Jan. 17, 2018 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
02:41:16
3966 P3N1S ON STRIKE - Call In Show - January 14th, 2017
Question 1: [1:29] - “I am a 20-year-old male, healthy and active. However, I do not have any desire whatsoever to have sex. I am in a long-term relationship where we used to be very sexually active but recently, I cringe at the thought of sexual activity. I struggle to unpack what is going on and when we discuss this together, I dissociate strongly and lose my ability to put my emotions into words. I tend to get angry and have to fight a strong urge to shut down the dialog. I feel so much shame and guilt about this as I know she has needs, needs I cannot fulfill right now with my genuine emotional experience. I see the danger of pretending and attempting to meet her needs while ignoring mine, as I know doing things out of sense of obligation or guilt will lead our relationship into ruins. I am certain this a psychological problem as I don’t show any of the classic signs (other than reduced sex drive) of lowered testosterone and I am not having issues “getting up” for the occasion. It seems like this is all stemming from my head. I would love Stefan’s help getting to the bottom of this as this is such a difficult topic for me to explore on my own, with friends or with my girlfriend. How can I overcome some of this mental blocks that are preventing me from having a fulfilling sex life as this is such an important aspect of successful long term relationship? More generally, what is a healthy mindset to approach a problem like this without beating myself up, as this only seems to make things worse?”Question 2: [1:46:08] - “What sort of incentive or event do you think is required for people (women in particular) to embrace the concept of having (more) children and being OK with either not having a career or delaying it until her children are in school (like I did)? There are logistical/timing issues but the FIRST priority should be to have children and raise them and everything else should be secondary.”Your support is essential to Freedomain Radio, which is 100% funded by viewers like you. Please support the show by making a one time donation or signing up for a monthly recurring donation at: http://www.freedomainradio.com/donate
Hey everybody, Stefan Molyneux, hope you're doing well.
Please don't forget to help out the show at freedomainradio.com slash donate.
You can also use our affiliate link, it costs you nothing and helps us out a little bit, at fdrurl.com forward slash Amazon.
Now, it's a long show, but it was only a twofer.
But what a great set of conversations.
The first was a man who was suffering from impotence.
Not political, not emotional, but yes, down there in the nether regions.
Penis not standing to attention, and I think we figured out why.
But it took a while. But it is really important, I think, to listen to and to understand just how deep our mind and our body unite sometimes in accepting evidence that we reject in our heads.
So it's a very, very powerful conversation.
The second caller was an older woman who'd had five kids.
And she was trying to figure out how you could encourage or convince people to have more children these days.
Because, as we know, birth rates are declining among certain demographics.
And how is it possible to make it desirable?
And it's a great question.
I mean, I have a father, of course, and lots of people have had kids as a result, even as a direct result of this show.
So we had a very, very good conversation with About males and females and marriage and courts and incentives and all that kind of stuff.
So it's a very, very important question.
And I'm sure you'll find the discussion enormously, enormously valuable.
Alright, well up first today we have Noah.
Noah wrote in and said, I'm a 20 year old male, healthy and active.
However, I do not have any desire whatsoever to have sex.
I'm in a long term relationship where I used to be very sexually active, but recently I cringe at the thought of sexual activity.
I struggle to unpack what is going on, and when we discuss this together, I strongly dissociate and lose my ability to put my emotions into words.
I tend to get angry and have to fight a strong urge to shut down the dialogue.
I feel so much shame and guilt about this as I know she has needs, needs I cannot fulfill right now with my genuine emotional experience.
I see the dangers of pretending and attempting to meet her needs while ignoring mine as I know doing things out of a sense of obligation or guilt will lead our relationship into ruins.
I am certain this is a psychological problem as I don't show any of the classic signs, other than reduced sex drive, of lower testosterone and I'm not having issues getting up for the occasion.
It seems like this is all stemming from my head.
I would love Stefan's help getting to the bottom of this as this is such a difficult topic for me to explore on my own with friends or with my girlfriend.
How can I overcome some of these mental blocks that are preventing me from having a fulfilling sex life, as this is such an important aspect of a successful long-term relationship?
More generally, what is a healthy mindset to approach a problem like this without beating myself up, as this only seems to make things worse?
That's from Noah. Hey, Noah.
How are you doing today?
Hi, Stefan. I'm really, really nervous right now, but other than that, I'm doing really good.
Well, that's alright. That's alright.
Welcome to our Sunday afternoon.
And I appreciate, look, I mean, it's not a fun topic to bring up, so to speak, right?
So I appreciate that you have the courage to do so, and I respect your openness in this area, because, you know, a lot of men and women suffer from sexual dysfunction, but it's something that people don't talk about a lot.
Yeah, it's something that I'm like, I've been kind of having a hard time coming to terms with because it started a few months ago and it's just gradually gotten a little bit worse.
Right. So I think it would be helpful to kind of start out with some questions until I get a little bit less nervous.
Yes, no problem at all.
So, I just wanted to give people some context for this.
I mean, I know that you're not married, but it's really quite a big deal.
About 15% of married couples basically don't have sex.
Married men and women have sex with their spouse 58 times a year, about once a week.
And well, if you're under 30, it's 111 times a year.
And 15% of married couples have not had sex with their spouse in the last six months to one year.
And there are, of course, people who consider themselves uninterested and sexless in relationships.
And that's not your case, though, because in the past you had a lot of sex or more sex, and there was no particular self-consciousness about it.
Is that right? No, not at all.
When it first started, it was very often.
I mean, pretty much every time I saw her, it happened at least once, if not more.
So this is something that just kind of started not that long ago.
And I have some ideas of what started to cause it, but I mean, I really feel like this is something that's just coming from my head or some mental blocks that are going on.
Yeah, I mean, my guess would be not so much from your head, but from your history.
So let's just start off with the meat and gristle.
So you did your Adverse Childhood Experience score, and you scored a seven.
So we have verbal abuse and threats, no family love or support, parents divorced, physical abuse towards female adults, lived with alcoholic or drug user, household member depressed, mentally ill or suicide attempt, and household member...
In prison. I wonder if you can give us the brief tour on the, it seems like, hellscape of Noah's childhood.
Yeah, it's just kind of weird having you read all that back, because a lot of times when I think about my childhood, there's a lot of blinks there, and I just try to push a lot of things back.
But yeah, looking back, I mean, growing up, it wasn't really fun.
So I think it would be best to start with my dad growing up.
Because a lot of those things were from him.
Right. So is there anywhere or a specific question you could ask to kind of start this off?
Sure. Because I have a lot of different directions.
I don't want to ramble too much.
Household member, depressed, mentally ill, or suicide attempt.
What do we have there? So that was my dad.
So I found out later on in life when I was like 14 or 15 that my dad was diagnosed with bipolar.
Yeah, that's really obvious to me in hindsight because one of the things I experienced with him a lot and it was really confusing growing up was there's a lot of times where he'd be like a really great dad and he would be there for me and I have some good memories of playing baseball with him and going to the batting cages but then there's a lot of times too where he would get like he would just go into these moods for a while where he would be really dissociated and Wouldn't be there at all,
basically, emotionally. He would say a lot of things to me that were really messed up, too.
Like, he would get drunk, and then he would tell me that he hated me, and that I have three sisters as well, and that we all ruined his life, and stuff like that.
And then the next day, he would say he was sorry, and it was really confusing growing up as a kid.
And did he say this to your sisters as well?
Yeah. I'm not...
I mean, I just have...
Like, right now, this is stuff I haven't thought about for years.
And I'm having some memories resurface right now.
I'm just... Like, he would get this look in his eyes where he'd just look at...
It was like... I mean, the only way I could describe the look would be almost like murderous.
It was just like really dark and cold and scary when you look at you like that.
And he would just say things under his breath.
And then he would just say things like...
Like, I hate you and stuff like that.
And I mean, thinking about this stuff right now, I'm getting this really sick feeling in my stomach and it's just stuff that I've really pushed away.
I haven't thought about it, like I said, in a really long time.
Right. Well, I mean, parental I hate you bombs, I believe.
Our experience is death threats by children.
And they are, I think, biologically.
If you are hated by a parent, remember, throughout most of human evolution, there weren't enough resources for everyone to survive.
And if you were the hated kid, if you were the runt of the litter, if you were the despised one, this is one of the reasons why, particularly in European cultures and in East Asian cultures even more so, this idea of being disapproved of, of being ostracized, is tortuous. To people.
And that is because it was a death sentence for the most part in evolution.
So if you were the hated child, well, you would do almost anything to avoid that because ostracism was a fatal form of predation upon children.
And so when parents say, like, I remember being, I don't know, maybe five or six and being awake at night, as I often was as a child.
Being awake at night. And my mom was just sort of sitting in the family room of the little flat that we lived in and just smoking away.
And she just suddenly screamed out, I hate these fucking kids, like top of her lungs kind of thing.
And I believed her.
And now I didn't think that we, or I just speak for myself, I didn't speak, I didn't feel that I was...
Hate it, but there was hatred in the room.
I didn't think I was hateable.
I mean, I was a nice kid, a good kid, and pretty easy to get along with, but it definitely was in the air, and that changes things very foundationally.
And because, I mean, for me at least, knowing my mom was sort of sitting in that room brooding, you know, for hours.
This is like, I don't know, three o'clock in the morning or whatever.
Brooding and that she had fixed upon the problems in her life being the existence and survival and continuing to draw breath of her children.
That is destabilizing in the extreme.
It means a lack of trust.
It means that you must conform to Or suffer the consequences.
And when you're a child, of course, you don't ever want to find out where the end of the escalation is of your parents' capacity for violence.
So you don't push it.
And you tend to go limp or find a way to comply when violence escalates because you don't want to find out where the upper limit of that is because it could be something permanently damaging to your body or your mind.
It could be fatal. So I sympathize and that is a very terrifying moment that you're living with someone who at times you feel or he even or she even openly expresses they want you dead.
I mean talk about being trapped with a tiger in a cage, right?
Yeah, one thing that I want to touch on right now that I'm just kind of realizing is For the first time I can remember in, I don't know, years maybe.
I mean, it's been a really long time.
I'm really feeling something deep in my stomach about this.
This is stuff that, I mean, for a while I kind of thought that I was kind of getting over my childhood just because I didn't think about it anymore.
But now I'm starting to consider maybe it's more along the lines of me just Really work, just really becoming more cold in terms of my emotions and connecting to the way I truly feel about things.
Because, I mean, these feelings for a while, they were just really mute or they were super numb for me.
I just didn't feel anything when I thought about this stuff or I ever talked about it.
But right now, I'm just really starting to connect with it.
And as I hear you talking about your experience, it makes me realize just...
I mean, there's just a lot more work I need to put in to kind of process some of these things, because I really don't think I have processed a lot of it.
I think in a way, the way I've dealt with it is just kind of pushing away all these negative experiences.
And I mean, it kind of is, I mean, this is something we can touch on later.
Well, okay, so let's, so as far as the I hate you bombs, or was it I wish you were dead?
Was that? It was, he would say things like, I hate you guys.
And he would say things like, I hate my life and stuff like that under his breath.
I just remember feeling very strongly as a kid that I was a huge burden.
There was very little I could do because it was just so unpredictable.
There wasn't any specific things I could do.
We could do the same things every day and we'd get different reactions from him.
There was no consistency.
There's no sense of universality growing up in terms of what the consequences of my behaviors would be on my dad.
And then my mom made the situation so much worse by freaking us all out.
Like before he would come home, she would all get us all worried and tell us we all need to clean everything up and make sure everything's perfect and just all this, like those type of things.
Yeah. Yeah, I don't want to keep going, rambling, get off track more.
No, no, ramble away. Ramble away. This is all important, important stuff.
It's funny. I mean, this bipolar thing, I guess what it used to be called manic depression.
Linda Hamilton, the actress, I think also suffered from it, destroyed her marriage to James Cameron, I think.
And she actually has a twin in the scene in Terminator 2.
You can always tell my viewing habits from my stories.
But the scene in Terminator 2 where she's shaking the wire fence, that's her twin who's playing the mom.
And It seems, it's always struck me, this sort of manic depressive or bipolar or whatever, and let me know what you think, Noah, but it always strikes me as, it's like a farmer who breaks his back to sow his crops and is proud of the crops that are growing and is happy and is looking forward to a bumper crop and then willfully, one night, out of nowhere, gets up, shakes gasoline on the crops and just sets them all alight.
Burns them to the ground.
when you see someone who does have that capacity to be happy, to be positive, to be engaging, to be charming even, then they're building bridges to other people.
And then with the darkness, with the rage, with the murderousness, with the verbal abuse, they then, so they're built, they're an entire cycle of building bridges and burning bridges, of planting crops and salting crops, of, it's like there's some inner devil that allows them to only have a certain amount it's like there's some inner devil that allows them to only have a certain amount of happiness and then boom, you know, the portcullis comes down and chains
And it is a very, very confusing thing because it feels like the person has more than one personality.
Okay.
And the apology thing, too, my mom didn't apologize, because eggs.
And you had a father who apologized, but the apology did not prevent the next recurrence, right?
Oh, yeah. One thing that I think really did mess me up, I think in a way that almost made things worse growing up because, I mean, this is a message that I've realized I've internalized and it's something I have to fight against a lot.
But I really got a strong message from him that words are one thing and actions are another.
And they don't necessarily coincide.
So you can say things that sound really nice in the moment and you can reap the instant rewards of that.
That doesn't necessarily mean that the words are backed by any sort of action or anything meaningful.
Well, the other personality is like, well, I didn't apologize for shit, and I'm not bound by any of that shit.
That guy can sign, but that's like getting your brother to sign alone and thinking that somehow you're on the hook for it.
It's like this split, right?
Now, was it associated a lot with his drinking?
Yeah, when he would start to...
I mean, when I grew up, pretty much until the age of, I would say it was like 11 or 12, you would drink almost every day.
I mean, it was a constant thing growing up.
When I was like 11 or 12, my parents went through a temporary separation.
And then my dad got clean for a couple, I'd say for like nine months or so and wasn't drinking.
And, but I mean, that wasn't the norm.
Most of my childhood he drank, but it did seem to get worse when he was, yeah, when he was really sad.
I mean, the image that's popping in my head is we used to have this armchair in our living room.
We would call it the man chair.
And I would just, I have these images in my head just waking up in the morning and seeing him pass out on the couch with beer cans all over the place.
I mean, I just, yeah, and he wasn't, when he would drink too, he wasn't any sort of, like his personality would change a lot.
