Aug. 30, 2018 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
03:52:21
4180 Profitable Tyranny? - Call In Show - August 29th, 2018
Question 1: [1:08] – “You have always compared religion to government, in the sense that you say that atheists have ripped away religion from people and left them stranded with nothing. No moral basis, or anything. Please correct me if I'm wrong or misunderstand you. You make the analogy that the religious were in a church, and atheists ripped that church apart, without providing an alternative for morality, or whatever the religion was providing, which you seem to view as a necessity for humans (for reasons I still don't understand). Why do you think that removing (the delusional) governments would not have the same destructive effect as removing (the delusional) religions? Don't you think there are destructive effects of removing governments, just like removing religions? Don't you think that humans are hard-wired to seek authority?”Question 2: [50:38] – “I’m in a difficult 23-year marriage. While I’ve not always been a saint, I’ve worked very hard the last 12-13 years to be a great provider, great father, and great citizen. No matter how much effort I give, my wife sees me as a tyrant and someone she needs to protect herself and our children from. How do I move forward in this relationship OR how do I give up on my ‘marriage vows’ and throw in the towel?”Question 3: [2:02:05] – “I'm a 28-year-old woman and started listening to FDR last year and since then my life has completely changed. I went from being single women with a serious case of hypergramy and risking a cat-lady life to being in a relationship with a loving, kind, devoted man with a deep integrity who I would have never given a chance in the past. We're already talking about marriage and are so excited to start a family and teach our children to become strong men and women of reason and virtue. Because I'm about to hit the wall I know I'll be losing my SMV and therefore my power, which frankly makes me a little anxious, how do I age well as a woman in practical terms? Is there a way to replace my sexual power so I can do good as I get older instead of fading into an invisible middle-aged woman? Or is it a virtue to accept losing this power?”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
Well, three callers tonight, which means you get both quantity and quality.
The first caller says, well, Steph, you've always compared religion to government.
You say, atheists have ripped away religion from people and left them stranded with nothing.
Isn't removing the state going to be the same thing, going to be the same situation?
Hmm. Yeah, he's got some Benjamins.
Guy has some money, but he's in a difficult 23-year marriage.
He had an affair once, his wife, kind of inert, and what he paid for?
Well, it still blows my mind to this day, but a very interesting conversation about how to navigate a challenging marriage, and if you have one or know someone who has one, very, very helpful.
The third caller says, ah, you know, I'm kind of hitting the wall, getting older.
My sexual power is diminishing.
How am I going to age well as a woman in practical terms?
Is there a way that I can replace my fading sexual market value with something else so I can do good or have some positive impact on society instead of fading into middle-aged invisibility as a woman?
It's a great question, and it's on a bunch of people's minds these days, and rightly so, I think.
So without any further ado, let's go.
Alright, well up for today we have Sam.
Sam wrote in and said, You've always compared religion to government, in the sense that you say that atheists have ripped away religion from people and left them stranded with nothing, no moral basis, or anything.
Please correct me if I'm wrong or misunderstand you.
You make an analogy that religions were in a church and atheists ripped their church apart, without providing an alternative for morality or whatever the religion was providing.
Which you seem to view as a necessity for humans, for reasons I still don't understand.
Why do you think that removing the delusional governments would not have the same destructive effect as removing the delusional religions?
Don't you think there are destructive effects of removing governments, just like removing religions?
Don't you think that humans are hardwired to seek authority?
That's from Sam. Hey Sam, how you doing?
Hi Stefan, nice to talk to you again.
Nice to talk to you too. Are you hardwired to seek authority?
I am not, but I see everyone else is like that.
Oh, you're the exception? I don't know.
I mean, I'm not like everyone else, and I know this sounds...
I don't know, narcissistic in some way, but I am someone who abandoned my religion very easily.
I mean, I can tell you stories how my friends were like, we are Muslims because our parents are like this, and I'm like, if Islam is wrong, I will leave it the next day, and that's what happened.
And it didn't take me so long.
I mean, I came to Germany in Like 2008, beginning 2010, I was already shook very hard and in one year I was out.
Right. Let me ask you this, Sam.
Sam, why do you think that the West, the cognitive elites, the intellectuals in the West, are so hostile towards Christianity.
It's because they're not hostile towards religion because they seem to embrace Islam quite readily, at least many of them do.
So, why do you think that they're so hostile towards Christianity?
Now, um...
Okay, I don't know why they are hostile to Christianity, but I think I have an explanation to why they are friendly towards Islam.
Sure. And I think it's all this...
First, number one, is this whole inclusion and multiculturalism and this nonsense.
Well, that should include Christianity, though, right?
No, this does not have to include Christianity, because Christianity was already there.
So it was like, by default, Christianity was there.
So if we want to include other religions, it does not have to be Christianity.
It's like, in some way, we gave it already so much.
So let's give other religions a little bit more.
Well, sure, but you can do that without attacking Christianity.
Like, if there's a lot of people seated along a bench, but there's room for one more, I don't have to beat someone up.
I just have to say, hey, move over, right?
I mean, there doesn't have to be hostility.
No, I mean, I'm not saying it makes sense.
I mean, come on, do you think this SJW bullshit makes sense?
We all know it doesn't make sense.
And it's the same thing with white people.
Why all this hatred to whites?
Does it have to make sense?
It doesn't have to make sense. A universal phenomenon has to have some explanation, right?
It can't just be random.
Otherwise, it wouldn't be universal, right?
No, I'm not saying it's random.
I'm saying the explanation is...
That they have something, I mean, like whites and Christians and all those people had their turn, quote-unquote, and now we have to give other people's turn because whites or whatever, they were strong, they were smart, they did, they built, they did all this good stuff, and now they blame everything that the other cultures did not achieve.
Like, they have this explanation that the whites have taken it from them, the Christians have taken it from them, and stuff like this.
You see my point?
Yeah, yeah. No, I mean, so if you criticize Islam, then you're called Islamophobic.
But, of course, if you criticize Christianity, you're not called Christianophobic.
Yeah, I think this Islamophobic thing is only because Muslims complain a lot.
I mean, I come from that culture.
Never noticed that at all.
Oh my god. I'm kidding.
I mean, come on. When any terrorist attack happens, the first thing you see, the first thing, you don't see any mourning for the victims from the Muslims.
The first thing you see from Muslims, this does not represent Islam, right?
Or it's mental illness.
Oh, okay, of course.
That's the new thing, right?
Like there was a shooting in Toronto, this Danforth shooting.
And the guy seemed to let non-whites go.
He seemed to be pretty well trained.
And he attended a mosque where there seemed to be some radical views.
And they wouldn't even release his name until they had the whole mental illness narrative set up.
And now they're even taking down the memorial to the victims.
Can't have that! Can't have that reality or reminder.
Well, yeah.
It's from the sense that it's mental illness.
I can't argue with that because...
I mean, you can always throw it at that.
But, I mean, the problem...
I consider myself a very rational person.
And when I see what those young people, SJWs or whatever, are doing, I cannot understand what they're doing and why.
You see, like... Well, okay, so, I mean, one of the studies or the stats that just came out recently regarding the United States is that the majority of teenagers live in a house Where it's dependent on the government for money.
Yes, yes. I mean, maybe it's like hardwired in them to seek resources.
Well, no, we're all hardwired to seek resources.
It's whether we do it honorably or dishonorably that matters or has the impact.
So the people who pay the most taxes in America are white males.
That's true. And so the people who have to be exploited for the welfare state and for diversity and for all of this other kind of stuff is white males.
And whoever you exploit, you must dehumanize.
You have to call people evil if you want to exploit them, otherwise you're just a jerk, right?
And so given that the entire modern system of misgovernance relies upon white males never waking up and saying, wait a minute, what the hell is in this for us?
How is this benefiting us?
Right? I mean, you have to keep attacking and undermining and criticizing and ripping down their statues and calling them evil and Islamophobic and patriarchal and misogynistic and racist.
You have to keep breaking them down.
Otherwise, well, it might be a little bit tougher to exploit people who have some pride.
Absolutely. That's one point, and I agree with it fully.
But I still think that Muslims complain a lot.
I mean, this thing that whenever some terrorist attack happens, You start seeing Muslims coming out and saying, this does not represent Islam.
What do we call this? I mean, do you have an explanation for this?
Wait, do I have an explanation for it?
Yes, yes. Do you have an explanation?
Why the first thing you have to see?
I mean, even Obama came out once after a terrorist attack, and the first thing he said was like, this does not represent Islam.
I mean, come on! Well, I think that it is, you know, if you do have, let's say, and we've all seen the graphs, right?
So if you do have a religion or a belief system that seems to produce Just a few more terrorists than everyone else, then you have two choices.
You can either distance yourself from the terrorism or you can look in the mirror and say, I wonder if there's anything, anything in our belief system that might give some kind of encouragement to this terrorism.
Even if it's misinterpreted, even if it's an earlier or later hadith, I wonder if there's anything possible that's in our belief system that might give some encouragement to this kind of terrorism.
And I think a lot of people, of course, in the Muslim world would rather say, well, it's got nothing to do with us, rather than say, gosh, maybe we should have a look at some of these belief systems or some of these hadiths and so on, and we should start some kind of reformation.
But that doesn't seem to be particularly imminent for reasons I've gone into in this show before.
So, you know, you can externalize the blame pretty easily rather than look in the mirror and say, maybe we need to change some of how we do things.
Yeah, yeah. And by the way, one fun fact, I think a reformation is not possible in Islam.
And I think the reason is that Islam has no central authority in any way, shape, or form.
And there are lots of cults.
I mean, there's the Sunni and Shiites, sure, the main ones.
But internally, there's lots of cults, so many, that if any rational Reformation happens in Islam, it will be one new cult that will be destroyed sooner or later.
This happened like a gazillion times already.
I mean, there were cults that were destroyed completely in history, and there were these rational people who did the golden era of Islam where they did all these translations and good stuff.
And they were exterminated.
I don't see any of them now, anyone who...
It says, I am one of these.
You see? So, now in this era, there are people who come out and do reformation.
And reformation, this is also one thing we have to discuss.
Reformation means a reinterpretation of the religion in a way where we discredit everything that's serious or anything that doesn't make sense and stuff like this.
And there are people who are doing this, but they're not that famous.
They are not that It's common and they are just a small cult.
It grows a little bit and then like a bubble and then blows up and it goes away.
This happened many times.
I mean, I can give you examples now.
Please do. For example, there's this guy called Adnan Ibrahim.
I don't know if you heard of this guy, but he makes lectures in Austria.
And his lecture...
I mean, in 2009...
Around that time, he was very famous because he had this flavor of science and the guy who makes sense and the guy who's rational.
But then over time, things changed.
People started realizing how much bullshit he has and people started splitting.
Because those people who realized what kind of bullshit he has, like myself, I distanced myself from him and I said, he's like everyone else.
He is seeking some interests, although he is trying to do some reformation of the religion.
But then, people split, and he is not that famous anymore.
He appears on TV every now and then.
I mean, his ideas are quite peaceful.
He's against all those kill infidels and all the stuff that we know.
And he's against every, like, for example, taking concubines from whites and all this crap.
He's against all that.
He's against stealing from the West Sea, against all the bad things we know.
But is he, like, becoming the mainstream?
Is he even close? Not even close.
And this is not the first time that this happens.
Sooner or later, you will have one, like, one group, like, saying that the other group are infidels or kafirs and they have to be exterminated in some way.
And if there's, I mean, countries fail at stopping this, and guess what's happening now?
I mean, this whole discussion with you was triggered by the fact of doing, by something happened with me, by doing what's right.
Look at what happened in Syria.
There is some chaos and anarchy, and guess what happens?
The first thing that happened, the people started killing each other, You think this is the first time this happens?
We've been killing each other since 1400 years.
The people of Muhammad killed each other like 20-30 years after his death.
I mean, it's an unresolvable issue, I think.
There's no way to solve it.
And I think this has happened many times and it's going to happen again.
And whenever there's any kind of anarchy, all these cults will start killing each other.
Well, yeah, I mean, so one of the challenges is that if Muhammad did it, it's tough to criticize, to put it mildly, right?
Well, how do you know that he did it?
Well, I mean, in terms of what is written and what is accepted as sort of the core text.
You can't even validate that. I'm sorry?
You cannot validate that.
That's very, very debatable.
Like I explained in my last call, you have all these levels of credibility, and every person can take any hadith and say, this is okay, I believe this.
This is not okay, I don't believe that.
And you have this cocktail of people.
Like you have a buffet, and everyone takes whatever hadith he wants.
And like I said, ISIS is really the true Islam, because they are objective.
They look at hadith based on what they are.
Like, if this is weak, they take it as weak.
If this is sahih, they take it as sahih.
Sahih is like a synonym for a credible.
And stuff like this. Like, I mean, how can you get consensus with this?
It's a mess. It is.
And listen, if it's any consolation, I mean, it wasn't that long ago that Christians were at each other's throats for 100 or 200 years as well.
I cannot speak for Christianity, but I see probably hopeless for Islam.
Probably we need hundreds of years, if not thousands.
Well, it would certainly be helpful to stop the cousin marriage stuff.
Yeah. Because the cousin marriage stuff is pretty harsh on the old IQ, and that may take away some of the subtlety of theological debate.
Yeah, like I told you the last time, my aunt married her cousin, and...
More than half of our children are insane.
I don't know. Lots of this.
Going back to our topic, we were discussing whether people are hardwired for authority.
This is not my main question in this discussion.
My main question is, why do you think that religion is necessary in any level or any shape or form?
Because doing what's right It's probably not the best thing to do.
And this is the core question in this call.
Because, you know, in 2010, 2011, when this whole Syrian revolution thing started, I'm originally Syrian, I was very excited.
I was very happy because the country is way corrupt beyond your imagination.
Seriously. And the regime has to be destroyed in any way.
And I was like, please, let's do this.
I was chanting for it and I wanted it to happen.
I contributed through Facebook and all this stuff.
It sounds like we'll be greeted as liberators, next thing we'll get a true Jeffersonian democracy out of Iraq.
I mean, everybody has these ideas going in, right?
Yes, yes. I mean, the right thing to do is to destroy this regime.
Well, no, because it worked in the Second World War in Japan, it worked in the Second World War in Italy, and it worked in the Second World War in Germany.
So, people are like, wow, we blew up the Nazis, we blew up the Emperor's troops, and Mussolini got hung, and next thing you know, you've got a pretty free society.
A little bit of a... And I said, well, it can't just be white people because Japanese aren't white and it can't just be Western values because the Japanese weren't Western, but it worked!
And so we're like, well, we've got to do this everywhere except the Japanese, the Germans and the Italians are high IQ populations, so it's different.
Probably it's that. I can say it's probably that.
But, I mean, now if you take me back in time, if I go back to 2010, if I... Get a time machine and have this choice.
I'll tell myself, please stop, don't do it.
Not because it's wrong.
But because look what happened.
There's now 10 times inflation in the currency.
People are hungry everywhere.
I have friends there telling me stories that are killing me when I hear them.
Like the military is in control of all food.
And this is not now.
This is like two, three years ago.
The military is in control of all food.
And women stand in front of my university where I had my bachelor education.
They stand in front of the university offering themselves to get a box of tomatoes or whatever.
It was that bad!
Yeah, and the same thing happens in Venezuela, which was a formerly relatively rich country.
So it's not just an IQ thing.
It's also a, it's a socialism thing.
It's a communism thing.
It's a central planning. It's a destruction of any remnants of the free market thing that, I mean, it's like Libya.
Oh, we're going to get rid of Muammar Gaddafi because he's a bad guy.
It's like, yeah, it was a bad guy.
But compared to what?
Saddam Hussein, a bad guy.
But compared to what?
And if you have a country which has boiling sectarian violence, a relatively low IQ population, you tell me how it can be run without a dictator.
I don't know. I don't know.
Me neither. I mean, now I'm convinced that some people are not smart enough to create democracy themselves.
And one of them is Syria.
And what are we going to do?
It's the right thing to do, to destroy the regime.
But am I going to do it? No.
Would I suggest to do it if I go back with the time machine?
No, because I've seen what happens.
Well, no, there's a horrible way to do it, though.
There's a horrible way to do it, and it's not one, Sam, that I recommend at all, but just looking at it objectively and horribly, there's a horrible way to do it.
And the way that you do it is, so think of the Middle Ages, more or less, in Western Europe.
So you had a cognitive elite, which were the priesthood and the aristocracy.
And obviously, you know, if you can learn Latin and ancient Aramaic and ancient Greek, you're a smart guy.
And I know that my ancestors, the Molyneux, on my father's side and on my mother's side, very smart people, very great writers and philosophers, intellectuals, artists, poets, and so on.
And you have a small group, tip of the pyramid, of cognitive elites, and then you have a big mass...
Of people who just aren't that smart.
You can't reason with them.
They can't defer gratification very well.
They're self-righteous. They're pompous.
They're arrogant.
They complain a lot. And they don't have any subtlety or self-doubt.
They're absolutely certain and they're absolutely wrong.
And then what you do, you see, terrible though, and it's not what you do, but this is one way that it can be done, which is what I'm trying to help avoid through this kind of conversation, is you say, okay, well, first...
You need a terrible illness.
Something like the Black Death.
And what that's going to do is it's going to wipe out a third of the population.
And it's going to generally wipe out a third of the population that's less intelligent.
Because smarter people have options.
They can get out of the cities.
They wash their hands.
They can afford soap.
You know, they can make sure they don't touch people, right?
And so what you can do is you can have a terrible disease raging through the region, which kills off the less intelligent portion of the population on average.
And then what you do, this is, again, not recommended.
Then what you do is you say, well, let's have all of the religious absolutists fight each other until they kill each other off.
life.
Because religious absolutism, I believe, is partly genetic.
There is a kind of fanaticism that has its roots in genes, which is why you can't reason with them.
It's like trying to reason someone into changing their eye color or being taller or shorter or changing their skin color.
You can't do it. And so what you do is for a couple of hundred years...
You let – so the first thing you get the wave of illness and then what you do is that gets rid of a third of the population and then what happens is you let a third of the lower IQ religious fanatics wage war against each other while the smart people are like, I'm just stepping back.
I'm going to sit in my castle.
I'm going to hoard my food and I'm just going to wait it out.
And then what happens is you end up with 20% of people or maybe 30% of people left over after this two-wave process of illness and religious warfare.
And then what they can do is they can build the enlightenment in the modern world without all of these other people in the way being idiots.
And I don't like that approach.
Obviously, I can't say this often enough.
But it works, and it is one of the ways in which...
It's like winter, right? Winter continually shaves off the bottom 5% or 10% of idiots who don't plan for the winter and lays around grasshopper style all summer and don't lay in their savings of food and resources for the winter.
And winter is just continually taking out, scooping out the bottom of your intelligence, and that's one of the reasons why.
There are races or ethnicities that constantly face winter, again, outside of the Inuit or the Eskimo because they can hunt and fish year-round, so there's not that need to defer gratification in the way that you have with agriculture.
But when you have winter, you're constantly shaving off and basically they're not reproducing the bottom 5% or 10% of your population on average, not every year, but over time.
And that just moves everyone up or to the right on the IQ curve.
So there are ways to do it, but man, it is not recommended.
And I'm hoping that there's other ways that this can happen.
I believe this is very close to what's happening now in Syria.
Because lots of people have died.
Lots of people have died.
You have no idea about the numbers.
It's scary.
And now religious fanatics are fighting each other.
I mean, this religious fanatics fighting each other, like I said, it's been going on since forever.
I hope this ends with something reasonable, but it looks like Bashar al-Assad won.
He won. Yeah, I mean, what do you do with your religious fanatics who are willing to use violence?
It's not just religious fanatics.
What do you do with the communists?
The communists who are willing to use violence to get their way, what do you do with them?
Can you reason them out of their perspective?
I'm sure that's true for a few, but with the rest, it's a pretty tough question.
If they're really dedicated, you can't reason with them, and they're willing to use violence to get their way, it's really tough to know what to do.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. By the way, Syria is a socialist country, by definition.
Not with what they're doing, It's a corrupt country, so you cannot really put it in any economic category.
But with their motives and what they say, it's a socialist country.
It is. It is.
And, of course, one of the ways that this could happen is everybody bails out and gets to other countries who are smarter, and you let the religious fanatics destroy each other, and then you move back.
Yeah, but no, the...
The currency is inflated.
The economy is destroyed. Everything is stolen.
Factories are off.
I mean, I don't know.
The country will need 50 other years to recover.
It's destroyed. Yes.
Well, that's the same thing with Libya, right?
And same thing with Iraq. Yep, yep.
The question now is about the right thing.
The right thing to do was to stop this regime, but we didn't do it.
Wait, wait. Which regime?
The Syrian regime.
I mean, we couldn't do it.
We shouldn't do it. We shouldn't even try to do it.
You mean Bashar al-Assad? Yes.
Why was it right to stop his regime?
Because he has a corrupt government.
Compared to what? What's wrong with living under a corrupt government if your other alternative is to be beheaded by ISIS? Thank you.
Now you're getting where I want to go.
It's that there are alternatives that are not always visible.
My first question was, you're saying that religion, please correct me on wrong, I don't like to say what you were saying, but I heard you say this, and I would like to understand your point here.
You were saying that completely abandoning religion is bad in some way, because atheism does not offer alternatives in some things.
