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Sept. 7, 2018 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

03:35:52

4187 Wrong About Sexual Market Value? - Call In Show - September 5th, 2018

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	Hey everybody, it's Stefan Molyneux, Freedomain.
	Hope you're doing well. Ooh, you know what's coming up?
	So close, so close that you can almost taste it.
	That's right, Phyllis Schlafly's Gateway Eagle Council, September 14th to 16th, 2018.
	And you can catch me speaking...
	There. And I'm looking forward to meeting with everyone and pressing the flash and chatting and getting caught up and all of that.
	So that is September 14th to 16th, 2018 in St.
	Louis. And you can check it out at phyllisschlafly.com forward slash council for the show we had today.
	We had five, count them five callers.
	The first, oh, it's back to one of my favorite places in the world to be, talking about universally preferable behavior.
	The Rational Proof of Secular Ethics.
	You can find the book for free at freedomainradio.com.
	But I had a debate with somebody about UPB. Hopefully, it clarifies some things.
	Now, the second caller.
	So, she had a troubled youth, to put it mildly.
	And she had a baby with a man who's now in prison.
	She's remarried. And she's not sure whether she wants to give her wonderful new husband a baby, even though she kind of promised him that she would.
	So, well, we had a good conversation about integrity and the consequences of breaking vows to loved ones, at least without renegotiating them first.
	The third caller, I have a very complicated relationship to Nietzsche.
	Friedrich Nietzsche, the German aphorist slash perhaps philosopher.
	So we talked about his influence and his effect.
	The caller thought that Nietzsche had more to do with the 20th century even than Marx, and we discussed that in great detail and great depth.
	So hopefully that will be of interest to you.
	I'm sure it will be. The fourth caller is an interesting question.
	Should rich people pay higher fines for things like speeding?
	Because otherwise, don't they just have a license to speed because it costs them so little relative to their income or resources?
	Now, the fifth caller gave up a raped baby for adoption, but had a lot of questions, a lot of back and forth about all of that and what should happen from here.
	And my first, well, you know what, you'll hear my very first question.
	I'm sure it's the first question on your mind as well.
	But it's a powerful story and a cautionary tale, and I hope that you will check it out.
	So thank you so much for listening.
	For watching, please don't forget to help out the show at freedomainradio.com slash donate.
	All right. Well, up first today, we have Matthew.
	He wrote in and said, In terms of behavior, you set up imaginary scenarios where certain behaviors are moral, such as rape, murder, theft, and so on.
	For example, if two people are in a room and theft is moral, then both people need to be continually trying to steal from each other in order to act morally.
	Therefore, it's impossible to be moral and also constantly trying to steal because the situation becomes completely unworkable as everyone is always stealing from everyone else.
	What I want to know is how does UPB prove a situation is immoral where, for example, it is moral to attempt to rape slash steal slash commit fraud, but only on occasions?
	Surely in this situation both parties can always be acting morally as long as they are only trying to commit the act every now and then.
	That's from Matthew. Hey Matthew, how you doing?
	How's it going? Good.
	So, UPB is universally preferable behavior, which is my answer to the void of ethics that comes out of the collapse of state and religiosity as the foundation for just moral actions in the West.
	The foundation of religion has been under attack, we'll be talking about Nietzsche, I think, during this show, since the 1800s, since the 1700s, you really could say.
	And really the foundation of state justification kind of fell after the First and Second World Wars for a variety of reasons.
	So I worked on a system of ethics and the one thing that's kind of missing here is these are examples as to why it probably can't be universal to have theft as a universally moral action, universally preferable behavior.
	But the other thing, Matthew, is do you think that it's possible For me to want you to take my property and also call it theft.
	No, that's impossible.
	Right. So if theft is universally preferable behavior, then I should want you to steal from me.
	But if I want you to take my property, Well, then it can't be theft.
	So theft can't be universalized, not just practically and that everyone's stealing from everyone else, but even theoretically, like from an abstract standpoint, it's a self-contradictory position.
	It's the same thing like, if I want a woman to have sex with me, I can't then claim it's rape, at least unless I'm at a Title IX. And It's the same thing with assault.
	If I want someone to do physical damage to me, I want them to take a tooth out or something, then if I want them to do it, then it's not assault.
	So that is one of the central proofs for UPB. I just kind of wanted to mention that to close off that particular circle.
	So the on occasion thing, I don't quite understand.
	It's sort of because the first word is universally.
	So universally means...
	Everywhere, at all times, no matter what.
	So how do you break the universality to say, well, it's okay or could be theoretically okay to steal on occasion?
	Well, I was kind of thinking that, you know, maybe...
	They could always be kind of thinking about doing something immoral and thinking maybe in the future I might need to do something immoral in that regards.
	See, I like the theory.
	I'm just trying to work out some of the critiques of it in my own head, which is why I asked the question.
	But what would thoughts have to do with ethics?
	Because it's universally preferable behavior and thoughts cannot be immoral.
	They can be correct or incorrect, they can be valid or invalid, they can be accurate or inaccurate, but a thought cannot be immoral.
	So what about planning to commit a crime?
	Is that immoral?
	Could that be counted as immoral?
	Like if you're planning, say you're planning to commit a major theft, so wouldn't that be immoral?
	Well, sure, of course. So that's obviously immoral, yeah.
	Of course, yeah, because the whole point of self-defense is you have to be allowed to protect yourself prior to being murdered.
	So if somebody comes at you with a clear intention to do you physical harm, then prevention being the better part of cure, for sure.
	But that's not a thought.
	Like sitting there idly thinking, saying, boy, I could really kill that person.
	That's not a thought.
	It would have to be something that is empirically validated or could be empirically validated.
	So if you were to hire someone to kill your wife, there would have to be a paper, as opposed to I had the thought, you know, there would have to be some action that you had taken that was empirically verifiable that would indicate that this was your planned course there would have to be some action that you had taken that Does that make sense?
	So it is still the actions, not the thoughts that you're judging.
	Yeah, that's correct.
	So I guess the reason I was asking the question is because couldn't it potentially maybe, I want to see how you'd refute it, be potentially moral for two different people to plan potential thefts or potential immorality against each other in the future?
	If it was mutually beneficial for both of them to do that, couldn't that potentially be universally preferable?
	Can you give me more of a concrete example?
	Do you mean like an insurance fraud or it's like I steal something from you, you steal something from me and we both claim it to be genuinely stolen and therefore we get money?
	Is that what you mean? I'm sort of, yeah, I'm just sort of throwing it out there.
	Then the issue would not be the theft.
	The issue would not be the theft from each other.
	The issue there would be the theft from the insurance company because we would be committing fraud against the insurance company, right?
	We would be saying something was unwittingly stolen from me when in fact it was wantingly stolen from you.
	So we would be lying and defrauding not from each other or stealing not from each other because we had both agreed to the, quote, theft, but we would be stealing from the insurance company.
	Through fraud, and that would be the immorality.
	Okay, so I guess an example would be, so maybe you're like, you've got two starving families who have a small supply of food, and they both want to survive, like they both want their family to survive, so they would both potentially plan to maybe steal a few pieces of food off the other.
	Would that be...
	Wouldn't that be preferable for both of the people in that situation, both those families, to maybe plan to steal or steal maybe a little bit in the future?
	Could that potentially be universally preferable in that?
	Obviously, it's not universally preferable, but it's because one person's getting stolen from.
	But I'm wondering if it could be possible for both of them to theoretically be moral to steal from another group in order to feed their own family.
	But if they're both planning on doing it at the same time, I think maybe I'm overthinking it.
	Well, no. I mean, they're fine.
	I don't understand. So are you saying that if somebody's starving, is it moral for them to steal?
	Yeah. Well, more that if two families are starving, is it moral for those families to steal off each other in order to save their own family?
	But if they're both starving, how can they steal from each other because neither of the families has any food?
	That's a really good point.
	Yeah, so I'm just trying to work out how I could answer this question in my head in a simple way.
	Sure. Now, as far as stealing if you're hungry goes, no, you can't steal when you're hungry.
	Hunger is not an argument, right?
	I'm hungry and therefore I can steal.
	Because stealing is labor and planning, right?
	And so, if you have the forethought, the planning and are willing to invest the labor in stealing, well, why aren't you doing work that you can get paid for so you can buy food?
	And also, how did you end up in a situation Well, you're just starving and have no options.
	You have no friends. You have no family.
	You have no community. You have no church.
	You have no one who's willing to help you.
	You have no one who's willing to put $5 in your cup.
	Like, this makes no sense, right?
	I mean, people don't just wake up completely destitute with no friends, no reason.
	There's a whole series of processes that go on through that.
	Need is not a valid argument for overcoming moral objections, right?
	For overcoming moral rules.
	I mean, I'm sure you've heard that there are some Afghan migrants in Europe and one of them raped a boy in a German swimming pool and he said it was a sexual emergency.
	Right? So, he really, really, really felt that he needed to rape that boy.
	Well, sorry, still immoral.
	Like, need does not trump.
	Moral rules. And so the fact that you're hungry, you know, hey, I sympathize, man.
	You want to come mow my lawn or clean out my basement or, you know, I'll give you some food ahead of time so you have the energy to do it.
	Or if you don't have that, then maybe, well, first of all, you should, let's say you got sick.
	Well, you should have had insurance, right?
	The whole point of having insurance is to try and bypass these things.
	Or why don't you, if you're hungry, if you're If you need medicine and so on, why is there no one in your life who's willing to help you?
	Are you a complete and total asshole to the point where nobody wants to give you the time of day, let alone 20 bucks for a meal?
	So what did you do to alienate all the people in your life?
	People are generally born into a family.
	And so why did your family want to have nothing to do with you?
	They meet people in school. Why do you have no friends?
	They meet people in college. Why do you have no friends?
	They meet people at work. Why do you have no one who cares for you?
	And it probably... It has something to do with the fact that people who end up in that kind of destitute situation have been jerks and takers and liars and cheats and mean.
	They just have been. That's why no one in their life wants to help them.
	Generally, the pattern is they sucker some new person into coming to their life to help them and then they end up taking advantage of that person.
	So, I mean, I sympathize.
	I do to some degree.
	But also sometimes the fact that you're starving might be a good clue in life that you're a jerk who needs to change.
	You know, it just is.
	It may be that you've used people so much that you've defrauded people or stolen from people or verbally abused people or just been a jerk to people for so long.
	That nobody wants to help you.
	And hunger is nature's way of saying, maybe be a nicer person, so that people are actually in your life who want to help you.
	That's a really good answer.
	I think the key you sort of touched on, you got the key for me right up near the start as well in that, see, when I hear universally preferable behavior, I was considering it behavior between two people.
	But like you said, it's actually behavior that's going to be moral all the time.
	So it's not just now, but it's...
	This universally preferable behaviour is behaviour that is moral now, and it's moral in the future, and it's going to always be moral.
	And I think that actually, because then it can't be always moral to be planning something like a theft in the future.
	Like, because you're moral now, but then you're not going to be moral when you're doing something which is not preferable to the person Who's, who you're stealing off.
	Does that sort of, does that make sense?
	Yeah. Universally means universally.
	It means now, in the past, well, to some degree in the past, until the ethics are understood.
	It means across the world.
	It means, you know, it is universally.
	And it is behavior. It is not thought.
	Because thought can't be verified, right?
	You understand? Thought is not an objective philosophical.
	It's like someone's dreams, you know?
	Like, you tell me you had a dream about an ostrich last night.
	It's like, I can't verify that.
	If you tell me that an ostrich is a flightless bird, okay, I can go and verify that, right?
	If you tell me ostrich tastes like chicken, I can go and verify that.
	But if you say you had a dream about an ostrich, I can't possibly verify that.
	It may be interesting conversation.
	It may be something to talk about with a psychologist, but it's not something that has philosophical content because it is not objective or independently verifiable.
	And so the only way you know for sure For sure that someone is planning to do something immoral is not just a thought, but some trackable behavior.
	They met with a guy. They paid him to do something.
	They're waiting for the payoff.
	Here's their motive. All of this kind of stuff.
	There has to be something that indicates...
	That the thought has been transferred from something completely unverifiable to something verifiable.
	This is why intention is important, but intention is not the only thing, right?
	Means, motives, and opportunity for a crime.
	And so if you've never done anything, if I'm just sitting at home thinking, boy, it would be nice to go and shoplift, you know, like, I mean, you can't verify that.
	I could write in my diary, I'd like to go shoplift.
	That means that I have the thought.
	But unless I actually go into a store and put something hidden in a pocket and try to walk out, that's when it's translated into action.
	And so it's universally preferable behavior is to not steal, to not rape, to not assault, to not murder.
	And that's the only way that a system of justice can do anything, because the moment you have thought crimes, you don't have a system of justice, you have a system of slander and intimidation.
	Fed, thanks. That answers my question completely.
	Yeah, check it out. I got a book coming up soon, tentatively called Essential Philosophy, where I go over UPB both in a dialogue form and in a much more concentrated form.
	So it's not the whole book.
	So hopefully you'll check that out and it will help with the stuff as well.
	But thanks for the question. Always a great pleasure to talk about one of the most important things I've done.
	Thank you. Alright, up next we have Christine.
	Christine wrote in and said, My early 20s started with a rough turn of events based on my poor decisions, overcoming addiction, arrests, poor relationship choices, which resulted in a baby who is now 7.
	The father is in and out of prison to whom she is unaware of.
	I cleaned up eight years ago, a drug court, and married a wonderful man who I've been with for six years.
	We started with virtually nothing and now are successful in our skilled trades.
	My question is, I recently accepted a new role within my company that requires about 75% travel.
	I would like to give my husband his own child, but I'm not sure I want more children.
	My success in financial health and security is very important to me.
	Being in my 30s, I know I don't have forever to decide.
	Will I regret and have a husband who is contempt for not sharing a child with him even though he has adopted my daughter as his own?
	How do I weigh my values of family over career?
	Also, at what time is the right time to explain to our daughter her true biological beginning without instilling insecurities or deception?
	That's from Christine. Hey, Christine.
	How you doing? Good.
	Thanks for having me on.
	My pleasure. My goodness.
	What kind of childhood did you have?
	Um, really not a terrible one.
	At least... I mean, I'm an ACE score of two, so when I was taking that, I was realizing that it really wasn't bad, at least in my opinion.
	So no family love or support is what you scored, and household member depressed, mentally ill, or suicide attempt.
	So what was the story there?
	Yes. My brother, he's about five years older than I, so he's had some depression issues, which resulted in Aggression, so there was some level of abuse growing up from him.
	But I think that was more of a...
	I guess I just kind of chalked it up to, I don't know, brotherhood.
	You chalked it up to brotherhood?
	What do you mean? Well, it's all I knew, so I didn't really think too much about the impact that I had as me and the choices that I made.
	And in what way did your brother's depression affect you?
	Well, he was pretty aggressive.
	He was, I would say abusive.
	How so? Just like physical, hitting, tying me up, stuff like that.
	Things to that extent. What do you mean tying you up?
	Well, back when I was younger, my parents had him babysit me.
	I was probably like seven or eight.
	And I think just...
	He thought it'd be fun if he tied me up to a chair, put some duct tape on me, and then my dad came home and saw what was going on, so he stopped it, and then my brother got punished for it.
	I guess I just always assumed that my brother had aggression out of jealousy for my sister and I. I think that would be where I attribute it to.
	Okay. Did the tying up thing happen more than once?
	No. No. And what about the hitting?
	In what way did he hit you?
	To the face, with implements, with fists, open, closed hand?
	How did that happen? It was more like beating on the arms and the torso with no implements, with closed fists or his fingers, things to that extent.
	And how often would that happen?
	Probably weekly?
	Like once a week kind of thing?
	Yeah, I just kind of depended on if we did something that frustrated him or whatever the circumstance was for that as far as how he felt like doing it.
	But it was also, I think, kind of like a sadistic thing where he enjoyed it.
	How has his life played out, Christine?
	He's successful in his job.
	He... Is single and pretty much an introvert.
	So he's always been kind of like a mystery going into adulthood.
	I don't really know like a lot about him.
	We do have a relationship and it's, I guess you wouldn't even call it a relationship.
	It's more of like a, you know, we see each other at family gatherings and things like that, but it's, we're not close, but I don't, I guess I never really expect it to be that way.
	What profession is he in?
	He works in an auto, like an auto parts place.
	So he's professional with his chosen path.
	I mean, he's not like a super successful person, but he pays for his own stuff.
	He has his own house. He has his own cars and things.
	He's never had a girlfriend, or at least to my understanding, hasn't.
	So I think he's still battling some things.
	Were your parents aware of his violence towards you?
	Yeah. Yeah, I guess they were.
	Wait, wait, hang on.
	We're fogging out a little here.
	You guess they were?
	What do you mean? Well, as children, you know, you complain like, Mom, you know, so-and-so hit me.
	And then it would, you know, don't do that.
	Or, you know, there'd be some sort of consequence associated with whatever the offense was.
	And what were the consequences to your brother?
	Uh, well, one that I can remember in particular, we were at a family's house and he was like, picked me up by the ankles and then dropped me.
	So I broke my finger. So his consequence for that was he had to clean my bedroom.
	And I, at the time I thought that was pretty awesome because my room was messy.
	So I felt like it was really good.
	Um, as an adult, I'm kind of like, well, you know, I don't really think that taught him anything.
	I think he felt bad about it though.
	He picked you up and dropped you and you broke your finger?
	Yeah, but he, yeah.
	How, how old were you?
	I think I was like in fourth grade.
	It wasn't a deliberate drop.
	I think that he just underestimated that he wouldn't be able to hold me.
	And his punishment was to clean your room?
	Yeah. Now, obviously this didn't stop the violence, right?
	When did the violence begin to diminish?
	Well, he took a lot of it out on my sister too.
	And I think in some way I kind of adapted to that and like Uh, would mimic the same things towards her as well.
	Uh, she's older than I am, but I've always been, you know, a little bit bigger, taller than her.
	So I think that she really got the brunt of it.
	Uh, but I remember when he turned 18, I said, happy birthday.
	And then I said that if he ever touched me again, that I would call the cops cause he'd be charged as an adult.
	So then I knew that at that point I didn't have to worry about it ever again.
	And he, he stopped.
	What did you mean when you said that you took it out on your sister as well?
