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April 16, 2018 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

03:08:18

4060 HOT OR $UCCE$$FUL - Call In Show - April 14th, 2018

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	Hey everybody, Stefan Molyneux, Freedomain.
	Hope you're doing well. Freedomainradio.com slash donate to help out the show.
	Some really, really wild, almost jaw-dropping calls tonight.
	Really appreciate the callers.
	The first caller struggled out of the friend zone after he asked a girl out that he liked, and then his parents demanded that he apologize to the girl and maintain the friendship, even though he said it will break my heart.
	Wild stuff, excavating that.
	Family blockage engas was quite the exercise and I think you'll find some really really useful stuff in there.
	Now, the next caller.
	She's a young woman and she's decided to try and settle down with a good man and she's good-looking herself.
	And she's got a fork in the road.
	She's got two men. One of them is very good-looking, but only averagely successful.
	The other is less attractive, but very successful.
	Should she go for brains or looks, primarily?
	She says, she makes a good case that good-looking people have it easier in the world.
	So, a very interesting question, and we dug deep into that.
	So, then, well...
	A young man called in. And his girlfriend of 18 months and he broke up recently because he betrayed her and he cheated on her.
	And discussing errors, discussing mistakes, discussing wrong things that we've done is very challenging.
	The tendency is, of course, either to excuse yourself completely, hey man, what happened happened, or to become self-abusive, I'm a terrible person, I'm a bad boyfriend, I did really bad things, and Trying to walk that middle line where you don't pretend you didn't do anything wrong, but you also don't attack yourself to the point where you just end up traumatized.
	Well, we all have self-criticism in our life.
	At least I hope you do, because if you don't, well, that's not good.
	We all have self-criticism, and I think I gave you some good tips and him some good tips on how...
	To deal with that kind of stuff.
	So again, thanks so much everyone for making this great conversations possible.
	FreeDomainRadio.com slash donate.
	Please don't forget to pick up your copy of The Art of the Argument, my book, at TheArtOfTheArgument.com.
	If you have some shopping to do, FDRURL.com forward slash Amazon.
	Alright, well first today we have Erwin.
	Erwin wrote in and said, A few months ago I decided to ask a female friend of mine on a date.
	Of course she said she only saw me as a friend and nothing more.
	As a result I ended the friendship telling her that we want different things from each other and that maintaining a friendship will only end up hurting us both.
	Well my parents found out they were upset and labeled me a sexist.
	that I don't know how to treat women and that I only see them as sex objects.
	To add salt to the wound, they want me to apologize to this girl and remain friends with her.
	I believe that this is a terrible idea and will only result in my heart crushed more than it already has been.
	And if I apologize, this will only serve to validate their opinion that I only see girls as sex objects.
	How do I stand my ground and at least convince my parents that I'm doing what is best for me?
	That's from Erwin.
	Erwin! How's it going?
	It's going pretty well. Can you hear me?
	I can hear you.
	I can hear you. And that is...
	That is quite a tale, my friend.
	Let me tell you that. Doesn't happen to everybody.
	Sorry? I said it doesn't happen to everybody.
	No. No, thank heavens.
	That is quite something.
	Is there more backstory that would be helpful?
	Or... The backstory was I had...
	Known this girl off and on for about a year.
	She was hanging out with some of my other friends.
	And at the time, I was in a two-year relationship myself in college.
	And then when that one ended, this girl who had been on a debate team with me and tried helping me get a job, the one I tried to ask out, she was Very attractive, very pretty, but the main thing that singed me was the fact that she was actually kind and nice to me.
	It's a rare thing to have a girl just be flat out kind to you and nothing's expected, so that's what sort of...
	But enough about your mom.
	What? We'll get to that, but go on.
	But anyways...
	So, after a few months of getting over my previous girlfriend, I decided, what the hell, I'll go for broke and asked my friend out.
	And she said, well, I only see you as a friend.
	And that's when I decided to end the friendship right there, because...
	I knew I was going to only end up getting worse and worse and it would make me feel even angrier and angrier as time went on and I didn't want to do that to her because she had actually tried helping me when I was in a not a great place.
	And what did she try to help you with or in what way?
	She tried to help me get an RA job which if you don't know it's a resident assistant and in the dorms at Where I went, they would pay for your housing and they'd pay for your meal plan, so all you'd have left to pay is for your tuition.
	Right, okay, okay, yeah.
	Do you think that she had any romantic interest in you that was bypassed in some way, or do you think it just never quite happened for her?
	I'm gonna assume that it never quite happened to her because when I asked her out, she obviously said no.
	But that's just my opinion on the matter.
	Right, right.
	So, did you guys share values in some way or another?
	You talked about the kindness and so on.
	And God help, God help a pretty woman who's kind to us, right?
	I mean, they want to be nice, they really want to be kind, but then next thing you know, it's like, have my children.
	Didn't get to that stage.
	Right. But we were both on the debate team.
	We had similar politics.
	I was a little more conservative than she was, but it was livable.
	Not uncommon.
	Yep. And those were some of the similar backgrounds we had.
	Okay, so any other values that you guys had in common?
	I mean, in terms of philosophy or religion or ethics or that kind of stuff?
	Purpose of life, meaning of it all, that kind of stuff?
	She was really into helping a lot of charity cases, but it was the type of she would actually invest her own money and own time into it.
	It wasn't the Hypocritical charity cases where I'm charitable but I'm using somebody else's money to fund it so she would help other college students if they were low on lunch money she would give them some of their own or her own money and she also would help people study up for exams and stuff and that appealed to me because that was actually being charitable.
	Right, right.
	I just got to share with you the thought that, do you think that you might have been one of those charity cases?
	I'm getting to, I got the hint that I may have been one of those cases.
	Right. And do you know where her charitable impulses came from?
	Honestly, I don't know.
	I think some people are just born that way.
	I never did get to meet her parents, so I don't know.
	Right. Now, you and her, just in terms of, let me just get the physical attractiveness spread, so where would she be on a 1 to 10?
	I would say she would be pretty comfortably in a 9, maybe a 9.5.
	And where would you be?
	A 7 or an 8.
	Not massively. Not too big of a gap, but a gap nonetheless.
	Right. It's not like, you know, Quasimodo chasing Christy Brinkley in her prime.
	I got it. I hope not. And how were you expecting to close that gap?
	I was expecting to close that gap by just simply asking.
	A lot of the times I've noticed that if you don't ask, you don't get anything.
	And I've seen plenty of Not-so-good-looking guys bring in girls by just asking them out.
	Now, they may get rejected about 10 to 20 times before they get one, but they do get results eventually.
	No, but you may not be dysfunctional enough to simply get a pretty girl by asking, because there's a lot of that Christian Grey stuff going around.
	And if pretty girls feel ugly on the inside, then they won't respond to a virtuous man.
	So let me ask you again. How were you going to close...
	Because sustainable relationships are when levels of sexual market value tend to be roughly equal.
	And how were you going to close the two-point gap in your physical attractiveness?
	Well, I was hoping that some of my achievements in the past might do that job.
	I'm a two-time national muzzleloader pistol champion two years in a row.
	I'm the first to be Invited to the Olympic Training Center for Air Pistol, and I've helped train other students on how to get to the Olympic Training Center in Air Pistol, so I've done quite a bit in the shooting sports area.
	Do you think that that's something that she values?
	I didn't think it was, but being a national champion in anything I thought would have some appeal.
	Yeah, it does have to be something, you know, you could be the very top-ranked Unreal Tournament player, but that doesn't mean that it translates into value for her.
	Because if you want to aim for a 9.5, and again, I'm not saying the whole thing is about looks, but this is just the reality, particularly when you're young.
	There has to be some way to close the gap because a nine and a half is going to be very aware of her looks and she if she then floats around with a guy who's a seven then you have to bring something to the table that makes that worthwhile to her from a social metaphysician standpoint like a you know this is just true of most people when they're young but or most people as a whole But you do need to bring something to the table that's going to close that gap so that she feels comfortable going out with a man who's less attractive than she is.
	Because come on. You know, it's funny.
	And let me just sort of give you a sidebar here because people get kind of mad at me about this stuff, which is ridiculous.
	We all know how this works.
	Let me ask you this.
	If you were to choose a woman based on looks only...
	And you didn't know what she looked like, but you saw a picture of her current boyfriend.
	That would be a pretty good way to figure out how attractive she was.
	So if her current boyfriend...
	You know, looked like the chiseled Adonis with abs and the viper back and all of that, then you'd be pretty certain that she would be a looker.
	And if you doubt this, I invite you, my friends, I just invite you to, you know, wherever you are, go to the mall, go to the fun fair, go wherever you want to go, go to the airport, and have a look at couples.
	This is not brain surgery, it's not complicated.
	The attractive man is with the attractive woman.
	The average man is with the average woman.
	And the ugly man is with the ugly woman.
	And the fat man often is with the fat woman.
	This is not brain surgery.
	This is just the way that we apes happen to mate.
	Now, I'm trying to elevate all of that with reason and evidence and values and philosophy and all that, but this is kind of where things are at the moment.
	A Kardashian female is not going for a rumpled garbage man.
	It's just not the way that things shake out.
	So given that attractiveness tends to parallel attractiveness, then if you're going to go for nine and a half, you can go for nine and a half, but you've got to have some way of closing the gap.
	Otherwise, you're going to end up disappointed.
	And that's Now, it can be humor, it can be income, it can be prestige, it can be status, it can be family connections, it can be wicked intelligence, it can be being an engaging storyteller, it can be being the life of the party, it can be overwhelming charisma, it can be any number of things.
	But if you want to get to the Mount Olympus of the 9 1⁄2s, you've got to bring some jetpack if you yourself ain't a 9 1⁄2.
	I just sort of am pointing that out as a basic way to not get your heart broken and to recognize how sexual politics work.
	So I just wanted to sort of throw that little bit out there.
	Once you see it, you can't unsee it, and it's very, very clear, and you should guide yourself according to those values.
	Okay, so let's talk about your mom.
	Alright. So when you say your parents said that you have to apologize to this woman and be friends with her again, when you say your parents, who in fact are you referring to?
	Are you referring to your mom, your dad, equally both, or what?
	Equally both. Do you think that the impulse came from them equally both?
	I... Here's what I think.
	It's just what I saw, but most of it was coming from my mom, and my dad was just going along with it.
	Of course! Of course.
	Of course. Okay, so I knew that.
	I just needed you to say it.
	Because remember I said earlier, but enough about your mom?
	Yep. Okay.
	So... Why does your mom want you to be a slave to a woman and lie to your mom and lie to this woman and pretend to be her friend and apologize to her for something you have nothing to apologize for?
	You were attracted to this woman.
	You asked her out. She said no.
	You moved on. There's no problem with that.
	There's nothing wrong with that. You're not a stalker.
	You're not somebody who's just floating around like some beta orbiter, hoping that if you help her move enough furniture and help her with her computer configuration problems enough, you're going to get some.
	I mean, you did a frank and decent thing.
	You acted honorably and honestly in your life.
	You're attracted to a woman.
	You put yourself out there.
	You asked her out. She said no.
	And you're moving on. There's nothing wrong with that.
	I have no idea what you would have to apologize for.
	I think for my mom...
	When I've looked into her dating history, apparently she would friendzone quite a few guys in her day.
	And the guy she ended up with, my dad, he was not her friend to begin with.
	In fact, she quite hated the guy for a while.
	And she only agreed to go on a date with him when he told her, I have some tickets for the hockey game.
	And My friend was supposed to go with me, but he backed out.
	Would you like to go, since I don't want to waste $100?
	And she's like, fine, I'll go with you.
	And then she found out my dad never bought the tickets when he bought them right at the stadium.
	And then after that...
	Wait, your father lied?
	Wait, wait. Your father lied to get your mom on her first date with him?
	Pretty much. Wait, wait, what do you mean pretty much?
	What part of that is not a lie?
	I'm sorry. I mean, it's exactly a lie or trickery or however you want to phrase it, but that's how my dad got my mom to go on a date with him.
	Oh, man, that's great.
	Oh, my goodness.
	That is wonderful.
	I mean, on so many conceivable levels, which we'll spend a few minutes unpacking, but that is an absolutely delightful story.
	Yep. Your mother hated him, he lied to her, and then she fell in love with him.
	That's exactly what happened.
	Yeah, nothing wrong with her.
	That sounds perfectly healthy.
	That sounds straight up page full of happiness mental health.
	Well, I do hate you and find you vile and repulsive, but now that you've lied to me...
	I'm going to stick my heels in my earrings.
	Oh man, that is just something else.
	Alright, how's their relationship?
	They've been married for, let's see, I think it's year 37 now.
	That's not the answer.
	I'm glad that they're still married, but just, you know, not everyone who has a job for 20 years is still happy in that job.
	Oh, they're very happy with each other.
	So they're very happy with each other.
	What? They're very happy with each other?
	Yes. All right.
	All right. Even more, the plot doth thicken, my friend.
	Now... Was your mother very pretty?
	She was pretty when she was young.
	I saw photos of her in very gorgeous redhead.
	She was also the quintessential bookworm or nerd.
	So she got a lot of good grades.
	And part of the reason why she didn't like my dad was my dad was a slacker, but he knew how to manipulate the school system, knew how to find what a teacher was looking for.
	I would give that to the teacher, so my dad would put in a fraction of the work and get better grades than my mom, and she just did not like that.
	Wait, seriously?
	You're trolling me, man, aren't you?
	I'm not trolling you.
	You've got to be trolling me.
	Come on. Your dad's a sleeker and a cheat and a liar, and she's like, hey, let's have children.
	That's pretty much how it happened.
	They have a great relationship.
	Okay, how handsome is your dad?
	Or was your dad, I guess. You could say maybe he still is.
	I would say he was about an eight or so.
	Back when he still had his hair.
	And what would you rate her? She would either be an eight or a nine.
	Right. Right.
	And how has your dad done as a whole?
	In life financially?
	He's upper, or not upper, middle class.
	So, pretty well, right?
	Yeah. We were able to, we lived on a house with 20 acres, so.
	Right. This was back when housing was cheaper and land was cheaper, but that's still not a half bad place to put your claim on.
	So now, my friend, we know probably why your mother...
	See, here's my basic issue.
	Your parents want you to lie to the woman.
	Right? Yep.
	They want you to apologize to her when you haven't done anything wrong.
	And that's not good, right?
	Doesn't lead to a stable relationship.
	Yeah. However, of course your mother wants you to lie to the woman because your father lying to her backed her, got her.
	So she's like, well, you were honest, that was the problem, but if you go back and lie to her, I don't know if she thinks things might improve, because your father, being a manipulator and a cheat and lying to me, worked well for me, right?
	Yep. Does your mother genuinely believe, or, sorry, let me put it this way, does your mother accept that your heart may very well be broken if you stay friends with this woman?
	I've tried telling her that many times, and it's like talking to a brick wall on that.
	It's just not going to get through anytime soon.
	So why doesn't your mother care about your heart being broken?
	Because she says the way I treat the girl by refusing to be friends with her.
	That was unthinkable.
	It was something that would get you posted on Nuremberg or something like that.
	Nuremberg?
	Like Nuremberg trials.
	Wait, she's comparing you not wanting to be friend zoned with being a Nazi war criminal?
	No?
	She never said Nuremberg, that's just...
	Oh, that's your...
	She's trying to make a point about it.
	All right, okay, okay, got it.
	So why does she not care about your heart being broken?
	Or why does she want to put you in a situation where your heart's going to be broken?
	I think it's essentially her valuing the girl's comfort more than her own kids, but I don't know for sure.
	Well, why do you think she cares more about this anonymous girl's feelings, if they're even confirmed, as she may be like, oh, well, you know, that's a shame, but that's all right.
	Why does she care about this anonymous girl?
	She's never met the girl, right?
	Why does she care about this girl more than her own son?
	It's kind of incomprehensible to me.
	I... Don't know.
	She always told me back in her day that when somebody got rejected that was trying to be more than a friend, it was the polite thing to be a friend still, even if you weren't going to get any relationship out of it.
	Oh, so she's very much into being polite.
	Yes. So, you know, being polite...
	Sorry, go ahead. Even though being polite's actually causing more harm than it's stopping.
	Well, being polite has a lot to do, of course, with being thoughtful and considerate about the feelings of others, right?
	Right. Why aren't you one of those others whose feelings she is thoughtful and considerate about?
	That's the kicker.
	I don't know. Yes, you do.
	Because if you don't know the motivations of your own mom, you will not be successful with women in general.
