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Oct. 16, 2017 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

03:25:38

3861 My Secret Life Among Animal F&%kers - Call In Show - October 11th, 2017

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	So you probably remember, Bob, we've chatted with him a few times before, and he wanted to know the best way to approach trying to address the problem of child abuse within the black community, a subject, of course, near and dear to my own heart.
	So we had a great chat about its prevalence, what he himself had experienced, the rage that it left him with sometimes, and what can be done to try and spread the good word about peaceful parenting.
	The second caller wants to know why there are so many people in America who don't feel the need to even bother learning English or speaking English around others.
	Isn't it kind of a common courtesy when you're in somebody else's country and had a good conversation about that?
	Now, the third caller.
	Indulge me. He's a furry.
	That's all I'm going to say.
	You really have to listen to that conversation.
	That was...
	Once in a lifetime, what can I tell you?
	Now, the fourth caller is a woman, her fiancé, and she are expecting their first child, and they want to know how to instill sound moral values and put a sound moral compass into the heart and mind of their first child and subsequent children to prevent this kind of pushback, lost boys, rebelliousness that occurs so often in teenage years.
	So, that was quite a show, a great show.
	I hope that you will listen to it, start to end, and appreciate the quality of the callers, the honesty and the openness of the callers, and the wisdom.
	Please, please, don't forget to help out the show.
	I beg you, please.
	You can pick up The Art of the Argument, my new book, at theartoftheargument.com.
	It's also available on Audible, of course, at audible.com.
	And please remember to check out our affiliate link if you've got some shopping to do at fdrurl.com slash amazon.
	Alright, well first today we have Bob.
	Bob wrote in and said, I have had my reservations about child abuse, and for those who have heard too many euphemisms, I'm referring to inducement of pain in children to correct behavior.
	On one side, I have common American culture, which has been working for the most part, for quite a while, which includes what they like to call corporal punishment.
	On the other side, I have, one, all the people who study it saying it causes actual brain damage, and two, the ever-awesome Free Domain Radio which makes an extraordinarily compelling case.
	When I read Once the Child Abuse Causes a Loss in IQ, I immediately sided against it due to my own beliefs about IQ.
	When I talk about child abuse with someone who does have a child, I have a clear disadvantage and my views are immediately discounted because I do not yet have children.
	Honestly, it is not my goal to convince them to stop beating their children.
	It is my goal to come to a clear conclusion myself.
	What can we say to those many parents who dismiss me when I speak against child abuse?
	That's from Bob.
	Hey Bob, how are you doing tonight? Uh, can you hear me?
	I'm doing pretty well.
	How are you? I'm well, thank you.
	I'm well. Well, so this idea, can you speak for other groups, right?
	Can men speak for women?
	Can white people talk about the black experience?
	I mean, I find this all kind of boring and silly because philosophy doesn't care, your gender doesn't care about your race.
	And I'll start listening to parents who say non-parents.
	Can't talk about parenting the moment that they pile on feminists for talking about the patriarchy or masculinity.
	You know, if black activists can talk about white power or white privilege, then clearly they're able to talk, as they see it coherently, about a group not themselves.
	If women can talk about the patriarchy, then clearly they can talk about being male.
	I mean, it's so funny with childhood.
	It's one of these weird exceptions.
	I mean, if I had lived for 20 years of my life, the first 20 years of my life, as an Oriental person, I'm sure that I could speak a little bit about the Oriental experience.
	The one thing we all go through is childhood.
	So the idea that we can't talk about childhood...
	If we're not parents, it's ridiculous because we all were children, every single one of us.
	And so I just sort of want to point that out.
	It's a way of just brushing aside an argument rather than engaging in a debate by saying there are certain categories of people who can't talk about stuff.
	And, you know, funnily enough, it always tends to be those people...
	Who most disagree with you?
	Oh, look, there's a category of people who disagree with me.
	Maybe I can just disenfranchise them and tell them that they're not allowed to participate in a debate based upon their gender or the color of their skin or whatever, right?
	So I would just sort of brush that aside.
	Well, if you don't have kids, you don't understand.
	It's like, well, I was a child and I've read about the facts.
	I don't have to be the weather to be a weatherman.
	Okay, well, that's a...
	Pretty concise answer on that smaller question.
	But the larger question is, as we've spoken before, it's about time for me to have children.
	And I... Oh, God.
	This is going to get very personal very quickly.
	Oh, we hate that on this show, Bob.
	Please, whatever you do, don't get personal.
	I'm sorry. Go ahead. I am afraid that I won't be the best parent.
	I have dealt with An extraordinarily wide range of abuse as a child.
	I mean, from being paddled at school to...
	Which was relatively minor.
	I'm sure I cried. I think I was eight or seven or I don't really remember.
	To being beaten bloody in my teenage years.
	So I've had a wide...
	A wide variety of it, I guess I could say.
	And... And I can see that it has caused me problems.
	I make good money now, so I'm around more well-adjusted people now.
	This is really gonna sound shitty, talking about poor people.
	But when people are in poorer communities, first of all, poorer people tend to, especially in the black community, tend to beat their children.
	I mean, that's just a thing.
	But now that I'm around wealthy people, I can see significantly more well-adjusted people.
	And I can see that there are some things that I'm lacking.
	I don't know if I'm saying this the right way.
	Maybe you could help pull this out of me better.
	Well, first of all, I'm really sorry for what you experienced as a child.
	We don't have to go into details, I mean, unless it's relevant, but...
	For those who don't know, you want to look up the Adverse Childhood Experiences Study by Dr.
	Vincent Felitti. He's been on this show, I guess, a long time ago now.
	The ACE score, it's something that people should take.
	It's an important health metric.
	It's an important history metric.
	And you have an ACE score of 6, which is very high, and I just really wanted to express Deep, deep sympathy for that.
	As far as I came from an abused background, I want to be a good father.
	Dude, you've come to the right place.
	You have come to the right place.
	This, of course, was my concern as well.
	I had a desperate, foundational, Old Testament-style biblical desire to not reproduce what happened to me as a child.
	And not just to reproduce it less.
	I'm all in your childhoods.
	Now, with less beatings, I wanted to...
	Not. Do it at all.
	Now, in general, and I know this is going to be taken out of context, but in general and in my experience, poor people suck.
	There is a correlation, not one-to-one, but there's a correlation between dysfunction and low IQ, between dysfunction and just being an idiot.
	Because if you have to go to work for eight hours a day, surely you want to go to a job that's more interesting, that's more challenging, that's more intellectual, that's less physically arduous and so on.
	And so if you're going to work, you'd want to work at a job that is going to be more challenging, more intellectual, require more intelligence, and therefore give you higher pay.
	And a lot of the poorer people that I know, they either didn't work and they hung off welfare, they kind of worked part-time, a lot of it under the table, or they just had regular old crappy jobs where they complained about everyone else and never advanced their own careers, right?
	It's a lot easier to blame the boss than to increase your own skill set.
	And with very, very few exceptions.
	You know, the socialists romanticize the poor, right?
	In the same way that feminists romanticize femininity, it's a form of praising people to make them enslaved to your doctrines.
	You praise the poor and they end up enslaved to the state.
	You praise women and they end up kowtowing to feminism, radical feminism in particular.
	So this form of possession of the soul through praise is very common, but for people who've actually spent time growing up around poor people, in general, they're pretty terrible.
	Now, again, there are exceptions.
	Theoretical for the most part.
	I didn't meet any of these wonderful poor people that you keep hearing about.
	They weren't all terrible, but they weren't great.
	And I've met rich, terrible, terrible people.
	I remember this one guy.
	I did some work for him way back at the beginning of my career.
	I set up his computer network and wrote some programs for him.
	And he had this big house, beautiful house, backyard gardens and all of that.
	And I was, I mean, I envied that stuff.
	I'll talk about that story another time because it's really been on my mind lately.
	But I really envied that kind of wealth, Bob, and that kind of comfort.
	And I said to him, you have a beautiful house.
	And he sort of looked at me in this, you know, he looked at me so pompously, he almost looked like somebody being interviewed by the Mata Haris of James O'Keefe's Project Veritas, you know, this pompous puffing and preening of, oh, yes, well, I'm James Comey, godson, and all this kind of weird lefty sexual market value.
	I've got political pull.
	Atlas Shrugged kind of crap.
	By the way, just check out.
	His videos have been staggering and fantastic and wonderful.
	Just go to, you know, look up Project Veritas and look at his videos.
	And I remember this guy, he's a rich guy.
	He turned to me and he said, oh yes, the Lord has been good to me.
	And I just, like, oh, I think I just tasted yesterday's lunch.
	Because this idea that the Lord was good to him, but not to me.
	You know, that he had this nice upbringing, this, you know, but just me, the Lord just cast me into the shadow, down into Mordor and so on.
	And I've known and met some very corrupt and smart, but corrupt rich people.
	So I find that the terribleness of the poor...
	Is uniform almost in general.
	The terribleness of the rich is a little bit more spotty, but in some ways much worse because they have more opportunities for improvement.
	So let's hear a little bit about, like I've talked about these statistics in an abstract sense, right?
	So spanking prevalence in the United States by self-reporting.
	We've got Asian parents at 73%, white parents at 79%, Hispanic parents at 80%, and black parents at 89%.
	And I wonder if you could tell me a little bit about...
	Forms of discipline, for want of a better word, in your house and also in the houses of the other black kids that you knew.
	Okay, so...
	Actually, I can tell you this in a bit of a story.
	Instead of my personal experience, I have an experience that elaborates more experiences.
	I was recently...
	My uncle recently had a 50th anniversary.
	And a bunch of family members, including my mother, and she never attends family reunions.
	My mother's a bit of a black sheep of my family.
	A tiny bit.
	Anyway, so we're all before the actual anniversary.
	My mother, her brother, who's the 50-year anniversary guy, his wife Their child and some other cousins on another side that I don't know too well, they were all sitting together joking about, not joking, talking about corporal punishment and how to discipline children.
	And everyone was around.
	They were talking about different belts and switches and things that they use.
	And the general tenor of the conversation was We didn't start young enough.
	That's my problem.
	I didn't start beating my children young enough.
	And I kind of poked my little brother.
	He's 24.
	He's not technically my brother.
	He's my mother's husband's son, but he's my brother.
	I mean, I've known him forever and I love him very much.
	I poked him and I said, you know, if we were around some Northeastern, middle or upper class whites, they'd be mortified of this conversation.
	Not just mortified, they might be ready to call the police or something.
	And then I looked, and then I pointed at my wife, who is Eastern European, and I said, she is too.
	She's pretending to smile and get along with everyone, but she's inside, she's screaming.
	And as expected, as I drove home with my wife, my wife said, what the hell is that?
	What the hell is wrong with those people?
	They're talking about hurting children.
	And she actually has a childcare company and has had a lot of years taking care of children.
	She immigrated as an au pair.
	You can probably understand that connection there.
	And that started a fight that has now...
	Have me not talking to my mother for probably a bunch of years again.
	I've gone a bunch of years without talking to my mother multiple times.
	She abandoned me as a child twice, maybe three times when I was younger.
	So that causes some issues here and there.
	But anyway, I told you that story to explain to you how corporal punishment, as they call it, is viewed.
	It's viewed as this is something that is done.
	Children need to behave, and this is how you get them to behave.
	And why is that the theory, Bob?
	Because this I find confusing.
	If, let's say, forget about the black-white thing, because that pushes so many people's buttons, but let's just talk about the Orientals, right?
	So, Orientals make a lot more money than whites, and whites make more money than blacks.
	And so, wouldn't you want to look at the most successful group in society, and out of Ashkenazi Jews, just look at the East Asians, the Orientals, wouldn't you want to look at that group and say, okay, well, what are they doing?
	If you're trying to lose weight and your brother's trying to lose weight and he's doing well and you're not doing well, you're gaining weight and he's losing, wouldn't you ask him what he's eating, how he's exercising, what he's doing?
	How is it just taken for granted as a fact that these beatings, this violence against black kids is the way to go, given that blacks are also complaining about being at the bottom of society?
	How is this not coming with some sort of questioning of these practices?
	Okay, and I have an answer, and it's going to sound a little too simple, but it works.
	Well, in the short term, it absolutely works.
	And that is the argument that I, and that is one of the things I tell people when I talk to them about it.
	I tell them no one disagrees that it works.
	I mean, you can get a dog to stop barking if you hurt them hard enough.
	But that is, that's the simple answer.
	It works. And to give you a tiny bit more perspective about how this is culturally communicated, Jamie Foxx won the Oscar for Ray, as you probably remember, about nine years ago.
	I don't really remember exactly.
	Maybe more. And he got on the stage, and he thanked everyone, and then he thanked his grandmother, and he talked about how she beat him when he wasn't acting right.
	And he called her his first acting coach.
	And that sparked this big outrage.
	Holy crap, do black people really beat their children?
	Why are they doing that?
	And it kind of got brushed under the rug as this is just a cultural thing.
	And the answer to me is really quite simple.
	Because it works and no one really understands the long-term effects.
	Well, I don't know that it's true to nobody.
	I know what you mean. It's not common.
	And I remember this from...
	Black comedians. Bill Cosby joked about the violence, being hit with a shoe.
	Chris Rock has talked about it.
	It's an Indian comic whose name escapes me.
	Sean Majumba? Anyway, I think he's talked about it.
	Oh, you know, you white kids, you don't get hit.
	But, you know, us minority kids, boom, boom, boom, right?
	And these kinds of...
	Eddie Murphy's talked about it with regards to his parents.
	And... It is something that's kind of very often communicated.
	The data is very clear.
	And, I mean, I have a friend who's doing sort of outreach in the black community to try and get these better parenting practices across.
	I've certainly, you know, aimed a lot of these messages at the black community.
	But it is something that is going to be very, very tough to improve things.
	If... Now, whether this is the IQ layer or the IQ thing, I don't know.
	But I would assume maybe higher IQ is less spanking.
	You have more verbal skills, more reasoning skills, more negotiation skills.
	But to me, you know, longer breastfeeding and non-spanking offer the best conceivable hopes of raising average black IQ to the point where there could be significant changes in that community.
	Because it is really, it's incredibly frustrating and annoying for me.
	And forgive me if I get a little passionate on this topic, Bob.
	It's a little frustrating and annoying for me that the mainstream media is broadcasting more radical black activists who say that who is oppressing the blacks is, you know, the whites.
	It's the system.
	It's the patriarchy.
	It's the cops.
	It's like, but who's beating the black children?
	Thank you.
	It's not me. It's not my daughter.
	It's not you. Who is beating the black children?
	It's the black parents.
	And people say, well, you know, there's black-on-black violence in Chicago.
	Yes, there is. And that's terrible stuff.
	It needs to be discussed. But no one's ever talking about That black parents are overwhelmingly hitting, if not beating, their children.
	That, to me, is the real cause of the violence.
	And this is one of these terrible combinations of both environment and genetics, right?
	This thing called the warrior gene.
	Individuals who have the warrior gene are prone to aggression, right?
	We've got a 2008 study of over 2,500 men Those with the warrior gene report a level of serious delinquency and violent delinquency in adolescence and young adulthood that were about twice as high as those with other variants of the gene.
	And Dr. Kevin Beaver, who's been on this show a couple of times, replicated the findings of this study focused on the arrest and incarceration rates of American blacks.
	And I quote, analysis of African-American males revealed that carriers of the two-repeat allele were at much greater risk for being arrested during their lifetime and for being incarcerated during their lifetime.
	But just having the gene is not enough.
	It's like being susceptible to smoking but without smoking.
	And for the violence to really manifest, you have to be abused as a child.
	And it is really astonishing just how powerful this correlation is.
	And I quote, for adult violent conviction, maltreated males with the warrior gene genotype were more likely than non-maltreated males with this genotype to be convicted of a violent crime by a significant odds ratio of 9.8, 9.8 to 1, almost 10 to 1.
	And this is the triggering condition for the violence.
	And because 5.5% of blacks carry this warrior gene compared to 0.1% of whites and 0.0007% of Asians, we have a high genetic susceptibility to violence, which is tragically, I think, being cycled and transmitted through.
	The culture of raising children and how to break the cycle, we can't change the genetics.
	What we can do, though, is try and change the parenting.
	But in order to do that, there's going to have to be criticism of black parenting.
	I don't know the degree to which black parents are going to sit there and say, well, you know, here's a white guy on the internet talking about peaceful parenting, or whether that's going to have to come from within the community.
	I have to interrupt you here.
	Criticism of black criminals is unacceptable in our society right now.
	So, if you want to go to the next step, then, you know, good luck and Godspeed with you there.
	That's all I have to say.
	It's just, you know, it is one of these situations and we shouldn't laugh, of course, it's really tragic, but it's one of these situations where You have a cure.
	It's a pill right here.
	I've got a cure. Stop hitting your kids.
	Reasoning with your kids. We've got a cure for a lot of what ails the black community.
	And no one's talking about it.
	I mean, it's not even like it's being talked about and violently opposed or aggressively opposed.
	It's just not even being talked about.
	I can't remember. For the life of me, maybe you've seen this.
	Maybe people who listen to this can let me know in the comments.
	I honestly, Bob, I cannot for the life of me remember a time in the mainstream media when problems in parenting Have been proposed, other than in a very generic sense.
	Nobody's, like to my knowledge, nobody's ever written an article, maybe there are, just I don't read everything, where they say, you know, something we really have to address in society is the aggression of black parents against their children.
	I mean, there are some people talking about the problems of single motherhood, particularly on boys, but also on girls, the problems and the environmental toxin in general known as single motherhood.
	There are people talking about that and focusing it on the black community.
	But not, in general, corporal punishment, spanking, or violence.
	So it's just not a mainstream topic.
	And to me, it's all just playing whack-a-mole when not getting to the source of the problem.
	And this is something that could be done right now that would lower black crime rates, that would raise black IQ, according to the studies.
	It is the biggest, single, most moral, and best option on the table right now.
	And it's nowhere being talked about.
	It is one of these just astonishing things to my mind.
	And it's one of these things that it's going to end up with people being racist.
	Because, you know, what if people say, ah, well, there's all this black criminality as well.
	It must be something fun. Okay, yes, there is an IQ issue.
	I don't know how to solve that, but I know how to ameliorate it according to the data.
	Why don't we talk about that stuff and help the black community in that way?
	That's tangible, moral, actionable stuff to be done right now.
	And I'm getting behind efforts to spread this in the black community.
	I'm talking about it constantly.
	If you care, I mean, these are people who are struggling and suffering.
	These are children who are being beaten and abused, as you were, Bob.
	Why the hell can't people talk about this?
	Because... Culturally, it's not just acceptable, but it's promoted.
	When Chris Rock, or Bill Cosby, or Sinbad, actually, a pretty good comedian, talks about this, they talk about it with a fondness.
	They talk about it with, oh, my parents kept me in line.
	They don't talk about it with, holy crap, what the hell were they doing to me?
	Do you understand what I'm trying to say there?
	Well, I do, but of course, slavery was a commonly accepted practice that people at some point had to say, this is totally evil.
	This has to change.
	This has to change. And, you know, the people who are upset at slavery and Jim Crow and segregation, and rightly so, these government programs are horrible.
	Well... They're once saying, well, cultural norms don't cut it.
	We have to go with what's right.