	Yes. What do you mean?
	Well, because I've talked to her about this before, and she said that there were just instances.
	I knew that I could overpower her, so if she did something that frustrated me or said something that I mean or whatever kind of banter we had, then I would push her or just pretty much in any way try to show my dominance over her.
	It wasn't physical hitting with hands or anything.
	It was more like pushing around and trying to show my assertiveness.
	And I know that she's been impacted, you know, by that as well.
	Because when I spoke to her about it, you know, she made it clear to me that it was also my doing.
	And then I kind of reflected on that and realized that, you know, she may, you know, have had effects from that too.
	So, you know, I apologized to her about it and we moved on from there.
	But you didn't hit her. It was more pushing, is that right?
	Or did you hit her as well? Yeah.
	Yeah, it was a lot of pushing. And how long did you do that for?
	I mean, I probably did it a few times a month here and there.
	Like whenever the instance brought out enough rage in me to do something like that.
	So in my recollection, I didn't even remember it that frequently.
	But when I talked to her, I realized that it did have an impact.
	But I can't really remember how often it happened.
	And the purpose of pushing her, Christine, was to get her compliance done.
	To something that you wanted or prevented?
	You said when you got angry, what was the purpose of it?
	I think it was to show her that I was in charge and that I had power over her by my physical ability.
	Because you were bigger, right?
	Yes. So your brother was bigger than you, is that right?
	You were bigger than your sister, so she got the roll-down effect.
	Yes. Now...
	Why did your parents not try to deal with the violence in the family?
	Or change what they were doing until it works?
	Yeah, I'm not really sure they knew the potential impact that it would have.
	I think they just kind of chalked it up to sibling rivalries.
	Oh, so they didn't think that the pushing and the hitting could have any negative effect?
	I would guess so.
	Oh, so then if you guys did it in public or you did it at other people's houses, they wouldn't have any problem with it because it's not going to have any negative effect, right?
	Yeah, I mean, I don't agree with how it was...
	No, no, hang on. Did they prevent you or oppose you acting out this way in public?
	Yeah, we didn't really act out in public, except for the instance with me being dropped.
	It was like at a family member's house.
	Right, so... They definitely did not like what you were doing because they didn't like you to do it in public, right?
	Correct. So the idea that they didn't think there was anything negative or wouldn't have any negative effects, right?
	I mean, it seems that they were more concerned about their own reputation than you guys' security.
	Yes. I would agree with that.
	So, how did the drug use start?
	Um... I think, well, you know, I started off with your marijuana and all that stuff back in my high school years.
	What age? Probably about 14 or 15.
	And did your parents know that you were doing drugs then?
	They found out probably about a year or so into it.
	How did they find out?
	I think... One of my friends' moms found some in my bag and contacted my mom and told her.
	And this is when you were, say, 15 or 16?
	But you've been doing it for a year.
	And what happened? There was a discussion about it.
	They would try to...
	There was a lot of grounding.
	I would be grounded. You know, unable to do activities or go out with friends.
	I'd have to stay home.
	That was the main...
	Repercussion that I faced.
	And what happened then?
	As far as the continued drug use?
	Yeah. I just kept experimenting and trying different things, and then eventually it led to prescription pain medication.
	And I think I liked that because it gave me...
	It was almost like a happy effect.
	Because I had been diagnosed with depression probably around the same age that I got caught with marijuana.
	We went to see a doctor to assess my mental health and stuff.
	And then they determined that I had depression.
	So then I was on antidepressants.
	So I think that I really resonated with prescription pain medication because it gave me joy or whatever false sense of happiness you get in that short amount of time.
	Right. And why were your parents taking you in to get your mental health assessed?
	Because I confided in them that I just didn't feel right.
	Didn't feel right, what do you mean?
	Well, like, that I was, you know, sad or, you know, I just didn't feel emotionally...
	Like I should. Even though at that age, it was hard for me to determine that something was wrong, but I just talked to him about it.
	And I think that maybe in a way, I brought that up as a scapegoat to say that that's why I was using marijuana.
	So that was their way of attempting to help me.
	Did you go to a psychiatrist?
	Did you get antidepressants or did any of that stuff happen?
	Yes. Yeah, I was seeing a psychiatrist and I also...
	Was on antidepressants.
	And this was in combination with marijuana and then painkillers, right?
	Yeah, the painkillers came more into effect in my adulthood when it was my responsibility to go to doctors and get antidepressants and things like that.
	So I really wasn't seeking treatment around that time.
	Right, but you were taking them as a teenager, is that right?
	Yes. Okay. And were you told to not take any other drugs with them or...?
	Oh, I'm sure that was probably what the doctor said.
	But I can't remember explicitly being told that.
	Right, okay.
	And how did it escalate in your 20s?
	Well, I was in some relationships that were purely centered around drugs or prescription pain medication.
	And then I realized...
	After like a year or so of doing it that I was addicted because I would get withdrawal and, you know, have some really bad side effects.
	And I just all around wasn't a good person.
	You know, I would be like not aggressive physically, but, you know, I could find myself getting easily agitated with the public and just side effects that come from taking medications like that.
	So I went through about three weeks of detox where I just completely said like I wasn't going to take anything at all.
	And I remember just laying on the couch for three weeks.
	And then I was still with that person at the time, so then I slowly kind of crept back into the same patterns.
	Was he paying the bills?
	It always struck me, because I've been working since I was 10 years old, how do you pay the bills when you're lying on the couch for three weeks?
	Well, the story behind that was I was working somewhere, and the aggression...
	I was coming in late and trying to sleep on my break and just doing a lot of things that just, you know, obviously don't make an ideal employee.
	So when my manager, her and I were really close, talked to me about it, it was just kind of like, you know, I told her, I think I probably told her off in a way.
	And so I walked out of my job and I was able to get unemployment from it.
	Because she said that I was fired.
	Oh, I see. Okay, so you were on the taxpayer's dime while you were going through the detox, right?
	Yeah, I definitely was not living a life of any values or virtue at that time.
	I'm just curious about the mechanics of it.
	Yeah. All right.
	And how long did that relationship last?
	A few years.
	And was this the father?
	No. Okay, so then you broke up with that guy and then what happened?
	And then I met my daughter's father.
	They were, she was actually an acquaintance of my ex or the guy that I had previously dated.
	He was, I don't like saying this, but he was out of prison and I had the impression that he was trying to make himself, you know, that he got another chance to do better.
	So I really kind of thought that, well, because at that time I was on drug court too.
	So we were kind of on the same boat of being, you know, having urine screens and trying to walk a clean line.
	So I related to him in that aspect.
	I'm sorry to interrupt, but how did you end up in drug court?
	How did you get arrested? So I had a close friend, a girlfriend that I associated myself with.
	Back when I was around 15 or so.
	And I had her friend staying with us at the house.
	He was running out of room. And his mom had called the police and said that I was harboring a fugitive because my friend had a warrant.
	So when the cops came to our house, well, the guy I was dating allowed them to come in and they were going to ask to search for her.
	And I said, yeah, that's fine because she wasn't there.
	And then when they searched in there, they found a prescription pill bottle.
	So I got a felony for that.
	Well, they found a marijuana pipe first, and then that gave them probable cause to search the rest of the house, to which they found prescription pill bottles.
	Right. I assume just not enough to be considered a dealer, but just for use?
	Yes. Right. Okay, and the father of your child, what was he out of prison for?
	I mean, sorry, what was he previously in prison for, is a better way to put it, sorry.
	It was a pretty bad charge as robbery.
	A robbery of a store or a gas station?
	A gas station.
	Was it armed robbery?
	I don't believe that he had a physical gun, but I believe that he gave them the impression that he did.
	Right. And he needed the money for drugs, or he wanted the money for drugs?
	Yes. Thank you.
	Drug war. And how long was he out of prison?
	Well, how long was he in prison and then how long was he out of prison when you guys started dating?
	He was in prison for a few years.
	He was fortunate enough to be blessed with a family that has a lot of money and lawyers and all that stuff.
	So he got his time cut in half.
	So I believe he was only in there for about two years or so.
	Wow. And how long had he been out when you met him?
	Well, I'd met him shortly after he'd gotten out when he was on house arrest.
	We went over to say, you know, visit him or whatnot.
	And then probably in about six months after he'd been out is when he and I started dating.
	And what attracted you to him?
	I think it was...
	I was pretty miserable in the circumstance that I was in.
	I mean, I was attracted to him prior to the end of my previous relationship, but nothing had transpired.
	And I think it was purely probably just his looks or, you know, something shallow about it.
	Well, yeah, I mean, his character would not be hugely stellar unless he had done some massive re-evaluation of his entire life in prison, right?
	Correct. And then he ended up back in prison, right?
	Several times, yes.
	And for the usual drug possession, petty theft, burglary, car theft, is it that kind of stuff?
	I believe the most recent one was dealing.
	Ah. Yeah, so his life is destroyed.
	Yes, but he always has resources.
	Because of his family? Yeah, there's no consequences with the family.
	So there's no learning of the mistakes because there's always, you know, a trust fund.
	Well, you know, two years in prison is kind of a consequence, isn't it?
	Yes. Yeah, I guess shortened or alleviated consequences.
	Hmm. But that's true.
	So how did you end up pregnant?
	By having unprotected sex.
	No, no, I understand that.
	I've read the books and seen the internet.
	But... What were you doing having unprotected sex with a prison guy?
	Not thinking or preparing.
	I was fully aware of the purpose of sex and what it could create.
	I guess I just didn't think that it would apply to me.
	But you had been using birth control for your sexual history, right?
	Yes. So what changed?
	The guy that I dated previously, he went on some drunken rampage one night and decided he wanted to have a baby or whatever, so he threw away my birth control.
	But that's shortly after he and I broke up because it just wasn't working out.
	So I never went around going back to the doctors to get back on it.
	Oh, so it was very early in your relationship with the prison guy that you got pregnant?
	Oh, yeah. Yeah, it was like a month.
	It was like a month and a half, two months or so.
	It was very early. Wow.
	So shortly after realizing that I was pregnant, I also realized that there was some terrible, you know, that it was not an ideal circumstance or the right person to be procreating with.
	What? That was too late.
	What gave you your... I'm sorry.
	What brought this illumination upon you?
	Well, because after he got out from underneath the wing of probation or whatever he was on, he was trying to cheat the system with things like synthetic marijuana and alcohol.
	So my idea of, oh, maybe this is a reincarnated, I know that's ridiculous, person that went to prison is coming out with a newfound appreciation for life.
	That wasn't really the case.
	I found out that this was a person that didn't know any other life or care to learn about that.
	So there was some infidelity during my pregnancy with that.
	And on his part that I found out about, that was pretty upsetting, even though I really didn't care for him at all throughout the relationship.
	I just kind of bared with it, trying to, thinking that, you know, the thing where, oh, I can help change him or, oh, he'll come around.
	You know, you think that once the child arrives that a light bulb goes off in their head or you at least hope that.
	But I've also, I realized shortly after that, that that wasn't a realistic way to think.
	Do you think that you were hoping to keep him with a baby?
	I tried for about nine months after she was born.
	No, no, but even at the beginning, like, oh, here's a hot guy, you know, he's kind of flighty, but if I let him knock me up, that's going to bring some sense and foundation to his life.
	No. There was no premeditated thoughts about trying to get him to get it together with a baby or that having a baby would somehow influence him.
	But you had unprotected sex.
	There had to be something behind it.
	Because you knew about birth control.
	There had to be something behind that decision.
	The dumb part to me was that I remember I was driving.
	I was actually on my way to Planned Parenthood because the day after we had had it, I was like, oh, I don't want this scenario.
	So I was on my way to Planned Parenthood and he called and we talked and I was like, yeah, I'm on my way to Planned Parenthood.
	I was like, you know, these things cost $40 or whatever.
	And at that time, I wasn't working and my unemployment had ran out.
	So he's like, oh, just don't worry about it.
	And then I was like, okay, well, it's not going to happen this one time.
	Oh, he said, don't worry about it?
	Yeah. Ah, so I think we have the clue here, Christine.
	You weren't working, your unemployment had run out, so you wanted babyployment, right?
	No, it wasn't for money at all.
	It wasn't- No, but that's traditionally the way that a woman can be taken care of.
	I mean, I'm not talking about like post-welfare state, like way back in the day, right, when we evolved.
	Yeah. That's the way in which a woman would end up being taken care of is to get pregnant, right?
	And then the man would have to marry her and he'd have to take care of her and so on, right?
	It's a possibility. Yeah, I could see that.
	I don't think that was a conscious thought of mine.
	No, no, I get that. I think I was just kind of rolling the dice and hoping that I could save $40 and just be more cautious.
	Yeah. Ah, so the 40 bucks was the issue, right?
	Now, I'm sure your daughter is very happy that the 40 bucks was an issue, but that's what your thinking was.
	That's where it was at the time, yes.
	Right. So then, what happened in particular?
	Just remind me what happened in particular where the guy where you're like, wow, this is terrible.
	Like you said, for nine months after your daughter was born, you were trying to get him to step up and be a father and be a provider, I guess, or whatever, right?
	Yeah. Yeah, and I don't really think there was much of an attempt on my half to get him to step up.
	I think I just bared through it, knowing that and trying everything that I could to try to make it work.
	Particular, that made me realize that he was no good, was just, it just seemed like there was something totally off with him.
	His inability to have compassion or And that shouldn't have been a surprise for me.
	The half-armed robber who was in prison has trouble showing compassion.
	Yes. Okay.
	I'm sorry. You understand from this perspective.
	It's like, well, yeah.
	Yes. All right.
	So he had trouble showing compassion.
	And what else? Well, there was the continued drug use, you know, with the synthetics and drugs.
	There were some other synthetic substances that came out around that time, too, that I found out that he was using.
	So I quickly realized that I was impregnated by a drug addict.
	I mean, I should have known that before, all the signs and everything.
	But it was just a culmination of his behaviors and how he would treat me when he was under the influence.
	And how would he treat you?
	Well, you know, no drug addict wants to be addressed on their drug use.
	If they do, they usually grow extremely defensive, so it would turn into verbal altercations.
	Oh, you'd say stop taking drugs and he'd be like, they're synthetic, or don't be such a square, or don't be so uptight, or the usual garbage, right?
	Yeah, some sort of...
	Yeah, it was usually more demeaning or...
	Well, I don't care. To me, it seemed so long ago that it's hard for me to remember.
	I remember one time coming to his apartment and seeing him with gloves on, mixing up something.
	I just found a letter in his car from this girl that he had cheated on me with.
	I confronted him about it, and then it was like, I don't care about you.
	Get out of here. So it was like...
	I was probably about five months pregnant or so at that time.
	So he cheated on you with another woman when you were five months pregnant?
	Yes. Do you have any nice guys who asked you out and you look back and you say, well, that guy became a productive member of society.
	Boy, I sure wish I'd gone out with him.
	You know, I have other exes and things that it kind of gave me a newfound respect or appreciation for.
	Yeah, because I mean, there are guys out there who can't find girlfriends, right?
	And you're getting knocked up by the felon.
	Yes. Yeah.
	Just can be a little frustrating for the nice guys out there.
	Just pointing that out so that they're validated, right?
	Yes. Okay, so what happened?
	Did you kick him out or how did that end?
	He would, when he was...
	Off of police supervision, he got into heroin and a whole bunch of pretty much any terrible drug under the sun.
	So he would disappear for weeks on end and not answer his phone or anything like that.
	He did that throughout the pregnancy as well.
	What did you live on at this point?
	I had a business out of my house I was running.
	It was a totally legal business.
	I didn't have a professional permit or anything, but I had clients that I was taking advantage of my skilled trade by having a shop set up at my house.
	All right. Okay. So that's what you were surviving on, all right?
	Yes. Yeah.
	So I just got fed up with it and I realized that he wasn't going to change and that Some of his verbal altercations were not healthy for myself or my daughter.
	So he had disappeared for a week and then he came back and I changed the locks.
	I wasn't aware that, you know, if somebody resides with you, that you technically can't do that.
	So I changed the locks and he was pounding on the door at like 3 a.m.
	So I opened the door and he barged in and went upstairs and went to bed.
	Well, actually, it was probably... At the crack of dawn, so it was probably more like 5 or 6 a.m.
	So he was getting verbally abusive.
	He came at me like he was going to get physical, so then I picked up my phone to call the police because I wanted him out of there, and he slapped the phone out of my hand.
	So then at that point, I called my dad, and my father came over and escorted him out of the house.
	Right. Did your father know that you had become impregnated by a criminal?
	Yes. And what did your parents say about all of this?
	It was not ideal.
	The conversations that they had was more out of concern, but they knew there was really nothing they could do about it, so they're pretty muted on certain things.
	They would be a listening ear if there was something I wanted to run off of them, give advice on it.
	Right, right. Did your parents ever wonder how you would end up being arrested and being in drug court and getting knocked up by a drug-addicted felon?
	I mean, did they ever say, gosh, maybe something went wrong in the upbringing or the raising or the parenting?
	Did that mirror ever emerge in your family?
	Not to my knowledge.
	I don't know what they discuss without me, but that was never like a conversation that we all had together.
	What was the answer?
	Your kid, your baby girl is addicted, getting arrested, knocked up by a criminal.
	What's the story? I mean, did you lose Jesus?
	What happened? Was there any discussion about what happened?
	It was just like, well, I guess this is just the next step on the journey.
	To my recollection, I don't remember them trying to assess the situation.
	What about your sister, your brother?
	Like, their take on it?
	Well, my brother, we didn't really talk at all, so that was a no-go.
	And my sister, she...
	Probably around the same things as not really trying to ask questions.
	I'm not sure what you mean. What is that?
	Well, I don't think that from my brother or sister's standpoint, there really wasn't a conversation about what led to my decisions.
	Right. Did your brother have any addiction issues?
	Not to my knowledge.
	And your sister? No.
	All right. All right.
	All right. So 75% travel.
	How old is your daughter? She's seven, right?
	Yes. Yeah.
	Why are you traveling when you've got a daughter at home?
	Why would you do that?
	More for the financial aspect and the joy that I get in my career from it.
	Oh, come on. I mean, I'm- The joy that you get in your career trumps the joy you get with your daughter?
