Jan. 10, 2018 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
03:36:37
3957 Dating the Unavailable - Call In Show - January 3rd, 2017
Question 1: [2:47] – “I am a 27 year old white male with a degree in black studies. I have lived in low-income, high-crime African American communities since birth (with very few exceptions), and during college I voluntarily lived in such a neighborhood and babysat for single mothers while also spending time with gang members. During this same time, I also underwent a radical shift away from and rejection of leftist identity politics and social justice dogma, and I ended up doing my senior thesis on gang violence and family dissolution. How can we make libertarian values of ‘rugged individualism’ and private enterprise seem more attractive to people at the low end of the socioeconomic distribution, and black Americans in particular (especially those that have been trained to pursue government-funded subsistence)? Also, how can we simultaneously incentivize and promote family formation in the service of these goals?"Question 2: [40:31] – “You've hired people, but you would hesitate to hire people today who have lost momentum. You've said that you would hesitate to hire people with college degrees, but you are aware of how weak the job market is. You're aware of the potential for discrimination for being white, so; your solution to all this is to ‘go be an entrepreneur’? Could you explain how this is done? What, in your mind, is an entrepreneur and how can a person suddenly become one with no capital and an unfortunate (in today's society) skin color?”Question 3: [1:11:09] – “Does being in the position where you either need, or believe you need someone, make it harder to authentically love them? Be it God, or an actual person, does necessity tend to breed contempt?”Question 4: [1:29:47] – “My friend and I both work in the emergency medical services, I recently had a discussion with him on the topic of anarchy. My friend is a self-proclaimed anarchist and believes that the government is fundamentally illegitimate: taxation is theft, government is immoral, the usual anarchist talking points. I’m as far right as I can be without being an anarchist, call me a libertarian. We recently had a discussion on the non-aggression principle and how it relates to EMS function in society. He recently got a job at a public ems provider, tax payer funded. When I asked him how this affects his beliefs on the non-aggression principle he couldn’t quite defend it. The conversation ultimately evolved into me saying he’s not an anarchist to which he said that he still is- I again reminded him that his entirely bi-weekly pay check was courtesy of my working parents and neighbors who had no say in funding this ems provider. Bottom line, my question is, can someone still be a an anarchist and voluntarily work for a company that thrives off of the initiation of force?”Question 5: [2:06:01] – “I am a depressed 25 year old woman who has a history of dating and being attracted to closeted gay men and men who are otherwise taken. I am diagnosed as depressive, anxious, and as a vacillator. I am painfully aware of how often I get taken advantage of. I am unable to speak up for myself and instead focus on pleasing others leading me to getting burnt out emotionally and unable to focus on my own wants and needs. What advice do you have for me to being healthy enough to date a good man and stop being attracted to gay or taken men?”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
Hope you're doing well. Happy New Year to you, my friends.
Thank you for a great 2017.
I look forward even more to 2018 with your support at freedomainradio.com slash donate.
And, and, and, if you are anywhere in the vicinity of New York, New York, the city's so nice they named it twice, on Saturday, January the 20th, 2018, Please feel free to book your tickets at anightforfreedom.com.
I am going to be giving a talk, along with frequent Free Domain guests, Mike Sunovich, Gavin McInnes, Michael Malice, Owen Benjamin, and many more.
Lots of great surprises. It's going to be a fantastic evening of great conversation, fun parties, thoughts, ideas, arguments, and all kinds of good stuff.
And of course, I'd love to meet you in person if you happen to be there.
So... Callers tonight?
Yes, we had five great callers tonight.
Well, actually, five callers.
They were all great. Well, what does that mean?
You say, oh, go be an entrepreneur.
How can I be an entrepreneur? I've got no money, got no capital.
How can I get all this solved?
Well, I think we found the problem with the guy wasn't necessarily my advice as we get into the conversation.
Third caller, a great question.
If you love someone, you need them.
But if you need them, is it really choice to be with them?
And that's a great question.
The more needy you get, generally, the less attractive you are.
But who's going to say, I love you, but I don't need you?
So it's a great set of questions.
We worked through that pretty well together.
The fourth caller is worried about his friend, the anarchist.
Who says, oh, I really, really want a voluntary and free society, but it's working.
Paid a little bit more by the government than this guy.
And we had a good chat about all of that.
And the fifth caller, wow, this was my New Year's gift to you.
It's a great conversation with a young woman who has a history of dating and being attracted to closeted gay men and men who are otherwise...
Kind of jaw-dropping, but man, was she magnificent in her commitment to self-knowledge, which is really the root of it all.
So once again, thank you so much for listening.
Thank you for a great 11 years.
Looking forward to 11 to 50 more, depending on how cryogenics works out.
And please don't forget to help support the show.
Help support what you care about, what does good in the world, at freedomainradio.com slash donate.
Alright, up first today we have William.
William wrote in and said, During this time,
I also underwent a radical shift away from and rejection of leftist identity politics and social justice dogma, and I ended up doing my senior thesis on gang violence and family dissolution.
How can we make libertarian values of rugged individualism and private enterprise seem more attractive to people at the low end of the socioeconomic distribution, and black Americans in particular, especially those that have been trained to pursue government-funded sustenance?
Also, how can we simultaneously incentivize and promote family formation in the service of these goals?
That's from William. Hey William, how are you doing tonight?
I'm good, how are you? Thank you for having me.
My pleasure, my pleasure. So, tell me a little bit about your history of your interest in these communities.
Well, I grew up right adjacent to what would be called The Projects.
Very low income, had issues with violent crime and gang violence.
There were two neighborhoods.
There was a black neighborhood and a Hispanic neighborhood.
They were right adjacent to each other, and I was kind of in the middle of them.
I had a lot of friends growing up.
Obviously, you're friends with the kids from around the block.
I had a lot of friends growing up who didn't have friends.
Fathers who, you know, as they became 12, 13 started emulating gang members and kind of getting into that culture and so I kind of feel like a personal emotional connection to some of the issues that are affecting African-Americans.
And so I, you know, going into college, I originally studied history and then I took a Black Studies 101 class because, you know, why not?
You take electives and, you know, it's got a little history in it anyway.
And the professor was very far left and he was a very good speaker.
And I was taken in for a minute and I was very interested.
You know, I already cared about these issues.
Maybe this is how I can do something about it.
I want to learn. So I changed my major and I had a lot of mixed experiences.
Like I said, I eventually Completely rejected the whole identity politics, pseudo-Marxist, you know, reboot of the Black Panthers or whatever they're trying to do these days.
And now I'm fairly conservative with a libertarian streak, but I'm still, I have the same focus.
I still want to help uplift black communities.
Now I think I have a better way to do it.
And I'm really trying to focus on, like, I accept that...
One of the fundamental reasons that there is violence among human beings and animals in general is because we reproduce sexually.
And men compete, especially because human females are very choosy in their mates.
They want a man with status.
And so men compete over status.
And that competition can be violent.
It can be gangs. It can be warfare.
Or it can be non-violent.
It can be business. It can be entrepreneurship and private enterprise.
And I really want to dig into where that diverges.
And I want to figure out how to steer, what kind of programs, policies can be implemented to steer people away from violent competition, which has characterized so much of history.
You know, we have a barbarian threat in each generation.
You never know when we can sink back into, you know, we were hunter-gatherers for hundreds of thousands of years, obviously you know this.
It's very difficult to fight our violent tendencies, but I see that it can be done, and I see that African-American communities are struggling, and I just want to get your take on where I can go with this.
Right. Well, I appreciate that background.
It's interesting to me, William, when you sent the message and you say, low-income, high-crime, and this is the way it's always portrayed, right?
Yes. As if it's like the dominoes.
Well, you get low-income, boom!
You get high crime, right?
Well, not in Appalachia. That's the thing.
There are examples of low-income communities that are not high crime, that are not high violence.
So I know that's possible.
Well, and of course, as you know, When poverty increased massively in the 1930s, 1920s and early 1930s as a result of the Great Depression, unemployment well north of 25% on average, like not even relative to particular communities, there was not an associated uptick in crime, right?
Yes. So what do you think that there is?
And of course the leftist thing is, well, the reason there's high crime is because there's low income and so if we give them more money they'll stop committing crimes, right?
Yeah, I used to buy into that.
But after many, many years of spending a lot of time with people who are affected by these policies, I came to understand from experience that that was not the case.
That the welfare state is the single mother state.
And I really want to understand where family comes into this, because I really do think that that's very relevant.
And especially considering the fact that the black family has only, you know, has only really completely dissolved in the last 60 or 70 years.
I mean, black people had stronger families during slavery than they do now.
So it's obviously not just racism or some external threat that's causing this.
Right, right.
So, I just want to put this in context for you and for others.
I'm sure you know some of this stuff, but just very briefly, the Marxist goal, the left-wing goal, is to create the exploiters and the exploited.
And then what they do is they sell protection from the exploiters to the exploited.
So, originally, of course, the class analysis was key, in that there were the capitalists who were the exploiters, and we're going to sell you protection.
From the capitalists by creating a authoritarian state that's going to reign in, the capitalists going to take out the middleman, it's going to increase your productivity, make you richer, and so on.
And so they tried that across a third of the world.
And it ended up, of course, as you know, as a...
Genocidal, mass-murdering clusterfrak of incomprehensible evil.
So they kind of had to give up on that.
So then what they did was they said, okay, let's put the class one aside because, unfortunately, the data...
And the data came out in the 50s and 60s.
The theory as to why it wouldn't work came out in the 20s.
But the data really began to come out in the 50s and 60s.
So the Marxists then pivoted and they said, okay, well...
Maybe let's de-emphasize the class thing and let's focus on the gender thing.
And so they began to create sort of radical feminism and they said, okay, the new exploiters is the patriarchy.
And we're going to sell you protection from the patriarchy in return for your freedoms and your subjugation to a state.
And so they did that and it was pretty successful.
But the data began to become more relevant and more – it began to be exposed, the whole lie of all of that.
Although that is still chugging along, but it wasn't enough for them to tip over capitalism and destroy the free market.
The data about the fact that the wage gap is the result of choice, the fact that there are at the highest levels of IQ many, many times more men than women, which explains most, if not all, of disparities.
The fact that men have more testosterone, more aggression, blah, blah, blah, right?
So that was sort of not sustainable.
And of course, they wanted a multi-front war on the free market.
So then what they did was they said...
And this was, to some degree, simultaneous with feminism.
They also wanted to move the exploitation narrative to race.
So then the white people are the exploiters, the black people are the victims, and they go to the black community and they say, you're owed reparations, straight bribery to believe in the exploitation narrative, and we're going to give you protection from the evil white victims.
And so I just want people to sort of understand that in general it's gone from class to gender to race and the race stuff has really taken off and we're kind of in the middle of this hysteria at the moment and it's going to take, as it did with the class-based stuff, it's going to take a huge amount of suffering for this story, this lie.
Right now, of course, the black community is doing very poorly.
And the answer, 100%, is white racism, institutionalized power, and so on.
And the data, of course, is beginning to float up as to why this is not the case.
We've got the race and IQ stuff, which I've talked about on this show many times.
And we also, of course, have the example of Did the black community do better under a black president or is the black community doing better under a white president, i.e.
Donald Trump? And the answer seems to be that the unemployment is down to historically low levels and it's down for black and Hispanic communities under Donald Trump.
And of course we do have entire cities and regions where you have like black mayors, black politicians, black school board members and it's basically run by blacks and People are doing terribly in those environments.
You know, there was, of course...
Well, you could say Democrat, but it's still Black, right?
Yeah, there are Black Democrats.
You know, Detroit, all these different inner cities that have been ruined from Democratic policies of wealth redistribution.
Sure, sure. But there are, of course, places where there have been Democrats...
Where you don't see the same kind of catastrophes, right?
I mean, if you look at Bernie Sanders, he's from Vermont, right?
Yes. If you look at Vermont and you look at Detroit, okay, there's Democrats, but it's not the same place, right?
Yes. So, I just wanted to sort of give that general background because now the challenge has been, you know, the longer a mistake is made, The harder it is to fix, right?
The longer, like the more fat you let yourself get, the tougher it is to slim down.
The longer you go without exercise, the more dangerous and difficult it is for you to start exercising and hurt your joints and your bones and all of that and your tendons.
And as you point out now, we've had a couple of generations of the welfare state And the near destruction, near universal destruction.
And certainly, like they say, black illegitimacy is like close to 75%.
But in certain neighborhoods, it's damn close to 100%.
Is that fair to say?
Oh, absolutely. And I've seen it with my own two eyes.
So the other thing to remember, and this is why it's going to be so difficult to change, William, is that personality is significantly genetic.
Like there's almost no aspect of personality that's not genetic.
And for certain personality traits like neuroses, like being neurotic, women score significantly higher.
Than men.
And so when women are in charge of raising children, which women are great at when children are young, but become less good, particularly for their sons, when the kids get older, there has been a significant genetic change in not just the black community, but in communities where there is the welfare state.
Responsibility, conscientiousness is one of the big five personality traits.
It's significantly genetic. Attention to detail, capacity to defer gratification.
You can look it up yourself.
I'm not getting it all perfect, but conscientiousness is generally a positive economic trait in many ways.
And the welfare state, of course, rewards people who are irresponsible and punishes people who are responsible.
And this has a dysgenic effect on the genetic makeup of a population, no matter what ethnicity it is.
So we do have what has been called, you might want to check a book out by Adam Perkins called The Welfare Trait.
It's been called The Employment-Resistant Personality, which has grown up in the ghettos and is now significantly genetic.
I don't know if you ever watched a film or a TV show called The Wire.
No, I haven't. I've heard about it.
It's like a police show, I think.
Yeah, it's an everything show.
It's a great show. Great show.
And there is a sociologist who wants to study black youths.
And he starts to study one guy who's already become a criminal and a gang member and so on.
And the guy is completely feral.
And they're like, no, you have to get someone younger.
His course is set.
He's never going to participate.
So this is the challenge, that now we have altered the The biological trajectory of entire communities and turning that around is going to be an entirely unpleasant task.
And the longer it's left, the more unpleasant it's going to be.
And because it's become difficult enough now, politicians don't really want to deal with it that much.
And so there is this defer to the point where, of course, you know, there's this welfare cliff as you know, that...
For a woman with two kids, in order for her to get the same kind of benefits she gets from the welfare state, she has to make like $65,000 a year.
And that takes a lot of training, a lot of work, and at $65,000 a year, she just starts to break even.
And so why, fundamentally, would she want to pursue that?
You say, ah, well, because you want to give a good impression to a kid.
Well, sure. And some people buy a more expensive item when there's something on sale.
But in general, people respond to incentives.
So with that sort of background, I mean, you've had a lot of, of course, time to think about this.
What would you say? Let's pretend I'm a single mom.
I got, you know, two kids by two different guys.
I have a GED. I was a Chris Rock called the Good Enough Diploma, a GED. And what would you say to me to talk me out of being on welfare?
You see, I understand that that conversation, it doesn't even really seem possible to me.
I mean, I'm thinking maybe this can be attacked from the family angle because I know blacks in America and elsewhere, blacks in general, skew more towards religious.
And there were a lot of very conservative family values that were very strong in African-American communities, specifically up until the welfare state, it seems like.
So maybe there's like a path through religion or spirituality or the sanctity of family that we could attack this from.
So what would you say if you were going to take the religious approach to me as a single mom with two kids?
Yeah, I mean, I feel like it's...
It might already be too late for somebody who's already in that situation.
I mean, I don't know, maybe we could take this from a policy angle in terms of welfare reform, some sort of gradual...
Weaning off, there would be like a period of lessening benefits or where you could work and have it at the same time until it's done so you could save up a little bit.
I mean, see, this is why this is so difficult.
I'm trying to reach my information tentacles out as far as I can and get as much information as possible.
Well, people will make transitions all the time.
You know, if you...
If you look at the history of colonialism, let's say the British, when they left a particular country, there often would be this kind of decay and this mess.
You know, that happens, which is, I mean, look at some of the countries in Africa where they end up murdering or driving away all of the white farmers, and then they run out of food, and then they try and get the white farmers to come back, and so on.
So people made the transition from the end of the Roman Empire.
People made the transition through the Black Death when a third of the European population died of the bubonic plague, interestingly enough, brought in from the Middle East on ships.
But so...
People will make the transition, but we have this weird passivity when it comes to human society and people.
You probably know people like this yourself, William.
It's incredibly maddening.
And it's one of these things, if you're a sort of self-moded, proactive individual, you have to look at that and you just have to say, okay, there's a whole species of human beings who only react.
They do not act proactively.
Everybody knows the existing system is utterly unsustainable.
It's going to crash.
It's going to collapse. Mathematically, it's inevitable.
And it's going to be sooner rather than later.
Everybody knows that. And there's no political will to deal with it.
I mean, Trump says, hey, let's stop bringing in immigrants from terrorist nations with no security checks.
And people, like, go insane.
They march in the streets. There are riots.
There is, like, judicial activism.
Even the idea that you would stop giving welfare to illegal immigrants, like, the idea that you're going to be able to cut the welfare state.
The politicians don't really have the capacity To initiate fundamental change, for the most part, in a country.
The population needs to be conditioned to better ideas first, right?
And so, unfortunately, welfare usage, I believe, and I think that the data is fairly strong to back this up, is just related to IQ. So the higher your IQ, the less you want welfare because you make better decisions in your life.
And also because competing in the free, if you've got an IQ of 100 or 105, 110 or 120, then competing in the free market is going to give you better results than going on welfare, right?
But if you have an IQ of 80, 85, maybe into the high 80s, low 90s, then welfare is a better deal for you than going into the free market.
Unfortunately, there has just been a massive pouring in of lower IQ populations into the West over the past few generations, which is creating a massive demand for the welfare state.
You know the numbers as well as I do.
Welfare usage in America, natives are at 30%, immigrants are at 51%, illegal immigrants are at 62%.
Natives, 30%.
Central America and Mexico, immigrant welfare usage is 73%.
From the Caribbean, 51%.
From Africa, 48%.
From South America, 41%.
From East Asia, 32%.
From Europe, 26%.
And from South Asia, 17%.
So there is, unfortunately, a massive demographic that's been imported into the West over the past couple of generations.
That is massively dependent on the welfare state with very little capacity to make as much money in the free market.
If the demographics in the West had remained relatively unchanged, in other words, if America had remained a biracial nation of about 9 to 1 whites to blacks, then there would be almost no welfare state left.
Because general rising incomes and so on would not be like the Hispanics, the illegal immigrants, and massive immigration from Mexico has created...
And it's exactly what you'd expect.
I mean, the people who run the welfare state don't want the welfare state to go away, so they want to keep importing customers.
I mean, it's natural. It's tragic, but it's natural.
So... I don't know if you can talk people out of taking welfare state benefits.
Now, you can say to smarter people, you can say to smarter people, listen, if you go on the welfare state, you're going to get stuck.
