3992 Married Gay Male Discovers That He Is Not Gay - Call In Show - February 4th, 2018
Stefan Molyneux will be speaking at "A Night For Freedom" in Washington, DC on February 24th. Tickets are now available, and we look forward to seeing everybody there! http://www.anightforfreedomdc.comQuestion 1: [0:55] – "I'm a 27-year-old male who listens to Stefan's content regularly. One of the points I disagree with him on is the role of parenthood, and I believe that I'll be happiest if I never have any kids of my own. I've taken measures to make sure that I won't reproduce including getting a vasectomy at the age of 23. I expect to continue living my life with happiness, value, and purpose, and I don't think that I will regret my choice to remain childfree. However, my mind is open to the possibility that I might be wrong. If a person is capable of having children but chooses not to, are his chances of having a happy and meaningful life truly diminished?"Question 2: [1:23:49] – “I’m a 20-year-old who is currently a sophomore in college in the US. I've had very good upbringing with very little to no abuse. My father is in the 1% of yearly income and I am extremely well off. Most of my expenses (rent, groceries, college tuition, etc.) are currently being paid for by my parents. I'm grateful that they do this for me and I can see that having them as benefactors enables me to have more free time to obtain new knowledge and skills, as well as save the money I do earn. However, I've had the nagging thought that by accepting their help, I'm hindering my own potential growth by living in such a soft and orderly environment. I understand that many parents want to create a better life for their child they never had for themselves. My grandfather worked to give my father more resources to utilize than he ever had growing up. My father works hard to provide me with even more resources to utilize than he ever had growing up. Is the transference of an increasing abundance of resources from one generation to the next really a keystone piece of creating and optimizing a great life for the next of kin, or does this abundance of resources hinder the progress of the next of kin by failing preparing them for the real world?”Question 3: [2:20:30] – “I have been married to a man for almost 7 years. I believe I may have entered my gay marriage because of a deep fear and mistrust of women. I found an ease of connection and brotherhood with my best friend that I possibly used to feed my own narcissism in our gay relationship. I believe I also felt an unwillingness to step into the deepest corners of my mental basement to work on foundational aspects of my history. I am deeply saddened that I have stolen seven years of my husband’s life in opportunity loss to find a truly gay lifetime partner, and I fear that I will not be able to surmount twenty-eight years of dysfunction with women of my past to build a virtuous marriage with a wife and children in the future. I have always had sexual attraction to women, and I have dated women, including a largely physical, two-year relationship with one. Please help me to unpack this foundational problem so that I can overcome my fear and move toward the best life for myself, my husband, and a potential future wife and children. I hope that my experience may also be a learning opportunity for others who may be confusing a lack of healthy male connection and a mistrust of women for homosexuality.”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
They developed into a kind of theme, which is good synchronicity for the bork brain.
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Alright, well up first today we have Vincent.
Vincent wrote in and said, I'm a 27-year-old male who listens to Steph's content on a regular basis.
One of the points I disagree with him on is the role of parenthood, and I believe that I'll be happiest if I never have any kids of my own.
I've taken measures to make sure that I won't reproduce, including getting a vasectomy at the age of 23.
I expect to continue living my life with happiness, value, and purpose, and don't think that I will regret my choice to remain child-free.
However, my mind is open to the possibility that I might be wrong.
If a person is capable of having children but chooses not to, are his chances of having a happy and meaningful life truly diminished?
That's from Vincent. Hi Vincent, how you doing?
Hi Steph, I'm doing well.
How are you? I'm well, so tell me a little about your life.
What's going on? In relation to the question or just in general?
No, just in general. What's your life like?
What are you doing? What are you up to?
I'm working. I'm doing well.
I have a steady girlfriend for three years.
I guess one of the most remarkable things in relation to the question is I truly can't picture myself having kids and being happy like that.
I don't know what you mean by can't picture myself having kids.
It's not an objection.
I'm just trying to follow that's not really an argument.
I mean, do you dislike children?
Do you hate kids?
I mean, what's... I don't think I would enjoy actually raising them and parenting them.
And why is that, do you think?
Could be lack of patience and...
And this is something I know we're going to get into, reflecting on my own upbringing, things that I've experienced.
So how long have you been listening to the show for?
Since late 2015.
Okay, good. Good. Well, I appreciate that.
Thank you very much. And if you don't think you'll enjoy being a dad or being a parent, Here's the Free Domain Radio 101 quiz.
What's my first question, Vincent, to you going to be?
Uh, what is that?
Uh, hello? Yeah, can you hear me?
Yeah. What's my first question, do you think?
This is how much have you got from the show.
What's my first question?
You know what, I'll give you three, because, you know, sometimes I can go on bits of tangents.
So what do you think would be the top three questions I would ask of you if you say you think that it would be horrible to be a parent?
Would you ask about my childhood and how my parents were like?
Oh, yeah, yeah. Okay, so you got that.
So the first question, of course, is trying to figure out what are your feelings and what are other people's feelings.
That's called individuation.
Like, we're all programmed to have these feelings that serve the needs of others.
And the question is, is this your feeling or is this someone else's feeling?
So the first question is, did your parents enjoy being parents?
Honestly, I don't think they did.
And why would you say that?
Why the hell? No, I'm just kidding.
Why would you say that? Why would you say that?
No, I... Had a pretty rough time growing up with my mother specifically.
My parents got divorced when I was nine years old.
My father was always very reliable, but he was not as much a part of my life.
After I was nine, I still got to see him weekly, but I grew up in a single-parent household.
What do you mean weekly? Do you mean like weekends?
Weekends and Tuesdays.
Hmm. Right, right.
And why did your parents get divorced, Vincent?
I believe it was my mom's choice.
For some reason, she was not satisfied in the marriage, and I think she wanted to pursue her own desires.
For some reason?
Well, you don't even know why your parents got divorced?
I'm not blaming you, I'm just...
I've never sat down and discussed this in depth.
No, that's not your job, Vincent.
Your job is not to sit down with your parents and try and extract wisdom from them like you're a sadistic dentist with a healthy tooth.
It's their job to sit down and say, well, we fucked up the family completely and we detonated your childhood with fatherlessness and divorce.
And given that this was one of the worst tragedies to ever happen to you...
Here's what happened, Vincent, and here's all the mistakes that we or I or made, and here's how you can avoid making the same kind of mistakes.
That's called being a basically empathetic and helpful parent.
Right. Yeah, that was lacking.
That was lacking. That's a very nice way of putting it.
So your mom divorced your dad, and you don't know why, and it wasn't like your dad was abusive or drunk or sleeping around.
Nothing like that. She was just dissatisfied.
Yeah, that could be a way of putting it.
I think that there may have been infidelity involved on her part.
Ah, right.
So she was handing out the V card like a Vegas croupier.
Okay. Probably. Right.
Okay. And how's she doing now?
I do not associate with her.
I'm essentially divorced from her for the past few years.
Well, I'm sorry to hear that.
No, I had to do it.
It may not be the worst decision in the world, but I'm obviously sorry to hear that.
And your dad? He's doing well.
He struggles with some things.
I mean, he's a great father.
He's always been very reliable.
He's a loving parent. A little bit on the closed off side emotionally, but I've always been able to talk with him about things and I see him regularly.
He's a big part of my life.
Well, I'm glad to hear that.
You have always been able to talk about him with things except the divorce.
It's funny you say that.
I don't even think he can explain why this happened except that She decided to end the relationship to pursue her own selfish desires.
And at that point, there was nothing he could do to try to change anything or to stop that.
But here's the thing, Vincent.
Personality doesn't really change that much.
People don't generally suddenly become selfish, or suddenly become inconsiderate, or suddenly become empathetic.
So, the question is, what were the signs?
What were the red flags?
What was going on ahead of time that could help you avoid such an outcome?
Right. This is relevant.
She spent a lot of time in the hospital during the 90s.
During my youth, she had many different forms of cancers.
She had lupus. And Actually, she did explain it to me once in a way.
She said, I chose to end the relationship and to explore other things because when she was so sick, she felt as if she might die and perhaps she thought she was wasting her time in life and she wanted to explore other things.
She calls herself a free-spirited person.
I personally see that as an excuse.
Can I tell you something, Vincent?
Yeah, yeah. When you hear the phrase, free spirit, run!
Do not walk to the local exit!
Throw down the dirigible! Jump off the plane!
Run! Free spirit, free thinker, that means crazy!
Just my particular.
Free of reality.
Free of rationality.
Free of consequences.
Free of empathy.
Free of just about any restraint upon my immediate, selfish, primordial lizard brain lusts.
Right. And it's good that you said that because I do believe that she suffers from some form of narcissistic personality disorder where nothing is ever her fault.
She can't be blamed for anything, even if her actions result in terrible consequences.
It's never her fault and she could never be held accountable for it.
Sure. She's a kid with tits.
That's, yeah. Well, and that's actually kind of an insult to kids.
And I apologize for that.
Children really don't deserve that.
And so she wanted to go explore.
Now, listen. I just wanted to say, before it sounds like a completely cold-hearted son of a bitch, that I really do sympathize with what happened to her in the 90s.
In and out of hospital, cancerous lupus, man, that is staring the...
The Grim Reaper when he's a little bit taller than a Jabba.
Yeah, it was rough. That is some scary shit.
But it doesn't actually sound like it scared much sense into her.
And that's a shame. You know, if you're going to stare down the Grim Reaper, at least do something courageous on the other side.
Like five years ago, I had my cancer terror and stared down the Grim Reaper.
And gained a fair amount of courage afterwards to explore more challenging topics that barely anybody else seems to have the courage to take on.
And so if you're going to stare down the grim reaper and say, well, I'm going to change my ways, shouldn't you kind of change your ways for the better rather than for the worse?
That's what I would think.
I mean, if you truly believe that your life may end and then you come out of the situation, everything's okay, wouldn't that make you want to value the things and the people that are most important to you even more?
I would imagine. Right.
So, here's the problem.
We can't see back through the tunnel of time, so to speak, to how our moms were or our parents were when they were younger.
You know, hot mom is kind of a weird thing.
And we don't know what signs our moms gave off before they were moms, right?
Because we know them as moms, so we don't know them in their Single state or their dating state or their engaged state or their married pre-children state or whatever sequence happens to be going on.
And so we know them after they become moms, which is a big change.
We don't know what they were like beforehand.
Now, if we don't know what they were like beforehand, we only see...
The disaster, if there is disaster, right?
We don't see the dominoes that set up to the disaster, right?
We don't see the steps that led up to the disaster.
We just see the slow motion crash, right?
Or fast motion crash, if that's what it happens to be.
Now, this makes us jumpy as shit, right?
We are jumpy.
We are like ducks on a hot plate, WKRP in Cincinnati.
Ooh! There's a reference that three people will get.
And so... That's what we need our parents for.
We need our parents for the archaeology of unearthing the steps that led to disaster.
That's what we need. And I haven't really got much of that from my parents.
It doesn't sound like you've got much of that from your parents, and that means we're kind of flying blind.
If we saw the steps that led up to the disaster, well...
And it's also because, like, in the past, there wasn't that much change in society, like when we were evolving.
Marriages were often arranged, or you knew the kids in the tribe from birth, and you knew their character, you knew their personality, and the elders taught you how to be a couple.
And, you know, like in the Amish community, the divorce rate is as close to zero as you can get without it definitively being zero.
Like the divorce rate in the Amish community is like the rejection rate from the FISA court.
It's incredibly low.
And so if you don't know the dominoes that led to the bust up or misery of a marriage, Then you really kind of have to reinvent the wheel from the ground up with, of course, a culture telling you that women are wonderful all the time because it seems like there's really no appeal to female vanity that's going to go unanswered.
At no point do women say, no, no, no, no, no, that's too much.
Too much! You're praising me too much now.
Don't be silly. They're like the actor.
You know, like you push out.
You push out. No, enough applause.
And then you beckon more applause.
It never ends, right?
There's no appeal to female vanity that seems too much.
Now, this is not that all women are vain, but just as a collective.
So if you don't know what the hell happened to your parents' marriage, how can you trust Marriage.
That's how I feel. I was going to bring that up also because I can't picture myself being happy if I were to get married either.
I don't want to get married. Right.
Yes, of course.
Of course, because you don't know how to avoid the disaster that happened to your parents.
Not only that, so many examples everywhere in society today.
In my country, I mean, what are the statistics now?
Over 50% of marriages end in divorce, and of course, I'm not going to base my own individual experience off of everyone else's, but- Yeah, I mean, I want to nag you about the statistic.
It's not 50, and there's so much that you can do to- Be pretty sure you're not going to get divorced.
You know, like when I've been married now 15 years, and you know what we're not getting?
Divorced. Never going to happen.
And that's because I knew something about it, about what to look for going into it.
You look for shared values.
You look for somebody who's well-educated.
That doesn't necessarily mean formally educated, but a good reader.
You look for someone's family background and try and find a decent amount of stability.
Or if there's instability, a good degree of self-knowledge and therapy regarding...
All of that. You look for a woman who hasn't, you know, ridden the cock carousel from here to eternity and back.
You look for a woman who's still got the capacity to pair bond.
And you bring up disagreements that you have early on, not to manipulate, but where there are disagreements, to figure out how she negotiates and whether she holds a grudge and all that kind of stuff.
And there's just a huge amount of things that you can do that are going to lower your chances of divorce to virtually no.
And of course, don't be an asshole.
You know, don't be an asshole husband.
Don't be a jerk. Don't be lazy.
Don't sleep around. Don't refuse to contribute.
You know, just do what you can within the house, with the environment, bringing resources and so on.
And I said this from the very beginning.
I mean, I started doing the show after I was a couple of years married and I said, we're never getting divorced.
And yeah, we've gone through some stressors, some health issues and all of that.
We're not getting divorced. You know, I mean, so, but that's because I really, really researched hard to figure out what needed to be present for a divorce to be out of the picture and out of the question.
And that's, I mean, we made the vow.
We were very serious about it. We said, no matter what happens, we're not getting divorced.
Not going to happen. Just no matter what.
Yeah, but that's what everyone says.
We just took it seriously. In sickness and health, for better or for worse, till death do us part.
Well, that's the way it works.
So you get an honorable woman who keeps her word.
And don't talk to me about no waltz and unicorns.
You're just looking in the wrong places.
Looking in a garbage dump, can't seem to find any diamonds.
There's no such thing as diamonds.
Right. So there are ways to figure it out.
It's not a crapshoot. But for you, Vincent, it seems like a crapshoot, right?
Right. It feels like it.
Yeah, it seems like it. Right.
Because you don't know the causes of what's going on.
Now, of course, there are a lot of people getting divorced.
And that has to do with a whole bunch of stuff.
I've got a whole truth about divorce presentation.
Oh, yeah, I've watched it. But one of the things that it does have to do with is parents not being honest with their kids about how they screwed up.
And there's this, you know, I understand the loyalty to the co-parent when you're young.
Like, you don't want to tell your 10-year-old, your mom's crazy, and I was an idiot from erring her.
I mean, that's really, but, you know, when your kids get to be an adult, that's important.
Yeah. Divorce presentation, you can check out the truth about single moms, which has some of this stuff, but we're going to work on, we're working on a divorce presentation.
It'll be out soon, but you can also check out the truth about sex, truth about single moms and that kind of stuff.
So there's this huge amount of non-ownership from the elder generation that, hey, something happened.
Asteroid hit the house. You can't plan for that.
You can't figure that out.
And there is ways, but parents don't want to take responsibility.
And because parents don't want to take responsibility, All of the accumulated wisdom of the past 150,000 years has kind of died with them, leaving the next generation pretty jittery about the basic of human life, which is pair bonding and kids.
Right. You see, these are values that they never were emphasized to me as I was growing up.
In fact, mostly all of my aunts and uncles, they've all been either separated or divorced.
It felt common in my family.
It didn't feel it was, right?
It was common. Yeah, that lack of loyalty.
And that's what I see so many people now around my age getting married.
And I can't help but wonder how many of those marriages are going to end prematurely.
Well, I don't know.
It depends whether they've done the work.
You know, you don't just get into a car and drive randomly and expect to end at your destination.
You sit down and you plan things.
Right, but even taking into account the stats, I don't think you can ignore them.
That's part of why I'm so hesitant.
I didn't suggest ignoring them. I didn't suggest ignoring them.
Oh, no, I know you didn't.
But... I'm suggesting that you recognize that divorce is very risky.
Yes. And you recognize that it is the most important decision you're going to make.
And you don't make that decision based on sexiness, or loneliness, or one-itis.
You know, this idea, there's only one, only one.
Gotta attach, can't judge.
You don't make it based on inertia.
Well, we've been dating for a while.
We kind of get along.
You make that decision fully consciously based upon all of the available data.
I swear to God, people spend more time figuring out which computer or car to buy or which phone to buy than figuring out who to marry, who's going to be the father or mother of their damn children.
Lordy. Right.
Yeah, I have a very pessimistic view towards most of society because of that.
And like you said, I did see your presentation on single mothers.
That's the sort of thing that bothers me the most.
It's designed to scare the pants on guys.
Yeah, and I've experienced it firsthand quite a bit.
Yeah, I was exposed to many, many things that I should not have seen growing up.
You mean like dating stuff?
Yeah, the men that she chose and the people who then we had to be surrounded with.
Yeah, it's gross, right?
Yeah, and she actually, she was dating, she was dating a guy for Almost a decade, maybe seven or eight years, and he had a son from his previous marriage also, and he accidentally killed himself.
He overdosed. And this was a person, he would have been my stepbrother because they were engaged at the time.
His son? Yes, his son accidentally killed himself.
And at the time, my mother was engaged to her boyfriend, her fiancé at the time.
And this was his son from a previous marriage.
And these were people who I spent a lot of time with.
And not that I truly even got along with him so well.
I mean, he had his own group of problems, but that was...
I had a lot of anger, a lot of depression in my adolescent years.
To ask an obvious question, Vincent, how do you know it was accidental?
That is a good question.
I'm not sure if we could prove it definitively.
I mean, was the kid depressed?
He was using all sorts of different drugs and substances during his teenage years, too, from what I know.
And by that time, I had tried my best to distance myself from him and from my mom, trying to spend the least amount of time as possible with these people.
And why was the kid doing all these drugs?
No supervision. He did not have good parenting behind him.
No supervision. What does that mean?
Your mom was there.
Her boyfriend was there.
Don't forget, she's a free spirit.
She should have been able to free him from all the drugs with her spirit.
Right, and I wish that they did do more to stop this, but at that time they were still living in separate houses.
So this is Russian roulette, right?
I mean, you take a lot of drugs.
It's Russian roulette.
I mean, the...
The possible death is kind of baked in.
It's kind of priced into the whole equation.
That's just one of the things. You don't talk to a habitual drug user and say, well, there's no possibility of health damage now, is there?
No possibility. Oh, yeah, absolutely.
I mean, you're buying illicit substances from people who have no reputation scores, and who knows what the hell you're putting in your body, right?
Right. He was...
He just did not make good decisions.
Consistently, he made bad decisions.
Well, he was traumatized.
Yeah, he probably was. When did he start doing the drugs, Vincent?
Probably two years before he passed on.
And? And by that time, I wasn't.
Yeah, by that time, I was not spending as much time around them.
Fortunately, I didn't want to be around that.
So this is where your mother's self-exploration and free-spirited nature led her, which was to a family where a kid was killing himself with drugs.
Yeah. That's what I call a hypergamy fail.
Yeah, and even after she stopped dating this man, she seemed to always choose people.
No, she didn't even seem. She did.
She chose people with substance problems consistently.
Wait, did she dump the guy after his son killed himself?
About a year or two afterwards that relationship ended, yeah.
Okay. Well, no, so not right after.
And what kind of substance did you use?
Like alcohol, cigarettes, drugs?
Harder drugs. Harder drugs?
Yeah, one of them was a habitual cocaine user.
And was he living in the house?
Only a few nights a week.
But by that time, I had fully moved in with my father.
And how old were you at this stage?
I was 18 or 19.
Right. Wow.
I'm sorry, Vincent. That's horrible.
So why do you think she chooses these dregs Maybe because she doesn't have to put much effort into attracting them.
Or maybe she enjoys that risky feeling associated with it.
How does she get her money?
Well, for the past how many decades after they got divorced from my father.
So she doesn't work?
