July 31, 2018 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:26:37
4154 An Honest Conversation About Marriage | Owen Benjamin and Stefan Molyneux
Owen Benjamin is a popular stand-up comedian and his new comedy special "Reluctant Warlord" is now available on Vimeo.Website: http://www.hugepianist.comYouTube: http://www.youtube.com/owenbenjamincomedyVimeo: https://vimeo.com/owenbenjaminInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/owenbenjamFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/owenbenjamincomedyYour support is essential to Freedomain Radio, which is 100% funded by viewers like you. Please support the show by making a one time donation or signing up for a monthly recurring donation at: http://www.freedomainradio.com/donate
Hope you're doing well. Back with a good friend Owen Benjamin.
He is a massively, I dare say, intergalactically popular stand-up comedian who apparently does one stand-up special about every 12 nanoparsecs.
His recent comedy specials are Feed the Bear, How Dare Me, and the brand new Reluctant Warlord.
And they're all available for purchase on Vimeo.
We will put... The link's below.
The website is hugepianist.com.
Do not mistype that as I did, I think, 20 or 30 times.
You can check him out on youtube.com forward slash OwenBenjaminComedy and Vimeo, of course,.com.
Owen Benjamin, thanks for taking the time today.
Thanks for having me, man. That was a great intro.
I'm available for MC duties around the world.
Awesome. Yeah, because with your accent, you can actually say pianist a lot better than a lot of people with just American or just Canadian accents.
Actually, I believe with my accent, the phrase is harpsichordist of the Queen.
So, we're going to talk.
So, on my show, as you probably heard, there are a few people having trouble with their marriages and people who call in having trouble with their marriage.
Kids. And, you know, that all makes sense.
But you don't want to judge human health by the endless parade of misery through the dentist's office.
So I thought we'd talk a little bit about some of the upside of marriage.
I hear rumors that you are happily married.
You have one two-year-old and another child so imminent.
I'm waiting for the bouncing yo-yo of baby coming off the umbilical cord in the background there as your wife manfully gives birth in the forest.
So we're going to talk about some of the upsides.
So I don't really know much about where you met your wife and how you courted and wooed and I assume abducted her.
So what's the backstory for the marriage?
Well, I'm 6'7 and she's 5'5, so I kidnapped her.
I'm just that much larger.
I didn't respect any property rights or anything like that.
No, I met her actually on the street in Los Angeles, which is the worst possible place.
Lowest probability to ever meet someone special.
You did not. Really?
I really did. I was walking my dog and she was walking her dog and she was going to USC for engineering and I was on a sitcom at the time.
And we just started talking.
And at first, you know, we had some rocky months, but- Okay, no, wait, wait, wait.
Before we get to the rocky months. So, you're walking down the street, and what was the moment, because, you know, it's just a life-changing moment, and don't you ever get chills?
I sometimes get chills thinking about the sequence events that led me to meet my wife, thinking, one little one of those dominoes didn't fall, and I don't know, it would be just terrible.
So you're walking down the street.
You got your dog, her dog.
Did you see her and like, I want to talk to this woman?
Did your dogs get tangled?
I mean, how did that moment happen where the conversation began?
It started with the dogs.
And then when I saw her, I obviously was blown away by her.
But at the same time, I was a little hungover.
Looking back, that's one reason why I think it's not good to drink too much, because I probably could have felt more at the time, but after an hour of conversation, it was on.
I think part of it was because the dogs are so much more forward than humans.
You know, like, my dog just went right up to her dog and was like, what's up?
I'm a dog! And her dog was like, me too!
And then we just started talking.
Wait, her dog had a me too moment?
Boo! Just kidding, go on.
A pound me too moment?
You ever hear my joke about that?
Where it's, if I didn't know about the hashtag, I'm like, I didn't understand, you know, this pound me too.
It's like, enough is enough, ladies.
You know about how I'm 38, so in my life it's a pound sign, not a hashtag.
Right. Just basic dramatic irony.
The audience knows something I don't know.
Yeah, and she was going to USC for engineering, and I was deep in the throes of Hollywood.
And I credit her for kind of pulling me out of that by just being, by having something that valuable and human and not the hedonic treadmill of Los Angeles.
I have those moments where I'm so thankful that I met her because I don't know what I'd be doing right now.
I'd be desperately trying to get a development deal from a bunch of sociopaths, you know?
And being groped, I would assume, as well.
We have a private audition in a vault with Kevin Spacey.
Yeah, just being groped.
He's brought your outfit.
It's like, dude, this is just a tube of floss.
Yes, that's right. Now do a twirl.
Now you have to test for it.
And then you don't even get the role because someone else had better floss.
If you hear him counting down from 12, it's time to run.
He enjoys the chase.
That's hilarious. No, it's a pretty crazy place, man.
It's gotten a lot worse, too.
I think it did actually at one point be...
I don't know, though. Have you ever had those realizations where you look back and you realize it was always bad, but at the time it felt a lot less bad?
I was, you know, I think for me, because my sort of sojourn in the art world and theater school and acting and so on, I don't think it was better.
I think I was just more naive.
You know, there's this whole peeling back of the innocence of childhood that occurs, you know, and as a parent, you know, for me, it's like, build the wall around the world, let her live in this lovely world, you know, because I introduced Introducing her to the world is like, you know, introducing the love of your life to your shiftless, drunken, gropey brother-in-law, you know, like, it's like, just want them to meet for as long as humanly possible.
And so yeah, it's that whole, having the scales of innocence fall from your eyes, I think is one of these wake up things that is not too pretty.
No. And it's kind of like when I've listened to some of your presentations on King and some of these other people that I always in my mind just assumed were just always inspiring about everything.
And then you realize he plagiarized his dissertation and he was just like...
Fornicating weirdo that just kept cheating on his wife.
And you're like, was it always like that?
And I felt that way about LA because at the time I was doing really well.
And it seemed like comedy was all about free speech and freedom and individuality and art.
And now it seems the absolute opposite of that.
That it's just status talking points.
And that's why meeting Amy and starting a family with her is really what saved me in a lot of ways from that just selfish You get kind of turned inside out with marriage and kids because it is about the good of the collective in the family and the good of your community.
Rather than, well, can I get a bigger paycheck?
Can I get the next deal?
Can I, me, me, me, me, you know, where the world becomes this conveyor belt of ego gratification for the self?
You're like, okay, I'm here to facilitate the continuance of civilization, the next generation.
I hold a precious young mind, heart and soul in my hands and I better not mess it up.
And that's, okay, but that's down the road a bit.
So you chat with Amy for...
An hour. And was there any point at which your lizard brain is like, whoa, this is different.
This is something I would like infinitely more of.
Absolutely. Because she had enough of the kind of wild vibe that I currently had, but I could tell instinctively that she had family values and was like a good person and was working hard.
And I think that combination is what really allowed me to fall in love with her.
You know, a comedian's lifestyle.
I lived three blocks from the Hollywood Improv and I'm like, I'm painted in the mural, you know?
So I'm over there doing sets every night.
People are sending shots on stage.
I wake up. I walk my dog.
I try and find food. I repeat, repeat.
And so when you see someone that's enough, you know, Free spirit-ish, but also grounded in reality.
You can actually make that jump and connect.
And I think that I felt that immediately.
And we both did.
But there was struggles, though.
And that's one thing I wanted to talk to you about.
I think a lot of people give up too easily, especially in this crazy world of divorce court and welfare state and single mother nonsense.
I think that we just have to fight extra hard to get through it.
It's like what you were talking about, about being shadow banned or all this stuff.
It's like, well, what are you willing to do to get through that?
You were giving a musician advice about that the other day.
Where it's like, you just have to do more than the other person is willing to do.
And I think love is a lot like that.
And I understand the arguments of like, you know, it's against males, especially white males in America.
And, you know, why even bother?
And it's like, we've made it through ice ages.
And the thing I'm most proud of in my life is my family, you know, and the thing that makes me the most happy.
And it pains me to think about good People that aren't ever going to experience that because they get jaded or they quit too early.
And what was the path between that first hour and then you like exchanged information and of course the big comedian is like, hey, why don't you come watch me perform?
You know, why don't you watch people swoon over me while I'm on stage, well lit and garish?
And why don't you watch me reduce intelligent people to fathomless gales of laughter?
Did you invite her to come see your act?
Is that how you kind of got connected?
Did you just go on a more normal date?
How did it go from there? I did.
I invited her to the club, and I did perform.
I wasn't planning on performing, but this is the funniest part, is it wasn't good for us.
And I think that's one reason why we worked out so well, is she liked me, and that whole, like, what you just described wasn't helpful.
In fact, it actually kind of supercharged, like, too early of a Of a bond that it wasn't right.
It was definitely not the right move, and it made her retreat a bit and feel uncomfortable.
I really liked that.
It took me a little while to understand that, but it was very rare that I got to meet someone outside of comedy or piano Or just someone wanting to be an actor or something.
And I think that was a very, very positive thing.
It didn't make her like me more, seeing me crush on a stage.
And I think that that's one of the reasons that we have made it so far.