Okay, let me make the briefcase, and listen, I'm talking more in the Western context.
Please go ahead. So one of the most central positions of secular skepticism, and this was laid out by David Hume, and it's been talked about by a number of other philosophers since, which is you cannot get an ought from an is.
So if you take some guy and you hold his head underwater until he drowns, There's nothing in the nature of the universe that says you shouldn't do that, right?
There's nothing in physics and physically you can do it.
Now, if you have religion, then thou shalt not kill is even deeper than the mere physics of the everyday because it's a moral reality that's larger and wider and deeper than the mere veil of tears physical reality that we live in.
Now, again, I'm not saying...
Well, actually, I mean, the crime rates in many Islamic countries is relatively low.
So, I mean, whether you consider what the government's doing a crime or not, that's another matter.
But in terms of, like, citizen-on-citizen crime, there are some stats that are not the end of the world.
But when you say, we are going to argue against the existence of God...
There's very logical reasons, and I've gone into them, and I've got a whole book on this called Against the God, so there are very good reasons to argue against the existence of God.
However, if God is the source of moral self-restraint, then the question becomes, how do you get people to be moral when you take away the shadow cast by God, which is morality?
And so, listen, I do not believe in God and I can make arguments with the best of them against the existence of God.
But if you are going to pull that thread in the West, then you have to provide a replacement for the moral absolutes that religion supports.
And if you don't, then what you're doing is just throwing the baby out with the bathwater is the phrase.
That you can use. What you're doing is you're saying, I'm getting rid of God because God is irrational or anti-rational in some ways.
And if you don't understand that that also gets rid of morality, as far as has ever been understood by the vast majority of human beings.
Then you have an innocent bystander in your takedown of God, which is morality.
Now, given that people need some sort of moral standards to live, what happens is you get rid of God and people will try to find some other structure by which they can absorb or practice or enshrine morality.
And I don't think it's an accident that the fall of religion provoked the rise of communism and socialism, because instead of self-restraint and thou shalt not steal and trying to get into heaven as the basis for moral decisions in the West, It became sentimentality plus the brutality of the state.
You know, well, poor people, they're sad, so let's just use the power of the state to redistribute income.
Or, wow, this woman, she got pregnant out of wedlock, it's really sad, so let's just give her $50,000 a year in goods and services for the rest of her life.
Or the rest of the life of her kid, at least.
And then, of course, she will just give her stuff for old age pensions and so on.
And so my concern, Sam, is that in getting rid of God, they also got rid of religion.
Now, I believe, I believe, that the real target...
Sorry, in getting rid of God, they got rid of religion, they got rid of morality.
Now, I believe that their real target was morality.
That morality, Christian morality, was what they wished to do away with.
And they... They shot at morality, and they shot through God to make sure that they got morality, right?
So they lined up, they shot through God in order to hit their real target, which was Christian morality.
And I say that because the level of hatred against Christianity that runs through the left is extraordinarily high.
Now, when I was younger, before...
Islam became a significant focus and force in the West.
I thought, wow, these leftists, boy, they really dislike religion, don't they?
And I thought, okay, but they really dislike religion, and they're willing to say, well, we'll scrap morality if it means getting rid of God, because we really dislike religion as a whole.
But what has been the great instruction over the past 20 or so years has been the left doesn't dislike religion at all.
The left seems to love Islam and doesn't even seem to have problems with things like Sikhism and so on, and doesn't seem to have any problems with things like Satanism and so on, right?
So no, they just hate Christianity.
And the question is why? Well, because the one thing that Christianity provides is the moral underpinning for Western civilization.
So they hate the West, they hate the free market, they hate individual responsibility, they hate all of this stuff.
And in order to take down the ethics that support it, they had to get rid of God, the Christian God.
And now when other groups come in, some of whom also dislike Christians, I mean, I know that in Islam, Christians are people of the book and so on, but they're considered to follow not the final prophet who is Muhammad in this.
Certainly in Islamic countries, there is the subjugation and taxation of Christians a lot of time, if not sometimes the outright attack, and sometimes it would seem attempts at genocide.
I'm looking at you, Turks.
And so... If they have other groups that also dislike Christianity in some ways, then they will ally with those.
They don't dislike religion at all.
They simply dislike Christianity, which means they dislike the fruits of Christianity, which are Christian morals, which produced the free market and the West and to some degree the separation of church and state and so on.
And so atheists, if they wanted to be honorable, good, decent people, say we dislike irrationality, then they should, of course, have problems with all religious structures.
And some atheists do. I mean, I'm thinking of people like Bill Maher and Christopher Hitchens and so on, who had their criticisms of non-Christian religions such as Islam.
But for the vast majority, they're perfectly happy to ally with Islam as they did in...
I mean, in Iran, the leftists, they aligned with the mullahs and the fundamentalist Muslims and worked against the remnants of the free market and separation of church and state that characterized, however corrupt it may have been, Iran before the revolution.
In the 70s and the imposition of fundamentalist theocracy.
So yeah, if you want to get rid of God because you hate Christian morality, okay, then just be honest and say, we hate Christian morality.
And they're not though.
They say, well, we're atheists and so on.
But then they always tend towards the left, they tend towards the government.
Because if you get rid of self-restraint, you end up having to restrain people through some other mechanism.
And generally, that is government force.
Okay. Yeah. Don't you think that atheism became more popular because of science?
Yes. I actually just made that case recently.
So I completely agree with you.
Atheism became more popular because religion had said for many thousands of years, oh, don't worry, come to us and we'll pray for you to get healthy if you're ill.
Or, you know, we're going to solve this problem.
Or if you have a question about how the universe goes, don't go to science, go to the Bible.
And over the past 400 years or so, that Modern science has really dominated the Western mind.
Yeah, there's not really any competition.
And that's the amazing thing, Sam.
This is what's so frustrating, is if you look at what science did to human power relative to religion, imagine what a scientific morality could do relative to religious morality.
Imagine what a scientific morality could do relative to a religious morality.
It would be an even greater step forward than physical science was relative to theology.
What is it? What is a scientific morality?
Well, a rational, empirical, universal morality.
I've got a whole book in it called Universally Preferable Behavior, a Rational Proof of Secular Ethics, which is...
And then, of course, you end up with a stateless society, right?
And a stateless society would be the greatest leap forward.
Humanity has ever experienced, bar none, and it would actually be the capacity for a sustainable growth of human society without all of this endless crap where you get growth, followed by corruption, followed by decay, followed by collapse.
When I mentioned that people seek authority, I maybe am not representing myself correctly or clearly, but it's basically what you said now.
It's basically people are seeking something to abide to.
But why? I don't know.
No, listen, you have a GPS on your phone, right?
Yeah. When you go to the mailbox or you go to the corner store, do you use your GPS? No.
No, because you know where you're going.
You know what you're doing. So why do people consult a GPS? They consult a GPS because they don't know where they're going.
So when people say, well, people seek authority, well, sure.
Sure, they seek authority because they don't know what they're doing or where they're going.
They don't know what the truth is.
They don't know what virtue is.
So they have to seek out authority.
If you blindfold a guy, then he's going to have to get a stick and feel ahead of himself and when you take the blindfold off he can walk more confidently.
So people seek authority because their independent thought has been castrated by a variety of social and political and theological factors and if you give people their balls back so to speak, they won't seek out authority because they will be able to think for themselves.
Fair enough. But then, this means that religion is not really any necessary, whether it's Christianity or otherwise.
Because we can refer to scientific morality, as you call it.
Because, I mean, the way I see it, religious morality is highly hypocritical.
Because it does not come from religion.
I mean, you can have very straight commandments, like thou shalt not kill, or thou shalt not steal, or whatever.
But then you can have very opposing cases like slavery.
I mean, you know the stance of Christianity on slavery.
If you go to a Christian now and talk to him about slavery, he will find ways and reasons and justifications to show you that it's wrong.
Right? Yes.
Where does that come from? Does that come from the Bible?
No, that's basically an interpretation of the Bible based on the morality he learned from society.
So basically, the source of morality is not really any religion.
It's basically society.
No, no, no. I agree with that.
I agree with that. So let me put it to you this way.
So if, you know, you and I, we live in the woods, right?
And people get infections all the time.
I mean, people get just like tooth decay and infections killed a lot of people.
And what we do is we say, I don't know, let's try crushing this berry and putting it in the wound.
Oh, that killed the guy.
Okay, let's rub these two leaves together and we'll put it into the wound.
Like you do this trial and error.
And over thousands of years, this trial and error may in fact produce some vaguely useful stuff.
Maybe. As opposed to the modern technique, which is, well, we understand what an infection is, we can study the bacteria, we can figure out what's going to kill the bacteria, now we've got antibiotics, we've got like, you don't have to do all of the stupid trial and error.
Now, the development of religious morality is a lot of trial and error.
Oh, well, let's try focusing on this particular part of the religious text.
Oh, actually, you know, for the next 500 years, that really didn't work out so well.
Okay, let's try focusing on this particular part.
Oh, wow, you know, this is going better.
And it's all this stupid trial and error, whereas, of course, philosophy is to this trial and error as modern medicine is to the trial and error of herbology and...
The humors and leeches and all of this kind of crap.
So we can actually figure things out ahead of time very easily and very quickly using philosophy, at least like using science to figure things out rather than trial and error.
So I agree with you, but if you look at the longevity...
Of religions, there has been a lot of trial and error that for a lot of religions has produced some fairly workable moral standards.
Again, I wouldn't agree with a lot of them around the world, but there have been some, particularly when you combine it or leave in it, I suppose, with the Greco-Roman philosophy, because we all say Judeo-Christian, but it's also Greco-Roman.
It's very strong in the Western tradition.
So, yeah, it doesn't produce it, but there's some useful stuff that's come out of religion in the same way that We have dogs and cats, not because anybody understood genetics, but because people bred the friendliest wolves together until we had dogs, and they bred the friendliest wild cats together until we had domesticated cats.
They didn't know what the hell they were doing, but they could still figure out the patterns.
Yes, yes. I'm getting the feeling from you that you are more empathetic to religious people, like they are not in control, they cannot understand That they have this good morality in their religion, and that's why you are sympathetic towards them, or empathetic, so to say.
So you are not exactly, I mean, you're against religion because it doesn't make sense, just like me.
But you are with religion because it gave Yeah, sure, sure.
Yeah, absolutely. And I'm a big one for let's go for what's true rather than what's false.
And there has been a huge amount of trial and error in religion.
And generally, those religions that are more accurate tend to spread more quickly.
And that's what's fascinating to me about Islam is that you can say, well, if you want, if you grew up in a Christian tradition like I did, you could say, well, Islam is crazy and so on.
But it's spreading pretty rapidly, which means it must be getting something right.
And that's a really fascinating question.
And I've made these kinds of jokes in the past when I hear about these, you know, Western people, Western women.
It was like, yeah, you know, I had a kid with a guy.
Now he's in jail. Now I'm living with some other guy.
And he's got a girlfriend who's moving in with us.
And it's all just this mad chaos, right?
And it's like, well, that's not happening under Sharia law at all.
And other things are happening that I don't agree with.
But... But something's working out because it's the fastest growing religion, right?
So something's got to be working.
You can say about any product that spreads, well, it's got to be serving some kind of need or serving some kind of...
Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's probably also poverty and...
Low IQ, because that means more procreation.
Yeah, there is that aspect as well.
But that would make sense as to why there may be higher populations in Muslim countries, but the fact that it's also spreading very rapidly to Western countries.
It's spreading very rapidly, actually, by birth.
If you check the numbers, it's the birth rate.
I understand that. I mean, the idea that England...
Within 35 years or so is very likely to be majority Muslim is really quite a stunning statistic.
And of course, this has been the goal and it's written about in the Koran, right?
And this has been the goal for many years that through our women's wombs will we gain victory.
But the reality is, of course, that this birth rate would be virtually impossible without the welfare state voted in by a lot of white Christians.
So that's not exactly helping.
Okay. So, I have a question.
If you had a red button, and it's written beside this red button, press this button and all governments will be erased.
Are you going to press this button?
Well, all governments erased is a very complex question because they're human beings.
If I could push a button and have people accept that the initiation of the use of force was immoral and that property rights are absolute, of course, yeah, I would push that button.
I mean, you understand that there's no way to test.
test this, but it would be the greatest leap forward in human freedom that could be imagined.
There is no way, of course, to have that button, and I'd rather make arguments.
But yeah, if there was a way to configure people's minds to be more open to reason and evidence, it'd be tough to say no.
No, no.
I mean, not reason and evidence, because that button is an analogy of removing governments now in If we had the choice to make the next election remove a government for our country, and you had the choice for that election in some way, you could play with the results in some way and make it happen and remove the governments.
Now, do you think people are capable of living without governments?
Well no, the question is, Sam, are people capable of living with governments?
And the answer to that generally is no.
Well, okay.
Because the governments always end up collapsing, they always end up starting wars, they always end up with bottomless debt, and they tend to result in the deaths of untold numbers of people.
I mean, if you look at what's going on in South Africa now, where they're openly starting to steal white farms, it's like, can people live without government?
It's like, well, they don't seem to be able to live with government very well, so I'll take my chances.
Absolutely. By the way, in no way I like governments.
No, no, I appreciate that, and I know it's a mental exercise, yeah.
Yeah, because I am trying to make the comparison between governments and religions, because two or three hundred years ago, Stéphane Molyneux would say that religion is wrong, let's get rid of religions.
And now I'm making the same mental exercise.
I mean, now we know that religions have some good in, like...
Some good things in them, like the morality they provide, and they help the survival of people through this morality, regardless of how other parts of this morality doesn't make sense, right?
Yes, but my conscience is very clear, because as an atheist, one of the first things that I did was work on the issue of morality.
Me too! And I have, I don't even know, probably 30 different videos explaining it.
The book is available for free all over the world.
It's been downloaded hundreds of thousands of times.
So I'm perfectly happy with my own conscience.
I don't know how other people live with themselves who are atheists who don't work on the question of morality, but my conscience is very clear.
And so I've done just about everything that I can.
Yeah, absolutely. And that's you.
And you're an IQ guy and It's not an issue, actually, for high IQ people.
They can resolve this. But I'm talking for the majority of people because, I mean, we seem to have agreed now that religion had some good effect.
Religion had some good effect.
No, high IQ people can be desperately amoral or immoral.
In their personal lives, they tend to be more moral, but when it comes to abstractions, very, very high IQ people are very, very keen on worshipping state power and very, very keen on socialism and all this kind of stuff.
You know, I mean, look at somebody like Noam Chomsky, high IQ people, still out there defending Venezuela and Chavez and all kinds of crap.
Okay, okay. Then...
I take that back.
That's not my point.
But my point is that the majority of people apparently have failed to live without religion and without worshipping the state, right?
But that's because now they go to the religion called government schools.
So we don't have an experiment wherein people are free to choose because they're indoctrinated both in primary schools, in junior high and high schools, and particularly in universities and colleges in the softer sciences and in the humanities.
They're just relentlessly indoctrinated into statist worship.
And hatred of their own culture.
So it's sort of like saying, well, I'm going to get a whole bunch of little kids addicted to heroin and say, well, you see, people have a tough time living without heroin.
It's like, well, maybe if we don't get them addicted to heroin first, that might be better.
Yeah. And I actually have the same theory about religions.
People abide to religions not because they make sense or not make sense.
It's because they're raised with it.
Mm-hmm. The majority of people don't leave their religions.
And if you raise people without religions, then they may be able to live without them and morally with scientific morality.
But then since we have this huge series of inheritance of religion, all parents teach their children their thoughts and their beliefs, That's how it's being bequeathed between generations.
But it can't last. It can't last.
And I'm just going to move on to the next caller.
But let me just finish sort of with my worst case scenario, which I actively hope won't happen.
But as you know, every human life at present in the world, billions and billions, on average is sustained by 30,000 US dollars in debt.
Yes, I know. And so what's going to happen, most likely, although again, I'm working my damnedest to prevent this, but what is still quite likely to happen is that the governments are going to run out of money.
There's going to be hyperinflation.
There's going to be interruptions in the food supply.
And a lot of people are going to fight and war and flee and die.
And unfortunately, this is one of these storms of historical inevitability based upon an ignorance or avoidance or downright rejection of basic rational principles and morality and free markets and so on.
There are going to be a lot of people dying and the people who were left over, we hope, are going to both learn from this horrible carnage and be slightly smarter than your average bear.
And these are the people who are going to have to rebuild things and humanity as a whole is going to have to have its never again moment where we say, okay, so when we give government control of the currency, people lose control of the government.
The government will always expand.
The government will always become corrupt.
The government will always end up destroying its host civilization.
So we're going to have to build something different.
We're going to have to build something truly free.
And we're going to have to start looking at government as a whole, like we look at Nazism in particular.
There may be a few lunatics who are really keen on it, but everybody as a whole recognizes that national socialism is a terrible idea.
All we have to do is take the national part out of it and say socialism.
Whether it's socialism of currency, whether it's socialism of human beings, whether it's socialism of children's minds in the form of indoctrination schools and so on, that socialism is a terrible, terrible thing because socialism relies upon the initiation of force and the destruction of human freedoms.
And so hopefully we will get the right lessons out of it.
Now the socialists, of course, Want this coming disaster to be blamed on capitalism.
And they say, well, you see, the problem is, you see, that all these banks and the banks were selling bonds and the bonds couldn't be paid.
And it was all about the greed of the free marketeers and the financiers and the banksters.
So what we need to do is make sure we never have a free market again and all will be well.
I heard this. I heard this before.
Of course. I really did.
And it's a very, very tempting hypothesis for idiots.
And we're just going to have to keep talking about what has really caused the modern disasters, which is violation of fundamental moral rules, not a few of which are contained within the Ten Commandments.
And the wages of sin is death.
So we must go forward as humanity and sin no more.
Thank you very much for your call.
I appreciate it. Let's move on to the next caller.
Thank you, Stefan. Bye-bye.
Alright, up next we have William.
William wrote in and said, I'm in a difficult 23-year marriage.
While I've not always been a saint, I've worked very hard for the last 12-13 years to be a great provider, great father, and great citizen.
No matter how much effort I give, my wife sees me as a tyrant and someone she needs to protect herself and our children from.
How do I move forward in this relationship, or how do I give up on my marriage vows and throw in the towel?
That's from William. Hey William, how you doing?
I'm well, Stefan. How are you?
I am all right.
So what do you mean when you say you've not always been a saint?
I had an affair in year nine of our marriage.
We've been married 23 years.
And what brought that on?
I think I just felt disconnected from my wife.
And in a small hotel road, and it slowly worked its way up, and finally ended up having a few months relationship with a co-worker.
And then one of our kids got sick and kind of snapped me back into reality, so I ended it.
And did your wife find out about it?
Yeah, I told her 12 years ago.
And why did you tell her?
It was a big mistake.
I shouldn't have. I felt like I was doing the right thing, but to be honest with you, I think it did more damage than it did good.
In fact, I know it did. Yeah.
Do you know if your wife has ever had an affair?
No, she hasn't. Right.
As far as I know. And what else would she say would fall into the not a saint category for you?
You know, I'm not sure because all this I feel like started before even the affair started.
I don't know that she would say that I'm not a saint.
I guess I would just describe myself that way.
I'm not sure what she would say the issue is.
We kind of have this joke that she sees me as an ogre.
I'm kind of a big guy.
I'm 6'5", and I can be And I've never lifted a hand to my wife or my kids, but I can be loud from time to time, especially if I feel like I'm not being heard, but I don't think I'm running around the house screaming or anything.
I'm just like, maybe raise my voice.
But anyway, I'm not sure exactly what that is.
What is? What her wanting to represent me isn't over.
Thinking that I've had on it is that, you know, both of her parents...
And how old are your kids at the moment?
20, 18, 16, and 14.
Boy, he's been busy. And does your wife work?
No, she's never worked.
Well, she worked a little bit as when we were just getting married, but nothing since we had kids.
Does she view your providing the money as equivalent to the value that she provides?
I don't know how she would describe that, but I would say that I think she thinks that I probably do quite a bit more.
I'm probably carrying more of a load than she is.
Okay, let me ask you this.
When was the last time she thanked you for paying the bills?
Maybe never. Right.
So let me let you in on a little secret that I'm sure you know, and this is not true for all women, but it's true for some, and I've known some, which is they get very upset.
Like, let's say that the woman makes you a nice meal and you don't thank her.
And she's like, you know, I've worked, I've been slaving over a hot stove, I've gave you the meal that you want, and you can't even...
Thank me. You don't appreciate what I do.
You don't show your thanks for what I do.
I keep the kids tidy and healthy and happy and I keep the house clean and I pay the bills and you just never seem to show any appreciation for what it is that I do, right?
And you may have heard this, I don't know, once or twice over the course of 23 years or so.
And I had a girlfriend once who said something like that.
And she said, you know, you're not doing half the dishes.
You're not doing half the laundry.
And I said, well, you're not paying half the bills.
Kind of important. And I said, when I go to work 10 hours a day, that's 10 hours a day I'm contributing to this relationship, right?
Because we were foolishly living together, which I don't recommend, but anyway.
And I said, no. She says, well, I spend, you know, two hours a day on the house.
It's like, well, I spend 10 hours a day paying the bills, so maybe you should up your game a little, because I'm doing five times the work that you're doing.
And... I really, really demanded to be shown appreciation for paying the bills.
