April 14, 2018 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
04:53:47
4056 Muscles Cured My Insecurity? - Call In Show - April 11th, 2018
Question 1: [1:57] – “I'm 28, male and I feel as though I've got low sexual market value/social value in general because of my height. After taking anabolic drugs and noticing the difference in the way people act toward me and I wonder if I've ever been respected before I ‘took the plunge.’ I'm wondering if this is the fate that befalls men like me. I've realized there is no positive word for a small man. I earn 6 figures and live in a major city and yet before my ‘transformation’ I was never approached first, was regularly rejected and was often cheated on. Since I started taking the drugs three years ago, it’s like I'm a different person. I got a fair amount of attention at the bar, had a year-and-a-half long, rocky relationship with my high school crush who'd previously ‘friendzone'd’ me, had my first three-way, and eventually met my current girlfriend who actually seems to value me. I've often battled feelings of worthlessness. I recently began to question if it was all in my head or if people actually looked at me that way. My current girlfriend even once drunkenly admitted that if I wasn't in the shape I'm in, our first date might have gone differently. I feel stuck between a rock and a hard place here. Do I keep risking my health for a ‘life worth living’, or do I stop, shrink back into my former self and go back to simply surviving?”Question 2: [2:13:16] – “Although both our political and ethical viewpoints mostly converge, unlike you, I wholeheartedly oppose anarchism. I believe libertarianism is actually a superior proponent of the non-aggression principal. That no freedom should be unnecessarily revoked, but a very small amount of regulation is required in order to sustain an ideal laissez faire, capitalist, as free as possible society. I believe that the idea of “no government" is fundamentally flawed, because humans will inevitably default to socialism or authoritarianism if no boundaries are set and so anarchy is unsustainable. I see an ideal government not as a enforcer, but as a failsafe for times where bad ideas become too popular, or when there is no incentive to not neglect them. I believe that we need to protect ourselves from ourselves, because we have severally underestimated the proportion of the population that is unqualified, by virtue of their objective intellect (IQ), to make political, economic, social and ethical decisions. Is leaving everyone to their own accord (anarchy) really viable considering the majority of the population is utterly incapable of consulting reason over emotions, or looking more than a few weeks into the future?”Question 3: [3:24:21] – “I have been in a relationship with my boyfriend for 18 months now. I am a Christian and he is an atheist. We have been able to have really good conversations, and while we don't agree on many things, we have been at least able to dialogue about it reasonably. Now though he is often bored and disinterested in our conversations. He swears that all I ever want to discuss is work, health, and ‘babies’ and he just doesn't care. I have tried to stimulate conversations about things he is interested in, but he feels like I'm unable to contribute to the conversation enough about things like politics, economics, history, and philosophy so he claims that he just gave up trying. Now I have lost some confidence in my ability to be an interesting, intelligent conversationalist. Do you have any advice for how to improve in that area? Is there something wrong with me that I am unable to keep up with him in this regard or are we just incompatible intellectually?”Your support is essential to Freedomain Radio, which is 100% funded by viewers like you. Please support the show by making a one time donation or signing up for a monthly recurring donation at: http://www.freedomainradio.com/donate
Hope you're doing well. Are you ready for a lengthy show?
Are you ready for some lengthy calls?
It's a long show. Three callers, two lengthy ones with a sandwich debate that was ferocious and great right there in the middle.
The first caller... He's short by his own admission and he found that he got girls and got attention and got positive feedback by getting jacked, by getting muscular, by getting ripped.
And he's just wondering where he takes things from now and we started talking a lot about exercise and height and sexual market value and then where we went was a really great ride and I really appreciate his hanging in there for that conversation.
The second caller was wondering if I thought that a stateless society, or if there was a tiny chance a stateless society would turn bad, would go bad, would be a disaster, would I withdraw my support for said society?
This kind of consequentialism is something that, well, let's just say he was really, really great at debating, and we had a good back and forth.
I hope it clarifies at least my positions and stimulates some thought.
In your mind along those lines.
Now the third caller is a woman.
Her boyfriend was supposed to join us for the call, but he didn't.
And she's kind of a sixes and sevens about the relationship.
There are value differences, but they seem to be quite wedded to each other.
So if you've got questions about your relationship, or you know someone who does, well that's the call for you to listen to.
So Thanks so much to the callers.
Thank you guys so much for making all of this possible.
Freedomainradio.com slash donate.
Please, please help out the show.
A subscription or a one-time donation.
Very, very much appreciated.
Freedomainradio.com slash donate.
Alright, well up first today we have John.
John wrote in and said, I'm 28 male and feel as though I've got low sexual market value slash social value in general because of my height.
After taking anabolic drugs and noticing the difference in the way people act towards me, I wonder if I've ever been respected before I took the plunge.
I'm wondering if this is the fate that befalls men like me.
I've realized there is no positive world for a small man.
I earn six figures and live in a major city, and before my transformation I was never approached first, was regularly rejected, and was often cheated on.
Since I started taking drugs three years ago, it's like I'm a different person.
I got a fair amount of attention at the bar, had a year and a half long rocky relationship with my high school crush, who previously friendzoned me, had my first three-way, and eventually met my current girlfriend who actually seems to value me.
I've often battled feelings of worthlessness.
I've recently begun to question if it was all in my head or if people actually looked at me that way.
My current girlfriend once even drunkenly admitted that if I wasn't in the shape I'm in, our first date might have gone differently.
I feel stuck between a rock and a hard place.
Do I keep risking my health for a life worth living?
Or do I stop, shrink back to my former self, and go back to simply surviving?
That's from John.
Well, hey John, how you doing?
Not bad, not bad.
Actually, when I wrote that, wow, that actually sounds really bleak to hear right now.
When I wrote that, I was off and considering starting up another cycle, and I have since, and that definitely makes me a little bit more manic, less depressive.
So, I'm doing pretty good today.
So, let's talk a little bit about just some of the physical stuff that you're working with.
What's your height? I'm 5'6", on a good day.
5'6", so still slightly towering over Mark Zuckerberg.
I think he's got an inch on me actually.
I think he has an inch on you, that's right.
And what was your frame before you started working out so hard?
I was working out since I was a teenager, actually.
And I was still stocky.
I was always a little bit overweight, even when I was younger.
I would say 15, 16 was when I started actually paying attention to what I was eating.
And I lost a fair amount of weight.
But at that point, I had already put actual stretch marks on myself that, to this day, are still there.
And at like 17, I started hitting the gym and by the time I was like 24, 25, I noticed the improvements had just stopped.
Pretty much stopped. How far did you get?
Sorry, I just want to get this sort of track, this bit by bit.
I never had abs until I used...
Hang on, hang on. Let me get my question.
How much did you weigh at your heaviest?
My heaviest? 198 pounds, actually.
I bought a scale one day, stepped on it, and decided that was the end of it.
Yeah, it's good before you break two bills at 5'6".
It's a good thing to gear back, right?
Yeah, I was about as wide as I am tall.
Alright, so then you hit the gym, and how hard did you hit it?
Really hard. I started doing cardio where I had a...
There was a heart monitor on the bike, and I was actually regularly pushing my heart rate over 200 beats per minute, and that's drug-free.
So, yeah. Were you mostly working on cardio, or you were doing weights as well?
In the beginning, I worked on a lot of cardio, and I feel like that actually helped.
And then when I did transition over to the weights, I had a pretty...
I mean, not an easy time, but like...
A good time with it.
My best bench clean was about 200 pounds.
I weighed about 150-140 pounds at the time.
Give me a sense of your regimen on a weekly basis.
I assume that there were some dietary changes involved here as well.
What was your regimen like? I don't eat any carbs at all.
I haven't for almost this entire time.
There's no bread in my house.
There's low-carb tortillas that are almost entirely made out of fiber and protein.
And cardboard, if I remember rightly.
It tastes pretty good if you fry a burger in them.
I just don't eat carbs.
I don't eat any sugar. I actually stopped drinking a soda the other day when I realized that the vanilla flavoring they put in it had sugar in it, and I just didn't finish it.
Oh, and the aspartame is hell on your system.
Aspartame is actually protein.
Would you believe that?
I would not, but I believe it because you're a listener and you're telling me.
So that's how gullible I might be.
Phenylalanine and aspartic acid, both of which are amino acids.
Right. Okay, so that's your diet.
And what about your exercise routine?
What was that? For a while, it was every other day.
It didn't matter what day of the week it was, I would be in the gym one day resting the next.
And then eventually, before I did anything, I took on an everyday workout where I was working out six days a week and on Fridays I would do yoga to stretch my muscles back out.
Because doing that much weightlifting can actually shorten your muscles a little bit and kill your flexibility.
They call it muscle-bound, right?
Yeah. Can you scratch your back?
Why, no, I can't. Thank you very much.
I was noticing that, and I had to do something, so the yoga was that did that.
But I still noticed that I was hitting a ceiling.
Again, maybe 24, where my bench wasn't getting any better, my squat wasn't getting...
None of my main lifts were even...
I wasn't improving aesthetically or physically.
It wasn't going nowhere.
And, you know, I still wasn't getting as much attention as I might like, as much as other people were getting, you know?
And I know you shouldn't really compare yourself to others, but, like, as soon as I did that, like, you know, I was like, wow, what is the problem here, you know?
You know, I'm not of the same philosophy that you shouldn't compare.
Of course you should compare yourself to others.
What are we supposed to compare ourselves to?
Sea sponges? Clouds?
Butterflies? Of course we're supposed to compare ourselves to each other.
You don't want to go overboard, but I think this idea you shouldn't at all is kind of crazy.
In my particular...
Because if you don't compare yourself to anyone at all, then what standard do you have?
You may have abstract philosophical standards, sure, but very few people have those.
What are you supposed to compare yourself to if not another human being?
It's just my particular perspective.
But at the same time, of course, you don't want to only compare yourself to others, right?
Like there's a whole bunch of other metrics that you want to work with, but I'm not of the opinion, just throwing that in there, that you shouldn't compare yourself.
I mean, it's going to happen anyway.
We're a tribal species.
Of course we're going to compare ourselves to others.
You know, if I'm out there looking at someone's YouTube views and I see their views and if I'm looking at their subscriber count or how big their show is or, you know, how long their book's been number one on Amazon, good job, JP. Well, of course you're going to compare yourself to others.
It doesn't mean that you've got to eat yourself alive with jealousy or smug superiority, but I don't know.
It's like life is a race.
You know, you're supposed to compare yourself to others when you're racing.
This is true. This is true.
What kind of...
I mean, just because I'm a bit of a workout geek myself, but were you using mostly free weights?
Were you using machines? What did you focus on?
Were you doing a lot of repetitions of short heavy weights kind of thing?
Or were you going more for longer?
What were you looking for? My workout was basically all free weights.
I barely ever touched any machines.
Just the chest fly one.
I would do a range of things.
When I really wanted to get stronger and I wasn't getting any stronger, I was feeding myself like 3,000 calories a day.
I didn't care how fat I was getting.
I put on like 40 pounds in three months.
Sometimes I would do five sets of five reps.
Sometimes I would go up to 12 sets of eight reps or vice versa, eight sets of 12 reps on the bench.
The squat I would never do too heavy because I never, like, I mean, I don't have chicken legs and I'm not going to get them, you know.
No, and you may want to use your knees after 40.
Yeah. You know, there may be a life plan that involves bending them, so that can be important.
Like, I know a couple, they were ski instructors and, you know, boy, they looked great in Aspen in the 1980s, but man, now watching them try to get around is not pretty.
Yeah, I can only imagine what that must be like.
I like to ski, but I'm never going to instruct anyone in it.
Right. Right. No, I remember when I was bulking up for playing Macbeth when I was in my 20s.
I mean, I did six reps maximum weight, like to the point where I could barely lift the last one.
Six reps of six.
And now I mostly do...
More reps and fewer repetitions because I'm just sort of in maintenance mode.
I'm not going to pretend I'm going to sort of bulk up in my 50s or whatever.
But I was just kind of wondering.
So you were really working, were you working for muscle growth in particular?
Yes. Right. Muscle growth and fat loss.
Like I wanted to be cut.
Like I was adding a lot of fat during that time when I was like overfeeding myself and like I was hitting the gym for three hours at a time, like three or four times a week.
I wanted to put on as much muscle as possible and cut it all off.
And then when I did cut, cutting is like a term in bodybuilding with cutting weight.
When I did cut, I took it off in three months.
So I gained and lost about 40 pounds in the span of three months.
And there was, I mean, there was an improvement there, but like I looked at it, I was like, wow, like it's not as much as I had expected.
Like a lot of it was, a lot more of it was fat than I wanted it to be.
Well, and of course, when you're at the gym, and you're looking at the monster troids who have to turn sideways to get through doors, and if they drop soap in the shower, it's like, ah, just leave it there.
I'll go get some new soap. I can't bend over to pick it up.
Not out of fear, just out of...
And I almost wanted the x-ray vision.
It depends the gym you're going to, right?
If you go to some real, like, the whole point is to move metal in a dark place, that kind of gym.
I almost wanted to x-ray and see, okay, How much of you is natural and how much of you is enhanced?
Like that's kind of what, because there's some guys you know for sure, they ain't getting that just by moving weights.
But I was always kind of confused.
I was always curious about that.
You got to look at guys who have exaggerated deltoids and pectoral muscles because there's a lot of androgen receptors in those muscles.
They're going to react to drugs like that way quicker than others.
So if their deltoids and pectoral muscles are disproportionately large, that's an easy tell.
Also, you can tell, personally, I don't inject, but I have a mark on my delt because there was a zit there.
But if you see a red mark on someone's shoulder, then that generally means that they did something there.
Also, if they're, like, ridiculously lean, that is actually way more difficult, and it's way easier with drugs than most people will let on.
Like, that Fight Club look, I wouldn't say it would take anabolic drugs to get that, but it would take fat-cutting drugs for the average genetic person.
Oh, there are the genetic freaks.
Yeah, no. Don't get me wrong, but that's such a small segment.
They have that paper skin and no subcutaneous fat and so on, but that's pretty rare.
Yeah, I know someone like that.
He lifts weight, and everybody accuses him of being on something for that reason, but he looked like an Ethiopian starving child from a commercial growing up.
I've lived in the same town a long time, so all the people I know now are people I've known forever.
No, they're the people who just complain that they eat and they eat and they eat and then they can't gain weight and they're actually very healthy until they're killed by obese people and then the jury of obese people will never convict anyone.
It's like, oh yes, he was just complaining all the time about, hey, eat and eat and never gain weight so I sat on his face.
Yay, ragged cheer goes up from the southern contingent.
You plateaued, right?
And you weren't physically where you wanted to be.
So what happened then? I kind of got like an eating disorder type of thing where I kind of got a little anorexic because I wanted to have abs so badly.
Like, that was just one thing I wanted to do.
Well, technically, you have them.
No matter what. You know, a guy who's 300 pounds has abs.
They're just... They're kind of like you have abs like you have dinosaur bones.
Only an archaeologist can find them.
Yeah. Yeah. Actually, there's one almost missing.
It turns out the six-pack standard is the golden standard.
There's a lot of genetic variation there because it wasn't really selected on during the way we evolved.
You could actually be missing an entire pectoral muscle.
Thank God I don't. A lot of people don't.
Most people don't. My abs kind of look a little wonky and crooked.
It's not the worst thing in the world, though.
It's still better than not having them.
So, you wanted abs, and this was your holy quest.
Now, just out of curiosity, though, what do you think gave you the willpower?
Because, you know, people who don't adjust their lifestyle.
I mean, a lot of people, you know, there's always this fantasy, I guess, when you're in junior high or high school.
It's like... I'm going to work out all summer.
I'm going to brush my teeth.
I'm going to get a great tan.
I'm going to get fantastic haircuts, fantastic clothes, and I'm going to come back unrecognizable in the fall.
They're going to think I'm the new haunt model.
But everyone has these kinds of I'm going to change, I'm going to improve, I'm going to do stuff.
And, you know, maybe they do it for a day or a week or a month.
But what was it that gave you, do you think, the willpower to keep going with this?
I remember exactly the day...
The day that, like, because I was already hitting the gym at that point, and, like, I wasn't, like, serious about it yet, but it was, like, a power outage at my house, and I had no computer.
Like, I'm, like, addicted to the internet.
Like, I tell people I'm from there first, and then reality second.
I can't complain about that, because, you know, we may never be chatting otherwise.
Yeah. Like, I'm a digital being.
I didn't even go to school, and I'm programming for a living, but...
So, I'm sitting there, I'm like, alright, my brain is the only computer I can fuck with, so I... I took a little bit of LSD and I was staring in the mirror because what else am I going to do?
I'm just going over how my life is.
At that point, my high school girlfriend was still a friend of mine, but we weren't seeing each other.
We just spoke every once in a while.
I actually started seeing someone else and that ended badly not too long before that.
And I just was like, I can't let this continue.
I don't want to kill myself, but it's either I die or I might as well.
I might as well be dead as living that life because spiritually I would be dead living that life.
And I was just so viscerally horrified about letting that continue that I just physically couldn't anymore.
And that's, it wasn't really a decision to change.
It was really just, I was, I visualized the alternative very clearly.
And I was like, I don't want to live like that.
Right. Your balls panicked.
Everything panicked, man.
I mean, I was tripping my ass off.
So like, yeah, but like, I feel like even to this day, that message rings clear in my head and it wasn't like a misguided, delusional message at all.
Looking back, I would be afraid to live like I was living.
I had a stack of Domino's boxes on my table as tall as I was.
It was bad, dude.
What do you mean? What does that mean?
Domino's is a pizza, a fast-food pizza place around here, nationwide.
Sorry, man. I thought you meant the...
I guess I was spending too much time around my door.
I thought you meant the game, Domino's.
Hey, man, that tells me how you come from a healthy environment that you don't think pizza when you hear Domino's.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You got your carbs, you got your fats, and you got your well-oiled meats.
Yeah, there's actually barely any meat on that.
It's pretty much a slice of bread with, like, pizza flavor spread on the side.
Yeah, yeah. So you panicked, you freaked out, and then is it fair to say you took it too far?
I mean, there was like years in between the day I really decided to dedicate myself to like being physically fit and like the eating disorder and then ultimately the anabolic drug use.
But I mean, I guess you could say that, yeah, like I've maybe like fallen off a cliff and haven't really built the airplane entirely yet.
Don't have an end game plan.
Now, the steroid use, I mean, it helps you bulk, but also it helps you, your muscles heal faster so you can put them back to work quicker, right?
Yes. Oh, wow.
Yeah, and not only that, you can actually gain muscle while losing fat, which is pretty much impossible for like 95% of people.
Right. Clean. And how quickly did it change once you made that transition?
How quickly did your body change?
I was benching like 185, 200 pounds for like years.
That was, like, my max. And, like, immediately, like, two months after, I'm up to, like, a 225, 235-pound bench.
And, like, by the end of that year, I'm benching, like, 300 pounds.
You know what? It's like getting some Terminator exoskeleton of infinite strength, you know?
Bro, that's why I call people who do this shit robots, because we are technology.
This is non-natural.
Yeah. Yeah, and it's basically like an injectable boob job for men.
I mean, that's the scary thing.
There's these new designers.
I'm not sure if I can say the names of them while I'm here.
No, don't. But just the new designers, yeah.
Yeah, they're all oral and they don't fuck with your liver.
It's crazy. Don't get me wrong.
Before I did this, I walked into my doctor's office like, I want a full nutrient panel because I wanted to make sure I wasn't deficient in anything because you can't be superhuman unless you're human first.
I want a full nutrient panel on all my hormones.
And I want a full STD test, you know, just in case.
And, you know, I found that my testosterone was like 353.75 naturally, which is on the low end of normal, which means they don't have to give you anything because you're not technically diagnosable.
But I felt that was low.
And so, you know, I actually picked up a couple of tricks to raise that up with drugs and then added, like, other anabolic drugs that would otherwise suppress my testosterone over that.
And I created this little cycle that, like, it really, it fucking works.
And, like, I noticed I hadn't done, I do one usually every, I'm on two months and off one month.
I do four times a year.
And, like, I skipped one this year and I noticed how much size I lost.
It fucking scared me, dude. Like, that's why I'm on one now.
Yeah, and it's, you know, I've talked about how if you're obese and you lose the weight, sometimes you end up with this excess belly rolls.
I guess some concern, I mean, looking at Schwarzenegger now, I mean, you can see the skin expansion that happened with his muscles and how it, you know, when you deflate, you're kind of like the old balloon.
Well, I'm not looking to get, like, Arnold big.
Like, I was originally looking to get Fight Club big, quote-unquote, and now I look at a picture of Tyler Durden and I'm like, he's small.
Lean, but small. I'm pretty much as big as I ever want to be.
I've been that way for about a year.
I'm in maintenance mode right now as well, I guess.
I'm running lower levels of what I was running just to get right back to where I was and get everything back to where it was.
That's the thing, man. Where it was.
When I first had that, I was so satisfied with it and so was everyone else.
The girl that I mentioned that She was the crush in high school friends on me.
This was a girl I had seen every single day for 12 fucking years.
You know what I mean? And then all of a sudden something happens between us.
How much is that going to fuck with your head?
Something like that should never happen psychologically to a person.
Oh, John, John, John.
What's happened, and I know this one very well as well, but what happened, John, is you got a terrifying view into just how fucking shallow the world actually is.
Oh, yeah, man.
Look at the qualities of my personality, my intellect, my ethics, my integrity.
Look what a great person I am!
Yes! Oh, look!
I got a muscle! Oh, lovely.
Oh, man. It is a shallow, shallow planet out there, people.
I went through one of these transformations myself.
I won't get into the details, but I went from ugly duckling to swan.
And I went from a nobody to the everybody.
I went from being not even in the orbit to the center of the universe when it came to sexual market value and what changed.
A little working out, better clothes, better haircut.
I mean, you just do one of those transformations.
It happened for me in my mid-teens.
And it was like, no, how was I? I was, you know, maybe 14 or so.
And I, like, literally came into school the next day, and people thought I was the new kid.
Like, no, I went from, like, the bowl haircut to the high sweep and all that.
And it's like, boom!
Suddenly, you're on the map.
You're on the radar. And suddenly, there's almost no girl.
That you can't ask out who at least is going to give you a second glance.
And it is terrifying to look at just how much the world talks about quality of character and it only really cares about tape measures, let's put it as nicely as possible.
It's just as much a lie as the fucking food pyramid that has the fucking bread at the very bottom.
This is, you know, make sure the farmers get their money and eat seven fucking servings of carbs a day.
Yeah, that's right. Bread's at the bottom because it goes straight to your ass.
Yep, yep, yep.
So yeah, no, it is a terrifyingly shallow planet out there.
And this is why, you know, when, you know, we got another call coming up for this, so I won't rant on this fully, because I got one nice and stored up, like a cobra's venom in my cheeks here.
But, you know, when women are like, don't you objectify us!
It's like, man, you're 5'6".
You're 5'6".
And women are like, don't just look at us as sex objects.
Don't objectify us. Look at our characters.
Look at our personalities. John, how did things change for you when you bulked up?
Yeah, no. They love it now.
It's crazy. They love...
I feel bad doing it to my girlfriend, but after doing this and Because it changed my personality.
I'm not going to say it didn't.
Like, I'm a more aggressive person in general, and I need to rein that in.
But that's because you've got traction.
Yeah, but I'm also like, sexually, girls just love being treated like shit.
It's scary. No, no, no, no.
It's like... No, I've got to be precise.
No, no, hang on. No, no.
There are some women who get off on being treated like shit, but only by a guy with muscles.
See, you've got to have some status.
In order to treat them like crap and have them like it if that's what they're into.
You can't be some, you know, 300-pound neckbeard guy and treat women like crap.
Like, that won't work at all. You've got to have something they want in order for them to surrender their self-esteem in that way.
Yeah, I often say that, like, if I met myself from 10 years ago, we would try to kill each other based on, like, our values and sense of what is, like, should be and shouldn't be done.
And I often say that I would win.
But yeah, that's how different I see the world now.
It's crazy. Yeah, so let's get a couple of before and afters when you really bulked out what was the change in how women perceived you.
Because remember, women are deep and sensitive, and they love to talk, and they love to listen, and they love to really get to know a man, and they don't like judging on shallow appearance and so on.
So why don't you tell us how it made no difference for women, or perhaps they got a little less turned on by you because, you see, you were manifesting a kind of insecurity that was a turn-off.
Go through John's experience of women after bulking up.
Well, beforehand, remember, I'm a programmer, and I've been doing this, like, over 10 years at this point.
I've always, you know, done well for myself.
I dressed well. I kept myself well.
And I was doing that, you know, I would say from, like, 20, 21, 22 on.
So I've always been, like, I had an eye for fashion and all that.
And, like, I would go to the bars and, you know, I would get conversation with And, you know, at the end of the night, there would be a goodbye and that would be it a lot of the time.
One time it was hilarious. And you get those conversations with the woman where she's scanning the room to see if there's anyone better to talk to?
Yeah. It's like, well, I'll put up with you for now just because, you know, I like attention, but I'm still scanning.
The radar is on. Yeah, or we all happen to be in a group and then the group eventually breaks off and then you realize you're just talking to three other guys.
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Afterwards, one time I went on vacation in Texas, and at that time I had a girlfriend, so I had to turn this girl down.
She literally just came up to me with a shot in her hand and said, want a shot?
I was like, wow, all right. We did shots, but I didn't go home with her.
It was really like that.
After this past election, we were having a party slash cry-in for two different groups at the bar over here.
And this girl just has her hand on my chest like, I am madly attracted to you right now.
She literally said that.
And I'm like, wow.
Wow. In my head.
You have to keep a certain attitude on your face, no matter what you're thinking.
Because remember who I still am inside.
I'm still that shrimp with the skinny arms and the fat belly.
So having that view through this, it's mind-boggling.
It's mind-boggling to see. And it's not just women either.
It's literally everyone.
People trust me more.
People think of me. People respect me.
People listen when I speak.
It's insane. I used to be in meetings where I would be talked over, and I knew what the right way to do things was.
I knew what the right way to do things was.
Remember, I'm programming over 10 years.
And if you count my hobbyist shit, I've had a website on the internet since 1999.
It's not the same website, but I've always had one or another.
I actually had one that was like, rate my teachers, but the main advertising thing was it was unmoderated when I was in middle school, and they got real pissed about that, but they never found out it was me.
Right. But anyway, yeah, just even in a job interview, I got...
I got three offers at the same time this past time when I went looking for work and I had to turn two people down last minute because the third person to call me had to choose your offer and everybody got mad but I wasn't too worried about it.
No, it's really hard to understand the world if you've never gone through this kind of transformation.