He would just become a lot more aggressive and mean.
Right. Yeah, the alcohol, as it so often is the case, was fuel for the dark side, right?
Oh yeah. Did he work?
Yeah, my dad, I grew up, one thing that I think really helped me a lot growing up is I did grow up in a household where my dad worked and my mom stayed at home with us and I do have a lot of good memories as a kid staying home and playing with my sisters and just having a lot of good days.
My mom We can get more about her in a second, but I just remember as a kid feeling like my mom was always the good one because she never hit us.
She never really yelled at us.
But of course, she picked my dad and allowed him to do everything that he did to us.
But as a kid, this didn't really register with me.
I just remember thinking to myself and feeling so bad about this that I like my mom so much more than my dad.
I don't really like my dad that much.
Right. But yeah, he would work a normal work week, like a five to nine, or a nine to five.
So he had discipline.
He could get up and go to work.
He didn't like say, well, I'm too drunk, I'm too hungover to work.
So he had discipline.
And, you know, I have a very uneasy relationship with this whole concept of mental illness, which I won't get into in great detail here.
Yeah. But...
To me, unless there's physical brain damage, you know, like the concussion issues that plague NFL players and boxers and so on, unless there is a brain tumor or some physical damage to the brain, I just put people in the category of asshole.
That's just my particular. You know, there's a big mental illness called being an asshole, and being an asshole makes you guilty, makes you...
Unhappy. And there is this cycle.
And then, of course, you promise to do better.
And then you end up not doing well.
And then you end up with self-recrimination and so on.
So, to me, it's like there's this big bucket called asshole.
And there are excuses and reasonable ones for that.
But even boxers, well, they...
They chose to be boxers and, you know, getting pounded around the head for years is not going to be great for you.
So, this issue of, you know, bipolar and so on.
And the funny thing is, or tragic thing, is that people say, I had a mental illness, I had a mental incapacity, I had diminished capacity, therefore I was not responsible for my actions, right?
Or something like that. Okay.
But if you take that as a fact, let's say that we accept that on its face.
We accept that there was a mental illness, there was diminished capacity, and therefore the parent is not responsible for his actions.
Well, the problem is...
If the parent is aggressive towards the child for the natural effects of childhood, carelessness, thoughtfulness, thoughtlessness, selfishness, sometimes inattention to detail, a preference for a hedonistic, pleasure-based lifestyle rather than getting chores done.
These are all aspects of childhood.
It's what you need to train children.
So there is a mental illness, in a sense, or a mental deficiency called childhood, which children are certainly not responsible for.
So if parents say, well, I had a mental incapacity or I had a mental diminishment, therefore I was not responsible, the problem is that if they attack their children for the natural effects of being a child, the diminished capacity of having a smaller brain and a growing brain, then they've kind of shot their own argument in the foot.
Because if you believe that diminished capacity means no responsibility, which means that children cannot blame, when they grow up, a parent for bad actions because of the parent's diminished capacity, but if those bad actions were attacking a child for the diminished capacity of childhood, the argument doesn't work.
It's self-detonating, right?
If children are responsible and can be attacked for the diminished capacity of childhood, then even if somebody claims a mental illness and therefore no responsibility, well...
There is 100% diagnosable mental incapacity called being a child.
Everybody knows that.
It's completely obvious and clear, and everybody knows that children have diminished capacity.
So it just seems to me odd that parents will attack children for the This incredibly factual, basic, real biological diminished capacity called being a child.
But then when the children get up and get critical, the parents say, well, no, no, no, I had diminished capacity, you see, so I wasn't responsible.
It's like, well, where was this lack of responsibility for diminished capacity when I was a child?
You held me to very high standards and punished me enormously when I was a child!
So, I don't know if that's been your father's story, but that's something I've certainly heard of and seen of.
Well, there's a couple things I wanted to say.
So the first thing that popped into my head there was one thing that's very obvious and notable, and this is something I've talked to my mom about too, is my dad, and I've heard you kind of pose this question before, like if there is a police officer there or a bunch of people from work or something like that, would he behave in the same way?
And the answer to that was absolutely not.
So to me that demonstrates an ability to control or People say, oh, my mental incapacity is like epilepsy.
I can't control it.
Well, you will have epilepsy if there's a police officer there because it genuinely is beyond your control.
But if you can control your behavior in the presence of external stimuli, then you choose not to control your behavior.
In other words, you care more for the negative consequences of yelling at, screaming at, or hitting your children in front of a police officer than you do for your own children.
You don't care about yourself.
Yeah, yeah. My dad would never seem to have these problems at work or anything like that.
A couple other things, too, was I had to find out about the bipolar thing through my mom after a traumatic incident happened in my life when I was 13, which is something I think is important to discuss.
But one thing that I've really strayed away from the last couple of years, I'd say especially in the last year, is the whole idea of mental illness as a way to excuse responsibility.
When I was going through therapy, I got diagnosed as well with a mood disorder.
Since then, I've kind of started to stray away from that mindset because I would allow myself to justify bad behaviors or if I was feeling a certain way, I would just kind of say like, well, I mean, I can't really help it or something like that.
And it just takes away so much power from you.
And I'm really easily able to criticize my dad for the choices he's made because I do see them as choices that he had because he did have alternatives.
I did see a side of him where he could have been a really good dad if he chose to do that all the time.
So since I think that Well, I am really glad in a way that I don't see it as a way of excusing his actions because then that would just allow me this.
I would allow myself, whether it's conscious or not, to behave in similar ways with the justification.
Right. Well, and society's relationship to children.
I'll just give you one or two examples.
I'm sure you have many more now.
A friend of mine, when I was a kid, had a really bad, really bad home life.
And he was...
Supposed to be taking a test, but his mother had had an, let's just say, episode.
And he was like kind of up all night, ended up in the hospital and so on.
And then he went in to the school and he said, listen, I, you know, this is what happened with my mom.
And they said, sorry, you got to take the test.
This guy had genuine, as a child.
As a teenager, he had genuine reasons to not have to take a test, but people were like, man, got to take the test.
There was no forgiveness.
There was no lowering of standards for the infliction of distress in this kind of way.
I know a guy in university.
He failed a few courses, again, massive, horrible, I think he was 18 or 19, but massive, horrible family issues.
And yeah, he wrote a letter.
He wrote a letter to the university because they were going to put him on hiatus for a year, right?
You're basically banned from the university for a year.
And so he detailed everything that was going on in his life and said, listen, you know, these issues have largely been resolved and I'd really like to continue with my education.
And they wrote back to him and they said, well...
No. No. Because, you know, you should have just adjusted your course load.
You should have just taken fewer courses if all this stuff was going on in your life.
It's not our fault. So, no.
You got to spend a year doing something else.
And we can all think of countless examples of this kind of stuff.
The kids who couldn't sleep because their parents were raging at night and then were supposed to pay attention in class.
You know, we all probably knew kids who were really sleepy in class.
And I even, as everybody knows, saw a kid fall asleep in class in the morning.
And get yelled at and dragged out and sent to the principal's office and punished.
And why was he tired?
Because I assume, I mean, I knew a little bit about his family life because his parents were drinkers.
So the kid didn't get any fucking sleep.
But too bad.
You are punished for the fact that your parents are alcoholics.
You are punished for the fact that your mother had a meltdown.
You, I mean, you are punished for the fact that your father is a drunk.
You are punished for that.
There's no sympathy, no empathy, no understanding, no nothing like that.
It goes on. And maybe that's changed.
I'm just talking about when I was a kid. So for me, when people say, well, but I've got all these excuses, well, I wasn't given any excuses.
My friends with terrible childhoods, they weren't given any excuses.
We were held to exactly the same standards as everyone else, though we were very much behind the starting gate when it came to getting going in life.
So I just find it I just kind of find it weird.
It's kind of inevitable that when you have power over children, you grant them no sympathy, no concern, no care.
But then when children grow up, you claim helplessness and I was not in control.
And it's like, well, I was a kid. My friend was a kid.
He wasn't in control of his mother's meltdown.
My other friend was not in control of his parents' drinking.
So, like genuinely not in control.
A kid. Didn't choose to be born.
Into the family.
So, until society starts to fucking address this issue of its unbelievable coldness towards children.
All the while saying, oh, children are the future and children are everything and we love children and sentimental hallmark cards and all this kind of bullshit.
Until society recognizes that it has kind of a sociopathic relationship to its children as a whole.
I mean, I really believe this.
Schools are horrible and people don't change.
National debt is intergenerational predation.
It is enslaving your children and people don't give a fucking shit about it.
and majorities in countries that are being displaced by other groups.
It's not fun for those kids.
Nobody cares, or very few people seem to care.
So society has as a whole a sociopathic relationship to its children.
Yeah, they're fine.
We'll just shove them in schools and have them indoctrinated for the sake of keeping peace and not annoying government unions.
And yeah, we'll displace their populations.
And yeah, we'll use them as collateral to borrow against so that we can feed our fat fucking boomer mouths in the trough of the state in the here and now.
Completely sociopathic relationship.
Not individuals, but society as a whole.
Certainly it's composed of individuals, but not all individuals.
And then what happens is, after being preyed upon and confined and caged and indoctrinated and brutalized and ignored and laughed at and scorned, Dripped with contempt, the children grow up and they start to judge their elders and say, well, my childhood was a shit fest from end to end and nobody gave a good goddamn about it.
As I've said before in this show, I got beaten half to fucking death in full earshot of hundreds and hundreds of people in the thin-walled apartment buildings of my childhood on three different continents.
Not one person.
Ever knocked on the door. Not one person ever called the cops.
Not one person ever intervened in any way, shape or form.
Not one person called social services.
And I'm not saying whether that would have been good or bad, but it would have been something.
So we don't care about the young as a whole, as a society.
Individuals may be different, but as a whole.
So then the children grow up and they look at their society and say, hmm...
I got some judgments here.
And then after praying on and confining and indoctrinating and beating and ignoring their children, society says, it's not our fault.
We have nothing to do with it.
Mental illness. Well, it was your fault.
You know, it was dad's fault.
And it's like, it's ridiculous.
You give children 500% responsibility.
You give children responsibility far in excess.
Of what children have responsibility for.
You're responsible for taking the test.
I don't care that your parents were drinking and smashing things up until 4 o'clock in the morning.
You've got to take the fucking test, junior.
So they give kids 500% responsibility when they're children.
And then when the children try to give the adults 10% responsibility, Oh my God, that's terrible!
That's so abusive!
Fuck it, cry bullies. I'm telling you, it turns your stomach when you really think about it.
Yeah, I mean, one of the things that I just thought of when the last things you were saying there, like the cry bully, the giving just a little bit of responsibility back, where I've really kind of realized that a lot is with my mom.
Because whenever... As I started listening to your show and really internalizing a lot of the messages and understanding the underlying principles behind a lot of the arguments, especially in regards to the family as having voluntary relationships in the family,
when I started talking to my mom about how I felt about my childhood, all the typical excuses came out like, oh, I did the best I could with what I knew.
I mean, just the total lack of responsibility.
I told her that she was the one that chose the environment.
I mean, she was married to my dad five years before she had me, and she knew about all these qualities that he had.
It didn't come out of nowhere.
It was like that from pretty much the beginning with him.
She was well paid to shut up, right?
I mean, I'm pretty sure that's definitely a part of it.
I know there are some other elements too, like her father was a pastor and she had a lot of religious guilt about getting out of a marriage.
But I mean, I still don't...
Wait, so she was Christian, right?
Oh yeah, my mom is really Christian.
So when Jesus says, whatever you do to the least among us, you do also to me, she was quite comfortable with...
Your father screaming I hate you and tormenting Jesus because that's what Jesus said.
If you do it to the kids, you're doing it to me too.
But that didn't interfere with her religious sensibilities?
I mean, I don't know.
I don't want to make excuses for her because I don't think there's any possible way to justify my life.
Did her father know that your father was a violent alcoholic?
I'm not sure how much of the details she gave to her parents about the true nature of their relationship, but it would be very hard for me to believe, considering that they were close, that her parents didn't have a good idea that there's just a lot of red flags in that relationship.
My dad was extremely controlling.
There's just a lot of incidents that were just I mean, if I knew somebody at my work that I barely talked to and they were telling me some of the things that went on in that relationship, I would definitely say something.
So it's just hard for me to believe that...
Well, it's their job. Yeah, they failed her horribly in that regard.
Yeah, it's your job to make sure that your daughter doesn't marry some alcohol-soaked lunatic, right?
Yeah, our parents definitely failed massively when it came to that because they...
And your father, sorry to interrupt, but your father has definitely elements of an evil character, right?
Yeah, I would...
Now, what's the one job that a pastor has?
Like, the one job of a doctor is to detect and treat illness, right?
What's the central job?
Maybe not the one job, but the central job of the pastor is what?
I would say...
To snip out and detect immorality.
Something along those lines.
To protect people from evil.
That's the job. To identify satanic, devilish, or evil elements in the environment and protect people.
That's the one job that the pastor has.
It's the one job they used to have for Western civilization as a whole until they got bought out by the government and Kirk Pope.
Protect your flock.
Guard your sheep. That is the one job that the pastor has.
And he, worse than failed, he colluded.
He colluded. Failed is, well, you know, my daughter was walking in some bad neighborhood in town and got jumped in an alley, right?
right that's failing but my daughter got married to a violent lunatic and stayed married to him for five years and then gave him a whole bunch of kids and kept them in the house that's that's more than a failure that's a collusion yeah it yeah it really is um She's a Christian, so she's concerned about the devil.
Where? Where? Where does she think the devil is in your childhood?
Does she think that he's in the bathroom at the school?
Is he in a closet in the mall?
Is he working behind the counter at McDonald's?
No. The devil is coming from inside the house.
I know she knew that.
I'm 100% certain of that.
And... I mean, I really don't know.
I can't tell you why that she allowed that to go on.
All I know is the things that she told me, and I'm not satisfied with the answer she's given me.
I know that.
I mean, I don't know. I don't really have much else to say about that.
This is... The grave horror that faces you as an individual, Noah, and society as a whole.
I just want to zoom out for a second.
We'll zoom back in, I promise. We'll zoom out for a second because when you fail to take responsibility, when you actively avoid responsibility, as your parents do, it seems, when you fail to take responsibility, you end up being a pathological liar.
You have to lie about everything all the time.
And you have to lie, most of all, to yourself.
You have to deny reality, you have to cling to cliches, and you have to become both a liar, a crier, and a bully.
