This is why this whole multiculturalism thing just flies in the face of science and anthropology and history and genetics and evolution and everything that you could imagine.
And so, when you put your kids into daycare, You're putting them foundationally at risk biologically, genetically, because we're just not evolved to care for strangers' children the way that we care for our own.
We're just not evolved that way.
This is not how evolution works.
Evolution works with genetic similarity preferences.
Can't work any other way.
So it's appalling and it's shocking and it sounds a little bit worse than average.
But it's not surprising from an evolutionary standpoint, if that makes sense.
No, I follow genetics very closely.
Speaking of the genetics of parenting, could I give you a short backstory just on my mother?
Because I think it's very illuminating on her behavior and my aunt's behavior.
Sure. My grandfather, my mother and my aunt's father, he is very abusive toward my mother and my aunt.
He also abused animals.
I've heard from them that He would put cats, I assume my grandmother's cats, my grandmother had a lot of cats, into garbage bags to have them fight each other.
And also he would tie a cat's tail to a ceiling fan, at least on one occasion.
When my mother got pregnant at 16, toward an abusive man, this is very important.
My grandfather, he beat her with a switch.
I don't know if you're quite familiar with what that is.
It's a tree branch, isn't it?
Yes. Yeah. Right.
So, some fairly primitive family structures going on, to put it mildly, right?
Yes, and they never criticized my grandfather, my mother, and my aunt.
It's hard to criticize what you've become, right?
Yes. So is it fair to say, Brandon, that you don't have a huge amount of trust for women with children?
Exactly. So you would only feel at ease if you stay at home with your kids?
I've never even had sex with a woman, at least not intercourse.
My mother got pregnant at 16 to a bad partner, and that hurt her market value, which led to her having my dad, who wasn't a good father either.
And I just won't do that to my future kids.
How do you feel, Brandon, about your ability to choose a woman who's going to be a good mom that you could trust with your kids?
I've met good women, and I pursued them, and they've been a great part of my life.
But I don't trust anyone but myself to raise my kids.
Well, no, but if you trust yourself, then you would trust yourself to choose a good mom for your children.
You can't say, only trust myself, but I don't trust my judgment about who to have kids with.
Then you don't trust yourself, right?
I trust my judgment that I won't let anyone watch my kids that won't be myself.
I don't know if you're not following what I'm saying, but I'm making an argument here.
You can disagree with me, but I don't want you to pretend like I didn't make it.
I'm saying that if you trust yourself, then you would trust your judgment to have a good mom for your kids.
No, I understand that. Okay, so you can say, well, I don't trust my judgment to have a good mom for my kids.
That's fine. But that's different from saying, well, I totally trust myself, but not others.
Well, if you want to have kids, it requires others.
And if you can't trust them, that means you can't fully trust yourself because you're going to have to make that choice, right?
I would feel more comfortable if I stayed at home because my partner would Bring in resources, or at least if I could stay at home, bring in resources as well.
You can't really mess up a paycheck as much, right, when it comes to hurting developing children.
Well, of course, if you mess up at your job, you get fired.
If you mess up with children, they suffer, right?
Of course. Well, listen, I mean, other than breastfeeding and a few other things, I think that a stay-at-home dad can be a perfectly great provider of care for a baby.
I mean, I'm a stay-at-home dad, so I'm not going to put myself in a category of deficiency with regards to that.
So, you can stay home with your kids if you want.
If you want, and then there are men who do that, and there are women who go out and work, and they do a great job of earning resources, and so on.
There is a challenge, of course, depending on how far you go in the hypergamy theories, or the trading-up theories, which is that it can be challenging for some women to respect a man who takes on a traditionally female role, if she's out there being the hunter-gatherer and your home being the caregiver.
You'd have to choose very wisely regarding a woman who would respect that rather than view that as you had become her wife, so to speak, and therefore sexual attraction may diminish, which may open you up to risk of monkey branching and upgrading outside the marriage.
I know it's a big problem, certainly with something like you said, breastfeeding and also just pregnancy with working.
That's kind of the problem is that in my future scenario where children cannot be hurt because I'm in charge of them, I'm kind of just LARPing as a housewife.
Well, no. I mean, you can be a housewife without being a mom, right?
