4135 THEN HE DIED - Call In Show - June 27th, 2018
Question 1: [5:22] - “I just graduated college with a degree in Public Relations, but I am not really sure if this is the path I want to take. I am much more passionate about music and, unlike your caller, have a drive to practice and work non-stop until I get where I need to be. I have been involved in music since middle school and originally did not want to go to college and instead focus on entering the music industry. After unexpectedly being accepted into a top public university, my family urged me to take advantage of this opportunity. Now that I am out of college I was wondering if you could share some wisdom with me as to how I should proceed in taking the next steps of my life.”Question 2: [48:13] - “I am an advocate for capitalism, however there are multiple areas where I think no regulations are actually detrimental. What are the ethical and economic implications of completely free market? Would the world be a better place with a basic economic safety net? Wouldn't a completely free market prevent successful policies from being applied by a fair government? e.g. helping those in need to get back on their feet so they can become productive again which in turn would maximize meritocracy?”Question 3: [1:46:37] - “I have been listening to your show for more than a year and it has been a life changing experience for me listening to people who call into your shows and talk about their struggles. It seems that always those struggles have something to do with their childhood but apparently, it is not the case for me. I am an immigrant from a Muslim country in US and I did not have a particularly traumatizing childhood. However, I have a very hard time negotiating on my behalf with the people who are higher than me in the hierarchy of authority wherever I am at. And as a particular example of this lack of negotiation skills I find it very difficult and anxiety triggering to talk to females. My ACE score was very low and I cannot understand where this problem comes from. My question is how come that with a low ACE score I still have such a tremendous difficulty negotiating on my behalf and also approaching women. And how can someone like me gain such life transforming skills?”Question 4: [2:52:17] - “My son died when he was almost 2 years old in 2005. He had batten disease a rare genetic brain disorder. My ex and I adopted 2 boys from foster care years after his death. They are 11 and 7 now. I have a biological daughter who is 13 and did not contract the disease. I've struggled this past year dealing with his death, closing my business and my recent divorce. A few years later I donated my kidney to my father. My question is how can I stop thinking about his death, and him possibly being somewhere in the afterlife, I have constant thoughts about his passing and want to focus on being the best father I can to my 3 kids and not on the past with my ex and son's death.”Your support is essential to Freedomain Radio, which is 100% funded by viewers like you. Please support the show by making a one time donation or signing up for a monthly recurring donation at: http://www.freedomainradio.com/donate
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So, for this call-in show, there are four callers, and the aforementioned range of topics really holds true.
The first caller. Ah, you know, the practical, no-you-can-make-money versus the sky-high dream.
This is someone who graduated with a degree in public relations, but loves music, most of all.
And now that he's out of college...
What should he do? Fork in the road time.
Do you go with the slow and sure and steady but less than exciting world of public relations?
Or do you roll the dice hoping to get double sixes in the music world?
There are ways to evaluate these decisions so you're not either compromising or being wildly irresponsible and we go through the steps in that.
Now the second caller, oh you've had these arguments, you've heard these arguments before, but I took a new approach on this one.
Because this caller is an advocate for capitalism, but there are multiple areas where he thinks no regulations are actually detrimental or dangerous.
So how can you convince people who believe that regulation is necessary for the support of the free market?
Well, there's new ways to do it.
The third caller is in the West.
He is a former Muslim, and he wants to date women of a particular ethnicity.
But he has a challenge being assertive and he has a challenge even being honest with his family.
And we did do a pretty deep dive into that and how that affects his dating prospects because problems in the dating world usually go pretty deep into personal history.
Now, the fourth caller.
This rung me inside and out, I'm telling you.
This rung me inside and out.
This man's little boy died.
And it happened a while ago.
And he just can't move past it.
He is blocked by a tiny headstone from moving on with his life.
And other people, his children, now need him.
And how can we honor the dead without giving them dominion over us and blocking us from our future?
It's a very, very powerful conversation.
I put heart and soul, mind and body, everything that I have, into helping him with this.
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Alright, well up for us today we have Daniel.
Daniel wrote in and said, I just graduated from college with a degree in public relations, but I'm not really sure if this is the path I want to take.
I'm much more passionate about music and have a drive to practice and work non-stop until I get where I need to be.
I've been involved in music since middle school and originally did not want to go to college and instead focus on entering the music industry.
After unexpectedly being accepted into a top university, my family urged me to take advantage of this opportunity.
Now that I am out of college, I was wondering if you could share some wisdom with me as to how I should proceed in taking the next steps of my life.
That's from Daniel. Public relations.
Public relations.
Boy, there's a foggy vapor canyon that I dare not tread.
What does that mean?
Is this like, I don't know, our star got caught with either a dead hooker or a live boy.
What do we do? Like, what is that?
Public relations. What does that mean?
Okay, just to clarify the beginning of the call, because I think my first sentence got cut off.
I was referencing the call you did two weeks ago about ambition.
You were talking to a kid who was in a similar position to me.
I don't know if you recall that at all.
Yeah, I do, and thank you for clarifying that.
I appreciate that. Yeah, so...
Look at you, managing public perceptions already.
It's like you've got a degree in this or something.
Yeah, public relations, you're right, has a very...
Negative connotation with it, but it has a wide range of job applications.
You can do things from social media management, crisis communications, reputation building, media placement.
For instance, if you were a company and you wanted to get a product announcement into CNN or in the New York Times, you would write press releases.
And then partnership. So working with other companies and kind of Creating lasting and mutually beneficial relationships.
So that's the textbook answer I'll give you on that one.
Boy, it sounds like either one of us fell asleep when you were talking about that.
Was that you or was that me?
It was probably you, but...
No, no. I think it might have been you because the level of excitement in your voice was barely palpable.
Let me just back up and say I'm into public relations because I feel like I can use it in music, which is why I chose that.
I was originally a music major.
And I just felt like that was a complete waste of money.
And my school is one of the top schools, like I have to have one of the top PR schools in the country.
So I figured like that would be a more useful application of like my time.
I'm sorry, I'm a little confused.
So you're a musician?
Yes. So why don't you just go make music?
Like, why would you be in school for all this?
Listen, I say this as a guy who, like, I went to theater school, which was, well, let's just say there may have been potentially better uses for my time and energies.
Although, you know, I think it helped to some degree with what I do now, one way or another.
But why not just go and make music?
I mean, I'm pretty sure, like, I can think of, like, the top 50 pop musicians or rock musicians or whatever.
I'm not sure too many of them went to Juilliard.
That's correct. But I was in a band and I felt like I was in a pretty good position, but I got an opportunity to go to a top institution because of music, but because their music school was bad.
So I got into their music school. No, but if you're in a band and it's working out, why?
You know, you quit school to be in a band.
You don't quit a band to be in school, do you?
My parents were very...
Ah, your parents!
There we go.
So your parents said, well, that's a risky life.
You've got to have a plan B. Well, exactly.
Those words, exactly.
Right. And how much did it cost you to go to college?
Uh, I didn't pay for any of it.
Oh, who paid? My parents did.
Okay, parents, stop doing that shit, okay?
Stop paying for your kids to go to college.
Do you know why? Because then the kids can't make a rational decision about whether it's worth it.
Yeah, I mean, my parents...
Sorry, sorry to interrupt. I just want to get a few more details before we go on.
Okay, okay. And how long did you spend in music school?
One semester. And how long did it take you to get a degree in public relations?
Three and a half years.
Okay, so we've got four years of your life studying this stuff, right?
Music and public relations? Correct.
Yeah. Okay, so how much do you think you could have made as a musician, being in a decent band, you know, getting experience How much do you think you could have been paid a year if you'd have worked with the band?
I honestly couldn't make that sort of prediction because it's very volatile.
I would have hoped to be touring and doing that sort of thing, but I just couldn't.
It's a very volatile industry, as I'm sure you're familiar with, so I don't have a crystal ball and I can't really I feel like I would have gotten by.
I would have been able to get by either if I had to teach or making money purely based on shows.
See, this is the thing.
This is the thing if you're a musician.
Let's say that you play four gigs a week for two hours of pop, right?
So there's your eight hours. And I know there's set up and you don't have a road crew when you're starting out and all of that.
There's set up and there's breakdown, there's travel and shit like that, right?
But here's the thing. Correct.
If you want to be a musician, here's what you do.
You write music. That's all it's about.
I don't consider somebody who only plays an instrument to be a musician any more than I consider a record player to be a band.
Or a photocopier to be an artist.
You create. As a musician, if you're not creating, I don't care.
I mean, I genuinely don't care.
So if you want to make it as a musician, you do your eight hours gig a week.
Maybe you got another eight hours of setup and breakdown and some travel and all that kind of stuff.
But you can still write while you're traveling because you don't all need to drive the van or whatever.
But if you are a musician, you have about 50 hours a week in which you can write music.
And that's what you should be doing, is just writing music.
And, yeah, the first hundred songs are going to be pretty bad, and they're going to be derivative, and people are going to say, oh, it sounds like this guy, or it sounds like that guy, and you'll listen back, and you'll hear, and it'll be kind of boring.
And, you know, what Tina Turner said in that movie about her husband's, Ike Turner's music, hey, these songs all sound the same.
Yeah, yeah, I'll get it. And then you'll start to get better.
And then you say, I mean, I did, I was writing for 20 years before I wrote anything original, really original.
Everything else was derivative.
That's natural. That's the 10,000 hours.
So if you want to be a musician, then sure, if it's going to be like, well, I'm in it for the, you know, the kicks of performing and the groupies.
And the high. Yeah, okay.
That's bullshit. Go make some music.
Because otherwise you're just preying on everyone else who's written music.
Because if you're a cover band, you're just kind of parasites, right?
Because it's just like, well, other people sat down and went through the difficult task of writing music, but I don't really want to do that because that's kind of tough.
So I'll just copy other people's stuff and call myself a musician.
You're a parasite. You're not a musician.
A musician creates. It doesn't copy.
And it's fine. You can be a cover band.
That's a great way to, you know, the Beatles started as a cover band and I get all of that and that's no problem.
You can start off that way. The Queen started as a cover band and then Freddie was like, we got to write our own stuff.
If we don't write our own stuff, there's no point being in this band because it's not a band.
It's just a copy. And so my question is, Daniel, if you had, let's say, you had been, let me bring up my little calc here, right?
So let's say that you had been writing music Let's just say 20 hours a week, right?
20 times 52 times 4.
Well, you would have had over 4,000 hours of music writing experience over the past four years.
Plus, you would have had an equivalent amount of playing experience, because you're kind of playing when you're writing music, and then you're playing when you're...
So there's your 10,000 hours, and you've become a world-class expert in music, right?
Correct. Now, what has your music playing and writing been like over the last four years?
I was still able to have a band on the side.
Of doing school, but it obviously wasn't my main focus.
My time was spent between doing classes and doing an outside group.
And then eventually I had two outside groups that I was running.
So how often would you play a month?
How many hours? I would be pretty much spending...
I had a storage unit I had to practice in because I was living in an apartment situation.
So I would be playing...
Almost every night for several hours in gigs.
We definitely had at least two or three a month in different cities in my state.
Wait, so you'd have two or three gigs a month for a couple hours a night?
Yeah, but my band was practicing at least three times a week for several hours at a time, and then I was trying to practice six nights a week.
Jesus, that's a pretty fucking easy degree, man.
No, seriously. You can do all of that while studying?
PR doesn't get super hard until the last year.
You think? Yeah.
You basically got a full-time job and you're able to waltz your way through a degree.
I'm not going to say you're wrong, but the only thing where that stopped was these past two semesters.
This past semester, I was pretty much not able to play at all.
Yeah, because you were actually working at your education rather than ambling through.
And I was doing a huge project, and it kind of just made me realize, wow, I really would rather do music than this, because it just is...
And if you'd had to pay for it yourself, you wouldn't have done it, right?
Yeah. Correct.
Is that fair to say? Like you wouldn't be graduating 100 grand or 50 grand in debt for public relations.
You'd have gone the music route, right?
Yeah. And this is why I say to parents, stop paying for your kids to go to school.
Stop paying for your kids to go to school because they can't make rational economic decisions if you're numbing them with free stuff.
You know, asking 18-year-olds to make sensible decisions on their future when you're paying for their school is like asking 18-year-old girls to make sensible decisions on family planning when they get free money for having babies.
So how much time did you spend writing?
Both of my bands were pretty much all original music.
So the first, like, three years, I got a decent amount of writing in.
No, that's great. It wasn't a complete loss of time, but I definitely feel like I have options right now.
There's the safe path, there's the path where I could get a job at a PR agency, get a job in a communications thing, make a decent income, or there's the more follow-your-passion type route.
I'm kind of just... Uh, you know, cause then I started like looking at, Oh, I'm getting older, I'm getting older.
And then, you know, like you're losing all that time.
Right. So yeah, I'm just kind of like, and then after listening to your, the other call, which kind of inspired me to write this, um, you know, I actually feel like I have like a drive to go do this.
And I just wanted to hear like what your input was on this.
Cause I've heard you say like, you know, different things about pursuing the arts over your phone calls that I've listened to.
Well, the important thing is to not have regrets.
And to not have regrets, you pour everything into your dream.
And then if your dream blows up, at least you say, well, it was a nightmare.
Right? Yeah.
That's the key. Right?
So if you want to do music, then do music, but do it 150%.
Do it 150%.
So I wanted to be a writer.
Yeah. So I took a very advanced writing course and was paired with a well-known Canadian writer, and we worked away on my book, The God of Atheists, and I wrote for four to five to six hours a day.
Sometimes I'd write six to eight thousand words a day.
I researched on the time that I wasn't writing, and I wrote the equivalent of four novels in 18 months.
Which is one novel that's like 370,000 words, which is like a big trilogy.
And then another novel, which was originally about 200,000 words, which I hacked down to about 120.
And so for me, I was like, well, I want to be a writer.
So I took this writing course, which gave me exposure to agents.
And I researched and I wrote and I researched and I wrote and I researched and I wrote.
And that's what I did. I did not become a novel writer.
I got amazing reviews.
Like one guy who had a PhD in literature, English literature, reviewed my book because my agent was like, you know, I'm trying to sell this book.
I like the book. I think it's really good.
And so she shopped it out to someone to get a review of the book.
He was a professional reviewer.
And he said of my novel, The God of Atheists, this is the great Canadian novel.
I've never read anything like this before.
This is revolutionary. This is the most wonderful thing.
I read this like...
Dazzled. And I like every time the phone rang for the next week, I'm like, well, here it is, you know, it comes my career.
But of course, for reasons that I understand now, but didn't 20 years ago, it didn't happen.
Now, I'm glad that it didn't happen because this is much more important for me to be doing and a much more positive thing for the world as a whole for me to be doing.
But I was all in. You know, I quit my entrepreneurial career and they offered me like 150 grand a year to go back for two to three days a week.
But I said, no. I said, listen, I'm doing this writing thing and tempt me with all the foul money that you want.
I'm going to do this writing thing.
And that's what I did. And I put heart and soul in it and I worked at it night and day, just like I did when I was in therapy.
I did three hours a week and then wrote dreams down and kept a journal and...
Like, I mean, I'm a big one for like, don't half-ass do things, right?
And so if you're going to go into music, then go into music, which means you wake up and you start writing music.
You know, I was listening to, um, what was it?
Some documentary on the American band, the Eagles.
And the guy was, uh, I think it was, I don't know, Glenn Fry or, um, Creepy Don Henley.
Boy, you should figure out why he really wrote dirty laundry.
It was pretty vile. 16-year-old dead hooker in his...
Sorry, 16-year-old OD'd hooker in his hotel room.
Nasty stuff. Anyway.
But yeah, they're talking about that they lived above...
The Lawyers in Love guy, I can't remember his name, Jackson Brown, the guy who later beat up Daryl Hannah.
I'm sorry that I know these things, I just do.
And, you know, like, oh, he'd like work up and he'd play the same phrase like 20 times, 30 times, then he'd write a little bit down and make another pot of tea and then he'd just keep writing and keep writing and this is what you do.
You know, funny, because people use this word like...
Well, he's just obsessive about X, Y, and Z, right?
It's like, you know, I don't know what the word obsessive is.
Everything that's really great in this world comes out of because people are obsessed with it.
People are obsessed with it.
And Bohemian Rhapsody, they only stopped adding tracks because the tape ran completely clear and they couldn't add any more tracks.
This is back before you could do this stuff on computers.
And the attention to detail that's necessary for that kind of genius to flourish is, of course, it's obsessive.
You know, that boy, that guy who invented the polio vaccine was totally obsessed with beating polio.
Yes, and I'm very glad that he was, because I like swimming in public pools when I was a kid, even now.
So be obsessive.
Surrender to your obsession and say, if I'm going to do this, I'm going to do it 150%.
Because that's mostly what's needed to succeed.
I mean, yeah, there's talent, and I get all of that, and I'm not saying that's inconsequential.
But talent without work is just self-contempt, because you know you have the ability, but you just won't work at it.
And so you end up, your talent becomes an avenue for self-contempt and a real sense of frustration and wasted opportunity.
So there is talent, and that's not inconsequential.
But the people who succeed in general, the people who succeed in general, there's only one thing you have to do, because you have to do one thing more than everyone else is willing to do.
That's all you have to do to succeed.
You just have to do one thing more than what everyone else is willing to do.
It's been true of this show from the very beginning, that I do the topics that people are too chicken shit to do.
They know they need to talk about these things.
They know they need to talk about family voluntarism.
They know they need to talk about the non-aggression principle when it comes to parenting.
They know they need to talk about racial IQ differences.
Everybody knows this. And the number of people I know in the public sphere who I know know this shit and don't fucking talk about it is ridiculous and contemptible.
So why has my show succeeded?
Because I'm willing to do what other people aren't willing to do.
And I'm not willing to do it for shock value.
And I'm not willing to do it for success.
I mean, it would be a much more comfortable show in many ways if I hadn't done the things that are controversial to do.
But I can't look at the camera.
I can't look at the listenership.
I can't write and go on people's show.
I can't do any of that and say, oh, people got to have integrity.
They got to be honest. They got to be courageous.
And they got to tell the truth and then conceal things that I know that are important that need to be talked about.
I mean, I just I can't do it.
I mean, I would I It's not even tempting to do it.
So when it comes to music, you just have to be willing to do what other people aren't willing to do.
Now, musicians, a lot of them, pretty hedonistic lifestyle, right?
It's very easy to slip into that haze of drugs and sex and rock and roll and waste a lot of time.
So you just have to be the disciplined musician.
That's what you have to be. You have to be the disciplined musician.
The guy who gets up and says, I'm going to write.
I sit down and write for three hours.
I sit down and write for three hours.
I sit down and write for three hours. I'm going to play my stuff in front of a live audience.
I'm going to continually test it and change it and improve it until it's what people love.
And then I'm just going to keep doing that.
And I'm going to keep doing that. I'm going to keep doing that.
And I'm not going to be defeated by setbacks.
I'm not going to be defeated by failure.
I'm just going to understand that there is no road in this world that is perfectly even.
There are bumps and dips and valleys, and there are roads that are washed away, and there are bridges that are cracked and broken, and you just find a way across the river.
You're just willing to do what other people aren't willing to do.
Most people, when they hit resistance, they get sanded down, right?
What is resistance? They get sanded down.
Because they say, well, I tried to do this, but then this happened, and this didn't work, and then this didn't happen, and this didn't work, and blah, blah, blah, blah, right?
And they just stop.
Or what happens is their forward momentum gets arrested just slowly over time.
Their forward momentum just gets arrested.
Slow down a little bit more each time.
Slow down a little bit. Oh, there's another resistance.
Oh, this guy didn't return my call.
Oh, this didn't work. Oh, I lost my work here.
The computer crashed. And then they just slow down, slow motion sickness, and they just grind to a halt.
And it's like, okay, then you've just failed.
And what's happened is the baton has been passed to someone who says, okay, so there's things in the way.
Good. I like the fact that there are things in the way.
Do you think I don't know what's happening to my stuff in social media?
I know it's being suppressed.
And I'm like, good.
That's actually fine with me in many ways because it means that We're having an effect.
What we're doing is having an effect.
And it also means that other people are going to get slowed and stopped by that.
And I'm sorry that this unfortunate and unjust stuff is happening.
But I'm not going to stop.
I'm like, okay, good. This was going to happen when we got closer to having an effect, when we got closer to having a real impact.
So it's baked into the equation.
It's built into the... Cost of doing business, so to speak.
The cost of telling the truth is you're going to get a lot of resistance.
And knowing that is a spur.
The resistance makes me stronger.
The resistance makes me more focused.
The resistance makes me go faster and harder forward.
And other people will get sanded down by that.
And I'm telling you out there, if you're out there, don't get sanded down by it.
Some of you will and some of you won't if it's identified.
Good. But you need to...
Just do what other people aren't willing to do.
That's all that success fundamentally comes down to.
Are you willing to stay up later? Are you willing to be vulnerable?
Are you willing to pour heart, mind and soul into what it is that you're doing?
Are you willing to be wrong? Are you willing to be scorned at and jeered and attacked?
And if you are, you'll succeed.
And if you are stopped by those things, you shouldn't even try because then you'll have a big failure.
That you'll judge yourself by.
And if you're not willing to go the distance, it's better not to even start the race because you just wear yourself out for nothing.
And I'm saying that to you, Daniel, because if you want to be into music, music is only risky if you're lazy.
Because anything you do long enough, you're going to get good at.
You're going to get good at.
And all you have to do is persist.
You know it's that old saying that success is 99% perspiration and only 1% inspiration.
All you have to do is persist.
And you will gather the skills that come from not giving up.
You will gather the resources and the robustness and the resolution that comes from simply not giving up.
And everything that's great in our life, from great technology to great music to great political theories to great philosophical arguments, are all the result of crazy, obsessive, I'm not giving up.
It took me Close to 30 years to come up with a working theory of secular ethics that has now stood the test of time.
It took me 30 years of thinking about it.
It took me even longer to come up with a functional and valid theory of free will.
And I've got all the stuff written down in a book that I'm working on and so on.
So you just have to be persistent.
Now, why haven't other people come up with secular ethics?
Either they don't think it's important, which of course it is, or they just gave up, or they just said, well, this answer is good enough for me, which is what I did with objectivism for quite a while.
I remember reading about free will.
In the psychology of self-esteem, I think it was in Nathaniel Brandon's book, and thinking, oh, well, he's written about it, and so here's the answer.
And I read it, and I was like, no, that's not really, that's not really very satisfying, not really a good answer.
Okay, well, I guess I was hoping to read, and so you just, you just be persistent.
And so I very clearly remember.
2006, 12 years ago, I sat down, And I had to pee.
It's actually important that I had to pee.
I sat down at a table and I was like, man, I gotta pee.
And I'm like, you know what? No.
You don't get to pee until you solve this problem.
You don't get to get up from this table until you solve this problem.
And that can be quite an incentive.