Because you have to fence off massive foundational sections of moral reality And pretend in your mind and in your heart that they're verdant fields of butterflies and bunnies and wildflowers, when in fact they are raging infernos of guilt and self-hatred.
And then when people say, oh, I'd love to take a stroll over these wonderful fields that you talk about, you have to warn them away without revealing why you're warning them away.
You have to manipulate. You have to push back against people's encroachment upon...
Your shame and your guilt. The secret hell of your pretended heaven of history.
And when people won't take responsibility, they continue to sacrifice their children's reality for their own vanity.
This is the denial of abuse or the excusing of abuse by parents is a continuation of that abuse, Noah.
When you have been done wrong as a child by parents and you go to those parents and you say, you did me wrong!
And they deny and they lie and they obfuscate and they bully and they avoid.
They are continuing that abuse because they are denying the reality of what happened in order to protect their own demonically false self-image.
And it's a continual sacrifice of the children.
And when you lie, you become...
The truth becomes a predator.
When you devote yourself to falsehoods, the truth becomes a predator.
It hunts you day and night, and you must continually wage war against it.
And it's like the Marxists, when reality and economics and empiricism and logic disprove Marxism, they destroy economics, logic, reality, empiricism in order to maintain it.
Their delusion. In other words, they sacrifice the truth to maintain self-deception.
And when you have an entire generation that has done wrong by their children, I'm not saying that your parents' generation were the first, but this is one where the bill has come due.
If you have an entire generation that did wrong by their ancestors, that did wrong to their children, that let them be raised in terrible schools, That let their futures be mortgaged for the sake of democracy and bribery in the here and now.
When they are neglected and abandoned and tossed into daycares, when you have a massive swath of unparenting, absent parenting, non-parenting, neglectful, pretend parenting, when you abandon your children to video games and electronics and screens and televisions and the feral horizontal Lord of the Flies nightmare of being raised by the lowest common denominator among your peers...
Well, y'all done fucked up, elders.
You fucked up really badly.
And you either admit it, or society gets worse and worse and worse.
Because when you become allergic to the truth, you become allergic to all truth.
You see, everything is an ecosystem in your mind.
Everything is dominoes. One domino goes down.
It's always attached to other dominoes.
Always. And everybody knows that you can't just be at war against this truth or that truth or another truth because all truths are interconnected.
All truths are interconnected.
If you are at war with a truth, you are at war with all truth.
Bar none, no exceptions, you are at war with all truth and everything becomes deception and self-protection and the sacrifice of others to maintain the delusion of virtue.
And thus you become As truth becomes your predator, you become the predator to truth.
You hunt truth. You attack truth.
You undermine truth. You kill truth.
If I am wrong, I will no longer be wrong if the truth burns to the ground.
But as the truth burns to the ground, so does everything else in your society.
So it is a very big deal what we're talking about.
Yeah, I mean a lot of the things you were talking about too, especially with the lying I even, right before you said that, I wrote down that note to talk on that, or to touch on that real quick, because that's something I know my mom does seriously.
Like, it's on another level with the way that she has to make these justifications to herself, because I know that she has to lie to herself about pretty much everything that's gone on in order to maintain seeing herself as virtuous.
Right. So, you have never really taken the red pill until you have sat across from a woman and seen her calculating look of what can I get away with in this moment?
What can I get him to believe?
What can I get him to accept?
What can I get him to swallow? That is to me the red pill that is one of the final ones, which is you sit across from a woman and you confront her.
And she dodges, and she side swipes, and she moves, and she's like a snake with a javelin of truth, twisting and winding.
And you see that look, and I've seen it, and a lot of other people have seen it, that look in a woman's eyes that says, what can I get away with at the moment?
Now, this happens with men too.
It's just that for most men, we can confront that relatively easily, but confronting a woman in her falseness is very challenging.
Now, let's talk about your girlfriend.
How long have you been in the relationship?
We've been dating for two and a half years.
What does she think of your family, Noah?
She does not like my mom.
She really doesn't like my dad.
And then one of my sisters is turning out very similar to how my mom is.
She doesn't like her, and she only likes one of my sisters, which is the same one I like too, because she has seemed to somehow have this force field around her from all the craziness.
She's turning out really good for all the things we've been through, but I think that's a really, really encouraging sign that she...
She can see through all this stuff.
And her family?
Her family?
She was raised in a very, very, very good household.
It honestly kind of weirds me out how close their family is together.
She always wants to do things to their family and she'll invite me to go do all these family events.
And It's just something I can't really comprehend.
Growing up, she's not going to have an AC of zero, but relative to most of my friends in high school and people I've talked to about their childhoods, she had a really good childhood growing up.
Oh, could you maybe ask a more specific question or something you're wondering?
Well, you're young. And this is not to say in any way, Noah, that you're not worthy of love.
But I guess the first question that comes to my mind is that she had a great family and you had a terrible family.
What's she seeing in you? Not you individually, because we all come with a family, right?
You're still in touch with your family.
So if she's got a great family and she's looking at dating you, maybe getting married to you, maybe having kids with you, does she want her kids raised around your family?
We've talked about all this stuff a lot.
I'm still up in the air right now about...
I mean, I would have to...
There was one thing I kind of wanted to touch on a little bit ago about...
A traumatic event that happened to me when I was 13.
No, no, no. Hang on.
No, no. Wait, wait, wait. Hang on.
Now you're using your trauma to distract me from the question.
Well, no. I can get to the question.
I just wanted to explain something because my life circumstances dramatically altered after that.
And I have a different family structure now with my mom.
And I was just bringing that up to mention.
I was only bringing it up to mention things have changed a lot.
My mom, she... She got, basically when I was 13, my dad, and this is hard to talk about, but my dad attempted to kill my mom.
And that was a really hard time.
I mean, it was really shocking.
That's when my dad went to jail.
I didn't see, I've hardly ever seen him since then.
But after that, my mom got remarried.
And is in a really, I mean, like it's a really healthy, strong relationship now with my stepdad, who I wish from like every fiber of my being I would have had in my life from the beginning.
And the only reason I'm bringing this up is because of a lot of the changing circumstances and there's been some things that have changed in a relationship since I moved out.
I'm still considering keeping her Possibly in my life when I have kids.
Well, and I apologize and withdraw what I said earlier.
You were entirely right to talk to me about that.
And I was not expecting anything like that.
So I do apologize for what I said just a moment ago.
So what happened when you were 13?
Tell me what happened.
I mean, this was when things in my life really started to go sour.
I mean, for example, I remember before this incident, One of the kids I went to school with offered or asked me to smoke pot with them.
And it's just not even an option to me.
It was just not even something I would ever consider or do.
And then, I mean, it's just hard to explain how much this changed me.
Like, my life became a blur after this.
No, but I'm sorry to interrupt, and I don't mean to discount this, but what specifically happened with your father and your mother?
So this was about, I would say like nine months after he moved back in, after they separated.
His whole sobriety thing ended.
And I know this night he had been drinking a lot.
And I remember specifically coming into their room about an hour before this incident happened.
And I was asking my mom about some...
We were going to go to an amusement park the next day.
And I was asking her if she could give one of my friends a ride.
And I just remember he gave me that same really cold, dark, evil look.
It was just like he looked at me like, just get out of here.
Like, I don't even want to see you.
And it was really scary.
And an hour later...
What I remember happening is I was playing Xbox in the other room with a gaming headset on so I couldn't hear anything that was going on.
And then my sister came running to my room crying saying we need to get out of the house right away.
Something happened and I was just really disoriented and confused.
We ran outside and my dad tried getting away in his car.
He was just leaving and shouting at us.
And then my mom told me that he attacked her.
And I remember her saying, too, that she tried calling out for help.
And I couldn't hear it at all.
And at the time, that really, really bothered me.
And I just felt like...
I mean, I'm sorry to interrupt, but what would you have done at the age of 13 with an enraged adult male?
I have no idea, honestly.
Well, I can tell you what you could have done is you could have got yourself fucking killed.
Yeah. I mean, that Xbox headset probably saved your life.
Yeah, I mean, this is just something I have.
Calling out for help? She invited this lunatic back into her house, back into her children's life?
This potential murderer back into her children's life?
And then she's what, calling for help from a 13-year-old boy?
Who brought him back?
Was it you? Did you invite him back?
No! She's calling for help?
Like a victim? She dated this guy.
She got engaged to this guy. She knew him for years.
She had three kids with him. She invited him back in.
I need help! God almighty.
Because I bet you she did a number on you.
Like, I can't believe you had those headphones on.
And if you hadn't had those headphones on, maybe you could have helped me.
Please tell me she didn't do that.
She didn't, like, go after it like that, but I mean, that's certainly how I felt when she told me that.
Well, she should have told you, no!
I'm very glad you had that headphone on, or those headphones on.
I'm very glad you had those headphones on, because otherwise you could have come in and you could have been really badly hurt or killed.
Did you ever hear that from your mom?
Um, nope. Mm-hmm.
Well, you should have. But of course, if she was capable of that...
She probably wouldn't have been in that relationship in the first place if she was capable of...
So how do you know he tried to kill her?
What happened?
Do you know? Because that's what he was charged with.
He was charged with attempted murder.
Was he strangling her?
Was he beating her? Do we know?
Yeah. I think it was both.
But I just know that my mom was really bruised after that and she got taken away in the ambulance and we had to stay with one of our neighbors that we barely knew and we were told by the police that we couldn't go back inside or we weren't allowed in our house and I just remember being really scared and confused and I remember I didn't want to be at their house and I When did you find out what your father was charged with?
I think it was...
I don't...
Honestly, I'm not quite sure when I found out all these details.
Like, this whole point from this whole incident in my life, I barely remember anything surrounding it.
I mean, I've locked out so much of my childhood as it is, but this particular part is just...
It's a whole year after this.
I barely remember it.
How did your sisters do with all of this?
Where are you in the birth order now?
I'm first. Right.
So, yeah, and then I have my three younger sisters.
Oh, four kids. Okay, you don't have to tell me their ages, but so you're the oldest.
I'll just say we're all close in age, but...
So she had a lot of kids with this lunatic, right?
Yeah. And I just, I want to pause on this headphone thing because I think this is a sticking point for you and it's important.
I just like, I want you to get these dominoes to understand that your mom, I assume she's good looking, right?
I mean, she really, she was definitely when she was younger.
Yeah, so she's very pretty, right?
Which is why she gets the pass and why she gets a lot of interest, I assume.
So she was very pretty, so she could add a pick of men, right?
Yeah. There were nice guys around.
There was solid, stable, healthy, positive, fun, responsible, non-strangly guys around, right?
Oh yeah. So she chose this guy.
She knew everything there was to know about him, I'm sure about that, within the first couple of dates.
She was crazy enough to be flattered by this obsession.
You said he was very controlling, right?
So she chooses to be with this guy.
She chooses to date this guy.
She chooses to get engaged.
She chooses to marry him.
She chooses to have four children with him.
She chooses to bring him back.
You know, she'd known him for 20 years.
She chooses to bring him back.
Let me tell you, I want you to understand not just that you're off the hook, but it's insane to think of it in any other way.
If you ever had the thought that the big problem with that 20-year process was that you were playing Xbox, I really want you to understand how insane that is.
That you had headphones on.
See, the problem is you have to worry about putting headphones on because the man your mom chose to be the father of her four children tried to kill her.
Now, you weren't responsible for your father.
You did not choose him.
You did not bring him back into the house.
She did. So the fact that you were having headphones on playing Xbox is not even on the list of a 10,000 bullet point list.
It's not even on the list of things that are a problem in this situation.
And I just, I need you to really get that and to understand that.
That the fact that you had your headphones on, well, actually I view as a positive.
But the fact that you had your headphones on and didn't hear any of her choking cries for help, that is not a problem.
That is not even remotely a problem.
And that's you white knighting for your mom.
I mean, I was saying that in the context of how I remember feeling at the time.
I know, but any sane human being should have talked you out of that immediately.
And released you from even that thought.
Because those thoughts, man, you've got to be careful.
You know, like we have these fields, these fertile fields of brain open to the sky.
We can't close it because, I mean, unless we go live in the woods, right?
So we have these loamy, rich, fecund, fertile, earthy fields open to the sky, and seeds are blowing over all the time, and we gotta prune and crop all the time, because a seed like this...
It was a problem. I was paying Xbox and I shouldn't have heard.
And that is a seed that if it sticks and takes root is devastating.
Or can be. So you've got to prune.
People got to prune all the time.
All the time. Now, you know when I'm talking about it that it makes no sense that you'd feel...
I mean, the fact that, of course, be mad at your dad and be mad at your mom.
But don't be mad at the headphone.
And don't feel guilt at all.
I mean, if I could snap my fingers, I'd have you wearing those headphones.
Because if you'd gone in, you saw that look that said, get out.
Right? What do you think would have happened if you'd gone back in?
I don't even... I have no idea.
I mean, I can't say I have no idea.
But I don't really want to...
No, and I am glad in hindsight that I wasn't put in that situation.
Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I also, exactly what you were talking about, too, that was a seed that was sown for a while.
I mean, it led me in...
I don't really want to talk about this too much, but I'll just say the relationship I had before this was basically with someone who was completely crazy.
The white knighting, the not giving responsibility, the letting myself get taken advantage of by a manipulative woman, all that stuff was totally present in that relationship.
I'm I can say for a fact now that that seed has been firmly uprooted.
Good. And the reason I go into this in such detail, sorry to interrupt Noah, is that it's not just you and me who's talking, but there's an audience out there, and I want to make sure that seed doesn't fall into their earth and take root as well.
All right, so let me ask you about your stepdad.
I mean, come on, if there was a girl, if there was a girl...
Who said, oh yeah, my father tried to kill my mother and was arrested for attempted murder.
Would that be a red flag for you?
Yeah, I have put a lot of thought into this, especially since listening to your show on why on earth my stepdad would have gotten involved in that situation where you have a single mom of four traumatized kids that are all in about teenage years.
And take on that responsibility.
I mean- When did he- I'm sorry to interrupt, but when did he- I really don't know why.
So you were 13. When did he come into the picture?
Not like probably six months after this happened.
So it was fast.
What? Yeah. Oh, come on, man.
And- No, no, no, no.
Come on. No, no, no. Come on. Come on.
Now that's when you became aware of him, so he may have been dating beforehand?
No, my mom told us the first night that she was going on a date with somebody.
I mean, yeah, she told us.