It really is. Because if you, let's just say you're born, you know, thin, beautiful, rich or whatever, then you always have people blow and smoke up your ass and you don't really know the difference and you mistake the accidental circumstance for some sort of personal value or what you do is you say, well, people respond positively to me and then you talk to people without your natural advantages and you say, well, you just need to do what I did.
And it's like, no, that's not the way that it actually works.
So if you have these natural advantages, and then you have some kind of fall from grace, like maybe you get overweight from some illness or some medication, or maybe your family loses the money, or you lose your money, or maybe you lose your prestige or your status in some manner.
And then, or maybe you lose your hair, if that's something of real concern to you.
And then what happens is, you see how the world transforms based upon appearance.
Or if you do, I guess, as you and I did, go from relatively innocuous to high sexual market value, you realize, man, it is one shallow planet we live on.
And you can rail against it all you want, but it's still a fact.
And you can rail against aging and gravity, but you still got to take them into account when you go about your daily life.
I hate that there are other drivers on the road, yes, but if you pretend there aren't, you won't live for very long.
So, it's seeing just how shallow the world is, is an astonishing wake-up call.
And it's something that's really tempered my philosophy, which is...
Why I do talk about, you know, the need for appearance, the need for good health and exercise.
It matters. It's good for you as well.
But it matters because the world is so relentlessly shallow.
And of course it would be because very few people are philosophical.
And so what do they make their decisions on?
Well, base mammalian status signals like height or wealth or teeth or muscles in this case.
And it's inescapable.
Yeah, honestly, when I see someone who's morbidly obese, I immediately think that that has a psychological basis and that there are other things that they maybe shouldn't be trusted with.
And that's not to say that they're bad people with moral failings, but there might be some sort of neurological miswiring that might cause not only that, but other problems.
Well, this is why I asked you, John, about the willpower.
Because what the muscles say to someone is...
Willpower. That's what turns on the women.
Not the muscles themselves, but what they represent.
They represent willpower and the will to dominance.
Now, of course, there is a very primitive center of the female brain that responds to muscles because it indicates an alpha warrior and, you know, in a time of war and blah-de-blah.
Although, of course, when it comes to resources, the fact that you can program is much more important than the fact that you can move metal.
But it signifies willpower.
And when we look at somebody, Obese.
I mean, I'll just tell you my particular thoughts.
When I look at somebody who's obese, I say, okay, well...
If their family's obese, then that's a problem that has now become genetic.
And there's no one around them who's saying, you should stop eating.
They don't have enough someone around them who loves them enough to say, you've got to stop, you've got to fix things, you've got to deal with things, you've got to change things.
Or, you know, their doctor's saying to them, but they're not listening, and also somebody who won't defer gratification.
And I'm just going to assume less intelligence based on that.
It's not absolute. There are smart people who are fat, and there are dumb people who are thin.
But in general, there is a trend that the smarter you are, the less likely you are to be overweight.
So it is a big marker to me of genetics, of family, of relationship to food, deferral of gratification, because everybody knows that there's prejudice against overweight people.
Everybody knows that. And so why you would willingly step into that is kind of beyond me.
Yeah. And being not obese, I mean, I'm not sure if that would...
198 pounds at 5'6 is obese.
I'm not sure. But having been that weight and then having not been that weight...
And then being very thin.
When I say eating disorder, I got down to 135 pounds at one point.
Wow. I was starving myself, man.
I literally was eating nothing but egg whites at one point.
They were cooked, but nothing.
Nothing but egg whites while working out?
Yeah. Like cardio and weightlifting every day.
How did you have the energy to do it?
When you have adrenaline in your system, Talking anything.
I am borrowing from the future.
Thank you very much. Pretty much.
Now, let's talk a little bit about the height thing.
And one of the best men at my wedding is your height.
And we've had long conversations.
About it. And it is something that, like, I'm just under six foot, so for me it's not such a big issue.
But I have talked about it with him, and he has said that it is a huge issue that's invisible to people who don't experience it.
And he once quoted to me a show where they, it was like a dating show.
This is sort of way back in the day.
And they had a guy who was like six foot two and a guy who was like five seven or something like that.
And in order to get the women to choose the 5'7 guy, he had to be both a millionaire and a doctor.
Jesus Christ. Right, so you can just be 6'2, or you can be 5'7, but then you have to be a millionaire doctor as well.
And then you get the equivalent of 6'2.
Like, it's insane just how height cyst women are.
It's mental.
It's absolutely crazy how heightest women are.
And height for men is like, I don't know, boobs for women, if you're a boob man, right?
And it is something that is so undiscussed in the field.
Because, you know, women, of course, you know, pretend to be these delicate flowers of, you know, looking into people's souls and stuff like that.
Oh, yeah, they're deep insensitive, but that's literal.
Yeah. I get it.
But yeah, so let's talk about the height thing because that is a huge deal for women, particularly if the woman wants to put her ass on a shelf by wearing heels.
She has a big problem with a short guy.
And I don't know if it's a problem in terms of just her or whether being short is such low sexual market value for men that the woman feels humiliated to date one.
You know, the thing is, women like to get thrown around a little bit, and they don't think you're able to do it if you're not a decent amount larger than them.
I've been blessed with having a lot of female friends growing up, and there's this one girl I've known for over 20 years, and she literally said that to me once.
She's like, that's just how it is.
It's just how it is. They like to be physically dominated, and if you don't seem capable of doing that, they won't even consider you.
Huh. Right.
And to me, I mean, that's obviously kind of shallow and all of that.
But to me, it would be okay if we could just be honest about it.
And everyone knows, like, the pretty girl is with the tall guy.
That's just the way it kind of works.
And if it's not, I remember a guy once showed me a picture, how do you tell a millionaire from behind?
And it's like, there's this fat guy, but he's got this beautiful, you know, tight-ass woman on his arm.
And so, to me, it would just be, you know, just be honest.
Just be honest. Just be honest and say that you want guys who are bigger than you, and you want guys who make more money than you, and you want guys who are more educated than you.
If women had been honest about that, then the trap of feminism, which is go make a lot of money, get really, really well educated, and then be older and try and get a quality guy.
Like the fact that the more educated and higher earnings the women get...
The more they need guys who are more educated and earn more than them, who are in dwindling supply.
And of course, when men are in short supply and there's great demand, then men play the field, right?
They don't settle down, right?
That's why I laugh at feminism.
I laugh at feminism because it tries to put women up on this pedestal.
Meanwhile, it just turns them into whores.
Go on. Like, you literally, like, if you want to find a girl that you can pry open with, like, two or three drinks, you just find the fucking feminist.
Honestly, you're not going to find ones that are too pretty after college, but just find a bar that's near a college and just wait until the rhetoric starts coming out or find the one with the green hair or some shit like that.
They become feminists because the sexual liberation aspect of it is literally the most wonderful thing that they've ever heard in their lives because they have fucking daddy issues.
Well, there are selected, so sex is more important than self-respect.
Sexual drive is higher. And of course, this is why our selected women want to pretend that they're men, and then they think they can do that, and then they emotionally wreck themselves, and then they blame the patriarchy.
Sex is also a commodity, and when everybody's giving it away, its value drops.
And if they want to feel special, and the only thing they have is sexual market value, then obviously it's not going to cost too much to get it from them.
I mean, I hate to phrase it so transactionally, but if you study sociologically transactionally, that's how it fucking gets phrased.
And, you know, I haven't actually formally studied anything, but I've read a book or two.
Right, right. How did the threesome come about?
Um, I, uh, cocaine.
Uh, yeah, it was literally, like, I was at a, I was at a, uh, like, kind of a rave.
It was not a very big show.
It was one of, it was a great drum and bass artist, uh, and a bunch of other people who were awesome, but I forget their names.
And... I was dancing with this one girl and she seemed to me.
She was maybe a good six inches shorter than me.
She was five foot nothing at best.
And she was pretty cute.
And then we were on the way out of the bar at the end of the show and she just happened to be in town with her friend.
They were both from Boston.
And so they tell me, wait, wait, before we get in the cab, we got to call the guy for the stuff.
And I pulled it out of my pocket.
I'm like, is this the stuff you guys got to call the other guy for?
And they're like, yeah, never mind.
Let's get in the cab. And we go back to their hotel, like, across the water in Manhattan.
Turns out there were these pretty well-to-do college girls.
And I was with the one I was with originally, the brunette, on the bed.
They had rented a hotel room with one queen-size bed to save money.
So the other girl was just sitting by the window texting.
And I just literally turn over to her.
I'm like, come over here.
And she's like, no, it's all right.
And I just kind of grab her by the head.
I'm like, no, come over here. And then she's like, all right.
And she gets up and she just gets in the bed and...
They literally said they have never done anything like that before, and it was kind of obvious.
They were kind of awkward with each other, but it was cute.
It ended up being a good 14-hour celebration of flesh.
Right. Kind of a pharmacy there, brother.
Oh, yeah, man.
You don't know the half of it.
I enjoy drugs.
I pride myself on drugs.
I've been addicted physically to drugs, but not psychologically.
I shattered my leg, my ankle, when I was a teenager.
I was prescribed Percocet for that.
And I had gotten physically addicted.
When I stopped taking it, I withdrew really hard.
But I was like, all right, if that's what that's going to do to me, I don't want to take it any longer because then it's just going to be worse.
And I just stopped. And then the same thing happened after that previous breakup with emotional painkillers instead of physical painkillers.
And like, oh my god, benzo withdrawals are scary, dude.
Like, I had a seizure.
I threw up all over the place.
My heart was racing for days and days and days before I could, you know, even function.
I actually got a decent amount of sick time from work because of it.
Like, my doctor said, he needs about, like, four weeks off to, like, get off of the shit.
Yeah, that's nasty stuff.
Yeah, don't ever take benzos.
I don't care how bad your life is.
They're only going to make it worse. The only thing they can do is defer that.
Well, it's a medication generation, right?
I mean, there's kids on this stuff that's basically meth.
You know, they use it to do better on exams.
And it's like, you know, that's just because it ain't as concentrated doesn't mean it's as good.
It's better for you. Paul Ordos took it, but he was an adult too.
He was making his own choice.
I don't think we should be giving it to children, but I don't think it should be unavailable either.
Yeah, well. Again, I don't think you should really need to go put your name in somebody's book and say you're taking it.
I don't really believe in doctors.
Well, I believe in doctors. I don't believe in prescriptions.
Now, your childhood was a mess, right?
Oh yeah, single mom and shit.
My father was a good guy, though.
We went to live with him for a decent portion of it.
Your father was a good guy.
My father's a great guy. My mother's a piece of shit.
Why would your father choose your mother if he's a great guy?
Come on, man.
You know there's no bigger choice that you make in your life that affects someone else than who you choose to be the mother of your children.
You're right. You're right.
I think he's accepted and more than made up for his mistake, though.
I can't say a bad word about the guy.
Does he know about your drug use and your enhancements for weightlifting?
Not explicitly, but I mean, we've talked about...
He's accused me of using it.
He's suspected it.
And what did you say? I told him I wasn't, because I didn't want to disappoint him.
So he's a great guy, but he doesn't know the heart and soul of your life at the moment.
You lie to him about things that are important.
I mean, I don't think the fact that I'm lying to him is a negative reflection on him.
It's a negative reflection on your relationship with him.
Yeah. So why?
What happens if you tell them the truth?
I think you would be really disappointed in me.
Are you disappointed in you?
I am. Okay, so that's the issue, right?
It doesn't matter if he's disappointed in you.
If you're not disappointed in you, I mean, every time I post a video, people are disappointed in me.
I've gone the wrong direction and I've sold out and I'm a shill.
This happens. But because I'm comfortable with what I'm doing, right?
If you're comfortable with what you're doing, then other people's disappointment don't matter as much.
Doesn't matter as much. But if you're not telling your father because you're afraid of his disappointment, I think probably the real truth is that you're afraid of confronting your own disappointment, right?
I don't think that's too far from the truth.
That's a very delicate way of not responding.
Yeah, it's a little bit of a touchy subject, you're right.
Why is it touchy? Because I didn't really pick these up lightly, man.
I am deathly afraid of needles, so it's not even like I was against that.
Viscerally, I couldn't do it. My hand would be too shaky.
So when I found out about these, it was like, all right.
I know what website I can buy them from.
I can type that in.
Anytime. You can buy it.
And, like, I looked at that for a good six months.
And, like, my life wasn't so bad.
I was doing it. And, like, at one point, I was just so fucking depressed.
It was like, alright. I mean, for some people in my neighborhood, they do heroin or they kill themselves.
I was like, alright. Instead of killing myself or doing some fucking crazy painkiller drug, let me see what that's like.
Let me see what that life is like.
And, uh... And now that I know what it's like, it's not something I want to give up.
When you were that depressed, did you talk to your father about it?
Yeah, I did. How did that go?
Is he short? He's got an inch.
He's about an inch tall than me.
Right. And...
I mean, he says, you know, there's nothing you can do about it.
You know, the best thing you can do is you can pick up and, you know, make tomorrow better than yesterday.
Not overly helpful.
Is that fair to put it that way?
I mean, yeah, like, he did his best in his life, you know?
Like, how am I supposed to expect much more?
You know, he worked his ass off.
He did physical labor.
I come from a long line of ironworkers.
I'm the first person in my family who doesn't do work with his hands.
Right. Well, you kind of do, because it's not like you lift the weights with a keyboard, but I know what you mean.
Yeah, everybody does work with their hands, but I work with my brain.
No, I just meant weightlifting is working with your hands.
Oh, yeah, but that's a fucking hobby.
I don't compete.
There's people who get paid for this shit.
So... You ended up turning to addictive behavior, whether it's the working out or the drugs or the Anorexia or whatever, you ended up turning to extreme and probably addicted behavior.
To deal with low sexual market value, is that a fair way to put it?
I would say that, yeah, before I was dealing with it internally like that by torturing myself and trying to be as extreme and addictive in a way that would change the way I felt.
Because when you haven't eaten in two days, you get high over that, as horrible as that is to say.
It's like, why do people fast, I guess, in the East and shit?
But, like, now it feels different because instead of the feelings being internally generated, I'm literally changing the way people feel about me by doing this.
Yeah, no, I mean, you've taken control, for sure.
Yeah. Alright, so tell me what happened with the girlfriend you said that was like a rollercoaster relationship.
Oh, the crazy one? Not the current one.
Yeah, the crazy one. The one that I had a crush on in high school.
Her and I, we were great friends.
Literally, I taught this girl how to smoke a bomb when we were like 15.
Oh man, please don't tell me that.
You know, we're getting along so well.
John, please don't tell me you taught a 15-year-old girl how to use drugs.
I was 15.
I don't care. I didn't think anything of it at the time, but she...
Where's this great father of yours, John?
I was living with my mother at the time.
We went back as teenagers. Anyway.
My siblings and I are idiots.
Anyway. I'll bookmark that.
Maybe we'll come back to it, but I just...
You know, we're great friends.
I taught her how to use drugs when we were 15.
I don't know about your definition of great friendship.
That ain't anywhere close to mine.
But we would have deep, long conversations.
There were multiple times when something would happen in one of our lives that we would just call the other one and we would just meet up and talk.
And we would hold each other for a long time.
A long time we would do that.
I remember one time when I had a relationship and she was the first person I spoke to about it afterward.
When my grandfather died, I called her when I was a kid.
And what was her childhood like?
She never explicitly said it to me, but I think something happened with her fucking father.
I think her father did something.
She's the child of these immigrants.
And I don't think they have a...
I'm not sure if it's where they come from, but I'm not sure if they had great values.
But her parents are married still.
I think it's possible. So, I mean, if you were friends, you'd probably have some more idea if you had these deep conversations, right?
She told me that things happen.
She never mentions who.
She always refused. Because, you know, I would knock the shit out of them if I knew.
Alright, so you...
Were you trying to date her when you were a teenager?
Yeah, the entire time.
And? Nothing.
Was she dating other guys?
She was. And what were those guys like?
Oh, fucking losers.
Yeah. Isn't it horrible?
Just by the by, John.
I've orbited a few black holes in my day, and you know you've got something real great to offer, and you're dating this, or you're orbiting this woman, and she's like, and he's terrible, and she comes crying on your shoulder, and it's like, I'm not terrible?
Do I get? No! I don't get the time of day.
I did the same thing to her.
Oh, you dated terrible women and then you go to cry to her?
Yeah. Yeah, well, I didn't do that.
But I mean, hey, you know, everybody hurts different, but...
Alright, so then when you jacked up, she orbited in, right?
Yeah, we were at the bar one day and she pulls out a bag of cocaine.
I'm like, oh wow. I hadn't done any of that shit since for years before she did that.
And I didn't know that she was even using it for a while.
She had been using it for a while by the time she had done that.
We were drinking all night and then, I don't know, for some reason those two things just go together, you know what I mean?
No, I don't, but go on.
You never tried it? No.
I've never tried any drugs.
Alcohol, caffeine, that's about it.
Honestly, man, alcohol is one of the hardest drugs out there, in my opinion.
Not if you have one light beer.
It really isn't. This is true, but no matter how much I've taken of anything, I've never felt more poisoned and disrupted the next day than from alcohol.
Oh, yeah. No, if you overdrink, you might as well just, you know, deep throat and puff at her.
I mean, it's just horrible. Yeah, I've taken 10 tabs of LSD. I've lost my mind on that shit, and the next day I was...
PG is a fucking squirrel.
But alcohol?
Alcohol literally feels like you're dying.
So what happened with this woman when you dated her?
Oh my god, it was...
It was like a beautiful disaster.
It was on again, and it was off again, and it was great, and it was terrible, and...
And there was fucking amazing wine, amazing drugs, and amazing steak, and amazing sex for, like, entire weekends.
Like, we would just stay naked the whole time.
Crazy in the head is crazy in the bed, right? Oh, fuck yeah.
Like, I always say, there's no such thing as a pretty girl who's not crazy.
It's because of what you said before, how the world treats you.
You just see that as how the world is.
Pretty girls are fucking crazy.
But I can't say I wish it didn't happen.
But I can't say I wish it didn't hurt so much.
How long did you guys go out for?
The first bout was maybe four months and then it was on again and off again for almost two years.
And then what happened in the end?
We just had this one crazy fight and then it wasn't even about anything important.
It was about like She had canceled on me like the second week in a row and I just got mad about it.
And then she goes on and gets called out by somebody I knew about drug use for posting something about weight loss on Facebook publicly.
And then she just literally says, wow, you really get your friends to get in on this?
I'm like, no, they had no idea what was going on.
They just have impeccable timing.
And she says she will never speak to me again after that.
And she held her word.
That's funny how these long-term relationships can just break on a thread.
I remember a long...
No, it was strained at that point.
That was definitely the worst. No, no, no.
I get that. But, I mean, the strain just, you know, they say the straw that breaks the camel's back.
I have a very, very vivid memory of a long relationship that I was in.
And the way it ended was interesting.
We were together, and I was watching, I remember this very, very clearly.
There's a great Queen concert footage from Montreal.
I think it's 1982.
And my favorite song is the Queen song, Somebody to Love.
And this is back in the day before you could just type in all the live versions on the internet.
And I got a VHS tape, or maybe it was a DVD, I can't remember, of the band playing live.
And I'd heard Live Killers, which is another good live album, but...
This was Somebody to Love live, and Freddie does these amazing intros.
He just jams and rambles and jazzes the whole thing, just does these vocal acrobatics.
They're just amazing. And I was watching it, and my girlfriend kept interrupting me.
And I'm like, hold on, I just, I really, I rewind.
I really, really want to hear this. This is amazing stuff.
She just kept interrupting me with some, and I just, it was like, wait a minute.
I love this. I really, really want to pay attention to this, and you're not giving me the space to do it.
And suddenly, just, it's like a pinata.
You whack, you whack, and then everything comes out.
And it was like, well, I'm an entrepreneur.
Like, you've been complaining that I don't know how to live my whole, like, the whole relationship.
You've been superior to me.
You're a secretary, and I'm the chief technical officer in a software company that I co-founded.
Who the hell are you to tell me how to live after so much time?
You better back off, and you better maybe learn something from me for once.
And it just, like, Boom!
You know, it's like a long-term relationship and 45 seconds of naked truth and the entire thing dissolves.
It's not even like a watercolor in the rain.
It's like a watercolor thrown into a wood chipper.
It's just like, boom! Boom!
What? And then you look at the person, like, literally in one minute, years have vanished.
And you look at this person and you say, I have no idea what held us together.
I have no idea what held us together for this long.
Now looking at you, it's like I've just walked into the room and I have no idea who you are.
What's even worse is I have no idea who I am when I'm with you.
And then for me, it's like getting out is like...
It's like you're tied to a rock...
And thrown in a lake and you're just like, you're bringing the rope up and you're chewing at it and you're just scrambling to try and get out.
It's like trying to get to oxygen.
It's like trying to survive, trying to get out of an overturned boat.
It's like if you turn over kayaking and you get stuck, it's like anything.
It becomes a life struggle simply to get out of that place.
And never look back. And it's so weird because it's like that morning you wake up and you're a couple.
And then something happens.
Everything comes together. The planets of exit align.
And it's like, now or never, dude, if you get out now, if you don't get out now, you're never getting out.
It's now or never.
These alignments, this knowledge, this will never happen again.
Get out now! Or forever hold your peace.
And then it just becomes like, I'm not going to die here.
I'm not going to spiritually die in this underworld.
I'm out. And then it was like, and when I'm there, you know, as I've said before, Europeans, we're really nice until we're not.
We're really, really not.
Yep. Yep.
Actually, my current girlfriend tells me that the white stereotype among Asians is that they're heartless.
That's why they should be careful of us.
Yeah. So, the question is, does she love you for who you are, or does she love you for how you look?
I don't know. I gained a little bit of weight since we've been together.
Lost some of it. Okay, look, let me be clear about something.
I know I just asked you a question.
I'm sorry for interrupting. That's a pretty heavy question.
Let me be clear about this. All love is performance.
There's no such thing as unconditional love after you're five years old.
Love, absolutely wonderful, when you're a baby.
You should absolutely get unconditional love.
But after you're a toddler, and particularly when you're an adult, nobody should give you unconditional love.
It is a drug. It is a love bomb.
It is a cult absorption tactic.
It's like when a woman just repeatedly fires the V-bomb at you for a long weekend hoping that you're just – your dopamine addiction is going to kick in and you won't judge her for her personality or her ethics or her friends or her family or her life choices or her educational choices or her ideology or her STD checklist, right? I mean – All love is performance-based.
All love is performance-based.
Nobody should ever love you for breathing.
That is a desperately dangerous, immature, childish, degrading tactic.
So when I say, does she love you for who you are, I don't mean, can you be an asshole to her and she'll still love you?
Well, no, you shouldn't be an asshole to people that you love.
You shouldn't be an asshole to anyone.
And so...
This idea of unconditional love, like, can you love the essence of who I am no matter what I do?
No, no, no, there's no such thing as platonic love in that sense.
Nobody can love the essence of you.
Well, if you're religious, you love Jesus in the person, you love the soul, you love God in the person, but if you're more secular, let's say, you love what the person does.
Not who the person is.
Because there is no is outside of doing.
So what you have to do is, you know, behave in a noble, honorable, decent, strong manner, which means calling people out on their stuff and being willing to be called out on your stuff, you know, being courageous and being alpha, I guess you could say, which is alpha just means honest, fundamentally. Yeah.
Honest and assertive.
Well, yeah, but I mean, honesty has to be something.
It's like having an essence without an action, right?
Honesty that is not expressed is not honesty.
It's actually even worse because you know the truth but won't say it.
So it's even worse than not knowing the truth.
So honesty without expression isn't neutral.
It's cowardice, right? Once you have the knowledge, then you must express it if you wish to be at all moral.
So the question is, does she love you for status?
Because most people...
Don't love you, right?
In particular, what they do is they love the status that you bring to them.
Well, yeah. Right?
So the question is, does she love the status that you bring to her?
In other words, he's jacked, right?
That means that higher sexual market value, so then women or other men are going to judge her as having higher sexual market value and so on.
And... Because people can't judge ethics from a distance and the world is shallow, they will judge you for all of this kind of crap to begin with.
So does she love you for who you are in terms of the values that you express and the courage that you have and the commitments that you have for doing good and being good in the world, being strong?
Or does she make you hot with status in the reflected eyeballs of shallow people around her, if such people are there?
I don't know. Pretty much homebodies.
We don't go out much, so...
I don't know.
I don't think she's doing it to be in the eyes of others.
Do you want kids? I do.
She does, too. You do?
Have you met her family? Yes.
Parents are married. And she's Asian?
Oh, yeah. My current girlfriend, we live together now for over a year.
And she's Asian, so what are we talking here?
Are we talking like East Asian, Japanese, Chinese Asian, or...
Pacific Island. Pacific Island, alright.
And what do you think of her family? They're great people.
They're great people.
And what do you love about her?
She's... A warm, caring person, more so than I. She...
She's quirky in a lot of the same ways I am.
She's four foot ten.
She's not afraid to eat McDonald's.
She's not afraid to say it either.
Neither am I. We're a little bit messy, but it doesn't matter much.
And she's really affectionate.
Like both like physically and emotionally.
And what would she say that she would love about you?
I honestly couldn't tell you.
I feel like...
I feel like when I really got to know her as a person, I was embarrassed at the person I had become.
And I wish that she could have met me when I was younger so that I hadn't become so much of an asshole.
And what do you mean? How would you designate yourself?
Honestly, man, based on what I've told you, is it a surprise that I can be a little bit bitter or sour at the world?
And have a negative view of it?
I don't think the best of people by default.
And... Not to say that I have a combative attitude off the bat, but it's definitely flippant and sarcastic and a little derogatory.
Oh, you are very closed.
Emotionally. Yeah. You know, in sort of our hour, I guess just an hour, that we have been talking, you deflect a lot and you're quite cocky and not vulnerable at all.
These aren't criticisms, they're just observations about...
No, that's definitely an engineered attitude because it's an illusion of confidence.
Yeah, when we get close to something, you get quite dismissive.
Yeah. Yeah.
You put out unsupportable statements like, your father's just this great guy while he let you live with your mom when you were a teenager and didn't know you were suicidal and didn't give you great advice and chose your mom as the mother of his children.
I'm not saying he's a bad guy, but, you know, like all of us, there are flaws that, but you're like, none of that.
Won't have any of that, right? Yeah, I guess so.
See, there you do it again, right?
Yeah, I guess so. It's a dismissive phrase, right?
The way I see it is you got to take people with their flaws or not at all.
Like, I haven't spoken to my mother in over 10 years because I cannot take her and her flaws.
Maybe we can get into that.
Maybe we don't have time for it.
But, you know, like...
She's not going to be in my life.
I've made that decision, but I'm not going to say that same thing about my father.
So if I'm going to have him in my life, he and I are going to have arguments about that, and it's going to be a terrible relationship.