You're going to get stuck in the lower middle class, maybe the upper lower classes, but you're going to get stuck.
Whereas if you Learn stuff and improve your skill set and go work at the free market.
You're going to end up, it's going to be tougher at the beginning, but you're going to end up better.
And it's sort of like something that one of the characters says to Charlie Sheen's character in Platoon, where, you know, they say, well, you're a rich kid, what the hell are you doing here, like in Vietnam?
And he gives this long explanation about why he's there.
And the characters, the other soldiers say, shit, you've got to be rich to even think like that.
You know, that this would even be a choice for you.
You've got to be rich to even make this a choice.
And so when you're selling the deferral of gratification and really good stuff down the road, if you go through years of difficulty, well, you have to be smart enough To figure that out, and for it to be a true statement.
You say to somebody with an IQ of 80 or 85, you say to them, you shouldn't take the welfare state because getting educated and working hard in the free market, you'll end up making more money while you're lying.
Statistically, it's almost certain that they won't.
So they are making a rational decision based upon the maximization of resources in the moment, and you can't tell them they'll do better.
Now, in the long run, sure, they'll do better, and the kids will do better, and so on, but you've got to have an IQ north of 100 to even figure that out, or to accept that as an argument.
So right now, there is no political will to deal with the issues of the welfare state.
There has been examples where the welfare state has been significantly diminished.
In Canada, in the 90s, it happened under the liberals, like the only Nixon goes to China kind of thing, only the liberals can cut welfare states.
Okay. But that was before...
Well, I mean, with Canada, the issues with immigration are going to be deferred a generation because there is some merit.
It's somewhat of a merit-based system for immigration coming into Canada.
But of course, there is chain migration, which doesn't really deal with that.
And that just means that maybe for a generation or two before regression to the mean, things are better.
But... I don't know.
It's like trying to talk individuals out of cashing in their lottery tickets.
Oh, you know, you raise taxes.
Well, no, they're just going to go cash in their lottery tickets, right?
And it's really hard to change yourself.
It's very, very hard to change others.
I don't believe that there's much political will to deal with the welfare state.
There's certainly not an understanding of the basic ethics of the welfare state, that it's immoral to use force to transfer resources from one group to another.
And so, tragically and horribly and Woefully, unfortunately, it's going to have to hit the wall.
And there's going to be a lot of unpleasantness.
And it is my hope.
It was my hope, of course, that this could be prevented.
But I don't believe that that's the case.
I mean, I've been talking to people about the welfare state for over 30 years.
And, you know, oh, how will the poor, you know, like...
I mean, I remember years ago when I'm talking about a stateless society...
People would say to me, well, how would borders be protected in the absence of a government?
It's like, boy, can you imagine a government that was paying hostile cultures to come into the country?
Can you imagine? I mean, back then, if I'd have said that, well, a stateless society is better because at least you won't have a government paying to bring hostile cultures into the country.
People would say, oh, come on, that's never going to happen.
That's insane. But, you know, I don't know that it can be talked out.
I think the only goal is to say...
This is bad. It's going to crash.
This is bad. It's going to crash. This is immoral.
It's going to crash. This is destructive to the poor.
It's going to crash. And if I'm wrong, which means that math is wrong, no one would be happier.
No one would be happier. When it turns out that I'm right, then you hope to gain credibility from having predicted it, if nothing else.
And then maybe people will listen to you about the solution, which is the respect for property rights and the reestablishment of charity.
Yes, yes, I agree.
And so, in the meantime, since we've already discussed how poverty and violence don't necessarily have to be linked, I really do want to focus on reducing violence in African-American communities.
Like I said, I grew up in one.
I lived in one during college when I did the babysitting, and I interviewed gang members.
I did my whole senior thesis on On gang violence, I actually wrote a book.
I'd be happy to send it to you.
It's called The Segregation of Dialogue.
And the first half of it is all about...
I read a number of books about evolutionary biology and evolutionary psychology and the origins of violence and how it's based in reproductive competition fundamentally among all animals, including humans.
And like I said, I feel like there's some sort of internal calculus that goes on I'm sorry to interrupt, William, but you know that with the welfare state, male competition goes out the window.
Yeah. Right, because men compete for resources so that they can afford the most fit female.
Whatever that standard happens to be.
Could be looks, could be intelligence, could be any combination of these things.
But men don't compete.
For resources to raise their families when the government pays for children, when children are no longer a liability.
See, children, as you know, are a liability that needs to be filled in by the excess resources that's able to be produced by a man.
Like a man without a family needs like one-tenth the resources.
If he has a family, he needs ten times the resources.
So a man has excess resources that fills in the economic hole of children.
When children are no longer a liability, but they are an asset, Then male competition, male responsibility, male being a provider, deferring gratification, subjugating yourself to an economic reality, you know, that goes out the window.
So this talk of male competition and so on, when the welfare state comes into being, the welfare state fundamentally...
The welfare state is as fundamental change to the family structure as communism is to the free market.
Yes. I definitely think I see what you're saying.
And so, in terms of dismantling the welfare state, and obviously that would, you know, there would be some bumps in the road and some unpleasantness on the way there, but it would be better in the end.
In terms of dismantling the welfare state, I do think that there is a chance, because the Democrats and the wealth redistributionists, I should say, the welfareists, rely very heavily on black inner cities to carry them in a lot of state and, in the end, the presidential election.
They wouldn't have Pennsylvania. They wouldn't have places like Minnesota and Wisconsin and Michigan, all of those.
And, you know, they lost them in the last election as well.
So I do think that there is hope for dismantling the welfare state.
And perhaps, like you said, I mean, maybe this could blow over in a generation or two, maybe.
Well, what we do know is that if we can work to eliminate spanking, In the black community, in particular within the black community, then we're going to do an enormous amount to help reduce the prevalence of violence.
So this, you've probably heard of this, the warrior gene, MAOA2R. Well, 5.5% of blacks carry this warrior gene compared to 0.1% of whites and 0.0007% of Asians.
And this is associated with aggression.
So 2012, Dr.
Kevin Beaver and a bunch of others, they replicated the findings of a 2008 study focusing on the arrest and incarceration rates of American blacks.
And I quote, Analysis of African American males revealed that carriers of the two-repeat allele This warrior gene were at much greater risk for being arrested during their lifetime and for being incarcerated during their lifetime.
But it's not just having this 2R version of the warrior gene.
And I quote,
So, to make a long story short, and there's lots of dominoes to this, but if you want to reduce crime in the black community by around 90%, then stop abusing young black children, particularly young black males.
90% or so, give or take, right?
And that is a huge finding which I have broadcasted for many years.
It's a huge finding on how to...
I mean, if there was a magic wand, you could wave.
Oh, look, we can reduce violence 90% in the black community.
Well, that's pretty important.
Okay, well, I'm definitely glad that you informed me about that because, you know, I've always, that's never been an issue that I've attacked directly.
I mean, I know what happens with the children.
I mean, I've heard it, you know, coming out of the neighbor's houses and whatnot, and it's very disheartening.
And I never really connected the dots.
So you're saying there's a pretty, there's potentially a causal link between that and violence later in life as an adult?
Oh, it's fairly well established.
It's fairly well established.
Also, of course, children who are spanked, it has a detrimental effect on intelligence development.
So you sacrifice a couple IQ points for the kids.
And so in the black community, right, Elizabeth Groshoff, Dr.
Elizabeth Groshoff, been on the show as well.
She examined 20,000 kindergartners.
89% of black parents spanked their children.
79% of white parents, 80% of Hispanic parents, and 73% of Asian parents.
And so if you have a high prevalence of spanking, of verbal and physical abuse, of sexual abuse in the black community, which is also quite high, combined with this warrior gene, the abuse triggers the warrior gene epigenetics, right?
It triggers the manifestation in behavior of the warrior gene.
So the warrior gene combined with abuse produces almost 10 times the amount of violent crime and reduces IQ.
And of course, and raising IQ within all communities, but in particular within the black community, which is in general the lowest in the West.
Whatever we can do to raise IQ and to lower the prevalence of violence in black communities would be fantastic.
And of course, if, I don't know, certain radical black organizations really cared about the black community, well, we can't dismantle the welfare state, at least you and I can't.
But can we talk to people publicly about the need, in particular, the need within the black community to treat children gently?
And we can.
And I've got a whole presentation called The Truth About Crime, has got all the details and all the sources about all of this stuff.
And because I'm interested in, I'm not putting you in this category of being in the opposite, but just for those, like, I talked about this on the Rubin Report, right?
Like, man, I'm interested in actually solving problems, not in being politically correct.
And this reality that if we can, and I'm actually helping people with this outside of the show, but if there's a way to get peaceful parenting into the black community, and there are ways to do it, if there's ways to get peaceful parenting into the black community, it will be the single greatest step forward that the black community has experienced in half a century, at least.
Okay, okay, absolutely.
And, I mean, do you know of any history of...
I mean, I know that this happens, obviously, because I've seen it, I've heard it.
Do you know if this has been a cultural thing going back hundreds of years, or if it's a more recent development in African-American communities?
Oh, well, I mean, just look at the tribes in Africa and look at the initiation rituals for the young males.
I don't know if you've ever... Oh, yeah.
No, I've heard stories from, you know, they generally circumcise you and then make you live in the woods for six weeks and you got to kill some animal and it's a whole thing.
Yeah. Yeah, I know you can – I did an audiobook reading of Lloyd DeMoss' book, The Origins of War and Child Abuse, for a historical view of how children have been treated throughout history.
And it's pretty grim.
And as you know, I mean, you've probably seen this in the neighborhood.
I mean, I had a friend when I was growing up, a Jamaican fellow, and it was astonishing just how brutally he was treated and how terrified he was of his mom.
Yeah. Yeah, absolutely.
And I feel like it's especially damaging when your mother is such a figure to be feared in that way.
And, you know, for example, my girlfriend is African and, you know, she grew up in a complete family because a lot of times the Africans, they come over here with a sense of tradition and, you know, they might be Muslim, they might have, you know, some conservative family values and Stemming from their religious traditions, and you can absolutely see the difference.
And, you know, they didn't do beatings in their family.
They did the kind of thing where, like, you have to hold up a rock for a long period of time or do some, like, intense physical exercise or something that wasn't, you know, traumatic in that way.
And so maybe, you know, maybe that...
Wait, wait, hang on. Being ordered to hold up a rock until your arm hurts, that's not traumatic?
Well, I mean, it's not the same as getting your butt kicked.
Wait, does your girlfriend think that's good parenting?
Well, we didn't say good or bad, but I mean, it's an alternative to beating.
I mean, I'd be happy to hear your opinion on it.
It's terrible. Okay.
It's called a stress position and it's used in torture.
Okay, yeah, she's in the room with me right now.
Is she there? Can she hear me?
Yeah, would you like to speak to her?
That's bad parenting, my friend.
I hate to say it, that is bad parenting.
You cannot put children into torture-based stress positions and call yourself...
You reason with your children.
You speak to them.
You use language. I mean, you couldn't...
Imagine you're running a coffee shop and you have an employee who drops some cups and breaks them, right?
Do you then say to the worker, you have to stand there holding the garbage can at arm's length for five minutes?
Would you consider that to be good management?
I'm sorry?
I said that would certainly be demeaning.
I mean, obviously, maybe it's a little bit of a different dynamic between parent and child than between employer and employee.
Sorry, the difference is that the power disparity between parent and child is vastly greater than the power disparity between employer and employee because the employee can quit.
Yes, you're right. They can take off their apron, they can march out, they can go get another job.
Children don't have that choice. So because the power disparity is greater between parents and children, it's the greatest power disparity in the world.
And therefore, you need the very best behavior on the part of parents.
I mean, William, if your girlfriend did something you didn't like, do you get to put her in a torture-based stress position to have her learn better?
No, that sounds pretty inappropriate.
And you know what you could say?
Well, it's better than beating her!
Yeah, no, I see what you're saying.
I mean, you know, the main point that I wanted to make, of course, was that since she grew up in a complete family, I think she's a little more level-headed because of that.
But I did want to mention, yeah, the stress positions and whatnot, because I did think that it was interesting.
But no, I'm very glad that you shared your opinion with me on that, and thank you.
Not an opinion. Okay.
And I hope that you guys talk about all of this sort of stuff before you go about anywhere close to having kids because you don't want to be trying to talk about it afterwards.
It's a little late. All right.
Well, thanks very much for your call.
I appreciate that. And let's move on to the next caller.
Okay. Alright, up next we have Christian.
Christian wrote in and said, You're aware of all the potential for discrimination for being white, so your solution to all this is to go be an entrepreneur.
Could you explain how this is done?
What in your mind is an entrepreneur, and how can a person suddenly become one with no capital and an unfortunate, in today's society, skin color?
That's from Christian. Hey Christian, how are you doing tonight?
Hey man, pleasure to be here.
Alright. What's your work history like, Christian?
Just before we get into all of the triggering stuff, I have to say.
I worked for a bank for about three years.
I decided I was going to go get my bachelor's degree, right?
So I moved to the city.
And I then got a job doing about the same thing that I had left.
And I left because it was soul-crushing being in a call center.
Sorry, you got a bachelor's degree in what?
I began my bachelor's degree.
So then I was doing the school thing full-time, and then I was working full-time.
I ended up losing my job, so I didn't have the financial backing to continue doing my schooling, so I stopped.
But what was your degree approximately in?
What were you aiming at?
Neuroscience. Neuroscience?
Yes. All right. Okay, so then you lost your job and you bombed out of school for financial reasons, right?
Right. Okay, and then what?
And then I lost, well, so I lost that job, right?
And I've been kind of like looking for jobs ever since.
How long ago was that? July of 2015.
July 2015, alright.
Yeah, so it's about a year and a half now.
And are you white? Yes.
Okay, because you were talking about discrimination for being white.
And how has the job applications gone?
It's abysmal.
I spend anywhere between four and eight hours a day applying for jobs.
The callbacks have decreased dramatically.
And when I do get called in to like, you know, go to an interview or whatever, you know, go get my hair cut and put on a suit and go to the interview.
I don't get callbacks.
I feel the interviews go great, but I don't get callbacks.
I've gotten to the point where I almost don't even want to apply to jobs anymore because I don't feel like it's getting me anywhere.
After a year and a half of not having employment and spending...
Other people's money, you know, get on a train or something to go to these places.
You know, it's really run me down.
No, I completely understand.
I really sympathize with that.
I mean, 917 days of rejection is bloody hard on the system, right?
Absolutely. Now, what have you been living on?
Bitcoin. He's right.
You in South Korea. And my parents and my girlfriends help.
Right, right. It's not something I want to do, but I'm in a position where I feel like I don't have another choice.
What do you mean? Well, I'm not making any money.
I had a stint for about five weeks doing a contracting role, but after that, I haven't gotten anything.
And do you think that you're experiencing or the victim of any anti-white racism in applications and hiring decisions?
You know, I started to feel that way, so I stopped putting my race and gender and whatever on applications.
I'm still not getting calls, though.
I guess it's probably because my LinkedIn's attached to it.
But, I mean, I didn't want to go and say, like, oh, well, I guess it's because I'm white.
Well, I mean, you can change your LinkedIn picture to...
A non-white and see what happens, right?
Yeah, put a motorcycle or something, right?
Yeah, or something else.
So, do you know anyone who is hiring?
Do you have any family members or extended family members or friends or people who went to high school or any kind of network that you can massage outside of this online Send My Resume stuff, which I find generally useless, but do you have anyone you know who might be hiring?
No. I'm sorry?
No, no, I don't.
I don't have anyone in my family who, like, runs a company or is in a hiring-type position.
But they – I mean, my question is, Christian, have you put out the bat signal among everyone you know that you're desperate for work?
Absolutely. And nobody knows anyone who's hiring anyone?
I get, like, links and stuff or connect with this person on LinkedIn.
Maybe they can help you out.
I had someone I considered a mentor at my last job that gave me a lot of – You know, breadcrumbs I could follow toward getting employment, but they never really panned out.
That's, I mean, so how many people do you think are actively engaged in trying to help you find work that you know, or that are friends of friends kind of thing, or friends of relatives?
I would say probably one that's actively engaged.
Two, my dad and my girlfriend.
And nobody else?
Not, maybe my aunt.
Maybe. Okay, so do they know how desperate you are?
Yes. Do they, I mean, do they care?
I think so. Well, shouldn't they be helping you more then?
Well, in what way?
I mean, they can send me links to jobs and be like, well, here's this person or connect with that person, but it's largely up to me, I think.
So on any given month, in terms of people that you know, family members and friends and friends of friends and so on, how many referrals or opportunities do you get on any given month from the people that you know?
Somewhere around 20, I would say.
20? Every couple days, my dad's sending me stuff from LinkedIn or whatever.
No, no, no. I don't mean people who are looking online.
I mean people who are working their contacts on your behalf.
I would say mostly just my girlfriend.
Right. Yeah, I mean, so listen, if you need things from people, ask and keep asking and bug them.
You know, if you've been over 900 days trying to find a job mostly online, it's not going to work.
Right. Right? You have to change up what you're doing.
Ask me what's being an entrepreneur. Well, the first thing is recognize when something isn't working and try something different, right?
Yeah. Now, I'll tell you this.
Sorry, go ahead. I did try something different.
I started a YouTube channel doing, like, citizen journalism and stuff.
So, I mean, I don't have, like, a big following or a big backing yet, but, I mean, since January...
I bring that up because I don't want it to be, like, I lost momentum.
Like, obviously, I haven't been in the workforce, but it's not like I'm sitting at home idly...
Just applying for jobs randomly.
Like, I found other things to keep me occupied while that's going on.
Right. So, I will tell you something that's interesting about the world.
Mm-hmm. Which is...
The world seems to value things like assertiveness and honesty very much in the abstract.
But if you are assertive and honest, for some reason...
You end up garnering a lot of hatred and hostility.
Like, I'll give you a tiny example, right?
Yeah. So, a couple of times a year, I go to this wonderful, fine listenership, and I ask for the resources to do what I do.
Right. Now, I'm not forcing anyone.
I'm not banning people who don't give me resources.
I'm not, you know, I'm just telling you what I need and why I think it's important.
I'm being honest. And I'm being assertive.
I'm not bullying. I'm not dominating.
I'm not, right? I'm just telling you.
And I tell people, support whoever you want, but just do something or do the work yourself.
Now, if you ever want to...
Kind of understand. And I have a really great audience, too, for the most part.
I mean, there are trolls who bungee in and so on, but really love the audience.
But if you ever want to know what the world's real relationship is to honesty and assertiveness, just go to one of these videos where I'm asking for resources, which, of course, I need to do what I do, and have a scroll through the comments.
I don't know if you've ever done...
Oh, absolutely. Anything like that.
I've been following your show since I stopped...
Going to classes.
Right, right. So, you know, it's, oh, you pathetic e-beggar, and oh, I can't believe you're such a manipulator, right?