	This is one of the great thorny barriers that people with dysfunctional moms, not putting your mom in that category, although I might, but if you have a dysfunctional mom, you have to understand your mother in order to be successful with women.
	Otherwise, you're not just flying blind, you're flying upside down and blind in reverse gravity with all your instrumentation backwards.
	You have to understand the motivations of your mother.
	I would say dysfunctional or not, although it's easier for your mom's not dysfunctional.
	You have to understand the motivations of your own mother in order to be successful with women.
	And by successful, I mean sustainably in love with a woman, not just have sex with or have short-term series of relationships.
	You must plumb the depths of your own mother's motivations.
	You must understand her before you can be successful with women.
	And this is why I'm pressing you about your mom.
	Could it have anything to do with the fact that she friendzoed many guys herself and none of them left her?
	I'm the first guy that she's ever heard of just flat-out ignoring the friend zone and trying to go somewhere else.
	Could that have anything to do with it?
	It certainly could, but the problem is, at least I assume, perhaps even hope, my friend, that you don't know a huge amount about your mom's friend-zoning dating history and so on.
	It's pretty vague.
	Right, right, okay.
	So, She friendzoned a lot of guys, and why do you think women friendzone men?
	Pretty much, in simple terms, you're not good enough.
	No. That's not why you get friendzoned.
	That may be why you get rejected, but friendzoning is not the same as rejection.
	Alright, you're not good enough to date, but you're good enough to give me resources still.
	Yeah, yeah. See, there we go, right?
	That's it. That's it.
	That's it. So, a woman will friendzone a man because she likes the attention, she likes the free stuff, she likes the resources, she likes the positive feedback, she likes having someone to talk to.
	It validates...
	Her primal desire for male attention.
	Now, it's profoundly manipulative.
	It's profoundly exploitive.
	It's profoundly cruel.
	And if Karl Marx had had any sensitivity towards male feelings or gender relations, then he would have written capitalism, well, with a slightly different first syllable, which would be women exploiting men.
	I just, you know, I was just thinking the other day.
	Today, I was just thinking today about this mythical wage gap.
	Ooh, the wage gap. Women earn 75 cents on the dollar for men.
	It's like, well, but men take a lot of that extra money and give it to women, right?
	Give it to women. Yep. And that is something quite important to understand.
	Because, yeah, okay, 75 cents women make on the dollar, but women make more than 80% of financing decisions or purchasing decisions within a family.
	So, they don't make as much money, but they sure spend a heck of a lot more money than men do.
	And the exploitation of men by women is something that is still a fairly unexplored territory in most thinking because of the women are wonderful phenomena and the closing of the phalanx of female in-group preference.
	But yes, women can exploit the living crap out of men and most men have at one time or another, if you've had a robust dating life, most men at one time or another have been in the orbit of a woman Who wants all the privileges of dating, but none of the commitment of dating.
	In other words, she wants you to take her out.
	She wants you to come over and help her with stuff.
	She wants you to set up her stereo, if people still even do that.
	And she wants to talk to you about all of her problems and so on, although she doesn't really want to hear about yours.
	But she doesn't want to give you exclusive dating rights, or maybe any dating rights at all.
	Kind of like somebody who wants to, you know...
	It's like, you know, when you're younger, everyone gets together to help you move, but then when you get older, certainly over 30, you pay movers, right?
	You pay movers. Or, as they say in the UK, removers.
	And I had a friend of mine, I was a little bit over 30, and he's like, hey, man, I'm moving my condo.
	Can you come over and help me?
	And I'm like, no, because you have a job.
	And once you have a job, you pay for movers.
	You don't ask your friends to come and do it because you're not 12 anymore.
	And he's like, well, wait a minute, you go to the gym, you work out.
	And I'm like, yeah, but that's just for show.
	The muscles aren't there for actually moving stuff.
	Good Lord, what are you, crazy?
	So, yeah, there is a lot of exploitation of women.
	And this translates with the power of the state into this rampant gynocracy that is inviting in medieval patriarchy, like all the kind of stuff that's going on.
	So... Did your mother have a career that contributed more or less equally to the household in which she was?
	She was the primary breadwinner in our household.
	It was sort of a weird situation.
	Wait, who was? My mom was the primary breadwinner.
	It was a reverse situation.
	My dad took a few years off of his work to help raise me and my brother and homeschooled us.
	And then when we were about...
	Oh, in our mid-teens, that's when we went to a charter school.
	So my dad was the primary teacher of me and my brother.
	That's very cool, man.
	That's very cool. Oh, yes.
	And because of that, that's one reason why I'm able to see through a lot of the BS at the college, because I'm able to...
	The most important thing my dad taught me was how to think.
	Well, and this is why you didn't get friend-zoned.
	What? That's why you didn't get friend-zoned by this woman.
	I mean, when you... Sorry, just before we get more into the family stuff, I forgot to ask this earlier.
	Can you tell me how the conversation went, more or less, when you asked the woman out?
	Um... It went...
	Listen, I... Appreciate you helping me try to get the RA job.
	I know that wasn't an easy thing to do, and I really appreciate the support you've been giving me all these months after my last relationship didn't end well.
	I'm beginning to like you more than a friend.
	Would you like to go out with me?
	And do some bowling on Wednesday.
	And she said...
	Oh, I'm so sorry. I absolutely apologize.
	You cut out there for about 30 seconds.
	And the last question that I asked was...
	If you could...
	Just give me...
	Go over the...
	The conversation you had with the woman.
	I apologize for asking you to redo it.
	But you just cut out there for a second.
	Alright. Is it recording now?
	We are all set.
	Okay. It was essentially...
	I was quite happy with her helping me try to get the RA job and her support she'd been giving me for a few months after my last relationship ended.
	So I told her, you know, I'm beginning to develop more feelings and just friendship with you.
	I'd like to take you out on a bowling date.
	Say Wednesday, would that work for you?
	And then that's when she told me, All she saw me as was a friend.
	Bowling? Yes.
	Does she like bowling? She does.
	Interesting. Well, um...
	Plus, I didn't want to go with the traditional dinner route.
	I wanted to have something that was fun and engaging.
	Right. Okay. Okay.
	And what was her phrase exactly?
	She said, what does she say in more detail?
	She said she was sorry about that, but she doesn't see me that way.
	She only sees me as a friend, and she's sorry for hurting my feelings.
	And if I need any help, she's always there for me.
	And I told her...
	Don't see you as a friend, I see you as something more, but continuing a friendship with you at this point is just going to cause more hurt for both of us.
	Right, and how did she respond to that?
	She was pretty understanding of it.
	I told her the best way she can help me is if she leaves me alone, and she said she'll respect my wishes, and she hasn't tried to contact me since then.
	Do you know if she had any other men she was interested in or she had a boyfriend?
	I assume that she didn't have a boyfriend or anything like that.
	She did not have a boyfriend, but I had suspicion she liked one medical student.
	Remember I was saying you got to close the two-point gap somehow?
	Yep. I'm guessing MD, two letters, two points, right?
	Pretty much. Now, I'm not sure how rich the guy was.
	No, but I mean, there's future potential there.
	And what's your degree in?
	I was essentially becoming a teacher.
	So, I'm not going to compete against a medical person.
	I see. So, you've got teacher versus doctor, right?
	Yep. Right.
	Right. And what was she studying?
	International studies, which is essentially, for our college, how to be a diplomat for working with other nations.
	Well, I will say this.
	She's very diplomatic, right?
	I mean, there's certainly worse ways...
	The classes are paying off.
	Yeah, no, I mean, or she just has a bent that way, right?
	Yep. So, the question is...
	Why does your mother get upset that you were interested in this woman?
	And, you know, she seems to have, I've got to be honest with you, I mean, she seems to have particular qualities that are actually nice, positive, right?
	Yep. I mean, she's sensitive, she's thoughtful, she's respectful, and so on, and she certainly knows what she wants.
	So it was not just a sexual attraction to the woman, right?
	No, when I pick out girls I want to date, looks matter, but I also want to know what their personality and character is like, because after a while you can have the prettiest girl in the world, but if her personality looks like Jabba the Hutt, it's just not going to work.
	Yeah, time washes away the watercolor of pretty and shows the feral Palpatine mask underneath pretty quickly.
	And there's no unlimited power there.
	Okay, so why does your mother think basically that you were only thinking with your dick with regards to this woman?
	Why does your mother think that it was the woman's mere sex appeal that was the only reason you asked her?
	Because maybe it reminds her too much of what she did in the past where...
	With my dad, how he was able to just trick her onto liking him.
	That seems kind of vague to me.
	Let's try this way.
	Why did your father ask your mother out?
	Primarily because she was pretty.
	Right. Has your mother used her looks throughout her life to get ahead?
	I don't know.
	When me and my brother were born, her looks had deteriorated pretty badly.
	So, when she actually had to use her brain and stuff to get ahead, I don't know what she was doing before we were born.
	Right. Tell me about your mother's virtues.
	Extremely hard-working and extremely intelligent.
	It's a double-edged sword because those are also her greatest weaknesses as well.
	She'd be more focused on working and trying to get ahead in the workspace than spending time with the family.
	I remember there would be many days Where she would go home, grab a bite to eat at the dinner table, and then straight up to her office to work the rest of the night.
	And she would do that for a few weeks every month.
	So really, it was a lot of time with your dad and not so much time with your mom, right?
	My dad was the main person that would help us.
	Now, I know my mom cared about me, but she thought that care should be...
	Providing a lot of money to the household, and that's how she would show her care rather than balancing out between work and showing more parental care to her kids directly.
	Okay, so those aren't virtues.
	You know, Hitler was hard-working.
	The guy barely took a day off.
	So hard-working is not a virtue.
	Making money, not necessarily a virtue, really depends on how and how balanced it may be, particularly if you're a mom.
	So, let's try again her virtues.
	Um, let's see.
	She would...
	Was very tenacious on accomplishing tasks.
	She would say you need to stand your ground if you want to get anything in life.
	Not a virtue. It's amoral.
	Okay. Hitler stood his ground for getting what he wanted in life.
	And that cost him many battles.
	Well. So.
	Virtues. Well, I would say starting off that she actually loved my dad and didn't do the typical divorce settings that's all too common with typical households.
	It could count as a virtue.
	I remember when I was trying to apply for college, she was the one that was helping me Apply for all these scholarships, and I did get a few scholarships, so I was able to graduate college without debt, which would not have been possible without her.
	She also helped me get jobs with one of the companies she was working with by giving good word of mouth.
	So in the business world, she was quite good at helping me get my foot in the door.
	Okay.
	I mean, didn't divorce your dad?
	That's not the pinnacle of Socratic virtues.
	you But, you know, helping you get into college, well, that's nice, sure.
	A guidance counselor could have done some of that.
	And of course, she does benefit directly financially from you not being in debt and getting you started in your life, that's nice.
	But to make a sort of silly point, you know, like...
	A mafia boss will help his son get started in the business, so to speak, right?
	Will be engaged in his success.
	So I'm looking for characteristics that are singular to virtue and not to, say, pair-bonded mammals.
	Singular to human virtues.
	And by that I mean integrity and courage and compassion and strength and some sort of charitable stuff that's not just vanity.
	You know what I mean?
	Virtues that are really admirable that can't be reproduced by amoral or evil people.
	Alright. When she was working for the They're rather corrupt and there was one point where they wanted her to cook the books essentially and she flat out refused to do it and as a result she ended up being fired.
	That's one example of her displaying some honesty.
	Alright, so go ahead.
	And It was that honesty in the workforce that caused her to bounce around through quite a few jobs because there was another one which was essentially doing the same thing and they were essentially trying the same thing so she stood her ground got fired and moved on to the hospital and When she arrived,
	the hospital was pretty much in financial ruins, and in about three years she got from one of the poorest hospitals to one of the most profitable hospitals.
	Then the management changed, and they didn't like her, and then they got rid of her doing that.
	Now she's working at another hospital as the And right now things seem to be stable, but I don't know how long that will last.
	So is it fair to say that she has suffered from the virtue of honesty or integrity in these business dealings?
	I would say so.
	So I guess I just have one question then.
	If she values honesty so much, why does she want you to lie to this woman and pretend to be her friend when you don't want to be?
	If that's a value, if you value honesty, why does she want you to lie?
	Because maybe her getting fired from jobs for being honest reminds her that honesty doesn't always pay in the world, and if you want something, lying for it.
	Is the better option than being openly honest about it?
	You mean if you want something in the world, like, say, your father wanted your mother, lying is the way to go about it?
	Yes. Because if she valued honesty, why would she marry a man who lied and cheated?
	Or manipulated, if we want to put it more nicely.
	Yep. I... don't know.
	Right. Why does she want to put you in harm's way?
	Because if you really care for this woman, if you want to date her, How are you supposed to be friends with her when she starts saying, oh, I'm really interested in this other guy.
	Oh, I think he's going to ask me out.
	Oh, you know what? I've decided to go ask him out.
	Oh, we're going on a date.
	Ironically, we're going bowling.
	And you're like, yay.
	Like, how on earth can you be honest and in an authentic relationship with a woman that you want to date?
	You can't. When she is going to be dating other people.
	How on earth are you supposed to free up your heart?
	For another woman, if you're stuck in the orbit of the woman you're still attracted to, because it's not like your heart's not just going to go like, well, you know, we're just friends now, great, I'm going to pack up and rewind and everything's going to be just like I never got attracted to her in the first place.
	Like, how is she expecting you to move on?
	How is she expecting you to be honest?
	And how the hell is she expecting you to be happy?
	By commanding you to go to apologize for asking your woman out.
	Holy God!
	How humiliating!
	Your mom says you have to apologize to a woman for asking her out and then not wanting to get stuck in the friend zone?
	Holy crap! And how is she expecting you to move on and be happy if you're orbiting this woman you're really attracted to?
	If she goes and dates someone else, which she will, she's a nine and a half, she's going to orb the MD probably, and they're going to end up dating.
	What are you supposed to do? Like, go along as a third wheel?
	Like, this is great. Can I hold your coat?
	I think I may have some condoms for you guys.
	Let me just check my pockets here.
	What is the plan here for your heart and your protection?
	I don't think there's a plan at all, to be honest.
	Because, to me, it seems quite obvious that this is a terrible idea, but no matter how many times I try to explain it to her, it just doesn't get through.
	So, she's a terrible listener, and she doesn't really care about what happens to you, and she's certainly willing to put you in a situation to satisfy her belief system or ideology that puts you directly in harm's way of heartbreak.
	Yep. Have you had a chance to chat with your father privately about this?
	I have, and he says he knows that it's every girl's right to refuse a guy's advances if he wants, and conversely he also says it's alright for a guy to refuse friendship from a girl if he doesn't want it.
	But he says, what I'm doing isn't exactly the best thing, because if I'm friends with this girl, she can introduce me to other girls, but...
	Well, he's quite a manipulator, isn't he?
	He hasn't lost that habit.
	Nope. However, my problem with that idea, besides the fact that it's blatantly dishonest, is if the girl knows that you're only hanging around her to be friends, or to...
	Date her friends? She's certainly not going to give you a good image to her friends.
	Well, no, I think your father is saying, listen, son, if you're really manipulative and falsify your entire relationship, you can end up with a girl like mom.
	Because that's what I did, and it worked super well.
	All right. I mean, that's fair.
	He's saying, go be manipulative.
	Go falsify, go lie, go misrepresent.
	Because that's what worked for him.
	Been married 37 years, right?
	Yep. So, it all comes down to one foundational question, my friend.
	The foundational question that you must answer as all men must answer over time.
	Foundational question! Do you want to marry a woman like your mother?
	No. Right.
	Then you have to figure out what's wrong with her for you, or objectively.
	Because look, if you have a great mom Then you want a woman who's like your mom.
	There's nothing eatable about it.
	Nothing weird about it. It's just natural.
	Those are the virtues that you want in a wife.
	Because you saw you had a great mom.
	She's honest and caring and courageous and thoughtful and loving.
	And you know, it's like, if it ain't broke, don't fix it.
	Get someone like that and you're going to be happy, right?
	Right. Now, if you don't want someone like your mom, you have to figure out what's wrong with her.
	So that you know what to avoid.
	And what to pursue, right?
	Alright. So...
	What's wrong with her?
	I would say the primary thing that's wrong with her is her attitude of success at any cost.
	Go on. Where you're willing to...
	Sacrifice family time and try to manipulate people or use them to the best benefit of yourself just so you can get that extra promotion or get ahead in life.
	And I've seen that in the world and I always know that short term wise that's a good idea but long term it's only going to lead to More misery and unhappiness.
