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March 27, 2018 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

03:36:52

4040 4 Kids With 4 Men? - Call In Show - March 22nd, 2018

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	Good evening. Good evening.
	Stefan Molyneux, hope you're doing well.
	Bunch of great callers in the show tonight.
	The first is a young man who wanted to be a theoretical physicist, and he also wants to achieve real things in the real world.
	So how do you resolve A drive, a desire for something that may make you happy versus something that's necessary for the world as a whole.
	That's a big and challenging question, something I've wrestled with quite a bit over the years, so I hope that I can provide or did provide something useful there.
	He seemed to think so. I think you'll agree.
	All right, second caller.
	Ooh. He's going through a divorce with his wife.
	They've been married for two years.
	She was a single mom of two, both from different fathers.
	When he met her, they had a child together.
	And now, he just recently found out that his wife is a week into carrying some other man's child.
	So, we had a little bit of a chat about that, which I think you'll find quite helpful.
	And the third question.
	How do we respond, or how do we best respond to the argument that the rich are greedy, the rich are entitled, the rich have exploited people, and do they really deserve their success?
	Speaking of success, the fourth caller wanted to know how she could overcome her fear of success, which she believes was implanted in her by her parents.
	Very interesting conversation.
	Good themes, I think.
	So please help out the show at freedomainradio.com slash donate.
	Alright, well up first today we have Frazier.
	Frazier wrote in and said, Gone are the days when I was sure of what would provide my life with meaning, that being theoretical physics.
	Such work would almost guarantee my dependence upon the state, as such I can't justify this path any longer, knowing what I know now.
	Thanks to you, I sincerely believe that my life will be best spent in service to philosophy and in championing the stewardship of the individual.
	Now that I have a new aim, I feel held back by my previous motivations, by the fantasy of becoming a great theoretical physicist.
	I am stuck deep in the cobweb-laden force of procrastination due to my being so attached to this fantasy.
	What are your thoughts about how to go about reconciling two disparate and conflicting motivational drives?
	Have you ever been at a point in your life where your motivations for pursuing a particular life goal conflicted with a different set of motivations?
	If so, how did you go about reconciling the two motivational frames?
	How did you let your old self die so as to move on and pursue your new purpose?
	That's from Frazier. Hey, Frazier, how you doing?
	I'm doing very well. Very nice to speak to you, Stefan.
	Nice to speak to you.
	Go ahead. Before we get started, I am extraordinarily nervous.
	You're someone I hugely look up to and admire.
	So if I'm jittery at any point, that's why.
	Well, with any luck, I won't screw it up.
	So we'll keep that relationship.
	Cross your fingers. You never know.
	So, yeah, that is...
	You're going through a very, very intense phase.
	But tell me a little bit about...
	The theoretical physics that you were interested in, that you wanted to pursue.
	Right. Well, I'm actually...
	It sort of starts back in primary school, in a way.
	I was, for a long time, absolutely, completely, terribly, terrible at maths.
	Really, really just completely in that, basically.
	And it was just a terrible struggle to get through each day.
	My dad would have to sit down with me.
	He's a maths tutor, so he'd sit down with me and he'd tutor me in maths and we'd sort of go over it again and again.
	And eventually I sort of got to a point where I was able to do questions and understand them and get them right and that was a massive sort of dopamine hit.
	And I started pursuing it of my own accord and then I eventually thought, well hang on, I'm starting to like this now.
	It's sort of becoming my goal as opposed to something that's chasing me and that's terrible.
	So I was drawn to theoretical physics as sort of the natural end to my conquering of my disability, in a way, if you want to say it like that.
	So it's sort of a way to justify my ability in maths.
	I've come to realize that's what it is.
	I'm actually doing a self-authoring program at the moment and I'm sort of working through exactly what the motivations are.
	But something about I'm conquering my prior inability.
	That's really where it sort of stems from, I think.
	Right. Was it a moment where you got the click with math and then it just kind of went from there?
	Or was it slow to accumulate for you?
	It was a slow, trickily uphill battle for about, let's see, from about year six to year nine was when I really started to sort of hit the ground running.
	I actually didn't study at all when I was, say, year six to about year nine.
	And then eventually, when I first started to see that glimmer over the hill of being able to actually be effective at doing problems, that sort of spurred me on.
	I was like, oh, wow, this is actually quite nice.
	And then I started to really pursue out of my own accord.
	But I wasn't saying there really There was a moment where it sort of clicked.
	It was quite a slow thing. And then eventually it sort of, you know, it was like an exponential type of deal.
	Mastery is such an addiction, isn't it?
	When you really feel like you've got traction on whatever hill you're climbing, it is such an addiction.
	And, you know, happiness, this is where Aristotle's idea of eudomania, right?
	That eudomania!
	Which is that if you pursue excellence, particularly if it has to do with virtue or logic, You will gain happiness.
	We want happiness like it's a state that we just sit in, like a hippo in mud.
	But happiness is something that we get through the continual expansion of our mastery of something important, something valuable.
	And that is, you know, we are a striving and struggling species.
	And people who want this sort of Fat Buddha sitting at the top of the hill bathed in happiness just for breathing.
	This is an illusion.
	This is crap that people sell you to pretend that You don't have to strive.
	You don't have to achieve. You don't have to work, not just for your own satisfaction, but for some good in the world, to gain happiness.
	Happiness is something that is given to us as a rest from striving and succeeding.
	And people often forget that a lot of times.
	Oh, and there's a lot of people who want to sell that.
	And maybe that's more of a male thing.
	I don't know. That's really something I've come to know in the flesh.
	I really distinctly remember on Christmas holidays, as a kid, I would get just so bored.
	Because I wasn't driven to do anything at school.
	I had this slave resentment in a way to doing anything of my own, to follow my own will.
	And I just got so terribly bored.
	I wasn't doing anything. I would just play Halo on the Xbox.
	And then I'd end the day, I'd be lying awake in bed thinking, I haven't done anything.
	I haven't actually, what have I done to further my mastery in any particular domain this day?
	And it would be terrible, this sort of like, well, what have I done to overcome myself today?
	Well, you try this pre-computers, man.
	Oh my God!
	I mean, I remember when it was just my mom and I, when she'd be off working, I guess I was around 11 or so.
	Yeah, that's a little harder, yeah.
	Yeah, and this was before computers.
	There was no, I mean, everything on daytime TV is basically designed to rot your brain from the stem upwards.
	And I remember I was reading the book Superman, which was really, it was from the original Christopher Reeves movie, and it was pretty bad.
	And I just remember like lying on the bed thinking like, I am just, I'm dying from boredom.
	I would go to the library and I would read like crazy and I had no money.
	I remember I joined a swim team And I needed seven bucks, and I had to just keep showing up saying, oh, I should buy it.
	Yeah, I remember you saying that.
	Yeah, that really struck me.
	We were really, really bored.
	And this is before society had been kind enough to give me the traction of philosophy, which was still a couple of years to come.
	But yeah, I mean, I guess in a way, not having computers was more helpful because it gave me that level of...
	Absolute boredom that just had me cast about for anything.
	And then I'd just pick up the biggest, thickest Russian novel I could find and just try and plow my way through it to at least feel like I achieved something.
	It's hard when you have the out of, well, let's just do another round of deathmatch.
	You know, it's like you can just sort of endlessly do that.
	And it empties you out.
	Like at the end of the day, there's this fundamental dissatisfaction.
	Yes, that's really what I felt.
	And it was probably, you know, the hour was about three o'clock in the morning.
	Also, I was one that sort of hit most.
	But I just had this intense feeling of I'm not overcoming myself.
	And so what I would do then is I would sort of procrastinate.
	And your video on procrastination you did way, way back ago, that really, really spoke to me very deeply.
	Oh, yeah. The first take of that was even better, but the sound was screwed up.
	I had to do it again. Oh, no.
	Anyway, yeah, so that was...
	That video in particular really kind of articulated those feelings that I was having at that point in my life.
	And even really up till about when I started listening to you, which was about October 2016.
	How did you first find the show?
	Oh, oh dear.
	Okay. I was studying for my, so in Western Australia, it's called WACE, Western Australian Certificate of Education.
	I was studying for my year 12 exams, big final, end of year, get into uni or not, failure or succeed type of deal.
	Death match. Studying for those.
	Yeah, yeah, intense stuff.
	And I was taking a break from study.
	It was like 10 o'clock at night or something.
	And then I went back onto my iPad.
	And at that time, I was quite deep into UFOs, of all things.
	And so I was finishing up a lecture and I was just sort of scrolling through the suggestion bar.
	And I saw this video.
	It said, the story of your enslavement.
	And I thought, ooh, how can I resist?
	That's my gateway drug.
	Oh, yeah. And I played that.
	And I kid you not, there were actually, my eyes were sort of wet at the end of it.
	I was almost crying. It sort of really, really...
	There's not even a whole lot in that video, but after watching that, I just had to click on your channel and see what more you had to offer.
	From then on, I was listening to you maybe six or seven hours a day.
	The call-in shows, these type of call-in shows, where you would really try and connect with people and pull away their They're sort of biases and alter egos and really try and get some level of truth established.
	I really connected with those.
	I mean, I loved your debates. I loved everything you did.
	I pretty much read all of your books.
	UPB is glorious.
	I just want to say that.
	Thank you. So yeah, that's how I started listening to you.
	It was just really serendipitous through the YouTube suggestion bar.
	Yeah. That's great.
	All right, so let me ask you this, Fraser.
	You brought up the alter egos, and for those who don't know, the term generally means personalities within us that are not usually at sync with what we may consciously want, that may undermine or oppose us, or may support us in other ways.
	But generally, if they support us, they're part of the conscious mind.
	You said that there are alter egos within you that are resisting an alteration in your life trajectory.
	Is that right? Well, I had a bit of trouble phrasing that.
	I'm not quite sure if that's the right way to phrase it.
	What I mean is that because I was so bad at maths, I wanted to be good at maths.
	I wanted to affirm myself, to prove myself, basically.
	And so if I was bad at it, that was a threat to my sort of And so I would work very, very hard to be good at it, to get rid of those feelings.
	So what probably I was trying to mean, reflecting back on it now, is that I was forced to do maths as a kid.
	And of course, I grew to resent that.
	So when it came time to sort of study it on my own, I would bring those feelings of resentment in with me and I wouldn't pursue it any further.
	So what I would do is I'd say, okay, well, I got my waist exams up ahead.
	I need to do well in them because I want to be a theoretical physicist.
	That means I have to be crazily good at maths.
	If I'm bad at maths, that means I'm not going to be a good theoretical physicist.
	That means I'm not going to be happy.
	So I would sort of, I think...
	I'd kind of hedge my bets.
	I'd say, well, if I study as hard as I can, if I do all the extracurricular study, if I talk to my teachers afterwards, if I go and chat up theoretical physicists at the University of Western Australia, and I do all of that, and I fail, then that's a pretty definite sign that I'm really not going to be able to do it.
	But if I kind of hold back, if I don't really give it my all, And then I don't get in, I might have the out of saying, well, you know, I probably could do it, but I just didn't try hard enough.
	So I think there was a lot of self-sabotage in that you sort of, you've said it before, like if you don't sort of articulate a goal, if you don't specify conditions of failure, then you can't really fail, but you also can't really win.
	So I was, that's What I was meaning when I said I had these alter egos, it's perhaps not alter egos, although it may be.
	It's really that if I tried my hardest to attain this goal and I failed, that would be terrifying.
	Parts of me, I think, were saying, let's hold back a little so that if we do fail, we can say that it's not because of some inherent trait.
	I've had feelings of inferiority for a very, very long time.
	Inferiority in what way?
	What are your fears that you're inferior about?
	Pretty much my only fear is that of inferiority.
	For the longest time, it was mathematical ability.
	Now, it's still mathematical ability.
	I know that I'm actually quite good at it.
	That fear is still there, but a lot of things really.
	I look at you, I look at people like Jordan Peterson, who are my two, you and Jordan Peterson are my two sort of heroes, if we want to say that.
	And I know that both of you have staggeringly high IQs and you've both been incredibly successful in the free market in getting people to connect with your messages.
	And I sort of look at that and think, man, can I do that?
	Is that really even possible?
	So there's this sort of, I feel constantly beaten down by my ideals.
	It's like, no, you can't have that.
	So you feel, let's take me out of the equation because then the question of ego becomes more challenging.
	But let's just say you are comparing yourself to someone like Jordan Peterson, who is on his way to becoming the most successful, I think, nonfiction writer in Canadian history, one of the most successful intellectuals, a very successful academic career.
	And, you know, now he's a media personality.
	And, you know, he does a lot of stuff very well.
	There's some differences that I have with him, particularly the parenting section of his new book.
	But we'll set that aside for now.
	Yes.
	So if you're looking at someone like Jordan Peterson and saying, I feel insecure relative to Jordan Peterson.
	That's not a bad thing.
	If you feel insecure relative to your local paper delivery man or pizza delivery man or, you know, whatever, then okay, I can understand that that's an insecurity.
	But if you feel insecure relative to Jordan Peterson, I would argue that that means that you think you can get there.
	Right? Because you wouldn't feel insecure unless you had some belief you could get there.
	Right, right. Does this make sense?
	Like, I don't sit there and say, well, you know, there's Ben Heppner, the Canadian tenor.
	I feel insecure about my opera ability relative to Ben Heppner, the wonderful Canadian tenor.
	It's like, I really don't feel insecure about that because there's no way to close that gap at all, right?
	Exactly. So if you feel insecure relative to someone, that means that the insecurity is telling you, do it.
	Do it! Do it!
	Do not hesitate!
	You can make that leap!
	No, seriously, like if you look across the Grand Canyon, you don't say, I feel insecure about my jump there, right?
	Because you're not going to do it.
	You can't jump the Grand Canyon, right?
	But if it's something that you probably could do, then you will feel insecure.
	And the insecurity is saying, you can do it.
	You need to be careful. But you can do it.
	That's what insecurity... We all think it's something that's holding us back.
	No, no, no, no. Insecurity. It's something that is driving us forward.
	It's something that says, you could have it, but you have to work and be careful and be focused and be dedicated.
	You could have it. The insecurity tells us, it's almost like a homing beacon or something on a compass that tells us which way to go.
	Whatever you're the most insecure about is kind of what you want the most.
	And the insecurity is saying, okay, if you want it, it's difficult.
	You can do it, but you got to be careful.
	And one of the things that really sort of spoke to me as well is when Jordan Peterson talked about the Arthur, the Arthurian myth that when they went into the forest to find the Holy Grail, they had to enter the forest at each of his nights.
	They had to enter the forest at the point which looked darkest to him.
	It's the area that you don't want to go.
	The place that you least want to go will hold the thing that you most want because that's where you haven't looked.
	So, yeah, going to the place that scares you, that's sort of what I have trouble with.
	I did his Big Five personality test a while back, and I was really shocked by the results.
	I got 32nd percentile for industriousness.
	Which just, man, that took a sledgehammer to my ego.
	First of all, remember, it's not a Bible.
	It's not something that's written in Sanskrit on a tablet handed to you by Moses.
	It's just a test. It's not determinism.
	Boy, if I could only get down to five personalities, that'd be a huge improvement.
	And if you're younger, you tend to have less industriousness, all of that.
	It will increase somewhat with age.
	But nonetheless, and I know all these things consciously, nonetheless, it did really sort of knock me.
	I was like, oh man, you know, Jordan Peterson, he's very, very hardworking.
	Stefan Molyneux, he's unbelievably hardworking.
	Does he ever sleep? I don't know.
	Who knows? And it's like, wow, I'm not like that.
	And I want to be people like them.
	No, no, no, no. Hang on, hang on.
	Okay, so let's take this one step at a time.
	First of all, laziness can be wonderful.
	Because... Oh, it's nice. No, no, let me just make a point here, then you can go to town on it.
	But laziness can be wonderful because...
	If you don't know what you want to do, don't work hard at anything.
	Because to me, it's not industriousness, it's enlustiousness.
	In other words, the lust is the key.
	If there's something that you really want to do, then it's not work.
	Like, I don't sort of, I've had jobs, a lot of jobs in my life, where I wake up and it's like, oh, I gotta go to work, right, and do your zombie shuffle down the Weird carpeted aisle of the rat's nest known as corporate stuff, right?
	And so, what I would say is if you have a passion enough, if you lust after something enough, Then I don't think you need to be industrious.
	I look forward to these call-in shows.
	I look forward to doing shows.
	I look forward to writing books.
	I mean, it's fun.
	I like it because I know it's doing good for the world.
	I know it's exercising me to my maximum capacity.
	Some might say a little bit beyond, but that's all right.
	And so I wouldn't worry about...
	Industriousness, to me, does not exist independent of desire.
	In other words, it's not like you hit the gas on a car.
	It doesn't matter which way you're pointed. It's just going to go forward at whatever speed you tell it to.
	It's lust that drives the work ethic.
	In other words, if it's a work ethic, then it's kind of a problem because it's a long life to just work.
	But if you find something, of course, that you're really passionate about, even though it's difficult...
	Then I would say that you don't have to worry about your work ethic if you lust after the goal enough.
	Yeah, yeah. Well, this is sort of part of the issue because for basically a lot of my life, that was theoretical physics.
	I mean, I sacrificed doing a lot of things to simply study maths and physics.
	But why was it theoretical physics?
	Why was it? Well, I think it's, again, it's...
	Attaining mastery over complex abstractions, and I know that that itself is a rather tangential way to put it, but...
	That's the synonym. I know, right?
	I know, but that's the question.
	Why theoretical physics?
	Well, it really felt good to do, to get, to understand, I would say, Abstractions in my own head, mathematical abstractions of the way that sort of mechanical reality works.
	It was really, really, it just was such a hit.
	So that won't sustain you?
	No, and it wasn't.
	It wasn't. No, it won't sustain you.
	Do you know why? Because it's not necessarily, it's not really, other than something aesthetic, it's not anything particular to What I'd eventually like to do.
	I mean, it's not. It's sort of a...
	No. The reason it won't sustain you, my friend, is that that's all about you.
	Right. Not what good can I provide to the world, not what good can I do with the privileged life that I have in a Western country with a good brain and educational opportunities of the internet and speaking English and all the things that happen that way.
	And this is a big tug-of-war that happens, and I understand both sides.
	There's like the objectivist side, which is you act in a selfish manner and this and that and the other, but...
	That's not even what Ayn Rand herself did.
	She took a lot of hits to try and bring a lot of truth to the world.
	But if it's only about you, it tends to not be very sustainable.
	And if it's something about the world and you, and I'm not saying sacrifice yourself to the world and do miserable things so the world ends up in a better place, but I'm not saying that, but I'm saying there needs to be a balance.
	If it's just about you, then it will not be sustainable enough because that's a solipsistic universe.
	There's just you and your dopamine and what feeds you and what makes you happy.
	There's nothing flowing out from you into the world and we are a social animal and we need that relationship with other people.
	Now, if you were to say, well, I want to do theoretical physics because I love solving problems, I love abstractions.