Well, also, if she's a morning person, That's the big, you know, the whole schedule of the comedian, you know?
Right. It's tough, you know? Two o'clock already?
Boy, I should get up. You know?
That's a challenge for people who are taking college courses, right?
Yeah. And also the engineering brain.
That's the funniest part is if you, like, bell curve style and with averages and whatnot, men are more likely to be, you know, engineers are logical.
But in our case, we really are reversed in that sense.
where she's way more likely to think about the structure of something and the math of something.
And I'm more likely to, you know, cry watching Braveheart, you know?
Well, but of course, we've talked about this before, but comedy is a lot about twisting logic and finding the flaws in logic and finding contradictions, where, of course, sounds like with the engineering brain, she's much more like the dominoes all have to line up.
They will be this far apart.
They will be of this color and they will be in this sequence.
And whereas you're just like, let's see if we can find all the absurdities in life and jam them all together into a monologue.
Right.
Like she'll set up that structure and I'll be like, well, so if we flip it upside down, what's it going to be?
And I think that that combination has been good for raising a child.
Right.
Well, it's like – so there's two kinds of kids when I was in summer camp.
There were the kids who would make the really elaborate house of cards.
You know, like I don't know if you've ever tried to do that.
It's really frustrating, especially if you've got any kind of – it's like you build a house of cards and it's really, really patient.
And then there are kids who come up and say, hey, man, you want to play 52-card pickup?
And of course, you're like, sure, that sounds great.
You know, they knock the cards out of your hand.
It's like, okay, man, now you're gonna go pick them up.
And I think I was thinking about you reading about Johnny Depp.
I don't know if you've read the Johnny Depp stuff that was in, I think it was in Rolling Stone lately.
So they sent a reporter over to the guy.
And Johnny Depp is one of these guys...
Like, his movies have grossed in the billions, and he's, I don't know, I can't remember the number, but it's some crazy amount of money that he's earned over the course of his lifetime.
And, you know, he's gone full Nick Cage, full MC Hammer, like currently having big trouble paying his bills, had to sell his yacht, he's engaged in lots of legalese and lawsuits back and forth with his managers and other people and so on.
And the same thing happened to Billy Joel, same thing happened to Sting, where his accountant, I think, ran off with a bunch of his money and so on.
And I think that's one of the key ingredients of success if you're like a really fertile brain creative person is you have to have someone around you who's going to dot the I's and cross the T's and just make sure that what you do is not just fun but also sustainable in a very practical numbers in the account kind of way.
Oh, yeah. And I got reminded of that recently because when I taped Reluctant Warlord, Amy was with me.
It was in Portland. And we were shut down from the comedy club because, of course, I'm one of the bad people now.
And so we had a show in a functioning woodshop, this massive woodshop right in downtown Portland.
I perform on the back of a giant military truck.
And we packed it, you know, and it was good people, like really good-hearted people.
And so Amy's there taking tickets and she had a pregnancy complication.
So she had to go to the hospital.
She's fine now, but we had to stay there for an extra week.
And I had to go back to New York because we're planning on moving out here to Washington State.
And so I had to be alone for almost a full month.
Because she couldn't fly.
And I just realized how necessary she was for keeping my life together.
The whole order falls apart and all chaos reigns and entropy and why am I going to have my pants on my forehead wandering around a goberator?
Absolutely. And the role of the comedian, as Jordan Peterson talks about, is the trickster that goes back and forth between chaos and order and reports and tries to make something out of it.
And so I need that order in my life.
And as much as I, in the past, have found it to be like picky or, you know, I've had that artistic reaction to it where it's like, why does it matter?
Why do I have to wear pants?
Yeah. Over time, I realized that she, and this is why trust is so important.
I know she has my best interests in mind, so I get to trust her with her strengths and she gets to trust me with my strengths.
And that's why it's good.
Well, it's the fundamental question of why make the bed?
And that was a big question for me.
You know, it's like, well, you know, it's the old garbage answer of like, well, they're just going to mess it up again and so on.
And it's like, but it actually kind of matters.
You know, I have a wife who's very much into this kind of order and neatness and tightness.
And it's beautiful.
You know, it's a beautiful place.
I feel like I'm living in Architectural Digest.
I don't want to sit anywhere. You know, like I just because and having that kind of order and structure is something I didn't grow up with.
You know, I had a very creative family growing up.
And having that kind of structure and order is really cool.
Like I had a friend of mine, when he got married, his wife moved into his home and she sees like this big box at the foot of his bed.
And she's like, hey, you know, I guess she never read Bluebeard or whatever, but she's like, hey, what's in the box?
And he's like, oh, I don't know, just some mail and stuff, right?
So she opens the box and it's just like he has taken the mail from his mailbox and thrown it in a box.
And she's like, some of these are like, Bill's past due?
Like, what are you doing with this kind of stuff?
He's like, I was waiting to get married.
He's like, that was the whole plan.
I was just waiting to get married.
And she's like, well, I guess we're in now.
So she began to run all of this kind of stuff.
And, you know, he ended up like not in jail.
Which is, you know, a very, very good thing.
But that's the kind of – He was very creative and a great business, a great wizard with computers and so on.
But as far as like, you know, open the mail and filling things out and sending the back, oh, that's for little people and so on.
Or whatever you have, you know, this arch vanity that you don't want to muddy your fingers with mere trivia.
But like that's the trivia that keeps things sustainable.
Yes, sometimes I see it as bandwidth, where I'm like, I don't have the bandwidth right now.
I'm synthesizing.
And then I realized, though, that order helps with bandwidth, because the only thing that could really supersede my artist ego is having a child that needs to be safe.
So that was the first time in my life I ever actually started Becoming more orderly, even in pain, I've developed a much better way to do it because now I can't do certain things.
I can't leave something out that he could eat that's poisonous or something.
So then I realized that it's better because you can compartmentalize all this chaos and then you have more mental focus on whatever you're focused on.
And I think I now see a lot more positive Aspects of order, it just isn't one of my talents.
Well, yeah, no, I was just realizing, I realized this a couple of years ago, that I was like, well, I'm too busy creating my intellectual treasures to cook a mere meal, you know?
And so, I would just like be thinking of a whole bunch of stuff, making notes for a show, and I would basically just grab anything carbon-based and wedge it into my eating hole.
Like, that was just like... I need fuel.
I don't care. It could be, you know, it could be the hoof of a cow that has been like anything.
I don't care, right? And then what would happen is I'd kind of run out of energy because I'd just grab some crap, step it in my face, and then be like, okay, well, that didn't really sustain me very much.
And I sort of realized, okay, so set time aside, make a good meal, sit down, have a conversation, eat the meal.
Okay, it takes an hour, hour and a quarter, you know, from soup to nuts to clean up.
But my energy stays sustained for the course of the day.
And I think that being able to look beyond the next moment of fertile creativity is really, really important.
And marriage has hugely helped me with that.
Yeah, what you just described is almost like being like, I have no time for bricks, I'm building a house!
Plans! Plans are anal retentive, I'm just gonna throw bricks in a hole!
Yeah, no, I'm a big picture guy, come on skyscraper!
And someone's like, well you need bricks, it's like nonsense, that's peasant talk!
I do tree work with my brother and I also make sure I do all my own yard work because that allows me to reconnect to my body and physical task completion.
You almost can get on a hot streak.
If you're having a hard time professionally or personally or something and you feel like Something's getting you down and you just can't win, which has happened to me many times.
Just start completing simple things, like mow the grass.
And I think that's why Jordan Peterson, that Clean Your Room, was so successful.
My mother used to tell me, tend your garden, which is Voltaire, I believe.
But it's a similar concept, where it's like, before you take on the world, how about you iron your pants?
And I think for creative types and People like us, that's very important to remember.
Like just prune your tree and then that's a win and then we can take on leftism.
You know what I mean? Well, it sort of reminds me of John Cleese.
I mean, he's a great comedian and had a real streak of comedy genius from like this late 70s through I guess to the mid 80s.
And he kind of said, well, you get about 15 years of peak creativity and then it just kind of all drains away.
But I remember thinking how with John Cleese or people like that, they often make such disastrous decisions in their personal life that it ends up draining away, I think, their creativity.
And in particular for comedians, that's really, really important.
Like I think of... Dave Foley, I don't know if you ever followed his story, but he was...
Oh, yeah! He's in this grueling divorce where he basically has to cough up half a kidney made of gold every second day to give to his ex-wife.
How are you supposed to go and be funny at a time where you're facing that kind of stuff?
When you say, well, I don't want to get involved in these little things, well, those little things can be like maintaining your relationship so it doesn't go off the rails.
The amount of...
The problems that are caused by the inattention to the details in the moment are legendary.
And it's the same thing now. I mean, how is Johnny Depp supposed to go and have fun making a movie when he's facing all of this legal hell because he just didn't want to pay attention to things in the past?
And we need that grounding.
And I've certainly found that family, more than any other thing, has given me that grounding.
Yeah, and just in the little ways that you're describing, like I'm writing way more and much better comedy now than I ever did in my 20s.