And she, like, it caused this massive short circuit in her entire world view.
Like, I mean, she couldn't say, you're not paying the bills.
She couldn't say, well, I'll pay half the bills, because I'm like, hey.
I said, listen, if you want to start paying half the bills, fantastic.
Then I'll have money to take us out for dinner, to send our laundry out to get done, and we'll both be happier.
So you just start paying half the bills.
But that kind of caught her a little bit, right?
Because she didn't want to pay half the bills.
She just wanted... But I said, I'm not doing half the housework if I'm also paying the bills.
Because you're spending two hours a day on the housework and all that laundry or whatever.
You're spending two hours a day on that.
I'm spending 10 hours a day working.
And let's just pretend it's like 7 days or whatever, 10 hours a day working.
So together we're doing 12 hours, of which you're doing 2 and I'm doing 10.
Now, if you say I have to do an extra hour at home, then guess what?
I'm now doing 11 and you're doing 1.
How is that more equitable?
That is more unfair.
And it was really, really tough for her.
It was really quite interesting to watch the machinery short-circuit and smoke and fall down in her mind, right?
Because this is just kind of like a scam, right?
So if you're paying the bills, does she thank you and appreciate you for paying the bills?
Does she say, man, you know, you got up early, you went off to work in the rain, you've been working all day, you're coming home.
Thank you. And then if she says that, then you say, man, you run a great house, you raise the kids well, you know, it's wonderful, I'm happy to pay the bills, thank you for everything that you do, right?
But there's this whole thing that's been taken out of society, which is, and of course, if the woman paying the bills, then thank her, but generally it's the man.
So the man, you can't ever, there's this weird thing where you don't thank the man for paying the bills.
And because of that, the woman can feel hard done by when she's paid really well for everything she does.
You know, I think she would say that she doesn't pull her fair share, but she doesn't really...
I don't know.
It's like she doesn't see a problem with it.
Wait, doesn't see a problem with what?
With not doing her fair share.
I mean, I own several businesses.
We've had maids. We've had all kinds of different domestic help to help her.
We've had a nanny for the kids at some point in time.
And I don't want to paint her as some evil person, but at the same time, she's just not a very hard worker.
Wait, you have maids and a nanny for a stay-at-home wife?
Not currently, because I just kind of said I'm not doing this anymore.
But I have.
But we've also had some kids that aren't super healthy, so it was certainly a challenge at times.
Okay, so if there are health issues, that could be very time and resource-consuming.
That makes things a little bit...
Better, but I assume that hasn't been constant throughout the kids' childhoods.
That's right. So has there been any correlation to, your kids are sick and so I need help?
Or is it just, yeah, it'd be great, maids and a nanny would have a stay-at-home mom be fantastic.
Well, I think the maid part has definitely been more the, oh yeah, that would be nice, but the nanny was more when the kids were sick.
Right. And how long did you have maids for?
In your 23-year marriage?
We've had it on and off.
We've had someone that came just about every day up until a couple of years ago and they probably just said, no, I'm not going to do that anymore.
Wait, every day? What do you mean every day?
How messy are you people?
What do you mean every day? Do you have like a food cannon that you outline the kids with in the dining room?
I mean, what are you talking about?
I hear you, Steph. I mean, I even got to the point where I took the maid to a couple of my facilities and had her clean nose instead, so there wasn't every day.
No, no, every day. Okay, so the maid came every day?
Yeah. And how long for?
Six, seven hours. Oh, come on.
You're trolling me. What do you mean, six or seven hours?
What do you mean? What? The maid came to your house for six or seven hours every day?
What? That's what I'm telling you, Steph.
For how long did this go on?
A couple of years. Are you insane?
What are you doing?
That's expensive as hell, isn't it?
It is expensive as hell.
Do you live in a small town that all needs to be cleaned from end to end?
I mean, do you live in a 20,000 square foot mansion full of, like, people playing paintball and pygmies eating rodents off the floor?
Like, what the hell? How can you possibly...
I mean, listen, I've been like the bathrooms cleaning guy and, I mean, how on earth can you need that much cleaning?
You're preaching to the choir staff.
All right. What did your wife say?
Did she like the company or what?
She just felt like she was busy shuffling the kids to and from school or whatever.
None of it ever quite makes sense to me.
Oh, no school bus or anything?
No, one of them. The oldest one, finally, would take the younger two to school.
And so she didn't have to take him to school in the morning.
And it still was kind of an issue.
So she may have been having an affair, but with the maid, right?
I have no idea. I don't know about that, but I don't think so.
How much did the maid cost?
I don't know, $30,000, $40,000 a year, something like that.
I'm sorry, I shouldn't laugh.
$30,000 or $40,000 a year after tax.
Income, and it's probably higher than that, but anyway, let's just say, right?
$40,000 a year of after-tax income, so you've got to make $60,000 or $70,000 a year for a maid when your kids are in school and your wife has no job.
Right. I don't think the big issue is your affair, my friend.
I don't think the big issue is your affair.
I mean, you may have cheated on her vagina, but she was having an affair on your wallet.
But the question now is what to do about it.
No, not yet. No, not yet.
Okay. So, you are the tyrant who pays all the bills and pays $40,000 a year for a maid to sweep up after your slovenly wife.
This makes you a tyrant?
I don't understand it.
I literally don't know what else I can do to work harder.
I mean, I'm working. I'm active in the community.
I'm serving people left and right and taking care of a lady in an old folks home.
You know, just everything.
There's so many different things out there.
And it does not.
That's why I'm calling.
It doesn't make sense to me. Well, it makes sense to me if you're treating your wife as a child for 23 years.
Well, maybe I am. Well, you are.
You are. Which is why she's manipulative and childish, right?
I guess. Well, tell me if I'm wrong, right?
I mean, if she says, I need to protect myself, and I need to protect the children from you, and so on, I mean, unless you're raging through the house with a Sirius Sam-style flamethrower, I don't know what, I mean, unless you're not telling me something, you say you're not physically violent, never raised a hand in anger, and so on?
No. None of that.
Right. So, who taught you to treat women like children, my friend?
Who taught you to say, to not say, are you fucking kidding me?
You want a maid and you're a stay-at-home mom?
Come on, pull the other one.
I'd like four wives!
It's like, no, not gonna happen.
Four wives would probably be cheaper.
Right. Well, who taught me?
I'm going back and forth between my mom and my dad.
They were divorced when I was young.
I barely remember him being at home.
He's been divorced, I guess, one more time since then.
He's on wife number three.
Was it a bad divorce? I was so little, I don't know.
I mean, and I've heard different things.
I've heard he was the problem.
That was kind of the story that went on forever.
And then more recently, he kind of pulled me aside and said, you know, your mom did something.
I'm not going to tell you what it was, but just know that she did something I couldn't forget before.
So who knows? I mean, I have not.
Right. Did your mom have a job?
She did. Once they broke up, she had a job.
And then when she remarried, she was the secretary for my stepfather the whole time.
So I'd say she worked 40 hours every week easily and took care of the house.
My stepfather never did any household work.
She did all of that.
Well, of course he didn't.
Because he's paying all the bills.
I tell you what, I'll buy the house.
You just keep it clean.
That's a pretty good deal, right?
Right. Yeah.
I mean, you can't get a house on 30 grand.
That's what the maid charged, or 40 grand.
That's, you know, at least not a decent one.
Well, a year you probably could.
An okay house, I suppose.
We live in a house like that.
So, what happens to your marriage if you try to treat your wife as an adult, which she is?
And what you do, sorry to interrupt, I just asked a question, but just so we're on the same page about what that looks like.
You sit down and you say, okay, so here's the hours a week that I'm contributing to the family, working and parenting and paying for maids or whatever.
I know that's not going on, but whatever it is.
Here's the stuff that I'm doing, the hours that I'm contributing to the family, right?
And then you hand the paper and the pencil over to her and you say, okay, let's Let's go through your contributions to the family, right?
And I tell you what, for marriage to work, it's got to even out.
It doesn't mean it's got to be down to the minute.
I mean, it can be more or less, you know, kids ill, so she's spending more time with that, and then maybe you've got a big project at work, so you spend more, like, it doesn't have to be like two kids trying to split a candy bar with a laser and atomic weigh scale, but it's got to even out at some point.
Otherwise, You're a slave or she's a slave and it ain't going to work, right?
So you sit down and say, okay, so I'm going to guess, right, given that you work, you commute, you've got a couple of businesses, you're probably cooking 50 to 60 hours minimum contributing to the family a week, right?
Is that a fair guess? Yes.
All right. And what's she doing in terms of contributing to the family per week?
She's cooking poorly.
Cooking, sorry, what? Poorly.
Wait, what do you mean poorly?
It's not great. What are we talking, like sloppy scrambled eggs or what are we talking here?
Just kind of what you would expect in the first year of marriage, you know, someone that hadn't cooked very much, you know, burned here, too salty there.
You know, just not a lot of care and attention.
So 23 years, has she been cooking for you guys for 23 years or did you also have an entire chef move in as well?
No, she's been cooking the whole time.
She's been cooking the whole time.
And she still sucks? Oh yeah.
Right. What do the kids think of her cooking?
They just kind of laugh.
And there's a lot of prepackaged stuff going on.
And a lot of times she's encouraging, you know?
She's encouraging what?
The prepackaged stuff? Like frozen pizzas kind of thing?
Right, right, right, right. Huh.
All right. So is she spending an hour a day cooking?
Two hours a day? Cooking, cleaning kind of thing?
Maybe an hour. You know, I've been encouraging her.
We've got teenagers now to have our children...
Take on more of those responsibilities because we're going to need them soon enough anyway.
And that's also a change.
Well, the women won't if they find a man like Dad.
Right. All right.
So she's an hour a day cooking.
What about cleaning? I wouldn't say any.
Maybe a couple hours a week.
So like half an hour a day?
Maybe three and a half a week?
Maybe. Maybe?
All right. So, we'll be generous, an hour and a half.
What about laundry and groceries and chores and banking and bills and finances or anything like that?
So, she does the laundry and the...
The shopping. I recently have asked her to take on the bills.
It's been kind of an arduous process to get it done.
You've been working 50 to 60 hours a week and you're handling the bills?
I was up until recently.
Oh, man. All right.
All right. So laundry, I mean, okay, so laundry is a big deal, right?
Because basically, you've got three teenagers, you might as well never turn the damn laundry off, right?
because it's pretty constant, right?
Oh, did we lose you?
I'm here.
Oh, you're here. So yeah, is she doing a lot of laundry, or do the kids do it themselves, or what?
Boys are supposed to do theirs themselves, so she's basically just doing hers and mine now.
Is it because the 14-year-old is a girl?
No, the 14-year-old does it too.
But wait, why are the boys only doing their own laundry?
It's a 14-year-old's a boy as well.
Everybody's doing their own laundry.
Oh, so it's all boys?
One girl, but she's the oldest.
And she does her laundry?
Yes. Wait, does she do her own laundry?
Yes. So your wife does hers and yours and the 14-year-old's?
No, she does just hers and mine.
The 14-year-old does his own.
Ah, okay. Well, I guess kind of productive.
So an hour a day for laundry?
Maybe, yeah. I don't know.
I'm folding and putting it away.
I have a little apartment in a town where I've got a business.
I'm sorry? Right, right.
I mean, I do my own laundry.
I have a little apartment in another town where I have a business, and I do my own stuff there.
It didn't take that long. I mean, just throw it in and out.
It's not that big of a deal.
Well, you don't stare at it, right?
You just in and go, right? Exactly.
All right. So maybe a little bit less than an hour a day in laundry.
Wow. Okay, so then maybe another hour, you know, on average, I don't know, miscellaneous and groceries and stuff like that, right?
Right. Okay, so being generous, we're looking at three, three and a half hours a day.
And maybe another couple hours a day getting kids to and from activities or school and that type of thing.
Okay, all right.
So, are we talking another hour a day?
Because there's less on the weekends, or maybe more, I don't know.
I think it's a little bit more than an hour a day.
I think it's probably an hour and a half to two hours a day.
Two hours a day driving the kids around?
Wow. Well, yeah, I mean, allergy shot, picking up kids from school, going to different activities, yeah.
Alright, alright. And she kind of waits there too, right?
Like if they go into a sports event or something, right?
There's a lot of unproductive time, yeah.
But it's not really work though, right?
Right. Right, okay.
And I don't know if driving is a huge amount of work, but alright, okay, okay.
So it's still five, five and a half hours a day, right?
All right. So, 38.5 hours a week, right?
Okay. So, a little more than...
Now, the 50 to 60 hours, does that include commuting?
No. Right.
Because if her driving counts, your driving counts, right?
Right, right. So what is your average work week hours, including work at home and phone calls and emails or whatever it is.
So we had 50 to 60 hours prior to driving.
So include driving and outside time, what are we talking?
60 hours, let's just say that.
60 hours? Okay, so she's doing 38.5, you're doing 60.
Right.
So that's not fair.
Yeah.
Now, there's another thing, too, which is that the labor, if you had to replace her labor or your labor, that's kind of different, right?
So there's a whole other calculation you need to do here, right?
So the kind of work that she's doing, I mean, outside of the parenting and all of that, which I assume you're doing somewhat on equal terms, but the kind of work that she's doing, it's not very skilled, right?
right so and you don't have to tell me down to the down to the nubbin but uh if you can give me a ballpark like you know six figures kind of what's your what's your gross uh income for a year um high six figures all right high six figures so i'm sorry i have to be retarded about this does that mean close to 200 000 or close to a million It's probably closer to them and sometimes more.
Okay. Now I'm starting to understand the 40k for the mate and all that, right?
Okay. So you're doing 60 hours a week, right?
So you take a couple of weeks off vacation a year?
Usually a little bit more than that.
Okay. So let's say you're working 48 weeks a year, right?
Right. I own my own business, so I'm never really on vacation, but yeah.
Yeah, yeah. Okay. So, we're going to say $900,000 divided by...
Right. So, you're making $312 an hour, give or take, right?
Okay. Okay.
So, $312 an hour, right?
Right. So, that's your value.
$312 an hour times...
60 hours a week. So your net contribution financially to the household is $18,750 a week.
Right? Uh-huh.
Now, she's working...
What did we have here?
She was working...
Sorry, I lost one of my counts.
Hang on, 5.5. So she's working 38.5 hours a week.
And let's be generous and say that what she does in terms of laundry and cooking and so on is 20 bucks an hour.
Okay. Right?
So she's contributing $770 worth of economic value per week.
Okay. Right?
So let's look at the ratio here, right?
So you are 18,750.
Divide that by 770.
So you are producing 24.35 times the value per week that she is.
Okay. 24.
Does this surprise you? No, no.
Would it surprise her? No, not at all.
That's some pretty profitable fucking tyranny, my friend, for her.
Yeah. Right.
So you're working almost twice as many hours, and you're producing 24, over 24 times the economic value.
And she's never thanked you once.
Not that it hasn't been kind of, you know, hey honey, you never thanked me.
Okay, thank you. No, no, like she doesn't appreciate it.
Right. Right. I mean, she doesn't know people that work with me or for me and doesn't take much of an interest in that.
Well, okay, so sorry to interrupt, but this is another thing that's interesting, right?
And this is the dynamic of male-female economic relationships in a marriage, right?
Because it could be that she's really great, understands your business, gives you feedback, reviews stuff that you do, check this email, look at this quote, or whatever it is, right?
And helps you navigate and negotiate and is really interested in your business, in which case, man, she's contributing a lot.
That's not directly profitable, but adds to your profit enormously, right?
Right. But you're saying she's not that interested in your business?
Not at all. Right.
Does she have any plans to grow up before she's dead?
You know, we argue about it at least weekly, if not daily, and about lack of accountability.
You mean for her? Yeah, and if I bring something up, she gets defensive and upset, and then I'll kind of point it out, hey, you're not being accountable here, you're just being defensive.
And can you give me an example of that?
It's piddly nothing, but it happened today that, you know, I have some drink containers that I use.
I mix up a drink every day.
I try to rinse them out and let them dry out so that I can use it the next day.
And she wasn't rinsing them out.
She was just kind of leaving the residue in the thing and turning it over.
Wait, wait. Sorry, you've got these drink containers.
Right. And she would, what, rinse them and not wash them?
She wouldn't even rinse them.
She would just pour out the excess and turn it over and let it dry out.
And what's in there? It's just water and some mix in the drink.
I'm sure it's not sugar, but something like that.
She just turned it over and it left a stain on the little towel that it was on.
I was like, hey, did you rinse this out?
No. She started getting defensive about it.
I was like, hey, this is not okay.
It was just this big argument for half an hour.
So let me tell you, man, I'm not gay, but if I were, and you and I were married, and you were bringing home almost $19,000 a week while I was contributing a grand total of $770, I'd rinse your fucking container.
I'd wash it. Like, you wouldn't have to think about it at all.
Right. Right.
I understand. I know what you're saying.
I got it, but... Oh, man.
Why did you marry her? You know, we dated through college a little bit.
And then we broke up for a while.
Her mom passed away.
And then probably six months after her mom passed away, she came back.
And to be honest with you, she wasn't really like this before.
I mean, she was somewhat productive.
She had a job.
It wasn't She kept her apartment clean always.
I mean, it never really was a big issue.
She was never a great cook.
She just didn't have that much interest in it.
So that wasn't, you know, like the end of the world or anything.
No, but she doesn't really have much of a choice to get interested in it.
Like if you're cooking for people, learn how to fucking cook.
Right? Right.
I mean, my wife, I mean, she's not a clean freak, but man, she's tidy.
And she's a good cleaner.
And so when I started doing the bathrooms, she's like, here's how you do it.
And I'm like, okay, show me how you do it.
And I'll do it because you're better at this than I am.
Because she grew up, you know, old school family.
And, you know, I grew up in all this crazy chaos and all that.
So I'm like, yeah, you tell me how to do it, man.
I'm happy to do it, you know?
Yeah. If we've got to snap-fold the bedsheets, okay, we'll snap-fold the bedsheets.
If shit needs to be ironed, let's iron it.
And so, I'm not going to sit there and say, well, this is just the way I do it.
And it's like, that's crap, right?
I mean, if she knows better and so on, then that's what should happen.
And it isn't even so much, this is just the way that I do it.
It's just, oh, I messed up again.
It's more that. Right.
Right. And if you, of course, say it's been 23 years, do you feel like pulling out a cookbook from time to time?
I'm just going to be inviting the fight.
Right. Right.
What are you teaching your kids with this?
Well, I'm not sure exactly what you mean.
What are you teaching your sons about masculinity and manhood?
Authority? Well, when it comes to...
I guess I'm at a loss in terms of what to do with her because I haven't come up with any way of talking to her, not talking to her, going to class, going to training, doing anything with her that's made any impact.
And I've tried a lot. But it hasn't had any effect.
Well, no, of course not, because you're trying to do something for someone, and the whole point is to stop doing something for someone.
Okay. Because she's like, now a project, you're an energetic, intelligent guy, right?
You make a million dollars a year, so you...
She's a problem for you to apply your considerable entrepreneurial energies and intellect to solve, to fix, right?
But it doesn't work, right?
Because it makes her passive.
Okay. You understand?
Yeah. It's sort of like if you have some employee who's not doing a job, a good job, and you just keep shouldering that employee aside and doing it for them, what are you teaching them?
That they don't have to do a good job.
Yeah.
So I'm a big believer in natural consequences.
I am too.
No.
That's how I live my life.
At work you are. At work and even with my kids I am.
But not with your wife. I guess it's just been complicated.
We had two kids that were very sick.
It was like we were barely holding on for a while.
I don't know. Maybe she's just never recovered from it.
I don't know. From the kids being sick?
Yeah. One of our kids was in a coma for three months after a brain hemorrhage.
I was born with difficulties.
It was a really challenging time.
Did you then stop being good at your job because of that?
To be honest with you, Stefan, I worked for another four or five years and then I just said, you know what, I'm going to retire for a little while.
It didn't do as well without me, so I went back to work after about four or five years.
Right. I don't see any direct causal line, my friend, between having an ill child and being a bad cook for 23 years.
I agree. I mean, I appreciate that you're bringing it up and I, you know, massive sympathies to you both.
But it's still not causal.
Like you could say, wow, my child almost died or my child was really sick for a long time.
I'm going to make sure that child has...
Wonderful meals for the rest of the time that he's at home.
Like there's nothing causal in that kind of disaster that results in this kind of behavior.
I don't think that I'm saying that it causes the behavior.
I guess what I'm saying is that I have some sympathy for the challenge that she went through during that period of time.
I mean, I know it was tough for me and it had to be tough for her.
Does she have the same sympathy for you?
No, I don't think so.
Not in that way.
Why not?
I think it was, she was wrapped up in her own pain with it all.
Hmm.
What was it about?
I mean, I asked this one way, I'll ask it another because I'm not sure the answer was What was it about her that made you want to marry her?
I liked her family.
I've spent a lot of time with her extended family before we got married and felt like we had a really common past.
We obviously went to the same school.
There's a lot of things that were similar to us.
We grew up 60 miles apart from each other and so I think I forget that.
I liked her. I was attracted to her.
Of course, but what were you attracted?
And please don't give me any more geographical proximity stuff, because I bet you there were tens of thousands of women who lived within 60 miles of where you were.
That's not much of it, right?
So what was it that you were attracted to about her?
I meant that we had similar values.
But you don't have similar values.