	And jetpacks are going to make people really, really happy or teleportation devices or anti-gravity or, you know, whatever.
	Time travel. People like candy, don't you know?
	Yeah. Yeah, yeah. So if you can combine what makes you happy with what makes the world a better place, Then I think you have something sustainable because then it's a relationship and it fulfills our need, not just for solitary dopamine hits, but for a community and a collective and a relationship with the world.
	Yes. And when I first started listening to you...
	I sort of looked ahead at my own trajectory and I thought, well, if I want to become a theoretical physicist, I have to sort of become a professor, which means that I have to become a leech upon the state, basically.
	And you may be corrupted by the power of being able to grant degrees to students and so on.
	And so I thought, man, that's not what I want at all.
	And that's not what the world needs, is another person sitting in a dark room with a chalkboard saying, I have a right to play with abstractions.
	And so when it came to thinking about what I would like to subjugate my life to, a purpose, the work that you do really, I think, is what in the final analysis is going to be both what provides me with maximal meaning, but also what's most meaningful and beneficial for the world.
	Well, it is what is needed now.
	It is what is needed now. To me, it's like the Titanic.
	Before it hits the iceberg, eat, drink, be merry, bang Kate Winslet in a carriage, whatever you feel like, because you're not sinking.
	But once you hit that iceberg and it begins to tilt and the guy flies down and bangs his head on the propeller, well, it's time to get people...
	Apparently not men. Women and children to get people to the lifeboat.
	That's kind of your job. And so given that we've hit the iceberg as a civilization, to me frivolity is deep in the rear view.
	And we have to work now to save.
	And we are very fortunate in that most people who've had to work to save their civilizations in the past have had to do so.
	In trenches with mustard gas and tanks rolling over their eyeballs and all kinds of horrible stuff.
	And we have to do what?
	We have to survive mean tweets and, you know, this kind of stuff.
	I'm reading the Gulag Archipelago at the moment, and that point really gets hit home very much.
	It's like, well, I'm not in the frickin' Gulag.
	Right. I'm here. But if all smart people only work for their own dopamine, we surely will be.
	Yes, exactly. Exactly.
	And that's... What I was saying before was that that's how I was thinking at the time before I had sort of, you know, come to philosophy.
	And when I eventually made sort of the decision to perhaps pursue something such as what you do, I really began to thought of my previous motivations as quite selfish.
	There was nothing really of any particular, there was no call to responsibility.
	There was no greater responsibility.
	Sort of purpose or meaning.
	And you're right, that would have led me down a path of...
	I can't do it. I just simply can't do it knowing what I know now.
	And we have become soft, smug, self-satisfied, and solipsistic in our civilization.
	We have not struggled and suffered for a long time in the West.
	We have a lot of things sort of just given to us.
	We've just become soft and lazy and we have become oppositional to discomfort.
	And this is the whole safe spaces hysteria crap that goes on in colleges these days.
	Yeah, sorry. I had to sit there and stare down the gaping maw of communism continuously.
	In my educational career.
	And in my artistic education.
	And, like, if I have to sit there and stare down socialism and communism and find a way to deal with that and oppose that, then you guys can sit down and damn well hear some arguments about nationalism and patriotism and in-group preference.
	Like, we've become so soft.
	I could survive hearing about the glorious and wonderful Communist society that awaited me if I only surrendered my soul and property.
	So yeah, but we've got this weird kind of fragility.
	And it is sad how fragile we become when we immerse ourselves in unreality.
	It's weird. The debt, the fiat currency, the hyper-regulation, the massive wealth transfers have created these unbelievable delusional swamps of unreality.
	And in unreality, we get soft.
	Reality is the sandpaper that sharpens and sparks and strengthens us.
	It is the weight which causes our muscles to grow.
	The resistance causes us to have strength.
	You know, we're kind of like what they discovered when they put people in space for long periods of time.
	Like when they were up there for months and months at a space station.
	You know what happened to their bones, right?
	Yeah, they sort of, they weakened and their muscles atrophied and they got their spines decompressed and all of that.
	Well, their muscles, they could do some stuff with their muscles and that helped.
	But because their bones were not resisting gravity, Their bones began to disintegrate, and they had a great deal of difficulty even walking when they came back to Earth.
	And the gravity called reality, or the reality called gravity, is what we need for our bones to function.
	And the way I see these sort of snowflakes and these hysterical people, particularly in colleges, though of course in other places as well, To me, they've just been in orbit.
	They have been away from reality.
	They have money given to them.
	They've not had to have jobs.
	They have maybe wealthier parents.
	Or maybe their moms don't work if they're single moms, just get a bunch of money from the state.
	Or maybe their parents are in the military-industrial complex and don't.
	It's the aristocracy of pull rather than competence.
	But what's happened is...
	There's just this whole unreality in society that has made people incredibly fragile.
	And they seem to me like how astronauts look when they've been in space for months.
	They walk out like elderly, elderly people.
	And they have been severely weakened by being detached from the world.
	And the only way is to slowly begin to build up their strength.
	But what's happening these days is people who come to gravity, they desperately want to get back into space.
	And they view gravity as an assault.
	It's violence! Reality, truth, reason, evidence.
	They're violence against me.
	Like I'm being assaulted by reality.
	That is a desperately sad place for people to end up.
	But that's what happens when you carve off entire sections of the population.
	And you give them stuff for free.
	You end up with tens of millions of people.
	Who are no longer adapted to reality and who view reality now as a predator in the same way that your bones view gravity as a salt.
	I really sort of, I was doing a double major of physics and philosophy.
	And we sort of had this impromptu philosophy club.
	It was fairly, very, very lefty, but you know.
	My friend and I went anyway.
	He listens to you, by the way.
	He would probably listen to this. Hello, by the way, why don't mention your name?
	Anyway, we had this guy come to talk about the metaphysics of gender.
	We were wringing our hands.
	We were like, well, this is going to be good, man.
	He came in and said, you know, there's a real problem.
	In first year, it's about 50-50 split between males and females enrolled in philosophy courses.
	Second year, it's about 70-30 tilted in favor of the men.
	Third year, it's almost all men.
	And then once you get to postgraduate, it's basically all men.
	And this, you see, was a massive, catastrophic, balls-to-the-wall problem that we need to solve.
	It's evidence of This sort of underground patriarchal forest of penises that are keeping women out of philosophy.
	Yeah, because young men love nothing more than driving women away from their environment, right?
	I know, right? Exactly.
	But that was the immediate conclusion, that there was this disparity between groups.
	Everyone's the same. Therefore, it must be because of discrimination.
	It's not because women make choices.
	It's not because any of this. And we sort of brought this up during, you know, we challenged him.
	Well, it's also not because there are far fewer women at the highest levels of IQ than men.
	Exactly. Proportionately, you know, once you get to those extremes, there are just proportionately fewer women at the same score range.
	Not a lot of women playing pro basketball in the NBA. Discrimination at the highest levels.
	Yeah, yeah. A lot of workplace deaths, you know, they tend to be men.
	It's just this manner more careless, that's all.
	Yeah, yeah. But I mean, there was, like, we really got a sense that he was just very much ensued in his own Corner of, quote, reality.
	He was very divorced from any sort of empirical method.
	Was he? I don't know.
	I don't know. Listen, you could easily make the case that he was just a court toady weasel who knew the kind of crap that you have to spew in order to move your way up that slippery ladder.
	Well, sure. In the system, he was operating, and he was operating perfectly fine, but that's to say that That the university system, particularly the humanities, tends to foster these sentiments of unreality and, you know, over-the-top offensiveness and, you know, opposing opinions must be, we must hold up our crucifixes and we must chant charms.
	No, they're giant launch pads putting people into orbit so that their bones weaken and they can't function in the real world.
	Yeah, yeah.
	So I'll tell you my particular approach to these things.
	Hopefully it will translate in...
	And help, Fraser, in what you plan.
	And I'm going to couch this in religious language.
	The reason for that will become clear, but as you know, I'm not religious, but it's a great way to approach this.
	So, if you worship God, then God doesn't want you to be unhappy, but God wants you to be happy In ways that also benefit the world, in also ways that benefit God's plan, what God wants of you.
	Now, if you say, God, you have given me life and skills and ability and power, charisma, looks, and I'm going to use it to gather resources for myself, to have a lot of meaningless sex and make money and fame, glory, success, accolades, ticker tape parades, if I'm lucky, that's What I'm going to do with your gifts, of course, the Christian answer is to say, no, no.
	God has given you these gifts so that you serve God, not that you serve yourself alone.
	It is the devil who tempts you to take these gifts and use it to serve your own ego, your own preferences, your own desires.
	Now, there is nothing wrong with the accumulation of wealth.
	There is nothing wrong with glory.
	The question is, what is it for?
	Now, To open a particular cellar door into my personality, I view philosophy as a kind of God.
	And there are certainly times, and have been many times over the course of my public career as a philosopher, I have not knelt, but I have certainly asked philosophy, what do you want from me?
	When I take a risk and I go someplace and philosophy says...
	You call that a risk, you cowardly bunny?
	You have taken one step in the journey of a thousand miles towards risk.
	The truth that need to be disgorged through.
	Your pearly whites has barely even started.
	And I'm like, come on. I'm talking about really risky, difficult snuff here.
	Come on, man. No!
	I don't care!
	You gotta go further and further and further.
	Because we don't have a lot of time, we have new technology, and philosophy has been tied up and restrained by the gatekeepers, lo, these thousands of years, and finally it is able to burst free!
	And spread across the world through these magic hot wires of the internet.
	It has been freed from the gatekeepers in the media and in the news and in academia and in the arts.
	We finally could have these conversations and philosophy has been like a genie bound in a tiny bottle for thousands of years.
	Boy have I got a crick from that!
	And philosophy Pulls me along like I'm a bad guy, tied behind the truck of some deliverance characters in some caricature of a southern movie.
	And you say, what do you want?
	What do you want? Have I not done enough?
	And philosophy, which sticks its hands up my butt and makes my mouth move, says, we have only started.
	We have only begun.
	We have only begun.
	And I say... I don't wanna.
	I don't wanna.
	I don't wanna. It's kinda hard.
	Yeah, Anna's like, too bad.
	You came into the church voluntarily and now if the glow hits you in the head and you must speak, don't complain.
	You joined the monk order of your own accord.
	You knew that the purpose was to spread the truth and not the answer.
	See, spreading the answers is easy enough because there's lots of people out there We just want answers.
	Tell me what to do. Well, they call into this show all the time.
	Tell me what to do. Tell me, tell me, tell me.
	Give me a list and I'll do it.
	And I had to resist that temptation as well.
	I mean, when I first started to formulate the question over the last year, I was like, Steph, what should I do?
	Physics or philosophy?
	I wish I got a list.
	I wish just give me the checklist.
	But philosophy says, philosophy says, give no answers.
	Or if you give answers, give them only to illustrate the value of the method, of the methodology.
	Spread the methodology.
	Spread reason and evidence.
	Screw the answers.
	Elevate to the divine, the methodology of reason and evidence.
	And that is very hard because there is such a thirst out there for people who say, what should I do?
	Tell me what to do. Now the priests...
	I need to be something.
	Yeah, I need to be something. Give me a checklist and I'll follow it.
	And philosophy says, no, I'm going to absolutely cock block your checklist.
	You do not get to have sex with your checklist and call yourself a lover of wisdom.
	No. I don't care how many three-hole punches here and how much you grind, it ain't going to work.
	Oh, okay. Paper cuts will.
	Paper cannons. So, the priests, Christian priests, they know the right answer when people say, what should I do?
	Do you know what they say to people?
	You should follow Jesus.
	Yeah, they do, but I mean, that doesn't help hugely.
	What they say is they say, pray to God.
	God will tell you.
	Pray to God. So they do.
	They sit down and they pray. And they drop the fishing hooks of deep questions deep into their selves, into the multi-layered, evolutionary-based lizard brain that goes all the way back billions of years, which we have built precariously like a Tower of Babel, our higher faculties on it.
	And often it will come back. And I find it very frustrating sometimes because I like, can we get to an end point here?
	No! We can't get to an end point because it's all about the methodology.
	When is science? Done.
	When is it finished? When is math?
	Done. We're done. Done and dusted, as they say in England.
	Sorted. Well, it's never done.
	When is literature? Done.
	When is philosophy? Done.
	The answer is never. And the resistance to the guru addiction, because there's so many, like people are, they're like baby birds with their mouths squawked and opening wide saying, give me answers, answers, answers, answers, answers, answers.
	And you're sitting there and you know you could disgorge a whole bunch of Rancid and Randy Worm bits into their gullets, and they'd be like, oh, thank you, I'm fed, I'm fed.
	Shiny syllables, yeah. Yeah, can't do it.
	Can't do it. Can't give you answers.
	How many times have I said this show? I'm not going to tell you what to do.
	Even now, I'm just telling you this is my perspective.
	Exactly, yeah. And I very much agree.
	I mean, I... I don't want to be just fed.
	Well, you see, Fraser, here's how you life, and you just follow these steps, and you'll be fine.
	Right. Or you do these things, and you'll be fine.
	You know what you'd be is bored.
	Yeah, yeah. Oh, man, yeah.
	Boredom, that's worse than pain.
	No true artist wants paint by numbers, right?
	Yeah. So the question is, if you were...
	To imagine gaining your greatest satisfaction, my friend, out of serving the world, what would the world, what would the future want you to do the most?
	It would want me to do as much as I can in the present to bring to bear the necessity of things like peaceful parenting.
	It would very much, that would be number one, I think.
	As well, volunteerism.
	I would need to explicate to people how it is that we can actually interact with one another without trying to force people to play our games.
	You need to learn.
	They would want me to tell them how to interact freely and voluntarily and without force.
	So that we can best maximize what we have to bring forth.
	That's a bit... No, that's a great place to start.
	That's a great place to start.
	Now, my personal perspective, which has been growing low these many months, is that we're not going to make it this round of history.
	We're just going to need to do the post-mortem sort of thing.
	We are basically saying...
	Don't sail this way.
	Dragons are in the waters and we'll swallow you whole.
	We're not going to make it this round.
	There's too many invested interests.
	There's too much power. There's too much swamp.
	There's too much corruption.
	And there are way too many people.
	See, the whole history of the West has been the fear, the growing fear of the state and terror of the state.
	And... When you have so many people dependent on the state, they can't be afraid of the state because the state is a source of their income.
	It's like saying to a farmer, you've really got to be terrified of your crops and cows.
	They're going to kill you.
	No. There's way too many people dependent on the state and therefore the danger of the state is drugged out of them by easy money debt, fiat currency, money printing, you name it.
	So we're not going to make it this round.
	But what we can do is we can map how we ended up here so that people can not go this route again in the future.
	Where that future is, how deep the cycle is, I don't know.
	But we're not going to make it this round.
	I don't see any conceivable way.
	I mean, maybe it's the one-two of talking to Tommy Robinson where he's talking about a million British girls raped and tortured over the past 40 years.
	If that's not enough to wake a country up, I don't know what is.
	And then seeing a $1.3 trillion omnibus spending bill sale through Congress today, which massively jacks up the deficit and which funds Chuck Schumer's tunnel of love for $900 million while there's no money for a war.
	I mean, there's no...
	There's no way to make it round.
	And all we can do, I think, is point out what happened.
	And I'm going to dedicate myself over the next little while to documenting how it got to the point where we can't pull out of this nosedive.
	What that means for everyone, I will get to over time.
	But I have always said I'm not going to resist the reason and evidence.
	And there's, you know, Brexit's not happening.
	Trump is being swallowed by the swamp in many ways.
	And, you know, I'm still very happy for the Brexit stuff.
	I'm very happy for the Trump stuff.
	It bought us some time. Certainly Trump did.
	But we're not. We're not going to be able to pull out of this one.
	There's just way too many people...
	Who are not smart, who are dependent on the state, who are corrupt.
	And there's very few people who even admit that there's a problem.
	Certainly the Republicans in Congress don't seem to.
	So what does the world need us to do?
	I think the world needs us to document the decline and to provide a roadmap for avoiding this for future generations.
	We're going down.
	We're going down. The engines are out, and we're going down.
	But that doesn't mean that we can't shoot up a flare so people can avoid this path in the future.
	And now we do actually have, for the first time in human history, A way to document the decline in a way that future generations can avoid it completely.
	But no, we're not...
	Five to ten, baby.
	One in five. No one here gets out alive.
	So, what does the world want you to do?
	You have spectacular gifts, my friend.
	You are brilliant, of course.
	Great verbal skills.
	High intelligence. And...
	Can you find satisfaction in service...
	To philosophy, to the truth, to the methodology, to the future.
	I sort of, I think that I will only find satisfaction in service to those things.
	That it will be the only route to justifying how terrible sort of being is, really.
	And it would be the only, it's the only, that's the only path that I can see that if I follow, things will get better.
	For both for me and for the world.
	Yeah, if you can't survive the Titanic, at least you can mark the iceberg.
	Exactly, exactly.
	Like if I can't, if I went and become a theoretical physicist, I would be miserable.
	I would be absolutely, because I would have betrayed both myself and the future generations that I could have perhaps had an effect on.
	So it's the only thing left to pursue in my mind.
	That's really any kind of efficacious thing.
	Meaning, it is the only course for me that I think will prevail.
	And there is great peace, I will tell you this.
	There is great peace in surrendering the vanity and surrendering the ego.
	Oh, yeah. And saying, I am now of service to the world.
	I am now of service to philosophy.
	I am a monk. In service of the greatest god the world could ever know.
	And there's great peace in that.
	It takes a lot of uncertainty and doubt out of your mind.
	You become like Joan of Arc, you know?
	Like, I'm gonna win. This is my gig now.
	And once you surrender that, then the act of being in service to a greater cause It gives you a strange sense of identity that is almost impervious to harm.
	Yeah. And that's a very, very funny thing.
	I mean, you know, you can read the comments under my videos and a number of ridiculous things that people say.
	Oh. And see, the funny thing is that I know they're trying to get me to stop what I'm doing, but they fundamentally misunderstand what's going on here.
	What's going on is that I'm in service of philosophy.
	And the idea that somebody says mean things to me and that puts me out of service of philosophy is ridiculous.
	It's like what you were saying with Lauren Southern.
	You know, it's like these people who say, oh, well, you associated with so-and-so two years ago and therefore that makes you terrible.
	It's like, well, no, it's not who I associate with.
	It's not even what I think.
	It's how I think and how I get to the people I associate with.
	That's the important thing. Well, here's what I would say to people who think that mean words are going to stop us.
	Look, if you have a winning lottery ticket in your hand that's worth $10 million tax-free, and you are walking to the office to pick up your $10 million tax-free check, and someone on the sidewalk says, you got a stupid haircut, man.
	Are you going to sit there and say, well, I'm going home then.
	I'm not going to go cash in this check.
	That's it. Because someone thinks I have a dumb haircut.
	Or, that's bad posture, man.
	Or, you got a pimple.
	Or, you're funny looking.
	It's like, you're so happy to go cash in this check, right?