She works a bit, but not enough to afford her lifestyle.
So she pays for these men?
Some of them she did, yeah.
But they were all pretty financially stable.
One was a doctor, one was a lawyer.
So high-functioning addicts, right?
That's, yeah. Wow, that's rough, man.
That's rough. I mean, this is to some degree what happens when women are past the wall, right?
The wall being when their youthful, fertile looks fade.
Right. So that's rough.
And this is so she kind of downgraded from your dad.
Oh, absolutely. Were there any substance abusers that were in the household that weren't well off?
I don't think so.
So they were all buying their own drugs, is that right?
Yeah, I think so. Well, I guess a doctor.
Right. Yeah, yeah.
Now, how does your girlfriend feel about all of this stuff?
She agrees with me about not having kids.
In fact, I disclosed that to her on the very first date.
And she agreed. Sorry, go ahead.
Oh, I was going to say she's not happy that I don't want to get married.
Right. Right.
Now, how old is she at the moment?
She will be 25 this year.
Yeah, well... I don't know.
Marriage has a lot to do with kids and paternity and stuff like that.
So to me, if you don't want kids, I don't know what the drive in particular is to get married.
But that's a topic for another time, perhaps.
Now, what happened to Vincent about the age of 23 that you got a vasectomy?
Did you have a pregnancy scare with a woman?
No, I never had anything like that.
I was pretty monogamous most of my adult life.
Pretty monogamous? You know.
Yeah, absolutely. I'm going to say pretty monogamous, honey.
You know, ish. I'm monogamous.
Right. Well, I had a string of very long-term relationships.
I was never one to be promiscuous or to sleep around.
Wait, so did you ever cheat on a girlfriend?
Never. Okay, so then you were monogamous.
Okay. Yes. Okay, got it.
That's what... I just wanted to check.
You're pretty monogamous. Right, right.
No, I should have phrased it like I had...
Long-term relationships and not just a string of one-night stands.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. Got it.
Got it. Right. So, what happened at 23 where you decided to snip the path from the puck to the goal?
Right. This was something that I had been thinking about for years in advance.
In fact, I remember in my early days of high school telling people, my friends, that I don't want kids.
I never want to be a parent.
And I had always talked about getting the vasectomy.
It took me a little while to find a doctor who's actually willing to perform the operation on me despite my young age.
And in some places, that's easier said than done.
Have you ever spent time with a child that's been fun for you?
Not necessarily fun.
A lot of the times...
I see it as a burden.
I see it as an unnecessary responsibility.
Right. And have you ever seen parents that enjoy being parents?
I've seen more parents who seem disappointed and stressed out, if that's what you're getting at.
That's not what I asked.
Have you seen parents who enjoy being parents?
You say, well, I've seen more, but I don't know if that's 51-49 or 99-1 or whatever.
It's not very clear. Yeah, I've seen parents who enjoy their kids.
Right. Right.
Do you think you could be a good parent if you wanted to be one?
Do you think you would have the skills to be a good parent?
That is a very good question.
Part of me is afraid because I... How can I say this?
I feel like I carry part of that selfishness, part of that narcissism that my mom suffers from.
You carry the selfishness and narcissism that your mom suffers from.
Yeah, I mean...
I can admit it myself, I'm a pretty selfish person.
Not to the extent where I want to do anything to wrong anybody or to hurt anyone else.
But I know what my own interests are and I will follow them as long as I'm not hurting anyone else in the process.
Do you have a sense that your selfishness could embrace the needs of others?
Because listen, we all do things for ourselves.
Come on. I mean, if that's the definition of selfish, then every living organism on the planet is selfish.
I don't want people calling into this show out of charity, right?
I want you to call in because you're going to gain value out of it because it's important to you.
I don't want my friends to like me because it's charity or because they're willing to submerge their own interests and just make me feel better.
I don't want my wife to be with me for any of those reasons, right?
So I want other people to be selfish in the pleasure that they take in my company.
Just as I am with them, right?
So the question is, does your selfish pleasure include the happiness of anyone else?
Oh yeah, the people I care about.
Okay, so the narcissist, as far as I understand it, views others the way that you view your cell phone.
It's a means to get something done, but you never consider the feelings of the cell phone.
Right. Right.
Right. They're just a means to an end.
They're just an object. They're just objects.
They're like the cow for the livestock, right?
The cow doesn't care. The farmer doesn't care if the cow's happy.
He might care if the cow's healthy, give him better milk, but he doesn't care if the cow's happy.
I mean, they put them in these tiny stalls.
They beat their heads bloody. They feed them all this crap.
Wheat belly, antibiotics.
I mean, they're just trying to get maximum utility out of their livestock.
Now, that's a selfish relationship.
And it doesn't sound to me like your circle of selfishness includes the happiness of people you care about.
Yeah. Did your mother's circle of selfishness include your happiness?
It depends. I felt that a lot of the affection I received from her, whether or not it was genuine, was based on my achievements or how well I could perform.
All right, so here's the problem.
Here we have it.
Here we have it. This is why you don't want to have kids.
Okay. Good. Thank you.
This is great. So she liked it when you succeeded, when you did well.
Yes. Right. Why did she like that?
Looking back now, I think it's so she can show me off and talk about me in a proud way to other people.
Yes. Yeah. As I mentioned before, when I was in grade eight, I was taking a grade 13 Writing course.
When I was in grade 9, I was taking adult computer science programming courses.
Floppy disk I.O. gripping stuff.
And so, yeah, I mean, of course, you know, you want to be paraded around as a vanity poodle for your mom, right?
For some moms. And so here's the confusion that you have, Vincent, in my opinion.
Yeah, I'll make a good case for it.
Tell me if it's bullshit. I'm listening.
All right. Did your mom consult you as to whether or not you wanted her to dump your dad?
No. Did your mom consult you as to whether or not you wanted unstable, fucked-up drug addicts in the home?
Of course not. Right.
Did your mother consult you about what you wanted that may have gone against what she wanted once in your childhood and follow up now?
No. No.
So you said, well, kind of, kind of, kind of.
And the answer to that is nope, not a smidgen, not a teeny tiny bit.
Did your mother talk to you about things that you damn well didn't want her to talk to you about, but wouldn't take no for an answer?
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
Tell me about that.
Here are my dating worries, oh, 12-year-old.
Yes. Dump, dump, dump, dump.
Dump, dump, dump.
I don't know what it is with some women.
Like, why they just need to talk and talk and talk and talk and talk and talk.
And it's like, good God, give me a plunger.
It's a super glue. Right.
There were many cases in which I felt like I was being the parent.
Sure. Or the girlfriend, you know?
Right, yeah. I don't want to hear about the horrible things that happened on your date.
I'm 12.
Shut up.
Right.
My God.
Yeah, that's horrifying stuff.
And I'm sort of trying not to overlap our prior experiences.
And I know people can type this in the comments below.
Kind of ironic that a guy with almost 4,000 podcasts is complaining about women talking too much.
But you see, the people I talk to are eager and voluntary participants in the conversation.
It's a little different. Right.
So tell me a time, if you can remember one, where your mother asked you what you wanted.
I just want to reinforce this, right?
She asked you what she wanted, listened to you and did it even though it went against what she wanted.
Right now, nothing is coming to mind.
And let me tell you something, Vincent.
If it had happened, you'd remember.
I still remember a solar eclipse that happened when I was in grade eight because it was pretty unusual.
You'd remember. Because it would be such a departure from the norm.
And this goes back to the origins of your mom.
And this was entirely the case when your father married her.
It did not change.
Ooh, I had a near-death experience.
Yeah. That just makes you more of who you are.
It doesn't make you different. It's like people say, well, he's a mean drunk.
No, he's just a mean person.
The alcohol just cleans the window so you can see inside.
Right. So if your circle of caring includes others, you are not your mom, and you never will be.
Never. You're not hanging from a vine over a big giant maternal vagina chasm.
You're not hanging by a fallopian thread about to fall.
Shit. What did I say in my journals once?
I said something I said.
I fell out of the hole of my mother and then I fell into the hole of my mother.
Yeah. There's nothing there but an echo chamber of dopamine chasing.
Did you see inappropriate romantic or sexual activity when you were a kid with your mom?
Did you hear it? Yes.
Yes. So she's banging Soviet style through the walls, right?
It was terrible.
That's horrifying.
I mean, the porn soundtrack called Mom...
Not a good bit of background music for childhood.
Yeah, I mean, one thing to say, I'm fortunate enough that I had what felt like nine normal years.
And even other people in my family, extended family too, always commented that my mom, she did seem like a very good mom.
She seemed like a very caring and affectionate mother during the years in which I was an infant.
And my early childhood, she was very attentive, but then she spent so much time away in the hospital.
This is the thing, man. This is the thing.
Narcissists like to look good, right?
Mm-hmm. So the fact that she looked good to others when others were watching her, she looked good?
Well, of course. That's kind of how they roll, right?
Right. Right. Well, every time I watched the self-absorbed narcissist who loved to parade and look good for attention, every time I was watching her, she seemed to be doing a good job.
Therefore, she must have done a good job.
No. No.
Right. I mean, I look back at the 90s.
I'm a very nostalgic person.
And... There's such a strong part of me that's longing for the past, seeking to relive my childhood in a way, and I feel trapped by it, honestly, because there's so many things that I can recall that make me happy.
So many good times I've had with family and friends and really Valuable relationships I had and great experiences.
And part of that is what helped me to get through my teenage years is because I could look back and say, you know what?
Things weren't always so bad.
Things were good back then.
Perhaps things will get better again.
And I feel now I'm climbing up out of that slowly, especially after listening to you so much, listening to Jordan do especially.
Trying to get things in order, and that's part of why I'm conflicted now.
So you want to relive a childhood, but you don't want to be a dad.
Yeah, I mean...
You get the paradox, right? I do.
I do. You're never too old to have a happy childhood.
Childhood! The sequel! Now, with fun!
Right. Because you can do that, right?
You can go and have a ball and you can build your snow forts and you can go to bargaining and you can climb trees and you can have a blast.
Yeah. That's, you know, that's why I called in and maybe there is something that I really will be missing out on.
Okay, I'll give it to you straight.
You ready? You're a big guy, right?
You're a tough guy. You've listened to this show, so I'll give it to you straight.
Yeah. You're still conflicted about your mom, and you're still conflicted about your dad, right?
They owe you the truth, they owe you the facts, or they condemn you to this kind of doubt, insecurity, and infertility.
Now, I'll tell you just my experience, Vincent, and maybe it'll echo yours.
I really didn't get how terrible my parents were until I became a parent.
I didn't, I swear to God, I swear to Zeus about, I had no fucking concept of what a different and oppositional species we were until I became a parent.
I had no idea, like, I can't explain We're not on different planets.
We're not on different sides of a chasm.
We're entirely opposite universes.
I mean, I look at my daughter and she is so delightful and so funny and so engaging.
Such a great storyteller and so open-hearted and positive and strong.
The idea of hitting her It's literally beyond incomprehensible.
Like, I cannot imagine any circumstance or situation under which that would be anything I would choose.
It's completely, to yell at her, to call her names, to put her needs last, to any of this, it's like absolutely inconceivable, literally inconceivable, that I would do any of that.
When I think back to the parents I knew, mostly the single moms that I knew as a child, they were mostly crap.
Selfish, needy, manipulative, controlling.
Unable to let their children go, their sons in particular.
Come be my little Lord Fauntleroy replacement husband until I die and you're left alone.
Fuck you. Fuck your future.
Mama's needy.
I was gonna eat you up.
Vagina dentata on steroids like a cave of teeth.
Now, when I feel the gulf between myself and my parents in how we are as human beings, I have more in common with a half-decent fucking monkey than my own parents.
A lot of monkeys don't beat the crap out of their kids, right?
Now, you're halfway between these two worlds, Vincent, I think.
If you become a parent, and you, having listened to the show, having listened to others, Jordan Peterson and so on, Assuming that you will, and I'm sure you will, accept and enact peaceful parenting.
The gulf between you and your parents will widen to interstellar distances.
Right now, it's half and half.
So the question is, is it you who doesn't want to have kids?
Or is it your parents who don't want their natures revealed by you being a good parent and recognizing the gulf?
Right, I see what you're saying.
Because that would illustrate just how poor of a job she did.
No, no. Oh man.
This is the halfway. She didn't do a poor job, Vincent.
She didn't do a poor job.
You know, if I'm supposed to paint your car, And I miss a few spots.
Maybe the paint's a little uneven, needs another coat.
That's doing a poor job.
If I return your car to you in a smashed-up cube, did I just do a poor job?
Right, I understand.
A poor job is less than 10 out of 10.
Minus infinity? Your mom...
was so abominably selfish that she's scream-banging drug addicts where you can hear it.
Yeah.
She's taking your dad's alimony and child support and using it to buy dinners for druggies.
yeah Yeah. That's not a poor job, man.
You know, if there's a parent out there and he's playing porn really loud where the kids can hear, that's fucked up.
If he is the porn that people can hear, that's even more fucked up.
Right. Now, if you have shitty parents, Vincent, and you become a parent, there's a battle going on.
There's a very deep war going on.
If you become a great parent, you will look at them with horror, the kind of horror it's hard for you even to imagine right now.
And that's very tough because we bond.
We Stockholm Syndrome with our parents.
We bond. And challenging that bond is a very, very big deal.
It's a very, very big deal.
Because throughout mostly human history, we simply couldn't.
Because our parents represented the elders of the tribe who had their police and their jails or their enforcers and challenging their authority, unless you were willing to go all the Macbeth way, was not positively selected for survival, let's say.
But if you become a parent, and this is why people say, well, you know, I'm scared of being a bad parent.
Question, Vincent. Did your mom ever express fears that she was a bad parent?
No. There you go.
Even having the thought that you might be a bad parent makes you infinitely better than these clusterfracts.
So there's a battle, and the battle is this.
If you become a really great parent, then your parents' bond with you will be threatened, number one.
And number two, your parents will suffer.
Your parents will suffer.
You see, here's the thing. Think of parents, most parents, like Saturn, and around them are the giant boulder rings of defenses and rationalizations, right?
So, what do they say?
They say, well, I had a bad childhood and I did the best I could, right?
Well, Vincent, you had a bad childhood and if you become a good parent, you did a hell of a lot better.
So that excuse falls away.
It's gone. Starcastle style, out of rim, gone.
Now, then they say, my kid was difficult.
My kid was non-compliant.
He was disobedient. He was willful.
He didn't listen.
He was lazy. And then they see you having a great relationship with your child and your child being very happy to help.
Ooh. Well, that one falls away now, doesn't it?
I did the best I could, they say, but the knowledge that I had.
And then they find you reading books and listening.
And that excuse falls away.
They didn't do the best they could with the knowledge they had.
Because they chose to parent while being fucking ignorant.
And that's a choice.
That's a choice. If I get behind the wheel of a car drunk and I say, well, I drove the best I could with the drunkenness that I had, it doesn't fly because you chose to drive drunk.
And if you chose to parent stupid, you're not doing the best you can with the knowledge you have because you could have got way more knowledge.
So that excuse falls away.
And then they see your child loves you.
My daughter says to me, Dad, I don't care if you wake up at 7 in the morning.
When you wake up, come and get me.
Let's start our day. Because it's a blast.
She never wants to go to bed at night because she's having so much fun.
So they see that relationship, and it hurts.
It hurts. You see, the only way that they live with the guilt of what they did is to pretend that it could not be escaped.
But if you show them that it can be escaped and surmounted and that you can be a great parent, that leaves the rings of Saturn stripped away and all of the massive ice asteroids of regret smash deep in the core of the foggy planet and tear it apart Krypton style.
Those around you who have done evil cannot stand the emergence of good anywhere in their vicinity.
It is sunlight to a vampire.
It is a memo to a secret court made of sunlight.
They don't like it.
Thank you.
And there's a battle. When you try to do good, when you're surrounded by people who've done evil and have not acknowledged that evil and apologized and made amends and gone to therapy and figured out why they did evil.
If you try to do good when you're surrounded by people who've done unacknowledged evil, they will fight you to the death.
Not because they hate you, but because they hate themselves.
But they don't know how much they hate themselves until they see someone acting out of love, out of self-respect, out of a commitment to virtue.
The reason, Vincent, you don't want to have kids is because your inner mom, your outer dad, whoever, have a great investment in your parenting failing, your marriage failing, your life failing.
It is they who stand between you and your progeny, your offspring, your future.
They don't want you to be a good father.
They don't want you to be a good husband.
They don't want you to be a happy adult.
Because then the physics that they thought ground them down without their choice is proven to be not physics, but the decisions they made that they cannot go back and unmake.
Those who have committed to immorality and not stepped back, asked for forgiveness and made restitution cannot be saved.
It is impossible. It is like expecting with the force of your language to cast a verbal parachute on someone who's jumped off a cliff.
You can scream, but your scream will not stop them or their fall.
Now, the question is, are you willing to run the gauntlet of these zombies and get the happiness that you deserve if you act with courage?
Are you willing to truly surmount the past and take the happiness that's yours if you want it?
Is it a battle?
Hell yeah. Is it worth it?
Hell yeah. Do not let The dead of the past stand between you and the light of the future.
Do not. Your mom was a shitty mom.
Terrible. Beyond words.
And I'm really sorry for that, Vincent.
I am sorry. Beyond words.
Your father has not explained to you how he chose such a shitty woman to be the mother of his children.
He has not explained to you how that came about and he hasn't taken ownership for it.
He chose the woman who banged drug-addicted half-zombies at high volume next to her son's bed in the same living space.
He has not explained to you how that happened.
He has not explained the weaknesses in his character that led him to go there.
Your whole fucking family hasn't talked about why there are so many single moms around and why the marriages bust up and break up.
They won't talk about it. Why?
Because they want to pretend it's physics or it just happens or we just grew apart or we just...
We ran out of love!
Mysteriously. Gas gauge was full.
Gone. Empty. You can't predict that.
We did everything right but everything went wrong.
Malevolent universe. Random universe.
Terrible things happen. You can't do anything about it.
50 plus divorce rate percent.
You're rolling the dice. You're flipping the coin.
Can't predict it. Can't figure it out.
That's why I said at the very beginning, okay, it's not 50 percent, but even if it was...
50% of car crashes occur.
50% of car drives end in car crashes.
But if you find out that 50% of the drivers are drunk and blindfolded, at least you can do something about that, right?
But nobody wants to tell you what happened.
What fuck-ups did they make to end up in this state?
They don't want the ownership.
They don't want the ownership of their lives.
And because they won't take control of their lives and accept self-ownership, your future looks out of control and you clamp down and you try not to decide and you get your ball snipped at the age of 23.
Because a kid is like a bomb and you don't know how to disarm it.
But if you did know, if you were certain, Vincent, that you could be A great dad, a great husband, and much beloved of your children.
Well, who the hell doesn't want more love in their lives?
Who the hell doesn't want more joy and happiness in your life?
And who the hell doesn't want to see a tadpole grow into a poet?
My daughter writes music.
I like it. I like it.
There's music in the world.
That would never have existed.
And everything that you enjoy in the world, everything that you love, the music, the movies, the plays, the stories, the video games, they're all created and produced by people who came from nothing.
There is joy and order in the universe because people fucked and sacrificed.
That's the reality of it.
If nobody fucked and sacrificed, there'd be nothing for you to enjoy.
There'd be nobody for you to talk to.
So my suggestion is, Vincent, join the fucking parade.
Join the parade of life that's been going on for over four billion years.
Yeah, there's some people who are crappy.
There are people who are evil.
But don't let them stand between you and the parade of life, of creation.
Every now and then, when I'm talking with my daughter, I think, if she weren't here, I'd be insane.
Just having a conversation in the car with myself.
And she surprises me.
There are thoughts in the universe that exist only because she exists.
And her perspectives, now that she's nine, her perspectives are not what I expect.
And she's going through the phase right now, which is, I think, entirely appropriate, of having an instinct as to why something is right or wrong, but having difficulty explaining why.
You ever have that? Like, you kind of know deep down something's not right, but you can't quite put it into words.
So we're trying to figure out how's the best way to take that from the mind and put it into language.
I'm pretty good at that. Right.
Everything that is in the world, the buildings that you live in, the chair, the computers, this internet, it's all part of the parade of life.