That's my point. You're hardworking.
You're responsible. You're an adult.
So what was it in particular that you found very attractive about her?
She was dead.
She was...
I don't know.
Maybe I just wasn't...
Maybe I wasn't out there playing the field that much.
And she was just...
She was there always.
I don't know. Was she pretty?
Okay. She wasn't ten.
She was seven and a half, seven, eight, something like that.
And did your family at all have any concern about you marrying her?
They love her. To this day, they love her.
And have you talked with them about any of your frustrations?
Um... I'm not really that close to my dad, and my mom, that's its own story in itself, so no, I guess not.
Because I know when people call in here, it's usually because either they think I have wonderful things to say, or B, they just don't have anyone to talk to.
I hate to put it that way, right?
Maybe it's a combo. But I'm like the last port of call, right?
In that if you were getting good advice and sympathy and empathy and so on, it may not be that you wouldn't call, but you'd be less likely to call, right?
Right. Right. Right.
So... I mean, we've been to a lot of therapy.
I mean, a few months ago in therapy, she said, you know, she's always kind of locked me on the outside of our family and kind of described it as she was in the castle with the kids and I'm on the outside, never let in, that type of thing.
What? I don't quite understand that.
What do you mean? Just that she kind of kept me at arm's length.
I guess, in a way, it kind of goes back to that ogre thing.
You know, he's dangerous, so we've got to keep him out there instead of in here.
See, that's the kind of insight that makes me have huge contempt for therapy.
What the fuck does that even mean? How does that help?
What does that move forward?
How does that make anything better?
I mean, I'm sorry. I mean, I know that's just a little time slice, a little photo of therapy, but it's just like, yeah, yeah, yeah.
I couldn't agree with you more about therapy.
It's a joke. It's an absolute joke.
I have not had any good luck with it.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah, it's all about these insights and revelations and so on.
None of this practical shit of like, hey man, I'm contributing 23 times more value than you are.
And let's find a way to equalize that.
It doesn't mean you have to go out and get a job making a million bucks a year, but at least rinse my fucking containers.
Right. Yeah.
At least take some of the million dollars that I make and spend it on a fucking cooking class.
Right.
Yeah.
Right.
Right.
What's going to happen in a couple of years when your kids are gone?
I don't think it's going to get worse.
I have some hope that it would get better because I think she does spend way too much energy on the kids, although she can probably do that when they're gone just as well as in there.
It's been kind of a source of contention between us lately is that she just does way too much for them, that they need to learn how to be adults.
And what is she doing for them that you think is wrong?
Like getting a Pepto-Bismol for my 20-year-old daughter the other day when she was perfectly capable of doing it herself.
Arranging pills for kids.
Even some of the transportation stuff.
They can sort some of that stuff out.
It's school work sometimes.
It's hard to not treat children as children if you're still a child yourself.
I guess. I mean, do your kids have jobs?
My 18-year-old does.
He's actually working for me, and he's done a great job.
My 16-year-old's part-time in another one of my businesses, and sort of okay.
My 20-year-old, she's got some challenges, and she does have a job.
She's got a part-time job.
Not for me. And so, I mean, they could Uber or cab or whatever it is for themselves, right?
Right, and there's a lot of that, too.
Like, my oldest doesn't drive, so she Ubers a lot.
And you don't have to answer anything, and I'm just curious about this.
I mean, are you guys... I mean, I have to ask this, because a lot of marriages don't.
Are you guys still having sex? Yeah.
Yeah, we are. And I think that that's probably the only thing that kind of therapy and those types of things have helped with lately, is that she's been more available...
Now than she was earlier in our marriage.
It was a real problem earlier in the marriage, which I think really kind of led to the affair.
Ah, you were kind of cut off?
Yeah. I wouldn't say completely cut off, but it was just not nearly what I would have thought a new marriage would be.
She was content with a couple, three times a month, and I'm thinking, hey, we're newlyweds.
What's going on here?
Wait, I thought, didn't you have the affair like nine years ago?
No, nine years into the marriage, so it would have been 15 years ago.
Oh, sorry. Okay. But that's not a new marriage.
Right, but it didn't improve during any of that period of time.
Oh, you mean, so after you got married, you're lucky to get it once a week, right?
Right. Does she know men at all?
I mean, does she have any idea how men function and...
What we get out of it for.
I'm sorry. I mean, does she not understand?
I mean, particularly, I mean, you've got to be a pretty aggressive, I don't mean that in a negative way, but, you know, running businesses, you're a boss, you're high testosterone, alpha kind of guy making a million bucks a year.
You got some needs, right?
Yeah. But, yeah.
Exactly. And I think, you know, honestly, it's not even so much the sex as much as it's the admiration, right?
I actually told her that recently, that I never have thought that she has admired me since we got married, not once.
Wow. Wow.
So she withholds admiration as a form of leveling up.
She wants to feel equal, but rather than up her game, she refuses to admire your contributions.
Bullseye.
Yeah.
Yeah, that's not good.
And listen, I mean, this is for the women who are out there.
If you withhold sex from your man, you're setting a fire under your house.
It's just a reality. It's just a reality.
And I don't know how to explain this to women.
But it is a fundamental betrayal of the marriage vows to not have much, if any, sex.
To me, it is an affair with celibacy that leads to an affair with another woman.
I mean, would she consider your contribution financially to be foundational to the marriage?
No. I think she would if it wasn't happening.
I agree. If you said, okay, listen, it's been a good long run with me paying all the bills, but we're going 50-50 from here.
Kids are getting older and you got to start kicking in.
So you got to get yourself 9,000 bucks a week.
Just to match my $18,750 that I'm providing.
So you got to figure out how to get yourself a cozy nine grand a week.
It's only $450,000 to $500,000 a year that you have to start kicking in to match what I've been doing.
I'm not going to back charge you for all the other stuff because you did your $20 an hour worth of work here.
And if you were to say, you've got to start kicking, like for us to maintain our lifestyle, I'm going to cut down by half, and you've got to kick in the remainder, so you've got to get 450 to 500 bones, 500,000 a year going, what would you say?
Well, I don't know.
It's probably relevant, but both her parents passed when she was young, and she got a decent-sized inheritance that was kind of like an annuity.
It has grown a little bit, so I don't think she would bat an eye.
She'd just say, fine, I'll use that.
Wait, she can kick in half a mil a year?
Not that much, no.
150, 200,000.
Oh no, that's not enough. That's not kicking in half.
So now she only has to do 300,000 a year.
Right. Right? So she's got to go and start kicking in 300,000 a year, right?
And what would she say? She wouldn't.
And no, I guess if it was even, I mean, she'd have been kicking $800,000 a year because...
No, no, let's just say you just said you've got to pay half the...
I'm going to cut back. You pay half the...
I'm not saying she's got to do the mill.
I see. I'm trying to be as nice as possible in this so nobody can accuse me of tilting the field, right?
Right. So if...
No, but if... This is an important thing and I'm saying this to you because women don't seem to understand this.
Some women do. But a lot of women don't.
Which is that if you go to your wife and say, you've got to start kicking in $300,000 a year to this relationship, and she'd be like, no.
No. You've been paying, and that's what I expect, and that's got to continue, right?
Now, when a woman gets married and has less sex with you, it's the same fucking deal.
If you're having a lot of sex before you get married, and then you get married, and she cuts it way back, that's like you cutting way back on your spending.
She'd be like, I don't accept that.
This is what I'm used to.
And so if a woman then cuts back on sex after marriage, you can say, I don't accept that.
That's not what I'm used to. And then people get all kinds of cynical and say, oh, so you're saying the man is paying for sex.
It's like, kinda.
It's not outside the bounds of the equation.
Well, to her credit, we weren't really that sexual before we got married either.
So it didn't really go down.
Wait, did you know you were going to make a million bucks a year and you're going with a fairly asexual seven?
No, I just thought that she had some hang up about marriage and that she wasn't willing to be that into...
I mean, it wasn't like we never did, but I just thought that she was wanting that commitment before she would fully commit herself to it, you know?
Oh, you thought you'd get more sex after marriage?
Well, that's kind of how it was portrayed to me.
Oh, she sold it to you like...
Oh, yeah, because women will do this too, right?
Women will do this too, where they'll say, well, you know...
Man, if you help around the household, like if you do some laundry, if you do some dishes, my head's going to be clear, I'm going to be less stressed, less worried, we'll have more sex, right?
And so basically, you have to do housework for sex.
That's the trade. And that's...
That's terrible.
That's terrible. And so I assume it's better now than a couple times a month.
Oh, yeah. Okay, good.
And to be honest with you, she probably initiates it more because I'm so frustrated.
I'm just like this way.
I know she's going to initiate it at least a couple times a week, maybe more.
Good. Well, that's good.
Yeah, because for men, you know, if you keep approaching your girlfriend or your wife and you keep getting to know, You know, it burns, right?
Right. It burns.
You become kind of avoidant and resentful.
And then what happens is some other woman finds you a hot, tasty piece of beef jerky and it goes to your head, right?
What goes to your head? Yeah.
Metaphorically, yeah. And then women are like, I can't believe you!
It's like, well, it's not good that I did, but it's a symptom of something and it's not just me.
And at least for me, it wasn't even as much about the sex as it was about the admiration.
It was just like getting a drink of water in the desert.
Yeah. Certainly, if you've been starved for positive approval from your woman, it's a red carpet to hell, right?
You know it's hot, but you're going anyway.
Right. Right.
Hmm. And you, of course, expressed to her that you want more admiration, and has she taken that in, or has she provided any back?
Well, it was kind of a realization from mine recently that I did never feel admired by her, and she was like, oh, wow, I can't believe you've never felt admired, but they didn't change anything.
Ah, I see. Now, that's a warning sign right there.
Not just that it didn't change.
But that you felt something for 23 years or more, and she has no idea.
Ah, yeah. I had no idea you didn't feel admired.
Really? Right.
Really. So let me ask you this.
Does she like to be admired?
In other words, if she dresses up, puts on a great dress, makeup, gets her hair done, and she comes down the staircase, does she like you to say, wow, you look great?
I think that's why she would say that I'm an ogre, because I don't give her enough words of affirmation.
I love languages, nonsense.
You don't give her enough words of what?
Affirmation. Well, it's not affirmation.
I mean, does she look good when she does herself up and comes down the stairs?
She can, but What I've always said is, give me something to admire you for.
I mean, you don't cook, you don't clean.
I mean, everything's kind of a mess.
I'd love to give you appreciation, but give me something that you're great at.
Right. But vagina!
Right, right.
You're human doing.
I'm human being. You have to do stuff to be admired.
Me, I just have to breathe.
And marriage is a complex thing and you get kids out of it and the life and another family and all of that.
Are you happy you got married as a whole?
I love my kids.
To some extent, I'd say I love my wife.
I don't know if it's love exactly, but I care Well, let me ask you this.
Let's go out on a limb, and let's assume, for the sake of argument, she's not going to change.
She doesn't have to be you.
Women, by male standards, are delightfully mental.
Men, by women's standards, are delightfully mental.
We compliment each other if we accept what the French say.
Well, now the French say Allahu Akbar, but when the French used to say things like vive la différence, right?
Celebrate the difference between men and women.
So, she's a pretty good mom, right?
Okay. I mean, she does the stuff that needs to get done.
I wouldn't say that she's setting them up for success in adulthood well, but she was great when they were young.
Yeah, but that's your job to set it.
I mean, moms don't get kids ready for adulthood.
That's the dad's job.
Moms keep them alive when they're knee-high to a grasshopper, and then dads get them ready for adulthood.
That's why, I mean, that's going to be your gig.
Sorry, man, you know that, right?
Well, I've got it, and I'm doing it.
Good. I wish I had more support in that area.
Yeah. Listen, I mean, when your kid's in a coma, I mean, so again, so sorry, and your kids are sick, you know, I'm sure she was pretty good with that stuff, right?
Yeah. I mean, yeah, she was pregnant during some of that, so I was the one at the hospital, but yeah.
And she's, yeah, you know, moms are better with little kids than dads are better with older kids.
That's the yin and the yang that we need, and that's a wonderful and delightful thing.
So expecting her to be great at preparing the kids for adulthood is unrealistic, I think.
Okay. Okay.
And so, if she's not going to change, because listen, a lot of times unhappiness in a relationship is simply not accepting that the other person's not going to change.
Because then you're just kind of restless, and it's like, I want this to change.
I want her to be different. It's like, dude, she's not going to learn how to cook.
It's not going to happen. She's not going to be a great homemaker.
And she's not going to be great at preparing your kids for adulthood, right?
Right. Now, if in your marriage, look, and I know this is one-sided.
I'm sure she has her complaints, and I get all of that.
But, you know, she's not here, so we'll just have to talk with all of this, right?
But what if you said, I don't need her to change at all?
I'm okay with her not changing a thing.
Because she's not going to change.
Now, if some of your discontent is, I wanted to do this, I wanted to do that, I wanted to appreciate me, I wanted to contribute more, I wanted to be a better cook, I wanted to help prepare the kids more for adults, I want this, I want that, right?
That creates a lot of frustration and annoyance that if you just accept your partner, it's not there.
To be discontented with your partner can be its own self-feeding problem.
If she's good enough the way she is, how much tension does that reduce from your marriage?
I just don't know if I can do it or not.
Maybe I can. I guess if she's good enough the way she is, would it reduce and I just kind of lapped off the nonsense that goes on, then it probably would be a lot better.
Now, when I say good enough the way she is, I don't mean is she the best possible wife ever.
I'm not talking about that.
But what I mean is, she's been good enough to have four kids with and stay with for almost a quarter century, right?
Right. So what if you take the pressure and expectation of change off the relationship?
I'm not saying, you know, that that means lower all standards and don't care about anything.
I'm just try it as an experiment where you say, what if I just don't need her to change at all?
Or a better way to put it, what if I accept that she's not going to change?
Then I'm not chafing at constantly wanting something to be different.
Because that's kind of torture, right?
Yes. Yes, it is.
I'm sure you've had employees like this, right?
The employees who are like, man, it'd be great if they just understood this about the business and they never do.
Right. It'd be great if this person was good at handling difficult clients, but they never are.
But you just got to find a place for them that they can be good at and that's that, you know?
But how do you do that with your wife?
Well, what you do is you try to find out what the marriage is like without you being dissatisfied.
See, there's dissatisfaction that comes out of things you can change.
And that dissatisfaction is a motive for changing things, right?
So in your business, if something's not working right, you're the boss, you can change it, right?
And that's the foundation, I assume, of the success that you've had in business, which is considerable, right?
Sure. But your wife is not your business.
You have no fundamental control or authority in that relationship relative to what you have at work, right?
That's correct. And so what if?
What's the relationship like if you don't at all expect her to change?
you accept who she is maybe it's better for her I mean I'm sure it would be better for her because I wouldn't be frustrated with her very often so Wait, are you saying that reducing frustration won't be better for you?
Well, no. Maybe it will be better for me.
I can't believe some of the stuff that happens sometimes.
What do you mean you can't believe it?
You've been married for 23 years.
What do you mean you can't believe it?
Is it new? Is it unexpected?
Is it unforeseen? Has it never happened before?
Are you that resolutely anti-empirical that you're going to be surprised by the sun coming up tomorrow and your wife making you a bad omelet?
Okay.
This is the ogre part of you, man.
Okay.
Right. Right.
That's what she would say. That's for sure.
No, listen. I'm not saying that I sympathize, but I understand.
Right. She's not going to change.
And this constant chafing at wanting her to change, I mean, it's going to bust up your marriage in the long run.
I'm sure of that. And you're not abusive to each other.
You're having sex. You love your kids.
She's a pretty good mom. You know what I mean?
It's not like you're in hell here.
It's better than limbo.
It's better than hell. It's not heaven, but it's not terrible.
And if you're going to stay, stay without expectation of change.
Because the change isn't going to happen.
You're worse at predicting your wife's behavior than she is at cooking a meal.
The incompetence here is in your fantasy of change rather than her reality of stasis.
Got it. You're like, to take an extreme example, you're trying to close a deal with somebody who's already in a coffin.
No, one more PowerPoint, man.
Let me explain the value proposition one more time.
It's like, he's dead, Jim.
He's dead. Or like the surgeon who, you know, that cheesy, like the surgeon is like, time of death, I'm calling it.
No! Like, clear!
Like, he's gone, you know?
And I'm not trying to say your marriage is dead, but what I'm saying is that I need you to kill, or I think you'll be happier if you kill your expectation of change where none is forthcoming.
Has your expectation and requirement, or if not demand for change, has it ever produced the change that you want in your marriage?
Not materially, no.
So 23 years, what you're doing has not gotten you what you wanted.
What do you think is going to happen at 23.1 years?
Right. She's dug in, man.
And listen, there may be change, but it sure as hell isn't going to come from anything you've done in the past.
It can't be anything, like if there is change, it can't be anything to do with anything you've done in the past.
It has to be something completely different.
Because you know the old thing, if you keep doing the same thing, expecting different results, you're crazy, right?
Right. You would be amazed at how many people will change when you remove the requirement for them to change.
Because right now, the pressure for change is coming from outside herself, and she's annoyed at it.
Therefore, she's digging in and won't change.
Whereas if you want to give her ownership of her own personality, her own choices, her own life, which means you've got to stop being an external pressure for change, because then she's not reacting to life.
She's not reacting to her kids' Making faces at her cooking.
She's not reacting at anything negative that might be occurring in her life.
She's only and forever reacting to you.
And she won't change because you want her to change.
And that would be to surrender to something she doesn't want to do.
That would be to give in, to retreat, to fail.
So the way that we give people independence is we stop applying pressure to them.
Okay.
And if you stop trying to change her, that is the biggest change that you can affect.
And I don't know if you've ever had this...
It's a funny situation.
You ever have this where you reach out to shake someone's hand and they just won't shake your hand?
Sure. And, you know, your hand just stands out there like a dead fish flapping in the breeze, right?
And you're like, well, okay.
See, because they've done something different, you have to change what you're doing.
You can't mime like you pretend to shake their...
I mean, it would be crazy, right? So because they're doing something different, you have to do something different.
And so if you stop trying to get your wife to change, that's a huge change in and of itself.
Who knows what's going to come out of that?
But certainly applying pressure and being dissatisfied and frustrated and unhappy and negative, I mean, that's not working and it hasn't worked for a quarter century, right?
Right. So you got to try something new.
And removing that pressure...
And removing that expectation, removing that negative judgment.
You know, you say, well, she has negatives, she's never really praised me, she's never really admired me, but you've been 23 years frustrated with who she is.
That's two-way, right?
Fair enough.
I mean, if someone came to you in business and say, I've been running the same ads for 23 years and I'm never getting any customers, what would you say?
Okay.
You just stop those ads.
Change your ads, man. Whatever you do, don't run any more ads.
And if they say, well, it's been 23 years, my ads have generated no customers, but I'm pretty sure 23 years in three minutes is going to turn it all around.
Oh, goodness. I'm thinking back to the beginning of the call, and you were waiting it all up, and that's been...
Right. I'll tell you this.
There is nothing that I would change about my wife.
Now, does that mean I agree with everything she does?
Not always. But there is nothing that I would change about my wife.
Not one thing. I'm not saying this like bragging.
I mean, nobody's perfect.
I'm not perfect. Well, okay, she's perfect.
But most people aren't perfect. What is it like having a marriage where you wouldn't change a thing?
Well, that's a realistic view of marriage because you can't change a thing.
You're already married. You don't buy a Ferrari, bring it home, and try and turn it into a boat, right?
You already bought the wife and you've had kids with her.
So now saying you've got to fundamentally change a woman I've been with for a quarter century and had four kids with.
It's like, it's a little late.
It's out of the showroom.
It's in the garage. And I think that's your greatest chance for success in the marriage.
I think it will produce change.
Because you're changing a fundamental variable that's been constant for 23 years, and it's going to change something in the marriage, I think, for the better.
You might find that as you appreciate her more, she's going to turn around and appreciate you more.
You might find that as you stop pressuring her to change or be dissatisfied with who she is, she might be more able to appreciate who you are.
Because your negative judgment of her has worn her down as well, right?
Now, I understand it would be better if she'd Learned to cook and not needed a maid for all these years.
Anyway, that's water under the bridge.
What I'm trying to say is, if you're going to be with someone, accept who they are.
Now, if you don't want to be with someone, then don't be with that person.
But don't be with someone and be judgy and negative all the time.
Don't be with someone and reject them at the same time.
That's kind of cruel. If you're going to be with her, accept her for who she is.
I've talked a lot, and I'm sorry because I've talked over you a few times, which is rude, but go ahead with what you thought.
No, you're fine. I think that actually gives me some leverage in this to not try to change her and not to be cruel to her by asking her to be something that she's not.
And I can wish that she was something different.
Even though things have been out of balance, there's been a lot of positives.
Maybe it just isn't how I dreamed that it would be.
Yeah, and listen, if I tell you to accept her without understanding where you're coming from, you won't listen to me, which is why I go through the exercise of saying, yeah, things are kind of unequal, at least in terms of financial value.
I accept that that's kind of unequal, but that's what you've accepted.
And changing the deal a quarter century into it is pretty tough.
And the best way to change the deal is to stop trying to change the deal.
The best way to get change is to stop trying to make change.
And it is, you know, it's a funny thing too.
I don't know if you feel this with your kids.