	Forget cultural norms. Slavery was immoral even when everyone thought it was moral.
	So there's all those arguments, which I agree with.
	But there is something...
	I mean, Tommy Sotomayor talks about how difficult it is for blacks to criticize their own parents, in particular their own moms.
	Maybe there's something to do with that.
	Maybe there's this Stockholm Syndrome of...
	She beat me upright kind of thing.
	Or maybe there's this fear that if blacks don't beat their children, the outcome's going to be even worse.
	And I see that whenever I put out stuff about spanking, of course, there is always this, well, you know, there's a problem with kids these days.
	I'm not hit enough, not toughened up enough.
	And it doesn't toughen them up.
	It doesn't toughen up kids. It makes them unstable.
	It makes them aggressive. Makes them fearful.
	Makes them anxious. Reduces their IQ. Doesn't toughen them up in any way that I can understand or that the data shows.
	Well, so the problem is really this.
	The only way to solve a problem within a society, there are only two really.
	There's legislatively and then there's culturally.
	And legislatively, that would just be a complete disaster.
	You mean sort of banning spanking?
	Yes. Well, if you ban spanking, then, of course, proportionately a lot more blacks are going to be arrested, which is going to cause more hysteria and upset and cries of racism.
	Because, again, we can't talk about cultural differences or ethnic differences, and therefore all disparities must be due to bigotry.
	So I have mixed feelings about...
	The issue of banning spanking.
	Certainly it is the initiation of use of force.
	I don't like government solutions to anything, but culturally things don't seem to be moving at all.
	Exactly. And what you just said is exactly what I was thinking said pretty well.
	But one other problem that we have is this, and this just drives me crazy.
	There is this idea, whenever I talk about child abuse, And people who do abuse their children, they say, oh, well, I just spank my children, or what I do is corporal punishment.
	And what they do, not basically, what they do exactly is put the line right above the worst thing they did.
	That's what they do every single time.
	Like me, I mean, I was beat bloody, but you know, in his defense, he never actually used his balled-up fists.
	You know, his knuckles were still pretty hard.
	You know, the back of his hand, the front of his hand, whatever.
	His foot, whatever. But in his mind, oh, I didn't use my fists.
	That would be abuse.
	And so I find that to be a common problem that people simply say, what I do is discipline and Anything above me is child abuse.
	Sure. No, and if you look at Muslim countries, some of the more extremist Muslim countries, they talk about disciplining their wives.
	I mean, everybody redefines their use of violence.
	I mean, we redefine social theft as taxation.
	You redefine the empire.
	The imperialism of countries is always defined as national defense, or in the national interest, or bringing democracy to wherever.
	I mean, people always redefine their immoral actions to the lighter side, the sunnier side of the street.
	And it's because fundamentally this is something I haven't talked about in years, but the issue is childism.
	The real bigotry in society, the most foundational bigotry and the one that is most likely to give rise to most of the other bigotries is childism.
	It is viewing children as non-people, as non-persons.
	And it is allowing for society to treat children as objects rather than as people.
	And, like, we don't understand how much childhood is communism in the West.
	Your parents are forced to pay for your education.
	You're forced to go. There's no choice.
	I mean, imagine if this was, as an adult, the government chose your job.
	The government forced you where to live and who to marry and made all these foundational life decisions for you, and you had no choice in the matter.
	But that's childhood with regards to education in particular.
	And so children are treated as socialistic units of profit by teachers' unions and by propagandists who want to infest them in public schools.
	And they're treated as emotional vomitoriums by their parents to reenact and thus justify their own terrible childhoods.
	They're used as, Lloyd DeMoss calls them, poison containers.
	Like the adult is full of venom and self-hatred and frustration and they...
	Right? They throw it up.
	They throw it. They open up.
	They drag open their children's mouths and vomit like some satanic bird.
	All of their emotional rage and chaos and hysteria and anxiety and depression.
	They vomit it all into their children.
	Children are used as objects to prop up the decaying bones of adulthood.
	Children are used as crutches to pretend that those without the power of mobility can somehow step on the children.
	Children are used socially socially.
	As mere resources to borrow against.
	They're used as collateral to borrow against.
	Well, the children are going to grow up and pay taxes, so let's have a 20-year bond.
	They're used.
	They're used as abuse vents.
	They're used as propaganda.
	They're used as hostages by public school teachers.
	They're used as collateral to borrow against from foreign banksters.
	They're used physically.
	They're used sexually sometimes.
	They are just objects.
	Children don't have a say.
	They don't have an identity, and they are scarcely protected.
	In fact, the laws generally work against children.
	Children are used as pawns in divorces.
	Right? It's called Sexual Abuse in Divorce.
	Sexual Abuse Allegations, S-A-I-D. It's a term used by lawyers.
	Oh, someone's getting divorced, a man or woman getting divorced, now the woman's going to accuse the man of sexual abuse of the children, that way she gets the children, he's kicked out of the house, and he's got to spend $150,000 to try and get to see his children once a weekend, supervised, if he wants.
	And so children are just used.
	And then, you know, we wonder why society is chaotic, why society is sliding towards socialism, communism, totalitarianism.
	It's because we have a largely totalitarian environment for children, daycares and primary schools and junior high, high schools and so on, and doesn't exactly end when they get to university.
	But that's because they're already broken, right?
	You don't need a fence for a cow that's afraid of the woods.
	So until we overcome childism, and we recognize that we should start building our social moral sensitivities where the children are, and we should design the greatest protection and the greatest sympathy for children, and we should even more hesitate to do an ill against a child than we would against an adult, until we start doing that, society is Fundamentally not going to get better.
	So that's sort of my...
	That's the fundamental prejudice that I absolutely believe in and nobody talks about.
	When was the last time you read anything in the mainstream media about prejudice against children?
	I had not considered it all as encompassing, as you just said.
	Well... I want to be a little selfish again.
	I want to go back to me.
	One last point before I forget, they're also used by pharmaceutical companies as a profit-based dumping of the toxic waste known as SSRIs into the brains of the kids.
	But all right, let's move on to you.
	Sorry about that. Okay.
	So, no, honestly, and I know I'm being selfish here, but I really, I, ever since I was maybe about 18 or, no, not even, maybe about 25, So this is about 14 years ago.
	I've been on a quest of understanding my deficiencies, what I'm lacking.
	And basically, this is when my career started to take off.
	So I had the means and the opportunity to sit around, to read, and things of that sort.
	I got in my last fight.
	I've been in a lot of fights in my life.
	Most of them, a vast majority, is when I was a child.
	I was very young. And I really think it's because I was just a miserable child.
	My mother just kept leaving me.
	I had to live with my grandmother or I have vague memories of living somewhere.
	I don't even really know. And so I got in my last fight probably about ten or nine years ago.
	And this is a little funny.
	Someone kicked my car.
	This drunk guy. He was in the middle of the street.
	He kicked my car.
	I got out. And he was on his phone.
	And he was like, I'm not talking to you.
	I'm on the phone. And I immediately just beat him up.
	And we were rolling on the ground.
	And then I got out.
	Hang on. Hang on. Slow me down a little here.
	So you go bump with the guy in the car.
	You go and talk to him. He's on the phone.
	And he just dismisses you.
	Like, I'm not going to talk to you? Yes.
	Was he black or white? Does it matter?
	I don't think it mattered, but yeah, he was white.
	And he was about my size.
	He had a good 30 pounds on me that I learned the hard way.
	Well, that's privilege. He's got the privilege humpback.
	It's like a dorsal fin of a great white shark, actually, interestingly enough.
	Okay, so, I mean, did you drag him out of the...
	I don't quite understand the mechanics of this, which I think is important.
	He was way too far into the street, and I'm just driving along...
	And he's too close to the street and I get close to him just driving by and he kicks my car really hard.
	And then I immediately stop.
	I jump out of the car and I yell at him and he...
	God, I'm really embarrassed about this.
	God, I shouldn't. I don't know when he hears this.
	And yes, and then it just kind of, you know, brushes me off, you know, dismisses me, if you say that's a better word.
	And that enrages you, right?
	And that, yes.
	Is that your big push button, Bob?
	Like the being provoked and then dismissed?
	No, my biggest push button is actually not this.
	My biggest push button is the fight right before this.
	My biggest push button is if I'm nice to someone, if I'm really nice to someone and I treat them well and they do something Terrible to me.
	Whether it's they say something or I lose it.
	Now, I want...
	So, let's get back to the most previous fight.
	Did he damage your car? Maybe a little.
	And do you think, in hindsight, I'm not justifying him hitting your car.
	I mean, I remember driving down, there's a place in Toronto called The Beaches.
	This is many years ago, back when I had a 98 Volvo.
	Like the tank I drove into the dust, my lord.
	But I remember driving down in The Beaches.
	And The Beaches is very granola.
	It's very left-wing. It's like a little slice of California granola embedded in the lakefront in Toronto.
	And there was this...
	I stopped a little bit over the line in front of a set of lights.
	And this woman came by and she thumped the front of my car.
	Now, she was a crazy woman. I could sort of see that, you know, the wild hair and all of that.
	Not exactly shopping cart lady, but not too far removed.
	And I just thought, well, that was stupid of you.
	I mean, like, how ridiculous, right?
	I mean, so I was a little bit over, and she was...
	And of course, I knew she had this whole, you know, you people with your cars, you're destroying the world, and boom, you know, she...
	I mean, obviously, maybe she thought she was doing the right thing or whatever.
	But the... And again, this is a woman, so it's a little different, that the idea that I would sort of jump out of the car and confront her or whatever it is, I mean...
	Tell me what goes through your mind in that moment, because that's the part, I think, that if you want to understand the better parenting stuff, that flashpoint is important to understand.
	Well, okay, so it's going to be difficult for me to...
	So I'll go back to...
	Oh, my God. I'm going to go back to the previous one in that, because I remember it extremely well.
	All right. But this one, all I wanted to say is the reason why this was my last fight, and this is...
	This is actually a little pitiful.
	It's because I was fighting him and we were rolling around the ground a little.
	And then after it was over, people separated us.
	And I looked down and I realized that my clothes cost a lot of money.
	And that was the moment.
	And that's so pitiful.
	But that's what basically stopped me fighting.
	And more than that, I think that there's a corollary there for a lesson that a lot of people, when they get into conflicts like this, they don't realize how much they have to lose.
	And that moment, it was very emblematic of, holy crap, dude, your shirt costs 800 bucks.
	What the hell are you doing? I know that's really...
	It's pitiful in this situation.
	But do you understand what I'm trying to say about how people might...
	Okay, I'm going to interrupt you because here's what I'm noticing, Bob, and I can't escape it.
	So you were talking about how people use euphemisms or they minimize what it is that they're talking about in terms of violence?
	Yes. So what have you described this as rolling around?
	You know that's a euphemism, right?
	So what actually happened? Did you punch them?
	Did you get bone crunch under your knuckles?
	I mean, what happened? Okay, so yes, there were definitely punches, and I know martial arts, so I did some moves.
	And we eventually ended up on the ground, wrestling on the ground a bit.
	That is my euphemism, rolling around.
	That's what that represented. But you drew blood?
	Oh, yeah. You said, oh yeah, so a lot of blood?
	Yeah. So what did you do to the guy?
	What did he look like?
	What was broken or bent?
	Oh, he just had a lot of, like, his face was bloody.
	So was that because he had a bloody nose or were there cuts over his eye or the bridge of his nose or what happened?
	Yeah. So, okay, I'm not, I promise I'm not pretending I don't know this, but I don't remember very well.
	But yes, there were There were different punches and gouges that I did.
	And what did he do?
	Did he get anything on you? Oh, yeah.
	Oh, yeah. He fought me.
	He fought me very well, actually.
	And if there was a policeman there, who would he have said initiated it?
	Oh, well, I think I might argue and say he initiated it, but the policeman might say, Jesus Christ, look at that guy.
	Or did you have the chance to...
	Leave the situation without fighting.
	Did I have the chance to do that?
	Yeah, I mean, I know that there's a stand your ground kind of thing, but I don't know if where you are, if you can leave.
	Like, if someone's being belligerent and kind of throws a drunken punch at you, I don't know that you get to hit them with a chair kind of thing.
	Like, if you can just walk out, isn't that better?
	Look, I'm ashamed to talk about this, but I will admit openly, I threw the first punch.
	His dismissal of me...
	Is what enraged me into jumping on him.
	So you have been very lucky.
	Have you ever been charged? I mean, that's assault, right?
	Yes. Yes, I have not...
	No, I have never been charged.
	Why not? Well, the police weren't there.
	I just left. Well, no, but I mean, what about the guy who you beat up?
	Oh, I don't... Well...
	Maybe he reported it.
	I mean, he didn't know my name or maybe he didn't know my license plate number.
	Yes, I was lucky.
	And how many times has this happened?
	In my adulthood, this has happened two major times.
	And how many minor times?
	No, no, I'm trying to think.
	I mean, I got into a fight in college, but that was not at all my fault.
	And the guy used a pool cue and...
	Yeah, he used weapons on me.
	I didn't start that at all.
	So yeah, so in the fights that I started because of my lack of control, too.
	Right. Is it a form of leveling, like you feel humiliated and you want to even up by bringing him down physically?
	I honestly don't know.
	And this is why I wanted to go to the previous one to that, because this one has a lot of details.
	I used to go to a...
	I certainly hope he doesn't listen to this show.
	I used to go to a restaurant in the middle of the night.
	It was not a good one.
	And I just liked this waitress.
	And she liked me. And I wasn't romantically interested in her, but I'm pretty sure she was interested in me.
	And so I went with a friend because he got off work at 2 a.m.
	And we'd go and we'd sit.
	We'd talk to her a little and then we'd leave.
	And one day I went there, and she wasn't there, and I just said, I would've...
	Sorry about that.
	One day I went there, and she wasn't there, and the food sucked, so we just turned around and left and went somewhere else.
	The next night I went, and she wasn't there, and I started to leave, and this guy called me a stalker, this waiter.
	And I was good to him, and I'm a really good tipper.
	Really, really good tipper, like 50%.
	So the waiter liked her, obviously, right?
	So yes, he probably liked it.
	And he didn't like the competition.
	Yeah, likely.
	So he called me a stalker and then I drove, we were driving back home and about 70% on the trip back home, 70% of the way, I was just thinking, why did he say that?
	Why did he say that? And I just got so angry.
	I turned around, I drove back and I walked into him and I, you know, I confirmed him.
	I said, what did you say? And then my goal was Oh, God.
	You're really embarrassing me.
	Well, you're not embarrassing me.
	I'm embarrassing me. My goal was to go and just punch him in the nose and break his nose.
	That was it. That's all I wanted to do.
	And so I walked toward him.
	I said, what did you say? Why did you say that?
	And the reason that I was extra angry is because I was good to him.
	I was friendly to him. I was even nice to him before he said that.
	And so...
	He started to walk away from me as he saw me advance toward him and then I started to drag him outside and then it was difficult to do that so then I hit him once and then I kicked him really really hard and then I said watch your fucking mouth and then I left and that is that is I think that's a more clear picture of When I'm nice to someone,
	I'm good to someone, and they do something against me, I frickin' go crazy.
	Now, I say this, and I don't tell this story to too many people.
	I say this to ask you, what is that on the normal scale?
	Let's say vicious criminal is 10 and...
	The Dalai Lama is zero?
	I don't know. I shouldn't put him in that scale at all, honestly.
	But do you understand what I'm asking?
	Of course. Of course.
	Of course. Well, the only thing I can say is that, so when I was younger, let's just say I didn't have a whole lot of respect for property rights when I was in my early teens.
	Okay. And...
	I remember at one point standing in front of something I wanted to steal.
	I think I was maybe 13.
	I was standing in front of something I wanted to steal.
	A pair of sunglasses. And I suddenly felt this wave of fear.
	Fear. Like, oh God, this is like, not the right path, not the right path.
	And, you know, at the time it was kind of frustrating in a way.
	Like, oh, I thought this fear was cowardice and it was actually wisdom.
	It was kind of seeing down the path of where that kind of stuff can lead.
	I guess my concern is, sure, we feel anger.
	But what is the counter to anger?
	In the end, the counter to anger is wisdom and knowledge and depth and serenity and security and empathy maybe for the person who's doing you wrong and so on.
	But in the short run, I guess my question is, where's the fear?
	The fear being any one of a number of things.
	I could get arrested. I could go to jail.
	I could end up losing an enormous amount of money in legal fees.
	I might, you know, like I was talking about Michael Hutchins, the singer for NXS who apparently killed himself sometime in the 90s.
	Well, I think one of the reasons his life became a whole lot less enjoyable is he got into a little push fight with someone on a street.
	The guy pushed him, he fell down, cracked his head against a sidewalk edge, and lost his sense of smell.
	Like he didn't go to the doctor for a day or two, and he just lost his sense of smell.
	And he apparently loved food, loved wine, and so on.
	So this took a huge amount of pleasure out of his life.
	Because, you know, if you don't have a sense of smell, you can't really taste much.
	And who knows?
	What else?
	Um, He lost during that moment.
	And that's just one little stupid push.
	Not even a fight. Not even people.
	He just pushed, slipped, boom.
	Right? A friend of mine's wife ended up being on a jury where there was a little altercation, a push or two in a bar.
	Guy goes plummeting down a set of stairs.
	Badly injured, right? There is a real demon that is unleashed when people start going postal, even if they don't mean to, even if it's, you know, I'm just going to do X or do Y. This guy could have been in some gang, you know, that you might have poked a whole hornet's nest, right?
	Or he might be someone who fakes an injury and sues you.
	Like, I don't know, right?
	And so, I guess my question is, is there any sense of...
	What could happen? I'm setting in motion here.
	What is going to happen from here?
	What demon am I uncorking?
	Where could this lead? Absolutely.
	Right after the incident ends.
	Okay. All right.
	Right. Force, bond door, exit, lock.
	Okay. Got it. I'm not even joking.
	I remember it.
	I remember, you know, I was an adult.
	I had, you know, good income.
	I had a life. And I thought, holy crap, what if I killed that guy?
	What if I, you know, what if I put him in a coma or something?
	What the hell happened?
	And so that is what I think is...
	I'm wondering, is that a normal thing?
	When people get into a situation where that is not even...
	That's not even a thought.
	What happens later, basically?
	Or what's the worst possible thing that can happen later?
	And I'm wondering, I know that has been inside of me.
	I mean, I've been on the straight and narrow for quite a while, so please don't, you know, don't run away when you see me on the street.
	But I'm wondering how normal is that in society?
	Well, again, I don't know in society because I don't...
	Well, you know, I knew a guy who got into an altercation with his wife and he ended up actually spending a night in jail.
	But I think once he went to counseling and all of that, I think he kind of...
	It didn't fall too heavy on him.
	But I mean, that guy has not been in my life for 15 years or more because I just, you know, because I said to the guy, listen, you've got to get into talk therapy.
	You can't just tamp this down with a little bit of group that's mandated.
	You've got to, right? And he's like, no, I've got it handled.
	It's like, okay, well, you handle it alone because I know how this plays out.
	I think, so when was the last one?
	How old were you when the last one happened?
	Oh, that was probably about 10 years ago.
	So I was 28, 29.
	Right, right, right.
	Well, have you had anything close to that since?
	Not at all.
	Particularly, after getting married, you're now not just responsible for yourself.
