Dec. 24, 2017 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
03:01:03
3939 Pretending To Be A Woman For Attention - Call In Show - December 20th, 2017
Question 1: [2:22] - “Since heroism is not inherently bad - hero simply means "defender" or "protector", but can be distorted by abuse or manipulated by other's personal motives, what thoughts do you have on how to balance confronting real issues in the world that may require our heroism vs. adopting heroism as a mask, or coping mechanism, for previous trauma or abuse? Conversely, how does one balance withdrawing sanction of an abusive society without "shrugging" out of sheer despair?”Question 2: [54:27] - “I've been living a false life as a woman in an online game and I'm ready come clean, but I fear I will lose a dear friend if I do so, thereby terminating the positive influences he and I have in each other's lives. Can truly moral relationships ever be built on a base of dishonesty? Can lies grow to a point where the revelation of the truth would be so damaging that we're better off living the lie? If my online masquerade has changed me from a lying scoundrel to an honest man in every other aspect of my life, might the lie not be a moral good for the world in general, at the expense of my friend's awareness of the truth?”Question 3: [2:27:24] - “I'm a 26-year-old man who has been working in the video game industry for the past three years. In this time, I have seen the lengths that most mobile developers go to in order to re-wire the neurological reward systems of their player's brains. By carefully gauging and systemizing the level of achievement needed for dopamine release, most mobile developers profit off of this carefully constructed addiction. Is engineering a voluntary experience (playing video games) to be addictive, moral?”Your support is essential to Freedomain Radio, which is 100% funded by viewers like you. Please support the show by making a one time donation or signing up for a monthly recurring donation at: http://www.freedomainradio.com/donate
Hey everybody, Stéphane Molyneux, I hope you're doing well.
Merry, Merry Christmas, this festive season, the winter of 2017.
I have been very honored and blessed to represent philosophy in the world, thanks to your support and your help, if you would like to help me out.
Help out the world. Please go to freedomandradio.com slash donate to do what you can to support the immensely important work that we're doing.
Now, we had... Okay, it's only three callers, but man, what conversations they were.
Now, the first caller, it's a bit of a tragic tale, but it's a very essential lesson about heroism.
He found his dad dead when he was very young, and really questions what it means to be heroic, what it means to be brave, what it means to be courageous.
And it is an age-old question, goes back to Aristotle and beyond.
What does it mean to be courageous?
The second caller, well, if he were Pinocchio, the nose might be visible from space.
So he wants to know if you can build a solid relationship with On a lie.
He's been living a false life as a woman online and has a relationship.
What can happen from here?
Now, it seems a bit odd.
I guess it's kind of common on the internet, right?
Nobody knows you're a dog. But he has very deep roots of falsehood.
And they go early and wide.
And it's a bit of a tragedy.
As you can see, he attempts to find his way to the truth in the conversation.
Very, very powerful, Jan.
The third caller, this is an interesting question.
He works in the video game industry, and he has noticed, of course, that there's a lot of research psychologists and other experts who try to guide video game designers into producing games That are very addictive.
That give you just the right dopamine drip.
Particularly for kids. Is this moral?
Is this good? Is this reasonable?
It's a very, very interesting question.
And I did get to geek out about my own history with video games.
Which is always a great pleasure for me.
And I'm sure will be interesting to you.
So thanks everyone again so much for an amazing, wonderful, powerful, inspirational year.
We are going to blow the barn doors wide in 2018 with your help and your support.
So, Merry, Merry Christmas, everyone, and let's get started.
Alright, well up first today we have Joe.
Joe wrote in and said, How does one balance withdrawing sanction of an abusive society without shrugging out of sheer despair?
That's from Joe. Hey Joe, how are you doing tonight?
Good, thank you. Thanks for taking my call.
I appreciate that.
Now, what is your relationship to heroism at the moment?
Yeah, it's rather complicated.
When I was a child, my father killed himself when I was four years old.
And When I was growing up, my thing was Spider-Man at that age.
And I always took it upon myself to be my mother's protector from an early age.
And then after that, shortly after my father killed himself, she met another man.
I already had a sister.
She had another child with this man.
And he was an alcoholic and abused her to the point where he would beat her almost to death.
From that age up until about seven years later, I was the one jumping on his back, pulling him off, physically having to save her life, and my own and my sister's as well.
And then it turns out she was also an abusive mother as well.
And for years, I rationalized her abuse as being a result of A, my father's suicide, and B, this other man beating her to near death.
Since then, my feet abandoned us, I guess, when I was about 17.
And from beginning on, from my father's death, it was religion.
It was my first panacea because we were told, you know, certain things growing up.
When I started to get old enough to be political, I first started out kind of leftist.
Then I discovered Ayn Rand when I was about 21.
And then I took up her cause to save the world, so to speak.
From there on, for about a good 20 years or so, I had made it my life's mission, so to speak, to get the good word out, to try to spread the objectivist-type message.
Here's the kicker. In the past year or so, my mother fell ill, and she came back into our lives a couple years after she had abandoned us, but she was pregnant with another child.
This child turned out to be handicapped or this and that.
Long story short, when she got, and I kept a distance from her for most part, but I still gave her a second chance, all that kind of stuff.
Still, if she seemed like she had changed, maybe she just slowed down, but it was hard to say.
But in the last year, she fell ill and she was in the hospital for a long time and I kind of had to step in to help things out where most of the other people in the family wouldn't.
During that time, I found out the reason why my father killed himself.
Because I grew up, we were told nobody knew why.
It was out of the blue. I had speculated possibly, because I'm homosexual myself, I speculated maybe he was gay.
She kind of let me think that.
She had also said some other things about him.
She said his family had abused him sexually, emotionally.
His family were alcoholics, and I cut them out, thinking that she was right.
She wouldn't lie to me about that.
Turns out, her brother, my uncle, and one of his drunken rants while she was in the hospital, he kind of...
I guess he never knew I knew, or didn't know, but him and his twin brother...
Apparently, his twin brother was there the day my father had shot himself, and my jaw kind of hit the floor, picked it up a couple times.
His twin brother came over.
He told me this story, how...
You're going to love this.
His family had claimed that my mother was cheating on him.
She denied it.
She told me other stuff, deflecting from it.
Turns out they were briefly separated shortly before it happened, and she had just moved back in a few days before.
But apparently while they were separated at one point, they had a I don't know if he called it a swinging situation or they just slept with each other's best friend kind of purposely.
I guess he didn't like that.
She did. She was still hanging out with the guy apparently while he was at work at night while we were in bed.
So he found out that they were still hanging out and he said he didn't like that.
He didn't want that happening. He was going to talk to them.
Don't say anything. She moved back into the house.
She's still hanging out with the guy.
They had a fight. She drops him off at work the next day.
Shortly after she drops him off with us in the car, she apparently runs into the guy that she was their friend, their mutual friend that she was supposedly not sleeping with.
They all work together, so he goes to work.
Somebody, a co-worker saw it, told my dad.
The guy gets to work. My dad said, what are you doing?
She's like, oh, he just told me what you said.
Apparently, that's when my dad got angry.
Walked home from work.
The guy called my mother to let her know he's coming home angry.
So she took me and my sister to the laundromat to let him cool down.
She comes home, finds him.
Well, I found him apparently dead on the floor.
But I was always told nobody knew why.
And apparently she said she told me about the laundromat that's where we were when it happened.
She didn't tell me she knew that he was coming home angry, all this kind of stuff.
It turns out my grandmother knew.
Two days before, he called her saying he was going to kill himself, et cetera, et cetera.
So, long story short, now I went from all this time being my mother's protector based on what – rationalizing all her abuse and everything that she did to us physically and emotionally, based on – and her abandoning us, but based on the fact of what happened to her, when it turns out in reality – She had done a number on him emotionally.
Pretty much broke his heart because everybody I talked to after I found this out, and I even got a police report.
I didn't know they would even have that, but I found I wound up getting it.
Her statements are in there, neighbors, my uncles.
Turns out she did a number on him and threw everybody else under the bus.
And I found this out while she was in the hospital, nearly dying.
And I couldn't even confront her about it at the time.
And when she was better enough, she found out that I knew somehow.
She brought it up. She was still back in the emergency room.
And then a few months later, brought it up again because she was pulling some stuff and came up.
And she refuses to have any remorse over it.
She called, first of all, she called everybody else a liar.
She said, your uncle lies.
Her mother lies. My sister lies.
The neighbor that I found, that was her friend at the time, she lied.
The police report lied. So on and so forth.
Joe, can I... Sure.
I have a feeling this story could go on for a long time.
Well, I'm coming up to the end of it.
Okay, go ahead. I don't mean to interrupt you.
I just had a thought or two.
Oh, trust me. I'm cutting out a lot of stuff there.
No, I'm cutting out a lot, trust me.
But the point is, now I always...
Here it is. When I was a kid, I wanted to defend my mother from the abuse, even though she was abusing us.
At the same time, I always thought, if I ever found out if somebody did something to my father, I wanted to avenge him.
So there's this hero complex that I've always had growing up.
It was my responsibility from four years old because my father did what he did, and the heroism that I was exposed to in comic books and whatnot, and the physical abuse from my mother or from my brother's father beating her.
It was kind of a necessity, and I transposed that onto the world because I couldn't control my life at home.
So I took it up politically and philosophically, psychologically, whatnot, from work incidents, sticking up for people in the workplace who I felt were being trotted upon out into the political world.
But now I see, I just recently came across the term white knight.
And even though I'm gay myself, I stuck up for women and other people because I did see a lot of the abuse of men towards women in the society.
But now I'm seeing the opposite at the same time.
Not only did what I find out about my mother blow that out of the water, every woman in my family seems to have done this to the men in our family.
Right. And they either kill themselves or they're alcoholics or whatnot.
And so when I was listening to your story about the Lord of the Rings, which I think was...
Dr. Besta. Yes, yes.
And you had made a comment about the...
The millennials, having this constant feeling of having another crisis to be saved, another person to be saved.
And I saw a parallel, listening to a lot of stuff with my own experience and what you've talked about with abused children, of parentified children having that same kind of mentality.
There's always somebody to save.
There's always somewhere where they need to step in because other people Won't do it.
And starting from childhood, their parents put them in that parentified role.
Right. Right.
So that's where I guess you would come in.
Right. Well, first of all, I'm incredibly sorry about all the things that happened to you as a child, Joe.
Terrible stuff. I just...
You said that your mom went to a laundromat, but you found your father's body?
When we came back.
Oh, when you and your mom came back, right?
Yeah, I walked into the house first, apparently, and found them on the floor.
Right. Right. Well, there's nothing heroic about any of this.
I'm going to give you a Christmas present.
A nice little fortune cookie that is going to be both freeing and will require some real heroism on your part.
And I'm not trying to imply or say, Joe, that you have not needed a lot of courage to overcome What has happened to you?
You have. But here's my Christmas present to you and to everyone out there.
Terrible people do terrible things and they don't stop.
Terrible people do terrible things forever.
Your mother was terrible when she was younger.
Your mother was terrible when she got older.
Your mother, when she got pregnant and now she has a handicapped kid, she's back in your life because she needs something, because she wants something.
And she's drawing you back into the role of filling in the holes in her own self-regard and her own judgment.
And your father, I hate to say it, was a terrible person.
He married your mom.
He shared your mom in this open marriage thing.
And he killed himself in a place where his son could find him.
I've said this before.
I really, really have such anger and contempt towards people who commit suicide.
I can't even tell you.
Now, as far as life can be unbearable and you want to end it, okay, I don't...
Really understand it, but I can, I guess, understand that people could end up in that mental state.
Okay, do the world a favor and make it not an obvious suicide.
Do the world a favor and pretend to be leaning over something and fall over.
Do the world a favor and go get lost in the wilderness.
And scrolling out saying, I love you, I'm lost, it's terrible.
Like, to kill yourself in the home where your children are coming home to, that is an intergalactic douchebag move, you know?
And I know, it's your father, he's dead, and we do have a tendency to wish to speak well of the dead, but I'm just telling you what I see.
Everyone that you've told me about, with the exception of yourself, sounds absolutely, irredeemably terrible.
Now, what does a hero do in that situation?
What is heroic?
Is it saving terrible people from the consequences of them being terrible?
No. I don't think that's heroic at all.
I think that is being a slave to the dysfunctional needs of dysfunctional people.
Is it Rushing around propping people up and reinforcing them and enabling them.
No. I don't think that's heroic.
And this white knight thing, in my experience, gay men white knight their moms even harder than straight men.
It's not a scientific study.
I'm just saying that I've read a little bit about Tennessee Williams.
So, the question is, when you come from a giant clusterfrak of shit-pitting family origins like this, What is actually heroic?
What do you think? What would be heroic to do?
Well, coming from the objectivist background, and it's something, she came along, Ayn Rand came along for me at the right time.
She told me in her writings basically what you had just said.
And that's the ironic part, is I have two minds about all this.
On the one hand, I have That sense that says, yes, you have a right to be selfish, to be rationally selfish, to defend yourself.
You don't have to take the weight of the world on your shoulders.
On the other hand, it was that emotional pull.
And I do have to thank you for one of your podcasts that you had with Tom Golden.
Yeah. I can't remember exactly what he had said, but there was...
Oh, I'm sorry.
It wasn't Tom Golden, although I did listen to that one.
It was something Regina Sullivan you had mentioned.
Yeah. You had mentioned a study that she did with mice, where the infants, when they were subjected to some kind of abuse related to the mother mouse, instead of going to that flight-or-flight situation, there was some kind of override that kept them going back in an evolutionary devil-you-know situation.
Stick with the devil-you-know. Yeah, this is all very abstract.
I mean, we're talking about very emotional issues, and you're talking to me like you're reading off a laundry list.
Well, the reason why I mentioned that is because you helped me with that.
I appreciate that. Okay, so listen, hang on.
First of all, we need to be clear what's going on.
Sure. You're not of two minds.
You're not of two minds. You may be ambivalent, but you're not of two minds because you're not correctly identifying the source of the emotional impulses.
There's your mind, what is good for you and what is good for your life, and then there's the minds of the abusers who use you.
And that mind is the one that wants you to rush in and save them from the consequences of their own shitty decisions and shitty actions.
You're not of two minds.
There's you and what's good for you, and then there's the abusers and what's good for them.
And if you haven't differentiated those two, if you think that those two are just two parts of you, I think you've got a ways to go.
That's what my therapist said.
Good. Okay. Then I'm not.
Because, you know, listen, you found your father almost 40 years ago.
40 years. And this is the first thing you said to me.
What that means is that this is still a fundamental definition of who you are.
This is shaping who you are.
And it doesn't have to.
Your parents made their crappy decisions.
They had their lives. Your father had his short life and your mother's had having her longer life.
And you have your life. You know, you're probably more than halfway through your life.
At what point do you start living by the values that you started imbibing through objectivism over 20 years ago?
What would Ayn Rand say about your family and their virtues, and what you owe them?
Well, I know what she would say, and that's where I was having the difficulty.
Okay, what would she say?
She would say, walk away from that.
I don't think she would say, walk away.
Run away? Jetpack?
Catapult? Take a space shuttle to planet Sane?
I read that scene with Reardon many times where he confronts his family.
Yeah. And during all this, this really rattled my...
When did you read that?
When did you read that?
Well, originally back, I guess, 21, 1996 for the first time.
Okay, so what are you waiting for?
Hang on. What are you waiting for?
Well, after...
It's been about five months since I broke contact with my mother once I knew she was out of the woods medically.
What? So recently you broke contact with your mother five months ago?
Yeah. So, I'm sorry, I thought you were still white knighting for her.
I still get this instinct that I'm wrong.
Well, sure, because she wants you to white knight for her.
Of course she does. It's almost like, if you like the Lord of the Rings comparison, it's like the Eye of Sauron keeps popping into my head.
Sure, but you have to recognize that.
As an alien presence in your body, that is against what will make you happy, and also what will make you lovable.
And that's what I mean when I say I'm of two minds.
No, you're not of two minds.
There's what they want you to do, and there's what you want to do.
Listen, let me give you a quick analogy.
Sorry for interrupting. Let me give you a quick analogy, Joe.
You're walking through the African jungle, and a panther is stalking you, right?
Right. What does the panther want you to do?
He wants me to stay and be food, I'm sure.
Yeah, lift up your neck, give me a jugular, lay down, rub yourself in some marinade, take off your sketchy pants, put on some deodorant, whatever, right?
That's what the panther wants you to do.
What do you want to do? That's why I brought up the Regina Sullivan thing.
No, no, stay with the Panther thing.