	I mean, I guess if I were to get joy in an aspect or, you know, I guess I've convinced myself that I bring more value in my professional career.
	Oh, so your daughter wants money, not you.
	No. Well, what does your daughter want?
	Stability. No.
	That's not really much of an answer, and it's certainly not something that seven-year-olds think much about.
	If your daughter has the choice between more time with mom or more money, what would she choose?
	Obviously mom. Right.
	So why are you taking a job that goes against what your daughter wants?
	I mean, I'm not saying this like it's obvious, but given that you have ridiculously emotionally distant parents, I'm trying to fix this wiring in your head.
	Because one of the major problems in your family is nobody talks about anything.
	Nobody connects. And nobody seems to give a shit about anyone else.
	So if you want to break that cycle, 75% travel is not the way to do it.
	Did you see where I'm coming from?
	Yes. Being a parent means, what does my daughter want?
	Why? Because she's there without choice.
	She's no choice. She didn't choose the father and she sure as hell wouldn't have chosen that father if she'd had a choice, right?
	Definitely not. She doesn't get to choose whether you travel or not.
	She doesn't get to choose the environment.
	She didn't get to choose the new dad.
	So, she needs to be able to make choices.
	She needs to be able to have her will have an effect.
	Or she's probably going to get depressed, in my humble opinion.
	Because depression is just another word for hopelessness or helplessness.
	Nothing I do is going to change a damn thing, so why would I bother doing anything?
	Why would I bother having emotions?
	Why would I bother having a willpower?
	Why would I bother trying to overcome anything?
	I'm not connected to anyone.
	Nothing I do makes a damn bit of difference.
	The solutions that I have are terrible, like physically abusing my sister.
	So if you strip agency and will and effect from children, of course they're going to get depressed.
	Because the whole point of willpower is to have you achieve something, and if you can't achieve something, why would you have any willpower?
	Why would you have an identity? Why would you have emotions?
	You couldn't fix what was going on in your family.
	You couldn't make relations with your parents better.
	You couldn't make relations with your siblings better.
	You couldn't make relations with yourself better.
	You got depressed when you hit puberty because you were woefully unprepared for adulthood.
	You went from drug to drug to drug.
	You ended up escalating, putting yourself in a disastrous and frankly dangerous situation.
	You were lucky that you didn't get physically hurt or your pregnancy harmed.
	And the question is why?
	Lack of connection. Lack of connection.
	Men can survive it a little bit more than women, but lack of connection, right?
	So now what's happening is the pattern is repeating itself.
	Because now you're going to be traveling a lot.
	And I know those kinds of jobs, it's not just 75, it can be more sometimes.
	And it's not like when you're home, you're home because there's work to do when you're home as well, right?
	Yes. So, what right do you have to have a child...
	And then be gone 75% of the time.
	None.
	It's not fair for her, is it?
	Thank you.
	No. Is it worth having more money now when you have more dysfunction with your daughter later?
	No. You don't want to be saving up your money now for her legal costs later, do you?
	No, and I know that there's the fear that she's Predisposed to have depression and, you know, drug addiction and stuff just based upon her family's history.
	So I know that that's a sensitive thing that I need to be aware of and try to navigate through.
	Well, I don't want to define you or the father, the biological father of the child with one word, but your daughter has the genetics of two criminals.
	Yeah. So, she's already starting a little bit behind the eight ball, just in terms of deferral of gratification, impulse control, all that kind of stuff.
	So, the way to solve that, as best you can, is connection, right?
	How is your daughter doing? She's a pretty strong-willed individual.
	She has ADHD. So, we try to work with her on that and her impulse control, like you mentioned.
	So it's challenging with me.
	So I guess sometimes traveling is not an escape, but it's a way for me to think about it, not to justify me being gone, because I know that doesn't benefit her, me thinking about the circumstance.
	What do you mean, thinking about the circumstance?
	I've really been trying to find ways to help her.
	And even though my job is 75% travel...
	Six nights out of the week, I'm home, you know, tucking her in bed, reading her and stuff.
	So it's not that I'm gone for weeks on end.
	So I still do have a presence at home.
	I'm confused then. What does 75% travel mean if you're home every night?
	Well, every single day I'm gone, you know, traveling 200 to 400 miles, usually home by 7 p.m., unless there's a convention or something about once a month or so that I have to go to for a week.
	Oh, yeah. So that's not what I mean by seven.
	It's like you've got a very long commute, right?
	Yeah. I'm probably only absent like one night a week, if that, and then sometimes longer than that.
	Well, when does she go to bed?
	About typical eight o'clock time or so.
	So you get maybe an hour with her a day or are you there in the morning or what?
	Yeah, I'm usually there in the morning and then on the weekends too.
	So I try to make an effort to do something fun with her on the weekends or, you know, do things that help build memories.
	And how do you know she has, I don't believe in ADHD fundamentally, but let's just go with the typical way.
	How do you know she has ADHD? Well, she's always been pretty hyperactive and I just said that was her.
	You know, I accepted it.
	How she was. And then when she was in school, there was a lot of issues with her being able to focus on her schoolwork and not distract the other kids.
	You know, constant fidgeting behaviors like that.
	Government school, I assume, right? Hmm?
	Government school? Yes.
	And do you think she's bored?
	Yes. She says that all the time.
	And is she on drugs?
	Yes. Really?
	Yeah. Two drug-addicted parents and the seven-year-old is also on drugs.
	Yeah, we tried alternate methods.
	We tried therapy and then medication that was not a stimulant, like a daily thing to help her.
	The therapy, they couldn't even get her to focus on what they were doing or Without getting frustrated or, like you said, bored.
	So this was more of a last-ditch effort.
	And I faced a lot of guilt or trying to figure out alternatives prior to putting her on medication.
	So it wasn't like she has ADHD. Oh, well, let's throw some pills at her and she'll be better.
	Because I'm very sensitive to the fact that she could be predisposed to things.
	But then I also did some research that says that I don't know where this research came from, but it said that children who have learning disabilities or ADHD or whatever the circumstances, if it's not treated or helped, then they're more likely to become addicted to drugs.
	So for me, that was kind of like, oh, I definitely don't want that.
	So maybe I was, I don't know, not considering the right information.
	Does she have ADHD in the summer?
	Yes. How so?
	It's like an impulsive, so much energy that she has to expel it through verbal, like screaming, not like an angry screaming, it's like a, I can't even describe it.
	She'll just yell out of, just to get that energy out.
	I'm sorry, I'm not sure what you mean.
	So, she's home on the, like in the summer, she's not in school, right?
	Mm-hmm. And who's home with her during the day?
	When I'm not working, either myself or my husband on his days off, and then she also goes to daycare when we're working.
	And how old was she when she first went to daycare?
	She was probably about 18 months.
	Right. And how long did she go to daycare?
	How many hours a week? At 18 months, she was full-time.
	And how many hours a day was that?
	Including the commute to and from the daycare?
	Probably about eight. So she was eight hours away from you when she was 18 months?
	Yes. And before that, you were full-time with her?
	Yeah, unless it was like a grandma or something watching her for a few hours.
	Because I was working like one or two days a week, so it depended on...
	If my husband was home to watch her or she'd go to her grandma's for a few hours, but it wasn't a consistent thing where she was going to other people's houses, strangers, or anything like that, or an established daycare.
	And you were breastfeeding that time?
	Yeah, I breastfed until she was one year.
	Okay. Did she appear to have ADHD when she was a baby?
	I'm not really sure what the signs of that would be.
	She was pretty strong-willed easily.
	She was very needy.
	I know babies are needy in general, but...
	Well, did she do this random screaming?
	Did she need constantly new stimulation?
	I mean, I don't know. I'm not a doctor, so I'm just kind of asking the amateur questions.
	But did you notice any dysfunction or problem in her behavior when you were home with her?
	First 18 months. No.
	And why did you put her in daycare?
	To, you know, the obvious reasons that people go to work.
	And now I... Well, no, but you were working a day or two for 18 months, right?
	I mean, I assumed that you were surviving on that, right?
	Yeah. More money, I guess.
	I wanted more than just to get by check to check.
	And, you know, I was on a I was getting food stamps and government insurance and things like that at that time.
	So I wanted to be more independent and get away from relying on the system and, you know, be able to provide for her on our own.
	But given that you, did you pay for daycare?
	I mean, did you then have to pay for more food?
	Did you have to pay for more healthcare?
	Did it actually make you any money to put your kid in daycare?
	I would think it did, unless if it just provided me with a false sense of more security.
	Wait, you don't know if it made you more money to go back to work?
	I mean, the paychecks did, yes.
	How those paychecks went out...
	Well, no, I understand the gross comes in, but if you're paying for more food, more healthcare, and you're paying for daycare, did you end up with more at the end of the day?
	Yes. Huh.
	How much was the daycare?
	I mean, it was a lady with a, she had a small in-home daycare and it was fairly inexpensive.
	I mean, it was $20 a day or so.
	$20 a day? How many kids did she have?
	Yeah. She had like three or four.
	And did your daughter like going to that daycare?
	Yes. She loved it there.
	It was like a, yeah.
	And I wholly trusted this lady.
	I really got to know her before.
	Did she have any trouble leaving you to go to the daycare to begin with?
	No. Really?
	So you'd been home with her for the most part, breastfeeding her and being with her for 18 months.
	You drop her at daycare.
	She doesn't miss you? I mean, she might have missed me, but during the drop-off or from hearing from the sitter, there wasn't an emotional...
	Why do you think that would be?
	I don't know. Because, you know, when I was nursing and stuff, we had a pretty good bond, or at least think of it that way.
	I haven't really thought too much about it.
	What are your thoughts? Again, like I'm no expert.
	I'm just, I'm comparing this with my daughter.
	And now kids are different, right?
	So this is not any kind of objective thing.
	But my daughter, I don't know, she was, I don't know, like maybe a year, year and a half old and...
	My wife and I wanted to go play some squash.
	And at the gym, there was a very nice little...
	We wanted 45 minutes to go and play squash.
	So we sat with her and chatted with her.
	And then we left.
	And we got about 10 minutes of squash in when we got the call.
	The call being that my daughter was requesting the pleasure of our company in no uncertain terms.
	It's been very tough.
	Yeah. I mean, it was virtually impossible to sort of pry her office in that way.
	Now, she'll go with people and it's much better.
	And when we were in Australia, she came to the dinner sometimes and chatted with people and, you know, she's fine now.
	But yeah, just at the beginning, I mean, again, kids are different.
	So this is not any kind of objective thing, but it's just...
	Yeah, I'm not...
	Different. And...
	I'm not the super nurturing type.
	I mean, I am for the child's sake, but I wasn't like a helicopter mom always over her.
	I was kind of a little bit more laid back.
	In my parenting approach.
	Well, you're really praising yourself there, aren't you?
	And kind of dissing the other parents.
	That's a sign. No, no.
	I'm just saying that. Yeah, yeah. Come on. You're saying I wasn't hovering over her.
	I wasn't a helicopter. I'm more laid back.
	That's all positive stuff for you and negative to other parents, right?
	I was negative to other people.
	Well, I guess in the way that I worded it, it could sound that way, but the intent was not to be negative.
	Well, I can't measure intent.
	I can only measure what people say.
	So intent doesn't mean much to me.
	And it may very well be like what you had mentioned about the lack of connection, that maybe somehow I've put that towards my daughter as well.
	If that's a theme in the family and then the way that I'm groomed to treat family, then it could be that I just wasn't as caring as I should be.
	I don't know.
	I'm just surprised that there'd be no fuss about being dropped at a daycare.
	Now, what about your husband?
	How did you meet him? We met through a mutual high school friend.
	And what's his story?
	What's his history, family and personal?
	He comes from a family of divorced parents.
	He has other siblings and a half-sibling from a remarriage.
	As far as what else would you like to know about him?
	When I told him I was doing this, he was like, I don't want to be brought into it.
	I'm like, okay, but I know that it is a construct of the conversation, too.
	I guess there was maybe some physical abuse as a child, and we didn't really get too much into it from stepfathers.
	Stepfathers, like plural? I think one.
	And your husband was physically abused by the stepfather?
	Yes. You said you didn't get much into it.
	What do you mean? I mean, we've talked about it.
	Because when I filled out the ACE score, I was asking him about his because I didn't have a thorough understanding of where he stood.
	So we did discuss it, and that's where I got the definitive answer that there was abuse from his stepfather.
	And was he hit with implements?
	Was he hit closed fist, open hand?
	How often? I didn't ask that.
	And if I did, I don't recall the answer.
	If there was implements, I know that there was spankings.
	But I can't attest as to the degree of it because I don't want to misspeak.
	Why do you think you've been with him for six years?
	Why wouldn't you know this stuff about him?
	It's important, right? It's not the only thing, but it's important.
	That's true. I mean, we don't talk a whole lot about...
	You know, emotions and stuff.
	I mean, that seems to be a trend.
	You think? Lack of connection.
	Lack of connection. Right?
	Yes. So what does he love about you?
	I'm not saying, that sounds like, well, what could he?
	I'm genuinely curious.
	Like, what is it that he, why is he with you?
	And, you know, with the history, it's a challenge, right?
	With the, you know, this guy, the biological father, he could just show up on your doorstep one day, right?
	I mean, there's kind of a risk about all of that kind of stuff.
	Why would he take on This kind of challenge, right?
	Like the criminal's kid and your history and, you know, all of these challenges.
	What is it that makes it worthwhile for him to take that chance and be with you?
	That has kind of boggled me, too, because, I mean, I got lucky from it, but for him to see the red flags and not step away, you know, then...
	I'm not really sure what that was.
	as I mean, we could say it's my charming personality or.
	So you're not too sure why he's with you?
	Well, I mean, we're very compatible together.
	We get along all the time.
	We don't fight. We don't bicker.
	When we're together, we just enjoy each other's company.
	We laugh a lot.
	So there's There's really no strife in our relationship.
	Now, from him to see that going into the relationship and not knowing what to expect or what he was walking into, then I can't attest to that.
	Like, why he chose to stick around.
	Does he want his own child with you?
	Yes. He doesn't say, I want a baby with you, I want a baby with you, but we've discussed it before, and he expressed that he would like to have one of his own.
	Right. You would like to give him the gift that you gave the felon?
	Yes. And you're concerned about money?
	Yeah, money and career.
	Does he make enough to support a family?
	We've discussed that and not without some struggle and selling of downsizing our house and making some huge adjustments to our financial means.
	So without some downsizing?
	Yes. And what does the downsizing mean to you?
	I mean, less house, more child seems like a good deal to me.
	But what does the downsizing mean to you?
	Vehicles and a house, probably.
	Oh, no, no, I understand. I understand what needs to be downsized.
	What I'm asking is, sorry, we're on a feeling question, so it's a challenge, right?
	But when you think of downsizing, like you get to a smaller place, maybe you have an older car or whatever, but you have a baby with the man who loves you and who wants a baby, What is so negative about the downsizing of your spending if you get to trade it for, say, an actual human life?
	Yeah, I guess the issue that I have is that I don't place enough emphasis on the desire to have another human life.
	Well, if you're not really connecting with your daughter in some way, then it's not as much of a treasure for you, right?
	Yes. How did you feel that day dropping off your daughter at the daycare for the first time?
	There were some emotions.
	I felt concerned, you know, that was I making the right decision?
	Is she going to be okay? But we had kind of transitioned into that, you know, like spending time over there with them or with the sitter.
	So that way the transition would be smooth.
	So, you know, it was like I did feel stress or concern about it, but it wasn't extremely difficult.
	Did you miss her during the day when she was gone?
	Yes, at that age.
	Right.
	You know that if your parents had chosen money over life, you wouldn't be here, right?
	Because kids cost money.
	If you care about money more than you care about human life, nobody gets born, right?
	Not you, not me, not your daughter, not your husband, nobody gets born.
	If parents praise money over life, none of us are here.
	You understand, right? Yep.
	So you're here because someone said, I'd rather have a human life than more money.
	Right? Yes.
	So, it doesn't mean that you have to have a baby.
	I just want you to be clear on that, that you enjoy the great gift called life because somebody chose you over money.
	But then when you say, well, I don't want a baby because it's going to cost me money, because that's really what it comes down to, isn't it?
	Yes, it's financial means.
	Well... We are one of the richest generations in human history, right?
	I mean, people had babies during the Black Death.
	People had babies during starvation, during famine, during war.
	People had babies when they had the Great Depression.
	People had babies when they had barely two nickels to rub together, right?
	Babies have always cost money.
	And except for the boomers, we are the richest generation in human history, right?
	So this idea that, wow, we don't have enough money for babies is like, none of us would be here.
	There'd be no human race if prior people had thought that way.
	And you like being alive, right?
	So I assume that you're happy that your parents chose you over money, right?
	Yes. And I agree that it's money.
	But I think for me, it's more of a pride in my position and title that, you know, I had I wanted for so long and I finally got.
	So for me to back out of that, because I know wholly that if we were going to have another child that I would commit to spending the years leading up into preschool or whatever it may be, one-on-one with that kid because I now understand the importance and the impact that it has on them.
	So there's that pressure of relieving this title, which is something that I hold higher than maybe I should.
	The perspective on how to put a family above all these vain things that I hold so dearly to.
	Well, it's even worse than that, as far as what I'm suggesting, Christine.
	Are you ready? Are you ready to contract every known muscle in your universe?
	Are you ready? Yes.
	It's not just about the baby.
	And it's not just about staying home with the baby, Christine.
	It's about getting your kid, your daughter, your wonderful daughter, the hell out of public school so you can homeschool her.
	It's a two-for-one deal, my dear.
	It's a two-for-one deal.
	Because you're putting her in what I consider to be a pretty toxic environment, which is a government school, and she's taking, again, I'm no doctor, my absolute personal opinion.
	I don't like the ADHD meds, but...
	What I'm talking about is a two-for-one deal.
	So it's not just, well, I'll take a short break and I'll come for a daycare.
	It's, are you willing to commit to your children to the point where you can create a home environment for them that is just wonderful?
	For both of them. I don't know.
	That's a little chilly. Well, like the idea of homeschool, I... If I had to, I would.
	But I feel pretty confident in this school.
	We specifically scouted out an area with the best schools.
	No! Your daughter hates the school, doesn't she?
	She's bored. She's drugged.