	You know, your responsibility sort of compounds.
	So the idea of spending a night in jail or a week off work or a month off work or something is, you know, I'm not just hurting myself anymore.
	I'm hurting the person who trusts me more than anyone else.
	So I know that's kind of looking at it a little too mechanically or logically, but I think that's one of the major things that happens.
	Right. So, the reason why I'm asking you all this, Bob, is because when it comes to being a parent, there will be moments where you are in direct conflict with your child.
	And you will feel, based on how you were raised, guaranteed, an overwhelming desire to have your will triumph and your child's will be crushed.
	Your child will defy you, they'll be angry, and they may be...
	Doing something even a little dangerous and you will have an overwhelming desire.
	You know, you ever do that cool trick, you know, like when you want to put out a candle, you just lick your thumb and your fork and you put it out?
	Well, you want to do that with your child's will.
	You need to conform to me.
	I am the channel. You are the river.
	I control where you go and what happens.
	And there will be that moment where you want to dominate your child and you will tell yourself it's for the best and you will tell yourself that they're defying you and you will tell yourself that all kinds of terrible things are going to happen if you don't win this moment and you will give yourself permission to escalate to whatever degree you need to.
	In order to dominate that moment.
	And you're going to tell yourself it's all about your fundamental authority, that your child's going to lose respect for you if you don't win this interaction, that things are going to be terrible, that everything's going to fall apart, that you're going to look back down the road when your kid's in jail and you're going to say, if I changed my mind in that moment and I'd won in that moment, everything would be great.
	And you will escalate yourself to a truly hysterical degree just to try and convince yourself that it is the right thing to do to crush the will of your child and dominate him or her.
	Because that's how you were raised, right?
	When you got into a conflict with your parent, they escalated until you complied.
	Is that fair to say? Yeah, absolutely.
	And that is a lesson.
	Now, if you don't escalate, in your mind will be all the same crap that your parents said to themselves, justifying why you would escalate.
	Now, you have to, you have to, say no to that.
	You have to be willing to lose to your child.
	Because your child will not respect you if you use size, power, strength, and viciousness to dominate your child.
	She will fear you, but she will not respect you.
	Respect arises not from power, but from self-restraint.
	Respect arises from not exercising a power you could.
	I mean, if you knew some kung fu master...
	We see this all the time in the kung fu movies, right?
	There's a couple of stupid thugs pushing around the kung fu master, and he just takes it, right?
	Now, that's self-restraint.
	Now, if it's some old granny being pushed around, we don't say, wow, that granny has a lot of self-restraint for not taking those punks down, because she can't.
	But, if someone has the power and does not use it, then we gain the respect for them exercising self-restraint.
	Your child knows you can win.
	Your child knows you're bigger.
	Your child knows you have a deeper voice.
	Your child knows you have the money.
	Your child knows you're in charge.
	There's no question of that.
	And your child is trying to carve out a little sphere of will.
	You know, like I always think if you're buried under a An avalanche, you just kind of elbow and try and get an air pocket.
	Like your kids are just trying to dig themselves out from under an avalanche of just being born helpless.
	Trying to dig their way to the top where they can run around like Legolas on top of the snow.
	So your child already knows that you're bigger, already knows that you're stronger.
	Your child always and always and always knows that you can win if you really want to.
	It's like when you have a running race with your kids.
	You don't want to put on full Kenyan strides, right?
	Because, you know, they're three and they're just going to be depressed.
	And so, you know, you run appropriately to their speed.
	Like now with my daughter, she's coming on for nine, I can finally go full speed and it's relatively close-ish.
	I mean, she's basically a Flintstones blur on the ground.
	But you don't.
	Your child knows that you can beat them in a running race when they're four.
	They know that. You know, it's the old joke that parents have.
	Like, you come up to a door, a set of double doors, and you push like you can't even open it.
	And then your child giggles and just pushes it open for you.
	And like, oh, thanks. I guess I must have loosened it for you.
	You know, something like that. Your child knows all of this stuff.
	So, given that your child knows how powerful you are and how much in control, you're a god.
	You're an absolute, literal god to your child.
	When they're born, you're like the top of Mount Olympus and then you slowly tumble down as they get older.
	So, given that your child knows that you can win anytime you want, you don't need to exercise that power.
	Because... They already know, right?
	And so refusing to exercise that power of dominance, refusing to exercise that power.
	And you already have the power of ostracism anyway.
	You already have the power of not engaging with your child if they're displeasing you, which if your child likes you is a negative for you.
	And you will have that impulse.
	To wet finger together over the fire of your child's willpower.
	And you must say no to that.
	And you must say, I'm willing to lose a few times so I can win in the long run.
	I'm willing to surrender in the moment and then have a conversation about it later.
	Like I have a rule, which is I don't hit my child with a rule.
	Sorry, let me just say I don't hit my child.
	I don't impose a rule on my child that we've not discussed beforehand.
	If I haven't thought about what rule there should be, Well, then that's my fault.
	I don't get to impose a rule in the moment.
	So if my child does something that I think is not right, if we haven't discussed the rules ahead of time, if it's safe, I'll let her do it.
	And then afterwards we'll talk about what the rule is, I think, should be.
	And then the important thing is to get agreement from your child or children to the rules.
	If you can't get your children to agree with your rules, either your rules are terrible or you're not explaining them very well.
	You know, either way you should revisit them.
	Once you get your children to To accept and agree to the rules, then you hold them to their word.
	And you earn the right to hold them to their word by always holding to your word.
	And if they try to break their word, you say, oh, okay, well, is that what we're doing now?
	We can just say stuff and then break our word.
	Like I can say, oh, we're going to go to Palladium and then just we drive to Best Buy or whatever living technological hell my daughter would rather chew her own foot off than attend.
	Right? So you don't crush their will.
	You reason with them.
	You get them to agree with things.
	Because if you hit them, all you've done is told them that might makes right.
	And that is not a lesson we need any more of in a world full of nuclear weapons.
	Well, there is something critically important you said in there.
	And that is, you hold them to their word by you holding to yours.
	As far as I know, My parents didn't hold to their words.
	So... Now, if you keep laughing, though, I'm going to have to bug you about it.
	You know that, right? Oh, man.
	You know that. You've heard enough of these shows to know that you'll leave me no choice.
	No, that's fine.
	That's fine. I'm not...
	Look, I'm... Look, I am in a situation where I am refusing to talk to my mother.
	And, you know, this is not the first time.
	I mean, we've done it...
	For at least two times before where I just say, no, no, no, no.
	You've messed up my life multiple times and I can't be around you.
	And then try to resolve situations.
	And this last conversation where she was talking about corporal punishment with the family was the catalyst for our current separation.
	Look, I know that...
	And I do not have the best perspective on this.
	I'm working to have it.
	I'm working to have this conversation with you.
	But please, be as critical as possible.
	Well, just stop laughing about terrible stuff, that's all.
	Because I'm sort of honor-bound to bug you about it, and you know enough because you've listened to the show before that that's just my reminder.
	Understood. Understood.
	Well... So you were talking about the thing that I said around sort of your parents not keeping their word, right?
	Why do I find that funny?
	See, I'm thinking about that now.
	Why do I find that funny?
	I laughed because the idea of having parents who keep their word is so distant from me that it's laughable.
	I'm really trying to understand.
	That's why I'm actually delving into that.
	But I think that's why I laugh.
	I mean, I've had...
	Oh my goodness.
	I mean, I have a mother who abandoned me.
	At least two times.
	So yeah, the idea...
	Trust me, it sounds exactly like what I'd like to be the case.
	Because I believe that a person's word is really the foundation of who they are.
	Or their word.
	So anyway... So I really like how you said that, and that does sound like something attainable.
	Right. And you're going to feel very tempted, because when our parents have power over us, we all seek power as individuals.
	And when we become parents...
	We want to inhabit the same power that our own parents have.
	And power, fundamentally, hierarchical power, is the power to break rules.
	Right? I mean, look at Hillary Clinton, right?
	Look at Lois Lerner.
	Look at, I mean, all of these people.
	What is their power?
	Their power is to break rules and get away with just about anything, right?
	Right? And the power to break rules is a terrible power because all it teaches is hypocrisy.
	It teaches people that rules are only followed by those who are powerless.
	And since we all seek power, we all then want to end up in charge of the rules so we can be above the law.
	Now, when you're a kid, your parents have all these rules which your parents don't follow.
	You know, tell the truth.
	Keep your word. Don't use force to get what you want.
	Don't grab. Don't snatch. Share or be nice.
	Share or be nice. Your parents don't share or be nice.
	Often. And so people say, okay, well, rules are this Nietzschean thing.
	They're just imposed on the weak by the strong who are above the rules.
	And so you will feel that you have no authority if you actually have to obey the rules.
	Because rules only have to be obeyed by people with no authority.
	So if your child says, Dad, keep your word...
	Then you're going to feel like your child is humiliating you.
	Because only losers and powerless people have to follow rules.
	Like when you're in school. Don't use force to get what you want.
	Teachers can hit you. Or teachers use force to get their pay through taxes.
	To get their sums off.
	I have to say something.
	You know, when you stopped me from laughing about something terrible, which it was, it really...
	It really made me think.
	And I was thinking very critically, if you were to sit around, I'm not going to guess your age, maybe a little older than I am, and sit around with a bunch of contemporaries your age who are all black,
	and if you, maybe a little younger, and if you said something about how to discipline your children, and Or how you were disciplined and you didn't say that corporal punishment happened or you'd say something like you had timeouts or you had things.
	They would laugh. They would all laugh and say, holy crap, man, my mother beat the crap out of me.
	And they'd laugh about it as my family did, as they joked about, holy crap, I have not looked at it like this.
	And why? Why do we do it like this?
	Oh, you know what?
	I have a lot of thinking to do about this.
	Why do you think you do it?
	I don't know.
	I never thought about it until today.
	Holy crap. I think I do it because it's...
	I don't know. Maybe as a coping mechanism?
	God darn it, I don't know.
	I'm going to have to honestly say I don't know now.
	Well, I can tell you why. It's your parents.
	Your parents want you to believe that it was cute and fun and necessary and good.
	Because your parents don't want to be criticized.
	So your parents implant these alter egos in your head that whenever anything comes up that might criticize them, they head it off.
	They block it. They turn it into you.
	You're trying to do this with me.
	Like every time you talk about the abuse you suffered, you'll hear it when you listen back.
	You start laughing like it's kind of cute and funny.
	that's your parents that's why I have to interrupt people who do that because I want to talk to you not your parents okay okay I'm gonna have to think about that that's a So what you just said is absolutely my mother.
	And one of the reasons why I can't talk to her, because she is in total denial about the things she does.
	And the biggest thing now is that my sister is basically a clone of her.
	A single mother of three children and living, you know, maybe right under the poverty line, maybe a little higher, with a lot of help from me, or it used to be until they just rejected it.
	And I am afraid of where they're going because one of them, he's 817 now.
	He's the smartest. He's smarter than I am.
	His IQ has to be super duper high.
	And he's not going anywhere.
	He's not pointing in any direction.
	And I just feel like that's just, that's a catastrophe.
	It's a tragedy.
	And so... I try to help.
	But whenever I get involved, they just shoo me away.
	And that's why.
	I could say much more, but I hope you get the idea of what I'm trying to say.
	Right. Right.
	Because your parents don't want to apologize for the wrongs that they have done, and therefore they need you to praise the wrongs as if they were right.
	That way there's nothing to apologize for.
	And this is how the virus replicates generationally.
	Well, you know, and that's interesting you say that, because I said to my mother, look, you had a lot, you had some failures, but so have I. I've had a lot, but I, you know, I recognize them and I try to actually learn from them and improve them.
	And her response to me was verbatim, I didn't have any failures, I made a few mistakes.
	Right, which makes you the intolerant one, like you can't tolerate any mistakes.
	Absolutely. Absolutely.
	Oh, my goodness. Look, I have taken a lot of your time.
	Look, I'm going to ask you that I can call back again because the child's not on its way yet.
	And I still think that you offer a lot of help, honestly.
	Oh, my brother.
	From another mother, you are welcome anytime on the show.
	You know that. You are welcome anytime.
	It was very good talking to you, and I really have had a lot to think about right now.
	I'm very glad, and I appreciate you calling in.
	This is very, very important stuff.
	And I hope that this, you know, if you're black or anybody who's been hit in this kind of way, who's been abused in this kind of way, it's tough.
	But, you know, talk about it.
	Share this video. Share the truth about spanking.
	Share this information. We can take this on, but we're going to need to stick together.
	Thanks, Bob. It's always a great pleasure.
	Thank you very much.
	Goodbye.
	All right, up next we have Matthew.
	Matthew wrote in and said, I'm a student at my local community college.
	The campus is primarily Asian and Hispanic with a sizable number of foreign students of those demographics.
	Most of those students are nice enough and I get along with them.
	However, they're a shocking number that simply frustrate me by refusing to speak English in public or even refrain from doing so in classroom discussions around me.
	My mother also has co-workers that frustrate me by speaking Spanish around her and excluding her from their conversations.
	Should these people not, or at the very least, do us native-born people the courtesy of speaking English and treating us with that common courtesy?
	That's from Matthew. Hey Matthew, how you doing?
	Good, Steph. How are you doing?
	I'm well. I'm well, thank you.
	I mean, look, I understand your frustration.
	I understand what's going on.
	But tell me a little bit more about...
	What you think all this means?
	So, I'll give you two examples.
	One from my experience and one that my mom was expressing to me recently.
	So, I'm in a chemistry class and in my laboratory group there's several foreign students who, you know, they speak decent English, but there's two of them and one of me.
	And, you know, in a chemistry lab, You kind of, well, not kind of, definitely need to be able to work with the other people, you know, collaborate to be able to learn anything.
	And the majority of the time they're not speaking English unless I directly ask them a question or, you know, I'm trying to communicate with them.
	Otherwise they're just speaking, it's probably Chinese or something.
	But, you know, it makes it really difficult for me because it's hindering my ability to learn.
	And, you know, they're in America and, you know, most people here speak English, so would it be wrong for me to feel that, you know, they should do me the courtesy of speaking, you know, kind of the native language here?
	What are your thoughts on that?
	Oh, it's annoying as hell.
	You know, I'm with you as far as that goes.
	Language is one of these things.
	I mean, I'm up here in Canada.
	And Canada, of course, has a French province.
	And I think it was under Trudeau the Elder that French became sort of a second official language.
	Everything had to be done in French.
	And what did this mean? Well, this meant that, of course, you had to be fluent in French in order to get to any degree of prominence.
	In politics. And what that means is that there's a huge advantage to people who speak French.
	It's the same thing I've heard from listeners and people in California.
	And they say, well, I'd love to get a job.
	My kid's a teenager.
	He'd love to go and work at the local McDonald's.
	But he can't. And why can't he?
	Most employers want you to be able to speak Spanish around here.
	Right. So it's more likely that someone who speaks Spanish is going to speak English than vice versa, right?
	So it gives an advantage to Hispanics in the job market, particularly if there's a lot of Spanish and few English, right?
	Because English speakers are around, then you want somebody who's more fluent in In Spanish, right?
	So, it is annoying because language is more than just, well, you know, it's different ways of saying the same things.
	There are concepts really hard to express in another language.
	Like, talk to somebody who's trying to translate Murray Rothbard into Mandarin.
	It's really tough because some of the words don't really exist.
	It's not like we just all have the same ideas, we just use different words to describe them.
	No, no, no. Language.
	I mean, there's a reason why the left is all into language policing, right?
	There's a reason why they want to replace statues, and they want to replace words, and they want to replace free speech, because they want to replace people.
	They want to replace populations.
	That's why statues are being replaced.
	So language really matters.
	American Western culture has not had much luck rooting itself in other countries.
	Why? Because countries which don't speak English have a very tough time gaining access to the concepts that were developed in English.
	There's a reason why French politics is different from Italian politics.
	It's different from British politics.
	Well, there used to be until the EU overrode them all with general soft totalitarianism.
	But language matters.
	And the amount of inefficiency introduced into a society by people speaking more than one language is insane.
	Like, literally, it is insane how expensive.
	It is. How inefficient it is.
	How many mistakes, how many misunderstandings, how much printing everything in two languages or three languages, how much you're at an emergency in a hospital and you need a phone that gives you access to 80,000 different translators because you can't figure out what's going on.
	When you're trying to do deals, when you're trying to understand legal documents, people say, well, I thought I understood, but I don't.
	I got it to translate, but it didn't work.
	It is ridiculously inefficient.
	I mean, look at Japan.
	They have a big problem with non- Japanese language is there or China?
	No, they don't. So this Tower of Babel, you know, like, you know the old story.
	People were building to the stars, building up to God himself.
	And how did God destroy them?
	Well, he had them speak different languages and everything fell apart.
	Languages are tribal.
	Languages are philosophical.
	Languages, to some degree, are biological, because flexibility and facility in a language aids in wooing.
	There's a reason why Cyrano de Bergerac is a very famous play, where the smart guy who's with the big nose ends up wooing on behalf of the dumb guy with a big sword.
	I don't think that's even an analogy.
	I think that's actually really just a big sword.
	And so... Oh, maybe it's an analogy, come to think of it.
	So, it is crazy inefficient.
	Now, how was this inefficiency dealt with before?
	Well, the inefficiency was dealt with before when people came into America from Europe in the 19th century.
	It was the big sort of age of migration.
	How was it dealt with? Well, there was no government support for other languages.
	There was no welfare state. So if you wanted, this is something Gene Simmons has said at some point, if you wanted to taste all of the fruits of the free market in America, you had to learn English.
	And the way it generally went is there'd be some Polish people, they'd learn a bit of English, they'd come over to stay someplace in New York, and where would they immediately go?
	Oh, I'm sorry, is that a question?
	Yeah, sorry, it's a surprise participation moment.
	The Polish, I'm honestly not sure.
	Well, they would go to little Poland town or little, you know, that's where they would go.
	Oh, right. They'd stick with people who speak similar languages.
	Yeah, of course. I mean, there's little Chinatown, there's little Italy, there's little Greek town, there's, you know, whatever, right?
	Yeah, Chinatown, San Francisco, you know?
	Yeah, yeah. So the first generation...
	Would have trouble with English, and they would generally cluster around their own people.
	But that would be a very limited place.
	And of course, their children would go to English-speaking schools, right?
	And what would happen is they would then learn their home language, right?
	They would learn Mandarin or whatever, and then they would learn English.
	And they would be fluent in English because they would grow up speaking it.
	And then the second generation would peel out of Chinatown and take their place among the general population.
	I mean, that's the way that it used to work.
	And this is what used to be called assimilation.
	Assimilation isn't that complicated.
	Assimilation simply requires you don't have too many immigrants at the same time, because otherwise they just create...
	An entire province of their own home country, and they can all trade among themselves, and there's no need to assimilate.
	So you have a small number of immigrants, and sure, they can cluster all they want, first generation, but second generation wants to break out of that tiny town, that little Chinatown.
	They're sick and tired of stepping over all the vegetables on the sidewalk.
	Don't they have fridges? Why do they need to store everything on the sidewalk?
	And why is everything so steamy?
	They open their pores. I guess they have good skin.
	So... The second generation heads out into the marketplace natively speaking English, and because they natively speak English, they have access to all the great libraries of Western thought and they can read the newspaper and everyone has somewhat similar views on certain things.