No, but John, you're doing it again.
And listen, we've already been down this road.
I'm not being critical. I'm just pointing out the logic of saying we have to take people with their flaws, but then saying that your father has no flaws, that's not even remotely logical, right?
I can't, I can't, I didn't say he has no flaws.
I said I can't say a bad word about him.
That's an equivocation. It says that I won't speak ill of him.
But you say you have to take people with their flaws.
Yes. So, what flaws are you taking of his?
I don't know. Maybe he didn't always have the best advice for me.
Maybe he's also a distant person that doesn't really like to touch upon issues that get close.
That's where I learned it. Maybe that's why I have a problem connecting with people.
Because... He has the same issue.
Who knows? Maybe we're both on the spectrum a little bit, or at least ADD or some shit like that, or however they would classify that.
You know, big deal what the fucking psychologists would call it.
There's definitely a range of different types of people mentally.
And that's not to say we're complete.
Sounds like you're opening a pill bottle as we speak.
I just wanted to point that out.
Oh no, I got a fidget spinner and it grinds a little bit.
Yeah, alright. But yeah, that's what I do when I get a little nervous.
I put it down. That's fine, that's fine.
There was a funny thought that...
No, I don't take the pills anymore.
Oh my God, dude. Benzos will kill you.
Don't take them. Do you know why it's important that you're able to criticize your father, John?
I'm not trying to pick on your dad or make you feel negative towards your dad.
Why is that? Do you know why it's important that you're able to see your father's flaws and criticize him?
Why is that? So that your children...
We'll see you as a fully rounded human being, and you won't need to put up a front for your children.
Oh shit, you're right.
Right? Yeah.
My daughter can point out flaws in my interactions.
I welcome it. Because I want her to know that I'm a fully rounded human being.
Not just above the eyebrows, but spiritually, I suppose.
I'm a fully rounded human being.
And if you are dismissive of your father's fully roundedness, then you will end up presenting a cool, distant, icy front to your children.
And they don't have any choice but to be with you.
You know, if there's some guy you meet and he's like, well, you know, he's kind of flip, he's kind of disingenuous, he avoids, he abstracts, he, you know, maybe this, maybe that.
He just keeps shutting down topics he doesn't like.
He's not for me. Okay, then he can move on and find somebody who's more open-hearted or willing to discuss things that are uncomfortable or whatever.
But your kids have no such choice, John.
They are stuck with you like burrs on share, right?
So... They're not going to have a choice about whether you're open-hearted or closed-hearted or whether you accept criticism or whether you are genuinely there as a full human being or whether you're this kind of brittle attitude of confidence and with-it-ness or whatever.
Yeah. You won't be vulnerable with them, right?
And children, I think, kind of spiritually starve to death at the absence of nutritional problems.
Access to the hearts and minds of their parents.
You know, that's just the sustenance that they need to grow.
And if you don't know why your girlfriend is with you or why she loves you, then your children's bond with you will be a great threat.
And you will push them away.
Wow. And you don't know, really, this is a self-knowledge thing, right?
Because you spent more time in the gym than doing other things.
And I'm not saying you have no self-knowledge.
I'm just saying that everything is an opportunity cost, right?
But you don't know that it was your father telling me that he can't be criticized, not you.
You don't know that I was talking to him in your head, not you.
Because you have criticisms of your father.
I'm a great dad. My daughter has criticisms of me.
Of course she does. Nothing wrong with that.
I mean, I've criticized him to his face, but...
And the worst thing I could say about him is that he was working so much I barely saw him growing up, you know, when I lived in his house.
So that's why I went back to my mother's house.
I made that decision, not him.
He was very upset about that.
Wait, you made the decision at what age?
I was nine when I went from my mother's house to my father's house because my mother couldn't put up with us anymore.
And then by the time I was 15, she decided that she could.
My sister and I decided to move.
So your father was great, but you'd rather spend time with your mother than you can't stand?
My father applied discipline and stuck to it and my mother didn't when we were teenagers.
But now, you will see this is bouncing all over the place, right?
First, he's great. And then he's a workaholic, or he's not there for you.
And then there's too much discipline.
I didn't say too much.
When he said something, he stuck to it.
I didn't say it was too much. Based on what I was doing, I deserved what was going on.
I deserved to be grounded when I got into a physical fight in school or when I was failing a class.
Come on. At least get my Nintendo taken away.
Jesus, how do you give a kid a fucking GameCube if he's got an F in social studies?
It doesn't make sense. No, the real question is...
Hang on, hang on.
See, this is where you're very rapid in your thinking, but what happens is you're just taking the conversational ball and running away with it, right?
So that no one can catch up and corner you, right?
Maybe. Because the real question is, again, right?
So the question is, John, I mean, in terms of, like, whether you should be on these drugs or not for muscles, and of course you shouldn't.
Of course you shouldn't. I mean, there's no question about that as far as I'm concerned.
Philosophically speaking, I'm not a doctor.
I'm just saying... It does not solve the problem of self-worth.
It does not solve the problem of having value to someone.
It's questionable because if your testosterone is low, you are going to have negative feelings.
That is a medical correlation.
RMP alleviates depression in a lot of older men.
No, no, no.
I'm not talking about testosterone therapy.
Come on. Don't treat me like I'm an idiot, okay?
I'm not talking about if you have low T and you take supplements.
I'm talking about the stuff that you take for muscle growth.
Testosterone. You boost your testosterone either secondarily with something called an estrogen receptor modulator.
I'm not going to say which, because there are a lot of those, and take the wrong one, it won't work.
My testosterone is over twice what it was, because I'm taking something that alters the way my body operates.
I'm not adding testosterone in secondarily.
My body's producing that.
It's a known therapy for hypogonadism.
It's just not approved.
It was something on the market that the FDA was...
And the funny thing is, it's just an isomer that's separated from another drug that has multiple isomers in it, and the other isomers cause side effects, and this one doesn't have those same side effects.
So, like, it's the same chemical formula, but, like, it's got a different, like, arm, so it does something a little different in your body, and then they take that one out, the one that does the bad shit.
Okay, listen, I don't want a pharmacy lesson, so if you're comfortable with what you're doing, that's fine.
But let me ask you these questions. Why were you failing in school?
Why were you fat when you were younger?
Why were you getting into fistfights when you were in school?
Why were you taking drugs as a teenager?
Why were you introducing disturbed friends to marijuana when you were 15?
And you saying to me that your parenting or your father was fine.
You say, well, it was my choice to leave.
But then you also said that your father was working so much that you never saw him.
That's his choice. And he doesn't have the right to make that choice when he's a father.
Particularly when he knows how bad your mom is.
He doesn't have the choice to do 18 hours a day when he's got children at home.
You can't do that when you're a father.
Although we're going to do not have a roof and not eat.
Are you saying that the only way that you could have a roof over your head was for him to be a workaholic?
I mean, I guess we didn't need all of what we had, but...
Didn't you say you got a fucking GameCube?
GameCube, yeah, that was, I mean...
Yeah, come on, man.
Work with me a little here. Pretend that I'm a tenth as smart as you are, okay?
And that I'm not that easy to lead around.
We weren't poor, but, I mean...
He did not have to work all that much.
You're right. That was his choice.
So the question is, why was he working so much?
When you were spinning out of control, when you were getting Fs, when you were getting into fistfights, when you were experimenting with drugs, where was your father?
At work. That's irresponsible.
That's wrong That's bad parenting I'm just going to be blank about I'm going to be upfront about it.
You don't have the right to be a workaholic.
When you have chosen a shitty mom for your children, and your children are with you because she can't stand them, that's traumatic enough!
And you're showing every single sign, man, you said you were suicidal, you were fat, you were getting fights, you were failing out, you're experimenting with drugs, you're giving drugs to children!
I know you were a child too, but this is every single marker of being out of control, of heading to a very bad place, Was present, that I can think of.
Yes, yeah. And it was your father's job to be your father, not to be at work.
And then you come with this story like I got nothing bad to say about the guy.
Come on. What you're trying to do is you're trying to tell me, you don't criticize the adult males around here, bucko.
Which means that you are exquisitely sensitive to criticism.
Which is why you're firing all these warning shots saying we don't criticize the adult males around here, my friend.
We can call it a warning shot.
I know, it's unconscious. I would call it a virtue signal, if anything.
Call it what you want. But yes, he deserves some criticism, because if he's not...
Listen, dude, I'm here for you.
No, I know. Listen, no, no, let me finish.
I'm here for you, John.
I'm here to help you. Not to help your father.
Because, you see, if your father did nothing wrong, then you were just a fuck-up.
That's how I saw it. And I'm here for your sense of self-respect.
You were, sounds like, from what you're telling me, you were under-parented, aggressively parented, randomly parented, And your father was a workaholic and your mom was a bitch?
Also on ADD meds.
You were on ADD meds?
Yes. So rather than try and figure out what was going on in the family, they just threw you on meds, right?
Yep. So, if your father did nothing wrong, then you're just some sort of weird existential fuck-up who's got to carry the whole burden himself.
That's how I saw things, honestly.
I know that's how you saw things because that's the inevitable way you're going to see things if your father's an angel.
If your father's an angel, then you're a devil, right?
Well, yeah. And how can you have love if you're some elemental fuck-up who had to coat himself in muscles just to get anyone's attention?
Well, yeah. You can't get love.
You can't have love. You can't be a good father yourself if you can't criticize your own father.
What course are you going to be able to change?
How are you going to be able to change anything your father did if you can't criticize him?
How are you going to end up with a different Do you want the same relationship with your kids that your father had with you?
Do you want your children to turn out like you were at 15?
Fuck no. Fuck no, that's right.
So something's got to change.
So then when you tell me, oh my father was basically perfect, they did nothing wrong and I got nothing bad to say about him, I'm like, okay.
So you want to photocopy your own teenage years and hand it down the line?
No. No.
No. No.
So you got to stop self-medicating, right?
You can stop at the drugs and all that kind of stuff.
And you got to realize that you were hard done by, man.
You got an adverse childhood experience score of seven, I think it is.
That's some bad shit, man.
You were a victim.
You had it bad. Yeah, I don't like to have the victim mentality, though, because I don't really think that ever got me anywhere when I did have it.
And I think they're just like strapping this burden on and like calling it my problem to deal with.
What do you mean when you had it?
I had a fucking victim mentality.
Why the fuck do you think I was suicidal?
Poor me. Wah.
And I realized having that attitude does nothing.
No, no, no. That's not a victim mentality.
No, no, no. You got that totally wrong, brother.
That is not. And I say this with all love and respect.
That is not a victim mentality.
A victim mentality that I'm talking about, like being a victim.
I'm chain-smoking here.
Sorry. I'm not shocked, come to think of it, but a victim mentality is if you were genuinely hard done by, if you were genuinely abused, neglected, badly parented, viciously parented, aggressively parented, not bonded, if your parents were craptastic in some manner or another, and I'm not saying 100%, there are higher adverse childhood experiences scores than you have, but not a lot.
If you were badly parented, if you were badly parented, You were a victim.
Now saying, well, that's a victim mentality and that's why I was suicidal.
No. You were suicidal because you were badly parented and you had no one around you to help focus your anger.
So your anger turned against yourself and wanted to snuff yourself out because there was no room for criticism in your environment.
And because you were angry and pissed off and rightly so when there was no room for criticism in your environment, Then your life was like a candle flame in a tiny matchbox with no air.
Whew! Out it goes.
There's no room to grow because the only growth comes from criticism.
When you are a genuine victim, that is the truth of your experience as a child.
And to accept that truth, to criticize those who victimized you or who abandoned you or who parented you badly in one form or another, to accept that is to accept the emotional reality of your childhood.
That's a base you can build on That is real.
That is true. That is factual.
And that means criticizing the people around you.
Now, if there's no room for your criticisms, but you're really, really angry, there's no room for you.
And then you have to change.
And then you have to drug yourself.
And then you have to get into fights so that you're there, so that you exist.
And then you have to layer muscles on yourself so that you're noticeable, so that you gain attention from people.
You can't be who you are because who you are is angry and hurt and frustrated and isolated because you're angry and you can't talk about it.
Nobody wants to hear it.
I want to hear it. You won't tell me.
Yeah, you, but like, if you're going out, you want to be sociable.
Nobody wants to hear that shit. You know, you got to put it away for, unless you don't want to have a social life.
Yeah, but see, that's the absolute, that's the problem.
If you don't want to have a social life with shallow douchebags, then yeah, it is tough.
Well, not with the people you're hanging out with.
I feel like that.
So why don't you find better people to hang out with?
You know, good people to hang out with, the few and far between, and the few that I do have, I keep in touch with for a long time and across many miles.
Man, you've got an exquisite fade out when a conversation gets someplace you don't like.
I'm just pointing it out.
I'm just pointing it out.
To tell you the truth, socially I've been kind of isolated just me and my girlfriend.
This is pretty much it. Does she know this about your history?
About what in particular?
The fights, the fails, the drug use.
Oh yeah, I never ever put on a mask for her.
I told her who I was from day one.
And have you ever criticized your father to her?
For picking my mother, yeah.
Anything else? Not really.
Based on the way I saw things, after him and my mother split, it was my mother's fault.
Wait, it was your mother's fault that your parents split up?
I believe so. How?
I never got the full story from either one of them, but I believe there was infidelity.
And... Yeah, it obviously ruined the marriage.
And... My sister and I both despise her.
And... Our baby sisters from my father's second marriage think she's dead.
And there's always one parent who gets away, right?
One parent is a scapegoat and one parent is the hero.
It's very common. Well, after all that happens, you know, a decent amount of life resetting needed to happen, you know, and I feel like my father put himself back on his feet pretty good.
And I took a lot of work.
You mean by being a workaholic when his son was going off the rails?
Is that what you mean by putting himself back on his feet, my friend?
Well, no. That all happened when I was very...
I was five when they split.
No, no. But you said that you were in your mid-teens when you went to live back with your mom because your dad was never around.
Yeah, but that was after it was getting to an extreme.
Like, when they first...
How did he let it get to an extreme?
How did he let it get to an extreme?
Frog in a boiling pot of water.
So, he has no responsibility in the matter?
I'm not saying he doesn't.
I'm just saying... You're not giving him any responsibility.
You're giving him excuse after excuse after excuse.
I don't think not noticing it is really an excuse.
I think it's still a moral failing to not have noticed such a thing.
It's just that's how it happened.
I explained mechanically.
No, no, no. That's not...
Oh, my God, man. It's not how it happened.
These are choices that he made.
Actions that he took or did not take.
It's not just something that happened.
Because if you can't give your father an identity and a choice, you don't get one yourself.
I could give two shits about your dad.
I'm caring about you, John, in this call.
If you can't give self-ownership and responsibility to your father, you will not have it yourself.
Which is why there's this absence within you, isn't there?
It is, but it's just difficult to like really think badly about some person who sometimes was like the only person who's really there for you in the world at points, you know?
I have not heard of a time when he was there for you.
I've heard of crappy advice he gave to you when you were suicidal.
I've heard that he was a workaholic.
I heard that he was fine or more or less fine with you going back to live with your mom who hated you or was indifferent to you or despised you or whatever it was.
So you've not given me one example of how he was genuinely there for you.
I'm not saying that it's not true or he was never there for you.
I'm just saying that we've been talking for an hour, 20 minutes, I got nothing.
So when you say this stuff, I'm a little skeptical.
Like when he saw the way my mother kept the house that we had lived and his children, he took photos of it and brought it to the judge and demanded custody of us.
And how old were you then?
I was eight when it happened, nine when we moved.
And we moved into a house that was kept very well.
Except your father worked all the time.
It was expensive. So he chose an expensive house over the happiness of his children.
Is that a good choice? It wasn't a house.
It was an apartment that we rented in Brooklyn because it was in the best school district in Brooklyn.
It was the best we could afford.
It wasn't going to be a bad school for me.
That's why we picked it.
And the apartment was shitty when they got it.
And my father and my stepmother got on their hands and knees and they scraped the carpet out.
And they put new carpet down and they painted it themselves.
Because they couldn't afford to hire anybody.
And they did it all in a month before we moved in when I stayed with my grandfather.
Because there was nobody else in the world that wanted me in that house.
So that's my father. And then he wasn't in the house.
That's how he kept it together.
I don't know what that means.
That's how he was able to afford it.
Worked two jobs. He worked seven days a week.
Months on end. He didn't have an education or anything.
He was in a union. Unions don't do much nowadays.
Didn't do much 20 years ago.
Go on. He worked for 20 years, and he got his pension.
And in those 20 years, he did as much work as possible.
And he would do overtime whenever he could.
But as a kid, don't you experience that as two parents who don't want to spend time with you?
Yeah. And the great school that you were at, where you were getting Fs and thrown on ADHD drugs and getting into fistfights and teaching 15-year-old girls how to do bong hits, that's the great school that he was sacrificing everything for?
Well, no, that was after I'd moved back into my mother's house in high school.
So it didn't end up working anyway.
All this extra work that he did, you didn't end up staying in the good school anyway, right?
Well... Yes and no.
The area I moved to was just better in general than anything you could find in Brooklyn.
So, it kind of just worked out as a crapshoot.
The area I moved to just had better schools in general.
Wait, so the area you moved to with your mom had better schools?
Uh, yeah.
Yeah. It was...
It's the difference...
Oh, hang on, hang on, hang on. So, I'm sorry to interrupt you, but I'm just trying to follow this.
So... The school I had attended...
No, hang on. Let me ask the question.
So you're at your mom's place.
Yeah. It's a pigsty.
She doesn't want you there.
And so you went from a place with a good school to your dad's place, which had a worse school.
No. Well, the place where my mother lives, pretty much all the schools are alright.
There's nothing visibly wrong with them.
There's no graffiti. In fact, you'd get in a lot of trouble if you graffitied on the desk.
You couldn't smoke in the bathrooms in the high schools.
You'd get in a lot of trouble for that.
They enforced their rules and they kept it clean.
They had the broken window policy pretty on point.
They kept everybody in line.
It was a good neighborhood.
But on the other hand, that one school was pretty much on level with all those other schools that were in the other neighborhood.
Like, that one school was, like, the only good school in, like, that the school district could offer.
And that was an elementary school and a junior high school.
After that, I went to go live with my mother, like, at the end of middle school, beginning of high school.
Did your mother pay child support?
She would work off the books to avoid that, actually.
We found out When we were growing up.
And what were the other issues with your mom, John?
She was an alcoholic.
She dated shitty men who abused her.
Do you mean like physically?
Physically, we had to call the police once when we were at our house.
And yeah, they arrested him.
We never saw him again, thank God, but Eventually, she starts dating this fucking bum.
And when I say he was a fucking bum, I talk about, like, my friends once caught him at the train station picking through the fucking garbage can for cans.
And he would act like he has these great business ideas.
I'm like, what the fuck business are you even in?
Like, it was ridiculous. They were just a couple of fucking alcoholics.
It was disgusting. He had a good foot on me, but he was such a drunk.
When we had fought... We had fought twice.
And it was not hard for me to knock him over.
And I didn't do too much after that because you're not supposed to kick him when he's down.
But I really didn't like him.
And the police were called.
I was arrested once.
And the second time they were called, they were like, we're not even putting up with this.
You guys got to work this out yourselves.
If she says you can't stay in the house tonight, you can't stay in the house tonight.
So I ended up having to stay with a friend of mine.
Same girl. So you couldn't stay in the house because your mother chose her boyfriend over you?
Yeah. I'm so sorry, John.
That's just horrible beyond words.
Where's the bond? Where's the affection?
Where's the umbilical? Where's the...
Yeah, these are just words to me.
Yeah. Yeah.
That's... It's horrifying, and you know, this is a very common issue with single moms, that they choose these needy, violent, destructive, dysfunctional men over their own children.
It's crazy. It's crazy.
Yeah. You know, half-wrecked, drunken dick over their own flesh and blood.
Yeah. So you're 15.
What was the decision to go back to your mom's?
What happened? Well, we had gone to see my mother every other weekend.
And as teenagers do, you notice that there are other teenagers on the block.
You say hello. I had gotten a group of friends in the neighborhood my mother lived in.
And I never knew until far later I'd read a study about how when boys are in a neighborhood that the other families are more affluent than theirs, it tends to be bad for them socially.
And that is not true for girls at all, like it doesn't even affect girls at all, what social standing their families in.
Well, that's because nobody cares how much money women have for the most part.
Yeah, exactly. That's not what their value is rooted in.
So I had a relatively good network of friends in my mother's town where I was at two weekends a month.
And my father's town, I was A, grounded too often to even have a social network, if you could call it that, in 2003.
Wait, wait. So your dad grounded you and therefore you couldn't go out and get your friends, right?
I mean, that would happen, yeah.
I had a few friends, even on my own block, but I was grounded so often I wouldn't see them sometimes in my mother's house with water's grounding, you know what I mean?
And, uh... Oh yeah, no, I remember very distinctly my mom grounding me when I was like nine and then insisting we go out to see a movie that night because she was bored.
Oh, I forget you were raised by a single mother.
I've watched a lot of your videos, by the way.
I've been following you for a few years.
I know a little of which we speak.
Just a smidge. Yeah, but, uh...
So, like...
Single moms with rules are like female voters with borders.
Oh yeah. Oh god.
Ha ha ha ha. So, like, I'm looking around and I'm like, alright, I have barely any friends in this town at all.
Like, why am I even here?
Like, I'm just pretty much shutting my house all day playing fucking video games.
I don't even have the fucking internet.
Let me go over and see what it's like in my mother's house.
So we make the decision to move, and all of a sudden...
I'm so sorry, I just asked you this.
Just before I forget, John.
So you're at your dad's place.
You're grounded. No internet.
So it's kind of... And he's not home, right?
Yeah. He wasn't married at this point, was he?
Remarried? He was. He was.
They had gotten remarried when I was about 12 or 13.
And what was your relationship like with his new wife?
It was good. It was good.
She would teach us things like, you know, how to cook.
And we'd go out early on Saturdays and Sundays.
Sometimes we'd watch the sunrise over the park.
Well, it's kind of like house arrest if you can't go out, right?
With your mom, because at least you can get out of the house.
Like, if your mom's a nightmare, at least you'll be out of the house with friends rather than stuck at home, rotten away.
And of course, you know, when you're a teenager, man, your social life is everything.
Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.
I'm like... I had had a good 10 or 15 people that I knew and talked to regularly.
When I lost my cell phone, I was fucking getting starved.
And I know what it's like to get starved.
I've done it to myself. It's worse than getting starved to lose your fucking cell phone as a teenager.
And that's back when texting, if you wanted to type an S, you had to hit 7 four times.
Oh, yeah. People got good at that shit and then that whole skill set just vanished.
I used to be able to do that with my phone in my pocket because baggy pants are cool back then.
So I have my phone in my pocket, I would text my friends in class.
Ah, the hammer pants. Yup, yup, yup, yup.
It's hammer time, baby.
Those are the days. Right.
So then, did you talk to your dad about heading back to your mom's?
Yeah, we'd spoken about it a few times.
He didn't like the idea. He said there wasn't really much he could do about it.
We were old enough to make our own decisions.
Wasn't much he could do about it?
What do you mean? I mean, he says if that's what we really wanted to do, who is he to say no?
Oh, I see where the passivity comes from.
He definitely voiced his opinion negatively about it.
He said it's not good. No, no, no, no.
There were particular circumstances, my friend, that were causing you to want to go to your mom's place, even though you knew she was a nightmarish alcoholic.
Getting screwed by...
At that age, I didn't know how bad of an alcoholic she was, or she wasn't really that bad of an alcoholic yet.
But it was not good.
I mean, it was definitely...
She definitely succeeded at hiding it, at least.
Or it wasn't affecting her that much.
I couldn't say it's not as bad, because alcoholism is always bad, but...
No, but you had memories of how bad it was when she was younger, which is why your dad went to the court to get custody, right?
Yeah. Uh, yeah, but at that point, like, when you're like a fucking five, six, seven, eight-year-old and your room's like a fucking wreck, like a hurricane just hit it, like, you've just been living like that forever?
Like, you don't think much of it, you know?
If that's just been your life forever, what the fuck are you gonna question it for?
Yeah, step over three hobos to go to the bathroom at night?
Yeah, that's normal. Yeah, right.
So, your father, though, could have done an enormous amount To alter your decision.
What could he have done?
If you were him, what would you have done to alter your decision?
I really don't know what I could have said at that point.
No, no, no, no, no. Did I say say or do?
What do you mean do? What could he have done to change your decision?
I don't know. I mean, being grounded or not in that neighborhood, you'd probably have to have a car to get anywhere, and I wasn't going to be getting a car anytime soon.
So, like, unless you could have magically expanded my social network at that point, it really wouldn't have been much.
Like, put it this way, I was 15 years old, I was kind of focused on getting laid, wasn't really getting that much when I was living at my father's house.
And when I was even visiting my mother's house, like, the girls in that town, they were a little bit more friendly.
You were kind of stuck at home, like it was house arrest, right?
I wouldn't, I mean, yeah.
What could he have changed?
What could he have changed to alter your decision to go back to your mom's?
He could have maybe been there more, let me out a little bit more.
Be there more? Be a parent to you more?
It's weird being parented by someone who's not your parent.
Yeah, I can...
That's weird. I can definitely say I love my stepmother.
I can definitely say that, but, you know...
I'm not saying you don't. She does treat her own children somewhat differently than she treated my sister and I, and my full sister.
I'm not saying she may be a fine woman for all I know.
Although, she should have been able to suss out your...
Women are better at sussing out bad women than men are.
Because they're not blinded.
She's spoken to my mother.
She hates the woman. We all hate her.
Wait, did she hate the woman when you were thinking about heading back?
She never spoke badly about my mother to me as a child, but she told me that she never liked my mother from the day she met her.
So then, why didn't they work like hell to change what was driving you away?
I think they had something maybe that they cared more about.
I don't know. Because you're basically, it seems like to me, John, that you're basically bouncing from one place where you're not wanted to another place where you're not wanted.
You know, I'll tell you this, man.
If my daughter was spending all day playing video games, I'd really miss her.
You know, I'd walk up the stairs, bring her a cup of cocoa, knock on the door and say, What's going on?
I'm lonely. I miss you.
Let's chat. And I would just sit there and talk with her.
And if it took a long time, I can't imagine this scenario, but, you know, should it happen, then I would not rest.
I could not rest, really, until we had reconnected.
You know, my girlfriend does that for me.
She, when I'm, like, have side work that I'm doing from home and I spend hours at my desk, Sometimes she'll come up, she'll just make something in the kitchen, she'll bring it to me, and like have a little bite to eat and a chat.
She's a good girl. So what was it like to live in houses where people didn't care about you enough to do that?
I mean, looking back, it definitely, it definitely, it's, it's, It definitely feels like there could have been something more going on there that could have been fruitful.