You sheeple who follow you, right?
And, good lord.
I mean, so, the thing is, when you ask people and you bug people for stuff, They often will end up not liking you for some reason.
Even though in the abstract, everyone says, I value honesty and assertiveness.
When they actually run into honesty and assertiveness, they get kind of feral, right?
Yeah. Or you might be, like, encroaching on something they wanted for themselves.
Well, yeah. Or people who don't have...
Like, if I ask someone for something, if they've never been taught how to say no, they get really stressed.
Right? And then they take out that stress by getting mad at me.
Like, it's not my fault that people didn't teach you how to say no.
It's not my fault that people didn't teach you boundaries.
I can't restrain myself.
I can't Make myself dishonest.
I want some resources from people.
I think I provide... I know I provide really, really great value.
I know that. We get emails like I just put out the video about the selfishness of suicide.
We had someone say, really, really, really helped, right?
We get these messages all the time.
People have met each other.
They've fallen in love. They've got married.
They're peaceful parenting. They're improving their lives.
I know I'm providing massive value in the world, so...
I think it's fair to ask for resources in return at freedomainradio.com slash donate.
Absolutely. And what happens, not you, you save your money for getting work, right?
It's fine. But what happens is people expect me to restrain myself, in a sense, to grind down and destroy my own commitment to honesty and directness.
If I want something from someone, you know what I'm going to say?
I'd like something from you.
I want something from you.
And people can say no.
The majority of people, when I do the pitch, I mean, I can count.
I can count the number of views of the video and downloads of the podcast, and I can count how many people have donated.
And it's a very, very small number.
So the vast majority of people say no when I ask them for something and then continue to watch the show.
But can't do much about that.
But people get really mad at me because they don't like the fact that I'm being honest and saying what I want in a non-bullying manner, an encouraging manner.
I think we can do great things with the resources that we have.
People want me to squelch my own capacity for honesty and my own commitment to being real, authentic, and assertive with what I want.
You know, if you want a woman to go out with you...
You ask her to go out with you.
You know what I mean? You know, sort of drop breadcrumbs to your lair, I guess, unless you're Matt Lauer.
Matt Lauer. Matt's lair.
Yeah, or a nice guy, right?
Oh yeah, one of these nice wife-beating feminist dudes.
So... So, the reason I'm saying all of this, Christian, is, you know, my suggestion would be, since the online stuff isn't working, certainly you can go places in person and so on, but that can be tricky.
But you need to invite everyone over you know and say, listen, it's 900 days.
I desperately need a job.
Like, I'll do anything. Any place where there's any capacity for upward mobility, I will work there and I will do a damn good job.
And I just, like, I need everyone's help.
I need everyone's resources.
I need... And now I'll, you know, anytime you need stuff, you know, you do me a favor, I'll do you a favor.
I will pay the favor back, but right now I'm in an ask state.
Right now I'm in an ask state.
And to get people to commit to helping you.
You know, isn't that what family is for?
Isn't that what people say?
You know, anything for family.
I really want to help family.
Really, really care about family.
Family, family, family, right?
And put that to the test.
I've been told that I should probably go work at Target or something so that I at least have some money coming in.
I don't feel like that's commensurate with my experience or my ultimate ability to provide to the best of my ability.
Well, that's a tough call.
That's a tough call because if you're working at Target...
True.
And we'll offer you something.
Who knows?
Maybe it'd be a customer.
Maybe a coworker at Target knows someone who needs someone.
There could be any number of things, right?
True.
Now, I understand aiming at neuroscience and ending up at Target can be a challenge.
But I think working is better than not working as a whole.
But before going to Target or someplace like it, nothing wrong with working at Target, of course, then you really need to do the big ask.
The big ask is so important in life.
The big ask.
Will you go out with me?
Will you hire me?
Will you help me find work?
Will you support me? What I do on this channel.
Will you? It's the big ask.
It's the ask where it really matters whether someone says yes or no.
That's the big ask.
And success or failure in life hinges on the big ask.
Whether you're willing to step into the itchy underpants of the big ask.
A big ask.
I need your help. I need your support.
I need your resources.
I need something.
It's a big ask.
Because if people say no, it's harsh.
It really matters.
You know, hey, can you grab me a glass of water?
No, I'm just heading out the back.
Okay, I'll go get my glass of water, right?
Can you save me from a life of increasingly desperate unemployment?
Please, I'm begging you.
Like, the big ask is really, really important.
And the big ask, it feels like you're incredibly vulnerable, but it is a position of strength.
Because when you make the big ask, Christian, what you're doing is you're saying, I can survive the big no.
I can survive the big no.
And I remember, listen, my big asks, I get more no's than yes's.
You know, when I was a software executive and entrepreneur, I would go, and the numbers were pretty clear.
You'd contact a thousand companies.
You'd get a hundred replies, you'd get ten meetings, you'd get one sale.
Yeah. Now, it's okay, because the sale was for a lot of money.
But the vast majority of life, you got the big ask, and you get the big no.
When I was in junior high school, I aimed ridiculously high relative to my bowl cut hairdo with pinking shears, like the front orning of an Italian bakery, sexual market value.
I asked the queen of the school out on a date.
I did the big ask and I said, want to go swimming on Friday?
And she said, With who?
Mayday. Mayday.
We're going down. I did the big ask.
I mean, I knew in the long run I was going to be a great boyfriend, great husband, great father.
I did the big ask. And then I asked the second most beautiful girl in school, and she went with me.
And you do the big ask.
Well, okay. I understand what you're saying.
That's like one thing. But I mean, given the things in my question here, like where I'm trying to get into some kind of position, I'm just confused as to how, like, I mean, on paper, it looks like I've lost momentum.
But in my life, I'm extraordinarily busy, especially with my channel, you know?
Okay, tell me a little bit more about your channel.
It's coffee with comment.
I do raw political analysis.
Free speech, pro-Trump, and that kind of stuff.
Every other day or so, I put out a video.
I have a series that's bi-weekly bullshit that's my news roundup.
And so I've been doing that since, well, I started that series in March last year, but I've been doing the videos pretty much right after Donald Trump's election.
I'm like, yes, we finally have a chance.
This is how I'm going to contribute to, you know, MAGA, to Making America Great Again.
But I enjoy doing it.
I really do. But I don't get, you know, I do the big ask.
I have, I did videos for like Patreon, Maker Support, which I guess is the newest one.
But what have you done to promote your channel?
I have a Twitter account.
And I'm on like Gab and Mines.
And I'll put out my material when it comes out.
No, no, no. I don't mean published.
What have you done? Because you're asking for my advice, right?
Yeah. So what have you done to promote?
What you've done. I used to buy Facebook ads.
But that wasn't really working out.
Maybe I'm not sure what you're asking.
Well... Certainly for the first couple of years that I was doing my channel, I spent far more time promoting it than making videos.
Because no one cares about you and nobody cares about me.
They don't care what I have to say.
They don't care my thoughts, my reasonings, my history, my education, my capacity to reason, my sense of humor.
They don't care at all.
Everyone's busy and everything that you want from them, if they don't know you, is a big interruption.
You know, if you make a video, everyone looks at that like some telemarketer is calling right in the middle of a romantic dinner.
You're just an annoying interruption, right?
So, when I'm saying, what have you done to promote?
I mean, back I used to do stumble-upon ads.
I did Google ads. I would go and take my videos and share them places and post them places.
I wrote articles and worked really hard to try and get them published and then include links to my channel.
Like, just for the first couple of years, it probably was...
Somewhere between 5 to 1 and 10 to 1 promotion versus content.
Now, I'm big enough now that I can spend much more time on content and much less time promoting because it's kind of got the momentum.
Sure. But that's like getting a car going, you know?
Like if you've got to push a car on a flat surface, the first foot is a hell of a lot of work and after that you get some momentum, right?
Yeah. Sure. So, that's my question, which is, what have you done to, because, you know, looking at the views, it's not going very well, right?
Yeah, well, no, I'm following what you're saying.
So, I collaborate with other channels.
They're also smaller channels, though.
Having such a small audience, I feel that maybe, you know, going after some of my other, like, YouTube idols and being like, hey, would you like to do a collaborate?
I don't feel like I'm quite in that space yet where I can do that.
But, um, I, I collaborate with other channels, you know, post videos to Facebook, Twitter, Gab, not as much minds, but you know, minds just to try to like get my name out there and say, Hey, you know, this is what I'm doing.
But I think I hear what you're saying though, as far as content creation versus promotion.
Like if I'm really invested in having the channel take off, then I should be promoting the content.
Not so much. My question is right.
So I don't know where you got a couple of dozen videos.
Is that right? I'm at 200...
260. Okay, so 260 videos.
So I'm looking at one of these from three weeks ago with 24 views.
I'm looking at one from a month ago with 62 views.
Yeah. I'm looking at one from two months ago with 94 views, right?
Right. Two months ago, 29 views, right?
So I guess my question is, if you've been doing this since Trump was elected, I guess you've been doing this for a little over a year...
And you've got 200 videos, all of which have, to my knowledge, very low view counts.
It's not an insult.
So what have you been doing to change what's not working?
Because your channel is not working, right?
So you have a choice.
You can either produce another video Or you can figure out how to up your view count.
Now, given that your videos aren't getting any views, not meaning this as an insult, I'm just sort of trying to, you asked for my advice, right?
Yeah, I'm calling you. Yeah, so given that your videos aren't getting views, then you need to change something.
But what you've done is kept pumping out like 200 videos, none of which really get any views.
And that's my, you know, if you want sort of like, how do you become an entrepreneur?
You listen to the market.
If you produce something, And it's not working, you change what you do.
So there's sort of three possibilities, right?
One is that your videos are terrible and bad and no one's interested in them, which means you have to change what it is that you're doing, right?
Right. The other is that you are misreading the market, right?
So you have a video calling Lauren...
Southern a thought, right?
Now, if you're kind of in the libertarian space and you're kind of insulting important libertarians, that's not a very good market move.
You may have criticisms, but you might want to wait until you're a bit more established for that, right?
Right. Or your videos are good, but you're just not promoting them.
But what's happening right now is you keep putting out these videos...
Like you're pedaling a bike machine and thinking you're getting somewhere because you're busy and you're doing lots of work, right?
Like you're putting out applications which aren't working and you're putting out videos and they're not working.
So my question is, if you want to be an entrepreneur, you have to listen to the marketplace.
And the marketplace is telling you that your resume is not valuable and no one cares about your videos.
So the question is, if you believe in your videos, then you have to nurture them and you have to bring them to the world's attention.
Like, I really believe in what I'm doing and I believed in it before I even became a public figure.
I've believed in it since I was a teenager that I was going to do great things in the world and was committed to that.
I believe in the quality of my videos, which is why I spent a lot of time Promoting, which is why I go on other people's shows to be raked over the coals for, you know, every unpopular thing I've ever uttered, because it matters, because I'm willing to take those bullets for the sake of the ideas contained in my videos.
I don't care about myself as far as that goes, or me.
I mean, if people could forget about me and focus on the arguments, I'd be much happier.
But I have a responsibility to the argument.
So if you really believe in your arguments, if you really believe in what you're doing, and nobody's watching them, then you have to go and grab the world's attention.
Because nobody cares about you, nobody cares about me, they don't care about my channel, they don't care about your channel.
But you just keep doing this thing that doesn't work.
And if you want to be an entrepreneur, you have to have that biofeedback mechanism of saying, it's not working, I have to try something different.
Right. Yeah, that's part of the reason I reached out to you on this.
One is just because of the video I was responding to, the millennials and working in that.
But also because obviously you had experience as an entrepreneur.
And so just trying to figure out what's the best move here.
So I think I've gotten that though.
Yeah, because it's interesting because you say...
How can you be an entrepreneur with no capital, right?
Yeah. Do you know how I started my show?
A $35 webcam and a $20 microphone.
I mean, you're saying to me, how can you be an entrepreneur with no capital and you've got a channel with hundreds of videos?
Maybe I had an incorrect assumption of what an entrepreneur was.
You know, Like starting a business versus...
I mean, because I already had all the stuff I have to do my channel.
I already had all this stuff.
I'm not sure what you mean. I'm concerned because I don't make any money from it.
Is that because...
It's probably just because of the view count, is what you're saying.
So I should be spending more time promoting the videos, promoting the channel, the material.
It's the way that you find out If you're good or not, right?
So if the videos are good, like if, let's say I write a fantastic song, or I think it's a fantastic song, and I record it and I throw the tape in a drawer, or I throw the thumb drive in a drawer, is it any good?
Nobody knows. Or, and good means, you know, do people have value?
Do people find value in it?
I don't know. What I need to do is get...
The song out of the draw and get it into the hands of people to listen to, right?
I need to create a video. I need to...
Whatever I'm going to do, right? And so you need to put your work in front of more and more and more people because if a million people get exposed to your song and only one person is willing to pay for it, it's just not a very good song.
Now, I mean, I know people say, well, it's good, but who knows?
But I'm just talking about you can...
You can make money from it, which is kind of necessary in terms of putting a roof over your head, right?
Right. So you're kind of on the libertarian side, is that right?
I probably lean more conservative, but yeah, somewhere in...
Definitely not on the left.
So tell me, what is the market opportunity if your video called Mike Cernovich Can Fuck Right Off?
I'm trying to remember what that was specifically about.
But he had said something on YouTube that was anti-Trump, and I decided to play more towards the Trump-supporting crowd.
Right. And did that work?
He actually retweeted the video.
And did it work?
It got a lot of views, but I guess it's not like I have a sustained audience from it.
Right, so it didn't work.
The comments were largely in agreement.
Right, but it didn't work.
Right. And you got 754 views.
Right. And that's a pretty provocative title, right?
Right. And was it based upon one thing he said that was critical of Trump?
It was... Something on Twitter.
Oh, no, it was about the Candace Owens thing, I think, that he had responded to.
Right. So in terms of your intellectual content, Mike Cernovich can fuck right off is not an argument, right?
Right. I mean, that's just a provocative title with no intellectual content, right?
And it's rude. Well, it is the internet after all.
Wait, are you telling me now how to be successful on the internet?
No, but I mean, there's a time to be glib and attempt to put material out that might be shocking or provocative.
But it didn't work!
Don't tell me about how the internet works like you're lecturing some three-year-old because it doesn't work for you.
Well, I put videos up that were highly critical of YouTube's Proud to Be campaign that they did earlier this year.
I did one on the...
More than a refugee campaign they did earlier this year.
I got up to 10,000 views before YouTube removed those videos and I got to strike on my channel.
So there was a time where I was able to break through to that audience and YouTube decided that wasn't great for their platform.
So Christian, you called me up, you asked me for help.
Yeah. You're lecturing me a little bit about how successful you are when I can read the numbers as well as anyone else.
And you've been really insulting to people I consider good friends.
Right? Lauren Southern, Mike Cernovich, people I care about, friends of mine.
You called one a thought and you told the other one to fuck right off.
Right. Do you think that the issue may have something to do with your judgment as a whole?
That's possible. I mean, there's different issues that you can have opinions on.
You put those out and it's supposed to generate, you know, commentary and that sort of stuff.
So you're defending this?
Yeah. Okay.
Well then, if you're defending it, man, you should just, if you're defending it and you don't want to take any feedback, I guess you're just going to have to keep doing what you're doing and hope that it turns around for you.
Okay, Steph. Thanks, man.
Take care. I'll talk to the next caller.
Alright, up next we have Trevor.
Trevor wrote in and said, Does being in a position where you either need or believe you need someone make it harder to authentically love them?
Be it God or an actual person, does necessity tend to breed contempt?
That's from Trevor.
Trevor, great question.
How are you doing tonight? I'm doing pretty well.
Well, I'm a little sick, but other than that, All right.
Well, you know, it's New Year's, which means you spend a lot of time with people.
And sometimes that means sharing a couple of germs.
No, it's a great question.
It's a great question. And is there anything you wanted to add to it?
Originally, as like a Christian, I felt like I really desperately needed God in my life to function.
And through Ayn Rand and the virtue of selfishness and all that stuff, I came to not feel that need.
But I'm still in between on whether or not God exists or not.
But the sense of possible relationship, I felt a higher sense of purity.
And so I kind of came to that question of, does needing something breed contempt?
Because I've seen it in other people where they get really angry whenever they don't get exactly what they want from the things they need, or they just don't seem to have an authentic connection.
It does seem like needing somebody might get in the way of that.
Right, right. No, and I think that's a very important distinction.
And I'll give you a sort of framework about how I think of it, and let me know if this is not a final answer.
It's just my sort of first thoughts.
So there are people in the public sphere, in the public space, who want both to speak the truth and to be popular.
Right? They want to speak difficult and dangerous truths, and at the same time, they want mainstream acceptance.
Now, That's really not going to...
It's one of the things you have to give up.
You just have to let it go.
Let it go. The mainstream is not going to love you if you tell the truth about particular issues.
Just the way it goes.
It's just the way the world is.
It's where the world is right now.
Leftists, a lot of times, they need this kind of approval from other leftists, like the virtue signalers, the people who, you know, preen themselves on how good they are without actually doing any good.
And if you need people in that way, like you need people's approval, you need people's acceptance, you need people's praise, well, that's not good.
That's not good.
So when you need people to prop you up, to support your illusions about yourself, then that's not good.
And you can't Love in that environment.
And I think that is the one that leads you to contempt.
Now, I need my audience.
I can't do this.
I can't do this.
Like that old Sandra Bernhardt thing, like, without you, I'm nothing.
Well, at least as a public figure, I'm William.
So I need views.
I need people to share. I need people to give me feedback.
I need people to come on the show.
I need people to support the show, freedomainradio.com slash donate.
I need. Now, but I'm honest about that, right?
I'm honest about that.
So, if it's a need you can be honest about, like if you can say, if you're a public figure, if you can say, I'm not going to talk about this topic because I desperately need mainstream acceptance.
Okay. Okay. That's honest, you know?
But if you pretend to be some sort of rebel, some sort of outlaw, some sort of freethinker, but there are certain topics you won't touch because you're afraid of being attacked, well, and you don't say that, well, then you suddenly, that's manipulative, right?
So... I need my wife.
I need Mike.
I need my audience.
I need my friends. I care.
But I'm not manipulating them about that.
I'm not pretending I don't, you know, like playing these games.
I'm not playing hard to get.
You know, emotionally, I'm really not that hard to...
I'm not playing hard to get with my heart and my mind.
It's wide open.
Sometimes thought style open to some.
So as long as you're honest about what you need from people...
Then you're not manipulating them.
If you're dishonest about what you need, right?
Like if you want someone to give you something but you won't ask them directly, then you end up having to manipulate them, right?
And, you know, like the example of the guy who's a drug addict, but he doesn't have any money and he goes to the dealer's house and he just kind of hangs around and talks about how great it is to share things and, you know, how he could really use a hit right now, but won't ask directly, can I get some free drugs?