	They can understand the concepts.
	But that requires relatively low levels of immigration, and it requires no welfare state, and it requires no official government support for second languages.
	That's how assimilation works.
	Assimilation has something to do and is quite intimately bound up with whatever language you speak.
	Because clearly, if people don't speak your language, they're not assimilating.
	That is not going to happen.
	You get, you know, 100,000 Somalis in Minnesota all living, not having to participate in the larger economy because they're living in Section 8 housing with welfare payments.
	How could you possibly assimilate with people you don't even speak the same language?
	Assimilation, absolutely impossible.
	Language balkanizes or it unites.
	And language, balkanization, is facilitated by the welfare state.
	Because the welfare state means that you can survive perfectly well in the society without learning the dominant language.
	You know, if somebody sends me to Japan and gives me $3,000 a month in cash and benefits, and I sit right there in a community with 100,000 other British-speaking Europeans...
	Am I going to spend a whole lot of time learning Japanese?
	Why? Especially if my IQ is in the 70s.
	But anyway, right? So this, I completely understand how this is annoying and frustrating and feels kind of Disrespectful, but the problem is not...
	It's easy to get annoyed at people who have the wrong incentives, right?
	It's easy to get annoyed at single moms saying, well, blah, blah, blah, right?
	But the incentives are so skewed up in modern society.
	We are in an incentive, upside-down, black-and-white vortex world of infinite impossibility.
	Incentives are completely reversed.
	You know, like when you were a kid, do you ever have this thing?
	My daughter says this sometimes, Dad, wouldn't it be great?
	If candy was good for you, well, sure, it would be great if candy were good for you, because it sure is tasty, if memory serves.
	But no, I mean, you have to develop slightly more subtle tastes.
	I mean, we like candy because we like sugar.
	We like sugar because it's concentrated energy and because it drew us to chase honey and fruit, which we needed in particular fruit, particularly in northern climates.
	And so... Our incentives are so weird, you can get mad at the Asians and the Hispanics for not speaking English, and I understand that, but getting upset at people who are merely rationally responding to really weird incentives, it's like calling workers in some Stalin-era Soviet factory lazy.
	They're not lazy. They just get paid the same whether they work or not.
	And working is annoying compared to like playing cards or whatever, right?
	And so when the incentives are so screwed up, you have to look at the incentives rather than get mad at the individuals, if that makes sense.
	Yeah, well, that's definitely a good point.
	I suppose to be frustrated at them is really...
	Because like you said, they're just, you know, people respond to incentives, right?
	And let me tell you something, too.
	I genuinely believe this, and I think it's not even as far away as people think.
	But there are a lot of Hispanics, they really feel they're getting good chunks of Mexico back relatively soon.
	There's a kind of demographic coup that's going on around the border, California, other places, and so on.
	They're like, well, we're going to go there, we're going to have lots of kids, and we're going to take the land back that the gringos stole from us.
	So, in a sense, I think that there's not an insubstantial number of Hispanics who are like, yeah, we're just waiting out this corrupt and decadent Roman Empire to collapse so we can seize back all the land and more that was taken from us in the past.
	So why on earth would they bother learning English if they feel that it's about to become more Mexico?
	I don't know. It's just one possibility.
	Probably not so much with the East Asians, though.
	It's kind of ridiculous, isn't it?
	Because they came here from Mexico for a reason.
	I mean, you know, if they want California to be Mexico again, Why are they in California?
	Because, you know, it's the United States.
	Well, of course, but I mean, that implies a long-term deferral of gratification in high IQ population and a deep knowledge of English political philosophy that they may not be entirely in possession of, all of them anyway.
	Yeah, and I mean, I suppose it...
	Like you said earlier, it feels disrespectful.
	If I move to Japan, I would assume that most people, and I'll admit I've only ever been in the United States, I haven't had the pleasure to travel the world yet in my life, but I would assume if you go to Japan or any country with its own unique language that the people there have the expectation that you can speak Japanese and be able to Assimilate to Japanese culture.
	And I feel like less and less in the United States that that's the thing.
	And also that more and more of the people coming here want to, you know, transform the culture to be more like their own instead of to become Americans.
	And that's sad because, you know, America's Western culture is one of the greatest things, you know, ever created in the world.
	And just the sheer decline of that right now due to this uncontrolled migration and the loss of our borders and our culture and our language as a result of that, it's depressing and it's sad.
	And it makes me feel less inclined to want to welcome new people to this country when Certainly not all, but it seems like a large number of people act in that way, you know?
	Right, right. Yeah, so, excuse me, I would say it's easy, again, easy to get mad at people, but look at the policies, because you can't fix the people without fixing the policies.
	You can't rail against communist workers and make them productive.
	You just have to work at trying to fix the incentives.
	Most people respond, well, everyone responds to incentives.
	And, um... You can't fix communism with nagging and resentment and blaming individuals.
	So again, don't focus so much on the individuals.
	Focus more on the general principles.
	But thanks. That's a very interesting and good call.
	I'm going to move on to the next caller, and hopefully we'll both be speaking English.
	All right. Thanks. Thanks, man.
	Alright, up next we have Leon.
	Leon wrote in and said, For the last six years, I have been part of something called the furry fandom.
	Despite knowing many of its flaws, failures, and oddities, I find myself increasingly drawn into this strange world.
	What is the best way to participate in this fandom without having it take over my life?
	That's from Leon. Well, hey Leon, how are you doing tonight?
	I'm doing alright, besides a little bit of back pain.
	Oh. Well, I'm sorry to hear.
	Well, I shouldn't say I'm sorry to hear because I'm still curious to hear about it.
	But I will say this. If you want to come for a cure for any kind of obsession with furries, this is the right channel because I'm really not very furry.
	A little bit on the nose, a tiny bit on the chest, fairly substantial on the armpits.
	So tell me a little bit more about the furry phenomenon, please.
	Okay, so in a general overview of things, it's people who are interested in animals that have anthropomorphic characteristics, so animals with human characteristics.
	So, you know, going all the way back through history, you know, you've got doing the whole Egyptian thing, how they have heads of animals.
	And let's see here, throughout history, what else, what else, what else?
	Well, you know, just plenty of things.
	Obviously, when it comes time to explaining something, I tend to forget it.
	But, yeah.
	Sorry. That was a little bit more rapid than I was expecting.
	All right. So, interested in animals with human characteristics.
	Yes. So, that's the overall...
	Yeah, so, well, it depends.
	There's like five stages of furry.
	So you've got things from like just having cat ears to, you know, a little bit of the facial characteristics to all the way is, you know, all the way on the far right side, there's a little infographic that says, oh, you furry bastard, you.
	Or, yeah, something like that. Anyway, so like that, it just depends overall.
	Sorry. Like I said, I'm feeling a little bit anxious in the moment here.
	No, no, no. It's probably better to ask you questions.
	What are the activities or the processes of the fandom?
	Sure. So most of all, it's highly, highly visual.
	So anything that is visually appealing in that terms, in terms of aesthetics, in terms of Presentation.
	If they have those characteristics about them having, you know, animals with human-like characteristics, then it's going to appeal to the fandom.
	So, for example, in 2016, Russia announced their World Cup mascot, Zabivaka, which was a wolf.
	And so with them, you know, it was a cute little thing just to highlight, you know, oh, you know, we're having the World Cup in 2018, so just kind of work out for that.
	With that, like mere hours after it started, people started making, you know, just tons and tons of art of this character and just really fawning over it.
	Of course, the first thing that was made is gay porn because about two thirds of this fandom are either gay or bisexual.
	It's really, really interesting and really weird too.
	So, for some reason, this fandom has- Oh, that's the weird part.
	Okay. I'm just wondering what we got to the weird part.
	All right. Sorry. Yeah.
	So, I'm going to just say it here.
	A large part of this fandom is degenerate, I would say.
	And I use that word because, well, I've been online and go through boards.
	If you know Poll or 8chan or anything like that.
	So, I've just learned to use hyperbolic language.
	And are you gay or bisexual?
	No. I was actually going to talk about that as well.
	For a while there, for like a year or two, I thought I could be.
	Just because everything that's in and around that you experience is that.
	That's like the norm.
	Here in the regular world, everything is heteronormative for, I guess, using the SJW term.
	Yeah, everything's heteronormative.
	It's just how society works.
	But in the fandom, I would say things almost always is always just sexually open and just available and things along those lines.
	Right. So people are very interested in representations of furry animals.
	Are there collections of the furry animals, quote, in the flesh or simulations of them?
	Yes, so in all forms that you can think of.
	So, for example, there's a group of furry or type of furry that are fursuiters.
	Basically, they make... These suits are, you know, representations of their character that they want to be or have or represent, and they can put them on.
	They're usually pretty darn heavy, like 20 pounds to wear and hot as can be.
	I have only worn one for about 10 minutes once.
	But for some reason, these people get the sort of like energy.
	They get excited. They're more friendly.
	It like opens them up to act in a way that they wouldn't normally.
	And so for them...
	The way they express it, that just seems to help them cope in terms of a social manner.
	So that's that aspect.
	There's other types of art where people who, you know, just straight up just drawn a character.
	You know, you can commission somebody to draw your character.
	What else? Yeah, it just depends on whatever format you want it to be in.
	And how much of this stuff is sexual?
	Um, so in that survey that I sent you here, um, let me go pull that up.
	It was on adjectivespecies.com.
	Um, so I would say, what did they say?
	It was something like 80 or 90% is influential in, in the fandom.
	So it's, it's pretty influential.
	So it's, yeah.
	So 80 to 90% of the activity is sexually related.
	Not 80 or 90 percent.
	I would say 80 to 90 percent of the fandom say that it has a major influence in their participation in the fandom.
	I think that's a distinction without a difference if I just want to break it down.
	Fair enough, fair enough. A significant majority, an overwhelming majority of the activity is not exclusively but significantly sexual regarding this stuff, right?
	That is correct, yes.
	And a large portion of this fandom is actually pretty darn young.
	I'd say 23, they said, was the average age and 19 is where it peaks the most.
	So from what I'm thinking here is that it's in large, it's just people who haven't or are just new in terms of...
	Very minimally experienced in terms of sexuality.
	So they're kind of expressing it that way.
	Well, human sexuality. Yeah.
	So you don't mind, Leon, if we get fairly frank here, right?
	I mean, I don't want to pull too many punches.
	So people want to fuck giant bunnies.
	Oh, yes. Okay.
	What other things do they want to have sex with that are furry and non-human?
	So, it does depend. There are a lot of niches and stuff.
	So, according to the demographics as well, there's about, what did they say, 16, 19% are straight up zoo file.
	So, people who want to fuck dogs, basically.
	Wait, okay, hang on a second here.
	Sorry, I know I'm getting up.
	No, no, no, that's fine, that's fine.
	I just, I just, okay.
	So, not real dogs.
	No, real dogs, some people do do that and some dogs don't even stand a chance.
	Oh man, okay.
	So ZooFile, they want to have sex with dogs?
	Yes, because for some reason they're attracted to that in that regard.
	I'm going to go ahead and ask, though it may mean I never sleep again.
	What else do they want to have sex with?
	Okay, good. Leon? Um...
	Well, being online and visiting, you know, like 4chan, 8chan, things like that, I have seen some things.
	There have been people who have done snakes.
	There's a guy, some Iranian guy.
	I don't even know how I saw this video.
	But it was a guy, he was eating out a chicken.
	And I was just like, how in the world do you people eat?
	I don't know. That is the wrong recipe!
	Absolutely. That is not how you eat chicken, people!
	Exactly. A little shake and bake!
	Come on! Was it Harvey Weinstein?
	I must know. No, no.
	Don't answer that. Don't answer that.
	I don't even want to. Actually, I thought I wanted to know.
	I really don't. All right. So, yeah.
	So, that's the major problem.
	So, we've got this whole fandom full of weirdos and just crazies and whatnot.
	I mean, yeah, there's a lot of good parts to it.
	Like, there are artists here. There's one in particular that I know.
	Okay. No, no. Hang on. I'm sorry.
	Sorry. Right after we get to the snakebangers, I can't get myself from that to the good part, all right?
	Sorry, yes. All right.
	And I'm desperately trying not to work out the physics of this stuff because I don't want to.
	Do not want! Do not want!
	Okay, so we got 20% of these who were zoophiles.
	That was the word, right? Yes, zoophilia.
	Does it get better from here?
	It does. Okay, so that's the bottom of the heap, so to speak.
	That is like the people you do not want sweeping the deck on Noah's Ark, right?
	Or you can end up with some very, very fucking strange species down the road.
	Okay, so what is the layer above this Dantian hell of zoophile?
	What comes after that? Then you've got people who are like baby furs.
	You've heard of that? So people who want to regress and then, you know, be in a diaper, play in a pen, have basic, simple problems like that.
	But wait, what does that have to do with being, babies aren't furry.
	Oh no, I know. Basically, I consider furry stuff, if you want to describe it, it's like an expansion pack for life or a DLC for life.
	So if you have a thing, so for example, Nazi furs, for example, that is a thing.
	So people who are Nazis...
	Wait, wait, so this just means, furs here just means fetish, right?
	To a large degree, some people do consider it just their fetish.
	So the baby furs or baby fetish, they're the people who want to regress to, you know, adult diapers and being taken care of and so on.
	And then you said there were Nazi furs?
	Yeah, there's Nazi furs, there's Antifa furs.
	Basically, if there's something in the real world, there's probably going to be a furry variety of it.
	Free domain radio furries.
	Anyway, don't, no, don't, I don't even want to know.
	Okay. Nope. So...
	And this is largely sexual stuff, right?
	Yes, that's digging at the deep bottom heap of the pool.
	Sorry for, yeah, giving you that shock value here.
	No, no, listen, I mean, this is stretching the rubber of the idea that nothing human is alien to me, but, you know...
	I'm going to stretch myself out and see where we land.
	All right. And so what goes up from there?
	There are people who collect stuffed animals without raping them?
	Is that a category? Is that a thing?
	Yeah, there's plushophiles.
	That's what they're called. No, no, but here we're back to the having sex with the teddy bear thing, right?
	There are people who just collect stuff without fucking it.
	That's what I want to know. I know people who collect ceramic mugs, but you're not afraid to take a cup of coffee from them.
	Like, there's people who collect stuff without fucking it.
	You know, there aren't people who roll up their STEM collections and bang that shit, right?
	Lots of people collect matchbooks.
	That doesn't mean they're trying to start a fire with the fappening.
	I mean, this is... People do this!
	They collect lots of stuff.
	You know, there are hoarders who don't fuck everything that they collect.
	You know, like it's like on a paper cut from the rolled up magazine.
	I guess that's back to Playboy.
	Okay, I just wanted to, you know, so there are people who collect stuff.
	I'm pretty sure of that. People who collect stuff without actually attempting to copulate it with it.
	Otherwise, knife collectors are in for a rather, well, lop-offish kind of day.
	Absolutely. So yes, there are people who just collect a ton of, you know, stuffed animals, dolls.
	Like, for example, Zootopia that came out a year or two ago.
	People just fell in love with Nick or Judy, obviously, that it would be the case.
	But yeah, they love those characters.
	They love how they interact. They love the design of the characters.
	Like, how would, you know...
	An anthropomorphic rabbit, how would they design that suit?
	How would they interact? Some people get more into the war of it.
	Oh, not a suit. Sorry, I was thinking Judy Hopp's particular police suit, like how the design of that would work.
	Oh, so they work on how the actual suit would work on a human-ish bunny?
	Yes. Yeah, because, you know, as civilization crumbles around us, it's really important to know that people are working on the important stuff.
	Okay, sorry. Decadence, Stefan, decadence.
	Yeah, decadent, degenerate.
	I think we're in the Ds.
	Okay. Yeah, sorry.
	So what else? So, I would say more towards the happier and brighter side of things, there are people who use their fursonas, their anthropomorphic, well, their projection of themselves to improve their lives.
	So, for example, my character...
	Which is Leon, which is all this, you know, calling myself Leon here is actually not my real name, but- No, I can understand that.
	Yeah. So Leon is an anthropomorphic North American river otter.
	So the reason- Oh, come on.
	No, really? Yeah, absolutely.
	Okay, I just want you to tell me you're not trolling me, right?
	I'm totally willing to have the conversation.
	I very much promise you I'm not trolling you.
	Okay, North American river otter.
	River otter, yes. I like how specific that is.
	Oh, yeah. Because, I mean, a South American river otter, that'd be fucking nuts.
	Oh, yeah. Yeah, you wouldn't want to be that.
	Okay. How did you narrow this down to the four descriptor, the four-word descriptor?
	So, for me, the reason I decided to settle with North American River Otter is after being in the Phantom a couple of years, I've been in it officially about six years, but, you know, I've had callbacks to previous parts of my life where it's had kind of an influence.
	But specifically-- - Wait, I don't know what that means. - Oh, what I'm saying is I've noticed in my life that there were times or things that kind of led me to this fandom overall.
	Okay, yeah, well, we'll get to some of those.
	Yeah, we'll get about that later. Okay, so how did you, again, how did you get to this very, very specific semi-aquatic mammal?
	So I wanted to commission a particular artist who...
	Was known for being at least a little bit more thoughtful when you go to commission your fursona.
	Yeah, he doesn't build it around the orifice first.
	Okay, got it. Exactly, exactly.
	So for that, he always expressed the idea that a fursona could be the projection of what you would like to optimally be.
	Or it could also be an idealization of something or just some sort of manifestation.
	So for me, I wanted to make this particular Otter character that would be the ideal me.
	So in terms of how I interact with others, how I would carry on my morals and values.
	Basically, in the end, when I look at it every day, I wanted to be able to remember Where I would like to get in life.
	I'm sorry to be interrupting you, and I'm not trying to be difficult.
	I'm just trying to sort of follow this, that you wanted, you know, some people, John Galt, Howard Rourke, Jesus, could be any number of moral ideals that they wish to emulate, that they wish to manifest, that they wish to...
	Aim at. Aim towards.
	So for you, the moral ideal that you wanted to manifest was the North American River Order.
	Those are the ethics that you wanted to manifest as your best self in interacting with people?
	Not so much the ethics.
	I wanted it a visual representation of what I would like to...
	To think about. So, I would talk about how I would want to be, and he would try his best to portray that.
	Why the otter? What's your history with the otter?
	Okay. So, yeah. So, otters in particular have had an influence on my life.
	There was an author, not by the name of Brian Jakes.
	He wrote the Red Wall series, if you know that.
	No. Um, so back in, in Liverpool, I think from, let's see here where he wrote from like 87, I want to say onwards, he wrote a ton of books about Redwall, which were all these anthropomorphic characters that lived around an abbey.
	And, you know, I was teaching English kids stories about bravery, about things like that.
	And so the otters in that particular series had a lot of influence on me that they were always the most interesting sort of characters that they, they were the brave ones.
	They were the warriors. They were, um, Just fun, you know, and being able to describe what they did with their tails, because, you know, pretty powerful, rudder-like tails.
	I always thought, oh, that's really cool.
	I always wish I had a tail, or at least experience having a tail.
	So with that...
	And how old were you...
	Sorry to interrupt, Leon, but how old were you when you read these books?
	I started at about nine, and then just from there...
	Just onward. And when did you read the last set?