My eyeballs are turning yellow.
I think I solved this problem.
And if you just say, well, I'm I'm not going to give up until I've given it everything I've got.
And then if you've given it everything you've got, you know, like when I left theater school, like I had a play and I had no money and I... I put ads up, and I hired actors, and I rented a theater, and we rehearsed that play.
And, oh man, it was rough.
I had to fire people who got really, I mean, they're actors, they're volatile as hell sometimes, right?
I really got people screaming at me because I fired them because they were pretty bad.
And somebody was screaming at me.
I fired him because he was just a terrible actor.
He was good in the audition, but just, and he just was bad.
And I had to, I had to fire the guy and he's screaming at me and he was going to send me a bill for every single goddamn hour.
He worked on this stinking fucking play and, you know, he's right in my face, red and screaming at me.
I had to fire another guy who was pretty bad.
I was actually going to take the role myself, which I didn't really want to do.
But instead, a friend of mine who I actually wrote the part based on agreed to take the role.
And he was not an actor.
He had no experience. But he was natural because I wrote the character based on him.
So he was actually able to do a good job.
And that play called Seduction was the adaptation of Turgendia's Fathers and Sons.
It only ran for like a week because it's all I could do before I was going back to school.
And a couple nights it was just pure magic.
Pure magic.
Just the way everything went and the way everything played out.
And it was all just wonderful, wonderful stuff.
And I really, really enjoyed it.
Didn't make a lot of money out of it.
But I gave it everything I had as a producer, as a director.
I was satisfied with what happened.
And I didn't want to do it again.
Because I wanted to do something else.
And... You give it everything you've got, and then you can walk away without regrets.
It's the same thing in relationships.
You communicate until you can't communicate anymore.
You either break through, you break out.
So I say to people, you've got problems with people in your life, sit down and talk with them.
Get the lay of the land.
Be honest, be open, be vulnerable, be willing to be rejected, to be cursed, and you will get the true value of the relationship.
Because if you're vulnerable with someone in a relationship and they shit on you, that tells you all you need to know.
So if you want to go into music, my advice is go into music.
But don't fucking half go into music.
Don't go in it to be a cover band.
Don't go in it for the groupies or for the high of just performing and so on.
Go into it knowing that it's a job.
And it's a job with a hell of a lot of competition.
And it's a job where the prize Is so great that everybody wants it.
It's like acting. The prize is so great.
You get millions of dollars.
You get fans. You get your pick and choice of projects.
You get to work with the very best people in the world.
Which means everybody wants it.
How many people would like to do what I do?
A lot. So why don't they?
Come on. It's the internet.
Take me on. Be better than me.
That'd be fantastic. I'd love to come work for you.
But they don't.
Why? Because they don't want to do what I'm willing to do.
That's the only barrier.
It's nothing magic about it.
So, oh, Steph, you're so eloquent and so on.
Well, yeah, because I started writing when I was six years old.
I started debating when I was eight years old.
I was on a debate team.
I was in theater school where we did lots of improv and role plays, and I wrote, and I wrote 35 plays, and I've written hundreds of poems, and I've written 12 books, and I was like...
This doesn't come out of nowhere. Oh, he's got a talent.
Yeah, tell me all about the talent, please.
I think I was this good when I started.
I was this good when I started in 2006.
Well, maybe not this good, but I was pretty good.
But that's because I'd already been studying philosophy for 25 years.
Doesn't come out of nowhere. So recognize it's going to be a haul.
And success is simply a game of last man standing.
That's all it is. It's simply a game of last man standing.
Be willing to do what other people aren't.
If they're willing to write for 10 hours a week, you write for 20 hours a week.
Now remember there's this Sticker or something you put on your fucking journal.
And it says, so I haven't written a lot lately.
So what? Neither has Shakespeare.
And it's like, he's got the excuse of being 400 years dead, bro.
Just get down and just write something.
Just do it. Like all the people I know who were like, oh, you wrote a book, man.
I've always wanted to write a book.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I want to write a book.
If you have to write a book, maybe you've got a chance emotionally if you feel like you have to.
But if you just want to do it, Or people who are like, oh, you know, I was doing this for a certain amount of time, but now I think I'm just going to write a book.
It's like, are you now? Yeah, you know, I've been doing software for quite a while, but I think I'm just going to do tracheotomies and appendix operations now, you know, because I just feel like doing it.
It's like, no, it's difficult and complicated stuff.
And so go make music, go write music, go test music, and just do more than the band next door.
And that's how you get to the stadium.
And there's no other way to do it.
So, and you hear these stories even like Aerosmith, you know, when Steve Tyler came along.
Yeah, creepy AF. But when Steve Tyler came along, he's like, man, you guys got to tighten it up.
You got to get professional. You got to make it happen.
You got to make it work. We got to start writing.
We got to like, this is a job.
This is a business. We got to be really good at all of this stuff.
And then you get...
To the top and you get to make some money.
Now, that doesn't mean you get to keep the money.
If you look at someone like Pink Floyd, had an amazingly successful run of albums.
I mean, all the way from Umuguma, which was a little freaky, but all the way through Animals and Dark Side of the Moon, of course, was a huge hit.
It was on like the Billboard Top 100 for like, I don't know, two years or something like that.
It's mental. And then they...
Gave all this money, or had a bunch of accountants and money managers run all their money, and then they basically blew all their money, the managers and the accountants.
The same thing happened with Sting, his accountant stole his money.
Same thing happened with Billy Joel, like 25 million of Billy Joel's money was stolen by people.
So just because you get to make the money doesn't mean you get to keep the money, so be smart about all that kind of stuff.
But Pink Floyd...
Two million pounds in the 70s, that's a crap ton of money.
I don't know what that would be like, like $20 million or something now.
Yeah, lost two million pounds.
That's why they had to right the war.
It's one of the reasons why they were kind of angry when they wrote the war, because they kind of needed to make some money, because they were broke from everybody pillaging them.
Left, right and center, I think the same thing happened at the Eagles.
I mean, the number of parasites around the creative industry is huge.
And you have to be aware of that, that great talent brings with it Great predation, right?
Whenever you have a big steaming pile of talent, the flies come to feast, so to speak.
And you have to be aware of all of that, because the capacity to generate wealth generates exploitation and predation like you wouldn't believe, unless you've actually experienced it.
It's one of the reasons I love interviewing, but I find it tough to work with people outside, well, the person I work with, because...
It is a big challenge, and I think a lot of people are going to face that who've come up through this alternative media, the intellectual dark web, not an argument.
And so, yeah, if you're smart, you're willing to work harder than other people are, you're willing to go further than other people are, and you're willing to be smart about what you make, then you can make it, and it'll be a hell of a lot more satisfying than public relations.
Yeah, thanks, Stefan. I really think that gave me some clarity.
I feel like I was just kind of apprehensive because I've seen examples on both sides of my life of people who are like...
They never really tried to go for their dreams, and then they regretted it.
And then people who did try to go for their dreams, but then it didn't work out.
And now they're living a pretty mediocre life.
So I'm just kind of trying to avoid all these feelings.
No, but did they really try and go for their dreams?
Did they? Yeah, that's something I'm thinking about now that you bring up that point.
Yeah, you've probably heard this story I've told before very briefly about the guy...
I met at a business dinner whose brother was an actor in New York who was like in his mid-30s.
He'd never quite made it, never quite failed.
And he was just kind of chugging along but didn't have enough money to start a family and just was like lost in limbo.
And that was a terrifying story.
But, you know, I mean, in hindsight, thinking about it now, 30 years later after I heard the story, geez, maybe more.
Yeah, about 30 years. Well, was the guy spending all his time coming up with an incredible one-man show?
Was he learning how to juggle?
Anything to get the role, anything to get the part?
Was he slimming down and working out to the point where he had abs so he could do topless scenes?
I don't know. Was he doing absolutely everything possible?
To succeed. I mean, I look back at the show that I've done for the last 12 years.
I don't know that I could have done more.
I mean, I couldn't have done more shows physically possible.
I mean, to either produce or consume.
And I don't think I could have been braver.
I don't think I could have been more resolute.
I don't think I could have been I've had more integrity.
So I'm very pleased with what I've done.
Those people who, yeah, the people who don't try that hard and then claim that they failed, they tend not to blame themselves and they infect other people with paranoia about following their dreams.
Yeah, I would tend to agree with you on that point after that pep talk you just gave me and everyone else who's out there trying to grind.
My other question relating to this topic is, obviously because I listen to your show, I'm very passionate about politics and politics.
Spreading correct ideology through debate and open conversation.
And I know currently the entertainment industry is kind of the exact opposite of that sort of atmosphere.
So I was wondering what your thoughts are on someone who kind of has an ideology that doesn't really match up with...
It's not very acceptable.
Like you saw what they did to Kanye.
They just massacred him.
No, they didn't. No, they didn't.
Let's not use that language, right?
I mean, they didn't massacre him.
They bitched at him.
Yeah, I just have like a bunch of friends in my social circles who just kind of were like, disowned Kanye.
And I'm very low-key about my politics.
I wouldn't leave with that stuff, right?
Because once you have some foothold, some traction in the industry...
Then I think you can be a little bit more or maybe a lot more upfront with what you believe.
But I wouldn't necessarily lead with that.
Now, I say this because my very first podcast was the Stateless Society and Examination of Alternatives.
And, you know, I think the sixth or seventh podcast was personal stuff about my life and my family.
So I kind of led with what was going on with me.
But there were no gatekeepers, right?
And there were no gatekeepers, so I didn't have to rely on anyone else to publish or to book what I was doing.
So if there are gatekeepers and you do need people's cooperation to get yourself going, Then you might want to temper things down until you get bigger.
On the other hand, if you go full tilt boogie with what you believe, and you can self-publish, and you can put your stuff out for sale somewhere, and you can, right, then I would go that.
I mean, if you have to go through assholes to get your work, your work's going to be shit, because the shit's the only thing that goes through an asshole, fundamentally, right?
So if, yeah, let me sort of revisit this, what I'm saying there.
So, because, yeah, you can...
You can hand out your music for free.
You can ask for donations. You can hand out part of your music for free.
You can sell the rest.
I mean, there's lots of different things that you can do.
And then you don't have gatekeepers.
And anything that you can do that's going to avoid gatekeepers, yeah, because right now, if a musician comes out, I mean, look at Joy Villa, right?
She seems to have, like, I mean, she garnered national attention just by wearing a MAGA dress, right?
And so if you are playing woke music, so to speak, then I think people will beat a path to your door.
So yeah, forget that first bit about compromise.
Yeah, forget it. Just have integrity, go full tilt boogie, and you'll get your audience that way.
But that means you're going to have to be more creative in how you get your stuff out.
Yeah, I'm still kind of like conflicted on that because, I mean, like, whereas...
We see where Joy Villa got now, but where could she have been if she didn't say anything?
You don't know if opportunities were closed off to her.
She could have been working with top artists if it wasn't for that statement she decided.
You can talk yourself into and out of anything like that.
That's why you have to live with integrity, because if you try and guide your life by consequentialism, all you'll be is paralyzed.
Yeah, that's true. Right?
I mean, oh, well, if I do this, then that bad thing could happen.
Or if I talk about this, then that bad.
Oh, you know, if it wasn't for me talking about this topic, well, because I took on race and IQ, I don't get a TV show.
Or, you know, well, the reason I'm doing so successful is because I talked about race.
And you can go any way you want, but you simply talk about what matters to you, what's important, and what is true.
And when it comes to art, I guess I question whether you could even be a good artist if you're self-censoring.
Because artistic creation for me is a lot to do with practice and relaxation.
So you practice and you practice and you practice.
And then, in the moment, you simply relax and create.
And the people who are the most creative I've always seen Have had a lot of preparation, and they're very relaxed in the moment.
There's some great live sets of...
So Queen... There's a sort of copycat Bohemian Rhapsody song called The Prophet Song, written by Brian May, which comes from a dream that he had.
And in it, there's kind of a semi-operatic piece, and it's not as flamboyant and creative as what's in Bohemian Rhapsody, but it's not bad.
And they used to do this...
I guess in the 70s, they used to do this live set of playing The Prophet song, which is a...
I mean, other than White Man, it's a hell of a nodule-busting song to sing and perform.
But in the middle, Freddie Mercury would just stand on a stage.
I don't know, like 30,000 people in the audience, sometimes even more.
He'd just stand on the stage, and he would sing or scat with a loopback.
And it's amazing stuff.
To me, I just, I find that jaw-dropping.
Just, he'd stand there with a microphone for like five minutes, seven minutes, sometimes even longer, and just, like just harmonize with himself and play around vocally and so on.
And Rock in Rio Blues is also where he does a falsetto.
It's just different every night and amazing stuff.
He just stands there with a microphone and just plays around.
He's very relaxed when he does it.
And every now and then, he'll just do something kind of funny.
Because he's doing a round...
At one point, he just went into Frere Jacques.
I think he was in Japan. And because he's harmonizing with himself because of the loopback, it's just an amazing thing.
Now, of course, he'd been singing since he was a little kid.
I actually dated a woman who was...
Whose family was friends with Freddie Mercury's family and said that the guy was singing loud like when he was a toddler, singing like crazy in the bathroom.
And so he had been doing this stuff for, you know, by that point, I don't know, 25 years, 30 years and so on, just harmonizing and playing around and so on.
So he could go up and stand. So he had huge amounts of preparation and then he's just kind of relaxed and having fun.
And sometimes when he's playing with the audience, he'll sort of sit down and say, all right, let's do a little Aretha Franklin, because he loved Aretha Franklin as a singer.
And just sitting and engaging with the audience, but he'd been doing it for, of course, forever.
And so that's sort of an example of a huge amount of preparation, and then just relaxing into creation.
And That is a very powerful combination.
A lot of people think creativity is like squeezing that last bit of toothpaste out of the tube.
But if you're in that place, you're not being creative.
You're straining. And creation is about preparation and relaxation.
And so I guess the reason I'm talking about this, Daniel, is because if you're self-censoring, you can't be in that relaxed place.
And if you can't be in that relaxed place, I don't know how you can create.
So I guess I'm going to amend my play it safe at the beginning to say, don't, because that's being committed.
You make some very good points, and I would have to agree with you.
Luckily for me, I'm not a vocalist, so hopefully I don't have to write any lyrics and just avoid interviews.
Maybe, yeah. All right.
Well, thanks a million. Move on to the next caller, but I appreciate the call.
Okay, up next we have Ricardo.
Ricardo wrote in and said, That's from Ricardo.
Hey Ricardo, how you doing?
Hi Stefan.
The problem, first of all, I think is the language that you're using.
A basic economic safety net.
And so if you take away a safety net, then by implication, that is a dangerous policy, right?
Because you wouldn't want to learn how to be a trapeze artist.
And operate without a safety net and so on, right?
So, what are ways in which a free society could provide a safety net to people?
Well, first of all, what does a safety net even mean?
And secondly, how could a free society provide those?
What would you say? The way I look at it is we want to get the maximum progress in society.
So, Wait, wait, sorry.
I'm sorry to interrupt you when I just asked you, but that's...
I'm not sure what that means.
We want to get the maximum progress in society?
I'm not sure what that means.
Progress for some people is disaster for others.
Like if you and I set up a competing restaurant...
Where kind of only one of us is going to survive, then your success is my failure.
I think we want to do good, not look at outcomes.
So we want to respect property rights.
We want to respect the non-aggression principle.
I don't really care what happens from there.
I don't know about, I think the result will be progress, but I don't think that we should aim at maximum progress, which is impossible to measure in any objective sense.
Well, I know that you were about to say that, because I've listened to a lot of your material.
And I understand that.
I think completely free society and no government is the most ethical thing.
Because that is just complete freedom.
It's like perfect freedom.
But I just don't understand why we would do that if the outcome isn't better than Having a government that works or having policies that better the situation of people.
So that's why I'm talking about maximum progress, because it's nice to have good medicine, it's nice to have technology, and we don't know if we would get that with a completely free society.
Okay, so let's look at Europe at the moment.
So, the majority of people in Europe do not want mass immigration from the third world.
And they have voted sometimes to try, like politicians have offered to stop that, right?
Even Angela Merkel in Germany said multiculturalism hasn't worked, integration isn't working, I'm going to solve this, I'm going to fix it, and people have voted in the UK for Brexit, which doesn't seem to be happening.
So on what grounds can the people make the government follow their own will?
The government has all the guns, the government has all the weapons, the government is in control of the legal system.
So let's say the government starts doing something that you don't like.
Let's say that you don't want the government to be able to print and control its own currency.
What can you do? Yeah, of course there are downsides.
But why do people want to go to Europe?
Why does Africa want to go to Europe?
Because of the welfare state.
Because Europe is vastly more advanced.
And because of the welfare state, yes, that's an incentive.
No, no, it's the welfare state.
But don't you think someone in a war-torn country I think that's better to go into, like, Germany, where the economy is a lot better.
No, it's because of the welfare state.
Because the vast majority of migrants from the Third World who come to Germany, let's say, the vast majority of them end up on welfare, seemingly permanently, and they go through other countries in order to get to Germany, which has one of the more generous welfare states.
So they're not coming for economic opportunity, they're coming for free money, right?
I mean, that we know empirically.
If we didn't have the welfare state, you would still get some people going to Europe and probably no one from Europe going to war-torn countries like, I don't know, Congo or whatever.
That's because Europe is more advanced.
Why is it more advanced?
No, but they wouldn't go to Europe if they couldn't succeed.
So somebody with an IQ of 85 Would probably not go to Europe because there wouldn't be any job for that person.
Because there are already people in Germany with an IQ of 85 and there aren't many jobs for people with an IQ of 85 or 80 or whatever, right?
And so if you are going to come to a country and if people know the truth about your religion, if people know the truth about your culture, if people know the truth Then they'll be much less likely to hire you, much less likely to offer you various economic opportunities.
You don't speak the language, you don't understand the culture, and you would be at great risk of a rational legal system actually prosecuting you for the crimes that you may end up committing.
So, I don't think in the absence of a welfare state, you're going to have the same problem with mass migration.
Okay, but don't you think that the reason why Europe is more advanced is because of the better organization and the stable governments that it had for centuries and centuries?
That's what Africa doesn't have.
It doesn't have a stable government, it doesn't have The crime is very high, that doesn't have police, so there can be no investment because there cannot be any safety in the return of the investment.
The organization is helping, even though we know that the government is Unbelievably corrupt and during the centuries has done hideous things.
But don't you know that the existence of an organization is better than just basically anyone by themselves?
For example, you talk about private police.
Don't you think that people with different ideals will have different police fighting each other, creating malicious and just chaos?
We had no government.
Dude, this is so annoying when people do this, just trying to give you the objective feedback.
So I give you an argument and then you go off on some other tangent and you bring up like five other major points in a row without giving me a chance to give you feedback.
That's not how debate works.
If I make a point, you can make a counterpoint, but going off on some other tangent and then just bringing up issue after issue after issue is just a wall of noise.
That's not how we can actually have a conversation about these matters.
So with regards to Africa, well, one of the major problems in Africa is it's generally a low IQ population.
These are just the basic facts, right?
If you look at Germany and you look at Japan, they were bombed into oblivion in the Second World War.
Within a couple of years after the war, they had rebuilt their societies.
And so the problem is, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa, you've got a population with an average IQ in the 70s.
You can't have a rational, free, empirically free market society with that level of IQ because there's very little capacity to defer gratification.
There's a lot of tribalism.
There's little capacity to understand and process vast abstractions like non-aggression principles, property rights, and so on.
So it's not just that Europe has magically had these stable governments, for want of a better phrase, and Lord knows they haven't been particularly stable since the fall of the Roman Empire, but It's not just a matter of, well, in Europe there are these stable governments which Africa mysteriously doesn't have.
The reality is that Europeans were the Africans According to some theories, who lost.
The Africans who were pushed out of Africa and ended up having to wander into the northern wastelands and where the less intelligent people died off because there was brutal and bitter winters.
And the progression and development of higher IQ societies in both Siberia and in Europe as a whole, which resulted in the East Asians and the Caucasians, was the result of unbelievable levels of suffering over tens of thousands of years.
While life in Africa was relatively easy because there wasn't that harsh and brutal winter.
And so it's not just a matter of, well, there are these stable governments and there are these not stable governments.
It is a matter of very, very different societies based upon very, very different people.
And so with an understanding about all of this, The idea that a free society would say, sure, that would be excellent.
Let us bring in a million people from sub-Saharan Africa, whether it's Japan or whether it's China or whether it's Europe and so on.
I don't see that happening.
The basic issue that we have is a lack of knowledge, a lack of understanding.
And this idea that you're going to bring these cultures, these ethnicities into your country, And they're just going to magically work and integrate and everything's going to be better than if you didn't.
Well, that is a big challenge.
And we have the example of America to see that.
That in America, 400 years.
Now, this was a forced integration and it was slavery and it was immoral and it was wrong and all that.
But 400 years later, I mean...
There's still massive conflicts, massive disparities in crime rates, massive disparities in income, and the average IQ of the African-American doesn't seem to be able to move much past the mid-80s.
And so we just need facts in order to be able to make these decisions.
And right now, The collectivists, the leftists, one might say those hell-bent on destroying the West, are actively attacking people who bring basic scientific and biological facts to people's attention.
And I want people in Africa to have a great life.
I want people in Europe to have a great life.
And the best way we can do that is to actually talk about facts rather than fantasies.
So with regards to private police...
I don't know. Why on earth would people pay private police who would end up in gun battles with other private police?
I wouldn't want that. You wouldn't want that.
So as customers, we would demand that that not be the way that they resolve disputes, right?
I wouldn't want people shooting randomly in neighborhoods and trying to overtake each other.
So it's sort of like saying, well, you know, why don't people just bring...
No, forget that. Okay, so let's just say that you wouldn't want it and I wouldn't want it and therefore it would not be something that the market would provide, which is the sort of random gun battle scenario that you're talking about.
With regards to the Africans, isn't it possible that their lower IQ caused the fact that they don't have a, let's say, somewhat stable organization or respect of the law and stuff like that?
Well, no, because we know that from Hispanics in the United States, that the Hispanics, which have IQs in the high 80s, That Jason Richwine has done this.
It was his thesis which got him into some trouble for a courageous turn.
And his thesis followed Hispanic IQ after the Hispanics came to America for, I think, two to three, three generations, I believe.
And his conclusion, what he found, was that even after moving to America, and America was a society founded by some of the highest IQ people in human history.
Like, let's be straight, but the founding fathers were almost, to a man, stone geniuses in a wide variety of fields.
And so you had a society founded by some of the most brilliant people in human history.
You had Hispanics move into that society.
And three generations later, despite all of the advantages in education and nutrition and opportunity in someone, well, the IQs hadn't really budged.
Thus leading the conclusion that Jason Richwine came to, and please read his thesis, I'm paraphrasing.
But he said that the low IQ in the Hispanic population was effectively permanent.