	Yeah, but I guess I would have to do some really crafty research on how to make her be able to focus at home.
	Because if we're not playing Barbies, then she's going to be bored either way.
	She's going to be bored with you?
	Yeah, if it has to do with school.
	Even just doing, you know, homework and stuff is a challenge.
	Well, first of all, education doesn't really matter.
	According to all the studies I've read, they can't find more than a couple of percentage points difference in kinds of education, types of education.
	It doesn't really matter. It doesn't really matter.
	It's like Is my child going to be taller?
	If they're homeschooled, then it doesn't matter, right?
	Her intelligence, a lot of her personality, genetic, genetic, genetic, right?
	Largely. And so, it's not a matter of, well, you know, I have to grind this knowledge into her ear and she's going to resent and hate it.
	It's like, there's lots of different ways of...
	Educating kids of getting them to learn important things.
	The one I do is this role playing, which is this fantasy, ongoing fantasy story that's been going on for a couple of years in my household where we do have, you know, we teach about communism and the court system and mathematics and negotiation and job interviews and, you know, all kinds of wild stuff that goes on.
	And there's lots of different ways.
	I mean, yeah, we do the regular old school work too and that, but there's lots of different ways of engaging children.
	But In an environment where, I mean, does she like school?
	No. Right.
	Right. Did you like school?
	No. I like the friendships, you know, the things that go along with it, but not the actual schoolwork.
	Yeah. Yeah.
	I mean, what if your desire for drugs was also related to just being in a government school?
	Yeah, I understand that.
	I was actually in Catholic, very strict Catholic schools in my life, so that might also...
	But I get what you're saying.
	Would she rather be home with you or rather be at school?
	Home. Yeah, isn't it interesting when we just ask ourselves what our kids want and what they need?
	Life just becomes a lot simpler, you know what I mean?
	Yeah. And listen, if you're home, taking care of the kids, and the kids are happy, and everyone's getting along, and so on, and you're able to run the household, then your husband will be able to make more money.
	It's not like, well, we got two salaries now, and if I stay home, that's half our money.
	It's like, no, that's not how it works.
	If the home life is the bedrock and the foundation for the man, what he can do professionally is amazing.
	What he can do to make money, what he can do to expand his income is amazing.
	That's true. I believe that.
	So it may be an upsize for you to stay home.
	Probably will be. Yes.
	But to do that, you have to figure out How to connect more with your daughter or your baby if you have one, right?
	Yeah. And I think maybe that's a fear that I have with having another infant is the inability to connect or provide emotional stability or whatever aspects that I'm lacking being able to alter that too so that way my own offspring doesn't have the same.
	But you understand What you're saying, Christine, is you're saying, to some degree, I am a toxic environment for my children.
	I have to limit their exposure to me.
	I guess it sounds like that.
	It does. I guess when I think of toxic, you know, I think of verbally abusive and, like, things like that, and so that doesn't resonate with me, but...
	Maybe the toxicity of my lack of connection.
	Distance. Distance, right?
	Yes. How much did you enjoy being the mom to a baby?
	I loved my daughter unconditionally and I really enjoyed the time that we had together when I wasn't working.
	I think that I associate pregnancy and babies and stuff with sometimes negative emotions because of my first experience.
	So that there's some kind of story in my head that associates those as negative things.
	But at the time... But your husband shouldn't suffer for that, right?
	Right. The circumstances wouldn't be the same at all.
	Does he deserve his own child?
	In other words, is he a good provider, a good husband, good father?
	Yes. Yeah, he does.
	Outside of breastfeeding, would he stay home if you worked more?
	Is he better at connecting with kids?
	Yeah, I would say that.
	So that's a possibility, whereas you could do the work and the travel.
	And again, I don't know how the breastfeeding works and all that, but...
	You know, assuming something could be worked out that way, that's a possibility, right?
	It is. Yeah.
	Do you think your daughter would prefer not to be an only child?
	Yes, especially when she was younger.
	She made comments about it.
	Now she wants a sibling that's her age.
	So as far as her sharing the spotlight with An infant, she may not relate to it and feel satisfaction from a sibling at this age because there would be such an age difference, but she has expressed that she would like a sibling.
	Right. How important, on a sort of scale of one to ten, over the course of your husband's life, how important will it be for him to have his own child?
	I actually asked him this question and he said eight.
	Eight? All right.
	Come on. Come on.
	Come on. Give up the eggs.
	Give up the eggs, woman!
	Well, I was like, in my head, I'm like, oh, an eight.
	If it was a ten, I'd be like, wow, he really, really wants this.
	It is a ten.
	It is a ten. He's just saying eight for some wiggle room.
	Yeah. These are all very good points.
	I appreciate them. Now you're dismissing me.
	No. Thank you for your input, Baldi.
	I'll take it from here. Locking up the eggs with a vault.
	No, and it's something that I know that that's why I sought you is because I know that I don't have forever to make that decision.
	And even when he was reading my question, I was like, man, I'm hearing a whole lot of me's in there.
	You know, I'll... Look, because you lack connection to some degree, Christine, you know what the big substitute for connection is in this world?
	Status. If you don't have connection with people, and I'm not saying you don't, but if you have less connection...
	With people than you could, then what happens is you want status instead.
	That's the consolation prize for a lack of connection is status, right?
	So the fact that you don't have, I think, as much connection as you could with your husband, with your daughter, well, what happens?
	You want status, right? You want the job, you want the position, you want the money, you want the, right?
	Very true. If you lack love, your substitute is vanity, right?
	Yes. But the problem is, love doesn't run out, but status does.
	And all the status in the world eventually is a devil's bargain relative to the beauty of love.
	Because status is other people envying you.
	And that won't last.
	Because we all get old. We all get infirm.
	We all lose our faculties to some degree.
	The peak of our intelligence is in our late 20s.
	I'm on the downward slope, baby.
	But the status won't last.
	Status won't last. And if you focus on status at the expense of connection, you end up in a very lonely place.
	Even if you have people around you, you do end up in a very lonely place.
	It's true. Yeah, even just the word status or status that resonates with me and how much of an emphasis I put on the importance of that.
	And I never really related it to lack of connection.
	Yeah, I don't like being known.
	You know, I mean, I don't like being semi-famous.
	I'll do it because it's good for philosophy, but I don't like it.
	I don't want it.
	And the reason that it does not matter to me is because I have love.
	I'm surrounded by love. I'm surrounded by connection.
	I have great relationships.
	So why do I want to impress strangers when I'm loved by friends and family?
	It's the old question, you know, Paul Newman married to Joanne Woodward, I think, and people said, well, you've never had an affair.
	It's unusual. Long-lasting marriage in Hollywood.
	And he's like, well, why would I want to go out for hamburger when I've got steak at home?
	And think of hamburger as status, right?
	Why do you want to go out for status if you have steak, if you have love at home?
	Why do you want to impress strangers when you're loved by friends?
	Very true. And that's way back to the beginning of our conversation when I said, or asked, and this is why I asked, was, did you guys hit each other when you were out in public?
	No. Why? Makes the family look bad.
	It's fine at home because nobody can see.
	It doesn't affect their status.
	It affects your children's happiness, makes them depressed, makes them anxious, makes them feel a lack of security, but it doesn't impact status, so it's fine.
	And that's where it all comes from, right?
	You would rather, I guarantee you, Christine, you would much rather your parents had cared less about status and more about your kids.
	Yeah. Is it your mom or your dad who's more into the status?
	My mother. How so?
	I'm not even sure how I can describe that.
	My father, he's more laid back.
	My mom is more about appearances, and I know that that's rubbed off on me.
	As far as specific examples, you know, it'd be their social circle, creating a good impression, wanting us to, you know, keeping things from them or her close friends that she might find.
	You know, like my circumstances, she probably didn't divulge the details of that to her friends out of fear that they would...
	You know, judge her for it or look down upon the perfect family.
	Ah, so, okay, okay.
	So this is really, really important.
	And I say this not just to you, but I'm playing for mankind, right?
	So if you're into status, you lose community.
	You lose community.
	So if you have a family where the kids are going off the rails, right?
	Getting addicted to drugs and...
	In trouble with the law, then you have to call in all the support you can get.
	All the support you can get a hold of.
	You need the community to come in and really help.
	Roll up their sleeves, sit down, talk it through, figure things out, right?
	But if you're into status, you don't get that.
	Why? Because you can't tell anyone.
	Because it's humiliating, because it's embarrassing, because it's bad.
	You look bad, right?
	So you gotta keep all these secrets, which means your kids don't get the help they need because you're hiding their problems, right?
	Yes. Which means the problems get worse.
	It's like heroin for a toothache.
	Hey, I don't feel pain anymore, but the rot goes deeper, right?
	And that's what I mean when I say, if your parents had cared more about you, your mom I guess in particular, but your father's responsible too.
	If your parents had cared more about you than about status, you could have been really, really helped to the point where you may never have been arrested.
	You may never have had an illegitimate child with a criminal.
	Your life could have gone completely differently, but your mother chose status over helping you.
	Because if she can't help you, then she needs to enlist a community to help you.
	But then she's got to confess that there are big problems.
	And if she chooses silence over salvation, you pay the price.
	Yeah. I can see that.
	And in your case, choosing status is literally choosing non-life over life.
	In a sense, it's like choosing death over life.
	Yes. I agree with that.
	And it's denying your husband something that he really wants.
	Did you guys talk about having kids before you got married?
	We did. And what did he say that he wanted?
	Yeah, we both wanted one.
	And within a certain time frame, you know, the idea was to have one before my daughter was five.
	And so then after the time kind of went past that...
	What happened? Well, we weren't going to have another one until we were married.
	And we weren't going to rush the marriage idea and the planning or whatever went into that.
	So it just... The engagement, the...
	Wedding and everything kind of pushed it out a little further.
	Wedding? You mean the status event?
	Yeah. Yeah.
	Bet you it was pretty. Yeah.
	Yeah. You chose dead flowers over a life baby, all right?
	So the deal was, going into the marriage, the deal was you have a kid, right?
	Yes. So you have a deal.
	I don't know why you're calling in.
	You have a deal. What am I missing here?
	Oh, you're right. I borrowed $1,000.
	I promised to pay it back.
	I better call Steph and find out if I should pay it back.
	I don't know. I think it's just with a different career and then- That was the deal.
	Yeah. Let me ask you this.
	Was monogamy the deal?
	Yes. So, maybe he can just change his mind and say, you know what, I'm going to start having affairs.
	And what would you say? Not very good things.
	That's not the deal. So, you can't, right?
	Yep. No affairs for you.
	No soup and no affairs for you, right?
	So, if your deal was have a baby...
	Barring some big unusual situation, that's the deal, right?
	It's the deal as solid as monogamy and taking care of each other and in sickness and in health, right?
	That's the deal. That's what he married you for, right?
	Partly was because of the deal about the baby.
	Like if you'd have said, I don't want a baby, he might not have married you, right?
	Because he wants to be a father, I assume, to his own child.
	Right. So that's your deal, right?
	Yeah, I underestimated the...
	The impact of the deal, because I figured it was mobile.
	It could change.
	We discussed it. It wasn't for sure.
	Wait, wait. The deal was mobile?
	What do you mean? You said maybe we'll have a child before you got married?
	Okay. It was a part of the deal.
	I just didn't value it in that way.
	So you negotiated in bad faith about him being a father because you figured, well, I could just change my mind.
	No, there wasn't an anticipation of changing the mind.
	I think it was just with the circumstances and stuff that I selfishly thought that it was appropriate to renege on it or...
	So basically, you're just repeating back to me what I said in a different word.
	Yes, exactly. So you negotiated in bad faith about him being a father because you said that it was going to happen, but you kept in reserve that it could not happen and it would be okay.
	Yes. Right. Don't do that.
	I mean, if you want to have a marriage that succeeds, don't do that.
	Now, it doesn't mean that you can't renegotiate.
	You can renegotiate anything, I guess.
	But if at the time...
	See, this is the tough thing, right?
	This is where the level of honesty needs to be for a marriage to work, right?
	Yeah. You need to be honest enough to say to him, I reserved the right to unilaterally renege on the deal about having children, and I knew that even when I opened my mouth and promised to you that we could have a child, or we would have a child, right?
	Yeah. Because saying now is like, well, I meant it at the time, but I've changed my mind since.
	That's not honest, right? Yeah.
	You didn't mean it at the time.
	You just said something so that he'd marry you, right?
	I wholly wanted to have a child at the time.
	I thought you said that you reserved the right to renege on it.
	Well, further past the marriage is when I, you know, after we got married, then I felt that I had the right to do that without even thinking of it that way.
	And did you tell him at that point?
	It's like, now, I know I said I would have a child with you, but now that we're married, I've changed my mind.
	Or I reserve the right to change my mind.
	Did you tell him that? That was more a condition upon accepting the career.
	It was a discussion that we had about the career.
	You know, if I take this job, then we know that a second child, first child for him would be pretty much out of the picture.
	Oh, so taking this job that requires 75% travel, he's agreed to not have a child?
	He agreed to support me in the decision that, whatever decision we made about the career.
	So I included him in it.
	Yeah, I'm sorry. Listen, let me just explain this to you, Christine, because maybe you're not used to seeing it from the man's perspective, but I'm going to tell you the dude's perspective.
	So, you marry a woman who's got a daughter, and you want your own child, and she agrees to have your child, right?
	And then what happens is, after a couple of years, she says, hey, by the way, not only are you not going to have a child, but I'm going to be gone about 75% of the time.
	So, you also now get to raise my child, but not have your own, right?
	Is that fair?
	What's in it for him? Just help me understand this.
	Maybe I'm missing something. What is in it for him?
	Why does he want to not be a father, raise your daughter, and have you gone 75% of the time?
	Why would he want that?
	What's the benefit for him?
	I'm sure he probably wouldn't want that.
	So why is he saying yes?
	I don't know. I know why.
	Why? Because he's scared.
	And he's angry. Of what? And he doesn't know how to communicate it to you, and he's not sure that you'll listen.
	Yeah. Because men are raised, oh, you can't put your foot down with a woman.
	That's the same as having a pimp hand, right?
	Because if he says, nope, you know, I'm going to hold you to our deal that I want a baby, right?
	Don't you tell me what to do.
	Don't you order me around. All this stuff, right?
	Don't you be... Ike Turner with me now, right?
	Yeah. Which means that women don't get feedback until the man just leaves, which is terrible, right?
	Yeah. And when I say things that you don't like, I can feel my nipples harden.
	Yeah. Seriously.
	I say things you don't like and you're like, ooh, chilly in here?
	Or is it just no longer white background in my studio?
	It's just a wall of ice around Christina's heart and possibly loins, right?
	So when you hear something that you don't like, what happens?
	I express that.
	Yeah.
	Yes, you do. Yes, you do.
	And then you get kind of dismissive.
	I think that I've gotten fairly well at communicating and try to be respectful, but maybe from a different perspective that you could be true.
	I could be dismissive and I just don't even know.
	You haven't even thought about what's in it for him and you claim to be a good wife?
	You haven't thought about how this benefits your husband.
	You traveling 75% of the time, he's raising a kid who's not his and he doesn't get his own kid.
	Have you thought about what's in it for him?
	Why would he want that? What's the benefit for him?
	Yeah. You haven't, right?
	I've thought a lot about it, but not really in that context.
	Oh, come on!
	Throw me a bone here, woman!
	Well, that's where the dilemma came from, as far as changing my perspective, you know, different ideas to change my perspective, because I could sense that my logic, you know, was flawed.
	Right. And your logic is flawed because...
	There's nothing in it for him. Does he want a lot more money and is he willing to give you up 75% of the time and raise a kid who's not his to get more money?
	It doesn't really make any sense, right?
	Yeah. His choices diminish because you're traveling so much.
	He doesn't get to be a father of his own baby.
	Why would he want that?
	And why is he, quote, supporting you if there's nothing in it for him?
	Yeah. And fear and anger would be the reason, right?
	That he's afraid of saying, no.
	No, I don't want more money.
	I want more you and a baby.
	Because he knows deep down that that stands between you and your status.
	And he already sees in the example.
	Of your daughter that you're willing to sacrifice relationships for status.
	So if he stands between you and status, what does he think might happen to him, Christine?
	I'd choose my status over him.
	Yeah. Yep.
	Yeah, and I think I just underestimated the fact that, you know, I'm more persistent if there's something that I want, so I assume that if it was something he would Was really adamant about prior to our discussion about the 8 out of 10 that he would be more assertive about his desire to have a child.
	So his silence with that has, I guess, in a way given me the implication that it's okay for me to choose status over that.
	And that's not his fault.
	It's just a lack of my ability to think about what's in it for him.
	Right. Now...
	Here's the irony. And this is like, I care about status.
	I understand, right? Status matters.
	We can't go life completely indifferent.
	We're social animals. We can't go through life completely indifferent to status.
	So I'm concerned about your status.
	Because here's the funny thing.
	And it's a tragic thing, Christine, which is your mom and dad, but focus on your mom.
	She's more into status, right? So your mom focused on status to the point where she did not share family problems with people, right?
	Couldn't get advice. Couldn't get feedback.
	Couldn't call in help. So the fact that your mother was so focused on maintaining her status, what happened?
	The lowest possible status thing happened.
	Drug addicted daughter gets arrested, is in drug court, gets knocked up by a drug addicted felon who abandons her.
	That's the lowest status thing that could conceivably happen, right?
	Yeah. So her focus on high status blew up her status.
	Pretending everything's fine when it's not causes massive low status events to occur, right?
	Negative status events to occur, right?
	Exactly. One day, I believe, I could be wrong, but I'm not.
	One day, your husband's going to wake up and he's going to say, I don't see my wife.
	I'm raising a kid who's not mine, who's miserable, who's on ADHD drugs, who's I've got behavioral problems and I don't have a wife around and I don't have my own baby.
	What am I doing here? What am I doing here?
	That's the fundamental alpha versus beta question, right?
	Because alphas don't marry single moms.
	They're just basically, right? So you had to choose a guy who wasn't that assertive, right?
	But one day he's going to say, and I don't know if you've ever had, you probably had this with the Biological father of your daughter, right?
	You wake up one day and you say, what am I doing here?
	What am I doing here? What am I doing here?
	And suddenly you're out.