	And what misery and unhappiness has it led to for your mother?
	The fact that she has a hard time trusting people, hard time making friends herself.
	I remember one time when she was in one of the jobs and what she thought was a friend betrayed her So she could get a better position and my mom was pretty crushed about that for a long time.
	So she was betrayed by someone who backstabbed her in the corporate climb, right?
	Yes. Right, right, right.
	Why do you think she chose work over her family so much?
	It would have to probably do with the way she was raised.
	My mom's parents were as poor as church mice.
	And to compound matters, they had eight or nine children.
	I can't remember exactly, but it was a whole lot of kids.
	And as a result, it was hard to get...
	There was always shortages of food, and it was paycheck to paycheck.
	That was her experience growing up.
	And as the oldest child, she had to take care of the other eight siblings.
	So, her entire life growing up, she believed that accumulating lots of wealth and getting a high position would lead to a happier life.
	And was she right, do you think?
	Partially. I think she had a part of it, but not the whole thing.
	You do need some money to take care of your basic living expenses and in case an emergency happens, but if your whole point in life is just to further your work career, I think you're missing the other parts such as your family or life experiences or just being content.
	If you're always searching to get that next position, no matter the cost, it hollows you out inside.
	And is she a feminist?
	She has feminist tendencies.
	She fully believes in the pay gap.
	And what's her relationship to female beauty these days?
	Feminists do not have a very positive relationship to female beauty in general, to put it mildly.
	I would say she's certainly looking like a feminist.
	She's definitely lost her thinness, to say it politely.
	And however, she still thinks...
	That if a girl's pretty, a girl's pretty, and she won't attack him on that.
	What influence does your father have over your mother's more extremes in personality?
	And I say that because one of the great things about marriage is you get that kind of feedback.
	I remember when I was about 12, I used to go to Camp Bolton.
	I actually ended up modeling for them in a photo shoot.
	But I used to go to Camp Bolton and I stayed in a cabin and I would be up there like half the summer sometimes.
	A pretty nice place, pretty cool place.
	But I remember, I hadn't seen a mirror For like a week or something like that.
	And we were going over to, I don't know, have lunch with the girl's side or something like that.
	And I finally, I looked in a mirror somewhere, and I had like a couple of pimples on my forehead.
	And I was like, whoa!
	You'd think I'd have noticed that, but I hadn't seen a mirror.
	So you kind of, if you're not in a marriage, you're not in a relationship with people who are honest with you, you kind of lose track.
	You become like a vampire. There's no reflection.
	You can't tell. I didn't know I had pimples until I saw them in the mirror.
	You know, you lick your finger and you rub your pimples.
	Like, that's magic. It's going to change everything.
	Just pop a few of them and the problem goes away.
	Yeah, except it doesn't.
	It makes it worse.
	But that's a deferral of gratification.
	That's like the teenager's marshmallow test is do you pop them or not?
	But, um... So when you're in a relationship, when you're married in particular, then you have a partner who's going to say, you know, you've gone a bit too far this way, let's rein it in over here.
	You know, the balancing act, and you do it back and forth, right?
	Yep. And it's one of the reasons single moms end up overweight so much.
	So, does your father have any...
	Have you seen him be assertive and say, now there's too much of this, so you've got to dial it back a little here?
	It may happen privately, but, you know, in general, when you get older, you probably would have seen it at some point or another.
	In other words, does your father have authority with regards to your mom?
	He does. Um...
	He definitely never let her walk over him at all, and if she was...
	My mom had an issue where if she found something that was, one of the rooms was unclean or something, or it was a bit junky, she would make a big deal out of it, and my dad would simply just say, I'll get to it when I get to it, not a second sooner.
	And if you bring it up again, it's not going to make it get any cleaner.
	And she would generally back off.
	My dad also kept my mom from killing herself through work.
	During one or more stressful periods, she was working 18 hours some days, and it was literally killing her.
	And my dad finally said, you need to quit this job or else you're not going to be alive much longer.
	And I'm tired of hearing your bad days at work all the time.
	So, my dad was able to convince my mom to tamper down the hours, relax some, and she was actually getting happier as a result of it.
	Strange, I know. Sorry to interrupt.
	up now how about with regards to you i don't know if you have siblings but with regards to you did he stand up to your mother with regards to interests that affected you um like when i would make mistakes and stuff and my mom would get upset about the mistake my dad said it's a mistake He didn't mean it.
	And if you're not making mistakes, you're not learning.
	And after I talked to her, she was much more lenient on that.
	till the next mistake happened all right and go ahead And my dad was also the one that introduced me to the shooting sports.
	He was the one that...
	Set up two shooting ranges, taught me how to shoot, and helped me get to the Olympic Training Center, as well as helping me become the national pistol champion.
	Right. The reason I'm asking this is...
	Why your mother is lecturing you about how to date or not date is beyond me.
	You know why? Because she's a mom.
	So why she would be lecturing you about dating versus, like, you should do this or you should...
	That's a dad thing. Sorry, ladies.
	It's a guy thing.
	You don't get it.
	You don't understand.
	You're like a 55-year-old woman and you're talking about a 20-odd-year-old young man.
	You don't get it! Not your wheelhouse.
	Not where the pipe is laid in your brain, so to speak.
	So I have no idea why your mother would be lecturing you about how to date women.
	She hasn't done it in close to 40 years.
	She hasn't been on the dating scene in close to 40 years.
	What the hell would she know about any of it, right?
	And so your father, if I understand that he's able to stand up to your mom, which is good, so wouldn't your father say, hey honey, appreciate the feedback.
	I got this.
	It's a guy thing. You wouldn't understand.
	Maybe you don't understand. That's no problem.
	Like I'm going to assume that the shooting is a little bit of a guy thing.
	Maybe she's not. You're going to put an eye out, right?
	Christmas story. This is a guy thing.
	Why are you lecturing my son on how to date women?
	You've never dated women.
	You haven't dated anyone in 40 years.
	It's not dating advice.
	That's archaeology.
	Like, why isn't he just telling you to back the hell off?
	Because her goals sort of intertwine with his...
	Idea of dating because he thinks, once again, that if I'm friends with her, that will help me get more girls.
	Wait, is that her perspective or his?
	His. Do you agree with him?
	I do not agree with that.
	Okay, so then the last question I have is this.
	Why do you keep talking to your mom about this?
	Like you say, you keep talking about it, she's like a brick wall.
	You keep talking about it, she doesn't listen.
	What's wrong with just saying, Mom, love you, but sorry, my life, my dating advice.
	Like, no. No, no, no, no, no.
	You have not successfully dated a young woman these days, so no thanks.
	Thanks for the advice. Appreciate the feedback.
	Not for me. Like, why do you want to keep explaining yourself?
	Explaining yourself to people is like pissing up into a strong wind.
	All right. So why do you...
	Why do you care if she gives you bad advice?
	I guess that's my question.
	It's bad advice.
	It's terrible advice, hurtful advice, destructive advice to you and to the woman.
	So... Why do you care that she approves of your dating habits?
	I mean, I'm not saying you shouldn't care what your parents think.
	We all do. But fundamentally, why do you need to keep explaining this to her?
	I mean, she's wrong. She's allowed to be wrong.
	You're allowed to know that she's wrong.
	I mean, why is this still the topic?
	Um...
	Essentially, she'll bring this up any time I try to date another girl, and I get...
	Either a short-term relationship or I get rejected.
	And then she'll bring up that I need to be friends with them before I have any hope of ever dating them.
	But then you say, Mom, you weren't friends with Dad!
	So what are you talking about?
	You hated dad and he lied to you and you married him and gave him children.
	What are you talking about?
	You crazy woman?
	This is the exact opposite of what worked for you.
	Are you saying that you shouldn't have married dad because he lied to you?
	What are you talking about?
	All right. I mean, how would she respond?
	He lied to her. He's a manipulator.
	She married him. What is she talking about?
	I don't understand. I know how she'd respond if I pulled that up.
	She'd pretty much say, I don't know what I'm talking about, and that doesn't apply.
	That's not an argument, woman.
	That's how a lot of her arguments are with my dad.
	No, they're not arguments. You say that honesty is a value.
	You married the first man who lied to you.
	Give me a break. This is like a shit test, right?
	This is like, I'm gonna give you the exact opposite advice that worked for me.
	Okay, so you want me to marry someone who's very much different than you, which means you're saying that you're not a good wife and I should get someone different.
	Okay, but let's at least be upfront about it.
	All right. I mean, that'd be like my mom saying, the important thing is not to put ads in random American newspapers and meet every creep south of the Arctic Circle.
	I mean, come on!
	If she wants you to do the opposite of what worked with your father, you kind of need to be upfront about that because that's kind of radical advice, right?
	Do the opposite of what produced you as a child.
	I mean, it's crazy. I think the reason why I try to prove myself to them is they're my parents and I've been raised essentially to try to always seek approval from them and part of growing up is you have to realize that you don't always need their approval on everything.
	That's way too much power to give to anyone, right?
	Yeah. I mean, listen, I understand where you're coming from.
	I mean, I'm a son, and I understand that.
	I have a daughter, and she wants to please me.
	But you can't give people that much power that they have to validate and approve everything that you do.
	That's not healthy, right?
	Especially now that you're in adults.
	No, it is not. And also, look, it's one thing.
	It's one thing if society hadn't changed enormously in the past 40 years, right?
	Right. But it's a different planet out there.
	And I get these comments too, right?
	Like I talk about dating and people are like, you haven't dated for a while, dude.
	You know, it's a different world out there.
	And I'm, you know, researching and trying to sort of get up to speed and literally getting up to speed on how many kids are using speed these days.
	So it is, they don't have much value to offer you in the dating world.
	Because it's so different now than it used to be.
	On every conceivable level.
	Sexual mores are different.
	Rampant pornographic use is different.
	You have kids who are heavily drugged.
	Single mother kids are all over the place these days.
	School quality has declined enormously.
	Massive amounts of multiculturalism and hyper-racial sensitivities.
	It's a whole different world out there.
	The idea that they...
	I mean, it'd be one thing if they said, do what worked for us, but if they say to you, having been out of the game for 40 years, do the opposite of what worked for us, then I don't know, what are they trying to make you fail?
	like I don't quite like that's just weird and listen it's perfectly fair it's perfectly fair to say to your mom don't bring this up again I don't want you to bring this up again.
	I appreciate that you thought about it, but now it's bugging me.
	It's upsetting me. And frankly, at some point, if I keep listening to this, it's going to start interfering with my confidence.
	I'm sorry that you're stuck in it.
	We can have a conversation about why you're stuck in it.
	But you are not bringing this up again with me.
	This is not healthy. This is not helpful.
	And it's entirely hypocritical because you're telling me to go be honest.
	Well, actually, you're telling me to go and lie to a girl which I don't want to do.
	Maybe dad lying worked for you, but that's not how I want to have a relationship start.
	It's called boundaries, right?
	Boundaries are where you say, no, I'm not talking about this.
	This is not a topic that I want to get into with you anymore.
	I'm tired of it. It's not helping me.
	It's annoying me. So please stop.
	Now, a healthy person will say, let's talk about why it's bothering you.
	Let's talk about why I feel the need to bring it up.
	But they won't just say, they won't just blow past it.
	Pretend you didn't say anything in the next five minutes and bring it up again.
	That's really unhealthy.
	And then it means escalation.
	It means escalation.
	And, you know, I'm sorry if people want to escalate, but you draw boundaries.
	If they walk right through those boundaries, you've got to draw boundaries in fire.
	And then if they walk through those boundaries, you've got to draw boundaries in walls.
	And then if they walk through those boundaries, you understand, right?
	You just have to keep escalating until you get your space, you get your respect, and you get your presence in the relationship.
	People who walk over you, people who blow past things that you don't want to talk about or are uncomfortable with or don't like, those people are attempting to erase you.
	They're attempting to drive your personality out of your body so that you're there just as utility for them as poison containers sometimes, as Lloyd DeMoss talked about.
	So no, you can say no.
	It's healthy. It's right.
	Your parents can say no to you.
	You're all adults now. You can say no.
	Listen, parents have this with children.
	When children first roughhouse, they don't know when to stop.
	And you say, okay, that's too hard, and then maybe they'll roughhouse again.
	And you have to be very firm and say, listen, when I say stop, we stop.
	When you say stop, we stop.
	Like if you're tickling your kid and the kid says stop, you stop.
	Because you don't want them to have to escalate just to get you to listen to them.
	And if you can't have boundaries in your relationship, guess what?
	You can't have a relationship.
	You don't have a relationship if you don't have boundaries, because there's not two people there who are exercising will and sovereignty.
	And in my particular experience, women are not great at respecting boundaries.
	Men True, not great either, but a little bit more on the female side.
	And as females have gained power politically, guess what?
	No boundaries in countries.
	Anyone can wander in and out.
	Because boundary violations for men historically came with a lot of aggression.
	Right? Like, we've all had this experience.
	You bump into some big guy in a bar and you're like, hey man, I'm sorry, you know?
	A little guy doesn't...
	I'm sorry, man. Because you want to establish that it was not an act of provocation.
	It wasn't an act of boundary violation because you're attempting to dominate.
	But women... A woman bumps into a man, what's he like?
	Hey! Give me a broken pool cue.
	I'm settling this. So, for men, boundary violations could escalate very quickly into physical violence, and so men have just become, hey, don't want to talk about it?
	But in my experience, when you say you don't want to talk about something with a woman, present family accepted, right?
	She's just like, oh, oh, there's a secret?
	I must find my way in!
	You know, like the story of Bluebeard's Castle, right?
	He says, you've got this giant castle, hypergamy for the win.
	You've got this giant castle that's just one door.
	One door, I don't want you to go through.
	And what does she do? I gotta get through that door.
	Boundaries, boundaries, boundaries, right?
	So, when it comes to this, just say no.
	Don't want to talk about it.
	Not helpful, not useful.
	It's annoying me. Stop.
	Now, people will then ask you to justify, well, why?
	So they want to talk about it without talking about it, right?
	It's like, it bothers me.
	Well, why does it bother you? It just bothers me.
	Well, you have to tell me why.
	No, I don't actually have to tell you why.
	It bothers me.
	So don't do it, because it's bothering me.
	It's not helpful. But you've got to tell me why.
	I actually don't, right? The whole point of boundaries is you don't have to explain yourself.
	You don't have to explore yourself.
	You just don't want a particular form of behavior around you.
	Now, if you feel like explaining yourself or exploring it, great, but you don't have to.
	So, that would be my suggestion, is if this is an unhelpful conversation for you, if it is confusing and baffling and annoying, just say no.
	Draw a clear line.
	Say, I don't like it when you bring this up.
	Well, why? Doesn't matter.
	I don't like it. Will you have to tell me what?
	No, I don't. Stop bringing it up.
	You can say, please stop bringing it up and then stop bringing it up.
	And then if they keep bringing it up, you get up and you walk out.
	And if they're on the phone and they bring it up again, I'm going to hang up now.
	And if they won't respect boundaries, you have to train them to respect boundaries by simply disengaging when they violate the boundary.
	I wish people listened to reason, but sometimes you've got to train them like a puppy with a rolled up newspaper.
	Oh, you're bringing this up again? Told you about this.
	Click. Oh, you're bringing this up again?
	I'm up and out of here. I mean, eventually, hopefully, people get the message.
	But that would be my suggestion.
	If people keep bringing up stuff that is annoying.
	So, appreciate the call.
	Thanks very much. Let's move on to the next caller.
	All right. Alright, up next we have Rob.
	Rob wrote in and said, That's from Rob.
	Oh, hey Rob, how you doing?
	Good, how are you tonight? I'm well.
	I'm well, I'm well, I'm well.
	Well, to me, it's a great question, and the best way that I can phrase it is, have you ever been lost, like in the woods or something?
	Not, no, not necessarily lost, no.
	Have you ever, I don't know, your phone died, no GPS or something, have you ever been lost when you're driving, like you're driving, trying to drive someplace, you get that uneasy feeling because the street just hasn't shown up yet?
	Yeah, actually I live near a major city and I have felt that way before.
	Okay, so the question is then what makes you stop and change your direction?
	Or at least consult a map or get a car charger for your phone or whatever, right?
	Yeah, I'm not sure what makes me actually reach that point.
	Well, you have a destination and you're feeling uneasy about whether you're getting to where you want to get to, right?
	So if you're out there, lost in the woods.
	So when I was working as a gold banner, I went out with a co-worker one night and we just, we worked too long.
	Now, we were seriously in the middle of Noma, a place called Dumas Lake, a bit north of Nikina, if I remember rightly, but it was like we had to fly in and we had to land on a seaplane, like an ice plane.