Why would you want to step out of it and be barren when you could have that degree of love and life in your world?
It doesn't have to in any way be anything close to what came before.
It can be quite the opposite direction.
But there is a price to be paid for that.
But it's worth it. Yeah.
Let me bring something up that a few of my friends said was important.
One of the things in my life lately that has gotten me to question all this is...
I've gotten so close to my girlfriend's dog, and I know there's a lot of stereotypes about people who choose not to have kids, and they substitute them with pets, but it's giving me those feelings.
I'm starting to really...
I'm not really sure how to articulate it, how to put it into words, but...
Something is happy that you exist, right?
That's what it is. Yeah, yeah.
You come home or you go into the house where your girlfriend is and the dog bounds at you and leaps on you, tail wagging, is excited to see you.
Yeah, and he just always wants to be with me.
He leads me to where his toys are.
He wants me to play with him.
He wants me to scratch his back.
And these are things that I never...
And it sounds silly to talk about a pet like this, but...
No, it's not. Yeah, he evokes...
I see what you're saying.
He evokes such emotions in me to say, wow, something so simple and so innocent can be happy just by spending time with me.
Vincent, this is what you wanted your parents to feel in your presence.
And this is...
We wish to make our parents happy.
We wish to make our parents happy.
And the great tragedy with very selfish parents is that we can only make our parents temporarily happy by ceasing to exist ourselves and conforming only to their needs at our own expense.
We can only make them happy by emptying out ourselves.
It's horrible. But you wanted...
Your parents to come home and you wished to be happy that they were home and you wished for them to enjoy your happiness the way that you enjoy the dog's joy.
Yeah. And you couldn't do that.
Yeah. And so you think...
I'm gonna be stuck with a pet for 20 years that whines and scrapes and tries to get away from me all the time.
Why would I want that?
Right, that's the fear.
Sure. Sure.
I understand because that's what you saw and that's what you experienced Yeah But what if your child was like the duck
What if your child was overjoyed to see you and you were overjoyed to see your child?
And you ask about the day and you talk about the dream you had and you play a game and you watch that brain develop and you have created a force of nature.
The greatest force of nature, human consciousness.
You've created a human consciousness.
It's wild.
It's absolutely, completely and totally wild.
And you've created a human consciousness that you appreciate for its own sake, that is not there, like a utility livestock robot to serve your needs.
Why does the dog love you?
Because you love the dog.
Because you bring pleasure to the dog.
You play with the dog. You rub its belly.
You take it for a walk.
Yeah. It's win-win.
That's what it is when you're a good parent. - Yeah, that's a good way to put it.
I mean, I have been trying to visualize that, especially over the past few months.
Of course, I wonder, could having a human child feel like this?
And probably even better.
But the honest truth is, as of right now, it's so hard to picture that from where I'm standing.
And that, you know, like you said, that could change.
But as of right now, it's...
But everything you've said in this call, you know...
No, but if you could have it, that would be something to consider.
Yeah. Dogs will die before you.
Hopefully. Dogs never achieve independence.
Dogs never need career advice.
What you feel for the dog...
Will be nothing compared to what you feel for a child.
In terms of that joy and happiness.
It is...
This one goes up to 11.
A dog is not a part of you.
A dog isn't born from your flesh.
Right. A dog will never debate you.
A dog... It goes so much further.
And especially, you know, when you get old.
A dog isn't going to give you puppies.
Right. You got a parade.
You got a kid. You get grandkids.
You get great-grandkids. The seed spreads.
The Vincent steps into a hall of mirrors with many reflections of Vincent, each of which comes to life.
It's amazing.
You're in the parade. The parade continues.
You're part of the cycle of life.
And it is the greatest joy that you can have.
Right. Yeah, that's what I've been thinking about because I'm seeing flashes of that.
I'm getting hints of those feelings because it's, like you said, in a way it's sad how I... And people think I am...
Weird, because of it, but how, really, how overwhelmingly happy this dog makes me.
Sure.
And I think I know exactly what you're saying because that's how I wished things could have been with my own parents.
But for your mother, weren't you pretty much, Vincent, an annoyance in the way that lowered her sexual market value?
Repeat that, I'm sorry.
Weren't you for your mother, to a large degree if not completely, a kind of an annoying inconvenience that lowered her sexual market value and got in the way?
Oh, yeah. There were so many instances where she would try to coax me, really, to either be out of the house or go do something else so she could do what she wanted to do.
Here are some quarters after the arcade with you.
Mommy needs to fuck. Yeah, that's what it was like.
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Right. There were even so many weekends where...
They would just be locked in the bedroom the entire night, the entire time.
I wouldn't see her till the next morning.
This was from maybe 6 or 7 p.m.
at night. And we would just be out in the living room, the rest of the house, really fending for ourselves, entertaining ourselves.
Yeah. And trying to ignore what was happening in there.
My mom would call around begging for people to take me for a sleepover.
And I'd be saying, Mom, it's Wednesday.
Right. I have a test tomorrow.
I need to study.
Nobody wants me on a Wednesday.
I'm a fun sleepover guy, but...
And everybody knew, right?
That's the humiliation. Everybody knew why she was making those calls.
Right.
Maybe you can take the little shit so mom can get her leg up.
The 70s have a lot to answer for.
As do the 60s.
This hedonism, this our selected fuck-a-thon of social disintegration.
People who chase dopamine lose everyone in their mind.
Her boyfriends weren't the only addicts.
Right. And it's coarse and it's rutting.
You know that word for sex?
Rutting. Usually farm animals.
It's just so fucking out in the rain.
Out of base.
Right. It's primitive.
Yeah. Yeah.
No eye contact, no tenderness, just discharge and temporary relief.
We are more than cocks and pussies.
Thank you.
And, um, I'm sorry.
Beyond sorry, Vincent, that your mom chose the random roulette spin-a-thon of anonymous cock over the feelings and tenderness and love of her own child.
Yeah. That is a terrible deal.
And then what happens is she gets too old even for that, right?
Yeah. And then what happens is, suddenly you see her children become so important to her.
She can't really attract men anymore.
And now she's all about her kids and how much she loves them.
Just jumping from one person to another.
None of it earned by virtue.
Thank you.
One earned by virtue of vagina, the other earned by virtue of a long ago pregnancy and a couple of decades of relative indifference.
It's like Uma Thurman.
*laughs* Uma Thurman. Who now complains that Harvey Weinstein was abusive towards her and Quentin Tarantino half got her killed in a car crash and filming Kill Bill.
And for decades she said nothing!
And she's had fuck you money for those decades.
She said nothing. Now, now that she's older, now that she's not really able to get the roles based on sex appeal, now she gets attention because of her moral upstandingnessness.
Brock. God, it's hideous.
Oh, it's so hideous. I will play a heroic woman who uses swordplay to fight evil while at the same time submitting myself to the ministrations of a bunch of psychopaths who damage me permanently.
Ah, what a heroine.
And who calls her on it?
They have a nice black and white picture of her looking slender in her apartment.
No makeup, because that's brave.
Strong, independent woman, trademark.
Unreality. I'm just waiting for Daisy Ridley to take all of her combat training from Star Wars and go and defend the women with vigilante gangs in Sweden.
Because women are strong and independent, don't need no man.
That's why they invite these third worlders in and then huddle home.
No, no, no. Aren't you supposed to go out?
Because, you know, you're strong, independent women.
Go out and protect each other.
Fight back. Push back.
Nah. Just stay home.
Now, the challenge, of course, Vincent, is your girlfriend.
If you decide that you want to have kids, you're going to have to deal with this.
With her, right? Mm-hmm.
I mean, your vasectomy can be reversed.
Yes, it can. So, if you do end up wanting to have kids, you've got to plan for the second half of your life, right?
I mean, when you're 27, it's kind of tough.
I mean, you're a decade away from middle age, perhaps.
But you've got to plan for the second half of your life.
There's a time when working just becomes boring.
For the most part. And there are times when the only people left around who are able to socialize easily are people who don't have kids.
And a lot of people who don't have kids are kind of weird.
A lot of unprocessed childhood trauma, some depression, some emptiness, some anxiety.
And if they're not weird before their middle age, they get kind of weird afterwards because what are you gonna do for the next 40 years?
Right. Well, you can have life, laughter, companionship, song, stories, memories, meaning, life.
Or what? You can buy a Foster iPad and while away your life stroking pixels.
Yeah, yeah, I noticed that about myself too.
I'm pretty materialistic and I, like you said, I love video games.
I I love these distractions, but like I said, the more I learn, the more I see, I'm realizing that, you know, why should I be wasting my time like this?
Isn't there something greater?
Yeah, see, the thing is, too, everybody participates in procreation in different ways.
I mean, I have one child.
I wish we'd had more, but that was not how things played out.
But I've encouraged, and I know that I'm responsible for the births of hundreds of children through this show, and hundreds of thousands of children are having far better childhoods than they would have had otherwise because of the adoption of peaceful parenting through this show.
Which means that they're more likely to grow up and be happy and want to be kids.
So I'm like, you know, good by Mr.
Chips. Like I've had thousands of children because he's his teacher, right?
Never had any kids. So there are, you know, if you want to be an entrepreneur, you want to create a company and hire 100 people and give them good wages in a good working environment, then you're giving people the money they can use to raise children.
And I mean, lots of ways that you can participate in procreation without necessarily having eight kids of your own.
But, if you're not going to take the time, the effort, the money, and the energy that you would have spent raising children and do it to do something great with your life, I'm like, yeah, Ann Coulter didn't have kids.
She gets a pass.
Right? Because she has brought amazing thoughts, arguments, ideas to the world, New York Times bestselling author multiple times, an amazing speaker, a courageous, heroic Valkyrie of a woman standing astride the universe and defending with a gold lame loincloth the waning freedoms of the Western world.
She gets a pass! Right.
I was going to say also another example from your show, Scott Adams, Dilbert.
Scott Adams. Scott Adams, not a father, despite dating a woman who seems to have just about all the markers of fertility known to man.
Now, so there are people.
You don't have to have kids, but do something great.
Do something great.
And I'd like to say kids are consolation prizes for those who can't create on their own.
No, no, no. There's no piece of art that you make that's greater.
Than a human being. There's no piece of art that you make that can create art.
There's no novel I can write that can write a novel.
There's no music I can write that can write music, but a child can do all of these things.
It is the art that is art and creates art.
It is not an end product, it is a portal to creativity.
So you don't have to have kids, but do something!
That's great and meaningful and deep.
Do something that is of value to the world.
If you raise kids well, you have done a great service to the world.
If you start a company, if you write a book, if you create joy, if you create meaning, if you create happiness, if you volunteer, if you help people, if you become the central social hub of your neighborhood to get people out of their homes and into the street, if you do something It's like what I say about morality.
We're all part of the moral ecosystem.
Every moral argument that you make, every stand that you take, whether it's in your family, among your friends, at your work, every stand, every pushback that you make is part of the moral fabric of the universe.
We all are knitting in this giant tapestry of humanity.
Nobody should be set aside.
Nobody should walk away.
We are all involved.
In the good of the world.
For a lot of people, it's kids.
For other people, it's other activities.
Things they can build, things they can grow, virtues that they can do.
It could be volunteering at a goddamn soup kitchen and listening to the tragedies that dumped people on concrete.
Do something. You can go build a house.
You can write music.
You can donate to charity.
You can create a one-man show.
You can just do something.
That's the only thing, Vincent.
If you don't want to have kids, don't take the bullshit consolation prize of video games and boredom.
That's a deal only the devil would offer and only a fool would take.
Right. Yeah, I agree.
And talk to parents who are having fun.
You don't have to have...
I saw parents when I was growing up and I saw how it could be a whole lot of not fun.
So, like I saw lots of divorced families growing up and I saw, well, that's shitty.
And so I learned.
Here's how you don't get divorced.
And here's how to plan your life so that you can have fun parenting.
Jordan Peterson just tweeted yesterday.
Doctor! The good doctor Jordan Peterson tweeted yesterday about how In my province, in my country, Ontario, Canada, the last vestiges of any kind of objective learning are being pushed aside to be replaced with the fascism of fields of totalitarian leftism, identity politics, hypersexualization, and the teaching of white privilege.
White privilege and anal sex!
Didn't we used to get some reading, writing, and arithmetic?
No! In elementary school, this shit is going down.
My two dads are in an orgy with Santa.
Can we learn how to deconstruct a sentence with any kind of grammar?
No! None of that.
Oh, and by the way, your father is a capitalist, so he's evil.
Off you go. Oh, and you can't have best friends anymore, because that's elitist.
Off you go. Enjoy.
Oh, you feel like getting a gardening job?
Sorry, third world immigrants have taken it from you.
You can't get started as a teenager anymore.
I know, cute. We love vast sensitivity to alternative sexual lifestyles and Muslims, because they just go hand in hand, pretty much. It's going to go great.
So, you can design things so that you can have great fun as a parent, but it takes some doing, and it takes some planning, and it takes some wokeness.
Yeah. Yeah. So yeah, just aim your ambitions high.
That's all. Yeah, just do something great.
Aim for something great.
Do something great. And it doesn't have to be big and spectacular and visible from space.
It can be something local.
But just do something. Do something that makes your life worth having.
You know, it's a great gift.
It's a great and rare gift to be animated.
To be the improbable aggregation of star stuff that gets up and walks around.
Don't waste it, chasing demons on Mars for no final purpose.
All right. I'm going to move on to the next caller, Vincent, but I hope that this was helpful.
Yeah, thank you, Steph. Please cut above.
Have your girlfriend call in sometime.
Right. Yeah, this was really great.
Thank you, Steph. Thanks very much.
Alright, up next we have Matthew.
Matthew wrote in and said, I'm a 20 year old who is currently a sophomore in college in the United States.
I have a very good upbringing with very little to no abuse.
My father is considered to be in the 1% of yearly income and I am extremely well off.
Most of my expenses, rent, groceries, college tuition, etc.
are currently being paid for by my parents.
I'm grateful that they do this for me and I can see them as benefactors enables me to have more free time to obtain new knowledge and skills as well as to save the money I do earn.
I've had the nagging thought that by accepting their help, I'm hindering my own potential growth by living in such a soft and orderly environment.
I understand that many parents want to create a better life for their child they never had for themselves.
My grandfather worked to give my father more resources to utilize than he ever had growing up.
My father works hard to provide me with even more resources to utilize than he ever had growing up.
Is the transference of an increasing abundance of resources from one generation to the next really a keystone piece of creating and optimizing a great life for the next of kin?
Or does this abundance of resources hinder the progress of the next of kin by failing to prepare them for the real world?
That's from Matthew. Matthew, how are you doing?
Pretty good, Steph. How are you doing?
Well, thank you. First thing I had to...
bit of a... A bit of a huh when it came to your email.
You said, my father is considered to be in the top 1% of yearly income and I am extremely well off.
Right, because of him.
So you're not well off.
True, true. I just thought that was kind of interesting.
Well, yeah, I mean, he could cut me off at any moment, but...
Uh, the odds that he would do that are slim unless, like, I did something...
No, no, but it's not your money.
You're not well-off. You're poor.
Uh, yeah. I mean, am I wrong?
You are not wrong.
So you've ego-identified with your father's wealth and success, which means you've kind of taken the fruit without growing the tree, so to speak, right?
Well, when I said that, I mean, like, I also, like, benefit from his...
Um, like gains, I guess you could say.
Financial gains. No, I understand that.
But you're poor. Yes.
All right. I just- My income is very low.
Yes, I am poor. Right. So how much do you make it yet?
I haven't done anything. Um, probably like 10 grand, maybe a little less.
And how do you make that?
Um, I was a personal trainer for a while.
I mean, I still am certified, but now I'm starting to do things that, um, I'm just starting to do different things like filming videos and editing, photography, etc.
And yeah, I'm getting paid for that right now, too.
So through college, I work for the athletic department, so I get the opportunity to film athletes and such.
So you're paid by the university?
Yeah. Right.
Okay. So you're way below the poverty line, right?
Yes. Okay. Because that's important.
That you do not own your father's success is very important for your ambition.
Because otherwise, you say, I'm extremely well off.
Okay, well, if you just finished a big meal, you don't start cooking, right?
You got to stay hungry.
And recognizing that you're broke, basically, or that you're way below the poverty line is kind of important, right?
Right. Because then you've got some place to go.
Yes.
Something to earn, right?
Exactly.
Now, how would you pay for all of this stuff if your father cut you off?
I'm not saying I'm going to make a phone call right after this.
I just wanted to mention it.
Let's just say my dad just said, okay, son, I'm not giving you any more money right now.
I'm not paying for anything.
What I would probably do is...
Take a few semesters off of college or drop out completely and then work until I could afford like a mediocre apartment and some groceries and then just kind of start working from there and then build my way back up either by going to college and paying for it while I'm working full time or something like that.
So yeah.
I just take a job and then work and then if I could afford to get educated or just educate myself.
And what are you getting educated in?
My degree is for statistics and a minor in computer science.
And what are the job options after you graduate?
So with statistics I could pretty much enter most fields Um, just by the virtue of the fact that, um, I can, you know, analyzing data is like pretty important in a lot of fields.
So, you know, going into big data or specifically, I guess one thing I was thinking about was software development for a strength and condition, collegiate strength and conditioning programs.
So some things that would kind of track athletes progress and, you know, form regressions to see like what you could do to change their programs that would make them perform better, et cetera, et cetera.
So you might build an app to help college athletes?
That's one possibility.
Another possibility is actually not even related to my college major, and that would be filming.
So, yeah. Okay.
So, if you want to build an app or you want to do filming, why do you need a college degree in stats and comp sci?
Um, so what I would say to that is I, I mean, I don't need something to learn how to program software, but, um, as far as the statistics go, I think learning, you know, the higher levels of math, like calculus three and stuff like that would be more difficult on my own because I do think it's good to have a resource of like a professor to like be able to constantly ask questions to.
Like, personally, like, you know, at office hours or something like that.
And by the way, I'm not saying that's the most economically effective.
Well, it is if you're not paying for it.
Yeah, exactly. So I'm not paying for it.
And it almost, it would almost, it pleases my parents or they want to send me to college.
You know what I mean? Like, they want me to get an education.
Sorry about that. You're equating going to college with getting an education, right?
Yeah. I mean, that's not the only way to get an education.
You're right. And I guess I'll break that down even further and say they want me...
When I say education, I guess I should specifically say, due to my major, like, I want to learn calculus.
I want to learn algorithms, etc., etc.
And I don't need college to do that.
But as soon as I ask my parents, or I bring that up to them, like, do I need all this?
And is it really going to be beneficial?
Like, I talk to my dad about this a lot, and he says...
That, like, just having a degree is just a little bit better.
Not that it necessarily, like, makes you stand apart from everybody entirely, and I know that, and I'm trying to branch out and do other things that besides just get good grades.
But when they hire you, he says it's a nice, it's something to kind of fall back on.
Why does your father want you to be hired by someone?
Why? As a backup, I guess.
As a backup plan to what I would be planning on doing.
Is that how he got his money, was by being an employee?
Yes, actually.
Well, so am I. So he went to just some small college, and then he went to law school, and he's a lawyer, but I'd say he's in the higher end of lawyers.
So he's like a partner or something.
You don't have to give me the details.
But yeah, you can make decent coin in law, particularly if you get all of that, right?
Yeah. So he required the certification to become a lawyer, right?
He had to go and get his degree in law.
He had to go past the bar.
And you can't practice law really without that, right?
But that's not what you want to do, right?
So you don't want to do something that requires government certification, right?
Certainly to do filming or to build an app, you don't need to have government certification.
So I'm just trying to sort of figure out what the reasoning is here.
Also, in college that I have right now are connections.
For example, the job I work has been directly...
here and being hired as a student intern.
So with a camera, like I saved up the money to buy a camera and some equipment and some editing software and such.
But now that I'm hired here by this opportunity that I had because of being in school, now I get to use $30,000, $40,000 cameras, state-of-the-art equipment, et cetera.
So, yeah.
So you think that it's a good business return on investment to be in college?
Thank you.
If I'm not paying for it, then yes.
Right. If you were paying for it.
See, I don't know.
And that's the problem with being subsidized, right?
That's the problem. You're like a government department.
It's like, do we need to cut any jobs?
Not really. Do we need to become more efficient?
No, not really. We got a budget, right?