	You're out, you're done, and you ain't coming back.
	And then what happens is, because of your pursuit of high status, leading you to travel all the time and not fulfill your promise, a very serious and sacred promise to your husband to have a baby, you can end up A single mom again with a daughter who's going to have significant behavioral issues and it's going to be very, very low status. See?
	You're pursuing high status.
	It's going to result in very low status.
	I want you to maintain your status, but that means sacrificing things in the here and now so you can maintain your marriage and your status down the road.
	And then your daughter's going to look at you and she's going to say, okay, you've now driven off or failed to bond with two men.
	So why should I listen to you about a damn thing?
	And she's going to fight you tooth and nail.
	And you won't be able to concentrate on your job and you won't be able to have help.
	You won't have connection.
	And your career will fall through or fail.
	And your daughter will get into more and more trouble.
	And you'll be like, wow, this is like a real slow roll groundhog day from hell.
	Yep. Do you see where I'm going?
	Yes. Am I completely wrong in this potential?
	No, I'm...
	It resonates. Right.
	Just out of curiosity, what's your idea on introducing her true biological beginning?
	Because at this time, she doesn't know.
	We don't...
	Force it on her and, you know, try to give her false ideas of who my husband is to her, but he's pretty much all she's ever known.
	Wait, does she think that he's her father?
	Yes. Yeah, she does.
	Okay, so she thinks that he's the father.
	Yes. And that was more out of, you know, we call him by his first name.
	Sometimes when she's speaking to others, she'll refer to him in the father context.
	But she hasn't put it together, and it's like when she's four and five and starting to piece this together and see him as a father, I didn't feel that was appropriate to correct her and say, no, he's not, and shake her sense of stability.
	I don't want to be deceptive towards her because I know she's going to find out and then be resentful towards us if she feels like we were.
	I just don't know how to introduce that or when the right age is or how to go about it so that way she still feels like she has her full self intact.
	Well, she's not going to have her whole self intact when the truth comes out.
	I mean, because she will have lived a lie for seven or eight or nine or ten years, right?
	So, I don't know what the age is at all.
	I mean, I don't know anyone who can tell you that, Christine, but I will say this.
	The closer your relationship is with your daughter, the easier the transition to the truth will be.
	If you're not connected, right, if she doesn't feel connected to you, how's her relationship with your husband?
	That's good. She, I mean, no issues.
	I mean, both of us are probably lack of emotion or connectiveness, I guess you could say.
	But she trusts him and confides in him.
	So this is why, to me, homeschooling and really working on your connection with your daughter is so important.
	And I'm not, I don't know whether it's a good or bad idea to lie to kids about who their parents are.
	I don't know. I don't know.
	I have no idea. I have no idea.
	I can see the case both ways.
	But it is going to be a very deep shock when she is told or finds out or whatever that her father is not the guy in the house, but the guy in the big house, the guy in prison, right?
	Yeah. And she is going to judge you more harshly.
	She can judge you very harshly.
	Because it's not just that she's going to discover the truth about her father, she's also going to discover the truth about her mother, right?
	Or a truth about her mother.
	Yeah, that I chose him to be her.
	Well, and all that led up to it, right?
	Yeah. So, your authority...
	It's going to be deeply cracked with your daughter, right?
	Yeah. So the question is, how can you counteract the cracking of that authority?
	Well, you counteract the cracking of that authority with as strong a relationship as humanly possible, right?
	Which you're not going to get, traveling 75% of the time and dumping her in a government school.
	The more time you have with her, the more time you have to connect with her, the more time she gets to know you and love you more.
	And then the stronger that bond is to handle the truth about her origins, right?
	Thank you.
	Yeah. That makes sense.
	And one day, one day, if you don't have a child, If your husband leaves because he wants to have a baby, and listen, you know, it's a conveyor belt of women that go past men, right?
	Yeah. And if he really, really wants to have a baby, you know what's going to happen?
	He's going to find some woman who wants to give him a baby, and he's going to leave, right?
	Yeah, it's possible. And if he leaves, your daughter's going to say, why did he leave, right?
	And if you're honest, you're going to say, well, he left because I broke my vow to have a child with him.
	And what's she going to think of your authority and honesty and integrity then?
	Yeah. Or you could lie to her and make up something that makes him look bad.
	She's going to find out the truth at some point.
	Kids do, right?
	Yep. And then there goes the Familial status.
	Or he's going to stay and he's going to be miserable and he's going to be frustrated and he's going to be negative.
	And he's going to be sitting there wondering how the hell he ended up being so cucked fundamentally.
	And your daughter's going to walk in when she's 14 or 15 or 16 years old and say, Daddy, what's wrong?
	Daddy, what's wrong? And he's going to say, well, what's wrong is the first word in your sentence.
	Daddy, I'm not one.
	And I'm sad about that.
	Oh, why didn't you become a father?
	Well, your mom wanted to travel and make money.
	Oh, well, you know, I'm sure you guys discussed this before you got married.
	No, no, she did promise to give me a child, but then she broke her word.
	And I'm sad about it.
	So I can't go back and fix it now.
	We're in our 40s. I'm just...
	I'm mad at myself more than anyone else.
	I'm mad at myself for not being clear about what I wanted for buying five minutes peace at the expense of decades of misery.
	I'm mad that I wasn't honest.
	I'm mad that I didn't fight for what I wanted.
	I'm mad that I just rolled over.
	And we got this money and I'm never going to be a father.
	But you don't want that for him, right, Christine?
	Not at all. I mean, that's a love thing, right?
	Yeah. Everything that happens in parenting is a preparation for the teenage years.
	I've said it before, say it again.
	Everything that happens in parenting...
	It's a preparation for the teenage years.
	For the war between you and the peers, right?
	The peers will come in and scoop up your child.
	The peers will come in and try to throw a wedge between you and your children.
	Society is going to come in and try and draw a wedge between you and your children.
	Do you think it's possible to go and be told that men are pigs, that men are patriarchs, that men are...
	Privileged and horrible and exploitive.
	If you have a good relationship with your father, you laugh at assholes who say that stupid shit about men.
	You have to have a cracked relationship for the propagandists to come in and sow their venom.
	The indoctrination in schools and in universities only works because the bond with the parents is broken.
	I never thought about it like that.
	The peers are gonna come in now, Christine.
	With your parents, you had peers saying, hey man, try this drugs, right?
	Now, why did you take the drugs?
	Because you weren't close to your parents.
	Because in the same way that your mother couldn't call in help with you when you were spiraling out of control in your mid-teens and onwards, Because you weren't close to your parents, you couldn't sit down and talk to your parents and say, this is what's going on at school.
	Help me. What should I do?
	So, the world is a vampire that tries to steal your children in their teens when they get independence, when they can stay out late, when they can drive.
	The world is a vampire of lies that will try to steal your children.
	And you've got to hold on to them.
	And how do you... Well, you can't stop building that shit in their teens.
	It's got to be built from day one.
	Hell, before day one, I was reading to my daughter stories when she was still the size of a Pac-Man and looked pretty much the same on the ultrasound, right?
	Mm-hmm. Now we're getting somewhere.
	What are you thinking? I think that you had a lot of really valid points and perspectives to kind of help me reevaluate my priorities.
	The homeschooling thing is the only thing that, you know, I would really have to research and figure out if I decided to go that route, but I think that you hit home in a lot of different areas that kind of helped me really understand.
	My thought process and where I should be putting my, where I should be making the most value of and especially with my daughter that I should be committing more time and effort to her to prevent the vampirist world from, you know, sucking her into it without having that strong emotional connection with her parents.
	Yeah. I don't mean the whole world is vampires, but there are vampires in the world.
	And what they do is they put their little tentacles in and look for every crack, every possible crack.
	And then they, right?
	Yep. I was part of that.
	You were? Well, I mean, you know, I got sucked up by the world and poor choices, but I could see exactly what you're referring to and how it- You hid things from your parents.
	You weren't connected with your parents and the bad people in the world won control over your soul and sent you in a half decade or three quarters of a decade of what could have been a total death spiral and probably came close.
	Yes, several times.
	Yeah. So it's all about having an unshakable bond You know, when my daughter gets older, she'll Google me.
	And we have to have a kind of bond where, well, when my daughter's older, people will talk to her and say, do you know what kind of a bad guy your dad is?
	Let me show you. Let me tell you.
	They'll try. Of course they will, right?
	Yeah. And one of the things that drives me to be such a good parent is that knowledge.
	They're actually helping me be a better parent.
	The trolls are helping me be a better parent.
	Because I have to have a bond and a trust that overcomes the lies and the destruction that people will try to wreak upon my family.
	Well, have already, but will try further when she gets older.
	And I won't lose to them.
	I won't. I won't.
	And you shouldn't either.
	Oh, well, I appreciate all your input, your perspective, and I'll make sure to update you.
	Yeah, let me know how it goes.
	And you understand, I'm not ordering you to have a baby.
	You understand? There's a lot of things to mull over.
	And you can change a deal, but you've got to acknowledge it openly and...
	If your husband is not negotiating on his own behalf, you need to put yourself in his shoes and try and work it from that way, just to protect the sanctity of the marriage.
	But I appreciate your time, and thanks a lot for the call.
	I mean, I know for somebody who's interstatus, it's a tough thing to talk about these kinds of things, and you did a great job.
	Well, thank you. I appreciate your time and all of your input.
	All right. Take care. You too.
	Okay, up next we have Jeff.
	Jeff wrote in and said, I've been investigating into the nature of the current political dynamic of universities and various social institutions in the contemporary West.
	When you mention it on your show with Tom Woods, I gain an interest in the thesis you wrote in college about the relationship between metaphysics and politics.
	From the reading and research I've conducted, I've come to the conclusion that Friedrich Nietzsche has more of an influence on the implementation of progressive policies, economic and political, than Karl Marx.
	Could the arbitrary and deconstructionalist nature of Nietzschean philosophy have more of an impact on the revolutionary and materialistic tendencies that Marxism employs, or do they complement each other on a purely ideological basis?
	That's from Jeff. Hey Jeff, how's it going?
	Good, Stefan, how are you?
	I am well.
	So, yeah, so the thesis...
	Which was my master's thesis was basically arguing that if you believe in an anti-rational higher reality, you almost must end up, if you're consistent, you must always end up advocating for dictatorship as the ideal political model.
	And I deployed a bunch of philosophers on both sides to trace this pattern during their thought.
	So that was the basic argument and I got an A. Although it took a while.
	It took a while. I'm sure it was worth it.
	Yeah, the Karl Marx thing.
	So let me, just for those who don't know, let me just do a little bit about Nietzsche.
	This is far from comprehensive because he's a complex and often baffling and sometimes annoying aphorist.
	He's not really a philosopher.
	He's an aphorist. So a couple of important events in Nietzsche's life.
	So Nietzsche was only five when his father died from a brain ailment.
	And this was like, it was pain, it was suffering, it was ugliness, and then his father died.
	And then his younger brother died the next year, right?
	So Nietzsche was five when his father died, he was six when his brother died.
	Suffering and ugliness and pain, and of course, medicine was still god-awful for the most part.
	It took until the late 19th century for you to go to a doctor and be better off for going to the doctor.
	So it was kind of hard for him to maintain his faith in the moral, just, wonderful universe when people he thought were very good suffered so terribly and then died.
	I mean, jumping around a little bit, Nietzsche also served in the Franco-Prussian War, right?
	This is 1870 to 1871.
	He was a medical orderly.
	And the horrors of war, I mean, back in the day, war is horrible no matter what, but back in the day, Where, you know, you had to sort people's legs off without anesthetic.
	And I mean, it's just horrendous what he had to witness there as a medical orderly.
	You're just going from wounded screaming guy to wounded screaming guy to dying guy to, I mean, it's just horrible, right?
	Yes, I think his traumatic experiences manifested in his philosophy for sure.
	Well, he also got diphtheria and dysentery when he was at war.
	I mean, even if you don't get shot, I mean, more British sailors died of scurvy than enemy cannon fire until they figured out the vitamin C connection.
	And so it was horrible being in war just in terms of bad food, bad environment.
	One little cat gets infected and you're doomed, right?
	Sure, yeah. And so he had this...
	Oh, and his health was wretched, I mean, throughout his life.
	He was a sickly child, and he had terrible migraines.
	He had also ridiculous stomach pains, and there's some theory that his stomach pains arose from syphilis that he contracted in a brothel.
	And there's also theories that it was the syphilis that attacked his brain to the point where he basically went mad.
	Hugged horses and wrote crazy letters and then ended up being taken care of, I think, by his sister for the last 10 years of his life, never recovering any of his faculties.
	And it could have been directly from syphilis or something like that.
	He had myopia, acute short-sightedness, and just crazy, crazy stuff.
	So he had a common...
	I mean, you can read The Sorrows of Young Werther by Goethe as well for this, but he had something that was fairly common in the intellectual circles of the time.
	And this certainly was true of the famous composer Richard Wagner.
	Nietzsche visited him a lot and was brought into his inner circle.
	And Schopenhauer, who had a big influence on both, helped convince Wagner that Human existence was bloody miserable, but you can create great art out of that misery, and that's the only way to transform that lead into gold.
	You're miserable, but you can squeeze that misery into beautiful art, and that's the only thing that you can do to fight it or to battle it.
	So, when you take that, he also was a subjectivist and a relativist, and where he was at the very end of his life, he seemed to be in the process of trying to organize his thoughts into something more cohesive, because he really was not recognized as a philosopher in his day, and I think it'd be hard-pressed to call him a philosopher, even in the here and now, but these are two statements Of Nietzsche, he says, there are no facts, only interpretations.
	And there are no eternal facts as there are no absolute truths.
	And you know that he's not a good philosopher because he doesn't wrestle with the basic contradiction.
	There are no absolute truths.
	Well, that's an absolute truth, you crazy mustachioed douchebag.
	So perhaps you'd like to wrestle with that a little bit.
	No! I won't.
	Sorry, go ahead. Well, what really interested me about Nietzsche Is that he sort of re-parameterized and shifted the axis of traditional Western philosophical practices.
	And so this really played a role in how people view the world, shifting it obviously from an objective platform to a radically subjective platform.
	And I think this is where a lot of Our issues and conflict come from when dealing with contemporary issues.
	Because you have the identity politics, which is just a championing of subjective interpretation of reality.
	And this can lead to fetishizing victimhood and everybody's always trying to justify their position just based on happenstance of how they were born into this world.
	And so I think that creates a huge issue with determining what is just and what is right because you can't even determine what is just and right when you operate under those circumstances.
	Well, and Christian ethics died in the 19th century.
	It took a while for the death throes to manifest in the way that they are now.
	But when he said God is dead, he was right.
	And people didn't believe him for a long time.
	And one of the ways both Freud and Nietzsche gained their resurgence as a result of the First World War.
	And I've talked about Nietzsche, Freud before, why he became, because there was no real concept of the unconscious, except men who were brave were, quote, shell-shocked.
	And they thought it was just something that addled their brain because of the vibrations of air sudden through the shells.
	But Freud was able to explain the unconscious, which was the cause of PTSD or shell-shock.
	And Nietzsche said that in the absence of God, people will worship the state and it will be even worse.
	It will be even worse than worshipping God.
	And so the First World War with 10 million dead and the virtual destruction, it was the destruction of Europe.
	The First World War was the destruction of Europe as it was known.
	The high point of European civilization was the mid to late 19th century and it's just been aftershocks ever since.
	And it's only been kept alive through technology, not through morality.
	And so, Nietzsche was right because Nietzsche was the first person, I think really first, at least first famous thinker, not that he was particularly famous at the time, but the first prominent thinker to say, to reason through or to puzzle through what it meant That Darwin had replaced the Bible, right? Because in the biblical view, the world is a moral play where good is rewarded, evil is punished, and someone's in charge of the whole thing, and your pursuit is not happiness, right?
	That's utilitarianism or pragmatism says that the pursuit Of happiness is the goal, and that's what informed a lot of, of course, the founding fathers.
	And he said, heaven was the goal, and you sacrifice in life.
	Life is miserable, but you get to heaven.
	That's the goal. That was the Christian worldview.
	Utilitarianism is the happiness of the greatest number.
	People want to pursue happiness.
	And what happened was, Darwin came along and said, to hell with all that.
	To hell with all that. That explains nothing about life.
	That explains nothing about biology.
	There is one thing and one thing only that explains life, biology, and evolution, and that is the will to power.
	The will to power.
	The lion eats the zebra.
	If the lion catches the zebra, plus one for the lion.
	If the zebra gets away, plus one for the zebra, minus one for the lion.
	It is not universal. It is not moral.
	The lion is not trying to get into heaven.
	The lion is trying to fill his damn belly.
	And the zebra is trying to get away.
	It is the will to power that characterizes the universe.
	And it is an amoral universe.
	And it is a universe wherein morality is used by the weak who cannot fight the strong to undermine the confidence of the strong.
	And we see this in identity politics and the concept of white privilege and all of this kind of stuff.
	Yes, absolutely.
	And this is one of the reasons he hated Christian morality, because if you take God out of the equation, you take heaven out of the equation, you take sin out of the equation, you take the angels out of the equation, you take Jesus out of the equation, the question is, why is there Christian morality if there's no God?
	And Darwin kind of said, there is no God.
	I was an atheist, kept it to himself because he was afraid of offending his wife.
	So he said, without a Christian God, how can we explain the success of Christian ethics?
	And his basic argument was that there's master morality and there's slave morality.
	And Christianity came out of slaves.
	It was popular among slaves.
	And people say, ah, well, you know, but the Christians sacrificed their own lives.
	It's like, well, sure, they did because their own lives are so miserable because they were slaves.
	Better to be eaten by a lion than continue to be a slave your whole life.
	And so slave morale.
	So there was a master morality and the master morality was the will to power.
	I'm bigger.
	I'm stronger.
	I dominate you.
	I get what I want.
	I drive your armies before me and take your women.
	And that's how my seed spreads it.
	It's pure Genghis Khan spraying of the seed and replicating your genes.
	The ethic is to be powerful, to be dominant, to be wealthy, to gain your wealth.
	And I mean, just look at people like the Clintons.
	I mean, the pure will to power human beings.
	They have lied and cheated and used false morality in order to gather unbelievable amounts of resources to themselves.
	And Obama does the same thing.