	Probably won't do you any good, but let's just use that as a commonplace analogy.
	And when people say mean things, and you're on your way to pick up the $10 million check, The degree to which you don't care can scarcely be overrepresented.
	I'm going to go pick up my $10 million tax-free check.
	Your words are almost funny.
	Because you're going to some dinky-dumb job, and I am rich.
	And they don't understand.
	It's a completely different level at which people operate.
	I did this, I've just published today this video of me having a debate with a pretty slimy guy about the drug war.
	People are like, you can see the point at which Steph loses his cool and loses the debate.
	It's funny because people will say stuff like, Steph, I'm a big fan, but I just feel like you were uncertain and on shaky ground in this debate.
	It's like, there's not a feeling.
	That's a judgment masquerading as a feeling, and you're calling it a feeling so that you don't have to actually make an argument, and thus if I reject it, you can say, hey man, you're rejecting my feelings.
	It's like, that's not a feeling, that's a judgment.
	Mad, sad, bad, glad, you know, these are feelings.
	You seem frightened by this information is not a feeling, that is a judgment, and you're cowardly hiding behind the womanly skirts of feelings so you don't have to make an argument and hoping that people won't notice.
	It is so fundamentally inconsequential to what I'm about, I wish people would stop doing it, not because it bothers me, but because they're so wasting their time.
	I am in service to philosophy!
	I am in service to the truth!
	And petty little squabbly words are absolutely irrelevant.
	Absolutely irrelevant. And I invite people to stop doing it because they're wasting their time and they need to of course elevate their game.
	Find something to be in service of.
	It doesn't have to be what you or I are in service to, but find something to be in service to.
	You gain a strength. It's not about you anymore.
	It's not about your ego.
	It's not about what you would like every day.
	It's about what is right and what is good, what leaves a mark, what elevates the discourse on the planet.
	That's what it's about.
	And the petty little haters and claws and shredders and little dash-and-heel-yapping snippers, I mean, just elevate your game.
	Go find something great. Go find something powerful to motivate you.
	Go find something larger than your life, your petty little matchbox life.
	Go find something big.
	Go find something elevated.
	Go find something powerful.
	Because you don't show up on the radar of people who know what the fuck they're doing with their lives.
	You're like a dust particle and you're saying, hey, do I show up on radar?
	No, you don't.
	You don't. You need to become big enough to even be noticed by people with a clear purpose.
	Be in opposition. Be big.
	Be grand. Be something.
	Just don't be yappy.
	That is an insult to the improbable aggregation of star vomit that makes us all get up, walk around, think, argue, and debate.
	Be elevated. Be larger than littleness.
	Because if you understood How little what you do means to people with a purpose?
	If you could see what we see, It would blow your mind.
	Well, hopefully it would elevate your mind.
	The inconsequentiality of what you're up to is so terrifying.
	And I think deep down people know that.
	But, you know, it helps to say it.
	The inconsequentiality of what you're up to, this yappy little snippy bullshit nonsense snarkyments.
	Oh, I just love it the way that Steph...
	Like, it's not an argument.
	Hey, make a good argument. Fantastic.
	I'd love to listen. But this petty little squeezing out girly resentment like it's the last scrap and atom at the bottom of a toothpaste tube, it's so sad.
	So maybe people who are in it for the ego get pushed back or broken or stopped by ego attacks.
	But when you're not in it for the ego, when you're part of a larger purpose, when you're doing what philosophy damn well needs you to do, you're aiming at entirely the wrong thing when you aim at the ego of somebody involved in a higher purpose.
	I think that's it.
	I'm just simply scared of the chaos that it will plunge me into by not going, say, to university and getting a degree and playing that game for a while.
	It needs to be something self-generated, as you say, subjugated to the needs of others as well, in the sense that you have responsibility.
	Simply by putting off that, by going to university or whatever and get a degree, you're really not living up to that, to adopting responsibility and Actually going and doing something meaningful in the world.
	Yeah, because if you're into how you look and somebody says, you look funny, then you're going to be stopped.
	If you're into being stylish and somebody says, I hate your outfit, then that's against what it is that you're about.
	And that will stop you. That will stall you.
	That will hiccup you and interrupt you.
	But if you think that you are bringing medicine to desperately ill people and people say...
	Your outfit looks funny.
	You understand, like, it's completely meaningless because you're trying to get medicine to desperately sick people to save their lives, and the fact that somebody thinks that your outfit looks funny, it's so completely irrelevant to anything that you're trying to do.
	It's hard to explain just how tiny and inconsequential and ridiculous it is.
	And dissociated from any sense of, really, priority.
	To be like that is to be It's alien.
	It's very very strange.
	And that's the power that you get.
	When you don't make it about yourself, you can't be stopped.
	When you don't make it about yourself, you can't be stopped.
	And that is the power that you gain in return for surrendering vanity and surrendering ego.
	You gain the power of unstoppability.
	And that is a consummation devoutly to be wished.
	Your metaphor of how you first got into philosophy, it's pulling you up from the depths, being hooked and dragged up almost against your will.
	That image struck me.
	Again, you need to be doing something that pulls you towards meaning and responsibility.
	Subjugating yourself to something larger.
	There is a great line.
	Sorry to interrupt. There's a great little exchange in James Joyce's only decent book, in my opinion, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.
	And I'm going off memory here, and it's been a long time since I've read it, probably more than 30 years.
	But there is a terrifying description of hell in the book.
	But in it, one of the students in this school is saying to another student, did it ever cross your mind that Jesus might have, in fact, been a bad man, might have been an evil person?
	And the other kid says, well, the first person that question occurred to was Jesus himself.
	Yeah. Like you think you're being surprising and original, but the very person you're talking about.
	So when people say, well, Steph, you could be wrong.
	It's like, you know, that has occurred to me for 30 plus years.
	And I've really, really wrestled with that and really, really tried to deal with that.
	And so the idea that people are going to sit there and say, well, they're going to try and throw their uncertainty, like fear, uncertainty and doubt bombs or concern troll me.
	It's like, I've been concern trolling myself for 30 plus years.
	You think you've got anything to add to the conversation?
	Maybe you do, but you better be pretty alert.
	Because if it's something I missed, it better be pretty obscure.
	And so when you've wrestled with these kinds of issues, and in particular, when you have decided to submerge your ego like a salmon into a swift current saying, I'm just trying to get up the waterfall.
	It's worth surrendering your ego to a higher purpose simply to gain the invulnerability to petty criticism because...
	It stops so many. It's so outside the box of anything that you're doing.
	All right, listen, I'm going to move on to the next caller.
	I hope that helps. And please, please let us know what you decide and what you do.
	And of course, if you do decide to get into this crazy philosophy game, please let us know and I will do what I can to help drive some traffic your way because it's not like we're overflowing with allies in this particular battle.
	So please let us know what goes on.
	Well, thank you so much, Steph.
	You're someone who has really, really genuinely changed my life.
	I really want to thank you.
	You are very kind and I really, really appreciate the conversation.
	Thank you and goodbye.
	Alright, well up next we have Brian.
	Brian wrote in and said, That's from Brian.
	Brian. Yes.
	My goodness. Yes, there's quite a lot going on over here, and so I am very curious to see what type of input that you can give me.
	Not really, I guess, direction, because from the previous conversation, it sounds like you've thrown upon that.
	But I'm just curious, because I've seen where there's been situations with my own family where, not me specifically, but cousins and things like that, where they've grown...
	Up in these broken homes, and then they've ended up just atrocious human beings.
	And I just want to try and, I guess, maybe break that cycle, but I'm not really sure how to go about doing that, if that makes sense.
	Sure, sure. Now, do you mind if I delve into a little backstory here?
	Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
	How did you meet this woman?
	What was attractive to you about her?
	I really liked that she was really funny, and we just kind of connected...
	In the aspect that life seemed like it wasn't such a big deal when I was with her.
	It was kind of one of my first real relationships that actually meant something and kind of went somewhere.
	The other ones were just one or two months and then on to the next one or whatever.
	But this one seemed different.
	It just seemed like we had a lot in common and a lot Yeah.
	Right. And how long after you met her did you find out that she had two children with two different men and was a single mom?
	I knew that right away.
	Yeah, I knew that going into it.
	I actually, we were set up through a blind date, so I knew more about her than she knew about me.
	And why did you want to go out with a woman who had...
	You manifested such terrible judgment in the past.
	Yeah. I kind of put that to the side where it didn't really bother me.
	But I guess I didn't really see it from a different perspective that, hey, she might do the same thing to me.
	Well, no, no, but why do you want to pour your resources into raising another man's children?
	Right, yeah. Or other men's children.
	Other men's children, yeah.
	I guess I didn't really see it that way.
	It was more just like, You know, this was a part of who she was.
	Wait, this was a part of who she was?
	It's not her fucking spleen, man.
	These are two children she chose to have with irresponsible fathers.
	Right, yeah. I don't know.
	Yeah, I guess it was just one of those where...
	You know, she...
	Yeah, I mean, because she had these kids, the first kid when she was 16, and that relationship didn't last very long.
	And then the next child, it was a couple years later, and then she was about to marry him, but then, you know, backstory, blah, blah, blah, stuff happened.
	Wait, no, see, the blah, blah, blah, that's the kind of stuff you don't want to skip over as a whole, right?
	Mm-hmm. Well, it was more like he cheated on her, you know, Relationship was supposed to, you know, they were engaged, about to be married, and then ipso facto, because he cheated on her, then they didn't get married.
	And so it just kind of seemed like all situational.
	Oh, well, if this doesn't happen to me, then we'll be fine, I guess.
	Something like that. And how was she surviving?
	Well, she was at her parents' house, but I... Figure that she was a responsible adult because she had two jobs that she was holding down as well.
	So she could have lived on her own, but she chose not to because the parents' house was more convenient.
	So she had two jobs.
	So who was taking care of her kids?
	Right. So when she would go do the second job, it would be like either her mother or the grandparents who also lived really close.
	So they were able to accommodate...
	Wait, her mother or the grandparents?
	What do you mean? Oh, she's young enough to the great-grandparents of hers?
	Yes, yes, yeah.
	Okay, so the women who raised this woman to have two children by two different men and now in fact four children by four different men, the grandparents who raised this woman are now also in charge of raising the next generation because they did just such a great job with the last one.
	Right, yes. All right.
	Were you a virgin when you met this woman?
	I was not, no. And how pretty is she?
	She's very pretty. Go on.
	One to ten, what do we got? Definitely, I'd say probably a nine.
	A nine after two kids, right?
	Because tens don't exist. And where would you rate yourself on the attractiveness scale?
	Well, probably like a six.
	Right. You know, it's interesting.
	It's a six. Gets an eight, a nine, you said.
	So two kids adds up to a three-point difference, right?
	Maybe two kids by two different dads adds up to a three-point difference.
	Helps you to close that gap, right?
	Absolutely, yeah. And did she have any virtues that you found admirable that you wanted to get together with her?
	Well, like I said, she did have the two children, but she seemed like she was doing a pretty good job raising them.
	No, no, no. You said she had two jobs.
	Hang on, what do you mean? Well, it wasn't like consistent jobs.
	So there would be one job where she would do five days a week, and then the other job she would do the other two days.
	But then that other job wasn't like every single weekend she'd be working it.
	So it was more like when she could or when she wanted to get some extra money, then she would work the second job.
	So she wasn't really raising her kids because she was out working one and a half jobs, right?
	Right, yeah. So let's throw out the great mom thing.
	Plus a great mom chooses someone as a father who's going to stick around, right?
	One would assume.
	No, a great, that's not an assumption.
	Like a great mom chooses a father who's going to stick around.
	Right. So she's not a great mom.
	Okay. Right?
	And now, this is going to be the third father who's gone, and Lord knows what's going to happen with the next one, but I think we can pretty much guess, right?
	Right. So she's going to have four children with no fathers.
	So spare me on the great mom crap, okay?
	Okay. So what else?
	She's pretty. What else?
	Well, I mean, when you put it that way, I guess that's all she's got going for her.
	So you got dicknapped?
	Sure. Right?
	Yeah. You just wanted a pretty hole to stick your junk in, right?
	Yeah. No, I mean, I'm not trying to be harsh, but I mean, tell me what else.
	I mean, this is not a responsible person, right?
	Right. Yeah.
	I mean, she's a terrible person.
	Because now she cheated on you.
	Right. I'm going to have to ask the obvious question.
	I hope you don't mind. What makes you think that the child you call your son is yours?
	You know what they say. It's mama's baby and daddy's maybe.
	Well, the child looks identical to the daddy.
	Oh, to you? Yeah.
	Oh, yeah. It's like my twin.
	Wait, a nine made a six?
	A nine? What? Well, she's a nine, right?
	But she made a six. Right. Yeah.
	So she made another six.
	Right. Now you are laughing about this stuff a little bit, which I'm a little confused about.
	Is it just nerves? Yeah, more than likely.
	Just because I haven't really openly talked about any of this stuff to anybody.
	And now I'm on a show doing so.
	Now... What would you look back, if you could look back, what would the warning signs be that would be of concern to you?
	Other than the ones you've already told me.
	Well, she definitely had some depression going on.
	And anxiety. And how did they show up?
	Well, they showed up through she ended up going to the hospital because she has panic attacks.
	She has panic attacks?
	Yes. All right.
	And how did the depression show up?
	Well, she's tried to end it all several times in the past.
	She's been suicidal?
	Yes. Dude.
	What are you doing?
	What are you doing?
	Come on. No, I mean, I get it now.
	Like, I totally understand. But what were you thinking at the time?
	Were you like, Captain Saber, oh, I could just ride in and...
	I guess, yeah, I mean...
	With my magic penis?
	I just thought that, I guess, I could save for...
	I could... White Knight Syndrome or something.
	Okay, so who taught you that you had to be of service to women?
	And who taught you to save women?
	I guess it would be my mom.
	Because my dad wasn't really around when I was growing up.
	I mean, he was, but he'd be on his business trips and stuff, so my mom kind of raised me.
	And did your mom know about this woman before you married her, like her history, her circumstances?
	No. She kind of did, but I left her in the dark on that.
	And we went through a whole debacle, too, where she didn't show up to my wedding.
	And we did it kind of fast, so that was another warning sign, too.
	How long were you going out before you got married?
	Nine months. How long were you going out before you got engaged?
	Seven. And did she really want to get married?
	She did. I mean, she acted like she did.
	She told me she did. Do you make good money?
	No. So, what was your appeal to her?
	It might have been just, I guess, a loneliness type of thing where I was showing her attention.
	Was she passionate for you?
	I mean, I felt like she was, but I guess I don't know.
	And then she would never talk to me or communicate anything to me.
	It's always like I was talking to a brick wall.
	Wait, wait, what do you mean? Where we would just live our daily lives and then she would explode at me about something that wouldn't go right.
	I'd always... Cook, clean, do dishes, laundry, all that stuff.
	And then she would never help me out with it.
	And I would ask her repeatedly to do so.
	And then she would just blow up and start, you know, and she'd never have a fight with me just talking.
	She'd always have to do it through text message.
	So she's lazy, dissociated, detached.
	Yeah. Was she still working the job and a half?
	No, she no quitting in the one.
	But it's because I had my salary and her salary.
	So she married you so that she could quit her job.
	And you ended up doing most of the housework while working a full-time job to support you both.
	Is that right? Right.
	Christ almighty. So then you're out there making the money to provide for this lazy person.
	Mm-hmm. And her two kids and your child.
	And then at a time when you're out there trying to make the money to support her children and her and your together child, she then decides to fuck another guy.
	That's it. Do you know the guy?
	I do. Did the guy know that she's a married woman?
	Yes, because he was also married.
	Have you had any conversations with him about this?
	I've had a couple. And how's that gone?
	And it was more of a screaming match.
	Not really a conversation.
	And did she not?
	Did neither of them decide to bother with birth control while they're having their...
	No. Absolutely not.
	Is she stupid?
	I'm getting to that point.
	No, I mean, seriously. I mean, this is just...
	Is it just stupid?
	Like, she's just low IQ? She's just kind of dumb?
	I just don't understand it. I don't get it.
	I'm sorry? I said, it's just mind-boggling to me.
	I don't understand it. I don't get it.
	No, but is she dumb?
	My vote is yes.
	Right. And how long after the first blind date, Brian, was it before you had sex with her?
	Two months. Really?
	Really. Because I went...
	I had certain standards and certain things that I was looking for and I thought I found them in her and I knew at that point then, okay, this might be a person that I want to be with.
	You had standards? Yeah, I guess they weren't very high.
	Dude, you know that you've been talking to me already for 10 minutes and now you're telling me you had standards?
	Right. What were these standards?
	She's got to be a nine!
	I don't care if she's a train wreck, as long as she's a pretty train wreck.
	A pretty train wreck.
	So what were these standards? I'm just curious.
	Well, I mean, I know that you're not a Christian, but I was looking for somebody who was a Christian.
	And did you find that she, who had two children out of wedlock, was a good Christian?
	No.
	No.
	Okay, so let's drop the Christian thing.
	What else? I don't know.
	I don't know. So no real standards.
	Yeah, I guess, yeah.
	Well, no, don't guess, because I guess sounds like you're passive-aggressively telling me I'm wrong without telling me.
	If I'm wrong, I'm wrong. I'm happy to hear the standards.
	Right. No, I mean, you're right.
	It's just truth hurts when you say it.
	Yeah. Well, listen, I mean, I don't want you to do it again, and I don't want any of my other listeners to get that dick trapped in a crazy lobster trap.
	And did you have any indication, Brian, that she was waving the badge in front of other guys while you were out there working?
	No, I didn't.
	Nautically. Were you still having regular sex with her while she was having this affair or whatever it was?
	No. Well, that's what she told me anyway, so...
	No what? Everything else she told me was a lie, so, I mean, why wouldn't that be a lie?
	Wait, sorry, I missed...
	What was the lie? If she was actually sleeping with this guy before, you know, we decided...
	Oh, no, I don't care what she says.
	I just assume she's, you know, lying when she's breathing.
	But what I'm curious about is, were you still having sex with her when she was having this affair?
	Or had your sex life with her dried up because she was getting strange salami on the side?
	I think it was dried up because it's strange salami.
	Right. Right.
	Right. And what would you like to say if you could send a bottle back in time, Brian, to yourself from about two years ago or so, two and a half years ago?
	See, that's hard though, because of course I want to say, don't fucking do it, right?
	But at the same time, I got a child out of it.
	But that's not the only child and the only way you could get a child, right?
	She's not the only woman in possession of eggs on the planet.
	No, I understand that, but I love this child.
	He's mine, and what's mine is mine.
	I understand where you're coming from.
	I totally get that. I'm not saying you shouldn't love your child.
	I'm just saying that you would have loved your child if you'd had your child with a non-insane, lazy, skanky bride.
	Right. Who appears to be riding a kind of pogo stick throughout the neighborhood, right?
	This is the woman you chose to be the mother of your child, right?
	Right. And she's terrible.
	And I chose horribly.
	Yeah.