Do we actually need to solve poverty?
You go to the welfare department, health and welfare or wealth and health fair and say, you know, we really got to solve poverty.
They'd be like, yeah, right. So this is the problem.
Matthew, everything has a price.
Everything has a price.
Now, if your father is laying down the gold brick road saying go to college, well, college seems very compelling then, right?
But if it was your money...
I might still go to college.
I would just see...
Because I can't play out the scenario in my head of the next couple years to see where I'm going exactly or what I want to be doing at the time.
But that's the problem with the language.
Right? Somebody...
That's the problem with the language.
You say, I don't know how the next couple of years are going to play out.
That's a very passive way of putting it.
Like you're on a conveyor belt, you're just not sure where it's going to dump you, right?
Well, the way I was thinking about it more is...
Let's say, you know, I get this job, I'm filming right now, and then some other opportunity opens because of that.
So I guess I don't know the precise opportunities I would get by choosing to not go to college versus going to college.
Because you're looking for opportunities.
Listen, I know you're a young man, so I mean, this is perfectly natural.
But you're looking for opportunities to come to you.
What's one other option?
Pursuing them out myself.
Go and make your opportunities. Yeah.
Go and make your opportunities.
I mean, nobody came to me and said, hey, feel like running a philosophy show?
Right. And I guess I know the perfect thing isn't just going to fall into my lap, but I'm saying...
Oh, that would be terrible if it did.
I mean... No, literally.
If the perfect thing fell into your lap, it would...
Trigger you to bypass all of the hustle and muscle and grunt work that you need to be successful.
Agreed. And then it would just take away all that it really means to be successful.
Well, the success would not be sustainable.
You know, YouTube channels come and go.
People start with a bang and end with a whimper.
I keep going and going and going.
Why? Because I'm willing to do things that other people just won't do.
Because I'm willing to put out 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 videos a week because Mike and I work very well together because I'm very committed because I'm willing to touch subjects that other people would rather die than touch even though I know they accept them privately.
Just willing to do things that other people won't do.
And in some sense...
I definitely see where you're coming from.
I know there's always something more I can do.
In fact, there's a lot more that I could do.
For example, with this job that I just acquired, I did put in a reasonable amount of effort in the fact that I've had to have a year of editing previously, just using my own resources, even though I have all the other things.
But whatever resources I did make, That's what I made.
Time I put into editing, probably hundreds of hours of learning and learning and trying and trying again, just so I could get this job.
Not just so I could get this job.
I didn't know about it at the time, but you see what I'm saying.
This opportunity happened because I was working towards some sort of tangible end, which was to get better, just to have more skill.
The moment somebody says a reasonable amount of effort, I know that they're not an entrepreneur.
Being an entrepreneur is not putting out a reasonable amount of effort.
It's not even putting out an unreasonable amount of effort.
It's putting out a literally virtually impossible unholy amount of effort.
I agree with what you're saying there.
But now think about this.
I think I might have just answered some of my own questions.
But if I were to not have all these classes, I would be going just...
Balls to the wall for one thing, I guess.
Because that's what I did in the summer.
I mean, when I didn't have classes and I didn't have to work more than 20 hours because I made a decent amount of money that I needed, given, you know, all the resources I get to pay for myself.
So in the summer, you know, I was filming like 30 hours a week, plus I was doing like editing and like tutorials and stuff, another 30 to 40 hours.
And not that like a 60 hours is like, Amazing.
Or, oh, I worked so hard, but more time was allocated to it.
And that's, I guess, the root of my question was, okay, now I allocated this much time to a certain craft without any fire under my ass.
You know what I mean?
Without the need to make this money because I had everything paid for.
But now if I need to get This money to sustain myself, maybe that would push me even further to do, or push me to work even more and more for that.
Okay, but here's the way to think of it, Matthew, in my opinion.
So, sophomore, that's first year, right?
Second. Second year. Okay, so you've got another two and a half years to go, right?
Yes. So, what is it all told for you a year, do you think?
Like, what do you mean?
Like how much does it cost for you to go to college for the year?
Tuition itself is probably...
No, just give me a grand total, like 20k, 30k, 15k, what are we talking?
Probably 12k to 15k.
Oh, because you're living at home? Okay, sorry.
So living and everything. Yeah, yeah.
I'd say about 20k then.
All right. So you have two and a half years more to go.
So let's just say 50k, right?
Mm-hmm. All right. So that's 50k that is dedicated to your future.
So my question is, Matthew, let's pretend that I'm your dad for a moment.
And I say, Matthew, I'm giving you 50k.
50k. 1,000 big ones, baby.
50 large. I'm giving you $50,000.
Now, you can use that for school if you want, or you can use that to start a business, or you can use it for whatever, right?
I mean, do something productive with it.
Don't just look at the video game rig I bought.
1,200 screens. It's beautiful.
Right?
So here's your 50K.
What would you do with it?
At this point right now, I would say I buy a better camera and then just buy more courses, which wouldn't cost that much money, but I would buy the camera and then get better but I would buy the camera and then get better with that camera.
And then I would also think that I would go to school But then I would also hedge back on my apartment and I would get a shittier apartment.
Okay, so how much would you spend on the camera?
All in all, I'd probably spend $10k on that.
So you'd spend $10,000 on a camera?
On equipment. Not one camera.
Okay, on equipment. All right.
And that would make you somebody who would be like a filmmaker, right?
Yeah. I mean, I wouldn't say that would make...
More or less. It would get you started, right?
Okay. More or less.
It would give me... Hang on. The camera I have now...
Okay. Let's not get...
I don't want to get bogged down in the technical details.
You'd spend 10K on a camera.
You've now got $40,000.
And you want to be a filmmaker.
Let's just say that's what you want to do at the moment, right?
You could change that later on.
So you've got $40,000.
You want to be a filmmaker.
So what would you spend next?
What would you do next? After I became a filmmaker?
No, no, no. With the rest of the money?
Tomorrow we go and we buy you your $10,000 worth of equipment.
Now you can be a cameraman. You can be a filmmaker.
And now you have $40,000 with which to start building your career as a filmmaker.
So what would you do? I would use the camera to get a few or more than a few local clients.
So it wouldn't be like...
I'm not trying to be a filmmaker.
Like, I don't want to make movies and stuff right now.
No, I understand. You want to, like, film events or film weddings or film stuff, right?
Events, yeah, weddings, real estate, local businesses.
Okay, okay. No, I understand all that.
Stuff for their marketing, yeah. Okay.
Sorry, Matthew, how would the camera get you jobs?
It would make me look more professional and No, but how would people even know what you were doing?
Word of mouth. Word of mouth.
That's your plan? Word of mouth.
That's not... I'm just saying that's one example because local businesses here, and if I went to school, I can go through the school too, and I can...
I mean, right now I know a couple people who work at these businesses or are managers at these businesses, so I could talk to them, and obviously I'd make a website and such to do that.
So you'd spend some money on marketing, on advertising, on getting the word out, right?
Right, yes. All right.
And then you would start to get jobs doing that kind of stuff, right?
Now, in the long run, what do you see in terms of this being a business?
In other words, do you want to be a business where you have a team of people you can deploy or do you want to keep doing it yourself for the next while?
I'm not certain, but the way I see it is the plan, I guess, was...
To build that client base right now.
And then once I'm done with college, I can use that to sort of sustain myself.
No, no, but I understand that, Matthew.
What I'm trying to figure out is if you've got $50,000, what are you going to spend it on?
Now, if you say, I've got $50,000, so I'm going to keep doing what I'm doing, Well, then that tells you that what you're doing may be a decent idea.
However, if you say, oh, $50,000, man, I'm dropping out, I'm buying the equipment, I'm doing the advertising, I'm talking to the people, I'm going to go out there and hustle and get myself some business.
Well, I guess I'd just, I mean, I'd probably, honestly, I'd probably just do what I'm doing now, but I might work a little more to make up for that money I spent on Well, no, because if you spend 10K on a camera, you don't have enough for school, right?
But then the money I would make with the camera...
Oh, so you think the money you would make having the better camera would more than make up for the 10K? Initially, but over the course of time, yes.
Not right away, but I'd say within a couple of years, yes.
Now, how do you know that a better camera will get you more work?
The reason I'm saying that, Matthew, is that an average camera now was a great camera five years ago.
And five years ago, you had to pay $10,000 for a camera you can get now for $2,000.
And people were happy with the $10,000 camera five years ago, and they're probably kind of happy with the $2,000 camera now.
Like, I'm just kind of curious how you know for sure that the camera is a worthwhile investment.
Well that's why I was talking more equipment than the camera itself so I do have like an adequate camera now but what I would buy is you know a drone so now I can shoot real estate better than other people can who don't have a drone and a stabilizer so I can shoot smoother footage than people who wouldn't have that.
If that makes sense.
But drones aren't 10k right?
No but like all in all I could see myself spending that much like So if I had a better camera that could shoot, you know, take in more information, then that would take more processing power of a computer, so I'd get a computer, and then along with the drone, and then the stabilizer, and then these things kind of add up.
10K is just a rough...
No, but you have enough to go and do filming now, right?
Right. And I do.
Okay, so you have enough to start, so you could actually take the 50K... And you could just start making bank, right?
Bank? Yeah.
Yes, I could make money.
Correct. Now, do you know anybody who's in this business?
Yeah, I know a few.
And are they making money?
Do they enjoy their work?
Why don't they have drones? So, the one...
Two of them do.
One of them graduated from college and he's actually kind of flexing some of the opportunities that he made when he was in college through the university to make videos for companies and such.
And then the other one had a few thousand dollars in his bank account.
He did drop out of school and now he's just flying around the world and traveling and Trying to shoot for that, but I don't really think he's making money off of that currently.
And do you know why he's not making money?
I would say that it's because he's not pushing a lot of content out.
He's not a frequent uploader to YouTube or anything.
He doesn't post that much, but that's what I think.
So, what do you think?
Have you asked him? No, I haven't talked to him in a little bit because he's been in Singapore and such.
Oh, come on, Matthew.
I mean, I know I can't.
Singapore? There's no way to contact people in Singapore.
Might as well be in Andromeda Galaxy.
He's been in some pretty remote places, I guess.
No, I understand. But look, if you want to get into a business, don't reinvent the wheel.
Try and figure out why people are doing what they're doing, whether they're enjoying it, what the business is like.
And... If they're successful, how they got successful.
If they're unsuccessful, what mistakes did they make?
What did they wish they could have done differently?
I mean, if you know people, figure out if it's even a viable business, you know?
Right. Because in college, you know, if they're paying you to do stuff, that's not the same as the free market, right?
Correct. And so, my concern is that you're going to start developing skills and expertise and maybe invest in equipment for something you don't even know.
Whether it could be a business in the long run.
I honestly do think it can be a business in the long run.
I know you do, but the question is, do you know?
I mean, do I really know?
I mean, like any business I could go into, can I know for like certain, but I know that with a very high percentage of confidence that money could be made here.
Maybe not millions, But money could be made there.
Because you know people who are making money there?
Yes. Okay. But the important thing is to talk to them and figure out how they're doing it so you don't repeat mistakes.
Right. That's, yeah, true.
Now, if you could go and do the filmmaking business instead of going to college, would you prefer that?
See, this is a tough question.
And I don't mean to dodge around your question.
It's just tough for me to answer because I don't really have this.
I don't have an inclination to go one way or the other.
That's so strong.
That's just, you know, I really want to go out and make films or I really want to be somebody who analyzes data and create software.
So that's why I'm just kind of testing the waters.
I'm learning these things now.
Do you have a passion that you really, really want to do?
As far as like a career, like a specific career, I don't.
But the things that I want to be able to do are just to live.
I guess I want, I mean, not without work, but I would like to be free to take work off or to travel a little bit if I want to.
with my girlfriend at this point.
you know, to That's really the one thing I'm passionate about is developing a good relationship with her right now and to thrive with her, I guess.
But that's not a job.
Neither is travel. Right.
So you're passionate about stuff that has nothing to do with a career or job or making money, right?
In fact, these things all cost money.
Right. And that's why I'm saying a job is just – it would almost be a means to an end to me.
It wouldn't be, you know, the end in itself.
But I do enjoy making videos, and I also enjoy the computer science aspect.
And your girlfriend, is she ambitious herself, or what's her relationship to ambition?
Honestly, she is...
I think she's very ambitious in...
More than me, I guess, because here's the kicker, is that she actually cut herself off from her parents for the most part.
So now, like, she lives across the country right now, and she, I mean, her parents own a place where she lives, so she lives in a vacant area.
House that her parents own, but she pays rent there.
Wait, she cut herself off from her family, but she lives in her family's property?
Financially. Financially.
And she pays to live on that property.
And it's a weird dynamic because her family isn't there.
Yeah, no, I get it. I get it.
Yeah, so...
And how did you guys meet? We were actually from the same hometown where we went to high school.
So yeah, we kind of just...
We met there, and then...
And is she going to school, or what's she doing?
She's going to school part-time, and she's working full-time.
And you said you weren't sure if she...
You said you think that she might be ambitious.
So, I guess I'm getting a little...
When I say she's ambitious, she really wanted to be on her own, so she went out and did it, in a sense.
She doesn't have any...
End goal of what she doesn't know what she wants to do.
Like she doesn't know what she wants to pursue.
So you can have both a little bit in the same boat that way, right?
That way, yeah. Right.
And how often do you guys see each other?
So we would see each other once a month to once every two months.
The largest gap we'll have is two months.
Right. That's tough, man.
You know the stats on long-distance relationships, right?
Yeah, but they don't worry me too much.
Why not? Because I know the statistics are usually taken on a general population, and I know that the general population doesn't build relationships off of virtue.
I don't know if you observed that, but that's what I'm observing.
Right, right.
And I'm not saying I'm a special person, but, you know, I'm not some person who's just the highest goal of being virtuous.
I'm just saying that I know when people ask me, how do you do this?
Like, how do you have this relationship with her over a long distance?
And to me, it's just, how could I not?
It's not even a thought, you know?
Right. Did she grow up wealthy?
Yeah, yeah.
Now, do you think that she's going to want you to provide some level of significant resources in the relationship at some point?
If you get married, have kids and someone, do you think she's going to want to be lower class, lower middle class, upper middle class?
Where do you think she's going to want to land?
I think she'll want to land somewhere realistically middle class.
But that's a big step down for her, right?
And do you think she'll be okay with that?
I know she'd be okay with that.
How do you know? So, A, I know she's not going to want a ton of resources from me because she will not let me do anything.
She won't let me pay for anything significant.
Like... If it's a flight, for example, if we're going somewhere and the flight's a lot of money, I said, just let me help you pay for it.
She's like, no. That's partly because you can't afford to help her pay for it.
Because your dad would be paying for it.
And she probably doesn't want to take money from your dad.
No, he wouldn't be paying for it.
Yes, he would. Matthew, you don't understand economics.
He absolutely would.
Because even if you say, no, this is my money, the only reason you still have that money is because your dad's paying for college.
Otherwise, your money would be in college.
Right. So he is absolutely paying for it.
Yeah. Right.
Yeah, I can see to that.
But she's never wanted me to...
And she always just wants to make her own way.
Well, no, but if she has kids, right?
If she has kids, she, I hope at least, won't be working full-time when your kids are babies, right?
No, she wouldn't be, no.
So you'll have to be bringing home the cheddar at that point, right?
Yes. And that's my question.
Is, if she grew up wealthy, how is she going to feel if you can't bring home much money?
Um... I guess depending on how much, if I couldn't bring home enough money to support and sustain a family, which, yes, it's expensive.
But yeah, then there would be a concern.
But I, like, objectively don't see myself getting a little amount of money.
Well, because, you know, there is this little thing in women called hypergamy, right?
Which is where women want to marry up.
Women aim upwards.
Like, you get the most attractive woman you can get, and she's going to want to get the man with the most resources that she can get.
I mean, it's not the only thing to a relationship, of course.
There is virtue and all of that as well.
Right. But that's important.
I mean, and look, she can say, listen, I saw my parents.
They had a lot of money. I'm not happy with it.
I want less money. The money didn't bring happiness.
It brought stress and misery and whatever, right?
But it's got to be a real conscious thing.
And it's still fighting against some of the female instincts, right?
Like, to be honest, I'm a kid.
How handsome are you, Matthew? One to ten.
I mean, can you see my Skype picture?
That's a fine question.
Let me see. Yeah.
I mean, I'll let you go off of...
Oh, that's both of you, right?
Right. So, I don't know.
I guess relatively defined jawline, pretty muscular.
I don't know if you want to throw me at a seven or something.
Well, she's like a nine, right?
Right. Or, I don't know, I can't see her.
It's too well, right? Yeah.
So, guess what, Matthew?
You got the prettiest woman you could get, right?
I'm not saying that's all she is.
Steph, I know this sounds weird, but...
I don't notice her looks.
When I was 16 or 17, I would actually say I had someone that was just about as...
Once you get to nine, it's like, okay, how do you really distinguish what's better or not?
But yeah, this wouldn't be the first time that I would...
Have been with someone like that.
And I don't even know why. Don't ask me.
Forget all this mouth noise thing that you're making.
Okay. So you're a good looking guy.
She's a good looking woman.
I mean, I can't judge her looks objectively because I'm straight, but she's very pretty.
So you are practicing male hypergamy.
You got the prettiest woman that you could get a hold of.
And I'm not saying that's all she is.
She'd be a wonderful woman and a smart woman and a wise and a virtuous woman, but she's really pretty.
Right? So you're practicing male hypergamy by getting the most physically attractive woman that you can get.
And she, most likely, is going to practice female hypergamy, which means she's going to want to get the man with the most resources.
Now you can say, well, she won't be like that, but you're like that.
Disagree with me all you want.
I'm just telling you what I think. I'm not making a case here that's objective or absolute.
I'm just telling you the way it looks to me.
I mean, if she was 5'2 and 250 pounds, come on, man.
No. You wouldn't be dating her.
That also reflects the fact that you don't take care of yourself.
And okay, I'll just concede and say, yeah, if she was ugly and even if she was thin and took care of herself, then I probably would have never been attracted to her in the first place.
Yeah. Right. Right.
So, you want the male hypergamy, and you don't think she's going to be subject to the female hypergamy?
Um... Because I'm telling you, if she grew up wealthy man, she knows a lot of wealthy guys.
She does, yeah.
So... The reason I've...
I mean... No, that's why you said your father's money is your money.
Explain. She's marrying into the money as well.
You being a great guy and all that, but she's marrying into the money as well.
She's marrying into the safety net.
I... She didn't know about how wealthy I was until recently.
Wait, did you go to high school together?
We didn't go to the same high school, but we knew each other.
Are you saying that women don't have any way to figure out how wealthy a man is?
That's like saying men have no way of figuring out how pretty a woman is.
Come on, man. You don't think she Googled your home address to see how big the house was?
You don't think she could figure out how expensive your clothes were?
You don't think she could figure out what kind of car you drove?
Come on. I mean, I don't drive a nice car.
I don't wear nice clothes.
I'm pretty simple like that, I guess.
As far as, you know, how I dress and such.
I don't dress flashy or anything.
So, in- No, but, okay, okay, Matthew.
Okay, let's say all of that's true.
I'm not, right? I'm not really denying.
Okay, I'm going to disprove you about any of this.
Let's say that everything you're saying is true and she had no idea from any of those things.
Do you think that's the only way to figure out whether a man has money in the family or not?
No. Okay. Other ways of doing it would be things like, hey, Matthew, when did you get your first job?
If the answer is 11, probably a lot of money.
Hey, Matthew, what did your dad do for a living?
I wonder if he can figure that one out.
Hey, where did you last go for vacation?
How many vacations a year do you take?
Do you ski? How many childhood activities did you go?
I mean, you understand. You can go on and on and on.
You can tease this stuff all apart in a three-minute conversation, right?
Right. And if we're just going to talk about hypergamy, though, there were people who...
She could have chosen then.
That would have been way farther up that distribution of wealth than I am.
Sure. Listen, I'm not saying that you and your personality and your values, I've said repeatedly, that's not all there is.
But to ignore it is dangerous.
It's not all there is.
Right. Right?
It's not all there is. I mean, she may be a great judge of character, and she'll say, okay, I'll take the guy with half the income who's twice as nice.