She's been like, well, it's six months since I was always scrambled to death by your dad, who I knew for 20 years, and he's going to go through a whole big trial and I'm going to have to guest call to testify and all this sort of shit.
But it's been six months.
I think I'm ready to date.
Was that the general idea?
Pretty much. I mean, it just...
This guy, I'm sorry, this guy wants to date a woman who six months ago was almost murdered by her husband.
Yeah, it's something that I really don't understand.
I mean, he has his whole history of dysfunctional relationships and...
I mean, it's something I just don't understand because I don't think it's, I mean, especially if, like, you were to talk to him and just sit, like, he's really rational.
He's, like, he's extremely smart, definitely really high IQ, very successful in his work life.
I mean, he's gone through a lot and overcome a lot of stuff.
But why couldn't he do better?
I just don't understand.
Hang on, hang on. Why couldn't he do better?
Well, I know for him, in his marriage before my mom, he was cheated on.
And he married literally the stereotypical...
Just like the worst case scenario, all the bad traits of a woman basically like who would sit at home and do nothing but gossip to her girlfriends about how bad their husbands were when he was there.
I mean, I know he put up with a lot of crap from women before, so I assume it has to do with that tendency.
How did your mom change in those six months?
Do you know? Did she go to therapy?
I mean, how did she change?
Or what was her... I guess you don't remember much of that time though, right?
Yeah, at that time, I mean, I can't directly speak from that time.
I mean, I can only speak from what I think about it now.
But I know she didn't do therapy.
I'm fairly certain of that because she was super against me doing therapy when I was doing that for a year.
And yeah, yeah, I mean, yeah, she just...
So your mother remains, if I understand this correctly, and correct me where I'm, of course, a stray now, but your mama remains, your mama, your mama remains addicted to lying and manipulating regarding your childhood.
Is that fair to say? Oh yeah, she likes to...
I mean, I did get some serious closure in the last year's conversation with her because it just clicked with me that she's never going to admit fault.
She's not going to do this and I'm not going to try anymore because every time I do, it just crushes me and I really fully...
I just truly understand that she's not going to...
But yeah, that's all she does.
She just says like, oh, I gave you a great childhood.
I did all these things for you.
Like when we used to stay at home, I used to take you kids out every day and do things.
And I made the best I could out of a bad situation without acknowledging that we were in that situation.
Yeah, I mean, women talk about bad things.
Husbands or bad boyfriends like it's just some fucking natural disaster.
There was no way for them to prevent it.
It's like it was a disease that she was born with or something.
Hurricane husband just came out of a clear blue sky and I just tried to help you kids and do the very best I could in this natural disaster which I had nothing to do with.
It's insane. So, Noah, help me understand this.
And I don't think that you're lying, but you're lying.
I don't think you're trying to lie, right?
But you've given me this whole story about how your mom and her stepdad have this great relationship, but your mom is still this pathological liar who takes no responsibility.
Well, here's the thing.
Like, the reason why I said on the ACA, no family love and support, because Before that, my mom, in a way, it was true in the way that she super overcompensated for the shitty environment that she put us in.
She gave me a lot of attention, especially when I was a kid.
We had a I had a really good bond.
It was kind of almost like a bond that she was lacking from my dad that she was trying to make with me.
It was probably not healthy looking back on it.
Do you think maybe you got promoted to little lord dad, little lord husband, as is often the case with eldest boys?
In a lot of ways, yeah.
I'm going to dress you up in a little suit and take you dancing.
When she married my stepdad, though...
That relationship completely disappeared.
She literally was compassionless when I was having serious problems.
When I was going through all this stuff, problems like serious depression, suicidality feelings when I was going through a lot of this stuff.
Basically, she had this super...
Like way too extreme tough love mantra.
Well, because she didn't need you anymore because she had a stepdad, right?
Yeah. Hang on, hang on, hang on.
Did your stepdad know that your mother was treating your suicidality with coldness?
Yeah, he was, I mean, my stepdad's ex-military.
I mean, he like has, he thought it was like the good thing to do is to be, I don't know.
I don't know. I don't want to seem like I'm going into all these details.
No, but you told me that it was very healthy, right?
I think their personal relationship is fairly healthy.
No, no, no.
Come on. Come on.
If she's a pathological liar, is cold-hearted towards her suicidal son, and takes no responsibility for her actions, tell me how the fuck that can be the foundation of a healthy relationship.
I'll just rephrase it this way because I think it's healthy relative to what I experienced, but it's definitely not because I think there's some mutual- Wait, wait, wait.
No, no, no, no. No, no.
Don't you start weaseling on me now.
I do not want to talk to your mom.
I want to talk to you. You said it was a healthy relationship.
And you wish he'd been around from the beginning.
And now you're saying, well, it's healthier than the guy who tried to murder my mom.
Okay, I'll agree with you on that one.
It's healthier than the guy who tried to murder your mom.
That still may be a long way from healthy.
I'm just... I mean, I really am...
From my personal experiences with them, I mean, they have...
It just feels like...
Literally, like, she took all the love and compassion that she used to feel towards us and poured it into him.
And indefinitely by, like, a real-time relationship standard, their relationship definitely can't be on the level of, like...
Come on, man, man.
God. Okay, Noah, you've got to understand this.
Okay. She needed you when your bio-father was around, so she attached to you, right?
Right. Yeah.
And then she needed another man to replace the provider who tried to kill her, so then she attached to your stepdad.
Now, once she had attached to your stepdad, she no longer needed her attachment to you, so she discarded it.
This is not love.
It's just base need.
I need this person. I'll be friendly to this person.
Oh, fuck, I don't need this person anymore.
I'll go be friendly to this person.
Fuck this person. This person now has what I need.
I'm going to attach and be nice to them.
No principle. No morals.
No ethics. No universals.
You're just something that she needed for her own preferences, regardless of what's healthy for you.
So she used you up, and then when she had someone else new to use, she tossed you aside.
I think you're right on this in a lot of ways because I'm thinking back and a lot of these things that I'm saying are...
It's definitely part of my past that I haven't gone through to really filter out what is my experience and what are the things that I was told about my experience because a lot of these things are...
Okay, let's get to the core of the matter because I'm basically listening to your dick, right?
Your dick is on strike, right?
Yeah, right now it is.
And I can tell you why I think your dick is on strike.
Why has the bishop laid down his arms?
Well, for the simple reason that if you define a healthy relationship as what your mom and stepfather had, then that's where you're heading.
Does your dick want to go there?
Your dick knows the truth. Your dick knows everything I'm saying.
Your balls know the truth. Your sperm know the truth.
Your gut, your second brain, knows the truth.
You're heading towards a relationship where you get to be the stepfather and your girlfriend gets to be your mom because you define that as healthy.
And your dick says what to that?
I'm just really trying to process everything that Okay, no, no, stop processing.
No, put your hands on your nets, give them a squeeze, remind yourself that they're there, and talk from the gut here.
This is the real-time relationship stuff.
Talk from the gut. You're trying to analyze, right?
If you end up like your stepdad and your mom, which you defined as healthy, if you end up like that, you're going to have a child, and you're going to treat...
Your child, like your mom and stepdad, treated you when you were suicidal, which I assume is, as you say, coarsely and brutally and coldly.
Do you want to reproduce what was done to you when you were suicidal in the future?
Do you want to be that kind of parent, Noah?
Well, I'm already 100% certain I won't be that kind of parent.
Yeah! No, no, no, no, no.
Listen, I'm pretty certain you won't be too, but you sure as hell are not helping yourself by defining what your mom and stepdad have as healthy.
Because what is healthy, we want to emulate.
We see a guy who's got a physique, the viper back, the narrow waist, the abs, and we say, well, what are you eating?
What are you drinking? What exercises do you do?
Because that's good, that's healthy, that's desirable.
What we admire, we emulate.
What we define as healthy, we become.
So you are laying train tracks from where you are to where your stepdad and your mom are.
Because that's what you call healthy.
I mean, you wouldn't want an unhealthy relationship, right?
So you've got to do what they're doing.
So do you want to be treating your children the way your mom and stepdad treated you when you were depressed and suicidal?
Well, absolutely not.
Can I ask a question real quick?
Because I think I might be confused about something.
When you're talking about my parents' relationship, are you also talking about that in the context of, like, my whole family?
Two, because when you're talking about how they treated me, when I was picturing, when I was trying to define the nature of the relationship, I wasn't thinking about it in that way at all.
Because if that's the case, then they absolutely do not have a healthy relationship because they don't have a balance at all.
It's not healthy. What do you mean, don't have a balance?
What does that mean? That was putting it way too lightly.
You think? Yeah, definitely.
I'm thinking too much about that.
Okay, this is just, I'm sorry, this is just syllables to distract me, and I'm not going to let that happen.
So, Noah, what does your girlfriend think of your stepfather?
She's intimidated by him.
She thinks that he's really nice, but she doesn't put him in the same category as my mom.
Yeah, she doesn't dislike him.
How long ago, Noah, were you suicidal?
A couple years ago.
Sort of mid to late teens?
More early, like when I was starting high school.
Yeah, of course. I mean, you had a temptation to complete the death sentence your father had on you, right?
Yeah. So why...
Is your girlfriend circling this gene pool?
Why is she circling this family?
Again, and this is tough, because I don't want to say, well, nobody should date you who's healthy.
I'm just trying to sort of understand.
If she was here, we could ask her directly, but she's not, unless she is, in which case throw her on.
Why? I mean, your entire gene pool has a lot of red flags, and again, so does mine.
So please, I'm not trying to, you know, but I've gone through years of therapy, and I didn't get married until I was older, and right, so you're real close to the furnace of your history, and you're still enmeshed in a dysfunctional family to some degree or another, right?
So why is she there?
What do you have to offer her that makes, like, what are the strengths and virtues that you have to offer her that make up for these More flags than a Chinese Communist parade, more red flags, right?
Well, the first thing I want to say about that is, well, I think that she isn't quite as concerned about that is because of the way that I talk to her about how I feel about the way they've treated me and how I give them full responsibility for all the things that I was put through and all the things I didn't get.
How I really distance myself from that behavior.
And if...
As you're talking...
No, no, no. This is all...
Sorry. So basically you're saying that you're manipulating her.
And she's falling for it.
I'm not manipulating her. What I was about to say was...
As you're talking, I feel like I've come across in a way, and I don't mean to say come across in a way like I'm trying to portray myself in a way, but I feel like the way I was talking about my past, it may seem like I'm a lot closer to it, or not necessarily closer to it, but I'm still entrenched in this family unit.
I still have a lot going on with it.
I don't really talk to my parents at all anymore that I moved out.
I don't No, no, but you were talking about the possibility, that you were open to the possibility that your mom would be around your kids, right?
I mean, yeah. You don't think women understand that they're marrying into an entire gene pool?
Okay, let me ask you this, Noah.
How good looking are you from 1 to 10?
I'd say like an 8 or an 8.5.
And your girlfriend? Okay, so for, I think that she's a 10, but there's something, I do have a particular type that isn't as rare.
I'm into bigger girls.
Are we talking full on chubby chaser here or what?
Yeah, absolutely. And how heavy is your girlfriend?
I mean, she's in the 200s, but...
And how tall is she? Five, six or something.
So she's... Yeah. What, like 120 pounds overweight?
Somewhere around there, yeah.
And why do you think that's attractive to you?
I've been asking myself the same question since I hit puberty.
It's something I literally have no control over.
It's something I... Tried to change about myself.
You have control over it. Okay, question.
What's your mom's weight? My mom is very healthy.
So she's thin? Yeah.
So you're looking for something different.
Because skinny women are crazy.
I mean, I just don't have any sexual attraction towards skinny women though at all.
You don't have any sexual attraction to your girlfriend?
I still see her.
It's very physically attractive. This is why I think it's a mental block because I still really look at her and I could really appreciate that and I really like what I'm looking at.
It's just something's not connecting in my head when it comes to the thought of action.
Something is going wrong in my head there.
Let me ask you this.
Let me ask you this. How does a very healthy and happy family let a daughter end up 120 pounds overweight?
which is devastating to her health, devastating to her long-term happiness, interferes with her fertility, and craters her sexual market value.
I mean, this is something I've asked her a lot of times, too.
And she says what? Well, with her, her initial reaction is to blame herself and say that it was her fault because she used to take food and she wasn't supposed to.
Oh, so we have two young people who, to some degree or another, are really white knighting their parents, right?
You less, but she more.
She is a lot worse than me.
That's something that I've talked to her about.
Like endlessly about...
But then, hang on, so wait, she white knights her parents?
She doesn't give them responsibility and they don't take responsibility?
I mean, I don't know if they would...
I would assume they don't take responsibility because that's probably where she learned it from, but she tends...
Yeah, she...
So we have two sets of...
Sorry, I hate to keep interrupting you, but we'd be going for an hour and a half and I need to keep it moving.
Yeah, I understand. So, and I'm not trying to rush you.
I just really want to be efficient here.
So we have two sets of parents who don't take responsibility and demand that their children not give them responsibility, right?
We have a girl who is, I guess, close to double her healthy weight.
And you're trying to sell me, at least you did, that your mom and stepmom have a healthy relationship and her family is just plain wonderful.
Very healthy. Super healthy.
Except that the parents don't take relationship and the daughter is obese.
Sorry, the parents don't take responsibility and the daughter is morbidly obese.
Tell me how that fits into the category of healthy.
Well, one thing I was...
When I was talking about her family, like I did say that I don't think that she would have gotten a zero in the ACE score.
It wasn't like... Oh, no, no, no, no, no, no.
Listen, if you're going to stop bullshitting me now, you portrayed them as very healthy.
Okay, so if you want to start withdrawing from all of that now, there's not enough time in the universe for me to continue this, because you need to be really frank.
You were selling her family, and you'll hear this back when you listen to it.
I make notes. I listen very carefully.
You sold her family as wonderful, as incredibly close.
She loves to do things with her family.
It's very healthy and blah, blah, blah, right?
Yeah. Your dick knows better.
Your dick doesn't want more of the past.
Your dick doesn't want a repetition.
And if you are blind to dysfunction, you are in significant danger.
I'm seriously about this.
What if this woman were to become pregnant?
What then? I mean, I'm just...
I feel like...
Okay, so the real-time relationships response that I'm having here, the way I'm really feeling right now is I don't feel like I would be that upset about that.
Or, I mean, I think it would be very...
Horrible and untimely.
But, like, when I speak about her family, like, everything I did say was true.