No, no, don't. Man, God, you're an abstract guy.
All right. What do you want to do if the Panther's stalking you in the jungle?
Well, if it was a Panther, I'd either run away or fight if I had the weapon, but get away, obviously.
Yeah, you want to survive. And anybody else in my life who would try to do anything like that, I would run or fight or whatever.
Well, there's no fighting here.
What, are you going to beat up your mom?
Come on, there's no fighting here.
No, not physically. But I'm glad you said that.
I do, part of me, a couple times during all this, I did confront her.
I yelled at her.
And then she started crying.
And then I felt horrible.
And then I'm like, that's not what I want to do to her.
I want her to understand.
And it's slowly dawning on me.
Wait, wait, wait. You were talking, hang on a sec.
You were talking about how upset you were by her actions and she cried?
Yes. Oh, come on.
You've got to recognize that for what it is, right?
At first, I didn't.
I thought she was sincere.
Oh, I'm sorry.
I shouldn't laugh. I shouldn't laugh.
I'll tell you why, Stefan, because I saw so much growing up.
I saw her legitimately being beaten.
By a man she chose!
Yes, I know that. She wasn't unjustly imprisoned with a violent guy.
She chose to have sex with him.
She chose to let him into her bed.
She chose to let her into her house.
And she chose to let him into the orbit of her child.
She chose for you, Joe, to see her being beaten up.
And she kept choosing it.
Please don't give her a victim card.
There are genuine victims in this world, my friend.
Your mother is not one of them.
But when I saw her up against the wall with this man's hand on her throat and she was crying and screaming while she could still breathe, that's the image that always pops into my head when she starts crying and I think she's going to do something to herself or something's going to happen.
It seems like it overrides my logic.
What do you mean she's going to do something to her?
Do you think she's going to kill herself? I had thought that for many years.
But you cannot be in a relationship with people you think are going to kill themselves.
Because you can't be yourself.
You can't be honest. You know what I mean?
Because they have this big giant suicide bomb always ticking in their hand.
How are you supposed to take your eye off that?
That was the funny thing.
During the last Halloween before, I just made a passing comment.
I said, what are you dressing up for? And she goes, a broken soul.
I know better now because I've read up on stuff like after the therapist recommended a few things.
Now that I've had about five months distance away from all this, it gets a little easier each day.
Yeah, so she has been very destructive in her life choices.
She has chosen violent men.
She's chosen suicidal men.
Where is the husband of her handicapped kid right now?
Sorry, the father. Tennessee.
That's the man she met when she abandoned us.
Okay, so is he out of the picture?
For the most part, yeah. Okay, so she's just made a whole series of terrible, terrible choices.
That everybody else has had to pay for, yes.
Well, that other people, I assume taxpayers have had to pay for it, you've had to pay for it, other people have had to pay for it.
And the only thing that she can muster when she looks at the wreckage of the whole life choices is self-pity, right?
I'm a broken soul.
And it wasn't until the second time I confronted her about my father and she...
Would not understand and express, and even blamed him at one point, is the day I finally- Well, of course she did.
Of course she blamed him. I could not tell her I love her anymore.
What's she going to do? Take ownership?
That's not going to happen. I would have hoped.
I would have honestly, that was hoped.
Okay, be rational, man.
What is the evidence that gives you hope that your mother will take responsibility for her life choices?
At the time, because she at first said she was sorry to me.
It wasn't until the therapist pointed me to books about narcissists and whatnot, it started dawning on me.
Oh, yeah. No, they'll apologize to you if it gets something they need or gets something they want.
And maybe those apologies can be vaguely believable.
But, you know, if you confront someone and then they say, well, I'm really sorry, can I borrow 50 bucks?
Yeah. Yeah. Which is what she would do.
Sure, sure, sure.
What's this done to your love life, Joe?
Well, I've been single for some years now, partly because of some health issues.
Honestly, partly because I never got over my ex, who I now look at as being kind of similar to my mother.
So that's another story.
So you know what it's done, right?
You hanging around, and I know it's been five months or whatever, but you wrestling with this inner panther and saying, well, I don't know if I'm going to run or marinate on my throat.
It's costing you love.
It's costing you stability in your personal relationships.
Why would you let your crazy mom run your love life?
I don't follow. Oh, that's nothing to do with it.
It's a separate issue, except for maybe the fact that now I wound up doubting my own homosexuality.
Wait, wait, wait. Hang on, hang on.
I'm sorry. Sorry, go ahead.
Your history with your mom has nothing to do with your love life, even though you chose a guy who broke your heart, who was kind of like your mom?
Oh, I thought you meant directly, like she was interfering.
Oh no, she's interfering because you haven't done the exorcism yet.
You think it's still, you're just of two minds.
I gotcha. I understand.
So it's killed to your capacity to be in a long-term loving relationship, right?
It's got me questioning my whole sexuality.
Now I wonder, I know Freud has been said to be discredited, but the weak father, absent father, domineering mother...
I wonder if that actually, and not only the fact of finding my father the way I did, and then being her defender, I wonder if that affected imprinted on, you know what I'm saying?
I don't know. I don't know.
I mean, that's either here or there in the long run, because I can't say that to you.
How's your work life? My work life right now for the past few years has been stable after some problems during the recession, so.
Right. It's funny, though, because most of the women, the people I work around are women, and I see some of the same...
I'm hypervigilant now, to use a clinical term.
Well, no, but you have to be hypervigilant because you haven't scrubbed your environment of predators.
I mean, if you're still in the jungle and there are sounds in the bushes, you have to be hypervigilant.
Once you're back in the hotel on the 14th floor, you can relax, right?
So you're hypervigilant because there are still people in your environment that are dangerous.
Yeah. In the family, in the workplace, in the society.
And that was part of my question.
I want to get your take on that.
Just looking at the society, it's like, now I want to...
I have this opposite tendency.
Now I feel like I need to white knight for men, for men's causes, because I'm seeing what they're doing.
Well, okay, let's hang on for that.
Let's hang on for that. So, your question is, what does a hero mean?
Defender or protector?
Okay, I think that that's a fair half definition.
Okay, defender or protector.
The question is... I'm sorry?
The etymology. The question is defender or protector of what?
Of what? Now, I would say a hero is someone who defends and protects the good.
Virtue. That which needs protection, honor, decency, integrity, honesty, strength.
Virtue. So, it seems to me, Joe, that you have spent the last couple of decades...
Defending and protecting vice.
Immorality. The opposite.
That's not being a defender or a protector or a hero.
That's being an enabler who sacrifices his own happiness for the sake of appeasing evildoers.
So yes, defend and protect away.
But they're good. On the one hand, I would defend myself because of the Adlerian connection.
I was defending...
What I considered virtues, even against the people in my family who opposed those, but I was taking it as my mission to change them, to save them.
Wait, wait, what were the virtues you were defending?
Objectivist values. But with regards to your family, what were the virtues that you were defending?
Oh, the same, but I was trying and attempting, at this point I was trying to change them, and first trying to convince them, or then when they wouldn't listen to live by example, But then I found myself – but then like I said,
I wanted to start off defending myself, but you are absolutely right because towards the end of this situation, this particular situation, this most recent one, I did find myself enabling because I started – one, I started to see the realization that these people don't want to change.
Two, the more I kept my mouth shut when I was around them for the sake of – when I was holding my tongue while she was in the hospital around – Other family members who wanted to put their political, interject political opinions where they were not, and I was trying to keep the peace.
I'm like, wait a minute. I did start to say I was enabling.
Then third of all, because my mother does get state assistance, and she's done this all her life, ever since she's received widow benefits, and she was never changing.
The more I was helping out while she was in the hospital, and she was manipulating me, this taxpayer, I'm like, I had to say, no, I am enabling.
And I am going against my objectiveness values at this point.
You know, life is short.
No, you're kind of, maybe it's because you're gay and you don't have like the cycle of kids and whatever, right?
But life is short.
And happiness is hard to find and hard to keep.
Given that happiness is a needle in a haystack or a Polar bear in an endless expanse of icy snow, we have to peel back the sensitivity of our antennae to find that which brings happiness, that which keeps happiness in our life.
So I don't know how to help you panic, Joe, but you're going to be dead before too long.
I was already in the hospital for this.
All right. So you know.
You know. I thought it was a heart attack, yeah.
You know. That's... Yeah.
And it could be tomorrow.
It could be next year. It could be next month.
You know, I was just chatting with someone today who was saying someone who knew had cancer came back after nine years.
Okay, I've had four and a half years since cancer.
You never know.
You never know. Congratulations to you, by the way.
Thank you. So, the question is, how badly do you want Joe to be happy and what steps are you willing to take?
Because I think for you to become happy is the heroism you really need.
To stop being used by shitty people for their own shitty ends.
There are some ways in which we have to enable the immoral against our will, which you talk about the welfare state or whatever government assistance your mom has been getting.
Well, they force that money out of people's wallets and force it into their hands.
Can't do much about that other than talk about taxation is theft and the welfare state is a sticky trap of socialist subjugation.
But I need you to panic or I think you need to panic and say, well, I've just spent...
More than half my life chasing around and trying to prop up terrible people.
And that's had an effect on me to the point where the panther, from our analogy, the panther is inside your head and is arguing with you and you're mistaking the panther for yourself.
Listen, my mom wants me to come and see her.
My mom wants Wants me to be there.
My mom wants me to comfort her in her old age.
My mom wants resources.
My mom wants all these things. Of course she does.
And I'm aware of that within my own mind.
I do not mistake it for myself.
You know, the panther wants to chew on your jugular, but you don't mistake the panther for yourself.
My mother had her life and made her choices.
And because I respect self-ownership and because I respect free will and because I accept that actions have consequences, I respect my mother's choices.
I know that sounds odd. I don't like her choices.
I don't think they're moral. But I respect my mother's choices.
I respect...
That she made her choices.
That they shaped her life.
That they gave her certain consequences.
I give her self-ownership, just as I take self-ownership, particularly with parents.
You know, some abstract guy theoretically in India, my relationship to his free will is not very powerful.
It's very abstract, universal.
But I cannot take any more free will than I'm willing to give those closest to me.
Now, If my mother had some brain disease or something, then that would be different.
That would be physical. A physical basis for all of this.
But my mother made her choices.
I respect her choices. I respect the consequences.
I respect her right to make those choices.
But they do not become a noose around my neck.
Do you understand? What your father did, what your mother did, what your family of origin did, Is no noose upon your neck.
It is no control over your spine.
It does not turn you into a serf or a slave to the immoral and the irresponsible.
You must live life for yourself, for your life to have any meaning and value.
It cannot be running around picking up the spilled blood of spiritual murderers as they traipse across the landscape, leaving squishy tissue and shards of broken bone in their wake.
To chart your own course.
To set your own destination and your own path.
You need that, Joe.
That is the fundamental courage that we all need.
Fuck the past.
Respect people's choices.
You say, Mom... You made some terrible choices.
I respect that. I respect that you had your free will and you chose to exercise it in this way.
And you chose not to listen.
And you chose not to listen.
And you chose not to question yourself when your four-year-old walked in on a dead fucking father.
You know, there's a couple of times in life where it's understandable that they could be seen as a bit of a wake-up call, right?
Your son walks in to find his dead father.
And he's four. Now that might be considered a reasonable time to have a bit of a fucking wake-up call.
And say, well, how the hell did I end up in this situation?
But no! None of that, right?
Move on to the next guy.
Move on to the next guy. Oh, now there's a guy who's got me pinned up against the wall.
He's beating me and he's choking me around the neck.
And my son is in the room watching.
Now that might be considered another time that you might be forgiven for thinking that's a bit of a fucking wake-up call, right?
But no! Move on.
Run away. Abandon your kids when they're 17.
Move off to the guy somewhere else.
Have another kid. These are all possibilities for wake-up calls.
And your mother chose not to wake up.
And my mother chose not to wake up.
Your son doesn't want to see you.
Is that enough of an incentive for you to change, Mom?
No. No.
No. Not at all.
This is why, you know, I mean...
There is no relationship.
I mean, if you don't want to see someone and they won't change, clearly they prefer their terrible habits to you.
I respect that choice as well.
I genuinely do.
I give people the giant, thorny, emblazoned and flaming crown of self-ownership.
Yeah, major choices.
Good for you. Good for fucking you.
You made your choices.
You chose to project.
You chose to blame others.
You chose to subject others to endless amounts of shit sandwiches because you couldn't be bothered to learn how to cook in the kitchen of halfway fucking decent behavior.
Good for you. Here, here are all of your choices.
Like, you know, we don't want to carry other people's choices.
Like a whole bunch of shitty vampiric blood-soaked porcupines squirming all over our body, lancing their prickly historical inertia ways through our tender, subcutaneous fat.
You know, everybody wants us to carry their decisions.
Everybody wants us to own whatever they fucking did.
And it was your fault, it was his fault, it was their fault, it was slavery!
It's the patriarchy!
Everybody else, nothing to do with me!
Your dad did not kill himself.
Because your mother had an affair.
Lots of men. And your father handed her out too.
It's an open marriage, right?
Your father killed himself because he made his own fucking shitty decision.
And you can't own that either!
You are four years old!
Everybody wants you to carry their shit.
Everybody wants to back up that dump truck of their own shitty decisions and bury you alive.
You pick up the pieces of what I threw to the ground.
You repair the Ming vase of history that I repeatedly crushed with my own immaturity and stupidity.
You live and fill in all the cracks of everything I broke.
I'm a broken soul.
No, you broke yourself.
You broke your own fucking self.
And I respect that.
I respect that decision.
But here's what you do in life, Joe.
People try and hand you their shitty decisions.
Here, just hold this for a moment.
I'll be right back. And they're gone, baby!
Gone! And they never come back to pick up their shitty decisions that they gave to you.
And your mom, you know what she's going to try and do, Joe?
I know. You know this.
You know this. She's going to try and get you to raise her handicapped kid.
Oh, she already tried. Oh, she already tried.
Okay, good. Yeah, that's clear, right?
Yeah. Here, can you just hold this handicapped kid?
I'll be right back.
This is a kid that requires 24-hour nursing, yeah.
And I'm very sorry for all of that.
Do you know if your mother's lifestyle choices had anything to do with her being ill or with her child being handicapped?
Well, the recent illness was due to—it was an intestinal blowout.
The child—the handicapped part of my brother— Supposedly, it was the hospital's fault.
She even won a settlement.
He was born with cerebral palsy, being in the air without oxygen.
They said he would have been fine otherwise.
Being in the air without oxygen?
In the womb. They didn't do the C-section.
Whatever happened, he was without oxygen.
How old was she, Joe?
I'm going to say 96.
This was... She was 57, maybe in the 40-ish range, 39, 40, I want to say.
So she chose to have a kid.
I assume she did not have the healthiest lifestyle in her history, right?
Cocaine is a hell of a drug, we'll say that.
So she was a drug addict.
Did she smoke? Did she drink?
She smoked. She smoked, right, but didn't drink.
Everything else, but she didn't drink it.
Okay, so she smoked cigarettes and she did cocaine and then she had a baby in her 40s.
And everybody just says, here, you hold my shitty decisions.
You feel, no, no.
And the reason I'm spending so much time on this, Joe, is this is the big fight coming up.
This is going to be 2018, 2019, and 2020.
Maybe even into 2021.
This is the big fight coming up.
This is the big fight with the boomers, the big fight with the migrants, the big fight with everyone.
We want you to pay for our shitty decisions.
We want you to pay for shitty immigration policies.
We want you to pay for retirement benefits.
That we're never funded enough.
We want you to pay for underfunded pensions with wildly exaggerated rates of return.
We want you to pay for the fact that Obama chose not to enforce immigration policy with DACA, with the dreamers.
No, no. The nightmares, not the dreamers.
Everybody's got to pay for the fact that only 12% of immigrants into the United States are even remotely vetted for education and employment opportunities.
The rest come in through chain migration.
See, chain migration is the wrong phrase.
Because a chain can be used for something productive.
What you mean to say is noose migration.
Bear trap around the fucking balls migration.
That's what you mean to say. And this is the big fight.
Everybody has been making shitty decisions pretty much for the last hundred years.
Let's have the government control all the currency.
Let's have the government take over all the education.
Let's have the government take over all of the retirement benefits and the health care and the welfare and the disability and the unemployment.
Let's have the government do it all.
Well, that was some shitty fucking decisions now, wasn't it?
Really bad stuff.
Cocaine... A muerto beneficial compared to all these shitty decisions that have pushed off and pushed off and pushed off the day of reckoning.