I mean, this Fifty Shades of Grey shit where it's like, well, he's got a helicopter but beats me half to death.
That's hot. But if you're not ambitious and if you're not in motion and you're not driven, it can be tough to keep the spark.
Let me tell you, Matthew, I am 51 years old.
I've been married for 15 years, been dating in the relationship with the woman for almost 16 years.
How do you keep things fresh?
How do you keep things sexy?
How do you keep the spark alive?
You keep the spark alive by breaking new ground.
By taking on new challenges.
I take on difficult topics in this show because it's breaking new ground.
It keeps me alert. It keeps me active.
It keeps me engaged. Yeah.
So if you don't have a new mountaintop to climb, you're both going to get bored.
Yeah.
And if you, sorry, if you were who you are and you were the son of an unemployed janitor, and she's going to have tons of options.
Listen, she's going to have tons of options.
She's very pretty. And she comes from a wealthy family and she's, you know, ambitious and she's a self-starter and she's goal-oriented and she's willing to forego family support, which is admirable.
So she's going to have a lot of options.
The question is why, you know, relationships, you constantly have to keep winning love.
And it's not just about being nice.
It's also about having goals and challenging yourself and being on the edge of your abilities.
Right. And, you know, my particular concern, Matthew, you said to me that your relationship is your biggest deal.
With the money that your father...
Sorry, go ahead. Yeah, so when I say, like, my relationship is my biggest goal, I... I mean, yes, that's like the most important thing is like, what good is a nice job when it's just there's nobody else around, I guess. So, do you see what I'm saying there?
Like, to have good relationships, yes, with her, but also with other people.
And just to be able to be, to like cultivate relationships with them, I guess.
Dude, what's all this relationship stuff?
I mean, I gotta tell you, it's a little girly.
Well, I mean, I mean...
No, I mean, where's your conquer the world?
Where's your Genghis Khan? Where's your Bill Gates?
Where's your...
Right? I want that.
I want to go travel and be close to my girlfriend.
That's kind of nice. Don't get me wrong.
Those things are great. But do you have any thundering hordes of archers on horseback riding across the Mongolian plain stuff?
I mean, any worlds you want to go out and conquer?
Yes, but what good is doing that when you're just...
Let's say, you know, something, you know, let's say I conquer some large mountain, some large task, and I just become the top of an industry.
Well, what good is that if there's nobody around me?
No, but this isn't either or.
You've got this false dichotomy, right?
What if in order to have good relationships, you need to conquer mountains?
As a man, I kind of think that's true.
I don't think like you just get to, oh, you know, let's say that your dad gives you a million dollars and it's like, oh, I don't know, let's just go travel for five years or something.
Like, come on. What if women get bored if you're not out there conquering the world, so to speak?
Yeah. Right?
Right. I mean, your parents are together, right?
545. Yes.
Right. Does your mother value your father's ambition and drive?
Yeah. All right.
All right. Seeing a man be a good provider is like watching a mom, like a woman, be a great mother.
Mm-hmm. And so this idea that, well, I'm going to be a workaholic and I'm going to be lonely and there's going to be no relationships, I understand that.
And I'm... At an extreme level, that doesn't work, right?
But the idea that the alternative to that is to be kind of aimless and travel a lot and be close to people, I don't know.
Yeah. I mean, that's not how your dad did it, right?
Right. So with regards to your big question, which is, what are the effects of taking the money?
My suggestion... Hang on.
Let me do a little spiel here and then I'll shut up.
So my suggestion, Matthew, would be this.
Sit down with your mom and your dad.
Is your grandfather still alive?
Yes. One of them.
If you can get a hold of your grandfather, so much the better.
So your grandfather worked himself up from the dirt, right?
Yeah. Right. So your grandfather worked like hell to give your father these opportunities, which now he's working to give even more opportunities to you.
And I think you need to have the conversation with the men in your family, and the women too, to say, well, granddad went from 0 to 100, my father went from 100 to 150.
Are the virtues and the strengths that we achieved as men, as providers, are they driven by a lack of resources?
Or are they driven by more resources?
Because I don't think it's working for you, Matthew.
And this is why you wrote in. I don't think it's working for you like you're finding your joy, your bliss.
Now, I mean, you're young, right?
So I get all of that.
And I'm not saying that, you know, it has to happen now.
But I'm not sure that it's imminent.
You've got stuff you're kind of okay with doing.
You know, I could work with big data.
That'd be okay. I can do some comp sci.
Maybe you can build an app.
I can do some film work and so on.
But none of it's really a passion, right?
And so I would sit there and say, we have this plan, which is, if I go to college, that's the very best use of resources.
But I don't know that it is.
Because did your grandfather go to college?
No. No, he did not.
And he was, I bet, even more ambitious and driven than your father.
Because he went from zero to 100.
So, I think, like, everybody has this plan, and this is one of the things that's so fucking terrible about college, man, is that, like, I was just, I went skiing last night, and I was listening to the ski lift guys, they were, oh yeah, man, I'm gonna go to college for sociology, you know, I really want to go to college for poli-sci or whatever.
Anyway, I won't tell you how that whole conversation went with me and them, but anyway, it's like, if you don't know what to do, go to college!
If you don't have any particular ambition, pick stuff you kind of like and go to college.
It's kind of like a placeholder.
It's like a rental spot for stuff you can't figure out what to do with.
Should we keep it in the house?
No. Should we throw it out?
No. We'll just put it in a storage facility.
We don't know what to do with it. And as far as ambition, particularly male ambition...
College has just become like this big storage facility.
Should I do nothing?
No. Should I be really ambitious?
No. I'll just go to college.
You don't know exactly what for.
You're kind of ambling around and going to classes and doing some stuff, but if there was no college, What would you be doing?
If there was no money for college, what would you be doing?
Well, you'd actually have to figure out whether you wanted to go into $50,000 of debt.
Actually, more. More, right?
It would be $80,000. It's $80,000 for you to go to college at $20,000 a year.
Plus, let's say that you were making, on average, $50,000 a year.
If you weren't going to college, you'd make less in the beginning and more at the end, but average out to 50k a year.
Well, that's 200k, plus the 80k you're spending for college.
It's $280,000.
That's $280,000.
Now, if somebody said to you when you were 18 or 19, here's $280,000, what do you want to do?
Would you sit there and say, go to college?
But that's what it's costing you.
More than a quarter of a million dollars.
In earnings, losses, and direct costs.
And if you want to know whether the resources are harming you, you say, what would I be doing if I didn't have these resources?
Would you be willing to spend $280,000, Matthew, for what you're doing now?
No. Well, that's your answer.
No. Now, the resources, the excessive resources...
That's blurring and blunting your economic calculation engine in your mind and heart.
Yeah, it's free and it's expected, so I guess I'll just go do it.
But what you're not doing is figuring out what you really want to do.
What you're not doing is getting your hands dirty.
What you're not doing is gaining job experience.
What you're not doing is gaining entrepreneurial experience.
What you're not doing is getting out there and hustling with a purpose and a goal and a dream and a desire.
You're just in storage.
Because you don't know.
And it's not helping you now.
Because college is the illusion of purpose.
You know, college is just another set of fucking breadcrumbs that you wander through the forest munching as you go.
Well, take this course. Well, next you take this course.
And now you can have a summer off. And then you come back here and you live in this neighborhood.
And then you go here. You take this course.
And then you take this. You're just following orders.
Just following rules. You're still not...
Figuring out what you want to do with all of the amazing opportunities that you have.
So that's my concern is that if you feel somewhat listless now because you're not exercising your muscles of independence and willpower spending two and a half more years being told what to do while someone else pays for it is not going to exactly strengthen those muscles.
Now if you sit down with your family And you say, listen, I got some grave doubts.
I got some grave doubts about all of this stuff.
I don't know. I don't know that it's working for me.
Oh, you got to go to college now.
Granddad didn't. Well, I did.
Says your father. It's like, yes, but you needed the piece of paper to do what you wanted to do.
I don't. So we need to have a discussion.
And certainly there are so many people who are enormously successful, even in intellectual fields, who did not go to college.
I mean, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, I mean, you name it, right?
You just go on and on. So, I would have a discussion, and I'd think about that $280,000.
Because that's the price tag.
And if someone else is paying it, and you don't see the lost income, then you're kind of living in a socialist paradise, and therefore don't care that much about costs and benefits.
But we, our ambition arises out of Why the fuck did people spend so much time learning how to build a fire because they were freezing their tits off?
Necessity is the mother of invention.
That's an old phrase.
I don't know if this is popular anymore, but it certainly was when I was growing up.
Necessity is the mother of invention.
Right. I mean, why is this show so successful?
Because I don't...
There's no other option for me.
Like, I'm not sitting there saying, well, or I could go become a dancer.
Or, you know, I'm going to become a painter.
You know, this is it, man.
This is it. And I got so trashed and slandered when I was starting out this show that I was like, well, that's it for a business career.
I guess I'm all in.
You know, it actually did me the world of good back in the day.
Did me the world of good.
And... If you never know what anything costs, you never know how to allocate your resources.
And I think it would be worthwhile having a conversation and say, okay, make the business case for me.
Like, why should I not take the money that we're going to spend on college and go and start my own business?
Tell me why. I don't need a piece of paper.
And there are lots of people out there, I think the more successful business people out there, They view a college degree as a liability.
Oh, so you have higher expectations.
You've been removed from reality even further.
You have debt, which I'm going to have to pay for as part of your salary package because you're going to need more money than somebody who doesn't have debt.
And you probably have a whole bunch of social justice warrior nonsense.
Maybe not in stats and comp sci, but you know what I mean, for a lot of employers.
Yeah. Like college, seriously.
Why would you do that? And certainly for...
You know, there's so many people, so many experts I've had on this show.
I have no idea what their education is.
I don't care. Why would I care?
So many people who watch this show have no idea about my education.
Why should they? Why should they care?
You see people on TV, I have no idea what they're educated in.
No idea. And it doesn't matter.
Why would I care? I mean, the stuff that you're educated in, it's either how to think, in which case you don't need to go to school, or it's what to think, in which case it's obsolete in a year after you leave.
It's like, okay, well, that's going to be gone in two years, so...
Right. So that would be my suggestion, is just sit down with your family and say, I'm kind of on a conveyor belt here, and I want to put the pause button and say, okay, what is it that we're really trying to achieve?
Because I still don't have much of a clue what I want to do with my life, and spending two and a half or more years in storage probably ain't going to help me get there.
Right. Now, this doesn't mean that you, you know, your dad could say, look, the money is for college or you don't get it.
And that's, you know, that's perfectly, that's a perfectly viable offer to make.
But then he's basically paying you to do what he wants.
And I don't think that's also going to help you develop your own particular preferences.
Right.
You know, parental anxiety is a big thing.
And I, you know, this drives a lot of this stuff.
He's got to go to college.
Because if he doesn't go to college, disaster.
Let's see the facts on that.
See the stats on that. College is a huge risk.
It's a huge risk.
Because it delays development.
It delays decisiveness.
It delays exposure to the free market.
It builds debt for a lot of people.
It is a huge...
And it can embitter people. And, of course, as a male in college, you're at risk of sexual allegations.
I guess if you've got a long-distance girlfriend, that's a whole lot better.
But, yeah, it's risky.
So, yeah, just try and figure out the business case for it.
Try and figure it out. And if you can't make it, that's important to know.
Yeah. All right. All right, man.
Well, thanks for the call. I really appreciate it.
And I hope you let us know how it goes.
All right. Thank you. Will do.
Thanks, man. All right.
Alright, well up next we have Brandon and his husband Jeremy.
Brandon wrote in and said, I've been married to a man for almost seven years.
In the last two years, my husband and I have done an enormous amount of therapy and self-knowledge work, solo and together.
I've realized that I may not be gay, but that I have extremely well avoided processing some of the traumas I experienced as a teen and child under the manipulative, narcissistic, and borderline women and the withdrawn passive men in my family.
I believe I may have entered my gay marriage because of a deep fear and mistrust of women.
I found an ease of connection and brotherhood with my best friend that I possibly used to feed my own narcissism in our gay relationship.
I also felt an unwillingness to step into the deepest corners of my mental basement to work on the foundational aspects of my history.
I am deeply saddened that I have stolen seven years of my husband's life and opportunity loss to find a truly gay lifetime partner, and I feel that I will not be able to surmount 28 years of dysfunction with women of my past to build a virtuous marriage with a wife and children in the future.
I've always had sexual attraction to women and have dated women, including a largely physical two-year relationship with one.
However, I feel a massive wall of terror and adrenaline flood my system when I try to imagine an emotional connection and vulnerability with a woman.
I feel paralyzed at what my next action should be to work through this terror and dysfunction.
Please help me to unpack this fundamental problem so that I can overcome my fear and move towards the best life for myself, my husband, and a potential future wife and children.
I hope that my experience may also be a learning opportunity for others who may be confusing a lack of healthy male connection and a mistrust of women for homosexuality.
That's from Brandon. Well, hey guys, how you doing this afternoon?
Hello, I'm a little bit nervous and a little bit excited to be here.
Excellent, excellent. And Jeremy's there too, right?
Yep, absolutely. I'm very excited but very nervous to be here.
Thank you. Well, nature nurture!
I'm not even going to touch this, right?
So, you know, gay born, gay environment, trauma versus homosexuality.
I mean, I just want to put that right out front there so that people can just say, well, that's interesting.
And I'm just going to say we're not going to deal with that.
We're just going to deal with your, Brandon's, personal experiences and, of course, what's happening to you, Jeremy, as well.
I just want to make sure that people understand that I'm not ignoring it.
But we can solve that in this particular conversation.
But I didn't want to pretend it wasn't anywhere in the conversation, right?
Great. All right. So, just a couple of housekeeping or tidying things that popped into my head.
So, Brandon, you say that you're gay, right?
I have considered myself bisexual for the last couple of years.
Um, and I consider myself just kind of questioning for throughout a lot of high school and coming out of that, those years.
Right. It's like penis solve for X. Right.
Okay. Okay.
Um, and yeah, because the, the gay thing combined with dated women, largely physical two year relationship with one, um, That's not, you know, well, one time in college I experimented.
That's like, that's some serious V, right?
Yes. Okay, okay.
Yeah, we were a serious relationship, yes.
Well, hang on.
Largely physical. Besides being emotional, yes.
And serious? We lived together for a fair bit of that.
And yes, though, it was, I should say...
There was a lot of emotional attachment that we were missing.
It was not ultimately an extremely healthy relationship.
Wait, ultimately as in to the end or ultimately as in deeply?
Throughout? I'm just giving you the easy questions up front here.
They get tougher later.
Well, I guess some background on that.
We had grown up in the same neighborhood together.
We had played with each other, a lot of kids.
And after high school, we reconnected.
And we'd already had those years growing up together some.
And that was sort of what brought us together.
And though, I mean...
We broke up after she contracted an STD and I had been entirely monogamous with her and for the two years that we were together she contracted an STD and she didn't have any good answers for how she could have gotten that.
Toilet seat? Sneeze?
Fork? Door handle?
No, not so. Like it was a sexual STD, emphasis on S, right?
Yes. Geez.
Now, did you end up catching it or what?
No, I did not. Wow.
Yeah, okay. Deep fear, mistrust of women.
Get it. Well, this is, you know, I did also, I was the...
I, in my family, I was the one who found the instant messages that my mother had with the man she ultimately cheated on our family with, and he cheated on his family, and they ended up, now they're married and...
I found the instant messages that she had with him on two occasions.
She accidentally left the windows open on the computer after her late night stuff.
And just even thinking back to some of the stuff I was reading, I still get nauseous to this day.
Was it very explicit? It was quite graphic, quite explicit, yes.
And remember, very little of what women do is accidental.
I'm sorry about that.
Was she doing her hypergamy thing?
Was she trading out from your dad?
Yes, she was. For wealth?
For status? For what?
Not for looks.
That sounds pretty emphatic.
Did she end up marrying Danny DeVito?
Like, what are we talking here? She married a man who was – well, she moved on with a man who was a higher status in society.
He has a job that has a lot more status than what my father did and he also made an extra 50 grand a year in his work.
Well, it's good to have a very clear idea of the actual price of your mother.
Yeah. But it's terrible to have a very clear idea of the actual price of your mother.
Wow. Right. And how old were you, Brandon, when that happened?
I was 16.
And do you think this was the first affair?
Yes. I think this probably was the first affair.
Maybe not the first emotional one, but I just don't know.
And nor does my father, in talking with him, to understand more about all of that time and what led up to it.
I don't think there were any other affairs.
Right.
Now, both of you guys, and I just really, in all seriousness, want to give you massive, you know, hugs and sympathies for this.
But both of you guys have adverse childhood experience scores through the very roof of hell itself, right?
You get an adverse childhood experience score of seven for both of you.
And the difference being, Brendan, you experienced, as you say, molestation or sex or rape as a child.
And that is rough and horrible.
Whereas, Jeremy, you saw physical abuse towards a female adult and the rest of it had some significant similarity.
So I just wanted to Really express my incredibly deep sympathy for all that you guys experienced as children.
That was a less than perfect start to the planet.
Yes. Thank you.
Yes. Thank you. Definitely.
And Brandon, what was it that happened for you in terms of molestation as a child?
Well, I almost hesitated to consider that in the ACE as a point for me.
I... Because per the ECE questions, they're saying someone five years older than you.
For me, it was a cousin who was two years older than me.
I was eight years old and for a period of months she would initiate playing doctor and then she advanced to try and attempt intercourse with me and was sort of coercing me into it.
And that went on for a period of months.
When we were discovered by the adults in the family eventually, we both got raged at.
Absolutely raged at.
I got spanked until I was deeply bruised.
And they couldn't sit down for a couple days.
And in particular, I should add, we were being raged at by My grandmother, my aunt, my mother, the men weren't involved in any of this.
Did they know? I don't know how much...
As I understand, yes, the men know about it, but none of the men came back to me to say, here's actually how boys and girls can be.
Here's weight, all of that kind of stuff.
I was also lectured.
They almost blamed me more than they did my...
Older cousin, because I was the boy.
As the male, you were given more agency than the female?
Fuck, that never happens.
Holy shit. And I was told that this is never okay at all for boys and girls to ever do such things with each other.
And actually, I'm not sure if...
I don't know if she got the spankings like I did.
But I just don't have that answer.
And of course, the question is, where did her behavior come from?
This is not to make it okay or sympathize, but the question any reasonable family would have is, okay, well, where is this hypersexualization of the 11-year-old girl coming from?
Yes. And why is she preying on her younger cousin?
Now, of course, like all fucked up families, they're not interested in solving problems but on beating down symptoms, right?
It seemed that way in my family, yes.
Yeah, there can't be any possible causality that the adults might have any responsibility for.
Maybe she had a... Cousin herself who had abused her as a child.
Maybe she had a babysitter. Maybe she had, I don't know, maybe it was someone in the family.
And to me, the more the family reacts to punish the symptoms of family brutality or dysfunction, the more it's likely that somebody in the family is doing it.
Yes, and I should also add, she also...
Again, this doesn't excuse any behaviors, but she is a daughter of a mother, my aunt, who has been married three times, divorced twice.
Do you know what ever happened to her, Brendan?
To? Your cousin?
She has struggled with a lot of depression.
She used to be trim.
She struggles with her weight now.
In fact, is back living in her parents' house now at 30 years old.
And did she ever apologize or was it ever spoken of again?
We have talked about it since.
When we have talked about it, it's kind of been in the manner of, well, we were just playing doctor, so we don't need to talk about this.
I shudder to think what her fucking relationship is like with her doctor.
Jesus. And your parents got divorced, right, Brandon?
That's correct. And how old were you?
This was the 16, right? When the mom left?
Right around my birthday, right around my 18th birthday.
My dad was served divorce papers.
He had been living for a couple weeks down in the basement, sleeping on the couch, still going to work, still making money for The family.
And it was coming up about, it was actually on his father's birthday.
You found these texts when you were about 16, right?
What's that? You found the texts on the computer when you were about 16.
So what the hell happened for those two years?
It was two years of my father continuing to try and bring them to couples counseling, trying to reparate and fix things that had been going wrong.
He also during this time was quite busy on a lot of business trips.
He'd be gone for a week at a time here, a week at a time there.
So there was a lot of time he was not around.
But he did spend quite a bit of time saying, you know, I don't ever want to get divorced.