	Landed on skis, and we were there looking for gold.
	And the plane was coming the next morning, and we had a bunch more holes to drill.
	So we would drill down with something called a peon jar drill, and we would get bedrock, because gold is very heavy, so it settles down to the bedrock.
	So you take a soil sample from the bedrock, if there's gold around, you'll find it when you're panning.
	And we had a lot of holes to drill.
	And we, I mean, when it gets dark up there, man, it's seriously dark.
	And it's funny because, you know, if it's a fairly decent moon and the stars are out, you get shadows.
	It's like this wonderful blue icing sugar like the winter.
	And if it's dark, it's really dark.
	Like if it's cloudy, if there's no moon, I mean, it is like Bilbo in a tunnel.
	Like you cannot see your hand in front of your face.
	It's that dark. And you have a flashlight and all that, but it's not hugely helpful.
	So we had, I think it was 10 holes left to drill, and it was getting on in the day.
	And we're like, oh, man, this is, we should head back.
	Sun's heading down, and we should head back.
	This is long before GPS, anything like that, right?
	So you get lost.
	You're lost in minus 30 temperatures, and it's a very difficult night.
	You got to keep shuffling around.
	You can't sit down, and it's very unpleasant.
	And so we're like, we should head back.
	It's like, oh, man, there's like two more holes to drill.
	If we head back now, the plane was coming, I think, at 10.
	So if we head back now, we have to, like, it was a long way back to the tent.
	And we'd have to get up at like 6 o'clock in the morning.
	We'd have to track out here.
	We'd have to do the last two holes.
	And then we'd have to be back by 10 to be picked up by the plane.
	And we'd have to pack. Oh, it's just a big mess.
	So we decided to push on.
	And we're like, we're going to get these last two holes drilled.
	And we're drilling, we're drilling, hurrying, but, you know, still wanting to do a good job.
	And then, like someone just turned out the lights, the sun was gone.
	And it's just like, it's like you close your eyes and cover them with your heels.
	It's like, boom! It's...
	So we get our flashlights out.
	Got to thump a little because the batteries don't work that well when it's that cold.
	We get our drill out, we pack it all up, and we start hiking back.
	At least we think we are hiking back.
	Now, you can follow your own snow footprints back, but we didn't come straight from the tent.
	We'd gone on a big, circuitous path, so we didn't know where the hell the tent was.
	That's a bit of an uneasy feeling, I'll tell you that.
	Like, it's really cold, we're carrying a lot of heavy equipment, and we don't know how to get back to the tent.
	And suddenly, getting up at 6 in the morning the next morning didn't seem like such a bad thing, because, you know, there's this kind of weird, uneasy feeling when you suddenly realize, well, I'm standing over a bit of a Grand Canyon of mortality here, right?
	I don't know, I've never spent a night in that kind of temperature, and it really drops down.
	And so we decided to head to the lake, to head out onto the lake, which we could sort of find where we sort of shone our flashlights or where the trees thinned down, and we headed out onto the lake.
	And there were two guys, there were four of us in the tent, and the two guys who had stayed back to do the gold panning realized that we weren't back.
	And they did something which I will forever be grateful for, which is that they took one of our lamps and they hung it on a tree in front of the tent.
	The tent was by the lake, the frozen lake.
	There's an old poem. Among 20 snowy mountains, the only moving thing was the eye of the blackbird.
	I think it's 19 ways of looking at a blackbird or something like that.
	And it's the strangest thing.
	You know, when you've ever been in a really, really dark environment...
	Like, you know when you close your eyes, you get these, like, electric boogaloo shimmers and glows and all this kind of stuff that just happens as the afterimages of whatever.
	That happens when, you know, the sun goes down, boom, and you're really in the dark.
	There's, like, these faint slither-io glowworms crawling across your vision and everything's kind of jangly and there's little swirls and, like, I don't know.
	Nothing's ever completely dark, I guess.
	And I'm with my friend, and we're like, I think it's this way.
	It's a really, really uneasy feeling.
	Of course, it should be an uneasy feeling.
	You wouldn't be comfortable in that situation.
	And what happened was...
	I thought I saw one tiny glimmer of light.
	But I wasn't sure, because again, your eyes kind of jangled, and you've got your glow worms, and there's like, you know, you look to one side, and your peripheral vision to see if you...
	Like, you know how sometimes you can't look at a star directly in the night sky, but if you look a little bit to the left or to the right, you can see it in your peripheral vision?
	And I'm like, I think that's a light.
	And he's like... Could be.
	We hadn't hung a light out before because nobody had been that late.
	But anyway, we did start trekking towards it and eventually we realized what it was and we went in and kissed the guy's feet who'd hung it.
	But that really uneasy feeling of like, man, we're kind of out here in the middle of nowhere, and it could be a really, really long and unpleasant night.
	Hungry night. Cold.
	Cold, cold, cold. My lord.
	That's the kind of cold sometimes, especially if the wind picks up, like 60 to 120 seconds, your skin can start to freeze.
	Your eyelids can freeze together if there's wind and you blink.
	So, the reason I'm telling that long story...
	It's because I love excavating little bits of my history and preserving them for eternity, but also because that feeling of unease is really, really important.
	And I think that's what motivates people to change.
	If you're really confident about where you're going, you don't feel that unease.
	So the reason why people change out of their broken histories, the reason why people break orbit from dysfunction, is they're uneasy with where they are.
	Now, for that to occur, I believe, There must be a standard of value that they can compare themselves to that they have not been taught to resent.
	So I, as I've talked about before, knew an upper-middle-class family that had a nice house, that had a pool, professional, dad, stay-at-home mom, nice family, functional, and I didn't resent them.
	Now, a lot of people will teach you to resent successful people or rich people or happy people or whatever, right?
	And those people are your bitter fucking enemies.
	Those people who teach you to hate success, who teach you to hate function, oh, they're such squares, they're so boring, such a suburban nothing lifestyle.
	Those people are your bitter fucking enemies.
	They are trying to chain you down to the underworld.
	They are trying to put you in a decaying orbit that has you flame out in the hot Bloody air of infinite dysfunction.
	So if you are in the orbit around planet crap hole, if you're surrounded by shitty people with shitty lives, making shitty decisions, pursuing their base satanic lusts rather than elevating themselves to anything higher and better, if you're in that world, if you're in that underworld, then you know that there's more functional people around you.
	You probably don't see them on Netflix, but you will see more functional people around you and what is your relationship to them?
	Do you hate them? Do you resent them?
	The Marxists will teach you to hate and resent them.
	Oh, you're only poor because they're rich.
	And the other leftists will teach you to resent them.
	Oh, you see, they're only better off because they're white and you're not white and they have privilege and they're racists.
	And if they're black, well, they're just acting white.
	They're Oreos, Uncle Tom's.
	Or if you have a single mom, then they may say, well, at least she escaped the hellish patriarchy.
	And so there are lots of people, they know, they want to keep you trapped in that underworld.
	There's great profit. for assholes and fear mongers and controllers if they keep you in that underworld so they know you can see better they know you can see the little lights in the dark that maybe you should start struggling towards you but they say no no no no you see success is exploitation success is racism success is evil success material success emotional success that's moral failure or they say Those happy people are ignoring your misery.
	They're ignoring your pain.
	They're dancing and skipping along.
	Don't they know these terrible things are happening in the world?
	Don't they know that you're unhappy and everyone else is unhappy?
	How dare they be happy when you're so unhappy?
	How horrible, how nasty, how terrible they are.
	And what they do, you're lost.
	On a frozen lake, in the dark, heavily burdened, and they take two wet fingers and they put out that light that could guide you home, that could guide you to the warmth, that could guide you to companionship, that could guide you out of the wilderness, that could guide you out of being frozen to death overnight.
	So I understand.
	I understand. Hang on.
	So... This is why I... Say, success is good.
	Success is something you should aim for.
	Success is wonderful. And here's how to get there.
	And if you are uneasy where you are, and you see a path towards something better that you can define as better, that hasn't been poisoned by language, by the soft, serrated syllables of sophistry, then I think you have a chance to change.
	And Ayn Rand was very, very important, as was Nathaniel Brandon and John Gray and John Bradshaw and other people who I read, the sort of self-knowledge people, the functional people, functional, decent, good people who said, here's a rope, man. Climb your way up.
	So if you can see something better, you're uneasy with where you are, and somebody gives you something to aim at, Then you can get there, if you want.
	Now, of course, everyone who's around you, who's stuck in this underworld, who didn't get out, and by definition, if they're older than you, they didn't get out.
	They don't want you to get out.
	It'd be like if I was down in a graveyard of all the people who'd never gotten out, and they were zombies holding onto me in that frozen lake, desperately not wanting me to get back to the light and the heat and the warmth, and the plane back to civilization.
	So all the people who are...
	In that shitfest and hellscape of a terrible world, dysfunctional world of brutality and exploitation and lust and greed and manipulation and attack and undermining and abuse and all those terrible people stuck in this terrible world, they don't want you to get out.
	So they'll mock you and they'll attack you and they'll undermine you and they'll, oh, you think you're better than we are?
	I hope to be. I really hope to be.
	Because you have to look at those people and say, if I'm like that when I'm 40, I'm putting a bullet in my head.
	I can't stand that life.
	That life is hideous to me.
	It's barely a life. It's a life of reaction.
	It's an animalistic life.
	Lashing out and fucking and drinking and drugging and fighting and screaming.
	It's a reactive base.
	It's a life of The spine rather than of the mind.
	It's a life of the lust rather than of the mind.
	So there's lots of people who don't want you to get out, and they'll try and pull you back down.
	There are some people who can service your examples, and there are other people even trying to cut off those good examples.
	It's a big battle. It's a battle.
	Angels and the devils, good and evil.
	Can you get out of hell?
	You're born into hell. The big question is, there's some leathery rungs, there's a light up top, there's a couple of ropes coming down, and there's a lot of people hanging onto your legs, chewing like crazy.
	Can you get out?
	And the more people who present functionality and a way to get out, the more we can help people, the more we can rescue people, the more we can take people from the clutches of the devils that infest and birth and surround them.
	And that has been my major mission, to show some functionality, to show interest in people, give them something to aim for if that's what they need, give them methodologies for getting out if that's what they need.
	And lots of functional people listen to the show, fantastic, great We have a lot to offer that as well, but for those people who need to get out as I needed to get out, this is how you do it.
	And once you have a goal, and you have a methodology, and you have the unease of being where you are, you can get there.
	But a lot of things need to be in place before you can begin to climb and rise.
	Okay, that's basically what I wanted to say.
	Okay, so I understand the being taught to resent the functional people by the ones who don't want you to succeed I definitely growing up I always had that feeling of unease Especially around family because they were the most dysfunctional for me But thinking back I can't I can't think of a good example of a functional person or family or entity that really Would have lit that path back to camp for me.
	So I'm curious if I don't know, there's some innate, inborn trait that...
	Wait, wait, wait. There was nothing, not even in art, not even in books, not even on television, nothing that you saw that was functional?
	That can't be. There wasn't a lot that was functional.
	No, no, no. You said nothing, now there wasn't a lot.
	And now those two things are radically different, right?
	Okay, well, I mean, I guess I should explain.
	So... My parents divorced when I was five, four or five.
	Dad was an alcoholic, mom was a drug user.
	Actually, my older brother and me ended up spending a couple years in foster care.
	Got out of foster care.
	When was the foster care?
	It's child services, when you get taken away from your family and placed in a temporary home.
	Sorry, what was the foster care like?
	Oh, so...
	I mean, I was six when I got placed in and I was in until I was about nine and a half.
	So for me, it was pretty horrible.
	Mostly, you know, people that I didn't know, nobody really, I didn't talk to anybody.
	I spent a lot of time being quiet as a kid.
	And then about two years in, me and my brother were separated.
	He ended up going or staying with a family that he seemed to really Connect with and I ended up going to a boys home and From there, I mean it was I mean looking back like it It wasn't great,
	but like I don't I know it's kind of blurry looking back on a lot of the memories it wasn't great, but It's not like I like I don't resent that time because it was just what happened and You don't resent that time because that's just what happened?
	Well, I resent the people, like my parents.
	You know, I resent the foster parents who were kind of, you know, not necessarily cruel, but uncaring.
	But I don't, like, looking at me living in foster care, I mean, I don't know how I feel about that.
	Like, it sucked for sure.
	I wish I would have had a functional childhood, but...
	I don't know. I don't know.
	I mean, that's the life I knew.
	I didn't know anything else.
	And it's not like I had a lot of functional people.
	No, you did. Of course you did. Of course you knew something else.
	First of all, it's like saying, well, I was born with chronic pain, so I didn't mind it because I didn't know anything else.
	Well, of course you did, because chronic pain.
	It feels bad. That's how you know you have pain.
	It feels bad. And of course, you saw in school, and you saw lots of kids who came from functional homes, who came from parents who weren't alcoholics and drug addicts, right?
	Of course you knew differently. And I'm not trying to tell you your experience, but I have to correct.
	Statements that are dissociating, right?
	Let me ask you this. So what's your thoughts about your parents?
	Would you say your mother was a drug user, your father was an alcoholic?
	And what are your thoughts about...
	That was really the source of the problem, right?
	That's what put you into this long journey, right?
	Yeah, I mean...
	Yeah, that was the main source of the problem that put me on the path I'm on.
	But, I mean, as far as what I think about them...
	I mean, my dad is...
	My dad's changed since he was back then.
	He doesn't drink anymore. I mean, he still has his problems.
	And, I mean, we're not...
	We're not as close as a lot of fathers and sons.
	My mother I don't necessarily speak to.
	She hasn't ever really moved away from that lifestyle.
	So I've severed ties with the majority of my family because at a certain point I realized that they weren't in it for my best interest.
	So I moved across the country and haven't really looked back.
	What caused your father to stop drinking?
	I think us going into foster care was a big catalyst for him not drinking anymore.
	And if your father quit drinking, why did you stay in foster care?
	Well, so that was because an accusation of child abuse was made against him.
	By your mother's?
	Yeah, and to my shame, she convinced me and my brother to lie about it, and it ended up prolonging our experience in foster care.
	So your mother, was it sexual abuse?
	Yes. So your mother concocted a story that your father had sexually abused you, bullied or cajoled or convinced you guys into corroborating it.
	Was he charged?
	He went to court.
	He was never convicted.
	So, I mean, that's never happened with that.
	But he did go through a lot and ended up losing a lot fighting the accusation.
	And I assume he was not charged because the accusation could not be verified, right?
	Yeah, I assume. So I know at one point when I was probably around eight, I finally broke down and told the truth.
	And I was still in foster care for another year after that, but I think that also helped his case.
	And how old were you when your mother convinced you for all this?
	About five or six.
	It's a little blurry, but I remember being in kindergarten with my parents and then foster care happened somewhere towards the end of that or the beginning of first grade, so five or six.
	Do you know why your mother, she just wanted to do damage, just wanted to break him?
	What was the purpose of that?
	I don't have all the pieces because I don't have a relationship to get all the answers.
	But from what I understand, my mother had gotten into drug use, started cheating on my father, and ended up leaving and wanting that child support and all that to gain custody.
	Oh, so this is what they call SAID, sexual abuse in divorce.
	It is a tactic which gives the woman automatic custody and I assume access to child support money or other support money from the ex-husband or the state, right?
	Yeah, and that's exactly what it did.
	I ended up living with my mom and her boyfriend at the time who remained her boyfriend for a long time but was also very abusive and not a very nice guy in general.
	But I mean, but even that was more manipulation on her part of me.
	So I guess I'll explain that real quick.
	So the memory I have of it is we were staying at my grandma's after my mom and my dad separated.
	She got into a fight with my grandmother and me and her ended up leaving.
	We were walking down the street and somebody came, pulled up and said, hey, do you guys need a ride to the police station or something?
	And, you know, I convinced my mom because I was tired of walking.
	Let's just take the ride.
	I don't want to walk anymore.
	And, you know, for years it was always, oh, you introduced us, you introduced us.
	But, you know, having gotten older and talking to people, I've since learned that that may not have been a chance meeting on the side of the road and it may not have been my fault.
	But, you know, there's a lot of manipulation there.
	It may not have been your fault? What do you mean?
	The fact that your mother was with an abusive guy?
	Is there any scenario under which that could possibly be your fault as a child?
	No, but to my thinking as a kid and for a large part of my life was if I hadn't convinced her to get in the car because I was tired of walking, we wouldn't have been in that situation, which is...