	The last time I listened to...
	No, no. I mean, sorry, how old were you when you kind of had plowed your way through the series?
	Oh, probably...
	Well, he was doing it every couple of years until 2008.
	So just until about 18.
	Right. Yeah, see, a lot of teenagers, when they think about getting tailed, they don't actually...
	Well, you know what I mean.
	All right. Okay. So, were you reading these?
	Sorry, were you reading these?
	I get an image or a sense, maybe incorrect completely, of course, but we have a sense or an image of isolation that you are reading these books on your own and not discussing them with people.
	Is that right? Oh yeah, I didn't have anybody really to talk with.
	You know, I had my family and I always had fun with them in that context, but I didn't, you know, when it came to bringing something up that I read, I didn't get a chance to talk with them in that regard.
	Wait, wait, wait. What do you mean you didn't get a chance?
	Rather, I would share it and the feedback, I have three sisters, the feedback I would get was not what they were interested in.
	So I couldn't really talk.
	But why weren't they interested in something because you're interested in it?
	Probably because they're selfish.
	I don't know. Well, no.
	See, they're your family.
	So the I don't know, as you know, never cuts it here.
	If you don't know things about your family, you don't know enough to pick up the phone and call me.
	So why was this common?
	You said you have three sisters. Was this common in your family as a whole to not be interested in things that you were interested in?
	Yeah. I mean, there's one time a couple of years ago when I decided, you know what, I'm going to come out, so to speak, as a furry to my parents.
	And the only thing my dad ever said was weird.
	And that was it. That was all he said about it.
	And every time I try and bring it up, you know, they just kind of want to put it away because it's weird.
	And so in my mind, it's definitely weird.
	And that's why I kind of want to get rid of it from my mind.
	I want to run it up against the...
	Sorry, the Molly test or the Stefan's test or whatever.
	Yeah, the cheese grater of rational empiricism and see if it holds firm, right?
	Exactly. And if it doesn't, I at least will have the...
	The reasoning to get rid of it properly, or at least get to the root cause of why I'm like this, or why I enjoy this thing, even though, you know, it screams in the face of all objects to even enjoy this sort of thing.
	Yeah, okay, we know that. Okay, so was there ever a time, Leon, in your childhood when people were interested in something because you were interested in it and took the time to figure out what was motivating you about it?
	Um... Maybe with video games, but that was just with friends.
	No, no, no. I mean within your family.
	Oh, within my family.
	No. Right, so neglect.
	They weren't ever, yeah. Neglect.
	You understand? Yeah, that hurt.
	Okay, so tell me more about what that means for you.
	Just being neglected like that?
	Yeah.
	Why?
	Why?
	I mean, I understand, I think, but I just if you can verbalize it, why the word has such emotional impact for you?
	Sometimes I feel like it's because I'm smarter than them or, you know, like I want to talk about something and they wouldn't even pay attention to it because, you know, they're.
	I'm trying to think, you know, my oldest sister spent her time...
	Well, I remember her mostly being depressed and kind of doing her own thing in that regard.
	My sister, my second sister, she's a year younger than the oldest.
	I don't know. She was interested in boys, kind of doing her own thing.
	And my sister, who's a year younger than me, who was my best friend pretty much until she decided she was my mom, or wanted to be my mom, was...
	I don't know. She went her own way in that regard.
	Now, when you said she decided she wanted to be my mom, there was a peculiar kind of energy in the word mom, so let's talk about that.
	Peculiar doesn't mean odd, it just means intense.
	Something of note, yeah. Yeah, yeah.
	From what I can tell, my mom, she's good about putting effort into things like when it comes time to, you know, I'm LDS, putting in, when she's asked to give a talk or give a lesson or anything like that, she's out for at least a week and a half beforehand.
	She's got all the notes out, got all, you know, just everything put out.
	Because she wants it to go right.
	Because I think it might just be performance time for her.
	Not necessarily, well, yeah, it's probably performance time.
	So to see her put that effort into something and not into me is, well, it's disheartening.
	And I know at some point, or at least I'd like to convince myself that she did that with me, hopefully.
	I'm probably just That's probably not the case, but I want to believe that.
	So you're a smart guy, right, Leon?
	I can be very direct with you?
	Yeah, please do. Okay. The otters are your family.
	Mm-hmm. Say that again?
	The otters are your family.
	Yes. Oh, so this is perfect.
	Okay, so there's a book in particular in the Redwall series called The Tagger Rung.
	It's about this otter character who was taken out...
	Well, when he was born, his father took him out to the stream to just go swim and do otter things with his dad, have a good time with his dad.
	When... This pack of vermin, so ferrets, weasel, stoats, all that, they had a prophecy that there would be this otter or this character out at this particular location.
	So what they did is they ended up killing the father right then and there in the stream and taking him and training him to be something called the Tagaron, which was this warrior character renowned basically throughout all the vermin tribes.
	But for him, he always knew he was different.
	He never, you know, he never murdered anyone.
	He never did anything wrong in that regard.
	And he always felt that he was different from all these vermin that were raising him.
	And so his story is a journey of, you know, he had a dream that he needed to get back to where he was at Redwall Abbey.
	And For some particular reason, that resonated with me.
	It's about his journey back there, and he meets friends along the way and has fun and proves his abilities.
	What I mean by this is that one of the amazing things about fiction and why it has this amazing power to generate empathy in people is fiction has a kind of intimacy that a lot of people's waking relationships don't have.
	You know, the one that pops into my mind is, it's a silly example, but I think it's illustrative, that in The Hobbit, there is mention that Smorg wakes up, the big dragon wakes up, from a dream where a fighter was menacing him with a very sharp sword, right? Now, of course, Smorg never tells anyone that.
	And so, how do we know?
	We don't know. If someone had a dream and never told you about it, you would not know about that dream.
	So, in... In novels, we can drift into people's minds in a way that we never have to doubt them.
	Like if the narrator says, he was thinking about an orange spinning in space.
	We know that that's true.
	Now, there is the unreliable narrator and so on, but let's put that aside.
	Let's not relieve the case in children's movies, right?
	Or children's stories. So when a narrator says, this character is thinking of an orange spinning in space...
	We know that that's true, that that's actually what the person is thinking of.
	However, if we go to someone in our waking life and we say, what are you thinking of?
	And they say, I was thinking of an orange spinning in space.
	Well, they may be telling the truth.
	They may not be. There's an old joke.
	I can't remember what it was made from Mad Magazine from years ago or whatever, but it went something like this.
	I remembered it always because it's one of these questions.
	Honesty is the best policy, unless you're thinking about Raquel Welsh in a bikini and your wife asks you what you're thinking about.
	Exactly. In which case you say, I'm thinking about how much my life has been enriched by knowing you.
	Whatever, right? Yeah, just whatever answer.
	So there's an honesty and an emotional availability and a connection and an authenticity.
	In novels that's not recreatable very easily in real life.
	You have to really trust people, know that they're going to be honest with you, and then you can have that.
	So you had emotional connection to these characters for many years that you did not have with your family.
	So what I meant to say was, when your artists are your family, it meant that you bonded with the artists in the book more than you did with your family.
	Oh, very much so. I'd say through his writing, I probably got closer to Brian Jakes than with my dad.
	Of course. And they had a relationship with you because you're looking forward to the books, you're surprised, you're curious, you imagine what you do in that scenario.
	I mean, the world draws you in.
	The world of fantasy draws you in in the same way that people dying of thirst in the desert really imagine that they're underwater.
	They really imagine that they're surrounded by water.
	We invent an excess in the absence of an available resource.
	And so, if you don't have intimacy in your life, then this is a great place to get it.
	But here's the thing.
	Here's the challenge, right?
	That which serves desperate needs in childhood Rarely serves productive needs in adulthood.
	Yes. Right? Mm-hmm.
	So, I mean, I remember being on vacation many years ago, and I was on my own in a tropical paradise.
	I went for two weeks. It was lovely.
	I brought all the books that I wanted to read, and it was great.
	And I went on an expedition.
	It was like, you know, one of these day trips and so on.
	Like, we swam.
	We water skied.
	We rode on burrows through the jungle and so on.
	And there were these two women who were chatting with everyone and inviting everyone over to their cabana for a party afterwards.
	And they didn't know anyone.
	They didn't vet these people.
	It's like, yeah, come on over.
	We'll give you alcohol. We don't know who the hell you are, but come get drunk around us.
	What could go wrong? Yeah.
	So clearly, this was something that, you know, my guess, if I had to guess, would be that these two women both came from abusive households where, if other people were over, the abuse didn't happen. So how did they cope with that as children?
	They invited other children over to their house all the time because it's what kept them safe.
	However, as adults, it was no longer keeping them safe.
	In fact, quite the opposite. It was probably putting them in considerable danger over time.
	You know, Mr.
	Goodbar kind of stuff. So that which productively serves desperation in childhood rarely serves progress in adulthood.
	So the interesting thing is I've often thought about this.
	You know how ducks bond with whatever they see, right?
	Yeah. Yeah. You put out an orange balloon in front of the ducks when they bond with the orange balloon, they'll follow the orange balloon around, they bond with whoever.
	Now, if you bond with an orange balloon and you're a duck, do you look down and say, there's something wrong with me?
	I don't look like my mom.
	No, they're not capable of it.
	Well, I don't know. I don't know if they know that they're different from their mom.
	They can certainly discern colors, at least I assume they can.
	So, if you bonded with an otter family through fiction, Aren't you going to look down at yourself and at some level say, I don't look right?
	And that's what I've been doing.
	Right. You've been trying to join your family.
	Yeah, and I can't connect to that family in the way that I'd like in real life.
	You mean the Otter family? Oh, I mean with my real family in the way that I connect with this Otter family.
	Well, no, that's not the issue.
	The issue isn't that you can't connect with your family.
	The issue is that you haven't processed that you can't connect with your family.
	Which is why when I use the word neglect, you got emotional.
	Yeah, that would be the case.
	You know, almost anything can happen to us short of death.
	If we process it, we can leave it behind.
	But I don't think that you have emotionally processed your isolation as a child.
	I probably haven't. It makes sense logically.
	It's got to have that impact emotionally.
	Well, what happened when I used the word neglect and you got emotional?
	What was happening for you?
	It's pulling up moments in my life where I would try and share things that I'm interested in and talk and didn't get that feedback that I was expecting and hoping.
	And what were the emotions associated with other people's indifference to that which made you passionate?
	I think I'm wrong.
	Maybe I'm wrong in my thoughts.
	Maybe, yeah, I'm going about it the wrong way.
	Maybe I'm just being stupid, you know?
	No. You're too smart for that crap.
	Yeah. Okay, so don't give me the correct answer.
	Give me the honest answer. Pretend I'm the writer who knows your thoughts and I'm writing it down, all right?
	So Leon, when people were indifferent or contemptuous to what made you passionate and made you feel alive and made you care about the world, what were the feelings that happened to you?
	Anger?
	There we are. Okay.
	Yes. Go on.
	Yes. So, I'd want to be angry and I'd want to do things, but the way I was brought up, you know, you don't express it that way.
	You don't express it?
	Yeah. Not that way.
	You just don't express it, right?
	Mm-hmm. And just bottle it up.
	We'll get you and Bob together to find a happy middle, right?
	Yeah. Okay, so anger.
	Because what we care about, what we're passionate about is how we connect to people.
	Have you ever been trapped at a party or a dinner party with somebody who's telling you the most unbelievably boring stuff?
	I experience that as a form of aggression.
	I want to slap people like that, silly.
	Literally, it is a punchable moment for me.
	Like, fuck off with boring me.
	Life's too short and I don't like the fact that you're putting me in a position where I have to be rude because you're a boring douchebag.
	Not you, obviously. This is sort of...
	I hate being bored by people.
	I hate being bored by people.
	It doesn't mean that people can't ever be boring around me.
	I'm sometimes boring. Every now and then, like, I'll be chatting with my family and my friends or whatever and I'll say...
	You know what? I'm just hearing myself.
	This is about the most boring thing I've ever said in my life.
	I'm going to have to, you know, if I'm just working through something or whatever and it's not particularly communicable, I'm just, I can see people's eyes glazing over and I can't blame them.
	Or if I'm chatting with my daughter and explaining something at too abstract a level, usually she'll say, but sometimes, right, she doesn't.
	And so I... But I dislike people who...
	Like, it's obviously boring.
	It didn't just become boring.
	Like, it's obviously boring. Like, people telling me about the shit their cats did last week.
	Oh, yeah. Like, fuck off.
	You're boring. You're killing me.
	And you're putting me in a position where I have to be rude.
	And it's a stupid trap because you're boring.
	I'm bored. I'm going to tell you you're boring.
	I'm going to tell you I'm bored.
	And then you get to be all offended and upset and happy and he's on here.
	Yeah. It's a bullshit manipulation and I think it's terrible.
	So the fact that when you're passionate about something, when you care about something, People don't tune in to watch me do my taxes, right?
	It's not really that interesting.
	It's raging. It's not interesting.
	And so when I was a kid, I went through this whole series of mad passions about things.
	From when I was very little, writing and drawing and singing.
	And I went through, I loved particular music.
	Believe it or not, the first modern music I was ever really exposed to was that a friend of mine's Grandparents.
	I was staying there. My brother had gone to England.
	My mother had gone to Germany.
	And I was stuck in this apartment with this old couple.
	She was sick. And we would go occasionally to a cottage of theirs.
	And they put in an eight-track of Engelbert Humperdinck, of all people.
	Loved the guy. Great stuff.
	Never heard of it. I'll have to look it up sometime.
	Yeah, it's a great singer. I mean, anybody who can go by that stage name, that's a whole nutsack of confidence right there.
	That's like Catalonia-style beanbags.
	So I went through various passions.
	I went through UFOs, psychic phenomenon.
	I got into Pink Floyd's The Wall.
	Love that. I got into Dungeons& Dragons.
	I got into fantasy novels.
	I wrote a bunch of them. I got into science fiction, read and wrote a bunch of it.
	I got into objectivism, philosophy.
	I've been a guy who is constantly pulled by 20,000 different ferrets of fascination at any given moment, or certainly in sequence.
	And for the most part, when I would share my passions, I had friends who I shared passions with, and I had great friends who I kept for many decades.
	We played Dungeons& Dragons together.
	But when it came to my family...
	You know, it was all helicopter, no landing pad.
	There was no place to go, no real place to connect.
	Yeah, I didn't get much chance to speak when I grew up.
	You know, I would always, you know, my sisters, my mom would always talk.
	My dad was kind of around and he would do stuff, but, and he, maybe make a comment every once in a while, but I always got the impression that, or rather, let's see, Harry, you didn't, I don't think you like the word impression, but I didn't get to speak.
	And I hated that.
	I hated that I couldn't share anything that I was interested in.
	So why, given that you were raised around women who are not known to be entirely strangers to chatterboxing-ness, did you feel that your father maybe should have elbowed a little bit of feminine polysyllables aside to give you a chance to turn a phrase or two?
	Yes. I actually recently, in the last year or two, tried specifically connecting with my father because I knew that I, at least innately, knew that I wasn't getting that connection I needed with him.
	So I tried doing stuff that he was interested in, you know, like watching movies from the 60s, 70s, kind of 80s era, because, you know, those are pretty good movies in and of themselves.
	But it was something that he was interested in.
	You know, he loves Swiss Family Robinson.
	And I always think, I think it's kind of interesting, but I try and connect with him through movies, doing things that he listened to, like listen to Tom Petty or Rush.
	Like for my dad, Rush is his go-to.
	Like he would listen to that every day if he could.
	Ah, falsetto, a bit screaming.
	I love it, too. Yeah.
	And, you know, that's pretty heady stuff or, like, thoughtful stuff, or at least he likes to go on about that part, too.
	But, yeah, so I try and connect with him in that regard, but we weren't finding that happy medium or that thing that we were both connected to or interested in.
	Well, no, because you don't know why he's interested in Rush.
	You know that he's interested in Rush, but you don't know why.
	Yeah. Yeah. And knowing that the why is where the connection is, not the interest.
	Why do you think he's interested in Rush?
	Let's see here.
	Well, he went on his mission from 1977 to 79.
	So he was in high school during the 70s.
	So that would be influencing his life.
	And he always... I think I'm coming to the wrong conclusion about it.
	What do you think? Well, Rush is a philosophical band, right?
	I mean, the drummer, you know, and it's funny because I have a sort of running gag about drummers in this show, and recently on the What Price for Sex video, where I made another joke at the expense of drummers, someone pointed out, and entirely rightly so, they said, well, if, was it Neil Peart, the drummer for Rush, hadn't been into objectivism, your show wouldn't exist.
	Yes. And that's, you know, fairly true.
	It would exist in a different form, perhaps.
	Well, certainly I don't think it's good a form, or as positive or productive a form.
	So I just wanted to apologize to drummers.
	Drummers, except for Neil Peart.
	I have to put that little asterisk in now for the running gag.
	But yeah, they are a philosophical band.
	And... They are a very 70s band.
	I mean, particularly their early stuff.
	I mean, not quite as bad as yes, but definitely, you know, 70s.
	How early is 2112?
	Yeah, I can't remember exactly, but it's 70s, you know, 80 or whatever, right?
	And it's just three guys who are all fantastic at what they do.
	I mean, I normally want to hit people who do drum solos with their own drumsticks until they lie gasping on the floor.
	But I've seen Rush a couple of times live, and I actually enjoy Neil Peart's drum solos.
	He is an exquisite musician, as Geddy Lee is an amazing singer and a great bass player, a decent keyboardist, and Alex Lifeson is a great guitarist.
	And, you know, the fact that they went to my high school is not the end of the world, but it's somewhat interesting.
	So what that means is when you get stuck at a particular music level, it's because there's a passionate bubble of emotional energy at that point in your life that...
	You can't bring forward.
	You have to go back to get your energy because the energy hasn't followed you into adulthood.
	Does that make sense? That's what nostalgia is.
	Nostalgia is, my energy is in the past, and so the past is drawing me backwards.
	I can't draw the energy into the present.
	I got stuck somewhere.
	A large portion of our weekly family dinners and stuff that we have, we do tend to reminisce quite a lot.
	Our whole family.
	We'll remember stuff like For example, we always bring up, you know, when we didn't really have TV, we had a TV, but we didn't have TV. So, when we were living out in the boonies, you know, my sisters were my friends.
	So, we would...
	We had this old refrigerator box that we cut out a hole in and we made it look like a TV and we had to act out each and every different channel that we would switch to.
	And on a dime, you know, we'd be giving the news report or trying to do a drama or anything like that from the limited amount of TV we had seen.
	And so for me, that's a very, that's a fun time when I was creative and I've lost that creativity to some degree.
	Right. That's something I wish I could recover more so.
	Right. So, as far as connection goes, if people don't care about your passions, they don't care about you.
	Because what are you except your passions?
	Now, you could say, well, you are your thoughts and so on, but the relationship between passion and thought is, well, it's complex, it's interwoven and so on.
	And we only generally think about that which we're passionate about.
	And so, our passions and our thoughts are kind of a big bundle.
	But for most of us, I think, it's the passions that come first.
	Like, when I first started reading philosophy, I was like, holy crap.
	Oh, my God, this is incredible.
	This is it. This is going to save me from going mad.
	And I don't mean that in...
	This is not hyperbole.