	And now I'm stuck with her for the next 17 years.
	And how did you find out about the affair?
	Was it an affair or just like a one night stand?
	I think it was a one night stand, but turned into affair, I guess, because we're still legally married.
	And are they still having this affair?
	I'm sure. I don't really ask.
	Right. And what is the status or situation of the family in the marriage at the moment?
	Going through the legal process of divorce.
	No, no, sorry. I'm really phrased that badly.
	I apologize, Brian, but...
	Sorry. What was the process?
	How did you find out?
	Did she just tell you I'm pregnant?
	Yeah. And did she tell you that she was pregnant because you hadn't been having sex?
	So it couldn't be yours?
	Right. Yeah. She figured at some point in time, well, I'm trying to remember the exact moment that she told me, but I'm pretty sure it was between her throwing up in the toilet from morning sickness.
	I'm like, why are you throwing up?
	I've been throwing up for a week. Yeah, it gets a little problematic to blame food poisoning at that point, right?
	Right. And what happened when she told you and what happened more immediately as a result of her telling you?
	Well, she told me and I kept a level head about it where I didn't freak out at her even though I wanted to, but I wanted to I guess that adjust everything that was given to me.
	Because that's not who I thought she was, even though clearly that's exactly who she was.
	And, you know, after taking that all in and just figuring out what she was It was more...
	I'm done with you.
	Now I need to focus on my kid.
	Because... He's the most important thing to me right now.
	And that's why I wrote into you as well.
	It's just...
	How do I not mess him up?
	I guess. Have you talked to a lawyer about any of this?
	What's that, I'm sorry? Have you talked to a lawyer about any of this?
	I have, yeah. And the current state that I'm in, regardless of the situation, they don't want to split up families.
	It's at best I get 50-50.
	So you get 50-50 with all three kids?
	No, it's just the one that's legally mine.
	I guess. Well, I guess they're all legally mine, but...
	What do you mean you guess? Are you on the hook for the other two kids now that you married them up?
	No. Uh-uh. No, because the other dads didn't pay child support still.
	All right. They didn't give up their legal rights, so I never adopted them.
	And are you going to be on the hook for the child conceived in the marriage or not?
	If we don't get divorced before the child's born, I won't have to.
	And you are going to get divorced before the child is born, right?
	Oh, absolutely. Yeah. And what's her attitude in all of this?
	How is she feeling? Or is she talking to you at all?
	Or did she say sorry?
	I mean, how did this play out?
	It's very minimal.
	It's basically all of our communication is for our child.
	Do you think she's going to try and make it work with the new sucker guy?
	Guy? I mean, we'll see.
	Only time will tell that, but the track record states no.
	Well, he's married, right? So he'd have to get divorced too.
	Well, he is, yeah.
	Oh, he is divorced? He's getting divorced.
	He's getting divorced. Right.
	And if he tries to make a go of it with your wife, then your child is going to be half-raised by this douchebag, right?
	Right. Right, correct.
	Who banged the mother of your child when he was married and she was married, so there's going to be that influence.
	Plus, of course, has she admitted faults at least?
	Did she say it was a bad thing that I did?
	Yep. Yeah, absolutely.
	Did she try and save the marriage at all?
	No, and I did, but she just was uncooperative about everything, so she ended up calling it quits before we even made it to counseling.
	Right.
	Yep.
	What do you think she's going to say, or what do you think she does say to your child about why daddy's not around?
	.
	Thank you.
	Well, he's a year and a half, so I don't think we've gotten to that point yet.
	I mean, she could talk to him still, but he's not going to When he gets older and he says, why did you and mommy split up, what are you going to say?
	I mean, I know it's early days, but...
	Right, right, right. Okay.
	Well, my hope is that she doesn't trash me.
	Just talks utter crap about me.
	But I don't know.
	I can't control her, so...
	Obviously. Because if I did, she wouldn't have cheated on me.
	Right. I'm doing my best not to root for Sharia law these days, man.
	I'm really doing my best. I'm doing my best, but I'm having a bit of a tough time, I'll tell you that right now.
	You and me, we gotta vote.
	Two votes. So this is, I mean, I don't have to tell you this, I'm just saying this for the benefit of the audience.
	This is a utterly disastrous and preventable fuck-up, right?
	Right. I mean, this was about the worst mom you could choose for your kid, right?
	Right. And now you're in a situation where you're going to kind of have to lie.
	Well, no, maybe not.
	Maybe not, because as your kid gets...
	Is son or daughter? Son.
	Son. So as your son gets older, he's going to notice that there ain't a lot of family resemblance, right?
	Right. Right.
	So your son is going to say, wow, I really don't look like my siblings.
	He'll say, well, they're all half siblings.
	Well, why? Because of the four kids in the family, there are four different fathers.
	Are the first two dads involved at all?
	No. They just pay and they don't.
	Yeah, yeah. That's great.
	Yeah, one lives in a totally different state.
	The other one lives right across the river and doesn't even make the trip.
	Well, who knows what happened with the dads and this paragon of female virtue.
	Right. Right.
	I do know 100% that I don't want to do this again.
	Do what again? This whole finding the worst mother that I possibly can.
	Oh, yeah. No, I get that. Yeah. I get that.
	So, I mean, if anything, life lessons, right?
	Just learn the really hard way.
	Oh, yeah. No, listen, I mean, in terms of what you should do, like a time machine and a literal ball-peen hammer would be the only thing I would suggest.
	Okay, well, when I find those two things...
	I mean, for you, not for her.
	For you. Right. Hit yourself squarely between the nads and avert yourself from the eyes of this fresh-faced Medusa of whoriness.
	Yes. Yes. So, this is going to be very tough.
	Is there any chance, do you think, that she might give up custody of this child?
	No. Why is that?
	Because we've already discussed that.
	Right. And I guess sleeping with everything that might have half a ball or more doesn't qualify her as an unfit mother, right?
	Right. So, this is going to be tough.
	This is what I would do if I were in your situation, and I didn't have the aforementioned time machine a ball peen hammer to hit myself in the nads with, is what your son is going to desperately need, Brian, is a good role model.
	And right now, that ain't you.
	Now, it could be you, but what you're going to need to do is get your shit straight and go and find a good woman, get married, and have a family so that he can see what the hell that looks like because he ain't going to get it from mom.
	So you've got to get your shit together.
	You've got to figure out what your values are.
	You've got to stick to them.
	You've got to not let your future get quicksanded by a pretty face.
	You have to get a quality woman.
	You have to try and lock her down, which is going to be tough, given that you've got the unbreakable cord to crazy stuck to you.
	The umbilical cord to crazy is stuck to you through this kid.
	So you don't look that great to a quality woman, right?
	Right. Hey, want to get on board?
	This was my last wife, so you have really got to make up for all of this, right?
	Mm-hmm. So you have got a...
	I don't know if it's therapy or some sort of self...
	You've got to figure out how you ended up with this mess.
	You've got to figure out how your friends...
	Did anyone try and talk you out of this?
	No, not really. Why do you think?
	I mean, this is more red flags than a Chinese communist parade?
	You know, it might be just...
	They were like, oh, he's happy.
	We'll just leave that alone.
	Who set you up on the blind date?
	It was my friend.
	His wife worked together with her.
	Oh, I see.
	Female in-group preference.
	Find someone to take care of the tart.
	Yeah, yeah, yeah. The woman says, who's the sucker who can take on this basket case?
	Who can we attach this proboscis to to suck dry from resources because she needs someone?
	And so I bet you, your wife and your friend's wife, she went to your friend's wife and said, I need a man.
	And what does that mean? I need ka-ching!
	We'll blow for dollars.
	I need a ka-ching! Do you know any suckers out there who I can fool for long enough and drug with my sexuality and pretty face who I can fool for long enough that I can Quit working so that he pays so that I can bang some strange salami on the side.
	Is this guy still your friend?
	No. Was it because of this or something else?
	No, it's something totally unrelated.
	I can't imagine it would be more important than this, though.
	Right. What do you want to say?
	I guarantee you there are thousands of young men who will listen to this, maybe tens of thousands, maybe even hundreds of thousands, Brian.
	Of young men who are going to listen to this and who are going to be terrified.
	Now, what do you want to say or what would you say to them so that they don't end up in this situation?
	What I would do is make sure you know who the hell you're marrying.
	But you do know...
	Make sure. No, you did know.
	Did I make sure, though? No, you did know.
	And I'm sorry, you started on the advice thing, but that's not valid, because you're trying to indicate you didn't know.
	You did know. Two kids by two different men.
	I did know. So you did know who you were married.
	Then would you be to take it to...
	To listen to your friends and other people around you who love you, because they're going to look out for the best interests of you.
	But you said that your friends didn't try and talk you out of it.
	Well, I didn't ask too many of them.
	Did any of your friends try to talk you out of it?
	Yeah, I mean, no, because I really didn't have any.
	You know, I had like one or two, but those were the people that set me up on this thing in the first place.
	And what about your family? You said that your mom didn't even come to the wedding or whatever, right?
	There was this drama about that. Right. She's states away.
	She's far away, so...
	Because here's the thing, Brian.
	Anybody who let this...
	I wouldn't say happen to you because you chose, but anyone who let this occur without strenuous objections doesn't love you or has no capacity to determine a quality person from a non-quality person, which means that they're incapable of love.
	It's like asking a blind man for his opinion on a piece of art.
	He can't be an art critic. So, what were the warning signs that you chose to ignore?
	And I'm saying this not because I want to torture you with regret, but because if you can clearly see them, you can choose better.
	But if you can't, you won't be able to.
	Right. Right.
	I mean, warning signs right off the bat were two kids, two different dads.
	Immediately. And then you gotta think, well, what were the reasons why they're not together with her?
	Why couldn't they stand her enough to stay?
	Right. And why are they not involved?
	Right, that's always bothered me.
	me.
	I never got that.
	Maybe this is it.
	You know, trip on a dick once, Well, okay, bad enough.
	Trip on a dick twice? But now we're up to four.
	Starting to look like a little more than coincidence.
	Right. So why is she choosing such terrible fathers?
	Did she, when you talked to her about this, what was her attitude about her history?
	Did she say, I've done these terrible things, these bad things have occurred, I've been an irresponsible mom, or was it like, you know, well, it just didn't work out?
	It was pretty much that. Just, you know, it just didn't work out.
	We went our separate ways.
	Yeah. Sometimes you just drift apart, right?
	Yeah, so zero learning curve for disasters like this.
	I mean, the fact that somebody has disasters in their past does not mean that they can't be a good partner, but they really have to have processed the crap out of it, right?
	And be able to lead you for a long weekend on all the reasons why and how things changed and what they've learned and all that, right?
	Also, She's pretty.
	Did she work out? No.
	So just, like, kind of naturally, was she slender or no?
	Yeah, yeah. Right.
	Did she put care and effort into her appearance?
	Yeah. She had time for that.
	No time to find a good man or spend a lot of time with her kids, but she had time for the makeup and the hair.
	Right. A pretty face.
	Is a danger. Look, it doesn't mean that everyone who's pretty is bad.
	I'm not trying to say that at all.
	Right. But it is a warning flag because it is a lot of power to give someone.
	You know what it's like? It's like if If a really good businessman gives his business empire to his son, it doesn't mean that the son is not a good businessman, but the son didn't earn it.
	And just being pretty, you don't earn that.
	It's just there.
	Right. It's just there.
	And that kind of power corrupts a lot of people.
	You see, pretty is not like intelligence, to just readjust the analogy I just gave, right?
	So the really smart businessman, he's most likely to have a smart son.
	He probably won't be as smart as he is, but he's likely to have a smart son.
	But pretty doesn't correspond to IQ. Facial evenness can have some indication of good genes, which may have some relationship, but in general, it's an unearned power.
	And it seems to me that what she did when you got married, Brian, was she said, well, I'm pretty and you're having sex with me so I don't have to do anything else.
	Right. Right.
	You bring a paycheck.
	You bring housework.
	You bring doing the laundry, doing the dishes.
	You bring all of the taking care of my kids.
	I bring vagina.
	That is a terrible deal.
	Pretty...
	Pretty should buy you nothing other than maybe a first date.
	Maybe. But if after that the woman seems to be relying on her looks or doesn't bring much to the table other than her looks, that is a huge red flag.
	And dating a woman just because she's pretty is like having a friend just because he's rich and buys you shit.
	It's a terrible basis for a relationship.
	And again, doesn't mean all pretty people are bad.
	But you have to have a pretty strong soul and a pretty strong commitment to virtue to not be corrupted by the power of beauty.
	And I don't imagine there's a lot of nines floating around your world, right?
	Right. And I say this as a man who's made his fair share of mistakes, chasing the balloon of prettiness off the cliff of dysfunction.
	I'm just about to catch it.
	Bounce, crash, bounce, crash.
	If only you fell on something other than your dick.
	So, you got to show this kid, as he gets older, something different than what he's going to see with his mom.
	His mom's not going to change. You're calling into this show, and I know that people are going to be ragging on you, but you're calling in.
	Good for you. Good for you.
	That's not an easy thing to do, and I admire you for doing it.
	It's a brave thing to do.
	So, you got to show your son something better.
	Now, maybe it's MGTOW for you, I don't know, but if you can find a way to get a quality woman Then you can show or mirror to your son what a functional relationship looks like, because he's not going to get it from his mom.
	His mom's just going to pogo stick from penis to penis, right?
	Right. Until she hits the wall, in which case, well, she's going to get into social justice courses like everyone else and who's pretty.
	I'm going to get attention through a different way now that you don't care about my looks.
	Me too! So, yeah, I mean, I'm sorry about the divorce, but if she's not willing to change or improve, you're just setting yourself up for another disaster.
	Right. So I would say, yeah, try and find a good woman and recognize that she probably ain't going to be a nine given your circumstances and given that you're a six.
	So... Adjust your standards.
	You know, people got mad at me when I said to the Swedish woman, lower your standards.
	Okay, I can use the word adjust.
	That's fine. Adjust.
	Adjust your standards to a woman of quality rather than a woman of prettiness.
	Right. Because that's not, right?
	That's a weekend. That's not a lifetime.
	And that certainly isn't mother of your kid's material, right?
	Right. Does that help?
	It does. It does.
	It really does. It gives you something to shoot for, right?
	And don't live a loveless life just because you got pulled into the quicksand vagina of one tartan huff.
	Right. You know, you're a young man.
	You made the mistake that young men are prone to make, which I made myself, though not with quite as permanent a set of outcomes, but...
	Right. Forgive yourself, learn from it, find a quality woman, and approach her humbly as a man who is dragging the body of pretty dysfunction behind you.
	A hot mess, as it were.
	All right. All right?
	Well, I appreciate it.
	Thank you so much. Thanks, Brian. I appreciate your call.
	Thank you. Alright, well up next we have Joel.
	Joel wrote in and said, They probably got rich because of inherent privilege.
	They're wealthy because they inherited it.
	We should tax them more in order to fund the poor.
	In fact, this bubbling anger seems to have surfaced in a neo-Marxist argument which is creeping ever further into our culture and politics globally.
	How do we solve the argument of entitlement of the wealthy?
	Do the rich really deserve their wealth in all cases?
	How can we argue against the rob the rich to feed the poor is justified mantra?
	I've been hearing more and more from the government and my social circles.
	That's from Joel. Hey, Joel, how you doing?
	Hey, Stefan. How you doing?
	Hey, I'm good. I'm good.
	Well, so, I mean, there's two basic delusions about wealth.
	And number one is that there's a fixed amount of wealth in the world.
	And if you have more, it must be because I have less.
	That's sort of number one.
	And therefore, there's this injustice about it.
	And number two, which is kind of a corollary of the first one, is that everyone's equal.
	And if everyone's equal, then the only way someone can win so much or earn or have so much is because they're cheating.
	Right? So if everyone...
	Is equal in ability as a runner?
	Then how can someone run 10 times faster?
	Well, they have to be cheating.
	Obviously, right? Isn't that how they figure things out in the sports world?
	You know, a massive increase in an athlete's performance must be the result of some illicit substance, right?
	The idea that wealth is not distributed, but created.
	That is something that's hard for people to kind of fathom.
	Like if someone sits down...
	I just had dinner with a friend of mine who's a good musician.
	We were talking about this. So if someone writes a really great song that's original, it's their own, it's catchy, it's going to sell well.
	If somebody writes a really good song, have they stolen that song from anyone else?
	No. Of course not.
	They have created the song.
	And that is really important.
	If somebody writes a really good poem, really good story, somebody, whatever, right?
	Somebody comes up with a really great product idea.
	Have they stolen that from other people?
	No. Right?
	You took my music, man!
	You stole my tunage!
	Thief! Right? No, of course not.
	They've created something.
	And people will pay them for it.
	And the money goes to them because they created something.
	They didn't steal. The money is just a reflection of the creativity.
	When I wrote my books, did I steal the books from someone else?
	No. No, I didn't.
	So, when you create something, the money follows.
	It's the creation that is different.
	The money is merely a reflection of the originality of the creation of something.
	And so...
	When people say, well, this person is rich, a smart person says, they're rich because they provide value.
	It's not what they take.
	Idiots think that people are rich because they take stuff.
	No. People are rich because they provide value.
	Look, you go to Amazon.com, you order stuff, you're adding to Jeff Bezos' insane wealth.
	Like crazy, $100 billion or something like that, right?
	It's a lot of money. Now, are you being ripped off by Jeff Bezos and by Amazon?
	No. You get to save time, money, energy, gas, risk, danger, by shopping at home and having it delivered to your house.
	And you know it's going to be reliable, you know that the product's going to be quality, and that's where you go.
	He's not ripping you off, he's providing you value.
	So he has wealth because he's providing value.
	And the measure of wealth is the measure of the value you provide to the world.
	A musician ends up wealthy because the musician is creating a lot of happiness or rich emotional experiences in the world.
	The wealth is merely the shadow cast by his service to the world.
	And so what people do is they look at a big house.
	And they say, that guy has a big house.
	Where did it come from?
	It did not come from him stealing.
	It came from his generosity.
	It came from his creativity.
	It came from his service to the world.
	In a free market. I mean, I know there's tons of exceptions in the modern world, but that's the free market argument.
	I'm not talking about whether he donated to the Clinton Foundation or something like that.
	Now, our capacity...
	To provide or produce value to the world is not at all evenly distributed across the population.
	It's like singing voices. Singing voices and the quality of those voices are far...
	Let me just go to karaoke night, man.
	It's far from evenly distributed among the population.
	Now, if somebody has a great singing voice, do we say, oh man, they stole my singing voice.
	They selfishly...
	That's who they are.
	And the singer becomes wealthy.
	People pay a lot of money to go see, I think Elton John's doing a tour now, which Rod Stewart has roundly mocked, and people go see these Vegas shows with Britney Spears or Celine Dion and so on, and they pay huge amounts of money.
	Why? Because people love to hear that kind of quality singing or see that quality show.
	I mean, Celine Dion's a vastly better singer, of course, than Britney Spears, but Britney Spears is a great entertainer.