And soon, all of the incompetent, stupid, avoidant, annoying, dumb as a bag of hammers people are going to sit there and say, you have to hold and own my decisions.
All the decisions that I made to say, oh, I'd ran, but her characters were very wooden, don't you think?
Her dialogue is not really very realistic, don't you think?
Terrible, terrible. I just find her writing style to be so pedestrian.
Yeah, because that's the fucking point of those novels, right?
How about... How about I swear by my life and my love of it that I will never live for the sake of another man or ask another man to live for my sake?
Does that sound pretty fucking wooden to you?
Now, all the people who reject Ayn Rand because of the aesthetics of her writing, they're not the kind of people who say, well, you know, I like Plato, but I do find the analogies to be a little of blah-blah-blah-blah sometimes.
Now, people reject Ayn Rand because she was right.
She was right 60 years ago.
No. 57, 2017.
60 years ago.
60 years ago, she predicted the decay of the welfare state, the fact that Europe would go first.
Unlike the Lives of the Saints guys, she didn't pick up on the mass migration, because leftism, it's always worse than your worst nightmare.
And so this entire generation...
See, after 1957, nobody had an excuse.
Because just about everyone's heard of Ayn Rand or read Ayn Rand or knows someone who's heard of or read of Ayn Rand.
And she had the answers.
You didn't have to get into Rothbard.
You didn't have to get into Hayek.
You didn't have to get into Von Mises.
Very easily digestible stuff.
Very popular stuff. And people say to me, well, why are you so mad at the boomers?
Because I've been trying to talk to the boomers about Ayn Rand for 35 fucking years.
I think it's okay to run out of patience after say, oh, I don't know, three and a half fucking decades.
So, your mom wants you to hold her terrible decisions.
And what does Atlas do?
I'll put it this way.
If I had known now about what happened to my father before she got sick, This is a horrible, it sounds like a horrible thing to say.
I don't think I would have shown up to that hospital.
I have no problem with you not showing up to the hospital.
I have a problem with you showing up to the hospital, for what that's worth.
Well, and I had to bite my tongue for months.
No, see, here's the thing.
You think that there's some thread that you can pull that makes any of these people worth having a relationship with.
Well, if I have this insight...
About this or that or the other.
If I learn this causality or that domino or this start of the chain, then somehow this is all going to become bearable.
Guess what, Joe? It's not!
There's nothing, I believe, that you can find out about your family history that makes any of these people less horrifying.
That was the hardest thing.
I'm still reeling from that revelation.
Because I did think there was some – I had this thing.
People have their troubles when they were growing up that maybe they can still be helped.
And you keep talking about – Oh, God.
Stop. Stop. Stop.
Stop. Listen. Do you know why I get to be a complete jerk about other people's history?
Because I've overcome my own.
I think I had a great childhood.
Certainly didn't. Certainly didn't.
Hang on. Had a terrible, terrible childhood.
The kind of childhood that if somebody had offered me to be alive until the age of 18, I'd have said, Thanks, I think you'll pass.
Or 15 at least, for sure.
Until my mom was gone. So, one of the reasons...
You know what they call it in British tabloids?
I didn't even know what this term meant.
Tell me if you know what this term means.
Revenge body. Do you know what that means?
No. So a revenge party, as far as I understand it, a revenge party, Joe, is a woman, maybe it's a man too, but they generally talk about it with regards to women.
So a woman is dumped by a guy, and then she goes and works out like crazy.
Do you know why? Yeah, so she gets somebody else, she can rub it in the guy's face, you turn me down.
Yeah, she can post her selfies, and he can be like, damn, I wish I was still hitting that.
Well, except for the crazy part on top, the rest of it looks fantastic.
Yeah. Right, so that's a revenge party.
Now, I have a little thing called revenge virtue.
It's a beautiful, beautiful thing.
It means that I have struggled to achieve freedom from my history.
I have struggled to become a better person and to not succumb to the lure of the past and not reproduce the abuse that I experienced so that I can lord it over other people.
I'm going to be frank with you.
It's not uninvolved in the whole motivation.
Because if I didn't have a past to overcome, I'd be much more prone to sympathy for those who succumbed to child abuse.
If I myself had succumbed to child abuse and was reproducing it as an adult, I wouldn't have a leg to stand on in terms of giving people full responsibility.
But one of the consequences of taking full responsibility is you give full responsibility.
And you don't want to do that.
My therapist had to drill into me that I had a choice.
And my friends had to drill into me that I had a choice.
And they were right.
I didn't feel like I did have that choice.
And I think I was compensating.
You used the term, the ring of power, the one ring.
I think I had that kind of a mindset.
If I could get power, I could fix these people.
And you kept saying you have to give them responsibility to take for their own actions.
I didn't want to do that. I kept taking on their responsibility.
So you don't want to...
I mean... Because listen, you're still being run what happened by when you're four.
Yeah, you're right. Which means that you're not taking self-ownership, which means that those screwed up people around you don't want you to give them self-ownership.
You understand, you're just a collateral damage to their own narcissism.
You can't have an identity because they don't have an identity.
You can't have self-ownership because they don't want self-ownership.
And they understand what self-ownership means a lot better than you do, I think.
They know that if you accept self-ownership 100%, you're going to give it to them.
And then you're going to get gone.
And they don't want you to. Yeah.
Because you're a very productive little serf for them.
You're a glistening slave.
And they don't want that to...
They don't want that resource to go away.
And anybody else would have said, see you later.
But I think because it was family...
And I couldn't understand why.
I couldn't say, see you later.
Why do you have to understand?
I don't know. What do you mean? What do you need to understand?
I couldn't understand why.
I just couldn't understand why I couldn't say no to these people for a long time.
Because they don't want you to say no to them.
Oh, I know that now. Yeah.
But I couldn't understand why I couldn't say no.
Oh my god, do you still not get this?
No, I do get it. You keep thinking that it's you who wasn't saying no.
Like how earlier you said you're of two minds.
You're not of two minds. You desperately wanted to say no, they didn't, and they put the brain virus in your head called say yes to them all the time.
It was an implantation.
Oh, I get that, yeah. I mean, if somebody stabs you in the side, the blade doesn't become an internal organ you've had since birth.
It's a foreign object that has invaded you and harmed you.
Same thing with the manipulative percepts of narcissistic people.
It's an invasion.
It is an assault. It is an infection.
It is a stabbing. Don't confuse it with yourself.
I call it a kryptonite.
Okay. Okay.
All right. Well, listen, Joe, I appreciate you calling in.
And I certainly wish you the very best.
And it sounds like a wise decision that you've been making over the last little while.
And I certainly wish you the very best with your therapy.
And a very Merry Christmas to you if you celebrate the season.
Me too, likewise. I appreciate that.
Thanks, man. Take care. Okay, up next we have Steven.
Stephen wrote in and said,
That's from Stephen.
Stephen, how's it going? Very well, man.
How are you? Good. Telling him there's no such thing as gender?
No, no, no. Is that a possibility?
No, let's not start there, man.
No. No? All right.
I guess in preparation for this meeting, I've been running this through my mind so many times, and I can't really get to a point where it doesn't become some kind of blathering mess of a...
A story. I don't really know where to begin.
Well, I guess my first question is, why did you pretend to be a woman?
All right. Okay.
There's a simple answer for this.
That's what I'm looking for.
All right, all right. Please don't give me the very complicated one, because I just did a long time with a guy who got virtually nowhere.
All right. No, the truth is, I've given a lot of introspection.
I think it goes back to my sister.
No, no, no.
That's the very complicated. No, you're already on the wrong side of the field.
Okay? What is the very simple reason that you decided to pretend to be a woman?
Coin. Coin.
Okay. Now we're getting somewhere.
All right. So, how did you get coin from pretending to be a woman?
Okay, so I started playing this online game about 12 years ago.
12 years ago? What are we talking, Zork with a modem?
Jesus, that's a long game.
All right, go ahead. Well, I had moved from America to China, and I found myself in a city, and to become a teacher, and I found myself in a city where I had nothing in common with any of the other foreigners who were living here, and it was really difficult to make friends.
The kind of foreigner who ends up in China typically is just about the douchiest leftist you could possibly want to ever meet.
And, you know, I was raised pretty, with very conservative values.
And so I kind of found this online game and I started playing.
Conservative values like virtual cross-dressing for money?
Is that, is that a, have I missed that in one of the commandments?
Did I, did I skip over that?
No, I gave you coin.
You wanted me to simplify it.
Okay, no, I appreciate it. Listen, I apologize for asking you to be honest and then making fun of you at your expense.
My apologies. No, no, I don't mind it.
This whole thing deserves some kind of ridicule, especially after the last call.
Good, well, I'm afraid I may be the person to supply it.
So, okay, so you're in China and you start playing this online game.
The fact is, I've never been good at games.
I'm mediocre, but there were things that I wanted to accomplish within the game that I just wasn't able to do on my own.
I would be in towns within the game, and I would be trying to find partners to play with, hoping to make friends, not just in the game sense, but just companionship.
At some point, I realized that it was on my female characters, because I used to make characters, sometimes I'd make a dude, sometimes I'd make a chick.
And it was only when I was on female characters with female names that I'd get any response in the cities to, hey, I need to clear this dungeon of trolls.
Anyone want to go with me?
So, okay, sorry, because before we got to the coin, the honest answer that I wanted is you got attention from pretending to be a woman online.
That's probably fair, yeah.
No, no, that's what you just said.
It's not probably fair, like I'm just pulling something out of my ass.
I may do that later. You'll probably hear it.
It's kind of weird sucking sound.
But no, because if you pretend to be a woman online, you get attention, right?
Yeah, yeah, that's true.
Got it. Okay, so...
Go ahead.
So I learned this, and I ended up in the game I was playing, I ended up in a guild of other players who were really very good at the game, And it kind of, I don't feel like I'm misrepresented myself.
OK, OK. So we're talking World of Warcraft, right?
No, no, no, no, no. Different game.
Oh, is it a different game? OK. So basically, you weren't very good at video games, but people forgave you because eggs, right?
Pretty much. Well, I'm not very good at video games.
On the other hand, I am fertile.
Got it. You can't keep making me laugh.
No, this is the reality, right?
All right. Oops, did I just hit you with my sword?
I got boobs.
Well, that's okay. You know, that was my virtual female privilege, you know.
Well, all right. All right.
So anyways, I ended up in a community of guys, what they call a guild, and I... I started to achieve all the goals that I wanted in the game.
I don't... Wait, achieve your social goals or the goals of the actual game?
I'd say both. So you got better at the game?
Well, it was never my goal to get better at the game in the beginning.
It was my goal to, you know, achieve certain achievements or weapons or armor or cool looking skins.
The game I played was very much a fashion game.
And, you know, the most sought after pieces in the game were always these weapons or armor.
A fashion game? Sure, yeah.
With trolls and swords?
What kind of freaky-ass fashion shows are you going to here?
Oh, look at the way the orc struts its swimsuit with the gristle pointing out of the butt.
Oh, man. All right, so maybe this is a whole aspect of gaming.
Bugbearers on a plate with a thong.
Sorry, go ahead. Listen, some of these online games, it's not just about can you beat the monster.
It's about How cool is the sword that the monster drops?
And then you can advertise that sword to everyone and say, hey, look at me.
I beat that monster. I got the coolest sword in the game.
I can't believe that South Asian countries are depopulating.
It's amazing. It sounds like they've got their priorities in order.
I could have a family or a virtual sword.
It's an American game, man.
It's an American game. Yeah, but I assume that a lot of people who are playing it were in China, right?
Yeah, maybe. I don't know how popular it is here.
I don't think it's so much of a one-child policy as it is an all-child policy.
So anyways, everyone who plays this game, for the most part, is after the fashion aspect.
You know, armor that has cool effects or special coloring or whatever.
And as I was in this guild, I learned that being in the guild allowed me to have access to this stuff much more quickly because they were all pros.
So the people in China in this game were very much focused on getting the coolest looking gear.
I think everyone who plays this game would feel the same.
Because I want to open up.
This sounds like I'm scornful.
I want to open up to a world Where, let's say, for instance, you're not facing cultural and demographic replacement.
What are the kind of things you can enjoy?
Oh, look, I got a cool sword!
I guess you have time to enjoy that when you're pretty much not being pushed like lemmings into a cultural ocean by immigration.
All right, good to know.
Good to know. I like that world.
Honestly, I love it that people can focus on that stuff without having to avoid basic truths about their demographic reality.
Okay, go on. Shouldn't games be an escape, though?
I mean... Well, yeah, but they just don't have quite as much to escape from.
Anyway, I think that's great.
Honestly, I think that's great. Okay, so go on.
And for the record, I do think I need to clear something up.
I really don't think a large portion of the Chinese population is even aware of this game because I'm also a teacher and...
I've taught kids, you know, of the gaming age and none of them have ever heard of this.
I don't think it's something that's popular.
All right. Okay, so you're in a guild and you became friends with a guy, right?
Mm-hmm. And this is not the man in question.
No, let's get to the man in question.
Okay. So I met this guy after I'd been playing the game and I had been established within the game as a woman.
For many years and actually the game has moved on to the sequel and that's where I met the guy I met him about five or six years ago and At that point I had become so established as this female character and I had I realized that the this reality that I was living as a female It kind of allowed me to relate to the men in my guild.
Because most of them were men, at least as far as I know.
I mean, for all I know, they were all lying too.
You could be an entire fucking K-pop band masquerading as a stone giant.
I don't know. Okay, go on.
Could be, right? But...
When I met this guy, that identity was already established.
And I really do believe this.
I swear to God, I've searched my mind for instances of me promoting this idea.
But outside of original promotion, once the seed was planted within this community that I was a chick, it became everything that I was in the community.
And like I said, because I'm not that great at the game, it was more the value of me being the chick in the party that...
That was my value within the community.
And they would ask me things like we would be doing something and someone would say something and like maybe something off color and they'd be like, hey, don't say that because blah, blah, blah.
No, listen, you're like the girl that the guys let play in softball because she's got big tits and they like to watch her run.
Even though you're not great at the game.
Yeah, I got it. That's right.
I got it. Okay. So you've been in a relationship with this guy as a girl who's not a girl for five to six years.
And have you chatted outside of the game?
I assume you've obviously never met in person.
No, we haven't. Okay.
So have you chatted outside of the game?
Only through email. I created a secondary email account.
To use as a way to communicate with him through email.
But even that, we haven't done that much.
It's really just been mainly an in-game relationship.
So what the fuck is this relationship then?
I don't understand. Well, it's a friendship.
No, it's not.
I mean, it's not a friendship if he doesn't even know that you're swinging twigs and berries.
You've got an outie, not an innie.
That seems kind of important.
Okay, okay. Yeah, I get that.
But that doesn't mean that The relationship can have no value, right?
And that's kind of the... No, it has a negative value.
No, no, no, it has a negative value.
Be honest. How so?
How so? What do you mean, how so?
Come on. Well, it's got a negative value.
I think it's got a negative value for me because I live with the fact that it's alive.
No, no, it's got a negative value for him.
Why? Seriously?
Do you want me to tell you?
I do. Okay.
Is your avatar or the signals...
That you've put out, Stephen.
Is the avatar or the signals that you put out of an attractive woman?
Not always. No, but does this guy have any thoughts about how old you are, say?
He does. And how old does he think you are?
35, around there.
He thinks you're around 35.
30 when we met. 30 when you met, all right.
And how old is he? He's about the same age, a little bit younger.
I'd say he's, right now he's probably 36.
Well, I mean, in relation to my actual age, I think right now I'm 40.
I think he's around 38.
And have you ever done anything that could be remotely interpreted as flirtatious in the game?
Or has he ever acted in a way that could be considered protective?
I guess you said, like, don't swear around because there's a girl in the party, right?
That might have been what drew me to him in the beginning.
But not, okay, not drew you to him, but drew your female character to him, who's not you.
Correct, correct. Okay. Well, I mean, let's define terms here.
I mean, if we have to keep redefining, if I say, I think the best way to do it would be to assume anytime I'm talking about me, we're talking about the female representation of the character, right?
No, let's do you in the avatar.
Okay, so he has probably fantasized about having sex with you.
I have no doubt about that.
Right. Do you think that it might be at all damaging to him to think that he might have whacked off to someone he thinks is a girl, but is in fact a guy?
No. You don't think that would be upsetting to him at all?
Well, not that...
I mean, the thing is...
Stephen?
No! Stephen? Stephen?
Stephen? Why don't you tell me that?
Come on. No, listen. If you don't have even this level of empathy, I don't even know how we can talk.