And part of it is I don't really drink much now because as I tried to make a joke out of once, I never, it wasn't that I was addicted to drinking.
It was all the high fives that came with it, you know, where I have no draw to alcohol.
Like I would never just sit around and drink.
It would be like, I loved being in an environment where people are just high fiving.
And if I was Sober, I would feel like I had a 180 IQ and everyone else has a 70 IQ and it would just be tedious.
And that's almost what I think sometimes drinking can do for intelligent people around idiots is it kind of makes you dumb enough to not hate being around them.
No, alcohol is there to make people who drink bearable.
That's all it's for. Yeah, because if not, it's just people grabbing me and poking me and saying weird stuff to me.
So now that I wake up and I sleep 98% of my nights without any alcohol or any Excessive emotions and craziness.
I just always have a better disposition on my life.
And it's like weird things like that will come from the family life.
And I've had train wreck years where supposedly it should have been the peak of my art, like 25, 26.
And in fact, I had one half hour special and then an hour special until I was 31, between 20 and 31.
And that's And that's like being repped by CAA in Hollywood, like doing really well.
And now I can write an hour every six months.
And it's literally just because of discipline that comes from caring about something more than just your own animal drives.
That's another reason that's made me more conservative and made me more right-leaning is wanting a better world for my children.
And I think that I never would have even thought about some of these things if I didn't Know that I was leaving behind a world for people that I really care about.
Well, this is, I think, really at the heart of things, Owen, which is What we do when we're fully and deeply attached and love our own children and our own families is what we're willing to do.
We're willing to talk about difficult issues.
You know, people get mad at me for bringing up the science of racial IQ differences.
Why would you want to do that? It's like, well, because it's true.
It's important. And because I love my daughter, I don't want her to grow up in a world because she's ended up being called racist for things that it's not her fault at all.
So it's just...
When you get that kind of attachment, you really care passionately about at least leaving the world as good as the one you inherited and hopefully better.
Yeah, and if you can't admit what's true, how do you even know what is more true?
What you just said is a block to an argument or a block to understanding something future.
If people can't just basically admit that that's what the results have shown, then you can't even discuss moving forward in any way.
I'm not an expert on any of this stuff, but unless you admit that there are racial IQ differences, you can't even talk about causes or what you could do about it or any type of developmental things or the fact that a lot of people beat the hell out of their kids and that might limit their IQs or maybe it's a cultural thing.
You can't even have that conversation if you don't admit the findings for what it is, like the most base And that's the thing that's made me a bit of a pariah in certain power circles of leftist Hollywood, is just being like, so you guys won't admit it's true, though? You know, because how can reality be any-ist?
And I've always found that so weird.
It's just like, how is reality hate?
But that comes from this.
I really, really believe that the one thing that I've really seen in common, Owen, with people who are not wedded to ideology and don't have the aristocratic luxury of pushing away reality is the people who work with their hands.
You know, because there's no ism when it comes to building stuff.
You know, there's no... You're mowing your lawn.
You're cutting down a tree. You're doing...
Like, there's no ism that's going to help you.
There's no manipulation. There's no whining.
There's no crying. There's nothing like this, right?
It's like that old Tom Hanks line.
There's no crying in baseball.
It's like there's no crying in reality.
You just try and get things done.
And, you know, the fact that you work with your hands, the fact that you take solace in manual labor, I'd like to just take people who have those, you know, I think of these like lily white aristocratic heads.
It touches scythe.
My heavens, right? Yeah.
And, you know, all for manipulating bonsais of social opinion, and just put them out into some place where manipulation doesn't count for anything.
And you just have to get things done.
You and sort of bare-naked reality, right?
There's a drinking game in my show, like every time I sigh, of course, and every time I mention that I worked...
Up north, gold panning, prospecting and claims taking and stuff.
But the reason I bring it up is because it's a very real and valid time.
I, like you, live a lot in my head and that was a very vivid time of just being out with nature's elements and you can't make any mistakes and there's no amount of ideology that's going to shift one flake of snow or find you one flack of gold.
And that kind of reality did a lot to, I think, help condition me to having better relationships.
Because when you work with your hands, you give up on the idea that manipulation is the be-all and end-all.
Yeah, and I think that's why Adam Carolla has taken a lot of heat as well.
He's in a similar category as me, where probably never identified as a political person, but now it seems so...
Right wing simply for acknowledging reality because he was in construction.
He was talking about it on one podcast.
He was like, yeah, if you take down the beam, the roof will fall down.
It's like, but I really want the beam to be down.
It's like, it doesn't matter.
The whole thing will fall apart.
You know, and it's that just basic.
I think what you're saying is so true where it's like, and then some of the most frustrating people that I see on the internet or their voices are on the internet are the ones that never worked with their hands to almost like a pathological degree where they just, you know, without naming names, just meditate silently in the woods for decades and just come up with these weird things.
Theories of determinism and how nothing matters and nihilism.
This comes from nothing.
It comes from just being like, I'm from wealth and don't move.
I don't know. To me, there's no...
I don't know how you can...
I don't know. What I just said is weird because I just don't feel like talking smack about someone personally.
But there's certain people that I just find infuriating.
No, I'm kidding. I'm just trying to tempt you here into getting in trouble.
No, that's fine. Sam Harris I find very frustrating.
Never experienced that myself, obviously.
And this is a funny thing too.
The gold panning story is interesting as well for me because literally when I'm at the mall, they're always 40% off.
They never price anything at the top.
It's always like 40%. And I see a gold ring.
And I see a gold ring and I think of guys like me slogging through leech-infested swamp water, swatting at bugs the size of biplanes.
In order to find a scrap of gold that might lead to a mine that might lead to massive machinery and trucks and getting that gold out of the ground and into a store.
Like when you see that giant tunnel of cause and effect and you know how hard it is to just make something.
It's the same thing with comedy.
A lot of people try it. How much of what you write ends up being the best stuff that's out there for you and for others.
How hard it is to make something and when you get that Humility of knowing how hard it is to make something, then it's really hard to just say, well, we just got to redistribute stuff and the people who have stuff, it's unfair and it's unjust and I want my share and it's like, I don't really think that's, that's not at all how things work.
It's really hard to make something.
Yeah, and purpose and pride is such a bigger motivator than people want to admit.
You know, a lot of the left thinks that if you just shovel stuff and resources at people without giving them any purpose or any sense of pride in what they accomplished, that they'll somehow be happy when, in fact, that takes away everything from them.
It robs them of any life.
The other day, I was helping my brother clear some of his land for this yurt.
He wants to do a school called No Bells.
I was working like an animal for no money because I was so excited to help my brother.
I think a lot of people that are in this waitlist, what was that movie?
WALL-E? The fat people in WALL-E? Where you're in this zone, you can't ever feel like what you just described, where you're trying hard to get that speck of gold that can lead to another speck of gold that can lead to more and more.
And then because you can form camaraderie with that.
And I think that's the biggest problem with immigration now is with the welfare state, you're not letting people come to this country and earn it.
It's almost like if people are trying out for the Patriots, it's like, yeah, you can run a 4-1-40 or a 10-40.
We don't care. And then football would suck.
Like you would just watch fat people waddle around and just get blasted by any team that has a meritocracy.
Oh, yeah. If the radio only played people singing karaoke, there'd be no radio, no music industry.
Like, you have to let the shaft fall away.
Otherwise, you don't end up with nutritious weed.
I mean, that's just the way things work.
Now, how does it work in your family?
Because I think a lot of people, if they've grown up with the kind of fractures, you know, the Bickertons, that sort of, you know, and another thing kind of thing that goes on with couples.
How does it work in your family or in your marriage when you have those kinds of disagreements that feel kind of intractable?
How do you kind of massage them through the mechanism?
Well, I think now we both are very committed to not fighting in front of Walter because it's just a bigger picture for that.
But I think over the years, we've developed some funny stuff.
I think comedy is very important for marriage and relationships and being able to laugh at yourself.
It jars you out of nonsense.
And I think that, you know, in both directions, I'm capable of the nonsense, she's capable of the nonsense.
And one thing we tried doing once was whenever we were Bickering or doing something that we knew was silly, we would start lisping.
And we would be like, do it.
And within a minute, you just start...
It was almost like a way to hijack your lizard brain a little bit to get out of that moment of conflict and start laughing at yourselves.
No, Rudolph the wet-nosed Wayne Dyer!
Okay, right. Yeah.
And I'd be like, no, I don't want to lisp.
And she'd be like, no, we promised we'd do the lisp.
And I'd be like... So I just feel like you're being disrespectful.
And then immediately, it's funny.
And another thing we would do is, it's the most important thing, is accepting the differences in men and women, which is what has been robbed of us.
And I've done so many jokes about that.
You know, most of my career up until the last two years was about men and women being different until, you know, you can ignore politics, politics won't ignore you type thing.
And so when that became hate speech, that's when I started getting a little more political.
Men, I believe, are more linear and women are more nonlinear because I don't believe that men are less emotional.
I think that's nonsense. I think men are totally emotional, sensitive beings, just like women.