	Isn't it amazing? It just blows my mind.
	It just blows my mind.
	That a woman, when she was at the height of her attractiveness and fame and sexiness and all that kind of stuff, couldn't do anything better than Kevin Federline.
	It's like your history and your past.
	Isn't that kind of weird?
	You could have your pick, Prince Harry.
	You could have your pick, and this is who you're going with.
	It's a shame, but you can't escape the past unless you really fight to get out.
	So, how do we fight this?
	It's really tough.
	It's really, really tough.
	I mean, I just wanted to give some context about myself.
	So, I'm East Asian, actually.
	So, I grew up in an East Asian society.
	And over here, it's, you know, in the West, it's like you see a lot of resentment To the rich and you have all these welfare systems where you prop up people for making bad choices.
	In East Asia it's different because it's more of a laissez-faire kind of economy over here.
	So we don't do these things.
	So as a result you can see there's a lot of inequality in Asia.
	But for the most part when I was growing up when you saw a rich guy And my dad used to say this.
	He would say, look at a rich guy.
	What's he doing right?
	And what can we learn from him in order to, you know, climb up the ladder ourselves?
	But recently, even in East Asia, I'm pretty concerned because it seems that a lot of Asians are going over to the U.S. and they go to these liberal kind of universities and they pick up all these You know, socialist ideologies, and they're bringing it back over here.
	And these people are getting top spots in the government, and they're actually trying to implement policies that redistribute all the resources.
	Well sure. Yeah, but I mean, sorry to interrupt, but that's because the government is a kind of market that can be analyzed in the way that any market can.
	The market for government, originally it was to sell protection.
	But Japan, China, not really at risk of invasion or war.
	And crime rates, as you know, particularly in Japan, are so low the police have nothing to do.
	I mean, not like the way that the police in England have nothing to do other than to chase mean tweets and step over the twitching bodies of gasoline-soaked, half-burned to death, and raped British children!
	But they have very little to do in Japan.
	So the government... This is what happens when the government has created an environment of relative security, or if circumstances have created an environment of relative security, then what the government does is it says, well, we're running out of things to offer to people because we can't sell them protection anymore.
	We can't sell them security because they either armed themselves or they have guard dogs or they have, you know, there's technological advances in having...
	Home monitoring systems and alarms and tripwires and so on so crime goes down or whatever.
	Or people are just getting wealthier and so they don't need to steal as much.
	I know, I know, criminality often produces poverty, not the other way around.
	But when the government runs out of things to offer, then what does it do?
	Well, it tries to create another market for itself.
	So once it can't sell you security from violence, security from theft, once it can no longer sell you that, then what it does is it changes the market.
	So it is no longer selling you security from violence or theft, it is now selling you security from risk.
	Ah, now that is a very, very big difference.
	So the government doesn't want to shrink.
	The government doesn't want to get smaller.
	The government always wants to get bigger.
	And in a situation where nuclear war, like it's no accident that the Cold War and welfare spending coincided.
	The Cold War meant that the government could no longer protect you from risk.
	Yep. Right? Because the missiles were going to get through if they were going to get through.
	The world was going to blow up if it was going to blow up.
	The government couldn't protect you from risk.
	So once the government can't protect you from risk, what's it gonna do?
	Well now it's gonna, sorry, once the government can't protect you from danger, from violence, then it's gonna try and protect you from risk.
	And so they'd now offer you security, not from violence or theft, but from the vagaries and the risks of life itself, right?
	And that is the way that they try and keep the market running for the state.
	And it does. It creates an entire class of people who are dependent on the state, who vote for more and more governments.
	It divides people. And, you know, one of the unfortunate side effects, which won't happen in East Asia because East Asia is full of race realists.
	No, it's true. Am I wrong about that?
	No, you're not wrong.
	I mean, to be honest, when I look at the news that I see daily in Europe and from the States, I'm pretty shocked at what some of the white people are doing.
	Tell me a little more about that, because I've seen a couple of comments on the videos about that, but what is the perspective from East Asia when you look at what the hell is going on in Europe and other places around the world that whites are, quote, in charge of?
	I mean, just take the grooming gang scandal.
	If that happened in, say, China or Japan, The plane will be fueled on the tarmac.
	We're waiting to throw these people out, basically.
	I mean, you wouldn't have all these arguments about, you know, is it humane to send them back?
	Or is it, like, justified that, you know, that we're sending them back to where they came from?
	No. I mean, the first priority would be our people.
	And it's a very strong in-group preference.
	Yeah. Which I see, I don't know why, and it escapes me why people, or at least a segment of them, are choosing to throw down these in-group preferences.
	I mean, it's just a very natural thing.
	And in fact, it feels unnatural that you're not doing it.
	Right, right.
	Well, it is unnatural and it's, you know, in East Asia, of course, you have a ethnostate, you have a monoculture, right?
	Yeah. So, have you ever been called the racist in East Asia?
	So, okay, so I'm actually not, I'm actually from a pretty multicultural state, so I'm from Singapore.
	Ah, okay. Well, it's 78% Chinese.
	Population and I'm ethnically Chinese, but who else is there?
	So there are like Malays and Indians so Pretty much it used to be a British colony and people from you know all over came over to like make a living because it was a trading port and so we do have Yeah, we do have these different races around.
	I mean, I have a lot of Indian and Malay friends and I don't consider myself racist, but some of the things I said about how there are inherent racial differences between groups, I have been called a bigot before.
	Sometimes I feel like I'm paying a price for my views because even in Singapore the mantra is multiculturalism is our strength.
	It's the same thing over here as well.
	I actually live in Hong Kong now so there isn't that much of This kind of mantra being spread around because it's an ethnostate basically.
	Right, and have you ever been called a racist in Hong Kong?
	No, but I'll tell you what because I think a lot of people in Hong Kong come back from the States and Canada and they bring back all these, you know, leftist ideologies and I think Even in the media over here, there is a growing presence of these people.
	And they do try to promote these, you know, oh, we should treat our minorities better.
	We should give them more rights.
	Yeah, so it's not such a big problem in Hong Kong, but it's definitely growing.
	And it's spreading over from the West, I would say.
	Oh yeah, no, this is a virus.
	It's going to be tough to penetrate into East Asia for a variety of reasons we've mentioned or brushed against, but it has often struck me, more recently struck me a little bit more, how when there was supposed to be this big war against communism, particularly in the 1960s, starting under JFK and I guess ending under Nixon, the war in Vietnam.
	There's supposed to be this big war against creeping communism, you see.
	But the irony is, of course, a lot of people, a lot of young men, ended up being draft dodgers by going into universities.
	Because if you were in university, you generally weren't drafted.
	And so while the poor kids were out there supposedly fighting communism in Vietnam, The richer kids were being indoctrinated in communism in American universities.
	Good job fighting communism, everyone.
	You can go and get your head blown off fighting communism, or you can escape fighting communism by being indoctrinated in communism by going to an American university.
	Just... Terrible.
	And it is. It's a creeping virus.
	And, you know, it struck me that in the 1960s, particularly after the 1965 Immigration Act, which switched immigration from Europe to the Third World, and of course it was promised that it wasn't going to change American demographics and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
	Now 60 million people have been brought in from the Third World over the past 50 or 60 years.
	And at the same time, A scientist named Arthur Jensen was putting together information about racial differences, and he published his paper, I think, in 1969.
	And he was incredibly attacked by the leftists because, of course, if his paper had been accepted, the scientific data behind his paper on racial IQ differences had been accepted, it would have provided significant pushback against the immigration policies favored by the leftists for reasons of power and destabilization.
	And it is, of course, one of the great tragedies that that fight did not occur at the time.
	And he himself did a pretty good job.
	And he actually said something interesting when people said, you've been called a racist, what do you think?
	And he said, I've put a lot of thought into this, I've given this a lot of thought, and I've come to the conclusion that it's irrelevant.
	And he said that, of course, because the data is the data.
	And applying pejoratives to people who are honestly expressing The facts of data is ridiculous and terrible.
	So, yeah, it is a virus that is spreading and it is very, very important that if you're listening to this from East Asia, do not go our way.
	I mean, I'm personally pretty concerned because what I see this is after they finish with white men, they're going to come for Asian men.
	Because we're next on the scale of so-called privilege.
	Right. Well, actually, in white societies, you're higher in terms of actual facts, right?
	Because East Asians, you know, better educated, higher incomes, more professional degrees, and more valuable.
	You know, not a lot of East Asians going into art history.
	A lot of petroleum engineering, computer science, all that kind of stuff.
	And so East Asians in white societies are doing better Than the average white, on average.
	And so, in terms of rationality, then, you know, there would be greater privilege to Ashkenazi Jews, to East Asians, above whites.
	But that's not where the money is yet.
	Yeah, so it's eventually gonna hit us.
	So that's why I'm fighting against the tide, I would say.
	Yeah, and I have seen how, of course, the Chinese in particular expanding into places like Jamaica, expanding into places like Africa.
	And I think my experience has been that Chinese people are, I mean, data-driven, very factual, not into pseudoscience, and are very frank about racial differences.
	Particularly in intelligence and I don't think are going to be as easily fooled by this anti-scientific radical egalitarianism.
	And it is going to be interesting to see how that plays out.
	And the other thing that is also a great and interesting thing is that China did not have worldwide empires for the most part.
	Chinese empires and other East Asian empires were generally confined to East Asia.
	Whereas Europe had worldwide empires, which meant that the aftermath of those worldwide empires was generally some residual citizenship rights within European countries, which was the thin edge of the wedge that brought the Third World into Europe.
	And it's just another example of the price that people are paying for the exploitation and privileges of past oligarchies.
	I never understood that, to be honest.
	Why would you feel compelled to offer these people citizenship in your home countries, you know?
	I mean, what was the argument for that?
	I mean, now I know recently socialism is the argument.
	So they're saying, you know, everybody's equal.
	So no matter who comes in or who gets replaced, doesn't matter because everyone's the same.
	Yeah. So that's a socialist argument.
	If you don't like being replaced, By people from Somalia, it's because you're bigoted against Somalians, because Somalians are exactly like you.
	And therefore, it is anti-rational and prejudiced to not wish for there to be more Somalians in your country.
	Now, the irony of this, of course, is that Somalians are not on average like everyone else, in that Somalians vote overwhelmingly for the left.
	And that's why the left wants to bring them in.
	So the left knows for sure that Somalians are not like particularly white males.
	White males will vote for smaller governments.
	Somalis will vote for larger government.
	And so when they say, well, how could you possibly not want more Somalians in your country because they're just like everyone else?
	Well, the whole reason that the left wants to bring Somalians into the country is because they're not like everyone else.
	Yeah. Yeah.
	I hope it will be a lesson that is learned by the rest of the world.
	It's... It's going to be quite a lesson.
	You know, I mean, I don't believe this, but I believed...
	I hoped this for a long time they were completely wrong about all of this stuff.
	It was all going to work out.
	Just tickety-boo, hunky-dory.
	But given the increasing likelihood that this stuff is genetic...
	That it can't be fixed.
	Then, yeah, we are heading to a very, very tragic place in history.
	And it is interesting that it's one of the few times in history where one single error will be responsible for so much suffering.
	Like, normally it's a cluster of mistakes, a cluster of errors, but one simple error, which is that everyone's malleable, everyone's the same, there's no genetics of ethnic differences and so on.
	One simple error Will cause such staggering levels of suffering.
	I mean, that one simple error, ignoring, say, the basics of cousin marriage in the Middle East, widely rampant in the Middle East.
	Cousin marriage costing IQ points that are significant in a population.
	That simply ignoring one basic fact like that, issues which have been brought up by MPs in England in particular with the overuse of Pakistanis in British healthcare systems and so on, birth defects and so on, as a result of cousin marriage, this is not out of the bounds, it's what people talk about.
	And so just this one, not acknowledging the IQ problems that result from cousin marriage in the Middle East, And saying, this is something that's going to be a permanent part of this culture, at least for the, as far as we can see, foreseeable future. Well, that has contributed to the rape, as Tommy Robinson says, the rape and torture and sometimes murder of up to a million British girls.
	Fact which will not be acknowledged, one biological reality which will not be acknowledged, has resulted or contributed significantly to the rape, torture, and murder of up to a million British children.
	And yet, and yet, people will not speak of this.
	That's astonishing.
	Just, you know, nature doesn't care, you understand.
	You can close your eyes and say, no, boulder is coming towards me.
	The boulder will come whether you choose to acknowledge it or not.
	This willful opposition to basic reality, to science, to biology, to IQ testing.
	This basic willing it away will not work.
	You can imagine you've grown gills, you can tie a rock to your leg and you can jump into the Mariana Trench.
	It will not help you breathe underwater.
	This willful denial of reality is always the last gasp of a dying civilization, and it's why it becomes terminal.
	Sorry, that was a bit of a tangent, but I just wanted to make that point.
	Oh, no problem. I mean...
	It's interesting because I actually found this show because I used to work with this colleague who's an American guy and then we talk a lot about the conservative politics in the US. So I just got online and I was searching around and I stumbled upon your channel.
	I think I'm probably one of the, you know, probably a handful of East Asians listening to your show.
	But I think it's great work you do, Stefan.
	I mean, keep doing it, man.
	I think it's a beacon in the midst of a lot of fog being thrown around.
	Actually, you'd be surprised at how many East Asians listen to the show.
	They get a kind of frankness here that they can't often get.
	And I've got to tell you, if you're going to study English, I'm not a bad guy to listen to because I can be a little flowery from time to time.
	So that can work out.
	And this is the thing, too, with the multiculturalism thing that I just sort of want to squeeze in here, perhaps unjustly at the end here, which is I just want to ask all the people who just assume all of this is going to work.
	That you're going to get all these groups coming into the West, and they're going to magically give up on all of their in-group preferences, despite all data, to the contrary, and that there's absolutely no genetic basis whatsoever, and we know how to move the magic levers of IQ up and down, well, I guess up as we see fit and so on, despite the fact that it's been unable to be achieved for the last couple of thousand years.
	For all of this to work, we have to assume not only that there's 0% genetic influence on IQ differences between ethnicities, but also But also, we have to assume that even if there's zero genetic influence on IQ between ethnicities, we also have to assume that we know how to move them.
	If there's genetic influences on IQ, we can't change that.
	There's no social policy that makes East Asians taller than Danish people on average.
	We can't change that, right?
	There's no social policy that's going to give me the blurred leg reflexes of some East Asian doing an electronic dance contest that I can barely even comprehend, let alone follow.
	Right? So, I just want to ask people, even if there's only a 5% chance that it's genetics, or a 5% chance that we don't know how to change it, If it is genetic and or we don't know how to change it, endless disasters will ensue.
	That's my fundamental.
	Can you be so absolutely sure, despite all historical evidence, we've been trying to move IQ for at least 100 years with no real success.
	There's been the Flynn effect, but that doesn't really hit G, doesn't really hit the fundamental intelligence and processing speed.
	That's more acquired skills, reflexes, regards to video games and things like that.
	It's not G, much.
	So, that's my question.
	You'd have to be 100% certain there's no genetics and 100% certain that we can move the levers of IQ as we want to.
	There's no evidence for that whatsoever.
	The evidence is overwhelming that it's genetic.
	It's genetic. Your intelligence is 80% or more, 80% plus genetic by the time you're 18 years old.
	We can say, oh, there's no difference between ethnicities.
	If it is genetic, We're in serious trouble because it's not going to change much.
	So just to go back to my point about, you know, the entitlement of the rich, sorry.
	Sorry to go on a tangent.
	So the argument that I hear a lot is, you know, so the wealth is generated by, say, the previous generation, so the parents.
	And their children get to enjoy the benefits that their parents have brought about for them.
	So how do we actually justify that these children deserve to enjoy being rich as compared to, say, someone who was born into a poor family?
	So I guess that's the argument of privilege.
	If it's such a benefit to be rich, then the happiest people in the world must be lottery winners, right?
	Yeah. Have you ever studied what happens to people who win the lottery?
	No, normally they get broke after five years.
	It's a disaster. Not only are they broke, like marriages get destroyed, families break up, long-term relationships just destroyed.
	I went through this, I think about two years ago with my daughter, we went through, I don't know, like 20 case histories of people who'd won the lottery in it.
	Every single time, it's complete disaster.
	Now, I mean, there are a few people who can handle it and so on, but for the most part, it's complete disaster.
	And if you look at people who are wealthy, you look at people who are wealthy, a lot of times their lives are a complete mess.
	Complete disaster. Divorce, addictions, infidelities, Me Too moments, alcoholism, and their kids, how often do they do well?
	Seldom. Seldom.
	And the kids are in a way even worse off because they had all the privileges and they still fail.
	So they can't blame anything but themselves.
	Well, you could blame genetics once you understand regression to the mean.
	So the idea that...
	And look, I understand this. Listen, when I was a kid, I envied the richer kids like you wouldn't believe.
	I mean, I remember I wrote a play when I was in grade 12 and performed it with my theater troupe.
	And we did rehearsals at...
	One of the kids' houses.
	Oh my God, above, man.
	You wouldn't believe how big these houses were, like how big this house was.
	How many rooms, how beautifully furnished.
	Swimming pools, two.
	And I'm wandering around this place, like big TVs and video game cartridges all over the place, and I'm like, God, what I wouldn't do to live here.
	It didn't eat me up, like I didn't hate them, but I wanted it.
	I wanted it. Now how do you think those kids have done and how have I done?
	They weren't hungry.
	Yep. I was hungry.
	I felt a massive mismatch between my potential and my circumstances.
	I was hungry.
	And this is one of the big problems of having money as a parent.
	Lots of rich parents talk about this.
	How the hell do you teach the value of money to kids you can never once say to them, can't afford it.
	Can't afford it. You can't say that to, if you're wealthy, you can't say that to your kids.
	So how do you teach them the value of money?
	Hard to say. Watch David Foster's story about his kids.
	It's a mess. So the idea that, well, these kids are rich and that's unfair, see, that's environmental as well.
	If you want to see a rich family and you want to feel better, just visit the next two or three generations in a free market.
	Right? But the idea, and it's a fundamental misperception, which is they say the reason the kids are going to do well is they have all this opportunity.
	So then what they do is they say, well, we're going to take a whole bunch of money and we're going to pour it into schools and give a whole bunch of money.
	To people in the inner cities.
	To poor people.
	We're going to give them welfare. We're going to give Olympic-sized swimming pools and computer labs to their kids in schools.
	We're going to shower them with money, just like rich parents do.
	And do you know what happens? Nothing.
	It never changes. Nothing changes.
	Nothing changes.
	It doesn't change anything.
	It's this idea that somehow...
	The rich kids are going to do well just because their parents spend money on them.
	They can't find more than 7% to 9% variation for teaching.
	Quality of teaching, inspirational level.
	You always hear these stories of the stand-and-delivered teachers and, oh, you know, they came in and their kids just did fantastically.
	I think that teaching matters.
	I do. And I think parenting matters is the reason I try and teach the world.
	I think teaching matters. And the less intelligent you are, the more you need philosophy.