We have to work through this.
And my mother was extremely resistant to any of that.
Any of the therapists that ever came to any conclusion that she didn't like was automatically what she would call them a quack.
And she would demand that they find a new therapist.
And she eventually went and found her own counseling.
She went between about three different counselors.
She kind of cherry-picked until she found someone who agreed with her preferences, right?
She waited until she found how she's told it to me.
She waited until she found a counselor who told her that all of her issues are just normal mothering things.
They're not anything to be concerned about.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I try not to hear too much about what some therapists say, because I still like the profession as a whole, but you gotta vet for quality.
So, all right.
So, Brandon, is it fair to say, and I can't imagine this wouldn't be the case, but there just wasn't a positive female role model anywhere in your childhood?
Because, I mean, what the hell would a decent woman want to have to do hanging out with these harpies?
That's correct. I saw not a single healthy marriage through my entire childhood and teenage years and how I look back on it now.
And pretty much all of the women in my family have...
All of the characteristics of borderline personality disorder.
They have total no empathy for anybody else.
They only care about the figure in the mirror that they see of themselves and will twist the world around that.
I was subject to a lot of physical abuse from my mother and a lot of verbal rage from her as well.
My dad was often gone on the business trips.
She would generally wait until he was gone.
There were only one or two times that he intervened to protect me from her.
And there were a couple times where Uh, I ended up having to just flee the house because it was too physically dangerous for me to be there.
And I would end up wandering my neighborhood all night long and going to school the next day in the same clothes that I had the day before, no backpack, none of my homework done.
And, um, uh, no, I, there's not any female relationship or any I can't look back on any of my teenage years and say I ever felt like there were women around who were empathetic or safe or cared the least bit.
A couple of those times when I had ended up just wandering my neighborhood all night and went back to school with none of my homework or anything done, there were three instances that stand out to me where I actually went up to the teacher And, you know, one of them I went up and I said, you know, my essay's not done.
Can you give me one more night for this?
Some family stuff happened and I was absolutely unable to finish it.
And she inquired a little bit more of what had happened.
And I filled her in on some of the situation.
And I was told, specifically by her, I've met your mother in teacher conferences.
She's such a sweet woman.
There's no way she could be like that.
You must be exaggerating.
And I'm going to give you an F on this because you have to turn this stuff in on time.
Don't procrastinate your essays.
Yeah, I know what you mean.
And there were then two other instances as well where it was basically the similar response of that, where I was told there's no excuses, don't procrastinate, your mother's not like that, you must be exaggerating.
And meanwhile, I was stuck in a survival mode where I can't put my energies toward my essay or my biology homework because I'm in survival mode.
Yeah. Yeah, for those who've not experienced that kind of abuse, the nomad lifestyle is pretty rough.
It's pretty rough. I mean, I remember being thirsty.
Being thirsty. Couldn't go home.
And I remembered that one time I was hiking in the woods not too far from my house and there was a spring.
And I had to spend like an hour, hour and a half in the gathering dark to go and try and find water that I could cup and drink because I was really thirsty.
And didn't have any money to get any water, and there were no drinking fountains around, wherever, you know, the mall didn't have any.
So, yeah, that nomad lifestyle, it's rough, you know, you become friends with comfortable places to sit in trees.
And I was, you know, I didn't do it with all night thing because my mom would fall asleep eventually.
And I'd find a way to get in that was, you know, like the drunken husband trying not to wake up the wife, that sort of cliche creeping in.
Yes. But it was pretty hard to get to sleep after that because if she woke up...
Could be rough. Or if she'd stayed awake, you know, because I was coming in late and she'd get angry.
It is a little tough to compete with the other kids in school who actually have functional households where they can get some work done.
Well, and this was another factor for the school stuff was I wasn't allowed to have friends.
As far as my mother was concerned, friends meant there's a lifeline.
Oh, yeah. Got to keep you isolated.
That's fundamental to that kind of abuse, right?
Correct. Isolation was a key to her control.
And so I eventually learned, you know, I think I had one sleepover through my entire school years because after that I learned.
After that sleepover, I wasn't allowed to be friends with him because I got raged at and harmed, and I learned that to show her that I was making friends somewhere meant that I would be attacked and raged at by her.
She actually would take part, starting when I was about 12 years old, in middle-of-the-night attacks on me, where she would I would barge down the door.
Usually it was around 3am, 4am.
The deepest sleep for me, at least to start off with.
Not anymore. She would barge down the door and drag me from bed or yank on me or start scratching at me.
She would be raging and yelling and screaming at me because of, in particular, Between the years of, I don't know, 12, 13, 14, it was that she was going to catch me masturbating.
And that was not allowed because, of course, her convenient Baptist faith only came in when it was convenient for her control.
And again, anyways.
Yeah, I think it's a central tenet of Christianity that if you can find a man with more money, fuck your family.
Am I right? Yeah.
So, for those years, it was maybe once a month, every two months or so, that would happen.
But I eventually would have struggled to sleep very well because I was always waiting for those attacks.
And then, between the ages of, you know, 15, 16, 17, until I left the house, Then those came on a lot more frequency, about once a month at least.
And those then turned into rage attacks, accusing me of all sorts of, in her words, what she was calling faggotry.
And... And she would carry on about, you know, it didn't matter what benign, most benign reason she could have thought up.
You know, I emailed my aunt.
She saw me watch as a guy rode by on a bike that day in the neighborhood.
She, you know, I left a speck on the dishes.
I, you know, didn't, I didn't fold the clothes properly, whatever those entailed.
It didn't matter what it was.
The rage would start because of some benign reason.
And then she would go into a rage.
They don't have standards because they want people to do better.
They have standards so that they can use it to beat people up based on, right?
I mean, it's like laws in a dictatorship.
They're not there to keep order.
They're there to give the government the excuse to abuse people.
Yeah. It didn't matter the excuse.
She would find...
Well, truly, I mean, this is where her borderline or narcissism came into it was...
It didn't matter anything going wrong in the world was somebody else's fault.
You know, I know that these, and I've used them myself, and I just, sorry to interrupt, but I just wanted to get this off my chest, because can we just say evil?
Because all of these, like, mental health terms, I don't know, I think that they're kind of used to cloak up that this is just crazy and evil.
I mean, this is abusive, this is destructive, this is harmful, this is selfish, this is...
And of course, because she didn't do it in public, sweet as sugar in public, right?
So she knew exactly how to behave in a positive manner.
She knew exactly how to behave to be good.
She knew exactly how to mimic good.
So she knew what goodness was.
So, if she knew what goodness was, but chose privately to act in this abusive manner, I think it's just an easier shorthand to just say, plain old evil.
Yes. I can accept that.
Otherwise, it gives you this whole mental illness and stuff like that.
It's just plain evil. Yeah.
The Bible has more to say about this than the DSM-5, I think.
And... Is this when you were, like in your late teens, is this when you had this relationship, late teens, early 20s, the two-year relationship?
No, that two-year relationship was after I graduated high school, between 18 and 20.
When did you first feel sexual attraction to men?
Right around that was when the middle of the night attack started when I was about 12 was after I had admitted that I was starting to have some sort of curiosity and that was it and that's when she you know started the rages when And all I'd gone to her was just to say, hey, I'm starting to have these curiosities.
I don't know what to do with this.
I'm a little bit confused right now.
And at first, I was met with what looked like it was an empathy, what looked like it was care.
You know, oh, let's do what we can to help you understand this.
Let's figure this out.
You don't have to make any conclusions from this.
And then it quickly turned into...
And how old were you then, Brendan? Twelve.
Twelve, okay. And it quickly turned into the abuse that it did.
Was she in contact with the priest at this point?
No, actually. We didn't go to church as a family.
I mean, her faith for her and my grandmother has largely, for the entirety of when I've been alive, has been a convenient tool.
All right.
I was just wondering if she was like maybe getting feedback from a priest who might have.
No.
Okay.
No.
Right.
Because, I mean, it's a strong kind of aversive training, right?
So, I mean, you have this, I guess, creepy or dangerous or scary and occasionally exciting, perhaps, interaction when you were nine with your cousin who, you know, starts with the playing doctor, tries to move on to intercourse.
And then when that's revealed, all of that complexity is just rained under a deluge of blows and screaming.
That's kind of like aversive training, right?
Yeah. Like, it's aversive training to stay away from women.
And the thoughts about masturbation, if you, of course, if you were thinking about masturbating, and you were thinking about a woman, and then if your mother comes in and starts beating hell out of you, again, this is aversive training for sexuality, right?
Yes. And I... Again, this certainly doesn't excuse any of her behavior.
I do question to this day whether there was some sort of sexual abuse in her past.
Also, again, my brothers did not receive the abuse that I did, even though they're all just two years younger than me down the chain.
They never received the abuse like I did in these ways.
I have wondered.
Was your mother as bad when you were younger?
When you were before nine? No, it was the women in my family.
They started to get more controlling, manipulative, raging.
And evil when the kids start to assert themselves more and assert more independence, which in our family started more like around, you know, nine, ten and up.
Well, it's also if your mother had experienced any kind of sexual abuse, then because of this doctor with the cousin, she may have then conflated you in her mind with her own abuser if it was male or if he was male.
Which doesn't explain anything and it's obviously just a rank conjecture.
Have you, Brandon, have you had a woman anywhere in your life that you would consider decent or virtuous?
Um, the only woman in my life who I could say was decent or virtuous.
One of my aunts did come and pick me up and house me one time when I had been wandering.
And it was snowing and I was wandering the neighborhood because it wasn't safe to be in the house.
And she did come and pick me up and let me stay at her house that night.
She has since, herself, overcome a lot of the dysfunctions of her past, though she did a lot of it through faith.
That was her route to her own Repairing her own dysfunctions.
And so, one giant 128-point asterisk with that aunt, who is, you know, certainly, as I have been around this family for seven years, have seen this aunt go through an incredible transformation.
Wait, what? Around this family for seven years?
Yes. This is Jeremy around Brandon's family for seven years.
No, no, no. I get who's talking, Jeremy.
Thank you for chiming in.
Around this family for seven years?
Well, we've been married for seven years.
That explains nothing.
No, I'm not finished yet.
I'm just about this aunt that...
You know, she has certainly gone a long ways, but this is the mother of the cousin I'm talking about.
No, no, no. I've been doing a good job of listening, but I've got to be a little assertive here, all right?
Great. Around this family for seven years?
Why? This clan?
Oh, we can certainly get to that if you want to jump to me, but if you want to keep going on, Brandon, for the moment.
Why? Why are you around this family?
Oh, well, because I have my own fucked up in this family that I now can look back and I can see a lot of the reasons why I was attracted to this family, this clan, this group of people.
Wait. Okay.
So, Jeremy. Yes?
You knew. For how long did you know how much they had abused Brandon?
Day one. Day one.
And did you feel that it was good for him to spend time around people who'd abused him in this manner?
No. He was out of contact with most of these people at that time and through some of my own encouragement, retouched out to some of these people and went back and forth for several years until we found philosophy in the show and RTR and all of that.
And now those people are no longer in the family.
So a lot of that was from my encouragement of, well, you know, maybe they tried the best they could.
So you kind of betrayed his experience a little bit there, right?
Oh, in many ways. You're running your own agenda, which is to do with your family and virtue signaling, and to some degree, I'm going to guess, tell me if I'm wrong, sacrificed his interests.
In many ways, in the beginning of our relationship, I absolutely did.
And Brendan, does that accord with your experience as well?
Yes, it does. When we met, for the last 10 years, until this last summer, I had vacillated between...
Reconnecting with my mother and grandmother and that side of the family and cutting off contact once the calm beginnings turned into the same turmoil as ever before.
But how have you guys handled that as a couple?
That Brendan was getting his freedom from these evil abusers and that Jeremy, you encouraged him to return to this abuse.
For the two of us both, I would say the first five years of our marriage here was a very unhealthy one.
I continued a lot of the dysfunction that I had learned under my mother and father, and I used that in conflict.
I used a lot of aggression.
I used a lot of rage myself.
Aggression? What do you mean?
Being very aggressive in your face, being emotionally just unleashed and not using any sort of reason, not using any sort of empathy in a disagreement where I know I'm right.
You are wrong, Jeremy.
And I'm going to beat you with my words.
And I'm going to beat you into submission with this yelling and aggression.
And were you physically violent at all?
No. No physical violence.
Right. But extreme verbal abuse, right?
Yes. Okay.
Okay. That would be accurate.
I was cruel.
I was. Right.
And Jeremy, I mean, the one thing that is higher on your ACE, if I remember rightly, than Brandon is verbal abuse, right?
Verbal abuse and alcoholism.
I think those are the two things that are markedly different.
And who did the verbal abuse come from?
Can I guess your mom? Is that?
No, actually, I mean, some, but not anything that I would actually really focus on.
No, that came from my father.
Okay. And who was the alcoholic?
My father. My mother, to a smaller extent, very functional.
My father was a functional alcoholic.
In fact, every person, all of his five siblings, their parents, all of them are heavy alcoholics.
My father's less an alcoholic now.
He has diabetes and he would die now if he had much alcohol.
But that was him. Right.
And so, two years ago, what began to change?
I left. Eventually, we just had so many bad arguments to a point where I... I decided that I made my own kind of internal changes that I'm not going to yell.
I'm going to bring peacefulness into our relationship.
We had some conversation, but I said, first thing, I'm just going to do myself.
I cannot expect more from him that I'm not going to do for my own self.
So I stopped yelling.
I stopped using my emotions.
I stopped manipulating in our relationship.
And after about a year where Brandon was not Following suit by my actions, then I chose to not enable his abuse by not being there, saying, I'm moving out.
We are going to, you know, we can try again sometime later, but right now I'm moving out.
We're going to try this from afar.
We can do counseling and help, and it was shortly after that we found RTR and all of those things.
I went back into the show and read more shows, but that's what it changed two years ago.
I moved out, and after about six months of us doing individual counseling, personal counseling, journaling, dream analysis, and it was by me moving out and not enabling that behavior of Brandon, who was the more outwardly aggressive of us two,
that's when we both Then came back into this relationship and are kind of in our second relationship, so to speak, that six-month period.
We are now very, very part two of our relationship.
Does that answer your question?
How has the sort of apology, restitution-y stuff been going between you guys?
So, you know, Brandon, obviously, for your verbal abuse, Jeremy, for talking to Brandon and staying in contact with his abusive family and so on.
Um, well, uh, in regards to just Jeremy and myself, um, it has entailed, uh, in again, these past two years, it truly was one year of Jeremy not enabling these past two years, it truly was one year of Jeremy not enabling my
where we can disagree, we can have these I believe I'm so right, he believes he's so right, but then not bringing any aggression into it.
It was one entire year of, if I started being aggressive, Jeremy saying, you're starting to be aggressive right now, this is not acceptable, here's why, if you keep doing this.
We'll have to come back to this argument a different time.
This is not acceptable. It has taken me removing the tool of aggression entirely out of my toolbox during conflict.
Where we found ourselves after that point is in a magnitudes different place as far as a relationship goes.
It has been incredible to be able to disagree but Have it be disagreement that isn't the rages that were so common in my family, where we're using empathy, where we're understanding each other, where we're putting ourselves in each other's perspective.
And I mean, it has been a truly foundational change for us.
Well, and the thought that popped into my head, Brandon, was as you removed or dealt with your inner mother, you became more attracted to women.
Yes, that has been quite a striking realization for me.
In particular, this last summer after I finally cut her out of my life and realized that I actually went and I tried to Come back to her and one more reach out of, please, will you see the son that I am and talk with me and be empathetic?
And do you understand who I am?
And can we at least talk about our foundational problems years ago?
And talk about them peacefully and try and find new ground.
And I was told in several different ways that my memories were entirely corrupt and I must delete them.
I am absolutely mentally ill and none of it ever happened.
And that if I want to get help, they will pay for my help because I must be so mentally ill.
And that's when I realized.
And then also my mother, another child, Another addition to that is after that, when I finally said, okay, well, it's clear to me that you don't have a place with your grandkids in my life.
You don't see me as a person.
You see me as the wax figure you want me to be who doesn't question you at all and doesn't offer any of my own sovereignty.
Yeah. And she drove 600 miles.
And I live extremely remotely out in the mountains, far away from a lot of people.
And she drove 600 miles and she walked up a half mile of my private road with a locked gate and just showed up one day.
And this was shortly after I had laid my boundaries of, you don't get to be in my life.
Because it is clear to me...
That you will never see me as the son that you should have.
And we'll never be able to talk about the things that happened because, according to her, this never happened.
So she showed up one day walking over the hill into my land and she started just taking photos.
She said, Hi, how's it going?
All sweet. Wow, I like what you've done here.
Wow, your cabin's amazing, etc., etc.
And I asked her, what are you doing here?
She said, oh, I came to take some photos and see you.
I said, unless you're here to talk about some very foundational things, like in the phone call, then you have no business staying on this land, you're trespassing, get off.
And she took a couple more photos, and then she left.
Yeah, she invited you into an unreality that she was hoping you would share.
Yeah, she acted as though the phone call that we had where I laid my boundaries, as though that had never occurred at all.
And she violated, I mean, me living out in the mountains, I don't think it's a huge...
It's a stretch to think about the isolation that I find comfortable from all people where I'm just growing my own food in the woods.
Everything I do has direct contact and control for my life.
If I stay warm, I have to split the wood for it.
If I need water, I have to go haul it from the creek.
If I need a home, I have to build it from the forest.
And I don't think it's any stretch of why that's the isolation that I... Desired for my life after a life where I had no control, where I was never allowed my preferences, where everybody was always trying to control me, and I was never actually seen as my own person with my own individual perception.
Well, and she made that very clear, right?
So you say, here are my boundaries, and the first thing she does is violate your boundaries just to tell you she can, and she can do it anytime.
Yes. Yeah. She's mocking her territory.
I get all of that. I get all of that.
And that violated a lot of the security that I felt where I was on my lap.
Well, this is in the middle of the night.
She shows up in your room and then randomly she shows up at your house.
I mean, this is crazy and evil 101.
So I'm real sorry for all of that.
Jeremy, what's your status with your family of origin?
I am in connection with my mother.
In fact, we have what I would call now a very rapidly growing relationship.
Both her and I are both doing a lot of independent growth.
After my parents divorced when I was 15, she took a couple years off of kind of Of parenting, in a way, she occupied herself a lot.
And we have some issues with that, and we've talked about them.
And sorry, how old were you when she took years off from parenting?
15. All right. We have since both gone through a lot of a journey.
We have a great relationship, a great growing relationship.
Not perfect, not great, but we are both growing very well.
She's doing a lot of the work and proving in her actions that she is learning from a lot of mistakes and implementing the change.
My father, I have actually not spoken with in about four months.
I certainly do not have a close relationship with him at all.
Have a very strong emotional aversion to doing that.
And I think I can make that pretty quick.
When I was about 14 or so, he has been through a lot of depression with his alcoholism on and off.
Sorry, depression with his alcoholism?
What do you mean? Just through his alcoholism went better and worse, like heavier, lighter.
Do you mean that the alcohol was causal in the depression, alcoholism?
I don't know that that's the case.
I think it's all connected to many earlier issues in his life, in his childhood.
Is anything connected to the fact that he was an evil father or performed evil actions of terrible abuse against you and others?
I'm Because we used to have this old Christian concept of if you do evil, you get a bad conscience, and you don't like yourself, and you drink too much, and maybe you can't sleep, and you can't feel comfortable in your own skin, and you hunger for a company because you feel empty.
I mean, as a moralist, to me, I find a great deal of sympathy with that old-timey stuff.
You know, because we have these words that don't have anything to do with evil doing in conscience.
And that's what I'm kind of trying to draw you guys a little bit back to.
That, you know, dysfunction and narcissism and alcoholism and depression and so on.
These are all kind of clinical terms that don't have any moral content.
And if you want those, of course, you can go to a psychologist or a psychiatrist or whatever.
But this is a bit more of a priesthood of morality.
At least that's my core work is on ethics.
And that's why I just wanted to sort of figure out when you co-joined the depression with the alcoholism.
Whether or not any moral issues had come in to the conception of your father in his life.
I'm not sure. He, as far as I understand, has been a heavy drinker for the majority of his life.