We're all humans. But I think a lot of the thought process of being task-oriented, which dates back to being in hunting parties versus gathering, Uh, is true.
And I think that if, if, if women understood more about giving direct orders and not being vague, like it's really cold out, which means get me a blanket, but a man just hears it's cold out and you're like winter, right?
And you commiserate. And, and I think that's so, and then a woman, a lot of times will react as if you didn't do what she wanted and she's offended.
Whereas she doesn't realize that you didn't know what she wanted yet.
And so now she has almost a valid Reason to be upset because in her mind, she said, get me a blanket, but in your mind, you just heard about seasons.
And so at that point, you're fighting over nonsense and then vice versa can be very true.
And it's not because men lack depth.
It's just about tasks versus web.
Because the way women talk to each other is so much implication.
You could go to a dinner party and a girl comes to the door and is like, Oh, hey, Owen, Amy, you guys didn't bring any wine?
That's fine. Come on in.
And your wife is like...
And you're on the surface saying, yeah, it's fine.
And she's like, oh, no, we'll never live this down.
Exactly. Because a dude would be like, you didn't bring wine?
Go get wine. You know, it's just very direct.
What are you, cheapskate? Yeah, and I think that women, because they're physically less strong than men, I think they probably develop that passive aggression more than male aggression.
I think women are more passive aggressive, and I say men are massive aggressive.
You know? I have this vision of the Inuit, right?
Like, so the first guy to actually put the blocks of ice together and make the igloo.
It's like, oh, you actually want to be out of the wind.
Okay, well, I'll build that.
It's like, then we have a private place to have sex.
Okay, I'm sorry. I just, I thought you were complaining about the wind.
Like, yeah, it's windy. But now I can build you something.
Okay, this works, you know?
And then you just, that guy ends up with all the chicks.
That's just the way things work.
But it's kind of hard to look at that kind of indirect stuff.
I remember very, very clearly...
The moment where it was like – because I was brought up, you know, with a lot of this blended, you know, there was this Viva La Difference thing, you know, like men and women are different and we should celebrate and we should not thrive, you know.
But then there was all of this Star Trek, we all should wear the same uniform and the only thing that's different is hairdos and boobs.
And I remember very clearly when I got that, it's like, okay.
Neither is better.
Both are important.
You know, it's like the plug in the socket.
You don't get electricity if you don't have both, right?
And that sense of like, because I had this thing, it's like, well, she's not doing it the way that I would do it.
And then I remember thinking, but you're not gay.
So why would you want another dude?
Like, that's important.
Like, if you're gay, then you want another dude.
And it's like, well, you're acting like a woman.
That's deviating from what I want.
But if you're straight, you're like, okay, well, you're acting like a woman.
That's kind of what I want.
But I have this weird impulse that's like, it's different from what a guy would do.
So, I want you to be a woman because I'm straight.
I want you to be a guy because it's more comprehensible.
Short circuit, short circuit.
And until you just say, no, we're different.
And then you can ask for that respect for difference as well, which is, I think, very positive.
Yeah, and here's another piece of advice for the young fellows out there that helped us a lot.
We started doing jurisdictions over our lives, where I'd be like, this is a me jurisdiction, that's a you jurisdiction.
And in calm moments, we would figure out what we wanted to be rulers of.
Where it's like, she is the ruler of the home.
And I've submitted to that.
It's hers. That's her home.
I am the ruler of my career and my work.
And that is mine.
There is no debating about that.
And with her, there is no debating about home decisions.
And that's Cause so much peace.
It's almost like those cop movies where it'd be like, FBI! It's like, it's mine, Skegnetti!
You know, they're arguing over whose jurisdiction it is, and it's like, I got the cower on this one, CIA! The man's gonna be all over my ass over this man!
Sorry, that's just another cliche.
Yeah, no, totally. And it's the same with marriages.
If you figure out what's the most important to you and you just allow that person to have dominance, then you don't end up in this relationship where one person just dominates the other.
And I've seen it both directions, where the male is very dominant or the female is very dominant.
Lately, it's been a lot more female because of the media being like, you know, it's so easy, even dad can do it.
It's like, oh, the one who bought it?
The one who bought it from his artwork?
It's funny, too, because When I was a bachelor, okay, so when I was a bachelor, I really lived a life of creative chaos.
Like I was writing lots of books and I was, you know, programming code and I was doing really, really creative stuff.
But I was really living like a savage.
Like I had this real duality going on, this mind-body dichotomy.
Like I remember once that I was living in a little apartment and the light went out in the kitchen.
And, of course, I could, you know, 20 minutes, go get a light.
Like, what are you, ridiculous, right?
But I wouldn't, because I was being creative, man, and, you know.
And so I remember one night, I was, like, hungry, and it was dark, and there was no light that reached into the kitchen.
So what I did was I took some rolled-up newspaper, I turned on the stove, and I lit the rolled-up newspaper, and I'm in my shorts, and I'm squatting down looking for some peanut butter with, like, a flaming torch.
And there was that moment, you get these zoom outs where you look at what you're doing and you're like, okay, something has to change.
You're going to be like a single-celled orgasm next.
Because it was like my caveman moment, you know, peanut butter will hold fire.
And it's like, you live in a 21st century environment.
Why are you burning wood or burning paper in order to find food?
Like, this is ridiculous, right?
And, you know, not safe. And I remember also waking up at a pigeon on my chest when I woke up.
Because I'd left the balcony open and the pigeon had just wandered in.
And you know, you wake up, you know, thank God I didn't like peck my Adam's apple or something like that.
And it's like, okay, so I'm looking like a caveman for food and waking up with, you know, disease flying rats on my chest and all that.
And again, a very creative time, I'm very proud of the stuff.
But it's like, can we find that balance?
And I think that balance is male and female.
Oh, it absolutely is. Steve Byrne once described me as one of the others from the show Lost.
Ever see that show? I was just tattered.
And I think part of it is dudes like us that aren't, it's weird to be kind of into objective reality and sense data and all that, but at the same time, not really be motivated by stuff.
Sometimes someone will be like, how did you forget to put oil in your car?
I'm like, it's just a car, man.
They're just like, what's wrong with you?
My brother, because I've been doing well financially lately, and he's like, dude, you don't care.
He's like, you could be homeless.
I'm like, well, not really, because I care now about the family.
I care about freedom, which can come from resources, which can be transferred into time and safety, obviously, but I'm not that motivated by stuff.
Women, I think, are more motivated by stuff.
Which is fine. And there's evolutionary reasons for all of this.
I think men are more motivated by accomplishment, you know, glory, taking down a elephant.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so women are more likely to want the things.
And I think that we're seeing that, you know, the macro of that we see and in the micro we see.
And I think it's a lot easier to become chaotic with your stuff when you're not motivated by stuff.
And I think that's why the caveman male is so Obvious and common is because we're like, who cares?
It's nothing. Something stands between me and my creativity.
I must set fire to it until it steps aside or burns away.
And just whatever, you know, like you're the addict and the drug.
Like whatever's between me and that cocaine must step aside or I'm going to burrow right through it like...
Michael Bourne is way to an all-you-can-eat buffet.
But for women, at least from what I've seen, there's this element of perfectionism that is really fascinating.
And originally, I was like, this needs to be fixed.
Then, of course, A, I realized I can't fix it.
And B, I realized it's not a problem.
Like, we have a dining room table.
Now... We're not Japanese, obviously, so we don't sit on the floor.
Now, you know, when you're a bachelor, you know, if something came in a crate, you can sit on that to eat, right?
It doesn't really matter. So we've had this dining room table in the dining room for quite a long time.
I don't know exactly how long.
It's been quite a long time. And every now and then I'm like, we got to get the chairs.
And she's like, well, yeah, of course.
But we have to get the right chairs.
Yeah. And I'm like, well, the right chair is the one to keep your ass off the floor.
That's what I want. I want my ass not to be on the floor so I can eat the food.
And she's like, no, no, no. It has to be the right fabric.
It has to be the wood that matches and so on.
And I used to think like, oh, this is just crazy.
Let's just go to some – like go to a garage sale or yard sale.
I don't care. Order something online just so we can sit and maybe it'll be a do-for.
Maybe it'll be a placeholder. She's like, no.
It has to be the right chair.
And I know based on the rest of the place, yeah, she's going to get it right.
I'm going to be like – Oh, yeah, yeah, that really.
Because for me, I'm like, okay, there's a placeholder.
We got something to sit. And then what happens?
I never do anything else about it.
Ever. You know, it's good enough.
It keeps my ass off the floor.
I can eat from the table and then I move on with some other damn creative thing.
I never circle back to fix the chair.
She knows that, which is why she won't let me buy a placeholder.
And it's like, it's going to be the right chair.
And it is, you know, when we get the right art and we get the right fabric for this.
And it's like, man, this is beautiful.
And I love it because it really helps me to be creative when I'm surrounded by beauty rather than chaos.
And before I was like, well, I'll sacrifice the beauty of my environment for the purity of my ideas.
And it's like, that's not really sustainable.
Because life just becomes too chaotic for the beauty of ideas to continue to rise above.