No, don't vague out on me, man.
I can't keep this conversation going if you're going to maybe me to fucking death.
Maybe this could have happened.
Maybe something could have been like, I can't have a conversation with the maybe.
It was definitely liberating.
There's no emotional content in any of that, and that's not where your emotions were.
Maybe you can't see them back in drugs and addictive behavior, but that's not where your emotions actually were at the time.
I just always wanted to get the fuck out of the house.
That's what it was. I wanted to go see my friends because they wanted to see me.
So I'm asking you what the emotions were like of fundamental indifference to your existence on the part of your parents.
Oh, it was like always having to be on your tiptoes.
You know what I mean? I would hide report cards.
And wait for the school to call.
I don't know. That's fear.
That's fear of punishment. I'm talking about nobody coming up the stairs with a cup of fucking cocoa, sitting down on the bed, and saying, John, how you doing?
How's your life? I couldn't even conceive what it's like to miss that because I never had it.
But you miss it. Now that I have it, I'm amazed by it.
When I talked about this, John, the first thing you told me was how your girlfriend does it differently, so you know.
Yeah. Now that I have it, I'm fucking amazed by it.
It literally, it floors me to be treated this way.
Right. Like, I don't understand it.
I don't, I can't, I can't comprehend it.
You do, listen. The drugs, the smoking, the jacks.
The weightlifting, the food management, all of that, in my humble opinion, stems from not processing the rejection.
You don't know what it's like to be loved when you were younger.
And you haven't processed, like, it's great that your girlfriend's doing it now, but that doesn't help you when you were 5 or 10 or 15 or 20.
I mean, you were on the verge of checking out like a plant that's dying from no light because you weren't being loved.
You were a nuisance.
You were a bother. You were in the way.
You were something to be stepped over.
You were garbage that had to be cleared up.
You were a stain that had to be ignored.
That is very, very tough on the emotions.
I didn't even realize it.
It is very, very tough on the emotions.
And that's why you end up in these situations where your heart gets scarred.
And this neediness, this need for approval, this need for respect, this need for, right?
Yeah. Because the first 20 years, at least, it seems to me, of your life was...
You know, there's no word for it, John.
I wish there was. There probably is some polysyllabic Welsh nickname of an Aztec God word for it in German, but there's no word for it than I am.
See, rejection is one thing.
You know, you go for a job, maybe they say no.
You ask your girl that, maybe she says no.
Okay, that's rejection. Parental rejection is a whole other deal.
Parental rejection is a whole other deal because it's in your face.
It's constant. You cannot escape it, and you're utterly dependent upon their approval.
So you self-erase just so you don't get thrown in a fucking snowbank.
Yeah, that's why I think that previous girl and I got along so well because we both had so much fucking issues, which is why it was so good and so bad at the same time.
That's why it definitely should be over.
Well, you're...
You're failing because you hate your environment.
You're fighting because you're angry that no one's noticing how desperately sad your childhood is.
And you're suicidal because the self-medication is not solving the problem.
And the problem can't be solved...
By, you know, there's no snapping fingers and having you go back in time and have your parents notice you were something other than something in the way.
Yeah. You can't, like, you can't go back there, but you can at least recognize what it was and that it really hurt.
And it made you mad, made you sad, and that has a big effect on everything that came after.
And I don't want you to be surprised by all of this stuff because, man, when you have a child, that child is so ridiculously dependent upon you.
There's not a word to say, oh, it's a bond and so on.
No, no, no. It's not. More than that.
It's symbiosis. It's like you've grown another head.
And... The level of dependence that children have upon the good opinion of their parents is a force of nature that I know that no other equivalent.
And you did not get The curiosity, the interest, the affirmation, the instruction.
You're like a lost boy.
You're like a kid raised by wolves or by himself, right?
What fucking instruction did you get?
You couldn't believe your teachers. Your mom was just like a horrifying wreck and your dad was not there.
You got no instruction.
So you got to try and raise yourself and like all of us who raise ourselves, we do it as well as we can, which is to say pretty fucking badly.
I think I did alright. I mean...
Except you don't know why your girlfriend loves you, John.
Yeah. And that's because you don't know why your parents didn't.
Why didn't they? Well, it wasn't you.
I guarantee you that, my friend.
And you can say, oh yes, well, I was tough and I was bad and I was fighting and I was this.
The question is, why?
Because you grew up in a household where your parents did not love each other.
And certainly where your mother did not love herself.
We learn to love not from being loved, but by watching our parents love each other.
And this is why people who say, well, we're staying together for the sake of the kids.
It's like, I don't want you to stay together for the sake of the kids.
I want you to find a way to love each other for the sake of the kids.
Just staying together is not helping the problem.
Your parents didn't know love.
They didn't act in a way that would generate love.
Yeah, I often notice my friends who did have parents that seemed to actually take an interest in their lives, just seemed to be On like a different level.
Yeah. And I did aim to learn as much as I could from those kids growing up because it just seemed to be something different about them, you know?
Yeah. And even the ones that aren't doing so great just like, you know, maybe financially, like they seem to still be more fulfilled somehow.
Sure. So...
Expecting to learn love from your parents is like expecting to learn Japanese from them.
They don't speak Japanese. You can't learn it from them, except you don't need to learn Japanese, but a child needs to be loved.
A child needs to be loved.
Needs to be treasured.
Listen, there's nothing lonelier than being in a room or a house with people who don't care about you.
Nothing lonelier. Nothing lonelier is infinitely better than to be on your own, than to be in a lonely relationship.
And as children, we are stuck in these homes.
We are stuck in these houses.
That can be great if your parents are great.
But we're stuck there.
And we're hungry. We're thirsty.
We want love. We want affection.
We want laughter. We want curiosity.
We want to feel important.
We want to be... We want people to be curious about us.
What did you dream? Did you have a dream?
What do you think? What do you feel? What's your opinion about this?
What's your idea about that? You know, I remember when I was younger...
Realizing...
It was like I... It was like I punched at the solar plexus, John.
It was like realizing...
That there were very few people in my life who knew my favorite movie, my favorite band, my favorite philosopher, my favorite ideas, or why, why I loved these things, or why I didn't like other things.
I was just a proximate carbon-based convenience.
I could be useful for jokes.
I could be useful for errands.
I could be useful for babysitting.
I could be useful to go on vacation with or to go to a movie with.
But as far as me, myself, what motivated me, what I cared about, and that's why when I began to do this, this, nobody could come along.
I can't ask the world to be interested in what I have to say if people around me aren't even interested in what I have to say and what I have to say.
Pretty damn interesting. And that's why I always wanted to be out of the house.
The only people who gave a fuck what I had to say were my friends.
And that's not to say they were just some random assholes either.
Like, a lot of these kids also came from single parent homes.
A lot of their fathers passed away.
It was weird. There were three kids I could name to you right now in the group.
Two of which I talk to to this day.
One of which is also dead.
Whose father's passed away.
In my group of friends, and we all leaned on each other growing up.
Well, it's not weird, because you all speak Japanese, so to speak, right?
Yeah. We still all talk.
We're like family at this point.
That's why I still live in the same fucking town.
So, my advice, for what it's worth, John, is if you can figure out why you're loved, then you have An entranceway to a kind of happiness that is hard to imagine from where you are, I think. And I'm glad you did what you did.
Not the drug use and so on, but, you know, the exercise and all of that.
More power to you. You know, there's lots of worse ways to deal with hollowness.
Oh, I know. So...
But I would like to see you not go through life as disconnected...
As defensive as...
I mean, you're so verbally fluid and you're so verbally adept.
And you can, of course, be intimidating in all of that aspect of yourself.
And there's times when that's valid and valuable and important in life.
But you were a lonely kid.
And you were a rejected kid.
To have people around you who are really your only access to emotional support, to emotional connection and affection when you're a kid to your parents, fundamentally.
To have those people around but have them not be interested in you is very painful and it distorts the sense of intimacy, the sense of connection, the sense of curiosity.
I saw a video of an elephant rejecting its cub and I really did I felt like I understood what Baby Elephant felt like.
It's hard to see, right? Oh, yeah.
It's hard to see. It's heartbreaking. I thought of my friends.
I felt blessed. But...
And I'm not saying don't feel blessed about your friends, but they're like the smoke thrown into the air from the crater of parental indifference, and that's the crater that I think you need to deal with.
And I think if you deal with that crater, and listen, that's going to mean criticizing your dad.
I mean, I know that you've criticized your mom, but separating the two so enormously in your mind is not...
I mean, it sounds like your dad is much better than your mom, but he still chose her.
And he still acted in a manner which had you go back to her.
And there's things that he could have done that are different.
That doesn't mean he's a bad guy.
It doesn't mean don't have a relationship with him.
I'm not trying to suggest that at all.
But what I am saying is that you need to place the burden where the burden lay.
And the burden lay with your parents.
Not with you. You are not a bad kid.
But you are badly parented.
I am not bad at speaking Japanese.
I was just never taught Japanese.
And you were unparented, or badly parented.
Parenting is not about rules.
It's like saying civilization is about rules.
Rules all over the place.
There's rules when you go to the library.
What's that old joke? Blonde walks into a library and says, I want a cheeseburger and fries and a coke.
Librarian says, Miss, this is a library.
And she says, Oh, I'm sorry.
I want cheeseburgers and a fry and a coke.
You were just badly parented, and that's painful.
That's painful. And it has, because you haven't identified where the burden lies, which is in the actions of your parents, then you own it yourself.
You own it yourself, and you feel not that people weren't interested in you, but that you're not interesting.
Not that you were badly parented, but that you were a bad kid.
Not that people were indifferent to you who should and had a moral responsibility to take an interest in you.
To not feed a child attention is almost as bad as not feeding the child with food and drink and health care.
You must provide attention to your children, because they're in your home, and they don't have a whole lot of choices.
And they did not provide you the attention, that is, how you shape your personality, to be a sensitive, strong, moral entity.
That is a relationship.
That is not rules.
Morality is not a set of rules, Ten Commandments.
Morality is the inevitable empathy that you get when people care about what you think and feel.
Wow. You understand?
You're like, well, I was punished for not obeying the rules.
Morality can never be just rules.
I literally went through a phase where I did not believe in morality and ethics.
Of course you didn't. Because who practiced morality with you?
No one. Punishment is not morality.
Punishment, moral punishments in particular, are usually discharges of sadism from people who haven't bothered to connect with you as a human being when you're a child.
So they don't connect with you, they're not curious about you, they don't teach you empathy by being curious about what you think and feel.
Christ, how do we expect children to care what other people think and feel when no one has cared about what the child thinks and feels?
It's impossible! And so they don't give the kind of investment in you that you need to become an empathetic, sensitive, moral, strong human being.
And then they say, well, we didn't get interested in you as a kid.
Fuck you. Here's 10,000 rules and we're going to fuck you up if you disobey them.
Yeah. Bullshit.
Bullshit. And I felt the same bullshit as I'm sure you did too, John, when it came to school.
Nobody asked me if I enjoyed it.
Nobody asked me if I cared about what was being taught.
Nobody asked me if I was interested in what the fuck was going on there.
Oh my god, no. But they give me 10,000 rules which I'm punished for not obeying.
You gotta sit there and look at the same shit every day when you already read the book during the first week.
It was ridiculous. And it's boring and nobody can tell me why we're studying any of this stuff.
And none of it is meaningful.
None of it has any depth or passion.
Oh, it was worse for me. Get this.
I was programming as a kid, and I liked to fuck around a little bit, so they teach me slope, rise over run.
And I literally used that to reinvent trigonometry.
I was able to calculate from rise and run degree measure in 360 degrees from that.
And the teacher tells me, why didn't you do the worksheet?
Because I did all this.
She was completely uninterested.
That is the right word for it.
Uninterested in the page of mathematics that I had fucking scrawled out to the point where my hand was dirty with pencil.
Trying to figure this out. And you know, I applied it.
I fucking applied it. I took it home and I made a little game where you drove a fucking car around the screen from the top down and collected fucking coins.
And nobody gave a shit about it.
Right. I did.
I still remember the name of the math teacher who half saved my life.
Mr. Robertson. He showed me an Atari 400 and the stars drifting through a little video game called Star Raiders that the guy who made it never even got paid for.
I found that out later. Jesus.
And I'm hypnotized by this shit.
I'm like, how do you program a computer to drift through a star field?
That's incredible. And I'm like, I want to use this computer.
And he's like, okay, well, you know, I guess you can find it out, take it home for the weekend.
And then the next day, no, that was the Friday, the Monday, I'm in the class.
And he's like, you're not even here.
And I'm like, no, so what are you thinking about?
Oh, I'm thinking about programming. I just learned how to do X, Y, and Z. And he's like, you know what?
You don't care about this math.
Just go to the computer lab, man.
Come on. Let's be honest.
And he let me out to go to the computer lab.
Yeah, they did not let anybody do anything like that.
I was caught in class to make websites when I was in high school.
Yeah. I was lucky enough that that same fucking girl, I'm sorry to keep bringing her up, she literally one day after school says to me, I was smoking a cigarette, you want to come sell newspapers over the phone for minimum wage?
It's like, fucking better when I'm going to go do it anyway.
Sure, why not? I happened to put on the resume that I'm good with computers, unquote.
And... The guy's like, you're good with computers?
You gotta meet my son. He fucking puts me on the team of this fucking magazine website, and that's where I actually sharpened my teeth as a professional programmer.
I'm fucking 17. 17 fucking years old, and I've been doing it ever since I dropped out of high school for that fucking job, and it was worth it.
Never look back on that shit.
Society as a whole, they're all like, oh, you know, you kids gotta listen to authority, you gotta follow the rules.
It's complete shit. It's complete shit.
Why should I follow the rules?
Well, because, you know, you don't want, how would you like it if, huh, right, someone did that to you?
It's like, well, how would you fucking like it if somebody put you in a prison and pretended it was a fucking school?
Yeah, it's pretty much it.
How would you like it if I forced you to pay for my income and threw you in jail if you didn't pay?
Would you like that? Well, that's how my school was funded.
I got suspended for a whole week for standing up in front of a class one day and telling the teacher she was just a babysitter so that the parents could go have their jobs and the economy could function.
Yeah. And you know how sad it is, right, John, that we have to think of these tiny little oasis.
These tiny little oasis of like, oh, I remember so vividly these four times when teachers gave a shit about me for five minutes.
I thought you were going to say the tiny little oasis.
In like 12 years. The tiny little oasis of stability, the island of stability where all the rules are perfect and this shit somehow functions.
It's a fucking myth.
Oh, it's horrifying.
I mean, I remember in university, there was a teacher, and I went to go and see him, and I had done an exam, and I'd worked really hard on the exam, and I didn't do as well as I thought I was going to do, and I was really, I was like, well, that's baffling to me, because, man, I studied like crazy for this thing.
And he looked at me for a moment. He was an older guy.
He looked at me for a moment. And he said, okay, well, let's, you know, sit here for a sec.
Let me go and have a look at your exam.
So he went and had a look at my exam.
And he's like, you know, there were a few people who took the wording of this question the way that you did, and I can see how they did.
But your answer was actually good relative to the wording that you took, which, you know, I can see how you take that wording.
So I'm going to adjust your grade.
And I was like, inside, I'm like, holy fucking shit.
That's amazing. Somebody cared that I was upset about a grade.
Didn't say, well, you should have just studied more!
But went and actually had a look at the exam, looked at the question, and said, you know, I can see why you'd answer it that way.
It's, you know, a bit unusual, but I can get where you got it from.
I remember a teacher that I had in grade 6.
When I first came to Canada, I lived in Whitby, and I was in grade 8, and then I came to Toronto, and they put me back in grade 6.
Oh, wow. Which was age-appropriate, and who knows?
Nobody fought for me at all, and nobody cared, right?
But anyway, in grade 6, there was a teacher.
He was actually pretty good.
I remember we did H.G. Wells' The Time Machine, you know, with the Eloi and the Morlocks.
Yeah. And he was, I remember vividly, so vividly, this guy, there was a little roll of tape on his desk, and he's like, oh, you know, they just have no interest in anything beyond the moment.
They pick something up, like this piece of tape, and he looks at it, and he goes, wow, that's a cool piece of tape, throws it over his shoulder, and, you know, like, it was just little ways of illustrating and having some vividness to what it is that we were Learning.
And I just kind of hung on that guy's every word.
It wasn't like he taught me some big principles, but at least he cared a little bit about the content of what was being talked about.
And there are very few times where a teacher...
I remember. It's a funny story.
I don't know if it's all popping up. I had a teacher, an English teacher, And I remember distinctly reading a book, going up to the front of the desk after class, and saying, excuse me, miss, I don't understand what the word phallic means.
Did you not understand what the word meant, or were you just being an asshole?
No, see, that's you.
I would never do that.
I mean, honestly, I would never have done that to make someone uncomfortable.
And I kind of liked her. And...
She actually answered the question pretty well.
Pretty nice. I was young.
I don't know. I was like, I don't know, 14 or 13 or something like that.
And then another teacher, she had this wiry hair, and she'd heard that I was writing a novel.
I was 12. I was writing a novel, By the Light of an Alien Sun.
And she asked me for it, and she said, can I read it to the class?
And I'm like, sure. And there was a rather thinly disguised girl in the story that everyone knew I kind of liked in the school.
I remember her name too, but I won't say it.
And she was reading the story out, and it starts out, there's a guy in a space station, and he passes a, in zero gravity, passes a pizza across to this girl, and she misses it, and it lands on her face, and he ends up kissing the pizza off her face, something like that, right?
Very sensual, very 12-year-old penthouse and all that.
And I remember her reading it, and the class was so excited by what I was writing.
They could sort of tell that it was sweet on this kind of girl story.
And there was such an energy in that room.
And it wasn't, I mean, it wasn't the kissy stuff.
I mean, it was just, everybody was hanging on it because it wasn't like it was great writing.
I'm sure it was fine for 12. But everyone was just kind of, and it was a wild energy.
And I remember her getting kind of embarrassed and she was laughing about it.
Like, oh, I wonder where this is heading, right?
And there was such a wildly positive and enthusiastic energy in that room that that was sort of my first big dopamine hit as a writer.
That everyone found it so engaging and so funny, but not laughing at it, but just like, what's next?
You know, what's he gonna write? What's she gonna read?
And there was this real curiosity.
And I wasn't like Arthur Rimbaud ripping off great poetry as a teenager or anything like that, but I just remember there's someone who actually read what I wrote.
To the class, and the class was very excited by it, very interested by it, very curious.
Yeah. And again, it wasn't because it was this great story, a great language, or who knows, Pearls Before Swine perhaps, but just these little bits where somebody gave a shit.
Yeah. And you can live forever on a drop of water sometimes.
Oh yeah, if it's the right kind.
Yeah. If it's the right stuff.
So I'd meditate on that, man.
I'd sort of say, okay, well, you did have two decades of being badly parented or not parented or people not taking an interest in you.
And that's painful.
That is painful. And we can be glib about ourselves.
Well, it's in the past and I'm over it.
And how can you miss what you didn't have?
Well, of course you do. Of course you do.
Deep down you do. And if you can find that loss and you can assign responsibility to the people who were responsible for it, which was your parents?
That doesn't mean that they're terrible people.
It doesn't mean that they're evil. It just means that they did things that weren't good.
And they have some responsibility for that, like it or not.
Because you cannot ever have more responsibility than you assign to your parents.
It's just a basic fact of life.
It's a basic fact of logic.
If your parents were adults and had no responsibility, how the hell are you supposed to take responsibility as an adult for your own actions?
How are you supposed to assign responsibility to other people?
Damn. Wow.
They had ownership. You give them ownership so you get ownership.
You give them responsibility so you take responsibility.
They own their lives so that you can finally own your life.
You have your honest feelings towards them so people can have honest feelings towards you.
It's the gift that keeps on getting.
And if you excuse them, you excuse yourself, which is one of the reasons why your moral compass spins so much.
You give your father all the excuses in the world, which is why you can do some of the stupid shit you've done, right?
Because you're giving yourself all the excuses in the world.
Stop giving your father excuses, you'll stop taking excuses, and you'll act in a way that has integrity, and then it won't be a mystery why someone loves you.
No, yeah, you're right.
You're right. I do try to give my father some advice every now and again.
Some shit like that.
Try to connect them too.
It's not about what your father takes.
It's what happens in your mind.
Your father doesn't have to take any ownership.
Your father doesn't have to admit any fault.
It's what you know.
Yeah, you're right. I mean, that's what I'm saying.
I wouldn't have said something like that unless I actually felt it.
You know what I mean? I wouldn't say that to him in an empty way.
I'm not saying I should say it to him to expect some kind of reaction.
I'm just saying I should say it to him.
And I had said it to him because I do feel that way.
I do feel that, you know, like I said, we've talked personally about him and I that he has made some mistakes.
You know? You don't even know if they were mistakes?
This is the whole point. You don't know.
You don't know if they were mistakes.
Maybe they were, but they were pretty long-term mistakes, and they were pretty bloody obvious mistakes, so who even knows if they were mistakes?
Maybe they were, maybe they weren't.
You don't know. Do you hunt at all?
I have hunted. Are you familiar with gun safety?
The difference between an accident and a mistake is you can't fire a gun by accident.
If you make a mistake, you did the wrong thing, but you made a mistake.
You know, it's not to say that you're not responsible for your mistake.
But it's different from an accident.
But here's the thing. Here's the thing, and you're making excuses still, which I understand.
This is a habit. Can you make a mistake for 20 years?
Yeah, that point that puts it into perspective.
You're right. I don't think you can.
You can't. And if you ask any parent you think you should pay attention to your children, they would say yes.
If you ask any parent you think you should know what your children think and feel, they would say yes.
If you say to any parent you think you should spend time around your children, getting to know them, they would say yes.
Any parent on this world would say yes.
So it can't be a mistake if he knew what to do and didn't do it for 20 years.
That's why I'm saying you don't know if it's a mistake or not.
You're trying immediately to jump to excuses.
The word mistake is also an excuse.
You don't know. And that's a way of focusing on his actions rather than your feelings, right?
We often jump into judgment so that we don't have to actually feel anything.
We jump to excuses because we don't want to feel things.
Yeah. And the people with the weakest bonds have the greatest difficulty in criticizing people.
When you have a strong bond, you can criticize, right?
When you have a weak bond, you feel that criticism is going to breed rejection.
It might, I don't know.
But it's important to know whether it does or it doesn't.
All right, I'm going to move on to the next caller, but I really appreciate the length of time and attention in this call, John.
I appreciate the detail you wanted to, man.
That was heavy.
I'm glad it was. I hope it was helpful, and thanks very much for your time.
Thank you. Have a good one, man.
Alright, well up next we have Trey.
Trey wrote in and said, I believe the idea of no government is fundamentally flawed because humans will inevitably default to socialism or authoritarianism if no boundaries are set,
and so anarchy is unsustainable.
I see an ideal government not as an enforcer but as a failsafe for times where bad ideas become too popular or when there is no incentive not to neglect them.
I believe that we need to protect ourselves from ourselves because we have severely underestimated the proportion of the population that is unqualified by virtue of their objective intellect, IQ, to make political, economic, social, and ethical decisions.
Is leaving everyone to their own accord, anarchy, really viable considering the majority of the population is utterly incapable of consulting reason over emotions or looking more than a few weeks into the future?
That's from Trey. Hey Trey, how you doing?
I'm doing well, how are you?
I'm well, thank you. Well, let's dive straight in.
Do you believe that the non-aggression principle is a universal principle?
Yes. Then you can't have a government.
Why is that? Because the government is allowed to initiate the use of force.
But what if the anarchy is, that you could prove that anarchy inevitably results in a situation where the initiation of force is used very frequently?
I don't care. Because if the non-initiation of force, if the non-aggression principle is universal, then governments violate the non-aggression principle.
So you can't have them.
You can't have a government.
You can appeal to some imaginary domino consequentialism and construct a scenario whereby there may be greater violations of the non-aggression principle down the road.
But the fact is that you're willing to break the non-aggression principle in the organization of your society.
So then the universal, then the non-aggression principle is not universal.
It's like saying slavery is wrong, so we need only 10% slavery in society.
So you're saying you would abolish slavery even if it resulted in more slavery?
Because consequentialism is not an argument.
Because nobody can know the future.
And you can scare anyone out of anything.
Well, honey, some guy could come up and say, well, you know, I need to beat you up right now because if I don't, I can construct a logical scenario wherein 10 people are going to beat you up tomorrow.
Okay, beat me up.
We understand. I have to come and shoplift from you because otherwise someone could come and burn down your entire store.
You can come up with any theoretical domino bullshit scenario with which you can break principle, but that's not an argument.
It's just kind of weird fear-mongering or whatever.
If the non-aggression principle is universal, then the state violates the non-aggression principle and therefore is invalid.
Done and dusted. I mean, you can come up with some science fiction story that means that it's worth breaking principle, but then there's no such thing as principles.
I mean, I'm sorry, I just disagree.
I don't think that suspending the principle to create a scenario where that principle is violated less is a bad thing.
I mean, but how am I wrong?
I mean, saying that you disagree with me, how am I wrong?
If you agree that the non-aggression principle is universal, and then the first thing you want to do is create an agency that violates the non-aggression principle, why should I take your argument seriously at all?
Because what if that agency prevents a scenario from arising where the non-aggression principle is violated even more frequently?
So you know the future. So there's no free will, everything is determined, and you can tell the future.
Man, if you can tell the future, why don't you tell me what the price of Apple stock is going to be next week, or why don't you tell me what the price of Facebook stock is going to be tomorrow?
If you can tell the future, man, you really should try and use this power for good and make a fortune out of being able to figure out economic trends in the future.
You can tell the future.
That's incredible. No, no, that's not what I'm saying.
Yes, you are.
You're telling me that you can tell how a free society plays out.
Okay, so let me ask you this.
If we went straight to anarchy and it ended in disaster, would you change your views?
I don't know what it means, end in disaster.
I don't know what that means. So let's say that we went to straight anarchy and then...
At some point, people got sick of it, the wealth gap.
And again, we can say that this is completely fictional, but let's say that the wealth- Okay, let me ask you this.
Let me ask you this. Let's say we stopped raping children and it turned out to be a disaster.
Would you accept that argument?
No. Let's say we stopped beating up people in wheelchairs and then it turned out to be a disaster.
Would you accept that argument?
No. So why on earth would you ask me to accept an argument that disaster happens from people following the non-aggression principle?
I don't... Because you're creating scenarios that are completely unrealistic, like stopping...
The word unrealistic is not an argument.
No, it is, because if...
No, it's not. You can't make an argument as to why beating up people...
And wheelchairs is going to benefit society.
But you could project that anarchy is going to end a disaster.
Oh, so when I say violations of the non-aggression principle could lead to bad things, I'm wrong.