So, no, it is not an environmental thing.
No, no, I'm not talking about an environmental thing.
I'm saying their IQ is what caused the fact that it don't have a good organization, which is the same in the U.S. because the African-American population has less respect for the law and their neighborhood are chaos.
So, maybe Like a government or any form of organization is the result of a higher IQ. Because you can see Europe, America, Japan, China, they all had strong governments.
And I am not advocating for a centralized government because I want the government to be as slim as possible.
But something that guarantees The respect of the law and the application of intelligent policies, I think is the basic that we need.
And after that, it should be free.
Well, but this is a wish list.
It's not an argument. You know, you would say, I would like the government to be small, right?
Well, the American government was founded as a very, very small government.
It was tiny, tiny, tiny.
There was no income tax, the government didn't control currency, there was no sales tax, there were a couple of tariffs on goods and that's about it.
And what happened? It didn't take more than two to three generations for America to, the American government, to break out of the bounds of the Constitution, to start meddling in the Middle East, to start, well actually meddling in the Middle East started under Jefferson.
And there was a giant civil war, and then there was conscription into the First World War, there was of course the Federal Reserve before the First World War, there was massive intervention into the economy in the 1920s, there was even more massive downright communistic intervention into the economy in the 1930s, and then you had...
The Second World War, and then you had the Cold War, and then you had massive interventions into the Middle East, the funding of jihadis, and then you had the invasion of Iraq.
And I mean, this is a huge and brutal government that grew out of something that was tiny.
So how are you going to stop it?
How are you going to stop it from growing?
Of course, the centralization of power will always yield corruption.
And I think that's the battle.
But I just don't see how not having it at all would be better than what we got.
But no, I don't see how is not an argument.
Like the fact that you can't picture what a free society looks like, Is not an argument.
That's like me putting my hands over my eyes in a game of hide-and-seek while standing in the middle of a well-lit room saying, la-la-la, you can't see me.
It's like the fact that you can't see it is not an argument.
And who cares whether you or I or anyone can see it?
What matters is, is it morally consistent?
Is it good? Well, the non-aggression principle...
Respect for property rights is good.
And the consistent application of those means a society without a government because the government by its nature violates the non-aggression principle, violates property rights.
So saying, well, I can't see what happens when we do good is not an argument.
Is it good? Is it moral?
Is it right? Is it consistent?
Your capacity to envision it is not relevant.
But the two principles that I vastly agree on, the principle of non-aggression and the respect of property rights, isn't that also a wish list?
Because how can you see that happening?
It can never happen.
It's just, okay, let's say tomorrow we have no government.
I think just the murders and the people destroying and stealing is going to go through the roof.
I agree that it's ethical if people were amazingly virtuous.
How can it be better than a government that's fair, even though with some corruption?
Well, I think that if we get rid of the government, everything will be wonderful.
You think that if we get rid of the government, everything will be terrible.
Do you see how that's not an argument from either of us?
Okay. I think good.
You think bad.
Okay. I like apples.
You like oranges. I mean, these aren't arguments.
The fear of consequences, you understand, is not an argument.
Saying everything will be better, saying everything will be worse, it doesn't matter.
It doesn't matter. What matters is, are we consistent and are we philosophically in the right?
Nobody can predict the consequences of freedom.
Not you, not I, not anyone.
So if you're just raising the ooga-booga scare man of, well, it's the purge, it's mass murder, it's disaster, it's...
You don't know!
You have no idea what's going to happen when we're free.
And you can say the same thing about everything.
Well you see if we end slavery we're all going to starve to death because nobody's going to pick any food.
If we reduce illegal immigration people are going to starve to death because food's going to get so expensive because we have to pay people more to pick it.
If we get Rid of the government!
Disaster will happen! Right?
I mean, that's not arguments.
Now, you can say you have a personal anxiety or fear about the end of government, and you can say that I, Ricardo, am very anxious about the end of government.
Let's talk about that.
That's an emotional subjective experience.
But saying that somehow you can see through the tunnel of time as to what happens in a free society, is not an argument and it also shows a distinct lack of self-knowledge.
I don't think you even know that you just feel anxious about it and you're imagining that this is some sort of objective judgment on the future.
Okay, let's say tomorrow there is not government.
How do you... are you gonna stop all of the things that are inevitably gonna happen?
Isn't the law the reason why there are so few murders?
So few murders?
I'm not sure what you mean. Have you not seen American foreign policy for the past 60 years, which has resulted in, some estimates say, 20 million people killed?
What are you talking about, no murders?
It is government. Governments kill their own citizens at the rate of a quarter of a billion people every hundred years.
Have you not heard of communism?
Have you not heard of socialism?
Have you not seen what's going on in Venezuela?
You think governments prevent murder?
Governments are the greatest enactors of murder in human history.
Yeah. I'm not talking when it goes wrong.
I'm not talking when it becomes a dictatorship.
Talking like the governments that have let progress happen.
Yeah, like I mean, if you look in England, immigration policy has directly resulted in the mass torture and rape of tens of thousands of little white British girls.
But we need a government, you see, because otherwise there might be rapists.
But how can you think that the reason why we are so advanced in the West is not because of the presence of some form of organization, governments, or anything of this matter?
Because the West has progressed because it's had the smallest government.
And so, that's the reality.
And so, if you want to look empirically, smaller governments equal more progress.
Therefore, no government equals the most progress.
You know, smaller cancer equals more health.
Therefore, no cancer equals the most possible health relative to cancer.
I agree. I agree that the smaller governments are better than the bigger government because the accumulation of power is detrimental.
I just don't think that no government would be better because there wouldn't be For example, the example of the police, if I want some policies or some aspect in the world to be respected, and some other group of people, or one person, whatever, wants otherwise, this is where I think the clash of two polices.
Okay, so give me an example.
There is a dispute on private property with my neighbor.
I think this square meter of land is mine.
He thinks otherwise. How do you settle that?
Wait, we have to have wars and mass immigration and massive national debt and the destruction of children's minds through endless indoctrination.
We have to have all of these massive disasters, the destruction of the family, single motherhood, the war on drugs.
We have to have all of this because you can't figure out how two neighbors might resolve the dispute over a square meter of land.
Really? That's a simple example.
Give me a good example then.
Don't give me a simple example.
I'm not a simple man. Give me a good example.
Let's say someone inherits land and I think a land of one A trillion meters.
And another guy thinks it's his.
Now they're ready to use guns.
And there is the whole family, like 100 people fighting each other.
Wait, wait. Hang on.
Now we're 100 people fighting each other?
Okay. So let's say that you and I are brothers.
And our father...
Gives me the land, but you think the Father should have given you the land, or you think that the real intention of the will was to give you the land, so you and I are in a dispute over land.
Is that what you mean? Yeah.
Okay, okay. So, Ricardo, what happens now if this occurs?
That I will use force in order to get my land.
Right now, you would use force to get your land?
I will occupy the land and it will escalate.
Really? You wouldn't go to the courts at all?
No? Right now with the government, yes.
Okay, see, that's why I'm talking about right now.
That's why I use the phrase right now repeatedly.
So right now, you would go to the court system, right?
Yes. Now, have you ever tried to use the court system to effect complex property right arbitration?
No. Have you ever known anyone who's tried to use the existing government court system to arbitrate complex property disputes?
Yeah, but I don't know the details.
Okay. Do you know if that person was happy and satisfied with the efficiency and effectiveness of the government court system in arbitrating complex property disputes?
Okay, so I have relatives that are in the court system and they all say it's slow, it's inefficient, it's dreadful and I know about this.
Okay, so the existing way of arbitrating that dispute is terrible.
It will take you years and years and years and hundreds of thousands of dollars or more to try and maybe get some kind of resolution.
Yes. Okay, so that's terrible, right?
And particularly because it means that poor people or people who are middle class have effectively no access to arbitration.
Yeah, there is a high bar for it.
Okay, so what exists is terrible, right?
Is that fair to say?
Sure, but isn't that better than nothing?
What do you mean nothing? Isn't that better than...
Oh, so your argument is if the government doesn't provide it, then it can't possibly be provided by anyone.
You cannot have it free, sorry, you cannot have it private, because there is going to be interests from different sides.
So what the government should be is disinterest A disinterested party that wants fairness over two people that have their own interests.
Why would the government be disinterested?
Is the government not composed of people who are self-interested?
Yeah, there's gonna be interest, but they don't care about who gets the land.
It's just the following of the law.
The government doesn't care who gets the land.
And the lawyers who run the system don't care how much they get to bill or how long it takes, right?
Yeah, because they're private.
So they want to get the most profit.
Now, you do... So, of course, the government often does care who gets the land.
And we know that because sometimes people donate money to the government or help particular politicians out in return for favorable concessions from the government in terms of property rights.
rights.
We know that because there was the Clinton Foundation where people got like Bill and Hillary Clinton got hundreds of thousands of dollars, sometimes up to three quarters of a million dollars for making half hour speeches to people who wish to gain particular advantage from the State Department.
And lo and behold, I guess their speaking skills and abilities just crumbled right after Hillary left office to the point where she couldn't get five bucks to bring you a latte at Starbucks.
So the idea that the government is just some neutral arbiter is false.
And And of course, the whole point is that because it's a monopoly process to a large degree, the lawyers set it up to the point where they can ensure maximum billability rather than that which is efficient to people.
That's one aspect. The other thing, too, is that where you say it's impossible for it to be done privately, I mean, I'm a little surprised, I suppose, that you would say that because I don't know if you've ever researched this or looked it up.
But there are already thousands and thousands of private arbitration services in most Western countries.
And they work very well.
And they're there because the government court system is inaccessible and so inefficient that very few but the most powerful can use it.
So yeah, there already are these private arbitration systems.
Now, in terms of how it works in a totally free society, Well, no contract would be considered valid unless it contained within it an agreement that you would abide by a third-party arbitration In the event of disagreement.
So if our father left land, let's say to me or to you or whoever, there was some dispute over the land that he left.
Well, embedded in that contract in a free society would be, and we see this all the time, you see this, like if you go skiing, then you see when you're taking a pee, you see like the list of things about skiing and it says, you know, if you have any disagreements, we agree that we're going to be judged by this set of laws and so on,
right? And so when you have any kind of enforceable contract in a free society, in that enforced contract, it would say, well, if Ricardo and Steph have a disagreement about the interpretation of this will, they both agree to abide by the decision of this ABC arbitration company or whoever it is.
And if ABC arbitration company is not available, they'd be like, I don't know, five in descending order of preference for whatever, some go out of business or who knows what, right?
And so we would agree to do that.
And the only way we would be able to take occupation, in other words, the only way that our claim to the land would be considered legitimate by any arbitration organization would be if we obeyed the stipulation set forth in the will created by our father.
Now, if we just said, well, I'm going to take the land anyway, and to hell with all of this, okay, well then...
Economic ostracism kicks in.
Now, economic ostracism occurs when your banks say, okay, here's your money in a bag on your doorstep.
We don't want to do business with you anymore.
And the electricity company says, oh, you break contracts arbitrarily.
Well, you're now a threat to society.
We don't want to have anything to do with you.
We're turning off your electricity.
And we're turning off You're water.
And, oh, by the way, you can't use the roads anymore, so good luck getting around.
And the bus company won't take you, and the airplane company won't take you.
And economic ostracism kicks in to the point where you either begin to conform again to society's reasonable expectations, or you have to abandon society completely and go live on a mountaintop in Tibet somewhere, in which case, who cares what you're doing because you're no longer affecting the society that you live in.
Economic ostracism is an incredibly powerful tool.
We also know that because it's what the left uses right now as an extrajudicial attack upon people whom they disagree with, right?
They try to get them fired. They try to destroy their reputation.
They try to destroy their source of income.
It happens regularly. They will phone people up and say, did you know that you're employing this terrible person who says all these terrible things?
And they try to enact economic ostracism, and it's very, very effective.
And I've heard this from people in Europe who say, even if I'm not going to run afoul of very murky hate speech laws, I also might get fired, I might not get a job, and so on.
And this is one reason why Lindsay Shepard is, I think, suing Wilfrid Laurier University, right?
She's the TA who showed the video of Jordan Peterson.
Because if you have scandal around you and if you've been censured or if you've had any problems with the administration, it's much less likely that you're going to be able to get some kind of job.
So economic ostracism is incredibly powerful and it's how society should punish people who don't conform to basic contract norms and this is how things work.
Would work and you'd have an appeal process and, you know, all of the kind of safeguards.
But yeah, if you were found to be guilty, then you would be persona non grata or an unperson with regards to economic cooperation.
Can't even buy groceries. Can't, right?
I mean, people have to want to do business with you in order for you to survive in a modern economy, in a modern society, in any society, really.
And especially if you have kids, too.
I mean, what if the doctors don't want to see you if you've broken?
Like, it's just not worth it. So there's so many ways that society can enforce basic contract norms or basic legal norms without requiring the always disastrous and always malignant creation of a state.
Okay. That makes a lot of sense, and it does.
I can see how it can work out.
However, You want to eliminate authoritative laws, like the government laws, in favor of normative laws, so people judging you, or ostracism,
economic ostracism, and you think that the social judgment Is stronger and more reliable and less corrupt than the government judgment?
Because what if everyone just hates, I don't know, let's say hates black people or something like that?
No one will serve you.
Just because they hate you. Oh, you mean like if people really start disliking white males and won't hire them and it becomes economically very difficult, if not downright impossible to hire white males?
You mean something like that?
Like if there's a kind of bigotry in the marketplace where white males aren't going to be hired?
Or maybe let's say you're an East Asian and you want to get into college.
And the colleges discriminate against you because you're East Asian and they want to equalize their numbers relative to Hispanics and blacks.
Do you mean that kind of stuff?
See, that's already happening. So your ooga-booga of what about racism?
Well, that's already happening.
That's actually already encoded.
In legal standards at the moment.
Or what if there's some kind of situation where you can be accused for crime and you don't even get to face your accuser and you can suffer enormously negative consequences from it?
Well, that was Title IX. And that was the shadow of accusations of sexual misconduct that hung over males in colleges for many, many years until recently.
So this idea that, well, what if these bad things, well, they're already happening.
And so I'll take my chances as they go forward.
Okay, so the basic argument is that since concentration of power or government, it will undeniably and inevitably become corrupt.
You want to remove it.
Yeah, because corruption, the only cure for corruption is competition.
Because corruption is expensive.
Right? I mean, if I am stealing from, let's say I'm some employee and I'm stealing from the store, well, the store has to raise its prices to cover that.
And so they have a strong incentive to find the thief and to deal with it.
And so corruption is very expensive, right?
And so there's no cure for corruption when you have a coerced monopoly, an enforced monopoly.
There is a cure for corruption in the free market.
It's called competition, which is you have to root out and deal with corruption because you can't force your customers to buy your services.
Now, the government can force you to pay for court services, even if you're never going to end up using them.
But arbitration companies can't force you to pay for their services, which means they have to be They have to be cheap, they have to be effective, they have to be efficient, and finally, for the first time in human history, the poor and the lower middle classes could actually get access to effective arbitration, and that's something really to be wished.
Okay, so just for my sanity, would you think that a perfect government, theoretically, so an organization that sets disputes, protects contracts, and doesn't have corruption, It would be better than no government at all.
Okay, can you define for me what would be moral slavery?
No, slavery isn't moral.
And the government violates the non-aggression principle by its definition.
And so when you're saying a perfect government, you basically are saying moral slavery.
And you might as well say to me, well, how much will you pay me for a square circle?
It's like, well, such a thing doesn't exist by definition.
And therefore when you talk about a perfect government, you're talking about a moral government, a perfectly moral government whose existence immediately violates property rights and the non-aggression principle and therefore it is an immoral entity in its foundation.
So you're proposing a contradiction which I can't address.
Yeah, I agree.
So there cannot be any government without the violation of the non-aggression principle?
That is correct. Okay.
Because governments force you to pay and then forcibly prevent competition in various areas.
And so they can't be moral entities.
It's like saying loving rape.
Like it's just one of these justifiable theft.
You know what I mean? Like you can't jam these concepts together and have them stay comprehensible.
Okay, so I fully understand perspective, but could you enlighten me on, for example, how would food regulation work?
How would construction regulation work?
And also, to get back to the safety net, what I meant is we have a distribution of IQ and talents, okay?
By giving the opportunities to the one they deserve would be better than just randomly having people that can access the education.
Because there is a bigger randomness element that would stifle progress.
Yeah, that's three questions.
You mean education?
Yeah, education.
If it's hard to access, you will only get people that are basically rich or were born in favored condition to attend college.
Do you feel that people are being educated in college at the moment?
I'm talking about the arts in particular.
Do you think they're being educated or do you think they're being indoctrinated?
I think they're being scammed.
Right. So are you saying that you wish for this scam to continue?
Yeah, but then you're dumb because you went to lesbian dancing.
And for example, that's why I wanted to talk about the college experience at first.
I have had better conversation about politics and whatnot with my department of data science.
Like in a pub with a beer than with people in politics degrees or sociology degrees.
It was absolutely impossible to communicate because everything was labeled as, you know, the drill, racist and homophobic.
And no logic, no science at all.
It's like they're trying to avoid it.
And everything is based on emotion and super arbitrary concepts.
So education, particularly higher education in the West at the moment, is terrible.
So what do we have to lose?
Let's say someone is a genius in data science, but is absolutely atrocious in having connection or was born poor and whatever.
We lost that person.
It's like the Formula One.
Wait, why would that person...
I'm sorry. If someone is a genius, why would we lose that person?
What do you mean? Let's say, for example, you told the boss about your experience, right?
That you were very disadvantaged and then you had success in life.
But what if they...
Like, this person is a genius in data science, but it's very bad that everything that concerns life and, like, that's his only skill.
But it will never get to that point.
So we lost someone that could have made a big progress.
No, I'm sorry.
Let me ask you something, Ricardo.
Have you ever run a business and hired people?
I know about my dad's business.
No, but have you ever run a business and hired people?
The responsibility was never on me.
I just know some about it.
Well, was your dad looking for talented people all the time?
He was looking for probably honest and easy to teach and not dumb people.
Yeah, he was looking for talented people all the time.
And if there's someone who's a genius who can provide value, then that person will be hired because businesses like to make money.
And so if someone who is a genius and can make something much more efficient or much faster or much better, you'll hire that person.
I mean, it's the businesses that want this kind of talent and they're always on the lookout for talent.
You know, there's tons of rappers and there's tons of musicians and tons of actors who come from dirt poor backgrounds.
But people are always looking for talented, charismatic, attractive people to make music, to make movies with and so on, right?
Thank you.
Oh, sure. So, people are always looking for talent.
And you don't need to go to school to be talented.
You don't need to go to school to be worthwhile.
If somebody's brilliant in computers, then what they're going to do is they're going to beg, borrow, or buy a computer, and they're going to take it apart.
They're going to figure out how it works.
They're going to learn how to program it.
I mean, I know all of this because that's what I did.
Yeah. And I came from a dirt poor background and ended up being the chief technical officer on a software company that I co-founded and grew to a fairly significant size.
Nobody ever said, well, where's your computer science degree?
I started coding when I was 11.
So there's my computer science degree, bitches, not you, right?
So nobody cares.
If you can make money, if you can build stuff that people want, the code that I wrote ended up being sold for a million dollars a pop at times.
So, yeah, I was valuable and investors saw it and the person that we ended up hiring as the chief executive officer saw it and the board saw it and so on, right?
Like after I left, they were begging me to come back just for three days a week for $150,000 a year.
I said no because I ended up writing books, which I'm very glad I did.
But... I didn't get educated in computer science.
I taught myself and did very, very well.
I mean, you say, well, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, these people all dropped out of college.
What the hell? I mean, they didn't want to go to college, right?
They wanted to start their businesses and get going.
What the hell does college and education in this have to do with it, right?
With increased competition with other governments, this would even be more prominent.
Okay, so just about the, for example, this is something that I cannot ever explain with a completely free society.
Food regulation, pollution, or construction.
I'm sorry, food regulation and what?
Food regulation or pollution or construction regulation.
Because these three have something in common, which is the bad aspects of it will only manifest After a lot of time.
So if someone builds you a house without any code and no government rules and stuff like that, they will make the most profit possible, right?
And he doesn't care if it's unstable and after 15 years it will collapse on your head.
So this is something that I cannot...
I don't see how it could work without regulations.
Okay, that's a fair question, Ricardo.
So, let me ask you this.
So, let's say I'm selling you a house and you're concerned that it's going to collapse because I use cheap materials.
What would you want me to do to put your mind at ease?
I would like to...
To have some experts that don't have any interest, that don't have a monetary interest in the material being cheap and stuff like that, to see the house and run some tests and tell me, yes, this was done.
Right. So there would be a third party that we would both agree on, who would be independent of the contractor, who would review and inspect the house to ensure that it was built with quality materials.
That's certainly one option.
Look at that. We just solved the whole issue, right?
And if the house broke down against the judgment of that home inspector, then the home inspection company would pay for it to be repaired, right?
Yeah. So there we go.
There's another option too, which is that you would buy or you would have included a warranty.
So the warranty would be for like 25 years for structural.
You know, this happens with cars already 100,000 kilometers or miles.
And, you know, you've got one for the powertrain.
You've got one for the... The paint or, you know, whatever it is, right?
And so you would have warranties and you would buy those warranties or those warranties would be guaranteed by the company who built the house.
And that way, if they built cheaply, they would end up paying for the repair, which is more expensive than building well, right?
So there's another way to solve the problem.
Okay, so you're saying that Instead of the government doing that, it will be private.
What does the government do right now?
Let's say that the government has given a license to some company and that company still builds fairly badly.
Okay, then you have to face the daunting task of trying to prove your issue in the government court, which is going to take you years and tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars and be generally inaccessible to the average person.
So right now, it doesn't work.
Here in Freedom, there's a chance it could work, right?
So you have to start thinking more like you're a customer, right?
Which is okay. I want clean food, right?
And so how do you get clean food?
Well, first of all, grocery stores guarantee clean food.
And if they don't provide you clean food, in other words, let's say you get sick with something, then they say, okay, we'll pay you half a million dollars if you get sick.
Or, you know, and it's verified that it was our food that made you sick.
You just have guarantees.
You just have money put in escrow to pay out to people who you violate.
Because it strikes me as kind of weird that people say, well, what about food safety and food effectiveness and food nutritional value in the absence of the government?
It's like, you know, the government food pyramid is just bought out by the farmers who are subsidized through force by the taxpayers, right?
The farmers want to sell a lot of wheat.
And so what do you get? You get bread at the top of the food pyramid, right?
Or, you know, it's just a bunch of garbage.
And people end up following these diets that are pretty bad for them.
And they end up feeling stupid and lethargic in the middle of the afternoon because they've overloaded on carbs because that's what the government told them was really, really great.
And fat is really, really bad.
Turns out fat is actually kind of good and bacon will kill you and eggs are terrible.