Oh, well... Let's put it this way.
Obviously, I had a problem with it.
No, no, we're not talking about your problem, Stephen.
We're talking about this guy.
I'm saying it's a negative value relationship because he has been dealing with you as a fertile woman when you are, in fact, a man.
Are you straight? Yeah, yeah.
Okay. So if you had been, say, fantasizing, maybe even masturbating to an online character that you thought was an attractive woman, a younger attractive woman, and then it turns out that it was an older man, how would you feel about it?
To be honest, I'd like to believe that I'd be able to separate it.
You'd like to believe is not an answer.
That is a complete evasion.
I don't care what you'd like to believe.
My question is, how would it affect you emotionally to find out that you've been whacking off to a guy, not a girl?
I'm sorry to be so blunt, but I have to be straight with you.
Listen, that's fine. Okay.
What I'm saying is, and I feel like this conversation got to the, I knew it would get to the sex thing, but I don't, that's not where I really wanted it to start.
No, you did, because you didn't pretend to be Driving Miss Daisy on your avatar.
You didn't pretend to be Kathy Bates or Rosie O'Donnell.
You had an avatar of an attractive, fertile woman.
So don't tell me that you didn't anticipate that anything sexual might be involved.
You were relying on female fertility sexual privilege for attention and acceptance.
Come on, you know that, right?
I think there's some details that you need.
No, there really isn't. No, definitely isn't.
Okay, what if I told you that my female avatar is not like some buxom-breasted beauty, it's a tree woman who looks disgusting, but she is female.
Well, then how does he know how old you are?
Well, we've talked about it.
It's come up in conversation. Okay, so you have given some indications of your age and that you're not the same as your avatar.
Okay. So you have been masquerading as a fertile young woman to a man who has lived for half a decade in a relationship with someone he doesn't know at all.
And what do you think that's going to do to his trust in his own knowledge, his own instincts?
What do you think that's going to do to his trust in the online world?
What if he wants to meet a woman online?
What do you think that's going to do for his trust on whether he can figure out what's going on online?
Nothing good. It's all bad, right?
You've kind of scrubbed internet dating from his vocabulary, or at least you will if he finds out the truth, right?
Do you think it will make him question his own sexual orientation at all if he's been flirting and fantasizing about a guy?
I have. Do you think that might be possibly upsetting to him?
Yes. So you have been stealing from him, right?
Because you have been masquerading a value that you don't have, which is eggs, youth, femininity, and fertility, in order to get attention.
You have been fraudulent, right?
You have been lying to him for half a decade.
Do you think that it can be a positive thing to lie to someone for half a decade?
Maybe. Okay, I'd love to hear a situation in which it's very moral to lie to someone for half a decade.
About something fundamental.
Alright, alright. We'll just start with this.
When I met the guy, he was just aimless.
He was unemployed, living with his parents.
And I feel like I've been a really positive...
I feel like... The sort of positive influence I've had on his life wouldn't have been attainable if it hadn't started with the lie.
There's no way that if I were just a dude who met this guy in a thing, he wouldn't have taken any of the advice I've given him about, you know, or any of the positive motivations I've given him in his life.
He would have disregarded it completely.
So wait, you're not interesting in a value unless you're a fertile woman.
You can't possibly raise your game to the point where people are going to listen to you if you're not a hot thing or a woman.
Because you've cheated yourself as well.
Listen, I'm not a hot woman.
You know, there are women who fire up their webcam and legions and legions of thirsty centurions come and ring them with protection and flowers and love.
I know. I know!
And it used to bother me.
I'm sorry, all I have is all the reading and philosophy in the known universe, a master's degree, and 30 years of experience in communication.
Just man boobs, not chick boobs.
So, you know, someone just fires up a 240p webcam, stares lustfully into the camera, elevates her boobs, bleep, bleep, bleep, Push accordion.
And it's like, woo! Look at that subscriber count go!
That's pretty much not a subscriber count.
That's a sperm count, honey.
But the good thing is, it causes me to up my game.
Listen, if I was younger, like when I was younger, I was quite the hottie.
And if I was younger, you know, full head of hair, squared jaw, fewer freckles, well...
It would have been a whole lot easier for me to get subscribers, which meant I wouldn't have to have become as good at what I do.
So what you've done is you have taken from yourself the opportunity to become interesting without lying.
The challenge to find ways to convince people of how to live better without pretending to be a woman.
So yeah, it's bad for them and it's been bad for you.
Okay, well, what if I told you that before I met this guy, my real life, I lived in just a constant state of dishonesty.
I was incredibly dishonest.
I lied to everyone, including my family.
And I was a thief.
I was just really just basically an asshole.
And by knowing this guy, and don't get me wrong, I understand this is me using him.
Even though maybe I didn't know it at the time, but because I was able to pour all of this dishonesty into the avatar, It allowed me to realize that I was an honest person in real life.
And to be honest- Wait, wait, wait, sorry.
I think you just made a mistake there or I misunderstood something.
You said that if you poured all, because you poured all of your dishonesty, you found out that you were an honest person in your real life.
Is that what you meant? Yeah, yeah.
So you became more honest in your real life as you were lying more online.
Correct. I found that my friend became an outlet For the dishonesty, in a way.
And this allowed me to overcome the dishonesty that existed in my real life.
Like, I try to think in my head how many times I've told a lie in the last five years since I've known this guy.
And I can't think of one, Stefan.
I can't think of even little white lies.
I just don't lie anymore.
And before I met this guy, I would say a compulsive liar.
And what did you steal?
I was never diagnosed.
No, what did you steal? What physical things did you steal?
Anytime I went into a store, I wouldn't walk out of there without something that I didn't pay for.
Whether it was even a candy bar or whatever.
It was almost impossible for me to leave a store without something I didn't pay for.
And why do you think you did that?
I don't know.
Oh, come on. You've listened to this show before.
Don't tell me you don't know. If you have that lack of curiosity about your own worst habits, then I don't know what you're doing listening to this show.
Why did you do it? I don't know.
It's something that my family did to me on the way up.
Why did you do it? Why did you steal?
Because I was selfish.
No, that's a manifestation.
That's an effect, right?
No, it's like I'm saying, why did you bleed?
Because I was stabbed? Well, yeah, but why were you stabbed, right?
So, why?
Because here's the thing. The reason I'm asking you this is that you say, well, me lying online has made me not steal, not compulsively lie, in which case you're saying it's a positive thing.
Okay, but if it's a positive thing, then it must have given you some self-knowledge.
And if it hasn't given you self-knowledge, then again, you've been avoiding.
So, why did you steal?
Greed? No. No, no.
Look, everyone's greedy.
Everyone's selfish. I'm selfish.
You're selfish. But we don't all steal.
So, why did you steal?
I don't know. Attention.
I wanted to get caught. Well, don't give me guesses.
That's just wasting my time.
I don't know. I've given you three answers.
No, no. You've given me three guesses that you're completely not involved with emotionally.
You're just throwing things out to throw me off the scent.
No, I'm not trying to throw you off.
I really don't know.
I've questioned it myself.
I don't know where it came from.
And if you have an answer, I'd love to hear it, man.
But I feel like I've given you three tries.
Yeah, well, tries, it's not self-knowledge.
I mean, this is like, you know, when you ask a kid a math question and they just start blurting out random numbers.
Even if they're right, they're not right.
Right? 59, 73, green unicorn.
Alright, so you stole because you were stolen from.
Something in your childhood you felt deeply stolen from, deeply ripped off, deeply exploited.
And society ignored it, and so you paid society back by stealing back because you were stolen from.
So what was it in your childhood that was exploitive towards you?
I don't know, man.
I feel like I had a pretty decent childhood.
I know... The relationship with my sister, the stealing began with my sister.
You mean stealing from your sister?
Stealing from my sister.
Okay, so why didn't you like your sister?
Because we don't steal from people, we laugh, right?
No, no, it's a little more complicated than that.
My sister was pretty gifted intellectually.
I mean, her IQ was off the charts.
And when I was young, I pretty much worshipped her.
I always sought a really emotional bond with her.
I can even remember the first time I really connected with my sister.
I don't know if this is going off the topic, but she was very precocious.
She was reading really difficult works at a very young age.
I remember she had to be six or seven, which would have put me at four or five.
She had been reading Crime and Punishment.
And I didn't know that, but I was in my bedroom, and the parents were on the other side of the house.
And I just heard her sobbing.
And I went into her room, and I realized she was really upset.
And she was bawling, and she said to me how...
I'm sure you've read it.
She was describing the scene in the book where the drunken louts, they leave the bar, and they...
Marlottos. See, I've never actually read it.
I'm terrified of reading it, even to this day.
But I can only describe it as she described it to me.
And how they get in the cart and this small horse won't move.
So they just start beating it to death.
Because they just can't get it to move.
And that upset her so much.
And she cried.
And I held her in my arms for an hour, consoling her.
And I feel like from that moment, I wanted to re-establish that connection with her.
And I wanted that to be something that we had every day.
And so I basically just started following everything she did.
If she started reading a series of books, I would read that series of books.
It started with something called Dragonlance.
It was a fantasy novel series by...
By a couple of British authors, I believe.
Don't get bogged down in the details.
Let's stay on the big picture. Oh, okay, okay, okay, sorry.
So if she read one of those books, I would not only read the book, even though I wasn't really understanding it the way she did.
I mean, my parents always told me I tested as pretty high IQ, but nothing like her.
And I didn't really understand what I was reading, but I would just follow her in everything she did, and I would actually take it even a further step.
If she read two books of a series, I would read...
Okay, no, I get it. I get it.
Okay. Okay. You're trying to swamp me with details so I lose the big picture.
All right. I'm not trying to deceive you, man.
No, I'm not saying it's conscious.
So, what was your sister's relationship to you?
Cold. Right.
Icy cold. Who was the household member who was depressed or mentally ill or attempted suicide?
No one attempted suicide.
And I didn't realize my father's depression until much later.
My sister revealed this to me even just a few years ago.
But I guess my father was taking really, really, really hard antidepressants, like the kind of stuff that they give to people in nuthouses.
And my father was always a really productive member of society.
He worked 35 years without missing a day of work, but I guess the medication that he was taking all through this time was serious.
And both my mother and my father were alcoholics, and I didn't realize that until much later either.
My God, you're annoying me.
Why? Come on, man.
I don't know what you're going to say.
I asked you about your childhood, and what did you tell me?
I explained my parents and their situation.
No. You told me you thought you had a pretty good childhood.
I did. Your father is depressed.
He's on fucking horse tranquilizers or something.
Both your parents are alcoholics and your sister is cold towards you.
And you tell me you're not telling lies anymore?
Are you kidding me? Do you know how easy that was for you?
That's chilling, man. You just tell me, you know, I think my childhood was pretty good.
I said, well, what happened in your childhood that was negative?
Or how did you feel exploited or let down or whatever, right?
He said, no, my childhood was pretty good.
And like, hang on, now not three minutes later, you're telling me about some seriously dysfunctional stuff.
And you don't even notice that you told me that your childhood was fine.
Like that didn't even occur to you that that was different, right?
From what you were telling me to what you told me not three minutes ago.
Well, you know, I just, I listened to the last phone call, man.
No, no, no, forget the last phone call.
No, no, I'm talking about you, Steve.
I know, I know. So did you notice that you told me your childhood was fine and now you're telling me it was horrible?
No, you said horrible, man.
Don't put that word in my mouth.
All right. Tell me if you heard somebody else who said, my sister who I desperately wanted to be close to was really cold to me and I had one hour that I can remember of us being close.
My father was so depressed he was on very heavy medications for depression and both my parents were alcoholics.
Would you say that's a good childhood?
My instinct would be to say, were you physically abused or mentally abused?
Did your father put food on the table?
Did he put clothes on your back?
And if he did, yeah, you did okay.
All right. So you did okay.
I don't know. I mean, my father was a diligent worker.
He took care of us.
He provided a home and a family.
They didn't have the greatest relationship.
I mean, you can be kidnapped and locked in a barn and they can give you food and drink.
What the hell does that matter? Oh, I don't think that...
You grew up as a thief and a compulsive liar.
From a highly dysfunctional background, and you're going to try to tell me that there's something was great going on here?
I'm not trying to absolve them of any blame in this situation.
I'm just saying, as things go, I don't think it was too bad.
Okay. Well, listen, Steve, if this is your commitment, I got people who want to tell me the truth and who want to work on issues.
So I'm going to move on.
And I will say this, though.
I will say this, though. It's interesting that you thought your sister was the most important and interesting person in your family, and you spent five years pretending to be a woman online, because the females in your family and online get the attention.
But I can't, I mean, if you're not willing to be basically honest with me about what happened in your childhood, then I really can't have much of a conversation with you.
Please, please don't hang up.
I really need your help with this.
I don't understand what you want from me.
The truth. I feel that growing up, I felt like other people had it worse.
And so? And why whinge about something that I couldn't control or I couldn't change even if I wanted to?
Stephen, for fuck's sake, man. The reason you connect with this shit is you don't steal from people and lie to people.
That's why you connect with it.
Of course people had it worse.
That has no bearing. If somebody comes along and saws your leg off and leaves you dying in the ditch, you say, well, you know, there are people in war who have shrapnel, so I'm fine.
I'm just going to walk around. Come on.
We deal with our own personal experiences.
This comparing yourself to everyone else in the world is a way of crushing your own experience, which then manifests itself in pathological lying, in deceiving people, in having the temerity to give advice to people online when you don't seem to know the first thing about your history, excusing your history, lying to people.
And taking what doesn't belong to you.
Of course it manifests that way, because you're not connected with the bad things that happened in your history.
How do I get connected to it?
Well, stop lying about it.
And I'm not saying you're consciously lying like you know something different.
I mean, I think you're that glib that you make up reality as you go along.
So you're like, okay, well, the right thing here to say is that my childhood was fine, because that makes me look good or better in the moment.
And then when I'm asked more detailed questions, then I will tell those facts, but there's no connection to the prior facts.
What you do is you make up whatever you need to make up to get through a particular moment, but there's no string holding these beads together.
Like you don't sit there and say, okay, well, now I'm telling Steph that my parents were alcoholics, that my father was so depressed he was on mental institution-grade medication, and my sister was cold to me, but I did just say to him a few minutes ago that my childhood was fine.
So like you don't have that connection thing, right?
So when I say that you're lying, I don't mean that you're sitting there rubbing your hands and you know that...
I think that you don't know how to tell the truth in a consistent way because I don't think you know what the truth is.
You're just kind of making stuff up in the moment.
All right. All right, so how do you get to the truth?
I... I just don't remember it being that bad.
And maybe it was in ways that I don't understand.
I just don't remember my childhood being, even though the circumstances were as they were, I just don't remember it being that bad.
I can't imagine, Steve, my daughter, decades from now, saying that she had a wonderful memory of one hour of closeness in her childhood.
That's hard, right?
That's horrible, man.
That's a lonely, lonely place.
Do you think there's, like I said, I've thought a lot about this phone call on the way, and do you think there's a connection there between my relationship with my sister and this false life?
No, fundamentally it's your relationship with your parents that matters.
Your relationship with your sister.
Sibling relationships are conditioned by parental relationships.
Because sibling relationships are like clay in the hands of the parents.
And if there's dysfunction in the sibling relationships, and there are psychological studies that seem to indicate that like half of sibling relationships are abusive and it's not really talked about much.
But if there is dysfunction in the sibling relationship, That results from dysfunction in the parental relationship.
I mean, I can't imagine if your father was half catatonically depressed, and on insanely heavy psych meds, that he was emotionally available to you.
No, he wasn't.
And if your parents, was your father drinking while he was on psych meds?
Now, you know that's not good, right?
Not good to the point where, like, that's seriously dangerous.
And your mother, she was an alcoholic too, right?
Yeah, but she'd, my father would, he'd have the gin in the glass.
My mother would hide it in a coffee mug.
So your mother lied too?
Mm-hmm. Right, you're mm-hmming me like that's not important to you, being a liar.
No, no, no, no, no, no. Yes, yes.
And how did you know your mother was a drunk?
She revealed it much later.
Did you know at the time? No, no, I had no idea.
Did you have any idea that things were wrong in your house at all when you were a kid?
Not really. Did you know any more functional families where they got along and where the parents were close to the children and where they loved each other and had fun?
I had friends who lived in those situations, but I don't know, I just kind of assumed different strokes, different folks.
What? I just figured, you know...
Hang on, you're rubbing something on your mic.
I'm getting a rubbing sound.
Oh, I'm sorry.