But when you say that the violation of the non-aggression principle could lead to bad things, you're correct.
Because magic? Wait, can you repeat that?
I'm sorry, I didn't really... So I say, if we stop raping children...
Yeah. You would not accept the argument that if you stop raping children, bad things will happen in society.
So when I say that violations of the non-aggression principle lead to bad things, that's an invalid argument.
But when you say violations of the non-aggression principle in the form of the state lead to bad things, that is an argument.
Well, why is it an argument for you but not for me?
Because there's evidence that suggests that without a state that, um, That would end in a situation where the non-aggressive principle is violated more than if there was a state, whereas you have...
Now you're talking about reading the future.
Now you're talking about your capacity to understand the ebb and flow and future of a stateless society, which means that you really, really know how society plays out, which means you should not be talking to me but making a fortune in the stock market or horse racing.
Now listen, let me just ask you this then.
Let's say that we, again, you kind of interrupted me when I started this, but...
Let's say that we tried anarchy and it ended in disaster, you know, whatever that disaster is for you, whether we just defaulted to communism or it was some crazy, unrealistic Mad Max scenario, right?
Then, if that happened, would you then reconsider that anarchy is a good option for a human civilization?
I genuinely don't understand the question, and I'm sorry to be so obtuse.
I'm just having trouble following you.
Sorry, I haven't really been on...
So again, if we stop beating up women, and then it turns out that more women get beat up, would you then say to someone, would you reconsider that we should stop beating up women?
Would you make that argument?
Yeah, I might. You might make the argument that if we stop beating up women, then more women might end up being beaten up.
No, no, no. I'm saying, can you...
Answer my question, I'm gonna try to phrase it more coherently.
So, let's say that we tried anarchy, we completely...
No, no, no, I understand the question. Like, I'm sorry, I'm just trying to ask you how you would answer a parallel question, because I'm telling you I don't...
You answered my question with a question, and I was just wondering if you could actually answer my question.
No, but if you won't answer the question when it's phrased to you, why would you expect me to answer the question when it's phrased to me?
I did answer it. I said yes, I would consider.
Okay, but then when I asked you again, you evaded, if I remember rightly.
So, I just want to make this clear.
I'm not trying to be antagonistic.
I just really want to understand the framework.
Okay. So, let's say that 25% of women are being beaten up by people in their society, right?
Right, yeah. Bloody lips, you know, black eyes, concussions, and so on.
Thrown downstairs, beaten up, and so on.
And somebody came along and said, we should stop beating up women in society.
And somebody else came along, and let's say that person was you.
No, let's say that person was me.
Okay. Come along and say we should stop beating up women in society.
And then you come along and say to me, but if we don't beat up any women in society, more women will end up being beaten up.
So we should beat up 25% of the women in our society.
Or all the women 25% of the time.
Would that be an argument that would make any sense to you?
Well, it depends.
Because that argument is kind of framed...
As being like a very absurd scenario, because how would not beating up women lead to more women being beaten up?
But if I could actually provide evidence as to why that would occur, then yeah, I would back that up.
So then there's no such thing as principles for you.
It's all consequentialism.
I'm sorry? So then there's no such thing as principles for you, it's all consequentialism.
You won't make your decisions based upon principles.
In other words, the non-aggression principle is bad, and that's how we should live as societies.
You won't make decisions based on principles, you'll make decisions based upon consequences.
Well, if the consequences result in scenarios where the principles are violated at a higher frequency, then it is consistent with the principle.
Is that wrong? No, but principles and consequentialism are the opposites.
Okay. Right?
Like, if I understand what you're saying correctly, it's kind of like if you get cancer, like the doctor says, sort of, do no harm, right?
If you get cancer, let's say you go through radiation therapy and chemotherapy, it makes you sick, it makes you dizzy or whatever, right?
And you say, yes, but that's so you don't get cancer again, right?
That's sort of how the argument goes, right?
So the sort of do no harm thing, it's like, well, there's a longer process and goal and so on, right?
So you're saying, okay, well, will you accept this radiation and this chemo if it means you're very unlikely to get cancer again, right?
Okay. So if you're looking at a consequentialism from that standpoint and mistaking that for principles, then I can sort of understand where you're coming from.
But the principle of the non-aggression, like the non-aggression principle, it's a universal moral thing.
Do not initiate force against other people.
Well, even if you're a proponent of consequentialism, you still have to have some sort of principle to guide you or else the outcome would be completely irrelevant to you.
Is that wrong? Well, if you can make up scenarios that break principles, then you have no such thing as principles.
Well, no, what I'm saying, if you're consequentialist, let's say, then how would you define an unfortunate outcome or an unfortunate consequence if you have no principles?
That's the point. That's what I'm trying to say.
That if you're into consequentialism, there are no principles that you can ever...
Because anyone can come up with some kind of convincing set of dominoes that is going to break your principle.
So if you have a principle, the non-aggression principle, then you have to be an anarchist.
And now if you say, well, I don't really have that principle, then you can be whatever you want.
But then you have no principles.
Okay, but I so I guess in that case under those definitions, which I mean are probably the correct definitions.
I'm not trying to be passive aggressive there, but um, I guess I would be a consequentialist but But what I'm saying is how I still have to have some sort of moral framework for deciding what consequences and outcomes are favorable and what consequences.
Outcomes and consequences aren't favorable.
No, you can't have any principles if you're a consequentialist.
Because you're saying there are no principles that are absolute.
And what that means is whoever tells the better story gets their way.
Whoever's the better fear monger, whoever's the better sophist, whoever comes up with the most plausible set of circumstances that break your principle, you now have nothing to oppose them with.
What if they come up with something more convincing than what you come up with?
That says, well, you know, totalitarianism is the very best way of protecting human life and human futures, right?
I mean, let me sort of give you a silly example.
I'm not saying you're claiming any of this, but, you know, there are people who say, well, if you had national socialism, then the migrant crisis wouldn't be occurring, and the migrant crisis is so terrible, blah-de-blah-de-blah, and they're like yearning for Nazism.
Because there's no principles there.
The fact that Nazism is national socialism, that it's totalitarianism, that it violates the non-aggression principle every time it opens its beak.
They say, well, I prefer that to this consequence.
They have no principles, right? It's just some consequentialism allows you to override and scrub out of existence any principle that you want because you can always construct some scenario which is supposed to maintain your principles.
But you have no principles because you can make up consequences to get rid of principles whenever you want.
Okay, I mean, I'll concede that.
I think that you kind of changed...
My perspective in that I guess I can't say that I'm a proponent of the non-aggression principle in that case because I don't think that implementing anarchy, if it's going to result in a scenario that's less favorable than the scenario that we're currently in, is a good idea for human, for humankind.
The scenario where, just for those who don't know, today is April the 11th, 2018.
And today, we are closer to Nuclear war to a conflict between America and Russia than we've been probably since the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis.
So, on a day when we are facing, although the odds may be small, at least the possibility of, say, the end of all life on the planet, and you're saying to me, well, you see, anarchy could be risky!
Well, I may be pushing back against that just a little bit, particularly today.
Okay, yeah, I understand that.
Okay, that was maybe today in the United States in 2018 is a bad example, but But it started as a minarchist government, right?
It started as a very, very small government.
The smallest government the world had ever seen with a constitution that didn't even last Beyond the whiskey riots.
But anyway, you started with America.
You started with a very, very small government.
After the reforms in England, 18th, 19th century in particular, you had, relative to now, a very, very small government.
You had, at the beginning of the Roman Empire, a relatively small government, a republic, in fact, where people only had to work two days a year to pay their taxes.
So we have lots of examples of very small governments and what always happens.
They get out of control.
They do. Right.
But I feel like, or I don't want to say I feel like, but it's evidence to me that you're kind of arguing in principles rather than what actually happens in practice because I don't see how an anarchy is not just the same thing as democracy, right? Because the problem with anarchy is that you have to trust that everybody's going to do it, right?
Wait, sorry, sorry, hang on.
What do you mean when you say anarchy?
What does that mean? No government.
Okay. So no government.
Hang on.
When you say having no government is exactly the same as having a government, I do question your perception of these things.
Because if I were to say to you, well, having no slavery is pretty much the same as having slavery, I'd be like, wait, what now?
What does that mean? I think that an anarchy is hard to distinguish from the particular form of government known as democracy, because in democracy there are no Okay, again, there's no constitution, right?
It's not like a republic where, like, you know, it's just the majority rules, right?
There's no constitution in America.
There's pieces of paper that are regulated.
No, no, no, no. I'm not saying that I'm a proponent of the United States and thinking that they're, you know, the best thing ever.
That's not what I'm saying. But in a democracy, you agree, right, that the majority rules, regardless of the consequences, right?
That's how, okay. And in anarchy, it's the same thing, right?
Because you have to trust that everyone's going to uphold the principle, right?
What do you mean when you say you have to trust that everyone's gonna uphold the non-aggression principle?
The whole concept of anarchy is founded on the fact that people would rather often not uphold.
The non-aggression principle. They'd rather violate the non-aggression principle, which is why you can't have a government, because the government is the most efficient and bloodless and destructive way for people to bypass the non-aggression principle.
Right, but if, and under anarchy, let's say, and I know these are fictional scenarios, right, but let's say that, you know, 55% of people or 60% or some majority suddenly decides, well, you know, I think the wealth gap is too wide and they want to switch to communism.
There's no one, there's no one left to stop them, right?
So you have to trust that everybody's going to just continue to do anarchy.
Wait, wait, wait. Oh, my God, man. Oh, my God. You've got to slow down.
You've got to slow down.
You just, like, ramble and throw these massive bombs out like it ain't no thing.
Well, what if the world is flat and up and down, it's black and white?
Assuming that, right? I mean, OK. So let's take your scenario.
Right. So let's say there's no government in North America.
Mm-hmm. Right? I mean, I know borders, boundaries.
Let's say no government in North America.
Right. And let's say a bunch of people want communism, right?
Yep. What's to stop them?
Exactly. Yeah.
Nothing. They can choose to buy up a bunch of land and they can all go there and they can voluntarily not exercise their property rights.
They can own things in common.
They can give the means of production to the workers.
They can do anything they want. There's nothing wrong with them.
I mean, it'll fail and it'll be a disaster just as it always is throughout human history for reasons that von Mises has gone into in great length and detail, a price problem and all that.
So they can go and they can do their communism and it can fail and then they can learn their lessons and they can rejoin society.
I mean, what's the harm?
Okay, what's stopped them from forcing everybody?
I mean, it's going to be the less productive people of society that are going to want to do the communism, right?
And they're going to need the productive members that don't want the communism to fund it, right?
Okay, so let's say that you and your friends want to...
What? Start a government?
Yeah. Okay, so how are you going to fund that?
Well, it's not just me and my friends, right?
It's like, what, a majority of the population.
Wait, we have the majority of population who are raised with the principles of the non-aggression principle, who are raised with all the benefits and fruits of freedom, who have horrifying memories of statism, which I'm sure we will relatively quickly, And then they suddenly just wake up one morning and say, we want governments back and communism.
No, no. It would be after maybe a couple generations or so that...
Oh, you mean like slavery might come back because it's been 150 years since slavery?
Like after a while you just...
No, no, that's not at all what I'm saying. But that's not necessarily, that's not really plausible, right?
But it is plausible.
Oh, that's not plausible, but a re-emergence of statism is plausible.
Yes. Why?
Why is no resurgence plausible?
Because in a complete free market, the wealth gap is going to be more drastic than it is now.
And I have no moral problem with that.
Why would it be more drastic?
Because there's not going to be regulations and taxes and social welfare.
That redistribute money artificially.
You're an empiricist. You know that welfare and taxes and redistribution has been going up like crazy over the past 50 years, and the wealth gap has increased during that time, right?
Okay, no, I didn't know that, but...
Now you do. See, the first thing you want to do is look at the data if you have a data-driven argument.
So the wealth gap has grown as statist intervention has grown.
Of course, it's called regulatory capture.
It means that the more power the government has to transfer wealth, the more rich people are going to use the power of the government to get their own big fat contracts.
There's going to be a military industrial complex that's going to have big fat profits from bombing people in the third world.
And you're going to have all these terrible things that occur because when the government has the power to redistribute a lot of money, the people with a lot of money really like to control what the government does, so to protect their own industry and to make sure that other smaller, more nimble competitors have a very tough time competing with them.
Okay. I am curious as to how you think that you're My prognosis that this is all gonna work out perfectly is more plausible than mine.
No, no, dude, dude. I mean, you say you're not gonna be passive-aggressive.
Don't give me bullshit like, all gonna work out perfectly.
Okay, okay, maybe that was extreme.
That's a very snarky, girly non-argument, right?
I already told you, we don't expect, rational human beings do not expect everyone to want to follow the non-aggression principle at all times.
Right. So, given that I've already said that, why would you throw in the word perfectly there?
Okay, that was ill-advised.
A little douchey. To use the word.
Perfect. Okay, I agree.
I agree. I shouldn't have used the word perfect, but...
That's fine. I just wanted to point it out.
So go ahead. No, yeah, yeah. So, what makes...
What do you think...
Like, what reason do you have to believe that your prognosis that is superior to mine is going to be...
is more plausible? Yeah.
So I tell you that I'm not a consequentialist, and then you ask me about the consequences of my proposal.
Because you used to do a prognosis, right?
Which means figuring out how things are going to play out, right?
Right. But we were just arguing about consequences, right?
Because you were saying how...
No, you brought up a consequence, and I rejected it.
You said the consequence of a free society is that income gaps are going to increase.
And I said, no. The consequence of a state of society is income gaps tend to increase.
You don't think there were income gaps between the inner party members and the proletariat and Soviet Russia?
Okay, so correct me if I'm wrong, but the fact that you'd be even willing to engage beyond consequences indicates that you care about consequences.
You made an incorrect statement, and I corrected you.
Okay, but you were saying that you didn't care at all about consequences, and then you were...
I don't really think we want to debate at this level, right?
I mean, you made an incorrect statement, I corrected you.
And I've told you that if you were to say, well, I want to end slavery, but what if it causes the end of the world?
You know, you can make anything up like that.
Why do we want to end slavery?
Because slavery is immoral.
Why was National Socialism immoral?
Because it was a massive, systemic, horrifying violation, series of violations, almost endless series of violations of the non-aggression principle.
Why is communism so evil and immoral?
Because it is systemic, universal, almost infinite violations of the non-aggression principle.
And so, the non-aggression principle is a central moral principle And that's what we build society around.
Like, human liberty is an essential moral principle, and therefore you can't have slavery in a moral society.
And the non-aggression principle is a sacred moral principle, which means you can't have a government in a moral society.
Now, you can say, well, in order to save morality, we have to violate morality, and it's like, okay, well, then you're just making up sci-fi stories, and you've given up on principles.
Okay. So, I'm wondering if I'd get an answer to my original question, which was that.
And again, admittedly, this is a completely fictional scenario.
Let's say that we implement anarchy.
But I have been answering your original question.
That's another douchey move, to say I have not been answering your original question.
You're saying, well, what about the consequences?
And I say, consequentialism is amoral at best.
No, no, no. It has nothing to do with moral principles.
You say, yes, but what about consequentialism?
Why won't you answer my question?
I have answered your question, you just don't like the answer.
No, no, no. I don't think you've answered my question, which was that if...
Anarchy did end in disaster.
Would you still support it?
Would you say, okay, let's just continue doing it based on your principles?
Even though, you know, it's resulting in a ton of terrible consequences.
After the fact. After it's no longer projection, but it's actually happening.
It's an irrelevant question.
No, no, hang on.
It's like saying, well, would you support ending slavery if ending slavery caused massive numbers of children to be gored to death by blue unicorns?
The question makes no sense.
How does it not make sense?
Because we can't know the future.
No, I'm not saying that we know the future.
Again, this is completely fictional.
I'm saying Let's say that this scenario did happen.
I'm not saying that it's likely to happen.
We can say that there's a one in a million chance that it's going to happen.
But if it did happen, would you still support anarchy based on your principles, even if it was ending in disaster and violence?
Wait, wait. What do you mean my principles?
Or the non-aggression principle, let's say.
Is that not a principle you share?
Well, I thought I did, but I think that you kind of are...
I think I'm more concerned with consequences, so I think maybe you've kind of changed my mind on that.
But no, it's just that when you say my principles, you make it sound like it's just my whim, you know, like I like...
The color blue and ice cream, you know?
I mean, just pointing out, I really sort of point out a little bit of the, I assume, unconscious sophistry that's going on.
But again, I do not understand, like, there's no possible principle that you can't construct some imaginary disaster scenario for, so I reject disaster scenarios as a methodology for making any moral decisions.
Well, there's a guy drowning in the lake.
Now what if you save him and he turns out to be an axe murderer?
In 10 years, should you save him?
Come on, man. These aren't real scenarios.
These aren't honest explanations.
It's certainly not philosophy. It's just scam-markering, right?
Well, I'm just trying to...
I'm having trouble, and I'll admit I'm having trouble understanding how it's not consequentialism.
Even if you could create an absurd scenario that is completely unlikely to happen, if it would change...
Your opinion or your prerogative, then how is that not consequential?
It doesn't matter. Listen, one in a million babies is going to grow up to be the worst human being you can imagine, right?
Right. Like, horrifying beyond words.
Whatever your worst case scenario, one in a million babies, maybe let's just pick one in a million babies, right?
Okay. So do you support killing babies in the crib?
No. So we're in agreement.
Now, that's for sure.
One in a million babies is going to grow.
I mean, there's one in a million. What if there's a one in a million chance that anarchy turns out to be a disaster, right?
What if one in a million babies turns out to be the worst conceivable human being and causes the death of 10,000 people?
Would you support killing babies in the crib?
No, because you're bringing us back to this projection standpoint where it's like, oh, well, what if, what if?
But I'm saying after the fact, what if the baby grew up and it killed 10 people, would you be willing to go back in time and then kill it?
Wait, now our argument requires a time machine?
Come on, man, really?
No, no, no. Do you not think that maybe you're just not arguing from a very honest and decent place if your argument requires the Terminator plots?
No, no, I don't think that that is...
That's not a reasonable place.
Like, okay, well, what if you find out and then you go back and you strangle the baby?
Come on, man. I mean, that's not how we make moral decisions in the world.
We don't have a time machine. Okay, I understand that.
But I'm saying, so then at that point, all right, I'll phrase it this way, right?
Let's say that you had the baby in front of you, and then 10 years, you know, or 30 years down the road, it killed 10 people.
Would you think, hmm, I should have, you know, ended the baby's life at that time, even though you can't go back?
Is this what you do with your moral imagination and your moral time in a time of a rather desperate situation in the world as you try and figure out absolutely impossible scenarios and try and solve them?
Because these scenarios will never happen.
You can't go back in time.
So, I'm not sure why you would spend any time working on this.
You know, it's like we've got this plague of immorality and amorality sweeping through the world, particularly the Western world, at the moment.
And it's like we're in this plague and we've got this cure called rationality, called philosophy.
And you're sitting there saying, well, okay, but what if we could go back in time and find some way to not have the guy eat the monkey who ate the monkey who gave us the plague?
And I'm like, can you just inject some stuff into people that's going to cure their disease?
It's like, well, okay, but what if humans and monkeys didn't split off a long time ago and, you know, that way there was no human beings to eat monkeys?
And it's like, you understand? Like, at some point, don't you actually have to help some people?
Well, I understand that, but what I'm saying is I'm not...
Convinced that anarchy is going to actually help people.
Because you're not making the decision based on whether or not it's going to help people.
You're making the decision based on the non-aggression principle.
Yeah. I'm making the decision about how society should function based upon universal moral principles called violence is wrong.
And the scenario that you just gave me was, oh, we have this cure here.
But that's assuming that it's Yeah, this is definitely a cure and it's not going to be a 50% chance that it makes you more sick, right?
And so you're making the decision based on the fact that the consequence is going to be that people get cured.
But if we don't know what the consequences are, then how can you say that it's the ultimate, you know, divine standard?
No, this was an analogy.
I'm not saying that this is exactly the same as a pill.
It was an analogy because you were coming up with scenarios that required time travel and baby killing.
And I was just pointing out that there were not very realistic scenarios for us to spend our time on.
In that scenario, you made the argument that you said, yeah, rather than trying to go back in time and waste time on trying to prevent the disease from happening, which is completely impossible anyway because there's no time machines, If we have this cure here, we should just start injecting people with it.
But that's based on the knowledge that you know the cure is going to work.
Well, let me ask you this.
Let me ask you this. Do you know anyone in your life who either violates the non-aggression principle or supports the violation of the non-aggression principle?
I mean, yes.
Good! Okay, then you have something to do.
Which is to talk to people about how they should neither violate the non-aggression principle nor support the violation of the non-aggression principle because I'm going to go out on a limb here and assume that we have at least this in common, that you think the government is too big and has too much power at the moment and that power rests upon the belief of the people that the power is both necessary and good.
So, you and I both share the goal of wishing to reduce violations of the non-aggression principle at the moment.
And neither of us is going to live to see a stateless society anyway, unless stateless societies find us, we're all dead.
And so, you and I both have a lot to do in this world as it stands, which is to convince people to stop violating the non-aggression principle.
In particular, what I'm talking about here is peaceful parenting, right?
Maybe you know People who are parents who are hitting their children or frightening their children or punishing their children or confining their children or yelling at their children which is more verbal abuse and not a direct violation of the non-aggression principle but not very nice.
And so you would have conversations about peaceful parenting with those people or you have people who believe that you know Massive taxation is great, and Syria needs to be bombed, and then you have lots of conversations you can have with people about reducing their enactment of or support of violations of the non-aggression principle.
And there, I think we're both fellow soldiers working together to make the world a better place.
And I'm just kind of curious as to why...
How society looks in 300 years, which we can't possibly comprehend, why that is a sticking point for you.
I suspect it's because you don't want to have the conversations with the people in your life.
No, no. It's not about that.
It's the fact that I care what you...
I think that... I don't think that...
I mean, I agree that, yes, we want to reduce violations of the non-aggressive principle, but I don't think that we're totally converging as...
I may have thought before, because I think that you're saying, well, as long as there's no state and the non-aggression principle isn't being violated, I don't care what happens after.
No, no, no. I never said, no, hang on.
I do care what happens after. Again, just to remind you, I never said the non-aggression principle won't be violated.
It certainly will be violated in a free society.
It will be rare because we only get to a free society when children are raised peacefully.
And so when people are raised peacefully, they don't have trauma.
They don't act out.
They don't have behavioral and interpersonal and difficult issues as far as all of that stuff goes.
And a free society is going to require a high IQ population.
And a high IQ population without the state tends to be peaceful and productive and gains far more value out of participation in the free market than it does out of participation in criminal activities.
And so, in a free society, we'll have all of these good things.
That doesn't mean that there won't be people who violate the non-aggression principle.
There could be people who are just born bad, you know?
There could be people who have brain tumors.
There could be people who just, through their free will, decide that they want to be jerks and mean and kick people's cats and spray paint their cars.
I don't know, right? I mean, so there will, of course, be violations of the non-aggression principle in a free society.
They just won't be Provided with the awesome power of status weaponry and surveillance.
Wait, so I'm confused. So it's not...
So how is that consistent with your principle?
Because you're saying that the non-aggression principle is okay if it's violated as long as it's not the state?
When did I say it was okay to violate?
Well, it's...
Because you're saying that these things are going to happen anyway, but that we just can't have a state.
Sure. The fact that some people like to violate the non-aggressive principle is one of the reasons why you can't have a government.
Because people like to get stuff for nothing and because people find it profitable or beneficial or maybe they're sadistic and they enjoy violating the non-aggression principle.
If you have a state, that's where those people are going to go and they're going to use the power of the state to enforce their wishes.
Okay, but you just, and correct me if I'm wrong, I think that you just admitted that in order for the free society to work, That we have to have all these contingencies.
The average IQ increases by 15 points and we have a couple generations of raising kids with this principle.
So how is anarchy the superior choice if it has all these contingencies on literally changing the mental state of humanity?
Do you think that it would work now?
What do you mean?
You think that, you said that in order for a free society to work, we have to have all these contingencies, right?
No, no, no, sorry.
In order for a free society to be achieved, then I do believe that we need peaceful parenting.
I think it can happen relatively quickly if enough people get on board with peaceful parenting.
And there is the IQ issue, which is that lower IQ people, there's a sweet spot for criminality, as you know, about the IQ of 85.
There's a lack of capacity to defer gratification, and there's a lack of appreciation of abstract principles in lower IQ situations.
And so there is that challenge.
So yeah, there are some things which most likely are going to need to be in place for us to be able to get close to a free society.
Yeah. I'm just sort of pointing out what appears to be necessary but not sufficient.
Okay, so I guess I would ask, would you be in support of just removing the government right now?
Again, this is akin to time travel.
There's no possibility of that occurring, so I'm not sure where we talk about it.
Because I guess I'm kind of confused, because are you saying that, like, okay, yeah, an anarchy...
An anarchal utopia is where everyone has 125 IQ and plus, and nobody beats their children, or at least it's a very, very small percentage of people that beat their children, and we're all raised with these principles.
I mean, of course I'm in favor of that, but I don't know that that's achievable.
I don't know if it's achievable either, but so what?
So what? We still have to talk about what's right, even if we have no certainty of how to achieve it.
I mean, I can't tell the future.
There's no such thing as determinism, and everyone has free will, so you make as strong a case as you humanly can, and then it's up to people to decide what they're going to do.
But that's why I'm kind of using the consequentialist argument, because...
Of course, in principle, yeah.
I mean, I would love the idea of an ideal anarchal society where there's no government and everybody just is intelligent and has the same principles.
Oh my god, will you stop strawmanning this fucking argument?
Oh, well, I'd love for there to be a perfect universe.
It's like, that's not what's being argued for.
I didn't say everyone has to have 125 IQ, and I didn't say no one can beat the, like, I'm just saying this is the direction we need to go and say, because if you set up a standard of perfection, you're automatically discounting the argument being proposed, rather than dealing with what I'm actually saying.
No, no, no. I'm not saying that you think that that is going to happen, but I'm saying that is an ideal that you're shooting for.
No, it's not. No, it's not.
No, I mean, how can you possibly shoot for an ideal that everyone has 125 IQ? I don't know how to do that.
So what is the ideal that you're shooting for?
The universal application of the non-aggression principle.
Or the universal acceptance of the non-aggression principle, which means that there can be personal violations and so on.
People can accept that smoking is bad for you and still smoke, right?
So I just wish to spread the value and morality of the non-aggression principle, as it applies in particular to what we have the most control over, which is not whether Syria gets bombed, but whether we hit our children.
Well, okay, yeah, I mean, we're in agreement there, but...
And we can't possibly know what society is going to look like when people accept freedom, when people reject violence.