And it turns out that bacon and eggs are actually pretty good for you.
And carbs are the problem.
And it turns out, oh, we're going to raise taxes on sugar.
And what that means is now everybody uses high fructose corn syrup, which is basically like arsenic for your brain.
And so this idea that somehow we're kept safe by government and we're going to face this Wild West without the government, no.
It'll just be more effective and efficient.
And if a restaurant gets a reputation for putting out soup that makes people sick, well, they've just destroyed the value of their business now, haven't they?
So they'd have insurance against putting out food that was bad.
So the insurance company would pay for the medical bills of someone they poisoned.
And the insurance company would say, okay, you have to do this, this, and this, and this, and this to get your insurance.
And we're going to send in inspectors randomly to go and make sure that you have complied to keep your food clean.
Otherwise, we're not going to insure you because it's no good, right?
And then you don't get that little stamp on the front of your restaurant saying this restaurant is insured by ABC non-contamination company or something like that.
And then, you know, it's eat at your own risk, right?
So, there's so many different ways to solve these problems, right?
Okay. So, last question.
Let me give...
Sorry, let me just give you...
I'm sorry to interrupt, Ricardo.
Let me just give you one other brief one.
I got this question the other day from the son of a friend of mine.
And he said, well, what about worker safety?
And that's an interesting one.
Well, first of all, worker safety was improving long before the government got involved.
What happens is the free market is making everything better than the government jumps on and says, hey, look, we saved you.
So with regards to worker safety, what you want to do to make workers as safe as possible is to create as much demand as possible for workers.
The workers, right? As much demand for the workers as possible, so the workers get to pick and choose.
Now, workers generally want to work in the safest area.
But the funny thing is, and there's lots of other considerations, but here's one that I was talking about with him that I thought was worth repeating, which is this.
So let's say in the name of worker safety, you end up putting in a huge bunch of regulations and controls and requirements and so on that basically drives manufacturing jobs overseas.
What happens then? Well, the interesting thing is that the workers who now no longer have jobs, they become unemployed.
And what happens to unemployed people?
Well, they get depressed.
They will often gain weight.
They may get diabetes.
They might shoot themselves.
They might get addicted to alcohol.
They might get addicted to drugs.
They might smoke more or pick up smoking because they're so bored.
They might start to engage in dangerous activities because they're so bored and hopeless and understimulated.
They may end up beating up their wives out of frustrated and impotent rage and then they get thrown in jail where they get beaten up or raped.
And so this idea, well, we'll just keep people safe by passing a massive number of regulations is like, well, no, you're not keeping them safe because you're kicking them out of work.
And unemployment is kind of like an environmental toxin for a lot of people.
There is no magic wand that makes everything wonderful and safe.
Yeah, I can see that.
And I've seen this somewhat firsthand with some people.
And, you know, some people like the danger.
Some people like the danger.
Some people, you know, it's like that turtle from Finding Nemo.
You got serious thrill issues, dude.
You know, some people, they love working as lumberjacks and hacking down trees with giant chainsaws.
They love working on power life.
They just love that thrill. And they also like The extra pay.
Like we had a caller called in some time back ago.
He loved working on high power lines.
Got a huge amount of pay. Loved the excitement.
Loved the thrill. I mean, there are people who want to run into burning buildings.
You know what I mean? Like, I want to be a firefighter.
I want to run into a burning building.
There are SWAT teams.
There are cops who go undercover.
There are people who just love that kind of thrill and they're well paid for it.
Am I going to say, no, you can't, right?
There are people who play football.
People who play football.
I mean, the number of people I've talked to over my life who were like, oh yeah, you know, I got to college on a football scholarship and then I got squished sideways by someone half the size of a Maltese bull and basically my toe and knee cartilage squirted out of my nose and I've been walking with a limp ever since.
It's like, yeah, it's a tough game.
It's a brutal game. Try Australian rules rugby, which is basically no rules rugby, and they don't even have padding or helmets.
Because they're Australians. Looking forward to seeing it, mate.
But, yeah.
I mean, people take huge risks.
I mean, if you look at people like Michael Jackson and Prince, Michael Jackson ended up with basically deformed feet and huge body dysmorphia and anorexia and constant pain and, you know, from so much dancing.
And he ended up on these...
He couldn't sleep and...
I don't know what some horse tranquilizers was like.
He was given some god-awful stuff that ended up killing him.
Look at Prince.
Prince had incredible hip pain from years and years of doing these crazy dances on stage.
And yeah, he also ended up...
What was it? Fentanyl or something like that he was addicted to.
And so... I don't know.
I'm not one to say, you know, I mean, I'm sure that for Prince and for Michael Jackson, performing in their prime was an incredible high.
And so they ended up broken down people addicted to painkillers, which ended up killing them.
I'm sorry about all of that, but I got to tell you, who hasn't fantasized about shredding an axe and singing at the top of your lungs in a very high falsetto in front of 20,000 or 50,000 or 100,000 screaming fans?
Is it worth it? I don't know.
Some days I can see that, some days I can't, but obviously they thought so to some degree.
Where's their worker safety, right?
I mean, people cheer that stuff.
Yeah. Well, the last question.
I've always been interested in finding the truth and science, and my IQ is around 115.
I tested many times with ments and stuff.
115 is not a genius, it's just a normal person's smart IQ, right?
So why Is it that there's so few people that I can have an honest, scientific, uninterested conversation that tries to lead to the truth?
For example, we had this conversation, right?
We both were prepared to concede something, of course, more on my part because I'm less knowledgeable than you, but we wanted to find some truth.
We wanted to have, like, Logical, fact-based conversation.
At least this was the intent, and I think we did.
But why is it so hard to find people like that?
Because I'm getting alienated.
I can't have a conversation at university.
I find so many people where if I even try to bring up anything logical but even slightly controversial, that's it.
It's done. The conversation is over.
Well, you're probably not going to find many very bright people in college these days.
It's just, I mean, we know that the net in college has been thrown very wide.
Lots of people are getting in and so everything gets dumbed down.
And the really great professors, with the exception of everyone who appears on this program, end up getting kind of frustrated and, you know, maybe ending up doing something else with their life.
But the other thing too, Ricardo, is you've got to focus on principles.
If you focus on principles, you'll be able to chat with a lot of people.
And if you focus on consequences and fear-mongering and, you know, like some of the stuff that happened in the first part of our conversation, then you're going to be annoying and alienating to people.
So if you just keep focusing on principles, then you can have very productive conversations with people.
And if you just say, well, do you say to people, do you think that it's better to use reason or force to resolve human disputes?
People are going to say Reason, for the most part.
Do you think that initiating the use of force to get your way is ever moral?
Well, probably people are going to say no.
And once you get them to agree on principles, then you can begin to use those principles to widen the gap and bring some light into their dank, state-generated black hole of ignorance and propaganda.
But start with principles And you'll end up with much more positive conversations.
If you start with the general goo of consequences and fantasy and so on, then it's not going to be very good.
You've got to find where your areas of agreement are and then widen it from there.
That's what I did in this conversation and that would be my suggestion about how to have better conversations with people.
Yeah, I should be more zen about it and just try to introspect and see if my opinions are actually very principled or if I'm a victim of some cognitive bias or something like that.
But I'm telling you, there are so many people that it's so hard to approach because they're so opinionated and so wrong and they don't care about the truth at all.
Good, well, don't talk to those people.
Yeah, which are like 50%.
Wow, you're actually in a pretty good environment.
If only 50% of the people aren't worth talking to you, that's pretty good.
So yeah, focus on the people you can talk to, and life's too short for those who don't.
All right, well, thanks for the call, Ricardo.
It was a great deal of fun, and I'll move on to the next call.
Bye, thanks. Alright, up next we have Ali.
He wrote in and said, That's from Ali.
Hey Ali, how are you doing tonight?
Hi, Stefan. I'm good.
Thank you for having me. Oh, it's my pleasure.
That's a very interesting question and I appreciate you calling in about it.
It's very interesting. Yes, absolutely.
I was just listening to my own question.
Again, I noticed this anxiety and triggering anxiety.
And that's true. That's what happens to me.
But I hate this word, anxiety and triggering anxiety.
It just reminds me of, I know, like trigger warnings and safe space.
You feel like a snowflake, right?
Exactly. I hate that.
Yeah, yeah. No, I get that.
I get that for sure.
It is one of the words that men in particular may dread a little bit more.
Because it feels, you know, kind of emasculating.
Absolutely. Yes, exactly.
Wait, are you saying you're a macho Muslim guy?
I've never heard of that before in my life.
What is macho? Macho is, you know, kind of chest-thumping, gotta-be-the-man kind of thing?
Well, I don't think that I will call myself that.
I would love to be one of those, but I'm not.
Oh, that's the aspiration.
Okay, got it. Now, tell me a little bit about...
I mean, we have your Adverse Childhood Experience score, and I'll just mention these, if that's all right.
So you have two...
Which is not too bad, but I'm not sure they're all equally weighted because you have molestation, sex, or rape, and no family love or support.
Now, with regards to spanking and discipline, yes, five to six times a year, barehand, mostly by my brother, occasionally my parents.
That's not a configuration I've seen before, but tell me a little bit about what happened in your childhood.
We'll talk about some of the negatives before we get to the positives, in particular this molestation, sex, and rape.
Yes. And no family love or support.
Again, let's start from this one, which is sensitive.
The molestation just happened just once.
And I guess I was like seven or eight.
I was out with my brother at the mall.
And I remember a man just molested me.
And I just kind of just got away.
And that was it.
And when we were coming back home, which was kind of far away from there, From the mall, when I was almost at the door of our house, I just saw the guy following me.
And that just sent a shiver down my spine.
And then that was it.
That's all I had.
How did he molest you?
Was it at the mall? In the washroom?
Yeah, at the mall, just like my backside.
That's it. No, no, no. Nothing much.
Because just the crowdiness of the whole mall, it took advantage.
Did he just grab your butt? Is that right?
Yeah, that's what happened.
Okay, got it. Now, sorry, when you saw him later, was it when you were close to being home?
Yes, yes. Our house, we had to just take a taxi and buses to home.
It wasn't straightforward walking there.
And I didn't notice him just following me in a bus or in a taxi.
But for some reason, when I was almost opening the door to go home, I just looked behind myself and I saw a guy far away just looking at me.
And it was just very It was scary, but that was it, and I didn't think much of it later.
Right, right. Okay. Now, what about the no family love or support?
Again, I'm not sure if, again, the questions are just often, and I'm not sure how often is often.
When, say, did you feel often unloved?
I don't think that I, maybe I felt like that, I don't know.
Couple of times a year and like our family being not very close like I have like five siblings and we are not particularly very close to each other we don't hate each other either and I was close to my sister and then like my brothers we're all right like we would get into disputes but we were all right they're just my older brother used to When we were younger,
very young, like maybe like before I turned 10, he used to just like be very bullish and I know like beat us or at least me sometime for whatever reason which I really don't remember but I'm sure it happened.
Again, no family love, I don't think that's what happened.
My parents did their best to grow as they were poor, and I was born in the middle of a war, and they did their best to just raise six children.
It's not easy to just give all of them a lot of attention.
I don't think that I was particularly unloved, but I don't think that I was particularly the center of attention because I was the middle child.
And middle child never gets enough attention.
It's not the oldest child who's in charge of everybody.
He's not the youngest child who is the adorable child.
It's just somebody in between who nobody knows that he's there.
That's the situation of my childhood.
That's why I don't understand.
I can't figure out what happened, why I am having these hard times.
I don't think that my childhood was traumatizing.
Right. I just wanted to point out that your family, your parents having six kids in a war zone, is that right?
War happened when I was born, which I was like the fourth child.
Right. Now, I just want to point that out.
First of all, it's interesting that it's not exactly breaking the stereotype of Muslim fertility, right?
But I also wanted to point out that for my friends in the West, Ali's parents had six children in a war zone.
So don't talk to me about, well, you know, I'm not sure it's the right time in my life to have kids, and I'm not sure I'm going to be able to afford everything that is, right?
Right. It will contribute to global warming.
I can't agree more with you.
Yeah. Just, you know, the Muslim commitment to just having kids is, you know, kind of a celebration of life in a lot of ways.
I agree. And, you know, that's...
Anyway. So, now, were you...
So, you say from a Muslim country, were you raised as a Muslim?
Yes, absolutely. And are you still a Muslim?
And I say that just because I don't think I am.
Yes, I don't think I am.
I'm like more agnostic.
I guess like my trajectory is towards like atheism.
So then when you were raised as a Muslim in this country, what was that like in terms of your education in the religious areas?
We had an education that was copied from Western education.
Not Western, this insane liberal indoctrinating education.
You mean the old-school stuff?
Yeah, very old-school.
I would say copied from the 90s, 20s, or 30s education system.
So, it was okay.
Of course, we were studying Quran and going to mosque.
Because I wanted to make my family and my parents happy, I would go to mosque.
I participated in these classes for Quran.
Because that was the only game we didn't have Debate clubs or dancing clubs or acting clubs that was the only game in the town so I would just go further ahead and because I guess I was the smartest at least in my class so that was the only stimulating thing to go after and I memorized half of Quran but I was never like Radical, like thinking about, yeah, like killing people is all right.
I was always like, what you would say, like a soft Muslim, that peaceful Muslims, they exist, but they're very rare, peaceful Muslims.
Well, I mean, my general thing would be that the Muslims that I've known who have high IQ, much like yourself, are generally of the opinion that it is a belief system that can help guide your life, but not something to kill or die for.
Whereas, of course, with a lot of the cousin marriage, the inbreeding, and so on, in other countries or other areas, well, you just don't get the same IQ. And unfortunately, the IQ can tend to land in that sort of sweet spot of criminality around 85.
And I think that's one of the big The degree of reformation that's possible until that's dealt with, I'm not sure, is hugely high.
Now, what about your relationship to non-Muslims when you were raised, I guess, to some degree in the mosque?
Because, I mean, you're in a non-Muslim country now, right?
At least non-majority Muslim.
So when you were raised, what was your relationship?
Well, what kind of relationship were you taught to have with non-Muslims?
Yeah, I don't know why you're asking this question, but because this is a very interesting question for me.
I had three or four Christian friends.
They are minority, but they are still there.
And I remember there's this Fatwa in Islam that you cannot shake hands with Christians because they are dirty.
It's just like saddest thing and stupidest thing about like...
They are people of the book, but they are not equals, right?
Yes. Yes, they are not equals.
And if you touch them, they're like as dirty as like blood, let's say, or like any other like dirty thing that like if you touch them, you cannot like pray.
And if you touch another stuff, those stuff will become dirty.
So it's very bad. So that was the thing that when I had to shake a hand with them, I had to go and wash my hands later on.
It's just sad, just teaching a child this.
When I now look back at this kind of teaching, it's just abhorrent.
But other than that, we had a very good relationship.
We were not the closest friends, but I liked them, and they were very civil and good, and we were very civil, and we were not particularly having any arguments about religion.
I don't think that's what teenagers do.
So I didn't have any problems with them other than this sad thing about handshaking and them being not clean.
But would you, I mean, other than that too, would there was in general the idea that you would have been superior based upon the religion that you had?
Yeah, and also, not only that, I was Shiite, and there were Sunni friends in my class, and I was trying my best to make them Shiites, to save their soul, what the Christians do right now with me, right? They try to convert you.
Yes, but again, I was sad about them that they will not go to heaven, or maybe they will have a hard time there, and I would But I don't remember any time bringing up religion to them.
And when you were taught about the life of Muhammad, was there anything that gave you concern in that teaching?
That's interesting that no.
I remember like I had like a few people, they were not particularly very devoted, but they sometimes would just like make fun of like Muhammad being a womanizer and stuff.
And I would think that, oh god, these are just like people who don't have the spine to be religious and they just like making fun of silly things.
And yeah, he had to have those women because he was getting into a contract with some I'm like this rationalizing that is going on in Islam, that's why one and a half billion people believe in this stuff, because there are ways to justify that.
And when you're inside that religion and you have a race with that religion, it just seems very just and very reasonable.
Oh, no doubt.
I mean, everybody who's raised in a belief system, it has a kind of inevitability to it, like gravity and the weather and so on.
Absolutely, absolutely.
Now, what about, because it also has to do with approaching women, your question, Ali, so what about what you were expected or what you are expected to do with regards to marriage?
I assume you have to marry a Muslim, right?
Yes, that's correct.
Because non-Muslims were so much minority, nobody was asking us not to marry non-Muslims because they thought we already knew that.
And we already never thought about that.
So it wasn't a thing that we just thought about that.
But the relationship between us and the opposite sex, that's the problem.
Our schools are segregated, gender segregated.
I was not growing up in a particularly neighborhood that I had interaction with a lot of girls.
I had interaction with no girls, I guess, other than my sister and some of my cousins, which we would see them once or twice a year.
And I guess the first girlfriend, if I can't call her girlfriend, I had was in college once because the colleges are not segregated.
And so because everything was segregated from the first grade towards the end of high school, it just didn't help at gaining any Skills dealing with girls, but still I was trying because of course I was a boy and I was like asking how in my country the way you do that, so because there's no bars, there's no schools to go and ask girls out, you chase girls.
You chase girls, you go after them, you give them your number if they are interested.
Like on the street right?
Find the street. I mean, I know women who've toured Muslim countries, this is some time back ago, but I've known other women who've toured Muslim countries who are somewhat startled by the forwardness of the Muslim men.
I don't know exactly how to put it in a nicer way, but it's like, you know, if your shoelace is untied and you're a woman, you just kind of leave it untied and keep walking, if that makes any sense.
Yes, that does.
And that was, like, under, like, constant threat of, like, morality police, which will definitely catch you and, like, make you have real trouble, take you to the police station and then your family...
But what would you be tagged for in that context as a young Muslim man?
As just, I don't know, like, misbehavior or, like, against, like...
But what would be considered misbehavior in the context of girls?
If I talk to a girl, even if we were talking, if we were going together and we were talking, we were friends, morality police, they did that to me at least like four times, would come to you and ask you, what's the relationship between you two?
And if there is no relationship as like marriage or your sister and brothers, or if there is no relationship and you're just friends, you cannot be friends on the street walking together.
You don't need to hold hands.
If you hold hands, that's of course like a whole another level.
That would be just like very bad.
But they would just take you to a police station if you're not lucky.
Or you just need to try to just tuck yourself out of that situation.
What is the punishment if they take you to the police station?
What could you face for talking to a non-related, non-married, non-wife woman?
The worst punishment is that you will stay in the...
They're detained until your family, your parents come and usually the parents don't know that you are talking to a girl or the girl's parents don't know that she's talking to a boy and that would be the most embarrassing thing for the girl and of course you would have to write a promise in the police station that you will not do this anymore and Who knows what kind of criminal record was that going to be for you?
And because you were going through college and after that you wanted to just find a job and when you're asking for jobs, they will just check these kind of backgrounds.
It was a vague fear of what they will do.
They will not arrest you for just talking to a woman.
They will take you to a police station, and that's a lot of trauma.
Oh yeah, especially when you're young, right?
Yeah, absolutely.
Let me be perfectly frank with you, Ali, because as a Westerner who was raised as a Christian, part of me says, this is the worst thing ever, this is so repressive, this is so horrible.
And another part of me is, well, not a lot of Me Too moments going on there now, is there?
I mean... No, it's weird.
It's weird. I'm sorry to interrupt again.
Up until, I don't know, a couple of years ago, I would have just been, oh, that's terrible.
There's no freedom. And it's like, well, after Bill Cosby and Harvey Weinstein and Eric Schneiderman and you name it, you name it, you name it, and all of these allegations of sexual misconduct, I just had a call.
With a woman who, you know, I don't know if you listened to it, she got into bed half drunk with some guy she'd had half sex with before and now she's destroyed his life.
And part of me is like, I gotta tell you, Ali, I'm really torn.
You know, I can really see how this oppressiveness avoids a lot of problematic situations.
But Stefan, as you always say, like, freedom is remedy to everything.
Like, if there's any problem, give me a problem, freedom is the solution.
Fine, okay. Yeah, that's true.
On the face, this might look good as a good solution.
But the thing is, of course, the boys and girls are already attracted to each other.
And because they cannot go to a coffee shop and talk to each other in a coffee shop or on the street, they will try to just go to each other's houses.
And then because it happens just about once a year that your parents are not home and you would be able to bring a girl or a boy to your house, And that's just like one opportunity for your whole year.
And who knows what you would do at home after all of this repression and oppression.
Sounds like a sexual emergency to me, but I can understand that.
It can be, like, preventing is good, like, not what is going on here, and me too, and just going into bed with a guy and, like, then just complaining about, like, rape is good.
Not that just, like, oppressing people is good.
Right, right. No, I mean, I agree with you.
Somewhere in the middle, but with freedom is the consequence.
I know that you were just, like, tongue in the cheek, what you were saying, but I was just, like, going to point it out.
Yeah, as long as it's my own tongue in my cheek, I think that's all right.
Now, do your parents know about your drift towards agnosticism?
They don't. They don't.
I hope they know. My mom will, I know.
I never want to put them through this kind of stuff.
They have their own issues.
They don't need to worry about my...
eternal life and how I will be in hell because that that's what they believe and it will be very very concerning for them I don't want to concern them no of course although you might have to but what when you were growing up Ali how traditional in the Islamic faith how traditional were your parents or was your parents relationship Very traditional.
We never saw them holding hands or kissing.
They didn't even sleep in one bed.
And they had six kids.
It's a very firm handshake they've got going on here.
Yeah, very traditional, I would say.
Yeah, very, very traditional. Okay, but what about in terms of male authority, female submission and so on?
Because, you know, I have this view and, you know, please correct me where I've gone astray.
But I've had this view that the more, quote, oppressed the women are out in public, the more dominant they tend to be in the home, particularly with the children.
Absolutely not. My dad was the king of the house, and my mom was just like, absolutely, it was a traditional family.
My dad, of course, had the authority.
My mom, barely.
It was always like what my dad said would happen.
It wasn't like, my dad will beat my mom.
I just saw that, I guess, maybe happening two times or three times in my whole lifetime.
And that was just very traumatizing.
Oh, you mean the beating? But having arguments and stuff, and my mom was very submissive to my dad, and she thought that that was the right way to live the life.
Well, I mean, it's not that she thought.
I mean, that is prescribed, right?
I prescribed as a child to her, and I guess she thought that that was the right thing to do.
But that is the right thing to do, according to certain interpretations of the Quran, if I understand that correctly.
And it's the same thing in Christianity, right?
That there's God, and then...
The husband and then, well, God, Jesus, the husband, the wife, and then the children, right?
I mean, that is kind of the way that things are prescribed in some religions, right?
Oh, yeah, absolutely. In the Quran, of course, you know that it is absolutely a patriarchal religion.
And in the text, in the Quran, it says that, sorry, that men have authority towards women.
It's just like clearly, unwakely, it's just stated there.
Right. With regards to the kind of...