	But this idea that the rich kids are somehow privileged, oh, it seems so at the time.
	And at the time, you know, what do people want?
	They want to be beautiful.
	They want to be rich.
	And maybe famous.
	But really, they want to be rich and beautiful.
	Because we think that the rich and beautiful people have it made.
	Their life is so great.
	Everybody wants them. Everybody loves them.
	Listen, I've had some conversations with some seriously beautiful people, and more often than not, their personal lives are hell.
	Because everybody wants something from them.
	They want a date.
	They want a girlfriend or a boyfriend.
	They want, they want, they want.
	And they feel isolated, they feel alone.
	They never know if anybody wants them for who they are, or rather just for what they look like.
	It's a shallow fantasy to think, oh, these beautiful people, how lucky they are.
	These rich kids, how lucky they are.
	I talked to a guy, I've mentioned this before, he's a Calvin Klein model.
	Very important conversation.
	He's a Calvin Klein model.
	And he said, I'm lonely.
	Yeah, girls want to go out with me, but they want to go out with my abs.
	They don't really care if I'm alone.
	Or this guy. I haven't told this story in a while, if ever.
	So after I broke up from a girlfriend once, I was living in downtown Toronto with two gay roommates.
	Wonderful kitchen. And...
	I played squash. It was in a building that has squash court.
	I just had a room in this apartment.
	And my squash partner, I met him in the gym.
	A bit of a short guy, really good looking though.
	Great hair, you know, nice jawline and all that.
	Really good looking guy. And he was telling me we would sometimes go out for a club soda after a squash game.
	And he was telling me the story.
	He said, oh man, I had a wild weekend.
	I said, oh, what happened? He said, I had the flu.
	And he said, let me tell you, I was so sick, I couldn't even get off the couch.
	I can't believe I'm resurrecting this story from like 30 years ago.
	Anyway. He said, I couldn't even get off the couch.
	And this is back in the day when you had these recording machines that you could hear.
	Like now it's all in some voicemail, some cloud or whatever.
	But back then you had these recording, like leave a message answering machines that you could hear people actually leave the messages.
	Oh, okay. And he said, so I get like a message on Saturday morning.
	And it's this girl I was going out with.
	And so I hear this beep and she says, I just found out that you had sex with my best friend one day after you had a date with me.
	I am disgusted.
	I am angry.
	I am outraged.
	You better give me a call back right now.
	Call me back and explain yourself to me.
	And he's like, you know, it's kind of shrill.
	It's like a drill bit going off in my ear.
	But I'm like, I'm so sick. I couldn't...
	And he did. He did. He was a total hound dog.
	So I'm just like, I can't call her back.
	I'm just... I'm too sick. Beep!
	Another message comes in.
	Like an hour or two later. Why haven't you called me back?
	You need to explain yourself to me.
	Why are you having... Sex with my friend the day after you're on a date with me.
	You owe me a call.
	You call me back.
	He's like, I can't get off the couch, man.
	I'm dying. Like I'm passing in and out.
	Like I'm having visions.
	Like I'm flying dragons over cotton ball clouds and stuff.
	Why aren't you calling me back?
	I'm sorry if I yelled at you before.
	I was so upset.
	I don't mean to, like, I don't want you out of my life.
	I just need an explanation.
	I mean, I think you owe me an explanation.
	I'm sorry if I was upset before.
	Please, please, just give me a call back.
	That's all I'm asking for. Can't get off the couch.
	Again, he would have called her maybe or whatever, but he just, a couple hours later, beep!
	I'm sorry. I'm so sorry.
	I yelled at you. I don't even know your side of the story.
	Maybe it's not even true.
	Maybe you're angry because I just heard this story and I assumed it was true.
	I'm so sorry. Beep!
	Please call me back. I owe you a thousand apologies if it wasn't true.
	Oh. Oh. Crazy.
	Crazy stuff. Like, just collapsing and apologizing and She's eventually just begging him to call her back.
	Now this is the life of a handsome man.
	Can you imagine? With women that neurotic and insecure, you can bang their best friend.
	And then don't answer the call for a couple of hours and then they're begging you.
	They still want you back. Yeah, they're begging you to accept their apology and, you know, like, what a nightmare to be surrounded by needy, insane, deranged, insecure, half-formed non-entities like that.
	Beep! Maybe you're sick.
	Are you okay? Maybe I've been yelling at you and you're not well.
	I hear there's a flu going around.
	I'm so sorry. Please call me.
	I'll come over. Oh, yes, that's right.
	She said at the end, call me back.
	I'll come over with soup and take care of you if you're not well.
	Wow. And then, beep!
	Oh, this, I remember the end of the story now.
	Oh, I remember the end of the story now.
	So, the woman, not the woman who was calling, but her best friend who he had sex with, she came over, didn't even call, just came over, and she's like, oh, you're sick, you're not well, right?
	Yeah. And then the other girl comes over with soup and finds him there with her best friend who he'd had sex with.
	Oh my God. And he's like...
	I'm so sick, I don't even know what to say.
	The girls get into a fight.
	The best friend storms out.
	And then the girl who'd been calling him all day, who comes over with the soup, he's like, you know what?
	I'm feeling better. I feel like having sex.
	So now I gotta talk this woman into staying.
	Plus, she's got soup.
	She's got soup. She's got pussy.
	It's a good day. And I'm like, Like, I half want to applaud you, and I half think this is the completely horrifying existence.
	But he's just like, eh, I'm a player.
	I felt like when we played squash, it was like good versus evil or something like that.
	It was crazy. What a story.
	Now, I mean, maybe he was exaggerating a bit, I don't know, but guy didn't seem to be at a loss for dates any time.
	So yeah, let them have their money.
	The other thing too, like if you want nice stuff, you have to be willing to let people give money to their kids.
	It's not unfair.
	It's like the whole mechanism is the woman chooses the man who can provide the most resources for the children.
	And part of the reason why men work into their dotage is so they can give more money to their kids.
	So if you take away that, I want to take away all the inheritance, I'm going to give it to everyone.
	Well, all that means is that less wealth is created.
	You won't get any money. Because men will just work less hard.
	Yeah, you kill the motivation.
	Yeah, so it just means there'll be fewer jobs, fewer companies created, wages will be lower, everyone ends up poorer.
	Like, I'm sorry that the world is not fair.
	I'm sorry there's a bell curve.
	I wish it wasn't the case so much, so widely.
	I wish it wasn't.
	And I've been on the downside edge of that bell curve and things I've wanted to do in my life as well.
	Man, if I had a better singing voice, fuck this philosophy shit, I'd be a rock star.
	But I don't. So, I've been on the downside.
	When I was in theater school, there were actors better than me.
	And I could just tell.
	And the guy who was the best of the class, gone on to do great stuff.
	Good, more power to him. Wasn't my thing that way.
	I mean, I got too many words of my own to be a mouthpiece for other people.
	So I've been on the downside of that bell curve.
	I've been on the downside of that bell curve.
	I know. It's a struggle.
	Look up at that thing. It's like Mount Everest.
	It's just the way nature is.
	Like, I wish it were different. I wish the races were more equal.
	I wish they were completely equal.
	I wish that genders were equal.
	I wish that the socialists were right!
	And all discrepancies in outcome were the result of prejudice, because then we'd have magic mind-meld of egalitarianism to fix everything.
	But they're not right. Nature's right.
	Evolution is right. Science is right.
	Genetics is right. I'm sorry there's a bell curve.
	Don't shoot the messenger.
	We have to deal with reality.
	I can get mad at being half Irish and half German and therefore basically being a combustible pile of vampiric dust in the sunlight, or I can just go out and buy a big floppy Tilly hat and put on four tons of sunscreen.
	It's just the way things are.
	It's just the facts of reality which we have to deal with.
	Or we don't have to. We can choose not to.
	And then we just get squished by the boulder we refuse to believe is coming at us.
	So yeah, let them make the money.
	Let them give the money to their kids.
	Social churn in society is very big.
	And this is even in the remnants of the free market where political pull and privilege keep people's wealth far higher than it should be for far longer than it should be.
	But if you're really mad about the kids of rich people, look at their kids.
	They'll be right back, you know, rags to riches to rags in three generations.
	It's very, very common.
	Social churn is huge.
	Just be patient. Just be patient.
	You'll be riding up, and then you'll want all the protections, and then your kids will be riding down, and blah, blah, blah, blah, right?
	Yeah. So do you think, like, philanthropy is the only way we can kind of Fulfill, like, the moral obligation to the poor?
	What is the moral obligation to the poor?
	Well, I mean, we should, you know, if I have a lot of resources and I can't use them all, then I should, I don't know, donate some to make someone, you know, have some food to eat for the night or something like that.
	So, I mean, I see that as kind of like, you know, charity.
	Sure, listen, I don't think it's a moral obligation insofar as you have to.
	Like, you're morally obligated to not beat up my dog or set fire to my house.
	Like, that's a moral obligation.
	Giving to the poor, I think it's great, and I do it myself, but it's tricky as hell.
	Because you want to give people enough that they're not suffering unduly, but you don't want to give them so much that they're no longer motivated to improve.
	Charity is more complicated than surgery.
	And we don't just let anyone with a knife be a surgeon, right?
	And charity is one of the most difficult things in human society.
	I mean, let me ask you this, my friend.
	Have you ever tried to really genuinely help turn around someone's life in your own personal life?
	Or really help them with the problem, even if they don't admit it exists?
	I mean, I haven't gone to a deep extent, but...
	You know, I've offered some consolation or kind words.
	No, no, no. I mean, have you ever really tried, like, somebody who's underperforming or somebody who's really depressed or, like, really tried to help them and turn things around?
	No. Why do you think that is, you cold-hearted bastard?
	No. Why do you think that is?
	I mean, it could be, like, many factors as to why, you know, they're in that situation.
	And I might not be able to kind of grasp everything and give advice that, you know, solves all the problems that the person might face.
	So, have you ever tried giving money to someone in need?
	Yeah, of course. But directly, not through charity, but directly?
	I've lent money to people in need.
	Right. But have you ever just straight up given?
	Uh... Yeah, I mean, to friends, once in a while.
	But not often, to be honest.
	And I assume not much.
	No, no, of course. Like, I'll buy dinner or whatever, right?
	Yeah, yeah. Yeah, but would you ever say to somebody, like, do you think, let's say that there were 50 artists come knocking at your door, and they say, if you give me $10,000, I will write a great novel.
	Do you think you would ever be able to find or choose the right artist?
	No. No. Right.
	I mean, it's hard enough to invest in a company that makes money, right?
	And that's your own money.
	That's right. Your own profit, right?
	Giving money to people, I don't know.
	A woman comes to you and says, I've had four children by four different men.
	I need money. What do you say?
	Bye. Well, no, but it's tough because it's not the kid's fault.
	And the kids need to eat, right?
	Well, I mean, that's the argument that socialists use.
	They hang the kids out as, like, some kind of hostage for your emotion.
	Well, sure, and they are. In a way, right?
	Because you can say to the woman, get a job, but if she says, I have four kids, I can't work.
	And they gotta eat. They need healthcare.
	They need education. They need an Xbox, right?
	What are you supposed to say? I mean, it's a very, very tough...
	I wrestle with this a lot, and I'll tell you my answer in a few minutes, but it's not easy, because it's not the kid's fault.
	And, you know, we don't want those kids to starve, but at the same time, if we give money to the mom, she might just turn around and have another kid with another guy, and another kid with another guy.
	Yeah. So it's very tough, particularly when you've already had a welfare state for half a century.
	Because then a lot of people, women mostly, have made terrible decisions about having kids.
	And then what do you do? This is another reason why we ain't pulling out of this nosedive.
	I'm afraid it's going to be balls-to-the-wall impact, because what do you do?
	What do you do? You know, you've got...
	Multi-generational people with no exposure to work.
	You have incredibly disintegrated families, disintegrated communities.
	You have people completely addicted to short-term self-gratification at the expense of their children's future, their government's future, their taxpayers' future, their civilization's future.
	It's one thing If there are very few people in that situation, then you can help them in very, very careful and measured ways.
	But when you have millions of people, tens of millions of people in that situation, I mean, what do you do?
	So, it isn't the children's fault, but it's very hard to help the mother.
	It's very hard to help the children without giving money to the mother, which is rewarding her for irresponsibility, right?
	Yep, yep.
	I don't know. I mean, this is a terrible situation that we have gotten ourselves into.
	And by we, I mostly mean white people, so you're off the hook, man.
	But it is a terrible situation we've got ourselves into because now so many people have made so many bad decisions and have been well rewarded for making those bad decisions.
	And as far as poverty breeding this kind of dysfunction, it's crap.
	The people on welfare now have infinitely more money and resources and technology and accessories than people even 30 years ago had.
	Would you rather be somebody who was in the top 1% 50 years ago, or would you be rather somebody who's on welfare right now?
	It's not that hard to figure that out, right?
	We'd much rather be on welfare now than at the top 1% 50 years ago.
	Much better medicine, much better technology, much better opportunities, much better travel, much cheaper this, that, and the other.
	And much greater opportunities in many ways because of the aforementioned benefits.
	So it is really, really tough.
	You know, I wrestle with this a lot, particularly with England, right?
	I mean, England has been a cruel island to me, for sure.
	I mean, I grew up in England, and I was abused very loudly and very, in a sense, publicly because I lived in an apartment building with paper-thin walls, and everybody knew I was being abused, and no one did a good goddamn thing about it.
	So, where is my investment in trying to save the United Kingdom?
	And... I don't know, 11 years, 10 years ago, however long it was ago, all the British newspapers published ugly stories about me and the British public snapped them all up and were very keen to read all the salacious details and lies and falsehoods and misrepresentations about me and so on.
	Nobody fought for the side of philosophy, truth and righteousness and justice.
	So where's my investment in trying to save?
	This island, it's a tough call.
	I say, well, you know, but it's not the kids' fault.
	It's true, it's not the kids' fault, but I'll tell you this, my friend.
	I find it a very self-destructive policy to care more about people's children than they do themselves.
	So the woman who comes to me and says, I've had four children by four different men, I say, well, you didn't care about your kids very much, now did you?
	Because otherwise... You've found, married a man, and had children with a man who's going to stick around.
	So you really don't care that much about your kids, and now you want me to care about your kids, because you didn't.
	Now that's an interesting conversation to have.
	I don't know what the result of that is going to be.
	I still don't want kids starving to death.
	That's a horrible thing to see. I still don't want kids being without health care.
	Of course not, right? But at the same time, I do find it A sacrilegiously self-destructive policy to care more about people's children than they do themselves.
	Can I care more about English children than English people do themselves?
	I don't see how.
	I don't see how that's possible.
	No, I mean, I see all this happening in the States and in the West, and I really don't want that to happen over here.
	And that's why, you know, it concerns me a lot when, you know, people start having these kinds of mentality.
	You have to fight it, and you have to fight it early.
	Once it takes root, man, is it ever difficult to get out.
	Yeah. Once it takes root, and once it's taken root as it has so deeply in the West...
	It is very hard to uproot without civil conflict, massive civil conflict.
	So, if you're in the early stages of the disease, now is the time.
	I say this to all the people in East Asia, all across East Asia, to expatriates, to people who are watching the end of Europe in tourist visas.
	You must push back against this now.
	You must push back against this now.
	Do not wait as the West has until it is too late.
	Because then it can only be solved through massive conflict.
	But push back against it now.
	The goal is freedom.
	You can have freedom of opportunity or you can have equality of outcome.
	You can have equality of opportunity or you can have equality of outcome.
	But nothing produces tyranny faster than imagining there must be equality of outcome.
	Because it will never be achieved.
	And the only way you can attempt to achieve equality of outcome is giving people in the government massive inequalities of power relative to everyone else.
	You have a starting gun, you have a race, and you have An equal length on each track.
	And you hit the starting pistol and people go run.
	And that's a simple, elegant, and free society.
	But a society where everyone has to end up at the finish line at the same time is tyranny.
	And it will never work because people will adjust their behaviors.
	Oh, we're going to put this guy 100 yards ahead because he's slow.
	Well, he's just going to walk.
	Oh, we're going to put this guy way further back because he's fast.
	Well, he's either going to give up running or he's going to run extra fast and catch up more and going to end up stronger.
	We're going to bar this guy from training on the good track.
	Well, then he's going to train on the bad track, which is going to make him stronger.
	You'll never end equality of outcome.
	And the whole point is not to end it.
	The whole point is to hold out this fantasy that can't ever be achieved so government power can always be expanded.
	All we require is freedom.
	You want great music? Don't pretend everyone can sing the same.
	You want great art?
	Don't imagine everyone can paint the same.
	You want a great economy?
	Don't imagine everyone can produce the same.
	Let the chips fall where they may, in a state of freedom.
	That will produce inequality, but it is the inequality Like I said, a stairs run equal.
	That's how we climb.
	So I hope that helps. Thank you very much for your call.
	I appreciate it. Let us know how it goes fighting the good fight.
	And let's do one last caller before the end of the show.
	Alright, well up next we have Christina.
	Christina wrote in and said, How do I get over the fear of success?
	Growing up, my parents encouraged participation-based sports and shunned any competition.
	For education, whenever I succeeded with my grades, my parents would downplay my success and make fun of me for being smart.
	As soon as I was doing something where I excelled, my parents would take it away.
	Or my sisters would mock me, become violent, and try to make me feel ashamed of myself for succeeding at things like sports or sewing.
	As an adult, I've shown skill in things like sewing, cooking, peaceful parenting, and my parents refuse to take an interest in my success, even downplaying my sewing projects, my cooking ability, and my peaceful parenting.
	I've attempted to start several small businesses because of how talented people say I am, but I stop working on the businesses once I start seeing success.
	Knowing my upbringing is having this effect on me, how do I break this cycle?
	That's from Christina. Hey Christina, how you doing?
	I'm good, how are you?
	I am well, I'm well.
	Can you just answer me something?
	What is a non-participative sport?
	Or non-competitive sport?
	Oh, like... Like, you know, like when you play soccer and it doesn't matter if, you know, you win a tournament or not, everyone gets a medal.
	Or like, I'm trying to think.
	I said soccer because I played soccer for like eight years or so when I was a kid and my parents pulled me out of it once I got into an age that it was really competitive.
	So before I would be like, well, you know, we had this big tournament at the end of the year and it didn't matter if you won or not or really excelled or like was really good, you would still get a medal or a trophy at the end of the year.
	Right. So basically a female-run sports program, right?
	Yeah, pretty much. It's like, good job, but here, you know, you failed, but here a trophy.
	Yeah. Right.
	Yeah, because women are generally very good at encouraging toddlers, and men are very good at whittling out losers, which is very important.
	Correct. Right.
	Okay. Got it. And so when men submerge themselves, they get a little nauseous at this eternal trophy bullshit, whereas women get a little anxious when it comes to whittling out the losers, right?
	Right. Because a man doesn't mind if his son or daughter gets whittled out as a loser because, I mean, by loser, I don't mean some existential loser, but just somebody who's not good at something.