So I'm not sure which came first, but I do know he's gone through heavy depression through most of his life in different periods and has been suicidal in his life, actually.
That is one thing on my ace that he did attempt to kill himself when I was about 15 during one of these very heavy depression and In the car one time when we were driving along, he had actually said, going along the stretch of highway from where I grew up,
very narrow, and there's a lot of logging trucks that go along, and a logging truck went by, and he said, there are a lot of times driving to work that I just think about Jesus, that's a scene from a movie, too.
It's a Woody Allen film.
I think Christopher Walken plays this Vietnam vet who is driving, I think, with Woody Allen.
I'm not saying look it up because it might be kind of traumatic, but I just very vividly remember that, that this guy's talking about going into oncoming traffic and Woody Allen, of course, is freaking out.
Well, it's Woody Allen.
Anyway, sorry, go on. One more connection.
He is also...
He was in Vietnam.
But at that point, then I immediately connected my father's life with my connection in his life.
And I have thrown around the...
I've strongly considered divorcing my father in a way...
And whenever I think about that, I think about the call that I'm going to get the next day that just said, well, dad finally did it.
And having the feeling that, well, he killed himself because of what I did.
And when I think about that, that just absolutely scares me senseless.
And because of that, I don't feel that I can ever have that tool of volunteerism in our relationship Because if I do, the consequences are he may kill himself.
Yeah, you are a forever hostage in that sense.
I feel that very strongly.
Sure. And that may be, I mean, that's an escalation and a calculation that I can completely understand because who wants that on their place?
I mean, I really sympathize.
That's a horrible source.
For commitment to a relationship, but I can completely understand where you're coming from.
And I think it was actually only one more thing.
I think it was only humorous that then two years later, he actually ended up kicking me out of the house and actually cut off communication from me for about six months.
So I actually think that was kind of humorous at the time.
But then if I did the same thing to him, that's where I... Like, just a tragic comedy.
Like, you know, he tells me that I'm the only thing keeping him alive, and then he cuts me off of TV. I think you mean hypocritical and kind of vicious, but I get what you mean.
Sure. I don't mean ha-ha funny.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Tragically humorous like that.
Right, right.
Now, Jeremy, with regards to your mother, you used to have a good relationship with her, a relationship in progress.
What's her relationship to not intervening when you were experiencing these torrents of verbal abuse from your father?
The verbal abuse largely went at my older brother.
I look back into my childhood and I feel like I ghosted.
A lot of it. That I had no attention through most of it.
And my brother, who is six years older than me, he got a lot of verbal abuse.
He had definitely the worst of the verbal abuse though my father certainly shared some of that with me as well.
She came from a very verbally abusive family and physically abusive family from her childhood and learned from her mother where if you are passive, if you just give them what they want, then it gets over faster.
She I went into the relationship, into her marriage with my father as a, I'm going into it absolutely 100%, divorce is not an option, and ended up picking a poor man and said, well, as long as I just do nothing, I don't rock the boat, then I... Then we're going to get through this.
But she has the duty to protect her children.
That's what happens when you become a parent, right?
She has a duty to protect her children.
No matter what. Yes. And she has since then.
We have then talked about it and has apologized for not doing more at the time.
Not doing more? Wait, what did she do?
For, well...
From my perception as a child, she didn't do a whole lot as far as intervening during those.
A few events I can think I can remember her stepping between my father and me, my father and my brother, and saying, you know, no, let's go into the other room and kind of redirect him out of the room.
A few events like that.
I don't quite understand. Let's go into the other room and do what?
Like, take my father, guide him to a room where he's not away from my bedroom or where my brother and I were at.
Now, was he verbally abusive with your brother or physically abusive as well?
He was much more abusive with my older brother, less with me.
I feel like I was more of a ghost in the family.
No, I understand that. You said that already, but I asked about whether he was physically abusive with your brother.
Okay, I'm sorry, I misunderstood.
Yes, yes, he was.
Actually, when my brother was four years old, The story that I just recently learned is that my father actually beat him, not just of a spanking, but actually beat him quite heavily.
And when my mother then found out, she actually left work to come home and find out what was going on.
That did not happen more than that one time, other than that the only physical abuse was spanking after that.
So he Brutally beat your brother when your brother was four?
Yes. And your mother stayed?
She not only stayed, she had another child with him.
Are you shitting me?
I am here in person to tell you that is the case.
Of course, yeah, of course, of course. And then she left when you were 15?
That's correct. So she was able to leave, just not for the sake of protecting toddlers from vicious beatings.
Yes. You guys don't seem to have any emotions about all of this.
I feel like I'm the only one who's appalled.
You know, we actually had that conversation before the show and...
It's like you're trying to invite me into the sickest sitcom that I can conceive of.
I don't mean to laugh.
It's not funny. It really is not funny at all.
This is stuff where we have Eight or ten hours a day talked about so many of these things.
We've cried about it. For two years, this has been a full-time self-knowledge journey.
I certainly don't mean to sound emotionless about it, but there is a sense of emotional exhaustion.
This isn't the first time all of these things have come up.
I have cried about these things.
I have cried. I've gotten a lot of the emotion out.
You know, it's like when your parent dies, you know, as soon as they die, terrible, terrible thing, but then after many years...
No, no, no. Come on, man.
Dying is not a moral action.
Come on. Life is not evil for killing you.
This is not moral action.
Death is a tragedy, but it's not a moral horror.
I do recognize for myself that For me, some of the coldness or emotionless that it...
That could be perceived. I do feel, I mean, this comes along with my paralysis of what do I do now.
I just feel stuck.
I also feel quite a bit of numbness.
I've been doing self-authoring suites and I've been journaling and audio journaling quite a bit, writing a lot.
I've also been going to those family members who I still have contact with and talking about these very uncomfortable things with them.
I've really been rocking the boat quite a bit.
That's also what has destroyed a lot of my other family relationships.
When I started asking these questions, a lot of people got very defensive and Attacked me because I was asking questions that were dangerous.
I feel like a lot of the emotionlessness that is perceived here is part of the numbness that I feel going back into these histories is what protected me those years.
Even with Jeremy, I am a very I behave very coldly.
I'm sorry, man. All these intellectual explanations as to why you have emo emotions also have no emotions, so it's not really solving the problem.
I'll tell you, Jeremy, straight up, this is like the big gap for me.
You have a good relationship with your mom.
Your mom fucked and had children with a guy who half beat a four-year-old to death.
Yes. I can't square that circle.
She knew he beat her four-year-old child, black and blue.
She stayed, had more children with him, stayed and stayed.
Now, she didn't stay because she's never going to get divorced, because she divorced him.
Yes.
But because she divorced him 11 years after he beat their four-year-old, black and blue, you guys had 11 more years of abuse.
But things are great.
She not only failed to protect you, she exposed your brother to close confined quarters with the man who beat him black and blue when he was four years old.
Not because of any principle to stay married because she divorced him later anyway.
Yeah. Help me to understand, guys.
Help me to understand. Because you guys are talking about this like it's a laundry list.
Like, it ain't nothing. And it's like, the fuck?
Is any amount of apology...
Like, for all the things that you have heard so far, and we'll just take for my mother, is any amount of apology and work on her end acceptable to say, I... Accept that you made all of those choices, and I'm going to continue a relationship with you.
Well, what restitution is possible?
How does she make it whole again?
How does she make it... Like, you know, if I dent your car, I can pay to have your car fixed, and your car is whole again.
If I borrow $1,000 and can't pay you back, maybe I'll give you $2,000 back next year to say sorry for the trouble.
So restitution is when you're okay that it happened.
You're not glad that it happened.
You're not sorry that it happened. You're okay that it happened.
So you tell me, where is restitution possible for exposing your children to 11 straight years of verbal abuse, chaos, alcoholism, emotional destruction?
How is that How can that be made whole?
How can you be okay?
Okay, I'm okay that it happened.
I'm not happy that it happened. I'm not angry that it happened.
It's okay. I'm not okay that it happened.
I accepted that it happened, but I'm not okay with it.
I'm still mad about it. Then she has not made restitution.
Not yet. Okay, so how is she going to make restitution?
Tell me what you would take.
You know, you ding my car?
And you go and take it, get it fixed.
I'm like, yeah, okay, that's fine. I'm not glad that it happened, but I don't mind that it happened.
Everything's fine, right? So tell me what restitution can come from your mother that makes it okay that it happened with your father and with your mother too.
Jeremy, what restitution...
See, if your mother had divorced your father when he beat...
A four-year-old child, black and blue, you know what wouldn't have happened, Jeremy?
You wouldn't have been in a car where your father said, basically, if you ever break with me, I'm going to kill myself.
So tell me, what is the restitution that makes all of that okay?
That makes you okay that it happened?
Because I can't see how it could happen, but I'm open to it.
I don't think that there is anything that she can do that will make me okay with that.
Right. But I'm not going to say that there's absolutely no way and I'm going to give her that chance as long as she is using that chance wisely.
And so far in the last three, four years, she has.
That nothing of any of those poor decisions has ever happened again.
She has apologized.
She has certainly said, I'm sorry, and in her actions, she has never apologized.
She's got no power over you now.
Come on. Yeah, absolutely.
She's got no power over you now.
So the fact that she's not exercising power over you now, sure.
You meet the guard who beat you in prison when you're not in prison and you're bigger than him.
I guess he's kind of nice.
But then when you were 15, Jeremy, didn't you say she took a couple of years off from parenting?
Yes, and emotionally absent.
She was physically there, had a roof, food was in the fridge, but emotionally was absent.
So, that's a time when you needed her, right?
Yes, and it is the time I definitely could have.
Now, at the same time, I also blamed her.
I blamed her for the divorce.
I blamed her for All of the terrible things that were happening and felt that my father was being a victim.
And I don't mean to make this sound white knight-y, but I was certainly not giving her any kind of a chance at the time.
Wait, wait, but didn't...
Hang on, hang on.
Didn't she tell you?
Thank you.
That it wasn't just your father?
Didn't she disabuse you of the notions that you had?
Didn't she say, I chose your father, I am causal in this relationship?
I stayed with him even though he was horrifyingly violent to a fucking toddler?
Didn't she tell you the facts about all of this so that you were relieved of this burden?
because you say she took a couple of years off for parenting, but that would have been a five minute conversation.
I'm not really sure.
I'm not really sure what, You say that you blamed her for the marriage, right?
For the divorce, right?
So, did she not say or could she not have said, I have some causality in the marriage in that I chose your father and I chose to stay with him for my own whatever reasons, but your father has these and these and these issues to sort of equalize it and balance it out?
Did any of them discuss with you the reasons why the divorce was occurring?
Yes. The end final cause was my father had affairs outside of the marriage and that was the final thing that did spur her to do.
Oh my god, Jeremy.
Oh, we can get to more stories about it.
No, hang on. Hang on. Just give me a moment.
I just need a moment.
I just need somebody to slap me with a wet fish and pour water down my pants.
All right. So for your mother, if I understand this correctly, she'll stay with a man who beats a four-year-old black and blue.
That's fine. She'll have sex with him.
She'll have more children with him.
She'll run his household. She'll cook his food.
She'll stay with him. No big fucking issue.
But if he has an affair, well, that's just unacceptable.
If he has a voluntary affair with another adult, that's unacceptable.
But if he half beats a four-year-old to death, oh, that's fucking fine.
As I understand, in fact, I just confirmed this right before the call to make sure I didn't have my...
Didn't have it incorrect, but when she found out about that, that, as I understand, was the first event where he went above a, and we'll just minimize it to a simple spanking, because she is okay with spanking.
But this was much more than a spanking act.
That was the only event. Okay, don't fuck me, bro.
Don't fuck me. Come on. Come on.
Come on. She was okay with the verbal abuse.
She was okay with the alcoholism.
She was okay with the occasional beating.
She was okay with you ghosting.
But she was not okay with an affair.
She's got standards.
She's got a moral line.
Do it to helpless children.
That's fine. Do it with a consenting adult.
That is unacceptable and the marriage is over.
Why didn't you guys matter enough to keep you safe?
Why is an affair worse than child abuse?
What's missing? What am I not getting?
She has standards. She's willing to end the marriage, just not for the fact that he's viciously abusing his children.
But he has an affair.
Well, that's it, man.
It's over.
I'll have sex with and give another kid to a guy who beats a four-year-old black and blue, but he better not have consensual sex with another adult because that's just immoral.
I don't know.
That's something that we are certainly still working through and an issue I still have.
Working through? Has it crossed your mind?
Is this new information to you or have you thought all this before or discussed it or is this kind of a new perspective or what?
Since learning of peaceful parenting and Learning philosophy and ethics, then, yeah, a lot of these things have certainly crossed my mind.
So does it bother you what I'm saying?
Like when I say, your mom stayed with your dad, though he was viciously, physically and verbally abusive to a toddler, and an alcoholic, and blah, blah, blah.
But she left him when he had an affair.
Does that... Did you get my perspective why that is...
I don't even know what the word is to use.
Like, that is beyond the pale.
I don't know. You don't know what?
Does it hit you emotionally at all?
Oh, absolutely.
That absolutely. Okay, so why aren't you sharing your emotions with me then?
Why are you giving me all of this abstraction and dissociation stuff?
Because, I mean, if you want to have value from the call, shouldn't we be open with each other?
Oh, absolutely. Absolutely.
That's... Yes.
So what do you feel when I talk about this?
It's new information, right?
I mean, it's pretty shocking to me.
She has standards by which to end the marriage, though.
Those standards just don't include relentless abuse on children who never chose to be there.
She's willing to live with, year after year, of physical and emotional abuse against her children.
That's fine. She won't end the marriage for that.
Won't even intervene much at all.
But she'll kick his ass to the curb if he has an affair.
In other words, when it impacts her interests, then she suddenly has standards.
but when it's her children getting beaten, she really doesn't give much of a shit about it at all.
I just, I can't believe that I'm the only person in this conversation that it bothers. - 100%.
It does bother me.
I'm not sure how to make that emotion come out.
I don't know. I don't know.
This has been an issue where I have questioned, especially after cutting out My mother for my life and having her violate a lot of boundaries with me afterward.
It has been an issue for me to then question because there is a lot of discussion that Jeremy has not had with his mother that I think Could be a really important thing to square.
I'm sorry to interrupt, just as you've started talking, but it's a real quick question.
Are these discussions that he hasn't had or connections that he hasn't made in terms of history and choices and responsibility?
I think these are connections that we have both made.
Some of these discussions, I don't think you've quite...
I don't think Jeremy has quite gone into with her.
Okay, that's not answering the question.
Okay, this one in particular that I was outraged about, that she only divorced...
Her husband after he had an affair and not after he beat and abused her children for 11 years.
Well, more, in fact.
I'm sure it didn't. The beating at four wasn't the first time the abuse had happened.
So let's say 15 years. Decade and a half abuse against children is not enough to divorce him, but one affair is.
Right? That's outrageous.
That is an outrageous and utterly selfish set of values.
That hypocrisy, I don't believe, has been a specific topic that they have discussed.
Especially for me, it gives me a lot of anger.
Especially because I look at my childhood, where I had a mother who had no empathy for her children whatsoever.
The one thing I always wanted was a hug from her that didn't feel poisonous because, you know, here she is bringing her claws into you, emotional claws, and you don't know what strings are attached.
And I have never been able to get away.
Listen, guys, I can't do any more dissociated horror stories, okay?
You can show up emotionally.
We can talk about this. I can't do any more dissociated horror stories.
I get it was a shit fest from beginning to end.
But if I'm the only one who feels it in the conversation, I can't subject the listenership to it because it's too dissociating.
All right? I can't do it.
It's not healthy. Right?
So if you want the question, I mean, I really appreciate the backstory and I apologize for being brusque.
It's not because I don't care. It's because I do care.
That I can't enable this recitation of horrors with no emotional connection because it's disorienting for people.
So, I'll tell you what I think, which means nothing.
I'll just tell you that right now.
It means nothing, but I'll tell you what I think.
Please. So, Brandon, you have done a lot to deal with your temper, your anger, your rage, your capacity for verbal abuse, and you've done a lot to dislodge your inner parental alter egos.
If I were to put it that way, I hope that way makes some kind of sense.
I'll speak to you in a sophisticated manner because you've read the book and done a lot of self-work, so I'm sorry if this doesn't make much sense to others, but this is where we have to have the conversation.
And I think that you've gained a fair amount of clarity with regards to your family.
Based on us chatting on the phone for like an hour and a half or whatever, so this is all incomplete.
I'm just telling you what I think. And I think that because you behaved worse according to both of your reports, it brought you up more quickly, more short.
Because when Jeremy decided to not engage in or support the verbal abuse and then moved out and for like six months or whatever it was that you were working on it.
So Brandon, your negative behaviors brought you face to tits with your inner mom.
And I think through therapy and self-knowledge and through work that you've done, I think you've been able to So internalize and manage and hopefully enroll your inner mom into actually helping you out rather than driving people away, right?
Because the inner mom is not the same as the real mom, right?
The inner mom you have to make friends with because she ain't going anywhere.
And she also is not an abuser.
Your inner mom is a weird kind of protector.
Your inner mom screams at you first so that if you have an abusive mom, your inner mom screams at you first so that you don't end up being abused by your Outer mom.
Because your inner mom isn't going to beat you black and blue.
Your inner mom is going to frighten you away.
It's like when you're a kid and you're in tall grass and you hear something move in the tall grass and you don't know if it's a dog or what.
Well, you feel that nervousness so you don't get bitten.
Because the nervousness isn't going to kill you, but the bite might be very dangerous, right?
So we have these internalized abusers that are designed to veer us away from behavior that might get us...
Damaged, hurt, killed, abused, who knows, right?
Who knows where the escalation goes?
We never want to find out when we have people who are willing to exert that level of despotic will over us.
We don't know where the top is to that level of aggression.
So, Brandon, I think that you embodied more of this verbal abuse, which unfortunately clicked into Jeremy's reception of verbal abuse and the fact that you were a man and it was his father who did it, as I'm sure some relationship he was used to managing it.
But I think, Brandon, what happened was because you acted worse, you ended up dealing with it more deeply.
And Jeremy, in his conversation, was talking about, in a sense, being the victim, which completely accords with when he was a child, but doesn't accord as much as an adult, because he chose you, Brandon, he chose to stay with you, and he was very much like, well, I stopped enabling the abuse, Brandon dealt with it, and therefore my job is largely done, and I don't necessarily think that's true.
I think what has happened is that, Brandon, you have...
Dealt with your inner mother to a large degree, which means she's a little bit more on your side, which means she's not going to jump into the faces of the women that you see in the world, right?
Because you've dealt with the history, because you've dealt with your abuse to a large degree.
It never ends completely, but you know what I mean.
So now your mom's on your side, and so she's not out there scaring the pants on you about women, right?
She's not spraying all over the place in the world.
So, if that's the case, I still, when I try to even picture a wife and children in the future, when I try to picture somebody standing next to me and a family, I just, I have a silhouette.
I have nothing else.
There's nobody I can put there.
All I see is here comes mom to rake my arms, to drag me from bed, to scream at me about faggotry.
Here's mom when I'm six years old giving me a herpes kiss.
Here's... Yeah, no, again, I'm not going to go through the recitation.
I understand that, but you have a silhouette.
No, no, but you have a silhouette.
Okay. You have a silhouette, which you didn't have before.
Okay, yes. I do.
Now I think, well, so Brendan, let me ask you this.
this, what do you think of Jeremy's mind?
I see a lot of there are times I've seen manipulation that looks a lot like what my mother carried out.
And that scares me.
And I have brought it up.
We've talked about it.
This has been part of our path of Jeremy going and talking with her.
I have also found myself questioning how much of it is my dysfunction with women, if I see it in all women, if I don't know.
I'm sorry to interrupt. It's tough to figure out.
Jeremy, this sort of relates to what we were talking about before, that if you go to your mother and you say, I have a problem with this, and she apologizes and it ends there, it's not a real apology.
If you go to your mother and you say, I have a problem with this, you talk it through And she apologizes.
And then she calls me the next day and says, after your apology, I thought of this and this and this and this.
And I feel ashamed about this and I feel bad about this.
Let's get together and talk some more about it.
And if it keeps going, then she's taking the initiative to be the parent and to deal with the problem.
It's really fucking exhausting to be a child, even an adult child, and be the parent in the relationship and bring up the topics and manage the conversation and unearth the past and be the leader.