So it's not a housewife.
You're a parent. You're a stay-at-home parent.
And look, there are... Listen, throughout history, men have raised babies.
We know that because women died in childbirth.
So particularly if it was like you only get one marriage, so to speak, or, you know, if you...
If your wife died in childbirth, as some women did, then you would end up raising the babies, right?
So men have more experience raising babies.
Well, I guess the women have with regards to war, right?
Men get drafted and so on, but throughout history, both genders have the ability to raise babies without a partner.
It's not ideal, but it can certainly be done.
So you have skills for raising babies, just as a wife does.
Again, you don't have the...
Feeding apparatus and there may be some other things in terms of hormonal bonding that may not be quite as strong, but I have no doubt that you could do a great job raising the children.
But I guess my question would be, Brandon, is that, is it not sort of surrendering your future freedoms to your mother's abuses?
If you say, well, because of my mom, I have to stay home.
With my kids. Isn't that, in a sense, letting her determine your future?
I'm not sure that we want to give bad people that kind of power over our choices.
I think she's already done that.
I know she has.
My question is, should she? No.
Right. And I guess that's your question as to, well, then how can I end up being a male provider and have a wife be a caregiver, right?
I want to have the best situation for the children.
Right. And me staying at home technically isn't that.
Well, no, it could be.
It could be. I don't know. It could be.
Again, if your wife is making, I don't know, huge amounts of money and is really ambitious and wants to go and do that, then, you know, she can...
You know, there's new studies out that are very strong and causal about...
For each extra year of breastfeeding, you get a couple of extra IQ points.
So, you know, I mean, whether she could pump breast milk and you could provide it in some manner or whatever, that is more of a technical thing to work out.
But no, you could do it.
You could do it. But if you have the choice, if it's 50-50, like if you both earn the same amount of money, then it makes more sense for your wife to be home just because breastfeeding is...
And breastfeeding isn't just the milk.
It's the eye contact.
It's the tactile contact.
It's the whole cuddling and the cooing and all that kind of stuff.
It's a whole thing.
Exactly. So I'd be depriving my children of that.
So the first thing that I would do if I were in your situation...
The first thing that I would do is I would tell the story of my mother's daycare to a woman I was interested in, and I would gauge her reaction.
If she's horrified, that's a good sign, right?
If she's like, yeah, that's exactly how I want to raise my kids, then you have different information to work with, right?
A lot of women I talk to, they don't even want kids.
Well, that's kind of a deal breaker then, isn't it?
It is. You can, of course, woo women into having kids.
You know, let me tell you a very strange story about this.
Before you do that, I'm hurting my market value as a man, though, because I'm not going out and getting the resources now.
It's crazy. When I plan for the future, well, I can't have any college debt because why would I do that if I'm going to stay at home?
But aren't you wanting to unlock your potential as a provider?
Not right now. No.
But when? That's what's holding me back.
Oh, yeah. Well, look, if I could guarantee you, Brandon, that you would choose a great mom for your kids who would never in a million years do anything close to what your mom did, I suppose, I guess I just think about the...
The window to it. I know women have more of a tight deadline in terms of fertility.
No, no, no. You're not answering my question.
Sorry, sorry, sorry. No, you're pulling focus here.
If I could guarantee you that you could marry a great mom for your kids, would you feel like you could go out into the workforce and unlock, as you say, your male ambition as a provider?
If you knew for sure that it was a great mom who was staying home, taking care of your kids.
Practically, I don't think I'd be able to get the resources.
I'm autistic and I'm very self-conscious of that.
Why, if you're autistic, does that mean you can't make any money?
I mean, I know some autistic people who make a fortune.
I definitely think it hurts my value in the free market.
Why? It hampers my social skills.
Which are very important to business and even non-business careers.
Well, not all careers.
I mean, if you are a financial analyst, you don't need to deal with people that much.
If you are creating exotic debt instruments or investment instruments on Wall Street, you don't...
If you're some genius computer programmer, I mean, there's lots of different things that you can do.
I was reading about one woman...
Who was autistic, she ended up designing abattoirs, if I remember rightly, and she had to create a hug machine for her office to keep her focused and centered.
So I don't necessarily accept, although again, please understand I'm no expert, but I don't necessarily accept that it means that you're going to necessarily end up earning less money.