Like, they're very close.
And I did... Oh my god, man!
Man, stop it! If they're close, why is their daughter morbidly obese?
Do they not think she's fat?
Do they not talk about her being fat?
Did they not notice her getting fat?
Do they not feed her?
Are they not responsible for her as parents?
When did she first become obese?
Was she a kid? Yeah.
Okay. So the parents fucked up badly and allowed and enforced and encouraged and enabled their daughter to become morbidly obese.
Stop trying to sell me this as some wonderful, functional, great family.
And if you...
Because...
I hate to be this frank, but morbidly obese women, not great moms as a whole.
Right? There are fertility issues.
There are body hygiene issues.
It's tough to clean all those rolls of fat.
There are self-esteem issues.
There are shame issues.
Because you've got some kid whose mom comes waddling into the play center.
How do you think that kid feels about his mom?
Oh, I'm so proud.
And what if she gains even more weight from being pregnant?
Then she's going to have bone issues.
She's going to have joint issues.
She's at risk for a wide variety of cardiovascular illnesses.
She's more prone to cancer.
And she can't play with her children because she's too fat.
And she's going to pass genes along to your children that they're more likely to be very fat.
Or just fat.
Like, I'm sorry, this is the science.
These are the facts.
And then you sit there and you say, well, you know, it wouldn't be ideal, but I'd be fine if she got pregnant.
Normally I say to guys, stop listening to your dick.
I'm saying to you, stop listening to your dick.
Because you've not processed any of this stuff, right?
Well, there's one thing that I was thinking about when we're talking, and I think this is really interesting because all these things that you're saying are things that I've talked about with her and things I know, and what's interesting to me is why I didn't bring it up earlier.
This is stuff that... Because you were telling me this whole thing about, I say to you, why is she interested in you, even though...
Your mom was almost killed by your dad and all this other red flags, and now we know why.
Because she's morbidly obese, and you're a nine.
Oh, and you said that your stepfather was very successful, which means that there's going to be lots of resources in the family, right?
So you're a lean, healthy, physically healthy nine with a rich family.
And she's morbidly obese.
So we know why she's willing to overlook the minor matter of a murderous father.
She doesn't have any real options.
She has to date down to the point where she's willing to troll a criminal family because she's fat.
And you don't feel that you can get a woman of normal weight.
And because of your family and all of this kind of stuff, and I'm not...
You can, but you need to have a lot, I think, more self-knowledge.
And I'm not saying you're lying, but the honesty that we're trying to achieve in this conversation is not quite there, right?
No, and I'm just feeling really disappointed in myself right now about that.
No, no, no. Don't start self-attacking.
No, no, no, no, no. Don't put those Xbox headphones back on, my friend.
Don't you start self-attacking right now.
Don't punish yourself for achieving a truth.
It's just upsetting me because this is all stuff I've known.
This is stuff I've talked to her about.
I've asked her those questions.
I've told her, I'm like, you know this is your parents' fault, right?
Is it your fault when you're eight?
Like, is it your fault?
She's like, well, I'd go sneak off food.
I'm like, well, why are they leaving all this food out?
Why are they leaving out stuff like this?
Why is she sneaking food?
That's a whole other set of questions.
Why is she comfort eating?
Why is she not exercising?
And here's the thing, too.
You're attracted to her because she's fat.
So she'll never lose the weight, right?
Right. This is a whole other thing that troubles me so much.
You can't tell her, I'm attracted to you because you're fat.
Now I want you to lose weight.
That's not going to happen, right? It's like a fetish.
This is a whole other thing that really messes with my head a lot.
There's a huge problem with this, whereas I literally have zero attraction.
You could show me all the supermodels in the world.
I literally look at them the same way I look at a guy.
Yeah, but, Noah, Noah, okay, you know enough about real-time relationships, right?
This is my book and all. People can get it, freedomandradio.com slash free.
But look, you need a good woman.
You don't need a thin woman, you don't need a pretty woman, you don't need a fat woman, you need a good woman.
An honest woman, an open woman, a connected woman, a virtuous woman.
That's what you need. Like, sorry, you've listened to this show.
You can't trawl the trailer park anymore.
Sorry. You can't send in the cocknet to pick up the detritus from the bottom of the ocean.
I mean, once you start listening to the show and you understand virtue and love and our devotion to the good, you can't go back.
And this is why your cock listens to the show, but you don't.
Because your cock is like, no!
No! Do not want!
Do not want! Right?
This is not what we want.
We need to do better.
You need to do better. And you are aiming very low.
Sorry to put it this way.
And it's not just because she's fat.
I mean, it's the whole thing. And the fact that you're not...
Really talking about this stuff.
So you say, well, I'm not that attracted to skinny women.
You're still just looking on the outside.
Your cock is saying, give me a virtuous vagina.
And I'll bury myself in hilt deep like outtakes from Sword of Thrones.
Wait, Game of Thrones.
Oh, that was almost good. And your penis wants a virtuous cave to nestle in.
And there's not one to be seen.
And listen, hot skinny women, they have their own issues as well.
Sometimes. Quite often.
And so the question is, where do you want to be in 10 years?
And where do you want to be in 20 years?
Let's say you stay with this girlfriend.
She's not going to lose the weight.
And even if she does lose the weight, she's been fat for so long that she's going to have the weight skin hanging off her like a curtain way too long for the ground.
You can look at these pictures online.
People get mad at me when I say this.
Well, I lost some weight and it's okay, fine.
If you just gained weight a little bit, you lose the weight and so on.
But if you've been, you said she was eight and overweight, it's okay.
If you've been overweight since you were eight, your skin has stretched.
Your skin has stretched. And sure, women, they get pregnant and then it pumps back down, but that's just like three or four months of strain on the skin, right?
But if she's been a decade or more overweight, the skin is stretched, in my humble opinion.
I'm no doctor. I'm just telling you what I think and the reality.
So you want to go look at these...
There's a reason they don't show you the weight loss people in bikinis.
They're always in these tops, these floppy tops.
And you can see this.
This woman, she lifted up her top and she'd lost like 100 pounds or whatever, which is maybe even less than what your girlfriend needs to lose.
And this skin was just like hanging off her, like down halfway through her thighs.
She said, oh, well, you can go and get surgery for that too.
It's like, okay, great. A lot of scars.
And God forbid you ever gain weight again, right?
So, what are you doing?
10 years, 20 years from now, what are you doing?
You won't be able to play sports with your girlfriend or your wife because she's going to be fat and you're not.
You won't be able to go skiing. You won't be able to play tennis.
You won't be able to go trampolining and she won't be able to play with the kids.
And the kids are going to be embarrassed of her.
And the kids, you're going to have to fight with the kids' genetics passed on from the mom.
You're going to have to fight them all the time.
Eat less, exercise more, eat less, exercise more, because they're going to have a tendency to get fat themselves genetically.
Is that what you want?
Can't you do better?
I... Some of those things I really don't know how I'm going to avoid because I've thought about this so much.
It's like a square circle to me when it comes to who I'm attracted to.
But you're not attracted to her.
her.
That's my point.
You might say you are, but you're not because your penis is on strike.
Because your penis can look down through the tunnel of time.
You're one of the rare young men whose penis can do that.
Time traveler. It's like Doc, right?
I mean, your penis can look down and see.
See, here's the thing too. You're a smart guy.
You say that your stepdad's very successful.
So you're, you know, probably going to be very successful yourself.
It means you're going to make a lot of money.
Which means that at some point you're going to look at your fat wife and you're going to say, well, I've outgrown her.
Sorry. I've outgrown her.
And I regret all this now.
And then what happens? Well, if you don't have kids, you get divorced, and she rapes you through the court system, which leaves you shattered, twitchy, broken, nervous, and your sexual market value, despite the remnants of your wealth craters.
Or you have some kids with her, and you outgrow her.
And then what happens? Well, She might take your kids.
She might accuse you of stuff.
There's pathology buried beneath obesity, in my opinion, quite often.
And that will come out.
Because when she's fatter and older and has kids, and you divorce her, what's her sexual market value going to be?
Very low. Which means that she's going to be enraged at you Because she's not going to have anybody waiting in the wings.
Nobody's going to want to date her.
She's going to take all of that hatred and frustration and loneliness out on you and out on your kids.
And then what?
You know, if one parent, and I'm not saying this is true, it's just possibility.
If one parent ends up, the mom often decides to drip the poison Iago venom into the ears of the children about their father.
Well, you can't fight that.
Then you end up alienated from your kids, broke, in baby jail for 20 years, lonely.
And I think your penis sees that future quite clearly, if it's to come.
I don't know, maybe...
I just don't have enough experience with girls or something.
I just have, like to me, that just seems like such an impossibility with the way her personality is and the way that, I mean, there's only so much I can go into with the amount of time that we have to talk about.
Wait, how long have you been going out? Two and a half years.
And this is, I mean...
Does she know about your desire to have her lose weight?
Oh yeah, we've talked about that early on, but she is right now actually.
She's already lost like 30 pounds.
We've talked about it a lot.
Hang on. You like him fat, but she's lost weight.
Yeah, it's not like...
With how it is right now, I've thought about it a lot.
The thing that always freaks me out in my head is kind of like...
I picture when I'm a kid, when I was a kid, like watching The Biggest Loser and just that dramatic change, you know, like the before and after.
And I had a realization that in reality, that's not how it is.
It's a really gradual, really gradual thing.
And the changes don't happen all at once.
Yeah, okay. You don't need to give me a lecture on weight loss.
I understand all of that. But do you know the...
Do you know the fail rate for weight loss?
I do. I know it's like 96% or something.
And of course, women as well.
If a woman's fat going into pregnancy, oh my God, are you kidding me?
I mean, it's tough enough.
That includes men, right?
right?
It's tough enough for men.
Men don't get pregnant.
I mean, the reason I call or wrote in Steph was because this is a relationship that, I mean, this, I mean, the reason I call or wrote in Steph was because this is a relationship that, I mean, this, I mean, we've gone I bet
This is something that right now I am really committed to and it's something that is really important to me.
And there are a lot of virtues that she does show.
There's a lot of really positive signs that I see.
Oh my god, dude. Okay, I get that you're not going to listen to this part, so I'm just going to say it mostly for the audience.
All right. So, this is a woman who defends her family that made her fat.
That's all I need to know. I'm sorry.
I mean, this sounds abrupt.
This may sound blunt. This may sound judgmental.
But she's defending the family.
Let me ask you this. Are her parents overweight?
Um, her dad is, but not her mom.
Ah, and does her dad make decent money?
Yeah, they're way better off than my family.
Okay, so that's interesting.
So the mom knows that being slender is important to get and keep a rich man, but she lets her daughter get fat.
Come on, I mean...
And she's with you, who still has a long road to go in terms of self-knowledge.
And I say that not because I want you to feel bad, but because I want you to feel good.
Because if you were at the pinnacle of self-knowledge and this is where your life was, in a relationship with a morbidly obese woman and unable to have an erection with her, if you were at the peak of self-knowledge and this is where you were, there'd be nowhere to go.
That would be despair, right?
But we have, she has a dysfunctional family.
Like, I'm sorry, if you let your kids get fat, that's a dysfunctional family.
And if she's defending her dysfunctional family, and she's not granting her parents any responsibility, and her parents won't take responsibility for any of this, that is a dysfunctional family.
I don't care if she can druggle shrunken heads.
That's the reality. That there's an unreality to the family.
And I think you've had enough unreality.
I think your cock has definitely had enough unreality.
Enough misrepresentation.
Enough white knighting. Enough avoidance of parental responsibility.
Enough of covering up family wounds.
Enough of wallpapering over massive dysfunctions.
Aren't you sick of it? Don't you just want the basic, honest truth in your life?
The good and the bad.
You can say that your parents did some terrible things.
And if you're honest about it, and if they're honest about it, the relationship can grow from there.
But you've got all of this covering up stuff and white knighting stuff and saying things are good when there's still big problems.
And come on.
You lived that growing up.
I mean, you don't want that for the rest of your life, do you?
Trying to battle with people to get them to say that two and two make four.
Hey, that's my job. Let's get paid for it.
You know what? I mean, I have a lot of ideas of why I've done some of the things I've done in this conversation.
And I really think I just need to sit back and listen to this conversation.
And really, I do know I have a long way to go in terms of self-knowledge.
As do I. Don't get me wrong.
It never ends. I still have that as well.
But go ahead. I mean, I really do know exactly what you're getting at and what you're saying.
I think the reason why I am so resistant to it is because of how emotionally invested I am in my current situation right now.
And, I mean, being honest right now, and I know saying that's kind of redundant because I have been being honest, but...
Right now, this isn't going to get through to me just on the phone right now.
It's just something I do have to listen back to and think about it a lot.
Like I said, I do know exactly what you're saying and what you're getting to intellectually.
It makes perfect sense to me.
I completely understand it and I agree.
It's just something that emotionally...
I'm going to be, I'm too resistant towards right now.
And that's something that I do have enough self-knowledge to realize right now.
No, and I respect that.
And I appreciate you saying that.
And that's why I said, I don't think you're able to listen right now to this, which is fine.
Perfectly fine. I mean, you've done fantastic work.
Are you thinking, I know that you were in therapy for a year.
Are you thinking of doing that again?
Absolutely. I was actually, one of the hardest things that happened was when I was, I found a Perfect therapist or he's a psychologist but I mean he really understood me really well understood where I was coming from understood why I did things the way I did we had great conversations and then he had some serious medical issues and had to retire and It came at the worst time,
too, because we were in the middle of an IQ test, and I only found out my verbal score and didn't get that finished.
And that was something I really wanted to do, and it was just the whole timing of everything.
It was just a really abrupt ending, but it is something I am looking into.
It's more than looking into.
I mean, I'm making calls and stuff, but it's something I'm going to get back into.
Okay, good. Well, Noah, I really appreciate the conversation.
I know it was a challenge.
It was a challenge, but I hope I was helpful, and I really, really appreciate your honesty and openness about these issues.
Thank you. And before I go, I just wanted to say that, or I just wanted to offer thanks to, Or more than a thanks.
Like, finding your show has been the best thing that's ever, one of the best things, if not the best thing that's ever happened to me, because before finding your show, my mind was muddled with just a complete lack of clarity and understanding of things in this world, and Through you, introducing the ideas of philosophy of reason and evidence, empiricism through the behaviors of other people, the idea of the voluntary family.
I mean, all these ideas you've talked about on your shows and your call-in shows.