Well, that drug addict needs the drug dealer.
And isn't being honest about what he wants and what he needs.
And so that, to me, you know, like the leftists, right?
They consider Democrats or the Labor Party or whatever.
They consider liberals in Canada.
They can say... If they want, they say, listen, we care about power and third world immigrants vote for us and give us the power that we so desperately want and need.
So we're bringing these people in.
We don't care about the long-term fabric of the society.
There's no such thing as Canadian values, according to Justin Trudeau.
We don't care about what happens to the societies that we live in.
We don't care! About the long-term effects of art.
We just, we want people to vote for us.
And we're not very good at making arguments and facts and history and data and logic go completely against what we want, what we advocate.
But we don't want to give up the power.
We can't vote for it.
We're going to import endless hordes of people from the third world who are going to vote for us.
The dreamers, the left can just say, we don't care about the dreamers.
We don't care about the state or quality of life of the illegal immigrants.
We don't care about what happens to schools or roads or housing or prices.
We don't care that public infrastructure is massively overstretched as a result of millions and millions and millions of people pouring into America, pouring into this.
We don't care. We just, we need the votes.
We want the votes. We're addicts to power.
Well, that would be, we need the votes because we're addicts to power.
There would be some honesty in that, right?
But if honesty about what you want destroys what you want, you have no choice but to be manipulative.
And so, what they do is they say, well, we value diversity, which is a complete lie.
Go to a leftist, you know...
Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged is one of the most influential books in human history.
Good luck finding an objectivist in a Western university.
Good luck. Good luck.
Because they don't value diversity at all, which is why communists hire communists, liberals hire liberals, leftists hire liberals, and they don't hire anyone else.
And the fact that conservatives even have any economic investment in leftists is, to me, not learning the lesson.
So, what the left does is to say, well, we care about the poor.
We care about diversity.
We care about people in the third world.
We're just struggling to support people who want a better life.
Like all these lies, right? All these lies.
Like the drug addict who goes to his drug dealer and says, hey man, I really care about you as a person.
You've always been really important to me.
Now you want the drug.
And you have to lie to get it.
Because if you tell the truth, as the drug addict which says, I'm thinking about smashing your face in with a rock if you don't give me some heroin right now, right?
Then he's not going to get his heroin.
He's got to lie. If he tells the truth about what he wants, he doesn't get what he wants.
And if the left tells the truth about immigration, we don't care about the culture.
We don't care about the society.
We just want the votes.
Fuck off with your arguments.
Just give us the votes.
We don't care. We don't care about the poor.
We don't care about the fact that endless third world immigration is driving down and destroying the wages of the native-born, particularly the poor, who we claim to care about so much.
We don't care. Now, if they're honest about their relationship with endless third world immigration, well, the voters will be disgusted, most of them, and won't vote for them, right?
So if they're honest about what they want, They don't get what they want.
And that's where the need and the manipulation and the immorality comes in.
If you can be honest about what you want, like I say to my listenership, as I've talked about, like, I need your support, I need your resources, I need you to share, to donate, to like, subscribe, you name it, right?
Repeat the arguments, don't care, don't give me credit, I don't care.
Well, I can be honest about it, and that's great.
And sometimes when I'm honest, it happens fairly regularly, like I put out a request for resources.
And some people are like, well, that's terrible, man.
I'm subbing. I'm canceling my subscription because you asked for something honestly.
It's like, okay, well, you know what?
I don't want your money. I don't want your money to take it.
Go away because I don't want that kind of relationship with people.
So if you can be honest about what you want and it doesn't destroy getting it, then I think you have a need that's good.
That's healthy. Because we can't, like, I need my wife.
I need the listenership.
I'm not going to pretend that I don't.
Doesn't mean I need them, like, to survive.
Sure, I could go work at a donut shop or whatever, and I could find a way to survive without all of this.
But it's more than want.
I don't just want my wife.
I need my wife. And could I survive without her?
Yeah. Sure.
Sure. Sure, I could.
I could, but it would just be survival.
It wouldn't be joy, at least not for a long time.
So, if you can be honest about your need without destroying what you want, without destroying your capacity to get what you want, I think that's healthy and that's good.
And it doesn't breed contempt.
But if you have to lie, if you have to lie, To get what you want, then what's going to inevitably happen is you're going to feel contempt and anger towards the other person or towards yourself.
Why is the left so full of rage?
Why are they so violent?
Why are they so destructive? Why are they so full of hatred?
Why are they always screaming at people to kill themselves?
Why? Because their existence requires lying, misdirection, manipulation.
That's a humiliating, humiliating existence.
The guy who's thinking of killing his drug dealer to get the heroin but who's pretending to like him is in a fundamentally humiliating position.
Because they have to lie continually about what they want and who they are.
Lie, lie, lie, lie, lie, lie, lie, because they can't tell the truth about what they want.
The teachers' unions, occasionally there's a flash of truth.
They don't care about the kids.
They only care about the resources, the summers off, the pensions, the healthcare.
They don't care about the kids.
And occasionally, but they can't be honest about that.
They can't say, well, we basically hold kids hostage because we have a monopoly.
You're forced to pay for us. We don't care about the kids.
We don't care about the quality of their education.
But we sure like free shit and summers off.
So they can't be honest.
And because they feel, based upon their thirst for the unearned, they feel they must lie continually, all the time, lie, lie, lie.
To have to lie for a living is extremely humiliating and creates a lot of pent-up anger, a lot of pent-up rage, which they regularly have to discharge.
Discharge. It's like When you get a brain injury and your brain swells and you have to cut your skull, open it up so that your brain doesn't crush itself with its bruise-like expansion, they have to open up and spew this ever-accumulating self-hatred because they have to lie all the time.
And they hate it.
And they don't know how to escape it.
And if they internalize it and say, I simply cannot lie one more fucking day.
I can't get out of bed and I can't pretend that I love diversity and immigrants.
And I can't pretend that I love the children and only are in this for the quality of the education.
And I can't pretend anymore that I love and care about the poor.
And I can't pretend anymore that racism is the only reason why...
Minorities don't always flourish.
And I can't do it.
I can't do it anymore.
If they internalize that and say, I can't fucking do it anymore.
Then they break out of that sick orbit, that decaying orbit of falsehood, and they're free.
But then the challenge is, to tell the truth, they have to tell the truth about where they came from.
I came from an environment where people lie and lie and lie and lie.
And then you wonder why... It's a tweet I put out.
The left lies and lies and lies.
They have to. They can't tell the truth about what they want without destroying their capacity to get it.
If people told the truth about government education, it would be dismantled tomorrow.
If people told the truth about immigration, there'd be an end to it tomorrow.
If people told the truth about the welfare state, it would be abolished tomorrow.
So when you have lived long enough in an environment where you must lie all the time, When you start telling the truth, the first honest truth that you have to say is how much you had to lie and how many liars you knew and how many people around you lied all the time.
And that invites blowback, which is why people get stuck, like flies on flight, but they get stuck in this world.
Because if you're going to be honest and you've lived among liars, the first thing you want to be honest about is how much you and they always had to lie.
And if you want to be that kind of truth-teller, good luck to you.
Good luck to you. I mean, seriously, I mean, that sounds sarcastic.
Like, seriously, good luck to you. Very few people do it.
And, you know, like there was a guy on the Honest Former Antifa member who was on the show a while back ago.
And it does happen, for sure, but it's dangerous.
You break ranks, you tell the truth about the pathological lying of the left.
It's dangerous. It's dangerous.
So most people just get stuck in there, and so they can't internalize their humiliation and self-hatred.
They can't turn it against themselves, because that would mean that they would change, which would expose them to danger.
Because they'd then have to start telling the truth about the lies around them.
So what they do is they say, basically, unconsciously, I believe, they say, deep down, I'm...
Not lying. You're lying.
What is it that the left says so much about Donald Trump?
He lies, he lies, he lies, he lies, he lies, he lies.
No, he was pretty honest compared to Democrat politicians.
He was pretty honest in what he said he was going to do, and he's been trying to do a lot of it since he got in.
He was pretty honest. And they say, I'm not lying, you're lying.
This is his projection, right?
And it has great power in it.
Like, I saw this post on one of Trump's tweets the other day, it says, you sound frightened and desperate.
It's like, no, no, that's you, the leftist who's feeling that.
And the rage that they pour out is they either feel that their own lying they just projected onto other people, or they feel that the other people are forcing them to lie.
And then they lose control of the truth completely, they lose control of identity, and the only values they have are weapons, right?
The left claims that empathy is a value, but to the left, empathy is a weapon.
You use it against other people.
Oh, you don't care about the poor.
Oh, you don't care about the sick.
Oh, you don't care about blacks.
Oh, you're whatever.
Sexist or racist. Homophobe.
So, it's fine to have need.
If you can honestly express that need within the confines of the relationship and still get what you need.
I need the audience.
I need support, so I ask for it.
And I get it from... Sometimes a dismayingly small portion of you, but I get it, enough.
And so for me to express my needs doesn't destroy what I want.
But if you're in a relationship where to express your need destroys getting what you need or getting what you want, then you either break the relationship or you end up falling down a virtually bottomless pit of lying, deceit, manipulation.
Humiliation and rage. Does that make any sense?
Um, yeah, it does. And, um, as you were talking about that, it kind of made me think of like in the context of, um, the religious sense or whatever, when people believe that there's this God that can, um, do everything and stuff like that, whenever he, when you do honestly express those needs,
you're put in the position where when he doesn't fulfill them, you either have to say he can't fulfill it, which is, um, Well, yeah, I mean, asking God stuff is very complicated.
Because a lot of people do public virtues for the sake of being praised or looking good rather than doing good.
And to be caught out on that is, I mean, it's impossible.
You can't read minds, right?
So it's kind of impossible to figure this kind of stuff out.
But I hope that helps.
I'm going to move on to the next caller.
But thanks very much for a great, great topic.
I really appreciate it. All right.
Thank you very much, Jonathan. Alright, up next today we have Ryan.
Ryan wrote in and said, My friend and I both work in the emergency medical services.
I recently had a discussion with him on the topic of anarchy.
My friend is a self-proclaimed anarchist and believes that the government is fundamentally illegitimate, taxation is theft, government is immoral, the usual anarchist talking points.
I'm as far right as I can be without being an anarchist.
Call me a libertarian. We recently had a discussion on the non-aggression principle and how it relates to EMS function in society.
He recently got a job at a public EMS provider, taxpayer-funded.
I asked him how this affects his beliefs in the non-aggression principle.
He couldn't quite defend it.
The conversation ultimately evolved into me saying he's not an anarchist, to which he said that he still is.
I again reminded him that his entire bi-weekly paycheck was courtesy of my working parents and neighbors who had no say in funding this EMS provider.
Bottom line, my question is, can someone still be an anarchist and voluntarily work for a company that thrives off the initiation of force?
That's from Ryan. Hey Ryan, how you doing?
Fine, how are you doing, sir? I'm well, I'm well.
Do you want me to start with the annoying stuff?
Sure, go for it. All right.
You got some pretty manipulative language here.
I just really wanted to point this out.
Okay. He's a self-proclaimed anarchist.
What does self-proclaimed mean?
He just states that himself.
Like, if I were to have him here, he would say that I am an anarchist.
Like, he says that, he believes that.
Yes, but why don't you refer to yourself as a self-proclaimed conservative, or self-proclaimed right-winger, or self-proclaimed libertarian?
Why are his beliefs self-proclaimed, but yours are not?
I am not actually sure.
No, because self-proclaimed is a way of diminishing somebody else's belief system.
Oh, well, I didn't mean to do that if that's how I came off as.
All right. Now, he said, you also said your friend is a self-proclaimed man, believes that the government is fundamentally illegitimate, taxation is theft, government is immoral, the usual anarchist talking points.
Now, this makes your friend, it's very insulting to your friend.
Because if it's just a belief, doesn't he have any arguments for this?
The usual anarchist talking points makes him sound like he's half brain dead but reading from a pamphlet with no understanding or arguments behind what he's saying.
Okay. Does he have arguments behind the proposition that taxation is theft?
Oh, absolutely. Like, that's not what I'm denying at all.
So then he's not making talking points.
He's making legitimate arguments, right?
Absolutely. So why would you refer to his beliefs, first of all, as beliefs, which is, a belief is usually something that you hold without evidence.
I don't believe that there's such a thing of gravity.
I accept there's such a thing as gravity, right?
So why would you say he self-proclaimed, refer to his arguments only as beliefs, and then say that they're the usual anarchist talking points?
That's all of these three things are very diminishing of your friend and kind of insulting to him.
Okay. The reason why I say that is because we've been friends for a very long time, and we've had these discussions on anarchy, and he's actually pulled me towards him quite a bit.
And so he's opened me up to Ayn Rand and Atlas Shrugged and all that kind of cool stuff.
So I've actually gotten into it due to him.
So I do not intend to insult him whatsoever.
And if I came across that way, I do apologize.
Anyway, the reason why I say those things, I guess, is because he upholds all the ideas of anarchy.
In a lot of parts of his life.
But then when it comes down to things like this, he doesn't.
And I'm just trying to figure out the best way to approach it and the best way to understand it.
What is his argument about taxation being theft?
What has he said? Oh, the taxation being theft is that the government is taking money from people, taking their wealth from people, and at force they take a gun to their head and remove it from their pocketbook is the idea.
Okay. Is that a false argument?
I don't believe it is, no.
I don't think it is.
So you accept his argument that taxation is theft?
Yes. So referring to it as the usual anarchist talking points when it's something that you actually accept and that he has an argument for, I'm just pointing out that it really does diminish him and you have a challenging relationship with him.
And I understand why. At least I think I understand why.
But I just wanted to point that out, that this way of communicating about your friend's beliefs.
Like you could say he's made convincing arguments for the proposition that taxation is theft, which I accept.
But in your message to us, you very much diminish him and distance yourself from the arguments.
I just really want to point that out.
It's unconscious because you seem to be apologizing sincerely, but you need to be aware that it's going on, and I think I understand why.
Now, regarding this question that he is being paid for by the government, right?
Yes. Now, let me ask you this.
Let's suppose that you and I are talking 200 years ago or so.
And you are an abolitionist, right?
You believe that slavery is immoral.
And you inherit slaves from a distant relative, but you're not allowed to set them free.
So you are now a slave owner, right?
Correct. Does that have any bearing whatsoever on the validity of the arguments against slavery?
That force is being applied to me to keep the slaves, is what you're saying.
Yeah, you must keep the slaves.
Right. You're not allowed to set them free.
Does that have any bearing on you being an abolitionist or your arguments against slavery?
Right. I'll be honest with you, I'm not sure how I feel about that.
I'm not asking how you feel about that.
I'm not appealing to your heart, your balls, your stomach, your ass, your brain.
If I'm in the position of owning slaves against my will, with no capacity to discharge my slave owning, does that have any bearing regarding my arguments against slavery?
No, because you are not capable of actually freeing your slaves.
You are being forced to keep them.
Like, force is an irrational argument.
It isn't an argument.
Now, let us say that we'll make it me because it's a little easier than for you, I think.
So let's say that I inherit slaves.
I am not allowed to sell them, but I can transfer them to someone else.
And I decide to keep them because I'm concerned that no one's going to treat them better than I will.
Because I'm against slavery, therefore if I'm a slave owner, I'm going to try and treat my slaves as well as humanly possible, so I'm keeping my slaves voluntarily.
Does that have any bearing?
On my arguments about slavery.
It's kind of like the concept of triage, doing the best you can with what you have.
I mean, like, you are treating them the best you can at the expense of still owning slaves because you can't get rid of them or else force is applied to you.
And someone else will own the slaves.
So someone might as well own them the best they possibly can be owned until you can adequately free them.
Right. So I can be a voluntary slave owner.
It has no bearing on my arguments regarding slavery, right?
A voluntary slave owner?
I mean, as long as you're being forced to keep them, like, that's the end concept.
No, no, no. I said I could transfer them to someone else.
But can those people free them?
No, no, no.
I can transfer them to someone else, which means I'm holding on to my slaves voluntarily.
Right. I could transfer the slaves to someone else.
Could they be transferred to themselves?
No, no. Someone has to own the slaves, but I could transfer the slave ownership from me to you.
But if I don't do that, I'm voluntarily retaining my ownership of slaves.
Okay. Does that have any bearing on my arguments regarding abolition?
No. Okay.
Let us say that I don't own any slaves, and I live in a society where clothing is produced by slaves.
Right? The slaves pick the cotton, the slaves do the jinnies, they whatever, right?
Now, I end up buying clothing because I need clothing.
Does that have any bearing upon my arguments about abolition?
No, I don't believe it does.
I don't think it does. Sorry.
Right. Now, let us say that I go and buy slaves and keep them, because maybe I think that they'll be better off with me than with anyone else.
Like, you know, if you're a cow, you want to be owned by Cassandra Fairbanks, not someone who's going to halal you from a rooftop, right?
So, if I voluntarily go and buy slaves and keep slaves, does that have any bearing on my arguments about abolition?
If the intent is to treat them better than, I mean, if you intend to treat them better than they were before, I guess it's a net positive.
If that's the intent, then no.
Okay.
So we have a variety of situations of voluntary and involuntary slave ownership, none of which has any bearing on the arguments regarding abolition.
Okay.
Now, let's say that I want to be a farmer, and the only way to be a farmer, like I'm desperate, all I've wanted my whole life is to be a farmer, and there really aren't a whole lot of job options.
So let's say I want to be a farmer, and slave labor is the only way that I could run a farm.
There isn't farm machinery because there are so many slaves, nobody bothers to develop farm machinery.
And so the only way I can be a farmer, which I desperately want to be, is to be a slave owner.
So let's say I buy a farm and it has some slaves.
I can't run the farm without the slaves.
Does that have any bearing on my arguments regarding slavery?
I mean, it might make the person who's making that argument seem sort of hypocritical, but it doesn't have any bearing against the actual argument against slavery.
So why do you care what your friend does for a living?
Oh, I don't particularly care.
I'm just asking him why he's doing something that, to me, seems contrary to what he thinks.
What bearing does that have on the truth or falsehood of his arguments?
Oh, nothing at all.
But at the same time, it has a bearing on the level of consistency, and it tends to show itself in the matter of hypocrisy.
He's saying that taxation is theft, but he accepts a paycheck from people that enforce that principle.
But you understand that...
You could make the argument if he drives on roads, or if he uses tap water, or if he's ever been to a government school, or if he uses healthcare, or if he uses the phone or the internet, you know, which have government funding or any R&D, or if he uses pills which are approved by the FDA. You understand that there's no possibility that he can live in a non-statist environment.
No, no, no. I'm not saying that.
I'm saying that here he has two choices.
And I added my question a little bit before I sent it in.
There are two types of EMS agencies.
There's public and private. He could work for a private, but he's choosing to work for a public.
And the mechanism of funding is significantly different in both public and private.