	And the Bushes have done the same thing.
	And so the...
	The person who has powerful says, I want resources and I don't mind an open contest and I don't mind battling and bullying to get resources because I'm a lion.
	Whereas the slave, the underling, the weak, well, they say that meekness and subservience and manipulation and charity, that these are how you get resources.
	There's the dog that growls over the other dog and the other dog that rolls on its back and bears its neck in an act of submission.
	But the act of submission is controlling the more powerful dog.
	And so, this victimhood, this victim mentality is a hyper-tumoresque exaggeration of this master.
	And slave morality to the point now where they have to invent imaginary masters like omnipotent or omnipresent imaginary Nazis everywhere in order to justify all of this stuff.
	So when the Christian story ended in the 19th century, and please understand, my friends who are Christians, I'm simply talking about as a large momentous...
	Force that drives and grows, right?
	We've had a lot of momentum because Christianity was the center and the core for close to 2,000 years.
	But Christianity was unable to prevent the First World War.
	It was unable to prevent the Second World War.
	Christianity has been unable to maintain the integrity of European and North American borders.
	It has been unable to maintain cultural...
	Hegemony within the Western culture, and this is because it's a momentum thing.
	In the same way that we don't have much of a free market anymore, but we have just enough that there's momentum with technology that continues to grow things.
	And so, this is not any disrespect to the sort of Christian philosophy and Christian theology, which I have more respect for now than I did before, and I've apologized for my disrespect in the past, but it is a will to power.
	You lie. You lie to get what you want.
	You manipulate to get what you want.
	And all is good.
	I mean, if you look at the way in which certain sects of Islam spread, well, they can lie.
	They don't have to tell the truth.
	They can manipulate. They can do whatever they want in order to...
	It's a will to power. It's a will to power.
	There's no universal ethic.
	It's just a sheer will to power.
	And that is where Nietzsche is.
	Now, I think that Nietzsche was necessary to some degree for Marx...
	Because when you break down rationality, universality, and absolutism, you really crack open the will to power, because that's how the animal kingdom operates.
	The animal kingdom operates on the will to power, does not operate on ethics.
	So everything that breaks down ethics, everything that breaks down universality, is that which then feeds the will to power.
	Because when you don't have ethics, You don't gain resources through productivity.
	You just simply gain resources through the will to power, through domination, through...
	There's no shame in lying if it gets you more resources.
	Saying that it's wrong to lie to get resources in the will to power universe is like saying to the snake, well, it's wrong to hide in the grass.
	Or saying to the alligator, well, it's wrong to sneak up on the deer.
	You're cheating. You're lying.
	It's like, I don't care.
	If it gets me a meal, that's my will to power.
	If ethics get in the way of me getting a meal...
	Forget it. I don't want it, right?
	Well, exactly. And so Nietzsche also, like, he states in his books that, you know, in order to precipitate this outcome, you have to eradicate traditional moral practices.
	And this is exactly what he tried to do in his writing by Presenting the idea of the slave morality and the master morality.
	But he also made a good observation or maybe just a line of thought in the genealogy of morals where he said society's transformed through conflicting systems of moral values.
	You can see this right now in the West where you have people who champion liberalism and individualism and It's conflicting with a group of people who, like you said, will do anything to achieve the willpower.
	They'll lie. They can fabricate narratives about this racism stuff.
	Even though they're committing objective wrongs to people in this society, they can say when someone tries to criticize them that, oh, you just have that white male privilege perspective.
	You're... You know, you're not seeing through the lens of a marginalized group of people.
	Yeah, and the whole white privilege narrative, people say, well, is it true or not?
	Right? There's the people on the right, the conservatives, and say, is it true or not?
	And they say, well, no, it's not true.
	But they don't understand that on the left, it doesn't matter whether it's true.
	It matters whether it gets you resources.
	Exactly. And screaming racism and white privilege...
	And whites gets you resources, because whites then get guilty, they feel bad, they get resentful maybe, but they'll certainly give you affirmative action, they'll give you money, they'll give you foreign aid, they'll give you welfare.
	So the will to power is, does it work?
	Not is it moral, does it work?
	And if morality, if moral judgments, moral condemnations, if they work at getting you resources, then you're being paid to lie.
	Right?
	So if you scream white privilege and sexism and racism and patriarchy at white males, and then white males say, oh, here's trillions of dollars in our taxes.
	Well, you're paying people to lie.
	And then the conservatives come along and say, my gosh, I can't believe these people are lying.
	It's like, well, you're paying them to lie.
	And they are gathering resources.
	You know, the chameleon who changes color in order to hide from predators and get close to prey, it's like, hey, you're changing color.
	That's wrong. It's like, no, it works.
	It works because I don't get caught and I get to eat stuff.
	Right. And so this sort of reminds me of like how Stalin would justify de-kulakization and collectivization Because he wouldn't say that that famine and massive shortages didn't come from his policy, but it came from having reactionary elements within that society.
	And so there's going to be a need to purge those elements from the society.
	So it's a completely arbitrary manufactured subjective type of explanation for the way the universe works.
	Well, and we know now a lot more about the genetics of belief than, well, infinitely more really.
	But there are significant Genetic bases for various political perspectives.
	I mean, just down to liberal and conservative, they are, to a not insignificant degree, inherited or created genetically.
	And so, this is why it's so important to have reason and evidence as our standard for resolving disputes.
	because belief systems are so genetic, then from a pure will to power, amoral standpoint, yeah, you kill off those who disagree with you because you're killing off competing genetics to your will to power.
	Now, of course, you end up killing off a bunch of people who are productive and all that kind of stuff.
	But this like, you know, slaughtering political opponents that is quite common among leftists has a will to power basis to it, but because they don't have the capacity to change other people's minds.
	Like the moment somebody says everything is subjective, they've said, I am never ever going to reason you out of your position.
	So they have opened the gates to the will to power at the same time that they've closed the gates to rational discourse.
	Of course, that's going to lead to violence.
	It can't lead anywhere else.
	Exactly. And this is also where the internal inconsistency with that logic is, because then they could tell They get to deem what's objectively harmful to a society, though.
	So you hear all the leftist professors criticizing all the evils of Nazism and stuff, but who are they to determine what is objectively harmful when they don't even operate from that standpoint, from that principle of objectivity?
	It's really frustrating and it's deeply concerning to me that you could basically just say anything.
	You say anything that gets you what you want.
	Well, yeah, and this is exactly where the mainstream propagandist media gets to say that, oh, Donald Trump is Hitler, even though that's really deeply concerning to me because that's not congruent with reality at all.
	It's scary because they're saying this just like, as you said, as a means to the will to power.
	They'll stop at nothing.
	I'm sure if killing a baby or something, like abortion, was an option to get what they wanted, they'd do it.
	Absolutely. Of course they would because it would be to them the equivalent of Would a lion kill a baby zebra to eat?
	Well, sure. In fact, great, because it's slower.
	And the meat is less gamey and so on, right?
	So yes, absolutely.
	And we see this repeatedly with these collectivists when they gain power is they just, they drown the land in blood.
	They drown the continent in blood when the collectivists gain power.
	And this is why I have talked about this.
	You should really keep your eye out and check out on The upcoming documentary called Hoaxed, H-O-A-X-E-D. You can go to hoaxedmovie.com.
	Just check this out.
	It's a fantastic documentary and talks about some of this from time to time.
	But yeah, the moment that you have taken out objective ethics.
	And this battle, right, between conservatives and liberals, between the right and the left, to use sort of traditional terms.
	That the left keep contradicting themselves, although always with the goal to power.
	Always with the goal to power.
	Everything that moves them closer to power or resists freedoms from interfering with their pursuit of power.
	And the people on the right, but that's inconsistent.
	If there's no such thing as truth, if there's no such thing as virtue, how on earth is racism bad?
	Right. I mean, if there's no such thing as reality, how do we even know there's such a thing as a patriarchy, right?
	But the whole point is that it's not designed to be true.
	It's designed, when you use language to gain resources, it's a lot easier than working for those resources yourself.
	If you can guilt people into giving you money, it's a lot easier than going out to earn that money yourself.
	And the purpose of the language is to gain resources.
	It is not to be true.
	It is not to be consistent.
	And that's why the moment you point out contradictions, the moment you point out contradictions, you get aggression.
	Because there's no goal for consistency, right?
	So like, here's a tiny example of it, right?
	So when I was in Australia, I did a couple of street interviews.
	And it's funny, because the people were like, well, did you just do a whole bunch of street interviews and pick the craziest ones?
	No! No, no, no, no.
	We published all of them except for two.
	One was a guy who kind of froze on camera, and the other was a guy who didn't speak English very well.
	Okay. So everything that we could publish, we did publish.
	And in it, there was one guy who was a cross-dresser.
	And he was like, well, I'm from the tribe of love or something like that, right?
	And I asked him, he was full of contempt for me and hostility towards me.
	But he was from the tribe of love.
	Until such time, as I pointed out a contradiction in his thinking, at which point he told me to fuck off.
	Right? So the tribe of love apparently has a little bit of some fuzzy borders.
	People from the tribe of love don't seem to stay there when you point out contradictions, right?
	So you do get that rage, that aggression, that hostility, almost that murderousness when you point out contradictions, right?
	Of course, yeah. And it's natural, because the point is to get resources.
	And if you point out contradictions, you're threatening their use of language to get resources, because their language is revealed as inconsistent or contradictory, and therefore you get the rage that's behind it.
	What is behind the left?
	What's behind the left is helplessness.
	Why?
	Because they're dependent upon the kindness of strangers, because they're dependent on the welfare state, because they're dependent upon the transfer of trillions of dollars through the power of the state.
	They are dependent.
	They are parasites in that sense.
	And I mean this, I mean, it sounds harsh and negative.
	It's just a description of the relationship.
	They're not producers in their own accord.
	And so they're helpless.
	They are dependent.
	And as helpless and dependent, quote, slaves, although they're actually enslaving, but they have no particular power to generate their own resources in their own minds in the moment.
	And so, of course, they have to be manipulative.
	As the weaker people, as the people who are dependent, right?
	The taxpayer doesn't need the welfare recipient, but the welfare recipient desperately needs the taxpayer.
	So the power relationship is very clear.
	And if that power relationship becomes clear, then people are going to really change society.
	And so what you have to do is you have to constantly crush down and humiliate the taxpayer Who generally are white males by calling them, you know, cisgendered scum and having the Society for Cutting Up Men, which is one of the feminist things and white privilege and white racism and white nationalism.
	And anytime white people have any kind of in-group preference, they're all Nazis, right?
	You have to. Because if the white males to take...
	I mean, it would be different in Japan, but, you know, in Europe, it's white males still...
	If they say, well, what's in it for me?
	How is this beneficial to me?
	And if they actually recognize the power that they have, well, the whole scam kind of comes crumbling down and people don't feel that they have the need or the capacity to support themselves outside of this predatory parasitical relationship.
	And so, of course, they have to be abusive because they're not producing of their own.
	They're dependent upon the kindness of strangers.
	That kindness is wearing thin.
	And so they have to pile on the abuse.
	You know, it's like the old thing.
	If a woman can get her way through sexual attractiveness, she'll do that.
	When she gets older, she just starts nagging.
	And originally, of course, originally, you know, whites paying for non-whites in terms of, to some degree, welfare, but to foreign aid and so on.
	How was it sold? It was sold like, well, this is going to make everything better, right?
	This is fair. You know, even if you didn't get into the whole colonialism thing, it's like, well, you know, we'll feed Africa and it will be great because then there won't be any...
	Hungry Africans left or maybe hungry blacks, right?
	Now that, nobody believes that anymore, right?
	Nobody believes, well, just keep dumping all this money and food and resources into these countries.
	It doesn't work.
	It doesn't work. It does kind of the opposite of working.
	And so now they can't claim, they can't rely on the charity impulse because charity is not working.
	They certainly have tried the victim, you evil colonists, OS reparations and so on.
	That It's kind of running out.
	And so now there's just open land grabs, you know?
	And we talked about...
	I talked about this in terms of South Africa, right?
	South Africa is...
	Everyone's like, oh, no, they've withdrawn that bill.
	It's like, well, yeah, because they need to find a way to make it more robust.
	They need to do a little bit more tweaking.
	They're not going to stop, right?
	And they just crashed into a recession, and in particular, in the agricultural sector, went into a huge recession in South Africa.
	Of course, you're going to steal things from people, and they're going to try and hide them or get away, or they're not going to bother being...
	Productive. So, yeah, I mean, Nietzsche was powerful insofar as he really got that it was going to be a will-to-power universe in the absence of religion.
	Now, hopefully, it would have been nice if he'd lived long enough or hadn't banged some syphilitic hooker in a brothel in his 20s.
	It would be nice if he'd been able to put together a rational proof of secular ethics, which is really what's been missing from the West for years.
	150 years or more, and that's what I've really worked to produce, and I'm going to continue to work to do more of that on the road.
	I want to do like a UPB tour.
	But he got it.
	Now, the diagnosis did not drive him to the cure.
	In fact, the diagnosis led him to make it cool to have a will-to-power universe.
	You're going to be a dominant, noble Greek god like Apollo.
	You don't want to be one of these weak slave Christian manipulators and so on.
	So he kind of made it cool. And hip and vivacious to be one of these amoral, will-to-power Napoleons, which was terrible.
	It was a terrible betrayal.
	Philosophers have such control over the future, more so than politicians, more so than novelists.
	Philosophers have such control over the future.
	And a little nudge in the here and now, a sentence here, an emphasis there, a cool phrase here, a publication there, can change the entire course of tens of millions of lives, literally.
	Tens of millions of lives can be saved or killed by where the philosopher puts a fucking semicolon.
	And he was intensely irresponsible in his description of the will to power and his prescription of it as the good.
	The good is what gains me resources, what gains me power, what gains me dominance.
	He did not attempt to find a secular explanation of universal ethics.
	And as a result... Tens of millions of people died.
	Yes, exactly.
	I want to emphasize what I meant about Nietzsche's philosophy and Karl Marx's philosophy, they complement each other on an ideological basis because Marxism depends On the subjectivity, like you said earlier, it's just based on the will of power of gaining resources, lying, doing all these things that ignore universal, preferable behavior, universal ethics.
	Well, Marx has the class consciousness, which means that the capitalist has a class consciousness called exploit the worker.
	And the workers have a class consciousness called kill the capitalist, or take over the means of production.
	There's no... It's all the will to power.
	You're right. I mean, and Marx was...
	Very much in this post, obviously post-Christian universe.
	I mean, he was a secular Jew, right?
	So he's definitely in the post-Christian universe, and there was no objective truth.
	There was identity politics.
	And Marxism keeps re-emerging, right?
	So it was originally class, and then it became race, and then it became gender, and now it's back to race and identity politics and so on.
	It just keeps reaffirming, saying, well, you've got this tribe and you've got this tribe, and they're both fighting over resources.
	I think this tribe should win because they're the cool guys.
	And I think that the proletariat should win.
	And I think that the victims should...
	I mean, it just goes on and on.
	And until we get back to some kind of universal ethics, well, this constant war of words and swords is just going to continue.
	Right. So how would you...
	What steps do you think we should...
	I mean, I know with your show, you're trying to expose these people to these ideas that there is a universal or an objective morality of some sort.
	How can we do this if these people aren't listening to reason and evidence and logic?
	If every time we present them with that, they become violent and they try to shut us out?
	Well, there is a...
	I think it was Mike Cernovich who said this, that the...
	I can't remember how he put it, but was it the new right or something like that?
	Like, we don't dox you.
	We don't hit you. We just get you thrown in jail.
	Right? Because, you know, I mean, if you are someone on the left and you attack someone on the whatever it is, the new right, I can't remember the exact phrasing, but whatever it is, right?
	It's like, yeah, we will contact law enforcement.
	We will give the affidavits.
	We will show the video. We'll get you thrown in jail.
	And that is, at the moment, the most civilized way to approach it.
	It is essential that we retain or regain the ability to ostracize insane people in society.
	Right now, not only we can't ostracize them, but they have very high status, right?
	Because a lot of the lunatics are in academia, and they're in the media.
	Like, these are intensely Crazy people.
	Because from a moral standpoint, the mere will to power is insanity.
	Not because it is the will to power, but it is the will to power that pretends to be It carries within it the disguise of objective ethics, and that's what makes it insane.
	If it was just like, you know, there's no such thing as truth, but I sure do like getting free money from taxpayers, you know, like that's great for me.
	Well, that's an honest statement.
	But no, it's all about victimhood and exploitation and reparations.
	And I mean, it's all couched in this moral language.
	And that's the insane part of it.
	of it.
	The lion just eats you.
	He doesn't tell you that it's moral to eat you and you ate his parents and whatever, right?
	So...
	And they really did a good job of making Hitler look like a right-wing capitalist, which is really...
	Yeah, Hitler, he hated capitalism.
	And he was one of these guys who left nominal control of the means of production in semi-private hands, but then just told them what to do, right?
	So it's just one step removed.
	And it is...
	You'll buy it from this person You'll... You'll sell it at this price, and you'll make the- Yeah, I mean, they call him a capitalist, even though he created a massive war machine that was paid for by a massive taxation.
	I mean, it's- Come on. I mean, this is just- Maybe they should refer back to Mein Kampf.
	I mean, they probably have never even read it.
	He dedicates a good portion of a chapter of explaining the evils of capitalism and how it was an economic system that the Jews used to displace or disenfranchise the German worker.
	It all follows the same line.
	I don't know why they can't see that.
	I don't know why any Any of these so-called intelligent college students can't connect the dots.
	No, it's because it's the narcissism of small differences or what they say about academia, that the fights are so vicious because the stakes are so small.
	Well, the stakes between national socialism and communism are very high, but the recognition of each other that they're willing to use violence makes them natural enemies.
	You know, the enemy of one mafia gang that's willing to use violence is another mafia gang that's willing to use violence.
	It's not some YouTube video.
	So the natural enemy of communism is another collectivist group that's willing to use violence to get their ends.
	I see these comments all over the videos, man.
	I have a very good finger on the pulse of where thoughts are at the moment, which is kind of new in the world.
	But I see these comments.
	I mean, I'm still mulling them over, the comments who say, yeah, it's great that you're making all these videos, dude, but that's not how these problems are going to be solved.