I've really started to absorb them.
Because of that, I really feel like that's given me a really strong chance.
Not just a chance. It's given me the window.
It's given me the way out of my past.
It's given me the freedom to understand that I'm not going to replicate my cast because of these reasons why.
And this is how I'm going to do it.
And the stuff you've done on parenting too, I mean, oh my gosh.
I mean, I did a school project on peaceful parenting because of you.
And I mean, there's just nothing I can really say right now that would really express how much gratitude I have towards you and what you've done for me.
And I know thousands and thousands of other people.
But your work is reaching.
It's reaching really well.
And it's really reached me.
And I just really want to thank you.
Well, thank you, Noah. That's wonderful to hear.
And to return the compliment fairly, you are an amazing person.
I mean, not just for 20.
20 is incredible. Like, your level of self-knowledge, your capacity to navigate these challenging conversations is incredible, wonderful, fantastic.
You should be enormously proud and pleased at what you've done.
And your courage in bringing up these difficult topics is, you know, people sort of listen into this.
They don't know. It's tough to be in these conversations.
And it is a challenge for both of us.
I like doing these shows because it remains a challenge for me, and I know it's a challenge for listeners.
So you are going to have a great life.
You are going to have a wonderful life, and you are going to be a great husband and a great father and a great friend.
And a very positive influence in the world.
I'm absolutely certain of that.
And I wouldn't have spent two hours otherwise.
So I think take a big bow and pat yourself on the back.
You have a great future ahead of you.
And you have a magnificently sensitive heart and mind as it stands.
Well, thank you, Stefan.
And that great future that I know I'm going to have is a large part due to you.
So thank you.
Thank you so much, man. Stay in touch, all right?
All right. Thank you so much.
Alright, up next we have Sabina.
Sabina wrote in and said, What sort of incentive or event do you think is required for people, women in particular, to embrace the concept of having more children and being okay with either not having a career or delaying it until her children are in school, like I did?
There are logistical-slash-timing issues, but the first priority should be to have children and raise them, and everything else should be secondary.
That's from Sabina. Sabina or Sabine?
Sabine? It's Sabina.
Sabina. Okay. He's not silent because it's German.
Aha! All right.
Well, thanks for calling in.
I appreciate you making time on a Sunday after.
And do you want to talk a little bit about your own history with kids or not kids or how it went?
Oh, yes. But I listened to everything that Noah had to say, and I'm really hoping that his situation is the exception, not the norm, because what I want to say is that I think we need to have more children, but not if they're going to be raised in that sort of environment.
So like I say, I hope it's an exception, not a rule.
And so, I think, well, I have, no, not I think, I know.
I know I have five children that I know of.
And, yes, I say that too.
I got some kids moan out there somewhere.
It's an old red fox line, but all right.
A woman has to know, obviously.
So, and the eldest is 29 and the youngest is 18.
So, there's quite an age gap and I even cheated and had to have a set of twins in there.
But, and I, they, they weren't all on purpose.
But in the end, um, I, it is.
I'm sure you'd figured out how this happens.
So what do you mean? People say that.
There I was washing the dishes.
Blop. Anyway, no, what do you mean?
No, it's been irony is that I actually had trouble conceiving and I had to take a fertility drug, but, and I think that's why I ended up with twins.
Cause I don't think I would have had them on my own, but the joys of measuring the FSH levels.
Did that. Yes, did that.
So, in the end, as I was thinking about what I wanted to ask, and Michael was helping me, I guess, spit it out into an actual philosophical question, I said that it's something that I'm the most proud of,
and I don't know if that's because I haven't really done much of Like, I've worked and everything, and I've had a quote-unquote career, but there's nothing that comes close to how proud I am of being a mom to five children.
And I guess I would like other women to feel what I feel about that.
And in my emails to Michael, I was talking about how this all started...
Because of the way I feel about feminism, and I call myself an anti-feminist.
And in watching your videos, I've stumbled across a whole bunch of other ones, and one very recently by the roaming millennial, a young woman who talks about the pitfalls of feminism, and then she mentioned the second and third wave of feminism, which I I investigated and it just all got very complicated and I wondered how intelligent or how much education do you have to have to be able to call something bullshit?
You don't have to be a farmer to know it stinks by the cow flop.
There you go. Yeah, so I don't have a university degree.
I have a journalism diploma, which was two years.
And I guess...
I'm very fascinated by many things, and I try to understand it, but when it gets to the point where it's just piling stuff on, I don't understand it anymore.
And I think that's why I really like listening to you, Stefan.
Is that how you say it? Stefan?
Stefan? Yeah, Stefan is fine.
I'm not too fussy either way.
Oh, I'm not too fussy either, except I draw the line at Sabrina.
Right. Yes.
Okay, there we go. Because you boil everything down to something that makes sense in layman's terms, like everyday rubber meets the road terms, without talking in the clouds and just like winding around and weaving around to the point where none of it makes sense anymore.
Well, and just to sort of point that out, there's an old saying that has influenced me a lot, which is, Smart people complicate, but really smart people simplify.
Okay, well then I must be really smart.
No, and I've really, really aimed at that.
I mean, some of the stuff I talk about is some of the most complex stuff known to man.
If I can't break it down into a manner that people can understand, philosophy is for the people, it's not for the elites.
Philosophy is for the people, not for the elites.
And it should be.
Yes, of course. We can't hold people morally responsible if we can't explain basic ethics to people.
Correct. I was just thinking about it because I watched Terminator 2 the other day.
And I remember this when I watched this when I was young.
I don't know when it came out, like in the 80s, I guess.
And when I was in my 20s, I guess I saw it.
And there was a great scene. There's a great scene in it where...
The kid says to the Terminator, you can't kill people.
And he's like, why?
And he says, you just can't.
Why? And I remember watching that as a kid, or I guess in my 20s, I remember watching that thinking like...
It's actually a pretty fucking great question.
Why? Why can't you kill people, you know?
And once we lost Christianity's answer to that, which is, well, it's a commandment from God that thou shalt kill, all the stuff I talked about with Dennis Prager from PragerU, I'm like, okay, so that was sort of the beginning.
It wasn't the very beginning, but it was one of the origins of universally preferable behavior, my rational proof of secular ethics, which is like, okay, I can't answer the Terminator.
You just can't kill people.
Why? Well, you just can't.
That's all you could say. You just had to escalate emotionally.
Why? Because it's wrong.
And I think we're born with knowledge, or at least I've heard and I agree that we're born with a knowledge of what's right and what's wrong.
And when we get really uncomfortable with something And we ignore it, then that's the same as doing something that's wrong.
But the problem is, of course, some people really like killing.
That's the challenge, right?
You good people, like this is what I've always said, like ethics is like diet books for thin people.
Because if you're sensitive and care about other people, you'll read a book on ethics, but you don't want to kill people anyway.
It's the people who want to kill people, the sadists and the psychopaths and the sociopaths and the...
The generals. And it's those people really, really seem to be keen on killing people.
They don't read a whole lot of book on ethics.
So anyway, let's not get dragged.
I just wanted to point that out.
Indeed. So I had also thought that about feminism, that women have been sold a bill of goods by the feminist movement.
And in the process, it's destroyed what it means to be a woman, which in turn has weakened society.
And I've heard the term baby-making machine in a derogatory sense, and I don't see why that's derogatory, because we have to get babies from somewhere, and why would feminists want to not glorify something?
That's the one thing, the one thing they can do that a man can't touch, and yet they disregard it.
Like, I don't know if they all disregard it, but When I grew up in the 70s, it was a woman can do whatever a man can do, only better.
And my thought then was, who cares?
I was raised by my dad, obviously, and my mom.
And my parents came from Germany after the war.
My dad was 17 years older than my mom, and he was in the Second World War.
And I remember when I was 17, having the...
An extremely large argument with my dad about men and women.
This, I think, was at the height of the 70s anyway, of the feminist movement.
And I got, you know, sucked into it.
And my argument to my dad was that men and women are the same.
Because that's what I thought feminism was all about.
We're the same. So therefore, we're just as good as each other and we're...
And I mean, I still think that we're just as good each other, but I realize that we're not the same.
We're completely different.
And my dad's argument was that men and women are wired.
Their brains are wired differently.
He said they have a different mentality.
And I vehemently argued with him.
And of course, he was right, as most parents are when you're only 17.
But I just really would like us to get to the point in our evolution, perhaps once again, Like, go back to the 50s and where, like, one example that I was thinking of was our daughters live in a house that was built in 1956.
And one of the things that I noticed right away, and I don't know why I noticed it, but on each side of the cupboard that's underneath the sink where most people put their garbage and their cleaning products are two skinny cupboards.
And they're really skinny, like they're only about four inches wide.
And I realized right away, like most people think, well, what can you fit in there?
And I thought, cookie sheets!
That's where the cookie sheets go.
And then I remembered that, and then I thought that that's what women in the 50s did, was they spent a lot of time baking and making cookies.
And kids would come home from school and they'd smell...
You know cinnamon buns or something and then you have that snack and I don't know clearly listening to your show I have a very rosy picture of what a family should be like and I guess I would like to believe maybe I'm being naive even though I'm not a child I do have a tendency to maybe be overly optimistic but My dad always said,
in spite of what he'd seen in the war and everything, he always told me that there will always be more good people than bad.
And then it's better to be optimistic than pessimistic.
So I have a vision of taking the good things from the 50s and the 60s, when I grew up in the 70s, where divorce was unusual.
Moms stayed home to raise the kids and dads went out and worked.
And I know that they're like, and Michael in the introduction said about the logistical issues because women, of course, run out of time to have children.
And maybe as we evolve as humans, women will get more time because men can have children anytime, really.
And I guess if anything would be unfair, I think that would be it.
Because women can and should have careers if they want, and women intellectually have a lot to offer, etc.
But, you know, eventually you run out of time with having children.
And it makes me sad to think that there's some women that, and I've spoken to them, Where they get to be in their mid to late 30s and they decide, okay, I'm ready.
And then they can't get pregnant.
Or they can't get a quality man.
Yeah, the ones that I... Talk to, like, they're in a, they are married, it's their maybe second marriage, and the fellow has kids from a previous, and it's not like I know many of them, but I relate to them because I, and I wish for them,
I wish they could have kids because I know how much I got out of my kids, like, and I'm not going to pretend to say, oh, it was easy, like, I remember After I had our twins, and I was so excited.
Like, I don't think there's anything that makes a woman feel more powerful, like super cool, like superhuman, than giving birth.
Like, it is just the most amazing experience that anybody could...
I remember years ago with friends who were parents watching with their children the Spice Girls movie.
Yes, I like that movie.
They're all talking about girl power, girl power.
And then a woman gives birth and they hold up the baby and one of them says, now that's what I call girl power.
And it's like, that's true.
I remember being quite moved and emotional by that rather silly film.
And that moment was quite powerful for me.
Oh, well, that's not how...
That's a really good observation as all your observations are.
But I was thinking along the lines, like, my daughters were very fascinated by a show that was on TV. I don't know if it's still on.
It was called A Birth Story.
And they would have births, like whether they'd be a natural birth or a C-section or whatever.
And they would say, oh my god, I never want to do that.
That's so awful.
And I said, well, childbirth isn't something you can do from the outside in.
It's the inside out.
And it's completely different.
Watching somebody give birth, especially if you've never had a child, is very traumatic.
I would never recommend that to a girl to watch somebody give birth before they've actually done it themselves.
And I guess I'm wondering, going back to...
I am distracting myself.
What do you think needs to happen for us to...
Go back to a time when women did that, and they celebrated it, and it was glorified.
Women get glorified for so many things nowadays, which is good, and I'm not saying they shouldn't be, but to the exclusion of our purpose.
Yeah, no, I mean, there's a lot in what you say.
And the reason why women have gotten pretty lazy as far as family life goes, as a whole, tons of exceptions, but is because it's a Soviet factory.
You know, if you get paid whether or not you work, you're not going to work.
And women get paid whether or not they're productive in the family, whether or not they're productive in the household, whether or not they raise children.
Why did people used to raise a clutch of kids?
Well, because they needed someone to take care of them in their old age often, right?
So you'd spend your money on your kids.
Oh, that's why I did. Sorry?
That's why I did it.
Right. And so you'll have, and I don't just mean money, right?
But just having people around. You know, when you get old, nobody cares about you.
If you're single, right?
You're just some old person tottering your way over to the drugstore for seniors Thursday.
Nobody cares. Nobody cares.
But if you have kids, they care, right?
So when your sexual market value is gone, when your productive life is gone, when you, you know, who cares about you?
And, you know, when your parents have died, and maybe your siblings are a long way away, or maybe they're dead.
And we know all of this sort of stuff, like the really lonely old people in the old age home.
Nobody comes to visit.
And, you know, if you're old, your partner can die too, or your partner can leave you or whatever, right?
So you just, it's a way of ensuring that the last 20 years of your life, you don't get progressively more senile from lack of attention, lack of interaction, and have this like lonely dealing with health issues, facing mortality.
I mean, it's a pretty grim situation.
to be alone when you're old.
So people have kids partly for that and also partly because – and also people used to treat their kids better.
They used to treat their kids better because they wanted their kids to stick around.
Now, like why are people so sensitive to the voluntary family?
Because families kind of turn to crap.
Women dumping their kids in daycare, men traveling, and they're being raised by peers and video games and all that.
I mean, so people haven't invested that much into their kids.
So they don't want anyone coming along and saying, well, you know, you got to treat your parents with fairness, right?
Which means don't give them a huge amount more than they gave you.
That's unfair, that's unjust, and that's exploitive or whatever, right?
What's happened is women now get paid whether they have families or not.
In other words, they have legislation from the 1960s onwards which forces employers to pay women the same as men for similar work, right?
Whatever that means, right? Which is ridiculous because women in general...
Stop and have babies.
So the idea that they're economically exactly the same as men, that just one penny is the same as the other, it's ridiculous.
Because women go off and have kids, and a lot of times they don't come back.
So of course they're not worth as much in the free market as men are.
I mean, why this needs to be said is sort of ridiculous, because we all understand it at a very fundamental level.
If you have one husband who says, I promise to be with you until we die, and the other one says, well, if you have kids or gain 10 pounds, I'm going to leave you, well, you know who you're going to choose, right?
So the fact that someone's going to be there on a more constant basis is more valuable to you, and it is the same thing with So what's happened is because there is welfare, because the education of children is paid for collectively, because there are old age pensions, because there is socialized healthcare and women consume more healthcare resources than men as a whole, because there's subsidized daycare, because there's government housing and so on, women get paid, whether they contribute to a family or not.