And why does he work for a public rather than a private EMS? He says that the public EMS provider gets him better experience, and I tend to disagree with that.
I work for a private company, and I get what I would consider the same amount of experience, and I see no difference in the experience personally.
But I'm sure you've asked him that then, right?
And what is his answer? His answer is that the company I work for, and I don't know if I should disclose it because it's a...
No, don't give me names of companies or locations.
Yeah. Yeah, I won't.
But it's a... The company I work for, the reason why he doesn't want to work for it is because he's heard bad things about it.
And working from that company, I can tell him that some of that's true, some it's false, but it is private.
It's not public. And if you were to be more in line with your principles, I would think you'd be in the private one versus the public one.
I'm sorry, I'm not sure.
What do you mean it's private?
It's privately owned.
The ambulance company is owned by a private company.
Oh, I understand what that...
I understand what that... I'm sorry, I was not clear on my question.
My apologies. No, it's fine.
When it's private, does that mean that they don't take any Medicare or Medicaid or get any funding whatsoever from the government?
They never take a dime of government of money and never pick up people on welfare or anything like that?
Sometimes they do, but not as 100% or anywhere near 60 or 70% of their funding.
It's very minimal compared to public.
Wait, you said not 60 or 70%?
Like, so for example, in public EMS agencies, they tend to take somewhere between like anywhere between 50 and like 90% of their income is directly through taxes.
Sometimes you just pay for an ambulance ride, but it's Most people that pay for ambulance rides, or most people that request ambulance rides can't pay for it because they tend to be poor.
Okay, so are you saying the public one is 50 to 90% government funded?
Or so. I mean, it's such a wide bracket because so many public agencies do so many different things.
But around here, it's for sure at least 80-90% funded.
Okay, and the private?
And the private, the one I work for, it's funded...
If I take a really good educated guess, I'd say anywhere between 30% and 50% at the most government funded.
So that means that the people they pick up who can't afford to pay in the private, that's paid for by the government?
Yes. It's paid through Medicaid or Medicare, one of the two.
Right. Okay.
So, we're talking, you know, in the tens of percentage points difference between the public and private.
So, it's not like he becomes perfectly consistent with his anarchic principle if he moves to the private, right?
True. So, it's kind of a matter of degree, not of kind, right?
Yes. I mean, 30 and 50% is not the same as 85 to 90, like, is a massive difference there.
But you also don't know.
You're correct, yeah. So it could be much higher.
I worked there.
I wouldn't see how it could be much higher.
So you're saying that sometimes 70% of the people picked up are paying for the ambulance service, not through even welfare or any other government scheme, but out of their own pocket?
Through private insurance, yes.
Well, private insurance in Obamacare land, you mean?
No, no, no, no. Like, the person has worked at a company and then their company has a contract with a health insurance company.
Something like that. I'm not sure how to explain that.
No, no, I understand that. But you understand that healthcare coverage through companies is just another government program, right?
Yes.
So we're talking a small difference in some ways between the funding of these two different organizations.
So my question is, if it comes down to a matter of fairly small degrees, what does it matter?
Why are you torturing your friend over something he doesn't really have much control of?
He says, oh, well, he could move to the private sector and then his degree of funding would go down by some percentage points from the government.
And therefore what?
Therefore what?
I don't think I'm torturing him.
I mean, according to my question, The way I said it, I agree.
I could have said it much more kind and much more objective of his...
What do you mean you're not torturing him? Aren't you calling him a hypocrite?
Yes, but...
Do you not think that for somebody who has a great deal of integrity, I assume being an anarchist is not the most popular position in the world because it's been so corrupted by skinny jean black-legged idiots throwing garbage cans through Starbucks.
So... Somebody who's really concerned with ideals and consistency, you say you've been his friend for many, many years, right?
Yes, it's probably approaching 10 now.
Okay, so his close friend of a decade, this man, your friend, who is very concerned with consistency and integrity, his friend of 10 years is calling him a hypocrite.
Yes. Do you not think that's a very negative experience?
I don't think it's as negative as it can be made out to be.
I think, I mean, in the sure sense of like saying, you are a hypocrite.
If you read that out of a book, it sounds really bad.
But if you and your friend are talking, saying that, hey man, this is kind of hypocritical, I think that you could, you know, do this differently.
I think that doesn't sound as bad.
I mean, he didn't take it that bad.
Wait, you know how badly he took it?
Well, I apologize. He didn't seem to take it that bad.
And we had a good conversation after that about something completely unrelated.
So tell me then, if you accept that taxation is theft, why are you not an anarchist?
If you're concerned about consistency and integrity and not being hypocritical.
That's an interesting conversation.
I'm not for a number of reasons.
I do see a validity in having public...
First responders of some sort, just simply because, for a variety of reasons, like my family, we've all been first responders of some sort.
My mom's a nurse, my dad was a paramedic, my brother is a volunteer firefighter, I'm an EMT. And so, maybe this is because of proximity, but I feel like, and yet again, I'm sorry, I think that there is some validity with publicly funded first response teams.
So if it's something you want, you're willing to allow evil doing to fund it.
So you're willing for what you want to be funded by the initiation of the use of force.
So violence is good to fund what you want or what you think is necessary.
So violence is good if it serves your preferences.
Well, saying it like that makes me sound like it's me against the world.
Tell me where I'm wrong.
Forget the makes it sound.
Just tell me where the argument is incorrect.
A lot of people actually agree with the concepts of first response teams.
You told me that you accept the tax.
You've got a purity test for your friend.
You're concerned that your friend is hypocritical because he could be taking a slightly lower percentage of government funding, right?
So if you're really concerned about integrity and hypocrisy, my question is, since you accept that taxation is theft and therefore immoral and therefore coercion, How do you justify using violence in the pursuit of what you want?
Because I feel that it's actually valuable, sorry, think that it's actually valuable to society.
But someone who claims to be...
No, no, no. If something's valuable to society, you don't need force to fund it.
Because society cares about it, therefore it will be funded, either through payments or through charity.
Yeah, I don't disagree, but that's not the case right now.
Good, so then you don't need force to fund what you want, because it's valuable to society, therefore society will fund it.
Right, but that's not how the system is set up.
Huh? That's not how the system is currently set up for that.
No, we're not talking about the current system, we're talking about what is right, what is consistent, which you seem to be very concerned about with regards to your friend's behavior.
How do you justify supporting the use of that which you have defined as immoral, which is public funding, coercive, redistribution of wealth?
I guess it's a matter of in the current time, I believe that it's necessary.
No, no, but we're not talking about the current time.
That's like saying, well, slavery is immoral, but we need it to feed people now.
That's what I'm telling you. I'm telling you, I don't have an argument, and the reason why I support it is because it has a necessity in the current time.
I'm giving you that. I'm saying, I don't have an argument, you're correct, but I think that it has a necessity in the current time.
So you would be against the liberalization of the slaves because slaves are used to produce food.
You'd rather that they stay slaves so that people can eat.
No. Because in the current time, that's how food is produced, right?
It's through slavery in this context, right?
You're correct. But I mean, back in that time, there was an abundance of labor to actually support a system of farming for those kinds of people.
You didn't need slaves. But right now, I mean, if you're to dismantle government from a top-down perspective, you wouldn't want to start with the first response teams.
You want to start somewhere else that we could all agree is significantly more evil.
Oh, so it's evil.
It's just not as evil as other things.
Right. And if I understand this correctly...
Is my understanding that you feel, or you believe, or your argument is that it was easier to end slavery when people were far poorer, far less communication, far less transportation options, far less automation options.
That it was somehow easier to end slavery in the early to mid-19th century than it would be to privatize things now when we're vastly richer, have vastly better communications and transportation technology.
It depends on how you're going to approach it, because in slavery, at least at the time of the Civil War, half the country, or so I'm not sure the population differences between the North and the South, at least agreed that it was wrong.
And so half the country agreed that it was wrong.
The other half didn't, resulting in the Civil War, unfortunately.
They could have been handled better. But with first response teams, that's a much different kind of concept.
You don't have people, you don't have maybe a 2-3% of people that would agree with dismantling and handing it all over the private sector.
But who cares what...
I'm not sure what people accept.
I mean... Who cares what people accept or believe?
The question is what's true and what's right.
This is not a popularity show.
This is a philosophy show.
And you're very concerned with your friend's integrity.
So saying, well, something's impractical has no bearing on whether it's right or wrong.
You understand? No, you're not wrong.
And the very first person in history who came up with the idea that slavery was immoral was a minority of one.
Now, if he'd have said, well, there's no point really making these arguments or talking about slavery being immoral because nobody in the world believes that slavery is immoral except me.
So you're saying you have to start from somewhere?
You have to start with what's true and what's right and what's good.
And saying, well, I can't really discuss this or I'm not going to get behind it because it's not popular enough.
Isn't that just a kind of cowardice?
I mean, the whole point is that you stand, you plant your flag in what's right, and you rally people to your cause.
You don't say, well, it's not very popular, so I'm not going to say it.
I mean, I don't understand that.
Okay, so I'm going to pull back real quick because there's a number of things there.
But you said this has to start with someone or somewhere is the idea.
So someone has to come up with the idea.
I'm not saying I came up with the idea that private EMS versus public EMS is better.
A lot of people actually have that idea, and they push it.
I work with a lot of those people.
So I start with someone or somewhere.
I push that idea.
I don't work at a publicly funded EMS agency.
I work where I can that has the least amount of government force so that I can get to where there is a total absence.
I'm saying that my friend here thinks that anarchy is a very consistent principle, which it is.
I just tend not to think that it's entirely practical, but you're correct, that's not an argument.
But for someone that actually thinks that anarchy is a consistent, practical resolution, why wouldn't they work somewhere where they can uphold as much of that concept as possible?
But he's explained that.
Has he? You told me that he has.
I mean, it's hard to talk about a third person without actually having him be here.
But those things aren't true from my angle.
Like, I don't understand this viewpoint there.
I don't understand what your angle means.
It's his life. It's his choice.
It's his decisions. Maybe he wants to get more and better and wider experience so he can open up his own private EMS service.
Maybe he wants to learn more about it so they can end up running for office to privatize these.
Like, I don't know. But the arguments are the arguments regardless of individual decisions.
Now, that having been said, I have made the case before, and I do this in the Truth About Marx presentation, that if you are a lying shiftless scumbag who relies on the profits of a capitalist system and then bangs his own maid, has a child with her and throws her out into the street, you might not be very credible when it comes to talking about the exploitation of the proletariat, which is Karl Marx himself.
So I understand that That there is such a thing as credibility.
But here's my question, and it really comes down to friendship.
The reason why you want to have credibility is for people who don't know you.
Right? So the people in my life, people I love, the people who love me, they trust me.
Now, people out there on the internet who come across me for the first time, they don't trust me.
So I need credibility for the people who don't know me.
My question is, Ryan, do you trust your friend?
On this topic, I don't know.
I don't actually think I do. Or I don't believe I do.
I don't feel I do. I don't think I do.
Because... There have been multiple times where this specific individual has actually gone out of his way and said things like, I don't care about it, I'm doing it for the money.
And I've said to him, don't you think that that's kind of...
I'm sorry, I don't care about what?
I don't care about XYZ, I'm doing it for the money.
Well, what does XYZ refer to?
I don't know what that means. I don't care about the mechanism of funding.
I don't care about what I'm required to do on job.
I don't care about how I'm paid.
I'm doing it for the money.
And he's said that to me.
And like one other one was that he works as a residence advisor or assistant.
I don't know what the technical term is.
I'm not sure if you know what that is, but it's like someone who works in a dorm who like basically works for the college and does stuff for them and like helps directing new residents around.
And that's an almost entirely publicly funded system.
And I've asked him, you know, why are you doing that?
And he said, I'm just doing it for the money.
Like, I'll be honest with you, I'm doing it for the money.
And I was like, well, no good honesty, but do you think that's in line with your principles?
And then we would diverge into that discussion.
Sorry, does your friend not pay any taxes?
Of course he does.
No, I don't think so. No, don't even, this is a rhetorical question.
Of course he pays taxes. Of course he pays taxes.
He takes the percentage out isn't paid.
No, no, he pays taxes.
So the government is in possession.
How do you know? Because everybody pays taxes who's not currently on welfare, right?
Not unless you're under a certain tax bracket.
Does he not pay any sales taxes?
Does he not pay any property taxes, directly or indirectly?
Does he not pay any gasoline taxes?
Does he buy any booze? Come on, man, work with me a little here, okay?
Okay, yeah, you're not wrong.
Okay, thank you. Yes. Thank you.
I mean, there's sensible oppositions to what I'm saying, right?
So let's hold off for those. Sure.
So he pays taxes. So is, I mean, this is the argument that, oh, people, Ayn Rand took Social Security, old age pensions.
Therefore, the hypocrite is like, no.
She says, look, I paid, I was forced to pay into the system for her to the tune of hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars, certainly in modern days.
She made a lot of money, right? So why shouldn't she get some of the money back?
I mean, if someone steals your bike and then you get the chance to take it back peacefully, she'd just say, well, no, that would be wrong.
But what if the amount that you receive is more than than not yet taken from you?
You have no idea of knowing that.
First of all, you don't know what taxes you're going to pay in the future.
Secondly, the amount of debt that people are being bombed into by governments these days means that there's no amount of money you can take outside of being at the top of the military industrial complex.
There's no amount of money that you can take that's going to make up for the million dollars plus of unfunded liabilities and national debts that most Western governments have put their citizens into.
Okay, wait, wait. So then you're telling me that you can actually consistently apply the principle that you can take more money now with the intention of, oh, I don't know how much I'm going to get back.
I don't know how much I'll pay in the future.
Like, that's faulty reasoning because you could be paying a lot more, you're paying a lot less.
Did you hear about the million dollars of unfunded liabilities and debt that people are into?
Plus, million dollars plus?
I'm not sure where that comes into play here.
We're talking about a single individual.
Okay, so let me explain to you how it works.
So the United States government has about $180 trillion of unfunded liabilities.
Right. Which works out to a massive amount per individual.
Which someone's going to have to pay, right?
Right. And so the idea that somehow you're going to come out ahead if you take some money legally and profitably from the government, it's like saying to someone, wait a minute, you're a libertarian and you took a tax return back?
It's like, well, that's my money that they took.
I'm just getting it back legally.
Is it wrong for a libertarian to take a tax refund?
No, because, well, libertarians also, some of them don't believe in actual government.
Some of them do. Is it wrong for an anarchist to take a tax refund?
I would say, yeah, because it's his money.
I mean, he actually paid that in a single transaction, and therefore he deserves that money back.
Right. So it's one layer of abstraction away from that, right?
Right. He's not in a system where he's making choices.
He's in a system where he was, I'm going to guess, coercively put into government schools and robbed of his capacity to learn joyfully and creatively.
Right? And then maybe he went to a government-mandated school to get some stupid bullshit license to do some damn job.
And he's paying a huge amount in taxes and property taxes and the taxes that the corporations are paying, the 40% that's gone down recently under Trump's tax bill.
He's paying a massive amount of extra money in everything that he buys because of taxes.
And he's paying a massive amount of money to pay for welfare.
And he's paying massive amounts of money in additional taxes.
Rent and mortgage payments because mass immigration is driving up the price of everything.
So he's not in a situation where he gets to choose much of anything about his life.
And you're nagging him about a 20 or 30% difference in how fucking something is funded?
It's like you're one slave looking to another slave.
And saying, hey man, you took an extra piece of pie at dinner, but you're against slavery.
You're a hypocrite. Do you want to look at a bigger picture here about the amount of coercion that we're all surrounded by and wrapped up in?
Do you really want to be nagging your fellow slave for the choices he's making in an almost universally coercive system that occurs from childhood onwards?
Is this really where you want to be pouring...
Your moral outrage?
We've got governments selling the unborn into economic slavery.
We have governments bombing the Middle East.
We have governments selling arms around the world.
We have governments trapping children in terrible and dysfunctional schools.
We have governments funding for cultural dissolution and population replacement.
And you're mad because he's taken a couple of extra points in his job?
I need you to raise your perspective a little bit here, man.
We've got propping up of dictatorships overseas.
We've got foreign aid being used to buy weapons and oppress local populations.
All by the state.
But your friend might be taking a little bit too much money back from the government that the government has robbed from him and will rob from him and his children.
His whole life. Is this really where your fundamental moral outrage is?
Ryan, if I thought that was the case, I never would have taken the call.
You don't like the consistent principles that your friend has because it puts you in uncomfortable positions socially.
That's all. That's all there is.
I don't for a moment believe that you care that your fellow slave is taking an extra piece of pie from the table.
You don't care. You can't possibly care about any of that.
You wouldn't have... Like, you'd be unable to tie your own shoelaces if you genuinely emotionally cared about this choice of your friends.
The reality is, he has given you ideas that you kind of wish you didn't have.
And you need to find a way to disarm those ideas because they're going to make your social life uncomfortable.
And so what you're doing is you're obsessing about the ratio of his public to private funding...
So that you can dismantle, defuse his ideas in your head.
So that you can keep them at a distance because there's people in your life or people in your head who don't like these ideas.
And so you're kind of obsessively focusing on this bullshit non-issue.
Rather than face up to the fact that this guy has some powerful ideas, ideas I happen to share to a large degree, there are powerful arguments that And irrefutable arguments behind them.
But if you accept those ideas, your life becomes more difficult.
That's all that's going on here.
I hope you can at least see that.
Okay. This is not the center of my moral outrage.
This is just a simple question I wanted to pose for someone that I think has really good communication abilities.
And so it's not the center of my moral outrage.
It is not by any means that.
It was just a very simple question that I wanted to speak with someone who's good at communication, who's good at philosophy.
That's all. Definitely.
Okay, well, if that's all, then I hope I've answered it, and I'm going to move on to the next caller, and I do thank you for bringing up this very important topic, even if I think you missed the boat completely on what I was saying.
But thanks for the call, man. I appreciate it.
Yeah, that's interesting.
All right. All right.
Up next is Kathleen.
She wrote in and said,"'I'm a depressed 25-year-old woman who has a history of dating and being attracted to closeted gay men and men who are otherwise taken.'" I am diagnosed as depressive, anxious, and as a vacillator.
I think I'm pronouncing that correctly.
I am painfully aware of how often I get taken advantage of.
I am unable to speak up for myself and instead focus on pleasing others, leading me into getting burnt out emotionally and unable to focus on my own wants and needs.
What advice do you have for me to be healthy enough to date a good man and to stop being attracted to gay or taken men?
That's from Kathleen. Hmm.
Kathleen, how are you doing this new year?
I'm doing well. How are you, Stefan?
Are you really doing well? Because, you know, when your fourth word is depressed, I just want to check.
Yeah, doing as well as I can be.
One to ten. What have we got?
Today is seven, eight.
Pretty good. Good, good.
Because, you know, it's nice for me to be talking about a 1 to 10 scale without it being some shallow physical attraction thing.