	Well, no, she told you that. She put the blame on you, right?
	Yeah, she did. Yeah, so it's not to your way of thinking.
	This is just what you were told.
	You know, I don't think that anymore.
	No, I know.
	You're not giving her agency.
	Right? She falsely accused your father of sexual abuse, putting him through literal hell for years.
	I'm going to go out on a limb here, my friend, and I'm going to assume that nothing bad ever happened to this lady for these false accusations.
	Yeah, no. There was no repercussions for that.
	No repercussions. That's way too much agency, way too much responsibility.
	We'd like to vote very much, but not so much consequences for unbelievably evil actions.
	And what do you think of your mom for all of this?
	I mean, I've...
	I think she's a pretty miserable person.
	I mean, I don't...
	I don't have any, you know, necessarily good thoughts related to her, but I don't have anything hateful, I guess.
	But I don't... I don't talk to her.
	I don't... the little...
	the few times that we do talk, I don't allow her to...
	because even a couple months ago, you know, she messaged me on Facebook and, you know, wanted me To, you know, vindicate her and make her feel better about everything that happened.
	And, you know, I told her then, you know, that she ruined my life.
	You know, everything that happened was her fault.
	But, I mean, even to this day, she still tries to, you know, put the blame on someone or something else.
	So, my feelings about her are indifference.
	I guess that's probably the best way to put it.
	She ruined your life, but you're indifferent to her.
	I don't follow that.
	I mean, I can't...
	I had a lot of hate for her for many years, but at a certain point I started to feel that hating her wasn't enriching my life.
	It was better to set it aside and try and salvage what I could.
	Without that influence of her and, you know, my family and stuff like that.
	But hatred and anger are healthy emotions, in my view, if they get you to safety.
	You know, people say, well, there's this terrible person, not you, but people say there's this terrible person in my life.
	I'm going to have to forgive them because the hate, the upset, the anger is eating me alive.
	It's like, well, why is this person still in your life then?
	I have to make peace with the tiger that's in my room because he keeps looking at me hungrily.
	It's like, well, why are you and or the tiger still in the same room?
	So I think for me, the anger, the hatred, people say, well, you're going to get stuck in it.
	You're going to get lost in it. It's going to do you damage.
	No. No, it's not.
	If you listen to them, what they're telling you to do is get thee to safety.
	Get thee to security.
	And once you're safe and secure, guess what?
	You don't feel the hate and the anger anymore because the fight or flight has done its thing.
	Get out of the way of the bear. The whole point of your emotions is to get you to change your behavior.
	And people have these emotions.
	They don't want to change their behavior. They say, well, the emotions won't change.
	It's like, well, of course they won't change.
	You know, if you're in the water and you think there are sharks there, you're going to be uneasy until you get to the boat.
	Then you'll feel not uneasy anymore.
	So, if you found that it was like this sort of chronic anger and hatred, I guess my question would be, were you in a safe, secure place and there was no one like your mom or your mom wasn't around?
	If that wasn't the case, I can understand why the emotions go on.
	mean I ended up joining the military moving across the country and essentially cutting her out of my life right and I'm gonna assume or tell me if I'm wrong that there are no longer these kinds of horribly dysfunctional people in your life
	There were for a long time, but as I've gotten older, as I've learned more about life and myself, I've kind of tried to surround myself with better influences.
	And how safe are you now on a scale of one to 10?
	Probably an eight.
	What's the two?
	Amen.
	So I do have an ex-wife who is a whole ball of dysfunction that I, you know, unfortunately have to deal with for quite a while more.
	Because of kids? Yeah, I have a daughter.
	I'm sorry about the ex-wife, not about the daughter necessarily, but what happened?
	So she was military also.
	I have a stepdaughter from a previous relationship of hers and then my daughter.
	I got out of the military, started going to school, and she got deployed.
	I stayed home and basically raised our daughters.
	I had a babysitter for when I'd go to class and I'd come home and be with them.
	And she ended up cheating on me on deployment, and then when she came home, decided she wanted to end the marriage.
	I moved out, and a couple weeks after I moved out, she had somebody new in the house, so...
	Yeah, that essentially ended the marriage.
	And what happened with your daughter?
	She lives with her mother.
	I live in a different state now.
	I'm about four hours away.
	But I travel back and forth to see her.
	I get her about one weekend a month and then half the summer and holidays.
	Why not shared custody?
	At the time, I didn't really fight.
	I gave up the house, everything.
	I was going to school full-time.
	I didn't really have a steady income.
	I ended up renting a room from a friend of a friend.
	So shared custody was a non-existent option because I had no No means to support a kid on my own at that exact time.
	And now? Now I'm engaged.
	I finish school.
	I have a great job.
	No, no, no. Now with your daughter, you could get shared custody, right?
	Well, we have joint legal, but I couldn't get shared physical custody because we live in different states.
	I don't know how the law works, but does that mean because you live in different states that you can't get your daughter in terms of shared physical custody?
	Well, they phrase it as primary physical custody, is wherever they live while they go to school.
	So because she goes to school, where she goes to school, she gets primary custody and then I get the visitation.
	Is there any chance to transfer to where she goes to school to where you are?
	So there is a chance that I could fight for it, and I plan to.
	My daughter actually wants to live with me.
	It is a topic of conversation quite often with her.
	But again, I have a lot of reservations because I saw how Poorly, my dad was treated in the child or the family court system.
	Oh, you're concerned about some sort of allegation hitting you, right?
	That or, you know, trying and failing, I guess, would be another thing I'm concerned about.
	And then, of course, there's always my stepdaughter, who I still have in my life, who still thinks of me as dad.
	And if I go after custody of my daughter, I would lose contact with my stepdaughter.
	Right.
	I'm very sorry.
	Sorry, that's a very, very difficult situation for sure, for everyone.
	Are you going to try for another family, do you think?
	It's something me and my fiancé have talked about.
	We're not sure. It's definitely something that we're talking about seriously, because I just turned 30.
	She's a little bit older than me.
	Now is the time to make the decision.
	But again, there's a lot of questions there, so we're not sure if we're going to.
	My advice is if there's any way you can, and certainly physically you can, you don't want to miss out on that.
	You know what it's like to be a part-time dad.
	It's even better to be a full-time dad, as you know, right?
	Yeah, I definitely missed a lot of valuable stuff.
	Right.
	Yeah, and she may not, I mean, if your daughter wants to live with you rather than the mom, then, of course, a functional, happy, healthy mom would say, okay, well, I've had her for a while, and why don't you take her for a while and see how that goes? I've had her for a while, and why don't you Because that's what my daughter wants, but that would necessitate, of course, giving up some child support, I would assume, right?
	Yeah, and that's why we're back to that two points of Not being safe.
	Right, right. Right.
	Yeah, I mean, I can hear the burden in your voice for sure.
	And that's another reason for my question because, you know, I grew up a product of divorce and now my daughter, unfortunately, is a product of divorce.
	I'm really curious about what makes me want to succeed.
	Is that something that I can teach my daughter or is it something that I just have to hope that she has born into her?
	Well, I mean, you are certainly providing an influence and an example to her, which I'm sure is going to be helpful.
	You know, one of the great problems with divorce in general is the fact that it's very, very hard, if not impossible, a lot of times, to be honest with your children.
	Really honest. I mean, does your daughter know that her mom cheated on you?
	I haven't brought it up.
	I would never lie if she asked, but she's a little young, so I haven't approached the subject now.
	Right. And you have to kind of walk on eggshells, right?
	Absolutely. You know, it's like being a conservative on Facebook.
	It's thin ice, baby!
	Right, so you have to walk on eggshells.
	You can't be genuinely authentic about your life experience.
	Because you don't want to lob any bombs into your ex-wife's nest, right?
	Yeah. You know what dad said?
	It's like... Right?
	You've got to be really diplomatic.
	You've got to soft chew. You've got to downplay.
	You've got to... People say this is mature, and it's like, no, you're just lying.
	I mean, I understand why, and the necessity seems to be pretty strong, but you have to falsify your experience with your children, which is a big complication of divorce that very few people really talk about and understand.
	And so, you know, either both people are terrible or one person is terrible, in which case the other person chose a terrible person, or both people are good or great.
	It's like, well, if both people are good or great, why on earth did you get divorced?
	If one person is bad and one person is better, then you can't...
	The bad person is usually bad-mouthing the good person, and the good person can't bad-mouth the bad person because they understand consequences.
	And if both people are terrible, then it's a disaster for the kid anyway.
	So, choose wisely who you share your sperm with.
	I'm sure you would agree with that in hindsight, although I'm sure you're happy to have your daughter in your life.
	It'd be nice for her. Yeah, but...
	Yeah, it's hard to say that, you know, oh, I wish it had never happened, because I love my daughter, but, you know, circumstances being what they are, like, I set her off to a bad start, and I really do regret that.
	Yeah, I mean, you wish that you had a better mom.
	Yeah, absolutely. For your kids.
	I mean, not to say I'm sure you made mistakes as well, but not the playing the V cannon randomly like a symphony in the night that the ex-wife did.
	So I'm very sorry for all of that.
	But if you provide the best example, that's great.
	That's more than a lot of kids are going to get.
	And of course, if you have other children, Then you will be providing that example as well.
	I'm sure that your daughter would not want to feel that her presence or existence, neither would your stepdaughter want to feel that her presence or existence prevented you from having another family, right?
	Yeah. That would be terrible.
	And if you do enjoy being a father, and it sounds like you do, I would give it a shot with the newbie.
	And then you give the example of somebody who has improved, right?
	Yeah. You always want to try and show good winning.
	Good winning. You want to show that virtue has traction, that virtue can ascend, that virtue can conquer, that virtue can win.
	And if you lose out on a new family because of your ex, well, you're losing out on half visitation or half custody for real and physical custody and so on, partly because you're in another state and all that.
	But if you say, bad people can do their bad things, I'm going to march on and still continue to succeed.
	Well, I think that's a very positive thing for kids to see.
	We all want to see good triumph.
	And if you have a rich family life, that's going to be a great thing for your daughter to see, and it sure as hell, I'm sure, won't be something your ex can achieve, so she'll see what the cost of immorality is from that standpoint.
	Now, with that in mind, you know, because, again, living in a different state, I get my daughter for a weekend a month, generally during the school year.
	I mean, Leading by example, is that enough time to really have an impact to instill those values in her?
	Or am I fighting an uphill battle with that?
	No, it's a delicate balance.
	It's a really delicate balance because if you instill really good, healthy, assertive values in her and then send her back to your crazy ex, what happens?
	Everything that we do, we teach them rules and we explain values to them.
	They go back to their mothers and it's like it never happened the next time they come up.
	It's a little disheartening.
	The only thing worse than that is if you send your daughter back to your ex-wife and she brings some of the assertiveness and the good values, what happens?
	Bad people are really good.
	At these negative alliances that keep virtue at bay.
	They're really good at, like if someone interferes with their capacity to act badly, they will block that very quickly.
	So if you are too positive an influence on your daughter, in my view, the risk is that she's like, well, I don't like you when you come back from your dad, so guess what?
	Right? No, you're absolutely right, and that's already, it's happened more than once already.
	Yeah. Yeah. You have an ally who's a good person.
	Oh, no, we can't have any of that, right?
	Yeah, she was supposed to move up to my area for orders for the military.
	And, you know, when I she she told me and it was an exciting thing and the girls were going to live closer and I could be a bigger part of their life.
	And as soon as I started talking about wanting to take a more active role and be there for them, Immediately she started working to get the orders canceled and she succeeded.
	So, you know, she took that away.
	But yeah, you're right.
	She immediately crushed that good influence because it kind of shone a light on her negative influence.
	Well, and if you end up being too happy, well, we can't have that either, right?
	Yeah. So that's a big problem.
	I mean, a friend of mine, a long time ago, he was going to go and travel with his new wife, and he was going to take his daughter with him and various machinations from the ex-wife.
	That was not able to happen. It would cancel the whole trip right after they got married.
	Can't have that happiness now, can you?
	Can't have your ex doing well now, can you?
	Gotta pee on that fire of masculine joy.
	So it is a very, very delicate balance.
	You want to be a positive influence, but not to the point where...
	Where I'm no influence at all.
	No, you want to be a positive influence, but not to the point where you positively influence her enough to annoy her mother.
	Yeah. And the idea of, okay, honey, in 10 years I can tell you the truth, it's like, well, what if that's too late?
	What if... You know, you have much less influence than her mother.
	And listen, I, you know, with regards to my own parents, who divorced when I was very little, having understood more about how the world works now, of course, than when I was...
	In my teens, it's not like in junior high school or high school they're going to step you through what happens in divorce and how the women have so much power and how these allegations can get the woman immediate custody in massive amounts.
	They're not going to go through any of that.
	I remember very clearly in class when I was 13 years old.
	I read a book. I still remember the cover.
	It had a red cover, and it was about everything that happens in divorces.
	And I remember the title.
	It said, Made in Heaven, Settled in Court.
	Made in Heaven, Settled in Court.
	You know, I should reread that one day.
	Just to figure out exactly what I learned when I was that young.
	But there should be classes, because so many kids are going through divorce.
	There should be classes saying, here's how the law works.
	Here's the power each person has.
	Here's how custody works. Because maybe you're not going through a divorce.
	Maybe your parents never divorce, but you probably have friends who have.
	But of course, you're never going to get female teachers to teach you about all the power that women have in divorce courts.
	They're never going to teach you all about Family courts and how they work, particularly in America.
	Otherwise, you're going to get children chanting, repeal the 19th, from here to eternity!
	And they go home and ask, Mom, did you do this in court?
	Do you have this much power in court?
	Why is Dad blah blah blah, right?
	You're never going to hear about that.
	And you should! Divorce Corps.
	Great documentary. I interviewed the director.
	You should watch it. Divorce Corps.
	C-O-R-P. Watch it.
	It's terrifying. So, the problem is that we can't tell our kids very much about the fundamental things that shape them.
	And now, my producer's just saying, that book was published on August 1, 1979.
	I guess I was 13.
	Yeah, 12 going on 13.
	So, I mean, I may not have got it right away, obviously, right?
	I saw it in the library. I'm like, I'd like to read about this.
	And it went through all the dirty tricks that can be used in a divorce.
	And I certainly began to understand, and I've learned a lot more since then, just about what may have happened between my parents when it came to divorce.
	I remember going for dinner with my mom when I was in my mid-teens, and she was drawing up a list.
	Here's all the things I want.
	Here's how much they cost, and I'm going to get lawyers to get this.
	From your dad! Yeah, I know those experiences.
	Don't get divorced.
	Which means, don't stick your dick at crazy people.
	Well, you know what I'm saying.
	Oh no! I used the word dick to an army guy.
	I'm so sorry, your lily white ears and all that.
	But, um...
	Yeah, you've really got to be careful.
	Not... I hate to interrupt.
	Not Army. I was Navy.
	Navy, sorry. Are you saying that makes much of a difference?
	Just kidding! Just kidding.
	Just kidding. Sorry. It's my prejudice.
	I hear military, I think. Anyway, so...
	It's tough, you know?
	I think that... The best that you can show her is indirect stuff.
	Because if you coach her on assertiveness and virtue and values and honesty and integrity, she's going to go smack into the Titanic, into the iceberg of your excess dysfunction.
	So I think you want to model the behavior without explaining the behavior.
	And then you can say, hey, I never told her to.
	And you can honestly say that.
	And whether that means anything, I don't know.
	But you can honestly say that.
	So if you coach her, that's going to be tough.
	But if you have a sort of functional, happy family life of your own, then you are that star in the dark at the end of the frozen lake that she can navigate towards.
	But I'm always concerned with, if you coach her and give her the values to exercise at home immediately, rather than leaving an impression for a future escape hatch, she's going to flame up the X and Lord knows what happens then, right?
	Yeah. All right.
	Well, I hope that helps.
	And please let me know how it goes.
	But we'll move on to the next caller.
	All right. Thank you very much. Thanks, man.
	Alright, up next we have Lisa.
	Lisa wrote in and said, I would generally want to go for the more successful guy, but I'm worried that my future children won't be good looking.
	Being an attractive woman, I know how beneficial it can be to be attractive in our modern society.
	I want my future daughters and sons to have the same advantages I had being a good looking person.
	Is it silly to factor in attractiveness when choosing a partner?
	Or is it selfish to not consider how my choice of partner can affect the lives of my future children, especially if they are girls?
	That's from Lisa. Lisa, that is a brutally frank question, and I appreciate you bringing it up.
	I am brutally frank most of the time.