	Yeah. It's kind of what you're saying too, right?
	Well, you can't stoop to the level that they're willing to because then you would just be as bad as they are.
	Well, no. See, I'm not sure that's for certain.
	I'm not sure that's for certain because if it's self-defense, that's one thing, right?
	Well, yes, yes.
	Of course, yeah. Good if it turns into people organizing and going down to shut the universities down.
	I mean, maybe it doesn't seem like such a bad idea, but I know that you promote the non-aggression principle and everything.
	Oh yeah, if we can defund the universities, if the government stops guaranteeing these loans, and if people get the facts about the productivity of the money that they're investing in their higher education, But the problem is we can't ostracize.
	And when you can't ostracize, you end up with tyranny.
	The whole point of the free market is to ostracize, to ostracize, to ostracize.
	Ostracizing is the opposite of tyranny.
	And if one goes down, the other goes up.
	I can't ostracize.
	Marxists who are indoctrinating the young.
	I can't because my taxes are taken from me by force and used to pay for the faculty and the entire structure that allows them to...
	I can't. I can't.
	I can't ostracize people who are making terrible decisions.
	I can't ostracize people who are way overweight and costing a lot in terms of health care.
	I can't ostracize women who have children with...
	Bad guys who don't stick around.
	I can't.
	There's not any particular point to be moral because most people aren't moral because there's some abstract vision that they're trying to achieve.
	They're moral because there are negative consequences to being bad.
	We know this from when the police are on strike or when there's a looting as a result of a natural disaster.
	Most people Avoid stealing for fear of negative consequences, not because there's some abstract moral thing.
	And this is what Heaven and Hell did before philosophy, and that's where we have to work from these days.
	Right. And with the internet and how efficient it is with delivering information, of course, if there's no censorship, like in China or in some cases the European Union, Then how can we really advance the education system because they're being so ironically unprogressive about the natural development of a certain thing,
	I guess we could say. The two great challenges to the West come out of Islam and come out of China.
	Or come out of Islam and come out of East Asian nations.
	And I was woken up to this in particular, talking to and doing some research on land ownership in Australia in particular, New Zealand to some degree as well.
	Now, some very interesting things come out of these two belief systems.
	And I'm not trying to say that China and Japan are belief systems, but out of this post-communist, semi-totalitarianistic society.
	Now one of them is interesting.
	So Islam's analysis of male-female relationships is something that people need to pay a lot of attention to.
	Please understand, I'm not advocating, I'm not praising, I'm simply saying that it is a very successful belief system and its analysis of male-female relationships is something that is one of the roots of its success.
	Particularly its reproductive success, like just having lots of babies, right?
	So that's something that...
	And the analysis that occurs, the race realist analysis that occurs out of East Asian nations, because they are an ethnic monoculture, they can talk about differences in ethnicities, particularly in terms of IQ and other things.
	They can talk about these things very openly and very easily.
	And the fact that we can't talk about male-female differences and we can't talk about...
	Ethnic differences in the West is the two fundamental reasons why we're failing and Islam and the East Asian nations are succeeding because they can talk about two foundational truths that we can't talk about and Until we can talk about these things which is why I'm constantly trying to break down these taboos because you look at what successful cultures are doing and you say well They have the capacity to be a lot more honest than we can be and to explore genuine facts than we are and Let's do that.
	Because, you know, they're doing very well.
	Right. And so, I mean, sorry.
	If you're catching any background noise, I'm sorry.
	But... Yes, it's important to talk about the fundamental differences between a population in terms of, like you said, it doesn't matter if it's race, IQ, gender, because once those differences are highlighted, you could come up with a rational way of maybe treating these social ills, if that's a good way of explaining it.
	Because right now, I like in your book, The Art of the Argument, that's what it is, where you said civilization is the function of discourse.
	Or the function of discourse is what keeps civilization functioning and alive.
	Because without it, then you get this...
	This absolute dustpot on the top or these group of bureaucrats that get to artificially manufacture every single situation that happens.
	You have complete totalitarian control over the environment and that's not conducive of progressing anything, of making anything grow.
	You know, and the same applies to having all these restrictions on like an economy.
	As we've seen from From the past, communism in the Soviet Union and in China, it was the most horrible human atrocities I've ever been committed.
	So yeah, I mean, it's important to really be open and to learn how to discuss and reintroduce that function into society.
	Yeah, well, the solution is always freedom.
	The solution is always freedom.
	All right, I got a couple more callers.
	I'm going to try and do one more before the end of the night, but feel free to call back anytime.
	It's a real pleasure to dig into and dissect these topics.
	So thank you very much for the opportunity.
	Yes, absolutely. Thank you.
	Thanks, man. Okay, up next we have Bradley.
	Bradley wrote in and said, Finland is an example of a country that implements this fine policy.
	My peers explain to me that this policy is to make crimes such as speeding and other illegal acts more punishing for the wealthy.
	I feel as if this still does not justify this policy to be in place.
	I feel that all laws should be enforced equally among all people, and that punishing the wealthy for being wealthy doesn't seem right to me.
	That's from Bradley. Hey Bradley, how's it going?
	Good, how are you? Well, thank you.
	Yeah. I mean, you're asking to me how governments should act morally and justly, which I can't answer because it's impossible.
	If you want to say, how would a private company do this?
	That to me is a more interesting question because the government's going to do it to make money, reward its friends and punish its enemies.
	Yeah. I just kind of want to expand on reasons why This topic comes up and what their reasoning is behind it.
	They were explaining, from what I've got, there's two things that they find and that they explain.
	One, the wealthy, they get away with things, with law, and they Get away with crimes because it means nothing to them.
	A hundred dollar fine means nothing and they don't feel punished and they don't feel any repercussions from a crime they do.
	And the second is they feel people who are intelligent, wealthy, are more They're more morally responsible than less wealthy, less intelligent people, and they should be the ones setting the example for the lower classes.
	Oh, so then rich people should get more votes.
	Right, and that's kind of on the other side of it.
	Yeah, and that would kind of bring to saying that lower class people should be treated as children, And the more wealthy are more responsible, they know what needs to go, and that's kind of like their reasoning behind it.
	And so I was just kind of wanting to see what your thoughts on that were.
	Yeah, I'm not entirely convinced that speeding is a huge problem.
	Right. I mean, there's arguments to be made, like the Audubon argument, or this is a video I did years ago on a town in Europe where they got rid of all of the street signs and lanes and everything, and traffic flow went up and accidents went down.
	And so I don't know whether...
	I mean, I'm pretty sure that speed limits and ticketing...
	It has nothing to do with keeping people safe, and mostly it has to do with making money for the government.
	This whole thing would probably be quite different.
	Now, as far as punishment based upon income, I mean, I can certainly see the argument that the true The cost is the same, but the value is different.
	So if you're someone who makes $1,000 a month and you get fined $100, that's 10% of your monthly income.
	If you make $10,000, you understand.
	So in a sense, proportional to income, it's a lower fine for the rich person.
	But that simply may indicate that money may not be the way To do it, right?
	Because the argument also would be, well, you know, if it's a $10 movie ticket and you make $1,000 a month, that's 1% of your...
	Right? Of your income.
	And if you make 10,000, then it's a tenth of a percent of your income.
	And so it should be $100 for the rich person, and it should be $10 for the poor.
	Like, you can't run a society like that, where you change the price of everything depending upon someone's income.
	Like, is your latte 50 cents or $500, right?
	That doesn't make any sense.
	Because if, as a whole, prices go up and you become wealthier, nobody's going to bother becoming wealthier.
	Because your purchasing power would remain the same.
	So as a principle, it doesn't work.
	Because you wouldn't be a millionaire if everything costs more.
	And so as a whole, I can sort of understand that a millionaire gets hit less with that kind of issue.
	But I would say that you can't do it as a general principle.
	So however the punishment occurs, or even if it needs to occur, I don't know.
	But it would have something to do with...
	So for a lot of people, there are points for their driving.
	And if you get a certain number of points, you get license restrictions and so on.
	So maybe it would have to do with that.
	Yeah, they get punished in different ways rather than monetary.
	Yeah, so the free market would work out something that would be effective.
	And I understand that the millionaire might say...
	Well, I'd rather just keep paying speeding fines because my time is worth more.
	Like if I make $1,000 an hour and I save an hour, And then every week I get a speeding ticket.
	Well, I'm making much more money by speeding than it costs me in tickets.
	So I understand that.
	And it's not a crazy argument.
	I mean, then you are basically giving millionaires the licensed speed, whereas poor people don't, right?
	They don't have the option.
	Yeah, I can completely understand that.
	In which case, the disincentive for millionaires would have to be something else.
	And what that would be, I don't know, because I'm not the free market and anyone who pretends to be is delusional.
	But there would be...
	There would be some way of controlling the behavior, if fines were relevant, of controlling the behavior of richer people, right?
	And so, yeah, license restrictions, you could lose your license for a day or a month, in which case it becomes really problematic.
	That happens even now, but it may be more common for that kind of stuff.
	Yeah. And so, you know, I think it's interesting.
	And people say, well, we'd really like to control behavior.
	We want to control people's behavior.
	Let's say we don't want anyone to speed.
	And actually, I find speeders really annoying as a whole.
	Mostly because if it's traffic flow, that's one thing.
	But people who are just zipping in and out, it's just like you count down to accident, right?
	Yeah. So the question is, how do you control people's behavior?
	Now, the traditional answer has been you pass a law and that doesn't really work.
	And so how do you control people's behavior?
	It's a very interesting question.
	And the answer is freedom.
	The answer is the continual experimentation in a free market system.
	Because, I mean, even if you look at roads right now, Roads were designed for a particular kind of car, often many, many decades ago.
	And now cars are safer.
	They're better balanced. They're, you know, like great stuff.
	We've got lots of safety systems, but it still kind of stays the same.
	And you want the constant experimentation of how do you catch speeders?
	I mean, catching speeders is ridiculous too.
	Like up here in Canada or in Ontario, there's a highway called the 407.
	And it's a private highway, which means it's fast and it's efficient.
	And they don't tie it up for months doing road work.
	Now, it's often struck me, so you have a little transponder, right?
	And it beeps. You can even hear this in my old podcast from back in the day in the car.
	When I'd get in close to home, you'd hear this beep, beep, beep.
	And so... For a private highway, you have a transponder and they know when you're coming on the highway and they know when you're leaving the highway.
	And they know how far you've gone and they know the time.
	So they can easily calculate how fast you went.
	You understand, right? Exactly.
	And so with that kind of system, you could just charge people for speeding and you wouldn't even need to catch them.
	There wouldn't need to be any tickets or whatever.
	So, you know, whether that would be right or wrong, it's very easy to catch people speeding.
	Because if you've gone, if the speed limit is 100 kilometers an hour and you've gone 120 kilometers in an hour, they know that immediately.
	Well, you've just been speeding.
	And so maybe that's a better way to do it.
	And that way you don't have to see if some cop is going to catch you.
	But again, I don't know.
	Maybe if you pass a particular course for high speed, you get to go faster than other people.
	I don't know. Maybe if you've been speeding, but you've never had an accident, after a year of speeding with no accident, you can speed.
	I don't know. Who knows?
	That's the glory, is that there are going to be people who want to speed, and those people may speed safely.
	In fact, it may be safer for them to speed.
	Other people will go the right speed limit, but they're on their cell phones or they're distracted by something and they're terrible drivers or whatever, right?
	So I don't know, but I'd love to see the experimentation that would come out of a free market about how best to manage these kinds of behaviors.
	Yeah, I think that's a great response.
	I just feel like attacking the wealthy in general with these kind of Things and these kind of ideas is kind of dangerous and a slippery slope.
	Just blaming the wealthy for being the ones that are doing the speeding and the actual crimes.
	And I think the general population who are doing the crimes and any kind of those kind of infringements are lower class, middle class kind of The ones who are generally doing crimes.
	Well, the hostility towards the rich largely comes out of the left.
	I mean, this is not very complex.
	I'm sure you understand it, but it's like if you were to say to people, should we have a tax on tall people?
	A special tax on tall people?
	They'd say, well, no.
	Right? Should we have a tax on people with great singing voices?
	Should we have a tax on people who are very handsome or very pretty?
	Well, no. Is that a jealousy and Yeah, well, so, and because people recognize that you're tall, it's just your genetics.
	It's just the way you are, right? If you're handsome or you're pretty, I mean, there's some work in keeping yourself at an attractive weight and all of that, but should we, you know, it's very rare for East Asian women to have green eyes, but it's considered to be very attractive, or for East Asian women or Asian women as a whole to have large breasts, right?
	Right. Should we tax East Asian women who have large breasts and green eyes?
	You know, the big trouble in little China women, right?
	Because they're going to do a lot better in the dating market.
	And you say, well, no, it's because it's not their fault.
	It's just the way they were born, right?
	So in general, the rich people are smarter, and the smartness is 85% genetic when you're in your late teens, according to the latest research.
	And so there's nothing to hate.
	They're just... They're smarter.
	They're smarter. And in the same way, some people are taller, and some people are prettier, and some people have better singing voices, and other people have perfect pitch.
	It's the wonderful crapshoot of genetics and evolution.
	So there's this resentment like, oh, well, he's rich because he's cold-hearted, and he's exploiting the workers, and that's ridiculous.
	That's like saying, well, he's tall because he's cold-hearted, and he stole food from other children.
	It's stupid. It's a stupid non-explanation that is worse than idiocy, because it actually provokes malevolence, right?
	I mean, the number of comments...
	I could do a video on South Africa.
	The number of comments I get from people in South Africa...
	Who are like, well, the whites stole the land and they're white devils and you're pale, soulless, go back to your European caves.
	And they're like, just this hatred, hatred, hatred.
	Because this is what people have fed into their minds, that the whites just came and stole everything.
	And the only reason the rights of which is because the blacks are poor.
	It's a horribly destructive lie that gets millions of people killed.
	It gets millions of people killed and the worst is yet to come.
	And there's the explanation of...
	History, culture, IQ, genetic differences, and so on, that explains it.
	It just explains it. And you don't need a whole lot of this other stuff.
	And this is why I talk about it, because I don't want millions of people to get killed.
	And millions of people are going to get killed if we continue to believe all of this, everyone who's wealthy is an exploiter and a mean guy and a bad guy.
	I mean, you dehumanize people because you want to hurt them, because you want to steal from them, because you want to kill them.
	And the dehumanization comes before The murder, right?
	There's a reason why in Rwanda, I think it was the Tutsis referred to, they're cockroaches.
	They're cockroaches. They kept dehumanizing them.
	They're exploiters. They're white privileged.
	They're racist. They're evil.
	They're Nazis. I mean, this language is the presage to massive attacks upon people.
	And if you don't have an alternative explanation, Then these words take hold and cause untold, death, murder, misery, starvation, destruction.
	And we've got to push back against these words.
	And the way that you push back against A false accusation of crime is with a true description of events.
	You have to have an alternative theory to dislodge an existing theory.
	And this is why I talk about the IQ stuff.
	All right. I'm going to do one more call, but I really, really appreciate your time.
	And yeah, just remind people.
	It's like, yeah, this is a very interesting question.
	And it should never be answered by government because governments will corrupt the answer.
	But the free market will come up with very...
	And you can discuss things.
	And then as long as people don't say, great, we'll just have the government do that.
	Well, then you've got somewhere.
	Right. Thank you so much.
	Thanks man. Alright, up next we have Amanda.
	Amanda wrote in and said, During a recent show, you asked a caller, was there no one else out there regarding his choice to marry someone who had a child via rape?
	Why do you feel this way?
	As a woman that had that situation, I felt it was an overgeneralized statement that was unwarranted.
	Women in my situation should know they have other options as well.
	Do you think women can restore their sexual market value after being raped?
	That's from Amanda. Hi, Amanda.
	How are you doing? I'm great.
	How are you? Good.
	I have a strong compulsion which I'm going to act upon to defend my statement because I think it may have been taken out of context.
	In fact, I'm pretty sure that it was.
	So if I remember the show correctly, the problem wasn't fundamentally the rape.
	It was the wild and wide variety of abuses within their existing relationship.
	The comment was at sort of the beginning of the conversation before it got into the mess that he was really in.
	No, no, but we get whole emails back and forth before we start this.
	The calls don't come out of nowhere, right?
	People will often take an adverse childhood experience score and we get emails and details and so on.
	Assuming that it's the beginning of the call for you and therefore it's the beginning of the call for me is not always valid.
	Agreed. All right.
	So I just wanted to point that out, that if somebody said my girlfriend was raped, it wouldn't be immediately like, oh, well, that's terrible.
	I mean, of course, it's terrible, but it wouldn't be like, oh, we've got to break up with them or whatever, right?
	But if... The rape is also occurring with a wide variety of other dysfunctions in the relationship.
	Then it would be like, yeah, well, I mean, is there no one else out there who doesn't have the history, doesn't have the abusive tendencies, and so on, right?
	So I just wanted to sort of point that out, that it was not the only factor in that conversation.
	Sure. All right. So now I get the joyful task of asking you...
	What happened? I assume that you were yourself raped at some point.
	What happened? Yes.
	I had a situation that happened with a friend of mine who I thought was my friend.
	To back up slightly, I grew up in a situation where I was surrounded by scallywags.
	And so when you grow up that way, People who are questionable are normal until you get to a point in your life where you realize that that's not really normal.
	So the person that I was friends with would be considered one of those people.
	And so I was raped and...
	Well, hang on, hang on. Sorry.
	The word scallywags...
	May not be as clear to me or the audience as a whole as it is to you.
	So, Erin, what do you mean by scallywags?
	So, people who not are like criminals, but maybe may not have the best morals.
	I grew up in a home that was surrounded by drug dealers and things like that.
	So, those were normal people to me.
	So, the person that Ended up assaulting me was on drugs.
	All right. So hold on, hold on.
	Before we get to the assault, and I'm sorry for asking the question, but if we're going to do the history.
	So you have an adverse childhood experience score of nine, which is, you know, massive sympathies, Erin.
	That is horrendous. So just for those who don't know, this is the test developed by Dr.
	Vincent Felitti, who was on the show many years ago.
	Okay. So that is, except for one, the worst possible score that you can get.
	And I just really wanted to extend my massive sympathies for that entire mess.