Right? Right? Now, if she's not sitting there and saying, you know what I've really been thinking about is that time when your father, my husband, the man I chose to have children with, beat my four-year-old black and blue.
That is haunting me. And I need to talk about it with you and with your brother.
And we've got to sort this out.
And then she calls up the next day.
And she's like, that's getting restitution.
You're not doing all the work. And she's passively listening and apologizing.
And not initiating.
And not solving the problem, but being...
That's to be like, oh, okay, so he wants...
Okay, he's upset about this.
I'll use my magic sorry word.
Maybe I'll have a tear in my eye.
And now it's all done. It's all gone.
It's all solved. More than a quarter century of abuse and avoidance and neglect and dissociation and god-awful behavior.
One emotional conversation and an abuse and an apology.
And it's like, whew, all done.
Whew. Deep in the rear view.
Now, if she's not initiating these conversations from here on in, she's not participating in the process and she sure as hell isn't really apologizing.
She's just responding with what she thinks you need to get through the moment and put it behind her.
There have been a lot of times where things were brought up and the answer was some sort of a, what I would consider a platitude of, you know, Not exactly the words, follow your heart, but those kind of platitudes that just people say them and they don't really mean much.
Yeah, they pick up a Hallmark card and, you know, follow your dreams.
And it's important to be true to yourself.
Hey, what did I last read on a fortune cookie?
Okay, I'll say that. That seemed like, you know.
So, Brendan, I don't think that...
There is the kind of...
I'm just telling you what I think.
Again, I'm not trying to tell you what you think or feel.
My sense is, Brendan, that there is not enough security in Jeremy's relationship with his mother for you to feel safe in the relationship.
In the same way, I would assume that Jeremy, back in the day, there was some threat from Brendan's family towards you, which I think, unfortunately, you tried to solve by having him get close and fix the family.
But I think that there is a difference...
I think that's why, Brendan, your heart is taking you outside of the relationship.
If you've dealt with your inner mother to a large degree, then the possibility of a romantic relationship with a woman will be higher.
And if at the same time Jeremy is...
Not dealing with certain issues in his past and is still under the control of his mother to some degree, then that if his mother reminds you of your mother, then you're not going to feel particularly safe in that relationship.
And that would be my guess as to where things might stand at some level.
Tell me what you guys think.
That does sound like an apt description.
Makes me scared out of my mind.
Why is it?
I, well, it started with you.
And it's so wild to me.
We've listened to the show for years.
To think of all the things that we have done so far.
To be on the show right now and you I thought I could describe what a real apology might look like.
And to now have you say, this is what an apology would look like, to look back now and say, well, what I have been given, I don't feel is a real apology.
And to...
And my mother's going to be listening to the show, too.
I told her that we'd be on here.
And I'm very interested to see what she thinks about it.
And I'm terrified now that things won't change.
That what we have been working on, which I think is a constant improvement, but certainly not good enough.
Not good enough at all.
That I... If I want to keep...
Okay, so you're trailing off because there's a lot of abstracts.
And you're talking about what your mom might think and feel without sharing what you might think and feel.
But I'll tell you this, Jeremy. Straight up, man.
When I hear about a four-year-old being beaten, black and blue, I think about your mom babysitting my daughter, me coming home, and my daughter is hiding under the bed, trembling and crying with bruises all over her body.
That's what I fucking feel.
It's terrifying. That's what I fucking feel.
I'd be straight up with you, man. Because that's the reality of what happened to your brother.
Now, if I were to say, hey, guess what?
But my daughter, she's also coming to babysit tomorrow.
Come on.
And the day after. And the day after.
for the next 15 years.
What do I do with that?
You don't do anything with it, man.
You just feel it. Because it's just what is.
It's just what is. Right?
That was a real Boy.
Right? And it's funny you connect when I talk about it with my daughter, because if you have the same compassion for your brother that you have for my daughter, we'll be miles further ahead.
But he was a real child who deserved real protection.
Just like my daughter.
Just like both of you. And he was fed to the wolves.
And she rewarded him with more children.
And that's why when you say things are great with your mom, I have some questions.
Because if she did that to my daughter, I'm just going to give you a set of ellipses after that.
But why does my daughter matter more than your brother or you?
Thank you.
What if you had heard of me doing something like that?
I can't even imagine that.
Right. And that lack of imagination is what your mother needs.
That level of dissociation is what your mother needs.
Do you understand? She's not even close to the court for these crimes.
She doesn't want to go. She doesn't want to go.
Does not want to go and be judged.
Does not want to go and have that history Pulled open and looked at directly.
And so she gives you emotionless stories of horror not to connect but to separate you from others.
Because the horror repels but the lack of emotions disconnects entirely.
And so you're driven to tell these terrible stories with no emotions, and then when people get upset, you attempt to minimize their emotion.
This is all running your mother's agenda, which is to not have anger connect to what she did and didn't do.
Who does this dissociation serve, my friend, Jeremy?
Is it helping you with your relationship with Brendan?
No. No?
It helps your mom. Well, we've talked about it.
You know, I have apologized.
I don't see the point of bringing it up over and over again.
I mean, I'm sorry. What else do you want me to say?
We did the best we could.
We didn't know everything back then.
I'm sorry that it upset you.
I'm sorry that you had this terrible experience.
I'm sorry about things that I did.
If I could go back, I would probably do things differently, but I can't go back and change things.
I can't go back and do anything differently.
And, you know, if listening to you helps you now, I'm happy to do that.
If there's anything that I can do now, if you want me to pay for therapy, I'll do that too.
But I don't have a magic wand to change what happened, Jeremy.
I'll do the best that I can to help you now.
But everyone makes mistakes, and I've made maybe even more than my fair share of mistakes.
But whatever I can do, you understand, this can go on and on and on.
There's no ownership, fundamentally.
That could go on for a long time.
Yes it can and I bet you it has.
And it has. Yes it has.
And it's all about self-protection and manipulation.
And it's not about empathy and it's certainly not about moral ownership for actions.
That's exactly what I brought into our relationship too.
you.
Good one. That's what I brought in with Brandon.
I I brought a disconnectedness.
I brought passivity in our relationship.
That's why for four or five years, we had a very poor relationship because, well, you know, it's not that bad or, well, you know, a lot of sorries and I'm That's exactly what I brought into this relationship and maybe that's what Brandon found in me.
Why is your mom... That's why you found a connection with me is because I... I'm not sure where to go with this.
Can I ask a question? Please, please.
Why is your mom not being held to the standard that I was held to when you wouldn't enable my aggression?
Because it's passive aggression so it's harder to see.
Yeah. She's an aggressive, she's passive.
She's rubber bones, right?
You ever do that strategy when you were a kid?
Yeah. Just go rubber bones.
Yeah, I did. And maybe it's because that is something that isn't...
It's certainly still there.
I'm sure it probably is always going to be there with me, but now that it's not there to nearly the extent that we are both taking much more self-undership, that maybe this is why Brandon starts to look at our relationship a bit more critically of, well, does he really find romantic interest in me?
Or was I just a very convenient person who happened to come along?
He also happens to have some same-sex attraction.
So that helps. And now that that's not a part of our relationship nearly to the extent and less and less every single day.
Well, if you came together as the result of dysfunction, who the fuck are you when you're healed?
What is your relationship when you're healed?
That's what we're asking ourselves.
And that's a big question, you know, it's the old thing, like, are you friends with the drug dealer when you're no longer a druggie?
Do you keep going to the physiotherapist's house after you're cured?
And that's a big, I don't know the answer to that, you understand?
I'm just, this is the foundational question.
And it is tragic. Now, this doesn't mean the relationship has been bad.
This doesn't mean the relationship has been useless.
Look at the journey that you've come from where you started to where you are.
It's incredible. Maybe relationships, some of them, like you're trying to get to orbit, you know, the rocket, a lot of fuel, and then it drops away.
I don't know. But the challenge is, it seems to me that you came together out of a Simon the Boxer, repetition, compulsion of early abuse.
And as that's falling away in various aspects, in various ways for both of you, you're kind of looking at each other saying, what's the foundation of this again?
You know, I know, I actually have a, I think I have an answer for that.
Yeah. Of what a foundation of a relationship is.
The foundation of our relationship started on a mutual friendship.
We found each other as hiking buddies originally and both enjoyed being outdoors and just were good guy friends.
And that's all that we ever were originally.
Eventually, I then, more or less, shortened for this, I know it's been a long show, so I'll keep it short.
I insisted that I didn't want to just be your friend.
I wanted more in the relationship and more, in a way, I feel that I kind of said, well, either I want you to be my romantic partner in this, not just be my friend or friend.
Or not. But you gave an ultimatum.
I now look back and I feel that way.
I did feel like I did that and I can't.
I have such a pit of guilt in my stomach for that.
Why is there guilt about that?
Because it's not what he wanted.
But I still...
You went along with it.
You still chose to do it.
But that's not what you wanted originally.
You wanted a wife and kids and then you found me who, you know, what's been one of the mottos is, oh, living with a guy is so much easier.
It's been one of the mottos of the relationship.
And now that just looks back and that looks so effed up.
Yeah, I mean, it's tough though, because if you want a relationship with someone, I mean, what are you supposed to say?
Pretend that you don't? That's a form of falsification too.
Now, the ultimatum thing, you know, I mean, in straight relationships, if you're in the friend zone, I mean, I've certainly done this, which say I'm either graduating from the friend zone or I'm not going to be a friend anymore, right?
So you're allowed to say, of course.
I mean, you've got to be honest, right?
And if you make a romantic play, you can't really just drop back down to second layer of friendship, right?
So I don't know about the guilt.
Maybe I'm missing something there. But saying...
I want a relationship or the friendship isn't going to work for me, that's an honest statement, isn't it?
Yeah. I mean, you weren't holding his pets hostage, at least I hope not.
No. Right? You weren't holding on to his Pet Shop Boys CDs and refusing to release them, right?
No, no, he wasn't holding that water buffalo hostage.
Yeah, yeah, that's right. All right, you come with me and I'll give you back your North American River Otter suit.
Straight up. So, yeah, I mean, making the play and saying that you want someone, that's the nature of the game, right?
I mean, the serious game, the important game of love and so on.
But... The question of why you got together.
I mean, you both have an adverse childhood experience score of 7, which is catastrophic.
It doesn't mean that your lives will be catastrophic.
It means that it's a bad injury.
And so you need rehab, right?
Just as I did, just as lots of people do.
So you got together, you were heavily traumatized, and you were very young.
And that just means that the dysfunction is going to be wound into the beginning of the relationship.
And as you say, it went on, this level of dysfunction, or similar levels of dysfunction, went on four or five years before, right, Jeremy, you said no more?
Yes. And that caused Brandon to collide with the verbal abuse that he was acting out and solved it to a significant degree, if not completely, right?
Right. And then what happened was, Jeremy, you probably thought, well, that's good.
Now things are better.
As the British say, done and dusted, right?
But the problem was, that was just the beginning, right?
Yes. Right?
Because then you have a lot of trauma with each other, a lot of abuse that's been inflicted on each other.
And the fact that you can't confront a woman who stayed in an abusive relationship, Jeremy, is not too fucking surprising, right?
Because you did too. I'm sure I'm going to listen back to this show and say, holy crap, who's that guy on the phone?
Well, yes, and I hope people do.
I mean, I want you to listen back to it because it's important, right?
But that is the big question.
Now, myself personally, I have not had a relationship that began with dysfunction, survived the cure of dysfunction.
That doesn't mean it's not possible.
I'm just telling you my particular experience.
My wife and I have never said a harsh or abusive or any word to each other.
There's nothing to fix, nothing to heal.
But there were relationships with Yelfest that I had in the past.
And it has been sort of my experience in the past that honesty, when the relationship is founded on functional stuff, productive stuff, moral stuff, then honesty is a real plus.
But when relationships are kind of founded on the negative stuff or the destructive stuff, then honesty is like the wave goodbye.
For me. What that means for you guys, obviously I don't know.
I'm just telling you my own sort of personal experience.
But it could be. It could be that you guys are able to build a foundation to move forward or it could be that you were in each other's lives to get to this point while you were still young enough to experience true love.
I don't know. But there's nothing wrong with a relationship that gets you to a higher plane and you move on from.
It's not a failure. It's not destructive.
It's not horrible.
In the self work I've been doing lately, I think you're absolutely right that our relationship I think you're absolutely right that our relationship founded on dysfunction doesn't determine that it can't be.
but definitely puts some problems there.
And especially because I have seen quite the reduction of my same-sex attraction Especially as I've done more work into dealing with the echoes of, you know, my grandmother, my mother, and my past.
And I couldn't have a positive relationship with a woman until I had confronted that shit, too.
So, I mean, that, of course, is my experience for what it's worth.
I still feel like, I mean, I'm meeting a point where I just feel paralyzed and I recognize...
The paralysis was their control back then.
I feel like I'm still under that paralysis right now.
How do I turn that silhouette next to me into an actual wife next to me?
Well, I mean, I'm just putting myself in Jeremy's shoes how heartbreaking even that sentence is.
Yeah. Right?
I mean, Jeremy, that's got to be pretty rough on your heart, right?
Yeah, my fear from day one was that because I know he's always had heterosexual attractions.
He's dated women in the past, still has those fantasies and attractions for women.
My fear from day one has always been that I cannot give you everything that you want.
You can satisfy me.
But I can't satisfy you.
And that has been heartbreaking for me to empathize with him, to say, I cannot satisfy you.
And in order to maintain a romantic relationship with me, you can't satisfy that.
Oh, Jeremy, though, my God, man.
Oh, I haven't met Brandon's mother, but I sure as hell have met yours in this conversation, man.
Holy shit! Holy shit!
Who snipped off the codpiece for Jeremy?
Oh my god, man!
Oh! Oh!
Clawing female sugar giving me diabetes!
I'm sorry, I shouldn't laugh, but it's like...
I swear to God, I'm waiting for the Liberace Orchestra.
I mean, I'm not dismissing your pain, seriously, but when you hear back on that, it's such a hand over the forehead couch fainting shit, right?
You chose a guy who verbally abused me, and now you're playing victim like, oh, you know, I can give him, I can't give him everything he wants, but he can give me everything I want.
It's like, only if what you wanted was five years of verbal abuse and rage.
Like, where are you and your choices in this?
You're just passively lying there saying, I hope he chooses me.
I hope he chooses me. Where's your say in this shit?
Where's what you want?
Where was what you wanted?
Because if he's going to choose you, don't you kind of have to be there?
Crossing your fingers is not a strategy.
Looking back in a lot of ways, I feel like that's kind of what it was.
Yeah, I think it is. You're like the wallflower.
I hope the alpha chooses me.
Look, I've blended in with the wallpaper.
Look, I can camouflage. I'm a chameleon.
That's cool. Because you kind of go in rubber bones, right, in this part of the conversation.
He's everything I want.
I just hope I'm what he wants.
And if he chooses me, that would be great.
And it's like, that's very passive, right?
And that's the price. Of not differentiating the stuff we were talking about with your mom.
Because that, I guarantee you.
I guarantee you. I don't come to a lot of certainties in these conversations, guys, but Jeremy, I guarantee you, that's your mom to a T. Now, Brandon's seen his inner mom because you wouldn't put up with the verbal abuse that came out of her.
I don't know about the passivity.
And you're inner mom, Jeremy.
But I'm pretty sure I can picture what she's wearing right now.
Did that make any sense?
That is, yeah, that's exactly...
That is exactly, I think, me to a point of...
I look back and I see myself in my little God view of...
In fact, that led to, I think, a lot of the control that I tried to control, Brandon, on a lot of things.
And passive aggression invites verbal abuse.
It's tragic and it shouldn't happen that way, but it kind of does.
Right, same thing happened with your mom and your dad, right Jeremy?
She's passive aggressive, he was verbally abusive.
Same thing happened with you, Jeremy, if you're passive aggressive, Brendan was for years verbally abusive.
It's not right and it doesn't justify a goddamn thing, but it's just the way it kind of fits.
Is it really much of a guess or a wonder to you right now that after we take that verbal abuse, after we take that control, after we take out these More fake things and excise it out of our relationship and we go full RTR on our relationship that Brandon starts having more interest back into women that he has less interest in me romantically.
Well, it was his mother who needed your mother.
This is complicated shit, but it was Brandon's abusive mother who needed Jeremy's inner mother to be passive-aggressive.
Once Brandon stopped being verbally abusive, he has, yes, less use for your inner passive-aggressive mom, Jeremy.
So now he may be looking for a real woman rather than the shadow of your mom on your balls, right?
Oh, that's disgusting to think about.
Wow. See, if one person gives up the dysfunctional strategy, the abusive strategy, they have less use for the abusive strategies of others.
So if he stopped verbally abusing and you don't stop being passive aggressive or just passive, ain't going to work.
Don't be someone who hopes to be chosen.
Be someone who Who's chosen.
Be someone who's active enough that people will choose.
Or not! The passive-aggressive thing is, if I'm rejected, I won't take it personally.
It won't feel as bad.
No, be out there.
Be who you are.
Be active. Be present.
And if you reject it, yeah, okay, that hurts maybe more, but at least if someone's there, they're there for the right reasons, and they're there for In perpetuity.
Because you are who you are.
But don't lie back on the couch, look pretty, and hope you get picked.
You may get picked, but it won't last.
Wow. Thank you.
I'm going to look back on this call, and Brandon will too, and I'm sure there's going to be a whole lot that comes out of this that's not even clicking with me right now.
Good. Well, listen, guys, good chat.
Was it helpful for you? Was it useful?
Incredibly. About halfway through the conversation, I started wondering, well, when are we going to get to the question?
Oh yeah, no, listen, I had to let you, you know when you fish, like you let the fish run a bit, I had to let you run with the dissociated droning on about terrible abuse, which in no way indicates that I'm not massively sympathetic to the abuse.
I needed to let that play out a little bit.
If I'd done it too soon, I would have just provoked more defenses.
I needed you guys to get a little bit tired unconsciously of that first, and then I could say, okay, we're done with this.
Now we can get to the real stuff.
And thank you so much for hanging in there for so long.
Well, at least Frye was definitely kind of pushing your patience a little bit.
Thank you for hanging in there. No, listen guys, it's a huge pleasure and it is a great honor that you bear your hearts and minds in this conversation.
A great pleasure to have these kinds of conversations.
This is kind of what life is supposed to be about, isn't it?
I mean, this is talking deeply about important things according to rational principles.
I think that's great.
So it was no trouble for me.
And it's a deep privilege for me to be in these conversations.
So I thank you guys enormously.
Massive sympathy for the hand you were dealt.
You guys are going to end up fucking superheroes because of all of this.
And it comes...
Sometimes it feels it comes a little too late, but the powers that you get from this kind of work is truly astonishing.
And you guys are doing amazing stuff.
And I think you should be very proud with how you've been dealing with the hands you were dealt.
Thank you. Is there anything you have to say, Brian?
I'm just feeling...
Quite a bit of overwhelmingness.
That's not a word, I guess.
I'm feeling overwhelmed.
And I... I'm certain to listen back.
There's going to be a lot of new questions that we consider and have to bring between the two of us.
And I still feel a little bit paralyzed.
But I...
First of all, it's probably more than a little bit.
Because this is a possible destination on a map.
Nobody's gone anywhere yet.
There's no magic wand, as you know.
You've been doing this work for years.
This may be helpful associations that can dislodge some of the paralysis, but there's a lot to talk about, a lot to work out, and a lot of conversations to have with a lot of people.
And so if it's a useful direction, fantastic.
But yeah, I mean, as far as travel goes, it's an X on a map that might be of value.
Yes. Thank you. All right.
Will you guys keep me posted about what happens?
Absolutely. Fantastic.
Well, guys, much love.
I really, really appreciate the conversation.
And thanks so much for the privilege of, well, and all of you out there, thank you so much for the privilege of allowing me and encouraging me and supporting me in doing what I do and what Mike and I do.
And so, freedomainradio.com slash donate is where you can go to help out.
And help support these kinds of conversations.
And you can, of course, do some shopping stuff.
You know, I'm not going to do that all after this kind of conversation, but you know all of the links.
And I just also wanted to mention that I am going to be speaking in Washington, D.C. A Night for Freedom, dc.com.