Well, let me ask you this first.
Do you want to get married and have kids?
I didn't last year.
I do after listening to your show.
If that makes any sense to be that much like your opinion, open to be swayed that much.
Well, I appreciate that.
And I'm thrilled to hear it, Ali, because it's funny because people say to me, oh, Steph, you only had one child.
That's true.
Directly. But I've encouraged lots and lots of people because I think it is a wonderful thing and a wonderful part of life.
And I hope that you get.
What you want with regards to that.
But the question is now, how?
Because if you're going to marry a Muslim woman, well, you're going to make your parents happy.
I'm not. You're not going to marry a Muslim woman?
No. You Islamophobe.
What's the matter with you? Right.
Okay, so tell me about that particular thought process.
I... I don't know, like, I had, like, Iranian girl, oh, I just, like, told you where I'm from, girlfriends, and I don't know, like, they were okay, they were good, they were high IQ people, but I I think I want something more.
I want something more stimulating.
I want something new, a new world.
I don't know. My decision is not to marry a Muslim woman, especially a devoted Muslim woman, but in general, not a Muslim woman.
Come on. It's only 40 or 50 years of faking it.
Come on. You can do it.
Take Pascal's wager. What if you're wrong?
What if you do go to hell? Okay.
That's not very helpful. What are you going to tell your kids?
That's the problem. Well, yeah, it's the kids, right?
Yeah, it's the kids. Yeah, like it.
Now, do you know of other...
I guess people from your culture, your country, or your general neck of the woods, that's very collectivist, but who are doing that maybe second generation de-emphasis on some of the original belief systems who were in a similar sort of spot between fundamentalism and I don't know where you'll end up, maybe pure atheism or maybe somewhere else.
Are there other people who are on this journey that you know of?
Oh, absolutely. Back in my country, it's just going crazy, all crazy liberal.
It's because of internet.
What is happening here just transfers there itself through internet, through media.
And now there's something called white marriage, if you believe it or not, in a Muslim country that people live together, if they call themselves girlfriend or boyfriend, but never marry.
And they don't want to have kids.
And that's Among educated second generation, like my age people.
Yes, again, when you oppress people a lot, they will try to just sway the other way.
And that's what's happening in my country.
But not in my country, just like we already said, my country is Iran.
And Iran has a particular situation in Islam because, of course, the Shiites are a minority.
Their beliefs are a little different, but also because of the religious government that they had.
And religious government as it did, there was a government during the Dark Ages in Europe and just like turned everybody away from religion because everybody hated religion because all the oppression was done in the name of religion.
Before the revolution, people were very very traditional and very Islamic, very close to Arab countries, but after the revolution everything changed.
Hard to think of it as a revolution.
Seems to me much more of a devolution.
It was. It was absolute, absolute devolution, as you say.
Yeah. But right now, yeah, a lot of people are becoming agnostic, atheistic, and a lot of people...
It's very hard to find very devout people there.
I don't know. I would say maybe now 20%, 30% of the people there are devout Muslims.
Almost every day, Ali, I mean, as I've said before, I have a very soft spot for your country.
And every day I see some act of defiance, some act of resistance.
That to me is real resistance going on.
And every day I'm like, can this swell?
Can this grow? Can you be free again?
I mean, Stefan, in 2009, we had like this huge movement in Iran for freedom.
And I was on the streets.
I was beaten by police.
And we were out at least for a year on the street, getting beaten, getting killed, getting murdered, and getting raped in the Jails and prisons, just because we were asking for freedom.
At the time, I remember on the street, in 2009, Obama was just elected.
We had a lot of hopes and we were chanting, Obama, Obama, you're either with them or you're with us.
Obama had already chosen which side he was going to stand on.
A bit of a bait and switch there, right, for freedom lovers?
Oh, yeah. We were so, so, so much betrayed.
Because at the time, Obama was trying to We held his legacy of the deal with Iran, the nuclear deal, and they were just having these secret letters back and forth with our supreme leader at the time, just at the time that they were killing people on the streets.
Just to make sure that his deal was going through, he just gave the green light and they just brutalized the whole people and just the whole movement just died.
Yeah, well, I mean, there are certain forms of fundamentalism that require that level of violence to survive, right?
I mean, there's certainly, I read this quote, the most influential Sunni leader in the Middle East said, if the Muslims had gotten rid of the punishment for apostasy, Islam would not exist today.
Oh yeah, exactly, yes.
Just by force.
My country was not Muslim country, and a lot of countries were not Muslim country.
We were not converted to Islam by the power of war.
We were converted to Islam by the power of sword.
Just ask the Hindus in India.
Right. But all you'll ever hear about is the Westerners coming to North America and the brutality and this and that, but you know, around the world, well, there have been other groups that have not spread most peacefully either, but you never really hear about that, right?
Exactly. Yeah, I agree.
Okay, so you want to get married, you want to have kids.
What is it, well, okay, what kind of women are you approaching?
And this is sort of a personal question, but, you know, we've already talked about getting your background at the mall, so who is the women, what kind of women are you most attracted to?
And, you know, when you're most attracted to a woman, that's when your anxiety is going to be the highest when you want to ask her out.
It's one of these... Curses of masculinity that women don't really seem to appreciate that much.
It's like the more attracted you are to someone, the more nerve-wracking it is to ask her out because you really care if she says no.
So I have to then ask what kind of women are you most attracted to to make the nervousness that high?
I was just like, of course, like everybody, like I'm attracted to fit girls.
Wait, so fit in the British sense or fit in the American?
Because fit in the British sense just means pretty.
Fit in the American sense means like work out a lot.
Yes, like athletic body, I would call it sexy, beautiful white women.
I'm like, Iranians are white, so yeah.
Right. Now, but Iranians are white.
Subsection, right? Because not a lot of blondes, not a lot of blue eyes, right?
Yes, yes. We're like Italian white.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Closer to Italian.
But, you know, some of the Italians are into the Swedish, you know, the tall, blonde, blue-eyed kind of thing.
Yeah, exactly. I guess because it's not very common in Iran, that would be my personal choice, if I had the choice.
All right. So, Olga the maid in the outfit is like your fantasy, right?
Yeah. Okay. Okay. And what is your sense of your success possibility with that kind of woman?
Zero, I guess. Zero.
Okay. Why zero? I think.
I don't know because it has never happened.
I have approached like three, four women.
All of them told me they had boyfriends and I think it's just like pointless because like all the good ones are gone and like they are too pretty to be alone, that kind of stuff.
Not only that, like I'm like, as you said, it's nerve-wracking to just like approach that kind of like stunning beautiful woman.
And once you go there and you see that kind of answer, you think this is pointless.
Why am I doing this? Why am I putting myself through this to just get rejected?
And where is your level of physical attractiveness if you had to do that 1 to 10 scale?
I don't know. Probably 6, 7.
I have no idea. If you're looking at a woman who I think objectively would rank as a 10, I think that's what you're talking, stunningly beautiful or whatever, right?
Then what is it that you bring to the table that makes up for not being as physically attractive?
Right now, nothing, I guess.
Right now, I'm an immigrant, not even an immigrant.
I'm just a student here trying to become an immigrant.
It's hard as hell to become a legal immigrant here.
I am still a student.
I'm studying my graduate studies.
So right now, I will say nothing.
I don't see particularly why they should choose me over a seven-feet blonde guy, masculine guy.
Why? Without accent and who's American.
Why they should choose me. I know that.
Well, it's not just that.
It's not just that.
I mean, look, you have a...
Very engaging and enjoyable intellect and your verbal skills are wonderful and I have no doubt that you will be an enormous success in your life and that's going to be wonderful to see.
But here's the thing, right?
I mean, you want some tall blonde goddess to get involved with a guy who hasn't even told his Muslim parents he's not a Muslim.
Yeah.
of comfortable relaxing family chats are going to be had around the not christmas table do you know what i mean like that's that's a complicated situation to walk into right yeah it's just a perspective of the the From the woman, right? Perspective of the woman, right?
Yeah. So even if she said, you know, Ali is the highest thing on two legs and, you know, I love him to death.
He's a wonderful guy. But women have...
I'll tell you this. I'm sure they think about this.
Hang on a sec. Hang on a sec. You probably know this about women, but I'll just sort of remind you about it.
That women... Like, men are fiery-hearted, random demons of lust and desire.
And that's why we have a civilization.
So I think it's a wonderful thing.
But men fall head over heels in love and in lust.
And you get all of this, right?
Absolutely. You live this.
I lived this when I was younger.
And I'm still very much in love with my wife.
But, you know, we just like...
Wow, that woman behind the checkout counter is really pretty.
I'm going to ask her out. Future be damned.
I don't care. She can have like serial killers for parents, but that's fine because she's got boobs or whatever, right?
So we...
Exactly. We leap where fools...
We leap in where angels fear to tread, driven by manly lust and someone.
But women, it's very, very different.
And you can understand why from an evolutionary standpoint, because for us, it's, you know, 18 and a half minutes followed by a nap.
For a woman, it could be 20 years of raising a kid.
So for women, there is lust among women for sure, but that lust is controlled by the cold, icy, frozen-fisted calculation of results.
They look deep into time.
Men look very little into time going forward when we fall in lust, fall in love, or whatever you want to call it.
it.
But women have this cold, calculated, long term that goes on, which is why men so often get into bad relationships.
And women certainly do.
And I'm talking about the kind of women that you really want to be with, like smart, intelligent, capable women.
They look at a guy, so they'll look at you and they may say, yeah, he's got those kind of exotic Middle Eastern looks and he's kind of hip and funky and obviously very intelligent.
He's got a good future ahead of him.
And so she probably gets that little tingle, right?
That's...
That little, ooh, that little tingle.
But then what happens is this unrolling of time goes on in a woman's head where she says, okay, well, Islamic parents, he hasn't told them it's going to be complicated.
I'm going to wander into this family, be viewed as an outsider.
There's going to be a lot of pressure to have my kids be raised in the Muslim faith and it's going to be complicated and it's going to be challenging and I'm going to not really know how to talk to those people that well and, you know, always going to have problems with your mother-in-law.
But when it comes to Christian slash Muslim, those problems may be exacerbated and so on.
So there's this cold, suddenly she has a boyfriend, right?
Yeah. Yeah. And she's like, you know, sorry, but I can't fall in love with you because on the other side of that falling in love is a lifetime of significant complication.
And that... Is a real challenge for...
It's a big thing to ask a woman to overcome, if that makes sense.
I mean, you haven't even overcome it.
You haven't even told your parents.
You start dating some Christian blonde goddess, and, you know, that's kind of saying so, right?
So how's she going to deal with something that you didn't even want to deal with yet?
My thinking was that I would tell them if it needs to be told, but I would not do that before.
It is absolutely necessary.
And also, like, the girls...
Wait, wait, wait. Nah, that's where you're wrong.
I'm sorry, Ali.
That's where you're wrong. Because a woman has incredible radar, as most people do, for how at ease a man is with himself.
Now, if you're approaching a woman and you've already had the conversation with your parents saying, listen, I'm not going to marry a Muslim woman.
If you've already had that conversation, you're going to approach a woman with a certain ease and peace of mind.
That's just going to be part of it, right?
But if you're approaching her with like, well, if I fall in love with you enough, I face certain collision course with my parents' belief systems, ooh...
That's tense. You're going to be tense about it whether you like it or not, right?
So if you don't already have that squared away, it's going to be very hard to approach a woman because the stakes are so high.
Stakes are high enough just if you like the girl.
But if you like the girl and she comes with a relationship that means you're going to have to deal with the stuff with your parents, that is a minefield and a half.
Does that make sense? You can't be cool with those kinds of stakes, right?
I think you're right.
But even just asking for a girlfriend, just asking them out, it's just very anxiety-triggering.
And I just don't understand why it is.
Let's say maybe you're right.
Maybe I just feel that I'm negotiating from a lower position because I'm coming from a Muslim background.
I have accent. I'm not American yet.
No, no. You just avoided everything.
Good job, man. You are dodgy.
You just avoided the one central thing that I talked about and talked about everything else that I didn't talk about.
I didn't talk about you coming from a Muslim background specifically.
I didn't talk about you looking Middle Eastern.
I didn't talk about... What did I talk about?
That's the big challenge. That the girls don't want to get into all of this drama with dealing with Muslim guy and Muslim family.
No, it's not even particularly that.
It's that you haven't dealt with it yet.
But they don't know that.
Yes, they do. They do, because you think you can hide all these things?
You think women haven't evolved to figure out when a man is at peace with himself and in a certain relations, peaceful and honest and open relations with his family?
Of course they have. Women see deeper into the male mind than the male mind can even see into itself.
I mean, I kind of agree with you, but I guess this evolution thing is just kind of overrated.
If the evolution was really, really that powerful, I would say we should have been the sons of the people, the guys who had the best game and were the best pick-up artists, because they were the ones who could make it out of the brutal environment and pass on their genes.
No, but no.
We get anxious as we approach women.
No, listen. You know that the whole point of...
We're not talking the modern welfare state bullshit.
We're talking about...
Actual evolution when resources were scarce.
And what women had to do was they had to figure out who was just a player and who actually was going to commit to them.
And a woman had to see through a man's glib talk into his family relations as a whole.
Why? Because the survival of her children had a lot to do with how well the man got along with his family.
Because the family gives a lot of additional resources to her children, right?
They've got grandparents, they might inherit stuff.
You at least have extra childcare.
For when you have this.
And of course, also, should the woman die in childbirth, if the man is connected to his family, then the family can step in, take her place, and help raise those children.
And so a woman is not just marrying you.
What do we look at? We look at a woman's smoky pretty eyes, her high cheekbones, her full lips, her figure, and we're just like, well, I'm in love, right?
That's what men do, right?
But women look at your whole spider web of relationships and try and figure out what is going to be best able to To support her children.
Now, that is going to include not just you as an individual, but you as an entire extended family unit.
Women look much deeper, much further than just you.
We look at fertility signs in the woman, and we don't care that much about her family because lust!
But women look at you and your family as a whole, and they're very good at figuring out what your relationship is like with your family.
Listen, I'm telling you this from very personal experience, though I'm trying not to project My experience onto yours, Ali.
I did not get a quality, great, wonderful woman until I had dealt with and resolved my family issues, my family of origin issues.
Then and only then, And I don't even know the mechanics by which it occurred.
But then and only then could I settle down with a quality woman.
And I wasted a lot of time thinking I could hide my challenges with my family of origin.
But I couldn't because I could never find someone to settle down with until it was dealt with.
And once it was dealt with, I swear, within six months, I met a woman.
We settled down.
We got married. Within 11 months, we've been happily married for 15 years.
And it happened very, very shortly after I dealt with my family issues.
Do you think it's because you became peaceful or just because you became peaceful and they could see you through?
You know, if I had to try and unpack that, I'd be a woman.
I'm just telling you, you know, and I know it's after this and therefore because of this, there's all these fallacies, but I think it's because I could bring my entire self to the relationship.
Because if you are, you find some woman of your dreams, let's forget about all the shallow stuff about blonde and blue-eyed and whatever.
You understand, like that's a bit of a fetish rather than looking for a quality woman.
Yes, of course. Let's say you find the woman of your dreams, as you get closer and closer to her, you're going to be more and more nervous about your family, because it's a collision course, right?
So she's going to sense that ambivalence, and you're not going to be emotionally available to her.
Yeah, I understand. I have not even told my families that I want to stay here.
Oh, are they thinking ahead and back?
They think that I'm heading back in a few months after like five years being here.
And I have not been able even to tell them that.
Wow. And why do you think that is, Ali?
Because I feel guilty for leaving them alone.
They got a bunch of other kids, haven't they?
They won't be alone. They did, but I was always the kid who tried to be with them when other kids left our city to other cities for education or marriage.
I always helped them.
I stayed home. I was the kind of child who was always taking care of everything at home.
Why did they come to the States?
They didn't come to the States.
I came to the States.
Oh, just you. I'm so sorry. Why did they send you to the States?
They did not. They didn't want me to come.
I wanted to come to a stage.
I just wanted to try a new lifestyle.
Oh, don't tell me that.
I know what it is, Ali. You're like, hey, America, there are blondes there.
Tall blondes with blue eyes.
Oh, Vietnam! Sometimes...
Maybe even 72 of them.
I'm just kidding. All right. It's not easy to talk to very smart people.
They see through you very easily.
It's a cultural experience called a threesome.
I believe I've seen some on the internet.
Right. No, I know it wasn't just that.
I just thought that was kind of funny. Yeah, I know.
Do you find the sort of American culture and experiences more in line with what you want in life?
I like it, yeah. You still have lots of other opportunities here than you had in Iran.
You still have freedoms that you don't have in Iran.
For God's sake, you don't have in the UK the freedom of speech that you have here.
No, you certainly don't have religious enforcement gangs roaming the streets dragging you off.
Yes, yes. You have a lot of freedoms coming from that kind of...
I'm sure if I go back to Iran, I will be very successful back there.
But I just, again, like, I think I have experienced that lifestyle.
Oh, but you'd get, I'm sorry to interrupt this just before I forget the thought.
If you're talking about only 20 to 30% of the Iranians still being fundamentalists, Mm-hmm.
Then wouldn't you have a wider pick of women to choose from?
Oh, absolutely. Absolutely.
So with regards to your sex life, and I'm not saying this like it's just, I mean, that's a very essential aspect of life.
It's kind of why we're all here to begin with.
Yeah. So with regards to your sex life, Ali can get some in Iran, but not so much in America, right?
Absolutely. Right. And you know, of course, the reason is that I don't come from...
I don't have that baggage of, like, being a Muslim and not being a Muslim or immigrant and uncertain future.
Yes. Right, right.
And, of course, there would be a lot of people who would be in your similar situation who have drifted away from the faith of childhood.
Okay, so then the question is, is there any equivalent community in America to who you might meet in Iran?
Can you give up the blonde fetish in return for a potential relationship?
I guess I'm not ready.
I just don't find it challenging enough.
I mean, don't get me wrong. I think it's a strong fetish for you, but the question is, right?
Oh, my God. No, I just don't find it challenging enough.
I don't think that's the extent of my ability.
What do you mean you don't find it challenging enough to date an Iranian woman?
Oh, I'm looking forward to all the emails we're going to get from Iranian women now based on this call.
I'd like to thank you for all of that.
I hope they don't.
I believe that may be a little more difficult for you now, based upon that comment.
Can I take it back?
I would if I were you.
I would if I were you.
Maybe just say, translation error, let me re-explain what it is that I mean.
Yes, okay. What I mean is that it's easy for me to get Iranian women.
And what is easy, I was like, is not what I want.
Okay, so tell me how it's easy to get Iranian women.
You walk up to an Iranian woman, and what do you do that makes it easy?
They will be open to this, because I'm educated in the West, I would have a lot of status there, just right there.
I don't know, I meant Iranian women in America.
In America, I'm not ugly, I'm sure, and I'm fit, I'm athletic.
I guess I would bring enough options to the table to be able to Ask them out and they will be, I guess, that's my experiences.
I have been to Iranian communities around here in Boston or any other cities and it was very easy.
Here's the issue, right? Okay, here we go.
Now we get into the core. If it's too easy, you're not interested, right?
No. How tough is it for a blonde goddess to get a date from you?
Very easy. Ah, you see?
You see how this works, my friend?
Oh my god, yes.
Oh yeah. So if you're so desperate for a particular physical type, most times you can't get it because it's like, eh, this is easy.
Right. Yeah.
A fetish is a kind of masochism, you understand, right?
Because it has you desperately reaching for something that the reaching drives it further away.
Because, you know, I'm going to give you the annoying older guy lecture on look for a woman of virtue.
Look for a woman of quality. Look for a woman of character.
Don't look for physical attributes.
That's dehumanizing and it's going to torture you.
I agree. You kind of do and kind of don't.
I don't think that they're mutually exclusive.
Your brain agrees. You're both, on the other hand.
I don't think they're mutually exclusive.
I don't think they negate each other.
No, but they're not always in sync, right?
Yeah, maybe.
Yes. I would love to have a very smart, engaging girl who is smoking hot.
I hope. That's not killing the whole conversation.
No, no. I mean, of course.
Of course. But then in order to do that, then you have to be somebody with abs and a million dollars.
Yeah. So if you want these massively high standards for a woman, then you have to bring those massively high standards to the table.
And if you can't, well, you have to lower your standards because you're going to ask the woman to lower her standards, right?
What I thought was that if I just could...
We could just approach I don't know, 100 girls, I would increase my chances a lot because I've seen people who don't bring that much to the table, but they have amazing girlfriends, not just beautiful, but very smart and very nice, kind. And I don't see them bringing a lot to the table, or maybe I'm just wrong.
But yeah, that's the core issue.
I think that right now, yes, I don't have a million dollar.
I'm like seven feet.
Hi, but I thought that that would be what I would bring to the table.
Well, okay. Approach, approach, approach.
Let me guess. Engineering?
You're studying engineering? Exactly.
Yeah, you are, right? Yeah.
Wow, an Iranian studying engineering!
Whatever next! Next, you're going to tell me you have a hairy back.
No, I'm just kidding. All right. So, here's the thing.
So, you have an uncomfortable relationship with your anxiety, right?
But maybe your anxiety is trying to help you.
Maybe your anxiety...
So, there's two kinds of anxiety, right?
There's the anxiety which is, I really want this good thing and I'm nervous I'm not going to get it, right?
But then there's the anxiety of I'm being drawn by irrational desires into a potential disaster.
I can't turn off the lust because I'm only anxiety and anxiety never trumps lust, at least for men.
I can't turn off the lust, but at least I can harm the self-confidence to the point where the lust probably isn't going to achieve its object.
Because maybe what you're aiming for is something that Won't work for you.
In other words, if you're going for a physical type.
Every man, at one time or another, who has dated successfully, Ali, every man, and I won't give you my own particular experience in this, but I think you can guess.
Every man has dated based upon a particular physical quality or attribute that they find most alluring, right?
Right. Every man has done that.
And just about every man has lived to regret it.
Because you're choosing the woman based upon something which is not a quality of character but an accident of physicality.
I really care about the quality of character.
I really do. Wouldn't you have a lot more in common with an Iranian woman then who has a similar kind of background and a similar kind of upbringing and would have similar kind of values?
I guess I would, but the thing is that...
Okay, so don't tell me about all of these inner attributes you're looking for.
This anxiety was with me even when I was in Iran.
So that's the thing.
This is not a new thing.
Wait, you had anxiety with the women you could get easily?
I guess it was just like boasting and like just...
It wasn't like...
I'm like... Here, because my status has risen to a guy who has educated in West, And now wants to marry.
My status is higher, and that's what I bring to the table.
But back in Iran, I was just nobody, right?
Just one in the millions.
It's like when I come to Canada with a British accent, people are like, ooh.
The girls in particular.
There's a reason I hung on grim death to this accent, which I last practiced when I was 11 years old.
That's 40 years ago.