	Like, this is like...
	The ship that comes by when you're going to drown.
	A lot of my extended family members are kind of crazy.
	And not just like eccentric, like flat out nuts.
	And we are a high octane intellectual family on both sides.
	And given that you're going to be driving fast at 200 miles an hour around some pretty vicious curves, you better know how to steer well.
	And philosophy is the only thing that can do that.
	And so it was life-saving for me.
	In fact, better than life-saving, because I'd rather be dead than crazy.
	I've seen what crazy is like, and it's worse than death.
	This is what zombies are.
	It is worse than death.
	You end up getting controlled by it.
	Right. So, what are we except for passions?
	If people don't care about what we care about, they don't care about us, because who are we except what we care about?
	That sounds like a koan or something, but it's actually very, very significant.
	If people reject your passions, they're rejecting you.
	If people want you around, but they don't want to care about what you care about, they're using you.
	That artist who gave me the commission, I became friends with him more or less afterwards, trying to talk with him, just trying to find things to talk with him about.
	And his main interest is he's interested about my When I give him something like a link to something that I think is interesting, he doesn't care unless I tell him why it's meaningful to me.
	And he won't look up any links whatsoever.
	And that's quite a blow.
	I'm actually on a three-month hiatus with him right now just to determine whether I should even talk with him anymore.
	And I've already done this once before with him for a couple of months where we just had a falling out because he's a pretty big SJW himself.
	And me, you know, I decided to go my own way.
	And like for the last year, I guess it's a good time to admit to you.
	I've probably listened to about 700 hours of your content of just everything from, you know, a good chunk from the beginning.
	And, you know, within the last year, probably most of your videos.
	And so for some reason, well, I know why probably it appeals to me because it seems to be explaining the world.
	It seems to be making sense in that regard.
	Right. Well, I appreciate that.
	I mean, that's wonderful to hear.
	And I'm very glad that the show has helped you, or has held your interest for that long.
	And here's the thing, too.
	So, like, you and I have been chatting for, what, 45 minutes or so, right?
	Yeah. And I hope that you understand that I'm very, very interested in what you're passionate about.
	And I don't have a particular agenda here.
	I'm genuinely curious and want to understand this phenomenon.
	It's not as rare as some people think.
	And all sexuality is fundamentally fascistic in a way.
	Because every culture has different courtships, rituals, and different ways of sexual market value and different methodologies for sexual success and so on.
	So we imprint and these sorts of sexual imprintings are very powerful and should not be underestimated among people.
	But we've been talking for 45 minutes and you've known your family for decades.
	How far am I coming along in terms of quality conversations with your family?
	Well, you're definitely beating them all out.
	The fact that you haven't verbally said it, but I know you thought, tell me more.
	Because like you said at one point, that is the best thing that you can tell someone, is tell me more.
	And I've always tried my best, personally.
	When I talk with someone, and I feel like, you know, in LDS culture, there's, you know, gifts of the spirit, or just like, you know, a religious thing.
	My gift is, I can talk to anybody about anything.
	So when somebody goes on, you know, I talked to a girl for about for a half hour about making cheese, because I thought, you know, that's really interesting.
	And just finding out all the little minutiae of things, because I really wanted to show her that I'm that I'm interested in it.
	And not just because it's connected to her, but it was just in and of its own right.
	I love learning. I love finding out about everything.
	In life. And I know that I don't, I don't know a lot.
	And so let's go back from the abstractions here a little bit and get back to, to your family, Leon.
	So if you have, I don't know, have you read, let me, let me ask you this.
	I don't know if you've read the book, Real Time Relationships.
	I have.
	I read it at work, so it's probably not as well remembered.
	I'm not going to ask you for a book review or anything, but in it I talk about this sort of Simon the Boxer repetition thing that happens, right?
	Because here's my concern.
	You were ignored, neglected as a child, in my opinion.
	And thus you bonded with a fictional family of otters.
	And my concern is that you're bonding with a fictional family of otters and you're wanting to be a North American river otter.
	Is now causing the same kind of alienation and disconnection as an adult that you experienced as a child.
	Because you have a secret life and a secret self that you're afraid to tell people about.
	And if you tell them about it, they're going to think you're crazy maybe.
	Like your dad thinks you're weird.
	Right.
	So that which allowed you to maintain the capacity for bonding and connection as a child is now interfering with your capacity to bond and connect as an adult.
	And frankly, is drawing you into some pretty weird circles as you talked about.
	I feel like a lot of people in this fandom are very fundamentally broken, particularly, well, more so than even average population, because of all the idea of inclusivity, the idea of acceptance that's just the standard within this fandom.
	Well, with some exceptions, obviously, they kind of seem to hate the normal.
	But I feel that's probably the major reason why I'm drawn in so much is because, you know, you just put the weird out on the table.
	But you're still in an environment of people you can't connect with, Leon.
	You haven't escaped your childhood.
	I haven't. You're replicating or what served you as a child, what fed you as a child is eating you as an adult.
	And this is very common.
	The survival strategies as children destroy us as adults or have that capacity.
	Because you're now in a situation where you don't want to bond with the people who are fucking snakes.
	Yeah. And you can't bond with people who aren't because of this subculture, right?
	Yes. And so you're in a void again.
	You've escaped nothing as yet.
	And by setting yourself up in a situation...
	Where you're less likely to get married, less likely to become a father, less likely to deliver grandchildren unto your parents, you're also able to act out your aggression against them by denying them the continuation of their line.
	In particular, as the sole male heir.
	I did, yeah, at one point I did threaten my father with, oh, you know, maybe I'll just go...
	Cut off my balls and, you know, just actually do the whole gay thing just to deny him that opportunity.
	No, but this is happening anyway.
	Oh, yeah, fair enough.
	You know, nobody wants to bang the river otter balls.
	No. I mean, and raise a child with them, right?
	Mm-hmm. You know, nobody wants the everyday is Halloween dad, right?
	Yeah. So, as far as, you know, in particular men, right, the continuation of the male line, right?
	You have the power to end the name of your father.
	Yeah, and that is present on my mind every day.
	This is what this does, though, by bonding with the River Otter family of fantasy.
	You are aiming to punish your father because you're angry at your father, but you can't talk about it with your father because you can't have an honest conversation with your father, so you have to act out the anger in ways that, in a way, it's even worse than being gay, so to speak, because if you were gay, you could have a relationship, you could adopt, there could be grandkids around of some kind or another, right?
	But in this situation...
	It's excusable asexuality, if that makes sense.
	So what I feel I should focus on then is how do I get past this?
	How do I readopt myself into the real world and not alienate myself from everything and not have this neglect in my life?
	Well, you have to accept that you were neglected, that you were unjustly treated and ignored as a child, and you're angry about it.
	Of course you are, because you deserved infinitely better.
	You deserved somebody who was going to be interested in what you cared about.
	Listen, Leon, I don't have to tell you this.
	You know how it works. Children It's the ABC of childhood.
	The ABC stands for accidental biological cage.
	Your kids are trapped with you, and as a child you are trapped with your parents.
	You didn't choose them, and you can't get away.
	Now, if your parents, if you love your parents and they treat you well and so on, great.
	If you're not happy, if they're not treating you well, Particularly, neglect is one of the most distorting forms of abuse.
	And we know that, or at least I know that, because studies seem to show, and I think personal experience bears this out, Leon, that children who are neglected will provoke anger in the parents just to get a response.
	They prefer abuse to neglect, you know?
	Yep. Yeah, because you get some sort of reaction from them, and you feel, even if it's in a bad sense, you can feel.
	They care, even if they're angry.
	Even if the best I can do is offer myself up as a poison container for my parents, that's what I'll do, because then at least I have some value to them.
	If they enjoy hitting me, then they'll feed me and keep me around.
	Yeah, but why did they neglect me?
	You know, why... I did everything right.
	I was very competent and capable.
	No, no, no. No.
	Sorry, Mr. Don Corleone has to step in and slap you upside the head, Leon.
	Don't give me the self-pity I did everything right.
	You're not supposed to do anything right to get your parents' attention.
	It's not a fucking job you're supposed to earn.
	You're not supposed to woo them.
	It's their goddamn job to pay attention to you.
	It's their job to make your childhood good and reasonable and rational and decent and intimate.
	It's their job to teach you that you have value and to take interest in what you...
	It's their job. It is not your job, ever, to earn your parents' attention.
	So don't give me this pity story, which is your parents' thing, that you did, oh, you should have done things better.
	No, that's not your job.
	And don't do any of this. Like, you know, you're so angry at your father.
	You're talking about castrating yourself in front of him.
	You get that that's pretty angry, right?
	Very much so. And I'm not getting that response that I want.
	Yeah. I'm not getting the response I want.
	So you're escalating and you're escalating hoping to get some sort of response.
	And I don't know how to address it or say it in a way that's going to get them to respond.
	I've got two wonderful words for you.
	Well, actually, no, four.
	And they're two sides of the same coin.
	Number one, be honest.
	Number two, give up.
	Right? So number one, I always encourage people, you got a problem with your parents, got a problem with anyone, you care about them, they're important to you, sit down and be honest with them.
	Ask questions. Be honest.
	And number two, give up.
	And what I mean by that is, stop trying to run both sides of the relationship.
	Yeah, sunk cost fallacy.
	No. Or not fallacy.
	No, no, forget that.
	Don't abstract on me, bro.
	Sorry, sorry. Stay in your deep otter brain.
	Hard to do, hard to do. Just stay right there.
	Don't abstract me, because you're very good at abstractions, and I need you to be balls deep in this, right?
	Okay. Do not try and run.
	Do you ever have this thing where you, well, I say this, and he says that, and I say this, and he says, you go back and forth in your brain with these conversations.
	Oh, plenty. Right.
	That's you trying to run both sides of the conversation.
	Do not try to run both sides of the conversation.
	When you try to run both sides of the conversation, you're not present.
	You're not there. Because you're running back and forth between the two brains.
	Right. You're trying to manage everything.
	And the moment you start managing people, you can't be honest with them.
	The moment you try to control people, you can't be authentic with them.
	I am not trying to control what you say.
	I'm giving you my feedback and telling you what I like I don't like, but I'm not trying to manipulate you into doing or saying anything.
	I can be honest with you and direct with you.
	I'm not trying to control you.
	I don't want to control you.
	And I'm interested in what you think and feel.
	Which is why I keep drawing you back from the abstractions.
	That's why I had to pull you back from describing to me the story in the Otter novel.
	Right? So, number one, be honest.
	And cutting my balls off, like threatening, that's not being honest.
	That's being manipulative. That's acting out the rage rather than saying I'm angry.
	And give up.
	Give up trying to control what they say.
	Just be honest and see what happens.
	You know, I can't teach my daughter how to play tennis by running back and forth and playing tennis with myself.
	I have to hit the ball to her and see how she hits it back and give her some advice.
	Do not try ever to run both sides of the conversation.
	That is a self-defensive maneuver that evacuates any potential connection.
	When you run both sides of the conversation, you are reintroducing and re-experiencing the neglect that you suffered from so enormously as a child.
	Yeah.
	I want them to actually respond to me.
	I... And you have to deal with the possibility, the very real, distinct possibility, Leon, that they won't.
	That they can't or they won't.
	It doesn't really matter whether they can't or won't.
	If you don't get it, you have to deal with that pain.
	Yeah. Right. Because here's the thing.
	When you're a kid, your parents must give you attention because they're keeping you at home.
	As I've said before, you've heard me say this before on the show, I'm not responsible for feeding some guy who lives under a bridge in Mumbai.
	I'm not responsible for feeding him.
	But if I take that guy and I lock him in my basement, I'm damn well responsible for feeding him.
	If I don't feed the guy living under a bridge in Mumbai and he dies, I'm sorry about it, but I'm not guilty of murder.
	But if I lock a guy in my basement and I don't feed him and he starves to death, what am I guilty of?
	Murder. Exactly, direct murder.
	So... Parents, by keeping the child in the house, well, you must feed the child.
	You can't take a dog home from the pet store and not feed it.
	Well, you can, but you're wrong.
	You're criminal. Because you have said, by taking the dog into your house, you have said, I am now responsible for the feeding of this dog.
	Everybody else, back off. I got it.
	If you don't take the dog home from the pet store, the pet store is responsible for feeding it.
	You take that dog home, he's yours to feed.
	Your responsibility. It's the same thing with attention.
	You bring that child home from the hospital, you bring that baby home from the hospital.
	You are now responsible for giving that child attention.
	That's your job. You must give them attention.
	In the same way you must give them food and shelter and medicine.
	You must pay attention to that child.
	You must be interested in that child.
	It's not an option. And they failed.
	Catastrophically. In that core responsibility.
	There I am thinking that I got a zero on my ACE test.
	Well, I was going to bring that up, but I figured you would.
	I know. Yeah, I want to bring everything up pretty much.
	Yeah, even though I said I got a zero on my ACE test, I didn't think about it in this aspect.
	Neglect is subtle. Neglect is subtle and it's hard to see.
	There's no bruises. There's no broken teeth.
	No broken nose.
	Right? There's no tender ass that you can't sit on for a week.
	It's subtle. No family or love or support.
	No family love or support on the ACE score.
	That's a big one.
	So, I have a girlfriend.
	I've had a girlfriend for, in about two days, it'll be two months.
	And I've been very hesitant the whole time.
	You know, I've been unconsciously, I haven't been telling her, but I've been kind of running her through some tests to make sure that she's interested.
	Like, she'll put in the effort to be interested in something that I'm interested in.
	Or at least look a word up if she doesn't know what it means.
	And I hope I'm not manipulating her.
	I really hope I'm not projecting this problem forward onto her.
	Because I really want this to go well.
	And she's been great. She's gone along well.
	I'd argue that she is, I guess, a little bland at times.
	Because she doesn't really seem to have her own personality.
	But... And it could just be because of compliance.
	I really hope it's not the case.
	We seem to be getting along well, but I definitely have that feeling in the back of my mind.
	But you've got to manage her a lot, right?
	You've got to keep a lot of secret thoughts locked up.
	Oh yeah, I'm not myself completely when I'm around her.
	No, no. Don't give me the completely.
	That's a false standard.
	I don't even know what it means to be completely yourself.
	But you have to hide a lot.
	I do. You have to be a non-otter guy.
	The only thing she's ever really seen is...
	I have a mouse pad right here.
	And it's of a...
	I think she's an alligator gal.
	She's got a one-piece swimming suit on.
	She's sitting on a swing in a pond.
	And she's just kind of looking off very happy, very peaceful.
	And for me, that's lovely.
	I like how peaceful she looks.
	I like how...
	Well, she's fit.
	She's healthy. And...
	She has a big old tail, as you can imagine, as an alligator.
	Hey, look, you're getting more tail.
	But yeah, I really like this, and that's the only thing she's seen.
	She hasn't commented on it, or at least when I highlighted it to her, I was like, oh, this is kind of cute.
	I definitely put my defenses up of putting minimal comments in there.
	She didn't really give any negative response to it, but yeah, I don't think she really thought about it.
	Right. Well, I think it would be something good to tidy up.
	I mean, if this is a conversation that starts the healing process, the closure process, right?
	I mean, you're hanging on to the otters because you don't want to deal with the reason why the otters were necessary.
	Mm-hmm. They are the sucking chest wound, you band-aid, you think you take it off, you bleed out, right?
	But you don't need your family of origin for that emotional sustenance anymore.
	You've outgrown that. This substitute family to give you the capacity to retain the ability to bond, to connect, the substitute, you don't need that.
	You can find your own companions now.
	And the artists have served their purpose.
	You understand? You had a fantasy family, but hanging on for them too long is not good.
	Right? Then they turn from something that maintains your capacity to bond to something that keeps bonding from ever happening.
	It retains your capacity to love, to bond with fictional characters, but if you then end up showing up on a date in an otter suit, that is going to somewhat interfere with your capacity to move forward with the relationship, right?
	Mm-hmm. Absolutely.
	So after I confront my family and address them and pour my heart out and basically get their response, and I hope it's a positive one, but I doubt it.
	And I've come over and I'm by myself.
	We're too from there. Because I know I do a good job.
	I'm sorry, you're still using the language that I have to interview with.
	Of abstract? Dang it.
	I'm sorry. No, no, listen. It's funny, you know, because if you listen to 700 shows, you're like, oh, I'm going to nail this.
	Exactly, yeah. It's frustrating as hell, right?
	It's like, oh, I know. I remember when I was in theater school, we would, you know, these people would get up and do a scene and we'd see what they did wrong and be like, I can't wait to get up and do this scene perfectly.
	And then we'd get up and make the same mistakes.
	Anyway, so I understand.
	Yeah. You say, if it goes badly when I talk to my family honestly and I'm alone, see, you're already alone.
	Yeah. This is the chance to not be alone.
	This will not reveal solitude.
	This will cure solitude one way or the other.
	Either you connect with your family, in which case you can start to undo the otter stuff, or it'll start to undo of its own accord.
	Or, you can't connect with your family despite repeated strugglings, in which case you can start to build, you can mourn the loss of connection with your family, you can start to build relationships to other people without the need for the fantasy otters, right?
	Yes. I'll have to go outside more.
	I'm sorry? I said I'll have to go outside more.
	Right.
	Yeah.
	Yeah, I think that hits the core problem here.
	And if you can find a good therapist, I've got a show on how to find a good therapist, at least in my opinion.
	So you can find that at fdrpodcast.com.
	If you can find a good therapist, that will be helpful because detaching from The fictional art of family and attaching to a human family is going to be a challenging process.
	It's going to involve a lot of pain.
	You know, when I was a kid, a teenager, and I've said this before on the show, but when I was a teenager and I was reading everything that Ayn Rand had ever put out, even down to her newsletters, even down to her praise of stamp collecting, my lord.
	My mom said to me, she said, I hated Ayn Rand because I felt she had become your mom.
	I had to also attach to a fantasy character.
	In this case, it was Ayn Rand.
	I remember being devastated.
	Literally used that word with my girlfriend at the time.
	Devastated. I felt desolate.
	When Nathaniel Brandon's Judgment Day came out and I was reading about what happened actually behind the scenes with objectivism.
	Devastated. And yet it was liberating, of course, because it meant I could stop being a follower and stop being a leader.
	So I understand the thirst to connect with whatever you can admire.
	And you admired these otters. You cared about these otters.
	They meant something to you, and I respect that.
	That is a great thing that you did.
	It's a great thing that you did, because the alternative...
	To fantasy food is starving to death is ending up as a nihilist or a sadist or a masochist or somebody who fucks snakes and posts videos of it on the internet.
	Right? So you retain the capacity to have this kind of conversation.
	I love and respect and honor the otters for that.
	No, seriously. I'm not kidding.
	I love and respect the otters for what that writer was able to do.
	And if he's alive, you should contact him.
	He died. And he died when I was on my mission.
	I was, I seem to have this habit of killing off writers when I start getting interested in them.
	So Brian Jakes passed away.
	And then Terry Pratchett died.
	That's not a great thing to say to a writer, but I know what you mean.
	I know. I know what you mean. Yeah, Terry Pratchett died on me too.
	Short of scenario guy, right?
	Oh, no. He was the one that did the Discworld series.
	Oh, yes. That's right. I remember.
	I read those. I listened to all those, yeah.
	In about a month, I listened to all those when I was working a Skeeter job, basically.