There's nothing I'd change about my daughter.
Now, there are things that are occasionally frustrating or things that, you know, can be annoying, but I'm sure she'd say the same thing with me.
I know she would. But there's nothing I'd change fundamentally.
Because anything that I would change to reduce even the occasional frictions would probably get rid of something great too, right?
Right. Parents say this, oh, I wish my child was more outgoing.
It's like, okay, so if you have a child who's more outgoing, what are you willing to sacrifice, right?
Because if they're outgoing, there's going to be some other part of their personality that is less or maybe the opposite way.
And we always think that we can just make all the positives and have none of the negatives, right?
And whatever is the case with your wife, man, she's hung it out.
For a quarter century, and there are a lot of marriages that don't last that long at all.
You know, she hung it out when you had an affair, man.
Lots of women would hang you out to dry, drag you through the court system, and take half your shit until the end of time, right?
Right. She didn't do that.
Right. That's something to be relieved about, isn't it?
Because that could have been a shitstorm, right?
With kids young and all, right?
Yeah, it could have been. It could have been.
Well, I appreciate it very much, Stefan.
It's been enlightening and gives me a lot to think about and a lot to chew on in terms of how I want to be different.
Great. Well, will you let me know how it goes?
I will. Good. And listen, I really, really appreciate the call.
You know, it's tough to talk about this stuff publicly, but it was great.
And I'm sure a lot of people will benefit from the conversation, too.
So thanks for that. Absolutely.
Thanks again. All right, man. Take care.
Bye-bye. So weird to think that during this call he could have made $700.
Anyway, alright. Alright, up next we have Beth.
Beth wrote in and said, "I'm a 28-year-old woman and started listening to Freedom Aid Radio last year, and since then my life has completely changed.
I went from being a single woman with a serious case of hypergamy and risking a cat lady life to being in a relationship with a loving, kind, devoted man with a deep integrity who I would have never given a chance in the past.
We're already talking about marriage and are so excited to start a family and teach our children to become strong men and women of reason and virtue.
Because I'm about to hit the wall, I know I'll be losing my sexual market value and therefore my power, which frankly makes me a little anxious.
How do I age well as a woman in practical terms?
Is there a way to replace my sexual power so I can do good as I get older instead of just fading into an invisible middle-aged woman?
Or is it a virtue to accept losing this power?
That's from Beth. Hey Beth, how you doing?
Hey Steph, good. Kind of nervous.
That's alright, that's alright.
Well, congratulations on the dude.
Why would you say you would never have given him a chance in the past?
Is he not Chadley McAbbs or something like that?
Oh man, I think MGTOW is going to rip me apart in the comments.
Don't worry, they rip cat videos apart in the comments, but go on.
True. So sad.
Um, yeah, I, well, yeah, he's not, um, you know, lots of abs and big guy.
Like before I met him, I was dating a guy who was like, you know, six foot and like massive and all this stuff.
And it didn't work out. Cause basically this guy really didn't have any virtues, a bit too young.
He wasn't ready to get married.
Um, anyway, go on.
Yeah. It was lovely.
We had fun, but yeah, it wasn't going anywhere.
Um, so I decided to cut that off pretty quickly.
Um, So I met my current partner and he's a little, I guess, he's a little socially awkward sometimes.
He's a bit eccentric. He's quite a high IQ so I think he spends a lot of his time in books and just enjoying his own mind essentially.
So yeah, I don't think I would have given him a chance in the past because he didn't have that I guess that high status of being very socially successful, but a male friend of mine pointed me in his direction after this kind of breakup where I'm like, holy crap, I don't have much longer to get my shit together and get married.
I was feeling, I guess, maybe a little bit desperate, but not so desperate to lower my standards that I would approach anyone that didn't have any virtue, essentially.
So yeah, and then I went up, I took a chance, I sort of introduced myself, and Yeah, we hit it off from there.
He's just been such a wonderful support.
It's been a really hard year because my dad died back in January.
Oh, just January of this year?
Yeah. Oh, I'm so sorry to hear that.
Was it sudden? Yeah.
Yeah, it was very sudden.
Sorry, I was quite emotional.
It's fine, it's fine. Good lord. I mean, this is a wonderful tribute to your father.
Good heavens. I hope people weep about me when I die.
So, it's fine. Go ahead.
Yeah, I think I'm just so used to telling people about it.
Dad died of a schismic heart attack when he was driving home from his property in the bush.
So he pulled over to the side of the road and He would have died in about half an hour or so.
He was quite morbidly obese for a lot of his life, so of course that didn't help, and that was the official cause of death.
My mum had passed away just back in April last year as well, so it's been a bit of a train wreck of a year.
Was she overweight as well?
No, well, not massively.
She was a little bit plump, but she had a stroke, and she was a very...
She'd had polio when she was quite young and had survived, you know, miraculously, but she also had been very mentally ill her whole life.
You know, she'd attempted suicide when she was about 18 and she'd run around with like a lot of men.
She had a little baby who died a cot death and I think she just, I think she self-medicated a lot.
With what? What did she do?
She was a mental health nurse, ironically.
No, but what did she self-medicate with?
Oh, I think she took a fair bit of Valium.
And, like, it was always kind of a bit of a pillbox in her, you know, in her drawer.
So nothing illegal, but she always knew how to kind of get, you know, antidepressants and that sort of thing.
And I think she had tried to kill herself with antidepressants as well when she was quite young.
So, yeah, so her death kind of was a...
A bit of a relief in the end for us.
Was she suffering for a long time?
Yeah, she was.
She had a narcissistic personality disorder.
I suspect she must have been arselected or something.
She had a lot of different relationships with a lot of men.
I have an older half-sister and an older half-brother who are two different men from each other and from me.
Um, and then my younger brother as well as she, you know, um, she just, yeah, I think she, there was a lot of hurt there.
Um, and then just, of course she hurt others cause she was hurt.
Like she was quite neglectful of all of her children.
Um, and she was particularly like destructive towards my older sister.
Um, so, um, she, Just playing games, a lot of guilt, a lot of neglect.
All of us have been dragged through the family court by her.
My older sister, when she was probably about 10, her father, who's probably also narcissistic, he basically wanted her to go to a private school.
It's very unclear what had happened.
Obviously, I don't have anyone left, really, to ask.
My sister isn't sure what happened.
But there was some argument, and they went to the family court for about three years, and my sister just kind of got, I think, torn apart between my mother and her father.
And ever since then, she's been quite, I guess, mentally or emotionally unstable herself, very neurotic.
She's a feminist. You know, all of those sorts of things.
She became a feminist after being torn apart by a family court designed by feminists.
That's kind of a Stockholm Syndrome bonding there.
Yeah, that's right. Funnily enough, she was the first of us to have a concept of having a voluntary relationship with her family, which I never understood when I was younger.
I'm like, why is she being such a bitch?
Why won't she just come along and be friendly with all of us?
Um, and it was only in the last, you know, I guess year that I've really understood why she really kept a distance from mom, um, and the rest of her family really, especially since I would have been running scripts at her.
Um, and yeah, it's, it's been quite interesting in a way.
So, um, she's never had children.
She's about 30, she'd be about 38 now and I don't think she wants kids, which I think is so despairing.
Um, Yeah, that was sort of mum.
It's horrible how these bladed whirlwind destructo-bots of personalities can just go through and destroy an entire gene pool, almost.
You know, to the point where people don't want to have kids, people can't bond, they can't fall in love.
It's just like, man, talk about putting an entire gene pool through a whirling dervish blade, Tasmanian devil cheese grater of a personality.
Like, how much destruction one person can wreak in a family is almost beyond comprehension.
That's right. And the thing is, it's her own gene pool, too.
I mean, it's madness.
Yeah. So, yeah, I mean, my brother and I were the youngest, so we grew up quite neglected.
Like, we lived in a farmhouse that we had drafts through.
And it's so funny listening to you talk about your mom.
You had what through? Drafts through this farmhouse.
Oh, drafts through. Okay, yeah, yeah, okay.
Yeah. You know, I hear you talk about your mom a lot.
And I just, oh, it's so crazy, Steph.
Some of the stuff you talk about, I'm just like, that's mom as well.
It's so similar. Like, this constant talking about her problems and not Kind of interested in yours.
No, you don't even have to be there.
Yeah. Yeah, my mom was in the bath once.
But the door, like a tiny bit open, right?
My mom's in the bath. Yeah.
Whining and droning about some damn guy at some dance that she was trying to get attention and all of the machinations and complexities of who glanced at what and what song came on and who did what.
I just went out. Went out, went to the mall.
This is back in the day where, at the Appied Way, the Don Mills Mall, you could get a slice of pizza for 75 cents and a pop for a quarter.
Wow. So I'd get a buck, because back then, man, I was making $2.20, $2.40 an hour.
And I went over and I picked up a slice of pizza and...
A pop. I ate and I drank.
Gone about half an hour. Came back quietly.
Just blabbing along.
Didn't notice. Didn't notice.
Doesn't matter. You don't even have to be.
And of course, if you're in the room, though, you're doomed if you don't pay attention.
Because you zone out.
And then she's like, well, what do you think?
And I'm like, I don't know.
It's complicated. Because you haven't been listening for like half an hour.
And it's a mess.
So... Yeah.
I mean, I remember sitting on my computer trying to do an assignment and my mother's in the other room because, I mean, this little farmhouse that I was doing was tiny.
She's in the lounge room with the TV on, knitting, telling me about all these problems she was having at work and just repeating herself over and over again.
I'm like, I just want to do my assignment in peace.
There's literally no escape.
It's not like I can go outside.
I don't think we have laptops at that point.
Well, the other thing too, and I don't mean to one-up you, but I just want to point out to people how boringly predictable dysfunctional personalities are.
And this is, I think, the Paul Johnson point that he makes.
There's an old Tolstoy line, Anna Karenina or something like that, where He says, every happy family is alike, but every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
And I remember Paul Johnson saying, that's not really true.
Like when you look at the family of drunks, it's all the same shit.
You look at the family where there's a narcissist, it's all the same shit.
You look at the family where the drug addict, it's all the same shit.
Happy families are all very individualistic.
But dysfunction is so boringly predictable.
It's like these people are just, they have a stamp, it's like they're programmed, it's like there's no...
Because, I mean, I remember my mother...
I don't remember what she...
I know what she was typing later.
She was always trying to sue people.
Anyway, but this is when I was about 11 or so.
My brother was still over in England.
I'm trying to sleep, and we have an electric typewriter, because no computers, but I had an electric typewriter.
And she'd sit there and smoke, like, six feet from my head.
And then she'd type a little bit, and then, because it's electric typewriter.
It's just loud, right? And then there'd be a pause and she'd smoke a little more.
And I'm literally like, I'm trying to sleep.
I have a test the next morning.
And it's like trying to sleep with the clatter of small arms fire and the smoke of a battlefield fucking drifting across your face.
It's mental. It's mental.
Yeah, it's just insane.
And I can't imagine what it's like to live...
Sorry to interrupt. Here I am talking over people.
But I can't imagine, Beth, what it's like to live in a world where you don't even notice that someone else is in the room.
Like I... I can't imagine.
Yeah. It's just crazy.
It destroyed me.
It destroyed my brother as well.
I mean, my brother's kind of in a situation where it's failure to launch.
Well, I mean- Really now?
It broke me down. It was tough.
It was tough. All right.
Hang on just a sec. Hyperbole.
I'm just making a little note here.
Stop teasing. Hyperbole.
Exaggeration. I'm very good at hyperboles.
Not quite hysteria, but we'll keep an eye on it.
Okay. All right.
Oh, something so sexist.
Hysteria. Trust me, men can be hysterical too.
You should see me when I have a pimple and a speech.
Anyway, okay. All right.
So it was tough though, right?
It was tough. That's right.
It was tough. And, you know, I've spent many years rebuilding myself.
I... It was quite manipulative when I came out into the world, very controlling.
I wanted people to feel a certain way because that was how mum had approached me.
I didn't understand the boundaries between other people's feelings and not firstly having to feel those feelings and secondly having to manage them.
I've only sort of gotten that through my brain recently that I don't have to manage other people's feeling and it's incredibly freeing.
It's amazing. Oh yeah.
It's interesting that you feel that way.
As opposed to the way that if you grow up in these dysfunctional households, it's like somebody just Japanese sword style opened up their intestines and they're spilling out and Well, that changes your day.
Now you've got to help them put their intestines back in.
You've got to get some ice and you've got to call an ambulance.
You can't just go on with your day.
And the idea that people, you know, like, oh, I just stubbed my toe.
Oh, I'm sorry you stubbed your toe. As opposed to, my intestines are spilling all over the floor.
Do something! Right?
I mean, it's mad. Yeah, that's right.
Yeah, you know, and it's like mom really making her, like, feelings our problem.
And because I remember once as well, she bloody, like, I could go on stories about it.
This one was just crazy, like, My brother refused to go and do his learner's permit test.
She'd just been having fights with him for weeks and weeks.
We had a veranda at the back of our house.
She took everything from his room and threw it over the balcony and then just left me to deal with trying to put my brother somewhere where basically he wasn't going to have to deal with her rage.
It was just crazy.
Yeah, it's that sort of upbringing.
And then, like your mother as well, she used to love suing people.
And just before she died, she was suing my aunts for more than a third of the estate of her father, even knowing it had clearly been set out, what each of them would get.
Because she made up this crazy story that one of them had been stealing money.
And I think that's kind of what caused a stroke in the end.
Basically, she completely stressed herself out.
And I'd also cut off communication a couple of years before.
I finally kind of grew a bit of a spine.
I said, Mom, I can't deal with this craziness anymore.
You need to go see a psychologist.
And once you do, we can have a chat again.
And that was just, you know, oh gosh, just the manipulation and the guilting.
But I managed to just get her away.
And we didn't speak for two years.
And the next thing, she was dead.
And I guess...
Many people would look back on that and regret it.
And I've questioned it sometimes.
I'm like, no, I have no regret.
Oh, God, no. Can you imagine if you hadn't had those extra two years?
That would have sucked. Yeah, that's right.
I got two years of not having to deal with a crazy woman.
Good, good. Exactly.
Because it's not like I don't have a healing power to make crazy people sane.
I mean, you can listen to Jordan Peterson talk about this kind of stuff.
It's in one of his talks about race and IQ, and I'll paraphrase here just very briefly.
But he's saying, look, if the child is antisocial, and that's more just like, that's like bad, right?
Antisocial personality disorder is bad.
If they're antisocial at the age of four, guess what?
No one knows how to change that.
And it's most likely, almost certainly, 99.9%.
It's not going to change.
Yeah. And if you look at this, like, personality structure, it's not going to change.
It's kind of what I was talking about with the last caller.
Like, it's not going to change.
Now, I think that if somebody's like, wow, I'm really unhappy and I really want to change and I'm going to go into therapy.
Like, if they really take a huge effort themselves, sure, then you can look for some kind of change.
But that person is like one out of a thousand.
Maybe. Yeah.
Maybe. Yeah, that's right.
Yeah, he's saying, you know, like the more you study personality development, the more despairing you get about any kind of social change that's centrally planned or anything like that.
Because, you know, what can you do?
So for these antisocial people, nothing changes.
Nothing changes. And they just, you know, have these terrible and destructive lives.
Now, maybe around the age of 27, things start to cool down a little bit.
You know, like borderline personality disorders, they tend to mellow a little bit as they get older.
They just kind of get exhausted.
Right. But no, it doesn't change.
And he says, you know, basically there's an argument to be made that you just keep people in prison until they're 27.
But the problem with that is that they're then with prison people.
You know, so that's no good either.
It's a mess.
That's correct. And, you know, I believe in free will.
Like, mom had the choice.
And obviously she loved her own chaos relationship.
More than she loved me, sadly.
Let me make a tiny case for you that might help in terms of looking back on this.
I can't know for sure, of course, but I think there's a strong case to be made for this.
Maybe she didn't have any more free will by the time you met her.
Okay. Right?
Because free will is not something that you get forever.
I think of free will like, can you run a five minute mile?
Well, okay, so if you say I want to run a five-minute mile and you're young and you're not obese and blah, blah, blah, blah, right?
Then okay, you can train and you can run a five-minute mile.
But if you're 50 and you weigh 400 pounds, you're never going to run a five-minute mile.
Like by that time, that choice has been removed from you because your joints are worn down, you're obese, your heart is a big pile of lard.
I mean, it's just a mess, right?
Yeah. Yeah.
Sorry, go ahead. I was just going to say, I know you're using a metaphor here, but I mean, that's a physical metaphor.
What about in your mind, essentially?
Oh, it's even worse. It's even worse for mental habits than it is for physical habits, because at least with physical habits, you have, well, you're 350 pounds.
You can see that in the mirror, right?
You're ashamed of it. You feel bad about it.
But for most people who have these kinds of dysfunctional personalities, they're perfectly right.
And you're perfectly wrong.
They're 100% right at all times.
And so it's almost like the person who's 350 pounds is looking in the mirror and sees like Ryan Gosling's body.
Yeah. And then you're saying to them, well, you know, you're unhealthy, you're way overweight.
I'm looking in the mirror, man.
I'm fine. What are you talking about?
You're crazy. So it's even worse because with the physical stuff, at least there's objective.
You can go on, the doctor's going to say you're fat, lose weight or something.
The scale is going to give you a number.
But the mental stuff can be so self-defined that reality is almost impossible to get a hold of.
And so I think that the mental stuff is even worse than the physical stuff.
Like if you say, well, I can run a five-minute mile, at least someone can say, okay, great, let's go out and I'll time you.
But when it comes to I'm a good person and everyone else is wrong, how on earth do you disprove that hypothesis?
You can't really because the other person can just redefine anything they want.
Yeah. It's quite scary, really.
Oh, it is. It is.
And trust me, my mom outlived your mom and nothing changes.
Yeah, that's right.
And in the end, sadly, that death is a relief.
It's... It ended all the court cases.
It ended all the madness. The lawsuit has closed with a bang.
That's right. Why did your dad marry her?
Oh, God knows.
This is something I've been really thinking about lately, like more listening to you as well and understanding dad had a choice, you know, kind of grasping that a bit more.
His mother was pretty bloody insane as well.
She... She got pregnant to a war hero who came back to Australia.
And they got married, like a shotgun marriage.
And basically, she really wore down all of the men in that family.
And Dad was the lucky one.
He escaped. He basically went, no, screw this.
I'm leaving home. I don't want to talk to you anymore.
Well, I mean, it's not like he escaped like he got out of prison.
He just decided relationships are voluntary.
Yeah, that's right. That's true.
That's true. She had wanted him to commit perjury in a court case to do with my uncle.
This seems to be a theme of court cases.
Dad said, no, that's not it.
She seemed to offer a bit of a poison chalice to each of her sons to prove their loyalty, and Dad was just like, I'm not doing this.
Yeah, I think I saw how King Lear ends.
It's not pretty. Yeah, that's right.
I think he had that upbringing and that first modeling of how a family functions.
And I don't know, it's strange that in the end he ended up with mum because he seemed to end up with a few kind of weird eccentric women, one woman in particular who I don't particularly like, and then ended up with mum.
And then I asked him one day if we were planned, and he said, ask your mother.
So I don't know what happened there.
But they were working at the same hospital, that's how they met.
She made some racist joke, and he laughed, and all the magic started from there.
Also, if he was very overweight, his options were limited, right?
Yeah, well, he wasn't that overweight at that point.
He was a little plump.
Mum was 40 when they met, so I guess maybe he was her option as well, because Dad was a little bit eccentric as well.
But, yeah, it was quite strange.
And then Dad was, I mean, Dad really fought for us as well because Mum moved about 700km up the coast just to make sure that basically we're out of his reach.
And he used to drive up every single holiday and just sit there at the gate with his car.
He fought to keep himself in our lives, essentially.
He read a lot of Warren Farrell's books and sort of realized how powerless he was as a man, too.
It sort of reminds me of the, I don't know if you've seen Cassie J's documentary, The Red Pill.
Yeah. It's an amazing, amazing piece of cinema, which just finds some way to watch it, people.
It's just wonderful.
And yeah, there's that guy in there, and I won't give it away, but it sort of reminds me of that story of your father.
Yeah, well, I mean, watching that, it just reminded me so much of Dad.
I mean, Dad was involved in the men's right movement here, and He also saved one guy from suicide because this guy's wife just would not let him see his kids and was dragging him through the courts for like 10 years.
And he was on a forum and the way he was speaking, Dad, because he had 40 years of mental health experience by then, was like, holy crap, this guy's about to commit suicide.
And he called the police and they found him in his car pumping gas into it in his garage and they saved his life.
He now found a really wonderful woman and Being able to see his kids and everything.
Just insane what they do to these men.
It's awful. So awful.
Alright, so let's get to your current dude.
Yeah. Why do you want sexual market value if you're in a committed relationship that is going to last?
You only need sexual market value for your husband, the father of your children, right?
That's true. I guess it's like, so obviously I don't have a good model of marriage, so I'm still trying to understand a lot of it.
But doesn't it kind of keep his status up as well if I have a sexual market value while being obviously committed to him?
Well, yes, but your sexual market value is different when you're a wife.
Okay. So your sexual market value when you're a wife is you support his career.
You're a great conversationalist.
You're good at running a dinner party if that's what's required.
You are supportive of his work and his ideas, just as he is of yours.
You're great at raising his children.