It's so true. It's the same in my house.
It's the same with, like, down the line, I realized she was right.
So that's one reason why we do jurisdictions now, because it's the same thing.
I'd be like, we have a fork.
Do you have your fork? I have my fork.
We just wash the fork when we're done with the fork.
But she sets things up, and she does it right.
And I think that that combination is wonderful, because I'm the same way.
If it wasn't for that order, I would just be in absolute chaos.
And that's why I feel for some of these young dudes That are in this chaos.
And I think it's a tough time to find that traditional companion because of the wackiness of our lives.
But if I can do it, you can do it.
I met Amy on the street in Los Angeles.
So it's doable.
And I just think, just like getting through an ice age, Because right now, things are slanted towards the feminine in our political system, where it's like safety over freedom.
I want to do a sketch where it's a feminist Braveheart, where he's just like, safety!
But when you have a toddler, you see it so clearly how good that is in moderation.
That you need to have someone that at all costs is like, it has to be safe, And we have to have enough stuff to get through the winter.
And that's great. But when you're dealing with adults, it's a terrible way to lead.
And I think that we're entering that zone where we're developing this almost resentment for femininity because of how much it's overblown, especially in Europe right now.
I just think we have to fight through it.
Because in your home, it's so beautiful and amazing to have that family and to have that child.
And a child to make you honest as hell, too.
When you've got a little kid, you don't lie to that kid.
You know, when he looks at you with those eyes like, is Aziz Ansari really funny, daddy?
And I'm like, no, buddy, he's not.
I can't lie anymore. You know, I can't say Amy Schumer's funny anymore.
Right. You know, everything becomes real.
Right. Oh, it's like when I tried to sneak a piece of chocolate years ago, my daughter was like, I don't know, two or three years old.
And I put a fairly small piece of chocolate like, you know, right in there.
Nothing major. I wasn't like I came in with like half a Hershey's bar sticking out of my nose.
And I'm coming in and just hoping she isn't noticing in that.
She just looks up. She says, what are you eating, Dad?
You know, like some just wild, bang on, straight on, just...
I don't even know how she scanned the whole facial apparatus and saw the tiny pocket or maybe there was one tiny bit of drool on the side of my mouth.
Like, what are you eating, Dad? And then you got this thing.
Or did you just say, yeah, it'll be the chocolate.
Here you go. Good catch, you know?
And that... That kind of honesty is a challenge, I think, for a lot of people.
And they start to resent the kids because the kids just peel back layers.
They're original. They don't have all of the defenses and lies and conformities and compromises.
They're just straight balls in your face.
This is life.
And the artifice that you develop, and of course, you realize how much other people have to Kind of participate in your artifice in life, right?
You know, if you're kind of down and someone says, how are you doing?
You say, I'm okay. You know, your kid's like, oh, what's the matter?
You know, are you okay?
Whereas other people are like, well, good.
You know, off I go. Yeah.
And so, yeah, go ahead.
No, you go ahead. Well, yeah, so you have all of this artifice that you develop in life, which other people play along and participate with, and that's fine.
But kids don't want any of that.
They are real original souls, straight up, straight honest.
And you either try and build up the artifice and then by punishing their honesty, you strip down the artifice in yourself, which is way better and you end up with better relationships all around.
Yeah, it's a lot like the Borat character of the foreigner, where it's like from fresh eyes, the world looks ridiculous.
He's like, so the woman must sit, you know, like when you're translating from a new language, it's the same with kids.
Like the kids will look right past these accepted rules that we don't think about anymore, these weird lies that we all live all day.
And I love it. And I committed early that kids don't do what you say, they do what you do.
And I've just always told myself that, where it's like, it doesn't matter what you say, it's what you do.
Treat his mother well, work hard in front of him, don't hit him.
You know, all these things. And because...
I instinctively think I'm never gonna hit a kid that in my mind, but no one thinks they can be a monster, you know?
So you have to almost like have these like rules and your show helped me with that.
You know, I wasn't hit as a kid, but I was raised with a lot of chaos and I didn't want him to feel what I was raised with, you know, like all that, like at any minute something could blow up.
And I feel like that raised cortisol in me.
And one reason why I might almost extra be drawn to chaos And so early on, I'm like, you know, just do these things and you'll be okay.
You know, the commandments of children.
And one of them is don't lie to them, you know?
And so I'm not. Yeah, I mean, you can withhold and you can, you know, give age appropriate stuff.
But the lying stuff too, because your kid is probably going to notice that you're lying and you're inviting them into this artificial world of artifice that I was just talking about before.
You know, like, I'm not going to tell you the truth.
You know, I'm not telling you the truth.
And you're not going to call me out on it.
And that's now our secret ugly handshake from this moment forward.
And I, you know, I refuse to do that.
I You know, when you have those kinds of easy conversations with your kids, I mean, it's probably starting with your two-year-old, but they are just fantastic.
Like last night, I was a little tired today because last night my daughter was in a bit of a cough, so she came to get me and it was like 1.30 in the morning.
And we were just sitting there for 45 minutes just chatting away and talking about life and all that kind of stuff.
And it's like... But this is so great.
And that's what you get if you don't hit, if you don't yell, if you don't punish, if you don't...
Like, I always get this question. How do you discipline your child?
And that, to me, is about as relevant as how do you discipline your wife?
It's like, yeah, good luck. I don't think so.
I don't think so. How do you discipline your friend Owen when he says something that you might disagree with?
And it's like, I don't really know.
We have a conversation about stuff.
And that... Ease of communication that happens, to me, that's what I wanted so much in a family.
You know, when you grow up in a family where there's a lot that can't be talked about because people got all these landmines and these triggers, it gets really boring and really stifled and really censorious.
And if you have that sort of commitment to honesty and you don't yell, you don't punish, you don't threaten, you don't need that kind of stuff, you just negotiate.
You have this wonderful free flow of conversation that to me is the essence of marriage.
It's the essence of family life.
I mean, a woman I don't massively respect who is Hillary Clinton said that she and Bill Clinton have been engaged in a conversation for like 30 years or something like that.
Okay, throw aside the source and there's something really valuable in that, that relationships are about conversations.
And if you have that relationship with your child where...
You are committed to that kind of honesty and openness, willing to be wrong, willing to be corrected, willing to explain and get things wrong.
Then it is such an easy free flow of conversation.
And when you have that conversation, problems get dismantled before they accumulate.
You know, why do people get divorced?
Because they have been avoiding problems to the point, you know, it's like, if you don't, you get chest pains, you're like, well, I'm not going to the doctor.
And then at some point, the clog is so big that your head just explodes, Mr.
Creosote style. And if you have that free flow of conversation in the family, I have found that Problems don't accumulate.
They get washed away real nice and easy.
It's a lot easier to move the concrete before it hardens.
Yeah, it's like that with health and everything.
And I think that my family was a lot more explosive and Germanic.
Our natural tone can be a yell.
And sometimes that would surprise people.
And Amy's family is a lot more...
You know, Norwegian-ish.
Where it's a lot more like reserved.
And I think that we helped each other in that.
Where she helped mellow me out a bit.
But she's told me that she's glad long term.
At first she wasn't. But long term, I would address issues early like that.
Like I wouldn't let things build.
You know, I'm not going to do that.
We don't talk about something for 10 years and then we're dead inside.
Like that to me is impossible.
Seems like a high price to pay.
It's impossible to me to the point where I'm a comedian.
My whole career is just like, this is what's real.
And so, but I'm trying to learn through her about not being so confrontational as I used to be and just, you know, being a little more sheathed sword with stuff, you know, English common law, you know, least amount of force necessary, but still apply force.
And your show helped me with that too, man.
It's the whole non-aggression principle because I'm aggressive.
I'm an aggressive person. So, Like, learning, like, these rules of, like, not invading someone, even emotionally.
I'm not even talking physically or stealing from people, but just, like, I'm aggressive.
I used to be a heckler at a renaissance fair.
It's like, I'm capable of just unlimited call-outs, and I'm trying to be more...
More respectful and more reserved, especially because I'm trying to raise this kid.
And he's the sweetest kid.
It's like crazy. And that's why I know this stuff works.
Because people that probably raise their kids horribly are like, man, you guys really lucked out.
He's such a nice kid. He's always smiling.
I'm like, no, because we spent time with him.
I literally moved out of Los Angeles because I knew I couldn't afford a safe environment for him.
It's like you do sacrifices for your family that really isn't a sacrifice when you look long-term, you know?
Well, that's the thing, you know, like I feel very strongly – well, it's going to be getting emotional even thinking about it, talking about it.
I feel very strongly that I live in this little slice of future heaven.
You know, like I am doing the job of my dreams.
I get to have great conversations with people like you.
I get to spend a lot of time with my family and it is – Like, some chunk of the future, the future that I want for everyone has just kind of come back in time, you know, like that spinning crystal from Superman's home planet or something, you know? Like, I feel like I bring conversations of future peace, I bring a vision to people, and I really want...
I want people to have what we have.
I want people to have these free and easy and fun relationships.
I want people to have relationships that are not conflict-free, but fight-free.