	If you're not good at something, then stop doing it and find something you are good at.
	And men can handle that.
	In general, women get very anxious and take it personally and, you know, all that kind of crap, right?
	Yeah. Okay, okay.
	So your adverse childhood experience score, Christina, is horrible.
	Eight. I know.
	And you know what's the really interesting thing in this is...
	So I started listening to your show about four or five years ago when I started dating my husband.
	And he...
	So we met like three or four years before we started dating.
	So like he's met my parents before.
	He's met my sisters and stuff.
	And... I thought that I had this great childhood.
	You know, I had this great parents.
	I had this great experience.
	And I was like this great person.
	And then I started dating my husband and he would ask me questions or like how I would feel and why I would feel angry about this or like, I was like, I had massive stress.
	I was really, really, I had this high anxiety going on.
	I had these breakouts of my hands and you could physically show my anxiety.
	You mean like eczema? Yeah, my hands would get severe rash and they would go up to my neck.
	I was really, really stressed my whole life up until about four years ago.
	I stopped being stressed. But, uh, it was really bad.
	And I thought, and like, I feel like I was brainwashed my whole life by my parents because you're like, Oh no, you had a great childhood.
	We did great.
	And like, you know, like all that crap.
	And then I started listening to your show and then talking with my husband.
	And I was like, this is weird.
	Like those girls are like this guy on the show, you know, experienced the same thing that I, that I experienced.
	And then Stefan is saying that it's It's wrong.
	And I'm like, but is it?
	And then I started questioning and listening more and talking a lot with my husband.
	And I realized, I was like, holy crap, I had a terrible childhood.
	And this is why abusive parents just love my show.
	Yeah. Oh, yeah.
	They don't like you.
	No, of course. Of course they don't like me.
	Well, they think it's me, but it's not me that they don't like.
	Yeah, I know. I know. Not you personally, but yeah.
	Now, just so people understand, right?
	So, the contrast between...
	What your image was of your childhood and what occurred.
	So, ACE score of eight translates into this.
	Number one, you lived with verbal abuse and threats.
	Number two, you experienced physical abuse that did not just include spanking.
	Number three, you experienced molestation or sex or rape as a child.
	No family love or support.
	Neglect, not enough food, dirty clothes, no protection or medical treatment.
	Physical abuse towards female adults you witnessed.
	You lived with an alcoholic or a drug user.
	You had a household member who was depressed, mentally ill, or had a suicide attempt.
	Yeah, it's pretty bad.
	Discipline? Spanking and discipline, you said, yes, not sure how often spanked with bare hand.
	I mostly remember the threat of spanking, threat of burning my butt on the hot stove.
	Go into my room and stand in the corner, mostly from my mother.
	My sisters, on the other hand, were really abusive.
	They would punch me, pinch me, slap me, bite me, push me, throw things at me, verbally abuse me every day, multiple times a day, more from my little sister.
	This was the childhood that you genuinely had been, I suppose, programmed into believing was some Mary Poppins paradise, right?
	Yeah, yeah.
	Even, like, you know, when, like, I was older, I was, you know, talking with my mom and my sister, and I was like, oh, yeah, like, you guys used to do this to me, and you used to do this, and they all, like, they still, even today, they still laugh about it, saying, like, oh, well, you were sitting your little sister upstairs to get candy just because you wanted peace and quiet, and we didn't have any candy, so that's why she was punching you afterwards, or...
	Or whatever. Like, just making up reasons.
	But I want to add that I cut my sister, my older sister.
	So I have two sisters. I'm the middle child.
	I cut her out of my life about a year and a half ago.
	So that's been great.
	It's been better.
	It's funny how little you miss bad people.
	You're supposed to, right?
	Your sister, your half.
	Yeah. But it's like, you know.
	It's pretty good. Yeah. And we could talk about her, like, for days and, like, She's just a horrible person, so I'm really happy that I cut her out of my life.
	I haven't seen my mom in, I think, 16 years.
	It's a lot of days, a lot of days, a lot of nights, and not one single one of those days have I missed her.
	Not once. Yeah.
	No, like, I'm not kidding.
	People, like, I don't really think about her anymore.
	I mean, but just because it came up, I mean, I can go Weeks without even thinking about my mom.
	But I've not missed her once.
	I've never had the urge to phone her.
	I've never, like, yearned.
	I've never, oh, it's so sad.
	Like, I've not missed her once.
	It's been a relief. There's been no negative I don't...
	I don't...
	I mean, I dislike what she did.
	I don't really feel angry at my mom.
	Why? Because I'm safe. The purpose of my anger was to make me safe.
	And the purpose of your anger and your fear is to make you safe.
	Now once you've achieved safety, funny story, your anger and your fear go away.
	And other more positive emotions can take their stead.
	Yeah. Yeah, like my hands started clearing up maybe like a year, year and a half after, you know, I was dating my husband.
	It helped because he was in a different province, so I moved in with him.
	So I wasn't, you know, in contact with him all the time.
	I wouldn't necessarily see them all the time.
	So it really helped the fact that I wasn't close, like physically close to them.
	Yeah. So that helped a lot.
	But yeah, it's...
	It's tough sometimes.
	Yeah, because there's this curse that evil people put on you, which is like, you're gonna miss me!
	You're gonna be full of regret!
	It's just a lie.
	I mean, it's not as big a lie as diversity is a strength, but it's still a pretty big lie.
	And you can, just I wanted to mention this, there's a book called When the Body Says No, The Cost of Hidden Stress by a guy who's been on the show a couple of times, Dr.
	Gabor Mate, M-A-T-E, which I would recommend.
	And I guess you were experiencing some of that.
	Yeah, oh yeah, absolutely.
	And like... I was living with my parents and I had this for years and Steven sent me to the doctor.
	The doctor prescribed me some lotion.
	So instead of being like, oh, are you stressed?
	A doctor in Canada who doesn't delve into any deeper issues but just gives you some bland and useless medication?
	I know, right?
	Who never would have heard of that?
	Yeah. And I'm still on the fence.
	Cutting my parents and my younger sister.
	I have no stress in my life anymore unless it's with them or it's associated with them.
	Sorry, Christina. I hate to contradict you, but you do.
	And that's why you called in.
	You have stress when you try to succeed.
	Yeah, I guess. Yeah, no, you're right.
	You guess? No, you're right.
	Sorry. Don't weasel word on me.
	We're doing so well. We're doing so well.
	I know. All right.
	No, and the no stress thing, nobody believes that.
	Everybody has stress. Everybody.
	I mean, and that's not bad.
	A certain amount of stress is good.
	It's healthy. It means you're doing something.
	Because if you have capacities and you're not exercising those capacities, you feel the stress of underachievement.
	And then when you are exercising them, you feel the stress of achievement.
	It's natural and there's nothing particularly bad or wrong about it.
	Stress can be very... Very helpful.
	But your question is, how do you overcome your fear of success?
	Correct. All right.
	I will tell you how I think you can overcome your fear of success.
	And the first thing, Christina, my dear, is to recognize that you have absolutely no fear of success.
	You, yourself, have absolutely no fear of success.
	There are other people in your life and in your history who have a fear of your success.
	But it's not you.
	Yeah, it makes a lot of sense.
	Like, I would do, so like I do a lot of sewings and stuff, and anytime I would do something for my parents, like exact measurements, the exact thing that they wanted, after I would make it, they would be like, well, you know, it's not exactly what I wanted, or it's a little bit too short, it's a little bit too small, or it's not right.
	Because parents who parent that badly are all about perfection.
	If only they'd been slightly more perfectionistic about, say, parenting.
	Slightly more important than, say, sewing.
	Correct. Yeah, yeah.
	So, let's just look at the way you phrased the question.
	How do I get over the fear of success?
	Now, that's interesting because you didn't say my fear of success.
	Right? So that's your first clue, right?
	You don't say my fear of success, you say the fear of success, which is good.
	Now, then you talk about your parents.
	Your parents would downplay your success and make fun of you for being smart.
	So the question is, why did they do that, do you think?
	What was the purpose in that?
	Nothing that abusive people do is accidental.
	That's the important thing to remember about.
	Nothing that abusive people do is accidental.
	Yeah, the...
	They're really angry with me right now for, well, yeah, for the past couple years, especially since I've been married.
	So my husband has been married for almost two years now.
	And so I don't depend on them anymore.
	And that really bothers them.
	So, like, I know my whole life they always try to, like, make them feel good or, like, make them look good or, like, try to, like, they're really not smart people.
	They They don't know how to think properly.
	Yeah, but they kind of...
	Yeah.
	So, like, my little sister, she's now living near them.
	So, like, they're all over her.
	They make sure that she depends 100% on them.
	And why do they do that?
	To make themselves feel better, to make themselves feel needed.
	Nope. No?
	No. Then why?
	No, listen, you can make yourself feel needed by being wonderful to people.
	You can make yourself feel better by doing good deeds.
	None of these lead directly to those actions, right?
	So the question is, why are those actions in particular?
	Why do they try to keep your sister dependent upon them?
	They're jealous? Nope.
	No. No, jealousy doesn't mean that you are abusive.
	You can be jealous of someone.
	Oh, that person is losing weight.
	You know what? I'm really jealous of that.
	I think I'm going to lose weight too.
	It doesn't mean you go and sabotage their food, right?
	Right. Then I'm not sure then.
	Good. Okay, good. Because if you were sure, then you wouldn't have asked the question, right?
	Yeah. What is in common with shunning competition?
	What happens... If you compete and you succeed as a child, what happens to your sense of self-esteem, your sense of confidence?
	It goes up.
	It goes up. It goes up.
	What happens when your confidence goes up and you're being abused?
	Can you just repeat the question there?
	If you're being abused, or when you're being abused, what happens as a result of your confidence increasing?
	Oh, it goes down.
	Sorry, you cut there. You oppose the abuse, right?
	Yeah. Sorry, yeah.
	And so, for you, if you had succeeded or been allowed to succeed in sports or in school, then you would have had an enormous amount of positive feedback About you from people, right?
	Correct. And then the way that your parents were treating you would have stood out in stark contrast to the positive responses you were having from others, right?
	Or getting from others. Right.
	So if you become really good at something and experience all that positive feedback, the increased confidence, Then your parents' behavior is going to start to see more of an exception to a more general rule.
	Does that make sense? A little, yeah.
	Wait, what doesn't then? Well, so you're just basically saying that...
	No, no, I'm wrong. Tell me. This is my theory, right?
	No, no, no. I'm just saying that you're wrong.
	I'm just a little confused.
	Sorry. I should say my English is my second language.
	Oh, I wouldn't have guessed. You're doing very well.
	Oh, thanks. So sometimes, like, words together does always make a ton of sense for me.
	Yeah, no problem. So, if you don't mind, maybe, like, just repeat what you just said?
	Oh, sure. So, if you're being abused, it requires that you believe that you are responsible for being treated badly.
	Oh, yeah, sure.
	The real abuse is not being beaten.
	The real abuse occurs when you believe it is right and good that you are beaten.
	Yeah, that makes sense. That you deserve to be beaten.
	That you deserve to be threatened with having your butt burned on a hot stove, right?
	The real abuse does not implant, it does not become pathological or problematic.
	As long as it is experienced as abuse, then it is survivable.
	It is when the value system is internalized.
	To the point where you do not perceive it as abuse anymore, but as funny, or as deserved, or as just, or as fair, or as punishment for bad behavior, when you internalize it and it is no longer abuse.
	That is when the real infection occurs.
	Does that make sense?
	Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.
	So... You have to believe that you're a bad person...
	In order to justify being abused, it is easier to believe you're a bad person if you're not good at anything.
	Yeah, that makes sense.
	If you gain confidence, you're harder to abuse.
	Yeah. Because I started doing other things, like I have, you know, I'm starting...
	Like, my mom never showed me how to cook.
	So, you know, and it's important for me to cook for my husband, you know, for my daughter and stuff.
	So, I've started, you know, like, learning a lot about cooking and I'm starting to be really good at it.
	And anything, like, new that I do and that I know that I'm good at, I am really confident about it.
	You know, I just picked up archery and I'm...
	Really, really good.
	You know, and like other things that I picked up, you know, for the past couple years that I'm good at.
	I'm super confident.
	I talk to people about it.
	If someone tells me that I'm not good, like I, it rolls on my back.
	Like I don't even, it doesn't even affect me because I know they're wrong.
	It's really this sewing.
	No, it does because otherwise you wouldn't have sent in this problem.
	Yeah, okay. You're better, but you now wish to achieve more, right?
	So it's becoming tougher.
	Yes. Okay. You say, I experience no stress.
	I have no problem when people tell me I can't succeed.
	Come on. I mean, we all have that challenge, right?
	I mean, don't swing from not confident to overconfidence.
	That's part of the same challenge, right?
	So that's my suggestion about that.
	that now why do you think your parents are trying to make your sister dependent upon them um well they don't have the greatest relationship with the older sister right now either
	They have close to no relationship with me at the moment, so I'm guessing they have one daughter left.
	And it's easier that way.
	So then, you know, she's close.
	Because right now they look really bad for other people.
	For like everyone else, you know, like they don't have a good relationship with both of their daughters except one.
	And they don't take any responsibility for anything that's been happening or that happened.
	Okay. No, I appreciate all of this, but I would go with something a little simpler, that they're trying to lower her sexual market value.
	Yeah. Yeah, okay.
	Yeah, I can see that. I was reminded of this, Christina, when you said that they didn't teach you how to cook.
	Right. Right.
	So when parents do not teach their children how to provide value in the dating arena, then they're trying to lower their sexual market value.
	Sabotage them, right? Right.
	Okay, yeah, I didn't see it that way, but yeah, that makes much more sense.
	Because if you're a man, and you meet someone like your sister, and she's dependent on the parents, and she's an adult, then you say, well, she's not going to be a good wife, right?
	Right. Because she's not able to set up her own household, she doesn't know how to cook, she doesn't know how to run things independently, she doesn't know how to support you, she's still kind of a child, right?
	Right. Yeah.
	Because here is, this is a big secret.
	This is a big secret, Christina.
	And it makes sense of a lot of people's lives, and this is why I wanted to spend, in particular, some real time and attention on this issue.
	Yeah. Here's the big secret.
	Abusive families, sole and main purpose when their children grow up is to keep quality people away from their children.
	Is to keep people with integrity away from their children.
	Is to keep people with honor away from their children.
	To keep people with good self-esteem and good self-confidence and with higher standards of behavior away from their children like the plague.
	This is why they don't like me.
	Because I'm out there providing support to victims of child abuse and saying it was unacceptable what happened to you.
	You don't have to put up with it.
	You can talk to your parents.
	You need to see a therapist.
	They need to apologize for the wrongs that they've done.
	You're free to see them or not see them.
	But they're accost to seeing them if they don't repent.
	Because through the magic of the internet, me, a high-quality person with standards and integrity, I'm now this close to their kids, whispering my Iago integrity into their ear.
	And this is one of the reasons why the internet is such a problem for abusers.
	Like bad parents or Hillary Clinton, right?
	Because... Yeah. The whole purpose is to keep your self-esteem low, to keep your confidence low, to keep your standards low, and to...
	Like, why do...
	It's always struck me as kind of weird.
	Like, why do single moms...
	Not teach their daughters how to be great wives.
	Well, of course, single moms aren't great wives.
	Not widows. Single moms aren't great wives because they're not married.
	Which means they either chose a bad man or drove a good man away.
	Either way, they're not good wives.
	But they don't in part because when you...
	When you teach...
	Your son or your daughter to be valuable in the dating arena.
	To be a potentially good father, mother, husband, wife, friend, supporter, companion, you name it.
	Then they'll start attracting a higher quality person.
	A person from a better family, a person with a better background, a person with more self-knowledge, a person with higher standards.
	And then what happens?
	When that person with higher standards Comes around the dysfunctional and abusive family, what happens?
	It shatters and the truth comes out.
	Yes, indeed. And then...
	Yeah. They lose their hold over their adult children.
	Yeah. No, that makes a lot of sense.
	They approved my bad previous relationships.
	And the same thing for my sisters.
	They both... Been and are in really, really bad relationships.
	And when my husband came along, my mom was like, are you sure about this guy?
	Yeah, yeah. That's right.
	And I was like, what do you mean?
	And even still today, he's like, oh, he reads a little too much.
	Or like, he does this a little too much.
	So she doesn't 100% approve.
	She always finds something...
	About him. And that fits this pattern, right?
	So if you're in a crappy relationship with an abusive guy, he's not going to call out the parents.
	How could he? He's not going to say, your parents are treating you badly or they treated you badly in the past.
	He's not going to say that.
	How could he? He's treating you badly in the present.
	Yeah. They conspire to keep any decent standards away from their victims.
	It's all a big coven.
	It's all a big, ugly, black, under-the-table handshake.
	Of collusion. Here are our victims.
	We form a perfect circle around them so no one can get in and no one can find them and no one can see them and we'll never lose control over them.
	And this explains why when you have a bad relationship, your family's fine.
	No problem. No problem at all.
	You find a quality guy and they start sowing fear, uncertainty, and doubt in you.
	Because he is a predator with lights coming out of his eyes.
	To show the freak show. Yeah, that makes a ton of sense.
	Now, if you succeed, you'll be around more functional people.
	Yes. And what are they going to say if they find out about your family situation that you have an adverse childhood experience score of eight?
	That is four steps short of satanic.
	Yeah, I was shocked.
	I remember doing it a few days ago and I was like, oh my gosh.
	My husband was like, what's wrong?
	I'm like, I just did the ACE score and I'm a number eight.
	He's like, oh.
	He's like, that's really bad.
	I was like, yeah, I'm like, I was not.
	And again, you know, a little bit in denial slash brainwash or like not 100% aware, still learning about my childhood.
	Like there's still memories coming back.
	I was like, oh my gosh, I can't even believe I forgot this.
	But I was shocked that it was eight.
	Right. Right.
	And that's when the conditioning breaks down and the matrix fizzles.
	And you, it falls away in fractal shards and you stand in the desert of the real.
	And all of the carnival and the distraction and the noise and the fireworks and the show, the fire eaters and the fire breathers, they all vanish and you stare at the actual dusty skeletons in the real closet.
	Mm-hmm. And that is the family portrait.
	Not where everyone's posed and smiling, but as it actually was.
	And you had a truly terrible childhood, and I'm very, very sorry for that.
	That is a terrible way to start life.
	Yeah. Yeah.
	Not great. That's for sure.
	Not great? No, no, I mean, I'm just, sorry, I'm just, you know.
	No, I just, I just, your parents popped in through the matrix there for a moment to come in with their, not great, not great.
	Yeah. No, sorry.
	Yeah. No, it's like my latte is not great if it's just not quite frothy enough.
	If it's a cup of camel piss, I don't say, not great.
	Yeah, you say horrible. Yeah, it was horrifying.
	It was horrible. Yeah.
	It was horrible. And so recognize, I think, Christina, that your parents stand guarding the perimeter of keeping quality judgments out of your life.
	I won't say quality people because your husband sounds quality, but he's not brought this to your attention as clearly as the ACE did, right?