You run a great household so that he can focus on, you know, you are like a great wife.
That's status.
You know, like if you were at a disco, okay, it's, you know, cleavage and dance moves and shit like that, right?
But that's not the case.
I mean, you don't come out with glitter cannons and dry ice when you're bringing the turkey out at Thanksgiving, right?
You know what I mean? Like you don't need backup dances and you just, wow, this is great turkey.
You know, you're lucky to be married to this wonderful woman, right?
Yeah, the great status for a wife, the great status for a husband is to have a wife who's competent, who's smart, who's attractive.
And by attractive, I don't, I just mean, you know, Don't gain weight.
Why are American women getting so fat?
Because they don't have to keep their men because they can get money from the government.
If you want your wife to stay thin, just make some money.
I'm sorry. It's just the way things work.
The high status for a man is to have a woman who's smart and competent and loves him to death.
That's what other men are going to envy, not some...
One who, like some woman who looks like she was cut out of a Playboy mudflap on a truck on the interstate, you know?
Like, I mean, you want not like, oh, she's like a woman who'd be great to have sex with.
You want like, man, that guy's lucky to be married to that woman.
She's a great wife.
Okay. It's wifely market value.
Sexual market value is before the ring.
After the ring, it's wifely market value.
Okay. So what are...
What are sort of practical things?
It's kind of like, I guess, keeping your cool and not being too crazy, that sort of thing.
Don't worry, that's a low bar for you.
Don't be crazy. Not being too crazy.
True. Don't be crazy at all.
In fact, be robustly sane, right?
Yeah. So, a man is a yacht and a woman is the wind that moves the sails.
So your love, your support, your respect for your man is his greatest conceivable chance for succeeding in this life.
Okay. You can will a great family for a woman often if you simply encourage support and believe in your man.
Okay. And that means that you're a team.
Because women are going to bristle and say, oh, you just sit there and worship your man.
And it's like, no, no, you're a team.
As a woman, you gain so much from supporting your man.
It's ridiculous. Because if your man has your support, he has a magic superpower that very few other men have.
Because a lot of other men, they've got these kind of naggy, bitchy, negative wives who are feminist-y and resentful and Independent in a way that is ridiculously atomistic when it comes to two trees growing together like a marriage.
You support that man.
You're gonna give him... A superpower to get ahead that is so rare and so powerful that it's going to pay you off in spades, just in terms of status and income and money and stability and all that kind of stuff, right?
So think of two salesmen, right?
I don't know what your boyfriend does, you get married or whatever.
Think of two salesmen, right? And I've seen the situation up close and personal.
So one salesman has a great wife who really believes in what he's doing, is very enthusiastic, talks about his work problems, really helps.
And she was staying at home with the kids, right?
And man, he'd just sail into work.
He was enthusiastic. He was great.
You know, people loved him and so on.
And then there was like right in the next office, there was a salesman who was just going through a divorce with a woman from hell.
Now, who do you think, who do you think made more money?
The one with a happy wife.
That's right. That's right.
He made eight times what the other guy made.
Eight freaking times what the other guy made.
Because it was an eat what you kill.
It was like commission only, right?
Now what happened, there was this death spiral with this other guy because his wife was kind of bitchy and so he was kind of jumpy and nervous and she would also like she wanted the money, right?
She liked the money and you know, hey, you like money.
There's nothing wrong with that. How you get it, right?
And so he'd be nervous about not hitting his targets which means he'd He'd be too needy, and he'd pressure the clients too much, and they'd back off, or he'd be jumpy.
The sensitive radar you need as a salesman was all over the map, and he just wasn't working.
Whereas the other guy was like, yeah, if I do well, I do well.
If I don't do well, my wife still loves me, so I can really focus on what's best for my clients.
I'm not trying to feed up my clients' money to the giant smorgmaw of my wife's materialism.
Yeah. And so I remember looking at this thinking like, what is this stupid woman doing who's bitchily disassembling her husband?
I think that it was one of these like with trial separation, like just anxiety producing, horrible, you know, tough for the kids.
And it's like, man, if you just got behind this guy, you guys would like, you're going to get way more money out of supporting this guy than you're ever going to get in a divorce.
Yeah, that's right.
And I'm just like, how stupid.
I mean, not only is it wrong and hateful, but even from an amoral practical standpoint, how retarded.
If you were enthusiastic and supported this guy, there's nothing he wouldn't do for you, and there's no amount of heights that he wouldn't reach financially.
At least he'd have his very best shot at that.
And I remember I'd walk past, you know, get my coffee, walk past these two guys, and...
You know, one guy was hunched over in the office, right?
Because, you know, if you're a salesman, nobody wants to see the salesman in the office, right?
I remember the boss coming down and saying, what are you guys doing here?
Like, what are you doing here?
Because, you know, there's one thing I know when you're here, which is you're not in front of clients.
So, don't be here.
Go to a coffee shop. Go get a donut.
I don't care. Just don't be here.
I don't care where you go, but you can't stay here.
And I just, yeah, one guy's hunched over just trying to make phone calls and he's got this huge pressure and tension and stress and he's got to make the money and, you know, especially man, I can't even imagine if that divorce went through, I don't know, right?
If that divorce went through and this guy's now got to make money or he goes to freaking jail because he's not making his payments.
Like, can you imagine? And this other guy is like, man, he's just, you know, hey, you know, he calls his wife, love you, you know, great, I'll pick up the steaks, let's have a barbecue, we'll have the neighbors over, how are the kids doing, you know, just a great life.
And I remember looking at those two offices saying, I got to break up with my girlfriend.
I was like, that was like, whoa, oh man, I can see which way my train track's going.
That's right. How do you disagree with your husband or try to encourage him in a different direction in a supportive way?
A few things at the moment we're discussing, obviously, because we're discussing marriage.
We're discussing where to live.
At the moment in Australia, house prices are just Like, you have to obviously be Chinese to afford anything here.
Hey, it's nothing you can't solve without another couple of million people immigrating a year.
Yeah, that's right. Yeah, yeah, it always helps, right?
Especially to one city, that's always great.
So I want to leave the major city we're living in at the moment to go to the country.
And that's where I'm from originally.
And the house prices are much more reasonable.
And our kind of discussion at the moment is he wants to be close to his parents, because obviously I don't have any parents left.
But he wants to be close to his mother so she can support me with the kids and stuff.
I mean, I'm not going to be working.
We've already agreed that that's the best way to raise our children.
You're going to be working, you're just not going to be earning.
Yeah, that's right. Sorry. I'm going to be bringing in value in another way.
And he wants to be able to support me in that.
And he wants to make sure as well that I'm able to kind of...
I love painting and art and stuff.
And I've been able to sell works and things like that.
Not that it's a money thing.
It's more of a... He'd like to support me to keep me as a well-rounded person for the children to see.
Yeah. I like how you talk about getting pregnant and being a well-rounded person.
But anyway, okay, go on. That's right.
Can't wait. Anyway, so how do I disagree with him in a supportive way?
I've been trying to run the numbers with him a little bit.
And it's pushed him a little bit out of the city, kind of.
And there's other things, like he wants to invent something, and he's sort of told me about it.
And I'm like, I'm not sure if that's going to work, but I don't want to break your heart, you know, essentially.
It's just... I think this is a remnant from my upbringing and stuff.
It's just being able to disagree with someone respectfully.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, and it's great.
Listen, disagreements should be welcomed in a relationship because disagreements, if you do it right, they get you closer.
They bring you closer. Like you learn more about each other.
If you agree, it's great, but you don't really learn that much about each other.
You learn about each other through disagreements.
Okay. So let's try a role play.
Okay. So you be...
Your fiancé, let's just say, right?
You be the dude, right? Yeah.
And I'm going to try and convince you.
Now, the first thing is that you don't want to convince him that you're right.
You want to convince him what's best for you both.
Okay. Right? Because if there's nothing in it for him, then it's simply an exercise in domination, right?
Which is not going to work in the long run.
You might get your way in the short run, but it won't work, right?
So it has to be something that is best for both of you.
And it may be a solution that no one's thought about yet, right?
Okay. So it's about curiosity.
Like, is there a way to solve this problem?
Is it even a problem? Because it may be...
When you go into negotiations, you have to be willing to give up every single one of your positions.
Because otherwise, you're not moving, and the other person has to fight or comply, and that's no fun, right?
So I'll give you an example of how that looks.
All right, so... So, first of all, I give you lots of sacks and a back rub to break down your defenses as a man, all right?
Wait, no, who am I again?
Oh yeah, I'm you. Okay, good, good.
All right, now that you're spent, all right.
After marriage, though, after marriage, right?
After marriage, yeah, that's right, that's right.
So, okay, so you need to imagine me in a maid's costume made out of spandex.
Oh my gosh, no one needs to say that.
I know. It's tough to concentrate for me too, trust me.
So I would say, okay, so I have this impulse to flee the city.
Now, okay, there's high crime.
Immigration zone are going to get worse.
There's going to be ethnic tensions and problems.
Taxes are going to go through the roof.
Our kids are going to go to school with, who knows, people who speak 12 different languages and there are only eight kids or something like that.
And, you know, we all understand that there's good reasons to it.
And it's sitting there in my mind, like something we have to do.
I don't know if it's something we have to do, but is there a chance we could just try and Work through this and see if there's a solution that works or if I'm just crazy and have a problem for no reason.
Yeah. All right.
Okay. Your issue is, which I completely understand, you want to have your mom around.
Wait, does he have both his parents?
He does. He does.
So you want to have your parents.
Are they retired?
His mother's a housewife and his dad's not yet retired.
Is it anywhere close?
I think the next couple of years, yeah.
Yeah, okay, okay. Right.
So your major – is it right – I'll just call it Bob, right?
So is it right, Bob, that your major concern is having your parents around when we have kids?
Yeah. Is there a big barrier to you if we move out of the city in terms of your career?
No, I can work anywhere.
Oh, okay. So there's that possibility.
Now, there's to me a couple of different phases in life.
So let's say that we get married in a year or two.
We have kids a year or so after that.
So I don't need to be out in the country before we have kids.
I don't even need to be out in the country after we have kids.
But with regards to your parents, what I think would be interesting is have they ever expressed any desire to live outside the city?
I don't think so.
Do they ever vacation outside of the city?
Do they like the country at all?
Yeah, they do. They travel down to my sister's place, which is just outside of the major city.
Right, right. Okay. So there is a possibility, which we can talk about with your parents if we think it's even something that might remotely work.
Because If we have kids in a couple of years, maybe your dad's retired, maybe, just maybe, If we get a place that's big enough, they could even move in to help with the kids for the first little while or if they want to stretch their retirement dollars a lot further, then what they should do is they should sell their place while the market is high but before the race war.
You know, whatever.
Before there's some kind of crash because people realize that the society is unsustainable as it is or whatever, right?
So there is a possibility that we could satisfy both our needs in that we could live in the country and your parents could be around.
It's a possibility, right?
I mean, who knows, right?
So I'm happy to stay in town for a while, years, as far as that goes.
But I want you to be able to spend more time with the kids, right?
Like, I mean... And if our housing is cheaper, you can spend more time with the kids.
Like, you'll have to work less, right?
Because, you know, we've got kids, they're going to be an expense and so on, right?
And if we can cut our housing expenses in half, then you don't have, you can work less, you can spend more time with the kids, right?
I mean, does that seem like even something that might be possible or is that way off the map as far as what you're thinking at all?
I don't know, because my parents live in the house we grew up in and have spent a lot of time building it up, so I'm not sure if they'd want to move from there.
What if we hold their grandchildren hostage?
True. Okay, so they may not want to move, right?
Yeah. He was also saying he'd like us not to be more than an hour's drive.
Because he said he always remembered his grandmother picking up the kids and things like that.
But for me, that's a total luxury.
I don't know. But anyway.
What is a total luxury? Well, to have a grandparent close enough to pick you up and take you for a treat.
Oh, and to be helpful. Yeah, yeah. Okay. Well, yeah, that too.
But also, you know, to live close enough to his parents is a luxury, essentially, as far as I'm concerned.
Does an hour's drive do you any good as far as where you want to live?
It's only mildly better.
Oh, so you're talking some serious boonies, right?
Yeah. It's really expensive.
They're even somewhat on the edge of the city, but anywhere that we could afford to live is just, you know, the house prices are going up and down.
And my partner sort of said, oh, they flatten now.
And I'm like, that's not good enough because we can't afford it.
We've already looked at the mortgage repayments.
It's more than you make. You know?
Well, he can live with one kidney.
Is there a black market among the Chinese for any kind of, I assume, boner pill involving white kidneys?
Now, what about this?
What about the possibility?
Like, you need the most help from the grandparents when the kids are little.
Now, when the kids are little, you don't need a house.
It's nice, but when the kids are little, you don't really need a house quite as much because they're not really as mobile, as active, and so on.
Like, when they're a couple of years old, it's good to have A house so that they can go play in the backyard and so on, right?
So if you have a smaller place when your kids are young, it's not too bad relative to when they get older, right?
Yeah. I mean, we're hoping to have a lot of children, so there will always be smaller children in the family, you know, for hopefully a good 10 years, depending on my fertility.
But let's say just for the first, say, four years, it's not quite as important to have a house.
Like, I'm just looking for sort of flexibility about what might happen.
Okay. So, because if you say, well, the moment I'm pregnant, we have to have a house and three acres, then that's not a place to really negotiate from.
Yeah, okay, that makes sense.
Now, if it is like, well, first of all, if you, I mean, the math is pretty simple.
If you can't afford the house, you can't afford the house, right?
Then it becomes, right?
But if it's a smaller place, and listen, just as a father, Beth, if I had the choice Between having great grandparents around and having a bigger house, I'd choose the grandparents.
Okay. Yeah.
Take a smaller place and have extended family because you want your kids to bond with the grandparents.
It's great having that extra labor around.
You're going to need some sleep.
They can help. Also, just having people who are experienced in raising children around is great because it's a lot of responsibility.
You know what I mean? If it's a real-life human being, you've got to keep alive.
That's right. And I find it scary because I've never, you know, we've never had little kids in my family.
And oh my gosh, some of these kids I see as well, not that kids are monsters or anything, but I've been seeing more and more little kids in action.
And just the chaos is insane.
Like you get this picture perfect idea of how children act and how like home life is.
But it's literally like we went to see his sister and her husband was there with these two kids.
And one's just a year old and the other one's, I think she's three years old.
And he couldn't even eat his sandwich during lunch because he's juggling these children.
Yeah, never going to happen. And it scared me.
I actually just felt my ovaries just go, no, for like a little while.
And then I'm like, I have to get over it.
No, you got to surf that stuff.
Like the kid energy is wild energy.
There's a pretty funny, there's this AB family on YouTube.
And there's a pretty funny little skit where, you know, life as a dad, you know, and he's like, oh, I finally get to sit down and dad!
Like, oh, the moment his ass touched, dad, come see, you know, and it's like, yeah, that's the way it is.
That's the way it is. So, yeah, I mean, now, the more you're connected with your kids, the more close you are, the less of that wildness there's going to be, at least of the non-delightful kind.
And so, yeah, I mean, so some options are...
To stay closer to the grandparents means a smaller place, right?
I mean, like an apartment or a condo rental or something like that.
Is that right? Yeah, well, half an apartment.
I think, yeah, we might be able to...
I haven't looked into the option yet, but that's definitely an option, like somewhere smaller, probably an apartment, but it'd have to be bigger than what he has at the moment as well.
Okay, so now I'm going to introduce you to a little something called fishing for grandparents.
Are you ready? This is shamelessly amoral, so here you go.
Are you ready? All right, I'm ready.
Grandmother. Grandfather.
Look at these beautiful bambinos.
Look at these babies. Aren't they wonderful?
You want to hug them.
You wish to hold them.
Stare into their giant Disney eyeballs.
You wish to bond with them.
Now you are close.
You are wound together like two trees growing into one, like tentacles in a Gordian knot.
You are bound. You are together.
And now watch, grandmother and grandfather, watch as I slowly back them away into the country.
Do you feel like coming along now that you're very closely bonded with them?
Do you feel like giving up, sell your property at the height of its market and economic power and come and live with the children and you can drop little, well, they're not really breadcrumbs, maybe little goldfish crackers or something like that, like little Cheerios.
Come with me into the country with the bambinos that you have bonded with so closely.
You would miss them a lot, would you not?
You would miss loving them and holding them.
No, you do not want to miss any of their major milestones or when they look up with their eyes and say, grandmother, grandfather, I love you so much.
I'm so happy you're in.
Oh, we're backing away a little bit more.
Are you sure you do not want to come with us?
It is wonderful in the country with the children that you have.
You understand how this goes, right?
Yeah, yeah. I could do that for about a week, but I'd punch myself in the head long before that.
Right, so once they're bonded, you know, they might want to actually, right?
So yeah, I mean, as far as sexual market value, forget about sending nude selfies to a guy, just send pictures of your grandkids to your grandparents.
Come with the children to the country where there are white people in peace.
Yeah, that's right. Yeah.
Well, that's the thing. The place that I'm suggesting to him has a very, you know, it's very white.
And I've been kind of red-pilling him pretty hard on race and our identity as well because his grandfather was English.
And I'm like, yeah, English, you know, it's beautiful, isn't it?
All of our culture and all of these beautiful nuances, even though we've got all these people pushing us away from that.
And he's beginning to get it, which has sort of helped with the country argument a little bit.
Yeah. His older brother lives, you know, in another state and his parents are willing to, you know, go and fly up there.
Yeah, yeah. You can find ways.
And listen, I'll tell you this again.
I mean, you know, when my daughter grows up and has a bushel load of kids, like, I'll just move wherever they are.
Yeah. You know, like, I mean, what does it matter?
It's a freaking house.
Just go be with your family.
I mean, like, that's just the way I feel about it.
Houses come and go. I've moved a lot.
And it's like, what could replace time with my grandkids?
Yeah, that's right.
Yeah. And that's true.
I can't love stuff more than people.
And I can't love foundations more than genetics.
Like, I just can't. I mean, it's just stuff.
You know, someone else is going to move into your house.
No one else is ever going to be your grandkids.
That's right, and it's more important we have a house for the children, so they have this concept of place and not being bloody...
Worrying they're going to get shanked at school and, you know, having to kind of deal with, like, all this, like, melting pot.
Or, you know, if it's heavily Chinese, there's just going to be tough stuff with that, too.
You can tell him this story.
This is kind of a funny story.
Okay. So back when they were making the first Star Wars, like 1977, when you were about minus 300 or something like that.
So back when they were making the Star Wars movies, I think it was the second one.
It might be the third one. All right. Anyway, so...
They had guys dressed as the Rebel Alliance.
Just random actors, right?
And then they had guys dressed as stormtroopers, right?
And then they had other guys dressed as sand people.
They had other guys dressed, like just, you know, people in their costumes, right?
Random actors.
Now, it's lunchtime.
Do you know what happens? The stormtroopers sit with the stormtroopers.
Ah. The Sand People sit with the Sand People.
The Jedi sit with the Jedi.
They're just costumes!
And they're still self-sorting by external characteristics.
Yeah, yeah. That's how ingrained it is.
You put on a costume and it's like, well, I can't be sitting with no Jedi.
Yeah, that's right.
It's the Star Wars diversity lunchroom test.
It's a trap!
Yeah. That's how ingrained it is in us.
Yeah, that's right.
And there's nothing wrong with that.
It's just, you know, how we order ourselves.
And I feel like it helps you create a richer interior life because you're not so worried about, like, who you're going to offend and what toes you sort of- Well, you know, diversity might work, but not as long as everyone's race baiting.
Like, that's off the table. Like, if we ever have a civilization where people aren't so addicted to race baiting and white privilege this and, like, I mean, no.
Okay, maybe we can give it a shot when people aren't so addicted to race baiting, but we'll never know if diversity works in the present because people just race baiting all the time.
So, and the IQ stuff.
But anyway, all right. So, as far as this negotiation goes, you're looking for creative win-win solutions, right?
You have to have a rule within yourself that says, I'm not going to bully, I'm not going to force, I'm not going to escalate, and as sure as hell, I'm not going to try and get my way.
Ooh, that's a weird thing, right?
Because we're so used to bullies and people who just, you know, like conflicts and dysfunctional families are like two pieces of paper being pushed together on a flat surface.
Like one goes up and one goes under.
One wins, one loses. And so you have to say in a love relationship, and this is like, I can't ever have my way.
I have to find something that works for us all.
I have to like, and we'll keep working.
We'll keep being creative.
But if you go in with like, well, that's it.
We're moving to the country.
It's like that's going to cause a lot of problems because either you give up what you think is really important, in which case you resent the person, or you get something against the other person's preferences, in which case they're going to resent you.
That's no good.
That's right.
That's really a negotiation rather than that.
You have to be like, I'm not happy with the idea of living in the city and raising kids.
I think it's crazy expensive.
There are ethnic issues, you know, rivers of blood.
Anyway, so I'm not comfortable with that.
So you come in with a feeling, right?
Which is the feeling is, I don't like this idea.
I don't like this. Now, everyone thinks that the solution to their feeling is, well, you got to move to the country.
That may be the solution to the feeling, but you don't know.
Because you come in, this is real-time relationship stuff.
The book is free at freedomainradio.com.
But you come in and you say, I have a feeling.
I don't like the idea of raising kids in the city.