There's a reason I hung on to this accent.
I lost my hair, but I'm going to keep this accent, man.
Yes, exactly. It's not like you're coming from, I don't know, back of the 40 acres in Alabama.
Nice tooth! So yeah, you have status now if you go back to Iran.
And this is kind of a roller coaster.
You go from no one to somebody who has high status among Iranians in the United States to even higher status among Iranian women should you go back.
But you now have proximity to your physical fetish and that is a great deal of quicksand, man.
That is a great deal of quicksand because a woman knows if it's a fetish-based relationship.
A woman knows and she knows how much power she has over you and almost all human beings are corrupted by power.
You make a woman worse by dating her for physical attributes only because you give her too much power.
You can't negotiate. It's a fetish.
You can't negotiate. I mean, you see what...
I mean, I'm not saying it's the equivalent, but you see these guys who have fetish for being dominated.
The whole point is to not negotiate, right?
Just have hot wax dripped on the nipples and have something unholy attached to their balls.
You know, I mean, that's the whole point.
Mm-hmm. So, I think, like...
If you're approaching women based upon that physical attribute, the anxiety might be danger, danger, danger.
But I'm not. The problem, that's a problem.
The problem is that I rarely approach them.
Of course, I crash and burn.
But usually what I approach is not very attractive women because I think I have, and that's what I hate about myself, doing that.
Wait, not very attractive white women or not very attractive women as a whole?
As a whole. Right.
And does that work for you?
Sometimes it does, sometimes it does not.
And your lack of respect for yourself is based on what?
Most of it. Just because they're not that attractive?
Yes. And why am I doing that?
Well, what are their qualities of character?
When you approach them, you don't think much of them.
Well, you should start.
Right? You should start thinking about their qualities of character.
That's the thing. They are not that attractive, they are not that engaging, so you don't get anxious when you approach them, because it's easy.
And you just hate yourself for doing that because you're doing something that...
Well, you're using them, right?
Because you don't have any intention of a longer-term relationship?
No, not because using them. It's just testimony to your weakness.
Well, no, but do you get into longer-term relationships with these women?
No, of course not.
So you're just using them for sex, right?
Yes, unfortunately. What do you mean, unfortunately?
Unfortunately is you stubbed your toe in the dark with something someone left behind accidentally.
Unfortunately, these are specific choices that you're making, right?
Yes. And I don't know why I'm making them.
It's just like because of the mandate of the biology?
I don't know. Well, no, there is a mandate of the biology.
But the question is, as a man, you have to scrub away the fetish and look for the quality of character.
Right. You have to look for that.
It doesn't mean be indifferent to appearance.
At all. Like some woman who's 300 pounds, like I'm sorry, that indicates personality characteristics that are not good.
That indicates a lack of willpower.
It indicates a lack of knowledge about how you come across to others.
It indicates a lack of capacity to defer gratification.
It indicates lower fertility and hard to clean places with God knows what growing.
And so it's not like physical appearance is irrelevant.
And I'm not saying, well, find some woman of glorious character housed in some horrifying shell of an exterior.
But what I am saying is that it is the quality of character that is the foundation of the family.
And if you are starting to look at something longer term that may lead to a family, then it is quality of character that you need.
Now, if you're mostly going for looks alone, You're going to be in a position of weakness, and you're going to be in a position of self-contempt.
And I think that your anxiety is saying, because you've listened to this show for a while, right, Ali?
So your anxiety is probably saying, this is a bad basis for pursuing a woman.
But when I ask a woman out, it's not like I know the woman for a long time.
I just see a woman, and I think like, How would I know the quality of the character, like the content of their character?
Well, you have a conversation before you ask the person out, right?
I just go and say, hi, I can't ask you out, I guess.
Well, maybe you could spend a little bit of time getting to know a woman, because if you ask a woman out without getting to know her, of course you're going to end up feeling contempt, because you're asking a vagina out and taking the person regretfully along, right?
Right. So you have a conversation and you have A coffee or you have an innocuous friend zone conversation, ask about history, ask about family, ask about values, belief systems. I mean, these are all things that you talk about before you get involved with someone.
Most people just don't or avoid these topics because they think that there'll be a compatibility cock block that occurs if they actually start talking about values.
But you're already having a cock block occurring in the form of anxiety, so you might as well ask about values because you aren't getting anywhere otherwise.
So there's no like magic remedy for anxiety.
Well, I think struggling to understand the root of it is important.
And I think, based upon what you've told me, Ali, that you are making decisions about who to date based on factors other than the quality of character.
And that is a dangerous place to be.
It's a dangerous place to be because we know that there are false accusations floating around.
We know that a woman can get pregnant.
We know that women can even sperm jack men, right?
And we also know that there's massive rates of sexually transmitted diseases around these days.
You are doing quite a bit of Russian roulette here, right?
Oh yeah. So you need to find a quality woman and you need to find somebody with a good character, somebody who's strong and brave and noble and courageous and intelligent and has integrity and is curious about you and you need to bring those values to the table as well.
Because what philosophy brings together, it seems no man can tear asunder.
Yeah. I absolutely agree.
But the thing is, I'm asking them out to just have this conversation.
But that's the thing.
I'm just starting to ask them out for a conversation.
It's like anxiety triggering.
Yeah, and I'm saying, if you're mostly attracted to the woman for her looks, then that may not be the person to ask out.
There's a lot of nonverbal, you know, 90% of communication is nonverbal, right?
There's a reason I film these conversations.
And put them out on YouTube, right?
Because a lot of conversation is non-verbal, right?
Oh, yeah. It's totally different than listening to it.
I've seen that, yeah. Right.
So you ask a woman a couple of questions and you see if she asks you any questions back.
And if she doesn't, well, she's probably kind of self-absorbed and you move on, right?
Okay. I guess, yeah, that's the best way.
Again, the thing is that I didn't have the skills of how to approach women in West because I was raised in a godforsaken place after the revolution.
So I came here. So how would I know?
How would I learn those skills?
I started watching these videos of pickup artists and then reading this absolutely abhorrent book of the game.
And they just messed me up much, much more.
Yeah. I mean, all due respect for some of the confidence that they're trying to instill in men.
But as far as...
Getting a philosophically quality woman, I don't think that manipulation is the way to go.
Yeah, just be rude to them.
Don't be nice. It just really messes up with your head.
But you think this is the book, this is the video, and it works.
You can see that in the video.
The book says it works, so you go for it.
I know, again, Some of it goes back to, again, anxiety, which I don't know if it's coming from my childhood.
Some of it goes to lack of skill, and some of it, I guess you're right, goes back to not approaching the right woman that I would be happy with, and just then ending up with self-contempt.
Well, if you have, you know, men want sex, right?
And I made this case before.
That if you want the most possible sex in your life, then get involved with a woman with whom you share values.
And that's going to get you the most possible sex in your life.
Because if you get involved with kind of trashy women or women who don't share your values, you're going to end up with volatility.
You're going to end up with emotional problems.
You're going to end up with potentially dangerous situations.
And there's going to be a long time you're going to end up with self-contempt.
And eventually you just might not be able to get a boner because you don't like where it's pointing.
Oh, absolutely. And if you end up getting married or having a long-term relationship with a woman where you don't share values or your values oppose, well, the sex life is going to be – it's going to diminish to nothing and then you're going to be having a huge problem.
But if you have a relationship with a woman and you share values, it's great.
It's great the whole way along. So I'm trying to help you get what you want.
Even if all we say you want is a lot of sex, the way to do it is through compatible values.
Yes. Yeah, I agree.
All right. And again, getting there is just like very important.
Just not being anxious, just even like approaching the woman, you think it will be very smart, very intelligent.
But again, like just going and approaching will be, it is still hard, but I really appreciate what you're saying here.
And I'm going to listen to this like a couple of times.
And I guess there are like a lot of points here for me.
Good. Well, let me know how it goes.
And I certainly wish you the very best of luck going forward.
And I really, really appreciate your openness and honesty in this conversation.
It's not the easiest thing in the world to talk about, but you did very well.
And I appreciate your help and also your wisdom, like always, which is very, very enlightening.
Thanks a lot. Thanks, Ali. I appreciate the call.
Thank you. Bye. Okay, up next we have Trent.
Trent wrote in and said, My son died when he was almost two years old in 2005.
He had Batten disease, a rare genetic brain disorder.
My ex and I adopted two boys from foster care years after his death.
They are 11 and 7 now.
I have a biological daughter who was 13 and did not contract the disease.
I've struggled this past year dealing with his death, closing my business, and my recent divorce.
A few years later, I donated my kidney to my father, but my question is, how can I stop thinking about his death and him possibly being somewhere in the afterlife?
I have constant thoughts about his passing and want to focus on being the best father I can to my three kids and not on the past with my ex and my son's death.
That's from Trent. Hey Trent, how are you doing tonight?
Great, how are you?
I'm sorry, go ahead.
My daughter says you have an interesting voice.
Oh, well, do thank her for me.
What a story.
That is heartbreaking.
And I just, I know it's been a while, but I just wanted to express my deep sympathy for the passing of your son that is enormously difficult.
And it's one of these things where I can't imagine, but I can't imagine if that makes any sense.
Yes, thank you very much.
Now, this was your first child, right?
The one who died in 2005?
Yes. And what was the...
Sorry, go ahead.
His name was Zane, by the way.
I didn't mention that in the question.
And what was the progression of his illness?
How did you find out about it?
And how long did it go on for?
Well, how it started is he was one years old, about...
Since he turned one, we started to notice that he was not responding or not progressing like he should as compared to other children.
So right around his birthday.
So we had an MRI and nothing showed up.
So a lot of the doctors were saying, well, he was a little bit early, so maybe he's just a little bit below his milestones.
As far as he hasn't walked, he wasn't walking yet.
By one, but that can be a period of between 10 and 14 months.
But we noticed he was getting worse as far as his mannerisms and sometimes he would stop in the middle of the room and put his hand up.
So one of the things about batting disease is they go blind first.
So we didn't realize at the time that he was actually going blind and he was actually looking up to figure out where he was at.
Oh, gosh. Where was his language at this time?
He never spoke, ever.
Oh, gosh. Never spoke any words.
Yeah. And, of course, as your first as well, you don't have the same comparison with other siblings, right?
Right. He babbled just like most kids or babies, and he drooled a lot, but the...
And I think that's another thing of the disease that they're...
There's a lot of drooling.
There's babbling.
But I guess, if I fast forward a little bit, my daughter was born 16 months later after Jane was born.
Yeah, I was just looking at the 05 and the 13 and doing the math that she was born the year that he died, right?
Yeah, she died.
My daughter, she's 13 now, but she was only seven months at the funeral.
So your son was sort of past a year.
He's starting to go blind.
But I guess you wouldn't be aware of that up front, right?
Right. One of the things that we found out is when we went to pick him up, because he was always happy to see us.
And in the morning, he'd be jumping up by his crib.
One day, he would not get up out of his bed.
He was in a crib then.
And he was struggling just to climb up.
And this was right after my daughter was born.
And I was talking to my wife then, and we were just talking about, like, there's something going on.
There's got to be more than what we're understanding.
So we got another MRI done, and nothing came up again.
So this went on for probably the May of 2005, before we finally...
Again, he wouldn't get up out of bed, so we actually took him to Riley Children's Hospital in Indianapolis.
Was he asleep or just had no energy?
I don't think he could just physically get up or move.
Because what's happening with Batten Seeds, they're slowly losing their motor skills, even after the blindness.
And we didn't realize that he was vision-deprived.
No, we didn't know. We didn't know anything until we went to Indianapolis and then we had all these tests done and then that's when they pretty much told us that he had bad disease.
I mean, it was less than a week that we were there.
They were pretty sure that's what we had.
So we went up and we read about it and yeah, it was pretty devastating to hear.
It's a fatal disease. No one ever lives from it.
There's There's hardly any, there's treatment to, currently there's treatment to kind of slow it down, but right now there's really no treatment.
Now there's four different forms of batting disease and Zane had infantile, which is the youngest.
He's one of the youngest kids to ever die of baton disease, actually.
Right.
And how long after the diagnosis happened?
I mean, I guess he just continued to deteriorate and decline.
Is that right? Yes.
So in June, we got the diagnosis.
And September, they told us he needed a feeding tube.
And then in October, he was on hospice.
And then in November, he passed away at the end of the month.
So, it was so fast.
Well, that's still pretty long, though.
I mean, that's still four or five months after the diagnosis.
And, of course, even before that, there's a lot of stress and anxiety of not knowing what's going on.
Oh, yeah. Yeah.
Yeah, I mean, we knew that it was a death sentence that he was dealing with.
So, we decided just to...
We went to hospice and then we just took care of him until he died.
Right. You know, the last...
The last 19 days were horrible because he couldn't eat or drink anymore and he just kept hanging on and we just couldn't understand why.
Oh, so like even he just couldn't digest or anything like that?
Yeah, they told us not to even give him anything anymore.
Because what's hurting is his system.
He just, I guess, is...
His organs were shutting down, so there was no point.
They told us to stop, and he's just going to pass away eventually.
Was he on painkillers or anything like that during that time?
Yes, he had anti-seizure medicine because a lot of the bad kids have seizures, lots of seizures.
Yeah, he was on some pain meds, but we didn't Obviously, the hardest part is he can't speak.
We don't know. We can only see him, just his facial expressions.
That's the only way we could treat his pain.
And you never heard him speak, I suppose, so he couldn't describe anything that was occurring?
Right. Or even he'd wince.
But he wouldn't put his hands to where things were hurting.
Because he had a feeding tube the last two years.
So even the medicine was going through there.
And what was the feeling, Trent, on Zane's passing?
Well, I should back up a little if I could, Stefan.
We actually didn't know that my daughter might have it as well.
They told us she had a 25% chance to have it because...
Because my ex-wife and I are carriers of Batten disease.
So we had to get her blood tested.
And it was a crazy time because we were thinking, oh my god, what if she had it to?
Well, and it could even be longer, right?
If it wasn't the infantile kind, it could go on for many, many more years.
Yeah. But from what I've known and met other parents with Batten disease, the The kids seem to have the same type.
So the day before he passed away, we actually heard that she didn't have it.
And then the next day he passed away, so we thought maybe he was just hanging on.
But I mean, you know that there was very little of him left by the time he passed, right?
I mean, I know that you are religious, I assume, but as far as the brain goes, I mean, again, I'm no doctor, but I would assume that kind of deterioration to the point where even the heart is shutting down and the lungs are shutting down, there's probably not much left of the brain activity, right?
Right. Those 19 days, he had one day where his eyes opened up for the whole day, but most of the time they were closed.
But no, I'm actually not very religious at all.
Well, I'm going with you're thinking about him possibly being somewhere in the afterlife.
Okay. It has an air of religiosity to it, if that makes sense.
Sure. Right.
Yeah, the feeling...
I mean, it was so hard to wrap your mind around what was going on because of the time was limited.
There's nothing we could do.
You feel totally powerless.
You are totally powerless.
Right. It's more than a feeling, right?
Yeah. Exactly.
We could have taken them overseas because in America it's hard to get special type of treatments for that type of disease.
Experimental, I should say.
But he was just too sick for us to even attempt it, you know?
Well, and the outside view, which I know isn't going to give you any comfort, but the outside view is if he can't be cured, the point of prolonging the pain is what?
There's no point.
That's why we didn't put him in a hospital or anything.
We decided the hospice was the best thing for him.
It's for him to be at home so he could...
He could hear us, smell us, you know.
Give what comfort you can, yeah.
Yes. Which I think was the correct decision.
I mean, it's hard to imagine being in that situation, Trent, but I can certainly see the case for...
If it's going to happen, in a sense, the sooner the better, right?
Because it can't be changed, and the suffering is going on, and life is on hold, and you know what I mean?
Well, of course you know what I mean, right?
More than I could imagine.
Yeah. Right.
And your daughter, how old?
You said at the funeral, she was seven months.
How old was she when Zane died?
Yeah. So, yeah, seven months.
Oh, when she died. Seven months.
Okay. When he died, rather. Yeah.
All right. Yeah, the funeral was about a week later after he passed away.
I mean, it's heartbreaking just to think of that tiny coffin and I just, you know, parent to parent, I'm so sorry.
What a, you know, it's horrible enough when your parents you love die, but to bury a child is a special kind of hell that I wish on no man and no woman.
Yeah, I mean, we were picking the headstone out.
I remember thinking that.
You know, during the time we were prepping for his funeral while he was still alive, which is just, it's unbelievable.
I was like, how can we do this when he's still alive?
But we knew that he was going to pass away.
It was inevitable. You had to kind of force yourself to, you know, do the funeral plans and do all those things.
Well, and the stress, of course, for your wife during this time when she's breastfeeding, and I assume the stress also when she was pregnant with your daughter, that is very hard.
Because you want to give all of your, you want to be emotionally available as much as possible to the newborn, but when you're dealing with the expiring son, this is, I mean, that's very hard.
Yeah. Yeah, in fact, you know, she breastfeed Zane for about a year, and And Zeta wasn't very long at all because of all the stress she was under.
Right. Only a few months, probably.
First three months, and then we had to switch her to formula.
Right. Now, how did it come about, Trent, that you adopted these two boys from foster care after, you say, years after Zane's death?
How did that come about?
Well, three years after he passed away, My daughter was four, and I think we were healing a bit more.
But you can't have more because of the genetic risk, right?
Yeah, so it would be a 25% chance.
And my ex-wife, she had such terrible pregnancies that I actually got a vasectomy.
Not really knowing that Zane was, or that I was a carrier for a terrible disease.
But after Zeta was born, I had a vasectomy because we weren't going to have any more kids.
So yeah, the process of reversing the vasectomy and then a 25% chance of Batten disease, we just thought that would, it's not a good, don't want to play that game, you know?
Well, combined with the very difficult pregnancies too, right?
Yeah. So, we thought that we started foster caring and through the foster care system, you can adopt children from, you know, broken homes.
Like a test drive, right?
Yeah. So, my son, he's 11 now.
We got him when he was two.
His birth mom was a teenager.
And she was sexually assaulted.
And she still had the baby, but she was too young to want to be a mom.
So she decided to have him adopted.
And then we ended up adopting him when he was three.
Now, that was going to be it, actually.
We had a boy and a girl again.
I mean, of course, we always have Zane, but...
You know what I mean? Right.
Among the living. Yes.
And Tice was kind of a...
He's my youngest.
When we got him, when he was a day old, his birth mom came in as a meth addict.
So they took custody right away from her.
We had him ever since.
Wow, you are...
Boy, you're taking some risks there.
I'm hoping it's working out.
Well, I've done some research.
I don't know a lot about the effects of meth on children.
Or even the genetics, right?
Yeah. Yeah, he's going to be prone to be...
You know, addiction, obviously.
Well, maybe, maybe, but I'm just thinking in terms of trauma.
We know that that has epigenetic effects.
Addiction may have epigenetic effects.
Deferral of gratification may have, well, almost certainly does have some genetic basis and so on.
And I applaud the courage, and I'm sure that these kids are in a great home, but, I mean, it's not like you completely avoided genetic risk by doing this foster care stuff.
Right. We did it for four years, and we actually, at the end, the last part of our foster carrier, we had a Down syndrome kid.
Ended up dying in the hospital.
Oh, really? And then I told...
Yeah. After how long?
How long did you have with the Downs kid?
I think we had him a few months.
He actually was just a terrible story.
He was actually abused. He was thrown against the wall by...
By somebody in the family.
Is that what caused his early death?
No, it's not what caused the Downs.
Downs is genetic, right? Yeah, Downs is genetic, but the reason why they were taken away is because his home condition obviously was terrible, where he was abused that way.
Here's a Downs kid being abused by some terrible people.
Threw him against a wall, and his head, his brain was, or his head was so big because his, um, His brain grew because it was, what do you call it?
I'm missing the word here. It was swelling.
Right. So he almost looked like an alien, kind of.
It was just completely sad.
But a lot of Down syndrome kids have trouble with their heart, and he had to have surgery for his heart.
And then he ended up passing away in the hospital.
Oh, under the knife, so to speak.
Yeah. Well, he made it through the surgery, but he died a few days later.
Wow. But after that, we were back at Riley, back where Zane was for all those times back in 2005.
And then I told her, I was like, I can't do this anymore.
I said, I can't take these.
I think you guys took quite a number of bullets for the goodness there.
Yeah. And then we just quit doing foster care because it's...
You got kids.
I mean, you can't be going through this kind of hell when you have kids to raise unless, you know, like it's something you have no choice about.
And here, at least you have a choice, right?
That's what I was explaining to her at the time.
Like, we have three that we need to take care of now.
And how are your two boys doing?
Well, they're doing well, actually.
They're a lot of fun. Good.
But yeah, they're a handful sometimes.
In what way?
Let's see.
Well, Trevin is on ADHD medicine, which I can get into later if you want.
Okay.
Which I'm really not For medicine with children.
I'm actually quite against it, but during our separation, my ex and the doctor prescribed medicine to him against my wishes, which they don't need my permission to do it.
I just need one parent.
Yeah. And that was your ex-wife and her doctor put him on, which you didn't have any say over, right?
Yeah. And what symptoms were they attempting to, quote, treat?
Well, any kind of boy type of behavior.
Can't sit still. Doesn't listen to the teacher in class, that kind of crap.
I'm going to assume he's in government schools.
Yes. And a lot of female teachers there.
Yep. And how's his relationship with his mom?
He's a great, great kid and he helps out a lot.
And so I think it's pretty good from what I can gather.
We've been separated for four years.
But the medicine I had actually had to be defeated on.
Well, here's why. In court, they tried to use it against me that I didn't give him his medicine.
Oh, so it's a pretty ugly divorce situation, is that right?
It was at the time.
It's better now.
But then, yeah, the lawyer walked in and pretty much said I was a terrible father and wouldn't give him the prescribed medicine that he needs.
Yeah, no, there's a lot of people who still think it's medicine, right?
Yeah. And then I was arguing with my lawyer about it because he's saying, you don't give him his medicine?
I said, no, he doesn't need it.
But luckily, I had a judge that was sympathetic with me and said it was reasonable for the father to disagree.
So I was pretty lucky with having a decent judge.
Yeah, that is lucky.
And what was it that...
Triggered the divorce, do you think?
Well, she was very depressed, obviously, during the time, more so than I was, after Zane passed away.
Yeah.
And it got pretty bad for a couple years where she couldn't get out of bed for a long time.
For many hours she would lay in bed.
She had a lot of anxiety, which is kind of ironic that what's happening to me now is what happened to her back then.
She was staying at home with Zeta, my daughter, and I was out working.
I think that was therapeutic for me.
I just opened my business and just started.
I just worked, worked, worked 60-70 hours a week.
Well, that may have helped you, but I'm sure it didn't help your marriage, right?
No. No, working that much wasn't worth it.
But I think I was escaping, actually.
Sure. I mean, that's what men do, right?