And so women don't really care to contribute as much to families anymore.
So they don't learn how to cook or run a household or clean or, you know, support their husband's career or whatever it is that they would be doing.
And again, My, you know, two of my big intellectual influences were women who didn't have kids who were writers, Ann Coulter and Ayn Rand.
I guess it's the Ann's. And so, I mean, it's not for, you know, it's like that line about London in Wonder Woman.
It's not for everyone.
So, but for most people, most women want to get married and want to have kids.
But if the marriage doesn't work out, they get paid anyway.
Because either they get child support, they get alimony, or the government steps in and pays all their bills.
And so they get paid whether they work in the family or not.
And just like in the Soviet Union, if you got paid whether you worked hard or not, you generally didn't work that hard.
And this is the big problem with the government interfering in the most sacred and precious of human relationships, which is the relationships between husband and wife and parent and children.
It's all been distorted.
The government runs marriages like the government runs gender relations like the government runs race relations like the government tries to deliver your mail.
I think that has caused a lot of problems.
The huge amount of female privilege, women vote more, and the natural white knighting that occurs among Western men.
You won't see quite as much of that in Saudi Arabia, but the white knighting that occurs in Western men.
Western men have given, of course, freedoms to Western women.
And make no mistake, the women did not earn it.
Those freedoms were granted to them by men.
And what's happened then is that women have freedom and the choice to choose who they get married to.
Like in other cultures, it's just, sorry, you're going to marry your cousin.
And to hell with the IQ effects of miscegenation, that's just the way things are going to be.
And so women don't really have choices.
They can't leave the house. They can't enter into their own contracts.
They can't drive in a lot of places, and they've got to wear the burqa.
So they have not been granted.
And there are not a lot of Wonder Woman fighters who are out there fighting for these women's rights.
In fact, a lot of Western feminists won't even look at the women who are trying to fight for their freedoms in Iran.
You can't hear pipsqueak about them from the Western feminists.
So men give these rights to women, and this means that women get to choose men.
And so men have to be really nice.
They have to go to white knight.
They've got to defer.
And what happens then is when you get equal rights, but you have a preponderance of voting, then you end up with excess power.
You end up with female privilege, right?
Because women live longer.
They vote more often.
And they have a greater incentive to vote because far more of them are dependent on government than men.
And so they have a greater interest in bigger government.
They live longer.
They vote more often.
And therefore, you end up with the government white knighting women, which gives women massive amounts of legal privileges over men.
So I'm almost done here with this thing.
So you end up with this female privilege.
Now, with the female privilege, what happens is when the price of marriage for men becomes too high, it's like economics, basic economics, right?
When the price of a transaction becomes too high, you find a substitute.
So if a particular can of bread that you like gets too expensive, you just buy another can of bread.
You find some cheaper substitute for what it is.
If gas gets too expensive, you'll just take the bus or sell your car or whatever it is.
So what's happened is the price, which is also the risk, the price slash risk of marriage, and price and risk are sort of two sides of the same coin, the risk of marriage has become so enormous that you've got this men going their own way movement, these men sort of Going galt and checking out of relationships because they're just too dangerous.
And this is a generation of men who've seen their fathers get completely cratered by a brutal and Stalin-esque family court system that destroys men on a regular basis and privileges women on a regular basis.
And every man knows some man who's been through this process of being just pillaged by the court system and having their lives virtually destroyed.
Everyone knows men who've Been completely broken financially.
Men who have died or committed suicide from stress from this stuff.
Men who've lost their children and mourn for that every day.
And you can see Cassie J's The Red Pill movie for more vivid stuff on that.
So the price of marriage for men has just become too high.
So what's happening?
Well, when the price of a particular good or service gets too high, you find substitutes.
And the substitutes are...
Pornography, video games, other things, maybe just casual sex or whatever it is.
But that's what happens when the price-to-price marriage has become too high.
And now what's happening is the second wave of female substitutions are coming in.
And they are sex robots and artificial wombs that I'm sure will be along at some point because there will be a huge market for them.
Because men want to have sex and want to have children.
And normally the way they would do that is commit to, I don't know, a flesh-based female.
But the price of that and the risk of that has become very high.
And so what's happening is you are getting pornography substitutes, VR, porn substitutes.
You've got sex robots.
And there will be artificial wombs at some point to the point where men can have their children without going through the legal risk and expense of surrogacy.
And so women are pricing themselves out of the market.
Out of the market. Yeah.
And that means that female privilege is not going to last.
It's either going to collapse because the system collapses or because other cultures and belief systems that don't have any concept of female privilege come in and take over in Western cultures.
Like there was a guy, he was from the Middle East.
Left a comment on a video the other day that I read.
He's like, I don't get you Western men.
You're so scared of your women.
Like, what's up with that? And it's like, well, we're not scared of the women.
We're scared of the women and the state.
The women? Yes. The women plus state kind of a problem.
I don't know if you've ever watched Game of Thrones, but there's this...
Spoiler! There's this blonde chickapoo who ends up riding this dragon, right?
And... You know, she's got this dragon, which can, you know, burn everything to hell and gone.
And there are all these men screaming and running away.
And it's like sort of saying, well, why are you scared of the woman?
It's like, no, not scared of the woman.
Scared of the big giant dragon that can burn us to a crisp from 100 yards and a half.
So when women unite in terms of taking over the power of the state, Then society becomes enormously distorted, and it becomes a mirror image of the patriarchy that they complained about, which is more myth than reality.
Because if it was a patriarchy, why on earth would men be drafted to fight?
I mean, what kind of privilege is that, right?
Why would men be drafted to fight wars if it's some patriarchy?
If men and women are the same, just send the women.
But it was the men who got drafted to fight, which tells you that it's not a patriarchy, but a form of tax livestock.
farm, as I've talked about in the story of your enslavement.
So the end result of all of this is that women have gained the kind of unjust privilege that they have complained about.
You see the same thing in race, right?
Everyone says there's white privilege.
And because there's this imaginary white privilege, what's happened is now there is non-white privilege to the point where there's excuses made for everyone who's not white and massive dumps put on everyone who is white.
And so you create this imaginary evil and then you get to become the real evil, right?
So you create this imaginary patriarchy and then you end up with this state-dominated gynocentric matriarchy that destroys society.
You say that there's all this white privilege, so then you get to elevate non-whites to a position where they can be racist with impunity, and that does create that whole privilege that you imagined to begin with.
So I just wanted to sort of point that out as a whole, I think, where that's going to go now.
You aim at virtue.
And if you are, you know, if a woman listens to this show, and, like, it's Karen Strawn, right?
Girl Writes Watch. She was talking about how her boyfriend, I think, I don't know, they're together, right?
But I don't think they're married.
But her partner, let's say.
Her partner had really been burned badly in divorce court, and she ended up, like, spending a long time...
Telling him, I'm not that kind of woman.
I'm never going to do that to you.
It's not going to happen. And he eventually accepted and believed her, and I think with very good reason.
And they're checking along, I think, relatively contentedly.
And so that issue of just be a good person, be a virtuous person, and find a good and virtuous person, and you'll have a great life almost no matter what environment you're in politically.
Yes. True.
Oh Lord, I may have answered everything.
Oh, for the first time in the history of the show.
No, so I also wanted to mention that if you are in a situation like that, like two virtuous people together just doing the right thing because it's the right thing to do, then I wish there was a way for them to have more than two children.
I know lots of, not lots of, I don't know a lot of people, but some who are well-to-do, they have two good incomes, they're together, they've been together since they got married in their 20s, and now they're in their 50s, and they have two children.
And I think it would be appropriate, given what you just explained and the fallout from everything that we're Wrong paths were going down and for all the reasons you explained it.
It all makes perfect sense when you connect the dots.
No, but just to answer your question relatively quickly.
When K selected groups are under pressure, they have fewer children.
When R selected groups are under pressure, they have more children.
So if you think of a family, it's been a bad crop and they don't have a lot of food for the winter, well, they won't have a kid.
Because that requires a lot more calories for the pregnant woman, for the breastfeeding woman, for the child, right?
So when you're under stress and you come from a sort of K-selected or maybe European or Eastern Asian kind of background, if you're under stress, if you're concerned about future resources, you have fewer children.
That's just the way that it works.
If you are selected and you're under stress, you have more children.
And that's just the way it works.
You scare wolves, and they have fewer children.
You scare rabbits, and they go have sex.
It's just the way that it works.
And the case-selected groups have a very strong sense of when resources are going to run out, and everybody knows.
Who's got half a brain that the current system can't last.
So it's kind of tough to talk people into having children when their entire biology says, well, we don't have a lot of resources.
You know, winter is coming. Winter is coming.
So should we have more kids?
Well, I think, you know, I would love to have had more kids.
Really wasn't up to me at that point.
But I think that if you aren't going to have kids, well, it's I mean, your civilization isn't going to survive.
That's a basic numerical fact.
And, you know, should you have kids and suffer for the sake of your civilization surviving?
Well, that's kind of an abstract concept, and it's a very collectivist responsibility, but it's a very real, real issue.
And so I think that the system is going to – and the funny thing is, if the system is going to crash, it's better sooner than later.
If you have more kids, the system is going to crash sooner, which puts you in a better position to rebuild things from there.
And that's the reason most people say we don't want more kids because we can't, quote unquote, afford them.
And I, like my husband and I, we're not, we're exceedingly middle class.
We couldn't afford to have five, but we just...
Yeah, exactly. We threw caution to the wind.
People had kids during the Great Depression.
People had kids during the Black Death.
People have kids during the Second World War.
People have kids. If you make the commitment and you want to have the kids, then you can have the kids.
And if you cut back on other things, you cut back on other things.
But, so what?
Yeah, and I guess I don't know if there's any appetite for, like, Western...
specialization, having more children, like even a replacement number because the birth rate is 1.7 or less than that, which is why we need to have so many immigrants.
No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.
The immigrants thing has nothing to do with the birth rate.
The immigrants thing is a specific leftist goal, a Marxist goal, in fact, to dilute Europe.
See, here's the thing.
Why should you have more kids?
Because so much of life is automated, and cities are crowded, right?
There are so many robots and like a third of jobs are going to be replaced over the next couple of decades by robots and so on.
So it's not like you need a whole bunch of kids.
And human populations going down is totally fine.
There are a number of reasons for the whole immigrant thing which I've gone into before.
One of the fundamental ones is they can't possibly...
You know, when governments can't pay their bills, they provoke conflict.
Of course, right?
I mean, it's like a guy who owes the mafia a whole bunch of money and can't pay them.
What does he do? He burns down his store or his house, collects the insurance money, right?
So if you can't pay your bills, you'll...
Create problems to distract people from the fact that you can't pay your bills.
And so you got a boomer generation that's retiring.
And if there's a lot of screaming about racism and a lot of intertribal conflicts and a lot of diversity plus proximity equals conflict scenarios, then it's going to be easier for the government to get away with not paying the boomers when that bill comes due, which it's going to come due at some point.
I mean, all these underfunded pensions and so on.
So it is a destabilize freedom, destroy the free market, undermine the West.
It's a plan.
It's not an accident.
It's a plan. So probably this is off topic, but I've often wondered, who is the puppet master?
Where's all this...
society coming from and who's who will ultimately benefit like is it one person right i mean if white societies get compromised if they um you know you get low iq groups coming into white societies it destabilizes and causes massive problems with white societies and so non-whites uh benefit uh in in the long run non-christians benefit in the long run
uh well in the long run everyone loses but very few people think that far uh down the road but um i mean immigrants benefit in the moment because they can make a lot more money on welfare in western societies than they can in their home countries and the home countries have often been destabilized but to me what happens is you sell your soul to the devil And the devil gives you riches and fame and wealth and sex and all these kinds of good things.
And then when you get older, the devil comes and takes his price.
He takes your soul. And so what happened was in the 60s, everyone had a blast.
Right? They sold their soul for fiat currency.
They sold their soul for debt.
They sold their soul for government giving them stuff that they didn't have to pay taxes for.
At least enough taxes to cover.
They got their welfare and they got their warfare.
And the government grew like crazy and it was a fun blast of consequence-free lifestyle.
And so the devil gave them riches and gave them sex and gave them drugs and gave them rock and roll and all those kinds of great things.
And now The devil has come, and he is exacting.
His price. You know, you had lots of fun.
You took a lot of free stuff.
You compromised your basic ethics.
You violated thou shalt not steal from the next generation or from others.
You allowed the government to take over and the government shielded you from reality in the same way that the devil shields you from consequences until the devil doesn't shield you from consequences anymore.
So now the devil is sticking his horny feet deep into the wet earth of Western society and saying, well, Now the bill is due.
You had your fund, now pay for it.
Yeah, as the gods have always said, take what you want, and then pay for it.
And we took, and we took, and we took, and now the bill is coming due.
And the tragedy is that those who took the most will probably end up paying the least.
But that is the way of the world.
Because now we have not just you've sold your own soul, but you've sold the soul of your grandchildren.
And you get to party it up, and the grandchildren end up with nothing.
Well, Stefan, that doesn't really provide a lot of incentive to have more children, does it?
Well, you see, but I, you know, my goal is not to have people have kids or not have kids.
Just tell the truth. Just tell the truth.
You can decide to not have children.
And then, you know, that becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy for the end of your civilization.
If you have a bunch of kids, then society is going to have to readjust sooner because kids are net consumption on society.
So if you want to crash the system quicker, which is better demographically, then have more kids and gather resources because smart people tend to survive whatever comes.
Or at least, sorry, wealthy people tend to survive whenever it comes.
Yeah, well, and I... Like I was saying at the beginning, I am not as well-read and well-educated as, I guess, the people who are making the decisions about our future.
But I just know that it always...
Like I say, what I'm most proud of are my kids.
And I just... I don't know how many women listen to your show, and I just stumbled on it, and I'm actually super hooked.
But I just would like everybody who's listening to know that you'll never be more fulfilled, or nothing will make you feel better about your purpose.
Because I think, I don't know, my whole life I've been trying, I've been working Trying to figure out what my purpose is.
Even when I was 18 or 19, just a kid, why am I here?
What is this all about?
And I keep wondering that.
And I'm not saying...
This is something feminists would really have a heyday over.
Because I hear them say, a woman is good for more than making babies.
Well, obviously.
But that is one of the purposes.
If your job...