I don't like it. Now, maybe the problem is my perception.
Maybe the problem is where we're living.
Maybe the problem is whatever, right?
Maybe the problem is I read too much Steve Saylor.
I don't know. It could be anything, right?
So, maybe the problem is I'm reading Ann Coulter's great tweets between the lines.
I don't know. Whatever it is, right?
But you come in with a feeling, which is, I don't like something.
And you don't know what the solution is.
So, you're inviting someone to come in and just discuss a feeling rather than, hey, honey, we've got to move to the country.
Which is an ultimatum and it's escalating and there's no negotiation.
You come in like, eh, you know?
Something doesn't feel right.
Something's not sitting right. Let's talk about it.
Without an agenda, without a conclusion.
Because you don't know what the solution is.
The solution could be something neither of you have even thought of.
Yeah, okay.
That makes sense.
Can I ask one more question?
This would be really annoying. How do you build intimacy in a romantic relationship as well?
What's the kind of key to that?
Build intimacy?
Yeah, I feel myself withdrawing sometimes.
I actually just finished your real-time relationships book yesterday, which saved me from making an arse of myself and having a big dumb fight over nothing.
So thank you. But I'm just trying to process, in practical terms, how to build that intimacy with him.
I don't know.
What do you mean by intimacy?
I don't know, like a deeper bond, essentially.
Okay, what do you mean by deeper bond?
Sorry. You both get stormtrooper outfits and you go to lunch.
Anyway. Go sit together.
Yeah, I guess, I don't know, wanting to be around him all the time.
Because I know you said, I remember listening to you talking about you wanted to be with your wife every single day.
And I feel like if I was with him every single day, I'd go insane.
But then I'm like, I want to marry him.
Doesn't make sense. If you were within every single day, you'd go insane.
Yeah. I don't know.
All right. Hang on. Hyperbole exaggeration.
Oh, stop it! Hysteria.
We have confirmed hysteria, citing vector three.
Vector three. I need to, like, tattoo that on my arm.
Like, hmm, hyperbole. All right.
You're going to be a great mom, I'll tell you.
I mean, in all seriousness, you are going to be a great mom.
Okay. Oh, thank you.
So... What's your scenario by which you lose your mind by spending time with your husband?
I think a good example maybe is, so last weekend, we spent all of Saturday together, but mostly in the vicinity of his family.
I thought you were going to say mostly in the hot tub or something.
All right, okay. After marriage, right?
After marriage. I need some pictures, but all right, go on, go on.
And then the next day...
We had this big stuff up where I thought he was going to pick me up.
And then he thought he wasn't supposed to pick me up.
And then he's 20 minutes late and I'm like, where are you?
And he's like, aren't you getting yourself there?
And I'm like, what?
So I got angry at that point.
And I think I got angry because I'd spent more time with him than usual.
And we also kind of, I don't know, we ran out of things to say to each other.
No, no, no. You didn't get angry because you'd spent more time with him than usual.
Yeah. Question.
Is this the big fight that you avoided or is this one that you had?
This is the one that I avoided because I kind of repressed my rage and then got snippy at him, so I didn't really repress it very successfully.
No, no. Snippy is better than raging, so that's a step in the right direction, maybe more than one.
That's right. Yeah.
I just feel like if I spent too much time with him, we run out of things to talk about.
Okay, so let's back that up a sec.
Did you spend more than 20 minutes in the conflict?
Do you mean when we were kind of resolving it?
No, we literally spoke about it for three minutes and I just said, I'm sorry, I'm snippy.
I was just feeling a bit frustrated about that whole situation.
He said, oh, I'm really sorry.
That was a whole big sort of stuff up.
And I said, yeah, we should probably just be a bit more communicative.
And then it was fine.
You know, we just went on with our day, essentially.
Okay, good, good.
That's good.
And it's funny how these things can ruin your day and or not, you know, and I remember being with girlfriends who would get crazy about stuff and be like, it's like watching a treasured art piece slide down the side of a glacier into a killer whale's mouth.
Like, no, why do we have to ruin it?
Why is it going this way?
Like, why does it have to be this way?
So you were waiting for 20 minutes and you thought he was supposed to pick you up, right?
That's right. Now, here's why you shouldn't get mad at him.
No, seriously, I'm appealing to your selfishness here, right?
Yeah. Because if you get – he made a mistake, right?
Yeah. Or maybe you did.
It doesn't really matter, right? But a mistake was made, right?
So if you get mad at him, let's say he made the mistake, right?
So if you get mad at him, you are setting up a principle in the relationship that says, if you make a mistake, you will be punished.
Yeah. Now, you know what that means?
What happens when you make a mistake?
Yeah. No, seriously.
That's what I mean. Like, you want to keep things loosey-goosey because you're going to screw up and he's going to screw up, right?
That's right, yeah. And so be like, sure.
Now, if you say, okay, it's a little annoying.
It's not a big deal. Now, if the next time you make a mistake and he's like, right?
And you're like, hey, remember this?
Like you were 20 minutes late and I'm like, you know, you don't want to – and you can say to him, you don't want to set it up that you get to get mad at me if I make a mistake because then I get to get mad at you and you make a mistake.
And then we've got to start denying mistakes and we'll just – it's horrible, right?
Yeah. Yeah, interesting.
Like everything, it's the Kantian categorical imperative.
Like act such that your action creates a general rule that everyone has to follow.
Okay. And that's what happens in relationships, right?
It's what happens in relationships is if you feel like, well, this other person made a mistake.
And when another person makes a mistake, you have power over that person.
And the question is, how do you handle power over another human being?
This is foundational to all human relationships, but particularly romantic relationships.
How do you handle power over another human being?
Now, when someone has made a mistake, you now have power over that person, because they feel bad, you're in the right, they're in the wrong, you have power.
And how do you handle power over another human being, right?
Are you like the Schindler's List guy in a good mood or the Schindler's List guy in a bad mood?
Right? No, and it's important, right?
And it's important to make this like...
And this is why you say, how do you become intimate?
Well, being intimate is being vulnerable.
And being vulnerable means that you trust the person not to abuse the power that they're going to have over you.
Because when you first meet someone...
Actually, just talking about this with my daughter the other day.
So you first meet someone, you don't really have power over each other.
If it's like a first date kind of thing, maybe if you think they're hot and they don't think you're hot, maybe they've got some power, whatever, right?
But in general, but what happens is as you get more embedded into each other's lives and you get more intimate with each other's hearts and you learn each other's weak spots and soft spots and vulnerabilities and little crazy corners and all that, you gain power over the other human being, right?
Now relationships grow when you use that power wisely and positively, not destructively.
So intimacy stops, curiosity and vulnerability stop, when you no longer believe the other person will use their power benevolently.
And you won't give them any more power, which means you start to hide yourself.
Yeah, that's interesting.
Well, maybe that's my question instead is, how do I be vulnerable?
Do I just accept that he might hurt me, essentially?
Well, no. You earn the right for vulnerability by using your power wisely and benevolently with your partner.
Okay. Right? So you model the behavior that you want in a relationship.
And if it's reflected, great.
And if it's not, you get out if you can't negotiate something better, right?
So you did something great, right?
He did something that really annoyed you or just annoyed you.
And you were honest about it.
You apologized, he apologized, and you moved on and you had a decent day, right?
Yeah. Now that's good because every time you solve a problem, you become less frightened of the next problem.
And every time a problem blows up, you become more scared of the next problem, which means you either become avoidant or things go to hell in a handbasket, which is two sides of the same coin, right?
Right. So every time you successfully solve a problem, you get closer.
Right. And every time you fail to solve a problem, you get further apart.
Right. That's interesting.
Because it was funny. Like, we had a week between the actual, like, makeup session.
Because he apologized after we'd finished up that night.
And I was sort of like, oh, yeah, whatever.
You know, like, went away and got, like, felt all pissy for, like, three days.
And kind of withdrew a little bit.
Wait, sorry. Hang on, hang on. You did what now?
So, wait. Where are we in the story?
Okay. So, um...
Last Sunday, he was supposed to pick me up.
Then there was a week in between. And then Saturday, last night, I saw him.
And we had our little makeup, essentially.
And we didn't see each other that whole week.
Makeup from what? I thought you solved the problem.
I think because I was angry at the time, and I was still angry.
You were still angry about 20 minutes late, him picking you up?
Yeah. That's what I'm talking about.
No, see, you said that you'd solved it in like three minutes.
Because I said, did you spend more than 20 minutes solving the problem?
Well, if the problem's still going on a week later, guess what?
You didn't solve it. Yeah.
Oh, sorry. I was a bit unclear there.
Hang on. Yeah, it was a week later that we were in contact.
Stop it. She's quite slippery.
Okay. Just making a note here.
I'm not being slippery. I'm just not a great communicator sometimes.
Like a bar of soap.
Okay. Okay, got it.
Got it. All right. Wait, sorry.
A bar of...
Hang on, I'm just going to backspace here.
Oily soap. I'm sorry.
I meant... All right.
So it did go on for a week, but when we actually met up and I wanted to solve it, it took three minutes.
Because I didn't want to talk to him over the phone.
I wanted to talk to him face-to-face about it.
And so I was angry for about three days.
And a bit, like, withdraw-y, but then I really had to push myself to sort of talk to him over text, you know, and joke around or whatever.
Yeah, I don't know. I just kind of withdrew a bit last week.
Okay, so you were being dishonest.
With him?
Yeah. Yeah.
I'm not, like, bad.
I'm not trying to say you were being mean liar.
I'm just saying that you were not being frank about what you felt, right?
That's right, yeah.
And I wish I had at the time, but I felt like I was going to kind of let him have it.
And I was doing that whole thing where I was creating that myth in my mind as well, which I'm becoming more aware of, where I'm like, oh, he's just a bad person, he's unreliable, blah, blah, blah, which is completely untrue.
Hang on, one more note here.
No, I'm just kidding. Stop it.
This is going straight on my blog.
Stop it. That's it, I'm out of here now.
All right, fair enough.
So, okay, so was it, so the 20 minutes thing went on for a couple of days, right?
Yeah, I mean, yeah, I was still, I mean, when you say went on, do you mean you were still angry about it?
I think it bothered you. I'm not saying you were grinding your teeth, you know, but it bothered you, right?
Yeah, that's right. Yeah, well, maybe for a good three or four days, to be honest.
Right, right. Now, this I would assume, I mean, it has deep historical origins and so on, but at the more practical and immediate level, Beth, I would assume it's something like this.
I'm angry at him.
I don't want to express my anger at him because it's going to make things worse.
Yeah, that's right.
Which means that it's tough for you to be angry at someone Without it being destructive, or you fear that it's going to be destructive, because when you were a kid, blah, blah, blah, like all the anger was destructive, right?
That's right, yeah. Right? So finding a way to express anger or negative, quote, negative emotions in a way that's not destructive is tough, right?
That's right. Right. So what I would suggest is to be really honest, and that's the whole point of real-time relationships, is it's really hard to be honest in the moment, right?
Yeah. Without falling into manipulation or management or something like that, right?
Or mismaking and...
Yeah, yeah. So, or trying to find some way to make the other person responsible for your emotions.
In other words, well, of course I'm angry because you did X, right?
Yeah. So, I'm angry because of the 20 minutes.
Well, that's not an honest statement.
Because he wasn't doing anything malevolent.
He wasn't doing anything mean.
He wasn't jerking you around.
He didn't have an affair. He didn't lie to you about something.
He made a mistake, right?
Yeah, that's right.
When you look at it completely objectively, yeah.
Right. So, the truth is...
The truth is something like this.
You could say to him.
There's something really important in this 20-minute thing.
The important thing is not what you did.
There's something important.
I don't know what it is, but it's been floating around in my brain like a firefly.
There's something important about it.
I don't know what it is.
It's left me feeling annoyed.
And, you know, please understand, it's not like you made this annoyance.
I've got a whole history before I came along, which you know something about.
But there's something really important, because let me tell you something.
I really care for you.
I really care for you.
And I hate that there's something in me that is interfering with me enjoying your company.
It's not your fault.
And it's because I care about you that I want to talk about this.
I don't know what the answer is.
99% sure it has absolutely nothing to do with you, but it's between my heart and your heart.
And I don't like it.
I mean, I like it when we're close.
I like it when we're happy. I really don't like it when there's something between my heart and your heart.
And I don't know how to cross that gap.
Now then what you're doing, Beth, is you're inviting someone in to help you explore and solve something.
Yeah. Rather than you rat bastard who, you know, like that just drives people away and then you're alone and it's Simon the Boxer and it never works and then you can't get angry and therefore you're all self-monitoring and it's no good, right?
That's right, yeah. Because you're bothered by the fact that it's bothering you, right?
Yeah. And like most people, we have the temptation, you, I, everyone, we have the temptation to say, after this, therefore because of this, right?
Yeah. Yes.
Right? And so after this, therefore because of this.
So you felt bothered after the 20-minute late pickup, and then you say, well, I must feel bothered because of the 20-minute pickup, and it's his fault, and he should...
Right? And so then what you want to do is not talk honestly about your feelings, but control his behavior.
Yeah, that's right.
Because you think that it was his behavior that caused your feelings.
But it's not. Yeah.
It's not. Now, it's not like his behavior is completely unrelated.
It's approximate. It's necessary, but not sufficient.
It's approximate, but not causal.
Okay. So then the question is, what's the really important thing that's happening underneath those 20 minutes of him being late that's really going on?
And that's intimacy, is saying, I'm not going to use your mistake to have power over you, but I'm going to use your mistake to reveal something about me.
That's alarming. So instead of you using power to dominate him, you reverse that whole equation.
And the fact that you have power over him, like he made a mistake, he was 20 minutes late, the fact that you have power over him means not that you dominate him, but that you're vulnerable to him.
Isn't that an amazing thing to do?
That instead of having power over someone and using it to dominate them, having power over someone and using it to be submissive or to be vulnerable to them.
Yeah. Yeah, that's right.
Gosh. It's weird because it's complete reversal, right?
I'm superior. And it would often be in the guise of, quote, comedy or whatever, right?
But it's not funny, right?
No, it's not. No.
And, you know, you don't get any close to those people.
You're just, you know, constantly defending yourself.
You're like, get away from me. That's right.
The thing is, he's got quite a scientific mind as well.
He's very interested in logic.
I'm sure he'd support me in that as well, to explore those feelings.
He's interested in how I feel.
Last night, we were driving up to this town.
I had to drive to this town when we went to ID Dad after he died.
It was quite an upsetting experience for me, obviously, because the last time I'd been there, it had been such a horrifying experience.
I expressed that to him.
I said, oh yeah, it makes me a bit nervous to be back here.
He said, yeah, you're definitely here in different circumstances.
I wasn't crying. I rubbed my nose and immediately said, are you okay?
The fact that he was actually interested enough in my feelings to ask is such a huge deal.
He wasn't interested in your feelings so that he could mess with them.
That's right. That's right.
But he was interested in your feelings so that he could know you better.
Yeah. Yeah, it's really beautiful.
I've been so lucky. And Steph, I thank you so much for all the work you do because I would have found him without you, really.
Well, that's a beautiful thing to say, Beth.
That's a wonderful thing to hear.
And I really, really appreciate that kindness.
And I'm just erasing a couple of these notes here.
No, really, that's a wonderful thing to hear.
I mean, that makes it all worthwhile.
Yeah. So let's just look at the last couple of things that you were talking about in your question here, right?
Sure. You say, how do I age well as a woman in practical terms?
We talked about some of that. Is there a way to replace my sexual power so that I can do good as I get older instead of fading into an invisible middle-aged woman?
Or is it a virtue to accept losing this power?
Now, again, this power is something that you're used to having.
You know, there's that movie, 12 Years a Slave?
Yeah. For women, 12 Years a Hottie.
12 Years of Making Men Your Slave, right?
Because 18 to 30, right?
That's right. Well, I mean, I only kind of, I was a bit of an ugly duckling, so it's only been the last couple of years I've had like orbiters and, you know, men that have been kind of So I'm like, yes, this feels great.
Everybody's looking up TFM on the internet.
Yeah, look it up.
It's great. Yeah, it's worth it.
And Ridonkulous is fun too.
But anyway, all right. So you're not invisible.
You're not invisible if your husband and your children adore you.
Okay. See, sexual power in a general sense is like the first stage of the rocket that gets you into orbit.
You're supposed to discard it.
And I know it's a little tough to discard, right?
But you have to because the whole point of your sexual market value is to get you a great guy who's going to commit to you and help you raise your kids.
Yeah. So...
The way to stay invisible is to not use your sexual market value to get a great guy.
Then you become invisible. Because your sexual market value fades and the quality guys are looking for younger women, so you are invisible, right?
Yeah. You know, like you're on some hot date and there's some middle-aged waiter.
You don't care about the middle-aged weight.
Bring me my damn food. No, I don't want to hear the specials because someone's special is sitting across the table from me, right?
So the way that you end up invisible is you don't cash in your sexual market value for a quality guy.
The way you stay visible is you cash in your general sexual market value for a quality guy and you remain sexy to him and you remain...
Being loved by your children.
That's the trade-off, right?
There's no way to keep that sexual market value.
Yeah. There's no way to keep it.
It's a lottery ticket that expires, right?
It is, you know, men age like wine, women age like milk.
It's just the way of the world, right?
So you can't keep this sexual market value thing that's general, gets you attention from men as a whole, not going to happen.
Not going to happen. You try that, you will fail.
It's a will-o'-the-wisp.
Like, there's this old myth, right?
The will-o'-the-wisp with these dancing lights that lead men into the marshlands and then they get lost and some horrible thing happens.
I can't remember what happens at the end.
So, your sexual market value, you got a lottery ticket, but it's running out.
It's running out. So, you've got to cash it in.
It sounds like you've got a great guy.
Yeah. And then you're saying, well, how do I keep my sexual market value?
My question is, why do you want to?
Ew. Ew. No, seriously.
You want to be loved by your husband.
Who cares about the guys on the street corner or the guys at the club?
Who cares about that, right?
Yeah. That makes sense.
It's to build the foundation of your family, not to have guys buy you drinks into your 40s.
Yeah, that's right.
Yeah. I just don't want to be one of those annoying middle-aged women.
It's a bit of a stereotype.
There's these like Women get to middle age and they just seem to be annoying and people don't want to be around them.
I mean, maybe it's a bit of a fear of abandonment or something.
Or a fear of being isolated because people just go, oh, middle-aged woman, I don't want to talk to that.
It's always in our culture and everything like that.
I mean, obviously I don't want to talk to the hotties.
Because they're tragic losers.
Yeah, okay. No, they are because it's not that complicated.
Like, women are hot and men want to buy them things.
Yeah. And women should trade in their hotness to get a commitment to be a good person and to be, you know, you want to be sexy for your husband until the day you die, right?
Yeah. But... It's just for your husband.
I mean, come on.
Right? I mean, come on.
You've got to be kidding.
Have you never picked up a magazine in your entire freaking life?
But my social construct.
Yeah. It's a little tough for women to say we want to break out of sexual stereotypes when they keep preying on men's wallets through the state.
That's right. You know, we don't want to be objectified as sex objects.
It's like, well, first of all, you can to do, which is why the malls are all about how to make women look pretty.
So please don't tell me you don't want to be objectified.
And secondly, even if you don't, you certainly don't want to take money from the government because that's mostly run by male politicians and it's mostly men who pay into the tax system.
So you don't want to objectify men for their wallets against their will if you don't like men objectifying women with their participation.
Right? So women, you know, is the old thing I saw in some store in the mall.
It was a makeup store. And you know what it said?
Tools of the trade.
Yeah. Tools of the trade.
That is so honest.
And women weren't saying, oh, that's so...
Everybody knows.
Everybody knows. You look pretty, you look hot, and you get...
Hopefully you get a more quality guy.
I mean, if it's all just vanity, then it's all bullshit and hypergamy and our selected monkey branching crap, right?
But the middle-aged women is like, this is why there's this, well, you know, a woman only comes into her sexual prime when she's 42 or she's in her 40s.
Like, no, she doesn't. No, that's just a lie.
That's just a lie that's made up to try and prop up the sexual market value of women falling into the great chasm of who gives a crap.
Yeah. Because you can't go back in time.
It's like, fundamentally, it's about the eggs, honey.
You can Botox your face.
You can't Botox your dino eggs.
Just not going to happen, right?
I don't want a kid with eight tentacles and four heads.
Like, it's just not going to happen, right?
Yeah. Or I don't want to say, wow, you know, it's great that you have an income and you've had a career, so now we can spend $120,000 on IVF treatments in the hopes of getting maybe one kid.
Yeah, that's right. When I share a cup with a 23-year-old and she has twins growing out of her armpits.
That's right. That's right.
Yeah. So that's a tragic situation for women.
Yeah. And they know...
I mean, the feminists with their...
It's like the women who say, well, I put on 50 pounds and I'm just not getting as much male attention.
It's like, no shit, Sherlock!
You picking up any homeless guys lately?
No! Why? No resources!
Oh, my God.
I mean, the women who are getting fat and say, well, I'm just not getting as much male attention.
It's like, you will from your doctor and possibly a mortician, but no, not for any men with choices because overweight women, you lose your period.
You are hard to have sex with.
It's kind of gross.
You got stuff growing where it's hard to clean.
And... Fertility is down and life expectancy is down and it's going to be more expensive to keep you alive.
And it's like, who wants that?