	No, that's good. I, you know, got to think about this ahead of time.
	And I don't know if you heard about the Chinese guy ended up suing his wife.
	What Chinese guy? Yeah, well, so he sued his wife because she was very attractive and he married her and had kids with her and the kids came out looking like Quasimodo and it turns out that she actually wasn't pretty, she just had a whole bunch of plastic surgery.
	And he's like, hey man, I thought I was marrying into genetics, now my kids are ugly.
	So, you know, to hell with you, I'm gonna go and sue you for misrepresentation.
	Is that a true story?
	That is in fact a true story.
	Wow. That is, in fact, a true story.
	So, yeah, you're pretty, no question.
	And pretty people do have it somewhat easier in life, in some ways.
	But whether that's good or bad, I don't know.
	Whether that's good or bad.
	In the long run, or in general, I'm not entirely positive.
	You know, it's the old thing, well, I want my children to have an easier life than I had.
	It's like, well, part of your success comes from the fact that you didn't have an easy life.
	So, I want my children to not have the same level of resistance.
	It's like, well, I want my children to be as muscular as I am, but I never want them to have to lift any heavy weights.
	It's like, well, you kind of got to choose one or the other, right?
	So, if that makes any sense, it is a...
	It is a problem. But tell me the good things that have happened to you, Lisa, because of your looks.
	That's a good question.
	What's it like being so pretty?
	Well, I have gotten a job because I look good, actually.
	And I also always had the pick of pretty good men.
	I mean, the two men that I'm talking to right now, I doubt that I would be talking to them if I didn't look good.
	It's, you know, you get, well, this is kind of a small thing.
	It doesn't really matter that much, but you can get to clubs really easy.
	You know, you can get free things.
	Not that you should accept free things from people just, you know, willy-nilly, but I'm just saying it's generally, I mean, it's It's also kind of fun, you know, just to be, get the attention and all that, but I don't know.
	I mean, I just know, like, just being a non-attractive woman, it's not easy, you know, it's really hard.
	And I just want what's best for my kids, I guess, but I don't know if I'm being shallow or, you know, I just don't know.
	Well, there certainly are advantages to being physically attractive.
	I mean, you can make more money, you get more positive response.
	It's easier to be charismatic if you're good-looking, obviously, right?
	Because you have that naturally positive reaction or response that you get.
	And what's your relationship like with other women, though?
	Awful, actually. Not too good.
	But I don't know if it's because I'm pretty or not.
	I'm not sure about that. But I have a hard time getting along with women in general because I'm very blunt and most women are rubbed the wrong way by me.
	So I actually have more guy friends than girlfriends.
	But honestly, I don't know.
	I mean, I don't think it's very...
	I haven't really thought about women seeing me as competition really that often because...
	I don't know.
	I mean, I have some girlfriends, but generally I just have more guy friends, I guess.
	Right, right, right.
	There was an interesting article that came out, and I just wanted to mention it a little bit.
	There are some downsides to being attractive that people may not be aware of.
	I talked with one woman a while back ago.
	I don't know if you've heard this RBS, resting bitch face.
	You can't be overly friendly because then every guy is like, hey, she wants my children.
	I'm in. I'm in like Flynn.
	And so there is that aspect of things.
	Relationships with other women.
	Can be a problem, of course, and lots of issues can come up around this kind of stuff, right?
	Talked about this with the first caller, too.
	So, the downsides, right?
	A couple of women have written about this recently.
	Jealous wives freeze you out of their lives.
	Insecure female bosses also barbed me from promotions at work.
	I was reading about this one woman who was attractive who was saying that her female co-workers put half-empty bottles of alcohol on her desk so people would think she was drinking on the job.
	No girlfriend has ever asked this pretty woman to be her bridesmaid because she doesn't want to be shone out on her wedding.
	And it is a big, a big problem.
	And it's not always easy.
	It's not always easy. I wouldn't say that that's very common, though.
	I mean, that's very extreme. You mean the bottles on the desk kind of thing?
	Yeah, I mean, that doesn't happen, you know?
	I don't know. It just seems a little...
	Well, she says it happened. I mean, who knows?
	Who knows, right? So, there are those issues for sure, and it's not like the beautiful life is naturally paradise.
	You know, if being beautiful was everything, then Marilyn Monroe might still be alive.
	Who knows, right? Now, with regards to having a guy who is more successful than pretty, statistically, in my humble opinion, Lisa, I would go, I hate to say this because, you know, you want some iron candy, but I would go for the guy who's more successful.
	And I'll give you my reasoning.
	The guy who's more successful is likely to be more intelligent.
	Now, if you want your children to have the greatest chance of success, and by that I mean the widest chance of success, you know, they won't have the greatest chance of success in the modeling industry, but in terms of having the greatest chance of life success, in other words, being happy and healthy and staying together with their partner if they get married and having a good career and being able to defer gratification and living longer,
	you want to aim for IQ. Always, always, always, you want to aim for IQ. And, you know, maybe, maybe not at the top scorching levels of IQ, like the 160 and, you know, that might come with a whole set of neuroses.
	Well, I don't know about those stats, but there is a certain amount of solitude that comes out of just being that smart.
	Which is, you know, I would imagine that you sit there and say, oh, the school system sucks.
	It's like, no, it just, I don't know any school system that can be designed around the one in a million person.
	You know, like, I'm sorry, it's just the way that it is.
	I mean, sorry. So, a feeling of disappointment, a feeling that society doesn't fit for you, that you're not in there.
	When you're at the real high-end extreme of the bell curve, I gotta imagine, it's pretty tough.
	To feel like you have much to do with society because society and its entire engines of operation have to kind of by definition be around the middle of the bell curve to a large degree so There is a little bit of think of interstellar solitude that comes out of that really high scorching end of the IQ spectrum I mean just look at Isaac Asimov's kid you can look that up boy Mueller was a jerk even back then so I would aim for the Because what you want your children,
	I assume, is to be happy.
	And happiness and IQ are positively correlated, and it's well worth aiming at that.
	Plus, you know, if your husband is good-looking and your kids are good-looking, they can't buy IQ, right?
	But if your husband is successful and your kids aren't quite as good-looking, they can buy IQ. Yes, true. Well, they have some options.
	I'm not suggesting it. I don't think it's a healthy thing to do, but, you know, if the looks are very, very important, they at least have some options, even if those options are just, you know, personal trainers and better food and, you know, whatever it is, right?
	So that would be my choice.
	And statistics, I think, would back me up pretty strongly on that.
	Oh, okay.
	Interesting. Plus, I'll tell you one other thing, too.
	If you're a beautiful woman and you're with a guy who's not As attractive as you are, do you know what you very openly state?
	What? He's very successful.
	Come on, you know that.
	You see some beautiful woman with a guy who's not up to her scratch, you know he's either 10.2 or six digits plus.
	So... You know what I'm saying, right?
	Yeah, I know. He's got to have something to make up for the lack of physical attractiveness.
	He may be charming, good conversationalist, he may be very funny, he may whatever, right?
	But he's got something that gets his marriage hooks into that grade A slab of woman meat, right?
	So it's not like people will think, oh, why is she with him?
	She'd be like, wow, I'm curious why she is with him because it's got to be something pretty great.
	Yeah, that's true. He can lick his own eardrum.
	I don't know. It could be any number of things.
	But it won't be like people say, why are you with him, right?
	If you have two beautiful people, say, okay, well, maybe they're just vain body narcissists.
	Maybe they're great people.
	Who knows, right? But at least you wouldn't have any questions.
	But when... If you're with a guy who's not as attractive as you are, it's a way for him to advertise his success, and it's a way for you to advertise your depth, right?
	Your willingness to look beyond very shallow external things, which, by the way, probably not going to last.
	Have you ever seen, I don't know, you're a young person, right?
	But younger. But if you ever want to have Some fun, not a lot of fun, but some fun when you get older, or maybe this is the case for you now.
	There are these little goofy website pop-ups and so on.
	It's like, stars from the 80s, where are they now?
	Stars from the 90s, where are they now?
	Just look at that kid from Sixth Sense.
	Oh, lordy.
	He really is like a very astute hobbit.
	But you look at these, you know, Angie Dickinson, then and now, Farrah Fawcett.
	Well, now, of course, mostly Ash.
	Who's that other one who went kind of...
	Kathleen Turner.
	Oh, my lord. I don't know who any of these people are.
	You don't know any of these people, but, you know, for those who do, and, you know, you can look these people up as it stands, there are people to whom time has not been overly kind.
	But then there's Halle Berry.
	Well, there's Harry Berry hanging upside down in a vat of formaldehyde, as you, while she's not out there getting little tiny gnats to hold up her boobs.
	So, yeah, and I couldn't, you know, see them without makeup.
	Right? See these people without makeup.
	Even the very attractive Ann Coulter has posted a picture or two of her.
	She said, well, this isn't my favorite photo.
	It's like, whoa! What happened there?
	And everyone has their bad angles.
	Everyone has their bad days.
	And it's tough to look pretty all the time.
	And, you know, even people like Anna Faris and so on.
	And it's not enough to, you know.
	And, of course, celebrities, it's their job.
	It's their job to be pretty.
	It's their most of them, right?
	It's their job to be pretty, so they have a whole team.
	They have a whole team. I remember talking to someone who knew something about Shania Twain.
	After Shania Twain had her babies, it's like she had a whole team helping her get back into shape so that she could look that way.
	If you look at Uma Thurman when she was trying to do Kill Bill right before she got her...
	Neck and knee hurt by that terrible car shot from Quentin Tarantino.
	She was going insane just trying to lose like one tiny little patch of fat somewhere.
	I think it was on her thigh or her butt.
	She's like, I can't get rid of this and we can't start shooting until we get rid of this.
	It's like, I'm barely eating as it is.
	I'm working out four hours a day.
	I can't get rid of it. And that's their job.
	You see these people on the red carpet.
	They're not human beings.
	They're like cyborgs of makeup and plastic and the teamwork.
	I mean, come on. Stay in the shade.
	You're going to fall apart.
	So these sort of standards of beauty are not particularly realistic.
	Oh, Meg Ryan! Meg Ryan, too.
	Man, back in the Sleepless in Seattle days, oh my gosh, like she was something else.
	And again, you know, men age like wine, women age like milk to a large degree.
	And a lot of that has to do with childbirth.
	And, you know, Lord, love the ladies for having the babies.
	If you're just going to marry for looks, well, you may not end up, you know, may not end up exactly as advertised early on.
	There can be weight gain.
	There can be illnesses. There can be ailments.
	There can be, oh, they look great, but, I don't know, they got a bone spill or some kind of rheumatoid arthritis in their toe.
	You know, there could be any number of things that happen.
	They need to go on medication that bloats them.
	You know, you lose your hair.
	Who knows, right? There can be so many things that happen that, you know, IQ is going to be stable, man.
	Unless you get a railway spike through your head or some degenerative brain ailment, IQ is IQ. IQ is the tits that don't sag.
	IQ is the hair you don't lose.
	IQ is the teeth that never go yellow.
	IQ is the one stable thing that you can build a marriage around that ain't going to change.
	Whereas looks, it's a little bit of a dice roll.
	And even people who take care of themselves, some of them Aren't going to age that well.
	It could be, you know, wow, he had a deep and luxuriant George Hamilton cocoa butter tan when I first met him, and now he looks like Leatherface because the sun, like a vampire, sucked up all of his vital juices.
	You know, sorry. No amount of face cream is going to reduce or eliminate much the massive exposure to sun that you can get when you're younger.
	I mean, just ask Hugh Jackman's nose, right?
	So, I'm showing that I know way too much about celebrity gossip.
	I'm not ashamed. I'm not ashamed.
	I stand in line in the supermarket, too.
	Sorry, you were saying? I said, isn't IQ passed down through the mother anyway?
	That's what I hear. That's what I hear.
	But it sure don't hurt to have some smart sperm in there.
	Sperm that don't have to stop and ask for directions.
	Sperm that don't get distracted by commercials.
	Sperm with focus and dedication and burrowing tools.
	Sperm with mechanical tools, with shovels, perhaps beyond our drills, as I mentioned earlier.
	So you want your innovative, creative sperm.
	They're going to build oil derricks over the eggs and get in that way.
	That's the ones you want. So it is passed down through the month from what I hear, although I'm sure that remains somewhat in flux, but it's not like the father's DNA. He is indifferent to the equation, I'm sure of that too.
	Yeah, you're right.
	All right. Does that help?
	Will you let us know how it goes?
	Yes, sure. Oh, can I ask you one question, tiny bit embarrassing?
	Uh-huh. When you say talking to two men, is that a way of putting it?
	That's not what kids are calling it these days, is it?
	No, it's just talking. You're just talking to these two men?
	Just talking, yeah. Okay, just wanted to check that you weren't doing the juggle.
	All right. Two to four.
	Thank you. Thanks for the call.
	I wish you the very best, and do let us know how it goes.
	Thank you. Thank you.
	Let's do one more. Okay, up next we have Colton.
	He wrote in and said, And if not,
	how can I, one, forgive myself for my absolutely terrible and stupid decisions, two, move past this in a healthy way that will assure I never make the same mistakes again and I can be a wonderful boyfriend and husband in the future?
	That's from Colton. Colton, Colton, what happened, brother?
	Hey, how's it going? Can you hear me all right?
	Yes, I can. Okay, cool, great.
	Um, I'm a little nervous, man.
	I'm surprised I'm this nervous, but, uh...
	Just once, I will try my very best to be nice.
	Just once. It's never going to happen again.
	Only for you. Basically, I feel like the reason why I did it, and I think I'm missing something in this rationale, but this is the best way that I've come to describe it.
	She, I felt sort of insecure in our future together because she ended up wanting to go to college far away from where we live now.
	And I was worried about this and I don't think we talked about this enough.
	And then I just ended up like, I mean, to be very blunt.
	What happened? Well, you kind of wanted out, right?
	Cheating is wanting out.
	Yeah. I mean, I wanted us to work, but I felt like because she wanted to do that, like, we wouldn't work.
	You know what I mean? Yeah, I know what you mean.
	I'm not saying you hate it or anything like that, but listen, I mean, you and I, you're a young man, right?
	You and I both know that the odds of a relationship lasting a long-distance college time is pretty freaking low, right?
	Yeah. Yeah, of course.
	She's meeting new people.
	She's making new friends.
	She's in a big stimulating environment.
	She's being taught how to dye her hair blue and hate men and capitalism and whiteness.
	So, you know, the odds that it's going to last.
	What was she going to go take just out of curiosity?
	She wanted to do something with like business or like economics or something like that.
	And I mean, to her...
	Credit. The college that she wanted to go to is like a very small private school, like Christian college.
	So, I mean, I don't think there'd be too much of that SJW kind of stuff.
	So, scratch my irrational response to the environment.
	All right. But nonetheless, I mean, how long would the degree have taken, do you think?
	Is it three years, four years?
	Probably like four.
	And she did also say that she wanted to study abroad and stuff.
	And it was just like, I didn't think that that was going to work out.
	What?! I'm going to go away for four years and then to another country, but it's going to work out just fine between us.
	Come on, man. Well, of course, yeah, no.
	I mean, I don't even really think it's worth her going to college because I know that she would much rather just have a stable, loving relationship and a good family and things like that.
	Well, it doesn't matter what you think.
	I mean, it does, obviously, but what does she think of that?
	I don't... I guess...
	I don't know, because I know that she wants that, but I mean, she really wanted and needed to get out of her current living situation, and she really wanted that, and I understand it.
	She kind of...
	Her mom is...
	Her mom's like a widow, but it's sort of like a single mom situation anyway because her father was a drug addict and that's how he passed.
	Oh, mama.
	Yeah. Like when we talk drug addicts, we're not talking like a couple of Adderall.
	Are we talking like some serious horse hooves on the head or what?
	I believe it was heroin.
	I'm pretty sure it was heroin. And he passed when she was, I believe, seven, and I think she was the one that found him.
	Yeah, she was the one that found him.
	Well, that's going to scramble a few eggs, wouldn't you say?
	If that's the way you'd like to put it.
	I mean, did it? I mean, how was she in terms of relationships and love and openness and honesty and empathy and all that kind of stuff?
	I mean, honestly, I found her to be very loving and pretty...
	She was very honest for the most part.
	And when I mean that, I say that because I feel like we kind of didn't really talk about this...
	Planning our future together, but aside from that, I feel like we were very honest with our feelings with each other.
	I found her to be very strong, just to be able to go through that and then still have just valuing family and being able to realize how dysfunctional her mother was and things like that.
	She did sort of have a father figure in her grandfather.