Yeah. If I'm sad, I'll work.
So, I just think we communicate poorly.
There's nothing really... We communicated poorly.
It was... We didn't cheat on each other.
We didn't have affairs or anything like that.
But your marriage followed Zane into the grave, right?
Yeah. I had a lot of resentment for her that last year.
I was very angry. Oh, at your wife?
Yeah. Why is that?
I did move out.
No, but why were you angry with your wife?
I blame her for my career.
I quit doing the business just because of the work schedule like I was telling you about earlier.
It was too much for me to be at home and work that much.
I didn't feel like she supported me pretty much even though I was busting my butt all those years so she could stay at home.
I didn't feel very appreciated, I guess.
Right. But then when that ended, I worn out and started working.
I mean, she actually told me that it was time to get off my ass and get a job, which was kind of her at the time, but she was probably right.
And how long after your business closed, how long were you unemployed for?
I went right into the job, so I kept some of my clients and then kept working part-time.
Wait, so your wife who couldn't get out of bed for quite some time said that you should stay active?
Yeah. It seems like a bit of a contradiction, wouldn't you say?
Right. I should lie in bed.
In bed, you have to get a job.
Yeah, I mean, I mean, that hurt me so bad just because I felt like given my all so far and allowed even us to adopt kids and for her to foster kids too.
Now, was it something that she wanted more than you or was it sort of equal or what?
I wasn't that interested in fostering.
I was really just interested in getting, having a son, you know?
Yeah. I wanted to have a son.
And after Zane died, I still wanted that.
And I'm grateful I have these guys now.
Right. Which is, you know, if Zane wouldn't have passed away, I wouldn't have them.
So it's kind of a strange feeling, you know.
What happened, Trent, in terms of processing the grief of Zane dying?
At the time? At the time of the death?
Or after, of course, right?
Well, I mean, you had time to prepare, but specifically after.
Nothing's real until it happens in some ways, right?
Well, the feeling was that he has died with him.
Sorry, the feeling was that who?
Part of you died.
part of your your dreams your aspirations for your for your child and like you never got to talk you You never got to all those kind of milestones that we think of as parents that are so...
Riding the bike the first time.
First steps. All those things you never got to do.
Part of you thinks about that a lot.
And as Zeta gets older and kids her own age, kids his own age, in our friend group, they get older.
It's hard not to think about that.
Think about what he might be like if he didn't have Baton disease.
Did I answer that? All of this seems like a way to not grieve, in my humble opinion.
My question is, what did you do to grieve?
Because if the thoughts are returning 13 years later, I won't say obsessively, but continually, I think it's probably fair to say, then it seems to me that some kind of lesson has not yet been learned.
In other words, he's coming back to your mind because he wants to tell you something, but it's something that's hard to hear.
I mean, how does one grieve?
Do you cry? Of course I cried, but I don't know.
I don't know how to answer that.
I feel like I did grieve at the time, but then I think I stopped it when I started working again.
Right. And how did your relationship with your wife go after the death of your son?
Because tragedy can bring you closer together.
I mean, I know that a lot of marriages found her pretty hard with the death of a child, but I don't think it has to be that way.
I mean, tragedy can bring people closer together.
Initially, I thought that we were going to be completely bonded.
Actually, we went to the conference, the bad disease conference, to kind of learn more about the disease.
We met families, and that was really...
Those are really bonding moments that we have made lifelong friends now with other parents.
So our relationship felt like at the time we were really tight and close.
But I think after we started getting involved in fostering, I started retreating from the marriage, I think.
I started getting involved in exercising and I'm working out, and I play volleyball recreationally, so I started enjoying doing those things.
So when you got the fostering, which is a time when logically you'd spend more time at home, you spent less time at home?
Yeah, sometimes I would, yes.
Why do you think that is?
Or was? Well, I work from home, so I wanted to not be at home sometimes.
That was...
I really never pinpointed why I was doing that.
Well, I think if you can pinpoint that, then you may have some relief from these thoughts of your son.
My ex-wife was...
Kind of hard to deal with sometimes, and some of the depression, hard to deal with someone while they're depressed.
Okay, yeah, now the depression, was it kind of like rubber bones in terms of like she just kind of went limp, didn't want to get out of bed, or didn't want to participate?
Yeah, but then she'd have these lows, and then she'd have these highs where she'd want to do all this stuff, you know what I mean?
So we made some really poor decisions during that time after Zane died.
Like, we remodeled our house and spent a bunch of money a year after he passed away, and we went into major debt because of that.
Right. I think that's weird.
Well, let's find something to ease the pain of him dying.
Yeah, no, I... I know that.
I remember a friend of mine whose wife had a miscarriage just called me up and said, we're painting the house.
Want to help? I'm like, yeah, I'll come help.
We'll talk about it. Right, and then there's the other problem is you really can't, it's hard to talk to other people about it after a while.
It seems like people are uncomfortable, even your own friends, when you want to Talk about it.
Talk about your son.
Talk about your son passing away.
And maybe they're probably thinking, why don't they just get over it?
I don't know if they're thinking that, but...
Now, with your wife and her depression and her ups and downs...
I don't want to put words in your mouth, but I'll just be frank about what I'm thinking, Trent.
It's like you have to deal with the death of your son and also the depression of your wife.
It's kind of like a double burden.
Yeah, and then I was running my own business.
Yeah, I was running a business too, and I remember going to...
I make videos. I remember taking my kids to video shoots and they were very young, you know, just because, you know, she couldn't get up or wouldn't take care of them, so I had to...
Yeah, so that happened a number of times where the kids...
I mean, I'm not really watching them because I was working, so it was a tough time.
When my nephew was born in 2013, that's when I had a panic attack on the toll road.
We were at a service area.
I just felt like every...
I think someone else is calling.
Sorry. Sorry about that.
Where was I? 2013.
Your cousin is born. You're having a panic attack.
Oh, yeah. My nephew was born.
Your nephew, sorry. Yeah. I just felt that the whole thing was crushing on top of me, like the whole world.
And this was during the time of your divorce, is that right?
Well, that was a year before.
A year before, sorry. Yeah.
So that's when I started taking a step back on my business and doing less.
And then I ended up stopped doing it.
All together in 2015.
Yeah, our divorce process started right at the end of 2014.
How long did that go on for?
We were separated for two years.
Oh, before? No, after.
Well, yeah, okay.
I moved out in September of 2014 and then we were divorced in November of 2016.
Wow. That's a long time.
Yeah. Were you hoping to solve or fix it, or what was the delay?
Well, at first, I think I just needed a...
We had done...
Sorry.
We did counseling for a while, for about two years, from 2012 to 2014, and I didn't think it really helped, to be honest.
It just seemed like... It seemed like everything was my fault, you know?
Was it a female counselor?
Oh, two of them was.
One of them was a male. Yeah.
Female in-group preference can be a strong force of nature sometimes.
Yeah, but the guy felt like he was kind of feminine too, so...
Because one time he told me, he's like, why don't you just stop playing volleyball?
That's what he said, because I played once a week.
I said, why would I stop playing?
It's only once a week. It's my outlet.
I bet you spend a lot less time playing volleyball than your wife spent not getting out of bed.
Right. I only play once a week.
One night a week. It was really therapeutic for me.
It still is. Sure.
Volleyball is a great, great sport, I must tell you.
Oh. Oh, do you play?
I do. Well, not as often as I'd like.
I met my wife playing volleyball, but anytime I'm near sand and there's a net, I'm all over it.
Yeah, me too. I play in leagues all around the lakes.
I love playing outside, but I like playing indoors.
I just love the game, yeah. That's right.
So, yeah, I grew up, my whole family played, my sister and my brother.
So we grew up playing in clubs and my sister played in college.
Trent, do you think that if Zane had lived, your marriage would have survived?
I've asked myself that at lunch.
Thank you.
I would say probably yes.
But you may not have adopted.
Oh, you may have, of course, you wanted the son, right?
Yeah. You know, at the time when I had the vasectomy, I didn't think we would have any more kids, so I thought we were done.
Yeah. But that was before all that stuff happened.
But, yeah.
So how much is your dead child costing your relationship with your living children?
I'm sorry, I missed your question.
How much is your dead child costing your relationship with your living children?
I think lately it's...
I feel like I'm in a fog sometimes and they're talking to me and I'm not really listening.
I'm just in a...
I'm too focused on the past or other things.
I'm having a hard time focusing lately.
Why do you think now, 13 years later?
I mean, I know it's not like it wasn't there and now it is, but I assume that it's, you're saying it's on the up, right?
Like now you say you can't stop thinking about his death, like there's more, right?
Yeah, then it was, then I started thinking about, well, why are we divorced?
And, you know, I start focusing on that stuff kind of thing, thanks to it.
It usually happens when, because I have them half the time.
I have my kids. So we split 50-50.
I always think that when they're gone, how I regret being divorced, you know what I mean?
Do you think there's anything you could have done different to not be divorced?
Yes. And what's that?
I think I shouldn't have moved out.
I felt like our relationship was so toxic and I couldn't even think anymore.
But if your relationship was toxic, how would staying have made it non-toxic?
I don't know. Or to put it another way, what was exactly toxic about your relationship at the time that you moved out?
I just felt like I was a work helper.
A what? A what helper?
Like a work helper because she started her own business.
Oh, okay. That time?
Oh, so you, yeah, a woman starts her own business and the man pours all of his energy into helping her make it successful when she didn't do the same for him.
Right, so I heard that story before.
I would have to make the deliveries. It's a furniture store, so I had to go and make all these deliveries.
And I was still working full-time and I was doing my part-time video work.
Wait, so you were doing the deliveries on her business?
Why didn't she pay someone to do those deliveries?
Yeah, she paid me.
Why she didn't, at the time she was thinking, or we were probably thinking that, I eventually just quit doing it, but at the time she was thinking, I can't afford to pay anybody, so you should do it.
Which is a pretty good sign that the business is not viable.
Yeah, she was just starting.
So, it was our first year.
Yeah. Did the business end up lasting for her?
She still has it today, but...
But what?
What's going on with her is a carousel of men going through the house.
Oh, no. Since I've left.
Oh, no. So you guys adopted two kids, got divorced, one of them's on meds, and there's a parade of boyfriends through the house half the time?
Well, there's been three since I've left.
And one was pretty quickly, and that's why I thought we'd never get back together, because I don't think my bed was even cold yet, and there was somebody already in there.
And we were married 12 years at that time.
Do you know much about these guys?
Yeah, the first two were not good guys at all.
Of course they weren't. She's a single mom.
Of course they weren't. Yeah, they had records.
Oh yes, but the big problem is you not giving ADHD meds to your kid.
Having guys around with records around at Little girl, that's fine.
And little boys. But the big problem, apparently, is you not giving crap non-medicine to your boy.
Yeah, and I feel like I was almost forced to.
Like, my custody was on the line if I didn't do it, you know?
Why is she...
Records?
yeah what like what kind of record are we talking here the first guy the first two the first two guys had felonies One was for B&E. The second one was so long that I was just...
You know, it was DUIs and there's a lot of assaulting other people, assaulting women.
So your ex-wife is bringing criminals...
Your ex-wife is bringing open criminals or ex-criminals around your kids.
Yes. And does the court not have anything to say about that?
I suppose I could have fought it, but...
Family court takes the stuffing right out of you, right?
They don't intervene.
They only intervene when it's the father, I guess.
Yeah, yeah. Well, I think that's true.
Now, do you have any sense of why she would end up stooping so low?
She has a major problem with being alone, obviously.
Wow. She can't stand to be alone.
And I think it's her way of dealing with all the crap that she went through.
No, it's not. That's a very charitable explanation, my friend.
But no, it's not. Now, was there any sign, thinking back to when you were first dating, when you first met her, was there any sign that she might have these kinds of potential habits in her?
As far as like being alone?
Well, yeah, these kinds of bad decisions, being alone, this instability, this selfishness, you know, she's got to know that's not good for her kids, right?
But she's doing it because she doesn't want to be alone and she's willing to sacrifice her children's peace of mind and potential safety in order to get what she wants.
So I'm talking about this kind of selfishness and bad decision making and so on.
Was there any sign of that when you first met her when you were dating her?
Well, there were signs of her being selfish that I pretty much ignored.
And what were they? Um...
She's more about what she was doing, and we wanted to be around her friends.
You know, she didn't really want to meet my friends.
She kind of shunned my friends.
Did she end up triggering your disengagement from your friends after you started dating seriously or you got married?
Exactly. Oh, yeah.
Yeah, you can't have friends around, otherwise your friends are going to say, she's crazy.
Right. And that's why she gets upset with me.
Sorry, this is general advice.
Always beware a woman who tries to separate you from your friends.
They are up to no good and nothing good will come of it.
And most of the time while we're married, if I ever played volleyball or did anything with my family, she was immediately upset with me.
Sure. Yeah.
No, this is not wanting you to have support, not wanting you to have relationships.
It's because she's planning to go nuts on you and doesn't want anyone to warn you.
Yeah, because I actually came across you when I was going to the MGTOW things.
I think you talked to Paul Elam a couple years ago.
That's how I came across your stuff.
Right.
So who trained you to be in the service of crazy women?
We may need to go a little further back to 2005, my friend.
and Okay. So you're asking about my dad or my mom?
I'm asking about who trained you to not ostracize selfish women.
I'm not sure.
Well, let me ask you this.
Did your family of origin know anything about the selfish side of your girlfriend slash fiancee, wife-to-be?
My sister was well aware, and my sister's very honest.
And what did she say?
She said, don't do it? Yeah, I was like, you shouldn't marry her.
She's really selfish.
And did anyone else in your family know about this or talk to you about it?
No. Wait, know about it or talk to you about it?
Or both? No, I'm sorry.
No one talks to me about it.
Is that because they didn't know that she was selfish?
No. Well, maybe they didn't want to...
At least my dad would never say anything bad about her.
Why? Doesn't he love you?
Yes, but that's not how he is.
He doesn't...
He wouldn't...
Oh, he prefers his own comfort to his children's happiness and safety.
Seems kind of selfish to me.
Yeah, I mean, he kind of just goes along with anything that's happening, you know?
Not really a...
You know, he's kind of like, things will work out kind of thing.
That's kind of his... Except when they don't.
Platitudes, you know? Yeah, but things haven't worked out so well, right?
No. At least as you're sitting right now.
But I knew that and I still pursued her.
So how pretty was she?
Like now or then?
No, back then. Now?
Well, now don't count. You've seen behind the mask.
Well, I thought, for me, she was probably eight, you know?
And where were you at the time?
I'm about there. Probably eight, yeah.
Oh. So why would you need to appease her if you're both the same level of attractiveness?
I thought she was a challenge at the time I pursued her.
How was she a challenge? Well, back then she was such a bubbly personality and full of life and laughter.
So I gravitated towards that.
Were you not that way at the time?
I mean, now you come across like a bit of a lead balloon, but were you more peppy when you were younger?
I have a voice on that bad.
Oh, listen, we'll fix it by the end of the conversation, my friend, but you got to listen back to this, man.
You are like energy vampire dude at the moment.
I'm not kidding you. Like if I didn't come into the conversation with an excess of energy, I'd be one crumpled piece of dust fluff on the floor.
You know, you come for the honesty, right?
I'll be frank. Oh, I'm not being boring, am I? No, it's not that you're boring.
It's just that it's monotone and it's laborious and it's slow.
It's like trying to go for a walk with somebody carrying a lead cow.
It's just tiring. No, you're not boring.
I mean, your story is fascinating and I have great sympathy for what you've gone through.
But it's like trying to play patty cake with somebody who's got shell shock.
Sorry? I don't give energy to a story like that.
How do you give...
Oh, now you're blaming the story.
Okay. No, no, no.
Let's not blame the story.
Let's not blame Zane. I agree.
You know, it's certainly not his fault, right?
No. Okay.
So, let's not try that particular strategy, if that's all right with you.
No, let's get back on track. Right.
Yes. So were you lower energy back then than she was or has sort of life ground you down to some degree over the last while or what?
Yeah, I think it's grounded me down, obviously.
All right. Now tell me about your mom.
Yeah, I was a lot more peppy and full of life than I am now.
I mean, it's obvious and I know it too.
So tell me a bit about your mom.
Um, where to start?
Uh, she's a stay at home mom.
Uh, Thank you.
She worked...
I have an older sister, older brother, like I was telling you.
And she stayed home for eight years.
My dad worked.
That was in the 70s. And she started working when I went to school.
She's not very... I would say she's not very emotional.
Emotionless, I would say.
She doesn't show much love or didn't really hug much.
She did use a wooden spoon, though.
And how often did that happen?
Oops, sorry, I hit the mic.
How often did that happen?
I would say... Possibly monthly, probably.
And how hard was it and how difficult was it?
It was welt, so it was hard.
Right. And equally distributed among the siblings?
Yes, they've...
They all...
We all got it, yes.
My dad didn't really...
I only remember him spanking me maybe once or twice in my life.
And why did your mother beat you with a wooden spoon?
And don't give me this, like, discipline stuff, right?
We're beyond that. But why do you think she did it?
She doesn't like kids.
She what? She doesn't like children.
She doesn't like children? Yeah.
And why do you say that? Because, yeah.
My kids now will stay with her occasionally, and I can just tell how upset and frustrated she is.
She gets with them. Okay, so why does she get frustrated with kids?
Sorry to interrupt. Why does she get frustrated with kids?
In other words, what do you think she says to herself?
Because frustration is when...
You have an expectation and there's a collision, right?
So when people are perpetually frustrated, it's because they have an expectation that is continually being violated and they won't adjust their expectations, right?
Like if you have this expectation that children should be quiet when they're home, well, guess what?
Unless you beat them into a coma, they're not going to be quiet when they're home.
Like if you have an expectation that as a parent, you should be able to sit down with your kids going, Dad!
Dad, dad, dad, dad, dad, dad, dad.
Well, that's an unreasonable expectation, right?
If you have an expectation that you should get a solid night's sleep with a newborn, well, that may be an unrealistic expectation.
So if you won't adjust your expectations, you end up in a state of perpetual frustration.
So I'm just curious what was the expectations that weren't being met by the very existence of children.
It was everything we'd do, if we would wrestle or if we would be loud or be boys or anything, any of that kind of thing, she would get upset about.
Right. Right.
And so she would get angry.
It's the same thing with my kids now.
Sorry? Sorry?
It's the same thing with my kids and now I can see how she was when we were kids.
Right. And it's the same thing, yeah, same thing with your kids now, right?
But she's never hit them.
No, but we got an argument this past week about it.
And that was her solution, is that I should beat them.
And then I was like, no, I'm not going to beat them.
So, we got a huge argument about it.
Wow. So she's pretty much doubled down to what she did to you as kids, that she thinks it was a good thing.
Yes. Wow.
And even now, she's 75 now, you know?
So probably not a lot of change on the horizon.
No. And have you ever talked to her about what you thought and felt around her as a child?
No. I've never talked to her about it.
Why do you think? I'm not really sure why.
Sure you are. Sure you are.
Of course you are. Which is, if I said, I've got your mom on the phone right now, why don't you tell her now, what would you feel?
Well, I think...
What I really think is, especially boys, she doesn't like.
She doesn't like the way boys act, the way boys wrestle, the way boys play.
I don't know if my sister felt the same way or not.
you Thank you.
Because, you know, she was a girl.
I don't understand what it means to say, I don't like boys.
You decided to become a mom and you had some fucking boys.
Like, it's a little bit too late to say, well, I don't like it.
You find a way to like it, they're your children.
Yeah. So, I'm not quite sure I get the, well, I don't like boys.
voice, it's like, well, then give them to someone else or learn how to like them.
Right?
Yeah.
Yeah.
I never understood why we were such a hassle for her.
We had a lot of fun, my brother and I. We had lots of property, about, you know, two acres.
We lived out in the sticks.
There was lots to do, lots of farmland and woods and lakes and such.
So we explored a lot.
Do you think she's a cruel person?
No.
Thank you.
Yes. Yes, I believe she is.
Because sometimes people are frustrated because they have bad ideas or bad thoughts.
other times people hold on to bad ideas or bad thoughts in order for themselves to be frustrated so that they can act in an aggressive manner and call themselves justified.
Yeah, like whatever my dad did to her because they got divorced when I was in high school.
She'll still bring it up sometimes that, oh, he did X, Y, and Z, and I tell her, like, I don't want to hear this anymore.
Like, it's done. It's over with.
You need to move on.
Oh, she's still complaining about your dad?
Yeah. This is almost 30 years ago now.
And how... How did they react when they learned that your marriage was on the rocks?
They were happy, actually.
What? What do you mean?
My mom was. Why was she happy?
Oh, because she's a cruel person?
Because she thought that...
Oh, she didn't like her.
She didn't like your wife?
Yes. Did she ever tell you before your marriage was on the rocks that she didn't like your wife?
Well, she knew because of all the Facebook bickering and fighting and texting battles.
Between your mom and your wife?
I was too, yeah.
Now, but when was the earliest that your mother said that she didn't like your wife?
Oh, that's the first I ever heard of it when I told her that.
I mean, that she told me in person.
Your mom told you in person?
Yes. Well, actually, I asked her if I could stay at her house.
And then she pretty much spent the entire time telling me about what my ex did to her during the whole time that they've had a relationship.
And what did your ex do to your mom?
Well, she didn't pay attention to me at this party or, you know, all this kind of small stuff.
You know, Facebook fighting or pictures or why didn't you invite me to this?
Why didn't you invite me to that?
Wow. Mom sounds like a desperately petty person.
But how much do you think your mom's aggression towards your wife contributed to problems in your marriage?
Well, it did. It didn't help, obviously.
No, how much do you think it contributed?
Like a percentage?
Yeah. Because your mom wanted you to get divorced.
And manipulative people can often find a way to get what they want, right?
I'd say it's pretty low.
But it just made things awkward around family time.
We do holiday things.
And did your mom, sorry, did your ex-wife ever complain to you about your mom?
Yeah. My mom never, even though she did all that stuff, they did that to each other, she never said anything to me about it.
Wait, who never said to you?
My mom. I'm sorry, my mom.
Right, but did your wife ever complain to you about your mom?
Yes. And what did she say?
The same things I just told you.
She acts like she doesn't care.
She's very cold.
And how was your mom and how was your dad when Zane died?
Like the last 20 days of his life, a lot of the grandparents were in the house with us.
So I don't really know how they were.
I mean, everybody was upset, obviously, but I actually wasn't really paying attention to what other people were doing.
No, but they should be there to help you, right?
Yes. They were there to help out wherever.
They'd drop over meals or they would take my daughter and take her out, watch her for a little bit.
Right. Well, I think I have enough information.
I'm going to tell you what I think, which may be complete nonsense, just so you understand, right?
Just some guy on the internet.
This may be complete nonsense, but I'll tell you what I think, and then you can tell me if it makes any sense.
All right? All right.
Okay. There's never...
Any way to make the death of a child okay.