So, all right. All right.
Attracted to closeted gay men.
I guess a lot of people would think that you're attracted to me.
But what is it that, is it obvious in hindsight?
Like, give me the lowdown on how that plays out.
Yeah, pretty obvious in hindsight.
For the first of it, I actually knew he was doing this kind of thing behind my back for about a year.
Which kind of thing? Like the gay thing?
Yeah, like hooking up with men on Crisis.
That's pretty closeted.
He would lie about it.
He would say that he was doing that just because he was Lonely.
And he couldn't find a girl to do it with.
Wait, wait, hang on. I'm sorry.
Okay. All right. And I apologize.
I don't interrupt because I want to interrupt or talk.
I interrupt because I really want to make sure I'm following.
Like, I don't want you to go so far in the woods that I get lost, right?
Because then who knows what I'm going to find in the woods?
And who's going to attack me for it?
So, are you saying that you were attracted to this guy who told you he was having sex with men?
No, he did not tell me.
I was looking through his emails and I was finding the evidence myself that way.
Okay, so why were you looking through his emails?
Insecurity. I thought he was cheating on me and this confirmed it.
The cyber stalker is coming from inside the house.
Run, run.
All right. So, he's going out and having sex with men, but he says he's just doing that because he's lonely?
Yeah. It would be when we break up and get back together, break up, and then he would go out.
Actually, he would be going out as a transgender.
So, he would be dressing up as a woman and meeting up with these guys.
And did you know that he enjoyed dressing up as a transgender?
No, I didn't know until I found out from the emails I was seeing.
So you're going through his email, but not through his closet.
Is that what you're telling me? I did go through his closet and I found all those things as well.
But, yeah, no.
But you found the woman's clothing that he wore when he went out to have sex with men?
Yeah, yeah. I found the clothing.
The fake boobs, the makeup that he had, everything.
And what did he say about that?
He didn't say much, and this is part of my own security.
He didn't have to say much in order to keep me around.
I would just believe whatever he told me.
He said he was going to stop.
It was just something he would do.
When he was doing drugs, he would do that just as an escape for A release and I believed him but it never did stop and he continues to lie about it and I continue to believe him.
Doing drugs? Yeah, he was a meth addict when I first met him.
He was a meth addict when you first met him.
Where did you meet him?
He was my boss.
I met him at work.
He was my boss. How did you know he was a meth addict?
He told me he had a problem with it.
He got clean about halfway through our relationship.
How long did you go out with him for?
Two years. It took me about a couple months to realize that he was doing kind of weird things behind my back.
And I was in denial for a while.
About a year ago, I decided, you know, I think you're homosexual or something.
I just don't understand.
Still, he was denying it, denying it, denying it the entire time.
So you, whether the gay thing or the transgender thing, I mean, he was screwing around on you, right?
Yeah, correct. Did you believe that you were in a monogamous relationship?
We had the understanding that we would be monogamous, but I don't think he was living up to it.
Well, you know he wasn't, right? Because he was out there having sex with guys, right?
While dressed as a woman and fighting off his meth addiction.
Correct. The things I say.
And... Do you have any concerns about any of the STDs he might have brought home from meth-addicted transgender sex with men?
I've been tested, so at this point, no.
So you're like the college kids in, oh no, you're like Samuel L. Jackson in Pulp Fiction, right?
The bullets just happened to go all around you, which is very lucky, right?
Yeah, I guess so, yeah.
Very lucky about that.
Very happy about that. And you said you have a history.
Does that mean that this is not the first?
Yeah, no. It's the first person I ever actually dated that was gay, but not the first person I've been attracted to.
Not the first person that's been attracted to me, if that makes sense.
Even though it's not physically attracted to me, but emotionally attracted to me.
The first guy I was ever in love with was gay.
Everyone knew he was gay. He didn't want to admit it, but I just thought maybe I could get him to change for me.
That didn't happen.
I ended up wasting 2-3 years of my life chasing that.
You were chasing this guy?
Yeah. And you thought maybe you could turn him, what, like doing a lot of upper body work and doggy style?
I don't know. All right. Tell me a little bit.
So you've got an adverse childhood experience score of five.
We've got verbal abuse and threats, no family love or support, parents divorced, lived with alcoholic or drug user and household member, depressed, mentally ill, or suicide attempt.
I wonder if you could touch on some of that history.
Yeah, absolutely. My father was alcoholic.
My mother is addicted to cigarettes.
My sister was suicidal.
I was diagnosed as a vacillator, which comes from a family of extreme neglect and abuse.
I don't know what, I mean, I know what vacillator means, like extremely indecisive, if not ambivalent and so on, but is that a technical term?
I don't know if you're aware of the attachment styles.
It's the fearful avoidant attachment style.
It's just another word.
I avoid getting close to people even though I really want to.
It just comes from severe neglect.
How old were you when your parents divorced Kathleen?
I was nine.
Right, right.
And the depressed mentally ill or suicide attempt as far as household member goes?
Yeah, my sister was suicidal when I was...
She was starting to get really depressed when I was around nine.
So probably from the divorce.
And then after that, I just got worse, worse and worse.
So suicidal maybe when I was 16, 17.
Older than you, I assume, right?
Yeah. What do you know about your infancy?
I was not raised by my mom.
I was not raised by my dad.
I was raised by babysitters.
And so I think that kind of impacts my ability to attach to people.
I don't feel comfortable getting attached to people.
And one of the babysitters was found out to be abusive, physically abusive.
I don't remember any of it.
When do you start to remember?
I started to have memories right about nine when we moved out of my dad's house.
Do you not remember much before nine or anything?
Yeah, I don't remember much before that.
Okay, do you remember how old you were roughly when your first memory shows up?
Like the first one?
Yeah, I remember maybe like four or five.
Okay, okay.
Yeah, I actually remember one when I saw my grandmother for the first time.
I did not like her, but I think I was a baby when I saw that.
So you said something that was interesting that you don't feel comfortable getting close, right?
Yeah, correct. I don't agree, which is nonsense.
I understand that, like, we've just met, but I'm just telling you, honestly, sort of what I think doesn't mean that I'm right.
And I'll tell you the framework that I work with, with this kind of stuff, and see if it makes any sense to you or not.
I'm no professional, but I think that you very much do want to be close to people, but I think it harms your existing family structure if you're able to achieve it.
In other words, if you have parents with whom you are not bonded, then if you bond with someone else, Then the emptiness of your relationship with your parents will be revealed to you which they don't want.
Yeah. It's sort of like if you grow up with a really bad cook, you don't know how bad a cook they are until you taste a really amazing meal, right?
Right. And so if the bad cook wants to pass herself off as a good cook...
Then they need to keep you away from good food, right?
Because the moment you taste really good food, you'd be like, stuff you made is shit.
Okay, I see that. Because when I was growing up, my mom didn't like me to have friends.
And so when I got close to my friends, she would always tell me that the person was a bad person, I shouldn't be friends with them.
And then I would end up leaving that person and being alone.
So I could kind of understand what you're saying.
Well, she wouldn't want you to have allies and she wouldn't want you to taste the sweet nectar of intimacy and connection with others.
Because that would threaten the non-bond that you would have.
Like, the reason why this popped into my mind, I was just thinking about this the other day.
My mom, bad cook.
Bad, bad, bad. Let me tell you, this is the sound that I shouldn't laugh.
Now it's enough time has passed, right?
So this is the sound, Kathleen, that I used to wake up to most days when I was a kid.
And that sound, my friend, was my mother scraping the burnt carbon off toast that she had overcooked.
Oh, man. You ever do that?
I mean, occasionally it happens, you know, for whatever reason, somebody's being like the toaster thing, and you...
Right?
And she would shave this thing, because we didn't have a lot of money, right?
So she'd shave this bread down to the point where it was like a knife blade or something, like half a piece of bread there, and it still got enough carbon on it that you could turn it into a sketch pencil.
And she was just bad.
I mean, the food was just bad.
Everything was overcooked, and she had this weird addiction.
It's not weird addiction, because she was German.
Dark, ugly, vicious German bread.
Like something you could use to tile a houseboat on a river.
Like the roof of a houseboat on a river.
Like just bread that's just dark and evil and full of bits of I don't even know what.
And putting butter on it doesn't help.
And she'd be like, oh, I'm going to make you some, what they call in England, biscuits.
Cookies, I guess. I'm going to make, and I would get these, like I used to love these.
Occasionally I'd get them, digestive cookies with like the...
Chocolate on top was so good.
And the only thing that saved my teeth was poverty.
And she'd, I'm going to make you these biscuits, and they'd be like these things that you, I don't know what you'd use them for, maybe slingshot weaponry or something you'd put underneath the leg of a couch so it wouldn't scratch the hardwood or something, but it was like just lumps of things that looked like rocks and tasted worse.
My wife is a great cook.
I mean, healthy, nutritious, fantastic, and so on.
And I cook a little bit here and there, but...
So, to me, it's all about the language that we use to describe these things to ourselves.
So, when I was growing up, I was somewhat nervous sometimes about getting close to people.
The reason being, and I understood this once I did finally get close to people, once you're close to people, you realize just how crappy those other relationships are.
Like, once you taste really good food, you realize how bad a cook you might have had in the home.
And once you have a good boss, the crappiness of your previous boss, right?
So you want to connect to people, but your parents don't want you to connect to anyone, in my opinion.
And so it's not your parents who are attracted to closeted...
Sorry, it's not you who are attracted to closeted gay men and men who are otherwise taken.
It's your parents who want you to pursue those relationships to normalize the distance they have with you.
In other words, you can go to anyone's house, says your bad cook mom, you can go to anyone's house as long as their moms are terrible cooks as well.
That way, the crappiness of my cooking never becomes real to you.
You chase the unavailable men to protect the unavailable parents.
Thanks.
So am I doing that subconsciously, or is that something that my parents consciously try to make me do?
I mean, are they aware that they try to prevent me from having those relationships, or is it subconscious for them?
Which matters why?
Why does it matter? I'm not saying it does or doesn't.
I'm just curious why it matters to you.
I guess I'm very analytical, so I like to understand why things work.
What does it matter if it's conscious or not?
I guess I want to know how much...
Okay, let me put it to you this way.
Let's say that you're being hunted through the jungle by two beings.
One is a tiger, one is a man with a gun.
Now, is the tiger hunting you instinctively?
Yes. Yes, it is.
Is the man hunting you consciously?
Yes. Uh, yes?
Yes he is. Does it matter who catches you?
I guess not. It doesn't matter.
It doesn't matter. I think that's just me trying to rationalize it so I don't have to deal with the emotional part of it.
I know. I know. The moment you say analytical, I know.
I know how this story goes.
So, it doesn't matter whether it is instinctual or conscious or not.
It doesn't matter. And I'll tell you why it doesn't matter.
Because we're all responsible for knowing ourselves.
This is a commandment as old as Socrates.
2,500 years ago, the central canon philosopher Of the Western tradition, Socrates himself said, the first commandment, know thyself.
So, if something's unconscious or conscious, it doesn't matter.
Because if somebody's conscious of it, and they're doing wrong, then they're bad.
But if somebody has avoided self-knowledge to the point where they're doing it unconsciously, then they're bad because they've avoided self-knowledge.
It's sort of like saying, is it better or worse if someone drives into your house drunk or sober?
It doesn't matter.
Because if they're sober, then they're really bad and probably aiming at your house.
If they're drunk, then we can say, well, they have less responsibility for hitting my house, but then they have full responsibility for getting drunk.
It doesn't matter.
What matters is your house got hit.
And the person is responsible.
We say, well, I was drunk. Okay, well, then we get you for drunk driving rather than careless driving.
Doesn't matter. So if somebody is doing something unconsciously, then they're responsible for that because they did not take the effort to learn about themselves, to know themselves.
And the self-help movement has now been going on for long enough, like the Oprah section of the bookstore.
It goes on and on and on.
It's like half the bookstore, it seems like, daytime TV, Dr.
Phil, you name it, right?
Supernanny, you name it.
The Freudian Revolution was 130 years, whatever, right?
The Jungian Revolution was less than that.
But this need for self-knowledge, this need to know yourself, the understanding of the unconscious, this has been going on way north of a century, and in terms of popular culture, way north.
Of 30 to 40 years.
So there's nobody, like, you could claim in the 19th century, I know smoking was bad for me, despite the fact that I cough out half a lung when I run up the stairs, but is there anyone now who can be forgiven or excused on the basis that they had no idea smoking was bad for you?
Of course not. Because if somebody genuinely doesn't know that smoking is bad for you, it means that they've avoided the information.
So, if your parents did it unconsciously, they're still responsible for not knowing themselves enough to know why they did what they did.
Right? You can't parent unconsciously any more than you can drive drunk and claim it as an excuse.
You become a parent, you are damn well responsible for knowing what makes you tick, for knowing the landmines of your history.
You are damn well responsible for everything you do as a parent.
Say, well, I didn't know I did the best I could, but the knowledge that I had, I don't care.
If I get behind the wheel of a Cessna airplane, behind the joystick, and I just randomly push a bunch of flaps and take off and crash, and I say, well, I flew the best I could with the knowledge I had, what would people say to me?
You shouldn't have done it.
That's right. You don't get into a plane and fly it if you don't know how to fly it.
And I say, I crash into someone's house, they sue me or I'm charged, right?
Well, I say, well, but I did the very best I could with the knowledge I had.
I flew the very best I could.
People wouldn't say, well, you know, he did the best he could with the knowledge he had, it's fine.
They'd say, no, you don't get into a plane and fly it if you don't know what the hell you're doing, and you sure as hell don't have kids if you don't know what you're doing.
And the knowledge that childhood trauma leads to adult dysfunction has been common knowledge throughout the West for more than a century, and artistically, even before then.
Even before then. The child is the father of the man, says the old poem.
And the idea that childhood trauma leads to adult dysfunction means that if you have had An abusive childhood, if you've been abused as a child, you are in a high-risk category for dysfunction as an adult, and in particular as a parent.
Everybody knows that. There's nobody around, at least in the West, I don't know, maybe somebody from Somalia or whatever, but there's nobody in the West.
Who can claim that they had no idea that childhood dysfunction might lead to adult dysfunction?
Everybody knows that. This is very well understood, very well talked about, very well.
It's as certain as the link between smoking and lung cancer and is well understood in the general population.
It's like saying, well, it's true, I did have 30 tequila shots and then got behind the wheel of a car, but I had no idea that those 30 tequila shots could possibly impair my functioning or my motor skills or my reaction times.
Nobody would believe that, right?
Right.
So it doesn't matter if she was doing it self-conscious consciously because at the end of the day she shouldn't have had kids and she should have done better.
Well, if you choose to have kids.
I should move on from this point, not necessarily caring about that.
Well, no, you're trying to make a differentiation where you get to put them in a category wherein they have less ownership.
Let me put it to you another way.
This is a very brief analogy.
Let's say I go to the local humane society and I pick up a dog and I sign the papers and I take the dog home and I don't feed the dog, right?
And the dog dies, starves to death in the most horrible, vicious, evil manner, right?
And I say, I don't know, I just, I never read anything up about dogs.
I didn't know how much food they needed.
I didn't know that they needed any exercise.
I didn't, I don't know. What would people say?
They would say you're foolish.
You shouldn't have gotten the dog.
Yeah, you get the dog.
You have to read up on it.
You are responsible.
Now that you've taken the dog, like you, you bring that child home from the hospital.
It's like bringing the dog home from the humane society, often to the inhumane society.
But if you don't want the kid, you can leave the kid at the hospital, they'll find a home for it.
You can drop the kid off at a fire station, at a police station, at a hospital.
You don't have to take that kid home.
You can say, I waive my parental rights and they'll take that kid and they'll try and find a home for that kid.
You're off the hook. And you can do that any time.
As a parent, anytime you can take that kid and you can drop them off with the authorities, and you're off the hook.
So you keep that kid, you take that kid home from, you take that baby home from the hospital, then you are damn well responsible for knowing how to treat that baby well, which means you better have read up.
You better know how to take care of that baby.
And there are enough parenting books out there.
Parent effectiveness training.
I had an expert on this show a couple of years ago.
I've talked about it repeatedly on the show.
It's a pretty good system. My own talks and thoughts about peaceful parenting are, I think, fine.
But no, you're responsible.
If you take a dog home and you beat it with a hot iron and you say, well, I thought that's how you were supposed to discipline dogs, people would say, well, is there any dog book that recommends that?
You say, well, no, but I just kind of made an assumption.
Well, then you're guilty because you need to read up.
You need to understand how to raise children.
So there's no way to get your parents off the hook, with the exception of if they had some sort of biological mental impairment, right?
In which case it falls to the extended family to intervene, right?
Mm-mm. So this is my concern that the moment I put moral responsibility, because you said to me, how do I stop chasing after these gay or taken men?
Well, you have to stop obeying the alter egos in your mind that are still squandering your happiness for the sake of their own self-protection.
The question is not, why do you chase unavailable men?
The question is, Who loses out if you stop?
It's not you, right? You don't want to be dating meth-addicted, closeted gay cross-dressers, right?
Right, no. Not a lot of future in that market.
So there's no benefit to you to do it, which must mean if you're doing it and there's no benefit to you, there's a benefit to someone else, right?
Because we don't act randomly.
And the thing that we do as children, this is the great power of parents, Kathleen, as you know.
What do we do as children?
We conform and obey and conform and obey and conform and obey.
For the simple reason that children who did not conform and obey did not survive.
There were often not enough resources for all the children to survive throughout our evolution as a species.
Which meant that parents had to choose who would live and who would die.
Who would get food and who would not get food.
Who would be protected from the predators and who wouldn't be protected from the predators.
My sister then. For sure that would be my sister, not me.
Go on. That my sister would be the one always getting the resources, getting the attention.
And... I actually wanted to talk about something you were talking about with Trevor earlier today.
Wait, sorry. Let me just finish my 30 seconds, right?
So given that our parents got to choose who lived and who died through a lot of our evolutionary history, because there weren't enough resources to go around for everyone, parents would tend to choose the children that pleased them the most.
And the children that pleased them the most were the ones who conformed the most to parental expectations and emotional preferences.
And so we, all of us, are like the precious egg handed on a chain of dying limbs throughout history.
And that egg is conformity and compliance with parental wishes and preferences.
That's what enables us to survive.
So the fact that you may be complying with self-destructive parental wishes is entirely in consistency with, I think, our evolution.
But that was all I wanted to say.
And you were going to mention something I talked about earlier.
Yeah. Yeah.
You were talking to Trevor about if honesty about what you want destroys the chance of getting what you want, then you lie.
And I think that's what I learned I had to do when I was young.
So it kind of plays into this whole topic.
If I wanted to talk to my parents, connect with them emotionally, I would have to gossip.
I would have to either talk bad about someone I knew or talk bad about someone about myself.