And I want people to get along with their kids and for their kids to be really excited and thrilled to see them in the morning and to enjoy their lives and their connections with people.
I mean, we know it's possible because we do it.
And we know it's not just Random.
It's not like, hey, I won the lottery.
Maybe if you work hard, you can win the lottery.
It's like, no, no, that's not how it works.
There are ways to build it.
And sharing that with people is really, really, it's the foundation of a lot of what I do.
Because if other people could have these kinds of relationships, I think that really is the brick by brick by which we end up with a much better world.
Yeah, and some of this stuff is multi-generational.
You know, I see that with my parents where...
My mom was very physically abused.
Back then, it was commonplace to lock a kid in an outdoor shed in the winter and stuff.
You know, Wisconsin in the 40s.
And she broke that for us and did all that effort.
And you've seen videos of me talking to my mom.
She's a wonderful human being.
But my addition to that is trying to break the emotional chaos that I had in my house, which I think brick by brick, you try and remove as much as you can that will contribute to this constant cycle of abuse force, abuse force. And I think that we're getting there.
I really listened to one of your episodes about things to be optimistic about.
It was from a few years ago.
I was just listening to YouTube and it popped on.
And about the decline in child abuse is really something.
In the 70s even, people would just pop kids in public.
And your message and a lot of peaceful parenting messages are really working.
And I think that's something to really look forward to.
I appreciate that.
The other thing I wanted to mention, I don't know if you have this issue in your relationship with your wife, Owen, but I've noticed from a lot of the male callers, they feel a little bit invisible because if they have a disagreement with their wife and they suggest a different course of action...
The woman pulls out the giant ball-crushing hammer of you're not being supportive.
In other words, if you're supportive, that just means agreeing with the woman.
For a man to have that kind of, look, I disagree with this and here's why and you can disagree with me, but I think you need that kind of friction to stay on course.
You can't drive a car and only turn one direction.
You've got to course correct the whole time.
Do you have that issue where if you disagree with something your wife is doing or some proposed course of action that she's like, well, I want you to be supportive.
And you're like, well, I am being supportive.
In the future, just not in the now, right?
Being not supportive in the now is, you know, ripping someone's cigarettes out of their mouth is not being supportive of their smoking in the now, but it's being supportive of them not dying of lung cancer down the road.
So, I think for a lot of men that is tough.
They haven't had it modeled and it's really not encouraged socially or in the media.
The woman's always right and the man's always bumbling and so on, but men have so much to bring and so much to offer and they kind of squelch down with, well, you're not being supportive.
Oh, yeah. I mean, I think a big thing that can help, and by the way, this is everybody, so don't feel weird if you're out there listening and you think that you're the only one that has gone through any of this, because we've all been through it.
It's important to separate the person from the idea, where you can be like, I'm supportive of you, not this nonsense idea.
Don't say nonsense. But I think that's an important thing.
And a hijack That you can do a little trick.
So it might not be the best advice because it is a trick.
But if you start a sentence with I feel, by the laws of women, they can't get as upset at you.
So if you say I feel that what you're saying would jeopardize our family's future, for some reason, if you start with I feel, there's this weird law where they can't really get as mad.
But long-term, if you do that, if you know what's right for you and you stand beside what you believe, they'll respect you way more than the short-term.
That's all simple sugars versus fat.
Because long-term, they'll look back and say, oh, you were right.
You sacrificed for the family.
Because they don't respect you for it.
They don't respect you if you just want approval from them in the short-term.
They'll think you're a pussy, frankly.
Women think men can be cowards and weak, and sometimes they want you to disagree with them to show that you're a stable person, that you're not just going to go with any whim thrown at you.
Well, that you'll be out there fighting with other men for resources.
All primitive stuff, but we don't get remade every generation.
We're built up on all the lizard stuff.
And the woman wants to know that the man is going to go out there, compete with other men for resources, and assertively bring back the goods.
And if he's like, oh no, whatever you want, Then there's this spineless jellyfish that's supposed to go out there and bring down a bison and it's not going to happen.
You're going to end up with a little stain on the bison foot, right?
So the maintenance of your wife's respect for you is very, very important.
And you may get temporary appeasement by complying, but it is going to erode the long-term value that you bring, which is, you know, that you are a rock, that you are a protector and a provider and so on.
We can't just wish those things away like evolution never happened.
Yeah, it's almost like thinking that cocaine will make it so you don't have to sleep anymore.
It's like the piper will be paid.
And agreeableness, you should have a little bit of agreeableness for social cohesion.
You can't go straight Rain Man in the world.
But you have to be able to be assertive or else women will know that you will be beaten by the bison.
And, uh, and it's a good quality to have, you know, when I was younger, I think, uh, public schools kind of train boys.
There's one reason why we're going to homeschool is, uh, they train boys that, that the ultimate, um, uh, man is the one who just agrees with whoever's in front of the four, uh, forward facing children, even when they're pronouncing words wrong.
That happened to me. My, my father has his PhD in, um, rhetoric.
And the woman kept saying rhetoric and I'm like, it's rhetoric.
And she's like, it's rhetoric.
I'm like, My dad has his PhD in rhetoric.
And I was punished.
I was put in in-school suspension for five days.
Because they're like, no, you have to agree with nonsense.
And we see that now.
We see a nation of nonsense people.
And they keep doing these almost cult purity tests.
Like, Caitlyn Jenner is the greatest woman.
And just say no.
And then people will respect you.
And the weirdest thing is my career is better now when I said no to nonsense.
And my family's better, and Amy respects me more.
That's another thing that people, like on the internet, they would make these memes.
They can be so vicious, these leftists, man.
And they would talk about how my wife's going to leave me, and my kid's better off without me, and I've ruined my career.
You know, just vicious, demonic picking at me.
Yeah, if those are people's wish fulfillments, they might want to re-examine their wishes.
Oh, it's nutty.
Well, they were just trying to get in my head, and Amy...
She ironically was having the opposite trend.
She was like, I've never respected you more than standing up for things that you believe in and going against the grain and giving up You know, fame and ego boost for the future of your family.
She's like, I love you more because of it, you know?
You double down, right? Because when people are saying the crappiest things about you, I mean, and then if you quit, it's like, okay, so when the kids grow up and they type in my name, which you know they will, right?
They get older and then it's like, well, they said all this crappy stuff and then dad folded.
You know, and it's like, no, I'm going to push through the crappy stuff until you're respected and recognized for being ahead of your time, and that's what your kids are going to find when they search, so I'm not quitting now.
I know, and if people could only see all the emails and the messages, it's almost like the praise is private and publicly the venom comes at you, you know?
It's like people have written, I'm sure you get the same thing, where they're like, you saved my life, like you're the reason I'm having a kid, or like I was going to kill myself, you know?
And publicly, it's like, oh, racist.
And it's like, if you type in my name, one of the first hits says that I'm an alt-right racist, and that guy was fired for that.
Like, there was some stupid Pittsburgh newspaper And he was fired for lying.
But there's no retraction. They never say they're wrong.
It's just plastered there because we're not into the state growing.
And that's the real secret. And they have these words that they throw at us.
And our families respect you more when you are the individual, when you are the person that they know to be good and to do the right thing, aside from short-term gain.
Because that's also the person that doesn't become obese and die of diabetes when he's 50 because he just wants the donuts.
It's all about self-restraint.
Family is the antidote to a lot of our problems in society right now because you're just so much less easily tricked by these giant propaganda machines when you truly love people.
When you're genuinely loved, it's a superpower.
People who don't have that kind of love in their life, I think they wonder how we get up and we continue to ford our way through a world that sometimes is crazy hostile and lies about us and makes stuff up and so on.
And I think if you don't have that love, it's sort of like some guy's in a sword fight and he's got a giant suit of armor on, but people can't see the armor.
And they're like, how is it that the swords aren't damaging him?
And it's like, because I got this thing called love.
I love, I am loved, I'm respected, I am treasured, I treasure people in my life.
And if you have that kind of love, You get a kind of bulletproofness.
You become a kind of Superman or Superwoman.
And so this is what I say to people. If you want to wade into the public sphere and speak unpalatable truths to sometimes an increasingly vicious and random horde of people, first be loved.
First be loved.
And then... They can't take much away from you because whatever happens, it's, you know, just a flesh wound, right?
I mean, because where you retreat to your cave, your tribe, is the people who love you and the people who care about you.
And some of them are more proximate and some of them are more remote.
But if you don't have that love, it's really, really tough because a lot of people gain energy through hatred.
And the only way to survive that hatred is to have that suit of armor called being loved.
And they will increasingly hit you, but they think they're hitting at you.
They're actually hitting at the love of those around you, right?
They're hoping that the people around you are going to ditch you or abandon you or back away like, whoa, maybe they're right.
But it just, the more you stand, the stronger you get.
And it is my hope, of course, that the people who attack the good, honest people in this world get exhausted.
And then start to say, well, he's still standing.
My arm's half fallen off from hitting him for no reason.
He's still standing.
What has he got? And then maybe that's enough to lure them out of hatred to try and find this kind of love so they can join forces with us.