	I'd run parts to a factory.
	Anyway, yeah. Who was the short of Shannera guy?
	It's not Brandon Simerson.
	Good kind? Yeah. I was a big one for the Chronicles of Thomas Covenant.
	But anyway, that's a story for another time, I'm sure.
	Terry Brooks. There we go.
	There we go. Yep. Stephen R.R. Donaldson, I think was his name.
	Anyway, so I would say that if we've got some idea of what happened, the grieving process of letting go of the otter family while retaining the capacity to bond, recognizing the level of desperation that you had, which I absolutely, hugely respect.
	You know, this is why the sort of nothing human is alien to me, snake fucking guy can call in and we'll figure that one out too.
	Yeah. Seriously, if you're out there, drop the snake, pick up the phone.
	So if we have some idea of the origin or the evolution of this, and I think as we look at it now, we have a framework in which it makes some sense, right?
	And so once we have a framework, then it's not a fetish.
	If you eat food that you hate because you're starving, it doesn't mean your tastes have changed.
	It means the need is extreme.
	If you bonded with otters, it doesn't make you crazy.
	It makes you desperate to survive.
	And I respect that you did.
	I respect that you called.
	And I expect that you can move on.
	Yeah, I do feel like I'm capable of doing that.
	That I will be able to move on and Honestly, do something that I've always wanted to do is voice acting and narration.
	You have a very nice voice.
	I was going to mention that as well.
	Oh, yeah, yeah. I've always loved that.
	I've had an interest in voice acting since, well, my mom's friend gave me a copy of Diablo, the first one, and the guy who does the voice of Deckard Cain and also does The Warrior.
	That's the two and a half D&D kind of game, right?
	Yeah. Kind of.
	It's a lie.
	Well, it's like a... Oh, bother.
	Of course, when it comes time to explain that, I can't remember.
	No, I played Diablo III very briefly, actually, when I was down getting my neck cut open for surgery.
	I remember playing in the hotel room while I was recovering.
	So, no, I think I know it.
	So there was a good voice acting in that.
	Well, here's a thought. Why don't you contact whoever's got the rights for these books and offer to do an audiobook version of them?
	Yeah. Well, they already have all the, like, a full crew that did the audiobook version.
	Really good. Oh, is that right?
	Okay. Wow. It's a bigger thing than maybe.
	I'll pick it up. You know, my daughter's always looking for new stuff to read, so.
	Oh, yeah. I love those, and I definitely recommend them to anybody.
	All right. Well, I'm going to move on to the next caller, but, man, how did the conversation go for you?
	I mean, I know it was a difficult topic to bring up, but how did it work out?
	Well, I'm surprised because I knew, well, I thought I'd have more control in the beginning, but I ended up just blurring and giving the worst of the worst, basically, of what I could get out first, and then we kind of grew into a real conversation from there.
	So, yeah, and I'm grateful for the opportunity for this, and I'm going to try and, you know, once this comes out, I'll be reflecting on it for a while, so that way I can Have a good, proper understanding and address my family and probably mourn the loss and work towards recovery.
	Excellent. Like I said, I had three months where I went with a talk therapist.
	It was an LDS talk therapist.
	So the reason I went with him is because it was free.
	And I was like, yeah, church is going to pay for it.
	As bad as that sounds, I wish I could have afforded it on my own, but it's expensive.
	But with him, I was able to talk about a few things.
	Not everything that I wanted, but at least some things.
	But I do feel like there was a perspective, since he's, you know, an LDS talk therapist, he didn't quite, you know, there's a little bit of a framework that you have to kind of have an understanding of to talk within.
	So I didn't feel completely expressive as I could have.
	Right. Well, I think you did a great job, and I appreciate the gift that you gave to the world in talking so frankly about a difficult subject.
	It was great. So thanks very much.
	Let us know how it goes. Let's do the next caller.
	Sounds great. Thank you.
	Right up next we have Shiloh.
	She wrote in and said, My fiancé and I are expecting our first child.
	How can we instill a sound moral compass in our child to prevent rebelliousness later on?
	And would front-loading equality education help ensure this?
	That's from Shiloh.
	Oh, hey Shiloh, how you doing?
	I'm great, thanks. How are you?
	I'm very well, thank you for calling in.
	How far along are you, my dear?
	I'm 11 weeks today, actually.
	Wow. Do you feel?
	What do you feel? What do you get? Anything?
	It's been, overall, a very mild pregnancy.
	I swear I've been feeling it, though, for the past couple days, as weird as that sounds.
	But, yeah, there's something in there.
	Yeah, I remember my wife, she felt like a little butterfly in her belly.
	Yeah, that's pretty much exactly how it feels, yeah.
	I remember seeing that first, waka waka waka, that little heartbeat, that little first thing.
	Oh, absolutely great. Absolutely great.
	So, congratulations.
	Was it tough to get pregnant?
	Thank you. You've just been trying for a while, or did it pretty much easy enough?
	Um, we had been trying but not trying, you know, or I guess not trying but not preventing for about a year.
	And there were several months where I thought this is definitely going to be it.
	And then, you know, it just wasn't.
	So I actually thought that we were going to have problems, but it ended up not being the case.
	Good. Yeah, because I think it's after about a year, they start to sort of say, okay, well, maybe we can look at something different or whatever.
	So good for you.
	Congratulations. And do you have any idea of gender?
	Are you going to try and figure that out or what?
	Supposedly, through the non-invasive prenatal testing, which is done at the end of the first trimester, they do some kind of blood test, and apparently they have the ability to find out if there's the presence of Y chromosomes.
	So I'm going to find out if I can have that done, and we should find out then in a couple weeks.
	In fact, I think my appointment for that is next week, actually.
	Well, again, exciting.
	Good stuff. Are you happy with the father you chose?
	Oh, my God. He's the best.
	I love him so much. We're getting married in three months.
	All right. Good.
	Good. All right. Fantastic. How long have you guys been together?
	We've been dating for about a year and four months, but we've known each other since junior high.
	Ah, okay, good, good.
	No, that's great. Good for you, good for you.
	There's nothing bad to say about any of this, so...
	All right. Sound moral compass in her child.
	So let me ask you this, Shiloh.
	How is the moral compass that you want to install in your child different than the one that was installed in you?
	Well... As you can tell from my ACE questionnaire, I did have a score of five, and my childhood was very questionable.
	Everything was fine when my mom was still in the picture, but when I was about six or seven, she and my father separated and eventually divorced.
	After the divorce, my dad just I don't know if you want to say he went off his rocker or I like to say that his true colors came out.
	I would describe my father as a predator.
	Honestly, if we're just being straight up about it.
	I was abused for things like writing my name on the top of my homework.
	If my H or my L in my name just barely dipped below the line I was writing it on, I would get slapped for it or whatever.
	Just really stupid things.
	I never understood why.
	Because I got great grades.
	In fact, I graduated in the top 10 of my class in high school.
	I got a scholarship to a Division I school.
	So I never had any problems excelling.
	So the abuse to me was just really...
	I just never understood why he felt the need to do that.
	Through the counseling I've gone through over the years, I realized that some people just like to be in control.
	Some people are just sociopaths.
	I'm obviously not a doctor, but if I had to guess what my dad's deal is, I'd say he's probably a narcissist.
	So I don't know.
	I just I feel like I've come to have a sound moral compass myself through learning what not to do and how not to be with people.
	Yeah.
	Thank you.
	I guess that's really all I can say when it comes to that.
	What was your mom's deal?
	I mean, you said they got divorced and all of that.
	Did she ever say why she would get married to and have kids with such a guy?
	He was way different when they first started dating, actually.
	I'll try to keep it brief, but my mom was very vulnerable when she first met my dad.
	My dad was already married.
	He had been married for 17 years, I think, to some woman who I don't know.
	I've never met her. But my dad is a community college professor, and my mom was a student there.
	She was a single mom to my sister, who obviously my sister and I have different dads.
	And they started Talking and dating.
	And she kind of had a hunch and was like, are you married?
	And he said no.
	My dad moved in with my mom.
	My mom actually ended up meeting my dad's wife.
	And for some reason, she still stuck around.
	I think that's just because she was vulnerable at the time.
	Hmm. I'm just going to have to call you the lady of the lamp for all of the white knighting you're doing for your mom.
	It's very nice.
	It's very nice and very bad.
	Yeah, I mean, I'm still the kid.
	She found out he was married and had been lying to her, right?
	Yeah, and I mean, I'm still the kid in the situation, so I take both sides.
	Don't squid ink me, bro.
	Okay, okay. She found out your father was married and had been lying to her.
	Yes. She wasn't pregnant at this point, right?
	Right. Why did she stick around?
	Don't give me this vulnerable word that doesn't answer anything.
	You might as well say magic. Well, the answer to that question, I don't know.
	Okay, then good.
	Then just say, I don't know, rather than she was vulnerable.
	Well, that part she told me specifically.
	Oh, she said she was vulnerable.
	Yes. As to why she stayed, I don't know.
	I've never actually asked her that question.
	Might be worth it. You know, certain amounts of personality are genetic, and this is why it's important to get the truth about those around us, particularly those we share genetics with.
	I agree. When you lie to people, you throw them off the scent.
	Yeah. Of what they may end up having to deal with.
	So, you know, like if, let's just say your family told you that, oh yeah, everyone smokes and everyone lives to be 100, you're going to feel more comfortable smoking.
	But if they're lying and it turns out everyone smoked and died at 40, that's kind of information you need to have, right?
	It tells you what kind of risks you can expose yourself to.
	So I had a sense that my family had some significant challenges with mental health, so I knew when I got to philosophy, I really, really needed it.
	So this is why it's important to get these facts.
	Not to humiliate your mom, but if you're having a child, she's going to be the grandmom.
	You need to know if she's got self-knowledge, right?
	If you're going to act differently, right?
	Right. Mm-hmm.
	You don't need self-knowledge if you're just reproducing the past.
	But progress is self-knowledge because it means we're not doing the same as the past, right?
	Mm-hmm. Well, she's married to a great guy now.
	They've been together for like, my God, like 17 years.
	And, you know, there's no issues there.
	I think she really genuinely learned her lesson.
	Well, no. If her lesson was communicating to you that she was just vulnerable, that's not learning a lesson, is it?
	Oh, yeah, in that sense, yeah, absolutely.
	I was talking about getting involved with like really sketchy people.
	Right. So, sorry, and I'm sorry if you said this and I missed it, Shiloh, do you have siblings?
	I have a half-sister.
	She's 12 years older than me.
	She's my mom, so we have different dads.
	And I have a half-brother who's eight on my dad's side.
	So your mom was involved with a guy before you came along?
	Yes. Right, 12 years or so.
	Mm-hmm. And who was that guy?
	I have no idea.
	Sorry, what now? I have no idea.
	It was my sister's dad.
	That's all I know. Why wouldn't you know?
	I think my mom maybe just doesn't want to talk about it.
	Well, no, but she needs to know.
	Well, she knows.
	She knows who he is.
	I've just never asked because I don't really care that much.
	You don't care who the father of your sister is?
	Not really. Why?
	Growing up, I think the age difference between my sister and I... I never felt really close to her.
	And also, when my mom left, my sister was, I think she was 18, and so she had the option of who she wanted to go live with.
	And she chose to stay with my dad because my dad didn't make her pay any rent.
	And so by her staying at home, my dad kind of pitted us against each other.
	He would always send me into her room and snoop through her stuff.
	Like, I wasn't a very good little sister.
	So our relationship has always been strained.
	Things that I've apologized to her for, but she just can't get over, even though I never really did anything super terrible.
	So you're not close to her?
	No. Okay, so it's not so much that you don't care about who her father is, but you don't have a whole lot of care about her.
	Is that right? I'm not criticizing. I just want to make you understand the pattern here.
	I care about her.
	But not a whole lot. I want her to be happy and stuff.
	She's still my sister, but she's content with my dad being her dad.
	In fact, she still talks to my dad.
	She sees him twice a week.
	I haven't spoken to my dad in over seven years.
	She's content with not knowing who her dad is.
	If that makes her happy, then That makes her happy, and that's fine with me.
	Well, I mean, even as basic as from a health standpoint, it's important to know the genetics you have.
	Well, I would think so.
	I mean, I want to know everything medical history-wise about my family, but my sister just doesn't seem to care about that stuff.
	Right. Okay. So when her current husband came along, she was a single mom with two kids by two different fathers?
	Yes. Why would he get involved with her?
	It doesn't show a massive amount of excellent judgment, is that fair to say?
	Yeah. Well, he had two previous wives of his own with two sons, one of whom passed away a while back.
	So... You know, I think it was a case where they're both just lonely and felt like they could move on from their divorces.
	I mean, I don't know.
	I don't believe in divorce personally, so I don't really know why they got involved with each other.
	But if I had to guess, it's because they just didn't want to be alone.
	Okay. All right.
	Okay. Good to know.
	And... I also wanted to say, which I didn't get...
	No, I shouldn't say. I shouldn't say I didn't get a chance to say it like it was some...
	But I wanted to say, ACE score of 5, that is...
	That is rough.
	And I am very, very sorry about that.
	And also, sorry about this.
	This hyper-controlling stuff is really toxic, in my mind.
	You know, like, you have to write your name a certain kind of way.
	You end up living in, like, terror of...
	Every aeroparticle, every, did I leave a coffee cup?
	Whatever, like, it's not on the coast.
	Like, crazy stuff happens that's just really horrible.
	And I just wanted to really express my condolences for that.
	You know, I... I lived through it.
	When I went to college, one of the first things I did was get a counselor because I wasn't allowed to as a teenager.
	My dad said counselors are for crazy people.
	As soon as I went to college, the first thing I did was go to a counselor.
	I went to a counselor every week for the better part of 10 years.
	I think it's helped me a lot.
	I don't even, like, it doesn't bother me anymore.
	It's just, you know, it's my past.
	I'm not gonna be a victim of it. Except for assigning your mom responsibility, I'd say he did a great job.
	So, but that's a tough one for everyone.
	That's why I have to keep coming back to it.
	The moment other people start talking about it more, I can talk about it less.
	But anyway, okay. Yeah.
	As far as where the ethics can go regarding your child, sound moral compass.
	Well, let me ask you this.
	How are you going to teach your child to speak English?
	Well, that's an interesting question.
	Well, I'm not going to baby talk them.
	Once they're in their critical period.
	I actually have my master's degree in speech-language pathology, so linguistics is a big part of my education.
	I think exaggerating intonation and the sing-song phonetics can be helpful for kids when they're very young.
	It does tend to keep their attention more.
	Yeah, and I always differentiated that from baby talking.
	I think that there's a significant difference there.
	Yeah, you don't want to do ooga booga stuff, because that doesn't really help, but you do want to give a sort of higher and lower lilt to what the kids hear, as far as I understand, does help keep their attention.
	But yeah, you know all of this stuff.
	So, you know, I just figure, I mean, this is my first child, so I just figure...
	You know, point at something or if my child picks something up, I say, oh, that's a cup.
	A cup and repeat it a couple times until, you know, I understand that kids don't grasp certain consonants until a certain age.
	So, you know, I'll try to be mindful of that and try to understand like, oh, my kid's not going to be like a baby Einstein or anything, but, you know, do my best to Work with the speed at which they're developing at.
	I don't want to like, you know, push my child too hard.
	You will use consistent language and your child will pick it up through repetition and accuracy, right?
	Yes. Well, it's exactly the same with ethics.
	Okay. You practice consistent ethics.
	Whatever you wish to see in your child, you must demonstrate to them over and over.
	If you want to see the correct use of the word tree, you keep pointing at a tree and calling it a tree.
	And they will pick it up.
	It is, to me, I mean, I'm fascinated by language as well, not to your extent of expertise, but certainly took my courses in linguistics and so on when I was in university.
	But it's incredible to me, Shiloh, just, I don't remember teaching my daughter like 90% of the words she uses.
	Yeah. Like, it's freaky.
	It's like, what secret pipeline to the Borg dictionary have you got going on there, little ass?
	She's smuggling all these words into the house.
	It's like there's this underground railway of language coming into the house.
	It's incredible.
	The nature versus nurture aspect is just, like, you wonder how much of that you're responsible for versus, you know, the environment.
	It's crazy.
	And it's the same thing with ethics.
	It's the same thing with ethics.
	We... Let's see here.
	So we had...
	This is a while back ago.
	There was a kid... Like, everywhere we go, we sort of pick up kids who want to play.
	Because... I'm the guy not on his phone.
	Like, I'm the parent not on his phone.
	So kids come over.
	And my daughter's sort of ambivalent about it.
	Sometimes it's fun. Sometimes it doesn't go so well.
	So we had a kid who wanted to join us when we were playing volleyball.
	And he joined us. And he was terrible.
	I was an overweight boy.
	And like... There are people who aren't great at sports, and then there are people who just, like, should never be near the word sports.
	I mean, he was just, like, seriously uncoordinated and sucky.
	Like, he got really whiny and frustrated and so on.
	And I tried talking to him, saying, you know, it's tough being the youngest.
	And I remember, you know, when I was...
	Everyone was older and better at stuff than me.
	And, you know, you can kick the ball if you want.
	But every time I suggested something to him, he would say...
	No, that's not how you play, right?
	So he couldn't play the right way and I couldn't get him to participate in a kind of scaled down way.
	I said, you can just throw the ball over the net.
	That's fine. No, right?
	That's not how you play. So it was one of these impossible situations.
	And of course, the kid was communicating to me that he felt in his life he was in an impossible situation.
	And then at one point he just, I shouldn't laugh, at one point he grabs the ball and just starts walking off.
	I'm like, okay.
	This is getting interesting.
	I shouldn't laugh either.
	Right. And, you know, my daughter just races after him and gets the ball back.
	It was quite a surgical strike, in fact.
	Well, no, she just took the ball and it came back, right?
	And the kid burst into tears and, you know, like, hello, parents, come on.
	I feel like getting off Facebook and doing something with your child.
	But, you know, like I never have the slightest shred of concern with my daughter in social situations.
	Like I'm never like, hope she doesn't headbutt the baby.
	It just, it never even occurs to me.
	You know, and I've said to her repeatedly, and I said, you've got great instincts with people, you're a great judge of people.
	Whatever you do socially, I'm going to support it.
	Like, I trust you. Whatever you do socially, I will support.
	I do not think you're going to do anything untoward or wrong or bad or anything like that.
	Like, whatever you want to do, I'm 150% behind you.
	I will support you. And I'm socially comfortable.
	I enjoy my interactions with people.
	You know, we're out and we meet...
	Listeners from the show when we're just tootling around sometimes in various places.
	And, you know, she really blows people's minds because, you know, they say to her, how are you?
	And she says, I'm very well, thanks.
	And how are you doing? How was your day?
	Which, you know, coming from an eight-year-old is not wildly common.
	But she's very poised. She's very comfortable chatting with people and so on.
	She has a bit of a shy streak, but that's, I mean, so did I when I was that age more so than she does.
	So... As far as like socializing go, I don't have to give my daughter a whole lot of instruction because she's seen a whole lot of modeling in terms of how I interact with people and all that.
	A mom's great socially as well, too.
	So if you are a good person and you are consistently a good person, you won't really need to teach your kid ethics.
	Now, if they're not with you and they're in some difficult situation, Mm-hmm.