Come on. You should love me at any size.
Nope. Nature says no.
That's true. That's true.
You know, if women stop treating men as tax livestock, then I'll believe it.
Then they don't want men to treat them as sex objects.
It's like, hey, I tell you what, I'll stop ogling your boobs if you stay out of my wallet.
How's that for a deal? Oh, that's terrible.
That's true. But given that you're not going to stay out of my wallet.
So no, you don't want, you're not going to fade into an invisible middle-aged woman.
You ever want to see some really happy women?
You see some really happy...
I remember this once, being on vacation.
And I've seen this a whole bunch of times.
Maybe you have too, but...
I've seen this a whole bunch of times, Beth.
I remember being in Florida once.
I was parking my car. And there was this...
Old...
Couple, like the first half of the movie, Cocoon.
Like this old couple... Guy had a hat on.
The woman had a big flower print dress.
You know they had just come out of church or something like that.
And they were walking along and they saw my daughter and they knelt down and said hi to her and we chatted for a little bit and they were really happy.
This is old school, man.
The guy flipped open his wallet.
That's what you had before cell phones.
Flipped open his wallet. Showed me a picture of his family.
They had six kids.
They had like 19 grandchildren.
They had like five great-grandchildren and they were some seriously happy people.
Because they had a great life.
They know they'd left a legacy.
They seemed like really nice people.
They were great with my daughter, probably pretty damn good parents, especially given the times that they grew up in.
They were never going to be lonely.
They were always going to be people at their dinner table, and they were going to be wall-to-wall Niagara of tears when they died.
Never had any question about the impact they'd had on the world.
They had taken ham sandwiches and alchimied them into actual human beings.
I'm not kidding. They had taken corn that grows in cow shit and turned it into human brains that get up and walk and talk and do the most astounding things.
And they are part of the great cycle of life and the great cycle of being.
And I have seen so many grandmothers who just love it.
They love it when the grandkids crawl on their laps.
They love to cook for everyone.
They love it when the house is full of noise and laughter and chaos and fun.
And it's a great life.
You think they're invisible? They are not invisible.
They're about as invisible as gravity.
They're about as invisible as sunlight.
Now, the women who just had a whole bunch of careers and a whole bunch of stupid sexual relationships that went nowhere and led nowhere, and then those women who fall off the cliff in their late 30s and early 40s into the who-gives-a-shit land, they then have another 50 years to go.
Yeah. And they don't have a house full of noise.
And they don't have people who care about what they think.
And they don't have people who care about what their health is like.
And they have their jobs, and then they retire, and what do they do?
They wander around complaining that nobody pays them any attention.
But you didn't fill the world with life.
You had the power to create life, you crazy women.
You had the power to create life, and you didn't?
What are you, crazy? Creating a life is much more than...
Writing a great song or penning a great novel, you created it.
You have the chance to create a human being and you didn't.
You damn well deserve to be lonely because you broke the great chain of being.
Someone sacrificed to raise you.
Someone gave up significant boob and ass elasticity in order to feed you.
Some woman had stretch marks that you could probably fly a TIE fighter down and Bomb the belly button like you're sending plasma down to the depths of the Death Star.
Okay, a couple of Star Wars analogies, but you know what I'm saying, right?
Like somebody, some woman's belly popped out and never quite popped back in.
So she looked like half a kangaroo leaning over for the rest of her life and got up in the middle of the night and fed you and had sore nipples and was tired and scared and nervous when you got a cold and, oh my gosh, she's got a fever.
What's the temperature? Do we go to the doctor?
Who do we phone? Someone went through all of that for you and you couldn't be asked.
To sit down and squeeze out a few pups to be surrounded by life, love and laughter in your old age.
You selfish, selfish crone.
You selfish, boring, inconsequential, who gives a shit and I don't care that they don't care kind of person.
Create life if you can.
Now for the people who can't, you know, got your fertility problems, maybe you just never met the right person.
I sympathize. I really do.
And I'm not including those people in this particular rant or this particular equation.
But... When you have children who look at you with a serious thrill just when you come home.
You know, like I come home when I'm out, my daughter like crashes into me, you know, jumps up, big hug.
Like it's a wonderful, wonderful thing.
You know, we had to head out the other day.
We went to a town not too far.
We spent two hours in a playground.
We went and bought soaps.
You know, things that I'd never do otherwise.
And then we found a little restaurant that kind of looks like a cavern and we played Battleship while we ate.
I mean, it was just like a perfect day and just a wonderful time and you can't ask for more out of your life.
And the idea of replacing all of that love and all of that Amazing connection with...
It'd be great if I got wolf-wistled when I'm 45.
Like, ugh, what a sad waste that would be.
Yeah. You will not become your mother, Beth.
You will not become your mother.
Because she became invisible, which is why she had to lash out so much, right?
Yeah. Yeah.
And she died alone, you know?
Yeah. She wasn't found for a week.
And she should have died alone.
That's justice. That's fair.
Yeah. Women, and there's some men too, but I think a little bit more, women need attention so much that if they can't get in a positive way, they'll get it in a negative way.
If you won't call them, they'll sue you.
Yeah. Just notice me, notice me, notice me.
Did she have pets that ate her?
You are so blunt.
Yeah, she had two dogs.
I don't know if they ate her.
I'll try not to think about it.
No, it's nice to think that she may have provided some value at some point in her life.
Oh, God.
No, it's nice that she couldn't bring anything positive to the people in her life.
Maybe she surrendered some tendons and calories to some hungry dogs.
Maybe that's the sum total of the positive stuff she brought to the planet, other than you, of course.
Thanks. Yeah, that's right.
Those dogs were very happy dogs.
They were very what? They were very happy dogs.
You mean because she died or because they finally got to eat her?
I don't know. And then after they ate her, they became very selfish and neurotic.
The curse passed to the canines.
That's right. I mean, yeah, she got her comeuppance in the end.
Well, she chose... Well, that's what she chose in the end, essentially.
Oh, yeah. No, absolutely.
Life is funny because life is not fair in so many ways.
But if you look for fairness in life, you will find it in a lot of ways.
And part of what I do, Beth, and I think you'll appreciate this as somebody who did focus on voluntary relationships in the family.
Part of what I'm all about is let's stop subsidizing nasty people.
I'm very much against subsidies in the business world.
I'm very much against subsidies in the artistic world.
I'm very much against subsidies in the personal world.
Do not subsidize bad people.
If you withdraw from bad people and everyone says, wow, you know, if you're a bad person, if you're selfish and you're mean and you're nasty, you're going to be alone.
What that is is a kindness to other people who still have the chance to change.
That's right. So we, in ostracizing evil people, and I mean people who, like, you've tried and it doesn't work and it just, it's worse.
By ostracizing evil people, not only are we isolating the effect that they can have on other people, which is great.
You know, I'm glad that I don't have any contact with my family before I got married, for sure.
I don't think I would have ended up getting married if I didn't, but particularly after.
I had a child. Because my mother has no effect on my child.
That's been sealed off, right?
The contagion has been contained, right?
And that's good.
That's what you want, right?
You want something that is toxic to not be floating through your house.
Like doing nasty things to the ecosystem of the minds therein.
And so...
To not subsidize immorality.
There are bad people in your life.
Cut them off if you can't fix it.
Because you shouldn't be harmed by their actions.
Those around you, in particular kids, shouldn't be harmed by their actions.
And they shouldn't get subsidized.
One of the central tenets of philosophy is justice.
And that means sometimes you have to turn your heart to just ice.
Yeah, that's right.
I mean, I'm Christian, right?
I'm Catholic. It's this kind of like, forgive people 77 times, but a lot of times people don't understand that passage, and the passage is if they genuinely apologize.
Mum never apologized, ever.
Nothing she ever did was wrong.
For a long time, for a few years, she was on some pills, and I was talking to my aunt about it recently, and she was like, oh yeah, she was great.
She was great. There was no problems.
And I remember during that time, I had asked her some questions about my childhood, and she was like, oh, but you upset me when you did that.
So no apologies. So she wasn't better.
She was just quieter.
I realized. Yeah, she may have been just sort of subdued or zoned out or spaced out based on whatever she was taking.
But it's a funny thing, right? So you go to people who abused you as a child, and you ask them about it.
And then they say, well, that's upsetting.
It's like, well, you know what was upsetting?
Being abused as a child!
That's right. If not upsetting people is some big virtue, why did you abuse me as a child?
Yeah, how do you think I felt?
But, you know, when they have power over you, they'll abuse you.
And then when they don't have power over you, they'll guilt and manipulate you.
I mean, that's just, that's almost inevitable, right?
And I was thinking about, let me just wedge this in, and I'm sorry for hijacking this, but this is something I've been thinking about.
And so, you know, I've had some criticisms of what is called defooing or separating people.
For psychological survival from your family of origin.
And it's interesting, you know, and it just struck me the other day.
I can't remember why, but it popped into my head.
That, you know, because I say, and I think it's a reasonable thing to say, which is I say, well, go talk to your parents.
You know, go bring up your childhood.
Go talk about things with your parents.
Because be honest.
Be honest in your relationship. Because if you can't be honest, you can only be as honest as your least honest relationship.
That's sort of a basic reality in life.
Like a chain is only as strong as its weakest link.
You get that sort of idea. And so I was thinking, like, so why did parents get so mad at this very idea that kids would come and talk to them about their childhoods?
Because earlier I thought, well, you know, defensive and this and that.
But then I thought, okay, well, okay, but what if?
And I'm not saying this is true for everything, but what if?
What if the abuse was criminal in nature?
Right, what if it was sexual abuse?
What if it was physical abuse above and beyond what is allowed legally?
What if it was starvation?
What if it was a lack of medical care?
Like all of the stuff that would get you holed up in front of a court.
What if the abuse that was committed against the children wasn't just screaming or spanking, but what if it was criminal?
Well, how do criminals feel when they have a possibility of being exposed?
Well, they feel pretty angry. They feel pretty scared.
They get pretty hateful.
And I thought for all of those people who've been out there saying, oh, this family separation is defooing, it's culty, it's bad, it's terrible.
There's a possibility that for some portion of these families, you are serving the needs of criminals.
You're serving the needs of people who weren't just bad parents, but were criminals.
Maybe pedophiles, maybe starving, beating, Otherwise, abusing, not getting healthcare for harming their kids.
It's just something to think about when everyone gets mad.
Well, when some people get mad about this kind of stuff.
It's possible, and there's a reasonable case to be made, that by pushing back so violently against this idea, you're just serving the needs of criminals.
That's right. That's right.
I was speaking to a couple of friends a few days ago, and that was the same criticism they had of your work.
And I just said to them, would you let an abusive person continue to abuse you?
They're like, no. And I'm like, well, it's the same with your family.
It doesn't matter. You don't need to be abused by your family just because society says you need to love your parents.
You can love them, but you love them from afar.
You can hope good for them.
I don't have any control, fundamentally.
The only control I have over whether I love someone is my own commitment to virtue.
I have no control over whether I love someone outside of my own commitment to virtue.
Because I know what love is.
Love is our involuntary response to virtue if we're virtuous.
Now, I can't make other people virtuous, but I can work on making myself a better person.
So when people say, I'm not saying you're saying this, but when people say, you have to love your mom, it's like I don't have that power.
Love is an involuntary response.
It's like saying to someone who just took a crap, you need to take a crap.
It's like, I don't have that power.
I'm empty, baby. I'm empty now.
I don't have the power to make myself love people.
Love, and of course, bad people, this is part of the subsidy, right?
Bad people want you to love them without them earning it because they want that subsidy.
They want the effect without the cause.
And I will not let myself be heart raped.
I will not let myself be love raped.
Which is where I, like, if a woman, if you said to a woman, well, you, you owe some guy sex, you know, like that, that's terrible.
No, you don't. You, but you say to someone, you owe someone love.
No, that's a form of heart rape.
I think it's reprehensible and horrible.
And no decent person would ever, ever say that.
I would never say to my wife or my daughter or friends, you owe me love.
I deserve your love.
You've got to love me. I mean, that's a confession that I've done nothing to earn it.
And I've done probably a lot.
To push it away. To destroy any capacity for love in others.
I will not subsidize.
I will not subsidize.
Because whatever you subsidize, you get more off.
Whatever you tax, you get less off.
And so if you want more evil, just subsidize evil.
And I will not do it because evil is the great enemy of philosophy.
And whatever I can do to undermine evil, I will do.
Yeah. Absolutely.
Yeah. I mean, I think I, you know, I still love mom and I, you know, I loved her in the, I wanted good, good things for her, but those good things, like good is also justice, right?
And I, I did want her to have her comeuppance.
It was a horrible comeuppance.
What did you love about your mother?
What did you love about your mother?
I think, well, that's a good question.
What did I love about her?
Can you, I wonder, can you love Someone in a kind of a more abstract way, so you want good for them.
No. Okay. No, that's like saying, well, I'm 350 pounds, but I'm thin in an abstract way.
Okay. I have heart disease, but I'm healthy in an abstract way.
Yeah. Yeah.
I mean, yeah, it's a hard one, isn't it?
Like maybe love's not the right word for it.
Yeah. Yeah.
Well, I'm now wondering if I completely kind of detached as well.
You're going to have to use the same word for your children and for your husband, Beth.
Don't poison that word.
Keep it holy.
Keep it for those who deserve it, who've earned it, not people who've harmed you.
Because when you said, and I was made a little bit of fun of you, but in all seriousness, I genuinely sympathize.
You said, she destroyed me.
How can you love someone who destroyed a child?
If it wasn't your mother, but a friend of yours, mother, would you say, I love that woman?
Yeah, true. True.
Yeah. You know, to be virtuous, you have to hate evil, essentially.
Yeah. I know Jesus did.
Yeah, that's right. That's right.
Yeah. And I wish the world was different and she could have gotten better, but that just wasn't it.
I mean, maybe it's just wishing a good for her, but she chose differently.
Well, this is the challenge with the Catholic thing, too, because inside your mother was a soul.
Yeah. And inside your mother was a soul that had the capacity to connect with God.
It had the capacity.
This is one of the challenges with the concept of the soul is that the free will remains relatively eternal, whereas a more physiological view says by the time you've got those habits grooved into your brain, you fundamentally don't have free will by the end of it.
And it doesn't mean you're not responsible.
Like if someone gets drunk and drives a car, they're not responsible for crashing, but they sure are responsible for drinking and driving, right?
We don't let them off the hook because they were drunk, right?
And so if somebody makes a whole series of bad decisions and ends up with diminished free will later on in their life, we don't say, oh, the poor dear, she doesn't have any choice.
It's like, no, she doesn't have any choice because all the bad choices she made earlier.
That's right. Well, it's, I mean, part of our theology as well is that God can cut you off at one point as well.
This is part of being Catholic.
If you mortally sin too many times, basically God goes, well, you obviously don't want it.
It's now crossed over to mortal, not venal, and there's no way back, right?
Yeah. That's right.
And you can confess, but you basically won't be saved.
So you've made your choice in the end, and sometimes your choice is an eternal choice.
And I believe that immorality, even evil, Is survivable if you can provide restitution.
So take a silly example, right?
So you steal someone's bicycle when you're a kid.
And then you feel bad about it.
And you fix their bike, you give them new tires, and you return their bike with a big apology.
Okay, you've made restitution, right?
Now, evil...
Becomes unrecoverable when restitution becomes impossible.
Now, if you really, really harm a child, Beth, is restitution possible?
Can you make that child whole again?
No. No, you can't.
No, you can't.
It is unrecoverable.
And that doesn't mean the child can't have a happy life.
But it will never be undone within the mind of a child.
So if someone steals your bike, fixes it, brings it back, you're like, okay, that's kind of cool.
You'll probably forget about it after a while, right?
But if you get beaten and abused or raped as a child, you'll never undo that.
Again, I don't want to say you'll forever be miserable or whatever, but you can never be the person that that never happened to.
That's right.
And so because restitution is impossible, then forgiveness is impossible.
Because forgiveness requires that someone make you whole.
And if someone cannot make you whole, they can't be forgiven.
Yeah. And it's not like you resent.
It's impossible. Somebody steals $100 from you and gives you back $150 with an apology.
All right. You know, like I took a vacuum cleaner years ago, I took a vacuum cleaner down to put in my car, my hands were full, I left it by the elevator, went to the car, came back, it was gone, right?
Because I guess someone thought that maybe it was blah, blah, blah.
So I called the police, they were useless as anything, right?
Yeah. And then, so I went and left notes everywhere saying, if you took this vacuum cleaner by mistake, please, I need it, you know, whatever, right?
Next morning, I woke up and somebody had left the vacuum cleaner in front of my apartment door.
There was no note. There wasn't like I'm so sorry.
It was just there, right? So I'm like, okay, that's fine.
You know, it cost me... 40 minutes of putting signs up.
It's not a huge deal. And I, you know, it's not like if I met that person, I'm like, you bastard.
You know, like, it's fine, right?
Restitution-ish, right? That's fine.
But if someone has done something to you to the point where, like, okay, let me ask you this.
How much money would you take to have had the childhood you had?
Oh gosh, nothing. Right.
There's no amount of money, right?
Like if somebody said, well, I'll give you $10 million to have that shitty childhood for 20 years, right?
Or $20 million or $50 million, you'd be like, nah.
There's no amount of money you take, right?
Yeah. And that's why you know that no forgiveness is possible because there's no possibility of restitution.
Yeah. Now that's on the receiving end.
When you lose free will as an evil person is when you commit the act which pushes you past the point of restitution.
Right? So you snap at your kid, okay, you apologize, you go for ice cream, you talk about it, it's fine.
It actually may be a better thing because you learn something and blah blah, right?
But when you commit to continuing to harm your children, In particular, it's the worst thing for children because children aren't there voluntarily.
Adults can get up and leave anytime they want, right?
I'm not saying it's easy, but they can.
Kids don't choose to be...
And, you know, if you're in a bad marriage, you chose to marry the person.
You dated them, you got engaged, you married, you're staying.
I'm not saying it's easy, but you're there by choice.
Children are not there by choice, which is why you have to have the very highest possible standards for your interactions with children because they're not there by choice.
That's right. And so if you harm a child...
Beyond what you can restore, it means you will never be a good person again, because it's impossible for you to undo the evil that you have done, which means you have no capacity.
This is why I tell people, treat your children well.
It's not just because I love kids and want them to be happy, but I care for the hearts, minds, and souls of people who are doing evil, and I'm saying to them, stop.
Stop before it's too late because one day you will wake up.
You will do something and it doesn't even have to be a big thing.
It could just be a little thing that's the last thing, the last domino to fall, the last straw that breaks the camel's back.
It could just be snapping or snarling or being mean or kicking over someone's Jenga or not caring that your kid drew something beautiful.
It doesn't have to be a big thing.
It could be a little thing and it's that last thing that breaks the cord, that breaks your capacity to restore what you have broken, fix what you have destroyed.
And when you said earlier, I was destroyed, what I got from that is my mother destroyed herself.
Because she could not make me whole again.
And after that, she could not find her way back to the light at all because there was no light left in her universe because there was nothing left that she could do to undo the evils that she had done.
And that's every single day.
Your first cigarette is probably not going to kill you.
Your 10,000 cigarette might somewhere in between is that dangerous cigarette.
You have that one cigarette and you're going to fucking die.
And that's the same thing with evil deeds.
You just had one too many, restitution is impossible, and you are locked in hell forever.
Yeah, that's right.
That's right. - Yeah. And she knew she was broken, too.
I remember her admitting it once.
You know, she said she was broken.
And I'm like, well, you can maybe unbreak yourself.
But, you know, the more I listen to you, I wonder.
It's too late. It was probably too late.
It may have been too late when you were born.
Yeah, that's right.
In which case you were just surviving a predator.
That's right. No more free will than a tiger in a cage.
That's right. Yeah.
Like, thank God she's dead.
You know, she won't continue it on with my children.
Like, I don't ever have to worry about her showing up and trying to impose herself.
Oh, yeah. No, I mean, you can get a fair amount of leash from a dysfunctional family, a fair amount of latitude.
But when the kids come along, a lot of times, man, they circle back pretty hard because now they have power over you.
Yeah, she did that to my older brother.
Did it to my older brother.
He lives in Thailand. Went over to Thailand and just hung around his local town trying to get to his son.
It was terrifying.
Right. Yeah, so now she's dead.
We're just lucky.
And so now, the lesson to get out of this, I think, Beth, is to look at your relationship.
Not that you're going to do evil, but that intimacy follows the same pattern.
That if you falsify or avoid or diminish or dismiss or rage or manipulate, then you're putting more and more stress on that thread.
And every time you're honest and every time you're close and every time you connect, then that thread gets stronger.
And every time you lie and manipulate or rage, the thread gets weaker.
And you want to make that thread stronger and stronger because that's joy, that's love, that's connection.
And so with your boyfriend, with your conversations with him, be mindful of that.
Because love can die.
And it dies through pettiness and selfishness and bossiness and dominance and self-righteousness.
They're not evil things.
Like you're not beating up a child or something like that.
They're not evil things. Yeah.
But a desert is not a whole lot more comfortable than hell.
Yeah. All right. Well, will you let me know how it goes?
Will do. Thank you so much, Steph.
I really appreciate it. You're very, very welcome.
Thank you everyone so much for listening and for watching and for participating in this amazing, greatest conversation in the world.
I really, really appreciate that.
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