That's the dream.
And it's archetypal.
I mean, it's Rocky.
Like when you see Rocky just taking a beating and not falling, or 300, or Braveheart, or any of these archetypal individual against the state, that's really what all these stories are.
You see that they have something deeper than the physical flesh.
And what does he say when he wins?
He doesn't say, yeah, I won.
Even when he gets beaten up, he doesn't say, oh, I lost.
This is the worst thing. He says Adrian.
He wants to find the woman that he loves.
That's the whole point of it.
That's the whole point. That was the strength.
And it's the same with having a son, a white son.
This sounds weird, but it made me so much more...
I don't want to use the word offended because it's so overused, but when people talk about white guilt and white privilege and slavery and all that stuff, I never thought about it with myself that much.
I was just in this weird lazy river.
To see my boy just dancing innocently and saying, mama, dada, and thinking that there's going to be these animals putting Putting that on him to acquire his resources, it was like, no, no, that ain't happening, man. And I think I have more of a protective nature of others that I love than I am even of myself.
I've had a few near-death experiences where I'm like, I can't die because I need to raise my kids.
And that feeling is very, very powerful.
You're right. People don't get it.
Even my dad, who I obviously love and respect, but when I lost a book deal to Norton, Norton had given me this big advance But I wasn't following protocol, so they took it back.
And he was like, you could have just played along a little farther.
And I'm like, once you kneel, you never get up.
And that's a fact. You know, and the prestige couldn't, it didn't do it for me.
Because I'm like, once I kneel, I don't get up.
And my dad, you know, like being in a university system and tenure and all this stuff, You can see how it didn't work for those guys.
They have the ability of saying anything they want, but it's almost like this devil's trick.
They only really give it to the people that aren't going to make waves.
I had this big book deal, and they took it away.
It was because they were like, don't say these certain things, and I wouldn't stop.
You got to see that it's not worth it for me.
And the reason I got the book deal, even without having any books or anything, is because I had something to say.
And so now I'm going to go down the self-publishing route because it's like, why not?
Prestige is nothing to me.
That's a joke.
It's like you see these fancy idiots.
And it has no draw to me whatsoever.
And I just don't understand why people are like that.
They're like, when's your Netflix special?
I'm like... Why would I sell something to them?
Why would I want to be where they are?
I just saw a Netflix comedy trailer, and it was this lesbian in Australia, and her whole thing was that she doesn't tell jokes because she finds them demeaning.
And people are like, and she's like, I stand here today not as a comedian, and I'm like, why would anyone want to work with these people?
Their brand of comedy is now non-comedy.
Well, that's postmodernism.
And I think for me as well, like sort of say, well, why do you take on some of the more toxic elements of feminism and so on?
Well, because I want my daughter to grow up and have...
Love. And if she's told that, you know, there's this evil white male patriarchy that's crushing women and holding them down and has enslaved women and mean and vicious and this rape culture, it's like, how the hell is she supposed to find love in that kind of environment?
When she's told that all men are, you know, narcoleptic predators wearing zombie skins as attack armor...
I mean, she's not going to find love.
And this is why it's like, I'm sorry, like, I know these people really, really wed to this stuff.
And they really, they've invested a lot of time.
And it's like, but like, I'm sorry, you're standing between my daughter and the love she deserves.
And I want her to have. So it's not even a...
It's not even a rough calculation.
Sorry, you're standing between my daughter and the love that she will get.
I'm sorry that you've invested so much into it, but this is like you're walking down and there's some little palm front in the way.
You push it aside. It's like, sorry, it's in the way.
Nothing personal. I'm sorry that all of this toxic and poisonous ideology is in the way of my daughter's future happiness, but There's no, you know, my dedication is to my daughter and her future happiness.
The idea that it might cause people upset for me to tell the truth.
It's like, well, maybe you shouldn't have fucking lied to begin with.
Yeah. And it's like feminism is the opposite.
It's almost like saying, hey, ladies, you want happiness?
We'll get you in a cubicle 60 hours a week, two abortions, and here's a dog.
It's like, okay, that's happiness.
That's the opposite of feminism.
That's just doubling your tax base and just destroying people's lives.
When you say stuff like that, people are like, oh, so you would never want a woman, blah, blah, blah.
I'm like, you can be president if you're the best.
You can be airline pilot if you're the best.
No one's holding back that at all.
That's not our point. The point is Like saying that there's virtue and that your goal in life is to try and beat men.
You had a great point about the wage gap where it's like if you include married women having half, like they're so much richer.
It's just like not even close.
And that's even if you don't account, like that's just men paying the bills for their wives who are staying home with the kids, which is great and a wonderful division of labor.
You throw alimony and child support and you throw in additional old age pension plans and the fact that women use free health care more and the fact that women get more on welfare and so on.
It's like, yeah, I think we do have a gender wage gap.
It's just not in the direction that you think it is.
Because we love women.
This is the weird thing, is that we love women so much, we built them an entire civilization to protect them from everything, right?
And the payback for building, you know, not a lot of wolves in downtown Los Angeles, right?
I mean, and not a lot of bears in Manhattan, you know, we built this whole civilization to keep the predators out.
And they're like, oh, well, that makes you the predator then.
And I'm like, oh, man, no, this is not how this was supposed to play out.
Well, I think some men have weakened themselves to allow people to talk to them that way.
I'm almost like telling men, like, dude, you're part of this.
Any man that lets that narrative continue without any opposition because they want candy, I'm like, dude, don't let these people talk like that because it's a small group of leftists that are now kind of pushing all people that I'm like, there's not that many of them.
But the more people just kneel because they want candy, the more everybody starts swaying this big Overton window.
And I think it's up to men To say, we love you guys enough.
It's kind of like we were talking about before.
It's like, we love you enough to not allow this to continue, this nonsense.
You know, because that's what real love is.
I used to do a bit about some of the most beautiful things in the world and some of the most horrific things where men just trying to impress women, where it's like, you know, the Eiffel Tower.
It's like, look at the Eiffel Tower.
Will you make out with me?
And then, but even slavery, it's like, we don't have to pay these guys.
Will you hang out with me?
You know, where it's just like, what can we give to you guys that will impress you?
And men have made some mistakes and had to come back.
And that's why, you know, consistent morality is important.
Why, you know, slavery is a bad thing.
But, you know, so much of it was just the acquiring of resources for status to impress women.
And so many times it would just go off the top.
It would either be beauty or horror.
Well, you know, so it was about the mid-1800s, like 1850 or something like that, Owen, when the first washing machine was invented.
Right? Like, I mean, what an insane thing, you know?
Like, well, we've got technology.
We have some kind of motor.
What should we do?
Reduce women's workload so we'll have sex with them more.
That's number one. It's like, well, you know, there's a lot of men in coal mines.
No! To hell with them.
We'll deal with them in about a century.
We're going to give them masks in about a century.
But right now, the important thing is my wife's not too tired to have sex with me.
So for God's sake, let's build her a washing machine.
And that's how ridiculous it is.
And this is called some sort of female exploiting patriarchy.
Literally, they developed the labor-saving devices for women about a century before they developed life-saving devices for men.
And then it's like, oh, yeah, I can taste the privilege.
It tastes like black lung.
I know. Yeah, my grandfather died of black lung.
That's why he said that. But it's interesting how we put our values today on the- Way to kill the joke, man.
Yeah, it got real real.
Yeah, holy shit. Now I feel like a complete asshole.
That's all right. We'll push through it.
We're men. Dude, uh, no, but that's a funny bit about the first thing we invent when people are still in coal mines is washing machines.
It's just because they don't want to do this as much.
But, uh, What were we just talking about?
I forgot what I was going to say.
Oh, man. I totally fucked you up with your grandfather's death, so sorry about that.
I completely derailed your train of thought.
No, that's all right. He died in a lot of pain, but thanks anyway, though.
I'm just kidding. No, but it's true, though.
It's like, oh, whoa, whoa, the values.
Yeah, like nowadays people are like, how come there were no women forefathers or foremothers?
They didn't invent... They were never given credit.
Maybe they didn't want to write their name on a piece of paper that ensured their death warrants.
It's weird how there's an honor to being the head of the household at home raising legendary children and cooking beautiful food and just making everything a castle.
And men go out and risk their lives and end up in a lot of pain and sacrifice to ensure that they get this nucleus of life.
And there's nothing shameful about that.
In fact, it's amazing.
And I just don't get where that flip happened where it's like, no, female empowerment is they now too have to go in the coal mines.
Yeah, but they don't.
But they don't. You know, there's no equality when it comes to like ditch digging or like in the business, me and my brother would do the arborist.
Like, you know, it's one of the most dangerous things you can do.
I've never seen one chick, not ever.
And we've worked on a lot of crews.
Oh, yeah. No, I mean, it's not how things roll.
Of course. I mean, and given that it's all government crap and all of that, of course, they'd want all the benefits and none of the downsides.
They're human beings just like everyone else.
But I don't know.