It's sort of like saying to people before the end of slavery, what is society going to look like 50 years after slavery?
Well, if you're arguing that, and again, correct me if I'm wrong, that what we should do is spend the next, you know, three generations or so prepping everybody for a free society, Then I'm completely on board with you.
But, you know, that's not the same thing as just saying, you know, we should just switch to anarchy, right?
Have I ever said we should just switch to anarchy?
I mean, that was an impossible scenario.
But we're not violating the non-aggression principle if we don't, right?
If we don't just immediately eradicate government right now.
If we had the power to, we would be not violating that aggression principle, correct?
If we had the power to, I don't...
It's sort of like saying, well, you're a terrible doctor because I don't live forever.
Well, there is no possible standard by which human beings live forever.
So saying that, well, it's immoral if we don't do the impossible means that the moral is the impossible, which has you not act.
The moral is the achievable.
The moral is what you can do.
Daydreaming about utopia or this or that or consequentialism is a way of avoiding immediate action in the here and now.
The moral is what can be achieved.
Like, being a good doctor is what you can actually achieve.
Not having people in a perfect state of health who live forever.
You can't achieve that.
There's no steps by which you can get there in any conceivable time frame.
And so if your standard of being a good doctor is people living forever and never ever getting sick, how are you going to treat people in the here and now?
Because you know that they're going to get sick and they're going to die.
So you do that which you can actually achieve.
That's what morality is.
Like you'd say, well, I can't go to the gym because it's not going to have me live forever.
Well, that means you're actually going to live less long because you don't even go to the gym or exercise or whatever, right?
And so saying, this is why I sort of push back my friend against these Disaster scenarios of, well, you know, four generations after the implementation of anarchism, it could be hell on earth!
It's like, you don't know.
I don't know. We live based on principles.
We act based on principles.
And the moral is the achievable.
If you can't achieve it, it has nothing to do with morality.
If you can't enact it or change it or do anything about it, it has nothing to do with morality.
Any more than a magic pill that has people never get sick and live forever has nothing to do with medicine.
That's just fantasy. So the moral is the achievable.
What can we do? We can talk to people about the non-aggression principle.
I can discuss a voluntary and free society.
I can write books like universally preferable behavior, a rational proof of secular ethics.
I can write practical anarchy.
I can write everyday anarchy.
I can make them available to people for free at freedomainradio.com.
That I can do. That I can achieve.
But you have to have some sort of end goal, right?
Some sort of ideal that you're shooting for.
What do you mean? In order for that to be, for you to have some sort of direction, right?
Like, to have a reason.
My end goal is to make the arguments and write the books.
I don't know what you mean, what's my end goal?
I can't control people. I'm not God.
I don't have an end goal that involves the contents of the consciousness of human beings around the planet.
Are you... Am I wrong to say that you're hoping that you'll have some effect on people and that you might contribute to a free society arising at some point in the future?
Of course. But my goal is what I can actually achieve.
I can't achieve a free society.
I can't achieve having this conversation.
I can't achieve writing books.
I can't achieve giving speeches.
I can't achieve these things.
But what is your reason?
What is your reason for doing that?
Just to do them? Why are you giving speeches?
Why are you making these podcasts free?
What is your purpose?
I'm not sure what you mean.
What do you mean? What is your purpose?
Why are you doing the things that you do?
Is that not a straightforward question?
Why am I doing the things that I do?
Well, if you go to a doctor and say, well, why do you have a clinic?
Well, what would he say? Specifically the things, right?
Like you're making, like the things you listed, right?
You're making the podcast available for free.
You're writing books and giving lectures.
Why are you doing that?
Well, again, I ask you, why would a doctor have a clinic?
To make people better and to hopefully have an income.
Okay. And so you want to make people better, right?
I want to help people to think clearly and to think rationally.
Okay, but why? Why is that important to you, that people think clearly and rationally?
It makes the world a better place.
It makes the world a happier place.
And it makes the world...
Hang on, hold on a sec. I just got to switch things here.
It makes the world a better place.
It makes the world a happier place.
And it makes the world a safer place.
And I have a child who is growing up.
And of course, I live in a world where I hope to grow old in.
And I would like it to still have a functioning civilization when my daughter grows up and when I grow old.
And to do that, people need to think more rationally than they're thinking at the moment.
Right. So you're concerned with...
The consequences, right, of what you're doing.
I'm concerned with the...
I don't have any control over the consequences of what I'm doing.
I can control the actions that I take.
I cannot control the consequences of those actions.
But you have an ideal consequence that you're shooting for, that you're crafting your...
No, no, I don't shoot for consequences.
This is the difference between principles and consequences.
I don't shoot for consequences. I shoot for truth.
You just said that you wanted to educate people to make the world a better place.
You just said you wanted to educate people to make the world a better place.
Is that not an end goal that you just described?
No, hang on. I understand the confusion.
Let me give you an analogy.
Hopefully, I'll make it somewhat clearer. Listen, I respect the questions.
It's a great question and it's a great topic.
The doctor will say to the man who's fat and a smoker, he will say, lose weight and quit smoking, and here's how you can do it, right?
Yeah. But he has no control over whether the man loses weight and quit smoking.
Correct. So the doctor can say, here's what you should do to stay healthy, and you should do it.
So he can control that, but he cannot control whether the man actually takes his advice, right?
Right, but he's going to do everything he can to try to frame that in a way that will be convincing to the man so that he will, because he wants the man to take the advice.
Well, I don't know what it means to do everything you can.
That sounds like quite a... I'm going to grab him by the lapel.
I'm going to wake him up at night.
I don't know what that means.
that he's a good enough doctor that he actually cares about the well-being of his patients, he's going to put in a suitable amount of effort to try to actually, rather than just say, oh yeah, do this, do that, and you'll get better, he's going to actually frame it in a way that's going to be understandable and relatable so that the patient is likely to actually take action, right?
Because he cares what the patient does, and he cares about the consequences of what he does, because if he says, if he doesn't engage the patient and he's not relatable, then the patient might be like, oh, you know, fuck that doctor, right?
But if he says it in a way where he's friendly and he's charismatic and he actually sells him on the treatment, then he's more likely to actually I don't know what works with everyone.
Some people will work with tough love.
Some people will work with having the shit scared out of them.
And some people will work with tender solicitation.
I mean, it really depends on the personality type.
It depends on the relationship.
It depends on the personality of the doctor, what works best for him.
So, you know, I don't know.
But sure, as a doctor, you would probably like it if...
Your patients followed good advice for their health.
Well, that's the whole, but it's not just you'd probably like it.
That's the whole reason why they're doing it.
I mean, I guess some doctors are just doing it for money, but there are some doctors out there.
No, no, no. Doctors are not in the business of making people better.
Doctors are not in the business of curing people.
Doctors are in the business of giving advice and tools for better health.
It's the patient's job to take that advice, to take the treatment, to drop the weight, to put down the cigarettes.
The doctors are not in the business of making people healthier.
That's each individual's choice.
Is it not the doctor's job to Can you deliver that advice and that information in the most comprehensible way as possible?
Yeah, give them information and medicine.
That's the doctor's job. Okay, but is it not just give the information, but to give it in the most comprehensible and relatable manner such that it's more likely that the patient will follow that advice?
Is that not awesome? I don't know how you measure the most comprehensible or comprehensible and relatable manner.
I mean, I don't know how you'd even measure that.
Well, I mean, it's like a salesperson, right?
I mean, there's good and bad salesmen, right?
Yeah, but a doctor's job, the doctor spends his time studying medicine rather than sales, right?
So, you know, that's putting a lot on the doctor.
Well, no, no, no. And I understand that.
But I mean, again, like the doctor, I mean, there's a difference between a good doctor and a bad doctor, right?
Like a bad doctor is just like, yeah, whatever, you know, here's your prescription.
And the good doctor actually, you know, gives information and says, oh, here's why I gave you this specific prescription rather than this other one.
And the reason why he's doing that is because the patient is more likely to trust the doctor and to actually follow through with the treatment if the doctor is relatable and the doctor is actually engaged in the discussion and seems like he cares.
I don't mean to sound obstructionist, but I don't agree with you that the good doctor is one who takes his time.
At all. Because the doctor who takes his time is going to be more expensive than the doctor who's rapid.
And some people cannot afford a doctor who takes his time, and therefore the best care that they can get is the doctor who says, here are your pills.
Look it up on the internet. Next patient, please.
That'll be 10 bucks rather than 100 bucks or something, right?
Okay. So it's, you know, in terms of like what's best, I don't know.
That's the whole point of a free society is I don't know what's best.
I don't know what the ideal is.
And this is why I keep pushing back.
You say, well, he should do it this way and it should be this amount of time.
I don't know. The market will provide a whole set of different tiers.
And some people would rather go to a doctor that gives them the prescription so they can go home because they have more time than money they can research on the internet.
Other people who have more money than time would rather have a more expensive doctor who takes his time and steps them through everything.
But I don't know. And those doctors are going to be...
But those doctors are going to...
Let me frame it this way, right?
Those doctors are going to...
Appeal to their respective markets, right?
I mean, I don't know what that exactly means, but yeah, they're going to try and have a business that works.
Right, so the doctors that deal with the rich patients that want the engagement are going to be engaging, and the doctors that are cheaper that are catering to the less wealthy patients are going to be more quick and to the point and go look it up online, right? Sure.
I'm a little lost as to what we're discussing here.
Because I'm just trying to say that the reason why anybody does anything is for a goal or a consequence, right?
And you just said that you're doing all these things to try to spread ideas and educate people.
And I'm saying you have to have some sort of motivation for that, right?
You're not just doing it for your health, right?
I agree that human action involves motivation, yes.
Right, but you have to have some sort of ideal or some goal that you're shooting for in order to be motivated, right?
Like, you're not just motivated by nothing.
Like, anything you do, like, if you're motivated to go and get a drink...
Yes, but I'm motivated by what I can control, and I have to have a very strict delineation between what I can control and what I can't control.
I can control how I present information.
I cannot directly control how people receive it.
I can control the quality of what I put out.
I cannot control how it's received and whether people act on it or not.
Okay, so there's a word you just use, quality, right?
Why do you want your videos to be higher quality?
Because you want them to be more easy to receive.
Well, no, that's not necessarily true.
Okay, okay, I'm sorry. So I should not assume that.
To make things easy to receive, I could easily dilute.
I mean, if I never talked about race and IQ, everything would be a whole lot easier for people to receive, right?
That was a wrong way to put it.
I'm not trying to catch you.
I'm just saying it's not always easy.
Yeah, and I'm not taking any offense, but I'm just curious.
So what is your motivation for making your videos higher quality?
Like, why do you do that? Instead of just throwing them together and like, you know, screw it.
Well, partly it's because I like the challenge.
I have to remain interested in what it is that I'm doing.
So I like the challenge of putting together something of higher quality, and it is an interesting balance.
So I could put... There are some vloggers out there who put out like one video every month or two, and the video is...
Dense with animation and this, that, and the other, right?
And there are other people who, clink clank, put out like sometimes three videos a day, which is pretty rare for me.
And so for me, it's like, well, I have to, it has to be an interesting enough topic and engaging enough topic that it keeps my attention.
It has to be something that I think is important to talk about.
And I do try and present it in a way that It's the easiest for people to digest, like a little bit of positivity, and I smile, a couple of jokes or two and so on can be very helpful.
You know, the old spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down and so on.
So I focus on what keeps me interested and engaged, what I think is important, and once I've decided that something is interesting and engaging to me, and therefore I assume to some degree the audience, and I Work hard to put together something that is engaging and interesting for people to listen to.
That is my motivation.
Sure, I mean, I want to try and introduce ideas that I think are important to people in a positive and engaging way, but I have no control over how they are responding.
And look, I mean, you can scroll through the comments on maybe even this video, my videos or other people's videos.
And you'll see this, you know, this is the greatest presentation ever.
I can't stand this presentation.
It's horrible, you know? Like, if I do something that's kind of emotional, like I did this one, a final plea for peace, pretty emotional about it.
And people are like, I really appreciate the passion you bring to what it is that you do.
It really hit me in the feels.
You know, it really got me. I was crying too.
And other people are like, you faggot drama queen.
You know what I mean? Like, you can't control how you can be...
I can control how...
Honestly committed I am to communicating, I can't control how people respond to it.
You can, I agree, you can't control individuals, but you can still implement strategies that are going to be, that are, you know, shown through just history to be more likely to be received well by a higher percentage of people, right?
No, no, certainly not if you're a philosopher.
I mean, not if you're a good philosopher.
Okay, well... Because there's tons of topics that if I had never talked about them, I'd be much bigger than I am now.
If I had never talked, I mean, we know what all the topics are, right?
Just ask Dave Rubin, right?
I mean, if I had not talked about certain topics, then I could have a TV show.
I could, I mean, this is not said with any bitterness.
I mean, I knew what I was getting into.
It's just that reluctantly nobody else was.
And so I stepped up because it's essential.
So the idea that you can package things in a way that is more pleasant, sure you can.
But not if you're really interested in truth and virtue, then you have to say things that people find enormously difficult to hear.
Okay, I agree with that.
I'm genuinely curious as to how you get motivation without an endgame.
How I get motivation without an endgame.
I'm not even sure what an endgame would mean.
And again, I don't mean to be dense.
I'm not trying to be obtuse. I'm not sure what an endgame...
Maybe I'm missing something. It just seems like...
I don't know what an endgame would mean.
Right. So, like, it just seems like, you know, you keep...
If you keep asking why, like, why do you make your videos?
Well, because, you know, I want to educate people.
Well, why do you want to educate people?
Well, because I want them to, I want the world to be a better place.
I want them to, you know, raise their children better.
It's like, well, why do you want them to raise their children better?
Why does that matter? No, but I enjoy it.
And so it has nothing to do with your principles.
It's just hedonism right then, right?
Because you're just doing it for the enjoyment of it.
It has nothing to do with your principles.
No, no, no. See, dude, you're like bouncing back and forth from one random absolute to another.
Why can't it be a combination of things?
Oh, it's pure hedonism.
Then there's no principles involved.
Because you just said you're doing it because you enjoy it.
If it was pure hedonism, I'd be doing a different kind of vlog that would be much more popular.
Because you just deflected from the principle aspect that I was trying to talk about by saying that you only...
No, no, no. You were supplying a whole lot of end games, none of which had to do with anything that I enjoyed.
And the fact that I enjoy it is important.
And so that's why I'm curious as to what is your motivation to do it.
If you don't have an endgame.
If it's just because you enjoy it, then...
I didn't say it was just because I enjoy it.
The fact that I say I enjoy it doesn't displace everything else that I said for the last half an hour, man.
That's what I'm trying to say. It's not just because you enjoy it.
You have other motivations, right?
Sure, yeah. It's not just a hedonism.
I'm curious as to how you can have those motivations if you don't have an ideal in mind or something that you're trying to reach.
It seems to me like You're motivated to reach certain things.
I'm motivated to get up and get a glass of water because my end game is to start drinking, right?
And so I'm just curious. I thought your end game was to satisfy your thirst and to stay alive or something like that.
Well, I mean, yeah. We can put it like that too then, yeah.
I mean, that's probably a better way to put it.
But that's just where I'm kind of getting confused because it seems like you have to have some sort of end game, right?
Like sustenance.
What is your end game for this conversation?
I'm hoping to change your mind.
Why are you hoping to change my mind?
Because I know that you're very popular within the community and if your mind is changed then you would be someone who would be a good person to spread the amended ideas.
And why do you want to spread the amended ideas?
To increase the likelihood That we are going to improve life for everyone.
To improve life for everyone?
Does that seem like a reasonable goal?
Is that not? Everyone?
Okay, not everyone.
On average, improve quality of life.
The average quality of life.
And so you come to a philosopher who accepts the universality of the non-aggression principle, and you hope to improve people's lives by getting him to break the universality of the non-aggression principle.
Is that right? Yes, because I don't agree that that is going to help people.
And why do you want to help people?
Well, okay, this is kind of getting into another conversation, because...
No, no, it's exactly what you asked me.
Why do you want to help people? Because I care about people and I want.
And I care about, again, my future children and myself.
And I'm motivated to do it.
And I'm not claiming that that's an objectively virtuous goal.
It's just what I want. Why do you care about people?
Because I'm a human being and human beings are endowed with vicarious emotions where they Where they suffer vicariously through other people's hardships.
And so it brings me pain...
Wait, wait. That's not a universal human trait by any means.
Well, it's a...
It's a...
I mean, if that was the case, you understand, if human beings, sorry to interrupt you, but if human beings hated it to see other people suffer and loved it when they did well, you're actually arguing for the ideal utopia that you kind of mocked earlier, because if that was a universal human trait, we wouldn't need a government, nor any laws, nor any reason for morality whatsoever. No, no, no, I'm not saying it's not a universal human trait, but it's the human that I am.
I'll fix that statement.
It is true about me.
You get upset when people are suffering and you want them to suffer less.
Yes. Now, do you want them to suffer less so that you'll suffer less?
Yes. So it's selfish.
Yes, but I agree.
It's my view that there is no such thing as non-selfishness in the world.
The only reason why anybody cares about other people is because they are That's just the way their brain is, right?
Because if you're born a psychopath, you didn't choose that, right?
And you're utterly incapable of experiencing empathy, right?
And just because you were born with a non-psychopathic brain doesn't make you any better than anybody else, right?
Do you have confirmation that psychopathy is 100% genetic?
That's quite something. No, no, no, no, no, no.
That's not what I said. You said if you're born with a psychopathic brain, you didn't earn that.
If you're born with a non-psychopathic brain... Well, if you were born with a brain that was susceptible to psychopathy and then you had a very unfortunate environment...
Okay, sorry. It just sounded like it was just your height or whatever.
Okay, sorry about that.
I don't agree.
I didn't think that this would be relevant for the conversation, but I guess it is.
I don't agree that morality is objective.
Of course you don't. That's why you're a consequentialist.
And that's why universal morality is bothersome to you, and it's why you like science fiction stories about freedom leading to disaster.
But it's because, let's say, okay, yeah.
If the only reason why it matters is because the majority of the population at this point in time, or at least the majority population of the Western world, does experience vicarious suffering.
But if they were all psychopaths, then no one would care.
Wait, wait, wait. Do the majority of people experience vicarious suffering?
Yeah. Is that wrong?
How could we have a concept of white privilege if people experience vicarious suffering?
White privilege is a racist concept that hurts white people and makes them feel bad and guilty and angry and upset and frustrated.
And white people are the majority, at least in a lot of Western countries.
And so the concept of white privilege...
Is very widespread, very damaging to the majority of the population.
So I'm not sure how it is that we've got this big excess of empathy.
Because they don't know what they're doing, right?
I can beat a witch to death if I'm convinced that she doesn't have a soul and she's not experiencing any pain and still be an empathetic person.
So just because you're ignorant doesn't change anything.
Wait, you can beat a witch to death and still be an empathetic person?
If I am convinced that that witch does not have a soul and can't feel any pain, right?
Does it trouble you when you say that you can beat a witch to death and still be an empathetic person?
Does that give you any pause?
Thinks maybe you've gone down the wrong road in some way or another?
No, because of the caveat that I put after.
That if I'm an individual that happens to be convinced that that witch has no soul and that they cannot feel any pain, right?
Because if I'm not inflicting any real suffering, then what is there to be I'm concerned about, right?
But of course, we know that's not the case, but those were common beliefs.
But if you feel that the, you know, there may be animals that we, or creatures that we don't really believe feel pain, but if we torture them or kill them, we assume that animals wish to live, right?
That's a fundamental human or animal drive as a whole, the desire to survive.
So I'm not sure how you'd beat a woman to death and think that you could still be empathetic.
Because what I'm saying is that if I was convinced that they didn't have a soul, and so there wasn't an actual person experiencing it.
It was just like a robot, basically.
You know what I mean? No, but religious people don't believe that, say, cats have souls.
But if you beat a cat to death, that's pretty bad, right?
Okay, but I'm not talking about...
I mean, I don't think people really burn witches anymore.
more I'm talking about.
I mean, this is like something that happened hundreds of years ago.
Right.
But I'm saying that you can, or like people who don't comply with the communist in South Africa, but all right, go on.
What I'm saying is that, you know, you can do something that is, um, what seems to be a completely heinous act.
But if you don't, if you're not actually aware of what you're doing, right.
If the intention isn't there, then it's not It doesn't necessarily mean that you're an immoral person or that you're an un-epathetic person.
But you see, this ethical approach, my friend, it's similar to your consequentialist approach, except now you don't just have to read the future, you have to read people's minds.
Because you have to figure out whether there's a particular subjective demon called intent in there or not.
And so these all become very subjective distinctions to make.
Well, again, I think...
I mean, anyone can say, like, you could beat a woman to death and you could say, well, I don't believe she has a soul and therefore I'm a good person.
What do you say? Well, because there's a difference between locking people up because they're dangerous to society and locking people up just for...
over vendettas, right?
The second is a waste of time and two wrongs don't make a right.
And the first is just a logical response to destruction.
Wait, what? Okay, what are we talking about now?
So, right...
This person, let's say they beat someone to death and they say, well, I didn't know, I didn't intend to do that, right?
Well, we might still lock that person up because they're a danger to other people, right?
But we wouldn't be locking them up just because of a vendetta or as repercussions, right?
Just so that we can feel the satisfaction of revenge.
Yeah, I'm sorry. We're like all over the place now.
We're talking about crime theory and so on.
So listen, I'm, you know, I'm going to part ways from you.
I appreciate the conversation. I would certainly suggest that you're going to get lost without principles.
And I think if you listen back to this, you'll realize just how much you skip jump all over the place and have a tough time coming down on any particular...
Principle, right? Because you can dilute whatever your principles are with consequentialism, with mind reading, with intentions and things like that.
So, you know, I invite you, you know, you can read the free book, Universally Preferable Behavior.
I invite you to examine your potential for principles.
Because consequentialism is, and this is going to sound pejorative, and I don't mean it this way.
I just want to illustrate it this way.
Right. Consequentialism is animalistic.
Okay. Okay. Consequentialism is, well, I'm not, you know, the monkey says, well, I'm not going to attack the alpha because he might rip my head off.
Consequentialism is animalistic and animals do it all the time.
Animals decide whether to attack a bigger animal, whether to chase the fast or the slow deer based upon their evaluation of the likely outcome of the scenario.
Animals do that all the time and they have to in order to survive.
So consequentialism or trying to figure out whether something is good or bad to pursue based upon an imagined outcome is animalistic.
It is not a higher order function.
And so the higher order function is to compare proposed actions to ideal standards, which is principles.
The problem with consequentialism is you can talk yourself in and out of anything.
You're talking about things which don't exist.
The future. The consequences of a radical change in human society.
I've studied a lot of history.
I've studied a lot of governments.
I've done a lot of presentations on these things.
You cannot find a sustainable state of society.
You cannot find a society that does not eventually self-destruct based upon an ever-expanding growth of state power, of fiat currency, of the tolerance and apathy of dying civilizations, of multiculturalism, of vote-buying, of intergenerational debts, you name it.
These governments always, always turn on their own citizenry and drag them back down to the Stone Age sooner or later.
And so when you come to me and you say, well, I don't know if a free society is sustainable, I just say, well, there is, of course, the last 5,000 years of recorded history, no states survive.
So don't talk to me about sustainability until you have something to offer other than the state, which is what voluntarism or anarchism offers.
So thanks for the call. I appreciate it.
Let's do Uno von Moors.
Alright, up next we have Alta.
She wrote in and said, I've been in a relationship with my boyfriend for 18 months now.
I am a Christian and he is an atheist.
We have been able to have really good conversations, and while we don't agree on many things, we have at least been able to dialogue about it reasonably.
Now, though, he is often bored and disinterested in our conversations.
He swears that all I ever want to discuss is work, health, and babies, and he just doesn't care.
I have tried to stimulate conversations about things that he is interested in, But he feels like I'm unable to contribute to the conversation enough about things like politics, economics, history, and philosophy, so he claims that he just gave up trying.
Now I've lost some confidence in my ability to be an interesting, intelligent conversationalist.
Do you have any advice for how to improve in that area?
Is there something wrong with me that I'm unable to keep up with him in this regard, or are we just incompatible intellectually?
That's from Elta. Hey Elta, how are you doing tonight?
Hi, I'm alright. How are you?
I'm okay. I'm troubled.
Is your boyfriend not on the call, right?
No, he ended up having to work tonight.
He was going to be here, but it didn't end up working out.
Yeah, it might have been an important call to be on.
Yeah. If you were having a baby, he would have taken time off work, right?
I would sure hope so.
And... What's the status of your relationship at the moment?
I assume you're not engaged.
Are you living together, or what's the story?
No, we're not living together.
Because you're a good Christian girl.
Right. No, no, I don't mean that snarkily.
I mean, genuinely. No, no, right.
That's caused some friction with him.
He's lived with previous girlfriends, and it's been very frustrating for him that I haven't wanted to get a place together in And that I'm holding off on sex and all of that.
So there's been a lot of friction regarding that.
Right, right. Now, do you talk a lot about work, health, and babies?
Yeah, probably.
I'm not criticizing. I'm just trying to get his perspective since he's not here.
Right. I talk a lot about work because we have the same career.
We went to the same school where we both do the same thing.
So I talk to him a lot about that because it's like, okay, this happened at work today.
I had a patient who had this problem and stuff like that and stuff.
What would you do if you had this person and stuff like that?
And we've been able to kind of talk about it.
We're both in the healthcare industry.
So you have an interesting job.
Right. Right. It's not like, I don't know, you're a waiter or something and it's like, yeah, the food came late and the clients were mad.
No, no. It's a little bit more...
Not to diss waiters, but you know, it's not the most exciting career to talk about.
No, but I mean, no, we have a problem-solving job every day.
It's like putting together a puzzle. Right, right.
So I feel like it's interesting.
He's less interested in it now.
It's not some...
I don't know if he's not as sold on it as I am or...
It just seems to...
Not do for him what it does for me, or at least not anymore.
How handsome is he, Walter?
Very. Yeah.
There's a reason you're putting up with an atheist who's indifferent to your conversational topics.
How handsome is he?
Is that another question?
Yeah, he's very attractive. I find him very attractive.
How tall is he? I think he said he's like 5'11".
He's not super tall, but he's way taller than me.
And what do you like about his looks?
He fits right into exactly what I've always liked.
He's very...
I try not to double entendre any of this, but go on.
Okay. He's got dark hair.
Dark eyes, he's fairly tan in complexion, and he's a strongman competitor.
He's tall, dark, handsome, and muscular.
Right. And apparently, if you have that, you don't need Jesus.
What was really interesting in the beginning about him that I found so interesting...
Sorry, I didn't mean to double say that twice...