Is to chop wood.
What's your job?
Chop wood. Well, no, but I'm sorry to interrupt because I meant to mention this earlier, Sabina, that it bothers me the way that the feminists formulate that.
Like a baby-making machine or a woman is good for more than making babies and so on.
It's like, but it's not, making babies is not that relevant.
It's the raising of the babies.
You can't say a baby-raising machine because machines can't raise babies.
Like, you could end up with an artificial womb.
You can't end up with an artificial mom.
Okay. Right? So when they say that it's simply the biological act of reproduction, that that's all motherhood is, it's simply saying to me that they have no clue what motherhood is.
It's like me saying, well, the only thing that's important in baseball, you just hit the ball well, you know, and think that I've said something important about baseball.
Well, there's a whole lot of training and practice and strategy and, you know, all this kind of stuff that goes into it.
Well, just go out there and hit the ball well.
I'm the greatest coach in the universe.
Yeah. You know, it doesn't make any sense.
Go out and write a great song.
You know, go out and be profitable as a business.
Go out and write. It's just...
Go forth and multiply. Yeah, well, so just saying that the only thing to do with motherhood is squatting and crapping out a baby.
It's like, well, that's got no particular relationship to motherhood because you can do that and give up your baby.
You can do that as a surrogate and you're not the mother.
You're, I guess, the birth mother.
But motherhood, it's an old thing from Dr.
Phil that parent is...
A verb, not a noun, right?
It's a to-do, not a thing.
And so motherhood, you know, women, it's like saying women have a greater purpose in life than to raise the next generation of civilized and wonderful human beings so that society and civilization can sustain itself.
It's like compared to that, what the fuck do men get to do?
Oh, I balanced the budget on some small business bookkeeping software today.
Oh, look, I moved some stuff from a truck into a warehouse.
Oh, look, that floor sure is clean.
Oh, look, I built a wall.
Oh, look, I painted a room.
It's like, you know what I didn't do today?
I didn't raise the next generation of civilized human beings so that society can continue its long march up towards perfect virtue.
I mean, it compares like...
It's like, well, men are not just money-making machines.
It's like, well, yeah, I kind of need to be if the woman's raising the kids.
But, you know, raising children, I mean, I've done more of that than I have of podcasting, being a father.
And raising children is like, that's the thing, man.
I mean, don't even ask me to choose.
That's the thing. That's what I'm going to go to my grave happiest about.
Yeah. Exactly. It's like the reduction of sex to penis, vagina, ejaculation, as opposed to connection and love and cementing families and all of that kind of stuff.
And keeping women from being depressed because sperm actually has antidepressants in it for women.
I just... I found that out recently.
So, just, you know, well, motherhood is just having a baby.
It's like, no, that's not.
That's not. It starts there, though.
Yeah, for sure. It's necessary, but far from sufficient.
And you make a good point about the role that fathers play because I guess humans are like birds or some of the other animals where both parents have an active role.
In raising the children and dads are the encouragers and moms are the nurturers.
And I know I've probably seen videos you've done about, I can't remember what it was, but single, oh, boys of single parent moms have lower testosterone levels.
I don't know if that was yours.
Yeah, that's pretty tragic.
Also, Very interesting.
So, clearly, you know, I don't know.
Like, maybe it's impossible.
Maybe this is where my overly optimistic nature comes in.
Maybe it's impossible.
Maybe we will never be able to have moms and dads.
And like I said, I'm not saying that women shouldn't work because I... Didn't have a child until I was 28.
And I worked up until that point.
Which meant that you were not that helpful to your employers.
Sorry to put it so bluntly, but if you were doing easy work, then it was low-paid work.
I'm not saying you were, but if you were just mopping floors, then what's the point?
Might as well go have kids. It's way more fulfilling.
If you were doing big, complicated work, like managing multi-million dollar contracts or whatever it is, then you got trained and you were introduced to customers.
And then what did you do? Well, you went off and had kids.
Right? So... Well, okay.
Well, then I guess we'll have to do it the hard way or the logical way.
And, like, women shouldn't work at all.
But that's not going to fly.
First of all, women do work.
And women... See, people misunderstand this.
I'm not saying you do. But people as a whole say, well, first of all, women work.
I mean, I'm a stay-at-home dad.
I know it's a huge amount of work.
It's a huge amount of work.
And... The other thing too is that women contribute enormously to the economics of the household.
Because women, by having the household run efficiently, free up the man to focus on making more money.
It is a direct correlation.
You know, behind every successful man is a good woman.
It's all very, very true. It's all very, very true.
And so if a woman is taking care of the household and raising the children and supporting her husband, he gets to go and make money.
A crap ton of money.
If he has the potential, that's how he's going to achieve it.
And so women, they are directly...
I mean, it's weird.
It's like you can both go out into the workforce, you just end up being taxed more, and everyone's not having a great time, everyone's busy, everyone's tired, everyone's stressed, no one's connected, and the family life becomes a pain in the ass in general.
Or you can have a well-functioning household, the man can go out and probably end up making more money than the two of you together.
Because he's got a single focus and a career path that's sustained, as opposed to trying to juggle two careers, which cripples momentum.
Yes, and actually, I said that when I was emailing Michael.
But I guess if I suggested that, who cares?
But I sort of feel like I'd be mocked or I would be betraying women or that would somehow be suggesting that women aren't worthy of, you know, being doctors and lawyers, which I think they are.
But here's the thing.
If you want to have kids...
Why do you want to also be a lawyer?
At least while the kids are young. You can do it later like Phyllis Schlafly did and so on.
But if you want to have kids, have kids when you're young, when you've got the energy, when you've got the fertility, when you can bounce back from a night's sleeplessness relatively easily.
And so when you can play, when your joints are stronger and your muscles are stronger.
There's a reason why I work out an ungodly number of hours a week.
It's because I want to stay healthy because my daughter is very active.
So just have kids when you're young, and then when they get older, if you want to go be a lawyer, I think that's great.
But, okay, so what's the point?
What's the point? You say, oh, I want to go be a lawyer.
Okay, so you then, you go get your law degree, and then you do your articling, and you're working your 80 hours a week and all that.
I mean, who are you going to meet?
When are you going to settle down? And let's say you do all of this.
So let's say you become a successful lawyer.
Well, then what happens? Well, women are hypergamous, which means the lawyer doesn't want to marry...
The dishwasher, right?
If you're a female lawyer, you're not going to sit there and say, well, you know, that gardener, he's pretty ripped, so I'm going to marry him, right?
You might have an affair, but you're not going to marry him.
You're going to marry the guy who makes more money than you do.
And what that means is if you're a lawyer and making $200,000 a year, you want to marry the guy who's making a quarter mil a year.
But if you've got the guy who's making a quarter mil a year, you can't possibly say we desperately need the second income in order to have children.
So then what happens is the more successful the woman is, the more she's making money, the more she's likely to marry a guy who's making even more money, which means the less necessity there is for her to work if they want to have kids, which means that society just invested a million dollars in resources to train a lawyer so that she can go home and play patty cake and breastfeed.
I mean, it's a huge waste of resources as a whole, and it's one of the reasons why we haven't got to Mars.
Yeah. I know.
So, I don't know what the solution is.
There's no solution, because there's no problem.
What's the problem? There's no problem.
If you want to go be a lawyer, if you're a woman, you want to go be a lawyer, go be a lawyer.
You illustrated the problem when you said that in Western culture, we're being overtaken by non-white cultures because they place more emphasis on having children.
Well, also, yeah, I mean, for sure, for sure.
And so, I don't know what the solution is, because I'm about giving facts, you know, giving conclusions.
It's a process, right?
But my point is simply get rid of people's illusions, right?
So, if you're a woman, you have been sold a bill of goods about how the important thing for you to do is to go and be a lawyer or a doctor or whatever, right?
Well, first of all, find out.
Find out if lawyers and doctors are happy.
Doctors, I can tell you, miserable bunch, for the most part.
Lawyers, these days in America, there are more lawyers.
Then there is demand, which for a country that has 15 million largely frivolous lawsuits a year seems kind of unusual, but that's the way it rolls.
So why? They're miserable.
It's tough to make a living as a lawyer.
And doctors, like I can't remember what percentage it is, like 40% of doctors said, by God, they'd wish they'd chosen another profession.
They hate it, but they're so buried in debt that they have to keep working.
So they're like... Health slaves or something like that.
So why do you want to be all of that?
Why do you want to do all of that?
Exactly. That was my question in the beginning.
And if you look, so people, I don't know.
Here's the thing. This is going to sound kind of weird, but it's factually true.
So, you know, someone like Ann Coulter has added way more value to the world doing what she's doing than if she'd had a couple of kids, right?
In my particular perspective and opinion.
Like the book that she wrote, great book, Adios, America.
The Left's Plan to Turn America into a Third World Hell Hole.
I think that's the name of the book, but certainly Adios America.
Well, I mean, Trump read it, and it's certainly having some effect.
And it turns out I may have been right about him doing the darker thing as a...
Anyway, it's another story.
Or if you look at something like...
People say to me, Steph, why haven't you had more children?
Well, first of all, again, it wasn't up to me.
And secondly, the fact is that I can think of at least...
15 to 20 kids that have come about as a result of this show.
Because people who've met through this show, people who got married, people who've had kids.
And that's just the ones I know of, right?
So without a doubt, there are hundreds and hundreds of children that have come into being as a result of this.
My show. So let's say I had adopted, I don't know, five kids.
Well, I just wouldn't be doing this show, or at least I'd be doing very little of it because I'd be so busy with that other stuff.
And the people who listen to this show are like the smartest people around, I genuinely believe.
And so basically, I've helped hundreds and hundreds of smart kids come into the world who otherwise wouldn't have come into the world.
And certainly being raised very, very well relative to what would have happened.
So it's just, you know, it's like an intelligence test where people say to me, well, Well, Ann Coulter.
Look at Steph and Ann Coulter.
Between them, they have one child.
And it's like, not really. It's a little more complicated than that.
It usually is.
But there's a lot more ordinary people out there than there are extraordinary.
Like, extraordinary being Ann Coulter and you and all the other people who are making a difference in By what they do.
Like, if the ordinary people would just be happy with less and put their focus into having bigger families, I really think that we'd be on the right road.
And we'd get there eventually.
But whatever's gone wrong in the past, like, we can't just keep saying, oh, well, we can't change it because that's the way we've always done it.
No, maybe we need to change it so that we can end up In a place where we can survive and keep going and sustain.
The way that we do that is we push back against these Marxist feminist lies that are designed to strip the birth rate of a particular demographic, in particular whites, right?
So we simply push back against that and we point out the facts.
The children are incredibly fulfilling that this idea that you should just wait and wait and wait and then try and have kids later is a bad idea.
Yes. And so just keep giving people the facts.
Keep giving people the truth.
And, you know, I've talked to women on this show, talked to them and read out the fertility statistics.
They had no idea. Millions of people have then listened to that over time.
And people are making huge decisions based upon this information, which has been fairly ruthlessly suppressed from people as a whole.
You know, when I did this video about how women are unhappy until they're in their 80s, But the happiest people are those with families of, I think, four or five kids.
Well, people just don't know that information.
In general, it's not broadcast.
So I'm just bringing as many helpful facts, useful information to people as possible.
And the other thing too, me publicly being...
A high-functioning intellectual and saying that parenting is absolutely wonderful changes people's minds, because parenting is relentlessly portrayed as negative, as problematic, as horrible, and so on in the media, particularly that which is attached to the young.
aimed at the young.
So even just me saying, like you saying, you love being the mom to five kids, me saying I love being a father, it helps break people's conditioning.
Well, you know, I'm too smart and high functioning to have children.
Because what the left has done is they've said, well, if you're a smart woman, you wouldn't have kids.
And if you've had kids, it's because you're an idiot.
Because you can't be a doctor, a lawyer, you just end up having to be a fisher wife and a washerwoman and a mother.
And that is genocidal to the smart.
Because if you're saying motherhood is a mark of low intelligence, then you're tempting people to say, well, I'd like to have kids, but I don't want to be perceived as a dummy.
And so it's just, it's horrible, horrible manipulations.
And it just ensures that the fewest smart women and intelligence is to some degree significantly passed along the female lines.
It simply ensures that the smartest women have the fewest children.
And that does not help society as a whole at all.
Yeah, I didn't realize that it was deliberate.
And I That's why I wondered, who's the puppet master?
Who's the one that's making us think that way?
I don't know. See, I don't care about the puppet master.
I care about, like, sorry to interrupt.
I don't care about the devil. I care about the temptation.
Because the devil, you can say, well, the devil shouldn't do what the devil's doing, but the devil's going to do what the devil's going to do.
The question for me is, who says yes or no to what the devil offers?
So my goal is just, I don't care who's coming up with all this conditioning.
I care that people stop listening to it.
Because let's say we identify, you know, we all know that there are some groups out there everyone thinks is responsible for all of this.
Let's say that's all true. Well, let's say that there's these nefarious groups out there and, well, let's, okay, well, they're not going to stop what they're doing.
So the only thing is the devil's going to keep doing what the devil does.
So the important thing is to focus on the people who are tempted by the devil and get them to say no!
That's the only thing. So I don't care about the source of it.
I don't care about the supply.
I care about the demand. Correct.
Yes. All right.
Listen, I'm going to have to close this down because it's been a couple of hours.
Great questions. I'm sure we could chat about this all day.
I really do appreciate the opportunity to rant about this stuff.
And congratulations on your family, Sabina.
That's a beautiful, beautiful thing.
I do sometimes wonder, you know, having a...
A bushel full of kids in the house, what that would be different.
I mean, we do when, you know, my daughter's friends come over and all of that, which is great fun.
But I envy it.
It's pandemonium. Yeah.
It's just the only way to describe it is pandemonium.
A glorious anarchy. Yeah.
I don't even remember half of it.
I just remember that I survived.
Here I am. The days are long, the years are short.
Thanks again so much and thanks everyone.
We're going to add for a little while, just give it a test run because we've got so many people lining up to chat.
We're going to add a second, two extra call-in shows a month.
We're going to give it a try and see what the reception is and what people like about it.
Thank you so much for listening and for watching.
Please, please don't forget a couple of things.
Just to close off the show, freedomainradio.com slash donate to help out the show.
You can use the affiliate link at fdrurl.com forward slash Amazon.
Follow me on Twitter at Stefan Molyneux.
And you can go to Free Domain Radio to sign up for the newsletter because you never know just what might happen.