	That was able to instill a few values that I think were good, that honesty and things like that.
	And he's a really smart guy, but it was his son that ended up making all those terrible choices.
	So her role model was the guy who raised the father whose dead body she found?
	Yeah, honestly.
	Really? What are you doing, man?
	How pretty was she?
	She is very pretty, that is for certain.
	Yeah. Yeah.
	Now, do you think that may have been guiding your dick?
	Decisions? Decisions just a little bit?
	Um, yeah.
	Yeah, definitely. So...
	But I really don't think she was...
	Your dick might have been drilling to freedom through another woman.
	I'm just, this is a possibility.
	Maybe, I guess, but I mean...
	Come on, man. This is a...
	You want to hit your wagon to this family tree, brother?
	Really? I mean, I'm sorry for the girl.
	Don't get me wrong. This is a terrible, terrible situation.
	But it's going to take her a long time to deal with that, and it's going to take a lot of therapy, and it's going to take a lot of work.
	And is this really where you want to put your precious sperm and life and finances and children?
	Right? Come on. Yeah, I understand all that.
	We definitely had conversations where she openly stated she wanted to have kids in the future.
	We're not ready yet, but in the future.
	She was like, yeah, my mom can't be involved in any of that.
	My mom's crazy. Screw that.
	Most of her family, she doesn't even really want to be Too much in her family's life.
	She has one aunt that I met that's pretty good.
	She has a stable relationship.
	She has a cousin that's very intelligent that I think were good influences to her.
	Her grandfather, obviously he did a bad job raising his kid, but I don't think he's a bad guy per se.
	I think him and his wife were working all the time.
	My ex's father was a single child and he was raised by nannies, so I feel like that contributed to being lonely and self-medication and things like that.
	So they had children and then didn't raise them much?
	Yeah, her dad's grandfather.
	Definitely, yeah. Right?
	I mean, you understand that to be a parent who doesn't see your child much is worse than cheating on a spouse.
	You're cheating on your children.
	The difference being that your children don't have any damn choice.
	Don't cheat on your children with your job, with another woman, with another man.
	Don't cheat on your children with video games.
	Don't cheat on your children!
	They have no choice. You decided to bring them in the world.
	Spend some damn time with them.
	Don't cheat on your children with money.
	Don't cheat on your children with your career.
	Don't cheat on your children with success.
	Don't cheat on your children.
	They have no choice.
	Be with your children.
	Now, I understand.
	You gotta go out to work.
	You got chores to do. I'm not saying stare at them 24-7 without blinking.
	But make them the sun around which your decisions orbit.
	They didn't choose to be there.
	You chose them. And they got no place to go.
	So everyone talks about, oh, I did cheat on my girlfriend, cheat on my wife.
	That's bad. We'll talk about that.
	But I think we can kind of see the effects of cheating on your children, which is a dead drug addict being found by a grandchild.
	Yeah, it's terrible.
	So...
	So, would your children want this woman and her family to be the environment they grew up in?
	Forget your decision, because your decision is around prettiness and sex.
	I don't know if she's a bad person or anything, but in terms of your precious seed, your future children, if they get the vote on who you date, is it her?
	Well, I mean, definitely not her family, but like I said, she didn't even want her family in her life, like, you know, going down the road.
	But that means the children have no grandparents, and grandparents are important.
	If you can have productive grandparents and decent grandparents, that's helpful, that's important.
	It takes a lot of the burden off raising children, gives them intergenerational wisdom, gives a rich and deeper sense of family.
	So, if your children had the choice, statistically, my friend, they would choose a family with grandparents.
	All other things being equal.
	Definitely, yeah. I got that.
	And they sure as hell may not want to choose a family where their mother is going to go into a catastrophic depression when the oldest one hits seven and she gets triggered by the memories of her being seven and finding her dead father on the linoleum.
	You never know when these bombs are going off.
	These bombs of history go off among people and in families.
	You never know. You know, my mom was much more functional for better, for want of a better phrase.
	She was much more functional until one day She just decided not to get out of bed.
	Or maybe she didn't decide, but she just didn't get out of bed.
	Stayed in bed. And I'd make her some tea in the morning, bring her some toast, put the tea and the toast by her bed, go off to school like I was in a dream, like I was walking in helium, and then I'd come back at lunch, and there would be no tea drunk, and I'd take the toast, throw it out, I'd make her some more toast, make her some more tea, put it by her bed, ask if she was okay, get nothing in response.
	And then I would head back to school, walking on helium, like walking in a cloud, walking on nothingness.
	And then I'd come back in the evening and I'd take my book and I'd sit in my room and I'd wait to see if I heard any sound of movement because I wasn't sure she was even still alive sometimes.
	I would check her breathing.
	This went on for weeks.
	She must have got something to eat while I was out.
	She must have gone to the bathroom, I guess, while I was out.
	But this went on and on and on.
	Now, I didn't understand it, of course, at the time.
	I was like, I don't know, 12 or 13.
	I understand it more now.
	Now that I'm older, I understand it.
	That was the year she turned 40.
	And she knew her looks were going.
	And she wasn't going to be able to get the kind of man that she wanted.
	She was going to have the grim single mother death march to old age that her sexual market value was plummeting.
	She didn't want to get out of bed.
	I understand it now. Back then, it was just...
	98-pound corpse mom ain't drinking her tea.
	And there may have been other things, I don't know, that triggered or caused that.
	But after that, she was never the same.
	Never really had a job again and never was able to function.
	She struggled, she struggled.
	Maybe just to get us to teenage years.
	Well, it wasn't us. It was just me and her then.
	So you don't know when this kind of stuff is going to kick up.
	Yeah, she was doing okay. She was terrible and violent and all that, but she at least, you know, functional, had a job, and you never know how long people can keep it up.
	And I'll tell you this as well.
	In my view, look, don't cheat on people, for sure.
	I'm not trying to condone that at all.
	But don't pretend to be in a relationship when you're going away for four years and then telling a guy you're going to work overseas.
	Come on. That's cheating already in a sense.
	That's just cheating with distance rather than with someone.
	Yeah, I kind of get that.
	I guess, like, I always, I don't know, I kept it in my mind that I, I don't know, I feel like I thought I could convince her to not go that route.
	Maybe she could move out of her house and get away from her dysfunctional mother and stuff, but she didn't have to go states away and do all that.
	Well, why not date a girl or get married to a girl and have kids with a girl who doesn't have that kind of crazy a mother?
	Because she can say, well, you know, I don't want my mom involved in the child raising, but what if the mom becomes like some crazy ass stalker?
	What if she becomes a real bunny boy?
	Or what if she's just intrusive and comes over with that?
	I mean, is that going to be what you want?
	You're a stressed out mom passing along her cortisol to the baby through her breast milk?
	I mean, Lord, this is like...
	It's a lot to take on.
	It's a lot to take on. I mean, forget the looks.
	I know it's tough to say. Forget the looks, man.
	Forget the looks. Looks are passing.
	We all know that. Looks like an ambulance.
	It passes.
	She gets a couple of kids coming out of her.
	She's been breastfeeding for six years, and when those things are happening down, like the point she can tie knots in them, I mean, sorry, it's just the way it goes.
	It's just the way it goes.
	You know, nature puts subcutaneous fat on a woman's hips after baby so they got some place to sit while she's making you a sandwich.
	It's just the way it works, man.
	Now, some people look fantastic and they work out four hours a day because they're cheating on their kids with their body narcissism, but for the most part, you know, Making babies is kind of a southpaw to the perfect dimensions of a woman's face.
	It just happens. There are stretch marks, the skin never returns the way it came, and the boobs hang and sag, and, I mean, it ages a woman.
	They're little vampires. I'm telling you straight up, they're little vampires.
	Men, we kind of sail by this, not too particularly bad, but...
	And, you know, for me, I mean, I think I actually look better than I did ten years ago, because I lost some weight and work out more and all that.
	But anyway... This is the reality.
	The looks are going to fade and you're left with that crazy little thing called the personality and the history and the family and the mess.
	And it's easier to deal, it's easier to avoid your issues before you become a parent because you don't get triggered as much.
	This is a friend of mine who said about parenting long before I became a parent, I kind of stuck with my head.
	He said having kids is like you got this whole kind of treasure chest of your issues and your problems and the things that you've managed to skate away from or skate by across and above from because you're young and energetic and hungry and busy and ambitious and all that.
	So you got this whole big box of issues and problems and tensions and triggers and so on and your kids are like, hey, cool!
	I like treasure chests.
	And they like rip the lid open.
	You're like, hey man, sensitive stuff.
	And they're like, hey, cool. What's in here?
	Oh, wow. Oh, that's cool.
	That's good. What happens if I twist this?
	I'm going to try hitting this against the side of the chest.
	I'm kind of curious about this. What if I dig down in this?
	I'm going to bite this and see what it tastes like.
	And you're like, issues. Tension.
	But they don't know. They're just kids.
	They're curious. They explore. They don't know they're tripping all over the damn time bombs and minefields of your history.
	They're just curious. They're just doing their thing.
	But it feels like...
	You know, people are stripping you down to your skivvies and putting you in front of a jumbotron.
	You know, it's like it's kind of weird that way.
	That's why you got to do a lot of work on your issues before you become a parent, because they're just going to be doing their thing.
	You know, they might raise their voice at you, and they're not sitting there thinking, boy, I hope I don't remind you of your mom now.
	It's because they don't know. They don't know.
	They're just mad or something, right?
	And they wake up for the third time that night.
	It's like, well, I hope I don't remind you of your drunken father who used to crash against things in the downstairs and wake you up three times at the night.
	Now I'm waking you for the third time.
	Hope I don't remind you of that. They're just like, want milk?
	Give boob. Right?
	So, like me on my honeymoon.
	So, I would just say that, you know, when there's a lot of issues...
	And of course, people, maybe a little bit more women with a lot of issues, sometimes, funny story, man, sometimes women will work on looks rather than work on their issues.
	They'll work on looking good, they'll work on exercising, they'll work on eating right, they'll work on their makeup, they'll work on their weave, they'll work on their hair, they'll work on you name it.
	Get their false Brooke Shields spider face eyelashes out there and They work on their looks rather than on their issues.
	Because that's the tool of the trade.
	So, my question is, forget the looks, man.
	Just from an interpersonal standpoint, just from a history and issues standpoint, just from a future minefield standpoint, man, is this the best you can do?
	No. Is this top shelf for you?
	Well, I don't think so.
	I didn't even think about this too much because I was blinded, as you know.
	Two eyeballs, two nipples.
	Funny how that works. No, but when you started to point out that they work on their looks as opposed to their issues, she was really into doing makeup and hair and stuff, so that's crazy.
	Yeah, I think a nice lady with some grandparents would surely be better.
	I had one grandmother growing up that I was really close with.
	My other grandparents live kind of far away, but that one grandmother definitely took care of me a lot and was definitely helpful in raising me.
	Dick, don't care about the inside, man.
	Your heart, your soul, your mind, they all care about the inside.
	Dick don't care about the inside, especially when you're young, right?
	Yeah. Well, I guess it kind of cares about the inside.
	It's crazy, but it's pretty crazy.
	So let's just pretend the crazy doesn't exist.
	Go for the pretty. And that's maybe why she's working.
	She should be working more on her issues than her looks, right?
	That's a big, big red flag right there.
	She comes from a ridiculously traumatized history.
	She found her dead, drugged father.
	Man, that's rough.
	That's horrible rough.
	And she should be working on therapy.
	She should be working on self-knowledge.
	She should be working on ironing things out with her family.
	She should be working on discovering as much as she can about where she came from and how to avoid any kind of repetition.
	If she's doing sit-ups and tummy tucks instead, well...
	I prefer a woman who says, does my soul look good in your future, rather than a woman who says, does my ass look good in these jeans?
	So you might have been escaping.
	Not cheating. If you know what I mean.
	Yeah, that's... I never really...
	I never thought of it like that.
	He has had a break orbit by busting a nut.
	Look, don't cheat.
	Don't get me wrong. I mean, this is stuff, you know, but this is where we get self-knowledge rather than just self-attack, right?
	Because I know you're down on yourself for cheating.
	And I'm not saying, you know, cheating doesn't matter, but the whole point of Self-knowledge is not to just get mad at yourself, because we're all going to do stuff that's wrong.
	We're all going to do stuff that's wrong.
	I have, you have, everyone who's listening to this, if they're honest, we've all done stuff that's wrong.
	But the whole point is if you just get mad at yourself, you learn nothing.
	If you figure out why you did what you did, which is like, I know that's why you're calling in, so I'm not telling you anything you don't know.
	But if you learn why you did what you did, The good thing is, you don't have to white knuckle and teeth grit your way through the next time.
	You just won't have the desire.
	Like, I am so happy in my marriage, man.
	I have no desire to cheat.
	I have no desire. Like, forget it.
	No interest. Not even a shred.
	And so, once you really figure out what's going on for you, you can give up getting mad at yourself.
	And because you've learned, you then have the certainty of knowing that you won't do it again.
	So if you figure out why you cheated on this woman, that's important.
	And I think you cheated on her because the relationship had no future, which was bad.
	But if the relationship did have a future, that was even worse because it was going to end in disaster, most likely.
	That's crazy. Now, if you know that down the road, Then what happens is you don't have to sit there and say, man, I'm a cheater.
	I'm going to cheat. I'm going to lay pipe like I'm some crazy construction crew in a gyroscope, right?
	I mean, you just sit there and say...
	Now that I know how to avoid the red flags that lead me to get out of relationships by cheating, I can wait and learn and find a woman so great I have no desire to cheat.
	And then I don't have to sit there and say, well, I hope I don't cheat on this woman.
	I got a white knuckle. I got to punch myself in the dick every time some curvaceous hottie walks by.
	You don't have any desire to.
	That's the whole point, is to reduce the amount of willpower that you need.
	You know, like you see these guys in the warehouse and they're like lifting these giant crates or beer bottles.
	It's like, dudes, get a forklift truck.
	You're going to hurt your backs.
	You're going to end up with some horrible arthritis or lumbago or whatever, right?
	You want that forklift truck so you don't have to work so hard.
	You want to find a woman who's so great you have no desire to cheat rather than, okay, well, I guess I've got to watch myself because I'm a cheater and I've got to white-knuckle this and I've got to grit my teeth and I hope I don't cheat with this person and I hope I don't cheat with that person because then all you're doing is putting off all these signals that you're obsessed about cheating and then destructive women will pick up on those signals and have you cheat just because they like to break people.
	They like to break relationships.
	Some lot of people out there are just like, oh, I see someone who's vaguely functional and a vaguely decent relationship, but they're putting off all these signals, so I think I'm going to go in there, fire the V-cannon directly into the shardy heart of their relationship and walk away like, boom, just blew up a relationship.
	I'm a good, happy sadist, right?
	So those people are always going to be floating around looking for you, thinking about cheating and worrying about cheating and obsessing about cheating.
	They're like, hey, I think I'll put him out of his misery.
	Now he'll know for sure. So just once you get these red flags, once you get the self-knowledge, you have no desire to cheat.
	You have to worry about it.
	Wake up every morning and say, I hope I don't cheat!
	I'm going to end up kissing someone else.
	It's not going to happen. I'm not going to cheat on my daughter.
	I'm not going to cheat on my wife. I'm not going to cheat on philosophy.
	I'm not tempted. When people come along and say, oh, I could give you this opportunity, but you gotta do this.
	It's like, nah, I'm not tempted, sorry.
	It's not even virtue anymore, it's just, it's not interesting.
	It's not interesting. And that's where I want to get you to.
	Not to get mad at yourself for cheating, because that's just punishment.
	And punishment teaches you nothing, other than avoidance and fascination.
	You know, you say to a kid, don't touch this thing or you're in trouble.
	What does the kid want to do? Touch the thing.
	All you teach is fascination and fear.
	But self-knowledge frees you.
	Fascination, fear, or freedom.
	These are the three F's we've got to juggle with, my friend.
	And if you figure out why you cheated without just saying, I'm a bad person, I cheated, it's wrong, it's okay, you shouldn't have cheated, I get that.
	But the question is, it's done, so you can't go back and undo it.
	The only thing that you can get out of it that's really worthwhile is why you did it.
	You did not want a future.
	With this woman. Deep down, you knew there was no future with this woman.
	She was telling you that because she was saying, hey man, I got a news flash for you, boyfriend of mine.
	Let me tell you something, Colton.
	This is how I woke up this morning.
	I woke up this morning, Colton, and I said to myself, I'm going to make every conceivable life plan that doesn't involve you in any way, shape, or form that I possibly can.