Here, is that better? Yeah.
Okay. I just figured different situations.
I mean, most of my friends had much larger families, and my family was just my sister and I, but almost all my friends, the families had four or five kids.
I don't, I mean, it's like someone else, your house is on fire, someone else's house is not on fire, and you're saying, well, different strokes for different folks.
I mean, that's more than a little different, isn't it?
Yeah. Your inner parents really don't like this topic being explored, I'll tell you that much.
Yeah, but that doesn't mean I don't want to.
Well, you know, you've got to fight with me, though, against this censorship.
I'm not going to fight this censorship for you because it's in your head.
I can't. Like if you are just going to mm-hmm me into obscurity, right?
And I don't mean, I'm not trying to threaten you.
I'm just telling you what I know is productive not, right?
If you don't show up, I can't coach you, right?
If you don't show up. And so if you're just going to mm-hmm me, like everything I'm talking about is unimportant or uninteresting to you, then you're not trying to fight to get through to the truth.
You're just letting the censorship of your parents run the relationship, run the conversation here.
Please don't take my mm-hmms as me downplaying the things you're saying.
I kind of want you to keep going.
But you know why I think you're downplaying the things I'm saying, Stephen?
It's because you keep downplaying the things that I'm saying, right?
You keep saying, well, you know, different strokes and things were just different and I didn't even know there was anything wrong and, you know, I still think it was fine.
I mean, you do downplay what I'm saying.
And again, I'm not condemning you or anything for this.
I'm just pointing out the reality.
Okay, fair enough. I'm willing to say that my childhood wasn't that great.
I guess I... Wasn't that great?
Well, it's a step, right?
I'm not interested in steps.
I'm not a therapist.
I'm not working with you for a year.
I'm not interested in steps.
Alright, you're more interested in leaps.
Alright. Alright, so it was a shitty childhood.
There was no emotional connection.
I don't have any memories of anything that my family did together that was, like, I have zero memories of any kind of real love.
You said any kind of real love.
What do you mean? Was there somewhat love?
Was there a bit of love? I'm not sure what that means.
Just, uh, there was support.
Uh, there was a rooftop, there was, uh, clothing, there was, you know, no, we went over the, they provided you like a gulag owner.
We already understand that.
But what do you mean by support?
Uh, just, I could never talk to them about anything that I was feeling.
So you couldn't talk to them about things that you were feeling and that comes under the category of support for you?
No, no, no. That's outside of the financial support.
Oh, so the financial support.
Okay, okay. I got it. I got it.
I just mean that, no, we were never a close family insofar as being able to discuss problems, even problems with, you know, at school or, you know, with friends in the community.
There was no way I could ever talk to my parents or my sisters, maybe specifically my sister, about that stuff.
And did they ever know you were a shoplifter?
They learned when I got busted when I was, I think, eight.
It's actually the only time my dad ever spanked me.
Wait, you got busted for shoplifting when you were eight?
Yeah. And you kept shoplifting afterwards, right?
Yeah. It didn't get as bad.
It kind of developed over time.
It wasn't always that I was always feeling something, like I mentioned before.
It was That developed probably in my early teens, but no, yeah, the first time I shoplifted something was when I was eight, and I got caught.
And I remember my dad spanked me, but for whatever reason, that did not deter me.
Well, spanking doesn't deter anyone about anything.
But you did rouse your father, and you got attention.
Yeah. He noticed you.
So you think that the lying, the stealing was all just an attempt to get attention?
I don't know. You're jumping to conclusions here.
Like you either don't go far enough or you go way too far.
I'm just pointing it out.
I'm just pointing it out.
Well, you criticize me either way, right?
No, no, no. Don't stop playing the victim with me.
Don't do that. Yeah, you're right.
No, don't extrapolate from what I'm saying about one particular instance to this being the explanation to everything, right?
I mean, that's all I'm saying, right?
Because that's another way of avoiding the emotions, right?
Yeah, that's fair.
So, and listen, you're doing great.
You're doing great. You're doing great.
How did your sister turn out?
Well, she's very successful in just about everything she does.
She works in Silicon Valley, and she and I now have a much stronger relationship that's developed over the years.
And I think Part of that has something to do with this online relationship.
I don't know. I might be making a false connection there.
What would she say about your childhood?
We've talked about it.
She's expressed surprise how little memory I have of things.
The last few conversations we've had, we've kind of gotten into it.
We've been kind of...
Do you remember this?
Do you remember this? I'd be like, no, but I remember this.
I remember this. I think there's a real chance for us to have a good relationship moving forward.
And she's got a niece, and I really want to be a part of my niece's life.
I've established a career here in China.
I'm thinking about moving back to the States just to be part of my niece's life.
Does your sister know that you pretended to be a woman for half a decade online?
No, but I've been trying to find a way to explain this to her also.
I wouldn't do it yet. Okay.
I wouldn't do it until you know why.
So you didn't answer my question.
I mean, I know you thought you did, but you didn't answer my question.
What do you think your sister would say about your childhood in terms good, medium, or bad?
Bad. She would say that it was bad.
Yeah, I'm pretty sure of that.
Wait, you haven't talked about it with her?
That part? Well, like I said, it's come up, different memories from childhood, and those have come up in conversation, and we kind of agreed together that most of the stuff that both of us experienced in childhood was pretty bad stuff, emotionally at least.
Wait, so you have, sorry to interrupt, you've had conversations with your sister where you've both said that emotionally things were pretty bad in your childhood.
And yet I still said it wasn't so bad.
Oh, good for you, man.
Look at you putting those beads together.
That's beautiful. This is like a matrix moment.
There is no spoon. You other spoon.
Hey, man, let's spoon. Look at you.
Look at that. So you're talking with your...
See how this works? Are you talking with your sister?
Bad stuff in your childhood.
You're talking to me. It was fine.
That's the challenge, right?
Putting the stuff together to be a consistent person.
Not try and appear better in the moment or whatever.
Does that make sense? Yeah, yeah, it does.
So, so now we know you were lying, right?
Because you knew, you at least had discussed this truth with your sister, right?
No, no, you're talking about the truth of the online...
No, no, no, sorry, the truth of your childhood with your parents.
Yeah, yeah. So you and your sister had discussed that it was pretty bad.
So then when you talked to me and said it was fine, you, did you know at that moment you weren't telling the truth?
Well, no. See, I didn't think I wasn't telling the truth because in conversations with my sister in this matter, I've always been kind of the one who said, oh, come on, it wasn't that bad.
And I've always kind of thought my sister was overreacting as to how, you know, how bad it was.
And I've always been kind of like, oh, don't you remember all the holidays we took, all the trips to the beach?
So you're trying to talk her out of thinking it was bad.
Yeah, that's what I've pretty much done.
Okay. No, that's a fair answer.
So you're denying her experience.
She doesn't know that you pretended to be a woman online.
You think you had a good childhood.
She thinks you had a bad childhood, and you tell her she's wrong, but you're really close.
See, what I'm going to submit, Stephen, is I don't think you really know what it means to be close yet.
See, you don't override somebody else's lived experience by just telling them that they're wrong, right?
Right? That's not being close.
That's doing to her what you were trying to do to me, which is to deny...
Listen, man, nobody becomes a thief and a liar because they had a really good and happy childhood.
Do you understand? I mean, nobody.
Nobody. I mean, okay. Brain damage.
Whatever, right? But nobody becomes a thief and a liar, misrepresenting themselves online for five to six years.
And I'll tell you why I knew your childhood was bad too, Stephen, because when I asked you to process basic empathy towards the person on the other side of your avatar, and you should listen back to this, you really had a tough time putting yourself in his shoes, right?
Yeah, that was pretty shocking.
And in the same way, you have a very tough time putting yourself in the shoes of yourself as a child, or your sister as a child, right?
And what that tells me is that you have a problem with empathy because you were not empathized with as a child.
Now, if nobody tried to put themselves in your shoes, if nobody mirrored your feelings and accurately interpreted what you thought and felt and reflected it back to you, and helped you learn how to deal with your emotions and manage your experiences, and helped you learn how to deal with your emotions and manage your experiences, if nobody empathized with you, then it will be hard for you Yes.
Because it's hard for you to empathize with others, you only focus on your feelings.
And not because you're a mean or nasty person, but because the other person's feelings don't really show up for you.
And so, when I want the truth, but you want to deny the truth, my desire for the truth doesn't really show up for you in life.
Our conversation. Only your desire to avoid the truth shows up for you emotionally, I think.
And so it's tough for you to be close to people because I don't think that other people's emotions, including your own as a child, but that's because of a lack of mirroring, you've got to, you know, alcoholic people are not empathetic.
I'll just tell you that flat out in my experience.
Alcoholic people are not empathetic.
Because, I mean, especially if you're not drinking, and of course as a kid you're not drinking.
I remember once an older woman was in my place.
Nothing to do with me. I'm just going to tell you real briefly.
I won't give you any details. But an older woman was in my place.
I wanted to go to bed.
Okay, it was a friend of my mom's.
And she just, she was drunk and she did not want to go to bed.
She did not. Like, you know, drunk people are, they can be desperately clingy.
You know, some of the people that are just bitterly drinking in the darkness and alone and, you know, I drink alone with nobody else.
But some people, when they drink, they become very barnacle-like suction proboscis attached to people where they just, they can't be alone.
They can't be alone. And I remember this woman, she would come in with the newspaper and say, it's not the Globe and Mail, it's the grope and fail.
You know, and she was just like all the messy, sloppy all over the place and telling stupid jokes and just wouldn't.
Now, that's, I'm tired.
I got to get up in the work in the morning.
I want to go to bed.
But she doesn't care. Because it's about her needs, right?
Her needs. My needs don't matter.
She just wants to avoid the horror of her own existence, so she needs to latch on, cling on.
Now, I don't know if this was the case with your parents, but it is very selfish to drink when you're a parent.
It is horribly selfish to drink when you're a parent.
And I don't mean like a glass of wine at dinner.
I mean, I'm like to the point where it's interfering with your emotional availability to your children.
Do you know, Stephen, because you keep talking about your material needs were provided for like that, and I say, what the hell does that matter?
And the reason I say that, Stephen, is that there are tons of studies that show that That a starving monkey child will choose its own mother over food, will choose hugs over nutrition.
We have a greater thirst physically for contact, for connection, for reflection.
Even more so than for food when we're starving.
Because if you'd had the choice between skipping a meal and having one more hour like you had with your sister, which would you have chosen as a kid, Stephen?
The hour. The hour, of course.
If somebody said you have to go a whole day without food, but you'll get one of those hours, what would you have said?
A week. A week?
Until you were just about to fucking die, you would have taken that hour, right?
Yeah. That's where our soul nutrition is, and we need more than...
We need that more than we need food to live.
And so... To be real, to be honest with people, is to recognize that you can't have a relationship if you're not honest.
Right? And you deserved all of that eye contact, that mirroring, that connection.
You deserved parents who were emotionally available to you, who were curious about you, who cared what you thought and what you felt.
You know, I can spend an hour sometimes in the morning talking with my daughter about what she dreamed.
Very interesting. I'm rapidly curious about what she thinks and what she feels and why and all of that.
And she's just getting to the point.
She's turned nine. She's just getting to the point where she can try and figure out why she's feeling what she's feeling and why she dreamed maybe what she dreamed.
And you needed all of that, Steve.
You deserved all of that.
That should have been there for you.
And I don't like parents who drink.
I think it's hard. Because when you have children, especially when they're young, they can't go any other place for their emotional connection.
You know, I'm a father.
My daughter, she's got no plan B for emotional connection outside of this house.
There's nowhere else she can go.
She's stuck. She's stuck here.
It's the ABC. It's the accidental biological cage.
And if you drink, if your parents drink, they're not available for you emotionally.
And that's very selfish.
Because children need you to be there as a parent.
They need you to help them understand what they think and what they feel.
They need to see their inner worlds reflected in the interest of the outer world.
I remember when I was a kid, maybe eight or nine years old, some Mormons came to our house, our little apartment that we had in London.
And my brother and I brought out everything to show these very nice and clean-cut and, if I remember rightly, quite handsome young men.
We showed them our papier-mâché collection.
We showed them the figurines that we had painted.
We showed them the Lancaster and Spitfire and Messerschmitt 109E model planes that we had put together and painted.
We showed them our dioramas.
We wanted to show them everything because here, finally, there was an adult in the house who had some interest in what the hell we were doing with our time.
We showed them how we had stuck...
Thread from one end of the room to the other, and we'd melted coat hooks onto the top of our airplanes, and we had a whole complicated system of having the airplanes fly down so that one would go below, the other would go over.
And they were very polite about it.
They were very nice about it.
I remember when I was just alone with my mom when I was 11 or 12, a guy came over.
I have no idea how he ended up in our Apartment.
A guy came over to sell us a vacuum cleaner.
It's more than, you know, it's such a cliche.
This guy, he was like, I remember so clearly.
He threw something on the carpet and he turned on the vacuum cleaner, slurped it all up.
He picked up the vacuum cleaner by the hose and shook it and said, look how strong it is.
This place is going to be gleaming.
It's like, dude, this is a one-bedroom apartment.
We have one carpet that's been around since the Paleozoic era.
I think it's got trilobites two levels down.
And of course, you know, we couldn't afford anything like that.
I don't know what the hell he was doing. But I was fascinated and I showed him all my stuff.
Here's my stuff. Are you interested?
See, it's a good thing I outgrew that, isn't it?
But... And I remember, although I do remember being pissed at him, because my mom went into the kitchen to get something, and he sort of pulled me in close and he said, go talk to your mom, will you?
Go get her to buy this.
Now, I don't know what desperate straight the guy was in.
Maybe he's dead now.
I don't know. He's probably old. But that's kind of shitty.
By the way, if you're out there, don't rope in the 11-year-old son of a single mom to go close a deal for you.
That's shitty. You know, yuck.
You know, if you can't sell it, fucking move on.
But don't rope your...
I mean, again, don't use me and my need for a father figure to sell your fucking vacuum cleaner.
But anyway, you needed that.
You needed that, and you were hungry for it.
Oh, I was. And it was withheld from you.
empathy connection interest was stolen from you because you were trapped there and you couldn't get it anywhere else right yeah i now you were emotional for a little while before were you In this phone call?
Yeah. Oh, yeah, no, no, I lost it for a bit.
So, let's get back to that.
Because now you're all like, oh, right?
Don't be the fat tennis bro out of Red Oaks.
Okay. Give me your feelings back where you were.
Well, when you mentioned, what would I have given up for just another hour like that?
I'm going to lose it again.
I would have starved.
I would have... Food was outside the door, but I knew that kind of emotional connection was inside the room.
I wouldn't have left the room. Right.
That's what we want, right?
And I want it again, man.
I always feel like my sister and I could get back to that.
Okay, wait, wait. Come back to your feelings, man.
You're jumping out of your skin again, right?
Because that's where your closeness is.
That vulnerability, that honesty, that loss.
Can you imagine who you'd be, Stephen, if you didn't even have that hour?
Prison, probably.
You know, I'm not kidding you, you're probably damn right.
Like that, fucking Dostoevsky saved your life.
And save the life of your potential victims.
That one hour, man.
One hour. Isn't it incredible what we can live on?
What we can survive on?
What fucking tiny crumbs we can make a lifetime worth of food out of.
Right? You know, I brought it up to my sister, the Dostoevsky story.
I brought that up to her one time...
And when we're adults, this was probably nine or ten years ago, and I don't think I was able to really get across to her how important it was.
But I'd like to try again.
Can you imagine if she didn't even...
She remembered it, right? She did.
She did. But, you know, my sister, she's kind of a...
And I'm not making excuses for her, but she's...
I'm sure she's a victim of the same kind of stuff I was as far as not having that emotional connection.
But it's always been difficult to talk to her.
Her mind is just always flitting around so quick.
I just feel any conversation I have with her, I feel like if I don't nail the approach, I just lose her.
Either I give too much detail and she gets bored, or I don't give enough detail and she doesn't find it interesting enough.
Even when I brought the story up with her, she remembered it, but I didn't get through to her how important it was to me and how that just affected me in so many ways.
Right. And I don't mean to interrupt your flow of feelings, but I just want to give you that Feedback, Stephen.
You say that your sister is hard to talk to, that she flits around all over the place, that she's kind of avoidant?
Well, I don't think it's necessarily that she's avoiding talking about things.
Her mind just works in just a really strange and unusual way.
She's hard to connect with.
And she gets so frustrated, man.
No, but hang on, Stephen. Okay.