It may, in fact, open you up to other ways of making money that could be even more lucrative.
I've been thinking about that, and I'm sure you know, most autistic people, they kind of have a niche where they kind of get addicted to it.
It kind of becomes their craft. I know I had one friend that he was addicted to, I think it was a vending machine.
It was like vending machines or something antique that would never make any money in the free market.
But I always liked kind of history and politics.
I suppose I could do a It could be, yeah.
Or you could write books, or you could do any number of things to pursue your knowledge.
There is a great hunger and thirst.
For honest knowledge in the world.
You know, we're dying from sophistry and if you can throw down the ropes to suck people out of the jello of false language, they will grab at it and cheer as you pull.
So I think there's some real options as far as that goes.
How are you with regards, you know, again, I don't know much about autism, but how are you, Brandon, with regards to other people having negative views of you or hostile views towards you?
Sorry, negative views?
Yeah, about you or whatever. Let's say you speak unpalatable truths and some people don't like it.
Or you. If you're talking about the unpalatable truths, I mentioned to Michael that I just recently started therapy and my therapist was a woman and I thought that would be Helpful, but actually she wasn't very helpful at all because she refused to be critical of my mother at all.
Oh, yeah. Well, that's not helpful.
With the in-group preference.
Right. In terms of how people have negative views of me, sometimes it really bothers me and it makes me very depressed.
I know objectively it shouldn't because I can't please everyone and such, but that's another problem I have with...
My mother, she had me after 30, and I think that's very selfish of her, because her eggs just wouldn't have been the highest quality.
I think about that a lot, just providing the best situation biologically for children.
Right. And my mother didn't do that.
Yeah, I don't know.
I mean, I know the risk does go up.
I don't know how much it goes up after 30.
I think after 40, it's higher for sure.
And... And the thing is, too, it's important to remember with other people's disagreements with us or disapproval of us, the reason why it matters when we say, well, rationally it shouldn't, is that, again, we grew up in these little tribes.
And if somebody hated us, we had a real problem.
Because, you know, they'd come into our hut or our tent or our teepee and hit us on the head with a rock while we slept.
If somebody had a visceral hatred for us, When we were in these small tribal situations or environments, I mean, it was showdown time, particularly in these brutal cultures, right?
I mean, it was kill or be killed sometimes.
So the fact that we have this fight or flight mechanism when it comes to extreme hostility makes perfect sense from an evolutionary standpoint.
However, Our amygdala, like the fight or flight part of us, has not evolved to the point where, you know, somebody typing something mean about us in Facebook from the other side of the world.
Our amygdala thinks that that guy's three tenths over and is plotting our death.
You know what I mean? Like, so the fact that, you know, people's negative views, it's not just like, oh, I'm insecure.
Our amygdala, you know, like our brain doesn't have much luck.
It's differentiating reality from fantasy.
This is why pornography works for people who want to masturbate, because the brain is like, hey, sex!
Sure, there's some visuals.
If sex is going on, I want some, because, you know...
And so... And, you know, our brain doesn't notice that our monitor never gets pregnant and our keyboard never has twins or whatever, right?
So we're not very good at differentiating fact from fantasy, which is why people scream in the It movie, right?
Or, you know, misery.
So... When we see significant hostility right there in front of us, because it's on the screen or whatever in the mailbox, our brains don't know that it's not imminent, proximate danger.
Our deep brains, our lizard brains are like, danger, danger, danger, danger.
Like, you know, if you're hungry and you see your favorite food on a TV commercial, you'll start to salivate.
Because your brain doesn't know you can't eat the TV, right?
Oh, visual stimuli!
Because our brains are not developed for anything virtual.
Our brains are not developed for anything virtual.
So I just sort of wanted to point out that if you say, well, you know, it shouldn't bother me when people dislike me, it's like, well, it damn well should.
Throughout most of human evolution, it really mattered if people hated you, because you better stop preparing for a battle sometimes to the death, because there'd be duels, there'd be attacks, there'd be whatever, right?
No, no, and I understand that that's actually a problem with my mother.
I know you said in previous podcasts that Criticism is a sign of respect, right?