But we were always able to have really interesting, long, in-depth conversations.
And he would always be able to bring up perspectives about things that I hadn't thought about before.
He was way more interested or had a lot more information to talk to me about.
Well, in the beginning, it started off being like anatomy, physiology, that kind of thing, like trying to figure out some health things.
We both also, one of the reasons why we talk about health a lot is because we both have chronic illnesses, chronic autoimmune diseases, so we're constantly both trying to figure out how to feel better.
So there was always, we had that to discuss and talk about, and yeah, he just always had some interesting different ideas and perspectives and things that I hadn't thought much about, and he was always so strong and Able to articulate his opinions and his perspectives very well.
And I think that I was very drawn to that.
Still am. And how long was it before he began to complain of you being boring?
Or his perception? I'm not saying you are.
His perception of you being boring.
It really came up that he came right out and said it.
In, like, January of this year.
He might have said things like it before, but I can't remember specifically.
No, no, it was Christmas.
It was Christmas. So, like, I guess a little over a year, a little over a year that you've been dating?
We've been dating, yeah, for a little over 18 months now.
Okay, so it was like four or five months ago that this came up, right?
Right. Right, okay.
All right. And was it any particular circumstance, or was it just something that began to sort of slowly arise?
I can't think of any specific circumstance that would have happened.
I think it was just kind of a build-up over time.
And do you find him interesting still?
Yes. Yes, I do.
I get very frustrated with some of his stuff, but I do find him still to be very interesting.
And what do you think of his atheism?
Well, obviously believing as I do, it's bothersome.
Pretty big value split, right?
Right. I've just kind of had to put it in the, he has his thing and I have my thing, and as long as we can respect each other and not constantly be undermining each other's beliefs, it's private and personal.
You know, believing in heaven and hell and stuff, it's bothersome to me that he doesn't believe as far as his eternal...
A destination and whatnot, but ultimately you can't decide that for somebody.
So as long as he doesn't try to push me to give up my faith, I have not been overly concerned with it.
It bothers me.
It's something that I've battled with in the beginning particularly quite a lot.
My biggest concern about it is We've talked about how to handle our differences in faith and everything with the kids, but that would be my biggest concern is where does that split, how does that affect them?
Have you prayed about this?
Yes. And what are you getting back?
Not really a lot of feedback and the silence is kind of unnerving as well in that regard.
Do you think that you're not getting feedback because God knows that you know already what the right thing to do is or because you're not ready to hear what the advice would be or is there some other reason?
It's probably...
It's probably an unwilling to hear or not sure I want to hear if I'm being honest.
Right. Now, where do his ethics come from?
Because I know where your ethics come from.
They come from God, from the Bible, from the Ten Commandments, from Jesus, the example of Jesus.
So I get where your ethics come from, and they're absolute and universal, and you're bound by them, and there are consequences if you fail to follow them.
Where do his ethics come from?
I think that a lot of it comes from reading and listening to your stuff and studying similar things like that.
The universal...
What is your...
Universally preferable behavior?
That one. He talks about that often.
And do you find that his ethics manifest in practice as much as they manifest in theory?
As far as does he lie, does he cheat, does he steal all of that?
Yeah. Does he have integrity?
Does he treat people well? Does he stand out for what he believes in?
Does he tell the truth even when it's difficult?
Does he? So on.
Yes. Where I would say I'm not always sure is the idea of treating people well.
He and I kind of differ in what that means.
and kindness and stuff like that.
But he tries as much as possible to be very upright and honest.
And I do believe he has integrity and tries to live by what he claims to believe in.
Yes.
Now, let me ask you, it's a difficult question, of course, because it's about you.
It's difficult to answer objectively, but do you think that he genuinely believes that you're boring, or do you think there's something else that's motivating these statements?
He has told me in the past that he...
Possibly due to his upbringing and his childhood and stuff.
Thrives and prefers chaos.
That he only feels alive when there's chaos and he's trying to fight for survival, basically.
And I want stability and security and...
I don't know if I'd go so far as, obviously I want a certain amount of comfort, not comfort to the extent that you don't grow and stretch and learn, but, you know, reasonable comfort.
And he finds that to be boring.
Also, you know, I think when he's mad at me about the sex thing, he really gets off about the goody-two-shoes Christian girl thing.
So then he throws out the boring, the not having sex thing.
And let me be clear about this.
He knew that I didn't believe in sex before marriage before we started dating.
The very first conversation we had, I made it very clear.
So that was not something I was hiding from him.
At all. But he comes up all the time.
Yeah, so you've not had sex with him?
No. Okay.
And listen, good for you.
That is a tough thing to do, especially these days in our selected universe that I've talked about before, and that is...
The Christian way. And I just wanted to say, good for you.
That is a tough thing for a lot of people to deal with, and I've had a lot of Christian ladies who have not quite made it as far as you have on this show, so I just wanted to point out, good for you.
Now, how does the chaos manifest in his life that he says he likes?
Or how did it in the past?
Uh... I'm not sure how much I should really say, but he's been homeless.
He grew up in a very chaotic household as a child.
There was a lot of fighting and abusive type things that happened.
There's just been a lot of uncertainty.
There's been a lot of Financial instability and struggling to survive and stuff like that.
There has also been illness.
And struggling to feel okay enough to work and all of that.
I guess I'm not entirely sure.
Did I answer your question? Is there more?
Yeah. Kind of blew back my forehead with the homeless thing.
Well, yeah. Was that for a long time?
Honestly, I get a little fuzzy on his timeline.
It's a lot of stuff that happened before he was like 23 or 24.
I have been unable to keep track of exactly how long that happened, but I don't think it was a very long period of time.
I think it was months, weeks, months, something like that.
Do you know if he does any drugs related to being a strongman?
Should I say that? You can say if you know.
You don't have to tell me yes or no.
Yes, I know. He's been very upfront with me on that.
All right. Fair enough.
And this is why it's tough if he's not here, but all right.
Okay. No, I understand.
I don't want to, you know...
Hey, he chose to work.
There are consequences. So, you know, and that's basically all I need to know as far as that goes.
Yes, I know. And how pretty are you?
I know it's a Christian humility challenge, but, you know, honesty, do not bear false witness to me, young lady.
I think I'm probably pretty average, 7 maybe.
He tells me I'm 11, but he's biased.
Well, no, that matters.
That matters to him, right?
Right. That counts.
So you're both physically attracted to each other, and there's a big split in values.
Right. What does Jesus say about that scenario, my friend?
You don't need to pray.
You just don't like the answer.
I know. One of the reasons why he initially thought that maybe we could have a relationship despite the Christian atheist...
No, it's not just that. It's the security chaos.
Right. Right.
It's not just a Christian thing.
Right. No, there's a lot of...
There's been a lot of stuff that has been lack of agreement on.
But there's been a lot of stuff that we've been able to have some really awesome, interesting conversations, which is why it was really unfortunate when that started kind of tapering out.
And, yeah.
Which is why I was hoping to...
See if there was something I could do, because I figure if a relationship is not working out as well or not going perfectly, then what can you yourself do?
You can't change the other person, so what can you yourself do to try to make it better?
And if I remember rightly, you did say that he had drug use in the past, right?
Um... You don't have to answer that, but going with the, I like chaos and I've been homeless and I'm going to go out on a limb and just say that there's a possibility that that may have.
I know the answer to that, but I don't feel like I can say it.
That's perfectly fair and perfectly understandable.
What does your family think of him, my dear?
They don't particularly care for one another.
That is a very nice way of saying something.
There's a lot of friction, particularly between him and my mother.
And what are the issues there?
Did he bench press her against her will?
He thinks that...
She is very manipulative and she's not a good influence in that she basically uses me to manage her feelings and her emotions and he doesn't like how she treats me.
And then she thinks that he doesn't treat me very well, that he's not as attentive as he should be.
Can you put her on the line?
I'm just kidding. I'd be a bit of a surprise to her.
Hey, feel like I'm on the podcast?
Oh, she'd probably do it.
So what would your mom say, though?
If she were on the line and I were to say, well, how does this man treat your daughter badly, what would she say?
Like I was just saying, he's not attentive enough the way she sees it.
She thinks that the dividing of values is...
Way too big of an obstacle to overcome.
And she thinks that his like for chaos is troubling.
Troubling? Yes.
Okay. Troubling can be a very nice word for other things.
Is there anything else you think she might say?
Probably. I'm pretty sure he's going to listen to this, though, so I don't...
Okay. That's fair. That's fair.
I'm just trying to think of how many people we can drag into your life to make things difficult for you.
No, I'm sorry. I'm just trying to get a lay of the land.
I'm not trying to be evasive.
No, no, I get it. No, I perfectly respect what you're doing, and it's very thoughtful and very considerate, and I appreciate that.
Now, you can't talk about Christianity with him much, right?
We have... No, no, no, I mean now, not in terms of like fleshing each other's, sorry, let me rephrase that, not in terms of mapping each other's belief systems, but in terms of like, you know, I was thinking about this to do with the Bible story yesterday and I had a prayer and this happened and, you know, like the priest said this and, you know, when I was thinking what would Jesus do in this situation, like in terms of the day-to-day stuff, is it fair to say that it's not much of a topic?
Right. Exactly. See, this is the problem with value differences.
Right. Which is that your values inform what you do day to day.
Namely, crossing your legs.
No, I mean, it's like lots of things that you're doing day to day that are informed by your faith, right?
Your relationship with Jesus, your relationship with God.
And you can't talk about it with Him because He is not that way inclined, right?
Right. So there's a big gap.
Yes, there is.
So if you take away the core of someone's faith and morals and belief system and relationship to the family and relationship to the universe and relationship to God and Jesus, can't talk about that.
I'm not saying that's all you are, but it's a big part, right?
Yes. And that's been something that he's brought up to me as far as why we're kind of At a stuck place in our relationship is that, you know, we don't have anything to talk about.
I don't mean to laugh, but just to give perspective to the audience.
So, okay, so let's just picture for a moment.
Maybe this is hell for you or whatever, right?
But let's just picture for, you know, a tiny split second of a moment, Alta, that you and I are dating, right?
Okay, just take a moment, you know, breathe through.
You and I are dating.
And then you come up to me and say, Steph, it's been fun.
You know, I still want to date you.
Let's still be boyfriend and girlfriend.
But you really, I don't want you ever again to talk about abstractions.
No philosophy, no economics, no evolutionary psychology.
I don't want you talking about ideas anymore.
Can I tell you what I would become, my friend, as your boyfriend?
Very, very boring.
Okay. Fair enough.
Do you see what I'm saying here?
I do, yes.
And what if you were to say to him, I don't want to hear anything about philosophy?
No, that's not at all. I don't want to hear any abstractions.
I don't want to hear any ideas. I don't want to hear any big picture stuff.
I don't want to hear any principles. What would he talk about?
Not a lot there to talk about.
Nice weather for this time of a year, aren't we?
Yeah. You'd devolve into the atomic deconstruction of small talk, right?
Mm-hmm. Funny when people can't talk about things that really motivate and move them that they become less interesting, right?
Yeah. What about your thirst for security and your concerns about his chaos-based lifestyle?
What about them? I'm not sure.
Can you talk about those, Matt?
Yes. I have been able to talk about them, but it often ends up turning into how we can live with less than what I think is...
Worth living on or able to be lived on or Needed he thinks that I collect too many things and he's a minimal like he really is a minimalist and I He's accused me of being a hoarder.
I don't think that I am a hoarder.
I think I have more stuff than he thinks is needed.
And what compromise does he make towards your preference for some more stability and security?
I'm not really sure what kind of things you're looking for.
I think you just answered the question, my friend.
So, You are further over towards security and stability, which as a woman and someone who wants to be a mom, I completely understand and makes perfect sense to me.
You're more over on stability and security, and he's more over on risk and chaos, right?
Yes. So in order for you both to be happy, you have to both value each other's perspective, right?
So I'll give you an example.
My mind is organized, sometimes a tiny little bit more than my immediate environment.
Yes. Just be very delicate about it, right?
I say the same thing.
Sorry? I say the same thing.
And he says that your environment is a reflection of the state of your mind.
Yeah, whatever, right?
But I mean, so, you know, it's not like Einstein's study was a mess, right?
So look, I'm not a mess mess guy, but let's just say there are other people in the household who are just a little bit better at that kind of organization than I am.
Now, having these kinds of differences is not a problem.
The question is, what is your emotional investment in these perspectives?
So if I, like my wife is tidier than I am.
Now, if I were to say, oh, stop tidying, that's so square, you know, chaos is where life is, oppa, you know, whatever nonsense, right?
Then what I'm doing is saying, what I do is right and good, and what you do is bad or wrong in some kind of way.
Now, there's no room for compromise, right?
Right. Like, if she says, let's go south to get to our destination, and I know for a fact that it's north, I'm not going to compromise, because I'm right and she's wrong.
I'm not going to say, well, let's compromise and go east so we don't get to our destination, right?
Right. And so if he says, listen, I have more towards this chaos stuff, you have more towards this order stuff, there's a lot that I can benefit from the order that you have.
I grew up in a chaotic household.
I had a chaotic youth.
You know, I need some structure.
Now, maybe you need a little shaking up.
Maybe you get a little complacent.
Maybe, you know, some risky stuff might be to the betterment of you.
Maybe there's a good mix we can have here.
But if he's like, well, you're square, I'm cool, you know, like chaos is where it's at and you're such a fuddy-duddy or whatever, then he's not going to compromise.
That's sort of what I'm asking about in terms of, has he recognized that your interest in and capacity for organization and stability is something he also needs?
I haven't felt like there's been a lot of compromise in that area.
A lot? I'm not saying you're wrong, I just don't know what that means.
I'm sure he's done some things that I just can't call to mind at the moment.
I know. You'd remember.
Listen, we all want compromises because compromise means that where we're coming from is valued.
And so if you're not getting compromise, trust me, you know when it comes, because it's rare.
Yeah. And it validates that you have something of value to offer.
Yeah. I need my wife's perspective in my life.
I'm not her.
She's better at some things than I am.
I don't denigrate those things that she's better at.
I think they're fantastic.
Mm-hmm. It's called teamwork, right?
I mean, I'm better at some things.
She's better at some things.
She doesn't denigrate what I'm better at.
I don't denigrate what she's better at.
We respect. I mean, the fact that I can't do those things as naturally and as well as she can is great.
It means that she can do the stuff she's good at.
I can do the stuff that I'm good at.
It's win-win.
Yeah. You would all need that.
If you were not getting it, you'd remember it.
Right. Okay.
As far as dividing up the basic everyday chores and things like that, it's easy to just kind of say, okay, you're good at this and I'm good at this, so let's just split it up that way.
That's not what I'm talking about.
Some of the other stuff, though, I know, I know.
So, let us use our time wisely if we can.
No, I'm sorry. You're right.
It's all right. So, has he made any compromises or shown respect for your perspective as being important to him and something he can learn from?
In other words, what do you have to teach him?
He said he never really thought about having a family and kids until we started dating.
That's really the only thing. I'm not talking about eggs.
Well, that's just the only thing he's ever said to me that I've really changed or given him a new perspective in.
If you have nothing to teach him, you have less to say.
Right? Yeah.
You know, if I'm learning piano when I go to a teacher, then the piano teacher has a lot to tell me.
Put your hands here, hold your rest this way, sit this way, do these exercises, right?
If I'm a concert pianist, what is the teacher going to say to me?
Good job, right?
Exactly. If we don't have anything to learn from our partners, what are they going to say?
If you can't share your values and he doesn't want to learn from your wisdom, how are you supposed to be interesting?
Well, and I guess that's where he's been struggling is with that exact thing, is that I'm not interesting, so why would...
You're such a nice person. Oh, so nice.
He says that too.
So nice. No, listen, and I think it's wonderful and it's not.
Mm-hmm. Right?
Because you say this is what he's been struggling in.
No. Listen. Having respect for the person...
Has he said, I love you? Yes.
Okay. So having respect for the fundamental values of the person you claim to love is not something you should damn well struggle with.
Darn well struggle with, sorry.
It's okay. I've heard it.
No, I know. I'm just, you know...
I'm going to be respectful and meet you halfway.
Oh, thank you. I really appreciate that.
So... You shouldn't struggle to respect the fundamental values that your partner manifests if you say you love them.
That's not a...
Refusing to compromise and find value in meeting in the middle.
If you say, well, he's really struggling with that, it's like, I kind of think he should be doing that.
If he says he loves you, then he should absolutely want to meet you halfway when it comes to values.
Listen, there's things that an atheist and a Christian can, I have conversations with Christians, right?
There are things that an atheist and a Christian can talk about that are incredibly powerful and deep.
What is virtue? What is love?
What is truth? What is goodness?
What is courage? These are all powerful questions.
I guarantee you I'd have much more luck talking about them with much more success talking about those questions with a Christian than I would with most atheists.
I mean, I'm not saying your boyfriend is like this, but in an image of atheism for me is some fedora-wearing douchebag.
No, that's not true.
No, I know. I get it.
I'm just... I understand what you're getting at.
I understand what you're getting at.
And artificial superiority for the rejection of values that they do not know how to replace.
But anyway, so what are you supposed to talk to him about if he's not manifesting That he values what you bring to the table as a person.
Yeah. What does he say that he values and treasures that you bring to the table?
What is that? I'm not...
At one point in time, he used to value that he...
He used to say that I was one of the few people that he could actually learn something from and get something new from every day that he didn't know more than them.
You are one of the few people that he doesn't know more than?
Yes. You are not doing much to dispel my inner atheist image.
I feel really bad that he's not really being represented here, but...
Well, do you wish to retract your statement?
It's fine with me if you do.
It's the true thing that he said.
I might not have said exactly the way it was said.
You know, if I look in the mirror and say it's not representing me well, I can't really blame the mirror, can I? Fair play.
Fair play. Yeah.
That's... Basically, he's told me that I would be an incredible mother and that I am occasionally able to teach him new pieces of information.
Occasionally? Occasionally, yes.
Quick question, if you don't mind.
If you can just sidebar for a moment, Your Honor.
I'm cautious, but sure.
Don't worry, we'll stay in full public view.
Okay. What does the Bible say about the sin of pride?
Have you ever heard or read anything about that in any kind of religious texts of any kind?
Yes. What is the general impression of pride in Christianity?
It's not like double parking, right?
Right. What kind of sin is it again?
One of the seven deadly sins.
One of the seven deadly sins.
Now, just for those of you who aren't theologians, deadly is not a synonym for okay-ish.
It kind of means deadly.
Now, I think pride is one of these ambivalent terms.
In other words, Pride and vanity are two different things.
So pride can mean having legitimate happiness in things that you have achieved that you're satisfied with.
I think that's, you know, I made a beautiful painting.
I'm proud of this painting. You know, I'm proud of how I act as a parent.
I'm proud of the work that I do in the public sphere in philosophy.
I'm very proud of that.
And I think I have reason to be, and that doesn't mean that I'm complacent.
I always want to continue improving and so on.
But I have genuine pride in the work that I have done, lo these many years.
Vanity? Well, that's going just a little bit further than pride would allow, right?
Because vanity then is not measuring yourself relative to some abstract standard and saying, well, I'm getting closer, but pride is saying, I'm better than people.
Vanity, sorry, vanity is saying, I'm better than people.
And if he's in a relationship with you, and he says to you, occasionally you teach me something, Does he believe that he teaches you something more than occasionally?
I don't know that he really cares.
I think that I learn quite a lot of information from him.
Wait! No! We just hit a deer!
What are you driving for? Stop!
Get out of the car! Let's look at the carcass!
I was hoping you'd miss it!
Oh, man. Oh, man.
You must be very pretty if people get away with...
People don't even stop you on that stuff.
Okay, let's just rewind for a moment.
Then I said... Or I asked.
Does he think that he teaches you things more than occasionally?
I think so. How often do you think that he thinks he teaches you?
How often do I think that he thinks?
Yeah, what is your...
Sorry, this is a confusing way to ask.
What's your guess on how often he thinks he's teaching you something new?
I... Couple times a week.
And I mean, he is. He's doing a lot of new research and stuff like that all the time.
So, I mean, we're talking information.
We're not just talking, like, life skills.
Okay, something important.
How often does he teach you something important?
I guess... It's kind of hard to put a number to something like that.
It doesn't have to be exact.
Is it five times a year, five times a month, five times a week?
It's just rough. I would say I probably get something pretty valuable.
I'm able to find something pretty valuable from him once a month or so.
Other than just bits and pieces of information, I feel like I've changed quite a lot and grown quite a lot and evolved Quite a lot since we've started dating.
And that's always been one of the rubs for me was that I feel like I'm getting stuff out of this relationship.
I'm learning new things about myself.
I'm working on stuff.
I'm trying actively to do new things and I feel like I've gotten a lot more out of this than maybe he has.
And how often do you think you have, well, if he were here, I know we're guessing, right?
and I would say to him, how often, just all to teach you something new, what would he say?
As far as like importance.
The once a month thing for you.
Okay. Two or three times?
I guess. I'm not sure.
So he's, you know, six times or so more giving you information than you would be giving him kind of new stuff that's cool, right?
Right. Now, when I first asked this question, do you remember what you replied?
The question about what does he teach me or what I teach him?
Yeah, what he teaches you.
I'm sorry, I guess I don't...
It's the one where I said, you just hit a deer, let's turn the car around or something like that.
You said, I don't think he cares.
Oh, that.
Yeah, that. What do you mean by that?
He kind of is in his own world a lot.
He often doesn't outright says, I don't care about Things outside of what's going on in his little world.
He often doesn't care about things that aren't going on inside his little world.
Inside of his head, inside of his...
No, no, no, no. Let's go back to his little world.
Okay. That is a contemptuous phrase, or a phrase of contempt, in my opinion.
Right, that was rude.
Sorry. No, no, no, please, please don't correct yourself.
This may be the path to Jesus.
That came across very snarky, and I did not mean it that way.
But it's what you said.
I know. And that can't, you know, you're such a nice person that the moment snark comes out, I'm just, we can't just brush it off, right?
Because it's not your natural state.
So where's that coming from?
His little world.
And without judgment, right?
I mean, we're just spelunking.
We're just exploring here, right?
What does it mean when you say his little world?
Literally, he spends a lot of time in his room and doesn't interact.
He's not much of a people person.
He doesn't have a large sphere of people that he's, well, really pretty much I'm the only person that he routinely lets inside of his little area.
And sometimes it's against his will.
But he doesn't have a lot of interactions with people.
He pretty much spends time with himself and his dog and, you know, listening to things on the internet and researching things on the internet, stuff like that.
He doesn't... He literally kind of encloses himself and he occasionally lets me in.
Like I said... I'm not criticizing.
I'm just wondering what that means.
I was literally talking about his physical space.
He closes...
He stretches himself out intellectually.
No, no. You said in his head when I asked you for clarification on Little World.
Okay. I guess...
No, it's a good try.
A great redirect try.
No question. Applause.
Really, seriously, that was fantastic.
Okay. All right. I got it. I got it.
His own Little World.
I guess I... I was mainly talking, I guess, about his fear of...
Well, he's in his own space.
He's in his own head. He's in his own...
Like I said, he does a lot of...
Spends a lot of time on his phone doing research and listening to videos and interacting with...
Okay. Sorry, sorry. I get all of that.
Maybe this question can clarify.
I'm sorry to interrupt. Okay.
I do a lot of those things.
Would you say that my world is little?
I spend a lot of time in my head.
I spend a lot of time researching.
I spend time on the internet. I think about ideas.
Would you describe me as my little world?
No, because you interact with a lot of people on a routine basis and you seem to enjoy the interaction.
Love it. Love it.
Okay, so no, this is important because this is a perspective that's really, really crucial, in my opinion.
Because I'm gonna guess that in his world, in his mind, it's a big place.
Big ideas, big movements, big history, big philosophy, big whatever, right?
Right. But for you, looking at things from a social and relational standpoint, you're not the first woman in history to do it that way.
It's a little world.
I guess, yeah, I need more of a social network.
And I grew up, I had a network.
I had a group around me, a network around me, and that's not something that he's had.
So his network is himself.
So either he's going to expand his to include yours, or you're going to contract yours for his, right?
Either he's going to grow his or yours, or maybe there's something in the middle or whatever, right?
But you said, because it's interesting, it's like the phone, the internet, his dog.
All those are things he's doing, or I guess the relationship that he has in that world, which is his dog.
Nothing about the content of his thoughts or his ideas.
Not a criticism, I'm just sort of pointing out that there is, you know, a bit of a gender divide, you could say a sex divide, that men...
Are a little more drawn towards ideas.
Women are a little more drawn towards relationships.
Relationships. Yeah, like I remember some girlfriend, I was chatting on the phone with a friend of mine.
He's an economist. And we were talking all about these great ideas and economics and all that.
And we were on the phone for like an hour, right?
And it was a great conversation.
I hang up. My girlfriend is like, that was horrifying.
And I'm like, what?
And she said, how's his wife?
I'm like, what? He had an aunt who was sick, how's his aunt?
I'm like, what?
And it's true, so then I'm listening to her talk to her mom for an hour and she gets off the phone and I'm like, that was horrifying.
Right. And she's like, why?
I'm like, how's the economy in this particular part of the world?
How's the economy doing?
What's the political situation?
And she's like, what?
No, that sounds exactly like he and I. What's the national debt?
What? What are the immigration policies?
No, she was telling me about her gallbladder.
Like, these are just same planet, different worlds, right?
Right. Right. So, when you look at him, you see that it's a little world because he has no real relationships outside of you and maybe a couple other people, right?
Mm-hmm. And you don't see the inside of his mind, which is where, for him, I assume the world is bigger, right?
Right. Exactly.
Now... He may think that solitude is independence and your interdependency is dependency, right?
Right. Entanglement.
Yes, that exact word has come up.
Ah, well, I may not be way off the beaten path here then when I say, how the hell, I'm sorry, how the heck are you going to integrate him, my dear, into your social environment?
I don't care how flat his abs are, you can't give up your community.
Well, that's kind of been two separate Two separate things.
I have my relationship and my interactions with him and then I have the rest of my circle and I kind of go out of that to be with him.
Oh, what are you doing?
What are you doing?
Come on.
How is this possibly going to work?
Oh.
I'm open to it.
I mean, I'm just telling you, like...
That's what we've been trying to figure out, is if it is even possible, and neither of us is sure that it is, and both are kind of in doubt that it is.
So that's kind of what we've been trying to struggle with and wrestle with.
We've got compromises. You've made some compromises, right, insofar as you have shrunk your social circle to virtually nothing to be with him when you're with him, right?
Right. So what compromise has he made in return to attempt to join and find value in your social circle?
He, in the past, has come to a couple of church functions and come to some of my...
He's come to all of my performances since we've been together and spent time with them.
He came home with me for one Christmas.