	Um, yes and no.
	Like, we do talk a lot about, you know, all that stuff, but I was...
	I don't know.
	I was still... I don't know.
	I think I don't...
	I guess I just have to accept the fact that it was really horrible.
	Alright, let me ask you this.
	No, let me ask you this. Yes, go ahead.
	Let me ask you this. If someone did to your daughter what your parents did to you, would they be in your life?
	No. Why does your daughter get higher standards than you do?
	You're right. It should be the same.
	Tell me why she matters and you don't.
	Tell me why protecting her matters and protecting you doesn't.
	No, you're right.
	We both matter and we both should have I mean, I should have had a good, you know, childhood, but I do matter now as well.
	And I think that's, I have to recognize this too, because I do things sometimes, and then there's like this little voice in my head.
	No, no, no, hang on. No, no, you're wood saladting me here.
	Sorry. That's all right.
	Let's rewind to the one five-second exchange that is the only thing that matters.
	If someone had done to your daughter...
	What your parents did to you or allowed to happen to you, would they still be in your life?
	No. Right.
	Why are your parents still in your life?
	I don't know. They are unrepentant child abusers.
	I know. Unacknowledging and unrepentant.
	Have they apologized? Have they taken ownership?
	No. Oh, no. No.
	They are unrepentant child abusers, Christina.
	I'm not saying they shouldn't be in your life, but I'm asking you why they are, which is a reasonable question.
	When you have a childhood as abused as this.
	Yeah. No, you're right.
	And I've been going through this in my head for a while now, thinking about, you know, cutting them off.
	So I've been doing, like, low-contact For a couple years now, I guess.
	So before I would, you know, talk to them a lot and then, you know, multiple times a week and then I cut them off to like only once in a while and then now it's really just, you know, if they want to see my daughter on FaceTime or whatever.
	It's very segregated, right?
	Oh, it's boring as heck.
	No, and listen, that could be perfectly fine, right?
	I mean, that may be the easiest, right?
	Because maybe cutting off would create a whole lot of drama, and maybe it would be like destabilize the situation.
	This may be perfect.
	My issue, personally, I'm just telling you my personal issue, Christina, is not whether or not you see your parents.
	It's whether you're clear about the boundaries.
	Mm-hmm. And if you would not allow someone in your life who treated your daughter the way you've been treated, and you're not clear about that, you may say, well, look, I mean, my parents were terrible, but this occasional FaceTime is fine.
	It's easier than whatever, whatever, right?
	Some escalation or whatever it is, right?
	Right. But you can't, this is the universality of ethics, right?
	If you'd had a babysitter or an aunt or a neighbor who had done one-tenth of what happened to you to your daughter, would they be FaceTiming?
	No. No, you're absolutely right.
	What are you saying to your daughter about abusers?
	Well, she's 11 months old, so she's...
	Point taken.
	We don't have that... Yeah.
	But over time, in the future.
	Over time. Yeah, for sure.
	She'll definitely know that you don't want them in your life.
	You don't want any part of it.
	How will she know that? They're in your life.
	Yeah, I guess. No, you're right.
	Well, it might not be at the point.
	We'll see. The clarity is clear.
	No, no, you're absolutely right. The clarity is what's important.
	Right? Like, you can say, well, listen, I would cut off people who harmed my daughter in the way that I was harmed, especially if they were unrepentant.
	But where I stand, it's easier with this occasional contact.
	I mean, that's perfectly fine.
	It's just the clarity didn't seem to me to be there.
	And that's why when we had this, and this, you know, this is what's so incredible about philosophy and so incredible about just universal objective standards, Christina, is that that took all of five seconds.
	Do you remember? Five seconds for that kind of clarity.
	That's how close it is all the time.
	If people treated your daughter this way, Would they be in your daughter's life?
	No. Then why are your parents in your life?
	That clarity is that close, and people spend their whole lives not asking themselves or being asked those simple questions.
	And that, to me, is the interesting thing around your husband.
	He's not there, is he? He's upstairs.
	I can ask him to come down.
	If he'd like to chat, I mean, I don't want to put him on the spot.
	I mean, he didn't call in.
	No, I... No, I told him that you may want to talk to him.
	Yeah, yeah, throw him on if he doesn't mind.
	If he doesn't want to, that's fine too, but if he doesn't mind, I'd like to chat with him.
	Yeah, I'm pretty sure he'll come down in three seconds, unless the baby woke up, but I don't think she did.
	Yeah, he's coming down. That would be very rude of the baby.
	Yeah. Yeah, she's still not sleeping great, so sometimes, you know, she wakes up before midnight.
	Yeah, he's coming down.
	We only have one set of headphones.
	So I'm going to pass the headphones to him, okay?
	Oh, thanks. Hello?
	Hey, how are you doing? I'm sorry to drag you into this conversation and feel free to, like, not participate, but I just had a couple of questions if you don't mind.
	Of course. All right.
	Adverse Childhood Experience score of 8.
	Did you read through this list?
	I did, yes.
	Did you know? Oh, how much did you know?
	I didn't know. Almost nothing, to be honest.
	How did you know almost nothing?
	Because everything she said was that they were great parents.
	When I met them, they were hosting dinners with her friends.
	I honestly thought I was getting into a relationship with someone because of her family.
	What do you think now?
	I was very wrong. No, not about whether you were wrong or not, but what do you think now about your wife and her family and protection?
	Oh, I love my wife, but what I'm concerned with is I don't want to, like, force something onto her.
	What do you mean? So, like, I don't want to say, yeah, I don't want to talk to her parents anymore.
	Well, do you want to talk to her parents?
	No, not at all. But you don't want to tell her that because why?
	You don't want to tell her the truth?
	Well, I think it's her decision to make.
	It's not her decision as to whether you want to talk to her parents.
	That's your decision, right?
	Oh, she knows I don't want to talk to her parents.
	Okay, so you...
	Okay, I understand. No, I understand you don't want to give her orders like don't talk to your family.
	Of course not. I completely understand that and I agree with you for what that's worth.
	But you don't want to talk.
	No. And when they come over, I don't stick around.
	I find other things to do.
	And how often do they come over?
	Once every couple months.
	For how long? A couple days.
	A couple days? Yeah, one or two days.
	You know that they presided over a family situation where your wife was sexually abused as a child.
	Yes, yeah.
	You have a daughter. And they won't have access to her in that manner.
	Right. Was, and I didn't ask your wife about this, I don't even know if you know, but was the sexual abuse the experience from the parents or from someone else?
	From someone else.
	Was it a family member?
	No. Okay.
	But her parents were responsible for keeping her safe and were responsible, I assume, for putting her in an environment where she was sexually abused.
	Yes, I agree with that.
	And they are unrepentant with regards to their parenting, right?
	Yeah. What would you like to happen?
	It's magic wand time, so what would be ideal for you?
	Ideally I'd like for them to repent and for her to still be able to salvage some type of relationship, but I'm not optimistic that that can occur.
	What grounds would you have for any optimism that that would occur?
	None right now. So if that's off the table and it seems that this is off the table, what would you like given that that's not going to happen?
	Well, at this point, I think the low contact or no contact is the best solution.
	Which would you prefer, low contact or no contact?
	I'd prefer low contact.
	Why is that? I think it's still important that she does have a family and that our daughter still has grandparents.
	Well, first of all, she does have a family, which is you and your family, right?
	And you and your wife and all the other people who weren't child abusers.
	So she's going to have family.
	Do you think there are any circumstances under which grandparents should not see a grandchild?
	Well, if they're abusive to the grandchild, yes.
	No, let me ask you this.
	Do you think that there are any circumstances under which the grandparents who are abusive to their child, not your child, that there's any abuse that the grandparents would commit that would result in their child not having them around?
	In other words, your wife has an adverse childhood experience score of 8.0.
	Do you think if it was a 9, that would be enough?
	Or is there nothing that would be enough for that?
	Well, I think the score can be misleading, too, because there's varying degrees of, like, abuse against a child.
	And I'm not excusing their behavior, but it's not—I don't think it's at the point where it's like an instant no— And why do you think that is?
	I mean, what do you feel is inaccurate in the Adverse Childhood Experience score that would...
	And listen, I'm not trying to talk you into or out of anything.
	I'm just genuinely curious about the thinking.
	So, in what way is the score misleading?
	Well, every negative aspect of that score can be mitigated by our parenting.
	So, like, we don't give her...
	Access or so we don't give them access to her like and definitely not alone.
	Wait, wait, wait. No, you do give them access to her because they come over for days, right?
	Yeah, not alone. No, I understand.
	Never alone. Yeah.
	So she's around child abusers, but they don't have the ability to abuse her directly.
	Yes. Do you notice any change in your wife when her parents are around?
	Yeah, her stress level is...
	Through the roof compared to like our everyday lives.
	Is she still breastfeeding?
	Yes, she is. Do you think that the stress hormones may pass through the breast milk at all?
	I definitely think that, yeah.
	So aren't you feeding your child stress hormones when the grandparents are around?
	Yes. Do you think that being highly stressed by being in the presence of Significant child abusers would have any effect on how your wife parents or in her capacity to be emotionally available to her child?
	Well, I think she's the perfect parent, to be honest.
	She's done so much work to get to the point where she is now, based on what she's learned negative about her parents.
	And I understand how horrible that sounds.
	No, no, listen, to be perfectly honest, she sounds like a wonderful person, and I admire what both of you have done, particularly what she's done with regards to her history.
	But that wasn't my question.
	It was a good sidestep, a good Uncle Hotep.
	But here's the thing.
	Do you think that being around huge child abusers, The people who abused her or allowed her to be abused for many, many years as a child, in the most egregious of fashions, do you think that having those people around has an effect on your wife's parenting in the moment that they're around or in the time that they're around?
	If she would acquiesce to their behavior, I would, but she doesn't.
	She's very strong. She says no to them.
	She disagrees with them.
	I... She continues parenting the way that we together feel is necessary for our child.
	So she's very stressed, but it has no effect on her parenting or her emotional availability.
	It does have some effect.
	I can't say it doesn't have any, but I think it's mitigated.
	What do you mean, mitigated?
	By what? Through her behavior, through what she's learned from like reading books and following her show.
	Oh no, I'm not saying she turns into a raging lunatic around her parents.
	I'm not saying that at all. And I'm not saying that the details of her parenting are compromised.
	But if she's stressed and around her abusers, she can't be the same person.
	I mean, it's like taking a Vietnam vet to a war movie.
	He's going to be reactivated.
	And it's going to be a challenge, right?
	Yeah, I definitely noticed that in her, too.
	In what way? Just from her stress level.
	It brings up a lot of painful memories, and it definitely reinforces the good things she's doing, though, at the same time.
	I understand there's a lot of awkward silence.
	So it's stressful. It reactivates her trauma.
	Yeah. It may pass stress hormones to your baby through the breast milk.
	I'm no doctor, but I think that happens.
	So where's the plus?
	What's the plus? I'm having a really hard time coming up with a plus.
	I mean, I understand the pluses to the abusive parents.
	I'm not sure I get the plus to you, to Your wife to your daughter.
	So let me ask you the question that I asked her.
	And again, I'm just curious.
	I don't have any preconceptions.
	I'm curious about the answer. And I really, really appreciate you stepping up to this conversation.
	I know it's tricky, but I really appreciate it.
	Let me ask you this. If someone other than your wife's parents had done what they did to her to your daughter, would that person be in your life?
	No. Why not?
	Because I want better for my daughter than to have to live through that.
	So why is your daughter's security more important to you than your wife's?
	Well, my wife's security is important to me.
	I think she's been handling it very well.
	Why does she have to handle it at all?
	That's my question. If you say that if someone had treated your daughter the way that your wife's parents treated her, they wouldn't be in your life.
	But your wife was your daughter at some point in her life.
	And her parents are unrepentant.
	No, I understand.
	It's not my decision to make.
	Well, I don't think it's my decision to make.
	I think that has to be her decision.
	I'm not trying to weasel out of it, but it does no good to anyone.
	A little bit. Because she's the victim of the abuse, so it's almost impossible for her to be objective, right?
	You're the voice of reason. You're the voice of objectivity, right?
	I'm not saying it's your decision to make, but don't absent yourself from the decision.
	You can have influence. You can reason it through.
	You can talk about it.
	You can, right?
	Do you like these people? We definitely do that.
	Do you like them?
	Not particularly, no.
	Is there anything that you do like about these people who did unbelievable harm to your wife?
	Because that's kind of an either-or, right?
	Yeah, well, they're in my life now and I'm trying to make the best of it.
	But why are you so passive?
	I don't think I'm passive about it.
	We speak at great lengths about this and we debate the pros and cons so that when we do make a decision or when she makes a decision, it's an informed one.
	Would you prefer...
	No, you said that you prefer it the way it is now, right?
	Well, I personally would prefer they weren't in her life.
	Right. So why is that not something that you can express a significant desire for?
	I mean, you can't, I mean, you're part of the household, right?
	Definitely, yeah. Right? I mean, you're paying some of the bills, if not most of the bills, so you're part of the partnership.
	Why can't you just say that's the way you want it?
	I couldn't say that. I'm sure she's going to hear it now.
	Right, you are. That's true.
	And I will say this, like, I don't know if it's a husband thing, a father thing, but you are the male lion protecting the family.
	Yes. Now, this is kind of a role that's fallen away from men in this gynocentric world.
	Majority female voting society.
	But it's important.
	It's an important role for the man to take.
	You have to protect your wife.
	You have to protect your daughter.
	You don't really have the right, either of you as parents, to introduce people into your life that negatively impact your capacity to relate to your daughter.
	So if child abusers, unrepentant, I add, unrepentant, significant child abusers come into the house, your wife can't be as good a parent.
	Just can't happen. It's just, it's a fact.
	You know it, I know it, everybody knows it.
	She can't be as good a parent when she's reactivated in this traumatic way.
	And now that she's taken the Adverse Childhood Experience score and she's truly shocked about what actually happened in her childhood, it's going to be different than it was before, right?
	Yeah, I've noticed even in the last two or three days a change.
	She's going to be destabilized for a while as she's grappling with what actually happened, right?
	Yep. Now, it's going to be very different having her parents over now than it was before, because before it was unconscious.
	Now, that actually will have more of an impact, I believe, on your daughter than if it's conscious, but it's going to be more uncomfortable consciously now than it was before, right?
	Definitely. Do you have the right to bring child abusers around your daughter?
	Do you have the right as parents to introduce people into your lives that are going to negatively impact your capacity to be a good, emotionally available, unstressed parent?
	No. I don't think you have the right.
	Now, in my opinion, it's all my opinion, this doesn't mean don't see the grandparents.
	But what it does mean is that you need to have some conversations with the grandparents.
	Because if they can accept what happened, if they can deal with it, if they can maybe get some therapy, if they can find some way to apologize, this could be incredibly positive.
	Yeah, it could be positive.
	People always think, oh, I don't know, some people think that the slander is, well, I'm telling people not to.
	I'm saying go have real conversations with your in-laws.
	You may need to take the leadership role in that because she was beaten down by all this child abuse.
	But go actually have conversations about what happened.
	Go have conversations, bring up the memories, get to the facts, maybe involve the sisters if that's not too volatile.
	She's owed some apologies.
	I agree. And I think that's a good game plan.
	Now, if some apologies, some resolution, some therapy, some positive things can happen, that could be a great healing moment.
	If they shut everything down, push everything away.
	Makes the decision easy. Well, then you have another fork in the old decision tree, right?
	I mean, that's just another place to be.
	So, I think this may be time for your leadership possibility.
	An option. I mean, I know we've, I was raised in a similar way, I think, to the way you were raised, which is, I don't want to impose my will, I don't want to, it's like, but sometimes being a leader means making things happen.
	Nobody's forcing anyone, nobody's bullying anyone, but it's just, this has to happen.
	Because if you put it in the hands or in the mind or in the heart of your wife, well, she's the victim of many years of child abuse.
	It's really tough for her to be clear about any of this.
	She's scared of them.
	She's angry at them.
	They're fearful of her and the truth bombs that she has in her heart.
	So someone's got to come in who can untangle all of these complications and expecting her to be able to do it?
	I think is way too optimistic.
	And it would be kind of inhuman if she could.
	I agree. There's a little bit of a language barrier, but I'll have to find a solution to that.
	I think you might find that when you sit down to have this conversation, the language barrier might mysteriously increase.
	I'm guessing that, yeah.
	But it's worth doing it nonetheless, for the sake of your daughter, too.
	As your daughter gets older, at some point she's gonna find out what her grandparents are like, and then she's gonna have some serious questions for you guys, right?
	If the grandparents are still sticking around.
	Yeah, you're right. Because she's gonna say, they hurt mommy that much?
	And you let them come over?
	You'd be like, well, yeah.
	You know, you gotta, as a parent, your daughter's 11 months old, before you know it, she's gonna be 13.
	She's gonna be racing with hormones and she's gonna be skeptical of your authority and She's gonna look for every chink in your armor to try and find a way to dislodge you and and Overthrow you and it's natural.
	It's healthy and there may be things that but nothing this big and obvious you have to parent with the goal of Having a hormone-ridden 13 year old look at you with respect That's not easy, right?
	Right. And if I show inconsistency here, she's going to see that.
	Well, she is. And then what's happening, what's going to happen is there's going to be some bully who's going to float around your daughter at some point, or someone who treats her badly.
	And you're going to say, you need to not see that person.
	And you know what she's going to say? Well, I'm not going to have a lot of credibility in the matter, so it's going to be a conflict.
	Well, you're going to have no credibility.
	Yeah. Because she's going to say, oh, well, so what if I abuse this person for 20 years?
	Like mom's parents did.
	Well, they're still in our lives.
	So who are you to tell me?
	Who I can and cannot see.
	Who I should and shouldn't see, Dad.
	Don't end up in that situation.
	I'm just telling you. Then you'll look back and say, whoa, that was costly.
	That was costly avoidance there.
	That's a heavy price to pay.
	Yeah, I never looked at it so directly, and I shouldn't have been so passive in this.
	You're trying to be respectful, and I understand that.
	You know, we men have been programmed to give up on protection.
	We can't go around protecting our borders, which should be happening.
	But we can't protect our families.
	We can't protect our entire culture and civilizations from mass immigration, but we can at least protect our families.
	And we should.
	Because I think if enough of us do that, the borders will reassert themselves.
	But it has to start with us.
	I agree. All right.
	I agree. We'll take a different approach.
	I hope so. And please let us know how it goes.
	Thank you everyone so much.
	Thank you very much to, I'm not going to even get your name because we can keep it anonymous, but I really, really appreciate you stepping up for that part of the conversation.
	Fantastic. A massive respect to you.
	Thank you everyone so much for listening and subscribing and sharing the videos.
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	No, Twitter.com at Stefan Molyneux.
	And last but not least, The Art of the Argument, a great book you can get at theartoftheargument.com.
	Also available, of course, on Audible.
	Thank you, my lovelies, for a wonderful, wonderful conversation.

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