If you're in a relationship and you criticize, then it means that you trust the person, that you think they'll listen, that they'll...
Oh yeah, this is why it's so frustrating.
White males get criticized and then are put down.
It's like, well, the only reason white males are criticized is because people don't think they're going to go nuts and try and kill them for criticizing them or go crazy.
Sorry, go ahead. See, I don't respect my mother because she won't accept any criticism.
She surrounds herself with people that...
Aren't critical of her.
Her new husband's a beta cuck.
And of course, the children don't criticize her.
She just hits them or verbally abuses them.
And when I've criticized her, I just had an argument with her a few months back.
She just threatens to kick me out and I don't really have the resources to provide for myself right now.
Wow. I am sorry about that, man.
That is harsh.
That is harsh. I mean, she's really hitting you where it hurts, right?
Because you don't have the resources, so she's basically talking about tossing you out on the street.
Well, I can't even help the children because I can't tell the parents what's going on because I'm dependent on my mother for resources.
Right. Well, as you say, a lot of the parents agree, right?
Sure, but I have to think that some of them don't know what's going on.
Right. And of course, if they found out, she would immediately, I assume, suspect you, and then...
Of course, because I'm the only other person here besides her aunt, or my aunt, which of course does the same behavior.
I'll give you another clue as to whether or not you're going to find a good mom for your kids, Brandon, which is, how does the woman react to your mom?
I usually don't get that far in relationships just because I don't want to have sex with anybody.
No, no, no. I understand that.
But I'm just saying, at some point, if you want kids, this is going to have to be how it goes until the giant pulsating replicant artificial womb is recreated to give you an infinite array of screaming Donald Sutherlands or something.
Then you're going to have to deal with a woman and sex or something like that.
So if you are...
Dating a woman and you tell her about your mom, you introduce her to your mom and she's like, your mom's great!
Well, that's pretty clear, right?
I would never want my mother to meet my future wife.
I would certainly never let my mother meet my children.
Right. Well, I can understand that perspective for sure.
I don't really want to meet any women until I'm out of this situation.
I have the resources for it.
And of course, my market value will go up once my resources go up.
Well, and certainly once your independence goes up as well.
Yeah. Yeah, it took me quite a long time to realize just how much of a millstone around my sexual market value my mom was.
Hey, would you like to meet your future mother-in-law?
Sorry, I need to get out of orbit.
Something has to be jettisoned.
So... So yeah, I mean, how...
But even, I mean, at some point she's going to ask you about your mom, and if you tell her honestly about your history with your mom, and if she understands where you're coming from, that's a very good sign.
Of course. So I think those things are definitely available, because if you can trust yourself to choose a good mom for your kids, then you can unlock your potential, your male ambition and potential as a provider, because... You can be certain that what's going on at home is worth funding.
Does that make sense? Yeah, I just have a lot of insecurity with that, as you can imagine.
Sure. Because either all the parents of the daycare children know about this and are complicit in it, or worse, they drop their children off and they just don't know.
They just don't know how their kids are being treated.
And I'm terrified of that.
Well, can you imagine? Let me just give you a scenario here, Brendan.
Can you imagine if somebody put a movie out about a daycare teacher or a daycare provider who was abusive?
Can you imagine how working women would react to such a movie?
They would attack the message and not the reality.
Of course. Yeah, of course.
Just a suggestion of it because, of course, women cannot be matriarchs or corrupted by power or hurt children because they're, you know, perfect caregivers.
Yeah. Yeah, and also it would go against a very important social narrative that I was talking about earlier in the show, which is women better stop having kids and get out and work.
Because that way they're paying taxes and their children aren't consuming government services and all the taxes are going to be necessary to keep the baby boomers in their retirement diapers and pensions, right?
Yeah, yeah. And that's the other thing.
I know you've talked about it in a few other of your podcasts.
All these women that are in their prime fertility years, they go to college and not only is it taking up time, it's taking up money.
So good men don't want to settle down with them because they have debt.
Oh yeah, no, it's a way of destroying the sexual market value of high IQ women is to lock them into debt and make them undateable from any man who can count.
So I was going to tell you a little story earlier.
Let me tell you a story about fertility.
So in the Weimar Republic, 1920s Germany, birth rates were down.