Just out of curiosity, do you think that there's anyone else in your family who might be a little hard to connect with?
Somebody maybe even on this very call?
Yeah, yeah, maybe one.
Maybe. Just maybe.
And of course, if you're denying her childhood experiences, it's going to be tough.
Like, here's the thing. You both are very close to the truth, and you both are very close to each other.
But someone's going to have to make the first step.
You see, she will trade the importance of that hour to you for you validating her experiences of the negative aspects of your childhood.
Because you want her to validate your experience, but you wanted to deny hers.
Doesn't work that way. If you want the validation for the hour, which you should damn well get, because that will break your heart and make your soul, you want the validation for that hour, which you should get, you got to give her validation for why she failed.
Right? Yeah, yeah.
Yeah. Wait a minute.
Where did you go? Where did you go?
You don't like that bit, right.
Well, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.
It's fine.
Just thinking about empathy, and I'm trying to think of – Other aspects of my life where I should have been empathetic.
No, no, no. Forget other aspects of your life.
Now that's you jumping out of your own skin again.
Okay. So when I talked about you giving empathy to your sister for something, listen, do you realize, Stephen, that you gave to me a validation of my thoughts about your bad childhood, but you're not giving it to your sister?
You gave it to a stranger.
Well, not a stranger, but you know what I mean, right?
Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Yeah, and that's not quite fair.
I mean, you gave it to me, man.
You gave it to me. Why can't you give it to her?
What's the problem with validating what she felt about your childhoods?
What's the barrier? I mean, I know what the barrier is, but do you?
I feel like I've tried, man.
I feel like I've tried to connect with her in so many different ways.
No, no, no. All right, all right, all right.
You are not connecting with her when you're denying her experience.
When you're saying, well, it wasn't that bad, and we had food and shelter.
Yeah, but my attempts to connect go back before I knew she felt any of this.
No, no, forget all that.
She's telling you something that's important to her.
Right? And you're denying it.
And you're trying to talk her out of it.
Because, listen, you said you want to be close to your sister, right?
Isn't that what you told me? More than anything.
Okay, so excuse me while I'm blank, while I'm frank and say shut the fuck up and listen when I tell you how to get close to your sister, okay?
Stop fighting me on this. I'm telling you how to be close to your sister and you're fighting me tooth and nail.
Well, it's not you, it's your parents, but you're talking, right?
How does it cost your parents if you validate your sister's feelings?
Because that's the real equation.
Do your parents want you to validate your sister's experience of her childhood?
Well, I don't think so.
I mean, my father died a few years back.
My mother and I are...
I have no relationship with my mother, nor does she.
So it's hard to know.
I've never had a chance to talk to either of them about any of this.
Why don't you have any relationship with your mother?
She abandoned my father when he was sick.
I mean, when he got really sick.
My mother was 14 years younger than my father, and he kind of saved her from a really shitty situation.
And then once he got old and frail, she just decided it wasn't for her.
But your family life was fine, right?
I mean, growing up...
Oh, come on. No, no, no.
Are you telling me that your mother fundamentally changed her nature when she got older?
Just had a whole new personality graft?
No. No. I mean, she is who she...
I mean, she was who she is.
So I... And I've come to...
That was something I really struggled with for a long time, was whether or not I should allow her back into my life since she made that decision.
And I've decided not to, and I feel strongly about the decision, and...
I'm not disagreeing with the decision.
Okay. Then what does it cost you...
If you want to be close to your sister, and you know what I'm saying, Stephen, right?
Like, I mean, I'm not saying you have to agree with your sister about everything she says.
But if someone's got something really important and emotional to talk about, you listen.
Right? You listen, you listen, you listen.
Now, maybe at some time down the road, you can have a judgment, but you listen.
And you absorb and you try and figure out where she's coming from, what the memories are, what it's done in her life.
That's how to be close to someone, right?
You listen. So you know what I'm saying intellectually, right?
Yeah. So why, when she says her childhood, and I'm just, I'm simplifying here, but let me just, you know, for the sake of argument, when she says her childhood is bad, why do you disagree with her?
Why do you minimize what she says?
I guess I always just feel, I mean, it's in the past.
It's gone. I mean, what good does it do to dwell on these things when you can move forward in positive ways?
Okay. What if she's, let's just say you're right about all of that, but what if she's not able to move on for some reason?
Is it not worth listening to her to help her move on?
Do you not think that her unburdening herself to you will help her move on?
Oh, well, yeah.
Listen, I think there's There's something I haven't gotten across here.
I have tried my best to make myself available for my sister, and I try to initiate these topics, talking about childhood.
And maybe I'm coming from the wrong place in the fact that I'm trying to tell her it's all going to be okay and whatnot.
I don't mind talking about this.
I don't avoid it. But she is emotionally unavailable.
She never initiates this kind of stuff with me.
Why do you think she doesn't initiate it with you?
Because you're fighting me like crazy, and you also told me before that you denied her experience of her childhood.
You think she thinks I'm just going to do it again?
Well, yeah. Because if I wasn't experienced and not emotionally invested in this, you'd have bested me long ago.
I mean, I'm fucking sweating here.
Seriously, like, I'm sweating here trying to connect with you.
And I don't have the whole history.
And I'm not vulnerable to you in the way that she is.
Siblings are incredibly vulnerable to each other.
No, no, listen, that's...
That's not the case with her.
She is just a machine of logic and no emotion.
Well, she is with you because you deny her emotional experiences.
Right? Maybe.
No, no, you told me you did.
Probably. You can say, well, no, I didn't.
I can change. But I can't pretend that you didn't tell me that, right?
Okay, yes, yes. I won't say maybe.
Okay, so if you have denied her emotional experience of her childhood, and then you say that she's not emotionally available, you understand why, right?
Or at least one of the reasons.
Or at least the reason that you have the most control of her, right?
Yeah. So, my question is, what does it cost you to listen to your sister's unhappiness about your childhood?
Okay. Nothing.
I have no problem with...
No, no, no. Otherwise, you wouldn't deny.
You say you want to be close to your sister, then you deny her emotional experience.
You can't have both. So if you want to be close to your sister, but you deny her experience, there must be some important reason why you deny her experience.
What does it cost you?
I don't want her to think of me as weak.
I feel like because...
I feel like everything she does and everything she says...
Is so rational and so devoid of emotion that I feel like if I try to, even if I try to empathize with her, even if I try to bring up these things, I feel like even if I can get her to talk about it and she starts talking about it.
The minute I start to give my perspective on these things, she closes down or she changes the subject, and it's really hard.
Because your perspective on things, Stephen, I'm really trying to help you, man.
You've got to open your heart to this, okay?
You don't have to do anything I'm saying.
You can end this phone call and you say, Steph doesn't know his ass from a hole in the ground, what a load of crap, blah, blah, blah, right?
It's fine. But for right now, you have told me you want to be close to your sister.
I want to get you that fucking hour back.
From here to eternity, I want to get you back more than that hour.
I don't want you to have to live for decades on a meal of one hour.
I want you to get you that hour back.
And you, complaining about your sister's lack of emotion when you specifically deny her emotions, isn't going to get you that hour back.
I'm trying to get you what you want.
I'm trying to figure out why you don't want it.
Because you say, Steph, I want to be close to my sister.
I say, here's how you get close to your sister.
You say, I'm not going to do that. Which means that it's going to cost you something to be close to your sister, something that you want to hold on to more than you want to be close to your sister.
Now, it's not a relationship with your father because he's dead, and it's not a relationship with your mom because you don't have one.
Ah, that's it.
You don't want to give up your capacity to manipulate because you don't know who you'll be without it.
Yeah, that's kind of where all this was probably going in the end.
I should mention that when I say I was a liar, I don't just mean like...
Telling bald-faced lies and...
Okay, stop, stop.
You tell me something and then you try to refine it to the point where I lose track of your emotions, okay?
Stop doing that. This is what I mean.
So I say, you don't know who you are if you're not manipulating, and immediately you stop manipulating me.
It's not a conscious thing.
I understand that. I'm not blaming you.
Can you imagine being honest and authentic, open and connected, and not having...
Permission to lie or to manipulate or to falsify.
I can now, but that wasn't always the case.
Because if you connect with your sister and you get how great that connection is, you now have a giant fight set up against the demons of manipulation that are in your heart and mind, I think.
And it's...
It's hard to learn these lessons later in life, right?
I mean, you're not a teenager. So there's a lot of undoing, there's going to be a lot of vulnerability, and there's going to be a lot of confusion, right?
And there's going to be a lot of feeling weak.
Because you have... The armor of manipulation, your inner muscles are weakened, right?
Like if you have a cast on your arm, your arm seems strong.
It can withstand more blows than the arm without the cast, right?
But the muscles and the bones are getting weaker inside.
So if you've got this armor called manipulation and lying, then the muscles for authenticity and honesty and connection have atrophied, right?
And you said you don't want to appear weak.
Well, if you've had your arm in a cast for too long, and you know you have to take it off, right?
You know you have to take it off. Because you're rotting.
Your arm is rotting and decaying inside the cast, right?
You know you have to take it off, but you say, I'm going to feel weak.
My arm is going to feel weak. And it's like, well, yes, it is.
But what's your alternative? To leave the manipulation on?
To leave the cast on your arm for it to get weaker and weaker to the point where it dies?
Steve, we don't have forever to be authentic.
We don't have forever to be honest.
We don't have an infinity of time in which to become real to ourselves, to those around us.
Like the last caller, I kind of need you to panic.
Because you don't have forever.
At every step you take, every day you take, lying or being manipulative is a day where it becomes harder, to be honest.
Maybe it's close to too late, and maybe that's why you're calling.
Are we talking now about my sister, about my online...
Because it's pretty much the same thing.
Are you just laughing about all this?
You really are leveling up, man.
You don't like to be vulnerable. I understand that.
I really do. No, I mean, laughter is a defense mechanism.
I don't know what to say.
I know, and a defense mechanism is when we don't want to be vulnerable.
Do you want that hour back?
Do you want to be able to have that hour when you want it?
I want that hour not only with my sister, but I want it with my friend.
Right. You can't have it with your friend, because you've lied to him for half a decade, and that's the price of lying.
But you can have it with your sister.
If you apologize for denying her experience, grit your teeth, commit to honesty and curiosity, and ask her.
Because I'll tell you this, Steve.
You have a niece, right?
Mm-hmm. So your sister needs you.
And she wants me.
No, your sister needs you because she was badly parented.
Because she was parented by an alcoholic who dumped your dying father and abandoned him, right?
She was parented by a selfish, drunken, absent woman.
Oh, it's so much worse than that for her.
And that's the thing, is that she didn't...
The experience of my mother leaving my father, that didn't happen when we were young.
That happened when... When we were both in our 20s, and my sister was on the short track to being like the CEO. It was there for her to take.
And then when my mother abandoned my father, she had to take my father in and care for him.
No, but you're missing the reality.
Because you're talking about your mother abandoning your father.
No. Your mother abandoned you and your sister for alcohol when you were children, right?
She chose fucking booze in a coffee mug over her own children's emotional needs.
The abandonment of your father was one of a series of dominoes of abandonment, and it was the least egregious of all of them.
Do you know why? Because your father chose her.
You did not.
Your father chose to marry her, chose to stay married to her.
You did not choose her as a mother.
So her abandonment of her children was far more egregious than her abandonment of your father.
He had choice in the matter.
He was an adult. You had no choice in the matter, and you were children when she chose fucking booze over you.
That's what I'm talking about.
So you keep dragging me off to your father in this abandonment, and I'm saying the abandonment as a child.
That's what your sister needs help with, because she's going to have a baby there who...
Who needs lessons I don't know that your sister has.
Who needs connection I don't know if your sister can provide at the moment.
But if you go in, apologize for denying her experience, build bridges, show her the strength of connection, that will help her be more emotionally available to her child.
And break the cycle.
Isn't that what you called in four that there's a new generation here?
You want to break this cycle?
It's a big part of it.
Tell me what you feel now.
I don't know if I can change.
I want to be in my niece's life.
Why would I even believe that the manipulative person I've been my whole life and the way I've justified it, what Why would I ever believe that that could change and that I could actually be a positive influence in my niece's life?
Right. You want to be there for her, but you want to really be there for her and make her life better for you being in it, right?
And I think I can.
I think I'm a different person now, but I just don't know.
Right. Now listen, I'll tell you something why it's scary.
You know how terrifying children are?
They are absolutely terrifying because you know what?
They know when you're lying.
And the thing is, unless we're willing to be real bullies to them, they'll tell us when we're not telling the truth.
They'll know, and they respond.
Even if they don't feel comfortable saying it, they'll still act on the fact that we're not being honest with them, that we're not being authentic, that we're not being direct.
So, here's someone, your niece, Stephen, who's come into your life, who you fundamentally cannot manipulate, but you want to have a relationship with, right?
That's tough. Because what you want is, well, I really want to be able to manipulate people because that's what I'm used to and that's what works for me and that's what makes me feel powerful.
But I also want a relationship with someone I can't manipulate.
And wouldn't you want a relationship with a woman, a lover, a mother to your children that you also didn't have to manipulate because it's pretty exhausting, right?
Oh yeah, I know. I know this stretches to that too because there's just no chance for me right now to have a Meaningful relationship of my own.
Right. Right.
Well, I wouldn't say no, John.
Well, I mean, it just feels like that sometimes.
And I feel like I'm in a position in my life where that's what's got to happen right now because I do want a family.
I do want to... I want to get married, but I just have...
There's... You're grinding that mic again.
Sorry, I want to concentrate on what you're saying, but go on.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Sorry, sorry. You're saying you do want to have a wife, you do want to have a family.
More than anything, probably.
I just worry that I can't do it.
That I haven't really changed.
That everything I do is a manipulation.
And that I, even worse than that, I... I feel I know better, man.
I feel like one of these fucking Bill Maher elites who says that we've got to get rid of democracy.
You know what I mean? I feel like I know better than what other people, so it's okay if I manipulate them as long as the end result is a positive outcome for them.
And the fact is, I just end up having a pretty good track record of that, especially over the last few years.
But it's such a denial of their own agency.
And I do this to almost everyone in my life.
I...
And you tried to...
And again, I sound like I'm offended and mad.
I'm really not. But you tried to do it to me by saying, well, this guy's better off because I lied to him, and I'm better off because I lied to him, and there were all these positive results that came out of me being manipulative and lying.
And again, it sounds like I'm being hard on you or criticizing you.
I'm not. I'm just pointing it out.
And you can have the family.
You can have the love.
You can have the fatherhood.
You can be an honorable presence in your children's life.
But you have to switch your priorities.
You know, people say to me all the time, Stephen, they say to me, this is what I want more than anything.
Do you know how I know if that's true?
How? If they're willing to do whatever it takes to get it.
People say to me, I want to be a pianist more than anything in the world.
And I say, well, how much time did you spend last week practicing?
And they say, well, I got kind of busy last week.
It's like, okay, well, then you don't really want to be a pianist.
Now, if they say to me, oh, I practice 20 hours or 30 hours or whatever, I'm like, wow.
You know, I get up. Like, when I was a kid, I got my first computer when I was 11 years old.
Grand total of 8K. Monstrous.
Monstrous. Now, I am not a morning person, but I would get up in the morning at like an hour, an hour and a half before I'd normally have to get up, and I would program.
And I would program, and I would program, and I made dungeon programs.
I made, well, I just talked about this in a show, but I made screensavers, paint programs, you name it, right?
Recently, I just did some more programming, which I haven't done in a long time.
Ah, it was great. I just remembered how much I love it.
And also what great training it is in logic.
People want to know why I'm good at debating why I'm logical.
Well, a lot of it has to do with decade after decade of computer programming where it ain't like an arts degree.
You can get things wrong.
You can get things slow.
You can make things slow. It works or it doesn't.
It's fast enough or it isn't.
Now, I wanted to have a positive influence in the world in philosophy, and I would say to my friends, I really want Free Domain to be a success.
And they'd say, well, what are you doing about it?
And I'd say, well, I just did 12 shows last week.
I remember spending five hours trying to figure out how to make an XML feed.
This is back in the day.
It was so new. It was so new.
It was really hard to find answers for anything.
Now it's like a kind of publish-and-go thing.
Back in the day, man, trying to get that thing to work on iTunes was a monster.
And... I work very hard.
Mike works very hard on this show.
We're just about to release a Christmas special that's seven-plus hours, of which only six and a half is me doing Christmas carols.
It's going to be a disaster.
LAUGHTER So, if you want something, you say, I want it more than anything, my question is, okay, well, what are you doing to make it happen?