What do you perform? I'm a singer.
Oh, cool. I envy that.
Anyway. So he came to a couple of church functions.
He's come to see your performances, not social.
Church functions, I assume he's not too chatty.
And then he came home with you for Christmas, and how was that?
It did not go particularly well.
And why is that? What happened?
He felt very uncomfortable in my parents' house.
Didn't feel very welcomed or a very warm invitation, welcome, whatever.
And so he spent a lot of time in his room.
He wasn't feeling well. He was uncomfortable.
He was having... Wait, he came to your parents' house and spent a lot of time in his room?
Mm-hmm. Like I said, he was going through...
Sorry, that was not the alarm on my side, but there was an alarm for sure.
That seems to me kind of fortuitous.
It's a sign. It's a sign.
It's a sign. Did you hear that alarm?
That was my washer.
Sorry.
Attempted to clean things up, is it?
No.
And I mean, that bothered me.
It bothered my parents. They were pretty offended.
Weird. I'm sorry that his childhood was chaotic.
But the whole point of going to your girlfriend's place is to figure out if you fit in the family.
And to do that, you have to spend time with the family.
There's no way around it. He's spent time with my family since then.
But first impressions, right?
Right. I mean, unless you said he wasn't well, unless he's literally holding his half-severed leg in his hands, you gotta do it, right?
Mm-hmm. And since then, my mother has said that she will never support me being with an atheist, and he's pretty much said, I'm done trying with your family.
They drive me nuts. I'm done trying.
So I'm kind of at an impasse between them.
No, you're not. Stuck in the middle of that.
No, you're not. You're stuck nowhere.
You are at no impasse.
Because you have all the choices in the world.
I'm not saying I'm stuck.
I said there's a...
I can't...
Have the fullness of, okay, all right, I said I'm stuck, but what I meant was that...
It's tough when stuff is recorded.
I know. Fine, you got me.
Okay. I didn't mean to go into the woe is me thing.
All I said, all I meant was that I can't make my mother or him move towards each other, and I'm trying to maintain a relationship with both of them.
And it's not going well.
If you have a daughter and if you can imagine listening to your daughter talking to me as you and your daughter was hanging between the boyfriend and you and you didn't like the boyfriend, what would you say to your daughter?
I would probably do everything I could to try to get her away from the boyfriend if I felt that she wasn't being taken care of or in a good relationship because I would rather have her be with me than with him.
Because I care about her.
I love her. I want what's best for her.
And he's an unknown.
He's not that unknown.
You've met him a whole bunch of times, right?
As the mother. Right.
I assume you've talked to your parents to some degree about your relationship.
I would hope so. Yes.
And your father? We haven't dragged him into it.
We haven't dragged him into it.
He kind of has similar opinions as my mother.
Pretty much. You know, he has certain ideas about What men should do in relationships and doesn't think that he lives up to that as much as he should.
Your children, your future children, get the deciding vote, in my opinion, about relationships if you want kids and if this is something where that is involved, right?
Yes. What do you think is going to be the relationship between your children and your boyfriend, if you get married and have kids?
Is he going to be the best father that you can get?
Does he have the self-knowledge?
Does he have the wisdom? Does he have the social skills?
Does he have the compromise skills?
Does he have the open-heartedness?
Does he have all the other virtues that you were looking for in a father for your children?
Where does he stand as far as that goes?
goes.
In other words, if your future children could decide who their father is, would they choose him above all?
With the way he interacts with other adults, if he acted that same way with the kids, it probably wouldn't be the most ideal person.
But he acts a little different with kids.
He's more attentive.
He's more engaged and loving and caring and stuff like that.
Do your parents live close by?
No. Would they move closer or would you move closer if you became a mom?
I would like to be closer to them.
Sure. Listen, grandparents are very important.
We talked about moving closer to them for a while.
There's also a chance that they would get a winter home down where I live.
Now, if your husband, let's say it becomes your husband, if your husband and your parents don't get along, that gets really freaking complicated really freaking quickly, right?
Mm-hmm.
Would you be willing to forego significant and quality time with your parents for the sake of him being the father of your children?
I keep hoping that we'll figure out how to make that work.
You can't make it work.
My father doesn't interact. No, no, no. You can't make it work.
Right. Because you want it to work.
And the difference in values between...
Your boyfriend and your parents is significant.
And you're not a mom, so I'm gonna pull the annoying I'm a dad card.
But if you're a parent and you see your child is experiencing difficulties in their relationships, it really, really bothers you.
Like in ways that I can't even fully express.
It's very deep and very powerful.
And it's even more so for them right now because my brother died two years ago and now I'm the only child.
I'm so sorry.
So we're dealing with that as well.
Oh, accident?
Illness? No, don't worry.
No, don't, don't. I mean, I've already, I'm sorry.
I shouldn't ask. I shouldn't ask.
I apologize. It's okay.
I just, massive sympathy to the entire family.
I am so sorry.
But it's stronger feelings from my parents now due to that.
I know that those are amplified.
The eggs are literally in one basket.
Yes. Right.
Right. Does your boyfriend say or acknowledge that there's a problem that he needs to fix regarding relationships with others?
I think he's kind of acknowledged that he's routinely going to counseling.
No, but with regards to your parents in particular, does he say, well, no, I mean, if we're going to be a family, I need to figure out a way to get along with your parents.
Let's go see them again. I've got apologies to make.
I've talked to my therapist.
You know, this is the approach I'm going to take.
You know, I've really, I don't want to come between you and your parents.
And like, I mean, is there any kind of acknowledgement that things need to be fixed?
Things need to be changed? I'm not saying that he's like, oh, 100% me, nothing to do.
But is there at least something on his side where he says, I got to fix this?
Not really. He's basically said that I can maintain my relationship with my family and he just will, you know, I can go do my thing with them and he'll stay off and do his thing.
How's that going to work if they're closer and you have children?
I guess he'll have to figure out how to deal with that.
You know, this cross your fingers thing?
No, no, no, no. Come on.
He's not that handsome. You can't just, it'll work out somehow.
There's no magic in this stuff, right?
Either people admit that there's a problem and work to try and solve it, or they don't.
And if they don't, nothing changes.
In fact, it generally gets worse.
Right. I mean, to take a sort of extreme example, you know, if he was a raging alcoholic and didn't even admit that there was a problem, hoping that things would get better would be a foolish strategy, right?
Yes. Does he say, well, I have an issue with vanity, I have an issue with pride, I have an issue with whatever, right?
We all have our faults, right?
Yeah, he'll admit to things that he needs to work on, just not where my parents are concerned.
He'll admit that he has things in his own Life and things that he doesn't do well.
Things that he needs to work on improving.
Yeah, he'll come out and admit that.
He just won't admit where he needs to do better with my folks.
Because he doesn't feel like he needs to, that he's been the one who's been wronged.
Oh, he thinks that the problems in the relationship all come from your parents?
I think so. What do you mean you think so?
I'm sure this has been a topic, right?
No, I think that's what he thinks.
Yes, it's been a topic. So, in the problems that he's having with your parents, it's 100% them and 0% him.
I know that's not the case.
I don't think he believes it's 100%.
No, I think that he understands that some of it is his problem, but I think he thinks it's mostly them.
But if some of it is his problem, then there's some things that he can change.
But it sounds like he's given up completely, right?
Because my mother said that she'll never support me being with an atheist.
So he doesn't think that there's any point in trying.
Well, hang on, hang on.
Sorry to interrupt. Did they know that he was an atheist before he came over for the first time?
Yes. So, no.
It's not that she won't support you being with an atheist, she just won't support you being with this atheist.
I mean, she didn't really get a choice in the matter of him being around.
Well, no, because if she wouldn't, like, if she, listen, you know, there'd be plenty of religious families who are like, no, the atheists can't come over.
No, you, I don't want you dating an atheist, I don't want you anywhere near an atheist, and an atheist certainly isn't going to sleep under my roof.
True. True. I mean, so it's not that she was innately, completely, and totally hostile to the idea of you dating an atheist, right?
Well... She didn't like it, don't get me wrong.
She didn't like it, but she was...
But she wasn't like, no way, no how.
She gave him a tiny sliver of a chance, right?
Yes. And he blew it like looking like a mushroom in his room.
Well, it kind of seems like...
Like I said, it's hard when he can't be here to speak for himself, but it looked that way.
Yeah, but I mean, so she was open to the possibility that, you know, they opened their home, right?
Mm-hmm. Right.
Now, you're in your mid to late 20s.
Yes. Time's ticking away.
I'm very keenly aware of that.
Yes, well, now would be an excellent time to panic.
I'm not kidding. I know.
Because if this is not the right thing, you gotta detach right away.
If you want to have kids.
Because it takes a while to get over a relationship.
Please understand, I'm not saying whether you should or shouldn't, I'm just giving you the paths, the forks, right?
There's a saying which says it takes half as long to get over a relationship as the relationship you've been in, right?
You've been in a relationship two years, it takes a year to get over, right?
So every day you're in the relationship is another half a day that you have to spend getting over it.
Okay. Right, so you've been in a relationship 18 months, which means it's going to take you nine months to get over the relationship.
That's going to put you into your late 20s.
Yep. Crowd of quality men thinning out, right?
They're getting snatched up and they're not on the market anymore.
And you maybe don't want a man who's got three kids by three different women or, you know, whatever, right?
No education, no prospects, can't harmonize.
As wonderful as that would be.
So, egg panic would be a rational state of mind at the moment, right?
Mm-hmm. Now, I'll tell you this.
Is this the longest relationship you've been in?
No. What's the longest one?
Three years in high school.
And what ended that? I mean, it was in high school.
That's like 30 years in high school years.
I couldn't deal with the clingy, possessive, overly needy thing.
I needed him to have some of his own things to do and I needed to be able to do some of my own things.
I needed to not...
I needed to...
Okay. He needed me to be his everything.
He needed me to be his mother, doctor, all of this stuff.
And I couldn't live up to all of that.
And so that's ultimately why I was the one who broke away.
Like I said, it was in high school.
He was very needy. He was very...
No, but what's... Do you see the pattern here, right?
You see the pattern? Do you see the pattern?
Am I missing a pattern? You're missing a pattern.
I'm missing a pattern. I apologize.
No, don't apologize. It's very hard to see your own patterns.
It is for me. I mean, that's why we like talking to each other, right?
That's why we talk to other people. Yeah, yeah. But I was hoping you could tell me, am I missing a pattern I have?
Here's the pattern, my dear.
Oh, I hope that never sounds condescending.
It's not meant to be. So here's the pattern also, which is that you have a guy who wants you to be his everything in high school, right?
And now you're dating a guy who has no other friends.
So you know what you get to be again?
I've seen that. Yes, now that you mention that, I have seen that pattern.
Well, Lady Duff, enjoy being needed, methinks.
Yes. Which means you need some kids.
No, seriously, you need some kids.
That's what I need is that I need kids.
You need kids because kids will need you without being needy, right?
Right. Kids need you organically, naturally, not because they have trouble forming care bond relationships with other carbon-based life forms.
I'm sorry? No, and that's definitely something that has been basically the top of my list as a husband and a family.
There's a guy in high school who was kind of needy, kind of clingy, and you had to be his everything, and now you've got a guy whose only relationship with a biped is you.
Yes. That similarity has crossed my mind.
So, does that have any pattern in your upbringing, in your parents' relationship, and other relationships you might know?
I suspect it's got a lot to do with my mom being a very nurturing person and always wanting to be needed.
Right. Yeah, I'm sure that it's rooted in that primarily.
I have a very nurturing.
I've always wanted to...
I was really, really hoping to be married with family by now and then I got sick and lost five years and now I kind of feel like I'm starting where a lot of people start when they graduate from college.
Yeah, and of course, your brother, this is very, very difficult stuff, and I, you know, again, my heart goes out to the family as a whole, just massive condolences.
But, see, here's the thing, like, we want to be needed, and it's great to be needed, but if you want to have a family, you can't have a husband who's needy.
Because you end up with this ridiculous joke of like, well, I don't have two children, I have three children and that kind of stuff, right?
You can't have a husband who's needy because you'll resent him because you need someone to support you as a mom.
And if he's needy and you've got kids who've been...
Colicky all night, and he's needy, you'll feel shredded, torn apart, pulled in 12 different directions with nothing left for yourself.
You need someone to fill you back up, so to speak, as a mom, right?
To give you resources, to give you emotions, to give you support, to give you, like, babies, little vampires, you know, they'll take you and your bone marrow too, and then there's nothing wrong with that, it's exactly how it should be.
But you need someone to give you comfort and fill you back up.
I hate to put it in a way that can be taken out of context, but you really do need...
You can't be a mom whose kids need you and then have a husband who also needs you in that kind of needy way.
Your kids will need you legitimately.
Your husband needing you will make you resent him.
Well, the thing about it is that he really isn't...
As far as boyfriends go, I'm the only person that he'll occasionally let into his world, routinely at least.
But he'd really rather have space and solitude and stuff like that.
He's not been exceptionally needy.
I've been more of the needy one and needing more attention and stuff like that.
So I'm really more worried about not getting enough attention than being needed too much as far as he's concerned.
Right. I mean, I don't have any advice about what you should or shouldn't do.
I hope the conversation has been helpful just in terms of illuminating some issues.
But I will tell you this. I mean, I dated a lot of people when I was younger.
In my sort of teens, 20s, early 30s.
I dated a lot of people. And, you know, it trunced along and there was a big flush of excitement at the beginning and so on.
And then maybe sometimes it would just kind of diminish.
But, you know, I sort of hate to tell this story because it sounds so ideal.
But when I met my wife...
I knew. I knew.
Not like right away, but I think it was in a month or two.
And by the time...
By the time we got to 18 months, we'd been married seven months already.
Mm-hmm. And you're not.
And you're not that close.
You're still in doubt, significant doubt, after 18 months.
That tells you something.
And you're still crossing your fingers, hoping, after 18 months.
That tells you something.
It's not so much the difference in values, it's that how those values are going to converge or not that matters.
Everybody meets with different values.
That's natural. I have different values, not fundamental ones, but I certainly have different arguments and perspectives than I did five years ago or ten years ago, a month ago sometimes.
People change. Values can shift.
It's not the proximity of values that matters.
It's the methodology of how you resolve these differences.
And if the methodology is, I'm interesting, you're boring.
I'm free, you're square.
You know, your parents don't like me, it's their fault.
That does not show, in my view, much of a willingness to grow together.
And I'll say this, this is the thing that bothers me the most about all of this, which I've sort of saved to this point because I really wanted to make sure it stuck with you.
Okay. I know we've only talked for, what, an hour and a half or whatever.
You're not boring. You're not.
Well, thank you. If your boyfriend thinks you're boring, either he's right or he's wrong.
Now, if he's right, he should leave you.
Because it's very cruel to be in a relationship with someone and keep telling them that they're boring.
Because at some point, that's going to stick in your soul.
Well, you said this right in the message you sent, Alter.
You said, I'm worried I'm not a good conversationalist anymore.
Mm-hmm. So, if he loves you, but he finds you boring, he'd be like, well, I don't want to keep exposing you to me feeling that you're boring.
That's unfair to you.
That's cruel to you.
Right? Mm-hmm.
You can't be in a sexual relationship with someone and say, I just find you so unsexy.
Like, you understand, that's cruel.
It's mean. Because if it's true, and he keeps inflicted it on you, then why would he be with someone who's boring, and why would he be with someone that he keeps having to tell is boring?
Now, either he's right, And you are boring to him, in which case he's cruel for staying with you and keep telling you that you're boring.
That's mean, right? Or he's wrong.
You're not boring.
Maybe he's vain. You're not boring.
Maybe he's just not willing to do the work to meet you halfway.
Maybe you're not boring.
It's just that the stuff you want to talk about is problematic in the relationship.
The stuff that matters to you, that moves you, is problematic in the relationship.
Like, you're a 27-year-old woman who want kids, you lost five years, you lost a brother, of course you're going to talk about babies!
Of course you are!
It's on your mind, right?
A lot! And if something is genuinely on your partner's mind, to say you shouldn't talk about it, it's bad to talk about it, it's boring to talk about it, I don't like it when you talk about it, is a fundamental rejection of your partner.
Listen, this stuff is on your mind.
And there's a lot of stuff that's on your mind, like religion, Christianity, Jesus and God, that you can't talk about in the relationship, because it's problematic, right?
I feel we lost our connection here, emotionally.
You're giving me some very chilly mm-hmms.
No, no, no, you're right.
I go kind of blank when I'm actually listening intently.
Okay, I'm just checking.
Because if you really hate what I'm saying, you can tell me I'm wrong or you hate what I'm saying.
That's totally fine. No, that's not it at all.
Like I said, I go blank when I'm actually listening.
So you appreciate that if he's right about you being boring to him, then it's cruel for him to keep telling you that and stay with you?
Yes. Because if you're genuinely boring to him, I'm not saying you are, but if you were genuinely boring to him, that's not going to change.
You can't just become interesting.
If you've known someone for 18 months, that's who they are.
Sorry? I said no, and that's what I've been trying to do, is figure out how to be more interesting, and that's...
No, no, no.
I get where the problem lies there.
Yeah, you can't be with someone and then just keep telling them that they're boring.
That's wrong no matter which way you cut it.
You can be with someone and say, you've gained weight, you need to lose the weight, that's perfectly valid and perfectly fair.
But you can't be with someone and say, you're boring over and over.
That is an act of diminishment, of belittling.
And my concern is that it springs out of the same vanity that we talked about earlier.
Mm-hmm. Well, I'm just so into risk, and I'm just so into edginess, and I'm so into chaos, and you're boring.
Listen, I may be oversensitive.
This is kind of a British thing, right?
And the British thing is, oh, you're so boring, you know?
It's dripping with thought.
I may have a whole lot of, like, whatever, right?
Stuff from... My cultural background, but the boring thing is pretty harsh.
I mean, it's really an unloving thing to say.
And it's a very harsh thing to hear, because doesn't it make you feel kind of helpless?
Yes. Like, what are you supposed to do?
Can't talk about stuff that's really meaningful to you, because he finds it boring or problematic, or there's a gap or it exposes differences that can't seem to be able to be bridged.
Can't talk about your parents, can't talk about wanting babies, can't talk about marriage, can't...
But these things are on your mind!
Right. Which means that's you!
Now, if he doesn't like the stuff that's on your mind, what's he there for?
And I've asked him that.
Um... Well, that is a very telling statement, that you've actually asked him what he's in a relationship with you for?
If I've basically put the question to him almost exactly the way you just said it.
So why are you so passive about it?
Why are you putting the ball in his court?
That's what I've been trying to figure out.
Um... I think there's a certain amount of...
Um...
Fear of not having another chance again, that there's nobody else out there.
Right. Is this the best you can do, right?
Yeah, he's only my third relationship.
I'm 27 and he's my third real relationship.
There hasn't been a lot of interest.
So I need to figure out why I'm not interesting.
And there's a certain amount of fear of what if there's nobody else?
And what's your weight? I'm not skinny.
I wouldn't say that I'm overly heavy either, but I'm not skinny.
I'm fairly curvy. I'm not going to give you a number if you're asking for one.
No, no, I'm not asking for a number.
You think I'm crazy? I'm not going to ask you for a number.
It's just not happening, dude.
No, no, no, that's totally fine.
That's totally fine. And look, and I'm not saying that's the only thing.
Please, I'm not saying, oh, it's magic.
I'm just curious.
That is something that I've been actively working on.
Sure, sure.
Right, so you're saying there hasn't been a lot of interest, and does that mean sort of like there are no men at the church or...
Right, like just nobody that I'm particularly interested in.
I don't think necessarily that it's been lack of interest.
I've been known to be a little bit oblivious, not always aware of when there's interest, and I also...
I really need somebody to be somewhat interesting to me.
Well, of course. You don't want to be boring or anything.
That would be mean. I'm going to, you know, going to churches and going places and I'm, the people that I'm finding that I have interesting conversations with are not necessarily people who share the same belief system as I do.
There gets to be a lot of putting on, putting on airs, putting on masks, and I'm I'm pretty straightforward and what you see is what you get, or at least I try to be.
And I get really annoyed with, oh, I can't actually say that in church or whatever.
Just like the constant editing of who people really are.
But you have that with your boyfriend.
Fair play. Fair play.
Right. I'm not trying to give a gotcha, but there's a lot of editing with your boyfriend too, right?
Right. And editing makes you boring.
You know, why do people still keep tuning into this show after 11 years?
Because I have very little filter.
I mean, I really try to be straight and honest and decent and all of that, but I'm constantly exploring new ground and, you know, the filter means that you can't be spontaneous, you can't be expressive, you can't be genuine, you can't connect. Censorship separates us from each other as well as from the truth because we're on guard.
Right. Especially now everyone's got a recording device.
Is this thing on? What should I say?
I can't spontaneously, oh, I can't say that, I can't say this.
Political correctness is a way of separating us from each other.
It cuts the cord of communication between us by making everyone so jumpy and paranoid.
It's horrible. It isolates people.
Well, of course, we want to be isolated.
It's hard to rule people with the community.
So, yeah, if you're self-censoring, then you are going to end up less interesting to yourself as well.
That's the big problem, right? If you're self-censoring, you lose respect for yourself.
Right. Is your parents or is your family or extended family, are they aware that you really, really want to get married, that you lost years to illness, that you lost time grieving for your brother and...
Are they aware that this is a very big priority for the family and everybody should be working on it?
They're all aware. I'm not sure if it's a big priority for the family, and it also is difficult when I live on the other side of the country for most of my family.
Well, for heaven's sakes, woman, go thump some tables.
Ask for help. Okay.
Get everyone on Plan Baby.
No, seriously, we expect, like, this used to be the job of the community.
This used to be the job of the elders.
This used to be the job of everyone.
You don't have to worry about dating and getting married when we were evolving as a species.
This was not our job.
This is like trying to figure out how to do your own dentistry with a mirror and a pair of pliers.
Get everyone's experience.
Say, look, family meeting, family emergency.
Eggs need sperm. And a ring.
Well, a ring, then sperm.
You know what I'm saying. A ring, please, first.
A ring first, right. And I would say, again, depending on what you want to do with this relationship, but the idea that you stay with this because you may not get anything better, well, if you mobilize, look, people love a mission.
People love to help others.
I'm sure your family's chock full of people who are desperate to help others.
And if you put out your need, people will respond.
I go ask people for donations and I get some donations.
You know, you ask, you show people what you want, you're assertive with what you want.
People love to help you. And you, such a delightful person, of course people would love to help you.
Okay, that's an interesting idea.
Just don't try and do it alone.
You know, then you get, not you, but then as a generation, people get crap like Tinder.
Because, you know, you can stare into someone's soul with a selfie pic with three kids in the background.
Actually, you kind of can with those, but...
But yeah, I mean, if it's just up to you to go and find the man of your dreams who's going to have your values and settle down, listen, people have known you since you were in diapers.
They have some idea of who would be good for you.
And if you put this...
Like, I remember when I... How did I get into my first programming job?
I just literally called everyone and said, I'm like a desperate for a job that doesn't involve moving boxes and stuff, you know, and delivering food.
And I know I've been programming for like 15 years.
Give me a job in coding, right?
And... You ask people, and you put all hands on deck, and then people get the pride of saying, I introduced those two, and they've been together for 20 years.
If you end up not with this guy, or whatever you decide, then as far as finding the right guy goes, for heaven's sakes, don't try and reinvent the wheel.
wheel.
We've got a whole elder system that we've evolved that's still, I think, in our DNA about all of that.
Okay.
That's a good point.
Thank you.
There's nothing wrong with a little healthy desperation and asking for help.
Seriously, I'm... Healthy desperation.
And where do you draw that line between healthy desperation and just sheer reeking of desperation that repels?
Oh, no. When it comes to your family, be as desperate as you actually are.
Okay. Because, like, what's your family going to say?
She's too desperate. It's like, no, they want to help you.
Okay. They want to help you.
Be open. Be honest.
You know, I'm nervous.
And ask people, if I sit down, sit down.
I'm nervous about this guy.
I've got questions. I've got issues.
It's been 18 months. We still, you know, I mean, the problem to me as well is it seems like you're further apart now than you were, say, six or 12 months ago.
For sure more than we were five months ago or so.
Wrong direction. Right.
Wrong direction.
Wrong direction. And because you have saved yourself a marriage, you are going to bond like crazy on your wedding night.
And that means that if the marriage doesn't work out, it will break your heart in a way that is all kinds of exquisitely horrifying.
Right. In particular, right?
That's why women like you are incredibly valuable.
Like, I hate to put, oh, some slave market poking your teeth or something, but like a woman who's not slapped around, a woman who's not had a whole bunch of boyfriends, a whole lot of sex, you are like the gold standard of brides who will remain loyal and will have a stable marriage.
You know, the more men a woman sleeps with, the more likely she is to divorce her husband.
Mm-hmm. You know, sadly, Dick's Trump rings.
It's just the way that it works.
And so the fact that you have remained abstentious from this means that you have extraordinarily high marriage market value for anybody who's got half a brain.
And it shows an extraordinary ability to defer gratification, which is a mark of high intelligence and discipline and case-selected behavior and So, if you're not getting, like, if you start with separate values and you then start working together in terms of methodology and respect and understanding and so on, good.
If you start with separate values and it ends up being, well, I can't talk about this, I can't talk about that, and now he won't talk to my parents, and this is getting further away, and now he says I'm boring, like, you're going in the wrong direction, and you're 27.
Alright? Right.
That's definitely a lot of stuff to think about.
All right. Will you let us know how it goes?
Yeah. Will you tell the young man that I'm sorry that we didn't get a chance to chat if he wants to call in?
He's certainly welcome to. Yeah.
But I want it to be you, your mom, and him on the same conversation.
Oh, no, you don't.
I actually would. I don't.
I'll let them talk to you together without me.
Okay, no, no, you wouldn't want to be here.
Alright, so listen, was it a helpful use for Convail?
Yes, thank you.
I appreciate this. Good, good, good.
Well, I desperately want you to get everything that you want in life and you deserve great things.
And I'm so sorry for your illness.
I'm so incredibly sorry for your brother and, you know, for what it's worth.
I mean, please, please, if you...
If it seems even remotely appropriate, please provide my condolences to your parents.
It is an astonishingly horrible thing to go through and my heart goes out to them and to you.
I hope that you get what you want.
If there's anything I can do to help with that, anything further, please let me know and thank you so much for your time today.
Okay, thank you so much for yours as well.
You're welcome. Hey, look at that.
We made it to the end.
So, hope everyone had a wonderful evening or morning.
I appreciate that.
I guess if you're a trucker, pull over.
You're probably tired and need to get some rest.
If you're a surgeon, well, you've got another 14 hours on the shift.
So, sorry about that.
It's just the way the crazy system works.
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