And when the Nazis got into power, I think it was Hermann Göring, or whoever was in charge of the propaganda arm.
Göring, I think, ended up in charge of the Luftwaffe, but the propaganda ministry went into full swing.
And what they did in Nazi Germany was they said, okay, we're going to show lots of images of happy women with happy babies.
And they put these in front of movies.
They put them in movies.
They put them everywhere they could.
Happy moms with happy babies and happy families.
And do you know what happened to the birthright?
Went up. Through the roof.
It went up through the roof.
Isn't that sad? Yes.
That all women need is a bunch of pro-baby propaganda and they'll just start cranking them out.
And conversely, of course, all you need is a whole bunch of anti-baby propaganda and they'll stop cranking them out.
I mean, it's so strange to me.
Like, where is our fundamental genetic drive for life or reproduction?
It's just weird to me. That's another problem that I have with women.
I hear all about this maternal bond all the time, but I see all these women that just drop their kids off at Daycare and my mother's daycare of all daycares and they put their kids in government schools and they don't stay at home with them.
They don't care for them. They don't have anyone that stays at home with them and they just drop them off with a stranger that can apparently take care of the kids just as well as they can.
It's very insulting not only to the kids but to them that just some any worker can replace you as a parent.
Tell you a funny story as well.
So years ago, I went to Stratford, the Stratford Festival in Canada to watch some Shakespeare.
And ahead of me, this is one of these weird things, you couldn't design it better to illustrate a point.
So ahead of me, I was listening to these two women who were talking about how great their daycare providers were.
Oh, it's a wonderful daycare.
It's so stimulating.
They play Mozart, and they've got all these wonderful colored toys, and the teachers there are just fantastic.
And, you know, I mean, the kids are thrilled and blah, blah, blah, right?
And they had come there to see, I can't remember if it was Brian Bedford or something.
They had come there to see some star.
And then Anasha came by and handed out notes, and the notes were, you know, tonight the part of Shylock will not be played by Brian Bedford.
It will be played by Joe Schmoe, who they didn't know, right?
And these women were outraged at the substitution.
Do you see the irony?
Yes. Well, wait a minute.
Surely the actors, like the moms and the caregivers, are completely interchangeable.
Oh, these women being paid minimum wage, they're totally fine to take care of my kids.
They're wonderful. They're just as good as me as a parent.
Completely interchangeable.
Wait a minute. The star I came to see is not doing the play?
Appalling! No substitutions are possible or allowed.
Oh my god. And they didn't have a clue.
The propaganda, at least in my community, runs very deep.
It's surrounded by all liberal colleges.
I was actually going to a liberal college to be a teacher.
I had a full-ride scholarship and everything.
And I got into the middle of my student teaching, which is about my third year, and it all went well.
I got great marks on it.
Then I had a professor that just asked for a small exit slip.
Probably wasn't even going to be graded. I could have walked out of the room.
Nothing when it came of it. And I just wrote that I didn't want to teach in a low-income school because it doesn't have as many resources for the kids or the teachers.
And I ended up having this Kafka-esque disposition assessment where they just wrote a bunch of adjectives.
I'm trying to think of one.
It was a pejorative, which just means negative, attitude toward low-income schools.
And that was discriminatory.
And I was pretty much kicked out of the program.
Jesus! It was all just adjectives.
I had a full-ride scholarship.
I could have went for anything. I just really wanted to be a teacher.
This was before I was so red-pilled.
And I thought it was pretty uncontroversial, both for left and right politically, that low-income schools are bad and they need more resources.
Now, whether that's tax money or, as I would prefer, private schools, I think we can all agree that they need to be better, but apparently not.
Well, of course, you said what most teachers do.
Most teachers, like, claw to get out of low-income schools, right?
I mean, you can't pay kids, you can't pay some teachers enough to go to those low-income classes.
Sorry, go ahead. Yeah, I had a big, like, you know, they called me in for a staff meeting, which, you know, which ended up just being an interrogation, pretty much, and it was like one of those Stalin's trials, a show trial.
But, um... I had that, and it was just a bunch of adjectives.
And I told them, like, you know, well, there's a high turnover rate here.
I know I was offered scholarships to teach in low-income schools.
They're not offering scholarships to teach in places that are already full, right?