I know that, you know that, better than I do.
But here's the thing to do with this kind of tragedy, in my humble opinion.
You have to try and find a way to get as much possible good out of the horror that has occurred in your life.
I mean, when I got cancer, out of nowhere!
The question is, how can you get the greatest possible good out of something like that?
Now, that never makes it okay that your son died, but you could at least, I think, get closure by saying that I got as much wisdom and security and safety and positivity and good stuff out of this terrible tragedy as humanly possible.
And that's the best we can do with tragedy.
It doesn't mean don't grieve.
It doesn't mean don't be shocked and horrified and appalled and cry and scream and groan.
It doesn't mean any of that. It just means that the only way...
To get as much good out of this is to try and wring as much positivity out of something like this as humanly possible, right?
Now, that had some potential insofar as you adopted these two boys and there was some potential to get something good in terms of, well, my biological son died, but now I have these two adopted boys, which kind of came out of that.
And if my son could speak to me In spirit form, in soul form, if my son could speak to me, he would say, you did the very best with my death.
That is possible. You planted as many flowers, as many opportunities, as many possibilities, as much positivity as possible on my grave.
You tried to turn as much tragedy into hope and possibility as humanly possible.
And this is an old Christian idea, actually, that I remember learning about when I was a kid, and you can read more about it in the Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis.
If the devil tempts you with greed, be more austere.
If the devil tempts you with riches, spend less.
If the devil tempts you with lust, be more chaste.
So try and turn the temptation to despair into a dedication to hope.
Try and turn the temptation for a living death To a commitment to live as much as humanly possible as deeply and as richly as humanly possible so that your son in your mind's eye can say I wish I hadn't died but at least I didn't die in vain I wish I didn't have to die but at least my death has caused a great eruption of positivity and love and connectedness on the part of my parents they are honoring my death With living greater and deeper and richer lives.
And I think, in her mind's eye, that is what the dead most desire in her history.
And I'm not even remotely going to try and compare my experiences to yours.
But I did have an unusual number of friends who died when I was a boy.
One of my friends didn't die, but he was probably dead now.
One of my friends did a flip when I was in boarding school into a pool, hit his head, went unconscious, wasn't noted for a while, wasn't noticed for a while.
And by the time they...
Got him back to life. His brain had been half destroyed.
And he was gone for a while. He came back, but he couldn't run.
He couldn't speak. And I remember trying to have so many conversations with him after this, because he was such a funny guy.
And I just couldn't go past what had died within him.
I couldn't get past that roadblock of what was gone.
I had another friend very close.
He was the first guy I connected with when we first came to Canada.
One of the kindest, most curious, gentlest, most compassionate, most empathetic.
I learned a lot about empathy from this boy.
An amazing kid.
We were best friends.
We clicked. I remember very clearly, like it was in grade six, that we would walk around All of the recess and all of the lunch and just having the most amazing conversations.
That it took me years to have those kinds of conversations again.
And I was pretty lonely because I had just come from a country to a new country and...
It was pretty feral where I was.
Pretty bad neighborhood. Not terrible, but fairly bad.
A lot of rough kids. And he was just a really cool guy.
And we had our sleepovers.
We had great conversations.
And he just didn't come to school one day.
And I found out sometime later that he just died in his sleep.
Just had some damn heart issue.
I had another friend who I used to go dirt biking with all the time.
And we were pretty close, but he was succumbing to a kind of darkness that came out of the family, which we don't have to get into here.
And we ended up not having a friendship because he would get progressively more aggressive and bullying.
And I pushed back against that as I want to do.
But one day we're biking home.
I think I've told this story before, but I'll mention it here.
I think it's relevant. One day we're biking home.
From dirt biking in the woods.
It's nighttime. And there's a big rock on the sidewalk ahead of me, and I swerved to avoid it.
And he almost crashed into me.
And we had this, you know how these, you know this, when you've had conflicts with people that have been brewing for a while, that just one little thing just sets it up.
Sets it off. And he was like, hey man, you cut me off!
And he was very aggressive.
And I was like, damn it, I've had enough of this.
And I said, no, you were tailgating.
And he's like, no, you swerved.
You cut me off. And I'm like, you should not have been biking so close to me that when I swerved to avoid a rock, we can bike back and have a look at the rock if you want.
When I swerve to avoid a rock and you almost crash into me, you're tailgating.
You're supposed to leave two car lengths distance in a car.
You could at least leave two bike lengths difference, right?
And we just had this thing, right?
He just went nuts.
He went nuts. And I was like, at some point, like he's just screaming at the top of his lungs, you know, and it was his life.
It didn't have anything to do with me.
It was his life and his mom and all this kind of stuff.
But he was focused on me and I'm biking home like I'm chased by...
I'm a Cerberus with a bell-shaped hairdo.
And I'm like throwing my bike down the stairs and fumbling with my keys to get into my building.
And he's coming to me. It's like a horror movie.
I get into the building.
I close the door just before he gets there.
I go up and I can see him.
Like I look over my balcony. I can see the guy screaming, throwing his bike around.
Just went nuts. And I was like, that was it.
Like I couldn't, like you can't have a relationship after that.
And then not too long after that, I read in the newspaper, he died.
And he died. He died on a motorbike.
And you know how he died on a motorbike?
He was tailgating.
Truck stopped, and he didn't.
He didn't leave enough room. Dead.
So, I can't bring any of these people back to life any more than you can bring your son back to life.
But what I can do is I can try and stuff myself full of the life that was robbed from them or that they gave up through lack of wisdom.
They got much less so that I, in a sense, can commit to much more.
And a lot of my ambition arises out of the grave, either explicit or implicit, of people's physical or spiritual deaths.
I've known a lot of people in my life who have taken this incredible gift of life and squandered it or given it away or had it taken away as your son did through god-awful happenstance.
And what is taken from them cannot be given back to them, but it can be further grown within you.
And if I were to imagine this soliloquy trend, I would say something like this, that your son Zane would say, Dad, I didn't have a chance for life.
I barely even had consciousness.
I couldn't speak. I went blind.
I decayed into nothingness.
I barely had a bubble of life in my short time on this planet.
But what are you learning from my death?
How much commitment to your relationships do you have?
I am never going to grow up.
I am never going to Go through puberty or learn to ride a bike or drive a car or have sex or have children or get old.
I'll never have any of these things.
You still have them. What utility are you making of them?
How much are you committed to living deeply and richly as a result of seeing how little life I was given by the fates?
I don't get to have a relationship with you, Dad.
How's your relationship with my siblings?
I don't get to cuddle on your lap.
I don't get to laugh with you.
I don't get to have you teach me volleyball.
And I can live with that.
I can live with living in this tiny grave for eternity.
As long as I know that you're learning from my death and fully committing to life and connecting with the people around you.
Because right now it feels a little bit like I died in vain.
Like nobody learned a damn thing from my death.
That you and mom split up.
That... You're distracted from your own children that...
What did I die for?
And there's never anything that makes my death acceptable or positive.
But I sure would like to know that people extracted as much life out of my death as humanly possible.
That what was minus infinity for me can at least be a plus thousand for other people.
That they cannot bring me to life, but they can bring themselves to life.
That they cannot take me out of the grave, but they don't have to follow me into the grave.
That I can't ever walk above the ground, but why are you not stepping through the clouds?
Why are you not? Do you feel like you're honoring me by living less powerfully, by living less vitally, by living less connectedly?
You're not. That's a terrible thing to be my legacy.
It's for you to think of my death rather than your life.
For you to think of what can't be changed in your history and what can't be achieved, which is me coming back to life, and that I would stand between you, the memory of me dead, that I would stand between you.
And those in your life, that I would stand between you and your daughter, that I would stand between you and your two sons, that I would stand between you and joy, that I would stand between you and vitality, is a horrible legacy for me to have.
The last thing that I would ever want, ever, Dad, is to stand between you and happiness.
I would like for you to escape the grave.
I would like for you to escape and walk away from the graveyard and live the life that I couldn't have.
And connect with the people that I can't connect with because I'm dead.
That's what I want.
More than anything.
That is what would give my death meaning.
But right now I feel you're half with me and half nowhere.
And that's the last thing that I would want on my tombstone is he died and took his family with him.
It was a murder-suicide.
A fate. You have the choice that I'll never have.
To live. To connect.
To breathe deep and drink deep the elixir of life.
And you're not.
Why? Do you think that you're honoring me?
By living half there?
Half connected? Lost in dreams of death and decay?
From 13 years ago?
That's not what I want. That's not what would honor me.
That's not what would honor the tragedy that occurred.
Fuck death. Fight death.
Live hard. Live deeply.
live powerfully so that death hangs his head in shame and wins nothing from the future.
Wow, that was that was powerful.
you Isn't that what he'd want?
If you die, do you want your children to be miserable for the rest of their lives?
Absolutely not. No.
No, you don't.
Your dying breath should be to bless them with the joy of existence and say, grieve and then live.
But if you grieve and grieve, I will feel worse about dying almost than I did about anything else.
You want your children to mourn your passing, to celebrate your existence, and to live deeply and richly because you died.
Death is the great organizer.
Death is the great prioritizer.
Hell, if I live forever, I'd do a podcast every month.
Maybe, right?
We prioritize and we focus and we're energetic because we're going to fucking die.
Right. And you're going to die.
And what do you want your kids to get out of your death, Trent?
You're going to die one day, right?
Hopefully a long way in the future, maybe tomorrow.
But what do you want your kids to learn from your death?
How do you want them to live because you died?
Because you will. Well, I don't want them to be with a passionless dad like I feel like I am right now.
Right. I feel like I'm a shell of- Well, they won't be because you're dead.
But how do you want them to embrace life?
What do you want their relationship with life to be after you die?
Do you want them 13 years after you die to be obsessing about your death and disconnected from people around you?
No. Why not?
No, no, no. But why do you think your son would want that?
I don't think he thinks that or wants that.
Well, then why are you disrespecting your son?
by doing the opposite of what he would want.
Your son would want you to connect with your children and not use him as a shield or an excuse or a distraction from connecting with people.
I don't think he'd be proud.
So you have a problem with connecting with those around you, right?
And the way that you hide the real reason is to think about your son, Zane, right?
What is the real reason that you have difficulty connecting with people?
It's not because of Zane.
Because that's not what he would want.
The real reason?
I'm not sure.
At this time.
Yeah.
Would you like to know the reason?
As I see it? Sure.
That's why I'm here. You sound very enthusiastic.
Fine. Let me just climb into my nuclear bunker first and put in my la-la-la fingers.
All right. Well, I'll tell you.
You can see if it makes sense. Okay.
Because you're still having arguments with your 75-year-old mother about being beaten as a child.
So I was listening earlier.
You said you couldn't – I think it was a previous caller.
You said you couldn't have a real relationship until you dealt with your family.
That's correct. If you can't be honest with your family of origin, you can't be honest with anyone, because they run everything.
You know history is everything.
You can't be any more honest in your life than your least honest relationship, Trent.
You can't be any more honest in your life than your least honest relationship.
And if you have a relationship in your life, Where you lie and bicker and hide and obfuscate and chicken out and avoid.
That's going to affect everything.
Everything that you do.
Until I told the truth to my mother, all I could do in the world was lie.
All right. You're thinking about your son dying with you because you refuse to live with your mother, to be alive with your mother, to be an adult with your mother, to tell the goddamn truth to your mother.
She's just a woman who had sex and gave birth.
She's not a goddess. She's not a force of nature.
She's just a woman who had sex and gave birth.
Why can't you tell her the truth?
I don't mean abuse her.
I don't mean hit her or anything.
Just tell her the truth. And what kind of example are you setting for your children, Trent?
That you can't stand up to your ex-wife because of the courts, all right?
But you don't know what assertiveness you're capable of if you're honest with your mother.
Have your children regularly seen you around your mom not being honest?
No.
They haven't seen you around your mom?
Never been in the same room with your mom and your children?
Oh, I thought you said they haven't seen me being honest.
No, they've seen you being around your mom and you're not being honest with her, right?
Yes, they've seen me with her, yeah.
Yeah, which is the same as seeing you not being honest, right?
Because there's things you want to say to your mom that are true and honest and powerful and important that you're too scared to say, right?
Or maybe you don't realize the importance of saying them.
Or maybe now she's old and you have to be careful and take care of that, right?
Well, no, I mean, that's why we got in the argument because I I told her that I would never do that.
The argument is not about her hitting your children, the argument is about her beating you.
That's what I'm talking about.
That's what I mean by honesty.
Maybe no one can stand up to your ex-wife because you're not standing up to your mom.
And your kids get that.
Women rule, men crumble.
Women dominate, men buckle.
Women say jump and men say, how high, honey?
I'll do anything you want.
Mm-hmm.
Just to keep the peace.
Just to break into pieces.
That's what I did was my whole life.
I've been keeping the peace and not sticking up for myself, I guess.
How's that working out for you?
Well, obviously not great.
And your daughter is 13, which is why this is coming up now, right?
Yeah. Because she is going to be entering into a phase of sexual power.
And I'm sorry to be saying this to any other father, but we know that it's true, right?
Yes. And so now she's going to gain great power over men because of her sexuality.
And she does not see an example, I assume, in her life of an adult male or any male rationally and positively being assertive.
So what kind of man or what kind of boy is she going to end up dating, Trent?
Like the felons of my ex.
Well, she's got that imprinting too, right?
So how are you going to keep your precious darling daughter safe from the boys and the men?
I have to be more assertive.
I have to stick up for myself.
You do. You have to model to her the behavior of an adult, mature male.
Who is able to tell women the truth.
By God, I mean, it's not just you, man.
I mean, I'm playing for mankind here.
I'm speaking to Western men as a whole.
Tell the truth and shame the devil.
If you've got issues with your mom, sit down with her and say, Hey mom, I've got some issues with you.
And I'm going to talk about them with you.
And she'll, you know, do a whole bunch of dance because women have been corrupted by power, by sexuality, by state resources, by family courts, by lawyers, by the welfare state, by old age pensions, by free health care, all the bullshit that shovels endless resources at the feet of women in hopes of appeasing them.
Spoiler! They won't be appeased.
And so, we need...
Men, to be honest with women.
You got some issues with your mom.
She beat you. And she's trying to convince you to beat your children.
The fuck are you going to stand up and say, no, no, no, no, no.
It's time for you to feel a little discomfort, mom.
It's time for me to be honest.
Yes.
She can handle it.
I think she can.
And she will. She bloody well will.
And that way, you can stop thinking about your spiritual death in the form of your son's physical death.
Come back to life.
Your son can't, but you can.
And life is truth.
You know, if you're not telling the truth, you're not really alive.
Because you're in a dictatorship.
Well, a chick-tatorship, as I've called it, right?
You're in a dictatorship. But I have the First Amendment.
Really? Can you talk to your mom about your...
No! Then you don't have...
How about a First Amendment of you?
It's too uncomfortable.
Oh, she'll be upset.
Right?
Well, did she care about you being upset when she was beating you with a wooden spoon?
I think she can handle being a little fucking upset because she didn't mind beating a child with a wooden spoon.
Kind of upsetting for you, right?
She didn't mind bitching to you about your wife.
Kind of upsetting to you, right?
Has she marched down to your ex-wives and said, get these goddamn felons away from my grandchildren, will you, honey?
No.
she hasn't. So she's fine beating little kids, but she doesn't want to actually confront adults, right?
Yeah. Real fucking brave, honey.
Now, you've got to save.
You need to give your sons the example, and you desperately need to give your daughter the example of a positive, assertive male.
Because you're kind of ground down a little here, right?
Yeah. Well, there's things you can't do.
Because of the family courts.
And there's things you can do with your mom.
And who knows what's possible.
After you... I keep wanting to tell people about the superpowers that come from confronting your parents.
Yeah. What I do, the strength of what I do, the courage of what I do, the commitment to what it is that I'm doing.
I'm one of the bravest people speaking out in the world today.
I'm not kidding. Hey, I've got my strengths.
I've got my weaknesses. A lack of courage is not one of my weaknesses.
You know the topics that I take on.
You know the issues that I deal with.
Most other people would rather skin their own penis alive with an orange rind rather than deal with the stuff that I talk about.
And people say, how do you do it?
How do you deal with the criticism?
How do you deal with the hostility? How do you go and speak when people have threatened to bomb your...
Because I got superpowers.
I got bitten by the radioactive spider called truth.
I was blown here from the planet Krypton called honesty.
The powers you get when you tell the truth to your history can't be over-described.
You can't over-sell them because whatever you think they are, think times a million.
I want to give people these superpowers called the truth!
You won't believe what you're capable of doing.
It's the myth of Jesus.
What did Jesus do? Jesus told the truth.
Yeah, kind of told the truth about a lot of things.
And then people say, oh my gosh, he could turn water into wine, he could walk on water, he could produce loaves and fishes, low where there were no loaves and fishes before.
That's just a nonsense amateur way of saying he got the superpower called honesty.
Honesty. Can you imagine, Trent, in your life, Telling the truth to people.
Being honest with people.
And not being always terrified of people's reactions.
That means that you have the capacity to both be loved and hated.
And if being hated is the price of being loved, I will take it every single day and twice on Sundays.
As I sometimes do.
Right? So, that is the price.
If you fully self-actualize and you tell the truth to people in your life, then, yeah, some of them are going to hate you.
But the ones who love you will love you forever.
Yeah. And once you have that kind of love, that's the real superpower, is being loved.
Half the world can hate me.
I don't care. I live in a house of love.
I am loved every day, deeply, passionately, in a committed and permanent way.
And if you haven't had that kind of love, I'm sorry, but I'm going to tell you how to get it, which is through honesty.
Now, being honest may take everyone out of your life who can't stand honesty, which opens up the room, the area, the space, the universe for other people who do value honesty to move in.
This is the path to the superpower of love, is honesty.
You will be a different person.
You will walk on water.
You will turn water into wine.
Oh, I'm blaspheming. I'm sorry.
But you know what I mean. You will have what most people consider to be superpowers.
It's called telling the truth.
When Superman stopped showing off and started doing good and telling the truth.
What is it to Christopher Reeves in the old Superman movie?
He says, I don't lie.
He says, I don't lie.
He tells the truth. Yes.
That's his power. People shoot at him and the bullets bounce off his chest.
People attack me.
I don't care. I'm sorry that your lives out there are so sad and pitiful that you have to attack someone who tells the truth.
I really am sad and sorry.
About that for those people.
And I wish that they would simply stop attacking truth-tellers, start telling the truth themselves, and join me in this cathedral and palace called love!
And I want you to have that!
Right now you're like a caterpillar under a John Deere tire track!
Right? You've got to listen back to this call, man!
You've got a lot of power!
You've got bodies in you.
You've got death in your wake.
When you've got death in your wake, you can blast awake.
You understand, right?
You can jolt because you have the example of death now in a very vivid way.
Your parents are still alive, but you have the very vivid experience of death in the tragic story of your son, Zane.
If that's not enough to blast you sky high into telling the truth, the fuck are you saving the truth for?
You're going to die either way.
Whether you tell the truth or whether you lie, you're going to die either way.
Telling the truth doesn't shorten your lifespan unless you're in Iran.
Telling the truth doesn't shorten your lifespan, but it sure as hell makes your life better.
And if you want to get these thugs out of your children's lives, tell the truth to your mom.
I'm not going to tell you I'm going to tell you the causality in any great detail, but the ripple effect you're going to have will be truly astonishing.
People will sense it about you.
It's revolutionary in a way that can't even be described in any...
It's one of these annoying things that you have to go through it.
You got to trust me. Tell the truth.
Once you go through it, you'll be like, wow, what the hell was I doing not telling the truth all these years?
This is Tony the Tiger Great.
Yeah.
Who was the alcoholic in your family when you were growing up, Trent?
and Or the drug user?
My dad drank when I was until about...
I never saw him drink when I was little, but I knew he was intoxicated.
Was he drinking to, like, fair drunkenness?
Yes, I... I remember a couple times when I was younger that he yelled at all of us when we were younger.
Yeah. It could be tough to live with a cruel woman.
My mom left him for a while and then when he came back and they got back together, I never from eight till they got divorced, I never saw him drink or saw him drunk.
After the divorce? No, like when they got back together when I was about seven or eight, he didn't drink till they got divorced from what I could see.
Okay. So your father used alcohol to vanish and you drank or drinking deep of the cup of your son's death in a sense to vanish.
Yeah. Right.
And then when my mom and dad got divorced, he went back to, you know, he started drinking heavily again.
Did that have anything to do with his kidney damage?
I know liver. I don't know if it does kidney.
No. It was from a stent surgery.
The dye in 5% of the cases, the dye that they release when they do stent surgeries, they'll sometimes kill the kidneys, and that's what happened to him.
Right. Well...
Does this perspective help at all?
Yeah. Yes, because I've always known that I've tried to please, even in my relationships, I try to be the...
I don't stick up for myself and I apologize too much.
And that's why I've been having a hard time since my divorce of even going out and dating.
Which I... I haven't introduced anyone to my kids because I haven't got to that point with any of the people I've dated so far.
You'd be amazed at who you can date after you tell the truth.
Yeah. But yeah, this has been great.
I mean... I feel like I've got some work to do.
The Great Secret... About apologizing and appeasing is it's a form of control.
It seems passive, but it's actually quite active in that you are trying to manage and control other people.
And when you're trying to control people, you can't be with them.
You can't connect with them.
Because you're managing them.
You're manipulating them.
Appeasement and apologies is a form of manipulation.
And you can tell because often if people push back against false apologies and appeasement, people get angry, right?
Yeah. I mean, if somebody doesn't take your appeasement and calls you on it, the next emotion you're probably going to feel is frustration and anger because your manipulations aren't working.
It's not nice to appease.
It's not nice to over-apologize.
Right. I know that.
And it casts people in the role of being abusers.
And those who aren't will get the hell out and those who are will exploit it.
Yes. All right.
Well, I am very sorry for your son's death.
But don't let it kill your life.
Honor his death with a renewed commitment to life and truth and honesty.
I think that's the best way to serve a horrible situation.
I think you're right at first.
That's what I tried to do.
And then all these other things happened.
And I'm not blaming the things that happened.
It's just I've let life beat me down too much.
And I want to have that renewed vigor.
I just want it back.
I do. That's my first step.
He's haunting you because the crime of appeasement is still in the house, right?
You know that old thing that ghosts haunt until the crime is solved?
Yeah. The crime of despair, the crime of appeasement, the crime of not relishing life, which is a real crime to those whose life was so unjustly or unfairly taken.
Yes. I think satisfy the ghost.
Live honestly. And I think that you will end up with a much better relationship to that incident or to that tragedy.
All right? All right.
Thank you much. All right.
Well, let me know how it goes.
I really, really appreciate the call.
Thank you, everyone, so much. Don't forget to pick up I hate to shift from that conversation to this, but, you know, we've got to move on with our lives.
Theartoftheargument.com. You can pick up that book.
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