	Yeah. You know, my fiancé has said to me, you know, based on how you were raised, I don't know how you turned out the way you did.
	Well, hopefully 10 years of therapy helps a little bit.
	Well, I've always been, even when I was a child, like, I mean, I started school early.
	I went to Catholic school at the age of four.
	Yeah. And I've always been described as precocious.
	And my dad used to race bicycles, and so I would spend a lot of time with the wives of his friends who also raced.
	So I didn't have a whole lot of friends my age growing up.
	I mean, of course, I was friends with kids I went to school with and stuff, but I had a I would say more adult interaction than most young children would.
	And so I think that's part of the reason why I've never felt, you know, comfortable with people my age.
	I mean, obviously now I'm an adult, I relate more, but growing up I always felt like I don't get along with kids my age.
	They're just so immature. They're drinking and doing drugs and having sex and all this stuff.
	I went through my phase with drinking and drugs in college, but I never did that in high school.
	I was focused on swimming and my grades.
	I just always felt different.
	I wonder When it comes time to socialize my child, what the benefit will be of socializing more with adults versus with children.
	Because kids these days, they have tablets, they have their video games, they have iPhones when they're like two years old.
	And my fiancé and I do not want a parent like that.
	We think that tablets and screen time is totally detrimental to psychological development, among other things.
	I just wonder, you know.
	If you are raised with conversation and with books, it is going to be increasingly difficult to connect with the electronic generation.
	They lack basic human connection skills.
	They lack basic reading of tonality.
	This is going to sound exaggerated, and I'm sure it is, but I just sort of put it out there to make a point.
	There are certain personality types that genuinely can't read other people's emotions, like psychopaths.
	Well, they can manipulate, but they don't really get other people's emotions.
	And I do have some concern about the degree of screen time that kids are having really interfering with their capacity to see and read in the easy back and forth of human interaction.
	There's a huge amount of information.
	This is one of the reasons why, I mean, I wish, and I've wished for many, many years, that I could have these kinds of conversations with video as well, so I could see the people that I'm talking to, because it's a challenge.
	I mean, it's hard to know what people are interested in, what they're following.
	I kind of sniff my way along and just assume that I'm basically fascinating, which I hope is the case.
	So I... I am concerned that there is, as you know, 90 plus percent of human communication is nonverbal.
	And sarcasm never works in emails, you know, like it never works in comments.
	And I am concerned at how much people are not developing or maintaining the ability to read emotional cues and complexity cues from human interaction because they think somehow, like I don't quite understand why kids are texting.
	When they're home, why wouldn't you phone?
	At least then you get the tone.
	A voice, at least then you get...
	I don't know.
	What is the advantage of texting?
	I mean, it's funny because some kids will even voice dictate their text.
	It's like, you know, that's just like talking to someone, right?
	It's like you're just stripping the human emotion out of what you're doing.
	And it's worse. It's like, well, I've got this wonderful souffle.
	Let me add some mud to it, stir it up and eat it.
	It's like you're downgrading things.
	I hate it. I hate what the future is coming to.
	I have a friend who, her and her husband, they have five kids, which in this day and age is pretty rare if you're a white family.
	And she homeschools all of her kids.
	And I think their oldest is nine.
	And she just gave birth to her fifth one just a couple weeks ago.
	None of her kids have tablets.
	None of her kids have phones.
	She homeschools her children.
	And I'm sure I haven't met them personally, but I'm sure that they're, you know, better behaved than 99% of other kids, you know, eight and under.
	Oh, yeah. No, we have some friends who have kids and they saw a PS4 and they reacted like I could release a tiger in the bedroom or in the room or something, you know?
	It's like, kids, what's that?
	Oh, that's a bomb, kids. You don't want to get into that.
	Like, they have that much of a negative relationship to video games.
	That's stronger than I am.
	But, you know, I respect where they're coming from.
	And if you're going to err on the side, err on that side.
	You know, when I was a kid, of course, it was the big, you know, television was the big babysitter and so on.
	And this is, to some degree, what made single mom households even vaguely functional was the kids just vegged out in front of TV when they got home.
	But, yeah, now it's the tablets.
	And, you know, great stuff involved in them.
	You know, there's wonderful stuff involved in electronics and tablets.
	But it is really...
	I mean, my concern isn't even to the kids with tablets.
	My concern, as I've mentioned a number of times on the show, is the parents with tablets.
	It's the parents with phones. It's the parents not acting with their children.
	Sure, I understand. I mean, I occasionally have to be out.
	I'll have to check phones if I'm doing something or waiting for something or, you know, there's something I need to check.
	But for the most part, if I'm going with my daughter somewhere...
	I'll leave the phone behind.
	And because I want to just have that conversation, have that capacity.
	And so it is, I don't know.
	I don't know where it's going to go. I think there's real positives.
	And there are, I think, going to be some significant challenges, just in terms of misunderstandings.
	I mean, if you have, and you get married, and you're going to have conflicts, you're going to have challenges, people need to be able to read each other.
	They need to be able to do all of that nonverbal communication stuff, because it's so much more efficient.
	You know, it's like if there was, I always thought, is there such a thing as psychic phenomenon?
	I remember thinking that when I was a kid, and I thought, well, no, there can't be any such thing as psychic phenomenon, because it's so much more efficient than language.
	That any tribe that developed psychic phenomena would be so much better at hunting and war that they would have taken over everyone else and everybody would be psychic.
	You know, it'd be like the Cro-Mannians versus the Neanderthals.
	But if you have all of this nonverbal communication skills to other people, it looks like you can read minds.
	It's amazing psionic abilities.
	It's like, no, it's just plain old human interaction distilled over decades.
	My fiancé is the best person I know at reading body language.
	Like, he knows when I'm upset about something when I don't even know that I'm upset about something sometimes, and I don't know how he does it.
	Yeah, I mean, this is part of the magic of these conversations, right, is that I'm able to zero in usually pretty quickly on core issues and find ways of communicating them in emotionally impactful ways.
	It's not magic, it's experience.
	I've been fascinated by, you know, How people think and why they feel, and myself as well, for many decades.
	And it's experience and a lot of research and thought about it.
	And, of course, I was having these conversations with people long before I had a show.
	This is, you know, like you sing in the shower before you get on stage for years.
	And so I think with regards, you know, the challenge is going to be, I would suspect, the challenge is going to be not so much teaching your child ethics, but teaching your child how rare it is that children are taught ethics in this kind of way.
	That's a good point and something that I wasn't thinking about that way.
	Because I figure if you instill a sound moral compass at an early age, it It's probably going to bring down the likelihood of rebelliousness during the teenage years.
	But then again, there's that genetic component where, you know, if I was rebellious when I was a teenager, or if my fiancé was rebellious when he was a teenager, then maybe the kid's just going to...
	I mean, I understand that a teenager's going to go through a phase where they hate their parents no matter what, basically.
	But I just wonder, you know, is my kid going to...
	I think that everything I taught them is a lie, even when I've done my best to show them the good in the world, show them the good in themselves.
	I've tried to be the best parent I can be without being overbearing or living vicariously through my child.
	Am I still going to have to worry about it?
	Oh, you know, my kid overdosing on heroin at 16 or something stupid like that.
	No, no, no, no, no.
	No, and Gabor Maté's book, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts, is the one to read on this.
	Addiction doesn't come out of nowhere.
	Addiction comes out of a profound unhappiness in one's childhood, for the most part.
	There may be exceptions. I just, I mean, who knows, right?
	Because people say, well, I knew this kid who was, he was raised wonderfully and he still got addicted.
	It's like, how do you know he was raised wonderfully?
	Yeah. You weren't following him around.
	There's no drone following people around 24-7 to record all their childhoods.
	You don't know what happened. I get that it's a circular argument, right, to say, well, I reject all evidence of the contrary.
	Like, I understand all of that.
	But it's a pretty high bar to say somebody was raised happily and then ended up so unhappy that the only happiness they could find was through self-destructive drug addiction.
	I mean, that just, to me, doesn't make...
	Any sense? That's like saying, well, somebody's going to get addicted to painkillers when they're not at any pain.
	I mean, it doesn't make any sense.
	So, no, if you raise your kids that way, the challenge, of course, is when you raise your children in a rational way, introducing them to a crazy world.
	Yeah. Because for kids, the household is the world, because that's the way it was throughout most of our evolution.
	It wasn't like the next tribe was really different, worshipped a different god, spoke a different language and different beliefs.
	The home was, the hut, the home, the teepee was, the tribe was the world that they operated in.
	And now, raising your children rationally, you have the challenge of introducing a crazy world to rational children and having them understand the uniqueness of their own upbringing.
	And It's a challenge, I think, is a great challenge.
	Because really, what is the alternative?
	Say the world's crazy, so I'm going to raise my children to be crazy?
	Well, that just lets the world win and doesn't help anyone.
	Exactly. Well, and this brings me to my next, well, rather the second part of the question.
	Front-loading a quality education.
	I mean, if my child is more educated, then surely they will be, you know, what's the word I'm looking for?
	They won't go into adulthood or teenagehood, you know, like all these vagina hat wearing, pink hair dyeing people that are running around screaming, you know, obscenities at people.
	Like, that's what I don't want.
	And I feel like these people who are doing that were cheated out of an education.
	Right. If that makes sense.
	What was the question, though?
	Well, how would I front load an education to prevent my child from thinking that way?
	I mean, that's a mindset that's learned.
	That's like indoctrination.
	It's like brainwashing. Yeah, you don't put them in government schools, right?
	Well, that's definitely what we want to avoid.
	And we've been teetering with the idea of either private schooling or I will homeschool the kids because I already work from home anyway.
	Yeah, I mean, if you homeschool, I mean, you think of the kid even in a private school.
	I mean, how much attention is the kid going to get from a teacher on any given day?
	Well, let's say there's a teacher and there's 10 kids in the class, right?
	And then let's say that there's like five hours of instruction.
	So each kid gets a half an hour.
	I mean, assuming that there aren't more difficult kids or more troublesome kids, the smarter your kid is, this is the weird thing, the smarter your kid is, the more education they should be getting.
	But the way it works in most schools is the smarter your kid is, the less education they're getting because they're dealing with all the dunderheads and troublemakers.
	Yeah. I mean, I feel cheated out of my public school education.
	When I transferred to public school from Catholic school in third grade, the kids in public school were just learning how to write cursive, and I had already known how to write cursive for two years.
	I mean, I was so advanced they wanted to put me up another grade And my dad said no.
	But, you know, in my college education, I don't use my degree.
	I hated what I majored in.
	And it was just a huge waste of money.
	And I've listened to some of your podcasts about, you know, the college degree is being lessened in value because of affirmative action and all this other stuff.
	Oh, yeah. It's like the college degrees are like fiat currency these days.
	They're just overprinting them.
	Yeah. And, you know, I never really thought about it until I saw one podcast of yours in particular.
	I can't remember which one it was.
	But I was like, you know, he's right.
	My degree, to me, is worthless.
	Like, I don't use it.
	I don't like my major.
	I have no desire to work in that field.
	It's unpleasant. It's highly stressful and demanding.
	And for what my degree costs, I don't think my pay is really worth it.
	Right. And I feel like college in general now, it doesn't really matter what your major is.
	I just feel like all college is the same.
	I feel like they're all trying to push an agenda, especially with a dad as a community college professor.
	I can only imagine how bad it is now in schools like UCLA, for example, or Harvard, for example.
	I mean, look at the kind of headlines that's coming out of those places.
	Like, why would I want to send my kid to a place like that?
	Right. Right. And of course, if you need specific skills to be taught to your kids, you can get a tutor in once in a while.
	But if you give your kid two hours direct attention, it doesn't have to all be at the same time, certainly not when they're young.
	You give your kid two hours direct attention every day.
	My feeling is that that's pretty good as far as education goes.
	And of course, there's so much education that can occur just in general conversation.
	You know, I mean, a lot of what kids learn, they don't learn in books.
	They don't learn in workbooks.
	They get through conversation as a whole.
	And of course, there are little programs that you can get on computers or tablets that can track what they're doing and report on you, you know, just in case there are some times where you're busy and you want to just throw some education at your kids.
	I think there are a lot of options.
	Outside of that. And I'm sort of a big fan of, well, how did we evolve?
	Well, we didn't evolve by sending our kids to school.
	Kids learned alongside their parents.
	They learned how to farm. They learned how to hunt.
	They learned how to maintain a house.
	They learned how to fix things. They learned carpentry.
	They learned masonry. They learned all of these things just by hanging out with their parents.
	That's kind of how we're designed to learn.
	And the idea that, you know, in a hunter-gatherer society, there wasn't like a school on the next hill teaching hunter-gathering.
	I mean, that wasn't how things were.
	So I'm a big fan of, like, what's the most natural for us.
	Yeah, and you know, I feel like with everything they're teaching in schools, because I see those things on the internet, like pictures of common core math problems that don't make any sense whatsoever, and I feel like my kids could learn more from watching your podcasts alone.
	Because you do cover such a wide variety of topics, and you put such effort into researching them and making sure they're accurate.
	I feel like your podcast alone would be more beneficial to my child's education and learning and real-world knowledge than anything that they're going to learn in a public or private school.
	I mean, I just weep for our future, really.
	Right. And it is a massive experiment that we're embarked upon and have been for the last 50 years or so of separating children from their parents and having them raised by the state.
	It sickens me.
	I could never do that to my child.
	It's like...
	I don't know.
	I could really go off on a tangent about it, but I'm not going to.
	It's just... I don't know.
	I don't know when it started becoming like this.
	And I just hope that it's, you know, that things are going to change and maybe go back to the way they used to be.
	But I just, I don't know if that's possible.
	Well, there is going to be an increasing divide in society, I think, between people who are raised well and people who are raised by the state.
	And at some point, the empiricism is going to be pretty clear.
	And... You know, it is my hope that human beings haven't survived by being unable to draw back from the brink.
	And the more examples we can provide of happy, well-raised children, the more people will start to question this kind of stuff.
	So that is all I can suggest.
	We have to do the very best.
	You know, fundamentally, I mean, I care about society, but I care about my family.
	I care about my friends. I care about my daughter.
	That's my responsibility.
	And I'm not going to compromise anything to do with my friends or family because of a fear of where society's heading.
	I have very little control over where society's heading, and I'm doing my very best to alter that trajectory or at least inform the bounce and where it heads.
	I simply won't compromise on the quality of my personal relationships out of a fear of where society is heading.
	I mean, there's no possible way to win if that is the case.
	So just, you do the very best you can in your own life and...
	You know, it's an old saying when I was growing up, take care of the pennies and the pounds will take care of themselves.
	Take care of the cents and the dollars will take care of themselves.
	And, you know, think globally, act locally.
	It's a statement from the environmental movement, which as far as ethic goes, yeah, think globally, act locally.
	And I think that's the best that we can do.
	And at least it will make the world happier by the people we raise.
	So, I mean, what do you think about homeschooling versus private school, though?
	I mean, would you, if you could send a message to everybody, would you recommend that everybody homeschool their children?
	Like, is that your preferred?
	It depends. I mean, it depends on so many different factors.
	It's really sort of a personal choice.
	There are some people who may not be able to.
	For various reasons, there may be reasons, like in Germany, it's, I think, illegal for you to do any of that.
	It also depends on how much flexibility the private schools have relative to the government curriculum.
	If they can basically have to follow the exact government curriculum, then it may be a distinction without much of a difference.
	There are other factors involved, like, is it all women?
	If it's an all-female teaching staff or a largely female teaching staff, well, there are statistically going to be problems then, in that your girls are going to be pumped up and your boys are going to be ground down.
	Statistically, again, there are lots of exceptions, but that's what you'd have to be concerned about.
	And also, you may have a parent who has wonderful virtues, but Patience may not be one of them, you know, for going over math questions with a five-year-old.
	So there are lots of different answers.
	For me, it's hard to say, well, you have to do this, you have to do that.
	And I'm not saying you're putting me into that corner, but there are variables.
	To me, if you can homeschool and you enjoy it, why not?
	It's more time. With your family.
	You know, like if you love your husband, if your husband could work at home as well, wouldn't you be happy about that?
	I mean, wouldn't you be thrilled? It's like, well, I love my husband.
	Now I get to spend an extra eight hours a day off and on with him.
	At least we can have lunch together.
	So if you have the option to have your children at home and it works, rather than have them at school, well, less commuting and less expense and more time with your kids.
	I mean, wouldn't that be great? Wouldn't you...
	Want that if you could? And I mean, if you can make it work?
	Yeah. And, you know, I also have to wonder about kind of the opposite end of the spectrum.
	What about something like military school?
	What, military school?
	Yeah. How do you feel about sending children away to military school?
	No, you're not really asking me that.
	I... I'm curious.
	Well, I'm going to put you out on a limb here, Charlotte.
	What do you think, I think, of sending children to military school?
	I think you think it's a terrible idea.
	Yeah, I mean, I went to boarding school.
	I mean, talk about unnatural.
	Yeah, let's take a six-year-old and separate him from his mom, from his parents.
	Yeah, it sounds like a great idea.
	I think military school is awful as well, but I figured I just had to cover that.
	Yeah, no, if you want to. If you want to.
	Sending kids to Guantanamo also probably not a great idea if that was your next question.
	No, I couldn't separate from my child like that.
	I would not be able to do it.
	Why would you want to have a kid and have someone else raise him?
	Yeah. It's like getting married to a man and then after the honeymoon sending him to live with another woman.
	What was the point of that?
	Yeah, I just, I couldn't do it.
	I, you know, I spent so many years coaching small children in swimming during like summer programs and stuff and I really learned to value little kids because they have no filter.
	I mean, they're just so, they're so neat, you know, and I just, I've always wanted kids of my own and I wouldn't want to miss out on that opportunity.
	Having kids really is something special and I'm fortunate to be able to have one of my own, hopefully a lot more, but I guess we'll cross that bridge when we get there.
	Yeah. I mean, you won't get tired of them.
	I mean, there are times, you know, if it's a rainy day, and it's like 11 o'clock in the morning, and you're home with your kid or kids, and it's like, okay, it's quite a long time till bedtime.
	There are times where it feels a little bit like crossing a desert.
	But what happens is you end up getting involved in something, and the time flies anyway.
	But yeah, if you look over that, it's a pretty wide stretch of water, like somebody used to say about Sunday afternoons.
	Yeah. Well, listen, I'm going to close down the show.
	Appreciate everyone's conversations.
	I guess I don't hugely recommend shows, but I watched this Eminem rap video the other night, and I thought it was, well, terrible.
	And so I spent, I don't know, 45 minutes and wrote down some rap lyrics and...
	Donned my candy necklace and decided to let rip.
	And so you can check it out.
	Eminem against President Donald Trump, question mark, true news.
	I was actually quite pleased with it.
	I mean, it's cringy as heck, but enormously funny and enjoyable for me to do.
	So I don't threaten anyone with doing it again, but if you want to check it out, I had a lot of fun doing it.
	So please don't forget to help out the show, freedomainradio.com slash donate.
	You can sign up for our newsletter at freedomainradio.com and also on Twitter.
	At Stefan Molyneux.
	You can use our affiliate link at fdrurl.com slash Amazon.
	And thanks everyone so much.
	Wonderful, wonderful crew to spend a Wednesday evening with.
	Have a great, great week.

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