And so, yeah, I mean, I would have to gossip.
And I think that's what my mom kind of...
Um, supported me dating horrible men because then she would have something to gossip about.
Well, and someone to feel superior to, right?
Yeah, that too.
Definitely. Why did your parents split up?
Do you know? I mean, not the cover story.
Do you know the real? Oh, uh, I know the cover story.
I don't know, I guess, what's real.
And what was the cover story?
My father was unemployed for years and years, and so he wasn't working.
Did he have a video log on YouTube?
No. All right.
I think this is for YouTube.
All right. All right. Just wanted to know if we've circled back at all, but go on.
Yeah, and so he was unemployed, and he was an alcoholic, and my mom said he was abusive towards her, and he was...
He was a dismissive person, so he caused people to be avoidant of him and just general unhappiness in the house between my mom and him.
I was so happy with my dad.
I was more attached to my dad than I was with my mom.
And when we got divorced, I completely dissociated for a long period of time. - I just want to interrupt you and I'm sorry to interrupt you. You said something really fascinating there.
Well, it's all interesting and don't get me wrong, but it just really jumped out at me.
You said you were really attached to your father and when we got divorced.
Yeah.
Not when my parents got divorced, but when you and your father got divorced.
I'm not trying to catch you or trip you up.
I just really wanted to point that out.
Yeah, I kind of think that's the way it was.
My mother and my father weren't emotionally connected and so I've been kind of getting the idea that I was the second wife to my father in a way.
Right. To this day I still try to please him emotionally.
I get so anxious when I go see him and so disappointed afterwards if he doesn't Respond well to me.
It's... Yeah.
Wait a second. So do you think that there's still this element of second wife with regards to your father?
I think so, yeah.
So your father, how would your father feel if you get married to a strong, confident, independent man?
He would know that I would never talk to him again, I think.
What do you mean? I already don't talk to him much.
And I see how manipulative he is.
And so if I was to marry someone confident and good, that would mean that I'm confident and I'm good and I'm not there yet.
But if I was that way, then I would not want to talk to him anymore.
So if you marry, sorry, if you date dysfunctional men, You still have a relationship with your father, which he wants, I assume.
Yeah. So it's almost like he doesn't want you to virtuously cheat on him.
I guess so, yeah.
Well, no, don't let me tell you anything about your experience because you already told me that you have trouble speaking up for yourself.
It's just my thought. I mean, if it doesn't match with your experience, please tell me.
I mean, I beg you. Yeah, no, I think it's more like he wants me to stay a little girl forever.
Right. We were watching a movie and a man raped a woman and then he told me, oh honey, he just did something bad to her.
And I was like, dad, I know exactly what happened.
I'm 25. He said, no, he just did something bad to her.
Well, it's interesting because if in his mind you're something of a girl, why would he be showing you or why would there be a movie with a rape scene?
Oh, no. He lives in a convalescent home.
And that was just what was on the TV. Ah, okay.
But, I mean, if I was sitting there in some place with my daughter and, like, I would...
Move or turn that off or move us away or something like that, right?
It's just kind of interesting. Like, I mean, he says, like a little girl, but then there's a rape scene that he comments on.
I don't think he had any control over the movie or any knowledge that that was going to happen.
Well, the moment it starts to happen, right?
I mean, if you were a child, then you would be responsible as the parent for moving the child out of that vicinity.
Yeah. Oh, this happened recently.
I know. I'm aware. I'm just talking about you saying he wants you to be a little girl and he's talking to you as if you're a little girl.
Right. Yeah, he does. I mean, if you were a little girl, then there would be no possibility that you should see a rape scene, right?
Okay, he's in a convalescent home, so he's not actually able to move around a lot.
And we were just in the common area, and the movie came on, and we were just watching it.
But he would then, let's say that this happened to me.
I'm just, you know, because you're making all these excuses, which I understand, or either your father's making these excuses.
I would then say to my daughter, you know, stop watching this, or find some way to turn it off, or whatever, right?
I mean, because if a convalescent home shouldn't be playing rape movies, you know, I just, that's just the basic.
Anyway, I don't want to get too stuck up on that.
I was just really, really struck by that.
So would you say that your father was nicer to you than your mom when you were growing up?
Yeah, I was his favorite, for sure.
And was your sister your mother's favorite?
Yes. And your sister became suicidal, but you did not, right?
No, for a while I was.
When was that? About two years ago, I was.
Was this during the time of dating the closeted gay guy?
Yeah, it was when we first started dating, but it wasn't related to him.
It was more about my boyfriend before that.
We had just broken up and that was the hardest thing ever.
So that's why I went really dark and really depressed after that.
And if you can remind me why you broke up with the other boyfriend?
I think I had a mental breakdown, to be honest.
I was very abusive.
Even physically? Towards him?
No. Towards his dog.
You were abusive towards his dog?
Correct. Tell me about that.
I've actually not talked about that before with anyone.
It's alright, it's just between you and me, the internet, so it's alright.
That's right. Yeah, so I would beat the dog.
And basically torture it.
And yeah, after a while I realized this is really, really, really fucked up.
And I broke up with him out of guilt and shame.
And I just left.
And after that I had the suicidal episode.
And I was in the hospital for a while.
And what did you do to torture the dog?
How did you torture the dog? I would hit it.
And I would pull on its tail and do things like that.
And would you hit it with your bare hand or an implement?
My bare hand. And how big was the dog?
It was a tiny dog.
So it was obviously somewhat defenseless, right?
Correct. And I assume that the behavior of the dog changed after you started abusing the dog, right?
Actually, no. It was still friendly.
It's still greeted me as happy as ever before.
And how long did you abuse the dog for?
A month, two months.
Wait, which? Two months.
And here's the big question, right?
It's the million dollar question, Kathleen.
Why? Did you abuse this little dog?
Because the dog was receiving so much love and attention, and it was just a dog.
And I never received that kind of love or attention my entire life.
And so I hated the dog, and I just wanted it to suffer a little bit.
And I know that's horrible, but...
Oh, no. Listen, the horribleness of it, we understand, right?
I mean, but that's not going to be particularly productive.
The question is why, right?
I was jealous of it.
And so your boyfriend at the time, was he more affectionate with the dog than with you?
Yeah. Yeah.
Right. Is it something you wanted to add?
Sorry, go ahead. It just reminded me of my grandmother, I guess.
What did? I don't know.
Just the old fragility of the dog reminded me of my grandmother and I do not like my grandmother.
So the little dog was old as well?
Correct, yeah.
And your grandmother on which side?
On my mother's side.
And what didn't you like about her?
She's very abusive.
She is cruel and she's manipulative.
She would...
Act like she really cares about someone.
And then when all of my family was over, she would pull out my dirty laundry and she would humiliate me in front of everybody.
Not literally dirty laundry, obviously.
No, I understand. She would humiliate me in front of everybody.
She would also use her role as the leader of the family to ostracize me so my entire family doesn't talk to me.
Is that a big loss? When I was growing up, yeah, I didn't have any support.
Oh, when you were growing up. Yeah, sorry, it's different when you were a kid, of course, right?
Yeah. It's funny, you know, this sort of public humiliation, I mentioned this before on the show, but just very briefly, I had a friend when I was much younger, Like everyone, I've had my share of smart and not-so-smart moments.
And one-on-one, this friend was great.
Like, he was reading Jung, we would talk about his dreams, we would, like, think about the world, and he was learning about economics.
Like, one-on-one, he was great.
But then, when we would get into a social situation with others...
He would end up, like, talking about, oh, Steph did this goofy thing, and then he did that goofy thing once, and it was just like this endless parade of these little negative stories.
You know, one is funny, twice is amusing, three times is like, what the hell's going on?
Like, why? Why did you?
Yeah, it was, and it became almost sort of driven.
Now, I'm not trying to compare the Kathleen.
I'm sure what your grandmother did was way worse than that.
But it is a weird situation to be in.
Because if you push back against it, suddenly you just don't have a sense of humor about yourself.
Or, you know, what's the big deal?
We all do silly things.
And why are you so sensitive?
But you know that something weird is going on, right?
Because it's this same thing.
Exactly. You can't win.
And everyone starts laughing. And, of course, if you find it not funny, then...
You're a buzzkill and all that.
You can't win that, right?
And, you know, that friendship went by the dodo.
Went the way of the dodo because, I'm going to try talking to him about it, but, you know, like they called it earlier.
If someone's not willing to admit that there's a problem, I'm pretty sure there's not going to be a solution, right?
So, is the dog, did you know if the dog was okay?
Yeah, the dog was fine afterwards.
I found out. Well, not fine, but not hurt physically, right?
Yeah, not damaged, I guess.
Was there a moment, were you actually hitting the dog when you realized how messed up it was, or was it something that happened when you weren't around the dog?
Yeah, when I was hitting the dog, definitely.
Like, just a complete nausea, just hatred of myself, and just, like, the idea of how did my life get here, that I'm doing this, to a harmless creature that never did anything to me, and yet I hate it for some reason.
And do you want to know why you hate it?
It's not your grandmother, I think, fundamentally.
Are you asking me because you have an answer for it?
Yeah. Oh, yeah.
Well, I don't have an answer.
I have my answer, which may not be the answer.
But I'll tell you what I think, Kathleen, and let me know if it makes any sense to you.
Your, we talked earlier about how your parents did not want you to become close to someone.
Because it would reveal the holiness of your relationship with your parents, right?
Yeah.
And you become enraged at an animal who's receiving affection.
Yeah. So in this situation, the dog is you, and you are your mother, or your father, or both.
And you are punishing the dog for receiving affection.
And the murderousness that you felt, I think, towards the dog, may have manifested itself in your sister's suicidality and in your suicidality.
That you beat the dog for being loved.
And being loved is so dangerous for you in the way that being loved was dangerous for the dog as you enacted your abuse against the dog.
Being loved is so dangerous for you, Kathleen.
Because of parental rage.
Being loved is so dangerous for you that you have to chase after unavailable men.
Because being loved, to be loved is to die.
or to be more accurate, to be loved is to be killed.
And this is the horrible paradox of this kind of history, that connection is death.
Thank you.
Intimacy is ending.
Yeah. I feel like whenever I feel really happy, I feel like I'm dying.
Right. It's the weirdest thing.
I feel like I'm dying and I'm happy.
Do you know an old band?
The lyrics just came to my mind.
An old band called Tears for Fears?
I don't know.
I'm going to make sure I get the lyrics correct here, because they think that they're important.
important.
I think it's mad world.
Let me just double check this.
Boy, it's been a while since I've heard of that song.
But, you know, as you were saying, it's a funny thing about the brain.
It's Mad World.
Gary Jules. I thought it was maybe Tears for Fears did it.
Oh, maybe he's one of the Tears for Fears guys.
I don't know. All around me are familiar faces, worn out places, worn out faces.
Here we go, here we go.
We have...
And I find it kind of funny.
I find it kind of sad.
The dreams in which I'm dying are the best I've ever had.
Yep, I can relate to that.
Children waiting for the day they feel good.
Happy birthday. Happy birthday.
And to feel the way that every child should.
Sit and listen. Sit and listen.
Went to school and I was very nervous.
No one knew me. No one knew me.
Hello teacher, tell me. What's my lesson?
Looks right through me.
Look right through me. Mad World is the name of the song.
And this...
The original is Tears for Fears.
There was another version released, which is the film Donnie Darko soundtrack.
Gary Jules is a cover.
So yeah, it was Tears for Fears originally.
This paradox that we thirst for connection, but connection brings death, it literally is like standing in the desert.
You're dying of thirst, and the only water around is poisoned.
Or there's a line from...
An old poem, the one with the albatross.
And I'm paraphrasing, it's not exact, but it's close enough.
They're on a ship, and they're in the salty ocean, and they're dying of thirst, and they're screaming, water, water, everywhere, but not a drop to drink.
Can you imagine? You're in an ocean-going vessel, you're dying of thirst, and you're surrounded by tons and tons of water.
You can't drink a damn thing.
And if you're dying of thirst and you drink salt water, you die faster.
So this horrible paradox of desperately needing connection, but connection kills you.
That tells me an enormous amount, Kathleen, about the pressures that you were under as a child.
I myself feared for my life as a child, and not without reason.
My mother beat me against a metal door so hard that I almost lost consciousness.
I feared for my life.
I had to step very carefully in the landmine of my mother's rage because it could blow off a limb or literally end me.
That kind of damage against a three- or four-year-old's head, it can destroy your brain.
It can physically kill you.
It's a soft skull and a hard surface.
And when you experience child abuse, you know, I've talked about this with the state.
The state escalates until you comply or die.
We know this, right? You don't pay your taxes, you get a letter, you get another letter.
Eventually there'll be a court date.
If you don't show up, you'll come and get arrested.
And if you resist, they'll escalate until you comply or die.
And that's the big question if you're the victim of child abuse.
How far will my parents go to ensure my compliance, to ensure my obedience?
Well, I knew that my mother was more than willing.
Like, what happened was, she'd beaten me up, and I went, crept into the kitchen in the middle of the night, and I took a little bit of food and some matches, and I was going to head out into the night.
Just leave. Just get away.
And she heard me opening the front door like a hurricane.
Grabbed me, dragged me, beat my head against the door, and...
I went limp. What else can you do?
You're trying to run away?
Yeah. I mean, I was willing to take my risk in the night.
And when you are being...
I don't remember the pain at all, but I certainly remember the ferocity of the attack, like a predator.
And I just remember I went limp.
Signaling utter compliance.
Because that was the only option I had.
I certainly couldn't fight back. I was like three or four years old.
And if I had attempted to resist the escalation, I could have died.
Or been permanently brain damaged.
And so you go limp.
You appease. You know, like dogs do it too.
They show their throat. You appease.
It's the only thing. It's that or die.
Yeah, for me it was the verbal abuse.
She would come into my room anytime she wanted.
She would just burst in. Your mom or your grandmom?
My mom. Right.
Yeah, my mom. This is what would happen if I had not even a confrontation, just if I had a bad attitude towards my grandmother.
She would tell my mom and my mom would yell and rant at me for at least an hour.
And so, like, it's just out of proportion, you know?
If I have a snobby attitude, have a conversation.
Don't berate me and don't humiliate me.
Don't scream at me for an hour.
I think that's even worse than having an attitude with someone.
Of course. You know?
Well, and it's one of these horrible paradoxical things.
Like when you've been screaming abuse at someone for an hour, a child, and then you wonder why they might have a, quote, bad attitude.
Well, verbal abuse tends to produce some negative emotions.
That's the whole point. It's literally like torturing someone and then saying, why are you flinching?
Well, the whole point of torture is to make someone recoil.
So the whole point of that was to kind of dominate me.
Let's see.
Okay.
So let me just sort of try and patch through to that bubble of history.
Sorry. The...
No.
The purpose of, I would imagine, the purpose of your mother coming in, if you had been negative in some manner towards your grandmother, the purpose of your mother coming in to verbally abuse you was to prevent herself from being verbally abused.
Hmm, okay.
Sacrifice you so that she doesn't get verbally abused by her mother.
Yeah, okay. I definitely see that.
My mom is completely cowardice towards my grandmother to this day.
And often cowardice to parents is bullying to children.
And so it was kind of like a loyalty test for your grandmother.
Are you willing to verbally shred The soul of your sister in order to appease me.
It's how your mother, it's how your grandmother would assume, how she would feel power in the situation.
And that if your grandmother felt disrespected, then she would need to level up by having your mother verbally humiliate you.
Yeah, that makes sense.
Thanks.
And I think it even goes into my sister as well.
Go on. If I would get into a fight with my sister, my sister would go to my mom and then my mom would, you know, yell at me.
I don't know about that.
Maybe my sister abused my mom, and my mom abused me, if that's the way...
No, sorry, Hank. So you would get into a fight with your sister, your sister would run to your mother, and then your mother would attack you?
Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Well, I think that there are two mechanics to that.
The first, of course, is that as the smallest and the weakest, it was easier for...
How much older is your sister?
Two and a half years.
Seems familiar. So, if...
And would this happen around sort of mid-teens?
Yeah. Yeah, I got worse in the teenage years, definitely.
So, your mother...
Wait, what was the relationship between your older sister and your grandmother?
What was it like?
Yeah. My sister gets bossed around by my grandmother.
She'll do pretty much whatever she says.
However, my sister will be very confrontational with her.
And it seems like she's standing up for herself.
But at the end of the day, she still does whatever my grandmother wants.
Right, right.
And do you have any memories, Kathleen, of your sister being berated by your mother in the same way that you were on the prompting of your grandmother?
I don't have memories of my mom berating my sister, actually.
I have memories of my mom berating me and then having my sister calm her down.
My sister was my mom's mom, in a way.
As the youngest, like if you have a dysfunctional family, it is the child with the least power who must always bear the brunt of the dysfunction, right?
Because the youngest child, of course, inevitably, is the easiest to bully and the easiest to control.
And so the way that dysfunctional families work and dysfunctional societies is not according to justice, but according to power, right?
It is not according to reason, it is according to appeasement, right?
Right, so, I mean, I've talked about this, how, like, white males, you can attack with impunity, because white males don't self-organize and raise holy hell when they're abused, unlike other groups, right?
So, white males are like the nerds of society and are picked on endlessly to the point of suicidality sometimes.
And that's because society is running on appeasement.
And so when you're writing a movie, say, and you have to take into account every pressure group.
Well, if we make this woman bad, then the feminists are going to get mad at us.
And if this black guy is bad, then the black community is going to get mad at us.
And if this Hispanic turns out to be a problem, then the Hispanic, right?
So you're not writing characters, you're writing appeasement.
Silhouettes. But white males, which is why all the bad guys, post-Gary Oldman Air Force One movies, are like Nazis and white guys and all this kind of stuff, right?
Why Nazis are the endless villains, because you shoot white guys.
And it's not to defend Nazis, obviously, but...
So dysfunctional societies, dysfunctional individuals run on appeasement.
Like, so... Tommy Robertson talks about this in his great book, Enemy of the State, how the police just appease the danger of the Islamic gangs and just everyone else.
So it's just about appeasement.
It's not about any kind of justice.
They arrested this young Muslim in England, and he describes in the book, and the imams were all saying, well, we can't guarantee the peace of the community if he's not released.
So what did they do?
Well, they released him. Because it's not about justice.
It's about appeasement. I work at a hotel, so I understand the idea of getting the loudest customer whatever they want and, you know, just satisfying them.
If you have a nice customer and an abusive customer, you will sacrifice the interest of the nice customer for the sake of the abusive customer.
Exactly. Sure.
I mean, and this is how society, in the absence of values and virtues and philosophy and Christianity, I might add as well, This is how society runs, and this is how a lot of dysfunctional societies run.
And the two are parallel.
So, your sister would run to your mom with a complaint.
Now, if your mom took your side, your sister would escalate.
But if your mom and your sister ganged up on you, you will comply, right?
Yeah, exactly.
So, nice guys finish last.