	So, you know, when I look at an adverse childhood experience score of nine, Erin, I gotta tell you, scallywags, not the term that I would use.
	Yeah. Alright, so if you could tell me a little bit about the circumstances that led to the rape, that would be helpful.
	Sure. So, the person that did this, we went to school together, and I went over there to pick up- Sorry, what school do you mean?
	High school, university? College.
	College, okay. College. I was 21.
	Essentially, I left my car at his place when I went out of town so I didn't have to pay for airport parking, which seems so stupid now.
	Of course. But you didn't know what the price was going to be, right?
	No. So I went to go get my car after leaving the airport so that I could drive home.
	The airport that I came out of was not the state that I lived at, but it was cheaper to fly out of there.
	And that's when it occurred, because he said, well, why don't you just come in, have a drink before you get on the road?
	And I said, okay, fine.
	Wait, have a drink before you get on the road?
	Yeah. You know, you're 21, you're not...
	It's like, yeah, sure, I'll have a glass of wine.
	But you're not supposed to have a drink before you get on the road.
	Yeah. But that's...
	See, that's a clue, right?
	Hey, why don't you come and do something that could get you in huge trouble legally in my house?
	Yes. All right.
	Okay, so he says, come have a drink before you start driving and then what?
	I go in and I don't even get halfway through the living room and I'm pinned down and the next thing I know, it's happened.
	And so I immediately leave and I don't fill out a police report or anything like that.
	It's just a lot of shame that went with it.
	I didn't say anything to anybody about it until I found out that I was pregnant and so then I I decided that I wasn't going to get an abortion and that I wanted my child to have a father.
	I didn't want to be a single mother, so I went through with an open adoption so that my child would have a family but still be open to updated medical records Contact me if she decided to, and that way it wasn't just a closed adoption where she wouldn't know anything.
	How long did you know the man before he raped you?
	About a year, but only at school.
	Were there any, like looking back, it's easy in hindsight, right?
	But looking back, Erin, was there any indication that he had this evil tendency before the night?
	No, but knowing what I know now, people do crazy things when they're on drugs.
	It was just a bad situation to put myself in, to just expose myself to in general.
	But again, that's all I knew.
	So it wasn't different. Wait, wait. Okay, so you knew him for a year.
	Was he a drug user for that year?
	Yes, but I thought he was only on marijuana.
	I had no idea that he was on harder drugs.
	Heroin and cocaine. Because I only knew him through school.
	You may know or may not know, but was he on those drugs when he raped you?
	Yes. And how did you know that?
	Because I asked.
	Because I actually reached out to him because I didn't file criminal proceedings.
	I actually legally had to have his signature for her to be adopted.
	So he had to be notified.
	And what did he say?
	He actually thought that it would be okay and that he could try to make a relationship out of it because there was a child involved.
	Wait, a relationship with you? Yes.
	So wait, I'm sorry, I'm a little confused here.
	So he raped you and then he tried to make a relationship with you?
	Yes, because he thought, in his mind, he thought that this is...
	And it technically was his child, but this was his child, and so he should try to make it right.
	But I had no interest, obviously.
	Oh, so you didn't have any contact with him until you contacted him about putting the child up for adoption?
	That is correct.
	Like, we'll not... Until the adoption.
	Once I made the decision I was going to do an adoption, and the adoption coordinator told me that I would legally have to have his signature, she wasn't born yet.
	This was about six or seven months into my pregnancy.
	So then he wanted a relationship with you because it would be better for the baby?
	Yes, and he was trying to convince me not to do an adoption.
	Because he quote-unquote wanted his child.
	And is that when he told you that he was on...
	Cocaine and heroin when he raped you?
	Yes. Because I was also trying to get as much medical history as I could for my child's future records.
	And so you knew this guy for a year.
	He was a drug addict and a rapist.
	But you got no bad vibe, no bad stories, no negative anything?
	No, because we only knew each other at school.
	And I just reached out because I knew that he was in the city and I thought I could just, you know, save some money with the airport.
	I didn't think that, I didn't want to know he was on heavy drugs and I didn't have any idea that I would be in danger in any way.
	Right. Now, Erin, what about the women he may have raped since?
	He has been in jail most of the time since my child was born, which was over a decade ago.
	He's probably spent less than a year outside of prison.
	He's been in prison for Possession of drugs and robbery.
	Oh. So he hasn't had a lot of...
	I don't know if he has assaulted anyone again, but I don't know.
	He hasn't had a lot of opportunity to do so.
	Well, he committed a robbery after, which he probably wouldn't have if you had reported him.
	Correct. Correct. So that's the question, right?
	Why didn't you report him?
	I was embarrassed and shamed.
	I didn't tell anybody, not that anybody would, like, I don't know who I would have told, I guess.
	Well, you'd tell the police, right?
	Yeah. I mean, hindsight, yes.
	And then I wouldn't have had to get him involved to sign any papers or anything like that.
	I didn't know what to do, so I did nothing.
	But no, you knew what to do, which is that he committed a terrible crime against you.
	You knew what to do, which is that it's illegal, and you report him to the police so that he pays for his crime and other women are kept safe, right?
	Yes, but I didn't do that.
	I know, and I'm not sure.
	The embarrassment thing, I don't quite follow.
	There's just a lot of shame, like, and...
	I put myself in that situation and I shouldn't have and you don't want to really talk about it and you don't really want anybody to know that that happened to you so by saying nothing you just deal with it internally.
	It's not the right decision to make but that's the decision that I made and that's Kind of how I rationalized it in my head.
	Well, of course.
	I mean, it's not a pleasant thing to go through and so on, but it is kind of essential to keep other women safe, right?
	I mean, do other people in your life know or is it a secret?
	It probably still would be a secret if there wasn't a permanent result of like a child.
	Yeah. It's just not something like my family would ever talk about.
	Right. Or want to hear about.
	And what's happened with the child?
	Thriving. Absolutely thriving.
	There are some...
	What I found interesting, and I said that it's a negative thing, But she thrives.
	She's, you know, doing great in school, active in all kind of extra activities, and has a great relationship with her parents.
	But she does have, like...
	All of her teeth didn't develop.
	And she's missing, you know, ten adult teeth that are just not growing.
	And her orthodontist asked her if either one of her birth parents were on drugs at the time of her conception.
	And that's hard.
	I didn't know that.
	So ten adult teeth not present.
	Yes, so she has to have special braces and then she'll have to get veneers or something.
	Well, yeah, she'd have to get, what, implants?
	Something like that. So right now she has braces to just move the teeth that she has currently.
	Oh, move them forward.
	Yeah, it's weird the way orthodontists can just shuffle teeth around like some Vegas card deck dealer.
	Yeah, but she's got a great, great life.
	I've always been involved to a certain extent.
	Her mother and myself have a very great relationship and it was very important to her parents that the birth mother is open and communicates and updates and things like that because they didn't ever want The child to feel as though they held anything back from them or didn't have access to information.
	She doesn't know her creation, if you will.
	She knows that her birth father is in jail.
	Her birth father. Yes, yes, her birth father.
	And I leave that up to her parents.
	To make that decision on if they decide to go any further into that, that's not really my call.
	And whatever they decide is fine.
	Sorry to interrupt, but does the family who adopted her know that she was the product of a rape?
	Yes, yes. They have all the information.
	Right, right, okay.
	And they knew that going into it...
	So it wasn't like a surprise or anything like that.
	I tried to be as open as I could with that because I felt like that was only fair.
	Yeah, yeah. Okay.
	How has your social circle been since?
	Have you had any other nasty incidents since 21?
	No. I would say...
	I just have to tell you, your show is so amazing and so instrumental for so many people, including myself.
	Before this happened to me, I felt like my sexual market value was just through the roof.
	I was the cat's meow.
	I was the end-all be-all.
	Once that happened, it was more like a reality check.
	You're not the best thing since sliced bread.
	But it's really made me quite an introvert and really tightened in my social circle a lot.
	And just made me leveled, I guess, if that makes sense.
	Did anything molesty happen when you were a kid, or was this...
	Yes, my virginity was taken by my stepbrother when I was a teen.
	Sorry, when you were how old? I was 14, but the same month I was turning 15, so pretty much 15.
	Yeah, so my dad wasn't a very good person, and he thought it would be fun and appropriate to let his 15-year-old get drunk on New Year's Eve, and so I did, and Yeah, my stepbrother just took advantage of me, who was 23, I think, at the time, somewhere like that.
	So your father got you drunk on New Year's Eve, and then your stepbrother raped you?
	Yes. Oh, I'm so sorry.
	My gosh. My gosh.
	But I don't really look at it as rape because I was conscious of it, but I was only 15 years old and I was intoxicated.
	I didn't really know what was going on.
	I barely had been out of the Barbie stage at that point.
	So you don't consider it rape when you were drunk and you were 15 and he was 23?
	What am I missing here?
	I think that's more of a mental...
	Just... thing? It is, it is, but I just, like, try to downplay it in my mind, because I don't want to think about the fact that, like, that's how I entered the sex market, if you will.
	You know, like, my first sexual encounter was with my stepbrother.
	No, that's not a sexual encounter.
	I'm sorry, I gotta be frank with you.
	That's half incest rape.
	Again, unless I'm missing something.
	No, you're not. And enabled by your father.
	Yes. I'm guessing police weren't involved in that one either.
	No. Right.
	I didn't tell anybody until...
	I didn't tell my family until probably...
	I was 25, 10 years later maybe.
	And he didn't believe me.
	Your father. Is your stepbrother still in the vicinity?
	No, there's been another stepmother since then and he's out of the picture.
	Okay, I'm getting lots of noise from your microphone.
	I don't know if you're moving it or what.
	Sorry. No, my stepmother and my father divorced and there was another...
	Significant other in between there.
	So he's been out of the picture for a long time.
	Pretty close to soon after that, maybe within a year of that happening, they were out of the house.
	But you had to live with the man.
	Was he under the same roof?
	Yes. Yeah, he lived with us.
	So you had to spend another year with the man who took your virginity through rape and half incest.
	Yes. And he might have done this to other girls since?
	Possibly. He did get a 16-year-old pregnant.
	Hmm. How long after that?
	Was this after you, right?
	No, this was before.
	This was when...
	This was probably three or four years before that happened.
	I was like elementary school age when that happened.
	So your father invited into your vicinity a man who had gotten a 16-year-old pregnant and then got you drunk when you were almost 15?
	Yes. So many crimes go unavenged.
	Like bodies rolling down a hill.
	Yeah. And my thought is that the fogging about the 15-year-old thing may have had some contribution to a lack of self-protection at 21.
	Yeah. Yeah.
	It was just me and my dad after that for a while.
	And my dad sold drugs.
	And so there were people in and out of the house and people Stuff like that.
	So I would agree with the lack of self-protection.
	What do you mean, stuff like that?
	What do you mean? You're doing a fly-by here when we kind of need a slow drive-by.
	People would come any time during the day or night and knock on the door.
	My dad would take them in the back and they would do...
	I wasn't supposed to know what they were doing, but it doesn't take a rocket science to figure out that You know, they were selling drugs out of our house.
	And then, you know, sometimes they would hang out with my dad.
	And you just get used to those kind of people being normal, like a normal person.
	Not somebody who you probably should not, you know, invest any time knowing.
	And did anything else untoward happen that way or in terms of violence or abuse?
	Well, my dad was very abusive, physical, emotional to anyone who was a female in his life, from his children to his multiple wives to his mother.
	It didn't matter if you were a woman.
	You were, you know, easy...
	Easy target. So, yeah, he definitely was not a good person.
	Where is he now?
	He lives alone.
	No one really talks to him.
	He's kind of exiled from everyone.
	Like, we're a majority of family of women, like my sister and He has sisters and his father died when he was 16.
	So it's really a family of women.
	And we band together when we found out he was abusing our grandmother.
	And everybody's kind of excommunicated him at this point.
	Not punishment enough, but I suppose it will have to do.
	And I asked my mom why she chose him.
	Because he had been, like, selling drugs.
	That's how they initially met, my mother and father.
	Like, why did you choose to have children, not only one child, but multiple children, with this man, like, you knew was a drug user, a drug dealer, an abusive person?
	And then you just left us there to fend for ourselves.
	And her excuse is that, you know, I was, you should ask your aunt because she introduced me to him.
	And I'm like, my aunt didn't.
	It's the aunt's fault that your mom had babies with the abusive drug dealer?
	I said, that's like, you chose that person.
	You chose that person.
	Like, you chose that person to be our father.
	You chose that person knowing, and you didn't do anything about it.
	You know, and she'll throw up the fact that, you know, I have a child from a drug addict, but I didn't choose.
	I didn't choose to procreate with that person.
	I didn't choose that.
	It's different.
	Yeah. And I made the decision to give the child more than that.
	And that's one thing I really want people on your show to understand is that you don't have to be a single mom.
	You don't have to be that statistic.
	There is adoption and it can be a beautiful thing.
	And, you know, statistically...
	Adoptive children do just as well or better in some situations than people who keep their child.
	Adoption is much better for children than single motherhood overall.
	And just wanted to point out that you did a really great job as far as the adoption went, as far as I can tell, right?
	I mean, you were honest, you were upfront, you kept the lines of communication open, you kept the relationship going, and your daughter, as you say, is thriving.
	So, you know, kudos to you.
	I mean, that was very well handled as far as I can tell.
	Thank you. It was very important to me that she was set up for as much success as, you know, I could do with You know the situation that was given and you know now like I met I've been married for six years and I we have children together and I told my now husband on our very first date about my child that was adopted.
	I was very upfront very honest about it.
	It's not a secret and I wanted whomever I was dating to know like This is who I am.
	This is the baggage that I come with.
	And, you know, this is what is important to me.
	And I don't feel like, you know, I just felt like that was really, really important.
	And so he knows about both rapes?
	Yes. Wow.
	Because the way you were characterizing the stepbrother incident was not the same to me.
	No, it's...
	And I guess it's just because I would mentally just departmentalize that into something different, even though it is the same.
	But in my mind, I had just done, put it in a different department.
	Well, I'll tell you...
	What I think about your question, I really, really appreciate all of this background, right?
	So, I had a bad childhood.
	And I don't think that that ended up diminishing my sexual market value because it's not what happens to you, it's what you do with it that I think matters in the long run.
	It's not purely subjectivist, like there's nothing good or bad except thinking makes it so, like the Hamlet line.
	But... As long as you have suffered evil and not done evil, then you can learn and grow from your suffering, and you can become a better person than you would have otherwise.
	It's the best that you can do in an evil situation, which is to attempt to take the evils that you have suffered and turn them into a renewed, expanded, deeper commitment to goodness.
	So I suffered under Violence and anti-rationality.
	And so the two foundations of my philosophy are the non-aggression principle and a commitment to rationality.
	Right? So these are things that I have sort of painfully worked towards and grown to make sure I'm not being reactionary but rational.
	Through the course of dealing with what happened to me as a child.
	Now, that has made me a very good husband, a very good father, a good philosopher and somebody who's making a positive impact in the world.
	Would I be as good at what I do if I hadn't had to relentlessly defend myself against anti-rationality and violence as a child?
	Well, I don't think so.
	In other words, I have taken the evils that were done unto me, and I have turned them into a renewed commitment to virtue.
	And the evils that were done unto me have created more virtues in the world than if those evils weren't done to me, and that is the greatest way in which you can shame the devil, that you can shame the evildoers, is to turn what is supposed to destroy you into something that not only helps you heal, but you can use to help heal the world.
	That is the greatest evil you can do to evil, if that makes any sense.
	So with regards to you and your history and your situation, if what you got out of that, and it sounds to some degree like it is, but if what you got out of that was, I will be very conscious of risks in life, I will stand up against evildoers in this world.
	I will commit myself to enlightening and making children more aware of the dangers in their environment, whether that's personally or publicly or whatever.
	You certainly made a commitment to do what was very best for your daughter in the situations, and that's to your great credit.
	So if the harm that has been done to you can be turned into Greater wisdom, greater understanding.
	If the scar can turn to muscle, then that is great.
	Would I be as good a father and husband if I had not been abused as a child?
	Well, it can go either way.
	You end up extremely good or extremely bad if you have been abused, in general.
	It's the tip of a mountain, right?
	It's such a sharp blade, you go one way or the other.
	Or I guess you split.
	So I don't think that suffering evil lowers your sexual market value, lowers your capacity to be a good mother, a good father, a good husband, a good wife, a good friend.
	But it really depends what you do with it.
	And with regards to the earlier call, the call that you were referring to, the woman, I don't think, did good things with it.
	And the rape was not the fundamental issue.
	It was the fact that she had not learned from the rape to say, okay, like from your standpoint, I was raped when I was 15.
	I was raped when I was 21.
	So who was around me?
	Why did that happen? How did that come about?
	Who did not warn me?
	What signs did I not see?
	And I'm damn well going to learn to have better people in my life, to have even halfway decent people in my life, to have very good people in my life, that whole scale as you climb out of the underworld of horror that you grew up in.
	You can become sterner, you can become stronger, you can become better, and you can say, screw you to the evildoers, all you did was make me stronger.
	Now, if the wrongs that are done to you can turn you into that kind of hero, fantastic.
	You have pursued virtue and shamed the devils that attempt to scar you.
	But if you then circle the drain of that dysfunction, which I'm not saying you have done, but those who do, who end up acting it out, denying it, continue to have the abuses around them, well, That is the warning flag, in particular, that I would be cautious about.
	Thank you. I really appreciate the time and the reach out and the insight on all your comments.
	And like I said, I really hope that people who listen to your show and you do a lot of single mom activities will consider doing an adoption.
	And consider not being selfish and think about your child.
	And just even if it's not a rape, just think about your child and what's best for them, not you.
	Well, and I think it turned out to be best for you in the long run too because...
	You ended up with your own family and your own children, and that's great.
	So, well, thank you very much for everyone.
	I appreciate everyone's call, and it's a wonderful opportunity to see deep into the hearts and minds of people in the world.
	And please help out the show at freedomendradio.com.
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	Come in and check out theartoftheargument.com to get a great book.
	I've got a new book coming up, which I'm very, very pleased with.
	And of course, if you've got some shopping to do, fdrurl.com forward slash Amazon.
	Thank you, my lovelies. Have a great evening.

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