	First, I'm joining the Foreign Legion.
	They're going to put me in a desert? With no phone access.
	Then I think I will become a deep sea diver who never comes up for air.
	I'm going to skim the bottom of the Mariana Trench in a bathyscape.
	Then you know what I'm going to do? Astronaut, baby!
	I'm going to go up to the...
	using SpaceX to get to the International Space Station.
	I'm going to be there for, I don't know, 10 to 15 years.
	Then I'm going to Mars! Then I'm going to get cremated.
	So enjoy your life, not with me.
	Come on! I'm going to college in another state.
	Then I'm going to go work overseas.
	If she'd had any self-knowledge, she'd have said, it ain't working, brother.
	I'm going to set you free.
	But she was telling you she didn't want to be with you by planning her whole life involving you, not at all.
	And you were telling her you don't want to be with her by...
	Having sex with another woman, you both were basically saying there's no future in this, and you were both right.
	But you didn't have the self-knowledge or assertiveness at this particular point, which you're young, I understand, to say it rather than act it out.
	You both were acting out a breakup.
	I'm going to another state, then to another country.
	Good luck. Well, I'm going to sleep with another woman.
	I'll see your distance, and I'll raise you one hoochie-coochie.
	I mean, right?
	This is you both break it up with each other, but you didn't have the self knowledge to make it explicit.
	And so you had to act it out.
	You go far, I'll go deep.
	I'll meet you around the other side of Breakupville.
	Yeah, I definitely never even never put that together.
	But, uh...
	I'm leaving on a jet plane.
	That's what she's saying. You're like, I'm leaning on some cleavage.
	Hey, can we meet around the airport of not so much together anymore?
	See how great self-knowledge is.
	It's not like you get to forgive yourself for everything.
	You want to get to a place where you don't want to spend your whole life fighting temptation.
	just get to a place where temptation isn't an issue.
	Definitely.
	Can I tell you a tiny story?
	Go ahead. All right.
	I was a teenager. I was dating a Jewish girl.
	And I didn't know back in the day that there's a lot of pressure on Jewish girls to marry Jewish guys.
	I'm not a Jewish guy.
	I know there are rumors, but I'm not a Jewish guy.
	And it wasn't like, you know, it was just kissing, but I ended up kissing another girl, right?
	And, you know, we ended up not, you know, going out, right?
	For obvious reasons, the Jewish girl and I. Now, of course, in hindsight, yeah, it makes perfect sense.
	Wasn't much of a future. And I think she ended up marrying a nice Jewish boy later on.
	And, you know, more power to her and good luck and all that.
	But it's like, okay, wasn't much of a future in that relationship?
	Because I'm not Jewish. So, it's like, okay, I ended up dating a nice Protestant girl.
	So... You know, do I sit there and say, oh, and I kissed another girl?
	Well, you know, I was a teenager.
	It wasn't the right thing to do. No question about it.
	But I think deep down, I kind of got that it wasn't much of a future.
	It wasn't much of a future.
	With the Jewish girl.
	And it's funny, you know, because back then I didn't really think about any of these things at all.
	Oh, she's pretty. I'll go out with her.
	You know, that's the way you work.
	But deep down, you know, deep down we're angling for something permanent.
	We live in the moment, but our spine kind of thinks deep into the future.
	So I would say be easy on yourself.
	You know, be strict with yourself insofar as, you know, of course it wasn't the right thing to do, but just stopping at it wasn't the right thing to do is missing the point.
	Of course, you knew it.
	I mean, if somebody said, oh, cheating, that's bad, you knew it wasn't the right thing.
	The question is, why did you do it when it was the wrong thing to do?
	Well, either you're just some bad guy, but what does that teach?
	It doesn't teach you anything. It's just a form of self-attack, right?
	And we have to be gentle with ourselves because we ain't going anywhere, right?
	I mean, I got to be myself.
	Everyone else is taken, right?
	So you got to find some way to be easy with yourself.
	And if you actually have genuine self-knowledge, then you can look at your failings, you can look at the things that you did that were wrong, and you can say, what can I learn?
	Why did I do it?
	And be curious about yourself like you're an archaeologist.
	Like, I look at decisions like, you know, if you're some Aztec archaeologist and you're uncovering some place where they would drug children and cut out their living hearts or something, okay, you can sit there and say, well, that was stone evil and child abuse.
	Well, yeah, it was, but you kind of want to learn...
	About the causality and the culture and the history and the thoughts and the religion and whatever, right?
	All this kind of stuff. And...
	It's the same thing with yourself.
	I mean, if you're an archaeologist and say, well, this is a place where great evil happened.
	Darkness is in the land.
	It's not really being an archaeologist.
	It's being a moralist, which is...
	I guess, okay. But if you're just a condemnatory moralist, then you're not teaching anyone anything other than self-hatred and a reliance on willpower that will surely fail sooner or later.
	You know, if you figure out, like, I'll give you a little example.
	So, I don't eat that much in the morning.
	I don't eat much during the day.
	But I have a big appetite at night.
	And I've learned to eat less at night.
	It's one of the ways in which, I guess, eight or nine years ago, I lost, I don't know, 25 or 30 pounds, and I've kept it off.
	And I figured out, okay, well, why do I eat more in the evening?
	Well, I can sit there and say, well, I'm not going to eat more in the evening.
	Well, but why?
	Of course, it's probably obvious to everyone out there, but it took me a little while to figure out that I eat more in the evening because when I was a kid, when my mom came home and other people came home, I was stressed.
	And I guess I'm a bit of a stress eater, right?
	So once I realized that the reason I eat more in the evening is that I was sort of stressed or worried and anxious and nervous, and that's a way that I managed that, then it became easier to not eat so much in the evening, right?
	It's just like I sit there and say, well, I'm just a pig in the evenings and I'm just a greedy in the evenings.
	Okay, well, then I can grip my teeth and I'm going to fail and run out of willpower eventually.
	Having willpower is like holding your breath and you can do it for a while and then you can't, right?
	You want to get into a situation where you can breathe.
	And when you have self-knowledge, which is not just attacking yourself, it's the same thing like when my daughter does something I don't agree with, I'll just try and figure out why she does it.
	Oh, you're bad! Okay, what have I achieved?
	Nothing other than the implantation of negative voices in her head, which is just going to create fear, fascination, rather than freedom.
	Once you figure out why you're doing what you're doing, the whole point of self-knowledge is to free you up from needing willpower so that you can focus on more important things.
	So that you don't have the narcissism of self-management that goes on and on and on forever, that moralists have been profoundly unable to release human beings from throughout almost all of moral history.
	And you get this kind of weird pull, sorry for the long lecture, you get this kind of weird pull where, like on the one hand, you have these moralists of, oh, it's evil, and you're a sinner, and it's bad, and you know, okay, well...
	Fear and fascination.
	And then you have this, on the other hand, you have this, you know, hey man, you know, you just don't have any of these rules.
	So you slap with someone, you know, we're like apes, apes do it, mammals do it, birds, bees, mammals do it, you know, dolphins do it, dolphins do it very aggressively.
	And... They then say, the first one says, you're bad and therefore you should avoid it, which doesn't work.
	And the second one says, there's nothing to avoid because there's no such thing as badness.
	Neither of them get you to a place of self-knowledge because neither of them have you curious about yourself.
	The first one says, well, you shouldn't be curious about yourself because you're bad.
	Just stop doing bad things.
	You're a sinner. You're bad.
	Okay, well, there's no self-knowledge to be gained from that.
	You're just supposed to set yourself up in willpower.
	That's why diets always fail. Or there are the other people who say, well, there's no such thing as bad, and no need for rules, and there's no behavior to change, and everything's loosey-goosey, and you just do your thing, and man, you know, it's relativism, subjectivism, you know, just do your own thing, right?
	Neither of them lead you to a place of self-knowledge, and therefore, they cannot liberate you.
	They can't liberate you.
	The whole point is to automate things.
	You know, when you're a kid, you learn how to walk.
	You really concentrate on learning how to walk.
	I still remember learning how to bike.
	You've got to really concentrate to learn how to bike.
	I remember the first time I was on skis, you know, you've got to really concentrate, right?
	But the whole point of getting better at these things is you don't have to think about the basics anymore.
	I don't have to sit there and think, well, I would like to have a conversation with someone, but I also do have to climb a set of stairs.
	Clearly, I can't do both, so I guess I'll have to call you back.
	I mean, that's not what you want. I walk up the stairs, I keep chatting, and I can cook my meal, I keep chatting, or I can podcast and drive a car.
	Whatever, right? Automate stuff.
	Automate stuff means taking away willpower and getting self-knowledge so that you don't have the fascination and the fear that leads you to transgress against values.
	And this is where philosophy, at least the approach that I take to me, is so important, so powerful, so helpful, so healthy.
	It's that you must become curious.
	I say the must like it's a rule. You will find yourself very liberated for higher and more important things when you release yourself from the fear and fascination and the self-denial that comes from self-castigation or the haziness that has you unprepared with any self-knowledge for just believing that no one does anything wrong and it's all fine and, you know, we're just flesh, you know, we're mammals and animals.
	It's like, well, kind of not, right?
	We kind of are, but we're pretty unique.
	So, I hope that long speech gives you some utility, my friend.
	But I would say...
	Be gentle with yourself.
	Do not fall into self-castigation.
	You've got a long time to live with yourself.
	You don't want to be standing over your own self with a whip in your hand.
	That is a bad place to be.
	That is a negative place to be.
	That's a horrible place to be.
	Be curious with yourself.
	Be firm with yourself.
	Be gentle with yourself. Gentleness and firmness can go very much hand in hand.
	And be curious.
	Curiosity, curiosity, curiosity is the great driving force of progress.
	Not, I'm bad.
	Not, I didn't do anything wrong, but I wonder why I did what I did.
	I wonder what the roots are of why I did what I did.
	It's not good that I did what I did, so I want to change it, but I'm not going to change it by instituting interstatism.
	I mean, there's no point saying I don't want a violent oligarchy outside and then find some way to substitute a violent or aggressive or abusive oligarchy inside.
	The reason we have a state out there is a state of mind.
	The reason we punish people and get mad at people and use force to try and solve every problem is because we get mad and punish ourselves, bully ourselves, yell at ourselves, call ourselves terrible names.
	I'm so stupid. All this kind of stuff, right?
	Why did I do? I'm such a bad guy, terrible boyfriend, terrible husband, blah!
	Why did I do what I do?
	Why did I date this person?
	Why did I cheat on this person?
	Why did I take that job?
	Why did I just be curious, be curious, be curious?
	And then you release yourself piece by piece from fear and fascination.
	And you get the freedom of release from temptation.
	And then you can do the things that you do.
	People say to me, like, how the hell are you so productive?
	You write these books, you do videos, you call in shows.
	How are you so productive?
	I exist largely without temptation.
	I don't castigate myself.
	I don't waste mental energy attacking myself.
	I course correct, of course.
	But out of curiosity and out of a genuine desire to learn about myself and to share what I've learned with the world.
	And that kind of gentleness and that kind of curiosity, but that firmness, is a great combination to go through life with.
	And it will lead you to some amazing places.
	Of self-revelation and personal power that give you what seem like superhuman abilities to others, that give you the superhuman abilities to withstand criticism, to withstand calumny, to take courageous stands on important information that others Fear to tread on.
	You know, there's an old saying that fools rush in where angels fear to tread.
	Well, the topics that I talk about, and you know which ones they are, all of them for the most part, they are places that other people, people I admire, brave people, courageous people, people who speak truth to power on a regular basis, I go places those people won't go.
	Why? Because I am genuinely curious about the world.
	And I also know when people attack me, when they write terrible things about me, and I said this many years ago, they're not engaging me.
	They're not putting me in a cage.
	They're putting themselves in a cage.
	Because they are fundamentally working...
	That's why I don't do a lot of attack videos.
	Get engaged. Because when you lash out at someone and try to punish them for their curiosity, It doesn't land on me, because that's not how I operate with myself.
	There's no weapon available to others that you don't first use upon yourself.
	And if you won't use a weapon on yourself, other people can only fire blanks at you.
	If I don't have an abusive relationship with myself, then other people can't have that abusive relationship with me.
	If I don't self-attack, their attacks don't add up to much of anything.
	Freedom from others is sympathy with the self.
	Freedom from control from others is refusing to control yourself.
	Because once you understand the value and the power of self-curiosity, of gentleness and firmness and curiosity with the self, then you can, like a superhero, walk through bullets and bombs and shrapnel that take down mortals and be largely untouched.
	And that is an amazing power to have.
	And it is the power of grace, and it is the power of curiosity, and it is the power of a relentless thirst to acquire and share knowledge about myself, about you in this conversation, about others, about the world, about all the topics that I deal with.
	This relentless curiosity and this refusal to attack myself means that attacks from other people don't land.
	See, nobody can hit you outside of physical direct punching, right?
	I mean, nobody can hit you. All they can do is talk you, try and talk you into hitting yourself.
	That's all they can do. The world It's like a boxing ring with two boxers in it who cannot hit each other.
	And all they can do is they say, you should really punch yourself.
	Oh, you should really punch yourself.
	Man, you deserve a really great left hook there.
	Oh, now pummel yourself. Rope it open the corner.
	Knock yourself out. Knock yourself out.
	Punch yourself. Punch yourself. Punch yourself.
	Throw yourself into the ropes.
	Pound your head down. Lift up your knee and crack into your nose.
	You can punch yourself below the belt, can't you, chicken?
	It's a war of words.
	All they're trying to do is get the other boxer to punch himself, to implant self-hatred into the mind of an innocent person.
	Maybe your girlfriend's trying to do that to you, I don't know.
	Maybe some of this self-criticism that's coming is coming from her.
	You're a bad person. You cheated on me.
	you're wrong, you're a bad boyfriend, you're a terrible boyfriend, blah, blah, blah, blah.
	Now, I'm not saying you hurt her, I'm not saying she should be just all big and curious and that's right.
	That's your job, not hers. She's hurt.
	But if you can get to the state of mind of realizing that nobody can hit you but you.
	Nobody can make you feel bad about yourself but you.
	That is a very powerful action because every time you punch yourself because someone's mad at you, you reinforce the power of verbal abuse.
	It would not be a very good boxing match if neither of the boxers listened to the other.
	And so you want to take weapons away from other people in order to pacify the world.
	And when people are saying bad things about you, if you listen and internalize that and beat yourself up about all of that, you are reinforcing the power of verbal abuse in the world.
	That is a terrible, terrible thing to do.
	I don't mean to self-attack about it because, you know, this is all just a self-knowledge and exploration.
	But I'm very much into diffusing verbal bombs.
	People say the most terrible stuff to me or about me, and I'm like, it's not an argument.
	It's not an argument.
	And that does a lot of powerful things.
	It tells the person that they're being most likely abusive, that they're being irrational, that they're not thinking, that they're not communicating, that they're acting out, that they're being immature.
	It's not an argument. Calling me a bad person, calling me whatever names, it's not an argument.
	Calling anyone, just calling them names is not an argument.
	And the not an argument thing is very important.
	It's very powerful. That's why it's taken on its meme status and meme stature.
	With hats. Because I'm not going to engage at that level.
	They're trying to get me to get mad at myself.
	Why? I know I'm acting honorably and decently with course corrections when necessary.
	I know that I'm coming from a good and loving place and a positive place of wanting people to get along better and know the truth and the truth shall set you free even if it pisses you off first, especially when it pisses you off first.
	So don't reinforce The venomous power of the Cobra Strikers of verbal abuse.
	Because when you free yourself from verbal abusers, you free them to some degree from the addiction of verbal abuse.
	The man who is trying to hunt, shooting nothing but blanks, will soon give up hunting.
	Because none of his shots will land.
	And every time we refuse to self-attack when we are verbally attacked, We release people from their addiction.
	Just a little bit. We release people from their addiction to abuse.
	And if we release them from their addiction to abuse others, maybe we can help release them from their addiction to abuse themselves.
	And then, as the Lord saith, let us sit down and reason together.
	Does that help at all? Yeah, I think it definitely does.
	Definitely. I'm very much more secure in my reasoning as to why I did it to a degree.
	The relationship basically didn't have any future.
	And I was sort of onto it, but not like 100%.
	I definitely grasped that a lot better now.
	There's a lot of ways of getting out of prison, my friend.
	All right.
	Well, I hope that helps.
	Thanks everyone so much for another wonderful evening's show.
	And please help us out at freedomainradio.com slash donate.
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	Have a wonderful evening. That was a terrible one.

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