Nice girls finish last. If you're nice in this modern world, If you're nice, you're dead.
And culturally, I really mean that.
If you're nice, you're toast.
The idea that somehow your niceness is going to be respected and people are going to defer to you because you're in the right, bullshit.
Right? We know this, right?
If you're nice, you're toast.
People say to me, well, Steph, sometimes you're not nice.
It's like, yep. Because this is the world we live in.
It's not the world I want to live in.
But this is the world we do live in.
If you're nice, you're toast. It's just the way that it is.
And so because you're the youngest, you're the easiest to bully.
You're inevitably going to be the most compliant because you have no allies.
And so when your sister can make more trouble for your mother than you will, and so your sister will align with your mother, your mother will align with your sister and bully you because it produces the least problems, right?
Mm-hmm. Yeah.
You sound somewhat unconvinced, which is perfectly fine if I'm wrong.
I just wanted to make sure.
I agree 100%.
Right. It's just a little bit depressing, I guess.
It is. I don't want you to get too depressed, but hopefully it gives you...
Because the whole point of knowing all of this is so you can get the fuck out.
Right. You understand? Because people say...
I mean, I'm sorry, Kathleen...
Don't look at the comments, because you know what the comments are going to be?
You are an intelligent, attractive woman with a good degree of self-knowledge.
We tell you, your self-knowledge is very impressive to me.
I know you've done some therapy, but not that much.
Like, you're smart as a whip when it comes to understanding this stuff.
And I don't just mean because you agree with me, although, of course, that's most of it.
Because I know what the comments are going to be.
The comments are going to be, and the reason I'm focusing on this, the comments are going to be, MGTOW for life!
The comments are going to be, so if I want to date and have sex with a young, attractive, intelligent woman, I need to be a guy with fake boobs in the closet.
And a list of guys I banged from Craigslist in my email inbox.
And even if she finds that shit, I still get to bang her.
And it drives men mad!
Well, I mean, if they were to ask me out, I would still go out with them.
But I don't get asked at all.
Are you saying that no nice guys ever asked you out, Kathleen?
Not one? No.
I'm saying that...
I've not been asked out at all my entire life.
You do the asking? I do the asking.
Are you saying you've never known a nice guy that you could have asked out?
Not one? I always felt like I wasn't good enough for them and so I didn't pursue the nice guys.
Well, that sounded like a very politically correct answer, and I don't think it's the real one.
And you know how I know that?
Because you're like, because I think it was good enough.
You gave me a question, not a statement.
Because when you grow up in a brutal family, where power wins and nice people lose, women are hypergamous.
Women want a man who can deliver the goods.
Women want a man who can deliver the resources.
And if you grew up in a family and a society where nice guys finish last, sorry, women aren't going to be turned on by nice guys.
Why? Because they lose.
This is why when you have a society not of justice but of power, women go for the bad boys.
Women go for unavailable, inconstant, alpha, pump and dump, use and lose kind of guys.
Because in a society where not justice and reason and truth and virtue prevail, but power, brutality, abuse, and the subjugation of the weak, nice people are perceived as losers.
Now, in a virtuous society, nice people win and succeed and bad people lose.
But in a power-based society, which is what we've pretty much devolved into over the last hundred years or so, Since the responsible just men of the West were, 50 million of them thrown, or tens of millions of them thrown into the flames of the First and Second World War, we have a society where to be nice is to lose.
And the nice guys say, why don't women want to date me?
And it's like, I'm sorry, it's not your fault.
But society has evolved in such, or devolved to such a degree, That a man who is emotionally unavailable, who is cold, is attractive to a woman because he's going to be brutal enough to dominate other men or to win-lose in those situations.
A man with empathy, a man who's kind, a man who's sincere, a man who's nice, a man who's sensitive...
Is going to be perceived deep down by the eggs as someone who's going to lose out in the painful win-lose battle.
Like in a society of power, it's win-lose.
In a society of freedom and virtue, it's win-win.
In a society of freedom and virtue, if you have the mature attributes of self-knowledge, of wisdom, of compromise, of reason, of negotiation...
Then you win! You win!
But in a society of brutality and power and complaints and pressure groups and identity politics and the civil, civil war of who can grab the most resources through complaining and nagging and bitching and being ferocious and complaining and marching and threatening,
when you have a society of power, then maturity, wisdom, Humility, negotiation, are fundamental signals that dry up the woman's vagina.
Because she's like, well, he may be nice, but my eggs don't need nice, they need resources.
And in the society that is, the brutal rule.
And nice guys lose.
And Christianity, of course, reversed that for a long time and had compassion and value for what were called, like the meek shall inherit the earth, the first shall become last, the last shall become first.
But that's all. Gone by the wayside, for the moment at least.
And so, for you to be attracted to guys who aren't nice is not too surprising, given that who ruled in your family was Well, not very nice people.
And who was the nicest?
Who I suspect was you, Kathleen.
What happened to you?
I was chewed up and spit out.
Right. So nice loses.
And nice guys will lose.
And your children will starve.
So you're attracted to guys who aren't nice?
Guys who are cold-hearted, who lie, who use.
Because in a society of power, those guys are going to win.
Well, until they lose.
Until a lot of people lose.
Now, the question is, if you know what it's like to be a victim, what the hell were you doing with that little dog?
Thank you.
What were you trying to learn through beating the dark, through torturing the dark?
I was trying to be strong, I guess, for once in my life.
And I know it's obviously not the right way to do it.
I was just trying to be strong. No, but it's what you learned, right?
I was learning that it's important to be able to have, to be able to defend myself.
I mean, So that means, I would assume, that you felt powerless with the man in your life, with regards to the power.
With regards to the man in your life, you felt powerless.
Is that right? Or you felt...
I felt powerless with everything in my life.
Right. Right.
So then, the goal is, I have power over the dog.
I can punish the dog for having what I don't have.
I can achieve power.
I can level up, at least relative to the little dog.
But that proved to be so humiliating and brutal on yourself...
That you became suicidal, right?
Right. Right.
Just as when your sister was colluding with your mother to brutalize you, your sister became suicidal, is that fair to say?
Hmm. That's the price.
Yeah. Yeah.
I do think, and I'm not putting you in this category, Kathleen, this is just a general observation, but I do think that people are abusive so they don't kill themselves.
So they don't kill themselves?
Yeah. Okay.
They externalize all of their self-hatred.
And they end up crushing and destroying others because otherwise...
And after you were abusive, you wanted to kill yourself, right?
When you stopped being abusive, the feeling that you felt was self-destruction, right?
Mm-hmm. Yeah. So if people can't process that feeling or are unwilling to look at that feeling and confront that feeling, then they continue to be abusive because the end result is if they're not abusive, I think that they become suicidal.
And I think it becomes a survival mechanism in a weird way.
They only survive because they abuse.
because if they don't abuse, I don't think they'll even want to get out of bed the next morning.
So, my thoughts, if this helps, if this helps, Thank you.
First of all, you are great.
And you have a lot to offer this world.
Your level of intelligence and nimbleness with these challenging topics Is a true force of nature.
I think you should be enormously proud of that.
Your willingness to be open and to be honest.
I mean, isn't this connection?
Do you feel it? Yeah.
You're being very honest.
Listening. We're conversing.
We're going back and forth.
We're trying to figure things out.
We're close, right? Yes.
How does it feel? It feels great.
Yeah, tell me what.
I mean, we're talking about some pretty grim stuff.
I mean, people hear this stuff, it sounds grim, but there's real liberation in being able to talk about this stuff in a positive environment.
So what's going on for you?
How's your heart doing? My heart feels lighter.
I feel love.
For the first time, I guess.
Does that make sense? Like, I feel...
Well, that seems important. Why don't we pause on that for a moment?
That seems very important.
Tell me what you mean. I feel like I'm receiving love from you, if that makes sense.
Like, I feel...
Can I describe what my body feels, maybe?
Yeah. Okay.
My body feels warm.
I feel relaxed. I feel...
I feel good. Okay.
I guess I don't really know how to describe it.
No, like I said in Twitter, that I wanted to more love this year.
And I have massive respect for the work that you're doing in this conversation.
It's incredible. So here, you know, we have a situation where we have a contact, like a heart-to-heart, mind-to-mind contact, And I don't think anything destructive is going to come out of it, right? In fact, it's a positive thing, right?
And you also, you know, you're talking about things that, you know, you're beating on a dog and stuff.
I mean, that's rough stuff to talk about.
I'm not using that to level up.
I'm not using that to humiliate you.
I'm not using that. I'm not using that power of you telling me things that you're not proud of.
I'm not using that against you, right?
In fact, I sympathize.
Because it's impossible. I will never sympathize more with a dog than with a human being.
And if people sympathize with the dog as I do, sympathize with Kathleen.
Because she stopped.
At risk of her own survival, she stopped.
And she went to therapy and she learned.
And she's talking about it, which is incredibly brave.
Don't you dare dump on this young woman.
Now, it seems to me, Kathleen, that you have the capacity to earn intimacy, as I think you have in this conversation, by being open and honest and participating by being open and honest and participating mindfully in a very important conversation.
So you can do it.
You can do it. Now the question is, are you willing to focus on what you want rather than what dysfunctional people need?
Yeah. Because you, like I, sorry to interrupt, you were like I, we have this big button on our hearts, maybe our groins, I don't know, this big button, serve dysfunctional people, serve dysfunctional people, obey dysfunctional people.
And we put out this sonar, right?
Now, are you willing to say, I disconnect that button, I will not spend the rest of my life in the service of broken people who want to break me further?
Yeah, absolutely I am.
Right. I will not serve dysfunction at any cost, you understand.
So when I first began to say I will not serve dysfunctional people anymore, I actually had some Hope.
Sorry, this is a terrible way to put it.
I had hope, Kathleen.
I'm curious about that. But no, I had hope and I thought, okay, well, I'm going to change what I'm doing so other people are going to change what they do.
Right? So dysfunctional people in my life, I'm going to stop serving dysfunctional people.
Maybe that'll liberate them from expecting that, right?
Now... It didn't happen for me.
It may not happen for you, but by God, it's beautiful on the other side.
Beautiful on the other side.
When you stop serving the shitlords of history, the dawn opens before you, and you crawl out of this midnight of historical hellishness to a beautiful, wide world of opportunity, love, power, possibility, rationality, and love.
So, whatever it takes is the mantra for me.
Whatever it takes. If people are going to call me the ugliest words that they can think of in my pursuit of the truth, well, that's what it takes.
Whatever it takes.
Whatever it takes.
You know, there's a guy, Logan Paul, who just did a video on the guy, and he went on and he apologized.
Bowing to the hate mob does not help them.
It actually serves to reinforce their power, which makes them more addicted to it, which makes the world a more rage-filled place.
We have to fight back, and usually it's through don't engagement, don't engage.
We have to fight back against the positioning of power and replace it with the certainty of virtue.
So, the question is, for you, Kathleen, to say, I want love.
I want connection.
I want passion.
I want security.
I want trust. I want all of these great and wonderful things.
And I'm going to take this joy and bring it into my own life, whatever the cost, to others.
If miserable, unhappy, destructive people don't like me because I'm happy, I will not shred my happiness and cast its broken bones before the bottomless maw of their dysfunction.
I will not shred my future joys for the sake of flushing them down into the sewage Of a broken history that will never be satisfied with any sacrifice I ever make.
Right? They don't see the sacrifice.
They don't. They're entitled, which means that they damn well expect it.
And if other people, if the success of other people requires the subjugation of my virtues, no.
No. A thousand times, no.
I will not do it.
Because there is no relationship when I sacrifice myself.
There is only an endless beating against the metal door, fear of brain injury, going limp, subjugation.
There is only surrender to evil for eternity.
That does not serve me.
That does not serve virtue.
That does not serve my future.
Does not serve my child.
Does not serve my community. Does not serve my family.
Does not serve my friends.
I will surrender, at this point, nothing.
Nothing. Because I know what it's like to surrender.
I had to for a long, long time.
I had to live as a broken ghost in my own meat prison.
I won't do it. I won't do it.
The dysfunctional people, they made their choices.
They can live their lives.
I'm not gonna chase after them and try and fix them or break them or anything like that.
Let them move on to whatever fates await them.
It is not of my concern.
Whether your father ends up happy or sad, or your mother ends up happy or sad, or your grandmother, whoever, your happiness is job one.
Because it's your life, not theirs.
They made their choices.
You have choices to make.
And do nothing that sacrifices your legitimate and just happiness.
If you meet a great guy tomorrow, Kathleen, and you bring him around your family of origin, what's he going to do?
You leave, I think.
Sure. He's going to say, okay, well, Kathleen's great, but these people are going to be around for the next 40 years!
Yeah. And every time she goes over, she's going to come back sliced and diced, ground down to powder.
Yeah, my sister is married, and I got really close to her husband at one point, and he was telling me how much he wants to leave her, he wants to leave the family, he just gets the urge to Just to leave.
And so, yeah, he's a great guy, you know, fantastic guy.
So if my family causes him to want to leave that much, it's sad.
Well, and your sister, if she ever listens to this, and I hope that she does, I sympathize with that too.
But do not sacrifice the future of your family for the shame of the past.
Do not sacrifice the joy of the future for the bullying of history.
It's not right.
It's not good. And this guy's going to say, oh, and they're going to be around my kids.
These toxic flesh bags of dysfunctional past.
This endless pinata of death gas.
Right? I mean, yay.
So he's going to have a choice between, you know, a great woman with a bad family or a great woman with a good family or a great woman with no family of origin around.
And if I had to shock my family to be with my wife, I'm telling you, I don't feel the bump.
I don't look in the rear view. People don't believe me.
It's absolutely true. It does not bother me a bit.
It does not bother me a bit.
Because the glory of the love that I have now, the idea that I would extinguish that for the sake of appeasing people, Who don't love and respect me?
Now, that's the Ayn Rand, right?
The Ayn Rand says, sacrifice means the destruction of a higher value for a lower value or a non-value.
Why would I sacrifice love for the sake of conformity to bad people like me?
Right? Once that clarity is there for you, once that choice is clear to you, Kathleen, that love is yours to take and to experience and to have for your life.
If you want it. But there will be bad people who don't like what you're doing.
And those bad people will be both outside your head and inside your head.
But once you have clarity about the choices ahead of you, they become incredibly easy.
And you can make them with not just no regret, but with relief.
I mean, when I think of sitting at another one of these dismal, neurotic, weird family gatherings compared to being with my friends and family now, I... My God.
Yeah, yeah.
You know what I'm saying? Yeah, I took shifts at work so I could avoid all of the holidays this year.
Right. Yeah, I know what you mean.
So that's the choice. One road leads up and one road leads down, but they don't converge, in my opinion, and my experience.
And I think according to just reason, I think if I, I'm telling you this, I think if I'd introduce my wife to my mom, don't think I'd be married.
Not a tough choice.
I'm sorry that that was the choice.
That I had, but I'm not sorry that I made it.
Yeah. I can be with the woman who loves me, or I can be with the woman who half beat me to death as a three-year-old.
Hmm. Tough call, that.
Hmm. Let me flip another coin.
Yeah. It's not really that complicated.
When choices are clear, and this is what people hate about philosophy, philosophy makes your choices very clear.
And very easy. Which doesn't mean easy to enact.
It just means easy to make.
But if you want to know how to stop pleasing others, you don't want to stop pleasing others.
I want to please my audience.
I want to please my daughter. I want to please my wife.
I want to please my friends. I want to please you in this conversation, Kathleen.
Wanting to please others is great.
Wanting to please math addicts Not so great.
So don't throw the baby out with the bathwater.
Keep wanting to please people.
Just make sure they're good people.
Don't.
Please don't appease.
And you shouldn't be in a relationship, I think, where you have to really focus on your own wants and needs.
and Because you should be in a relationship where other people focus on your wants and needs.
Which doesn't happen in these power relationships, but it does happen in virtuous relationships.
Because your own wants and needs should not be in massive conflict with the wants and needs of people around you.
It shouldn't have to be this big juggling act.
Well, I could get what I want, but then everyone around me could be really mad.
That's not good.
And imagine meeting a man with the family that you have, whether you'd be attracted to or not.
Now, I will say, as I always say, I mean, if you can fix things with your family, great.
But if you can't, and it's not up to you, then choose your own future happiness rather than the terrible mistakes that people have made in the past.
And stop letting your parents run your dating life.
.
That's never going to work.
Yeah. Yeah.
And what do you think now?
What do you feel now?
I feel very happy for my future.
Very excited. I feel lighter.
I feel like I can finally let go of the death of my family.
I'm sorry, you just garbled there for a second.
Let go of the what of your family?
The dead weight of my family.
Like they were holding me back in every way possible and now that I can kind of see that I don't owe them what they're asking from me and that feels big relief.
Yeah, if you ended up dating a guy who was a closeted, gay, sleeper-arounder, trans, cross-dressing meth addict, anyone around you who let that happen without a massive intervention is to be entirely suspect.
Okay, my mom knew about it the entire time.
Well, okay. So your mom let this go on and on, which means your mom is invested in your failure, which means, you know, I had a guy, let me tell you, let me tell you something, let me tell you something.
Long relationship in my life.
I won't get into the ins and outs of it.
It doesn't really matter. When I was engaged, which I wasn't engaged for very long.
Met my wife. Got engaged in a couple of months.
Married within 11 months.
It's been 16 years now.
There was a guy in my life.
Didn't really get to know her.
And that was a bit odd to me.
I was friends with his wife.
And I said, you know, you're not really getting to know her.
And he said, why bother?
you're just gonna get divorced anyway.
And that was it.
Because I'm not gonna have people around who are invested in my failure.
If this guy thinks I'm going to get divorced, he's not going to be positive about my marriage.
In fact, he's going to want to confirm his bias, which means he's going to be destructive towards my marriage.
Sorry, mother of my child, light of my life, love of my heart, or some guy invested in the failure of said relationship, it's not a tough choice.
So, you're still in therapy, is that right?
Yes. Okay, good, good.
Will you keep us posted about how things are going?
Yeah, absolutely.
Do you promise? Yes.
It's a public promise, you know.
That's a contract. I'm just kidding.
All right. Good conversation?
Useful? Helpful? Yes, absolutely.
Look at me being needy. What's that?
I said, look at me being needy.
Anyway, tell me.
It was good for you, too. All right.
Well, thanks, Kathleen. I really, really appreciate it.
What a great... Conversation.
And I appreciate everyone who makes all of this possible.
freedomainradio.com slash donate.
You know the drill. You know the value that's being offered.
Please come and help us out.
I look forward to this amazing year of...
2018. And I look forward to all of these conversations.
It's going to be even better.
It's been great so far.
It's going to be even better this year.
So thanks, everyone, so much.
Don't forget, theartoftheargument.com.
Still worth picking up a great, great book, even though the holidays have passed.
The gift can be the New Year's gift for you or a loved one.