It's become like this weird thing, especially, I think, because this sort of modern or post-modern economy crap where everything's kind of made up money and debt and manipulation and price controls and interest rates and all this weird stuff.
It's like... The purpose of man is to work and the purpose of women is to make the next generation of men who work and women who, right?
Because that was the curse, right?
Back in the day, Adam and Eve, right?
According to the story, right? She aided the tree of knowledge of good and evil.
They messed up.
They disobeyed. And the two curses were given by God.
Number one was you got to go out and make your own stuff.
None of this free stuff anymore.
And she gets childbirth.
So that's, of course, it's adulthood, right?
You get the ability to have children after puberty and you get the work to provide for a family after that.
And it was considered a curse because, of course, work and childbirth were, like, crazy dangerous.
You know, you hear a lot from feminists who are women, died a lot in childbirth.
It's like, yeah, and then the guy got a cut from his scythe and it got infected.
His arm rotted off and they had to beat him to death with a half-dead cow.
And so this idea that, well, there was all this privilege for men in the past.
They just got away with all of this stuff.
It's like... Well, we worked and women had a lot of kids and that was an incredible life.
I mean, and people don't want to do that.
That's fine. It's their choice. But now there's so many men who don't have a job and there's so many women who don't have kids.
I think that we are a problem-solving species.
And you know this as a father.
Your kids are, like, to some degree, one problem after another.
That sounds kind of negative, but, you know, I got to keep them safe.
Well, now I've got to get them off the couch, and, you know, like, I want them to learn how to read.
Well, they're reading too much. I got to get them outside.
You know, this is just, you know, this maneuvering and all of that, and...
It takes up a huge amount of time, especially if you're a stay-at-home dad.
You know, like it's morning until night and you've got your wife there to help and all that and so on.
But you get really, really busy.
And because we're a problem-solving species, my particular concern is that the men who don't work and the women who don't have kids, it's like, well, I'm a problem-solving species.
I don't have any problems.
I think I'm going to make some.
I'm going to make massive injustices founded in biology that we can't possibly change, but by God, I'm going to beat my head half to death on the wall of things I can't change because I don't have anything to do.
Exactly. It's an issue of supply and demand.
We have so much demand for problems and not enough supply.
I do a song on stage called The Summer of 1869, where it's a cover of that old song.
It's just horrible.
Everyone's just dying. But those are the best days of my life.
It's like in the Civil War, they made me shoot my best friend.
And now, because we've accomplished so many things, we just are yearning for problems.
But the thing is, there's always going to be problems to solve if you follow the right path of having a family and working hard.
Because there's no end to it, in a beautiful way.
You know, you want a better world for your kids.
Like, we have so many actual problems that we could be solving, and we're just in this nonsense world.
Like, the actual problems is like the welfare state, beating kids, the fact that we have a war machine that kind of starts fights in the middle of nowhere to sell bombs, like things like that.
But we're just obsessed with microaggressions, by definition, it's because we ran out of aggressions.
You know, it's like microaggressions.
It's like, you know, you finally drive the snakes from your island and it's like, yeah, but those worms are gonna kill me, man!
Okay, well... I know.
And it's so many times it's the very people that got rich or are currently becoming rich from these very problems are the ones that are, you know, trying to get the sins out of them, but they're projecting it on other people.
Oh, yeah. Well, we should do a whole other thing about this reincarnation of religion in the form of leftist hysteria.
But, okay, let's do this.
So, You're in an elevator.
Let me take you one after me.
You're in an elevator and some guy comes in and you got like two minutes or whatever, right?
And he's like, MGTOW for life!
If you did feel like working to change his mind, what would be your elevator pitch for him?
My elevator pitch for him would be that...
You can't, you know, whack off and play video games forever.
Frankly, I don't know that much about MGTOW. I have a couple buddies that are a little into it.
But I would just say we've made it through ice ages.
Don't be a baby.
You know, like, because right now there are issues men face.
And don't get me wrong. I respect that.
It's like a divorce court is unbelievably harsh on men and can destroy their lives.
In the media, we're called babies and children.
We're infantilized. You know, women now, a lot culturally think that being a woman means having abortions, a small dog, and being angry all the time.
Like, I get it. But we've made it through war and famine and ice ages.
And the greatest thing about being a man, and if you have a lot of pride in being a male, which you should, you know, don't become this, like, shadow self because of these Tide commercials.
Being a man is getting through problems and still doing the right thing.
And the right thing is Loving a woman, creating life, protecting that life, and getting through problems.
And right now our biggest problem is the cultural hatred of men, especially Straight white men in America and in Europe.
And it's a challenge, but that's what makes being a man a man, is getting past challenges, solving tasks, protecting, nourishing, getting resources and bringing it home.
And I'm telling you right now that this is not as severe as an ice age where you can only eat ferns.
The funny thing is, I don't know if you knew this, I just found this out recently.
During the last ice age, we were down to 10,000 human beings.
Oh, yeah. Like, that's it.
If you can do a head count of all of humanity on the planet and you're still in five digits, you are not having a great time.
We're down to 10,000 people, man.
I mean, one bad STD, we're done, baby.
We're starting from scratch with single-celled organisms.
That one guy trips and it's like, oh no, the human population just went down by a significant percentage point, you know?
We fought our way back to, what is it, like, I don't know, six, seven billion, whatever it is now.
Maybe a little too far. But we fought our way back from only 10,000 of us.
You know, I mean, that's a very small number of people.
And we fought our way back from that.
And yes, I mean, I get the MGTOW arguments.
I really do. It is risky.
It is dangerous. It can destroy your life.
Good is still really good.
The goodness in marriage is so great that the whole point to me is not just to say, well, to hell with it.
It's risky, so I'm not going to do it.
The point is, what are you going to do to reduce your risk?
What are you going to do to reduce your risk?
That is talking about values.
That is talking about their family, the woman's family, and what kind of relationship.
Exploring the degree of self-knowledge.
Because people without self-knowledge, all they do is blame you for everything.
They have no agency.
Everything that goes wrong is either your fault or someone else's fault.
So you can't negotiate with people who have no self-ownership.
It really is like trying to negotiate with a robot.
It's absolutely impossible.
Why don't we try and come to a conciliatory agreement with your ottoman?
It's just not going to happen.
And so if you explore people's sense of self-knowledge, their level of self-ownership, their level of responsibility taking, do they take on too much?
Well, then they're going to give you a license and you're going to go off the rails.
Do they take too little?
Well, they're going to blame you for everything and you're never going to be able to negotiate.
Do they have a decent level of – it doesn't necessarily mean formal education, but they read books, they have curiosity about the world, do they understand basics about psychology?
These aren't impossible standards to reach and to achieve.
And for the people who say, and it's a false statistic, oh, 50% of marriages – End in divorce.
About who you choose, and you can reduce your chances of divorce to virtually zero.
Like people who've got the same values, similar levels of curiosity, education, and so on, and they negotiate with each other, you have almost no chance of getting divorced in that situation.
So I don't like this whole mixing in idiots with people who are doing wise things and saying, well, the risk is just too great.
It's like, well, it's not if you're not an idiot.
Exactly. And you've got to also remember, a lot of women out there want you to be that guy that you want to be.
Some guys don't realize that, that if you are an honorable person and work hard and ask them out and you're respectful and you want a family, their biology will light up.
The state isn't as powerful as people think.
It's like you can get through that.
And then they will also get that armor that we were just discussing.
And in the same way, you know, I'm a direct descendant of Clark from Lewis and Clark.
And I was driving across the country to come out to Washington.
And I was driving for 30 hours and I was like, you know, I took a nap and I was like, man, this is rough.
And I thought about our ancestors.
This is rough. Yeah, and to think about the risks that we think now, it's like, oh, we might have to give up some of our fake money in a divorce court.
It's like, to come to America back in the day, part of my family came in 1710.
The odds that you drowned with chains on your legs were higher than divorce right now.
And that's why I think it's very important to honor your ancestors and to think about where you come from and all the sacrifices that got us to this point and how negligible some of these risks really are.
It's devastating in perspective of our modern world, but in reality, what you're giving up, having that balance in your home, having that family, having that purpose in your life is worth any risk.
I'd die for my family straight up, and Judge Joe Brown isn't going to take that for me.
All right. Well, listen, I really, really appreciate the time and do let me know how the birth goes.
I imagine this sort of big, giant, wart-covered, half-diseased fist coming through the portal of time saying, microaggressions, come live with my life for two weeks and see if you're still concerned about microaggressions.
But I wanted to remind people, check out these standards, these specials, comedy specials.
They're on Vimeo.
A couple of bucks, well, well worth it.
And they are Feed the Bear, How Dare Me, and the brand spanking new Reluctant Warlord.
Vimeo.com forward slash Owen Benjamin.
YouTube.com slash Owen Benjamin.
And, of course, the website is hugepianist.com.
Owen, always a great, great pleasure to chat.
I really, really appreciate your time today.
Oh, it's a blast, man. And if people are running low on cash or anything, I got a bunch for free on YouTube.
I have, like, Live at Bellevue, where I did a song for Tommy Robinson on there if people just want to watch it on YouTube.