It's an incentive to fill what's unwanted, just as if you have a job that's not filled, you might have to offer a higher wage to get that job filled.
What was the gender distribution of the people judging you?
Women. Right.
And I was just called a bunch of adjectives, like uninformed, which was, like you say, not an argument.
Elitist. I contacted that group, Fire.
I know you had one guy that mentioned them in a podcast a few months back.
I contacted them all the way back in March, and I got a case number, but nothing else from them.
Hmm. Even after I sent them documentation.
So, academically, I'm kind of in limbo and that doesn't help the resources either.
I'm really sorry about that, Brendan.
I mean, that's a terrible experience to go through.
You know, there's a very visceral education that comes out of being honest in the world.
And it's hard to unsee how the world reacts to basic honesty and facts.
Oh no, you said something that is true and which we all act on, but you verbalized it.
Attack, attack, attack. Horrible.
So, yeah, I mean, I'm very sympathetic for your situation.
The only thing I can say is that if this is the way the teaching was going to go, probably better sooner than later, if that makes sense.
Sure, and at least I'm not in any debt for it.
I'd like to get it resolved so I could at least go to another university in the future if I ended up wanting to pursue more resources.
Sorry to interrupt, but you sort of kicked out with prejudice and it's sort of black mark on your...
Well, it was going to be like a show trial thing, again, very Stalin-esque, so they didn't kick me out, but I was going to have to do this.
I was going to have to meet back with them, and I was going to have to kiss the ring, and I was going to have to write all these extra papers in addition to my assignments already about what I did was wrong and how I was going to change it.
And I just ended up leaving, but of course I had to finish up the semester, so I just didn't bother attending classes, so they all showed up as Fs.
Yeah, I mean, that is very Stalin-esque, right?
That is very...
Sure, because they wouldn't let me attend one of the classes anyway, so I couldn't have done anything about it.
Right. And all because you said you didn't want to teach in a low-income school because they didn't have enough resources.
Yeah, and the funniest part was that I did my student teaching in a low-income school, and I had just gotten the great marks on it.
So I had no prejudice, as I had shown.
Right. No, of course not.
I mean, well, it's just another way of keeping men out of school, right?
If you'd have been a woman, it seems unlikely.
It seems to me hard to believe you'd have been treated the same way, unless you were a conservative woman, in which case it would have been pretty much the same.
Yeah, so that's why I've been thinking about the podcast more.
I was going to be a history teacher, so...
It is appealing and it would fix a lot of problems with staying at home and everything.
Yeah. You know, I mean, it's hard to say, you know, this stuff is very, very painful at the time, but it sort of reminds me of the Scott Adams story when he hit the diversity ceiling and was basically told he was never going to be promoted in his...
Corporate career because he was not a woman or a minority, so he ends up having a fantastic life as a cartoonist and, you know, making huge amounts of money and dating a woman whose attraction seems to defy physics.
And, you know, no, right?
You know, it's the old, you know, it's a cliche, well, when one door closes, something else opens and so on.
But where I've been blocked in my life and have spread and gone in a different direction, that direction has almost always been Much better.
Much better. I mean, gosh, can you imagine?
Like, thinking about the Emmys and just the endless, psychotic, obsessive, deranged Trump-bashing that goes on there.
Imagine if I'd stayed in the art world, you know, as an actor, a writer, a director, all the other things that I had done in the art world.
Oh my gosh, can you imagine?
Can you imagine what it would be like to be in that environment?
How much you'd have to shut up and how much you'd have to nod and how much you'd have to pretend...
To believe things you couldn't, or be honest and have no career whatsoever, and then be smashed publicly to the point where even having any other kind of career would be almost impossible.
Oh, thank goodness the art world did not work out for me.
What a blessing. Same thing with academia.
All right, but listen, I wish you the very best.
I'm very sorry to hear about this kind of stuff, and I hope that this is instructive or illustrative for other people.
I really, really appreciate everybody's call tonight.
Once again, I mean...
I kiss you guys from where I am.
It is a beautiful experience to have these kinds of conversations.
A great honor and a privilege. Please don't forget to check out theartoftheargument.com for my new book.
And you can, of course, follow me on Twitter at Stefan Molyneux.
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