Are you going to therapy?
No, no. Are you reading self-aware books?
Are you keeping a journal?
Are you working through, I don't know, some of these workbooks?
Nathaniel Brandon has some.
I think John Gray has some.
There's things that you could be doing to practice being more authentic, right?
Yeah. What? Practice being authentic?
That sounds bad. But you know what I mean?
Developing the habit of honesty and authenticity, right?
Yes. Well, I imagine.
I don't really know the authors or the books.
But you could go to therapy, right?
Oh, I'm not going to say that.
I know. You're in China.
But no, there are people who do it online, as far as I understand it.
We'll put, no, what I was going to say that I decided not to and now I kind of have to is I was going to say I kind of see the hours I spend on day or online per day with this friend of mine as kind of my own therapy.
I know you felt that at the beginning of this conversation.
Do you still feel like it now?
I wouldn't have been ashamed to say it at the beginning, but now I am.
I don't really think that you can solve a problem of lying in a relationship based on lying.
I'm not a therapist, but I'm going to go out on a limb and say that's the case.
It's like, well, I have all these problems caused by loneliness, but I'm going to work on them alone.
No, I don't think that's going to work.
Well, as far as a therapist, I mean, there's really no access to that where I am here in China.
So I don't even know, there'd be no, even any place to start looking for that here.
The Chinese don't.
Stephen, did you hear what I just said?
About 40 seconds ago.
No, I did.
What did I say?
About finding therapy.
Or finding a therapist.
What did I say? Do you remember? It's okay if you didn't hear.
I might not have heard at all.
Okay, so when I say you're in China, but there are people who do it, do therapy online, as far as I understand it, do you remember that at all?
Oh, I do, and that got me thinking about the fact that the game was my online therapy.
Yeah, I do remember that now.
You think that would be valuable?
No, I love suggesting things that are not valuable.
That's what I live for. I hear you do it so often.
That's right. Because, you know, there's nothing more authentic than rage-filled sarcasm.
Yes, of course it's helpful, I think, if you get a good therapist.
I mean, if it's Skype, it's Skype.
If that's all you've said, yeah.
FDR1939, I think it is. How to find a good therapist is my thoughts on it.
Because you need someone to catch you and push back these habits, because you're not that aware of them.
Right? Like I say, you can find a therapist online, and you say, well, I can't get access to a therapist.
Right? Well, I get distracted.
I get distracted. I understand.
I understand. But generally, when we're distracted, we don't immediately forget something we just heard.
Right? Unless the distraction is, oh dear, a railway spike went through my head.
Alright? So if you want connection more than anything, and then the first thing you do is start throwing up barriers, you have to re-evaluate that statement.
Do you want connection more than anything?
Do you want to be a husband who is loved and a father who is loved?
Is that what you want?
Well, I think to myself, I agree with what you said.
No, no. Is that what you want?
Well, no, no, no. Let me finish.
It's kind of made me question as to whether or not that's really what I want, because if it's what I really wanted, why wouldn't I have made more of a move towards it already?
So you're asking questions of yourself, and I don't understand.
You're 40 fucking years old.
Make it happen. If you want it, make it happen.
What, are you waiting until you're 50?
Are you waiting until your sexual market value completely declines and your sperm are so old they're going to produce dino eggs?
But that's kind of what I'm saying.
Maybe it's not really what I want.
Maybe what I need to reevaluate is what I really want.
So you want to keep lying and manipulating rather than have connection.
Is that your plan? Is that what you really want?
You're just never going to grow beyond your childhood and the emptiness of your early experiences.
That's what you want is for your parents to win, for the alcohol to win, for the depression to win, for the absence to win, for the hunger to win, for nothingness to win.
That's what you want. That's going to be your big fucking proud life.
That's what you want. Never ever escape your childhood.
That's your plan. That's not the plan.
That's not the plan.
Good. Then have a different plan.
And make it happen.
Will it?
You look and find a therapist.
You talk to a therapist. You audition a therapist.
You find out if you can work with the therapist.
You ask what experience they have dealing with your particular issues.
And you make a commitment to be honest.
You wake up every morning and you say, I'm not going to lie today.
I'm not going to lie today. And if you lie, you have to force yourself to go back to the person and say, I'm sorry, I lied.
You make it harder for yourself to lie than to tell the truth.
I mean, you train yourself.
You change course.
You don't wait for it to happen.
And you don't have a life where you say, for one hour, for one hour, when I was eight, I was happy.
But I feel I have...
What you just said, you make it sound like I live this life where I'm lying to everyone.
I feel like I have changed that.
I don't lie.
And those moments when I even tell the slightest lie, I immediately feel it.
Okay, Stephen. Stephen, shut up.
Sorry. I hate to be so blunt with you.
The number of lies you have told me in this conversation probably runs into the dozens.
So don't fucking tell me about how you don't lie.
I mean, I'm going to get mad at you about this because you're just lying about lying.
This is how unconscious it is for you, and this is why you need to see a fucking therapist, okay?
You have lied to me dozens of times in the course of this conversation to the point where I was going to hang up on you, if you remember.
And then you sit there with the temerity and the fucking balls to tell me, well, I don't lie to people anymore.
I've given up on the lying.
You're fucking lying to me about lying.
This is how automatic and unconscious it is for you.
This is why you need some help, if you want to change.
If you don't want to change, you don't need any help at all.
I'm pushing back because I care.
I want you to get what you want.
I want you to revisit and live in the beautiful moments of that hour when you were eight.
I want you to not feel like you have to pretend to be a woman to get attention and to have value.
I want you to have a life where you're loved and seen.
I want you to escape the accidental biological cage of your childhood.
And I need you to listen back to this conversation.
With the notepad and lie down and write down every time you lied, because I don't think you know how continual it is for you.
And I was pretty much patient with it until the last one.
I don't...
I really don't. You're right in that.
I feel like I've been open and honest.
I think there's things that you've brought up that I hadn't considered.
Okay, I'm not going to enable this.
All right? Go see a therapist.
I'm going to move on to the next caller.
I'm not enabling this.
I feel like I did this because I know the reality of our conversation.
You need to listen back to it because you're just digging yourself in deeper.
But I do appreciate the call. I really do.
I think it was very helpful to be here.
And I will listen.
I will listen again. And thank you very much for your time, man.
Thank you. And please keep up all the good work.
Thank you.
By carefully gauging and systemizing the level of achievement needed for dopamine release, most mobile developers profit off this carefully constructed addiction.
Is engineering a voluntary experience playing video games to be addictive moral?
That's from Jack. Hey Jack, how you doing?
Very well, Stephon. How are you?
Goddamn to push a man!
Wow. Tell me more.
This is really, really quite fascinating.
I may have been on the receiving end of those dopamine drips.
Curse you, Doom 2016 people.
But I may have been on the receiving end of, oh no, there's another mod in Skyrim.
Wait, let me stop twitching about my video game history and tell me a little bit more about what you've seen.
If you've played in the last 10 years, you most certainly have.
For me, it started when I was in college.
And if you remember this guy named Jack Thompson, It was a lawyer in the early 2000s who led sort of a personal one-man crusade.
No bathing while you're calling.
That's not for me, man. Is Steve now peeing on our conversation?
Is that his plan? I don't know, man.
Okay, dump him if he won't mute.
Steve, you need to mute. And no peeing before you find a therapist.
All right, I think we can go ahead.
Sorry about that. Okay, so basically there was this guy named Jack Thompson who led a personal crusade against violence of video games and claimed, you know, the old saying that they have led to aggression and school shootings and all that stuff.
And I used to dismiss that as sort of peak boomer logic.
But now that I've been on the inside, so to speak, especially with how the marketing works to what we call the two and the six-year-old demographic and the six and the 12-year-old demographic, you know, it's sort of like making these mobile games that...
Just give your kid a tablet and you sit him down and he just plays with that.
You know, he just pushes and pushes and how it really rewires developing brain.
And the things you talked about, like, you know, free play in nature that is needed to develop empathy, that, you know, a lot of kids especially aren't getting that.
And that, you know, could potentially lead to some of these antisocial behaviors we see.
And now I've sort of switched around that way of thinking a bit from my own experience.
So tell me more about the mechanics of how all of this is tested and engineered.
That sounds... Interesting, yeah, sinister.
Yeah, indeed. So things that I've personally seen, for one, is something we call push notifications, which is basically if you have a game installed and you've been playing it, that game will send you sort of text messages to your phone or to your console or whatever about things happening in the game.
Your dragons need feeding.
They're hungry. Exactly, exactly.
Yeah, I've seen those. So how that works is we log the time That all the user is active.
And then we gauge that when they're most active.
Then we aggregate that together.
And then we send them a push notification specifically for them when the times where we know that they're least likely to play, so that they'll come back and sort of fill all those gaps.
Oh, so it's not like, oh, well, four hours or every 8 PM. It's like when they've got a trough in their usage stats, that's when we're going to ping them to try and get them to smooth it out, right?
Exactly. That's the personal approach.
It's gaming slash stalking.
I like it. Exactly. And there's also the broad spectrum approach where we sort of, and this is the testing phase when we have like, you know, 50, 60 testers all testing the game and, you know, Southeast Asia sweatshop style.
But that's another thing. But we measure sort of the amount of joy or elation each user gets by different achievements.
Like, oh, you made your farm.
That's a little bit. You made a better farm.
That's a little bit more. And then we tier those different sort of Dopamine releases, so it's a little bit, then a little bit more, then a little bit more, then a little bit more.
Sort of like this series of diminishing returns that is required in something like drug addiction or any other kind.
You need a bit more each time to sort of get you to that first initial release or high.
Right. Okay. So these are like the medals or the achievements that, you know, ultra rare, you've done X, you know, and those kinds of things?
Yeah. I mean, I guess I'm a bit old school.
I don't care about those. I mean, that's kind of neat.
But I mean, I guess for younger people, maybe they're more used to it.
And also because I don't care about bragging rights.
In fact, I'd view it as kind of shameful.
You've now logged three Ewoks lifetimes on Skyrim.
It's like, please don't let anyone know that.
Actually, I haven't, but you know what I mean.
Like, I'd be kind of embarrassed about that.
And it's mostly an aesthetics thing.
You know, it's mostly visual. And we have the demographics for who plays these games and mobily.
And, like, the largest sort of slice of the population is middle-aged Southeast Asian women.
And one guy, North Korea, but no idea who that could be.
Wait, hang on, hang on, hang on.
But you're not including Stephen in that.
Oh, of course not, Stephen.
Okay, I just want to check because, you know, his demographics online would be a little confusing.
Let's skew the stance a bit.
I mean, he would count as a middle-aged Southeast woman for our purposes, you know.
I didn't know that. I wouldn't have guessed that that's the biggest demographic.
And is that mostly, you know, I hate to sort of divvy things up into boy games and girl games, but is that more like the Candy Crush and less of the Skyrim?
Absolutely. So for male gamers, you know, it's first-person shooters, sort of conflict-driven competitive games.
Oh, that is, I'm afraid that is my crack.
You know, with Steam, it's like, all of my games involve dismembering people with chainsaws.
Like, all the suggested games are, you know, well, we've determined that you might be a psychopath.
Here are games that psychopaths seem to like.
I'm like, oh, I'm not a psychopath, but I'm torn because I really like those games, you know.
Exactly. And that's the point.
Someone's going to mean that.
There you go.
And there's also some of the other sort of techniques we use is...
These incentivizing consecutive play sessions, like, if you logged in yesterday, wow, here's this thing you get.
You log in for three days in a row, here's another thing.
And then also, it's the carrot and the stick, you know, positive reinforcement if you play consecutively, negative reinforcement in the form of push notifications if you don't log on enough.
And some of these can get a little manipulative, like the kids' games will be like, oh, your dragon is dying.
Don't log in to play. We have mummy in a paper sack!
In a helicopter over Chile.
Play for five minutes or your pet gets it.
You know, that kind of stuff. That's the Tamaguchi thing, right?
Where you have to feed your pets, your digital pets, or they're going to die.
Exactly. And that's also more sort of aesthetic female, you know, dress-up kind of things, which...
It's most the Mo market in general.
It's obvious it's based on gender and interest and stuff like that.
I listened to your interview with James Damore, which I thought was amazing, because I sort of see it as a bit of ideological drift towards the left-leaning in the past 10 years that has put some of this Mo stuff in, in terms of that.
Well, it's funny because there are these movies with these female leads, right?
These heroines. You know, like Rey in Star Wars.
It's like, yeah, can you tell me how many young, attractive brunettes are playing Battlefront II? It's like, well, they're in the movies, but they're not on the consoles because, you know, women don't really have as much interest in the Battlefront series.
Exactly. It's not, I wouldn't say, you know, video games are for men.
But generally, men's interests and proclivities are more to this type of thing.
And trying to sort of push the narrative that women should love these kinds of games and including the men.
And some may do. You know, a lot of women do love, you know, competitive first-person shooters, games, that kind of thing like that.
But generally...
You know, it's more nurturing, more feminine things where, you know, it's pretty well aesthetically pleasing and sort of bonding and nurturing and growing and building to the women's life.
So what you're saying is that if there had been a breastfeed the demons module in Doom 2016, it would have appealed more to women.
Exactly. Would you like to breastfeed the demons going to chew your torso in two?
Okay, that's a man game now again.
Rip off the heads.
You know, you can breastfeed your demon, and it'll say, you can breastfeed your demon again in 20 minutes, or you can pay five bucks and do it right now.
And that's sort of like the pay incentive that we see, like the paywalls you see all the time.
No, no, listen, you've got to understand, man.
Malls are complete anthropological evidence at how good women are at prioritizing important expenditures and deferring gratification.
Oh, of course, of course. As are credit cards.
Just amazing stuff.
But there's... Several development studios actually have staff psychologists now, the big AAA ones, for just this kind of purposes.
And I wouldn't say it's inherently malevolent, because everyone wants to make money.
And a lot of things are psychologically addictive.
You can get psychologically addicted to anything you like, anything you enjoy, like movies, stuff like that.
But I feel like video games in particular have a proclivity towards being engineered to this kind of thing.
And that's my main qualm, I guess, is that 10 years ago, games were better on content, and it was that content that you liked that sold the game.
Now, games are less well-made because they're pushing a narrative, and they make up for that lack of content with all these psychological hooks to get you to play the game.
What do you mean in terms of like less well-made and less content and relying more?
I mean, I understand the psych hooks and you're saying that's displacing the quality.
Like in before, it was like the quality of the game that drew you in.
But now it's like the free gems and your dragons miss you.
Like it's more manipulative and less quality based.
Is that right? Yes.
The way I see it is it's games as art versus games as a commodity.
Video games as art strive primarily for a high ideal of narrative structure and entertainment and interaction, and secondarily to make money, kind of like an interactive novel.
And then video games as a commodity serve primarily to make money and secondarily as entertainment.
So interesting. Online activities focusing on delivering quality rather than making money directly.
Huh. I wonder what that would be like.
Mike, what do you think? Right. No idea.
We have no idea what that might be like.
We're all about the, your philosopher is starving because you haven't logged on for the last.
Give me a gem or a Bitcoin.
Come on. I've been telling everyone about it a long time ago.
Your Tamaguchi is fading.
I need some dragon berries!
freedomaderadio.com slash donate.
All right. So what you're saying is I need more push notifications and you're willing to work for me to get people addicted to my show.
Is that the plan? I'll be talking about that now.
It's pretty much it. I mean, if you need someone to back engineer, you know, some of your websites to, oh, don't look, buy bitcoins to step so he can have, you know.
I'd really, really like to say I was above that.
Boy, that would be a great thing.
Like in my head, I know that would be the right.
Okay. Wow.
That's wild. That's wild.
And you said, sorry, I think you said in your, you've been in there for the last three years.
And has it escalated even over the last three years?
It has. And I think the main point for me was, of course, Gamergate, where a lot of these, I wouldn't necessarily call them tensions, but a lot of this ideological drift had been bubbling beneath the surface.
And then Gamergate happened, and we saw it start as sort of an ethics issue, you know, like ethics in video game journalism.
And video games journalism is kind of a joke to begin with, but I mean, it is, you know, a blossoming industry and it makes millions of dollars.
But the ethics of video games journalism, and then it ballooned into this women in video games being harassed sort of issue.
Like it was sort of hijacked from the inherent...
Well, and the data is pretty clear that it's men who are harassed more online than women, but women are more bothered by it because gender is a social construct.
Exactly, right? I mean, if gender is a social construct, then it doesn't matter if it's men or women who are being abused, right?
Right. Well, and then the numbers should all be the same.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
But that's basically when I saw it shift.
And if you think about 10 years ago, you know, it was all- And I just wanted to interrupt for just a sec, because I will tell you that I think that video game journalism is not a joke, any more so than movie reviews are a joke.
I mean, or sports much more.
See, video games, I won't get on a big rant here, but video games are values shapers.
Significant value shapers. My God, I can't even tell you the number of times people have said that they know.
They've tried to tell me they know something about objectivism because of fucking Bioshock.
Bioshock was a trenchant critique of Ayn Rand's work.
No, it wasn't.
It really, really wasn't.
Well, it was a dark vision of the Ayn Rand universe.
No, it wasn't. Bioshock?
Not an argument!
Anyway, sorry. I've just...
That's been going on for a while for me now.
Well, there was this underwater city in a video game that had babies that were scary in carriages.
I guess that's disproof of the objectivist theory of epistemology.
Let me give you a hint.
If you're shooting it, it's not an argument.
If you gotta put little coins into a dispenser, it's not an argument.
If you need to upgrade your video card to get any kind of decent textures, it's not an argument.
If it's not breathing smoky Russian raspy breath into your face, it's not an argument.
Anyway. Nah, it was one of these...
I don't know. I'm getting too old for complicated games now.
It's like these real-time strategy games, you know?
Every now and then, I'll try and find some game that I can...
I haven't found anything in a while.
But every now and then, it's like, we have this online interstellar strategy game with 3,000 resources, 17 different kinds of class capital ships, and you can form legions with up to 32 other people and trade on 12,000 planets.
It's like... I'm sorry, I'm too old.
I can't possibly learn these rules.
I was done after StarCraft.
I got no room for new rules.
That's it. Just give me something to shoot.
But then if you just want something to shoot, you end up with, I don't know, tank wars from the Atari 2600.
So anyway, just wanted to point that out.
I guess there are people who like learning these new rules.
I'm not one of them. Just give me something simple.
Defense zone 2. Anyway, StarCraft was the perfection of that genre.
I'm sorry, say again? In many ways, StarCraft 1 was the perfection of that genre, so I'm with you there.
Right. Plus, you can't win against the South Asians anyway.
I know race and IQ. I know race and reflexes.
I'm not even going to try. I don't do dance games in China for money.
So no, I just wanted to point out that there are values in video games, and they are in many ways more compelling value sets for people than even movies are.
Because movies don't have values anymore.
Movies have response to pressure groups.
Like every time they make a movie...
What happens is there's a script, and then everybody sits down there and says, okay, which group's going to be pissed off by any element of this script, other than white males who never self-organized, don't care, and appear to be willing to roll over?
Stop rolling over! But they'll sit there and say, okay, well, is there anything negative about this lesbian character that's going to make the lesbian lobby group really upset?
Or is there anything about this black character that's going to make any black group upset?
Or this Muslim character?
And so movies have become stripped...
Free of any kind of objective values or judgments or rationality.
They simply are a whole series of appeasements to everyone except white men.
And Christians.
And priests. Right?
So, movies, this is why they've just become so empty and so boring for anybody with half a brain for the most part.
Because... They're just appeasement to various pressure groups.
There's no integrity involved in moviemaking anymore.
And plus they've been dumped down and universalized because foreign sales are such a big part of the movie business.
And I don't know how much that's shown up in video games or not.
But I will say that I think video game journalism is a significant and fairly important field because there are a lot of tropes in video games.
I don't think that the Sarkeesian stuff is particularly where I would focus.
You know, how much I can see the characters but is not really a foundational part of my existence.
But there are values that are put forward in video games.
There are the values of, oh, it's a big corporation.
It's evil. Oh, it's an advanced intelligence.
It's going to take over the world.
And it's evil.
You know, like there's huge amounts.
I think of Liandry Corporation from the Unreal Tournament series that it's, you know, like every time there's a developer in a children's movies...
Well, there's a lovely little wood with fluffy bunnies and deer, and here comes a developer in a flaming, chainsaw-laden caterpillar who's going to plow everything under, and he must be stopped.
Hey, let's put together a show to save the park from the developer who wants to build evil...
Condos or whatever, right?
There's the Umbrella Corporation in Resident Evil.
There's the general...
I don't know. Is it a government or a corporation that was in the Half-Life series?
You know, the guys who have the masks on them or whatever, right?
I mean, it is...
There is a lot of anti-capitalism in video games, and that is pretty significant and gets programmed in, I think, to kids pretty early.
If it's a big corporation, multinational.
Boy, multinational.
It's like, when you think they're a Nazi, but you think you might get in trouble for calling them a Nazi, just call them a multinational, and we're all good, right?
Right. And so, yeah, I think there is a lot of that stuff going on.
And think of the Alien series, right?
Which is a movie and, of course, a whole series of video games as well.
It's the corporation who's harvesting the dangerous aliens for profit and unleashing them on an unsuspecting civilization.
Or, I guess it's movies and video games as well, which is the Jurassic Park series.
No expense spared.
No expense spared. It's a capitalist who is doing all this terrible stuff and unleashing terrible dinosaurs on an unsuspecting population, you know, and the government must rush in to save and go on and on, right?
RoboCop! Yeah, we've got this automated police force, and it guns everyone down for no particularly, you know, like, it's just, or the Matrix, or, you know, anyway.
So it's corporations and machinery that tends to be the most terrifying.
Terminator, right? Tends to be the most terrifying stuff.
We built these machines to serve us.
It turns out that they ended up ruling us.
It's like, no, that's the government.
That's not what you're thinking of, so...
Anyway, sorry for the little rant, but I think it is important to analyze what's going on in video games because there's more programming going on than people think.
What I meant by this, I don't think the idea of games journalism is a joke.
I think it's obviously a big thing, but I think the objectivity of the agents in games journalism is a bit corrupt.
We know what Ayn Rand would say about this corporate phobia, of course.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, I mean, they generally look at corporations without realizing the attachment to the state is what makes them dangerous.
Indeed. It's not like capitalism has been the greatest engine for wealth creation, you know, in the history of the world or anything.
Right. Wait, I never know when people are being sarcastic.
I'm not, I'm not. No, you're being sarcastic.
So, is engineering a voluntary experience playing video games to be addictive moral?
Well, let me ask you another question.
Is a woman wearing a low-cut top on a YouTube channel moral?
Yes. Why?
Don't think men are getting some dopamine from that?
Oh, definitely. But it's a clearly voluntary experience.
Like, if you're an even partially self-actualized man, you know that you're going there for the The sexual market value, the exchange of fertility.
And she might have some good points to that, whatever.
But the thing that differentiates her from just a guy saying the same thing is that sexuality.
Okay, so is it your issue that people don't know this about the gaming industry, whereas the cleavage is more noticeable?
Well, I don't really have it.
My issue is not so much a compunction about feeling guilty, it's that This is affecting the quality of gaming as a whole and also the societal repercussions of that early sort of brain development stuff.
But why don't you just make better games?
Why don't you design and make a better game?
I mean, I have to compete with the women with the low-cut tops and I like the challenge.
I like the challenge because I have to be better than cleavage.
I only have one boob and it's on top of my head.
So I like that challenge.
So if there are these game companies that are making these dopamine drips and are sacrificing quality for the sake of addiction, isn't that a huge market opportunity for better games where people come and play because they love it rather than, ah, I have locked into Galaxy on Fire Manticore.
I get something I can't pronounce.
Wouldn't that be a market opportunity?
Oh, definitely. And it's like the thing you say about the big advantage the poor have over the rich is they can operate for less and they can out-compete them.
And I think that's definitely a market strategy here where if you're a smaller independent dev company, you can make a better game with less gimmicks and hooks than the big companies that have to make those because they have these huge profit margins and huge expenses to pay for.
And I think that's definitely the strategy moving forward with any decently aware developer in terms of quality and overall effect.
So, have you tried?
I've been trying from the inside, and I think I might have to start trying from the outside.
Huh? What? I've been trying from the inside, and I think I might have to start trying.
I'm just moving out of the AAA world to start my own studio and do things in my own way, sort of the Ayn Randian entrepreneurial principles.
Right. I mean, I guess when it comes to money-making, there are these tricks which people can use.
I mean, I... A fool in his money is soon parted.
And if you don't understand that this stuff is going to be addictive, then you pay.
But you're paying to avoid the self-knowledge.
And lots of people pay lots of money to avoid self-knowledge.
It's called Netflix. No, I shouldn't say that.
But there is this aspect of things.
But there is, of course, the people who want to do high-quality stuff.
And I like, again, I like that challenge, you know, like I got a blank wall, I got no music, I got no ads, I got no props, I got nothing other than the most boring PowerPoint backgrounds occasionally that you could ever imagine, because I like the challenge of holding people's interest without props.
Without props. It's like the most confident singers go acapella, right?
I mean, and so, you know, the fact that there is, I don't think it's immoral at all.
I don't think it's immoral any more than trying to sell beer by showing bikini-clad women is immoral.
I think that we should elevate ourselves beyond that, but I don't think it's immoral at all.
I mean, because it's not the initiation of force, and it's not the initiation of fraud, right?
Right. And as far as the kids go, you can say, well, it's wrong for the kids, but that's the parents' job.
Listen, I like that there are tablets around for kids because I have to be more interesting than a tablet for my daughter.
Right? My daughter has access to a tablet.
And I have to be someone that she'd rather interact with than spend time on a tablet.
I like that challenge. It means I have to up my game.
As a parent, I have to be more interesting, more engaging.
You know, we've been playing this sort of participatory story-based language game for the past year and a half, which is her favorite thing to do.
It was her birthday recently.
We did like three and a half hours of it.
It was great fun. And she'll rather do that than work on a tablet, like every day of the week and twice on Sunday.
So I like that challenge.
Maybe if there weren't tablets, we wouldn't have developed that as a way of being more interesting than tablets.
But if parents are just like, well, thank goodness there are tablets, I'm just going to throw them at my kids and see what happens.
First of all, turn off the automatic purchases.
Everyone knows that. But I'm sorry for that.
I'm sorry for that. But maybe it's better than the parents yelling at them.
Maybe it's better than the parents hitting them.
Maybe those are the only other choices for parents who don't want to do a good job.
I don't know. But the problem is, you know, I never try and deal with the symptom, but always the cause, right?
If people like each other's company, you know, like you and I are having this conversation rather than playing a video game.
I know that not a single one of my listeners ever plays a video game while listening to this show.
Because they're all having sex listening to this show, which obviously makes perfect sense.
A little to the left. Now, we're having this conversation because it's more fun for us than playing a video game.
And so video games, they just require people to up their game.
In terms of being more interesting than a video game.
And some people will rise to that occasion and some people won't.
But it's sort of like if you're married to a hot wife.
Just have to be a better husband so she doesn't wonder.
If your husband's very rich, to take a couple of cliches.
If your husband's very rich and other women want to angle to get a hold of those resources, well, you just have to be a better wife.
You know, like, this kind of competition is all over the place.
All over the place. You know, if you are not as physically handsome, if you're not as facially handsome, maybe you need to work out more.
Maybe you need to develop your sense of humor.
Like, this kind of competition is always going on.
And I think it's good, and this is why I'm glad that you called about this, I think it's good that we know about this stuff, for sure.
But I don't think it's immoral.
I do think that it's wrong for parents to dump their kids on tablets and video game consoles and phones and all that kind of stuff.
And I do think that Parents need to recognize that there is a challenge, there's an online world challenge that is difficult for their kids because it's been pretty widely known and even studied,
I think to a large degree proven, that an addiction to social media causes isolation, alienation, depression, a sense of futility, if you Follow political news in Europe, but it is a challenge.
And yet, just ordering kids to, like, oh, you know, we're not going to, no online access, and you kind of, I don't know.
I like competition because it makes me better.
But there are some people who dump their kids into the online universe, and the internet cannot raise your children.
It cannot. It cannot raise your children.
And it is dysfunctional to imagine that it can.
Tablets cannot raise your children.
The television cannot raise your children.
And it was the TV when I was a kid.
And it is tablets now.
Or phones. But I think that tablets are better than TV. I do.
I do. There's more reading.
There is more interactivity.
At least there's some hand-eye coordination that's being developed.
I have no problem with video games at all.
They're fine. It's the old thing, you know, like the Aristotelian mean.
Can't have any. Okay, well, you're missing out on some fun.
I'm gaming 40 hours a week.
Okay, well, you're missing out on life.
So I like the fact that it's there.
I don't mind the fact that people want to make them addictive.
I want to make my show addictive.
You know, I just, you know, I don't do pop-ups.
Wait, hang on. There you go.
There's one. But I don't think it's immoral.
I do think that if you have an issue with it, it's part of your psyche saying, go for quality, not quantity.
Go for a realized world rather than dopamine-based visa payment pop-ups.
And I think, again, if people are aware of this kind of stuff, it makes all the difference in the world.
Definitely. So you're saying sort of the burner responsibilities on the consumer rather than the producer?
Oh, yeah. Well, you can't ban this stuff.
What are you going to do? I mean, how could you possibly create rules that would manage this stuff, even if we thought it was immoral?
You can say no pop-ups.
I mean, come on. I mean, that's exercising control over someone's tablet.
It's not your property, right?
I mean, the computer program is not your property.
The tablet is not your property.
The router, the internet is not your property.
Who are we to impose property rights on other people's voluntarily chosen property?
You can turn off notifications on your operating system, right?
It's pretty easy. Yeah.
And so I don't think that we can interfere with that.
I don't think that we can say no tablets for toddlers.
I mean, how could that possibly...
I don't know.
I mean, that's more statism.
I do think that we want to encourage parents to spend more time interacting with their children.
But there's so much wrong with the family that's maybe manifesting in tablet use that I hate playing whack-a-mole.
With giving the state more power to fix problems caused by an excess of state power.
You know, families are too heavily taxed.
There's too many regulations. There's too much terrible stuff going on with government.
Giving entirely the wrong incentives.
You know, there's too much alimony.
There's too much welfare. Too much unemployment insurance.
Too much of all of the...
Even too much old-age pensions, which means that parents don't have to treat their kids as well because they can rely on the government to take care of them when they get old.
It's fundamentally broken the entire...
Like, there's a reason why the boomers screwed their kids at the same time as getting free stuff from the government.
Because once you get free stuff from the government...
You don't need to be that nice to your kids because you don't need them to take care of you when you get older, because you can just nag the government to pay all your bills.
So families have been, you know, there's feminism and debt and terrible schools run by the government, so families have been really...
They've taken a whole bunch of body blows from an excess of state power and giving the government more power to manage those symptoms, you know, that's a never-ending process, right?
The important part is to undo the aspects of state power that are undermining and destroying the family, not give the state additional power to deal with the symptoms of its prior power.
For sure. And it's, you know, it's like the R versus K reproductive strategy.
It's like you have, you know, the The rate of the carrying rate, if you put more time into your kids, more effort, then you won't necessarily be threatened with this kind of, you know, tablet-induced IQ loss.
Right, right, right.
Yeah, I mean, if my daughter, if I come downstairs, my daughter throws down the tablet and, let's say, let's role play.
Let's, you know, do our story, our game.
And it's like, great. You know, that's, I like the challenge.
And it's made us closer and have more fun together, so.
Well, listen, I'm going to close off the show tonight, because I'm sorry we only got to three callers, and I really do apologize for those who are waiting.
It's always tough to know, very tough to know, how long some of these calls are going to go.
And I do try, and I know people have been waiting for months to get on the show, and this may be the only time we talk, and I think we have...
I have the unique capacity to bring people some real illumination in the issues that they have.
And so I really want to give everybody my entire full attention and speak to the conversation until there's some breakthrough, either of truth or clarity, either of the other person getting stuff or me getting that the other person might not get stuff.
So I'm sorry for those who have to wait.
This is a general apology because I know we cascade from time to time.
But I think conversations need to happen until they're done.
And that's very, very tough to predict, which is why we don't do ads.
And why terrestrial radio would be a special kind of hell for me and for the listeners.
So thanks.
Jack, for some very, very interesting stuff.
And yeah, look this stuff up.
Look this stuff up. Look at how video games do manipulate people.
I think it's important to be aware of.
We're aware of this when it comes to advertising and so on, and we're becoming aware of this when it comes to the government.
Like, there's a reason why the Democrats don't call the tax cuts tax cuts.
They call them tax reform because they don't want to say we're against tax cuts because, you know, basic marketing.
So thanks everyone so much for listening and for watching.
Thank you for an amazing year.
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